I wuKfl'L 1 if. 1 I 1 1 m I I ■ inr ;::. mm Km W mmk jmwmm ^H iOM ^^^H WraWl , i!. , ,' 1 i-.i,:i'.I iBUBBUuMiiH;] ■i "■!:•?!•;.; 'ii',r'i!!: :! '' ri9H LIBRA R.Y OF THE UN I VLRSITY Of ILLINOIS 325243 P75g <*p-2 IU.. WST. SURVEY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/germancultureinaOOpoch GERMAN CULTURE IN AMERICA 1600-1900 German Culture in America PHILOSOPHICAL AND LITERARY INFLUENCES l600-IC)00 HENRY A. POCHMANN With the assistance of Arthur r. schultz and others THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS Madison, 1957 Published by The University of Wisconsin Press 811 State Street, Madison 5, Wisconsin Distributed in Canada by Burns and MacEachern, Toronto. Printed in The Netherlands by N.V. Drukkerij G. J. Thieme, Nijmegen Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 55-6791 Preface A patent and irremediable fault of this book (and most books of its kind) is that its very nature makes it one-sided, or at least makes it appear one-sided. While I have tried to appraise German philoso- phical, educational, and literary influences in America against influences in these areas from other countries, I seldom found it possible to present any detailed compara- tive analysis, but had to content myself with what I consider a fair statement of the extent of Germanic influence. There will be time enough for a final synthesis and eva- luation of the foreign versus the native . elements in American culture once all the foreign impacts have been assessed. Fin- dings in these and other spheres of compa- rt- rati ve cultural relations will inevitably mo- i dify my conclusions and put them in a perspective now impossible. It is much to be desired that investigations in parallel i areas may be pushed vigorously; for, as I ' see it, the study of literary culture in the United States has reached a point beyond f which it cannot proceed effectively unless and until the several foreign accretions are segregated from one another and from the ; native ingredients and all of them are ap- praised in terms of each other and the final .- product. A second fault is that while I constantly -employ the terms German and American, I < have not found it possible anywhere pre- i cisely to define those terms, or even to distinguish between what might be termed German Geist and American spirit. All for- mulations of Nationalgeist that I attempted 3 turned out to be so vague as to be meaning- less or so narrow as to be useless or so comprehensive as to be self-contradictory. In the end I came up with little more than such obvious distinctions as can be made in terms of persons, themes, ideas, forms — in terms of time and place. I can only hope that the cumulative evidence presented in the following pages of how a Kant inspired an Emerson to establish a Prima Philo- sophia in Boston, or the German tale in- fluenced the American short story, or Faust supplied motifs for The Golden Legend will speak for itself and be interest- ing and illuminating in both directions. The time to answer the larger, more difficult questions regarding how German culture as a whole modified the course of American culture as a whole is not yet; at all events, it is not for me. In the interest of economy, the manu- script of this book was subjected to two drastic condensations and complete re- writtings by which its length was reduced from 2,800 to 1,800 to 1,000 typewritten pages. In the process three chapters were eliminated altogether: (1) German educa- tional influences, (2) German-American radicalism in the Midwest, and (3) German- American writings (in German) in the Uni- ted States. A goodly amount of material was transferred from the text to footnotes, and much more was omitted altogether. Documentation not absolutely essential was deleted. At several points in the text, notably in the chapter on Emerson, I have indicated that I shall be happy to supply vu Hi vm Preface such information for students desirous of having it. In order to make these materials more readily available for consultation or microfilming, I have deposited in the Uni- versity of Wisconsin Library a copy of the first version of the manuscript. Since the arrangement or ordering of material (except for the omitted sections) is substantially the same as that of the printed version, it should not be too difficult to find what is wanted. During the twenty-five years that I de- voted to this study, I had the advantage, largely through the generosity of the Re- search Committee of the University of Wisconsin, of help from competent research assistants — among them Calvin V. Huene- mann, Lucille Hein, Louise H. Johnson, Eleanor Coswell, Louis Budd, and Arthur R. Schultz. Dr. Schultz, during a two-year appointment as post-doctorate fellow, did much of the spade work on the vogue of German literature in the United States, on George Ripley, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller, and on the introduction of German philosophy into American colleges and universities. In addition to the grants and research leaves from the University of Wisconsin, I have enjoyed fellowship ap- pointments from the Henry E. Huntington Library and from the Rockefeller Founda- tion. The latter enabled me to consult materials in the larger depositories in Germany, the British Museum, and the more important stores of German-Ameri- cana in American libraries. I cannot possibly detail in this foreword the extent of my indebtedness to earlier investigators in the field of German- Amer- ican cultural exchange, but I have sought scrupulously to indicate in the notes my reliance on prior findings. H. A. p. January, ig$4 Table of Contents Preface v List of Tables xv Introduction 3 Book One GERMAN THOUGHT IN AMERICA Early Interest in German Culture THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY .... 19 Points of View 19 Anglo-German Backgrounds .... 20 Lutheranism 21 Separatism 24 German Books in the Colonies ... 26 Early Enthusiasts for German Learn- ing 26 The Winthrops — Samuel Lee — Josh- ua Moody — Daniel Gookin — Michael Wigglesworth — Ebenezer Pemberton — Robert Child — George Stirk — John Davenport — John Wilson — Nathaniel Ward Harvard College 29 The Colonial Book Trade 30 Prominent German-Americans ... 30 Quakers, Quietists, and Pietists. . . 31 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 32 Interchange of Ideas 33 The Mathers — Jonathan Belcher — Benjamin Colman — Thomas Prince — The Yale College Library — Jonathan Edwards The Methodist Revival 37 German Pietism and Methodism — German Hymnody The Wave of German Immigration 40 German- American Leaders 41 Francis Daniel Pastorius — Christo- pher Dock and other notable teachers — Jacob Leisler — -Peter and Anna Zenger — The Miihlenbergs — Johann David Schoepf — Christian Gottlieb Priber Benjamin Franklin's Position ... 44 German Learning in America. ... 46 Pufendorf— Leibnitz The Influence of Political Events . . 47 Paths of Influence after the Revolu- tion 47 Literary Relationships — Peter Will — Political and Diplomatic Relations — German-American Patriots and Merchants— John Quincy Adams — - Benj amin Smith Barton — J ohn Trum- bull — The Vaughans The Ebeling-Bentley Relationship . 51 Christopher Daniel Ebeling — William Bentley Early American Lexicography ... 56 IX X Table of Contents Thought Currents of the Nineteenth Century THE GROWTH OF INTEREST IN GER- MANY 59 The Colleges and the Clergy .... 59 Samuel Miller and Joseph Buck- minster 60 Journals and Journalistic Exchange. 62 American Students in Germany . . 66 George Ticknor — Edward Everett — Joseph Cogswell — George Bancroft — John Lothrop Motley — Other Ameri- cans in Germany German Influences on American Col- leges 77 NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM. 79 Character of the Movement .... 79 Transitional and Intermediary Fig- ures 82 AVENUES OF TRANSMISSION 85 German Philosophy in England . . 85 Dugald Stewart — Sir William Hamil- ton — Samuel Taylor Coleridge- Wordsworth — Southey — Robinson — Hazlitt — De Quincey — Thomas Car- lyle German Philosophy in France ... 101 Madame de Stael — The Eclecticism of Cousin and Jouffroy — The Contro- versy over Infidelity — Murdock's Moral Philosophy among the Germans EARLY EXPONENTS IN AMERICA . . . II4 From Beck to Hedge 114 Carl Beck — Carl Follen — Georg Blat- termann — Friederich List — Francis Lieber — Charles Sumner — Moses Stu- art — James Marsh — Convers Francis — Frederic Henry Hedge The Unitarian and Congregational Clergy 148 The Transcendentalist Writers RALPH WALDO EMERSON The Platonic Period (to 1830) . The Kantian Phase (1830-1838) The Neo-Platonic Interlude (i£ 1850) The Hegelian-Darwinian Period (after 1850) OTHER EARLY TRANSCENDENTALISTS . George Ripley Theodore Parker James Freeman Clarke . . Amos Bronson Alcott . . . Orestes Augustus Brownson 153 155 158 192 198 207 207 215 222 224 234 Isaac Thomas Hecker 239 William Henry Channing 241 William Henry Furness 242 THE LATER TRANSCENDENTALISTS . . 242 Conflicting Points of View 242 Samuel Osgood 247 Cyrus Augustus Bartol 248 Octavius Brooks Frothingham . . . 248 John Weiss 251 David A. Wasson 251 Samuel Longfellow, George Willis Cooke, Samuel Johnson 252 Moncure Daniel Conway 252 James Elliot Cabot 253 The Spread of Interest in German Philosophy the st. louis movement 257 Harris and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy 274 History of the Movement 257 Snider and his Literary Schools . . 281 Brokmeyer and the Translation of Related Clubs and Movements in St. Hegel's Logic 269 Louis 289 Table of Contents XI Related Clubs and Movements Else- where 290 THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY 294 The Nine Sessions 294 Interrelations with Other Movements 300 GERMAN PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICAN COLLEGES 304 The Early Teaching of Philosophy . . 304 The Common-Sense Tradition — Ger- man Influence before 1800 German Influence, 1800-1850 . . . 305 German Theology at Harvard, Ver- mont, and Andover — Henry Boynton Smith— William G. T. Shedd— Fre- derick Augustus Rauch — Philipp Schaff From 1850 to 1880: College Courses and Texts 307 Logic — Ethics- Psychology -Metaphysics and Factors in the Development of Ger- manic Influence 310 A New Type of University — College Courses in 1880 — Resistance to Ideal- ism — Influence of Transcendentalists and Hegelians Professors of Philosophy 313 Charles S. Peirce — George S. Morris — George Holmes Howison — Josiah Royce — George Herbert Palmer — James Edwin Creighton — John De- wey — William James- — Thorstein Veblen — Borden P. Bowne — George Santayana Experimental Psychology: G. Stanley Hall 319 The History of Philosophy 320 Book Two GERMAN LITERARY INFLUENCE Some Areas and Lines of Influence THE VOGUE OF GERMAN LITERATURE A SURVEY 327 From the Beginnings to 1810 . . . 327 Eighteenth-Century Sentimental Literature — Interest in Sturm and Drang — Kotzebue From 1810 to 1864 328 Classical and Romantic Authors — Re- lative Standing of Various Authors — ■ Representative American Critics From 1864 to 1900 335 Leading Critics and Translators — Relative Popularity of Genres, Schools, Authors — The Genteel Tra- dition AMERICAN THEATER AND DRAMA 348 The Stage before 1800 348 Dependence on British Drama — Les- sing and Schiller The Vogue of Kotzebue 349 From 1804 to 1830 353 Statistical Summary — The Success of Newly Introduced Plays From 1830 to 1900 356 EARLY AMERICAN FICTION 358 William Hill Brown 359 Charles Brockden Brown 359 Elihu Hubbard Smith 362 James Fenimore Cooper 362 The Gothic Element 363 Germanic Materials and Motifs in the Short Story WASHINGTON IRVING 367 Early German Interests 367 The Sketch Book 367 Irving's German Tour 373 Tales of a Traveller 375 The Alhambra 379 Woolfert's Roost 380 Xll Table of Contents NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 38 1 Allegations of German Influence . . 381 Influence of Tieck 382 Hoffmann and Chamisso 387 The Faust Motif 387 EDGAR ALLAN POE 388 Poe's Knowledge of German .... 388 Indebtedness to German Stories . . 392 Romantic Stories 393 Mesmerism and Metempsychosis — ■ The Doppelganger Motif — Stories Dealing with fixe Ideen — Tales of Horror Literary Principles — Poe's Debt to Schlegel 405 Nineteenth-Century Poets, Novelists, and Critics EARLY POETS 4O9 Drake and Halleck 409 James Gates Percival 409 William Cullen Bryant 409 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. . 4IO First Trip to Europe, 1826-1829 . . 410 The Bowdoin Period, 1829-1835 . . 411 Second European Tour, 1 835-1 836 . 412 Cambridge, 1836-1842 414 Third European Trip, 1842 .... 423 Cambridge, 1 842-1 868 424 Fourth Trip — Later Years, 1 868-1 882 426 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 427 German Music 445 Acquaintance with German Liter- ature The Harvard Professorship . . . . OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER . . . . German Legends, Tales, Scenery . . Abolitionism: Follen and Luther . . Germans as Poetical Subjects . . . HENRY DAVID THOREAU His Literary Personality. . . , Affinities with German Writers German Criticism German Scientists 427 429 430 43o 430 43i 43i 432 432 434 434 435 HERMAN MELVILLE 436 436 436 Literary Background Interest in Religion and Philosophy. MARGARET FULLER 44O Early Intellectual Interests Goethe and Schiller .... The Romantic School . . . 440 441 444 MINOR MOVEMENTS AND GROUPS . . Transcendentalist Writers Godwin, Wheeler, Hurlbut — Louisa May Alcott — Christopher Pearse Cranch — John Sullivan Dwight — Thomas Wentworth Higginson The Genteel Writers Charles Timothy Brooks — Nathan- iel Parker Wills — Bayard Taylor — Charles Godfrey Leland — Richard Henry Stoddard — Edward Everett Hale — George Henry Boker — Charles Dudley Warner — Edmund Clarence Stedman — Eugene Field The Southern Writers William Gilmore Simms- Cooke — Sidney Lanier 447 447 451 -John Esten WALT WHITMAN. Early Contacts with German Culture Literary Influences Goethe — Zschokke — Herder — Heine — Miscellaneous Influences 459 461 462 462 Philosophical Influences 467 Whitman's Philosophic Personality — Sources of German Idealism LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITERS 474 John Burroughs 474 William Dean Howells 475 Henry James 477 Mark Twain 477 Residence at Heidelberg — Berlin and Vienna Bret Harte 480 Edward Rowland Sill 481 Ambrose Bierce 481 O. Henry 482 Recent Trends 482 Table of Contents xm American literary criticism . . . 484 Transcendental Criticism 486 The Concern with Shakespeare Criti- The Historical-Realist School . . . 488 cism 484 Journalists and Editors 491 The Schlegel-Coleridge School . . . 485 Recent Trends 491 NOTES Introduction 495 a Survey 677 Early Interest in German Culture American Theater and Drama ... 686 _. „ ,. „ Early American Fiction 691 The Seventeenth Century 498 J The Eighteenth Century 507 ••»*■.., j ™ .•«■ • Germanic Materials and Motifs in Thought Currents of the Nineteenth t ^ e ghort Storv Centurv _ ,. _ , . Washinton Irving 696 The Growth of Interest in Germany. 522 Nathaniel Hawthorne 705 New England Transcendentalism . . 534 Edgar Allan Poe 709 Avenues of Transmission 538 Early Exponents in America . . . . 562 __. , _ _ „ ,. , Nineteenth-Century Poets, Novelists, The Transcendentalist Writers an( j r r itics Ralph Waldo Emerson 586 Other Earlv Transcendentalists. . . 617 ^ , , ' " ' ' ' ' ' ~, T . X. , , ,. . , Henry Wadsworch Longfellow . . . 724 The Later transcendentalists. . . . 632 J „ ° ' ^ James Russell Lowell 745 The Spread of Interest in German Oliver Wendell Holmes 748 Philosophy John Greenleaf Whittier 749 The St. Louis Movement 639 Henry David Thoreau 752 The Concord School of Philosophy . 658 Herman Melville 755 German Philosophy in American Margaret Fuller 760 Colleges 661 Minor Movements and Groups . . . 768 Walt Whitman 777 Some Areas and Lines of Influence Later Nineteenth-Century Writers . 789 The Vogue of German Literature — American Literary Criticism .... 795 Index 801 LIST OF TABLES i. Periodical Items (1910-1864) in American Journals 343 2. The Number of Poems by German Authors Appearing in Translations in American Collections 1830-1899 344 3. Counts of Translations (British and American) of the Works of the Most Fre- quently Translated German Authors, by Genres and Periods — 18 10-1864 an( i 1865-1899 346 4. Performances of German Plays as Compared to Those of Other Origins (1798- 1804) 351 5. Numbers and Performances of German Plays in New York and Philadelphia, 1804-1829 352 6. Performances of German Gothic and Romantic Spectacle Plays 356 XV INTRODUCTION Introduction Whether one Tyrker who accompanied Leif Ericson was a German, and whether Captain John Smith's settlement at Jamestown did indeed include some Germans are matters for the determination of which some antiquarians appear prepared to barter the promise of eternal bliss. Heated arguments revolve around the exact number of German immigrants who came to America at specific times, the precise location of their settlements, the details of their migrations, and the number of their descendants. Others seem ready to shed their heart's blood if, by so doing, they could establish as fact the old story that the German language missed becoming the official language of the United States by the margin of one vote of a Con- gressional committee, or authenticate the legend that Abraham Lincoln (Linkhorn ?) was of German extraction. Questions whether three or four families comprised the party that moved from New Orleans in a certain year to settle on the Red River are important, but for the matter in hand, what is more significant is whether the "German Coast" in Louisiana represented merely another racial or cul- tural "island," or whether the Germans of lower Louisiana were of a type to exert a cultural influence beyond their own little communal limits and racial sphere. It is not necessary to retell the circumstantial history of the first permanent German settlements in Pennsylvania (1683) and New York (1709), their phenomenally rapid growth and spread southward and westward, and the numerous accessions to their numbers direct from Germany. These matters have been treated adequately for our purposes (though not exhaustively) in a number of histories. 1 In all of these works the emphasis is on what the authors agree in calling "the German element," by which is meant the immigration, settlement, and distribution of the Germans in America, together with such concrete contributions as lie on the surface. The point of view is historical or biographical. Several are little more than a directory or a "Who's Who" of Germans and German-Americans in the United States — recounting the careers of notable individuals, their business successes, their participation in American wars, and the like. While further investigations into these areas of inquiry are worth while, the study of the more significantly cultural influences of Germany upon America needs not wait until all the data on the German element in America are recorded. However late they were in making their entry into the United States, few important men, movements, or ideas of modern Ger- many failed, in one way or another, to im- press themselves upon American cultural development. Kantian transcendentalism played havoc in the United States with Congregational and Unitarian theology just about the time that Hegelian and post- Hegelian criticisms were breaking up the empire of Kantian idealism in Germany. Hegel's philosophy of history arrived in this country with decided force after Marx and Engels had turned Hegelianism upside down in the fatherland, and a later generation 3 German Culture in America of Americans took seriously Marxian ma- terialism just at the moment when Mann- heim was shooting it full of holes at home. But however belatedly Germanic influences made themselves felt in the United States, they have made — or are making — them- selves forces in American civilization that cannot be disregarded. 2 Considering the tremendous body of ma- terial that has been printed on the general subject of Germanic influences, one is at a loss to understand why the more strictly cultural influences — philosophical, political, religious, literary, and artistic — have re- ceived so little attention. Except for a few studies of limited scope, all of which will be particularized in their proper places in the sequel, nothing comprehensive has been done to segregate and evaluate Germanic influences of thought and art in the tradi- tion of American cultural development. Professor Faust's two-volume work, by all odds the best in the field, was written nearly a half-century ago. The second volume, partially devoted to Germanic influences in American agriculture, industry, politics, education, religion, and the arts, is pano- ramic in its point of view and subj ect matter ; but, as the author himself pointed out, it had necessarily to be less definitive than illustrative and suggestive of what subse- quent investigations, following his efforts, might yield. 3 For the process, now definitely beyond its initial stages, of rewriting the history of American culture, especially as it manifests itself in American thought and letters, the findings of Professor Faust and his co- workers have been useful; but the under- taking has now proceeded to a point where further analyses of foreign (including Ger- manic) contributions to American life need to be made before the larger work of rein- terpreting American civilization can proceed satisfactorily. The facts presented by Professors Faust and Wittke and a host of investigators of more special or local subjects provide an indispensable frame of reference. The histo- rian of German cultural influences in Ameri- ca needs to remember Benjamin Franklin's estimate in 1766 that one-third of the popu- lation of Pennsylvania was Germanic and Crevecceur's definition of an American as "a new man ... an European, or the de- scendant of an European . . . whose grand- father was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations." He must bear in mind that Germans and their descendants in the American colonies in 1775 numbered approximately 225,000; that by 1790, the year of the first census, the number had increased to 250,000; and that by 1900, it was some 18,400,000; but he must not lose sight of the relation of this last figure to others in the following estimate (also for 1900) of the relative strength of the more im- portant European blood strains in America : ' English element 20,400,000 German element 18,400,000 Irish and Scotch elements 13,900,000 All others 14,290,000 Total white population in 1900 66,990,000 The study of any foreign strain in America involves the necessity of bearing in mind the fact that the United States is a land in which the experience of Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian of the American fron- tier, is duplicated a thousandfold. He de- scribed his home town, Portage, Wisconsin, in these terms: The town was a mixture of raftsmen from the "pineries" — of Irish (in the "bloody first" ward), Pomeranian immigrants (we stoned each other), in old country garbs, driving their cows to their own "Common" ; of Scotch, with "Caledonia" near by; of Welsh (with "Cambria" adjacent); of Ger- mans, some of them university trained (the bierhall of Carl Haertel was the town club house) ; of Yankees from Vermont and Maine and Connecticut chiefly; of New- York Yankees; of Southerners (a few rela- tively) ; a few negroes ; many Norwegians and Swiss; some Englishmen; and one or two Italians. 5 Introduction It would be too much to expect the rapid completion of the already numerous studies of immigration, the interpretation of the voluminous census data, the elaborate ethnographical surveys, and the intricate history of races and nationalities in the United States; and it would be foolish to insist that the writing of the more strictly cultural history of the United States must wait until the historians, statisticians, and cartographers have done. There is no good reason why both cannot advance together, mutually supporting each other. Nor is it to be presumed that the task of re-evalu- ating and rewriting the history of American civilization will be accomplished in short order, or, indeed, that it will ever be com- pleted to the satisfaction of everybody; but there appears to be no good reason why any future moment should be more propitious than the present for making a beginning. As a matter of fact, the critical study of Ameri- can literary culture, beginning about twen- ty-five years ago, has already made ap- preciable progress. The reinterpretation of American literature has proceeded boldly and on the whole successfully from the presupposition that American letters are the composite result of the interplay be- tween a foreign tradition and a native en- vironment. Starting from the assumption that the interactions of foreign and indig- enous forces comprise the essentials that demand analysis before any real study of American literature can be initiated, several students of American letters, during the twenties, voiced their disapproval of the prevailing methods and the status of Ameri- can literary history and criticism. 6 Since then, American literature as the subject of academic study has made what, at least in some quarters, amounts to a conquest of academic curricula. Despite some over- enthusiastic professions of faith and some mushroom growth, the critical interpreta- tion of American literature has proceeded in measures and degrees which would make the subject unrecognizable by the few brave men of the first two decades of this century who dared profess themselves professors of American literature. Bibliographical works, on a hitherto unprecedented scale, have been compiled ; authoritative biographies of major American authors have appeared; definitive texts are in the making. Several multiform collaborative histories of Ameri- can literature have been published, and other co-operative plans of study are under consideration or in process of execution. Meanwhile several departments have been generally overlooked. Since the appearance of Professor Jones's book on French cultural influence in America, little more than piece- work has been done on the very fundamen- tal problem of segregating, analyzing, and appraising the several foreign influences that have infiltrated the very fabric of American culture during the three and one- half centuries of its growth. That is to say, what we have grown ac- customed to call the critical reinterpreta- tion of American culture has been so un- critical as to overlook the necessity of keeping constantly in mind the basic defini- tions and the fundamental assumption that what we are studying is the result of the interaction between foreign backgrounds and native conditioning. We have paid scant attention to the elements that are British, or Germanic, or French, or classical, or otherwise. In short, we are proceeding without having in hand anything more than the most superficial ideas regarding what is American at all. Unless definition and analysis proceed a good deal further than they have gone so far, we may find that some of our most ambitious undertakings are ill-conceived, and that some of our proudest achievements are premature syntheses based on questionable premises and in- complete evidence. All departments of comparative cultural study are complex, and that which includes America as one of its component elements of comparison is especially hazardous by reason of the complexity of American civili- 6 German Culture in America zation. Derivative and eclectic, American culture is deeply indebted to the French, to the Germans, most signally to the British, and in lesser degrees to other nations, past and present; but it cannot fairly be said that any European nation, or indeed, all of them jointly, ever succeeded in reducing America to a mere cultural province. The point of view which regards American civili- zation as nothing more than a transplanta- tion of European culture disregards the fact that from the moment of its transplanta- tion, a native American environment began the process of remaking it into something as distinctly different from its European ori- gins as the Declaration of Independence is different from the Magna Carta. To be sure there are degrees and stages by which Amer- ica's Coming of Age can be traced, and it is not easy to see precisely when American writings, for instance, ceased being colonial and became American. Yet whoever reads will understand that a remarkable revolu- tion took place between the dates that mark the publication of Captain John Smith's True Travels and Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. For Smith's writings are truly a part of the great library of English renais- sance travel literature, while Mark Twain's Innocents in the Old World, or William Dean Howells' Laphams in the New, cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be re- garded as European, although neither can be understood without reference to Euro- pean backgrounds. While, then, American literature is not a mere extension, or re-establishment, of European literary culture within new geo- graphical limits, and American ideas and their expression are no mere iteration of European thought, American culture must be viewed in relation to its heritage from abroad. To understand this heritage is at once to deepen our understanding of the forces that have molded our civilization in the past and to illumine the process of ac- culturation that we see going on round about us. Preliminary, therefore, to a critical reval- uation, it would seem that we shall have 'to investigate the several foreign influences in a manner involving some such program as this: (i) to differentiate among the varied impulses which have gone into and are still in process of going into that peculiarly eclectic hodgepodge which we call American culture; (2) to determine which of the ele- ments thus analyzed are imported and which are indigenous; (3) to determine, if possible, what these foreign and native ele- ments have contributed toward the making of this thing of rags and tags into a fabric showing some pattern or design ; and (4) to reintegrate, or suggest a way toward the reintegration of, these various and some- times mutually repellent particles, so that we may at least feel we understand what we are and why we are so, though we may still not have at our command the means of knowing how to proceed most wisely in sloughing off what is worst and cleaving to what is best. Our progress in these essential consider- ations is far from having reached a point at which we can say anything definite about which of the several foreign impacts have been the most pervasive or effective. Quite possibly these questions will never be finally settled, although, for practical purposes, it may be assumed that the British influence has been the most profound. This assump- tion, based on obvious considerations, has been so generally accepted that it has led to many facile, oversimplified, and sometimes exaggerated conclusions. Periodically the cry goes up from one or another of the several racial or national groups represented in the United States that historians have neglected to credit its par- ticular constituents with this or that cul- tural contribution to which they lay claim. Historians representing the Germans, the French, the Italians, the Jews, the Norwe- gians, and several others have not been modest. So stoutly have the protagonists, defenders, and apologists of all descriptions Introduction argued their claims that if all claims were allowed, little would remain that could be credited to English influence, and nothing whatever that could be ascribed to what, in the final analysis, is of primary concern for the historian of American culture — namely, the motivating influence of native American conditioning. Among the several groups contending for the lion's share of the credit in making the United States what she is, none has been more denunciatory in at- tacking American historians for allegedly slighting their particular share or for re- putedly falsifying the record to the disfavor of their particular party than those who have argued the claims of the Germans and German-Americans. Much of their attack has centered on what they maintain are the overrepresentations of the Scotch-Irish, who have not, themselves, been timorous in pushing their claims. Whatever may be said regarding the justice or injustice which the German element has received at the hands of American historians of whatever de- scription, it cannot fairly be said (in view of thousands of items comprising the bibliog- raphy which forms the companion-piece of this study) that the Germans themselves have tamely submitted to what some of them call discrimination. Indeed, the Ger- mans share with the Scotch-Irish a remark- able ability for surviving in the world of modern historiography, as they shared re- sourcefulness and pertinacity with their Scotch-Irish neighbors of the eighteenth century in pushing the farmer's frontier up the interior valleys, through the mountain gaps to the West, down the river courses to the Mississippi, and subsequently, beyond. Less able than the Scotch- Irish to make good their claims in certain departments of American life — public and political life, for example — they outshone them in others. For instance, in the realm of philology, no other department of comparative studies, as it impinges on European-American rela- tions, has half as many solid and compre- hensive bibliographical tools upon which to proceed to further study. The thoroughness and indefatigibility of the bibliographers who have engaged in this spadework are remarkable. Even the study of British- American cultural relations lags far behind in these fundamental bibliographical mat- ters. 7 In the more restricted areas, such as Pennsylvania-German culture, the work shows even higher stages of development. Whoever looks into Dr. Emil Meynen's 7,858 numbered items in a stout volume of 636 closely-printed, double-columned pages, entitled Bibliography on German Settlements in Colonial North America, Especially on the Pennsylvania Germans and Their Descend- ants i683-ig33 (Leipzig, 1937) wu l be struck with the advanced stage to which Pennsyl- vania Germans have brought the study of their cultural traditions. Dr. Meynen might easily have extended the number of his items two- or threefold and still fallen short of making his compilation truly comprehen- sive, 8 though it is to be doubted that its value would have been increased propor- tionally. What is to be inferred is that the Pennsylvania Germans have not fared ill at the hands of historians, and that they are not lacking in the sentiments that lie this side of Ehrgeiz. Professional genealogists regard the Germans of Pennsylvania as in no way behind the proud descendants of the Mayflower Pilgrims in the matter of re- cording their history. Similarly, in the field of more comprehen- sive surveys of foreign elements in the United States, the investigations of the Germanic element exceed all others in num- ber and scope. In this wider field, however, the historians of Germanic influence exhibit failings in degrees seldom matched by students of comparable areas for other nationalities. Too many of them, sometimes doubtless unwittingly, have been more in- tent upon German than upon American culture. This point of view, in its proper place is both valuable and valid, but for the reinterpretation of American culture it has 8 German Culture in America little utility.* To be sure, we dare not over- look anything that falls under the broad head of German culture — be it Goethe or Kant or Mozart, Gemiitlichkeit, Gesang, or Biergarten, Wallenstein, Hansel und Gretel, Baron von Munchhausen or the Katzen- jammer Kids — either for its own sake or for its value to the world. But the student of German cultural influence in America, if he is intent on contributing anything of value to our understanding of American civili- zation, must adopt a straightforward course — must consider his study one of in- fluence going from Germany to America. The reciprocal view by which deutsche Kul- tur, becoming a primary or sole object, is regarded as an all-conquering imperialism seeking, through the vulnerability of Ameri- can receptivity, to make of America a cul- tural colony or province of Germany, is little to his purpose. American receptiveness to the radiation of German ideas, modes, and forms puts America in the place of the debtor nation but hardly in the position of the conquered. That is to say, the vogue and influence of Goethe in America considered in relation to Goethe's stature as a German or as a world poet is one thing; his vogue and influence in America as a motivating and modifying force upon the course of American thought and art is another. Again, the confusion between one and the other point of view results in minute studies of Kotzebue or Schiller on the stages of various American cities, but never a hint as to why they were found acceptable in America during the early years of the nineteenth century, nor a suggestion concerning their effect upon the early development of the American drama and stage, nor even a clue to the reasons why they went into an eclipse when they did. The investigator of German-American cultural influences needs to guard against adding new difficulties in an area already bristling with problems and confusions in- herent in the intricacy of the subject. For instance, there is the problem of defining the influencing factor. What is meant by German culture, by German literature, by German philosophy, by a German ideal ? How shall one conceive of Goethe: the Goethe of Werther and Goetz or the Goethe of Meister and Faust II, Goethe the man or Goethe the scientist ? Which is the typically German motif: Lessing's thesis in Nathan der Weise of tolerance and cosmopolitanism, or Korner's celebration, in Leier und Schwert, of a Teutonic God and the glories of the Fatherland, or the Hitlerian concept of these themes ? What constitutes German transcendentalism ? Kantian criticism as it reputedly affected New England Transcen- dentalists during the thirties and forties of the last century, or Hegelian absolutism as it acted upon the St. Louis philosophers three or four decades later ? What, more- over, is meant by a Germanic idea? "The history of ideas," remarks Professor How- ard M. Jones, "cannot be a bloodless dance of categories ; ideas must have been put to work ; they must have contributed historical effects. But what constitutes an effective idea ? . . . What shall we say of the creation of American scientific laboratories on Euro- pean models, with all their far-reaching in- tellectual consequences ?" 10 How shall we treat the techniques and ideas that lie be- hind an art movement, even when it is clear and precise, as it almost never is, and how can we evaluate its effects ? To take another example, how is Charles Sealsfield (Carl Postl) to be classified ? Born an Austrian subject, in Bohemia, he eventually became an American citizen. In the United States he gathered materials for a series of books on American themes, which he published, then and afterwards, in the German language in Germany and Switzer- land, and sometimes almost simultaneously in England and America, either in the orig- inal or in translation, or both. His books were translated into many languages, and he acquired international fame; but in America he had no great vogue, except among German-American groups, where his Introduction language presented no obstacles. Consider- ing the fact that he acquired American citizenship, is he an American or a German writer ? Without stretching the facts, he may be treated (i) as a German who was profoundly influenced by America; (2) as an American who had a tremendous vogue in Germany and in other European countries, and materially affected immigration to America; and (3) as a German-American who enjoyed a considerable vogue among other German-Americans and with an oc- casional Anglo-American, like Longfellow, who enjoyed his books and was influenced by them. In a study of this sort, where some analysis is in order, is he to be regarded as a German, an American, or a German-Ameri- can ? As a writer of books in German about American subjects, did he exercise any real influence upon Americans in the broader sense ? The failure to see Sealsfield in proper perspective and relationships has led to some highly exaggerated claims for him, not only for his intrinsic worth as an artist but also for his influence in America. 11 Complicating matters still more is a mo- tive that for want of a better word may be called Ehrgeiz. Americans have, at various times, come under the spell of it ; our terms for it have been nationalism, 100 per cent patriotism, or chauvinism. A militant form of it was abroad in Hitler's Germany, foster- ing the idea (and this applies as much to some German academicians as to German propagandists) that the Germans are a superior race, and that German culture is as good as the best and better than most. Such extremist nationalism, coupled with a sense of the high destiny of Teutonia, makes some German and German-American students attribute all the better elements in what we call "America's Coming of Age" to Ger- manic origins, meanwhile ascribing the less estimable ones to British, French, Spanish, and other influences. Altogether too many studies in the field are vitiated by this type of bias. The relatively few objectively scholarly works which the field shows have been torn apart and reinterpreted by plagiarists, pop- ularizers, and propagandists, who have twisted the facts and misapplied the sober conclusions of such a book as Faust's Ger- man Element in the United Stales in a man- ner and to a degree that they are unrecog- nizable by their author. The excuse given for much of this poaching and popularizing is that it is done to promote an enlightened internationalism — to effect better under- standing and co-operation among races and nations; but in much of it the conclusion is inescapable that the real reason lies in a desire to advance German Kultur as we understood the word before 1914. 12 An examination of the piles upon piles of Ger- man propagandist literature circulated in this country, notably between 1900 and 1917, often under sober, academic titles, suggests that the Germans have had no near rival either in the scope of their activity in this field or in the unimaginativeness, not to say clumsiness, of their efforts. Then, as in more recent years, this kind of material was disseminated mainly among Americans of German extraction; it had little appeal beyond these circles ; and most of it fell flat even among them. Among treatises emanating from Germa- ny that treat German literary influence upon the major American authors — and there is at least one each for Irving, Bryant, Poe, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Emer- son, Whitman, Lanier, and Mark Twain — there are few that do not suffer either from certain preoccupations of what is to be "proved" or from a failure to grasp the American angles of the problem posed. Their reliability as to fact is seldom to be questioned, but the marshaling of fact is often inept or misleading. Generalizations and conclusions offered, when checked against significant factors not taken into account, often turn out to be untenable. Strong on the accumulation and compila- tion of data, often unrelated or unassimi- lated, they are devoid of imagination, direc- 10 German Culture in America tion, interpretation. They have the unity of a dictionary and the coherence of an ency- clopedia. Without implying that our German col- leagues' industrious gathering of facts is worthless, it may yet be suggested that in some departments we already have a stag- gering mass of facts — more than we shall ever know what to do with. So far as the evaluation of German intellectual and liter- ary influence in the United States is con- cerned, we already have in hand the essen- tials for the project undertaken in this book (i) about the immigration, settlement, and distribution of Germans in the United States, (2) about the history of a number of restricted spheres of German-American social influence as these can be observed by following the history of German-American communities, and (3) about translations of German literature into English and about the accessibility of German literature, both in translation and in the original, in America. 13 It is not to be urged, of course, that we should all, individually or collectively, fall to writing syntheses on the basis of the evidence accumulated. Before that can be done with a reasonable assurance of suc- cess, ground must be broken in areas as yet untouched. We need first to investigate hitherto unexplored fields of Germanic in- fluence, to prosecute fundamental inquiries into Spanish, Italian, Scandinavian, Slavic, classical, and oriental influences, and to undertake comprehensive investigation into the one subject which is most important, but which shows little beyond a few re- stricted efforts — British influence in Amer- ica. As far as the progress of German-Ameri- can cultural studies is concerned, there are several hopeful signs. The organization, in 1932, of the Anglo-German Literary Re- lations Group of the Modern Language Association of America provides a kind of clearinghouse for people interested in and engaged upon problems concerning the in- terrelations in language, literature, and thought between Germany and the English- speaking countries. Thus far, its programs have been devoted to German > American influences rather than the reciprocal re- lationship or German-British interrelations. Aside from its annual meetings, which have afforded opportunities for people with mu- tual or related interests to consult with one another, the most noteworthy work of the Group is the compilation of an annual list, published in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology (since 1 941, in the Amer- ican-German Review), first, of published books and articles in the field, and second, of projects of research in progress and un- published studies, theses, and dissertations. The first seven installments (1934-1940, inclusive) list more than a thousand printed items and a third as many unpublished studies, many of them dissertations and monographs by mature scholars, in varying stages of completion. Of these many items, more than half deal with German-American literary and intellectual relations. It would seem that there is little cause for despairing of a field which engages some six or seven hundred students, many of them seasoned, reputable scholars. But there are as yet few signs to indicate that this host of workers knows whither it is headed, or, indeed, that it cares very much. The Group has done little more than to listen, once a year, to several of its members who had particularly cogent subjects to present for the consideration of the mem- bers. The Committee on Bibliography has undertaken little more than to take notice of what is being done here, there, and yon- der, and occasionally to pass cryptic judg- ment on an item that seemed especially good or notoriously bad. If the Group could be transformed into an effective steering body, the value of its work would be en- hanced ; but thus far this body has been no more successful than other subdivisions of the Modern Language Association in the much desired objective of giving unity and cohesion to its work. Introduction 11 In the meantime the Carl Schurz Memo- rial Foundation, under the leadership of its executive secretary, Wilbur K. Thomas (retired in 1947 and succeeded by Howard W. Elkinton), has taken initial steps to per- fect a plan of organization that promises eventually to put the study of German- American cultural relations in a favored po- sition as an effective, co-operative enterprise. During 1936-1937, Dr. Heinz Kloss under- took, at the direction of the Foundation, a preliminary survey of the status of research in German-American cultural relations. His "Report on the Possibilities for Re- search Work of an American-German Insti- tute," comprising 238 typewritten pages, has been filed with the officers of the Foun- dation, and may well serve as an excellent point of departure for a program of research when the Foundation is prepared to proceed. More than this, the Foundation has pub- lished since 1934 the American-German Review, a bi-monthly of high quality. In 1941, it secured permanent quarters in the Old Custom House at 420 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. A capable director of re- search was appointed, and basic work was begun, including the compilation of a union catalog of German-Americana, until World War II interrupted the program. An attempt is made in the Introduction to the Bibliography, which forms a part of this study, to list (1) the leading deposito- ries of German-Americana, (2) German- American research associations, and (3) co- operating European organizations and in- stitutes, and to give some indication of the location and contents of European libraries and archives of most immediate value for the prosecution of German-American cul- tural and historical investigations. Although my survey indicates that the amount and variety of material preserved is considerable, its state of preservation and, more espe- cially, the inaccessibility of much of it balk the investigator at every turn. It is hoped that the Bibliography presented with this study will facilitate research, but it is too much to hope that really efficient work on a large scale can be done until comprehen- sive guides to archives, check lists of period- icals, indexes to the more important jour- nals, and a union catalog of all printed ma- terials become available. Until then the investigator will inevitably find himself forced often to rely on instinct and chance instead of scientifically accurate guides to locate the materials most pertinent to his study. 14 Any attempt on the part of an individual to analyze and appraise so large and com- plex a field as German-American cultural relations is necessarily hazardous. Yet I should feel that I were side-stepping one of the problems of real importance if, after devoting years to compiling a bibliography and weighing the relative merits of thou- sands of the items surveyed, I should allow the hazards involved to deter me from set- ting down, however tentatively, my obser- vations regarding (1) the areas of this gener- al subject of investigation that have been treated with some degree of finality and (2) such fields as seem still to be relatively un- filled. Such judgments as I shall venture to make can be checked against the Bibliog- raphy, to which, it is hoped, the cross- referenced index may provide a handy guide. Enough has already been said on the score of purely historical studies of the in- flux of Germans into this country. Barring completion of many investigations small in scope and of the above-mentioned projects (e.g., the interrupted plans of the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation), it would seem extravagant to expect immediately anything definitive on this head. Lacking numerous studies paralleling Rudolf L. Biesele's History of German Settlements in Texas (Austin, 1930) and John A. Russell's The Germanic Element in the Making of Michigan (Detroit, 1927), it is questionable whether anything designed to supersede the books by Professors Faust and Wittke could accomplish its purpose in a manner to justify the effort. 12 German Culture in America Before a synthesis of German "social" and "folk" influence upon American com- munity life can be considered possible, many more individual and local studies need to be made of German customs, folk beliefs, pop- ular lore, superstitions, handcrafts, etc. Linguistic and dialectal factors, economic and agricultural elements, educational and ethnographical considerations, as these af- fect the German and other national con- tingents in the United States, will have to be analyzed and squared against one an- other before anything comprehensive can emerge. Among the more puzzling problems to- ward the solution of which many small in- vestigations and at least two general treat- ments have already given partial answers is that regarding the importance in American society and the influence upon political, so- cial, and economic theory in America of the many German communities — socialistic, communistic, and otherwise — which once dotted the American landscape. One should like to know whether these communities were socialistic or communistic, whence they derived their ideas, and what connec- tions they had, if any, with such Anglo- American communities as Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Economy. Ephrata, Ama- na, Zoar, the Nassau Adelsverein, and the rest are individually and collectively the sub- jects of books, but one is left to conclude, from the failure of their historians to tell us much about origins and connections, that, like Topsy, these communal experiments in living "just growed," that they existed in isolation for some years, and then suddenly or gradually ceased to be, leaving no ap- preciable influence behind them beyond sites upon which sentimental descendants or historical societies have erected markers or shrines for the edification of tourists. For the purpose of the historian, the ex- ternal data relating to German and Ger- man-American participation in the public and political life of America have already led to some significant conclusions, most notable progress on this head having been made under the auspices of Turner's theo- ries about the frontier. Yet nothing more exhaustive has been attempted than oc- casional chapters in histories of particular sections or areas and in such works as Clif- ton J. Child's German- Americans in Poli- tics, 1914-igij (Madison, 1939) and the two books by Professors Wittke and Zucker on the Forty-eighters. Charles B. Robson's University of North Carolina dissertation of 1930 on "The Influence of German Thought on the Political Theory in the United States in the Nineteenth Century" (a portion of which has appeared in print) is the best analysis available in its field. For the fur- ther study of German-American political influence in America, Dr. Heinz Kloss's Um die Einigung des Deutschamerikaner- titms (Berlin, 1937) * s provocative and help- ful. This history of the oft-attempted uni- fication of German-Americanism, far from complete or final, is a mine of information for every kind of investigation utilizing historical facts and statistical data con- cerning German-American organizations, combinations, and associations — local, na- tional, and international. The book is of especial significance for the future historian of German-American religious movements and of German religious influence in the United States, since many of the efforts to unite German-American groups had a reli- gious or denominational orientation. Of German church history in America — Luther- an, Reformed, Mennonite, Moravian, and the others — there is a tremendous body of published material, but much of it is un- critical in method, and all of it is limited in scope, heterogeneous and incoherent. There is as yet no approximation toward a history of all German-American churches in America, and virtually no effort to consider their influence upon the broader stream of American religious thought. On the basis of materials already assembled covering indi- vidual churches, congregations, synods, conferences, and denominations, a historian Introduction 13 able to see beyond the infinite minutiae in which the subject lies submerged should be able to make a notable contribution to the history of religion in the United States. Such a history should put us in a favored position to consider, next, questions regard- ing (i) how extensive and pervasive Ger- man religious influences were and are, beyond the circle of German-American communicants, (2) how these German church bodies were modified by the non- German religious groups surrounding them, and (3) how significant they are in the American religious tradition. Some attempts are made at various points in the following pages to indicate how theological speculation filtered into American religious thought directly from Germany. For example, attention is direct- ed toward the impact of German theological researches upon influential American min- isters — Calvinists like Moses Stuart at Andover, who read the German Biblical in- vestigations sympathetically and availed himself of the tools of German theological research; Unitarians like Andrews Norton, who read the German theologians, even though mainly to refute them; or later transcendental theologians like Theodore Parker, whose journals, sermons, pam- phlets, and books bristle with the names of Tholuck, Hengstenberg, Jacobi, Schleier- macher, Herder, Strauss, and the "higher critics" of German Biblical research. Ob- viously the history of these infiltrations cannot be complete until the course of Ger- man-American religious movements has been traced and their influence evaluated. 15 In the area of scientific influence from Germany (often closely related to that of philosophical and theological influence) basic work is currently being completed by my colleague, Professor Harry Hayden Clark. Until quite recently it has been generally assumed and often flatly said that Ameri- cans were innocent of any knowledge of German thought until it was brought over in the heads and trunks of the generation of young Americans (Ticknor, Bancroft, Ever- ett, et al.) who studied in the German uni- versities during the second and third dec- ades of the last century. On closer exami- nation of the records left by earlier genera- tions, we find a lively interchange on philo- sophical and more general intellectual mat- ters that goes back, in an almost unbroken continuity and tradition, to Nathaniel Ward, John Winthrop II, Robert Child, and Cotton Mather. But when we come to such fundamental questions as how, when, and where German philosophy was intro- duced into our academic halls, we are con- strained to turn the brittle pages of old college and university catalogs and bulle- tins. 16 I have tried to clarify the issues, insofar as they involve Germanic influences, of the highly controversial questions (1) whether or not New England Transcendentalism was merely the natural and integral develop- ment out of native traditions, including Puritan idealism and Unitarian rationalism, (2) whether, if it was not mainly indigenous, it derived from Greek or German or French philosophy, or all three, and others as well, and (3) if so, how much and in what parti- cular respects. And I have tried to sketch the history of how Emersonian Transcen- dentalism migrated westward to join forces with St. Louis Hegelianism, and how the Hegelians from St. Louis, Quincy, and Jacksonville, in turn, brought the current of idealistic thought full circle by joining in the activities of the Concord School of Philosophy in ways and degrees that threatened to wrest the sceptre from Alcott and Emerson. The emergence of pragma- tism, personalism, behaviorism, and experi- mental psychology affords other examples of later forms of Germanic influence that await intensive study before the relations can become clear. In the area of literary influence, the con- siderable body of exploratory, and in some instances definitive, studies provides a rela- 14 German Culture in America tively greater and safer degree of guidance, although the special pleading and exag- gerated claims characteristic of some of them create problems of their own. German- American literary relations of the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries — virgin territory until Professor Jantz published his preliminary survey in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology for January, 1942 — promises the most immediately fruitful rewards. The study of poetry, drama, and prose fiction produced in Ger- man by Germans and German-Americans is still in its rudimentary stages. 17 The subject is not one of primary concern in the ensuing pages, except that I have endeavored to include in the Bibliography the authors and titles of greatest import. The brief summary chapter on German-American writings with which this book originally concluded had to be sacrificed to save space. The literary productivity (in the English language) of Americans of German descent is another subject which has received little attention. Besides writers like Henry Timrod and Joaquin Miller, there are hundreds of others — from Henry L. Mencken and Theodore Dreiser to Thomas Mann and Emil Ludwig — who might profitably engage the atten- tion of the historian of German-American literary influences. Literary influence is a broad subject, with many ramifications. It can be traced most readily in terms of men or of literary genres; but often associated departments, such as the stage, dramatic criticism, jour- nalism and printing, eloquence and oratory, are of real importance because of the way they affect the literary development of a people. Thus eloquence, whether in the pul- pit or on the lecture platform, exerted throughout Emerson's lifetime an effect which we have hardly begun to divine. 18 On first thought, it would seem that little in this respect could have come from Germany; and yet, when the significance of German university education in America is considered, we begin to see connections. Certainly the people who heard Edward Everett soon after his return from Gotting- en were quick to detect a new force in the man, his scholarship, and his lectures. There was wide divergence of opinion about his effectiveness: some thought him elo- quent, others pedantic, but all agreed that he had something, in both matter and man- ner, that distinguished him from the home- bred scholar and man of letters. The history of the German periodical press in America, of German printing in this country, and of Germans in that business are other subjects which invite investiga- tion. Seidensticker's monumental biblio- graphy of German printing in America stops with 1830; bibliographies prepared by Flory, Bender, Reichard, Raunick, and others are all restricted to special subjects or to limited areas and periods. On the history of the German periodical press in America we have little beyond a few mono- graphs and articles, such as Miller's early studies of German-American newspapers and magazines in Pennsylvania and those by Keidel on German newspapers in Maryland. The recent survey made by Dr. Edmund E. Miller (University of Maryland) of the German periodicals that appeared in Baltimore during the last century and a half reveals at once interesting facts re- garding their history, their circulation, and their influence that are of significance to the historian of American culture whether he is interested in Germanic influences or not. Similar investigations for such German centers as Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, and San An- tonio are in order. Obviously, the gaps are numerous and broad. It is not my purpose to point out all of them, much less to fill them in. It would be more to the point to say briefly what this study purports to do, for an enumera- tion of what has not been done by others and of what is not undertaken here would be endless. On that score I need perhaps to say no Introduction 15 more than to avow frankly that because I am a professor of American literature, I profess to the study of that subject, and have selected areas of investigation most germane to it. Accordingly I have undertak- en to treat chiefly three aspects of Ger- manic influence in America — the philoso- phical, the educational, and the literary — which, in the first place, I felt I could treat with some degree of success, and which, in the second place, I believe to be of particu- lar relevance to the progress of the history of American literary culture at this time, as forming a fairly unified and coherent body of material. I particularly regret my inabili- ty to treat the German influence in the other arts — notably music, the area in which German influence has been most per- vasive and profound. There will be no lack of questions why this or that other subject was omitted, or why some phase of the three areas chosen was neglected. I have no de- fense except the knowledge that I possess all the common human frailties, that I have no assurance of longevity, that I am not omniscient, and that publishers still prescribe certain limits. I can only express the hope that my failures and omissions will stimulate, or irk, other laborers to help in the gathering of a rich, ripe harvest. Book One German Thought in America Early Interest in German Culture THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Points of View The accepted view of colonial Americans as a singularly provincial people, isolated from the great cosmopolitan traditions of the world, is gradually being revised as investigation progresses into the cultural heritage of America. Among European in- fluences felt in colonial times, those emanat- ing from Germany have been consistently underestimated. The tradition persists that Americans were content to remain ignorant of Germany until the early nineteenth cen- tury when, so the legend goes, a group of young Harvard men, suddenly fired by Ma- dame de Stael's account of the great Ger- man universities, journeyed thither and brought back with them the weapons wherewith to effect a Teutonic conquest of American learning, literature, and thought. The story is too pat to be credible, and re- cent investigations 1 lead to the inescapable conclusion that there was, almost from the date of the first settlement in New Eng- land, a lively and rather steadily mounting interest in Germany. 2 The conventional account of early Ger- man-American relationships 3 takes cogni- zance of the work of Francis Daniel Pastorius as the founder of Germantown about 1683 and mentions the stream of German books that issued from the Saur and Ephrata presses, but it finds little else to record save the correspondence that Cotton Mather is known to have carried on with August Her- mann Francke 4 of Halle until a century lat- er — so the story runs — when Madame de Stael's De I'Allemagne (London, 1813 ; Paris, 1814; New York, 1814) opened bright young men's eyes to the dazzling splendors of Ger- man libraries and to the unparalleled ad- vantages of a German university education; whereupon Ticknor, Bancroft, Everett, and a few others set out at once to learn the language, only to meet the formidable ob- stacle of finding no German books available in all Boston. 5 Andrew Preston Peabody, recalling Dr. Carl Follen's introduction, in 1825, of German as a regular subject of in- struction at Harvard, relates how he joined the first class of eight volunteers and how they encountered similar difficulties until Dr. Follen prepared a "German Reader for Beginners' . . . furnished to the class in single sheets as . . . needed and printed in Roman type, there being no German type within easy reach." 8 Lowell, reminiscing in 1890 over a span of almost half a century, helped to give currency to this tradition by asserting, "Mr. George Bancroft told me that he learned German of Professor Sydney Wil- lard, who, himself self-taught, had no no- tion of its pronunciation." 7 And Moses Stuart, who himself taught philosophy and theology of a sufficiently Germanic cast as early as 1810 to put the heresy hunters on his trail, recalled in 1841 how "for years to- gether" he was "almost alone in the study of German," adding that "the late J. S. Buckminster, of Brattle Street Church, was the only man among the Literati of this region, who at that time had any other knowledge of German than what belonged 19 20 German Thought in America to the mere tyro." 8 Stuart's reference to Buckminster leads us back to Ticknor, who was on terms of intimacy with Buckminster as early as 1810, the year when Ticknor was admitted to the Anthology Club. 9 Obvious- ly Ticknor's memory, trying to span fifty- five years, tricked him; for close as he was to Buckminster, he could hardly have been unaware of his friend's wholehearted devo- tion to German studies nor of the choice collection of German books which he had begun to acquire long before the publication of M. Villers' or of Madame de Stael's books. The unanimity of testimony appear- ing in these reminiscences, which launched and kept afloat this myth, is hardly to be explained unless it is assumed either that these several individuals who undertook to study or to promote the study of German were so far separated from each other as not to be aware of their several efforts (an assumption hardly tenable for those who belonged to the Boston-Cambridge com- munity), or that by the late nineteenth cen- tury these several pioneers 10 were, perhaps unconsciously, glorifying the role they had played in introducing a study that had at- tained a high respectability in the mean- time. Anglo-German Backgrounds Early German-American intellectual in- terrelations cannot be appraised until six- teenth- and seventeenth-century German- English relations are studied more ex- haustively. Such investigations as have been made are indicative of the influence which became increasingly significant, es- pecially just before and during the period of the Thirty Years' War. These contacts can be traced in terms of British interest (1) in the German Reformation and subsequent religious developments in Germany and central Europe, (2) in German classical, scientific, and theological scholarship, and (3) in the dominance of German book-mak- ers and printers in the preservation of learning and publication generally. The semi-annual Frankfurt Book Mart became the mecca of scholars and the clearinghouse of learning for all Europe. Early Anglo-German relationships were reciprocal. There were settlements of Eng- lish Puritans in Frankfurt, Zurich, and other German cities; English acting com- panies freely trouped through the German countries; and noted English savants and travelers (among them Roger Ascham, John Dee, Robert Fludd, John Pell, Henry Wotton, and John Durie) traveled, resided, and sometimes published their works in Ger- many. 11 There were also German savants, as well as political and religious refugees of various kinds who came to England, notably London, early in the seventeenth century, and who left behind a deposit of reform ideas that were found acceptable among groups of Puritans and Separatists from whom the New England colonists were re- cruited. The outlines of these relationships, some- times circuitous but often direct, begin to emerge with some degree of precision. For example, there was Johann Valentin An- dreae, that interesting professor, theolo- gian, scientist, mystic, and litterateur, whose Lutheranism readily absorbed Cal- vinistic principles, and whose interests in science did not preclude his enunciating ideas upon which the order of Rosicrucians was reputedly founded. What is of more importance is that Andreae was the author of a Utopian work entitled Christianopolis (1619), the product at once of Tubingen Lutheranism and Genevan Calvinism, which exerted a considerable influence in England through such intermediaries as Comenius, Durie, Hartlib, Figulus, Hiib- ner, and Haak. 12 Andreae was one of the moving spirits behind several Utopian and educational movements which came to the attention of New Englanders before they embarked for America, through the agency of Germans The Seventeenth Century 21 residing in London and of Palatine refu- gees. Thus some of the underlying ideas for the founding of a self-governing common- wealth in the new world, as it took shape in the minds of the Pilgrims and the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Company, were based partly upon German Utopian ideas, whose prime source was the cosmopolitan circle that came within the Andreaen orbit of influence. Aside from Durie, Hartlib, and others in London who interested themselves in Andreae's ideas, there was a group of Palatine refugees of the 1620's in London and Dorchester who seem to have served as intermediaries and to have accentuated, at just the right time, certain Germanic ideas for which the ground had been prepared by English dissenting doctrine. We know that John White of Dorchester, the moving spir- it for a "New England" (though he never went thither) opened his home to a number of them — Johann Nicholas Ruzilius (Reu- liss), Johann Kaspar Hopff, and Theodor Haak, among others. 13 So did John Cotton, while he still lived at Old Boston in Eng- land. 14 The full substantiation of definite personal relations connecting Andreae's group, the Anglo-Germans in London, the leaders among the several trading and set- tlement companies, and the Pilgrim and Puritan fathers (an undertaking which Professor Jantz has set for himself) awaits the examination in detail of certain English documents and records ; but already enough evidence has appeared to show that streams of thought emanating from men like Luther, Andreae, and Althusius were not unheeded by early English Separatists and Puritans. Quite possibly, when all the facts are in hand, a reorientation of the accepted his- tory of how the earliest New England com- monwealths were constituted will be in or- der. Lutheranism How far Luther and Lutheranism in- fluenced colonial Americans poses other provocative questions. The complexity of the problem is aggravated by the fact that various sectarians, among them Anabap- tists, Mennonites, Moravians, Amish, Dun- kers, and Schwenkfelders, made their way to America by various routes. The influence of some of them can be traced with a fairer degree of surety than that of the parental movement from which most of them stem — namely, Lutheranism. The principles and implications of Luther's revolt, or "pro- test," in the new land became volatile forces readily adaptable and supplementary to the indigenous political liberalism in New Eng- land that attacked and eventually helped destroy the old theocratic absolutisms of church and state. The gunpowder packed away in Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and the right of every man to interpret his own Bible was capable of making breaches in political and social as readily as in theological ramparts, although the demonstration of how this was done in specific instances presents difficulties. Puritanism in America developed from the first two broad tendencies, fundamen- tally opposed to each other: the one strict, the other liberal. The Puritans of Massa- chusetts Bay, who leaned most in the direc- tion of Calvin, and who are often referred to indiscriminately as Calvinists, went most often to Geneva for their principles, but they often looked also in the direction of Zurich, Heidelberg, Wittenberg, Herborn, Franeker, and Leyden. Separatists, as rep- resented by Plymouth, while ostensibly Calvinistic in their profession, oftener sought guidance in Luther's "protests" than in Calvin's Institutes. Two noteworthy facts uniformly overlooked are (1) that Calvin's Institutes are to be found very infrequently among early New England inventories, Luther On the Galatians alone appearing quite as often, 15 and (2) that German theo- logical works of all kinds are listed with remarkable frequency. 16 The New England settlers were not in the strict sense of the word Calvinists. The designation of Cal. 22 German Thought in America vinists is one that is attached to early Amer- ican Pilgrims and Puritans because nine- teenth- and twentieth-century American historians have fastened it on them. They regarded themselves as purifiers or reform- ers, not as Calvinists; nor were they con- tent to stop where Calvin had stopped. They never admitted that Calvin had discovered the whole of religious truth. 17 It is to be borne in mind, in the next place, that there were in the Colonies a great many schismatics — Anabaptists, Seek- ers, Congregationalists of various kinds, Antinomians, Mennonites, Dunkers, etc. — ■ who, though differing among themselves, were united in the common purpose of breaking down social restrictions, theologi- cal uniformitarianism, and political abso- lutism. Under whatever name they went, or in whatever colony they agitated their reforms, they all represented a form of sep- aratism that refused to abide by such In- stitutes as Calvin had imposed upon the Lutheran Protest. As the left wing of the Reform movement, they were bent on car- rying through to logical conclusions the rev- olutionary premises upon which the Refor- mation was based. Like the New England Puritans, they had resolved to put into practice Luther's advice that where "con- strained defence" fails against governors who are enemies of God and of God's word, it behooves God's children to sell or forsake all and go to a new land where they will be free to worship, "as Christ commandeth." Theirs was also, as Parrington has sug- gested, "the final expression of the disinte- grating gospel of individualism implicit in the doctrine of the priesthood of all be- lievers." 18 The reaction which set in in Germany even during Luther's lifetime — indeed, in the older Luther himself — against the ex- treme liberalism which this doctrine incited may be represented as receiving codifica- tion at the hands of Calvin. Luther had been more mystical than rational, drawing his inspiration primarily from the New Testa- ment, finding the creative source of the Christian life in the spiritual union of the soul with Christ, and inclining to tolerate differences of opinion among believers that did not involve fundamental matters of doc- trine; Calvin was more austerely logical, drawing inspiration mainly from the Old Testament, exalting righteousness above love, following the Hebraic code, and laying emphasis upon an authoritarian system. 19 Neither developed a wholly consistent poli- ty, but Calvin's training in jurisprudence and government enabled him to produce the more coherent system of the two. It has been said that the principal difference between Lutheranism and Calvinism is owing to the fact that Luther began life as a monk and Calvin as a lawyer. Calvinism was not only a creed but a system of govern- ment, the State serving as the protector of the Church; while Lutheranism developed (whatever it became later) under circum- stances in Germany whereby religion was recognized as occupying a separate sphere from that of the State. 20 Calvinism developed differently in differ- ent countries. In the case of Lutheranism, the differences were even more pronounced, for Lutheranism lacked an equally consis- tent body of political theory, and it early developed, as a consequence of social con- ditions in Germany, a schism as regards the relation of Church to State. Moreover, a distinction has to be made between the Luther before the Peasants' War of 1525 and the Luther after that date. The young- er Luther recognized the tyranny of nobles and petty princes and was in accord with the "Twelve Articles" that formed the charter of the peasants' revolt, but the ex- cesses of the uprising prompted him to call upon the nobles to crush the revolt at whatever cost. This change of front had the significant effect of tying him and his followers to the princes. While insuring his own safety and that of Lutheranism, this protection was won at the expense of liber- ty, and from that time forward Lutheran- The Seventeenth Century 23 ism in Germany became more and more a department of State. 21 Luther's action had another important result. It led to a split that divided the Ger- man Reformation into two camps. "The Lutheran Reformation which had started as a national movement, now became mid- dle-class in its orientation, while the peasant movement tended to break up into many fragments, all gathered under the general name of Anabaptist." 22 By the later six- teenth century there were a score or more of "Anabaptist" sects representing a great variety of religious and political opinions. Most of them came later to be more or less closely identified with either the Menno- nites or some form of Halle or Herrnhut pietism, which in the beginning represented a movement within Lutheranism itself. Thus it came to pass that Lutheranism in Germany, instead of developing logically, as it might have, the democratic spirit im- plicit in Luther's "protests," became iden- tified with a state system of religion, while the Anabaptists and pietists carried on the tradition of individualism and freedom. That is to say, when we speak of the in- fluence of Luther among New England col- onists, we refer less to Lutheranism as it developed into a state church in Germany than to the spirit of the younger Luther as it was exemplified first in the Protest and later in the Lutheran and Reformed schis- matics, among them Anabaptists, Men- nonites, Moravians, Dunkers, and Schwenk- felders. 23 To return, now, to the original principles of Luther, we may set down as a funda- mental tenet his proclamation that the only requisites for Christian life are conscionable righteousness and individual liberty. 24 "Neither pope nor bishop nor any other man has the right to impose a single syllable of law upon a Christian man without his con- sent ; and if he does, it is done in the spirit of tyranny." 25 "A Christian man is a per- fectly free lord of all, and subject to none. A Christian man is a perfectly dutiful ser- vant of all, and subject to all." 26 These doc- trines involve (i) a spirit of uncompromi- sing individualism in church and state that leads to the overthrow of theocracy and autocracy, and (2) an advocacy of a doctrine of faith that is inimical to the Calvinistic doctrines of predestination, election, impu- tation, justification, sanctification, and works. 27 . In Calvin's system there was no room for such Christian liberty and freedom. The Genevan was more logician than philoso- pher — "a rigorous system-maker and dog- matist who knotted every argument and tied every strand securely into its fellows, till there was no escape from the net unless one broke through the mesh." 28 But there is ample evidence to show that not all men and women who came to New England during the seventeenth century readily submitted themselves and their consciences to Calvin's strait-laced prescrip- tions. The proportionate fealty of Puritan attitudes toward Luther and Calvin is a matter than can be determined only in rel- ative terms. If either of them had achieved a true and full Reformation, there would have been no occasion for the New England Puritans to desire further clarification of the Scriptures or of an extended purifica- tion of the Church. They understood that it did not begin with Luther, nor end with Calvin. John Cotton, for example, regarded the efforts of Petrus Waldus, John Huss, and Savanarola as inaugurating three eras of reformation, so that by 1500 "the Re- gions were white and ready for the harvest, else Luther had not found such good success in his Ministry"; yet Cotton grieved that "the pregnant strength and glorious lustre of many heroical and excellent gifts of Lu- ther had bin so idolized that many and great Nations followed him in some noto- rious errors of his way instead of setting themselves to perfect what they [reformers like Luther] left defective." 29 That being so, various types or factions of Puritans found in various ones of their predecessors varying 24 German Thought in America degrees of guidance. Many set greatest store by Calvin, even while admitting that he was only one among many "judicious and pious" reformers. 30 Others, especially those most intent upon breaking the insti- tutional power of church and state, found in Luther their guide, for he had been the first effectively to batter down the institu- tional forms and restrictions imposed upon individualism. Accordingly the conven- tional-minded leaned toward Calvin's "in- stitutes"; the liberal-minded, seeking fur- ther liberalizations in their creed, govern- ment, and social arrangements, tended to- ward an extension of Luther's "protests." As a group, they thought of themselves as belonging to an eclectic and progressive wing of the general Reformed church, and accordingly when they consulted continen- tal reformers, they esteemed the works of the irenicist David Pareus of Heidelberg no less than those of Calvin of Geneva or Lu- ther of Wittenberg ; while the efforts of John Durie toward a Luther-Reformed union met with the formal approval of the entire New England Synod. 31 Altogether there was a greater theoretical liberalism among the Puritans than their practical conduct of affairs leads one to believe. Separatism The earliest group to come to New Eng- land, the Separatists of Plymouth, stead- fastly maintained their "separatism" and escaped for some time the worst entangle- ments in Calvinistic meshes by the for- tuitous circumstance of distance which separated them from Boston. It would be too much to suggest that Luther was prin- cipally responsible for their uncompromis- ing individualism; no definite statements of indebtedness to Luther for their separa- tism appear in the writings of those Pil- grims who came to New England. Yet it seems altogether likely that during their sojourn in Holland their contacts with Lu- theranism predisposed them to embody in their covenant the principle of separation of church and state, one of Luther's cardi- nal tenets. Certainly their chief spokesman, the Rev. John Robinson, who was with them throughout their exile, incorporated a number of Lutheran principles in his writings, though he chose to differ from Luther on consubstantiation, baptism, and details of church discipline. When he bade his parishioners farewell (he was destined never to follow them to America), he ad- monished them to this effect: I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion . . . The Lutherans can- not be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw ; whatever part of his will our good God has imparted and revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it. And the Calvinists, they will stick fast where they were left by that great man of God who yet saw not all things. This is a misery to be lamented; for though they were "burning and shining lights" in their times, yet they penetrated not into the "whole counsel of God"; ... I beseech you to remember it: it is an article of your Church-covenant, "That you will be ready to receive whatever shall be made known unto you from the written word of God." 32 A second group, represented by Thomas Hooker and congregations like those at Newtown, Dorchester, and Watertown, who opposed certain oligarchical forms of Puri- tan church polity, and who sought to intro- duce a modicum of democracy in both church and state, only half succeeded in their designs by breaking away from Massa- chusetts Bay and settling at Hartford and elsewhere to the west. Here they achieved a partial separation of church and state, and by means of a set of Fundamental Or- ders, in the nature of a constitution, put restrictions on "magisterial autocracy," placed authority in "the free consent of the people," removed some property qualifica- tions and religious tests for the franchise, and declared the admission of freemen a political matter to be left to the several township democracies. The Seventeenth Century 25 A third group, represented by antino- mians like Anne Hutchinson and John Wheelwright, whose ideas were derived ultimately from Johann Agricola 33 and thus more or less closely allied with Lutheranism, chose to suffer expulsion rather than relin- quish their heretical, "Germanic" prin- ciples. 34 The worst offender on the score of non- conformity, except Samuel Gorton, was Roger Williams, who, in the eyes of the or- thodox, was no better than a Seeker and only slightly less reprehensible than an Episcopalian wastrel like Thomas Morton. It is known that he read Luther, although we cannot be certain when — possibly in the library of Sir Edward Coke, or as a student at Cambridge, possibly also later. That he was familiar with Luther's treatises on civil liberty is indicated by his frequent refer- ences to Luther and his several writings on the subject. 36 By 1635 he came out in favor of the Lutheran principle of separation of church and state, and while in Salem he questioned certain theocratic dispositions of lands and civil rights, thus getting him- self involved in difficulties with the author- ities that led to his banishment. He pro- ceeded soon to insist on complete autono- my of secular government, agreeing with Luther: "No temporal matter shall be tak- en to Rome ... A pope shall have no authority over the emperor . . . 36 He was in full accord also with Luther in preaching justification by faith alone, without priest or visible church organization, and he in- sisted upon the church as a purely spiritual entity, a communion of believers. Except for his dislike of Luther's reactionary modi- fication of his earlier views, he held that Luther led the way to the true pattern of Christianity with "a spark of true Light," and consistently preferred Luther's doc- trines to those of Calvin. 37 In his espousal of Separatist-Leveler ideas he proceeded on the basis of Luther's desire for neither autoc- racy or mobocracy, but for lawocracy or booklaw, that is, constitutional govern- ment, to a position that has won for him, from historians like Parrington and Ernst, the title of father of American democracy. 38 Williams' reforms in religion were hard- ly less potent than they were in politics. He sought to secularize the church on its in- stitutional side, according to six theses; 3 * he endeavored, at the same time, to vitalize its spiritual nature by preaching, in con- formity with Lutheran principles, the cov- enant of grace — the doctrine that man is justified by faith, and that he receives for- giveness of sins "in and for the merits of the Lord Jesus imputed and given to us." He rejected what he called the "hellish doctrine of Sanctification" and insisted on modify- ing the Calvinist Covenant of Works, sub- stituting for it the principle that man re- ceives "a pardon and justification freely . . . without desert." 40 For Calvinistic deter- minism and predestination he substituted Lutheran conditional election based on God's mercy, Christ's atonement, and spir- itual regeneration, or New Birth. 41 Thus, in his two-fold aim at reformation — the separation of church and state and salva- tion by repentence and faith — Roger Wil- liams followed in the steps of Luther rather than Calvin. Samuel Gorton (ca. 1592-1677), involun- tary founder of the "Gortonites," was a brother-in-iniquity of Roger Williams in the eyes of the orthodox in Massachusetts Bay. 42 The "heretical" principles which kept him in trouble, and which he boldly proclaimed, orally as well as in a series of pamphlets that culminated in his Simplici- ties Defence against Seven-Headed Policy (London, 1646), included the following: (1) he discounted the trinitarian doctrine; (2) he denounced a "hireling ministry," de- nying the fitness of men who were paid, and claiming that every man should be his own priest; (3) he wanted to abolish all outward ordinances; (4) he taught a conditional im- mortality depending on individual char- acter; (5) he denounced the doctrine of im- puted sin and righteousness; (6) he held 26 German Thought in America that by union with Christ one partook of the perfection of God; and (7) he denied the actual existence of heaven and hell. These tenets bear the stamp of radical Protestant doctrine as promulgated by Agricola, Lu- ther, and their followers. The question of precisely when and by what means Gorton came by his principles presents problems that await further investigation, but it may be presumed, since he was "more than or- dinarily skilled in the languages" and was judged in Rhode Island as next in learning to Roger Williams, that his "ample" library did not lack the requisite facilities to put him in touch with German religious thought. 43 Subsequent Pietistic, Mennonite, Ana- baptist, and other quietistic or mystical movements — sometimes allied with, some- times opposed to, Lutheran trends — are considerations that will engage our atten- tion later. In the meantime we shall have to survey other, more general, intellectual relationships that obtained between Ger- many and America during the seventeenth century. German Books in the Colonies Early American interest in Germany was often neither philosophical nor literary but general, reflecting a desire to keep abreast of German advancements represented by books in the realms of history, geography, astronomy and related sciences, printing, commerce, political theory, linguistics, grammar, dictionary- and encyclopedia- making. Often this interest was without specific reference to Germany, for of Ger- many in the modern sense of the word there was then no semblance. Oftener than not during the seventeenth century the books that engaged the attention of the well-read in America were in Latin rather than in German. By far the majority of books in the libraries of educated New Englanders were English books, of course; but of the continental books in the collections of men like Nathaniel Ward, Robert Child, Gover- nor Winthrop the Younger, his son and his grandson, Increase, Cotton, and Samuel Mather, books written by Germans, printed in Germany in either Latin or the vernacu- lar, were decidedly in the majority, with Dutch books next, followed by French, Italian, and Spanish books in the order named. 44 Inventories of estates, however sporadic and incomplete, indicate that German books were not uncommon in Plymouth house- holds from 1620 onward. 45 In the Massa- chusetts Bay settlements there were even more German books. As early as the first year of the colony, its official library in- cluded, besides two French works (Calvin's Institutes and a Molerus), sixteen books by Germans, including Johann Gerhard, Mar- tin von Chemnitz, Johann Piscator, David Pareus, and Johann Buxtorf 46 — all favorite theological scholars whose names occur in many private collections owned by New England leaders. When in 1638 John Har- vard presented Harvard College with his library of 329 titles, aggregating about four hundred volumes, the gift included twenty- five titles (forty-five volumes) of books by Germans — more than the French, Italian, and Dutch combined. 47 Early Enthusiasts for German Learning THE VVINTHROPS German learning enjoyed an auspicious introduction into America by no less a per- son than John Winthrop, Jr. (1 606-1 676), who, after being well educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and admitted a barrister of the Inner Temple, London (1625), trav- eled in Italy and Holland, and followed his father to Boston in 1631, where he became at once one of the leading men in the colo- nies, one of the founders of Ipswich and Connecticut, and governor of the latter col- ony (first elected in 1657 an d annually from 1659 to his death in 1676). A man of gentle- manly tastes and sound learning, the ear- The Seventeenth Centurv 27 liest American Fellow of the Royal Society (elected January i, 1662), first scientist in America, industrialist, ambitious promoter of projects to tap American natural resour- ces, most widely traveled colonist of his day, he was also perhaps the best-loved man in all the colonies. He not only possessed many German books but carried on an extended correspon- dence with German scholars and tried to keep abreast of scientific advances in Ger- many. His published correspondence con- tains many allusions to German titles, in- quiries about German authors, and requests of friends to send him German books or scientific and literary intelligences about or from Germany. 48 The library of John Vv'inthrop, Jr., which his father mentioned December 15, 1640, as comprising "above a thousand" volumes, 49 has been dispersed. 50 The sources of some of Winthrop's German books have been established by Professor Jantz. Several, for example, a heavily annotated Paracelsus volume, came to Winthrop from the library of the famous scientist and mystic John Dee; a volume by Basilius Valentinus came from the Dutch scientist Cornelius Drebbel, the reputed inventor of the thermometer; and certainly some of them came into Win- throp's possession from Robert Child, whose mercurial career in New England came to an untimely, and, for him, unprofit- able, termination in 1647 by what amount- ed to deportation. 51 Volumes of primarily literary interest in- clude that delightful composite of mining, homily, folk song, and wit, Serapta oder Bergpostilla (Niirnberg, 1564) of Johann Matthesius (Matthiae), the well-known pastor of Joachimsthal and the biographer of Luther (Niirnberg, 1570). Several of the volumes are entirely in German verse; others contain good and bad verses scattered through them. One large volume, composed mainly of Heidelberg theological disputa- tions of the 1580's, contains a verse satire, Der Schwdbische Uhu (1588), and a pam- phlet on the Spanish Armada. Conrad Gesner's Mithridates, sive de differentiis linguarum observationes (Zurich, 1555), one of the earliest essays on comparative philol- ogy by this famous Swiss scientist, whose works were not unknown to other colonial Americans, 52 attests Winthrop's interest in languages. 53 Nine early Rosicrucian tracts in Win- throp's library form one of the most remark- able items in American colonial libraries. These include not only Johann Valentin Andreae's Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz Anno 1549 (1616), of which only one copy is known to be in America, but also the even rarer tracts of 1614 and 1 61 5, together with two pages of manu- script, written in Latin and giving the rules of this projected German scientific order (not to be confused with the modern Rosi- crucians). Marginal notes, some of them in Winthrop's handwriting, together with the evidence contained in a letter from Child to Winthrop, dated May 13, 1648, 54 suggest that both Child and Winthrop were interest- ed in the Rosicrucian society. Several of Winthrop's scientific papers were published in the early volumes of the Royal Society; 55 others were lost in transit; still others, described as "a Barrell of Pa- pers," were 'Burnt in a warehouse in Bos- ton" about 1800. 56 The marginalia which Winthrop made in his German books, his correct use of German scientific terms in a letter to Slegelius (Nov. 10, 1650), and other German notations in his handwriting, all suggest that the German element was an active one in his thought processes, the pre- cise extent of which awaits investigation by students of the progress of science in New England. SAMUEL LEE Another seventeenth-century library, next in size to that of the Mathers and in scientific content second only to Winthrop's, was the collection owned by Samuel Lee (1625-1691). When it was offered for sale in 28 German Thought in America 1693, Wait Still Winthrop, as well as the Mathers, bought a number of the Lee vol- umes to add to their family collections. Not many of the Lee holdings were in German, but they included the Latin books by the usual German theologians and schoolmen, as well as a small but notable group of his- torical works, among them Rhenanus' De Rebus Germanicis." JOSHUA MOODY DANIEL GOOKIN MICHAEL WIGGLESWORTH EBENEZER PEMBERTON Among other collections of the seven- teenth century are those of Joshua Moody (1635-1681) and Daniel Gookin (1612-1687), and with these may be considered those of Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705) and Ebenezer Pemberton (1671-1717). In 1718, when the collections of Joshua Moody and of Daniel Gookin came up for sale together, they contained the best of the old German scholarly works, including a fine copy of Pistorius' Illustrium Veterum Scriptorum de Rebus Germanicis Collectio, besides an English book of travels through Germany and An Account of Switzerland Written in the Year 1714. The library of the author of The Day of Doom, though relatively small- er than those mentioned, contained sever- al standard German scientific works besides the usual theologians. It may be that the latter were used to good advantage in the preparation of the elaborate Biblical refer- ences that adorn the margins of his fearful poem on the day of judgment. Ebenezer Pemberton's library, when it was sold shortly after its owner's death, included several of the standard scholarly German compends, a few of the better scientific works by Germans, and such newer books asPufendorf 'sDissertationes, Francke's pop- ular Manductio ad Lectionem Scripturae Sacrae, and Toland's Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover. 5 * ROBERT CHILD The collections of the Mather dynasty, of Thomas Prince (1687-1758), Benjamin Col- man (1673-1747), and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) belong to a later day. Before turning to these, we must retrace our steps to the age of John Winthrop, Jr., whose friend Robert Child (1613-1654) played a prominent part in the introduction of Ger- man learning, especially as it related to early American scientific efforts. 59 He and Winthrop supported each other's interest in German scientific works, and their exchange of lists of scientific books which each possessed indicates that they had in mind, and possibly effected, a satisfactory plan of exchange by which their libraries were made to supplement each other. Child's list of his chemical books, made in 1 64 1, starts with fifteen German titles, continues with six Italian, twelve French, some English, and such important German works in Latin as Georg Agricola's De Re Metallica (1561).* Child's heading his list with his "libri . . . Germanici" indicates, perhaps, that, as in the case of Winthrop, his German library was not only the greatest in number but also the most highly prized. GEORGE STIRK Closely associated with Winthrop and Child, during the few years he spent in America, was George Stirk (or Starkey), B.A., Harvard, 1646, M.A., 1649. He ap- pears to have received his introduction to chemistry and metallurgy chiefly from Child and Winthrop, the latter placing his books at Stirk's disposal. But he soon departed for England, where he became one of Child's group closely associated with Samuel Hartlib, Robert Boyle, John French, the translator of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (dedicated to Robert Child) ; he became a prominent alchemist, traveled in Germany, and achieved the distinction of being the first American-educated scientist to have a number of his works translated into German. 61 The Seventeenth Century 29 JOHN DAVENPORT- NATHANIEL WARD -JOHN WILSON Other friends and associates of Governor Winthrop of Connecticut knew the German language, and many more were well ac- quainted with German scholarship through the media of Latin or English translation. Among the older generation was John Dav- enport (1597-1670), minister at New Ha- ven, who received, about 1661, German mystical and religious books from John Durie, then traveling in Germany. 62 John Wilson (1588-1667), educated for the law at Cambridge, a Puritan minister, heretic hunter in America, and author of several poems, owned at least one of the famous volumes of German renaissance literature — the dramas of Nicodemus Frischlin. But the most important wit among the first genera- tion of Puritans in America who cultivated German letters was Winthrop's friend and one-time neighbor and pastor at Ipswich — Nathaniel Ward (1578-1652), 63 the Simple Cobler of Aggawam, who promised to "mend his Native Country lamentably tattered, both in upper-Leather and sole," and to do it both gratis and merrily, how- ever earnestly. His Simple Cobler of Agga- wam (1647) contains numerous references to Germany and German matters — many of them doubtless reminiscent of his ear- lier sojourn in Germany. Among them are allusions to Paracelsus, Frederick Duke of Saxony, Prince Rupert, German Anabap- tists, Theosophists, the Rosicrucians, David Pareus, and the state of the German churches. There is little external evidence regarding Ward's familiarity with German literature on the strength of which one might connect him with Hans Sachs beyond the striking parallel between the German cobbler poet and his American counterpart and the possibility that the Knittelverse of the Niirnberg wit may have suggested to the Simple Cobler of Aggawam the dis- tichs with which he adorned the pages of his prose tract. Harvard College Although the scientific training of men like Winthrop and Child was acquired out- side Harvard College, seventeenth-century Harvard was not as destitute of scientific learning as has often been supposed, in either the amount or the variety that was taught in the classroom or that was availa- ble in the library. One of the most prolific and popular German textbook writers of the early seventeenth century, Bartholo- maeus Keckermann, was prominently rep- resented by his logic, his mathematics, 'and his physics. 64 Professor Morison brackets with Keckermann and Peter Ramus, Jo- hann Heinrich Alsted as the "favorite authors" for students' use. Among works of reference analogous to the general use to which the Encyclopaedia Britannica is put nowadays was Alsted 's Encyclopaedia.^ Other popular texts and works of reference of Germanic origin include books by Jo- hannes Magirus, especially his physics (per- haps the most frequently used German textbook at Harvard), W T ollebius' compen- dium or digest of theology, Johann Pisca- tor's analysis of the New Testament, Johann Buxtorf's Hebrew grammar, Wolfgang Musculus' commentary on Matthew, Mar- cus Friedrich Wendelin's physics and his logic, and Martin Trost's Syriac New Testa- ment. 66 As studies of seventeenth-century Harvard proceed, we find increasingly not only that education there embraced a wide range of subjects but also that German works in use covered almost every field of learning, 67 not excluding belles-lettres. 68 Through gifts and donations, 69 the Har- vard library soon acquired duplicate copies of a number of titles, which were disposed of by sale beginning about 1682. 70 The lists of these duplicates afford some indication of what books were popularly used. The money thus derived made possible the di- rect purchase of books in 1698, and it is a matter of some significance that the first accessions made with these resources were 30 German Thought in America the German Ephemerides'' 1 of Niirnberg and the Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig, 72 both highly reputed learned periodicals of their day. The first catalog of the Harvard library, published in 1723, reflects a strong predi- lection for German books throughout the seventeenth century that was superseded during the eighteenth by a tendency to ac- quire more Dutch and French works, 73 al- though for the entire period up to 1723 German works exceed in number the Dutch and at least equal the French works. 74 The Colonial Book Trade The general book trade as it was carried on in the late seventeenth-century in New England did not overlook German books, either, although Latin and English trans- lations were more frequently imported than books in German. 76 There are the old stand- ard scholarly works and also a few new ones, such as Johann Christian Sturm's compends on mathematics, architecture, and mechanics, which were used for colle- giate instruction until the mid-eighteenth century. 76 German folk books in English translation appear especially often in the order invoices of the time. For example, John Usher, Boston bookseller, imported between 1682 and 1685 six copies each of Reynard the Fox and Fortunatus, twelve copies of Seven Wise Masters, and sixty-six copies of Dr. John Faustus, only Bibles, Psalm books, and a few school books ap- pearing oftener and in greater numbers than Dr. Faustus.'''' Forty-eight copies of Dr. Faustus receiv- ed by Usher during 1683- 1684 were appa- rently disposed of handily, for in 1685 he ordered six more. The popularity of the old Faustus story at exactly the time when In- crease Mather was preparing his Illustrious Providences (1684) leads to conjectures about the possible influence of the book, not only on Mather but on the people gener- ally, in preparing the ground for the hys- teria that culminated in the Salem trials of 1692. The taste in New England for the marvelous and the magical did not pass immediately following the revulsion of feel- ing engendered by the witchcraft delu- sions. Although Dr. Faustus appeared less frequently in the invoices after the Salem tragedies, German books on related sub- jects continued popular, as indicated by the order placed by Michael Perry, another Boston bookseller, in 1700 for five copies of Fortunatus and three of the Seven Wise Masters. 1 * Thus German literary produc- tions early became associated in the popu- lar mind with the mystical, the mysterious, the diabolical, and the bizarre. The vogue which this kind of literature maintained throughout the eighteenth century helps explain in some measure the attitudes to- ward it at the beginning of the nineteenth, when, under romantic auspices, it made a new bid for recognition and acceptance in America. Prominent German-Americans The vogue of German lore in early New England is all the more striking because there were then in the region comparatively few Germans who might have propagated it. Thus far we know of only a dozen or so Germans of sufficient importance to exert any considerable influence, although there must have been others. Among this number, the six who appear to have been most influ- ential were, significantly, all physicians. The first appears to have been Dr. Felix Chris- tian Spori (Sporri) of Zurich, who except for a successful operation performed on the son of Governor William Brenton of New- port, R.I., did little more than visit in New England in 1661 and again between 1662 and 1665, despite very persuasive efforts that were made to induce him to settle per- manently in the New World. But his ex- periences provoked him to write his Ameri- kanische Reise-Beschreibung (Zurich, 1677), which may have had its repercussions later The Seventeenth Century 31 in terms of the immigrant movement. The next was John Lederer, who, after explor- ing the Appalachians of Virginia and the Carohnas, went to Connecticut, where he performed chemical experiment with Gov- ernor Winthrop at Hartford, and then practiced medicine at Stratford and Stam- ford about 1674-1675. 79 The next two came in the 1680's: Dr. Heinrich Burchstead Birkstead, Birksted), 80 who settled first at Nahant and then moved to Lynn Town; and Dr. Johannes Kaspar Richter von Kronenscheldt, 81 who settled at Spring or Lynn Pond about 1684 but soon removed to Salem, where he became the progenitor of the famous mercantile family of Crown- inshields. A few decades later Dr. Francis Grahtmann became a respected physician and citizen of Salem. 82 The sixth and best known was Christian Lodowick (Ludwig) of Leipzig, who, after completing his medical studies at the University of Leipzig, came to Newport in 1684, aged twenty-four. His Quaker leanings made him acceptable to the Newport Friends, in whose meeting house he taught school presumably until 1691, when his entrance into the Quaker controversy on the side of Cotton Mather and against George Keith 83 led to his closer association with notables of Boston like Mather, Samuel Sewall, James Oliver, and Thomas Brattle. Although his movements immediately after 1692 are not clear, about 1694 he seems to have made his home in Boston, where Sewall mentions meeting him. 84 Here he published his New England Almanac for 16Q5, interesting chiefly be- cause of its critical prefatory essay directed against certain types of astrological predic- tions customarily printed in almanacs and suggesting that Lodowick's wit may have had a part in shaping the form which the Old Farmer's Almanac was to take in colo- nial America. Toward the end of 1695 he began what turned out to be an adventure- some journey to Europe. After a sojourn in France, England, and possibly Holland, he returned to Germany, settling at Leipzig as a translator and teacher of English and serving actively as a linguistic and literary mediator between the German- and the English-speaking peoples. His English grammar was standard in its day, and his English-German dictionary in numerous editions from 17 16 onward was widely used in America as well as in Europe. He was remembered with great respect long after he left America. 85 "All in all, Lodowick probably ranks second only to Pastorius among the distinguished seventeenth-cen- tury Germans in America. He was the only German author in America before 1700." 85 Quakers, Quietists, and Pietists A tantalizing problem is presented by the influence, direct and indirect, which the Quakers of Rhode Island, Nantucket, Penn- sylvania, and elsewhere exerted in spread- ing German religious and philosophical ideas in colonial America. That close rela- tionships were maintained by the Quakers and several like-minded German sects is a well-known fact, and historians of the Friends' movement freely acknowledge the parallelism of their doctrines with those of certain German mystics and pietists, as well as the strong probability of Germanic in- fluence, especially from Jacob Boehme. 87 Before these problems can be resolved, historians of American religious thought need to investigate the extent and appraise the effect of Quaker doctrines on colonial American thought. The question of Boeh- me 's direct influence in America is another unexplored field. The introduction into America of ideas like those of Boehme's was not dependent upon Quaker intermediaries. Boehme's works had some circulation even during the seventeenth century. The Harvard library had a set of Boehme's works before 1723, 8S and a number of individuals possessed works of his 89 or books of a related mystical or quietistic nature. 90 During the eighteenth century the Ger- 32 German Thought in America man pietistic influence increased rather than diminished, not only through books but through direct contact with sectarians of a mystical or pietistic persuasion. In- deed, as the eighteenth century got under way, the avenues by which Germanic in- fluences came to America were multiplied. During the earlier century, Germanic in- tellectual influences in America were, in the absence of personal media, dependent al- most solely upon books and transatlantic correspondence; but during the next cen- tury, while the vogue of the German school- men (as represented by their encyclope- dias, compends, textbooks, and periodi- cals) decreased, 91 German religious and philosophical ideas received accelerated dissemination and currency through the increasingly larger contingents of German pietists and mystics who came to America. In the meantime the old German schoolmen continued to be consulted and quoted ; sev- enteenth-century libraries, often with rel- atively large Germanic contents, descended through successive hands, thus becoming agencies of transmission in the perpetuation of Germanic influences from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, the two most notable examples being the Winthrop and the Mather collections. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Before turning to the Mathers and, with them, to the eighteenth century, another word about the seventeenth is in order. The account of German contacts as given in the preceding pages is necessarily sketchy. It neglects many individuals and overlooks entire sections of the country. One should like to know more than is known about German travelers, traders, merchants, ad- venturers, and professional men in the middle and southern colonies, notably in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, and about their contacts with the Anglo-American portion of the colonial pop- ulation. Particularly intriguing are ques- tions regarding the precise position which Pastorius held among Pennsylvania colo- nists at large, i.e., his sphere of influence outside the settlement of Germantown. Similarly, there are Kelpius, Koster, Falck- ner, Seelig, Matthai, and the colony of millenial mystics who settled first at Ger- mantown and later on the Wissahickon. 92 After Pastorius, Kelpius was probably the most influential individual in bringing to America the Arndt-Andreae-Spener com- plex of mystical religious ideas. Questions regarding his precise relations with Penn and the Quakers generally remain unex- plored. And then there were the Dunkards (Dun- kers, Tunkers) who came early in the eight- eenth century to settle at various places in Pennsylvania, many of them ultimately fanning out into Virginia, while others con- gregated at Ephrata. At Ephrata they established a community in which they strove for earthly self-sufficiency and heav- enly salvation. Beissel and others among the gifted leadership provided for their communal requirements — spiritual, intel- lectual, and artistic— creating, for example, a body of song and music unequaled else- where in the American colonies. Christo- pher Saur (Sauer), one of the most success- ful of the group, did their printing until they set up their own press. How they affected their neighbors and what influence they exerted through correspondence and the distribution of their books in Pennsyl- vania and beyond Pennsylvania remain open questions. Our knowledge concerning the early Schwenkfelder, Moravian, and Trappist groups remains about where Pro- fessor Faust left it four decades ago. One wishes also to know more about William Penn's relations with the Germans who settled in his province and about the inter- actions between Penn's Quakers and Pasto- rius' pietists. Where, for instance, did the The Eighteenth Centurv 33 German Friends stand on the Keithian controversy, and what were James Logan's connections with the early German settlers in the colony of Pennsylvania ? For New York the situation is no better. Professor Dieter Cunz's recent work is adding to our knowledge of early Germans in colonial Maryland, but in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia existing studies leave us to infer that there were few or no German contacts during the seventeenth century. By and large, we are no better off so far as our knowledge of eighteenth-cen- tury German-American relations goes. The extension of knowledge in these areas is beset by a number of peculiarly difficult problems, not the least of which are the in- accessibility of the scanty and fragmentary materials and the equivocal promise of returns commensurate with the time and energy demanded by these ground-breaking investigations. There is little likelihood that our knowledge of German-American interrelations during the colonial period will be much enlarged until Professor Jantz completes his fundamental researches. That being so, the ensuing chapter has the same fault of incompleteness as the first chapter. For the nineteenth century, where, of course, our chief interest lies, we are in a more favorable position. Interchange of Ideas THE MATHERS But to return to the Mather family — notably Increase and Cotton — we have to do with an unbroken family tradition of learning extending from Richard of the early seventeenth through Samuel of the late eighteenth century. There was no in- terruption or break in the German interests of later members of the family as in the case of the YVinthrops. Moreover, in the case of Increase and Cotton, the son outlived the father by only five years, so that their pe- riods of activity were almost coincident. Both drew largely upon the same store of books; both were active before 1700 but equally so after that date; their learning and their libraries therefore serve admirably to demonstrate the transition from the sev- enteenth to the eighteenth century. Although Richard Mather had already concerned himself with German literary and theological productions, Increase was the first of the clan to take a prominent in- terest in German literature. He and his son Cotton, together with the YVinthrops, were among the leading perpetuators of the seventeenth-century tradition of colonial learning. They were also the chief agents in New England at the turn of the century by whom German religious and intellectual currents, as represented by August Her- mann Francke, Anthon Wilhelm Boehm, and Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, were pro- mulgated, before the efforts of Whitefield, the Wesleys, and Jonathan Edwards gave them greater and more popular currency. Increase Mather's interest in German learning may be judged in part by the con- tents of his library, large portions of which, together with additions made by Cotton, are preserved in the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society. 93 According to the catalog of 1664, Mather's library was similar to other noted colonial collections, only much larger. Ger- man works exceeded in number the books by French, Dutch, and Italian authors combined. 94 The use to which the Mathers put the Germanic scholarly resources of their li- braries in their prodigious labors involve in- vestigations beyond the scope that I could untertake; but until these sources are thoroughly examined, as Professor Mur- dock has done for portions of their works, 93 the critical study of the Mathers can hardly be said to have begun. A list of the Germans referred to, or quoted, in text or footnote, by Cotton Mather alone is to present in out- line the history of German scholarship and learning, holy and profane. Such a list would besrin with Melchior Adam, Heinrich 34 German Thought in America Cornelius Agrippa, Johann Heinrich Alsted, Heinrich Alting, Johannes Arndt, A. W. Boehm, Johannes Brandmiiller, Johann Buxtorf, Philip Camerarius, Johann Clop- penburg, Johann Coler, proceed through Wolfgang Franz and Paulus Freherus, Jo- hann Gerhard and Conrad Gesner, and so on through the alphabet to Zwinger's Theatrum Humanae Vitae and his Morum Philosophia Poetica. It would aggregate several hundred names and titles. 96 A preliminary survey indicates that the kinds of German works most attractive to Cotton Mather's foraging mind fall into the following categories (arranged roughly in descending order of importance, although exhaustive research may alter the order) : (i) general reference works of an encyclo- paedic nature; 97 (2) theological writings, (3) classical scholarship; (4) the occult, de- monology, and witchcraft, notably during the years when all New England was ab- sorbed in these subjects; (5) the sciences, with less emphasis on chemistry and metal- lurgy than among the Winthrops but with greater attention to astronomy, geology, and biology; (6) German charitable and missionary endeavors, involving often childhood training and educational meth- ods; and (7) pietistic religion. Among Germans upon whom Cotton Mather drew for much of his scientific and generally antiquarian lore, the following figure very prominently: Athanasius Kir- cher, the Jesuit antiquarian; Martin Weil- ler, a geographer and traveler; Peter Lam- bech, the historian; Otto von Guericke, the scientist; Johann Carl Rosenberg and Jo- hann Jacob Waldschmidt, both physicians; Johannes Arndt, Johann Jacob Coler, and Johann Conrad Danhawer, the theologians; and Alsted, especially his Theologia Natu- ralist Often the source is veiled in some general attribution such as "A pious Ger- man scholar says" or "A famous German Doctor of Philosophy declares." Such refer- ences, when run down, usually lead to the two learned periodicals which seem to have served Mather as his most constant source book, especially for curious lore — the Leip- zig Acta Eruditorum and the oft-mentioned "German Ephemerides" of Nuremberg. 99 Cotton Mather's learning was uncommonly ostentatious, if for no other reason than that it is ostentatiously universal in its derivation. Although he knew little more than the names and titles of hundreds of his references, there still remains a solid residue which argues that he possessed a wide knowledge of authors and books and had at his fingers' tips a fund of bibliographical in- formation that is encyclopaedic in variety and scope, even though it cannot be rated as profound. Cotton Mather's extended correspond- ence forms an important chapter in early American-European cultural relationships. Among of his most interesting exchanges, covering the years from 171 1 to 1724, was that with August Hermann Francke, one of the leaders in the German Pietistic move- ment of Halle, and with Francke's friends and colleagues, Anthon Wilhelm Boehm (1673-1722) and Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg (1683-1719). 100 These letters illustrate the eagerness with which Mather, "tho' a sorry and obscure creature," seized upon the op- portunity to exchange intelligences with the learned men of Halle ("my friends in the Frederician University"), thus giving him, as he modestly added, "a Name among ye great men of ye Earth" (Diary, Mar. 7, 1 7 16). The discourses and books which they sent him were to him "as cool waters to a Thirsty soul" (letter to Boehm, June 6, 1716). That he was profoundly affected by what he called Francke's "True, Real, Vital Piety" and "Glorious Revival of the Primi- tive" religion appears at once in his profes- sions to his "Frederician friends" and in his writings designed to acquaint his own countrymen with the numerous works of Francke and his extraordinary success as a teacher and missionary. 101 The Francke-Mather correspondence and Mather's notes concerning it make it plain The Eighteenth Century 35 that the chief intermediary between Math- er and Francke was Anthon Wilhelm Boehm, 102 the very active Lutheran court chaplain in London at the time, the chief promotor of German pietism in England, in contact with both German and American scholars, and an active transmitter in both directions. In him Mather found what Winthrop had found earlier in Hartlib, Haak, and Oldenburg. Boehm produced many pietistic tracts and discourses in Eng- lish, which were distributed by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and thus given wide circulation in America. He translated from the German the Nach- richten of the Orphan House and other in- stitutions at Halle, together with several volumes of Francke's sermons, including Francke's long Latin letter to Mather, for the London Pi etas Hallensis (Vol. Ill, Lon- don, 1716). The one labor of his that ap- pears to have been most immediately in- fluential was his translation of Johann Arndt's Wahres Christenthum and his Para- dies Gdrtlein, 103 both of which were put to good use by Cotton Mather in The Christian Philosopher. 10 * He also influenced Ameri- cans directly through his voluminous cor- respondence — much of it in connection with the work of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge- — which he carried on with Americans as well as Germans. His own works also had widespread currency in the American colonies. It is significant, for example, that Jonathan Edwards, a tutor at Yale, put down on the first page of his booklist, 105 Boehm's Doctrine of Original Sin; and it may well be, as investigation proceeds, that his Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (written about I 757)> on its positive side, may be as much the product of Boehm's influence as, on its negative side, it is a refutation of John Taylor's Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin (1738). Another correspondent of Mather's was Ziegenbalg, a pioneer in philological studies (particularly the Hindu language) that bore fruit a century later not only in German linguistic studies but also in romantic liter- ature and philosophy. Collections of Zie- genbalg 's letters and reports circulated freely in England from 1709 onward, being several times reprinted, once at least in Boston in 18 13. Cotton Mather exchanged letters and gifts of books with him, ordinar- ily through Francke or Boehm. One letter from Ziegenbalg to Mather (now apparently lost) seems to have contained a very de- tailed account of his missionary efforts at Tranquebar in Malabar. For his part, Math- er was inspired by this letter to write his India Christiana (Boston, 1721), in one sec- tion of which ("Unio Fidelium. Communi- cations between Western and Eastern In- dia") he printed his own letter to Ziegen- balg (dated Dec. 31, 1717, Latin and Eng- lish on opposite pages, double pages 62-74). Mather's letter did not reach Tranquebar until after Ziegenbalg's death in 1719, w r hen his fellow-pastor, Johann Ernest Grundler, sent a reply (reprinted in India Christiana, double pages 75-87), together with Ziegen- balg's translation of the New Testament in Damulic and several of his small books on Christianity. Mather donated all these ma- terials to the Harvard library. 106 The side of Cotton Mather that was at- tracted to German pietism is one that has been obscured by students who have dwelt too much on the harshness and dogmatism of Mather the Calvinist; for assuredly he saw in "Frederician vital pietism," in its "glorious intentions," and in its "Miracu- lous" achievements, means to counteract the "Lifeless Religion" that he believed New England to be suffering from. He con- sidered Francke's training of children in piety and religious self-expression, as exem- plified in the Orphanage at Halle and in the missions in far-away India, evidences of the "True, Real, Vital Piety" that would rein- stitute "a Glorious Revival of the Primi- tive . . . Christianity." 107 Whatever the forces may have been that contributed to his adopting this point of view — whether he 36 German Thought in America came to it by conviction from within or by pressure from without — the last years of his life demonstrate the softening process which granitic Puritanism underwent, even dur- ing the twenties, and that is symptomatic, in some sense, of the emotionalism and fer- vor that accelerated the spread of revival- ism during the forties. It is safe to say that when this whole movement is exhaustively studied, Germanic factors will be found not merely contributory but conditioning forces that not only prepared the way but helped direct the course. Samuel Mather (1706-1785), in whom the theocratic light of the earlier Mathers flickered low, was nevertheless a man of parts and of industry. His learning was nearly equal to his father's, and he carried on the German interests of his father. In 1733 Samuel Mather published and dedicat- ed to Harvard worthies his Vita B. Aug- ustus Hermanni Franckii, including a Latin translation of Francke's autobiography (supplied by Gotthilf A. Francke), a list of Francke's Latin 108 publications, and a chronicle of "memorables" in the history of the German churches. In 1736 young Francke sent several of his father's books, which Samuel gave to Harvard in 1744. 109 There is also evidence that Samuel Mather continued to use the German books which he inherited, 110 though with less "straining for far-fetched and dear-bought hints" and, as the last of the Mathers, with less visible effectiveness. JONATHAN BELCHER The career of Governor Jonathan Bel- cher suggests that interest in German pie- tism was not confined to Bostonians. On October 25, 1718, Cotton Mather wrote: "For my remittance to ye Orphan-house at Glaucha, I gathered eight pounds of our money for which Mr. Belcher generously furnished me with a Bill of Ten pounds Sterling." If this is a reference to Jonathan Belcher, who in 1730 became governor of Massachusetts and afterwards of New Jer- sey, then one of the first patrons of the Col- lege of New Jersey was also early a bene- factor of Francke's and had some knowledge of the famous institutions at Halle long be- fore Princeton was founded as the seat of evangelical Christianity in America. 111 BENJAMIN COLMAN Benjamin Colman (1673-1747), the first pastor of the liberal Brattle Street Church, took a considerable interest in German in- tellectual matters. In William Bentley's opinion, he had "great advantages over every other Minister in his day from his early visits to Europe" and because of the European correspondence which he main- tained. 112 He was active in the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, be- coming a commissioner of the society in 1730. He kept in close touch with pietistic activities in Germany, England, and the American colonies, notably those in Geor- gia. 113 He urged the establishment of char- ity schools in Boston, Indian missions, and other enterprises in the spirit of the pietists. In the quarrel over emotional religion as initiated by Edwards, he sided with the innovators until the Great Awakening ran into what he considered "excesses." THOMAS PRINCE Another of the notable eighteenth-century Americans interested in Germany was the Rev. Thomas Prince (1 687-1 758), who collected a fine historical library at Old South Church in Boston in preparation for his elaborate history of New England. He acquired not merely Americana but also European works of all kinds that shed light on the thought and action of the New Eng- land fathers. The collection included many German works: some rare early English Protestant books printed in German cities, English translations of books by German Protestant reformers, German editions of the classics, the German theologians, and a good collection of German historians, in- cluding many volumes of that important The Eighteenth Century 37 source book, the Cologne periodical called the Mercurius Gallobelgicus. 11 * THE YALE COLLEGE LIBRARY The history of Harvard during the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries is rela- tively complete in comparison with the paucity of authentic information and his- torical detail available regarding the early history of Yale (founded in 1701). While the Yale library did not at once overcome the advantage of sixty-odd years of growth which Harvard enjoyed over its rival at New Haven, the textbooks and reference works commonly used at Harvard were also those that were used at Yale. 115 For example, the reading list of Jonathan Ed- wards, who entered Yale in 1720, contains some of the same titles that we find in simi- lar records left by contemporaries of his at Cambridge — among them Keckermann, Alsted's Geometry and his Metaphysics, and Wollebius. 116 JONATHAN EDWARDS Jonathan Edwards not only included Boehm's Doctrine of Original Sin on his reading list but appears to have read rather widely among German authors — certainly Luther, Pufendorf, Alsted, Wollebius, Keckermann, Stapfer's Institutiones Theolo- gicae Polemicae (1 743-1 747), and Francke's Letter Concerning the Most Useful Way of Preaching. 11 ' 1 The Methodist Revival GERMAN PIETISM AND METHODISM The Wesleys' and Whitefield's activities in America provided the most important means by which German pietistic tenden- cies, already set in motion by individuals like the Mathers, gained widespread curren- cy. John Wesley, accompanied by his brother Charles, made his first trip to America during the winter of 1 735-1 736 in company with eighty Salzburgers and twenty-seven Moravians going to Georgia. His attraction to their pietistic faith, put to proof during a storm at sea, his learning German, the impact upon him even before this of Lutheran principles, and subsequent- ly, the influence of his travels in Germany and his sojourn in Herrnhut — all form a story that is well known. 118 What is not so well known is that these contacts with Ger- man pietism were not only contributory but decisive influences in John Wesley's reli- gious development, 119 and, through him and his co-workers, on the development of evangelical religion in England and in America. Although German pietism, English Wes- leyanism, and the Great Awakening in America, strictly speaking, started inde- pendently of each other, in their inner essence as well as in their outward charac- teristics they had affinities which, in the course of time, brought them into close harmony and in some instances almost identity. 120 Pietism in Germany antedates both Wesleyanism in England and the Great Awakening in America. Its rise is bound up with the work of Jacob Spener (1635-1705) and August Hermann Francke (1663-1727) and beyond them, Arndt and Andreae. More immediately, it grew out of the social and religious paralysis of Ger- many following the Thirty Years' War, especially as it affected the lower and middle classes. Pietism in Germany and Meth- odism in England were alike in that they became a powerful leaven in strengthening the moral fiber and self-consciousness of the "Burger" class. 121 Conditions in Ameri- ca were naturally very different from those in Germany and England, but everywhere religious leaders were pointing to a falling- off in religion. In America the general in- difference to religion in the Middle and Southern colonies was matched by the for- malism of religion in New England. 122 Thus the ground was prepared for the quickening process which the country was to feel under the impetus of the Great Awakening, the most pervasive intellectual and emotional 38 German Thought in America agitation experienced in the colonies before the Revolution. The initiation of this movement is usually ascribed to Jonathan Edwards, in whose church at Northampton he held a notable revival as early as 1734. But he was not for long a sole laborer. The Tennents of New Jersey were not far behind him. More- over, Edwards' Narrative of Surprising Conversions (1736) profoundly moved John Wesley, so that he, his brother Charles, George Whitefield, and others of the "Holy Club" soon joined Edwards in America and enlarged the movement to proportions such as Edwards could hardly have envisaged, and in a manner that soon took the leader- ship away from him. 123 Although they had heard and read about Francke and the Halle Stiftungen, the Wesleys got their first real contact with German pietism on that memorable trip to Georgia, Oct. 14, 1735 -Feb. 5, 1736. 124 Two years were to pass before John attained peace of mind regarding his faith, but his observations of the Mora- vians' simple worship, their complete re- liance on God and self-possessed calm in the face of adversity, together with ques- tions put to him upon his arrival by August Gottlieb Spangenberg whether he had a witness within himself — whether he had a subjective experience of conversion — all helped put Wesley on the right track. During his four months in Georgia in 1738 George Whitefield was profoundly af- fected by Arndt's Wahres Christenthum, 12S which, coupled with his earlier reading of Francke's Fear of Man, led him to accept the essential principles of pietistic religion as professed and portrayed by the Georgia Salzburgers. Henceforth the main theme of all his preaching was that of "regenera- tion." 126 A visit to the Orphan-House at Ebenezer inspired him to found, on his next trip, Bethesda College and an Orphan- House in Georgia. The latter, widely publi- cized through his extensive travels, was modeled upon Francke's institutions at Halle, and formed one of the more tangible, direct German pietistic influences during the early history of American evangelism. 127 During the winter of 1 738-1 739 the Wesleys became regular attendants at the Moravians' religious exercises in Fetter Lane (London). Peter Bohler (1712-1775), sent by Zinzendorf to Georgia, stopped in London and became their instructor in the doctrines: (1) that faith is the free gift of God, given instantaneously; (2) that a trust in and reliance on Christ is man's sole justi- fication, redemption, and sanctification ; and (3) that true faith in Christ is insepara- bly attended by dominion over sin and by constant peace arising from a sense of for- giveness and "the witness of the Spirit." On May 24, 1738, while attending a reading of Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Ro- mans, in which Luther teaches what faith is and that faith alone justifies, Wesley felt himself "a Partaker of the Divine nature," and on June 11 he preached his famous ser- mon at Oxford on the text, "By grace are ye saved, through faith." 128 The doctrines that conversion and re- generation are the work of the Holy Spirit, that justification is by faith, and that the convert must give a satisfactory account of his religious "experience" — these staples of personal or "experimental" religion the Methodist leaders learned from Peter Boh- ler and his associates. The philanthropic and charitable enterprises and the organ- ization which they found most effective for the propagation of Methodism had been perfected by the Pietists of Halle and the Moravians of Herrnhut. From them Wesley and Whitfield derived both the forms and the doctrines that revitalized religion and that fixed the character of Protestant Christianity for the next century or more. 129 GERMAN HYMNODY Another Germanic influence attending the Great Awakening was the promotion of a new psalmody in America. Charles Wesley had been impressed, as early as 1737, by The Eighteenth Century 39 the angelic singing of the Moravian Society in London, and both John Wesley and George Whitefield were quick to see the value of hymn-singing as a means to further the social intention of the Gospel, as well as a check upon the time-hallowed opposition to "mere human composures" as infringe- ments on the exclusive authority and suffi- ciency of the Scriptures. John Wesley's first literary effort in America was the pub- lication in 1737 of his Collection of Psalms and Hymns, a book that marks an epoch in the history of English hymnody. 130 Suc- cessive English editions appeared in 1738, I 739. I 74°. an d : 74 2 . m which the number of translations from German grew from five to thirty-five — all still in use today, not only among Methodists but incorporated in not fewer than a hundred important Protestant collections. A search for the authorship of these hymns and chorals leads at once to German pietism, for Wesley found his originals in Zinzendorf's Gesangbuch der Gemeine in Herrn-Hnth and in Freylinghausen's Neues geistreiches Gesang-Buch. 131 In the furtherance of this new hymnody no one labored more earnestly or success- fully than Charles Wesley, for he possessed an unparalleled gift of sacred song. In more than forty publications he sent forth, between 1738 and 1785, some 4,100 hymns, and at his death two thousand more re- mained in manuscript. Thus he provided the readiest vehicle for the expression of the hopes, fears, beliefs, and aspirations of the people, in terms certainly more inti- mate and possibly more forceful than the thunderous sermons of Whitefield or the superlative church organization supplied by John Wesley. 132 The character of these hymns is as sharp- ly distinguished from the militant battle cries of Luther's "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" as from the austerely literal Puritan psalms. The aggressive spirit of the Refor- mation was lost, and the threadbare dog- gerel of the Bay Psalm Book gave way to poetry. The Wesleyan hymns are the pious outpourings of individual souls, longing cries for a mystic union with the divine, songs of praise and thanksgiving, or prayers and petitions for divine assistance — all pervaded by an unswerving optimism re- garding the goodness and wisdom of an overruling Providence. The quickening ef- fect of these new songs on a generation unaccustomed to thinking that the praises of God could be sung in any other strains than those of Sternhold and Hopkins or of the Bay Psalm Book can hardly be esti- mated today, but the impression produced by turning from the old "composures" to "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" must have been profound. This much seems clear: the mod- ern hymn came to be an index of joyous faith and a spontaneous vehicle of heartfelt worship to the vast congregations assembled by the revivalists. It became an eloquent and fervent expression of the whole visible church, and being generally adopted by evangelical churches, came in time to supply, in a large measure, both liturgy and creed ; it became a potent force to keep alive a vivid sense of the spiritual in the human soul, in the common consciousness of which all shared in a manner tending to level distinctions and differences, social as well as ecclesiastical. 133 Thus, working through the medium of evangelical and experimental religionists, Germanic influences supplied much of the motivation that freed American religion from the strait jacket of Calvinism, while preserving feelingful piety. From the neo- Lutheranism of the German pietists and Moravians was derived a good part of the impetus that led to the formulation in American churches of a sense of duty owing to the poor, the aged, the weak, and the neglected. 134 From the "Pietas Hallensis," no less than from the London Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, emanated a spirit that inspired the Ameri- can churches to encircle the globe with a chain of missions and to attempt the evan- 40 German Thought in America gelization of the entire earth. Finally, these same pious influences contributed to the creation of a new psalmody and church music that not only made over the church service but insinuated itself into the very heart of American spiritual life; while the impulse given by the moral literary pro- ductions of Gellert, Gessner, Bodmer, Klop- stock, and Wieland reinforced and supple- mented the essentially puritanic literary consciousness of eighteenth-century moral- ism and didacticism, the end of which is not yet, nor likely to be soon. The Wave of German Immigration The great wave of German immigration did not come until the nineteenth century when the accession of thousands upon thousands of German Lutherans, Mennon- ites, Moravians, and German Reformed exerted a powerful effect upon American religious life, not only in the Atlantic states from New York to Georgia but especially in the middle-western states, where they con- centrated in ever-increasing numbers, so that by 1900 a city like Chicago contained as many communicants in the Lutheran church as in the Episcopal, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches com- bined. 133 In cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and St. Louis the Lutheran church stands first in number of members. Only fourth in size among denominations in the whole of the United States about 1900, 136 and far from presenting a unified front (for of Lutherans in America there were in 1900 no less than seventeen varieties), the German sectarians have nevertheless exerted a modifying in- fluence in American religious life and thought commensurate with their relative numbers. However, the effort to evaluate so-called German religious influences by denominations, or as a whole, presents in- surmountable obstacles, for the sectarian and denominational threads have become so inextricably interwoven that it is vir- tually impossible to trace them, or to speak of denominations once distinctively Ger- man as still being so. There are large num- bers of Germans and German-Americans in the Catholic church; there are very large contingents in the Methodist and Baptist churches; others have become Presbyte- rians or Episcopalians or Congregational- ists or Unitarians. Churches once conduct- ed wholly in the German language have adopted the English language; and other interrelations have come into existence that make the effort to point to anything more than general tendencies hazardous. 137 Until much more piecework is done, it seems useless to try to say much more about the influence on American religion of German church organizations than to point to the total membership of the several Germanic sects and to suggest that so large a number of church members attending German churches necessarily exerted a leavening effect on American church life. For the earlier periods of our history, when our social relations were less complex, and national groups had a greater tendency than now to keep their identity, the attempt to trace their interrelations presents fewer problems. In the beginning, German im- migration left New England virtually un- touched, 138 while the Middle and South- ern colonies began to receive ever-in- creasing migrations of Germans. These were not always received with equanimity, either in the Middle or Southern colonies or, for that matter, in New England. For example, while the plight of the Salzburg- ers in Georgia and of the early Palatine redemptioners in New York often moved New Englanders to pity them, reports of quietistic, "Quakerish," or "extremist" doctrines among Dunkers, Mennonites, Moravians, and other Germanic sectarians moved others to alarm. The greatest ap- prehension seems to have been provoked in some quarters by the efforts of Zinzendorf to unite not only the Moravians and Lu- therans but "all Protestant churches," for The Eighteenth Century 41 which purpose he sent out invitations to all sects to meet in Germantown on Jan- uary i, 1742. 139 Unwilling as most of the German sectar- ians were to give up anything or to yield a point to the proposed "Congregation of God in the Spirit," Zinzendorf's plan came to naught, except that it aroused non-Ger- man Protestants to what they sensed as dangerous elements in both the doctrines and the organization of these churches, especially the Herrnhuter Moravians of the Zinzendorf variety. Forced as most of the orthodox churches were to make con- cessions to "experimental" religion (in- trinsically as much Moravian as Wesleyan), they nevertheless conceded no more than they had to, meanwhile setting themselves to combat the gentle, quietistic doctrines of the Herrnhuter Moravians and Men- nonite pietists as inimical to the strict and rational plan of salvation which they had striven hard and long to establish and opposing strenuously Zinzendorf's and all other attempts toward Protestant union. 140 In the meantime industrial develop- ment, land speculation, and shipping com- panies co-operated in encouraging more and more Germans to come to the Middle colo- nies, while in the Southern colonies large landowners like Colonel William Byrd of Virginia made repeated efforts to attract Swiss and South Germans to settle on his broad acres in western Virginia. 141 Through- out the eighteenth century Germans in America tended to keep to themselves, to migrate and settle in groups, and thus to form cultural islands. Often this exclusive- ness was viewed with alarm, even in cities like Philadelphia, whose cosmopolitanism seemed to Franklin, for example, in danger of being destroyed by the Germans. In 1753 he expressed the fear that the Germans would soon "so outnumber us that the advantages we have will, in my opinion, be not able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious." 142 The alarm proved unfounded for Philadel- phia, where the close propinquity of Ger- mantown to the more multi-racial Phila- delphia prevented the German language, culture, and customs from prevailing as exclusively as in some of the valleys of in- terior Pennsylvania, New York, and Vir- ginia. Indeed, subsequent events have demonstrated that usually those German localities which showed themselves most adaptable to the cultural ways of their non- Germanic neighbors eventually exerted the more effective and profound influence in America. But throughout most of the eighteenth century the prevailing tendency among them was to maintain their cultural autonomy. They often pointed to the fact that the reigning monarchs of Britain themselves were men who spoke Hano- verian German far more fluently than Eng- lish, and many of them refused to become bilingual or to adapt their habits to Anglo- American customs. Many actively worked for the Teutonization of the colonies; but the more farsighted saw that such aims were shortsighted, that a refusal to learn English would only diminish their sphere of influence, and that an uncompromising insistence upon Germanic folkways would alienate them from the common business of American life. German-American Leaders Hence it does not follow that the regions which contained the greater number of Germans and German-Americans always exerted the stronger cultural influence. Sometimes more was owing to the leader- ship among these groups than to their num- bers. In Philadelphia, for example, the fact that Germantown was under the sagacious leadership of Pastorius from the beginning was a matter of prime importance in mak- ing the Germans a real factor that had to be reckoned with in every public question that arose. Under similar circumstances, other men — the Miihlenbergs, for instance. 42 German Thought in America or the Saurs — not only unified the Germans within their sphere of influence but, as the spokesmen and visible embodiment of their national or racial constituency, be- came influential far beyond the possibility of anything to which they could have at- tained without such connections. In virtual- ly all instances where Germans exerted any direct or pervasive influence during colonial days, it was because they were willing, through their leaders, to weld themselves integrally into the common life and tradi- tions of America. FRANCIS DANIEL PASTORIUS Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651-1719) was the first of those leaders among the German groups whose influence went beyond his immediate locality and people. Educated in law and theology in the uni- versities at Altdorf, Strassburg, Basel, and Jena, a polylinguist who wrote down his thoughts in his commonplace book in eight languages, acquainted with most of the cul- tured countries of his time, he was, in James Truslow Adams' opinion, "the most learned man of his day in America — not forgetting Cotton Mather." 143 On intimate terms with William Penn and Thomas Lloyd (presi- dent of the provincial council from 1684 to 1 691), he was not merely the leader of Ger- mantown but a member of the legislative assembly of the colony from 1687 to 1691, a teacher of German in the English Quaker schools of Philadelphia from 1698 to 1700, and thereafter headmaster of the first school in Germantown — a position which he held until his death in 1719. His New Primmer (1698) was the first school book published in the province of Pennsylvania. The first formal protest, in the form of a petition, against slavery to be made in the American colonies was the work of Pastorius' pen in 1688. Except for the effect of his writings, notably his reader, the influence of Pasto- rius was primarily personal through his political, educational, and social activi- ties. 144 CHRISTOPHER DOCK AND OTHER NOTABLE TEACHERS Christopher Dock became a worthy suc- cessor to Pastorius in the Germantown Mennonite school, where he labored devot- edly from 1 714 to 1 77 1. He is credited with being the first to substitute the rule of love for the rule of rod in American education; he introduced the blackboard and demon- stration method for primary instruction; and in 1750 he published his Schulordnung, the first pedagogical work to be produced in America. 145 In recognition of these services, he is often called the German-American Pestalozzi. Virtually every German sect established its schools. The Schwenkfelders were par- ticularly active in their educational efforts, and the Moravians were hardly less so. They established schools of grammar grade (at Nazareth, Lititz, and Bethlehem) and young ladies' seminaries and academies, one of which (at Bethlehem, founded in 1749) is still doing service and claims to be the oldest of its kind in existence. 146 The Lutherans and German Reformed (the most numerous among the German groups) established schools early, but definite facts relating to them can be traced only from 1720. Among their most capable teachers were Johann Phillip Boehm (of Whitpain, Montgomery Co.), Georg Michael Weiss (a graduate of Heidelberg), Georg Stiefel (Tulpehocken, Berks Co.), and Johann Jacob Hock and Kaspar Leutbecker (of Tulpehocken) — all of whom served between 1720 and the middle of the century. 147 Later Muhlenberg among the Lutherans and Schlatter among the Reformed became great educational leaders, while the print- ing presses of Saur and of Franklin aided appreciably the movement toward more and better schools among the Germans. JACOB LEISLER PETER AND ANNA ZENGER Among the earliest of the German colo- nials to win a patriot's name was Jacob The Eighteenth Century 43 Leisler, who led the revolt in 1 689-1 690 in New York against Tory hirelings and Brit- ish exploiters of the colonies, and suffered martyrdom for his pains in 1691. Peter and Anna Zenger led a triumphant fight against arbitrary governmental authority and for liberty of the press in the same colony during 1 734-1 735. By the time of the Stamp Act and the Lexington-Concord fight, all three had become enshrined in the popular consciousness as patriots and opponents of European domination and oppression. THE MUHLENBERGS Even more generally popular and more immediately effective were the several members of the Muhlenberg family, which supplied clergymen, soldiers, statesmen, and scientists to our colonial society. The careers of the Miihlenbergs became legend- ary and helped raise their race in the po- pular estimation. Heinrich Melchior Muh- lenberg (1711-1787) was the scholar preach- er of Pennsylvania, able to speak in Lat- in, Dutch, English, or German as the oc- casion demanded. As one of the first stu- dents to enroll in the University of Gotting- en, in March, 1735, it was he and his three sons, rather than Ticknor, Bancroft, Everett, and Cogswell, who first brought Germanic scholarship and educational meth- ods to America. His sons, John Peter Gabriel (1 746-1 807), Frederick Augustus Conrad (1750-1801), and Gotthilf Henry Ernst ( 1 753-1 807) were all sent to Halle in 1763 to receive seven years of education in the best German schools. John Peter Ga- briel settled at Woodstock, in northern Virginia, and from there he was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1774. He supported Patrick Henry eloquently in his resolution, closed his last sermon with the comment, "There is a time for preaching and praying, but also a time for battle," and, throwing off his clerical robes, present- ed himself to his congregation in the uni- form of a colonel in the Continental Army. Three hundred recruits were taken into his regiment on the spot; and the next day, with the number increased to over four hundred, Muhlenberg's regiment marched to war. He was Representative at Large in the First Congress during 1 789-1 791, and again in the Third and Sixth Congresses. In 1 80 1 he was sent to the United States Sen- ate from Virginia. Frederick Augustus Conrad was first Speaker of the Pennsyl- vania state legislature, member of the first four sessions of the United States Congress, and Speaker of the First and Third Con- gresses. The youngest, Gotthilf Henry Ernst (who usually wrote his name simply "Henry E. Muhlenberg"), was a scholar and scientist, said to have been as thorough- ly in command of Greek, Latin, and He- brew as of English, German, and French. As a publisher of several botanical works in both Latin and German he won high re- nown, and in 1787 was called to the presi- dency of Franklin College (later Franklin and Marshall College). 148 JOHANN DAVID SCHOEPF No less influential than the Miihlenbergs was Dr. Johann David Schoepf (1752- 1800), who came to America with the Ger- man mercenary soldiers but remained after the Revolution and became an enthusiast for America and a prolific recorder of his scientific observation in the colonies. 14 * At a time when the typical attitude of Euro- peans was one of condescension, he wrote appreciatively of the new world in his po- pular Travels in . . . the United North American States saying, "America has her genius as much as the old countries, and eventually the former will take the measure of the latter." 150 His special reports, to- gether with his Travels, form so considera- ble a body of work that Schoepf is of im- portance not merely as one who told Euro- peans a great deal about the new world but as one who is entitled, on his own account, to a place in the intellectual history of America. 44 German Thought in America CHRISTIAN GOTTLIEB PRIBER One of the most colorful of the earlier German adventurers in the Southern colo- nies was Christian Gottlieb Priber. 151 A native of Saxony, he enjoyed excellent educational advantages, but becoming in- doctrinated with the radical Utopian ideas of the time, suffered banishment, first to France, then to England, and finally to America, where he arrived in 1753. After spending two years at Amelia, S.C., he be- came objectionable to the authorities for his "subversive" agitation for "natural rights." Divesting himself of the super- fluities of civilization and armed only with the weapons of the philosopher, he set forth on an exotic mission to the Indians. 152 He chose as the base of operations the town of Great Tellico on the Tellico River, about 500 miles from Charleston by trading route, and soon became deeply involved in the struggle between the French and the English for the Indian trade, urging the Indians to look to their interests against the sharp trading practices of French and English alike. In 1739 the Assembly of South Carolina appropriated 402 pounds currency for the expenses of an expedition against him. Despite valiant attempts of Priber's Indian friends, the military mission sent to seize him succeeded in 1743. Charged with scheming "a confederation among the Southern Indians" against all whites, 153 he was summarily convicted. He spent his re- maining few years in the Charleston prison. A Utopian philosopher, linguist, scholar, friend of peace, of progress, and the Indian, he deserved a better fate than befell him. He is uniquely interesting as a forerunner of German "radicals" making similar efforts in other parts of the country a hundred years later. There were other Germans in South Caro- lina, in Georgia, and notably in Virginia whose careers merit closer attention than they have received. In South Carolina, for example, there was Michael Kalteisen from Wiirttemberg, founder of the German Friendly Society in 1766; there was Jere- miah Theus, who established himself in Charleston in 1739 and became "one of the very best of the colonial painters"; and there was an engineer named Von Brahm whose geographical book and map of South Carolina and Georgia were the first of their kind. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the Germans in Charleston had be- come prosperous enough to inspire the quip that the city was owned by the Germans, ruled by the Irish, and enjoyed by the Ne- groes. David Duncan Wallace names a number of prominent Germans in South Carolina during the eighteenth century, and an extended search of definitive histories of others of the Southern and Middle At- lantic provinces and colonies will yield many more. 154 Benjamin Franklin's Position Perhaps no American of his time was more actively interested in the Germans than Benjamin Franklin. Finding them omnipresent in and around Philadelphia, he regarded them variously. When they op- posed him, as they sometimes did, he could be severely critical; when they could be of service to his purpose and made to support what he considered good political or public causes, he neither overlooked nor under- estimated them. As early as 1730 he printed the first German-American book for them — the hymn book of the Ephrata Cloister. He had profitable printing contracts from them, and printed a number of German works, including hymnals, a prayer book, several textbooks, and a German catechism. As early as 1732 he proposed to print, and probably did issue several numbers of, the Philadelphische Zeitung, the first German newspaper in America. 155 After 1738, when Saur set up his famous printing press, Franklin's German business fell off. But in 1757 he joined with Anton Armbruster in publishing a German weekly. Indeed, he The Eighteenth Centurv 45 kept in constant and close contact with the Germans and often found them staunch allies in his numerous enterprises, public and private. Franklin's several educational ventures brought him in contact with institutions of higher learning in both Germany and America. His organization of the Junto Club in 1732, its enlargement into the Phi- losophical Society in 1743, and the part this society played in 1749 in the establishment of the Public Academy of the City of Phila- delphia (eventually to become the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania) are well known. Franklin himself planned the curriculum and recommended instruction in both French and German — the first instance of German being introduced into an American school above the grammar-school level. In 1753 the Academy became the College of Philadelphia, and the following year Wil- helm Kramer (Creamer) was appointed professor of the French and German lan- guages. He served until 1775 and never had occasion to complain for want of students. In 1764 Franklin went to England to represent Pennsylvania in the several co- lonial controversies, and in 1766 he made his first direct contact with Germany. An incident in his German tour that has been generally overlooked was his visit to Got- tingen, by which he became the first pro- minent Anglo-American to visit and in- vestigate a German university. The ac- counts of this "travel of discovery" are fragmentary and vague, and the reasons for his going are not clear; 158 but the 170th number of the Gottingische gelehrte Anzei- gen, of September 13, 1766, referring to the sessions of the Royal Society of Sciences, held on the nineteenth of the preceding July, reported: "The two famous English scholars, the royal physician, Mr. Pringle, and Mr. Benjamin Franklin, from Penn- sylvania, who happened to be at that time in Gottingen . . . took their seats as mem- bers of the Society." 157 The published re- ports of Franklin's visit to Gottingen re- cord his conversation at the meeting of the Royal Society, and outside of it, on English colonial affairs and on other subjects relat- ing to America, but make no mention of his interest in the University of Gottingen as a possible model for an American univer- sity; yet Johann Stephen Putter, whom Franklin and Pringle also visited, says pointedly that Franklin was at that time working on the plan for an American uni- versity, and that his reason for coming to Gottingen was to inspect that institution. Putter adds that Franklin, though unable at that time to read German easily, seemed very glad to get a copy of Putter's history of the University, and that they discussed the book, as well as the University, at some length. 158 Putter's testimony is of a nature deserving credence. In the light of Frank- lin's previous and subsequent interest in the Germans, it seems reasonable. It is alto- gether possible that the transformation of the College of the City of Philadelphia into the University of Pennsylvania and the pro- vision for a "German Institute" within the University, effected soon after Franklin's return from Germany, were in some degree owing to Franklin's journey to Gottingen. When, in 1779, the college was rechar- tered and the six strongest denominations in the city 159 were represented on the board of government, two of the most prominent German ministers in Philadelphia w r ere named trustees, namely Johann Christoph Kunze and Kaspar Weiberg. Owing to the influence of these two men, aided doubtless by Franklin, the following remarkable res- olution was passed on January 10, 1780: "A German professor of philosophy shall be appointed, whose duty it shall be to teach Latin and Greek by means of the German language in the academy as well as in the present university." Kunze, then one of the most eminent teachers of the classical languages in America, was ap- pointed to fill the post, where he labored until 1784 to make the new university the Gottingen of America. 180 4G German Thought in America When Kunze resigned in 1784 to become professor of oriental languages in King's (Columbia) College, he was succeeded by the Rev. Justus H. C. Helmuth, who could boast an increased enrollment to the num- ber of sixty the next year. But his success was short-lived. Division among the Ger- mans themselves led to agitation for another German college; and on March 10, 1787, an act was passed by the Pennsyl- vania Assembly incorporating and endow- ing the German College and Charity School in the borough and county of Lancaster "for the instruction of youth in German, English, Latin, Greek, and other learned languages, in theology, and in the useful arts, sciences, and literature." Franklin enthusiastically supported this new venture, contributed the largest single sum for its endowment ($ 1,000, a sizable gift for that day), and himself journeyed to Lancaster to lay the cornerstone, 161 in consideration for all of which the institution was named Franklin College. Unfortunately, however, neither the zeal of Helmuth nor the support of Franklin prevented the diminution of instruction in German at the University of Pennsylvania. By 1787 Helmuth's class had shrunk to six; and although he was retained as Professor of German, the Ger- man Institute was abolished. One of the chief reasons why the progress of German instruction suffered so decided an interruption toward the closing years of the century was the general disrupting in- fluence of the struggle for independence, which did not really come to an end until after the War of 181 2. Many colleges (among them Columbia, from 1776 to 1784) closed for longer or shorter periods; others were abandoned altogether. Kunze's German Seminary in Philadelphia was among those swept away; Franklin College at Lancas- ter lost its distinctive character as a Ger- man institution. The alliance with France, the services of Lafayette, and the gener- al pre-eminence which French ideas gained provide other reasons why Germanism re- ceived a setback. The hatred of Hessians was another contributory element, and so was the decrease in immigration from Ger- many. The war resulted in blockaded har- bors, and it was only after 181 7 that immi- gration on a scale at all commensurate with pre-Revolutionary days was revived. Mean- while, various measures intended to Amer- icanize America overnight were viewed as oppressive by Germans already here and as repulsive by many who contemplated coming. German Learning in America However, German intellectual influences, notably such as came through the medium of the printed word, did not come to a com- plete halt, although they often came by way of England or France. German scholarship and the tradition of German books did not enjoy the same importance as they had during the seventeenth century; for as the eighteenth-century Americans prepared for the struggle against British political and economic dominion, the colonies tended to find inspiration and support less in Ger- manic authorities than in the newer and more immediately applicable forms of radi- calism emanating from Locke and Rous- seau, chiefly because they were more read- ily available and because they were ade- quate for the purpose. 162 PUFENDORF LEIBNITZ Meanwhile some of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century German schol- ars were not neglected. Pufendorf (1632- 1694) was unquestionably the best known of political theorists. Among his most popular works were De Jure Naturae et Gentium (1672), De Officio Hominis et Civis (1673), and De Statu Republicae Germani- cae.™ 3 The first of these, translated by Basil Kennett in 1703, became one of the chief sources of eighteenth-century conceptions of natural law. The reputation of Pufen- dorf in colonial America may be judged by The Eighteenth Century 47 the fact that in 1721 Cotton Mather used and acknowledged De Jure Naturae et Gen- tium as the source for many of the support- ing illustrations for his Christian Philos- opher, Mather's attempt, in his way, to reconcile religion with science; and that when, in 17 17, John Wise argued the cause of independency and autonomy of the separate congregations in his Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches against the proponents of unification, he professed (in Chapter II: "Of the Civil Being of Man"), "I shall Principally take Baron Pufendorf for my Chief Guide and Spokes-man." Pufendorf served admirably the purposes of liberal theologians and political theorists of the stamp of John Bar- nard and Jonathan Mayhew; while the prominence which Mather and Wise gave Pufendorf in their widely current and in- fluential books enhanced his reputation among colonial religious and political polem- icists. Leibnitz (1646-1716) is another who was not unknown. Very probably Jonathan Edwards was acquainted with his work, 164 and another Yale man, Samuel Johnson, afterwards president of King's College, noted in 1727-1728 that he read Dr. Clark "His Papers between him and Leibnitz." 165 There are also references to Leibnitz' pupil Christian Wolf. The Influence of Political Events Political and historical events, too, had their effect. The accession of the Hanover- ians to the throne of England in 1714 proved a stimulus to interest Americans in Germany. The question of Catholic versus Protestant succession itself was a matter of great concern in the colonies, and numerous sermons were preached lauding the Protes- tant Hanoverians and denouncing the Catholic Stuarts. A well-known example is Benjamin Colman's Fidelity to Christ and to the Protestant Succession in the Illustrious House of Hanover, delivered in Boston, August 9, 1727, on the accession of George II. New England towns, sometimes without any German inhabitants whatever, were given German names like Hanover and Berlin. The importance of the German language in the English court and increas- ingly profitable commercial relations with Germany, notably Hamburg, made the acquisition of German desirable in both England and the colonies; and several books appeared designed to promote the study of the language. The earliest appears to have been the German-English Dictionary by Christian Ludwig (Lodowick) in Leipzig in 1716. 166 By the middle of the century Bailey's English-German Dictionary (revised edition by Theo. Arnold, Leipzig, 1752) seems gradually to have displaced the older Ludwig or Lodowick. In 1751 appeared John James Backmair's German Grammar in London, long the book in most common use for the acquisition of German. It seems to have been standard equipment in colo- nial libraries, in either English or American editions. 167 Paths of Influence after the Revolution LITERARY RELATIONSHIPS By the seventies these influences, to- gether with the long-sustained Hanoverian tradition and the rise of the University of Gottingen to pre-eminence, brought about the acceleration of scholarly interest — a half century before Madame de Stael's glowing account inspired the young men of Harvard to go to Gottingen. Among the earliest Gottingen publications to gain a popular reputation in America was Albrecht von Haller's Physiologia (1751), which re- mained standard far into the nineteenth century. The Institutionum Historiae Ec- clesiasticae of Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (Helmstadt, 1755) translated by Archibald Maclaine in 1764, republished in Philadel- phia in 1797 and many times thereafter, also reached a wide audience. These were followed by Johann David Michaelis' 48 German Thought in America theological works and Anton Friedrich Biisching's comprehensive Erdbeschreibung {1754). When, in 1773, Harvard issued a select catalog of books in the Library in frequent use, the list included not only Mosheim and Biisching but also such works as the Dutchman Gerhardt Brandt's Histo- ry of the Reformation (1668-1704), the jour- nal of the Royal Scientific Society of Got- tingen (4 vols.), three of Michaelis' works, three of Pufendorf's, and Christian Wolf's Elementa Matheseos Universae (5 vols., 1713-1715). 168 Again, one is reminded that the conventional account of the scarcity of German books in the vicinity of Boston in the second decade of the next century fails to take into consideration certain obvious facts regarding the contents of the Harvard Library. Outside the staid walls of Harvard, a number of more spicy German books or me- moirs, such as those of Baron Tott and Baron Trenck, enjoyed a sensational vogue. These, together with English books of travel in Germany, added detail and definiteness to the picture which many Americans had formed of German lands, German people, and German culture. 169 The catalog of the Boston booksellers, Cox and Berry, for 1772, lists other titles ; while Harvard added many of the newer scholarly German pro- ductions, as well as such other works as Cramer's Art of Assaying and Winckel- mann's Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks. This accelerating interest in German literary productivity was reinforced by a stream of religious and moralistic books (already mentioned), which, in turn, led to curiosity about types of books requiring greater catholicity of taste. The unusual interest in Gessner's Death of Abel was followed by an almost equal relish for everything by "the divine Gessner," par- ticularly his idylls, which were frequently reprinted in American newspapers and mag- azines. 170 Lavater's Physiognomy, in a British translation, was imported in large numbers during the last half of the century, the bulk of the book evidently deterring American printers until 1803, when an abridgment of the Holcroft translation was published in Boston, but his Aphorisms was thrice printed in 1790 (in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York) and in 1793 at Newburyport, 171 while the periodical press found the reproduction of the Maxims, as well as his Aphorisms, especially well adapt- ed to its purposes. 172 From Gessner's Abel, Wieland's Abraham, and Klopstock's Mes- sias it was natural that the taste should turn to such works as Zimmermann's sen- timentally romantic Thoughts on the In- fluence of Solitude on the Heart, which ran through ten editions between 1793 and 1819, to raise Zimmermann to first rank among German authors in American opin- ion. 173 With the rise of sentimentalism the public seized upon the German Familien- roman 17i and naturally came soon to like a stronger and more sensational fare, such as Goethe's Werther 175 and Schiller's Ghost- seer. 176 These and dozens of similar fictional works that followed in their wake gave rise to a flood of variants, imitations, adapta- tions, and translations that literally glutted the market; 177 while in the drama Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen and Schiller's Rob- bers spawned a similar progeny during the last two decades of the eighteenth century that continued unabated until the Kotzebue craze ran its murky course under Dunlap in the early nineteenth. 178 PETER WILL Bobbing up repeatedly in this unusual literary ferment that centered upon the wilder productions of German romanticism and Sturm und Drang about the turn of the century is the name of Peter Will (1764- 1839). He was a translator of exceptional ability 179 as well as industry, 180 who, ac- cording to the testimony of Dr. John W. Francis (1789-1861), an oracle on matters pertaining to old New York, lived in New York City during 1799 while furnishing The Eighteenth Century 49 translations from the German for the John Street Theatre. 181 We are still much in the dark about many of Will's activities in America, except that the yellow-fever epidemic in New York during the late sum- mer of 1803 endangered his wife's health, so that he returned to London to continue his preaching there and to go on with his work of translating. About 1823 he went to Darmstadt, and continued active in the work of introducing German authors to the English-reading world. Engaged as he was in many literary undertakings, one should like to know whether, while he resided in New York, he moved in the same circle with Charles B. Brown, how intimately he was associated with Dunlap, the New York theatre, and the Kotzebue vogue in Amer- ica, and what else he did during his year or two in this country. Apparently he did not himself see any of his books through the American presses, though several of them were published here, in cities ranging from Boston to Baltimore. It is certain that his reputation as the translator of current best- sellers in the realms of German piety, sen- timent, and horror preceded his arrival. The London Museum (1 799-1 801), in which a large proportion of his contributions were initialed "P. W.," was promptly selected by American editors of journals as fit to plunder, with or without acknowledgment. Even the Phi Beta Kappa associates of Boston, when they published their Literary Miscellany during 1 804-1 806, appropriated Will's contributions on "Deutsche Literatur und Wissenschaft." 182 And Samuel Miller, while preparing his Brief Retrospect, found Will an equally acceptable authority for what became the first critical discussion of the whole of German intellectual life and literary activity available in the United States. But in following the vogue of German pious, sentimental, and sensational literary productions in America, wehave gonebeyond the limits of the eighteenth century. We return now to the 1 770's to resume our story. POLITICAL AND DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS While the Revolutionary War slowed down all literary and intellectual inter- change with foreign countries — with Ger- many as much as with other European countries — in some respects the war con- tributed toward the establishment of closer contacts than had obtained earlier. Hes- sians were cordially despised, of course; but informed people did not mistake Hessian hirelings for German scholars and literary men, 183 while all could and did distinguish between mercenary soldiers and individuals like Frederick the Great, whose military prowess and private virtues had begun to interest American editors as early as 1758. 184 With the change of relations between England and Germany during the sixties, interest in Frederick cooled; 185 but when the German king was the first repre- sentative of any foreign power to recognize the political independence of the United States and to sign a commercial treaty, the old monarch's character, his idiosyncrasies, and his military achievements combined to make him a very popular subject for sketch and anecdote for nearly a century after his death. 186 GERMAN-AMERICAN PATRIOTS AND MERCHANTS Other paths of influence, relatively un- important before the Revolution, came now to be of real significance. One was the increasingly closer, more frequent, and more sympathetic contacts fostered between Anglo-Americans and prominent German patriots like the Miihlenbergs, the Ritten- house family, Baron von Kalb, and Baron von Steuben. 187 This growing feeling of mutual respect is reflected in Dr. Benjamin Rush's A ccount of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania (1789). A sec- ond was the increasing number and prom- inence of German merchants in Phila- delphia, Boston, and elsewhere — such, for example, as the great merchant family of 50 German Thought in America Crowninshield (Kronenscheldt), who, by reason of their combined civic enterprise, learning, philanthropy, and mercantile in- terests, came to be highly reputed. 188 Ger- man merchants and consuls in Hamburg (for example, Samuel Williams and Joseph Pitcairn) and in other ports, as well as ship captains — many of them, as we shall see, with keen cultural interests — came to form links effecting close German-American in- tellectual relations. A third means serving to promote nearer interrelations was estab- lished by travelers and diplomats, among them John Quincy Adams, John Trumbull, and Joel Barlow. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS John Quincy Adams' stay in Berlin as U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary to Prussia from 1797 to 1 801 was important (1) in pre- paring for the significant role that he was to play later in supporting Follen, Ticknor, and other enthusiasts for German learning and literature, (2) in inspiring him to write for the Port Folio forty-four letters descrip- tive of Germany, and (3) in prompting him to translate Wieland's Obey on (during the period of his German residence) — a really excellent work which has only recently been edited and published. 189 Sotheby's translation of 1798 won Wieland's appro- bation, whereupon Adams modestly with- drew his version; but Professor Faust's re- cent edition, resurrected from the Adams Family Archives, makes it abundantly evident that it is not only the first complete translation of Oberon in the English lan- guage but also a performance in no way inferior to Sotheby's. The whole is distinctly more than an episode in the life of the sixth President of the United States, and future historians and critics of American culture will take more than passing note of John Quincy Adams' efforts as an enthusiast and translator of German literature fifteen years before Madame de Stael published her epoch-making De I'Allemagne. 190 BENJAMIN SMITH BAHTON The part that Benjamin Smith Barton (1768-18 1 5) played in the early German- American cultural exchange has not been appraised. After studying medicine at Edin- burgh and London, Barton went (according to the biographical sketch by his nephew, W. P. C. Barton) to Gottingen in the fall of 1788 and took the M.D. degree there in 1789. A search of the official lists of matric- ulated students and of the archives of the medical department at Gottingen has failed to substantiate the story, but it may be that Barton studied at some other German university. In any case, the prominence of Barton as a botanist, as professor of medi- cine at the College of Philadelphia (after 1 791, the University of Pennsylvania), and . as the associate and eventually the succes- sor of Dr. Benjamin Rush is such that his reputed travel and study in Germany are worthy of further examination. JOHN TRUMBULL Less well known but better authenticated than Barton's are the Rhineland travels of John Trumbull, the painter, in 1786, 1795, and 1797. His notes on the journey down the Rhine from Worms to the Netherlands are full of firsthand observations and pencil sketches well worth reproducing, not only as being probably the first of the Rhine made by an American but also because they are excellent in their kind. 191 His subse- quent trips were made primarily to Stutt- gart, where Muller was engaged on the en- graving of Trumbull's famous picture of Bunker Hill. THE VAUGHANS Another intermediary agency— there must have been others like it — was the English family of Vaughans. Active sumpathizers with the colonies during the Revolution, they came to New England soon after the peace. They brought with them "fine libra- ries, containing German books, literary and The Eighteenth Century 51 scholarly, to which they kept adding." Many of the books of Benjamin and Samuel Vaughan are now at Bowdoin, Harvard, and other institutions ; some are still in fam- ily possession. It was from one of the Vaughans that William Bentley in 1786 ob- tained his first "View of the German Wri- ters." 192 Indeed, the Vaughans, through their correspondence and personal contacts, served as connecting links among widely separated individuals like William Bentley of Salem, Daniel Ebeling of Hamburg, and Joel Barlow of Connecticut and France, thus bringing to a focus earlier German- American relationships and providing a substantial basis upon which the inter- change of ideas between Germany and the United States proceeded unabated during the nineteenth century. 193 The Ebeling-Bentley Relationship CHRISTOPHER DANIEL EBELING Christopher Daniel Ebeling, born in 1741 at Garmissen, Hanover, and educated at Gottingen (1 763-1 767), where belles-lettres, history, and geography with special refer- ence to America already formed his cen- tral interests, became a teacher in the Ham- burg Handelsakademie in 1769, and soon after, its director. In 1784 he was made Professor of History and Greek Language in the Gymnasium, and in 1799 Hamburg city librarian as well. Already bilingual, he developed his strong interest in America and especially his republican predilections to a point that the geographical and in- stitutional history of America became his dominant interest, most notably demon- strated during the earlier period of his pro- ductivity by four numbers of the Amerika- nische Bibliothek (1 777-1 778), the first Ger- man periodical devoted solely to America. 194 In the meantime he had already under- taken an elaborate Erdbeschreibung und Gesckichte von Amerika, projected in many volumes and comprehensive in scope. In 1793 appeared the first volume of this systematically encyclopaedic survey of the new world by states, territories, provinces, and nations, beginning with New Hamp- shire in the north. He persevered with un- remitting energy in the colossal task of extracting from the letters of his numerous correspondents and from the books they sent him the data for the successive vol- umes. In 1816 he published Volume VII, on Virginia, the southernmost state treated. His death in 181 7 terminated the ambitious undertaking to which he devoted more than forty years of his life. 195 Although Ebeling never visited America, he developed, in the course of his long labors, an extensive correspondence with Englishmen and notably with Americans of prominence. For example, President Ezra Stiles of Yale was one of his chief inform- ants on Connecticut. Crevecceur, a per- sonal friend, supplied him with information on the middle colonies, first, through his Letters from an A merican Farmer (1782), and later, through conversation while Creve- cceur resided near Hamburg during 1795- 1796. Another first-hand source was Aaron Burr, whom he knew in Hamburg in 1810. 196 Thereafter a steady stream of American travelers and students visited Ebeling in Hamburg, among them Ticknor, Everett, Cogswell, and Thorndike. American consuls in Hamburg likewise supplied him with data. During 1 796-1 798 Samuel Williams helped him by soliciting the aid of Timothy Pickering, Secretary of State, in the procurement of informa- tion not available from any other sources. Pickering, in turn, enlisted the help of friends in America to send the information and books most needed by the German geographer-historian for his gigantic un- dertaking. Joseph Pitcairn, successor to Williams as consul in Hamburg (1798- 1802), was similarly helpful then and later when he established himself as a merchant in Hamburg. Upon Ebeling's death in 1817, it was the firm of Pitcairn and Brodie that represented Edward Everett and Augustus ■'W**^ (WHO* 52 German Thought in America Thorndike as agents in the purchase of Ebeling's great library of 35,000 volumes besides manuscripts, maps, and charts for Israel Thorndike, by whom the collection (which cost him $65,000) was given to Harvard in 181 8. This incident signalizes the entrance of the American upon the German book mar- ket. The purchase of the Ebeling library was the forerunner of the Biicherwanderung which subsequently brought to America such famous collections as those of Bopp, Bluntschli, Zarncke, Scherer, Bechstein, Hildebrand, Weinhold, Goertz, Trendelen- burg, and Bernays. The fact that the ac- quisition of German libraries followed hard upon the migration of American students to Germany is noteworthy. That so notable a library as the Ebeling collection should have gone to raw America, and that it was acquired against the competitive bidding of European royalty created comment not only in Europe but particularly in Ameri- ca. 19 ' German merchants who lived or traveled in the United States provided other means by which Ebeling secured his data and kept alive contacts with his American corre- spondents. For example, there was the well- known and prosperous Hamburg merchant, Georg Heinrich Sieveking, one-time student of Ebeling's at the Handelsakademie, who improved the opportunities of his career to visit Bentley and others of Ebeling's learned correspondents in 181 1 and 181 2, and who remained to the end one of Ebeling's most helpful allies in the procurement of Ameri- cana. 198 Among other German merchants who helped Ebeling were some who settled in America. As early as 1794 Matthias Midler and Jeremiah Kahler were well- established merchants in Boston. The latter was received in Boston society; and as the friend and neighbor of Jeremy Belknap he prepared the way for the establish- ment of cordial relations between the Ger- man scholar and the founders and leaders of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the New York Historical Society, in all of which Ebeling was elected to membership upon Bentley's proposal. The importance of merchants of the stamp of Sieveking, Mid- ler, Kahler, and the Crowninshields in the establishment of early cultural interrela- tions is greater than has been recognized. Often they went to considerable trouble, outside the line of purely mercantile duty, to promote an exchange of ideas as well as of goods. The importance to William Bent- ley of the comings and goings of ship- masters and merchants had a special significance because of his relative isolation in Salem. Ebeling exchanged intelligences on al- most every conceivable subject of interest to a learned man with his transatlantic friends. To some of them he sent long list.-; of "Books I wish the most for" or "Lists of Maps and books which I desire most to procure in behalf of my American Geog- raphy," 199 together with requests that his friends bear in mind his needs. And because they heeded his requirements and supplied , them handsomely, he acquired the remark- able library of Americana that outshone anything America herself had to offer, and that put the Harvard Library into the undisputed position of leadership when it acquired the Ebeling collection. His queries and requests were often numerous and specific, so that they sometimes taxed the ability and energy of his correspondents; 200 but his demands upon them were easily overbalanced by his own prodigality in supplying answers to their questions, even to sending unsolicited information. He was, moreover, a most generous donor of books to the several historical societies to which he belonged, and his letters to his friends seldom reached their destination unaccom- panied by a book, a monograph, a journal, a chart, or a pamphlet, so that he often repaid manifold what he received. 201 Madame de Stael's eloquent appraisal of Gottingen, of German scholarship, and of The Eighteenth Century 53 German literature might have fallen on deaf ears a decade later if Ebeling's detailed accounts and shipments of books and periodicals, circulated widely among his correspondents and reported, often cir- cumstantially, in Bentley's column in the Salem Gazette (1794-1796) and the Impartial Register (1800-18 19), had not prepared the way among the influential men of Bentley's circle. WILLIAM BENTLEY Ebeling's chief American correspondent, William Bentley, was born in Boston in 1759 and educated at Harvard (1773-1777)- After teaching for several terms in various Boston schools, he became pastor of the East Church of Salem in 1783. Here he served until his death in 18 19, refusing to leave either to assume the chaplaincy of Congress or to become, upon his friend Jefferson's solicitation, president of the University of Virginia. Almost fabulously learned, master of twenty-one tongues (in- cluding real facility in German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Slovenian, Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Persian), he made all learned subjects his province and set about collecting a remarkable scholar's library of some four thousand volumes, which be- came, in its day, second only to that of Jefferson. 202 From first to last, Bentley's primary scholarly interest was the history of Ameri- ca, 203 but he early formed also a real en- thusiasm for German scholarship, so that, next to his American antiquarian interests, German learning became his most absorbing intellectual concern. His fondness for Ger- man books goes back at least thirteen years before he received his first letter from Ebe- ling in 1795, for he began collecting such items as Buxtorf's works and Mosheim's ecclesiastical history — books available in Boston- — as early as 1782. 2M By May 20, 1787, he was ordering, through Captain Benjamin Hodges, Muller's Sammlung russischer Geschichten, Gellert's works, Miiller's Journal of Petersburg, and German periodicals — all of which, together with French, German, Latin, and Russian dic- tionaries, were delivered to him by Captain Hodges on October 23, 1787. 205 The manner in which Bentley put his German studies to use is indicated in various ways. They enabled him to attack successfully Noah Webster ("that literary quack," as Bentley called him) and to cor- rect some of Webster's wilder theories on the origin of the English language, 204 but most especially they proved useful to him in his journalistic career, launched about 1794, when he began to contribute freely to the Salem Gazette and, from 1800 to 1819, to the semi-weekly Impartial Register, of which he soon became editor in all but name. His column in these two papers appeared for a quarter of a century under the head of "Summary." It was a digest of foreign and domestic news, chronicling not only political, military, and commercial events, but dealing also with everything new and noteworthy in philosophy, theol- ogy, astronomy, meteorology, geology, scholarship, literature, art, and so forth. To his desk came all the important Ameri- can periodicals, which he subsequently sent to Ebeling, 20 ' who dutifully repaid him in kind. Thus his "Summary" became what was the best digest in America of foreign intelligence, raising the Register to a posi- tion hardly to be expected of a paper issued in Salem, and subscribed for by many prominent Americans in all parts of the country. In 1816, John Pintard, the virtual founder and long the secretary of the New York Historical Society, rated the "Sum- mary" as "without compliment or flat- tery . . . the best brief chronicle of the times in this or perhaps the European world." 208 From reports on Ebeling's works on America which Bentley printed in his "Summary," and in which he compared the critical methods of Ebeling with the super- ficialities of Morse and other American geographers and historiographers, Bentley 54 German Thought in America soon enlarged his "summaries" to include German belles-lettres and virtually every other subject of intellectual interest re- garding Germany. By 1796 the contagion had spread sufficiently among his friends for Thaddeus Mason Harris to undertake an abridgment of Zollikofer's Exercises of Piety. 209 In 1797, while visiting in Dorches- ter, he was entertained by a Mr. Schweizer from Zurich with accounts of Lavater, a relative of Schweizer's wife. By this time he began to be sought out by students am- bitious to learn German. In August, 1797, William Jenks, a brilliant young tutor at Harvard, wrote him to say: "The German language pleases me much. I am at present engaged in a poetic translation of Klop- stock's Messiah, which occupies much of my time. It is a heavenly work." Bentley lent Jenks books, and himself borrowed several from Jenks's slender library. 210 An episode that did much to call popular attention to Bentley and to Ebeling as scholars of the first order, and that first spread among large groups of Americans the importance of German scholarship came as a result of the stir created in this country during 1 798-1799 by the Illuminati. This passing phase of the bitter rivalry between England and France for ideological domi- nance in the United States was brought to a head by John Robison's Proofs of a Con- spiracy against all the Religions and Govern- ments of Europe Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (Edinburgh, 1797; first American edition, Philadelphia, 1798). This inflammatory book and the numerous spawn that followed its wake, charged that America was in imminent danger of conquest by the powers of subversion. Robison, whose knowledge of Germany, of German secret societies, and of German was in inverse proportion to his credulity, saw a German Illuminatus lurking in every corner. Before long even some of the more sober of American stalwarts were aroused — among them Jedidiah Morse, Professors Tappan and Pearson of Harvard, and Presi- dent Dwight of Yale. New England was prepared to indulge in another orgy of witch-hunting that threatened to revive the delusions of a century before and to get as much out of hand. 211 Bentley, an influential Mason, at once engaged Ebeling in correspondence on the matter and received from him a long letter, dated March 13, 1799, in which Ebeling, disclaiming membership in the Order of Illuminati as well as in the Masonic Lodge, proceeded step by step, and point by point, to give Robison the lie and to demonstrate that Robison "knows a little of all and nothing exact." 212 By this time the Ameri- can anti-Illuminati had made themselves pitifully vulnerable by their sweeping assertions and violent accusations, so that Bentley and his friends, armed with the scholarly, documented arguments of Ebe- ling regarding the true nature of German secret societies, overwhelmed their oppo- nents. Their rout became complete when Ebeling's letter itself appeared in Novem- ber, 1799 (thereafter often reprinted, ex- tracted, or summarized by newspaper ed- itors), and for several years only Morse dared show his head — not indeed on the main points of the controversy, but on quibbles. The issues of this controversy them- selves proved to be negligible, and the effect of the entire ferment was mainly neg- ative. One positive result was the wide currency which Ebeling's letter gained in America, but what was still more impor- tant was the really detailed account of Ger- man religious and intellectual history from Francke of Halle to Kant of Konigsberg which the letter presented. Bentley espe- cially enjoyed to the full the advantage he had over his adversaries, and he improved every opportunity, from 1800 onward, to heap confusion upon their heads (even after the controversy had run its course) by excerpting and enlarging upon the points of Ebeling's letter, the bibliographical The Eighteenth Century 55 richness of which supplied him with endless opportunities to deny the charge that Ger- man philosophy was inimical to religion and to assert that German literature rep- resents the truly "golden age" of modern literary achievement. The controversy seems also to have had its immediate effect upon Bentley. The utility of German learning in such a con- troversy as he had just passed through set him now more energetically than ever to build up a first-class library of German periodicals, of Biblical and classical scholar- ship, and of German writers from Klop- stock to Schiller. 213 His interest in and knowledge of German thought and art grew steadily during the years, 214 and with them his reputation and influence. His relationships with famous men included five presidents — John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Toward the end of his long and fruitful career, the intellectual atmosphere was turning increasingly in favor of the kind of learning he advocated, and even Professor Norton was compelled to admit, in his inaugural address (1819), that a knowledge of German was requisite to thorough scholarship. Recognition and honors came to Bentley from many quarters: not only from the Middle Atlantic and Southern states but also, now less reservedly, from nearer home — even from Harvard, which, under its new president, John Thornton Kirkland, was undergoing a change of heart with respect to German learning and let- ters. Edward Everett's funeral oration was an eloquent eulogy, in which Bentley was represented as a courageous pioneer seeking newer and broader intellectual spheres. 215 Thus the relationship that seems at first glance to have been little more than an unusual correspondence between a German geographer and an American divine was in reality much more. In the course of the quarter century during which Bentley and Ebeling exchanged letters, their contacts and influence spread to include several scores of men, especially among the circle of Bentley's friends, the ramifications and interrelations of which invite further study. For example, during 1 804-1 805, when Ebeling's former pupil, Alexander von Humboldt, was in Washington, he became acquainted with Bentley's friend, the far- traveled Jacob Crowninshield, and with Samuel Latham Mitchill, who was on inti- mate terms with both Bentley and Crown- inshield. It was the latter who sent Bentley the silhouette of von Humboldt which found a prominent place among portraits of other famous men — among them Ebeling, Gellert, Michaelis, Mosheim, Klopstock, and Luther. By this time, too, the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard evinced an interest in German literature. The Literary Miscel- lany, which the society published quarterly during 1 804-1 806, contained a contribution from William Jenks in the form of a series of articles on Swiss history, an essay by Francis Dana Channing entitled "A Brief Review of the Progress of Literature in Germany" (abridged from the London German Museum for 1800-1801), a review of Daniel Appleton White on the Memoirs of Salomon Gessner, and a review by Joseph Stevens Buckminster of Samuel Miller's Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, which included a long section on German developments. Another member of this same group, Sidney Willard, translated Eichhorn's life of Semler from the German, and published it in the General Repository and Review for 18 12. Bentley and his colleagues prompted and encouraged many of the younger generation to turn, during the first decades of the nine- teenth century, to German arts and sci- ences. Thus young Joseph Buckminster and Samuel C. Thatcher were persuaded to in- clude Germany in their European itinerary. Both brought back with them in 1807 many German books. 216 The next year Thatcher was installed as librarian at Har- 56 German Thought in America vard. In 1808, when Bentley visited Cam- bridge and was shown "every attention from Mr. [Levi] Hedge P[rofessor] of Logic," he was also pleased by Thatcher's active concern to increase the Germanic content of the college library. As pastor of the Brattle Street Church in Boston, Buck- minster was in a favored position to pro- mote the cause of German theological and classical scholarship. In 1809 he saw through the press an American edition of Griesbach's New Testament. 21 ' In prepara- tion for the Dexter Lectureship of Biblical Criticism at Harvard he earnestly studied German theological books ; and although he died shortly after his appointment in 1812, he had already won for himself an enviable reputation as a scholar. Among the liberal- minded and forward-looking clergy, he was regarded as a pioneer in the introduction of Germanic Biblical research methods. When his library was sold at auction in 181 2, his German books provoked the most spirited bidding and brought the highest prices. Another group with which Bentley and his associates had more than cursory con- nections formed the Anthology Club, sever- al members of which (besides Buckminster) began actively to agitate the importance of German methods and models for American theology, classical scholarship, and letters. For example, George Ticknor reviewed Wieland's Oberon for the club on August 14, 1 810, and published this review, together with a biographical sketch, in the club's journal, the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review for September, 1810. 218 He was soon to investigate German universities in person. Thus something like a tendency or movement came into being and gathered momentum; 219 and when the peace of 1815 facilitated travel and removed other in- conveniences of cultural exchange, and Madame de Stael's book accentuated the long tradition that had been building since the earliest days of the colonies, the young Harvard men were ready to embrace the opportunities which, according to thor- oughly publicized report, the German uni- versities were reputed to present. Early American Lexicography Meanwhile, Noah Webster (1 758-1843) and James Gates Percival (1 790-1 856), in the course of their linguistic studies, had interested themselves in German. Taking a cue from John Home Tooke, Webster came to the conclusion that English was a Teutonic, not a Latin language as was generally held, and that an investigation of its principles depended upon a study of all the German dialects. Accordingly, in preparation for the Compendious Dictionary (1806), he added German to his store of twelve languages. When he resumed work on his unabridged dictionary, he found it necessary to acquaint himself also with the early English and Teutonic dialects, so that by 1 81 3 he had acquired twenty languages, and had become not only America's first eminent lexicographer but also her first comparative philologist. After completing two letters of the alphabet, he turned aside to prepare a synopsis of the affinities of these twenty languages, with the view to study word relationships and root mean- ings. Unfortunately he did not search deeply enough the literatures of the lan- guages involved, and at times erred because he adopted a dictionary definition without taking account of the subtle nuances which literature supplies. Also he worked inde- pendently and failed to avail himself of the morphological studies of Rask and Grimm. While the work was nearing completion, Percival came to lend a hand, first as proof- reader and eventually as critic and collab- orator. Percival, who had studied the find- ings of Bopp, Grimm, and other German philologists, called numerous errors to Webster's attention — so much so that his meticulous criticisms came to try Webster sorely. Percival counseled holding up pub- lication until every etomology was cor- rect; but Webster, seeing the sand run out The Eighteenth Century 57 of the glass, believed that perfection was impossible. Although Webster had his way with the publication, Percival, feeling him- self better fitted to see the work through the press, clung with his post as he clung to no other. He belonged to the new order of philologists whose work was piling up new proofs of the relationships of languages, but their incomplete investigations had not yet progressed far enough to upset Web- ster's conclusions. 220 Thus it was that Perci- val 's contributions, inspired by German morphological science (while they immeasur- ably enriched the accuracy of the dic- tionary) remain mainly hidden and in- distinguishable from the work of Webster, but they signalize the entry of German linguistic methods into American philolog- ical study. To consider the American publication in 1 8 14 of Madame de Stael's book on Germa- ny as marking an epoch before which Ger- many was only a "geographical concep- tion," and after which German literature and thought quickly conquered America is to neglect the facts adduced in the preced- ing pages. They serve to demonstrate the fact that there was by 1800 already a well- defined tradition and a history extending back nearly two centuries. Madame de Stael's book was less initiatory than cli- mactic in its effect. It was primarily Bentley and the group about him who brought to a head, as it were, American concern with German lore at the end of the eighteenth century. When the younger generation — Ticknor, Bancroft, Everett, Cogswell, et al. — left for Germany, Bentley supplied them with books, with advice, and with letters of introduction and recommendation; while Ebeling, for his part, introduced them to his friends among the professors at Gottingen, received them in his home at Hamburg, inquired after their welfare, and otherwise interest- ed himself in their behalf. After their re- turn, Ticknor, Everett, Lyman, and Pea- body visited Bentley during his last months and told him about their German expe- riences and studies. 221 Thus it came to pass that their activities bridged the gap between the concern with Germany which the sev- enteenth and eighteenth centuries had fostered and the closer and deeper preoc- cupation with German belles-lettres and critical philosophy which characterized the nineteenth. So far from being a sensational or revolutionary development, this shift was perfectly orderly and natural. It was a long, slowly-developing, indigenous coming- to-fuller-consciousness of a vital set of cul- tural and intellectual tendencies which had long been nurtured and with which many Americans were already thoroughly fa- miliar. Thought Currents of the Nineteenth Century THE GROWTH OF INTEREST IN GERMANY The Colleges and the Clergy The nineteenth century got under way with no immediately discernible chan- ges in American intellectual interests or de- velopments. Philosophical inquiry remain- ed, as in earlier eras, the concern primarily of the colleges, of the clergy, and of occasi- onal individuals. In the universities new winds of doctrine had begun to stir the dead air of tradition throughout the preceding century without accomplishing any marked revolution. But after the turn of the centu- ry the phenomenal increase in the number and variety of institutions, 1 spread over a wide geographical area, necessarily encour- aged a greater scope of interests, including an ever-widening awareness of what was happening abroad. But what particularly operated in liberalizing and humanizing the mechanically rigid regimen of tradition- alism was the advent of more liberal and enlightened college presidents, such as Joseph Caldwell at North Carolina (from 1796 to 1835), Eliphalet Nott at Union ( 1 804-1 859) , Horace Holley at Transylvania (1818-1827,) James Marsh at Vermont (1826-1833), Mark Hopkins at Williams (1836-1872), and Josiah Quincy at Harvard (1829-1845). While the famous Yale Report of 1827, drawn primarily by President Jeremiah Day, made short shrift of vision- ary innovations and much prolonged the status quo, protests against the collegiate treadmill and gerund-grinding could not be stifled forever, and under men like Philip Lindsey (president of the University of Nashville, 1 825-1 850), Francis Wayland (Brown, 1827-1855), Henry P. Tappan (Michigan, 1 853-1 863), and Frederick Bar- nard (Columbia, 1 864-1 889) the work of liberalization was carried forward, until the generation of university presidents repre- sented by Andrew D. White (Cornell, 1867- 1885), Daniel C. Gilman (Hopkins, 1876- 1902), and Charles W. Eliot (Harvard, 1 869- 1 909) saw the revolution completed. Although some philosophical instruction was given throughout the four years of the college course at Harvard and at several other institutions, it was generally concen- trated in the senior year, and in most cases entrusted to, or at least supervised by, the president of the college. In the hands of such men as have just been mentioned, philosophy took on a new meaning. To many undergraduates it became the high spot of their college career. Loosely organ- ized though it still was under the head of moral philosophy, its core of ethics was leavened by some instruction in logic at the same time that it embraced also whatever literary criteria, political economy, and psychological data (usually derived from the old Aristotelian categories), and reli- gious doctrine the institution wished to give its charges before sending them forth into the world. A topping-off course of this kind, with its virtually limitless content, afforded almost boundless opportunities for ingenious and gifted teachers — oppor- tunities which, as we shall have occasion to observe, several of the nineteenth-century preceptors were adept at utilizing. 59 60 German Thought in America Samuel Miller and Joseph Buckminster The other chief area of philosophical activity was among the clergy, who re- mained traditionally orthodox and were generally opposed to new or foreign ideas. But even as early as 1800 these guardians of orthodoxy were not wholly unaware of German currents of thought. For example, it was directly out of a sermon by the Rev. Samuel Miller (1 769-1 850), one of the most influential of the Presbyterian stalwarts, on the first day of January of the new cen- tury that he expanded his now nearly for- gotten but once widely read two-volume Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (N.Y., 1803). 2 At once one of the earliest and most extended considerations of Ger- man achievements in learning, philosophy, and the arts and sciences, it is already typi- cal in its reservations and suspicion of German philosophy expressed in many American comments of a later day. Ad- mittedly derived, often at second or third hand, Miller's presentation is rather severe on the transcendental philosophers, especi- ally Kant, against whom he repeats the accusations as he found them in his British sources. 3 Kant is charged with having brought forth nothing new, nothing defi- nite. His enigmatic language, instead of promoting human progress, serves only "to delude, bewilder, and to shed a baneful influence on the true interests of man." So much for blame. Leaving, now, the castiga- tions of his British authority, Miller adds what his sense of fairness appears to have dictated : The system of Kant had found numerous friends and commentators, particularly in Germany, who contend that it sets limits, on the one hand, to the scepticism of Hume; while, on the other, it refutes and overturns materialism, fatalism, and athe- ism, as well as fanaticism and infidelity. [Il.ii] Despite the insuperable difficulties re- putedly involved in grasping Kant or in attempting a resume of his thought, 4 he proceeds to do just that. Following his British expositor in the London Monthly Review, he devotes two and one-half pages to a simplified explanation of Kant on space and time, analytical and synthetical judgments, reason and understanding, pure and practical reason, and the categories. The account concludes with a list of advo- cates of Kant (Reinhold, Schultze, Jacobi, Will, Reimarus, and Adelung), while Her- der, Plattner, and Selle are classified as opponents of the Critical Philosophy. 5 What is more important in the Retrospect than Miller's judgment on this or that Ger- man is the extraordinary comprehensive- ness of his report. His summary embraces at least twenty-four German philosophers, twenty classical scholars, nineteen Hebrew scholars and nine engaged in scholarly pur- suits of a more general nature, eighteen poets, eleven historians, thirty physicians, fourteen chemists, eighteen zoologists, four- teen botanists, and a host of other represent- atives of German learning. 6 Miller's main source of information on German literary and learned achievement was Peter Will's "Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of Literature in Ger- many" printed in the London German Mu- seum for 1800 and 1801, which he contented himself with paraphrasing in some instances and copying in others, at the same time that he followed his model also in the ar- rangement and organization of materials. His dependence on Will is most marked in the earlier portion of his survey of German literature, less so for the later sections and for the more scattered references in other sections of the work, for Miller was no slavish copyist. For example, his section on German philosophy is markedly different from Will's treatment, and his favorable opinion of Schiller departs radically from Will's judgment. 7 Emphasized by Miller as the distinctive achievements of Germany during the pre- The Growth of Interest in Germany 61 ceding century are (i) the development of the German language; 8 (2) the progress in "Natural and Mechanical Philosophy" as typified by Leibnitz, Wolff, von Humboldt, Werner, and seventy-two others; (3) the rise to prominence of German historians, such as Meusel, Miiller, Ebeling, and Schil- ler; (4) the flowering of German romances and novels and the various forms of poetry; (5) the advance in classical learning; (6) the development of oriental studies; 9 (7) the extraordinarily large number of professional writers (15,000) and the accompanying gen- erally prevalent taste for reading, numer- ous printing presses, and the incredible number (6,000-7,000) of books published annually; (8) the great Leipzig and Frank- furt books fairs; (9) the general encourage- ment to literary and artistic productivity given by princes and lesser noblemen, so that "the residence of many a petty prince is more fertile in literary productions, than some large cities in England and France," where the concentration of literary centers is said to be inimical to similar literary pro- gress; (10) the resulting decentralization of the book trade, which is beneficent for the general diffusion of literary culture ; ( 1 1 ) the "incredible . . . zeal and enterprise of Ger- man booksellers," whose "agents and cor- respondents in every part of Europe" pro- mote literary intercourse among the nations, whence it often happens that the originals and the translations are offered at the same time; (12) the thirty-nine German universi- ties, contrasted with seven in the British Isles — each a "grand focus from which the rays of light are thrown over the whole adjacent country . . . bringing the means of knowledge to almost every door"; (13) the emphasis in German education upon the modern foreign languages; and (14) the multiplication of public libraries and litera- ry and scientific societies. 10 Aside from the three sections devoted to an organized treatment of philosophy, lan- guage, and literature, numerous other achievements are particularized at appro- priate places in the survey. 11 Several obser- vations and judgments take on particular significance in the light of German-Ameri- can relations of the day. While Miller de- plores the "pernicious moral tendency" of some of the more sensational German dra- mas, he believes the German playwrights performed a notable service in the creation of a "more distinct and national" drama in America by supplying the native dramatists with materials to free the stage of a cramp- ing British domination (II, 482-83). Be- sides seeing special significance in the Ger- man influence on the American book trade, he often calls attention to the accomplish- ments of Germans in America, particularly the fine typography of the Saur Bible (II, 506), the establishment of Franklin College, especially by and for the Germans of Penn- sylvania (II, 502), the missionary work of the Moravians in America (I, 535), and the unusual prominence of Germans in the early development of American botanical studies (I, 142; II, 370, 402). Miller lays no claim to firsthand knowl- edge of the entire range of men and books surveyed, but his work is decidedly more than a superficial throwing together of heterogeneous materials from the compends of the time. 12 It is a matter of some moment that a New York clergyman of the conser- vative kind should have prepared the first comprehensive and well-organized survey of German classical literature, antedating Madame de Stael's book by more than a decade, and preparing many thoughtful readers for the message to which the Frenchwoman subsequently gave further emphasis and currency. 13 Imposing as Miller's Retrospect is, it is quite likely, so far as the spreading of popu- lar information about German scholarship goes, that less pretentious essays in the periodicals and, even more notably, the work of individuals like Bentley and Buck- minster were more immediately effective. Yet it seems that it was precisely Miller's Retrospect that aroused Buckminster's in- 62 German Thought in America terest in Germany, at the same time in- spiring him to write his first published essay, a review of Miller's Retrospect, for the Literary Miscellany for 1805 (I, 82-92). After a tour of England, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland, Buckminster returned to Boston in 1806, bringing with him upwards of three thousand books, many of them German. In 1808 he collaborated with Wil- liam Wells in the preparation and publica- tion, under the patronage of Harvard Col- lege, of Griesbach's Greek Testament (1809), and himself wrote four articles for the Monthly Anthology for 1808, 1809, and 181 1 in which he defended Griesbach's scholarly methods as the only adequate means for dealing with technical problems of Biblical exegesis. His Phi Beta Kappa address of 1809 "On the Dangers and Duties of Men of Letters" included an eloquent plea for a sound American scholarship modeled on that of Germany. His proposal to prepare a critical edition (in translation) of Gries- bach's Prolegomena came to naught by his untimely death. 14 His career was meteoric, but it was sufficiently profound to lead young Emerson, a decade after Buckmin- ster's death, to read his sermons and ad- dresses and to honor him as a brilliant pioneer in the cause of Transcendentalism. 16 Moreover, Buckminster was the first New England minister to study German specifi- cally for the purposes of Biblical research and to champion German scholarship as indispensable for the progress of American theological learning. 16 His example was emulated soon after by Moses Stuart at Andover; while nearer at home, George Ticknor, who was with Buckminster to the last, and who was intrusted with his papers and subsequently had a hand in preparing the "Memoir" incorporated into the volume of Buckminster's Sermons, was influenced to turn his attention to Germany. 17 The influence spread through Ticknor to Ban- croft, Everett, Cogswell, Harvard College, New England, and beyond. In New York City, meanwhile, young Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771-1798), having become an enthusiastic student of German as early as 1796, played a similar role by communicating his interest to the members of the Friendly Club, which included Samuel Miller, Charles Brockden Brown, and William Dunlap. Journals and Journalistic Exchange In the meantime, writers for American periodicals, who included both clergymen and professors, were beginning to introduce to their readers the more notable names of German scholars, men of letters, and phi- losophers. Kant's name was mentioned as early as July, 1797, in the New York Maga- zine (VIII, 365), in a brief "Explanation and Vindication of the Kantian Tenets," with special reference to the Categorical Imperative, quoted largely from Nitsch's View of Kantian Principles (London, 1797). During the next year the Philadelphia Monthly Magazine 19 published what ap- pears to be the first notice of Kant that was more than perfunctory. The writer seems to have relied for his information upon Lange's note on Kant appended to his German translation of Stewart's Elements. With so little to draw on, he naturally misunder- stood Kant on some points and misinter- preted him on others. He identified Kant's pure and practical reason with objective and subjective knowledge and bridged the gap too handily between mind and the Ding an sich. Kant's great contribution is, how- ever, correctly stated to be a criticism of philosophical methodology. 19 References to German philosophers at first are scattered, indicating little more than ephemeral interest. Jacobi is noticed as early as 1798 in the Philadelphia Monthly Magazine (I, iii, 205), but he is not again mentioned until three years later, when John Quincy Adams' Journal of a Tour through Silesia (first published in 1801 in the form of letters in the Philadelpia Port The Growth of Interest in Germany 63 Folio in forty-four installments) brought a good deal of information on German phi- losophy in general and on Garve, Wolff, and Kant in particular. Adams expressed a "preference of Garve for Kant," preferring "that philosophy which is easily applied to the purposes of life" to "that which is merely speculative." 20 On January 21, 1801, William Bentley in the Salem Impartial Register, already a prominent periodical, reproduced passages from Fichte to refute the charge of atheism directed against him "in some newspapers." 21 The twenty-fifth number of the Port Folio (June 20, 1801) presented another series of "Letters of an American, Resident Abroad, on Various Topics of Foreign Literature," in which are mentioned Kant, Lessing, and Fichte (I, 197). The next year the New England Quar- terly Magazine (II, 135) of Boston published a notice on Christian Gottlieb Heyne, and later in the same year (III, 26-28), a two- page essay entitled "Observations on the Philosophy of Kant," signed by the initials "A. B." Insofar as American periodicals provide an index, this early sporadic interest in German philosophy dropped off to almost nothing during the first decade of the centu- ry, 22 while concern with German theology and with literature, particularly literature with a pietistic or moralistic cast, became more marked. Meanwhile there was discern- ible a steadily mounting interest in the polite literature of Germany; and when, in 1814, the Analectic Magazine of Philadel- phia (III, 284-308) and the New York Quarterly Review (X, 355-409) printed es- says of twenty-four and fifty-four pages, respectively, on Madame de StaeTs De I'Allemagne, the preliminary phase of con- cern on the part of the American review- reading public was past and a new epoch had begun. Each year brought more articles and new allies among the journals, not the least of which was the newly founded and immediately influential North American Review.™ In 1815, too, George Ticknor and Edward Everett left for the University of Gottingen. In 18 16 Everett contributed the first of his letters on Germany to the North American Review, 24 and the year following George Bancroft, another of the young Americans studying in Germany, published the first of his essays designed to awaken Americans to the significance of the new spirit abroad in Germany. 25 Henceforth, especially after this first group of Harvard men returned from Germany and took academic posts in strategically located American educational institutions, the work of disseminating information about Germany was in the care of native Ameri- cans who had seen and heard at first hand, and who spoke with authority and convic- tion. Their primary concern was according to their predilections: one was interested primarily in belles-lettres, another in Ger- man historiography, still another in German classical scholarship, in German educa- tional advances, or in theological investiga- tions. None made it his main business to instruct Americans on the score of German philosophy more than on any other subject; but incidentally much information regard- ing German metaphysics in general and regarding men like Kant in particular got into their reviews, essays, and lectures. By the early twenties the "German craze," as it came to be known in Boston and vicinity, had fairly begun. The educated and well- read no longer cared or dared to confess themselves ignorant of the latest literary intelligences from Germany, the country which it had become the fashion to acknowl- edge "the most advanced intellectually on the face of the earth," and even John Adams, in one of his almost endless ex- changes of letters with the sage of Monti- cello, claimed to be a "diligent student of many books" entirely unknown to Jeffer- son and fully informed "on the controver- sies in Germany and the learned researches of universities and professors." 26 Even before the work of Ticknor's associ- ates could make itself felt, another force or 64 German Thought in America influence, hitherto overlooked 27 by students of comparative literary relations, had got under way. According to Peter S. Du Ponceau, a prime mover in the affair, a kind of "conspiracy" to promote a close cultural alliance with Germany was formed among his associates in Philadelphia at the time when Harvard first sent her graduates to Germany. The motivation had its origin in a growing literary self-consciousness after the War of 1812, when, says Du Ponceau, "some patriotic gentlemen of Philadelphia and New York," finding "that our weak efforts were derided by British critics," determined that as Americans had sought alliances abroad to secure political inde- pendence of Great Britain, so, to secure cultural autonomy, they must now "seek literary friends on the continent of Eur- ope .... We began with Germany." Two journals were established, one in English in New York, under the title of The German Correspondent and another in Ger- man, at Philadelphia, under that of Views of America (Amerikanische Ansichten) .... At the same time there appeared in Leip- zick another periodical publication entirely devoted to this country and tending to the same end with the other two, entitled America described by herself (Amerika dar- gestellt durch sich selbst) . These three period- icals lasted little more than a year; the last, however, was followed by another, entitled Atlantis, also published at Leipzick, by a gentleman who is now a respectable member of the medical profession of this city (Dr. Eduard Florens Rivinus), and went through two octavo volumes. These works produced the desired effect. 28 Thus it happened, says Du Ponceau, that the two contending parties, the Anglophiles and the Gallophiles, found themselves chal- lenged by a third party, the Germanophiles, whose general effect was to inject a healthy leavening influence from Germany into what had been too exclusively an Anglo- French competition for cultural supremacy in the young nation. The third of the periodicals mentioned by Du Ponceau, but actually the first in the field, was Amerika dargestellt durch sich selbst, published by Georg Joachim Goschen of Leipzig and running through three vol- umes of 56, 96, and 96 numbers, respective- ly, for the years 1818-1820. This semi- weekly paper, normally in four-page num- bers with occasional supplements, was the organ in Germany of an "Institute" just as The German Correspondent was in America. 29 According to the "Prospectus" issued with the first number, the "Institute" has for its purpose the dissemination of four kinds of information: (1) intelligences on all political developments: (2) reports on cultural prog- ress, including spiritual, ethical, religious, literary, artistic, educational, and scientific matters, and anecdotes taken from the lives of famous and representative men illustra- tive of the traditions of both countries; (3) full accounts of industry, agriculture, com- merce, ship schedules, population, comfort, entertainments, etc. ; and (4) reports on unusual happenings, remarkable observa- tions in nature, the heavens, and the earth, oddities in peace and war, etc. Already the information in hand is so abundant that nice editorial care in the selection of ma- terials is required. 30 As the "Prospectus" suggests, this peri- odical was truly a miscellany, dividing its materials in its three volumes about equally between general information and current news. By the end of 1820, however, the Leipzig editor found that his semi-weekly could no longer compete on equal terms with the London newspapers in reporting current American affairs in Germany. 31 Accordingly the editor announced a change of policy in the last number (Dec, 1820) : Amerika will appear henceforth in the form of annals, which, properly edited and shorn of irrelevances and partisanship, will bring to German readers reliable reports in the realms of learning, art, literature, and the moral and political life of America. With this change of policy the project lost its distinctive features and was soon swallowed The Growth of Interest in Germany 65 up in the welter of books on America that issued from German presses. In the meantime the founding of The German Correspondent in New York, the American counterpart of the Leipzig A meri- ka, had been delayed until January 31, 1820, when an anonymous editor who signed himself "Hermann" (probably the Rev. Eduard C. Schaffer) published the first number. 32 In his introductory remarks "to the Public," the editor, stating the editorial policy in terms often identical with those used by Goschen, his Leipzig collabo- rator, dedicates himself to correcting the false opinions of Germany which Americans derive from French and English accounts. The pages of The German Correspondent, "while they shall merit the attention of the general reader, will be entitled to the notice of the philosopher and the Christian." In exhibiting the German character, "Her- mann" says he proposes "to refute the calumnies, with which the land of his fore- fathers is assailed," but he hastens to add that while he "feels happy in being de- scended from German ancestors," he con- siders it "one of the greatest earthly privi- leges to be a native citizen of America." A true miscellany, 33 this paper came to an abrupt, unexplained termination in Janu- ary, 1821, having run just a year. Meanwhile one of the German periodicals published in America distinguished itself from the numerous other German-language periodicals of the day by going beyond the purpose of informing Germans about Amer- ica and Americans about Germany. It adopted the added purpose of promoting cordial relations between German-Amer- ican and Anglo-American groups. This journal, entitled A merikanische Ansichten ? x grew out of the Mosheimsche Gesellschaft in Philadelphia, founded in 1804, by a group of young unmarried men who origi- nally aimed through union to advance piety among their number and to perfect them- selves in the use of the German language, which they hoped to preserve in its purity, unaffected by the Pennsylvania-Dutch dia- lects and by Americanisms. By 1810, when the Society was incorporated, it had forty resident members and a number elsewhere, for whenever a member withdrew for as much as five miles from the city, he became a corresponding member. Composed largely of young ministers, teachers, artists, and merchants (and some learned corresponding members in Europe), its aims soon grew to embrace the general objectives of other learned societies of the time. Ten years after incorporation, the Society established the monthly Ansichten, 35 which ran for ten is- sues (to October, 1820), when the editor related the difficulties involved in editing the Ansichten, expressing doubt of his abil- ity to prepare the promised annual volume, and announcing the decision to postpone the November and December numbers, in the hope that meanwhile the subscribers might be increased beyond the 300 now on the list, so that the publication could be resumed in January. These hopes were evidently not realized, for no more numbers appear to have been published. The publication during 1818-1820 of two journals in America (one in German and one in English) and another in Germany, all designed to encourage cultural exchange, through the agency of men like Du Ponceau (who was active in many directions, and who maintained contacts with men as var- iously situated as Bentley of Salem, Buck- minster and Follen at Harvard, Stuart at Andover, and Marsh at Vermont), exerted more than a passing influence in disseminat- ing knowledge of Germany in America before the work was taken over by the more firmly established American reviews and the Harvard graduates who had studied in Germany. This work, carried forward apparently successfully during 1818-1820 and then interrupted, was revived a few years later through the establishment by C. N. Roding of Hamburg of a monthly entitled Colum- bus: A merikanische Miscellen 3 * and of the 66 German Thought in America quarterly Atlantis 37 by Eduard Florens Rivinus 38 of Philadelphia. The first of these, both larger and more informative on the more strictly artistic and cultural matters than its predecessors, maintained itself throughout 1825-1832 in Hamburg and was sold in Vienna, London, and Paris. 39 The Atlantis (1826-1827), too, was a more con- siderable journal than its predecessors of 1818-1820. Its editor, Rivinus (1802-1873), an accomplished man, a prominent physi- cian and botanist, long resident in Philadel- phia, and widely traveled, could speak with greater assurance regarding America than earlier editors of periodicals that circulated in Germany. But he, too, labored under difficulties. His residence in Philadelphia necessitated long delays while his manu- script was transmitted to Leipzig for publi- cation — sometimes as long as four months. As a result he had to minimize current news in favor of materials of more enduring in- formational value, such as official acts, laws, proclamations, statistical reports, and general accounts. Eventually he found the competition of Roding's Columbus insuper- able. 40 Although these early journalistic ven- tures shrink in importance when compared with the more significant roles played a decade or two later by such American peri- odicals as the Christian Examiner, they per- formed a distinctive service for their day. Their position again illustrates what be- comes increasingly apparent as researches are pushed forward, namely, that the stream of Germanic influence was relatively steady, and that the activity of Ticknor, Everett, Bancroft, and their associates rep- resents less a sudden wave than an invigor- ated flow in the continuous current of influence from earlier da}'s. Du Ponceau's "conspiracy," the efforts of editors and publishers in Philadelphia, New York, Ham- burg, and Leipzig, and the preparation and plans which had of necessity to precede the establishment of these journals are all cur- rents of a stream of cultural interchange that had already acquired some momentum when Madame de StaeTs book had not yet become popular in America, and while Tick- nor and his friends were still reputedly ransacking libraries and bookshops in and about Boston in search of a German dic- tionary. American Students in Germany Recent investigations dealing with the first generation of Americans who went to study in German universities make it un- necessary to relate in detail what is readily available elsewhere regarding their tours, studies, and subsequent influence. 41 Alto- gether they exerted more effort and were more effective as literary intermediaries than as proponents of German philosophy ; yet several of them — notably Ticknor, Everett, Cogswell, and Hedge — served, in one way or another, repeatedly to call American attention to German intellectual matters other than the merely literary, so that for the sake of completeness and some degree of proportion, the more important relations must be rehearsed, however briefly. GEORGE TICKNOR George Ticknor (1791-1871) was the first of this group to be inspired — in his case principally by Madame de StaeTs Germany and Charles de Villers' sketch of the Uni- versity of Gottingen — to complete his edu- cation in the land where Madame de Stael had found a university at virtually every crossroad. 42 He spent nearly two of his four years abroad (18 15-18 19) at Gottingen, where he found himself from the first heart- ily welcomed by the most prominent pro- fessors. His primary interest being classical scholarship, he heard the lectures of Eich- horn, Schultze, Heeren, and Dissen, but he also attended the lectures of Saalfeld on modern European history, of Bouterwek on aesthetics, and of Blumenbach on natural history, while Benecke, the professor of The Growth of Interest in Germany 67 English literature, taught him German. His letters to Jefferson and others of his Amer- ican correspondents leave no doubt that he readily adjusted himself to the tempo of the German university system, and that he profited tremendously by the instruction he received. 43 Ticknor's call, during 1816-1817, to the Smith Professorship of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures at Har- vard necessitated his removal to Paris. 44 Following sojourns in Switzerland, ftaly, France, Spain, England, and Scotland, he returned to Boston on June 6, 1819, and his formal inauguration took place two months later. During the sixteen years that he served at Harvard he devoted his time principally to French and Spanish literatures, and until 1825, when Karl Follen joined the Harvard faculty, he seems to have done little more than to "discourse on German literary history at large," undertaking "simply to teach a few young men every year to read German and to know what German books they may afterwards read by themselves." 45 But when Follen came to Boston, he was quick to recognize Follen 's worth and utility for his own educational objectives, and was instrumental in secur- ing his appointment as the first regularly appointed instructor of German at Har- vard. 46 Ticknor preferred his philosophy in mod- erate doses, and seems to have cared little for German philosophy as such. Indeed, he did not know much about it. In his letters from Germany he occasionally referred to the extraordinary advance of philosophy among the Germans, never, however, with- out some qualification, usually with refer- ence to its extremely theoretical nature. 47 Yet he was not averse to all philosophy and clearly recognized the advantages of what he called the "philosophical" approach of German scholarship. He and Everett under- took, in the fall of 1816, a tour "for the express purpose of seeing all the universities and schools of considerable name" and some of the more famous preparatory schools, notably those at Meissen and Schulpforta. Writing to Jefferson, to whom he reported his observations, he enlarged upon "the liberal spirit of German scholar- ship," and particularly praised the Germans for pursuing the arts as well as the sciences philosophically, adding that he wanted to see this method, together with the attend- ant tradition of academic freedom of in- quiry, "transplanted to the U. States." 48 Although he declined Jefferson's several invitations to join the faculty of the new university at Charlottesville, he assisted him by sending "a list of the principal Ger- man works in literary History and of the best belles-lettres writers" for the library; he advised him in the selection of five pro- fessors from abroad, including Dr. Blaetter- mann, who taught German; he forwarded to Jefferson syllabi of his own courses in Cambridge; and he counselled him regard- ing the organization, discipline, and meth- ods of instruction for the new Virginia institution. 49 But when Jefferson asked for a copy of the regulations governing Harvard, Ticknor refused to furnish it because he considered the rules at Harvard "one of the most cumbrous and awkward systems" 50 and sent instead the prospectus of the fa- mous Round Hill School established at Northampton, Mass., by his friends Joseph Cogswell and George Bancroft. In the same letter he gave an outline of his own general plan of reform at Harvard for which he had been laboring since the summer of 1821 in the face of inertia and entrenched opposi- tion bred of provincial tradition. His plans included a revision of the organization and administration of the departments, more freedom in the choice of studies, especially for students not pursuing work towards a degree, a separation of students into divi- sions according to proficiency, improvement in the quality of instruction, and a general expansion of the scope and function of the institution. 51 68 German Thought in America In his own department he successfully carried out his reforms. Indeed, his views on innovations were adopted by the Corpo- ration of Overseers in June, 1825, but the faculty persistently balked at his efforts, so that in 1827 his ideas were modified and virtually abandoned, except in his own de- partment. 52 Discouragement at his failure to make Harvard over into an institution of university grade partly prompted his resignation in 1835. Most of the next three years he spent in Germany and Austria, where he was received with great acclaim in the highest circles of officials, scholars, and literary men, and he met virtually everyone of importance. 53 Upon his return, he devoted ten years to the preparation of his History of Spanish Literature (3 vols., 1849), the work upon which his reputation as a scholar principally rests. Impressed by the central position occu- pied in the German universities by their great libraries, he became, in 1852, the chief founder of the Boston Public Library, the first of its kind in the United States. In June, 1856, he made a third trip to Europe, chiefly to confer with prominent European librarians and to purchase books in Italy, France, Germany, and England. Active in many directions, he was until his death in 1871 one of the most influential figures in the social and intellectual life of Boston and of his country; along with Everett and Ban- croft, he formed the earliest group of Amer- ican-born savants to represent the German- trained scholars in the United States who gave the German spirit in letters and learn- ing a savory reputation in America. EDWARD EVERETT Closely associated with Ticknor was Edward Everett (1794-1865), 54 who sailed with Ticknor in the spring of 1815 and returned in the autumn of 1819, after al- most five years in Europe, nearly half of which he spent with Ticknor at Gottingen. Except for a brief excursion to see his brother Alexander in Holland, Everett was inseparable from Ticknor throughout their period of residence at Gottingen. They lived at the same house, the home of Professor Bouterwek, attended many of the same classes and lectures, and traveled together during their vacations. Everett was by far the more assiduous student of the two. Ticknor declared that his friend required only six hours of sleep, and that his capacity for work was "prodigious, unequalled." 55 Everett's primary interest was, of course, Greek under Dissen, but he also heard the lectures of Heeren on modern history and of Hugo on civil law. He received private instruction from Eichhorn in Hebrew and Arabic, devoted considerable time to the study of the modern languages, receiving two hours of private instruction weekly from Eichhorn in German, and found spe- cial delight in reading Winckelmann, Klop- stock, 56 Schiller, and Voss's Luise. Reading Schiller led him to Kant : "He [Schiller] was a high Kantiner, as they call it. We are going to take Kant by the horns." 57 His initiation into Goethe came through Torqua- to Tasso, followed by Dichtung und Wahr- heit. After a year at Gottingen his unful- filled promise to send contributions to Wil- liam Tudor, editor of the North American Review, began to trouble his conscience. The result was a forty-five -page review of Goethe's autobiography, published in the January, 1817, number of the Review, the first significant paper on Goethe published in an American journal. Armed with letters from Professor Wolff and from Mr. and Mrs. Sartorius, he and Ticknor visited Goethe on October 25, 1816. Everett's judgment of Goethe was far more critical than Ticknor's; and though he was pleased several days after their visit to find that a letter from Goethe to the Professor of Mineralogy recommending them to mem- bership in the Jena Mineralogical Society had preceded them, he wondered whether this was not merely Goethe's way of asking them to send him a box of American minerals. Nevertheless, in September, 181 7, The Growth of Interest in Germany 69 he followed up his acquaintanceship with Goethe by giving his young Harvard friend, Theodore Lyman, a letter of introduction to Goethe, together with a copy of Byron's Lament of Tasso and a request that Goethe autograph "any volume" of his writings for the Harvard Library and also Everett's own copy of Hermann und Dorothea.™ Here are the beginnings of the negotia- tions that ultimately led, through the more direct instrumentality of Cogswell, to Goethe's giving a twenty-volume set of his writings to the Harvard Library. Soon he began to carry out his commission, assigned to him by act of the Harvard Corporation, to purchase five hundred dollars' worth of books for the college library. 59 Subsequent- ly he aided Cogswell in perfecting the ne- gotiations by which Israel Thorndike of Boston purchased and presented to Har- vard the famous library of the Hamburg geographer-historian C. D. Ebeling. 60 On September 17, 181 7, he realized his ambi- tion to become, as he said at the time, "the first American, and as far as I know, Eng- lishman" to receive the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Gottingen. 61 The manner in which he was welcomed at Harvard in 18 19 is indicated by Emerson, then beginning his third year, who expected "all the good of his lectures" during the next term, only to find that he was not eligible "to profit by him" until his senior year, when he was permitted to enroll in Everett's class. 62 Of even greater signific- ance than his classroom teaching, 63 in Emerson's estimation, were Everett's nu- merous lectures on the public and lyceum platforms. 64 During the years of his pro- fessorship he wrote for the North American Review (of which he was editor during 1820- 1823) six long reviews 65 of various German books, and an extended essay on "Univer- sity Training," 66 in which he commended Jefferson's plan of organization and in- struction in Virginia, reviewed the history of university education in Europe, and pleaded for a more liberal policy and more enlightened methods of higher education in America. Among educators, he corres- ponded with several of his former profes- sors at Gottingen and, on this side, with Jefferson chiefly, sending him copies of his textbooks. When he saw his name reported among those who had criticized Jefferson for importing professors from abroad, he wrote to his friend at Monticello : . . . having myself gone (at a period, when most men regard themselves as emancipat- ed from academic restraints) and plunged into the cells of a German university, and used all my influence . . . tho ineffectually — to induce our Trustees to import a Ger- man Professor in my own department, I may claim not to be suspected of so ridicu- lous ... a sentiment, as crept into some of our newspapers, on the arrival of your teachers from abroad. 67 Jefferson replied assuring him that no ex- planation was necessary, at the same time inviting him to pay a visit to Charlottes- ville and soliciting the benefit of Everett's criticism based on his extensive European experience. 68 But Everett needed to make no journey to Virginia to find objects of criticism. He found enough at Harvard that he would change. Like Ticknor, he found his plans and desires continually frustrated by tradi- tion or authority; 69 unlike Ticknor, his resolution to quit his post was soon made. He longed for a larger sphere of activity and opportunity. Elected to Congress in 1824, he "quit coldly," to use Emerson's phrase, "the splendid career which opened before him" and took "the road to Washington . . . attracted by the vulgar prizes of politics."' Except for the years from 1846 to 1849, when he returned to Harvard as president, his distinguished political career was con- tinuous until his retirement from public life in 1854. No longer actively engaged in scholarship, he nevertheless continued to exchange letters with some of his friends in Germany, 71 found pleasure in reading Ger- man literary works, and encouraged the 70 German Thought in America extension of German educational methods in American institutions. In 1837, when called upon to speak at the Williams Col- lege Commencement exercises, he prepared an address on "The Influence of German Thought on the Contemporary Literature of England and America." 72 His address, entitled "University Education," delivered on his inauguration as president of Harvard, on April 30, 1846, and inspired by his own experiences in Germany, was thoroughly imbued with German educational ideas, notably those of Herder. 73 As an adminis- trator he turned out, contrary to expecta- tions, rather conservative in his attitude toward curricular changes and at times even hostile to the liberalizing tendencies of foreign universities. On educational reform, men of Longfellow's generation stood now where Everett himself had stood in 1820; but twenty-five years had elapsed, and Everett would have none (or little) of inno- vation. Longfellow wrote dolefully: "The whole system of college studies is now undergoing revision. Everett wants to bring things to something like the old order of things." 74 His administration at Harvard was fraught with difficulties and was nota- bly brief. 75 His long public career overshad- owed, in the popular estimation, his earlier scholarly activity; but it is to be doubted that his active life as a politician exerted the same abiding influence as did the stamp which he helped impress on the in- tellectual character of the young nation. JOSEPH COGSWELL Joseph Cogswell (1 786-1 871), graduate of Harvard in 1 806, lawyer for a year, tutor of Latin for two years at Harvard, and traveler for some more, in 1816 decided to go to Gottingen. He sailed in September, having under his charge Augustus Thorn- dike, a young Harvard graduate who was to complete his education in Europe. In the beginning Cogswell found himself at a disadvantage, for he had not, like Ticknor, read Werther nor, like Everett, studied Herder's Theologische Briefe before leaving for Germany. Already thirty years of age, he found university routine in general and the difficulties of the German language in particular irksome, but he soon learned to recite lessons, construe words, and submit to correction "with as much docility [he confessed] as if I had never known what it was to be myself a teacher and a gover- nor." 76 His program of studious activity, which he himself deemed "respectable," his friends Ticknor and Everett agreed in calling "prodigious." 77 He grew restive under the strict attention he was required to give to philology, history, and politics, and he came to look upon these disciplines merely as supplementary to his main purpose of preparing for the career of a scientific explorer — to which end he con- centrated on scientific subjects, especially geology, mineralogy, and botany. During his first vacation period Cogswell undertook a tour of Prussia and Saxony, as Ticknor and Everett had done the year before, devoting special attention to the famous schools at Schulpforta, Meissen, and Grimma, thus already foreshadowing an interest later to be developed in his and Bancroft's educational venture at North- ampton, Massachusetts. Although he ex- pected "a repulsive reception," he was charmed by the manner in which Goethe received him at Jena and conducted him on a tour of the mineralogical collections. 78 Upon his return to Gottingen in May, he set really to work. To Ticknor, then in Paris, he wrote on May 23, 1817: I go on very regularly, rising at four, study till six, then hear Hausmann on Geogno- sy . . . At 7 Schrader . . . at 8 Welcker .... From 9 to 1 1 I am at liberty to study — 1 1 . hear Hausmann privatissime in Mineralo- gy ... . From 12 to 1, free, — 1 to 2 in Bo- tanic Garden or Library; 2, Heeren who lectures well; 3, with Reck; 4 Saalfeld in Northern History; 5, Blumenbach; 6, Be- necke .... At 7 comes my drill sergeant and so ends the day as do the lectures I hear. At 8 I give Augustus [Thorndike] one The Growth of Interest in Germany 71 in Italian, and study as much afterwards, before 12, as . . . circumstances allow .... Saturday I make excursions with Schrader, and Sunday with Hausmann, who makes nothing of carrying us a round of 15 or 20 miles. 79 Small wonder that Bancroft said, "Mr. Cogs- well behaved like an absolute mad man. He studied and became sick, and studied and became almost dead, and yet studied. Mr. Everett behaved more like a Christian." 80 In this varied and heavy program of work nothing appealed to Cogswell more than the library training that he received, at Bancroft's suggestion, from Professor Georg Benecke, who explained to him the system of organization and administration of the library at Gottingen, and instructed him in the methods of classifying, catalogu- ing, and arranging the books. In his future travels Cogswell never neglected to inspect university and public libraries, thus acquir- ing information later turned to excellent use in reorganizing the Harvard Library and in planning and organizing the Astor (later New York Public) Library. After a tour including Hamburg, Bremen, Kassel, and the Harz region, during June, 1817, in the company of Everett and Thorn- dike, Cogswell returned to his studies, only to grow more restless and dissatisfied at finding, as he put it, that "at this period of my life ... I knew nothing." Deciding that he had "grasped too much," and that he could not at this late date bring his mind "to new habits," he tried to reconcile him- self to the idea that he must be content to remain ignorant and adopt, instead of an academic career, his natural calling as "a bird of passage." 81 On September 6, 181 7, he left for Munich, where he enjoyed knowing Sommering, famous for his anatomical discoveries, Schilling, and others of the Royal Academy of Science, of which society he was elected a corresponding member in March, 1818. 82 From Munich, he proceeded by way of Vienna and the Tyrol to Rome, where he met Bancroft, who viewed with alarm the "perfect fanaticism" with which Cogswell pursued his mineralogical studies. 83 The following spring and summer were spent in Switzerland, where he covered 1700 miles afoot in pursuit of mineralogical and botani- cal specimens, but he also took time to visit Fellenberg at Hofwyl and Pestalozzi at Yverdun. He talked with both and noted carefully their methods, thus adding to his store of educational theory acquired earlier at Schulpforta, Meissen, and Grimma, put to use later when he and Bancroft es- tablished the Round Hill School. Following a period in Paris, he turned to England and Scotland, and in the spring of 18 1 g returned to Germany with his pro- tege Thorndike. They spent varying periods of time in Dresden, Hamburg, Gottingen, and elsewhere, fraternizing with scientists, forming new acquaintanceships among scholars and literary men, or renewing old friendships. 84 The most interesting chapter in the history of Cogswell's second residence in Germany pertains to his relations with Goethe, whom he had met at Jena in 1817, and to whom he had sent several American scientific publications in the interim. Cogs- well called on Goethe again in May, 1819, and again in August, being graciously enter- tained on both occasions. 85 While Everett had furnished the original suggestion, it was Cogswell who finally induced Goethe to execute his idea of sending his books to Harvard. He turned to Cogswell for specific directions for transmitting his gifts and utilized Cogswell as the official intermedi- ary between himself and the Harvard au- thorities. "America owes to Cogswell," says Professor Long, "a debt of gratitude for aiding in establishing friendly relations between Germany's greatest poet and our oldest seat of learning." 86 In September, 1919, Cogswell left Ger- many for Switzerland, where at Yverdun he again visited Pestalozzi (whose system he did not consider nearly so good as Fellen- berg's) and after a winter in France and the 72 German Thought in America following summer in the British Isles, he returned to America in October, 1821. The following January he accepted an appoint- ment as Professor of Mineralogy and Libra- rian at Harvard. He set at once system- atically to reform the library, classifying, cataloguing, and rearranging all the books according to the methods employed at Got- tingen. So it came about that the oldest American university library was organized on the German plan — a circumstance which, in the end, had far-reaching effects upon American education and learning. 87 But Cogswell shared the experience of Ticknor, Everett, and Bancroft in finding Harvard unwilling to adapt herself rapidly to Gottingen methods. With George Ban- croft, who was equally dissatisfied with his position as tutor of Greek, 88 he pooled re- sources and information on European schools, and together they opened in 1823 the Round Hill School at Northhampton, Mass., on principles avowedly copied from German and Swiss models and embodying the theories of Fellenberg, Pestalozzi, and Schleiermacher. 89 Considering the manifold handicaps under which Cogswell and Ban- croft proceeded, their school prospered admirably. It enrolled, during the first eight years of its existence, 293 pupils, drawn from nineteen states and four foreign countries. But after five years of "entire devotedness to one object," which offered little or no intellectual gratification," Cogs- well's mercurial temperament again as- serted itself, and he felt, by March 23, 1830, "There must be a change ere long or I die." 91 His purchase of Bancroft's interest in March, 1830, and his subsequent single- handed management of the school gave him a temporarily renewed interest in the work, but the end of the school in the spring of 1834 could have been foreseen long before. More or less at loose ends for several years, 93 he purchased, in 1838, an interest in the New York Review, and from 1839 to 1842 found himself sole owner and editor. During these years the journal took a prom- inent position by way of introducing German literature and thought to its readers and in championing the German system of secondary and university edu- cation as superior to all others. 92 His New York associations led to a friendship with John Jacob Astor, whom he assisted and advised in collecting books, and to whom, when Astor sought a worthy enterprise upon which to bestow "three or four hundred thousand dollars," Cogswell suggested founding the Astor Library. He settled "all the points which arose dur- ing the progress of the affair," went to Europe repeatedly to inspect important collections and to purchase books, and in 1843 became the superintendent and first librarian of what is now the New York Public Library. He was responsible for every detail of its organization: he formu- lated the cataloguing, classification, and numbering systems which it still retains in all essentials, and which have since been widely adopted and recognized as among the best in use in America. He also prepared the first published catalog of the Astor Library, in four volumes. He wrote his name indelibly into the history of American library science and scholarship; for when, on January 9, 1854, he threw open the doors of the Astor Library (says Dr. H. M. Leyenberg, carefully choosing his words) Cogswell "set before the public the first collection of books ever made in this country primarily for the scholar and the research worker." 93 Thus in all his activi- ties — as teacher, scientist, editor, and librar- ian — Cogswell is another of the pioneers who, while not a philosopher or even greatly interested in philosophy, yet la- bored effectively in this country to make prevail principles and practices which origi- nated in German philosophical systems, and which ultimately aided signally to advance American learning. GEORGE BANCROFT George Bancroft (1800-1891), the fourth The Growth of Interest in Germany 73 of the young Harvard men to go to Got- tingen, had graduated with distinction in the classics in 1817 and remained for gradu- ate studies until the Harvard Corporation sent him to Germany for three years, on a scholarship with an annual stipend of $700, to become, as President Kirkland hoped, "an accomplished philologian and Biblical critic, able to expound and defend the Revelation of God." With him sailed, on June 27, 1818, Frederic Henry Hedge, the son of Levi Hedge, in whose home Bancroft had lived while a student at Harvard. They arrived in Gottingen on August 14, in the midst of a particularly violent town-and- gown riot, which caused Bancroft to feel "proud of home and the good discipline that reigns there." Within a few days they were comfortably established in the home of Bouterwek, where Ticknor and Everett, too, had resided. 94 He formally matriculated on September 22, and heard the lectures of Eichhorn in the New Testament, Koster in Hebrew, Welcker in Latin, and Dissen in Greek. The next year he added historical studies under Planck and Heeren and Syriac under Eich- horn. 95 Professing to know already "enough theology for use in America" and consider- ing Gottingen "no place to study the sub- ject," he assured President Kirkland, "I have nothing to do with it [German the- ology], except so far as it is merely critical. Of their infidel systems I hear not a word." 96 By the following winter Bancroft became critical of the foul weather and the rude society of Gottingen, but sought recom- pense in the fact that "in Gottingen are assembled the choicest instructors and all good books of all ages and tongues." How- ever, the students were vulgar and their linen dirty; professors were "neither pol- ished in their manners nor elevated in their ways of thinking, nor even agreeable, witty, or interesting in their conversation." He complained that learning at Gottingen is not "the companion of public life, nor the beautifier of retirement, nor the friend and comforter in affliction," but is "attended to as a trade, is cultivated merely because one can get a living by it." 97 The theologians as a group he found especially rude, indecent, even blasphemous. 98 These strictures, made in letters to Kirkland, Norton, Stephen Hig- ginson, S. A. Eliot, and others, 99 did much to give currency to what came to be common charges of the infidelity and atheism of Ger- man theology. Coming from a brilliant young scholar who had been sent to Ger- many specifically to gather what would enable him to advance the cause of true Christianity upon his return, Bancroft's accusations had a devastatingly disillusion- ing effect upon his patrons and sponsors. Among these Harvard correspondents, Norton was at the time the best informed on Germany. Sensing in Bancroft's animad- versions a degree of exaggeration, Norton questioned some of his criticisms, and Ban- croft replied loftily defending his veracity and repeating his charges. 100 The truth of the matter was, as they discovered even before Bancroft returned to Cambridge, that he had acquired a critical, not to say supercilious attitude, which he expressed more or less unconsciously when he wrote to Norton that he found "one place nearly as bad as another." 101 Norton detected a degree of affectation and a certain captious- ness, so that he reminded Bancroft of the state of society in Cambridge and of the American dislike of "ostentation or vanity, anything outre or bizarre." 102 But when he strode forward to welcome his young friend home, Bancroft accosted him in the Euro- pean manner by kissing him on both cheeks • — whereupon followed a serious breach be- tween the two. 103 While they came eventu- ally to make allowances, some of the odium of his charges against German theology lingered. Bancroft alone could not have been responsible, but it is more than a mere coincidence that henceforth, for fifty years to come, the accusations launched by him against German scholars and theologians 74 German Thought in America are identical with those so widely repeated in the American press afterwards. 104 Bancroft never suggested that learning at Gottingen was not earnestly pursued. He charged that it was done too earnestly, that the scholar was too diligent, that Germany made too much of science and too little of the scientist, that the whole process was too coldly calculating and impersonal. On leaving Gottingen, on September 19, 1820, to go to Berlin, he again leveled his charges of uncouthness at the city and the profes- sors' manners, saying, "I go from Gottingen without regret"; but he also added what bespeaks a real appreciation of the intel- lectual stimulation which Gottingen had given him during his two years there, "Farewell, oh! Georgia Augusta, and mayst thou long continue to bring forth offspring worthy of thy present glory." 105 Berlin he found more satisfactory. 106 He pursued his philological studies under Boeckh, Hirt, and Wolf, and attended Hegel's course in philosophy and Schleier- macher's lectures on education. 107 Berlin offered other attractions. He reveled in the city life which he had missed in Gottingen. He especially appreciated the frequent opportunities he had to be a guest in the homes of Schleiermacher, Savigny, and W. von Humboldt. With Savigny and Humboldt he discussed Shakespeare, Mil- ton, Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, and German literature in general, and with Schleiermacher, German educational meth- ods and their applicability in America. 108 When his five months in Berlin were up, he left reluctantly. He visited Goethe twice, on March 7 and 17, at Weimar, and found himself received graciously. His comments on Goethe at the time exhibit nothing of the venom that he later displayed in his essay on Goethe. From Weimar, he proceeded to Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, and Hei- delberg, where he spent a month in the company of university scholars and attend- ed the lectures of Schlosser the historian. He arrived in Paris in time to meet A. W. Schlegel, then preparing to leave for Bonn, and soon established contacts with Alexan- der von Humboldt, Cuvier, Lafayette, Baron de Stael, Irving, Gallatin, and many other notables. Three months in Paris and three weeks in London were followed by a walking tour through Switzerland, a winter chiefly in Rome and Naples, and a visit to Byron at Monte Nero in the spring. He embarked from Marseilles in June and landed in New York on August 3, 1822. 109 Yielding to his father's wishes, he was licensed to preach. While he preached for several years, it was without much satisfac- tion to himself or his auditors, and he soon came to prefer the lecture room to the pulpit. He applied unsuccessfully for permission to deliver lectures on history at Harvard, and then accepted a tutorship in Greek. Bedev- illed by students who failed to appreciate either his parts or his methods, he soon found college "a sickening and wearisome place . . . nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble." Constantly under correction or criticism of his elders, who, he complained, "do not understand my character . . . have not taken any pains to consider it," 110 he threw up his post and joined Cogswell in establishing the gymnasium at Northamp- ton. 111 Because of differences between his and Cogswell's temperaments and views concerning methods of teaching and the management of the school, Bancroft sold his interest in the school to Cogswell in August, 1 83 1, but remained a year longer as a salaried instructor. Thereafter he de- voted himself to literary and historical scholarship and to political pursuits. Besides some early, very Byronic verses, some miscellaneous essays, and texts for his classes, 112 he published in 1828 a translation of Heeren's Ideen iiber die Politik, den Ver- kehr und den Handel . . . der alien Welt. Dur- ing his years at Northampton he wrote sev- eral important essays and review articles on German subjects, especially for the North American Review and the American Quarterly Review. 113 His History of the The Growth of Interest in Germany 75 United States, in ten volumes, appeared at varying intervals over a period of forty years (1834-1874). His career as Secretary of the Navy (1 845-1 846), as minister to England (1846-1849), and as minister to Berlin (1867-1874) is well known. During the critical years while the kingdom of Prussia was transformed into the North German Confederation and finally into the German Empire, Bancroft's former ex- perience in Germany enabled him to repre- sent his country tactfully and effectively in the German capital. Throughout his career Bancroft injected a strong leaven of German culture into the manifold roles that he played. 114 Like Tick- nor, Everett, and Cogswell, his main in- terest was not philosophy; but, as in their cases, his championship and exemplifica- tion of German scholarship made him at once a pathfinder in American learned endeavor and an effective agent for the reception which German philosophy was accorded by later generations of Americans. More particularly, his historical writings, inspired chiefly by Heeren's methodology and Hegel's philosophy of history, 115 set the fashion for American historiography — in fact, created it. While every successive volume of his History of the United States was, as it were "another vote for Jackson," Bancroft's historical writings were the first notable examples in America embodying the German concept by which historical writing was related to and given orientation in philosophical concepts and enveloping movements. If it is true that "his position as Father of American History is as un- shaken as is that of Herodotus among the Greeks," 116 then Bancroft's influence on what John Spencer Basset called the Middle Group of American Historians is more readily understood. Later historians, however (e.g., Henry Adams), did not re- gard Bancroft's methodology sufficiently scientific or "Germanic." Here we interrupt the account of the Har- vard graduates who went to Gottingen, before proceeding to Motley, by a brief review of the historical work of Prescott and Parkman, who stood between Bancroft and Motley ; for it is to be observed that neither Bancroft nor his Harvard associates were solely responsible for leading American historiography in the direction of the scien- tific, or philosophical, method of the Ger- mans. In 1821 William Hickling Prescott (1796- 1859) began his lifelong association with the North American Review and with its editor, Edward Everett, whose sympathy for Germany was manifesting itself in the Review to the extent that some of the older subscribers and contributors complained that it was "becoming too partial to the German at the expense of our worthy brethren, the English." 117 More than that, George Ticknor came to exert a leading influence on Prescott, so that when Prescott found the poor state of his eyes preventing his continued study of German, it was Tick- nor (who had been at Gottingen at the time when German interest in Spain was at its height) who turned Prescott in the direction of Spanish subjects. 118 His essays written for the North Amer- ican Review between 1823 and 1839 on critical subjects indicate that he was being initiated into what was called at the time the "modern historical literary criticism" coming out of Germany. 119 Having formed a high opinion of German scholarship, it was natural, once he had chosen to study the history of the conquest of Mexico, that he should consult A. von Humboldt's writ- ings on Mexico. 120 In preparing for Philip II (1855-1858), he not only read Schiller's Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Nie- derlande von der spanischen Regierung but studied most intently Ranke's Spanish Empire, while both Humboldt and Ranke assisted him in the procuring of materials from the public offices and libraries of Tus- cany, Austria, Prussia, and Gotha. 121 Prescott still relied in large measure upon 76 German Thought in America British models, such as Robertson, Gibbon, and Scott, and upon Mably's De V etude de I'histoire; that is, in attempting to see the record of history as time had left it, he was not following exclusively German models. His method of hunting out original sources was well established, even by American precedent. Nor did he follow the objective critical method of the Germans sufficiently to satisfy Theodore Parker, who observed that Prescott often referred events to Prov- idence which other men would be content with ascribing to human agency. 122 In his way, however, Prescott, like Bancroft be- fore him, while still regarding history as a branch of polite literature, sought to emu- late German models and in so doing ex- pedited the tendency toward following the methodology of German historiography. Francis Parkman, too, belongs still basi- cally to the school of literary historians, but in the care with which he examined histori- cal evidence and in his emphasis upon the rational rather than the inspirational aspect of writing, his practice is allied to that of the German school. Also, he was meticu- lous about going to firsthand sources and supplying full documentation, but there is little more to connect him with the German school. 123 JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY Turning to John Lothrop Motley, we return to the Harvard-Gottingen men and more distinctively Germanic influence. 12 * Association with Cogswell and Bancroft at Round Hill and with Dr. Follen at Harvard led him to sail for Europe in April, 1832, for three years of travel and study. Not un- naturally he proceeded directly to Got- tingen, where his first task was to improve his German under the tuition of Benecke. 125 The first fruits of his study in Germany appeared in two excellent articles on Goethe in the New York Review for October, 1838, and July, 1839; and in December of the next year he published in the New World an acceptable translation of Tieck's five-act drama Bluebeard. In the meantime he had written and published Morton's Hope (1839), a kind of counterpart of Longfellow's Hy- perion, in which he pictured, in novelized form, his early life, his love of languages, literature, and history, and his aspirations. His friend Bismarck, "the mad Junker," is thinly disguised as Otto von Raben- marck. 126 Only after the failure of this loosely-constructed autobiographical novel did Motley turn seriously to history. By the time Motley began his work as a historian, Ranke had already sent forth from his seminar in Berlin groups of gifted students imbued with the desire to subject the sources of history to severe criticism and had himself illustrated, in a series of brilliant works, the principles on which the internal criticism of sources was to proceed. The movement thus initiated was accentu- ated by the work of Guizot in Paris as well as by several Dutch and Belgian historians, so that by 1851, when Motley had done his preparatory work for The Rise of the Dutch Republic and set sail for Europe to inves- tigate the primary sources, the new histori- cal science had already produced a school of historians. What is more, the ground- work of making available collections of documents bearing on Motley's subject had been done so that the subject was ripe for a well-equipped scholar to make the synthe- sis. 127 Having set out with little conception of the requirements of the new historical science, Motley did what he could with the materials available in Boston, but in 1851 it became apparent to him that he must visit Germany and Holland. The result was that he wrote this, his first major historical work, practically three times — once in the United States, a second time in Germany, and a third time in Holland. 128 While omit- ting formal bibliographies and still using the cryptic, or clipped, form of footnotes in vogue during Irving's day, Motley's Dutch Republic (1856) is based on painstaking, methodical research and a careful criticism of all the available sources in a way to The Growth of Interest in Germany 77 identify his method of work with that of the new scientific school, while in his manner of writing he remained still close to the tra- dition of the "literary" historians. 129 The preceding sketch of American edu- cators, men of letters, and scholars who sought inspiration at Gottingen is represen- tative but incomplete. Another who was profoundly influenced in his life and his writings by residence in Germany was Long- fellow, who might be considered along with Ticknor, Everett, Cogswell, and Bancroft; but since his period of residence in Germany came some years later and his work was distinctively more literary than theirs, a discussion of his career falls more logically into the section of this study that deals with the more strictly literary influences. OTHER AMERICAN'S TN GERMANY Among others who ought to be men- tioned in this connection is Robert Bridges Patton ( 1 794-1 839), the one-man audience that applauded when Bancroft made the American eagle scream in his Fourth-of- July oration at Gottingen in 1820. 130 George Henry Calvert ( 1 803-1 889) , the great-grand- son of the founder of the colony of Mary- land, was at Gottingen during 1824-1825 ; 131 and William Emerson (1801-1868), the older brother of Ralph Waldo, and a fellow- student of Calvert's, studied theology at Gottingen, and later turned to the law. 132 The earliest American at the University of Berlin was Henry Edwin Dwight, son of "Pope" Dwight of Yale, who was registered in the philosophical faculty from November 9, 1825, to June 26, 1826, and whose Travels in the North of Germany (1829) had a wide circulation at precisely the time when Amer- icans were becoming greatly interested in Germany. 133 During the thirties and forties, the generation represented by Henry Boyn- ton Smith and James Elliot Cabot, follow- ing the example of Bancroft and Cogswell, included more than one German university in their itinerary. Gottingen remained the most popular, but Berlin, Halle, and Leip- zig were definitely on the circuit, and by 1850 there was no German university that did not have its American colony. Some- thing of the force of this movement can be gained from the following figures: from 1820 to 1830, an average of 5 students were registered annually; by 1840, there were 9; by 1850, 11; by i860, 77; by 1880, 173; by 1890, 446; by 1900, well over 500. When it is considered that by 1 900 upwards of ten thou- sand Americans had studied in Germany, 134 and that of the first 225 of these, 137 became professors in American colleges and univer- sities, 135 it will be seen that the movement set afoot by Ticknor and Everett in 181 5 136 had effects the full import and detailed ramifications of which are hard to estimate. Aside from the Harvard graduates who made a breach in the wall of ignorance and insularity that separated Germany from the rest of the world, there were younger men like Hedge and Thorndike, who began to go thither either for their secondary educa- tion or, as in the case of Thorndike (who already held the Harvard baccalaureate degree), less to take advanced degrees in preparation for learned professions than to complete their education, as the phrase ran. Another important group, to be taken into account later, were the German exiles — men like Follen, Beck, and Lieber — who labored to promote educational reforms in the land of their adoption. Finally, there was an ever-growing number of travelers and observers who went to Germany (either on their own responsibility or because they were commissioned to go on a special assign- ment), many of whom published formal re- ports or informal essays on their return. Soon the idea became current that a visit to Ger- many promised more stimulation and profit than a tour of any other European country. German Influences on American Colleges In the meantime a general movement to- ward educational reform had gained mo- 78 German Thought in America mentum. Students like Ticknor, Bancroft, and Longfellow were joined by observers, mainly teachers and school supervisors or administrators who sought firsthand infor- mation about educational theory and prac- tice in Germany. One of the first and most influential among this group, which includ- ed Wm. C. Woodbridge, Calvin S. Stowe, Alexander D. Bache, the Rev. Charles Brooks, Horace Mann, and Henry Barnard, was John Griscom (1744-1852), a respected teacher in New York City, who spent the year 181 8-1 819 studying European univer- sities and charitable institutions. 137 Gris- com's influence was exerted mainly in New York and New England, but it made itself felt even in Virginia, where Jefferson pro- nounced the book the best report on Euro- pean literary and public institutions that he had read ; at the same time he acknowl- edged that he had incorporated in his plan for the University of Virginia (which he was then engaged in establishing) as ma- ny of Griscom's suggestions as seemed practicable. Jefferson's plan, adopted by the Virginia Legislature in 1819, shows the marks of many influences. Among others, it is said to have been affected by Alexander von Hum- boldt's views of education. This alleged influence does not lend itself readily to verification, but it is certain that Humboldt was the guest of Jefferson in Washington, that a long correspondence and exchange of books ensued, and that consequently Jef- ferson may have been led by Humboldt, who had definite views on the form and function of universities, to substitute for the "French Academy" 138 that he had projected earlier, his later plans for a "State University." What is clearer is that the German system of elective studies in general and of Tick- nor's counsel in particular (possibly also von Humboldt's and Griscom's) decided Jefferson in favor of the system. 139 An- other of the plans that Jefferson derived from German practice was to make the department of languages and literatures the core of the university. 140 Follen's appointment at Harvard fol- lowed closely upon Blaettermann's at Char- lottesville. By this time, too, Moses Stuart was vexing the ecclesiactically orthodox by introducing his students to the findings of German theological investigators and urg- ing the adoption of methods of German Biblical research; while in another quarter James Marsh was busying himself with re- making the University of Vermont on Cole- ridge's plan, editing Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, and spreading a new philosophi- cal gospel soon to be denominated "Tran- scendentalism." Thus teachers in public and private schools, professors in colleges and presi- dents of universities, theologians in seminar- ies, and observant travelers contributed to provoke similar or allied tendencies that soon fomented a movement of recognizable proportions, and that prepared the ground- work upon which the New England Tran- scendentalists could build. Thus, too, was perpetuated a tradition of veneration for German scholarship which, on being in- troduced by men like Bentley and Buck- minster, was established by Ticknor and his colleagues. It was carried forward by various agencies and persons (including the Ticknor-Longfellow-Lowell succession at Harvard, the Transcendental ferment, and the steadily mounting interest on the part of the Unitarian theologians in German Biblical criticism) until it carried through the century and beyond. Professor Bliss Perry, 141 speaking for a later day and accounting for the reasons that led him and his friends to the German universities, tells us: "That Germany possessed the sole secret of scholarship was no more doubted by us young fellows in the eighteen-eighties than it had been doubted by George Tick- nor and Edward Everett when they sailed from Boston, bound for Gottingen, in 18 14 [1815]-" New England Transcendentalism 79 NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM Character of the Movement Although since its efflorescence more than a century has elapsed, New England Transcendentalism remains still desper- ately vague. It has been variously regarded as a philosophical system, a reform move- ment, a religion in revolt, a mental or spirit- ual attitude. It had its connections with philosophy and theology, with literature and sociology, with economics and politics. It was at once theoretical and practical. Its origins were both native and foreign: its sources lie in American democracy, in New England Unitarianism, in ancient Greece, in England, in France, in Germany, in the Orient. While this is neither the time nor the place to attempt a history of Tran- scendentalism, an examination of possible Germanic influence on Transcendentalism suggests the need for attempting a definition or description. Emerson tried to define the term in his lecture on Transcendentalism in 1842: The first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New Eng- land, at the present time, is that they are not new, but the very oldest thoughts cast into the mold of these times .... What is properly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. The idealist . . . reckons the world an appearance . . . Mind is the only reali- ty ... . Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena .... It is well known to my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquires the name Transcendentalism from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigs- berg, who replied to the skeptical philoso- phy of Locke, which insisted that there is nothing in the intellect which was not previ- ously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and preci- sion of that man's thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature ... to that extent that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcendental. Almost as if he were afraid of having spoken too definitely, Emerson went on to make certain circumspect qualifications: The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He be- lieves in miracles, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy .... This way of thinking, falling on Roman times, made Stoic philosophers; falling on despotic times, made protestants and as- cetic monks . . . ; on prelatical times, made Puritans and Quakers; and falling on Unitarian times, makes the peculiar shades of idealism which we know. Obviously this is no narrow policy and represents no exclusive party. You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a Transcendental party; that there is no pure Transcendentalist; that we know of none but prophets and heralds of such a philosophy .... This seems rather to enlarge than to define the meaning of Transcendentalism. This much, however, Emerson does indicate, namely, that among the many sources and affinities of Transcendentalism, three are paramount : the idealism of Plato, the Uni- tarianism of America, and the critical tran- scendentalism of Germany. The three chief influences on New England Transcen- dentalism are (1) Hellenic, (2) American, and (3) Germanic. 142 Frothingham, the historian and one-time disciple of the movement, says unequivo- cally, "Transcendentalism was a distinct philosophical system," only to add in the next sentence, "Practically it was an asser- tion of the inalienable worth of man; the- 80 German Thought in America oretically it was an assertion of the imma- nence of divinity in instinct, the transference of supernatural attributes to the natural constitution of mankind." 143 Subsequently it appears that so far from being a distinct philosophical system, with both theoretical and practical aspects, it was also a religion ; for, says Frothingham, while "Transcen- dentalism is usually spoken of as a philoso- phy, it is more justly regarded as a gos- pel. 144 As a philosophy it is abstract and difficult . . . inexact and inconclusive; so far from uniform in its structure, that it may rather be considered several systems in one." 145 Later we learn that it is little more than a state of mind, an inspiration, a certain temperament — "an enthusiasm, a wave of sentiment, a breath of mind that caught up such as were prepared to receive it, elated them, transported them, and passed on, — no man knowing whither it went." 146 Next, Transcendentalism was a challenge; it immediately took the offen- sive. "The problem of transcendental phi- losophy," declared Parker, "is no less than this, to revise the experience of mankind and try its teachings by the nature of man- kind; to test ethics by conscience, science by reason ; to try the creeds of the churches, the constitutions of the states, by the con- stitution of the universe." 147 This was an offensive on a broad front. The Unitarians, no less promptly than the Congregation- alists and Presbyterians, accepted the challenge. In the beginning the controversy was engaged in chiefly by clergymen and fought primarily on religious grounds. 148 Emerson's Nature of 1836 and his American Scholar of the year following, although both were as radical as anything he published later, were allowed to pass, but the Divinity School address (1838) put the fat in the fire. At the request of the Alumni Association of the Cambridge Theological School, the Rev. Andrews Norton wrote a vigorous attack on the new intuitional philosophy under the title, A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity (1839), which provoked Ripley's spirited reply and successive counterblasts from both sides. Two years later Parker declared open war in his South Boston sermon on The Transient and Perma- nent in Christianity . The periodicals joined in spiritedly. The Dial set forth the claims of Transcendentalism as an outgrowth of Unitarianism 149 at the same time attacking the traditionalism of Unitarianism. The result was that Unitarians found them- selves in the dilemma of having to choose between adopting the Transcendentalists, thus lending color to the old charge that Unitarianism was merely the halfway house on the road to infidelity, or expelling them from their midst, thereby abandoning the very principles for which they had fought all along. The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, the orthodox Presbyterian organ, felt it to be "a solemn duty" to warn its readers against "this German atheism, which the spirit of darkness is employing ministers of the gospel to smuggle among us under false pretenses." 150 In the Christian '■ Examiner, a Unitarian organ of liberal tendencies, the argument waxed especially hot — symptomatic of the internal dissen- sion and civil warfare that it provoked. The controversy was carried on so vigorously, and it touched so many important persons and groups, that the temptation is strong to regard religion as not only fundamental but all-embracing for the movement. So to view it, however, would be to mistake a part for the whole. Nor do these points of view exhaust the angles from which Transcendentalism must be considered. "The Transcendentalist," says Frothingham, "was by nature a re- former. He could not be satisfied with men as they are. His doctrine of the capacities of men . . . kindled to enthusiasm his hope of change. However his disgust may have kept him aloof for a time, his sympathy soon brought him back, and his faith sent him to the front of battle." 151 The times were propitious for the reformer; dissent New England Transcendentalism 81 and agitation were in the air; and every cause — mad, insignificant, worthy — had its hearing and its following. 152 If anything emerges from this account, it is that the framing of a definition of the Newness or the New Views, as Transcen- dentalism was originally called, is no slight task. Frothingham, by and large the best commentator on the movement, tried drawing distinctions but never kept them clear. Nothing is gained by corralling all the Transcendental views, ideas, reforms, cur- rents, and eddies under such a heading as the New England Renaissance. It adds a name, but it clarifies nothing. When the term Transcendentalism is pressed into service and made to stand for all the mani- festations of the quickening spirit felt in New England during the forties, it definite- ly goes beyond what Emerson, for example, or Parker thought it was. Transcendental- ism was a part of the so-called Renaissance of New England, but not the whole of it. 153 Two more quotations and we shall be done with definitions. Professor Henry D. Gray offers this statement: New England Transcendentalism was pro- duced by the deliberate importing of certain imperfectly understood elements of German idealism into American Unitarianism; . . . it became a creative force in American life and letters; but ... as a philosophy it was merely a sort of mystical idealism built on pragmatic premises. 154 Harold C. Goddard puts it in the following terms : Transcendentalism was a part of the thought currents of its own day, and . . . like those currents themselves, it was linked with the thought of earlier times. . . . Hence it is that transcendentalism seems from one point of view a gradual outgrowth and culmination of Unitarianism; that it connects at a score of points with French Revolutionary influences; that it is almost an offshoot of German philosophical ideal- ism ; that it is intimately bound up with the growth of the scientific spirit ; that it is by no means unaffected by contemporary currents of social unrest. 155 While these statements do not define Transcendentalism, they do afford sugges- tions for tracing its origins, pointing out its affinities, and analyzing its tenets, and thus help us to an understanding of it. It has been argued that Transcendental- ism was essentially indigenous, 156 that in its simplest analysis it was little more than Unitarianism in the process of "getting religion." 157 This last observation is partic- ularly pertinent and contains more than a germ of truth; for as Unitarianism had opened the New England mind and re- moved from it some of its more rigorous dogmas, so Transcendentalism carried forward this process of liberalization. The chief exponent of this idea is George Willis Cooke, whose opinion, considering his as- sociation with the later Transcendentalists, might well be considered authoritative if it were not based on disputable terms and questionable generalizations. Cooke's argu- ment runs as follows: Transcendentalism "has always been indigenous to New Eng- land in some form , 158 In the earliest days in Boston it was accepted under the form of Antinomianism by John Cotton, Anne Hutchinson, and Sir Henry Vane. By the Friends it was preached with eagerness, and it was notably exemplified by William Penn .... No one had more of its true spirit than John Woolman. though he taught it in the form in which it was promul- gated by George Fox." 159 John Wise, as he appears in the Churches' Quarrel Espoused (1707) and his Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches (1717), and Jonathan Edwards as the instigator of the Great Awakening, the theological teachings of Samuel Hopkins, the sermons of Jona- than Mayhew, the teachings of Professor Andrews Norton and Dr. Henry Ware, and lastly the preaching of Dr. Channing are paraded in review by Cooke, in the order named, with a view to illustrate the conti- nuity of Transcendentalism from John Cotton to Emerson — from 1636 to 1836. It is not necessary to repeat Cooke's 82 German Thought in America argument of twelve pages. Obviously, in the case of every man named except Dr. Channing, the term Tvanscendentalist can- not properly be applied. All had leanings in the direction either of mysticism or idealism, but therefore to identify them as Tran- scendentalists seems an unwarrantable procedure. All Cooke succeeds in doing is to trace an element of liberal thought in New England from Puritanical to Transcenden- tal days, but he does not thereby establish the origin and descent of Transcendental- ism. It may be observed, however, that while only one of the persons named by Cooke closely approached Transcendental- ism as formulated by Emerson, together they did facilitate its coming. Without their preparation of the ground, it seems certain, not that Transcendentalism would necessarily have been impossible, but that it might have been long delayed. To claim much more requires better proof than Cooke has advanced. Without this native stock of idealism, the Newness might not have succeeded in making itself articulate as early as 1836; and insofar as this is so, Transcendentalism may be said to be indig- enous; for its basic ingredient was ideal- ism. But this is not to say that native ideal- ism, unassisted by influences from the out- side, would or could have engendered the Transcendentalism of 1836. The first clear indications that a new phi- losophy was abroad in New England were rumblings within the Unitarian Church. Begun as a revolutionary attack on Calvin- ism, Unitarianism remained primarily a negative movement. While it could point to something like a continuity of circum- stances to explain its rise— from 1785, when King's Chapel became Unitarian by the revision of its Trinitarian liturgy, to 1819, when Dr. Channing preached his famous sermon on "Unitarian Christianity" — it really had no internal history of growth or development. It remained, as it had begun, critical in orientation and incapable of developing a distinctly positive program. 160 Among the academic philosophers the situ- ation was even worse, for they were com- pletely under the domination of the Scotch common-sense system of Stewart, Brown, and Hamilton. There was no help to be derived from that quarter. Native idealism was helpless to proceed ; while Unitarianism itself, whether of the theologian or the academician, did not have within itself the necessary life; it was, by its very nature, static. When the necessary impetus came, it came from abroad. It was inevitable that the intense fervor and new ideals of Europe — among them the revolutionary ideas of France, the romantic literature of England, and the transcendental philosophy of Ger- many—should invade America; 161 it was equally inevitable that with the arrival of these foreign commodities, there should be young people, imbued with liberal and idealistic yearnings, ready to embrace them. 162 Thus it would seem that native idealism, acted upon by certain energizing impulses from Europe, brought to a logical completion, in the form of Transcendental- ism, the revolt against Calvinism that Uni- tarianism had begun. For as Dr. Channing admitted somewhat sorrowfully to Eliza- beth Peabody, "This Unitarianism which so many people think is the last word . . . is only the vestibule. 163 Transitional and Intermediary Figures Channing, at once the greatest of the Unitarians and the first of the Transcen- dentalists, early rejected the Calvinistic be- lief in the depravity of human nature and soon went on to adopt what Emerson called his "one sublime idea" — the divinity of man — which became the cardinal tenet of Transcendentalism. As early as 1820 Channing had voiced his dissatisfaction with current Unitarianism : I wish to see among Unitarians a develop- New England Transcendentalism 83 ment of imagination and poetical enthusi- asm, as well as of the rational and critical power .... Unitarianism has suffered from union with a heart-withering philoso- phy ... it has suffered also from a too ex- clusive application of its advocates to Biblical criticism and theological contro- versy, in other words, from a too partial culture of the mind. I fear that we must look to other schools for the thoughts which thrill us, which touch our most inward springs, and disclose to us the depth of our souls. 164 The phrases, "other schools" and "thoughts which thrill," when combined with Emerson's derogatory remark about the "pale negations of Boston Unitarian- ism" are fraught with meaning. So far as Channing was concerned, he had already found the thoughts that thrill in other schools, as we shall see presently. About 1840, recalling his college years, he confided to Miss Peabody: "Only three books that I read at that time were of any moment to me: one was Ferguson on 'Civil Liberty,' one Hutcheson's 'Moral Philosophy,' and one was Price's 'Disserta- tions.'" 165 About the same time, while read- ing Jouffroy, he said to Miss Peabody: I have found here a fact which interests me personally very much. Jouffroy says that Dr. Price's Dissertations were trans- lated into German at the time of their first appearance, and produced a much greater impression there than they did in England ; and he thinks they were the first movers of the German mind in the transcendental direction. Now, I read Price when I was in college. Price saved me from Locke's Phi- losophy. He gave me the doctrine of ideas, and during my life I have written the words Love, Right, &c, with a capital. The book probably moulded my philosophy into the form it has always retained, and opened my mind into the transcendental depth. And I always have found in the accounts I have of German philosophy in Madame de Stael, and in these later times, that it was cognate to my own. I cannot say that I have ever received a new idea from it; and the cause is obvious, if Price was alike the father of it and of mine. 166 This avowal, whatever the historian of philosophy may think of Channing's ex- planation of how Kant came by his think- ing, is interesting, first, as an admission that Channing regarded his philosophy as "tran- scendental," and second, in its implied denial that he derived anything from the Germans, or, indeed, that he ever read them. He suggests also that what he knew of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling was derived from Madame de Stael and, "in these later times," from such commentators as Cole- ridge, Carlyle, Cousin, and Jouffroy. 187 As will appear in the sequel, the name of one other teacher of Channing must be added to the list — that of Carl Follen. Now, Madame de Stael, although she wrote wittily on many subjects, did not always write very clearly about the German idealists; but Channing was not dependent solely on her, for Coleridge had attempted an exposition of the Kantian terminology in his Biographia Literaria (1817), and his A ids to Reflection and The Friend reiterated the significance of the Kantian contribu- tions. Meanwhile Channing had come in contact with transcendental ways of thought as represented by De Gerando and Cousin. While Miss Peabody copied fifty sermons of his for him, he translated for her "the whole of De Gerando's 'Du Perfec- tionnement Morale,'" 168 and subsequently she read to him translations of Cousin's Introduction to Philosophy 169 and his Exam- ination of Locke. 1 '' If he did not make the acquaintance of Jouffroy through Ripley's Philosophical Miscellanies of 1838, his nephew's translation, in 1840, of the Intro- duction to Ethics directed his attention to Jouffroy. Yet most of his "acquaintance with the master minds of Germany" that gave him such "intense delight" came through the medium of Madame de Stael and especially of Coleridge and Carlyle. Through them (and through such transla- tions as were available) he also learned something about Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Richter. In all this reading he found ideas "cognate" with his own; he found his 84 German Thought in America own ideas "quickened, ' ' but would not admit that he "ever received a new idea from it." 171 Despite Channing's disclaimers of de- pendence upon others for his ideas, his contemporaries were right in observing, "Dr. Channing is a great moralist and the best kind of religious genius, but no philoso- pher." 172 His was not an acutely original or speculative mind, and his relations with Dr. Follen indicate pretty clearly that he had much to learn from Follen about metaphys- ics in general and about the German phi- losophers in particular. Introduced under most favorable circum- stances into the Cambridge-Boston com- munity, Follen made his way easily to intimacy with the most notable men of that group. The meeting between Channing and Follen took place in the autumn of 1826 at one of the informal discussion group meet- ings at Dr. Channing's. The subject was the significance of the death of Christ. Chan- ning turned to Follen with the idea of drawing him out. As Follen spoke, Chan- ning became "entirely absorbed, his counte- nance growing brighter at every word. He saw he had struck a mine .... From that moment was cemented a friendship that never had a shadow of misunderstanding fall upon it, but was a perfect mutual respect and tender love." 1 ' 3 After some d liberation, Follen acceded to Channing's urging to become a Unitarian minister, and until Follen's untimely death in 1840, they remained on most intimate terms. 174 Follen exerted a powerful influence upon him, although this does not mean that he re- made or radically altered Channing's think- ing ; but we cannot be far wrong if we agree with John White Chadwick, who observed: "I have seemed to find in Channing's later thought more of Follen's than of any other personal influence. Those tendencies in his preaching which were deplored as transcen- dental were quite surely, in some measure, developments of germs which fell into his own from Follen's fruitful mind." 175 Channing's basic faith in man's moral nature as instinct with divinity hints the paternity of the German idealists, but he espoused and proclaimed this idea long be- fore he knew much about German philoso- phy. We may take him at his word when he declared that he arrived at it by himself, but was pleased when, later, he found cor- roboration for his view among the German transcendentalists. After 1826 Follen was available to give him expert instruction in the Kantian epistemology, but there is nothing to indicate that Channing cared much for precise and abstract forms of meta- physics. He employed the Kantian nomen- clature, including Understanding, pure and practical Reason, and Categorical Impera- tive, but without benefit of any sharply defined analytic. Follen's explanation of the terms appears to have satisfied him. Indeed, it is pretty clear that he adopted, as agreeable to his own way of thinking, Follen's modification of the rigor of the Kantian categorical imperative, and that, like Follen, he objected to the tendency of Kant to regard the moral principle as the sole foundation of religion. Kant's "de- mands of duty" appeared to leave too little room for the "grounds of religious faith." He sided rather with Follen's explanation of Schiller's doctrine of freedom and hap- piness, allowing for a measure of natural desire, enthusiasm, and affection. The point at which Channing comes closest to Follen is in his view of morality as the direction of the mind towa'-d the hap- piness that results from a striving after the greatest efficiency, after perfection, and of religion as the direction of the mind toward the happiness which results from the desire and belief that the world is so constituted and governed as to make possible this greatest perfection. The attainment of this perfection depends not solely upon man, but partly upon Providence — upon the power which has created the universe in such a way that man is aided in his striving after it. These elements, which Follen took over from Fries, were expounded in detail Avenues of Transmission 85 in Follen's Moral Lectures, and we may be sure that they formed the subject of exten- sive discussion between him and Channing. Finally, there are striking parallels be- tween Channing's and Schleiermacher's views of religion, and again Follen is the in- termediary. This view of religion is posited on Kant's denial of the possibility of knowing God by means of cognition. It regards religion as an essential element of human nature — as indispensable to the development of the inner life of man. But it does not seek, like metaphysics, to explain the universe, nor, like morals, to advance and perfect the world by the free will of man. Instead, the finite individual's pious contemplation of the order and majesty of the external universe raises in him a con- sciousness of his oneness with the infinite All. The Christian Church becomes an associa- tion of pious men. This involves a sharp differentiation between dogma and religion, the repudiation of all irrational devotion to creed, the concept of religion as consisting at once of feeling, piety, and reverent con- templation of God, the sublime work of nature and art as the expression of an im- manent Deity — as a symbol through which the mind and heart are directed toward the one eternal God; and the Christian Church as an association of pious men for mutual aid and the cultivation of a closer relation with God. Thus Schleiermacher, Follen, and Channing alike emphasize the social nature of religion, quite apart from the old Puri- tanic concept of "Works" or the deistic notion of merely utilitarian "service to man." Thus, too, Channing freed his Uni- tarian beliefs from the "heart-withering" philosophy of John Locke without aban- doning his ambition to keep his religion philosophical and his philosophy religious. Thus he stimulated and accelerated a way of thinking that made him, in the eyes of Transcendentalists like Emerson, "our Bishop." Channing stands a transitional figure, first, in the manner in which he straddled Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, and second, in that he marks the point beyond which the indigenous influences recede and the foreign importations gain in importance ; for in proportion as the Transcendentalists went beyond the position of Channing, in so far, usually, did they go to foreign sources for those advances. At this point it becomes necessary to consider the ways and means by which German ideas made their way to America. The chronology of how they gained vogue and influence in the United States is, roughly, as follows: first, through the dis- cipleship of German transcendental views among English writers like Coleridge and Carlyle; second, through the adaptation of German transcendental ways of thought by such eclectic French thinkers as Cousin and Jouffroy, whose restatements gained cur- rency in America; and third, through the domestication which German philosophy attained at the hands of those who got their information more directly from Germany herself. Among the last named group are to be distinguished (i) German emigre's like Beck, Follen, and Lieber, who labored con- scientiously to translate the thought of their homeland into the land of their adoption, and (2) native Americans like Stuart, Marsh, and Hedge, who initiated inquiries on their own account and sought to spread the gos- pel until the major Transcendentalists — Emerson, Parker, et al. — took over. AVENUES OF TRANSMISSION German Philosophy in England Although it has been shown that German transcendental ideas began to filter through English insularity as early as 1793, 176 Kant was introduced into England only slowly, partly because of the difficulties of the lan- guage and the failure of Kant's first propo- 86 German Thought in America nents (Nitsch, Willich, and Richardson) to attract attention, but more particularly because of the opposition of the prevailing Scottish philosophy. 177 While on the Con- tinent Kant's Critique of Pure Reason called forth some three hundred books and articles during the first ten years following its publication, the first English book on Kant, written by Friederich August Nitsch, 178 did not appear until 1795. It met with an indifferent reception, as did the second, two years later, by Anthony Florian Willich. 179 Meanwhile, in 1797, had appeared the first translation, a very free one, in which Kant's Ding-an-sich was rejected and his funda- mental distinction between Begriff and An- schauung modified, by John Richardson. 180 In 179S and 1799 appeared two volumes, presumably Richardson's work, 181 entitled Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political and various Philosophical Subjects by E. Kant. From the German by the Translator of the Principles of Critical Philosophy (2 vols., London, 1798, 1799). This was followed by Kant's Metaphysic of Morals, together with a Sketch of Kant's Life (London, 1799). All this seeming activity with Kant's works about the end of the century belies the facts, for the combined influence of these early books appears to have been, with four notable exceptions, negligible. The first exception is that Coleridge possessed a copy of Willich's Elements, which he anno- tated copiously. In the second place, Samuel Miller used the book in preparing his Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803), which gave many Americans their first glimpse of the new German philosophy. Third, the Harvard library listed in its cata- log for 1830 a copy of Willich's Elements, but by that time it had also the two Cri- tiques and several other works of Kant, all in the original. The fourth case is A. Bron- son Alcott's reading, toward the end of 1833, both Nitsch's General View and Willich's Elements .He covered fifty-seven pages of his journal with extracts from the former and worked carefully through the latter, but apparently neither radically changed the essentially intuitive cast of his mind. These isolated cases suggest that there were prob- ably others in America who read these early books. What is odd is that no clues appear to indicate that Richardson's several books on Kant were known in America. Emerson possessed the Hayward translation of Kant's first Critique (London, 1838), but we do not know when it was acquired. 182 DUGALD STEWART We may pass by the ephemeral work of Franz von Baader and of Berthold Georg Niebuhr; that of Thomas Brown, in 1803, as the first professional philosopher in Eng- land to take notice, slight though it was, of German transcendental philosophy; 183 and the ridicule and diatribe in William Drummond's Academical Questions. The first important fact in the history of Kant in England, and in America, is the notice which the high priest of Scottish philosophy, Dugald Stewart, himself deigned to take of Kant, 184 in 1822, in his General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Prac- tical Philosophy Since the Revival of Letters in Europe in Two Dissertations (or two parts, London, 1815, 1822; Boston 1822). This work is important (1) as being among the first in time to bring information about Kant to America, Emerson, for example, reading it attentively in 1822, and (2) as being incomparably bad as a commentary on Kant. Stewart's ignorance of German prevented his reading either Kant or the lucid exposition of the Kantian philosophy by Carl Leonhard Reinhold, a copy of whose works Dr. Samuel Parr had given him, 185 but it does not explain why he did not profit by the relatively adequate Abstract of the Critical Philosophy by Thomas Wirgman, a manuscript copy of which the author had sent to Stewart in i8i3. 18 « As to Kant's works [he confessed], I must acknowledge that although I have frequent- ly attempted to read them in the Latin Avenues of Transmission 87 edition [tr. by F. G. Born, 4 vols., Leipzig, 1 796-1 798], I have always been forced to abandon the undertaking in despair, partly from the scholastic barbarism of the style, and partly from my inability to unriddle the author's meaning. Wherever I have happened to obtain a momentary glimpse of light, I have derived it, not from Kant himself, but from my previous acquaintance with those opinions of Leibnitz, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, and others, which he has en- deavored to appropriate to himself under the deep disguise of a new phraseology. 187 This confession of bias, together with the evidence which his footnotes afford of his complete reliance upon secondary sources of questionable value, 188 explains his suc- cess at misinterpreting Kant in the twenty- odd pages that he devoted to him. After quoting a half-dozen commentators on Kant's philosophical aims, he attacks Kant's distinction between the sensitive faculty and the understanding as merely a revival of Locke's distinction between per- ception and intuition, which Reid had effectively exploded. 189 Missing altogether Kant's distinction between Understanding and Reason, he insists that Kant has been anticipated in this, as in practically every other part of his thought, by French think- ers, by Dr. Price, and by the Cambridge Platonists, but especially by the "immor- tal Cudworth," who is "far superior to the German metaphysician, both in point of perspicuity and of precision." 190 Indeed, Kant is really not worth an Eng- lishman's attention. The inimitable De Gerando is quoted to the effect that even in Germany, at present, a pure Kantian is scarcely to be found, except such as have so much exhausted their minds deciphering the intricacies of Kant that they have not enough energy left to deny him and to embrace a true faith. 191 "In fine, the Critique of Pure Reason, announced with pomp, received with fanaticism, disputed with fury, after having accomplished the over- throw of the doctrine taught by Leibnitz and Wolff, could no longer support itself upon its own foundations, and has produced no permanent result, but divisions and enmities, and a general disgust at all system- atical creeds." With this, Stewart leaves Kant for dead and proceeds to Fichte, who gets two pages of comment a la Madame de Stael and De Gerando, and to Schelling, who gets one. 192 This, be it remembered, is the thin fare that Emerson, late in 1833, said "saves you a world of reading .... It is a beautiful and instructive abridgment of the thousand volumes of Locke, Leibnitz, Voltaire, Bayle, Kant, and the rest." 193 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON Sir William Hamilton was the first of the British professional philosophers to appre- ciate the historical magnitude of Kant's intellectual reform and to comprehend the Kantian distinctions between Understand- ing and Reason and his deduction of the categories. 194 He agreed with Kant, also, in his view of the synthetic powers of the mind without, however, accepting the transcen- dental apperception in the Kantian sense. His declaration that a comprehension of Kant "is now a matter of necessity to all who would be supposed to have crossed the threshold of philosophy" 195 bore weight, and his appointment, in 1836, to the Profes- sorship of Logic at Edinburgh marks a date in the history of English thought since which every British philosopher has had to take a stand for or against Kant. The first eleven pages of Hamilton's essay in the Edinburgh Review of Cousin's Cours de Philosopkie present a clear-headed summary of Cousin's system, ending with the conclusion: "it is manifest that the whole doctrine of M. Cousin is involved in the proposition, — that the Unconditioned, the Absolute, the Infinite, is immediately known in consciousness, and this by differ- ence, plurality, and relation." 196 For Cousin, the condition and end of philosophy is the recognition of the Absolute as a constitu- tive 197 principle of intelligence. This is fol- 88 German Thought in America lowed by a section of twenty-seven pages, of which three are devoted to philosophical tenets which Hamilton himself holds true, four to an exposition of Kant's position, four more to what the author considers unwarrantable extensions of Kantian thought by his followers, notably Schelling, and sixteen to Cousin and a criticism of Cousin's Absolute. 198 While Hamilton approached nearer than any of his British predecessors to an under- standing of Kant, even to adopting some of his ideas, he was no disciple. His interpreta- tion and use of the Kantian doctrine is opposed to the more logical application adopted by the post-Kantians in Germany — Fichte, Schelling, and most notably, Hegel; 189 for Hamilton regarded the Criti- que of Pure Reason as having raised in- superable barriers between the human mind and its knowledge of the Absolute. En- trenched as he already was in agnosticism, he embraced and perhaps exaggerated the negative aspects of Kant's criticism as lending support to his own views, and con- sequently became one of the chief retarding influences toward the domestication of German philosophy from Kant through Hegel in the English-speaking world. 200 Ultimately, however, a serious study of Kant led to a consideration of Hegel. During the fifties, Ferrier in his essays on Schelling and Hegel sought conscientiously to understand and to present the meaning and significance for contemporary thought of the philosophy of the absolute; 201 and in the early sixties Frederick Denison Maurice led the way by pointing out that De Quincey's notion of Kant as the "Alles-zer- malmende" was exaggerated, and that Hamilton's emphasis on Kant's negations was essentially wrong. 202 Finally, James Hutchison Stirling, powerfully stirred by Sartor Resartns, was led, in 1856, to study at Heidelberg, where he came to a realiza- tion that only through Kant could Hegel be reached. A firsthand study of the former led, in i860, to a period of eight years of intensive study devoted to Hegel. The first fruit of this labor was The Secret of Hegel : being the Hegelian System in Origin, Form, and Matter (2 vols., London, 1865). 203 This work, which articulated the significance of Fichte and Schelling in the succession from Kant to Hegel, marks at once the full arriv- al of German idealism in England and a new departure in English philosophy, T. H. Green declaring that Stirling's book "contrasted with everything else that has been published as sense with nonsense." Jowett, Carlyle, and German Hegelians agreed that Stirling had truly assimilated Hegel's thought; 204 while in America Emerson hailed the book as "the most com- petent and compulsive of modern British books on metaphysics" and carried it with him on a prolonged lecture tour of the West. By the thirties, however, the work of Cole- ridge, De Quincey, 205 and Carlyle had made Kant known in circles beyond the "learned" and the "academic," and had popularized the names of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, especially Schelling. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE Samuel Taylor Coleridge's knowledge of German philosophy was acquired indepen- dently of the work of his British predeces- sors, partly during his residence in Ger- many and more particularly about 1801 when he studiously read the German philo- sophers and Kant especially, as he says, "took possession of me with a giant's hand." 206 Coleridge's important intermedi- ary position between German and Ameri- can transcendentalists and the reliability of his interpretation of the critical philos- ophy have occasioned much inconclusive argument 207 until recent years when a tho- rough examination 208 of the extant German philosophical works in Coleridge's posses- sion, 209 plus his illuminating annotations of these volumes 210 and the evidence furnished by Coleridge's several unfinished metaphy- sical manuscripts, 211 lead Professor Muir- head to the considered conclusion that Cole- Avenues of Transmission 89 ridge's ideas form a "far more impor- tant . . . and coherent body of philosophi- cal thought than he has been anywhere credited with." 212 This thorough considera- tion of Coleridge as a philosopher by a phi- losopher stresses (i) Coleridge's sensitive- ness to current philosophical currents and eddies, (2) his recognition of the fundamen- tal problem that had to be formulated and the inadequacy of regnant methodologies for solving it, or for interpreting the rich and varied spiritual movements of the age, and (3) his positive contributions to the discussion of the problem as it appeared in the several fields of logic, metaphysics, ethics, religion, politics, aesthetics, and natural science. 213 The crisis in Coleridge's philosophical development came in 1801, when (March 16) he declared to Tom Poole: "I have not only extricated the notions of time and space, but have overthrown the doctrine of asso- ciation . . . and with it all the irreligious metaphysics . . . especially the doctrine of necessity." 214 A week later he professed to having found the underlying fallacy of the whole Xew r tonian philosophy, namely, that the mind is merely "a lazy looker-on on an external world." 215 His making these discoveries coincides with his "most intense study" of Kant, under whose influence he frankly avows himself in the Biographia Liter aria: The writings of the illustrious sage of Koe- nigsberg . . . more than any other ... at once invigorated and disciplined my under- standing .... After fifteen years' famil- iarity with him, I still read . . . his . . . productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. The few passages ^in the first Critique] that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of thought (as the chapter on original apperception) and the apparent contradictions which occur, I soon found were hints and insinuations re- ferring to ideas, which Kant either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he con- sidered as consistently left behind, in a pure analysis, not of human nature in toto, but of the speculative intellect alone. Here therefore he was constrained to commence at the point of reflection, or natural con- sciousness ; while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as a postulate deduc- ible from the unconditioned command, or (in the technical language of his school) the categorical imperative, of the conscience. 214 After voicing his refusal to believe that Kant "meant no more by his Xoumenon, or Thing in itself, than his mere words ex- press," 217 and repeating substantially Schel- ling's objection to Kant's "matter without form" as having the effect of making "all conceptions of cause and effect arise in our mind," 218 Coleridge proceeds to Fichte, whose Wissenschaftslehre, besides giving the "mortal blow to Spinozism . . . supplied the idea" of a truly metaphysical system, "i.e., one having its spring and principle within itself." Unfortunately Fichte allow- ed "this fundamental idea to be overbuilt with a heavy mass of mere notions" so that his philosophy degenerated into "a crude egoismus," involving a "boastful and hyper- stoic hostility to Nature," a godless religion, and an ascetic ethicism demanding an unnatural denial of all "the natural passions and desires." 219 Schelling was much more congenial to his way of thinking. Indeed, at the time he was writing the Biographia Literaria, parts of Schelling's system harmonized so well with his own thought that he translated, or adapted, and incorporated into his manu- script whole portions of Schelling, 220 mean- while risking his reputation on a blanket avowal of obligation prefaced by these words: "In Schelling's Natur-Philosophie and the System des transcendentalen Idealis- mus, I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do "221 jhg reac ier of the very long para- graph that follows cannot escape feeling that Coleridge doth protest too much. But what is more important for our purpose than the degree of plagiarism is that Chap- 90 German Thought in America ters VII, VIII, IX, and XII of the Biogra- phia brought to American readers a rather accurate account of Schelling's philosophy of nature and of his system of transcenden- tal idealism. This much seems clear : however satisfied Coleridge had been with his new-found philosophy based on a Kantian terminolo- gy, about the time he was engaged on the Biographia, he faltered sufficiently in his self-confidence to come under the spell of Schelling. How passing a phase Schelling's influence represents is hard to determine and of no great importance for our purpose. That it did pass seems certain from his own criticism of the Biographia, which, consid- ering that it was uttered within a month of his death, has someting of a testament- ary deposition : The metaphysical disquisition at the end of the first volume of the "Biographia Literaria" is unformed and immature; it contains the fragments of the truth, but it is not fully thought out. It is wonderful to myself to think how infinitely more pro- found my views now are, and yet how much clearer they are withal. 222 Coleridge did not live to give final expres- sion to a completed system, but Professor Muirhead's skillful work in equating the unfinished manuscripts with the published works substantiates his conclusion that Coleridge's thinking was far from unprecise and unsystematic — in short, that his final thought presents a remarkably harmoni- ous body of doctrine. As basic to such a system Coleridge set out to construct a "Logic." This "propaedeutic" or "introduc- tory to a system" he projected even before he realized the full significance of what Kant had done in that direction. An ab- stract of the Logic or the Opus Maximum, or both, is beyond the limits of this inquiry, nor is it necessary, first, because the com- bined work of Professors Snyder, Muirhead, and Wellek has done this admirably, and second, because, as far as Americans are concerned, these works could not have in- fluenced them less if thev had been non- existent. But they are significant because they offer evidence to show that whatever Coleridge's understanding of German criti- cal philosophy may have lacked in 1809- 1810, when The Friend was published, 225 and however much he may have been under the spell of Schelling about 18 16- 181 7, when the Biographia Literaria was written, 221 he had, by 1825, 225 when Aids to Reflection was published, arrived at a com- plete and unmixed understanding of the Kantian system and had proceeded, in- dependently of Hegel, to make the same effort which Hegel was making to achieve a higher synthesis, although neither the methods nor the results were the same. Whatever changes his philosophy under- went, one thing remained constant — the necessity of reaching a view of the world from which it could be grasped as the mani- festation of a single principle. By the time he wrote the Aids, he had found that point of view in the distinction between Under- standing and Reason. It had become a fixed frame of reference which he applied to every object that came within the range of his thought. But a merely casual perusal of his published works is not sufficient to show that this is so. Although he censured Bacon and even his favorite Leighton for using philosophic terms like Reason and Under- standing indiscriminately and thus running into difficulties out of which they sought to extricate themselves by sustituting fantas- tical and mystical phrases, only to find themselves worse involved than before, 236 Coleridge himself is not entirely guiltless on this score, though in his case the dilemma proceeds not from ignorance but rather from the necessity under which he felt him- self to "write down" to the level of the gen- eral reader. For example, in a passage in which he prefers charges against his favor- ites, Bacon and Leighton, he compounds rather than clarifies their mistake when he says: "... by reason Leighton means the human understanding . . . namely, 'the faculty judging according to sense.'" 227 Avenues of Transmission 91 With this definition we have cause to find fault, but before passing judgment, it is per- tinent to bear in mind the circumstances and purposes which led him to prepare Aids to Re fleet ion. Writing for the general reader, he allowed, perhaps forced, himself to write popularly and often with less ter- minological precision than he did in the Logic. The effort to avoid abstruseness is everywhere apparent. Failure on the part of the reader to comprehend the Aids to Re- flection would have been a grim jest indeed on the purpose avowed in the title. But he appears not to have been sufficiently aware of the equally great danger of leaning too far in the opposite direction. Thus, in defining Understanding as the "faculty judging according to sense," he carried simplification too far. He translated quite correctly from the Transcendental Analytic (Bk. I, Ch. I, sec. i) Kant's definition of 1 Understanding as the "faculty of judging," but this effort to simplify and at the same time to synthesize the elaborate analysis of sensation in the preceding Transcendental 1 Aesthetic — full of passages suggesting and in a manner justifying Coleridge's qualify- ing phrase "according to sense" 228 — led him to qualify and limit the sphere of the Understanding too severely. American readers, unfamiliar with the Kantian anal- lysis, could easily be led to conclude (as Emerson, indeed, did) that the Understan- ding is prevented from going beyond the sphere of sensuous data, that it can proceed a posteriori only. This view led some of the Transcendentalists to conceive of the Under- standing as being at some points opposed, and at others inferior, to the Reason. Since they found this limited and erroneous view of the Understanding corroborated in Car- lyle's essays, the misconception gained currency. Another difficulty, especially among those who find Coleridge inconclusive, arises when detached statements are taken liter- ally or out of their context. The very definition just adduced has been singled out as evidence of his blundering efforts to follow Kant. But the point is that this definition is but a preliminary statement to a section of twenty-six closely-printed pages in the Aids 229 solely and specifically devoted to the further elucidation of the meaning of Understanding in relation to Reason and Sensation, in the course of which the Kantian meaning appears clearly enough — as clearly perhaps as such mean- ing can appear without quoting the entire section of the Kantian text itself. 230 Intent on popularizing the thought of Kant, Cole- ridge avoids technical explanations, pre- sumably because he feared that too many minutiae might explain the meaning quite away for the general reader. 231 Another tantalizing problem that has troubled students of Coleridge is how nearly Coleridge's Reason approaches Jacobi's Gefiihl; whether Coleridge does not, indeed, forsake Kant's Pure Reason and by gradual transition through the medium of Schell- ing's "intellectual intuition," arrive finally at Jacobi's philosophy of pure faith. Cole- ridge's injection of "Revelation as the essence of religion" into the argument which finds the moral grounds of religion in the Kantian reason is confusing, so much so that Dr. W T ellek offers the opinion that "on the whole the Aids to Reflection seems . . . like an attempt at a reconstruction of Kant for the purposes of a philosophy of faith." 232 The point is important, for if Dr. Wellek can so interpret Coleridge, it is all the more likely that Emerson and his American dis- ciples might have thus interpreted him. Shortly after Dr. Wellek raised the ques- tion, it was cleared up by Professor Julian I. Lindsay 233 by examining various margi- nalia which Coleridge wrote into his copy of Jacobi. They demonstrate beyond the pos- sibility of any doubt that he understood precisely what the controversial issues were between Jacobi and Kant. His comments show that he reread Schelling and checked Jacobi against Schelling, and both against Kant, and concluded that Jacobi's role was 92 German Thought in America one of stupidity and Schelling's one of cowardice in attacking "the Herculean in- tellect of Kant." 234 If Coleridge's reason seems sometimes to act with the immediacy of intuition, the intuitiveness is always an intellectual one, and that makes all the difference; for it means that however immediate the act may seem, it is penetrated by a light which it owes to the organizing power of thought. In short, two philosophies can hardly diverge more radically in tendency than those of Coleridge and Jacobi. On the basis of his "reason," Jacobi could know by intuition that God and soul are, but never what they are; they must remain, so far as his philoso- phy is concerned, forever ungrounded possibilities. Coleridge, on the other hand, was led by his conception of reason to be- come absorbed in the great questions of morality, including the freedom of will and of moral evil, and to seek a purely metaphys- ical interpretation even of the doctrine of Trinity. Thus the whole trend of Coleridge's metaphysical labors is in conflict with the method of Jacobi's mysticism. Coleridge's marginalia illustrate abundantly that his temporary concern with Jacobi was no more than a moment in a lifelong war that he waged within himself in the effort to restrain his sensibility and susceptibility to feeling by sound principles grounded on reason — "to make," as he said, "the reason spread light over the feelings, to make our feelings diffuse vital warmth over the rea- son." After The Friend Coleridge never again mentioned Jacobi in his writings. This advance beyond Jacobi's position is pertinent to our inquiry of how the Amer- ican disciples of Coleridge interpreted Kant. It is significant that James Marsh, as the American editor of Coleridge and the first so-called Coleridgean in America, in prepar- ing the first American edition of The Friend, felt it incumbent upon himself to point out that Coleridge's qualification of Jacobi's definition of reason represents a complete transcendence of the German's meaning. 236 It does not follow that Emerson, for exam- ple, read Coleridge correctly, but it does suggest that if he read Coleridge as Marsh tried to explain him (first, in his edition of The Friend and, second, in his long Prelim- inary Essay and the elaborate Notes to the Aids in 1829), he should have got what is essentially the Kantian sense of under- standing and of reason. 236 Again, this is not to imply that the American Transcenden- talists, following Marsh and Coleridge, grasped the whole of Kant. For the philoso- phy of Coleridge, as it came to America in his popular works, combined elements of Fichte, of Schelling, and of others superim- posed upon Kant's basic distinctions. Nor does it mean that the American Transcen- dentalists always kept clearly before them the Kantian distinctions either between understanding and reason or between the pure and the practical reason. But the fact remains that nothing goes deeper in the life or philosophy of Coleridge than the meaning and significance that he attached to these distinctions. Whether he discussed religion, morals, the state, art, or metaphysics, he invariably based his judgments upon these distinctions and seemed incapable of think- ing except in terms of them. But he was as unwilling to stop with Kant's negations of pure reason as he had been discontent to rest in sensationalism or utilitarianism. A philosophy that failed to justify and satisfy his inmost spiritual aspirations was for him inadequate. Irre- futable as he recognized the rigor of Kant's logic on the speculative side to be, he was quick to grasp Kant's practical reason, as it operated in the realms of morality and reli- gion, in order to assert his faith in God, immortality, and freedom, and to harmo- nize his religion with his philosophy. When- ever he speaks of reason in the highest sense, he means always the practical reason. The primacy of the practical over the spec- ulative reason is a constant with him. Actually, the distinction between pure and practical reason is with Coleridge far more Avenues of Transmission 93 important than that between understand- ing and reason; and it is the failure to recognize this basic fact that led Carlyle to throw off his clever but shallow quip about Coleridge's "sublime secret of believing by the reason what the understanding had been obliged to fling out as incredible." Such a verdict overlooks a very pointed statement like the following, taken from the Aids (of which a dozen more can be adduced) : The Practical Reason alone is Reason in the full and substantive sense. It is Reason in its own sphere of perfect freedom ; as the source of ideas, which ideas, in their conver- sion to the responsible Will, become ulti- mate ends. On the other hand, Theoretic Reason, as the ground of the universal and absolute in all logical conclusion, is rather the light of Reason in the Understanding and known to be such by its contrasts with the contingency and particularity which characterize all the proper and indigenous growths of the Understanding. 237 In some of his phrasings Coleridge assert- ed more than Kant dared affirm, although it does not follow therefore that Kant was right and Coleridge wrong — not until a greater philosopher arise than has yet appeared, to demonstrate greater validity for the pure than for the practical reason or to establish the superiority of philosophy over religion. Coleridge accepted the Kantian distinc- tions gratefully but passed over whatever of the Kantian system he could not use. Thus he tacitly minimized the restrictions to which the pure reason seemed forever subject, and forthrightly rejected Kant's critical position by which noumena could never mean more than the mere word sug- gested. But Kant's postulates of the practi- cal reason, which he found more in accord with the irresistible spiritual yearnings within him for union with reality, he elevat- ed into the "truths of reason." Funda- mentally, he agreed with Kant that the supersensuous convictions of the soul are not objects of logical or syllogistic reasoning, and he refused to believe the neo-Platonic mystics that there were pure intuitions. 238 On one point he steadfastly refused to follow Kant — that is, in subjecting his feelings completely to the rigor of logic. Instead, he wanted "to make the reason spread light over the feelings, to make our feelings, with their vital warmth, to actual- ize our reason — these are my objects, these are my subjects." 239 That being so, he found it impossible to accept what he called Kant's "false, unnatural, even immor- al" stoic principle, by which he treats the affections "as indifferent ... in ethics, and would persuade us that a man who disliking, and without any feeling of love for virtue, yet acts virtuously, because and only because of his duty, is more worthy of our esteem than a man whose affections are aidant to and congruous with his conscience." 240 This insistence upon the value of the feelings in morals represents the chief point of his departure from the position of Kant, differentiating the emotionalism of Cole- ridge from the rationalism of Kant. It was this fondness for the affections that moved him to modify Kant's connotation of reason so as to make it a means of contact with objects which Kant had banished to the limbo of noumena. 241 It was the predilection of the romanticist — of one who "prayed with drops of agony on my brow, trembling not only before the justice of my Maker, but even more before the mercy of my Redeem- er" — that differentiated his position from the coldly logical criticism of Kant. But it was also this that raised Coleridge above the position of a mere translator of Kant — a mere ape of other men's thought — and provides that element of originality that entitles him to be taken seriously as a phi- losopher at all. Although it led him to push beyond the limits of practical reason as defined by the cautious logic of Kant, it was precisely this reinvestment of philosophy with an emotional-spiritual content that marked his characteristic and significant contribution to his and succeeding genera- 94 German Thought in America tions. Kant's thought, in passing through Coleridge's mind, issued a Coleridgean- Kantian product, in which the Coleridgean element was dominant. Although Kant's critical method early took hold of him with a "giant's hand," as he confessed, it was the hopes that Kant's practical reason offered that appealed to Coleridge. On the practical reason he was ready to stake all : Let the believer never be alarmed by objections wholly speculative, however plausible on speculative grounds such ob- jections may appear, if he can but satisfy himself, that the result is repugnant to the dictates of conscience, and irreconcilable with the interests of morality. 242 This principle is a constant in his think- ing, at least from 1820 onward, when he advised a friend in terms leaving no doubt (1) that he understood precisely the limita- tions placed by Kant on the pure reason in its strictly regulative functions as against the "affirmations" of the practical reason as constitutive and (2) that, despite Kant's warnings, Coleridge knew what he was about. I by no means recommend an extension of your philosophic researches beyond Kant. In him is contained all that can be learned, and as to the results, you have a firm faith in God, the responsible will of Man and Immortality; and Kant will demonstrate to you, that this faith is acquiesced in, in- deed, nay confirmed by the Reason and Understanding, but grounded on Postu- lates authorized and substantiated solely by the Moral Being. They are likewise mine : and whether the Ideas are regulative only, as Aristotle and Kant teach, or con- stitutive and actual, as Pythagoras and Plato, is of living interest to the philosopher by profession alone. Both systems are equally true, if only the former abstain from denying universally what is denied individually. He, for whom Ideas are con- stitutive, will in effect be a Platonist ; and in those for whom they are regulative only, Platonism is but a hollow affectation. 243 In his attempted reconciliation of philos- ophy with religion, of knowledge with belief, four doctrines were of primary im- portance: (1) the existence of God, (2) im- mortality, (3) sin, and (4) redemption. 244 His determination of these four ideas is illuminating as showing his relation to Pla- tonic thought, on the one hand, and to the Kantian criticism, on the other— often pushing beyond the circumspections of the cautious logic of Kant, who regarded the attempt to reduce the postulates of the practical reason to the terms of the under- standing as nothing short of perilous. But following Kant in attributing to the practi- cal reason the power of positing a reality beyond the limits of experience, Coleridge was impelled by his religious convictions to go further and to assert the unassertable, if not on the ground of reason, at least on the 1 ground of conscience loosely identified, in its highest reaches of religious insight, with • the categorical imperative. He made no attempt to reduce supersensible truths to logical terms, but he sought with spiritual zeal to stir the divine element in man to ' justify itself on its own terms. 245 However strenuously Coleridge objected to Kant's unknowable noumenon, he accept- ed in toto his methodology — though, like Fichte and Schelling, he sought to close the gap in the Kantian dualism and "to make philosophy all of one piece." He gave Fichte his due as having substituted Act for Substance, or Thing, and of emphasizing the Dynamic principle in man. He accorded to Schelling full credit as "the most success- ful improver of the Dynamic System" in applying the Dynamic to Nature. To Schell- ing he bowed for having identified subject with object, thus closing the chasm be- tween noumena and phenomena and prepar- ing the way for the Schellingian synthesis, or trichotomy of subject-object-identity — a principle which he defended, with minor alterations, to the last. These acknowledg- ments he made, but not without realizing the wide divergence between Fichte and Schelling, and between both and Kant, nor without realizing that the true synthesis still remained to be made. The exaggerated Avenues of Transmission 95 Egoism of Fichte and the thinly veiled Spinozism of Schelling 246 served but to show him the errors of any but the "Critical Way"; hence he returned to Kant, and set out, on the solid ground of Kant's Critiques, to make his own synthesis. This effort, in so far as it was successful, he made indepen- dently of Hegel (of whom he knew little at first hand) by combining, consciously and unconsciously, something of Fichte's Ego- ism and larger portions of Schelling's the- ory of the Dynamic and of his trichotomy with his own deep-rooted conviction about the reality (both natural and spiritual) of the creative activity of the human mind and of the principle of that activity as the nisus toward true Individualism. This last idea is the central principle in Coleridge, round which all the rest revolves. In the words of Professor Muirhead, it is this prin- ciple of "the true meaning and place of Individuality in the world both of nature and of man" 247 on the basis of which Cole- ridge sought the rational synthesis to solve the problems of the many and the one, matter and form, the actual and the ideal, the finite and the infinite. 248 The Kantian elements in Coleridge, lengthy and involved though our analysis of them has been, need to be considered in any evaluation of Kantian influence on the American Transcendentalists, for their opinions of Kant were derived from the Coleridgean or some other restatement, and almost never from a firsthand study, of Kant. WORDSWORTH— SOUTHEY ROBINSON HAZLITT DE QUINCEY William Wordsworth, lagging always some years behind Coleridge in his philosoph- ical development, even during the period of their close association, dropped hopelessly behind him in his later years. Little inclined to philosophical pursuits and averse to 1 abstruse research, ignorant, moreover, of German, he remained a poet while Coleridge t turned more and more to strictly intellectual activity. To Kant have been referred certain phrases and ideas in "Ode to Duty" : "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God" as guide, law, and law-giver; the weariness of "chance-de- sires"; the wish to become a "Bondman" of Duty; 249 but they apply equally well to the Christian tradition. Emerson was quick to detect a transcendental note in Wordsworth's obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings, Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized, 250 but they cannot be related directly to Ger- man transcendentalism. Similarly, passages such as Dr. Wellek mentions 251 are, as he himself suggests, more logically derived from Coleridge than from Kant. Asked whether the Wanderer's discourse in the Excursion (beginning Book IV, line 65: "And what are things eternal?") derived from Kant, Wordsworth said that he was "utterly ignorant of anything connected with Kant and his philosophy." 262 The answer seems sufficient. Robert Southey's concern with German philosophy was confined almost entirely to the use he made of Kant's Idea of a Univer- sal History in a Cosmopolitan Plan, as trans- lated by De Quincey for the London Maga- zine of October, 1824, in an imaginary dia- logue between Sir Thomas More and Mon- tesinos — a work of limited circulation in America. Henry Crabb Robinson had a real interest in and grasp of the essentials of critical idealism, 253 but his letters and several essays long remained buried either in the pages of forgotten reviews or in unpublished manuscript, so that in America his services as a disseminator of German ideas went for naught. 254 The notice that William Hazlitt took of Kant illustrates how difficult it was for the British mind (though in this case it had been prepared by Coleridge and a prior rejection of Locke) to understand and 96 German Thought in America accept German transcendentalism. Hazlitt penned two articles for the Morning Chroni- cle that deal with Kant, both occasioned by Madame de StaeTs De l'Allemagne. 2ii The second is the more considerable of the two. It presents an elaborate criticism of Kant, based almost solely on Willich and therefore poorly informed. 258 These essays are of little significance except that their appearance in the Morning Chronicle gave the misinformation with which they were packed some currency in both Britain and America. Thomas De Quincey's concern with Kant, in point of time, was one of the longest among English romantics. His first published notice of Kant was in 1825, and the last preceded his death in 1859 by only a year. 257 The first article, in the London Magazine for July, 1823, 258 while abounding in generalities, is void of any effort to ex- pound Kant's philosophy. The second, "Last Days of Immanuel Kant," in Black- wood's Edinburgh Magazine for February, 1827, 259 is wholly biographical and anecdo- tal; but in Blackwood's for August, 1850, 280 he promised to give an exposition of tran- scendental philosophy as outlined in " Kant's Miscellaneous Essays." However, he lived up to his declared purpose only to the ex- tent of commenting briefly on five or six of Kant's minor works, and then proceeded to belabor Kant as an unlettered, uncouth German who "never read a book in his life, ' ' and who, as an "enemy of Christianity . . . shuffled, equivocated, in fact (it must be avowed) lied." 261 More substantial was his work of translating for the British periodi- cal press of Kant's essays "On National Character, in Relation to the Sense of the Sublime and the Beautiful," 262 "Abstract on Swedenborgianism," 263 "Idea of a Univer- sal History on a Cosmopolitan Plan," 264 and "Age of the Earth." 265 But much of his work, except what appeared in the British journals that were widely read in America, left little mark on the American mind. 286 THOMAS CARLYLE Because Carlyle's writings, after those of Coleridge, were the main source of informa- tion from which Americans learned some- thing about German thought, the relative success and failure of Carlyle as an exposi- tor of German philosophy is a matter of importance. For our purposes Carlyle is most readily understood when he is viewed as the opponent, in his time, of the Lockean tradition, of hedonism, of atomism, of utilitarianism, and as the promulgator of the creative and the dynamic in literature, thought, and society. 267 For this program, Carlyle sought fresh concepts as well as new terms. He found both in the German writers. Little interested in technical philosophy, he often handled metaphysical ideas with the licence of a dilettante, altering old con- cepts, employing ambiguous expressions, referring ideas to indefinite and sometimes wrong sources, going merrily on his way "appropriating, rejecting, transforming" and exercising a kind of royal prerogative to take his materials wherever he found them and to order them as best served his purposes. 268 While much interested in thought, Car- lyle, like his chief master, Goethe, "never thought about thought." 269 As a matter of fact, he was not abundantly endowed for the pursuit of speculative philosophy, al- though he loved, "especially when talking theology, to play with metaphysical lan- guage," not unlike the layman who "ven- tures on the terminology of lawyers and finds that he has implied far more than was in his mind." 27 ° "His distrust of speculative reason he found succinctly stated for him in Goethe, and elaborately justified — so he thought — in Kant's Kritik der reinen Ver- nunft. He sought the stimulating power of a great personality, and found it presented in Goethe himself, and its cultivation set forth in admirable detail in Wilhelm Meis- ter. He had fought with the demons of skep- Avenues of Transmission 97 ticism and suicidal despair; and Schiller's triumph and Goethe's progress from Wer- ther to the serenity of the Wanderiahre and the second part of Faust showed him that his problems had been other men's prob- lems and had been solved. What he missed in current English and French thought — the dynamic element — he found in Fichte, and especially in Novalis." 271 His passion for history (which Hume, Gibbon, and Robert- son left dissatisfied) fed on the theories of Schelling, Schiller, Novalis, and the Schle- gel brothers; while his admiration of great men and the wish to account for them found a ready ally in Fichte's popular essays and in the romantic notion of the man of genius. In spite of his native Puritan- ism, he had a number of common interests with the German writers. 272 Of all the Germans who helped shape Car- lyle's thinking, the influence of Goethe is the greatest single one, 273 although Carlyle himself was inclined also to credit Kant with helping him to his fundamental con- victions. Certainly Carlyle's knowledge of Goethe was wider and deeper than that of Kant and of equally long duration. 274 What Goethe fundamentally taught him was faith in himself . . . Carlyle admired increasingly Goethe's union of the singer and the sage, his combination of the real and the ideal in Werther, Meister, and Dich- tung und Wahrheit, his treatment of the actual as the raw materials of the ideal, his conception of renunciation as the prelimi- nary act of true living, his reverence for sorrow, his pantheism — so far as it was present in his teaching — his wise silence on the unseen. Goethe's serenity, breadth, and tolerance, achieved after heroic struggle, gave significance to Carlyle's own problems. Long after the novelty had worn off the doctrines of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Novalis, and Carlyle had ceased to ponder the speculative enigmas of the philosophers, Goethe remained the permanent and vital- izing power in his thinking. Indeed, concludes Professor Harrold, "all other German writers had relevance for Carlyle only as they elaborated or confirmed the principles he had derived from Goethe. It is difficult to imagine how he would have interpreted Fichte's doctrine of the hero, Novalis' doctrine of Selbsttotung, of Schell- ing's doctrine of organism, had he not found in Goethe himself an example of a hero, in Entsagen an ideal comparable to 'self-annihilation,' and in Goethe's general philosophy an expression of the organic character of Nature." 275 One gathers from Carlyle's numerous references to Kant, beginning as early as 1820, that he was thoroughly conversant with Kant. As a matter of fact, he privately confessed but an incomplete comprehension of "Kant, Schelling, Fichte and all those worthies," 276 but in his published works he usually spoke as if he were an authority on critical transcendentalism. 277 His reading of Kant was probably confined to a perusal of 150 pages of his edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. On September 27, 1826, he reported : I am at the 150th page of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft; not only reading but par- tially understanding, and full of projects for instructing my benighted countrymen on the true merits of this sublime system, at some more propitious season. To speak truth, however, one of Scott's Novels would suit me much better: last night I found Kant was getting rather abstruse; and in one or two points he puzzled me so, that today I have not once opened him. 278 In the light of such interpretations of Kant as Carlyle incorporated in his writ- ings, we may believe him when he confessed that he found Kant puzzling on "one or two points," for there is good evidence to indi- cate that he understood neither the Kantian explorations into the limits of human knowl- edge nor the significance of his conclusions. Without following in detail what has al- ready been expertly examined by Miss Storrs, we may summarize her findings, which are (1) that Carlyle's conception of the ideality of Time and Space is quite divorced from the meaning of Kant, (2) that 98 German Thought in America Carlyle's and Kant's conceptions of the nature of Reason and Understanding, as well as their interpretations of the value of the distinction between these two faculties, are essentially at variance, (3) that Carlyle is opposed to Kant's whole explanation of the derivation and character of moral law, and (4) that, on the whole, the essence of critical idealism remained foreign to Car- lyle. 279 All this, however, did not prevent his attempting to instruct his "benighted coun- trymen in the true merits of his sublime system," for when he undertook his next work, Wotton Rein/red, he incorporated, in Chapters IV and V, relatively lengthy ex- positions of Kantian doctrine, put in the mouth of Dalbrook, who is undoubtedly Coleridge. While the hearers of Dalbrook's discourse readily recognize his sentiments as "Kantism! Kantism!" the reader today fails to find in Dalbrook's distinction be- tween Reason and Understanding anything but the old dichotomy of the head and the heart; while Space and Time are said by Dalbrook to be "modes, not things; forms of our mind, not existence without us; the shapes in which the unseen bodies itself forth to our mortal sense; if we were not, they also would cease to be." 280 This repre- sents a misconstruction that Carlyle never fully corrected. By the autumn of 1827, when "The State of German Literature" was written, Car- lyle had discovered that the "critical philos- ophers, whatever they may be, are not mystics . . . Kant, Fichte, and Schelling are men of cool judgment and determinate energetic character; men of science and profound universal investigation." 281 But he proceeds to discuss them en masse with- out making distinctions among them. 282 We learn further that the "ultimate aim of all philosophy must be to interpret appear- ances"; and the "first steps towards this, the aim of what may be called Primary or Critical Philosophy, must be to find some indubitable principle; to fix ourselves on some unchangeable basis ; to discover what the Germans call Urwahr, the Primitive Truth, the necessarily, absolutely True." 283 This the German idealists, with Kant as leader, are said "to seek by intuition in the deepest and purest nature of Man." 284 All this one might get over, particularly since Carlyle's grouping together of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling allows him a certain latitude ; but one begins to have real trouble with his peculiar interpretation of Reason as not being possessed by all men alike — and the resulting implication that the Reason is neither necessary nor universal. 285 He goes definitely beyond Kant in another respect, i.e., in limiting the Understanding too strictly while glorifying the Reason un- qualifiedly. "Reason," says he, "discusses Truth itself, the absolutely and primi- tively True; while Understanding can dis- cern only relations and cannot decide with- out if." 28i The Reason freely discerns the Ultimate, the Absolute, "not by logic and argument; ... its domain lies in that higher region whither logic and argument cannot reach; in that holier region, where Poetry, and Virtue and Divinity abide, in whose presence Understanding wavers and recoils dazzled into utter darkness by that 'sea of light,' at once the fountain and the termination of all true knowledge." 287 And with this we have arrived not only at a general misapprehension of Understand- ing and Reason but also at a confusion of Pure and Practical Reason. Entirely out- side the area of Kant's careful analysis, we are back in the realm of the head versus the heart, of science versus religion, where knowledge and faith stand in irreconcilable opposition to each other. In 1829 Carlyle produced his essay on Novalis, into which he incorporated a leng- thy exposition of Kantism, the fundamen- tal principle of which is "to deny the exist- ence of Matter." 288 He goes on to argue triumphantly that since Time and Space are mere "forms" of the mind, Matter itself is annihilated: Avenues of Transmission 99 If Time and Space have no absolute existence . . . out of our minds, it removes the stumbling-block from the very thresh- old of our Theology. For on this ground, when we say that the Deity is omnipresent and eternal, that with Him it is a universal Here and Now, we say nothing wonderful ; nothing but that He also created Time and Space, that Time and Space are not laws of His being, but only of ours. Nay, to the Transcendentalist, clearly enough, the whole question of the origin and existence of Nature is at an end, for Matter is itself annihilated; and the black Spectre, Athe- ism, "with all its sickly dews," melts into nothingness forever. 289 Even worse confused are Carlyle's con- ceptions of Reason and Understanding as they are represented in the essay on Nova- lis. 290 In the end, he comes to the conclusion that the "Teologia mistica" of Tasso, the "Mysticism" of Novalis, the "Faith" of Jacobi, and "generally all true Christian faith and Devotion appears, so far as we can see, more or less included in this doctrine of the Transcendentalists ; under their several shapes, the essence of them all being what is here designated by the name Reason, and set forth as the true sovereign of man's mind." 291 Here, apparently, is no glimmer of comprehension of Kant's distinctions between Reason and Understanding or be- tween speculative and practical reason. 292 Sartor Resartus contains no evidence that Carlyle had penetrated to a deeper or truer conception of Kant by 1 830-1 831, when this work was written except that he appears in the chapter entitled "The World Out of Clothes" to approach the Kantian interpretation of Time and Space, but he does not retract the idea that Kant's "an- nihilation" of Space and Time had also anni- hilated matter, or things-in-themselves. Indeed, this peculiarly Carlylean mis- conception of the Kantian notion of Time and Space becomes one of the cardinal doctrines in the Philosophy of Clothes. 293 Nor do Carlyle's references to Kant after the thirties (i.e., after he "had happily got done" with all philosophy) reveal any advance in his comprehension of Kant. He thought of Kant, in 1841, as the means of deliverance "from the fatal incubus of Scotch or French philosophy, with its mech- anisms and its Atheisms," 294 but he nev- er penetrated to the foundations upon which Kant based this deliverance. Twenty years later he repeated what had been the measure of Kant's worth to him throughout the years: "Kant taught me that I had a soul as well as a body." 295 Seeking for weapons with which to do battle against what Dalbrook, in Wotton Reinfred 296 calls "atheism in religion, ma- terialism in philosophy, utility of morals, and flaring, self-seeking mannerisms in art," Carlyle perceived the general effectiveness that certain of Kant's ideas would provide for the impending battle and boldly adopt- ed them. He did not bother to learn the new technique required for wielding them most effectively and never achieved finesse in handling them, but laid about him, as was his wont, with a heavy cudgel to make prevail German idealism, or immaterialism generally. In this campaign he found the Kantian ideality of Time and Space, 297 a loosely interpreted distinction between Reason and Understanding, and above all, moral law (embracing Kant's Categorical Imperative as well as Goethe's doctrine of Entsagen) satisfactory war slogans in the crusade to re-open the road to faith. But in the process, his loose interpretation of criti- cal terms did a great deal of harm, 298 as we shall observe later, to earnest people like Emerson, who, adopting Carlyle as a guide, found themselves involved in all kinds of perplexing epistemological difficulties. 299 Carlyle was influenced, positively or negatively, by other German writers, 300 but for the purpose in hand we need to take note of those ideas only which he transmit- ted to his American readers — not always in purest form. He appropriated Fichte's prac- tical philosophy, especially the broad impli- cations of the Fichtean ego. He made little effort to comprehend Fichte's technical 100 German Thought in America treatises, and remained unaware of any great incompatibilities between Fichte and Kant or, for that matter, between both of these and Goethe, but drew what he believed to be theoretical support from both (especi- ally from Fichte) for practical doctrines already derived from Goethe. Among the more pivotal ideas that he found in Fichte (although his expression of them is often couched in the more figurative language of Goethe) are the following: (i) the world as physical in appearance but spiritual in significance and reality, (2) the perpetual outpouring of the Infinite into the many finites, the immanence of the Divine in the actual, and the divine symbolism of Na- ture, (3) the function of history as revelation of deity through progressive development and the alternation of periods of belief with periods of unbelief, (4) the divine mission of the hero as a superior vehicle of the divine idea, and (5) the moral doctrine of action, or work. 301 Although Carlyle frequently mentioned Schelling, his reading probably extended little beyond the Methode des akademischen Studiums; 302 but it was sufficient to confirm (and to pass on to his American disciples) Schelling's views of the nature of history, of the universe as "Offenbarung," of the world as an organism in process of "Becoming," and of Nature as the "vast Symbol of God," or "the garment of God." In the vivid and precise rendering of Novalis' Fragmente he found appealing and stimulating interpre- tations of many of the more abstract prin- ciples that he had encountered in Fichte, 303 Schelling, 304 Schiller, and Goethe; while his concern with Goethe's philosophy of Ent- sagen made him susceptible to the doctrine of Selbstlotung as he found it in Novalis. To Jean Paul he was indebted for (1) elements of style (such as memorable images or expressions the better to clothe abstractions derived from other writers), (2) the structure of Sartor Resartus, and (3) confirmation for the idea that the whole aim of philosophy as well as the meaning of life should be grounded and sought in the ethi- cal deed. Jean Paul's success, not unlike Goethe's and Schiller's, in working his way through sheer heroism from unhappiness, doubt, and despair to an affirmative philos- ophy of experience made a strong appeal. While the new concept of development as applied to history by Schelling and especi- ally by Herder in his Ideen affected him negatively, Schiller's theory of history, in spite of its several highly theoretical and a priori elements and the prominent place it gave to "perfectibility" and the Humani- tatsideal (which Carlyle 's Calvinism rejec- ted) was more to his liking. 305 From the Schlegels, Carlyle derived criteria regarding German belles-lettres, a new approach to the critical evaluation of literature, further sup- port for his antagonism toward the Enlight- enment, and, in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, the conception of Fantasy as "the organ of the God-like" and contributory ideas for his theory of the revelation in history. 306 In all his German studies Carlyle's mind worked like a magnet picking a phrase here that expressed the essence of his notion or lifting an idea there that served his pur- pose. 307 Thus he went swashbuckling through German writers with the result that his philosophy, insofar as he developed it before 1834, 308 was a curiously eclectic, inharmonious product. 309 While he eluci- dated few abstract principles, his practical doctrines, often couched in "apoplectic" terms, were such as made young Emerson (even before he knew the name of Carlyle) recognize in him a "Germanick new-light writer" who "gives us all confidence in our principles." 310 As an expounder of the technical features of critical idealism, Car- lyle failed dismally, but all Young America understood the lessons he taught on the practical side, and in this respect he brought a message from Germany more potent than the more adequately conceived and accur- ately phrased metaphysical exegesis that Coleridge offered to Emerson and his con- freres. 311 Avenues of Transmission 101 German Philosophy in France MADAME DE STAEL. Some twenty years before Carlyle's in- fluence was felt in America, German thought had gained some degree of notorie- ty, if nothing more, through the instrumen- tality of the French. Indeed, in some re- spects the most important, and in others, the first information concerning Germany to reach America came from Anne Germaine Necker, Baronne de Stael-Holstein, whose De I'Allemagne, published almost simulta- neously in Paris and London in 1813, was reprinted (from the English edition) in New York the following year. The vogue which this book enjoyed in America was tremen- dous. 312 Many of its readers gathered from it their first information about Germany. 313 But while Madame de Stael was the first to tell Americans about the new German cul- ture, much of the information that she spread is neither profound nor accurate. 314 Her lengthy discussions, as in the case of Schiller and Goethe, tend often to be vague and superficially facile; and what is true of her analyses of belles-lettres holds also for her feeble attempts to explain German metaphysics. Carlyle, after recovering from his first enthusiasm for her book, found her often "misty and inconsistent" 315 and, in the third book, which is devoted to Ger- man philosophy, "very mysterious, now and then quite absurd." 316 Strongly biased as she is by religious pre- possessions, 317 she is less concerned about explaining Kant's ideas than about general- izing upon the ethical and religious import of his doctrines. Regarding Kant's episte- mological inquiries and his purely specula- tive problems, the reader learns little be- yond the statement that Space and Time are "primitive intuitions" and that the cate- gories, which are listed, are "the principles of reasoning." 318 She dwells at great- er length on the piety of Kant. But — So few minds are able to comprehend these reasonings, and those who are able are disposed to combat each other, that it is rendering a great service to religious faith to banish metaphysics from all ques- tions that relate to the existence of God, to free-will, to the origins of good and evil (p. 165). Whatever others may think of the Cri- tique of Pure Reason, Madame de Stael finds it "impossible not to read with respect" the Critique of Practical Reason "and the differ- ent works he has written on morals" (p. 173). Unfortunately "the style of Kant . . . deserves almost all the reproaches with which his adversaries have treated it" (p. 175), so that "no one in France will give himself the trouble of studying works so bristling with difficulties as those of Kant." This is the gist of the chapter of twenty- three pages on Kant. The four pages devot- ed to Fichte explain that he "makes the whole universe consist of the activity of mind" (p. 190); while Schelling, "like Fichte . . . [aims] to reduce existence to a single principle" (p. 195). But this is merely a return to Spinoza, with which observation Madame de Stael leaves the reader to his own thoughts on German transcendental philosophy while she goes into a lengthy discussion of pantheism (p. 195). 319 Too frequently her enthusiasm turns her away from objective exposition of German thought into subjective rhapsodies of her own, a passage on Jacobi (pp. 184-87) being a good case in point. Even on the subject of ethics, which represents her primary inter- est and to which she devotes fifty-six pages (pp. 231-86), she makes many words but says little. 320 Although she censures the French for making the principal end of their writing "not the subject they treat, but the effect they produce" (p. 146), she herself indulges her fondness for repeating anecdotes, literary gossip, and other tittle- tattle. 321 Madame de Stael had an abun- dance of wit of the sort that makes women of her type interesting, but of philosophical acumen, in the Kantian sense of the word, she had not a whit. Certainly no reader who 102 German Thought in America sought to penetrate to the core of critical transcendentalism came away from a reading of her two volumes with much more than the recollection of some names, including those of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Jacobi— the first of whom somehow brought about a divorce between philoso- phy and religion (an effect the virtue of which Madame is not prepared to praise), the second representing a kind of stoic morality, the third a vague sort of panthe- ism, and the last somehow overshadowing all three. He came away, also, with a recol- lection of many details of German geogra- phy, manners, dress, customs, national feeling, educational methods and institu- tions, and a good deal of solid information on German literary people. But concerning the philosophy of the new Germany Ma- dame de Stael had little to impart. THE ECLECTICISM OF COUSIN AND JOUFFROY It was not long, however, before her countryman, Victor Cousin, came to her assistance in the effort to instruct the world on the subject of German philosophy. Al- though Americans of the early nineteenth century read French more readily than German, there is little indication that Cou- sin's writings were popularly read before they were translated in the early thirties, the first of such translations being Henning G. Linberg's rendition of Cousin's Introduc- tion a Vhistoire de la philosophie in 1832. 322 If any reader failed to grasp the point of view and significance of eclecticism as out- lined in this work, the publication, two years later, of Caleb Sprague Henry's trans- lation, with notes and appendices, of the Elements of Psychology : Included in a Criti- cal Examination of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding 323 left little room for misunderstanding either the eclectic philosophy or Kant and his merits and defects, that is, as Cousin conceived them. For Henry, conscious that Cousin "devel- oped his philosophy rather in his applica- tions, by history and criticism, than in any full and systematic exposition of its first principles," first called attention to Lec- tures IV, V, and VI of the Introduction as containing a concise "exposition of the fun- damental principles" 324 of eclecticism, and then proceeded, in the following eighteen pages, to sketch, in laudably clear terms, both Cousin's psychology and his philoso- phy. 325 Since Henry's exegesis is of value not only as indicating what the American reader of the thirties and forties understood Cousin to stand for, but also what he under- stood Kant to teach, several quotations are reproduced. Says Henry: In the psychological analysis of M. Cou- sin, all the facts of human consciousness are reduced to three classes, — sensible, volun- tary, and rational. The first and the last have the character- istic of necessity ; those of the will alone are personal and imputable. Personality be- longs solely to the will ; and self is the centre of the intellectual sphere .... We perceive by the light which comes not from our- selves; for our personality is our will, and nothing more. All light comes from the reason, and it is the reason that perceives both itself, and the sensibility which envel- ops it, and the will also upon which it im- poses obligation, though without constrain- ing it. The element of cognition is, by its essence, rational ; and consciousness, though composed of three integrant and insepar- able elements, has its own most immediate foundation in reason, without which there would be no possible knowledge, and conse- quently no consciousness. 326 In short, sensibility is the external con- dition of consciousness; will is the center; and reason is the light. The relation of these three elements — the intelligence, the activi- ty, and the sensibility — is so intimate that when one is given, the other two enter into exercise. "Since the me cannot so much as perceive itself, and perceive the sensation, but by the reason, or intelligence, it follows that the exercise of reason is contemporane- ous with the exercise of the personal activi- ty and sensible impressions." 327 Hence the triplicity of consciousness (the three ele- Avenues of Transmission 103 ments of which are distinct and cannot be reduced to each other) reduces itself to a single fact, a unity of consciousness, which exists only under condition of its triplici- t y 328 The most distinctive part of Cousin's system is his two-fold development of rea- son: the first, primitive, unreflective, in- stinctive; the second, ulterior, reflective, voluntary. The former he terms the sponta- neous reason, spontaneity of reason, or simply spontaneity; the latter, reflective reason, reflection of reason, or simply reflec- tion. 329 At this point Cousin comes to his criticism of Kant, who, along with Aris- totle, "listed all the elements of reason" and "exhausted all the statistics of reason" ; but he adds, "I am far from thinking that the reduction of these elements which they have made is the last boundary of analysis; nor that they have discerned the fundamental relations of these elements." 330 Kant erred in objectifying the laws of our thought, without arriving at any legitimate and veri- table objectivity. He never got outside the realm of the subjective, and hence did not "legitimately arrive at any thing truly objective." 331 Now, if the laws of human thought are purely subjective, we have no right to transfer them beyond the sphere of our consciousness; in their utmost reach they could engender only irresistible convictions, but never independent truth. For sensation and reflection begin in subjectivity and remain subjective. 332 Therefore, says Cou- sin, "the problem upon the solution of which this good man suffered shipwreck, modern philosophy still finds before it." However, all is not to be despaired of, for, claims Cousin, "I have myself, on a former occa- sion, given a solution of it, which time has not shaken." 333 This solution rests upon a fundamental fact: "we do not commence with science, but with faith; with faith in reason, for no other faith is given." 334 All this, of course, is referable to nothing more complex than the phenomenon of pure affir- mation, the faith that God is represented in us by reason; whence it follows that if man "believes that he exists, he then believes that his thought — he believes that his ex- istence — is worthy of faith; he therefore places faith in the principle of thought; — now, there is God. Because every thought contains faith in the principle of thought, therefore, according to my doctrine, every word pronounced with confidence, is noth- ing more than a profession of faith in rea- son itself, that is, in God. Every word is an act of faith." 335 At this point Emerson may well be par- doned if he discovered what he believed to be "an optical illusion" 336 in Cousin and in eclecticism generally. Precisely what con- stituted this "optical illusion" he did not specify, but it requires no great philosophi- cal astuteness to pick flaws in the eclectic practice of Cousin, for whom, as Mr. Van Wyck Brooks recently put it, "all systems were true in what they affirmed, false in what they denied." 337 A lesser man than Emerson might have seen, as indeed most American Transcendentalists eventually did see, that Cousin made everything too splendidly simple. 338 Meanwhile eclecticism had already en- joyed a considerable vogue in America, especially during the thirties and forties. Cousin, available in the Linberg and Henry translations, 339 acquired added circulation in 1838 through Ripley's Philosophical Miscellanies from the French of Cousin, Jouffroy, and Benjamin Constant. 3 * The periodicals, while not unanimous in wel- coming Cousin and eclecticism, all devoted space to the new French thought tinged, as it was understood to be, with German tran- scendentalism. In 1829, A. H. Everett, in the North American Review, devoted some fifty pages to Cousin. 341 The American Quarterly Review for December, i83i, 342 discussed eclecticism, commented on its lack of "new truths" and its inability "to combine the fragments of old hypotheses into new unities," but upheld Cousin gener- 104 German Thought in America ally against Locke and praised him for re- establishing God on his throne; for "ideal- ism is right, and sensationalism is wrong, as the Coleridges and the Cousins exist to show." 343 The American Monthly Review 3 * 4 for January, 1832, and the North American Review 345 for July of the same year agree upon Cousin's catholicity of spirit, his just respect for humanity, and his reverence for religion; 346 while the Quarterly Christian Spectator for March, 1835, paid tribute to S. C. Henry's translation of Cousin's Ele- ments of Psychology. 3 " By 1836, Orestes Brownson, not yet a full-fledged Transcendentalist and still some years removed from his Catholicism, chimed in enthusiastically and expressed gratification over Cousin's attracting "con- siderable attention" and his exerting "no little influence on our philosophical specula- tions." 348 In November, 1837, Francis Bowen wrote on "Locke and the Transcen- dentalists" for the Christian Examiner. Brownson replied in the newly-founded Boston Qviarterly Review. Presumably, said he, Bowen's article was prompted by a desire to vindicate Locke and to issue warn- ings to all right-thinking Christians against all Transcendentalists. He denies that American Transcendentalists exhibit any "overweening fondness for German litera- ture or philosophy." Instead, he argues, "The genius of our countrymen is for Eclec- ticism." 349 Meanwhile the Christian Review found Cousin's doctrines to be based on error and their tendencies injurious to phi- losophy and religion; it hoped that this "poison of German Transcendentalism" might be expelled from the land. 350 Emerson's Divinity School address pro- voked the Rev. James Waddel Alexander, editor of the Princeton Review, and his col- league Albert Baldwin Dod to utter a tre- mendous blast against what they called "the latest form of infidelity," reputedly inspired in part by Cousin, the translations of whose works by Linberg in 1832 and by Henry in 1834 they had read "upon their first appearance." "But," they added, "we kept silence because we did not wish in any degree to draw public attention to them until evidence was afforded that they were read. We now have that evidence [presum- ably in Emerson's address], and have felt it our duty to be no longer silent." 351 Their surmise as to the derivation of Emerson's ideas from Cousin was wrong, 352 for he had come to have serious doubts about Cousin and eclecticism at least a half-year before he delivered the address before the Divinity School ; but of these dis- satisfactions of Emerson with Cousin, Alex- ander and Dod, of course, were entirely unaware. While it would appear, then, that about 1 838-1 839 Cousin was running onto the opposition of conservative clergymen like Alexander, Dod, and Norton and of such liberals as Emerson, there was no lack of support for him. Brownson came to his rescue with thunderous metaphysical argu- ments in the Boston Quarterly Review 313 paying particular attention to the Reason au Cousin. 354 He distinguished between the objective and the subjective reason in the following terms: By the objective reason we may under- stand the eternal Reason, the immaterial world, the world of necessary Truth . . . identical with the Logos of the Apostle and the Greek Fathers, the 'inner light' of the Quakers .... In this sense Reason is not mine, nor any man's. It is impersonal and absolute .... By the subjective reason we may understand . . . our general faculty of knowing, that by virtue of which we are intelligent beings, capable of intelli- gence .... But we apprehend that a careful analysis of the facts of consciousness would go far to identify this subjective reason with the objective reason, so far at least as to prove that our reason must be in immediate relation with the impersonal reason — that it is, in fact, as it has been called, "a fragment of the Universal Reason." 355 The ease with which Brownson shifts from Reason to Intelligence to Intuition to the Inner Light is a common characteristic Avenues of Transmission 105 among several of our American Transcen- dentalists, especially among the lesser lights. It often involves, as we shall see, a certain slackness not only in the use of terms but also in thinking. However that may be, the vogue of Cousin mounted. By the end of the thirties, eclecticism had spread to Wisconsin and the old frontier, where Calvin Stowe and the Beechers ar- gued about it with Ephraim Peabody, J. F. Clarke, J. H. Perkins, and W. H. Chan- nm g 356 gy !8^8 de Bow was iunning Lin- berg's translation of Cousin's Introduction to the History of Philosophy in installments in his Commercial Review. From 1838, immediately following the publication of Ripley's Philosophical Mis- cellanies . . . of Cousin, Jouffroy, and B. Constant, and increasingly after 1840 (re- flecting doubtless the effect of W. H. Chan- ning's translation of Jouffroy's Introduction 10 Ethics), 367 Jouffroy is a matter of concern for reviewers and editors. Often he and Cousin are discussed together, Constant, in comparison, attracting little attention. Ripley reported that his Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature were meeting "encouragement to a degree beyond the expectation of its proprietors." Meanwhile Brownson was proceeding, enthusiastically though unsuccessfully, to eschew the word Transcendentalism and to give currency instead to the term Eclecticism. In his opin- ion, the latter seemed better to fit the varied groups represented by the Newness, and he hoped it might avoid the connota- tion of foreign skepticism with which the word Transcendentalism had become asso- ciated. He hoped, too, that the adoption of eclecticism would act as a deterrent to the obscure terminology and the wild specula- tion to which some Transcendentalists seemed addicted. Brownson's praise of Cousin and Jouffroy as the high priests alike of Eclecticism and Transcendentalism did not fail to give both currency among the discipleship. By 1840, in Volume I of the Dial, there was rejoicing: "Few, if any, living writers upon Ethical Philosophy stand so high in the estimation of those who have made this science a study" as Jouffroy. 353 The Boston Quarterly Review, in replying to Andrews Norton and the two articles in the Princeton Review, defended Cousin against all charges of atheism, pantheism, egoism, and fatalism; 359 while the Christian Examiner, after making a "comprehensive survey" of all moral sys- tems, found that "no French writer has appeared whose labors can be so agreeable to English minds as those of Jouffroy," who combineswith his "national enthusiasm . . . all the cautious logic of the Scotch school. " 38 ° The North American Review, more reserved, while admitting that eclecticism had a great vogue in America, considered it a shallow system. 361 By 1 84 1 the indefatigible Brownson was constructing a complete system of philoso- phy based on Cousin, which was published in the Democratic Review for 1841, 1842, and 1843 ; while the American Eclectic presented a translation of the first of Cousin's series of essays in the Revue des Deux Mondes 362 on "Kant and His Philosophy." 363 In 1842, the Henry translation of Cousin's Psychology was prepared "for use in Colleges"; during the next year Jouffroy's Prolegomenes an Droit Naturel, in Channing's translation, was introduced as a textbook at Harvard by James Walker. 364 The year 1842 appears to have been the high -water mark of Cousin's as well as of Jouffroy's popularity. The North American continued to express its doubts. 365 Brown- son, who had by this time passed succes- sively through Presbyterianism, Universal- ism, Socialism, and Unitarianism, besides coquetting for a while with Transcendental- ism, finally coming to profess a real affec- tion for Eclecticism, was already beginning to feel "dissatisfactions" even with it, and all but ready to embrace Catholicism. In an essay of 1843, entitled "Remarks on Uni- versal History," 366 he suspects Michelet of being a Manichean, inclined to fatalism 106 German Thought in America (p. 459), Joufifroy of holding a false view of human development (pp. 464-65) ; while Cousin's impersonal reason, borrowed from Hegel (whom, be it observed, Brownson professes not to be acquainted with at first hand), asserts the "impotency of humani- ty" and is in danger of annihilating it (pp. 267-74). 1° tne second installment of this essay, which appeared in June, 1843, he vigorously defended the "providential the- ory" of history as enunciated by the Catho- lic Bossuet at the expense of Jouffroy and Cousin's eclectic pantheism, and improves the opportunity to attack also Friedrich Schlegel's and Herder's philosophies of history (pp. 579-80). He entered the Catho- lic Church in 1844. The first of his anti- Transcendental articles appeared in his new journal, Brownson's Quarterly Review, in May, 1844. In it he attacked Cousin's the- ory of knowledge and defended scholasti- cism against eclecticism. Jouffroy, whose Catholicism Cousin is accused of having perverted, is repudiated in January, 1845. With this, Brownson washed his hands of eclecticism. A few articles which follow in 1845 and subsequently add nothing new. Cousin and Jouffroy, forsaken by their chief American proponent, have had their brief day and disappear rapidly from the pages of American periodicals. One is inclined to think that where there is much smoke, there should be some fire; but so far little evidence has appeared to indicate that the eclectics left any lasting marks on American thought. The problem of precisely how much influence French eclecticism had in America has been at- tacked by two French students, M. William Girard and M. Regis Michaud, 367 but the old study made by Dr. Walter L. Leighton of French Philosophers and New-England Transcendentalism (1908) remains still the best treatment of the subject. Leighton points out that eclecticism, popular though it was for a decade, never overshadowed other foreign influences, whether Greek, German, or British; 363 and in this conclu- sion he is supported by the authoritative researches of Professor Howard M. Jones. However, Girard and Michaud serve to show that eclecticism made its appeal to American Transcendentalists as being non- partisan, urbane, and rational in manner, clear and distinct in statement, democratic and religious in inspiration. Some of the Transcendentalists who found Kant un- fathomable comprehended Cousin more readily. Kant was understood to have recov- ered the mind of man from sensationalism and materialism to reassert "the freedom of the moral will, the dignity of moral being, the nobility of existence, the persistency of the individual as a ground of continuous effort and far-reaching hope, the spiritual- ity of man and his destiny." 369 And Cousin was understood to have taught the same doctrine. But the difficulties of the German language and the crabbedness of Kant's style deterred many from confirming their belief by a firsthand examination of the critical philosophy of Kant. For them. Cousin seemed a Kant to advantage dress'd — what Kant had thought but ne'er so well express'd. Moreover, Cousin established close personal connections with several Americans, carried on a voluminous corre- spondence with American translators and friends, and worked hard to effect cordial Franco-American relations. 370 That Cousin enjoyed an unparalleled vogue for a brief span of years, approximately from 1838 to 1842, is obvious; that he made a profound or lasting impression on American thinking does not follow. His was a vogue more than an influence, except in one important res- pect. For it is apparent from the numerous periodical references to Cousin's "Reason" that for a number of American idealists, particularly among the lesser Transcenden- talists, Cousin's distinction between spon- taneous and reflective reason was synony- mous with the Kantian distinction between Reason and Understanding — an error which men like Hedge and Parker did not make. In proportion as the Transcendentalists Avenues of Transmission 107 were equipped with philosophical acumen and linguistic ability, they worked out their Kantian epistemology for themselves, or with the aid of reliable commentaries; the lesser lights meanwhile contented them- selves with Kant as he came through the refractory rays of Madame de Stael, Cousin, and Jouffroy. James Murdock — who was in an enviable position to know and whose candid Sketches of Modern Philosophy Especially Among the Germans is, considering its early date (1842), not only a good exposition of Ger- man idealism but also the first history of Transcendentalism in America — points out that the term transcendental as used by some of its American exponents would cer- tainly have been repudiated by Kant, who would have denominated their method not "transcendental" but "transcendent" (pp. 167-68). After giving Coleridge his due as an expositor of transcendentalism, Mur- dock continues in a strain which, while it suggests oversimplification, is illuminating. may adopt different principles; or, if they adopt the same principles, they may ex- press themselves in a very different man- ner. And, if we suppose the same persons, with only a moderate share of philosophic learning and philosophic tact, to attempt to reconstruct the philosophy of Cousin, by comparing it with the German systems from which it is taken, and at the same time to adopt Cousin's lax use of language; we may easily conceive what confusion of thought and obscurity of statement may appear on their pages. Now, the Transcen- dentalists, if I do not mistake, have thus followed Cousin. Of course, they differ con- siderably from one another; some following Cousin more closely, and others leaning more towards the German ; some preferring one set of Cousin's terms, and others an- other, or coining new ones to suit their fancy. After all, Linberg's translation of Cousin's Introduction to the History of Philosophy may be considered as the great storehouse, from which most of them — e.g. Brownson, Emerson, Parker, &c. — have derived their peculiar philosophical opin- ions, their modes of reasoning, and their forms of thought and expression (pp. 178- 79)- None of the Transcendentalists . . . are Philosophers by profession. Nearly all of them are clergymen, of the Unitarian school; . . . their aims are manifestly the- ological ; . . . they give [no] proof that they have devoted very great attention to phi- losophy as a science .... So far as I can judge, they have taken up the philosophy of . . . Cousin, and after comparing it ac- cording to their opportunity with that of the more recent German schools, have modified a little some of its dicta, and ap- plied them freely to scientific and practical theology .... They address us as if we all read and understood . . . Cousin, and were not ignorant of the speculations of the Ger- man pantheists (p. 177). Now, Cousin, who adopts and uses at his own pleasure the peculiar tenets and phra- seology of all systems, "causes his writings to exhibit not only great variety, but appar- ently, if not really, great inconsistency of terminology" (p. 178). Hence, different persons, aiming to follow him as a guide, may easily mistake his meaning, they The last sentence is too sweeping. As will be indicated later, Murdock's contention does not hold true for Parker and Hedge; there is some doubt about its applicability to Emerson; it fails to allow for the wide- spread popularity and influence of Cole- ridge, years before Linberg's and Henry's translations appeared ; nor does it recognize the vogue of Carlyle. More particularly, it does not take into account the lengthy dis- cussions of German thought in the periodi- cals of the day. 371 Certainly Emerson, unless he is to be put down as not knowing his own mind, felt and said that in so far as New England Transcendentalism owed anything to foreign sources, it owed a debt to Kant. He never mentioned Cousin in this connection. In short, eclecticism did not affect the basic thinking of the Transcendentalists except as some of the minor or peripheral figures were led to interpret the Kantian reason in terms of Cousin, so as to include 108 German Thought in America in it the "unreflective apperception of truth," inspiration, revelation, spontaneous faith, and intuition. 372 Brownson, for exam- ple, raised no objections, before 1843, to the all-inclusiveness of Cousin's spontaneous reason, which amounted at times to clair- voyance, and which Cousin variously spoke of as "an instinctive perception of truth, an entirely instinctive development of thoughts," "the absolute affirmation of truth, without reflection, — inspiration, — veritable revelation," "an original, irresis- tible, and unreflective perception of truth," and "pure apperception and spontaneous faith." 373 For Brownson, perhaps, it was true, as Murdock says, that the "radical principle of the Transcendental philosophy, the corner stone of the whole edifice, is Cousin's doctrine that Spontaneous Reason acquaints us with the true and essential nature of things." 374 But, then, it must be recalled that Brownson was never fairly launched as a Transcendentalist : the Sym- posium had hardly begun its meetings when, as Dr. Hedge (whose name the club bore for a while) recorded, "Orestes Brown- son met with us once or twice, but became unbearable, and was not afterward invit- ed. 375 Brownson 's fervent sponsoring of eclecti- cism contrasts sharply with Emerson's reserved attitude. Following his acquaint- ance with De Gerando's Histoire Comparee des Systemes de Philosophic 376 in 1830, 377 Emerson was led, in 1832, to take some cognizance of eclecticism, 378 and in 1833 he put down Cousin's translation of Tenne- mann's Grundriss 379 as a book to be read. The following June he heard Jouffroy lec- ture at the Sorbonne, 380 and then there is complete silence in his Journals on both Cousin and Jouffroy until March 4, 1838, at which time Ripley's Philosophical Miscel- lanies forced the French eclectics upon his attention. It was now almost a decade since he had become engrossed in Coleridge's interpretation of German critical metaphys- ics in Aids to Reflection?* 1 the Friend, 3 * 2 and the Biographia Liter aria; 3 * 3 while Car- lyle had been known to him since 1830 384 as the translator of Wilhelm Meister and, what is more to the purpose, since 1832 385 as the author of essays in a "Germanick" style on "new-light" subjects. He had approached Coleridge's philosophical works almost reverently, and had resolved to understand them; 386 while Carlyle served to give him "confidence" in his own principles. 387 Small wonder, therefore, that Cousin had no great appeal for him in 1838. After drinking the Coleridgean vintage, what Cousin had to offer was but new wine in old bottles, apt to put one's teeth on edge. Accordingly we find him recording Cousin's worth to him in 1838 as "a mere superficiality." What others considered Cousin's virtue — his clearness, his precision— Emerson consider- ed his great fault, for he found these qual- ities in Cousin "but unluckily never an inspiration." 388 And when he delivered his oration on "Literary Ethics" at Dartmouth on June 24, 1838, he employed the occasion to say : Take . . . the French eclecticism, which Cousin esteems so conclusive .... It avows great pretensions. It looks as if they had all Truth, in taking in all systems, and had nothing to do but sift and wash and strain, and the gold and diamonds would remain in the last colander. But Truth is such a fly-away, such a sly-boots, so un- transportable and unbarrelable a commod- ity, that it is as bad to catch as light .... Translate, collate, distil all the systems, it steads you nothing; for truth will not be compelled in any mechanical manner (Works, I, 171). Emerson's position here is noteworthy; for he agreed neither with Brownson, who accepted at face value Cousin's claim of having made the perfect synthesis of all existing philosophies nor with the orthodox for whom Cousin's arguments led into too many vagaries. Instead, he held that Cousin was not vague enough — that he was too precise, and that he made everything too beautifully simple. Himself able by now to Avenues of Transmission 109 make some headway reading German (though apparently he never read extensive- ly in Kant), he did not agree with those who, unable to read German, found Cousin an acceptable substitute. 389 THE CONTROVERSY OVER INFIDELITY Aside from the linguistic difficulties which Kant and his German confreres in philosophy and theology presented to American readers, a potent cause for Cou- sin's popularity lay in the fact that the Transcendentalists, desirous of popularizing their unpopular creed, were hesitant about citing their German sources 390 because of the horror felt by the orthodox at the men- tion of the names of Kant, Fichte, Schelling Hegel, Schleiermacher, De Wette, and Strauss. 391 They often recommended Cou- sin's simplifications of German thought to those unskilled in the German language and in the critical methodology as a means both to get across their ideas and, if possible, to direct hostile attention away from the Ger- mans and toward the relatively mild, com- promising eclectics, who had not yet acquir- ed the same infamous reputation. So far as orthodoxy was concerned, however, this was an idle gesture. For example, what Andrews Norton understood in 1839 to be the latest form of infidelity was represented not by Cousin (whom he does not so much as mention in his Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity or in his Remarks that fol- lowed) but by ideas enunciated by Emer- son the year before in the Divinity School address and, more particularly, what lay behind them, namely, German philosophy and theology. The attack is upon the "modern German School of Infidelity," 392 represented chiefly by Hegel, De Wette, Schleiermacher, and Strauss. 393 Norton's pamphlet defends the "Exclusive Principle" that "Miracles recorded in the New Testa- ment are the only proof of the divine origin of Christianity," as against the "higher crit- icism" of the Germans. Norton's Discourse provoked Ripley's anonymous reply, "The Latest Form of Infidelity" Examined. Heav- ily documented as this polemic is with citations of the Bible, classical authorities, and European as well as American theologi- ans, Ripley does not get round to the French eclectics until the 129th page, where Cousin's and Jouffroy's opinions of Spinoza are discussed. 394 After this belated refer- ence, neither is again mentioned. The empha- sis throughout is on German theology, and especially upon a defence of Spinoza, Schleiermacher, and De Wette against Norton's charges. Norton's reply, Remarks on a Pamphlet Entitled "The Latest Form of Infidelity" Examined, although the author was aware of his opponent's identity, is less free of names than the first Discourse and resolves itself into three parts, one each designed to substantiate his views (which Ripley had attacked) on Spinoza (pp. 11-27), on Schleiermacher (pp. 27-52), and on De Wette (pp. 52-70). Again there is the same meticulous care as in the Discourse to give sources and render translations strictly, but nowhere are the French eclectics mentioned. Ripley had the last word in two more letters, one on Spinoza and another on Schleiermacher and De Wette. 395 Absorbed as he is, in these letters, in the central prob- lem, he gives chapter and verse for every statement made, citing frequently the works of the men whose ideas are under debate, but never so much as mentioning Cousin. 396 Nor did the issues long remain beclouded for the layman once the editors, reviewers, and watchdogs of orthodox the- ology set out to instruct the general reading public on the sources of Transcendentalism and the evils to be apprehended from that quarter. It is noteworthy that while the Rev. James Waddel Alexander and Albert B. Dod placed at the head of their famous article on "Transcendentalism" in the Princeton Review 391 the titles of Cousin's Introduction and his Elements and of Emer- son's Divinity School address (ostensibly in- tending to review these works), they did not 110 German Thought in America get round to an examination of Cousin until they had first devoted twenty-nine pages to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel as the originators of New England Transcenden- talism. 388 A year later Dr. Charles Hodge, the founder and moving spirit of the Princeton Review, lent his voice to the argument. 399 We know, he begins, that this latest form of infidelity "had its origin in German phi- losophy." Like Alexander and Dod, he was diverted from his intention of presenting a review of contemporary American publica- tions bearing on the subject by launching an attack on atheism in Germany, as he under- stood it. Although he set out to review Nor- ton's and Ripley's pamphlets, he shifted, at the very outset, to a castigation of Hegel, 400 Schleiermacher, Strauss, Gans, Meyen, Richter, and Marheineke. 401 Cousin is mentioned once in passing. 402 Andrew Preston Peabody, in his review of Norton's Discourse, 402 also slurs over Cousin. The fight, everybody understood, was over Ger- man idealism, not French eclecticism — over Kant, not Cousin. Transcendentalism, everybody understood, bore the mark "Made in Germany." 404 Only Brownson and the translators Linberg and Henry (who were not among the select circle of Tran- scendentalists), and to a lesser degree Rip- ley and W. H. Channing, cared anything about eclecticism per se, or about Cousin and Jouffroy. It was well known, also, that the French presented nothing better than a very diluted form 405 of what the Tran- scendentalists considered the true philoso- phy, and what the orthodox called the infidelity of Germany. Although Cousin and Jouffroy played a part in provoking the controversy, the fight itself vitally involved neither, but centered upon German philoso- phy and theology, where it was believed the American disciples were learning their "infidelity." The influence of the theological principles of Herder, Schleiermacher, De Wette, and Strauss upon American theology is a matter of more than passing moment but at pre- sent virtually unexplored. Portions of the works of the first three were translated by New Englanders and used by the Transcen- dentalists in their religious arguments, while the work of Strauss, especially Das Leben Jesu (1835), was by no means un- known in America. Ripley was enthusiastic in his Letters and his articles in the Christian Examiner about Herder, Schleiermacher, and De Wette. 406 George Bancroft, during his stay in Berlin, had been on intimate terms with Schleiermacher; and Carl Follen had worked in close association with De Wette at Basel before coming to America. Increasingly during the twen- ties and thirties, these German theologians ' were presented to the review-reading American public. Herder's ideas were discussed as early as 1808 407 in the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, * w and the Christian Disciple and Theological Review for 1820-1821 printed a ' translation of Brief e das Studium der Theolo- gie betreffend. 409 By 1822 even the Religious Inquirer 410 of Hartford was ready to take cognizance of Herder, and three years later Bancroft contributed his essay on Herder j to the North American Review. 411 The next year the New York Mirror 412, published some translations, and by 1834 the Knicker- ' bocker 413 joined in the work of making Her- der known in America. The publication, the year before, by James Marsh of Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry 414 inspired Ripley's enthusiastic "Life of Herder," of 56 pages, in the Christian Examiner. 41 * This interest was well sustained 416 until 1841, when the New York reprint of the 1800 London edi- tion of T. O. Churchill's translation of Herder's Ideen provoked interest in Herder beyond theological circles. Herder's idea of the organic in the history of man received a thorough airing in the magazines; while his religion, which he said was comprised in "the one theme" of preaching "the full humanity of human nature" and his phi- losophy, which taught "the philosophy of Avenues of Transmission 111 human nature" as enthusiastically as did Emerson, were welcomed by those who felt the stirrings within them of the Newness. 417 The vogue which the works of Wilhelm Martin Lebrecht De Wette enjoyed in America is attributable mainly 418 to the inclusion of Theodore; or, the Skeptic's Con- version* 19 and of Human Life; or. Practical Ethics* 20 in Ripley's Specimens. The former elicited two long reviews, one by Barnas Sears in the Christian Review for December, 1841, 421 and the other by C. A. Bartol in the Christian Examiner for January, 1842. 422 Both temper their criticism with praise. 423 While De Wette provoked no great to- do in the literary journals, the theological reviews continued for years to make him a controversial subject. The American translations of Theodore and of Human Life went into second printings in 1856; and Parker's translation of De Wette 's Critical and Historical Introduction to the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament*' 1 * went through three editions by 1858. In that year Frederick Frothingham offered his translation of An Historical-Critical Intro- duction to the Canonical Books of the New Testament,* 2 *' as a "monument in the history of New Testament literature," possessing a standard of "high authority and ... a per- manent interest and value" (p. hi). This statement went unchallenged. The general silence of the opposition on the appearance of these last two works suggests that by 1858 the opposition had become passive, and that the more liberal theologians were inclined to accept De Wette 's researches and interpretations for what they were worth. 426 Although parts of Schleiermacher's works were available in British translations, 427 and Ripley was his enthusiastic exponent (speaking of him as "the greatest thinker who ever undertook to fathom the philoso- phy of religion" 428 ), Schleiermacher en- countered strenuous opposition from first to last. Ripley's advocacy, for example, in his Letters to Norton and in his long reviews in the Christian Examiner, was almost a single- handed one. While the threads may be ex- ceedingly hard to run down, it is to be desired that students of American religious thought examine closely the effect which the widespread publicity attending the Norton-Ripley controversy gave to Schlei- ermacher. It does not seem fantastic to ex- pect to find that the liberal theologians and the orthodox, by reaction, should have been influenced by the emphasis which Schleiermacher placed upon a spiritual Christianity without proselytism, priest, dogma, or intellectual limitation, upon the social elements of religion, and upon the right and duty of the individual to assert his true individualism in his religion. 429 He was never popularly known in America, nor even widely read by the clergy, so that he never exerted what might be termed either a popular vogue or a wave of influence among the laity. 430 But that he left his mark upon the Unitarian religious con- sciousness appears in several instances. 431 Least apathetic was the American recep- tion of Das Leben Jesu by David Friedrich Strauss. Published originally in 1835, it was noticed in American periodicals as early as April, 1837. 432 The most important review which the book inspired in America was one in the Christian Examiner* 33 by Theo- dore Parker, whose resume-critique served admirably in lieu of the book itself for those unable to read it in the original. In 1843, however, the first American edition ap- peared in New York, three years after the first French version 434 but three years before the first British translation. 435 Mean- while Parker declared that the work "is valuable to every student of the Scriptures, who has sufficient sagacity to discern the true and the false ; to any other it is danger- ous, very dangerous, from its 'specious ap- pearance.'" 436 A second edition was called for in 1845; and a new version, from the fourth German edition, was produced by Marian Evans in 1855, reprinted in i860. By 1842, knowledge of Strauss's book was 112 German Thought in America well disseminated, and the controversy which it provoked was so well under way that Ripley, writing in the Dial for April, 1842, predicted that "this book may be regarded as the forerunner of a theological controversy which, if once begun, will not be soon ended." 437 It goes without saying that the end is not yet, for although the name of Strauss is today seldom used in theological arguments, many of the ques- tions raised by him are still argued on lines indicated by him in 1835. Many of the threads of the twentieth-century contro- versy of fundamentalism versus liberalism, if traced back, lead directly to Strauss, although they need not be considered as originating there. Most of the issues were latent in American theology long before Strauss's book became known, but he did serve to crystallize the opposition to con- servatism and to make it articulate. 438 A significant by-product, perhaps better regarded a parallel movement, of the theo- logical ferment in New England during the thirties and forties was the rapidity with which the liberal-minded as well as a por- tion of the orthodox clergymen learned German. However widely they differed in their views with those advanced by the Germans, they felt increasingly the need for knowing the latest theories emanating from men like Niebuhr, Eichhorn, Heng- stenberg, Herder, De Wette, Tholuck, and Strauss. 439 Increasingly one finds that the controversially-minded and review-writing clergy of New England not only read but studied, however disagreeable some of them found the principles they encountered, the German works which marked the progress of the "higher criticism." 440 That some were more glib than profound in their knowledge is apparent; and that there was some lip service, springing from a desire to do what was being done by those who set the intellectual pace, is patent in some of the perfunctory reviews and super- ficial articles appearing in the periodicals. But among people who matter — people like Stuart, Marsh, Emerson, Ripley, Parker, and Margaret Fuller — there was no pretend- ing. The group of young men who learned the language in Germany — Hedge, the two Everetts, Ticknor, Bancroft, Calvert, Cogs- well, Motley, and Longfellow — were com- pletely masters of the language; while people like Emerson, Ripley, Clarke, Park- er, Dwight, and Margaret Fuller, although mainly self-taught, made no show of know- ing what they did not know. All these be- came proficient as students of German, though several of them, notably Parker and Margaret Fuller, professed to have trouble interpreting Kant and Fichte — as who has not ? Their professions are indicative rather of a sincere desire to read German literature in the original and to fathom Ger- man thought than of any reluctance to do so. If they had professed to comprehend completely the intricacies of German specu- lative idealism, we should be justified in ; doubting their proficiency. The inability to • read German resided oftener among the opponents than the exponents of Transcen- dentalism, although there were, as has al- ready been observed, a good number of theologians, editors, and critics among the orthodox who got their knowledge of Ger- man thought at first hand. That their atti- tude was not always one of uncompromising antagonism, or based on inadequate knowl- edge, is illustrated vividly in a little book of two hundred pages, entitled Sketches of Modern Philosophy Especially Among the Germans, published in 1842 by the Rev. James Murdock, a retired Congregational minister then residing in New Haven. 441 Murdoch's Moral Philosophy among the Germans Murdock's book is illustrative both of a thoroughness which entitles it to a greater importance in the history of American phi- losophy than has been recognized and of a method at once objective and unbiased in a degree relatively rare during the period. 442 After the introductory chapter, in which Avenues of Transmission 113 Murdock distinguishes between two funda- mental "modes of philosophizing," namely empirical and metaphysical, and a discus- sion, in Chapters II and III, of the expo- nents of these two methods, Chapter IV sketches German philosophy prior to Kant. The next four chapters (pp. 44-92) present a lucid exposition of Kant. 443 Among the Anti-Critical philosophers, who have sought to "bridge the impassable gulf of Kant, which separates phenomena and noumena" p. 94), are mentioned Reinhold and Fichte. The latter's doctrine of Science (IVissen- schaftslehre), based as it is on the self-evi- dent equation, A = A, leads, says Mur- dock (following Tennemann), to Fichte 's "annihilating, by his idealism, the evidence of the objectivity of any sensible world, leaving us only a system of empty images" (p. 100). Tennemann's Grundriss (the 5th Ger. ed., by A. Wendt, Leipzig, 1829), which Murdock had before him as he wrote, and which he often refers to (always giving ac- curate page citations), supplied his informa- tion on Fichte and Schelling, as well as for his briefer sketches of Bouterwek, Bardili, Eschenmayer, Wagner, and Krause. Hegel's philosophy, which forms the subject of Chapter XI (pp. 118-28), Mur- dock professes to have studied earnestly only to find himself "after a fortnight's hard study . . . nearly as ignorant of the whole process, and of every part of it, as when I first sat down to examine it" (pp. 120-21). Accordingly, in his efforts to distinguish between Schelling and Hegel (p. 121), Mur- dock makes a slight attempt to draw upon his own reading of Hegel but comes soon to the easier alternative of quoting, for the remaining six pages given to Hegel, Krug's Encyclopddisch-Philosophisches Lexikon (ed. 1832-1838), although he is constrained to add that Krug handles Hegel "with too much severity" (p. 126). The issue of the Icontroversy following Hegel's death in 1831 Murdock says he has no means of knowing. Instinctive philosophy, with Jacobi as lead, forms the subject of Chapter XII (pp. 129-40), the whole of which Murdock derived from Krug and, more particularly, from Tennemann. Although strictly deriva- tive, the sketch is not inadequate. Chapter XIII (pp. 141-55), on French eclecticism, centers attention on Cousin, and recounts his focal principles as contained in Linberg's translation of the Introduction to the History of Philosophy. The next section (pp. 156-66) deals with Coleridge, especially his A ids, as an intermediary in transplanting idealism from Germany to America. The origin and radical principles of American Transcen- dentalism are discussed in Chapter XV (pp. 167-88), a portion of which has already been quoted; and the volume concludes with a chapter on the psychology of Friedrich A. Rauch (pp. 189-201). Elementary and derivative though por- tions of Murdock's book are, it is, nonethe- less, one of the various avenues through which German thought filtered into Amer- ica. It is especially significant as indicating that by 1842, at least, critical transcenden- talism received sometimes an unbiased hearing, even from people temperamentally opposed to the whole system of German idealistic thought and fearful of its conse- quences for orthodox theology. While the last section aims to correct the impression that only the greater German metaphysicians exerted an influence on American thought by pointing out that men like Schleiermacher and De Wette also had their day, each in his way, it is neces- sary to reassert that the greater influence is, of course, attributable to the major Ger- man philosophers. Although their influence is not always readily discernible, they nevertheless left their mark on the Ameri- can consciousness, for there was, before 1838, when the first English translation of Kant's first critique appeared, 441 a much deeper and more widely diffused knowledge of Kant and his associates than is common- ly allowed. This is not to assume that either German philosophy or theology ever became a commodity for popular consumption, or 114 German Thought in America that the German metaphysicians and the- ologians ever found a large buying public in Boston or elsewhere in America. Yet there was in Boston and Cambridge, about 1830, a definite predilection for things German. Already in 1825, on Dr. Carl Follen's arrival in Boston, he found there "much inclina- tion" to study German ; and before the year was out, he had secured, through the inter- vention of Du Ponceau and Ticknor, an appointment to teachGermanatHarvard. 445 Only a decade earlier, Ticknor, in his efforts to learn German, had found useful German books hard to get in Boston. 446 Now the picture had changed: the interest in Ger- man had gained so much that Lafayette spoke of Boston and Cambridge as "la por- tion des Etats Unis oil la litterature alle- mande est le plus en honneur." 447 "Before Channing died, in 1842," says Barrett Wen- dell, "you could find in Boston few edu- cated people who could not talk with glib de- light about German philosophy, German literature, and German music." 448 EARLY EXPONENTS IN AMERICA Among the earliest and more potent in- fluences that brought about the "German craze" in New England (for so it was called by those who opposed "Germanism") was the personal influence of Carl Beck and Carl Follen, both native-born German uni- versity men, who, falling under political suspicion in Germany, and finding every avenue for academic or public advancement closed to them there, came together to America in 1824. From Beck to Hedge CARL BECK Beck, younger than Follen by two years, had enjoyed unusual educational advan- tages as the stepson of the theologian De Wette, as a student at the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, and Tubingen, and as docent at Basel. In America, he soon be- came associated, through the influence of Ticknor, with Cogswell, then director of the Round Hill School at Northampton, Mas- sachusetts. He taught Latin at Round Hill, developed a gymnasium there, and trans- lated Jahn's Deutsche Tnrnkunst. i * 9 In 1830, with two others, he opened a school at Philipstown on the Hudson, opposite West Point. Here, as at Northampton, the study of languages, especially German, was emphasized. In 1832, he was elected pro- fessor of Latin at Harvard, in which capa- city he served for eighteen years before retiring. Conscientious, thorough, and in- i dependent after the German academic tra- dition, he did much to introduce German . scholarly and educational methods in the United States, 450 and in this capacity as well as through his active participation in civic and political affairs, 451 wielded a strong personal influence in and about Cam- bridge. On terms of familiarity with men like Ticknor, Everett, Cogswell, and Ban- croft — the first generation of American students to study in Germany — Dr. Beck and Dr. Follen were held up by them to the younger generation as the ideal products of the German university system, and both did much to inspire ambitious young Amer- ican students to study in Germany. CARL FOLLEN The career of Dr. Carl Follen was especi- ally influential. Dismissed from his lecture- ship at Jena for his participation at Giessen and at Jena in the so-called Burschen- schaftsbewegung and charged with complic- ity in Carl Sand's assassination of Kotzebue, he was hounded out of Germany by the reactionary authorities. Unable at once to make satisfactory professional connections in America, he and his fellow-exile Beck were ready to turn to anything — farm- ing or day-labor — when Lafayette came to their rescue. Through him, Du Ponceau, Early Exponents in America 115 and Ticknor, Follen became, in 1825, the first instructor of German at Harvard Col- lege, giving at the same time lectures on civil law. Besides teaching German classes and lecturing on jurisprudence before se- lected audiences of Boston lawyers, he gave practical lessons on the new art of gymnastics with which the name of Jahn is associated, wrote his own textbooks, 452 be- sides philosophical and theological trea- tises, 453 organized a German club, 454 advo- cated Pestalozzian and Froebelian theories of education, 455 contributed essays to the critical reviews, preached occasionally in the Unitarian churches in and around Boston, lectured on German literature and philoso- phy, and in the fall of 1828 became instruc- tor in ethics and ecclesiastical history in the Harvard Divinity School. His marriage the year before to Eliza Lee Cabot opened to him the circle of the socially elite in Boston, his intellectual versatility having already won for him an important place in intellec- tual circles. 456 By March, 1830, he acquired American citizenship, 457 and in August of the same year Harvard College elevated him to the position of Professor of German Literature. Successful and respected in educational, as well as public, affairs, he was readily accepted by the several literary and educa- tional groups of Cambridge and Boston and became at once their guide and interpreter of German culture. 458 His influence was not purely personal nor local. For example, with J. Q. Adams, who was an admirer of German literature, he carried on an ani- mated correspondence, in which he acted in the capacity of guide and critic. To Thomas Tracey, the translator of Fouqu6's Undine, he gave encouragement as well as much practical assistance by way of explaining obscure allusions and difficult passages; while both Marsh and Henry turned to him :for advice in their efforts to make Kant and Coleridge intelligible to the American read- ing public. 459 He became an ardent abolitionist, joining the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1834. His "Address to the People of the United States Concerning the Problem of Slavery" contributed largely to his failure of re-election to the professorship of Ger- man at Harvard when the appointment for five years expired in August, 1835. His bold stand as an abolitionist also led to his resignation, in 1838, as pastor of the First Unitarian Church in New York City.* 60 For the remaining five years of his life (after the termination of his Harvard connections), he taught German privately, contributed to periodicals, began a work on psychology, and served in several Unitarian pulpits, ardently battling against all forms of oppres- sion that seemed to him to endanger demo- cracy. At the age of forty-four he perished in the fire of the steamer Lexington while returning from an engagement in New York City, where he had delivered a course of lectures on German literature before the Merchants' Library Association. 461 Follen's association with leaders of thought in New England did not stop with Channing, Marsh, and Henry. During the period covered by his diary and during the remainder of his life (devoted as it was in part to the Unitarian ministry), he associ- ated with such men as Ware, Palfrey, Pea- body, and Higginson and freely discussed with them theological, philosophical, and literary matters, at the same time stimulat- ing their interest in his broad, enlightened views on religion and ethics. 468 It is in connection with his ethical teach- ings in the Harvard Divinity School from 1828 to 1830 that we can best trace his in- fluence, for his position brought him in close contact with prominent Unitarians oustide the College circle as well as with the theological students who were afterwards to become the leaders in the Transcenden- tal movement. It is in this connection, also, that we can best reconstruct his ethical teachings, for the subject matter, if not the form, of his lectures before his students 463 is preserved in his popular lectures on "Moral 116 German Thought in America Philosophy" delivered in the winter of 1 830- 1 83 1 464 toa' 'large andappreciative audience" in Boston and subsequently printed to form the third volume of his collected Works. As a representative of German idealism, which he considered "the system of funda- mental and regulative principles of all the various branches of learning and knowl- edge," 465 Follen utilized every means at his command to further the reception of it by informal discussion, by correspondence, and by lecture. 466 For him, German philosophy was no separate field sundered from litera- ture, or education, or ethics, or religion. Each of these areas (and he labored in all four) was related by him to German ideal- ism, grounded in Kantian transcendental- ism. 467 For example, the system of ethics that he taught had its basis in the Kantian terminology and ideology, in which he had been schooled by his German university training. For him, Kant had laid the foundation for all modern intellectual life ; 468 to the Kantian principles he referred all speculative questions, and by them he squared all his practical teachings. But he was no slavish follower of Kant. His course of fifteen lectures on Moral Philos- ophy demonstrates that while the entire fabric of his thought rests upon the Kantian epistemology, he had made himself master also of the leading systems of morals prior to, and of several since, Kant, 469 and that he boldly deviated and dissented from Kant's position in several important particulars. What is especially noteworthy about Follen's presentation of Kant is that he in no wise initiated the practice that later became so common among New England Transcendentalistsand Unitarians of the left wing, namely, to slur over the negative con- clusions of the first Critique with regard to the inability of the Pure Reason to prove its Ideas true. On that head he said at the outset : This theory of human knowledge, pro- posed by Kant, particularly in his great work, "The Critique of Pure Reason," must have proved unfavorable to the establish- ment of moral and religious principles if Kant had not assigned to reason another, a practical function, which, in his own judg- ment, far surpassed its theoretical use. This highest function of reason consists in laying down the laws of morality. 470 Follen's independence of the master appears most markedly in his rebellion against Kant's categorical imperative, because Kant's rule of morality is "too general and too vague to serve as the supreme rule of conduct, or to enable us to deduce from it any practical duty." 471 But his greatest objection stems from Kant's definition of the categorical imperative in terms that lead to too "strange a dispropor- tion between the grounds of faith and the demands of duty." "According to Kant, ; religion is founded wholly and exclusively . on morality," 472 and this proposition Follen is neither prepared nor willing to admit. 473 Follen's chief departure from Kant, then, arises from his objection to the rigor of the Kantian doctrine by which the moral prin- ciple becomes the sole foundation of reli- gion. While holding with Kant, as with Fichte, that moral law is the utterance of reason, he sided with Schiller in rejecting Kant's doctrine that an act loses its moral character if it is performed for the sake of happiness or pleasure. 474 He agrees with Fries that moral action springs from con- viction through reason, but disagrees with his demand that the conviction of the individual should necessarily coincide with that of the cultured man. Instead, Follen taught that every individual man must determine by his own reason in what his duty consists. His action, to be ethical, must proceed from choice, or free will, and from a desire for happiness. Since happiness increases as one advances toward perfec- tion, the ultimate object of ethical conduct is perfection. In this respect religion and morality are alike, for the true element of religion, like that of morality, is the innate desire of man for the greatest happiness. 475 But this desire, he is at pains to point out, Early Exponents in America 117 does not identify religion with morality. 478 It does no more than indicate that both rest upon the same foundation. 477 "On the whole," concludes Spindler, "Follen con- siders religion not as a theological specula- tion, not as a belief in dogmas, not as moral action, but as a pious contemplation of the harmonious working of the universe; as a natural impulse toward and a reverent feeling of dependence toward the Infinite Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being 478 — a view quite in harmony with Schleiermacher." 479 Schleiermacher and Follen alike followed Kant in distinguishing between pure and practical reason and in throwing aside the possibility of knowing God by means of cognition. With Schleiermacher, Follen held that religion is an essential element of human nature, indispensable to the devel- opment of the inner life of man ; that it does not seek, like metaphysics, to explain the universe, nor, like morals, to advance and perfect the world by the free will of man; but that the finite individual's pious contemplation of the order and majes- ty of the external universe raises in him a consciousness of his oneness with the in- finite All and a feeling of dependence upon the Author of life. 480 Follen tells us that while he was still pursuing his studies in Germany, he felt "the inefficacy of the established forms of faith and worship," 481 and was led by Schleiermacher to envisage a universal church resting for foundation and support solely upon the natural inter- ests of man in religion. This church of man- kind was to be reared on the principles of freedom, intimate spiritual intercourse among men, and the tendency toward in- finite progress in human nature. These ideas he brought with him from Germany. By 1835 he had developed them into a grandly conceived plan of religious reform for the United States. On August 13 of that year he wrote to his old Giessen friend, Christian Sartorius, then resident in Mexico, about his plan by which he hoped "to put an end forever to schisms, while in the one general church each sect shall appear merely as the representative of one of a number of confessions, all of which are important for the information of the whole church." 482 These and related ideas, derived chiefly from Schleiermacher, were reworked by Follen into a philosophy of religion in- dependent of any American influence and long before he knew anything of the New England movement. In all likelihood, the close parallelism between the religious thought of the New England Transcenden- talists and his own (and with that of Schlei- ermacher) is in some measure attributable to Follen himself. His forceful presentation of this religion, its social nature, its creed- lessness, and its emphasis upon individual- ism found a ready hearing among Unita- rians who were veering toward the left, to- ward the New Views. During the two years following 1828, when he began lecturing on ethics and ecclesiastical history in the Har- vard Divinity School, he had unusual oppor- tunities for sowing the seeds of his ideas among the young theological students who heard him. His broad, liberal interpretation of the New Testament, his doctrine of the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, moral freedom, the dignity of human na- ture, and the incarnation of God in human- ity which progresses constantly toward per- fection, toward the divine life to come — these ideas made an impression on his stu- dents. Prepared to lend willing ears to a teacher of a religion that would liberate them alike from the bondage of a harsh Cal- vinism and from a torpid Unitarianism, the more liberal-minded among them were inspired by the sense of inner freedom which this Follenesque religion of Schleiermacher 's offered; 483 and though they may have been unaware of its derivation from Schleier- macher, when they later went into the new religious movement, they brought to it a critical attitude toward theology strongly reminiscent of Schleiermacher. Socio-religious minded as Follen was, it 118 German Thought in America would have been strange indeed if he had not formed definite political views. Follen was, from the time of his arrival in America, intensely interested in American politics; and, as we have already observed, his par- ticipation in public affairs cost him his pro- fessorship at Harvard. Thereafter, for the rest of his brief life, he was freer than ever to engage in public controversy. In the realm of political thought, Follen, along with Lieber, was among the first to add a third to the two main currents of thought upon which American political theory was developing — English utilitarianism and French socialism. The strain of German idealism which they added was at first in- significant in comparison with the older and more firmly entrenched philosophies, but from the first it provided a salutary leaven, and eventually it became a significant in- gredient in the evolving theory of the young nation. 484 Follen's political views are to be found primarily in his lectures on moral philoso- phy, his A ddress to the People of the United States on the Subject of Slavery (1834), an( i an article "On Peace and War." 485 Al- though he was familiar with the history of civil law and with the works of Niebuhr, Savigny, Hugo, and Loehr, he followed in the main the philosophical approach of Kant and the German natural-rights philos- ophers by deducing all political principles from man's nature as a moral and rational personality. 486 Man's moral and rational nature implies the right and duty of each man to employ his faculties in such a way that he and his fellowmen do justice to themselves in all their relations to nature, to their fellow men, and to God, 487 whence it follows that men have found it convenient to form themselves into "a society for maintaining the rights of all by common legislation and administration," for "this is the origin, the essence, and the object of the state." 488 Such a state, resting upon a contract, was, in Follen's opinion, no artifi- cial contrivance but the natural state of man, though it could have no existence as a personality having will, reason, or con- science apart from the men who compose it. To this end, a republic, in which the major- ity rule, is best adapted. 489 Follen's argument against slavery is founded on the natural right of personal freedom based on morality and justice. 490 In that cause he was an energetic agitator from the first and one of the first to suffer for it. His political theory, inspired by a range of theorists including the Roman jurisconsults, Mably, Locke, Kant, Fichte, and Robespierre, the teaching of Jesus, and the principles of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, was calculated to appeal to men like Garrison and Sumner, with whom he maintained a shoulder-to-shoulder associa- tion in the agitation against slavery at the same time that he kept up a lively exchange of ideas with men like Channing and Parker on the more general topic of the nature and foundations of the state. 491 The blending of ethics and politics is as old at least as Plato. Throughout the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century political philosophy was commonly regarded as a branch of moral philosophy. But the unique conception of the relation- ship between the rights and the duties of the individual, which identifies the New Eng- land agitators with the German idealists while distinguishing them both from other groups, is not common to earlier schools of thought. Earlier theorists had often enough differentiated between political duties and political rights, but "the derivation of individual rights from individual duty and the peculiar conceptions of freedom and duty which made this possible had not been developed before the time of Kant." 492 The New England and the German tran- scendentalists alike held that since man can not become free by liberation from law, he was to be made free by subjection to the law of his own will. But such a solution could rest only upon a conception of indivi- dual man as the ultimate moral unit, capable Early Exponents in America 119 of imposing upon himself a law emanating from his own will, but of a general charac- ter, for this moral capacity is identical in all men. 493 It was this capacity of man, this autonomous will, whose existence Kant had been at great pains to demonstrate, that Channing and his followers accepted intui- tively on the evidence of their inner persua- sion or conscience. Whether it be Kant's conception of "practical reason," of the "categorical imperative" resting on a "spontaneous, autonomous, universal, and free will," or Channing's idea that "Man's rights belong to him as a moral being, as capable of perceiving moral distinctions, as a subject of moral obligations," or Emerson's doctrine of the origin of all government in the moral identity of man, 494 the foundation is the same. "The super- structure of political and social theory is built in each case upon what Hegel desig- nated 'Morality' (Moralitat) as distinguished from 'abstract law' (das abstrakte Recht), on the one hand, and 'social ethics' (Sittlichkeit) , on the other." 495 Follen's doctrine was ideally adapted to the purposes of the New Englanders in pro- testing against the existing restrictions which hindered the growth of the individual to the full stature of his moral and rational nature and their advocacy of a self-reliant individualism. Yet there are indications to suggest that they caught only the broad implications of the Kantian moral-political philosophy without troubling themselves much about the details. For example, Dr. Channing, in his Discourse Occasioned by the Death of the Rev. Dr. Follen (1840), said: His intellect . . . had one quality which, whether justly or not, prevented its exten- sive action on our community. It did not move fast enough for us. It was too deliber- ate, too regular, too methodical, too anxious to do full justice to a subject, for such an impatient people as we are. He did not daz- zle men by sudden, bold, exaggerated con- ceptions. In his writings he seemed com- pelled to unfold a subject in its order; and sometimes insisted on what might have been left to the quick conception of the hearer. 498 Channing's passage expresses a common attitude of the Transcendentalists toward the Germans. "Impatient" as they were to grasp the "sudden, bold, exaggerated con- ceptions," they caught the broad import of Kant's (in this case, Follen's) demonstra- tion of the innate moral capacity of man in his political nature, but passed over the systematic demonstration itself, meanwhile turning to the French and English commen- taries, supplied by Madame de Stael, Cousin, Coleridge, and Carlyle, as being more "dazzling." Kant's practical reason became by a "quick intuition" and with little regard for its epistemological foundations, the unlimited intuitive capacity of man. In politics and ethics, as truly as in the con- ception of God, they "took to Germany what they sought there." 497 Circumstances of this kind make it diffi- cult to ascertain the extent of Follen's in- fluence upon the young men of the day, or to determine definitely the direct influence which he exerted on such students of Ger- man thought as Emerson, Alcott, Ripley, Parker, Clarke, W. H. Channing, and Mar- garet Fuller. Emerson, for example, was a resident in Divinity Hall at the time when Follen joined the Harvard staff, and again in 1828-1829. 498 Intimate as both he and Emerson were with Dr. Channing, they must have met, and Emerson must have become acquainted with Follen's religious views. 499 Considering, moreover, that Fol- len and Emerson became, in a manner, rival candidates to assist the Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., at Old North Church during the winter of 1 828-1 829, Emerson receiving 74 to Follen's 3 votes, 500 it is all the more likely that the two should have known each other : although Emerson's references to Follen are scant indeed. In the absence of stronger external evidence, the merely internal evidence is not sufficient to establish direct influence. One is tempted to read a special meaning into Cabot's assertion that Emer- son's differences with his congregation on the Communion service were symptoms of 120 German Thought in America deeper differences— questionings not so much about particular doctrines and obser- vances as about their sanction and author- ity, and that they had begun to declare themselves when he was still in the Divinity School, "listening to the schemes of the Liberal Theologians." 601 Follen would qual- ify as one of these "Liberal Theologians" who set Emerson to dissenting. But we do not know that the young candidate heard Follen ; we can only surmise that he should have; and surmises, in the case of Emerson, are hazardous. One is tempted, also, to take such ser- mons as have been preserved from this early period of Emerson's ministry and relate them to Follen's utterances. The coincidences of thought are extensive and startling. Among them might be listed these: the same criticism of ecclesiastical authority as resting upon antiquity; the same insistence that every individual must test his religion for himself and for his own time; the same criticism of formal Christi- anity and the same repugnance for conven- tional prayer. Both define religion and ethics in like terms — the terms of Schleier- macher ; and both appear to have reshaped the mental processes of man, as defined by Kant, in the terms of Schleiermacher to include under the "Reason" that "highest faculty of the soul, which never reasons, never proves; it simply perceives"; 602 whence it follows that both agree with Schleiermacher that "that pious contempla- tion of the order and majesty of the exter- nal universe raises in the finite individual a consciousness of his oneness with the infinite All." To this parallelism between Emer- son and Schleiermacher we shall have oc- casion to return later. Here it is enough to remark that it were a nice solution to the problem of how Emerson came by his views so like Schleiermacher's if Follen could def- initely be put down as the intermediary, but the evidence to establish such a connection appears to be missing. Indeed, such purely objective evidence as is at hand suggests that Follen's enthu- siasm for German thought and art left Emerson cold at this particular time. Cer- tainly this much is certain: Emerson was not persuaded by Follen, as were Clarke, Parker, and Ripley, to take up the study of the German language, literature, theology, and philosophy. In 1824, he wrote to his brother William, then in Gottingen: If you think it every way advisable, in- disputably, absolutely important that I sh[oul]d do as you have done & go to Gfottingen] — & you can easily decide — why say it distinctly & I will make the sacrifice of time & take the risk of expense immediately. So of studying German . . . . ' Say particularly if German & Hebrew be worth reading; for tho' I hate to study \ them cordially I yet will the moment I can ; count my gains. Had I not better put on my hat & take ship for the Elbe ? sos Here is no great reverence for anything that comes from "the paradise of diction- aries and critics." 604 Four years later, ■ during Emerson's second residence at the Divinity Hall, Dr. Hedge "tried to interest him in German literature, but he laughingly said that as he was entirely ignorant of the subject, he should assume that it was not worth knowing." 506 This was at a time when Follen had already labored for three years at Harvard, though he had not yet begun his lectures in the Divinity School. Al- though Emerson had placed Madame de Stael's Germany on his list of "Books In- quirenda" as early as 1821 606 and professed, the next year, to be delighted by Stewart's "beautiful and instructive abridgment of the thousand volumes of Locke, Leibnitz, Voltaire, Boyle, Kant and the rest," 607 his general attitude toward German art and learning in 1828 appears not to have been materially changed from what it was in 1822, when he said, in a letter to his friend William Withington of Andover, "I am delighted to hear there is such a profound studying of German and Hebrew, Park- hurst and Jahn, and such other names as the memory aches to think of, on foot at Early Exponents in America 121 Andover." 508 The very names one encoun- tered in the German were an ache to the memory. In spite of the enthusiasm and energy of the new professor of German at his Alma Mater, German had as yet no great attractions for Emerson. The stimula- tion, when it came, beginning in 1 829-1 830, came mainly in consequence of his reading Coleridge and Carlyle, who gave him a desire to read Goethe in the original. 509 Simultaneously with his interest in Goethe and the intellectual ferment caused by his first acquaintance with German transcen- dental philosophy, as relayed by Coleridge and Carlyle, came a curiosity also to know more about Schiller. And at this point (about 1831-1832) Follen, who during Emerson's days in the Divinity School apparently meant little to him, entered to contribute his bit toward the unmaking and remaking of Emerson's mind. 510 In October, 1832, while he was groping for a philosophy by which to square his heart by his head, his reading of Carlyle's essay on Schiller in Fraser's S11 prompted the resolution to add Schiller to his list of Germans to be inves- tigated further : " I propose to myself to read Schiller, of whom I hear much." 512 The words, "of whom I hear much," suggests Follen; for alive as Emerson was to the intellectual crosscurrents in Boston during the early thirties, and immersed as he was in the lyceum program and lecture courses, 513 he could hardly have overlooked Follen's eloquent lectures on Schiller during the winter of 1831-1832, nor his "Introduc- ' tion" to the first edition of Carlyle's Life of Schiller (1833). Indeed, on April 30, 1835, he wrote at great length to persuade Carlyle that the ground was well prepared in and about Boston for the "worshipful Teufels- droeck ... to command all ears on what- ever subject pleased him," but that lectures on Goethe and Schiller would be most enthusiastically received. Goethe's name, he felt, would stimulate the curiosity of scores of persons ; while the missionary work which Dr. Follen had done with his "lectures to a good class upon Schiller" 514 would make the latter equally attractive. Of course, by 1835 Emerson was studying German at first hand, as well as with the aid of Coleridge and Carlyle, Stuart and Marsh, so that Follen's help seemed no longer necessary. But what we should like to know is whether Emerson heard Follen's lectures on "Moral Philosophy" in the winter of 1 830-1 831 and, during the next winter, those on Schiller, with their elabor- ate analysis of Schiller's ethical system and its relation to German thought generally. That assurance would help to explain how Emerson, in the interval between 1830 and 1835, came to hold moral convictions so strongly reminiscent of Follen, of Schleier- macher, and of Schiller, and how the Uni- tarian preacher came to be the author of Nature (1836). In passing from a consideration of the Follen-Emerson relationship to that of Follen's contacts with others of the Tran- scendentalists, we reach surer ground. The first impetus to set Ripley off on his long and ardent career as a student of German came in 1821, two years before he was graduated at Harvard at the head of his class. He found his "progress in the intri- cate mazes of metaphysics" facilitated by the guidance of "our learned Professor Hedge" ; but the influence of Follen did not lag far behind. It is hard to determine precisely when he met Follen. Follen be- gan teaching German at Harvard in 1825, but his lectures in the Divinity School did not begin until 1828. Meanwhile Ripley had left Cambridge in 1826, and was at once ordained pastor of the new meetinghouse on Purchase Street in Boston. But Ripley was acquainted with Dr. Channing as early as 1823, and later he became a member of Channing's circle of "Friends" (likened by Parker to a "Socratic meeting"). He and Follen doubtless became intimate either before Ripley left Harvard or during the early years of his ministry in Boston. Frothingham mentions Hedge's article on 122 German Thought in America Coleridge's literary character, his German metaphysics, and his theological views in the Christian Examiner for March, 1833 (which included a commendation of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling and a general recom- mendation of the intellectual influence of the transcendental philosophy), as a "potent influence in determining Ripley's mind." 515 True as this statement is, it should be pointed out that already in 1831, Ripley had taken careful notice of Follen's Inaugural Address, by all odds the best general account of German literature and philosophy that had appeared up to this time, and had published, in the Examiner, 51 * a highly complimentary review of it. This is the fourth of a series of ten papers contrib- uted to the Examiner between 1830 and 1837, all foreshadowing his later conclu- sions regarding German theology and philos- ophy as these appear in the Norton-Ripley controversy of 1839-1840, the Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature (1 838-1 842), and the other numerous works that issued from his study well stocked with German books. Follen's strong defense of the Ger- man theologians was doubtless of primary importance for the position which Ripley took in defending Schleiermacher and De Wette against the charges of Professor Andrews Norton. Theodore Parker, the man of many lan- guages, early felt the influence of Follen. Coming to Harvard in 1830, just when Follen was made Professor of German, Parker availed himself, in 1831, of Follen's help in teaching himself German, as he had already acquired French and Spanish, and as he was later to teach himself Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Icelandic, Chaldaic, Arabic, Persian, Coptic, Swedish, Hebrew, Syriac, Anglo-Saxon, and Modern Greek. 517 The next year he fell under the spell of Convers Francis, who henceforth exerted the strongest influence upon Parker's extensive studies in German theology and philosophy, 518 but his contacts with Follen continued both then and later — as when, in 1834, Parker entered the Cambridge Divinity School, when both he and Follen became members of Dr. Channing's Boston "Society of Friends of Progress," 519 when the Transcendental Club began to hold its sessions, at which Follen was sometimes a visitor, or when they met in the infectious atmosphere of the Peabody book shop. 520 Even the ethereal Alcott took kindly to the German scholar. When he went to Boston in 1828 to open his school and to seek out the "Minds" of Boston, 521 he found among such minds as he could appreciate that of Follen. With him Alcott discussed Pestalozzi, Froebel, and his own theories of education. He remained on intimate terms with Follen, whom he continued to meet at the Peabody bookstore, at Dr. Channing's, and sometimes within the hallowed circle of the Club, on the periphery of which both Channing and Follen hovered. 522 According to James Freeman Clarke, who was himself a student of Follen's and the constant companion of Margaret Fuller during his Harvard years, 523 Margaret undertook the study of German in 1832, shortly after Carlyle's articles in the English reviews and Follen's Inaugural Address of 1831 and his lectures on Schiller drew her attention to German literature. 524 Encouraged and aided by Clarke, she could record in her diary "rapid progress." 525 Moving as she did in the same intellectual and social circles as did Follen, she very probably heard some of his discus- sions of Goethe and Schiller at Channing's or in the various reading circles in which Follen had been active since 1827. Under the combined stimulus of Carlyle and Fol- len, she read far enough by June, 1833, to know that she did not "like Goethe as well as Schiller now." His "perfect wisdom and merciless nature" seemed "cold" after Schiller's "seducing pictures of forms more beautiful than truth." 525 Later she was to modify her views, Goethe becoming an all- absorbing interest ; but for the moment she was grateful to Carlyle and Follen for giving Early Exponents in America 123 her this "pursuit of immediate importance" to which she would, and did, give her "undivided attention." Follen's services in spreading the German gospel in America were especially signifi- cant because at the time when some of the Transcendentalists seemed to be more enthusiastic than thorough in their study of German, he encouraged them to look to first principles and provided them with the necessary tools. As a school, the Transcen- dentalists were all too content to get their metaphysics from secondary sources — for example, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Cousin. They were, for the most part, ministers, teachers, or men of letters, who, as Ripley put it, appeared to "care more for freethinking than for precise think- ing." 527 Yet some of them were keenly con- scious of their limitations and made inter- mittent, sometimes heroic, sometimes pa- thetic, attempts to remedy their short- comings. Margaret Fuller, for example, said of herself in 1832: When I was in Cambridge I got Fichte and Jacobi; I was much interrupted, but some time and earnest thought I devoted; Fichte I could not understand at all, though the treatise which I read was one intended to be popular, and which he says must compel to conviction. Jacobi I could under- stand in details, but not in system. It seemed to me that his mind must have been moulded by some other mind, with which I ought to be acquainted, in order to know him well — perhaps Spinoza's. Since I came home I have been consulting Buhle's and Tennemann's histories of philosophy, and dipping into Brown, Stewart, and that class of books. 528 About the same time she wrote regarding her religion and philosophy of life : I have not formed an opininon; I have determined not to form settled opinions at present; loving or feeble natures need a positive religion — a visible refuge, a pro- tection — as much in the passionate season 3f youth as in those stages nearer to the grave. But mine is not such .... I believe in eternal progression; I believe in a God, a beauty and perfection, to which I am to strive all my life for assimilation. From these two principles of belief I draw the rules bv which I strive to regulate my life. 529 The tenor of all this is distinctly negative. She had no philosophy. Yet she was in a state of mind to accept the "cardinal truths" of a philosophy such as transcen- dentalism, without having the desire or the power to apprehend its metaphysical groundwork. If she had entertained a phi- losophical creed, it would doubtless have been that of Schelling, or one very like it. But she was no philosopher; she was content to be a stimulating conversation- alist and an appreciative critic — a critic by gift rather than by training. In the final analysis, her creedlessness consisted in holding to her creed that her "genius" alone was her proper guide. To take another representative, Theodore Parker, admitted by himself and by most of the fraternity to be the intellectual giant and the most indefatigible student among them all — Parker who, even in the Norton- Ripley controversy, sought to speak a "higher word" than either of the disputants had spoken, and to base the argument on "first principles, unobscured by personali- ties and irrelevancies" 530 — even he la- mented the fact that he "was meant for a philosopher and the times called for a stump orator." 531 And then, after years of earnest labor as student and translator from the French and German, he was to find, upon his first visit to Europe, that he could not make himself understood in either lan- guage. 532 There is, of course, a difference be- tween reading German and speaking the language; and in the case of men like Par- ker and Ripley, the inability to speak Ger- man in no way detracted from their under- standing of a German treatise. Yet even for them it was definitely reassuring to have in their midst a man like Follen, who could expound a doctrine authoritatively or interpret a knotty passage satisfactorily. 124 German Thought in America Another contribution to the intellectual life of Boston and Cambridge made by such German scholars as Beck and Follen was the stimulation they gave to a broader and deeper study of all the other departments of knowledge: history, archaeology, biolo- gy, economics, and especially theology and philosophy — subjects in which, it was understood by the well-informed, German scholarship was supreme. The German universities of the early nineteenth century, more than any others, gave systematic training in the use of libraries and labora- tories, inculcated the habit of independent thought and research, quickened the crea- tive impulse, and engendered a spirit of freedom both in teaching and learning. Their ideal was the pursuit of truth; their aim, the emancipation of the human spirit. Accordingly, Wissenscha/i, Lernfreiheit, and Lehrfreiheit were the ideals which Beck and Follen taught and illustrated; and in these ideals they were actively supported by the Harvard-Gottingen men, whom all New England pointed to with pride as products of the German university system. Together they helped break down the sterility and insularity of eighteenth-cen- tury collegiate education in America, thus preparing the way for the tremendous growth that American university education has since experienced. GEORG BLATTERMAN Another German scholar whose influence dates back to the twenties was Georg Blattermann, professor of German at the University of Virginia from 1825 to 1840. Apparently little interested in philosophy, he exerted his influence mainly in encourag- ing the study of German literature and advancing German educational methods in the United States. FRIEDRICH LIST A fourth German intellectual who came to America about the time of Beck, Fol- len, and Blattermann, although the full force of his influence was not felt until later, wasFriedrich List (1789-1846). After a stormy career in Germany, as university professor, legal counsellor, legislator, and . publicist, he followed Lafayette to America in 1825. 533 Profoundly impressed by the accelerating economic development after the War of 181 2, List set himself to thinking on the means by which the emerging Amer- ican economy might meet British competi- tion. He enlisted on the side of the protec- tionists and in 1827 proposed his "American System," which he called a "Declaration of Economic Independence." Allied with Charles J. Ingersoll, Mathew Carey, Pierre S. Du Ponceau, and Redwood Fisher, he became influential in the Pennsylvania i Society for the Promotion of Manufactures ' and Mechanic Arts, and at the 1827 conven- • tion of this body in Harrisburg was one of the principal speakers. On the opening day of the meeting he published the last of a series of letters that comprised his first \ American book, Outlines of American Politi- cal Economy, of which the Society distribut- ed many thousand copies. It systematized the principles that gained currency as the "American System," and that were written into law as the high-tariff program by Con- gress the next year. Next to Hamilton, List is the most influential advocate of American protectionism . 534 After Germany herself, no nation was more profoundly stirred by List's teachings during the later years of the last century than the United States, where his principles were kept in a place of prominence by the writings and efforts of the school headed by Mathew Carey (1 760-1 839) and Henry C. Carey (1793- 18 79), soon to be reinforced by an ever-growing number of American students who returned from the German universities indoctrinated by List's ethico- economic theories. 635 Their efforts to for- mulate an ethical foundation for political economy represent not only (in Professor Gabriel's words) "the spirit of List return- ing to the United States," 636 but also a Early Exponents in America 125 union of American economic theory with the ethico-political theory of Francis Lie- ber, whose influence on American political scientists had grown markedly since the late thirties, and who, by the time of his death in 1872, had written his name in- delibly into the intellectual history of the United States. FRANCIS LIEBER Francis Lieber came to America in 1827 (following a tempestuous career at home) on the invitation of Carl Follen to direct the Tremont Gymnasium in Boston, which had grown beyond the ability of Follen to supervise. 537 Finding his evenings free, Lieber became the American correspondent of a group of German newspapers; and when the winter months afforded still more leisure, he set himself to edit an encyclopae- dia after the model of the Brockhaus Con- versations-Lex ikon, in the preparation of which he proceeded adroitly to make con- tacts with the most influential men in America, soliciting their favor and help. When the Encyclopedia Americana (later Appleton's American Encyclopedia), in fourteen volumes, appeared between 1829 and 1833, he had drawn advice and help from an imposing array of America's finest scholars. The venture was not only success- ful financially but brought him prominently before the public. Not since Tom Paine 's day had an immigrant to these shores succeeded so promptly in winning the favor of influential Americans. 538 Not the least service performed by Lieber was his giving America an encyclopedia which did not follow the pattern of those in common use at the time. For it is a matter of importance whether a people that does not possess an encyclopaedia of its own uses a British, a French, or a German one. His German birth and education accounted for an emphasis on German civilization that was lacking in earlier encyclopaedias. Indefinite and incalculable as the effect of this emphasis may have been, the wide circulation of this work served as a means by which a strong element of the German spirit was injected into the American mind, leading Americans to a fuller understanding; and appreciation of German arts, sciences, and institutions. 539 The encyclopaedia conferred a lasting benefit on Lieber himself. As editor of so comprehensive a work, he was forced to acquire a broad and accurate knowledge of American life and history, which, coupled with his excellent university training, prepared him for the writing of his signifi- cant books on political science. 540 His con- tributions to political theory marked the beginning of a new era in American ideas on the nature of the state. There had been anticipatory statements of the theory he advanced, but these had been fragmentary and unsystematic as compared with the organic system presented in his learned treatises. The publication between 1838 and 1853 of his three books on political ethics, on legal and political hermeneutics, and on civil liberty and self-government put him at the head of the new school of political thought, at the same time putting the then regnant theory of natural law to rout. 541 A liberal idealist, unhampered by local ties or sectional loyalties, and instructed by his youthful European experience in the fatal weakness of disunited states, Lieber found the natural-rights theory flimsy and sought to substitute for it a government by law, in which liberty was to be guaranteed by the twin safeguards — the Federal Con- stitution and the Common Law. A histori- cal evolutionist, he found the seeds of free- dom in institutions, defined as the organic expressions of daily life and the customs of society which take spontaneous form from social needs. For natural law he substituted the idea, caught from Kant, of rational development as a broader and safer basis for the evolution of a consciousness of law. Similarly, for his Manual of Political Ethics, he derived his principles from his study of German ethics, notably the Kantian con- 126 German Thought in America cept of moral law. He accepted at the out- set, as the basis of political relationships, Kant's imperatives, and stated them in the following terms: Consider constantly and without ex- ception the intelligent being as being its own proper end and which can never be- come a simple means for the ends of an- other. Act always in such a manner that the immediate motive or maxim of thy will may become a universal rule in an obliga- tory legislation for all intelligent beings. 542 Both, Lieber and Kant abandoned the utilitarian and eudaemonistic conceptions as regards the legitimate objects of state activity; and both rejected the paternalistic government as injurious to the self-activity and self-development of the individual. Both regarded the insurance of justice in all relationships as the chief function of the state, arguing that if this protection were adequately provided, civilization would be advanced in other necessary particulars by independent action. Lieber's crowning work, Civil Liberty and Self-Government , while it grew partly out of his experiences with despotic princes and his predisposition to glorify Anglo-Saxon liberty, derived most particularly from his early indoctrination in German idealism. His subtle and unobtrusive application of Kantian political philosophy and moral law to American institutions gave a new turn to American speculation on the origin and nature of the political state. His conception of the organic nature of the state and his theory of an evolutionary freedom rooted in the institutions of the people fell in with the centralizing movement that followed in the wake of the Civil War and prepared later generations, in certain quarters (as we shall observe later), for the acceptance of Hegelian concepts of political theory. 543 Lieber was the first scholar of note widely to introduce the German scientific methods of research into American colleges and uni- versities. 544 Aside from the regimen of method learned at Jena, he had demon- strated to him, during his residence in Rome at the home of Niebuhr, the importance of giving quotations, examples, and citations fully and accurately so that the reader could not only verify the truth of state- ments made on the authority of another, but also be put in contact with the authori- ties on any particular subject, to the end of initiating further investigations or indepen- dent researches. 545 This method, introduced by Lieber and emphasized both by precept as a teacher and by example as a writer, did not, at first, appeal to American students, and one continues to hear mumbled grumblings among writers of doctoral dis- sertations and certain historians, biogra- phers, and critics who seem to feel that footnotes and bibliography detract from . the aesthetic appeal of the printed page; but the system has prevailed and continues in general use. 546 Whether Lieber's labors in this area affect- ed New England Transcendentalists and the course of German philosophy in Amer- ica is a question to which no exact answer appears. It is safe to say, however, that although the new methodology went large- ly unnoticed by Emerson, Alcott, Mar- garet Fuller, and others of the Transcenden- tal hierarchy, it made its impression on men like Hedge, Francis, Stuart, Parker, Ripley, and later disciples, and strongly seconded the parallel movement for reform in educational and scholarly methods which the Harvard-Gottingen men sought to effect at Harvard and elsewhere. Eventu- ally, the acceptance or non-acceptance of this method of study and of writing spelled the degree of success or failure which Ger- man critical transcendentalism attained in its partial conquest of American thought; for without attendance to close reading and careful interpretation, to sources and com- parative methods, to accuracy and preci- sion, the domestication of German thought in the United States could not prosper. Indeed, in proportion as the early New Early Exponents in America 12^ England Transcendentalists failed or re- fused to commit themselves to a thorough- going study of their sources, insofar did they fail to establish themselves upon sound philosophical grounds at all. Much of the inconclusiveness of their theorizing — Emerson's, for example — is attributable to their impatience with details, their unwil- lingness or inability to bring their minds to strict discipline — to think hard and straight. 547 This failing, more than any other, perhaps, accounts for the fact that New England Transcendentalism, philo- sophically considered, proves so evanescent when one seeks to evaluate its influence on the history of American thought. 548 Another salutary effect to Lieber's credit is that he helped to dispel the prejudice current in England and America against Germany as the "paradise of dictionaries and critics," a land whence nothing original or inspired could come. Combining as he did an exacting scholarship with a keen interpretation of humanistic values, and representing at once the active and the passive life of the scholar at his best, he did much to break down the old idea that all German scholars are born pedants. Here at last was a scholar after Emerson's own prescription— a scholar at once Man Think- ing and Man Acting; 549 and the extensive contacts that he made and maintained paved the way for an ever-widening sphere of influence. During his long tenure from 1835 to 1856 as Professor of History and Political Econo- my at South Carolina College (later the ■ University), Lieber established cordial relations with Southern leaders of thought. His removal, in 1857, to Columbia enlarged the compass of his friendships and influence even to being summoned (much as "brain- trusters" of the New Deal era were sum- moned) to Washington during and after the Civil War for consultations with the Presi- dent, the Secretary of War, and others in high office. On a number of occasions he was drafted to execute important educational and governmental commissions, one of which, requisitioned by Lincoln and pro- mulgated as General Order No. 100 of the War Department, was his Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States, in the Field (Washington, D.C., 1863) — the starting point for more humane rules of warfare and the basis for similar codes adopted by the English, French, and Ger- mans. It is not too much to say that this work constitutes the most important con- tribution which America made to the law of nations before the twentieth century. 550 Throughout his long career he carried on an extensive correspondence, national and international in scope, that operated to promote cordial relations among the na- tions. Among his more famous foreign correspondents were De Toqueville, De Beaumont, Rolin-Jacquemyn, Pierantoni, Garelli, Heffter, von Mohl, von Helzen- dorff, Mittermeier, Bunsen, Niebuhr, La- boulaye, and Bluntschli. 551 It remains to mention Lieber's remark- able success as a teacher in South Carolina and New York, 552 his personal influence among his many students, his success in illustrating and making prevail scholarly methods, and the widespread use of his books, both in college halls and among the first men of the land. But his most distinc- tive achievement remains his contribution to American political science, 553 — the direct result of the impact of his German philo- sophical theories upon his experience among the historical realities of Anglo-American liberty. CHAELES SUMNER A man who did much toward giving Lieber's political ideas currency in the United States was Charles Sumner (181 1- 1874). From 1834 until Lieber's death in 1872 (except for the years 1851-1861, when the slavery issue temporarily estranged them), they were in constant touch with each other. During the years that Lieber was in South Carolina he often availed him- 128 German Thought in America self of Sumner's friendly offices in negotiat- ing with publishers in Boston and in bring- ing his works before the public. Sumner, on his side, found Lieber an excellent guide in the department of political ethics and phi- losophy, and often sought his views on questions of international and public law. 554 As a thoughtful, studious youth, Sumner had enjoyed the best educational advan- tages of New England, including instruc- tion in French and Spanish from Ticknor and German and civil law from Follen. 555 He went to Europe in 1837-1840 and again in 1857 and 1858, on each occasion visiting Germany. His European experience in 1837 constituted a turning point in his life. 65 * His five weeks in Berlin were filled with unusual opportunities. Besides meeting the Crown Prince, he talked with Alexander von Hum- boldt, the historians Ranke and Raumer, 557 and he discussed his favorite subject, the codification of law, with Savigny. The same subject was considered also in 1840 with Thibaut at Heidelberg, where Sumner spent "five delightful weeks." Here he was also shown particular attentions by Mittermeier, with whom he had already had much correspondence upon legal matters before leaving America. 558 During the period of his editorial connec- tion with the American Jurist Sumner invited Mittermeier to write for the journal, and Mittermeier contributed sever- al articles. 559 From time to time Mitter- meier wrote directly to Sumner concerning prison discipline, capital punishment, penal jurisprudence, public administration, and codification, and Sumner kept him abreast of important American developments in these fields by sending him the latest publi- cations. 560 Sumner performed a similar ser- vice for Dr. Julius, the Heidelberg criminol- logist and translator of Ticknor 's History of Spanish Literature, whom he had met in the United States in 1835 and whom he visited in Berlin in 1857. 561 Upon Sumner's return to the Senate in 1859, he became intimate with Rudolph Schleiden, Minister from the Hanseatic towns during 1853-1864. Although Schlei- den had little sympathy for antislavery principles, Sumner placed a high value upon the opinions of this shrewd observer of world affairs, and together they discussed "American and foreign politics, as well as literature and art." 562 The effect of all these contacts was not to change radically Sumner's political views, which remained basically English in origin; but he was an important agent in disseminating among Americans information regarding the devel- opments of political theory in Germany and in securing a hearing in America for Lieber's idealistic system of political science. The course of German political theory in the United States beyond these early figures becomes complicated. It merits specialized . analysis, and lies outside the province of this study. It has been charted briefly in an essay by Professors Thomas I. Cook and Arnaud B. Leavelle through Lieber, Whit- man, the St. Louis Hegelians, O. A. Brown- son, Elisha Mulford, Theodore D. Woolsey, John W. Burgess, W. W. Willoughby, Joseph A. Leighton, George Howison, Josiah Royce, and Wm. E. Hocking. 563 It is discussed at greater length by Professor Charles B. Robson 564 and Miss Anna Had- dow. 565 We shall also have to forego a dis- cussion of the historiographical influence of Germans like Moser, Heeren, Niebuhr, Ranke, Meinicke, Treitschke, Spengler, and others like Herder, Schlegel, and Hegel upon American historians from Bancroft to Turner; 566 and individuals like Franz R. Rivinus, Johann Georg and Robert W. Wesselhoeft, Franz J. Grund, Franz W. Grater, and August Konradin must be passed over while we turn to the more in- fluential American-born scholars who bent their efforts to introducing German thought into America. MOSES STUART Among the first active workers falling into this category was Moses Stuart (1780- Early Exponents in America 129 1852), who in 1810 was called to the pro- fessorship of sacred literature in the newly established stronghold of Calvinism, the theological seminary at Andover, Mass. He speedily became dissatisfied not only with the state of American theological study at the time but equally with his own insuffi- cient scholarship. 567 Recognizing the neces- sity of knowing somewhat of Hebrew, he consulted Schleissner's Lexikon, the Ger- man terms of which troubled him and aroused his desire to add German to his theological tools. After securing the neces- sary books, he professed having made enough progress in a fortnight to read the Gospel of St. John in the German. With the aid of a friend he secured Seller's Biblische Hermeneutik, which supplied him with the suggestions and references necessary to collect for the seminary the best library of German Biblical literature in America at the time. 588 His search for books brought contacts with others who shared his inter- ests, among them young Edward Everett, with whom he began corresponding in 1812. He urged Everett to make a translation of Herder's Briefe das Sludium der Theologie beireffend, encouraged him in his ambition to study in Germany, and commissioned him to buy German books for him. 569 In 1829, when Follen visited Stuart, Follen reported finding "more German books in the library than elsewhere in the country." 570 Since Follen was, of course, thoroughly familiar with the contents of the library in Cambridge, Stuart must have been pleased by Follen's estimate, especially considering what it had been a decade earlier. But he was soon to learn that there were others less happy than Follen about his success in building up a good German theological ■ library at Andover. Having concluded that thoroughness was not to be attained without mastering, first the Hebrew texts and next the German commentaries, Stuart published, for the benefit of his own and of theological stu- dents generally, a Grammer of the Hebrew Language, without Points (Andover, 1813) and a Grammar of the Hebrew Language, with Points (Andover, 1821). 571 He intro- duced Rosenmiiller and De Wette in his classes ; he translated and published a collec- tion of Dissertations on the Importance and Best Methods of Studying the Original Lan- guages of the Bible, by Jahn and Others (An- dover, 182 1); and he translated, for the use of his students, from the Latin of J. A. Er- nesti, The Elements of Interpretation . . . with Notes and Appendices (Andover, 1822), which included extracts from Kiel, Beck, and Morus. But if he encountered diffi- culties teaching his students Hebrew and interesting them in German and the Ger- man theologians, he found it harder still to convince his colleagues of the need to emulate German methods. Nothing daunt- ed, he battered against entrenched opposi- tion with a series of some forty books and brochures, none of which failed, by direct statement or pointed implication, to champion the cause of German Biblical research. In the course of twenty years he succeeded in breaking down much of the opposition. But he found, before he had gone very far, that he had aroused the suspicion and enmity of many of his col- It was whispered that I was not only secretly gone over to the Germans, but was leading the Seminary over with me, and bringing up, or at least encouraging our young men to the study of the deistical "Rationalism"; and besides this, it was also whispered about, in a very significant way, that it was as much as the other pro- fessors could do to keep the Seminary from going over to Unitarianism. 572 Well might they whisper, for it was common knowledge that the study of Ger- man was dangerous. Did not the Unitarians of Cambridge and Boston favor it ? Now, it appeared, one from among their own fold stood ready to deliver the last stronghold of Calvinism in the country into the hands of the enemy. In 1825 Stuart was inves- 130 German Thought in America tigated by the trustees of the seminary, whose committee reported that "the unre- strained cultivation of German studies has evidently tended to chill the ardor of piety, to impair belief in the fundamentals of revealed religion, and even to induce, for the time, an approach to universal skepti- cism." 573 Stuart denied the charges against himself as teaching heretical doctrines and against the Germans as being conducive to irreligion, at the same time pointing out that if the Unitarians had been led into any errors, it was by their reading the English deistical writers and not by their German studies, for of a serious study of the latter, he claimed, the Unitarians were as yet entirely innocent. 574 It is obvious that in this claim Stuart was unaware of, or was minimizing, the growing tendency among the Unitarians, notably at Harvard, to read German theologians like Tholuck, De Wette, Hengstenberg, Paulus, and Schleiermacher ; but it is also clear that his German studies were not making a Uni- tarian of him. How little he was being led by the German scholars, chief among whom were Ewald, Rosenmuller, and Gesenius, in the direction of Unitarianism may be gauged by his zealous defense of Trinitari- anism against Dr. Channing's attack. 575 Indeed, Stuart's spirited Letter to Dr. Chan- ning Containing Remarks on His Sermon Recently Preached in Baltimore (Andover, 1 819) laid the worst fears of some of his colleagues. The extraordinary interest which this pamphlet aroused, 576 coupled with Stuart's assertion that he could not have written it without the aid of his Ger- man studies, helped dispel some of the opprobrium then usually heaped on German theology. For assuredly, if German philo- logical research and Biblical investigation could be thus effectively brought to the defense of "true" religion, then perhaps it was not altogether vicious. For his part, Stuart set himself with renewed energy to facilitate the study of exegetical science in America by publishing, in addition to the books already mentioned, the following: (1) Ernesti's Elements of Interpretation? 1 '' (2) Georg B. Winer's Greek Grammar of the New Testament, 578 (3) Hebrew Chrestomathy, Designed as a Course of Hebrew Study? 19 (4) Practical Rules for Greek Accents and Quanti- ty? 60 (5) Grammar of the New Testament Dialect? 81 and (6) Hebrew Grammar of Gese- nius, as Edited by E. Roediger, Translated with Additions and Also a Hebrew Chres- tomathy? 82 His first important original work on Biblical criticism, a Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (2 vols., Andover, 1 828-1 829), 583 demonstrated the excellent. use to which these German tools could be put. The work won high repute for him as j a Biblical scholar in America, in England, : and even among the German theologians. 584 During the next quarter century he estab- lished himself as the undisputed leader in American exegetical science by publishing commentaries upon Romans? 66 Revela- . lion? 66 Daniel? 61 Ecclesiastes? 66 and Pro-' verbs 669 — all demonstrating in detail how German scholarship had revolutionized the field of Biblical criticism. 590 Stuart's letter to the editor of the Chris- Han Review on "The Study of the German Language," 591 in reply to Barnas Sears's attack on the irreligious character of Ger- man literature published in an earlier num- ber of the same journal, 592 sets forth his position on the value of German for Ameri- can students of theology and suggests at the same time the reason for his success in breaking down the prejudice on the part of American theologians against German the- ology; for he was among the first to point out the use to which German theological science could be put in combatting the evil which men like Norton and Sears feared. The letter concludes with the observation that "it is not [now] so much a matter of praise to be acquainted with it [German], as of shame to be ignorant of it." This essay was written in 1841. Though the institutional vis inertiae of American Early Exponents in America 131 colleges still operated against a broad exten- sion of the study of German, and though an occasional father still forbade his son to study the language for fear of corrupting his Calvinism or Unitarianism, as the case might be, the battle was all but won. Eleven years later, in 1852, when Stuart died, the smoke had cleared away, and F. B. Sanborn, entering Harvard that year, noticed that "the prejudice against German had worn itself out," and that "many studied it." 593 Moses Stuart must have derived considerable satisfaction from the knowledge that his efforts had not been in vain. 594 What he may have known also was that his labors had earned for him the title of "Father of Biblical Learning in Amer- ica." 595 What he could not have estimated was the full extent of his influence upon the fifteen hundred American clergymen and the seventy-odd professors and presidents of American colleges who learned their theology at his feet. 89 « One of his students, however, he had the pleasure of seeing follow in his own footsteps — James Marsh, whose discipleship bade fair to outstrip the success of the master, until his untimely death in 1842 cut short his brilliant career. JAMES MARSH James Marsh (1 794-1842) came under the influence of Stuart in 181 7 when, after graduating from Dartmouth College, 59 ' he iecided to prepare himself for the ministry it Andover. After one year at the seminary, ie returned as tutor to Dartmouth to spend :wo formative years. During this second Dartmouth period he became dissatisfied ■vith the philosophy and theology he had Jeen taught. 59 * He determined to go to Cambridge, where he believed the ad van- ages offered would be greater than those at Andover. However, after a stay of less than wo months, he was back at Andover, by November, 1820, apparently satisfied that Andover provided as good opportunities as lid Harvard. After all, Andover had Moses Stuart; Harvard, only Andrews Norton. He set about the task of completing his theolo- gical training. Falling under the spell of Stuart's enthusiasm for exegetical studies, he resolved to make a critical study of the Old and New Testaments under Stuart's direction and to study modern languages and literatures. By January 21, 1821, he was satisfied with his knowledge of Ger- man. 599 In search of the true belief, which should replace the religion of the day and "keep alive the heart in the head," at the same time that it brought "unity to all his knowl- edge," 600 he rediscovered Coleridge's Bio- graphia Liter aria. 6ax Coleridge struck him as having been remarkably successful in effecting what his own heart yearned for, namely, to "satisfy the heart as well as the head." The phraseology used here is rem- iniscent of a passage in Chapter X of the Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge gave credit to Kant for bringing unity out of the chaotic state of his mind when his "head was with Spinoza" while his "whole heart remained with Paul and John." Taking the obvious hint from Coleridge, he reread his Plato and reanalyzed St. Paul. Since both Madame de Stael and Coleridge recommended Kant highly, he secured a copy of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft and searched it for "the certain guiding light" which Coleridge professed to have found in that work. 80 * Here, in 182 1, it would seem, we come upon a very early direct contact between Kant and the New England Tran- scendentalists. A contact it unquestionably is, but one not to be taken too seriously, as will appear hereafter in a letter, written eight years after this date, as well as in others of Marsh's writings. Prompted by Stuart's urging him to study the Germans, Marsh went foraging into German literature, philosophy, and theology. By 1822 he had become perhaps the most widely read American-born student of German in this country', 603 and he promptly set out on a career of instructing Americans on the subject of German reli- 132 German Thought in America gious and philosophical progress. In 1822, he undertook, with a friend, to translate and edit Bellermann's Geography of the Scrip- tures (completed December, 1823). The next year he went to Hampden-Sydney College as a teacher of ancient and modern lan- guages. During his three-year residence in Virginia he began his translation of Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, the first sections of which were published periodically in the Christian Repository at Princeton, although the whole did not appear until 1833. 6M Marsh's election to the presidency of the University of Vermont in October, 1826, greatly enlarged the sphere of his influence. It marks the beginning of the Vermont School of Transcendentalism, whence the gospel was carried first, to Concord and Boston and later, westward as far as St. Louis. Marsh's inaugural address was the first published utterance of the Tran- scendentalists in America. 605 It left no doubt in the minds of his auditors that the new president of the University (which a series of unfortunate circumstances had reduced to the status of a struggling and generally ineffectual college) possessed a dynamic personality and a head chockful of Colendgean ideas. For those who under- stood his inaugural address he became at once the American Coleridge. We cannot pause here to trace the influence which Marsh exerted on American collegiate education generally, 606 or to detail the steps by which he wrought a reformation in the University of Vermont, transforming it from a provincial college into the first academic center in America of the new idealistic philosophy. He caused to be adopted a new course of study, 607 the revolutionary nature of which has been described in these terms: If this course of study is carefully ex- amined, it will be found to contain perhaps, what no other Collegiate study in the United States has so fully attempted. It seeks to give coherence to the various studies, in each department, so that its several parts shall present, more or less, the unity, not of an aggregation, nor of a juxtaposition, nor of a merely logical arrangement, but of a development and a growth; and therefore, the study of it, rightly pursued, would be a growing and enlarging process, to the mind of the student. 608 Here was a program based on ideas caught from Herder and Coleridge, as the American edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, just published by Marsh, made abundantly plain to all who put two and two together. If they read on in the pro- spectus, they discovered that the courses offered were, indeed, designed to effect an "enlarging process" in the minds of the students. Marsh's own department, that of philosophy, cut across departmental lines with splendid audacity, aiming at a tran- scending synthesis — it was to be the inte- grated integration; for Marsh, like Bacon, was equal to taking all learning for his province. The whole was based on the all- important distinction between Under- standing and Reason, the significance of which Marsh never wearied of reiterating. Thus was born, between 1826 and 1829, the first American university drawn after the transcendental pattern. It was Kant, Herder, Schlegel, and Coleridge, as much as Marsh, who reorganized the University of Vermont and made it the first asylum for transcendental idealism in America. In 1833 Marsh voluntarily resigned as president to take over the chair of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, but it was an open secret that he remained, as long as he lived, the power behind the throne. Re- lieved of administrative duties, he now- turned to what had always been his first love — his philosophical teaching. In the course of the sixteen years which he devot- ed to teaching, he developed from various sources what became known, among his students, as "Marsh's philosophy," the general composition of which has already been noted. In the meantime Marsh had contributed Early Exponents in America 133 to the Christian Spectator for March, 1829, a review of Stuart's Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. This, his most tech- nical theological piece of writing, bears strong resemblances in both vocabulary and ideas to Coleridge — similarities to which Marsh himself called attention in a letter to Coleridge. 609 Nor did Marsh rest here. His next act was to present to the American public one of the works of the master himself from whom he had learned most. He had long wanted to edit a volume of selections from his beloved seventeenth- century divines. Such a book, he believed, might be able to counteract the "mater- ialism" of his age. Coleridge's Aids, with its long extracts from Archbishop Leighton and Dr. Henry More, seemed ideally suited for that purpose. 610 Accordingly he set to work upon an American edition. To it he prefixed a fifty-five-page "Preliminary Essay," which Professor Nicolson calls the first publication of American Transcenden- talism. 611 Its exposition of Coleridgean doctrine, together with the accompanying text, Rufus W. Griswold credits with giving to the orthodox of New England their first serious shock. 612 That Marsh, born a Vermonter, trained in a Calvinistic seminary, knew what he was about in going beyond even Unitarian- ism to sponsor the Transcendentalism of Coleridge, as presented in A ids to Reflection, appears in his opening remarks : I must not be supposed ignorant of its bearing upon those questions which have so often been, and still are, the prevailing topics of theological controversy among us .... I have not attempted to disguise from myself, nor do I wish to disguise from the readers of this work, the inconsistency of some of its leading principles with much that is taught and received in our theologi- cal circles (pp. x-xi). Candid as this statement is, his treatment of Coleridge's book and its significance is no less so. He wastes no words in getting to the main point that he wishes to make, namely, that "Christian faith is the perfection of human reason." 613 This principle leads him at once to the fundamental and all- important distinction against which all phi- losophy and all theology must be squared — the distinction between Reason and Un- derstanding. 614 Marsh's argument regarding the momen- tous effect and far-reaching implications of this distinction need not be rehearsed here. More to our purpose is what is not easily determined, namely, his interpretation of the two terms, as it comes out incidentally in the "Essay" and more particularly in the Notes. Marsh, like Coleridge before him, has often been accused of inaccuracy and of inconsistency in the use of philosophic terms. 615 On this score, such evidence as the "Preliminary Essay" affords would seem to argue exactly the contrary. Indeed, the ''Essay" exists chiefly to point out the current misconceptions regarding reason as they have grown out of the philosophy of Locke, 616 and according to which the rea- son, "considered as a thing differing in kind from the understanding, has no place in our popular metaphysics." "Thus we have only understanding, 'the faculty judging ac- cording to sense, ' a faculty of abstracting and generalizing, of contrivance and fore- cast, as the highest of our intellectual powers." 617 In this restriction of our common termi- nological and philosophical conceptions lie, says Marsh, the popular objections raised against Coleridge's "peculiarities of lan- guage" and "the unintelligibleness of his thoughts" (p. xlvii). The first is not a pecu- liarity referable solely to Coleridge, but arises from the common confusion of usage derived from Locke and the Scottish school. Should Coleridge, therefore, "still use these words indiscriminately, and either invent a new word, or mark the distinction by descriptive circumlocutions, or shall he assign a more distinctive and precise mean- ing to the words already used ?" The ques- tion is rhetorical. 134 German Thought in America The charge that Coleridge is unintelligible, he says, can be answered in only one way, namely, not to answer it at all; for the critics who bring this charge are either prej- udiced against him or feel that his philoso- phy is "too deep for them" ; whence we may conclude that they mean to insinuate, spite of all their professed love of truth, either that there are depths in philosophy "not worth exploring" or that they prefer "to sleep after dinner" (p. xlix). The simple truth is that Coleridge is in no wise to blame if his subject is one requiring "labour both of attention and of severe thinking." Indeed, among the four objectives aimed at in the book, his first and chief aim is "to direct the reader's attention to the Science of Words, their use and abuse, and the incal- culable advantages attached to the habit of using them appropriately, and with a distinct knowledge of their primary, deriva- tive, and metaphysical senses." 818 The suc- cess achieved by Coleridge in this respect is insisted upon by Marsh a number of times; and if the reader will bear in mind, says Marsh, that Coleridge uses terms like rea- son, understanding, free will, and conscience in a "precise, exclusive, and steadfast sense," the chief cause of his supposed obscurity will be removed. 81 ' Later he revised his high opinion of Coleridge's perspicuity. His biographer tells us that Marsh awaited impatiently the appearance of Coleridge's promised treatise on "Ele- ments of Discourse," which went the way of so many of Coleridge's promised perfor- mances. 620 In view of his well-established character for probity, Marsh's assertions that about 1829 he understood, or thought he under- stood, Coleridge's distinctions must be taken at face value. The problem therefore resolves itself into the questions of (1) whether Marsh failed, his belief to the con- trary, in his understanding of Coleridge, or (2) whether Coleridge drew the distinctions correctly. Some doubt has been cast upon the trustworthiness of Coleridge as an expositor of Kant by reason of his apparent reliance, in some of his works, rather upon the seventeenth-century divines than upon Kant for his definitions. 621 Some support, too, may be given to this idea by Marsh's statement: In most cases, where his language may at first seem wholly unauthorized, it will be found, that he derived it from those pro- found thinkers and unrivalled masters of language, the great English Philosophers and Divines of the Seventeenth Century. 622 Here it may be observed, first, that one element — a very important one — in Marsh's thought which must never be overlooked is that of neo-Platonism, theologically inter- preted ; for Marsh found in the seventeenth- century Cambridge Platonists most of the important ideas which his own and the next generation felt were peculiar to Ger- man romanticism. Thus he was led by his fondness for the Cambridge Platonists to overemphasize Coleridge's making them major objects of reference in his Aids, and, in the absence of any exhaustive firsthand knowledge of Kant himself, to defer too much to Coleridge's interpretation of Kant and to overestimate the influence upon Coleridge of the Cambridge Platonists. What he seems to have overlooked is Cole- ridge's frank avowal in the Biographia Liter aria that his studies in the mystics and neo-Platonists had done little more for him than "to keep alive the heart in the head," and thus prepared him for an understand- ing and acceptance of Kant, at the same time saving him from "irreligious Panthe- ism"; whereas Kant is credited with having drawn the all-important distinction between Understanding and Reason by which Cole- ridge professes to have equated his own thinking. 623 However, since Coleridge no- where, in the Aids, specifically mentioned Kant as having originated the distinctions, but referred them also to Bacon and Leigh- ton as having, in a measure, anticipated Kant by setting forth the essentials of these distinctions, Marsh was easily led to over- Early Exponents in America 135 state the case. That it is an overstatement appears from the fact that Coleridge him- self seldom cited Bacon and Leighton on Reason and Understanding without finding it necessary, in some detail, to correct their language in order to make it harmonize with the critical terminology of Kant. 924 The precise relationship of thought be- tween the Cambridge idealists and the Ger- man transcendentalists is still being de- bated. The correct answer doubtless de- pends on the degree and kind of paral- lelism insisted upon. Modern scholarship is coming to the conclusion that the differ- ences are more apparent than real — that there is less difference in spirit than in letter — thus essentially substantiating what Coleridge seemed to imply and what Marsh asserted. Of a close coincidence or identity of thought it is impossible to speak (indeed, neither Coleridge nor Marsh went so far), for the terminological differences, to say nothing of the divergences of aims, between the seventeenth-century theologians at Cambridge and the critic of metaphysics at Konigsberg are too obvious. 625 For Marsh, the "New Movement" in Germany appears to have been not new so much as a necessary and right revival of the thought already implicit in his beloved English divines, although he did not emphasize, in his edition of Coleridge's Aids, the sharp differences between the spirit of German and English idealism, or, to put it more accurately, between native English thought and the thought of Cole- ridge as derived from the Germans. 628 Hence he held that so far as its relation to theology was concerned, the new philosophy of Germany, or, for that matter, Coleridge's interpretation of it, was not so much some- thing apart from seventeenth-century British thought as an interesting parallel to and extension of it. Another consideration to be borne in mind is that philosophy for Marsh was worth while chiefly as the handmaid in the development of a satisfactory theology. Like the Cambridge Platonists, he was less interested in founding a new philosophy, apart from theology, than to bring the two into harmony. Like them, too, he was more vitally interested in ethics than metaphys- ics. 627 Hence, after he had grasped what he considered the correct distinction between Understanding and Reason, the theoretical argument of Kant's Critiques held little of vital interest for him; what was more to his liking was the wide and practical applica- tion to which the distinction could be put in theology and morality. 628 Thus it is ex- tremely hard to determine precisely what Marsh's conception of the Kantian distinc- tion was. Although he asserted, on the one hand, that all that was needful for a proper understanding of the terms was to grasp the interpretation of Bacon and of Leighton, yet in practice (e.g., in the "Preliminary Essay," as well as in the Notes and Appen- dices) he went beyond the meaning of the seventeenth-century writers by subscribing to definitions which, refurbished as they were by Coleridge in a Kantian terminolo- gy, 629 Bacon and Leighton would have had trouble identifying as their own. Marsh concurred completely with the Coleridgean interpretation as presented in the Aids and added numerous passages from others of Coleridge's works to elucidate the Cole- ridgean meaning. 630 Nothing short of a close examination of all these commentaries by Marsh, together with a comparison of their import in Cole- ridge's text, suffices to determine how accurately Marsh followed Coleridge and, through him, Kant. Such a search substan- tiates abundantly the fact that Marsh, following Coleridge, is usually accurate in interpreting Kant in approximately the same degree that Coleridge is so. For example, following Coleridge, he is faithful to the letter in interpreting the Kantian Reason as a faculty above Understanding, grasping correctly Kant's direct statement : "All knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds thence to the understanding, and 136 German Thought in America ends with reason" ; 631 although it is obvious that Kant had no intention of conveying quite the meaning which Marsh extracts from the statement, namely, that the Rea- son begins to function at the point where the Understanding leaves off. Here it is worth remembering that Marsh was not only a sincere Christian but also an attentive reader of Aristotle, whose Meta- physics was always by him. John Dewey summarizes Marsh's philosophy as "an Aristotelian version of Kant made under the profound conviction of the inherent moral truths of the teaching of Christian- ity." 682 While this characterization is too summary, as Dewey himself admits, there is a large element of truth in what he says ; for it was not only Fries 633 but also the Aristotelian tradition as well as contempor- ary scientific writers, notably the Schelling- ian physicist Oersted and the psychologist Carus, whose doctrines of natural develop- ment were responsible for Marsh's compara- tive neglect of Kant's phenomenalism and the subjective view of nature and for the equivocal manner in which Marsh dealt with the Understanding and Reason. 634 What goes even deeper is Marsh's treat- ment of the relations of Sense to Under- standing and of both to Reason. It should be said in extenuation of the too ready facility with which Marsh presents the Rea- son as based on the Understanding, and the Understanding as growing out of Sensation, that had he consulted Kant's first Critique, he could have found plenty of parallel passages to justify such a view; for Kant, in several instances, uses a phraseology which easily lent itself to such a construction. 635 The danger (of which Marsh seems not to have been aware, and concerning which Coleridge neglected to warn him) — the danger lies in taking an introductory state- ment of Kant at face value without con- sidering the explanations, elucidations, and qualifications that follow. Another defect in Marsh's method appears to have been that he followed Coleridge rather uncritic- ally and therefore failed to recognize in Coleridge certain oversights and certain liberties that Coleridge took with Kant's text, as when he defined the Understanding as the "faculty judging according to sense." 636 The errors which arise from such generalizations, 637 however, are not as detrimental as are those arising from an- other cause — the inability of the mind untrained in the critical methodology to keep the critical transcendental way throughout. This is illustrated in Marsh's failure to distinguish always clearly be- tween a posteriori and a priori methods 638 — a distinction which Kant makes the very foundation of his criticism. Apparently Marsh failed to keep steadily in mind the point which Kant had enforced in the Introduction to his Critique of Pure Reason, namely, that "a priori knowledge" must be kept "perfectly pure," and that "Transcen- dental philosophy is the wisdom of pure speculative reason." 639 Marsh uses terms like logical faculty, intuition, reflection, and reason not only loosely but at times inter- changeably for something which, in Kant's ' sense, none of them is. 640 Coleridge is not guiltless of a similarly loose use of terms. For example, when he says, "Reason indeed < is far nearer Sense than Understanding: for Reason ... is a direct aspect of Truth, an inward Beholding, having a similar relation to the Intelligible or Spiritual, as Sense has to the Material or Phenomenal," he is (i) saying what may lead the uninitiated to believe that he imputes to the Reason a direct, sensual, empirical, or a posteriori basis which Kant did not admit into the transcendental system in the first instance, or (2) ascribing to pure Reason the immedi- acy of vision and consequently either some mystical or constitutive power which Kant emphatically denied, or (3) transgressing the boundary of pure Reason and entering the domain of the practical Reason, or (4) attempting to say (and this we may credit as being his intention) that the pure Reason has a certain primacy or directness similar Early Exponents in America 137 to that which sensibility enjoys in respect to its intuition. At all events, he has not said anything profoundly helpful to the novice, while his use of popular and vari- ously interpreted terms tends merely to compound misconceptions in the mind of the general reader. Finally, we suspect in Marsh, as in Cole- ridge, an all-too-ready transition in his thinking from the realm of speculative Reason to that of practical Reason, from metaphysics to ethics, 641 and consequently from transcendental to transcendant prin- ciples. 642 Religious-minded as both Coleridge and Marsh were, they were less patient to consider the severe limitations of the pure Reason than impatient to substantiate their faith in the three Ideas of the Reason (God, immortality, and freedom) by the so- called "proofs" of the practical Reason, without always heeding Kant's clear warn- ing regarding the "brilliant pretensions of reason." 643 They were less interested in the "records and full details" of the "law- suit" 644 which Kant brought against Rea- son to prove the insufficiency of transcen- dental philosophy, in its purely speculative applications, to establish the validity of its three Ideas beyond their existence as Ideas merely (however great its service might be, as Kant pointed out, "to correct our knowl- edge of them if they can be acquired from elsewhere") 645 than they were eager to follow the processes by which the practical Reason, starting from the moral order as a unity founded on the essence of freedom, "traces the design of nature to grounds which must be inseparably connected a priori with the internal possibility of things and leads thus to transcendental theology, which takes the ideal of the highest ontolog- ical perfection as the principle of systemat- ical unity that connects all things accord- ing to general and necessary laws, as having their origin in the absolute necessity of the one original Being." 646 Their hearts intent primarily on the latter, and their main purpose to ground their theology in philosophy, they readily made the unifying synthesis which Kant hinted at in the con- clusion of his Critique of Pure Reason and came at once to the point where "practical and speculative Reason become united." 647 By a process natural to the romanticist, they relegated the pure Reason and its an- noying negations to the realm of the forgot- ten, and spoke, whenever they spoke of the practical Reason simply as the Reason, usually without the prosaic adjective. 648 Thus Coleridge, in his popular works (although he drew the distinction clearly enough 649 ) commonly failed, once he had drawn it, 650 to keep the distinctive terminol- ogy; while men of less acute philosophic understanding, coming after him, either failed to understand Coleridge or — if they did understand him — failed to make distinc- tions among terms. Thence arise some of the difficulties we encounter in attempting to reconstruct the speculative thinking of men like Marsh who seem, at several points, to waver in their meaning, chiefly because Coleridge, however dutifully they tried to follow him, had not sufficiently enforced the significance of such Kantian warnings as the following: Thus we find that pure reason, which at first seemed to promise nothing less than extension of our knowledge beyond all limits of experience, contains, if properly understood, nothing but regulative princi- ples, which indeed postulate greater unity than the empirical use of the understanding can achieve, but which, by the very fact that they place the goal which has to be reached at so great a distance, carry the argument of the understanding with itself by means of systematical unity to the highest possible degree; while, if they are misunderstood or mistaken for constitutive principles of transcendent knowledge, they produce, by a brilliant but deceptive illu- sion, some kind of persuasion and imaginary knowledge, but, at the same time, con- stant contradictions and disputes. 851 While Marsh had begun to read the Cri- tique of Pure Reason as early as 1821, there is little to indicate that he comprehended 138 German Thought in America (if, indeed, he ever read thus far) the solemn warning of Kant's sentence, the torturous sinuosity of which, in the original German, even Max Miiller's ability as a translator did not materially alleviate. The word regulative in the passage just quoted from Kant suggests the cause of another error perpetrated by uncritical followers of Kant. On the point that the proper use of the pure reason permits only regulative, never constitutive, uses, Kant insists repeatedly. 652 That Marsh was acquainted with the distinctions between the terms transcendent and transcendental as they are used by Kant appears from Marsh's addition of a note, 653 based on his reading of Chapter XII of the Biographia. But we can understand why he encountered difficulties (in the absence of Coleridge's failure, in either the Biographia or the Aids, to emphasize the question whether the Ideas of the Pure Reason belong to the constitu- tive or the merely regulative order) 654 in his efforts to understand the speculative foun- dation work upon which (as he understood it) the Reason supports the mandates of religion. When we add to this the difficul- ties inherent in the problem of distinguish- ing consistently between a priori and a posteriori, between reason with constitutive and reason with merely regulative uses, and between the practical and the pure reason, we have sufficient reasons for surmising the causes that led Marsh to write to Coleridge, on March 29, 1829, in a tone suggesting that there were, indeed, "some things hard to understand," and that he should welcome a work from Coleridge in which these com- plexities would be "unfolded from first principles in a manner suited to the nov- ice." 655 While he wrote thus to Coleridge, he had no doubt whatever that Coleridge had drawn the distinctions correctly. In spite, therefore, of such questions as he privately confessed, he proceeded publicly, eight months later, when his edition of the /I ids was published, to avow his complete confidence in the principles which the book stressed. To return, now, to the "Preliminary Essay," we observe that Marsh lists Cole- ridge's next great service (after his explana- tion of the all-important distinction be- tween reason and understanding) to be the reconciliation which Coleridge effected between religion and philosophy. 656 This reconciliation, says Marsh, the system of thought currently dominant in New Eng- land can never hope to make, for Locke and the Scottish school can only establish and defend the essential difference between what is natural and what is spiritual; they can never find rational grounds for the feeling of moral obligation, let alone make religion and philosophy of a piece. 657 Cole- ridgean transcendentalism, on the other hand, supplies the philosophy which satisfies the understanding and does not contradict or offend the reason. It satisfies the thinking man who demands to rise above doubt and confusion to a conception of religion which his understanding can find acceptable at all points, and which his reason will, at the same time, verify. 658 Here again Marsh has transcended the realm of the pure reason to that of the practical. To Marsh, as seemingly to Coleridge also, this transition from the former with its limitations to the latter with its assurances was too inviting to resist ; and men like Emerson, who followed one or the other, seem at times equally careless or unconscious of the necessity for keeping sufficiently distinct the several domains presided over by the theoretical reason and the moral will. 659 Marsh's early death was not solely re- sponsible for his leaving his later philosoph- ical writings in a fragmentary state. Some- thing of his inability to develop the desired consistently Kantian philosophy is owing to his failure to grasp clearly and unmis- takably the Kantian terminology. Al- though his later writings contain evidence that in some particulars he attained after 1829 to a better understanding of the Kant- ian position with regard to the tripartite mind than he had before that time, there is Early Exponents in America 139 also evidence to argue that even if he had been completely successful in this respect, he would no doubt have modified the criti- cal philosophy to suit what he considered the "higher" ends of philosophy. However that may be, we know that shortly after publishing his edition of the Aids, Marsh felt that all was not well with his understanding of Kant, for in a letter to Coleridge, already mentioned, he frankly admitted : The German philosophers, Kant and his followers, are very little known in this country; and our young men who have visited Germany have paid little attention to that department of study while there. I cannot boast of being wiser than others in this respect ; for though I have read a part of Kant, it was under many disadvantages, so that I am indebted to your writings for the ability to understand what I have read of his works, and am waiting with some impatience for that part of your works which will aid more directly in the study of those subjects of which he treats. The same views are generally entertained in this country as in Great Britain, respecting German literature; and Stewart's History of Philosophy especially has had an exten- sive influence in deterring students from the study of their philosophy. Whether any change in this respect is to take place re- mains to be seen. To me it seems a point of great importance, to awaken among our scholars a taste for a more manly and effi- cient mental discipline, and to recall into use those old writers, whose minds were formed by a higher standard. 660 Both the date (March, 1829) and the con- tents of this letter are significant as indicat- ing, first, that Marsh's study of Coleridge's prose works published before 1829 had not succeeded in clearing up for him all the knotty problems which he sensed as attach- ing to Kant, and second, that he still looked to Coleridge to supply his wants in this respect. According to Torrey, Marsh had set himself the "grand object to prepare him- self by reading and reflection, for taking a comprehensive view of all the parts of knowledge, as constituting a connected and organic whole, and to understand the relations and relative importance of the several parts." 661 Four parts, at least, of this comprehensive work, begun in 1832, were these: (1) a sketch of the general architec- tonic of philosophy, in which psychology, logic, ethics, metaphysics, physics, mathe- matics, etc. were to be related, one to an- other, in a way to demonstrate the "unity of human knowledge"; (2) remarks on physiology; (3) a psychology, which, follow- ing the advice of Dr. Follen, 662 was to be the propaedeutic to the entire philosophical or- ganon; and (4) a logic, which should aid in this design by laying the necessary ground- work. 663 These philosophical fragments were not published until a year after the death of Marsh, when Joseph Torrey collected them, together with several theological dis- courses, under the head of Remains of the Rev. James Marsh . . . with a Memoir of His Life. It is doubtful, therefore, that in the printed form they exerted any consider- able influence. They are significant, how- ever, as demonstrating (1) what Marsh taught in his classes, (2) what the deriva- tion of some of those teachings was, and consequently (3) what modifications he made while interpreting German critical philosophy. His attempted general organization of human knowledge comprises twenty-four pages as edited by Professor Torrey. 664 It is entitled "Letter to an Advanced Student. A Fragment," and bears the subtitle, "Outlines of a Systematical Arrangement of the Departments of Knowledge, with a View to their Organic Relations to Each Other in a General System." It begins with pseudo-Kantian definitions of Space and Time 665 and a discussion of a priori and a posteriori principles, and proceeds to a discussion of Metaphysical Principles of Natural Philosophy and Organic Life, but it affords no conclusive evidence bearing on his interpretation of Understanding and Reason, although Kant is several times referred to in the text as well as in the foot- 140 German Thought in America notes, suggesting that he had read as far as page 293 of the particular edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft he possessed. 666 The "Remarks on Physiology" 667 has no other importance for our purpose than that of presenting the main principles which Marsh regarded as lying at the basis of that important science. He was in the habit of commencing his course in philosophy with a presentation of the principles sketched in these "Remarks." They serve to illustrate the importance which he attached to cor- relating philosophy with science. His views are the same that are hinted at by Coleridge and more fully exhibited in the works of the German Carus. 668 The fragment of the "Psychology" 669 is at once the longest and the most helpful in any attempt to determine the question of how nearly Marsh approached Kant. It consists of ten chapters and a fragment of the eleventh. The arrangement suggests that he proposed to write a psychology on Kantian terms. The first five chapters are devoted to Sensation, and the next five to Understanding. Both sections are drawn faithfully enough after Kant, although the explanation of the Understanding is given without utilizing the Kantian categories or their applications. For a psychological work not designed as a critique of psychology, these first two divisions are adequate. It is in the eleventh and last chapter, where the Reason is introduced, that we are primarily interested. Up to this point even a rigorous critic of the Kantian school might raise little more than minor objections to indivi- dual statements or details. The moment, however, that Marsh reaches the point at which he attempts a definition of Reason and an explanation of its attributes and functions, the critic experiences trouble commensurate with those which Marsh himself appears to have encountered. Significantly, only seven pages of this chapter (ibid., pp. 360-67) were written, and here the "Psychology" abruptly ends. A nearer examination of this fragmentary chapter reveals evidence that Marsh ran into a dilemma by which, when he sought to define Reason, it became either some- what too much like a rarified form of Understanding or, when he attempted to use a freer terminology, too much a type of free intuition to accord with the meaning which he sensed Kant had given to it. The same difficulty that frustrated his efforts in distinguishing between Understanding and Reason in the Aids still dogged his steps. He still failed to see them as disparate faculties, and he still saw the former as supplying the materials for the latter to work on. Hence he encountered difficulties in his efforts to explain why the truths in the realm of the one are transferable to that of the other. Unwilling to circumscribe the Reason by the severe limitations with which Kant's Critique had hedged it round, but ambitious to ascribe to the Reason the establishment, upon grounds of undisputed validity, of its Ideas of God, immortality, and free will, he found in the end the same insuperable chasm between matter and mind that Emerson was to discover when he sought to graft upon his essay on Nature another to be entitled Spirit. A letter written at the time hints at the great difficulty. In it he speaks of the "novelities in terminology necessary to a thorough scientific system." 670 This termi- nology was wanting ; and wanting that, he found his epistemology inconclusive, and the continuance of his work impossible. "He was waiting," says his biographer, "in hopes of deriving some assistance in respect to language from Coleridge's promised 'Elements of Discourse,'" 671 which never appeared. Thus he died before he could realize the object to which so much labori- ous study and serious reflection had been devoted — still "waiting with impatience," as he had writen to Coleridge in 1829, "for that part of your works which will aid more directly in the study of those subjects of which he [Kant] treats." What is singular, in view of Marsh's personality, is that he Early Exponents in America 141 relied so largely upon Coleridge to supply him with a short cut to Kant when he might have resumed his firsthand study of Kant and thus gotten for himself what he had little reason to expect from Coleridge, who had never acknowledged or replied to his letter of 1829. 872 The alternative is to assume that having read his Kant and made the discovery that the Kantian Reason was incapable of accomplishing what Marsh had concluded it must be made to accomplish, he had given up Kant (though this is un- likely in view of his repeated references to Kant as his authority) and was waiting for Coleridge, or a light from some other source, to supply what was lacking. One other circumstance helps explain the inconclusiveness of Marsh's philosophizing. It arises from the fact that he had been led, by Follen, into too great an admiration for Fries, and that he appears not to have recognized the points at which Kant and Fries were at variance. 673 Any attempt to reconcile Kant with Fries and both with Coleridge could not produce anything but unsatisfactory results. These irreconcilable elements explain, as much as does Marsh's early death, the fragmentary nature of his philosophical accomplishments. The Fries- ian elements in his thinking, however, could have been communicated only to his students. His edition of the Aids was unaf- fected by them. Hence, so far as the general influence of Marsh on the Transcendental- ists goes, we are more concerned with the Coleridgean than the Friesian version of Kant. It is possible, of course, that there lies at bottom a deeper reason still for Marsh's incompleteness: that he purposely avoided identifying his thought, in his later efforts of thinking and writing, with Kant. It is hard to believe that Marsh's extraordinary fondness for Fries should have proceeded solely from Follen's enthusiasm for this neo-Kantian faith-philosopher. Marsh grew increasingly conservative during his later years. About 1836 the spirit of the times had become displeasing to him, and many of his later comments represent the mind of a man who seeks criticism in theology less than piety in religion. It is possible, therefore, that the pure faith of reason which Fries offered appealed more strongly to him than the inadequacy of the Pure Reason of Kant, which was incapable of affirming anything concerning the soul's three great Ideas. That Marsh had a vague sense of some- thing lacking in Coleridge's metaphysics does not surprise us, who, after the lapse of more than a century, still find it difficult to interpret Coleridge satisfactorily on purely Kantian terms. It still requires the most attentive reading, together with careful research in Coleridge's unpublished manu- scripts (all unavailable to Marsh), to under- stand that Coleridge not only grasped correctly the Kantian method of criticism but went beyond it in his attempt to make a higher synthesis, which may be likened to the similar and more successful attempt made by Hegel. Aside from Coleridge's too ready facility in shifting from the theoreti- cal to the practical (and back again) and the terminological perplexities that he intro- duced, Coleridge nowhere, in a single work, developed a system of philosophy. His first American editor was left to piece it together as best he could. The works in which Cole- ridge planned to bring all into a central unity were never completed, and they remain to this day generally inaccessible manuscript fragments. What is more, he was not content merely to repeat and elucidate the Kantian aesthetic, analytic, and dialectic; he was ambitious to build, upon the basis of the Kantian analysis, a System of Pure Reason which Kant himself had preferred not to attempt. He was ambitious to go beyond Kant, yes, to cor- rect him at certain points. With Fichte and with Schelling, he adopted the Kantian terminology and as much of the methodol- ogy as served his purpose; but like Fichte, he objected to Kant's unknown and un- 142 German Thought in America knowable noumenon, and like Schelling, he sought to close the gap in the Kantian dualism — to make philosophy all of one piece. The result was that his philosophy, as it came to his American disciples, com- bined, with the critical way of Kant, first, something of Fichte's Egoism, or Individu- ation, as Coleridge preferred to call it; sec- ond, larger portions of Schelling's theory of the Dynamic and of his trichotomy of subject-object-identity; 674 and third, his own deep-seated conviction regarding the true meaning and place of Individuality in the world both of nature and of man. In so far, therefore, as the American Transcen- dentalists of Vermont and Massachusetts derived their Kant from Coleridge, it was never a pure Kant, but always one with admixtures of Fichte, of Schelling, and of Coleridge himself. 675 However inaccurately interpreted, Kant- ian idealism received through the medium of Coleridge and Marsh a considerable currency in America. Its effect was less dramatic than pervasive. Where Marsh's book failed to penetrate, the literary and theological journals carried the message in reviews and articles, for and against. During the ten years following the publica- tion of Marsh's book, a great number of significant reviews appeared in the various American periodicals. Not to have an article, either laudatory or condemnatory, on Coleridge and German thought was to be behind the times. Among the earlier and more significant was one by Frederic Henry Hedge in the Christian Examiner for March, 1833 ; 676 among the later articles was one by Noah Porter in the Bibliotheca Sacra for February, 1847, on "Coleridge and his American Disciples." The latter indicates at once the influence of Coleridge and the growth of the Transcendental ferment. Porter's point of view is that of a theologian, in which capacity he finds much to object to in Coleridge, but he credits Coleridge with exerting a powerful influence in directing American thought. 677 Marsh sought to reinforce the general influence of Coleridge in America by editing in 1830 Selections from Old English Writers on Practical Theology, 616 and by preparing a preface, in 1831, for the first American edition of The Friend. 619 Two years later appeared, in book form, Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry 660 and four years later his translation of D. H. Hegewisch's Introduc- tion to Historical Chronology. 681 In the last years of his life he returned to the "great work" which he had projected years before — the preparation of a comprehensive work on all forms of knowledge. His reorganiza- tion of the University of Vermont had been one step in this program; his edition of Coleridge, the article on Stuart's Hebrews, and his translation of Herder, three others; and now he set himself to write something fundamental on psychology and logic. These works were far from complete at his death in 1842. When we reflect how heterodox Emer- son's addresses before the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Harvard Divinity School were considered by his comparatively liberal-minded Cambridge audience, we get some idea of the stir which Marsh must have provoked in Vermont ten years ear- lier. His success in carrying through his reforms of the University without a dissent- ing vote from his colleagues sufficiently emphasizes his forcefulness. The most effectual medium by which Marsh exerted his later influence was through his students. It is said that of the young men who attend- ed his lectures, eighty-one became teachers, fourteen of them in colleges, and twelve be- came ministers — all of them distributed, according to an alumni report, in nearly every state of the union. 682 Twelve years after his death many of his former students gathered at their Alma Mater to celebrate the semi-centennial of the founding of the University. By 1864, when another alumni celebration was held, the center of Tran- scendentalism had swung to Concord and thence westward, 683 but the reports of the Early Exponents in America 143 celebration leave no doubt that the students and alumni of the University of Vermont considered Marsh the originator and their university the fount of the movement which had, by that time, spread its in- fluence throughout the land. No oration, poem, or address delivered on that occasion failed to pay tribute to Marsh's command- ing personality, his Christian character, his literary achievements, his philosophical astuteness, his influence as a teacher, and his success in bringing the University into a prominent position of leadership. CONVERS FRANCIS With Convers Francis and Frederic Henry Hedge we reach firmer ground, for the evidence of their understanding of Ger- man thought and art is unequivocal, and their close contact with and influence upon the Transcendentalists is indisputable. In point of time, only Moses Stuart, among native Americans, anticipated them. Older than the generation of Emerson and Parker, Convers Francis (i 795-1 863 ) 684 was revered by them as a student of the classics and of modern European literature. Scholarly and retiring, he was never con- spicuous, nor was he regarded by the Tran- scendentalists as a representative apostle of the Newness; but, as being an "elder states- man," so to speak, he was accorded the honor of presiding at some of the meetings of the Transcendental Club. In this capaci- ty, as well as through his essays and lectures, he contributed much toward a liberal recep- tion of German thought in the United States. During the period of his active ministry he read widely and gained the reputation of being a veritable encyclopae- dia of information on theological scholar- ship, particularly of German theology. 685 His interest in German was more that of the theologian than the philosopher. There is no indication that he read far into Kant's criticism or his followers' transcendental speculations. Like others of his generation, he was content to take on trust the gener- ally current opinion among the progressive party that German transcendentalism had re-enthroned religion on a sound philosophi- cal basis, without inquiring into the precise steps by which this re-enthronement had been effected. Francis enjoyed a wide personal popular- ity both before and during the period of his teaching career at Harvard. When Parker went to Watertown in 1832, he found in Francis a man of liberal and undogmatic views who stood ready to help him in his ambition to acquire a knowledge of German thought both by teaching him and by lend- ing him books from his well-stocked libra- ry. 686 As early as 1836 Francis prognosti- cated correctly that the recent pronounce- ments of men like Ripley, Brownson, Al- cott, Furness, and Emerson indicated that the "spiritualists" were taking the offensive and carrying the field. Francis himself was on the side of the insurgents, the spiritual- ists, the German school, the Transcenden- talists. 687 His successive classes of divinity students imbibed from him a stimulus and direction that carried them into the ranks of the Transcendentalists. This shaping influence is discernible in the life and work of such students of his as Samuel Johnson, Samuel Longfellow, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Yet he was a Transcendentalist with a difference. He was, on the whole, a gentleman scholar of the eighteenth-centu- ry stamp, a bibliophile, and an antiquarian, possessing a tolerant personality; he was too old to be aroused to flaming enthusiasm by the influx of romantic feeling. While he presided at the conclaves of the Transcen- dentalists, at once the confidant and adviser of a host of Emersonians, he retained the good will and friendship of conservatives like N. L. Frothingham and Andrews Norton. He actively participated in the Transcendental movement so long as it confined itself mainly to idealistic discus- sion, but when the plans for propagandism and schemes for social reorganization were agitated, he quietly withdrew, yet contin. 144 German Thought in America ued to follow closely the fortunes of his younger, enthusiastic friends. By tempera- ment, he was less zealous than the younger men in the cause of insurgent idealism, but his sister once said to him what seems to sum up his position very neatly: "You have the highest peaks of your mind at least a little gilded with transcendentalism." "A conscientious natural eclectic," he revered Emerson and loved Parker as men, but he disagreed with the former on many points and regretted what seemed to him sarcastic, arrogant, derisive, and destructive in the work as well as the manner of the latter. Less dynamic than thoughtful, he content- ed himself with exercising an inspirational and shaping influence, rather than himself assuming, offensively or defensively, an active role in this latest idealistic crusade. 688 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE A colleague who took a more energetic course, both practically and theoretically, and who delved relatively deeper into the intricacies of the German speculative science was Frederic Henry Hedge (1805- 1890). 689 Educated as he was chiefly in Germany, he early became known as "Ger- manicus" Hedge, and was one of the prin- cipals in the great drama of progressive thought which the diverse and stimulating ideas from abroad helped to produce in New England during the fourth and fifth decades of the last century, for among the native sons of New England he was one of the few who could speak authoritatively on matters pertaining toGerman philosophy. 690 His sympathy with the spirit and ideas of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, whom he con- tinued to read, was a tendency of mind that displayed itself while he was still a student in the Harvard Divinity School, and it may well have been communicated to Emerson during their period of close association while fellow-students there. This enthusi- asm for German thought he transmitted to Margaret Fuller, James F. Clarke, Theodore Parker, and George Ripley. Hedge's perso- nal influence in communicating his knowl- edge of German philosophy to these thoughtful and earnest young people has never been evaluated. Higginson, one of the later generation of Transcendentalists, spoke of him as "a fountain of knowledge in the way of German," and "the best trained and most methodical of the earlv Transcendentalists." Obviously, they were not entirely without guidance in their efforts to grasp the new thoughts which Coleridge and Carlyle were praising and making some attempts to explain. 691 As early as 1833, when Emerson first planned a "periodical paper," he thought well enough of Hedge to want his assist- ance. 692 By 1835, Hedge seems to have become the prime mover for the establish- ment of a journal on the plan of the Dial, which did not come into immediate exist- ence, we may believe, mainly because Hedge was to be the editor, and because in that year the editor-elect was called from among his confreres to the ministerial charge at Bangor, Maine. In 1836, however, he attended the bicentennial celebration at Harvard. After the exercises, he fell into conversation with Emerson and Ripley : regarding the state of thought and religion , in the churches in general and the fate of the projected journal in particular. This was the preliminary meeting of the Transcen- dental Club, also variously called the Sym- posium, the Club, the Hedge Club, and Hedge's Club — in deference to his priority of knowledge of German philosophy, his arrival in town being an informal notifica- tion to the several subscribers to the New- ness of another gathering to be held. 093 That the personal influence of Hedge had a good deal to do with popularizing German philosophy among the Transcendentalists may be surmised from his wide contacts with them. His essay on Coleridge was the first clear and specific exposition of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling published in the United States by a native-born American. The essay itself, comprising twenty-one Early Exponents in America 145 pages, was occasioned by the American editions of the Biographia Literaria (1817), Marsh's editions of the Aids (1829) and The Friend (1831), and the three-volume Lon- don edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works (1829). "Coleridge's Literary Character" forms the subject of the first ten pages, near the end of which Coleridge's reflective and critical powers are assessed, 694 logically followed by a consideration of his stature as a philosopher and of his relation to Ger- man transcendentalism. Deploring Cole- ridge's failure to write more precisely when discussing the critical philosophy. Hedge proceeds to the main object of his essay — "a few explanatory remarks respecting German metaphysics, which seem ... to be called for by the present state of feeling among literary men in relation to this sub- ject." 695 The sequel demonstrates Hedge's firsthand knowledge of Kant's Critiques, of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, and of Schil- ling's System des transcendentalen Idealis- mus, quite independent of any reliance upon Coleridge or Carlyle. Indeed, the next eight pages present as luminous and comprehensive an exposition of the basic tenets of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, and of the general import of their systems as can easily be incorporated in so short a space. German philosophy, he says, is the expression of just such a tendency as characterizes the present age in this coun- try, when, passing from a state of spontane- ous production to a state of reflection, men are particularly disposed to inquire con- cerning themselves and their destination, the nature of their being, the evidence of their knowledge, and the ground of their faith — when they are "striving after infor- mation on subjects which have been usually considered as beyond the reach of human intelligence." 696 But transcendental philosophy does not seek immediately to answer these ques- tions: "It seeks not to explain the existence of God and creation, objectively considered, but to explain our knowledge of their existence." Moreover, Kant did not himself create a system, but furnished the hints and materials from which all the systems of his followers have been formed." Kant, as the father of the critical philosophy, aimed to do no more than develop the preparatory or ' 'propaedeutic ' ' branches of the science, 697 leaving to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel the creation of the system itself. Among them, there was developed a transcendental point of view as well as a philosophy which Hedge describes as one of "interior conscious- ness ... of spirit and form, substance and life, free will and fate, God and eternity." Their attempt to test what is called "a priori knowledge" is only an inquiry "con- cerning themselves and their destination. . . a striving after information on subjects which have been usually considered as beyond the reach of human intelligence, an attempt to penetrate into the hidden mysteries of our being." 698 However syn- thetical the method of some of Kant's suc- cessors, the Kantian critical method itself is analytical; and the result, "the last step in the process, the keystone of the fabric, is the deduction of time, space, and variety, or . . . the establishing of a coincidence between the facts of ordinary experience and those which we have discovered within ourselves, and scientifically derived from our first fundamental position." And this, Hedge argues, "is not a skeptical philoso- phy ; it seeks not to overthrow, but to build up; it wars not with the common opinions and general experience of mankind, but aims to place these on a scientific basis, and to verify them by scientific demonstration." After re-emphasizing the revolutionary significance of the Kantian search for a priori principles, Hedge points out that the followers of Kant did not long content themselves with the analytical method, with the merely epistemological problems, but soon adopted the "synthetical, proceed- ing from a given point, the lowest that can be found in consciousness, and deducing from that point 'the whole world of intelli- 146 German Thought in America gences, with the whole system of their representations. " ' 699 This system, characterized in a manner to suggest that he had Schelling in mind, received its preparation at the hands of Fichte, who stood midway between Kant and Schelling. Already in Fichte there is "an alternation of synthesis and analysis." There follows a brief but precise statement of Fichte 's demonstration of the "identity of consciousness" in the Wissenschaftslehre (pp. 122-23). But Fichte's tendency toward skepticism repels Hedge; Fichte's egoism, moreover, based on his axiom "I am I," whence he derived "I am all" (Ich ist A lies), was more than Hedge was prepared to accept. Fichte, he concludes, is "altogether too subjective" (p. 124). The objective idealism of Schelling, as contrasted with the subjective idealism of Fichte, is more to Hedge's mind, Schelling's converse proposition by which "All is I" (A lies ist Ich) being more in the nature of objective universalization. Of all the Ger- mans who have built upon the foundations of Kantian epistemology, Schelling, the "ontologist of the Kantian school" and the "projector of the natural philosophy," is the "most satisfactory." 700 "If Fichte confined himself too exclusively to the subjective, Schelling on the other hand treats princi- pally of the object, and endeavors to show that the outward world is of the same essence with the thinking mind, both being different manifestations of the same divine prin- ciple." Going on to Schelling's Transcenden- taler Idealismus, Hedge points out that "all knowledge, according to him, consists in an agreement between the object and the sub- ject. In all science, therefore, there are these two elements or poles, subject and object, or nature and intelligence; and corresponding to these two poles there are two fundamental sciences, the one beginning with nature and proceeding upward to intelligence, the other beginning with intelligence and ending in nature. The first is natural philosophy; the second, transcendental philosophy." 701 This passage in the Christian Examiner for March, 1833 (XIV, i 125), which Emerson found on his desk immediately upon his return from Europe, was some- thing to his purpose for the book which he had begun aboard ship. In it he found stated, in terms the echoes of which are obvious in several sections of Nature (1836), the entire range of ideas which he soon set himself to elaborate in two essays — one on "Nature" and another on "Spirit," al- though the latter was never to be written and published in its projected form. Hedge does not profess to more than he knows, and does not attempt to go beyond the three books before him: Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Fichte's Wissenschafts- lehre, and Schelling's Transcendentaler \ Idealismus. While he admits that "the immediate, and if we may so speak, the incalculable results of their speculations . . . are chiefly under the head of method," yet there are to be mentioned also "the sharp and rigidly dividing lines that have been drawn within and around the kingdom of human knowledge; the strongly marked distinctions of subject and object, reason and understanding, phenomena and nou- mena ; — the categories established by Kant ; the moral liberty proclaimed by him as it had never been proclaimed by any before; the authority and evidence of law and duty as set forth by Fichte; the universal har- mony illustrated by Schelling" (p. 126). These "direct results of the critical philoso- phy ... by no means exhaust all that phi- losophy has done for liberty and truth," for the "excellence" which Germany has attained "in science, in history, or poetry is mainly owing to the influence of her philos- ophy ... in a word to the transcendental method." 702 Its richness is immediately and noticeably evident in the theological writ- ings of Coleridge, which President Marsh has labored so effectively to give currency. And thus Hedge closes with a tribute to Coleridge's "intellect of the highest order" and his success as an expositor of German Early Exponents in America 147 philosophy — for, adds Hedge, "as a trans- lator, he has not his equal in English literature" (p. 128). Enthusiastically as he expresses himself for German philosophy, Hedge himself was neither Kantian nor Hegelian; 703 he studi- ously avoided identifying himself with any particular school, except that he could always be found on the side of the idealists and opposed to the sensationalists, experi- mentalists, and realists. 704 As a preacher, he was not mainly theological or specula- tive ; he was mainly ethical, in which respect he was a follower of the Kantian basis for religion. 705 But again, he asserted his in- dependence, for where Kant would combine what he called Physico-theology with Ethico-theology to arrive at an explanation of God, Hedge reinvested his proofs with something of Revelation. 706 Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany, in- fluential though it was in spreading among the popular American audience a knowledge of German literature and philosophy, is little to our immediate purpose; for by 1847, when it appeared, the leading Tran- scendentalists had progressed beyond the formative stages in developing their thought, and for such books as Emerson's Nature or his Divinity School address, it came a decade too late. 707 Moreover, as regards the German philosophers represent- ed in the volume, the translations are by the hands of co-workers, 708 while the introduc- tory sketches are either the work of helpers or, as in the cases of Jacobi, Fichte, and Schelling, though penned by Hedge, con- cerned with general or summary statements of the significance of their contributions rather than with a detailed explanation of their thought. One important feature of the book is that Hedge re-emphasized the distinctive differences between Kant and his followers that he had first pointed out in 1833. His success in grasping clearly these distinctions when almost everybody else in America missed them, betokens his perspi- cuity. He was also the first to use the term transcendental in the sense in which it was understood by the better Transcendental- ists; and he was quite correct in surmising that the word, as he understood it, would continue, in common usage, to signify both the method of Kant and the systems of his followers. Although Hedge early formed an ambi- tion, like another Milton, to sing "a song to generations," his poetic achievements were modest. A few of his hymns and lyrics have survived. 709 For the most part, his best creative work was done in his orations, notably the one on Luther, delivered memoriter in Boston in 1883, when Hedge was seventy-eight, on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of Luther's birth. As a lecturer he was popular from the thirties until well into the eighties, ever ready to pass on to successive generations of Americans the philosophy of idealism that had first inspired him as a youth in Germany. As late as 1881 he participated in the third session of the Concord School of Philosophy by lecturing on the founder of critical philosophy in commemoration of the centenary of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. 1 ™ Perhaps his most effective work was done as editor and translator. 711 His Prose Writers of Germany (1847), his nu- merous translations of German poems, the Hours with German Classics (1886), 712 and a translation of Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl (1848, 1889) were all notable achievements. But his many contributions, in the form of books and articles, to theology and philoso- phy also made a powerful impression in their day. 713 His appointment, in 1872, to the professorship of German at Harvard was a somewhat tardy recognition of his zeal and scholarship. Professor Gray observes quite correctly that "the introduction or rather domestication of German philosophy, which brought New England Transcenden- talism itself into being, was the work, mainly, of Frederic Henry Hedge." 714 As time went on, able coadjutors joined him in the work, but he was the pioneer and the 148 German Thought in America most accomplished leader of the German party in the Transcendental movement. The Unitarian and Congregational Clergy Before we turn to Emerson and a con- sideration of the role played by others of the major Transcendentalists in domesti- cating certain aspects of German culture in America, we must correct a common im- pression, namely, that Unitarians consist- ently and implacably opposed German ideas. Nothing can be further from the truth, for there were Unitarians and Uni- tarians. In the first place, the disciples of the New Views who espoused German thought and art were, or had been, almost without exception, Unitarians. Further- more, in many areas, conservative Uni- tarian ministers, in good standing in the Association, prosecuted German studies quite as diligently as did the liberal left- wingers who went by the name of Trans- cendentalists. The columns of journals like the Christian Examiner, itself the recognized organ of Unitarian ism, provided the chief arena in which the battle for and against Germanism was fought. Even the Presby- terian Princeton Review opened its pages to the German heresies, though, of course, its facilities were available principally for the defenders of the faith against "German skepticism" and "atheism." The German theologians provided the Unitarian cler- gymen with arguments for the maintenance of their position against Calvinism quite as often as the Transcendentalist ministers sought in them principles in support of their position against the conservative Unitarians. Often to be sure, the Unitarian clergy read German theology and philos- ophy not only to answer their gainsayers, whether Calvinist or Transcendentalist, but also to refute the Germans themselves. We have already seen how among the Unitarians a long succession of their leaders, from William Bentley to Frederic Henry Hedge, were pioneers in this realm. Between the two, and forming a kind of succession, were W. E. Channing, Carl Follen, Convers Francis, and J. S. Buckminster. It will be recalled, also, that Emerson, Parker, Ripley, Clarke, Furness, Cranch, Dwight, W. H. Channing, and even Brownson were basic- ally Unitarians; while among the younger generation, Samuel Osgood, C. A. Bartol, O. B. Frothingham, John Weiss, D. A. Wasson, Moncure D. Conway, Samuel Longfellow, Samuel Johnson, and G. W. Cooke, all started as Unitarian ministers. Apart from the notable work of W. E. Channing in preparing the New England of Jonathan Edwards for the New England of Ralph Waldo Emerson, there were stalwarts in the Unitarian church — men like James Walker (i 794-1 874) —whose temperate pronouncements on Transcen- dentalism bore especial weight. Walker was one of the founders of the American Unitarian Association in 1825, editor of the Christian Examiner from 1831 to 1839, Alford Professor of Natural Reli- gion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard from 1839 to 1855, and President of Harvard from 1853 to i860. As early as 1834, that is, two years before Nature was published, he declared himself in favor of "a better philosophy than the degrading sensualism, out of which most forms of modern infidelity have grown." 715 He went on to assert that "to a rightly constituted and fully developed soul, moral and spiritu- al truth will be revealed with a degree of intuitive clearness and certainty, equal at least to that of the objects of sense." The young Transcendentalists seized immediate- ly upon this statement as supporting their position. Actually, however, Walker was more the critic of Unitarianism than the proponent of Transcendentalism. What he aimed at was to repel skepticism by the argument that innate faculties exist in the soul for the apprehension of spiritual truth. He had not yet (indeed, he never) proceeded much beyond the desire to transfer "the Early Exponents in America 149 sanctions of authority from outward to inward, from external testimony to imme- diate consciousness, from the senses to the soul." In short, he was still largely under the influence of the Scottish realists. He never got from under their influence, and in 1849 he edited Dugald Stewart's Philoso- phy of the A ctive and Moral Powers and the next year Thomas Reid's Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. 716 But when we have said all this, there remains the fact that his mind was not closed to the new thought. In 1840, for example, he declared, in a discourse before the Cambridge Divinity School, that "the return to a higher order of ideas, to a living faith in God, in Christ, and in the church" had been promoted by such men as Schlei- ermacher and De Wette. Voicing the con- viction that the religious community had reason to look with distrust and dread on a philosophy which limits the ideas of the human mind to the information imparted by the senses, denying the existence of spiritual elements in the nature of man, he went on to welcome the philosophy taught in England by Butler, Reid, and Coleridge, in Germany by Kant, Jacobi, and Schleier- macher, and in France by Cousin, Jouffroy, and De Gerando. And he concluded by saying that "men may put down Transcen- dentalism if they can, but they must first deign to comprehend its principles." 717 Such words from the prominent expounder of the metaphysics of nineteenth-century Unitarianism caused even the most conserv- ative to surmise that there might be some- thing in transcendentalism worth inquiring into. Quite aside from the several generations of Transcendentalists who began as Uni- tarian ministers and apart from other Uni- tarians (James Walker, for instance) who adopted a liberal attitude toward the tran- scendental philosophy of Germany, there were the dyed-in-the-wool Unitarians them- selves who gave more than passing atten- tion to German developments. The follow- ing Unitarian ministers represent in their attitudes toward German idealism all the varying stages from enthusiastic approba- tion to unqualified opposition; but whether they expressed themselves for or against German theologians, philosophers, and men of letters, none of them spoke without some knowledge of the subject. The list, 718 though far from complete, is imposing, including as it does the names of Joseph Henry Allen (1 820-1 898), William Bentley (1759-1819), Joseph Stevens Buckminster (1784-1812), Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch (1809-1863), Frederick Frothingham (1825- 1891), Nathaniel L. Frothingham (1793- 1870), William Batchelder Greene (1819- 1878), Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), Andrews Norton (1786-1853), George R. Noyes (1 798-1 868), Andrew Preston Peabody (1811-1892), Ephraim Peabody (1807-1856), James H. Perkins (1810-1892), Palmer Putnam (1814-1872), Henry Ware, Jr. 719 (1 794-1843), William Ware (1797-1852), and W. D. Wilson (1816- 1900). That the Presbyterians were not far behind the Unitarians in a knowledge of what was transpiring in theologians' cells and philosophers' studies in Germany ap- pears from the following list of clergymen who took a stand for or against Germanism : James Waddell Alexander (1804-1859), Daniel Dana (1771-1859), Henry Davis (1771-1852), Albert Baldwin Dod (1805- 1845), Charles Hodge (1 797-1878), James Marsh (1 794-1 842), Samuel Miller (1769- 1850), James Murdock (1776-1856), Noah Porter (1811-1892), Henry Boynton Smith (1815-1877), and Moses Stuart (1780-1852). Among Baptists, Barnas Sears (1802-1880) was the most noted for his knowledge of German. These lists include only the names of clergymen whose writings on the subject warrant consideration in a survey of this kind. Obviously the lists could be extended, but enough has been indicated to suggest that the Transcendentalists were not alone in considering German thought as having a 150 German Thought in America bearing on American problems, for there were among the orthodox clergymen some who not only supported but topped the efforts of the "German party." Even when they stood at opposite poles in the contro- versy over the "Latest Form of Infidelity," as did the Transcendentalist Ripley and the Unitarian Norton, their efforts may be considered, from one point of view, as hav- ing eventually promoted the same ends. Perhaps no one brings this matter into sharper focus than the Rev. Andrews Nor- ton, often thought of as the leading oppo- nent of German philosophy because his several pamphlets on "German infidelity" and his refusal to permit his son to study German at Harvard lest it corrupt his Uni- tarian principles are emphasized out of all proportion to his general work and to the disparagement of his just reputation as a Biblical scholar. Norton's long association with Harvard as Dexter Professor of Sacred Literature in the Divinity School (1819-1830) 720 and his substantial contributions 721 to Biblical criticism and controversial literature long maintained him at the head of the conserv- ative Unitarian spokesmen. How he acquired his knowledge of German is not clear, but his contributions to the General Repository and Review (181 2-1 81 3), which he edited, to the North American Review, the Christian Examiner, the Select Journal of Foreign Periodical Literature (edited jointly by Norton and Charles Folsom; 4 vols., 1833-1834), and his tracts on the "latest form of infidelity," all serve to show that he was well enough read, particularly among the German theologians, to score telling blows against their principles, against the extension of their doctrine in America, and against Ripley and Emerson, reputedly their exponents. But these earlier essays were only preliminary exer- cises to his more substantial work The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels, which he began as early as 18 19, and the first volume of which was published in !837, 722 at precisely the moment when it seemed to him the German heresies were making dangerous inroads upon "true" religion in America. The scope of Norton's indebtedness to the German theologians in this work is signalized in the "Introduc- tion: Statement of the Case," at least five of the eleven pages being translations which he made from Eichhorn's Einleitung in das neue Testament (1804-1837), and much of what follows being a refutation of Eich- horn's Urevangelium hypothesis. Aside from his own investigations, he relied chiefly upon British theologians, notably Jones, Marsh, Kaye, Lardner, Paley, Pearson, and Wake, for the positive part of his argument ; but the Germans whom he quoted, used, and misused are also prominent. 723 The French Biblical scholars run a poor third. 724 Norton's summary condemnation of Ger- man philosophy and theology was, of course, displeasing to the Transcendental- ists; and Brownson, in the newly-founded Boston Quarterly Review, was one of the first to oppose and twit Norton. Reviewing the first volume of the Evidences (1837) he observed that Norton's references to the German Credner, "a young man scarcely known in his own country," left one to infer that the author was widely read among the German theologians whom he so much abhorred. 725 Brownson also expressed, ironically, his disappointment that Norton's book does not lay the charges of infidelity brought against Norton by his friends and enemies. Considering Norton's reputation as a "first-rate theologian," Brownson finds it all the more disappointing to find Norton resting his case for the truth of Christianity on little more than his argument regarding the truth of the miracles. If he possessed much philosophical sagacity, he would not have fallen into the absurd position of citing Locke in support of the theory which rests the basis of Christianity upon the miraculous. Even Jonathan Edwards, says Brownson, was less blind in this respect than the learned Dexter Professor. The fact Early Exponents in America 151 is, says Brownson, the Lockean system "embraced by our author is as fatal to all sound morality as it is to religious faith," and nothing is to be expected from either Norton or any other professor of Harvard, entangled as they are in the toils of Lockean sensationalism. 726 To make a fairer representation of the controversy we should present the more moderate views of men like Barnas Sears and Francis Bowen, but enough has already been said to indicate that for every Norton who set his face against the inevitable there was a colleague who took a more tolerant view and sought to guide the new religious and theological impulses issuing from Ger- many into the "proper" channels. Regard- less of the many varying attitudes assumed by the several defenders of the "right" and "true" religion, whether Congregational or Unitarian, it is clear that without the Uni- tarian tradition of "free inquiry" and with- out the active support of many individual Unitarians as well as Congregationalists, German ideas would have been much longer than they were in making their way into America. To come to a realization of how the attitude toward German thought changed, one needs only to compare the attitudes expressed during the thirties to- ward "Germanism" in such periodicals as the Princeton Review with the attitude explicit not only by direct statement but also in the proportion of articles devoted to German theological and philosophical sub- jects, as well as in the elaborate "Literary Intelligence" and "Notices of New Publica- tions" from Germany that we find during the fifties in such a journal as the Bibliotheca Sacra.'' 2 '' And what became typical in con- servative periodicals was multiplied mani- fold in more liberal journals like Parker's Massachusetts Quarterly Review and the Radical, the Index, and the Open Court of a later day. Having defined our terms, traced the av- enues by which German ideas came to America, and considered the agencies that prepared the way for their adoption and adaptation by New England Transcenden- talism, we turn now to Emerson as the leading promulgator of the new philosophy in America. The Transcendentalist Writers RALPH WALDO EMERSON Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is by common consent at once the most original and the most influential of the New England Transcendentalists. He was their leader and their philosopher — not because he led them or because he gave them a distinct system of philosophy, but because he came so much nearer doing so than any other that his primacy went unchallenged in his day and later. But Emerson did not consider himself the head of a "school," he denied being a systematic philosopher, 1 and he blandly put off a would-be but question- ing follower by saying, "Very well, I do not wish disciples." 2 But all this is not equivalent to saying, as has been said too often by those who misquote and misinterpret Emerson's bon mot about a foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds that his philoso- phy had neither unity nor cohesion ; nor is it to imply, as is equally common, either that Emerson was incapable of thinking clearly or that he complacently contented himself with half-truths in religion and patent falsehoods in philosophy. It was rather that he was cautious about forcing his thoughts into set forms and rigid terms. 3 He had a profound distrust of all "systems" and all system-makers, even to the point of disliking preachers and preaching. "I hate preaching," he said, "whether in pulpits or in teachers' meeting. Preaching is a pledge, and I wish to say what I feel and think to- day, with the proviso that to-morrow per- haps I shall contradict it all. Freedom boundless I wish." 4 It was for the same reason that he disliked being called a Tran- scendentalist — not because he disclaimed his beliefs or denied his associates, but because he believed people did not know the meaning of the word. He did not like labels which lent themselves too readily to misinterpretation. Hence he preferred the word idealist. Transcendentalism to him was idealism — "Idealism as it appears in 1842." Idealism was nothing new in 1842. It was not new to him. In fact, it was instinctive. In 1 84 1 he recalled how, as a mere child, he developed an attitude of mind that laid the groundwork for what, in 1835, he tried to formulate into a "First Philosophy." I remember, when a child, in the pew on Sundays amusing myself with saying over common words as "black," "white," "board," etc., twenty or thirty times, until the word lost all meaning and fixedness, and I began to doubt which was the right name for the thing, when I saw that neither had any natural relation, but all were arbitrary. 5 This experience he interpreted correctly as "a child's first lesson in idealism." And this, we may believe, was all that was need- ed to lead the curious mind of Emerson into the high road to Idealism. Much has been made of the influence upon Emerson of Plato, of the neo-Plato- nists, of Oriental philosophy, of the Scottish philosophers, of German thinkers working through Carlyle and Coleridge, and of a score of others. The effect of one or all of these, considered as shaping influences, is 153 154 German Thought in America easily overstated. The alleged influence of Plato on Emerson illustrates the point. An active reader of Plato from first to last, Emerson undoubtedly found in Platonic thought his most steady point of reference. But to relate the whole of Emerson's intel- lectual development to Platonism, as John S. Harrison tends to do in his otherwise excellent Teachers of Emerson, is obviously doing violence to the facts. 6 It fails to take sufficiently into account other influences; it neglects too much the native heritage of New England idealism and individualism, 7 of which Emerson was never unconscious; and it tends to overlook what must ever be put first in any accounting for Emerson's thought, namely, that strong element of originality and individuality without which Emerson would not have been Emerson. Too great an insistence upon "influences" runs counter to Emerson's oft-repeated principles of individualism, independence, and originality, and overlooks his saying that "the office of reading is wholly subor- dinate ... I get thereby [only] a vocabu- lary for my ideas." 8 There can be no doubt about the correctness of Emerson's obser- vation that he read mainly for the "lustres, 9 the quotables and memorabilia, and to get confirmation for his ideas. Books, asserted Emerson, are for the scholar's idle times; but since he added in the same breath, they "make my top spin," 10 we infer that the stimulus derived from them sometimes went beyond the mere suggestiveness of single words or phrases. That he read for something more than a vocabulary is sug- gested by such a note as that made on August 20, 1837: "Carlyle and Wordsworth now act out of England on us, — Coleridge also," 11 as well as by the arrangement he made of his reading in 1847, by which the writings of Goethe and Coleridge are put under the head of "Tonic Books," and Cousin, Madame de Stael, and Southey are listed under "Importers." 12 And yet, while he refused, like Carlyle, to acknowledge discipleship to any master, every page of his diary refutes the inference that he contemned studies. He kept constant company with books ; no man kept company with better books, and few men kept better company with books. 13 Take out of his essays and lectures what is owing to his reading, and we should leave them poor, shrunken things indeed. After the first exbuerance of youthful in- dividualism had worn off, Emerson, in 1855, made what appears to be a maturely con- sidered general statement of indebtedness: "My best thoughts come from others." 14 This bald utterance provokes knowing winks and raised eyebrows among the influence- seekers and source-hunters, and sets them off on the old tack of pointing out parallels and tracking down coincidences, all of which are afterwards lumped under the head of "influences." But Emerson's observation is only another instance among many that must not be taken out of the context, for what he adds in the next breath suggest that he did, indeed, borrow, but with a difference: "I heard in their words my own meaning, but a deeper sense than they put into them ; and could well and best express myself in other people's phrases, but to finer purposes than they knew." 15 Books [he wrote on Christmas Day, 1831] are apt to turn reason out of doors. You find men talking everywhere from their memo- ries, instead of from their understanding. If I stole this thought from Montaigne, as is very likely, I don't care. I should have said the same myself. 16 Two weeks later he found a thought in Mendelssohn's Phaedo that pleased him, and that he wrote down on his blotter: "Little matters it to the simple lover of truth to whom he owes such and such a reasoning." 17 In his essay on Plato he said, "Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he among our original- ities . . . Plato is philosophy and philoso- phy is Plato"; but in his journal he was more chary: "Mv debt to Plato is a certain Ralph Waldo Emerson 155 number of sentences; a like to Aristotle. A larger number, yet still a finite number, makes the worth of Milton and Shakespeare to me." 18 All these statements, diverse as they are in the conclusions which they suggest, are yet consistent in the implication which they leave, namely, that Emerson read and read abundantly, though never to appro- priate merely or to steal. 19 However, his good Yankee habit of storing up in his copious notebooks — the penny-savings bank of the lecturer and the stock-in-trade of the essayist — the "lustres" which he found in his readings suggests that they were designed to be put to use. 20 The sever- al genetic studies that have been made of how these notebook materials went first into his lectures (sometimes into letters) and later into essays have made abundantly plain how this design was carried out. Always the memorabilia of his journals were metamorphosed into the finished discourses of his public utterances or writings by undergoing a transmutation, a selection and reordering, an assimilation and naturalization, a revision or reapplica- tion. By contact with the genius within him, they came forth in a new synthetic form which was no longer Platonic or Kantian, Shakespearean or Goethean, Carlylean or Coleridgean — but Emersonian. The Platonic Period (to 1830) It is not necessary to suppose that Emer- son, once he had learned "the child's first lesson in Idealism," required to appropriate much from Plato to become the idealist he became. Indeed, it is difficult to put a finger on a passage in his writings which he could not have come by even if he had never read Plato. It might be observed, also, that while there is in Emerson's essays between 1836 and 1838 hardly an idea in the expression of which he was not anticipated, either wholly or partly, by Carlyle (especially in Carlyle's earlier essays), 21 yet it would be hard to find an idea in Emerson's essays of the period which he could not have thought of even if he had never discovered this "Germanick new-light writer," 22 as he called him in 1832. Not that Emerson was original at all points, or that he learned nothing from Plato, or that he found nothing in Carlyle; but rather to suggest that it is all but im- possible indisputably to relate this or that idea in Emerson directly to a similar or identical one to be found in either Plato or Carlyle. There are few thoughts in Emer- son's writings which, in the light of his various reading, could not be related to several sources; and whoever is minded to seek them out will find a dozen coincidences with Plato, a like number with Kant, as many more with Coleridge or Schelling, and so on. Another influence upon Emerson that has been overrated is that of Quakerism. 23 Entirely too much has been made of Emer- son's saying, none too well authenticated, that he considered himself "more of a Quaker than anything else." 24 Emerson's Unitarian heritage made him forever suspicious of Quakerish enthusiasm. 25 To be sure, his "spiritual religion" is at some points similar to Quaker doctrine, notably in the matter of conscience or the inner light. But these are only particularizations of his doctrine of self-reliance, not referable to any creed or sect. Similarly, other points on which Emerson seems in agreement with the Quakers, such as the doctrines of the immanence of God, of obedience, and of individual responsibility, are all common ideals which Emerson doubtless learned at his mother's (or Aunt Mary's) knee. Finally, as will appear in the sequel, Emerson did not rest content with a religion that relied as largely and unquestioningly as did the Quakers' on the mystical inner light. His most conscientious efforts were exerted to raise his belief into something approximating knowledge — to bring his heart and head into agreement. Conditioned 156 German Thought in America as he was by the harsh discipline of Puritan dogmatism and Unitarian rationalism, his strong will and insistence upon understand- ing his religion constantly egged him on to rationalizing this inner light — to lift it out of the realm of mysticism into that of intel- ligibility. The entire method of his reading, study- ing, thinking, and writing supports the view that insofar as Emerson's thought was derivative, it was eclectic. Systems of thought interested him little, but individual ideas he grasped eagerly, especially when they tallied with the genius for truth within him. The result was an eclecticism that developed, as all eclecticisms do, a number of mutually repellent particles, which the critics call inconsistencies. For him, fortu- nately, consistency and inconsistency were mainly quibbles on words. He neither loved the former nor feared the latter, and in the privacy of his journal he lustily damned both. 26 Not that he was unambitious to bring unity into his thinking, but that he objected to the subtle sophistries of critics who could not see the forest for the trees — who failed, in their worship of the great god Consistency, to see the larger truth for the smaller exceptions. Once he had grasped the three Ideas of Reason as truths, no appar- ent contradictions, whether bred of the Understanding or the speculative Reason, could shake his faith in them. For above all contrarities was the absolute Unity, by which the Many become the One, or the Over-Soul, in which subject and object, spirit and nature, ego and non-ego, merge into one. Insofar, then, as it is possible to speak of Emerson's "body" or "system" of thought, students who made its resolution their object have found themselves involved in difficulties. The main components of his thought are clear enough, and they have been charted too often to require restate- ment here. Professor Henry David Gray's study is among the more succinct and satis- factory of these analyses. But while there remains little doubt about what Emerson thought, there is less certainty about how he came to hold such views. Although Professor Gray recognizes in Emerson the "material for a system," and is prompted to order and systematize it in a way to present Emerson's "final theory," he finds the necessity under which this plan puts him of translating Emerson's statements into precise metaphysical terms a hard and thankless task. 27 The reason for the difficul- ty is threefold. In 1869 Emerson confessed frankly: "I never could get beyond five steps in my enumeration of intellectual powers: say, Instinct, Perception, Imag- ination (including Fancy as a subaltern), Reasoning or Understanding." 28 Epistemo- logically, Emerson's mind was not richly equipped. Another circumstance that threw ob- stacles into the path of Emerson's progress as an epistemologist was his thorough in- doctrination, at the hands of his Harvard professors, Levi Hedge and Levi Frisbie, in the Scottish school — Stewart, Reid, Hamil- ton, and Brown — a philosophy which identified the intuitive moral sense with the highest reason. 29 Emerson never fully ■' divested his mind of the tendency to make this easy identification; and when later he sought to define Kant's pure Reason, it often took on admixtures of meaning from the Scottish moralists. A third cause for Emerson's incompre- hensibility to himself and to us lies in the element of mysticism which was an innate part of his mental equipment. Wherever it rears its head, his philosophy ducks out of sight. All his efforts to the contrary, when- ever he reached the highest point in his phil- osophical aspirations, he lapsed into a rapt, inspirational tone which belongs to that which is sacred and becomes often the attempt to utter the unutterable. 30 When he reaches this point, Emerson lapses from metaphysics into mysticism, which the phi- losopher endeavors vainly to resolve into propositions, for mysticism has no geneal- Ralph Waldo Emerson 157 ogy. Whenever we approach the point at which Emerson leaves off thinking and begins communing, we have to leave him to his devices. Yet we can attend him some distance on the way in his speculative efforts. It is certainly a mistake not to take Emerson's philosophical aspirations seri- ously. Professor Harry H. Clark's searching study of the extent of Emerson's early concern with natural philosophy and of his indebtedness to the sciences 31 is a very effective refutation to the conventional view which regards Emerson as a purely mystical and philosophically irresponsible traveler in the land of whim, blandly affirm- ing an impossible optimism and enunciating inconsistent and untenable platitudes. To be sure, Emerson once asked whether a sensible man ever looked twice into a metaphysical book, and he sometimes professed to share with Wordsworth a disgust for the scientific analyst; but these isolated statements are nullified by hun- dreds upon hundreds of references in his writings that belie this supposed disdain. 32 He defined philosophy as "the account which the human mind gives itself of the constitution of the world"; and, he went on to say, "Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one and the two. — i. Unity, or Identity; and 2. Variety . . . Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think without embracing both." 33 Nothing goes deeper toward explaining Emerson's mind than the recognition that the primary passion of his life was the reconciliation of this Unity and Variety, to find "for all that exists conditionally ... a ground uncondi- tioned and absolute"; 34 in short, to find what he called the "First Philosophy." He approached religion philosophically: no religion that did not have its justification in the light of reason was acceptable to him, and no philosophy that did not include his religious prepossessions was possible for him; he could no more accept an irreligious philosophy than an unphilosophical reli- gion. 35 At this point we become aware of a fourth problem that aggravated Emerson's diffi- culties and that compounds our difficulty as we try to follow him through this period of uneasy and puzzled Platonism that pre- ceded his German transcendental phase. Naturally inclined though he was to take an idealistic view of life (a view for which his delvings into Platonic thought during the twenties lent support), what he was taught at Harvard College and the Divinity School about Lockean sensation- alism and Scottish common-sense seemed forever at odds with his idealism. Near- sighted though the Lockean empiricist un- doubtedly was, Emerson had to admit that he was clear-sighted and not easily moved from his position by anything short of logic. However far he read in Platonic literature, he failed to find arguments with which to beat the Lockean rationalist on his own grounds or with his own weapons. And he was not himself a sufficiently astute psy- chologist or epistemologist to arbitrate, once and for all, between the widely dis- parate claims of the Lockean rationalist on the one hand and the Platonic intuitionalist on the other. Instinctively he sided with the Platonists, but he found no way, in any epistemology with which he was aquainted before 1830, to reduce Plato's two worlds to one, and no convincing logical argument by which to refute Locke. And so he continued to waver, inclining at one time toward in- tuitive divination, and the next toward log- ical understanding — knowing well enough that he preferred Plato to Locke, but never able to convince himself that Plato had the better of the argument. Before inquiring into the epistemological difficulties which Emerson encountered, it is necessary to indicate the broad proposi- tions upon which his practical philosophy rested — to indicate what he believed before we attempt an inquiry into how and why he could believe thus. Emerson's speculation began with nature, and his first published work bore the title 158 German Thought in America Nature. "A noble doubt," he wrote in that book, "perpetually suggests itself wheth- er .. . nature outwardly exists." This noble doubt, occasioned by "my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects," he recurs to repeat- edly; and in the end he concludes, "Be it what it may, it [Nature] is ideal to me so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses." 36 Merry though the frivolous make them- selves with the ideal theory of nature, the stability of nature is in no wise affected by her ideality. Indeed, "any distrust in the permanence of [the] laws [of Nature] would paralyze the faculties of man." However illusory, Nature has yet a very practical reality. But if Nature is illusory, what, we may ask, gives reality and permanence to her laws ? The answer is simple, so simple that Emerson enjoys repeating the seeming fallacy: "Whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the ques- tion of her absolute existence still remains open." 37 The Kantian Phase (1830-1838) Thus far Emerson could well have trav- eled for himself after having learned "the child's first lesson in Idealism." Thus far Berkeley, whom he read "in early youth" might readily have carried him. 38 But Berkeley alone could never have led to the conclusions he reached in the latter por- tions of Nature. Indeed, the combined heritages of Puritanism, of his early study of Plato and Berkeley, of Harvard College and the Divinity School and all they stood for, of Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, of marriage and death, of the joys and sorrows that acted upon the young man, potent as these were, all still left his mind beclouded and his tongue inarticulate — left both his religion and his philosophy incomplete and unsatisfactory. The impetus to go on, to extract an essential unity out of his incho- ate prepossessions and half-substantiated ideas, did not come until he found the key in the Kantian threefold division of the mind. It is impossible to segregate and evaluate absolutely the several component influences that wrought this electrifying effect between 1830 and 1836. Whatever we attribute to the manifold influences of travel, to the personal contacts with Cole- ridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, and to his reading of their works, to the influence of men like Follen, Stuart, Marsh, Francis, Hedge, Channing, and the Gottingen men of Harvard and Boston, it all comes, in the end, to what is essentially the sum of all of them, namely, the distinction (derived from Kant through Carlyle and Coleridge) be- tween Understanding and Reason. No philosophy with which he was acquainted previous to 1830, whether of Greek or British or some other origin, seemed to supply the means for bridging the gap between what he called variously "spirit" or "mind" on the one hand and "nature" or "matter" on the other, or to supply what he felt would be a satisfactory metaphysical basis for the truths which he believed to be truths, but could not dem- onstrate to be so. Of the apparent dualism he was painfully aware; he could not bring mind and matter, spirit and nature, into correspondence. Although his genius for the truth within him told him he was right in denying the sensationalism of Locke and in insisting upon a tempering of Unitarian rationalism, he recognized the folly of a purely destructive criticism so long as he found nothing constructively consistent to replace what he proposed to take away. How to reconcile philosophically the dual- ism patent on the very surface of things ? This remained an open question until he discovered Kant. For "Nature is brute but as the soul quickens it; Nature always the effect, mind the flowing cause." 39 Yet the two must be shown to be one, and to the "marrying of Ralph Waldo Emerson 159 Nature and Mind" 40 he devoted his best efforts. The first extant notation, written in 1820, on his "Blotting-Book" is concerned with an attempt to define nature, mind, and God. Seldom thereafter, during the next ten years, does he make an entry or reflection without in some way reverting to this knotty problem of dualism, 41 until in the early thirties, it became a problem of all-absorbing proportions without the solu- tion of which he felt all further speculation would be futile. But as early as January 11, 1823, at least, he was in the clear regarding moral reality. Concerning it there never was any doubt in his mind: There is one distinction amid these fading phenomena — one decided distinction which is real and eternal and which will survive nature — I mean the distinction of Right and Wrong. Your opinions upon all other topics, and your feelings with regard to this world, in childhood, youth, and age, per- petually change. Your perceptions of right and wrong never change .... The mind may lose its acquaintance with other minds and may abandon, without a sigh, this glorious universe; but it cannot part with its moral principle .... If there be any- thing real under heaven, or in heaven, the perception of right and wrong relates to that reality ... It is the constitution of the mind to rely with firm . . . confidence upon the moral principle, and I reject at once the idea of a delusion in this. This is woven vitally into the thinking substance itself, so that it cannot be diminished or destroyed without dissipating forever that spirit which it inhabited. Upon the foundation of my moral sense I ground my faith in the immortality of the soul, in the existence and activity of good beings, and in the promise of rewards . . . , 42 This, when reduced to essentials, will be recognized as Kant's practical philosophy, without analytic or dialectic. Yet in 1823, when this passage was written, Emerson was entirely innocent of any knowledge of Kant, nor had he read Coleridge and Car- lyle. To be sure, he could have been helped to his view of moral reality by one of several impulses, among them his Puritan and Unitarian heritages, the Quaker in- fluence, the personal influences of his mother and Aunt Mary, his study of Plato and the English Platonists, or his careful reading of "Price on Morals" two years before. 43 Any one or all of these could have inspired this creed. But, as seems more likely — and the fervency of his expression indicates that he held it to be an irresistible personal persuasion — he worked it out for himself. At any rate, he felt it to be incon- trovertibly true, though he had no guaran- tees for its validity other than the sanction of his innermost feelings. And to it he clung, without giving a jot, for the rest of his life; to it he held as fast before 1830, when it seemed to him without all philoso- phical corroboration whatever, as after that date, when Kant's metaphysics of morals gave him all the confirmation he could wish. Thus Emerson made, almost at the outset of his philosophical career, a moral synthesis, which, had he been a more systematic philosopher, he might have put off until he had probed more carefully the preliminary epistemological and metaphys- ical bases upon which such an ethical con- clusion could, or should, rest. Indeed, the record of his philosophical inquiries, as revealed in his diaries and letters of the next decade, demonstrates how, holding always to this moral funda- ment, he labored, step by step, to substan- tiate it. The course of these endeavors, circuitous though it was, must be plotted, for it goes to the very roots of Emerson's philosophy, and demonstrates most forcibly the influence of German transcendentalism upon him. Through him, it developed into the most fertile idealistic movement yet experienced by America. These endeavors led him back always to this starting point ■ — the dualism of mind and matter. 44 By 1822 nothing more satisfactory had sug- gested itself to him than a vague sort of Platonic sense of communion, born of a "Sunday morn," by which he was enabled "at intervals ... to depart from the pur- 160 German Thought in America suits and habits of men to hold conversation with the attributes of Deity, and, in the emphatic language of the Hebrew historian, to walk with God." i5 Satisfying though such intuitive com- munion may have been to the religious faith within his heart, his head, seeking always a more strictly reasoned approach, found it inadequate. In the final analysis, it rested on nothing more than faith and, in the particular form in which it presented itself to him, seemed dangerously near to Pantheism. He felt uncomfortable, for "to believe too much is dangerous, because it is the near neighbor of unbelief. Pantheism leads to Atheism." 46 He found that neither his strong-minded Aunt Mary 47 nor the "consecrated" Channing, 48 neither his uncle the Rev. Samuel Ripley 49 nor the "consis- tent Atheist" Murat, 50 with whom he frater- nized in Florida, had anything to his pur- pose. He turned to books of the past and present. The Journals for the later twenties and early thirties record varying degrees of familiarity with the following: Zoroaster {26) 51 Confucius (27), Mohammed (12), the Scriptures, both canonical and apocryphal (38), the Church Fathers, both Catholic and Protestant (12), Thales (2), Anaximander (5), Pythagoras (13), Xenophanes (8), Anaximanes (2), Anacreon (1), Heraclitus (19), Anaxagoras (4), Democritus (3), Empedocles (4), Epicurus (4), Zeno (3), Lucretius (5), Plutarch (78), Epictetus (4), Socrates (20), Plato (168), Aristotle (27), the Neo-Platonists from Plotinus to Cudworth (60), Boethius (2), St. Augustine (17), Thomas a Kempis (9), Luther (53), Calvin (19), Knox (2), Fox (32), and the Quaker doctrine (36), Bacon (88), Galileo (12), Des- cartes (4), Milton (109), Hobbes (11), Locke (24), Newton (68), Leibnitz (16), Laplace (2), Shaftesbury (3), Whitefield (7), Hume (25), Berkeley (12), Hartley (2), Montaigne (61), Pascal (13), La Rochefoucauld (1), La Bruyere (3), Fenelon (17), Fontenelle (14), Le Clerc (2), Montesquieu (18), Voltaire (22), Buffon (5), Rousseau (19), Chateau- briand (6), Madame de Stael (45), Wollaston (3), Sir Thomas Browne (13), Richard Hooker (6), Bishop Butler (8), Burnet (1), Clarke (3), Taylor (15), Paley (9), Price (3), Reid (4), Priestley (6), Bentham (15), Malthus (9), Adam Smith (7), Stewart (13), Burke (36), Gibbon (14), Mackintosh (23), Playfair (5), Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry (1), Wm. Sherlock's Sermon on Faith (2), Mellen On Divine Vengeance (1), Forsyth's Principles of Moral Science (1), Thomas Browne's Lectures on the Philoso- phy of the Human Mind (3), Combe's Con- stitution of Man (4), Sampson Reed's Growth of the Mind (22), Swedenborg (118), 52 Her- der (10), the German theologians (13), 53 Eichhorn (6), Mosheim's Ecclesiastical His- tory (2), Alexander von Humboldt (25), Cotton Mather (6), Jonathan Edwards (3), and the sermons of W. E. Channing (17), J. S. Buckminster (4), Henry Ware, Jr. (2), and Nathaniel Frothingham (2). This prodigious regimen of philosophical reading (consult also the reading lists given below), begun during the twenties and pursued with increasing intensity until the early thirties, when his interest in science began to overshadow his concern with phi- losophy, operated more to compound his problems than to resolve them. His funda- mentally unshakable moral principles not- withstanding, 54 he was left to wonder whe- ther the understanding was indeed "the ultimate determiner," 55 as Price argued; and whether "Morals and Metaphysics, Cud- worth and Locke, may both be true, and every system of religion yet offered to man wholly false." 56 This represents a groping state of mind, the vacillation of an agitated, half-believing, half-knowing, half-trusting, half-doubting young probationer, seeking guidance everywhere and finding it no- where — approaching even to the despair of Carlyle's "Everlasting Nay" in several journal entries of 1826-1827. 57 He seemed forced to conclude: "The argument for Necessity can never be got the better of. It is like a goose which, — fight it down as much Ralph Waldo Emerson 161 as you will, — always cackles of victory. It always turned on you as you retired." 58 Troubled though he was, he had no desire to avoid the issues. Indeed, the very in- scrutability of his problem, we may surmise, held him inexorably. Resolutely he con- cluded, on April 18, 1824, "I deliberately dedicate my time, my talents, and my hopes to the Church." 59 This he did knowing full well that in embracing theology, he was entering "from everlasting to everlasting 'debatable ground'" — knowing also that his "reasoning faculty" was "proportion- ally weak." But he was willing, then as later, to risk all upon what he correctly evaluated as his "strength of moral imagi- nation." So he added, "In Divinity I hope to thrive." 60 In the decision thus reached lie evidences of the best elements of both the Puritan and the Yankee that Emerson was. He was born self-reliant and tenacious of purpose. He would not temporize or compromise ; he would follow the admonition to seek, and expect to find. Indeed, the very day on which he had reached what seemed an impasse and found himself powerless to answer the arguments either of Necessity or of Berkeleian Idealism, he discovered the word Transcendentalism, which, imper- fectly understood though it was at the time, was the clue that led eventually to his bringing something like unity into his chaotic thoughts. Among the seven "Peculi- arities of the Present Age," which Emerson jotted down on his blotter on that day (January 3o[?], 1827), there stands, in fourth place, this one: "Transcendentalism. Metaphysics and Ethics look inwards — and France produces Mad. de Stael; England, Wordsworth; America, Sampson Reed; as well as Germany, Swedenborg." A comparison of the names associated with Transcendentalism in 1827 with those which came, by 1837, to represent this new philosophy shows that he had not by 1827 proceeded far in his comprehension of what the new spirit abroad in Europe held for the solution of his difficulties. Jouffroy and Cousin came later to occupy the place assigned in 1827 to Madame de Stael; Wordsworth sank into the background before the ascendancy of Coleridge and Carlyle; Channing, Marsh, Hedge, Margaret Fuller, Alcott and other disciples of the "Newness" came to occupy a place of honor alongside Sampson Reed; while, for Ger- many, Swedenborg seemed less representa- tive than Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and the great German poets and philosophizing theologians. He had still to go through what we may call, if we make allowances for the differences between Carlyle and Emerson, the Centre of Indifference before he would find answers to his most pressing questions. Indeed, this first period of his philosophic development, which we may liken to the period when Carlyle tossed about disconsolately in the perplexities of the Everlasting Nay, was of considerable duration, and may be dated, in Emerson's case, from the winter of 1 826-1827 to tne end of 1829. The musings prompted by those "Dark Hours" in St. Augustine, Flor- ida, whither he had gone to recoup his health, and whence he was not sure he would return alive, led to crises less turbu- lent, to be sure, than those encountered by Teufelsdrockh in the Slough of Despond; yet they were occasioned by similar causes, and nonetheless real. Despondingly the candidate for the Church and future expo- nent of self-reliance now asked himself: What am I in the general system of being but an iota, an unregarded speck .... And what is the amount of all that is called reli- gion in the world ? Who is he that has seen God of whom so much is known, or where is one that has risen from the dead ? Satisfy me beyond the possibility of doubt of the certainty of all that is told me concerning the other world, and I will fulfil the condi- tions on which my salvation is suspended. The believer tells me he has an evidence, historical and internal, which make the presumption so strong that it is almost certainty, that it rests on the highest prob- abilities. Yes; but change that imperfect 162 German Thought in America to perfect evidence, and I too will be a Christian. But now it must be admitted I am not certain that any of these things are true. The nature of God may be different from what is represented. I never beheld him. I do not know that he exists. 61 But once this outburst had given the overflowing soul relief, the worst was already over. Returning health brought renewed hopes 62 and a reaffirmation of his faith that he was "a moral agent of an indestructible nature, and designed to stand in sublime relations to God and to my fellow men." 63 While the inquiries and the puzzle-headed questionings (as revealed in the Journals) continue for some years longer, they become increasingly less fre- quent; the tone of his reflections loses all evidence of such turbulence of mind as was revealed during the Florida period. Eventu- ally questions regarding the worth of man, the absolute validity of moral law, and the existence of God stop altogether. Mean- while he begins to note correspondences, connections, interdependencies, compensa- tions, and identities of various kinds and orders, as between "poor matters" and "rich ends," 64 "greatness of destiny and lowness of lot," "contiguities between what is minute and what is magnificent," 65 and what is most immediate to the all-impor- tant question, between matter and mind, man and God. The Centre of Indifference has not yet been passed, but there is already noticeable the steady effort to seek a posi- tive meaning of life and to withstand its negations — all symptoms that the antidote is taking effect, that the poison is being dispelled, and that the patient's illness has reached a stage when medicine, if the right one can be prescribed, will effect a cure, though the period of convalescence may still be protracted. 66 Among the first of the restoratives to facilitate the recovery was that effected by Madame de Stael, whose name, at least, had been known to him as early as June 10, 1821. In November, 1826, he had her book on Germany in hand, and two months later he spoke of her as one of the more potent influences on the times. 67 Henceforth, for some years, De VAllemagne was his chief guidebook or manual to the newly discov- ered land. Fortunately for his understand- ing of German art and thought, he eventu- ally found more authoritative commenta- tors to guide him. A second and more immediately personal influence to direct his attention to Germany was that of his brother William, whose European travels and studies Emerson followed eagerly. He was sorely tempted to throw up school-keeping and hear at first hand some of the revelatory doctrines taught in Germany. William urged him repeatedly to study German and Hebrew and to join him at Gottingen. Between them they calculated the cost. Although Waldo acknowledged that William's "Ger- man advice must needs be weighty," 68 he demanded that William commit himself flatly on the absolute necessity of studying in Germany. If you think it is every way advisable, indisputably, absolutely important that I sh'd do as you have done & go to G — & you can easily decide — why say it distinctly & I will make the sacrifice of time & take the risk of expense, immediately. So of studying German .... Say particularly if German and Hebrew be worth reading for tho' I hate to study them cordially I yet will the moment I can count my gains. Had I not better put on my hat & take ship for the Elbe ? 69 Unless (he added) he could take the wings of morning for a packet and feed on wishes instead of dollars and be clothed with imagination for raiment, he must not expect to go. 70 Apparently William failed to send the necessary assurances, for on Febru- ary 9, 1825, he took a room in Divinity Hall, deeming it wiser "to forswear Ger- many & go to the cheapest stall where education can be bought ... an economy of time not to be despised by a hard handed American who reckons acquisitions by Ralph Waldo Emerson 163 dollars & cents, not by learning and skill." "I tell you," he added, "your German towns are Castles in the air to me." 71 Although he did not regard a German education as a positive requisite to his professional career, at least not to the ex- tent of journeying thither in person, he was nevertheless prepared, by his brother's experience and the strength of his advice, to lend an attentive ear to the new thoughts issuing thence. Indeed, the process by which he was led to hold German learning in high regard had begun during his under- graduate days upon the return of Everett, Ticknor, and Bancroft from the German universities. As a sophomore, he gleefully recorded the news of Everett's expected arrival, in August, 1819, expecting himself and his classmates to have "all the good of his lectures" during the next term, only to find that the junior class were not permit- ted "to profit by him." 72 He heralded the return of Ticknor and Bancroft in similar terms and praised their perfect scholarship and accomplished oratory. 73 Sampson Reed's Observations on the Growth of the Mind (1826) and Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences, which Reed emphasized, acted further to make his mind receptive to the new philosophical doctrines from Germany, when they should come; while the influence of Wordsworth's nature poetry, although critically received in 1819 as "the poetry of pigmies" 74 when it first came to his attention, 75 came eventu- ally (especially after he reinterpreted Wordsworth in the light of Coleridge's critical writings) operative in the same general direction. Yet all these, individually and collectively, were only milk-and-water fare; what Emerson needed was strong wine — strong intellectual and strong emo- tional stimulation. When the stimulus came, it hit hard. It hit twice, and very nearly together. The first was purely intellectual — his reading, toward the end of 1829, of Marsh's edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection. (The second, a crisis provoked by a series of soul-stirring experiences, we shall come to in due time.) What appears to have struck him most forcibly in the book was what Marsh had most emphasized in his Preli- minary Essay — the Kantian distinction between Understanding and Reason. It inspired him to write to his Aunt Mary a letter, the original of which is now lost, but the contents of which we can divine because in her reply she speaks of her nephew's letter having satisfied her "craving for Kantism for the day." 76 Two months later he was reading The Friend "with great interest" and finding Coleridge's philoso- phy comparable "much as astronomy [is to] . . . other sciences, taking post at the centre and, as from a specular mount, send- ing sovereign glances to the circumference of things," at the same time expressing wonder at his Aunt Mary's refusal to be as enthusiastic as he. "What a living soul, what a universal knowledge!" People might wag their heads ever so much at Coleridge's reputed obscurity. For himself, he thanked God for Coleridge as being "one more instance of . . . the restless human soul bursting the narrow boundaries of antique speculation and mad to know the secrets of that unknown world." I say a man so learned and so bold, has a right to be heard, and I will take off my hat the while and not make an impertinent noise .... His theological speculations are, at least, God viewed from one position .... I love him that he is no utilitarian, no necessarian, nor scoffer, nor hoc genus omne, tucked away in the corner of a sentence of Plato. 77 At last here was a mind, an original mind, Emerson believed, that promised to show him the way to resolve, at long last, the seemingly inexorable dualism to which Plato had bound him for so many years. Here was no man whose philosphy could be tucked away in a phrase or two of Plato. Coleridge boldly transcended the old master. He would lend an attentive ear to 164 German Thought in America this new philosophy and see what it had for the purpose of reducing Platonic dualism to a monistic synthesis. 78 This change of heart must be recognized as a repudiation, temporary at least, of Plato — a pivotal point in the progress of Emerson's intellectual development, which, odd though it be, has been generally over- looked. Important as is this rebellion against Plato (wrought by Coleridge's use of the weapons borrowed from Kant) for our understanding of the most fructuous period of Emerson's life and work, there is, in this questioning of the Platonic position, an effect of even greater significance. It represents the first effective shock trans- mitted by German critical transcendental- ism to the incipient American Transcenden- talism, by which, ere it dissipated its ener- gies, it effected the most influential renais- sance of American idealism since early Puritan days. 79 During the years from 1830 to 1838 Kant rose as Plato sank in the scale by which Em- erson judged a man's philosophical worth. Thereafter, until about 1850 (when his thinking underwent still another change), the order was reversed. In the mean- time, however, he had published Nature, The American Scholar, and the Divinity School address, and had worked out, or phrased for lectures, practically all that was needful for the composition of "Self- Reliance," "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," "Heroism," and all else that pre- ceded or accompanied the Essays of 1841. In all these Kantian transcendentalism more than Platonic, or neo-Platonic, dualism is the mainspring. To return to our problem, we must turn back to the years immediately preceding 1830, when Emerson was still under the influence of the Scottish school and far from realizing the significance which the Kantian distinction was eventually to have for him. Its full import did not dawn upon him until after his return from England and his settlement in Concord. Indeed, it pro- duced no tangibly constructive effect on his mind or his writings before the end of 1834. One is inclined to believe, rather, that, coming as it did, when his mind was in a state of ferment at the complexity with which the affairs of his life were arranging themselves, the first effect of the Coleridge- Kantian philosophy was more to agitate than to assuage his troubles. Only half-recovered from his strictures of the chest, and still undecided, upon his return from the South, whether he had not better give up altogether the ministry "on the score of ill health" 80 and turn author, yet going on to fill various pulpits, he found himself, in March, 1829, installed as pastor of the Second Church of Boston. In Novem- ber of the year before he had been profound- ly shaken when his brother Edward, "the admired, learned, eloquent, striving boy," was reduced by a mental derangement to the state of a maniac. 81 But by now there were indications of a more cheerful future. Earlier in the year he had met and fallen in love with Ellen Tucker. Edward made a rapid, though incomplete recovery. Emer- son's own health was better than ever be- fore ; his professional career seemed assured, especially if he should accept the call to fill the pulpit of Henry Ware, Jr., who was going to the Harvard Divinity School. At last his life seemed to be regulating itself; it seemed too good to be true. Would this luck last? Apprehensive of "reverses al- ways arising from success," he wrote early in 1829, a strange letter of dark foreboding to Aunt Mary. 82 Three weeks later his bride fell ill of tuberculosis, necessitating a post- ponement of the marriage until September. A year later he buried his wife. 83 The old doubts returned with renewed force. A new program of reading in scientific books, begun early in 1830, served merely to accentuate the troubled state of his mind. By June of 1832 he resolved to throw off cowl and frock; on September 8, he deliv- ered his farewell sermon; and on January 2, 1833, he sailed for Europe. Ralph Waldo Emerson 165 The record, as it can be read in the Jour- nals, leaves little to the imagination regard- ing the agitating influence of these events. Ill-health for himself; insanity in a beloved brother; exalted love for the woman whom he loved above all others, her threatened death of consumption, her recovery, their marriage, a brief respite of happiness, mocked shortly after by her death ; growing scruples regarding religious forms and observances in the church to which he ministered; agony in consequence of his own irresolution ; the mental and emotional excitement occasioned by the decision to unfrock himself and resign his ministerial charge ; the resultant criticism from parish- ioners and colleagues; and worst of all, the agony of his own uncertainty whether he had done right or not — all these cata- pulting themselves into the life of the young minister during a brief span of years, con- spired toward the end of 1832 so thoroughly to dishearten him that he determined to find surcease of sorrow and quiet for his troubled mind across the waters. The death of his young wife produced a deeply humanizing distress. It was his pro- foundest emotional experience up to this time, and it is doubtful that he later ex- perienced anything of comparable poignan- cy. He felt a "miserable apathy"; his grief left him dry; and questioningly he wonder- ed: "Will the dead be restored to me ? . . . Shall I ever again be able to connect the face of outward nature, the mists of the morn, the star of eve, the flowers, and all poetry, with the heart and life of an en- chanting friend ? No. There is one birth, and one baptism, and one first love, and the affections cannot keep their youth any more than man." 84 Ten days later he wrote what takes on added significance from the crisis he had just experienced: The questions that come to me this morning are few and simple. It is worth recording that Plotinus said, "Of the Unity of God, nothing can be predicted, neither being, nor essence, nor life, for it isj above all these." Grand is it to recognize the truth of this and every one of the first class of truths which are necessary. Thus, "Design proves a designer," "Like must know like," or "the same can only be known by the same," out of which come the propositions of ethics . . . and a thousand sayings more which have a quasi truth instantly to the ear, the real worth of which is this elemen- tary fact in all, "like must know like." It would be well . . . to . . . make a catalogue of "necessary truths." They are scanned and approved by the Reason far above the understanding. They are the last facts by which we approximate metaphysically to God. 85 Here for the first time the terms Reason and Understanding stand in juxtaposition in something like the sense in which he habitually used them several years later. 86 It had been something over a year since he had first read about the Kantian distinction between these mental faculties, but neither its importance nor its applicability to his own problems seems to have occurred to him until the first great sorrow of his life had heightened his perceptions and quick- ened his intuitions. Here also, at the beginning of 1831, we may, if we wish to pursue further the analogy already suggested between Carlyle and Emerson, place the point at which Emerson passed into the phase designated by Carlyle as the Centre of Indifference, out of which was to emerge the affirmation of Carlyle's Everlasting Yea. Actually, how- ever, the victory was not won in a day. While Emerson's mental agitations were perhaps less turbulent than those of Carlyle, who identified the point at which the light broke in upon Teufelsdrockh in the Rue Saint Thomas de l'Enfer with one June afternoon in 1821, as he went down Leith walk to bathe in the firth of Forth, 87 they were more prolonged. The spiritual crisis in Emerson assuredly did not come and go with the dramatic vividness described in Sartor Resartus. So far as the written records indicate, the final phases belong to 166 German Thought in America the period between his return from Europe in September, 1833, and the completion of Nature three years later. Meanwhile, between his first coming upon Coleridge's metaphysical aids and his first close contact with death, two or three purely intellectual influences worked stead- ily though unobtrusively to prepare his mind for the Kantian interpretation of Understanding and Reason and for the idealism enforced by Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, Schiller, and the other exponents of German art and thought whom he was soon to encounter. Always a lover of manuals, handbooks, digests, compendia, and other short cuts to learning, 88 he hailed with delight Dugald "Stewart's last Dissertation" 89 in Novem- ber, 1822, when his eyes first lighted on that book. Madame de Stael's book on Germany was similarly used and abused by him. 90 A sounder manual came to hand in 1829, in the form of De Gerando's Histoire Compare'e des Systemes de Philosophies which he set about seriously to read through in the spring and summer of 1830, even to making copious extracts (covering some fifteen pages of the printed Journals)* 2 and sketching the entire sweep of ancient occi- dental 93 and oriental 94 thought. In January of 1832, when Cousin's Introduction a Vhistoire de la philosophie was first trans- lated and published in America by Linberg, Emerson fell upon this abridgment with similar though more short-lived avidity. 95 Unquestionably the greatest single effect which De Gerando had on the mind of Emerson is discernable already in the first references which he made to the French- man. On October 27, 1830, Emerson began reading De Gerando and recorded the fact that he was led thereby "in the outset back to Bacon." 96 In De Gerando's tendency to search the foundations of science Emerson found the Frenchman strongly corrobo- rated by his reading in Coleridge and in Bacon. 97 While he had discovered, as early as November 3, 1830, what he believed to be the essential difference between the facts of science and the ideas of Reason, 98 he came to hold, four months later, what seemed a necessary corollary, vouched for by both Coleridge and De Gerando and by his own innermost conviction, namely, that "the religion that is afraid of science dis- honors God and commits suicide. It ac- knowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empire, but is not the immutable universal law." 99 More and more impressed by the idea that Nature speaks in parables to man's spirit, 100 and that religion is thus revealed to man each hour and not only in past cen- turies, 101 he began to read books of science with keen interest and to make notes recording facts in support of this theory or belief. 102 De Gerando and Coleridge both sent him back to Bacon, 103 and thence he made his way, sometimes independently, oftener by the aid of encylopaedias, manu- als, and other aids to study, back to Bruno (5), Copernicus (11), Galen, apud Aberne- thy's Lectures (2), to Aristotle (27), and for- ward to Kepler (13), Galileo (12), Leibnitz (12), Dampier (1), Newton (68), Sir Thomas Browne (13), Scougal (10), Swedenborg (118), Kant (41), Pestalozzi (12), Herder (10), Goethe (172), Schelling (46), Hegel (38), Humboldt (25), Neander (3), Priestley (6), Buffon (5), Laplace (12), Thenard (2), Davy (12), Hunter (12), Abernethy (3), Faraday (14), Hutton (4), Wm. and John Herschel (16), Cuvier (16), Gay-Lussac (4), Jussieu (3), Biot (3), Arago (7), Jouffroy (6), Cousin (22), De Gerando (8), Amici (2), Jacob Perkins (4), Stevenson (1), James Hall (2), Gregory Watt (1), Adam Smith (7), Bent- ham (15), Malthus (9), Oberlin (i), Brough- am's Discourse upon the Advantages and Prospects of Science (6), Basil Hall's Voyages and Travels (1), Mary Somerville's Mechan- ism of the Heavens (2), Gilbert White's Natural History and A ntiquities of Selborne (4), Daniell's Meteorological Essays (2), Huber's Natural History of Ants and New Ralph Waldo Emerson 167 Observations on . . . Bees (i), Sir George Bell's Animal Mechanics (i), Benjamin Silliman's Boston course of lectures on geology (i), Parry's Voyages (3), Turner's Elements of Chemistry (1), Condelle and Sprengel's Elements of the Philosophy of Plants (2), Knapp's Journal of a Naturalist (1), Kirby and Spence's Introduction to Entomology (2), Mavve's Linnaean System of Conchology (1), Bigelow's Florula Bostonien- sis (2), Nuttal's Ornithology (2), and Audu- bon's Ornithological Biography (2). Emerson's interest in science during 1831-1833 is so concentrated that it be- comes remarkable. The list enumerated above 104 includes only the more important of the scientists and scientific writings that engaged his attention during the period. From 1833 to 1836, Erasmus Darwin (8), Lamarck (2), Linnaeus (20), and Lyell (12) are among the scientists who began to act significantly upon him. Thereafter, the list becomes quite extensive and includes the names of virtually all the scientists who attracted attention at all. A study of the all-important influence upon Emerson's thinking of such men as Saint-Hilaire (5), Robert Chambers (10), Asa Gray (8), Agas- siz (51), Richard Owen (7), Michael Faraday (7), Charles Darwin (8), 105 and Thomas Huxley (4) remains still to be made. 106 The significant exploratory study of Professor Harry H. Clark ends with the year 1838. If science, before 1830, had been only a secondary interest with Emerson, it be- came, during 1 830-1 833, 107 a passionate pursuit for facts to reinforce his religion and his philosophy. 108 Without being truly systematic or thorough, his knowledge of scientific thought was more extensive and his interest more prolonged 109 than that of most of his contemporaries. In the words of Burroughs, "Emerson went through the cabinet of the scientist as one goes through a bookstall to find an odd volume to a complete set .... He took what suited him" ; 110 yet the fact is worth recording that Agassiz remarked he preferred Emerson's conversation on scientific subjects to that of any other man of his acquaintance. 111 While his approach to science smacks often of the dilettante, his end was nonetheless downright serious. He searched the sciences to find answers to questions which were to him matters of real moment. Oddities, to be sure, attracted him, but not as oddities — rather as eloquent refutations to the tendency which he deplored among the systematizers to make everything too beautifully but rigidly simple. His was no love of the spectacular for it own sake, but a desire to find help in his efforts to bring order into his thinking. Although his concern with science was most intense during 1832-1833, it is a significant fact for the understanding of the maturer Emerson that this interest became an abiding one, displaying itself not only in an eager reading of scientific and pseudo- scientific treatises but equally in grasping every available opportunity to visit mu- seums of natural history, to view collections of various kinds, or to do a little indepen- dent botanizing for himself. 112 A correlation of the important passages in his journals of 1 833-1 835 that relate to his firsthand study of nature and to his reading of scientific lore 113 with his first public lectures and with such essays as Nature, "The Over-Soul," "Circles," and The Natural History of Intel- lect will indicate the extent to which the scientific influence contributed to his writ- ings. As will be observed, by referring to the dates given in the note immediately preced- ing, the number of references to science in the journals tapers off soon after Nature was published. The subsequent diaries and the letters demonstrate a sustained interest but no longer an intense concern with the natural sciences, until about 1850, when they became (for reasons to be suggested later) once more all but a preoccupation. For while Emerson never asserted that science could discover the processes of God, he frequently suggested that science, when allied with ethics, could do much in that wav. 168 German Thought in America A consideration of some importance in this study is the fact that the influence of German critical transcendentalism (imper- fectly understood though it was by Emer- son in 1832, when his scientific studies were most intense) and that of science were not mutually exclusive. Emerson's study of natural history in the light of preconceived abstract laws was encouraged by Kantian transcendentalism learned between 1829 and 1832 chiefly from Coleridge and, in- creasingly after 1832, from Carlyle, also. 114 "Transcendentalism," Emerson explained, "is Idealism"; however "the Idealist does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone .... The Idealist takes his departure from his con- sciousness, and reckons the world an ap- pearance." He values the data of the scientist as "a manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of detail the laws of being." 115 This is followed by passages in which Emerson refers the ethics of Tran- scendentalism directly to Fichte and Jacobi and refers its metaphysics to the "extra- ordinary profoundness and precision" of Kant's thinking. 116 Kant's distinction be- tween Understanding and Reason became invaluable to Emerson, for, as he under- stood it, Kant had validated both the Ideas of the Reason and the data of the Under- standing. Thus Kant laid the foundations upon which Goethe had opposed the science of his day. Writing in 1867 on the subject of "Life and Letters in New England" in the thirties, Emerson interpreted the effect of Kant on Goethe in the following terms: Goethe declared war against the great name of Newton, proposed his own new and simple optics; in Botany, his simple theory of metamorphosis; — the eye of a leaf is all ... . He extended this into anatomy and animal life, and his views were accept- ed. The revolt became a revolution. Schel- ling and Oken introduced their ideal natural philosophy, Hegel his metaphysics, and extended it to Civil History. 117 Great as he considered the gain for the religionist, he felt the gain for the scientist no less great. At last it had been demonstrat- ed that both the speculative and the prac- tical thinker, both the metaphysician and the moralist, both philosopher and theolo- gian, yes, both nature and God, had equal claims to validity — one in Understanding, the other in Reason. Thus ran Emerson's musings. The relation between German speculation and Emerson's concern with science is further illustrated in the reinforcement which Emerson drew from Goethe's natural theories. Goethe was most influential upon Emerson between 1830 and 1840, 118 pre- cisely during the most formative period of Emerson's intellectual life. 119 Emerson read both Goethe's belletristic 120 and scientific works. Of the latter he consulted with great interest the Metamorphosis of Plants, 121 the Introduction to Morphology, 122 as well as the Theory of Colors. 123 Qualified though his admiration of Goethe sometimes was, 121 he considered Goethe as having laid the specu- lative foundations of comparative morphol- ogy in both the animal and vegetable worlds. "Goethe," he said, "suggested the leading idea of modern botany, that a leaf, or the eye of a leaf, is the unit of botany"; and he quoted Goethe's doctrine that as "the tapeworm, the caterpillar, goes from knot to knot and closes with the head," so "man and higher animals are built up through vertebrae, the forces being concen- trated in the head." 125 While he was strug- gling with the intricacies of his own theory, only imperfectly grasped in 1835-1836, 126 concerning the Each in All and the All in Each, he found in Goethe 127 what he de- scribed in his diary as "a comment and con- sent to my speculations on the All in Each in Nature." 128 Finally, in Goethe Emerson came upon Saint-Hilaire's theory regarding the unity of type and variety of form; in Goethe, also, he had access to the doctrine of a deity immanent in natural law. It seems probable, then, concludes Professor Clark, that Goethe was not the least in- Ralph Waldo Emerson 169 fluential among those who encouraged Emerson, in 1838, to define deity as "con- scious, animated law." In following the Goethe-Emerson rela- tionship, we have got ahead of our story, and shall have to retrace our steps to the crucial year of 1832. It is significant that Emerson's scientific inquiries, notably in physics and astronomy as relating most directly to the constitution of the universe, came to a head at precisely the time when he decided (unless he were permitted to dispense with the rites of the Lord's Supper) to resign his pastorate. 129 Prompted by his conviction that the im- mutable laws of physics translate, as it were, the laws of ethics, he set down in his diary on May 26, 1832, his conclusion that "astronomy . . . modifies all theology .... [It] proves theism, but disproves dogmatic theology." 130 The next entry, a week later, records "a week of moral excitement." These bare words, phrased almost laconic- ally, are almost the only record which Emerson made in the journal of that most turbulent as well as epochal moral and in- tellectual crisis. Having decided that science modifies all theology, proving the- ism, but disproving dogmatic theology, he resolved to repudiate "an effete, superan- nuated Christianity" and "the dead forms of our forefathers." 131 Accordingly he pro- posed to his congregation the omission of certain rites. When they declined to sanc- tion the change, Emerson was forced to decide between conforming and resigning. Following the example of Jesus in periods of trial, he withdrew to the mountains for self-communion, spiritual renewal, a recon- sideration of life, and a re-examination of the grounds upon which he had proceeded thus far. 132 In the White Mountains, in July, 1832, he fought it out with himself. Though he knew "very well that it is a bad sign to be too conscientious and stick at gnats," the truths learned of science, on the one hand, and of German philosophy, on the other, held fast; and he concluded, "I can- not go habitually to an institution [the Lord's Supper] which they [the congrega- tion] esteem holiest with indifference or dislike." 133 On September 9, 1832, he deliv- ered his farewell sermon, at the same time stating the ground of his dissent. 134 Precisely how much Goethe contributed toward Emerson's dissatisfaction with the clerical profession and the determination to resign his pastorate are questions not hith- erto considered. A letter of Emerson's to his Aunt Mary, dated August 19, 1832, suggests the strong probability that Goethe supplied the final impetus that caused him to quit the church. To her he reports "entering into acquaintance with Goethe who has just died" — Goethe, whom the Germans rate with Homer and Shakespeare, and whom he invites her to read with him. "We will try him whether he deserves his niche .... The Germans regard him as the restorer of Faith & Love after the desola- tions of Hume & the French, that he mar- ried Faith & Reason, for the world." 135 Directly to the point of the disagreement with his congregation (and it is significant that the date of this letter is August 19, less than a month before he preached his fare- well sermon), he goes on to tell her: "[While] I have not yet come to any point with my people ... I apprehend a separa- tion." And the reason he gives is the dictum upon which Goethe had insisted so often, namely, of acting strictly according to one's own lights as far as they are given. "I can only do my work well by abjuring the opinions & customs of all others & adhering strictly to the divine plan a few inches of whose outline I faintly discern in my breast." "Is that," he asks significantly, "German enow ? It is true." The decision turned out to be a hard one ; and the criticisms and whisperings among his colleagues subjected him to a trial equally severe. The death, the year before, of his wife, whose memory he commemorat- ed daily by an early morning walk to her grave, the long battle with himself regard- 170 German Thought in America ing his beliefs, and finally the resolution to renounce his profession, the resulting hub- bub, together with hints that he had acted "Quakerish" and the "loud whispers of mental derangement," 136 all conspired to break his spirits. His brother Charles wrote to Aunt Mary on November 26, 1832: Waldo is sick. His spirits droop ; he looks to the South, and thinks he should like to go away. I never saw him so disheartened. When a man would be a reformer, he wants to be strong. When a man has stepped out of the intrenchments of influence and station, he would feel his powers unim- paired and his hopes firm. One does not like to feel that there is any doom upon him or his race. 137 Little though he realized it at the time, his battle was already won. He had been through a baptism of fire, and his newly achieved principles, compounded of a new scientific synthesis, a Goethean self-reli- ance, and a Kantian metaphysics (vaguely conceived though the last still was) had stood the test. Science had supported his Transcendentalism, and the transcendental division between Understanding and Rea- son had given meaning and validity to the cold facts of science, at the same time affirming the irresistible persuasion of his soul that he must be true to himself. Together they had enabled him to assert the Everlasting Yea of his inmost convic- tions — enabled him to have faith in himself in the face of all the opposition the world and men could marshal. Henceforth, al- though he was not yet fully cognizant of the victory he had gained, the denial and the doubt would present less formidable opposition to the affirmative principles of his soul. Having once spoken the Everlast- ing Yea, he felt the old trammels were broken. Meanwhile, however, he suffered from a temporary relapse, bred, we may be certain, largely of the cruel criticism showered upon him. The slurs and sly digs that came directly or were relayed to him cut deeply and upset him emotionally. Considering he had made his decision and given his reasons as manfully as he could, he saw little to be gained by bandying words or replying tit for tat. Nine more years were to elapse before he wrote, in the essay, "Self-Reliance," "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself . . . nothing but the triumph of principles"; but already the truth of this principle seemed substantiat- ed. He resolved to test it in the laboratory of life, applying the full flame to the cru- cible, to determine whether the residue were solid. Meanwhile, however, his body cried for rest and a change of scene, and his spirit longed to be away — to commune with those two or three who beckoned from Europe and promised clarification and confirmation of the ideas on which he had acted. Disconsolately, yet with something of hope, too, he determined to meet Coleridge and Carlyle — the men by whom he had arrived at the principles which, together with the newly-learned insight inspired by science, had given him the courage to re- nounce his clerical robes as unbecoming to himself and inconsistent with his philoso- phy. Carlyle had exerted a bracing effect ' upon him even while his identity still , remained hidden. 138 On October 1, 1832, less than a month after the farewell sermon, and at a time when he felt the brunt of criticism most keenly, he had written: "I am cheered and instructed by this paper on Corn Law Rhymes in the Edinburgh by my Germanick new-light writer, whoever he be. He gives us confidence in our principles." 139 Nineteen days later he discovered Carlyle's name. 140 Before the year was out, he was aboard ship headed for the Mediterranean; if it had not been a winter sailing, he would have gone directly to Scotland. Instead, he looked up first Landor, whose Imaginary Conversations, enforcing self-reliance and idealism, had attracted him. 141 He saw something of the remains of past ages and the accumulated treasures of art, 142 wan- dered about southern France, and then Ralph Waldo Emerson 171 settled in Paris, where he was "not well pleased" either with the city or with him- self. 143 At the end of six months in Europe he felt he had gained little by all his travel. Three weeks after arriving in Paris, he reflected: "A man who was no courtier, but loved men, went to Rome — and there lived with boys. He came to France, and in Paris lives alone, and in Paris seldom speaks. If he do not see Carlyle in Edinburgh, he may go to America without saying anything in earnest, except to Cranch and to Landor." 144 He resolved he would not neglect Carlyle and Coleridge. Although Coleridge must always be given first place as influencing Emerson at this stage of his intellectual development (both because Emerson lighted on him first, and more particularly, because it was Coleridge who first supplied him with the idea without which the Transcendentalism that he later enunciated could never have been possible for him), it was Carlyle, rather than Cole- ridge, whom Emerson sought in Europe in 1833. Both, he believed, would be able to enlighten his mind on the score of Kantian transcendentalism, but he presumed that Carlyle would be the better expositor. 145 During his undergraduate days Harvard had, of course, been innocent of all enthu- siasm for or knowledge of German critical idealism. 146 Later, when he studied in the Theological School, he learned little about the German theologians, although Andrews Norton disparaged them, and Follen's close relation to the German Biblical scholars and his championship of their methods could not have escaped his attention al- gether. 147 Madame de Stael's book had been something to the purpose since 1826. 148 Dr. Hedge, in 1828, pointedly suggested that he should learn German, but Emerson had not deemed it necessary to go further than to take some cursory note of the German theologians, whom he refers to several times, en passant, from 1826 onward. 149 However, reader of reviews that he was, the names of Herder, Schleiermacher. and De Wette came to be something more than mere names during the late twenties, when the American, as well as the British, literary and theological reviews began to take note of them and to bring intelligences concerning them. Of Herder, indeed, Emer- son had known something since 1826; ten years later he had grasped the importance of Herder's great seminal ideas as they relate to history, language, and literature. 150 Meanwhile in 1834 Hedge had read to him "good things out of Schleiermacher" re- garding physics and ethics, how "all things [are] brought into the mind," and how "the mind [goes] into all things," 151 and had discussed with him "why I was I." 152 Steeped as Hedge was at he time in German metaphysical and theological speculation, we may presume that Emerson received rather pointed instruction on this score during the years from 1829 to 1837, when they were often together. Similarly, his con- tacts with Dr. Francis Convers, who shared with Hedge the distinction of being the first among the brotherhood to have a thorough command of the German language and a respectable knowledge of German theology and philosophy, might have trans- mitted to him information in a form more appealing than Emerson could possibly have found it in reviews or the ponderous German tomes themselves. As far as the Journals and Letters indi- cate, Emerson did not then or later set him- self avidly to reading Kant, Fichte, Schel- ling, Hegel, Jacobi, Oken, M(B)aader, De Wette, Schleiermacher, Strauss, Tholuck, Hengstenberg, and the rest. The first ref- erence to Kant in the Journals is dated October 2, 1832 ; 153 Schelling had been noticed only the year before; 154 Hegel, in 1832 ; 155 and Fichte's name does not occur before 1834. 156 Schleiermacher, too, is men- tioned in 1834, 157 but the names of Oken 158 and Strauss 159 do not appear before 1842; that of Baader 160 in 1846; Tholuck 161 first in 1848, and Jacobi 162 waited until 1853, although Emerson had borrowed one of 172 German Thought in America Jacobi's volumes from the Boston Athenae- um as early as March 24, 1837. While it does not follow that because Emerson fails to mention an author or book in his diaries or letters, he had no knowledge of him, yet it may be assumed, in view of his habit of referring often to the men who occupied his mind most, that the German theologians, by and large, were not of primary impor- tance in his thinking. Nor can we be sure that Emerson knew nothing of these men and their works before the dates indicated, for there were such readily accessible inter- mediary sources as Madame de Stael, De Gerando, Tennemann, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Cousin. Indeed, there is plainly discern- ible after the first contact with Coleridge's and Carlyle's writings, a steadily growing tendency on the part of Emerson to forage among the hitherto neglected Germans. After his allegiance shifted from such hand- books as Madame de Stael's and De Geran- do's, serving as little more than orientators, he found in Coleridge his best instructor in German philosophy, and in Carlyle his tutor in German literature. Both presented engaging glimpses of the German theolo- gians, but his attention was not thereby focused upon them exclusively nor did he ever become deeply absorbed in them. We return now to 1830, shortly after Emerson's first contact with Carlyle, when the latter's services as translator of Goethe's Meister came to his notice. It should be ob- served that at this time Emerson was im- pressed more by Goethe than by his trans- lator ; for while he was becoming acquainted, about 1 830-1 83 1, with German writers "through articles by Carlyle and others in Fraser's Magazine, the Foreign Review, and other sources," Carlyle himself meant noth- ing to him except as a translator and commentator. But once he discovered the identity of this new-found "Germanick, new-light" expositor of German literature, Carlyle's influence became all-powerful, especially after their meeting at Craigen- puttock in August of 1833. As a result, many a new German philosopher, theologian, scientist, and author swam into his ken or was reinvested with a new interest 163 — among them Lessing, 164 Schiller, 165 Goethe, 166 Novalis, 167 and A. W. Schlegel, 168 to be followed shortly after by Boehme, 169 Winckelmann, 170 Wieland, m Niebuhr, 172 Heeren, 173 von Ranke, 174 Fichte, 175 Schel- ling, 176 Hegel, 177 Jacobi, 178 Schleiermach- er, 179 Friedrich Schlegel, 180 Spurzheim, 181 Leonhard Euler, 182 Lavater, 183 Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, 184 Musaeus, 185 Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, 186 Tieck, 187 Jung-Stil- ling, 188 Piickler-Muskau, 189 Oegger, 190 Jo- hann von Miiller, 191 Merck, 192 Zelter, 193 Eckermann, 194 Karoline von Giinderode, 195 Bettina von Arnim, 196 and Heine, 197 while Leibnitz, 198 F. A. Wolff, 199 Kant, 200 Her- der, 201 Alexander von Humboldt, 202 Men- delssohn, 203 Neander, 204 Krummacher, 205 and Pestalozzi 206 received renewed atten- tion and emphasis. His acquaintance with Varnhagen von Ense, 207 Holderlin, 208 von Platen, 209 Mundt, 210 Tauler, 211 von Ham- mer-Purgstall, 212 Tholuck, 213 Baader, 214 Oken, 215 Strauss, 216 Gervinus, 217 Lieber, 218 Scherb, 219 Stallo, 220 Liebig, 221 Mulder, 222 Oersted, 223 Max Miiller, 224 Karl G. Miiller, 225 Friedrich M. Miiller, 226 Friedrich 227 and Hermann 228 Grimm, Berthold and August Auerbach, 229 Schopenhauer, 230 and Karl Marx, 231 among Germans who are promi- nently mentioned in the journals and letters, belongs to later years. 232 The index which this array of men and books gives of Emerson's curiosity about German literature and philosophy after 1833 contrasts sharply with the inference to be drawn from his answer to Hedge's suggestion, five years earlier, that he should interest himself in German literature, when he "laughingly said that as he was entirely ignorant of the subject, he should assume that it was not worth knowing." 233 What happened between 1828 and 1833 was that he had made the acquaintance of Coleridge and Carlyle. Between them, they complete- ly changed his evaluation of German art Ralph Waldo Emerson IP* to to and thought. Emerson wrote truly, though somewhat tardily, when he inscribed on his blotter this notation: "August 20 [1837]. Carlyle and Wordsworth now act ... on us, — Coleridge also." 234 This notation was made eight years after he had first read Aids to Reflection, seven years after being cheered and supported by this "Germanick new-light writer," and four years since he had seen both vis-d-vis. The insistence with which Coleridge 235 and Carlyle 236 had occupied his mind between these dates may be surmised from the diaries of the period. Reference to the dates given in the footnotes above indicates that in propor- tion as Emerson's concern with Coleridge decreased, after 1833, his interest in Carlyle increased, suggesting that after 1833 the philosophical influence of Coleridge was supplanted by the more immediate stimulus from Carlyle as affecting Emerson's ethical outlook, his literary interests, and his general view of life. As between Coleridge's sinking and Car- lyle's rising in the scale by which Emerson measured men's worth to him, he was affected by the very different impressions which they made on him when he met them face to face. His visit to Coleridge turned out to be "rather a spectacle than a conver- sation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity." 237 It had been a great disillu- sionment. The man who had seemed three years before "a living soul," possessed of "universal knowledge . . . bursting the narrow bounds of antique speculation and mad to know the secrets of that unknown world" had turned out in fact to be only "a short thick old man with bright blue eyes, black suit and cane, and anything but what I had imagined," 238 his mind ossified, hope- lessly lost midst the mazes of metaphysics and Anglicanism, reduced to parroting the books he had written long ago. However, a distinction must be made between Emerson's relative judgments of Coleridge and Carlyle as men and as think- ers. For though Coleridge the man failed him dismally, Coleridge the critic-philoso- pher never did. The magnetism by which friendship for Carlyle drew him increasingly to the person of the lovable Scot during the years 1833-1838 did not alienate him from the ideas which he derived from Coleridge. Indeed, the journals for these years show him studying (where three years earlier he had only read) the books of Coleridge, and coming to a fuller appreciation than ever of the Coleridgean mind and the significance of his ideas for his own thinking. From Coleridge he derived at last a critical appre- ciation of Wordsworth, and upon him, in large measure, he built his own body of literary criteria. 239 Best of all, from Cole- ridge primarily he derived the Kantian distinction between Understanding and Reason — the most important single philo- sophical doctrine that ever came to him from without, or that could not readily have come to him from within himself. By it he learned to bring a semblance of unity into his confused thoughts and to compose the first four of his writings. By it, too, he arrived at a means to rid himself of Locke's "heart-withering" sensationalism, to dis- credit the old spectre Dualism, and to re- pudiate Platonism, as he had understood it. Between 1838 and 1841 the cyclic devel- opment of his mind passed into another phase, to be discussed later, by which the repudiation of Plato became less a denial than a reconciliation of Platonic with Tran- scendental idealism. This reconciliation contented him (except for some years of restlessness after he met the St. Louis Hegelians) for the remainder of his life. As a result of his association with the St. Louisans, his later formulation of his Tran- scendentalism, took on certain admixtures from Schelling, Hegel, and Darwin, as will appear in what follows; but it remained more a Transcendental than a Platonic form of idealism. But back in 1833, contemplating the great differences in the persons of Coleridge and Carlyle, he had no doubts regarding the 174 German Thought in America relative worth of the two men. To be sure, Carlyle's mind, on some subjects, had al- ready hardened into rigidity; and on others, they were as far apart as the poles; but Coleridge's mind was utterly lost. However wide Carlyle considered the cleft between his and Emerson's "ways of practically looking at the world" 240 in 1850, Emerson for his part having already put down Car- lyle as "Kleinstddlich" 2il and as harboring "a large caprice," 242 they both saw the point "where the rock-strata, miles deep, united again ; and the two poor souls are at one." 243 Dismal as August 5, 1833 (the day on which he had gone to Highgate Hill), had turned out, he put down August 25, 1833, as "a white day in my years," for on that day, he added, "I found the youth I sought in Scotland, and good and wise and pleas- ant he seems to me." 244 A week later, ready to sail from Liverpool, he set down this considered opinion : I thank the Great God who has led me through this European scene, this last schoolroom in which he has pleased to in- struct me .... He has shown me the men I wished to see, — Landor, Coleridge, Car- lyle, Wordsworth ; he has thereby comforted and confirmed me in my convictions. Many things I owe to the sight of these men .... To be sure not one of these is a mind of the very first class .... Especially are they all deficient, all these four, — in different degrees, but all deficient, — in insight into religious truth .... But Carlyle — Carlyle is so amiable that I love him. 245 The next evening, still becalmed in Liver- pool, he reflected: "Ah me! Mr. Thomas Carlyle, I would give a gold pound for your wise company this gloomy eve. Ah, we would speed the hour." But, he was con- strained to add, "It occurs to me forcibly, yes, somewhat pathetically, that he who visits a man of genius out of admiration for his parts should treat him tenderly. 'Tis odds but he will be disappointed." 246 Reviewing his experiences and talcing stock of the men he had sought out, he consider- ed that to "an intelligent man, wholly a stranger to their names . . . they would be remembered as sensible, well-read, earnest men, not more .... They have no idea of that species of moral truth which I call the first philosophy. Peter Hunt 247 is as wise a talker as either of these men. Don't laugh." 248 Was it distance that had lent enchant- ment, or was it merely that he was coming to himself ? Rather the latter. He was com- forted to know that even genius such as he had encountered had its limitations — even as he. I shall judge more justly, less timidly, of wise men forever more .... The comfort of meeting men of genius such as these is that they talk seriously, they feel themselves so rich that they are above the manners of pretending to knowledge which they have not . . . . 249 Carlyle described Emerson as "the lonely wayfaring man" touring Europe in search of men possessing the key to life's riddles — and finding it in the talisman of self-suffi- ciency. Emerson found the object of his search in Carlyle more than in any other man. Not that Carlyle answered his ques- tions, for that is precisely what he found , his British friends could not do; Carlyle — and for that matter, Coleridge and Words- worth and Landor, too — possessed the same defects which he found in himself, greater even than those he recognized in himself. All were old men with closed minds — all but Carlyle. But even he lacked religious insight as much as the others. They, the greatest among the great in his estimation, could give him no satisfactory answers. Coleridge had gushed religious and metaphysical nonsense ; Wordsworth was sunk in hopeless orthodoxy; Landor had a closed mind; and Carlyle, even he, the best of them, beset by undeniable doubts and unanswerable ques- tions, had roundly skirted his impassioned queries, put as they sat high up on the Craig, about the worth of Christianity and the belief in immortality, by a wave of the Ralph Waldo Emerson 175 hand to Dunscore Kirk in the valley below and dashed off to help catch a pig that had got out. The rector's pig had got out of the sty and had to be caught; meanwhile Christianity and the immortal soul might wait. Emerson sensed at once Carlyle's re- luctance and his inability to answer either question. Truly, these men had no preter- natural endowments any more than he; indeed, they lacked some strengths that he possessed. This discovery hit him like an encouraging and reassuring slap on the back — back-handed though it was. 'Twas himself he had come three thousand miles and more to find. He loved their very limitations; they gave him confidence in himself. 'Twas the great lesson of Self-Trust — this unfolding to him of the idea which had been struggling for years to find confirmation, now attested by his experiences with some of the wisest men on earth. Wordsworth was right, ever so right, in saying that a poet is merely "a man speaking to men." A genius, whether Coleridge or Carlyle, was no more than a man, endowed, to be sure, "with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness . . . and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind" — but in the final analy- sis, merely a man like himself. This discovery had an electrifying effect. It gave him confidence in himself and led him to examine more minutely than ever before the mysteries of the Self that was his. Turning to his diary to set down what he had "seen and heard" during the four days that he had been detained in Liver- pool, he recorded what takes on added significance in the light of his most recent discovery: "Really nothing external, so I must spin my thread from my own bowels." 250 There follow now in the diary passage after passage of self-examination and self-assertion, beginning on September 8, with "This is my charge plain and clear, to act faithfully upon my own faith, to live by it myself, and see what a hearty obedience to it will do," 251 and ending a week later, with what had become already, as he said, "the old string," namely, that "we are bound to be true to ourselves." 252 Turn to whatever subject he wished, he came always "back again to myself," whence he derived these important con- clusions: "A man contains all that is need- ful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All good or evil that can befal[l] him must be from himself. Nothing can be given to him or taken from him but always there is a compensa- tion." 253 At this point he recalled the philosophi- cal distinctions between mind and matter and between Reason and Understanding, imperfectly as he had grasped the latter from Kant through Coleridge during 1829. He now associated with them the lore derived from science during 1830-1832, namely, the correspondence between the laws of physics and those of ethics; and adding to these concepts his old persuasion regarding the validity of moral law, his be- lief in the divinity of man, and the new- found faith in self-reliance, he suddenly found the whole jig-saw puzzle coming round to fit in one piece. Self supplied the key piece, round which the others arranged themselves. All the parts assembled in their proper order spelled out the broad general- ization that "there is a correspondence be- tween the human soul and everything that exists in the world." Since "the purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself ... he is not to live in the future as described to him, but to live in the real future by living in the real present," for "the highest revelation is that God is in every man." 254 Never a system-maker or lover of sys- tems, yet he was struck with what seemed so obviously simple and so simpy consistent that he could not but pay heed and give credence. It was remarkable how One led to the Many and the Many back to One; how from Self he arrived at God, and 176 German Thought in America thence back from the all-encompassing Circle of God to the Centre of Self. All this, be it observed, came suddenly to him, although the five individual parts of this synthesis had been previously consid- ered, but never put together to form a whole. The passages just quoted were all written "At Sea on Sunday, September 8 [1833]"; and coming thus precipitously, they were less metaphysical analyses or syntheses than intuitive convictions. The metaphysical bases upon which to erect a philosophy embracing all five of his convic- tions were not yet worked out. They might wait, as, indeed, they did. Meanwhile he was content to grasp as a whole these gloom-dispelling principles, and willing to leave to God and the future what the present did not supply. Of more immediate concern was the problem expressed on September 8: "I wish I knew where and how I ought to live. God will show me. I am glad to be on my way home." 255 He was already living in the real future by making the most of the present. Accord- ingly he thanked the Great God who had led him through this European scene, "this last great schoolroom," and had taught him (through Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Car- lyle) the great lesson of Selfhood. Although it was the same "old string" on which Aunt Mary and even he himself had harped for years, it had now been revitalized, and it had acquired a new potency. Under its spell he began to write, and his first efforts pleased him sufficiently to record, in his diary, what is the first significant record in the life of Emerson the author: "I like my book about Nature." 256 He reflected that he had seen somewhat of men, and read more in books; now he must turn from Man-thinking into Man- acting. The first step in this resolution had already been taken in setting down, in his blotting-book, the great seminal ideas out of which Nature, The American Scholar, the Address before the Divinity School, and Self-Reliance were to be compounded. What he wrote at sea on September 8, 1833, al- though he could hardly have known it at the time, contained in embryo almost everything he was to write later. It was enough, for the time being, to grasp these great principles. Their justification might wait until a later day, when more reading, ; more thinking, and more living should supply what was still lacking completely to bring them all under the discipline of the Understanding and the Reason — to fill in the connecting links and to erect the philo- sophical buttresses. Two significant facts emerge. First, his contact with the men whom he had gone to Europe to see brought him to the realization j that by their side he was no dwarf — in some respects, indeed, he topped them all — whence he concluded that their high achievements were not entirely outside the pale of the possible for him. They surpassed him only in having lived longer and more abundantly; otherwise they possessed no mysterious powers that he did not have or could acquire. Second, being cheered by the confirmation drawn from their example, he became suddenly articulate. His journals, referred to as "my Savings Bank," had ■ grown richer daily. The prolific deposits, fractions though they still were, were being added to others and "made integers by their addition." 257 He must combine and add them all up. He would write a book! He began (in the process of getting at fundamentals) where he always began — with morality. Piqued by the challenge of a fellow-passenger aboard ship that he de- fine what he meant by morals, he defined, as he lay in his bunk, ethics as "the science of the laws of human action as respects right and wrong." "Right," he concluded, "is conformity to the laws of nature as far as they are known to the human mind." 358 "What," he asked, "is this they say about wanting mathematical certainty for moral truths ? I have always affirmed they had it. Yet they ask me whether I know the soul Ralph Waldo Emerson 177 immortal. No. But do I not know the Now to be eternal ?"2s» It may be recalled at this point that ten years earlier Emerson had judged his "moral imagination" as strong, and his "reasoning faculty" as proportionally weak. 260 His strength in the former led him to formulate early what remained a con- stant throughout his life, namely, the faith that God (depersonalized though Emerson's Over-Soul was) is made manifest in "ani- mated universal law," or, to put it another way, that the "celestial geometry . . . affirms the coincidence of science and virtue." 261 Irresistibly persuaded though he might be of the validity of moral laws and their parallelism with scientific laws, and indig- nantly though he denied the need either for justifying the former on scientific grounds or of demonstrating the coincidence of the two, yet his own intellectual curiosity con- tinued to pique him into doing just what he asserted to be unnecessary. After all, he was, in 1833, too good a scientist not to be struck by what seemed a fallacious prop in his argument, namely, of regarding some- thing to be true simply because he asserted it to be so. The search for the demonstrabil- ity of moral in natural law was to be long and arduous, largely because of the weak- ness of his "reasoning faculty," or, as he put it on January 15, 1833, because "my com- prehension of a question of technical meta- phyics [is] very low." 262 The journals for 1 833-1 836, covering the time which elapsed between his visit to England and the publi- cation of Nature, illustrate vividly the successive steps by which he progressed, and enable us to judge the relative success and failure which he attained. The flush of excitement attending the composition of the first pages of Nature left him exhilarated to the point of telling him- self that the book was already all but done. 263 If the initial passages literally wrote themselves, subsequent sections pre- sented formidable difficulties. Originally sketched during the first weeks of Sep- tember, 1833, 264 the little book was three years getting itself down on paper — long years as Emerson impatiently reckoned time then and weighed his accomplishments against the passage of the years. On June 28, 1836, he reported to William: My little book is nearly done. Its title is "Nature." Its contents will not exceed in bulk S. Reed's "Growth of the Mind." My design is to follow it by and by with another essay, "Spirit"; 265 and the two shall make a decent volume. 266 On August 8, he reported: The book of Nature still lies on the table. There is, as always, a crack in it not easy to be soldered or welded, but if this week I should be left alone ... I may finish it. 267 Finally, on August 27, came the first proof sheet, and the booklet itself appeared in September, preciselv three years after he had begun it. The causes for the long delay in writing so slight a book are not hard to find. While, as Cabot remarks, the first five chapters, including the introduction and the four Uses of Nature, had been "for some time in hand," 268 the section on Spirit, originally designed as a separate essay to balance or provide a counterpart for Nature, threw many a stumbling block into his way. Eventually the idea of a separate work was abandoned altogether, and what he had to say on the subject of Spirit became the seventh, the shortest, and the least satis- factory chapter of Nature, the preceding section on "Idealism" serving to make the transition between "Nature" and "Spirit." I n these later chapters he sought to illustrate the interrelation between nature and spir- it, between matter and mind — in short, to bridge the gap between science and philoso- phy. In the first five divisions he had merely to find and explain the theory of nature, which is science. But "philosophically con- sidered," he went on to observe, "the uni- verse is composed of Nature and Soul"; 26 ' 178 German Thought in America and the theory of Soul, he was soon to find, presented far deeper problems for him than the theory of Nature. The last sections of Nature, in which he planned to demonstrate how "the axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics, ' ' involved several formidable difficulties, not the least of which was his lack of an epistemology adequate for the purpose. Unlike Lucretius, who, upon determin- ing to write on the Nature of Things, planted his footsteps firmly on the "im- printed marks" of his predecessor, Epicurus, Emerson, having another De Rerum Natura to write, was a long time choosing the right guide. As we shall see, it was only as he came to perceive the relatively greater soundness of Coleridge over Carlyle as a metaphysician that he found an adequate epistemological basis for his work in "the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg . . . the extraordinary profoundness and precision of whose thinking" he acknowledged public- ly in 1842. 27 ° The record of his struggle with his diffi- culties can be read in the journals. As has been intimated, he had, as early as 1832, confirmed his belief in the efficacy of science to deal with nature. Even earlier, at least as early as 1823, he had convinced himself of the absoluteness of the moral principle, woven so vitally into the thinking substance itself that it could not be diminished or destroyed without "dissipating forever the spirit which it inhabited." 871 Now that he came to the necessity of putting his thought on paper, to give definite expression to his ideas on these two realms and their corre- spondence, he encountered the need of some- thing more than an intuitive feeling or inner conviction to supply the exactitude that words demand. Lover or no lover of meta- physics, he had, in the first place, to under- stand precisely his problem; in the second place, he had to solve it; and in the third place — and this seemed hardest — he had to set forth his solution in intelligible terms, which meant philosophical terms. It - became necessary now for the poet to turn philosopher — to turn from seeing and divining to articulating and defining; for if he aimed to say anything in this book of his, as he did, he must say it so that it would be understood. This precisely is the task that Emerson set for himself when he wrote his first book. The means to perform this high undertaking (as he must have reflected when Nature was finally done) had lain in his hands since the day in February, 1831, when, while reading Coleridge's Aids, he first grasped the signi- ficance of Kant's distinction between Understanding and Reason. 272 But there, in Coleridge's book, it reposed until after the several deeply humanizing experiences of 1832-1833 and especially those of 1834- 1836 quickened his perceptions sufficiently to rouse his philosophical intuitions into constructive action. The stimulating emo- tional crises and affairs in his personal life can hardly be overemphasized. On October 18, 1834, ne received the sad news of Edward's death, the effect of which can be surmised partly from the references that he subsequently made to him. 273 A year and a half later, he buried Charles — "my brother, my friend, my orna- ment, my joy and pride." 874 In the mean- time he had moved into the Old Manse in Concord, the home built by his grandfather, to take what he felt at the time to be his proper place in the "quiet fields of my fathers!" He had the feeling that his coming hither was "not wholly unattended by supernatural friendship and favor." This consciousness, coupled with the inspiration drawn from "Coleridge's fine letter (in the London Literary Gazette, Sept. 13, 1834)," moved him to rededicate himself to self- reliance: "Be it so. Henceforth I design not to utter any speech, poem or book that is not entirely and peculiarly my work." 275 During the summer of 1835 he bought the house and plot of ground which was to be his home for the remainder of his days; thither he brought his bride a month later; Ralph Waldo Emerson 179 and there, a year later, he held his first child in his arms. Truly, life was running deep: it was both real and earnest, com- pounded of deep sorrows and abiding satis- factions. It was almost as if this concatenation of stirring events were necessary to bring the slowly developing genius to fruition. For, though he had left the audience of his favorite British triumvirate full of high resolution to write, and though he had actually made a fair beginning, yet the remainder of 1833, the whole of 1834, and much of 1835 had gone by without his doing much toward developing his "Prima Philos- ophia" 276 or completing his book on Nature. The editors of Emerson's Journals hesitatingly prefix to the passage in which Emerson first set down in black and white the elements of his "Prima Philosophia" this note: "The following, probably written in 1833, are from a smaller note-book." 277 They are unquestionably in error by two years or more. In the first place, Cabot dates this same passage specifically and unhesi- tatingly as belonging to June, 1835, 278 and full corroboration for such a dating is supplied by internal evidence. To place it in 1833 would be to put it at least a year ahead of the time when the Kantian dis- tinction between Understanding and Rea- son began actively to occupy his mind. Except for this misdated passage, there are between September, 1833, when Nature was begun, and December, 1834, when he turned his attention intently upon the Kantian distinction, only two cursory allusions in the Journals and only one in his letters, either to the Kantian distinction or to the Coleridgean explanation. There is much concern with the antagonism of mind and matter and with the particulars of the science of nature, as these apply to the first five sections of the book, Nature ; but there is no coming to grips with the basic prin- ciples of epistemology involved in his problems. 279 But after December 2, 1834, his concern with the two Kantian terms becomes a passionate and all-absorbing study, by which all other matters are relegated to a place of secondary impor- tance. The distinction between them, or the Coleridgean explanation of them, and the applications to be made in the development of the First Philosophy are specifically mentioned (sometimes at considerable length) thirty-six times between December 2, 1834, and September 2, 1836. 280 On December 22, 1834, just two weeks after his first reference to the "divine light of every man's Reason," he observed signif- icantly, "Mr. Coleridge has thrown many new truths into circulation." 281 A notation on January 13, 1835, indicates that he had returned to a reconsideration of the Aids to Reflection,™ 2 and that he was also re- searching Cousin's Introduction to the History of Philosophy for whatever light could be derived thence. 283 In May of 1834, preparatory to delivering his lecture on "The Naturalist," he reread Coleridge's Friend: A Series of Essays to Aid in the Formation of Fixed Principles in Politics, Morals, and Religion with special attention to Coleridge's remarks on the extreme im- portance of "the Science of Method." 284 He noted carefully that for the supreme prob- lem of philosophy, namely to find a ground unconditioned and absolute for all that exists conditionally, only a critical episte- mology (i.e., the transcendental "method") can provide the necessary "copula." It alone, in Coleridgean phrase, provides "the link or mordant by which philosophy be- comes scientific and science philosophical," and by which he hoped to show that "the axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics." 285 In the meanwhile, it may be observed that if the application of the Understanding and the Reason to his problem of marrying Nature to Spirit had been as definitely in his mind as the passage misdated 1833 by the editors indicates. Nature should have been finished out of hand, and there would 180 German Thought in America have been no occasion for Emerson's com- plaining, as late as August of 1836 about the persistent "crack" that prevented his finishing the book. Instead the journals in- dicate that the section on "Spirit" was not formulated with any degree of definiteness until after his removal to Concord, and that the chapter on "Idealism," designed as a link between "Nature and her Uses" and "Spirit," remained largely in outline form as late as March 17, 1836. 286 Emerson came by the philosophy that went into these two chapters by the hard- est way. No one every showed him a royal road to philosophy any more than he found it for himself, and he never felt himself truly initiated in the science. 287 Meanwhile however, he made a serious effort to under- stand the philosopher's jargon, and so far as he was able, to write it. His first serious attack upon the episte- mological problem which had to be solved goes back to May, 1834. It is coincident with his rereading Coleridge on "The Science of Method," in The Friend. Writing to Edward, he spoke of the accidental and phenomenal data of the Understanding and the eternal truths of the Reason, and then added, as much as to ask his brother, to help him, to confirm, deny, add to, or sub- tract from his conception of Kant's terms at the time: Now that I have used the words, let me ask you do you draw the distinction of Milton, Coleridge, and the Germans between Reason and Understanding[ ?] I think it is philosophy itself, and like all truth, very practical .... Reason is the highest faculty of the soul — what we mean often by the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision. 288 The Under- standing toils all the time, compares, con- trives, adds, argues; 289 nearsighted but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present[,] the customary. Beasts have some understand- ing but no Reason. 290 Reason is potentially perfect in every man — Understanding in very different degrees of strength. The thoughts of youth, and "first thoughts," are revelations of Reason, the love of the beautiful and of Goodness as the highest beauty[,] the belief in the absolute and uni- versal superiority of the Right and the True[.] But understanding^] that wrinkled calculator[,] contradicts evermore these I affirmations of Reason and points at custom and Interest and persuades one man that the declarations of Reason are false and another that they are at least practicable. Yet[,] by and by[,] after having denied our Master[,] we come back to see at the end of years or of life that he was the truth. 291 "Tell him," was the word sent by Posa to the Spanish prince, "when he is a man to reverence the dreams of his youth." 292 And it is observed that "our first and third thoughts usually coincide." 293 Religion[,] Poetry[,] Honor belong to the Reason; to the real[,] the absolute. These [(]the Understanding sticks to it[)] are chimeras[:] he can prove it. Can he, dear ? The blind man in Rome said the streets were dark. Finally to end my quota- ' tions, Fen[elon] said, "O Reason! Reason! art thou not He whom I seek" — The mani- fold applications of the distinction to Liter- ' ature[,] to the Church[,] to Life will show how good a key it is. So hallelujah to the . Reason forever more. But glad should I be to hold academical questions with you here at Newton. ZM What Edward might have added by way of correcting Emerson's understanding of critical idealism at this point is problemati- cal; but it is clear that he could hardly have confused him more or led him further off the mark than he was already. 295 By June 20, 1834, he had proceeded no further in his analysis than to record that "the gestures of the Reason are graceful and majestic, those of the Understanding quick and mean." 296 Two months later he referred to the "discord" between Reason and Understanding, 297 and on December 2 of the same year he spoke again of the "instinct of the Understanding to contradict the Reason," 298 thus following the interpreta- tion of Madame de Stael 299 and especially of Carlyle more than that of Coleridge. Emerson's thinking never changed, in the same degree as did Coleridge's, from a sensual to a spiritual system of speculation ; consequently he never learned what with Ralph Waldo Emerson 181 Coleridge was basic and instinctive, namely, that the Understanding and Reason, since they move in separate spheres or on differ- ent planes, are less capable of contradicting than of supporting one another, especially as the latter many correct the former. 300 Instinct, to be sure, Coleridge considers as standing "in antithesis of Reason"; 301 but there is in Coleridge never any desire to debase the Understanding in the sense in which Emerson in this passage (and Carlyle in his essays) sought to degrade it. 302 But in December of 1834 Emerson was still following poorer expounders of Kant than Coleridge — among them de Stael, Cousin, and Carlyle. In the last passage adduced, in which the Understanding is endowed with the instinct eternally to con- tradict the Reason, Emerson is accurately quoting Carlyle, who in turn is quoting not Kant but Jacobi. In Carlyle's essay on Novalis, Emerson found this passage: "The elder Jacobi who indeed is no Kantist, says once, we remember: 'It is the instinct of the Understanding to contradict Rea- son.'" 303 Not only is Emerson here setting forth a distinction gotten at third hand — a quotation of a quotation — but he is definite- ly outside the pale of Kant, wandering in the misty realm of Jacobi and Faith. 304 Fortunately he was already turning back to Coleridge, whose Table-Talk lay on his desk. 305 Either in it or in his rereading of the Aids or the Friend, 306 he found what made him question Carlyle's oversimplified explanation, about which Carlyle himself seems to have had some qualms of con- science. 307 But before Emerson divested his mind of the misconceptions derived from Carlyle, a full year was to pass. 308 Mean- while Cousin's eclecticism had been called to his attention at least as early as May 24, 1 83 1, by which date he had read "7 or 8 lectures of Cousin — in the first three vols, of his Philosophy . . . , 309 'Tis good read- ing — well worth the time." 310 The next year Linberg's translation brought Cousin still more forcibly to his attention. 311 But the influence of the French eclectic was very evanescent. Although mentioned in the Letters as early as May 24, 1831, noticed in the Journals as early as January 20, 1832, 312 and referred to three more times in the course of the year, 313 by December 9, 1834, Emerson boldly questioned Cousin's contention that all men alike possess "the Divine Light of Reason." To the proposi- tion, "Every man's Reason is sufficient to his guidance," Emerson was compelled to add, "if used." As Cousin would have it, "Every man's Reason can show him what is right. Therefore every man says what is right, whether he use his Reason or no." "I hate," added the Brahmin in Emerson, "this fallacy the more that it is, beside being dire nonsense, a profanation of the dearest truths." 314 Thus he speedily and thoroughly disabused his mind of Cousin and eclecti- cism before any serious damage was done. Four years later, when the publication of Volumes I and II of Ripley's Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature brought eclecti- cism once more prominently to the fore, Emerson felt called upon to renounce, once and for all, eclecticism as a "shallow" and "pompous" system. 315 Thus was Cousin finished off. Carlyle, however, was not thus easily disposed of; and it may well be that Sir William Hamil- ton's generally prejudicial and oversimpli- fied view of Kant contributed to Emerson's difficulties in arriving at an understanding of Kant, 316 at the same time predisposing him to follow Carlyle's, rather than Cole- ridge's, explanation. It is certain that it took Emerson several years to rid his mind of Carlyle's exposition of German meta- physics, and it is not unlikely that much of the difficulty he experienced is attributable to what must have seemed irreconcilable between Hamilton's half-hearted criticism of Kant and Carlyle's whole-hearted championship of him. For Carlyle was not to be summarily shunted aside. Aside from Carlyle's latest writings, there were those unforgettable personal relations and the 182 German Thought in America reciprocal invitations and editings of each other's books. No, Carlyle had to be heard to the bitter end. It is questionable that Emerson ever completely divested his mind of the false ideas regarding Kant to which Carlyle (and Hamilton) predisposed him. Talking German metaphysics and read- ing Schleiermacher with Hedge doubtless helped clarify his thinking on some points, but it seems not to have explained to him that in opposing the Understanding to the Reason, he was voicing a Carlylean and not a Kantian conception; for he continued to make, throughout 1835, antithetical state- ments regarding the one being unalterably opposed to the other. 317 For example: The Reason is well enough convinced of its immortality. It knows itself immortal. But it cannot persuade its down-looking brother, the Understanding, of the same. 318 He [the philosopher] speaks from the Reason, and being, of course, contradicted at every word by the Understanding, he stops, like a cog-wheel at every notch to explain. Let him say, / idealize, and let that be done once for all; or I sensualize, and then the Rationalist may stop his ears. 319 The Understanding, the usurping under- standing, the lieutenant of Reason, his hired man, — the moment the Master is gone, steps into his place; this usher commands, sets himself to finish what He has been doing, but instantly proceeds with his own dwarf architecture, and thoroughly cheats us, until presently for a moment Reason returns, and the slave obeys, and his work shrinks to tatters and cobwebs. 320 Carlyle agreed with Coleridge that the Ver stand- Vernunft distinction is "preemi- nently the Gradus ad Philosophiam" 321 as being "not only . . . true, but the founda- tion and essence of all other truth." 322 But he also understood the transcendental philosophy to teach that in "Reason (Ver- nunft) the pure, ultimate light 323 of our nature . . . lies the foundation of all Poetry, Virtue, Religion," and that "all true Chris- tian Faith and Devotion" appear to be included in this Vernunft-iiber-Verstand relationship. 324 At the same time he indi- cated that the Time-Space relativity and the principle underlying it provided a double premise for the conclusion that the Understanding can produce only relative truth — "true only for us, and 2/ some other thing is true." 325 At the same time, also, "he appears to pass directly from the prin- ciple of Time-Space relativity to a resulting assurance of the permanent within the flux, over-leaping the Vernunft-Ver stand distinc- tion as implicit." 326 By November, 1831, he avowed the belief that man's conception of immortality depends on that of time, and indicated this conception of time to be at once a requisite of the deepest philosophy and the greatest single triumph of modern philosophy. The Time-Space relativity is indicated to be the only efficient reconciler of contradictions, 327 and as late as 1829 he professed to see a connection between Kant's definitions of Time and Space and his own faith in immortality. 329 In the beginning the Reason-Understand- ing distinction was to him all-important; later it became subordinate to the Time- Space relationship and in a sense sequent to it. 329 There is nothing to indicate that Carlyle derived these ideas directly from Kant, or, indeed, that he considered them derived thence. He nowhere specifically related them to any precise source in Kant, but merely referred them to "Kantism." 330 The overemphasis upon the contrariety between Reason and Understanding, in both Carlyle and Emerson, proceeds generally from one cause: Carlyle (in his essays on "Novalis," the "State of German Literature," and "Characteristics") and Emerson (in the Journals for 1 834-1 836 331 ) refer consistent- ly to Reason and mean thereby the practi- cal Reason, without, however, using the qualifying adjective. Emerson here simply fell into what in Carlyle is an habitu- al proceeding from ignorance, and what even in Coleridge is not unprecedented, although the latter knew well enough the Ralph Waldo Emerson 183 difference between the relative validity of the Practical and the Pure Reason, and several times, in works Emerson was thor- oughly conversant with, pointedly called attention to the difference, 332 without how- ever himself being scrupulously or uniform- ly careful to use the adjectives pure and practical. Thus it is that what to Carlyle, Marsh, and Emerson seemed the "momentous" distinction between Understanding and Reason resolves itself, for him who would reconstruct the epistemological steps by which they arrived at their conclusions, into a problem of distinguishing between Pure and Practical Reason (or between regulative and constitutive ideas), at one time, and between Understanding and Practical Reason, the next time — rather than the strictly Kantian distinctions as drawn in the first Critique. It is significant that after July, 1835, there is only one more statement in the Journals that dwells upon these supposed contradictions and contrarieties between Understanding and Reason. 333 How much Coleridge contributed toward rectifying Emerson's thinking on this head is problem- atical, but it appears pretty clearly from Emerson's comments in the journals that as he progressed, during 1835, to a greater appreciation of Coleridge as a philosopher, his esteem of Carlyle as a thinker fell pro- portionally. On January 23, 1835, he ex- pressed the opinion that Carlyle is "the best thinker of the age" only "since Coleridge is dead." 334 On August 13, in the midst of his period of greatest concern with the Under- standing-Reason puzzle, he asked himself: "Who can read an analysis of the faculties [of the mind] by an acute psychologist like Coleridge, without becoming aware that this is proper study for him and that he must live ages to learn anything of so secular a science ?" 335 On October 30, he remarked that "it will not do for Sharon Turner, 338 or any man not of Ideas, to make a System .... But Coleridge sets out to idealize the actual, to make an epopoea out of English institutions, and it is replete with life." 337 A month later he recorded what he seems to have been overlong getting at: Carlyle's talent, I think, lies more in his beautiful criticism, in seizing the idea of the man or the time, than in original speculation. He seems to me most limited in this chapter or speculation in which they regard him as most original and profound — / mean in his religion and immortality from the removal of Time and Space. 338 He seems merely to work with a foreign thought, not to live in it himself. 339 This judgment, be it observed, represents an accurate analysis of precisely the weak spot in Carlyle as an expounder of German critical thought; for however facilely Car- lyle bandied about the words Verstand and Vernunft, it was at the very beginning of Kant's first Critique — in what Kant had to say about Space and Time — that Carlyle's misunderstanding began, when he con- cluded that because Kant treated of Space and Time as mere forms, he had thereby annihilated Matter. 340 However much in- spiration Emerson drew from Carlyle for his purposes in the realm of practical ideas, Carlyle had inevitably to act upon him as a sterilizing agent in the domain of pure speculation. The truth of this was long coming to Emerson. When it did come, he set out, with divine optimism, to suggest, albeit somewhat obliquely, to Carlyle that he return to a consideration of "first prin- ciples." But Carlyle commented sneeringly upon Emerson's aspirations to establish the First Philosophy in Boston as "The Eutha- nasia of Metaphysic altogether." For him- self, he added that he had happily discarded "innumerable sets of metaphysical specta- cles," and now that he had got done with philosophy altogether, he hoped "one day actually to see a thing or two." 341 Emerson, on his side, grieved over the death of a phil- osophical brother, lost henceforth, in vitri- olic scoffings and worship of power and a dead past, to the sweet uses of philosophic 184 German Thought in America insight. "I always feel his limitations," he wrote in 1842, "and praise him as one who plays his part according to his light, as I praise the Clays and Websters. For Carlyle is worldly, and speaks not out of the celes- tial region of Milton and the angels." 342 Nine years later, he added, "I still feel, as of old, that the best service Carlyle has rendered is to Rhetoric or the art of writ- ing." 343 Only the great barrier of the ocean that rolled between them preserved their friendship. Nearer association always pro- voked the sharpest risibilities in both men. 344 By June, 1835, then, it was already amply apparent to Emerson that Carlyle's career as a philosopher was retrogressive, or at least, at a stand. Yet the false meta- physical lessons learned of that source continued for some time to plague him and to becloud the issues raised in the composi- tion of Nature. And when, in June of 1835, he wrote, "I endeavor to announce the laws of the First Philosophy," 345 he incorpo- rated into them certain ideas which belong more to Carlyle than to Kant, or even to Coleridge. "It is the mark of these [laws]," he continued, "that their enunciation awakens the feelings of the moral sublime, and great men are they who believe in them. Every one of these propositions resembles a great circle in astronomy." This emphasis on sublime morals and the practical Reason, found as it is in both Cole- ridge and Carlyle, smacks, in its phraseolo- gy, more of Carlyle's rhapsodical language in the essay on "Novalis" (where a resum6 of German transcendentalism is inserted) than of the more strictly reasoned dis- courses of Coleridge's Aids. "The -first philosophy, that of mind," Emerson goes on to say, "is the science of what is, in distinction from what appears. . . . Reason, seeing in objects their remote effects, affirms the effect as the permanent character. The Understanding, listening to Reason, on the one side, which says, // is, and to the senses on the other side, which say It is not, takes middle ground and de- clares It will be." 316 And here we appear to be once more within the realm of the Coleridgean explana- tion, for however indistinct Practical and Pure Reason are still left in the passage just quoted, there appears at least a recognition of Sense as distinguished from Understand- ing — a distinction which Carlyle did not bother to make. Indeed, the passage may well have been suggested by one in Cole- ridge's Table Talk, for this book, which lay on Emerson's study table at the time the passage was penned, contains this state- ment: "The Understanding suggests the materials of reasoning: the reason decides upon them. The first can only say, — This is, or ought to be so. The last says, — It must be so." 347 But already in the next sentence Emerson is off again in pursuit of strange gods: "Heaven is the projection of the Ideas of Reason on the plane of the understanding." Jesus Christ [he goes on] was a minister of the pure Reason. The beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount are all utterances of the mind contemning the phenomenal world. 'Blessed are the righteous poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men revile you," etc. The Under- standing can make nothing of it. 'Tis all nonsense. The Reason affirms its absolute verity. Various terms are employed to indicate the counteraction of the Reason and the Understanding, with more or less precision according to the cultivation of the speaker. A clear perception of it is the key to all theology, and the theory of human life. St. Paul marks the distinction by the terms natural man and spiritual man. 348 With the "absolute verity" of the affirma- tions of "Reason" and the attempt to make Christ and St. Paul speak the language of Kant we appear to have wandered far from the interpretation of Kant's critiques of both the Pure and the Practical Reason. The beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, as related to "[practical] Reason" are con- strued less in the manner of Kant's second Ralph Waldo Emerson 185 Critique than in the tone of Carlyle's "moral science as the highest development of purest and highest truth" and the "boundless importance of Religion," as he identifies these with Novalis. 349 Indeed, the next paragraph in this first statement of Emerson's "Prima Philoso- phia" provides the clue for ascertaining the derivation of these ideas and their terminol- ogy. "When," writes Emerson, "Novalis says, 'It is the instinct of the understanding to contradict the Reason,' he only trans- lates into a scientific formula the sentence of St. Paul, 'The Carnal mind is enmity against God.'" 350 This statement was available to Emerson in only one source in 1835, Jacobi, the originator of the state- ment, being as yet unknown to him except in the account of him as given by Madame de Stael, who did not use the statement. That source was Carlyle's essay on Nova- lis. 351 Emerson's finding it there and his quoting it from memory explain why the statement is erroneously attributed by him to Novalis rather than to Jacobi. Closely associated with this extremely loose interpretation by which the voice of Reason becomes associated with the word of God, or with the authors of the Scrip- tures, is the similarly loose application to which the distinction between Understand- ing and Reason is put. Without attempting a nearer identification, it might be observed that many of the followers of Kant — among them Goethe 352 and Schiller 353 — were given to making applications of the Kantian distinction much in the same manner in which Emerson made them. In this respect Emerson was simply doing what is a natural inclination and common procedure among romantic idealists, particularly among the Germans who built on Kantian or pseudo- Kantian premises. All things, so long as they could be placed in antithetical relation to each other, were referred to the distinc- tion in a manner against which Kant would certainly have remonstrated. From the distinction between the Ideas of Reason and the factual data of Understanding, it seemed to Emerson but a short step to the distinction between mind and matter, 354 spirit and nature, 355 religion and science, 356 wisdom and knowledge, 357 right and wrong, 358 thought and thing, 359 reality and illusion, 360 the true and the false, 361 the divine and the human. 362 All these antip- odal relationships and many more be- sides had been made commonplaces in Ger- man literature by the various followers and "improvers" of Kant. That Emerson was aware of the uses to which Kant had been put in Germany appears from a passage in the Journals, where, commenting on the distinction between the Real and the Apparent, he wrote on September 23, 1836 — precisely at the time when he was most concerned with the practical uses to which Kant might be put: This came deepest and loudest out of Germany, where it is not the word of a few, but of all the wise. The professors of Ger- many, a secluded race, free to think, but not invited to action, poor and crowded, went back into the recesses of consciousness with Kant, and whilst his philosophy was popular, and by its striking nomenclature had imprinted itself on the memory, as that of phrenology does now, they analysed in its light the history of the past and present times which their encyclopaedical study had explored. All geography, all statistics, all philology was read with Reason and Understanding in view, and hence the re- flective and penetrating sight of their re- search. Niebuhr, Humboldt, Midler, Hee- ren, Herder, Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel. — Journals, IV, 93—94. A comparison of the list of antitheses expounded by Emerson shows remarkable similarities with a similar list made from, say, Schiller's dissertation concerning the naive and the sentimental in poetry. Emer- son's list and applications, set down in the order of their first occurrence in the journals, presents, besides those already mentioned, the following: the beautiful and the ugly, 363 strength and weakness, 364 inward religion and outward form, 365 moral philosophy and 186 German Thought in America natural science, 366 the conscious and the unconscious, 367 love of God and love of se lf 368 country and town, 369 ethics and physics, 370 moral law and physical law, 371 immortality and mortality, 372 saint and sinner, 373 idealist and sensualist, 374 the real and the apparent, 375 genius and talent, 376 self-reliance and dependence, 377 poetry and prose, 378 imagination and fancy, 379 wit and humor, 380 noumena and phenomena, 381 the eternal and the temporal, 382 unity and variety, 383 the whole and the part, 384 synthe- sis and analysis, 385 the universal and the particular 386 — yes, even Carlyle's strength of silence and weakness of speech. 387 All these applications are the work of Emerson the poet, not the philosopher. They did little harm, and no good. Epistemologically and ontologically, they brought him no nearer the solution of the most difficult problem of philosophy than he had been when he first set to work on Nature in 1833. Thus far Carlyle proved more of a hindrance than a help. Always there remained the "crack" in his reason- ing which neither Carlyle's definitions of Reason and Understanding nor his practi- cal applications of them seemed capable of cementing. Fortunate for the metaphysical foundation-work upon which Nature finally came to rest was Emerson's turning back to Coleridge. On May 3, 1834, he sensed the fact that "Mr. Coleridge has written well on this matter of Theory in his Friend." 388 Gradually he discovered that Coleridge's elaborate analysis of science in The Friend 399 and the more strictly philosoph- ical portions of the Aids on Reason and Understanding were deserving of closer attention. In preparation for the lecture on "The Naturalist," given before the Boston Natural History Society on May 8, he reread The Friend; 390 and thereafter, although he continued to draw the distinctions ad nauseam almost, the name of Coleridge is mentioned with rapidly mounting rever- ence. 891 Throughout 1835 an d 1836, Cole- ridge won increasingly high regard from Emerson. The result of this changing of horses in midstream, as it were, can be studied in Nature, compounded, half of Carlyle's shallow metaphysics seeking refuge in capital letters, and half of Cole- ridge's more strictly reasoned, if still some- what indefinitely phrased, philosophy. There were times when Emerson agreed with Confucius in defining knowledge as knowing what was understood and admit- ting ignorance of all else; there were other times when, with Coleridge, he wanted to find the foundation in thought for every- thing in fact. At the time when Nature was 1 composed, Carlyle had already passed to the 1 position of Confucius; but Emerson was never more ambitious, than precisely at this time, to know all. In the opening pas- sages of Nature he went so far as to declare, "undoubtly we have no questions to ask ' which are not unanswerable." No wonder, ' therefore, that he should turn from Carlyle, ■ who held out little hope, to Coleridge, in whom he found stated again and again the principles: (1) that the "truths" of moral, or Practical, Reason take precedence over ' all others; 392 (2) that these "truths" contain their own sufficient evidence; 393 and (3) that, these things being so, philosophy, as the science of finding a ground "for all that '| exists conditionally" in the "unconditioned and absolute," becomes possible. 394 Thus it is that Nature emphasizes in language reminiscent of Coleridge (1) that philosophy is the science of grounding the conditional in the unconditioned and absolute, and (2) that "all science has one aim, namely, to find the theory of nature," which, when the true theory appears, "will be its own evi- dence." All this is prefaced by the naively and supremely optimistic assumption, de- rived from Coleridgean hypotheses and in- ferences, that we are justified in trusting "the perfection of the creation" so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things arouses in our minds, "the order of things can satisfy" — whence we may conclude that there are no questions Ralph Waldo Emerson 187 for which answers cannot be found. 395 It is to be expected that Emerson would not be able to confine himself solely to the theory of nature in its purely scientific aspects. Already in the third and fourth sentences of Nature he expresses the wish that the modern man might recapture and enjoy his original relation to the universe by beholding "God and nature face to face, " and thus he goes, at the very outset, far beyond the strictly scientific purpose of expounding "the theory of nature." There follow some obvious definitions regarding the Soul and nature, the me and the not-me of the philosophers, and the distinctions within them, which (although their expression suggests Coleridge 396 and beyond Coleridge, the Germans Schelling, Fichte, and Kant, as giving fresh currency to the me-not-me, the ego-non-ego, relation- ship in philosophy) are commonplaces, and need not be referred to any specific source. The same holds true for the paragraph on the reverence inspired by the starry heav- ens. It suggests Kant's oft-quoted observa- tion about the "ever-increasing admiration and awe" inspired by "the starry heavens above and the moral law within." 397 But again, the idea is a stock-in-trade of the philosophers, and Kant's expression is not unusually unique. Hence this paragraph and those which immediately follow con- cerning the kinship between the soul of man and outward nature could be related to Coleridge or Wordsworth and dozens of other sources quite as reasonably as to the German idealists. Certainly at the point where Emerson becomes "a transparent eyeball — part and parcel of God," aware of the Universal Being circulating through him, he transcends the position of German transcendentalism and passes, by a method common to philosopher-poets, from the doctrine of Transcendence to that of Im- manence. In so doing, Emerson is not going beyond the possibilities suggested and seemingly approved by Carlyle, 398 but he is clearly outside the limits of Kantian principles or of the Coleridgean explanation of them. As a poet's preface, the Introduc- tion to Nature will do; as an introduction to a philosophic Weltanschauung, the scientist and philosopher justly object to its vague, confused point of view. The violence here done to strict philo- sophical methodology is in a manner re- paired in the succeeding chapters on Na- ture's uses. In Chapter II, Nature as Com- modity is related to the useful arts and sciences in terms of Sensation and Under- standing; and in Chapter III, Nature as Beauty is related to the fine arts in terms of Sensation, Understanding, and Reason. 399 In presenting a rather clearheaded expo- sition of the Time-Space relationship to Sensation, 400 the derivation of the knowl- edge of Understanding as based on the data of Sensation, 401 and the view of Beauty by which "it becomes an object of the intel- lect, 402 this section becomes, in the main, the most satisfactory part of Nature, con- sidered from Kant's epistemological point of view. It is still, especially in the latter portion, a poet's version of Kant, with ad- mixtures of Fichte and Schelling, all three seen through the eyes of Coleridge; but the distinctions are drawn essentially correctly and together they represent a succinct ex- pression of transcendental idealism in prac- tice on the several levels of Sensation, Understanding, and Reason. 403 The next chapter, on Language, attempts to carry forward the triplicity of Sensation, Understanding, and Reason as related to the realm of language. The plan or pattern is unquestionably inspired by a hint caught from Coleridge in both the A ids to Reflection and the Biographia Literaria i0 * regarding sphericity as manifest in the triplicity of unity, multeity, and totality — the several triads and trichotomies of the post-Kant- ians. The substance itself of the chapter on Language, in its emphasis on the deriva- tion of words from nature and their philo- sophical import, strongly suggests a similar emphasis placed by Coleridge on these 188 German Thought in America aspects of language in the Preface to his A ids and in the book itself. But again, it is safer to regard Coleridge and the Germans who stood behind him as supplying corrob- oration for ideas which Emerson doubtless came by of himself. Three propositions are advanced and discussed: (i) "Words are signs of natural facts" ; (2) "Particular nat- ural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts"; and (3) "Nature is the symbol of spirit." A poetical version though these seem to be of Schelling's Transcendentaler Idealismus, as explained by Coleridge, they are perhaps best regarded simply as Emer- son's. 405 Little more is involved than the familiar Emersonian doctrine of symbols (or of correspondences), phrased in terms of the transcendental epistemology. An important point to notice in this chapter, as well as in the preceding one, is that Emerson made no effort here to repeat either the Reason-sw^ra-Understanding or the Reason-confra-Understanding fallacies — no effort to elevate the one at the expense of the other. Natural facts as embodied into laws by the Understanding are neither in- ferior nor opposed to spiritual "facts" of [Practical] Reason ; instead, they represent a reciprocal parallelism or symbolism. 406 In the chapter on Discipline, with which Emerson should logically have closed his book on Nature (if the poet in him had per- mitted him to do so), he reaches the point at which he might have come to grips with his epistemological problem. For in dis- cipline all the other uses of Nature are comprehended. Nature disciplines man by educating him through "both the Under- standing and the Reason." 407 Indeed, "To this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire." 408 Emerson proceeds to say what bears evi- dence of having been derived from Cole- ridge's disquisition "On the Difference in Kind of Reason and Understanding" as set forth in the eighth of the "Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion Indeed" in Aids: "The Understanding divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene"; while "Rea- son transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind." 409 At last we have arrived at the essential problem. Precisely how, we ask, is this marriage effected ? The answer is not given in the chapter on Discipline, which instead, consists of trenchantly phrased but essentially obvious observations on the means by which Nature, working through Understanding and Rea- son, disciplines the mind of man, that is, provides the moral education of man. 410 But the final teaching of the former by its "lessons of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and seeming, of progressive arrange- ment" is but "to instruct us that 'good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they are executed,'" 411 i.e., fulfill "the doctrine of Use"; 412 while the ultimate ' teaching of the Reason is to show that under- neath all variety lies a Unity as "the under- garment of Nature," betraying "its source in Universal Spirit." 413 This, whether it be called Reason, Moral Law, the Uncon- ditioned and Absolute, or God, "lies at the . centre of Nature and radiates to the circum- ference ... it is the pith, the marrow of every substance, every relation and every process .... it is like a great circle, com- prising all possible circles." 414 "Every particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world"; 415 and "Every universal truth . . . implies or supposes every other truth." 416 In the final analysis, then, Nature and Goodness are but two aspects of the same thing, i.e., as they are contemplated by the Understanding and the Reason. All this is asserted; nothing is proved, except as the "design of nature" is said to "hint and thunder to man the laws of right and wrong." 417 This might be loosely identi- fied with the physico-theological argument advanced in Kant's dialectic as deserving of more respect (even though it can never be Ralph Waldo Emerson 189 wholly and scientifically valid) than the ontological, cosmological, or any other argument. But since, when Nature was written, Emerson had not, as far as we know, any firsthand acquaintance with Kant's Critiques, it is more likely that these ideas, if they are to be related to external sources at all, were derived from Coleridge and from such an essay of Carlyle's as the one on Novalis. The latter contains, both in Carlyle's summing up of German idealism generally and in his lengthy quotations from Novalis, striking parallelisms, even to verbal identities, with Emersonian phrases. 418 Having disposed of Emerson's four "Uses" of Nature, we look, next, into Chapter VI, on Idealism, for the metaphys- ics which shall identify subject and object; for here is reinforced the idea of the preced- ing chapter, namely, that "to this one end of Discipline, all parts of Nature conspire." Yet all is again left doubtful — nobly doubt- ful: "A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, — whether this end be not the Final Cause of the Universe ; and whether Nature outwardly exists." 419 "Man is . . . apprised that whilst the world is a spectacle, some- thing in himself is stable." 420 In his impotency "to test the authentici- ty of the report of [his] . . . senses," Emer- son professes to be entirely unconcerned whether the stars are in their heaven or whether some god paints their images in the firmament of the soul. "Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only an apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses." Any other conclusion is unthinkable, because "any distrust in the permanence of laws would paralyze the faculties of man." Their per- manence is sacredly respected, and man's faith in them is perfect. 421 With this con- clusion we are again beyond the realm of the unknowables of Kant's Pure Reason and within that of the morally necessary persuasions of the Practical Reason. On the basis of the practical Reason, we may be irresistibly persuaded (even where we can not find proof) of the permanence of natural laws and their coincidence with moral laws; but on the basis of the speculative Reason, the question of the absolute existence of nature must forever remain open. 422 The contradiction between affirmation in the realm of practice and denial in the realm of speculation is close enough, in all essen- tial points, to Kant to indicate its deriva- tion. What is un-Kantian is that Emerson is impelled to go on — in the realm of the practical Reason — to assert more than Kant deemed justifiable and against which he pointedly remonstrated. Thus Emerson wrote: When the eye of [Practical] Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the [Practical] Reason is stimu- lated to more earnest visions, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God. 423 By the addition of imagination and affec- tion to Reason, Emerson transforms the faculty of moral will into one of intuition. The doctrine of Transcendence becomes one of intuitional Immanence, seeking to make knowable what the purely critical transcen- dentalist must hold forever unknowable. 484 But Emerson, so far from being content merely to believe, sought always to know — never more than at precisely this time. His problem was what Plato held to be the problem of philosophy: to ground all that exists conditionally in the unconditioned and absolute. And so he was prompted to peer through phenomenal nature and fasten his attention "upon immortal necessary un- created natures, that is, upon Ideas," in whose presence "we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade." 190 German Thought in America We ascend into their region, and know that these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being. . . . we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. . . . We be- come immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that with a perception of truth or a virtuous will they have no affinity. 425 While he went on to say that this "ideal theory" is "precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind — is, in fact the view which Reason, both speculative and practical, take," 426 he realized that thus far he had offered no positive proof for his sweeping assertions. He knew very well that the five arguments for the ideal theory that he had just enumerated 427 were only "arguments" — possessing practical appeal but no absolute authority. Accordingly, in the next chapter, on "Spirit," he returned to his tantalizing problem, this time front- ing it squarely by asking the three questions put by nature to the mind: "What is Mat- ter ? Whence is it ? and Whereto ?" Unfor- tunately idealism has an answer for only the first of these questions. "Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total dispar- ity between the evidence of our own being and the evidence of the world's being." 428 It has no answer for the second and third ques- tions. He concludes by admitting himself defeated, for on purely speculative or ab- solute grounds, idealism is nothing more than "a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry." So far from laying the old Spectre Dualism by demonstrating the identity of matter and mind, idealism serves merely "to apprize us of the eternal distinction between the soul and the world." 429 All the protestations of Carlyle, Coleridge, and Marsh to the contrary, Emerson found the Kantian distinction between Understanding and Reason une- qual to the task he had set for himself in Nature — except as he found quasi-answers to his questions in the "truths [that] arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness," where Kant gave him no license to stray. 430 The chapter on "Prospects" with which Emerson concludes Nature adds nothing to the philosophy advanced except to re- emphasize, in the long last paragraph, the idea of individualism, which, in view of the earlier statement that the individual is "part and parcel of God," 431 provokes the disturbing question whether Emerson is not involving himself in a deep contradiction. That he was himself conscious of the danger of the point of view which sees the indivi- dual as part and parcel of God, and who is, therefore, no individual at all, appears most clearly in the essay on "Nominalist and Realist" of the Essays, Second Series (1844) : I wish to speak with all respect of per- sons, but . . . they melt so fast into each other ... it needs an effort to treat them as individuals. . . . But this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be a Buddhist. ... As man is a whole, so is he also a part ; and it were partial not to see it ... . You are one thing, but Nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment. She will not remain orbed in a thought, but rushes into persons. 432 Thus we have, on the one hand, "that overpowering reality . . . that unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man's partic- ular being is contained and made one with all other," 433 and, on the other, a Nature which "rushes into persons," each of which possesses both true individuality and free- dom. This involves an inconsistency that troubled Emerson. Writing down, in 1835, 434 the basic tenets of his philosophical creed, he observed : Our compound nature differences us from God, but our Reason is not to be distin- guished from the Divine Essence. To call it 'ours' or 'Human' seems an impertinence, so absolute and unconfined it is. . . . 435 Time and space are below its sphere; it considers things according to more intimate properties ; it beholds their essence, wherein is seen what they can produce. It [the Divine Essence, or Reason] is in all men ( even the worst, and constitutes them men Ralph Waldo Emerson 191 In bad men it is dormant, in the good, efficient; but it is perfect and identical in all, underneath the peculiarities, the vices, and the errors of the individual. In this explanation is involved man's threefold nature: (i) in its lowest form is man's sensory organism, which, as a part of nature, never loses hold of the reality of which it is only the effect; (2) above it, and in a sense springing from it, is the under- standing, "the executive faculty" or "the hand of the mind, ' ' which "mediates between the soul and inert matter"; and (3) above both is the Reason, not to be distinguished from the Divine Essence, ready to surrender its freedom and return to the great reality from which it came to dwell in the soul of man. This much is clear. All is roughly within the pale of German transcendental- ism, even if Reason, as used by Emerson, is almost always the Practical Reason put to extraordinary uses, i.e., more than strictly Kantian uses. This position repre- sents Emerson's highest reach in the realm of transcendental epistemology, modeled on a Kantian-Coleridgean base. Its best expres- sion is found in Nature. But like Schelling, and like Coleridge, Emerson sought to go beyond this "first philosophy," which, as he came to look back upon it, was, after all, far from satisfactory in all points. The philosophy enunciated in Nature, so far from establishing the iden- tity of subject and object, left unanswered two of the three big questions. The mar- riage of mind and matter remained uncele- brated. At its best, the thesis advanced in Nature was mere theory. Epistemologically considered, it was only a nettling possibility ; it defied all proof. Accordingly the tran- scendental idealism of Nature is put down as being, "in the present state of our knowl- edge," only an hypothesis — a "useful in- troductory hypothesis, serving to apprize us of the eternal distinction between the soul and the world." 436 More than this, Emerson has to admit, it is impossible to claim for it. Whether he comprehended Kant's differ- entiation between pure and practical reason and his demonstration of the failure of the pure reason to prove its Ideas and of the inefficacy of the practical reason to establish indisputably the Ideas of God, freedom, and immortality, Emerson sensed that his own demonstration of the marriage of mind and matter, as well as of the perfect identity of moral and natural law, had failed. If he had read Kant's pointed statement in the Preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, "1 have found it necessary to deny any knowledge of God, freedom, and immortality, in order to find a place for faith," it is possible that Emer- son might have saved himself a good deal of trouble; but it is more likely that even if he had read this statement of Kant's, he would still have gone through the steps of his attempted proof, if only to satisfy his own mind. The phrase "in the present state of our knowledge" suggests three things: (1) that in 1836 he was far from satisfied with his results, (2) that the final synthesis needed still to be made, and (3) that in making it, he would need, perhaps, to draw more than he had upon analysis — upon the knowledge bred of science. Two avenues of approach to the problem presented themselves : he could proceed intuitively or synthetically, or he could retrace his steps to 1832 (back to where he had left science) and proceed rationally and analytically. Emerson would not have been Emerson if he had not at- tempted first the former alternative. While he was about it, however, he did not entirely lose sight of the gains of science which he had noted in his studies before Nature was undertaken. Far from espousing scientific evolution, Emerson does avow already in Nature a belief in "a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect," 437 a belief in a "progressive development" 438 and in a "principle of growth," 439 for "it is essential 192 German Thought in America to a true theory of nature and of man that it should contain somewhat progressive."** Widely though this differs from Darwin- ism, 441 there are in Emerson, side by side as it were, two tendencies: one seeks to push the philosophy of intuition to the limit of its capacity, and the other inquires of science the means to establish the absolute identity. Both tendencies are discernible before 1836, and they continue to engage his mind after he became more clearly aware of the inadequacy of transcendental- ism as expressed in Nature ; but the empha- sis varies with the years. From 1836 to 1839, approximately, the emphasis is upon the theory of emanation, the concern with science being secondary; thereafter, espe- cially after 1850, Emerson concentrates more and more upon the theory of evolu- tion, while the doctrine of emanation and the intuitional approach become gradually subsidiary. While Emerson speaks in Nature of "an occult relation between man and the vege- table" 442 that demands "somewhat progres- sive," 443 the motto which stood at the head of the book in 1836 was a sentence from Plotinus to the effect that "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul." 444 This must be recognized as being more appropriate to the thesis of the book than the verses which were substituted in 1849, ending, And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form. The latter motto represents an afterthought, put there thirteen years after the work was done, and reflecting a new stage in the author's thinking. In 1836 he was far from such a position. 445 The Neo-Platonic Interlude (1838-1850) Emerson's choice of Plotinus to furnish the motto for the first edition of Nature is a matter of some moment. It supplies the cue to the next step in the thinking of Emerson, which thus far had gone through three phases : first, the Lockean sensational- ism learned at college ; next, a loosely con- ceived Platonic idealism, viewed as dual- istic, which served to discredit Locke; third, a revolt against the "spectre dual- ism" by an attempted adherence, from about 1830 to 1838, to German transcen- dentalism. When this, in turn, failed to effect the identity of subject and object, it was only natural that he should proceed to the next step (instinctive in the mystic) by which reason becomes intuition. The journals between 1836 and 1841 (between the publication dates of Nature and the Essays, First Series) illustrate how earnestly, though futilely, Emerson sought, at one moment, to reason his way through to a complete and consistent whole and, at the next, to grasp the mystical intuitions of truth. 446 Idealism pure and simple (as he looked back upon Nature) presented him with the dilemma by which man remains a mere "idea"; evolution, as he grasped it at the time, accounted for man as merely the product of a great evolving reality — not an established unit, but merely an evolving, partial phase of that reality or unity. 447 Both problems occupied him equally and simultaneously throughout 1836 and 1837. The journals of these years indicate the steps by which he was prepared to grasp neo-Platonism, notably the emanation the- ory of Plotinus, 448 in an effort to effect a reconciliation. By the end of 1837, the Kantian Under- standing and Reason, hailed a short time before with great delight and looked to for glorious results, have shrunk to "Common- Sense" and "Vision," respectively. 449 "The Intellect always ponders" ; it is no longer the high Reason which it was represented to be in Nature. It never participates. "It is always [merely] the observer." 450 Yet Emerson feels himself "continually impelled by the influx of the higher principle to abstract himself from all effects, and dwell with Ralph Waldo Emerson 193 causes," to dwell "in the region of laws," in the "native air of the human soul." He seldom finds himself able to climb so high ; but "the child lives with God, as a dweller in the higher sphere, that of the Absolute Truth." 451 "This infinite nature bursts through at last into the affirmation of real being; I am." 452 "Long prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of the mind. Out of darkness it comes insensibly into the marvellous light of today." "God enters by a private door into every individual." 453 Here is a man all ready to forsake metaphys- ics for mysticism — Kant and criticism and transcendence for Plotinus, intuition, and emanation. The result of this transfer of allegiance can be read in the essay on "The Over- Soul," composed between 1836 and 1838, 454 and especially in what presents perhaps the best exposition of this phase of Emerson's philosophic development — the remarkable lecture on "The Method of Nature" (1841). That Plotinus' doctrine of perpetual emana- tion and return, however hard Emerson struggled with the doctrine, 455 would give him no final satisfaction could have been put down as a foregone conclusion. A minute examination of what Emerson derived from Plotinus and the neo-Plato- nists generally in the doctrines of emanation, archetypes, soul intuition, the One and the Many, microcosm, and related ideas in- volves matters foreign to our immediate purpose. Moreover, the studies of Professors Harrison, Carpenter, Christy, and Hotson do just that, and do it admirably. So long as Emerson stuck to his intention to find and explain in the Absolute the ground for all that exists in the conditional world — and fundamentally he did not wa- ver in the intention, however far afield the effort led him — there could be for him no final resting place in mysticism and sheer intuitionalism. Neither the intellectual demand to establish the identity of subject and object nor the personal urge, which would not down, to find a philosophic cer- tainty for the Individual as distinguished from the all-absorbing Totality could be satisfied by the theories emanating from Asia. Eventually it was inevitable that he should endeavor to equate his inherited idealism with the theory of evolution. The latter forced itself upon his attention with increasing insistence. Though he never wholly gave up his belief that "nature pro- ceeds from above" and that man is part of the godly order, there is traceable through- out his work a growing faith in evolution. Hostile though it was to his earlier idealism, it finally forced him, even while he was immersed in the most unscientific stage of his thinking — in the occultism of the East — to pay ever more heed to the accumulated data of the scientists, at the same time that he suspended, more or less uncon- sciously at first, the intuitionalism and faith of his earlier position. Thus it came to pass that even while he was phrasing, about 1838 to 1841, the brilliantly mystical intuitions and giving utterance to his reveries and communings in "Intellect" and "The Over-Soul," he was re-searching his mind for the scien- tific lore which he had made his own in the thirties and seeking to integrate it with what the newer scientific books told him. But during the years from 1841 to 1849 he seems to have called a halt to his philosophizing. 456 Of metaphysics pure and simple the works of this decade are signally free. His thinking, in so far as it can be traced in his published writings and public utterances, appears to have reached a plateau; that is, the decade of the forties was devoted chiefly to the philosophy of use, or to more purely literary concerns, either critical or creative. They were years during which he produced his essays on "practice" — essays like "Experience," "Character," "Manners," "Gifts," "Poli- tics," "New England Reformers," and the book on Representative Men. They were also the years during which he gathered most of the matter that later went into English 194 German Thought in America Traits, Conduct of Life, and Society and Solitude. This does not mean that philoso- phy no longer engaged his mind, or that the high intellectual undertaking of his youth no longer interested him. It means that he preferred to express himself publicly on practical matters, while privately he sought as avidly as ever for a new theory, a new metaphysics, a reintegrated philosophy. Twice at least he had thrust before the public theories which he had had, in a measure, to repudiate (or modify) later. Before he spoke again as a philosopher, it might be well to make sure of his philo- sophic, i.e., epistemological, grounds. He planned not again to go off half-cocked. 457 Generally quiet as the published works of the decade from 1840 to 1850 are on the subject of technical philosophy, his journals show him struggling as actively as ever to achieve a new metaphysical synthesis. But, except for the challenging idea of sphericity, formulated about 1840 for the essay on "Circles," he made no real progress until 1849, 458 when he came upon a book the tremendous significance of which in the development of Emerson's last stand in philosophy has never been evaluated. 459 This book was entitled General Principles of the Philosophy of N ature : With an Outline of Some of its Recent Developments among the Germans, Embracing the Philosophical Sys- tems of Schelling and Hegel, and Oken's System of Nature, by J. B. Stallo, A.M., lately Professor of Analytical Mathema- tics, Natural Philosophy, and Chemistry, in St. John's College, N.Y. (Boston, 1848). 460 To Stallo's book belongs the credit, first, for bringing home to Emerson with compelling force how far science had advanced beyond the position of the scientists that he had studied in the thirties, and second, for giving him a more detailed and accurate account of post-Kantian metaphysics than he had hitherto found in any single source. 461 From this reading of Stallo forward, 462 he referred to Oken, 463 Saint-Hilaire, 464 and other scientific evolutionists, including Charles Darwin, and to Schelling and Hegel as evolutionary philosophers with increasing frequency. It is not too much to say that Stallo, more than any other, is responsible for what became about 1850 a serious effort, far more prolonged and more thoroughgoing than the earlier one, to understand what was going on among the evolutionary naturalists, on the one side, and among the philosophic theorists, on the other. It was something more than mere chance that Emerson copied into his journal, in 1849, from Stallo the sentence expressing the idea that "the development of all in- dividual forms will be spiral," and that he substituted, in the same year, for the motto in the 1836 edition of Nature (which he had derived from Plotinus) the verses describing the spiral ascent of the worm to the form of man. 465 Another factor not to be overlooked in accounting for Emerson's revival of interest in science is his meeting, during his second visit to Europe, the leading British scien- tists. His letters of 1848 voice his delight in the companionship of these eminent men, of dining with them, or hearing them lec- ture. He particularly enjoyed his contacts with Robert Chambers, Charles Lyell, Michael Faraday, Richard Owen, William Buckland, Edward Forbes, Robert Brown, "the great Botanist," William Spence, "the entomologist," George Combe, and Sir William Hamilton. 466 That personal contact with these men should have stimulated him to a renewed interest in science was natural. Important and interesting as these con- siderations of a scientific nature are, it is more particularly to philosophers and phi- losophy that we must turn our attention. Yet even while we do so, we shall constantly have to revert to science and scientists, for Stallo led Emerson to return not only to a more intense re-examination of German thought than even Coleridge had been able to arouse in him twenty years earlier, but also to evolution and science generally (which had gone into a decline in his Ralph Waldo Emerson 195 thinking since 1836). Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Emerson was more or less naturally impelled by reason of his dissatisfaction with his own philosophy of mystical and intuitional neo- Platonism during the forties, to come round full circle in his thinking to approximately the same approach which he had followed and then forsaken during the late thirties. Then he had studied science and the Ger- man thinkers as co-ordinate sources from which to extract his prima philosophia. Now he returned to what is essentially the same positon, except that the philosophic experience of the intervening years had dis- abused his mind of several ideologies as either false or sterile for his purposes. Truly might Madame de Stael, echoing Goethe, observe of the mind of man, "It is always advancing, but in spiral line." What is to Stallo's credit primarily is that he most directly influenced Emerson to make this spiral return, whence, as Emerson grasped with increasing surety the true import of evolution, he was to attempt another phil- osophical synthesis, this time with Schel- ling and Hegel as guides. That he turned with searching attention to these two rather than some others, the times and Emerson's own bent of mind about 1849 made inevitable. At the time when Emerson was most in- terested in Kant, his ideas were available to Emerson only at second hand. Sometime after 1838, however, he acquired a copy of Francis Haywood's translation of the Critique of Pure Reason (London, 1838) ; but since there are few marks in the book, and since the index which Emerson habitually made of the books which he read includes, in this instance, only three entries or heads, namely "Locke and Hume," "Immortal- ity," and "Oblate Sphericity," we cannot be sure that he read the volume either attentively or entirely. There is no indica- tion of the date on which the book came into Emerson's possession. But these are matters of little moment in view of the fact that Kant never after 1838 held an important place in Emerson's thinking, although he did hold firmly on to an ethical philosophy that is, from first to last, essentially the same as Kant's in practice, though not necessarily derived thence. Not that Emerson dismissed Kant completely from his mind. The references to Kant in the later journals and writings continue, even with accelerated frequency; but they are often references of a general nature, and there is nothing to suggest that he returned to a serious consideration, or reconsideration, of Kant. 467 Instead, he sought to grasp Kant's significance for evolutionary philosophy, and honored him as initiating the point of view by which science and philosophy were to be equated. More to the later Emerson's taste than the epistemological abstractions and metaphys- ical analyses of Kant were the poetical vagaries of Schelling. The reasons for this deflection in Emerson's allegiance are fairly obvious to the student who follows Emer- son through his neo-Platonic stage. Emerson's interest in Fichte, if the jour- nal references afford an indication, was even and prolonged, but never impassioned. There is not, in the published record, con- clusive assurance that Emerson ever read Fichte either in the original or in transla- tion, except the considerable portions of the first and third books of The Destination of Man printed in Hedge's Prose Writers of 1847. 4S8 Altogether, there are in the Jour- nals eight references that warrant being noted: the first in 1834, the last in 1870, and several in between that refer to "the grand unalterableness of Fichte's moral- ity," 469 the "strength of his moral convic- tions" which form Fichte's "charm and character." 470 These characterizations are derived less from a firsthand knowledge than from a reading about Fichte in such secondary sources as Carlyle, who speaks of "the sublime stoicism" of Fichte's ethi- cal sentiments in his essay on the "State of German Literature," 471 and Madame de 196 German Thought in America Stael's Germany,* 72 whence Carlyle himself appears to have drawn a good deal of his information about Fichte. This being so, it is questionable whether the sweeping claims that have been made regarding the derivation from Fichte of Emerson's ethical theories are sustained by facts. What is more, Emerson could not, in 1847, have entertained appreciatively Fichte's strict determinism and necessity in Nature as described in The Destination of Man, however much the point of view and the aim, as expressed in Fichte's prefatory remarks, may have attracted him. Fichte's dictum that "Practical reason is the root of all reason" may well have struck a respon- sive chord, but that was something Emer- son had held all along. If it could be estab- lished that Emerson read The Destination of Man before 1836, we should perhaps be justified in ascribing to Fichte large por- tions of Nature. By the same token we should be able to relate to Fichtean idealism the extreme egoism, optimistic self-reliance, and call to action of The American Scholar and the Divinity School address, but these are referable rather to other sources, as we have observed. Fichte, except as he came to Emerson at second hand, came too late to affect these utterances of 1836, 1837, and 1838. When, in 1847, Emerson did read Fichte's Destination of Man, it no longer held anything novel for him. 473 He himself had passed the state of mind which Fichte describes — that of "a mind just beginning to speculate on its own nature and destiny and the grounds of all being and knowing." 471 If, on the other hand, Emerson had, in 1836, or even during the neo-Platonic stage of his thinking, come upon Fichte's Divine Will and Sublime Faith, as developed in The Destination of Man, he would undoubt- edly have drawn confirmation from that source. But in 1847 he had advanced to the position which sought something more than Fichte's "Faith" to effect the epistemologi- cal reconciliation between Mind and Mat- ter, Spirit and Nature, God and Man. More- over, when, in 1847 Emerson encountered (in The Destination of Man) what Fichte called irresolvable Doubt and impossible Knowledge, he could not but be repelled by them; while the vague means by which Fichte's "sublime, living Will" effects the identity of the finite and the infinite could have given Emerson no substantial satis- faction. Already in 1837 he owned: "A believer in Unity, a Seer of Unity, I yet behold two." "Why," he cried, "cannot I conceive the Universe without contradic- tion?" 475 Although he was impelled at various times to assert the inscrutability of absolute truth, he never relinquished his search for it. He never gave up his desire to know. Fichte, on the other hand, said frankly in the treatise which Emerson read : I will not attempt that which is denied to me by my finite nature, and which could avail me nothing. I desire not to know how thou art in thyself. . . . Thou workest in me the knowledge of my duty, of my destination in the series of rational beings. How ? I do not know, and need not know. Thou know- est and perceivest what I think and will. How thou canst know it, — -by what act thou bringest this consciousness to pass, — on that point I comprehend nothing. 476 As philosophy, then, the popular works of Fichte held little for Emerson. 477 On the other hand, everything conspired to his giving Schelling's ideas a more favorable reception. Coleridge 478 had prepared the way, and there was available a good deal of other explanatory material on Schelling during the early period of Emerson's liter- ary productivity. Yet he seems not to have availed himself of it, and a remark made in 1838 suggests what indicates that Schel- ling then had little to teach him: "Leave me alone; do not teach me out of Leibnitz and Schelling, and I shall find it all out myself." 479 Eight years later, he set down a conclusion, the exact import of which is hard to extract: In Germany there still seems some hidden dreamer from whom this strange, genial, Ralph Waldo Emerson 197 poetic, comprehensive philosophy comes, and from which the English and French get mere rumors and fragments, which are yet the best philosophy we know. One while we thought that this fontal German was Schil- ling ; then Fichte, Novalis ; then Oken ; then it hovered about Schleiermacher, and set- tled for a time on Hegel. But on producing authenticated books from each of these mas- ters** we find them clever men, but nothing like so great and deep a poet sage as we looked for. And now we are still to seek for the lurking Behmen of modern Germany. 481 It would seem that something tran- spired between 1838 and 1846 to direct Emer- son's attention to Schelling. He had sup- plied himself between these years with some parts of Schelling's works, and consid- ered himself by now sufficiently well read in post-Kantian speculation generally and in Schelling particularly to warrant his haz- arding some rather sweeping generaliza- tions. The letters made available in the Rusk collection, together with what is known about the general direction of Emer- son's mind during the forties, afford fair indications of what happened, and enable us to sketch the steps by which he was led to appreciate Schelling. First, the mystical intuitionalism, in which he dwelt following the collapse of his high hopes for the transcendentalism which he had expounded during the thirties, made him naturally susceptible to the mystical- religious philosophy of Schelling, all the more so because of Schelling's reinforce- ment of his own philosophy by poetry and religion. In Schelling the aesthetic reason served to harmonize religion and philoso- phy. Madame de Stael, Carlyle, and Cole- ridge all agreed on that point. Emerson doubtless recalled the high esteem in which Coleridge had held the Identitdtslehre of Schelling. Thus prepared, Emerson entered the second phase of his enthusiasm for Schel- ling. In November, 1842, Charles Stearns Wheeler began sending him reports from Heidelberg of "German universities and scholars" — reports which Emerson decided to print in the Dial.** 2 He professed at this time to be especially interested in Schelling because of the "grandeur" of the attempt in which Schelling and Oken combined "to unite natural and moral philosophy." 483 Wheeler next sent Schelling's erste Vor- lesung, which Emerson promptly forwarded to Hedge to be translated for the Dial*** where it appeared in the January, 1843, number. Yet nothing substantial came of this burst of enthusiasm until James E. Cabot sent him, in February of 1844, an article on Kant for the Dial,* 65 and himself came to Concord a year later "to comfort the dry land with a little philosophy," as Emerson whimsically reported. 486 Emer- son's account to Elizabeth Hoar of this first visit indicates the antiphilosophic cast of his mind at the time. He asked her not to charge him with "levity and the old aloof- ness"; he professed to revolve as truly as ever, but with "humble docility and desire, the world-old problems." Steeped in neo- Platonic mysticism, he viewed the philoso- phy of the professionals as no more than "the poetry of the Understanding, the mirage of Sahara"; for himself, he added, "I worship the real, I hate the critical and Athwart." 487 But the indefatigible Cabot gave him no rest. In the summer of 1845 he sent Emer- son his "Essay on Freedom," a translation of Schelling's "Philosophische Untersu- chung iiber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit." At last Emerson's interest was truly aroused. To Cabot he wrote: This admirable Schelling, which I have never fairly engaged with until last week, demands the 'lamp' and the 'lonely tower' and a lustrum of silence. I delight in his steady inevitable eye, and the breath of his march including and disposing of so many objects of mark. ... I cannot for the present let any Miss Peabody or other person have the book [Cabot's translation], which has, I am sure, come just to the right reader for the present. Whenever you 198 German Thought in America choose to print it, which is the best thing to do with it, or, as soon as my good will to philosophic readers overpowers my desire to understand and appropriate it, I shall send it back. 488 A month later he reported that while "Schelling continues to interest me ... I am so ill a reader of these subtle dialectics, that I let them lie a long time near me." 489 Thus he kept the manuscript a year and then felt obliged to ask Cabot's forgiveness, at the same time passing on to Cabot his final estimate of the work: The Schelling I have only now concluded to let alone. I wish you might some day feel disposed to print it, that it might go mag- netising about to search for the souls now unknown that belong to it. Yet that were hazardous, since it is one of the books, like my Alexandrian Platonists, which seem to require a race of more longevity and leisure than mankind, to sound all these depths which yet do not pretend to be the sea, but only the swimming school. But again I should like to have you print it . . . . 49 ° His intercessions with Munroe to publish the work came to naught, 491 and his in- terest in Schelling appears soon to have waned. The conclusion seems to be that this remarkable burst of enthusiasm had been impelled less from within than from without by enthusiasts like Heath, Wheeler, Hedge, and Cabot. In any case, the difficulties of Schelling's dialectics soon cooled his ardor. The chief significance of the episode is that it kept his moderate interest in natural philosophy from subsiding altogether and, what is more important, that his reading of Schelling and his contacts with Hedge, Cabot, and soon after, Stallo eventually brought Hegel prominently to his atten- tion. When he next undertook to review ideas emanating from the post-Kantians, it was less Schelling than Hegel who interest- ed him ; and it is in connection with his view of the latter that we shall revert to his attitude toward the former. The Hegelian-Darwinian Period (after 1850) Of Hegel Emerson knew little more than the name prior to 1846, when he observed: Hegel's philosopheme, blazoned by Cou- sin, that an idea always conquers, and, in all history, victory had ever fallen on the right side (a doctrine which Carlyle had, as usual, found a fine idiom for, that Right and Might go together), was a specimen of this Teutonism. Something of it there is in Schelling; more in his quoted Baader; something in Goethe, who is Catholic and poetic. Swedenborg had much; Novalis had good sentences; Kant nothing of it. 492 Apparently repulsed at first by Hegel, Emerson was slow coming to him. The notes on his reading show him less interested during the forties in Hegelian than in the Schellingian kind of mystical naturalism as represented by Oken, Maader, and Boehme on the one hand and the mystical neo- Platonists, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Por- phyry on the other. First impelled, about 1850, by Stallo to re-search the scientific bases of his thinking, Emerson made little progress in that direction between 1850 and 1855, when his observations in his diary show a vacillating state of mind between faith and knowledge, intuition and logic — the intuitional and the scientific methods striving against each other. Indeed, about this time he went so far as to remark that in Germany and in German philosophy he had "no interest . . . since the death of Goethe," 493 to whom he still attributed "preternatural size," 494 and whom he called "the pivotal man of the old and new times." 495 As for the German philosophers' having "found the profoundly secret pass that leads from Fate to Freedom," he professed, as late as 1855, to have grave doubts: 'Tis like that crooked hollow log through which the farmer's pig found access to the field ; the farmer moved the log that the pig, in returning to the hole, and passing Ralph Waldo Emerson 199 through, found himself to his astonishment, still on the outside of the field: he tried again, and was still outside; then he fled away, and would never go near it again. Whatever transcendant [sic] abilities Fichte, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel have shown, I think they lack the confirmation of having given piggy a transit to the field. The log is crooked, but still leaves grumpy on the same side of the fence he was before. If they had made the transit, common fame would have found it out. So I abide by my rule of not reading the book, until I hear of it through the newspaper. 496 Yet unable to leave metaphysics alone altogether, he confessed, somewhat apolo- getically, "I write metaphysics, but my method is purely expectant." 497 One day he depreciated the results and significance of German speculation and scientific research, and on the next he paid them homage, as when he imputed to Edward Everett "an immense advantage in being the first American who sat in the German universi- ties." 498 Moreover, Stallo and Hegel soon received a powerful ally in the person of Emmanuel V. Scherb, a German patriot and exile who came to Concord in 1849, precisely when Emerson professed to have little interest in any German since the death of Goethe. On hearing Scherb, Emerson said, "Mr. Scherb attempted last night to unfold Hegel for me, and I caught some- what that seemed cheerful and large, and that might, and probably did come by Hindoo suggestion." 499 Still, he was far from converted to Hegelianism by Scherb's first effort, for, added Emerson: But all abstract philosophy is easily anticipated, — it is so structural, or necessi- tated by the human mind. Schelling said, 'the Absolute is the union of the Ideal and the Real.' 500 All in all, Stallo's General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature was the most persist- ent influence to keep Emerson's mind occupied with German thought. Already in November of 1849, he had set himself to copying out extracts. 501 A year and a half later he paid a glowing tribute to Scherb and his "masterly" lectures as "a most gratifying monument to culture . . . such a regnant good sense, so sane, so catholic, so true to religion and reason." 502 His concern with the German philosophers and scien- tists became increasingly more frequent and sympathetic. During 1855 he made one more extended excursion into the neo-Pla- tonists, 503 but after that year his active occupation with the thought of the near- and far-East was over; and even the be- quest of Thoreau's oriental books (which came to him in May of 1862) seems not to have again actively aroused his interest. 504 Instead, he accorded, in 1856, the German philosophers and scientists his highest praise : I think the Germans have an integrity of mind which sets their science above all other. They have not this science in scraps, this science on stilts. They have posed certain philosophical facts on which all is built, the doctrine of immanence, as it is called, by which everything is the cause of itself, or stands there for its own, and repeats in its own all other; 'the ground of everything is immanent in that thing.' Everything is organic, freedom also, not to add, but to grow and unfold. They purify, they sweeten, they warm and ennoble, by seeing the heart to be in- dispensable, not in scraps, not on stilts. In music, it was once the doctrine. The text is nothing, the score is all . . . but Wagner said the text must be fixed to the score and from the first; must be inspired with the score. So in chemistry, Mulder said, — For a good chemist, the first condition is, he shall know nothing of philosophy; but Oersted and Humboldt saw and said that chemistry must be the handmaid of moral Henceforth, to the end of his career, he clung to the idea he had grasped during the early thirties, but which he had temporarily forsaken a decade later — namely, the "identity of law, perfect order of physics, perfect parallelism between the laws of Nature and the laws of thought." 506 Stallo's 200 German Thought in America principles of the philosophy of nature served to reinforce the ideas of ascending advance and development, rhythm, law, polarity, centrality, and identity. For the formulation, or reformulation, of these principles Stallo provided the impetus, while Darwin, Schelling, and notably Hegel lent confirmation. "The iterations or rhymes of Nature," Emerson wrote in 1849, "are already an idea or principle of science, and a guide." 507 In Stallo he found these ideas of Schelling and Hegel, among others, which he thought worth copying into his journal for future reference: Geologic strata whose supraposition in space is a sufficient warrant for their suc- cession in time. The configurations of Nature are more than a symbol, they are the gesticular ex- pression of Nature's inner life. 508 Whatever exists, exists only in virtue of the life of which it is an expression. [Stallo] p. 3 5 . 5 °6 Every individual existence is but a living history. 510 The development of all forms will be spiral. 511 Matter is only by its relativity. The quantitative and qualitative existence of matter is an uninterrupted flight from itself, a never terminating whirl of evanescence. Stallo. p. 93. 512 Animals are irregular men. 513 Animals are but foetal forms of man. 514 The limbs are emancipated ribs. 515 Extension is petrified succession, or space is dead time. 516 Immediately following these memorabilia from Stallo, and partly based on them, Emerson set down his generalization re- garding cycles or eras in the history of man's attitude toward nature: I easily distinguish three eras. 1 . The Greek : when man deified Nature . . . 2. The Christian: when the soul became pronounced, and craved a heaven out of Nature and above it, — looking on Nature now as evil .... 3. The Modern: when the too idealistic tendencies of the Christian period running into the disease of cant, monachism, and a church . . . forced men to retrace their steps, and rally again on Nature; but now the tendency is to marry mind to Nature, and to put Nature under the mind, convert the world into the instrument of Right Reason. Man goes forth to the dominion of the world by commerce, by science, and by philosophy. 517 "Man goes forth to conquer the world by commerce, by science, and by philosophy"; and, Emerson might have added at the time, "the greatest of these is philosophy," for only when science is grounded upon philosophy is it capable of reaching the degree of perfection to which the Germans have developed it. 518 Intertwined as science and philosophy are in this last phase of Emerson's intellec- tual development, leading eventually to a point which Emerson believed to be essenti- ; ally Hegelian, we can yet trace with some degree of precision the steps by which, ' following the suggestions of Stallo, he advanced by regular gradations through Chambers, Lyell, Schelling, Oken, Hum- ' boldt, Saint-Hilaire, Agassiz, and finally ; Darwin, Huxley, and J. H. Stirling, 519 to a point where he felt "the supreme delight with the laws of Nature and its own law of \ life." 520 This he called the "universal law of Identity and Centrality," 521 and to Hegel he ascribed the glory of having formulated it most clearly. For the acceptance of this doctrine he had been prepared by a prin- ciple grasped and accepted much earlier — ■ that of sphericity. The direct impetus which lent most to his acceptance of the idea of Centrality was Schelling's Identi- tdtslehre as Stallo explained it. 522 Three propositions (the first two from Schelling and the last from Hegel) from which Emer- son appears to have derived most help and satisfaction at this time he found in Stallo's book, namely: (1) "The absolute is the union of the Ideal and the Real," 523 (2) "All difference is quantitative," 524 and (3) "Liberty is the spirit's realization of it- self." 625 Ralph Waldo Emerson 201 Emerson himself did not rank the philo- sophical scientists whom he read at the time, and it is virtually impossible to do more than speculate on which were the more influential in shaping his thought during the fifties, except as the frequency with which he recurs to them and the tone of his comments on them give some in- dications. Darwin, apparently, did not at once interest him very vitally. Although he appears to have understood the general significance of On the Origin of Species shortly after its appearance, the first con- clusive evidence now available strongly suggests that a careful consideration of the volume was delayed for some years. In 1869 Emerson speaks of having read Owen, Tyn- dall, and Darwin more than their compeer, Huxley; and in 1873 he observed signifi- cantly that while Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, Stallo had antici- pated him by a decade when he wrote, "Animals are but foetal forms of man." 526 The wording here and that in the passage which precedes it are such as to imply that Chambers (from whom he appears to have learned the phrase "arrested and progres- sive development" 827 ), Lyell, Saint-Hilaire, Oken, and notably Stallo had taught him all he cared for in Darwin's doctrine of species, selection, and evolution. 528 Not that he rejected Darwin's theory of evolu- tion. He simply asserted the Emersonian prerogative of not troubling his mind with the minutiae upon which the theory was based. Darwin's detailed explanations and specific demonstrations were merely wel- come confirmatory evidence for a doctrine which he had grasped as a whole and accepted long before. That he had been impressed by the idea of evolutionary development as early as 1849 the Journals for that year illustrate; while the essay on "Poetry and Imagination" (substantially in the form in 1854 in which it is today) leaves little room for doubt that Darwin had little to offer Emerson in 1859 that he felt he had not long known. A few passages from that essay will suffice for illustrative purposes : Nature is not final. First innuendoes, then broad hints, then smart taps are given, suggesting that nothing stands still in Nature; that the creation is on wheels, in transit, 529 always passing into something else, streaming into something higher; that matter is not what appears; 530 that chemis- try can blow it all into gas .... The noble house of Nature we inhabit has temporary uses, and we can afford to leave it in one day. The ends are moral, and therefore the beginnings are such .... Everything [is] undressing and stealing away from its old into new form, and nothing [is] fast but those invisible cords which we call laws, on which all is strung . . . All multiplicity rushes to be resolved into unity. Anatomy, osteology, exhibit arrested and progressive development in each kind ; the lower pointing to the higher forms, the higher to the highest, from the fluid in an elastic sack, from radiate, mol- lusk, articulate, vertebrate, up to man; as if the whole animal world were only a Hunterian museum to exhibit the genesis of mankind .... Each animal or vegetable remembers the next inferior and predicts the next higher. 531 Here we recognize the advance which Emerson made in his scientific and philo- sophic thinking during the twenty-year interim which separates these passages from those in his first published work, by which he tried, in 1836, to explain "the theory of nature." In Mature he had sought after a similar idea, but it succeeded always in just eluding his grasp. The journals from 1850 on demonstrate, on nearlv every page, how eagerly he set once more to groping about among the dead bones of zoology in an effort to reanimate a philosophy which had lapsed into so hopeless an intuitionalism that it stood in danger of sinking into fatalis- tic mysticism altogether. But even the strictly "evolutionary" the- ory of science (not to be confused with the earlier graduated-scale or chain-of-being theory) would have been useless for his purposes without the philosophical concept which Emerson speaks of next, that of 202 German Thought in America polarity and identity of thought. Thought, he says, taking the idea from Hegel apud Stallo — "Thought has its own polarity .... Identity of law, perfect order in physics, perfect parallelism between the laws of Nature and the laws of thought exist." 532 Here are two ideas perfectly companionable and congruent for Emerson, whom every- thing had conspired to prepare for Darwin- ian evolution and Hegelian idealism. Just as it was inevitable that in science he should pass from the old chain-of-being to the more organic evolutionary theory, so it was natural that in philosophy he should turn his back upon the hopeless dualism (which threatened to put man in a cave guarded by the twin monster Fate-Necessity) and to entertain the doctrine of organic central- ity and absolute identity. The latter com- pleted the former, and was reached by gradual, almost imperceptible, stages. This transition from the eighteenth-century con- cept of development to that of nineteenth- century evolution and from Platonic and neo-Platonic dualism to Hegelian absolut- ism is what chiefly distinguishes the mature from the younger Emerson. Contact with Hegelian thought is what chiefly accounts for the difference. 533 Hegel appealed to Emerson because he seemed to put Nature and Spirit, matter and mind, in right relation — a relationship which Stallo repeatedly emphasized as being central to both Hegel's and Schel- ling's philosophy of nature. This was pre- cisely the relationship which Emerson had endeavored to establish all along. There was another reason : Hegel's form of speculation (more accurately, the results of it) appealed to Emerson because there he found room not only for the concept of the organic but also for his sense of Nature's process of "unfolding" — an unfolding or flowering of nature from the mind. This was a favorite idea for which he had failed successively to find a completely satisfactory metaphysical confirmation. This metaphysics Hegel seemed to supply. But Emerson did not proceed immediate- ly from organic evolutionism to Hegelian absolutism, natural though such a step might have been. Stallo's agency in prepar- ing him for the step has already been noted. Even more directly to the purpose was the position of Schelling as an agency by which Emerson came to accept Hegelianism, or (shall we say ?) those portions of the Hegel- ian philosophy that he understood and liked. The conclusion of Nature indicates that in 1836 all was not well with the epistemo- logical groundwork of Emerson's philoso- phy. The ideal theory as enunciated in that book and as based on the Kantian distinc- tion between Understanding and Reason he had had to put down as being at best only a "useful introductory hypothesis" — not a proved fact. Three years later, although he still found within him the "invincible ten- dency of the mind to unify," self -analysis and conversations with F. H. Hedge left him no alternative but to conclude that something in his metaphysics was askew. Hedge, arguing that "the world is not a dualism, is not a bipolar unity," accused Emerson of "overlooking great facts in stating the absolute laws of the soul. 534 The criticism disturbed Emerson. For a decade, from 1839 to 1849, Emer- son was in a dilemma: he was unable quite to establish or, for that matter, to accept a purely monistic universe; he was equally unable entirely to repudiate the dualism which he sought to transcend. The best he could do in 1839 was to assert that "there are degrees in idealism." 535 In this state of indecision and vacillation he languished until Stallo called his attention to Schel- ling's philosophy of identity by which "the Absolute is [explained as] the union of the Ideal and the real," and "all difference is merely quantitative." 536 The philosophic distinction between quantity and quality as Schelling had drawn it struck him for- cibly, and in his journals he reverted to it again and again. One instance will illustrate. Ralph Waldo Emerson 203 Amount and Quality. Schelling's distinc- tion, 'Some minds speak about things, and some minds speak the things them- selves,' 537 remains by far the most impor- tant intellectual distinction, as the moral distinction, or the quality, is the important moral distinction. Quality and Amount. Searching tests these! 538 Twenty years later he still regarded Schelling's idea of Identity as all-impor- tant. Under the head of Identity, he wrote : The best identity is the practical one .... Steffens relates that he went into Schel- ling's lecture room at Jena(?). Schelling said, 'Gentlemen, think of the wall.' All the class at once took attitudes of thought; some stiffened themselves; some shut their eyes; all concentrated themselves. After a time, he said, 'Gentlemen, think of that which thought the wall.' Then there was trouble in all the camp. 539 Variations of the themes which he found in Schelling, and which he preserved in his daybooks include the following (none of them in the printed Journals) : 'Every growth in nature has but one moment of perfect beauty.' Schelling. 540 'That is free which only acts conformably to the laws of its beauty.' Schelling. 541 That effort of identity between the con- scious and the unconscious activities that Schelling calls the sole privilege of genius. 'The infinite (or perfect) presented as the finite is Beauty.' — Continental Review, No. i, p. 59. 542 As these memorabilia indicate, what in Schelling appealed to Emerson was the possibility he provided for integrating with the philosophy of the Absolute the doctrine of the Organic, for by now he had caught hold firmly of the principle that "every- thing is organic, not to add but to grow and unfold." 543 This last doctrine he found best expressed by Hegel, for the reception of whose ideas Schelling had prepared him. 544 Thus we find Emerson recording from Hegel, presumably on the basis of his read- ing in Varnhagen von Ense's Tagebucher and Hoefer's Nouvelle Biographie Gene- rale, 5 ** these thoughts (none of them in the printed Journals) : 'Liberty is the spirit's realization of it- self.' Hegel. 548 'The man is what he does.' Hegel. See passages from Hegel's Encyclopedia, Thl. II p. 461 and p. 84 cited in Varnhagen Vol. XI p. 43. 547 Before Hegel, Heraclitus said, 'Nothing is, everything becomes.' See article, 'Hegel' in Biographie Generale. 548 Just as he contented himself with second- ary sources on Schelling, so he relied on expounders and historians of philosophy for what he wished to know of Hegel. Stallo was of primary importance in directing him to Hegel, but almost as influential were Hoefer's biographical dictionary and especi- ally James Hutchison Stirling's Secret of Hegel, although the former did not reach his hands before 1862, while the latter he got hot from the press in 1865. Later he con- sulted such works as Schwegler's History of Philosophy 5 * 9 and Thomas Stanley's Lives of the Philosophers 550 and History of Philoso- phy. 551 Hardly less important, although the influence came later, were the Tagebucher of Varnhagen von Ense, through most or all of which he seems to have thumbed between 1870 and 1876. 552 The receipt in September, 1865, of Stir- ling's Secret of Hegel (published in the same year) set him anew to praising Hegel. 553 He carried the two-volume work with him on a lecture tour of the West the following January; and reading it of nights, in dingy, cheerless hotel rooms, he found it a "good book," one offering "some lasting knowl- edge." He declared it a book that invited him to "purer, loftier service," that lifted him "quite out of prosaic surroundings." 554 Whether or not he followed Hegel's techni- cal arguments, Emerson saw in Stirling's Secret of Hegel what T. H. Green professed to see in it : the full articulation of the sig- nificance of German philosophy in the succession from Kant to Hegel, 555 in such a way that Stirling's book "contrasted with 204 German Thought in America everything else that has been published as sense with nonsense." Emerson hailed it as "the most competent and compulsive of modern British books on metaphysics," and characterized Stirling as "a more subtle metaphysician than any other" on the British Isles. 556 Meanwhile something of Hegel came to him through Hedge, with whom he continu- ed to hold high philosophical talk, particu- larly during the sixties. 55 ' But the final impetus that led Emerson to give Hegel a sympathetic hearing was supplied by William Torrey Harris. Stallo, Hedge, and Cabot had, each in his way, repeatedly induced him to consider the Hegelian system; but until Harris entered upon the scene, Hegel had elicited from him only half-hearted attention. Thus, while he expressed this thanks to Cabot, in 1855, for having lent him some volumes of Hegel, he felt impelled to add : "I did not find my way into Hegel as readily as I hoped, nor was I as richly rewarded as probably better scholars have been." 558 A decade later he had met Harris in St. Louis, then engaged in organizing the Hegelian school of thought in the West — a philosophy which Harris took pains to explain should be an extension of Emersonian idealism. In letters written at the time Emerson's enthusiasm for Harris and his Hegelian confreres appears genuine. He introduced Harris to Cabot and Hedge as a "sharp sighted philosopher ... an intelligent, faithful student, using his own eyes on a pretty wide range of facts." 559 He accepted the St. Louisans' invitation to speak before their Philosophical Society and urged Henry James, Sr., who had been prevented from accepting a similar invita- tion, to grasp the next opportunity. For himself, he reported to James: "It was a true gratification to see Harris at St. Louis amidst the German atheists, and to share his pleasure in that, though he had begun alone, he now counted . . . nineteen young men as spiritual and affirmative philoso- phers, and could rely on them as active prop- agandists." 560 He appears to have lectured before the Philosophical Society in Febru- ary, in March, and probably again in December of 1867. 561 He became an "auxili- ary" 562 member of the Society and a reader of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy from the first, Harris supplying him with advance sheets of the first numbers, which were especially detailed in setting forth the aims of the St. Louis School and abundant in Hegelian materials, both translation and explanation. He complimented Harris upon his "brave undertaking," and added: I shall think better than ever of my coun- trymen if they shall sustain it. I mean that you shall make me acquainted in it with the true value and performance of Hegel, who, at first sight is not engaging nor at second sight satisfying. But his immense fame cannot be mistaken, and I shall read and wait. 563 Henceforth, until Harris himself settled in Concord in 1879, there was a steady interchange of letters and opinions between Emerson and Harris. They borrowed each other's books and pooled their efforts and influence to secure literary and academic advancement for J. H. Stirling. 564 They consulted each other regarding contribu- tions and editorial policies for the Journal. Emerson steadily encouraged Harris' jour- nalistic venture and paid for his copy of the Journal, although Harris had sent it gratis. S6S Apparently Harris confided to Emerson, as early as 1870, his ambition to bring Hegel to Concord, for Emerson wrote, on March 3, 1870: We have no news yet to give you of real progress in speculative Philosophy in Mass tts . It is a good sign surely of the cour- age of our new President at Cambridge in establishing University Lectures ; and he is this year making a direct attempt to bring Mr Stirling from Edinburgh. I think it is good that Mr J. E. Cabot reads lectures in these weeks on Kant. The class are very small. It was a mistake to make the price of admission too high. 566 I have put my three vols, of the 'Journal' to be bound and mean Ralph Waldo Emerson 205 to read them much in the next month. Thanks especially for Hegel in No 12, and for Mr Davidson's 'Parmenides.' This last is a wonderful piece of Greek precocity. 567 The "Hegel in No 12" for which Emerson thanked Harris is doubtless a reference to the latter's translation, in Number 1 of Volume IV, 568 from Hegel's "Philosophi- sche Propaedeutik," which the translator entitled "The Science of Rights, Morals, and Religion." Lacking decisive evidence regarding how long Emerson continued to read Harris' publication, we are unable to conjecture how closely he studied Hegel's system as revealed in this source. If he read no further than Volume IV, number 1 (March, 1870) he became exposed to more than a smattering of German speculation; if he continued to read, and to comprehend, subsequent numbers, he stood an excellent chance to become one of the best informed men of his time on the subject of Hegelian- ism. That he became thus informed is im- probable. 569 In the absence of precise evidence dem- onstrating the influence of these materials on Emerson's subsequent thinking and writing, the conclusion must be that while he may have made good his resolution, his reading the Journal of Speculative Philoso- phy did not affect him vitally. Much of it was highly technical, and quite possibly his old aversion for the technicalities of philos- ophy revived. The conclusion seems to be that now, as earlier, he divined the general import of Hegel and his compeers, but that he contented himself with grasping the general significance of Hegelianism without plumbing the metaphysical depths requi- site for a detailed comprehension and com- plete assimilation. In 1879 the Concord School of Philosophy was established, with Alcott the titular, and Harris the real, head. Henceforth there was an abundance of talk in Concord about Hegel, with Harris most assiduous about doing the work of the master, but Alcott, too, lending a hand occasionally, as when he took an active part in the Kant centen- nial of the third session. 570 Emerson joined the School. Though he did not talk about Hegel, he delivered two lectures — one on "Aristocracy" and the other, ironically enough, on "Memory." By this time Emer- son's memory was failing, and his mind was beginning to wander. Whatever their im- pact on others may have been, or was to become, Harris and his Western Hegelians settled in Concord too late to be of much use to Emerson. In the light of what has been recorded regarding the ways and means by which Emerson came by his knowledge of Hegel, it is apparent that, lacking a firsthand acquaintance with the German's works, he never mastered the metaphysical logic and dialectic of the Hegelians. Stirling's Secret, if Emerson succeeded in extracting it, and the columns of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy served his purpose. As he said in 1840, when Scherb first tried to unfold Hegel to him, he caught "somewhat that seemed cheerful and large" in Hegelian thought; but the techni- cal groundwork upon which Hegel's Iden- tity and Absolute rested did not much con- cern Emerson. He was ready to take the word of those who told him that Hegel had, by means of his doctrine of opposites and the triadic dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, reconciled the finite and the infinite, and established the Absolute as that Identity by which "One law consumes all diversity" 571 — by which subject and object become one, nature and mind are merged in the Absolute, and liberty (free- dom) becomes "the spirit's realization of 'itself.'" 672 The propositions, arguments, and proofs Emerson was willing now, as formerly, to leave to those who had seen them. His metaphysics, he reaffirmed before the Harvard students of philosophy who came to hear him lecture in 1870, were "to the end of use." 573 And so he continued to speak lightly of metaphysical books, even to saying, "Dreary to me are the names and 206 German Thought in America number of volumes of Hegel and the Hegel- ians .... I want not the metaphysics, but only the literature of them." 574 About the same time he declared: The reason of a new philosophy or phi- losopher is ever that a man of thought finds that he cannot read in the older books. I can't read Hegel, or Schelling, or find in- terest in what is told me from them, so I persist in my own idle and easy way, and write down my thoughts, and find presently that there are congenial persons who like them, so I persist, until some sort of outline or system grows. 'Tis the common course: ever a new bias. It happened to each of these, Heraclitus, or Hegel, or whosoever. 575 The intimation, conscious or unconscious, seems plain enough. Again, he wrote : Bacon or Kant, or Hegel, propound some maxim which is the keynote of philosophy thenceforth; but I am more interested to know, that, when at last they hurled their deep word, it is only some familiar ex- perience of every man in the street. 576 Yet, while he belittled metaphysics and metaphysical books, the metaphysicians themselves — Kant, Schelling, and Hegel, singly and collectively — he uniformly apos- trophized during this later period. They are "grand masters" 577 and "architects" build- ing "our inward heaven," 578 — "the fore- most scholars in all history." 579 Hegel's is "a superior mind," and Schelling is spoken of as "another great genius." 580 The ques- tionings whether the German idealists had solved their philosophical problems cease about 1856. Henceforth he has nothing but praise for them, singly and together — British and American thinkers, by compari- son, being often depreciated : In England and America there is the widest difference of altitude between their scholars and that of the Germans, and here in America a nation of Germans living with the Organon of Hegel in their hands, which makes the discoveries and thinking of the English and Americans look of a Chinese narrowness, and yet good easy dunces that we are, we never suspect our inferiority. 581 The question of precisely to what extent Emerson was indebted to philosophy gener- ally and to German philosophy specifically remains, in some respects, an open one. Within limits, however, certain conclusions may be drawn. First, Emerson was not a philosophic anarchist repudiating tradition and law. Rather, he sought from first to last — and few men more fervently — a unified philosophical religionandaconsistent religious philosophy. Second, Emerson made at least four rather closely defined attempts at philo- sophical synthesis — each time on a new epistemological base. These are, if we exclude the Lockean sensationalism and Scottish common sense in which his Unitar- ian heritage and Harvard schooling had given him a thorough indoctrination — these are (1) Platonic dualism up to about , 1830, (2) Kantian transcendentalism (a la Coleridge and Carlyle) roughly from 1830 to 1840, (3) mystical intuitionalism from 1840 to 1850, and (4) an eclectic philosophy ; composed primarily of Hegelian idealism and Darwinian evolution to produce what the mature Emerson believed to be his j nearest approach to a perfect system of thought for him. Third, Emerson represents the develop- ing rather than the static type of thinker whose entire career demonstrates one con- sistent and coherent point of view. Except for holding fast to some form of ethical idealism, Emerson's theorizing changed as often as his epistemological hypotheses changed. During two of these phases he was dominantly under the influence of Germanic epistemologies, once under British, and twice under systems derived mainly from Greek thought. It may be found, when these variations in Emerson's epistemological allegiance are scrutinized in their relation to his more practical thinking, that the gross inconsistencies of which he stands accused are not so much inconsistencies as changing conclusions drawn from shifting epistemological bases. Other Early Transcendentalists 207 Fourth, Emerson not only dwelt longer under what was a prevailingly Hegelian influence than under any other, but he published the bulk of his work while under that influence. Including Nature, he pub- lished before 1850 only five full-length books; after that date, which marks the point at which Hegel began to exert a noticeable effect, appeared ten more. Finally, it is worth observing that during the Kantian period, Emerson produced Nature, The American Scholar, the Ad- dress . . . before the Divinity College, and the bulk of Essays, First Series. These four works, under the impetus of Kantian ideal- ism, signalize Emerson's finding himself, and to the general reading public they remain his best known and most influential works. Quite possibly, if the matter were determinable or measurable, it would be found that German thought gained through these four books of Emerson's its most effective means of diffusion in America, for the manner and means by which Emer- sonian idealism insinuated itself into the intellectual consciousness of America were as subtle as they were various and pervasive. OTHER EARLY TRANSCENDENTALISTS George Ripley (1802-1880) Among the Transcendentalists grouped about Emerson, the more influential of those who made philosophy a major concern were Ripley, Parker, and Alcott, although lesser lights like Clarke and the Channings had their own spheres of activity and in- fluence. George Ripley, never as fiery an agitator in any cause as Theodore Parker, was nonetheless in the thick of the contro- versy raging about Transcendentalism, Germanism, infidelity, and the attendant innovations that were debated during the first half of the nineteenth century. His position as manager of the Brook Farm Association for Education and Agriculture necessarily kept him in the public eye even after the termination of his rather mediocre ministerial career. Subsequently he forsook religious controversy, philosophical dispu- tation, and social reform altogether for a humdrum but calm editorial career; but be- fore he passed from the scene of activity, he had, both by what he said and by what he did, affected the lives of many of those who helped foment and further the "Newness" between 1830 and 1850. Germanic influences were admittedly of primary importance in directing his thought and action. The exam- ination of these influences as determining factors in Ripley's career resolves itself into three parts, according to Ripley's three major interests before his retirement: (1) as student and disseminator of Germanic thought, (2) as defender of German theolo- gy, and (3) as social reformer. Under the tutelage of F. H. Hedge, Rip- ley early displayed a keen interest in Ger- man thought. Impressed even more than was Emerson at about the same time by the precept and example of Hedge, Everett, Ticknor, and Follen regarding the utility of studying in Germany, Ripley, having graduated at the head of the Harvard class of 1823, would have devoted several years to residence at the German universities except that his lack of funds forced him, like Emerson, "to forswear Germany and go to the cheapest fetall where 'education can be bought" — the Harvard Divinity School. 582 He took up ministerial duties as pastor in the meetinghouse at Purchase and Pearl streets in Boston. During the fourteen years of his service there he kept up his study of philosophy and theology, at the same time acquiring a fine library that in- cluded many German and French works. 583 Throughout his ministerial career Ripley, as an eager champion of the new liberal religion, published a series of articles, mainly reviews of German and French theological works, 208 German Thought in America which, together, proved to be an impor- tant source of information and interpreta- tion during the early thirties of the new "spiritual" Christianity of the post-Kant- ians and the French eclectics. His article on "Degerando and Self- Education" (1830) 584 strikes the keynote of that whole series which culminated in the papers of the Norton-Ripley controversy by making an earnest plea for a profounder appreciation of the inward truths of re- ligion as revealed by intuition in preference to the doctrine of miraculous revela- tion. 585 His article on "Religion in France" (July, 1831), 586 reinforces his high opinion of the intuitive religious movement abroad in Europe. His essay on Pestalozzi of Jan- uary, 1832, 587 indicates that he is thorough- ly familiar with the writings of Pestalozzi; while his discussion of Carl Follen's inaugu- ral address at Harvard, in the same num- ber of the Examiner, is so replete with intelligent comments on German literature and philosophy as to make untenable the assumption that his knowledge was superfi- cial. 588 Neither in 1832 nor later did Ripley espouse a single philosophical system or attempt to rear, for himself or others, a systematically philosophical credo. His effort was always to find an essentially spiritual, intuitional base for the higher truths of Christianity, divorced from dog- matic narrowness. Accordingly he was never a close follower of Kant. But this is not to imply that Ripley, either during the thirties and forties or later, failed to comprehend the Kantian criticism or to grasp the dis- tinctions between understanding and rea- son, the regulative and constitutive aspects of reason, the categories, and the other technicalities of the critical system. 589 It means simply that he deliberately chose to rest his faith on intuitive persuasion in realms where Kant had demonstrated the inability of man to attain to knowledge. Religion he defined as "a gift from heaven," and Christianity as a "divine communica- tion to man." He constantly called Christ "Saviour" and spoke of him as "the highest of all the soul's prophets" — though as synonymous with moral Truth rather than with Divinity. 590 A curious combination of detached thinker and zealous Christian reformer, he had none of the pedantry or vanity of the recluse scholar but used his library to find support and guidance toward that purer religion that he envisioned. 591 The article of May, 1835, on Marsh's translation of Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry is indicative at once of his great admiration for Herder and his appreciation and defense of German literary and theolog- ical writing, 592 as well as of his command of the German language. He shows himself competent in pointing out minute errors of translation in Marsh's book and in making , penetrating criticisms of Marsh's rendition ; of the text. Although Herder hardly more than made a beginning at constructing a positive crit- ical and metaphysical basis for idealism, he appealed to Ripley because he expressed with poetic fervor the spirit of the modern . intuitional school. "He formed," says Rip- ley, "a connecting link between the old 1 school of Lutheran orthodoxy and the modern school of Rational divines. The progress of his own mind seems ... to mark the progress of theological opinion; and in his voluminous writings may be found the germ of most of the important thoughts which have since produced such a mighty revolution in the prevalent conception of religion. " 593 That the religious tenets of Her- der (and Schleiermacher) were of some in- fluence in shaping Ripley's own thought is not to be doubted, for, like his German preceptors, he sought an intuitive basis for religion. Though he admired Kant, he felt that Kant's system left too little room for the irrational and supernatural. 594 However, his desire to preserve part of the irrational domain of religion did not prevent his enthu- siastic championship of German historical and philosophical study of the Scriptures. 595 Other Early Transcendentalists 209 Ripley prefixed a sketch of the history of religious thought in Germany to his sec- ond article on Herder (November, 1835). 594 Here he placed Herder squarely in the new tradition of Biblical criticism, identifying him with those who assert the efficacy of continual immanent revelation as opposed to a literalist's strict dependence on the hol)^ word. History, he pointed out, was to Herder the account of the spiritual develop- ment of man. In his article of March, 1836, on the theological writings of Gieseler, Liicke, Mitzsch, and the memoirs of Schlei- ermacher, Ripley again revealed his sympa- thy with those who wanted to "save the validity of religion against science" and to "make a harmony between philosophy and theology" by putting the emphasis "on the religious consciousness of human nature." 697 In the same year he embodied this point of view in a simple and persuasive pamphlet, Discourses on the Philosophy of Religion, Addressed to Doubters Who Wish to Believe, and in a review of Martineau's Rationale of Religious Enquiry he incorporated a moving plea for the development of a truly spiritual religious science. 598 What this science of divinity ought to be is defined more closely in his evaluation of Professor Ullmann's Theological Aphorisms, printed in the Examiner for January, 1837. 599 Here he asserts his allegiance to Herder, Schleier- macher, and De Wette as having produced "a higher life, of more consummate beauty, and of more divine energy, in religion, the- ology, and society" than had obtained ear- lier (pp. 385-86). Thus Ripley acquired during the thirties the knowledge and facility to use that knowledge in the controversy with Norton and with entrenched Unitarianism that was to come. 600 So far his opinions, derived though they were from Germany, escaped the charge of heresy; his championship of German philosophy and theology aroused no great animosity. Thus far he had done no more than exercise the right which every Unitarian minister claimed — to make free inquiry into the Scriptures, even when such an inquiry led to keeping company with suspect persons like the German crit- ics. It was only after Emerson attacked the citadel of Unitarian orthodoxy itself and Ripley rushed to his defense against Norton that his "Unitarianism" became odious. Thereafter he was put down as a Trans- cendentalist and an Infidel. Soon after 1840, when he resigned from the Unitarian Association, quit the pulpit, turned to farming, and later, to editorial work, the Defenders of the Faith lost interest in him. However, between the time of Emerson's Address before the Divinity School (1838) and Parker's sermon on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity (1841), he was as lustily belabored as ever were Emerson and Parker. The Norton-Ripley controversy was a natural and inevitable culmination of events that can be traced backward a cen- tury or more, and that had been coming to a head during the two decades immediately preceding. 401 It was a peculiar compound of native critical developments, scientific influences, and German importations, which, as they progressed (first under the banner of Unitarianism and afterwards under the auspices of Transcendentalism), brought upon the Unitarians the uncom- fortable accusation that theirs was "a half- way house to infidelity," and that Unitari- anism was merely a temporary stage in the decline from true religion to infidelity. 80 * The orthodox pointed the finger of scorn not only at the Transcendentalists but also at the Unitarians for having hatched such a brood ; while the Unitarians, attacked on both sides, were at a loss to know whether to defend themselves against the one or the other, or both at once. The three chief apostates, by their own confession in articles, sermons, and ad- dresses, were Emerson, Ripley, and Parker. Their defection seemed to the Unitarians nothing less than treachery within their own ranks. Besides finding themselves in a 210 German Thought in America dilemma that seemed of their own making, the Unitarians were confronted with the necessity of making a hard choice. To con- tinue association with men like Ripley and Parker was to lend confirmation to the old, now vociferously renewed, charge by the orthodox that Unitarianism was, as they had always foretold, merely the portal to infidelity and complete skepticism; to expel them was to abandon the principles of free inquiry and an "open house," principles for which they had long fought, and which they still cherished. 603 Emerson's "infidelity" (or "atheism") was not easily related to specific sources. To be sure, he had kept several terms in the Harvard Divinity College, but he had also traveled to Europe specifically to learn at first hand the questionable principles of Coleridge and Carlyle. Clearly, Harvard might wash her hands of any responsibility for Emerson's opinions. What was more, Emerson's resignation six years before he delivered his offensive address to the divin- ity class at Harvard in 1838 had put him effectively beyond the reach of Unitarians and Calvinists alike. Both groups might damn him roundly, but obviously no one need assume any responsibility for a man who had unfrocked himself, and who had, by his own confession, left the church with a yawn. Parker's case was different. His opinions seemed clearly traceable to his Unitarian training under Andrews Norton of Harvard, under whom he had studied as late as 1834- 1836. So said many. So said Noah Porter, recently elected Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Yale College, who in summing up the whole ugly business, asked pointedly: "Where learned Mr. Par- ker his philosophical system ? Where did he discover that man himself might be so inspired, that his God could give him no added inspiration ? . . . Mr. Norton will start up with his accustomed promptness, and reply: 'Not from me — not from me.'" 604 Mr. Norton did just that. Endeavoring to anticipate the charges and trying to defend Unitarianism and himself, he shifted the blame to the German metaphysicians, or to the adoption, on the part of addle- pates like Emerson and Parker, of every latest heresy issuing from the cells of the- ological and philosophical professors of Germany. "The latest form of infidelity," he took care to say, with great emphasis, in his pamphlet by that title (1838), was bred in Germany, not at Harvard; Kant is responsible, not Norton. But Norton's pamphlet turned out to be a boomerang. Far from clarifying the issues, it served only to set the stage for the en- trance of the third of the renegades. George Ripley, another of Norton's erstwhile fledglings, had been suspected of mild apostasy since 1830, when his articles on Coleridge, the French eclectics, and the German transcendental theologians had begun to appear in the Examiner. Now that Ripley came to the defense of Emerson with a reply to Norton, entitled "The Latest Form of Infidelity" Examined (1839), there was left little room for further doubt; and when the controversy thus provoked ran through a series of replies and counter- replies, Ripley, refusing to yield to Nor- ton the last word, was put down by all. right-thinking Unitarians as one of the chief of the inglorious fallen. The controversy added nothing essenti- ally new or significant to the arguments up to date, and the result was virtually a stalemate. So far as Ripley was concerned, it yielded nothing to his solution of the problems involved and added little to his stature as a philosopher or a theologian. Indeed, Parker felt that "Pope" Norton's "steel-cold intelligence" was driving Ripley into a position which made it hard to make out a case for the Germans as believers in a personal God and immortality or the trustworthiness of Herder, Schleiermacher, and De Wette as guides in Biblical studies. The situation, he said, called for "a higher word," 605 and he prepared to say it in The Other Early Transcendentalists 211 Previous Question between Mr. Andrews Norton and His Alumni Moved and Handled in a Letter to All Those Gentlemen, by Levi Blodgett (Boston, 1840). In it he reached the conclusion which, as Noah Porter observed, marked Parker as "a consistent and logical thinker [who] . . . has carried them [the principles and modes of thinking peculiar to liberal Christians of the German- ic persuasion] to no unnatural conclu- sions." 606 Parker's impatience with halfway measures led him to shift the argument to a broader base by asserting that neither Christ's divinity nor the authenticity of miracles was necessary to true religion. For all he cared, all might go by the board — Old Testament, New Testament, miracles, ordinances, and formularies. Planting him- self on the ground that man has a spiritual nature endowed with original capacity to apprehend primary religious truth directly, without mediation of sacrament, creed, or Bible, he stood outside and above the con- troversy, while his enemies declared that he had "done Transcendentalism up." Needless to say, Parker's position went beyond that which Ripley was prepared to embrace, though, like Parker, he found him- self far from done with Transcendentalism or religious problems. In the transition from Unitarianism to Transcendental theology, Ripley occupied a position approximately midway. He was more the son of Channing than the brother of Parker. Unable, on the one hand, to proceed with the rigor of Kantian logic, and unwilling, on the other, to lose himself in transcendent mysteries, he was poorly equipped for theology, how- ever good a religionist he may have been. He went too far to please the Unitarians, and he did not go far enough to satisfy the Transcendentalists. His association with the latter and his management of Brook Farm kept him for some years more in the midst of the theological and philosophical squabbles of the times, but it was not by choice. If he had had his way, he would have given up theorizing altogether. The resignation of his ministerial charge in 1840 and his assumption of the managership of the Brook Farm community immediately thereafter are indicative at once of his dissatisfaction with speculation and con- troversy and the recognition that his abili- ties in both fields were mediocre and of his resolution to turn from theory to practice. If, in 1840, he applied to himself what Emerson was just then saying about the Knower, Sayer, and Doer, he may have considered that he had now passed, not entirely satisfactorily to himself, through the phases of life designated, in Emersonian phraseology, by the terms, Knower and Sayer, and that the was ready to turn Doer. While 1840 was a climactic year in Rip- ley's career, his resolution to give up the pulpit and turn farmer was not reached overnight. Impassioned and full of strong religious conviction though he was, Ripley had little gift for pulpit oratory. This inabil- ity appears to have been one of the basic causes why his congregation, in the course of his fourteen years among them, lost many of its members, although the general dete- rioriation of that part of the city was certain- ly a contributing factor. Even more impor- tant was the rift between his thinking and that of his parishioners — all set down, as Ripley himself says, with "great plainness of speech" in the second of the three letters which he addressed to his congregation during 1840. As in Emerson's experience eight years earlier, "a profound feeling of incompatibility" had grown up between the pastor and his flock. As in Emerson's case, too, Ripley set forth his position in a formal statement, which made his avowal of "the principles of Transcendental philosophy" so plain that there was but one possible termination. Ripley's offered resignation was accepted three months later. 607 Ripley's letter to his congregation makes abundant- ly obvious that his studies in the transcen- dental religion as developed by Herder, Schleiermacher, and De Wette — "now taught," says Ripley, "in every Protestant 212 Gei*man Thought in America university on the Continent of Europe . . . [as] the common creed of the most enlight- ened nations" — supplied the fundamental reason why he preferred to resign his pulpit rather than continue to occupy it under restraint of being prevented, by congrega- tional opinion, from freely preaching those principles. Like Emerson, he left the church feeling that as a minister he had failed; unlike Emerson, he never, in any form, resumed the ministry, or re-entered the pulpit, except to deliver the "Address to the People" at the ordination of his successor, J. I. T. Coolidge, on February 9, 1842. But he was not therefore unconcerned about religion or about the ministerial profes- sion.* 09 Among the first things he wrote after his release from the ministry was his "Letter to a Theological Student," publish- ed in the second number of the Dial. In it he exhorted the young probationer to attend faithfully to the new methods and teachings and to follow Herder above all others. Ripley's papers contributed to the Nor- ton-Ripley controversy are a neat summa- tion of how his Unitarian theology was modified into a mild form of transcendental religion by the German theologians. Never willing to follow them to a purely scientific interpretation of the Scriptures, such as Strauss for example reached, he nevertheless borrowed from them the tools that enabled him candidly and expertly to handle a limited phase of the argument provoked by Norton. These letters also demonstrate, more succinctly than do any of his other writings, that he was a confirmed believer in German idealism and in the German method of Biblical criticism. He found his faith strengthened instead of weakened by his German studies, and though he never credited himself or any other theorist with having found strict philosophical confirma- tion for religious "truths," he confidently believed that he had shifted the arguments for Christianity to a firmer, because more practical, basis than that upon which they had rested before. Ripley's strong sense for the need of so- cial reform, or what he termed "the prac- tice of religion," was not a sudden inspira- tion that came to him about the time the Brook Farm experiment was planned. As early as 1832, in one of his articles in the Christian Examiner, he paid tribute to the achievements of Pestalozzi as a pioneer in the realm of social as well as educational reform. Ripley was well acquainted with the Neuhof experiment eight years before he organized Brook Farm, where were com- bined Yankee agricultural methods with larger portions of Pestalozzian educational methods than are generally recognized. He underwrote Pestalozzi's manner of teaching as "a return to the dictates of nature and good sense," 609 and expressed the hope that the Pestalozzian revolution might have far-reaching social effects. Ripley was not espousing any thoroughgoing socialism; he was arguing, on a simple humanitarian ground, for the greater benefits to come to the lower classes of society by means of a better education. When the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education was formed, the articles of incorporation com- bined specific stipulations regarding educa- tion, agriculture, and common business principles. 810 But there was not a breath about "socialism" in the then accepted sense of the word, or of "communism." Little effort was made to win proselytes, and of course there was no thought of setting up an international organization. George Ripley was not one to agree with his wife Sophia — somewhat more volatile than himself — when on one occasion she rebuked Theodore Parker for not "shriek- ing at wrongs," though, like her, he did not want to lose "humanity in abstractions." 811 Farmer Ripley was no visionary, either in the management of the affairs of the Farm or in his educational theories. But he did insist that it were well for all American teachers to study the philosophical bases of their educational procedure with the view to square their aims with social objectives. Other Early Transcendental ists 213 He interpreted the system of Pestalozzi not as a means for the sudden regeneration of mankind but as a step toward the ameliora- tion of social ills. 612 It was Ripley's strong idealistic turn of mind, his faith in practical Christianity, or what was synonymous with it in his mind, socialized religion — not at all his personal interest — that led him to turn his energies to organizing Brook Farm, even to sacrificing his personal feelings in pushing the enterprise. The manner in which Christian idealism impelled men like Ripley to experiment with the practical reformation of society is described by Ripley himself in the Harbinger, 613 and in 1846, writing an article on Fichte, he de- scribed explicitly the easy transition in his mind from the position of a religionist to that of a practical reformer : The study of German philosophy is more attractive in an historical point of view than for the positive, scientific results to which it has arrived .... It has failed to solve the mighty problems of Divine Providence and Human Destiny .... It presents nothing to the scientific inquirer . . . [except] cautions against error . . . and noble aspirations after the spiritual dignity and excellence .... The ultimate tendency of . . . [Fichte's] philosophy is to enkindle a holy enthusiasm for the progress of man toward the fulfil- ment of his earthly destiny. The exercise of the pure intellect leads only to scepticism and despair; the last result of the Infinite can never be fathomed by the finite under- standing .... But the nature of man com- prises higher elements than the power of abstract thought. His most important con- victions are not the fruit of speculation. He lives also in a world of moral emotions and ideas. He finds within the depths of his own soul an instinctive sense of justice, duty, universal sympathy and unity. An interior voice calls upon him to shape his life in accordance with these principles. Hence, the world presents him a field of moral action; and to realise these truths in all material relations is the earthly destiny of man. The transition is not difficult from these views, to the doctrine of social har- mony as set forth in the writings of Fourier. And to the philosophic mind, the study of Fichte, in his most remote abstractions, is an admirable preparation for the broader and more commanding synthesis of the great expounder of social sciences. — Har- binger, II (Apr. 18, 1846), 297. These passages, written after the best days of Brook Farm were already over, are significant as indicating that except for Fichte, whose practical tendency he ad- mired, he had grown dissatisfied with the extreme abstraction of the German meta- physicians. They express also a certain disillusionment, possibly with such efforts at social reform as had been tried at Brook Farm, certainly with some of the philosoph- ical theories that had prompted these reforms. 614 In the end he turned even upon his beloved Schleiermacher, not, it may be presumed, because he came to consider him false, but simply because he regarded the abstruse speculations of transcendental theologians and metaphysicians alike as relatively inconsequential. Urged by Parker to publish a translation which Ripley had made earlier of one of Schleiermacher's works, he replied, January 31, 1852, that he would not (1) because no one would read the work, and (2) because he had lost all "immediate interest in that line of specula- tion." 615 His disillusionment with speculative philosophy in general and with German metaphysics in particular was no sudden development. It will be recalled that Brook Farm, where Ripley was the guiding resi- dent spirit, was abreast of Boston in the interest taken in German thought and literature, and well ahead of any commun- ity in the country in the appreciation of German music. Ripley's library was at hand in the "Eyrie" for all who cared to read. The Harbinger, under Ripley's editorship, contained many reviews of German books, translation of German poetry, and Dwight's column devoted to music, including long discussions of German music. Ripley him- self taught Spinoza, Kant, and Cousin in the school at Brook Farm. Nowhere on the 214 German Thought in America American continent was there a more con- centrated effort to absorb German art and thought. But as the debts mounted, and as the course of the Farm moved steadily downward, Ripley had cause to reflect upon the inefficacy of transcendental philosophy to solve the practical problems of living. The failure of the enterprise swal- lowed up everything he possessed, in- cluding his library. He had literally given his all, and it had availed him nothing. When he moved to New York City to begin life anew, in his forty-seventh year, he broke off all active association with Boston Transcendentalism beyond the mainte- nance of a friendship and correspondence with some of his old colleagues, such as Dwight and Parker. During his last years, as assistant editor of the New York Tribune, reader for Har- per's, and contributor to numerous maga- zines, his primary interests were literary. While he established himself as "the father of literary criticism in the American press," he left the fields of theological and philo- sophical controversy far behind him. In 1866 he and his second wife, who was German- born, made a long-deferred trip to Europe, and the visit was repeated and greatly ex- tended in 1869. While he entered enthu- siastically upon these tours that led to many of the places for which he had yearned in his youth, the opportunities came too late to leave any more visible effects upon him than such as can be read in the travel sketches which he sent back to the Tribune. The rest of his life was devoted to journal- istic work and the making of encyclopedias. After Brook Farm, Ripley's growth in philosophical and theological speculation, while not reaching a positive period, went into a decline. In reviewing such books as came across his desk, he continued to write interestingly about the Germans whom he had studied in his younger days; he did some book reviews of German authors who were new to him; occasionally he re- emphasized the worth of the transcendental school generally and Kant particularly; 816 and to a friend who expressed surprise at Ripley's facility in throwing off an article on Goethe, he said, "It is not wonderful, seeing that I have been fifty years about it." 617 But, by and large, his enthusiasm for Kant and for Goethe belonged to his earlier career as idealist and reformer. The prin- ciples for which he had striven appeared to be defeated. The socialization of Christian- ity as Herder, Schleiermacher, and Ronge had formulated it, and as he had sought to propagate it, had failed. While his hatred of slavery and his accounts of the social con- ditions in Europe, especially in his reports of the Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco- Prussian War, manifest his continued interest in social progress, his erstwhile zeal was gone. He wrote as a reporter, not as a participator. Something may have been owing to his second marriage, to a woman thirty years his junior, who took him out into New York society; something, to the substantial increase of his income from the editorship of the New American Encyclope- dia; more, to his disillusionment based on personal experience. 618 His own ambitions as a minister had come to naught when, after fourteen years of earnest endeavor, both his matter and his manner had failed to satisfy. It seems clear, too, that not the least important result of his long theolog- ical career, during which he never felt what he called "firm ground under his feet," 619 was the melancholy conclusion that his own theology was unsatisfactory to himself. Convinced though he was that his efforts as the editor of the French eclectics, his numer- ous essays on German theology, and his letters to Andrews Norton helped to shift the bases of Christianity to firmer ground than that on which they had rested, they were not, after all, secure enough. Unable to subscribe to a thoroughgoing rationalism and unwilling to follow uncritically a "tran- scendent" mysticism, he sought to find a ground midway between the two in "the inward truths of religion" as revealed by the Other Early Transcendentalists 215 intuitions of the moral man, only to find that the "truths" still escaped him. Like Emerson, he found theology "from ever- lasting to everlasting debatable ground"; like Emerson, too, he gave up the profession of the theologian ; for trying, as he did, to steer a middle course between two extremes, he approached neither, and he failed to satisfy even himself. About all that can be said with certainty is that he was never, between 1820 and 1850, a Unitarian of Norton's kind nor a Transcendentalist of Parker's. Nor was he then or afterwards an infidel. After abandoning the religious beliefs of his "transcendental" period, he never returned to them, never deplored their loss; and on his deathbed, if he could have had his way, he would have had in attendance neither a Unitarian nor a Tran- scendental minister, but Father Hecker. 620 Except Orestes A. Brownson, none of the Transcendentalists illustrates better than Ripley the difficulty that beset Emersonian idealists who sought, like their master, to find in German philosophy the means to square their head by their heart — to make their religion philosophical and their phi- losophy religious. Ripley's failure was no greater than that of many another, more richly endowed than he, who found it equally impossible to reconcile faith with knowledge. Theodore Parker (1810-1860) Theodore Parker was eight years younger than Ripley and seven years the junior of Emerson. Beginning his studies a decade after Ripley and Emerson, he was in a bet- ter position than they to discover early the richness of German literature and scholar- ship and to make them a central part of his studies. He began these studies a little be- fore the year 1832, which, as we have seen in connection with Emerson, Hedge, and Ripley, was en epochal one for the introduc- tion of German studies in Boston. Parker, more than any other of his generation, was the one who sought, in the phrase of John Weiss, "to invoice the lot" of freight from Germany that was dumped on the Boston wharves, despite the warning of the older generation that German was "the natural language of infidelity and spiritual despair," and that none could associate with free- thinkers of the Germanic cast without losing his homebred piety. He did not read far before he concluded that his elders did not know enough of the proscribed litera- ture even to misrepresent it effectively. Their antagonism seemed to him prompted by no more than languorous laziness, timid fear, or dogmatic orthodoxy. Before he would condemn, he would see for himself. Already during his year of teaching in Boston (1831) he had added German to his French and Spanish, and had acquired some facility in writing the language. While preparing for the Harvard Divinity School during 1830-1834, he plunged into the deepest waters of German philosophy and theological criticism, and often found him- self in depths over his head; yet what he read he liked well enough to begin laying the foundations for his great library of schol- arly works in the diverse fields in which he was interested. He was introduced to a good deal of this material by Dr. Convers Francis of Watertown, at the time when Parker was conducting a private school there (1832). The older man gave him free run of his large theological library, in which German books were especially prominent. Here were "Dogmatik, Metaphysik, and Hermeneutik for Theodore, with a competent guide to hold the clue for him. The two years spent with these advantages were always grate- fully remembered by him. Theodore's ques- tions accumulated frightfully when he found such a hospitable ear for them." 621 His reading during the Watertown period included the Greek and Latin classics, some metaphysics, including Hegel and Kant, besides Cousin and the new school of French philosophers, the poets Goethe, Schiller, and Klopstock, and Coleridge's Aids to 216 German Thought in America Reflection.*™ Here was enough revolution- ary idealism to entice any young mind from the path of orthodox sensationalism. The rapidity of his progress toward the tran- scendental position is indicated by the rec- ord of his studious activity while in the Divinity School during 1834-1836. He undertook to study eleven languages (in addition to those he had already acquired), to translate parts of Eichhorn's Urgeschich- te, Paulus' Handbuch, Ammon's Fortbil- dung des Christenthums , and other smaller works, to give tutoring lessons in Hebrew, Greek, and German, and to read in fourteen months a parcel of over three hundred volumes of literary and critical books, at the same time that he clarified his own position on the important questions of revelation and prophecy as raised by such German theologians as De Wette and Astruc. Even at this early date he took a stand "in ad- vance of the average Unitarian of the time." 623 That he was ahead of orthodox Unitarians, although he himself was hardly able at the time to define just where he stood, or whither his reading was leading him, is revealed in his report of a conversa- tion with Professor Andrews Norton con- cerning the value of Biblical research among the Germans. Having read in 1836 such books as Ackermann's Das Christliche in Plato, Schelling's Lectures on Academic Study, and De Wette 's Introduction to the Old Testament, he came to Norton "bursting with enthusiasm for German scholar- ship . . . but Professor Norton assured him coldly that all the Germans were 'raw' and inaccurate, unfitted for the refinements of metaphysics. They made good diction- aries and grammars, he admitted, but even these were so large one could not use them. Parker was considerably dashed, and that night he confided to his journal that Norton was a bigot." 624 To round out his knowledge of philoso- phy and literature, he read carefully during his stay at the Divinity School in such authors as Coleridge (notably T able-Talk and Aids to Reflection) , Wegscheider, Staud- lin, Storr, Schmidt, the English Platonists Cudworth and More, as well as Descartes, Leibnitz, Lessing, Schelling, Cousin, Con- stant, Kant, the Gnostics, and the medieval mystics. It was at the Divinity School, too, between August, 1836, and May, 1837, that he began to translate De Wette's Einlei- tung. 62& During the period of his ministry at West Roxbury (1837-1847) much of Parker's extra time was spent in the preparation of the monumental set of notes and commen- taries which went into his edition of De Wette's Critical and Historical Introduction to the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testa- ment. Published in two volumes in 1843, this work was Parker's offering on the altar of scholarship — an imposing, accurate, clearly organized, and shrewd digest of all that the world had accumulated on the subject of the Old Testament Canon. To prepare it, he bought and read hundreds of German works, consulted the libraries of Francis and Ripley, studied history, philology, compar- ative religion, and oriental literatures, with an intense zeal and absorption. 626 The book received little acclaim from American reviewers and turned out a bad financial loss for the author, but it remains a testimony to the genuine sincerity and enthusiasm which Parker brought to the profoundest questions of theological study. 627 During the years of his pastorate at West Roxbury Parker's time was still largely devoted to pastoral duties and theological studies — not, as later, much taken up with agitation and reform. He could spend long hours in discussion with his neighbors, the Russells, or with the congenial spirits of Brook Farm, within walking distance. His circle at the time was occupied with Bettina von Arnim and Goethe, Fourier, Emerson's lecture in the Divinity School and the controversy stirred up by it over the Latest Form of Infidelity, and "all Kosmic questions." 628 Following the example of his beloved Ger- Other Early Transcendentalists 217 man scholars, Parker was determined to put his studious efforts on the broadest possible foundations — to collect and read the best that had been said in his own field and in all related fields. Accordingly he soon owned a collection of books that was considered one of the marvels of American scholarship during the fermentation period of Transcendentalism, and even those who were not enthusiastic about the study of the German theologians conceded it to be "the richest and most varied library in the whole of New England." At his death in i860 the library contained some 16,000 volumes, three-fourths of them in foreign languages, German heavily predominant. 629 During the West Roxbury period Parker wrote his exhaustive critical reviews of German scholarly works for the Christian Examiner and the Boston Quarterly and his articles for the Dial. As a critic, his judg- ments were independent and penetrating, his study of each work thorough and com- plete, in avowed imitation of the "depth, philosophic grounding, and all-sidedness" of the Germans. 630 So he bewildered his read- ers by flinging at them the names of scores of unheard-of German writers, astounding them with the sharpness and clarity of his judgments, his easy, comprehensive grasp of so many strange, new fields of study. The first of this series was a review of Ackermann's Das Christliche in P/a/o. 631 In April, 1840, appeared his long and some- what condemnatory appraisal of Strauss's Leben Jesu. 632 In the light of Parker's later position, both of these reviews may be con- sidered unduly conservative. He was by no means willing to underwrite all the startling conclusions of Strauss about miracles and prophecy, and he denied what Strauss asserted, namely, that Biblical history is nothing more than the record of myths and popular ideas without basis in fact. At the point of reducing the story of Jesus to sheer myth Parker balked, though twenty years later he expressed a more favorable opinion of Strauss. 433 In 1840 Parker was still deep within the career of a dutiful pastor. His controversial period had not yet begun; few suspected as yet the future great heresiarch. But his ponderings upon the theses and arguments of Strauss and more particularly his inten- sive historical, analytical, and critical work on De Wette's Introduction to the Old Testa- ment were conditioning him for the position that is foreshadowed in his sermon on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity (1841) and that is more explicitly expressed in his discourse on The Relation of Jesus to His Age and the Ages (1845). The steps by which he progressed from the relatively orthodox position of his Unitarian col- leagues in 1840 to that which he held ulti- mately regarding the nature of Jesus can be traced in his sermons and publish- ed tracts. Strauss was the major fac- tor, though he never wholly agreed with Strauss. One important result of his preoccupa- tion with Strauss before 1840 was to in- crease Parker's suspicion that the New Testament as well as the Old had a mythol- ogy (though he would never go to the ex- treme of Strauss and claim that it was all myth), and that the evidence on which the miracles rested was in all cases insufficient to establish their claim. 634 Despite his thorough preparatory work and his complete familiarity with Strauss's book and its background, his review is disappointing. Its point of view is confused, and the conclu- sions are equivocal. 635 The review of Menzel's German Literature printed in the Dial for January, 1841, was a similarly overwhelming exhibition of erudition. 636 In the biographical essay on his friend Follen (printed in the Dial for January, 1843), Parker tells the stirring life-story of this champion of freedom, who found refuge at Harvard and there intro- duced the study of German literature. Par- ker's address on "The American Scholar" 637 is an analysis of the relation of literature and scholarship to general culture, with 218 German Thought in America special reference to the advance of learning in Germany. His study of Schleiermacher, Strauss, and De Wette was followed by numerous references in the journal to indicate the growth in Parker of a skeptical attitude, first most notably apparent in connection with the Norton-Ripley controversy. In 1838 Emerson had made his statement re- garding transcendental religion in his ad- dress before the Divinity School; he was promptly answered by Norton in The Latest Form of Infidelity. Thereupon Ripley under- took the vindication of Spinoza, Schleier- macher, and De Wette against Norton's charge of irreligion and atheism, and in an anonymous pamphlet sought to combat the doctrine that miracles are the only evidence of revelation. Impatient of what he consid- ered halfway measures, Parker entered the fray at this point and sought to shift the argument to a much broader base. While Ripley affirmed the divine mission of Christ and his belief that the miracles related in the Gospels were actually wrought by Jesus, Parker set out to show that neither Christ's divinity nor faith in miracles was necessary to true religion. 638 He believed that Norton's "steel-cold intelligence" 639 had driven Ripley into a position that made it difficult for Ripley to make out a case for the Germans as believers in a personal God and in immortality. He felt himself called to extricate Ripley from a weak position, and accordingly announced that since Ripley, in his forthcoming reply to Norton, would "not say all that I wish might be said," he intended to say "a higher word." He had concluded that he might as well face the issue squarely and have it out once and for all. His Germans would help him, and so he set about saying his "higher word" in an anonymous pam- phlet, The Previous Question between Mr. Andrews Norton and his Alumni Moved and Handled in a Letter to All Those Gentlemen, by Levi Blodgett. This was his reply to those of the lav brethren who believed that Mr. Norton had laid Transcendentalism low. Planting himself on the ground that that man has a spiritual nature endowed with original capacity to apprehend pri- mary religious truth directly, without med- itation of sacrament, creed, or Bible, he stood outside and above the controversy that raged about him. His faith, he argued, was unassailable by either historical skep- ticism or literary criticism. For all he cared, all might go by the board — scriptures, miracles, ordinances, forms, usages. He was safe. Here was Transcendental religion full blown. In 1 84 1 Parker came on the scene again with his sensational sermon on The Tran- sient and Permanent in Christianity, the title itself being taken from one of Strauss's essays. Parker's knowledge of German , Biblical inquires and especially of Strauss's theories regarding mythology and history had destroyed for him his belief in the in-: spiration of the New as well as of the Old Testament, so that in this ordination sermon he ranged the miracles, the proph- ecies, the story of Jesus himself among the ■ "transient" elements of religion, affirming, on the other hand a warm and enthusiastic I preference for the undying religious spirit,, divorced from all theological and ritualistic forms. As a result Parker was henceforth assailed as "infidel," "scorner," and "blas- phemer," 640 and he found it increasingly difficult thereafter to receive invitations for exchange sermons with his Unitarian brethren. The year 1841 also saw the composition of Parker's first group of collected lectures, entitled Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion and published the following year. With imposing scholarly documentation 641 and great clarity and forcefulness, Parker set forth his views of religious doctrine and religious history in this book, which he looked upon as a sermon on the transient and permanent "writ large." Original in plan and development, the work defines the main articles of the Transcendental point of Other Early Transcendentalists 219 view, denying much of Christian orthodoxy that still adhered to the New England Protestant position, at the same time attempting a positive statement of the bases of belief for enlightened, scientific, rational inquirers in his age. The book could hardly have been written without the aid of the scholarly German works referred to so frequently in the footnotes on his pages. Despite its many innovations in doctrine, the text of the book itself is written in a clear, simple language, the erudite and technical terminology being kept to a mini- mum. Parker obviously aimed at reaching the popular audience, 642 and the fact that three editions were distributed during the year indicates that in this aim at least he was successful. In the first book, Chapter II, "Of the Sentiment, Idea, and Conception of God," and in Chapter IV, on "The Idea of Religion Connected with Science and Life," he em- ploys a distinctly Kantian terminology in his division of religion into the speculative and the practical. 643 He also cites Kant to show that all purely philosophical arguments for the existence of God are inadequate, 644 and in his definition of religion employs a phraseology obviously derived from Kant. 645 But Parker's independence of any single philosophical system is clearly revealed in a footnote, wherein he sets side by side the definitions of a host of thinkers: Plato, John Smith, Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Hase, Wollaston, and Jeremy Taylor. He does not waste time on Kant's fruitless speculation, on the ground of pure Reason, regarding the three ideas of the Reason. He is content to regard Kant's antinomies as valid and to accept the Kantian pure Reason as impotent to prove God, immortality, and freedom. In- stead, he readily adopts the intuition of the post-Kantians, "the instinctive intui- tion of the divine, the consciousness that there is a God," 646 which is universal and primary in the soul of man, the necessary basis for all religious forms. 647 Leibnitz and Hegel likewise engaged Parker's attention during the West Rox- bury period and later. After having begun the study of Leibnitz in 1836, 648 he came to employ certain Leibnitzian terms in his discussion of the problem of evil. On some occasions he calls the soul the "primitive monad," 649 and he argues very much in the manner of Leibnitz on the question of the infinite God in the universe. However much Parker was tortured by the outward signs of evil, pain, and misery in the world (and it was this that lay at the bottom of his strong reformist sympathies), he had an unshak- able conviction that in the totality of the universe all apparent evil is resolved in a higher good, with a prospect of future in- finite progress toward perfection, in which all created things, animal as well as human, could in the after-life attain to a state of ever-increasing felicity and harmony. 650 There is not enough evidence definitely to link these ideas to Leibnitz ; yet what there is is highly suggestive that he read Leibnitz to good purpose. It may represent no more than the conscious reaction, shared by others of his contemporaries, against ortho- dox Protestant views of sin. Though Parker had not yet finished struggling with this question, he is here approaching the posi- tion that ultimately became his settled conviction on the subject. 651 Toward Hegel, he remained unsympa- thetic on several counts. As early as 1841 he attacked Hegel's identity of Sein and Nicht-Sein in God. In general, he rejected the "fruitless subtleness" of the modern metaphysical schools, 652 and deplored the fact that Hegel had to resort to such very intricate reasoning to preserve the divinity of Christ; he felt it far more expedient to abandon the attempt altogether. Parker was content to rest his case with Kant; he ex- pected no one (indeed, wanted no one) to prove the existence of God — to tell us "the metaphysics, and the physics, too, of God." He classified Hegel's philosophy as an ideal- istic monism, a "spiritual pantheism," 220 German Thought in America which denies the perfection of God. Hegel gives us "a variable God, who learns by experience, and who grows with the growth and strengthens with the strength and growth of the universe itself . . . for their [the pantheists'] God knows nothing until it is either a fact of observation in finite nature — in the material world, — or else a fact of consciousness in finite spirit — in some man; he knows nothing till it is shown him. That is the fatal error with Hegel and his followers in England and America." 653 But it was not only the theology of Ger- many that interested Parker. From his earliest years he read the leading literary writers of that country and constantly re- corded his criticism or appreciation of them in his journal. Most frequently his attention turned to Goethe, whose works he read in their entirety (except for the Grand-Cophta, which alone he found uninteresting). Even more than Emerson, however, he found Goethe not commendable in all points. He did not, like Emerson, search him assidu- ously for support for either his own philoso- phy or theology; certainly he did not find as much in Goethe as did Emerson. Goethe's morality he found "commonplace," but his language "exceedingly graceful ... its richness, clearness, and beauty . . . above all praise." 654 Besides Luther and Schiller (whose poetry Parker heartily disliked), 635 Heine attracted his attention, and he once planned an article on the poet. In his later years especi- ally he read a good deal of him; though, as might be expected, he did not relish all of Heine, for "Heine has a good deal of the Devil in him, mixed with a deal of genius. 656 All in all, however, the poets and roman- cers of Germany meant little compared with the significance to him of the philosophers and theologians. Parker's thinking, even more than Emerson's, was rooted in reli- gion. In Emerson the tendency generally is to accord religion a primacy over philoso- phy, but often he rates the two domains as more or less on a par, and always he seeks to reconcile one with the other. In Parker, the tendency is rather to show the great disparity between the two. Religious truth is consistently held to be not only distinct from but superior to philosophic truth. Whenever philosophical reason and religious intuition clash, the former is summarily denied. This tendency he developed relative- ly early in his career, and he consistently propounded it from pulpit and platform. Yet he accorded philosophy an honored place. Looking back on the days of his early wrestlings with these problems, he said near the end of his life that although he had "studied assiduously the metaphysics and psychology of religion," as well as Locke, Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, Paley, and the French Materialists, Reid and Stewart, Clarke and Butler, Cudworth and Barrow, and Cousin, he "found most help in the , works of Immanuel Kant, one of the pro- foundest thinkers in the world, though one of the worst writers." "He gave me the true method, and put me on the right road." 65 ' This is followed by a brief statement of his three-point "instinctively intuitive" phi- losophy by which he is assured of God, moral law, and immortality. This he called a system of "absolute theism," "the foun- dation of all religion, laid in human nature itself." 658 The contribution of German idealism to Parker's "absolute theism" is to be found, first of all, in the insistence on the function of "instinctive intuition" as the ground of our knowledge of God — the belief that the existence and nature of God cannot be ascertained by the finite understanding, since it is an idea of Reason not constitu- tive, but regulative. In this negative aspect of Kant's first Critique, Parker is in full accord with Kant. Further, we recognize in Parker's insistence on the efficacy of an inner moral law something akin to Kant's imperative — the all-important principle on which God, freedom, and immortality are postulated. But the fundamental nature of the "proofs" on which these ideas are based Other Early Transcendentalists 221 by Parker and by Kant are as far apart as the two poles; for with Kant moral law is a categorical imperative, and with Parker it is a compound of Christian piety, instinctive intuition, and the still small voice. It is likely that Parker's acquaintance with Jacobi, however little he said in apprecia- tion or criticism of him, and with Schleier- macher, whom he mentioned often, helped him to formulate his ideas on the func- tion of intuition; though considering Par- ker's innate sense of piety, it is not neces- sary to assume that the influence of either was requisite for such a formulation. Simi- larly, the emphasis on man's feeling of dependence, which for Parker is the basis of his consciousness of God, is traceable to the Christian tradition generally, but, so far as his dependence on books goes, seems closest to Schleiermacher and De Wette. There was no system in Europe or America which represented in its entirety the kind of "absolute theism" preached by Parker although, as Parker himself admitted, De Wette came "nearest to it." 659 Parker's formulation of his religious creed was not a result, as with Emerson, of a long struggle between conflicting positions. "The new philosophy commended itself to Parker at once .... Religion had always been a spiritual thing with him from child- hood, never a formal or doctrinal thing." 660 His lack of interest in the finer points of metaphysical argumentation is revealed by the fact that he often resorted to modes of thinking foreign to the transcendental method. 661 But insofar as the New Thought confirmed and strengthened his belief in his personal religion, Parker drew on the great German thinkers and theologians at every turn. From the German scholars he learned about critical discipline, and, following them, he set a standard of responsible and thorough research such as had not been seen in American theology up to his time. His interest in the interpretation of history in terms of the Mythos was undoubtedly excited by his study of Herder and Strauss ; similarly, his great respect for the philolog- ical tools as used by Biblical scholars, and his argumentation from the new discoveries of archaeology and oriental history are modes of working adopted from his German mentors. 662 His prodigious talent for the organization of huge masses of knowledge, which is convincingly displayed in his pre- paratory notes for a great projected history of religion, was developed under the tutelage of German historians in the tradition of Herder, Eichhorn, Schlosser, and Gervinus. But Parker had never time enough to devote his whole mind to these scholarly pursuits. In the end he emerged not so much a thinker or scholar as a pulpit orator and a popular moralist. Least of all did he give evidence of being fitted for strictly speculative philosophy. Even in the sphere of his reformist activities, he was spurred on by the example of the German liberals. Just as George Ripley received encourage- ment from watching the attempts of Ronge to introduce a type of Christian Associ- ationism in Germany, so Parker was interest- ed in Ronge's projects. 663 Writing to Ronge in 1854, he professed to draw support from Ronge's example for his own project of "liberalizing" America. 664 And finally, he received no little comfort and moral support from the knowledge that the European reformers and democrats as well as the young German exiles in America joined with him in the great cause to which he dedicat- ed the larger rart of his life. 665 It was not until 1844, when he was well along in his ministerial career, and had published many books of sermons, lectures, articles, and the great commentary on De Wette, that he found the opportunity to go to Europe. He saw Italy, France, Germany, and England, and made full use of his opportunities to visit the cathedrals and art centers. His notebooks record relatively little comment about art and music, but much on manners, education, religion, and social conditions; for these things, together with his interviews with men of letters and 222 German Thought in America scholars, engaged his liveliest interest. In Germany he made it a point to visit the university towns, and he made a deter- mined effort to seek out many of the great scholars and philosophers whose books he had come to know so well. He attended the lectures of Schelling at Berlin, met Tholuck, Gervinus, Ullman, and Ewald at Halle, and visited De Wette at Basel. He heard the scientist Oken at Zurich, met Carlyle in London, and Martineau in Liverpool. His visit to Wittenberg was a pilgrimage to the scenes of Martin Luther's historic rebellion against Rome. Wherever he went, he collected local statistics on population, wealth, crops, flora and fauna. Of course, he sometimes came away from his interviews with professors disappointed or disillusion- ed; they did not always measure up to his preconceived pictures of them, but he managed, despite the language difficul- ties, 666 to establish some lasting friendships and to learn a good deal about the state of Biblical criticism and philosophical discus- sion in the Europe of the forties. And he learned, how some professors could be nothing less than ridiculous, when, with their pompous metaphysical apparatus, they attempted feats of reasoning which any man's common sense knew to be un- reasonable. 667 Following his trip to Europe he was on intimate terms with many German theolo- gians and teachers, and especially from about 1847 on, his works began to be translated and noticed in Germany. His Discourse was published in 1847 at Kiel in a translation by Archdeacon Wolf, who in that year sent a copy to the author. During the years 1854- 186 1, Parker's Sdmmtlicke Werke (tr. by Dr. Johannes Ziethen, 5 vols.) appeared in Leipzig. He was much heartened to read the favorable reviews as they came to him from time to time. 668 Parker's career was that of a publicist, moralist, and rationalistic critic of the con- servative order; he was a reformer, teacher, and agitator for the fulfilment of the demo- cratic promise of America. He was not an outstanding speculative philosopher, nor a real appreciator of literary art, but rather a practical Yankee leader, with a penchant for law and polemics almost as strong as for preaching. His great service was to bring his pious worship of an infinitely good and wise Creator — without the ritualistic and formalistic limitations of American Protestantism — to millions of Americans who were drifting out of the denominational churches. Without the instruments of Wissenschaft and Kritik, with which he was able to cull out of Protestantism many of those ingrained inconsistencies that he felt hampered its development, he could never have carried through the revolt which he undertook. From German scholarship and philosophy he borrowed heavily because these were fashioned to his purposes. He was not in a position to add much to the rapidly expanding knowledge of Biblical criticism; his contribution lay primarily in the practical application that he made of German scholarship and criticism to con- temporary American religious problems. To the Germans he was indebted also for something positive — for revealing to him in strong, impassioned, poetic terms the universal human basis of man's conscious- ness of the eternal and the infinite; they gave him a vision, not anywhere else so clearly and beautifully drawn, of the "pure" or permanent values that reside in the Christian movement. And the success which he attained in revealing that vision to the Americans of his generation virtually sum- marizes the worth of Parker in the tradition of American culture. James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) James Freeman Clarke, born the same year as Parker, took a much less radical stand than Parker on questions that sepa- rated the Transcendentalists from the ortho- dox. He preceded Parker by some years at the Harvard Divinity School and was re- Other Early Transcendentalists 223 pelled less than Parker by the prevailing theological doctrines of Ware and Norton. For example, he felt that the Rev. Henry Ware exerted the strongest pedagogical influence that came to him during his col- lege years. But, as in others of his class, the famous Class of 1829, his reading in Car- l y l e 669 Coleridge, 670 Goethe, 671 and Jacobi 672 soon raised doubts regarding the "wooden philosophy of John Locke." 673 He came utterly to reject sensationalism and went over to the camp of the intuition- alists. He came, like others of his class- mates, to consider the distinction between reason and understanding, as sketched by Coleridge, the crucial discovery of modern philosophy. He became a professing Tran- scendentalist, or, as he put it, a "pure ideal- ist, sure of the real presence of God . . . sure that society was to be made over again with- in fifty years." 674 Though a member of the Transcendental Club and throughout the period of his ministry in the West in close touch with the transcendental rebels of Boston, Clarke exhibited a "philanthropic comprehensive- ness" that precluded partisanship and doc- trinal narrowness. 675 Because of his disin- clination to preach about the different points of the divinity of Christ, revelation of the New Testament, and damnation and ultimate restoration, he was looked upon as best fitted to represent the Unitarians as a group: he took a judicious middle ground, and refused to be badgered into any sem- blance of a creed or dogma, and accordingly his writings have come to be regarded as the most nearly authoritative statement of the essential Unitarian belief. 676 Clarke's education, like that of all the more advanced Unitarians of his generation, included a considerable training in German theology and a fair acquaintance with Ger- man literature. During part of the time that he was a student at Harvard, Emerson was living in Divinity Hall, and it is recorded that the two discussed the writings of Goethe. He formed a friendship with F. H. Hedge, and W. H. Channing had been his intimate friend since his Latin School days. Clarke took up the study of German in 1832, and from that time on Goethe and Schiller ranked very high in his list of favorite authors. Soon his interest was extended to include Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul, and Lessing. 677 The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, edited in part by Clarke, bear testimony of the great admiration for German literature shared between them in the years 1832- 1833 and after. 678 In the course of a half-century Clarke produced a great many translations from the German, some of which appeared at various times in periodicals and antholo- gies. While most of them remain unprinted, the best of them were published in 1876 under the title of Exotics, a Collection of Translations in Verse. Some of these "ex- otics" are from Latin, French, and Persian (the last chiefly retranslations of German versions), but the great majority are from the German. Already in 1836, at the age of twenty-six, Clarke wrote to Margaret that he saw no "use of Metaphysics," 679 and there is no evidence to indicate that he read seriously in German philosophy either then or later. But his interest in German literature was stimulated all the more, while his profes- sional studies put him in close touch with German theology. Thus he was being pre- pared for the articles he was soon to write for the Western Messenger. The Messenger, established in 1835 in Cincinnati, contains Clarke's first contri- butions to the literature of Transcenden- talism. This magazine, which he established and edited with the support of Wm. G. Eliot, Ephraim Peabody, C. P. Cranch, and others, foreshadows in many ways the aims and achievements of the later Dial. It was as definitely Transcendentalist in tone as the latter, and at least ten of its contribu- tors later wrote for the Dial. 680 It defended Emerson against Norton in the controversy over American "infidelity," French eclec- 224 German Thought in America ticism, and German theology; and it gave a good deal of prominence to German liter- ature, both in review and translation. 681 Clarke's contribution to the crusade designed to spread the gospel of idealism, as promulgated in German literature and theology, through the columns of the Western Messenger include the following more considerable offerings: extensive ex- cerpts from De Wette's Theodor in transla- tion, 682 a translation of Schiller's Philoso- phische Brief e* 6i an adaptation of Jean Paul's Ein toller Vorbericht der Zuknnft, 6Si a highly laudatory review of Carlyle's essays on German literature, 685 and a good appreciative review of John S. Dwight's Select Minor Poems of Goethe and Schiller.™* The ready reception of parts of Theodor, oder die Weihe des Zweiflers, which he had Englished for the Messenger under the title of "Theodore, or the Skeptic's Progress to Belief," induced Clarke to undertake a translation of the complete work. It appear- ed in 1 84 1 in two volumes. In the Trans- lator's Preface, he explained that De Wette represents the "average condition of Ger- man theology," and that, since he is neither extremely radical nor extremely conserva- tive, his book should serve as a good intro- duction to German theology. 687 Although he recognized Theodore to be a book for popular consumption — of less intrinsic merit as a fundamental work, for example, than Parker's translation of De Wette's Introduction to the Old Testament — he nevertheless felt it a work excellently cal- culated to suit the needs of the times. 688 In his later years as professor at the Har- vard Divinity School (he was appointed in 1867) and as an author of semi-popular books on the Unitarian doctrine and the history of religion, he made use again and again of his knowledge of German theol- ogy. 689 His influence at Harvard was brought to bear on the reorganization of the educational system toward a closer approx- imation of the continental plan. He urged such reforms as greater emphasis on modern languages, the admission of women to medical studies after the example of the University of Zurich, the introduction of the elective system, and the broadening of the scope of the Divinity School. 890 Throughout his life he retained a measure of transcendental fervor and idealism, and he remained a staunch opponent of the skepticism and materialism which he saw growing around him. 691 Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) Alcott, like Emerson, learned his philos- ophy first from nature. No school of philos- ophy, no institute of theology, could have taught Alcott of Spindle Hill what Emerson learned at Roxbury about meeting with God in the bush. Yet, like Emerson, Alcott all his life found a pure nature philosophy inadequate; both searched constantly, though more or less unsystematically, in books for that something more which neither external nature nor their own inner nature seemed able to supply. Their own assertions to the contrary, they did not find in themselves their own sufficient guides, although Alcott, perhaps more steadily than Emerson, found in the mystic inner light a unifying and guiding voice. 692 From young manhood to old age Alcott read insatiably, throwing himself some- times upon books "with a passion amount- ing to monomania." 693 More neglectful of history than Emerson, he came to be, especially after his Germantown period, very nearly as well-read in the natural sciences and in philosophy as Emerson ; but on the whole he stuck more consistently than did Emerson to the "intuitional" thinkers. His reading of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection and The Friend in 1832 marked, he said, a "new era in my mental and psychological life." 694 Swedenborg fascinat- ed but never quite convinced him. Jacob Boehme's mysticism he found basically harmonious with his own thinking. Hindu literature, particularly the Bhagavad-Gita, Other Early Transcendentalists 225 his hospitable mind readily domesticated. Aristotle, Plato (in the stimulating but in- accurate paraphrases of Thomas Taylor), Plotinus, Proclus, and Bacon filled his thoughts with "majestic and cloudy con- jectures." 695 Yet all these and others, 696 "bright and glorious as they are," seemed to Alcott "lost in the transcendent radiance of the Gospel of Jesus," whom he regarded as "the exponent of human nature," and whose "theory of Life and Being" he con- sidered "a sublime synthesis of Infinite and Absolute." 697 On March 28, 1850, he wrote with a note of deliberation that betokens a certain finality : My debt to Plato is greater, perhaps, than to any [other] mind — greater than to Christ, I sometimes think, whose spirit is an element of humanity but whose genius I did not entertain and comprehend till Plato unsealed my eyes and led me to the study of his fair performance. . . . Plato and Christ interpreted each other and the mind of mankind. 698 That being so, German critical philoso- phy could have only a secondary impor- tance for Alcott. Though he read, from first to last, in the writings of many Germans, he usually found in them little more than supplementary notions or complementary affirmations of ideas either his own or derived from Platonic tradition or Christ's example. In a few instances, however, the German complement was of real signifiance, so that an account of his indebtedness from that quarter is in order. On the basis of available records it would seem that Alcott's introduction to German came during the early twenties — during one of his peddling circuits, when he read Locke's Essay on Human Understanding and Lavater's Physiognomy and found the former as uncongenial as the latter was congenial to his thinking. 699 He remained interested in physiognomy all his life, consistently maintaining that "the body is a type of the soul." 700 We do not know what books fell in his way during the spring and summer of 1825 when he was "reading widely in philosophical literature, and helping to edit the Churchman's Maga- zine,'" 101 but during the four consecutive terms of school-teaching that followed, while he was master of the Centre Cheshire School in Cheshire, Connecticut, he earned the right to be called "The Pestalozzi of America." Bronson Alcott did not derive from Arminius, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Pestalozzi, or any other bookish source his conviction that childhood is essentially innocent, nor did he ask John Calvin or Jonathan Edwards whether children, like men, are essentially depraved; he simply looked at the children who sat daily before him and drew his own conclusions. But in formulating his practical educational pro- cedure, he did have recourse to books, notably two little books, written by men who had been closely associated with Pestalozzi : Joseph Neef's Sketch of a Plan and Method of Education (Philadelphia, 1808) 702 and Hermann Kriisi's Coup-D'Oeilon the General Means of Education (Yverdun, 1818). More than that (says Professor Shepard) : William Alcott 703 . . . was a friend and associate of the Rev. Wm. C. Woodbridge of Hartford, who had spent some time in Hofwyl, Switzerland, in the School founded by Fellenberg, one of Pestalozzi's assistants. Dr. J. M. Keagy, a Swiss physician, who was conducting a Pestalozzian school at Harrisburg, wrote to Alcott about the principles and methods of his master in April, 1826. Eight months later there came a long epistle on the same topic from William Maclure, 704 a wealthy philanthro- pist, geologist, and President of the Philadel- phia Academy of Natural Science, who was at that time managing a Pestalozzian school at New Harmony, Indiana. In July, 1826, Alcott read a little book called Hints to Parents . . . in the Spirit of Pestalozzi' s Method, from which alone it would have been easy for him to secure a clear knowl- edge of the system. Upon the whole, there- fore, he was not making a vague and boast- ful reference to matters of which he was really ignorant when he entitled the first volume of his Journals 'The Cheshire Pestalozzian School.' 226 German Thought in America But this was not all. At Philadelphia, in May 1828, Alcott got from the famous bookseller Matthew Carey a Pestalozzian pamphlet entitled Exposition of the Prin- ciples of Conducting Infant Education, written by J. P. Greaves — a man, then unknown to him, who was to have a deep effect upon his later life and thought. Early in 1829 Alcott compiled for William Russell's Journal [of Education] an article on "Pestalozzi's Principles and Methods of Education." Two years later he was reading with close attention an admirable book by Dr. E. Biber entitled Henry Pestalozzi, then just published in London. 705 "And so," observed Professor Shepard "one might continue to tedious length; but these citations are enough to show that Bronson Alcott was far from ignorant of the theories and practices evolved by the foremost educational genius of his time. During the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, Pestalozzi's teaching was inescapable anywhere in Europe, England, or America. 706 Before he had been many months in Cheshire he certainly knew the chief Pestalozzian principles, which taught that education ought to be: moral and religious; organic, harmonious, and complete; not mechanical but designed to penetrate and regulate the entire being; free, natural, and individual; based upon intuition rather than upon memory and the lower reason; gradual and progressive and linked, like a chain; social and domestic, and closely related to life. All this sounds like Alcott. It actually is Pestalozzi." 707 During his Germantown period (1830- 1834) Alcott read "fast and far and deeply, at first under the guidance of William Russell and then under Dr. Channing, " 708 who spent part of 1833 in Philadelphia. During the summer of 1835 Alcott left his family in Germantown and took an attic room in Liberty Street in order to be near the Philadelphia and Loganian libraries. There he shut himself up for months to read, in a sort of frenzy. Innately inclined toward Platonic philosophy, he now went right through Plato and Coleridge and goodly portions of Plotinus, Proclus, Boehme, Bacon, Berkeley, and Kant. 709 Besides British romantic poetry, he read the Biographia Literaria 710 and Marsh's edition of Aids to Reflection, someSweden- borg, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, 711 his trans- lation of Wilhelm Meister, and everything else of Carlyle's available in the British reviews. 712 The next year Coleridge's Essay on Method moved him deeply. 713 During 1834, too, he gained some acquaintance with Schlegel's history of literature, with the writings of Richter, Herder, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe (always in transla- tion). 714 In these works, which he identified with "whatever comes from the higher order of minds in Germany," he found "Imagination and Reason blended in one Whole, and the human spirit . . . led on- ward by their mutual aid." "How long," he , exclaimed, "it has taken me to make the discovery!" 715 Coleridge assisted me in the beginning, Wordsworth too exerted a genial influence, and by these and my own innate tendency to pure ideality and a life of intellectual pursuits, I was led to a full view of things. Herder, Schiller, Richter, Goethe — and even Bulwer and Carlyle, though English-' men yet German in education and in spirit — were understood and believed. Before this, however, Channing had spoken in- telligently to me, and I had sympathized with the spirit of Plato, perused Plotinus, and found the depths of Aristotle, Bacon, Locke and Kant. With these last I was dissatisfied. 716 What in Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, and Kant dissatisfied him is clear enough from his explanation that they "narrowed the range of human faculties, retarded the progress of discovery by insisting on the supremacy of the senses, and shut the soul up in the cave of the Understanding." 717 Obviously he did not interpret Kant as Emerson interpreted him at the time, for Emerson asserted Kant's great service to have been precisely the opposite — widening the range of human faculties, insisting on Other Early Transcendentalists 227 the supremacy of the Reason, and freeing the soul from the cave of the Understand- ing. Of course, Alcott had not yet met Emerson, but had made his own interpreta- tion of Kant, which was, in the end, no more correct than Emerson's, though it had the merit at least of being his own. Where Emerson failed to distinguish between the negations of the Critique of Pure Reason and the affirmations of the Critique of Practical Reason (while asserting for the pure reason what Kant had limited to the realm of the practical reason), Alcott apparently did not, then or later, get beyond the restrictions which Kant hedged about the pure reason. There is nothing to show that Alcott ever seriously considered the practical validity of the reason as interpreted in Kant's second Critique. The Kant who became available to Alcott in 1834 was precisely what would lead Alcott to the conclusion he reached. He read, toward the end of 1833, Friedrich A. Nitsch's General View of Kant's Principles (London, 1895) and A. F. M. Willich's Elements of Critical Philosophy (London, 1898). It may be, as Professor Shepard observes, that Nitsch had been "one of Kant's pupils and profes- sional associates." 718 but it is clear that he had not been one of Kant's star pupils, and that his professional association had not been very close. Nitsch's book is note- worthy only for its superficiality. Although Alcott copied "no less than fifty-seven pages" from it and carefully worked through Willich's book, equally unsatis- factory as an organized, lucid exposition of Kant, he did not get from either any clearer idea of Kant than he got from Cousin's History of Philosophy , which he read in 1831, and which left him equally dissatisfied. 719 What he did get was the conviction that Kant, a la Nitsch and Vvillich, was not for him. He never acquired facility in the German language, and he did not later avail himself of such opportunities as more accurate commentaries on Kant offered. Consequently he remained all his life faithful to his own "Spiritual in- stincts" 720 and suspiciously wary of Kant- ian critical philosophy. More nearly harmonious to his way of thinking were such books as Zimmermann's Einsamkeit, which he read about 1837, in a poor translation then in its twentieth American edition. 721 By this time, too, he was rereading annually the famous twelfth chapter of the Biographia Literaria with its glorification of Schelling's idealism. 722 Both Schelling and Kant were often in his mind and doubtless contributed something to his thinking during those crucial years of 1833 and 1834 when he was undergoing the radi- cal transformation from the philosophy of Sense and the Baconian method to that of Transcendentalism. 723 But neither of them, then or later, influenced him as profoundly as did the philosophy of Jesus, Plato, and Coleridge. 724 He understood the general import of Kantian transcendentalism to be in support of idealism and a priori knowl- edge ; 725 and, following the lead of Coleridge, he gave both a place of honor— but below the place assigned to his "Master" Coleridge and the "Sublime" Plato. 726 Antagonistic to the method of the critical transcenden- talists, Alcott sometimes found in them corroborative support but never much germinal or inspirational value. Alcott's change of thought was complet- ed during his Germantown period and before he knew Emerson. With his intro- duction to Emerson in 1835 and his partici- pation in the Symposium the next year, he learned much about other Germans, such as Fichte and Schleiermacher, from men like Francis, Hedge, Parker, and Ripley. Thus stimulated, Alcott's knowledge of German literature increased rapidly during the next few years, but there is little to suggest that, so far as German philosophy is concerned, he read much beyond some of the more popular works of Schelling, Fich- te's Destination of Man, and the mystical aphorisms of Novalis. By October of 1838 he recorded his dissatisfaction with French 228 German Thought in America eclecticism as "not deep enough for us," 727 and in December he was urging that Confu- cius, Zoroaster, Paracelsus, Galen, Plato, Bruno, Boehme, Plotinus, More, Sweden- borg, and "others of the sublime school" should be put into the hands of English readers. 728 By 1840, in the midst of much concern with More, Cudworth, Iamblichus, and Porphyry, 729 he was turning from the more literary works of various Germans to more specialized books like Goethe's Theory of Colors. 130 Among fifty-five titles of books which he purchased in London in 1842 there were, according to his own memoranda, "Fichte's Vernunft, Fichte's Bestimmung, Schelling's Bruno, Novalis Schriften, 2 vols., Theosophia Revelata of Behmen, with Life, and Behmen's Life by Okely." 731 At Fruitlands, while Mrs. Alcott asked for "one day of practical philosophy," which would be "worth a century of specu- lation and discussion," 732 Alcott's love for books did not abate. 733 Alcott had first run upon Boehme, the theosophical shoemaker of Gorlitz, in the form of Francis Okely 's Life of Jacob Behmen, in Philadelphia during the sum- mer of 1833, at the same time that Sweden- borg's Treatise on the Nature of Influx first fascinated him. 734 But nothing definite came of this first contact, for his miscel- laneous readings at the time in the Puritan fathers, the French revolutionists, the Greek idealists, Jesus, Bacon, Locke, Kant, and the mystics generally would not mix until the next year when Coleridge's Essay on Method supplied the solvent 735 by which he segregated from the disciples of Sense and Understanding those with "Spiritual instincts" — Plato, the neo-Platonists, Law, Leibnitz, Oken, Schelling, Goethe, Baader, Coleridge, Swedenborg, and Boehme. He bought Boehme's works in 1842 and read and reread them. 736 Apostrophizing Boeh- me as "the subtilest thinker on Genesis since Moses," 737 he derived thence his theory of temperaments, which involved the doctrine of man's soul as "lapsing out of innocency" and the four chambers or complexions; 738 but he disagreed (by the right asserted by all mystics when they interpret symbols) with Boehme on the fall of man and the symbolism of the serpent. 739 In an essay on Boehme (first published in the Radical for 1870 and reprinted in Con- cord Days, 1872), he praised Boehme's teeming genius as "the mother of number- less theories since delivered," and suggested that Law, Leibnitz, Oken, Schelling, Goe- the, and Baader all depended on him. 740 As late as 1882, he founded, with Sanborn and Harris and a few other choice theosophi- cally-minded spirits, a "Mystic Club," ■ chiefly for the reading of Boehme. 741 He repeatedly and publically espoused Boeh- ; me's doctrines of temperament and lapse ! and even attempted to apply the former to his own family relationships. That is, he • sought several times ingeniously but unsuc- cessfully to explain Abigail May Alcott's : occasional tartness of mind and harshness . of tongue in terms of Boehme's declaration that persons of dark complexion are of "demonic" origin. In the end, however, he ' was relieved to find a more natural explana- tion of his wife's dark complexion in a geneaological book which traced the Mays back to Portuguese origins. 742 Associated with his liking for Boehme was his interest in Lorenz Oken, the spe- culative scientist, whom Alcott discussed with Emerson on August 5, 1849: "All day discussing the endless and infinite theme in the study and while walking, the late revelation leading all the rest— Oken, Goethe, Swedenborg, subordinated and sunk in their theories of the Creation as they seemed and were." 743 The "infinite theme," "late revelation," and "my late experiences and their fruits" all refer to Alcott's theory of Genesis, now first formulated though not yet fully elaborated or expressed. Goethe, Swedenborg, the neo-Platonists, Baader, and Stallo all contributed something to it, 744 but apparently it was Oken who brought on, during the summer of 1849, the Other Early Transcendentalists 229 intensive period of illumination, or what Alcott called "introversion," 745 that result- ed in the "late revelation" of Genesis. A remarkable passage in his journals attempts to describe the "ecstatic moment" induced by his submersion in Swedenborg and Oken, during which he had a vision that included, besides "a goblin or two," an image of "the entire universe as one vast spinal column." 746 "This [adds Professor Shepard], he sensibly decided, was going too far. Urged thereto by his wife — who again thought that he must be losing his reason and that he was going to die — he went to Concord for a fortnight's rest." 747 There and then it was that he had the long discussions with Emerson already noted. Besides Boehme, Goethe, Oken, and Oeg- ger, they talked about Emerson's Represen- tative Men, notably "Swedenborg"; and Emerson read to him "the introductory paper to his Representative Men, now nearly ready for the press." 748 These circumstances help to explain a portion of Emerson's essay on Swedenborg, in which, immediate- ly after the passage that refers obviously to Goethe's morphology of the leaf, he speaks of "a poetic anatomist, in our day" (who could be Alcott or Oegger or Oken), "who teaches that a snake, being a horizon- tal line, and man, being an erect one, con- stitute a right angle ; and between the lines of this mystical quadrant all animated beings find their place." 749 With this idea of man and serpent form- ing a right angle, other animals filling the quadrant, Emerson had been familiar since July of 1835, when Elizabeth P. Peabody lent him the manuscript of a translation of a portion of Guillaume C. L. Oegger's La Vraie Messie (Paris, 1829), which she published later in the same year as The True Messiah. "I find good things in this manuscript of Oegger [wrote Emerson at the time], and I am taken with the design of his work." 750 From the manuscript he copied "many pages of extracts," of which only "a few" are reproduced in the publish- ed Journals, among them the one referred to. 751 In "Swedenborg" Emerson details a similar theory, obviously derived from Oken apud Alcott: Nature puts out smaller spines as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the other end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. At the top of the column she puts out another spine, which couples or loops itself over, as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with ex- tremities again: the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the lower jaw, the fingers and toes being represented this time by upper and lower teeth. 752 This and what immediately follows paraphrase a passage in the Tulk transla- tion of Oken's Physiophilosophy that ends with "The Mouth is the stomach in the head, the nose the lung, the jaws the arms and feet." 753 The same idea finds expression in Alcott's theory of Genesis. 754 These passages illustrate at once some- thing of the manner in which Alcott came upon some of his mystical ideas of Genesis and Lapse, the means by which the curious lore from men like Boehme, Oken, Sweden- borg, and Oegger, after transmutation by Alcott, found its way into Emerson's published writings, and finally, the manner in which Emerson and Alcott served mu- tually to inspire and influence each other. They are indicative of the uses to which Alcott put the neo-Platonists, theosophists, physiophilosophers, and scientists in the derivation of his peculiar doctrines. The strong attraction which the mystics exerted on his mind was conducive to his pondering also upon the Schellingian philosophy of nature and related scientific and pseudo- scientific theories that could be combined with his unique divinations. It is not unnat- ural, therefore, that the concern with theorists like Oken should have led in Alcott's case, as it did in Emerson's, to a renewed interest, during the fifties, in scientific books, to a re-examination of the dynamic transcendentalism of Fichte and 230 German Thought in America Schelling, and ultimately to a consideration of Hegel. And so it was also in the natural course of events, after 1859, when Alcott encountered Harris' Hegelians in St. Louis, that he should find it impossible not to take cognizance of Hegel, whom Harris' "young men" knew so well and he knew not at all. 766 As soon as he returned to Concord, he pro- cured some simplified expositions of the philosophy of Hegel, but he could make little of them. Anyway, the war and its disturbances, as well as his duties as the newly appointed Superintendent of the Concord Public Schools, soon pushed Hegel into the background. 756 Yet, between 1859 and 1866, his first and second visits to St. Louis, there kept re- curring to Alcott memories of the remark- able men of St. Louis and of their more remarkable performances, executed in the name of the Hegelian "system." He had seen enough of both to be disturbed by the feeling that in shutting his mind resolutely to Hegelianism and to systematized thought he might be missing something. To be sure, these Hegelians were not an altogether likable lot. For one thing, they were aggres- sive, in a Western sort of way. When he had read them some of his "Orphic Say- ings," they had wanted to know precisely what each term meant. They had much to say about "dialectic" and "method," and they got results by their sinuous circumlocu- tions. It left a man to wonder whether his own methods did not stand in need of re- examination. "Examine myself," he wrote in his Journals on October 26, 1861. "A deplorable lack of early discipline in ex- pression that leaves me lame at last." There was nothing fundamentally wrong with his ideas, he concluded; he was merely having dialectical difficulties. He recalled an un- happy evening at Emerson's, back in the forties, when Emerson had invited in some people whom he wanted to make acquain- ted with the Orphic Sage — so that they might "know what a rare fellow he is." Among them had been Theodore Parker, of the "steel-cold intelligence," sharpened on German metaphysics. The evening had been a humiliating failure, for when Alcott's intuitions clashed with Parker's reason, Parker (says Emerson) "wound himself around Alcott like an anaconda; you could hear poor Alcott's bones crunch." 757 He recalled the bad moments he had suffered in the "hard logical" grip of Brokmeyer, "who was far more like an anaconda than Theodore Parker had been when it came to the crunching of transcendental bones." 758 His memories gave him food for thought. Foreigners like Brokmeyer could be in error; but surely Harris, a New Englander ' by birth and one of his own disciples, could not be deluded by a philosophy that did I not have something to it. So he set himself to reading Hegel's Philosophy of History, , which the St. Louisans told him was the key to Hegel and to the universe. Glorifying the "state" and "institutions," as they did during their earlier period (quite in contrast with Alcott's emphasis on the "individual") , they had told him that nothing could be understood except in terms of history, in terms of the "world spirit" and "world progress." To Alcott, who knew scarcely any history, this was all very perplexing. Humbly, he set about reading Hegel on history. But this first direct contact with an utterly new point of view left him beaten as his first encounter with Brokmeyer had left him cowed. I look into Hegel's Philosophy of History , Sibree's translation, published by Bohn, 1857. I find the book much too dry and crabbed for my taste, as I have found nearly all books claiming the merits of system; but it contains valuable information and repays perusal. Hegel has the advantage of writing later than his masters, and of drawing largely from them all . . . and I think with- out due acknowledgment. I do not find anything better than Plato and Behmen have for me, and read best at first hand what I wish to find, being more sure of falling upon it in the pages of these masters. 759 But Alcott was never one to turn tail Other Early Transcendentalists 231 where a matter of principle was involved. Once the war was over, he set forth again to "exchange views" with the men who were coming to be known as the St. Louis Philosophers. 760 This time he was better pre- pared for the West and the Westerners. The war years had given him an appreciation of the "slovenly greatness" of the West, after all as much a part of the "united" States as his own beloved, little New England. 761 Brokmeyer especially intrigued him — this German immigrant, bootblack, shoemaker, iron puddler, hermit, hunts- man, politician, spellbinder, lawyer, specu- lator, entrepreneur, soldier, philosopher, mayor of St. Louis, legislator, and soon-to- be governor of the state of Missouri. Con- stantly busy in a dozen activities, Brok- meyer had remained an impassioned stu- dent of Hegel and an inspired interpreter of Goethe. He had completed a translation of Hegel's Logic with characteristic in- difference to the niceties of English idiom. Whatever else he was not, Brokmeyer was clearly a man cast in a large mold. On the second occasion (1866), Alcott remained four weeks among Harris and his colleagues in St. Louis — amazed to find such a company encamped there on the edge of the wilderness and going deeper into German philosophy than he or the Eastern academicians cared, or dared, to go. "Brokmeyer — at any rate when he was not idly whittling sticks or spinning tall tales — was a perfect tornado of intellectual force and speed. Harris had a precision and delicacy of metaphysical thought to which Alcott never pretended and the like of which he had never before seen. Dr. Wat- ters, a physician, had been thinking out for some years, it seemed, precisely Alcott's own favorite doctrine of 'Genesis.' He had perfected it by the campfires of the Union Army, and meant to publish his results as soon as he could get free from political work. Kroeger, primarily a student of Fichte rather than of Hegel, was Treasurer of the City and a man of many affairs. Howison had a surprising erudition in many fields. Young Denton Snider, although not a man of any deep thoughtfulness, had an audacious and irreverent wit that some- times made one uncomfortable." 762 Snider adored Brokmeyer and worshipped Shake- speare — neither of whom Alcott could appreciate. Tom Davidson, the unpredict- able, was an Aristotelian of no mean ability. Amateurs, they met at Harris' house for "musical evenings," and played Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, and Men- delssohn like professionals; he heard them discuss aesthetics, the likes of which he never dreamed possible outside the sacred halls of Harvard. Their clubs, associations, and societies — philosophical, artistical, musical, educational, literary — were enough to make one's head whirl. He did not come away from his second visit without receiving several severe jolts, notably from Brokmeyer and Snider, and he was not sure that he had met fully the expectations of this exacting group; 763 but, on the whole, they pleased him in spite of their forthrightness and tough-mindedness; while they, professing to see in him some hopeful hints and gleams of Hegelianism, seemed inclined to accept him. 764 What worried him a good deal was that they should detect in his philosophy certain ideas of their beloved Hegel. He knew not how they got there. But Harris, already with an eye on Concord, assured Alcott that he was "a Hegelian in spirit"; and the Philosophical Society, under Harris' prompting, seemed disposed to claim him "as of their master's school." 765 Who was he to gainsay "so competent a judge as Harris" ? 766 So he let it pass. After all, it seemed a good deal easier to agree rather than argue with these Hegelians. When he got home in March, he found Concord and its less strenuous life and thought "good and enjoyable." Still, the inevitable compari- sons between New England Transcenden- talism and Midwestern Hegelianism dis- turbed his peace of mind. He went to 232 German Thought in America compare notes with Emerson, who also had just returned from "those wild parts." Emerson doubted that systematic thinking was superior to the intuitive affirmations of Concordian Transcendentalism, but Emer- son's assurances did not allay all the doubts of Alcott, who had tested the matter at first hand. His delicate intuitive divinations had made a rather poor showing against Brokmeyer's bludgeoning logic. He was beginning to develop a new respect for systematic thinking. 76 ' It is claimed [he reflected] for Hegel that his dialectic is an organism of the spirit, like the mathematics of nature, completing for mind what Plato and Aristotle attempted in their way. Certainly the uses to which Harris and Brockmeyer [sic] put it were surprising to me, and almost persuaded me that Hegel's claims are valid. 768 As a preliminary to reducing his own philosophical thought to a system, he set to reading Stirling's Secret of Hegel™* but it does not appear that he made much prog- ress with his own "system," or that Hegel proved of much assistance, though it is clear that the example of Harris in St. Louis, Jones in Jacksonville, and others in Du- buque, Quincy, Rockford, 770 and elsewhere revived within him the old ambition to form at Concord a philosophical "school." In his Journals he makes comparisons be- tween East and West and begins to find in Boston and vicinity too much "exclusive- ness and reservedness." He begins, also, to dream of "founders of schools" who, "com- plementing the defects of the teaching at the schools," might correct the eclipse that New England has undergone. 771 Why should not he do at Concord what had been done so brilliantly by Harris in the wild West? The beginning was made with an infor- mal meeting of Weiss, Wasson, and Alcott at Emerson's. James E. Cabot and others were to be invited for "future meetings . . . at Emerson's or at my house." 772 But the "school," first called the Free Religious Club, 773 became the Radical Club 774 after a year, and soon languished. His "system- making" fared no better. In November, 1869, he started westward again, with St. Louis as his destination, but planning several stops on the way. 775 Between 1852 and 1882 he made ten "conversational tours" of the West, speaking, from first to last, in about a hundred towns in New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. He met with varying degrees of success — at all events with sufficient encouragement to entertain ambitions, even after he had passed three score and ten, of going all the way to the Pacific Coast, "belting the hemisphere with ideas." 776 In some towns he appeared re- peatedly, notably in Bloomington, Peoria, Dubuque, Evanston, Chicago, Rockford, Quincy, Jacksonville, Beloit, Janesville, Cleveland, and St. Louis. During the sev- enties he grew accustomed to being called "the American Plato," "The Sage of Con- cord," yes, even "Emerson's Master." 777 He took his honors lightly, but the thought of setting up a school of philosophy in Con- cord with himself at its head was constantly with him after the trip of 1 869-1 870. 778 Throughout the seventies, therefore, he went adroitly about recruiting a "Faculty" and drumming up "students" for the Con- cord School. As early as May 3, 1870, he had a tentative plan of organization: "With Sanborn and Harris as neighbors, what might I not hope for! My cup would over- flow. Concord is the proper seat for an Academy of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion." 779 Before the decade was out, his plan had materialized. He had not only Sanborn from Springfield; he had Emery from Quincy; he had, also, Harris from St. Louis, and Hiram K. Jones from Jacksonville. Harris, to be sure, was a bit "too Hegelian" and Jones was "too Pla- tonic," 780 but there were compensations: besides forming the nucleus of his "Facul- ty," each brought with him a class of students. Other Early Transcendentalists 233 So it came to pass that his visions of a Concord School of Philosophy materialized. The School ran through nine successive summer sessions, from 1879 until the year of his death. It was a dignified, wholly beneficent, though somewhat Victorian institution. Its success was made possible less by Alcott's contributions than by "the frequently brilliant lectures of William T. Harris, Ednah Dow Cheney, Professor Benjamin Peirce, Thomas Davidson, Den- ton J. Snider, Frederic Hedge, E. P. Pea- body, Noah Porter, Emerson, and Dr. Hiram K. Jones." But the school was "Mr. Alcott's," and the Boston papers reported its activities respectfully, while all Concord was agape at the two thousand or more persons who were attracted to its sessions between 1879 and 1887. m He experienced some trouble keeping the debates between Harris and Jones, 782 be- tween Snider and Sanborn, 783 and later between Harris and William James, 784 from getting out of hand ; but he was ambitious to have thought discussed "freely," and therefore took philosophically the tiffs that developed. As the school progressed, he saw how impossible it was for his several pro- fessors to get together on fundamentals. As the debates went on, Alcott himself, always bent on preserving unity and peace, some- times had a hard time of it. On one occasion, when Harris and Jones waxed particularly warm, he began to deprecate the apparent misunderstanding by suggesting a higher ground upon which the two disputants might find a common footing, only to have both turn upon him with exclamations that they did not understand what he meant. As the worthy Dean subsided into his seat, he muttered, "Well, I don't know as I know what I mean myself," adding, as the audi- ence tittered, "I am a 'mystic, 'you know." 785 Gradually he learned that his own attempted systematization of Plato and Hegel was hopeless. Try as he would, he never got much beyond his position recorded on July 18, 1 87 1, while Harris was again in Concord : Emerson calls on Harris, and we have conversation for the moment, sitting in my arbor on the hilltop. — We are at his library in the evening and have further discourse on the Hegelian thesis of Being. Emerson's categories are those of the imagination, not of pure reason. The Hegelian logic is strange and unintelligible to him, as it is to myself; but I see what marvels it performs in the hands of a master like Harris, and owe it a deep respect. 786 He tried repeatedly afterwards to follow Harris' dialectic 787 and to regularize his own thinking by it, 788 but in the end he con- cluded, "I am not philosopher enough to know whether I am a philosopher in the strictest sense of pursuing a methodical habit of thinking." 789 1 confess full faith in Mr. Harris' logic but am incapable of following the steps leading to his conclusion .... At the 'Orchard' with Emery, Harris, Dr. Jones, Dr. Kedney and McClure, discussing the Hegelian Idea and methods. I find my thinking ideal, my method analogical rather than logical, and thus reaching the conclusion by concrete symbols. Accepting Personality as the Prime of things, I aim at exhibiting this alike to imagination, reason, and the conscience in its three-fold attri- butes as one and entire, thus speaking to the reason and faith at once. 790 In 1882, within three months of the time when he terminated his journals, he wrote what takes on a confident tone : I confess less interest in the philosophic methods of German thinkers than in the more familiar English methods of treat- ment. With difficulty I follow even Harris in his interpretations of Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and others. I find nothing of this in Dr. Jones' methods. I fancy my method is of a subtler and more salient type than either, and implies an active and sprightly imagination inflaming the reason and divining the truths it seeks. The philosopher who finds the pure truth is also the poet, interblending imagination and reason by the alchemy of his genius. 791 It becomes therefore all the more ironic that the last time he wrote in his Journals 234 German Thought in America he had to admit his method incapable of making his beloved philosophy comprehen- sible to his most devoted disciple: "Harris comes and takes me to tea at the 'Orchard House.' . . . We have much discussion of The Lapse. I do not succeed in showing them the place of this in my theory of Genesis, or of the Renovation of men from the ruins of sin." 792 Constitutionally incapable of entertain- ing German critical transcendentalism, Alcott was able to absorb few positive doctrines from the Germans directly. But indirectly, even while his method of phi- losophizing remained incomprehensible to men following more precise methods, he wielded a powerful influence by perpetuat- ing the idealistic tradition of thinking in America. To him perhaps more than to anybody else belongs the credit of having kept alive and finally of drawing together, near the end of the century, the numerous and sometimes divergent idealistic "schools" which the earlier Transcendentalism had en- gendered. Alcott was the main influence in the intellectual awakening of W. T. Harris, who in his turn — as editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy and, later, as Com- missioner of Education^spread Hegelian idealism throughout the country. Without Alcott's numerous western tours and his Concord School, Harris, in all likelihood, would never have reached Washington. Without Alcott's inspiration, he might never have gone to St. Louis in the first place. From this point of view, Alcott, as much as any other individual, can be accounted responsible for the fact that by 1900 the regnant philosophy in American colleges and universities became Hegelian 793 — a philosophy which he him- self had never been quite able to fathom. Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876) In sharp contrast with the consistent career of Alcott is that of Orestes A. Brown- son ( 1 803-1 876), who changed his basic views a half-dozen times, at each stage explaining the error of his earlier position and arguing that this time he could not be wrong. From the Calvinism in which he was reared, he turned to the Presbyterian Church, and thence veered toward agnosti- cism and Universalism. By 1830, however, he revolted against the extreme Universalist views and began to approach the Unitarians in his sympathies and until 1840 allied him- self with Boston Unitarianism, though he was never in complete agreement with either the conservatives or the Transcen- dentalists. 79 * At first only tentatively accepting the name of Transcendentalist, he soon iden- tified himself with the group, although he realized that they were not united on any single program, either philosophical or social; while they, for their part, found him too outspoken and belligerant. Hedge con- sidered him "unbearable," and after two or three meetings of the Transcendental Club, he was not again invited. 795 But, writing continuously and vigorously, he put him- self before the public as one of the most aggressive proponents of the Newness. For the promulgation of his ideas of social reform, which had been shaped through his reading of Saint-Simon, 796 he organized the Society for Christian Union and Progress, 797 and in the same year (1836) published his first book, New Views of Christianity , Society and the Church, in which, with all the fervor of the inspired prophet, he an- nounced the necessity of a bold radicalism in social organization and a revitalized conception of practical religion. The three articles of his Society were "intellectual liberty, social progress, and a more spiritual morality than animated the ministers who took care not to offend State Street." 798 The ideas set forth in New Views came, accord- ing to his own testimony, mainly from French eclectic sources, supported however by Heine's De I'Allemagne, Schleiermacher, and Dr. Follen's treatise on Religion and the Other Early Transcendentalists 235 Church. 799 In Brownson's view Cousin was "if not the first, one of the first philosophers of the age," 800 who settled in a satisfactory manner the controversy over a priori knowl- edge raised by Kant. In his long critical articles on modern philosophy published in the Boston Quarterly Review for 1 838-1 842 he set forth with skill and precision a defense of Cousin much more closely rea- soned and logically tenable than anything that previously appeared in America on the subject. Undertaking the conduct of the Boston Quarterly Review in January, 1838, he dedicated it to the presentation of new views on a great variety of subjects. Him- self an indefatigible writer, he accepted outside contributions only occasionally. 801 He was outspoken, vigorous, thorough, presenting in five volumes of the journal several long analyses of philosophy, much political discussion in favor of a thorough- going democratic national policy, and many important reviews of current publications. His allegiance to Cousin is apparent from the "Introductory Remarks" in the first number, where he announced his intention to appeal from tradition and authority to the "Universal Reason, a ray of which shines into the heart of every man that cometh into the world," 802 for it was Cousin's doctrine of impersonal reason on which he based his whole position. Later, in the same number, in an article on "Locke and the Transcendentalists" (an answer to a piece on Locke in the Christian Examin- er* 03 ), he again apostrophized impersonal Reason (not the limited Vernunft of Kant) as the "true light" which "enlighteneth every man who cometh into the world." 804 Brownson denied Cousin's dependence on any German since Kant, and, while praising Kant's experimental method, maintained that the German failed in "the application of his method to the phenomena which a profound psychology detects." While Kant had taught that there exists "no objective rational principle above the understand- ing," Cousin obtained "the objective by a process at once simple and legitimate," by "detecting in the fact of intelligence the presence of an element which escapes our control, and which determines our judg- ments." 805 This conclusion, subtly argued and skillfully presented, is Brownson's interpretation of Cousin's epistemological discovery. By the time he was writing the final number of the Boston Quarterly Review in 1842, Brownson was revising his theological views and beginning to move away from Transcendentalism. Feeling that regenerate Unitarianism lacked the necessary ground- ing of deep piety and all-embracing warmth, he began defending the Roman Catholic position, read Aristotle, the Fathers and Schoolmen, and renounced the political liberalism exhibited in his writings during the campaign year of 1840. Running thus almost the complete cycle of possible thought, Brownson might be suspected of sophistry or insincerity if the earnestness of his writings, at each successive stage, did not argue convincingly to the contrary. The pages of the first volume of Brown- son's Quarterly Review (1844) show how far out of the Transcendental current he had moved. His review of Margaret Fuller's Woman of the Nineteenth Century (1845) shows how stubbornly and bitterly he was opposed to feminism and to reform gener- ally. The error of Margaret Fuller and of all other so-called modernists is that they think "the true moral and social state is to be introduced by the free, full, and harmo- nious development of human nature," to which end natural nature becomes an object of worship. But nature, says Brown- son, in the fullness of his conviction that the world and all that it contains is of Satan, does not suffice, cannot be trusted, is rotten and accursed. The earth is a "prison house," and no amount of earnest human effort to improve it will ever turn out according to the plans of projected reforms. 806 Tran- scendentalism represents by now for Brown- son the summation of all the erroneous 236 German Thought in America doctrines abroad in the world. He traces out its effect in current publications. While the Transcendentalists in particular are the objects of his attack, 807 his incipient Ca- tholicism is already at war with all forms of Protestantism. 808 Brownson's influence was directed against all forms of idealism in thought and liberalism in politics and religion. His hope of meliorating the status of the common man had been shattered by the bitter experience of the campaign of 1840, when the Whigs, using every trick to discredit the serious aims of the Democrats, estab- lished again the party of capitalism, vest- ed interests, and power in the White House. In his disillusioned state of mind he came to believe that only "Conservatism" is the "condition of Reform"; and in philosophy he took refuge in the doctrine of Aristote- lian order and stability as the only true basis of human society. 809 But before Brownson could enter the Roman church, he had to put his philo- sophic house in order. To do so, he felt he had to disprove Kant's contention regarding the impossibility of reaching absolute truth on the plane of pure reason. 810 While editing the Boston Quarterly Review from 1838 to 1842, he had made long excursions into Kant's Critiques and had enthusiastic- ally seconded Cousin's contention that there was, after all, a way of reaching abso- lute truth in terms of reason. Obviously the newly espoused Catholicism would require a reorientation of this doctrine. In spite of his frequent shifts and changes in religious associations, Brownson was, from first to last, the most persistent and most consistent epistemologist of all the disciples of the Newness — that is, after he had once repudiated Universalism and Unitarianism. Before 1836 he was as un- willing as Emerson, Parker, Ripley, or Hecker to rest his faith in sheer intuition, and as eager as any of them to substitute knowledge for faith. It is a mistake to consider the Transcendentalists as a group to have adopted easily any shallow form of intuitionalism, and Brownson is no excep- tion. 811 Brownson's difficulties were no less serious and prolonged than those of his associates. The chief point at which he is to be distinguished in this respect from the rest is that once he was started in the direc- tion that he finally went, he proceeded more steadfastly and more assuredly than any of the others toward that goal. It can be said, too, that more than any of the others, he systematically examined the epis- temological bases upon which he reached his decisions, and that among them all he alone made a really thorough examination of Kant's actual text, in the original, before he made up his mind. That done, he repu- diated Kant and espoused a form of intuitive faith without further qualms. In this respect he and Hecker were unique. Before and during the period of his con- version he came at several stages to several conclusions and positions that seem some- times irreconcilable with each other. For an understanding of these developments his numerous contributions to the periodical literature of the day provide an index and record. Beginning in 1834, that is, during his Unitarian ministry, when he undertook to read German, he enthusiastically recom- mended the German theologians from Herder to Schleiermacher, especially the latter, as effecting a "meeting of inspiration and philosophy" and as exhibiting at once "remarkable warmth of feeling and coolness of thought." 812 By 1839 813 he was espousing Cousin's "impersonal Reason" above all other human faculties and comparing it with Kant's "pure Reason" to the dis- credit of the latter. 814 Already he made ob- jections to Kant's denial of any objective rational principle above understanding, even while admitting, as he was always ready to admit, Kant's "masterly skill and wonderful exactness" of method and his "analysis of Reason" as "complete and final." 816 As against Kant's severe limita- Other Early Transcendentalists 237 tions placed on the pure Reason, he pre- ferred Cousin's epistemological conclu- sions, 816 though even here he wished to make emendations. In his essay on "Eclec- ticism — Ontology" for April, 1839, he suggested : Perhaps it would not be amiss to divide the Reason into objective reason and sub- jective reason. By the objective reason we may understand the eternal reason, the immaterial world, the world of necessary Truth which overshadows us, underlies us, and constitutes the ground of our intelli- gence, — identical with the Logos of the Apostles and the Greek Fathers, the inner light of the Quakers. ... In this sense Reason is not mine, nor any man's. It is impersonal and absolute. . . . By the subjective reason we may under- stand . . . our general faculty of knowing, that by virtue of which we are intelligent beings, capable of intelligence .... But we apprehend that a careful analysis of the facts of consciousness would go far to identify subjective reason with the objec- tive reason; so far at least as to prove that our reason must be in immediate relation with the impersonal Reason— that it is, in fact, as it has been called, 'a fragment of the Universal Reason.' 817 This passage, with its obvious departures from Kantian definitions, be it observed, was written five years before he turned his attention more closely and intently on the text of Kant. It represents Brownson's general position about 183 8-1 839, when he took part of Kant and more of Cousin to get an eclectic epistemology which contributed to the collapse of transcendentalism alto- gether, as far as he was concerned, in 1844. But it is to be noted that even in 1839 he was already clearly opposed to the negative aspects of the Kantian epistemology, and that by 1842 he explicitly rejected rational idealism. The refutation of Kant and Fichte, and therefore of all Idealism, Egoism, and skepticism, whether atheistic or pantheistic, is in the simple fact . . . that the object- element of thought is always not me. The error of Kant and the error which led astray his whole school and all others, is the assumption that the me does or may devel- op as pure subject, or, in other words, be its own object, and therefore at once sub- ject and object. Kant assumes that the me develops itself, without a foreign object, in cognition; hence he infers that all knowing is purely subjective, and asserts the impo- tency of reason to carry us out of the sphere of the me. S19 But Brownson was cognizant of the fact that this statement did not present Kant adequately, for he added a note saying: We know very well that this was not the real doctrine of Kant, that it was only demonstrated by him to be the result, to which all philosophy must come, that is based on pure reason. He himself relied on practical reason, that is to say, on plain common sense, and his purpose of writing critiques of pure reason was to demonstrate the unsatisfactory character of all purely metaphysical speculations. A wise man, after all, was that same Emanuel Kant. 819 Yet it is clear, both from his use of the term ' 'common sense ' ' as identical with prac- tical reason in this essay 820 and from another essay of the next year, that this partial retraction of his objections to Kant still rested in part upon oversimplification or misconception, and that he was subse- quently to criticize the whole critical phi- losophy too severely on the basis of the Critique of Pure Reason alone, i.e., without taking into account Kant's other treatises. But in 1844 he set to work anew on the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, this time study- ing the text intently for several months, translating much of it for his own use, and writing a long analysis of it. 821 The result of all this labor was that he rejected the entire argument, because (as he believed) he laid bare Kant's "capital blunder at the outset," namely the logical difficulty involved in the very statement of Kant's problem; for, says Brownson, "To ask if the human mind is capable of science [knowl- edge of reality] is absurd ; for we have only the human mind with which to answer the 238 German Thought in America question." 822 Looking back on his intellec- tual wanderings of the previous years, Brownson recounted, in the first pages of the new Quarterly, his adventures among the philosophers in terms of a gradual approach out of night into light — as a con- stant progression in the direction of Aristo- telian dogmatics. He explained his interest in Cousin as a "state of transition from Naturalism to Supernaturalism," and as- serted, while making a clean breast of his former defections that might seem to stand in the way of his becoming a good Catholic, that the Germans (except Kant) had never won his approval for long. Kant's "eminent analytic ability" he was still prepared to acknowledge, but his philosophy as a whole he now considered "fundamentally false and mischievous ... an inextricable maze of error." 823 But it appears that Kant was not, after all, thus summarily disposed of, for imme- diately after writing this blanket disavow- al, he busied himself with the careful analysis of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft already mentioned. The result was three closely reasoned essays, 824 which served the dual purpose of filling a considerable por- tion of the first volume of the new Quarterly and of laying low the worst dragon of modern philosophy, so that henceforth he could, with good conscience, devote his time to the Aristotelians, ancient and modern. Thus Kant was to Brownson from first to last an acute technical analyst of purely logical and epistemological matters, but Kant's general tendency and conclusions were essentially repugnant to him, at least after 1842, when he avowed his objectivism and anti-Cartesianism. 825 His tendency to neglect Kant's teachings except in the first Critique and his oversimplification of Kant- ian doctrine represent Brownson 's greatest single error in his interpretation of Kant, though it may be understood in the light of his drift toward Catholicism after 1838 and his avowed Romanism after 1844. Yet it is worth noting that his position among the Transcendentalists is unique in this res- pect: they were all but unanimous in their glorification, conscious and unconscious, of what they conceived to have been Kant's great service in establishing the "proofs" of religion upon the basis of the "Reason"; he steadily maintained that that was pre- cisely what Kant had not done. In view of Brownson's professed objec- tivism and his general disavowal of German philosophy, we are already prepared to surmise what his attitude toward Fichte was. Fichte, he says, in an article written in 1842, represents the reductio ad absurdum ' of subjective idealism. He "fell into the absurdity of representing all ideas as the ■ products of the me, and even went so far as ' to tell his disciples how it is that man makes . God." While aware of Fichte's later specu- lative as well as more practical writings, he \ felt that these did not sufficiently mitigate i his earlier "speculative errors," and he did • not change his views of Fichteism as an "egoistic philosophy." 826 In 1864 he saw a direct Cartesian-Kantian-Fichtean descent , of iniquity that terminated in the Fichtean . assertion that God and the external world are only the soul projecting itself. This he considered the logical heretical deduction from Kantian premises, as derived from Descartes. 827 Schelling's more objective idealism and his Naturphilosophie temporarily struck a responsive chord in Brownson during the period when he was most closely associated with the Transcendentalists. The Schelling- ian philosophy seemed to him in 1836 "a magnificant poem"; but even while he believed it "to be mainly true," he con- cluded that it is "nevertheless no philoso- phy, and can in no degree solve the diffi- culty stated by Hume." 828 After his conver- sion he saw Schelling as an atheist and Spinozist who "maintains the identity of subject and object, and thus asserts, from the subjective point of view, the Egoism of Fichte and, under the objective point of Other Early Transcendentalists 239 view, the Pantheism of Spinoza, while under both he denies the intention and even the possibility of science." 829 Of Hegel, Brownson is the only one of the disciples of the Newness early to have any distinct views. In an essay of 1843 he objected to Hegel on two grounds — philo- sophical and political. On the first head, besides rejecting the whole deductive method, Brownson raises ontological ob- jections: he cannot admit that "the system of a universe is only a system of logic," and that the "Ideal and Eternal, idea and being" are identical. 830 Moreover, Hegel's method "claims for man, confessedly finite, absolute knowledge, which would imply that he himself is absolute, and therefore not finite, but infinite" — obviously a "vain" boast. 831 Aside from rejecting the Hegelian pretense to absolute knowledge, Brown- son's Yankeeism is outraged by what he considered Hegel's political absolutism, and he sees something profoundly funny in the view that "the infinite God and all his works, through all the past, have been engaged expressly in preparing and found- ing the Prussian monarchy" as if "his gra- cious majesty Frederick Wilhelm" were "the last word of creation and progress." 832 After entering the Roman Catholic Church, Brownson throws off the bantering tone and lashes out bitterly against Hegel as nothing less than "a reproduction of the old French atheism." 833 Except for occasional references, the smaller fry among the German transcen- dentalists were beneath Brownson's notice. Having finished with the "four horsemen," he was quit of all and could conclude in I ^57, "Germany has produced no philosoph- ical system not already exploded, and no philosophers to compare with Vico, Galluppi, Rosmini, Giobertiand Balmes." 834 Among all of those not in the Catholic communion, Leibnitz seemed to Brownson the "greatest of all modern philosophers," for "his refutation of the Cartesian doctrine that the essence of substance is extension" and his "rejection of the atomic" in favor of "the dynamic theory of matter" were for Brownson invaluable contributions. Yet he found even Leibnitz "the veritable father of German Rationalism" as well as a "mis- taken believer in the ontological argument and the priority of the possible before the real." 835 Except for the brief period from about 1836 to 1842 when he was close to the New England Transcendentalists, and except for his life-long admiration of Kant's profi- ciency as an analyst, German philosophy was for Brownson a regrettable episode in his earlier life. His significance for the history of German philosophy in America was in the nature of an episode before his entry into the Catholic church, but a highly influential one as long as it lasted. After his conversion, his full influence was exerted against any further acclimatization of Ger- man thought in America. Still active though he was during the decades when the Ger- manization of philosophical instruction in American colleges and universities went on apace, his Catholic withdrawal left him relatively powerless to do much about it; while among the Catholics who formed his chief reading clientele, there was no partic- ular need for his thundering against German skepticism and "atheism." Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819-1886) Another whose Transcendentalism was as short-lived as Brownson's (largely for the same reasons), and whose addiction to Ger- man philosophy was brief yet influential in directing the course of his life, was Isaac Thomas Hecker. The youngest son of im- migrants from Prussia, he enjoyed few educational advantages in his native New York. At the age of eleven he went to work in his brother's bakery, but his hunger for an education and for a tenable religious faith were such that, in the words of his biographer, the boy in his teens could be seen "at his kneading trough with Kant's 240 German Thought in America Critique of Pure Reason fastened up on the wall before him, so that he might lose no time in merely manual work. Fichte and Hegel succeeded Kant, all of them philoso- phers whose mother-tongue was likewise his own"; 836 but they merely combined to per- plex him all the more in his efforts to reach a religious position grounded in philosophy. The stimulation to consult the German philosophers in the first place appears to have come from Orestes A. Brownson, six- teen years his senior, whom Hecker met in the fall of 1834, when he was not yet fifteen. From Brownson, too, he imbibed an enthu- siastic humanitarianism; he accepted un- questioningly the perfectionism of Brown- son's social philosophy at the time, joined the Workingman's Party, and made num- erous political speeches, while still in his teens. 837 But his naturally mystical and ascetic nature soon turned from political to religious subjects. Unable by himself to make satisfactory headway in the solution of his religio-philosophical problems, and suffering from "a certain singular intensifi- cation of disquiet with himself and his surroundings" 838 in 1842, he followed Brownson's advice to join Brook Farm, where he arrived in January, 1843. 839 He hoped to profit by the fullness of a varied activity and the opportunity for that con- templative calm that were denied him at his home and that were reputedly to be had at Brook Farm. In the midst of his struggle to attain certainty with regard to the na- ture and extent of the Christian revelation, he enrolled in Ripley's classes in "Spinoza, Kant, Cousin, and their compeers," but got little help from that quarter. While he spoke, many years later, of Ripley as "a great man, a wonderful man," 840 he was unable to put philosophy ahead of religion, as Ripley suggested and as the philosophi- cal method demanded. Philosophy could never be more for him than the handmaid of religion. He was never truly a member of the inner community of whose aspirations and convictions the farm was intended to be the embodiment. Then and later he smiled good-naturedly at the singularities he observed at Brook Farm, but he was a "general favorite," his "charming amiabil- ity" and earnestness endearing him to all. George Willis Curtis called him "Ernest the Seeker," after the title of the story of mental unrest which W. H. Channing was then publishing in the Dial. 8iX For more than a year he earnestly sought help from the Transcendentalists. He con- sulted Emerson in Concord. He went to hear Parker preach in the Unitarian church in the neighboring village of Roxbury, he consulted Brownson in Boston, and on April 18, 1843, Easter Sunday, he went to the Catholic church in West Roxbury, and found the "sanctified atmosphere" in- spiring "awe" in him. 842 On July 11, he hopefully joined Alcott at Fruitlands only to be speedily disillusioned because Alcott's experiment left out of account "the Eter- nal" and made mere "human perfection" the goal. 843 Two weeks later he resolved to seek his own salvation and to seek it else- where. After a brief visit to his friends at Brook Farm, he returned to the home of his parents. But after less than a year with his family and the bakeshop, his asceticism reasserted itself, and he spent April, May, and June of 1844 in study and contempla- tion in Concord, where he lived with the Thoreau family. 844 When Henry D. Thoreau, then preparing to make his experiment in individual living at Walden Pond, discov- ered Hecker 's drift toward Catholicism, he tried to rally Hecker, saying, "What's the use of your joining the Catholic Church ? Can't you get along without hanging on to her skirts?" "I suppose [says Hecker] Emerson found it out from Thoreau, so he tried his best to get me out of the notion." Emerson was disturbed by this first defection from the ranks of the Transcendentalists. On June 13, two days after Hecker had gone to Boston to inquire of Bishop Fenwick about "the necessary preliminaries for one who wishes to be united to the Church," Emer- Other Early Transcendentalists 241 son invited Hecker to tea and endeavored repeatedly but unsuccessfully to draw him out. The next day he took Hecker on a two- day visit to the Shaker community at Har- vard, Massachusetts. All the way there and back [says Hecker] he was fishing for my reasons, with the plain purpose of dissuading me. . . . Then Alcott and he arranged matters so that they cornered me in a sort of interview, and Alcott frankly developed the subject. I finally said, 'Mr. Alcott, I deny your in- quisitorial right in this matter,' and so they let it drop. 845 The next day Hecker went to Boston to put himself under the instruction of Bishop Fenwick. That night he poured out his heart in his diary: "My soul is clothed in brightness; its youth is restored. O blessed, ever-blessed, unfathomable, divine faith ! O faith of apostles, martyrs, confessors and saints! Holy Mother of Jesus, thou art my mother. . . . Bless me. Virgin Mother of Jesus." 846 Thus Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott, far from preventing his entry into the Catholic church, badgered him into taking the step which he had resisted for years, and which he did not take until he had long considered both Transcendentalism and the Episcopal church, not to mention the claims of "pan- theism, subjectivism, idealism, and all the other systems." 817 After his baptism on August i, 1844, he saw less and less of Emerson and his associates, 848 but went on to an influential career in the Catholic church, first as a Redemptorist priest among the steadily increasing number of German immigrants in New York, and, after 1857, as the founder and superior of the Mission- ary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle, or the Paulist Order. Possessed as Hecker was of a natural linguistic faculty to read the German phi- losophers and theologians, he read them eagerly for several years; but lacking the philosophic urge or the metaphysical prowess of a Brownson, he appears not to have followed them far in their epistemolog- ical involutions and theological convolu- tions. The Germanic influence upon him was primarily a negative one. The only thing of a positive nature that he derived from German transcendentalism or its American complement was a confident democratic faith in individualism which inspired him and Brownson alike to har- monize Catholic doctrine and spirituality with the American democratic faith and liberty. 848 William Henry Charming (1810-1884) William Henry Channing, though princi- pally known as a spiritual leader, exhibited less interest in the purely speculative prob- lems of the movement than did his con- temporaries. On the other hand, he formed, along with Margaret Fuller, a link between the theological and the aesthetical phases of Transcendentalism. Despite the leadership of his uncle William Ellery, of Emerson, and of Parker in going to German sources for the founda- tions of their transcendental faith, Chan- ning hardly approached the important questions with philosophic inquiry until he was forced to do so by the violent eruptions in the Unitarian ranks of 1840. Meanwhile he had been preaching a very emotional, spiritualized kind of Christianity based on the assumption of the priority of transcen- dental over the sensualistic epistemology of the old school. Traveling in Italy in 1835-1836, he came to appreciate the beauties of Roman ritual and tradition and was strongly attracted to Romanism. This tendency is reflected in Ernest the Seeker, which appeared in the 1840 volume of the Dial. The plan of Ernest involves taking a hero through a series of religious experiences in the various denominations until he finally arrives at a kind of "spiritual" or "higher" religion which takes on the best features of all. The structure is obviously 242 German Thought in America based on the pattern of the Bildungsroman, such as were well known in New England, notably Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Pestalozzi's Gertrud itnd Leonhard; but the immediate suggestion probably came from De Wette's Theodor, a translation of which Clarke was preparing when Channing was with him in Louisville in 1839-1840. 850 Chan- ning's translation of Jouffroy's Introductian to Ethics (1840) was his only excursion into the study of fundamental philosophical questions. 861 William Henry Furness (1802-1896) William Henry Furness was one of the older generation of Unitarians who, like Parker, went over to the Transcendentalists early in his ministerial career. His special theological study was the life of Jesus, on which subject he wrote much. Disagreeing violently with the myth-theory of Strauss, Furness argued that the story of Jesus' life and the miracles were not legend but fact, and that this fact is the primary source of religious faith and inspiration in modern times. 852 He contributed to the knowledge of German theology by publishing in 1866 a translation of Daniel Schenkels' Character of Jesus Portrayed (Philadelphia, 1866). 853 The first flush of excitement over Ger- man thought began to fade in men of the generation of Transcendentalists like W. H. Channing and W. H. Furness. In others of the group — Margeret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Christopher P. Cranch, and John Sullivan D wight, for example — attention centered more steadily upon Ger- man literary and broadly aesthetic than upon theological and philosophical matters. A discussion of their contributions is there- fore deferred to a later section of this study, where they will find treatment along with Bayard Taylor, T. W. Higginson, and others of this later group of Germanists. Here it remains to consider now a group of so-called second generation Transcendentalists in whom something of the earlier attachment to German philosophy lived on — among them Osgood, Bartol, Frothingham, Weiss, Wasson, Conway, Samuel Longfellow, John-, son, and Cabot. THE LATER TRANSCENDENTALISTS Conflicting Points of View The leaders in Transcendental theology, among them Emerson, Parker, Ripley, and Clarke, performed the useful service of establishing rational Biblical criticism as acceptable in American seminaries and pulpits; but as soon as they had enunciated their principles, there was established ipso facto an American body of authority that was as respectable, or reprehensible, as the foreign in the opinion of their successors. Henceforth, when the orthodox vented their wrath against transcendental philoso- phy or theology, they oftener attacked Emersonianism or Parkerism (notably the latter) than Kantian or Tubingen criticism. For example, when Joseph Cook delivered the popular Boston Monday Lectures for 1877, 854 he singled out Parker as the real author of "what calls itself Free Religion in Boston." 855 It is true, says Cook, that Boston, Cambridge, and especially Con- cord "once listened to Germany"; and even now "Cambridge cannot show at the foot of her text-book pages five English names where she can show ten German," 858 but the "right wing and center" of a "great movement" like Transcendentalism must not be confused with the "left wing," its "erratic side," which "broke with Christian- ity, and which now is variously denominat- ed the Free Religious Movement or the Religion of Humanity. It was Parker who led these schismatics; since his death, his mantle has fallen on O. B. Frothingham, Later Transcendentalists 243 who has the shamelessness proudly to con- fess his succession. Parker had the misfor- tune of grasping too early, too eagerly, and too imperfectly the principles of the Tu- bingen school; for subsequent develop- ments have shown that what Parker es- poused was in Germany herself only a "reactionary eddy." 86 ' Similarly, Emerson "made pantheism the logical outcome of Fichte's teaching," but Fichte's own son has shown that German "philosophical discussion, beginning with Leibnitz, run- ning through Kant, and so coming to Lotze . . .had never broken with Christian- ity, nor been drawn into either the Charyb- dis of materialism or the Scylla of panthe- ism (Applause)." 858 "Ethical theism is now master of the situation" in Germany, where "the naturalistic theory was swallowed by the mythical theory, and the mythical by the tendency theory, and the tendency by the legendary theory, and each of the four by time (Applause). Strauss laughs at Paulus, Baur at Strauss, Renen at Baur, the hour-glass at all (Applause)." 859 Joseph Cook, like other orthodox apologists of the time, 860 regarded the German tradition of "sound philosophy" from "Leibnitz and Kant to Lotze" as his ally rather than his antagonist in the fight. After the Civil War the theological journals continued to carry notices of new German publications, but not in as great a number as formerly; and the reviews were not the lengthy analytical articles which the periodicals of the thirties and forties presented. 861 Meanwhile the defenders of orthodoxy themselves often turned to Ger- man theological authority for help in com- bating the views and influence of hetero- doxy as represented by the several forms of Transcendentalism, the Young Men's Christian Union (after 1857), 862 the Free Religious Association (after 1867), the Boston Radical Club, 863 the various types of free-thinkers and Freie-Gemeinden, the "godless Hegelians of St. Louis," and all those who, from whatever source they drew their inspiration, and with whatever groups they fraternized, adhered to what was called, after Comte's phrase, the Religion of Humanity. 864 At the center stood the Free Religious Association, which, in New England, found expression (notably during the seventies) through the Boston Radical Club and its annual Proceedings, as well as through the columns of the Tribune, the Index, and the Radical. The Boston Radical Club met on the first Monday of each month, usually at the home of the Rev. John T. Sargent in Chestnut Street, to conduct a forum for "the freest investigation of all forms of religious thought and inquiry." According to Mrs. Sargent, who prepared a volume of memo- randa for the club, it grew from thirty persons, present at the first meeting in 1867, to nearly two hundred at the closing ses- sions in 1880. The communicants considered themselves the heirs and perpetuators of the Transcendental Movement of an earlier day, although some of their number in- sisted on carrying their radicalism far beyond anything that would have been countenanced by Emerson's generation. In the beginning the decorous rooms of the Sargents provided a proper setting where "conservatives," "liberals," and "radicals" might expound their views. Here on one occasion Thomas W. Higgin- son and D. A. Wasson led the assault of the liberals upon the well-fortified position held by Calvin and Harriet Beecher Stowe. On another occasion, one day in October, 1871, Charles Sumner . . . dropped in to discuss 'The Function of the Heart in Religion' . . . John Fiske and Wendell Phillips also joined in the melee of that day. At a November meeting of the same year the aged Alcott came to hear . . . Julia Ward Howe's paper on 'Moral Trigonometry.' The author of the famous battle hymn . . . had been pained by the destructive logic emanating from the trenches of the radicals. Determined to turn their own weapons upon them, Mrs. Howe wheeled her mathematical artillery into position and laid down upon her adversaries 244 German Thought in America a withering barrage of moral sines and cosines. 865 Hither came men and women of little and great renown, of all complexions of creed, and visitors from all sections, though the core of the group remained solidly Boston- ian and decidedly genteel. There never was any doubt who was a member and who was a visitor. Social and intellectual decadence was already in the air; the death of Sar- gent provided a convenient excuse for closing the house and terminating the meetings in 1 880 ; New England reticences, on the one hand, and free scientific inquiry, on the other, had done their work. 866 The injection of Darwinian principles into the program caused some of the mem- bers to conclude that the reputation which the Club had abroad as "the jumping-off place of all belief into negation" 867 was not altogether undeserved. Some of the stouter- hearted, intent on checking the scientific tendency, remained within the Club; others withdrew and eventually joined forces with the more orthodox. A rival series of lectures was conducted, during 1870, 1871, and 1872, by the General Association of Con- gregational Churches of Massachusetts, acting through the Committee of Congrega- tional Pastors of Boston, on "philosophical subjects," "themes of Biblical criticism," and "internal evidences of Christianity.' These lectures, published annually as Boston Lectures : Christianity and Skepticism, were delivered by the most influential worthies, clergymen, and professors of divinity that could be drawn, chiefly, from Bowdoin, Bangor, Boston, Andover, Har- vard, Amherst, Brown, and Yale. They presented the conservative, or orthodox, point of view; but it is to be noted that they, no less than those who spoke on Radical Club forums, drew upon German Biblical scholars for the arguments with which to confound what the German ex- egetical and historical critics were credited with having generated in America in the first place. The origins of the several liberal or radi- cal religions lay in numerous, not always compatible, sources and forces, among them (1) native idealism, a heritage that traced a direct descent through various transforma- tions from Puritanism, (2) German tran- scendentalism, critical and intuitive, as imbibed by the left-wing Unitarians of the thirties and forties, and as it became transmogrified into the New Views in New England, (3) German exegetical and historical research in the Scriptures, (4) rationalism as fostered by sensationalism, deism, and Unitarianism, (5) New England Transcendentalism itself, (6) Comtean positivism, and (7) Darwinian and Haecke- lian science. The result was a welter of dissent various enough to embrace O. B. Frothingham and F. B. Sanborn as well as Andrew D. White of Cornell and, some said, Robert Green Ingersoll himself. 868 Some adhered to Kant, some to Hegel, others to Feuerbach, still others to nobody. Some repudiated Comte, others damned Spencer; but all agreed in defining religion as the I direct effort of man to perfect himself. Free- dom and unity were the watchwords: (1) freedom from the bondage of sect, creed, and dogma, (2) the right to follow the new humanism whether by the avenue of scien- tific evolution or of historical criticism of the Scriptures, and (3) liberty for all living religions to unite into a universal religion of humanity. Cast into a milieu so complex, the later Transcendentalists were even more diverse in the systems of thought toward which they leaned than were their predecessors of the prewar era. They made less claim to being Kantians or post-Kantians than did Emerson and his associates. Some of them, like Weiss and Wasson, were well enough read in German metaphysics to write dis- criminating philosophical essays which took up the epistemological questions raised by Kant ; many of them, trained in the liberal atmosphere of Harvard in the forties and fifties and guided by men like Hedge and Later Transcendentalists 245 Francis, gained a firsthand acquaintance with German theological criticism and, be- coming familiar with it early, took it as a matter of course. Although the Germans may ultimately have meant as much in their intellectual development as they did to the earlier men, their coming upon the Germans was not nearly as much in the nature of a discovery as it had been for the older generation. Throughout the nineteenth century, of course, the German influence exerted on American students who studied in Germany grew steadily stronger. Important as it was for the development of the natural sciences, the evolution of literary and critical theory, the study of history, and the cultivation of philosophy generally, German academic training could not contribute much to the growth of American transcendental philos- ophy, principally because Germany her- self, in those later decades, had ceased to teach the faith-philosophy of Schlei- ermacher and De Wette and had gone over to the side of the positivists, material- ists, and evolutionists, who were all ranged on the opposite side of the philosophic battleground, and who eventually hoped to discredit idealism rather than support it. In a world of thought dominated by the new Darwinian science, while literary taste was undergoing slow but sure atrophy under the auspices of the genteel tradition, few of the later Transcendentalists adhered with complete fidelity to the idealism advocated by W. H. Channing and Margaret Fuller. Some continued on the road taken by Parker when he sought for a substantiation of his faith in the scientific deductive method, and others emphasized extreme rationalism or skepticism and continued to fight both the supernaturalism of the old school as well as the vague faith-philosophy of some of the earlier Transcendentalists. In their philosophical and religious differ- ences the later group can be distinguished most readily from the older generation by comparing Emerson and Margaret Fuller's Dial or Parker's Quarterly with Morse's Radical and Abbot's Index. The Index owes its significance principally to its opposition to, and criticism of, the idealism of an earlier day. This tendency can be seen in Abbot's essay on "The Scientific Method of Religion," 869 his "Free Religion versus Transcendentalism," 870 and the resulting controversy 871 between the "intuitional free-religionists" and the "free free-religion- ists." Emerson and Parker were deferred to as authorities, sometimes by both sides, for there were some who believed that Emerson and Parker were essentially in harmony and therefore agreed with Edwin D. Mead when he declared that "Emerson was Parker writing books; Parker was Emerson's truth in the pulpit." 872 But most of the Free Religious Associationists saw in Emerson and Parker deep and fundamental differences regarding their philosophical methods and therefore their religious ten- dency. Emerson represented intuitive idealism; Parker, historical criticism. 873 To be sure, Emerson had attacked conventional Christianity in the Divinity School itself, but he had of his own accord scratched his name off the roll of the Unitarian Church, though he maintained a pew for his family and him- self occasionally attended. But Parker, after daring to draw the line between the Permanent and the Transient in Christian- ity, had been virtually excommunicated by the Church herself, yet had pursued, to the day of his death, his uncompromising criti- cism of the holy books. Whereas Emerson's general tendency had been to attempt a reconciliation of mysticism with criticism, Parker had steadily pursued the methods learned of the German rational school, and the whole tendency of his work was inter- preted as illustrating the disparity between religion and philosophy. They took sides accordingly and divided themselves into the Emersonians and the Parkerites. In the end B. F. Underwood, the junior editor of the Index during its last years, tried to sum up the whole controversy 246 German Thought in America in an editorial bearing the significant title "Transcendentalism at Bay" 874 by observ- ing that few members of the Newness were left, and that he regarded the intuitionalism and sensationalism defended by their respective adherents in his youth as now absorbed in a "deeper synthesis," in which the error of either (or both) was lost in a synthesis "entirely consistent with evolu- tion" as promulgated by Spencer. Thomas Wentworth Higginson made a last "Transcendentalist's Plea for Life." 875 He confessed his own belief in evolution — but the evolution of Darwin, not that of Spencer— maintaining at the same time that transcendentalism and agnosticism were both legitimate forms of Free Religion. While this controversy did little to settle the issues, one conclusion emerges pretty clearly, namely, that Samuel Johnson was correct when he said that it had been a "prevailing habit" to call the Transcen- dental movement a halfway step, a school outgrown, good and needed in its day, but belonging to the past. The Newness was no longer new. "In allying itself with each intellectual protest that was made in America during the later nineteenth cen- tury, Transcendentalism finally completed the circle, and turned against itself when it showed itself friendly to the protest of science." 876 While ideologically the unity of the "Emersonidae" dissipated itself in the later years of the century by breaking up under the stress of new times and new forces, the later Transcendentalists remained as unit- edly sympathetic with the proponents of social reform as their predecessors had been, even though this meant that they had on occasions to strike peculiar alignments with atheists and materialists. Thus it happens that some of the extreme freethinkers, writing in the columns of the Radical (a journal set up by men who generally are to be classed as Transcendentalists), actually welcomed the rise of extreme German radicalism on American soil and for a time considered a political alliance between the adherents of Karl Heinzen and them- selves. 877 In 1876 the Index printed a long letter from Heinzen wherein he discussed the possibility of a political merger between the German-American radicals and the liberal groups within the Unitarian church. Almost patronizingly he extended to them an invitation to join with him in his pro- gram, though he bluntly told them that he felt his brand of radicalism would be too strenuous for them to stomach. 878 That the eastern group was at least on friendly terms with these German-Americans of the in- tellectual vanguard in the Middle West is indicated by the fact that from time to time the Index printed communications from member bodies of the Union of German- Amercan Liberal Societies. 879 It likewise • printed appeals for aid on behalf of German liberals suffering persecution under the Prussian government. 880 Boston, with the presence of W. Wesselhoeft, Eduard Schla- ger, and later, Karl Heinzen, was one of the outposts of the movement toward unifica- tion of all German political forces, which culminated in the Philadelphia and Wheel- ing Congresses of 1851 and 1852. The Bos- ton liberal press, ever since the days of the Harbinger, had followed the career of John Ronge with interest ; and in their ambitious plans for a world union of German revolu- tionaries the Boston German-American radicals achieved, if for a short time only, a direct alliance with their sympathizers in London. 881 The Schiller Celebration of i860, at which the Transcendentalist Furness of Philadelphia was the principal speaker, was a project conceived and planned by the liberal Forty-eighters, including Schurz, Hecker, and Douai. When the Germans of Boston met in Faneuil Hall on July, 1870, it was Frederic H. Hedge who addressed them in these terms: Your country in one sense is also mine. It is the fatherland of my mind. It was there I first drew the breath of intellectual life ; it was there I imbibed my first ideas of poetry Later Transcendentalists 247 and philosophy; it was in German that I made my first essays in prose and verse. All that I am intellectually I owe to your country .... The body of the speech, reprinted in the Index for August 27, 1870, 882 is epitomized in his statement, "Unreservedly I side with Prussia in her struggles against France (Applause)." Circumstances and statements such as these unified sympathies and solidi- fied friendships between Eastern Anglo- American liberals and Midwestern German- American radicals. The Radical and Index illustrate how fast Transcendentalism was being diluted and dissipated. Both periodicals carried broad- side attacks on the old-fashioned idealism. Though they printed occasionally articles like those by Cram in defense of Spinoza, 883 the preponderance of space went to discus- sions of the St. Louis Hegelian school 884 and of post-Hegelians. In subtle, indirect ways the center of gravity shifted from New England to the radical Midwest. Though they printed accounts of the Goethe course of lectures at the Concord School of Philoso- phy, they indicated, too, that the "tran- scendental" theorizings of some of the speakers there amounted to a "too exclusive veneration" for the German writers. 885 Instead of the long interpretative articles on Goethe, Richter, De Wette, and Schleier- macher that appeared in the Transcenden- tal organs of an earlier day, we find in the periodicals of 1 855-1 870 a scattering of undistinguished translations of prose tales, novels, and lyrics. Political events, the Franco-Prussian War, the insurgence of free religionists like Ronge — these are noticed in some of the magazines; but before the appearance of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1867-1888 [1893]) there is much less concern with philosophy than had prevailed in the days of Emerson, Ripley, and Parker. Many of the later Transcendentalists turned journalists and essayists in the genteel tradition, and the greatest literary reputations as interpreters of German literature were held by such essentially uncreative literati as Charles T. Brooks and Bayard Taylor. Men of talent, not genius, they often divided their energies and were profound in no single field. As a group they belonged to the class of whom Emerson asked, "Of what use is genius if its focus be a little too short or a little too long ?" 886 Of the later group of Unitarian clergymen associated with the Transcendentalists, Samuel Osgood and Cyrus Augustus Bartol were the oldest. Both deviated from the tradition of Parker in important respects, and from others of their predecessors in other matters ; together with W. H. Channing and W. H. Furness, they illustrate the gradual transition from the position of the older to that of the younger Transcendentalists. Samuel Osgood Osgood (181 2-1888) was old enough to write voluminously for the Western Mes- senger during its brief existence. An earnest student of German, he contributed a mass of articles and reviews 887 to the Messenger, as well as a translation of Krug's Atone- ment M% and a shortened version of Her- mann Olshausen's History of Our Lord's Passion* 99 (also published in book form in Boston in 1839). In the Christian Examiner he published articles such as the one on "De Wette's Views of Theology,"* 90 showing no thorough- going penetration into German metaphys- ics, but sincere, enthusiastic appreciation of the "faith philosophy" of Germany as it was understood by his group. His most important contribution toward the domesti- cation of German ideas in America was his translation of De Wette's Human Life; or Practical Ethics, published in 1842 as Volum- es XII and XIII of Ripley's Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature. In 1856 he brought out still another German book, this time a series of drawings by Overbeck representing events in the life of Christ. 891 248 German Thought in America How far Osgood's reading and editing of the liberal German theologians contributed toward his own liberalism is hard to deter- mine. He remained untouched by what he would have called the "destructive" ele- ments of the German, or, for that matter, of American, criticism. 882 Typical of his attitude is his essay on "The Schleier- macher Centennial and Its Lesson," publish- ed in 1869. 893 Without subscribing to all of Schleiermacher's opinions, Osgood sees him as playing a most important role in the resurgence of faith. He was a "restorer of faith in the nineteenth century, as Voltaire stood at the head of its assailants in the eighteenth century." 894 Schleiermacher's Christian Faith is "the most memorable theological work since the 'Institutes of Calvin!'" 895 But the "evangelical order of Unitarians," with whom Osgood now identifies himself, no longer stand in any direct relation to German theology, how- ever much they recognize its importance as a liberalizing agent in the earlier decades of the century. And in a later article, Osgood shows an even stronger tendency to mini- mize the significance of German importa- tions. He takes issue with Frothingham and endeavors to show that the growth of Transcendentalism in America can be understood as stemming from the English and native traditions. 896 Writing from the vantage point of this late date, Osgood is inclined to believe that idealism will have to undergo a metamorphosis in order to be preserved at all. In the past the Transcen- dentalists (with whom he says he would not want to break) have been "too exclusively idealists"; they have been "meditative, lonely, introversial, and separatists" when they should have been doing more practical missionary work, forming themselves into a more united, militant body. 897 This is the answer of Osgood and, we may add, of his brethren of the later generation when forced to meet the challenge of the rising material- ism and evolutionism. His statement of adherence to the Transcendentalist faith is almost the last to be found — the last ex- pression of the hope that the revolt of the forties will not find its energies depleted in the face of new conditons and new forces. Cyrus Augustus Bartol Bartol (1813-1900) graduated from Har- vard Divinity School in 1835, and in 1837 settled in the West Church of Boston. He was a liberal and independent theologian, in his early years closely associated with the members of the Transcendental Club, who sometimes met at his house. Nevertheless, he held himself a little apart from the move- ment, being more mystical in his faith than Parker and anxious to preserve some of Parker's "transient" elements of Christian- ity. 898 In 1842, at the height of the tran- scendental enthusiasm for German theolo- 1 gy, Bartol took the relatively conservative position that the German idealism prevalent in Boston is not altogether good for the development of an American faith. 899 Like so many others in the Boston liberal tradition, Bartol shared the com- mon enthusiasm for German literature. Though he wrote little on the subject in his earlier years, he contributed an important essay on "Goethe and Schiller" to the 1885 volume of Concord lectures. He sets Goethe far above Schiller, at the same time that he defends Goethe against typical earlier American charges of moral laxity and social indifference. 900 The lecture revises Ameri- can critical opinion of Goethe, while pre- serving down to this late date, characteris- tic transcendentalist appreciation of Goe- the's nature-philosophy and Spinozism. In Bartol we see the original liberalizing im- pulse of the Newness still at work seeking to emancipate American thought from its narrow provincial bonds. Octavius Brooks Frothingham Frothingham (1822-1895) grew up under the influence of a father, who, albeit a Later Transcendentalists 249 member of the conservative group of the Unitarian church, was a thorough student of German literature. 901 While studying at the Divinity School, Frothingham was in- fluenced by Longfellow, Felton, Beck, Francis, and the German tutor Roelker to read a good deal among the less "danger- ous" of the German Biblical scholars, by now in good repute among the Unitarian professors of divinity. Though he admired Emerson, he did not count himself a Tran- scendentalist until he made the acquaint- ance of Parker and as a result, underwent a "crisis in belief" that ended in his adopt- ing a thoroughly critical attitude toward all conventional forms of theism. Under Par- ker's influence he read the theologians of the Tubingen school. 902 He left his Salem parish, to which he had gone in 1847, to travel in Europe, and finally, in 1855, resumed his ministerial work in Jersey City with a group of liberal Unitarians. In 1859 he moved to the Congregational Unitarian Society of New York, where he remained for twenty years, preaching first in Lyric Hall and, after 1875, in the Masonic Temple. Frothingham's theological position was further from traditional Christianity than Parker's; and in his later years, while yet the close associate of many younger Tran- scendentalists, he opened his mind more and more to rational scientific skepticism and became known as a leading evolution- ist. 903 He kept in close touch with current theological criticism of Europe and America, and besides occasionally writing reviews of new German works, 904 incorporated many of the latest findings of German Biblical research in his sermons. 905 Despite his al- leged skepticism, he was a man of real spiri- tual powers, to whom the Transcendental- ism of Emerson and Parker had been "balm and elixir" until German historical criticism cast doubt upon Emerson's too exalted concept of nature, and Darwinian science robbed him of his "absolute faith" in the mysticism of New England Transcenden- talism generally. 906 Though "the sunset flush [of Transcendental idealism] contin- ued a long time after the orb of day had disappeared," a new age and new forces demanded a reinterpretation that could not overlook the claims of science and the positivistic progressivism by which a mysti- cal Emersonian Over-Soul could be given content, meaning, and force. Frothingham's new religion of humanity abandoned conventional theism, together with its traditional affirmation that God is still actively working in the world. 907 His congregation on Sixth Avenue in New York heard with increasing regularity sermons on "The Despotism of Faith," "Authority and Religion," "Letter and Spirit," "Secu- lar Religion," "Reasonable Religion," "The Larger View of Christianity," and "The Proper Treatment of the Infidel Tendencies of Our Day." 908 This congregation, number- ing between six and nine hundred, included George Ripley, now a journalist and pro- fessional literary critic, George C. Barrett, the jurist, Calvert Vaux, the architect, E. C. Stedman, the broker-poet, 909 Henry Peters Gray, the artist, Sanford G. Gifford, the painter, and C. P. Cranch, the poet. Frothingham himself characterized his flock as having ceased long ago to be a Unitarian Congregation. "These were people of Catholic training, many of Protes- tant training, some of no religious training whatever, materialists, atheists, secularists, positivists — always thinking people, with their minds uppermost. It was a church of the unchurched." 910 Frothingham's numerous theological dis- courses were widely circulated in pamphlet and book form, and his biographies of Theodore Parker (1874), Gerritt Smith (1878), George Ripley (1883), and W. H. Channing (1886), together with his histories of Boston Unitarianism (1890) and of Tran- scendentalism in New England (1876), established him as a notable theologian, biographer, historian, and critic. Much of his influence was exerted through the col- 250 German Thought in America umns of the Index. 911 During the seventeen years of its existence, it remained the organ of the Free Religious Association, printing again and again the "Fifty Affirmations" of the movement. Religion [proclaimed the Index] is the effort of man to perfect himself. Its root lies in universal human nature; because of this common root, historical religions are all one. Free religion is emancipation from the outward law, and is voluntary obedience to the inward fundamental law. Its moving power is faith in man as a progressive being. Its objective is the perfection or complete development of man, the race serving the individual, and the individual the race. Its practical work is to humanize the world, to make the individual nobler here and now and 'to convert the human race into a vast Co-operative Union devoted to universal ends.' 912 Much of this has a strongly positivist tone and may, indeed, have derived from Comte, who gained some American readers after 1853 through Harriet Martineau's free translations and condensations and through such works as David Goldman Croly's Positivist Primer (1871), dedicated to "the only supreme being man can ever know, the great but imperfect Humanity, in whose image all other gods were made, and for whose service all other gods exist, and to whom all the children of men owe labor, love, and worship." 913 But this book, as well as the Positivist So- ciety, organized in New York in 1871, came too late to have vital influence on Frothing- ham, 914 who had developed his religion of humanity as early as 1858, the year before he moved to New York City, and about a decade before he organized the Free Reli- gious Association in Boston. There were many natural causes why Comtean positivism was very slow to win a following in the United States. 915 Eventually positivism made a strong contribution to the movement of progressive humanism, but evolution and the advance of science generally had a long head start in this country and consequently made more effective contributions earlier. Basically the religion of humanity was an American movement growing out of native needs, the greatest of which was the desire for intellectual freedom. As far as Frothing- ham was concerned, he sensed the impor- tance of science as a creative instrument for his purposes and used it accordingly, just as, during the eighties, positivism was used by the disciples of the new humanism. First and foremost for his purposes in freeing the American mind from the grip of orthodoxy was the native tradition of rational criti- cism implicit in Unitarianism, which goes back to the rationalism of the Englighten- ment. Frothingham himself had been a Unitarian minister, and he had watched the ineffectual efforts of the Unitarians to effect a humanistic revolution long enough to know that Unitarian orthodoxy and tradi- tionalism would not surrender to the spirit of criticism from within the church. Emer- son, Parker, Ripley, Clarke — all of the first generation Transcendentalists — bore testi- mony that American Transcendentalism as they had conceived and promulgated it, on idealistic ground, was unequal to the task. Neither Kantian nor Hegelian idealism sufficed. 916 To shake American Christianity free of popular lethargy and the ecclesiasti- cal strait jacket, strong methods were wanted. These he found in Baur, Schwegler, the Tubingen Theologische Jahrbiicher, and the criticism of the Tubingen school gener- ally. Without these he could hardly have been more successful than his predecessors in uprooting the deeply imbedded tradi- tionalism. With them, aided by the times and the steadily mounting importance of science and positivistic progressivism, he battered away until he became, in the eyes of his orthodox contemporaries, the arch- infidel — as fearful in this later day as Parker had been in his. By their aid, too, he exerted an influence that extended into the Midwest, where, his religious humanism, in all its social and political implications, joined forces with freethinking, radicalism, Later Transcendentalists 251 and the democratic spirit as these were bred and spread among various radical groups of German-Americans on the frontier. John Weiss One of the most serious students and active translators of German among the younger Transcendentalists was John Weiss (1818-1879). Born in Boston, he represent- ed the third generation in America of a family of German Jewish refugees who originally made their living by giving lessons in the language. In 1837 Weiss graduated from Harvard College, and in 1840 from the Divinity School. During 1 842-1 843 he studied in Heidelberg, and upon his return became pastor of the church in Watertown, succeeding Convers Francis. Like so many liberal Unitarians before him, he found that the ministerial duties did not well suit his talents, and accordingly he left his pastorate for writing and lecturing. He wrote on a wide range of subjects— history, religion, literature, re- form — and always exhibited great mental power and often startling brilliance. 917 At first a confirmed Transcendentalist and a thorough student of German meta- physics and theology, in the tradition of Theodore Parker, 918 he turned later toward a position of extreme radicalism, espoused the new evolutionism, and propounded an "animalistic conception of immortality." 919 This later position, charged with all the warmth of feeling and optimistic faith characteristic of the Transcendentalists, is set forth in his book of 1871, American Religion, in which he treads the borderland between religion and science, recognizing the claims of both, and bringing to their adjust- ment as fine intellectual scales as any of his contemporaries. His central idea is the har- mony of religious conceptions with the law of progressive development in the domain of science, the facts of genera, species, strata, epochs, and transitions expressing our mental recognition of the principle of pro- gressive evolution of religious themes "in just such a manner and under such condi- tions as the individualism and freedom of America are best fitted to promote." 920 Thus Weiss provided one of the strongest impulses which led later Transcendentalists away from their idealism toward the scien- tific rationalism so prominently espoused by the Index and the Radical. 921 Weiss 's energies were drawn equally to- ward literature and polemics. Some of his colleagues adjudged him more poet than thinker. 922 His translation of Schiller's Philosophical and Aesthetic Letters and Essays (1845) 923 was one of the most difficult and demanding of all translation projects in German undertaken up to that time in America. In the Preface he treats the rela- tion of Schiller to Kant and Fichte with remarkable accuracy and finesse. That he was definitely interested in the metaphysi- cal criticism of the German authors is evi- dent in the circumstance that he edited and translated works by Novalis, Fichte, Schil- ler, and others as early as 1841. 924 In the next year he edited an anonymous trans- lation of Heinrich von Ofterdingen and furnished the translations of the poems contained in the work. In 1846 he edited, with a preface, William Smith's Memoir of Fichte, and the next year he contributed his translation of Schiller's Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung to Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany, thus bringing before the American public one of the most im- portant theoretical essays of the modern period of German literary theory. The publication in 1877 of Weiss's translation of Goethe's W est-ostlicher Divan marks the first translation by an American of this group of Goethe's lyrics, and is recognized as one of the two best versions that have ever been made of them. David A. Wasson David A. Wasson (1823-1887) was a brilliant essayist and erstwhile Unitarian 252 German Thought in America minister who was "converted" to Tran- scendentalism under the influence of Carlyle, Hedge, and Emerson. 925 A student of Ger- man at first hand, 926 he read more widely among German literary authors than among the philosophers, though his acute mind was well equipped for metaphysical analysis, and he had enough independence of spirit to make penetrating judgments on many current problems. 927 His essays are distin- guished for vigorous and rigorous thought, for sharp judgment, and for a quaint but forceful simplicity of style. A decided rationalist, a friend and defend- er of Parker, a sympathizer with the Free Religious Association, a shining light of the Radical Club, a frequent contributor to the Radical and the Index, as well as the New Englander , North A merican Review, A llantic Monthly, and Unitarian Review, a thorough- going individualist, Wasson pursued his solitary, defiant way, upholding at once the Free Religious Associationists and the in- tuitive faith-disciples of Emerson's genera- tion. He was almost holily jealous of the influence of Comtism and of men like Spen- cer, Mill, Bain, and the latest school of ex- perimental psychologists. The essence of his doctrine, particularly as it relates to the objective or material system, is closely stated in his essay on the "Nature of Reli- gion," published by the Free Religious Association in a volume entitled Freedom and Fellowship in Religion (Boston, 1875), as well as in his essay on "The Adequacy of Natural Religion" in the Radical for March, 1866. 928 Samuel Longfellow, George Willis Cooke, Samuel Johnson Most of the remaining Transcendentalists of the later decades — men like Samuel Long- fellow, George Willis Cooke, and Samuel Johnson 929 — show little immediate depen- dence either on contemporary German thought or on the great tradition of post- Kantian idealism. The older generation had been thrilled by the discovery of each new German author who appeared on their hori- zon. These authors were now established classics, and most of the younger generation took them for granted. Many of the younger group felt that enthusiasm for German literature was on the wane. Samuel Johnson's career in this respect is typical. After an undergraduate educa- tion at Harvard, where he enthusiastically read Cousin and Jouffroy under Walker's tutelage, he included Germany in his tour of Europe but showed little interest in either German universities or German phi- losophy. Upon his return, he entered the ■ Harvard Divinity School and soon allied himself with Parker's cause. While espousing j Baur's theology and welcoming the work of ' the Tubingen school, 930 he did not follow , Parker's example of reading widely in Ger- man theological literature. Early identified with the group that contributed to the Radical and Index, he found (like others of the Free Religious Associationists) more immediately important authorities than Kant, De Wette, and those other Germans who had been vital for the first generation of Transcendentalists. His essay on "Tran- scendentalism," 931 aside from a stock quota- tion from Kant 982 and another reference to Kant and Fichte, 933 contains nothing to indicate that German philosophical specu- lation or theological investigation touched him vitally. Moncure Daniel Conway Only Conway and Cabot were actively interested in Germanism in anything like the manner in which earlier Transcenden- talists had been. Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907) was inspired by Emerson's enthusiasm and by Longfellow's lectures on Goethe at Harvard in 1853 to appreciate Goethe. 934 While he felt that "the Goethean cult at Cambridge and Concord had cooled," 935 he studied Goethe intently; and during his years as a Later Transcendentalists 253 Unitarian minister in Washington and Cincinnati he frequently derived the texts for his sermons from Goethe, notably Wilhelm Meister. 93 * In Cincinnati Conway made an unsuccess- ful attempt to establish a new Transcen- dental monthly under the resurrected name, Dial. It ran for a year (i860), print- ing such items as poems by Emerson and translations of oriental verse from the Ger- man, but had not enough vitality to estab- lish itself firmly. 937 In 1864 Conway visited Germany and became acquainted with a host of famous writers, teachers, and theo- logians, making special efforts to consult Strauss at Heilbronn and Gervinus at Heidelberg. 938 While in Germany he wrote popular sketches and essays on German life and literature. 939 In Cincinnati he asso- ciated himself with various German- American radical and liberal movements and knew intimately Johann B. Stallo and August Willich, editor of the Republikaner. He was an enthusiast for the Free Religious movement, the friend of every liberal Ger- man thinker and reformer, and a disciple of the new science and the positivist philos- ophy. His voluminous writings as foreign correspondent for the New York World, together with his numerous contributions to radical periodicals such as the Index and the Radical, interpreted these new tenden- cies for the American public. James Elliot Cabot Finally, there was James Elliot Cabot (1821-1903), who, among all the later "Emersonidae," was the most faithful to the ideals of the earlier Transcendentalists. As the scribe of Emerson during the later years of Concord's sage, and Emerson's appointed biographer, he was closer to the master than the others. More thoroughly schooled in Kant, Schelling, and Hegel than they (not excepting even Hedge, for Cab- ot, when he studied at Heidelberg, Berlin, and Gottingen, was no longer a lad in his early teens as Hedge had been when he went to Germany), Cabot espoused the idealistic absolutism of Germany that had been popular among the Transcendentalists before the Civil War and set his face reso- lutely against the progressivism and rela- tivism that had come into vogue under the auspices of the Boston Radicals, the Free Religious Associationists, and the National Liberal Leaguers. Outliving the nineteenth century and feeling, with his fellows, the full impact of the new science, he never- theless refused to let evolution and the ex- clusively inductive method shake his faith in Kantian epistemology and Hegelian logic, and as a consequence came to be regarded by his fellows as anachronistic even while they deferred to him as the authority among them on German philoso- phy generally. 940 Cabot returned from Europe in 1843, enrolled in the Harvard Law School, and took his degree two years later. 941 Not great- ly interested in the law (nor later, in archi- tecture, when he became his brother's part- ner in an architectural firm), he indulged his literary and philosophical tastes by con- sorting with the Transcendentalists. While still in Harvard Law School, he prepared the admirable essay on Kant that was al- together the best single exposition of Kantian criticism to appear in the Dial. 9 * 2 During 1 844-1 845 Cabot was often in Con- cord. Emerson, whose first bout with Kant- ian epistemology had not been altogether successful, and who had by now developed an antimetaphysical animus, reported whimsically that Cabot came "to comfort the dry land with a little philosophy." 943 In the summer of 1845 he sent Emerson his "Essay on Freedom," a translation of Schelling's Philosophische Untersuckung tiber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, which Emerson gratefully acknowledged, 944 and which he appears to have studied attentively for a while, only to report, a year later, "the Schelling [translation] I have only now concluded to let alone," 945 254 German Thought in America though he urged Cabot to seek a publisher for it, and himself sought to persuade Munroe to print it. To this period also be- long Cabot's translations of the portions of Kant's Critique of Judgment and of Zum ewigen Frieden, as well as the "Introduc- tory Remarks" on Kant and the translation of Schelling's lecture On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature which Hedge printed in his Prose Writers of America (1847). When, in May of 1847, Parker assembled a group of fourteen at Emerson's home to discuss ways and means for founding a new journal that was to be a successor to the Dial (only more "Tremendous" — "a Dial with a Beard"), it was natural that Cabot should have been present. While Emerson consented "rather weakly" to aid in the project, Cabot (whom Parker had put down in his notebook as "Certain and Valuable," along with John Weiss and W. H. Channing) agreed to act as corresponding secretary and business manager. 946 Already in the first contribution to the new journal (a notice of George P. Marsh's Phi Beta Kappa address) Cabot announced his attitude toward German philosophy when he reported, with apparent approval, Marsh's view of the prospect of American literature as bright because "the American intellect combines the speculative propen- sities of the German with the practical ten- dencies of the English mind." 947 His posi- tion with regard to German metaphysics became more explicit in his essay on "The Inductive System," a review article of J. S. Mill's System of Logic, in which Kant and Hegel are cited as authorities to refute what Cabot considers the too strictly in- ductive philosophy of Mill. Of special inter- est is Cabot's review of J. B. Stallo's General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature : with an Outline of some of its Recent Developments among the Germans, embracing the Philosophical Systems of Schelling and Hegel, and Oken's System of Nature (Boston, 1848). Professing inability to do justice to the book in anything short of "a regularly projected article," Cabot calls it "alto- gether the best thing upon the profound subjects to which it relates that has yet appeared ... a most intelligible and tho- rough analysis of the modern Identity- system of the Germans," discriminating "most sharply and successfully the true story of Development from that bold, popular generalization which first appeared in the 'Vestiges.' Its analysis of the Ger- man systems from Kant to Oken is just, clear, and comprehensive — just the thing for our meridian." 948 It is not impossible that this enthusiastic review in the second number of the new journal, for which ' Emerson wrote the "Editors Address," may have led him to consult Stallo's book I in the first place. We have already consid' ! ered the immediate influence of this book , on Emerson, as it can be traced in his journals, in the poem that he prefixed to the 1849 edition of Nature, and in the new ; resolve which it inspired in him to make one more attempt to equate his religion with his philosophy, this time in terms of Hegelian synthesis and Darwinian evolution. 949 After his trip to Lake Superior with Agassiz in 1850, Cabot settled in Brookline, married Elizabeth Dwight in 1857, became active in various civic and cultural enter- prises, participated mildly in reform move- ments, including abolition, revisited Europe in 1857 and 1885, indulged his fondness for sketching and water-color landscapes, gave a series of lectures on Kant at Harvard ( 1 869-1 870), and acted as Instuctor of Logic for a time. 950 About 1875 he became the volunteer secretary for Emerson, and upon Emerson's death wrote his Memoirs, by the wish of the family — a work so well done that it remained until very recently the best biography of Emerson. For the rest, he sent occasional contribu- tions to the magazines, including the North American Review 951 and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy , 952 He was on friendly terms with W. T. Harris and other individ- uals of the St. Louis and Concord schools, Later Transcendentalists 255 but did not take a prominent part in the ten Concord summer sessions. The Hegel essay in the North American Review for April 1868, is indicative at once of his attitude toward Hegelian idealism and of the reason why he withdrew more and more from the enthusiasms and move- ments of the day, pursuing instead his favorite studies, following the quieter pur- suits of art and literature, and adjusting himself to an attitude that recognized, while it acquiesced in, the fact that he was in a manner superseded by the newer, rising generation. He knew that he was setting himself against the current of the time which regarded his philosophy of idealism anachronistic, but he believed that it was only momentarily so, and accordingly he quietly maintained his own faith, only occasionally taking the trouble gracefully to reiterate his point of view, which, modern- ity to the contrary, he believed would prevail in the end. Hence he saw all the less reason for getting excited or angry about it, though occasionally he employed a tone of gentle raillery or irony to call the attention of the younger generation to a position which he believed they stood in danger of forgetting. Thus the essay on Hegel begins with a frank avowal of his love for metaphysics as against those who say that "metaphysics is exploded, obsolete." 953 Here, then, from among the Eastern Transcendentalists themselves, is a belated statement and attempted vindication of a philosophical point of view of idealism that had been dominant during the forties, but that was rapidly falling before the advance of evolution, induction, and positivism. Yet, while his voice is that of a bygone day, its insistence upon the Hegelian logic and methodology, which should make provision within the Hegelian synthesis for the new science, forms a link between the Emerson- ian idealism as it was expounded in the East in an earlier day and the Hegelian absolutism of the St. Louisans in the West. At the same time, it left the door open for the Catholicism expressed in the Concord School of Philosophy and did not absolutely shut it in the face of the anti-idealistic, pro- scientific Radicals and Free Religionists. The Spread of Interest in German Philosophy THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT History of the Movement Among the more easily discernible ave- nues by which Emersonian idealism spread were two associated movements: (i) the St. Louis Movement in Philosophy, Psychology, Literature, Art, and Edu- cation, and what was eventually merged with it, (2) the Concord School of Philos- ophy. The relations between New England Transcendentalism and these two later movements are clearer than are those con- tacts which Emerson and his cohorts formed with individual clergymen, editors, writers, and auditors inside and outside New England, and to whom they commu- nicated elements of Transcendental thought. The conversations, lectures, articles, and books that attended the Newness wrought powerfully upon successive generations of students who came to Boston and Cam- bridge, and who, in turn, went thence into the highways and byways of the country to spread the gospel of idealism. We have sporadic reports and occasional attes- tations of how a Follen or Hedge, a Marsh or Emerson, a Parker or Ripley inspired some young man to hold aloft the torch of "plain-living and high-thinking" or to search for the "permanent" among the "transient" elements of religion. But the influence of individuals was soon dissipated unless they happened to congregate, as they did, for example, in Louisville, Ken- tucky, where J. F. Clarke, W. G. Eliot, and Ephraim Peabody published the Western Messenger from 1835 to 1841, or somewhat later, in Cincinnati, where M. D. Conway, assisted by O. B. Frothingham and C. A. Bartol, sought to spread the doctrine of Transcendentalism under the aegis of the western Dial (i860). More precise is the connection between New England Transcendentalism of the thirties and forties and the St. Louis Movement, dated by Denton J. Snider (the last survivor of the founders and the his- torian of the movement) as beginning in 1865 and ending in 1885. The St. Louis Movement was regarded by its promoters and adherents, and was in fact, the second phase and, in a way, the result of the New- ness in New England. Its members — although most of them never wearied of paying tribute to Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, Parker, and other revoltees of New England 1 — felt that the New England idealists had contented themselves too readily with mere iconoclasm, a negative program of attack. To break down for- malism, topple authority from the throne, and liberate the individualistic spirit were accomplishments worth while but good only as far as they went. What was wanted was a positive, progressive program, to which end a broad philosophy based on first principles seemed necessary. As the St. Louisans contemplated the philo- sophical pretensions of the Concordians, they smiled indulgently at the New Englanders' ready contentment with Ger- man philosophy got for the most part at second hand. For themselves, nothing less would do but to trace Transcendentalism 257 258 German Thought in America to its fountainhead — in Kant, Fichte, and, notably, Hegel. Writing from the retro- spective point of view of half a century, Snider recalled that the time was calling loudly for First Principles. The Civil War had just con- cluded, in which we all had in some way participated, and we were still over- whelmed, even dazed partially by the grand historic appearance. What does it all mean ? was quite the universal question. . . . Naturally our set sought in philosophy the solution, that is, in Hegel as taught by our leaders. A great world-historical deed had been done with enormous labor and other panoramic pageantry. . . . We began to grope after the everlasting verities, the eternal principles, the pure Essences (reine Wesenheiten) as they are called by our philosophic authority. These transcendent energies of men and of the world were said to be collected and ordered in one book — Hegel's Logic. 2 In their effort to formulate a philosophy for the times, Henry Conrad Brokmeyer, William Torrey Harris, Denton J. Snider, and other knights-errant of thought and deed seized upon Emersonian Transcen- dentalism and Hegelian idealism as their chief weapons. But they did not stop with theorizing; they were ambitious to translate thought into action, and accordingly they attacked and sought to reform every realm of practice — literature, the arts, education, politics, religion, economics, social insti- tutions. Philosophy, they felt, had a high public service to perform. They all com- bined thought and action; they were, all of them, teachers — many of them professional teachers. Most of them spent their lives in class- and lecture-rooms. 3 Although Harris chose for his Journal of Speculative Philosophy the motto (from Novalis' Blidenstaub), "Philosophy can bake no bread, but she can procure for us God, Freedom, and Immortality," the associated philosophers were no cloistered academicians. In their clubs and schools they seriously propounded and tried to solve the intricacies of the Hegelian logic, and in the Journal their discussions often turned technical; but they were not con- tent to be merely "knowers" but sought to follow the Emersonian command to be "sayers" and "doers" as well, and they were eminently successful in all three capacities. Henry Conrad Brokmeyer 4 (1826-1906) translated Hegel's Larger Logic, published two plays and a diary, besides writing some verses, and he rose politically to govern his state. W. T. Harris' list of publications approximates five hundred titles, 5 while his active life embraced educational posts from the lowest to the highest in the country, besides editorships of school books, philosophical series, encyclopedias and dictionaries, a long succession of lectureships, and numerous special reports and commissions. Denton J. Snider (1841-1925), the self-styled Writer of Books, has fifty titles to his credit, including novels, poems, dramas, trans- lations, literary and art criticism, edu- cational treatises, psychology and philoso- phy, religion, biography, and history. He was, in addition, the head of the Communal University and an indefatigible lecturer in many places and before many groups. Thomas Davidson (1 840-1900) wrote upon educational problems of democracy and was, among other things, a recognized authority on Greek art, the founder of summer schools at Farmington, Connec- ticut, and Glenmore, New York, and the editor of The Western: Review of Education, Science, Literature, and Art (1872-1874). Adolph Ernst Kroeger (1837-1882) trans- lated several works of Fichte and a collec- tion of German lyrics, aided Harris in establishing the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and contributed extensively to other periodicals. 6 John Gabriel Woerner ( 1 826-1901) wrote a novel, two German plays, and two famous works on law, all admittedly motivated by Hegelian and "Sniderian" philosophy. 7 William McKen- dree Bryant (1843-1909) published books on American education, on Goethe, Hegel, The St. Louis Movement 259 Dante, landscape painting, ethics, psy- chology, and religion. James Kendall Hosmer (1834-1927) turned from the Unitarian ministry to teaching, first at Antioch, next in the University of Missouri, and finally in Washington University, and published a number of literary and his- torical works, one of which, A Short His- tory of German Literature, was the first his- tory of merit by an American of German literature. Frank Louis Soldan (1842-1908) wrote on education and published several German text books. Horace Hills Morgan (1839-1893) devoted ten volumes to liter- ary research, notably on Shakespeare, and to education. In 1875 he succeeded David- son as editor of The Western, which bore henceforth the subtitle: A Journal of Literature, Education, and Art (1875-1881). Susan Blow (1843-1916) and Anna C. Brackett (1836-1911) wrote numerous educational tracts, participated in several schools (such as the Concord School of Philosophy), and headed the kindergarten movement in the West. George H. Howison ( 1 834-1 91 6), first vice-president of the Philosophical Society and a teacher of philosophy in various universities and finally at the University of California (1884-1909), which he raised to the western center of philosophical studies, wrote extensively and drew a number of brilliant younger men into philosophical pursuits. 8 Louis (Lewis) J . Block (1851-1927) published a dozen volumes of dramatic sketches and poems. Charles F. Childs (1831-1866) wrote essays on educational and generally cul- tural subjects. Britton Armstrong Hill (1818-1888) wrote extensively in legal, economic, and politic areas. John Calvin Learned (1 834-1 893), one of the few theologians associated with the movement, wrote numerous pamphlets and books on religion, ethics, and social criticism. A half- dozen others contented themselves with contributing to Harris' Journal or David- son's Western, or both. All of them were articulate. No similar group, before or since, has remotely approached their published output. 9 All members of the group subscribed to their leader's doctrine of "self activity" and followed his injunc- tion: "If you have any thoughts to give to the world which you consider of value, get them printed; disseminate them." 10 Begun as an intellectual movement which seized upon Hegel's philosophy as the most effective weapon with which to combat what seemed to this young group of western idealists an engulfing materialism and invidious agnosticism, the St. Louis School nevertheless drew inspiration from the frontier milieu, with its optimistic faith in materialistic progress, its expansive am- bitions, its grandiose schemes. In his his tory of the early phases of the movement Snider speaks of a deep-seated dualism of which he and his confreres themselves were not aware at the time — their devotion, on the one hand, to the life of pure thought and the search for "the eternal principles, the pure Essences," and, on the other, their enthusiastic and uncritical faith in the Great Illusion of the time that St. Louis was the Future Great City of the World. A remarkable energy, a unique cultural out- burst, unbounded aspiration of individuals, along with grandiose civic ambition, were felt throbbing throughout the community. When Snider came to St. Louis in March of 1864, he felt at once the electrifying "city soul" and recognized it as an "all domi- nating psychical trait," which, says he "I soon caught, and then it caught me." 11 When the census of 1880 shattered the Grand Illusion and demonstrated that the "wicked Sodom" to the north had with- stood the Wrath of God (visited on Chicago in the form of the great fire) and had actually outstripped the "world's coming Metropolis" in the race for size, wealth, power, and splendor — even then many clung to their illusion and declared the United States Bureau of Census in league with the forces of evil to subvert the good and the beautiful. The best mathematician 260 German Thought in America of Washington University was engaged to check the names and the arithmetic of the census tabulations and to give the official census-taker the lie. Faith in the approach- ing triumph of the Great Continental Capital had for so long been axiomatic in every mouth and on every street corner that it took some time for the bare, cold fact of Chicago's supremacy to dispel the illusion. Snider makes 1885 the terminal date of the movement ; it coincides with the date by which the Grand Illusion finally made way before the Grand Disillusion. Meanwhile, the twenty years between 1865 and 1885 sufficed to combine a pregnant idea with a powerful Zeitgeist and to revive the most energetic and pervasive idealistic movement that the United States of America had felt up to that time. There were other forces at work too, not the least of which was the peculiar combi- nation in St. Louis of a very strong Germanic strain and the Hegelian idea of Teutonic destiny. Many of those comprising the "little German world that arose in the West with St. Louis as its heart" 12 were intellectual idealists of 1848 — trained in the philosophical modes of German thought from Kant to Hegel and exiled from Ger- many because of their protest against bureaucracy and militarism. Nearly all of them had received military training in the Fatherland: they represented virtually a standing army equipped to step from peaceful to military pursuits on a moment's notice. Although they had fled from militarism in Europe, they saw in the issues of the Civil War a call to take up arms once more. In a day's time they were mobilized under Francis Preston Blair, and the next day they struck at Camp Jackson. This was the first decisive fight for Federal union: universal history pivoted momentarily on St. Louis. At Camp Jackson was performed, says Snider, "The First Great St. Louis Deed." 13 Both Grant and Sherman were in St. Louis at the time — spectators, not participants. A month later both had cast off indecision and were colonels in the Union Army. The German regiments were in the thick of the fight all the way, and when they returned — victorious, confident, assertive — they demanded and got their share of the spoils. Already when Snider reached St. Louis in 1864, he found the Germans in possession of the "city's control, material and spiritual." 14 Soon the muster of the city council read like the roll of the Reichs- tag. The German language was introduced into the public schools, and a bilingual citizenry was stoutly advocated. The constitutional convention of 1 864-1 865 chose a German for its president, and that of 1875 was completely dominated by Brokmeyer and his German supporters, including Pulitzer, who had risen to prominence by Brokmeyer's assistance, and who was now editor and owner of the Post- Dispatch. When Finkelnburg was sent to Congress, and Schurz was elected U.S. Senator, the victory was complete. The capture of Washington and the transfer of the nation's capital to St. Louis seemed assured. St. Louis was Teutonizing, and the Hegelian sense of Teutonic destiny ran subtly but powerfully through the entire population. 15 Another vehicle of this inter-Teutonism at the time was the surprising circulation of German literature, in periodical and book form. Snider found in St. Louis "three considerable book-stores, well-stocked and doing good business . . . not to speak of lesser shops ever ready to send orders to Leipzig and Berlin for old and new volumes. All these places were manned with a trained German book-seller, known over the entire globe as the unparalleled of his kind, and as the main pillar of the vast German book- trade, being found in Asiatic Tiflis and African Timbuctoo as well as in our Western cowboy town of Hardscrapple." 16 Though of native or local origin, the movement was propagated chiefly by men who migrated to St. Louis. "I do not The St. Louis Movement 261 recall," says Snider, "a single born St. Louisan in the set, though nearly all of us were Americans. Still the movement was not immigrant, but indigenous; ... it originated on the soil of St. Louis, and . . . was begotten of the city's unique spirit of that time." 17 Thus it came to pass that Snider felt his destiny wrapped up in the West. During his period of participation in the Concord School later he refused to be "colonialized," though Emery gravitated between the East and the West, and Harris' thoughts seem never to have dwelt far apart from New England. There was all but an open clash. The St. Louisans were considered "borderers" in Concord, and the New Englanders "immigrants" in St. Louis. Paradoxically, the only real immigrant among the leading spirits was Brokmeyer; 18 and among them all, he turned out to be the truest son of the West. Of his kind, i.e., of immigrants from Europe, there were several sorts in St. Louis. Predominantly Germanic though the movement was, both in principles and in membership, all persons of Germanic origin were not therefore welcome. The several radical groups of St. Louis- — socialistic, communistic, an- archistic — were excluded; so were the immigrant laborer, the untutored, the boorish. Not that the workingman was excluded because he was a laborer. Quite the contrary. He was as welcome as any other, but he had to demonstrate his eligibility to participate in the life of pure thought. Proselyting was not carried on in the saloons, on the river front, or in the factories. All conversions were effected in Philosopher's Row 19 — itself humble enough in external appearance; but within burned the pure light of the Absolute. The mem- bers demanded of their fellows what Shelley asked of his mate: the ability "to feel poetry and understand philosophy." Whatever aspects the more popular phases of the movement bore, the members of the Philosophical Society kept their eyes steadily on America. All the members sought to deepen their own thinking and to equate it with the German thought which Brokmeyer proclaimed, but they cared little for Germany as such. It was America that they kept constantly in mind. So, too, their president. In leaving Germany as a youth, Brokmeyer had forsaken it for all time. He wasted no time romanticizing a lost Fatherland or indulging in escapist fantasies. In this respect Brokmeyer and the idealistic movement that he engendered are to be sharply distinguished from many another that began, continued, and soon ended as a Germanic tour deforce, restricted to an exclusive German point of view, and consequently destined to exert little influence beyond the sphere of its pecul- iarly restricted cultural "island" of Ger- mans and German-Americans. The St. Louis Movement was thoroughly American in everything but inspiration. Given (i) the dramatic episodes of the struggle for national unity, (2) a strong German contingent dedicated to humani- tarian and political reform, and (3) a boundless West to which St. Louis was the gateway, it was perhaps inevitable that St. Louis should seize upon the romantic features of Hegelian thought by which to bring order out of the chaos of the Civil War and to give interpretation and purpose to the role that St. Louis was to play in a frontier society. Hegel was the philosopher of progress, of advance. He was also the proponent of the absolute, pure, free thought. Above all, he was the reconciler of opposites. The young men of St. Louis seized upon him as pointing the way to reconcile materialism and idealism, faith and knowledge, individual statehood and federal unionism, rights and duties, and a dozen other conflicts of the time. Viewed in the light of American civilization as a whole, the St. Louis Movement is a phase of the conflict between naturalism and supernaturalism that characterized the nineteenth century generally — a phase of that long crisis, partly religious, when many 262 German Thought in America a thoughtful man saw but one choice: to avow himself either a medieval man and a Christian or a modern man and a skeptic. 20 The men of St. Louis were distinguished more for their aloofness from churches than for their adherence to religious creeds. Emerson, when he first met the group, half jocularly but approvingly called them Harris' "German atheists." But they were, to a man, profoundly serious and thought- ful. They were philosophers whose philos- ophy impinged at every point on religion. They professed themselves to be, and were, the disciples of the Kantian reason and the Hegelian logic, but they denied the capacity of understanding and pure reason alone to solve all of man's problems. With certain tendencies of twentieth-century philosophic inquiry they would have had little sym- pathy — for instance, with the aspiration to be strictly scientific, in the sense in which physics and geology are scientific, in areas apparently not belonging solely to the scientific realm. The "pure essences," they contended, were not discoverable by any one of man's mental faculties or by such a procedure as the scientific agnostic employed. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness were not to be analyzed by chemical techniques or measured in physical terms. Nor were they mystics, content with soul- satisfying but fundamentally irrational intuitions. On the first page of the first number of their Journal, Harris expressed their dissatisfaction alike with pure natu- ralism and with pure mysticism. He ex- plained that while he and his associates would not accept tradition unmodified, neither would they break with it altogether. They regarded the old truths as still true, not because they were old, but old because they were true. Nourished on Christian concepts, they were men who sought a philosophy that would enable them, without sacrificing their intellectual integrity, to accept both the measurable facts of science and the immeasurable concepts of the heart and soul. Harris, whose philosophic course is most consistently straightforward, set his face against the Atomists, the Sophists, the Brahminists, the Eleatics, against Spinoza, Hamilton, Hume, Rousseau, Mill, Comte, Cousin, Spencer, and all others whose teachings led, in his opinion, to mechanism, materialism, pantheism, agnosticism, athe- ism. In conformity with Hegelian precept and example, Harris fought less against any one or all of these than against the presumption of any one of them to be the only true system. He studied all sys- tems, even the various oriental mys- ticisms, for what they held that might be ' of value in making the final synthesis, but he consistently denied that they, individ- j ually or collectively, represented the ' whole truth any more than Occidental modes of thought. For him, one was thesis; ' the other, antithesis ; what was wanted was ' a proper synthesis, a ' 'correlation of forces, ' ' ; a reconciliation of opposites, neither one of • which was wholly true or false but merely , in and of itself, inadequate. In short, he sought in the speculative the point at which \ "the two are one." These Hegelian concepts, which the average American, if he considers them at all, treats lightly, were amazingly useful in the practical situation with which the St. Louisans were confronted. Harris saw, on taking a second look, what others have seen — namely, that the involved dialectic of Hegel is simply the philosopher's queer statement of principles which the average successful American knows and applies almost instinctively, and to which he owes a large measure of his practical success. That Hegel helped the leaders of the St. Louis Movement out of the dilemma which the times presented is not be doubted. Hegel's doctrine, that for a man to under- stand anything at all he must see it in its relations, held a large meaning. The American way of life is a continuous compromise. Success in America, whether in business, family, church, or government. The St. Louis Movement 263 requires a constant willingness to conciliate opposing interests. All American experience seemed to substantiate the Hegelian doc- trine that all that is finite is provisional, that no antagonisms are final, and that all objects and institutions are but phases of a process referable to the dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. These Hegelian principles and their implications struck a bewildered group of young intellectuals groping about in a chaos compounded of disunion, war, and reconstruction in a "border" state with compelling force. Ambitious to get the whole lesson, the leaders sought to master the intricacies of Hegel's abstruse dialectic, and some of them succeeded markedly. The lesser lights, content with being practical idealists, accepted Brokmeyer's or Harris' ex- planations. Hegel's involved logic and dialectical subtleties they regarded as merely the professional philosopher's jar- gon for those principles which every practi- cal man knows and applies without triadic mental gymnastics. Hegelian thought, at all events, its practical applications and implications, fitted the men and the times of St. Louis. Circumstances such as these suggest but do not entirely explain why the St. Louis Movement occurred in St. Louis instead of one or several of a half-dozen other cities in the Mississippi Valley. They hint no reason why Harris, for example, left Yale at the end of two and a half years to teach Pitman's shorthand in St. Louis rather than in Chicago or Milwaukee, why Brok- meyer walked out of the woods into St. Louis rather than Cincinnati or Detroit, nor why, shortly before Appomattox, Snider, a graduate of Oberlin, engaged himself by letter to teach in a Catholic College in St. Louis — all at about the same time. It has been said that the best explanation is that winds of doctrine from Germany and similar winds from New England crossed each other's path in St. Louis and caused a rotary motion which whirled a goodly portion of the population up into the empyrean. 21 The St. Louis Movement itself was about as unorganized and formless as it could be and remain a movement at all. Like New England Transcendentalism, it found its modus operandi in a club, denominated the Philosophical Society (organized in Jan- uary, 1866); but even more than its New England predecessor, its meetings and business were left to inspiration or occasion. It had a titular president, Brokmeyer, characterized by Snider as "the primal Titanic demiurge of our Movement." 22 Harris was the acknowledged secretary, but instead of keeping minutes, he saw his chief duty the editing of the Journal of Specu- lative Philosophy — surely more important work, but hardly calculated to perfect and preserve the organization. Both ardent disciples of Hegel, president and secretary mutually encouraged and supported each other; they led the talk and steered the symposium, but they formed no constituted hierarchy. When Brokmeyer was drawn into active pursuits, Harris simply carried on until Brokmeyer left St. Louis alto- gether, whereupon the mantle fell on the shoulders of Harris, who bore it lightly. When Harris himself, and Davidson and Snider, too, left about 1880, the club as a club simply ceased to be. 23 There were within the limits of St. Louis three other philosophical clubs — the Kant Club, 24 the Hegel Club, 25 and the Aristotle Society 26 — not to mention such organi- zations as the Art Society, the Society of Pedagogy, the Shakespeare Society, and a dozen other literary or musical clubs. There were, besides, several others in neighboring cities and states, among all of which there was kept up a continual interchange of visitations by the associated members. Most prominent among these were (1) a philo- sophical club at Quincy, Illinois, under the direction of Samuel Emery, (2) another at Osceola, Missouri, under the guidance of Thomas M. Johnson, (3) the Plato Club of 264 German Thought in America Jacksonville, Illinois, under the leadership of Dr. Hiram K. Jones, and (4) the Kant and Hegel clubs of Chicago, founded by the Rev. Robert A. Holland, not to mention the several schools organized later by Harris and the communal universities directed by Snider in Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and elsewhere, or Davidson's retreats in the Adirondacks, or the edu- cational mission of Brokmeyer among the Indians of the Oklahoma Indian Territory. All this activity betokens a considerable amount of enthusiasm. That out of it all emerged so substantial an achievement as the twenty-two volumes of the most distinguished philosophical journal pro- duced in this country during the nineteenth century bespeaks also the fact that the membership possessed something more than ebullition. Considering that the multiplication of organizations invited divergent points of view and divided energies, their extraordinary tenacity of purpose is all the more remarkable. The stage was all set for them to dissipate their energies in talk; but they followed their leader's command to do and, above all, to publish. The failure of the Philosophical Society to achieve anything like a close organization appears, on first consideration, all the more odd because, unlike the Transcendental Club (which grew out of very informal discussions and never rallied round any- thing so definite as a great book or a single saint, but revered a whole galaxy of high priests from Confucius to Emerson him- self), the St. Louis Movement acknowledged its "original source and inspiration" to have been "in Brokmeyer 's translation of Hegel's Logic." 27 Yet this book came to be a veritable "Book of Fate, destined to stay unborn in the unprinted underworld during the whole life of the St. Louis Movement." 28 The great Bible of the movement remained "in the voluble and expansive genius of Brokmeyer," whence neither his own heroic exertions nor the combined and almost cabalistic efforts of his friends succeeded in extracting anything like a printable draft. So long as he, "a thinker," in Harris' estimation, "of the same order of mind as Hegel," 29 remained among them, he was both Hegel and Hegel's Logic for them. So long as Brokmeyer 's genius, "equal to that of Hegel and more poetical" (says Snider) stood by, they needed no Canonical Book. Time and again, Brokmeyer would, by "one lightning flash of his consuming dialectic," resolve their doubts and explain their queries. 30 In him they found a certain unity that held them together even while such individualists among them as Davidson and Kroeger chafed at the bit. When he left, however, without having given them the great Bible by which to chart their course, the several individuals asserted their individualism. That commandment of their master's they had learned complete. 31 Brokmeyer himself set the example of self- determinism. Like another Thoreau, the primary passion of his life was to be him- self, to go his own way. An idealistic exile, journeyman, steel worker, huntsman, sol- dier, lawyer, and philosopher, he next turned statesman and finally hermit. An egoist, and idealist, he was never an organizer. The mild-mannered but nonetheless individualistic Snider was the next to strike out on his own path. As soon as he had mastered Hegel, he put philosophy behind him, and carefully husbanding his talents, prepared for his Super- Vocation. His years ( 1 865-1 871) of devotion to his eighteen volumes of Hegel — although he recognized this period of intense study as "not without influence" on his future career — he soon came to view as basically nothing more than "a time of pure acquisition." "I was still repeating, not creating, though pos- sibly getting ready for the latter." 32 This "German Era," during which he "not only thought Hegel, but lived Hegel, was Hegel," was to what he spoke of as his 'Life's Central Node" only a "German The St. Louis Movement 265 Overture" 33 that "graved upon me certain lines, which have continued to run through my whole career." 34 They led directly to "Life's Central Node," which meant for him a life dedicated to literature — the pursuit of his Super- Vocation as a "Writer of Books," though it meant keeping close company with "Chum Poverty." 35 He side-stepped every opportunity and refused every offer that might have led him astray, even when it promised sure pecuniary gain, or influence, or power. He was a "talented and lovable man, but he had to be a free lance : he would not submit to being edited and consequently had to publish his work himself; he would not accept administrative responsibilities or tie himself down to an academic position." 36 Davidson, "a jolly drifter and a general free fighter," delighted much more to kick over the traces than help pull the load. 37 Howison, whatever capabilities he later developed, did not show any remarkable administrative ability while he remained in St. Louis. Miss Blow was a very intelligent and energetic woman, but she was a woman and therefore never in the inner circle of the original group. Moreover, if Snider's picture of her is accurate, she was poorly adjusted to her social environment and incapable of assuming a leadership re- quiring pliability, forbearance, and tact. 38 That left Harris to keep some semblance of organization. Harris showed himself effi- cient in many ways, notably as an editor and an educator. In the latter capacity he was particularly effective; but the broad boundaries of all his educational endeavors were already staked out. He was superb as a co-ordinator of details within the frame- work of an organization, both in the public schools and later in the office of the Bureau of Education; 39 but the work of founding and organizing was not his forte. His greatest success in this respect was his establishment of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, through which he made him- self, for a time, the voice of the Movement. He could publish a magazine in which his associates could air their views: he could arrange publication for them, could get them speaking engagements, could provide them with chances to earn a livelihood. He could, and did, keep the community stirred up over philosophy. For moments at a time he could sway and mould and lead. 40 He could lead his hearers to a view of the Eternal City from the rarefied atmosphere of the delectable heights of pure thought; some were moved beyond the capacity of their understanding. But fundamentally Snider was correct in denying that Harris was a philosopher par excellence. Indeed, Harris never claimed pre-eminence as an original thinker but contented himself with making "Hegel talk English." 41 His return East to help found the Concord School was prompted less by a desire to rear an original Amerian philosophy than to further the cause of Emersonian Transcendentalism by leading it into Hegelian channels — to "hitch the two horses, Concord and St. Louis, to his philosophic chariot," 42 as Snider put it. If Snider had had his way, he would not have tried "to capture and reconstruct" New England Transcendentalism, but would have started anew and built from the ground up. He questioned Harris' wisdom in going East at all, and foretold his failure. 43 His misgivings did not prevent his participating in five of the first seven sessions; but when he heard Sanborn berated as "a Yankee renegade for his part in foisting the Western set of philosophers upon Emerson's Concord," 44 he was sure there would be trouble. As for himself, he knew he lacked the necessary "coloni- ality." 45 He felt that Emery, nominally the Director of the School, would not stick, as indeed he did not. Moreover, F. B. Sanborn, officially the Secretary and actually the chief journalistic spirit of the enterprise, puzzled him from the first. He was soon to learn that behind Sanborn's "mellifluous" voice and "winsome" smiles there was "concealed a stinger which he knew how 266 German Thought in America to flesh upon occasions. " 46 Hiram K. Jones's Platonism and W. T. Harris' Hegelianism seemed forever to provoke arguments which even the philosophic serenity and sepulchral voice of the presiding Alcott could not always assuage; 47 and when the disturbing subject of psychology, as pro- mulgated by William James, 48 reared its head, and Tom Davidson's learned sneer and paradoxical sardonicism 49 confounded the confusion, he foresaw the end. In 1882 Emerson died, and Alcott was stricken with apoplexy. Snider rated the third session the best; henceforth, he felt, the course would be downward. He went fishing to Walden Pond and interpreted his failure to get even a nibble as a sign that the St. Louisans were not destined to make any "great haul of philosophical fishes" in Concord. "No,"hetold himself, "the Missis- sippi cannot be made to flow eastward through New England." 50 He could only shake his head over the way things were going. He feared that Harris would not be able to maintain his intellectual primacy over Sanborn, "the unparalleled man of publicity," ever eager to start a new order. The failure of Harris' high-minded effort, he reflected, was inevitable; and so he was not surprised when, after laboring in Concord for a decade, Harris fell back into his old pedagogy — -"lapsed," says Snider, "into the national Bureau of Education and almost quit philosophy." The contrarieties in the times, yes, in Harris himself, were too great. 51 Finally, there was from first to last a strong contingent of dissent. There was Thomas Davidson, a lively and ingenious Scotchman, a veritable free lance, who usually upheld Aristotle against Hegel, and the Greek world against the Christian. He possessed both erudition and spirit but loved nothing better than a good fight in open meeting. Another of the brethren who often kicked over the traces was Kroeger, stout defender of Kant against Hegel and translator of Fichte. Soldan remained usually neutral, but he really preferred Spinoza to any of the Germans. Finally, Snider, one of the triune leadership, was himself something of an apostate. The six hundred pages of his history explain, what- ever else they do not clarify, that all his earnest early efforts to understand Hegel and to follow the Hegelian path eventually came to little. The subjects of his "Literary Bibles" were Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe. He was "a writer of books," not a philosopher. St. Louis Hegelianism, like New England Transcendentalism, embraced a number of inharmonious elements, and neither bred a leader capable of organizing ' and controlling the several "individuals" who comprised it. There were bickerings : and jealousies the moment Brokmeyer '' relinquished the leadership to devote his 1 time and energies to politics. Snider him- self protests his own forbearance and magnanimity too much, as in the case of his tiff with Miss Blow, who had remained ' in St. Louis, and who, on his return, seemed inclined to dispute the leadership with him. 52 And there were deep-seated , differences that grew out of the opposition of East to West, of the native to the foreign. Brokmeyer was of foreign birth; he adopted St. Louis as a temporary scene of his activity; but whether he dwelt in the mansion of the Governor of Missouri or pitched his tent among the Creek Indians of the Oklahoma territory was all one to him. He was no native, no true son of St. Louis. Harris was suspected from the start as a New Englander at heart; "under- neath all his enthusiasm for the West lay an exile's longing for New England." For a while Snider wondered "why Harris should so often bring to us the aged Alcott to say over again what the repeating sayer of the said had already better said, and why he could be so assiduous in admiration of what he had often sufficiently admired." In 1879, when Harris went to Concord, Snider saw the light: Harris had been preparing the time and manner of his "great Depar- The St. Louis Movement 267 ture from the St. Louis Public Schools to a new career purely philosophical." But Snider doubted that "it was the part of wisdom in Harris to make this change." For himself, says he, "my goal remained in the West, even when I was compelled to quit St. Louis. I had no Mayflower tradition to chain me to Plymouth Rock or to any other piece of stone." 53 Aside from these antithetical elements, there was the irrepressible individualism of the several personalities. Brokmeyer demonstrated it less by what he said than by what he did when he turned his back upon the civili- zation for which he had planned so much, and went to live among the savages. For some years, while the time was right and the enthusiasm rife, the Hegelian triadic thought processes served to effect some- thing like a unified movement; but as the times changed, the political scenes shifted, the individualities asserted themselves, the abstruse Hegelian dialectic fell apart, and the movement split in a number of tan- gential directions. At the time when Brokmeyer first agitated the minds of his friends, the practi- cal social and political situation had fully prepared them to receive his message. For the fact needs to be emphasized that in the beginning the movement was more prac- tical than theoretical; its center of gravity was political, not scholastic. 54 "There was an urgent social milieu in which the flint of Brokmeyer struck fire"; he could not have hit upon "a solvent theory to bring order out of chaos or a systematic defense of his faith more to the point than Hegel's." 55 When the first meetings in Old Philoso- phers' Row were held, three of the group — Brokmeyer and the two judges, Jones and Woerner — were already actively engaged in politics. Together they considered the dialectic of politics, political parties, and impending problems. Of most basic concern was the relation of the Federal government to the individual states that comprised it, and the means to prevent each from devouring the other. The uncontrolled desire of both to do just that had resulted in the debacle of war, from the conse- quences of which the men of their gener- ation were trying to extricate themselves. They studied political theories ; they delved into the Constitution of the United States; they planned a philosophical work on the subject that never materialized, unless we accept Judge Woerner's Rebel's Daughter, a novel with an elaborate presentation of political points of view and arguments ; but especially did they pore over Hegel's philosophy of the state and its applica- bility to the United States in the sixties. It seems paradoxical that the men who fled from Prussian tyranny should have chosen for their guide Hegel, nowadays credited with having been the creator and glorifier of the Prussian state. But the paradox is more apparent than real: it rests upon a misalliance between Hegelian theory and subsequent historical events by which what happened in 1848 and later is imputed to Hegel as if he had willed it. 56 However much power Hegel came to surrender to monarchy, and whatever uses his philosophy was put to in Prussia, the essence of his political theory was, from beginning to end, his dictum that "the his- tory of the world is the unfolding of liberty. ' ' Thus the St. Louisans understood him, and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy repeatedly enforced this interpretation. It is discussed at length in the sixth volume (1872) under the head, "Hegel, Prussia, and the Philosophy of Right," 57 where it is argued that it was Hegel's drastic criticism of the radical student corps that first gave him the erroneous reputation of being antidemocratic, but that he "did not become false in Prussia to that con- ception ... of the fully developed rational state . . . [which he had] earlier advocated at Jena," 58 and that the Hegelian state remains the most rational, and the expres- sion which it attained in Hegel's presenta- tion, the most beautiful. 59 268 German Thought in America To the political philosophers of St. Louis nothing was clearer than that Hegel was the prophet of a reunited nation after it had suffered the terrible "dialectic" of civil war. The Southern position, Brokmeyer explain- ed, was what Hegel termed "abstract right"; the Northern, that of an equally "abstract morality"; while the Union represented what Hegel called the "ethical state." This interpretation is clearly stated, though not exactly in these terms, by Harris in his prefatory remarks in the first number of the Journal. At once faith- ful to the Hegelian principle that the his- tory of the world is the progress of liberty, and obedient to the letter, as well as the spirit, of the master, the St. Louis disciples did not shrink from the conflict, but met it, confident that no real synthesis in history is possible except through the tragic process of the dialectic of events. These circumstances explain the rumble of the Hegelian traidic movement through- out the written record of these Hegel-intoxi- cated men and women. They vied with each other in applying the fixed formula of Hegel to every phase of the gigantic strug- gle. Thus, Fort Sumter was the "thesis," Camp Jackson the "antithesis," and the declaration of war the "synthesis." 60 The great real-estate boom, or "illusion," in St. Louis is the "thesis," the founding of the Philosophical Society is the "antithe- sis," and the building of the Eads Bridge is the "synthesis." 61 The Hegelian dogma was applied even to the rivalry between St. Louis and Chicago. The rise of the latter was in "antithesis" to St. Louis. Unshame- facedly they hailed the Great Fire of Chicago as the conclusion of the "phase," following which St. Louis would be free to establish the hoped-for "synthesis." In 1890, Harris recalled that they used the Hegelian dialectic to solve "all problems connected with school-teaching and school management," and that "even the hunting of turkeys and squirrels was the occasion for the use of philosophy." 62 He empha- sized the applicability and significance of this dialectic again and again in the Jour- nal. While Judge Johann G. Woerner refrained from putting it as baldly as did Snider and Harris, nevertheless the idea oi The Rebel's Daughter: A Story of Love, Politics, and War, involving, as it does the clash of Southern and Northern issues, turns upon the same development of thought; 63 and Anna C. Brackett early enshrined the Hegelian triad in some verses entitled "Comprehension," which conclude that only when the one is twain, And where the two are one again, Will truth no more be sought in vain. 64 For the matter before us several ap- proaches are possible. We may consider the movement in its several relations to reli- gion, politics, philosophy, education, and art, or we may consider it from the point of view of the chief participants. For the sake of economy, a combination of the two methods may serve. Since the movement was not primarily religious, what has been said on that score may be deemed sufficient, except for such incidental observations as will be made in connection with individuals to be discussed hereafter. The political activity of the group has been sketched. 65 It is best viewed in relation to Brokmeyer, who was most prominent in politics. Our examination of Harris will provide numerous opportunities to consider the educational activities of the group, although he had many assistants whose careers merit individual attention. The philosophical endeavors were shared alike by all members, although Brokmeyer and Harris took the lead. To Harris, as editor of the Journal and as a prime mover in the Concord School, belongs the primacy, the twenty-two volumes of the Journal and his books on Hegel's Logic and the Psycho- logic Foundations of Education affording an objective body of data for evaluation. In Snider are concentrated the literary ambi- tions of the movement, although he, too. The St. Louis Movement 2G9 had numerous assistants, as well as other interests. Brokmeyer and the Translation of Hegel's Logic To resume, then, we turn to Brokmeyer, whose career remains vague partly because of his quixotic manner of living in retire- ment, partly because historians and bi- ographers have unaccountably overlooked him. 66 It is not known precisely when and by what means Brokmeyer came by his knowledge of Hegel. He appears generally to have given the impression that he was born "a full-fledged Hegelian." 67 In his revolt against society and his headlong measures to achieve "universalized emanci- pation," he seemed to his friends the perfect embodiment of the daemonic and titanic in Nature, as elemental as Nature herself. It came, therefore, as a great surprise to Snider when in 1904, while talking over old times, Brokmeyer confessed his spiritual evolution to have grown out of the ortho- dox Lutheranism of Germany and the hidebound fundamentalism of the Bible belt of the United States. During his stay in Mississippi he had been a member in good standing of the Baptist Church, and by letters of transfer from the church had won admittance to Georgetown University. But while there, Brokmeyer went on to confess, "I got to reading on the outside and slowly began drifting away from my former moorings." 68 He gave little further intima- tion of any other influence that led him to Hegel except that in Providence he came to know Dr. Hedge, and that he drew from Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany his first conception of Hegel's philosophy. This con- ception must have been faint, for Hedge's book contains little that is pivotal in Hegel's system; although Hedge himself may have supplemented, by way of person- al explication, what his book failed to supply. Another important result of Brokmeyer's sojourn at Brown University was that there he discovered New England Transcenden- talism. He greedily appropriated the ideas of the Newness, carrying Transcendental notions of individualism, originality, and worship of nature to their extreme conclu- sions. His flight from the established social order to the backwoods of Missouri was nothing plaintive like Emerson's bidding good-bye to a "proud world." The Yankee experiments in living, at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and elsewhere, were diminutive compared with the way of life he adopted for himself in Missouri and the colonization scheme which he promoted in Illinois about 1856. 69 Thoreau's famed flight into his shanty on Walden Pond was an inconse- quential lark compared to Brokmeyer's life in the primeval forest, in defiance of Family, Church, State, and Society. He transcended Transcendentalism. A Mechanic's Diary makes it clear that the main lines of his thought were already graved on his mind by 1856. Hegel was already his god, 70 while Kant and Aristotle contended for second place. 71 When Harris and Brokmeyer first chanced to meet in 1858, the latter (although already a self- confessed Hegelian and ready to answer questions by the book) was still not fully emancipated from his quixotic romanti- cism. He had just returned to St. Louis for one of his brief periodic trips to earn from society the money necessary to keep up his anti-social life in the woods. 72 Shortly after their meeting, he disappeared. A year later, Harris, George Stedman, and Dr. J. H. Watters found him in his wild retreat nearly dead from a congestive attack. Rescued from his hermitage, and restored to health, he was persuaded by his benefactors to give up his primitive life and to settle down in the city to purely intellectual pursuits. 73 Themselves poor, they staked him to food and established him in the attic of an old lodging house in South Market Street, Brokmeyer for his part agreeing to trans- late and thus to make available to them the 270 German Thought in America wonder-working truths of Hegel's Wissen- schaft der Logik (after the 1841 Henning edition). Meanwhile Harris had drummed up a small group of "respectable vagabonds," who formed themselves into a loose organi- zation known as the Kant Club, not to be confused with the more formal organization by the same name founded by Harris in 1874. Of these "fifty-eighters" little is known. Snider, the historian of the move- ment, did not meet with the group until 1865. Dr. J. H. Watters of McDowell's Medical College and George Stedman were two, and Ira Divoll and Dr. R. A. Holland were probably two others of the group. The members were few; they met informally, their several boarding-house rooms being the place for their more-or-less chance meetings. Harris at this time knew little more of Hegel than the name; he was still immersed in Kant. While Brokmeyer pro- claimed Hegel's Logic to be "the book to tackle," he approved their study of Kant as good preparation for Hegel, whom he hoped they would be ready to receive when his translation would be done. Meanwhile he set blithely to work to "make Hegel talk English," as ironically enough, Harris found it necessary, many years later, to attempt doing all over again. 74 Brokmeyer lived the life of a medieval ascetic during 1859-1860, preparing his own meals and sleeping on a pallet on the floor, wrestling with the abstrusities of Hegel, the confusing nomenclature, and his own difficulties with the English medium. 75 Although it was planned to have the trans- lation published at once, what steps, if any, were taken at the time cannot now be ascertained. Soon the plan was obscured by the more pressing events of the Civil War, in the prosecution of which Brokmeyer him- self led the way, swapping off his Hegel for Hardie's Infantry Tactics and sporting soon an eagle on his shoulder straps. Shortly after the end of the war, the Journal was founded. In view of the fact that Harris found room in it for several translations at least as long as Brokmeyer's, his failure to publish what he and Brok- meyer agreed to be the greatest philosophi- cal book takes on added significance. Snider's implied criticisms of Harris and the associated members for their failure to per- form their "first duty" of revising and printing "this central work" explain little. The simple conclusion of any disinterested student who takes the trouble to examine Brokmeyer's manuscript (and there is no good evidence to show that it has been looked at by anyone since the Missouri Historical Society acquired it in 1921) is that Brokmeyer's best efforts left it un- printable. 76 But it would be a mistake to assume that since Brokmeyer failed in his efforts to translate Hegel in writing that he failed also in expounding him verbally. Everyone who heard him discourse testifies to the pungen- cy and clarity of his exposition of Hegel — among them Snider and Harris, both of whom possessed intellectual integrity and some philosophical perspicacity. Certainly Harris can be trusted. Moreover, there are Brokmeyer's nine "Letters on Faust," 77 which form an intelligent application of Hegelian dialectic to Goethe's poem, and there is A Mechanic's Diary, which demon- strates Brokmeyer's ability to write a clear, crisp, straightforward sentence. His main difficulty with the Logic appears to have been that having made an ultraliteral translation, he was unable to recast it into English idiom. The failure to get Hegel's Logic printed was, in Snider's opinion, a serious defection of the members of the Philosophical Socie- ty. "The publication of the Logic . . . would have anchored our movement, which because of this capital deficiency has shown itself unsteady, aimless, and vanishing." 78 Snider's observation appears sound because the school did eventually disintegrate, but it is to be remembered (1) that the strong individualism — "self-activity" was their The St. Louis Movement 271 word for it — of all the members would have defeated any effort at long-sustained and concerted effort anyway, and (2) that while the movement split into several constituent parts, each of the scattered members be- came a co-ordinating center in its own right and situation, thus affecting perhaps more people and spreading its influence over a wider area than would have been possible for a movement, however close-knit and unified, that remained localized in St. Louis. Before we can follow these later developments, we shall have to consider Brokmeyer's crowning achievement for the movement, namely, his organization of the Philosophical Society, its membership, and its work. During the war Harris had remained in St. Louis and had kept the home-fires burning. Brokmeyer returned shortly after Appomattox. Snider met him less than a vear later at the Pension Francaise of Pierre Guilloz on Walnut Street, and was at first rebuffed by the daemonic in this "back- woods philosopher, ' ' but their paths crossed again during the early fall of 1865 when he accompanied his friends J. G. Woerner and Dr. J. Z. Hall to a small gathering at Harris' house in Salisbury Street. 79 Follow- ing other preliminary meetings, the formal organization was effected on January 22, 1866. A constitution was adopted and Brokmeyer was elected President; Howison and Watters, Vice-Presidents; Hill, Treas- urer; and Harris, Secretary. There were three classes of members : Directors (or full members), Associates, and Auxiliaries, the last being mainly philosophers and scien- tists not resident in St. Louis. There were no dues, and minutes were not regularly kept. A roll of the membership can be recon- structed today only by patching together stray bits of information. 80 The establishment of the Philosophical Society welded into a visible body the Hegelians of the West and set the stage upon which Harris decided early in 1866 to show off his friend from "back East, — Amos Bronson Alcott, the Plato of Con- cord." Nothing was further from Harris' design or Alcott's wish than that this stage should provoke an open clash between East and West, but neither as yet knew Brok- meyer well enough to know that the only thing about him that could be predicted with certainty was his unpredictability. Alcott and Brokmeyer had met earlier, back in 1859, when Alcott came to "con- verse" with the first, pre-war group of philosophers. But on that occasion Brok- meyer had kept the peace. He was not yet the high and mighty commander of men. So he contented himself with damning his friend, William Hyde of the Missouri Republican, for persuading him to give up an evening with his beloved books to go hear this wise man from the East, who had turned out to be an "unmitigated charla- tan" parading about in the nineteenth century in the cast-off rags and tags of second- and third-rate neo-Platonists. The rest of his steam he let off harmlessly in his diary, by calling Alcott mild names, such as "peddler of infantile asininities of mum- my wrappage," the result of having "bur- rowed round until he hit upon the works of Iamblichus and Plotinus." 81 On Alcott's second visit, things were different. In the first place, Harris had, in a measure, mismanaged the affair; certainly he had not exercised his usual circumspec- tion. The Society had been formed on January 22, ostensibly to gather support for the publication of Brokmeyer's trans- lation of Hegel's Logic. President Brok- meyer had been asked to institute the programs of the Society by presenting his exegesis of Faust. Then it developed that apparently Harris had hurried up the organization of the Society to have it in readiness to receive Alcott. Brokmeyer had delivered only the first of his discourses on Faust. Brokmeyer did not like the looks of things. Still he contented himself, during the first of Alcott's lectures, with sniffing audibly, and once he observed that he had 272 German Thought in America difficulty in following Alcott's theory of "lapse," or emanation, by which he could derive, through some process of reasoning incomprehensible to Brokmeyer, from the indestructible, unsayable One any resultant at all, thus making a reduction from an irreducible and unknown Godhead to a known atom. For himself, he said, he cared not a fig for divining as against reasoning. It was at the seventh meeting that Brok- meyer's daemon overpowered him. On this occasion some twenty men had gathered "into a kind of circle before the new Orpheus," who read in a "sepulchral tone" from slips of paper, which, as he finished with them, he threw down in an annoying manner as if to say, "There, gentlemen, what say you to that ?" Directly in front of the prophet sat Brokmeyer, eyes alert and mischievous, ready to act both as chief interpreter and hierophant. Soon Alcott began to suspect that as a mouth- piece Brokmeyer was not altogether trust- worthy. To some of his oracles Brokmeyer gave "an easy sober signifiance, which all understood, but others he seemed to turn inside out and then shiver into smither- eens." Finally he picked up one that had just been read, and "at the fiery touch of his dialectics, set off with his Mephisto- phelean chuckle, he simply exploded it into mist with a sort of detonation, as if it were a soap bubble filled with explosive gas." At this point Alcott began to realize that, by some Hegelian process which he did not understand, his oracles were being made to contradict themselves. He grew testy, as a man well might; then he lost his temper; and finally, turning upon Brokmeyer, said : "Mr. Brokmeyer, you confuse us with the multiplicity of your words and the profu- sion of your fancy." "This," says Snider, "was the first wholly intelligible saying of Orpheus that evening." Brokmeyer, visibly restraining himself and recollecting that he was Mr. Alcott's host, replied calmly, "Perhaps I do"; but it was evident to the men trained in Hegelian logic at "Brok- meyer University" that if it ever came to a serious intellectual tussle between this "poor old man, thin in thews and in thought," and their Titanic president, the New Englander would leave hardly "a philosophic grease spot." 82 Other eastern luminaries came to St. Louis to shed or reflect light, but of them all only Emerson created any great stir in Old Philosophers' Row, when, the winter following Alcott's ill-starred visit of 1866, Harris imported the chief of the Transcen- dental diviners. On their side, the St. Louisans instantly recognized Emerson as made of firmer metal than Alcott; for the moment the introductory formalities were over. Snider observed, he took the offensive by "whipping out his rapier and giving sly but very courtly digs at our Teutonic idol." He observed plaintively that he could find in Hegel "no pithy saying or memorable metaphor": "When I fish in Hegel, I cannot get a bite." Snider sighed for Brok- meyer, who would given Emerson "some of his much-desired pithy sentences . . . en- wrapped in a metaphorical tornado which would have whirled him off his feet." But Brokmeyer had enough of Concordians and kept his distance; so Snider mustered enough audacity to lecture Emerson "with some degree of ardor" on the virtues of systematic thought. In his youthful self- conceit and ardent devotion to Hegel, Snider did not realize that Emerson knew tal that — had known it ever since the early lhirties when he had tried to give order to his thoughts in Nature ; nor did Snider then know that Emerson had given up the meth- od as unsatisfactory, had lapsed back into an intuitional phase, and was only recently coming round to something approaching, though still far from identical with, the method which Snider was championing. 83 Little is known about the rest of Emer- son's stay in St. Louis, which seems not to have extended beyond a day or two. Yet he continued to demonstrate some enthusiasm for "Harris and his men," maintained an The St. Louis Movement 273 auxiliary membership in the Philosophical Society, subscribed for the Journal, and before the year was out was twice more in St. Louis, on at least one of which occasions he lectured before the Society. 84 Others came to St. Louis, but only Alcott returned repeatedly, "to repeat again," says Snider, "what had been already too oft repeated." For the rest of the time, the days passed uneventfully enough. Harris saw to it that the members worked industriously. The translations from Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Kant, and a half-dozen other thinkers proceeded satisfactorily, and many of them found their way into print in the Journal. The Society continued to meet regularly. 85 The first serious defection from the ranks came in 1868 when Brokmeyer, the "high- throned Olympian" who might have ex- celled even Hegel if, as Snider thought, he had stuck to philosophy instead of allowing his daemon (and Frank Blair) to turn him into political pursuits. 86 Brokmeyer ex- plained that he was only temporarily for- saking his true vocation "to work out his world-view of philosophy, in literature, in poetry — and become a Writer of Books," in order, first, to devote himself to those human institutions that needed reforming. Thirty years later he returned to his earlier vocation, only to discover that he was now incapable of doing what, as a man of forty, he might have disciplined himself to do. Even though he failed to get himself in hand and failed in his ambition to give every American the opportunity to read Hegel in English, Brokmeyer performed two notable services: (1) he put into circu- lation several copies of his manuscript translation — no one knows how many, and (2) he inspired Harris to carry on in a fash- ion that never won Brokmeyer's whole- hearted approval, but that was doubtless more effective than Brokmeyer's own plans could have been if they had been realizable. On the first score it was long assumed that the fragment of Brokmeyer's transla- tion in the Missouri Historical Library was the only one in existence. While there were conjectures that other copies existed, none came to light until Professor Paul Russell Anderson found a complete copy in Jack- sonville, Illinois. That discovery led to clues concerning still another complete draft presumably stored somewhere in Quincy, Illinois, but not yet located, and to an earlier draft, dating back to 1859- 186 1, part of which was found in the pos- session of Miss Edith Davidson Harris, daughter of W. T. Harris. 87 How these manuscripts came into being and how they circulated is part of the story of Hegel's introduction in America. In the Preface to his book, Hegel's Logic, Harris intimates that Brokmeyer's first translation was made in longhand ; he speaks of copying every word of it. Actually, it seems that Brokmeyer dictated part of it to Harris, who took it down in Pitman shorthand. 88 In conformity with the original plan, Harris' copy was submitted in 1861 to the publisher Henry Bohn, who rejected it because he considered it unpublishable unless first "revised by a fluent English scholar," though he doubted that even then it would prove salable. Harris' copy circulated among the members of the Philosophical Society, who were commissioned to study and revise it. Brokmeyer himself was active in the revision and gave portions of the original draft to Snider and C. F. Childs for correction. 89 Harris, too, was busy, apparently making a completely new copy in i860. How many complete copies and parts of copies came into existence during the sixties and later can only be guessed at today. In 1875 a manuscript, comprising twenty- seven sections in large folders, was sent to S. H. Emery, jr., of Quincy, Illinois, at his own request. Miss Sally Williams, copied it for him, and the original was returned in 1876. 90 Two years later Emery had a copy of his copy made for Dr. Hiram K. Jones of Jacksonville (at Jones's request) . The Jatt er , 274 German Thought in America bound in three volumes, is today in the Illinois College Library. 91 About 1882 another copy was struck off by Meeds Tuthill for the use of the Hegel Club of Chicago, organized about this time by R. A. Holland. The several St. Louis copies underwent various vicissitudes. Harris took at least one of them when he went East; others appear to be irretrievably lost. About 1890 Brokmeyer began a new revision, some of which was typed by his daughter before she eloped in July, 1894. He continued to make alterations. Finally he decided to add extensive notes. In this manner he con- tinued until 1902, but at his death in 1906 he remained still dissatisfied with his work. 92 What is more important than the fate of Brokmeyer's translation is that what Brok- meyer gave his associates was accurate, however literal and crabbed in style. It was no attempted restatement or populariza- tion of Hegel in Brokmeyer's terms, as was Coleridge's exegesis of Kant and Schelling. It was Hegel as nearly as Brokmeyer could render him in English. Of equal importance is the fact that a number of copies were in circulation. Harris carried one (or several) with him to Concord and later to Washing- ton. 93 Samuel Emery and Edward McClure showed up with another copy (in three bound volumes) at the Concord summer sessions. What the precise influence of Brok- meyer's translation may have been upon the younger, or for that matter on the older, generation of Transcendentalists who partook of the philosophical repasts in Concord during the eighties remains largely conjectural; but it is safe to say that the influence, impossible as it is today to trace the various journeyings of the several manuscripts, was pervasive. But Brok- meyer's most notable achievement lay in his inspiring Harris to promulgate Hegel- ianism far and wide. He kept the Society together for some years longer, at least until 1880, when he went to Concord. The twenty-two volumes of his philosophical Journal, his position as the virtual head of the Concord School, and later his influential career as U.S. Commissioner of Education, together with his half-thousand books, articles, and addresses, spread Hegelianism into all the departments of life — public and private — that his multiform activities touched. Harris and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy The development of Harris' philosophic personality began in a prolonged, almost quixotic, search, for which he found little help in the formal educational facilities of his native New England. Following a pre- paratory-school education that included a J year each in five academies, he entered Yale ; but his peripatetic training, his restless- ■ ness, and his dissatisfaction with the college 1 curriculum (which did not satisfy his im- patience to study the "three moderns — modern science, modern literature, and • modern history") caused him to leave in the ; middle of his junior year for the West in pursuit of vaguely defined goals of self- realization. 94 Several years earlier he had encountered Emerson's essays and, like other young men of his generation, taken to heart, as confirmatory evidence of his own vague convictions and aspirations, Emer- son's advice to oppose formalism, authority, and orthodoxy. His revolution became complete when he met Alcott, who came to New Haven to hold "Conversations" during the first two weeks of March, 1857. Alcott disabused his mind of the phrenological psychology and convinced him of the "doctrine of pre-existence and of the primordial power of the soul." In Alcott he saw Idealism personified — "a living com- manding personality" illustrating "the supremacy of the soul and the ideality of the material world." This he later called his "Aufklarung," his progression from an epoch of "negation" to "the attitude of insight and reliance on reason." Alcott The St. Louis Movement 275 saved him from the worst vagaries of spiritualism and led him upon his Lehrjahre, as he later came to think of his develop- ment in terms of Wilhelm Meister's Lehr- jahre, Wanderjahre, and Meisterschaft. 95 Soon after Harris showed up in St. Louis in 1857, ostensibly to teach the new Pitman shorthand in the Franklin School, he found himself teaching a half-dozen subjects besides and serving also as assistant princi- pal. Promotions followed rapidly: he be- came principal of the Clay School in 1858, assistant superintendent of the city school system in 1867, and superintendent a year later — a position which he held until 1880, when he left St. Louis for Concord. These cumulative responsibilities soon made of the young man a solid citizen, nonetheless eager than formerly to learn but less given to chasing will-o'-the-wisps. During his first year in St. Louis he read "an eloquent essay by Theodore Parker on German literature" which spoke of the high "German achievements in philology and history, in theology and philosophy" and of the ascent of "four philosophical lights — Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel." About the same time, he discovered Wilhelm Meister, a book that turned him from "books of protest" to "constructive books." "On the frontier," he observed, "man becomes a builder of civilization and has no time to criticize it." He took to heart the lesson he saw running "like a continuous thread" through Wilhelm Meister — Goe- the's gospel of culture, "finally culminating in the nobler aim of building up the institu- tions of humanity." 96 The better to prepare for his Lehrjahre, he turned back to philoso- phy. He recalled Parker's recommendation of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Brokmeyer, who had just then come into Harris' orbit, enthusiastically seconded the recommendation . Harris was twenty-three when, in 1858, he chanced to meet Brokmeyer, then an iron-worker, at a meeting in the old Mercantile Library, where the conversation turned upon theosophy, mesmerism, and phrenology — from the toils of which Harris had just extricated himself. Brokmeyer singled out Harris as the one sane person in the assemblage, accosted him on leaving, engaged him in talk, and began to question him as they walked along. When the name of Cousin, one of Harris' late divinities, came up, Brokmeyer undertook to show his companion that the French eclectic "con- tradicted himself on every page," and to make the demonstration, he went with Harris to his quarters. "This," says Brok- meyer, "was the beginning of our friend- ship, and the nucleus of the group of students who soon gathered together." This is also the beginning of the first Kant class in America, the inspiration of the first American translations of Fichte and Schel- ling, and the initiation of the first systemat- ic study of Hegel in America. 97 Harris had possessed a copy of Kant's first Kritik since 1857. When the new pre- ceptor appeared, he had already spent a year making "repeated attacks upon the work, reading a few pages at a time and turning back to the beginning again," only to find Kant's style "so difficult" that he "did not seem to understand one page of it all." He professed not to be "particularly discouraged by all this," because he found, to his great delight, that he was acquiring "a power of reading other works which formerly had been very heavy and dull." However, under Brokmeyer's tutelage, he broke through the shell and began to reach the kernel of Kant's critical philosophy. This experience he interpreted as forming "a real epoch" in his life. 98 By 1859 Harris felt himself prepared to grapple with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Fichte and Hegel at first proved much harder to follow in their systematic exposi- tions than anything he had encountered in Kant. Fichte he soon relegated to a second, and Schelling to a third, place after Hegel, in two of whose books he found all he wanted at the time and more than he could 276 German Thought in America digest. These were the Wissenschaft der Logik and Philosophie der Geschichte — "the two works of Hegel," he said in 1887, "that made and still make on me a deeper im- pression than all other books." Of the former he could make little before 1866, when Brokmeyer returned from the war and resumed his tutorship; with the latter he had better success because he saw the immediacy of its political application to the war-torn era in which he lived. Meanwhile the main lines of his thinking during the war years seem to have been worked out by himself: In 1863 I arrived at the insight which Hegel has expressed in his Fur-sich-seyn or Being-for-itself, which I called and still call 'independent being.' I did not obtain this insight by study of Hegel's logic, how- ever, but rather by following out the lines of thought begun in 1858. The next year he arrived at "an insight into the logical subordination of fate to freedom": the idea that the totality of conditions cannot have a fate outside it, but must be spontaneous in itself and self- determined ; and hence that all fate and all changes not spontaneous must be secondary and derivative from a higher source that is free." Harris defined philosophy from the epistemological point of view as a science that aims to discover the first principles by the intellect. Lest such a philosophy be considered abstract, he repeatedly iterates his contention that "the test of any system of philosophy is the account it gives of the institutions of civilization," whence it follows, because Hegel "is pre-eminently the thinker that explains and justifies institu- tions," that Hegel is the guide to be heark- ened to. 100 But "thought alone," he con- cluded, "makes life valuable, and has power to protect and preserve us." 101 Thus he held firmly to the conviction of the idealist that spiritual life determines the material, and accepted Kant's a priori possessions of the mind as conditioning the world. Time and Space are two of these possessions, the necessary presuppositions of the extension and multiplicity of objects. But a deeper principle than space and time is Causality. It is their logical condition. "Causality implies both Time and Space . . . [which] are in a certain sense included in causality as a higher unity." The principle of causality is as "deep and logical a condition of ex- perience as . . . time and space are them- selves." No act of experience is complete without all three. 102 In any series of causes we see each cause presupposing a preceding cause; but a real cause requires no cause behind it. It is ' independent, absolute, self-caused. Hence there is Cause and Self-Cause; 103 that is,; there are two classes of beings in the world ' — dependent and independent. 104 The latter are their own causality; they are free and morally responsible, endowed with causal energy, hence with power to build them- ; selves. While they are not fully realized, ■ they are potentially realizable. The presup- position of man as a developing free and independent individual is "the perfect individuality of the Absolute Reason, or God." 105 Self-Cause, or Self-Activity, had many stages or degrees of realization, depending on the use made of sensation, understand- ing, and reason. Harris proceeds, in Kantian terms, to distinguish among (1) men of "common sense," who see the world as a number of real and independent objects, 106 (2) men of understanding (or reflection), to whom relativity is the highest category of thought, 107 and (3) men of pure reason, who represent the highest manifestation of self- activity in man. 108 Upon this "psychologic system" as outlined in some detail in his Psychologic Foundations of Education, 10 * Harris proceeds to construct his views of freedom, immortality, and God. 110 The multiform applications and implications of these premises, together with the extent of his reliance upon Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and most notably, Hegel are beyond the The St. Louis Movement 277 possibility of representation here. This object had been satisfactorily achieved by the ingenious and meticulous work of Marietta Kies in her Introduction to the Study of Philosophy Comprising Passages from his [W. T. Harris'] Writings (New York, 1889), which comprises quoted pas- sages from his writings, selected and ar- ranged, with commentary and illustrations (with Harris' "full consent and approval"), in a very logical order. Lest Harris be regarded as an American mouthpiece of Hegel, a mere echo of Ger- man philosophy, sight must not be lost of his assertion in 1868 (repeated many times thereafter) that what was wanted was not "American thought as much as American thinkers." 111 However much he derived from Hegel, his concern with Plato, Aris- totle, Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte, and Schel- ling, 112 as well as with the oriental philoso- phers, 113 is not to be minimized in the devel- opment of his philosophic individuality. His interest in oriental thought, by which he meant Indian philosophy, ante- dated by two years his acquaintance with Hegel, but he did not attain real familiarity with it until 1861. He had only a slight knowledge of Sanskrit, but provided him- self with the best translations available. 114 By the time he launched the Journal, he was as apt to insert a discussion of Vedantic or Buddhistic concepts into an article on kindergarten methods as into an outline of the history of philosophy or, later, into a government report on educational proce- dure. 115 But he remained too uncompro- misingly American and Christian to admit the validity of the fundamental ideas of Indian philosophy. Individual oriental con- cepts appealed to him, and he recognized the value of Hindu thought for western culture, but on the whole he interpreted it as abstractionism or nihilism. 116 Dedicated to a progressive and enterprising America, he could not accept what he deemed an es- sentially negative or static creed. Schooled as he was in Hegelian dialectics, he found in it the contrasts and opposites to Amer- ican ideas that moved his dialectical thought processes. Harris' unbounded faith in the verbal inspiration of gospel truth according to Hegel and his eagerness to lead his friends to the same glimpses of rarefied pure thought that he was experiencing about the time of the end of the Civil War, and which significantly coincided with Brokmeyer's return to St. Louis, led to the formation of the Philosophical Society in January, 1866. Snider, who had come to St. Louis the year before, found Harris already possessed of Hegel's works in the original and bent on forming an "inner group who might become agitators and promulgators." Always me- thodical, Harris made the rounds, helped them with their studies, and kept them at their tasks. 117 For himself, he set to the severe task of copying Brokmeyer's trans- lation of the Logic, correcting it, and preparing a draft for publication when the opportunity should arise. The matter of publication presented difficulties. None knew it better than Harris. He never acquired a nice ear for style ; he could write clearly, but never with the distinction of a stylist. His best efforts — represented at this time by an essay in which he attacked the "materialism" and "agnosticism" of Herbert Spencer — had come back to him repeatedly, most recently from the North American Review, together with a critical letter from the co-editor, Charles Eliot Norton. The refusal of this article provided the last or direct impetus that called into being the Journal of Specu- lative Philosophy. Although Brokmeyer had earlier suggested the idea of a periodical, and Harris himself had consulted Alcott and Emerson on the advisability of found- ing a "Speculative Journal," nothing had come of it, except that Harris had kept the plan in mind. Shortly after receiving Nor- ton's rebuff, he brought with him to one of the meetings of the Society a tin box, which he deposited with the declaration: "We are 278 German Thought in America going to have a German philosophical magazine." When Howison asked who was going to supply the necessary money, Har- ris replied, "We don't propose to print it. We are going to make papers and read them here, and put them away in this tin box." Then he proceeded to read Norton's letter to the group assembled in Brokmeyer's office, stopping to make "sarcastic com- ments which made all laugh." The reading concluded, he "jumped up, clenched his fist and brought it down defiantly upon the empty air, saying, 'Now I am going to start a Journal myself.' This he did at once [and] the first number appeared in January, 1867, " 118 the condemned article on Spencer leading others resurrected from the little tin box, among them also Brokmeyer's "Letters on Faust." 119 The historian of the St. Louis Movement suggested in the title of his book the relative importance of philosophy, literature, educa- tion, and art, in the order named. The following analysis of the contents of the 9,254 pages comprising the twenty- two volumes of the Journal substantiates this rating and indicates that the Journal is a faithful mirror of the movement. PHILOSOPHY: Total pages, 7,411 Translations, History, Criticism: 5,632 pages ancient philosophy: 308 pages Trismegistus Sanhyka Karika Zoroaster Parmenides Plato Aristotle Porphyry medieval philosophy: 56 pages Bonaventura Aquinas modern philosophy: 4,278 pages French: 146 pages Descartes Lachelier 83 4 11 16 86 81 28 36 20 91 55 Philosophy : Modern, (continued) Dutch: Spinoza German: 3,400 pages Leibnitz Kant Fichte Schelling Hegel Goeschel Schopenhauer Minor figures Baeder Bayrhoffer Delff Herbart Jacobi Lambert Lotze Michelet Noire Preyer Scheffler Zeller General Essay English: 501 pages Berkeley Spencer Bradley Buckle Minor figures Boole DeMorgan Green Martineau, J. Oliphant Tyndall American: 45 pages Edwards Emerson Alcott James, Henry, Sr. James, Wm. Polish: Trentowski Swedish: Swedenborg Italian: Rosmini 60 127 938 401 133 1,244 159 136 218 2 19 12 49 10 12 14 22 18 30 7 15 44 42 117 70 64 104 11 9 19 32 23 IO 4 52 42 22 Philosophy of Science: 122 pages General 81 Darwin 41 Philosophy of Mathematics: 58 pagts The St. Louis Movement 279 'hilosophy, Modern, (continued) ditorials, Comments, etc.: 820 pages 460 169 190 Correspondence, notes, discussion Book notices Book reviews 120 riginal speculation: 121 i,779 pages Abbott, Francis Alcott, A. B. Anderson, Jos. G. Bayrhoffer, C. T. Blood, Benj. P. Boulting, Wm. Brinton, D. G. Burns-Gibson, J. Cabot, J. E. Caird, Edward Day, H. N. D'Orielli, A. Dewey, John Eliot, J. E. Fullerton, Geo. S. Gulliver, Julia S. Hall, G. Stanley Halsted, Geo. B. Harris, W. T. 122 Hazard, R. G. Hebbard, S. S. Henkle, W. D. Henry, Francis A. Hickok, Laurens P. Hodgson, S. H. Holland, R. A. James, William Jones, Hiram K. Kapp, Ernest Kimball, Wm, H. {pseud. Theron Gray) Kroeger, A. E. Lutoslawski, W. Morgan, H. H. Mitchell, Ellen M. Patten, Simon N. Peabody, Eliz. P. Peirce, C. S. Randolph, Richard Rigg, J. M. Salter, W. M. Sewall, May W. Sheldon, W. L. Spence, Payton Stearns, F. P. Stirling, James H. Thompson, John C. Tuthill, Meeds Vera, A. Ward, James 14 62 12 13 53 10 3 10 12 19 33 7 20 6 30 15 6 7 229 22 38 19 128 8 20 50 96 65 11 76 7 5 7 8 10 19 45 11 16 3i 12 H 83 9 79 17 106 100 3i Philosophy : Modern, Original Speculation (continued) Watson, John 40 Weiss, John 19 Woerner, J. G. 13 Anonymous 3 LITERATURE: Total pages, 1,178 Criticism and History: 1,066 pages Homer 115 Bion 8 Dante 222 Shakespeare 286 Milton 4 Coleridge 12 Shelley 68 Goethe 323 Schiller 20 Turgenieff 8 Original Verse: 112 pages EDUCATION (includes Educational Psy- chology) : 123 Total pages, 281 ART: Total pages, 229 Artists: 82 pages Leonardo da Vinci 9 Michael Angelo 27 Raphael 28 Turner 18 History of Art: 58 pages Criticism: 89 pages Grimm, Herman 82 Winckelmann 7 MUSIC: Total pages, 67 Composers: 30 pages Beethoven 18 Mendelssohn 6 Schumann 6 History and Criticism: 37 pages MISCELLANEOUS: Total pages, 88 Sanskrit 5 Grammar 1 4 Japanese Character 43 Library Science (classification of books) 14 Friendship, Essay on 11 280 German Thought in America Thus, the 9,254 pages classified are distributed as follows: Philosophy 7,411 pages, or 80.1 Literature 1,178 12.7 Education 281 3.0 Art 229 2.5 Music 67 .7 Miscellaneous 88 .9 That the Journal would devote more space to German philosophy than to any other is to be expected. The 4,576 pages 124 devoted to translations from or the history and criticism of philosophical writings are distributed as follows: German 3.4°° pages, or 74.3% English 501 10.9 Ancient 308 6.7 French 146 3.2 Dutch 60 1.3 Polish 52 1.1 American 45 1.0 Swedish 42 0.9 Italian 22 0.5 Among the Germans, Hegel, of course, gets the greater share of attention. A further breaking down of the 3,400 pages devoted to German philosophers shows the following distribution : Hegel Kant Fichte Goeschel Schopenhauer Schelling Leibnitz All others 125 1,244 pages, or 36.6% 932 27.6 401 11. 8 159 4-7 136 4.0 133 4-o i^7 3-7 262 7.7 Several observations are in order. First, while Hegel, Fichte, Kant, and Schelling among the transcendentalists were of prime interest, the concern was not merely with these four; thirteen lesser figures received enough attention to justify the conclusion that the St. Louis philosophers read not only deeply in a few German critical tran- scendentel philosophers but also widely among their disciples and commentators. Second, the remarkable interest in Goe- schel is not as odd as it may appear when it is recalled that Goeschel among the post- Hegelians led those who sought to connect the theistic idea of God with the Hegelian concept of divinity. 128 Third, the 127 pages devoted to Leibnitz indicate a real interest in the author of the Monadology, represented particularly by translations made by F. H. Hedge and A. E. Kroeger, which seek to demonstrate that "God alone is the primitive unity," the "Pre-established Harmony." 127 Fourth, the extraordinary concern of Brokmeyer's men with Schopenhauer, while never intense, was reasonably well sustained — much more so, for instance, than concern with Spencer, the other of their chief aversions among nineteenth-century thinkers. Schopenhauer is represented by translations or discussions in 1867, 1871, 1874, 1875, 1877, 1879, and 1883. J. H. Stirling's fifty-page article on Schopen- hauer's relation to Kant — so severe as to be just short of scurrilous in its attack — was used by Harris as the leading article in the 1879 volume. The inference is inescapable that Schopenhauer was read mainly to be refuted. 128 Fifth, Kant throughout is praised as having established the basis upon which Hegel was able to make his supreme syn- thesis. Represented by 938 pages in the Journal (123 of which represent A. E. Kroeger's translations from the Metaphys- ics of Rights and Prolegomena and the entire Anthropology), Kant attracted more atten- tion and from a greater number of students than any philosopher save Hegel. It is easy to overemphasize the uniformi- ty in point of view and purpose of the Journal. One of the greatest services per- formed by Harris for the future of Ameri- can philosophy was that his periodical became the outlet for many of the younger generation of philosophers to air their views. G. Stanley Hall, G. H. Howison, George S. Morris, Charles S. Peirce, Wil- liam James, Josiah Royce, and John Dewey, already developing divergent tendencies, nevertheless found in Harris and his Jour- nal both patron and patronage. The St. Louis Movement 281 Harris' influential career as an educator belongs to the history of education in the United States. 129 His educational philoso- phy appears in broad outline in the studies of John S. Roberts and Merle Curti. 130 As U.S. Commissioner of Education, his great- est achievement was the organization of the American public school system into a unit. He did his work so well that, as Nicholas Murray Butler remarked in 1929, his service is already almost forgotten. The fixed and absolute principles upon which he pro- ceeded in his organization, correlation, and conservation of educational forces in the United States were destined eventually to fall before the onslaughts of the New Education. The first indication that his dogma of formal discipline and educational principles of Hegelian absolutism were under fire as early as 1895 is Dr. B. A. Hinsdale's epoch-making paper read before the National Council of Education at Asbury Park. The following year at Cleve- land, before the Department of Super- intendence, Charles DeGarmo and the two McMurrays bounded into the arena with new weapons drawn from the armory of Herbart and Rein of Jena to debate the really great paper of Dr. Harris on the Hegelian Correlation of Studies. There came a time when G. Stanley Hall, with his brilliant platform method, preached elo- quently the gospel of a wholly different psychology from that taught by Harris ; and eventually the forces of James, Dewey, et al. overwhelmed Hegelian absolutism in American education, leaving only a few die-hards like President Butler to proclaim Harris "the one truly philosophical mind which has yet appeared in the western con- tinent," and to assert, all appearances to the contrary, that the spirit of Harris still marches on. Harris' participation in the Concord School of Philosophy is reserved for discus- sion later. We turn now to Snider, the last of the triumvirate. Snider and the Literary Schools As Brokmeyer was the philosopher of the St. Louis Movement, and Harris its educa- tor, so Denton J. Snider was its litterateur, though, like the others, he was much in evidence in other fields besides. All three alike had nothing but disgust for narrow specialization; yet each followed his own bent — pursued, as Snider put it, his "Super- Vocation." Through Snider's liter- ary and educational efforts many people became interested in Great Books, notably those of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. In the prosecution of his purposes he wrote fifty books, conducted many classes, and gained a following that ex- pressed its appreciation by forming in his name an association for universal culture and by making, as late as 1936, an annual pilgrimage to his grave. Nurtured as Snider had been in the tight little Puritanic community of Oberlin Col- lege, he was hardly prepared for the catho- licity of thought and action that he found among the St. Louisans when he first came among them. In his autobiography he de- scribed his herculean efforts "to master ab- stract Thought." When he finally achieved what he called a "disentanglement from that vortical labyrinth of ever-spinning and interlacing triplets of categories" and felt that he could spin them better than they could spin him, he terminated his epoch of concentrated "acquisition" and turned his whole-hearted attention to "creation." Freely acknowledging that Hegel "graved" upon him "certain life lines," of which he remained acutely conscious, he nevertheless followed henceforth his super-vocation as "a Writer of Books." 131 He took the first step in 1872 when he printed in the Inland Magazine his youthful poetical drama, Clarence. To earn a liveli- hood, he had become a teacher of philoso- phy in the high school in which Morgan was the principal and over which Harris pre- sided as superintendent. 132 During the 282 German Thought in America latter years of his "decennium" in the high school ( 1 867-1 877) he added to his already remarkably comprehensive program a course in Shakespeare for seniors. To this ambitious regimen of teaching he devoted himself wholeheartedly until administra- tive work, in the form of an assistant super- intendency, threatened to divert him from the main business; then he threw up a promising educational career to return to his beloved books. 133 In the meantime two conceptions, "twinned in origin yet different in charac- ter," had been crystallizing in his mind. His ruminations on Hegel's political theory and on the Hegelian aesthetic had resulted in series of essays (beginning about 1871) on the American state and on Shakespeare. A half-century later, as he looked back upon these early literary efforts, he still saw the fundamentally unifying conception that resulted in these two so apparently dispar- ate books : The A merican State and The System of the Shakespearean Drama. The deepest and most distinctive thing in them . . . was my persistent effort to grasp the World-Spirit . . . Philosophically I had wrestled with the pure Idea of it for years, all the way from Plato to Hegel . . . and to unfold it as the ultimate vital factor in our American political system. ... At the same psychological moment . . . was born the imperative push to trace this elusive but super-eminent World-Spirit, the presiding Genius of History, in Great Literature, especially in Greatest Shake- speare, who must have the highest if he be the highest. 134 The American State was inspired by the discussions held by the St. Louis philoso- phers as they contemplated the results of the struggle that had been occasioned by ''the attempt of the Single-State to destroy the Union." Although they had fought for the Union and had rejoiced in the victory, "now a few years' turn brought just the opposite danger: the victorious Union, grown insolent in its triumph, was threat- ening to undo the Single-State, by which deed, if successful, it would simply undo itself." This whole subject, says Snider, "I threshed over to the limit of my powers." The result was a series of essays, first published in The Western and afterwards collected in a booklet, in which a theory of the state is unfolded on strictly Hegelian terms. 135 But by now Snider was getting weary of his too "excessive immersion in Hegel." Moreover, philosophy had delivered its message, or as much of it as he could assimi- late. He longed for a new intellectual exer- cise that might afford a new expression of himself and of the universe, "less abstract, more living and concrete." When he was asked to add Shakespeare to his courses of instruction, he says, "I seized with all my might the opportunity to change my . masters ... to pass from Hegel the philoso- pher to Shakespeare the poet." 136 But he had been too long organizing "all branches fo instruction upon a basic principle of the Hegelian philosophy" 137 to break away at once and altogether: It must not be thought that I flung away philosophy entirely and forever; I could • not. On the contrary, I took it over with me , into Shakespeare, who also has his philo- sophic substrate ... I hold that he would not be the supreme poet that he is unless he were in his way at the same time the su- preme philosopher. Thus in my case my Hegel was the forecast and the preparation for my Shakespeare. 138 The first play which he undertook to study with his pupils was Julius Caesar. In it he immediately recognized Shakespeare "grappling with the loftiest world-historical character of all time at one of History's supreme nodes." In it he saw Shakespeare's "sublimest, his most ideal conception and characterization, that of the World-Spirit itself, the immortal soul of History, incar- nate in a poor mortal, who sinks to death in its conflict." 139 Snider's analysis of Julius Caesar, first published in the Journal for J uly, 1872, is sufficiently Hegelian to satisfy the The St. Louis Movement 283 most devout disciple: all the forces in the play are brought to stand in typical Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis relationship to each other. The play is interpreted in three "moments," each incarnate in one of the three leading characters: Cassius repre- senting the political, Brutus the moral, and Caesar the world-historical point of view. The struggle presents "a complete cyclus of characterization." In stabbing Caesar, Cassius and Brutus triumph momentarily, but thesis and antithesis serve only to negate each other, and in the end the syn- thesis is effected : for though Caesar is slain, the Caesarian movement is vindicated in the triumph of Anthony. 140 In like manner Snider continued to publish his analyses of nine more of Shake- speare's plays in the next five volumes of the Journal. 1 * 1 In each of them appears the familiar three-fold movement. The neatness with which the individual plays fell into this mold led him to "a very thorough study of Hegel's three large volumes of Aes- thetic," and that, in turn, inspired him to search for the key to the Shakespearean pattern or system — "to organize them [the Shakespearean plays] internally and then unite them externally into groups according to what seemed to me their deepest prin- ciple." This is the idea that was to result in his two-volume System of Shakespearean Drama (1877). 142 By now the love of systematizing had a secure hold in Snider. His autobiography explains how this propensity led him next to consider Faust, which Brokmeyer de- clared to be the world's greatest poem, and which Snider now felt needed "reconstruct- ing" upon what he had come to believe "a complete standard of interpreting a world poem." 143 Shakespeare to my mind could not help calling up his fellow-giants of the World's Literature, of whom I then had begun to see the huge outlines of three more — Homer, Dante, Goethe. ... I felt myself unprepared for this Gigantomachia .... At first I skulked out of the fight, but I could not escape the ever-haunting idea. I must go to Europe and there speak and hear spoken the mother-tongue of Italian Dante and even of old Greek Homer. 144 After his European journey (1877-1879), which took him to England, Germany, Italy, and Greece (the homes of his four poet-gods), the remaining three parts of his grand commentary on the "four Bibles" dutifully appeared: Goethe's Faust (2 vols., 1886), Dante's Divine Comedy (3 vols., 1 892-1 893), and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (2 vols., 1895-1897). All of them are ani- mated by what Snider calls "my ideal life- long friend, the World-Spirit," the systema- tizing and unifying principle by which he sought to synthesize the universe. All of them bear the mark of the Hegelian dialec- tic. Together, they represent the most unique, if not the most profound, case of literary influence exerted by Hegel in America. The man of the twentieth century smiles indulgently at Snider's confessed ambition to become the "organizer of the thought- world," 145 and the modern literary critic takes philosophically Snider's "philo- sophic ' ' method of pressing the world 's great poems into Hegelian categories. He finds the involved analogies, sweeping general- izations, and cosmic symbolisms, couched as they often are in ornate, rhetorical terms, overdone. But even where Snider's style becomes prolix and his argument sinuous, as they do, for example, when he endeavors to point the analogy between Faust (especi- ally in Part II 146 ) and the dialectical move- ment of Hegel's logic, there remains no doubt about his ability as a dialectician or his enthusiastic and sympathetic critical faculty. All in all, his commentaries on the "Literary Bibles" form, whatever else they may or may not be, the most ambitious attempt made in America to organize and explain, from one consistent philosophic point of view, the works of four of the greatest writers the world has known. 284 German Thought in America While vigorously prosecuting his own several educational ventures, Snider also participated in five of the nine Concord programs by lecturing like an Hegelian on Shakespeare, Homer, 147 and Goethe, 148 but refusing "to spout pure Hegel," 149 and trying to avoid all involvement in the fac- tions engendered by Harris' Hegelianism, Jones's Platonism, Davidson's Aristotelian- ism, and James's Pragmatism. From the first he deplored the great emphasis placed on philosophy in the Concord School. He felt that Harris' "heaviest philosophic bom- bardment," however profound, was neither what was most wanted nor what was best suited to the capacities of the students. When, about 1 885-1 886, the School turned its attention to Goethe and Dante, it pleased him to think that his lectures on Shakespeare and Goethe had been partly responsible for turning the emphasis from metaphysics to literature. 160 Aside from his participation in the Con- cord School, Snider was active, during the remainder of his diversified career, mainly in three directions: (1) in supporting the kindergarten movement, (2) in the forma- tion of "communal universities," and (3) in the creation of what he called a "psycho- logical renaissance." That he should have become ambitious to create "communal universities" was a natural outgrowth of circumstances that followed upon his return from Europe in 1879. With Brokmeyer away in Oklahoma and Harris in Concord, the several currents and eddies in and about St. Louis flowed around Snider. He directed his first efforts toward the establishment of the "home- grown university" in the West, to be kept distinct from the Europeanized American university. 161 Soon the small, informal groups grew in size and number so that before long he had classes going simultane- ously in all the four Bibles. His journeyings to the East to participate in the Concord sessions spread his reputation, taught him something about the organization of schools, and encouraged him to spread the gospel according to Homer, Dante, Shake- speare, and Goethe. The first venture in which he participated as more than a mere lecturer was the Goethe School in Milwaukee in August, 1886, immediately after the conclusion of the Concord session devoted to Dante. While this school was engineered mainly by residents of Milwaukee, it fell to the lot of Harris and Snider jointly to arrange the program. It was decided to reassemble the great triumvirate — "Harris from the far East, Brokmeyer from the far West, and Snider from the Midland somewhere be- tween." 162 Harris was enthusiastic. He saw in the Milwaukee Goethe School an oppor- tunity to extend the influence of the Con- cord School into the West. 153 Snider looked upon it as an opportunity to effect the return of Harris to the West, where, in Snider's opinion, lay the best opportunity for striking an effective blow for Hegelian idealism. Brokmeyer, too, signalized his enthusiasm by his ready acceptance of the invitation. But it turned out that the deci- sion to have Brokmeyer was ill-advised. His behavior was little short of outrageous. 154 He delivered his address in Faust with "a backwoods informality of speech and manner which stamped him at once as aboriginal, if not original," and he inter- larded his remarks with Creek-Indian expressions which he claimed had no English equivalents. Worst of all, in view of his former glorification of Faust as the world's sublimest poem and in considera- tion of his Goethe-worshipping audience, he turned Faust upside down by interpret- ing the life of "the ever-striving Faust" as leading to an utterly "negative outcome." He appeared to take a kind of sardonic pleasure in turning "a very unconventional somersault right in the presence of fastidious Lady Convention herself" — though, in Snider's estimation, his unconventionality was not as painful as his repudiation of Faust. The latter symbolized for Snider "a The St. Louis Movement 285 kind of Adam's fall of the man whom I loved." Only Harris' masterful tact kept the Milwaukee School together and brought it to a successful conclusion. Neither Harris nor Snider could account for Brokmeyer's unseemly conduct, but they were in com- plete accord on two points: (i) "Milwaukee, in spite of the city's loyal and generous co-operation, had to be given up, though the- same management talked of having an- other session the following year," and (2) Brokmeyer could not be invited again. Not that Brokmeyer cared; he had come to prefer Indian society to either a literary circle in Milwaukee or a philosophical school in Concord. Snider, for his part, resolved upon four additional points: (1) the Literary School must go on in the West, for even under bad local handling and Brokmeyer's bombshell, the Milwaukee experience had proved that "it could not only live but thrive in the West" — thrive to the point of paying the lecturers double and treble as much as had ever been possible at Concord; (2) hence- forth he would "take the Literary School into his own hands, especially as regards program, lectures, and the conduct of exercises," for a local committee could be trusted only with such matters as finance, attendance, and procurement of halls; (3) Harris must be secured as his "main prop" in all future schools; and (4) since Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe are "a sort of breviary of all lettered excellence, veritably the central Organon of all Litera- ture," the Literary School must be built closely around these central figures. 155 These resolutions bore good fruit, and as the sequel proves, Snider exercised good judgment in seeking to evolve out of the philosophical school of the East (then already showing signs of decline) the litera- ry school of the West. 159 Between 1884 and 1897, a period which Snider reckoned the busiest of his life, and which he called his "Epoch of Propagation," 157 he ranged from Boston, New York, and Washington along the Atlantic Coast to Omaha and Minnea- polis in the West. In Ohio, his native state, he appeared in three cities — Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati; 158 but Oberlin, his Alma Mater, steadfastly refused to invite this evangelist of the new Bibles, until 1894, when she conferred "upon her greatest scholar" 159 the honorary doctorate. Mason and Dixon's old line, too, was tightly drawn against him, and he never penetrated deeper into the South than Baltimore on the eastern and Omaha on the western borderland. 160 But it was no longer St. Louis that held him : the old ties were all broken, his former colleagues had gone, and the Future Great City of the World seemed to him, in 1885, only a husk of her former enterprising self. In the autumn of 1884 he gave his first course of lectures in Chicago, on Homer, to a small and miscellaneous audience in a schoolroom. The course was so well received that it ran for five weeks. There followed requests for a number of similar classes on others of the Literary Bibles. Chicago was experiencing a cultural outburst such as he had witnessed in St. Louis twenty years earlier. Seeing that he had staunch friends and promoters, mainly "people who had been either at Concord or at St. Louis" (in the latter case chiefly kindergartners like Elizabeth Harrison, who had studied with Miss Susan Blow), he plunged into the civic and cultural "maelstrom that was Chicago" and adopted it as the "Center of Propaga- tion." 181 Chicago had the great advantage over St. Louis of being nearer to the center of his wider activities, for Illinois and Indiana remained, year after year, his "main seed-fields." 182 Something like a circuit formed itself for him in this territory, with Chicago as the base of operations. In Chicago itself he had, by 1887, a rather pretentious Dante School in progress in the Art Institute. 163 He made especially elaborate preparations for the Goethe School of 1888. He organized numerous small classes for the study of various ones 286 German Thought in America of Goethe's works, conducted lecture courses for a more general audience, and thus drummed up a clientele. 164 In all this he was ably assisted by his kinder- gartners, recruited fom St. Louis but also from among native Chicagoans who were becoming enthusiastic about the kinder- garten movement. Thus the stage was set for the Goethe School in December, 1888, at the Madison Street Theater. Eight of the lectures were given by Harris, Davidson, and Snider, and one each by Mrs. Caroline K. Sherman (whom Snider called the Mar- garet Fuller of Chicago) and Professor Cal- vin Thomas of the University of Michi- gan. 165 The cycle was completed by a Shakespeare School in 1889 and a Homer School in 1890; then the whole cycle was repeated for the years 1891-92-93-94. 166 In the meantime news concerning Snider's success in Chicago had got back to St. Louis, and he was invited to return to rouse that city from its "deepest lethargy and benightment of her Great Disillu- sion." 167 Three schools were held there under Snider's direction and with the assistance of Messrs. Harris, Holland, Sol- dan, and the Misses Mary E. Beedy and Susan Blow. But the old ardor was gone from the city. Moreover, Miss Blow, assisted by Mary E. Beedy, Mary C. McCulloch, and other women, left leaderless by the departure of Brokmeyer, Harris, and Snider, had set up an independent cultural movement. 168 Miss Blow had her own ideas. Of a distinguished family, she had already at twenty (when Snider first came to St. Louis) acquired a reputation for erudition, including more than cursory acquaintance with German litera- ture, philosophy, and education. Though her sex disqualified her for membership in the Philosophical Society, she was closely associ- ated with all other activities of the group. Harris selected her as his special lieutenant to propagate the kindergarten in the public- school system of St. Louis. He also instruct- ed her in metaphysics, particularly in Hegel. She possessed real talent, abundant energy and a flair for organization and leadership. 169 Miss Blow was not one to welcome the returning males without some mental reser- vations. She had no intention of surrender- ing to them her hard-won laurels. But she recognized in Snider a possible ally, bring- ing to St. Louis a fresh and inspiring message from Hellas. So she invited him to lecture on Sophocles to her advanced class of kindergartners. Having tested him, she engaged him the next year to lecture to the same class on the Greek historians, Herod- otus and Thucydides; but she took care, ' says Snider, that "I was the teacher . . . she was the ruler." It soon developed that J! Snider was "too heathenish" for her, and ; she put an end to all further collaboration, thus dashing Snider's hopes of transforming what he called her "Calvinistic Regenera- tion" into a "Classical Renaissance." Henceforth she was his chief critic and gainsayer whenever he appeared in St. Louis — even to the point of setting up her own classes in Dante to save her fellow- townspeople from the "perversion" of Dante as interpreted by the "heathen back- slider" Snider. 170 While Snider's courses in the Greek historians in 1881 were, in his own opinion, "the culmination of the Greek Renaissance in St. Louis . . . and the beginning of its decline," he returned in several successive years to repeat the Schools held earlier in Chicago — notably in 1887, 1888, and 1889, and once (in 1908) to conduct the St. Louis Communal University on the Literary Bibles. But what he calls "the backflow to St. Louis" of the older genera- tion of leaders was little more than a trickle. 171 Brokmeyer was impossible; Har- ris was getting ready to go to Washington ; and he himself could not make headway against Miss Blow. The movement in the city was in younger hands. Yet something of real importance for Snider came out of his contacts with Miss The St. Louis Movement 287 Blow. Through her, he became interested in the kindergarten movement. Though too old himself to become a practical kinder- gartner, his enthusiasm for the kindergart- ners and their work carried over into his work in Chicago, where they became his chief stay in supporting his "Schools" and later his "University," while he, in turn, became their teacher. In 1886 he was a "Lecturer" and after 1891 a "Professor" in the Chicago Kindergarten College, estab- lished in 1886 at 10 Van Buren Street. The final phase of Snider's career was a natural outgrowth of his Literary Schools and his Kindergarten College experiences. By 1 89 1 his lectures in the latter institution began to broaden in scope so as to include the Philosophy of Literature, of Art, and of History. In 1894 he added the Philosophy of Psychology; in 1900, the Philosophy of Ethics; and in 1901, the Philosophy of Social Institutions. 172 In 1907, when his official connection with the Chicago Kinder- garten College appears to have become nominal (although he continued to give occasional series of lectures there until 1913), 173 he was ready to start his own "University." Snider's first Communal University was organized in St. Louis in 1908, but it soon shifted to Chicago. In St. Louis, the Com- munal University was created less, says Snider, by his own initiative than by the co-operative work of Professor Francis E. Cook, president of the Kant Club, and Miss Amelia D. Fruchte, president of the Society of Pedagogy. The old Pedagogical Society, dating back to Harris' days in St. Louis, had been reorganized upon a plan of University Extension by Professor Wm. M. Bryant, who renamed it the Society of Pedagogy and built up its membership to 1500. Under Miss Fruchte's leadership the Society en- rolled more than 2000 members and be- came one of the largest organizations of its kind in the West. When Snider reappeared among his friends in St. Louis, after his Chicago period, with the slogan "The Psychological Age is dawning," and set about organizing his first Communal Uni- versity in St. Louis, in 1908, the Society supported him eagerly. 174 Snider's interest in psychology had been forming slowly through the years since he had taught Hegelian "Mental Philosophy" to a class of seniors during his "high-school decennium." He had kept "in cold storage a pretty full manuscript" of that course. As a reader of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy he had become familiar with the name of Wundt, first mentioned in that periodical in 1878. Thereafter psychology had become a subject of some concern in the Journal. 115 Most important of all, William James, at Concord in 1883, had confirmed his faith in "the rise of Psycholo- gy to the forefront of the New Educa- tion." 176 When eventualities proved his faith well founded, Snider was ready. While on the faculty of the Chicago Kindergarten College, he had already en- larged the scope of his lectures to incorpo- rate psychology and its applications. Through the years he published a series of books that formed what he called a veritable "Psychological Organon." Arranged chronologically, the titles are these : Psychology and Psychosis. 1896. The Will and the World, Psychical and Ethical. 1899. The Life of Frederick Froebel. 1900. The Psychology of Froebel's Play-Gifts. 1900. {Froebel's Mother Play-Songs, a Commentary, had appeared in 1895.) Social Institutions in Their Origin, Growth and Interconnection, Psycholo- gically Treated. 1901. The State, Especially the American State, Psychologically Treated. 1902. Ancient European Philosophy ; the His- tory of Greek Philosophy Psychologi- cally Treated. 1903. Modern European Philosophy; the His- tory of Modern Philosophy Psychologi- cally Treated. 1904. Feeling Psychologically Treated and Pro- legomena to Psychology. 1905. 288 German Thought in America Architecture as a Branch of /Esthetic Psychologically Treated. 1905. Music and the Fine Arts; a Psychology of the Esthetic. 1905. 177 In all this there is a recognizable Hegelian organization and systemization of psychol- ogy so as to embrace education, ethics, aes- thetics, social and political philosophy, and even the history of philosophy. Thus, to use Snider 's own words, "the Psychological Organon had completed itself as a written work" for the "newborn association of workers headed by Miss Fruchte and Pro- fessor Cook," who would provide readers and hearers ready to receive the new doc- trine. 178 A beginning had been made in St. Louis about 1900 by D. H. Harris and his wife, who first started classes in their home in psychology as promulgated by Snider's Psychology and Psychosis (1896) and his Will and the World, Psychical and Ethical (1899). About 1902, the work was transferred from Harris to Francis E. Cook, who continued to instruct classes, at his home, in Snider's psychological system. When, in 1905, Snider's Feeling Psychologically Treated became available, it formed a third text. As the classes grew in size, they were moved to the Public Library auditorium. When Snider himself entered upon the scene in 1908, the stage was all set, and all he had to do was to assume charge. The Communal University enrolled, says Snider, "150, and never fell below 100. " 17a Snider participated in several other "universities" and "schools" in St. Louis after 1908, but their manage- ment appears to have been entrusted to Cook, in programs embodying two-year courses. 180 In Chicago Snider had watched the phe- nomenal rise of the new University of Chi- cago at the same time that he witnessed the demise of his Literary Schools. While the "new university of the Rockefeller millions" seemed to him "the best medicine for the time and the place," it also seemed to him too much like "a complete German univer- sity, bought somewhat as if it were a valu- able European book or picture or piece of merchandise, with its full equipment of men, material, and libraries . . . lifted out of its homesoil . . . and set down in the West along the Michigan lakeside ... a marvelous achievement — but still the hug- est sudden dose of old-world traditionalism that was ever administered to any mundane patient." Feeling that his sustained attack upon the "mighty fortress of ignorance and philistinism called Chicago" had had some share in preparing the cultural climate that made the new university possible, he re- joiced in its establishment; but he also felt, in his "autobiographical ego," 181 that still another antidote was needed to humanize "this crude, ephemeral, vortical Chica- go. 1Vi By 1913, therefore, he had his Communal University in full swing in Chicago. Most of its students were recruited from the Kinder- garten College, but there were also others ' ' not in touch with kindergarten work. ' ' That there were some among Snider's students I (not among the kindergartners but among the seekers of "mental improvement") whose smiling appreciation on their coun- tenances was no clear indication of real comprehension within their heads goes with- out saying. That the adulation paid to the lecturer, or lecturers, by their students was often excessive is also clear from the remi- niscences left by some of them. 183 But there is abundant evidence that Snider never took himself too seriously, and that he could have his little joke about himself, as when he repeated with relish the bit of badinage, tricked out in Hegelian terminol- ogy by a local wit, that he defined a hole in one's coat as "the partial negation of the totality of being on-and-around-itself (des an-und-um sich Seyns)." The conclusion is inescapable that Snider's Literary Schools and Communal Universities were more than literary feasts or philosophical banquets, and that a good deal of honest work was done. 184 The St. Louis Movement 289 His failing health during the early twen- ties put an end to the Communal Universi- ties, but upon his death in 1925 the Denton J. Snider Association for Universal Culture, an outgrowth of the Communal University, was formed with headquarters in St. Louis. It met regularly every Saturday afternoon at the Cabanne Branch Library and ap- pears to have heard chiefly addresses from members, who followed set programs. As late as 1929, when W. F. Woerner, son of J. Gabriel Woerner, was president, the Association carried forward a program of organized study of Dante and Shakespeare of the type that Snider would have ap- proved. 185 Related Clubs and Movements in St. Louis Other members of the St. Louis Move- ment deserve more attention than they can receive here — notably Thomas Davidson, Johann Gabriel Woerner, A. E. Kroeger, James Kendall Hosmer, William McKen- dree Bryant, Horace Hills Morgan, Francis E. Cook, Louis (Lewis) James Block, Anna Callender Brackett, Amelia Fruchte, and Susan E. Blow. Some of their activities that have a particular bearing upon Germanic aspects of the movement have already been noted; others will appear in the account that follows of the various clubs, societies, and associations that had connections with the St. Louis Movement in St. Louis, Chicago, Jacksonville, and elsewhere. The prime mover of club life in St. Louis was Harris. He was especially active among the women, conducting classes on philos- ophy and on art at the homes of Mrs. Re- becca N. Hazard, Mrs. Beverly Allen, Mrs. Lackland, and others. In this way many of the women, though excluded from member- ship in the Philosophical Society, were in close touch with whatever agitated the minds of the St. Louis philosophers. The Kant Club, organized by Harris in 1874, met every Saturday evening alter- nately in the north and south parts of the city. Francis E. Cook was the first and only president, but Harris, as expositor, inter- preter, and inspirer, was the moving spirit. The Club began with the study of Kant; in 1 875-1 876 it took up to the Smaller Logic of Hegel, then the Phenomenology (in Brok- meyer's translation), and finally the second volume of the Larger Logic. Although Harris left St. Louis in 1880, he returned frequently to present his expositions of Hegel's Logic as he completed successive sections of his commentary. The Club flourished until 1887 and became defunct about 1890. 188 Thomas Davidson, who arrived in St. Louis in 1867, became soon the center of a group who desired to study Plato and Aris- totle, and who called themselves the Aris- totle Club. It was organized in 1873 by Davidson, then teaching Greek and Latin in the St. Louis schools, as an antidote to what he considered a too-strict addiction of his friends to Hegelian logic. The group included about a dozen young men, none over forty, among them, Harris, Soldan, Pulitzer, C. A. Todd, Dr. D. V. Dean, and George Class. Often closely associated with these phil- osophical clubs were several literary groups, the leading spirit behind which came to be Snider. 187 In these organizations the women found their special sphere of activity. Among the more long-lived was the Shake- speare Society, founded in 1870 by Amelia C. Fruchte. Originally a study club, dedi- cated to a consideration of Snider's Hegel- ian interpretation of Shakespeare, it be- came, after Mrs. Adeline Palmier Wagoner took over the management, more and more social in orientation. 188 The arts were not neglected. Harris' "Musical Evenings," once a week, effected an introduction of classical German music in circles beyond the Germans and German- Americans in St. Louis. Himself a compe- tent amateur, he gathered around him other accomplished performers on the piano, 290 German Thought in America violin, and cello to play "Beethoven, Mo- zart, Schumann, and Mendelssohn and the entire galaxy of German genius" ; but Beet- hoven, "in trio, quartettes, sonatas, and four-handed renditions," remained the fa- vorite. That they were more than dilettanti in their appreciation and performance of the German masters is apparent in the es- says they contributed to the early numbers of the Journal.™ 9 Related Clubs and Movements Elsewhere While these multiform activities within the city suggest the St. Louis Movement was local, the truth is that it was ambitious to become national in influence. It remained rooted in St. Louis, but wherever and when- ever an occasion arose for a St. Louisan to carry the light into the provinces, east or west, he accepted the challenge. Not one of them was content to be a Kleinwinkler ; all professed nothing less than a cosmic point of view. And when, in 192 1, a commemora- tive meeting was held on the occasion of Snider 's eightieth birthday, Louis J. Block said with justice that to call the movement the St. Louis Movement involved a dimi- nution of its true scope and influence — that the movement belonged "organically and properly to the entire history of philosophic thought in the United States." Aside from Snider's far-flung operations and Harris' numerous appearances in many cities, there were men resident in other cities and towns who organized philo- sophical societies of their own that came, in one way or another, eventually within the orbit of the St. Louis Movement. The most influential of these in the West was the Plato Club founded by Dr. Hiram K. Jones at Jacksonville, Illinois, "The Athens of the West." 190 Jones (1818-1903) was omnipresent in the cultural and literary life of Jacksonville. 191 Already during his college years he had been inspired, by a reading of Emerson, to cultivate the sweet uses of philosophy. He was led by natural stages from Emerson to Plato; in 1845 he published his Plato Against the Atheists, a running commentary on the tenth book of the Laws. Throughout the fifties he was busy establishing his practice and studying Plato and Swedenborg, and by 1 860 he had won three converts to Plato — Miss Louise Fuller, Mrs. J. O. King, and Mrs. Elizur Wolcott. For five years they met once a week at various homes; in 1865, when Jones's study became the regular meeting place, the Plato Club was formally organ- ized. After the first influx of new members, recruited from the ranks of local teachers, a second group, also largely teachers, was admitted during the early seventies. These included David H. Harris, brother of W. T., Harris, and Louis J. Block, Superintendent of the Jacksonville Schools, whom Harris, imported to become principal of the high; school. "With these two men, partic- ularly with Block, a wave of Hegel- ian philosophy came in." 192 While their influence was never strong enough for the, Hegelian point of view seriously to threaten the supremacy of Plato in the "Athens of the West," they added a leaven that pre- vented what might, without their influence, have developed into an esoteric Platonism. As a matter of fact Jones himself was a man who read widely, and who constantly associated Platonic ideas with similar ones in Dante, Shakespeare, Hegel, Goethe, and others, intent upon drawing parallels in Christian, Hindu, Persian, Chinese, Greek, British, and German thought. The Club made no creedal, religious, or racial discrim- inations, and individual members main- tained special preferences and allegiances of their own. While the Plato Club remained largely a Jacksonville institution, it attracted visi- tors from such cities as Quincy, Decatur, Bloomington, and Chicago, Illinois; St. Louis and Osceola, Missouri; and Daven- port, Iowa. Thomas M. Johnson of Osceola The St. Louis Movement 291 and Horace Hills Morgan, editor of The Western, came often ; Snider talked to them on Hegel, Shakespeare, and Goethe; Thom- as Davidson, on Aristotle; W. T. Harris, on Education and Hegel ; and Alcott visited them repeatedly. So it came about that Jones and the Plato Club attained to more than merely local influence even before Jones went to Concord and before the Club began to reach out for a larger sphere of in- fluence through its Journal of the American Akademe. The Concord School, upon which Alcott had ruminated for forty years, became a reality in 1879. Without the encouragement of the flourishing Plato Club in Jacksonville and the Philosophical Society in St. Louis, it would not have materialized. 193 In July 1878, Jones, accompanied by eight or ten of his disciples, spent a fortnight with Alcott in Concord; before they left, it had been decided that the moment was propitious. When the school opened in 1879, its two chief attractions were Jones and Harris, both midwesterners, and S. H. Emery, Jr., leader of the Plato Club in Quincy, became the permanent director. 194 Jones, a confirmed Platonist, carried on a continuous debate with Harris, equally confirmed in his Hegelianism. After the fourth session, when, according to Snider, Hegel's logic more or less overpowered Jones's less rigorous Platonic intuitional- ism, Jones was persuaded by his associates from the West to insist that the School should be held in the West in alternate years. Disappointed when the vote went against them, Jones and his followers started the American Akademe in Jackson- ville the following year. Jones never again appeared on any of the Concord programs. The American Akademe was organized on July 2, 1883, at a meeting where Jones acted as president and Alexander Wilder of Newark, N. J. (whom Jones had met at Concord in 1881) as secretary. 195 While the Akademe found a unifying bond in Plato, it was a school rather than a sect in philos- ophy. Block, originally inspired by Hegel, often had difficulty squaring his earlier philosophy with his more recently acquired Platonism, and sometimes engaged Jones in disputes of a kind that Jones had found distasteful in Concord. But stout defender of the faith though he was, Jones was not the man to cut off discussion or to maintain a closed mind. Long before the influx of the St . Louis Hegelians — before even the Akademe had been founded — he had caused S. H. Emery, Jr. (who had a copy of Brokmeyer's translation of Hegel's Logic) to have a com- plete transcription of that bulky manuscript made for himself. It may be presumed that he did not pay to have a manuscript of some 2600 legal-cap pages copied without putting it to some use. Moreover, W. T. Harris himself was often on hand to expound Hegel authoritatively. 196 Dr. Jones's professional practice, his teaching duties at Illinois College, the death of his wife in 1891, and his failing health were among the reasons why he decided, in 1892, that he could no longer shoulder the responsibility for the Akademe and the Journal. Another, less tangible but clearly deciding, factor was the naturalistic trend of the age. The Akademe felt its impact first in 1884, when Elizur Wolcott discoursed on "The Theory of Evolution." Although Jones and his stauncher disciples set them- selves against this current of thought, Wol- cott did not long need to fight single-hand- edly, and eventually the winds of new nineteenth-century doctrine helped sweep away, before the end of the century, the Akademe as it did the other schools of idealistic thought from St. Louis to Con- cord, together with their journals. St. Louis and Jacksonville exerted spheres of influence that often diverged and then drew together again. Thus the St. Louis school projected itself most clearly (1) in the ferment which Snider and his colleagues created in Chicago, (2) in the Hegelian tinge that Harris succeeded in giving to the Con- cord School, and (3) in the effect that Harris 292 German Thought in America exerted in places like Terre Haute, Indiana, and Kirksville, Missouri, where the normal school movement developed a distinctly Hegelian orientation. The Platonists of Jacksonville inspired smaller but no less enthusiastic groups of disciples in Osceola, Missouri, and Decatur, Bloomington, and Quincy, Illinois. In the Concord School of Philosophy (i 870-1 888) all the threads con- verged again. The school at Osceola, under the leader- ship of Thomas M. Johnson, appears not to have achieved the closely unified organi- zation that Jones's Akademe attained. Under Johnson's direction the members were less interested in following closely Plato or any other single philosopher than in the historical study of the Platonic and neo-Platonic traditions. Of the club itself little information is available today. John- son's several publications exist, of course. They yield little to indicate that German philosophy was actively pursued by the Osceola group, so that, for our purposes, Johnson's activities are of interest prima- rily as part of the general philosophical ferment that was working throughout the body of American thought at the time and helped keep alive the tradition of idealism in America. Quincy, like Jacksonville, early had a high institutional and educational develop- ment. 197 There was enough catholicity of thought and spirit in Quincy for Emerson and Alcott to appear without encountering any annoying hecklers or other untoward experiences. 198 In Quincy, as in Jackson- ville, it was the intermittent visits of Emer- son and Alcott, coupled with the work of local leaders (in this case Mrs. Sarah Den- man and Samuel H. Emery, Jr.) that brought the movement to fruition. Although Emery was destined to become the head of the Quincy movement, back in 1866 he was only twenty-five, so that Mrs. Denman (1802-1882) 199 held the priority by reason of her wider experience and her following in the club life of the little city. By way of im- plementing and providing organizational support to the feminist movement, she organized, in 1866, the Friends in Council (chartered 1869), one of the first women's clubs in the United States. 200 In the beginning essentially a reading club, designed to prepare women for their legitimate rights and duties, the original twelve members met weekly for communal readings. 201 After an experimental period of three years, Friends in Council divided (in 1869) to enlarge its membership, while maintaining a maximum of thirty-five members. Along with this enlargement of membership came a diversity of interests. Plato as a sole or primary subject of study was given up for a more varied program, the club being divided into sections accord- ing to the interests of the several groups. Plato was never again the main concern except among a group organized by Mrs. Denman especially for the purpose. In the meantime a number of men, chief among whom was Samuel H. Emery, Jr., 202 took over the philosophical department. Early in the seventies Emery organized the Plato Club, a less formal organization than Jones's group in Jacksonville. 203 The combined efforts of Mrs. Denman and Dr. Jones (who made frequent and protracted trips to Quincy) were not enough to coun- teract the steady nourishment which Emery drew from the Journal of Speculative Philos- ophy and particularly from Harris, who maintained that Plato and the Greeks had failed to pursue philosophy as systematical- ly as Hegel. If Emery had had his way, his club would have been called the Hegel Club rather than the Plato Club, 204 but his own feeling of incompetence and the in- terest of others offset his personal wishes. He bought Hegel's works in the original, but, unable to trust his own ability as a translator, borrowed from Harris the Brok- meyer translation of Hegel's Logic and had a copy prepared during 1875. By March, 1878, he had won over Dr. Jones, at whose request another copy was made. 205 When, The St. Louis Movement 293 the next year, Emery and McClure went east to study in the Harvard Law School 206 and to participate in the Concord School, they took their manuscript translation with them, used it to good purpose throughout the Concord sessions, and even sought to indoctrinate Boston and Cambridge by turning philosophical discussion toward Hegel and the idealistic tradition. 207 The literary productivity of the Quincy group is meager in comparison with that of St. Louis, Concord, or Jacksonville. 208 The departure of Emery and McClure for Con- cord robbed Quincy of its dominant mas- culine figures, and Mrs. Denman's death two years later was another blow. When Emery and McClure returned in 1888, phi- losophy had lost its organizational stability, other interests having usurped its place. The men and women of Quincy had talked and lived philosophy, but they did not write it. Emery served as a link between Quincy and St. Louis, between Quincy and Jacksonville, and between all three and the Concord School, to which we shall turn after considering briefly the several schools instituted by Thomas Davidson in New York State and elsewhere. Thomas Davidson (1840- 1900), Scottish- born and educated, drew inspiration from the "University Brockmeyer" during the mid-sixties, but soon developed tangential interests, professing Aristotle in favor of Hegel, 209 berating modern Christianity while confessing himself a classic heathen, and playing to perfection the part of the advocatus diaboli, subsequently turning even upon Greek culture (with what Snider called "damnatory bitterness") in his essay on the Parthenon (London, 1882). Upon leaving St. Louis in 1875, he became, as the London Spectator called him, "the last of the Wandering Scholars," primarily in- terested in Greek and Roman antiquities, but returning often to the United States to take part in the schools held in Concord, Milwaukee, Chicago, and elsewhere. 210 About 1888 he established, first, atFarm- mington, Connecticut, a summer school for his pupils; and then another, on a farm in the more remote region of Glenmore in the Adirondacks, near Keane, N.Y. Here, be- ginning in 1 891, he provided for his young East-Siders (and for all cultists who cared to share his lavish hospitality) an extra- ordinary array of lecturers, including him- self, Percival Chubb, Mary C. McCulloch, W. T. Harris, Amelia C. Fruchte (all with St. Louis connections) but also people like Henry N. Gardiner, Josiah Royce, William James, and John Dewey. Thither came, too, Platonists from Osceola and Hegelians from Chicago and several members of the Jack- sonville Akademe to spend their vacations and to enjoy "good lectures, choice spirits, delightful conversation, superior wisdom, and a sprinkling of enthusiasts of various cults that gave spice and variety to the entertainment." 211 Thus were brought together, in remote Glenmore, under the aegis of Aristotelian Tom Davidson, Jews and Gentiles, the Hegelians of St. Louis and the Platonists of Jacksonville, the Transcendentalists of Concord and the professional philosophers of the academic halls. What is more re- markable about all this is the extraordinary forbearance and mutual good will evidenced by all who heard the babble of sense and nonsense and witnessed the display of whim and eccentricity that passed current at Glenmore. Davidson's death in 1900 cut short his elaborate plans to insure the per- petuity of his "beautiful Akademe." Meanwhile, back in St. Louis, the leader- ship had devolved on the shoulders of men like Kroeger and Woerner who had their business or profession to attend to, or upon women like Susan E. Blow and Amelia C. Fruchte who, for one reason or another, were unable to take over where Brokmeyer, Harris, and Snider had left off. Thus the Western movement as a movement lost force, even while the individuals who had once formed it went on with unabated vigor to prosecute its work, each one as he hap- 294 German Thought in America pened to conceive it and in whatever local- ity he found himself. A gleam of hope that all might yet be saved appeared in the Concord School of Philosophy, and to it all turned about 1880. The Concord School is often rated as the most influential, as it probably was, of the idealistic movements of the late nine- teenth century. It is also sometimes con- sidered merely a recrudescence of Platonism on Puritanic soil, or simply a resurrection of earlier New England Transcendentalism. It was more than either, for without the Western Hegelians, the Concord institution could never have got beyond the conceptual stage in Alcott's mind. 212 Dean Alcott, without Emery, Jones, Harris, and the "students" they brought in their wake, would have had the title but little more. The entire movement is best viewed as a cyclic development, which, beginning in New England Transcendentalism in the thirties and forties, partially begot (or re- inforced), during the next decades, the Hegelian movement in St. Louis; both combined to fructify the smaller outposts of idealistic thought in Jacksonville, Quincy, and Osceola in the West ; finally, during the eighties, when all the Western groups — ■ Platonic, Aristotelian, and Hegelian — con- verged toward Concord to join the Eastern idealists in the formation of the Concord School, the movement came round full circle. The emphasis given to the conflicts and rivalries between St. Louis and Concord tends to obscure the mutually co-operative relationship that existed between Eastern ' Transcendentalism and Western Hegelian- ism, for it is clear that as the St. Louis Movement without inspiration from New ' England could not have developed as it did, 1 just so the Concord School of Philosophy without Harris, Snider, Davidson, Emery, Jones, and the groups which each repre- sented could not have materialized. THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY The Nine Sessions As early as 1840 Alcott had envisaged an "academe" or "university" in Concord with himself, Hedge, Ripley, Parker, and "one or two others ... to make a puissant facul- ty." 213 But nothing constructive or practical was done until the summer of 1878, when Hiram K. Jones, accompanied by his wife, the Wolcotts of Jacksonville, the Denmans of Quincy, and two or three other Western- ers visited Concord. After "a fortnight of glorious talk," Jones and his party returned home. "The Concord School was assured." 214 It is significant that Dr. Jones the Pla- tonist and not Dr. Harris the Hegelian was the co-founder of the school. Jones and Alcott originally conceived a Platonic insti- tution; but once Harris was invited to par- ticipate, the die was cast. However much Jones gesticulated and Alcott regretted the "purely speculative," Hegel rose in repute in direct proportion as Harris gained con- trol of the academy. The school got off to an auspicious start. The several lieutenants in the various parts of the country whipped up enthusiasm for it. Though the school opened on July 15, 1879, "without funds," it almost paid its way even the first year. 215 Following Eme- ry's "genial welcome" to the assembled scholars, Alcott gave "an outline of our method . . . and the spirit of our purpose," which was "to pursue the path of specula- tive philosophy . . . the lectures serving mainly as a text for discussion," though (as Alcott solemnly declared) "dispute and polemical debate" were to be avoided. Harris lost no time declaring the logically rational method the only one fitted to their undertaking, and that same evening he, Emery, Jones, McClure, and the Rev. Dr. J. S. Kedney discussed further "the Hegel- ian ideas and methods." Thus the Concord The Concord School of Philosophy 295 School got off to a start under Hegelian auspices which Alcott, if he had had his way about it, would have modified in a way to make the method less speculative — in a way to treat "imagination, reason, and con- science in its threefold attributes as one and entire, thus speaking to the reason and faith at once." This method, he believed, would reach "the many," while the method of Harris would reach "but the few." Accordingly Alcott lectured the next day on psychology as the key to all knowledge, taking care to make his discourse a "stair- wav" or introduction to Harris' subtle metaphysical method. The day following Dr. Jones initiated his series of ten lectures on Plato with a discourse on "the Platonic significance of ideas," in a manner to "pro- voke eager discussion;" but Alcott also observed that when in the afternoon Harris resumed "his exposition of the speculative method," his auditors admired "the sub- tlety of his expositions and are apparently persuaded of his holding the key to the ab- solute truth .... The faith he inspires is almost universal, though none, it may be comprehend [sic] his method completely." Between the two it was hard to choose. Jones's "allegorical genius" was "refresh- ing;" yet Alcott was forced "sometimes to question whether the Platonic ideas are not modified essentially by the Doctor's expo- sition." Then, too, such a remark as Hig- ginson's, that "the defect of the Transcen- dental School is want of form," was a little disturbing. 216 Moreover, Jones, though he had disciples who would have heard him all day, lacked the virtue of condensation ; his lectures had virtually no terminal facilities. 217 What's more, the Illinois Platonist was used to holding the center of the stage and deliv- ering his opinions ex cathedra. Harris, brought up in the school of Brokmeyer, was used to the give-and-take method of trading philosophic opinions. He might lecture for- mally for an hour or more, but his discourses inspired questions, and his manner encour- aged animated discussion. As the meetings went on, Alcott continued to prefer the analogical method by which reason and imagination were brought into play jointly; yet he began to perceive also that though Jones was being heard with "deep interest," the attention inspired by Harris somehow seemed to have a more substantial quality. By July 25, Jones was lecturing on the "Apology of Socrates" to "a smaller but interested audience"; while Harris, speak- ing on "methods of study" and recom- mending "Kant's Critique of Pure Reason particularly" as a whetstone of the mind, held a "large" audience. Harris emerged from the first school having on the whole "the larger audience." 218 The first Concord School, covering a wide range of human interests, was truly intro- ductory. Subsequent sessions were more specialized. That of 1880 already showed some evidence of planned specialization, doubtless the result of Harris' influence. 219 The third session (1881) continued Harris and Jones as the protagonists, each with his customary ten lectures on Hegel and Plato, respectively. Two innovations are noteworthy. First, Snider's lectures on Shakespeare the preceding year had been so successful that he was asked to enlarge the literary content of the school by dis- coursing on "Greek Life and Literature," a subject on which he was primed so shortlv after his return from Athens. Second, the centennial of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was observed bv seven lectures on Kant, August 2-6. 220 After some preliminary discussion of the methods and results of Kantian philosophy, Alcott set forth his views of the distinction between pure and practical reason. His remarks demonstrate that some Transcen- dentalists had not yet divested their minds of the over-simplification under which the Kantian terms had gained currency among them forty years earlier. "In the first trea- tise," said Alcott, Kant tried "to explore the possibilities, the reach of the pure rea- 296 German Thought in America son, or the reason unilluminated by faith, or by what he called the 'categorical im- perative,' the conscience. So I will take these two terms — reason and conscience — as expressing, in a generalized form, the two phases of Kant's thinking." 221 He went on: In the first treatise he [Kant] does not seem to have taken into his thought what he called the Practical Reason in the other ; he uses "reason" in two senses. But really does he not mean faith, or the necessary influence which the affections have upon reason ? He finds in the first treatise that the reason cannot solve moral questions . . . he becomes confused because he is seeking to find depths of the pure reason which of itself it cannot fathom. He finds he can come to no conclusion, and he ends in the unknowable, and must be classed as an agnostic with Spencer and Huxley and all that class. The Free Religionists largely, and even Unitarians to some extent, appear to have fallen into that error, and may quote Kant as authority. 222 Now, putting these two facts [sic] to- gether — conscience and reason — and trying to find a term which will express all that can be thus received and conceived, we say revelation. For, unless a revelation is made to the heart, the love in us, and also to the reason through the moral sentiment, reve- lation is incomplete ; it is but a doctrine, a dogma. 223 Professing to treat Kant "with all hospi- tality," Alcott likens him to "a Columbus exploring unknown regions": Kant is an explorer; he goes on to unfold relations, and tells us, with an absolute honesty of conviction, what he saw, and no more. When he saw anything, he has re- ported it to us; and when he put out his sounding-lines and brought up nothing, he said so. Is not that what he did, this Co- lumbus ? That is the man we are here cele- brating in this chapel. This is a perfect example of Alcott's favorite kind of "analogical" reasoning — "the pure truth of the poet interblending imagination and reason by the alchemy of his genius." 224 Finally, with a flourish of inconsistency not at all uncommon among the Transcen- dentalists, and forgetful of the fact that he had, only a few minutes earlier, crowned Kant as the high priest of the "Free-Reli- gionists," "Unitarians," "agnostics. . . and all that class," he concluded: . . .here was a grand mind to whom all are indebted ; and we shall no longer go into that realm where went the deists and that class of people, and tried to solve the riddle of the world through their senses. Kant lifted us from that, and showed us that there is something in our minds not derived from the senses, that the senses can only reflect what is in the mind. What a step that was! to take us out of our senses and show us that these can only reflect in images the ideas in the mind; which are innate, eternal; that we brought them with us at : birth as truth, justice, love, mercy, and beauty, being all revelations and intui- tions. 225 Here Mr. Cohn, one of the "students," ventured to "offer a criticism" of the Dean's : interpretation, by emphasizing the differ- • ence between Pure and Practical Reason and by relating the word practical to its original meaning: "to do, to act, to make." Cohn was not much concerned about how "definite" or "true" Kant's conclusions were; he was not concerned at all about Kant's conclusions. What did interest him was Kant's "method." His conclusion, "The whole is a question of method," is one that could hardly have harmonized with Alcott's way of thinking. At this point Harris took the floor. Al- though he was not scheduled for this part of the program with a formal paper, what he delivered has all the earmarks of having been prepared in advance. He began by taking up Alcott's metaphor of Kant as the Columbus of speculation, but objected to the assertion that Kant often "put out his sounding-lines and brought up nothing." After a passing reference of agreement to Jones's point that neither Kant nor any other philosopher had yet said "the last word," he proceeded to a discussion of the paper read the day before by George Syl- The Concord School of Philosophy 297 vester Morris, formerly a lecturer on philos- ophy at Johns Hopkins, recently installed Professor of Philosophy at Michigan, the translator of Ueberweg, and now working on a critical exposition of Kant's first Critique (published the next year). Harris emphasized the natural process of develop- ment and, at the same time, the essential unity of thought that runs from Plato and Aristotle, through Kant, Fichte, and Schel- ling, to Hegel. In order to discover the "fundamental" and "central" principles of this essential unity that will give us "ra- tional explanations and reduce the many to the one," it is necessary to take into account all "previous philosophers." Al- though Harris usually had scant praise for electicism and electic methods of the sort he advocated on this occasion, his recom- mendation was doubtless made in view of the need he felt for greater harmony than the remarks thus far had engendered. And on this note of harmony, the morning ses- sion of the Kant centennial closed. 226 In the afternoon, President John Bascom read the principal paper, on "The Freedom of the Will, Empirically Considered," pref- acing it "with some criticism of Kant, and also some remarks upon philosophical tech- nique," in which he contended that philo- sophic terminology should be translatable into common language. Immediately fol- lowing Bascom's address, Samuel Emery arose to say, "while somebody else is getting ready to speak," that he too had had some trouble with the Kantian time, space, and categories (if viewed as purely subjective), and that it might reasonably be doubted that Kant was being fairly interpreted by Dr. Bascom, who put a peculiarly individual- istic construction upon Kant's view of the subjectivity of time and space. With Bas- com's interpretation of Kant on free will and liberty, he agreed heartily. By the time Emery had finished, Harris was ready. This time he spoke extempora- neously. He interpreted Bascom's criticism of philosophical terminology as directed at him. While Bascom had seemed, in his pre- fatory remarks, to disparage the use of special terms, he had gone on to use tech- nically philosophical words "derived from a good many systems," and had given them varying applications. Far from disparaging technique in speculation, Harris repeated his arguments for a more exactly technical nomenclature, at the same time calling upon President Bascom's "long experience in teaching philosophy" to bear out the principle that "the most fearful technique in philosophy is that of a person who uses a common term in a special sense and yet leaves the reader to think that he is using it in an ordinary sense." 227 Yes, Harris' mellifluous voice, too, concealed a stinger which he knew how to flesh on occasions. At this point Sanborn, evidently anxious to avoid a squally session, suggested that all might find a harmonious common ground in Emerson, through whom more than "all other persons combined . . . the Kantian movement had affected America." 228 And Alcott, taking his cue from Sanborn, went on to deliver the valedictory upon the Kant centennial by reminding all that "human faculties are differently cast in different types .... Do not seek to put your minds, those of you who are not logical, into logical forms . . . neither shall I say to you who are logical, put your thoughts into poetic forms." Having delivered this "charge" to the scholars, the Dean went on to pro- nounce the benediction. The beauty of this school is that we have those who speak from these different aspects .... We call it a School of Philos- ophy, it is true. Mr. Emerson puts his philosophy into warm tropes . . . but Hegel and that class of thinkers strip off the image and give us the pure, absolute truth as it lies in their minds. Mr. Emerson could not ... do his work as Hegel did .... The poet and the philosopher work differently, but they do the same work. 229 With this final word of wisdom the Con- cord Kant Centennial came to a triumphant and harmonious close. 230 298 German Thought in America However often Alcott reminded his "faculty" of the virtues of tolerance and catholicity, there remained an undercur- rent of rivalry between the Platonists and the Hegelians, the poets and the metaphy- sicians. It was decided that the fourth ses- sion should be arranged in such a way that the lines of methodology would be less sharply drawn. The leading lecturers were, as before, Harris, Jones, Alcott, Kedney, Sanborn, and Watson. Alcott was to go on, as before, to expound his own philosophy; but Harris' ten lectures were to be less strictly Hegelian and less abstruse than heretofore (five were to treat of the general history of philosophy, three of Fichte, and two of art) ; while Jones's eight lectures, instead of expounding Plato solely, were to deal, four of them, with Christian philoso- phy, three with Oriental thought, and only one with Plato. 231 But Harris' lectures on the history of philosophy turned out to have a strongly Hegelian cast; those on Fichte presented Fichte in relation to Hegel; and his two discourses on art were pure Hegelian Aes- thetik. And Jones, whether he was scheduled to lecture on Christ, Zoroaster, or the rela- tion of science to philosophy, discoursed on Plato. He still remained one of the major attractions, but his position had grown progressively subordinate to that of Harris. Even Alcott found himself less and less drawn to the Jacksonville Platonist with his earnest but interminable Platonic ex- positions. Moreover, the influence of Harris, as a Concord resident, was more nearly present and compelling than that of Dr. Jones in faraway Illinois. Before the fourth school opened, Alcott wrote significantly in his Journals, "Sanborn and Harrris are now taking warm and sweet places in my re- gard." 232 By the end of the 1882 session it was apparent to the Jacksonville contingent that unless the Concord "ring" of Hegelians could be broken up, Jones would not be able to maintain a position of respectable and co-ordinate leadership with Harris. The Westerners held a caucus, whence they emerged with the decision, since so many of the students were from the Midwest, to ask that the next school be held there, and that thereafter it should alternate between the East and the West. When the decision went against the pe- titioners, they were keenly disappointed, none more than Dr. Jones. Some of them, notably the St. Louisans, remained faithful and continued to attend; but others, espe- cially those from Illinois, ceased going and joined efforts with Jones in the formation, the next year, of the American Akademe in Jacksonville. Jones maintained cordial per- sonal relations with Alcott, Sanborn, Em- ery, Harris, and others of the Concord ' School, but he never again appeared on any of its programs or attended its meetings, thus making inevitable the eclipse of Plato by Hegel in Concord. The withdrawal had other important effects. The departure of Jones and his; colleagues meant not only the loss of a number of hitherto faithful attendants but also the loss of competition and conse- quently a diminution in the intensity of philosophical interest and discussion, thus preparing the way for the encroachment of the literary upon the more purely philosoph- ical interests of the school. This trend did not become immediately apparent. The program for 1883 included the usual course of lectures by Harris on Hegel and the philosophy of the absolute; Howison lectured on Hume and Kant; and Sanborn on Puritanic philosophy, Franklin, and Emerson; while the most distinctive feature was William James's three lectures on psychology. 233 But, as regards the gener- al tendency of development in future years, the most noteworthy element of the 1883 school was the recall of Snider (absent dur- ing the preceding session, for he had be- come a bit obstreperous and not sufficiently mindful of the Concord reticences) to pre- sent four lectures on the second of his "Literary Bibles," namely, Homer. 231 The Concord School of Philosophy 290 Snider considered the third session (1881) "the culmination of the School" and "its best and happiest year," because in later vears he missed "the same up-swing . . . the same spontaneous overflow of enthu- siasm." 235 But all the indications are that the best year, the climax, came about 1882. Emerson died in that year, and he had al- ways been a powerful magnet drawing people to Concord, even though he cared little about schools of any kind and never took a prominent part in this one. Alcott's health grew progressively worse. But most destructive to the distinctly philosophical nature of the school was its increasingly literary character. The session of 1883 had already been deflected from its philosophical course; that of 1884 was devoted almost solely to Emerson, with considerable em- phasis on his literary character; 236 the program for 1885 was dedicated to Goethe, nineteen of the lectures being devoted to him. 23 ' The lectures on Goethe at the seventh Concord School (1885) represent a land- mark in the history of Goethe's vogue and influence in the United States, and they provide an illuminating commentary on the state of American literary culture. They suggest also that the tradition of specula- tive thought in America was not yet strong enough to withstand dilution, for they in- dicate that a marked change had taken place in the school to deflect it from the original"pathsof speculative philosophy." 238 Another change is signalized by the fact that the directors could no longer count on the same singleness of purpose, unanimity of interest, and general knowledge of their students, all of which they had taken for granted during the earlier years; for in 1885 they began to distribute in advance bibliog- raphies and lists of readings for the better preparation of the students and to encour- age their more general participation in the discussions following lectures. 239 Estimates vary regarding the preparation of the students who came to Concord from 1879 to 1887. Denton Snider always spoke a little disdainfully of the intelligence of his hearers at Concord. By his own account, he could not always resist giving way to the imp of the perverse and spilling over into some diablerie at the expense of the Con- cordians, in a manner to shock or offend the gentry of "vacant face-long gravity" who sat before him. 240 He doubted that the "smiling appreciation" of the students was always synonymous with "adequate under- standing" as "Harris talked his unmixed Hegel to that mixed crowd," and himself related with obvious satisfaction the story current that the erudite lectures could be tersely summed up as "What's mind ? Never matter. What's matter ? Never mind," as well as the report that the Con- cord faculty was much concerned with "the Whatness of the Howsoever" and "the Thingness of the Why." While he hastened to add, "I never heard such talk there," 241 he often displayed an illiberal disposition when he compared the Concord School with his own schools in St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Chicago, and elsewhere. 242 . That some who went to Concord were essentially Chautauqua-addicts is obvious; but it is equally clear, from the stature of many of the lecturers and the excellence of their lectures, that the intellectual fare at Con- cord was phenomenally good. Men of the caliber of Harris, Howison, Morris, Fiske, James, Royce, Porter, and Bascom would hardly have devoted their time and energy to sham philosophical and literary feasts. The fact remains, however, that after 1885 the course of the Concord School went rapidly downward. 243 The inadequacy of its "scholars" cannot have been the only cause. The "faculty" remained, to the end, as distinguished as they had been during the earlier years, though some of them began to develop tangential interests. Harris, for example, was turning more toward practi- cal educational matters and was soon to go to Washington as Commissioner of Educa- tion. Emery returned to the West. Alcott 300 German Thought in America died in 1888. Some responsibility for the decline of the school must be attributed to the loss, beginning in 1883, of its specula- tive character. Following the Emerson school of 1884 and the Goethe school of 1885, the two weeks of the 1886 session were divided equally between Dante and Plato; while for the ninth and last session (1887) the directors returned to their original aim of pursuing "the path of speculative philos- ophy" by devoting the major part of the program to Aristotle. But Alcott's "uni- versity" was past saving and came to an end almost simultaneously with his own earthly existence. Interrelations with Other Movements Two general observations are in order. First, we may take note that American Transcendentalism, originating in the vi- cinity of Boston during the thirties and forties, migrated westward, or was carried thither by lectures, essays, reviews, books, by young ministers, editors, and New England pedagogues, who spread fanwise over the West. Here it did fruitful and practical work in a pioneer society, even while it became decentralized into groups, circles, and cults that exercised their own originality to such degrees that their com- mon origin was sometimes hardly percep- tible. The movements in Missouri and Illi- nois, wherever else they derived their nourishment, drew heavily on New England Transcendentalism ; and though free lances like Snider and Jones believed their destiny lay in the West and therefore desired to declare their independence from Plymouth Rock, and others like Davidson denied alle- giance to anybody and anything, all of them eventually gravitated toward the East. In the name of Alcott and under the direction of Harris, American idealism re- turned to its fountainhead. Finally, through efficient propagandists like Harris, it was given a wider and more practical applica- tion, notably in the educational system (elementary, secondary, and collegiate) of the United States. Second, German transcendentalism, be- ginning with Kantian epistemological and ontological techniques, was given applica- tions in socialized religious forms by Schleiermacher and in ethico-political forms by Fichte, and received its final institution- alization in Hegel. In America 'a similar, though by no means identical, progression is discernible. American Transcendentalism, in Emerson's hands, originated a theory under the impetus of Kantian terminology, however widely Kant and Emerson differed at other points. In the hands of men like Ripley, Transcendentalism took on elements of Fichtean ethics and assimilated something of the socialization of religion as taught by Schleiermacher and Ronge; while in the West, Brokmeyer, Harris, and their col- leagues, in their pursuit and practice of Hegelian principles, represented in some respects a complementary and in others an antithetical movement. Finally, in Concord all differences and opposites were drawn together and given something like a syn- chronization or synthesis. Hegelians like Harris and Snider could not fail to observe that the course of American idealism, as affected by German absolutism during the nineteenth century, was but another illus- tration of the Hegelian triadic dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Undoubtedly the most lasting effect of the St. Louis Movement, as it can be traced today, lies not strictly within the realm of philosophy but in the work that Harris performed as Commissioner of Education in channelizing, systematizing, and stand- ardizing the public-school system of the United States within the Hegelian frame- work. While the revolt against his princi- ples and procedures grew steadily stronger from the mid-nineties onward, the disciples of the New Education never succeeded in undoing the work of the Great Conservator, so that even today the American public- The Concord School of Philosophy 301 school system remains so much the develop- ment of Harris' principles and the result of his labors that the product (especially in its fundamental organizational aspects) is in- distinguishable from the principles that shaped it. In most other respects the influence of the St. Louis Movement becomes elusive and evanescent when we try to appraise it in terms of the twentieth century. While Harris' multiform activities, Snider's wide- spread operations, Brokmeyer's great per- sonal magnetism, Davidson's Sittings hither and thither, and the great bulk of their pub- lished writings, all insinuated themselves in some degree into the life and sum-total of American culture, the movement as such dissipated itself without leaving many clearly recognizable tokens. The latest sur- vivor was the Denton J . Snider Association for Universal Culture with headquarters in St. Louis until the depressed thirties sent it on the way that many such anachronistic relics went during that discouraging decade. It may be that if Harris had adopted a more popular tone for the twenty-two vol- umes of his Journal, he might have won a larger audience among nineteenth-century Americans for his philosophy which offered so many conciliations in an age that was a compound of contradictions and opposi- tions. But that was not the way of William Torrey Harris. Persuaded by Brokmeyer that the only proper explanation of history lies in the Hegelian law of dialectical growth, he chose to move in the rarefied atmosphere of scholastic symbols, even to the point of subordinating Hegel's ethics and political works to the sixth and seventh places in a list of eight, in which the Logic is placed first. 244 The wonder is that, in his educational endeavors, he succeeded as well as he did in giving currency and cogency to his abstruse phrases and his fine-spun doc- trines among the teachers and public- school administrators of his day. What's more, if he had addressed himself more largely to the popular audience, he would have missed winning the academic allies who, as things turned out, provided the chief stronghold in which his type of think- ing was fostered and perpetuated. It may be that the St. Louisans would have been more successful if they had stuck more closely to the profession which bred them in the first place. Although most of them remained teachers in some sense of the word, many of them chose to work out- side the common framework of teaching in the organized schools. Few of the original group were ambitious to take regularly appointed positions in established colleges and universities. Only G. H. Howison, the first vice-president of the Philosophical Society, was a regular academician, but eventually he demonstrated his "self-activ- ity" by becoming virtually the founder of personalism. Something of the original Hegelian impulse was surely imparted to the successive generations of his students in California, but he veered more and more from the absolute idealism of Hegel in favor of a form of personal idealism or spiritual pluralism. Thus the great following that he built up became as much a dissipating as a perpetuating force, so far as the St. Louis Movement was concerned. 245 One other who was more or less closely identified with various individuals of the St. Louis group, notably with Harris, was George S. Morris, though his enthusiasm for Kant and Hegel was acquired independent- ly of the St. Louisans. 246 His influence is another example of the type of following and influence which the St. Louis Hegelians might have secured for themselves if, in- stead of expending their energies on semi- popular groups, communal universities, summer schools, and philosophical clubs of various complexions, they had sought the stability of regular academic appointments. Certainly Harris and Kroeger, possibly Snider, and others of the many writers for the Journal possessed, or could readily have acquired, the requisite qualifications. Looking back upon the late nineteenth 302 German Thought in America century as we can today, we have no diffi- culty seeing that while the media through which the St. Louisans chose to work tend- ed in the end to diffuse or dilute rather than prolong and preserve the ideals for which they strove, Hegel in more academic ac- coutrements conquered many of the philos- ophy departments in American colleges and universities, and often those of history and political science as well. The conquest was in some instances short-lived ; but while it lasted, it was pretty general. The Hege- lization of our universities was more the result of the trek of American students to the German universities than of direct con- nections with the semi-popular Hegelian movement on native soil. Royce, for ex- ample, learned his absolute idealism in Germany, where he studied with Lotze, Wundt, and Windelband at Gottingen and Leipzig. Peirce turned directly to Kant's Critiques; as for Hegel, whose philosophy he said "mine resuscitates, though in a strange dress," 247 he got something from Morris at Hopkins and more from Augusto Vera's commentaries in the Journal of Spec- ulative Philosophy and still more from Hegel's books themselves. Palmer acquired his knowledge of German idealism partly in Germany and (particularly as affects Hegel) from the books of the Scottish Hegelians Stirling and Caird, as well as from Hegel's works. Bowne studied at Halle and Got- tingen, and Creighton at Leipzig and Berlin. James, too, studied in Germany, read the Germans themselves, and consulted their commentators. Hall, Ladd, Cattell, Bald- win, and Munsterberg imported experi- mental psychology directly from Germa- ny. 248 Among the contributors to Harris' Journal were Benjamin Rand, G. Stanley Hall, Josiah Royce, Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, all of whom became philosophers in their own right and professors in American univer- sities. To most of these the Journal was more than an outlet for their first efforts at philosophical writing, and all of them ac- knowledged that German philosophy ex- erted a shaping influence on their own philosophic personalities; but the greater impetus directing them to a consideration of German thought came from quarters other than St. Louis. William James — even while grudgingly acknowledging that He- gel's influence "remained always more or less pronounced" — usually poked good- natured fun at the St. Louis Hegelians. 249 On the other hand, John Dewey, whose primary sources of inspiration were ob- viously not St. Louis, and whose final po- sition developed much beyond anything he could have learned from Hegel, nevertheless wrote to Harris on December 17, 1886: When I was studying the German philos- ophers I read something of yours on them of which one sentence has always remained with me . . . you spoke of the 'great psy- chological movement from Kant to He- gel' . . . one thing I have attempted to do is to translate a part at least of the signi- ficance of that movement into our present psychologic movement. 250 There was no dearth of personal contacts among them. Even in Tom Davidson's quix- otic retreat, Josiah Royce, William James, and John Dewey found themselves eating at the same table with the men from Jack- sonville, Osceola, St. Louis, and Concord. The Glenmore retreat, the communal university movement, and the Concord School all sought to effect the consumma- tion of American idealism, but all were swept aside by the times. The naturalistic trend of a new age made headway, however resolutely Jones opposed it at Jacksonville or Alcott in Concord. It was no mere coin- cidence that the Plato Club, the American Akademe, the Philosophical Society, the Concord School, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the Journal of the American Akademe, and the Bibliotheca Platonica all came to an end within the short period of five years (1 887-1 892). The same years saw the first appearance of the Monist (1890- J 936), the International Journal of Ethics The Concord School of Philosophy 303 (1890), and the Philosophical Review (1892), which, together with the Journal of Philo- sophy (1904), remained until recently the chief periodicals for the publication and exchange of speculative opinion in the United States. The Western Philosophical Association was established in 1900, and the American Philosophical Association in 1901. All announced in unmistakable terms that a new era had begun, that the old dispensation, however much the new might be indebted to the old, was dead. In the search for a distinctively "American" philo- sophy, there were few who agreed with Walt Whitman that "Only Hegel is fit for Amer- ica — is large enough and free enough ... an essential and crowning justification of New World democracy." 251 Struggling against hopeless odds, the half-dozen idealistic schools and move- ments — East and West — put up a stiff resistance from 1836 to the end of the cen- tury against what came increasingly to be called "the American philosophy." Time and again, especially after 1880, they were forced to retreat. In every counteroffensive that they launched, they moved under the banner of Plato or Kant or Hegel — or all three. But their best efforts were ineffectual. After the cycle from Concord to St. Louis- to Jacksonville, and back to Concord was once completed, it was not repeated, not only because the times were against abso- lute idealism of whatever kind but also because the idealists had neglected to train among the younger generation able succes- sors to take over and carry forward the movements which had, in all instances, depended too much on individual leader- ship. The individualism of "self-activity," developed no less in New England Tran- scendentalism than in St. Louis Hegelian- ism, failed to breed the required community of effort and solidity of association to per- petuate either of them as a movement or as an institution. However, while failing to change rad- ically or even to deflect the direction of American thought, the several groups, taking them altogether, did assist signifi- cantly in the revitalization of the oft-dor- mant and equally oft-recurrent strain of idealism that has been a vital part of American consciousness from earliest Pur- itan days, and that, thanks to the nine- teenth-century idealists, still runs deeply through the American mind. This they effected because they never surrendered or admitted themselves utterly routed, even while they bowed before the more strongly organized and compelling forces of natural- ism and materialism. Another important service which they performed was that in their insistence upon free inquiry they proved strong allies and supporters of the long line of liberal Amer- ican academicians from James Marsh of Vermont and Henry Boyton Smith at Amherst to Josiah Royce at Harvard and J. E. Creighton at Cornell, who fought a slow but increasingly successful fight to liberate American philosophy from a too exclusive domination by Lockean sensa- tionalism and Scottish common-sense. Emerson and Jones, Harris and Emery, no less than this succession of professors of philosophy, opposed academic tradition and professional prejudice: (1) the deep- seated predilection in American universities for British empiricism, and (2) the preva- lent prejudice against any brand of philos- ophy that emanated fromGermany, whether critical or romantic. In these aims, however widely they differed in other particulars, the Platonic intuitionalists of Concord and Jacksonville and the Hegelian rationalists of Quincy and St. Louis were united no less among themselves than were the professors of philosophy and of theology who were developing a sense of historicity and of criticism. Thus they helped prepare the way for twentieth-century freedom and objec- tivity that permitted the evolution of the pragmatic, or the "American" philosophy, which they opposed, and which, as things turned out, spelled the doom of their hope 304 German Thought in America that idealism might become the prevailing American philosophy. But while late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century winds of new doctrine swept all these early semi-popular currents before them, the academic halls remained places where the tradition of idealism from Kant to Hegel could find a domicile promis- ing a degree of perpetuity. The significant shaping influence of German philosophy upon the idealism of Royce, the psychology of Miinsterberg, the pragmatism of Peirce and James, and the educational philosophy of Dewey are later and transmuted mani- festations of a long process of acculturation that earlier conditioned New England Transcendentalism, that was carried for- ward by the St. Louisans and the Concord- ians, and that persists very markedly in current pragmatism, as well as in the cur- rent academic tradition of philosophical instruction in American colleges and univer- sities. By such means and avenues, the several motifs of German philosophical idealism have become so deeply imbedded in the course of constructive thought in the United States that the termination of its influence cannot be envisaged unless American thinking itself should come to a period. GERMAN PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICAN COLLEGES The Early Teaching of Philosophy the common-sense tradition The history of the introduction, vogue, and effect of German philosophy on the substance and methods of American collegi- ate instruction provides a relatively valid test of the degree of penetration that Ger- man thought attained in the United States. Since only acculturated materials ordinar- ily become the accepted objects of class- room treatment, it is important to note at what juncture and under what circum- stances German philosophy was able to command the sanction of authorities in the American institutions of higher learning. Was the so-called "Germanization" of the American college system during the latter half of the nineteenth century confined to matters of external organization, or did the American university take over also some- thing of the very spirit and ideological background from its continental models ? What American teachers and writers of texts incorporated terms, points of view, and basic philosophic attitudes stemming from Germany in their thoughts ? Only by inquiring into the genetic history of this process can approximate answers to these questions be given. The philosophical orientation of Ameri- can colleges throughout the seventeenth century was Ramean or Aristotelian. Early in the eighteenth century the emphasis shifted to Locke, who was introduced at Yale in 17 14 and at Harvard shortly after. His long hold on the American mind 252 fostered the firm establishment by the opening of the nineteenth century of the common-sense philosophy derived from the Scottish school. 253 Even deism and Berke- leian idealism nowhere gained a firm foot- hold in the college halls, and it was not until the 1840's, when the Transcendentalists began their agitation for German idealism, that any strong challenge was offered to the cautious and discreet treatment of philo- sophical problems prevalent in the leading institutions. 264 GERMAN INFLUENCE BEFORE 1800 Insulated as the American college of the eighteenth century was against direct in- fluence from the Continent, German thought had access in only a few minor instances. The schools of Pennsylvania, established by and for the preponderant German- German Philosophy in American Colleges 305 American element of that region, had on their faculties immigrant teachers who brought with them from Germany a knowl- edge of contemporary Aufklarung and of Kantian thought; 255 but because they used the German language almost exclusively and drew students chiefly from the immedi- ate vicinity, their influence was limited. Perhaps none of the Miihlenbergs achieved fame much beyond German-American circles. Gotthilf Muhlenberg (1735-1815), who studied at Halle for seven years, was president of Franklin College after 1787 and a well-known preacher, scientist, and linguist. In Boston the Rev. Johann Chris- toph Hartwig (1714-1796), a German immi- grant who endowed Hartwick College, exerted some influence in favor of German culture from 1784 to his death. In Columbia College Johann Daniel Gros, minister of the German Reformed Church and friend of Baron von Steuben, become the first Ger- man-born professor at one of the larger American colleges. In his teaching of moral philosophy from 1789 to 1795 he devoted some direct attention to German philoso- phy. 256 Thomas Cooper, teacher at the University of South Carolina and at Carlisle College, is the first, so far as is known, among American authors, to cite German higher criticism of the Bible in attacking the claims of the orthodox theologians. 257 German Influence, 1800-1850 GERMAN THEOLOGY AT HARVARD, VERMONT, AND ANDOVER Meantime the pioneering work of teach- ers of theology such as Moses Stuart at Andover, Joseph Buckminster at Harvard, and James Marsh at Vermont in directing attention to German Biblical criticism initiated an unbroken sequence of events which contributed to the Transcendentalist revolt of the thirties and forties. Such Ger- man-born teachers as Follen and Lieber reached large audiences with accounts of German philosophy and literature, and native Americans like Hedge in Maine, Marsh at Vermont, and Francis of Harvard became active in the promulgation of Ger- man thought, seeking to demonstrate that German criticism and Biblical research could no longer be ignored in American seminaries. Though the broadly liberal tendencies of the German theologians were often violently denounced, there were al- ways a few earnest students who made use of Ernesti, Semler, Baur, and later, Strauss. Even at Andover, in 1824, the interest in German philosophy and theology was sufficiently general for the authorities to investigate the unrestricted study of the "infidel" German writers. 258 HENRY BOYNTON SMITH The work of Henry Boynton Smith (1815- 1877) at Amherst from 1847 to 1850 made that school, in close association with An- dover, a center for one branch — the con- servative "right" — of German theological doctrine. This famous Presbyterian teacher, converted from Unitarianism at Bowdoin, studied at Andover and Bangor, taught for a year at Bowdoin, and then on the advice of President Leonard Woods, 259 spent a year at Halle and Berlin (1837-1838). 260 Upon his return Smith became minister to a Con- gregational Society at West Amesbury and devoted part of his time teaching at Aji- dover. Hedge engaged him, as a known authority on Hegel, to contribute several translations from Hegel to Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany. 2 * 1 Correspondence and visits kept Smith in close touch with the movements of thought in Germany. He prepared several translations of German theological treatises (chiefly from Twesten) for the Bibliotheca Sacra. His article, "A Sketch of German Philosophy," 292 won for him the notice of Presidents Wayland of Brown and Sears of Newton College and Professors Torrey, Hitchcock, and Gibbs. The result was a call to Amherst, where he taught mental and moral philosophy. Here he changed the tenor of philosophical teaching, discarding the slavish use of texts, 306 German Thought in America assigning special readings for subsequent open discussion in the classroom, and en- couraging a profounder grappling with fundamental questions raised by the new Biblical criticism. In 1850 he moved to Union Theological Seminary, where he remained until 1874. His friendship for George S. Morris was perhaps the strongest guiding influence in the early work of that influential teacher, who, in a few years, was to bring German idealism to Michigan and Johns Hopkins. 263 WILLIAM G. T. SHEDD William Greenough Thayer Shedd (1820- 1894), a Presbyterian student at Vermont strongly influenced by James Marsh to become an "ardent disciple of Coleridge, Kant, and Plato," is notable for his work of popularizing Transcendentalism of the Coleridgean type. After graduating from Andover Theological Seminary in 1843, Shedd taught at Vermont, Auburn Seminary, Andover, and finally Union Theological Seminary, where he remained for eleven years as successor to Henry Boyn- ton Smith. Though in his later years he became a violent critic of the German Higher Criticism, before i860 he was a champion of the type of idealism stemming from post-Kantian sources. Like Coleridge, he tended to equate the ideal with the su- pernatural, and looked upon the doctrines of the German orthodox theologians as an important source of truth for his genera- tion. 264 Schleiermacher and the Tubingen school he rejected, and in the 1870's he felt constrained to warn American students against being "deluded by the phosphoric lights of schemes and schemers." 265 Like Smith and others who made use of German Biblical scholarship, Shedd was by no means fully conversant with the entire history of recent German philosophy, and he made use of it only to the extent that it could easily be assimilated by native theological principles and tenets. Shedd's most significant contributions were his edition of Coleridge (1853) and his trans- lations of several standard German theologi- cal works. 266 FREDERICK AUGUSTUS RAUCH The seminaries of the German Reformed Church produced a group of important professors of theology 267 who were generally more conversant with German thought than their colleagues in the secular colleges. One of them, Frederick Augustus Rauch ( 1 806-1 84 1 ), 268 was an enthusiastic disciple of Hegel and probably the first bearer of Hegel's teaching to America. His Psycholo- gy (1841) is the first book in English bearing the title "Psychology," and was designed by the author to "unite German and American mental philosophy." Dividing the field of psychology after the German fashion into Anthropology and Psychology, he presented a system of "Hegelian real- ism," intended to "give the science of man a direct bearing upon other sciences, and especially upon religion and theology." 269 The book received instant notice, among both Transcendentalists, like Brownson, and Unitarians, like Walker at Harvard. Its acceptance was, of course, not complete in every quarter, the orthodox being quick to label it as pantheistic in tendency; never- theless, it was used as a text in some schools and colleges, reaching four editions by 1853. 270 Rauch was equally well informed on Kant and on Hegel : he drew strictly the Kantian distinction between understanding and reason, and was careful in selecting an adequate and intelligible terminology for the new Hegelian concepts. Dr. Haag remarks that with Rauch, Hegel spoke English. 271 He certainly impressed his native American successor, John Niven, as having succeeded markedly in adapting himself and his German heritage to the needs and capacities of his American surroundings. 272 PHILIP SCHAFF Another early German-born teacher German Philosophy in American Colleges 307 whose influence reached beyond the limits of German groups was Philipp SchafT, a renowned teacher and scholar who was active for many years at the Union Theo- logical Seminary in New York. He had studied at Tubingen, Halle, and Berlin from 1837 to 1840, and became Privat- dozent at Berlin in 1842. Subsequently he was established at Mercersburg, whence he removed to New York. He was one of the best informed men in America to interpret the Biblical scholarship and points of view of such men as Neander, Edersheim, Giese- ler, and Hagenbach. 273 From 1850 to 1880: College Courses and Texts From about 1850 to 1880 there was little outward change in the philosophical teach- ing, except that, on the whole, the increment of scientific courses in the college curriculum grew at the expense of courses in philoso- phy. Meanwhile "philosophy" split into three major components — natural, mental, and moral; and mental philosophy tended further to divide into two increasingly distinct fields — logic and psychology. A list of texts in use during the period reveals a considerable number of books reflecting a mounting direct influence, either through translation or commentary, of German philosophy. 274 LOGIC Textbooks in logic used most frequent- ly were those by Levi Hedge (18 16), Arch- bishop Whately (1826), John S. Mill (1843), Henry P. Tappan (1844), W. D. Wilson (1856), Henry C. Coppee (1858), Francis Bowen (1965), Charles Everett (1869), and R. H. Lotze (1887). Despite the general hostility to German idealism as a system, none of the writers after 1850 could dis- regard the contributions made by Kant, 275 and every one of the later American texts acknowledged a greater or lesser, direct or indirect, debt to German thought. Even Bowen (1811-1890), instructor and later Alford Professor at Harvard, and a very outspoken critic of American Transcenden- talism, recognized the changes wrought since the appearance of Whately's book. By 1842, when he published his Critical Essays (a book which, according to Dr. Haag, "marked Bowen as the best informed con- temporary critic and expositor of the phi- losophy of the Germans in relation to American thought"), Bowen boasted of the extent to which European philosophy was being studied in the American colleges. 278 The Elements of Logic (1844) of Henry P. Tappan (1805-1881), written some years before the author became chancellor of the University of Michigan, reflects more strongly than does Bowen 's a dependence on Kant. In his earlier books on the will Tappan had struggled vainly to find a way out of the determinism of Edwards; he finally succeeded by adopting the Kantian threefold determination of the mental faculties. 277 Charles C. Everett (1829-1900), a pro- fessor in the Harvard Divinity School from 1878 to 1900, had studied in Germany under Gabler, the disciple of Hegel. His Science of Thought (1869), as he explains in the Preface, is an adaptation of Hegelian logic, especially in "form." Everett made extensive forays into German philosophy, and in 1884 published a critical exposition of Fichte's Science of Knowledge in Griggs's influential series of "German Philosophical Classics," edited by George S. Morris. The Laws of Discursive Thought (1870) by the Scottish-born James McCosh (President of Princeton from 1868 to 1888), while honoring Kant, emphasized the "errors" of the "new," or post-Kantian philosophers. McCosh, an able critic, spent much of his energy fighting Hegelianism. He was so successful, and his reputation in academic circles rose so high that he was generally credited with having raised Scottish realism to the position of being the American philosophy of the time. 308 German Thought in America Finally, it is to be noted that Lotze's Outlines of Logic, in George Trumbull Ladd's translation of 1887, was introduced in several institutions during the last decade of the century; Lotze's earnest religious tone appealed to conservative and "semi-theological" academicians. 278 ETHICS Until late in the nineteenth century the college course in ethics, usually taught by the president, was a conspicuous feature of the curriculum of the senior year. Under the title of Moral Philosophy, often in con- junction with courses on the Evidences of Christianity of Natural Theology, this important study embraced a broad range, from simple character building to an in- quiry into the powers of the mind and their application to individual and social life. 279 Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1788) reached its tenth Ameri- can edition in 1821. The texts of McBride (1796), Wayland (1835), Jouffroy (1842), Whewell (1847), Bowen (1855), Hickok (1856), Whately (1857), Metcalf (i860), Hopkins (1862), Calderwood (1874), and Andrew P. Peabody (1887) were the most extensively used, though there were others. 280 At the time of the Transcendental fer- ment the teaching of ethics at Harvard was under the supervision of James Walker, who used Jouffroy's books as a text during the forties. Whatever its defects on the side of superficial, inconsistent eclecticism, it afforded many students their first glimpse of German thought. Walker, like Bowen, was a staunch Scottish realist, who, however, was thoroughly informed about the ethical theories of Kant, Schleier- macher, and Hegel; and in his edition of Stewart's Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers (1849) he included them in a list of German treatises that "must be read" by anyone who wished to pursue the study. 281 The System of Moral Science by President Hickok of Union College, quite as much as his general system, owes much to Kant. Hickok defined the individual soul as a supernatural force and a free agent. As Kant postulated freedom of the will and immortality as the necessary grounds for practical morality, so Hickok argued that the facts of the moral life require and demonstrate the reality of the individual soul. His ethical views were rigoristic in the Kantian manner. 282 The position of Presi- dent Mark Hopkins of Williams was simi- larly close to Coleridge and Kant. Although he started from the common-sense philoso- phy, he later dissented from Paley's "doc- trine of ends" and adopted instead a doc- trine "of an ultimate right, as taught by Kant and Coleridge, making that the end." 283 This view, which has been called a kind of "sublimated utilitarianism," roused the vigorous opposition of McCosh and other conservatives. 284 Calderwood's Hand- book of Moral Philosophy (1874) enjoyed some vogue in American schools and was in use at Indiana University in 1880. Because it assembled the ethical doctrines from a host of authorities, ancient and modern, continental and British, it gave a fair idea of recent German ethical thought. In such ways as these, directly and indirectly, the Kantian position was brought to and inter- preted for the American student. METAPHYSICS AND PSYCHOLOGY Another large class of textbooks and corresponding college courses was devoted to metaphysics and psychology. Under the various titles of Intellectual Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, and Mental Philoso- phy (later generally more sharply differenti- ated into metaphysics and psychology), these courses in their development followed the trend of philosophical speculation apparent throughout the century. The roots of the study of epistemology and the mental processes are to be found in the agnostic attitude of Hume and the speculations of Berkeley on the one hand, and in the German Philosophy in American Colleges 309 German Kantian and post-Kantian specu- lations on the other. On the whole, Ameri- can teachers remained loyal to the Scottish realists. Nevertheless, the new points of view revealed in the agitation over Tran- scendentalism and Kantian skepticism is described by Hall as having been "amaz- ingly fructifying . . . from without." That is to say, even the most unwilling of the orthodox were forced to come to grips with the questions posed by Emerson, Parker, and company. 285 An important innovator among writers of texts 286 in this field was Thomas Upham (1799-1872), a student at Andover under Stuart and later professor at Bowdoin. Beginning in 1827, Upham published his large and carefully worked-out Elements of Mental Philosophy (first entitled Intellectual Philosophy) in a series of revisions. The 1 83 1 edition contained for the first time the very important tripartite division of the faculties, which afterward was taken up in most American textbooks. 287 Upham's text was a very successful one, still widely used as late as the eighties. Another highly successful writer of philo- sophic textbooks was Francis Wayland (1796-1865), President of Brown University (1827-1855), whose Moral Science (1835), Political Economy (1838), and Intellectual Philosophy (1854) were very popular. In his Intellectual Philosophy he cited Coleridge, Cousin, Hamilton, together with other Scottish and English writers as his authori- ties, and his Political Economy appears to rely most directly on Fichte. 288 Laurens Perseus Hickok (1798-1888) 289 wrote between 1849 and 1875 a series of philosophical texts and treatises embracing the fields of psychology, "moral science," cosmology, and logic, elaborating a system of "Constructive Realism" which he felt would avoid the errors alike of idealism and of naive realism. He felt he could make a defense of Christian theology without resorting to mysticism by putting it rather on a firm and broad rational foundation. The terms of his problem were set for him by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, whose significance he understood better than did his theological contemporaries. 290 His Ratio- nal Psychology (1842), a tome of seven hundred pages, which reached a second edition in 1861, was a reworking of Kantian epistemology, wherein he attempted to overcome Kant's negative conclusions by setting up a priori principles free from the subjectivity of the Kantian categories. Hickok's ethics, as already indicated, were grounded on the Kantian doctrines of liberties and rights, and his Rational Cos- mology (1858) expounded a priori principles in the manner of Kant. 291 Hickok's Empiri- cal Psychology (1854) employed the Kantian division of the mental faculties. Revised twenty -five years later by Julius H. Seelye, the book long found adherents among college teachers. 292 Professor Joseph Haven (1816-1874), student at Gottingen and Berlin in 1830 and translator of Heine's Letters on Polite Literature of Germany (1836), is another of the Amherst teachers who published a textbook, Mental Philosophy (1857), and whose tendency ran counter to the prevail- ing realist doctrine. Haven adopted Up- ham's threefold division of the mental faculties and cited Cousin as his forerunner "and previously still, Kant of Germany." Among the first in America to interpret the German aesthetic theories, his Mental Phi- losophy included a short historical sketch of German aesthetic thought, as represent- ed by Leibnitz, Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Kant, and Schiller. 293 Asa Mahan (1 799-1 889), first president of Oberlin College, published in 1845 his System of Intellectual Philosophy, which, in its original form at least, acknowledged the significance of continental idealism and brought together ideas from Locke, Reid, Cousin, Coleridge, and Kant. 294 From Cousin, especially, he absorbed much of Fichte's teachings, which he stated accu- rately in the Intellectual Philosophy (1845), 310 German Thought in America as well as in his Doctrine of the Will (1847). Noah Porter (1811-1892) was the author of Human Intellect (1868), and Elements of Intellectual Science (1871), two compendi- ous works, which, coming somewhat after the violent outbursts against idealism had died down, gave relatively more space to the history of the subject. They treat of theories of sense-perception from Aristotle to Kant, and set forth the Hegelian doctrine of the Absolute. Porter had spent a year of travel and study in Europe in 1 853-1 854, during which time he attended the Univer- sity of Berlin. Essentially a conservative, in his later years he became more tolerant and a decidedly better critic of German metaphysics. In 1886 he published his book on Kant's Ethics and wrote a section on American philosophy appended to G. S. Morris' translation of Ueberweg (1871- 1873). Because of his prominence in educa- tional circles (he was professor at Yale from 1846 to 1 87 1 and president from 1871 to 1886) Porter wielded great authority and influence in his time. President John Bascom (1827-1911) of the University of Wisconsin, author of textbooks in many philosophical branches, was a student and disciple of Hickok and used Hickok's texts in his classes. He firmly believed in Hickok's system of rational psychology as opposed to empirical psychol- ogy. His Science of Method (1881), while resisting the evolutionism of Spencer and Bain, made use of the genetic method and shows an awareness of the results of Ger- man psychology. 295 Factors in the Development of Germanic Influence A NEW TYPE OF UNIVERSITY The introduction of the elective system on a widespread scale, the development of graduate studies and the seminar method, and the mushroom growth of the sciences made it impossible to keep all the old studies alongside the new. The classical languages were commonly made optional, modern languages were generally intro- duced, German and French being made compulsory; and the entire course, while still within prescribed limits, permitted a far higher degree of specialization than before. Philosophy was kept, often as a required course, but it weighed much less in proportion to the sum total of subject matter than it had in the earlier years of the century. Even so, there was a considerable increase in both professors and courses; 29 ' and with the increase in offerings, room was made in the program for the closer study of special problems, of individual philosophers or schools of philosophy, and for courses in the history of philosophy, the entire study of philosophy becoming comparable in scope to the German system. 297 The crucial innovation in the eighteen-seventies was the introduction of regular instruction in the domain of German philosophy. This occurred at Harvard in 1873-1874, when Professor Bowen for the first time conducted his course in modern German philosophy. Harvard's lead was followed in a few years by others of the larger schools. 298 These developments are closely linked with the gradual victory of the so-called "German" principles of university educa- tion — elective studies, the seminar and lecture methods, and the support of schol- arship and research activities. Not the older schools of the East, but the University of Michigan in the fifties introduced this ideal conception of the German university, under its enthusiastic Germanist, President Hen- ry P. Tappan (1805-1881). 299 During the period of his presidency (1 852-1 863), he insisted on the important distinction be- tween the College and the University, the College being the preparatory or trade school, fitting men for special practical careers, the University instead being "libraries, cabinets, apparatus, professors, and provision . . . where study may be extended without limit" — -an assembly of gifted scholar-teachers and mature, respon- German Philosophy in American Colleges 311 sible, well trained graduate students. 300 After a deliberate consideration of the claims of all types of higher education the world over, Tappan found the German practice most nearly approaching his ideal; and that is why, in his earlier writings on the subject and in his addresses and official duties as President or Chancellor of the University of Michigan, he constantly cited Prussian examples, even to the point of annoying and antagonizing local opinion in intensely democratic frontier Michigan with his Germanic enthusiasms. 301 In 1863 he was ousted by the combined forces of Protestant orthodoxy (fearing the rise of a state university as a threat to denomina- tionalism) and of narrow, personal, and political partisanship. Not long afterward, Tappan's famous colleague, Andrew Dickson White, was given the opportunity to organize Cornell University and thus to carry forward some of the principles first charted by Tappan. 301 Cornell, established in 1868, and Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876, both emphasized certain features of the German system, especially the cultivation of experimental science, the creation of great libraries, and the use of lecture and seminar methods. The story of their establishment and their debt to German example has been told too often to require further elaboration, 303 but none of the later exponents of the German idea defined the concept of the University quite in the liberal, broadly humanistic spirit of Tappan. In an era of scientific discovery it was not difficult for Johns Hopkins, Har- vard, and soon afterward, the other larger schools vastly to increase the expenditures for libraries, laboratories, and scientific apparatus. COLLEGE COURSES IN 1880 After 1875 college philosophy benefited under the new dispensation, and many features of accepted German practice in the teaching of that subject were introduced, especially in the larger institutions. As early as 1 86 1 Tappan had outlined for Michigan a course of study for postgraduates entitled the History of Philosophy, though it seems not to have been immediately given. By 1886, however, there were offerings of four- teen different courses at Michigan, including psychology, logic, the history of philosophy, aesthetics, the philosophy of the state and of history, experimental psychology, ethics, the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, specu- lative philosophy, and seminars in Plato's Republic, in Hegel's Logic, and in Aristotle's Ethics. 30 * At Hopkins, the graduate school offered in 1 879-1 880 and thereafter, the history of philosopy and ethics, the history of British philosophy, and in addition, private readings in ethics (using Kant's Critique of Practical Reason), in German philosophy (1880-1881), systematic ethics, and some phases of the history of Ameri- can philosophy (1881-1882). 305 While more progressive schools welcomed the study of German philosophy, 306 the process was not generally spontaneous and easy elsewhere. The intellectual tone of the college did not change overnight from indifference to enthusiasm, and it was only by experimen- tation and piecemeal change that the prin- ciples of free electives, a wider range of studies, and the emancipation from the textbook were put into practice. 307 In the smaller denominational colleges and in some of the older or larger institutions like Princeton, Columbia, and Wisconsin, the philosophical faculty continued its warfare on idealism until the end of the century and beyond. 308 President McCosh of Princeton published numerous attacks on idealism as well as materialism from 1875 to 1894. He was convinced that the interest in German thought was an infatuation and delusion destined quickly to pass. 309 RESISTANCE TO IDEALISM In 1875 Princeton awarded a fellowship to J. P. K. Bryan for the study of philoso- phy in Europe, this being the first awarded in that branch, though others had gone 312 German Thought in America before him to do work in the natural sciences. From the report of his work published by Bryan on his return, one gains the impression that he heard the German lecturers more to refute them than to be taught by them. His report was an attempted defense of the Scottish point of view and a summation of errors and weak- nesses of the Germanic. McCosh's comments on Bryan's report and on the state of affairs in Germany amounts to this: Bryan, while attending Zeller's lectures, learned that [Zeller's] system is Ideal-Real — whatever that may mean It is clear that the ideal philosophy is running to seed, and the adherents are giving us nothing of any value except histories of ancient and mod- ern speculation. All over Germany there is an ominous reaction from it, and a strong tendency toward materialism. 310 In 1882 McCosh continued the argument in a paper contrasting the Scottish philoso- phy with the German, at the same time conceding the practical necessity of making a judicious use of Kant and of the recent researches into psychology by Wundt and Lotze. So McCosh in a manner joins the Back-to-Kant movement, insisting, how- ever, that German philosophy will not be transplanted into America "till there is a change to suit it to the climate." It must accommodate itself to us. In fact, McCosh in his later writings tended to reject sensa- tionalism and to agree with the Concord School on the subject of the "divine Idea in the mind." Though he remained suspicious of "lofty systems," he wanted to be empiri- cal and inductive in his method. 311 The attack came from other quarters, too. James Hervey Hyslop, Professor of Logic and Ethics at Columbia, ridiculed those who enter the "blue empyrean of transcenden- talism," 312 and President Bascom in 1881 feared idealism as conducive to atheism. 313 The growth of interest in German philos- ophy continued despite these retarding forces — fostered in part by the influence of those Americans who received all or part of their academic training in German univer- sities; for throughout the period under consideration a large proportion of Ameri- ca's most famous students and teachers of philosophy learned to know at first hand the German tradition of philosophic study and imported directly the methods and points of view of these centers of learning. 314 The presence of German-trained men in various technical and humanistic fields other than philosophy further facilitated the reception and vogue of German philoso- phy. 315 INFLUENCE OF TRANSCENDENTALISTS AND HEGELIANS Despite the oft-heard contention that! academic teaching was little affected by, either New England Transcendentalism or its later counterpart, the St. Louis Hegelian Movement, it is to be noted that men closely identified with these groups were given opportunities in several of the : colleges and universities to present their views. At Harvard, R. W. Emerson and J. E. Cabot were among those appointed to participate in the University lecture course in philosophy in 1 870-1 871. The Transcen- dentalist Samuel Osgood was called to lecture on German literature and modern thought at Union College in 1876. Joseph • Cook, a popular speaker on the Boston Monday Lecture Series, presented in 1876 a course of lectures at Mount Holyoke Seminary, including such subjects as "Decline of Rationalism in Germany," "Evolution," and "Materialism." 316 The Hegelian W. T. Harris presented series of lectures before many schools and institutes and, in 1882, gave a special course on the philosophy of education at Holyoke. 317 Students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology heard not only Howison but were permitted during the seventies to attend the lectures of the Lowell Institute free of charge; and there, in 1874-1875, for example, they heard a course of eighteen German Philosophy in American Colleges 313 lectures on modern philosophy, half of which were devoted to German thinkers since Leibnitz. 318 Professors of Philosophy Thus many factors conspired to make the last twenty years of the century the high point of Germanic influence in American philosophy. As idealism became dominant, even its opponents — including pragmatists, personalists, and realists — were profoundly influenced by the German classical and post- Hegelian philosophies. Aside from a host of influential professors trained in Germany under men like Lotze, Fechner, Windelband and the psychologists Hartmann, Helm- holtz, and Wundt, more and more of our more influential universities came under the guidance of men like Andrew D. White, widely known for their interest in promul- gating the German ideal of higher education in this country. 319 Furthermore, the in- fluence of the St. Louis Philosophical Socie- ty, founded in 1866, together with the Kant Club and the Journal of Speculative Philoso- phy, expressing the views of the Hegelians Harris and Brokmeyer, formed a rallying point for a whole generation of rising young teachers — Peirce, Howison, Hall, Morris, James, Royce, and Dewey, all availing themselves of the pages of this journal to publish their early writings. 320 CHARLES S. PEIRCK The writings of Charles S. Peirce (1839- 1914) are an important and oft-mentioned source of many points of view later develop- ed by James, Royce, Dewey, and others. The son of Benjamin Peirce, the mathema- tician, the boy received a thorough scien- tific training in the Cambridge atmosphere then pervaded with German thought. Years later he recalled that of all the national schools, the German had the deepest in- fluence on him. The first strictly philosophical books that I read were of the classical German schools; and I became so deeply imbued with many of their ways of thinking that I have never been able to disabuse myself of them. Yet my attitude was always that of a dweller in a laboratory, eager only to learn what I did not yet know, and not that of philosophers bred in the theological seminaries, whose ruling impulse is to teach what they hold to be infallibly true. I devoted two hours a day to the study of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for more than three years, until I almost knew the whole book by heart, and had critically examined every section of it. . . . The effect of these [studies] was that I came to hold the classical German philoso- phy to be, on its argumentative side, of little weight ; although I esteem it, perhaps am too partial to it, as a rich mine of philo- sophical suggestions. 321 Peirce's great contribution was the for- mulation of the concept of "pragmatism" — the doctrine that only through application to existence, to some future consequence, can any philosophic proposition be given meaning. The choice of the term rests upon Kant's distinction between "praktisch" and "pragmatisch," 322 but Peirce was the first to insist on its wider significance. While Peirce's ideas are scattered in a number of fragmentary or special studies, his careful and independent study of the problems of cosmology and psychology may be consid- ered to be in harmony with the Kantian point of view — even though certain Kantian ideas are discarded. 323 Professor Muirhead, in a summary statement of Kant's influence on Peirce, asserted that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — "the textbook, as it might be said, of the philosophically wise of his generation" — furnished him with the doc- trine of the "purposiveness of all activity, whether practical, theoretic, or aesthetic. It was the general view founded on the recognition of this purposiveness that, to distinguish it from pragmatism, he called pragmaticism .... In the second place, he learned from Kant the place of thought as the direction of intellectual and moral ac- tivity towards unity and organization in the 'matter of experience.'" 324 The third thing he learned from his study of Kant was 314- German Thoucrht in America the "impossibility of combining the belief in an intelligible thing-in-itself with the real teaching of the Critique." 325 Peirce did not rule out the possibility of the final harmony of all reality in an absolute, and this makes it understandable why he could say, as he once did, "My philosophy resuscitates Hegel, though in a strange costume." 326 Following his avowed purpose of erecting "a philosophical edifice that shall outlast the vicissitudes of time," he found only one system, "the new Schel- ling-Hegel mansion," that "stands upon its own ground." 327 His mathematical concep- tions were employed to support and modify this "Schelling-fashioned idealism" which emerged more and more in the later stages of his writing. 328 Like Hegel, Peirce was fond of formulating his thought in triadic forms; 329 and idealists like Royce were indebted to Peirce for insights and ideas which contributed to their idealist logic, and which they traced back to Hegel. 330 Thus, contrary to the impression conveyed by certain remarks of his in condemnation of Hegel, 331 Peirce on the whole, and espe- cially in his later writings, did not remain entirely uninfluenced by the German idealists. GEORGE S. MORRIS During the time when Peirce was a lecturer on Logic at Hopkins (1879-1884), he was associated with George Sylvester Morris and G. Stanley Hall in the conduct of courses for advanced students. This group of three, all somewhat older than the group of idealists and pragmatists whose brilliant work was to raise the status of American philosophy in the succeeding years, is to be credited with inspiring and guiding the future development, not only by their own work but also by the work of their students, Royce and Dewey. 332 Peirce's original and penetrating studies contained the germ of many divergent ideas elaborated by the idealists, pragma- tists, and realists alike. Hall was interested mainly in furthering the study of experi- mental psychology, while Morris propound- ed Hegelianism. Morris (1 840-1 88q) 333 left comparatively little original writing to perpetuate his fame, but as a teacher in that critical period he was acknowledged to be a real influence in the dissemination of German philosophical points of view, laboring indefatigibly and effectively to make the department of phi- losophy an integrating force where science and ethical and religious knowledge could have a common meeting-ground, 334 and becoming widely known as a champion of Hegel and Kant and a co-worker with' W. T. Harris. Even while nominally a professor of modern languages at Michigan, ; he undertook, during 1 871-1873, the work 1 of translating Friedrich Ueberweg's History, of Philosophy, in the "Theological and Philosophical Library Series" edited by Henry B. Smith and Philip Schaff. A little later he assumed the editorship of a series of critical expositions of "German Philo- sophical Classics" — Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel — in which series he himself published Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, a Critical Exposition (1882) and Hegel's Philosophy of the State and of History (1887). 335 Ever the earnest and grateful disciple of Henry B. Smith, Morris was yet destined, mainly because he belonged to a younger generation, to find little solace in his teacher's reconciliation of faith and specu- lative thought. Coming from orthodox Presbyterian circles, he was depressed and troubled for a long time by this problem. 33 ' The British Hegelians, T. H. Green, the Caird brothers, and Adamson, were the first to aid Morris in constructing an ideal- istic view that overcame the dualism of science and faith. 337 He undertook an intensive study of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel only after 1877, at the time when he was preparing the critical expositions of Kant and Hegel for his series. These works are critical and expository, not an independent German Philosophy in American Colleges 315 adjustment of the ideas of Kant and Hegel to American needs of the time. In later lectures and essays, Morris discussed the main doctrines of Protestant dogmatics in terms of "what may be loosely called Hegelianism of the extreme Right Wing. " 338 He drifted toward speculative idealism, but lapsed into an ethical theism which con- stantly skirted the basic problems. There was in him to the end of his short life a large residue of Calvinistic moralism, individualism, and dualism. GEOHGE HOLMES HOWISON While the interest of George Holmes Howison (1834-1916) in technical philoso- phy was first aroused by his personal con- tact with the St. Louis group of Hegelians, he later attacked the orthodox Hegelians for their metaphysical absolutism and pantheism, and took his stand in favor of spiritual pluralism and personal idealism. 339 At first a Hegelian "pure and simple," 340 he took part in the Symposia of the absolut- ists and lectured before the Concord School of Philosophy. But by 1883 he had formu- lated an important objection to absolutism, on the basis of which he separated from the Hegelians ever afterward: he wished to reconcile the affirmation of the existence of the individual with Hegelianism. Going back to Plato and Aristotle, and reading more of Spinoza, Fichte, and Hegel, he moved closer to rational theism. But his doubting of Hegel continued, until he rejected the belief in impersonal ideas and, reading James and the English writer, F. C. S. Schiller, came to believe in object- ive causes analogous to the will. 311 JOSIAH BOYCE One contributing reason why philosophi- cal idealism had so many devoted followers and exponents at the close of the last century was the challenge which the em- pirical and naturalistic science offered to religion. Evolutionism and radical empiri- cism had rendered the traditional concepts suspect, while idealism provided a reforma- tion of religion without completely rejecting science. Josiah Royce (1855-1916), perhaps the most formidable of all the champions of idealism in the America of his day, was a student of Peirce and Morris at Johns Hopkins in 1878. But for two years before that he had studied at Gottingen and Leipzig under Lotze, Wundt, and Windelband. After a few years of teaching in California, he began his career at Harvard, where he remained until his death in 1916. His total system contained features derived from many sources. Especially after being subjected to the criticisms of Howison in the "Great Debate" of 1898, Royce emphasized the voluntaristic aspect of his thought, derived mainly from James and Lotze. 342 From Peirce he learned the method of mathematical logic which he used in his later books. Professor Cohen suggests that he was strongly influenced by the Kantian doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason and by the whole metaphysic of the Critique of Pure Reason. 3 * 3 Other elements are traceable to Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. "The creative Ego of Fichte and the Self of Hegel, the Ego as spectator of itself, as Royce expresses it, living on the spectacle of its birth and death ; these are all found in his philosophy." 344 From Schopenhauer, perhaps, was derived his tendency to give prominence to the will, 345 while the empha- sis on duty suggests Fichte. 346 According to Royce's own testimony, Hegel was not as important in his thought as the other Romantics. 347 By such means he constructed a system which was so complex and inclusive that it harmonized with much of James's prag- matism, while providing a metaphysics and epistemology built on the foundations of Kant and presenting the problems of the relation of the American individual to his universe, physical and moral, in terms of an absolute idealism that is essentially Ger- manic. His community is one in which 316 German Thought in America personal subordination is sublimated into identification of the self with the larger social world or whole. Thus he retained what he regards as true individualism. For the world of Royce is one in which there are objects to be attained and defects to be made good. And so the unique meaning of the individual life, the meaning of the differences between individuals, is retained. This emphasis on uniqueness, suggested to him most immediately by James, but developed also by others, ultimately recom- mended Royce's system to the American community, notably New England, while his pervasive and profound personal in- fluence, in the years up to 1916, did much to uphold the reputation of idealism at a time when realism and instrumentalism were threatening to carry all before them. GEORGE HERBERT PALMER Professor George Herbert Palmer (1842- 1933), beloved teacher of ethics at Harvard and translator of Homer, taught an ideal- istic theism which owed much to the Kantian formulation of the function of the Practical Reason. Absorbing less from the college courses at Andover and Harvard than from his independent reading, Palmer was drawn to German idealism as early as 1 865-1 866, when he read Coleridge and F. H. Maurice as well as Kant. His years at Tubingen (1 867-1 869) made him a con- firmed follower of Kant, in whom he found his "liberator" from the "arbitrary limita- tions of English empiricism." 348 On the appearance in 1878 of the Scottish-Hegelian Caird's book on Kant, Palmer struck up a lasting friendship with the Scottish author, though he by no means subscribed to Hegel's system. In teaching his course in ethics Palmer acknowledged himself a follower of Jesus and Kant, setting the Kantian imperative (in simplified, general- ized form) as the basis of morality. 349 JAMES EDWIN CREIGHTON James Edwin Creighton (1 861-1924) was perhaps the strictest Hegelian of all the later idealists. He studied in Leipzig and Berlin in 1888, afterwards becoming in- structor at Cornell and later being associ- ated with the Sage School of Philosophy. He defended speculative idealism against absolute idealism, pragmatism, and realism. He rejected the tendency in Kant to center the philosophical universe in the subject and to set subject and object transcenden- tally opposed to one another. Instead of mentalism — whereby everything is defined as mental in character, of the content and substance of mind — he proposed specula- tive idealism, appealing to the principle of the concrete universal which recognizes that only the individual is real. 350 His translation of the writings of Wundt ma- terially aided in the introduction of German philosophy into America. JOHN DEWEY Though John Dewey (1859-1952) was later to develop radical empiricism to greater lengths than any other American thinker of his generation, during his youth he was strongly influenced by the German idealists and particularly by Hegel. 351 In- fluenced also by Green and the Cairds, he made an intensive study of the works of Hegel, which left its mark on his subse- quently developed thought principally in his opposition to dualisms of all sorts, "in his historical approach to all cultural life, his mastery of concrete material, and his extraordinarily acute perception of the con- tinuities between matter and life, life and mind, and mind and society. . . . Even after he abandoned Hegelian idealism and its artificial schematicism, he honored Hegel's insight into the processes of change out of which the relative and shifting concretions of things emerge that provide the context of all discourse and action. He naturalized Hegel's historical approach by a biological theory of mind and an institutional analysis of social behavior." 352 German Philosophy in American Colleges 317 WILLIAM JAMES The idealist systems proposed by Royce, Howison, and others, though they were successful in making a rationalistic union of science and religion and thus in preserv- ing, in a sense, much of the view of life espoused by the genteel tradition against the continued strong attacks of realists and materialists, were found to be far from satisfactory to a number of typically Amer- ican personalities. The absolute threatened to give a static, predetermined, intellectual- istic picture of the world at a time when American thinkers wished to express in philosophy the opposite picture of practi- cality, change, flux, and meliorism, with full freedom for the individual will to alter the course of events. William James (1842- 1910) was the one first vividly and effective- ly to present this view. His father, "half-Swedenborgian, half- Hegelian," trained his sons in the methods of philosophical discourse and taught them a type of transcendentalism in their earliest years that William later partially rejected and partially revived. 353 After a period of eighteen months in Germany (1 867-1 868) he read widely in Comte, Spencer, Jouffroy, Schopenhauer, Kant, Schleiermacher, Fich- te, and Renouvier, 354 besides a great deal of French and German literature, and in 1867, Hegel's and Cousin's lectures on Kant. 355 After publishing his Principles of Psychology in 1890, his books were mainly devoted to the statement of his pragma- tism and his study of problems of religion. Not a system-maker primarliy, but a man gifted in presenting imaginatively the philosophic structure of the American world here and now, James took Peirce's term pragmatism and made it, with simpli- fications and slight changes of emphasis, the central concept of his doctrine. Pragma- tism for him became a theory of truth, not merely, as for Peirce, one of meaning. James, the student of fact-loving Agassiz and of Peirce, had an intense interest in and respect for empirical facts; he would allow no abstraction to come between him and the hard, irregular, primal stuff of experi- ence. But like so many romantics, he had moments and moods when the desire for a final merging of disparate individuals into one ultimate totality overcame all else. James "was not insensible to the Hegelian influence which really always remained more or less pronounced in his mind"; and, following Fechner, he approached at times a sympathy with Royce's idea of a vaster consciousness enveloping our own — -though his method of reaching this absolute was concrete and hypothetical, not abstract and deductive as was that of his colleague. 358 James's absorptive mind was nourished on a wide range of books, and the sources of his thought are manifold and sometimes remote. But the outstanding fact is that his friend and contemporary, Renouvier, offered him the necessary help at a critical juncture in 1870, so that he said in 1884, "My reasonings are almost wholly those of Renouvier." 357 While James protested "the circuitous and ponderous artificialities of Kant" and felt that the "true direction of philosophic progress lies . . . not so much through Kant as round him to the point where we now stand," 358 Kant was not thus easily outflanked. For one thing, as Re- nouvier confessed himself "a continuer of Kant," 359 so James recognized the fact that Renouvier started out with the acceptance of Kant's forms and categories and with his definition of phenomenon. Thus it was from ideas originating in Kant that the empiri- cism of James developed. 360 Seeing con- temporary philosophies gravitating to the two extremes of Hegelian idealism and evolutionism, and concluding that the philosophy of the future would be "either that of Renouvier or that of Hegel," he unhesitatingly took sides with the French thinker, "determined to continue, in an even more radically empiristic fashion, the tradi- tion of neo-criticism simultaneously with the tradition of men like Lotze and Sigwart." 361 318 German Thought in America But James arrived at some of the same ideas through other channels. The system and temperament of Fechner were similar to those of Renouvier and were important to James in reinforcing his thinking. In 1908 James waxed enthusiastic over the German writer's Zend-Avesta, calling it "a wonderful book, by a wonderful genius. He has his vision and he knows how to discuss it, as no one's vision ever was discussed." 362 J ames 's poly theism — his theory of the multi- plicity of consciousness and his transcenden- talist theory of the soul, whereby particular souls proceed from a single immense reservoir, an infinite thought or mother con- sciousness — were inspired by Fechner and his disciple Myers, rather than Renouvier. 363 Lotze, another critic of Hegel, and Wundt, whose teachings were derived from both Fechner and Lotze, were recognized by James as those of contemporary Ger- man thinkers with whom he could feel most in sympathy. 364 Not only did James and Lotze agree on philosophical method and orientation, but James also derived some of his special arguments from his reading of Lotze. These are especially noteworthy in his Psychology. James used several of Lotze's books (in English translation) in his classes at Harvard. 365 Inasmuch as James rejects most of Kant and is unsympathetic to the ways of think- ing of the German idealists, he represents a force tending to discredit what had long been considered the main current of German philosophy. But he had close relations, some indirect, with some lesser-known German writers, and his debt to German teachers in another and quite separate field — psycho- physics and experimental physiology and psychology — was very great. 366 The sub- stance of his first book, the Psychology (1890), was in sympathy with and partly derivative from German experimental psychology. He had learned the experimen- tal methods during his eighteen months in Germany in the sixties. 367 During his later years he concerned himself less and less with experimental psychology, but kept up his close and friendly relations with German writers in the field, 368 and it was entirely through his efforts that Professor Hugo Munsterberg was induced, in 1892, to leave his laboratory at Freiburg and carry on his work at Harvard, 369 in co-operation with Palmer, Royce, and James. THORSTEIN VEBLEN The work of the independent, ironical, enigmatical Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) is difficult to categorize because it belongs to several fields at once. In 1880 Veblen began his graduate studies at Johns Hop- kins, 370 taking work in philosophy with Morris and Peirce. On the whole he was closer to Peirce's critical point of view than to Morris' attempts at constructing an idealism consonant with Christian theism. Earlier, Veblen had read W. T. Harris' Philosophical Basis of Theism and found himself unsympathetic with Hegel. In- stead, he was more willing to align himself with the neo-Kantians and evolutionists, trusting that an extension of Kantian metaphysics would provide a basis for solid work in the contemporary scientific age. He continued his philosophical studies at Yale under the famous conservative Noah Por- ter. In preparing his dissertation on the "Ethical Grounds of a Doctrine of Retri- bution," he made a thorough study of Kant and the post-Kantians and, rejecting cur- rent utilitarianism and hedonistic ethical theories, replaced them with Kant's rigoris- tic ethics of duty. It is interesting to note that Harris' Journal of Speculative Philoso- phy in 1884 printed the first article of Veblen's to appear before the public — an analysis of Kant's Critique of Judgment. 5 " 11 Veblen's antagonism to Hegelianisms of all kinds — conservative or materialistic — dates from this period of his study of Peirce and Kant, and was a permanent safeguard against any tendency to accept Marxian socialist doctrine without close criticism and important revisions. German Philosophy in American Colleges 319 Although Veblen devoted his years of teaching and writing to the fields of eco- nomics and sociology, every book that he wrote was finally grounded on his individual philosophical approach to the problems of his day. Many, because of their ironic, iconoclastic attitude toward existing in- stitutions, hide the author's positive beliefs under an almost impenetrable mask of indirection, wit, and cautious circumlocu- tion. His last work in the field of philosophy proper was the translation he made for George Trumbull Ladd of the volumes of Lotze's Dictata. 372 On those rare occasions where Veblen presents a positive statement of his convictions, he returns to the neo- Kantian emphasis on an ethics of duty, on the centrality of morality. This is perhaps clearest in the Instinct of Workmanship and in his book on the Nature of Peace, in the Preface of which he cites Kant's late work, Zum ewigen Frieden. BORDEN P. BOWNE Contemporary with James was Borden P. Bowne (1847-1910), professor at Boston University, who constructed a transcen- dental empiricism or personalism with many features similar to those noted in James. Bowne studied at Halle and Got- tingen from 1871 to 1873, under Lotze, Erdmann, and Ulrici. In his personal ideal- ism he faced the same problems that Howi- son encountered : he differed from Royce by putting his system on a basis of the primacy of practical reason. Bowne defended the rights of the religious consciousness against positivism, materialism, and naturalism, following Lotze closely in his arguments but drawing also on Plato, Aristotle, Berkeley, Leibnitz, Kant, and Renouvier. With his emphasis on particular, concrete experience, and his suspicion of abstractions, his gener- al receptivity to pragmatic positions makes him a personal idealist opposed to imper- sonalism or the Hegelian fondness for the abstract. 373 GEORGE SANTAYANA George Santayana (1863-1952), natural- ist and materialist, was ever the enemy of the absolute idealists. In many forceful utterances he criticized the point of view of the whole German post-Kantian group of thinkers. Nevertheless, his period of study in Berlin under Paulsen, as well as under Palmer at Harvard, was fruitful. He en- joyed Paulsen's exposition of Greek ethics and his living sense of the historical spirit of the time. Fichte and Schopenhauer, he asserts, helped him formulate what he calls necessary radical transcendentalism, his doctrine of essences. 374 Santayana in his time stood virtually alone in rejecting almost completely the work of the German classical idealists. For his colleagues, the discoveries of Kant and Hegel, if not of the post-Hegelians, to- gether with recent writings on psychology and the history of philosophy, were so obviously in the direct line of the Western philosophical tradition that they could not afford to neglect them, either in formu- lating their own ideas or in their teaching. 376 Further evidence of the widespread adop- tion by the 1880's of the method and con- tent of German philosophical study appears in the use of a large number and variety of German textbooks, some in the original 376 and others in translation. 377 Experimental Psychology : G. Stanley Hall American experimental psychology was imported from Germany during the seven- ties and eighties by such students as George Trumbull Ladd of Yale and G. Stanley Hall of Clark. Hall set up the first experimental psychological laboratory in America, pat- terned directly on those he had observed in Leipzig under Wundt's direction in 1879- 1880. By 1895 the study was being carried on in "two-score of the best institutions" in this country. 378 Earlier widespread notice 320 German Thought in America of the work of Lotze and Eduard von Hart- mann's on the Unconscious (1869) un- doubtedly facilitated the rapid spread of interest in the subject. Hall spent nearly six of the twelve years between 1870 and 1882 in the lecture halls and laboratories of the German investiga- tors. 379 The experience of complete intel- lectual freedom as afforded by the German university in contrast with the narrow limitations of American college life was refreshing and stimulating. The range of Hall's studies was so wide as to include the theological discourses of Dorner, Trendelen- burg's seminary on Aristotle, Delitzsch's lectures on Biblical psychology, recent psychology by Pfleiderer, and much more in the fields of Hegelianism and Herbartian- ism, chemistry, biology, physiology, anato- my, neurology, and anthropology. Aspects of German Culture (1881), Hall's first book, was a collection of foreign letters originally published in the Nation and other journals. For the most part a com- mentary on German theology, science, and philosophy, the essays embrace a fairly wide range of loosely related subjects, in- dicating the extent of Hall's immersion in German life and thought. In 1 881-1882 he was invited to give a lecture course at Johns Hopkins, where Morris was lecturing on a similar appointment. Here he set up the first psychological laboratory in 1881; and his work ever afterward was devoted to experimental psychology, the study of childhood and adolescence, and related pedagogical subjects. John Dewey and James McKeen Cattell were students under him in Baltimore in 1882-1883. His call to the presidency of Clark University, with which school his name is closely associated, gave him his opportunity, as he termed it, to make Clark (in respect to its graduate studies in psychology and philosophy) an "offshoot of Johns Hopkins," where the methods and techniques of German research could be organized on his plan. 380 The titles of courses in various schools in the 1880's point to a rapid introduction of experimental methods. At Cornell in 1878- 1879, for instance, the course was labeled "nervous physiology in relation to mental phenomena." In 1 890-1 891 a special psychological laboratory was set up by William James at Harvard, although sever- al years earlier James had introduced ex- perimental features into his lecture courses. The study of the new psychology in all the larger schools dates from the early eighties. In 1892 Professor Miinsterberg, who had been trained in the school of Wundt and had been invited to the University of Freiburg, took charge of the experimental work in psychology at Harvard. 381 The History of Philosophy Among the last but in some respects most important developments in American phil- osophical teaching was the remarkable acceleration of emphasis during the period from 1880 to 1900 on the history of philoso- phy after the German fashion. A beginning had been made much earlier — at first with little reference to German precedent, 382 but during the last quarter of the century the movement was in the hands of men enthusi- astically sympathetic toward the German academic tradition, many of them having acquired a deep understanding of the lan- guage and the philosophy of Germany at first hand. Bowen's History of 1877 and Bascom's History of 1893 (each devoting a large amount of space to Germans from Kant to Lotze) represent significant conces- sions made by the entrenched realists to the new materials and modes of teaching. With the capitulation of the conservative Scot- tish realists the newer school may be fairly credited with a victory for their cause. Henceforth the teaching of philosophy was set squarely on the road it has traveled since. Eventualities during the period from 1880 to 1900 amount to a vindication of the aims of men like Seelye, Hickok, and Hall. The year 1900 is in a sense an arbitrary German Philosophy in American Colleges 321 stopping-point in the history of American teaching of philosophy, for the situation as it developed through the eighties and nine- ties remained almost unchanged until the outbreak of the war of 1914. The German- trained professor still occupied the position of command over the body of American teachers in that branch. Nevertheless, the rise of the group of neo-realists and critical realists early in the twentieth century is symptomatic of that vigorous protest against all forms of idealism that has gained in strength up to the present time. Before that day there was no significant movement in American philosophy — with the possible exception of the radical empiricism of John Dewey — which did not look to German thinkers for important contributions to their systems. The school of naive realism represented by McCosh rapidly lost prestige after 1880 and made concessions to neo- Kantianism in an effort to save its system from complete bankruptcy; while the growing power of materialistic and positiv- istic thought facilitated the tendency, as administrators saw that it was better to defend faith by teaching a tenable idealism than to let all religion wither and die under the attacks of blatant mechanistic material- ism. The idealists, led by Royce, were everywhere recognized as one of the most formidable groups; and the proponents of various forms of personalism, pragmatism, and realism — all acknowledging their debt either to German classical or to post- Hegel- ian writers — contended for supremacy in those places where idealism was not fully accepted. While no attempt to summarize the re- sults of so complex a relationship as that obtaining between German and American thought is, at this stage of the inquiry, as yet in order, three or four observations may be made. The introduction of German phi- losophy was no isolated event, but a series in a chain that led Americans to examine all traditions of philosophic thought from ancient to contemporary times. In their effort to find a universal explanation of things, they not only became acquainted with ideas until then unfamiliar to them but achieved a rational maturity of their own. It is noteworthy that at precisely the time when this process of winning intel- lectual maturity was at its height, the accul- turation of German philosophy was strong- est. Begun primarily as an effort to find a philosophic reorientation for religion and theology, the search for a comprehensive philosophy led, in the first place, to a re- definition of the place and meaning of phi- losophy in the whole of our intellectual life. Philosophy came to be not only logic and ethics but an attempt to find a more scien- tific method by which to solve the problems of religion, aesthetics, politics, and the sciences in terms of a sound epistemology and a comprehensive metaphysics. In the place of the older catechetical methods of instruction by which accepted dogma and sectarian doctrine in catenarian series were memorized, the basic definitions and con- cepts of German philosophy encouraged a spirit of free inquiry that eventually brought all arts and sciences, as well as religion, within the orbit of philosophy, and provoked a philosophic reorientation of all aspects of human thought and life, theore- tical and practical, such as neither the older Calvinistic nor the later Common- Sense dispensations had deemed possible or permissible. In this process nothing went deeper than the new bearings taken, under Kantian and Hegelian auspices, by which all religious experience and all theological speculation were subjected to the refining fires of ration- al investigation. Thus philosophy was raised from the rank of a dependent science to the status of a disinterested critic of the entire cosmic and human scene— to become the science of sciences, precisely as it was in Germany. This growing faith in the univer- sal applicability of philosophy and the 322 German Thought in America growing sense for the necessity of trans- lating concept and theory into action and life made it come to pass, also, that the new philosophy should be applied to the political and social patterns of a democracy. In this respect Platonic as well as Christian prece- dent was re-enforced by the application of the speculative and practical reason of Kant in his Critiques as well as his other writings, by Fichte's addresses to the Ger- man nation, and by the Hegelian applica- tion of his dialectics to the philosophy of history, with its promises of inner unity in the face of outer disparities ; and the return from Germany of the first group of Harvard men, supported by the examples of Follen and Lieber, signalized the advent in Amer- ica of this idea, soon to be given further ob- jectification by the New England Transcen- dentalists and the St. Louis Hegelians. In short, philosophy was made practical and was domesticated to the common political and social contingencies of the day. 383 A second result accruing to American philosophy from this closer alliance with German thought was the acceptance of the methodology of the Germans, involving careful research, meticulous analysis, and a willingness to follow through to conclu- sions indicated by the data. It led to an objectivity hitherto unapproached by American scholarship, revolutionizing the methods of research, enlarging the scope of investigation, and involving a new attitude toward literary sources of philosophy and history, a re-evaluation of libraries, books, and periodicals for purposes of university instruction as well as of research, a remark- able increase in book and periodical publi- cation, a rejection of the textbook method of teaching and the substitution therefor of the lecture and seminar methods, a re- orientation of the teacher-pupil relationship by which the student was led or guided into the ways of the history of ideas to solve his own problems rather than instructed ex cathedra, a complete reformation of curric- ula and disciplines, and a tendency to develop a greater open-mindedness, toler- ance, and universality in point of view. Another and in some respects more im- mediately effective influence was exerted by the more precise ideas and concepts which American thought derived, or gained support for, from German sources. Among the more influential of these is the concept of development (variously called das Wer- den or der Entwicklungsprozess) as applied not only to science but also to the history of ideas. Long before the spirit of Buffon, Lamarck, Hutton, Lyell, Wallace, and Darwin profoundly affected Americans, Herder, Goethe, the Schlegels, and Hegel had boldly declared that ideas in the realms of literature and language, philosophy, and history itself, as well as forms of organic life, exhibit traceable forms of development or evolution. Zeller's and Heeren's studies of Greek civilization and the vast amount of German Biblical history, much of which was translated by Americans between 1S30 and 1850, are other examples. Following these cues, thinking Americans were quick to conceive of reason in terms of organic unity — as incorporated in Kant's Critiques, as developed in Fichte and Schelling, and as it received its rational culmination in Hegel's phenomenology, logic, and dialec- tics. The thought of an active world-soul working in every area of human experience and achieving synthesis and objectivity in progress appealed to democratic Americans. The New England Transcendentalists vague- ly grasped but boldly accepted this sense of movement, growth, and evolution. The St. Louis Hegelians, adopting the Hegelian triadic movement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, made it an integral part of their philosophy and applied it to the resolution of the conflicting forces and ideas of the postwar period. The academic and profes- sional philosophers of the idealistic persua- sion domesticated it by acclimatizing it to American conditions and incorporating it into what passes currently for the charac- teristic American philosophy. The concep- German Philosophy in American Colleges 323 tion of man's place at the center of the universal order of evolution is at once an illustration of the "irrefragable unity of all western thought" 384 and an indication of America's readiness to assume its place in the onward movement of thought and culture. 386 This concept provided a new sense of freedom and withal a sense of re- latedness. Thus American philosophy early declared its independence by joining a philosophical process, the dependence upon which it has as yet shown little indication to throw off. This ready acceptance of the Hegelian doctrine of Prozess in the philos- ophy of history prepared the way for the acceptance of Darwin and did much to help thoughtful Americans over the baffling difficulties involved in the synthesis of the religious heritage with the newer evolution- ary discoveries. But above all else, this view of evolution meant most for the development and expression of American philosophy, the progress of American education, and the historical concept of American destiny. The breadth, catholicity, and freedom from big- otry explicit in Kantian transcendentalism and its emphasis on human values powerfully impressed the American Transcendentalists from Channing through Frothingham; it directly influenced the "Religion of Human- ity" promulgated by the Free Religious Associationists ; and ultimately it was trans- muted and utilized in the basically human- istic philosophy of Charles S. Peirce and William James, labeled Pragmatism. One of the seminal concepts that found recogni- tion in American pragmatism, Instrumen- talism, and Experimentalism is the basic distinction made by Kant between das Praktische and das Pragmatische , as adopted by Peirce. Finally, the philosophical con- cern with personality as accentuated by the German transcendentalists found exempli- fication and emphasis in American specula- tion that led to what is currently called Personalism, or Personal Idealism, as ex- pressed by Howison, Bowne, Ladd, Calkins, and Brightman. Fourth, and last, it is to be observed that while idealistic thought in America owed its first allegiance to English interpretations of Greek and Christian philosophy, it re- ceived a remarkable revivification from German idealism. The reaction against British thought that set in after the Revo- lutionary War and the dissatisfaction alike with French rationalism and Scottish common-sense led American idealists to Germany. Here they found two important ideas not an integral part of the earlier idealistic tradition in America: first, the concept of the activity of the mind as a part of the total cosmic process, and second, the emphasis upon mind as the active agent in the approximations to reality above the level of nature. The first is one growing out of Kantian transcendentalism, and the second, especially as it places emphasis upon the mind as creative, derived mainly from Hegel. These two became the cardinal principles of American idealism from Chan- ning and Emerson through Henry Boynton Smith and William Torrey Harris to its more recent exponents, Creighton, Royce, and Hocking. By them and through the in- strumentality of idealists among the profes- sors of philosophy in American colleges and universities, idealism of a basically Germanic cast has been perpetuated in America despite numerous graftings upon the parent stem and offshoots in new directions, long beyond the time of its decline in other countries. Book Two German Literary Influence Some Areas and Lines of Influence THE VOGUE OF GERMAN LITERATURE— A SURVEY From the Beginnings to 1810 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SENTIMENTAL LITERATURE As has been indicated earlier, scholars in Boston in the seventeenth century had kept in touch with the learning of Germany, a number of New England leaders acquiring for their libraries a considerable proportion of German treatises. There was some in- terest in the popular literature of Germany as well, though not as great as in England. 1 Pietistic and mystical religious literature and moralistic tracts furnished the bulk of German writing that appeared in trans- lation between 1788 and 1810. 2 In the eighteenth century certain political events and a popular military figure aroused the earliest widespread American interest: e.g., the successes of Frederick the Great of Prussia, ally of England in 1 758-1 759 in his campaigns against France and Austria. There were numerous translations, adap- tations, and imitations of his poems, es- pecially "The Relaxation of War" (1752). 3 Acquaintance with literary figures as such was limited and was largely dependent on British example. Salomon Gessner, author of prose pastorals in a gentle, sentimental vein and of the Death of Abel, a prose epic in imitation of Klopstock's Messias, ap- peared frequently in American magazines and in book form between 1741 and 1804. 4 The Messias itself, in Collyer's indifferent translation, the fables of Christian Gellert and of Herder, and Sotheby's version of Wieland's Oberon were known through translation and printings in the magazines, 5 and certain pieces of juvenile and humorous literature, notably the Baron Munchhausen tales, became widely popular. 8 interest in Sturm und Drang A new phase of interest was reached with the arrival of the Sturm-und-Drang writings of the young Goethe and Schiller, the Lenore of Burger, 7 and the tales of Zschokke. These reinforced the growing interest in Gothicism and horror. The Wertherfieber struck America with the first printing of the novel in 1784 (to be followed by nine other printings by 1809), and in 1787 the Ameri- can Museum carried the earliest of many poetical and dramatic adaptations of the story. 8 While Wert her had much in common with the products of the sentimental school, its fascination lay in its challenge to exist- ing ethical standards and in the forthright- ness with which it treated an engrossing emotional conflict. 9 Schiller was first known for his novel of mystery and intrigue, Der Geisterseher, which was extensively extract- ed in the magazines in 1794 and after, and twice published in book form before 1801 . 10 The appearance of Zschokke's horror tale of the bandit Abaellino, adapted for the American stage in 1792 and thrice reprinted before 1809, brought readers into the world of Schiller's epochal Rauber. Of The Robbers (in the British translation by Tytler) there were reprints in 1793, 1795, 1802, and 1808. A generation of readers found this story of 327 328 German Literary Influence the high-minded outlaw and champion of pure justice against the venality of the social institutions extremely satisfying. The story underwent several of permutations in popular fiction and drama, and it enjoyed a moderate popularity on the stage from *795 to 1 815. Schiller's Kabale und Liebe appeared in 1795 and was reprinted in 1802 and 1813, and Fiesco and Don Carlos, together with Coleridge's translation of the Piccolomini, were reprinted from British translations between 1799 and 1805. 11 Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson was published in 1789 in a translation by David Ritten- house; at the end of the century his Emilia Galotti appeared in book form and in a periodical. 12 KOTZEBUK The best known of German authors at the turn of the century, however, was not one of the classical writers but the drama- tist Kotzebue. By virtue mainly of the work of William Dunlap, translator, adaptor, and theatrical entrepreneur, thirty of the plays of this prolific author were published in America between 1799 and 1820, the greater number before 1803. 13 London managers had discovered a few years before that Kotzebue provided fresh, sure-fire material for the popular stage, and Dunlap in his first venture hit upon Kotzebue's most famous and perhaps most characteristic work, Menschenhass und Reue (billed as The Stranger). Dunlap now per- fected his German and undertook further translations, and in seven seasons between 1798 and 1805 the dramas of Kotzebue made up a substantial portion of his play list. Few critics, Dunlap least of all, read literary merit into these plays, but they were stageworthy, and they satisfied the tastes of the moment, mixing sentiment and heroics with shallow rationalism and exotic allure. Audiences were kept amused by what a contemporary critic called Kotze- bue's "facility of invention," his "admi- rable incidents," and even his "fine deline- ation of character." 14 The meretricious quality of Kotzebue was used by some critics, unfortunately, as the basis of attack on all German drama and the "Teutonic Muse" generally. 16 But on the whole Ameri- can criticism in these years was preparing the way for a fuller understanding of Ger- man literary life by bringing a number of sketches of men like Burger, Schiller, Klop- stock, Wieland, and Gellert. 18 John Quincy Adams, Charles Brockden Brown, William Dunlap, and others contributed moderate, informative discussions on the subject. 17 From 1810 to 1864 CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC AUTHORS The year 18 10 marks the point of division between the first and second phases of American interest in German letters. German writers of the recent romantic schools then became of some importance to American readers and students, and soon afterward the first personal links were es- tablished between representative American literary men and some leading German authors. The first important event in this development was the printing of Madame de Stael's Germany in 18 14 in New York and the subsequent discussion of her work in the periodicals. 18 From 1815 to 1817 George Ticknor and Edward E. Everett were at Gottingen, absorbing German learning at its source. They and their many successors gave to German literature the prestige which only personal advocacy could give, and the re- sults of their studies were soon afterwards appearing in the North American Review along with essays by George Bancroft. 19 The coming of that early refugee, Carl Follen, to Harvard in 1825 and the at- tendant publicity of his inaugural, the appearance of Carlyle's early trumpet- blasts in support of German thought and German Poesie — these events are further stages in the growth of German-American The Vogue of German Literature — A Survey 329 rapport, affecting at first, of course, only a small body of eager students but providing the impetus for the mounting interest of the next twenty years. The studies in German philosophy and belles-lettres made by such theological students as Joseph Buckminster, Convers Francis, Moses Stu- art, and James Marsh likewise aided this development, encouraging many to study the language and to acquire libraries of German books, and making a wide circle of religious students conversant with Ger- man speculative thought in all its rami- fications. To such well-schooled and cultivated men as Ticknor, Everett, Bancroft, and Long- fellow must go the credit for demonstrating that the recent classical and romantic German schools take precedence over the eighteenth-century sentimentalists, Gothic- ism, and Sturm und Drang. Their essays and reviews, based on the judgments of the professors whom they had heard at Got- tingen, gave a more penetrating and a sounder analysis of German literary his- tory than anything hitherto written by American critics. 20 In the next forty years there was an ever-widening stream of serious and appreciative reviews and arti- cles. Within that time certain ingrained British-New England taboos were cast a.side; Goethe, Jean Paul, and Schiller came to be cordially accepted — a result not of the efforts of the "Germanico" Transcen- dentalists alone, but of a more broadly based revolution in taste and feeling. 21 During the thirties the minds of Emerson, Margaret Fuller, J. F. Clarke, George Ripley, and Theodore Parker matured in an atmosphere "charged with an intense excitement over the newly-discovered German writers." 22 One editor commented in 1836: Five years ago the name of Goethe was hardly known in England and America, except as the author of a 'silly book,' Werter, an incomprehensible drama, Faust, and a tedious novel, Meister. . . . But now a revolution has taken place. Hardly a review or a magazine appears that has not something in it about Goethe, and people begin to find with amazement that a genius as original as Shakespeare and as widely influential as Voltaire, has been among us. 23 The journals carried a vast amount of discussion — charges, countercharges, de- nunciations, and vindications — of the Ger- mans and Germanism. Though journals like the North American Review and the Christian Examiner provided the principal battleground over German philosophy, vir- tually all periodicals in all sections opened their columns to reprints of German poetry and fiction in translation. 24 Furthermore, in the book trade a wide variety of collec- tions and anthologies of German poetry and tales were issued, beginning with Carlyle's German Romance (London, 1827) and con- tinuing throughout the period. 25 A number of volumes of literary history, commentary, or criticism were printed, notably C. C. Felton's translation of Wolfgang Menzel's German Literature (1840), Joseph Gostick's German Literature (1854), and G. H. Lewes' Life and Works of Goethe (1855). RELATIVE STANDING OF VARIOUS GERMAN AUTHORS As for the relative popularity of various authors and groups of authors, it is possible on the basis of accurately compiled data 26 to show that Schiller and Goethe were the best known German writers of the period. Almost a third of all the periodical items — translations, notices, reviews, critiques, sketches — carried in the journals to 1864 dealt with them. Among authors introduced before 1810 the following ranked in the order indicated : Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Zschokke, Kotzebue, Herder, Luther, Lessing, Burger, Klopstock, Wieland, and Gellert. Of those who became known after 1810, Korner, Uhland, Heine, Fouque, Riickert, Tieck, the Schlegels, and Freili- grath reached such prominence as to rank alongside the older men. 27 For the period 330 German Literary Influence as a whole the older classics Herder and Lessing remained high on the list, though favored not as much as Jean Paul or Kotze- bue. The appearance of so many romantic writers — poets and authors of Novellen — among the most popular is in accord with the romantic tastes and interests of the period. In the field of the lyric poem (counting the frequence with which indi- vidual poems were printed in the magazines or included in American collections) Schiller held slight precedence over Goethe ; Korner, Geibel, Ruckert, Uhland, Freiligrath, Heine, Burger, and Klopstock followed next in frequency. 28 The classicist Goethe was brought to American attention by Madame de Stael, Carlyle, and the Gottingen students. Before 1 8 1 2 there had been nothing to alter the popular estimate of him as the author of a notorious Wertker and an affecting ballad, the "Erlking." However, in 1812 the American Review came out with a review of the recent novel Die Wahl- verwandtschaften, at the same time enlarging somewhat on the whole of Goethe's career to that moment. 29 This marks the begin- ning of the long history of mingled praise and censure, the note of acrid controversy that governs American comment on Goethe to 1864. 30 Considering how much Goethe's philosophy had in common with the reg- nant doctrine of Unitarianism, the history of his influence in America would have been quite otherwise than it was if he had been accepted by those who guided the literary- taste and set the intellectual pace. During the early years he had only a few cham- pions, such as Margaret Fuller, James F. Clarke, and George H. Calvert. The quali- fied approval, the hesitance of men like Emerson, Longfellow, Parker, and Motley, was as great an obstacle to general accept- ance as the outright hostility of a Bancroft or Norton. In the stock comparison which the New England (and in many ways Puritan) conscience customarily made, namely of contrasting Goethe and Dante (or Milton), the German poet was invariably worsted. The printing of Goethe's Memoirs (Dichtung und Wahrheit) in 1824 and of Wilhelm Meister (1828), together with the translation of a number of poems, opened the way for comment on the private life of Goethe before the public had the oppor- tunity to study his most characteristic longer poems and dramas. Madame de Stael had of course paid her respects to Goethe's greatness and genius, but at the same time she felt constrained to mention what appeared to her his moral short- comings — his aloofness from politics, his retreat from the sphere of the practical or active life, his lack of sympathy, his cool- ness toward the creatures of his imagi- nation — in short, his moral neutrality. 31 The important long reviews by Everett (1817) and Bancroft (i824) 32 repeated these charges. Carl Follen at Harvard deepened the lines of contrast between Goethe and Schiller, to the disadvantage of the former, and Professor Felton penned articles that illustrate his inability to reconcile his artistic and moral judgments. Felton's review of Iphigenie (1830) praised the author's genius, imagination, versatility, depth and power, and command of lan- guage, but when some years later he exam- ined the Elective Affinities (Wahlverwandt- schaften) from the standpoint of morals alone, he crossed it off as "licentious and detestable." 33 One of the first of modern histories of German literature was the Deutsche Lite- ratur (1827) of Wolfgang Menzel, a work inspired by a youthful spirit of rebellion against the "indifference" of Goethe. His genius was denied; he was accused of possessing nothing more than a talent for the gracious comforts of life, an aesthetic appreciation of sensual pleasures and deli- cate refinements. The overpowering image of the older writer appeared to Menzel 's socially conscious Jung Deutschland gener- ation as the symbol of the politically under- The Vogue of German Literature — A Survey 331 developed and irresponsible German tra- dition that they were fighting. Menzel's history, partisan and extreme as it was, was selected by the Transcendentalist George Ripley to be included in his Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, in a translation by C. C. Felton (1840). It was not Ripley's intent, by printing the work in his series, to prejudice American opinion to the ad- vantage of Schiller and the political poets; nor was Felton willing to subscribe to all that Menzel charged, feeling indeed that Menzel was unfair to his subject. 34 Yet, the years of the thirties and forties were marked by bitter controversy, even vi- tuperation. This vein was most extreme in the writings of Andrews Norton and George Bancroft, more temperate in reviews by Leonard Woods, Jr., and J. L. Motley. 35 By 1840 Hayward's Faust (prose) and Margaret Fuller's translation of Ecker- mann's Conversations with Goethe (1839) had appeared, and the next decade brought the Faust by Anna Swanwick, the Schiller- Goethe Correspondence, the Essays on Art, Iphigenie, Egmont, and Hermann und Doro- thea, all in American printings. Goethe's general popularity as a lyric poet is evident from the fact that after Schiller, poems by him were most frequently included in American collections. Up to the appearance of the Dial and the growth of Transcendentalist influence in American criticism, the American critics hardly knew how to explain, much less to justify, the pre-eminence of Goethe. To neutralize what they saw of the harmful implications of his naturalistic philosophy, they bound him with the threads of a parochial and often illiberal ethical system. Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, J. F. Clarke and many of the younger Tran- scendentalists were temperamentally dis- posed to accept the Goethean point of view fully. Their intense study of his works and times equipped them to see that the subject was far more complex than a reading of Menzel or Heine would indicate. How far they understood Goethe and in what re- spects they differed from him are matters considered elsewhere in this study. Parker's temperament was drawn to the more ex- clusively religious elements in German literature; Margaret Fuller and her disciples had perhaps a closer affinity with the Romantic successors of Goethe than with Goethe himself. Emerson treated Goethe the writer in Representative Men, and, while preserving his sense of a difference in Welt- anschauung, created perhaps the greatest single monument to Goethe yet produced in American criticism. Longfellow's Hy- perion approached the subject from the point of view of nostalgic romanticism and remains an interesting document of Ameri- can romantic feeling toward Goethe. On the whole the Transcendentalist critics were willing to keep the categories of moral and aesthetic judgment apart — to distinguish between the moral character of the author and the ethical teaching of his writings. 36 One reviewer of 1846 argued that when Goethe is considered as "The Artist of His Age . . . the contradictions of his career become plain; . . . his conduct as a man" is justified. Goethe "saw in the issues and tendencies of art, a universality and gran- deur of development, which no man before him had ever seen so clearly and no con- temporary had so successfully embodied or expressed." 37 This attitude was supported by G. H. Lewes in his Life of Goethe (Boston, 1856), which centered attention on Goethe as artist and wise observer of life. For its earnestness and high competence the flood of Transcendentalist discussion of Goethe is impressive, especially as it was combined with so many noteworthy pioneering efforts at the translation of his later writings and his poetry. Dwight's Select Minor Poems of Goethe and Schiller (1838), Brooks's metrical version of Faust I (1856), and Margaret Fuller's Englishing of Eckermann's Conversations in 1839 are among the most notable in a long list of works which by 1864 had made most of the 332 German Literary Influence major writings of Goethe (except Faust II) accessible to the English-reading public. 38 After 1850 American opinion gravitated toward a view of Goethe as a man of great gifts and of artistic integrity. In some circles, though not among the Fundamen- talists who continued to be vocal, his name carried high repute and prestige. 39 If Goethe ranked first in number of magazine articles and of books in English translations, his friend Schiller still led all German authors in the number of bio- graphical studies devoted to him, and his poems were printed more frequently in American magazines than those of any other German author. In the absence of any significant controversy over him, 40 he of all German authors inspired the greatest admiration and affection in American readers. His stature as a wholesome moralist and expounder of Kantian ideal- ism was recognized soon after Madame de Stael's opinions became current. 41 By 1850 Schiller had won the hearts of Americans in every section and of every philosophic persuasion. The centennial of his birth in 1859 was an occasion for elaborate festivals in his honor. By this time there were of course eloquent and enthusiastic trans- planted Germans in all the larger cities of the East and Northwest, and they joined vigorously in paying homage to the German who they felt had lived and created in the spirit of the New World. 42 Temporarily eclipsed, the older writers Herder and Lessing became relatively less prominent after 18 10 than they had been earlier and were again to be later. Yet Herder was well known in the twenties for his Letters Relating to the Study of Divinity, his monumental Ideen, and his study in folk poetry and religion called Vom Geist der ebrdischen Poesie, translated in 1832 by James Marsh. Herder was frequently treated in biographical reviews and stud- ies throughout the period, and the Ameri- can attitude toward him was one of admi- ration and reverence. Lessing's dramas had occasionally been translated and played in the early years of the century. Afterward not much attention was paid to him, though in the forties appeared several studies and a new translation of Minna von Barnhelm (1849). Both Minna and Emilia Galotti were included in the "Select Library of the German Classics" instituted by the Democratic Review in 1848, a series that issued such universally admired works as Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, Iphigenie (in part), and Schiller's Taucher (The Diver).* 3 The sudden great vogue of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter in the thirties marks the transition to a temporary ascendancy of the German romantics. A romantic a little before his time, a German Sterne or Fielding with a portion of whimsey and willfulness all his own, this contemporary of Goethe and Schiller had an amazingly strong hold on American interest in those years. Carlyle not only patterned a good deal of the manner of Sartor Resartus on Jean Paul's style but in his essay on the "State of German Literature" (1827) and else- where set him among the foremost of the august body of German writers. As a result of Carlyle's advocacy, Margaret Fuller in 1832 was talking in extravagant super- latives about this somewhat remote and difficult Jean Paul, defending him vigor- ously. As a teacher of second-year pupils in German literature at Alcott's Temple School, she guided the class through the whole of the interminable, rambling, and often brilliant Titan; and Charles Follen likewise influenced his students to devote long hours to the deciphering of Jean Paul's crabbed, elusive pages. The periodicals printed extracts and sententiae from him. As George Calvert put it, Jean Paul was loved for his German "truthfulness," religiosity, earnestness, "playfulness, "mys- ticism, "warm affections and aptness to sympathy." 44 And then, to insure the perpetuation of his fame, Charles Timothy Brooks started his long task of putting a The Yojme of German Literature — A Survey 131 number of his novels into English, the last of which came out as late as 1884, thus prolonging Jean Paul's popularity well into the Genteel era. Jean Paul ranks third among all German authors for the number of magazine references devoted to him, and a total of forty-six books of his were issued in English translation after 18 10, nearly half of them after 1864. 45 Among contemporary German writers popular after 1810 were a number of the leading members of the Romantic schools and certain representatives of the Jung- Deutschland group as well : Theodor Korner, Ludwig Uhland, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Riickert, Ludwig Tieck, and Ferdinand Freiligrath ranked among the first twenty Germans most frequently reviewed and translated in the periodicals, and Baron Fouque, Adelbert Chamisso, E. T. A. Hoff- mann, Justinus Kerner, Wilhelm Hauff, and J. H. D. Zschokke ranked among the first thirty. In general, America showed a warm interest in two genres: the lyric — ■ simple, naive, expressive of the personal emotions, and drawing on the resources of the folksong ; and the tale or Novelle, which exploited in prose the realms of legend, folklore, phantasy, and the supernatural. The popularity of the latter was in a sense an outgrowth of late eighteenth-century interest in the Gothic tale, and the line of division between Gothicism and Romanti- cism was not very precisely drawn by the American audience. In 18 13 there had ap- peared a long article by Alexander Hill Everett on Musaeus, whimsical and fanciful storyteller who had collected his materials from the common folk. Musaeus himself was not much printed in America, but the demand for the kind of art that he dis- covered was to develop to large proportions and to influence the development of the short tale and short story in this country. 46 The year 1821 saw the British printing of Fouqu6's Undine, and in 1824 both this work and Chamisso's famous Peter Schle- mihl appeared in America. Undine, the highly fantastic but essentially simple story of the love of a knight for a sea nymph, was one of the three or four most frequently reprinted of all German tales. 4 ' Zschokke's popularity likewise remained high. Out of a long list of titles, his Hours of Devotion (Stunden der Andacht), a far cry from the blood-curdling Gothicism of Abaellino, was translated in 1834 and went through several printings. The first notice of the brothers Grimm and their Mdrchen came in 1822; their book was to increase steadily in popular acceptance through the century. In the latter half of the period the shorter narratives of Gerstacker (Tales), of Gutz- kow (Prince of Madagascar, 1853), Storm (Immensee, 1863), Paul Heyse (Novellen, from 1857), Auerbach's Schwarzwdlder Dorf- geschichten, and the stories of Ernst von Wildenbruch were well received, 48 along with a number of important items of children's literature that found a vast market in America. 49 However, the most important vehicle for the transmission of the Novelle and tale to America was the book of collections. 50 Though full-length novels were also being imported from Germany, the critics took to the shorter narratives in a kindlier way, finding as one critic put it that the "length and merit of German fictions" were in a "directly inverse ratio." 51 Americans were warmly receptive to many of the contemporary German lyri- cists, both the poets of a distinctly Roman- tic persuasion, such as Riickert, Uhland, and Eichendorff, and those who combined the patriotic note or Jung Deutschland social criticism with their Romanticism, as did Heine, Griin, Herwegh, and Freiligrath. In general the American critics found the lyric superior to German writings in other genres. After Goethe and Schiller, those reprinted most frequently in American collections were Korner, Geibel, Uhland, Riickert, Heine, Burger, and Griin. This group had not quite the high distinction and perfection of the art of the Lied that we 334 German Literary Influence find in Eichendorff, Platen, Novalis, and Wilhelm Miiller (who enjoyed a moderate popularity later), but the simplicity, direct- ness, and heartfelt warmth which character- ized their work made it eminently success- ful here. The young Korner's "Prayer during Battle," from Lyre and Sword, was the most frequently printed German poem in America. 52 To 1848, Geibel, Uhland, Riickert, and Freiligrath retained an im- pressive popularity as they embodied in their songs the issues of the great move- ment toward popular representative gov- ernment, American sympathy going out toward a man like Freiligrath who was exiled for the republican sentiments ex- pressed in his writings. The older ballads and folk-song genres were of course not forgotten. Lenore, long a favorite, was translated anew by C. T. Brooks and Sarah Whitman in the thirties. In addition to many translations — good, bad, and in- different — scattered among the periodicals, there was a good market for collections of German lyrics: Brooks's Songs and Ballads of Uhland, etc. ; his German Lyrics ; Long- fellow's Poets and Poetry of Europe; W. H. Furness' Song of the Bell and Other Poems and Ballads; and others by J. C. Mangan, C. A. Dana, C. G. Leland, and Hermann Bokum. Heine made his bow in the twenties as a prose writer, author of the Reisebilder, and was known in the mid-thirties as a critic with a style and manner uniquely facile, penetrating, and witty. In general, American opinion re- gretted his sharp hostility to the romantic point of view and his irreverence toward the older classics; 53 but when the more appreciative estimates by George Eliot and Matthew Arnold were reprinted in 1856, the way was prepared for the more cordial reception of Heine that prevailed in later decades. 54 Some novelists occupied high rank in the tabulation of translations and periodical items despite the fact that critical opinion was generally agreed that the German novel lacked humor and was overburdened with reflections on morality and tediously minute descriptions. In the category of Unterhaltungsliteratur the contemporary novel found its usefulness in America because there was a good market for great quantities of fiction. 55 REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN CRITICS The translators, critics, and reviewers in all sections who guided American tastes toward the appreciation of particular authors and genres are too many to enumerate here. The Boston community, the Harvard faculty, and the body of Unitarian clergy provided a number of critics, among whom Nathaniel L. Frothingham (1793-1870) may be taken as typical. A Unitarian minister and man of cultivation and literary attainments, Frothingham was a student of the classics and of Goethe. He is represented in several collections of poems in translation, in- cluding a variety of poems from the German. 56 He was a conservative in a Boston where insurgent ideas and un- orthodox philosophies were much in evi- dence. Characteristically he agreed with Professor Felton on the subject of Goethe and "greatly preferred Schiller to Goethe," but shared with the Transcendentalists their delight in a number of German authors. His "favorite language next to English was German, then came French, then Latin." 57 His opinions are represent- ative of Bostonian taste. What was later to become the genteel tradition was already in process of formation in the forties among his wide and influential circle, which included Felton, Convers Francis, Parkman, Long- fellow, Hilliard, Ticknor, and Prescott. 58 Among authors of the Middle South, George Calvert (1803- 1889) played a commanding role in the introduction of German literature. He was one of Goethe's visitors in Weimar, his admirer and de- fender, and his first American biographer. 59 The Vogue of German Literature — A Survey 335 He made his debut as translator with a rendering of Don Carlos in blank verse (1834) — the first serious translation of a Schiller drama by an American. 80 His reviewing in 1836 and 1837 covered a wide range of German letters but empha- sized Goethe, Jean Paul, A. W. Schlegel's lectures Vber dramatische Kunst und Literatur ; 61 and by 1845 he had published a translation of one half of the Correspond- ence between Schiller and Goethe. In the Preface to this work Calvert joined with Margaret Fuller to refute animadversions against Goethe then current. 62 Calvert the Southern gentleman revealed a more tolerant understanding of Goethe's life and character than did many New Englanders even after decades of controversy over the subject. He set the issue of Goethe's domestic morality in a fair light and, like Margaret Fuller, he answered the old charge of political indifference and con- servatism in the older Goethe by pointing out that he needed aesthetic calm to carry out the "great things of his high calling." From 1864 to 1900 The war period, a time of slackening in the book trade and of a diminution in the output of periodical literature generally, accentuates the line of cleavage between the "Romantic" and "Genteel" eras. A low point in the printing of translations was reached during 1 860-1 864. 63 Ex- planations of this falling off of interest in German literature are to be found in the turmoil of the Civil War period, the alter- ations of aesthetic standards, the receding of older interests, the shifts in critical eval- uations, and the movement of German letters out of the position of leadership which they had enjoyed in the first half of the century. The romantic spirit as em- bodied by several successive groups of German lyricists and prose artists had been the most potent attracting force — the best appreciated element in the American picture of German letters. The most widely enjoyed quality was the stress on spiritual freedom in a framework of high ethical purity. Consequently Schiller, unlike Jean Paul or Theodor Korner in literary in- tention, doctrine, or form of expression, was regarded as a fellow-warrior in the cause of idealism. Neither Goethe nor Heine, as we have observed, in spite of their obvious importance and genius, withstood the test of ideality, virtue, and nobility of spirit as successfully as did a host of lesser men. American taste was not homogeneous or static at any time, and after i860 the balance was apparently tipping slightly on the side of the "un-German" Germans. While Schiller continued to hold first place on many counts, the genius of Goethe was contending for more earnest attention, and though Heine perturbed many with the shocking directness of his wit in the Reise- bilder, many readers began to recognize his brilliance. Schiller's strain began to seem empty rhetoric, lacking charm and beauty of natural forms — addressed to the con- science of the individual but silent on the absorbing modern questions of national and public life. So American criticism reached a kind of impasse with regard to German literature: many of the old favorites were gradually falling into neglect, and the public was finding few contemporary writers to fill the void. During the seventies, on the broadest level of appreciation, fiction and romance dominated all else. Berthold Auerbach, Spielhagen, Gerstacker, and a number of female novelists of the "Gartenlaube" type were published frequently and with great success in the American market. The shift in appreciation of the classics is indicated by the fact that in the seventies Goethe was more often represented in poetry collec- tions than any other German writer, and the period 1865-1879 also marks the highest frequency in the printing of Heine's lyrics. The period was rich in translations of 336 German Literary Influence important works like the Faust and the lyrics of Heine. Lessing not only retained his modest popularity but even enjoyed something of a revival. Scholarly studies on the subject of German literature by American students, notably E. P. Evans, James K. Hosmer, Bayard Taylor, Helen S. Conant, and H. H. Boyesen, were becoming more numerous. In the last two decades recent fiction, largely of a second- or^third-rate kind, dominated the popular journals. Comment and reprinting of such important contemporaries as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, on the other hand, is very sparse, and there was not much interest in the new naturalists Sudermann and Haupt- mann. LEADING CRITICS AND TRANSLATORS Who were the critics and translators most active in transmitting German authors to American readers ? 64 Among a host of occasional writers were a number of the later Transcendentalists of Boston and the Midwest, including W. H. Furness, Samuel Osgood, George Ripley, Moncure D. Con- way, Cyrus A. Bartol, O. B. Frothingham, and that patriarch of the movement for the study of German letters in America, Frederic Henry Hedge. These were some- times closely associated with those mem- bers of the evolutionary-scientific move- ment who wrote for the Radical, Western, and Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Brooks, Calvert, Bayard Taylor, and Leland devoted relatively the largest part of their talents to the introduction of German authors into America, and the fame of each rested in large measure on their labors as critics and translators. When we add the name of Nathaniel L. Frothing- ham, we have named the five most active and typical interpreters of German letters during the later nineteenth century — not the keenest or ablest critics of their time, nor the best equipped in scholarship, but on the whole the most devoted and most influential American proponents of German literature. In addition to the host of more occasional contributors, many professors of German in the newer and older seats of learning now presented their views to a wide public in books and periodicals. 65 RELATIVE POPULARITY OF GENRES, SCHOOLS, AUTHORS A decided revival of interest was under way by 1870. Though the average length of notices was perhaps less than in early decades, there was a considerable over-all increase in space over the preceding period. Instead of directing their attention to a single writer or a particular school, re- viewers now displayed an urbane though still not an altogether discriminating catholicity toward classics and new writers, romantics and post-romantics, the more serious as well as the ephemeral fiction writers. That certain older groups, such as the romantic lyricists, held their popularity well is evident from their high ranking in collections. Uhland was next in popularity after Goethe, Heine third, with Ruckert, Schiller, Geibel, Lenau, Herder, and Freili- grath following next in order. The last fifteen years of the century especially showed an unparalleled high frequency of German poems in American collections. Despite the persistence of the old and in- evitable Puritan bias, there was now sentiment for the absorption and acclima- tizing of the best of German literature (along with music and philosophy) as an indispensable component of Western cul- ture — a mark of genteel cultivation and good taste. 66 The respect for German letters was enhanced by the military and political events that suddenly raised Germany into prominence among Western nations. She had been friendly to the Union in the Civil War, and in 1870 the Reich gave notice to the world that it had assumed a new status as a unified, prosperous, and The Vogue of German Literature — A Survey 337 victorious power. By this time influential colonies of German-Americans had estab- lished themselves throughout the nation, and now they tended to look upon this development with pride. The development of German language and literature study in schools and colleges, the high repute of German universities in scientific and scholarly pursuits, the influence of many educators who had studied there, and the emergence into prominence of so many German-American citizens of high cultural attainments and social respectability — - all these combined to open the way to the steady and easy access to German culture, which for centuries had been the dark region of western Europe. The list of "Collected Works" of German authors grew rapidly. In the eighties such study groups as the Chautauqua, the Concord School, and the schools of the St. Louis group made German w r riters the object of zealous missionary effort. Most reviews took an interest in German letters for granted; they printed large numbers of notices and detailed reviews, even when the works were not available in English. It was no longer necessary to urge the study of the language, for the opportunities to learn it were nowhere far to seek. From the famous 1870 translation of Faust by Bayard Taylor through the various sets of Goethe's works published in the later decades, the stream of works in English by and about Goethe was notably heavy. 67 Critical notes in the journals were correspondingly voluminous ; fifty-two lead- ing periodicals carried as many as 522 references in 162 journal volumes in the five years of 1 885-1 889. 68 Faust was the single work most frequently discussed, 69 and Meister, the lyric poems, Werther, Goetz, Hermann und Dorothea, Iphigenie and Tasso, the W ahlverwandtschaften, Dich- tung und Wahrheit, Egmont, and Reineke Fuchs ranked next in frequency in the order named. If magazine references were most numerous about 1890, that was owing in large measure to a combination of external factors. The periodicals found him "good copy" when they could report the opening of the Goethe-Houses at Frankfurt and Weimar, the examination of the archives, the discovery of important unpublished manuscripts, including the Urfaust, the founding of Goethe societies, and the erection of monuments to Goethe on both sides of the Atlantic. Faust as play and opera was being performed on the American stage, and prominent lecturers (in a day when the lecture was an important medium of cultural education) carried his name down the highways and byways of the East and Middle West. 70 The prevailing opinion came to be that there were "impurities" in Goethe's writ- ings, but these did not overweigh the value of his positive teaching. The American consciousness attached high value to "purity," moral elevation, and genteel propriety, and in these terms marked its difference with the catholicity, calm realism, and broad tolerance of the Goethean spirit. 71 Only by 1900 had a gradual change of tone in the hostile criticism upon Goethe taken place, so that even when writing on a topic such as the "Loves of Goethe," popular writers could temper their objections with the reflection: "from his myriad heart experiences and mind experiments we all profit." 72 Progress in the nineteenth century toward a full understanding of the poet of Weimar was painfully slow. Schiller's rank in this period as fifth in frequency of representation in American collections (he had been first in the pre-war period) is indicative of a gradual falling-off of interest in him. 73 The general critical attitude was that he had little to say in the present age of modern optimism. As the Literary World put it in 1884, he was "the poet of idealism, in an age of realism." Of course there were those who hoped that the older fashion for the literature of instruc- tion and ethical guidance would not die out. 338 German Literary Influence and the exemplary "purity" and "sweet- ness of his private life" recommended him to the adherents of the moderate "genteel" idealism that existed far down the cen- tury. 74 But by 1900 he was no longer the subject of attention from the periodical press, though he had by then become enshrined as a "classic" in the American high-school and college textbook. It was in the sixties that Lessing came into his own. Nathan, Minna, and the famous essay Laokoon were newly trans- lated, and the reviews carried several critical sketches, notably a long essay by Lowell (1867) and the translation by Edwin D. Mead of Eduard Zeller's essay "Lessing as a Theologian" (1878). Adolph Stahr's two-volume Lessing. Sein Leben und seine Werke was translated in 1866 by Professor E. P. Evans. The first American edition of the Works, albeit a very incomplete one, appeared in 1895, and to the end of the period appeared a number of competent sketches in the journals on his career and his historical position. 75 For his saving grace of humor, Jean Paul continued to be read and praised. He was fondly remembered by Lowell and depicted by Boyesen as the "healthiest" of the romantics. 76 C. T. Brooks issued the lengthy Levana in 1866, and even as late as 1883 and 1884 was still adding new works to the series of translations from Richter. 77 In point of frequency of translation, Heine earned a measure of popularity that sets his name next to Goethe's. Introduced during the preceding epoch, his Reisebilder and his book on the Romantic School (together with a good deal of his lyric poetry) were already well known. The Reisebilder went into the fifth edition by 1866, 78 and selections from the lyrics appeared in volumes by Emma Lazarus (1874), Leland {Book of Songs, 1864, 1868 1874, and 1 881), and others. The Works in twelve volumes (edited by Leland) began to appear in 1891, and Frances Hellman, F. Johnson, Kate Kroeker, and Martin and Bowring issued volumes of his poetry after 1880. The main lines of criticism were the same as those established earlier. In 1863 Matthew Arnold had spoken for a large section of his Anglo-Saxon audience when he praised Heine's strictly literary abilities but declared that his work had only "a half-result, for want of moral balance, of nobleness of soul and character." 79 In 1866 E. I. Sears, and with him at about the same time, Ripley, Hedge, and Parker, granted him lyric grace but denounced his personal character, his shockingly brutal treatment of his friends in his writings. Lowell, Leland, and Howells expressed a greater delight in his wit and caprice, his brilliance and beauty. 80 Emma Lazarus pointed out the reflections of Jewish tradition in his work — his being at once Hebrew and Hellene. 81 Heine's criticism undoubtedly was an influence in shaping the American view of German literary history. His essays appeared to special advantage by virtue of the contrast in style between his concise, deft, and lucid exposition and the usual ponderousness of scholarly prose. In later years there was less moral condem- nation than formerly, but Americans clung to the opinion that Heine should have been less the scoffer and more the champion "of the ideals of the existence of which he had spoken so fervently," 82 even while most readers were entranced by the lightness and delicacy, tenderness and subtle pathos of his lyrics. Heine's attacks, together with a swing of the pendulum away from the Transcen- dentalist intuitionism and idealism, put a halt to the growth of interest in such writers as Novalis, Tieck, and Hoffmann. Infrequently discussed in the journals, they were dismissed as "morbid," "hyper- mystic," "intensely egoistic," and "lacking in intellectual balance and symmetry." 83 The lyrics of Uhland, Lenau, Freiligrath, Geibel, Miiller, and others continued to hold their place high on the list of lyricists most frequently represented in collections. The Vogue of German Literature — A Survey 339 Riickert, admired for his facility in handling difficult forms and his easy didacticism, appeared with his Weisheit des Brahmanen (1882), a collection of lyrics in oriental style, in translation by Brooks, and there were new editions of Uhland's Poems in 1871 and 1899. The profoundly romantic Taugenichts of Eichendorff, translated in 1866 by Leland, was reviewed unfavorably. Late romantic Dichtung and drama received only sparse and sporadic publication: Gutzkow's Uriel Acosta in 1876; Grill- parzer's Sappho (1876, translated by Ellen Frothingham) ; Geibel's Brunhild (1879) and Loreley (1872); Griin's Letzter Ritter (1871). 84 Scheffel's epic poem Der Trompeter von Sdckingen was translated in 1887, and his Gaudeamus, a collection of lusty humor- ous verse, by Leland in 1872. The in- defatigible Brooks introduced the poetry of Karl Kortum (1863 and 1867), Leopold Schefer (1867), and the comic cartoons of Wilhelm Busch, presenting two of the latter's works in the seventies. 85 Of con- temporary drama, Freytag's fine comedy Die Journalisten appeared in 1888 and Hermann Sudermann's Heimat in 1896. Gerhart Hauptmann came to notice just before the close of the century, when his Weber and Hanneles Himmelfahrt were produced on the New York stage in English. 86 THE GENTEEL TRADITION During the first half of the century the public found few German novels to its taste, but with the rise of the popular magazines room was found for increasing numbers of stories by such good craftsmen as Freytag, Auerbach, Reuter, and Spiel - hagen as well as a whole army of second- and third-rate fiction writers. As one critic observed this development in 1869, he found that no genre "now has a sale so large, or so ready as this." 87 From 1864 to 1879 there were twenty American editions of twelve separate works of Berthold Auerbach, in translation, by Brooks, Eliza Lee Follen, and others. 88 This author was at his best when portraying sturdy peasant life and rural scenes (though somewhat prettified to make them acceptable in the salon) ; his Dorfgeschichten had charm and interest, even if a didactic purpose lay just under their surface. 89 His village tales, best exemplified by the excellent Black Forest Tales, were regarded by American readers as a delightful and "new branch of litera- ture." 90 Gustave Freytag's novel of middle- class life, Debit and Credit, had been avail- able since 1858 and was preferred to Die verlorene Handschrift and Die Ahnen (intro- duced some years later). Freytag's not too searching realism was enjoyed by a public which insisted that its fiction treat the "more smiling aspects of life." 91 Friedrich Spielhagen wrote studies of contemporary life {Hammer und Amboss, Problematische Naturen, translated by Professor de Vere and others) that forcefully expressed the progressive political convictions of their author. Though a few reviewers welcomed his vigor, his down-to-earth portrayal of the modern industrial and metropolitan scene, America on the whole preferred the roseate coloring of an Auerbach or the pleasant remoteness of the historical romance. 92 Gerstacker (for his Germels- hausen especially), Zschokke (for his Toter Gast and other stories), Fouque, and Heyse remained well known throughout the period. American readers accepted Fritz Reuter more readily than did the British. His long autobiographical novel Ut mine Stromtid was serialized in Littell's in 1871, and the charm and wit of this regional dialect humorist was increasingly popular through the years. His great Swiss con- temporary Gottfried Keller, on the other hand, was not noticed until 1880 and then only occasionally mentioned by the critics, nor did these other masters of the short narrative, Conrad F. Meyer and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, attract notice. Viktor von Scheffel's massive historical novel of 340 German Literary Influence medieval life, Ekkehard, was given three printings between 1881 and 1895. The great bulk of fiction throughout these years was supplied by a succession of long-lived and astonishingly productive female authors, most of whom were never prominent in German literary history and who are now quite forgotten. This large group of the "Gartenlaube" school (many of whom published under pseudonyms) is perhaps best typified in the work of "Luise Miihlbach" (Frau Klara Mundt). Twenty-three of her grandiose historical ro- mances were introduced in the late sixties (but some had started in the late forties) to total twenty-seven printings by 1 880 and to hold a vast audience down to the out- break of World War I. 93 The market for these romances was cultivated by American publishers and fostered by large-scale promotion. They fed the same level of popular taste that supported the native domestic novels of Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Caroline Lee Hentz, and others character- ized by Hawthorne as a "damned mob of scribbling women." The firms of Leypoldt and Holt and Roberts Brothers vied with each other in publishing Auerbach. Apple- ton and Lippincott sponsored the female writers especially. For a time no amount of ridicule or condemnation could diminish the trade. Surprisingly enough, some critics gave their approval to the whole lot, professing to prefer them even to Auerbach, Hawthorne, Scott, or Tur- geniev. 94 At bottom, the reason for then- popularity was the fact that the life and manners depicted in these novels was enhanced and veiled over with a glow of romantic coloring. The books were not without incident and sensational climaxes; they drew out suspense in an elementary and obvious way, and the characters, though dull or unconvincing, were blessed with one virtue, as a reviewer remarked: they were never "gross." About 1890 the tide of interest ebbed noticeably, though individual authors retained their following to 1914. 95 American interest in German literature at the close of the century presented con- spicuous gaps. Hauptmann and Suder- mann, powerful exponents of a new natu- ralism, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, caus- tic and merciless in their attacks on the moral bases of earlier thought — these did not gain even a foothold among any important groups of American readers or critics. 96 Further, those German writers and poets who themselves were discovered late and popularized but slowly in their own land remained virtually unknown here: the poets Holderlin, Platen, Morike, the dramatists Kleist, the later Grillparzer, Hebbel, and Otto Ludwig; the pross masters Stifter, Keller, Storm, Meyer, and Fontane. 97 In sheer volume of materials published in America, the juveniles and the novel together overshadowed almost all of the writers of higher literary standing. 93 Any attempt to determine by quanti- tative count alone precisely what impact German books had on the minds and tastes of the elusive "average reader" must be inconclusive. In 1886 a critic writing in the Boston Literary World put the matter in the following extreme terms: Germaa literature is not commonly studied; "its true character . . . has not become known. Far fewer German than French books are being purchased, and there is "the utmost ignorance of everything pertaining to German literature." The literature itself is at fault: it has "too great richness," it is "heavy food," "overflowing with 'Gehalt,'" but its "new and valuable ideas" are wasted. Regard for its authors is "repu- tation" only; they are universally accepted but "thought of by nobody." 99 This is at bottom a diagnosis of phenomena attendant on the growth of the Genteel tradition. The loss of ground on the part of the classical authors and the romantics is concomitant with the basic change in temper which took place after i860, from an intense pre- The Vogue of German Literature — A Survey 341 occupation with the idealistic striving so much a part of the great tradition in German letters, to an easy-going and, by- comparison, undisciplined, vague, and un- focussed interest in "culture" per se. In a time when the gap between the specialist scholar and the public was widening, Americans no less than large groups of the reading public in Germany and elsewhere were not keeping alive the spiritual values that had produced their classics. The approach to Goethe, Heine, Lessing, or Schiller was for the average reader not an easy one, and the scholarly guides and erudite interpretations of these classics were not as helpful as they might have been if they had been more clearly and attrac- tively written. 100 After i860 there ceased to exist the fervor and profound personal commitment that marked the enthusiasms of an earlier generation. Through teaching, lectures, and personal advocacy they had guided and shaped opinion, causing their insights to radiate through ever-widening circles. By raising German idealism to the status of an intellectual issue, the Transcendentalists had forced a reconciliation of the extremes of radical and traditional thought. By contrast, the St. Louis group (to use the clearest example) did not win the same hearing or respect from their contemporaries. The popular journals ignored the Hegelians or dismissed them with the stigma of "cult," and there was no such give-and-take as had agitated New England when the "Newness" first arrived. Not even the presence of large concentrations of German-Americans in the cities fostered any great degree of "German-mindedness" in the public at large. It is interesting to note the opinion of Josiah Royce in connection with the study of Faust in America. In 1881 he noted the neglect of "important matters that used to be a good deal talked about." The true end of life [he observed], the nature and grounds of human certitude, the problems of Goethe's Faust and of Kant's Critique — these disappear from the view of many representative men . . . only within twenty years has there been a general in- attention to the study of the purposes and hopes of human life — a study that, em- bodied in German idealism, or in American Transcendentalism . . . had been filling men's thoughts since the outset of the Great Revolution. 101 By 1850 the Transcendentalists had established a precarious balance between native standards of taste and propriety and a sense of membership in a cosmopolitan and international realm of letters. By 1900 progress toward the acceptance of a concept of Weltliteratur fell short of what a Margaret Fuller would have desired. Nevertheless, the sheer quantitative in- crease in the number of books imported from Germany in the later decades was keeping pace with the over-all growth of the book trade in this country. At the end of the period the vogue of German authors in America could be charted by these developments: the general veneration for many, especially older, German authors (though not in those quarters where Puritan and Fundamentalist sentiment prevailed) ; the broad familiarity with many of the major works of these authors; the ready acceptance of a century of German lyrics from Klopstock to Heyse; the incorporation of a number of children's book from Grimm's Mdrcken to Heidi into the body of standard American favorites; and the establishment of a continuing tradition of the study of German language and litera- ture in our schools and colleges. The Vogue of German Literature — A Survey 343 TABLE I PERIODICAL ITEMS (1810-1864) IN AMERICAN JOURNALS* Rank Name Number of Items Rank Name Number op Items i Goethe 379 2 Schiller 264 3 Jean Paul Richter 101 4 Th. Korner 80 5 Uhland 73 6 Zschokke 50 7 Heine 46 8 Kotzebue 43 9 Herder 41 10 Fouqu6 36 10 Luther 36 12 Riickert 33 13 Lessing 27 13 Tieck 27 15 Krummacher 26 16 Burger 25 17 A. W. Schlegel 24 1 8 Klopstock 2 1 19 Wieland 20 -)t 1815- 1835- 1828 ) to 1845)** 1818 ) 1839 ) 1818- 1818- -) 1812-1852) to 1862) 20 Freiligrath 1 8 20 Fr. Schlegel 18 22 Matthison 17 23 Hauff 15 23 E. T. A. Hoffmann 15 23 Lavater 15 26 Auerbach 14 27 J. Kerner 13 27 W. Menzel 13 27 Varnhagen v. Ense 13 30 Gessner 1 2 30 "Grim" 12 32 Arndt 1 1 32 Gerstacker 1 1 32 Brothers Grimm 11 32 J. H. Voss 11 36 Gellert 10 36 Novalis 10 38 W. Miiller 9 1844 ) 1817-1849) 1831 ) 1835 ) 1825-1852) to 1839) 1847 ) 1836-1862) 1817-1842) 1839 ) to 1853) 1839 ) 1821 ) 1847—) 1822 ) 1816-1852) 1 8 10 ) i828- 5 2)tt * The table includes data on translations, notices, reviews, and critical articles on German literature, and biographical sketches on German authors. Based on Goodnight and Haertel. f Omission of terminal dates indicates that the author appeared in the journals both before and after the period 1810-1864. The omission of the prior date signifies mention before 18 10; of an end-date, after 1864. ** Forty of the forty-three items occurred before 1824. ft In the remaining twelve places in a list of the fifty most frequently mentioned authors, the following would be added: G. Freytag, 8; I. v. Hahn-Hahn, 8; Geibel, 7; Gutzkow, 7; Piickler-Muskau, 7; Salis, 7; Bettina v. Arnim, 6; Claudius, 6; J.J. Engel, 6; Gleim, 6; Jung- Stilling, 6; Zimmermann, 6. in 5? 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"* : h ; -o : m rj-o , 3 c y •< 5 4 ° S rt £ .? y £ !> tv; yj fe t/) rv rt y y y rt :0 S c > S On I s * r-» if ^t- *f ■t rf i^O » CO oo r^ r^o >o t 1 ■*• to N O c N (S ■*- IT; U") tO 00 CO M IN N f iO • 6 : (N N N o tr, pj ^ < c o < M to = £ Bfl — 3 CT> >^ -- a> pjCI - - ft. Id o ti j2 Cm --T — 3 s t^ G y y « n JG CO y a to o n X •a y i ft . ts rt to £ X) y 3 C/3 ro o "0 346 German Literary Influence TABLE III COUNTS OF TRANSLATIONS (BRITISH AND AMERICAN) OF THE WORKS OF THE MOST FREQUENTLY TRANSLATED GERMAN AUTHORS, BY GENRES AND PERIODS— 1840-1864 AND 1860-1899* No. OF 1810- 1865- Rank Author Items 1864 1899 "classics" and earlier writers I Goethe 527 216 3" 2 Schiller 294 187 107 3 Grimm Brothers (Mcirchen) 132 26 106 18 Lessing 56 15 41 18 Kotzebue 56 52 4 21 Jean Paul Richter... 46 24 22 26 Raspe (Munchhausen) 39 16 23 26 Luther 39 21 18 39 Klopstock 26 26 55 Gessner 19 18 1 J. G. Zimmermann (On Solitude) 13 12 1 Jung-Stilling 10 10 Wieland 9 9 Lavater 7 5 2 Frederick the Great 3 2 1 ROMANTIC AUTHORS 7 Fouque 109 54 55 12 Heine 79 7 72 13 Zschokke 77 52 25 29 Fr. and A. W. Schlegel 37 24 13 32 Haufi 35 11 24 34 E. T. A. Hoffmann 30 8 22 43 Burger 24 13 11 43 Chamisso 24 12 12 55 Musaeus 19 13 6 Piickler-Muskau 12 12 POST-ROMANTIC AUTHORS 4 R. Wagner 131 3 128 15 Auerbach 66 19 47 17 Gerstacker 63 30 33 28 Heyse 38 4 34 29 Freytag 37 11 26 3i Sealsfield 36 25 11 43 W. Busch 24 24 47 Spielhagen 23 2 21 G. Hauptmann 8 8 H. Sudermann 8 8 F. Nietzsche 2 2 * Based on Chart II in B. Q. Morgan, op. cit., pp. 15-17. The Vogue of German Literature — A Survey 3Y, TABLE III (Continued) No. OF l8lO- 1865- Rank Author Items 1864 1899 LESSER FICTION AND PROSE WRITERS 9 "E. Werner" 98 98 IO "L. Muhlbach" 97 19 78 ii G. Ebers 86 I 85 15 "E. Marlitt" 66 3 63 23 "W. Heimburg" 43 43 37 J. G. Kohl (Travels) 28 15 13 38 Ida Pfeiffer (Travels) 27 22 5 42 W. v. Hillern (Fiction) 25 25 43 Hacklander 24 10 14 48 I. v. Hahn-Hahn 22 15 7 52 O. Wildermuth 20 4 16 59 E. Eckstein 16 16 JUVENILES AND RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION 5 Christopher Schmid 124 76 48 6 Wyss (Swiss Family Robinson) 119 27 92 14 Franz Hoffmann 73 15 58 20 Bogatzky (Golden Treasury) 47 21 26 21 C. G. Barth 46 34 12 POPULAR DRAMA AND 1 3PERETTA 34 F. Zell 30 30 39 G. Moser 26 26 PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY, SCIENCE 8 A. v. Humboldt IO8 79 29 24 Niebuhr (History) 41 36 5 25 Kant 40 9 3i 33 Schopenhauer 31 3 28 36 D. F. Strauss (Theology) 29 H 15 39 Fichte 26 15 11 48 Lotze 22 22 48 Max Nordau (Popular Philosophy) 22 22 5i E. Curtius (History 21 3 18 52 Heeren (History) 20 20 52 Marx 20 3 17 55 Mommsen (History) 19 7 12 348 German Literary Influence AMERICAN THEATER AND DRAMA The Stage before 1800 DEPENDENCE ON BRITISH DRAMA No event in the history of our Colonial stage points to any significant direct contact with German theater or German drama. Indeed, until William Dunlap came upon the New York scene in 1798, little seems to have been known of German practice that was not transmitted via British trans- lation, adaptation, or previous performance on the British stage. 102 After 1 790 the stages in New York, Philadelphia, and in many smaller cities as well, performed the same Restoration and eighteenth-century favor- ites as had held the boards in England: Otway, Addison, Farquhar, Shakespeare, Lillo, Vanbrugh, Cibber, Goldsmith, and Mrs. Inchbald. In the closing years of the century the condition of the British theater was such that directors went abroad to supplement the output of "Monk" Lewis, Holcroft, Colman, and Dibdin; and it took over countless works of every genre, musical and dramatic, that the Continental theater afforded. Many pieces attributed to British authors had as their source (whether acknowledged or not) French or German originals, which in turn were often borrow- ings from some remoter source in another language. France was the mediator for the transmission of much German material: both Schiller's Robbers and Kotzebue's Stranger, for example, reached London through French translations. After 1780 the British periodicals noticed contempo- rary German drama, and on the whole the public showed itself receptive to the senti- mental, moralizing tone and even the Sturm-und-Drang violence of recent German drama. This drama, as reformed by Lessing and influenced by Shakespeare, was pa- tently closer to English tradition than the French forms, and there arose in England such pro-German spokesmen as Henry Mackenzie (with his famous lecture on the German drama in 1788), Alexander Tytler (original translator of the Rauber), William Taylor of Norwich (translator of Lessing's Nathan in 1791 and of Goethe's Iphigenie in 1783), and Matthew Gregory "Monk" Lewis (translator of Schiller's Kabale und Liebe). 103 LESSING AND SCHILLER The first German play on the New York stage was The Robbers, introduced on May 14, 1795, and repeated in the next three seasons. 104 In other respects the American stage showed few innovations over the British, 105 and German immigrants and Americans of German origin appear to have had little interest in the drama. 106 The notorious Robbers, even in its curtailed and diluted British versions, was recognized as the work of an original genius whose power, wealth of ideas, and floods of passion could hardly be contained in the bounds of his poetic product. On the surface the action is that of a family tragedy, but the play reveals deep perspectives of brooding on the structure of the moral cosmos and is the battleground of philosophical systems, among which a youthful pessimism of blackest hue gains the upper hand. 107 Too violent, pessimistic, and Satanic to please all American playgoers, it nevertheless enjoyed a long life owing to its essential power, strong situations, and splendid acting roles of Karl and Franz, and to the implicit sentimentalism that could be grafted onto the story of Amalia and Karl. It becomes doubly important in theater history because, along with Goethe's Goetz and certain examples of the German ballad and tale then current, it established the motifs of banditry and outlawry, the use of romantic natural scenery as background, and the themes of violence and mystery, in the manner of the Gothic horror tale. American Theater and Drama 349 The Vogue of Kotzebue, 1798-1804 With the arrival of the 1 798-1 799 season, the history of German influence on our stage becomes the account of the work of an outstanding manager, William Dunlap, who, following his unsuccessful production of Schiller's Don Carlos and Kabale und Liebe, in the last weeks of the season in- troduced with startling success the name of Kotzebue into our theatrical annals, thus rendering, as Dunlap put it, "Hamlet and Macbeth and all the glories of the drama for a time a dead letter." 108 Kotzebue's Menschenhass und Reue, as presented in a version fashioned by Dunlap and entitled The Stranger, with Thomas A. Cooper in the title role, took the town. It was given at least a dozen times in that season, inci- dentally relieving the acute financial dis- tress in which the company found itself. 109 This, Kotzebue's earliest play, is a sen- timental drama in the tradition of Lillo, Lessing, and Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, but spiced with equivocal moral ration- alizations, excessive emotionalism, and the new doctrines of libertinism and de- mocracy. 110 It was a play that exercised the moralists and nativists to thunder against foreign importations, but it held audiences enthralled for many seasons. To follow up his success, Dunlap set to perfecting his knowledge of German so as to be able to translate from the original. 111 His next offering was Lovers' Vows (from Das Kind der Liebe, 1791), another bour- geois drama, in a version prepared from a well-known English translation by Mrs. Anne Plumptree. The season saw eight performances, all enthusiastically received by the press. After a relative failure with Count Benyowsky, a heroic drama of Siberia, the season's final offering was Kotzebue's Indians in England, another failure. Out of a total of 93 performances in that season from December, 1798, to June, 1799, there were 28 performances of 6 German originals. This sudden Germani- zation of a leading American stage is a remarkable episode and quite as significant as that which obtained in England at the same time. The next season Dunlap had his weary, overworked, underpaid company study the parts of fourteen pieces by Kotzebue, all given in rapid succession be- tween November, 1799, and June, 1800. 112 Not every Kotzebue premiere became a hit, but the events of this crowded year established the fame of four great suc- cesses: the sentimental Stranger and Lovers' Vows, the spectacle Pizarro, and the farce The Wild Goose Chace. Out of a total of 94 recorded performances of plays of all types at the Park during the 1799- 1800 season, 54. were German translations or adaptations. 113 As a consequence of the prestige gained through their acceptance in Britain, and because of their genuine effectiveness with the audience of the time, the majority of newspaper notices en- couraged the growth of the Kotzebue fever. 114 Kotzebue's sensational and (to our taste) meretricious attractions were not in the Gothic style. Pizarro and The Virgin of the Sun made pathetic grand tragedy out of the conquest of Peru. Much of the success of these plays depended on costume and scenerv 115 and on their appeal to the Rousseauistic sentimentalism toward the noble savage. Their emotional impact was not far different from that of the Ruhr- stuck. A contemporary reviewer spent fine words depicting the situations of Pizarro: What can be more affecting to the female part of the audience than the picture presented at the opening of the 2d Act, a beautiful young creature playing with and caressing her infant while the fond father hangs over them in delight .... 3d Act . . . warriors returning from victory — the clangor of arms — the animating sound of numerous warlike instruments — the sight of Cora with her babe in search of her husband among the ranks, and almost inanimate with apprehension, enquiring . . . of Rolla and Ataliba and her lost Alonzo . . . as beautiful a collection and contrast of circumstance as ever was imagined. 118 350 German Literary Influence This was the piece that became the stand- by for virtually every season down to 1830 in New York and Philadelphia, a favorite vehicle of the great stars for decades there- after — scoring a triumph on every consider- able stage in the nation. 117 In its first forty years it was given approximately two hundred times ; its nearest competitor, The Stranger, was given half as often. Domestic comedy, represented by Lovers' Vows and The Stranger, was a type perhaps more characteristically Kotzebue's than any other. Both plays turn upon motives of remorse, contrition, renunciation, and noble forgiveness. As George Odell ob- serves : There is something about the tone of The Stranger that exactly fitted the mood of the last three years of the 18th century. The melancholy and misanthropy of the mysterious stranger, who must have suf- fered horribly to have acquired that fine frown and far-away look and that fatal propensity to sit on stage banks under stage boughs, typified, no doubt . . . the essence of what we have since learned to call the romantic revival. It was very degenerate Rousseau and Werther. 'Neath melancholy boughs and afternoon sun always reminded of the grave. Tears wetted many handkerchiefs in the theater and in life.' 118 The severest strictures upon the moral (or immoral) tendencies of The Stranger were expressed in the early years of its vogue. The immediate question was to decide whether Kotzebue was condoning marital inconstancy by permitting the restoration of his heroine to happiness after her self-confessed defection. While some, like Joseph Dennie ("Oliver Oldschool") condemned the author for subversive morality and for antiaristocratic and Jacobinical tendencies as well, 119 the play was staunchly defended by others. A writer in the Port Folio for 1802 (II, vi, 42) doubted whether the censure . . . [was] altogether just .... [He was] strongly inclined to doubt the purity and justice of that morality, which would refuse our pity and forgiveness to one, whose fall was momen- tary, and who had attempted to repair her error by three years of solitary life and repentance. At first Hodgkinson was preferred for the role of the Baron in Lovers' Vows, 120 and Mrs. Melmoth received the highest plaudits for her interpretation of Mrs. Haller in The Stranger. Leading stars of the American stage regularly chose it for their benefits. 121 The nature of the Kotzebue fever can be shown most precisely by citing some statistics relating to the number of per- formances of German plays as compared with those of British, French, and native American origin (see Table IV). The figures for the years 1 798-1 804 encompass the rise and fall of the first wave of enthusiasm for German drama. Kotze- bue's significance in the over-all picture can be judged from the fact that of a total of 262 performances of German pieces in the two cities, 211 (over 84 per cent) were of his productions. In both cities the crest of the wave was reached in the phenomenal season of 1799-1800, when fifteen dramas by Kotzebue were produced. A reaction and falling off of interest soon after 1800 was probably inevitable, for the extra- vagant praise in newspapers and journals had gone far beyond what the pieces merited. 122 Even in 1799-1800, the New York company of actors rebelled against being forced to play the "Dutch stuff," and in Philadelphia Cooper, while bowing to popular demand by appearing in Kotze- buean roles, preferred to act Shakespearean parts. 123 In 1800 the United States Gazette expressed the hope that Cooper would "vindicate the insulted majesty of Shake- speare from the insolent usurpation of the play mongers"; 124 yet Joseph Dennie's exultation, in 1801, "that, after an un- accountable run of popularity, the plays of Kotzebue are now sinking fast into ob- livion . . . the reign of good taste again revives," was premature. 125 American Theater and Drama 351 TABLE IV PERFORMANCES OF GERMAN PLAYS AS COMPARED TO THOSE OF OTHER ORIGINS (1798-1804) Season All Plays Number of Perform- ances Number OF German Plays Performances of German Plays NUMBER PERCENTAGE Kotzebue Plays NUMBER PERFORMANCES In New York* i 798-1 799 93 6 (1) 28 (3) 30% 4 25 1 799- 1 800 94 19 54 57 17 52 1800-1801 106 13 (1) 39 37 11 29 1801-1802 9i 13 (6) 27 (16) 30 10 20 1802-1803 118 12 (5) 27 (5) 23 8 13 1 803- 1 804 ...f 4 (17) 7 2 5 In Philadelphia 1 798-1 799 1 799-1 800 1800-1801 1801-1802 1802-1803 1 803-1 804 6 28 18 9 2 * Data compiled from Baker (op. cit.). Figures for Philadelphia are not as detailed as those for New York. The figures in parentheses in the third and fourth columns count plays which Baker described as doubtful; i.e., as reflecting possible but not definitely ascertainable German influence, or as dealing with German subject matter only. Data on the short summer seasons are here omitted. f Data not available. The introduction of new German works continued. Kotzebue was represented by Fraternal Discord, a five-act comedy, translated and adapted by Dunlap from Die Versohnung, oder der Bruderzwist (1798) , and first played on the New York stage on October 24, 1800. There had been seven performances in Philadelphia of Dibdin's version the previous season, and there followed scattered repetitions down to 1825-1826, for a total of 31 performances in that city. The New York version of Dunlap was even more popular, with seven performances in 1 800-1 801 and a total of 33 to 1828-1829. 126 The failure of The Blind Boy (from Kotzebue's Das Epigramm), premiered in New York in March, 1803, was warning to Dunlap that the vogue of Kotzebue was not completely secure. At this juncture he turned to other Germans in search for materials. Only one of his several introductions in this category, Zschokke's Abaellino, can be called successful. 127 In December, 1800, Dunlap was already preparing it for the stage and publicizing it as superior to The Robbers, "in sublim- ity . . . and in its denouement" exceeding The Stranger. 128 Dunlap's, the earliest rendering into English, was published in 1802. Played nine times in 1801, it reap- peared virtually every season until 1823- 1824; it had 59 performances in New York and 39 in Philadelphia to 1828-1829. A good deal of the interest of the piece lies in its clever concealment of the identity of Abaellino — an anticipation of the stock device of the mystery play which was to become popular a century later. 129 05 IN 00 I-H I o 00 X Pn hJ W Q < i— i X Oh Q z < W tf O >< w z J >< 03 < < J H P* a H O o oa W o M O fa w W PQ Ph w S3 CQ W N H O W Ph S « w O w IN tj-nO en d\ •*■ o m oo oo O o r^oo n oi n n o w O • ■ ■ • • O O oo in u-i oo ui u-i -ooo •<*■ uooo oo M 04 0( f o o o : : : : : d o 04 c< NO N(n CI lOlO Oi 0> "1 N "t ^ 00 o oo o n- in M M N M o >n ■»«- o n on w 0) O iO "3-vO O 00 no O "0 CO IT) IT) O IT) iOoO Oioo N m N tl (ON q o o oo o !>. 00 M ro oo M hi 0O N m u-> O On 0) ►h ro On >0 >0 q\ NO M * (N| NO U01OW H 00 00 t-^O H O 01 M M 0O 0O MMM ni rt cd ci £ J3 J2 JZ u") O m 0) ro nO r^ 00 On 0>-. 00 l>. N On (Ni M m On m tt oo ->a- o) no o m M itON O M M 0) 0) 0) 00 00 00 00 00 00 I I I I I I ■*■ >o o >o o O O >-< m o) 00 00 00 00 00 00 IT) {/] >-" American Theater and Drama 353 From 1804 to 1830 STATISTICAL SUMMARY The type of play which Dunlap had sup- plied so abundantly lost popularity after 1804. For a short period to about 1812 there were relatively few German importa- tions. Thereafter followed a gradual in- crease of performances of German items, owing mainly to the revival and repetition of a small number of established dramas. The statistical counts, based on surviving records, are given in Table V. Kotzebue continued to enjoy more and more performances until very nearly the end of the period, though only two new pieces by him were introduced after 1812- 1813. Unfortunately there are no figures extant to show what proportion of the plays performed in any year after 1 804-1 805 were of German origin, but we may assume that the proportion was never again so high as in the remarkable season of 1799- 1800, when 57 per cent of the plays pro- duced in New York were German. While constituting an important portion of the theatrical fare available in America, Ger- man drama was never again so prominent as to be pre-eminent in the total picture. THE SUCCESS OF NEWLY INTRODUCED PLAYS For the succeeding years, noteworthy theatrical introductions include the follow- ing works of Kotzebue, Miillner, Fouque, Wieland, and Goethe. Kotzebue La Perouse, or the Desolate Island. — This "Grand Pantomimical Drama" was in- troduced in Philadelphia, December 26, 1804. It is a play with music prepared by the Englishman J. Fawcett, based on Kotzebue's La Peyroitse, Schauspiel in zwei Aufzugen (1798). The story is taken from the adventures of a well-known French explorer in Africa. Fawcett's version is a radical remaking of Kotzebue's plot. While the latter was indelicate enough, the dramatic problem posing the claims of two wives for the love of the same husband, Fawcett vulgarized it even further by introducing a chimpanzee as one of the main characters. La Perouse is about to be burned at the stake at the behest of a love-smitten but spurned native girl, but in this crisis he is rescued by a faithful chimpanzee, which earlier had been be- friended by La Perouse. This elementary exercise in pantomime entertainment was relegated to the palaces of lighter amuse- ments and seldom if ever played in the regular houses. It had 84 performances to 1830. How to Die for Love. — This farce in two acts was prepared by an unknown translator from Kotzebue's Blind Geladen (181 1). After its introduction in December, 1812, it had a total of 76 performances to 1830 in New York and Philadelphia. The Poachers, or Guilty or Not Guilty. — Translated for the London stage from Kotzebue's Der Rehbock, oder die schuld- losen Schuldbewussten (181 5), this comedy in three acts was premiered in October, 1827. By 1830 it had 19 performances in New York (sometimes billed as The Roebuck) and three in Philadelphia. It continued popular for some years after 1830. 130 MlJLLNER Guilt, or the Gipsey's Prophecy (Die Schuld, by A. G. A. Miillner).— A British blank- verse translation of this play, announced as a "German tragedy" in five acts, had two performances in 1820. Fouque Undine, or The Spirit of the Waters. — ■ This melodramatic spectacle adapted by the Britisher G. Soane from the popular tale by Baron Fouque was played nine times in Philadelphia in 1822. In 1823-1824 it enjoyed a run of 21 performances in the Park Theatre, New York. Undine exploited novel "water-effects" and exhibited such fascinating fantastic personages as Kuhle- born, the Water-King, the Rosier ucian Seer (protector of the quasi-mortal heroine), and a "goblin-spirit . . . who at his pleas- ure, is either mortal or a 'goblin-fiend.'" — New York Mirror and Ladies' Literary Gazette, I, xix (Dec. 6, 1823), 151. 354 German Literary Influence WlELAND Oberon, or the Charmed Horn.— Roman- tic fairy tale in two acts after Wieland's celebrated poem, written by James R. Planch6 with music selected from eminent composers by T. Cooke, was transported from London to New York in September, 1826. It enjoyed ten performances that season in New York and twelve in Phila- delphia — a considerable success. Goethe Faustus. — Also known as The Devil and Dr. Faustus this romantic drama was prepared by Soane, with original music by Bishop and Horn. It was introduced in New York in October, 1827, and was given 14 performances that season. Two seasons later it ran for 13 performances in Phila- delphia. Reviewers, obviously unprejudiced by acquaintance with the original, re- commended it enthusiastically: "It teaches that unbridled curiosity if mingled with enthusiasm of feeling and power of in- tellect, and directed by those mysteries which are too intricate and too vast for human understanding, must necessarily end in despair." — New York Spy, October 13, 1827; Baker, op. cit., pp. 140 f. The plot is little more than a series of commands by Faust for indulgences in sensual pleasures, with hurried denouement wherein he is whisked off to the inferno. Musical numbers included a chorus of fishermen, "Home! there's a storm in the whistling blast"; chorus of hunters, "The wild Bird is rocking is his nest"; chorus of peasants, "Now for the Fireside's cheerful blaze"; chorus of fiends beneath the earth, "He comes! he comes!" etc. — C. F. Brede, op. cit., pp. 291 f. 131 The account of these introductions puts in relief the fact that romantic spectacle, usually with music (and thus in the nature of melodrama or of opera), was displacing the sentimental comedy of the type that had made Kotzebue supremely popular about 1800. The quality of the shallow sensationalism seems largely to have determined the selection of dramatic subjects from German authors. The theater reveled in exoticism of every sort: the primitive in La Perouse; the fantastic in Undine, Oberon, and Faustus; the Gothic in Abaellino, Faustus, and Guilt; the foreign, medieval, and remote in Peter the Great and The Tournament. By 1830 "German drama" came to be synonymous with the violent, exotic, and overstrained, and unbridled romantic. Kotzebue's peculiar type of sentimentalism combined with libertine motifs persisted most powerfully in the Stranger, Lovers' Vows, and Fraternal Discord. His most distinctive contribution to the American theater (a field in which he had no rival) was to develop the sentimental bourgeois drama to a point of highest finish. Schiller was not widely known for any but his first play, and this was ap- preciated as a unique mixture of the Gothic and the sentimental. The genre of the melodrama (me'lodrame) , a superficially violent play with sensational effects, came into prominence after 1800. As is true of Gothicism and horror in the prose narrative, the type of the melodrama is in considerable measure of Germanic origin. From the beginnings British melo- drama drew both plot and atmosphere from German balladry, folktales, fantastic romances, legends, and tales of outlawry. Lewis' Castle Spectre (1797) bears un- mistakable marks of kinship with The Robbers. 132 The Bleeding Nun and The Forest of Rosenwald, both adapted from The Monk, share with that work certain features borrowed from Schiller's Ghost- Seer. Similar traces in plot, setting, and character and a fondness for German back- grounds 133 are evident in Lewis' King Alfonso of Castille (Philadelphia, from 1 802-1 803 on), in Rugantino, and in his Adelmorn the Outlaw (New York, 1801- 1802, and Philadelphia, 1 802-1 803); and in many other works which had long runs on the nineteenth-century stage. 134 Ballad themes find echoes in The Gnome King, or the Giant Mountains, a legend of the Riesen- gebirge (1819-1820), and The Wood Demon, or The Clock has Struck (1807-1808 and thereafter). The Flying Dutchman was a American Theater and Drama 355 melodrama founded on the familiar German theme, and the story of Faust was repeated in such pale imitations as Melmouth (New York, 1 824-1 825) and The Harlequin Dr. Faustus, a pantomime (Philadelphia, 1796- 1808). A native production illustrating the affinity of melodrama with the Faust story is S. B. H. Judah's blank verse drama Odofriede, the Outcast (printed 1822). 135 It has often been said that writers like Kotzebue, however popular, hardly out- lived their little hour; but investigations into the American stage history demon- strate that Kotzebue's Stranger and other plays of Germanic origin were played regularly to within the memory of some persons living today, existing in the bills of the larger houses into the nineties. The tabulation of some scattered records from representative stages serve to sketch the course of that long trail which started in 1797 at the Park. The list of performances, in rough chronological order, based on studies available, 136 demonstrates a vitality often unsuspected and unknown. Abaellino New York: 1834-1843 (2 performances); 1857 (1 perf.) Philadelphia: 1835 (3 perf.) St. Louis: 1820 ("two or three nights," with the Ludlow Company) The Robbers (EXCLUSIVE OF PERFORMANCES IN GERMAN) New York: 1850-1857 (7 perf.); 1857-1865 (5 perf.); 1865-1870 (8 perf.); 1870-1875 . (4 perf.); 1875-1879 (2 perf.) Philadelphia: 1 842-1 855 (43 perf.) Chicago: 1849-1875 (31 perf.) St. Louis: 1820-1839 (3 perf.) Nashville: 1819 (1 perf.); another, June 20, 1832 Davenport: 1857, 1859 Boston: 1872 (with Mr. and Mrs. J. B. Booth) New Orleans: Jan. 1, 1806; Nov. 9, 1859 Wilhelm Tell (By Knowles and others ; operas excluded) New York: 1834-1843 (29 perf.) ; 1850-1857 (12 perf.); 1857-1865 (14 perf.); 1865- 1870 (9 perf.); 1870-1875 (10 perf.); 1875-1879 (3 perf.); 1879-1882 (1 perf.); 1882-1885 (3 perf.) Philadelphia: 1835-1855 (13 perf.) Chicago: 1857-1870 (13 perf.) 137 St. Louis: 1830-1839 (5 perf.) Nashville: "William Tell, the Swiss Pa- triot," 1830-1838 (3 perf.) Davenport: 1 830-1 838 (3 perf.) Boston: 1 856-1 857 (Boston Theater, in- troduced by Edwin Forrest) ; repeated. 1861-1862 Houston: 1839 (in each of two theaters); 1 839-1 840 (Houston Theater, 2 perf.) Plays on the story of Faust (After Goethe) New York: Soane's Faustus, 1834-1843 (4 perf.); 1850-1857 (7 perf.); 1857-1865 (3 perf.); 1865-1870(11 perf.); 1870-1875 (4 perf.) 1879-1882 (3 perf); 1875-1879 (1 perf.); 1882-1885 (none); 1885-1888 (8 perf.) . Faust, or the Demon of the Drachen- fels, 1842 (1 perf.); 1845-1846 (1 perf.) . Faust and Marguerite, 1857 (1 perf.) ; 1862 (1 perf.) -. Faustus and Mephistopheles, 1854 (perf., Bowery Theater) Faust, parody in French, 1870 (1 perf. perf. Faust, burlesque, 1 865-1 870 (5 Faust, ballet, 1857-1865 (10 perf.) Philadelphia: Soane's "grand romantic spectacle," 1 845-1 851 (19 perf.) Boston: 1886-1887 (Margaret Mather); 1887-1888 (Henry Irving, supported by Ellen Terry, run of 22 days); 1888-1889 (2 weeks' engagement of Lewis Morrison as Mephistopheles) ■ . Faust and Marguerite, 1858-1859 (4 weeks' run, with Thomas Barry); 1 866-1 867 (J. B. Roberts) -. Faust, ballet, 1857-1858 (in reper- tory of the Ronzani Ballet Troupe) Undoubtedly these plays owe their long life largely to the fact that they were standard items in the repertories of the 356 German Literary Influence TABLE VI PERFORMANCES OF GERMAN GOTHIC AND ROMANTIC SPECTACLE PLAYS Philadelphia New York St. Louis Pl \y PERFORMANCES YEARS performances years years Of Age Tomorrow 18 1836-48 11 1834-40 How to Die for Love IO 1836-52 8 1834-50 Virgin of the Sun 3 1843-57 La Perouse 1847 1851 Rugantino 1857-65 1834 Birthday, or Reconciliation 1835 Lovers' Vows 1816, 1830 Rinaldo Rinaldini 5 1836-37 Ugolino 19 1835-54 Undine 14 1847-49 great stars, who in that day exercised imperious command over their choices of roles. The Stranger was used by Edwin Booth, Charlotte Cushman, and Julia Dean; the part of Karl von Moor by J. B. Booth; that of Faust by Henry Irving; Mephistopheles by Lewis Morrison; and Rolla by Edwin Forrest, Wyzeman Mar- shall, and John McCullough. Despite the long life of certain German favorites, the general trend of the mid-century was the gradual displacement of melodrama by the romantic drama in the grand style. How- ever, some German Gothic and romantic spectacle plays continued to be given, as the data in Table VI indicate. Under the encouragement of such stars as Forrest, James Hackett, the Keans, J. B. Booth, W. C. Macready, and the Kembles, the preference shifted to a drama wherein the action was more unified, better motivated, and psychologically more subtle than in the melodrama. These actors were catholic in their tastes, playing Shakespeare, Resto- ration comedy and tragedy, eighteenth- century comedy, Hugo, and Dumas; but they ignored almost completely the post- Goethean German drama. By the time of the Civil War, the stream of exchange between the American and the German stage had fallen to its lowest ebb since 1795. From 1830 to 1900 The period following 1830 shows no effort to present Germany's classical or contemporary dramatists in America, or to interpret the work of such outstanding experimenters as Kleist, Hebbel, Grill- parzer, Ludwig, Freytag, or Geibel. Most of these were, of course, far from successful in their own country; in America their work was hardly noticed. In a few cases, Ameri- can theatrical entrepreneurs took a risk on some adaptation or translation from a German stage success. The word "success" is some clue to the level of literary worth to which these stray recruits belonged. They were of the class of heavy romantic tragedy which had evolved out of the genres dis- cussed above. Friederich Halm's Ingomar, or the Son of the Wilderness, introduced in the fifties and maintained as a standard acting vehicle until 1870 and beyond, is of the type. Translated by the Englishwoman Maria Lovell, this romantic drama in the grand style had as its theme the triumph of personal morality and love over uncon- trolled primitive passion. It was performed in New York at least 28 times in 1850-1857 and 34 times in 1857-1870; in Philadelphia 45 times from 1851 to 1855; in Boston from 1854 to 1859 in the repertories of Julia American Theater and Drama 357 Dean, Mrs. Bowers, Kate Reignolds, and Mary Anderson. The latter brought the play to Boston annually from 1877 to 1882. This same role was used in 1887 by the great Julia Marlowe at her debut. About the period of the Civil War the "stock system" of theater management (in centers outside New York City) showed signs of disintegration, and the practice of filling the gaps with performances of traveling stars was initiated. As a result more and more theatrical history was con- centrated in the larger houses of New York City, whose managers in this way gained greater control over the theater than earlier managers had enjoyed. One of the most successful of these New York managers was Augustin Daly (1838-1899). The large group of German farces and comedies adapted from such contemporary popular writers as the Schonthans, Blumenthal, Mosenthal, Genee, Rosen, Kadelburg, and Benedix that the American public saw in the sixties and later is owing almost exclusively to the managerial work of Daly. 138 Daly was not an actor but a writer of great skill in meeting the popular demands and an astute manager in the highly competitive field of commerical drama. 139 He began his career with an adaptation of Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal's melo- drama Deborah (1850) under the title Leah the Forsaken, produced in Boston in 1862, with Kate Bateman in the title role, and brought to New York the next year. 140 In 1873 he scored another great success with his adaptation of Mosenthal's Madeleine Morel, a "tragedy bordering on the melo- drama" 141 done on the pattern of French romantic tragedy after Dumas. 142 Among some ninety productions from the hand of Daly throughout his career, about a third are adaptations from such German writers as Gustav von Moser, Franz and Paul von Schonthan, and Julius Rosen, the others being altered or adapted from English and French theatrical literature, or from novels. In almost all cases Daly altered the origi- nals freely, transferring the action to this country and changing characters and situ- ations to make them conform. 143 Daly brought more plays to the Ameri- can stage than did Dunlap, but his adap- tations approached less closely the main line of the Germanic dramatic tradition than did Dunlap's. Because the authors he was interested in cultivated a broadly inter- national type of light comedy, and because his adaptations thoroughly Americanized them, 144 these plays of Daly's were not known to audiences as of distinctively German origin or character. There was apparently no such critical discussion as in Dunlap's time over the pro's and con's of the "Dutch" or "Germanic" element in them. Their virtues were almost exclusively those of craftsmanship and easy mastery of technique, and in this respect they exactly fulfilled the function that was served by the facile Kotzebue seventy years earlier. Daly was always ready to admit that he chose his pieces because they lent themselves to easy alteration. On the whole, it cannot be said that Daly's adaptations deeply influenced or materially altered the course of the American dramatic tradition. Many of the remaining plays on our list of adaptations from the German were in- troduced by or for the German-American actors or actresses who became prominent after i860. From 1840 on, the German theater was a lively institution in several large centers, especially in New York. 145 The high cultural aspiration of the German- speaking theater in America, its extra- ordinary vitality and perseverence, and the general respect that it won among play- goers and critics even outside the German circles make it a considerable factor in the history of the American drama. If we look at its activities in New York, we gain some idea of its function in a dozen other cities where, while not as firmly entrenched, it was nevertheless well established through the second half of the century. Using a 358 German Literary Influence variety of halls, theaters, and places of amusement, the German theater in New York between 1840 and 1848 gave a total of 88 different plays in 149 performances. 146 Even in those early years, the literary level of these plays was considerably higher than that of the German drama in translation. They included Tell, Die Rauber, and Kabale unci Liebe by Schiller, Heinrich v. Kleist's Kdtchen von Heilbronn, Grillparzer's Ahn- frau, and Milliner's Schuld. After 1854 the German theater centered around the two famous Stadttheater: the Altes Stadttheater , in existence from 1854 to 1864, and the Neues Stadttheater, from 1864 to 1872. In the former from 1854 to 1864 Leuchs finds a total of 123 plays given 289 performances. Of this total, Shakespeare, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe accounted for 48 performances, or 16 per cent, though the lesser comedy writers like Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer and Benedix accounted for a large proportion, too. Jnst as important as the maintenance of this large inclusive repertory was the introduction of German actors, many of whom very quickly gained fame outside the German-speaking populace. Occasionally an actor from the English theater attempt- ed a performance in German for the German theater, but more frequently the situation was reversed. 147 Heinrich Moesinger of the New York Theater in 1 869 performed Huiko in English, "a drama especially translated for him by Professor J. E. Frobischer." 148 The actress Methua-Scheller made her English debut in 1864 in an English version of Birch-Pfeiffer 's Dorfund Stadt under the title of Lorlie's Wedding. It was given at the Winter Garden on March 28, 1864, and seems to have been seen in Boston two weeks earlier, given there by the same actress, supported by John McCullough and Forrest's Company on March 2 and 5. This play traveled to Baltimore and Buffalo, and was given with Booth in the cast in 1866. For the season of 1865 we find a similar adaptation from Birch-Pfeiffer for Daniel Bandmann, for at Niblo's Garden in that year he played The Beauforts (based on Lytton's novel Night and Morning), as especially re-translated into English by Alfred Ayres. In 1867 arrived Fanny Janauschek, "the most distinguished of all German actresses to change from one language to the other." After two sensation- al seasons in the German theater, she changed in 1870-1871 to the English and achieved widespread renown in a number of roles. Her repertory included Bleak House (adapted from Dickens), Macbeth, Deborah, Mary Stuart, and Brunhild. The German-language theater enjoyed a healthy, uninterrupted existence until the outbreak of World War I. 149 The production of Hauptmann and Sudermann in English in America began in the nineties, with considerable success ; but this movement hardly got under way before 1900 and does not belong in the era under discussion. On the whole, the German contribution to the American theater was (first) to provide some effective Kotzebuean roles for a number of the greater guest stars and (second) to bring to our stage certain well-liked plays of the light comedy class. The foreign-language theater also ex- erted some influence in this way. Yet in the drama there is nothing comparable to the tremendous enrichment which Americans received from the hands of German musi- cians, composers, and orchestra leaders. EARLY AMERICAN FICTION The student of American literature finds little purely "literary" Germanic influ- ence 150 until after the War of 1812, when a trend toward the development of a national literature became marked. The seventeenth - century Puritan who read Dr. Faustus or the eighteenth-century scholar who con- sulted Pufendorf or Alsted or Keckermann Early American Fiction 359 was not indulging in a love for belles-lettres so much as his desire to acquire knowledge or to get a better understanding of his relation to his God. Even when the taste began to turn to Klopstock, Lavater, Gessner, and Wieland, it was principally their pious didacticism that attracted the American reader. But by the turn of the century we come upon isolated examples of American interest presaging a purely literary concern with German productions. Among the first is John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), who developed an abiding appreciation of the poems of Burger, Goethe, and Schiller, and made, while he was U.S. Minister to Prussia, during 1797- 1801, a verse translation of Wieland's Oberon. There were other isolated in- stances — even in remote Lexington, Ken- tucky, where we are told on the authority of James Lane Allen that the bookstores sold, along with Fielding, Smollett, Gold- smith, Paley, Butler, and Watts, the works of Lavater and Baron Trenck as early as 1800. m By the thirties, of course, there had developed a "German craze" in and about Boston, and people like James F. Clarke, Ephraim Peabody, Samuel Osgood, and Christopher P. Cranch were carrying their enthusiasm for Goethe and Schiller with them to Louisville and Cincinnati, where, through the columns of the Western Mes- senger, they disseminated it throughout the West, and where their efforts were soon seconded by those of the German in- tellectuals called the Dreissiger as well as the A chtundvierziger , and only a little later, by the far-flung efforts of the St. Louis disciples of Goethe and Hegel. William Hill Brown In the meantime the early American novelists had become infected by the fever of Wertherism and German Sturm-und- Drang sentimentalism generally. One of the earliest instances of infiltration occurs in William Hill Brown's Richardsonian novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789), generally regarded as the first American novel. Toward the end of the story, the hero (Harrington) is discovered, a suicide, and by his side is found The Sorrows of Werther. German productions of the Werther, Goetz, Rduber, and Geisterseher type spawned (as we have observed) a numerous progeny of English and American translations, adap- tations, and imitations, in all imaginable forms, by second- and third-rate novelists, dramatists, and story-tellers who count for relatively little in the sum-total of the abiding American literary production. Of the seventy-odd American novels published between Brown's Power of Sympathy and Cooper's first success, The Spy (182 1), only those of Charles Brockden Brown escaped oblivion and need detain us as exhibiting Germanic influences. 152 Charles Brockden Brown Gothic horror did not derive solely from Mrs. Radcliffe or "Monk" Lewis. German "romance," the common parent of both, subsisted alongside English Gothicism and found many avenues by which to insinuate itself into the American consciousnses about 1800 without benefit of any British (or other) intermediary, though often it came to America in guises and forms virtually indistinguishable from the British versions. Much of this was stuff of a sub- literary nature — not only Burger's ballads and Goethe's and Schiller's Sturm-und- Drang productions but popular tales of banditry, plays based on the Illuminati and the Fehmgericht, and novels designed to teach lessons of social melioration as well as domestic virtue. Coincidentally with the time when Brown was preparing for a career as a writer of novels, the flood of this type of literature reached its crest. 153 Aside from Goethe's Werther (available in translation since 1779), Schiller's Rduber (translated in 1792), Goethe's Goetz (1795). Burger's Lenore (1796), Kotzebue's Pizarro (1796) 360 German Literary Influence and The Stranger (1798), and Zschokke's Abaellino (1798), to say nothing of the numerous adaptations and imitations which they inspired, there appeared translations of a number of Familienromane and Rduber- geschichten. 15 * This is the sorry stuff on which Brown's fancy was nourished during his apprentice days. 155 As early as 1793 Brown claimed famili- arity with Gessner, Haller, and Leibnitz, but among all the German names, the one that stood above all others in his estima- tion was Wieland 156 — a circumstance that explains why, when he cast about for a title, characters, and background in which to invest his story of the supernatural, terror, religious fanaticism, spontaneous com- bustion, ventriloquism, transformation, and rational moralism, he should have chosen to identify his Wieland family with the German poet of the same name as descended from a common ancestor. 157 Not unnaturally Clara Wieland seeks dis- traction for her troubled thoughts in German ballads of chivalry, 158 her brother received from Germany a new tragedy by a Saxon poet, wherein "headlong passions are portrayed in wild numbers, with terrific energy," 159 the Wielands and Pleyel re- hearse a German verse tragedy, 160 the sweetheart of Pleyel is the Baroness Theresa de Stolberg, 161 Wieland 's mother is a disciple of Zinzendorf, 162 virtually all the characters of the book have lived or have traveled in Germany, and all but Carwin are familiar with the language. 163 It would seem that Brown followed his own recommendation to the readers of the Monthly Magazine and American Review that they should become acquainted with the writings of Kotzebue, Gessner, Iffland, Wieland, Haller, Schiller, and Goethe as sources of "intellectual pleasure and im- provement," 164 and that German romance supplied more than a dash of seasoning for Wieland, for Brown's indebtedness goes deeper than a borrowing of externalities. For example, Wieland exhibits what was a common and mutually interdependent characteristic of German and English tales of terror, of history, of adventure, of sen- timent, and of purpose, differing only in national backgrounds. A subtle force arising from the Enlightenment gave special emphasis in Germany to a more thorough psychological investigation of character, largely for the purpose of combating superstition and other aber- rations of the mind, and therefore also to a balanced, rational approach to life. 165 Not only Rousseau in France and Godwin in England but a hundred writers in Germany enforced lessons of the dangers and evils of following too strictly one of the mental faculties, and habitually illustrated and applied this theme to programs of social and political betterment, Utopian melio- rism, institutional reform, the position of women, marriage, punishment for crime, and other advanced areas of social think- ing. 168 Brown adopted this motif of a reasoned approach to life. Wieland, or the Trans- formation presents a number of illustrations of the tragic effect, or transformations of humanity, that occur when human reason is overthrown by superstition or passion. 167 While this theme is not exclusively Ger- manic, when we find it repeatedly in con- junction with others that are obviously of German origin, the presumption is strong that there is a connection — that the German rational tale had at least a contributory effect. In both Wieland and Ormond we find characterizations that bear the un- mistakable stamp "Made in Germany." Ludloe in Carwin the Biloquist, the sequel to Wieland, and Ormond are both members of secret societies "in Berlin" on the order of the Illuminati. Both "had met with schemers and reasoners who aimed at the new-modeling of the world, and the sub- version of all that has hitherto been con- ceived elementary and fundamental in the constitution of man and of government." 168 They are bound by dreadful oaths of Early American Fiction 361 secrecy to this society, whose purpose, since it is to erect a "political structure" as "the growth of pure wisdom," is not evil, though the pursuit of it raises questions regarding whether the means adopted justify the end sought. 189 Aside from these similarities in atmos- phere and theme, there are, especially in Wieland, identities with other German productions. In 1900 F. H. Wilkins sug- gested that Brown borrowed part of Wieland from Schiller's Geisterseher, 110 and a decade later Walter Just found the whole plan of Brown's novel there. 171 He pointed out that the secret efforts by unknown persons (the Armenian — Carwin) are direct- ed against a guileless youth (Prinz von *** — Theodore Wieland), and that in both cases the mysterious unknown foretells the death of a beloved one. What neither pointed out, but what is more to the point is that both the Prince and Wieland are susceptible to a species of religious fanati- cism. 172 But it is Tschink's Geisterseher (or The Victim of Magical Delusion) that stands even closer to Brown's Wieland, especially in the lesson that is inculcated. Both turn upon identical themes. Both present victims of delusion (Wieland and Miguel) played upon by men (Carwin and the Unknown) who seem to possess super- natural powers. Both discuss with their victims the probability of supernatural manifestations in the same terms. The pur- pose of Tschink's Victim is explained in the Preface in words that Brown could readily have inserted verbatim almost anywhere among the arguments of Wieland: If we . . . conceive an exclusive attach- ment to one of . . . the different Sources of Knowledge ... or confine ourselves merely to sensation and experience, if we desire to see and to feel those things which cannot be perceived by the senses, but are known to us only through the medium of our under- standing; if we, for example, are not satisfied with what the contemplation of nature and the gospel teach us of God, but desire to have an immediate, and physical communion with the invisible ; we then cannot avoid the deviations of fanaticism, and are easily led to confound our feelings and ideas with external effects; the effects of our soul with effects produced by superior beings; we believe that we see, hear, and perceive what exists no where but in the imagination; we . . . are misled by the variety and strength of our feelings and mistake for reality what is ideal. . . . All pretended apparitions, every imaginary communication with superior beings, the belief in witches, sorcerers, and in the secret power of magical spells, owe their existence to this species of fanaticism (I. i-iv). Just so, Theodore Wieland jumps too readily to the conclusion that the voice of the ventriloquist is of supernatural origin. His senses become "depraved" so that he becomes a religious maniac; Clara's equi- librium is overthrown by terror, Pleyel's by disgust. Only tragedy can restore the balance, and the speedy denouement after the murders enforces the moral: "This scene of havoc was produced by an illusion of the senses." 173 Carwin, the master mischief that occasioned all the delusions and their fearful consequences, resolves to write "a faithful narrative" of his life "as a lesson to mankind of the evils of credulity on the one hand, and of imposture on the other." 174 Brown's characters are exempli- fications of precisely the errors against which Tschink's story and Schiller's had given warning. Wieland failed to take into account the common human experience in respect to man's moral duty and the common opinions of God's attributes — he violated all the fundamental rules of rational procedure and consequently ended according to the exact prescriptions of the Geisterseher of Schiller and of Tschink. 175 It would seem, then, that Charles Brockden Brown, the first American writer of fiction whose work possesses more than ordinary merit, gave to American fiction at the very outset a Germanic coloring, and that he used Germanic sources in a measure which, considering his 362 German Literary Influence influence, acknowledged and unacknowl- edged, upon Irving, Cooper, Poe, Haw- thorne, Melville, and Dana, 178 profoundly affected the development of the American novel and American fiction generally. Elihu Hubbard Smith Although none of Elihu Hubbard Smith's writings show more than modest accom- plishment, his friendship for Charles Brockden Brown, William Dunlap, and the Rev. Samuel Miller, his connections with the Connecticut Wits, his interest in the progress of American literature, and his position as one of the well-known scientific writers of his day make him important despite his death at twenty-seven. His manuscript diary reveals that he studied German in 1796 and looked forward to the time when he would be able to make considerable use of his knowledge. 177 He and Brown were inseparable for years, and Smith communicated his enthusiasm for German thought and art to Brown as well as to Dunlap, who began in the year of Smith's death to present Kotzebue in his theater. 178 As a prime mover in the Friendly Club and adviser and collaborator of both Brown and Dunlap in their early literary endeavors, Smith served as a catalyst among his friends in New York during the last decade of the eighteenth century very much as Joseph S. Buck- minster did in Boston during the early years of the next century. James Fenimore Cooper While the vogue and influence of Cooper in Germany is the more significant, 179 the reciprocal influence of Germany on Cooper is in several respects more important than has been recognized. For one thing, he made four trips to Germany or Switzerland in- stead of the two recorded by Lounsbury. 180 The first journey was made from Paris to Berne during July, 1828. 181 Except for Italy, Switzerland appealed to Cooper more than any other European country, for here he found natural beauty heightened by an abundance of romantic tradition. Of all the traditions, legendary and authentic, the story of Wilhelm Tell had the greatest appeal for him, 182 and he gathered infor- mation on it from the guidebooks, the oral tradition, and Schiller's play. 183 In Italy during 1829-1830, Cooper moved his family via the Tyrol and Munich to Dresden in May of 1830, where they re- mained until the July revolution attracted him to Paris, whither the family followed him in September. A third journey, in the nature of a circular tour from Paris, was taken the following summer through Belgium, the Rhineland, back to Paris. It was on this trip that Cooper was inspired by the Abbey of Limburg and the castle of Hartenburg, the Heidenmauer and the Teufelstein, all near Durkheim, to write The Heidenmauer (1832). 184 The fourth trip was begun on July 18, 1832, in a caleche commodious enough to accommodate the entire family, plus two servants, one of them a Saxon girl hired in Germany. 185 These journeys, in and of themselves, would mean little if they had not provided the leading motifs for two of his books and formed the direct materials for two others. The latter use is best exemplified in Sketches of Switzerland, which appeared in two parts in two volumes each in 1836. 186 The first volume of Part One of these Sketches relates his excursion from Paris through Burgundy to Berne in 1828. Throughout Cooper shows himself a competent student of Swiss history and an alert traveler. 187 The second volume of Part I takes us to Lake Lucerne, the Tell country, thence through the upper regions of the Rhine, the Alpine passes, Berne, and finally to Milan. The whole is plentifully supplied with German phrases and tourist information from Ebel, anecdotes from Winckelmann, and statistics from Picot, plus much legend- ary and general antiquarian lore garnered Early American Fiction 363 from miscellaneous sources, including oral tradition. 188 In Part II of Sketches of Switzerland™* Cooper the antiquary comes to the fore even more prominently than in Part I. He pokes about in dusty corners and amid crumbling ruins, especially alert for literary lore, even to dragging into the book a circumstantial account of how, two years before in Dresden, he nearly made the acquaintance of Tieck. 190 In the midst of the travels thus circum- stantially described, Cooper began the second of his European trilogy. The Heiden- maiter. In the Preface he describes sub- stantially the same itinerary that is related in Part II of the Sketches, though an earlier Rhineland journey is merged with it, for the original inspiration for The Heiden- mauer had come during the tour of 1831, when the illness of one of Cooper's en- tourage had necessitated a halt at Diirk- heim. As the account in the novel has it, Cooper asks the host at the inn at the Sign of the Ox what of novelty the vicinity holds ; he is directed to "a ruined abbey, and a ruined castle, too!" "Here," says Cooper, "is sufficient occupation for the rest of the day. An abbey and a castle!" And when the host tells him about the Heidenmauer and the Teufelstein, Cooper engages Christian Kinzel, a loquacious guide, and sets out on a tour of inspection. 191 The Heidenmauer is the second of Cooper's European novels of social purpose. Where The Bravo enforces the moral that "the good in human nature will triumph over the evil in government," The Heidenmauer is a broader objectification of the process by which the "group mind of man" undergoes a transition "from medieval to modern social and religious ideas." Cooper draws an elaborate parallel between social changes that took place in the Palatinate following the Reformation and those of the group mind of his own day. 192 In thus illustrating the effect of Lutheranism in liberating the mind of man from superstition and the social order from corruption, and in drawing the parallel to his own times by indicating the effect of the American ideal of liberating the modern mind from the corruption of a world controlled by the ancient regime, Cooper made a notable and altogether unique contribution to the American novel. As Professor Spiller has remarked, the final paragraph of the novel states the domi- nating motif not only of The Heidenmauer but also of several of Cooper's later books. 193 That being so, Cooper's rumination upon historical and legendary events of German intellectual and social life and his em- bodiment of his conclusions in The Heiden- mauer mark a significant point in his development as novelist and thinker. The last of the European trilogy, The Headsman, is a better story and less of a social document than the second. The moral, while less prominently displayed, is the same as that of The Heidenmauer. The conclusion of the book is that the American heritage is twofold: European tradition grants to America the culture and the sanity born of long experience, and Ameri- can resources grant exemption from the evils attending a decadent European society. Like The Heidenmauer, The Heads- man applies old Germanic institutions to American civilization in a manner to reveal the difference between them, and (as Cooper observed in A Letter to His Countrymen) to show that a direct imitation would be of the utmost danger to the integrity of the new country. Seen in this light, the in- fluence upon Cooper of German and Swiss associations is far from trivial. The Gothic Element Even while the Gothic and Germanic motifs became the rage in periodical liter- ature, spokesmen for the "American" tradition from Royall Tyler and Joseph Dennie onward strenuously opposed the introduction of foreign exoticism of all kinds. One of the most forceful proponents 364 German Literary Influence for the indigenous of a slightly later day was James Kirke Paulding. 194 Despite such opposition, Gothic mystery and Germanic horror long continued popular. The Gothic insinuated itself into American architecture of the late eighteenth century (and after- wards), and early in the nineteenth Washington Allston embodied some of its elements in his paintings. Freneau's "House of Night" (1779), Joseph Story's Power of Solitude, and Jonathan M. Scott's Sorceress, or Salem Delivered (18 17) are exemplifi- cations in verse before Whittier in his Legends of New England, in Prose and Verse (1831) and Poe, from 1827 onward, worked the same mine of romantic materials. 195 The drama, of course, provided ample scope for the melodramatic, and after Dunlap's Fontainville Abbey (acted 1795, printed 1 806) , the Gothic play with or with- out German motifs of the Faust-Werther- Robbers-Str anger sort, produced a veritable flood that threatened to inundate the whole land and submerge every other style. Most of these were translations, adaptations, or bold plagiarisms. Among the more original in conception and style was the dramatic poem Odofriede, the Outcast (printed 1822) by Samuel B. H. Judah. 196 But the com- bined influences of Faust, Manfred, and The Robbers were not enough to raise this play or any other of the same type into the realm of literary excellence. Only in fiction did Gothicism attain anything approaching distinction, partly because the earlier decades of the nine- teenth century produced few authors of merit other than writers of fiction. More- over, fiction permits what is forbidden by the inescapable realness of the stage, in- cluding a free imaginative range and the indefiniteness of effect so essential to the treatment of the weird. These circum- stances help explain why the Gothic element is a primary ingredient of American fiction from the first. Its earliest exemplification is found in the first regular American novel — William Hill Brown's Power of Sympathy (1789), in which one of the characters, in a Dantesque dream, visits the realm of departed sinners and is thrown into a paroxysm of fear and horror when he beholds the punishment that is meted out to one guilty of seduction, the blackest crime on the blotter of Hell. Just as he is seized by a demon, who thrusts him among the damned, he awakes, thus initiating the American fashion of explaining mysteries and supernatural happenings naturally or rationally. But the distinction of writing the first Gothic novel and of channelizing the conventions which the genre was to follow in America (including the technique of rational explanation, its frank adaptation of the typical literary themes of German , Gothicism, and its transfer of medieval European settings to contemporary Amer- ica) belongs to Charles Brockden Brown, whose Wieland (1798) is the first full- blown flower of this exotic plant. The Americanization, or naturalization, of the Gothic theme and setting is carried forward , in George Watterston's Glencarn; or, the 1 Disappointment of Youth (1810) and Isaac Mitchell's Asylum (181 1), and soon received its best illustration in some of Washington Irving's Hudson River legends. The modern short story has long been regarded as the one literary genre that is distinctively American. The epic, the novel, the drama, and the others we have never laid claim to. "But the short story," we are in the habit of saying, "that is ours. We invented it, we developed it, we perfected it." And we point to Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, and their successors for proof. But our patent to the short story has not gone unchallenged. Not long after the first specimens appeared in The Sketch Book (1819-1820), it was pointed out that one of the best of them, "Rip Van Winkle," was based on a German tale and could not, therefore, lay claim to absolute origi- nality. 197 Succeeding tales by Irving drew from the critics the charge of plagiarism. Early American Fiction 365 In a review of Bracebridge Hall (1822), a contributor to Blackwood' s declared that "the great blemish of the work ... is that it is drawn not from life, but from musty volumes." 198 When Tales of a Traveller appeared in 1824, English readers were dis- appointed that it was no Sketch Book of Germany, as Irving had led them to expect, and reviewers voiced their displeasure by charging him with "pilfering the materials of other men, working up old stories." 199 Such were some of the comments elicited by America's first examples of this new genre, and similar charges followed Irving throughout his story-writing career. Nor did Irving's successors fare much better. Almost the first critical comment published on Poe's tales connected them with "Germanism," 200 and Poe felt himself called upon to declare: "If in any of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul." 201 And Poe himself was the first to accuse Hawthorne of plagiarizing the Germans when he professed to have found the secret of Hawthorne in Tieck. 202 Thus, from the beginning, the American short story has been coupled with the German tale. An examination of the basis for making these allegations is in order. Germanic Materials and Motifs in the Short Story WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859) Early German Interests While Irving's earliest writings demon- strate his discipleship of the eighteenth- century literary tradition, The Sketch Book shows him striking out on a new course, utilizing certain German romantic materials in short prose tales instead of the conven- tional multi-volume novel of the eighteenth century. Irving's earliest contacts with things Germanic include the Gothic novel, the periodical literature (British and American) of the day, 1 and Dunlap's con- coctions from Schiller and Kotzebue for the Park Theater, where Irving was an habitue throughout the years of his dandyhood in New York City. 2 In England during the latter half of the second decade of the nine- teenth century, he moved agreeably in the infectiously romantic atmosphere of Mur- ray's London drawing rooms, and a visit to Scott, whose "border-tales, witching-songs, and stories crowded" Irving's mind with "a world of ideas, images, and impressions" producing a "kind of delirium," supplied what was needed to direct, or re-direct, his attention to the literature of Germany. 3 Irving's visit to Abbotsford was followed by a wild effort to take German by storm. He bought a German grammar and fell to work on Rabenhorst's German dictionary as the corridor to the inviting land of legendary lore and literary inspiration which Scott had described. 4 On May 19, 1818, he report- ed to his friend Brevoort that while learning German had proved "a severe task" re- quiring "hard study," he was "able to read and splutter a little," and that however great the labor, he believed that "the rich mine of German literature holds forth abundant rewards." 6 The Sketch Book In The Sketch Book, written mainly during 1818, we have some of these "abun- dant rewards." Composition formerly so halting, now proceeded readily, often spontaneously. 6 "Rip Van Winkle" is one of the pieces written "under direct inspira- tion" — a quaint but not altogether errone- ous way of putting it when we observe Irving's close reliance in this so-called "first" American short story upon its source, the old German legend of Peter Klaus. The parallelism is worth considering in detail that the extent of Irving's borrow- ing may be known and that his technique in rewriting old materials may be observed and appraised. The German source is there- fore reproduced entire, together with paral- lel passages from Irving's version.* * The German tale of "Peter Klaus" (Otmar's Volks-Sagen (pp. 153-58) "Peter Klaus, ein Ziegenhirt aus Sittendorf, der seine Heerde am Kyfihauser weidete, pflegte sie am Abend auf einem mit altem * The substance of Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" Rip Van Winkle, a happy-go-lucky inhabit- ant of an old village on the Hudson, in company with his faithful dog, Wolf, clambers one day to 367 36S German Literary Influence It is obvious that "the direct inspiration" lay open before Irving as he wrote his story about Rip Van Winkle, 7 and yet Irving's tale is more than an English version of Otmar's story. In spite of the extensive and precise debt to "Peter Klaus," "Rip Van Winkle" cannot fairly be assigned to any single source. Like Shakespeare, he lifted Gemauer umschlossenen Platze ausruhen zu lassen, wo er die Musterung iiber sie hielt. "Seit einigen Tagen hatte er bemerkt, dass eine seiner schonsten Ziegen bald nachher, wenn er auf diesen Platz gekommen war, ver- schwand, und erst spat der Heerde nachkam. Er beobachtete sie genauer, und sahe, dass sie durch eine Spalte des Gemauers durchschliipf- te. Er wand sich ihr nach, und traf sie in eine Hohlung, wo sie frohlich die Hafenkorner auflas, die einzeln von der Decke herabfielen. Er blick- te in die Hohe, schiittelte den Kopf iiber den Hafer-Regen, konnte aber durch alles Hinstar- ren nichts weiter entdecken. Endlich horte er iiber sich das Wichern und Stampfen einiger mutigen Hengste, deren Krippe der Hafer ent- fallen musste. "So stand der Ziegenhirt da staunend iiber die Pferde in einen ganz unbewohnten Berge. Da kam ein Knappe, und winkte schweigend, ihm zu folgen. Peter stieg einige Stufen in die Hohe, und kam, iiber einen ummauerten Hof, an eine Vertiefung, die ringsum von hohen Felsenwanden umschlossen war, in welche durch iiberhangende dickbelaubte Zweige eini- ges Dammerlicht herab fiel. Hier fand er, auf einen gut-geebneten, kiihlen Rasenplatz zwolf ernste Ritter-Manner, deren keiner ein Wort sprach, beim Kegelspiel. Peter wurde schwei- gend angestellt, um die Kegel aufzurichten. "Anfangs that er dies mit schloddernden Knien, wenn er, mit halbverstohlnem Blick, die langen Barte und die aufgeschlitzten Wamser der edelen Ritter betrachtete. Almahlig aber machte die Gewohnung ihm dreister; er iiber- sah alles um sich her mit immer festerm Blick, und wagte so endlich aus einer Kanne zu trin- ken, die neben ihm hingesetzt war, und aus welcher der Wein ihm lieblich entgegenduftete. Er fiihlte sich wie neubelebt; und so oft er Ermiidung spiirte, holte er sich aus der nie ver- siegenden Kanne neue Krafte. Doch endlich ubermannte ihn der Schlaf. "Beim Erwachen fand er sich auf dem um- schlossnen griinen Platz wieder, wo er seine Zie- gen ausruhen zu lassen pflegte. Er rieb sich die Augen, konnte aber weder Hund noch Ziegen entdecken, staunte iiber die Straucher undBau- me, die er vorher nie bemerkt hatte. Kopfschiit- telnd ging er weiter, alle die Wege und Steige hindurch, die er taglich mit seiner Heerde zu durchirren pflegte; aber nirgends fand sich eine Spur von seinen Ziegen. one of the high- est parts of the Kaatskill mountains in pursuit of squirrels. About to descend, he hears his name called and perceives a man, strangely dressed, laboring under the load of a stout keg, which he is carrying up the mountain- side. The stranger asks Rip to assist him, with which request Rip, though wondering at the oddity of the man and his task, promptly com- plies. Passing through a ravine, they come to "a hollow, like a small amphitheatre, surround- ' ed by perpendicular precipices, over the brinks of which impending trees shoot their branches so that one catches only glimpses of the azure ' sky and the bright evening cloud. "On entering the amphitheatre, new objects of wonder presented themselves. On a level spot in the centre was a company of odd-looking ; personages playing at nine-pins. . . . What seemed particularly odd to Rip was that though j these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest faces, the most ] mysterious silence. ... As Rip and his com- panion approached them, they suddenly de- sisted from their play, and stared at them with such fixed, statue-like gaze, and such strange, uncouth, lack-lustre countenances, that his heart turned within him, and his knees smote together. . . . By degrees Rip's awe and appre- hension subsided. He even ventured, when no eye was fixed upon him, to taste the beverage, which he found had much the flavor of excellent Hollands. One taste provoked another; and he reiterated his visits to the flagon so often that at length his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head, his head gradually declined, and he fell into a deep sleep. "On waking, he found himself on the green knoll whence he had first seen the old man of the glen. He rubbed his eyes — it was a bright morning. . . . He looked round for his gun, but in place of a clean well-oiled fowling-piece, he found an old firelock lying by him, the barrel incrusted with rust, the lock falling off, and the stock worm-eaten. ..." He calls for his dog, but no dog comes. The Washington Irving 369 a ready-made plot, but in subjecting the material to his own personality, his de- scriptive and narrative technique, made it his own. 8 His workmanship in "Rip Van Winkle" is typical of his manner of writing almost every other selection comprising The Sketch Book. None is without some incident, character, or motif gleaned by Unter sich sah er Sittendorf, und endlich stieg er, mit beschleunigtem Schritt herab, um hier nach seiner Heerde zu fragen. "Die Leute die ihm vor dem Dorfe begegne- ten, waren ihm alle unbekannt, waren anders gekleidet, und sprachen nicht so, also seine Bekannten; auch starrten ihn alle an, wenn er nach seine Ziegen fragte, und fassten sich an das Kinn. Endlich that er fast unwilkiirlich eben das, und fand, zu seiner Erstaunung, seinen Bart um einen Fuss verlangert. Er ring an, sich und die ganze Welt um sich her, fur verzaubert zu halten; und doch kannte er den Berg, den er herabgestiegen war, wohl als den Kyffhauser, auch waren ihm die Hauser mit ihren Garten und Vorplatzen alle wohlbekannt. Auch nann- ten mehrere Knaben, auf die Frage eines Vor- beireisenden, den Namen: Sittendorf. "Kopfschuttelnd ging er in das Dorf hinein und nach seiner Hutte. Er fand sie sehr verfal- len, und vor ihr lag ein fremder Hirtenknabe in zerrissenen Kittel, neben einem abgezehrten Hunde, der ihn zahnefletschend angrinzte, als er ihm rief. Er ging durch die Offnung, die sonst eineThur verschloss, hinein, fand aber alles so wuste und leer dass er, einem Betrunkenen gleich, aus der Hinterpforte wieder hinaus wankte, und Frau und Kinder, bei ihren Namen rief. Aber keiner horte, und keine Stimme ant- wortete ihm. "Bald umdrangten den suchenden Mann mit dem langen eisgrauen Bart, Weiber und Kinder und f ragten ihn um die Wette : Was er suche ? Andre vor seinem eignen Hause nach seiner Frau oder seinen Kindern zu fragen, oder gar valley, every foot of which he had known for years, is a network of birch, sassafras, and witch-hazel. The night before, it had been a smooth meadowland. ". . . He again called for and whistled after his dog; he was only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows. . . . He shook his head, shouldered the rusty firelock, and with a heart - ful of anxiety, turned his steps homeward. "As he approached the village, he met a number of people, but none whom he knew, which somewhat surprised him. . . .Their dress, too, was of a different fashion from that to which he was accustomed. They all stared at him with equal marks of surprise, and whenever they cast their eyes upon him, invariably strok- ed their chins. The constant recurrence of this gesture induced Rip, involuntarily, to do the same, when to his astonishment, he found his beard grown a foot long! "His mind now misgave him; he began to doubt whether both he and the world around him were not bewitched. Surely this was his native village, which he had left but a day before! There stood the Kaatskill mountains — there ran the silver Hudson at a distance — ■ there was every hill and dale precisely as it had always been." Rip believes himself still under the influence of the "wicked flagon." Shaking his head, he enters the village. "It was with some difficulty that he found his way to his own house. . . . He found the house gone to decay — the roof fallen in, the windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges. A half- starved dog that looked like Wolf was skulking about it. Rip called him by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth, and passed on. "He entered the house. ... It was empty, forlorn, and apparently abandoned ... he called loudly for his wife and children — the lonely chambers rang for a moment with his voice, and then all again was silence." Unaware that a new nation has been born since he left, he goes to his favorite loafing place, the village inn; but instead of the quiet old Dutch inn, he finds a rickety wooden hotel, flying a flag which he does not recognize. "The appearance of Rip, with his long griz- zled beard, his rusty fowling piece, his uncouth dress, and the army of women and children at his heels, soon attracted the attention of the tavern politicians." 370 German Literary Influence himself, and none is without borrowings from other gleaners. 9 This circumstance may explain why Irving's note (obviously designed as Knickerbocker banter) misdi- rects the reader by referring the source of the story to "Emperor Frederick, der Roth- bart," entombed with his army in the Kyff- hauser mountain. This story, as given in the collections by Otmar, Biisching, Grasse, and others, has little more in common with nach sich selbst, schien ihm so sonderbar, dass er, um die Fragen los zu werden, die nachsten Namen nannte die ihm einfielen. 'Kurt Steffen!' Die meisten schwiegen und sahen sich an ; end- lich sagte eine bejahrte Frau : 'Seit zwolf Jahren wohnt der unter der Sachsenburg, dahin werdet ihr heute nicht kommen.' 'Velten Meier!' 'Gott habe ihn selig!' antworteteeinaltesMiitterchen an der Kriicke, 'der liegt schon seit funfzehn Jahren in dem Hause das er nimmer verlasst.' "Er erkannte zusammenschauernd seine plotzlich alt gewordene Nachbarin; aber, ihm war die Lust vergangen, weiter zu fragen. "Da drangte sich durch die neugierigen Gaf- fer ein junges rasches Weib, mit einem einjah- rigen Knaben auf den Arm, und ein vierjahriges Madchen an der Hand, die alle drei seiner Frau wie aus den Augen geschnitten waren. 'Wie heisst ihr?' fragte er erstaunend. 'Marie.' 'Und euer Vater ?' 'Gott habe ihn selig! Peter Klaus; es sind nun zwanzig Jahre.dass wir ihn Tag und Nacht suchten auf den Kyffhauser, da die Heerde ohne ihn zuriick kam; ich war damals sieben Jahr alt.' "Langer konnte sich der Ziegenhirt nicht halten. 'Ich bin Peter Klaus,' rief er, 'und kein anderer!' und nahm seine Tochter dem Knaben vom Arm. Alle standen, und noch eine Stimme rief: 'Ja, das ist Peter Klaus! Wilkommen Nachbar! nach zwanzig Jahren Wilkommen!'" The strange old man is accused of being a spy or a runaway prisoner. Rip assures the crowd that he has merely returned to find some of his old friends and neighbors. They demand to know: '"Well — who are they ? — Name them.' "Rip bethought himself a moment, and in- quired, 'Where's Nicholas Vedder?' "There was a silence for a little while, when an old man replied in a thin piping voice, 'Nicholas Vedder! Why, he is dead and gone these eighteen years. ..." '"Where's Brom Dutcher?' '"Oh, he went to the army in the beginning of the war; some say he was killed at the storming of Stony Point — others say he was drowned in a squall at the foot of Antony's Nose. I don't know — he never came back again. . . .' "Rip's heart died away at hearing of these sad changes. . . . He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man. "At this critical moment a fresh comely woman pressed through the throng to get a peep at the gray-bearded man. She had a chubby child in her arms, which, frightened at his looks, began to cry. 'Hush, Rip,' cried she, 'hush, you little fool; the old man won't hurt you.' The name of the child, the air of the mother, the tone of her voice, all awakened a train of recol- lections in his mind. 'What is your name, my good woman ?' he asked. '"Judith Gardenier.' '"And your father's name?' '"Ah, poor man, Rip Van Winkle was his name, but it's twenty years since he went away from home with his gun, and never has been heard of since — his dog came home without him. ... I was then but a little girl. . . .' "The honest man could contain himself no longer. He caught his daughter and her child in his arms. 'I am your father!' cried he — 'Young Rip Van Winkle once ■ — old Rip Van Winkle now! Does nobody know poor Rip Van Winkle ?' "All stood amazed until an old woman, tottering out from among the crowd, put her hand to her brow, and peering under it in his face for a moment, exclaimed, 'Sure enough! it is Rip Van Winkle- — it is himself! Welcome home again, old neighbor — Why, where have you been these twenty long years ?'" Washington Irving' 371 "Peter Klaus" than that they are both laid in the same locality. 10 This misleading reference appears to have been deliberate. That it was a mere slip of the memory does not seem likely, for he recalled the details of the Rothbart story too precisely three years later in Germany to have made a mistake about it in 1819. Whatever the reason, we find Irving subjoining a note to "The Historian" in Bracebridge Hall (in a later undated edition of his works 11 ), in which he defends himself, yet studiously avoids naming the real source: In a note which follows that tale, I al- luded to the superstition on which it is founded, and I thought a mere allusion was sufficient, as the tradition was so notorious as to be inserted in almost every collection of German legends. I had seen it myself in three. I could hardly have hoped, therefore, in the present age, when every ghost and goblin story is ransacked, that the origin of the tale would escape discovery. In fact I had considered popular traditions of the kind as fair foundations for authors of fiction to build upon, and made use of the one in question accordingly. 12 And here we might as well let the matter rest. If he sought to cover his tracks, the critics gave him sufficient cause. What is important for our understanding of Irving's literary personality is that he "considered popular traditions ... as fair foundations for authors of fiction to build upon," and that while he won a notable success in The Sketch Book by following this method, he recognized it as a dubious, dangerous pro- cedure and accordingly developed an un- happy self-consciousness and hesitancy about working up like materials that he gathered for his later collections of stories. Another of the short stories in The Sketch Book generally accepted as an authentic Knickerbocker tale — "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" — also derives from the German. The introductory parts of the story relating to Ichabod, his school, his pupils, his aspirations, the Van Tassels, and their "quilting frolic" are all native; but the incidents which give the very point to the story are borrowed from the German legends about Rubezahl as recorded by Musaeus. 13 In this story Irving went to work very much as he did in "Rip Van Winkle." He transferred the scene from the Riesengebirge of Silesia to Sleepy Hollow on the Hudson. The characters he found ready to hand, having simply to draw upon his Dutch burghers of Knickerbocker noto- riety, though Ichabod Crane himself may be a concoction of the Yankee pedagogue and various eighteenth-century English schoolmasters (notably those of Shenstone, Fielding, and Goldsmith), set in a Dutch- American community. The climax of the story, however, he borrowed from the fifth of the Legenden von Rubezahl. 1 * The settings are identical: ghost-and-goblin-ridden lo- calities, where old wives' tales abound. 15 The mind of Johann (who corresponds to Ichabod) has been infected by this fabulous lore. Finding himself in the famous resort of Rubezahl, all the stories rush to his head, and he wishes "with all his soul" that he had "never heard a syllable of the matter." Ichabod is equally susceptible and equally apprehensive. 16 Johann and Ichabod have the same fearful misgivings. 17 When the apparition appears to Johann, it is "a jet- black figure, of a size exceeding that of man"; Ichabod, in the same situation, beholds "something huge-misshapen, black and towering." 18 The maneuvers of the night-riders are identical. When Johann quickens his pace, so does "the figure"; whenever "Ichabod quickened his steed, the stranger quickened his horse to an equal pace"; when he fell into a walk, the other did the same. 19 Suddenly to both comes the terrible discovery that their adversary is headless. 20 Ichabod, like Johann, receives another shock, for the pursuer does not wear his head as normal people do. Johann's carries his under his arm, Ichabod's "on the pommel of the saddle." 21 Unable to outrun his headless adversary, Johann tries, as a last resort, a 372 German Literary Influence conjurer's word to drive away the ghost, but too late — the monster hurls his head at Johann and tumbles him headlong. Ichabod, too, is about to free himself of his unwelcome companion, by gaining the hallowed bridge, across which the ghostly rider cannot follow, when he turns and sees "the goblin rising in his stirrups in the very act of hurling his head at him." It encounters his cranium with "a tremendous crash," and Ichabod is "tumbled headlong into the dust." 22 In Irving's story, the fearful missile that fells Ichabod is a pumpkin; ia Musaeus' story it turns out to be "an huge hollowed gourd filled with sand and stones, and worked up into a very grotesque figure, by the addition of a wooden nose, and a long flax beard." 23 The mystery is explained naturally in both stories. The goblin in Rubezahl is not Rubezahl at all, but a rival of Johann, who is motivated by revenge and robbery. In Irving's story the robbery motif is lacking, but all other details are closely parallel. Moreover, Johann's adver- sary is a big, strapping Kyauskopf (Curly- pate, in the Beckford version), who fits pretty accurately the description of Brom Bones, and who uses the same methods in undoing his rival in love. 24 The story of the inception of "Sleepy Hollow" can now be revised. Pierre M. Irving, the biographer, tells us: The outline of this story had been sketched more than a year before at Bir- mingham [autumn, 1818], after a conversa- tion with his brother-in-law, Van Wart, who had been dwelling upon some recollections of his early years in Tarrytown, and had touched upon a waggish fiction of one Brom Bones, a wild blade, who professed to fear nothing, and boasted of having once met the devil on a return from a nocturnal frolic, and run a race with him for a bowl of milk punch. The imagination of the author kindled over the recital, and in a few hours he had scribbled off the framework of this renowned story, and was reading it to his sister and her husband. He then threw it by until he went up to London, where he expanded it into the present legend [com- pleted Dec. 29, 18 19]. 25 It appears, as in the case of "Rip Van Winkle," that something had been lacking to complete the story. The framework, the setting, and the characters of the tale all came readily enough; all that was needed was an incident, together with a good motif, to provide a climax with a punch. This necessary impetus to complete the story Irving found in Johann's fearful ride as related by Musaeus in the Rubezahl legends. The source of the third short story in The Sketch Book, a tale significantly entitled "The Spectre Bridegroom," Irving himself indicated when he had the Baron relate, at the wedding feast, "the history of the goblin horseman that carried away the fair Leonora, — a dreadful story, which has since been put into excellent verse, and is read and believed by all the world." 23 Burger's Lenove, the ballad relating the ghastly ride of Lenore with her lover who has been slain in battle, and who returns to keep his love-tryst with her, is well known. Irving's tale begins with the young Count von Altenburg on his way to Castle Katzen- ellenbogen to wed the Count of Landshort's beautiful daughter, whom he has never seen. Near Wiirzburg he falls in with an old friend, Herman von Starkenfaust. In a thickly-wooded pass they are attacked by robbers, and von Altenburg is mortally wounded. With his dying breath he entreats his friend to proceed to Katzenellenbogen to explain the cause of his not keeping his appointment with the bride. Herman von Starkenfaust arrives at the castle some hours after the appointed time for the wedding, and, without being given an opportunity to say a word, is married to the blushing bride, who had all but despaired of having a wedding at all. He is hurried from the wedding ceremony to a banquet, and from one place to another without a chance to explain his imposition. Only when the wedding company assemble in the old armorial hall and begin to tell "wild tales and supernatural legends" does he get an opportunity. Old Landshort tells the Washington Irving 373 tale of Leonora; Herman jumps up, an- nounces that he must away, that he must be buried at midnight, that the grave is waiting for him; he jumps on his black charger and is lost in the whistling of the night blast. The company breaks up in consternation. Old Landshort is in a rage; the bride is in tears. On the night of the second day of her widowhood, however, she sees the spectre bridegroom at her window ; and, although she faints from fright, she understands enough to be ready the next night to mount behind the goblin and gallop away with him. Katzenellenbogen is again in turmoil. But just as preparations are completed to scour the country for the goblin rider and the erring maid, they return, make explanations, and are forgiven on the spot. The old count is in transports of joy that his son-in-law is no wood demon, that his grandchildren will be Katzenellen- bogen and not a brood of goblins. Finding the spectre-bridegroom substantial flesh and blood, he is perfectly satisfied; only the aunt of the bride is mortified that this mar- velous story is thus marred, and that the only spectre she has ever seen should turn out a counterfeit. Irving's banter and pleasant ridicule of Burger's ballad is too obvious to need further illustration. The story is one of the best examples of the sportive Gothic, a genre in which Irving has scarcely been surpassed. Between Irving's saying in 1818, while at work on The Sketch Book, that he was learning "to read and splutter a little" in German on the promise that the "rich mine of German literature" held forth "abun- dant" rewards, and July n, 1823, when he wrote his last entry in his Dresden diary, a good deal had taken place to change his literary personality. The Dresden notebook closes with a comment which, in its un- doubted personal application, takes on added significance in the career of Irving as the romantic antiquary. He wrote: "Soli- tary miners of literature in Germany — men working hours and hours each day in dull little towns." 2 ' This observation, together with the fact that his first book of tales had drawn heavily on Germanic sources, and the further fact that as soon as the opportunity appeared, he paid a visit to Germany, suggests that the stories of Irving's subse- quent volumes might be expected to show even greater Germanic influences than The Sketch Book. Irving's German Tour In passing from the period of The Sketch Book to that of Tales of a Traveller, we proceed from the first stage of Irving's development as a romanticist to that of the second. Of the intervening period the greater part of the years 1822 and 1823 were spent in Germany. He entered the Rhine- land a lukewarm romanticist, with more in- terest in the grotesquely romantic than in the truly romantic ; he returned from Dres- den, two years later, an out-and-out roman- tic, prepared to write Tales of a Traveller (1824) and the Alhambra (1832), in which for the first time, as far as American prose fiction is concerned, the vein of romanticism is fully developed. 28 He had hardly entered upon German soil, when rheumatism "tripped up his heels" in the H6tel de Darmstadt in Mayence; but already he was inspired to start a new book, and then and there he wrote the Preface to Tales of a Traveller. 29 I attempted to beguile the weary hours by studying German under the tuition of mine host's pretty daughter, Katrine; but I found even German had not the power to charm a languid ear, and that the conjuga- tion of ich Hebe might be powerless, how- ever rosy the lips which uttered it. I tried to read ... I turned over volume after volume, but threw them by with distaste: "Well, then," said I at length, in despair, "if I cannot read a book, I will write one." Never was there a more lucky idea. ... I rummaged my portfolio, and cast about, in my recollections, for those floating materials which a man naturally collects in travelling; and here I have 374 German Literary Influence arranged them in this little work. ... I am an old traveller; I have read somewhat, heard and seen more, and dreamt more than all. My brain is rilled, therefore, with all kinds of odds and ends. In travelling, these heterogeneous matters have become shaken up in my mind, as the articles are apt to be in an ill-packed travelling trunk; so that when I attempt to draw forth a fact, I cannot determine whether I have read, heard, or dreamt it ; and I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories. These remarks are at once symptomatic and prophetic of his manner of writing his next book, which he hoped to have ready for spring publication. The writing of that book was long delayed, but meanwhile he assiduously stored up and tried to assimi- late a vast body of "floating materials" against a time when another "fit of scrib- bling" should hit hem. 30 As he proceeded into the upper Rhineland, he surrendered to romance as well as sentiment; in his reveries, the Hudson, the Rhine, and the Neckar were fused into one, the Odenwald mountains beckoning to him as once the Catskills had. At Heidelberg he intensified his study of German. As he progressed southward, he discovered that he liked best the smaller villages, as being quainter and richer in lore and color. At Ulm, Augsburg, and Blenheim his thoughts turned to mementous historical events that had taken place there. 31 On arriving at a town of any size, one of the first places he visited was its library. 32 After leaving Munich, he felt he was shaking off civilization, and as he approached Salzburg, anticipated getting into a veritable gnome- and pixie-land, where mountains still held entombed be- witched phantom armies. He rededicated himself to the purpose formed as early as 1 817, back at Abbotsford, to create his own volume of German legends. At Salzburg he wrote down eight local legends, told him, it seems, by the valet de place? 3 Almost the first thing he did on arriving in Vienna was to explore the castle of Diirenstein, and as he walked the garden of Prince Lichtenstein the thought struck him that he must prepare "a collection of tales of various countries made up of legends, etc., etc., etc." 34 Another vain wish. A month ex- hausted the possibilities of Vienna. Having regained his health, he decided to push on to Dresden for the winter. He chose Dres- den as "a place of taste, intellect, and liter- ary feeling," as "the best place to acquire the German language, which is nowhere so purely spoken as in Saxony," and as a place where he hoped to find congenial fellow- countrymen. 35 From November 22, 1822, to the follow- ing July he made Dresden his home, finding especially delightful the company of Emily Foster, the oldest daughter of an English family, and spending much time in the Foster home studying German, French, and Italian, reading collections of German fairy-lore, and participating in amateur dramatic productions. Through the English Minister John P. Morier, an old friend of his days in Washington, he immediately found himself mingling freely with the diplomatic corps and moving agreeably in the court circle, where he was "in great favor with the old queen." He participated in the old Saxon ceremonies ranging from formal court parties (where he joined in dancing the "Grossvater") to the royal boar hunt. The old conventions and punctil- ious forms exemplified by the court, the retinue of huntsmen, the villagers, their costumes, the inns, and the very country- side seemed to rejuvenate his jaded imagi- nation that had gone stale on English scenes. 36 The forty-seven friends listed by Irving in his Dresden journal suggest rea- sons why during this "most agreeable" winter's round of gaiety he did so little toward his projected book. Prominent among them was Dr. Karl Bottiger, a Ger- man antiquary and director of the Museum, who repeatedly gave him expert help in his folklore studies, 37 and Colonel Livius, 33 with whom he collaborated in translating German operas. 39 Throughout the Dresden Washington Irving 375 period there were formal and informal occasions where he met German literary people. On Christmas day, at Count Kno- belsdorf's house, the foremost American humorist of the day met the foremost German humorist, Jean Paul. 40 On May 3, he paid a visit to Kleist, with whom he had some "pleasant literary conversation." 41 Among the most stimulating of his literary connections in Dresden was his friendship with Tieck, who had come to Dresden in 1819, and was already the central literary figure of the little capital when Irving arrived. 43 When he first arrived in Dresden, Irving still bemoaned his bad French and "worse German," 43 but he soon took steps to allevi- ate this situation by devoting two hours a day, from seven to nine in the morning, to regular instruction from a German tutor. 44 What we know of Irving's love for the com- forts of life argues that he would not have risen early every morning to take two hours of instruction in the language without learning at least to read it with ease, espe- cially at a time when he was steeped in the study of languages, for in addition to study- ing German, he would go in the afternoon or in the evening to the Foster's, where Mrs. Foster taught him Italian, and Emily superintended his French exercises. More- over, he kept up his German after he moved on to other interests, such as the Spanish, and kept coming back to his German books, notably Schiller and Goethe, and reading them. 45 In thus conscientiously studying German while searching for legends and traditions and frequently committing them to paper, Irving consciously gathered what he termed "those floating materials which a man naturally collected in travelling." 46 But the distractions of Dresden, not the least of which was his unprosperous love affair with Emily Foster, kept him restless and unable to write. He found what consolation he could in telling himself: "I have lived into a great deal of amusing and characteristic information." Thus he acquired new ideas and a "variety of modes of expressing them" 47 (German, French, and Italian) if and when he should be able to get control of his pen. But he did not succeed in getting down to work on his German book for a year after he had torn himself away from Dresden and established himself at 89 Rue Richelieu in Paris in August of 1823. 48 A year later (September 4, 1824) he wrote what throws light on his manner of writing Tales of a Traveller and explains much about subsequent developments in his literary career. I have been thinking over the German subjects. 49 It will take me a little time to get hold of them properly, as I must read a little 50 and digest the plan and nature of them in my mind. There are such quantities of these legendary and romantic tales now littering from the press both in England and Germany, that one must take care not to fall into the commonplace of the day. Scott's manner must likewise be widely avoided. In short, I must strike out some way of my own, suited to my own way of thinking and writing. I wish, in everything I do, to write in such a manner that my productions may have something more than the mere interest of narrative to recom- mend them, which is very evanescent; something, if I dare use the phrase, of classic merit, i.e. [,] depending upon style, &c, which gives a production some chance of duration beyond the mere whim and fashion of the day. I have my mind toler- ably well supplied with German localities, manners, characters, &c, and when I once get to work, I trust I shall be able to spin them out very fluently. 51 Other passages in the same letter show how anxious Irving was "to keep on steadi- ly" until he could "scrape together enough" from all his "literary property to produce a regular income, however moderate" and thus become "independent of the world and its chances." 52 Tales of a Traveller The most likely thing for him to prepare speedily for the press, aside from the 37 6 German Literary Influence dramatic and operatic pieces on which he was engaged, was the unfinished story of "Buckthorne" (sometimes called "History of an Author"), which had been laid aside as the groundwork for a novel. He took it up but laid it by a fiftieth time, to try his hand anew at his "German subjects." 53 That did not prosper either; he changed plans a dozen times, 54 fagging on at this discouraging task until August 24, 1824, when Tales of a Traveller finally appeared. Although he always regarded portions of the book as the best of his writings, its inception was slow, its composition spas- modic, its final revision troublesome, and the result — a book of pieces ill-arranged, poorly classified, a disjointed, piece of patchwork. 55 "Buckthorne and his Friends," which was begun first, had its inception in Paris at the suggestion of Tom Moore in the summer of 1 82 1. 56 Designed originally as part of Bracebri-dge Hall, then as a separate work, it ultimately became Part II of Tales of a Traveller. The early portion, with its back- ground of Longmans' dinner and Pater- noster Row, has no connection with things German; but the latter portion, in which Buckthorne, no longer a free lance in Lon- don, becomes a strolling player and finally a theater manager and owner, is German inspired. 57 Like Wilhelm Meister, Buck- thorne feels he has a theatrical mission. The latter part of "Buckthorne" is a German graft upon an English stem, growing from native roots, containing, as Irving's story does, shadowy sentimentalized elements drawn from his own career. The parallelisms with Wilhelm Meister can be traced from the very beginning of the story, though it should be observed at the outset that whereas Goethe is serious and hesitates to ridicule the young appren- tice, Irving is playfully sportive throughout. Both Wilhelm and Buckthorne, idealistic visionaries, are endowed with the poetical feeling and passion for the theater, so much so that both steal from their homes at night to see the plays. Both are grossly misunder- stood by very matter-of-fact fathers and coddled by indulgent mothers. Both are extremely sensitive to feminine beauty, and both have sentimental love affairs which result in broken hearts and contribute to their leaving home and throwing in their lot with a strolling theatrical company. Both are held spellbound by the wonders of the stage — the pageantry, the panto- mime, the magical tricks of the conjurors, the distressed damsel, the fun of it all. 58 Both become fully initiated in the myster- ies backstage, including the disorderly dressing-room of their dirty-muslined hero- ine — but the gay disarray and the merry informality of it convince both they are getting a glimpse into another planet. 59 Both become actor-folk quite unconsciously, naturally; though both tell themselves they are seeking only temporary gratification and indulgence of their humors, their genius. 60 Our heroes drift along contentedly for a while, playing here and there, paying little heed to the world. But as they observe (in almost identical terms) the dissensions, petty jealousies, and quarrels that go on backstage, 61 their illusions about the happy gaiety of their actor-life suffer. As in Wil- helm Meister, so in "Buckthorne," the only thing on which all parties agree is to back- bite the manager and to cabal against his rule. Then comes Buckthorne's unlucky love affair with Columbine, which may well be considered a burlesque of Wilhelm's sentimental connection with Marianne. Following this disillusioning experience, Buckthorne gives up his theatrical career. Unlike Goethe's hero, he has had enough. Irving's story turns to other matters, and the similarities with Wilhelm Meister cease for a time, but in the last chapter of "Buck- thorne," Mr. Flimsey, the great tragedian of the company, carries forward the role of Wilhelm Meister. Finding an unorganized, ungoverned, half-disbanded theatrical group, Flimsey, like Meister, invests his Washington Irving 377 small capital in the company and becomes its manager. Irving's account of Flimsey's trials as manager exactly parallels Goe- the's. 62 Worse still, Flimsey's wife is jealous, and like Frau Melina and Philine, she compounds the poor manager's trou- bles. 63 Learning that the playhouse in a neighboring town is vacant, Flimsey sees an opportunity to realize his life's ambition, even as Wilhelm Meister had conceived his mission. Flimsey engages the place, and like Wilhelm, reaches the very summit of his ambitions, only to discover, even as Wilhelm had, that his position is fraught with vexations and troubles, within and without — bickerings, jealousies, disputes, and finally, failure. In disgust both give up their theatrical careers. Irving's story is a slight sketch, a loosely organized extravaganza, vastly different, of course, from Goethe's methodically planned and carefully executed Kultur- roman — in several ways, the history of his own soul. But the one was undoubtedly largely motivated by the other. In the "Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman," which form Part I in Tales of a Traveller, we have a group of tales set in a framework. 64 The framed tale is a device as old at least as Boccaccio, and Irving him- self had used a similar device in Brace- bridge Hall. But his scheme to get the stories related, the interruptions of the narratives, the critical comments on the tales by various members of the group, and the wit combats they engage in, all call to mind the motivating framework employed by Tieck in Phantasus, in which a group of men, dedicated to the spirit of "Fantasy," tell stories like "Der getreue Eckart," "Der Tannhauser," "Der Runenberg," and "Die Elfen." 65 "The Adventure of My Uncle," the first tale, is related by "the old gentleman with the haunted head." The narrator's uncle, an experienced traveler, on asking for a night's lodging at an ancient turreted castle in Normandy, was hospitably received by the Marquis and put into a chamber of the oldest, most venerable wing of the chateau. During the night the tread of approaching footsteps awakened him in time to see a stately female figure enter his room, warm itself at the fire in the grate, and glide softly out again. Questions addressed to the host the next morning cleared up the mystery. The Marquis, after much halting and stammering, explained that the lady's honor had one night been violated by an ancestor of his as she had sought hospitality in the chateau, that the deed had been perpetrated in the very room the uncle slept in, and that the night before had been the anniversary of the deed. Every year, on the night of the shameful crime, the out- raged woman visits the chamber, warms herself, and quietly departs. The lady dressed in white who haunts certain localities is a very common figure in many folk literatures. Grasse tells the stories of no less than a dozen "weisse Frauen." 68 Irving, who seems to have preferred ghost stories to all others, actively pursued the trail of "weisse Frauen" stories in Germany. One especially, "Die Edelfrau von Scharzfeld," resembles Irving's tale and may have suggested it. It is a story of deceitful hospitality and outraged virtue. The lady, after her death, becomes a Burg- geist and haunts the wing of the castle where the deed was perpetrated. Every year, on the anniversary of the crime, she comes in a rush of wind, enters by way of the turret, and pays a visit to the same chamber. 67 Irving used the occasion of one of these annual visits as the central point in his story.* 8 "The Young Italian" is traceable to Schiller's Rauber.* 9 The story, taken osten- sibly from a manuscript, is the autobio- graphy of the Mysterious Stranger, the subject of the preceding introductory sketch: A young Neapolitan nobleman, of sensitive and passionate nature, is placed, while still a boy, in a monastery. Here his melancholy nature is nurtured. A chance 378 (German Literary Influence trip into the world arouses his dejected spirits. He escapes from the cloister and seeks out his father. His older brother urges the father to send the young man back to the monastery. He overhears their plans and leaves his home. In Genoa he falls in with a celebrated artist, under whose tutelage he becomes an inspired painter, especially adept in delineating the human countenance. By chance he sees the lovely Bianca, daughter of a noble Genoese house, who becomes his betrothed ; but the relationship is kept secret because the young painter, nameless and exiled, has small hope of securing the consent of Bian- ca's proud guardian. News arrives from Naples that his older brother is dead, and that his father, old and ill, wishes his son to return to be restored to his home, title, and father. He leaves at once for Naples after making Fillipo, son of his patron, the confidant of his plans. To Fillipo is intrust- ed the charge of watching over the lovers' interests. He is also to forward their letters to each other. Finding his father very ill, the young painter remains at his bedside. Only upon the death of the old man, two years later, can he return to Genoa. He comes upon Bianca unexpectedly in the garden. After a convulsive embrace, she tears herself from his arms and reveals to him the fact that she is married to Fillipo. The whole dark plot of Fillipo is quickly discovered. He had intercepted the lovers' letters, persuaded Bianca that her lover had died, thrust himself into her confidence, and married her. Seeing Fillipo approaching, the young artist rushes forward, runs him through, and fearfully mangles the corpse. The shrieks of Bianca bring him to his senses. He looks with horror upon the scene, and like another Cain he flees. Restless wanderings and frenzied remorse drive him finally to Genoa where he surrenders him- self to justice. Intercepted and falsified letters, a be- trayed bride, a lover's revenge are old and overworked themes, and not peculiar to Schiller's play. Moreover, the young painter is no Carl Moor, no banditti leader, no world reformer. Yet he has all the mental qualities of Schiller's hero — fine sensibilities, talent, dash, a romantic imagination, and a sense of a high mission in life. Finally, like Carl Moor, he surrenders to law and justice. Irving's story seems to be one of the numerous productions — dramas, poems, tales — that followed in the wake of Die Riiuber, 10 drawing inspiration if not direct influence from Schiller's Sturm-und-Drang play. 71 "The Bold Dragoon" reads like a veri- table chapter from Jean Paul's Schmelzles Reise or Tieck's Vogelscheuche, 12 but the resemblances are only general, so that no direct borrowing seems to be involved. On the other hand, Irving's journals record his seeing in Prague, on November 25, 1822, "a tolerable piece in three acts called "Alps Roslein," and among undated memoranda this further notation: At Prague actor who played Almacrin — good scenes in mittelalter wars — young warrior flushed with wine — fiery — mous- taches turn[e]d up — feather thrown back — ■ staggering into house of sturdy burg[h]er — sitting down throwing out leg — slapping on thigh — trying to stick arms akimbo but staggerling — seizes burg[h]er's daughter. 73 The description fits the bold dragoon, even to the phrasing employed; but as in the case of "The Adventure of My Aunt," Irving incorporated into the tale, in addi- tion to its Germanic details, a jumble of his experiences on a tour of Holland and other general observations so that the tale has hardly any national character. 74 The Italian Banditti tales, forming Part III of Tales of a Traveller and strung out over a hundred pages, make the least interesting reading in the volume. For these basically trivial robber stories, with their trite plots turning on hairbreadth escapes and pseudo-chivalrous adventure in the Appenines, a traveling man like Irving required little help from the outside Washington Irving 379 beyond the descriptive effects and atmos- phere provided by Mrs. Radcliffe and other commonplace fiction fashions of the day. In Part IV, chiefly addenda for the book and rifled from his inexhaustible Knicker- bocker notes, 75 the only story (incidentally, the best of the group) that owes anything to Germany is "The Devil and Tom Walker." It is a sort of comic New England Faust, 79 which, in the happy blending of the terrifying and the ludicrous, rivals "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." The setting is a gloomy, snake-infested swamp. Here Tom encounters the Devil and sells his soul in exchange for pirate gold. After a career of iniquity, he is whisked back to the swamp on a black horse and is never seen again. Significant as borrowings from the Ger- man are in individual stories, the whole is not an honest body of German lore but rather a "huddle of tales of all nations" — emasculated German legends jostled by Dutch-American lore, Italian backgrounds, French anecdotes, and English travel ex- periences. Lacking the unified integrity of Bracebridge Hall and the saturation of Spanish lore in The Alhambra, Tales of a Traveller reminds one, as Professor Wil- liams has observed, of Irving's own charac- terization of the bastard wedded to the lady of easy virtue as "nobody's son marrying everybody's daughter." The entire volume lacks cohesion, unity, concentration. Even, in Part I, the portion for which Irving relied most on his accumulation of German materials, no story makes such direct, effective use of Germanic stuff as does "Rip Van Winkle," for example. 77 Fearing the cry of "Stolen goods," he wrote camou- flaged composites and succeeded in making only diluted spectral stories that were no more original or effective than any frank reworkings of the kind he might have made (with much less trouble to himself) of the Marchen-lore reposing in his journals. It was no German Sketch Book. It was a Scrap Book. Tales of a Traveller failed in England, where he was anxious that it should succeed. The truth of the matter is (and no one knew it better than Irving) that even regarding The Sketch Book, great as its popularity had been, the critics had been right in designa- ting many of its pieces as essentially "Dorf- schilderungen," "new leaves on old trees." 78 When his latest book turned out neither a German Sketch Book nor a comic Knicker- bocker's history of Germany, but a ragout of miscellaneous pieces, the English were disappointed. The notes and prefaces of concealment, designed to throw the hounds off the trail, only put the scent in their noses. The critics wrote more ill- naturedly than ever. 79 And there was little he could do about it beyond defending him- self obliquely among his friends by calling the reviewers "crows" and "buzzards of criticism." The Alhambra We pass now to The Alhambra (1832), which most fully exemplifies Irving's romanticism. Heretofore he had never yielded to romance so completely as not to be able to put his feet on solid ground at any moment he chose. 80 But The Alhambra contains no Knickerbocker capering; the book is "an arabesque, as redolent of the orient as the tales of Scheherazade." 81 His surrender is complete because, as he put it, "I gave myself up, during my sojourn in the Alhambra, to all the romantic and fabulous traditions connected with the pile . . . lived in the midst of an Arabian tale, and shut my eyes ... to everything that called me back to everyday life." 82 One might suppose that German literature, so stimulating during 1818-1824, would have continued its influence during the Spanish period. That seems not to be the case. The Alham- bra contains only two instances of possible Germanic inspiration. "The Legend of the Moor's Legacy" and "The Legend of the Two Discreet Sisters" are reminiscent in a general way of Otmar's "Der Ritterkeller 380 German Literary Influence auf dem Kyffhauser" and "Die Dumburg," respectively. Yet buried treasure is com- mon matter for folk material, and there is little ground for doubting Irving's asser- tions that he took the legends from Spanish sources. It may well be that he first caught the contagion for the romantic past of Spain from the enthusiasm rife among the German Romantiker while he lived among them, 83 but once the Spanish and Oriental influences began to work directly on him, they proceeded under their own power. The German influence, traceable from The Sketch Book through Tales of a Traveller, was important in Irving's development as a romanticist; without his prior contacts with German literature, The Alhambra is hardly conceivable. But the interest in German things suffered an abatement, and the Spanish influence, personal and literary, is directly responsible for the ripening of those romantic fruits which Scott had planted and German literature had nurtured. Woolfert's Roost Finally, there is a volume entitled Wol- fe rt's Roost (short pieces written chiefly after 1832 and first collected in 1855), which contains, as a contemporary reviewer re- marked, "representative" pieces of all of Irving's former works. One of the nine narratives in this volume — "Guests from Gibbet-Island" — rests on a German source > namely Grimm's "The Gallows' Guests." 84 Irving's method in adapting this tale from Grimm is very like his procedure in "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Giving the tale a local habitation in Communipaw, adding to the characteri- zation, and turning the German tipplers into pirates, he made of it a Knickerbocker tale some ten times as long as the original and infinitely more entertaining. Another story, "Don Juan: A Spectral Research," may well have received a suggestion from Gottschalck's "Der See- biirger See." 85 In both stories a dissolute young nobleman 86 and his companions determine to attack a convent. In Gott- schalck's tale the villain succeeds and despoils his own sister, who, unknown to him, is a novice in the nunnery. He spends the remainder of his life in a cloister in expiation of his crimes. Irving's tale presents a similar situation except that the incestuous deed is not committed. 87 He is stopped in time by a stranger who cries, "Rash man, forbear! is it not enough to have violated all human ties ? Wouldst thou steal a bride from heaven!" Don Manuel turns, draws, runs the stranger through, and makes his escape. The next day he sees the funeral of a young man, who, he is told, is Don Manuel. He stops the funeral pro- ceedings, declaring that there is an impos- j ture, that Don Manuel is alive, that he is Don Manuel de Manara. "Avaunt, rash youth!" cried the priest; "know that Don Manuel de Manara is dead! — is dead! — is dead! — and we are all souls from purgatory who are permitted to come here to pray for the repose of his soul. " Don Manuel falls down senseless. The i next day he sends for a priest, confesses his crimes, enters a cloister, and like Count Isand in Gottschalck's story, spends the rest of his life doing penance for his sins. 88 Perhaps the greatest of Irving's numerous services to American literature is his rob- bing short prose fiction of its moral — making his first models of the American short story vehicles of entertainment, pro- ducing a pleasurable rather than a moral effect. Finding the eighteenth-century subjects "trite and commonplace," so much so that in The Sketch Book and in Bracebridge Hall he apologized for traveling "over beaten ground," he started a search for new subjects. These books already exhibit some of the fruits of that search, which was as much a new manner of treating old materi- als as a search for new materials — both exemplified in the stories of these early volumes which are borrowed from the Nathaniel Hawthorne 381 English Gothic and the German legendary- stores. Bracebridge Hall proved less popular than The Sketch Book had been, and Irving realized that if he hoped to "develop a line of literature peculiar to himself," he must bow to his "desultory habits" and husband his slender talents by "writing when I can, not when I would . . . and occasionally shifting my residence, write whatever is suggested by objects before me." 89 His year in Germany represents such a change of residence in the effort to find subjects sufficiently congenial to activate his pen. Tales of a Traveller out of the way, he spent a miserable two years doing little more than chew his pen while casting about for material to make his wayward powers tractable, until the opportunity to shift his residence to Spain presented itself. To be sure, in Knickerbocker he had shown a remarkable felicity in one genre of writing, and ten years later, a similar excel- lence in the short story. But everything after The Sketch Book was retrograde, as the critics told him so often that he feared he had written himself out. The effect was to make him more timorous than ever, and, except for The Alhambra and a few miscel- laneous short pieces later, to settle upon history and biography as less demanding of originality than fiction. Thus was born (or rather, finally confirmed) Irving the bio- grapher and historian. Beginning his career under the influence of Addison and Gold- smith, Sterne and Swift, he felt during the most creative period of his life the impact of English, then German, and finally Spanish romanticism, until he retreated to the comforting safety of historical fact and biographical detail. Under the influ- ence of books from the beginning, he con- tinued under their power to the end. Yet he succeeded in writing forty-five examples of what he was the first to produce — the American short story. Of this number about a third are traceable, wholly or in part, to Germanic sources. Thus the German tale from the very first brought a powerful in- fluence to bear on the American short story. Irving was unquestionably the most influential native literary force during the early part of the nineteenth century in America, and his influence consciously or unconsciously directed the course that the short story was to pursue in its develop- ment. Already in 1824 Irving wrote to his friend Brevoort: "Other writers have crowded into the same branch of literature [the short story], and I now begin to find myself elbowed by men who have followed my footsteps; but at any rate I have had the merit of adopting a line for myself instead of following others." 90 This being so, we turn to Hawthorne and Poe as Irving's more important successors (and admirers), in order to see whether the close connection between the German tale and the American short story as initiated by Irving was contin- ued by them. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864) Allegations of German Influence Almost as soon as critics began to notice Hawthorne's tales, they pointed out simi- larities with Tieck's works. A reviewer of Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842), writing in the Foreign and Colonial Quarterly for Oc- tober, 1843, found cause in Hawthorne's "fantasy," his "linking the seen to the un- seen, the matter-of-fact to the imaginative, " to be reminded of Tieck, despite "vast differences in the materials used by the two authors." 91 A few months later the Demo- cratic Review designated Hawthorne "the Tieck of this American literature of ours (though the gayer fancy of the German is clouded in his case by a slight tinge of the gloom of puritanical New England)." The 3S2 German Literary Influence London Athenaeum for August 8, 1845, in a review of Mosses from an Old Manse ( 1 846) , saw in Hawthorne and Tieck a like "power of translating the mysterious harmonies of Nature into articulate meaning." The next year came Poe's charge that Hawthorne "is not original in any sense" but only "peculiar," and that "those who speak of him as original mean nothing more than that he differs in his manner of tone, and in his choice of subjects, from any author of their acquaintance — their acquaintance not extending to the German Tieck, whose manner, in some of his work, is absolutely identical with that habitual to Haw- thorne." 92 Following Poe's pronouncement, as critics became better acquainted with Hawthorne, the allegation of his indebted- ness was made less often, 93 and so the notion gradually faded until more recently stu- dents reopened the question for the dual purpose of evaluating Poe's critical honesty and the degree of Hawthorne's alleged indebtedness. 94 The general conclusion, voiced by Miss Myrtle J . Joseph, is that "in style Hawthorne owes nothing to Tieck." Between Poe's and this later opinion there is a vast difference. As is common in such cases, we may expect to find the truth somewhere between the two extremes. Influence of Tieck While Hawthorne began to study Ger- man in 1838, at the instigation of Sophia Peabody, who became his wife in 1842, he appears to have made no phenomenal prog- ress. During April, 1843, when he devoted several hours of four successive days to plodding through "the rugged and bewil- dering depths" of an unidentified tale of Tieck's, he succeeded only by constant references to his "phrase-book." While his references, on these same days, to his catching ideas "by the skirts" and "dimly shaping out scenes of a tale" are provoca- tive, he found his task "slow work, and dull work, too!" 96 And there is nothing to suggest that this one serious bout with German did not leave him content to let severely alone a language so bristling with difficulties. But his lack of German was no insuper- able barrier to becoming acquainted with the German romancers, for the English and American translators were busy making them available in books and periodicals. 96 One of Tieck's translated tales, "The Friends," appearing in the Democratic Review for May, 1845 (XVI, 496-501), is of particular importance as the probable occasion for Poe's criticism of Hawthorne as a borrower from Tieck. The story runs as follows : On a beautiful spring morning Ludwig ■ Wedel sets out for a distant village to see a ' friend who lies dangerously ill, and who wishes to see his friend just once more (p. 496). As Ludwig wanders through an idyllic country, his mind is turned to melancholy reflections by the voices of Nature and of i Spring. Seating himself on the trunk of a . fallen tree to reread his friend's letter, he ' falls into a trance. "He forgot that it was Spring; that his friend was ill ; he listened only to the won- drous melodies whose echoes flowed upon him from distant shores, the wildest tones blending with those most familiar, and his whole soul was changed. From the deep perspective of Memory, from the abysses of the Past, arose the images that once filled him with delight and anguish, those uncertain, formless phantoms, which so often flit around the brain, and overwhelm the senses with their perplexing voices. The sports and puppets of his childish days danced before him, covering the green sod, so that he no longer saw the flowers beneath his feet. His first love encircled him with the beamings of its early dawn, and caused its sparkling rainbows to fall upon his eyes ; his first sorrow passed by and threatened at the end of life, to meet him in the self-same hope. Ludwig sought to detain these shift- ing fancies, in their magical enjoyment to remain conscious of himself, but in vain. Like the grotesque pictures in story books, suddenly opened and then in a moment closed again, these apparitions appeared to his soul, fleeting and unstable" (p. 497). In this (Hawthornesque) dream, he con- Nathaniel Hawthorne 383 tinues his journey. He wonders that "the purple flush of evening had so soon over- spread the clouds," for evening appears to be drawing nigh. A shadowy, vaguely- remembered figure glides before him, and he is impelled to follow, while all Nature conspires, through myriad forces and influ- ences, to effect a transformation by which he is led by subtle, almost imperceptible, steps into Fairyland (p. 498). In it stands the fairest of palaces, to which he is wel- comed by noble female figures. Trembling, he draws near, and finds a veritable para- dise, the fullest realization of his most ethereal imaginings. Asked whether this life contents him, he replies that this "golden existence" fulfills all his anticipations and aspirations. In this land of ideality he lives on happily, though "at times it seemed as if the crowing of a cock was heard near by; and the whole place quivered and his companions grew suddenly pale" (p. 500). At such times Ludwig dimly remembered the world he had left behind, and his sick friend. Once he asked the Fairy ladies whether they can cure his friend by their arts; they replied, "Thy desire is already accomplished." Suspecting that his question betokens a lingering fondness for his former life, they ask whether he longs "for the earth," and he replies, "Nevermore." Buthaving missed "friendship and love" in the "old world," he expresses some disappointment at not finding "both united in beautiful harmony" in this Fairyland. Given his choice between staying with the Fairies and returning to the earth, he chooses to remain. Wandering about one day, he meets a stranger, who salutes him with the words: "It is good to see thee once more. ... I am thy sick friend." "Impossible! thou art wholly a stranger to me," said Ludwig. "Simply for the reason," said the Un- known, "because to-day, for the first time, thou seest me in my true shape. Hitherto thou hast found in me only a reflection of thyself. Thou dost right to remain here, where there is no friendship, no love; where all is illusion and show." Ludwig sat down and wept. "Oh, let us go back to the dear, dear Earth," he cries, "where once again we may know each other, although in borrowed shape; where we may possess the sweet illusions of Friendship. What do I here ?" "What will it avail ?" said the stranger. "Thou wilt straightway wish thyself back again. The earth is not splendid enough for thee, its flowers are too little, its songs are inharmonious; not so richly does the light blend with the shadows ; the flowers wither soon and fall; the birds are thinking of their death and sing but sorrowfully. But here all things are in fadeless beauty." "Oh, I will be content," cried Ludwig, between hot gushing tears, "only return with me once more, my old friend — let us escape this desert, let us flee from this splendid exile" (pp. 500-501). At this point Ludwig awakes from his dream to find his friend bending over him. He had unexpectedly recovered, and having received Ludwig's letter announcing his intended visit, had set out to meet him on the way and found him asleep in the forest. Ludwig asks his friend's forgiveness for having doubted his friendship, and after relating his strange dream experiences, wonders whether "after all, there are such things as Fairies." "That such things exist," answered his friend, "there can be no doubt, but that is only a fiction which represents them as delighting to make men happy. Uncon- sciously to ourselves, they plant within our hearts those exaggerated fancies, those supernatural longings which prompt us to misanthropic musings, and to despise this beautiful earth with its rich blessings." Ludwig answered him with a pressure of the hand (p. 501). Even this summarized form of Tieck's tale illustrates the dozen points of similari- ty between it and Hawthorne's type of tale. The translator, whoever he was, succeeded in giving his version a decidedly Hawthorn- esque turn, not only in idea but especially in tone — so much so that Hawthorne him- self (if he had been given to translating from the German) could hardly have made it more peculiarly like his own style. Nor is it the allegory only that suggests Hawthorne ; it is also the psychology that underlies the story — the practical moral for the conduct of the soul — that makes the resemblance startling. How often in Hawthorne's stories and essays are we not warned against the extravagancies of fancy — against "those exaggerated fancies, those supernatural 384 German Literary Influence longings which prompt us to misanthropic musings and to despise this beautiful earth with all its rich blessings!" 97 Small wonder that Poe, who had al- ready noticed in his 1842 review of Twice- Told Tales Hawthorne's lack of versatility or variety, 98 should have been struck by this thirteen-fold repetition in Mosses from an Old Manse of the same theme, developed in the same tone. A regular reader of the Democratic Review, w Poe, already prepared by previous reviewers to make his allega- tion, 100 reading Tieck's tale and readily finding striking similarities, concluded that the manner of this tale was "absolutely identical with that habitual to Hawthorne." And that seems to be all the mystery there is to this matter. 101 The obvious similarities in style and analogical meaning, including the dream and fantasy motifs, have been cited as cause for regarding "The Celestial Rail- road" as derived from "Die Freunde." Mention of such places as Vanity Fair, Enchanted Ground, and Delectable Moun- tains, of characters like Mr. Flimsey-faith, Mr. Scaly-conscience, Rev. Mr. Stumble-at- truth, Rev. Dr. Wind-of-doctrine, of Chris- tian, and finally of Bunyan himself suggests Pilgrim's Progress rather than "Die Freun- de." Moreover, the references to "volumes of French philosophy and German rational- ism" 102 and the description of the "terrible Giant Transcendentalist of German birth," who dwells in a cave where he seizes "honest travellers" and fattens them for his table with "plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moon- shine, raw potatoes, and sawdust," 103 indi- cate that the immediate purpose for writing the story originated in Hawthorne's desire to satirize such free-and-easy ways of entering heaven as his neighbor Emerson and his associated Transcendentalists seemed to advocate. It has been suggested that there are hints of "allegory in Tieck's 'Marchen' — which are far from being mere fairy tales — that remind one frequently of Hawthorne's shadowy art in such stories as 'Ethan Brand,' or 'The Minister's Black Veil,' or 'The Great Carbuncle.'" 104 And so they do. But when these hints are pursued, they lead nowhere. There is, for example, "The Elves," in which a little girl in stepping across the footbridge over the brook that borders her father's garden finds herself in a magic land where she stays, as it seems to her, a few hours; but on returning home, she learns that she has been absent seven years. The story suggests Hawthorne's "Snow Image" and "Wakefield." But we know that the former was suggested by an incident in the Hawthorne household, 105 and that the latter was derived from a newspaper article. 106 Then there is "Der Runenberg," in which a youth, wandering ' into the mountains, receives from a sorcer- ess a wondrous tablet set with gems of a mystic pattern ; and years afterwards he . 1 wanders back into the mountains, in search of more jewels, only to return again to his village and friends, an old and broken-down ; man, bearing a sackful of worthless pebbles, which he regards as precious stones. Several . of Hawthorne's stories immediately suggest themselves, among them "The Great Car- buncle" and "The Three-Fold Destiny." But we find their immediate sources in Hawthorne's Note-Books. 10 '' It would be fallacious to suppose that because one finds a passage in his notebooks from which a story is expanded, that therefore this story is entirely original with Hawthorne. We would need to inquire where and when he got the idea that he jotted down in his journal in the first place. Moreover, a number of Tieck's tales, including "The Elves" and "Der Runenberg," had been translated long before 1 836-1 837. Haw- thorne could have drawn suggestions from them for his notebook memoranda. How- ever, such a conclusion is not consistent with other known circumstances: (1) it was Hawthorne's habit to draw upon his own experience or observation for the materials of much of his writing; 108 (2) most of his Nathaniel Hawthorne 385 suggestions that came to him from the out- side are traceable to his Puritan inheritance and to his intimate knowledge of colonial history; 109 and (3) his stories all appear to have developed from within — the pro- duct of his brooding upon the ideas or morals illustrated in his stories. 110 Hence their genesis is oftener in an idea than in an incident or character derived from another writer. 111 Unlike the methods of Irving and of Poe, Hawthorne's procedure was not as much a matter of "looking about" as of "looking within" him for his materials. Thus, such a story as "The Shaker Bridal," which has points of similarity with Tieck's "Der Pokal" 112 (for in each story there is a pair of lovers whose union is frustrated and postponed until they find that only the ghost, or memory, of their love is left to mock their youthful hopes), resolves itself, in the final analysis, to an expression of an idea brooded over in Haw- thorne's mind ever since his visit, in the company of Emerson, to the Shaker com- munity at Harvard, Massachusetts. Its primary source lies in Hawthorne's famili- arity with his native New England. "Der Pokal" reminds the reader of an- other story of Hawthorne — "Wakefield." In Tieck's tale, a man, believing his beloved untrue, withdraws from society and, though he continues to live near her, never again sees the lady. In Hawthorne's story, Wakefield, out of mere whim or perversity (Hawthorne does not clearly indicate which) goes by his own door one night and lodges in a neighboring house. The next night circumstances prevent his returning home, but with every recurring opportun- ity, he finds it harder to resume his place, and so twenty years pass before he returns to his wife. Hawthorne concludes with this moral : Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe. 113 The difference between the two tales, despite the similarities, is easily found. Tieck has only a tale to tell ; Hawthorne is interested primarily in the subconscious workings of Wakefield's mind, in the psychical reactions and interactions of husband and wife, and in the moral. Con- cerning the source of the story, he tells us, "In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man — let us call him Wakefield — who absented himself for a long time from his wife." 114 It is unlikely that this account should have been a translation of Tieck's tale ; even Poe admits that "Wakefield" is based on "a well-known incident," and adds, "Some- thing of this kind actually happened in London." 115 Still there remains the fact that Haw- thorne read a tale of Tieck's, presumably to the bitter end; and it provokes us to attempt an identification of the tale and to inquire concerning possible influence. It has been plausibly argued that Tieck's "Vogelscheuche," a tale of 365 pages in Tieck's Gesammelte Novellen, is the story in question, and that its influence can be detected in Hawthorne's moralized story of the scarecrow, "Feathertop." 116 There are enough parallels to make the presumption strong that Hawthorne had this story in mind when he wrote "Feathertop," but there are several considerations that need to be weighed before that conclusion can be reached. In the first place, Hawthorne's notebooks for 1840 contain this notation: To make a story out of a scarecrow, giving it odd attributes. From different points of view, it should appear to change, — now an old man, now an old woman, — a gunner, a farmer, or Old Nick. 117 Tieck's story was first published in 1835, but in the Berlin Novellenkranz, an annual 386 German Literary Influence with a very limited circulation, so that Hawthorne would hardly have seen it there. The story was not published in Tieck's works until 1842, two years after Haw- thorne made his entry in the Note-Books. Nor were there any translations of the story before 1840. Hence, if the 1840 note is accepted as the source of "Feathertop," the probability of Hawthorne's indebtedness is lessened. But there is another note in Hawthorne's journals, written in 1849, which should be taken into account: A modern magician to make the sem- blance of a human being, with two laths for legs, a pumpkin for a head, etc., of the most modest and meagre materials. Then a tailor helps him to finish his work, and transforms this scarecrow into quite a fashionable figure. At the end of the story, after de- ceiving the world for a long time, the spell should be broken, and the gay dandy be discovered to be nothing but a suit of clothes, with these few sticks inside of it. All through his seeming existence as a human being, there shall be some charac- teristics, some tokens, that, to the man of close observation and insight, betray him to be a mere thing of laths and clothes, with- out heart, soul, or intellect. And so this wretched thing shall become the symbol of a large class. 118 It is hardly to be doubted that this note of 1849 is the direct source of "Feathertop," which was first published in the Interna- tional Magazine for February-March, 1852. Yet it does not follow that we need to dismiss both the note of 1840 and Tieck's tale as supplying earlier suggestions. They may represent first and second steps toward the composition of the story, for Haw- thorne habitually proceeded slowly and gradually developed his stories by a process of thoughtful evolution rather than by sudden inspiration. 119 But perhaps the parallelism between the two tales involves little more than a pecul- iar Geistesverwandtschaft between the two authors. Consider this characterization of Tieck by an anonymous reviewer in Black- wood's for September, 1837 (XLII, 396): Tieck, whatever . . . his merits, does not possess the power of that vivid creation of character, of conception, of incident which . . . great poets have possessed. . . . Tieck has not the vigorous imagination which, acting on the materials furnished by acute and penetrating observation of life . . . enables the poet to create new combina- tions. ... A certain air of vagueness per- vades his descriptions ; his incidents rarely, if ever, excite our curiosity ; if he has to deal with strong passions, we have them ex- hibited, not in action, but narration, and more frequently in their results than in their birth and growth. The charm of a delightful style, no doubt, carries the reader pleasantly along his prose tales, as the lulling music of his versification and the luxurious sweetness of his imagery do along his legends in verse. . . . We are seldom roused, moved, melted. Finally, not one of Tieck's novels ever causes a hearty laugh, even where, from the extravagance of his combinations, it appears to have been his intention to excite a feeling for the ludi- crous; nor have we ever happened to meet with one who has dropped a natural tear over one of his delineations. In the Preface to the second edition (1842) of Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne used strikingly similar words in his remark- ably accurate description of his own stories : They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade, — the coolness of a meditative habit, which dif- fuses itself through the feeling and obser- vation of every sketch. Instead of passion there is sentiment; and even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind with- out a shiver. Whether from lack of power, or an unconquerable reserve, the Author's touches have often an effect of tameness; the merriest man can hardly contrive to laugh at his broadest humor ; the tenderest woman, one would suppose, will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest pathos. The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was writ- ten; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages. Nathaniel Hawthorne 387 Hoffmann and Chamisso The Faust Motif There are a few similarities between some of Hoffmann's tales and Hawthorne's sto- ries. Hoffmann was more widely translated than Tieck, 120 and it is possible that Haw- thorne knew more about Hoffmann than Tieck. Die Elixiere des Teufels (1816), translated and published in London, 1824, contains an account of a painter who is able by the subtlety of his art to make it appear that the features of his portraits can change and shift. While it is possible that Haw- thorne drew a hint from this source for his "Prophetic Pictures," the manners and methods of the two authors vary consider- ably. Hoffmann's interest is primarily in the peculiarity of the phenomenon and the telling of his story; Hawthorne's is mainly in the moral to be deduced from the story. A second parallel is between Hoffman's "Des Vetters Eckfenster," in which a man stations himself at an upper-story window and observes the life below him in the street, making comments on people and events, and Hawthorne's "A Sunday at Home." Hawthorne was fond of this device of standing in some out-of-the-way place and describing what passed; he used it in "Sights from a Steeple," "The Toll-Gath- erer's Day," "Night Sketches," and else- where. But it seems clear that what we have here constitutes parallelism rather than influence. Lastly, there is Hoffmann's "Die Aben- teuer der Sylvesternacht," the story of a man who loses his Spiegelschatten — which suggests Hawthorne's "Monsieur du Mi- roir." But since a similar idea is used by Chamisso in Peter Schlemihl, and since Hawthorne refers directly to Peter Schle- mihl's shadow, he probably got the sugges- tion, if one was needed, from Chamisso 's tale. 121 As in the case of Tieck and of Hoff- mann, the similarities can easily be over- emphasized. The influence of Chamisso and Hoffmann must be put down as negli- gible, and that of Tieck as questionable. More considerable is Hawthorne's reliance for several of his more basic motifs upon Goethe's Faust, notably his use of the daemonic or inner urge that possesses some of his characters and of certain Mephisto- phelean and Faustian elements of charac- terization. Already in 1835 he presented in New England dress the story of a naive, trustful young man's initiation into the mysterious iniquities of life. At the begin- ning of his journey into the dark forest he meets a stranger who has "an indescribable air of one who knew the world" — the proto- type of Goethe's all-accomplished Mephisto. Under his guidance, Young Goodman Brown's demon is developed until it drives him, against his will but irresistibly, deeper and deeper into the forest of fearful reve- lation that leads to his undoing. The daemonic desire of man for perfection or for ultimates and absolutes forms the core of several of Hawthorne's stories. Aylmer, Rappaccini, Ethan Brand, Sep- timus Felton, even Chillingworth, while they derive from different pages, are all drawn from the same chapter of Goethe's book. In his numerous case histories of the nature of sin, of evil, of intellectual pride, of the devil in man, and of man's over- weening ambition to make himself equal to God in knowledge — in writing this anatomy of the daemonic-titanic-promethean-faus- tian desire — Hawthorne pondered not only the Bible account of Adam's eating of the forbidden fruit and the Miltonic portrayal of Beelzebub but also the entire library of deviltry that the Puritan mind created in early New England, the diabolical creations of Marlowe, of Byron, and of the Gothic novelists. It would have been odd, indeed, if he had stopped short of Goethe's concep- tion of Faust, concerning which almost everyone of Hawthorne's acquaintance at Brook Farm and in Concord was voluble. To be sure, we need not presuppose that Goethe's particular conception of Faust 388 German Literary Influence was necessary for Hawthorne's portrayal of Aylmer, Rappaccini, Brand, and Chilling- worth. They all meet the fate of Dr. Faustus of legendary frame as recorded in the old chapbooks, current in New England from the earliest days. The example of Marlowe alone would have sufficed. But The Marble Faun exists to demonstrate the fact that Hawthorne's probings into the nature of sin and its effects on man went deeper than the old allegory, drawn in unrelived black and white, of a compact by which man barters his soul for sensual pleasure and ends by being whisked off to hell. In Dona- tello, Miriam, and Hilda, contact with sin does not lead to the spiritual death of Hawthorne's earlier egoistical sinners. The evil they do, or witness, contributes toward the perfection, rather than the utter de- struction, of their humanity. This is more nearly in accord with Goethe's view of man's ceaseless striving as leading, despite errors and failures, to a progression up- wards — on stepping stones of his dead self to higher things. In Goethe's Faust the devil is cheated of his victim ; in The Marble Faun the moral is not, as it was in The Scarlet Letter and the earlier tales, that the wages of sin is death. In short, Hawthorne's final treatment of the problem of evil is that since it is an integral part of the nature of things, man must acknowledge it, for only by experiencing sin can he recognize it, and finally triumph over it. The knowl- edge and experience of sin thus become steps in the process of man's humanization. This view marks the difference between Goethe's and the earlier treatments of the Faust theme; and it suggests, despite the paucity of references to Goethe that is so striking in Hawthorne's books, that he took notice of Goethe's raising the theme above the level of the old chap books and mo- rality plays, and that his final thoughts on the subject were colored by Goethe's view. By and large, however, the influence of German literature on Hawthorne is rela- tively inconsequential. Most of Hawthorne's tales which suggest outside influences are traceable less to Germanic sources than to his peculiar temperamental inheritance. 182 EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) Poe's Knowledge of German While industriously and ingeniously discovering plagiarism in his contempora- ries, 123 Poe emphatically denied that he himself borrowed from others. In the Preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Ara- besque (1840) he publicly disavowed Ger- manic influence. After commenting on the grotesque and arabesque qualities of his stories and admitting that his '"phantasy- pieces' . . . are Germanic," he explains that "Germanism" is merely their "vein," that with "a single exception," none partakes of that "pseudo-horror . . . identified with . . . some of the secondary names of German literature." If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul — that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results. 124 In spite of this and similar disclaimers, neither Poe's contemporaries nor posterity have been willing to accept his protestation at face value, though great difference of opinion and much uncertainty upon that point still prevails. European critics in general have argued that Poe was under varying degrees of foreign influence ; Ameri- cans are divided, not only among them- selves but even in their own minds. 125 In a consideration of this kind, beset by Edgar Allan Poe 389 the pitfalls of what the Germans call Motivenjagerei, the first inquiry concerns the facilities Poe had for knowing German literature both in the original and in trans- lation. The question whether he read Ger- man has been discussed pro and con. Grue- ner, Cobb, and Campbell m hold that Poe knew enough German to read Hoffmann in the original; Woodberry, 127 Beale, 128 and Bel den think he did not. Belden expressed the view of the latter group in this way : There is nothing to show that he read German, and there is much reason, in the lack of regular education in his hurried, hand-to-mouth career, to believe that he never undertook what in those days even more than now was an arduous task, the acquisition of that language. He could make effective use of a name now and then, or of an occasional phrase, but there is nothing to warrant the belief that he knew German well enough to detect the "manner" of a German book. 129 This position is based on three argu- ments. Of these, the first, namely, that there is no record or authoritative statement that Poe studied or knew German, is irrefutable. The second claim, that he lacked, or failed to take advantage of, the opportunity to undertake the arduous task of learning German, is not warranted by what we know of Poe's linguistic abilities and of his literary interests. The third argument, that Poe's occasional use of German was only for effect, was meretricious, is a charge which, while not without some supporting evidence, is debatable. There can be little doubt that the sincerity of Poe's work suffers from his noxious habit of throwing a glamor of erudition over his writings by citing obscure authors and little-known treatises among which he had foraged with a special design — a method that betokens clever trickery even in its artfulness. 130 In itself, this practice is no more an argument against his knowledge of German than against his familiarity with French and Latin, both of which he knew well, even though his quotations in both are inexact at times. In view of the testimony of teachers and schoolmates that Poe was uncommonly precocious, with a marked ability for lan- guage study, the acquisition of German need not have been an "arduous task." 131 What is more, Poe's year at the University came right at the time when the English- speaking world was becoming profoundly interested in German literature and thought, particularly of the Romantic school. Poe was already writing weird tales and serious- ly busying himself with poetry. The trend and spirit of German romanticism were sufficiently in accord with the tempera- ment of the incipient author, ever alert for what he called "novel effects," to recom- mend themselves to his attention, either inside or outside his classes. 132 If he did not study German at Charlottesville, he must have given some attention to it almost immediately after his departure, for from the very beginning of his literary career there is evidence that he knew something of both the language and the literature of Germany. In a note to the poem "Al Aaraaf," first published in 1829, he quoted three* lines from Goethe's "Meine Got- tin." 133 In his first published tale, "MS. Found in a Bottle," referring to his hero's favorite studies, Poe wrote: "Beyond all things, the study of the German moralists gave him great delight." 134 Again, in "Morella" (1835), the heroine "placed before me a number of those mystical writ- ings which are usually considered the mere dross of early German literature. These were her favorite and constant study — and ... in the process of time became my own." 135 While such references, in and of themselves, mean little, they take on added significance from the fact that Poe's heroes, like Byron's, contain a good deal of him- self. 136 There are also correct references to the German philosophers: Leibnitz is quoted once and referred to four more times, Kant is mentioned seven times, Schelling five times, Fichte thrice, and Hegel once. 137 Hegel is also quoted once 390 German Literary Influence and Schelling's idea of identity lies at the base of "Morella." 138 Poe's "philosophic Bon-Bon ... a character of strange in- tensity and mysticism" is "deeply tinc- tured by the diablerie of his favorite German studies." "Clearly," concludes Killis Campbell, "Poe shared with the Transcendentalists an interest in German philosophy." 139 Now, for the third argument, based on Poe's alleged superficiality of mind and display of erudition, notably in the foreign languages. 140 To begin with, there is scat- tered testimony proving Poe's general knowledge of considerable areas of German literature and thought. Altogether, his writings contain 128 easily identifiable quotations from and references to German authors. None of these, nor all of them combined, prove that Poe knew German literature at first hand, for he could have found many of them in English translation, though hardly all of them. They do illus- trate his accuracy and discrimination in using names and quotations at the same time that they affirm his keen interest in a wide range of German thought and art. 141 "To garnish some trite context or give an air of superior learning to some critique," Poe most commonly used French, which he handled more fluently than the German; but when he does employ the latter, he shows a nice appreciation of its terms and demonstrates a correct knowledge of gram- matical detail. He uses distinctive German words like Schwarmerei rather than some inexact English synonym. 142 He speaks of his own Philistine age as a "period not inaptly denominated by the Germans as 'the age of wigs,' i.e., Zopf- or Periicken- zeil." li3 In Griswold's edition of the Literati, Poe's castigation of Thomas Dunn English ends in the epithet, "In character, a wind- beutel," Xii in which the German word speaks volumes. Again, he contrives to give a sentence a clever or humorous turn by using a German phrase. 145 While he does not often quote German expressions, when he does, he gives them correctly and uses them tellingly. 148 Finally there is more positive evidence of Poe's knowledge of German— evidence that would be absolutely convincing for almost any other author, and which, even con- sidering Poe's love for mystification and dubious reputation for literary honesty, is all but conclusive. The first case in point is found in the tale "The Premature Burial," 147 in which Poe gives the details of a case of premature burial, taken, as he informs the reader, from a recent number of '"The Chirurgical Jour- als' of Leipzic 148 — a periodical of high au- thority and merit, which some American bookseller would do well to translate and republish." While it is not impossible that ' Poe had hit upon the case cited in some English or other European journal, or that ' someone had read and told him about it, the tone and the whole setting of the inci- dent described suggest that he read the ' report himself, and that he consulted the , "Chirurgical Journal" at other times for , abnormal medical cases. There seems to be no special reason for Poe's wishing to display erudition in this instance, as he might in a learned review or literary essay. The next case seems to furnish more direct, positive evidence. It is a passage from the German of Novalis prefaced to "The Mystery of Marie Roget," 149 contain- ing forty-five words, correctly quoted with the exception of what is obviously a typo- graphical error. Poe adds a translation. There was at that time no complete trans- lation of Novalis' work, 150 and only one book, as far as can be ascertained, included a translation of this particular passage. This book, Mrs. Sarah Austin's Fragments from German Prose Writers (London, 1841; reprinted by D. Apple ton & Co., in New York, 1841), was noticed and reviewed at least five times in American magazines during 1841 and 1842, 151 and it is not unlikely that Poe knew the book. 162 The Edgar Allan Poe 391 passage in question is No. 440 of Novalis' Fragmente vevmischten Inkalts: 153 Es gibt eine Reihe idealischer Begeben- heiten, die der Wirklichkeit parallel lauft. Selten fallen sie zusammen. Menschen und Zufalle modifizieren gewohnlich 154 die idea- lische Begebenheit, so dass sie unvollkom- men erscheint und ihre Folgen gleichfals unvollkommen sind. So bei der Reforma- tion. 155 Statt des Protestantismus kam das Luthertum hervor. The passage is translated by Mrs. Austin and by Poe as follows: 158 Mrs. Austin There are ideal trains of events which run parallel with the real ones. Seldom do they coincide. Men and accidents commonly modify every ideal event or train of events, so that it appears imperfect, and its conse- quences are equally imperfect. Thus it was with the Reformation, — instead of Protes- tantism, arose Lutheranism. Poe There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reforma- tion ; instead of Protestantism came Luther- anism. The two versions (major divergencies are indicated by italics) differ chiefly in the choice of words, which seem dictated more by taste than by the demands of exactitude. The translation are such as would be made by two persons independently of each other, both of whom understand German, but are not obliged to translate word for word or with the assistance of a diction- ary. 157 This conclusion is supported by an- other German selection which Poe quotes in the original as a footnote in Eureka. This passage of seventy-six words from Alexan- der von Humboldt's Kosmos is much more difficult German than the paragraph from Novalis. Only two English translations antedate Poe's: one by Prichard (London, 1845), the other by Sabine (London, 1847). The original, which Poe quotes letter per- fect, without giving the source, runs as follows : Betrachtet man die nicht perspektivi- schen eignen Bewegungen der Sterne, so scheinen viele Gruppenweise in ihrer Rich- tung entgegengesetzt ; und die bisher ge- sammelten Thatsachen machen es auf's wenigste nich notwendig, anzunehmen, dass alle Theile unserer Sternenschicht oder gar der gesammelten Sterneninseln, welche den Weltraum f iillen, sich um einen grossen, unbekannten leuchtenden oder dunkeln Zentralkorper bewegen. Das Streben nach den letzten und hochsten Grundursachen macht freilich die reflektierende Thatigkeit des Menschen, wie seine Phantasie, zu einer solchen Annahme geneigt. Prichard's, Sabine's, and Poe's trans- lations follow, in the order named: If the non-perspective proper motions of the stars are considered, many of them appear groupwise opposed in their direc- tions ; and the data hitherto collected make it at least not necessary to suppose that all parts of our astral system, or the whole of the star-islands which fill the universe, are in motion about any great unknown, lumi- nous, or non-luminous central mass. The longing to reach the least or brightest fun- damental cause, indeed, renders the re- flecting faculty of man as well as his fancy disposed to adopt such a proposition (Prichard, Kosmos, I, 154). If we consider the proper motions of the stars, as contradistinguished from their apparent or perspective motions, their directions are various; it is not, therefore, a necessary conclusion, either that all parts of our astral system, or that all the systems which fill the universal space, revolve about one great undiscovered luminous or non- luminous central-body, however naturally we may be disposed to an inference which would gratify alike the imaginative faculty, and that intellectual capacity which ever seeks after the last and highest generalisa- tion (Sabine, Kosmos, I, 135). When we regard the real, proper, or non- perspective motions of the stars, we find 392 German Literary Influence many groups of them moving in opposite directions; and the data as yet in hand render it not necessary, at least, to conceive that the systems composing the Milky Way, or the clusters, generally, composing the Universe, are revolving about any particu- lar centre unknown, whether luminous or non-luminous. It is but Man's longing for a fundamental First Cause, that impels both his intellect and fancy to the adoption of such an hypothesis (Poe's Works, XVI, 299). A comparison of the three versions sub- stantiates Gruener's judgment that Poe's is "surely as independent and original" as the others- — a faithful rendition of the substance and form of the original, such as would be made by one thoroughly conver- sant with the original German, and hence feeling himself free to make changes not essential to the sense for the sake of a good literary translation. It might again be assumed that Poe secured someone to look up and translate for him the passage in the German text — something of a task, for the pretty bulky five-volume work of Hum- boldt's available in Poe's day had no index. The assumption is questionable when we take into account the frequency with which Poe would have had to rely upon such help. Among the 128 references to German authors and quotations from their writings, August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose Lectures on Dramatic Art Poe read, is oftenest al- luded to. Schlegel is quoted twice and men- tioned fifteen times. 158 Goethe is next with a dozen references 159 and four citations — two from "Meine Gottin" and two from "Das Veilchen." 160 It is likely that he knew also Werther, Tasso,™ 1 and, one would suppose, Faust. Schiller is quoted once and mentioned five times. 162 Burger is referred to three times, and Herder, Korner, and Friedrich Schlegel each twice. 163 Musaeus, Wieland, Winckelmann, and Uhland are mentioned each once; 164 the dramatists Grillparzer and Ohlenschlager are men- tioned in passing; 165 and a passage from Prince Piickler-Muskau's Brief e eines Ver- storbenen is cribbed from Mrs. Austin's translation, entitled Letters by a German Prince. 166 In his reviews of Longfellow's ballads, Poe discusses with discrimination a number of German ballads, and he ventures some generalizations concerning their na- ture. He finds that Longfellow's "German studies" have changed his "conventional habit of thinking," 16 ' and that he is so "imbued with the peculiar spirit of German song that ... he regards the inculcation of a moral as essential" 168 — a perfectly valid statement in respect to many German songs and "ballads." Poequotes Tieck once 169 and refers to him five times. 170 He is also greatly interested in Fouqu6, of whose Undine he wrote an appreciative review of ten pages in 1839. 171 He wonders, in one of the Marginalia, whether "anyone had remark- ed the striking similarity in tone between 'Undine' and the 'Libussa' of Musaeus" 172 — again a proper question to raise. In his review of Longfellow, he refers to Hoff- mann's "Phantasy-Pieces of the Lorrainean Callot," 173 and himself projected in 1842 a new collection of his tales to be entitled "Phantasy-Pieces, " 174 obviously an inspira- tion from Hoffmann and Tieck's use of the terms Phantasie and Phantasiestiicke . Finally, Poe could hardly have hoped to achieve his position as a leading critic among a generation of writers who were all but unanimous in reverencing German literature without making himself at home in that area; and when we add to this the fact that by temperament he was naturally more sympathetic toward German roman- ticism than any other literary school, 175 we have compelling reasons for believing with Professor Gruener, that Poe knew enough German "to read easy prose and, when necessary, to translate difficult prose with exactness and facility." 176 Indebtedness to German Stories Among the several groups or types into which Poe's stories fall, the hoaxes, ex- travaganzas, and satirical pieces show the Edgar Allan Poe 393 fewest Germanic qualities, most of them being suggested by Poe's own observations on persons, events, and contemporary ideas and movements. 177 The second group, detective stories and ratiocinative tales, also contain little Germanic influence. 178 Yet the note which Poe prefixed to "The Mystery of Marie Roget" inevitably draws our attention to Novalis, notably to the passage from Novalis already cited regard- ing seemingly parallel circumstances and series of events. At the head of the story Poe wrote boldly : What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. — Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial. To find answers to such questions (paral- leling the way Poe goes about making his elaborate analyses and rationcinations) requires, he tells us, that he direct his atten- tion to the seemingly trifling circumstances which seem to be coincidences but which are not coincidences for Poe. All events arrange themselves into a perfect train or series, and form the links of his logical processes; 179 it is by training his reasoning faculties upon these coincidences (as others regard them) that Poe solves the puzzles and mysteries of his tales of ratiocination : "Coincidences, in general, are great stum- bling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities." 180 The fragment which Poe quotes from Novalis as a motto for "The Mystery of Marie Roget" has a like content. Further- more, the Fragmente of Novalis, which Poe shows himself familiar with on two other occasions, 181 contain frequent repetitions of the same idea. 182 In view of Poe's interest in others of Novalis' works, it seems reason- able to conclude that he drew suggestions for his theory of coincidences, his "Calculus of Probabilities," from Novalis' Fragmente. Romantic Stories MESMERISM AND METEMPSYCHOSIS It is in a third group of Poe's tales — stories portraying the conflict of powerful emotions, the growth of evil, revenge, dis- ease, decadence, madness, hysterical or neurotic states of mind, fixe Ideen, mesmer- ism, hypnotism, metempsychosis, Doppel- ganger — that we come to some of Poe's best tales, and to those in which "Germanism" is most palpable. Of these, perhaps the most startling are three in which Poe is concerned with mesmerism: "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (Godey's Lady's Book, April, 1844), "Mesmeric Revelation" {Co- lumbian Magazine, August, 1 844) , and ' ' Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" {American Whig Review, December, 1845). They invite comparison with tales of the German ro- mancers Tieck, Novalis, Kleist, and notably Hoffmann, who frequently occupied them- selves with mesmerism in their stories. 183 Alert for the novel and the fantastic, both Hoffmann and Poe were attracted by the doctrines of Mesmer and the theories of hypnotism. Disciples of the new theories tantalized themselves with promises of the discovery of the deepest secrets of nature. Hypnotism (magnetism, Hoffmann called it) plays a role in many of his tales, usually in terms of "das hohere geistige Prinzip," "eine freundliche feindliche Kraft," "innige geistige Verbindung," or "wunderbares psychisches Phanomen." In "Der Magnetiseur" and "Der unheimliche Gast" 184 Hoffmann based his plots upon the hypnotic relationship existing between his characters, the general features of the two stories, including plots, being very much alike, as Hoffmann himself admitted. 185 The fact that both Poe and Hoffmann used the motifs of metempsychosis and of mesmerism in their tales is, by itself, insig- nificant; but when both united them in one story and both worked them out in almost identical terms, these similarities, extend- 394 German Literary Influence ing sometimes to details, become meaning- ful; and when he consider the novelty of mesmerism at the time, it is safe to con- clude that Poe did not accidentally hit upon the "same singular combination of singular motives." 186 Hoffmann's "Magnetiseur" is much more complicated and less strictly unified than Poe's "Tale of the Ragged Mountains." There are three loosely connected parts. In the introduction a family group gathers before a cheerful fire. The Baron is induced to relate a tale that has to do with a dream and an experience of his youth, in which figures prominently an officer about whom hangs a fearful mysteriousness. Seine Riesengrosse wurde noch auffalliger durch die Hagerkeit seines Korpers, der nur aus Muskeln zu bestehen schien; er mochte in jiingeren Jahren ein schoner Mann gewesen sein; denn noch jetzt war- fen seine grossen schwarzen Augen einen brennenden Blick, den man kaum ertragen konnte; ein tiefer Funfziger, hatte er die Kraft und die Gewandtheit eines Jung- lings. 187 The strangeness of his person, his temper- amental attributes, a shady past, and the hypnotic power that he wields over others surround this Danish officer with an atmos- phere of mystery and terror. The Baron comes at last to the climax of his story when he sees in a dream the Major enter his room at midnight and hears him say, "Armes Menschenkind, erkenne deinen Meister und Herrn! . . . Ich bin dein Gott der dein Innerstes durchschaut." The Baron pro- ceeds: "Pldtzlich sah ich ein gliihendes Instrument in seiner Hand, mit dem er in mein Gehirn fuhr." 188 Terrified, the Baron awakes, and rushing to the window, where he hears a noise, he sees the Major disap- pearing through the garden gate into the open country beyond. The mystery of the situation is heightened by the fact that all doors and windows are locked. Other in- mates of the house are aroused. They break into the Major's room and find him lying in his blood. Thus ends the Baron's story. Following a general discussion of dreams, the Baron's son, Ottmar, relates a story told to him by his friend Alban, a convert to hypnotism or, as Hoffmann calls it, magnetism. The relationship of the characters is confusing. Ottmar relates the story as he heard it from Alban, whose story, in turn, deals with his friend Theobald, who is not otherwise related to the group in which the stories are recited. During Theobald's absence at a distant university, his fiancee comes under the influence of a stranger, an Italian officer, and becomes so enamored of him that she forgets her first lover. The story turns upon a theory of dreams. The girl is so beset by ' tormenting dreams of her Italian lover, who is called away on a campaign, that she: becomes insane. Theobald, on returning' home, finds her in this condition. He applies ■: hypnotism. Slowly, his influence over the girl's dreams enables him to supersede the power the Italian holds over her, and finally she is completely restored (pp. 152-58). Here begins the third, and central, part of the story. As Ottmar finishes his account, his sister Maria, who has shown signs of. agitation during the preceding recital, falls into a faint. Ottmar's friend Alban, the "Magnetiseur," suddenly appears. He is attracted to Maria, and though he knows her to be the betrothed of Hypolit, he determines to cure her and at the same time bring her under the power of his will by magnetism. He succeeds, but on the wedding day she falls dead at the altar. Duels, catastrophe, and death follow for all members of the original group (pp. 158-75) except one, who lives to tell their tragic history. At several points in the story the Baron expresses his distrust of Alban because he finds a singular resemblance between him and the Danish major, whom he had known in his youth. On the evening of Maria's wedding, the old Baron, meeting Alban in the corridor, mistakes him for the Major in the flesh (p. 174). The reader is Edgar Allan Poe 395 left to infer that the Danish major of Part I of the story, though presumed dead long ago, is the Magnetiseur. Thus Hoffmann uses the theme of metempsychosis. Poe's story uses the same motifs — hypno- tism, metempsychosis, dreams, premo- nitions, and visions. As often in Poe's tales, there is no love episode. We learn of a singular relationship between Dr. Temple- ton, a physician, and Mr. Bedloe, an inva- lid. Bedloe was singularly tall and thin. . . . His limbs were exceedingly long and emaci- ated. . . . His eyes were abnormally large. . . . In moments of exitement the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous rays, not of a reflected, but of an intrinsic lustre. We recognize some of the same features that Hoffmann emphasizes. Like Hoffmann, too, Poe is undecided about the origin, the past, and the age of his character. Both authors are puzzled by his seeming old one moment, young the next. The men are alike also in retaining marks of their handsome youth, despite their present haggardness. Dr. Templeton, Bedloe's physician, is a "convert to the doctrines of Mesmer," and he used "altogether magnetic remedies" for his patient. 189 After detailing the relation- ship between patient and doctor, Poe pro- ceeds to an account of Bedloe's visions and dreams on a solitary walk in the Ragged Mountains of Virginia. Growing tired, Bedloe comes to a secluded spot and feeling an "indescribable uneasiness" as a heavy mist and intolerable heat surround him, seats himself under a tree; he falls into a trance during which his senses become hyperacute. Looking up at the tree under which he is seated, he sees, to his surprise, that it is a palm. 190 Suddenly the fog lifts, and he perceives below him in the valley a bizarre scene — an "Eastern-looking city," swarming with Oriental people. He descends to find the city in "the wildest tumult and contention." It appears that the Indian inhabitants are fighting a "small party of men clad in garments half-Indian, half- European, and officered by a gentleman in a uniform partly British." Bedloe joins the smaller party; he and his allies are driven for refuge into a species of kiosk. Presently he observes an effeminate-looking person descend, by means of a rope knotted from the turbans of his attendants, from an upper window, leap into a boat, and make his escape. During a renewed attack on the kiosk, Bedloe rushes into the street to fight, but he is struck upon the temple by a poisoned arrow. "I reeled and fell. An instantaneous and dreadful sickness seized me. I struggled — I gasped — I died." When he comes to his original self (the change comes about as if by a galvanic shock), he finds himself again in the mountains. Slowly he proceeds on his way home, where he relates his experiences to Templeton and Poe. "And not even for an instant," he declares, "can I compel my understanding to regard it as a dream." 191 Dr. Templeton, Poe's magnetiseur, now produces a water- color portrait, an exact likeness of Bedloe's features, and makes the following explana- tion: You will perceive . . . the date of this picture . . . 1780. In this year was the por- trait taken. It is the likeness of a dead friend — a Mr. Oldeb — to whom I became much attached in Calcutta, during the administration of Warren Hastings. I was then only twenty years old. In your detail of the vision which pre- sented itself to you amid the hills, you have described, with the minutest accuracy, the Indian city of Benares, upon the Holy River. The riots, the combats, the mas- sacre, were the actual events of the insur- rection of Cheyte Sing, which took place in 1780, when Hastings was put in imminent peril of his life. The man escaping by the string of turbans, was Cheyte Sing himself. The party in the kiosk were sepoys and British officers, headed by Hastings. Of this party I was one, and did all I could to prevent the rash and fatal sally of the officer who fell, in the crowded alleys, by the poi- soned arrow of a Bengalee. That officer was my dearest friend. It was Oldeb. You will perceive by this manuscript, (here the 396 German Literary Influence speaker produced a note-book in which several pages appeared to have been freshly written) that at the very period in which you fancied these things amid the hills, I was engaged in detailing them upon paper here at home (Works, V, 174-75). The tale ends with the death of Bedloe, the result of Dr. Templeton's accidentally applying to his patient's temple a poisonous instead of a medicinal leech. Poe's (i.e., the narrator's) attention is arrested by the newspaper announcement of the death of Mr. Bedlo. He inquires of the editor regard- ing Mr. Bedloe and is told that Bedlo should have been printed Bedloe, with the final e — • "merely a typographical error," explains the editor. "'Then,' said I mutteringly as I turned on my heel, 'then indeed has it come to pass that one truth is stranger than any fiction — for Bedloe, without the e, what is it but Oldeb reversed ? And this man tells me it is a typographical error 2 '" (Works, V. 176). The doctrine of metempsychosis appears in the suggestion that Bedlo(e) is a reincar- nation of Oldeb. However widely the stories differ in external particulars, the presence in both of metempsychosis, hypnotism, dreams, and the mysterious magnetiseur seems to involve something more than mere coincidence. 192 In the opening sentence of "Mesmeric Revelation" Poe makes the bold declara- tion: "Whatever doubt may still envelop the rationale of mesmerism, its startling facts are now almost universally believed. Of these latter, those who doubt, are mere doubters by profession — an unprofitable and disreputable tribe." 193 After indicating that the knows several works on mesmerism, among them "the logical inquiry of Cousin and his European and American echoes," Poe goes on "to detail without comment the very remarkable substance of a colloquy between a sleep-walker and myself," the sleep-walker being a Mr. Vankirk, who had long suffered from phthisis, and whom Mr. P. as magnetiseur, had "been in the habit of mesmerizing" and thus relieving. The conversation turns upon questions of the magnetiseur concerning the states of feeling of the patient, and resolves itself gradually into metaphysical gibberish, which is termi- nated suddenly by P's calling his patient to wakefulness. Less than a minute afterwards he expires, his corpse assuming the "cold rigidity of stone." The question involun- tarily comes to P: "Had the sleep-walker, indeed, during the latter portion of the discourse, been addressing me from out of the region of the shadows ?" 19 * In the mesmeric state, says Poe, the external organs of sense are dull, while through "channels supposed unknown, matters beyond the scope of the physical organs" are clearly perceived. The same observations are made by Hoffmann. 195 But Poe was not content to stop there. If mesmerism enables us to learn profound truths from the "region of the shadows," why should it not be equal to preserving life itself ? This question he propounds in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar." In this story, M. Valdemar, with whom Mr. P. as magnetiseur professes to have long been en rapport, sends for the author just before his death, and gives him permission to perform upon him the experiment of prolonging life by mesmerism. At the moment that M. Valdemar seems to expire, P mesmerizes him and holds him in this state while he propounds questions to him. This condition endures for more than seven months. To all ordinary appearances, M. Valdemar is dead, but he still responds to P's passes; and upon P's question, whether he is still sleeping, the subject replies : "Yes; — no; — I have been sleeping — and now — now — I am dead." 196 However, examina- tion shows that his tongue still moves, and that he still breathes. Eventually singular changes come over his features. Questioned about his wishes, M. Valdemar breaks forth: "For God's sake! — quick! — quick! — put me to sleep — or, quick!— waken me! ■ — quick! — / say to you that I am deadl" 197 Edgar Allan Poe S^ The magnetiseur hastens to awaken him and succeeds. "As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of 'dead! dead!' abso- lutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once — ■ within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk — ■ crumpled — absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed . . . there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathesome — of de- testable putridity." 198 The story illustrates how far Poe super- seded Hoffmann in the realm of the hor- rible. Moreover, Hoffmann, though his tales end as tragically as Poe's, uses such incongruous touches as the humorously grotesque or the frankly supernatural that the reader is seldom deceived for long. Poe, on the contrary, is often serious and aims at convincing, to the point of shocking the reader if necessary. He puts his stories upon as reasonable (scientific or pseudo-scientific) a basis as the subject allows. Also, Poe's characters in these stories are neither weak, sentimental females of the Gothic type nor inexperienced, fantastic young swains; they are men who, though psychic or neurotic, are capable of reasoning and of proceeding effectively in their undertakings. Finally, while Hoffmann's hypnotists have the marks of extraordinary personages, bearing the outward stamp of wizards or magicians, Phoe's differ little in outward circumstances from ordinary men. Dr. Templeton is described as a capable physi- cian, and in "Mesmeric Revelation" and "The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar" the magnetiseur is sufficiently commonplace not to warrant description at all. It is largely this greater seriousness, congruity, plainness, and directness that makes Poe's tales, though ghastlier than Hoffmann's, more convincing and more forceful. the Doppelgdnger motif A theme not unlike metempsychosis that interested Poe at various times is the Dop- pelgdnger motif. The idea of the double- or other-self is a very old one. 199 The German romanticists were especially fond of using it. 200 Fouque used it in "Zauberring." Novalis made use of it in Heinrich von Ofter- dingen. Hoffmann himself was frequently haunted by the idea of being pursued by his double. 201 The idea is basic in his story entitled "Doppelganger," and he used it prominently also in "Der Elementargeist," "Der unheimliche Gast," and in "Der Sand- mann," but it is in his "Elixiere des Teu- fels" that he comes closest to employing the idea as Poe used it in "William Wilson.'' The motif on which both narratives are constructed is that of the struggle for supremacy between good and evil in man. Both authors have availed themselves of the device of a double existence, mental and physical, to illustrate the tragic conse- quences of a separation of moral and physi- cal identity. 202 Hoffmann traces the growth of this "dunkle Macht" minutely from its first inception until, grown gigantic in its power, it plunges its victim into an abyss of crime. We follow the same development in Poe's tale. The difference in Poe's tale (and this adds force and gripping power in Poe's story) is that William is lost; the evil triumphs over the good. Hoffmann's Medar- dus thinks he has killed his double, that he is therefore lost ; but in the sequel we learn that this last damning crime has not been committed. Medardus is reclaimed. While adapting Hoffmann's duelling scene, Poe, with a better estimate of its dramatic possibilities, makes the duel fatal to Wil- liam's double, and therewith ends his story on a climactic, tragic note. What Medardus only fears becomes reality for William. William stabs his double, but sees him arise and hears him speak, no longer in a scraping whisper, but in the tone of his own voice: "You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforth art thou also dead — dead to the world, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst 398 German Literary Influence thou exist — -and in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself." 203 Another motif that Poe appropriated but used to better advantage is the whispering voice of the Doppelganger. Both Medardus and William are pursued by hissed and whispered utterances. With Hoffmann the exact correspondence of personal features and the whispering voice of Medardus' double have no special significance; they are the stock-in-trade of the double-motif. In making the two voices finally identical, by slow stages, Poe achieves an added and more forceful (because cumulative) final effect. 204 By discarding much of Hoffmann's episodic matter, many nonessential compli- cations, and all unnecessary characters, while concentrating upon the main line of action and the two focal characters, Poe heightens the effect. Hoffmann vacillates between the matter-of-fact and the super- natural, crossing and recrossing the border and leaving the reader in doubt until the very end, where everything is cleared up on natural terms. 205 Poe, instead, drives at once boldly into the realm of the super- natural and keeps the reader in an atmos- phere frankly unearthly. "William Wilson" is constructed after Poe's own principles as laid down in the "Philosophy of Composi- tion." 208 He started out to produce an awe- inspiring atmosphere of mystery, and in "looking about . . . for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best serve ... in the construction of the effect," 207 he drew largely on Hoffmann's Elixiere des Teufels: first, for the criminal proclivities of his main character, second, for the Doppel- ganger motif, third, for its typification of the good and evil forces in man, fourth, for the mysterious, solemn whispering and the final, exact correspondence of the double's voice, and fifth, for the murder of the double and the resulting extinction of the good principle in the murderer. stories dealing with fixe Ideen A motif akin to the dual nature of man (typifying good and evil) is what Poe calls "the imp of the perverse." Poe and the German romantics knew it well — this desire to torture oneself, even to annihilate one- self. Corollary with it is the "desire to do wrong for the wrong's sake," in spite of it, nay, because of it. 208 Poe's "Imp of the Perverse" is one of a group of stories in which Poe develops this idea. After a six- page discussion of the spirit of perversity, Poe's character relates how he murdered a friend out of sheer perversity, going about it coolly, calculatingly, carefully destroying all possible clues that might lead to his detection. For a long time he reveled in the idea that he was absolutely safe. "But there arrived at length an epoch, from which the pleasurable feeling grew, by scarcely per- ceptible gradations, into a haunting and harassing thought ... 'I am safe ... if I be not fool enough to make open confes- sion.'" Obsessed by the imp of perversity, he is finally driven to go before a judge and to inform against himself, consigning him- self "to the hangman and to Hell," not because he is penitent, but because "the imp of the perverse" has driven him to destruction. 209 "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" (both of 1843) develop the same theme with even greater intensity and effect and greater circumstantiality of detail. There is nothing in the work of the German Romantiker to equal these three tales of Poe. But there is a motif very like it which they used often, and which Poe likewise employed. In general we may call it the fixe Idee — a kind of monomania, some singular thought which takes hold of a weakened, unbalanced, neurotic, or extra- ordinarily intense mind and turns into an obsession. Hoffmann, for instance, was harassed all his life by thoughts which drove him from self -contemplative brood- ing to thoughts of suicide. An ill-regulated Edgar Allan Poe 399 imagination and an overdeveloped ten- dency toward the horrible and the distres- sing made him apprehensive of mysterious dangers; and the whole tribe of Demo- gorgons, apparitions, spectres, and goblins that filled his stories, though products of his imagination, were no less discomposing for him than if they had had real ex- istence. 210 He wrote a number of stories deal- ing with such fixe Ideen, among them "Das steinerne Herz," "Meister Johannes Wacht," "Meister Martin, der Kiifner, und seine Gesellen," and, more Poesque, the following: "Das Fraulein von Scuderi," "Der Sandmann," and "Die Jesuiterkirche in G ." "Das Fraulein von Scuderi" is typical. The goldsmith, Cardillac, has a consuming passion for jewels and gold ornaments. As they take form under his deft fingers, they grow dearer and dearer to him, and he delays delivery as long as possible. Once they leave his hands, he finds no peace of mind until he has them again — anything, everything to get them again into his possession. To secure them, he kills, and kills again. He is perfectly conscious of the blood guilt which he is accumulating but is powerless to withstand the urge. As in the case of "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Black Cat," he finds no rest until the urge is satisfied. As in Poe's stories, there is no trace of peni- tence. So crime follows crime until he is driven to surrender and confession. 211 In "Der Sandmann" a student named Nathanael becomes obsessed by the idea that one Guiseppe Coppelius, an alchemist, who has brought misfortune to his family, is haunting him. In his childish fancy Nathanael identifies Coppelius with the sandman of nursery lore, and visualizes him as a monster who stabs out children's eyes. As he grows older, he sees the evil spirit personified in this man who, after all, is little more than the creation of his over- wrought fancy. 212 So fixed does the idea become that it robs him of his bride, throws him into a frenzied fever, and leads him in the end to kill himself. His reason tells him that he is laboring under a delusion, but the imp of the perverse drives him on. The similarity in the mental states of Hoff- mann's Cardillac and Nathanael and of Poe's characters dominated by perversity is apparent. Details in these stories, as well as in Die Elixiere des Teufels, parallel so closely Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" that there may well be involved something more than mere coincidence. Particularly noteworthy is the identical use to which both writers put a mysterious knocking below the floor- boards. 213 The idea of a man being hounded by his conscience or by some mysterious motive until he confesses his crime is, of course, not novel. "Murder will out," or "Die klare Sonne bringt's an den Tag," as the old folk saying has it, is not an unusual theme. 214 But Poe's use of the idea is on the same order as Hoffmann's; and since he appears to have borrowed, or adapted, other motifs from Hoffmann and otherwise shown himself akin to the German roman- cer, it is likely that he drew a suggestion for his "Tell-Tale Heart" from "Der Sand- mann" and Die Elixiere des Teufels. Among Poe's stories dealing specifically with women, "Berenice" (1835), "Morella" (1835), "Ligeia" (1838), and "Eleonora" (1842), all rest upon some form of fixe Idee. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" the film-covered eye of the victim motivates the entire story. In the woman-group of his tales Poe returned to the device of concentrating upon some personal feature: the eyes of Ligeia and of Eleonora, the melodious voice of Morella, the teeth of Berenice. "Berenice" is the most gruesome as we watch Agaeus driven by a ghoulish vampire desire to possess himself of the teeth of his beloved, deceased, and entombed Berenice. The words of Agaeus, "Dicebant mihi sadales, si sepulchrum amices visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas," point toward a practice of the ancients — a practice which the romanticists were fond of treating — 400 German Literary Influence namely, the love of dead bodies, the de- spoiling of corpses, and the annihilating power of love. 215 If Poe turned to the Ger- man romantics, he found a number of instances upon which he could have drawn, for the Germans, like the English, had their graveyard literature. 218 The story in which the idea comes closest to that of Poe's is Hoffmann's "Der Vampyr," one of the group comprising "Die Serapionsbruder" stories, which Poe drew upon on other occasions. In this story the curse of a hateful mother leads a young wife to a passion for corpses. Horrible is the scene in which the husband follows her to the cemetery and there sees her tearing with her teeth, like a hyena, a dead body which she has dug up. 21 ' While there is little resemblance be- tween the action of Hoffmann's and Poe's stories, there is a striking similarity in motivation and characterization. As in Poe's story, there is a long struggle against the steady growth of the fearful, mono- maniac desire. As in Poe's story, also (and unlike other examples cited above), the ero- tic impulse plays no part. Finally, there are the garments and other properties, bearing marks of the ghastly deed, which are used as evidence, as in "Berenice." In both stories, madness is the end. 218 If in "Berenice" the perfect teeth of the lady become a prepossession in the lover's mind, in "Ligeia" it is her eyes that become the object of his monomania. The story bears remarkable analogies to the love episodes in Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann." Hoffmann's Clara is the prototype of Poe's Ligeia. Like Ligeia, Clara is passionately devoted; like her, too, her erudition is profound. Even more striking is the simi- larity of their persons. Like Poe's hero, Nathanael describes her perfections in detail, but always comes back to her eyes, which hold him most powerfully. 219 Poe dwells at length on "Those eyes! those shining, those divine orbs!" 220 But in an evil hour Nathanael forsakes Clara for the false image of a woman, a mere automaton. So, too, Poe, in the trammels of opium, leads home a successor of the unforgotten Ligeia — the Lady Rowena. Ligeia is the embodiment of Beauty, not "classic" Beauty, yet Beauty in the highest earthly sense, "the symbol of that aethereal beauty the author himself adored." 221 Hoffmann's idea is the same. 222 Poe's love for Ligeia is not of the heart; it is of the mind. In the unremembered first meeting, in her all- comprehending knowledge, in the intellec- tual music of her voice, in the unsolved mystery of her eyes, we see Poe's embodi- ment in Ligeia of "Beauty as an idea." The Lady Rowena symbolizes the perverted taste, whose existence in Poe's mind is at length ended in that long mediation of his, first pure love. The three or four ruddy ! drops 223 are potent distillations from the' life-essence of the unperceived spirit, which thus replaces Rowena in his vision. 224 Poe himself commented on the idea developed in his story. 225 Concerning P. P. Cooke's' criticism of "Ligeia," 228 Poe wrote: Touching 'Ligeia' you are right — all right — throughout. The gradual perception of the fact that Ligeia lives again in the person of Rowena is a far loftier and more thrilling idea than the one I have embod- ied. . . . And this idea was mine — had I never written before I should have adopted it — but there is 'Morella.' Do you remember that there the gradual conviction on the part of the parent is that the spirit of the first Morella tenants the person of the second ? It was necessary, since 'Morella' was written, to modify 'Ligeia.' I was forced to be content with a sudden half-conscious- ness, on the part of the narrator, that Ligeia stood before him. One point I have not fully carried out — I should have intimated that the will did not perfect its intention — there should have been a relapse — a final one — ■ and Ligeia (who had only succeeded in so much as to convey the idea of the truth to the narrator) should be at length entombed as Rowena — the bodily alterations having gradually faded away. 227 Had Poe done this, i.e., had he intimated that the will did not perfect its intention (as Hoffmann did in his story), and had he in Edgar Allan Poe 401 the end entombed Rowena as Ligeia, in- stead of leaving all questionable, he would have had exactly what happens in Hoff- mann's story. Poe leaves the thing in the air; the reader does not know whether it is Ligeia who dies, or Rowena, or both. In the German story, Clara had warned Nathanael in words very like those used by Ligeia in her admonition that lack of will power would lead to ruination. As she predicts, Nathanael's weakness leads to his unhappy love, his madness, and finally his death. "Morella" is, as Poe admits, very like "Ligeia," except that the idea is worked out to its natural conclusion. As in "Ligeia," the lover tells the story; and as in that story, he meets the lady by chance. Though he loves her, "the fires are not of Eros. ... I never spoke of passion, nor thought of love." Their union is happy, but their happy relationship is based on Morella's prodigious learning. Together they bury themselves in metaphysical studies: "the wild pantheism of Fichte . . . and above all, the doctrines of Identity as urged by Schelling." But unlike Ligeia, Morella becomes the victim of a slow, consuming disease. Daily she sinks lower. As she dies, she gives birth to a child, which lives. The girl grows strangely in stature and intelligence. He beholds with terror the extraordinary mental develop- ment of the child. Daily she grows more like her mother, until the father shudders at the "too perfect identity." When she is ten years old, he takes her to be baptized. When the priest asks what name the child is to have, many names occur to him, but irresistibly, inevitably he utters the name "Morella." What more than fiend convulsed the features of my child, and overspread them with hues of death, as startling as that scarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy eyes from the earth to heaven, and, falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault, responded — T am here.' — She died ; and with my own hands I bore her to the tomb ; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh as I found no trace of the first in the charnal where I laid the second — Morella. 228 In both stories Poe develops the idea that the second woman takes the form of the first, while the first becomes incarnate in the second. At the basis of Poe's stories lie two ideas. The first is summed up in the quotation from Joseph Glanvill placed at the head of "Ligeia": And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor ? For God is but a will pervading all things by nature of its intent- ness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. The second is indicated by Poe's refer- ences to Schelling's Doctrine of Identity, but Poe goes no further than to allude to the German philosopher. Of Identity he has no more to say than this: "But the princi- pium individuationis — the notion of that identity which at death is or is not lost for- ever, was to me at all times, a consideration of intense interest"; and, as he admits in the same breath, "not more from the perplex- ing and exciting nature of its consequences, than from the marked and agitated manner in which Morella mentioned them." 229 Nor is there anything in Poe's writings to indicate that he was familiar with the whole of Schelling's philosophy. Since there is evidence that he knew Novalis, and since he could have gleaned from Novalis all the ideas which he relates to Fichte and Schel- ling (for Novalis's Fragmente abound in quotations and paraphrases of them 230 ) we may reasonably presume, in the absence of evidence of more than a general acquain- tance with the German philosophers, that he derived most of his information on that score from Novalis. Indeed, we can find every one of Poe's ideas about the relation between the philosopher and the poet, about the relation between will and the power to do, and about the relations of the living and the dead tersely phrased in Novalis' Fragmented 1 402 German Literary Influence Poe wrote two other tales that may be designated love stories: "The Assignation" (1835), which exploits the theme of the unhappy love of Prospero for the Marchesa de Mentoni, and "The Oval Portrait" (1842), which combines the love theme with that of the jealousy of art as a mistress. The resemblance of Hoffmann's "Doge und Dogaressa" and Poe's "The Assignation" has been noted repeatedly, 232 but the relationship is one that can easily be over- emphasized. The love plot, which Poe may have adapted from Hoffmann, itself differs in many particulars from Hoffmann's. The setting of both is Venice, but the descrip- tions are not close enough to argue that one is derived from the other. Indeed, Byron's Marino Faliero and Delavigne's were al- ready written and could have suggested Poe's tale. The difficulty here is that both Byron and Delavigne make the conspiracy of the old Doge and his tragic end the sub- ject of their dramas. Hoffmann and Poe disregard this element entirely, while making the fate of the Dogaressa and her young lover of paramount importance. A fair statement of the case seems to be that Poe may have been attracted to the subject by Hoffmann's story. Definite influence is hard to establish. The source of "The Oval Portrait" is more easily detected. Again, it is Hoffmann, as Cobb has pointed out. 233 Poe's story grows out of his contemplation of a picture, a device often used by Hoffmann, and with particular effectiveness in "Die Jesuiter- kirche in G ," which appears to be the source of Poe's story. Both stories are told in the first person. The narrator in both cases finds a remarkable portrait, so striking that he is led to inquire further concerning it. Both learn — Hoffmann from a professor, Poe from a book — that the portrait is that of the wife of the artist who painted the picture ; and what follows in both stories is an account of the life of the artist, illustratingthethesisthat the priceof success in painting a picture of his beloved is the life of its object. The relationship between the artist and his model, between lover and beloved, is the same, but Poe's story is more closely constructed and more impres- sive in its climax. Hoffmann's artist fails in his attempt to paint the Madonna-like features of his wife until he kills her. Her death speeds his success. Poe's painter succeeds in his aim to paint her perfect portrait. Following the last stroke of the brush, "the painter stood entranced before the noble work . . . but . . . while he gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, 'This is indeed Life itself!' turned suddenly to regard his beloved: — She was deadl" 23i His success results in her death. By a slight shift in handling the same material, and by reducing the length of the story from twen- ty-five to four pages, Poe made his story far more impressive. He omits Hoffmann's long discourses on the subject of art, which give his story a didactic tone. While using the same motifs, he established a closer causal relationship between the successful completion of the painting and the death of the model, and thus realized more nearly the dramatic potentialities of the action. TALES OF HORROR We come, now, to Poe's tales of terror, four of which — "Metzengerstein" (1832), "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842), and "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) — appear in subject matter and in tone to have parallels in German stories. "Metzengerstein," when it first appeared in 1836, bore the subtitle "In Imitation of the German." This designation and, still more, the subject matter of the tale invite the Motivenjager to seek a German source for the story, especially since it turns upon the theory of metempsychosis, this time the incarnation of the spirit of a man in that of a horse. German romantics often treated this, or similar, themes. 235 Germanic in general atmosphere as the story undoubted- Edgar Allan Poe 403 ly is, and offender on the score of "German- ism and gloom" though it was, there appears to be no specific German source for it. Poe's arch-revenge story, "The Cask of Amon- tillado," involuntarily suggests Kleist's "Hermannschlacht," 236 in which Kleist probably outdid Poe ; but the materials are so different that the influence of one on the other is out of the question. The grim horror of "The Masque of the Red Death" provokes comparison with such tales as Tieck's "Liebeszauber" 237 and Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann," 238 as well as "Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober," 239 but again, the similarities are superfical. A closer relationship seems to obtain between "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Hoffmann's "Das Majorat." The name of the hero of both stories is Roderick, and Hoffmann's castle is similar to Poe's house of Usher. 240 But these features are the very ones which Scott had emphasized in his article on Hoffmann in the Foreign Quarterly Review. 2 * 1 He noted that the Baron's name is Roderick, and that his lady is "young, beautiful, nervous, and full of sensibil- ity." 242 Scott's depiction of the exterior of Hoffmann's castle coincides in a number of important details with those accentuated in Poe's story. 243 Most important is Scott's description of the "chasm, which extended from the highest turret down to the dun- geon of the castle." Poe observes that a "barely perceptible fissure which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn." 244 Poe emphasized this detail and returned to it for its unifying effect at the end of the story. 245 If Poe's "House of Usher" owes its setting to Hoffmann's "Majorat," its plot is more nearly an adaptation of Arnim's "Die Majoratsherren." Arnim's Majorat sherr is a fanciful young man who sees the real world only through the fantastic creations of his mind. A dark power hangs over his life and causes him, already lacking in courage and will power, to become entirely unhappy and renders him unable to take an active part in life. He spends his nights in mystical studies and phantasmagoric reveries. Like Poe's Roderick, he is a musican and poet, engrossed in odd, old books. Like Roderick, he plays on stringed instruments and sings romantic songs to the accompaniment of the mandolin. Like Roderick, his hearing is remarkably acute, for he can hear noises entirely inaudible to others. Like Roderick, he shuns the light, spending the day in sleep and the night in his dimly lighted study. 246 Like Roderick, he can resolve nothing; an emergency requiring resolute action leaves him helpless. He knows that a girl, who lives near his old Majorat, is the rightful heir to the possessions which he holds; and though he loves the girl, he lacks, like Poe's Roderick, the ability to right the wrong, however hard he tries. Finally, he sees Esther, the girl, choked to death but fails to go to her rescue. Only after she is dead, does he go to her, and then it is merely to die. 247 Like Roderick, he suggests the last stage of human decadence. The heroes of both Poe's and Arnim's stories are the last of an old, once noble line, whose fate appears determined. Unable to cope with circumstances, they drift with them, and fall a prey to their own weakness. Their fate is closely linked with that of the ancestral castle. Usher lives in dread of the gray walls of the house, with which he believes his fate inevitably connected; like Arnim's Majoratsherr, he lives in fear of the dark, unfathomable evil that connects him with the Majorat. 2 * 8 In both stories the lady is temporarily entombed, and in both stories the hero knows she is not really dead. 249 Finally, they have the opportunity to save the girl, but they let the opportunity pass for lack of energetic action. Both in the end find their death with the lady. 250 How or where Poe read Arnim's tale cannot be determined, but it is hardly possible that Poe's story was written entirely indepen- dently of Arnim's. 404 German Literary Influence A fourth group of Poe's short pieces — sketches, descriptive pieces, anecdotes, loosely constructed tales, and jeux d'esprit — warrant brief attention. Professor Wacht- ler, always on the lookout for psychological kinship between Poe and the Romantiker — Gesinnungsverwandtschaft he calls it — points out that Poe's attitude toward nature is the same as Hoffmann's. He cites, in support of his observation, parallel passages from Poe's "Island of the Fay" and Hoffmann's "Der goldene Topf." 251 While there are obvious similarities, they are not distinc- tive, extending as they do, little beyond the coincidence that both saw in nature a reflec- tion of their own thoughts and feeling, fancy and imagination — a common trait of the romantic mind. To argue that Poe learned his Naturanschauung from Hoffmann is to force matters. Poe's sketches in the metaphysical- mystical vein — "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" and "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" — remind the reader of Jean Paul's "Uber den Tod nach dem Tod." 2s2 As in Poe's studies, the characters discuss the sensations of dying, the bodily changes, and the life after death. Two lovers meet in Aideen and compare their experi- ences, indulging in mystical conjectures and arguments regarding the significance of their experiences, and of life and death. The difference in the German sketch is that the conversation is carried on by people thor- oughly alive — the whole is a play of fancy in which they indulge. 253 Two other pieces, "The Spectacles" (1844) and "The Sphinx" (1846), seem to have drawn on Germanic sources. "The Sphinx" suggests Hoffmann's "Heimatochare," 264 in which a fly is mistaken for a woman through an optical illusion ; but Poe's story, in which a fly is mistaken for a monster, was proba- bly inspired by Butler's "Elephant in the Moon." 255 The other story in which a de- fective eyesight figures is "The Spectacles." The point of the story is that a young man, who is nearsighted, thinks he sees a beauti- ful young woman, who in reality is his great-great-grandmother. He woos and weds the lady, and does not discover, until he puts on his spectacles, that she is an ugly old woman of eighty-two. Hoffmann uses a similar motif several times. In "Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober," in "Prinzessin Brambilla," and in "Meister Floh," a glass is used to similar purpose. In "Der Sand- mann," Coppola, a glass-fitter, sells the student Nathanael a small glass, which, when he sees Olimpia through it, changes her image into that of the most beautiful woman for him. His exulting at having found so prodigious a beauty is very like Poe's. Similar, also, is his rage on finding that she is only an Automat. The difference in the two stories is that Hoffmann's tone is serious, while Poe is trying to be funny. The theme itself is a relatively common one. In "Bon-Bon" (1835), one of Poe's earlier productions, we have a story after Hoff- mann's fashion, with characters, situations, setting, and humor in the approved Hoff- mannesque manner, except that Poe ex- aggerates everything in it just enough to make it a travesty on German metaphysics and German diablerie. 25S Indeed, when J. P. Kennedy wrote to Poe on February 9, 1836, concerning the eight tales which had appeared in the Messenger, characterizing them as bizarreries and gently lecturing Poe for indulging in the extravagant vein, 257 Poe replied: Most of them were intended for half banter. . . . 'Lionizing' 258 and 'Loss of Breath' were satires properly speaking — at least so meant — the one on the rage of Lions, and the facility of becoming one — the other of the extravagancies of Black- wood. 259 Poe here refers to the German tales which were flooding the market. As early as the twenties Irving had spoken of the wild tales of the German type as "the commonplace of the day." A decade later they had grown wilder and had invaded Edgar Allan Poe 405 even the most conservative of British magazines. 260 This type of literature ran counter to Poe's conceptions of literary art. "While the public was revelling in the Blackwood's type of tale steeped in 'Ger- manism and gloom,' while the metaphysical cult, especially in New England, was dis- cussing Swedenborgian mysticism, and the transcendentalists were loading the maga- zines full of the intricacies of German tran- cendentalism, he resolved to write tales that would out-Herod Herod." 261 To his "Loss of Breath" travesty in the Messenger he added the subtitle, "A Tale a la Black- wood." In this story he presses the popular manner to the extreme. Chamisso had writ- ten "Peter Schlemihl" and Hoffmann "Das Abenteuer der Sylvesternacht, " in which the heroes lost their shadows; Fouqu6's Undine had lived without a soul; Hauff's Dutch Michael had done very well without a heart; and Faust and Tom Walker had disposed of their souls ; he would tell of the man who lost his breath. In the Messenger version, the worst extravagancies of which were not retained by Poe in the final reprint of the tale in the Broadway Journal, 2 * 2 we see him carrying his travesty to the last extremity. The hero is maimed, mangled, crushed, hanged, and buried alive ; but being without breath, it is impossible for him to breathe his last. Consigned to the tomb, he industriously opens all the coffins, exposes the contents, finds in one of them his lost breath, and taking possession of it, is rescued, none the worse for his adventures. This is outdoing the Germans at their worst. Later he wrote the extravaganza, "How to Write a Blackwood Article" (1838) and added the story, "A Predicament," to illustrate the method. Travesty and burles- que can hardly go further. Literary Principles — Poe's Debt to Schlegel It remains, now, to consider Poe's critical theories, with reference especially to his pronouncements on the unity of effect or singleness of impression 263 — dicta which, as has been pointed out, Poe himself did not always follow. 264 That Coleridge, when Poe first discovered the Biographia Literaria, made a profound impression upon him is certain. 265 Poe's "Letter to B " of 1831 demonstrates the fact that Coleridge more than any other critic supplied Poe with the groundwork of his literary theory about the time his critical personality was developing. Yet, as Professor Campbell has observed, pervasive and significant as Poe's debt to Coleridge was, it was "largely unsubstan- tial" 266 — vague and atmospheric rather than specific and verbal. His indebtedness to Schlegel, on the other hand, was specific, pointed, and consequently more influential and significant. Poe does not directly name or quote Schlegel before September, 1835 267 (when he does both) , while reviewing for the Southern Literary Messenger 2 ™ R. Potter's transla- tion of Euripides. The review incorporates two paragraphs quoted from Schlegel's Lectures and four pages of adaptation so bold and ascription so vague as to consti- tute plagiarism. 269 Of special importance here is Poe's first reference to that Ideality which Schlegel had found to be the distinc- tive characteristic of Greek dramatic poetry. 2 ' He proceeded at once to interpret Schlegel's Idealitdt der Darstellung (Black translates it "Ideality of the representa- tion") as comprising both "ideality of con- ception" and "ideality of representation." Seven months later, while appraising the poems of Drake and Halleck, "the Faculty of Ideality" had become for Poe synony- mous with "the sentiment of Poesy" itself. 271 In the meantime (reviewing Mrs. L. H. Sigourney's Zinzendorfj and Other Poems for the Southern Literary Messenger of January, 1836), Poe had made another significant reference to Schlegel — signifi- cant because it embodies his first statement of his favorite doctrines of brevity and singleness of tone or effect : 406 German Literary Influence In poems of magnitude the mind of the reader is not, at all times, enabled to include in one comprehensive survey the properties and proper adjustment of the whole. . . . But in poems of less extent . . . the pleasure is unique, in the proper acceptation of that term — the understanding is employed, without difficulty, in the contemplation of the picture as a whole — and thus its effect will depend, in a very great degree, upon the perfection of its finish, upon the nice adaptation of its constituent parts, and especially upon what is rightly termed by Schlegel, "the unity or totality of inter- est." 272 A few lines further on he speaks of "totality of effect," a variant readily derived from Schlegel's "totality of inter- est." This article of January, 1836, contains Poe's first, still vague, formulation of the theory which, in 1842, he embodied in the famous passage beginning: A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thought to accommodate his incidents ; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique and single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such inci- dents — he then combines such events as may best suit him in establishing this preconceived effect. 273 What is noteworthy is that in 1835, and perhaps earlier, Poe had read Schlegel's Vorlesungen (either in the Black translation of 1 815 or in the 1833 Philadelphia reprint), 274 for in that year we find him turning Schlegel into grist for his mill. More than that, he does just what Coleridge had done before him : 275 he copies or paraphrases passages from Schlegel's Lectures and passes them off as critical formulations of his own. 278 Poe's coming upon Schlegel was no mere accident, for in following the early volumes of Blackwood's, he became familiar not only with Hoffmann and Hoffmann- esque tales but with the Schlegel brothers, notably August Wilhelm, whose literary principles Lockhart worked hard to domes- ticate in England through the columns of the magazine. 277 But if Poe had never seen a copy of Blackwood's, his acquaintance with Coleridge's writings, notably the Biographia Literaria, would still have intro- duced him to Schlegel. While it seems plausible, as Professor Stovall points out, 278 that Poe's reading of Coleridge antedates his firsthand acquaintance with Schlegel, it is certain that by 1835 he had turned to Schlegel himself, for he quotes and para- phrases passages directly from Schlegel's Lectures — passages not be found in Cole- ridge's writings. Thus, while he obviously derived his characterization of a poem as "opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object pleasure, not truth . . ," 279 from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (Ch. XIV), where the phraseology is almost identical, it is clear that Poe's theory of the totality of effect or unity of impression is not derived from Coleridge, who does not advance such a theory except to offer a few vague intimations of unity of tone as it is implicit in the doctrine of organic unity. Coleridge was only a cognate source with Schlegel for Poe's all-important doc- trine of unity from which stems practically the whole of Poe's mature thought, whether literary theory, cosmogony, or philoso- phy. 280 Long before Poe formulated his famous pronouncements on unity, in his critiques and in Eureka, he had, during the first year of his connection with the Mes- senger, read in Schlegel (and inserted into the magazine) Schlegel's famous comment regarding Aristotle on the three unities. The connection is made obvious when the relevant passages in Schlegel and Poe are compared : Schlegel (Black's translation, p. 337): It is amusing enough to see Aristotle driven perforce to lend his name to those three Unities, whereas the only one of which he speaks with any degree of fullness is the first, the Unity of Action. With respect to the Unity of Time he merely throws out a vague hint; while of the Unity of Place he says not a syllable. Edgar Allan Poe 40^ Southern Literary Messenger I, xn (Aug., 1835). 698 Aristotle's name is supposed to be au- thority for the three unities. The only one of which he speaks decisively is the unity of action. With regard to the unity of time he merely throws out an indefinite hint. Of the unity of place not one word does he say. These passages, taken in conjunction with Poe's acknowledgments in two reviews of about the same time, leave little doubt that by 1835 Schlegel more than Coleridge was Poe's mentor. More particularly, Poe derived his theory of the short story from Schlegel's explanation and criticism of the conventional interpretation of Aristotle on the unities by simply adapting certain ones of Schlegel's principles of dramatic litera- ture to the short story. In discussing the "three unities" attributed to Aristotle, Schlegel wrote: De La Motte, a French author, who wrote against the Unities in general, would subsitute for Unity of Action, the Unity of Interest. If the term be not confined to the interest in the destinies of some single per- sonage, but is taken to mean the general direction which the mind takes at the sight of an event, this explanation, so understood seems most satisfactory and very near the truth (p. 243). "Unity of interest being the aim of the dramatist, how does he proceed?" asks Schlegel. "The object proposed," he an- swers, "is to produce an impression 281 on an assembled audience, to rivet their attention, and to excite their sympathy and interest. In this respect the poet's occupation coin- cides with that of the orator. How does the latter attain his end ? By perspicuity, rapid- ity, and energy. 282 Whatever exceeds the ordinary measure of patience must be diligently avoided. . . . 283 The dramatic poet, as well as the orator, must from the very commencement, 284 by strong impres- sions, 285 transport his hearers out of them- selves, and, as it were, take bodily posses- sion of their attention." 288 Poe expresses the same idea when he insists, in his review of Hawthorne's tales, that a short story shall not be so long as to produce weariness in the reader; 287 and subsequently in "The Philos- ophy of Composition," he limited the length of a poetical composition still more severely. 288 Poe, whose literary theories appear to have been formulated in a manner generally to suit his own peculiar literary abilities, was naturally led to deduce from the doctrine of effect its corollary concerning the length of a poem or story, namely, that it should be short — so short that it could be read at one sitting. It is for this reason, according to Poe, that the poem of about one hundred lines and the short story afford the greatest opportunity for achiev- ing excellence. 289 Finally, Poe borrowed from Schlegel illustrations for his arguments, as, for instance, in the case of the Iliad, which both critics assert secures a certain unity of action and totality of effect, not from a cause-and-effect relationship of the events, or the logical sequence of incidents, but rather from a great number of impressions, each separate and distinct from the one that precedes and the one that follows, yet all tending, in the end, to produce an impres- sion or effect on the mind much like the bas-reliefs on a vase, which, while they are seemingly incongruous and isolated, yet give us a sense of unity, a totality of effect. 290 Just as Poe derived from Schlegel his doctrine of effect, so he found Schlegel useful in formulating the theory of unity which underlies all his metaphysical think- ing, especially as it was finally embodied in Eureka. In "The Philosophy of Antiqui- ty" 291 he cites Schlegel, Tennemann, Tiede- mann, and Lampriere as his sources, con- cluding that the point which all these writers have in common is the concept of unity as the elementary principle of ex- istence. 292 Margaret Alterton has pointed out that his immediate source was princi- 408 German Literary Influence pally Tennemann's Manual of the History of Philosophy, for his phraseology is almost identical with that of Tennemann. 293 Eventually Alexander von Humboldt (to whom Poe dedicated Eureka), as well as the cosmological theories of Newton, Leibnitz, Madler, Argelander, Laplace, Herschel, Ferguson, Dick, Coleridge, Whewell, and the encyclopaedic works (old and new), contributed something to Poe's theories embodied in Eureka, but basically Eureka had its inception in Poe's mind chiefly in the concept of unity as derived from Schle- gel and Tennemann. Thus Poe adapted not only themes and motifs from the German Romantiker , but appropriated from the foremost of the Ger- man critics his most important critical principle. It was Schlegel who most pro- foundly influenced Poe's sense of literary form and technique, and it was from Schlegel that Poe adduced the first, and to this day, the most important critical theory that has been formulated for the modern short story, although, in the end, its effect was rather to cramp than to enlarge the sphere of development of that genre. From the very beginning the American short story has drawn important and valuable materials from German literature. It is only fair to add that what it borrowed it often improved. To be sure, Hoffmann and Tieck especially had already made a beginning by going a step beyond the simple hair-raising tales of sensationalism and Gothicism by putting an idea, or allegory, into their narratives. More often, however, German writers of short prose fiction were content to tell their tale for its telling effect with little concern whether there was an idea behind it or enough weight to carry it over. Of technique, in the sense in which Poe conceived it, they knew little, except that somehow, some way, the story must be written so as to hold the reader's attention. In their attempt to do this, they frequently piled ghost on ghost, horror on horror, and absurdity on absurdi- ty (the development of the Novelle as a more legitimate artistic form came later) . Irving, in general, was content to take a German story and transfer it to America, as in the case of "Rip Van Winkle" or "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," whose chief difference from their models (and their chief virtue) lies in the fact that Irving was astute enough to give his tales an authentic setting, flesh-and-blood characters, and a delightful style. Hawthorne, though he cannot be said to have borrowed much directly from the Germans, nevertheless used themes and materials which are decidedly Germanic. In his handling of these materials, he advanced a step beyond Irving by using the Germanic grotesquery merely as a flavoring, a dress in which to clothe his allegory or moral or idea ; and Poe went another step, by adding a clear-cut, workable technique to the short story. Thus we have represented in Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe, the first three stages which German blood-and-thunder material underwent in being transformed into American short stories. Irving used the material as he found it, merely adding a native locale or local color; Hawthorne gave it carrying power and weight by adding an idea; and Poe contributed to the material, and the idea a definite technique in terms of an effect to be created. Thus far the Ger- manic motifs and materials were beneficent for the development of the American short story. For several generations, the form, as imposed by Poe, persisted, until later nine- teenth-century writers — among them Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Sidney Porter — revolting against the strait-jacketing of Poe's set form, struck out on new paths, in the pursuit of which Germanic materials appear to have been of little significance. In its later developments the American short story grew more original by becoming more strictly American. Nineteenth Century Poets, Novelists, and Critics EARLY POETS Drake and Halleck During the closing years of the eight- eenth century American dramatists exploited the more sensational features of Schiller and Kotzebue, and writers of prose fiction created a Wert her -fever of their own, but American lyric and narrative poets before Bryant remained singularly oblivi- ous of Germany, 1 except for a series of adaptations spawned by the story of Werther and Charlotte, several poems on the Lenore-motii, and scattered poetical effusions inspired by the sentimentally pious fare of a Gessner or a Klopstock. Despite his wide reading and a tour of Europe, Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820) made only a passing reference to Germany. 2 His friend, Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), came nearer to German literature, though not near enough for it to produce any marked effect on his poetry. Indeed, when in 1847, the first illustrated edition of his poems appeared, he was commended for having remained true to the natural, indigenous tradition instead of surrendering to "the dreamy and fanciful school of poet- ry to which German literature has given birth" in recent years. 3 Actually, however, he more than once glanced in the direction of the novel effects created by the German school, though he did not find all specimens equally praiseworthy. He disapproved heartily of Faust as "coarse, impious and impure, licentious and blasphemous," but explained "My dislike to [sic] German literature is confined to the 'Faust' of Goethe — the worst book in the strongest sense of the word worst that I have ever read through." 4 For Schiller he had a real fondness, 5 and even Goethe was not alto- gether objectionable, for among the four extant translations or adaptations which he made of German poets, two are from Goethe. While these transliterations be- token a mild interest in German literature spanning a period of nearly forty years, they have little intrinsic importance beyond the pittance they added toward the means by which a steadily growing number of American readers became cognizant of German poetry. James Gates Percival A contemporary who did much more in this vein was James Gates Percival (1795- 1856), a scientist, lexicographer, and stu- dent of literature, who also versified in thirteen languages — among them, German. During his later years at Madison, Wiscon- sin, where he was state geologist, he wrote more verse in German than in English. He learned German about 1820, presumably to read the linguists Bopp and Grimm. Next, he turned to the German philosophers and became one of the first Americans to read Kant in the original. Soon his interest spread to Kotzebue, Lessing, Burger, Voss, and finally to all German writers. 4 William Cullen Bryant By 1835, when William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) first centered his attention on 409 410 German Literary Influence the language and literature of Germany, the poems which every school boy knows and his Lectures on Poetry, which embody his basic and abiding principles of literature, had already been written a decade or more, and the main lines of his literary develop- ment were already well drawn. His turn to Germany produced no radically new direc- tions in either his literary theory or prac- tice ; but, as we shall observe, it did lead to a general broadening and enrichment of his literary personality. Germany, which before 1835 had been for Bryant little more than a geographical or political fact, 7 became an object of interest for him during the first of his six trips to Europe, on five of which he included Germany in his itinerary. On his first European tour (1835) he entered Germany by way of the Tyrol. 8 The interest thus aroused led him to compose and publish, over a period of almost forty years, trans- lations of nine German poems 9 — exactly equaling the number of his translations from the Spanish. Although Bryant was, especially during the earlier years of his journalistic career, all but preoccupied with other matters, he kept at his German. 10 Professor Tremaine McDowell thinks that Bryant's first visit to Germany encouraged him to "dabble in blood," 11 in such poems as "The Strange Lady," "The Hunter's Vision," and "A Presentiment." 12 One later poem that can properly be regarded as written under Germanic influence is "The Song of the Sower" (1859). It is much like Schiller's "Song of the Bell" in form, in the order of thought, and in the universaliza- tion of its theme, the fruitfulness of labor. While there are a few verbal and figurative similarities, a closer relationship is recog- nizable in the general theme, the tone, and the structure of the two poems. For the rest, Bryant manifested an active interest in German literature and Germany generally. 13 He appeared on a number of public occasions to pay tribute to German achievements, and became known as an enthusiast for German culture. 14 In his commanding position as editor of the New York Evening Post and as a poet and critic of weight and influence, Bryant helped signally in acclimatizing German literary culture by presenting to his fellow-Amer- icans a once strongly suspect literature as the veritable embodiment of respectability and gentility, a knowledge of which came to be the mark of a cultivated man. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882) Among the major American men of letters of his generation Longfellow is most deeply imbued with the spirit of Ger- man sentiment and song; and that is so because, more than any other, he was by temperament naturally susceptible to Ger- man literary influence, because he lived himself into the life of Germany during his periods of residence there, and because he consciously indulged his fondness for Ger- man literature after his return from abroad. 13 First Trip to Europe, 1826-1829 The mounting enthusiasm in the vicinity of Boston for German literature had not yet penetrated very deeply the quiet, orthodox atmosphere of Bowdoin when Longfellow graduated in 1825 ; but the offer of the new- ly created professorship of modern lan- guages at his alma mater, together with the suggestion that the eighteen-year-old pro- fessor-elect prepare himself for the post by studying abroad for a year, resulted in his seeking the advice of George Ticknor, who urged him to include Germany in his itinerary. 16 In Paris, where he spent the first eight months, he found it difficult to fix his attention on studious pursuits. Dissatisfied Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 411 with his progress in French, he yearned for the reputedly more romantic Spain. His half-year in Spain was spent mainly in Madrid, where he did not neglect to get letters from Irving to Rumigny, Bottiger, and Lowenstein in Dresden. His father, reading between the lines of his son's letters and recognizing a vacillating, romantic state of mind, recommended industry and economy at the same time urging that he proceed to Germany: "the German lan- guage will be more important to you as a literary man than any two other lan- guages." But young Longfellow managed by stratagems and excuses (valid and otherwise) to indulge his romantic fancies for a full year in Italy (chiefly in Rome) before yielding to his father's entreaties that he push on to Germany. Even a letter from his Bowdoin classmate, Ned Preble, an- nouncing his arrival at Gottingen and urg- ing Longfellow to join him, had little effect, until news from his father that Bowdoin had changed the offer of a professorship to an instructorship, at a greatly reduced salary, roused him out of his lethargy and recalled to him the need for making the most of the little time that remained for the acquisition of German. After a brief visit to Venice and Trieste, he set out via Vienna and Prague for Dresden, meanwhile debat- ing whether to follow Irving's advice to settle there or to push on to Gottingen. Irving's advice bore weight, all the more now that he was forming ideas for a Sketch Book in imitation of Irving's. 17 But at the end of a month in Dresden he was lonesome, homesick, and generally discontented. Dresden, he concluded, held "several in- conveniences for a studious life" ; moreover, Ned Preble beckoned from Gottingen. After paying calls to those who had be- friended him, he left Dresden and arrived in Gottingen on February 23, 1829. 18 Arrival in Gottingen brought the realiza- tion that his pleasant tour of Europe, already of three years' duration, must end soon; it could not go on — "a song sung between acts." He determined to put an end to all vacillation and stop gathering nosegays and picturesque impressions. When he asked himself whether he was as well qualified to teach the foreign languages and literatures as Professor Ticknor was teaching them at Harvard, he shuddered. So he set to work to make up as much of the lost time of the past three years as possible in the few months that remained. If the Bowdoin matter should turn out badly and he missed the professorship, he would be thrown altogether on his own resources. In his diary he wrote: "I've kept close to my studies, almost to not going out of the house, and not allowing my eyes to wander from my book to look at the beautiful and modest Miss Young, my compatriot who lives across the street." 19 What he did not say was that he was spending most of his time acquiring what he had neglected in France, Spain, and Italy, and that practi- cally all the books which he was drawing from the University library dealt with the literatures of these countries rather than with German literature. 20 It is difficult to make an accurate appraisal of his linguistic achievements at Gottingen. Despite his resolutions, he did not attend as closely to his studies as Tick- nor or Cogswell before him had done. He left Gottingen with little of the Sprachge- fiihl that he acquired seven years later at Heidelberg; still he came away, after a month in Dresden and three months in Gottingen, with some facility in the lan- guage, as is evident from the numerous, usually idiomatically correct German pas- sages with which the pages of his journals and letters are studded. 21 The Bowdoin Period, 1829-1835 The controversy over his professorial rank and salary at Bowdoin having been settled to Longfellow's satisfaction, he entered upon his duties there in August of 1829, but soon found his position anything 412 German Literary Influence but a sinecure. 22 German had a less promi- nent place in the curriculum than French and Spanish, but he managed to keep alive his interest in the language and its literature. In the meantime, he returned to his plan, first formed at Gottingen, to write "a kind of Sketch-Book of France, Spain and Italy." By March 9, 1833, he had enlarged the scope to include Germany, and in July of the same year appeared the first number of Outre-Mer, published in book form in 1835. Concerned though he is in this book prima- rily with romance materials, yet his ex- periences in Germany contributed more than a dash of German flavor. 23 In spite of his success as a teacher, the satisfactions of an academic career, and a happy marriage, Longfellow was never really contented at Bowdoin. 24 He was hardly settled when he began looking for a better post. Carefully prosecuted relations with his friends at Harvard came to a fruit- ful conclusion in December, 1834, when President Quincy informed him of Profes- sor Ticknor's impending retirement from the Smith Professorship of Modern Lan- guages and of Longfellow's election to the position. He concluded with the suggestion that Longfellow prepare himself for the office by going to Europe for "a year or 18 months" at his own expense "for the pur- pose of a more perfect attainment of the German." Second European Tour, 1835-1836 On April 10, 1835, Longfellow and his wife, accompanied by Miss Clara Crownin- shield and Miss Mary C. Goddard, sailed from New York for London, where they enjoyed a month of sight-seeing and liter- ary sociality. 25 Before setting out for Ger- many, Longfellow and his party proceeded via Hamburg, Copenhagen, and Gothen- burg, to Stockholm, where they arrived at the end of June and spent most of the summer. 28 On arriving at Amsterdam (Oc- tober 1), following a rough passage, his wife was brought to the verge of death by the premature birth of her child, and the party was detained for nearly a month before proceeding via the Hague and Delft to Rotterdam, where Mary Longfellow again fell ill. While awaiting her expected recov- ery, he busied himself with Dutch, already begun at Amsterdam, and made occasional forays also into the Scandinavian litera- tures. 27 So he kept himself occupied until November 24, when his wife took a turn for the worse. Five days later she died. Dis- traught, he made the last arrangements for sending her body to America, and on De- cember 2 he left, with Clara Crowninshield, for Heidelberg, where he hoped that immer- sion in books would occupy his mind to the exclusion of all other thoughts. He proceeded rapidly up the Rhine and on December 11 arrived in Heidelberg, 28 where he took lodgings in the pleasant home of Frau Himmelhahn, who appears under that name as the aged Heidelberg gossip in the first edition of Hyperion (altered to "old Frau Himmelauen" in later editions). 29 Suffering the pangs of self-accusation and remorse for having insisted on leaving at once on the European journey against the advice of his parents, and well-nigh crushed by his loss, he sought forgetfulness in seri- ous study. He had come well provided with letters to Heidelberg celebrities, and there was a round of visitations to professorial homes. 30 He lost no time resuming his study of the language, and before the end of 1835 could "hold his own eloquently in German discussions." 31 In the area of modern German literature Longfellow contented himself for the time being with browsing more or less at random, as when, on December 18, he busied him- self with a "little work containing Schleier- macher's Letters on Friedrich Schlegel's romance of Lucinde." But with the begin- ning of the new year, he began a more systematic study of German literature 32 — in pursuit of a plan to prepare a "Handbook" or "Syllabus" of the "Literature of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 413 Middle Ages" from the close of the fifth to the end of the fifteenth century. 33 Beyond this systematic study of earlier German literature, his diary reveals that he read a remarkable array of works. 34 Among them all, Goethe affected him most profoundly. With Clara he selected sixteen of the best of Goethe's lyrics for her album and himself read widely enough to catch the essential spirit of German lyric poetry. 35 However important his discovery of the lyrical quality of German song was for the development of his own poetic craftsman- ship, what is of more immediate signifi- cance is the effect upon him of his dis- covery of the deeper meaning of Goethe. He read Faust (with Clara), Egmont, Werther, Wilhelm Meister, Eckermann's Gesprdche, Dichtung und Wahrheit, "Das Marchen", and Die Geschwister. The last, "trifling" though he considered its literary merits, yet contained "one or two touches of pathos, that brought tears into my eyes, and recalled the affection and devoted love of one that is gone." 36 He devoured The Sorrows of Werther and, though admitting that "such books are not favorites of mine" because they "leave in the soul . . . unrest and pain," he found the language and imagery "beautiful," and insisted that persons possessing "intellect" and "tender- ness of heart" found the "peculiar tone of such books" altogether "ideal." 37 The senti- ment of German romantic literature pre- sented a mood that he could appropriate to his own heartache. He found his mood most perfectly reciprocated in Novalis, the young tragic poet who had wept alone over the grave of his beloved in the twilight and composed "Hymns to the Night" very much like some of the Voices of the Night that were beginning to shape themselves in the mind of the young American poet who also had loved and lost. He began to under- stand the language of the German romantic sentiment and to accept the mystical com- munion which Novalis established with the spirit of his departed beloved in the holy solitude of night. 38 The Sturm-und-Drang literature of sentiment perfectly accorded with his mood; and he read into Werther, Meister, Faust I, Fouqu6's Undine, Jean Paul's Titan, and Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen the story of his own life. The tragedy of Mary Longfellow's death was a humanizing experience that developed his emotional susceptibilities and prepared him for the keener intellectual perceptions and spiritual insights which he was soon to develop under the stimulus of Goethe's more strenuous doctrine of renunciation and persistence. 39 As he read the German romantic poets, he saw a great diversity among them — even within individual ones of them. For example it seemed odd that Werther and Wilhelm Meister could both have been conceived by the same mind. The affinity that Longfel- low's bleeding heart felt for the sorrowing Werther was neutralized by the New Englander's dislike of Werther's motives and actions. They seemed weak, pagan, terrible. 40 A work like Wilhelm Meister left an entirely different effect on his mind. It taught a doctrine of resolution, faith, work, and presented a pattern of conduct which Longfellow could appropriate to himself. Meister's life and Goethe's simple lyrics taught him much that he would not have understood a year earlier. 41 But he worked too steadily and soon felt exhausted. When Greene's young cousin, gay Samuel Ward, paused in his travels at Heidelberg, he awakened in Longfellow the Wandertrieb, which the approach of spring conspired to augment. He made several short excur- sions, 42 but by June 20 he recorded in his diary: "Torpor steals over me again. . . . My mind has lost its sensibility and does not feel the spur. I cannot study : and therefore think I had better go home." But because his friend Greene was still in Italy, he de- cided to travel through Austria, Switzer- land, and across the Alps, instead of pro- ceeding directly for America. Leaving Hei- delberg on June 25, he began what proved 414 German Literary Influence a joyless trip, all set down later in Hyperion with sufficient circumstantiality to serve as a guidebook for any traveler who wishes to follow the same route. 43 Toward the end of July he joined the Appletons; two days later he wrote: "I now for the first time enjoy Switzerland," while Frances Apple- ton confided to her diary: "Have a nice walk with Mr. Longfellow to the old bridge. . . . Sketched. ... A nice talk, delicious twilight." They sketched, they walked, they read poetry together: "Uhland and Count Auersberg [sic], till dinner." Longfellow accompanied them for a week of travel to Lake Lucerne, Zurich, and Schaffhausen. My propitious star [he wrote] placed me in Mr. Appleton's travelling carriage with the two young ladies, who are all intellect and feeling. I cannot say what kind of country we passed through, for I hardly looked from the carriage window. . . . Our conversation was all that is gentle and fair ; and we read the Genevieve of Coleridge, and the Christabel; and many other scraps of song; and the little German ballads of Uhland, simple and strange. And all this to me is a passion — a delight, strong and unchanging. Fanny wrote more laconically: "Read German, Coleridge, etc., all the morning and saw no scenery." Later in the day, Longfellow's soul was still "filled with peace and gladness," but not many hours later came the enigmatic observation : "... and finally — Damnation." 44 This passage, read in conjunction with Book III, Chapter IX, of Hyperion, suggests that the young widower had overreached himself by the expression of some ardent sentiment and had been effectively checked by the young lady from Beacon Street. However, the journey went on, and so did the joint sketching, reading, and translating. 45 After nearly three weeks of such pleasant occupa- tions, they stopped at Schaffhausen, where he received a peremptory letter from the faithful Clara (still in Heidelberg, and "out of patience waiting for an escort to Amer- ica") that recalled him to his duty. Con- science-stricken, he tore himself away, and in three days reached Heidelberg, whence, a week later, they went via Paris to Le Havre and sailed on October 8, 1836. 48 Cambridge, 1836-1842 Early in December, 1836, Longfellow took lodgings at Dr. Stearns' in Professors' Row in Kirkland Street, Cambridge, where C. C. Felton, the professor of Greek, also had his quarters, and prepared for his duties that were to begin with the opening of the second college term in January, 1837. How- ever arduous his work became later, for the time being he had little to do but prepare a course of lectures. 47 He found time to see a good deal of Boston society and to act and dress the part of a dandy — enough to occasion some criticism in the sober Cam- bridge community; he seldom found it necessary to study at night. 48 Meanwhile he worked leisurely on a "course of lectures on German literature, to be delivered next summer": "I do not write them out, but make notes and translations. ... In this course something of the Danish and Swedish (the new feathers in my cap) is to be mingled." 49 On May 23, 1837, at the beginning of what was called the "first summer term," he gave the first of his series of "public Lectures." Seniors were required to attend, and members of the Law and Divinity schools were admitted. The discourses were liberally interspersed with translations (including his own), ranging from short pieces from Matthisson to a four-page selection of what Professor Hatfield calls "a rather astounding attempt at a trans- lation of the original Hildebrandslied." 50 Among the manuscript materials pre- served in Craigie House are two bulky sets of lecture notes that can be identified with these early discourses. The notes on Goethe are the most extensive of the lot — as they should be. It is worth observing that in thus Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 415 emphasizing Goethe, Longfellow was mak- ing an innovation at Harvard, for Goethe was still very much suspect, and Dr. Follen earlier had concentrated on Schiller and Korner, so that Longfellow was the first to introduce him effectively there. 51 His opinion of Goethe the man and poet was one of increasing sympathy. The unanimity of critical opinion against Goethe played its part in setting him against certain aspects of Goethe at the beginning; for, though he arrived at some of his judgments indepen- dently, 52 he neither exhibited much bold- ness or originality as a critic nor showed much interest in first principles and ac- cordingly found it relatively easy to accept established opinion. Constitutionally con- servative, he fell easily into the grooves of the genteel tradition as it was being formal- ized among his immediate friends at Har- vard. He owed these men everything — including his position. And when he went with Felton to call on the Rev. Andrews Norton, he stepped warily when the discus- sion turned to the latest "infidel" philoso- phy of Germany which the "transcenden- tal" Emerson was just now making bold to proclaim within the hallowed precincts of Harvard halls. When Norton thundered against the "Newness," Longfellow, who had neglected to inquire into these matters while in Germany, found it easier to nod a quiet assent than to offer contrary opinions on a subject about which he knew little. He must have felt that much of what was charged against the new school of thought was owing to traditional prejudice, but he was not one to speak out of turn. Similarly, when in the spring of 1839, Professor Felton brought over to Craigie House (whither Longfellow had transferred his quarters in August of 1837) his translation of Menzel's History of German Literature, seeking Long- fellow's help and advice, Longfellow, whose lectures showed him forming a steadily more sympathetic and liberal attitude toward Goethe, suffered a relapse of critical opinion . Menzel's critical judgments of Goethe seemed authoritative ; and rather than trust to his own lights, Longfellow, then engaged on Hyperion, chose to present for public inspection the established opinions of Men- zel rather than his own faltering conclu- sions. As things turned out, it was well that the book did not stir up a literary, or moral, controversy over Goethe, for the sentimen- tal issue between himself and Frances Appleton (thinly veiled in the romance between Paul Fleming and Mary Ashbur- ton) made trouble enough. But the fact remains that from a critical point of view, at least where Goethe is concerned, Hype- rion is a botch. The real opinion of Long- fellow is mixed up with that of Wolfgang Menzel and of current American judgment in degrees and proportions to leave the impression blurred. Paul Fleming, gener- ally to be identified with Longfellow, usu- ally represents the conservative moralist's point of view, which leads him to condemn Goethe's private life and the "immorality" of his works, while praising his craftsman- ship. In the end, although many attitudes are presented, nothing is settled. The only conclusion possible is that Longfellow, at the age of thirty-two, did not know his own mind, or if he did, dared not avow it. At the beginning of Chapter VIII of Book II, the Baron, generally Goethe's advocate, sets the stage for the argument by proclaiming "Goethe was a magnificent fellow." Only think of his life; his youth of pas- sion, alternately aspiring and desponding, stormy, impetuous, headlong; — his roman- tic manhood, in which passion assumes the form of strength ; assiduous, careful, toiling, without haste, without rest [Goethe's 'Ohne Hast . . . ohne Rast'] ; — and his sublime old age, — -the age of serene and classic repose, where he stands like Atlas, as Claudian painted him in the Battle of the Giants, holding the world aloft upon his head, the ocean-streams hard frozen in his hoary locks. 53 Granted [replies Fleming]. What you glorify is what the world calls his indiffer- entism. It is precisely that in him, this cold 416 German Literary Influence detachment and self-culture in him, that I condemn. And do you know [says the Baron] I rather like this indifferentism ? Did you never have the misfortune to live in a community, where a difficulty in the parish seemed to announce the end of the world ? or to know one of the benefactors of the human race, in the very storm and pressure period of his indiscreet enthusiasm ? If you have, I think you will see something beauti- ful in the calm and dignified attitude which the old philosopher assumes. An interesting example of how Longfel- low transferred materials from his lectures to the book Hyperion is found in the con- cluding passage of his introductory lecture on Goethe: And now tell me, young men, what do you think of it ? From your own experience in the world — is it not best to take things coolly ? . . . Have you never been in a troublesome community where a difficulty in the parish seemed to announce the end of all things ? Have you never had the mis- fortune to know a fussy, indiscreet individu- al, whose bread-and-butter enthusiasm almost made you fall on your knees and implore peace ? . . . How calmly the philos- opher stands amid all this and says: that the best way to reform the world is to do one's own duty, and not the duty of others. Let each one labor in his sphere! 54 It would seem that while many of his friends still withheld their enthusiasm for Goethe's philosophy of life, Longfellow was viewing Goethe indulgently and with enough sympathy to defend him before his students. But obviously, these sentiments, uttered before adolescents in the semi- privacy of a classroom, was one thing; to publish them, where adults might read the opinions of Paul Fleming, whom every- body would identify as the Smith Professor at Harvard, was another matter. Prudence as the better part of valor won : the German Baron, who was beyond the reach of public attack, became the mouthpiece of these disturbing, if not dangerous, opinions; while the Harvard Professor preferred to have himself interpreted as repeating the moral platitudes of contemporary gentility. One would like to believe that some of Paul Fleming's utterances are made tongue- in-cheek, but the instances where Long- fellow braved the prevailing winds of doc- trine are so few that the possibility is hardly admissible. After Fleming expressed the wish that more of Goethe's defenders and defamers might practice Goethe's "philosophic cool- ness," instead of heaping ridiculous titles and epithets upon him, 55 the Baron observes "I confess he was no saint." Fleming, pick- ing up the cue, does precisely what he has just condemned in the critics of Goethe, and breaks forth with some vehemence: "What I most object to ... is his sensuality." The Baron has his answer ready (and there is something of Longfellow's own opinion in what he says) : "Oh nonsense! Nothing can , be purer than the Iphigenia. . . . Goethe is an artist, and looks upon all things as objects of art merely." Still Fleming de- murs : "The artist shows his character in the choice of his subject. Goethe . . . gives us only sinful Magdalens and rampant Fauns. He does not so much idealize as realize." To this the Baron replies simply, "He only \ copies nature." Here again the Baron has appropriated portions of the lecture notes of Professor Longfellow, who, discussing Goethe's style, spoke from the following notations: Style: Looked upon all things as objects of art. Realized, not idealized. Reflection of earth lies nearer us than that of heaven. We take little thought of the moral impression. All we can require of the artist is not to choose immoral themes. Naturalness. No effect, no struggle for effect. "Immer hab' ich nur geschrieben Wie ich's fiihle, wie ich's meine." 56 On the score of Goethe's philosophy of art, Professor Longfellow was ready to play the devil's advocate before his stu- dents; but in Hyperion he judiciously put such sentiments into the mouth of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 417 irresponsible Baron. Fleming goes on to belabor Goethe, but is ready to agree that Menzel "goes too far" when he blames Goethe for being neither "politician" nor "missionary." 5 ' The running argument between Fleming and the Baron continues with further references to Goethe's life, his fame and influence, and finally ends when, passing a shop and seeing a full-length cast of Goethe in the display window, Fleming says : "But let us step in here. I wish to buy that cast." This is a poetization of Long- fellow's buying in 1836 at Heidelberg the statuette of Goethe which stood, and still stands, on Longfellow's high study desk in Craigie House. What has been detailed of Longfellow's patchwork process of bookmaking in the chapter on Goethe applies also to other chapters in Hyperion, notably those on Jean Paul, on the Lives of the Scholars, and on Literary Fame, all in Book I. The same method is used in the sketch of an artist's life in Rome and the picture of the Middle Ages (both in Book III) and in the chapter on Hoffmann of the last book. During the second term of his second year at Harvard (1837-1838) Longfellow began his course on Dante, 68 and another on "Literature and Literary Life" was initiated on May 2, 1838. Precisely what the course included is not clear because the notes are no longer intact. Apparently he placed particular stress on German authors, the extant notes on Goethe, Jean Paul, Hoff- mann, Tieck, Engel, and German popular tales being especially detailed and complete. The extent and proportion in which these were combined for the several courses during the years cannot now be deter- mined, 59 but we can generalize regarding his lectures on German subjects to this extent: they show Longfellow "as a pioneer and prophet in the systematic presentation of German writers to the American public." His estimates, not usually profound, some- times show an "uneven" or "dispropor- tionate" emphasis, 60 but errors are rare, and his judgments are fresh, derived from first- hand reading of primary sources. He steered clear of the "misty or rhapsodic phrases of the German critics," though in their de- livery his lectures were perhaps a bit too much in the nature of "a dish of delicious and dainty devices," or, as young Hale put it, "too flowery." 61 On rare occasions the young professor permitted his erudition to get the better of his good sense of sound classroom technique by bringing in far- fetched allusions or questionable deriva- tions; yet, on the whole, he succeeded in maintaining a sprightly style and avoiding the conventionally academic tone. In his first lecture on Goethe he stated his purpose and kept it steadily in mind in a manner that would delight the lesson-planners of today: it was to show "how Goethe, from a buoyant, cloud-capt youth, perfected him- self, into a free, benignant, lofty-minded man." To illustrate, he translated the "Wanderer's Song in a Storm," and by way of recapitulation, he said: In Goethe's development there are three periods : (1) 1749-1776: Youthful passion, as- piring, desponding, infinite longings. (2) 1 776-1 786: Fiery passion under control; passion assumes form of strength. (3) 1786-1832: Classic repose: 'to stand like Atlas in the Battle of the Giants.' This last period is the important one. 62 All in all, Longfellow's novel manner of introducing German writers to college students was a radical departure from the traditional pedagogic procedure. 63 Obviously Goethe had a sympathetic and learned friend in this young professor, who worked seriously and lovingly at his task of indoctrinating successive classes of Har- vard undergraduates, and who, if he had had more allies in equally strategic positions elsewhere, would have materially advanced the day when Goethe received an unpreju- diced reception in America. Interested as 418 German Literary Influence Longfellow was in many German writers, there was never, after he went to Cambridge, any doubt in his mind about Goethe's pre- eminence; and as his annual Goethe lectures became an institution, the feeling grew that not Schiller or Heine, not Luther or Kant, but Goethe was the German mind most deserving of attention. 64 While the regular repetition of his lectures on Goethe and the attendant steady mental occupation with his life and work alone might have led Longfellow eventually to jockeying himself into the position of regarding Goethe supreme, there were other, intrinsically more valid reasons for his championship of Goethe. However unlike he and Goethe were, Longfellow developed, especially during his own years of Storm and Stress (just before his second marriage) an ever growing and deeper appreciation of the applicability of Goethe's key doctrines to his own problems. As his aesthetic suscepti- bilities enlarged and his moral perceptions became liberalized (both partially under Goethean influence), Goethe the "Old Heathen" or "Old Humbug" assumed the stature, first, of a worldly-wise "German Horace," 65 perhaps only "a rhymed Ben Franklin," 66 but withal "a glorious speci- men of a man"; 67 next, "the greatest name in German literature" 68 and finally, a "god," 69 for whom he acknowledged having as late as 1871, "an ever-ascending regard."' Longfellow never found his position at Harvard an easy one, and during the years before 1843, when his persistence finally broke down Frances Appleton's resistance, he endured frustration, unrest, indecision, and inner conflicts in proportions and de- grees symptomatic of Teutonic Sturm und Drang. His immersion in the romantic literature of Germany did much to nourish his perturbation. His love of Frances Appleton, nurtured amid the romantic surroundings of their first meeting in Ger- many, remained invested in the sentiment of German romance. Rebuffed, yet unwill- ing to give up, he carried on a correspond- ence with Mary Appleton regarding their common interests in Heine, German popu- lar tales, Faust, and his literary plans (which seem to have included a design to write "a Faust-in-New-England sort of play"), and did not neglect to intimate his hope that Mary would intercede in his behalf with her sister. Choosing the German idiom as appropriate to the sentiment he hardly dared express, he wrote: Ach, du schone Seele! Es wird mir gar traurig zu Muthe, wenn ich daran denke, und sehe, wie der schone Traum dahin zieht, — wie die Wolke sich theilt, und in Thranen zerfliesst, und um mich wird alles so leer, und in meiner Seele eine dunkle Nacht — eine dunkle sternlose Nacht ! — Und dass [sic] hab' ich Dir auf Deutsch sagen mussen, weil eine fremde Sprache ist eine Art von Dammerung und Mondlicht, worin man den Frauenzimmern allerlei sagen kann — und so herzlich treu ! Eben so herzlich griisse mir die liebe, liebe Fanny, die ich immer liebe, wie meine eigene Seele. Ach! dass [sic] bisschen Verstand, das einer ha- ben mag, kommt wenig oder gar nicht in Anschlag, wenn Leidenschaft wiithet. Wie wird mir das Herz so voll! — Das letzte Mai, das wir zusammen waren, gingen wir aus einander ohne einander verstanden zu haben: denn 'auf dieser Welt keiner leicht den andern versteht.' Und dass [sic] is gar zu traurig. 71 The quotation near the end of this pas- sage is from the last sentence in Werther's letter, dated August 12, and the whole is cast into a decidedly Wertherish tone — a reflection of his reading. There can be no doubt that his lovesickness was real enough, but the record of that period of Long- fellow's life as revealed by Professor Thompson and as reflected in Hyperion makes it equally clear that his unhappiness was aggravated rather than assuaged by the literature of sentiment and romance in which he dwelt. Searching for a course of action that should alleviate his suffering, he only worked himself deeper into his gloomy thoughts. With Hawthorne he planned a book of tales and legends to be called The Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 419 Wonder Horn. Its relation to the Arnim- Brentano Wander -Horn, which had thrilled him at Heidelberg, is not hard to discover, but nothing came of the plan. Numerous other literary projects all came to naught. Nothing could draw his attention for long from the unapproachable "Dark Ladie" in Beacon Street, and, what was almost as bad, his recurring moods of grief and loss and disturbing questionings regarding what the future course of his life should be — poet, teacher, scholar, or what ? Sitting discon- solately in his Craigie House study and pondering the past and the future, life and death and the life hereafter, as he did with increasing frequency since Mary's death, he lapsed, on the evening of his thirty-first birthday, into that vague mood, compound- ed of nighttime and otherworldliness which he had found so moving in Novalis and Matthisson. Sorrow, which had taught him to look into his heart, also drove him into a dream-world refuge where the mystical experiences of the night conjured up "forms of the dear departed," a "Being Beaute- ous," who entered at the open door to take "the vacant chair" beside him and to "lay her gentle hand" in his. This is the mood that evoked the poem, "Evening Shadows," in which, following Novalis, he sought a kind of escape into the twilight of a world of phantoms that only prolonged his agony. In the meantime his occupation with Goethe, notably Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and Dichtung und Wahrheit, taught him Goethe's sterner lesson of growth, through control of passion, to ultimate peace. But he found it easier to tell his students to emulate Goethe's perseverance in the struggle for self-conquest by doing what lies near than to follow that gospel himself. He struggled against morbidity and told himself repeatedly that one must "bear one's self doughtily in Life's battle and make the best of things" as they are. While reading Wilhelm Meister he wrote into his diary the maxims which had enabled Wil- helm to progress from an apprentice to a craftsman: "A man is never happy till his vague striving has marked out its proper limitation." "It is not of yourself that you must think, but of what surrounds you." "The safe plan is, always simply to do the task that lies nearest us." 72 In Faust (11. 558-59) he found repeated the famous motto of Hippocrates, "Life is short, and art is long," that he had himself quoted in Outre-Mer. 73 So he concluded, "Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient — therefore, be doing." 74 Saturated with these ideas, he tried, on June 27, 1838, to set down this creed in "A Psalm of Life." 75 That this adaptation of Goethe's so-called carpe diem philosophy, combined with the Tatigkeit morality of Faust and Meister, was conscious appears in his first reading the poem at the close of one of his lectures on Goethe, evidently intending to emphasize the part of Goethe's message that impressed him most forcibly at the time. That it did so impress him is evident from his own observation: "I kept it ['A Psalm of Life'] for some time in manuscript, unwilling to show it to anyone, it being a voice from my inmost heart, at a time when I was rallying from depression." 76 The parallels in a few instances are ver- bal. Goethe's "Die Kunst ist lang, und kurz ist unser Leben" 77 is very close to Long- fellow's "Art is long, and Time is fleeting." 78 And his line, "Let the dead Past bury its dead" is close enough to Goethe's "Lass das Vergangene vergangen sein" (Faust I, 1. 4518) to be recognized as an influence. Other parallelisms are not strictly verbal ; yet one senses in the entire stanza in which the last-quoted line appears at once a reminiscence and a re-embodiment of the oft-repeated counsel of Goethe: Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act, — act in the living Present! Heart within, and God o'erhead! 79 But his battle was far from won, however often he told himself he must work in the 420 German Literary Influence present, must write himself clear of his troubles. There was no dearth of plans and projects, 80 none of which materialized ex- cept that his "Psalms" and "Ballads" were appearing in the newspapers and that his romance Hyperion (presenting the pageant of his bleeding heart) was given to the public in August of 1839. "I have written a Romance during the last year," he an- nounced to his friend Greene, "into which I have put my feelings, my hopes and suffer- ings for the last three years. . . . The book is a reality ; not a shadow or a ghostly sem- blance of a book." 81 He had noticed in Goethe's life the same central idea upon which Faust and Wilhelm Meister turn. Following Goethe's example in the latter, he set himself to write an EntwicklungsYoman, largely autobiographi- cal in nature and showing "the passage of a morbid mind into a purer and healthier state." 82 Hyperion develops the same cen- tral theme already expressed in "A Psalm of Life." Both illustrate his tendency to identify his own problems with those ex- pressed in his favorite German books. In his Harvard lectures he dwelt on the threefold pattern of growth as exhibited in Goethe's character and as developed alike in Faust, in Wilhelm Meister, and in Dichtung und Wahrheit.* 3 Carefully pondering the mes- sage, he grasped and appropriated to his own problem Goethe's emphasis on the ennobling power gained through suffering. Already he felt better, and writing to Hillard, he spoke of his happy recovery from his "late serious accident in Beacon street" ; yet characteristic of his still fluctuating moods, he closed the letter with a quotation from Wilhelm Meister: Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours Weeping upon his bed has sate, He knows you not, ye heavenly powers. 84 The genetic relation between Wilhelm Meister and Hyperion is suggested by his using this quatrain as the motto for the first edition of Hyperion. Complementary evi- dence appears in the Baron's characteri- zation of Paul Fleming: . . . you have a rakish look . . . you carry a cane, and your hair curls. Your gloves, also, are a shade too light for a strictly virtuous man. . . . Why the women already call you Wilhelm Meister. 85 When Longfellow first reached Cam- bridge, he affected the dress and manner of Wilhelm Meister, so that in the staid and sober Cambridge society he "was not ex- empt from some social criticism"; and when he applied to Mrs. Craigie for rooms, she thought he had "somewhat too gay a look," and supposing him a student, at first refused to take him in. 88 In 1840, recalling the figure he had cut in Heidelberg society during the winter of 1835-1836, while participating in musical evenings and whist parties at the Hepp home, he sent a letter to the sprightly Julie Hepp, which he signed significantly "Wilhelm Meister": Meine liebe Freundin! Der IJberbringer dieses ist der Herr Shaw aus Boston. Er wird den Winter in Heidel- berg zubringen, und ich weiss ihm kein grosseres Vergniigen dort zu verschaffen als ihre Bekanntschaft. Er ist von einer sehr ansehnlichen Familie, hat viel Talent, und einen schonen Charakter. Ich bin uberzeugt dass Er Ihnen gefallen wird. Ich danke Ihnen recht sehr fur Ihren lieben Brief des 26 Feb. Immer mit Freude denk' ich mich in Heidelberg zuriick: und wahrscheinlich werden wir uns noch einmal dort treffen. Das wird aber nicht diesen Winter geschehen, also schicke ich Ihnen diesen jungen Freund um meinen Platz in ihrem Herzen und in den Whist Parthien zu behalten bis ich wiederkomme. Unterdessen rede ich mit Ihnen in den Stimmen der Nacht die ich Ihnen hiniiber schicke, als ein Hauch von meiner Seele. Ade! liebes Fraulein! Meine schonsten Empfehlungen an die Frau Mutter, Evchen und Eduard. Clara [Crowninshield] ist in Portland, dreissig Meilen von hier; immer wohl und immer geheimnisvoll, wie die Heldin eines franzosischen Romans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 421 Und so gute Nacht! Mit treuer Anhang- lichkeit, Ihr ganz ergebener Wilhelm Meister 87 Cambridge, den 28. Sept. 1840. These circumstances help to explain why Longfellow proceeded to depict in Hyperion his bewilderment and loneliness following the death of Mary and the turmoil of mind occasioned by his unrequited love for Frances Appleton in terms of the soul of a youth, sustained by high aspirations, sur- mounting all suffering and reaching a victory far greater than Werther's "shoot- ing-himself" — more like Wilhelm Meister 's triumph over vain strivings to attain the victory. From this point of view, which (as Longfellow said) "is the point," 88 Hyperion is but another sermon preached on the same text of renunciation, practicality, and action — already embodied in the "Psalms." To supplement his travel experiences, 89 Longfellow added the fruits of his intensive reading at Heidelberg. 90 Especially note- worthy in this connection are the German lyrics and the spirit of German song that pervades the entire book. The Baron, "in morning gown and purple-velvet slippers,'' is discovered lying on the sofa, strumming the guitar and "humming his favorite song from Goethe: The water rushed, the water swelled, A fisher sat thereby." 91 And it is with equal naturalness that the Polish Count serenades Emma of Ilmenau, in a manner and under circumstances like those in the scene of Faust where Mephis- topheles sings before Margaret's door. In this instance the song is "those beautiful lines which Goethe wrote on the wall of the summer-house at Ilmenau," which Long- fellow renders O'er all the hill tops is quiet now! In all the woodlands hearest thou Hardly a sound! The little birds are asleep in the trees; Wait! wait! and soon, like these, Sleepest thou. 92 For the rest, he incorporated into his romance long sections of his college lectures on Goethe and Jean Paul, Hoffmann and others, usually casting them into the form of argumentative conversations between Fleming and the Baron. To enliven the book he liberally introduced anecdotal material drawn from the lives of German literary men. The most obvious stylistic influence on Hyperion is that of Jean Paul, 93 rather in the nature of a momentary sus- ceptibility to the stylistic features of Rich- ter than an abiding influence. None of Long- fellow's later works exhibits a like influ- ence. What goes more directly to the heart of the book — its burden of thought, or its central idea — is more properly related to Goethe. As Goethe had demonstrated in his own life, as well as in Fauct, Wilhelm Meis- ter, and Dichtung und Wahrheit, so it was Longfellow's intention to portray a restless and agitated youth, filled with indefinite longings and unrealizable yearnings in an unknown Future, working his way out of doubt, irresolution, and despair, by Goethe's calm gospel of renunciation and the simple philosophy of working in the Present. 94 In so far as Hyperion was designed as a means to write himself clear of his troubles and to effect, possibly, a change of heart and capitulation in Frances Appleton, the book was, of course, a huge paradox— a circum- stance of which he was probably only vaguely conscious at the time. To win her, who had "no talent for matrimony," by telling her in a book of three hundred pages that he desired nothing more than to forget her — to shed no more tears over unrequited love — that was surely a dubious procedure. The entire book seemed to enforce the climactic point of Suckling's poem (which Longfellow had the tactless temerity to quote in full), that since "nothing will make her, The devil take her!" 96 A week before the book appeared he confessed his fear (as well he might) that the book would be misunderstood; for after all his brave resolutions, he had to admit: "I am as 422 German Literary Influence much in love as ever. . . . The lady says she will not\ I say she shallV Everything else having failed, he resolved to stake all on one throw. So much of resolution he had, though of renunciation he had learned little. "Next week I shall fire off a rocket which I trust will make a commotion in that citadel. Perhaps the garrison will capitu- late ;-perhaps the rocket may burst and kill me." 97 The rocket landed in the garrison on Beacon Hill without producing a capitula- tion, without any show of a white flag. 98 Four months later he met Frances Appleton on one of his walks in the vicinity of Beacon Hill. She passed without a sign. That night he wrote in his diary: "Met the stately dark ladie in the street. I looked and passed, as Dante prescribed. ... It is ended." 99 So much for Goethe's resolution and renunciation, as resolving the affairs of a young man's heart. Yet the sequel, as everyone knows, is that Longfellow's perseverance was rewarded three years later when she wrote that she was ready to let the "dead Past bury its dead," and Longfellow had cause to cele- brate May 10, 1843, as a "Day forever blessed, that ushered in this Vita N[u]ova of happiness." 100 Two months later they were married, and as a token of her complete surrender of any lingering reproach she gave him her European sketch book, which they had made together in Switzerland eight years earlier, now beautifully bound in green Levant morocco and inscribed simply, "Mary Ashburton to Paul Fle- ming." 101 The main tendency of Hyperion (insofar as it is possible to speak of a single tendency in so formless a book) is suggested by Goe- the's Enlwicklungsroman. Jean Paul influ- enced the style of the book, and a touch of Heine inspired some of the lighter irony in which the book abounds, 102 but what is of most significance is that Hyperion offered the first fair interpretation and panoramic view of the essential spirit of German romantic literature to the American reader. Although Longfellow may have overes- timated its intrinsic worth when he said in 1840, "It will take a good deal of persuasion to convince me that the book is not good," 103 there can be no doubt about its historical importance in making Germany better known to Americans. 104 Although the rocket's burst in the sum- mer of 1839 almost killed him (as he prog- nosticated it might), life had to go on; and much of the year was spent reading widely, re-perusing Goethe's works, and helping Felton with his translation of Menzel's History of German Literature. The book appeared in 1840, and early in June Long- fellow prepared a lengthy review of it, not as critical of Menzel's slashing attack on Goethe as one might expect from his fore- most professional exponent in America. 105 Meanwhile he had gathered enough poems to make a little volume, which appeared as Voices of the Night in December, 1839, and into which went more of the stuff garnered in Germany. Although the book contains two of his "Psalms," their titles belie his true sentiments at the time: he was far from cured of the wavering between living bravely in the present and dwelling long- ingly in the sweetly sad realms of the past, of nighttime, and of visions. Moreover, the opening poem, the "Hymn to the Night," beginning with lines that Poe praised, is in perfect antithesis to the lessons of the "Psalms." He still hears "the sounds of sorrow and delight" in "the haunted chambers of the night," and finds "relief" from "the frenzy and despair" and "the apathy of grief" by drinking from "the cool cistern of the midnight air." The reference to "some old poet's rhymes" in the third stanza suggests literary influence, 106 and a search through the slender booklet reveals an abundance of it — from the German lyric writers, as one would suspect. Speak- ing of Arnim and Brentano's Boy's Wonder- Horn, which he had bought in Heidelberg, he had written in Hyperion: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 423 I know the book almost by heart. Of all your German books, it is the one which produces upon my imagination the most wild and magic influence. I have a passion for ballads! . . . They are the gypsy- children of song, born under hedgerows, in the leafy lanes and by-paths of literature, — in the genial Summer-time. 107 The type here mentioned is the German ballad of sentiment. His fondness for the other type, the ballad of action, of heroic love and feats of valor, was a later develop- ment. There is no trace of the latter in the Voices of 1839. Voices of the Night includes, besides the "Psalms" with their Goethean lessons, a poem called "Flowers," which opens with an allusion to Carove's "Marchen ohne Ende." Similarly, "The Beleaguered City" relates the "old marvellous tale" of the Kachl-Lager which nightly "beleaguered the walls of Prague beside the Moldau's rushing stream." "There is a Reaper, whose name is Death," the opening line of "The Reaper and the Flowers," undoubtedly derives from the familiar Volkslied, "Es ist ein Schnitter, der heisset Tod," though (as Professor Hatfield has observed) the deli- cate treatment of the theme is far removed from the style of German folk poetry. 108 The volume also contains ten translations from the German, six of which had already appeared in Hyperion. 109 Longfellow had considered introducing into Hyperion a long Scandinavian ballad "on the deeds of the first bold Viking who crossed to this western world, with storm spirits, and devil machinery under wa- ter," 110 and on May 24, 1839, Felton first suggested a poem on the Round Tower at Newport. 111 "The Skeleton in Armor" and "The Wreck of the Hesperus" were written toward the end of 1840. They represent a new note in Longfellow's poetry — a turning away from the sentiments of German romance, which, as he was given to under- stand by the critics, involved rather too much reliance upon (or borrowing from) "foreign" materials, instead of the more appropriate indigenous sources. 112 But Longfellow did not then, or later, entirely give up playing his more sentimental Ger- man tunes, least of all in Ballads and Other Poems of 1 84 1. Among its more notable pieces were his versions of Uhland's "Das Gliick von Edenhall" and of Pfizer's "Der Junggeselle," rendered with admirable fidelity while retaining the identical rhyme thrice-repeated in each stanza. 113 Third European Trip, 1842 Despite a busy academic career, absorb- ing literary activity and a distinctly grati- fying and steadily mounting reputation, evenings of convivial gaiety, and even attempts to fall in love with some one else, Longfellow found no effective balm for his heartache. 114 In April, 1842, he set out to seek a change of scene and to take the water cure of Marienberg at Boppard on the Rhine. There much of his unoccupied time was devoted to short foot-tours in the pic- turesque vicinity, often in the company of the vivacious Herr Landrat H. C. Heuer- berger of St. Goar, the nearest considerable town up the river, where, as was natural, he soon met Heuberger's close friend and near neighbor, Ferdinand Freiligrath. Each admired the other's writings, and Long- fellow immediately recognized in Freili- grath "a jovial, good fellow and a poet of genius," while Freiligrath, pleased that his American friend spoke "German well," found him "exceedingly charming and agreeable." 115 During this third visit to Germany Long- fellow perfected his understanding of the German temperament and gained a wide familiarity with the physical character of the Rhineland, as well as of other sections of Germany. 116 There appears to be more than a casual relationship between these stimulating experiences and his writing a few weeks before leaving Marienberg the poem "Mezzo Cammin" with its resolve "to build some tower of song with lofty para- 424 German Literary Influence pet," for out of it grew The Golden Legend, at once the central portion of the trilogy which he deemed his loftiest undertaking and the most strictly Germanic of all his compositions. During the rough ocean passage in late October, 1842, Longfellow overcame his dislike for occasional verse to the extent of writing a series of poems supporting the antislavery cause. Thus he finally composed what his friend Sumner had repeatedly urged but what he could not bring himself to write until Freiligrath's romantic poems about Negroes, wild animals, and exotic places showed him how he could combine antislavery sentiments with romantic word pictures. In the first letter to Freiligrath after his return to Cambridge, he acknowl- edged borrowing "one or two wild animals from your menagerie." 117 Cambridge, 1842-1868 Life in Cambridge soon settled itself into its wonted if busy routine, except that his marriage in 1843 introduced a new peace and happiness and an enlargement of labors both literary and professional, and of domestic and social spheres. 118 Poets and Poetry of Europe appeared in the summer of 1845, with a portrait of Schiller for the frontispiece. Among the German authors, Goethe had, in the first edition, 119 what might be considered a strictly proportionate share of the space. When a new edition appeared in 1871, Schiller's portrait was significantly replaced by Goethe's; and while no new translations from Schiller were added, Longfellow's own version of Goethe's two "Wanderer's Night- Songs" and extracts from Bayard Taylor's translation of Faust II were included — both changes symptomatic of the steadily growing importance of Goethe in Longfel- low's estimation. Evangeline (1847) has been a stumbling block at once to English readers who are congenitally opposed to hexameters and to German scholars 120 who would like to make it an American imitation of Hermann und Dorothea. The argument runs usually as follows: first, Klopstock, Voss, and Goethe are forever associated with the modern revival of the classical hexameter, and Longfellow is the fourth in line, hence Evangeline is a "German" production; second, Evangeline and Hermann und Dorothea are both properly idyls ; both deal with true love that does not run smooth when political affairs intervene; in both a parish priest appears who attempts to set things aright; in both idyllic scenes of domestic tranquility are drawn — therefore one derives from the other. True, Freiligrath, when he finished reading his friend's story, wrote to say that he regarded it "a master- piece," and that he had placed thebook on his shelves, "not near Voss' Luise, but near old Wolfgang's Hermann und Dorothea." 121 But, as Professor Hatfield has remarked, "there the resemblance ends. There is not one line which shows a direct imitation." 122 For one thing, the circumstances that evoked the two poems are quite dissimilar. Goethe, aside from what he drew from Voss's Luise, got his story from Das Liebthd- tige Gera gegen die Salzburgischen Emigran- ten . . . (Leipzig, 1 732). m Longfellow, as all the world knows, got his story from H. L. Conolly, who related it to Hawthorne in Longfellow's presence. His immediate source was native, and the adornments he added represent gleanings from a veriety of American sources, notably books on Can- ada, Indian lore, Audubon, Sealsfield, and Banvard's panorama of the Mississippi. 124 But the most important differences arise from the two authors' different purposes. According to Scherer, Goethe represents in Dorothea that strength growing out of the sorrows of a woman who has been literally torn from her native soil, and who, in spite of adversity and lonely homelessness, develops an independence and resource- fulness, and in her heart, a tenderness for the needy and afflicted; and in Hermann the enduring and abiding strength of that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 425 culture which is fostered by the security of a regular, well-ordered existence and home life. Longfellow, on the other hand, presents only an impressive picture of love and con- stancy in the heart of a woman — a tale intended to inculcate the lessons of hope, endurance, and fidelity to an ideal. In view of these broad disparities, it would seem that there is no necessary con- nection between the two poems. To be sure, Longfellow's library contained several copies (original and translated 125 ) of Her- mann und Dorothea, and we know that he read the poem in the original as early as June 10, 1838, finding it "a very simple, singular, and beautiful poem"; 126 but following a brief reference to Hermann und Dorothea in 1840, 127 there are no further references in his diaries and letters until some thirty years later. 128 And there is nothing to suggest that he returned to it at the time he was working on Evangeline. 129 His adoption of the hexameter as his verse form could have come as readily from Voss (whose Luise he had known as early as 1839) or, what is most likely, from classical sources. 130 During the years between publication of Evangeline (1847) and The Golden Legend (1851), Longfellow's life went on much as it had been. He kept supplementing his knowledge of the German authors, especial- ly the more contemporary. 131 In the mean- time he had his say on nationalism in Amer- ican literature, voicing an opinion striking- ly at variance with the one expressed in 1837 when, in reviewing Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, he had argued that in choosing native New England materials Hawthorne had selected "the right materi- als" for his stories. In Kavanagh (1849) he argued against the thesis that American literature, if it is not national, is nothing, by observing that while nationality is good, "universality" is better. "We shall draw from the Germans tenderness, from the Spaniards passion, from the French vivacity, to mingle more and more with our English good sense." 132 This doctrine of transplantation and acculturation is, of course, in perfect accord with his own en- deavors as professor of modern foreign languages and literatures, with his practice of translating some of the best foreign specimens, and with his publication of the Poets and Poetry of Europe. His repeated periods of residence in Europe, notably Germany, and the literary and personal ties formed there, are in a large measure re- sponsible for this change of front. The Golden Legend, written during 1850- 185 1, has no close connection with Jacobus de Voragine's A urea Legenda; it received its title because Longfellow considered the story, as he got it from Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich, "to surpass all other legends in beauty and significance." As early as November 27, 1839, he had con- sidered whether he should work up some- thing from Cotton Mather or write "a drama on the old poetic legend of Der arme Heinrich." "The tale," he added, "is ex- quisite. I have a heroine as sweet as Imogen, could I but paint her so." 133 Eventually it became the Second Part of his trilogy, The Christus, which was completed in 1871 — thirty-two years after he first recorded his interest in the subject and fully thirty years after he conceived of it as part of his chief life work — "a long and elaborate poem by the holy name of Christ, the theme of which would be the various aspects of Christendom in the Apostolic, Middle, and Modern Ages." 134 The drama as Longfellow wrote it enor- mously transcends the simple epic of the old Minnesinger. 135 Der arme Heinrich was available to Longfellow in Mailath's Alt- deutsche Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1809), which he discovered at Heidelberg in 1836, 138 and also in a complete prose version which his assistant Rolker made for him. Longfellow derived the central story directly from the Middle High German text, as well as from Rolker's manuscript, but he also drew heavily on Goethe's Faust. 426 German Literary Influence Hartmann's simple epical poem presents, in its 1530 lines, an economically unified picture of religious faith in the Middle Ages. The Golden Legend finally achieves some- thing of a unity of tone, but it is done by a variety of effects. Little of the simple atmosphere of pious faith remains. Prince Henry is no armer Heinrich as he is in Hart- mann; he is a modern man whose simple faith has been destroyed by the modern enlightenment and its consequent inquisi- tiveness and skepticism. 137 But the closest parallel is not that between Faustus and Prince Henry. Longfellow's conception of Lucifer in the image of Mephistopheles represents his most direct debt. The effort to unite in one poem the story of Heinrich von Hoheneck and that of Faust involved a fusion of the medieval and the modern man, the believer with the skeptic, that was only half successful. Poor Henry lacks the consistency of either Hart- mann's Heinrich or Goethe's Faust; neither one nor the other, he is at best, a blurred image of both. 138 The verbal parallels are often very close, 139 but need no enumer- ation. Considering how often by 1850-1851 Longfellow had repeated his lectures and gone over the text of Faust with successive classes, we understand why there should be a great number of these reminiscences and parallels, voluntary and involuntary, in a poem whose leading characters are so much like those in Faust. 1 * Among the "Birds of Passage" poems published in the Miles Standish volume are several shorter pieces, of which "Victor Galbraith" is close enough to Mosen's "An- dreas Hofer" to suggest a genetic connec- tion. And the two very effective lines from the "Lapland Song," quoted at the end of each stanza of "My Lost Youth," were taken directly from Herder's Volkslieder. Fourth Trip— Later Years, 1868-1882 Following the tragic death of his wife in 1 86 1, Longfellow turned to translating Dante. A fourth and last sojourn in Europe, lasting fifteen months, was undertaken in 1868-1869. Traveling in a family group of ten, this expedition resembled more a Volkerwanderung than any of his three ear- lier journeys, which were more in the nature of a student's pilgrimage. Germany was traversed only cursorily. 141 While German literature ceased to be a matter of insistent academic concern after 1854, Longfellow's reputation as an author- ity on German literature survived, he con- tinued reading to enlarge his knowledge of classic authors and foraged widely among contemporary writers. 142 He produced also a few translations, one of which remains unsurpassed — the version of "tJber alien Gipfeln," which he prepared in 1870 for the new edition of Poets and Poetry of Europe (1871). 143 Although none of his later poems depends as strongly upon German models • as do the poems of his middle period, it was inevitable that certain German notes should make themselves heard. 144 From first to last, Longfellow's poems illustrate his absorption of the spirit of German poetry. He was, for his generation ; and in his locality, the representative of German letters. It was only natural that J. T. Fields should have been struck with the likeness of Longfellow's "private rooms to those of a German student or professor, — a Goethean aspect of simplicity and space everywhere." 146 As professor of modern languages and literatures in Ameri- ca's most influential university during the most formative decades of American cultur- al development, Longfellow stood in a unique position to introduce into American literature those better elements of Europe- an culture by which he hoped a too strict spirit of American nationalism would be transformed into a broader spirit of uni- versality. To that end the atmosphere of "the castled Rhine" that pervades so much of his prose and verse — specimens of which still adorn every grade-school reader — provided a powerful leavening influence. James Russell Lowell 427 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891) Acquaintance with German Literature While Lowell's writings exhibit a wealth of German allusion, he was, among the middle generation of Brahmins, one of the most staunchly Anglophile; and the Ger- manic influences, except in the formulation of his critical principles, do not form as pervasive or as basic a part of his literary personality as in the case of Longfellow. The pronounced Germanic flavor which his allusions and references give to his writings was mainly a part of his academic nature. His highly allusive style illustrates his con- viction, expressed in his essay on Carlyle, that "a great part of our pleasure in reading is unexpectedness." To achieve unexpected novelty, he ransacked all literatures for tel- ling phrases and figures. What De Quincey called the "gluttony of books" is in a large measure responsible for the piquancy of Lowell's prose style, but his bookishness worked to the detriment of original ideas and the formulation of first principles in his critical and literary essays. For though he deprecated the book suffocation of Cotton Mather, Lowell himself had (as he said of Emerson) the keen eye for a "fine telling phrase that will carry true . . . like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle." Emerson, he ob- served, will "dredge you up a choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather himself"; yet Lowell was no less ready to ransack Mather or any other source of whatever age or clime if what he found could be made to add sparkle to his sentence. The result is what has been deplored in Lowell's charac- ter as a critic — that his literary essays are less statements and applications of funda- mental critical principles than "clever" but essentially "random comment." 146 Although he studied German during his undergraduate days at Harvard (1834- 1838) and spent a year in Dresden (1855- 1856) working hard on the German lan- guage and the forty volumes of Goethe's writings in preparation for his duties as Smith Professor of Languages and Litera- tures at Harvard, it was not until 1866 that he wrote his "Lessing," his single complete essay dealing with German literature. In his last public address, "The Study of Modern Languages," delivered before the Modern Language Association in 1889, Lowell expressed satisfaction at the fact that modern languages and literatures were be- ing taught seriously and thoroughly in American colleges and universities. He had watched the development of foreign-lan- guage instruction at Harvard from the time when only French was taught, and that not regularly; when German was acquired, as he put it, only "by hook or by crook," 147 through the decade of Follen's career there and the eras of Ticknor and of Longfellow, whom he was destined himself to succeed in 1855. Lowell's letters and his commonplace book indicate a mild interest in German literature during his undergraduate days. 148 He proposed going to Germany to study law but seems to have accepted with good grace his father's veto of the plan. Upon reading Margaret Fuller's translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, he thought of "writing a series of communica- tions for some periodicals in the form of Eckermann and Boswell," 149 but never carried out the plan. At times he lost all patience with the "cant" of overenthusias- tic Goetheans, 160 and not until he read Wilhelm Meister in 1840 did he find any- thing of Goethe's unqualifiedly delight- ful. 151 Even though he found many qualities of Goethe's admirable, Lowell remained inexorable in his condemnation of the great German's willingness, in order to satisfy his own intellectual curiosity, "to soil the maiden petals of a woman's soul": "to get 428 German Literary Influence the delicious sensation of reflex sorrow, he would wring a heart." 162 But if Goethe's morality troubled him, he could accept Schiller wholeheartedly, and his first book of poems, inspired by Maria White, bore a motto from Schiller's Wallenstein, "Ich habe gelebt und geliebt." Preoccupied during the early forties with personal problems, journalism, and anti- slavery propaganda, Lowell made little more than passing references to things Ger- man; 153 butin 1848-1849 he became aware of the high quality of German literary criti- cism (theoretical and applied) 164 in which area he came to feel the Germans had made their greatest contribution. In 1851 the Lowells made the long-hoped-for-trip to Europe. Toward the end of their fifteen- month stay they paused briefly in Ger- many, but the visit bore no literary fruit, unless it revivified the phrase "Auf Wieder- sehen," which Maria was fond of using during the early days of their love, and which her husband took for the title and burden of the memorial verses which he wrote shortly after her death in 1853. In 1855, in a series of lectures on the English poets, which won him the Smith Professor- ship at Harvard, Lowell made passing references to Fouqu6, Jean Paul, Luther, Kepler, and Kant, and quoted Schiller. 165 The year abroad (1 855-1 856) was in several ways a disappointment. Lowell had hoped to master German during the fall and winter, at the same time making himself proficient in the Spanish language, so that he might spend the spring in literary study in Spain. But German inflection and word order proved more troublesome than he had anticipated. He never appreciated linguistic study except as a means to an end; and his letters are full of complaints against "der, die, das" and against sen- tences in which "one sets sail an admiral with sealed orders, not knowing where the devil he is going till he is in mid-ocean." 166 The forty volumes of Goethe which he acquired and set himself to read also proved heavy going, although by late November he reporting reading 150 pages a day. 157 He soon resigned himself to de- voting all the remaining months in Europe to acquiring the command of German that his position required. From time to time he expressed sober satisfaction at his progress, and occasionally his reading brought him a sense of intellectual enlargement, 158 but his letters seldom mention any great aesthetic delight experienced through his widening contact with German literature. 159 The Harvard Professorship During the first decade of his Harvard professorship Lowell seems to have made little use of his painfully acquired knowl- edge. For a time he taught a course in Ger- man literature, 180 of which there remain some manuscript notes for lectures on Middle High German literature, the Nibe- lungenlied, and Wolfram von Eschenbach 161 . It was not until 1868 and 1870 that the published essays on Shakespeare and on Dante indicated the full extent of his debt to German literary scholarship and criti- cism. 182 Later essays contain scattering references, but a surprisingly high propor- tion of all that Lowell had to say about German literature and criticism appears in the essays of the five years from 1866 to 1870. Even during these years the range of the allusions is not particularly wide. Per- haps a dozen new names are mentioned, but many of the references are inconsequential or satirical. 183 In the end, Goethe and Les- sing emerge as the two who, in Lowell's estimation, stand head and shoulders above all other Germans. Of the several Goethes whom Lowell considered, it was chiefly Goethe the man of wisdom and Goethe the critic that even- tually meant most to him. Faust and others of his poetical productions served to em- bellish a sentence or garnish a text, but his "wise sayings" were treasured and quoted, sometimes repeatedly. 184 Lowell's essay on James Russell Lowell 429 Carlyle further emphasized Goethe's catho- lic wisdom as helping Carlyle break down the parochial standards and religious pre- possessions of British criticism. 165 More important still for Lowell was Goethe's Shakespeare criticism. In his essay on "Shakespeare Once More" he emphasizes the powerful effect of Goethe's dictum "not to accept and take for granted, but to weigh and consider" in creating what is called the "productive" criticism of the Germans. He is not always in complete agreement with Goethe's individual judgments. Thus, while acknowledging the fecundity of Goethe's "distinction between ancient and modern drama" as resting on "the difference be- tween sollen and wollen, between must and would," he points out instances in which this "conveniently portable" distinction has its "limitations." 166 and he questions the validity of Goethe's conclusion that Shakespeare was a greater poet than drama- tist. 167 After acknowledging his debt to a number of German critics (among them Goethe, A. W. Schlegel, Gervinus, and T'eck), Lowell proceeds to apply the theory of "productive" criticism to Hamlet. In the process he must inevitably consider the oft-quoted criticism from Wilhelm Meister, with which, again, he finds himself in im- perfect agreement. 168 Oftener than not, however, he accepts Goethe's pronounce- ments. 169 It is significant that Lowell chose a critic as the subject of his one full-length essay on a German man of letters. His essay entitled "Lessing" afforded an opportunity for his most extended comments on German literary culture — on the genuine value as well as the ponderous pedantry of German scholarship, the recalcitrance of the lan- guage, the heaviness of German humor, the low state of German literature before Lessing, the quarrel between classical and romantic disciples, and the German Shakespeare criticism. Lessing himself Lowell rated a genius, though not a poetic genius; it was as man and critic, not as poet or dramatist, that he valued him. 170 Lowell's knowledge of German literary learning went beyond the great critics and the Shakespeare scholars 171 to include the students of Dante 172 and Chaucer 173 and the great linguists; 174 but his chief debt (as he freely acknowledged) was owing to the critical views of Lessing, Goethe, A. W. Schlegel, and the German aesthetic theo- rists, including Zeising and Vischer. 175 It is often difficult and sometimes impossible to determine whether a certain idea was derived directly from Lessing, Goethe, Schlegel, or Gervinus, whether it came by- way of Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Carlyle, or Arnold, or possibly several of them jointly. 176 Yet the tone of his references and his frank avowals leave little room for doubting that in the realm of critical or aesthetic guidance he turned more fre- quently to German than to English critics even, 177 though for his numerous literary allusions, embellishments, and general stylistic garnishments, it was but natural that he should lay a heavier levy upon English than upon German writers. 178 Of Goethe, only Faust I, Hermann und Dorothea, and a few of the shorter lyrics touched that "something deeper than the mind" which Lowell felt it was the province of imaginative literature to stir and dilate. The dull, heavy unhappiness of his winter in "dreary Dresden" seems to have colored his subsequent approach to German letters. Want of style and heaviness of language destroyed his pleasure in much of the work of the lesser writers, while the too great freedom of some of the greater figures was objectionable on moral grounds. He could respect German literature, but he could not enjoy it. Despite the strong moral strains in Lowell's own poetry and criticism, he never, in theory, wavered from the position that the first duty of the muse is to be delightful; but he had as little stomach for the "questionable" morals of Elective Affinities as he had for the abstrac- tions of Faust II. National tastes being 430 German Literary Influence what they are, it seemed to him that Eng- lish, even French and Italian poetry, was more closely akin, more nearly consonant with, and better suited for the enrichment of the native tradition of American letters than the German could be. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-1894) The very Brahmin of the Brahmins and one of the hierarchs on whose image the Genteel modeled themselves. Holmes is different from the breed he helped to en- gender chiefly in one respect: he did not share fully with the succession of greater and lesser men, from Emerson to Stedman, their enthusiasm for German culture. 179 His life became wrapped up in the twin foci of Cambridge and Boston, and he developed a kind of provincialism that militated against the type of cosmopolitanism which the Transcendentalists espoused. "I have lived so long stationary," he confessed, "that I have become intensely local, and doubtless in many ways narrow." 180 Identification with a locality, he always maintained, is a surer passport to immortality than cosmo- politanism. 181 But, says the Autocrat to his fellow-boarders, "I was born and bred, as I've told you twenty times, among books and those who knew what was in books" ; 188 and accordingly, having handled books from infancy, he was not afraid of them. 183 When the subject of conversation round the break- fast table turns to Kant on Space and Time 184 or on the distinction between "understanding and reason," 185 the Auto- crat is not flustered. Indeed, at one point, he allows himself to discourse on distinc- tions between knowledge and truth in such a manner that, to check himself, he allows "the old gentleman who sat opposite" to sniff audibly and to observe that the Auto- crat "talked like a transcendentalist." "For his part," he added, "common sense was good enough." 186 Pre-eminently a Boston wit, Holmes was nonetheless a man of the world — an alert, worldly-wise, well-read, and if not recep- tive, at least sympathetic, observer. The Autocrat and its three successors are, like Thoreau's Week, a mine of allusions and quotations from diverse sources. But while references to Byron, Bulwer, Thomas Browne, Bacon, Swift, Shakespeare, and Latin authors, notably Horace, come "trippingly," the German writers supplied no strongly activating inspiration and are mentioned sparingly — usually en passant. 187 The conclusion must be that German litera- ture and thought, except when used for superfical literary embellishment, served Holmes rarely. It was mainly in his think- ing on scientific subjects that he looked abroad, but even in this area he got most of his training in Paris, and for the rest he relied mainly on English and American medical precedent; while in letters he was inspired chiefly by the principles of the Latin authors and the practice of the neo- classical school of English writers. The Germanic element stricken from his writ- ings would substract little from the record as it stands. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-1892) German Legends, Tales, Scenery As a youthful romanticist Whittier took hints from German legends of wizard, demon, and ghost. From time to time throughout his life he enjoyed vicarious or fanciful fireside journeys into the Rhine- land. As a militant, religiously motivated John Greenleaf Whittier 431 reformer, he now and again turned to Luther for pattern and for warning. In his fight against slavery he became allied with a number of political refugees who espoused the abolitionist cause, and during his publicist career he repeatedly referred to German-American liberal publications and to the antislavery tradition of the Penn- sylvania-Germans. 188 He felt an affinity with the German quietists and mystics and a friendly tolerance for those who were more ascetic and more concerned with the occult han he. Finally, he formed friendships with several American translators of Ger- man literature, notably Longfellow, C. T. Brooks, the Rev. Thomas Tracey, and Bayard Taylor, through whose translations and those of others he became familiar with the masterpieces of Goethe and Schiller and with the lyrics and tales of the German romantic writers. The newspapers which Whittier edited and the magazines to which he contributed, especially for the years 1828- 1838, when his mind was much occupied with the type of supernatural tradition dear to the German romantics, contain evidence of his early interest in the Faust story and other Ger- man legendary lore 189 — an interest that reappeared from time to time and extended far beyond the years usually set as bound- ing his period of fanciful romantic fondness for the lurid, the strange, the sensational, and the dreamy. 190 Akin to Whittier's enjoyment of German romance was his pleasure in imagined Ger- man scenery. Germany was to him, as she was to other romantically-minded poets, a classic region of fable and romance; and allusions to the Rhineland especially came trooping to his imagination, during both the earlier period of his poetic career 191 and his later years. 192 Abolitionism: Follen and Luther Whittier's addiction to romantic super- naturalism in his early poetry was sup- planted, in his more mature work, by Quaker humanitarianism, manifesting itself chiefly in the fight against slavery. In May, 1834, he attended an antislavery conven- tion in Boston and heard a stirring address by Dr. Carl Follen, 193 whose abolitionist activities had already cost him his post in Jena and were soon to lose for him his pro- fessorship at Harvard. Until Pollen's death in 1840 Whittier frequently worked with Follen on antislavery committees, and the relations between the two men were warmly affectionate, so that Follen's personal in- fluence upon Whittier must be rated as cognate with that of Garrison in arousing his ardor for abolition. 194 An even older presence in Whittier's mind was that of Martin Luther. Again and again, when the Abolitionists were re- proached for stirring up discord, the Quaker poet reminded his antagonists how the leader of the Reformation had shaken the quiet of Christendom, irritated the rulers of the Church, rebuked the princes, and, planting his feet on the rock of principle, declared "I cannot otherwise." 195 Germans as Poetical Subjects The settlement in Pennsylvania of the German followers of William Penn was a subject of lifelong interest to Whittier. As early as 1835 he wrote a story about Penn's visit to Germany in 1677, in which he told how the stranger from England brought to the sweet enthusiast Lady Eleanora and her studious lover Ernest the message of the Inner Light. 196 In "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim" (1872) he wrote the exquisite idyl which stands a fitting memorial to the learning, piety, Christian charity, and gentleness of spirit of the German-Amer- ican Quaker Pastorius, who drew up for the Germantown Friends the document which Whittier correctly described as "the first protest made by a religious body against Negro Slavery." 197 Others of Whittier's poems suggestive of Germanic content include "Maud Muller," 432 German Literary Influence with a headnote explaining that its "some- what infelicitous title" is derived from "the recollections of some descendants of a Hessian" named Muller, but that "the poem has no real foundation in fact." When a correspondent inquired whether the u in Muller should not be umlauted, Whittier replied, "Pronounce the name with either the Yankee or the German accent — it mat- ters not which," and there is nothing to suggest that he thought a second time of his heroine's ancestry or national origin. Nor has the nationality of Barbara Friet- chie's antecedents any significant relation to the ballad that bears her name. In "The Palatine" (1887) nothing is made of the fact that most of the unfortunate passengers on the wrecked and burned ship were German emigrants bound for Philadelphia. 198 In "Cobbler Keezar's Vision" (1861), however, the "tough old Teuton's" colorful recollec- tions of his homeland and his scorn of his glum, psalm-singing Connecticut neighbors are essential elements in the texture of the ballad. The "Hymn of the Dunkers" (1877) is fraught with memories of the religious persecutions from which the German pie- tists fled, but these memories are subdued by the mystic calm with which the sisters in serene Kloster Kedar at Ephrata await the second coming of the Lord. 199 Another late poem which shows Whittier's continued responsiveness to German religious tradi- tion is "The Two Elizabeths," read at the unveiling of the bust of Elizabeth Fry at the Friend's School in Providence in 1885. 200 When, with the aid of Lucy Larcom, he edited Child Life (1872), a collection of poems, and a companion volume, Child Life in Prose (1874), he included a dozen selec- tions from the German 201 as representative of the simple or pious sentiment he wished to perpetuate among children. Without constituting a major or direc- tive influence on Whittier, German motifs provided him with a significant supplemen- tary source of subject matter and allusion. From first to last, he drew heavily upon the storied lore of ballad and legend for his narrative poetry and upon the lives of German mystics for his historical, as well as religious and humanitarian, poems. Lacking fluency in the language, he yet made several translations and adaptations of German poems. For the greater part, however, he relied upon such English translations as were available. Throughout his life he was aware of certain movements of German and German-American thought; from personal contacts and from reading he absorbed such elements as were congenial to his spiritual nature; but the currents of Ger- man thought that attracted an Emerson or a Parker left him cold, and his Quaker pre- possessions kept him from entertaining sympathetically either the methods or the results of German critical theological in- vestigations. HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862) His Literary Personality In a writer like Thoreau it becomes desperately hard to distinguish what the man read from what he was. For one thing, his deep-seated desire to be utterly himself and his horror of dependence make the attempt to find the sources of Thoreau a baffling process. Sharing the Transcenden- talists' worship of self-trust and originality, he yet absorbed from them much of their enthusiasm for books from many lands. They were constantly putting books into each other's hands. The first principle in Emerson's (and Thoreau's) theory of good books was that they must not be allowed to lie fallow or merely pass through the mind, but that their proper use lies in the reader's acting out the best of what he reads. Thoreau, even more resolutely than Henry David Thoreau 433 his mentor, Emerson, set out to make all his activities of one piece — to the point of steadfastly refusing to indulge in activities that could not be made to contribute directly to that purpose; but however many items he put down on his list of things without which he could get along, good books were not among his proscriptions. All his life he had ready access to books. 202 But no man can be explained solely in terms of the books he read; and in Tho- reau 's case, instead of saving that he became what he read, it might better be said that his reading indicates what he was. His first published work, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849), that "mine of quotations from good authors," 203 is at once an "anthology carried on the frame of a story" and an authentic literary autobio- graphy. 204 As such, it contributes, as do also the earlier volumes of his Journal, to our understanding of the books that were most vital to him, and occasionally we get a glimpse of how a Goethe or a Schlegel helped him to his characteristic ideas. For example, the passages on poetry and authorship in "Thursday" of the Week which culminate in the definition of a poem as "one undivided, unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature" 205 is inspired by his reading of Goethe's Autobiography, Wilhelm Meister, and Italian Travels. WB The immediate source is to be found in the Journal for November 15, 16, and Decem- ber 8, 1837, 207 whence he transcribed what- ever he wanted when he came to write the Week. But in this instance, as seemingly in others where Thoreau quoted or otherwise deferred to printed sources, the borrowed material did little more than embellish or round out the structure that Thoreau him- self had reared. In this case, Goethe served as an example of the Man of Art as distinct from Thoreau 's conception of the Man of Genius. 208 The main concept itself Thoreau had grasped long before — not from Goethe or Shakespeare or Emerson even, but from within the recesses of his own conscious- ness, his inviolate personality. Goethe's literary career only served to supply a foot- note, as it were, to document Thoreau 's view of the simplicity, spontaneity, originality, and organic nature of art. For Thoreau's reading of Goethe did no more to make him a German than his reading of the Bhagavad-Gita made him a Hindu. And yet Thoreau read much and was manifestly affected, for better or worse, by his reading. 209 The Week and Walden would hardly be recognizable without the portions deriving from Greek, Latin, Oriental, British, and other literatures. Without this literary background, the central body of thought that we recognize as being the heart of Thoreau would doubtless be intact, or nearly so; but the illustrations, or the "lustres" (to use an Emersonian expression) would be missing; and in at least a few cases we should miss certain Oriental con- cepts, Greek attitudes, and German ideas that must be regarded as more than mere marginalia or embellishments. Very likely if, in 1856, Whitman had talked to Thoreau about the German trans- cendental philosophers as Thoreau talked to Whitman about the Orientals, and then asked whether Thoreau had read them, he would have replied, as Whitman did to Thoreau's inquiry about the Orientals, "No, tell me about them." 210 It is doubtful, as Professor B. V. Crawford has observed, that Thoreau, had he been asked, "would have acknowledged any important debt to the philosophical thought of Germany." 211 There is nothing to indicate that he read Kant or Schelling; and yet there can be little question that in one way or another (whether through Emerson, Coleridge, Car- lyle, the reviews, or the transcendental climate around him), he learned something more than the dictionary definition of the word transcendental. During the years when he assisted Emerson in editing the Dial, he became familiar, as the copy and proof passed through his hands, with a consider- able body of German transcendental ideas, 434 German Literary Influence pure and diluted; although it seems fairly obvious that he never divested himself of the misconceptions respecting Kantian epistemology that Carlyle (and through him, Emerson) put into circulation. This, how- ever, was no great loss to Thoreau; for "metaphysics was his aversion," and "no work of metaphysics found room on his shelves unless by sufferance." 212 The twenty volumes of his Writings reveal few noteworthy German passages. On the first page of his journal he wrote, with apparent approval, "The Germans say, 'Es ist alles wahr wodurch du besser wirst,'" and during the first year of his journal-keeping he translated five passages from Goethe's Tasso and two from Ilalienische Reise, 213 but nothing in his later journals suggests that this kind of activity consumed much of his time. His library contained few German books. 214 His article on Carlyle makes it fairly clear that he was not fond of the involved German language, and there is good evidence for inferring that much of what he read during his later years of Ger- man authors was read in translation. 215 Affinities with German Writers Nonetheless, Thoreau was, first and last, affected in one way or another by various German writers. The technicalities of the romantic philosophers left him cold; he could not entertain either speculations on the special faculties of the mind or ques- tions whether the "Not-Me" derives from the "Me" or the All from the Infinite Nothing. 218 Yet there are a number of striking coincidences of thought and mood, so that, as Paul Elmer More once observed, the whole body of German romanticism can be found reflected, explicitly and implicitly, in his journal and formal works. 217 For example, the metaphysical parallelism by which Schelling defined nature as visible spirit and spirit as invisible nature has its counterpart as much in Thoreau as in Emerson ; but it would be a fruitless exercise to try to ascertain whether Thoreau arrived at the same conclusion independently of Schelling, or derived it from Emerson, or through Emerson, or elsewhere. It is enough to point out that there is a remarkable similarity. 218 Turning from these general affinities to more specific points of contact between Thoreau and German authors, we should note that Goethe meant more to him than any other German. Aside from seven trans- lated passages which he wrote into his journal for 1837 (most of them subsequently transcribed into the Week )and the essay on Carlyle (where, of course, Goethe figures prominently), there are eight other note- worthy references to Goethe from which to construct Thoreau's opinion of Goethe. 219 Other German writers did not vitally interest Thoreau. 220 German Criticism In the essay on Carlyle, Thoreau speaks of "the German rule of referring an author to his own standard," 221 meaning the sym- pathetic (or what Margaret Fuller called the "affirmative") type of literary criticism , practiced by the German romantic critics and given wide currency among American Transcendentalists through Goethe's fa- mous formulation of their creed and the Schlegel brothers' practice. Thoreau him- self, in his critical essays, seems inclined to follow the Schlegel-Coleridge school of literary appreciation and critical evalua- tion, but he probably relied, in this depart- ment, more on Coleridge 222 than upon any firsthand familiarity with the German critics who followed in the wake of Herder. In one instance he spoke disparagingly of the excessive adulation heaped upon Shakespeare by the German romantic critics. 223 In his concept of the organic, however, it would seem that his relation to the Germans was mainly accidental. The idea of poetry as organic expression (as developed by Herder, Goethe, Schelling, Henry David Thoreau 435 and the Schlegels) had by the forties be- come a commonplace in transcendental New England. It had been given wide cur- rency by Carlyle and Coleridge; it was re- peatedly discussed in the Dial; and Emer- son, as well as Margaret Fuller, never wearied of reenforcing the doctrine. Wher- ever Thoreau got the idea, he early con- ceived of poetry, not as imitation, but as expression — not as something made, me- chanically shaped by rules imposed from without, but as something following the laws of organic growth. This led to his for- mulating distinct theories regarding intui- tion and form, genius and talent, which approximated rather closely those of Her- der, Schelling, the older Goethe, and the Schlegels. 224 Thoreau went beyond the Germans in one respect. His conception of the organic principle embraced far more than poetic expression, or even art in general. It fur- nished the key to his basic attitude toward the whole of life. He sought to "live as ten- derly and daintily as one would pluck a flower," to make his life the outer expres- sion of his inner organic principle of simple, sane, good living, which had its base no more in the natural and emotional man than in his mental and moral discipline. My life hath been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and live to utter it. His practical Puritan idealism, by which he placed great store to foster growth of char- acter through discipline, objected to the unrestained emotionalism of "Wertherish" literature, the unrealizable idealism that led to disillusionment, irony, and despair — all that which the older Goethe repudiated as das Krankhafte. He was fond of repeating after Samuel Daniel the lines, Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man ! Thus it would seem that here, as in other instances, Thoreau succeeded in giving to sentiments of whatever origin his own turn in a manner to make them his own. A German writer who probably lent something to Thoreau 's creed is Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann, whose Betrachtungen iiber die Einsamkeit (1784- 1785) first became available in an English edition in 1791, and after 1793, in many American editions. 225 Thoreau listed the book in the inventory he made of his library in 1840, 226 and it may be presumed that he read it before he went to live in his hut at Walden Pond on July 4, 1845. We can be reasonably certain that the most direct motivation that led him to give solitary life a trial was the example of his friend and classmate Stearns Wheeler, who had lived in the woods near Flint's Pond. 227 Thoreau began to comment during 1841 228 on the desirability of finding a solitary retreat; and it does not seem far-fetched to conclude that his reading of Zimmermann's book at about this time should have suggested to him the idea, or, at all events, encouraged him in his resolution to put the theory of solitude into practice. 229 Impossible though it be to determine the degree or extent of influence, we may conclude that whatever Thoreau owes to Zimmermann he trans- lated not merely into his writings but made a component part of his life — again illus- trating, as in the case of his relation to Emerson, an instance of the disciple out- distancing the master. German Scientists Another group of German writers inter- ested Thoreau — the savants, scientists, and travelers with scientific interests. He found their writings useful in his nature studies and used them accordingly, often quoting Konrad Gesner 230 and Alexander von Hum- boldt, 231 and occasionally Ida Laura (Reyer) Pfeiffer 232 and David Crantz. 233 His reading and use of Gesner and Humboldt provide good examples of what Channing had in mind when he said that Thoreau read with pen in hand making what he called "Fact- 436 German Literary Influence books — citations which concerned his stud- ies." 234 The only other German with whom he occupied his mind to any considerable degree was J. A. Etzler, a native of Ger- many residing in Pennsylvania in 1833 when he published his Paradise within the Reach of All Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery, the second Lon- don edition (1842) of which Thoreau reviewed in the Democratic Review for November, 1843. The review, while signifi- cant as setting forth some of Thoreau 's essential doctrines, is little to our purpose. The ideas presented in the book are not characteristically Germanic, and Thoreau's occupation with it sheds no light on our problem of German influence on him. Everything considered, Thoreau was not much influenced by Germany. True, he understood well enough that when he avowed himself a Transcendentalist, as he freely did, the roots of the philosophy that he professed were understood to lie in Ger- many; but he did not have the curiosity about metaphysical roots that he had about Greek and Latin roots. There are affinities a-plenty between Thoreau's romantic ideas and those common among romantic writers of Germany, but who can say that Thoreau derived his sense of the organic from Schel- ling or Schlegel, or that his doctrines of work and renunciation are drawn any more from Goethe or Carlyle than from within himself ? That Goethe's method of truthful and circumstantial description seemed an ideal which he strove to emulate, and that he was encouraged by Zimmermann to try solitude as a means to the end of human- istic control in his own life seem fair enough inferences ; and there are other such particu- lars which he adapted to his purposes. But, taken altogether, foreign influences did not radically alter the man who resisted nothing more strenuously than influences from out- side himself, and who must be put down in the end as having succeeded better than most of his contemporaries in remaining true to himself. HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891) Literary Background Ishmael's observation that a whale-ship had been his Yale College and his Harvard, too, has helped inspire the myth that as a young man Melville learned little about books. But overlooked is Ishmael's declara- tion that while he sailed through oceans, he also swam through libraries. 236 The publication of Typee (1846), a scant two years after his return from the South Seas, suggests that there was somewhere a pre- paration and literary foreground. 236 To be sure, he had still to write, partly to get them out of his system, his travel romances ; but the germs of Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre were already lodged in his brain. After the pap and pablum of his earlier "trash," as he styled his first books — "written to buy tobbacco with" 237 — he turned his back on light fiction and set off on his voyagings in the untracked seas among the Mardian islands: on voyagings that led from one metaphysical abyss to another. Already predisposed to speculation, he was plunged into the world of books and literati repre- sented by the Duyckincks, who placed their libraries at his disposal. 238 Whatever he missed during his earlier years was made up by indefatigable reading after 1844, though it may be observed that this eager inves- tigation of bookish lore brought him little peace of mind but only mounting rage at the necessity under which philosophy, in- cluding the Kantian criticism, put him to regard truth as dual, casting two shadows — one earthly, the other heavenly. Interest in Religion and Philosophy If anything was lacking before he wrote Herman Melville 437 Moby-Dick to turn his attention to German thought, the necessary stimulation came during his trip to Europe in the autumn of 1849. On the second day aboard the South- ampton, Melville met "some very pleasant passengers," chief among whom were George J. Adler, lexicographer and Pro- fessor of German at New York University, and Dr. Franklin Taylor, a cousin of the translator of Faust — both of whom were versed in German philosophy. Adler im- mediately struck Melville as a capital fel- low whose learning placed no barriers in the way of free intercourse, despite Melville's inexpert dialectical powers. On the day he met Adler, Melville "walked the deck with . . . [him], till a late hour, talking of 'Fixed Fate, Free-Will, foreknowledge absolute,' etc." Sizing up Adler as a "Cole- ridgean," he made this erudite linguist, "full of German metaphysics and discour- ses of Kant, Swedenborg, etc.," his "princi- pal companion." There were evenings when, says Melville, "Adler and Taylor came into my room, and it was proposed to have whiskey punches. . . . We had an extraordi- nary time and did not break up till after two in the morning. We talked of metaphysics continually, and Hegel, Schlegel, Kant, etc., were discussed under the influence of the whiskey." These gaudeola, varied by whist, mock trials, and other jollifications j were oft-repeated throughout the voyage, during all of which the slightest excuse "Got — all of us — riding on the German horse again." 239 We know little about the precise con- tents of Melville's library, or when and where the accessions were made ; but know- ing something of the philosophical problems that tantalized him and that form the crux of Moby-Dick and Pierre, we can under- stand why visitors to Arrowhead were struck by his "well-stocked library." 240 Apparently works of German authors included were not numerous; 241 yet some- where along the way he picked up an acquaintance with at least the general significance of German transcendental philosophy and Biblical criticism. When, during 1 856-1 857, he visited the Holy Land, he found his mind "sadly and sugges- tively affected" by "the indifference of Nature and Man" 242 to all that should make Jerusalem sacred, and disenchanted by that "great curse of modern . . . skepticism." He charged men like Niebuhr and Strauss with having generated and encouraged it, and added, "Heartily wish Niebuhr and Strauss to the dogs. — The deuce take their penetration and acumen." 243 This is but one instance among many of Melville's inability to choose between the Will to Believe and the Desire to Know 244 — - a harassing indecision that sent him roam- ing through pagan and Christian philoso- phies, ancient and modern, to his own bewilderment. 246 The moderns, from Bacon to Schopenhauer, especially interested him because they were presumed to have had the last word. 248 Of the Germans, he appears to have known most about Kant. 247 How much of German philosophy he read in translation we have no way of knowing exactly, but it would seem odd, considering his rather systematic analysis of English thought from Bacon to Hume and his great interest in Schopenhauer, had he neglected Kant and Hegel altogether. It may be, of course, that he felt the conversations he had with men like Adler and Taylor sufficed for his purposes; but it seems more likely that by the time he wrote Moby-Dick (cer- tainly by the time he considered the ambig- uous moral problems of Pierre), he had either consulted Kant at first hand or had pondered long on what his informants had told him. Even earlier, Melville had men- tioned Kant in Redburn and in Mardi, us in the latter book making Bardianna (whose whimsicalities and profundities Babbalanja is fond of quoting at length 249 ) the mouth- piece of Kant. 260 Mardi, the first of Melville's deeper books represents Taji-Melville following religious truth and political justice through all 438 German Literary Influence known and unknown parts of the world and finding both forever eluding him. His trav- eling companions elect to remain among the Serenians, in the land of Alma-Christ, which is governed by the laws of Christian love. They rest content in Christian faith. Taji finds their uncritical acceptance of faith, untested and unconfirmed by the absolute reason, incapable of satisfying his inquiring mind. The problem at the beginning of Mel- ville's quest concerns social justice, but it soon involves the nature of God, man's divin- ity, his immortality, moral nature, free will, evil. Questions regarding all these become explicit in Mardi, but none is solved. In the end it is explained, by those who find faith and "provisional" truth sufficient, that these final questions involve secrets which Oro-God guards. To divulge them would make man equal to God in knowledge, thus destroying the distinction between the human and the divine. Not content with this answer, which seems to Taji-Melville an evasion, he seizes the helm of his boat and, fixing his eye on eternity, steers for the outer ocean, to re-emerge in Moby-Dick as the questing, avenging spirit of Ahab de- termined to dispel the mysteries by re- ducing them to knowledge or to pull down heaven in the attempt. It was inevitable that sooner or later Melville's questions respecting God, immortality, and freedom would lead to the crucial one underlying all problems affecting the Ideas of the Reason, namely, the epistemological one which Kant had considered in his two Critiques. Mel- ville saw that all answers must remain tentative until the validity of the Reason itself is established: all ontological prob- lems, for example, remained riddles until the legitimacy of the reason to reduce its Ideas to knowledge is validated. According- ly when Ahab rants and raves against the inscrutability of the universe, what tanta- lizes him is not merely that he lacks the ability either to prove or to disprove the validity of the Ideas of the Reason; what particularly torments him is that, though he grinds away at the nut of the universe until it cracks his jaws, he finds himself baffled at the very outset by his inability to prove Reason itself capable of acquiring ab- solute knowledge on these high matters. It is not only that he finds himself confronted at every turn by the chasm that sepa- rates mind and matter but that the mind itself seems incapable of marking clearly the grounds, limits, and validity of human knowledge. Everywhere Ahab sees himself confronted by the grinning masks of subtle, elusive inscrutability. 251 The quenchless feud which he feels, and which Melville confesses "seemed mine," 252 is against these masks, all incarnate in the white whale: All visible objects . . . are but pasteboard masks. ... If a man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall ? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. ... I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. 253 The conclusion of the book, couched though it be in allegorical action instead of abstract proposition or syllogism, is, for every practical purpose, the same as that of Kant's first Critique. The marriage of mind and matter remains unconsummated, and human reason remains forever in- capable of reducing its Ideas to scientific knowledge. It is hard to believe that Ahab had not pondered Kant's argument, and that the Kantian examination of the antinomies did not lend argument and illus- tration to the thought that Melville incor- porated in the story of the whale hunt. While Kant relegated the purely specula- tive reason to a position of exercising regu- lative functions only, at the same time denying it any constitutive powers, he had insisted that the results of his criticism were Herman Melville 439 not altogether negative. Unable to supply us with knowledge of God, immortality, and freedom, nevertheless it is a gain if, in its purely regulative province, the Pure Reason can criticize and test our ideas affecting supersensible qualities if they come to us from some other source. There Kant might have stopped. But he was loath to rest his case on a purely theoretical or speculative basis, and was impelled, by a practical human desire as a moral and religious being, to re-examine the entire problem from the point of view of Practical Reason — on the basis of moral will. The result was the Critique of Practical Reason, in which he affirmed, in the realm of the practice of ideas, what, in the purely specu- lative or theoretical sphere, he had logically been compelled to deny. And it is worth noting that Melville's next step, in its broader aspects, parallel's Kant's second. Although Ahab ended disastrously in his attempt to carry the turrets of heaven by escalade, Melville tried, in his next book, to have Pierre test the adequacy and validity of moral law. Having failed in the purely theoretical, he would test the practical sphere of rational activity. The difference between Melville and Kant here is that Melville still seeks for what he calls "the Ultimate of Human Speculative Knowl- edge," 254 that is, he demands of moral truth the same finality which Kant had proved impossible in the first Critique, and simply posited in the second. 255 The result is that Pierre is befooled by Truth, Virtue, and Fate, and that he concludes "it is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind." For like the Arctic explorer, when he finally reaches the pole, to whose barrenness the needle of his compass has led him, he finds that the needle "indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike." 256 The subtitle of the book is, appropriately, "The Ambiguities." The answers are all ambiguous. 257 Different as this conclusion is from that of Kant's second Critique, there is still the singular parallelism of both men's examining the problem of knowledge on identical levels — the metaphysical and the moral— in a man- ner to suggest that Melville was not una- ware of Kant's example. 258 The influence of Kant on Melville is not one of clear-cut concepts or precise propositions, but rather one of Melville's understanding and apply- ing the main or broad conclusions of the Kantian criticism. His interpretation of Kant, as voiced by Babbalanja, Taji, Ahab, and Pierre, is that Kant had marked the boundaries of "the Empire of Human Knowledge." 259 Rightly or wrongly inter- preted, Kant furnished Melville with the backbone upon which to build his anatomy of despair. 240 Among German literary figures Melville had, with a few notable exceptions, little acquaintance. As has already been noted, he bought in 1849 a copy of Schiller's Poems and Ballads ; in 1851, writing to Hawthorne, he mentioned Schiller's advocacy of an aristocracy of the mind, but added, "I don't know much of him." 261 In the case of Goe- the, the situation was different, for Melville paid a good deal of attention to Goethe and was alternately attracted and repulsed by him. "As with all great genius," he con- cluded, "there is an immense deal of flum- mery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contrast with him, a monstrous deal of it in me." 262 As regards the other German writers, convincing arguments have been presented by Professor Leon Howard (1) that Fouqu6's Undine supplied more than a suggestion for Melville's conception of Yillah in Mardi, and (2) that Melville's flower symbolism (in Mardi as well as the rose imagery of his later poems) derives from that of Fouque, Tieck, Novalis, and others of the German Romantiker. 2 * 3 Melville was attracted to German thought in much the same way that Emerson was drawn to it — by the hope that it would help him in the problem of squaring his heart by his head. Like Emerson, too, he con- 440 German Literary Influence tented himself largely with information derived at second hand, and seldom got beyond the comprehension of general tendencies, except perhaps in individual tenets of Kant, in whom, be it observed, he only found his worst fears substantiated. For where Emerson felt German speculative efforts to constitute an affirmative Yea to human questionings, Melville interpreted their conclusions to be an Everlasting Nay. "A pondering man," as he styled himself, unwilling to accept "the infinite cliffs and gulfs of human mystery and misery" that Dante first revealed to him, 264 he groped about in Kantian epistemology and Goethe- an "pantheism" and found that after vast pains of mining the pyramid, "with joy we espy the sarcophagus ; but we lift the lid — and nobody is there! — appallingly vacant, as vast as the soul of man." 265 MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850) Early Intellectual Interests In evaluating the influence of German literature as distinct from theology and philosophy in the complex of forces that went to make up New England Transcen- dentalism, the career of Margaret Fuller, the Aspasia of the Transcendental high council, is highly significant. More than any- other single influence, her activity as re- viewer, translator, and conversationalist was the agency that brought German literature into the orbit of the Transcen- dentalists' interests. Just as the young theologians in the Divinity School were receptive to the pious emotion and high spirituality of Herder and Coleridge, so she was taken with the warm, enthusiastic accounts of German letters then being trumpted "by the wild bugle-call of Thom- as Carlyle." 266 Early in her prodigious program of Ger- man studies she perceived that metaphysics would be of inestimable value to her. She looked into Locke "as introductory to a course of English metaphysics, and then [Mme] de Stael on Locke's system," and progressed soon to Kant and the post- Kantians as necessary to one engaged in studying Lessing, Schiller, and Novalis and "meditating on the life of Goethe," but these first excursions into German tran- scendental speculation left her optimism a bit dashed. By 1836 she was ready to admit the inadequacy of her metaphysical pre- paration, and the thought that she had considered "writing a life of Goethe" now "shocked her." 267 However, the propaga- tion of the "spiritual philosophy" had gone so far in her day that, while it proved in- sufficient to plumb the deepest meanings of critical transcendentalism, it provided her with confidence in her own intellectual resources, even to the point that she could declare, with perfect sincerity, that she found in America "no intellect comparable to her own." 268 Much that she believed was not only intuitional in the sense in which Parker used the term, but was communi- cated to her in flashes of mystical insight, and her communication of that "truth" was in turn couched in metaphorical, dark, and obscure language. Yet at bottom there lies the great tradition of German idealism from Kant and Jacobi to Hegel. 269 On occasions she wrote of "faith" as contrasted with "understanding," 270 thereby recalling the Carlylean re- or misstatement of Kant. Again, she would affirm, "Our lives should be considered as a tendency, an approxima- tion only," and in so doing, call up an image of Kant's Idee, dimly apprehended. 271 She conceived of the unity of existence as "the natural life of the soul," 272 as "the law and plan of God" ; 273 or (what is highly charac- teristic) she borrowed a term from the Ger- man to call it simply the life of "Poesie" or "Poesy." Though the archaism "poesy" was Margaret Fuller 441 rarely used among the English romantics and was uncommon in modern English generally, it was a Germanism that Mar- garet became exceedingly fond of, and which she came to employ as a key element in her thought. In German (as antonym to Prosa and synonym for Dichtung) Poesie had been revived by recent romantic critics and poets, and was a favorite of Bettina, No- valis, Schelling, and Goethe. After 1836 Margaret used it freely to denote all forms of the aspiration toward the ideal, the ful- fillment of the highest spiritual potentiality of man. It is, she would pay, "the ground . . . of the true art of life; it being not merely truth, not merely good, but the beauty which integrates both." 274 In the end it became a term by which she could establish the identity of the aesthetic and the reli- gious impulses (in their purest state) : she called it directly "the spirit of religion. . . . In their essence and their end these (poetry and religion] are one." 276 Thus the gradual elaboration of her concept of "poesy" as suggested by her German studies foreshadowed a marked growth of her interest in the arts as avenues to the spiritual life. Especially after re- moving in 1839 to Jamaica Plain her pre- occupation with poetry, art, and music was pronounced. In the Boston community she had ready access to museums, galleries, and concert halls ; she read Flaxman and Retzsch and made the acquaintance of Allston. 27 * Though she undertook, at the urging of Dr. Channing, to make translations of the German philosophers, her enthusiasm for the study of the arts drew her attention away from metaphysics, 277 and she never com- pleted any of these translations. The neces- sity, occasioned by her work on the Dial, for orienting herself in the basic principles of literary criticism, accentuated this tenden- cy. 278 She never engaged in a concentrated study of philosophy as a pursuit in itself, and her cry in 1836, "Ofora safe and natural way of intuition," represents a point of view she maintained for the rest of her life. 27 ' In German literature she became speedily more expert, Emerson observing that she knew the subject "more cordially than any other person." 280 Between 1834 and 1838 she demonstrated her command of German by teaching it both in private and in Alcott's school. 281 She was convinced that her voca- tion was to be teaching, 282 however difficult that would be in an age when all posts in the higher schools were held by men. 283 By 1836 she wrote on the subject of teaching that it was her earnest desire "to interpret the German authors of whom I am so fond to such Americans as are ready to receive," their "kind of culture" being "precisely the counterpoise required by the utilitarian tendencies of our day and place." 284 She soon earned the name "Germanico." 285 As early as 1833 she recognized the need of a suitable organ for her purposes, and by March, 1835, she was actively planning, chiefly with Hedge, the "periodical" that eventually became the Dial, the fundamen- tal aim of which was to draw New England into a closer relationship with the totality of western culture. Freely offering to "lend a hand" whenever it should be launched, she made clear that if the projector ac- cepted her help, she would emphasize Ger- man literature. 288 "I fear I am merely 'Ger- manico,' and not 'transcendental.'" 287 Goethe and Schiller Her first tangible step toward popular- izing German authors in America was an effort to bring Goethe out from under the cloud cast over him by Menzel's attack on his morality. To this end, she made a verse translation of Tasso. As soon as she com- pleted it (March, 1834), she asked Hedge to submit it to Emerson, who read it but recorded no impression of it. All efforts to secure a publisher failed until the appear- ance of the second volume of her Works, edited posthumously by her brother, in 1859. 288 Tasso spoke directly to Margaret's heart, and she responded warmly to the 442 German Literary Influence human sympathy displayed by Goethe to- ward the problems of the artist. She did more. She identified her isolated existence with that of the frustrated, misunderstood poet. Poor Tasso [she wrote to Emerson] in the play offered his love and service too offici- ously to all. . . . If I wanted only ideal figures to think about, there are those in literature I like better than any of your living ones. But I want far more. I want habitual intercourse, cheer, inspiration, tenderness. I want these for myself; I want to impart them. 289 Emerson, who preserved the New Eng- land reticences, while regretfully confessing his "porcupine impossibility of contact" with other personalities, doubtless read this confession warily and counted it an em- barrassing instance of her overwarm nature, which throughout the period of their friend- ship half-irritated him and impelled him to keep her at arm's length. 290 Margaret's first publication was a trans- lation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (1839). She shortened the work slight- ly, omitting references to the Farbenlehre and certain other topics. Throwing light on the little-known later years of Goethe and displaying to full advantage the ripe wis- dom, the humanity and profundity of his character, this work revealed an entirely new side of him ; and many of the younger Transcendentalists must have felt as did Thomas W. Higginson: "It brought him nearer to me than any book, before or since, has ever done." 291 Her publication in 1842 of a small portion of Bettina (Brentano) von Arnim's Giln- derode in English translation affords a glimpse into some special enthusiasms in the field of German literature about which she otherwise wrote very little. Margaret was fascinated by this German woman who had achieved success as an interpreter of the inner lives of the romantics. 292 She pored eagerly over Bettina's revelations about Goethe and the extended account of her love affair with the elderly poet, and found herself even more carried away by Bettina's second book, a fictionization of her corres- pondence with the melancholy young poetess Karoline von Giinderode. 293 While somewhat shocked at the sensationalism and candor of the Correspondence with a Child, 29 * she was delighted with the affecting and beautiful account of the friendship between two gifted girls as recorded in Gunderode. 29i She saw in it a parallel to the intimacy and tender spiritual response that she herself was attempting to establish in her relations with the young girls who flocked about her in Boston. 296 Without pausing to consider whether the work would have any appeal to an American audience, she set about preparing a translation, the first installment of which she put on sale in Elizabeth P. Peabody's shop, though with- out identifying herself as translator. Thus the "somewhat angular Boston sibyl," as Henry James once characterized her, 297 not only attained a certain release from emo- tional tension which had been built up in her but made a covert appeal to have her kind of high-minded sensibility understood and recognized by unsympathetic Boston. She was revealing the strong undercurrents of genuinely romantic emotionality that linked her in spirit with such feminine rebels of her time as George Sand, Rahel, Mme de Stael, and Bettina. Needless to say, Giin- derode failed of its purpose. The salutary effect of her criticism was that, through her continual attention to European writers and modes of thought, she was able to lead the writer and reader away from parochialism toward subjects and attitudes of universal validity. She defined the critic's function as an activity paralleling that of the creative writer, in which they strive together to realize the objective ideal standard that lies outside and beyond them both. 298 The critic, she says, must be accepted in the community of thinkers as one who keeps up a protes- tant spirit in the literary church. All liter- Margaret Fuller 443 ature is required to pass muster in the light of reason. This she considered a universal basis of criticism, and its best justification — a conception where both critic and writer are brought before the same bar and permitted to settle their differences on equal terms. 299 From this lofty critical eminence, she sought to review the literary productions of her time. From this point of view, American literature was for her but a small area of the totality of western culture. Her success on the Tribune under such an exacting master as Horace Greeley is a signal achievement in American letters, one that has given her the reputation of being "the best critic produced in America before 1850," 300 only Poe disputing the position with her. From the German romantic critics, Schlegel and Tieck, and from Goethe, she learned to apply the laws of historical development in the realm of literature even while, like them, she clung to the ideal principle as the ultimate goal. 301 She used both the ideal and objective criticism with success. The former principle, she held, is consonant with New England absolutism; the second is the naturalistic, organic, and at the same time artistic approach of Goe- the and the historical school. 302 The former is in agreement with classical tradition in the drama, the latter with Shakespearean- historical tradition. 303 Margaret's long struggle to understand Goethe involved the reading of all avail- able works, memoirs, and letters. She recognized that in him there spoke a wise and experienced authority on the problems of life, who, observant and penetrating as he was, taught a doctrine of realism and renunciation very difficult either to refute or to accept. This dilemma, together with her fear of the impulses within her that seemed dangerously close to his own "paganism," made the study of Goethe a serious occupation for a full decade of her life. He alternately "solaced" and "dis- quited" her soul, yet provided for her the greatest literary as well as spiritual experi- ence. 304 By 1838 she had collected a large mass of notes on Goethe's life, which she tentatively promised to write for Ripley's Specimens, but which she never completed. There was no personality, either in books or among her acquaintances, who did more to emancipate her soul from the limitations of New England morality and the restrictions of femininity. Critics before her were at a loss how to answer Menzel's charges, how to justify the ways of this man to the Puritan con- science. 305 She knew Goethe well enough to see that he lived by a morality and a religion of his own. She completely shifted the ground of argument: she defined morality, not as did the others, as conformi- ty to absolute rules laid down by religious authority, but as conformity to the indi- vidual's own code as prescribed by his personality. From this point of viewGoethe's life was, as she said, "active, wise, and honored," 306 as consistent and beyond reproach as the Gods on Olympus. Her essays on Goethe in the Dial and her Preface to the Conversations with Goethe 307 are not principally criticisms of separate works but rather interpretations — remark- ably modern in tone and depth of under- standing — of the total personality of the man. 308 She was no "blind admirer" of the man, but her vision was not obscured by the search for values which he does not profess to have. In her essay on "Menzel's View of Goethe" 309 she continued her work of defining the limits and range of Goethe's mind, affirming again and again that we are not fitted to judge him unless we have studied him long and well. "He obliges us to live and grow, that we may walk by his side. . . . We doubt whether the revolution of the century be not required to interpret the quiet depths of his Saga." She predicted that the caviling at this or that fault in him will end "in making more men and women read these works and [go] 'on and on,' till they forget whether the author be a patriot 444 German Literary Influence or a moralist, in the deep humanity of the thought, the breathing nature of the scene." 310 She explained his career as determined by the environmental influence of his youth — as the one necessary to bring German literature to its fruition; though, again, she was careful to show the limits of his gifts, deploring the fact that he was not a poet-prophet, but "only a sage." 311 Particularly appealing to her was the idea that the role of woman in society could be charted and illustrated by taking such Goethean types as Philine, Marianne, Natalie, Makarie, Ottilie, and Margarete as basic symbols for the range of feminine qualities and types. Goethe's ideal of woman, "dasewigWeibliche," was for her a key for interpreting woman's essential character and potentiality. In her feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century she made effective use of the Goethean gallery of female characters, drawing on her vast knowledge of those women who figured in the actual life of Goethe as well as on the creatures of his imagination. In the area of feminism, where Emerson failed her dismally, Goethe was able to supply her with the orientation and illumi- nation which she so much desired, and which, more than anything else, became the mainspring of her genius and power. In short, the central doctrine that Margaret learned from Goethe (not Emerson) was self-reliance, self-culture. 312 It was this that liberated her from New England puritanism and taught her to resist the pressure of social convention under which her nature felt stifled. It encouraged her to take a bold stand on the "woman question," for it taught her that for all their well-meant chivalry, the men of her society were put- ting unfair restrictions on the lives of women. From Goethe, too, she learned to take a cosmopolitan view of literature — to look upon the advent of a Weltliteratur as the distinctive development of the future. Her discussion of American writers, her praise and blame of individual authors, are predicated on the conviction that the local and national must be harmonized with the ideal and universal. 313 Finally, she learned from Goethe much about the nature and history of art; only through him did she come to appreciate the great tradition of modern and classical sculpture, architec- ture, and painting. 314 The Romantic School Yet Goethe's liberalism, his precept of "extraordinary, generous seeking" alone never satisfied the demands of her idealistic nature. She belonged to a generation of romanticists, while Goethe stood apart from that movement, not at its center; he was too calm, too patient with the reality of life, too aloof. 315 Under his influence she could make heroic efforts to master her volatile feelings, to learn the lesson of resignation ; but her glowing enthusiasm for Beethoven and her sympathy for the Romantic School show that this was not constantly in her power. 316 The reading of Novalis and Korner she found "a relief, after feeling the immense superiority of Goethe." She was enchanted while she read him, but found "when I shut the book, it seems as if I had lost my personal identity." At such times "the one-sidedness, imper- fection, and glow of a mind like that of Novalis" seemed "refreshingly human" to her. 317 The part of her nature that was repulsed by Goethe's tepid equanimity turned, with true spiritual kinship, to the romantic sentiments of Jean Paul, Novalis, and Bettina and, above all, to the "Titanic utterances" of Beethoven. Margaret's delight in the tenderness, fancy, and rich brilliance of Jean Paul made for direct sympathy with his message and point of view. 318 She found him the priest of natural religion, a "magnetic influence." Her Italianate soul 319 responded to Jean Paul's high coloring, his pure, sensitive heroes, his extravagant, rhapsodic passages of description, and his fondness for omens, Margaret Fuller 445 puzzles, premonitions, and apparitions. To become acquainted with Novalis was to indulge some of the same preferences. In 1832 she was studying Novalis and Goethe, and there were moments when she felt much more sympathy for the "wondrous youth" than for the old "master." 320 His religion of nature, his view of the external world as the image of the inward being, the mystical significance he attached to flowers, stones, and minerals — these found many echoes in her own thought. They gave stimulus and direction to the development of her esoteric mystical studies, which even to her closest friends remained an obscure, imperfectly realized phase of her thought. 321 Her interest in Justinus Kerner also springs from her addiction to the occult. The lengthy account of his Seherin von Prevorst, inserted in Summer on the Lakes (pp. 125-64) presents the results of some pseudo-scientific investigations into spiritu- alistic and so-called "electrical" phenom- ena. A somnambulist from childhood, she could not let the occasion offered by Ker- ner's book pass without giving her observa- tions to her readers. 322 All in all, she made no favorable impression on the public by displaying her preoccupation with these mysterious phenomena. It was precisely her penchant for mysticism, 323 nature-worship, and spiritualism that caused her New England neighbors — who possessed more of the witch-hunting spirit than they realized — to look upon her as a foreign creature, a Bacchante entirely out of place in the realities of American life. 324 In her treatment of the ballad literature of Germany, Margaret performed a service to the literary culture of America. Her review of Simrock's Rheinsagen (1842) 325 showed an insight into the significance of folk poetry as a basis of a national litera- ture. While most enthusiastic about Rhein- Romantik, she also emphasized the impor- tance of the Volkslied as a social phenome- non, 328 and urged American writers to fol- low the German example of paying more attention to their own heritage, including the fast-vanishing Indian lore. 327 She made a strong case for an indigenous American literature, rooted in the native past, and not merely imitative of the European. 328 German Music The romanticism of her nature is revealed most clearly in her passionate response to music. To hear the symphonies of Beetho- ven was, as she described it, the supreme spiritual and aesthetic experience of her life in New England. 329 In Beethoven she recognized a genius fired with the high ide- alism of the age, and in his music she heard the surging romantic affirmation of the universality and prophetic power that she demanded in the highest poetry. Knowing Beethoven, she could say that music was the highest of the arts. 330 She would have the soaring aspirations of her nature ex- pressed not in imperfect words, but in appropriate music. The musical genius was the man completely dominated by "das Damonische." Music transported her com- pletely; it was a rapture, a fulfillment of her strongest "Sehnsucht." 331 It was for her the embodiment of that religion of nature wherein nothing is negation, and all is seen as the substance of the divine; in a sense, her form of Transcendentalism. 332 Her in- tense experience in music goes far beyond anything that we find in the other major Transcendentalists. Her dependence on it as a ministrant to the soul reveals her a person closely identified with romanticism in a pure and drastic form. Her utterances on the subject (often private poems not intended for publication 333 ) lay bare the irrationalism and desperate romantic lone- liness which are strong components of her mind. For a number of years she explored the possibility of finding the meaning and fulfillment of her life in art, above all in music. That this endeavor was difficult and indeed finally unsatisfactory is demon- strated by the fact that after 1844 she 446 German Literary Influence altered the direction of her interests and began to take an active part in practical issues, in prison reform, pauperism, educa- tion, and European political movements. 334 Margaret Fuller's influence was exerted in many ways. Not the least was her person- al impact on leaders of the Transcendental movement — on Emerson, above all, but also on Clarke, Ripley, W. H. Channing, and their younger associates. Anyone interested in music or art or foreign liter- ature knew what Margaret Fuller had said on these subject, for as Emerson remarked, "All the art, the thought, and the nobleness of New England, seemed . . . related to her and she to it." 336 It was her distinctive achievement to do for American criticism and literary culture what Parker did for American theology. The wide international viewpoint which she fostered became an- other strong characteristic of American Transcendentalism. German literature, which was in the ascendancy in that day, received the largest share of her attention because she recognized it as the fountain- head for the newer European movements. 336 In later years, after her removal to Italy and her sudden death in 1850, her efforts attained a wide effectiveness through the work of younger Transcendentalist dis- ciples. By her example of faithful trans- lation of the German classics, she encour- aged Brooks and Dwight, to name the most prominent, to undertake similar projects; and by her discriminating critical labors, she hastened the assimilation of German authors into the receptive but nonetheless provincial community. In J. F. Clarke, who decades after her death was to become an authority in the field of primitive religions and mythology, we can see the shaping influence of her mind. Emerson's debt to her was at least as great as hers to him. W. H. Channing, another of her close friends, shared her sensitivity to the beauty of European art and literature. W. E. Chan- ning the younger, C. P. Cranch, C. T. Brooks, Bayard Taylor, and John Weiss can be considered as direct inheritors of her position in New England life, for they continued her pioneering work in trans- lation and criticism from the point where she left it. 337 American interest in German literature generally was in the ascendancy until well into the 50's though the attention focused on different groups of writers at different times. The high point of interest in theology was reached earliest — in the writings of Parker, Ripley, and Hedge. Then followed, with the stimulus of Margaret Fuller's essays, the study of Goethe and the German romantics. This phase culminated before 1865, by which time most of the larger pieces of translation from the German classics had been completed. After the Civil War came a wave of popularizing and imitation of relatively unimportant con- temporary writers of fiction. The members of the Genteel Tradition — reared mainly by the Transcendentalists, to be sure, but developing a different social attitude alto- gether — now set up a new authoritarianism in taste. The deep, firsthand inspiration which the older generation had drawn from Germany had almost disappeared, leaving in its place a mere curiosity for the enter- taining or the sentimental. This superficial worshipfulness of all things German, of course, had already a long history before the so-called Genteel tradition became operative. The temptation on the part of the meagerly gifted to draw upon German materials in the vain hope thereby to give their effusions a certain afflatus as a substitute for what was inher- ently lacking goes back to the time when German literature first attracted attention. During the early years of the nineteenth century there was a rash of Werther adapta- tions and of Gothic productions faintly reminiscent of German horror. Later, and running parallel to the flow of books that came from the better Transcendentalist writers, there was a steady stream of second- Margaret Fuller 447 and third-rate books that claimed descent from the same spiritual source, and that had, indeed, a superficial overlay of Ger- manic inspiration. Examples that come to mind run from Mrs. L. H. Sigourney's Zinzendorff (1836) and Philip James Bailey's Festus (1839) to John Lothrop Motley's The Chevalier de Satiniski (1844) and Syl- vester Judd's Margaret (1845). Representa- tives of a later generation are men like Richard Henry Stoddard and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who, while they stood basically outside the Germanic tradition, did not entirely escape the contagion. Be- sides writing a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, Stoddard invested several of his poems in a German locale and appar- ently wrote his ballad "The Wine Cup" on the model of Uhland's "Gliick von Eden- hall"; while Aldrich's drama Judith and Holofernes appears to be a watered-down version of Hebbel's Judith. Meanwhile, on a more popular level, certain distinctive concepts originally derived from German books had become popular possessions, so that the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, in sermons to his Plymouth Church in Brook- lyn during the seventies, explained his emotional entanglements to his parishioners in terms of "elective affinities," and pre- sumably was both understood and forgiven. Already in 1856, when Moncure D. Conway preached his farewell sermon in Washington he took his text "from Mignon's song in Wilhelm Meister" and quoted Mephisto- pheles, and assumed that his audience knew enough of Goethe to grasp his allusions. Years later, when he reported to his free- religionist congregation in Cincinnati his meeting with David Friedrich Strauss and explained the latter 's "purely anthropolo- gical view of immortality," he again pre- sumed that his auditors comprehended him; but it does not follow that either he or his congregation had any longer the intense interest in the several schools of German Biblical criticism that had inspired the generation of Parker, Ripley, and Norton. These instances, and a hundred like them that could be cited, betoken an ever-widening popularity or speaking- acquaintance with concepts or tendencies stemming from Germany, but often lacking the intensity and absorption of interest of an earlier day. That is to say, there was, except among several groups of specialists, a certain dilution of that once clear stream of Germanic influence as it flowed through the thirties and forties, when it provided for many an exhilerating, sometimes intoxi- cating stimulant, until during the seventies and eighties it was taken, in many quarters, as a kind of postprandial concotion. In literary circles, a dash of German allusive- ness served admirably for garnishment, ornamental embellishment, and a univer- sally recognized sign of literary sophistica- tion. The Transcendentalists on the whole resisted this relative lowering of appreci- ation and taste; they stood out conspicu- ously as the only group (with the exception of professional teachers of German liter- ature) whose interest in Goethe, for exam- ple, increased rather than diminished; but some of the youngest among them — -men like C. T. Brooks and T. W. Higginson — no longer possessing the inspiration of the original Transcendentalists, followed in the easier ways of the Genteel traditionalists. MINOR MOVEMENTS AND GROUPS Transcendentalist Writers GODWIN, WHEELER, nURLBUT Directly out of the circles of the Dial and Brook Farm came a group of amateur critics and translators who disappeared from view rather quickly, either because they turned to other interests or because their lives were cut off at an early age. George Bancroft's contributions were a few 448 German Literary Influence poems in Dwight's anthology of Schiller and Goethe, and George P. Bradford translated a small portion of the Wahlverwandtschaf- tenior Frederic H. Hedge's Prose Writers; yet the latter is significant as the only sampling of Goethe's novel available to English readers before Boylan's version of 1854. Parke Godwin (1816-1904) was a Fourierite during his earlier years and editor of the Harbinger. With the assistance of Dwight and Dana, he translated Goethe's Autobiography in 1846, and with W. P. Prentiss the Tales of Zschokke. Later he contributed to Putnam's and other journals many critical articles on German literature, among the more notable one on Strauss in 1855 and another on Goethe in 1856. Charles Stearns Wheeler (1816-1843), tutor of Greek at Harvard from 1838 to 1842 and close associate of Thoreau, sent back from Heidelberg, whither he went in 1842, reports to the Dial on German books and authors, especially on philosophy. One was a lengthy transcript of Schelling's important Intro- ductory Lecture delivered in Berlin in 1841. Finally, there was the young divinity stu- dent William Hurlbut, at Cambridge, who busied himself with translations from Heine during the forties. His article in the Chris- tian Examiner for March, 1849, "The Religi- ous Poetry of Modern Germany," was full of praise in the manner of Parker and Rip- ley for the "religious character" and the beautiful expression of "reverence and belief" to be found in Novalis, Schiller, Jacobi, and Herder. 338 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), who was as much a May as an Alcott, soon came to see some of her father's idealisms as eccen- tricities, and in her essay, "Transcendental Wild Oats," she touched on the comic side of Transcendentalism. However, as a girl she felt some of the enthusiasms of the day very keenly, particularly those affecting German romantic literature. 339 Never a close student, but always a great reader, she especially admired "Goethe, Emerson, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Margaret Fuller . . . Whittier, Herbert, Crashaw, Keats, Cole- ridge, Dante." 340 While she was trying out her pen, she was constantly in the company of her father's associates, especially Emer- son and Parker. Not unnaturally, she ex- panded her reading in Goethe, and soon Schiller, Jean Paul, and Madame de Stael too became favorites. 341 In 1859, when she won her first literary triumph by selling a story to the A tlantic for fifty dollars, editor Lowell had some reason for wanting reas- surance that her contribution was not a translation from the German. 342 Thereafter she sold readily enough what she called her "blood and thunder" stories and "rubbishy" tales, 343 but she soon tired of these and grew ambitious to write something touching her inmost thoughts. The result was her first novel. Moods (1864). It achieved a momen- tary success, but after a week people dis- covered that it belonged to the class of writings known as "transcendental." 344 Its fault was that it was too full of the thoughts inspired by her reading in books like Wer- ther and Elective Affinities', and as soon as the dangerous word affinities was noised about by the reviewers and attached to the Warwick-Moor-Sylvia relationship, the popularity of the book fell off speedily. Having decided long before that the situ- ation in Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften was immoral, the New England public con- cluded that Moods, so obviously inspired by it, was also wicked. "I seem to have been playing with edge tools without knowing it," said Miss Alcott. 346 She knew almost everybody even remote- ly connected with the Transcendental group from the time when she was a child through the period of the Concord School of Philoso- phy and the Radical Club. She often accompanied her father to the meetings; but since philosophy was early associated in her mind with poverty and suffering, she never felt its charms and contented herself Minor Movements and Groups 449 with watching "the philosophers mount their hobbies and prance away into time and space," while she "gazed after them and tried to look wise." 346 Yet after the thorough immersion which she had in the Transcendental, Germanic climate of Con- cord, her books could not remain unaffected. They are full of German touches, ranging from allusions and quotations to German characters and whimsical references to German metaphysics. 347 More important as indicating Germanic inspiration is A Modern Mephistopheles (1877). Long de- sirous of writing another novel like Moods, into which she might pour more of her own thoughts than was possible in her popular stories, she wrote during the winter of 1876-1877 A Modern Mephistopheles, pub- lished the following April in the No Name Series. She wrote rapidly and con amore, fascinated by the excitement of the incogni- to afforded by the anonymity of the series. The book, she said, "had been simmering even since I read Faust last year," and she added, "Enjoyed doing it, being tired of providing moral pap for the young." 348 The book took its inspiration from Faust in the sense that it built on Goethe's con- ception of a Mephistopheles as a gentleman who moved in the best society. 349 All in all, though Louisa May Alcott never learned to handle the language competently and refused to concern herself actively with German metaphysics, the influence of Ger- man literary motifs on her work is more than superficial. CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892), one of the Transcendentalists associated with Margaret Fuller in cultivating the arts of poetry, painting, and music, was a Southerner by birth who entered Harvard in 1832 and thenceforth indulged his versa- tile talents. 350 Impressed by the preaching of Parker, Clarke, and W. H. Channing, he attended the Divinity School and accepted various preaching engagements, but still remained undecided about his life work. At Bangor he met Hedge ; while in Cambridge he practiced music whenever the occasion offered; and in 1836 he often enjoyed the company of a certain "musical German minister." His wanderings took him to Cincinnati in time to assist in the editing of the Transcendentalist journal, the Western Messenger, during the absence of Clarke. 351 During 1841-1844 he was often at Brook Farm, where he w r as always welcomed by the assembled company as one of their gayest and brightest wits. Even his carica- tures of the Transcendental hierarchy, born of a sense of realistic objectivity and sketched with a sharp pencil, were objects of merriment. 352 He introduced them to the pleasures of hearing German Lieder such as Schubert's Serenade (Stdndchen) and Erl- king (Erlkonig). In 1841 he decided, as did others of the younger disciples of Margaret Fuller and Emerson, that his interests were too diversified to be cramped in the clerical mold. He was ready to substitute painting for sermon writing. 353 The rest of his life was one of genial devotion to poetry, painting, and music. 354 He wrote children's stories and poems and translated from the Latin, French, and German. His first volume of poems (1844). dedicated to Emerson, contained several translations from the German. He became one of the group of artistic expatriates who spent long periods of time in the art centers of Europe. He continued to write poetry throughout his life, and once remarked he had "enough translations ... of the Ger- man and Latin chiefly, to make a volume, but there is no demand for such ware." 355 Thus it happens that none but a remark- ably small number of his translations are accessible today, though his friends en- joyed them and valued them highly. 358 JOHN SULLIVAN DVVIGHT John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893) dedi- 450 German Literary Influence cated a long life to the expounding of the Transcendental aesthetic and religious creed, and distinguished himself in a field which twenty years before had lain entirely uncultivated — the interpretation and criti- cism of music. 357 The study of German poetry and music were Dwight's two loves, which gradually supplanted his interest in a theological career. By 1837 he was pre- occupied with his studies of literature, and in 1838 appeared his volume of trans- lations. The Select Minor Poems of Goethe and Schiller, the second in Ripley's series of Specimens. It was precisely their shorter poems that were least known, and Dwight's book, which contained many of the best translations that have ever been made, led to a far more favorable reception of the authors than their dramas and novels alone had won for them. While he was assisted by a number of his Transcendentalist friends, 368 Dwight himself provided versions of admirable finish and tone and added some seventy pages of notes interpreting the poems against the background of their authors' thought. The volume has remained unsurpassed in its field during the century since its appearance, many of the versions still being accepted as standard. His intermittent preaching was no great success. In November, 1841, he went to Brook Farm, where he taught harmony, voice, and piano, as well as Latin. Through- out this period he translated the texts of many German songs and hymns, especially from oratorio scores. Dwight led singing classes and choruses, instructed the mem- bers in the fundamentals of art, and he took pains to develop their talents. He lectured on musical subjects in Boston and New York and wrote much for the Harbinger and the Democratic Review, dwelling little on the technical aspects of music but attempt- ing to convey in words the inner meanings of the musical message. Those who were unsympathetic with his approach (and there were many such) thought his utter- ances rhapsodical, flighty, abstruse. He had a vibrant and loosely strung nature, ex- tremely sensitive and responsive to art, perhaps too much at the mercy of the emotion that music generated in him. 359 For him, music contained the essence of the view of life that Emerson, Parker, and Ripley were grappling with in other media. The growing recognition of music as "the art of arts, the soul of them all," at the same time that "the law of social harmonies is being announced," seemed to him an all-important fact, and he was prepared to spend his life developing the analogy. Just as Ripley learned from Fichte that the propositions of metaphysics must be put to the test of practical experiment, so Dwight looked upon music not merely as a refuge of the soul, but as one of the avenues over which mankind is to pass into the realm of social harmony. 360 However visionary these reformist dreams may have been, Dwight's columns in the Harbinger were extremely successful in the sense that he made that paper one of the best musical journals the country had ever possessed. 361 In 1 850-1 85 1 Dwight gave over his re- viewing in favor of a new periodical venture. The Harvard Musical Association assisted him in raising a guarantee fund for a pro- jected musical journal, which he was to edit and manage. The first number of Dwight's Journal of Music appeared on April 10, 1852, to continue an honored and influential career until 1881. What the reformers and social planners had been unable to effect at Brook Farm by immedi- ate, practical experiment, Dwight hoped might be realized gradually through the refining, ennobling influence of the arts. 362 His Journal of Music was devoted to this end. In filling its pages, Dwight made no concessions to the relatively low state of popular knowledge and taste. He was "intensely German in his preferences," and he took the stand that the composers of the "classical" school from Mozart through Beethoven had carried the art to the apex of its development, though he did not Minor Movements and Groups 451 neglect other national schools nor ignore contemporary figures and the advocates of program music. 363 In his last years, how- ever, he found himself among the party of the old-fashioned — outmoded by the public taste that he had molded but that went beyond him in its enthusiasm for opera, program music, and theater music. THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823- 191 1 ) is a late Transcendentalist who, though not a writer of lasting importance, was an accomplished representative man of letters of the idealist tradition. His work as historian of the movement and biographer of Margaret Fuller and George Ripley is an invaluable contribution to our knowl- edge of the earlier phases of the Newness, and his long career is an excellent mirror of the changes in thought and feeling in Boston from the forties to the end of the century. 364 Born and reared in the shadow of the Harvard buildings, Higginson grew up in intimate association with the Harvard teachers and students. He entered as a well- wishing friend the circle of young men at Brook Farm; this influence, he reported, made him a "half-way socialist for life." The writer who took strongest possession of him, after Emerson, was Jean Paul, whose memoirs Mrs. Eliza Buckminster Lee of Brookline made available in 1845. He eager- ly read all new translations of Jean Paul as they appeared. Though his mastery of Ger- man was not complete, he was affected in his impressionable youth by romances, ballads, letters, and patriotic songs of the German romanticists then appearing in profusion from the American presses. He remained at Harvard through the year 1 846-1 847, his reading "tending more and more to Cousin, Jouffroy, Constant, Le- roux . . . and the easier aspects of German philosophy," social reform finally super- seding his interest in both philosophy and theology. 365 As a mature writer Higginson came to look back on the forties as a period too strongly influenced by European romanti- cism, the great wave of enthusiasm in Jean Paul, for example, stemming largely from this absorption in the sentimental. 366 In his late years he appraised Germany as a great nation of science rather than of literature. 367 He was a literatus and genial gentleman representing the New England liberal tradi- tion of his day. By and large, he was one of the group including Dwight and Brooks who took their cues from the earlier Tran- scendentalists, notably Margaret Fuller. But Higginson, while carrying forward the tradition of art and music which she initi- ated, tended to conventionalize it and to superimpose upon it a code which she would have been the first to denounce. Higginson never reached the depth of understanding of German literature that is found among its earlier students and translators. 368 As a late Transcendentalist, he joined forces with the disciples of gentility who patterned themselves after Longfellow, Holmes, Low- ell, and Whitter. By gradually introducing an emphasis on propriety and decorum, the literati of his kind transformed the earlier insurgency into that branch of the Genteel Tradition in American art that is best exemplified, perhaps, by Charles Timothy Brooks. The Genteel Writers The Genteel Tradition in American liter- ary culture embraces men of varying abili- ties, often totally different backgrounds, and sometimes sharply divergent personali- ties. Certainly they were less conscious of being a group at all than literary historians and critics today make them. Almost to a man, however, they were in accord in regarding German literature as the latest and finest flowering of literary culture. They believed that American letters stood to be enriched by the addition of a German leaven, and they did what lay within their 452 German Literary Influence powers to introduce that leaven. In this respect and in others, Charles T. Brooks, Bayard Taylor, G. H. Boker, Charles G. Leland, Edmund C. Stedman, and Richard H. Stoddard, each sought to emulate his elders, yet each missed the literary dis- tinction of the older generation. These men were belated romanticists in a world already stirring with a new ferment — a world that was to repudiate them as the realistic movement gained power. Their roseate view of life, compounded of German idealism and romanticism, was ruthlessly swept away before the newer critical realism. CHARLES TIMOTHY BROOKS Though not a creative writer in his own right, Charles Timothy Brooks (1813-1883) was the most assiduous translator of Ger- man literature ever to appear on the American scene. On the whole his work was competent and skillful, and some of his productions have not been superseded to this day. Though a respected contemporary and friend of the Transcendentalists, he was never closely allied with the movement, except insofar as his literary interests coincided with theirs. Like them, he was attracted to Schiller, Jean Paul, and the romantic lyricists; but unlike the Transcen- dentalists, he tended to seek out the writ- ings which displayed to best advantage the Germans' warmth of sentiment, didacticism, piety, and simplicity. He culled from the vast but then unknown reserves of recent German literature primarily those works that were distinguished by the qualities of gentleness, sweetness, moral purity, and optimism. A large segment of the American public demanded a belletristic fare of this kind, and Brooks's translations were popu- lar successes. Occasionally he wrote articles on theological subjects, but his attitude was moderate, pacific, and spiritual in tone. 369 Brooks absorbed the current of Tran- scendentalist doctrines in ethics and Bibli- cal interpretation, and he owed to them, also, his early sympathy for such authors as Goethe, Riickert, Jean Paul, Freiligrath, and Schefer. In 1838 he published his first work of translation — the first American version of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, and, excepting the versions done in England by S. Robinson (1825 and 1834), one of the earliest readable renderings of that work. From Tell, Brooks turned to the lyric, and in 1842 published Songs and Ballads: Translations from Uhland, Korner, and Other German Lyric Poets 310 as the four- teenth and final volume of Ripley's Speci- mens. The book was uneven in workman- ship, containing not a few successful trans- lations alongside some mediocre ones, just as there was an astonishingly wide range in quality between the better and the weaker specimens chosen for inclusion in the col- lection. In a similar way, his next volume, Schiller's Homage of the Arts, with Miscel- laneous Pieces from Riickert, Freiligrath, and Other German Poets (1846), brings a varied selection of lyrics. It strikes somewhat more loudly than the first book the tone of social and political protest as expressed by Freili- grath, Herwegh, and Riickert. Brooks's next collection, German Lyrics (1853), de- votes almost half its space to poems by Anastasius Griin (Count von Auersperg), but on the whole, the romantic tone still pre- dominates. Uhland, Riickert, and Kerner, with their poetry of radiant sentiment and simple virtue, are clearly the poet's favor- ites among the more recent writers. From the lyric, Brooks turned to Goethe and in 1856 published his version of Faust I. Coming as it did on the heels of a number of wretched attempts, this work enhanced the English reader's enjoyment and under- standing of the work. Notwithstanding occasional mistranslations and "lapses into pedestrianism," Brooks's translation is a creditable piece of work, and one which had its influence on Bayard Taylor when, two decades later, he undertook the same task. Like Margaret Fuller and his teacher, Fol- Minor Movements and Groups 453 len, Brooks was a warm admirer of Jean Paul. As early as 1843 he had praised this writer in an article in the Christian Examin- er, and in 1847 he had published an excerpt from Levana in the Christian Register. Brooks remains to the present day the only translator of the Titan (1862), Hesperus (1864), and The Invisible Lodge (1883), three of the greatest of the author's long works. In sheer volume of output, Brooks's trans- lations are monumental. His work with Jean Paul alone — an author notoriously hard to translate — amounted to over two thousand closely-packed pages. 371 His representative position in the literary scene of his day makes his career a good measuring-stick of the tastes of his reading public. His translations represent that branch of German literature that was con- genial to the temper of the genteel tradition, which Brooks did as much to call forth as to foster. Professor von Klenze's phrase for the interests of these "Victorians" — — "meliorism unembarrassed by facts"- — - suggests the limits of their appreciation. They stopped this side of the vitriolic irony of Heine; they preferred the sentimental Auerbach to Keller; and they avoided or misunderstood the tragic depths of Hebbel and Grillparzer. The uncertainty of their literary standards is evident in the uneven- ess of their translations as well as in the absence of an assured sense of discrimina- tion among the worst, the mediocre, and the best of German verse. NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806- 1867) belonged to an older generation, but since his writings are similar to the product of the Genteel Tradition, he may be discussed with them. Finding journalism in America an uphill struggle, Willis seized the op- portunity that came in 1831 to go to Europe as a traveling reporter and letter-writer. He was able to catch the American vogue for European sketches, or pencilings, as he called them, at its height, and his letters were widely printed in newspapers and magazines. 372 His best pictures of German scenes are to be found in Pencillings by the Way (1835), although the descriptions in In- valid Rambles in Germany (1845) are more detailed. Something of a dilettante, Willis looked on Europe superficially, more con- cerned with scenic details, imposing archi- tecture, and picturesque folkways than with books, literary people, or ideas. He is the reporter who describes engagingly his first glimpse of the Rhine, presents the tourist's view of Cologne, or recounts the ordeal of customs inspection at the Prussian border. 373 A few of his stories have German settings: the locale of "The Icy Veil" is Leipzig at the time of the fair, "Love and Diplomacy" and "The Bandit of Austria" have a Viennese background, and the poem "To Ermengarde" has a German setting as well as German atmosphere. His occasional references to Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, or Tieck are of a kind to suggest that he did not penetrate into the inner spirit of their writings, and his notices of German com- posers sound artificial. He was at his best when he had something concrete to tran- scribe, but he had little of the essential Germany, beyond romantic coloring and picturesqueness, to pass on to his American readers. BAYARD TAYLOR Once one of the most famous American authors, Bayard Taylor (182 5- 1878) has paled in the eyes of twentieth-century critics, though his translation of Faust is still highly regarded. From the very be- ginning, with the publication of Views Afoot (1846), to his death in Berlin in 1878, his career is intimately bound up with the story of German -American cultural inter- change. Standing at the very center of the group who formulated the Genteel Tradi- tion in American letters, he was the perfect medium between German and American 454 German Literary Influence literary culture. The characterization, "Lau- reate of the Gilded Age," with all its implications of cultural pretense and limita- tion fits him perfectly. 374 Before he left America for Europe, his imagination was aglow and dazzled by the stirring scenes and hallowed wonders in store for him. Leaving in July, 1844, he toured Scotland, England, and Belgium and arrived in Germany in September. He spent the winter in Frankfurt on the Main, and between May and July of 1845 he made a tour which included Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and Munich. 375 The manifold impressions of his rambles in the fascinating world of the European past were recorded in Views Afoot, or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff (1846). From the outset he struck a clear, colorful style of writing, an extraordinary kind of verbal photography, and poured into his reminis- cences all the youthful thrill of discovery and recognition which his impressionable nature felt at the sight of these wonders. Views Afoot was a successful book because it brought something vivid and original to the American reader. Devoted as it is in such large part to the romantic exploitation of German scenery, and coming in 1846 near the peak of the American interest in Ger- many, it forms an important contribution to the American conception of Germany. Like Longfellow's Hyperion, it takes for granted the romantic point of view, de- votes little space to the discussion of current affairs, but paints in glowing, shimmering colors the pretty half-legendary picture of quaint customs and traditions, the reminis- cences of medieval splendor, and the affecting stories of poets and musicians, that were part of the current myth. On returning home, he kept up his con- tacts with Freiligrath by correspondence and hoped to publish a volume of trans- lations of his poems. He continued to study German authors and to acquire a library of their works. However, the press of daily reporting prevented his writing of much poetry and pushed into the background the rich experiences of the previous years. When in 1847 he moved to New York, he was engaged for a time in translating articles from Brockhaus' Conversations- lexikon for Griswold. The record of the next decade is one of alternate travels, reporting, writing of travel accounts, and lecturing. In 1856 he was prevailed upon by German friends to pay them a visit in Gotha, from which point he made several excursions in Germany and Switzerland. He visited Riickert, Ger- stacker, Gutzkow, and Auerbach of the Dresden Circle, and Fritz Reuter, as well as some famous German scholars. 378 Between sojourns in Europe, Taylor was busy on the American lyceum platform. Though he usually spoke on general topics, he lectured once on Alexander von Hum- boldt and occasionally on "The Life and Times of Schiller." From May, 1862, to the end of his life in December, 1878, he spent a full third of his time in Europe. He made Gotha his home, but from thence undertook elaborate trips of exploration into Iceland, Egypt, and "the least known corners and by-ways of Europe." His second book, At Home and Abroad, First Series (1859) 377 was in part a personal narrative of experiences in Germany; in substance and tone it was similar to Views Afoot. At Home and Abroad, Second Series (1862) includes ten chapters on "A Home in the Thuringian Forest," the record of a stay there in July, 1861, with a faithful and charming re-creation of the daily lives of its people. Section IV of the book, "A Walk through Franconian Switzerland," is the narrative of a tour made in company with a German friend, a professor from Erlangen, who in 1816 had been a fellow-student of Ticknor and Everett at Gottingen. Because of his growing interest in Goethe and his project of writing a new biography, Taylor enjoyed exploring the localities associated with Goethe, and in preparation of his next book, By-ways of Europe (1868), he visited Minor Movements and Groups 455 the home of the blacksmith ancestor of Goethe at Artern. 378 Forgotten as these travel sketches are today, they were immensely popular in Taylor's lifetime and were an important agent in shaping the American attitude toward Germany. Taylor wrote from the point of view of a tourist- reporter. He did not, like Parker, search out the social ills of Europe; nor was he, like the emigres Cranch and Story, inter- ested in the study of the musical and artistic life of the Continent. His judgments of German authors was bounded by a set of values that precluded an appreciation of such figures as Lenau, Grillparzer, Heine, or Keller. He understood best those men of the late romantic school who in Germany represented the same compromise of the bourgeois and the conventionalized roman- tic that was dominant at the moment in America. There existed in his day no translation of both parts of Goethe's Faust in the original meters, and of really satisfactory versions of Part I none except Brooks's of 1856 and Miss Swanwick's of 1849. Burning with ambition to elevate his name into the first rank of American poets, Taylor seized the opportunity to try his prowess on the large task of translating Faust. "Indeed," he said, "an English 'Faust' seems to me the next best thing to writing a great original epic!" 379 He conceived the idea before 1850, but did not begin work until the autumn of 1863. After several years of interrupted work, he finished it early in 1869, afterwards spending a good many months more in the preparation of notes and comments, in which he hoped to "sum up all German criticism and comment . . . and especially to make the Second Part clear." 380 Taylor's Faust remains the best-known and most often recommended English version, remarkable for its close fidelity to the original metres, rhyme, and sense, though lacking in richness, depth, and the intrinsic poetic beauty of Goethe's lines. Since every translation of Faust becomes a single man's commentary upon the poem (in the sense that each reader or translator interprets and emphasizes its ideas in the light of his own philosophic and aesthetic position), the present-day reader often finds Taylor's version inadequate. 381 The work of scholars since Taylor's day has eluci- dated many passages which were misunder- stood in 1870, so that the limitations of his translation are owing as much to Taylor's age as to Taylor himself. In the midst of his work on Faust, Taylor was winning recognition as a student of German literature. In September, 1869, he accepted a nonresident professorship of German literature at Cornell University, and the following spring he delivered a course of lectures at Cornell on Lessing, Klopstock, Schiller, Goethe, and Humboldt. Later he expanded the list to twelve, to include the whole range of German liter- ature. The full course was given on at least two other occasions at Ithaca and in several other cities. 382 His approach lacked the intense, personal, and almost fanatically dedicated spirit that had moved the earlier Transcendentalists. But insofar as he reached an immense audience, he outdid even Brooks in making Faust a part of our national culture. During the last decade of Taylor's life he wrote a good deal of criticism, including some of German authors, which appeared in leading periodicals and was collected as Critical Essays and Literary Notes in 1880. 383 However, the main task of his last years was the projected great "double biography" of Schiller and Goethe. 384 But when he was appointed Minister to Germany in 1878, he had not yet written the first chapter. Although he was delighted at the prospect of living near the scenes of his newest book, ill health and the press of official duties prevented progress on the ambitious work, and it remained "written only on the tablets of his brain." 385 In his later years Taylor ventured into 450 German Literary Influence new poetic fields. Intensive study of Faust and other German poems prompted him to renounce his earlier "sensuous" style (which borrowed heavily from Shelley and Tennyson) in favor of a more "solid," more abstract and "philosophical, manner, trace- able to Goethe more than to any other single writer." 386 Unfortunately these poems betray signs of imitativeness com- bined with lack of power and poetic content ; the bare intellectual concepts do not come alive. Taylor was embarrassed by a lack of something real and heartfelt to say. It is for this reason that his version of Faust, though a remarkable performance in many ways, fails to give a true and full reflection of Goethe's meaning and poetry; why Taylor's criticism lacks originality and the marks of strong conviction in the principles and ideas discussed; why his lyrics, so brilliant on the first reading, seem hollow when reread; 387 and why, finally, his travel books, which promise to do no more than describe, remain his most individual and most successful work, although his Faust is a monument to his efforts of transplanting the culture of Germany in America. By virtue of his excellence as a journalist, he promoted in America a better understand- ing of German people, life, and literature. 388 For sheer quantity of information, skill- fully and sympathetically presented, he was the most assiduous and devoted American student of German affairs in his time. CHARLES GODFREY LELAND No less a Germanophile than Bayard Taylor was his friend Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903). Exposed to German influences from earliest youth, 389 he was educated at Princeton, and then spent three years (1 846-1 848) at the universities of Heidelberg and Munich. Everything in Germany enchanted him. 390 What a mighty fascination Germanism has over one who has been under its influ- ence! It is the opium of the mind. . . . That strange feeling of God in all, of the Infinite, is everywhere in Germany. . . . Germanism, that mysterious wonderful spirit, impresses itself on everyone who lives unprejudiced in that country. ... I shall never recover from Germany nor do I know a single person who has lived in Germany who does not prefer it to any other country. 391 Although learning the language cost him "incredible labour," 392 he mastered it so that it presented no barrier to his full, sympathetic entry into the spirit of the literature — until, in short, he felt himself qualified to translate the least translatable of German lyricists, Heinrich Heine. His predilection for Heine was owing largely to' the fact that he had in himself something of Heine's combination of seriousness and; humor, of tenderness and drollery. 393 Leland's generation and later ones, persisted in thinking of him primarily as the creator of Hans Breitmann, often to his ; annoyance identifying him with his hero. The earliest of the Breitmann ballads, ■ "Hans Breitmann at the Barty," was "knocked off in a hurry" as a kind of relief from the tedium of journalism, but it was at once so popular that Breitmann soon j developed into "a definite personality" as Leland added new episodes in the life of his comic rogue. 394 In the Preface to the English edition of 1871 Leland explained what he was about in creating the character: Breitmann is one of the battered types of the men of '48 — a person whose educa- tion more than his heart has in every way led him to entire scepticism or indifference, and one whose Lutheranism does not go beyond Wein, Weib und Gesang. Beneath his unlimited faith in pleasure lie natural shrewdness, an excellent early education, and certain principles of honesty and good- fellowship, which are all the more clearly defined from his moral looseness in details identified in the Anglo-Saxon mind with total depravity. The dialect which Leland used in the ballads caused comment from the first. Even his friend Boker criticized Leland's Minor Movements and Groups 457 inconsistencies in the Breitmann dialect ; but Leland painstakingly justified his practice, explaining that though there is "actually no well-defined method or standard of German-English," he used "observation and care," as well as "suggestions of well- educated German friends," in recording the dialect in a "truthful form." Breitmann, he added, "in several ballads" is a "literal copy or combination of characteristics of men who really exist or existed, and who had in their lives embraced as many ex- tremes as the Captain." 395 He soon went on to cast Teutonic legends into the same dialect. 396 One of his greatest hits was De Maiden mid Nodings On. It is a burlesque of the old tale of "Sir Rupert the Fearless, a Tale of the Rhine," which Leland carried in his memory for years, until, taking a cue from Goethe's "Wassermadchen," he saw the way to turn it to account. De Maiden mid Nodings On became at once a "delight- fully grotesque morsel on every tongue." 397 There is often in these dialect poems more than immediately meets the eye. "Breit- mann's thoughts were ever soaring so to the infinite, so many tags of old verse and bits of old legends were ever running through his head, that only those familiar with German philosophy and literature appreciate the learning crammed into what, to the casual reader, seems mere 'comic verse.'" 398 In this way, Hans Breitmann did much to domesticate certain German con- cepts and folkways in America. Hans was not universally appreciated by the German- Americans, 399 but (as Leland observed) the Germans themselves recognized that the pen which poked fun at them was no poi- soned stiletto. In Philadelphia, during his later years, Leland moved much in German- American circles and actively sought to promote cultural and social contacts be- tween the German and English elements. He participated in German political and social meetings until he felt that the Ger- mans considered him "almost so good ash Deutsh" and very "bopular" to boot. 400 RICHARD HENRY STODDARD In a man like Richard Henry Stoddard (1825-1903) is exhibited the potency of that bookish tradition which aroused in writers of moderate talents the desire to emulate such popular leaders as Taylor and Willis of the Genteel Tradition, whose veneration of German literary culture was integral with their credo. Stoddard had few advantages of education, but fondness for reading and ambition to make a literary career brought him into contact with Taylor, Boker, Aid- rich, Winter, Willis, and Stedman. In 1858, while living with the Taylors, Stoddard wrote his life of Alexander von Humboldt, drawing heavily on Taylor's store of personal reminiscence to enliven the ac- count. 401 Willis' European travel letters, likewise, served to attract and encourage Stoddard to the pursuit of letters. He once asserted that Goethe's Essays on Art helped him profoundly, 402 but very few of his poetical effusions show any direct or marked German influence. 403 EDWARD EVERETT HALE Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) had the advantage of early contact with the German tongue. 404 Like the other Genteel writers, he toured through Europe and visited the famous scenes of southern Ger- many. His books contain numerous refer- ences to Germany and to German figures. Goethe and Schiller, in Lights of Two Centuries (1887), are singled out for special treatment, but the perfunctory tone of his remarks suggests that he was not deeply versed in either. In his booklet on Emerson, Hale's casual and general remarks about Emerson's indebtedness to German philos- ophy imply a familiarity with and mastery of the subject not borne out by the facts. 405 Indeed, this glibness, this tone of easy familiarity with world literature and phi- losophy, is put on as a badge of cosmopoli- tanism and of universality of taste by many 458 German Literary Influence who inherited the tradition of Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes. GEORGE HENRY BOKER George Henry Boker (1823-1890), friend of Taylor and Leland, undertook private studies in German with the latter during their college years at Princeton. 406 His tour of Germany predisposed him to imbibe the generally romantic literary views of the Schlegelian school. Like the Germans, he held that great poetry embodies a philo- sophical idea, and he advocated the organic concept by which thought and design (Gehalt and Form) are viewed as flowing from a single source. In his poem Konigs- mark (1869) he drew on firsthand knowl- edge of Germany to picture corrupt eight- eenth-century court life. "Countess Laura" is a poem that has superficial resemblances to Goethe's Faust and draws on other motifs of German romantic literature as well, but the influence goes no deeper than surface coloring and atmosphere. In his searches for poetic and dramatic themes, ranging through legends and romances from the Far East to the American Far West, he hit upon the intention of doing a dramatic poem to be entitled "Tannhau- ser," 40 ' but nothing came of this enthusi- astically adopted plan. On the whole, he was more responsive to the English, Spanish, and Italian traditions than to the German. CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1902), famous editor of the Hartford Courant, struck out for a literary career upon graduating from Hamilton College in 1850. He made five journeys abroad that kept him altogether seven years away from home. Like Willis and Taylor, he became a writer of popular travel letters, his work appearing in Harper's and the Atlantic. His first journey (1868- 1869) produced a vol- ume of European impressions entitled Saunterings, in which chatty, familiar sketches of Germany make up a consider- able portion. 408 Warner's forte in these essays was a kind of informal philosophic comment on men and manners, such as is well displayed in the chapter on Innsbruck in A Roundabout Journey (1 883-1 884). En route to Italy, his stay at the Golden Adler inn brought to mind the occasions when Goethe, Heine, Emperor Joseph II, and Andreas Hofer had stopped there; the author played over this rich history of the spot with an admirable imaginative recon- struction of literary and historical associ- ations. In a sense, Warner's talent for com- pilation and his wealth of information brought, in his Library of the World's Best Literature (1 896-1 897), in 31 volumes, a fitting climax and monument to the endeav- ors of the Genteel Tradition to foster cos- mopolitan literary culture in its time. EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1905) was a member of the New York group of writers who shared with the "respectable" company of Taylor, Aldrich, Stoddard, and Gilder "the knighthood of the pen" and the prevailing views of gentility in American letters. 409 German literary names, titles, quotations, and allusions figure prominent- ly in his works, notably his critical writings. Several of his books and essays on aesthetic theory are based directly upon the founda- tions of Lessing, Goethe, and Schopen- hauer. 410 As a literary critic of his own age, Sted- man was inclined to interpret such writers as Poe, Longfellow, Whittier, Emerson, and Whitman against a European back- ground. 411 He pointed out the ways in which Goethe, Richter, and Heine influ- enced Longfellow; 412 he indicated similari- ties between German romantic concepts of art and those of Poe and suggested that Poe was indebted to A. W. v. Schlegel for his theory of the "totality of effect" or Minor Movements and Groups 459 "singleness of impression"; 413 he compared Whitman's and Goethe's ideas on poetic prose; 414 and he drew parallels between Goethe and Emerson as leaders of their time. 415 He was an influential poet and critic, possessed of high, if not the highest seriousness, ideality, and range, without the admixture of sentimentalism or frivoli- ty that spoiled so much of the work of his associates. His urbane pronouncements upon aesthetics and his cultivated judg- ments upon literature served the cause of American letters in his day. The ideas which he derived from Germanic sources were only supplementary to the main body of his fundamentally English theory and practice, but they served to counteract American provincialism and didacticism and to promote universality of aim and a devotion to the beauty and dignity of letters. scored a notable success with his "Der Niebelrungen und der Schlabbergaster- feldt," when he read it at a dinner in Chica- go and again when it was given wide cur- rency in the German-American press in German text. 423 As would be expected, German legends appealed to him, and he turned several of them to comic or serious use, usually in his dialect. 424 He occupied himself very little with the heavier and more serious classics, concentrating instead on the Lieder, es- pecially those of Heine and Uhland. 425 On the whole, the Germanic element in his work is superficial rather than deep. He illustrates the tendency of the disciples of gentility to preserve the refinements of the older school of Lowell and Longfellow without inheriting their intellectual force. The Southern Writers EUGENE FIELD It is not clear whether Eugene Field (185c— 1895) learned his German at college or taught himself. His tours of Germany in 1872 and i88g-i8Qoand his contacts with German- Americans, notably Carl Schurz, were doubless of influence. By the time he accompanied Schurz on his campaign of 1 874, Field had become sufficiently proficient in the English-German dialect to indulge his inordinate love of practical jokes at the expense of Schurz and his thick-tongued supporters. 418 Field's interest in Germany was primarily that of a connoisseur of Ger- man art objects or rare books, 417 or that of a seeker after oddities that could be turned to comic uses. 419 In his search for the humor- ous, he extolled the virtues of gosling stew as he had tasted it in Germany, 419 and in his curious mixture of German and English he sang the praises of German onion tarts, 420 while German Kneipen-liis inspired him to compose four poems after the manner of the German drinking song. 421 He composed a poem on the German feather bed, 422 and he WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS The romantic culture of the South, even after the Civil War, continued to take its impress largely from the French in matters of taste, while in literary matters it followed with few exceptions, the tradition of Eng- lish romanticism. William Gilmore Simms ( 1 806-1 870) was among the first, following Poe, to take some cognizance of German literary figures and motifs. 426 His Wigwam and the Cabin (1845) and the collection of stories published under the title Carl Werner and Other Tales of Imagination (1838) are indicative of the extent to which he dabbled in the grotesqueries of Ger- manic Gothicism, but the relationship is one chiefly of general kinship in tone rather than direct berrowing. Closely associated with Simms, the Nes- tor of the group, were Henry Timrod (1826— 1867) and Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830- 1886), who combined their efforts in 1857 to found Russell's Magazine. During the three years that it flourished, this journal promised to compete for the position which 460 German Literary Influence the Southern Literary Messenger had at- tained under Poe's editorship, and which it still held, as the leader among Southern periodicals in devoting space to German literature. The war nullified all this; and the cultivation of German literature, which might have grown into something of con- sequence, is traceable today only as echoes in the writings of the Charleston group. In the case of Timrod, the most cleary recog- nizable German notes are several passages in his long poem, "A Vision of Poetry," that appear to be reminiscent of lines in Faust, and in Hayne the Germanic tones are even more evanescent. JOHN ESTEN COOKE John Esten Cooke (i 830-1 886), who aspired to do for Virginia what Irving, Cooper, and Hawthorne had done for their regions, was inspired mainly by Scott, but he also showed strong leanings toward German Gothicism and found the German romantics engaging — especially Jean Paul, to whom he devoted a chapter, "An Autumn Evening with Jean Paul," in Leather Stocking and Silk (1854). Ellie (1855) and The Heir of Gay mount (1870) contain Ger- man allusions, names, and characters, and, of course, in his Virginia : A History of the People (1833) he dwells at length on the German-American settlements; but most of his literary allusions appear to be derived from such sources as Carlyle, for example, provided. SIDNEY LANIER In the work of Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) the Germanic influence runs deeper. As a young man at Oglethorpe College he came under the spell of James Woodrow, who had taken a Ph. D. degree at Heidelberg and whom he credited with exerting the most "formative influence ... in all my literary work." 427 Lanier formed an ambition to go to Heidelberg to prepare for a professorship in an American university. It is not know how much of the German language am literature he learned from Woodrow, bu he began to try his hand at translatin some of Goethe's lyrics, and his earlies poems were observed to be in a Wertherisi vein. 428 The Civil War destroyed his hope of going to Germany, but the study of th language continued "his most importan intellectual activity of this period." 429 B- 1867, when Tiger-Lilies appeared, he ha< begun to formulate his characteristi theory of poetry. Most of his poems of th time are on melancholy themes associate! with love and show a strong, sometime strained tendency to the personification o natural phenomena and of abstractions "Both tendencies need to be traced n< further than to the influence of Germai poetry which he was so thirstily absorbing to which tendency must also be ascribec Lanier's characteristic and often unfortu nate tendency to use compound nouns an( nominal adjectives." 430 Tiger-Lilies has been called "a boyisl record of one just initiated into the world o German thought." 431 So numerous are quo tations from Carlyle, Richter, and Novali that they interfere with the plot. The them< of the first part of the book is given a Ger manic investiture of quotations and charac ters with German names. Gretchen anc Ottilie reflect Lanier's reading of Goethe Thalberg, the name given to Sterling House, is a translation of Montvale, the name of Sterling Lanier's Tennessee re- sort. 432 Gretchen speaks as Lanier imagi- nes a newly-arrived German would speak English: "How ish all with your house? Und was fur ein Man ish Mr. Cranston ?' ; Riibetsahl is a free spirit, a haunter of the mountains, obviously inspired by Lanier's reading of the Riibezahl legends of Ger- many. 433 The Cranston-Riibetsahl relation- ship is comparable to the Mephistopheles- Faust relationship, and Ottilie says to Cranston, "O, Mephistopheles, play what pleases thy Satanic fancy." 434 Instead of Walt Whitman 461 laying the scene in Germany, which he had never seen but which he yearned for, Lanier in Tiger-Lilies brings Germany to America. Thus the novel becomes part of the literature of transplanted German ro- manticism. Largely self-taught though Lanier was, 435 his German served to give him a wide and discriminating knowledge of German com- posers, among whom Schumann was his favorite. 436 Not equally familiar with all German achievements in art, literature, and science, he had rather an eclectic's knowl- edge of many fields; except for the arts of music and poetry, he was expert in none. In these two realms he studied intensively and thereby found the means to construct his unique fusion of music and poetry. In June, 1875, he published "The Symphony," a poem designed to demonstrate that love is music, that music is poetry, and that both are revelations of God. 437 The same idea finds expression in Tiger-Lilies (1867), The Science of English Verse (1880), and Music and Poetry (1899). In elaborating this theory, Lanier drew on German romantic aesthetics as developed by Wackenroder, F. Schlegel, and Novalis. The German school regarded music as the most spiritual of the arts ; poesy, in the words of Wacken- roder, lay conquered at the feet of music. In his experiments with "reine Poesie" Tieck attempted to utilize tones and notes directly in poetry, and he sought in the novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen to resolve all life and poetry in music. Novalis, whom Lanier admired and frequently quoted, taught in Heinrich von Ofterdingen that it was the romantic destiny of lan- guage to become music, to be transformed into pure song. Catching hints also from Coleridge and Poe, Lanier embodied in his theory the sum of these romantic specula- tions on the possibilities of word music. 438 WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892) The cosmic sweep of Whitman's "barbar- ic yawp," 439 the comprehensiveness of such poems as "Salut au Monde," and the ease with which by the twirl of his tongue he "skirted sierras," "covered continents," and encompassed "worlds and volumes of worlds" 440 are at once disarming and sug- gestive that inquiries into his literary antecedents are petty. While admitting "I conned old times, I sat studying at the feet of the masters," 441 he habitually denied having borrowed from them, and even in his later utterances took pains to say that he received the "precious legacies of the Old World" merely "to give them ensem- ble," to mold them into "modern American and democratic physiognomy." 442 Like Emerson, who resolved in 1835 "to utter no speech, poem or book that is not entirely and peculiarly my work," so Whitman recorded, among the notes made in prepa- ration of Leaves of Grass, his intention to "make no quotations and no references to any other author." 443 Both resolutions were idle; and as inquiries are pushed forward, it becomes increasingly apparent not only that Whitman was one of the most widely (though not systematically) read of the major American authors of the last centu- ry, 444 but also that his reading colored his writings and in some instances supplied the main tenets of his doctrine. 445 If we in- vestigate his claim that he was pre-emi- nently the "pOet of science and democracy, ' ' we shall find him in the first area owing practically everything to his foraging among scientific books; and, as the poet of democ- racy (where he spoke more clearly from his own experience and conviction), we find him admitting that he found "in the for- mulas of Hegel" his "justification of New World Democracy," 446 for "only Hegel is fit 462 German Literary Influence for America — is large enough and free enough." 447 Associated with his faith in democracy was his theory of a national new-world democratic literature, which he said he derived from Goethe, as Goethe had derived it from Herder. 448 Early Contacts with German Culture The question naturally arises: Where, when, and by what means did he acquire a sufficient knowledge of German thought and literature to form such basic judgments? He knew little or nothing of the German language. 449 His acquaintance with German literature appears to have received marked acceleration during 1 846-1 848 while he edited the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, from which time onward his German allusions come in great profusion. 460 In his capacity as editor he reviewed a number of German books that came to his desk. 451 In his pub- lished writings are upward of a hundred references to Goethe, approximately half as many to Hegel, and a like number to Kant; but of the three we cannot be sure that he read much beyond those works of Goethe's that were readily availabe in translation — notably the Autobiography — while of Kant and Hegel he obviously read nothing be- yond what he could find in such books as Gostick's German Literature and Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany. For books and subjects requiring a knowledge of German — "the one language," he observed in 1888, "I am sorry I did not go into when I was young" 462 — he habitually resorted to his practice of "posting up" instead of reading closely or studying systematically. That some of this "posting up" was rewarding is abundantly apparent in the case of the Nibelungenlied, which, by whatever means the illumination came, supplied him with fertile suggestions and some of the essential elements of his distinctive theory of a national American literature and of the type of American bard that he envisaged. 453 Literary Influences Although Whitman said late in life that he was not a "constitutional reader," Emerson's opinion of him as a man who made a copious, if not thorough, survey of the world's books is quite correct. 454 In the process it was inevitable that he should learn something about German writers, though the evidence of what particular authors or books he knew best is not always conclusive. In the case of Goethe, for instance, he professed to know enough to justify his passing judgment upon him, even while confessing, in the next breath, "I know nothing about Goethe." 466 , This is but one instance among the many contradictions in Whitman that involve little more than his love of paradox, 456 for . it is evident (as will appear in the sequel) that he read at least portions of Goethe very attentively. Far from being borne out by • the facts, his professed ignorance of Goethe is an aspect of the Whitman "pose" or "legend," which he himself did much to create and to perpetuate. In this instance we are concerned with that phase of Whit- man the poseur which sought to deflect the reader's (or critic's) attention from the track of his foragings. In his published writings his "concern to conceal his indebt- edness" 467 generally succeeds, but occa- sionally his phraseology is so close that the alert reader recognizes what amounts to a borrowing. One such instance occurs in his characterization of Goethe, who (he says) was, like Sophocles, one of those fortunate individuals endowed with "genius, health, beauty of person, riches, rank, renown and length of days, all combining and centering in one case." 468 The passage is recognizably like Hedge's observation in Prose Writers: "Sophocles alone, among the poets of all generations, may vie with him [Goethe] in this. ... all things conspired for once to make a perfect lot: genius, organization, beauty of person, high culture, riches, rank, renown, length of days." 459 A nearer ex- amination of this popular work on German Walt Whitman 463 writers reveals that it was one of three or four general sources from which Whitman derived more than he cared to acknowledge. A comparison of Whitman's introductory notes for a series of projected "Sunday evening lectures" on "Hegel and Meta- physics" with Cabot's remarks on Hegel in Hedge's Prose Writers illustrates the ex- tent of his reliance on this book: Hegel — born at Stuttgart in 1770 — died at Berlin of cholera — educated at Universi- ty of Tubingen — student of theology — matriculated in 1788, aged 18 — then in retirement pursued extensive and severe courses of study. At 31 was a public lecturer at Jena, at the University — was an associate of Schelling — examined, in his lectures, the difference between Fichte and Schelling — edited a newspaper — then con- ducted an academy or gymnasium at latter place (as rector) — inaugurated and planned his great work of works. Was professor of philosophy at Heidelberg (181 6-18 18) and there published his Encyclopaedia, devel- oping his whole philosophy. 460 * {Writings, IX, 167] Whitman's relation to Friedrich Schlegel presents another interesting case. His notes do not indicate that he delved deeply into Schlegel's characteristic theories, but there is evidence of more than a schoolboy's interest in noting down dates and biograph- ical facts. In 1847 he reviewed the Morrison translation of the Philosophy of Life and Philosophy of Language for the Daily Eagle; a decade later, while making notes on the intention and meaning of Leaves of Grass, a passage in Gostick on F. Schlegel suffici- ently rearoused his interest to make a siz- able notation: Friedrich Schlegel — 1772-1829 — one of two celebrated literary brothers — the other named Augustus. Had a strong predilection toward the wonderful and mysterious. 1803 entered Roman Catholic church. Wrote Philosophy of History, most valuable tenet of which is, — "the inexpediency of destroying old institutions before new ideas are prepared to develop themselves in consistency with the order of society." Lectures (History of Literature) 1811-1812 have chiefly extend- ed his fame. He makes literature the repre- sentative expression of all that is superior in a nation, thus elevating it, especially poetry, far above the views of trivial and common- place criticism, and regarding it as in- corporating and being the highest product of human life and genius. He appreciates the great masters of all countries and sets them off from crowds of temporary persons. Prejudices. — But remember in reading these lectures Schlegel was full of preju- dices of a zealous newly converted Roman Catholic, t [Writings, IX, 120-21] The two passages which Whitman under- scored — the first about the expediency of destroying old institutions before develop- ing new ones in consistency with the order of society, and the other, about literature as the representative expression of all that is superior in a nation — are both paraphras- ings of Gostick's account and represent what in Schlegel was significant for Whit- * See Hedge, Prose Writers, page 446: George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the last of the four great German philosophers, was born August 27th, 1770, at Stuttgart, in the kingdom of Wurttemberg. . . . He was matriculated as a student of Theology in the University of Tubingen in the year 1788. After completing his University career, he pursued an extensive and severe course of study in comparative retirement, being meanwhile chiefly employed as a teacher in private families. In 1801 he became a public lecturer in the University of Jena, dedicating his first work to an examina- tion of the difference between the systems of Fichte and Schelling. Here he continued to give courses of lectures, and to develope his own system, until the taking of Jena by the French in 1806. For the next two years he edited a newspaper, then he was rector of a gymnasium in Nuremberg, where he perfected his most important work, in which he gave a new character to the whole system of logic. While professor of philosophy in Heidelberg (1816-18) he published his Encyclopaedia, in which his whole scheme of philosophy is contained. He was called to Berlin in the year 1818, and remained there until his death, on the four- teenth of November, 1831, when he fell a victim of the cholera. f See Gostick, pages 278-79: Friedrich Schlegel, the younger brother (1772-1829), wrote his work on the "poetry of 464 German Literary Influence man. When they are considered in conjunc- tion with what he derived from Herder about national literary expression, we see how vital they were for the formulation of Whitman's own literary doctrine. Another important source of information for Whitman was Carlyle. The clue that leads to this conclusion is a notation made by Whitman in 1856 at the head of five pages of memoranda on Goethe's life, character, and writings: "Carlyle, in re- views and otherwise, seems to have been the introducer of Goethe and the principal German writers from 1827 onward 10 years." 461 Following the heading "Goethe," he added in parenthesis, "reading Carlyle 's criticisms on Goethe." "His first literary productions [he continues] fell in his 23rd year. Sorrows of Werther in his 25th year." This is recognizable as a passage taken from Carlyle's essay of 1832 of "Goethe's Works": "His first literary productions fell in his twenty-third year; Werter, the most celebrated of these, in his twenty-fifth." 462 Thence he proceeded, point by point, to digest Carlyle's essay, except for occasional interpolations drawn from Carlyle's essay of 1828 entitled simply "Goethe." 463 GOETHE While it might be presumed that as a critic-journalist Whitman knew something about Goethe prior to November 19, 1846, when he published his review of Parke Godwin's translation of Dichtung und Wahr- heit, w nothing of importance appears earlier. This review, in Mr. Holloway's estimation, is significant as throwing light upon the germination of the literary ideals which, during the next year, began to shape parts of Leaves of Grass. Wh The reviewer envisages a "prodigious gain that would accrue to the world" if more men, like Goethe, would write "Life instead of the million things evolved from Life — Learn- ing," and he particularly commends the simple easy truthful narrative of the existence and experience of a man of genius, — how his mind unfolded in his earliest years — the impression things made upon him — how and where and when the religious sentiment dawned on him — what he thought of God before he was inoculated with books' ideas — the development of his soul . . . with all the long train of occur- rences, adventures, mental processes, exer- cises within, and trials without, which go to make up a man. 466 the Greeks and Romans" in 1798. He was even more decided than his brother in opposition to the scientific character of some philosophical theories of his day. His mind had a strong predilection towards all that was wonderful and mysterious in literature as in religion, and the result of his studies was, that he entered the Roman Catholic church at Cologne in 1803, which produced some excitement in the liter- ary world. . . . His lectures on the "Philosophy of History" were evidently written with religi- ous and political purposes, to which he often sacrifices the fair and candid statement of facts. Perhaps the most valuable argument in these lectures is that which exposes the danger of "negative" reformation; or, in other words, the inexpediency of destroying old institutions before new ideas are prepared to develop them- selves in consistency with the older society. . . . His lectures on the "Literature of all nations" (1811-1812) havechiefly extended his fame. . . . The great purpose of the author is to describe the development of literature, in its connec- tions with the social and religious institutions of various nations and periods. He thus elevates literature, especially poetry, far above the views of trivial and commonplace criticism, and regards it in its highest and most important aspect, as the product of human life and genius in various stages of cultivation. The history of the world of books is thus represented as no dry and pedantic study, but as one intimately connected with the best interests of humanity. In the establishment of this "humanitarian" style of literature the services of Friedrich Schlegel were valuable. He endeavored to show the wide distinction between superior men of true genius and the crowd of frivolous writers who have in every period degraded the charac- ter of literature. His design was noble, though its execution was disfigured by prejudices, as the following summary will prove. [Here follows a summary of the Literature of All Nations, in which the reader is again warned against Schlegel's Roman Catholic prejudices, a warning Whitman faithfully recorded.] Walt Whitman 465 These comments take on a special mean- ing when they are related to his stated purpose in Leaves of Grass : to portray a representative personality against the American background of democracy and science. Goethe's "intention of rendering a history of soul and body's growth" is echoed in his own plan for Leaves of Grass in the Preface of 1855: both are a record of "the development of the poet, the type-charac- ter, against the contemporary back- ground." 467 At the time when Whitman first read Goethe's autobiography, he was looking, as Dr. Holloway has said, "for a biographical work — whether in prose or verse seemed to matter little — which should express the entire man very much as his own Leaves of Grass set out to do." 468 Here was a "road map" not only "of the life he was to live" but also "of the book he was to write." 469 Goethe's Dichtung and Wahrheit furnished not so much materials as inspira- tion for the work Whitman planned to write, but it was not the sole influence in directing the composition of Leaves of Grass. George Sand, 470 Carlyle, 471 and especially Emerson 472 had a share in it. However, priority of influence appears to belong to Goethe, whose autobiography had suggest- ed a "ground plan" or "road map" as early as 1846, while Emerson appears not to have counted for much before 1850, when Whit- man read Representative Men* 13 and when he may have heard the Concord sage lecture in Brooklyn. It was 1853 or 1854 before he was ready for the Emersonian message; only then had he "simmered" long enough for Emerson to bring Whit- man's pot "to a boil." While Whitman owed something to Dichtung und Wahrheit, he never became a close student of Goethe. 474 The only other work of Goethe's that left its residue on Whitman's mind was Faust, a book in which he said Goethe "drew deep water." 475 He repeatedly acknowledged reading it, but late in life he insisted that he had only "looked into it — not with care, not studi- ously, yet intelligently, in my own way. ' ' 47S When his admirer, Doctor Bucke, pointed out parallels between Faust and Leaves of Grass, Whitman "appeared interested" but put him off saying, "It is striking, Maurice, though I don't know how well you would hold it against the scholars if they slapped back at you." 477 Soon thereafter Bucke again opened the subject in a letter, saying, "There are just two great modern books — Faust and Leaves of Grass"; and Traubel records Whitman's laughing "mildly" and then remarking airily that Bucke's bracket- ing him with Goethe represented "a modifi- cation of Doctor's partisanship." Then he added that Bucke "always goes far enough and on days when he feels particularly good he goes too far." 478 The complacency with which Whitman regularly accepted tributes, however fulsome, in other instances makes his protestations in cases where similarities between his poems and Faust were stressed singular enough to arouse the suspicion that comparisons on this head were not welcome to him, 479 and that, in this instance he took unnecessary pains to deny a connection which few people had thought important enough to mention. But there are admitted similarities be- tween the general aim of Leaves of Grass and Faust. Both are built on the theme of human effort, human striving. "The justifi- cation of evil, indispensable for keeping the equilibrium in the spiritual energy of man- kind" 480 is a postulate as much of the Faustian creed as of Whitman's view of the world. 481 Inactivity and complacancy spell stagnation in both books. But these are general ideas for which Whitman, who had read Milton, Emerson, and other expositors of the same theme, 482 was not necessarily indebted to Goethe, however suggestive or confirmatory Goethe's poem may have been on this score as, apparently, Hegel came to be later. 483 ZSCHOKKE Several circumstances suggest that Whit- 466 German Literary Influence man derived something from Zschokke's Autobiography, and corroborative evidence appears in certain memoranda that Whit- man made, presumably in 1848, from Zschokke's Selbstschau.*** These notes include both comments and quotations — some exact, others modified in various ways by Whitman. It has been suggested that Whitman discovered in Zschokke ' 'a kindred and congenial spirit, ' ' and that he " may have derived his conception of evil, politics, the individual, and religion from Zschokke be- fore the reading of Emerson brought him to a 'boil.'" 485 A comparison of Zschokke's and Whitman's texts fails, on the ground of in- ternal evidence, to substantiate these inter- esting suggestions. Parke Godwin's trans- lation contained only Part I of Zschokke's Selbstschau, i.e., the biographical portion of the book. Part II, entitled "Welt-undGott- Anschauung" and embodying the kind of sentiments that might have been useful to Whitman in the formulation of the creed that underlies Leaves of Grass, had not been translated and hence was not easily available to Whitman. Indeed, an attentive reading of Whitman's prose writings befoet 1 84s 486 serves to authenticate the fact thar many of the ideas characteristic of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass — democratic principles, political idealism, questionings of sense and outward things, individualism, and what he already called the "American identity" — were already firmly lodged in his mind. Their fruition, if they derived from anything outside Whitman himself, could as readily be related to his contacts with Emerson as well as to his random experience in the practical realm of living, rather than to Zschokke's autobiography, the most fruitful part of which for his pur- poses he probably never saw. Nevertheless, Zschokke's book left its mark. Whitman's memoranda indicate that what impressed him most was Zschokke's simple, honest, straightforward account of himself. Already provided by Goethe's Dichtung xmd Wahrheit with one notable model of autobiography, he saw in Zschok- ke's book another. Paraphrasing Zschok- ke's purpose, Whitman observed, "the Life of Man is interesting and striking enough to stand by itself unwarped by the merit of the Author, or the celebrity of the States- man." 487 In short, Zschokke's book helped confirm Goethe's example for his own plan of employing a simple, natural, autobio- graphical method for Leaves of Grass. 488 Nothing more seems to be involved. HERDER For the rest, Whitman's acquaintance with German literary personalities was neither extensive not profound ; yet in a few particulars their influence was decisive. He : applauded Herder's insistence on a national literature, and credited him with teaching' the young Goethe that "really great poetry is always (like the Homeric or Biblical canticles) the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polished or select few." 489 While this concept and the atten- dant idea of the poet's supreme position and function had become, under the auspices of the romantic dispensation, a commonplace, Whitman's direct attribution of the idea to Herder suggests that he knew what Herder had said on this score and was not merely echoing a widely current idea. 490 Passage after passage, in both Whitman's prose and poetry, parallels Herder's theory. As in Herder, Whitman's interest centers in poetry and on the influence of the "litera- tus." 491 "The topmost proof of a race is its own born poetry. . . . No imitations will do." 492 But we need not go on citing paral- lels from Whitman's pages, for we should have to reproduce large portions of Demo- cratic Vistas, the several prefaces, "Poetry in America To-Day, " "American National Literature," and several of the poems. 493 Heine is the other German literary figure Walt Whitman 467 with whom Whitman occupied himself at some length. Whitman was drawn to Heine by a kinship of spirit, a like feeling for free- dom and modernity, and by their common attack on outworn ideas. Heine was the one German poet whom he discussed at length and admired without qualification. 494 MISCELLANEOUS INFLUENCES Among his memoranda are mentioned a number of other German literary figures who engaged his attention at various times and in varying degrees. Among the older examples was the Nibelungenlied, which he kept coming back to, and regarding which he kept making notations. Luther similarly engaged his attention. If we consider the relative space he devoted in his "Notes and Fragments" an indication of his interest, we shall have to name first "the illustrious four" 495 among German philoso- phers — Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel — as most meaningful, for he devoted twenty pages to them. 498 Following them come Goethe with five pages ; Richter, with two ; F. Schlegel and Herder, one each ; and Hans Sachs, Boehme, Leibnitz, Klopstock, Lessing, Schiller, Heine, Lenau, each, less than a page. Others include Freiligrath, Riickert, Uhland, and Hoffmann von Fal- lersleben (each mentioned twice), and Kinkel, Xavier, Tieck, Chamisso, and Schultze (each once). Beyond some acquintance with the liter- ary theories of the Schlegels, of Herder, of Heine, and, of course, of the German romantic school generally (especially as affecting the criticism of Shakespeare 497 ), Whitman was not deeply conversant with German criticism. In his essay on "Slang in America," he spoke appreciatively of the "honest delving" of German comparative philologists and the significance of their findings, 498 and he knew something of the archaeological discoveries of Schliemann. Among German historians, only Niebuhr is commemorated — in two brief paragraphs. 499 He made some notes and preserved several newspaper clippings regarding Alexander von Humboldt, 500 and he got from such books as Gostick's German Literature some general conceptions of the influence of science on the thought of Schelling and Hegel. In the realm of German philosophi- cal thought he attained, despite his reliance on secondary sources, a better orientation. Philosophical Influences whitman's philosophic personality Whitman's status as a philosopher is indicated by Horace Traubel's report of a conversation between Daniel G. Brinton, Whitman, and himself in 1888, when Brinton said to Whitman, "You give us no consistent philosophy." "I guess not," replied Whitman. "I should not desire to do so." 501 Hereupon Traubel suggested, "Plenty of philosophy but not a philoso- phy"; and Whitman added, "That's better — that's more the idea." 502 His meditations often sound like the stammerings of an adolescent bewildered by the multiplicity of impressions streaming in and upon him : "I cannot say to any person what I hear — I cannot say it to myself — it is so wonder- ful." 503 Humbled before "the puzzle of Being," 504 he stands "baffled, balk'd," ready to admit, "I perceive I have not really understood anything." 505 This feeling of impotence provokes him to scorn philoso- phy: "Philosophies — they may prove well in lecture rooms." 506 "A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books." 507 Yet he accepted without much discrimination all things and all philosophies: "I reject none, accept all." 508 I believe materialism is true and spiritu- alism is true, I reject no part .... I adopt every theory, myth, God, and demi-god. 509 The wag points knowingly at the passage in the "Calmus" cycle of poems: 468 German Literary Influence Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them And yet they expose me more than all my other poems. 510 But when we lift the mystic curtain of obscure terminology and tongue-in-cheek paradox, we discover that the base of all his thought is "the dear love of comrades," 511 essentially the Christian concept of brother- hood. This is the thought upon which the poem, "The Base of All Metaphysics," turns : Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems, Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel, Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato, And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine having studied long, I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems. See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets see Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ the divine I see, The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend for friend, Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents, Of city for city and land for land. 512 "The base of all metaphysics" is not "what the world calls logic," 513 he told Traubel. The rigorous method of the logi- cian was not for him, though he honored those who mastered it. He paid homage to "wondrous Germans and other metaphysi- cians" for their contributions to the culture of the America that is to be 514 — "to such as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods." 515 What is to be made of these mutually nullifying contradictions ? Here, as else- where, Whitman's pose is the key. Having set up, on the one hand, as the "great accepter," unwilling to reject any phase or part of the universe, however irreconcila- ble, 516 he yet felt the need, on the other hand, for a philosophy broad enough to bring harmony into this diversity. There are indications that the cosmic inclusiveness of his creed as enunciated in the earlier editions of Leaves of Grass subsequently occasioned moments of embarrassment, notably during the period immediately before his adoption of Hegelian absolutism as a means at once to j ustif y his assertions to himself and to answer his critics. 517 A number of circumstances converge to indicate the nature of the dilemma in which he found himself. In the first place, as his vision expanded, he found himself checked and amazed at every turn by newer and greater contradictions, and often he could think of nothing better to do than to throw up his hands in a gesture compounded of despair and bravado to assert his "diversity" and "comprehensiveness," or roundly to damn philosophy altogether. In the second place, the oft-repeated criticism of his gainsayers who charged him with inconsistency wore on his equanimity; and in the end his composure was ruffled by the defection of several of his closest disciples, like Brinton, who complained of the master's contradictory principles. 518 Finally, his own experience and growth resulted in a sober- ing development that compounded his difficulties as he progressed. As he gradu- ally shifted from his earlier nationalistic, pantheistic, not to say materialistic, and egoistic tendencies to his later position embracing more of internationalism, Chris- tianity, idealism, and humanism, 519 Whit- man felt increasingly the necessity for a larger philosophy by which to justify his changing views. There can be no doubt that when he chanced upon Hegelian idealism with its doctrine of the Absolute — in which, by definition, all opposites find reconcilia- tion — he clutched eagerly at its more general phases as providing a system of metaphysics large enough for America and for himself. 520 Walt Whitman 469 Conditioned as he had been by Emerson, as well as Hicksite Quakerism, 521 to accept the doctrine of spirit-mirrored-in-nature, he held that "Body and mind are one; an inexplicable paradox," as Whitman goes on to say in the notes for the projected series of lectures on the German idealists : The varieties, contradictions and para- doxes of the world and of life, and even good and evil, so baffling to the superficial ob- server, and so often leading to despair, sullenness or infidelity, become a series of infinite radiations and waves of the one sea-like universe of divine action and pro- gress, never stopping, never hasting. "The heavens and the earth" to use the summing up of Joseph Gostick whose brief I endorse : "The heavens and the earth and all things within their compass — all the events of history — the facts of the present and the development of the future (such is the doctrine of Hegel) all form a complication, a succession of steps in the one eternal process of creative thought." 522 Here we arrive at once at the reason why Hegel appealed to Whitman and his chief source of information regarding Hegelian idealism, for the conclusion of the passage just quoted is closely adapted from the 1854 edition of Joseph Gostick's German Literature (p. 269) : The heavens and the earth, and all things within their compass, all the events of history, the facts of the present, and the developments of the future, may be (accord- ing to Hegel's doctrine) only so many steps in one eternal process of creative thought. Whitman's pose complicates the problem of determining by what means he arrived at this Hegelian conclusion. To hear him tell it, he searched all philosophies, "the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems, Kant . . . Fichte, and Schelling and Hegel" before he found at last "the base and finale for all metaphysics" in Hegel. 523 That the search approximated anything as extensive and systematic as he suggests is unlikely. There can be no doubt that he searched, but all known facts in- dicate that the quest was a groping about until he stumbled on Gostick's abstract. On the basis of all his published writings and those of his notes that are available, we must conclude, first, that the German idealists did not seriously engage his atten- tion prior to his study of Gostick's book; second, that this could hardly have been many years before 1870 ; 524 and third, that his reading about the German metaphysi- cians was completed (perhaps it were more accurate to say, his conclusions regarding them had been formed) before the end of 1872, for in that year, when he published his small volume As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free and Other Poems, he appended an advertisement of Leaves of Grass in the form of an alleged quotation from John Burroughs which bears the unmistakable impress of Whitman's own hand: 525 "The history of the book [Leaves of Grass], thus considered, not only resembles and tallies, in certain respects, the development of the great System of Idealistic Philosophy in Germany, by the 'illustrious four' — except that the development of Leaves of Grass has been carried out within the region of a single mind, — but it is to be demon- strated, by study and comparison, that the same theory of essential identity of the spiritual and material worlds, the shows of nature, the progress of civilization, the play of passions, the human intellect, and the relations between it and the concrete universe, which Kant prepared the way for, and Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel have given expression and statement in their system of transcendental Metaphysics— this author has, with equal entirety, ex- pressed and stated in Leaves of Grass, from a poet's point of view . . . ." — John Bur- roughs' s Note. 526 Thus it appears that by the end of 1871 Whitman had got from Hegel and his Ger- man colleagues what was essential for his purposes, and that he wished Leaves of Grass in its several editions to be understood not merely as an exemplification of Hegel- ian philosophy but as paralleling, in its organic evolution, the development of the "great System of Idealistic Philosophy in 470 German Literary Influence Germany," with the difference that what in Germany required the combined efforts of four men in America was done single- handedly. In his anxiety to give currency to the idea of Leaves of Grass as an organic outgrowth and a consistent illustration of the system of thought developed in suc- cessive stages by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, he repeated the idea three times in as many years in his advertisements. He also wrote it into his poem on "The Base of All Metaphysics," and he allowed W. D. O'Connor to say in a letter, dated February 22, 1883, to R. M. Bucke (a letter which Whitman took care to read and edit very carefully), "Walt Whitman had never read Emerson at all until after the publication of his first edition [of Leaves of Grass] .... But he had read Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel." 527 By 1883, Whitman's memo- ry, like Mark Twain's in later years, had become facile and could recall some things that had not happened at all. He could not remember having read Emerson before 1855 — Emerson whom in 1856 he called "dear Master" ; but he could remember that he had read Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel before 1855 — philosophers whom, as the sequel will show he hardly read at all, but only read about — and that, much later. In view of Whitman's repeated assertions that he not only considered carefully the systems of all four but that his writings represent an American poetic distillation of their ' 'magnificent system, ' ' 528 it behooves us to examine the matter in detail. SOURCES OF GERMAN IDEALISM Whitman's notes for the projected "Sunday evening lectures" aggregate twen- ty pages in the collected edition of his writings. After jotting down birth and death dates for the four German thinkers and adding two paragraphs of biographical facts concerning Hegel (taken directly from Hedge's Prose Writers), he launches into a discussion of the need for a precise meta- physical terminology not merely for the discovery of truth but the better to show the relations among philosophy, religion, ethics, and history. Hegel's strict logic observed this precaution scrupulously, and accordingly he "probably rendered greater service than any man we know, past or present." 529 Despite all this, transcendental philosophy failed to make any "notable increase or diminution" in ethics and religion. "Nor does the Hegelian system, strictly speaking, explain the universe, either in the aggregate or detail. . . . The Eternal mystery is still a mystery." But granting this limitation, there still remains "an entirely legitimate field for the human mind, in fact its chosen ground where all had before gone by default." 530 Next, Whitman falls back on Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany.* Penetrating beneath the shows and materials of the objective world we find . . . that in respect to human cognition of them, all and several are pervaded by the only absolute substance which is SPIRIT, en- dowed with the eternal impetus of develop- ment, and proceeding from itself the op- posing powers and forces of the universe. A curious triplicate process seems the resultant action; first the Positive, then the Negative, then the product of Mediation between them; from which product the process is repeated and so goes on without * Hedge, Prose Writers, p. 446: There is one Absolute Substance pervading all things. That Substance is Spirit. This Spirit is endowed with the power of development; it produces from itself the opposing powers and forces of the universe. All that we have to do is to stand by and see the process going on. The process is at first the evolution of antagonistic forces; then a mediation between them. All proceeds by triplicate ; there is the positive, then the negative, then the mediation between them which produces a higher unity. This again is but the starting point for a new series. And so the process goes on, from stage to stage, until the Absolute Spirit has passed through all the stadia of its evolutions, and is exhibited in its highest form in the Hegelian system of philoso- phy. Walt Whitman 471 end. In his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, this is illustrated in the portion on "History as a manifestation of Spirit." 531 Having said this, Whitman turns at last to a consideration of Hegel's predecessors. Biographical facts, derived in part from Hedge and more particularly from the encyclopedias, 532 are followed by a brief discussion of Kant's purpose and method, with emphasis upon his criticism — all obviously drawn from such popular sources as Hedge, Gostick, Madame de Stael, and the Britannica, 533 for of a firsthand acquaint- ance with any of Kant's works there is no suggestion. 534 In explanation of the problem which Kant attacked, Whitman reports, in Gostick's terms,* on the Locke- Leibnitz controversy as follows : Long before, the speculations of Locke and the materialists had reached the formula that "there is nothing in the under- standing which has not arrived there through the sense," Leibnitz had replied, "Yes, the understanding itself. "[Writings, IX, 176] From this point, again in Gostick's terms.f Whitman proceeds: We must sum him [Kant] up briefly. Kant analyses, dissects, dissipates the vast suffocating miasma that had so long spread impediments to philosophy — discusses much — clears away, removes, sometimes like a surgeon's knife — yet in fact and after all decides little or nothing — is of indes- cribable value — denies the possibility of absolute knowledge of the eternal world. . . . Kant's entire speculations are but a splen- did amplification of this [Leibnitz's] reply. He endeavors to get at and state the phi- losophy of the understanding. The problem of the relation between understanding and the universe of material nature, he does not attempt to solve. The pursuit or examination and elabo- ration of the inquiry. Is a science of meta- physics possible and practicable? involves the gist of Kant's entire labors. [Writings, IX, 176] In the case of Fichte, to whom Whitman devotes the next two pages of his notes, he relied entirely on the Britannica. It is worth noting that while he understood "Subjec- tiveness" to have been Fichte 's basic princi- ple, this doctrine, by the time he made his condensation of the article in theBritannica, did not attract Whitman as it might have if he had come upon it at the time when he first composed "Song of Myself." Fichte's philosophy is acknowledged to be "simple, single, complete and logical as far as it goes," so that there "will always be a select class of minds, and superior ones, to whom Fichte's theory will be everything," but his subjective egoism is important for Whit- man chiefly as representing one of the phases by which the critical philosophy came to fruition in Hegelian absolutism. 535 Similarly, Schelling is important mainly because he attempted to answer "the * See Gostick, page 269: German philosophy, from the time of Leib- nitz, to the present day, has been marked by its "Idealism." The writings of Locke, Condillac, and others led to the conclusion, "there is nothing in the understanding which had not arrived there through the senses." To this Leibnitz replied by saying, "Yes, there is the understanding itself." t See Gostick, pages 266, 269: Kant began his theories with the skepticism of Hume. Like Hume, he begins by denying the possibility of a real knowledge of the external world. He admits that we receive all the ma- terials of our knowledge through the senses, and that from these materials we induce general laws in accordance with the nature of the human understanding; but the question remains — Are these laws, or conclusions (which result from the constitution of the mind), in accordance with external truth or reality ? Kant asserts that no proof can be given to this question. . . . The whole of Kant's system was simply an exposition of all that was implicit in the remark of Leibnitz. Kant explained the laws of the understanding. But are these laws accord- ant with external truth or reality ? Schelling and Hegel have endeavored to answer this question. 472 German Literary Influence question left open by Kant with a doctrine of 'spontaneous intuition'" — by which the human mind and external nature are to demonstrate "the essential identity of the subjective and the objective worlds," and thus to "restrain Fichte's all-devouring ego- ism." 536 Gostick, again, is the main source of information : [Schelling] professes to largely answer the question left open by Kant with a doctrine of "spontaneous intuition" — in other words to solve the problem . . . with the theory that the human mind and external nature are essentially one. That which exists in concrete forms etc. in Nature exists morally and mentally in the human spirit. The difference between him and Fichte is that Schelling's philosophy is more largely objective.* [Writings, YK, 180] No one of Hegel's three forerunners is entirely acceptable to Whitman; yet each in his way originated or carried forward "with epic succession, the modern system of critical and transcendental philosophy," until it reached its fullest expression in Hegel. 637 Together they are "the illustrious four." 538 "They fit into each other like a nest of boxes — and Hegel encloses them all." 539 Of the major nineteenth-century Ameri- can writers, Whitman expressed his appre- ciation of the German transcendental phi- losophers most enthusiastically. This cir- cumstance is all the more striking because he, unlike the New England Transcenden- talists (though he delved no deeper than they did into the "four great philosophers"), never fell into the error common among them of ascribing to these philosophers greater powers than they possessed or greater successes than they achieved. With- out pretending to master their dialectics or to follow them in their more rigorous methods, he recognized their limitations and the limitations of philosophy in general. He repeatedly remarked on the inability of the human mind to achieve absolute know- ledge, 540 yet rated it an inestimable gain that the German transcendentalists had justified "the thought of universality." 541 The longest consideration of the German idealists to be found in Whitman's pub- lished writings occurs in the section in Specimen Days (1882) entitled "Carlyle from American Points of View." Two observations are in order : first, it illustrates a method analogous to Emerson's transfer- ring ideas and expressions from his notes and lectures to his essays; and second, it is entirely fitting that Whitman should have inserted his comments on German philoso- phy into the essay on Carlyle, who had supplied him with much information on the subject in the first place. In a comparison that Whitman makes between Carlyle and Hegel, he sets off Carlyle's "dark fortune- telling of humanity and politics" against the "far more profound horoscope-casting" of Hegel on the same themes. 542 Carlyle seems to Whitman to have done in the realm of literature what Kant did in speculative philosophy. Carlyle cleared away the "jungle and poison vines and underbrush," hacking valiantly at them, "smiting hip and thigh." Kant did the like in his sphere, and "it was all he profess 'd to do; his labors have left the ground fully prepared ever since." 543 But the "main point of Carlyle's utterance was the idea of duty being done," 644 and with this Whitman is off to a discussion of this "most profound theme that can occupy the mind of man," in the course of which his enthusiastic preoccu- pation with Hegel's "fuller statement of the matter" ("probably," says Whitman, "the last word that has been said upon it") soon * See Gostick, page 269: [Schelling] professes to solve it [the problem left open by Kant] by an appeal to "spontane- ous intuition," which discovers that the human mind and external nature are essentially one, or, in other words, that the same intelligence which exists in a conscious state in man lives in an unconscious condition throughout the universe, pervading "all thinking beings, and all objects of all thought." Walt Whitman 473 leaves Carlyle behind and forgotten. This inquiry involves the question: "What is the (radical, democratic) Me, the human identity of understanding, emotions, spirit, &c. , on the one side, of and with the (conserv- ative) Not Me, the whole of the material objective universe and laws, with what is behind them in time and space, on the other side?" 545 Although Kant explained the laws of the human understanding, he left this larger question an open one; "Schelling's answer" is valuable "as far as it goes"; only Hegel's more coherent metaphysical system provides a "substan- tial answer (as far as there can be an answer to the foregoing question)." 546 Hereupon Whitman proceeds to recount "a little freely," he admits, "Hegel's theories of metaphysics, 547 politics, 548 and theolo- gy, 549 in each instance drawing either upon his own notes or upon Gostick's account. Following this summary of Hegelian doc- trine, "indispensable to America's future," he returns to Carlyle in order to call atten- tion to the identity of purpose while con- trasting the great divergence of method between the inspirational progressivism of Hegel and the drastic prescriptions and abysmic pessimism of Carlyle. 560 While the latter is "quite the legitimate European product to be expected," the formulas of Hegel are an "essential and crowning justification of New World democracy." 551 Without being, in the strict sense, either scientist or philosopher, Whitman did possess, especially during his later life, a fairly consistent Weltanschauung ; and that view of life was, in the main, in accord with the absolute idealism of Hegel. His universe like Hegel's, was fluid — in the eternal proc- ess of becoming, or progression, by orderly development, which is best described or explained metaphysically by the Hegelian triadic dialectic. The scientific conception of evolution, his faith in democracy and individualism, his transcendental doctrine of idealism, and his self-reliant trust in the godliness of man were all acquired long before he knew anything about Hegel, although the extension and final elabora- tion of these and related doctrines went forward under Hegelian auspices after he discovered the Hegelian framework about 1870. Most of the elements of Hegelianism which the successive and expanding forms of Leaves of Grass exhibit are properly regarded as basically Whitmanesque in inception, the Hegelian expression of them being in the nature of an overlay, a kind of rationalization of his own still more or less inchoate thinking, but indubitably his own. Hegel's influence on Whitman was in the nature of organizing and regularizing his thought, less in the nature of a great crea- tive or originative force setting him off on a new tack; for by 1870 the direction of Whitman's mind was too clearly determined for Kant or Hegel or any other philosopher radically to deflect him from his course. But once he discovered and largely accepted the transcendental formulas of the "four great philosophers," his later poems, like his later prose, could not escape taking on admixtures from the German source. The point is that his basic doctrines had involved him in so many contrarieties and contradictions that he all but despaired of his problem. It is worth noting that while, after 1870, he continues to stand perplexed before "the puzzle of puzzles," the mystery of Being, repeatedly calling attention to the inscrutability of life's deepest secrets, 552 he is now as anxious to find a consistent ex- planation and to have his philosophy appear harmonious as earlier he was con- tent to shrug off the imputation of incon- sistency. 553 Finding Hegel's doctrine "a reasoned apprehension of the absolute," he adopted it, according to his lights, as the only scheme of reference by which he could justify his thoughts to himself and himself to America. Hegel corroborated in the abstract what he had created in the con- crete; and having offered himself to Ameri- ca as the poet of democracy and science, he appropriated Hegel in the same dual 474 German Literary Influence capacity — as a philosopher of democratic freedom and of "modern scientism." 554 Everything considered, it is remarkable that a relationship so tenuous should have produced such startling results. It may be partly owing to the slight firsthand knowl- edge which Whitman had of "the great System of Idealistic Philosophy of Ger- many" 555 that he so readily found in it lessons for the future of America that he envisaged. Certainly it is a striking instance no less of the absorptive power of the American spirit than it is an example at once of the irony of history and the ambi- guity of the Hegelian system that the "Prussian State- and Court-Philosopher" should find among his most notable dis- ciples the American poet who called himself the poet of democracy and "the greatest poetical representative of German philoso- phy." 556 Finally, the impact of German thought is another instance to prove false the idea that the German influence subsided with the decline of Transcendental-Roman- ticism and the dawn of Realism in America. However, it is noteworthy that in his tran- sitional position and in conformity with his predilections for science and his demand for a new literary spirit, Whitman turned his attention away from Kant and toward Hegel as more nearly consonant with the new science and the future democracy in the Western World. LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITERS John Burroughs (1837-1921) John Burroughs was a literary naturalist who was familiar with not only the works of German scientists like Kepler, Helmholtz, Haeckel, and Weismann 557 but also a num- ber of literary men, and he was genuinely fond of German music, especially Bach. Beethoven, and Wagner. 558 Since he was never in Germany, 859 his contacts with German culture were entirely through books and people. It is doubtful that he knew much of the language ; his use of Ger- man words is rare. What he lacked of facili- ty in German he made up through familiari- ty with writers in English and French who informed him about German science, phi- losophy, and literature, among them Cole- ridge, Carlyle, Hobhouse, Tyndall, Darwin, Huxley, Lodge, and later the French phi- losophers Bergson and Carrel. Emerson and Carlyle were two of his chief informants. For the rest, he depended on translations, of which there were a great many by his time. His references to German writers are numerous; they cover a wide range; and occasionally they are penetrating. Of all Germans, Goethe is the subject of greatest interest to Burroughs. He is dis- cussed, quoted, or paraphrased some sixty times. The greatest single source of his information was Eckermann's Conversations , with Goethe, which he read in both Margaret Fuller's version of 1839 and the complete John Oxenford translation of 1850. 560 The materials derived from Eckermann are of various kinds, touching all sides of Goethe's character: Goethe's interpretation of hap- piness, 561 the necessity of personality and manliness in great literature, 562 his dis- cussion of weather and the inhaling and exhaling of the earth, 563 his opinions of Dante, 564 his criticism of Byron, 565 points of similarity between Goethe and Kant, 566 the superiority of Eckermann over Goethe as an ornithologist, 567 Goethe's description of Scott as a "comprehensive nature," 568 his discussion of the proper subjects for poetry, 569 his view of nature's benefi- cence, 570 his religious nature, which Bur- roughs considered inadequate for the mod- ern world, 571 Goethe's foreshadowing of some of the ideas of modern scientists, 572 his wondrous insight and his cool, uncom- mitted moral nature, 573 and his "intense individual point of view." 574 Generally in Later Nineteenth-Century Writers 475 agreement with Goethe's critical dicta — on Byron, Shelley, and Scott, for example — he disagrees with Goethe on the nature of the Beautiful as objective, holding instead that it is a subjective experience. 575 He cites Goethe upon the necessity of art to produce by semblance the illusion of a higher reality against the rising realists who, he feels, con- tent themselves with "only common reality." 876 And he agrees with Goethe that "a loving interest . . . amounting to a one- sided enthusiasm, alone leads to reality in criticism." 577 Discriminating as Burroughs doubtless sought to make his views of Goethe, all his observations taken together reveal little originality of judgment based on a close study of Goethe's writings in their entirety. There is about his remarks a tone of sinceri- ty, but there is also about them the air of the man who relies chiefly on secondary sources and consequently does not trust himself to discuss minute details but courts safety by sticking close to established opinions, phrased often in striking, but none the less general terms. 578 Interest in Henri Bergson led him to make a study of the translations and com- mentaries on Kant and Hegel that were available in English, 579 and in his book on Whitman he discussed the Hegelian in- fluence on Leaves of Grass, professing to find Hegelian thought in Whitman "as vital as the red blood corpuscles in the blood." 580 German literature enriched Burroughs' mind in many ways, but on the whole he read, following the practice of his friend Emerson, mainly for the lustres. Except in science, where he read for information, German writers provided him chiefly with points of comparison, allusions, embellish- ments — materials with which to garnish his style. Except for Goethe, no German literary figure added much to his stature; but no admirer of Burroughs would delete the German element that adds so much to the pungency of his style. William Dean Howells (1837-1920) William Dean Howells' acknowledged indebtedness, mCriticism and Fiction (1891) and elsewhere, to the English and Conti- nental realists is so well known that the extraordinary catholicity of his literary taste, especially during his earlier years, is often forgotten. Even after the main lines of his realism were clearly drawn, the variety of his interests manifested itself — most notably in My Literary Passions (1895). 581 In his autobiographical Years of My Youth (191 6) he described the excite- ment and intoxication that he felt as a youth of fourteen when, dedicating himself to literary pursuits with delirious obsession, he set himself to unlock the stores of foreign literatures by "studying four or five lan- guages" and "reading, reading, reading." 588 Early during his years as a compositor in his father's printshop he came under the spell of Heine through a German type- setter, and promptly proceeded to do battle with the German language. 583 Before he was eighteen, the witchery of Heine had led him to develop a fondness for all German liter- ature, and his daily association and cultural contacts with the large German populations of Dayton and Columbus engendered a kind of frenzy for Germanism. 584 In retros- pect, years later, this Teutonic phase of his self-culture seemed to him "fantastic," but there can be no doubt that at the time he was seriously affected, and that, however far he subsequently got away from these youthful enthusiasms, they left a substan- tial cultural residue in his mind. 585 During his Ashtabula period, while for- aging about for something to read, he came upon a copy of Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Literature. He chanced upon this book at an opportune moment, immedi- ately after Spanish drama had engrossed his attention. I cannot give a due notion of the comfort this book afforded me by the light it cast 476 German Literary Influence upon paths where I had dimly made my way before. ... Of course, I pinned my faith to everything that Schlegel said. I obediently despised the classic unities and the French and Italian theatre which had perpetuated them, and I revered the romantic drama which had its glorious course among the Spanish and English poets, and which was crowned with the fame of Cervantes and Shakespeare whom I seemed to own, they owned me so completely. 686 Even before he read Schlegel, he dis- covered Goethe, about whom he had more to say than about any other German except Heine. Taught that he should admire Goe- the in all his parts, the youthful Howells was chagrined to discover that his "heart would not kindle at the cold altar of Goe- the." 587 Even after he had formed his own literary theory, he found Goethe's novels crudely constructed, the dialogue stilted, and the tone too sentimental to suit his taste for realism. 588 Holding that "art, like law, is the perfection of reason," and that "whatever is unreasonable in the work of an artist is inartistic," 589 Howells found distasteful Goethe's blending of the real and the unreal and his veiling of the reasonable behind the implausible. Finally, demanding a realistic portrayal of life that centered on normal, healthy people, he objected to the unmoral nature of Goethe's works. 590 But Heine (he said) "dominated me longer than any author that I have known." 591 Aside from Heine's direct liter- ary influence on individual poems, the earliest and in some respects most profound effect of Heine was to correct Howells' idea, learned from Goldsmith and Pope, that to be a writer he must adopt a literary attitude or pose — that he must "literarify" himself. This he thought, meant developing a cer- tain type of style as far removed from reality as "acting which you know to be acting" is removed from life. Heine at once showed me that this ideal . . . was false; that the life of litera- ture was from the springs of the best com- mon speech, and that the nearer it could be made to conform, in voice, look and gait, to graceful, easy, picturesque and humor- ous or impassioned talk, the better it was. He did not impart these truths without imparting certain tricks with them, which I was careful to imitate as soon as I began to write in his manner, that is to say in- stantly. . . . But in all essentials he was himself, and my final lesson from him, or the final effect of all my lessons from him, was to find myself, and to be for good or evil whatsoever I really was. 592 As he intimates, he did not learn this lesson at once, for in imitating Heine and copying his mannerisms, Howells was, of course, defeating his own purpose. A decade later Lowell, to whom Howells had sent ' some verses for the Atlantic, held them over until he could be reassured that they were ■ original and not translations from Heine. 593 Later Lowell improved an opportunity to . tell his young friend that he disliked the "pseudo-cynical" note which he detected as deriving from Heine, and advised him to "sweat the Heine out" of himself "as men ■ sweat mercury out of their bones." 594 The poem entitled "Pleasure-Pain," whose authenticity Lowell questioned, is among the most obviously Heinesque poems of Howells. The melancholy sigh, the long- ing, the disappointment, the passionate love coupled with the thought of death, that pervade Heine's poems are imitated in both manner and rhythm, 595 and the superscrip- tion from Heine, "Das Vergniigen ist nichts als ein hochst angenehmer Schmerz," further accentuates the relationship. Often the similarity extends only to mechanics and mood, both of which are followed rather faithfully in "While She Sang," identical in meter with Heine's "Lorelei." The same may be said for "Convention," a poem of eight lines; while the metrics of the "Elegy on John Butler Howells" bears a striking resemblance to that of Heine's "Belsazer." Occasionally, as in "A Poet," Howells seeks to combine the lyric note of longing with that of cynicism that is so characteristic of Heine; but the more striking parallelisms Later Nineteenth-Century Writers 477 are usually in metrical arrangement, notably in the manner in which he seeks to imitate Heine's variations from two- to three-syllable feet and back again for lyric effect. Except for his "saturation in Heine," from whom he unquestionably drew much support in developing his characteristic doctrines of writing "truthfully" or "realis- tically," the German writers left him re- latively untouched. 596 The boundless en- thusiasms of his youth, appropriately called "passions," however much they "empar- adised" him at the time, were evanescent in their effect, as such infatuations often are. After all, Howells' technique was of the simplest kind — about as untheoretical as it could be. He set out simply to do for his place and time what "the divine" Jane Austen had done for hers. "The faithful treatment of material," once he realized that he must rid himself of imitation and mannerism, schools and cults, required little more than keeping his eyes straight ahead and setting down what he saw, and that simple procedure enabled him to make the boast that he could concentrate on his materials, or the selection of them, with a minimum of distraction by any theoretical or technical considerations of craftsman- ship. In crediting Heine with showing him the way, he acknowledged Heine to be the one from whom he learned more than from any other literary source. Henry James (1843-1916) Germany was largely irrelevant for Henry James. As a lad of sixteen he spent a sum- mer at Bonn, with tutors, busy with the German language and literary classics, in the faith that everything "so mystically and valuably Gothic" somehow was an agency "ministering to culture." 597 But he was not won over; and when, in 1872, his commis- sion to write a series of European travel letters for the Nation again took him to Germany, he soon concluded that he was done with Germany — that he could "never hope to become an unworthiest adoptive grandschild of the fatherland." 598 There are occasional references to Goethe and other Germans in his writings, 599 and for the sake of universality, he included among his social revolutionists in The Princess Casamassima (1886) a German named Schinkel along with Muniment of England and Poupin of France, and other German characters appear in others of his "inter- national" stories; but fundamentally, he remained antipathetic toward Germany — an instinctive feeling that finally expressed itself in his embracing British citizenship as an act of protest against his native country's not coming promptly to the aid of the Allies in World War I. Mark Twain (1835-1910) Howells' observation that Mark Twain was "the most unliterary" literary man he had ever known engendered the myth that Mark Twain was a completely "self-made" writer "lacking in book learning," 600 — that more than any other American writer, he dug into the native virgin soil and copied nature only. As the study of Mark Twain proceeds, it becomes steadily clearer that Mark Twain was unliterary only in the sense in which Howells was literary. He was fully cognizant of his shortcomings owing to the irregularity of his education. It required no Dr. Holmes to remind him that to be "self- made" was not synonymous with being "well-made." 601 But that he was ever driven by established opinion or "genteel" tradi- tion into denying his own feelings and con- victions about what he considered good or bad in art is refuted by numerous passages in A Tramp Abroad 60 * and elsewhere. He once observed, "I ought to have recognized the sign — the old sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor." 603 But Mark Twain made a fine art of talking through his hat, and care 478 German Literary Influence must be exercised to recognize his drollery when we come upon it. 604 He was no more reticent about voicing his opinion of books or about quoting from them than he was about continuously repeating a word or phrase that suited him, all the resulting tautology notwithstanding. 606 But there is no profit in laboring the point. Mark Twain was unacademic but not unliterary. 609 Among the 695 references to books and authors that I count in his published works, there are few allusions to Germans and fewer to writers in other foreign languages. There is nothing to indicate that in French or German, the languages which he knew best, he ever read a book in the foreign language if he could get it in translation. 607 Paine tells us that Mark Twain tried to learn German from an old German cobbler who lived in Hannibal, but his English was so meager that little was gained from him. It was not until he was fairly launched on his career as a writer that he began a more serious study of the foreign languages and literatures. Howells was of the opinion that Mark Twain knew German ' 'pretty well, and Italian enough late in life to have fun with it." 608 Even after Samuel Clemens acquired fair facility in German during his several periods of residence in German-speaking countries, he continued "to have fun" with German, purposely exaggerating his diffi- culties with the language in order to capi- talize on its absurdities, and ingeniously inventing unheard of linguistic atrocities for calculated comic effects. Many of his best passages in "The Awful German Language" and in the playlet which he composed in a jargon of German-English are felicitous hits only because the author, far from being the inept linguist that he represents himself, knows perfectly well what he is about. RESIDENCE AT HEIDELBERG During the first months of 1878 the entire Clemens family seriously undertook to learn German in preparation for a year which they intended to spend in Germany. A German nurse was engaged, and "the whole atmosphere of the household present- ly became lingually Teutonic." 609 Bayard Taylor, going on his appointment as Minis- ter to Germany, accompanied them, and lessons were profitably continued aboard ship. The study was prosecuted even more vigorously immediately upon finding living quarters in the Schloss Hotel at Heidelberg, to the point, said Mark Twain, that all suffered nightmares. Little Susy wished that Rosa, the German nurse, were "made in English," and Clemens himself heartily damned the language time and again. But they all persevered, and by May 7, Mark Twain wrote to Bayard Taylor in that mixture of tongues for which he had a special gift: Wir werden hier bleiben villeicht fiir drei Monate, zum Schloss-Hotel. — Dies hotel steht about fiinf und siebenzig Fuss hoher als das Schloss, und commandirt ein Aus- sicht welcher ohne Ahnlichkeit in der Welt hat. (Sie miissen excuse auskratchens, inter- lineations, u.s.w.) Ich habe heute gecalled on der Herr Pro- fessor Ihne, qui est die Professor von Englischen Zunge im University, to get him to recommend ein Deutschen Lehrer fiir mich, welcher he did. Er sprach von mehrerer Amerikanischer authors, und meist giinstiger und vergnugungsvoll von Ihrer; dass er knew you and Ihrer Lebe so wohl, durch Ihrer geschreibungen ; und wann Ich habe gesagt Ich sollen Ihr schrei- ben heute Nacht gewesen if nothing happened, er bitte mich Opfer sein compli- ments, und hoffe Ihnen will ihm besuchen wenn du kommst an Heidelberg. Er war ein vortrefflicher und liebwiirdiger and every way delightful alte gentleman. Man sagt Ich muss ein Pass (in der Eng- lish, Passport,) haben to decken accidents. Dafiir gefelligt Ihnen furnish me one. Meine Beschreibung ist vollenden: Geborn 1835; 5 Fuss 8 1 / 2 inches hoch ; weight doch aber about i45pfund, sometimes ein wenigunter, sometimes ein wenig oben; dunkel braun Haar und rhotes Moustache, full Gesicht, mit sehr hohe Oren and leicht grau pract- volles strahlenden Augen und ein Ver- Later Nineteenth-Century Writers 479 dammtes gut moral character. Handlung- keit, Author von Biicher. Ich have das Deutsche sprache gelernt und bin ein glucklicher Kind, you bet. 610 On July 4, he addressed the American students at the University in the same kind of jargon. 611 Later from Munich, he wrote to Taylor that "the children talk German as glibly as they do English," but that his own facility in the language still left some- thing to be desired. The oddities of the language continued to engage his attention, but he gave up actively studying German because it interfered with his writing. Triumphantly he reported that since he had "learned the German language and forgot- ten it again," he felt justified in resuming English once more. 612 He had attained a certain fluency, and he decided to forego accuracy, while he capitalized on his own mistakes, even to exaggerating them grossly and blaming all on the "awful" language itself. He reported with relish Twitchell's saying to him, on an occasion when he was speaking in English of some private matters which he did not want German bystanders to overhear, "Speak German, Mark, — some of those people may understand English." 613 Thus he practiced his atrocities on the lan- guage and stored up materials for his essay on "The Awful German Language," for the playlet Meisterschaft, and for the translation which he made of Struwwelpeter some years later. The concern with German did not cease once the Clemenses returned home. The German nurse remained a fixture; 614 and as late as 1887, when the study of Browning was on the wane, the Browning Club was succeeded by (or blended with) a German Class which met at regular intervals at the Clemens home to study "der, die, das" and the "gehabt haben's" out of such texts as Meisterschaft and Ollendorff. 615 For their amusement and profit, Mark Twain con- cocted a play in three acts called Meister- schaft, a literary achievement of which he was proud. His struggles with German, his studied corruptions of the language, an "innate gift of gab, and his western relish for sonorous idiom that underlay his love of declamation and profanity," 616 all eminent- ly prepared him for the writing of this farce. The play was given twice by the class "with enormous success," and it was pub- lished in modified form in the Century for January, 1888. 617 BERLIN AND VIENNA During the summer of 1891 and the following winter the Clemenses were again in Germany. 618 Mark Twain and his wife enjoyed the most flattering attentions from Berlin society, from Emperor William II on down, so much so that little Jean remarked, "Why, papa, if it keeps on like this, pretty soon there won't be anybody for you to get acquainted with but God" — a remark that he relished less and less the more he thought about it. 619 He was much in demand at the mighty Kommers, and it was for one of these occasions that he dug up a chapter of an essay in which he had made a beginning thirteen years earlier to "improve and simplify" the German language. Still intrigued by the mouth-filling compounds, he proudly produced a word of thirty-nine letters, which, as he observed, "merely concentrates the alphabet with a shovel." 620 The Berlin winter also yielded his essay on Berlin, "The German Chicago." 621 Most important, he came across the old nursery book of Struwwelpeter by Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann and straightway set to trans- lating it for the edification of his children. 622 The third period of residence in German- speaking countries came during 1 897-1 899, toward the end of the long lecture tour that resulting in Following the Equator (1897) and the settlement of Mark Twain's debts. 623 On November 21, 1897, the Concordia Club of Vienna honored him with a Festkneipe, for which all the great ones of Vienna assem- bled, and for whose delectation he spoke on "Die Schrecken der Deutschen Sprache." 624 480 German Literary Influence Thus by steps was produced "The Awful German Language," an essay which contains ample evidence to show that while in speaking German Mark Twain may have disdained to employ more than "a touch of good grammar for picturesqueness," he was far from uninstructed on the subject when it came to writing. For no one not thorough- ly acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of the language could have butchered it as success- fully as he did. 625 In some respects the most important literary result of Mark Twain's Vienna period came as a consequence of his twice seeing Adolf von Wilbrandt's Der Meister von Palmyra, an impressive play in which Death, the principal character, is presented as all powerfull. 826 As one reads Mark Twain's commentary on the play, one feels that he found strong confirmation, not to say satisfaction, in the Meister von Palmyra for his own "sorry creed," as it took shape in his mind during the nineties. "The piece," he wrote, "is just one long, soulful, sardonic laugh at human life. Its title might properly be 'Is Life a Failure ?' and leave the five acts to play with the answer. I am not at all sure that the author meant to laugh at life. I only notice that he has done it." 627 He then proceeds to elaborate on the lessons of the play in precisely the tone adopted in What is Man? and The Mysteri- ous Stranger. Germany provided Mark Twain not merely with the bewitchingly romantic atmosphere portrayed in A Tramp Abroad but also with a retreat from a life whose sorrows were bearing him down. He found the German language excruciatingly funny, but he also found in that language the play that gave him food for serious thought. Finally, it may be observed that, despite the fun he made of it, the language itself became a family possession of the type that entered into their daily lives. It developed overtones of meaning that only long familiarity could breed. An instance is the peculiar spell which the word unbernfen worked on all members of the family. It acquired a special meaning and became a kind of talismanic charm which the anxious watchers at the death-bed of Mrs. Clemens uttered — softly, half-superstitiously, half- religiously — as she made her last rally. On the simple marker which Mark Twain had placed at her grave he had inscribed, besides the name and record of birth and death, the words: "Gott sei dir gnadig, O meine Wonne!" Bret Harte (1836-1902) Previous to his appointment as consul to Crefeld in Prussia, Bret Harte had taken' little notice of German literature. 628 When he sailed for Europe in 1878, he left his' family in America, intending to have them join him after he was established. His early . dislike of Germany appears in his first' letters home: the climate, the officiousness, the militarism, and the scenery around Crefeld left much to be desired. Even the vaunted German opera displeased him: in Tannhduser he found the singing, acting, orchestration notoriously bad, and he was , disappointed in Faust and Der Freischiitz. Aside from the ill health that troubled him during his first year in Germany, he had serious difficulties with the language, and the work incident to mastering the records of his office and organizing the consular service was very trying, for he had to rely largely on an interpreter. 629 Soon after his arrival in Crefeld, the Berliner Tageblatt asked him to write a series of semi-monthly letters. 830 These letters of "impressions" turned out rather more "frank" and "outspoken" than the editor had bargained for, or the reading public liked; and by April, 1879 Harte gave up the plan. 631 Even before going to Ger- many, he had written a parody called "The Legends of the Rhine," in which he listed, recipe-like, the ingredients required for concocting a German legend. In Germany, when he set himself to turn to literary use Later Nineteenth-Century Writers 481 some of the German lore that he found on every hand, this critical tone insinuated itself into his stories. In poems like "A Legend of Cologne," instead of surrendering to the atmosphere of romanticism as Irving and Longfellow had done, he adopted the quizzical tone of Mark Twain's Innocents. In "A Legend of Sammstadt" the hero drinks a glass of wine, inducing a dreamy state in which he relives the events related in an old German tale, but throughout the author remains critically aloof, and the whole is treated in the nature of a hoax. Altogether his nearest approach to an appreciative tone is struck in "Views from a German Spion," in which, after the manner of the Lady of Shalott, he views a street scene below his window by looking into a small mirror; but even in this sketch, his critical temper asserts itself in the inevitable comparisons which he draws between small-town life in Germany and America. 632 After two years in Crefeld, Harte was transferred to Glasgow, and he never again saw Germany or his native land. The liter- ature of Germany touched him but lightly. For the most part, the German influence on his writings is one of places and characters, or what might be termed local coloring. Edward Rowland Sill (1841-1887) In the case of Edward Rowland Sill, an- other one of the men interested in the Over- land Monthly and, like Harte, long a resi- dent of California, the purely literary influ- ence was stronger than in Harte. 633 He early turned his attention to making Ger- man literature available through trans- lation. In 1867 he proposed to Henry Holt a volume of Zschokke's tales, to be trans- lated by himself and his friend Shearer, and the next year he prepared an English ver- sion of the novelized life of Mozart by Hermann Rau. 634 It is clear from his trans- lation as well as from several of his critical essays, notably one on the art of translation and another in which he compared French and German lyric poetry, that he had expert knowledge of both languages. 635 His literary ideal was Goethe, whose life and writings furnished him with anecdote and illustration for his own essays. 636 He was fond also of Kant and approvingly quoted Kant's ethical pronouncements. 637 Another work of serious import that interested him was F. W. von Humboldt's Briefe an eine Freundin.* 38 Most of Sill's essays, appearing in maga- zines as various as the Overland, the Nation, and the Atlantic, were unsigned, so that the establishment of his canon presents diffi- culties. The extent of Germanic influence on Sill will not be known until his writings are brought together ; but it is apparent, on the basis of the available fragmentary collections of his prose and verse, that he repeatedly drew upon German authors for his own writings. Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913?) A self-educated adventurer in many realms and a bold pretender to universal learning, Ambrose Bierce declared on one occasion that a knowledge of foreign lan- guages and literatures was of no use to a writer, only to claim at the next opportuni- ty, expert linguistic attainments for himself in many languages. 639 It is generally be- lieved that he attained in a considerable measure the scholarship to which, earlier, he pretended. His publication, in 1892, of a translation of Richard Voss's Der Monch von Berchtesgaden is not conclusive evidence that he attained to competence in German, because it was in reality only an adaptation of Danziger's translation of the year be- fore. 640 The Devil's Dictionary, appearing in installments from 1881 to 1906, affords some indications of Bierce's knowledge of German language and literature, as well as of philosophy, although much of it bears the earmarks of curious learning dug out of out-of-the-way places of a sort to suggest 482 German Literary Influence that he mastered all literary and philosoph- ical books. 641 His spurious learning and his mock references to books only deepen the studied enigmatical nature of the man, whose unexplained disappearance about 1913 in Mexico came as a fitting climax to his odd career. O.Henry (1862-1910) Irregularly educated, O. Henry became a voracious reader, first, of all literatures in translation, and after 1882 (when he began to study German, French, and Spanish), in some cases in the original. Included among his earlier reading are some of the stories of Auerbach and the Hammer and Anvil of Spielhagen. After he went to live with the Halls in Austin, Texas, he paid some atten- tion to the German language, but never progressed as far in that medium as he did in the Spanish. It may be that the large German population of San Antonio and Austin led him to resume studying German about 1 894-1 895, while editing the Roll- ing Stone, a humorous weekly, published in both cities and circulated in consider- able numbers among the Germans of those localities. An illustration of a German musician brandishing a baton and some humorous verses below the picture cost him most of his German subscribers. Occasional references to Germany, German art and music and German architecture indicate that Germany appealed to his imagination, but there is little in his writings to suggest anything like a distinctly literary influence. Recent Trends By the time of O. Henry the prevailing emphasis on localism and veritism, that is to say, attention to the near at hand and to the factual, made romantic and transcen- dental Germany seem remote and inconse- quential. In some realistic and naturalistic quarters everything German was foreign, exotic, false — at all events, inapplicable. Veritism insisted upon the "truthful" de- piction of the local American scene; and in the craftsmanship of people like Frank Norris and Hamlin Garland German senti- ment and idealism alike ceased to have much significance. However, with the advent of the local- color movement and its attention to regions, races, nationalities, and folkways, the Ger- man settler came in for his share of literary treatment. The occasional "Dutchman" who flitted across the pages of Cooper and Irving was invested with a new significance by the local colorist. The tendency is noticeable in John Esten Cooke, whose interest in Germany otherwise is non- existent. His portraits of German settle- ments in Virginia and of individual German characters provide more than merely inci- dental touches. The same tendency is no- ' table also in some of Edward Eggleston's novels of Indiana, especially in The End of the World (1872), 642 which embodies a highly successful rendition of the German-Ameri- can dialect in the speech of Gottlieb j Wehle. 643 The trend continued unabated, and finds exemplification in more recent times in the novels of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, the latter himself the son of German immigrants ; and in an area like Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania-German has been exploited for literary purposes not only by himself but by writers of non- German extraction. While American literary interest in Ger- many underwent a general abatement with the rise of the realistic and naturalistic schools, Germanic influence never came to a sudden halt or a final period. Even the imagists, whose chief emphasis fell upon matters of technique (for which they found their models primarily in France and Eng- land), were not unacquainted with poetic trends among modern German poets. Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound are cases in point. Sara Teasdale's inspiration came not only from her early reading in Christina Rossetti, but quite as much from German lyricists. Later Nineteenth-Century Writers 483 especially Heine, with a translation of whose verses she busied herself while she was still a schoolgirl. John Gould Fletcher inherited through his mother, who was born of Ger- man immigrants and who never felt at home in America, his aspirations toward the aesthetic life of Europe, so that he became an expatriate, until his reading of Nietz- sche and Spengler, together with events in Europe at the time of the first world war, led to his repatriation. The impact on American writers of Schopenhauer's pessimism and von Hoff- mann's philosophy of the unconscious goes back as far at least as Edgar Saltus' Philosophy of Disenchantment (1885). It has been called "a pocket exposition of the doctrines of Schopenhauer and von Hart- mann," jauntily concluding that "life is an affliction." A contemporary of his, who also represents the malaise de la fin de siecle, though from a very different angle, was Henry Adams, whose autobiographical Education spells out very precisely the crucial effect upon his turn from faith in unity to acceptance of chaos by the distress- ingly disintegrative complex of ideas stemming from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Haeckel. The Education of Henry Adams ( 1 907) , obviously inspired by the Erziehungs- plan of Goethe's Autobiography and Wilhelm Meister, explains in the chapter entitled "Teufelsdrockh (1901)" how his reading of Schopenhauer led him to proclaim that "the larger synthesis" of the Hegelian "principle of contradiction expressed by opposites" led inevitably to the conclusion that "in the last synthesis, order and an- archy were one, but that the unity was chaos." Thus prepared, he describes in the chapter called "The Abyss of Ignorance (1902)" how his "plunge" into the science of Wilhelm Ostwald, Ernst Mach, and Ernst Haeckel led at last to his initiation into "The Grammar of Science" by which he was forced to conclude (1) that "Chaos was the law of nature, and order was the dream of man," and (2) that "the mind could gain nothing by flight or by fight" but must "merge in its supersensual multiverse, or succumb to it." This, in turn, led to the final phase of the education of Henry Adams by which he formulated the dynamic theory of history that fixed "1950 as the year when the world must go to smash." The impacts of Haeckel on writers like Dreiser, of Nietzsche on Jack London and Frank Norris, and of Freud on Anderson, Hemingway, and the stream-of-conscious- ness writers are relatively recent but im- portant phenomena that will long occupy the critic and historian of twentieth - century literature. In the drama, Eugene O'Neill admittedly learned much from individual Germans like Hauptmann, Kai- ser, and Wedekind and from the entire tradition of Expressionismus in recent German literature. Men like T. S. Eliot have, of course, made the language and literature of Germany an integral part of their intellectual and aesthetic equipment. The writings of William Ellery Leonard breathe the very atmosphere of Germany, where he received much of his education. Even the naturalistic verse of Robinson Jeffers bears the mark of his years in Swit- zerland and Germany, so that while more immediate native concerns have largely displaced the powerful interest which classic German literature once evoked in American writers like Emerson and Long- fellow, there is still an active and continu- ous stream of influence that shows signs of outliving even the catastrophe that German culture suffered during recent years. The first comprehensive, though brief and necessarily very tentative, survey of what twentieth-century American authors owe to German critics and writers has been attempted by Professor J. Wesley Thomas in the concluding pages of his A merikanische Dichter und die deutsche Lileratur (Goslar, 1950). In the meantime, especially since the end of World War II, we have witnessed a decided shift of emphasis and direction in 484 German Literary Influence German-American cultural exchange. Ger- many, long the exporter to America, has become steadily more the importer from America 644 — a shift in cultural influence that promises to provide the counterpart in this century for that remarkable German cultural imperialism felt in the United States during the last century. AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM German literary criticism did not make itself felt in America until after 1820, partly because American critics were under Eng- lish-Scottish tutelage, 645 and partly because German criticism itself was meager and derivative before the era of Lessing and Herder. The generation of Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, reading Schiller, Goethe, the Schlegels, Tieck, Gervinus, and Ulrici and probing into German idealistic philosophy, were the first to make extensive use of German criticism. Following a time lag of another decade or two, this body of German thought was transmitted to America, when W. H. Prescott, R. H. Dana, H. N. Hud- son, Emerson, and Lowell fostered Schle- gel-Coleridge-Carlylean criticism — a roman- tic approach to literature and art in general but especially to Shakespeare. 846 The Concern with Shakespeare Criticism The effort of the Germans to incorporate Shakespeare into their literary tradition was the aspect of their criticism that re- ceived more notice in England than Les- sing's examination of the broad principles of poetic creation, or the violent and provoc- ative naturalism of the Sturm und Drang school, or the speculations on aesthetics of Kant, Schiller, Novalis, Wackenroder, and Schelling. German critical influence in nineteenth-century America can conven- iently be studied in relation to Shakespeare, for virtually every literary principle ad- vanced by German critics from Herder and Lessing to the Schlegels and Hegel was itself bound to be brought to bear on Shake- speare. 647 Shakespeare criticism came to be a common ground on which German and American critical opinion could meet most readily. Three broad, not always mutually exclusive, streams of critical opinion emanating from Germany had a deep and lasting effect: (1) the Schlegel-Coleridge view of Shakespeare as interpreted by such writers as Prescott, Dana, Whipple, Giles, Lowell, Emerson and Margaret Fuller; (2) German philosophical transcendentalism that inspired the transcendental critics, principally Margaret Fuller; and (3) the historical-scholarly school, inspired by Goethe and the Schlegels, introduced by the Ticknor-Everett-Bancroft generation, and adopted as the standard in method and point of view by our universities and gradu- ate schools generally. The extraordinary vogue of Shakespeare in Germany 648 between 1760 and 1780 en- couraged the British to re-examine the bases upon which their own criticism had so long rested, and it inspired in them a renewed interest in their national past. Aided by the synthesizing efforts of the aesthetic philosophers, German criticism was at long last in a position to strengthen the critical revolt in England that had been germinating as far back as Addison, Steele, Lord Karnes, Dr. Johnson, and the Wartons. The implications of the new criticism for the interpretation of Shakespeare may be reduced to the following principal points: (1) the effort of historical criticism to see Shakespeare in his own age and country; (2) the substitution of the principle of or- ganic unity for the rules and authority of the French neoclassical school; (3) the attempt to read a philosophic content, a "larger unity," dramatic consistency, and central idea into the Shakespearean dra- ma; 649 (4) the assertion of the artist's right to expression as opposed to the imitation of American Literary Criticism 485 models; (5) the appearance of a note of appreciative sympathy, often mixed with sentimentality, in discussing Shakespeare; and (6) a strong feeling of national pride. The Schlegel-Coleridge School These romantic principles — especially the concept of organic unity, of the "myriad- minded" Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare's superiority to the "rules" — were at first attributed almost wholly to Coleridge. 660 An exception was an anonymous critic, writing in the Analectic for 1818, 851 who traced the new criticism to A. W. Schlegel and described the Coleridge-Hazlitt school as imitators of Schlegel, the "discoverer of Shakespeare." William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859), himself a disciple of Schlegel, 662 has the credit of introducing the Schlegel- Coleridge inspired views in a tentative way in essays appearing intermittently from 1823 to 1859. 663 The Lectures (1834) of Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879) were more extensive and influential. Early convinced of the pre- eminence of Coleridge among critics, Dana followed the romantic interpretation of genius, condemned formal criticism by rules, and in 1834 delivered, in his eight lectures, the first organized American treatment of Shakespeare in the manner of Schlegel and Coleridge.' 64 In the forties the succession went to a clergyman scholar, Henry Norman Hudson (18 14- 1886), who dedicated his Lectures on Shakespeare (2 vols., 1848) to Dana. Hudson's Lectures, his Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters (2 vols., 1872), and his twenty-volume "Harvard Edition" (188c— 1 881) established the German-in- spired Coleridgean Shakespeare criticism on a broad footing in this country 666 and did much to domesticate it in academic circles. Hudson probably read no German, 666 but his Lectures of 1848 show that he made an early acquaintance with Coleridge and Lessing, Goethe, and A. W. Schlegel on Shakespeare (in translation). 867 In his 1872 volume on Shakespeare we find him quoting and citing in footnotes, in addition to the critics already named, Gervinus, Ulrici, and Karl Werder. Schlegel is most frequently quoted as an authority on the principle of organic unity, on the distinction between the classic and the romantic, and on the rela- tion between the philosophical and moral in literature; in his moral interpretation of Shakespearean characters, Coleridge, Goe- the, and Gervinus share equal honors as inspiring him. His borrowings are numer- ous, sometimes unacknowledged, and often verbatim. * hS Edwin Percy Whipple (1 819-1886) syn- thesized the efforts of his predecessors Dana and Hudson (whose work he knew and acknowledged), and he gave forceful, unified formulation to the theories which, in various states of disjointedness, they had fostered. 659 Beginning as a disciple of Cole- ridge, he came to accord Schlegel greater authority even than Coleridge except in one respect: Schlegel sometimes neglected the characters of plays when tracing out the pervading unity. 660 He expressed the com- mon American attitude toward German scholarship when he found that, in their search for "ground ideas," the Germans sometimes arrived at little more than barren ethical, political, and social tru- isms. 661 In Whipple we find signs of the weakness which the slavish following of German criticism led to, and which ulti- mately produced a reaction. Refusing to resort to historical research on the grounds that the mystery of genius is impenetrable, American disciples fell back on a system of idolatry that left them little to do but to exclaim. On the constructive side, Whipple's contribution consisted in "pointing out how Shakespeare's productions fulfill the organic requirements of literature, how they exhibit Unity within Variety," and in "illustrating the ideal and representative quality of the poet's broadly diversified characteriza- tions." 662 Henry Giles (1 809-1 882), the disciple of 486 German Literary Influence Coleridge, brought to a head most of the romantic attitudes and especially the ten- dency to read moral and philosophical ideas into the plays of Shakespeare. His Human Life in Shakespeare (1868) marks the climax of the Germanic character analysis linked with the search for "ground ideas" in Shakespeare. Aside from the attitudes of Lowell, Emerson, and Jones Very, the "sympathetic appreciation" derived from the German Romantic school became less ecstatic, critics of the oppo- sition — Richard Grant White, Walt Whit- man, George Wilkes, and the scholar- critics of the universities — insisting upon a more realistic and historical approach. Meanwhile, James Russell Lowell, re- presenting mainly the romantic point of view, had his say, as did also the Transcen- dentalists Margaret Fuller, R. W. Emerson, and Jones Very — critics whose work was not decisive, but is part of the story of how German Shakespeare criticism long domi- ated American literary theory even while it fostered an independent literary concious- ness in the young nation. Lowell was aware of the vast critical commonwealth of which he was a part. In his essay on "Shakespeare Once More" (whose title obviously echoes Goethe's "Shakespeare und kein Ende"), after dis- tinguishing between the conventional "de- structive" criticism and the Germans' "productive" approach, he lists Lessing, Goethe, Schlegel, and Gervinus as the line of succession in this tradition. A member of their school, he naturally showed similari- ties with all of them, just as they paralleled each other in many particulars, and frankly avowed himself in debt to them all. 663 "Shakespeare Once More" is an example of Lowell's eclecticism and of his debt to German criticism and to Coleridge. 864 It lacks logical unity, except insofar as it discusses Shakespeare historically in re- lation to his time. Here Lowell probably followed a principle originally derived from Goethe. 660 Lowell indulges in romantic adoration and unqualified defense, joining Coleridge in his disagreement with Goethe when the latter maintained that "Shake- speare was a poet, but not a dramatist." 666 From Goethe and Schlegel came Lowell's formulation of the difference between the ancients and the moderns as the distinction between must and would (sollen und wollen) — that in general in the Greek drama Destiny is outside the control of the charac- ters while in Shakespeare it lies within them. Again, Lowell agreed with the German school in regarding each of the plays as developing out of a central germinating idea and unifying principle. In applying the organic theory to Hamlet, Lowell (though he rejects Goethe's explanation of the tragedy) is as much in debt to Goethe's long discussion in Wilhelm Meister as to Coleridge, and in a lesser degree to Schlegel and Gervinus. 667 Goethe more than any other individual affected Lowell's personali- ty as a critic, though he often found fault with Goethe, especially on the score of his not taking the critic's task and responsi- bility seriously enough. 668 The theories and principles of Lowell's that derive most clearly from A. W. Schle- gel, or the Coleridgean restatement of Schlegel, are the concept of organic unity, the division of the powers of the imagina- tion, the critical terminology for dealing with the endless antitheses between fancy and imagination, talent and genius, under- standing and reason, the real and the ideal, and so on, and the lofty conception of the function of the poet. 669 Finally, from both the German and the English romantic schools Lowell caught the contagion of Shakespeare-Schwarmerei, to which Cole- ridge gave expression when he said, "I have a smack of Hamlet myself." Transcendental Criticism The Germanic preoccupations of Prescott, Dana, Hudson, and Lowell were but a prel- ude to the more deeply tinged romantic American Literary Criticism 487 Germanicism of the American Transcen- dentalists, of whom Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and Jones Very may be taken as the types. The community of interests of their group, their co-operative, enthusiastic, and unselfish spirit, made it possible for them to absorb the German romantic con- ception of literature with thoroughgoing and radical completeness. They constituted the second prominent avenue by which German critical principles came to America. Margaret Fuller's editorship of the Dial, her conversations, and voluminous critical writings combined to make her the leading critic of the movement. Her greatest achievements as critic were to break down the moral reservations of Puritan-condi- tioned American literary consciousness, as applied to Goethe, for example, and to affirm the legitimacy and respectability of what she termed "the gentle Affirmative School" of criticism. 670 What she had to say regarding first principles in criticism is significant. The Germans (Schlegel and Tieck) persuaded her to join the positive, constructive school which engages to "appreciate the good qualities." Yet, in "a time and place so degraded by venal indis- criminate praise as the present," she rec- ognized also "the uses of severe criticism and of just censure" and was determined to "tell the whole truth, as well as nothing but the truth," so long (she added) as the "sternness be in the spirit of Love." 671 She called upon Goethe as her authority in applying the laws of historical development, and upon the German romantics to justify her faith in the ideal principle as the ulti- mate goal in literature. 672 Thus she sought to reconcile the ideal with the real — the appreciative with the historical, or the romantic vision with the historical present — both to be united in a millenial "golden age" when man will enjoy "the largest appreciation with every sign of life." 673 The ideal principle is consonant with traditional Puritan otherworldliness, the other with the naturalistic and organic school, and at the same time, with the historical school of Goethe and Schlegel. Her criticism of Goethe himself affords the best index of the remarkable success she achieved, by her fine insight and intuitive powers, in uniting all three. Not the least of her services in her time and place was her adoption of a broad- ly historical and cosmopolitan point of view, which helped to lead American literary consciousness out of its parochial- ism. From her serene eminence she surveyed the whole of American and British liter- ature in its proper relation as but a small area in the totality of Western, not to speak of global , culture. Round her gathered the lesser writers of the Newness as well as the young artists, like Cranch, Dwight, and Brooks, whol earned from her the function of every art in the service of the ultimate, the Spirit. While Emerson is not as much the critic as Margaret Fuller, his central and repre- sentative position among the Transcenden- talists, together with his considerable amount of critical writing (including of course the essay on Shakespeare in Repre- sentative Men), justifies consideration of him in this connection. His attention to the German critical temper was aroused when he saw, as an undergraduate at Harvard, Everett and his associates, just returned from Gottingen, promoting the type of his- torical scholarship and criticism that the German universities fostered. Although he was never overfond of German historical research, he hoped to go to Germany to complete his education, but had to content himself, as far as the new criticism was concerned, with the new-found treasures of Coleridge and Carlyle. Following the advice of William who wrote in 1824 from Ger- many urging his younger brother to "read all the Herder you can get," 674 he availed himself of the 1800 London translation by T. Churchill of Herder's Outlines of a Phi- losophy of the History of Man. Interested as he already was in science and in finding the key to a unified reading of the universe, the principle of organic development in history 488 German Literary Influence as presented by Herder in that book made a profound impression on him. Like Schle- gel and Coleridge, Emerson began to dis- tinguish between the organic and the mechanic. By the time he became associated with Margaret Fuller on the Dial, he was ready to assimilate the doctrine of the organic in art. 875 In July, 1841, he was recommending to a friend that, besides Wotton, Malone, Dr. Johnson, and Lamb, Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Literature, Goethe's critique of Hamlet in Meister, and his "Shakespeare and No End" were all "well worth reading." 676 As he studied the Germans on Shakespeare, he got much of the general critical views of Schlegel and Lessing, some of it direct, more of it through Coleridge. The organic theory in art was readily, almost necessarily, brought to bear on the idealism with which he began and by which he sought, as he expressed it in Nature, to effect the marriage of mind and matter. Its formulation 677 came precisely, and significantly, at the moment when Emerson was concerned in "The Over- Soul" with the attempt to demonstrate that "the Universe is the externalization of the soul" and (shortly afterwards, in "The Poet") with the poet's need for expression: "The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression." 878 The expression being organic and deriving from "the nature of things," it must be one with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. It cannot be other- wise, for "poetry was all written before time was." 879 Thus the unity and parity of the Emersonian Trinity of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness harmonizes with his conception of the innate need for expression ; 680 the poet's symbols become legitimate forms of the ideal beauty, truth, and goodness, showing unity in variety. It is doubtful whether the Aristotelian concept of organic unity, as in- vested with new life by A. W. Schlegel, was equally portentous for any other American poet. 681 It rounded out and unified Emer- son's philosophy of the func tion of art. Emerson practiced various modes of criticism: He believed in judging books by absolute standards, but he often wrote sympathetically and romantically in the Schlegel-Coleridge-Lamb tradition. He voiced the reservations of the moral idealist, but admitted that Goethe and Coleridge "are the only critics who have expressed our convictions with adequate fidelity." 682 He also foreshadowed Whitman's realistic approach to Shakespeare and viewed him in relation to his age as dependent on his past, on tradition, and on books. 683 Jones Very's view of literature and his interpretation of Shakespeare is so highly individual, based upon a mystical and religious concept of art, that it represents a kind of climax to the transcendental ■ criticism in America. The German influence ' came to him indirectly through the agency ■ of Coleridge. He found Shakespeare's great- ness manifested in an unconscious revelation ' of the Divine, but considered his failure to express a conscious moral in the plays a serious limitation. 684 The type came to a period with him. The Historical-Realist School Upon the heels of the romantics and the Transcendentalists there followed Richard Grant White (1 821-1885), w ^o marks the advent of the historical-realistic criticism of Shakespeare. White took it to be his duty 1 as editor to restore, as far as possible, the conditions of the past and to put the reader "in the same position for the apprehension of his author's meaning that he would have occupied if he had been a contemporary with him." 685 Though an early enthusiast for Coleridge and the German "sympathy" school, he later deplored the Coleridgean "hysterical ecstasy about Shakespeare," the "inflated nonsense" and the "pompous platitudes" of the philosophical critics. 686 He attacked the Schlegel-Coleridge school for failing to point out that Shakespeare depended upon his sources for the course American Literary Criticism 489 of action in his dramas and for the motives of his characters. 887 He found the chief absurdity their attempt to discover how Shakespeare systematically set "forth a philosophy of life," a moral and "central informing thought in his dramas." 888 While he was never as far from the school of Schlegel and Coleridge as he thought him- self to be. White's hard-headed common sense, thorough historical scholarship and persistent opposition to current "eulogistic gush" helped check the growth of the "phi- losophical" and prepared the way for the historical approach. Walt Whitman ably seconded White's aim in insisting upon realistic interpretation. Attracted to Shakespeare all his life, often indebted to him, and oftener still concerned with assigning a place to him, Whitman charged Shakespeare with doing "every- thing possible ... to make the common people common — very common indeed." 689 The poet of democracy and science, of the people and the future, Whitman isolated and rejected what he called the anachronis- tic features of Shakespeare's writings — his "feudalism." 690 Yet always seeking "les- sons" for American democracy, he endeav- ored to absorb Shakespeare into the heart of American thought by Americanizing the ideas that the poet voiced. Even in the 1855 Preface he said, ' 'America does not repel the past," and as he grew older, he came to feel more keenly that Shakespeare was one of the figures needed for the realization of the great New World democracy. 691 Considering Whitman's view of the relations among past, present, and future, it was inevitable that he should be struck by Hegel's evolutionary philosophy of history, and that he should interpret Shakespeare in terms of it. Whitman's Hegelian reading of the universe is "clearly behind his steady efforts to discover Shake- speare's real 'lesson' for America. . . . The Past is a legitimate and necessary stepping stone to the Present; . . . hence, in their very opposition to Democracy, Shake- speare's plays serve America." 692 Thus he could assign, in a roundabout way, a value to Shakespeare, even while he was dissatis- fied with the episodes of Jack Cade and Joan of Arc, his history plays, and his style. 893 In this protest Whitman, along with Richard Grant White, marked a break in the romantic interpretation of Shake- speare in America. The social consciousness which made him cry out against the "lordly port" of Shakespeare and made him critical of the undemocratic, unrealistic "purpose" elegance of Shakespeare's style prepared the ground for later social, humanitarian, and realistic critics. Over and above Whitman's Shakespeare criticism, but equally as important for his literary creed as the Hegelian concept of history, was an idea which he took over early from Herder (through Goethe). This was the theory "that really great poetry is always (like the Homeric and Biblical canticles) the result of a national spirit," 694 and the corollary that a national spirit is the result of a really great poetry: "Immortal Judah lives, and Greece immortal lives, in a couple of poems." 895 Brooding upon this idea from the time of his apprenticeship to his last days in Camden, Whitman develop- ed his thesis of a national new-world democratic literature, which earned for him the self-chosen title of "poet of democracy." Whitman wished to be regarded not only as the poet of democracy but also as the poet of science. In respect to the latter, he held the scientific conception of nature as a reality independent of the Hegelian cos- mic reason but determined by the processes of historical evolution. 698 Here again he is indebted to Herder, whose view of nature as beautiful and beneficent is more in accord with his thinking than the post-Darwinian conception. Familiar with the significance of Herder, in whom the dominant interests and assumptions of nineteenth-century science were already vital, and finding Herder's ideas consonant with those of Hegel and not contrary to later scientism, 490 German Literary Influence Whitman found the scientific thought of Herder as applied to the philosophy of man, to nationality, to art, and to literature useful for his theorizing on science and democracy. 897 To resume the discussion of Shake- spearean criticism in America as affected by the Germans, we turn to George Wilkes (1817-1885), whom Whitman grudgingly acknowledged his successor in treating Shakespeare as the embodiment of "the spirit and letter of the feudal world." 898 Wilkes was a left-wing humanitarian and nationalist who presented what he called Shakespeare from an American Point of View (1876). He studied and collated the important commentaries from Dr. Johnson through Dowden, including the Germans Gervinus, Elze, Horn, Ulrici, Rotscher, Hebler, and Kreysig. His purpose was to "ascertain the character of Shakespeare's social and political sympathies from an American point of view," 699 and to refute the advocates of the Baconian theory of authorship. Wilkes condemned what he considered Shakespeare's servility to the ruling classes and to the Church, his con- tempt for the working classes, his alleged hostility to the "march of democracy and liberal ideas." 700 With the rise of the realistic and of the historical criticism in the universities, the Schlegel-Coleridge inspired Shakespearean school ceased to be a potent force in Ameri- ca. It had conferred the benefit of making nativism less blatant, inherited Puritanic moralism less rigorous, and critical proce- dures more philosophical, less opinionated, less provincial. Without the leavening, transmuting, and liberalizing effects of German romantic criticism, it would be hard to account for the relative critical ma- turity of the twentieth century. While German influences were hastening the ripening of an American criticism, scholars and students were becoming aware of German methods of literary-historical research. The so-called philosophical tech- nique of historical investigation and inter- pretation, of textual criticism, and of scientific literary research as practiced in the German universities had won the atten- tion and admiration of intellectual Ameri- cans. Soon after Madame de Stael and Car- lyle described the method, Follen and Lie- ber exemplified it in our schools. Then followed the first generation of Americans who studied at Gottingen. Objective use of sources in furthering independent thought and research, systematic training in the use of libraries and laboratories, and meticu- lous documentation in the service of Wissen- schaft, these features of the German meth- 1 odology gradually won acceptance and overcame the commonly held view that^ German scholarship must be synonymous 5 with pedantry. The importation of German, professors and the education of more and' more Americans in the German universities accentuated the trend. By the third quarter: of the century the Germanization of the- American university was well under way. 701 The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago were no accidental creations; the ground had been preparing for fully half a century. The new methods of study and of writing affected and partially engendered a new generation of scholar-critics in America. The influence is first detected in the new type of review-article that began to appear in the North American Review about 1820. Among the earliest is Edward Everett's fifty-five- page review of Goethe's Dichting una" Wahr- heit, written while Everett was still a student at Gottingen and published in January, 181 7. This was followed by many essays on literary, historical, philosophical, religious, and generally cultural subjects, by Ticknor, Bancroft, Cogswell, and others, and by such German-American savants as Beck, Follen, and Lieber. They exhibited ed a new approach, in their point of view, their manner of applying philosophy to humanistic study, their regard for historical American Literary Criticism 491 perspective, their careful examination and reliance upon primary sources, their meth- xlical documentation, and their insistence jpon the freedom of inquiry and the deduc- :ion of conclusions based on the evidence without regard to presupposition or tradi- :ion. Many who engaged in the new type of ;ritical writing were academicians, among :hem Follen, Beck, Lieber, Stuart, Marsh, Francis, Hedge, Ticknor, Everett, Cogswell. 3ancroft, and, later, Longfellow and Lowell, rheir influence was exerted through the periodicals, in the classroom and lecture lall, and in books as various as Longfellow's arly textbooks for language study and his Hyperion or Lowell's vast miscellany of xitical essays. Often this influence in scholarly method vas related, as in the case of Lowell, to the listorical type of criticism identified with Goethe and Schlegel, though others, of :ourse, were also cognizant of the work of Jainte-Beuve, Taine, and other historical xitics. Often, as in the case of Longfellow's ;arly reviews or Margaret Fuller's criticism, t was connected with the romantic type of 'affirmative" criticism. Again, as in the nstance of the American Shakespeare :ritics, the method of German scholarship vas identified with the "philosophical" ype. However construed and employed, it jrepared the way for the development of he literary scholarship currently in use. 3ur textual criticism, linguistic research, iterary history, and our philosophically xitical interpretation — all the academic lisciplines most widely employed today )ear the mark "Made in Germany." Journalists and Editors Editors and journalists were affected also. Everyone who had charge of a literary nagazine or a periodical with a literary lepartment had to take note of German iterature. Some, like Joseph Dennie, set :hemselves to halt the advance of "Ger- nanism" in the United States; but even notable isolationists and nativists like Charles Fenno Hoffman took cognizance of it. Horace Greeley (1811-1872), during his long editorship, saw a considerable body of German literature pass across his desk. Thomas Holley Chivers (1 809-1 858), a contemporary of Poe and Margaret Fuller, moved in the literary circles where Ger- manism was the rage and was himself affected by all the prevailing forms of romanticism, though little of it came to him directly from German sources. Rufus Wil- mot Griswold (18 15-1857) occupied a like position, while as late a figure as Frank Stockton (1834-1902), though he cared little about trends in contemporary letters and less about the literary aims of his fel- low-members of the Authors Club, was not untouched by German literature. Recent Trends While the inspiration of later critics like Howells and James came principally from English and French sources, they were conversant with German masterpieces and not unmindful of German critical theory. The same may be said of the versatile Henry Adams. William C. Brownell, G. E. Woodberry, S. P. Sherman, Paul Elmer More, and Irving Babbitt lived and wrote during a time when familiarity with Ger- man letters and criticism was part of the indispensable equipment of the critic. A journalist and editor of the type of Henry L. Mencken, himself of German parentage, came to be as much at home in German letters as in the literature of his own land. His essays form a Schimpflexikon that bristles with German terms and allusions, while his autobiographical books breathe the atmosphere of the Baltimore German- land whence he stemmed and to which he retired in his later years. And critics of our own day who speak to a more than parochi- al audience from a more than journalistic point of view have made German (along with classical, French, and British) letters 492 German Literary Influence and literary criteria an integral part of their aesthetic possessions and prepossessions. But the twentieth century is witnessing a remarkable shift of emphasis in German- American cultural interrelations. Germany, long preponderingly the exporter of books, is now (following her defeat in two world wars) the debtor nation. Since 1945 she has imported more books from abroad than she exported, and the proportion of German translations of foreign books to native productions has steadily increased. What is especially striking is that the once predomi- nant interest on the part of Germans in England and English literary productions is (if bibliographical statistics provide a reliable index) rapidly shifting America- ward. Symptomatic as this tendency is of the increasingly influential role that Ameri- ca is playing in world affairs, it suggests that, while European influences in the United States are still potent, the reciprocal rela- tionship is no less significant, and is daily growing stronger. NOTES Notes INTRODUCTION i . Chief among the attempted general treat- ments of the subject are Franz Loher's Geschich- te und Zustdnde der Deutschen in Amerika (Cin- cinnati & Leipzig, 1847), Gustav Korner's Das deutsche Element in den Vereinigteu Staaten von Nordamerika, 18 18-18 48 (Cincinnati, 1880), Anton Eickhoff's In der neuen Heimat (X.Y., 1884), Herman J. Ruetenik's Beriihntte deutsche Vorkdmpfer fur Fortschritt und Friede in Nord- Amerika, 1628-1888 (Cleveland, 1888), Karl Knortz's Das Deutschtum der Vereinigteu Staa- ten (Hamburg, 1898), Julius Goebel's Das Deutschtum in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Munich, 1904), Georg v. Bosse's Das deutsche Element in den Vereinigten Staaten (Stuttgart, 1908), Drei Jahrhunderte deutschen Lebens in Amerika (Berlin, 1909), and German Achievements in America (X.Y., 1916), Albert B. Faust's The German Element in the United States, with Special Reference to its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence (2 vols., N.Y., 1909; rev. and enl. ed., N.Y., 1927; 1st ed. also in German, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1912), Oswald Lohan's Das Deutschtum in den Ver- einigten Staaten von Amerika (Berlin, 1913), Frederick F. Schrader's The Germans in the Making of America (Boston, 1924), Colin Ross's Unser Amerika. Der deutsche Anteil an den Ver- einigten Staaten (Leipzig, 1936), and Rachel David-DuBois and Emma Schweppe's The Ger- mans in American Life (N.Y., 1936). Das Buch der Deutschen in Amerika (Phila., 1909), edited by Max Heinrici for the German-American National Alliance on the occasion of the 225th anniversary of the first German settlement in America, though in the nature of a jubilee publication, deserves inclusion in this list because it rises above the level common among books of its kind. One of the most satisfactory of recent books attempting to evaluate all the major immigrant contributions from the histo- rian's point of view is Professor Carl Wittke's We Who Built A merica : The Saga of the Immi- grant (N.Y., 1940). 2. See Charles A. Beard and Alfred Vagts, "Currents of Thought in Historiography," Amer. Hist. Rev., XLII, hi (Apr., 1937), 465. 3. Preface, pp. vi-vii. 4. For other statistical data and comparative figures on immigration, see Faust, op. cit. (1927 ed.), I, 285; II, 13, 24, 27; and the U.S. Dept. of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner- General of Immigration (Washington, D.C., 1929), Table 83, pp. 186-87 '• see a ' so PP- 182-83. 5. Wis. Mag. of Hist., XIX, i (Sept., 1935), 101-2. 6. Inspired by the theory and example of historians like Turner and Paxson, American literary historians and critics called for a new- deal. Professor Fred Lewis Pattee led the way in June, 1924, with his "call for a Literary Histo- rian" in the American Mercury. Six months later Professor Xorman Foerster proposed to the small nucleus of professors who then com- prised the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association of America the necessity for adopting a new point of view and distinctively literary criteria upon which to proceed in the reinterpretation of American literature. His proposals were published in the Saturday Review of Literature, April 3, 1926 (pp. 677-79), and reprinted the same year as a twelve-page pamphlet by the Houghton Mifflin Company, under the title. New Viewpoints in American Literature. The essay was reprinted in a volume entitled The Reinterpretation of American Literature, edited by Xorman Foer- ster (N.Y., 1928), pp. 23-28, together with eight other essays by as many contributors, ex- plaining and illustrating in some detail the plan proposed. In 1927 Professor Howard Mumford Jones published his America and French Cul- ture, 1750-1848 (Chapel Hill, 1927), the first significant example of what such a method of literary history could effect when applied to French cultural influence in America, although the methods and criteria employed by him differ markedly in some respects from the scheme proposed by Mr. Foerster. Since then other schemes of evaluation have been proposed 495 496 Notes to Pages 7-9 one of the most provocative of which is that outlined by Professor Oscar Cargill in his book Intellectual America (N.Y., 1941). His approach he calls the "Ideodynamic," in which Ideas are viewed as "on the March" and "in Conflict." 7. In the field of literary influence, for ex- ample, major bibliographical contributions include Bayard Q. Morgan's Bibliography of German Literature in English Translation (Mad- ison, Wis., 1922; 2nd ed., Stanford, Calif., 1938) ; Edward Ziegler's Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines, 1741-1810 (Phila., 1905); Frederick H. Wilkins' Early Influence of German Literature in America 1762— 1825 (N.Y., 1900); Scott H. Goodnight's Ger- man Literature in American Magazines Prior to 1846 (Madison, Wis., 1907) ; Martin H. Haertel's German Literature in American Magazines 1846-1880 (Madison, Wis., 1908); Lillie V. Hathaway's German Literature of the Mid-Nine- teenth Century in England and America as Reflected in the Journals, 1840-1914 (Boston, 1935) ; the joint work of W. M. Roloff, M. E. Mix, and Martha Nicolai, edited by B. Q. Mor- gan and A. R. Hohlfeld, German Literature in British Magazines, 1750-1860 (Madison, Wis., 1949) ; and Oswald Seidensticker's First Century of German Printing in America, 1728-1830 (Phila., 1893). This list can readily be supple- mented by several hundreds of bibliographies on more restricted subjects. S. Consider the significance of 7,858 items on a subject as severely limited as this bibliogra- phy is by its title. Dr. Meynen's work is espe- cially thorough on the score of immigration and settlement and on the side of genealogy and local history (notably church, community, and county history), on arts and crafts, and on Pennsylvania-Dutch customs and folkways. He made no effort to cover German imprints published in America, or in Pennsylvania, or to prepare a check list of German newspapers and periodical literature, or even to indicate the extent of Pennsylvania-German dialect writings. In these several departments he contented himself with referring simply to such works as Seidensticker's compilation, Harold Bender's Bibliography of Mennonilica Americana, 1727— ig28 (Goshen, Ind., 1929), Daniel Miller's several studies of early German-American newspapers, John H. Flory's Literary Activity of the German Baptist Brethren in the Eight- eenth Century (Harrisburg, 1900), Ammon M. Aurand's A Pennsylvania German Library (Harrisburg, 1930), and Harry H. Reichard's Pennsylvania-German Dialect Writings and Their Writers (Lancaster, 1918). 9. An excellent example of nice adjustment between this and the reciprocal point of view is explicit in Professor Morgan's bibliography of German literature in English translation. The book was designed to serve investigators who adopt either point of view, and it is being put to excellent use by students of English and American literature to study the modifying effect of German literature upon their literary culture no less than by Germans who, following the leads presented, may thus study German literature through the refracting judgment of American readers and the distorting medium of the English language. Factual and objective, Morgan's book is without thesis; it is concerned neither more nor less with the German than with the English and American aspects of the subject; it looks impartially both ways. 10. "The Influence of European Ideas in Nineteenth-Century America," Amer. Lit., VII, ii (Nov., 1935). 244- 1 1 . Similar difficulties beset the endeavors of the American student when he undertakes to trace the vogue and influence in Germany of American authors, let us say, of James Feni- more Cooper. Such studies are often strong on factual information regarding translations, editions, and sales statistics, but lacking on the interpretative side. They tell us little about the reasons why Cooper was read in Germany at a time when Hawthorne was not; nor do they dwell upon the effect which Cooper's stories of the new land exercised upon the Europa-muden of the nineteenth century. All too often students of comparative cultural relations have at their command a thorough understanding of the radiating culture and a correspondingly poor knowledge (not to say appreciation) of the receiving culture. It is this one-sidedness, this inability to see larger connections, and the consequent failure to add significant interpreta- tions, that makes the books and monographs of many German students who attempt to deal with German-American relations so arid. They possess a profound knowledge of Kant and Fichte and Schelling, of German theology, or of German literature ; but their ignorance of Emer- son and Parker, of Concord and Boston, of American Unitarians and New England Tran- scendentalism is equally marked. 12. This criticism does not, of course, apply to many individual writers on the subject nor to all agencies and organizations set up to pro- mote a better feeling between Germany and the United States. The Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation and, among the German-American historical associations, the Pennsylvania-Ger- man Society and the German-American Histo- rical Society of Illinois can be cited as typical of those who have sought to keep partisanship out of their programs and their publications. Notes to Pages 10-14 497 13. For example, the studies of Morgan, Wilkens, Davis, Goodnight, and Haertel of the vogue of German literature in America, together with the Hathaway and Morgan-Hohlfeld stu- dies of German literature in British magazines, cover the ground with sufficient precision and completeness so that further efforts in the same direction cannot be undertaken with any assur- ance that the results will be commensurate with the labor required. Similarly, existing studies of the "German element" in communi- ties, cities, and counties, histories of Gesang- and Turn-Vereine and other local German clubs, local church histories, and technographical surveys of Germans in countless localities al- ready clutter up our book shelves and our bibliographies. However valuable their indef- inite multiplication may be for investigators in other areas, the literary historian will lose little if he resigns these matters to the U.S. Census Bureau and to the historical and genea- logical societies, local and national. There are dozens of other fields, thus far virtually uncul- tivated, that promise far greater and more rewarding yields. 14. This chaotic state of affairs is notlpeculiar to the department of German- American studies ; it is even worse in French-American and Anglo- American areas. Indeed, until recently, the study of American literary culture itself was in a very poor state of organization, and it cannot be claimed that the ambitious bibliographical undertakings of the Federal Records Historical Survey, the Works Progress Administration, and the numerous historical studies carried on under federal and state auspices made much signal progress. Perhaps the most marked advance was made by the co-operative project, con- ducted under the supervision of Dr. Edward H. O'Niell, to compile a comprehensive Bibliog- raphy of American Literature. When this work stopped, it embraced complete biblio- graphies of 602 American authors, represented by a catalog of some 750,000 bibliographical cards (now deposited at the University of Pennsylvania) .This bibliography is supplement- ed by a similar one begun earlier at New York University under the direction of Professor Oscar Cargill. 15. Complementary to this broad subject is the study of the several German church periodicals, of the type recently completed by Professor Victor Gimmestad, of Normal, Illinois — a history of the Lutheran Quarterly Review. 16. On the basis of the experience gained in compiling the Bibliography, the conclusion is unavoidable that the historians of American philosophy have been as lax about making such fundamental inquires as have the historians of American education. Except for certain trite observations whenever the names of German educational pioneers like Pestalozzi are men- tioned, or the influence of the German univer- sity system upon Johns Hopkins is related, or the introduction of German at Virginia and Harvard as a subject of instruction is rehearsed, such histories of American education as we have offer little. An examination of thousands of pages of educational history does not produce convincing evidence that any appreciable ad- vance has been made in this area in the half- century that has passed since the publication of B. A. Hinsdale's "Notes on the History of Foreign Influences upon Education in the United States," Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year i8gy-i8g8 (Washington, 1889). I, 591-629, and George S. Viereck's "German Instruction in American Schools," Report of the Commissioner of Education for igoo-igoi (Washington, 1902), I, 531-708, ex- cept for the publication in 1913 of Charles H. Handschin's Teaching of Modern Languages in the United States (U.S. Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1913, No. 3, Whole No. 510, Washing- ton, 1913). Numerous documents repeat what Viereck, Hinsdale, and Handschin reported, and a few bring addenda for succeeding years ; but none of them is basic in the manner of these earlier studies, and none is interpretative in a measure to make it of much value for the historian of American civilization. 17. There are basic studies of Pennsylvania- German authors and of their writings, several anthologies of Pennsylvania-German literature, and a few studies of German-American literary activity in other states or localities (such as the Metzenthin study for Texas) ; but Professor Faust's eighteen-page contribution to the Cam- bridge History of American Literature, published in 192 1, remains the chief source of information on German-American literature in the German medium. My own brief treatment of the subject in "The Mingling of Tongues," Literary History of the United States (3 vols., N.Y., 1948), II, 676-93, III, 284-303, is nothing more than a sketchy summation. 18. See the interesting suggestions set forth in F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance. Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London & N.Y., 1941). Professor Carl Bode (University of Maryland) is currently studying the American lyceum as a factor in the literary consciousness of the last century. 498 Notes to Pages 19-20 EARLY INTEREST IN GERMAN CULTURE THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 1. See esp. Harold S. Jantz, "German Thought and Literature in New England, 1620- 1820: A Preliminary Report," JEGP, XLI (Jan., 1942), 1-45. 2. This concern was not always with strictly philosophical or literary matters: it included commercial, ethnographical, scientific, geo- graphical, theological, and many other human interests, fostered partly by the presence in America of sizable contingents of German immigrants and by the immigration companies and other agencies on both sides of the ocean, but also by more strictly "American" interests that may be called, for want of a better term, intellectual. The reciprocal relationship — Ger- man interest in America — has long been known to have been both early and extensive. See Paul Baginsky, German Works Relating to America, 1493-1800 (N.Y., 1942). See further the Biblio- graphy of German Culture in America, to 1940, by Pochmann and Schutz (Madison, Wis., 1953), hereafter cited as Bibliography. 3. See, for example, A. B. Faust, The German Element in the United States ... (2 vols., N.Y., 1909; rev. ed., 2 vols, in 1, N.Y., 1927); Scott H. Goodnight, German Literature in American Magazines prior to 1848 (Madison, Wis., 1907), pp. 12-15; Emma G. Jaeck, Madame de Stael and the Spread of German Literature (N.Y. & London, 1915), pp. 21-25, 2 5 I_ 99; Harold C. Goddard, Studies in New England Transcen- dentalism (N.Y., 1908), pp. 202-3; O. W. Long, Literary Pioneers : Early A merican Explorers of European Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1935). 4. For Kuno Francke's several studies of this correspondence, consult the Bibliography. New England especially is represented as having been dedicated to a rigid theological, political, and social exclusiveness, tightly self-contained except for such contacts as she maintained with Puritan England. Unleavened by such Conti- nental influences as New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and others of the Atlantic colonies felt, seventeenth-century New England is presumed to have been immune to intellectual infiltrations from Germany. Even for eighteenth-century New England, little attention has been given to Germanic influences beyond the exploratory study by John P. Hoskins (Princeton Theol. Rev., V, i [Jan., 1907], 49-79; ii [Apr., 1907], 211-41), with reference especially to the impact of German pietism on American religious and social life, notably through the agency of the Moravians, the Wesleys, and Whitefield, in a manner that was not without its effects on Jonathan Edwards and those large segments of the colonial populace that were affected by the Great Awakening. Then there follows a long barren stretch until we come upon John Quincy Adams, at the turn of the century, studying German during his ministership in Berlin and translating Wieland's Oberon, a document that remained more mythical than real until Pro- fessor A. B. Faust discovered the long-lost manuscript and edited it in 1940. 5. Virtually every account that deals with the introduction of German culture into Amer- ica repeats the story of how Ticknor, spurred on by Charles Villers' Coup-d'oeil sur les universites et le mode d' instruction publique de I'Allemagne protestante (Kassel, 1808) and Madame de Stael's book, resolved to learn German preparatory to going to Germany, but found himself reduced to seeking instruction from a Dr. Brosius, an Alsatian teacher of mathematics in Jamaica Plain, until his friend Alex. Everett lent him a German grammar in French, and he had time to send for a German dictionary which he knew to be in New Hampshire. See Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, ed. by George. S. Hillard(2 vols., Boston &N.Y., 1877),!, n-12. 6. What is left entirely unexplained is why these young men did not avail themselves of the several thousand volumes of German books on the Harvard library shelves. For details and some noteworthy discrepancies in these early accounts, see A. P. Peabody, Harvard Reminis- cences (Boston, 1888), pp. 117-18; Mrs. Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, Life of Charles Follen (Boston, 1844), p. 105; and O. W. Long, op. cit., p. 233, n. 116. 7. PMLA,V (1890), 5. 8. Christian Rev., VI, xxiii (Sept., 1841), 454, 456. It may be observed that Moses Stuart knew better, for he was acquainted with Wil- liam Bentley's circle, he repeatedly called on Bentley, and often borrowed German books from him. For Bentley's position as a medium of Ger- man-American intellectual interchanges see Jantz, loc. cit., pp. 31-45. Dr. Jantz's ingenious detective work at Worcester, in other New England depositories, and in special collections elsewhere, led to findings which he graciously placed at my disposal — many of them while they were still in manuscript form. While his systematic investigations, together with my own more modest and miscellaneous discoveries, are sufficient to modify our earlier view of New England insularity, Dr. Jantz's work is far from complete; hence there is every likelihood that the story as told in the pages immediately Notes to Pages 20-22 499 following will be much amended as his research progresses. 9. Buckminster was commissioned to inform Ticknor of his election on June 12, 1810. Following a protracted illness, Buckminster died in Ticknor's arms, in 1812. See Journal of the Proceedings of the Anthology Society, ed. by M. A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston, 1910), p. 231. 10. Convers Francis and Frederick Henry Hedge are others who claimed similar priority for their knowledge of German language and literature. 11. Charles H. Herford's Studies in the Liter- ary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixtheenth Century (Cambridge, 1886) and Gil- bert Waterhouse's Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Seventeenth Century (N.Y., 1914) are suggestive of areas still unexplored. For Anglo-German literary relations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the several bibliographical studies of Lawrence M. Price, Mary Bell Price, and Bayard Q. Morgan are most helpful. For other studies, and especially for significant investigations now in progress, consult the Bibliography (Index). 12. See Wilhelm Begemann, Die Frucht- bringende Gesellschaft und Johan Valentin An- dreae (Berlin, 191 1), and Felix E. Held, Johann Valentin Andreae's Chrislianapolis : an Ideal Slate of the Seventeenth Century (N.Y., 1916), esp. Ch. V. 13. Consult Mrs. Frances Rose-Troup's John White . . . (N.Y., 1930), pp. 43-47 et seq., her Massachusetts Bay Company and its Predecessors (N.Y., 1930), and Roger Conant and the Early Settlements of the North Shore of Massachusetts (Roger Conant Family Assn., 1926) ; and Sam- uel E. Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston & N.Y., 1930), pp. 21-50. 14. See A. W. M'Clure, The Life of John Cotton (Boston, 1846), pp. 267-68, and Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (2 vols., Hartford, 1855), I, 279. 15. See the book lists in Thomas G. Wright, Literary Culture in New England, 1620-1730 (N.Y., 1920). Wright notes only four copies of Calvin's Institutes as against five copies of the writings of Pareus. See also Morison op. cit., pp. 10, 57, 128, and his Puritan Pronaos (N.Y., 1936). P- 136- 16. After extensive investigations. Professor Jantz concludes that John Cotton's statement that he loved "to sweeten . . . [his] mouth with a piece of Calvin" as a kind of bedtime dessert (Mather, Magnalia, I, 274) stands as one of the few expressions by seventeenth-century Ameri- cans of a special preference for Calvin. They read Calvin, but not as exclusively (or even mainly) as we infer from the standard works on the subject. New England Puritans were not content with Calvin's Institutes alone or, for that matter, with the Bible alone. They searched all the available and reputable literature that held any promise of leading to the conclusions which they sought. They quoted Calvin less frequently than English theologians like Ames, Perkins, and Whitaker; when they went for authority to continental theologians, they con- sulted not merely Calvin but Luther and Pareus no less than others (Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony, pp. 57, 128). 17. Professor Morison remarks that although seventeenth-century New England theology was of the Calvinist family, it was not Calvin- ism; and there is a good deal of justice in his calling Jonathan Edwards "the first New Eng- land Calvinist" (Puritan Pronaos, p. 155), although Edwards himself might have denied such an allegation. It is to be observed that even in Edwards' day, by which time the so- called "hardening process" of Calvinism had set in, a man like John Barnard, though defi- nitely identified with the conservative Mathers before 17 10, in his autobiography (written during his eighty-fifth year) declared flatly that he read "all sorts of authors," but that he "never to this day read Calvin's works, and cannot call him master." — Coll. Mass. Hist.Soc, 3rd ser., V (1836), 186. 18. See Luther's statement: "We are all Priests, as many of us as are Christians." — Works of Martin Luther (ed. by Henry E. Jacobs, 2 vols., Phila., 1915), II, 279; see fur- ther, ibid., II, 68, 282, and compare V. L. Par- rington, The Colonial Mind (N.Y., 1927), p. 9; Kuno Francke, Social Forces in German Liter- ature (3rd ed., N.Y., 1899), pp. 150, 155, 156; M. S. Bates, Religious Liberty: An Inquiry (N.Y. & London, 1945), p. 419, as well as Luther's Tischreden oder Colloquia (hrsg. von Karl E. Forstermann, 4 Bde. in 2, Leipzig, 1846), IV, 156-75, 176-237, 456-72. 19. For a comparison of Luther and Calvin, consult James MacKinnon, Luther and the Reformation (London, 1925), and his Calvin and the Reformation (London, 1936) ; G. P. Gooch, and H. J. Laski, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1927), esp. p. 8; John N. Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414-1625 (Cambridge, 1916), p. 86. For Calvin's borrowings from Luther, see Preserved Smith, The Age of the Reformation (N.Y., 1920), pp. 163-64. 20. "Luther, it is true, taught that the State had the duty of protecting the true religion, but it was a negative duty. In Lutheranism the duty of the Church was to establish the King- dom of God on earth; in Calvinism that was tho 500 Notes to Pace 23 duty of the Church and State working intimately together." — William W. Sweet, Religion in Colonial America (N.Y., 1942), pp. 13-14. See also Gooch and Laski, op. cit., pp. 2-3; Robert H. Murray, The Political Consequences of the Reformation (Boston, 1926), pp. 75, 90; R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (N.Y., 1926), p. 88; and L. H. Waring, The Political Theories of Martin Luther (N.Y., 1910). However, as far as early New England Puri- tans' dependence upon continental political theory goes, it appears that neither Luther nor Calvin was as decisive as Johannes Althusius, or Althaus (1557-1638). His Calvinistic view of the state as expressed in his Politica methodica digesta (1603) found its way to almost every seventeenth-century Puritan who interested himself in political theory and practice. His book achieved many editions and reprintings, for details regarding which see the introduction by Carl J. Friedrich in the modern edition of the book, reprinted from the third edition of 1614, Cambridge, Mass., 1932, as well as O. F. von Goerke, The Development of Political Theory (tr. by Bernard Freyd, N.Y., 1939), devoted almost exclusively to Althusius's political theo- ry and its influence. The great popularity of Althusius among New England colonists is due to several causes: (1) his widespread reputation as professor at Herborn, (2) his application of the Ramistic method to politics, which struck a responsive chord among the Puritans, who had a predilec- tion for the Ramean logic, and (3) the consist- ency of his political theory with Puritan doc- trine. The copy of Althusius owned by the Mathers, preserved in the library of the American Anti- quarian Society, shows annotations by Samuel Mather which particularly accentuate certain of the revolutionary-republican ideas that even- tually led to democracy and independence. A thorough examination of the impact of Althu- sian thought upon colonial polity may well lead to a revision of the conventional view which finds the origins of American republican and revolutionary principles exclusively, first, in England, and, later, in France. 21. For American separatists, purifiers, and reformers, bent on liberalizing their church and state, Luther the "protestant" was inevitably more vital than Luther the "reactionary," regardless of what the final effect of his in- fluence in his own country turned out to be. It is beside the point to argue that because Lu- theranism in Germany promoted absolutism, Lutheran principles should have had an iden- tical or similar development in America, where an entirely different set of conventions and environmental conditions obtained. Ideas of whatever kind, particularly ideas of reform, are adapted to or modified by existing condi- tions. In America, given certain contingencies favoring the growth of liberal tendencies in Church and State, certain ones of Luther's principles might achieve a degree or a kind of objectification impossible in older communities ; while others of Luther's principles might be disregarded altogether. 22. Sweet, op. cit., pp. 14-15; C. H. Smith, The Mennonite Immigration to Pennsylvania in the Eighteenth Century (Norristown, Pa., 1929), P- 37- 23. These eventually made their own distinc- tive contributions to eighteenth-century Amer- ican religious, political, and social development. It may be observed at this point that the Lutherans of the recognized Lutheran Church in Germany (except for the Salzburger Luther- ans who were persecuted by a Catholic arch- bishop) found little cause to migrate to America for religious reasons. This circumstance explains in large measure why German Lutherans did not emigrate in great numbers until later, when economic advantage rather than religious perse- cution made them seek new lands. It explains also why the Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, Inspi- rationists, and certain groups of German Re- formed, as well as the Salzburgers, came early and in relatively large numbers. For a brief treatment of each, see W. W. Sweet, op. cit., pp. 210-14, and for a longer discussion, Faust, op. cit., I, 262, et seq. More special studies of individual groups can be located through the indexed Bibliography . 24. Works, II, 314. 25. Works, II, 233. 26. Works, II, 312. 27. The last four of these became vital issues in the Antinomian controversy provoked by Anne Hutchinson in 1636. 28. Parrington, op. cit., p. 12. Luther set men free at once from the purely theological concept of moral law and from a purely supernatural moral system. Ethics became the real test of religion. If a man walks uprightly in love and mercy, that is a sign, and the only sign, that he is saved, and that he has a proper faith in God. With such a faith, the Christian's life will natu- rally and freely flower in moral virtue. To Cal- vin, such complete freedom seemed dangerous, and led, as American theocrats had bitter occasion to find in persons like Anne Hutchin- son and John Wheelwright, to a confusion of imputation, justification, and sanctification, besides making a not-to-be-thought-of assault upon the social, economic, and political struc- Notes to Pages 23-24 501 ture of the Puritan theocratic community. Thus while Luther confidently refused to abridge the Christian freedom of individual moral responsi- bility, Calvin and his followers timidly but fervently searched the letter of the Scriptures for prescriptions of human duties, and con- verted the free and natural ideal of Lutheran- ism into Puritan theocracy. The basis of Luther's faith was his own ex- perience, which he sought to confirm by the Scriptures; Calvin started with the Scriptures and searched them for God's prescriptions. And where Luther entrusted to the State the power of deciding what was in accord with the Gospel and stamping out divergencies, Calvin affirmed the medieval supremacy of the Church. Para- doxically, Luther's refusal to carry his religious democracy into politics ended in promoting political tyranny in his own country, while Cal- vin's emphasis on the power of God and sub- mission to His will, when put to use in a new country, eventually resulted in strengthening the human power of the individual against all earthly authority. See further, John E. Ran- dall, The Making of the Modern Mind. A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age (N.Y., 1926), pp. 151-53. 29. John Cotton, A Modest and Cleare A nswer to Mr. Balls Discourse on Set Formes of Prayer (Boston, 1642), Ch. X, p. 44; Perry Miller, The New England Mind (N.Y., 1939), p. 468. John Robinson was of a like mind when he observed that "Religion is not always sown and reaped in one age .... John Huss and Jerome of Prague finished their testimony a hundred years before Luther, and Wickliff well nigh as long before them, and yet neither the one nor the other with the like success as Luther." — Alex Young (ed.), Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth from 1602 to 1625 (Boston, 1841), p. 423. "The character of New England Puritanism, ' ' concludes Professor Perry Miller, "was deter- mined as much by questions which Luther and Calvin did not solve as by those which they did." — The New England Mind, p. 194. Thus John Cotton declared, "We may oppose Cal- vin's authority with reason. It's not the autho- rity of Calvin that concludes for . . . but the reason . . . according to truth, that determines the question." — Quoted, ibid., p. 93. 30. Ibid., pp. 92-93. 31. See the letter written by John Daven- port and signed by the New England clergy, as reproduced in Samuel Mather, An Apology for the Liberties of the Churches in New England . . . (Boston, 1738), pp. 151-66. 32. Quoted in Mather's Magnalia, I, 64; see also Words of John Robinson's Farewell Address to the Pilgrims . . . (Boston, 1903), pp. 351-52; Ed. Winslow, Hypocrasie Unmasked . . . (Pro- vidence, 1916), p. 97; Alex. Young (ed.), Chron- nicles of the Pilgrim Fathers . . . (Boston, 1841), pp. 296-97; W. W. Fenn, "John Robinson's Farewell Address," Harvard Theological Rev., XIII (1920), 323-39; and J. G. Powicke, John Robinson (London, 1920). Robinson's works are available in an edition prepared by Robert Ashton (3 vols., Boston, 1851). John Cotton, no less than the good Robinson, lamented this disposition of reformed churches to "keep at a stay just where their reformers left them." — A Modest and Cleare Answer, Ch. X, pp. 44-47; M'Clure, op. cit., pp. 214-15. Orthodox Pilgrims were, of course, less Lutheran than Calvinist in their theology. See Williston Walker, Creeds and Platforms of Con- gregationalism (N.Y., 1893), pp. 60, 91; his History of the Congregational Churches in the U.S. (N.Y., 1894), p. 101; Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony, p. 57; and H. K. Rowe, A His- tory of Religion in the United States. (N.Y., 1924), p. 22. They particularly disapproved of Smyth's acceptance of the Mennonite faith, and they reputedly left Amsterdam for fear of be- coming involved in the disputes of the other religious communities established there. Yet their espousal of Calvinism seems to have been motivated as much by the hope that by cleaving to Calvin's clearly-stated and close-knit system they might escape the disintegrating forces of dispute, dissent, and schism as by any in- trinsic love for the "points" of Calvin. For while they followed Robinson in his espousal of con- servative Calvinism, including the doctrines of Election and Predestination, they heard him also, and attended to his counsel, when he warned them against being too rigid in their doctrine, because "The Lord hath more truth yet to break forth out of his holy word . ' ' See Walker , History of the Congr. Churches, pp. 101-2 ; H. M. Dexter, Congregationalism . . . (4th ed., rev., & enl., Boston, 1876), pp. 118-32; and Roland G. Usher, The Pilgrims and Their History (N.Y., igi8),p. 33. Still more important, they championed the right of the individual to investigate the Scrip- tures, as that right had been proclaimed by Luther, and soon made the important discovery that this type of defense for their own secession from Pope and Archbishop involved permission also to differ from the minister or majority opinion regarding the meaning of Scripture. See Usher, op. cit., pp. 43-44. They deviated also from the rigid path of Calvin's teachings in their form of church government, "employing in addition to Calvinist presbyterian customs, certain congregational characteristics," which 502 Notes to Pases 25-26 appear to have been derived from Browne, Barrowe, Greenwood, Penry, and others (see W. Walker, History of Congregational Churches, pp. 118-27). Hence the search for origins of Separatist principles and practices leads not only to Calvin and Luther but also to doctrines and forms called Anabaptist, Brownist, Hussite, Lollard, and Congregationalist — relationships that deserve exhaustive investigation. It would seem, then, that it is as fallacious to assume that all New England Puritans were strict Calvinists as it would be to hold that all non-Calvinist Protestantism among them was inspired by Luther. See further Esther E. Burch, "The Sources of New England Democracy," Amer. Lit., I, ii (May, 1929), 115-30. 33. But see O. C. Goodell's argument in Hist. Coll. of the Essex Institute, III (1861), 238-53, esp. 239, that antinomianism in Massachusetts derives mainly from Johannes Tauler. However, the Lutheran Agricola, rather than the Illumi- nated Doctor of Strasbourg is generally accep- ted as the founder of antinomianism. 34. For the issues involved, see Winthrop's Journal for Oct. 21, Nov. 17, 1636; Jan. 20, Mar. 7, May 17, Aug. 30, Nov. 1, 1637; Mar. 1 and 22, 1638. The Antinomians were supported in their principles by William Coddington, John Clarke, and Henry Vane, and they also referred their accusers to the earlier teachings of John Cotton himself. Cotton, who had been Mrs. Hutchin- son's spiritual adviser, was doubtless more re- sponsible for her "heretical" opinions than he dared or cared to admit. If Mrs. Hutchinson was right in charging her former pastor with her opinions, one wonders whence he derived them, and whether his entertainment at Old Boston of such German refugees as Libingus, Saumer, and Tolner could have led to his defection from strict Puritan doctrine (see Mather's Magnalia, I, 279). At all events, Cotton found himself in a very uncomfortable position, and at the height of the controversy he meditated removing to New Haven. Instead, he compromised his views, and submitting to the manifold pressures seething about him, turned upon Mrs. Hutch- inson, even to pronouncing sentence of ban- ishment upon her. 35. James E. Ernst, Roger Williams, New England Firebrand (N.Y., 1932), pp. 422, 476, and The Political Thought of Roger Williams (Seattle, Wash., 1929), p. 19. Quite probably all or most of the American Puritan divines who were trained at Cambridge read Luther during their university days. 36. Luther, "An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility," Works, II, 66, 69, 103, 108. 37. See his Hireling Ministry None of Christ's (London, 1897), pp. 201, 290, 309, and Ernst, Roger Williams, New England Fireband, p. 487. 38. That is, he penetrated to the foundations of Christian liberty as implicit in the New Testa- ment and took to heart the revolutionary ideas that underlie its teachings. See L. Fuerbringer, T. Engelder, and P. E. Kretzmann, The Con- cordia Cyclopedia (St. Louis, 1927), p. 424; for Williams' arguments, see Publ. of the Narragan- settClub, I (1866), 299-300; III (1867), 214, 248, 349, 355. 366, 398; IV (1870), 187. 487; VI (1874), 401. 39. Publ. of the Narragansett Club, III (1867), 74-78; IV (1870), 222; VI (1874), 51, 263-68. 40. Ernst, Roger Williams, p. 483. While Luther held that "all the righteousness of the best men, their thoughts, good works, alms, prayers, and sufferings avail nothing before God," he held, with Williams, that good works would ordinarily follow faith, repentance, and election. See Luther's Works, I, 173-285. 41. Like Luther, Williams rejected the doc- trine of unconditioned free will. See Luther's treatise on free will and his argument that man's future depends less on human free will than upon God's free grace; and compare Wil- liams and Luther on this score with the difficult position into which Puritan theologians got themselves by their acceptance of Calvinistic predestination. On their efforts to square the doctrine of works with that of predestination, consult Professor Perry Miller's excellent dis- cussion in The New England Mind, pp. 365-97, esp. pp. 366-70; also pp. 397-4°7. 444-5o. 475-80. 42. For Gorton's troubled, peripatetic career in the colonies, see Adelos Gorton, Life and Times of Samuel Gorton (Phila., 1907). 43. Gorton, op. cit., pp. 12, 146-48. During his later years Gorton became more moderate, leaving at his death some manuscripts now in the possession of the Rhode Island Historical Society, notably a commentary on the Lord's Prayer that suggests that Gorton was definite- ly, probably directly, under Luther's influ- ence. The manuscripts await closer study than they have received. Indications of Lutheran content are to be gleaned from the extracts given in Lewis G. James, Samuel Gorton: A For- gotten Founder of Our Liberties (Warwick, R.I., 1896). 44. This conclusion is corroborated by Pro- fessor Jantz, whose survey of colonial libraries, or remnants of them, goes far beyond my own. Exact numbers and comparative figures on all libraries and library lists examined are prom- ised by Dr. Jantz when he completes his com- prehensive study (a few will be given below). Much of what follows regarding seventeenth- Notes to Pages 26-27 503 and eighteenth-century libraries is based on Dr. Jantz's findings. 45. Samuel Fuller's booklist in 1638 included a Musculus; Captain Miles Standish's in 1656, The State of Europe and The German History; and Governor Bradford's in 1657, a copy of Luther On the Galatians. William Brewster's list of 1644, the first of any length and reasonable completeness, included a number of works by Germans, among them the theological works of Musculus, Oecolampadius, Lavaterus, Zanchius, Sohnius, Pareus, Piscator, Buxtorf, Wigandus, Chemnitz, Keckermann's Systema Physicum, and three English books on the German wars. — Jantz, loc. cit., p. 5; T. G. Wright, op. cit., pp. 254-65; Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, ed. by N. B. Surtleff (Boston, 1855), esp. Vols. I-IV, on the years 163 3- 1668; H. M. Dexter, "Elder Brewster's Library," Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc, 2nd ser., V (1889-1890), 37-85. 46. Jantz, loc. cit., p. 5; J. H. Suttle, "The Libraries of the Mathers," Proc. Amer. Antiq. Soc, new ser., XX (Apr., 1910), 269-356. Buxtorf's Thesaurus Grammaticus Linguae Sanctae Hebraeae (1629) was one of the most generally used books among studious Puritans. The first literary use to which I find it put in America is in Richard Mather's Preface to the Bay Psalm Book (Cambridge, Mass., 1640). 47. John Harvard's gift includes two works of Luther and Melanchthon. See the Harvard Library Bibliographical Contributions, ed. by W. C. Lane, No. 27, pp. 5-14: "Books Given to the Library by John Harvard, Peter Bulkley, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Governor Bellingham." See also No. 55, pp. 26-28, as well as S. E. Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), p. 265; Alfred C. Potter, "Catalogue of John Harvard's Library," Trans. Col. Soc. Mass., XXI (1919), 190-203; Henry J. Cadbury, "John Harvard's Library," Trans. Col. Soc. Mass., XXXIV (1942), 353-77. Subsequent bequests to Harvard almost in- variably included German works. Of particular importance among seventeenth-century gifts are the Sebastian Miinster Cosmographia from Peter Bulkley of Concord, scientific and mystical works from Sir Kenelm Digby, the friend of John Winthrop, Jr., and several scholarly and theological works from John Winthrop the Elder. See Robert C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop (2 vols., Boston, 1869), II, 438. That these gifts were not fornaughtappears from many contemporary references, among ■which may be cited Leonard Hoar's advice in 1661 to his nephew, then at Harvard, that he should study, in addition to the Bible, Petrus Ramus, and other fundamental sources, such universal reference works as Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca Universalis (Zurich, 1545-1549), a catalog in the three learned tongues of all known writers and books, and Georg Draud's Bib- / iotheca Classica (Frankfurt-am-Main, 161 1 and 1625), a catalog of books and authors not sur- passed until Bayle's Dictionary appeared in 1697. 48. A list of his foreign correspondents pub- lished in Volume XL of the Transactions of the Royal Society (London, 1741), enumerates 81, of whom 15 are Germans, 3 are Englishmen who maintained close German connections, 5 Dutch, 3 Italian, 2 French, 1 Danish, and 1 Bohemian. Among the Germans, the best known are the chemist Johann Rudolph Glau- ber, the astronomer Johann Hevelius, the Ham- burg physicians Paul M. Schlegelius and Johann Tanckmarus, and a well-known group of Ger- mans residing in England : Samuel Hartlib, the friend of Milton's whom Winthrop held dear as "the great Intelligencer of Europe"; Hein- rich Oldenburg, a founder of the Royal Society and its corresponding secretary for many years ; and Prince Rupert of the Palatinate, who, after a tempestuous youth, had settled down in Eng- land, devoting himself to artistic and scientific pursuits. To this list Dr. Jantz has added the names of three other influential European men of learning: (1) Theodor Haak, a friend of Milton, translator of half of Paradise Lost into German blank verse, and generally accredited founder of the Royal Society; (2) "Mr. Morian," "Morlian," or "Morlean" (the name is variously transcribed in the Winthrop papers) to whom both Winthrop and his German correspondents invariably refer with respect and devotion ; and (3) Augustinus Petraeus. 49. John Winthrop, The History of New England (ed. by James Savage, 2 vols., Boston, 1825-1826), II, 20. The library was steadily added to by his son Wait and his grandson John. Professor Morison thinks that Winthrop brought a thousand-volume collection of books with him when he emigrated in 1631. Of the 270 volumes which he considered, Mr. Morison classifies 135 as scientific works (including 52 devoted to chemistry), 61 religious, 36 as re- lating to history and belles-lettres, 24 on lan- guages, law, and philosophy, and 12 on the occult sciences. See Builders of the Bay Colony, p. 272; The Puritan Pronaos, p. 130. 50. In 1812, Francis B. Winthrop gave to the New York Society Library 259 volumes. Another sizable portion of this colonial library, comprising "One hundred sixteen Volumes of Books and twenty three Pamphlets," was given by the same donor to the New York Hospital in 1812, whence it came, in 1892, into the pos- session of the New York Academy of Medicine 504 Notes to Page 27 Library. Francis B. Winthrop also gave up- wards of another hundred volumes of the Win- throp collection to the Massachusetts Histo- rical Society. Since 1942, when Dr. Jantz pu- blished his "Preliminary Report," he has found two other sizable groups of Winthrop books — one at Yale University and the other at Trinity College — so that approximately a half of the thousand-volume Winthrop collection is now available for analysis. Regarding questions of provenience, see Herbert Greenberg, "The Authenticity of the Library of John Winthrop the Younger," Amer. Lit., VIII, iv (Jan., 1937), 448-52. While a number of the Winthrop books represent accessions made by Winthrop's descendants — some of them, for instance, bear marks indi- cating that they were used as textbooks by late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century members of the family — Dr. Jantz is confident that his researches, when complete, will substantiate his belief that a much higher percentage of the extant books were acquired by Winthrop him- self than Mr. Greenberg's figures (based on an examination of only the 259 volumes in the New York Society Library) indicate. Professor Samuel Morison, tells us that half the books are in Latin, 71 in English, 23 in Ger- man, 17 in French, 12 in Dutch, 7 in Italian, 4 in Greek, and one in Spanish. A survey based on an examination of the books themselves, rather than on the Catalogue of the Society Library of 1850, whose short titles are often misleading or inaccurate, shows that there are at least 40, rather than 23, German books, ex- clusive of those now deposited in the New York Academy of Medicine, Yale University, and Trinity College. This number will doubtless be increased considerably when a classification is made of the 116 volumes and 23 pamphlets in the New York Academy of Medicine Library and of the smaller holdings of Yale and Trinity. Professor Morison's error may well be attribu- table to the circumstances that in several cases a number of separate publications are bound together in one volume, and that in seven- teenth-century German books the upper part of the title page is often in Latin with the Ger- man title below, so that a work wholly in Ger- man may appear in a short-title catalog or a hastily made classification as a Latin work, when in reality it is a German book. Of the four hundred-odd books examined by Dr. Jantz thus far, "all but a small portion" were acquired by John Winthrop, Jr., himself; later acquisitions, made by his descendants (since they include relatively few German titles) are of no particular significance for the matter in hand. 51. For Child, see G. L. Kittredge, "Dr. Ro- bert Child the Remonstrant," Trans. Col. Soc. Mass., XX (1919), 1-146, and Morison's ex- cellent chapter on Child in Builders of the Bay Colony, pp. 244-68. 52. The concluding section of this work, on "Torwelsch," was abstracted in Alsted's Ency- clopaedia (Nassau, 1630), one of the standard reference works used by seventeenth-century New Englanders. See T. G. Wright, op. cit., pp. 30, 52, 59, 130. 53. Winthrop's copy shows interesting notes in the section on German language.— Jantz, loc. cit., p. 11. 54. Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc, 5th ser., I (1871), 160. 55. Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc, XVI (June, 1878), 206-51, esp. pp. 210-11; also Discovery, VI (1925). 383-92. 56. See Jantz, loc. cit., p. 11. Quite possibly others of Winthrop's papers and books disap- peared or were destroyed earlier. For example, his father describes in his Journal, December 15, 1640, the havoc wrought by mice among his son's books while they were stored, temporarily, it is presumed, in a granary. The history of the Winthrop library and the interest of Winthrop's descendants in German learning, while showing some interruptions, is more or less a continued story. The two sons of John Winthrop, Jr., especially Wait Still (1642-17 1 7), carried on where his father had left off. He both preserved and added to the books he inherited; he wrote his name into many of his father's books and acquired addi- tional German works. See the letter to his brother Fitz-John, asking him to procure the works of Glauber in an English translation. — "Winthrop Papers," Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc, 5th ser., VIII (1882), 503, 511, 513, and Jantz, loc. cit., p. 18. Wait's son John (1681-1747) became a scholar in his own right and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was honored in 1 74 1 when the society dedicated to him a volume of its Transactions and again when the translation of the German-Latin work of John Andrew Cramer's Elements of the Art of Assaying Metals (London, 1741) was inscribed to him — both of them with references to his learned and distinguished ancestors (Jantz, loc. cit., p. 18). Another John Winthrop (1714-1779), the grandson of Adam Winthrop (brother of John Winthrop, Jr.), carried forward the family tra- dition. In 1738 he was appointed Hollis pro- fessor of science at Harvard; and his son, James (1752-1821), became the close friend of William Bentley and, like him, an admirer of German learning as well as of the rising German litera- ture — for all of which he acquired adequate Notes to Pases 28-29 505 representations for his library. Thus German learning and literature attained, around 1800, once again the position of importance for a Winthrop comparable to that which it had held during the middle of the seventeenth-century. 57. The significance of Samuel Lee as a popu- larizer in New England of the new discoveries and theories of science and as a directive force in the tentative explorations of Cotton Mather and his successors into such realms as are considered in The Christian Philosopher merits further investigation. 58. Jantz, loc. cit., p. 23. 59. Educated in medicine at Leyden and Padua, and committed to liberal political and religious views, Child found his efforts to carry liberty as well as prosperity to the New Eng- landers rewarded by the imposition of fines (which Winthrop paid for him), confiscation of property, and imprisonment ; yet he refused to be "weaned from New England for their dis- courtesye" and continued to offer his money for joint enterprises with Winthrop in the prosecu- tion of scientific ventures in agriculture, chem- istry, and metallurgy in the promotion of industrial projects, including a scheme to com- bine viniculture with silkworm culture, a fur trading company, blacklead mining, iron works, and salt wells. 60. Another popular volume among early colonial learned men, e.g., among the Mather books now in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. and among James Winthrop's books in Allegheny College. See also the book lists in Wright and in Morison. 61. According to Johann Conrad Creiling (Die edelgeborne Jungfer Alchymia, Tubingen, 1730), the writings of Eirenaeus Philalathes be- came as familiar to alchemists as their daily bread. He goes on to say that Philalathes was identified by some with "Dr. Zcheil, residing in America" (who is, of course, Dr. Child), and by others with "Georgius Sterkey, an apothe- cary in London." General opinion today agrees with G. L. Kittredge, who observed that Phila- lathes "was the creation of George Stirk's teem- ing brain and not too scrupulous conscience." See S. E. Morison, Harvard College in the Seven- teenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 78. It requires little more than a glance at the index of Professor Kittredge's Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1928) to discover the close relationships existing among German, English, and American witchcraft, necromancy, alchemy, and allied pseudo- sciences. 62. Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc, XVI (June, 1878), 212-13. "Durie appealed to him and to John Norton particularly for New England support of his plan of Protestant union, in the further- ance of which he spent many years in Germany conferring with noted scholars. The replies of Davenport and Norton, quoted in part in Cot- ton Mather's Magnalia (I, 272-74, 297) were friendly in spirit and conciliatory in doctrine. Davenport shared many of Winthrop's scien- tific interests, corresponded with the London Germans, and received many books from them. " — Jantz, loc. cit., p. 12. 63. Master of Arts of Emmanuel College in 1603, he studied and practiced law in London for a decade, and then traveled on the Conti- nent, stopping at Heidelberg, where he was well received at the court of the Elector Palatine and the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I. At Heidelberg, about 1618, David Pareus, the learned Reformed professor of theology, persuaded him to enter the ministry. His first living was the chaplaincy of the mercantile colony of the Eastland Company at Elbing, Prussia — the same Eastland Company of which the deputy-governor was Theophilus Eaton, later the organizer of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the first governor of the New Haven Colony. He remained in Prussia long enough after the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War to see something of the Counter- Reforma- tion, and then returned to England about 1624. After suffering the displeasure of his former friend, Laud, he emigrated to America in 1633, aged fifty-five, and soon settled at Aggawam. 64. For the popularity of Keckermann's books among students at Harvard, see Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 157-58, and Arthur O. Norton, "Harvard Text- books and Reference Books of the Seventeenth Century," Publ. Col. Soc. Mass., XXVIII (Apr., 1933). S^^S. esp. pp. 379, 412-14. 65. For the widespread use of this book, as well as of others of Alsted's works, see Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 147, 158-59, 162, 209, 217, 226, 273, and Nor- ton, loc. cit., pp. 383-84. 66. See ibid., pp. 396-97, 421-22, 432-33; Louis F. Snow, The College Curriculum in the United Stales (N.Y., 1907), pp. 20-77 passim; and New Englands First Fruits (London, 1643), sec. 2. 67. For details, consult Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 139—297, and Norton, loc. cit., pp. 361-438. For text- books in use in philosophy at Harvard during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Benjamin Rand, "Philosophical Instruction in Harvard University from 1636 to 1900," Har- vard Graduates' Mag., XXXVII (Sept., 1928), 29-47, and Snow, op. cit., pp. 31-35, 46-48, 56-77, 78-116. For books in use at Yale during the eighteenth century, see ibid., pp. 23-25, 506 Notes to Pages 29-31 37-39. 42-45. 51-54. 79. 90-92; at Princeton, PP- 38-39. 54-55. 72-73: at Columbia, pp. 56-72; at William and Mary, pp. 73-74; at the University of Virginia, pp. 75-76. 68. For example, as early as 1657 Elisha Cook (B.A., 1657) owned a copy of Buchler's Thesaurus Poeticus. John Hancock, a freshman in 1685, had another copy (Cologne, 1609, ed.). - — Jantz, loc. cit., p. 14; Morison, Harvard Col- lege in the Seventeenth Century, p. 178. 69. Ibid., pp. 285-97; Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), pp. 263-70. 70. See Morison, Harvard College in the Seven- teenth Century, p. 292. Apparently this weeding- out process continued regularly. In 1682 Cotton Mather, just then taking his second degree, purchased ninety-six volumes of duplicates for 43 pounds and 19 shillings, and his classmate, John Cotton, paid 30 pounds for "double books" in 1695. F° r details see C. S. Brigham, "Harvard College Library Duplicates, 1682," Publ. Col. Soc, Mass., XVIII (1916), 407-17. 71. Miscellanea Curiosa, sive Ephemerides Medico-Physicarum Germanicarum. 72. Morison, Harvard College in the Seven- teenth Century, p. 293; Alfred C. Potter, "Har- vard College Library, 1723-1735," Publ. Col. Soc. Mass., XXV (Feb., 1922), 1-13. 73. Compare the list given by Norton (loc. cit., pp. 361-438) with that by R. F. Seyboldt, "Student Libraries at Harvard, 1763-1764," Publ. Col. Soc. Mass., XXVIII (Apr., 1933), 449-61. 74. Among works of special interest are the Ephemerides Brandenburgicae (another schol- arly periodical), Reuchlin's Hebrew grammar, Frischlin's Latin grammar, Serreius' Latin- French-German dictionary (Strassburg, 1603), Johan Clacius' (probably Clajus') German grammar (Leipzig, 1617), Luther's German New Testament (Wittenberg, 1595), the com- plete works of Jacob Boehme in German (1638), De Signatura Rerum (n.d.), and Josephus Redi- vivus (1631). Among significant newer works are those that came through Cotton Mather's German correspondents, August Hermann Francke, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, and An- thony Wilhelm Boehm. The supplement of the catalog for 1724 lists additional titles. 75. Thomas Grocer's inventory in 1664 listed a "German Dyet" and "Praehes Emblems," the latter identified by Ford as Stephanus Praher's Erste Thayl dess Podagraischen Fliegenwadels . . . Passau, 1614. — T. G. Wright, op. cit., p. 54; Worthington C. Ford, The Boston Book Market, i6yg-ijoo (Boston, 1917), p. 74. 76. Jantz, loc. cit., p. 15. 77. T. G. Wright, op. cit., pp. 121-23. 78. John Dunton's Letters from New England (Publ. of the Prince Soc, Vol. IV, Boston, 1867), pp. 314-19. esp. pp. 315-16. 79. Dieter Cunz, "John Lederer," William and Mary Quar., XXII (1942), 175-85. Dr. Jantz has found among the Winthrop papers letters by and about him, as well as a thirteen- page manuscript in his handwriting. 80. The Diary of William Bentley, D.D. (4 vols., Salem, 1905-1914), II, 444. 81. Ibid., II, 74, 200; IV, 435. 82. New England Journal of Medicine, Apr. 21, I938. 83. Mather published A Letter from the most ingenious Mr. Lodowick of Rhode Island, Febr. 1, i6giJ2, in which Lodowick is represented as professing to have been once a Quaker and as undertaking now to speak authoritatively con- cerning Quakers, at the same time endeavoring to deflate the claims of "the more learned sort of people called Quakers" to superior enlighten- ment by asserting that they had all their ideas at second hand from a German nobleman, who is left unidentified, but whose children he pro- fesses to have tutored. Regarding the identity of this nobleman, consult Thomas J. Holmes, Cotton Mather: A Bibliography ... (3 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1940), II, 569. 84. Diary of Samuel Sewall (3 vols., Boston, 1878), I, 318, 391. 85. Judge Sewall, in his Letter Book, pre- served a letter from Lodowick dated Leipzig, March 24, 1712, in which Lodowick gave him specific directions for the cure of an ailment diagnosed as "the Hypochondriack Evil" (see Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc, 6th ser., II [1888], 25-29). As late as 1752 Thomas Prince, in the preface to a medical pamphlet mentioned "the learned Dr. James Oliver of Cambridge, one of the most esteemed Physicians in his Day, who had a singular Help in the Art of Chemistry by the ingenious Dr. Lodowick a German, who was also accounted an excellent Physician, and the most skilful Chymist that ever came into these Parts of America" (quoted by Samuel Abbot Green in A Centennial Address . . . June 7, 1881, before the Mass. Hist. Soc. [Groton, 1881], p. 54). Green also quotes (p. 37) a news item from the Boston Weekly News Letter of 1717 about another German physician in Boston, Sebastian Henry Swetzer, and his marvelous "cure" of a Negro. About the middle of the eighteenth century Dr. Johann Rhode was a prominent physician in New Haven (see Charles F. Boll- man, "Zur Geschichte des Deutschtums in New Haven," Deulsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsbldl- ter, XXVII-XXVIII [1927-1928], 216-24). There were also Germans in other professions around the turn of the century, e.g., Colonel Notes to Pages 31-34 507 Wolfgang Romer, an army engineer in charge of New England fortifications between 1698 and 1705. See Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc, 6th ser., Ill (1899), 336-37. 547-51- 86. Jantz, loc. cit., pp. 16-17. The fullest account available on Lodowick is Dr. Jantz's "Christian Lodowick of Newport and Leipzig," Rhode Island History, III, iv (Oct., 1944), 105-17; IV, i (Jan., 1945), 13-26. Dr. Jantz, upon whose researches I have relied heavily for the facts adduced concerning the aforementioned German professional men in seventeenth-century America, is investigating, among other Germans in early New England, Captain John Luther, one of the first settlers of Rhode Island. 87. Rufus M. Jones, Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1914), esp. Ch. XII, "Jacob Boehme's Influ- ence in England." See also his Studies in Mys- tical Religion (London, 1909), Chs. XII-XIX, as well as Some Exponents of Mystical Religion (London, 1910), pp. 199-200. 88. Harvard Library, Bibliographical Contri- butions, No. 27 (1888). 89. For example, the library of George Al- cock, a medical student, included among eight German works Boehme's De Signatura Rerum (probably the J. Ellistone translation, London, 1651) as early as 1676. — S. E. Morison, "The Library of George Alcock, Medical Student," Publ. Col. Soc. Mass., XXVIII (Feb., 1933), 350-57. esp. p. 356. 90. It is all too easy to overestimate the dogmatic exclusiveness of New England Puri- tanism and to assert that Puritans inexorably opposed all aspects of pietism and mysticism. For a corrective of this view, consult Professor Perry Miller's New England Mind, notably Ch. I and II, but also pp. 286-87, 37 2 . 373. 396-97, 484-91. 91. While this influence never disappeared, it tended to fall behind the growing vogue of the Dutch and French scholars, until it was revived by the Harvard-Gottingen men about 1820. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 92. For brief treatments see A. B. Faust, Ger- man Element . . ., I, 47-52, and A. Steinmetz, "Kelpius, the Hermit of the Wissahickon," Amer.-Ger. Rev., VII, vi (Aug., 1941), 7— II. 93. Julius H. Tuttle's list in "The Libraries of the Mathers," Proc. Amer. Antiq. Soc, n.s., XX (Apr., 1910), 269-356, esp. pp. 313-56, when checked against the "remains" presented in 1814 to the American Antiquarian Society, is found to be very incomplete, at least sixty titles of German authors now deposited in Worcester being omitted. Those of Mather's books that are now in the Massachusetts His- torical Society Library are listed by Tuttle (ibid., pp. 280-90). See also H. J. Cadbury, "Harvard College Library and the Libraries of the Mathers," Proc. Amer. Antiq. Soc, L (Apr. 17, 1940), 20-48. 94. In addition to the common reference works and commentaries, it included such unique items as Trithemius' Historia, the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, Lemnius' De Occullis Naturae Miraculis, Carion's Chronicon, and two translations into English: Causes of Pestilence and Bucer's Judgment on Divorce (in the Milton translation). In 1676 Increase Mather acquired from Mrs. Bridget Usher Gesner's natural history, the works of Cornelius Agrippa, several of Buxtorf's works, and the Laws of the Fraternities of the Rosie Crosse by Michael Maierus. — Tuttle, loc cit., pp. 291-92. 95. Increase Mather, the Foremost American Puritan (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), and Selections from Cotton Mather, with Introduction and Notes (N.Y., 1926) ; consult also the bibliographies in Perry Miller and T. H. Johnson (eds.), The Puritans, pp. 821-31, esp. pp. 829-31. 96. It is not to be presumed, of course, that a reference by Cotton Mather ("book-suffocat- ed" as he was) to a German author or book is presumptive evidence that he knew the author at first hand or that he had the book before him. Often Cotton Mather quoted at second- and third-hand. Professor Murdock reminds us that if one reads Mather's Christian Philosopher with Ray's Wisdom of God Manifested in the Creation and his Physico-Theological Discourses, Wm. Derham's Physico-Theology, Dr. Cheyne's Philosophical Principles of Religion, and Grew's Cosmologia Sacra open before him, he will discover that much of what Mather says — particularly by way of quotation or reference to authorities — derives from these books, "or from others like them." — Selections from Cotton Mather, Intro., p. 1. 97. Here may be mentioned the most oft- used German works in the Mather collection, the Acta Eruditorum and the Miscellanea Cu- riosa ("the German Ephemerides," in Cotton's phrase) — both many times acknowledged as the sources of Mather erudition, and equally often unacknowledged. 98. While writing his Christian Philosopher , Mather found Alsted as indispensable as Drew's and Derham's physico-theological books. The Theologia Naturalis turns out to be the source of many of Mather's longer quotations. See, for example, "Essay XXVI: Of the Vegetables." 99. Miscellanea Curiosa sive Ephemeridium 508 Notes to Pages 34-35 Medico-Physicarum Germanicarum, etc., ac- quired by Mather during his university days, formed perhaps the one reference work of his that he found most useful. In this case, as in the case of Alsted's compends, Mather's meth- ods illustrate the not uncommon practice of students to revert to the books which early study and long use have made familiar. For a good illustration of the use to which he put his "German Ephemerides," see "Essay XXXII: Of Man" in The Christian Philosopher. This book is but one among many that demonstrate the method by which the learned Mathers arrived at their reputation of being "walking libraries." Cotton's Magnolia, with its various contents — historical, political, theological, cos- mological, astrological, etc. — is another illus- tration of how, in the numerous departments of learning that engaged his attention, he went to corresponding German sources. What I have been able to learn about the six massive manu- script folios of his Biblia Americana suggests that in this department of learning he was equally dependent upon the findings of German theologians, most likely drawn at second-hand from his "German Ephemerides." ioo. Reprinted, largely from the originals in the American Antiquarian Society, by Kuno Francke, "Cotton Mather and August Hermann Francke," Harvard Studies and Notes in Philo- logy and Literature, V (1896), 55-67; "Further Documents Concerning Cotton Mather and A. H. Francke's Correspondence," Americana Ger- manica, I (1897), 39-45; and "The Beginnings of Cotton Mather's Correspondence with A. H. Francke," Philol. Quar., V (July, 1926), 193-95. 101. Francke inspired him to write a thir- teen-page treatise, NunciaBona a Terra Longin- qua. A Brief Account of Some Good 27, 230 n. 272. 49. Ibid., 19-20, 30-31, 33, 52 ; Long, Thomas Jefferson and George Ticknor, pp. 26-28. 50. Long, Jefferson and Ticknor, pp. 49-50. 51. See Ticknor's Remarks on Changes Lately 528 Notes to Pages 68-69 Proposed or Accepted in Harvard University (Boston, 1825). 52. The liberal tradition in his own depart- ment was carried forward by Longfellow, who succeeded him from 1836 to 1854, and subse- quently by Lowell, from 1854 to 1872. 53. For particulars, see Long, pp. 55-61. 54. Graduated from Harvard with highest honors at seventeen, he pursued graduate lit- erary and theological studies for several years and succeeded, in 1814, to Buckminster's pulpit in the Brattle Street Church. Well prepared, according to contemporary American standards, in the classical and several modern languages (including a reading knowledge of German, acquired under the stimulation and direction of Moses Stuart of Andover), he was appointed Eliot Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard in 1815, but granted permission to travel for two years before assuming his duties. 55. Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc, VIII (Jan., 1865), I37-4I- 56. During the spring and summer of 1816 his letters to his brother are full of plans to translate Klopstock's Messias and have it ready for publication on his return to America, but the project came to naught. — Long, pp. 66- 67. 57. Letter, Oct. 2, 1815, in the Massachu- setts Historical Society, quoted in Long, p. 238, n. 19. 58. Goethe Jahrbuch, XXV (1904), 5-6. 59. On October 25, 181 7, in a tone that sug- gests gratification at the results of his efforts, he wrote to his brother, "I have received a letter from the College ordering 20 German Grammars, 20 German Dictionaries, 5 Schnei- der's German Greek Lexicon, 20 Schleussner's etc. So that German seems to look up." — Long, p. 238, n. 32. 60. Ibid., pp. 79-80, 90; North Amer. Rev., VII (July, 1818), 288; VIII (Dec, 1818), 208. 61. See his letter to Stephen Higginson, Sept. 17, 18 1 7, printed in Harvard Graduates' Mag., VI (Sept., 1897), 14. His comments on Gottingen varied from time to time. For example, a year after taking the doctorate, he wrote from Rome to Bancroft, then at Gottingen, "With respect to a degree, if they are willing to give it to you without examination, as they did mine, and you have nothing better to do with 60 or 70 Thalers, you can take it" (Long, p. 269, n. 36). Generally, however, he referred to Gottingen more appre- ciatively in some such terms as "the famous fountain of European wisdom" (Harvard Gra- duates' Mag., VI, Sept., 1897, 14); and years later he said, "I left Germany in the fall of 1817, strongly attached to that country, and after deriving in my opinion very great ad- vantages from my intercourse with learned men in various parts of it and especially from the course of studies which I pursued at Got- tingen."— Long, pp. 71, 239, n. 37. For the rest of his European sojourn, he spent the winter of 1817-1818 in Paris, continuing his studies of Greek and Italian and cultivating Alex, von Humboldt, Benj. Constant, Madame de Stael, and Lafayette. In London he called on Dr. Nohden, "whom I had seen once in Got- tingen, and whose German Grammar I had diligently studied. He also called on Wm. von Humboldt, who "was quite pleased to find I had read his own German translation of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus" (Journal, May, 1818; Long, p. 239, n. 40). In both London and Edinburgh later he had access to the same distinguished circles of literary people in which Ticknor moved so agreeably later in the same year. After a winter in Rome and a tour of Greece, he returned on October 7, 18 19, to Boston to assume his duties as Professor of Greek at Harvard. 62. Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (ed. by R. L. Rusk, 6 vols., N.Y., 1939), I, 76; see also pp. 78, 84. In the meantime he heard Everett's "Introductory Lecture" and as many others as were open to him, and recorded his unqualified admiration of Everett's inspiration, eloquence, and tremendous stock of factual knowledge. Forty years later, writing his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," Emerson likened Everett's influence on the young people of his day to that of Pericles in Athens: "Germany had created criticism in vain for us until 1820, when Edward Everett returned from his five years in Europe, and brought to Cambridge his rich results, which no one was so fitted by natural grace and the splendor of his rhetoric to introduce and recommend. He made us for the first time acquainted with Wolff's theory of the Homeric writings, with the criti- cism of Heyne. The novelty of the learning lost nothing in the skill and genius of his relation, and the rudest undergraduate found a new morning opened to him in the lecture-room of Harvard Hall." — Works (Centenary ed., 12 vols., Boston, 1903-1905), X, 330. Emerson continues in this vein for the length of five pages. In his Journal for 1851 (VIII, 225-26) he wrote: "Edward Everett had in my youth an immense advantage in being the first American scholar who sat in the German uni- versities and brought us home in his head the whole cultured method and results, — to us who did not so much as know the names of Heyne, Wolf[f], Hug[o], and Ruhnken. He dealt out his treasures, too, with such admirable pru- Notes to Pases 69-71 529 dence, so temperate and abstemious that our wonder and delight was still new." Samuel E. Eliot, on the other hand, thought Everett's lectures "rather calculated to set forth the amount of the professor's studies than to do any particular benefit to the students." — Bancroft MSS, Mass. Hist. Soc, quoted in Long, p. 73. But admirers of Emerson's sort seem to have been in the vast majority. See, for example, the testimonials in Andrew P. Peabody's Harvard Reminiscences, p. 93, and the tributes collected in the Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc, VIII (Jan., 1865), 161-70. 63. For his classes he prepared and, in 1822, published a translation of Philipp Karl Butt- mann's Greek Grammar, and the next year a Greek reader based on that by Friedrich Jacob. Both were reviewed by Bancroft in the North Amer. Rev. (Jan. & Apr., 1824). 64. In his lectures Everett was often lavish in his praise of German thought, scholarship, and literature. He particularly singled out Goethe, Schelling, Oken, and Hegel as having been helpful to him and as worthy of considera- tion. Of especial importance is his address on "American Literature," delivered on August 26, 1824, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard. In it he exhibited a keen grasp of the situation of his day, espoused the cause of higher education after the German example, and expressed his conviction of the scholar's responsibility to lead — a belief which seems to have been inspired by his study of Fichte's ideal of the scholar and his national mission. It, in turn, helped inspire Emerson's classic statement, thirteen years later, when he stood in Everett's place before the same society and addressed them on the subject of "The Ameri- can Scholar." 65. Conveniently located by consulting Goodnight, op. cit., pp. 138, 146, 149. 66. North Amer. Rev., X(Jan., 1820), 115-37. 67. July 6, 1825, Jefferson MSS, Lib. of Congr., quoted in Long, pp. 73-74. 68. July 21, 1825, Jefferson MSS, Lib. of Congr., quoted ibid., p. 74. 69. Not only in academic matters but in his personal desires, as when he asked for permis- sion to reside in Boston while teaching in Cam- bridge, or when he asked to be sent on an ex- pedition to revolutionary Greece (Long, p. 75). As early as April 13, 1821, he wrote to Judge Joseph Story, one of the Harvard Overseers: "You have occasionally, though undesignedly, placed a thorn in my side, by remarks which you have dropped, that you thought I would have been a good lawyer ; — the rather as I find I am a poor professor. From the first week of my return hither, I saw that our university — -as good I doubt not as the state of society admits — would furnish me with little scope for the communication of the higher parts of ancient literature, and that a good grammatical driller, which I cannot consent to be, is wanted. But I find that the whole pursuit, and the duties it brings with it, are not respectable enough in the estimation they bring with them, and lead one too much into contact with some little men and many little things" (original in Mass. Hist. Soc, quoted in Long, pp. 74-75). 70. Emerson's Journals, VI, 257 (Sept., 1842; see also Works, X, 330-38. 71. See, for example, the letter written on Nov. 9, 1835, while he was Governor of Mass., to Prof. Blumenbach of Gottingen, admitting that while he had lost some of his facility in speaking and writing "for want of practice," he continued to read German "with pleasure and ease," as, he went on to say, he retained "an affectionate remembrance" of his "German friends." — MS letter in library of Univ. of Got- tingen, quoted in Long, p. 75. 72. Edward E. Hale, Memories of a Hundred Years (2 vols., N.Y., 1902), II, 14-15. 73. Emerson, who attended the inaugural exercises, wrote on May 1, 1846: "The satis- faction of men in his appointment is complete. Boston is contented because he is so creditable, safe, prudent, and the scholars because he is a scholar, and understands the business." — Jour- nals, VI, 168. 74. MS diary, May 1, 1846, preserved at Craigie House, and quoted in Long, p. 76. 75. For details, see Paul R. Frothingham, Edward Everett, Orator and Statesman (Boston & N.Y., 1925), pp. 265-301. 76. Anna E. Ticknor, Life of J . G. Cogswell as Sketched in His Letters (Cambridge, Mass., 1874), p. 51. One gathers, however, that he never fully succeeded in subjecting himself to the discipline required, for a chance remark of Dissen's that after spending eighteen years, sixteen hours daily, exclusively on Greek and still being unable to read a page of Greek trage- dy without the aid of a dictionary, led him to strike Greek from his list of studies. — Harvard Graduates' Mag., VI (Sept., 1897), 12; see also pp. 9-10. 77. Long, pp. 78, 240, n. 5. 78. Anna E. Ticknor, op. cit., p. 57 79. Ibid., pp. 60-61. 80. Long, p. 241, n. 12. 81. Harvard Graduates' Mag., VI (Sept., 1897), 12-13; Long, pp. 83, 241, n. 15 82. Ibid., p. 83. 83. Anna E. Ticknor, op. cit., p. 73. 84. Although Cogswell had resolved by now 530 Notes to Pages 71-73 to prove to his friends that he was not a "way- ward, froward child," he was still unable to settle on a vocation. "When I return to Ameri- ca," he wrote on May 4, 1819, "I mean to listen to the calls of reason and duty and if these take me to the Poles or sit me quickly down in New England, I shall cheerfully obey their dictates and go on my way rejoicing." But he was suffi- ciently mindful of the future to take the Got- tingen doctorate in August, 1819. — Long, pp. 85-87. 85. Cogswell's account of his country and countrymen inspired Goethe to read more wide- ly concerning the new world and to say, "If I were twenty years younger, I should sail for North America." He avowed more affection for Cogswell than for any other American of his acquaintance and spoke of him as "ein Iieber Mann." 86. Long, pp. 90, 242, n. 34. 87. See Alfred A. Potter and C. K. Bolton, The Librarians of Harvard College, 1667-1877 (Cambridge, Mass., 1897), PP- 3°-37; also Cogs- well's article "On the Means of Education, and the State of Learning in the United States," Blackwood' s Edin. Mag., IV (Feb., 1819), 546- 53, which contains (pp. 552-53) his criticism of American libraries. 88. Cogswell had met Bancroft earlier at Gottingen. Bancroft had entertained the idea of founding "a high school of the German character" as early as January, 1819, when he communicated his design to Dr. Kirkland, who encouraged him in his plans. He had inspected a number of schools in Berlin and the cele- brated Schulpforta, consulted Schleiermacher, and had drawn up a plan of organization for what he considered an institution ideally adapted to Massachusetts. 89. Long, pp. 141-44. For the principles of organization and particulars of indebtedness to European models, consult Cogswell and Ban- croft's Prospectus of a School to be Established at Bound Hill, Northampton, Mass. (Cambridge, June 20, 1823); Some Account of the School for the Liberal Education of Boys Established on Round Hill . . . (n.p., 1826); and Outline of a System of Education at the Round Hill School (Boston, 1831). 90 Anna E. Ticknor, op. cit., p. 160. 91. While casting about for something to do, he engaged himself for two years to superintend an Episcopal school for boys in Raleigh, N.C., where he was surprised to find that he could employ successfully a system of "German ideals . . . more severe" even than any he had thought of applying to his New England schol- ars at Northampton.- — Ibid., p. 197. In 1836, he returned North to tutor the three sons of Samuel Ward, but in October he joined Francis C. Gray on a tour of Europe. 92. See, e.g., his essay on "University Edu- cation," N.Y. Rev., VII (July, 1840), 109-36. Consult also Goodnight, op. cit., for the years indicated. 93. H. M. Lydenberg, "A Forgotten Trail Blazer," Essays Offered to Herbert Putnam (New Haven, 1929), p. 302; see also pp. 303-14, as well as Lydenberg's History of the New York Public Library (N.Y., 1926), pp. 1-56, and Fred Saunders, Historical Sketch of the Astor Library (N.Y., 1895). 94. Letters of introduction from Everett to Benecke, Gauss, Blumenbach, Eichhorn, and Dissen prepared for their ready access to the innermost circles, if such a preparation was at all necessary for this latest contingent of "neue Amerikaner." By September 5, writing to An- drews Norton, then librarian at Harvard, Bancroft rated himself fortunate to be in "the land of learning, of literature, of science . . . the pure fountain of wisdom" and "to drink of her unpolluted waters and be refreshed" (Long, p. 109; Mark A. DeWolfe, Howe, The Life and Letters of George Bancroft, 2 vols., N.Y., 1908, I, 30-44; hereafter cited as Howe). Feeling the inadequacy of his German, which he learned from Professor Sidney Willard (himself self- taught), Bancroft set at once to perfect himself in the language, and apparently succeeded in record time, for by June of the following year he reported, with justifiable pride, to his friends in America that he had gone to "a village in the vicinity and delivered a sermon in the German language" (Long, p. 111). 95. Long, p. 112; Howe, I, 48-58, 63-64. 96. Long, pp. 114-15. 97. "This degrading love of money is carried beyond all bounds." So far is learning reduced to the rules of trade that an inquiry of a Got- tingen professor after information not imme- diately related to the matter in hand invariably meets with the reply, "It would cost me time to tell you, but you can hear what I have to say on the matter, in a course I am going to deliver next term," that is, by paying the fees and pre- senting a properly endorsed receipt. — Long, p. 120. 98. "They have no idea of the sublimity or sanctity of their science. 'Tis traduced to a mere learning. I never hear anything like moral or religious feeling manifested in their theo- logical lectures. They neither begin with God nor go on with him, and there is a good deal more religion in a few lines of Xenophon, than in a whole course of Eichhorn. Nay, the only classes, in which I have heard jests so vulgar and indecent, that they would have disgraced Notes to Pages 73-74 531 a jailyard or a fishmarket, have been the theo- logical ones. The bible is treated with very little respect, and the narratives are laughed at as an old wife's tale, fit to be believed in the nurs- ery." — Long, p. 1 20. 99. E.g., Long, pp. 121-24, I2 7-3°. I 3 I » 134-36, and Howe, I, 84-87, 89-92. 100. Letter of Aug. 19, 1820, quoted in Long, pp. 127-30; see also Howe, I, 77-78. 101. July 18, 1821, printed in Howe, I, 11 1. 102. Howe, I, 155-57. 103. Emerson, too, while he considered Ban- croft "a perfect Greek scholar," who had made good use of his time in Germany, admitted that he needed "a good deal of cutting & pruning." — Letters, I, 127 (Jan. 23, 1823). See also Higginson's opinion as given in Harvard Gra- duates' Mag., VI (Sept., 1897), 17. As a young man Bancroft had a faculty for going against the current and for attracting the attention and often the ill-will of the con- servative-minded, who thought him eccentric or foolish. In Germany, he felt, he was "all too American" to get on smoothly; but when he returned to his own country, he seems not to have realized that it was chiefly his foreign manners and views, social and professional, that provoked irritation in Cambridge. Even before he entered upon his duties at Harvard, he told Norton, "I do not expect to be popular, be- cause I intend to require more than has been usual." In external matters he imitated the German professors, and was exacting in his assignments, while the boys retaliated by con- gregating under his study windows in the college yard and singing a ditty beginning, "Thus we do it in Germany." If his German- ized manners offended in America, his ultra- Americanism was one of the contributing fac- tors that made him unhappy in Germany. For example, on July 4, 1820, his pent-up dissatis- faction with the Germans, their customs, and their institutions, overflowed in a grandilo- quently jingoistic Fourth-of-July oration, delivered to an audience of one — Robert Bridges Patton of Middlebury College, the only other American in Gottingen at the moment. This was followed, after a poem by Patton, with a round dozen toasts to George Washing- ton, the President of the United States, the American flag, the heroes of '76, American liberty, American institutions, etc., etc. See Long, pp. 124-27. 104. Compare his letters printed in Long, pp. 121-23, with the stock criticisms as they appear in Goodnight, pp. 33-107. 105. Mindful of the practical value of the Gottingen doctorate, he presented himself for examination before eight members of the fa- culty, defended successfully nine theses, accor- ding to requirements, and on September 9, 1820, became "Dr., Herr Doctor," as he put it. — Long, p. 130; Howe, I, 78-84. 106. The longer he remained, the more Ber- lin pleased him. His frank condemnation of certain aspects of Gottingen and his equally frank glorification of the Royal Friedrich Wil- helm University in Berlin supply one of the causes that turned the trek of American stu- dents, during the 30's, increasingly toward Berlin. See the lists of students at the several German universities before 1850, as presented in A. B. Hinsdale, "Notes on the History of Foreign Influences upon Education in the United States," Ch. XIII, in the Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year i8gy- i8g8 (Washington, D.C., 1899). It is noteworthy that Halle, which had so delighted Ticknor, particularly disgusted Bancroft. He would not go there, he wrote to Norton, "for all the He- brew Gesenius has in his scull or his library . . . If Gottingen is a little hell, Halle is the place the devil would blush to show his face in." — Long, p. 248. 107. On his first visit to Hegel, he put him down as "very sluggish for one of Schlegel's school," and at the end of the course observed that the time spent listening to Hegel's "dis- play of unintelligible words" was so much time "lost" (Long, pp. 132, 248, n. 5; Howe, I, 92). Concerning Wolf, he sent President Kirkland the following, not entirely consistent report : "He is a genius of the first order; one of the few great men it has been my lot to meet in Ger- many . . . the most learned man on the conti- nent . . . But Wolf has neither dignity of cha- racter, nor purity of morals ... is stubbornly vain, childish, licentious." — Long, p. 132 ; Howe, I, 47, 92-93, 96. Schleiermacher made alto- gether the most favorable impression: "Schlei- ermacher delighted me extremely . . . [His] mode of preaching is very dignified and severe. Language flows from his lips fluently . . . the best extempore speaker I have ever heard .... He is a preacher for the understanding, not for the heart." — Long, p. 132 ; Howe, I, 97. See also the praise he bestowed on Schleiermacher in his letter to Kirkland, Nov. 5, 1820, printed in Long, p. 132. 108. Fired by Schleiermacher's lectures on education, he began to contemplate principles and plans for Germanizing American secondary education. Although Humboldt pointed out to him several good reasons why such plans would be hard to realize in America, when Bancroft's term at Berlin came to a close in February, 1 82 1, he spent four days at Schulpforta, osten- sibly to look after young Hedge (who was caus- 532 Notes to Pages 74-75 ing trouble by his "impertinence and undescrib- able Faulheit"), but really, one would gather from his enthusiastic comments at the time, to study the history, organization, equipment, discipline, modes of instruction, and general life of the famous school there. He was acquir- ing data for the formation of a school on the German model in America. As early as January, 1 8 19, he had written Kirkland regarding such a possibility, and Kirkland had encouraged him. Now that Schleiermacher had revived his interest in the project, his letters became replete with details concerning German schools, Fichte's ideals, Schleiermacher's principles, and Pestalozzi's and Fellenberg's methods. See Long, pp. 133, 142-44. 109. Long, p. 138. For a more circumstantial account of Bancroft's experiences at the Ger- man universities, see the excellent study by Russel B. Nye, which has appeared since this section was written. — George Bancroft, Brahmin Rebel (N.Y., 1944). no. Long, pp. 141-42. in. More the scholar than the administra- tor, Bancroft devoted all his time to teaching, teaching German, the classics, and history; but when G. H. Bode joined the staff in 1825, Bode took over the German classes. Although eminently fitted and trained for scholarly research, Bancroft was not a highly successful teacher. His lack of sympathetic understanding of young students and his eccentric, romantic, and emotional temperament made him unpopu- lar with the boys. 112. A Greek grammar, abr. and tr. from that of Philipp C. Buttmann (1824) ; a Latin reader, tr. from the 5th ed. of Christian F. W. Jacobs (1825); Cornelius Nepos, from the 3rd ed. by J. H. Bremi (1826); and a Latin grammar, tr. from the German of C. G. Zumpf (1829). 113. Chief among these were a review of Schiller's Minor Poems in the North Amer. Rev., Oct., 1823, and two essays — "The Life and Genius of Goethe," loc. cit., Oct., 1824, and "The Writings of Herder," loc. cit., Jan., 1825. Beginning in 1827, he published a series of ar- ticles on "German Literature" in the Amer. Quar. Rev., based on recent German publica- tions and outlining the development of Ger- man literary culture. When John S. Dwight published, as No. 3 of Ripley's "Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature," his Select Minor Poems from . . . Goethe and Schiller (Boston, 1839), Bancroft wrote his last long review in this category for the Christian Examiner, July, 1839. In it he incorporated a scathing attack on Goethe's personality and character, thus re- vealing a tendency in his own development toward conservatism between 1824 and 1839. 114. When, in accordance with its custom of renewing degrees on fiftieth anniversaries, the University of Gottingen sent a special deputy to Berlin to present the new diploma, Bancroft, later recalling the event, said, "I answered him in German, giving an account of Gottingen in my day," at the same time relating something of his student days at Berlin and of his asso- ciations with Hegel, Wolf, Humboldt, and Schleiermacher (Long, p. 157). Numerous other honors came to him from Germany. He became one of the original members of the Goethe Club in New York Cit} - . To the end, as earlier in his life, he maintained a certain Germanic air about him, and there was a story current during his last years in Washington to the effect that when a stranger, who had repeatedly observed an old man of peculiarly military bearing riding past the Soldiers' Home, asked a guard who the old gentleman was, received for his reply, "Why, that's an old German named Bancroft." 115. See Michael Kraus, "George Bancroft 1834-1934," New Eng. Quart., VII, iv (Dec, J 934). 662-86, esp. pp. 667-68, 683. 116. M. A. DeWolfe Howe, in Harvard Gra- duates' Mag., XVI (June, 1908), 652. 117. J. S. Bassett (ed.), "Correspondence of George Bancroft and Jared Sparks, 1823-1832," Smith College Studies in History, II (Jan., 1917). 73- 118. Wm. Charvat and Michael Kraus (eds.), William Hickling Prescott (Amer. Writers Series, N.Y., 1943), pp. xxvi-xxvii, xxix; George Ticknor, Life of Prescott (Boston, 1864), pp. 68-69. 119. In 1832 he credited the Germans with "throwing the light of learning on what before was dark and inexplicable," no other nation having done "so much to lay the foundations of that reconciling spirit of criticism, which, in- stead of condemning a difference of taste in different nations as a departure from it, seeks to explain such discrepancies by the particular circumstances of the nation." — Biog. and Crit. Misc. (Boston, 1850), p. 254. 120. He concluded that Humboldt, as "the first, almost the last writer on these topics," made his "theories conform to the facts, instead of binding his facts to theories," and hence merits "the name of a philosopher." — Ticknor, Life, p. 195. When his Conquest of Mexico (1843) won for him the admiration and fellowship of Humboldt and, in 1845, membership in the Royal Society of Berlin, he was elated. — G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (N.Y., 1935), p. 414; Ticknor, Life, P- 239- 121. Finding the English edition of Ranke's Spanish Empire ill printed, Prescott had four Notes to Pages 76-77 533 copies of the part touching Philipp II struck off in a large type, so that whenever his eye would permit the indulgence, he might recur to it "as a manual and guide." — Ticknor, Life, p. 290; see also pp. 171, 287. 122. Parker also found The Conquest of Mexico lacking in philosophical background, and charged that Prescott seemed to know "nothing of the philosophy of history, and little, even of political economy." — Parker, Works (14 vols., London, 1863-1871), X, 116, 153. But Parker, be it remembered, had immersed him- self in German Biblical research, had gone over completely to the German school, and was not the man to be pleased by methods short of the severity of the strictest critical ones. 123. Chas. H. Farnham, Life of Francis Parkman (Boston, 1901), pp. 183-84; Wilbur Schramm (ed.), Francis Parkman (Amer. Wri- ters Series, N.Y., 1938), pp. lii, liv, lv, lvii; Wm. T. Hutchinson, The Marcus Jernegan Essays in American Historiography (Chicago, 1937), P- 50. 124. After spending the years 1825-1827 at the Round Hill School and acquiring the rudi- ments of German, French, Greek, and Latin, Motley went to Harvard, where he graduated in 1 83 1. At the college exhibition during his senior year the seventeen-year-old lad delivered an address on "The Genius and Character of Goethe," which Cogswell thought good enough to send to Goethe's daughter-in-law, Ottilie, who wrote to say, "I wish to see the first book that young man will write." 125. He attended Hugo's lectures on civil law and in the next semester added "Heeren's lectures on History" and "Saalfeld's Political lectures." After two semesters at Gottingen, where he partook more freely than his prede- cessors of German student life, and where he formed lifelong friendships with Graf Alex. Keyserling and Otto Bismarck, he proceeded to Berlin; but being more interested in belles lettres than historical subjects, and finding at Berlin no great "menagerie" of literary lions (he appears to have overlooked Ranke), he set forth in the spring of 1834 on his travels, which included a number of the principal German cities. Disappointed at having arrived in Europe too late to see Goethe, he nevertheless visited Weimar and was graciously entertained by Ottilie. At Dresden he met Tieck, and pro- ceeded thence via Vienna, through the Tyrol and southern Germany, to Paris. After tours of Italy and England, he returned to America in the autumn of 1835.- — Long, pp. 202-4, 208-12. 126. For details of the Motley-Bismarck re- lationship, see Long, pp. 221-24. 127. C. P. Higby, and B. T. Schantz, (eds.), John Lotkrop Motley (Amer. Writers Series, N.Y., 1939), pp. lxxv-lxxvii. 128. Fortunately he had become acquainted at Gottingen and Berlin with the painstaking process of minute research, and he knew some- thing of how German libraries were arranged, so that when he applied for help to Dr. Klemm, the chief librarian at Dresden, and to Herr von Weber, the head of the Royal Archives of Saxo- ny, he was prepared to proceed with a mini- mum of lost motion. In Germany, as later in Holland, the custodians of printed and manu- script sources co-operated fully in supplying him with the desired materials. 129. His later work does not exhibit any marked changes in method or manner, except that he came to rely more and more on manu- script materials, and that with practice he gained facility in writing and a more assured style. His apprehension of the dramatic power of great painting led him to develop a style embodying dramatic and pictorial painting in his presentation of men and events in a manner essentially alien to the severely objective and critically restrained German method of histori- cal writing. In whatever degree he fell short of equaling the German historiographical scien- tists, his books became models which later American historians sought to equal or surpass in critical accuracy and scientific objectivity. 130. He was the second American to win the Ph.D. degree from the University of Gottin- gen. He matriculated in the theological faculty but devoted himself mainly to the ancient lan- guages, and subsequently became a noted Greek scholar and professor of that subject at Middlebury, later at Princeton, and finally at the University of the City of New York. 131. On his return he was for several years the editor of the Baltimore American. He be- came a prolific writer, produced translations of Don Carlos in 1836 and the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller in 1845, and a life of Goethe in 1872. 132. For a complete list of Americans studying at Gottingen, see Daniel B. Shumway, "The American Students of the University of Gottingen," Ger.-Amer. Annals, n.s., VIII, v-vi (Sept. -Dec, 1910), 171-254. Shumway's list extends to 1910. The statistical data which he presents (too detailed for summation here) are indicative of how thoroughly the Gottingen in- fluence insinuated itself into the intellectual life of the United States. 133. From 1828 to 1831 Dwight and his brother Sereno operated a Gymnasium at New Haven on the order of the Round Hill School. 134. C. F. Thwing, The American and the German University (N.Y., 1928), pp. 12-39, 42-43. 534 Notes to Pases 77-80 135. The figures are those of Louis Viereck in his "German Instruction in American Schools," Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year igoo-igoi, Washington, D.C., 1902. For other significant figures and conclusions, see D. B. Shumway, loc. cit., pp. 171-96, and A. B. Faust, op. cit., II, 231. 136. They themselves were preceded by three or four others, who, however, failed to achieve the fame of Ticknor and Everett, and they consequently count for less in the cultural history of the United States as it is preserved in the written record. See D. B. Shumway, loc. cit., pp. 172-73. 137. He became acquainted with Pestalozzi and Fellenberg, and upon his return published a report in two volumes entitled A Year in Europe, which included extended accounts of his visits to Yverdun and Hofwyl, as well as other institutions. In the opinion of Henry Barnard, "No volume in the first half of the 19th century had so wide an influence on the development of our educational, reformatory, and preventive measures, directly or indirectly, as this." 138. This projected institution, proposed chiefly by the Chevalier de Beaurepaire, was to be a kind of French academy of Arts and Sci- ences at Richmond, with branch academies in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, with widespread international affiliations with the royal societies of London, Paris, Brussels, and other learned bodies, together with an elaborate hierarchy of officers, professors, resident and nonresident associates selected from both hemispheres. Fantastic as the scheme now appears, it had a good deal of support, and some money was collected (especially in France) toward its establishment, when the French Revolution stopped the proceedings. Jefferson, who was loath to give up the project, for a while cherished a scheme of "removing bodily to Va. the entire faculty of the Swiss College of Gene- va." His preoccupation with these plans for a "French" institution doubtless explain why, when in 1788, he made a coach trip up the Rhine as far as Mannheim, he made no note in the written accounts of the trip of German educational or literary accomplishments but concentrated on certain sociological, agricul- tural, and topographical features of Germany. See Marie Goebel Kimball, "Thomas Jefferson's Rhine Journey," Amer.-Ger. Rev., XIII, i (Oct., 1946), 4-7; ii (Dec, 1946), 11-14. 139. Ticknor had labored, since the summer of 1821, for "more freedom in the choice of subjects" with only partial success at Harvard. Mindful that his institution would be less en- cumbered by what he called the "ecclesiastical leaven" than Harvard, Jefferson announced, on July 16, 1823, "We shall . . . allow them [the students] uncontrolled choice in the lec- tures they choose to attend, and require ele- mentary qualifications only, and sufficient age" (Long, Thomas Jefferson and George Tick- nor, pp. 33-34; Jefferson's Works, Library ed., XV, 454-57). At Harvard Ticknor and his colleagues were soon checkmated in their ef- forts; by 1827 their reforms were abandoned in all but Ticknor's own department. Until after the administration of Everett (1 846-1 849) little progress was made. Free election was re- instituted between 1872 and 1885 by President Charles W. Eliot, but by that time Michigan, Cornell, and Hopkins had entered the field and made advances in this direction quite apart from earlier efforts at Harvard. Hence it seems that to Jefferson rather than Eliot belongs the honor of being the first successfully to intro- duce the elective system. 140. When, on March 17, 1825, the Univer- sity of Virginia formally opened its doors, German was offered, under Blaettermann's tutelage, along with French, Italian, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon, as a language that "now stands in line with that of the most learned nations in richness of conditions and advance in the sciences." See Jefferson's plans for the University as proposed to the Virginia Legisla- ture. Of the first class of 116 students at Vir- ginia, 64 studied German. By 1854 the number was 200, and in 1869 a knowledge of German and French was made obligatory for the degree of Master of Arts. 141. And Gladly Teach (Boston & N.Y., 1935). PP- 88-89. NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM 142. This threefold derivation is emphasized by W. H. Channing: "In part, it was a reaction against Puritan Orthodoxy; in part, an effect of renewed study of the ancients, of Oriental Pantheists, of Plato and the Alexandrians, of Plutarch's morals, Seneca and Epictetus; in part a natural product of the culture of the place and time. On the somewhat stunted stock of Unitarianism . . . had been grafted German idealism, as taught ... by Kant and Jacobi, Fichte and Novalis, Schelling and He- gel, Schleiermacher and De Wette, by Madame de Stael, Cousin, Coleridge, Carlyle; and the re- sult was a vague yet exalting conception of the godlike nature of the human spirit." — Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (2 vols., Boston, 1881), II, 12. 143. O. B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England (N.Y., 1886), pp. vi-viii, 136. Notes to Page 80 535 This dual nature was observed as early as 1842 when Xoah Porter remarked : "The word Tran- scendentalism . . . has two applications, one of which is popular and indefinite, the other philosophical and precise. In the former sense it describes men, rather than opinions, since it is freely extended to those who hold opinions, not only diverse from each other but directly opposed." — American Biblical Repository, 2nd ser., Ill (July, 1842), 195. From the beginning, no one, not even the members, quite agreed on what Transcenden- talism was. There was more agreement on who were and who were not Transcendentalists, though even here there were differences of opinion. To the earlier generation belonged Dr. William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), Convers Francis (1 795-1865), Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), Wm. Henry Furness (1802-1896), George Ripley (1 802-1 880), Orestes A. Brown- son (1803-1876), R. W. Emerson (1803-1883), Elizabeth P. Peabody (1804-1884), F. H. Hedge (1805-1890), Wm. H. Channing (1810-1884), James F. Clarke (1810-1883), Sarah Margaret Fuller (18 10-1850), Theodore Parker (1810- 1860), C. P. Cranch (1813-1893), J. S. Dwight (1813-1864), and H. D. Thoreau (1817-1862). Whether Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804- 1864) should be listed with them poses several nice questions. Hedge named Caleb Stetson, Mrs. Sarah Ripley, Jones Very, and Robert Bartlett as other members of the Transcendental Club, and among occasional visitors he mentioned George Bradford, Samuel Osgood, Ephraim Peabody, and George Putnam. Among the later Transcendentalists were Cyrus A. Bartol (1813- 1900), John Weiss (1818-1879), Samuel Long- fellow (1819-1892), J. E. Cabot (1821-1903), O. B. Frothingham (1822-1895), Samuel John- son (1822-1882), T. W. Higginson (1823-1911), David A. Wasson (1823-1887), Moncure D. Conway (183 2-1 907), and George Willis Cooke (1848-1923). 144. Lowell called it "the protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and an escape from forms and creeds." — Works (Ed. de luxe), II, I37 . 145. Frothingham, op. cit., 302. This ad- mission, by one on the inside, explains why those on the outside considered Transcenden- talism incomprehensible. The uninitiated called it nonsense and moonshine. Members of the group themselves were conscious of their repu- tation for shadowy vagueness. Said Thoreau : "I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations." — Journal, V, 4 (Mar. 5, 1853). Emerson himself sometimes poked sly fun at the whims and oddities of his confreres, while good Transcendentalists like Clarke and Cranch enjoyed making humorous drawings of the brethren. See F. D. Miller, C. P. Cranch and his Caricatures of New England Transcendentalism (Boston, 1951). Emerson's efforts to explain Transcendentalism were un- availing; the public either oversimplified his meaning or roundly pooh-poohed it. As early as 1836 one of his Concord neighbors explained, with a wave of the hand, that Transcendenta- lism meant simply "a little beyond" (Emerscn's Journals, Cent, ed., IV, 114). Even Dickens was given to understand "that whatever was unin- telligible would be certainly transcendental" (American Notes, in Works, Household ed., I, 51-52). A teacher, taking his pupils on a Missis- sippi riverboat excursion, explained, "See the holes made in the bank yonder by the swallows. Take away the bank, and leave the apertures, and this is Transcendentalism." — Clarence Gohdes, Periodicals of Transcendentalism (Dur- ham, N.C., 1931), p. 8. The theologians were more serious. "To me," said the Rev. John Pierce, "it is like the tale of an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" (Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc, 2nd., V, 227, Jan., 1890). A Baltimore clergyman described it as "a new philosophy . . . maintaining that nothing is everything in general, and every- thing is nothing in particular." — M. D. Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (Boston, 1862), 187-88. For most people, Transcendentalism was anything that lay beyond the realm of common sense, whether in thought, word, or deed. 146. Frothingham, op. cit., p. 355 ; see also pp. 153-58. 147. Works (Cent, ed., 15 vols., Boston, 1907-1913), VI, 37. 148. The Transcendental hierarchy was re- cruited chiefly from the Unitarian clergy. First and foremost as the greatest preacher of his generation stood W. E. Channing, a kind of godfather of the Transcendentalists, though not strictly one of them. Others who were, were to be, or had been Unitarian clergymen include Emerson, Ripley, Dwight, Cranch, Parker, and W. H. Channing. Alcott, though without a pul- pit, was a preacher all his life ; while Brownson was a preacher of all orders in succession. Among the younger men, Samuel Longfellow, Johnson, Higginson, and Bartol were Unitarian ministers. 149. It was generally agreed that Tran- scendentalism, this latest form of infidelity, was the result of erstwhile Unitarians, like Emerson and Parker, going in pursuit of foreign gods — German theologians and German metaphysi- 536 Notes to Pages 80-81 cians. For a lucid presentation of the issues in- volved, see Clarence H. Faust, "The Back- ground of the Unitarian Opposition to Tran- scendentalism," Mod. PhiloL, XXXV, iii (Feb., 1938), 297-324. "This movement," contended W. D. Wilson, "grew out of the Unitarian mo- vement. It did not, however, grow out of Uni- tarian theology. It is not a carrying out of Unitarianism, for the two systems have differ- ent starting points, and tend to different direc- tions .... The association is, philosophically speaking, purely accidental." — Dial, I (Apr., 1841), 421. Professor Henry D. Gray, too, con- cludes: "However much more it may have been, Transcendentalism was a development in the history of the Unitarian church." — Emer- son: A Statement of New England Transcenden- talism (Stanford University, 1914), p. 11. 150. XII (Jan., 1840), 71. That German met- aphysics and theology were mainly responsible for the "atheistical tendencies" among the Transcendentalists was assumed by almost everybody. See C. H. Faust, loc. cit., 304-5, 307, 316-24; Christ. Exam., XXIII (Nov., 1837), 181-82; XXV (1836), 266ff., XXXI (1841), 98ff; XXXII (1842), 251 ff.; and Parker's "Experiences as a Minister," Works, XIII, 324-25- 151. Frothingham, op. cit., p. 153; Emerson, Works, I, 340-42, 347-48. 152. Horace Mann was agitating for educa- tional reforms, and Elizabeth P. Peabody, among others, was beginning to evolve a system of kindergarten education. The temperance movement was attracting attention, and Pier- pont quit the pulpit because people were not ready to become total abstainers. The first na- tional temperance convention was held in 1813, and in 1838 a prohibitory law was passed in Massachusetts. Conventions of all kinds were held, and newspapers espousing all sorts of ideas and reforms appeared, among them the Non-Resistant , begun in Boston in 1839 and edited by Garrison, Edmund Quincy, and Maria W. Chapman. In 1840 the Anti-Slavery Society split because women demanded to speak on its platform. Soon after a women's convention was called. Emerson resigned his ministerial charge because of religious scruples; Ripley and Parker preached naturalism; Abner Kneeland was preaching materialism. In 1838 George Combe came to this country and aroused un- bounded expectations among the phrenolo- gists. About the same time spiritualism began to claim attention; mesmerism, clairvoyance, and kindred subjects electrified the people. Homeopathy, hydropathy, the Graham diet, and the Thomsonian cure came in for their share in the effort to redeem human life. Some forswore the use of cotton because it was pro- duced by slave labor; others refused to wear woolen goods lest they rob the sheep of their natural defenses. Many became practicing vegetarians; some denied themselves not only meat but also tea and coffee. In the midst of all these reformations and dreams appeared Wil- liam Miller to prophesy the end of all things and to do a brisk business selling ascension robes. Nearly all the disciples of the Newness were affected by this ferment. Thoreau declared his independence of all visible churches, announc- ing that he had never joined one and would henceforth withhold his money. Next, he led a one-man secession movement and, protesting taxes and an unjust war with Mexico, found himself lodged in jail. Shortly after this clash with the state, he went to Walden Pond to live in seclusion. On the social front, Brownson advocated ideas and a program that were too extreme even for the disciples of the New Views, so that after the first meetings, he became "un- bearable" and "was not afterwards invited." Margaret Fuller conducted her remarkable con- versations in Boston and elsewhere. Francis, Hedge, Ripley, and Clarke were reading the German theologians and publicly defending them. Alcott left his Temple School, went to Concord, and there lived by manual labor, and nibbled his celery and asparagus at the wrong end. Only the "heaven-aspiring" vegetables were proper food : potatoes because they grew underground and carrots because they grew downward were proscribed. Emerson helped him procure the means for going to England, there to establish a school which should realize the idea conceived in Boston, only to have Al- cott return with Charles Lane and establish Fruitlands at Harvard, Mass. — another one of the numerous attempts looking forward to the new order. Robert Owen's enterprise at New Harmony was followed by others; the writings of Fourier were interpreted by Albert Brisbane and given currency in Greeley's Tribune, which absorbed new ideas like a sponge. The Brook Farm community was established in 1841, Hopedale the same year, and Northampton in 1842. Among the more notable combinations were the conventions of the "Friends of Universal Reform" held in the Chardon Street Chapel, Boston. Their purpose was to revitalize the old church forms and doctrines. Three meetings, each of several days' duration, were held during 1840-1841, to discuss the institution of the Sab- bath, the church, and the ministry. Edmund Quincy was moderator; Brownson was one of the chief speakers; Alcott found himself at home on the platform ; Emerson attended and Notes to Pages 81- 83 537 served on committees but did not speak; but he did print, in the Dial, what he considered the best speech delivered, by Nathaniel H. Whiting, a mechanic. Later he reported, with a good deal of detachment: "A great variety of dialect and costume was noted ; a great deal of confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as zeal and enthu- siasm. If the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians and philosophers, — all came succes- sively to the top, and seized their moment, if not their hour, wherein to chide or pray or preach or protest." — Works, X, 374; see also the opening paragraphs of Lowell's essay on Thoreau. 153. The Brook-Farm Institute of Agri- culture and Education of 1841-1846 and the Dial of 1 840-1 844 were admittedly among its more tangible and representative manifesta- tions, but neither was, in the philosophical sense of the word, Transcendental. While Brook Farm had its inspiration in the New Views, not one of the four generally regarded as the leading Transcendentalists — Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Parker, and Alcott — went to live at Brook Farm or invested their money in it. The Dial indicated, through the balanced nicety of its good will toward the community, sympathy for the aims of its founders but ina- bility to subscribe to the theories underlying the experiment or the practices actually put in operation there. The collectivism upon which Brook Farm was founded did not chime har- moniously with the extremely individualistic base upon which the Transcendentalist built his faith. Emerson, when Ripley pressed him to join the Association, said, "At the name of a society my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen" (Letters, II, 368-71, Dec. 14, 1840; Journals, V, 473-74). "He never spoke of Brook Farm," says Lindsay Swift (Brook Farm, p. 52), "without conveying to the finest sense the assurance that someone was laughing be- hind the shrubbery." Similarly, the other char- acteristic venture of the Transcendentalists, the Dial, did not satisfy all Transcendentalists, in either policy or accomplishment — no, not even the editors, assistant editors, and con- tributors. 154. Emerson . . ., pp. 14-15. 155. Studies in New England Transcenden- talism (N.Y., 1908), pp. 107-8. 156. T. W. Higginson, Writings (7 vols., Boston, 1900), II, 12. 157. Gohdes, op. cit., p. 12. 158. My italics. The qualification implied in the italicized phrase throws the meaning of the term Transcendentalism open to a wide variety of interpretations. 159. G. W. Cooke, An Historical and Bio- graphical Introduction to Accompany the Dial as Reprinted in Numbers for the Rowfant Club (2 vols., Cleveland, 1902), I, 1. 160. There was nothing in Hobbes's materi- alism, Locke's sensationalism, or Hume's skep- ticism to encourage an enthusiastic and live religion. Based on the cold light of reason and nature, it could not logically admit either en- thusiasm or ecstasy. The result was a frigid, empty theism — what Emerson spoke of as "the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism." Par- ker, too, was aware of this spiritual sterility: "I felt that the 'liberal' ministers did not do justice to simple religious feeling; to me their preaching seemed to relate too much to out- ward things, not enough to the inward pious life; their prayers felt cold." Writing of Massa- chusetts, Emerson said, "From 1790 to 1820, there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the State." 161. "From 1830 to 1840," testified Mrs. Caroline Dall, "was a period of mental activity. It produced some confusion when Leibnitz, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Herder, Schleierma- cher, and Jean Paul came sailing at once into Boston harbor and discharged their freight. The wharves were littered with the spoils of a century. Idealism, which had originated with Anne Hutchinson, was now imported in foreign packages from France and Germany." — Tran- scendentalism in New England (Boston, 1897), pp. 12-13. 162. Transcendentalism was essentially a young people's movement. In 1836, the leading adherents averaged thirty years of age. Their teachings were most eagerly caught up by the young. See Lowell's essay on Emerson as well as Emerson's observation, "The old people suspect and dislike me, the young love me." — Journals, V, 270-71. 163. Elizabeth P. Peabody, Reminiscences of the Rev. William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1880), p. 56. 164. W. H. Channing, The Life of William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1899), p. 276; also Works (new and complete ed., Boston, 1903), pp. 272-73. 165. W. H. Channing, Life, pp. 39, 54 - 57> 87-88; Peabody, Reminiscences, pp. 367-68. He retained, even in his late years, a vivid rec- ollection of how, during his undergraduate days at Harvard, after reading Hutcheson, there came to him an intense intuitive experience which marked a "new spiritual birth." Reali- zations of the dignity of human nature, of the beauty of disinterested love, of man's position 538 Notes to Pages 83-8G in an order of eternal progression penetrated his soul and dominated his thinking. His reading of Ferguson on Civil Liberty led him to apply to society what Hutcheson had taught regarding the tendency of the human soul to- ward moral perfection, an application that led to Channing's conception of social progress. — Life, 32-33; Goddard, op. cit., p. 46. 166. Life, p. 34; Reminiscences, pp. 367-68. Later students seem to find not necessarily that Kant depended upon Price but that there does exist a striking parallelism in general tendency of moral thought. For able but contrasting views, see James Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory (2 vols., Oxford, 1885), II, 439-47, and Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols., London, 1876), II, 12-15. Both find in Price anticipations of Kant: Stephen, of Kant's Categorical Impera- tive, and Martineau, of his distinction between the pure and practical reason. 167. Reminiscences, pp. 9, 70, 72, 75-77, 80-81, 127, 134, 143, 158, 188, 364, 441; Life, pp. 275-76, 341; Works, pp. 161-62. 168. This bore fruit, in 1830, in the form of Miss Peabody's publication of her translation of Self-Education ; or, the Means and A rt of Moral Progress (reprinted 1832 and again in 1833) . When De Gerando wrote to Miss Peabody requesting information on religious views in America, Channing himself responded on June 29, 1 83 1. In view of these circumstances it seems not unlikely that De Gerando's Histoire com- paree des systemes de philosophic (Paris, 1804), which the North American Review reviewed enthusiastically in 1824 (XVIII, 234-66), should have been known to him. This is the work on which Emerson fell with so much relish in 1830. The contribution of De Gerando's to the rise of new ideas in New England has been discussed by Howard M. Jones in America and French Culture, 1750-1848 (Chapel Hill, 1927), pp. 463-64. 169. Reminiscences, p, 351. Cousin's Intro- duction was translated by Henning Gottfried Linberg (Boston, 1832). 170. Tr. by Caleb S. Henry (Hartford, 1834) as Elements of Psychology: Included in a Critical Examination of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. 171. His nephew-biographer tells us: "In Kant's doctrine of the Reason he found con- firmation of the views which, in early years received from Price, had quickened him to ever deeper reverence of the essential powers of man. To Schelling's sublime intimations of the Divine Life everywhere manifested through nature and humanity, his heart, devoutly conscious of the universal agency of God, gladly responded. But above all did the heroic stoicism of Fichte charm him by its full assertion of the grandeur of the human will." — Life, p. 275. 172. Reminiscences, p. 350. 173. Reminiscences, pp. 213, 250; see also Geo. \Y. Spindler, Karl Follen : A Biographical Sketch (Chicago, 1917), pp. 107-8. 174. Follen's diary, kept from November 5, 1827, to February 26, 1828, although only frag- mentarily reproduced in the biography his wid- ow prepared indicates that he spent on the average at least one day a week with Channing in private conversation. Among the subjects discussed, the following are representative: the personality of God, the nature of Christ, im- mortality, free agency, moral and religious education, Christianity as a particular form of religion, religious instruction of children, the value of imaginative literature and of fiction in general, Schiller's idea of co-operation of kin- dred minds for the discovery of truth, German art and literature, the moral teaching of Fichte, the theological contributions of De Wette and Schleiermacher, and the philosophies of Kant, Fries, and Schelling (Works, I, 180-246 passim; Spindler, op. cit., pp. 106-7, 167-68). Follen's diary records evenings when he read to Chan- ning from such works as Foster's Rise and Pro- gress of Religion, Tennemann's History of Phi- losophy, and De Gerando's discussion of Kan- tian idealism. To Miss Peabody, Channing avowed his opinion of Follen as his su- perior in learning and Christian character (Reminiscences, p. 301). Doubtless Follen was the determining factor in changing Channing's view of German literature. In 1823, laboring under the impression that German thought was subversive to true Christianity, he cautioned William Emerson against studying in Ger- many (Frothingham, Life of George Ripley, pp. 20 ff.) ; five years later, prompted by Follen, he himself undertook to learn German in order to gain a firsthand knowledge of German thought (Spindler, op. cit., p. 158). The evidence that he succeeded in learning German is inconclusive. Generally, it seems, he contented himself with French and British restatements of German philosophy or Follen's more authoritative ex- planations. 175. William Ellery Channing (Boston & N.Y., 1903), p. 383. AVENUES OF TRANSMISSION 176. Rene Wellek, Immanuel Kant in Eng- land (Princeton, 1931), p. 5. 177. Other deterrents included British theo- logical orthodoxy and prejudice. Consider, for example, the translation of Tennemann's Notes to Pages 86-87 539 Grundriss by the Rev. Arthur Johnson, who, in order to appease his own religious conscience, permitted himself some rather unusual liberties as a translator. He not only substituted terms and otherwise modified Tennemann's text but confessed that he "judged it better to omit al- together a few passages which appeared to militate against Revealed Religion rather than alter or soften them." He solemnly warned the reader against Kant, and as for Fichte and Schelling, "the most fanatical dreams of the wildest religious enthusiasts were never more repugnant to common sense than . . . the Ab- solute Identity of Schelling or the Ego and Non- Ego of Fichte" (first ed., 1832, Preface, p. xi). For similar wholesale condemnations in the more academic English philosophical books, see J. D. Morrell, Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the Nine- teenth Century (4 vols., London, 1846), II, 156- 58, 159; Robert Blakey, History of the Philo- sophy of Mind (4 vols., London, 1850), IV, 158; and George H. Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy (Library ed., London, 1857), p. 725. 178. A General View of Professor Kant's Principles Concerning Man, the World, and the Deity, Submitted to the Consideration of the Learned. By F. A. Nitsch, Late Lecturer on the Latin Language and Mathematics in the Royal Frederician College at Konigsberg, and Pupil of Professor Kant (London, 1796), 234 pp. 179. Elements of Critical Philosophy : Con- taining a Concise Account of its Origin and Ten- dency ; a View of All the Works Published by its Founder, Professor Immanuel Kant, and a Glos- sary of Terms and Phrases . . . (London, 1798), 183 pp. This book is little more than a chrono- logical listing, with tables of contents or chap- ter headings, of thirty of Kant's principal works, including the two Critiques, and of four- teen of his minor works, together with a trans- lation of Joh. Schultze's Synopsis of the Critical Philosophy . 180. This is really a translation of Ignatz Sigismund Beck's Erlduternder Auszug aus den kritischen Schriften des Herrn Professor Kant auf Anrathen desselben (Riga, 1793), published in London, but actually printed in Altenburg, 1798, under the title of Principles of Critical Philosophy , Selected from the Works of Em- manuel Kant by I. S. Beck. Translated by an Auditor of the Latter. 181. Ascribed by George M. Duncan to A. F. M. Willich, in "English Translations of Kant's Writings," Kantstudien, II (1898), 253-58. 182. For the chief bibliographical facts re- garding early English renditions of Kant, see Morgan, op. cit., Nos. 4787-89, 4801, 4810-n, 4819-20, 4838, 4850a, 4851. 183. See Wellek, op. cit., pp. 28-38; also John H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London & N.Y., 1930), pp. 422-36. Thos. Brown's review, in 1803, of Charles Villers' Philosophie de Kant ou Principles Fondamen- taux de la Philosophie Transcendenlale (2 vols., Metz, 1801) is of some significance (1) because of Brown's importance, for he later became Dugald Stewart's successor at the University of Edinburgh, (2) because Villers' book was the chief source of popular information on Kant in French until it was superseded by Madame de Stael's, and (3) because the review appeared in a very conspicuous place, the first number of the Edinburgh Review (Jan., 1803), pp. 253-80. The essay was known to both Wm. Drummond and Dugald Stewart. See Stewart's Complete Works (ed. by Wm. Hamilton, 11 vols., Edin- burgh, 1 854-1 860), V, 117. 184. A brief treatment of the Kantian time- space problem in his Philosophical Essays (1810) may be disregarded. See Collected Works, pp. 420-22. 185. Wellek, op. cit., pp. 40-41, 273. 186. In 1 81 7 Wirgman sent Stewart an ar- ticle on metaphysics which contained a good account of Kant's main points. This Stewart acknowledged, but added that there was "little probability" that he would change his views at the same time that he offered to sub- scribe forWirgman's projected (but never com- pleted) translation of Kant's first Critique. Wirgman's efforts to introduce Kant into Eng- land were continued throughout his lifetime, from 1795 to 1838. Notwithstanding Coleridge's snap judgment of him as knowing "nothing about Kant — a mere Formalist — a Buchstab- ler," Wirgman was far from being the worst expounder of Kantism in England. For his relations with Coleridge, H. C. Robinson, Ma- dame de Stael, and De Morgan, see Wellek, op. cit., pp. 40, 211-42, and Fr. Ueberweg, Hist, of Philosophy from Thales to the Present Time, tr. by Geo. S. Morris (2 vols., N.Y., 1874), II, 434- 187. Collected Works, V, n 7-18. 188. Chiefly (1) G. G. Johann Buhle, Histoire de la Philosophie moderne (9 vols., Paris, 181 7), a translation of the original German edition (8 vols, in 9, Gottingen, 1 796-1 804) ; (2) Willich, (3) Nitsch, (4) Madame de Stael, and (5) J. M. De Gerando, Histoire comparee des systemes de philosophie (2 vols., Paris, 1804). 189. The misapprehension involved here is doubtless owing to Stewart's reliance on Nitsch, whose refinements upon reason, understanding, and sensibility, present these faculties under very novel colors. See Nitsch, op. cit., p. 40. 190. Without discerning the principles on 540 Notes to Pases 87-88 which Kant deduced the categories, but iden- tifying them with Cudworth's conglomeration of innate ideas, he quotes verbatim, in a foot- note in the Appendix, the Kantian categories from Willich. Depreciatingly he adds: "These tables speak for themselves without further comment." And with this nourish Stewart is off to matters of greater moment — matters which he came little nearer comprehending — namely, Kant's practical reason, free will, mo- rality in general, and religion. Kant is gener- ously excused of the intent "to establish a sys- tem of skepticism" ; his inquiries simply got out of hand. Hence the "Practical Reason is a wing which Kant prudently added to his edifice, from a sense of the inadequacy of the original design, to answer the intended purpose." Un- fortunately "the whole of Kant's moral super- structure will be found to rest ultimately on no better basis than the metaphysical conundrum, that the human mind (considered as a noume- non and not as a phenomenon) neither exists in space nor in time." 191. Stewart, General View, pp. 245-46; com- pare De Gerando, Histoire comparee, II, 244 ff. 192. He quotes Madame de Stael's account of Fichte's announcement that "in his next lec- ture he 'was going to create God,' . . . mean- ing that he intended to show how the idea of God arose and unfolded itself in the mind of man." — De I'Allemagne (London, 1813), III, 107. Most of the two pages are devoted to De Gerando's exposition of Fichte's equation, ego = ego, and its implications, of the "un- paralleled absurdity" of which Stewart says simply, "I cannot make anything." Compare Stewart, op. cit., pp. 249-50, and De Gerando, op. cit., II, 314. Then he proceeds to Schelling, who gets a bare page of commentary, quoted, first, from M. G. Scheringhauser's article in the London Monthly Magazine for October, 1804, to the effect that Schelling's mystical trans- cendentalism has led a number of his Prot- estant disciples to embrace Catholicism, "not as a true religion, but as the most poetical" (XVII, 207; cf. General View, p. 251), and second, from De Gerando, who regards the "system of Schelling but an extension of that of Fichte, connecting with it a sort of Spinozism grafted on Idealism." Following a mere men- tion of Jacobi, Meiners, Herder, and Rein- hold, whose works lay unread in Stewart's study, the venerable Professor of Moral Philos- ophy of Edinburgh passed on to a sixty-four- page eulogy of his beloved Scottish philosophy of common sense, firmly convinced that the latter had nothing to fear from the thoroughly discredited critical philosophy of Germany. 193. Journals (10 vols., Boston, 1909-1914), I, 289-90. A few years later James Marsh of Vermont appraised Stewart more critically and correctly as one of the chief deterring influences in America to a reception of Kantian idealism. See Jos. Torrey, Remains of James Marsh . . . with a Memoir (Boston, 1843), p. 137 (Mar. 23, 1829). 194. See his review of Cousin's Cours de Philosophic in the Edinburgh Rev., L, xlix (Oct., 1829), 194-221, reprinted in Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education, and Uni- versity Reform (London, 1852), esp. pp. 24-25. Sir James Mackintosh's earlier study of Ger- man in 1 804-1 805 with the view to read Kant had born little fruit. See Memoirs of Sir James Mackintosh (Boston, 1853), I, 260; Wellek, op. cit., pp. 49-50- 195. See Hamilton's review of Johnson's translation of Tennemann's Grundriss (Lon- don, 1832) in the Edinburgh Rev., LVI, cxi (Oct., 1832), 160-77; repr. in Discussions, pp. 98-116. 196. Discussions (Edinburgh & London, 1866), p. 11. The italics are Hamilton's. 197. Ibid., p. 12. The force of the word con- stitutive, if Emerson, for instance, read it in this context, was doubtless lost to him. As we shall have occasion to observe later, Emerson seems never to have distinguished clearly between the constitutive and the purely regulative aspects of the reason. 198. Himself far from a professing Kantian, yet confessing "sincerest admiration" for Cou- sin's "character and accomplishments," while dissenting from "the most prominent principle of his philosophy" (ibid. p. 7) and objecting to Cousin's easy popularization of critical tran- scendentalism, Hamilton was, nevertheless, the best commentator on German thought in Brit- ain up to his time and the first "authority" on German philosophy available to Emerson in America before he turned to a more earnest study of Coleridge. Hamilton outlines four fundamental posi- tions with respect to the Absolute (Uncon- ditioned): "(1) The Unconditioned as uncognis- able and inconceivable; its notion being only negative of the Conditioned, which last can alone be positively known or conceived. (2) It is not the object of knowledge; but its notion, as a regulative principle of the mind itself, is more than a mere negation of the Conditioned. (3) It is cognisable, but not conceivable; it can be known by a sinking back into identity with the Infinito-Absolute, but it is incomprehensible by consciousness and reflection, which are only of the relative and the different. (4) It is cognis- able and conceivable by consciousness and re- flection, under relation, difference, and plural- Notes to Pa 172-204; and an essay on "Schleier- macher as a Theologian," ibid., XX (Mar., 1836), 1-46. 407. For Herder's poetry, see E. Z. Davis Translations of German Poetry in Amer. Mags., Notes to Pages 110-11 559 1741-1810 (Phila., 1905), and M. D. Learned, "Herder in America," Ger.-Amer. Annals, VI, ix (Sept. 1904), 536-628. 408. V, 258, 373-75- 409. VIII, 233-37, 4 J 7- 2 9; IX, 1— II, 81-88, 171-76, 241-54. 410. I, 103. 411. XX, 138-48. 412. Ill (1826), 307. 413. IV, 123-26. 414. Two vols., Burlington, Vt., 1833. 415. XVIII (May, 1835), 167-221. Osten- sibly a review of Marsh's translation of Vom Geist der ebraischen Poesie, but really an extend- ed biographical sketch drawn from Erinnerun- gen aus dem Leben von Herder, by Marie Caro- line Herder (Stuttgart, 1830), Herders Leben by Carl L. Ring (Karlsruhe, 1832), and Herders sammtliche Werke (ed.by Johann G. Miiller, 18 vols., Stuttgart, 1827-1830). Thankful that German literature in good translations is fast becoming known in America, Ripley regrets that he "cannot make so favorable a report of the prospects of German theology," Americans being still ignorant of the "masterly intellects" of Germany in theological matters (p. 167). Mindful that German theology will not "settle any theological controversies now pending," he yet earnestly recommends "a sober examina- tion of . . . the massive theological learning of Germany" to all religious-minded Americans (p. 168). Marsh's translation is praised as supplying the right kind of information. Un- fortunately his rendition has killed much of the vivacity of Herder's original text (pp. 169-70). Three pages are devoted to discrepancies between the German and English versions (pp. 170-74). The remainder, and by far the longer portion, of the essay is devoted to Her- der's life (pp. 170-211) and character (pp. 211-21). Ripley's essay was logically completed a year later by his article in the same journal (XIX, 172-204) on "Herder's Theological Opinions and Services," which is more properly a review of his Werke. See also XX (1836), 1-46. 416. The North American Review for April, 1836 (XLII, 299-334), discussed at some length Herder's poetry in a longer discourse on Ger- man popular poetry {ibid., pp. 265-339). In 1839 the Baltimore Quarterly Review (II, 77) brought out a translation of Herder's legendary ballad, "Die Geschwister," and the Southern Literary Messenger printed a version of "Das Grab" (V, 149). In his "Letter to a Theological Student," in the Dial for 1840 (I, 187), Ripley recommended Herder's Letters to all and sun- dry. 417. For other works of Herder's available in translation, see Morgan, and for later periodical concern with Herder, see the bibliographies by Goodnight and Haertel. Three essays are par- ticularly noteworthy: (1) Samuel Osgood's "Modern Ecclesiastical History," Christ. Exam., XLVIII (May, 1850), 423-26; (2) H. J. Wer- ner's review of Von und an Herder, ibid., LXXII (July, 1862), 137-41; and (3) Karl Hil- debrandt's essay of 124 pages in the North American Review for July and October, 1872, and April, 1873. 418. Not to be overlooked, however, is the fact that De Wette had two personal disciples in America as early as 1824: first, his stepson. Dr. Carl Beck, who taught Latin at Harvard from 1832 to 1850, and second, Dr. Carl Follen, teacher of German at Harvard from 1825 to 1835. De Wette and Follen had jointly edited the literary journal at the University of Basel in 1821. See W. E. Channing, Death of Follen (Boston, 1840), p. 28. 419. Translated by J. F. Clarke (2 vols., Boston, 1841; repr., 1856). It had already run serially in the Western Messenger (Louisville), of which Clarke was editor, during 1 836-1 837. 420. Translated by Samuel Osgood (2 vols., Boston, 1842; repr., 1856); reviewed by C. F. Brooks in the Christian Examiner, XXXIII (Nov., 1842), 252-57. 421. VI, 537-57. 422. XXXI, 348-73- 423. Sears knows "no theologian and biblical critic in whose works there is so much to ad- mire, and at the same time so much to censure, as in those of De Wette" (p. 537). It might be observed here that Sears, the editor of the Christian Review, only recently returned from a visit to Germany, was usually more uncom- promisingly critical where German theology is concerned. See, for example, his article on "German Literature" in the Christian Review, VI (June, 1841), 269-84 — to the charges of which Moses Stuart felt constrained to reply in the next number (pp. 446-71). Sears goes on to criticize De Wette for adopting in his Theodor the philosophy of Fries and for supposing he found therein proof that "the mind itself is a source of intuitive truth," as "an all-sufficient guide in the criticism of divine revelation." He has nothing but censure for Fries's system which "appears to hold a middle-place between Kant and Schelling, and to unite the two" (pp. 540-41). He criticizes De Wette for setting aside the conclusions of the understanding by the authority of our moral feelings or intuitions without specifying the tests to which the latter are subjected (p. 543) . With the position held by De Wette in regard to the canonical authority of the Scriptures (pp. 544-51) and his view of 560 Notes to Page 111 faith (pp. 551-56) Sears is in substantial agreement. Cyrus A. Bartol, one of the younger Tran- scendentalists, agrees with De Wette's views of justification by faith, which, he adds, are "not new to theologians among ourselves" (p. 349), but he differs radically on the relation found in De Wette "of Naturalism and Spiritualism in the true interpretation of the Christian Birth" (p. 350), and on the question, "Is Christianity a development of the natural powers of the human mind, or a spiritual interposition of God ?" (p. 350). This leads to a critique of De Wette's treatment of miracles (pp. 351-58), the character of Christ (pp. 358-62), the faults of a too-exclusive supernaturalism (pp. 363-70) , and the faults to a too exclusive rationalism as total- ly unfit for the mass of mankind (pp. 371-73). Among other noteworthy articles are two by Samuel Osgood in the Christ. Exam: (1) "De Wette's Views of Religion and Theology," XXIV (May, 1838), 137-71, and XXV (Sept., 1838), 1-25, and (2) "De Wette and Schleier- macher's Ethics," XXIX (Nov., 1840), 153-74, and XXX (May, 1841), 145-73; also Osgood's rev. of De Wette's Manual on the New Testa- ment, ibid., XXXIV (Mar., 1844), 284-86; and an article on Dr. Martin Luthers Briefe. By De Wette, repr. from the Edinburgh Rev., in Littell's Living Age (Boston), VI (1845), 325-39. 424. Two vols., Boston, 1843; 2nd ed., 1850; 3rd ed., 1858. On the vogue of Parker's transla- tion, see Wm. F. Warren's "Theodore Parker: The Good and Evil in His Opinions and In- fluence," in Parkerism (N.Y., i860). 425. Tr. from the 5th, improved and enl. German ed., Boston, 1858; rev. by G. R. Noyes in Christ. Exam., LXV (July, 1858), 140-46. 426. However, the victory was not won without a struggle. For example, the Christian Examiner alone, during the twenty years which elapsed between 1838, when it first noticed De Wette, and 1859, when it reviewed the third edition of Parker's Canonical Scriptures devoted ten articles, comprising 180 pages, to the sub- ject, and other religious periodicals showed a similar interest. 427. Notably his Critical Essay on the Gospel of St. Luke . . . tr. by C. Thirlwall (London, 1 821); Schleiermacher's Introduction to the Dialogues of Plato, tr. by Wm. Dobson (Cam- bridge, Engl., 1836); and Brief Outline of the Study of Theology ... tr. by Wm. Ferrier (Edinburgh, 1850). 428. O. B. Frothingham, George Ripley (Bos- ton, 1883), p. 229. 429. Ripley translated the fifth of Schleier- macher's Reden Uber die Religion, today con- veniently turned to in The German Classics, ed. by Kuno Francke and W. G. Howard (20 vols., N.Y., 1913-1915), V, 19-30- 430. While editorial concern was neither spirited nor sustained, it continued intermit- tently from 1938, when Parker first introduced Schleiermacher through the columns of the Christian Examiner, until November 22, 1868, when a Schleiermacher Centennial was held by the united Unitarian congregations of Now York City. See Samuel Osgood's article on the centennial, Christ. Exam., LXXXVI (Mar., 1869), 171-91. In the meantime, the Examiner had, on three other occasions, devoted space to Schleiermacher's theology: in May, 1850, when Samuel Osgood had discussed him (XLVIII, 427-32) in relation to "Modern Ecclesiastical History"; in H. Davis' "Schleiermacher," LIII (July, 1852), 66-93; an d in Miss L. P. Hale's "Life of Schleiermacher," LXXII (Jan., 1862), 109-23. All in all, the Examiner published five articles, totaling 117 pages, on Schleiermacher — an indication that he is of more than passing interest in any study of American theology that concerns itself with origins and influences. 431. For example, as early as 1834, Hedge read to Emerson what the latter termed "fine things out of Schleiermacher" {Journals, III, 393, Dec. 14, 1834); and in September, 1838, Emerson linked the writings of Schleiermacher with those of Goethe as desirable to read (ibid., V, 37). See also the discussions below of Ripley, Parker, and Clarke. 432. Princeton Rev., IX, 198-215. In Straus's book, says the reviewer, "infidel theology appears to have reached its consummation" (p. 108). The Southern Rose (Charleston) took notice of it in 1839 (VII, 285) by reprinting a critical estimate of it from the London Foreign Quarterly Review. 433. XXVIII (July, 1840), 273-316. 434. Tr. by E. Littre (2 vols., Paris, 1838- 1840). 435. Tr. by George Eliot from the 4th Ger- man ed., London, 1846. For other British eds., see Morgan. 436. Following an honestly executed and detailed summary, chapter by chapter, of Das Leben Jesu (pp. 280-306), Parker devoted ten pages (pp. 307-16) to pointing out the "false principles, extreme conclusions, and extrav- agances" in Strauss's book, but concluded in a manner which, although he himself was in- capable of accepting the conclusions of Strauss, nevertheless indicates how effectively liber- alism had proceeded by 1840 to breakdown the entrenched dogmatism of fifteen or twenty years before. In 1820 or even 1825 none but the veriest heretic would have admitted, as Parker did, on the mere testimony of Dr. Ullmann, that Notes to Page 112 561 Strauss is no atheist but "a religious man." Nor is it likely that at that time all Boston harbored a theologian who would have dared write and subscribe his name, as Parker did, to the passage in which he speaks of Strauss as "an individual raised by God" to discover "a great truth, which marks an epoch, and by its seminal character marks the coming ages .... Before mankind could pass over the great chasm between the frozen realm of stiff super- naturalism, and lifeless rationalism, on the one side, and the fair domain oifree religious thought, where the only essential creed is the Christian motto, 'Be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect,' and the only essential form of Religion is love to your neighbor as to yourself, and to God with the whole heart, mind, and soul, on the other — some one must plunge in, devoting himself unconsciously, or even against his will, for the welfare of the race. This hard lot Strauss has chosen for himself, and done what many we fear wished, but none dared to do. His book, therefore, must needs be negative, destructive, and unsatisfactory. It pleases no one. It is colder than ice . . . the most melancholy book we ever read .... But it only marks a period of transition" — a necessary phase presaging great advances to be made on the basis of it. For Strauss is not representative of the German theologians or the German people; they will transcend him (pp. 314-15). 437. See, e.g., the article by G. E. Ellis on Strauss in the Christ. Exam, for Nov., 1846, in which he assumes that every reader of the Examiner is familiar with the doctrines of Strauss — so much so, in fact, that many people in America have ceased to think of them as originating in Germany but regard them rather as of American origin (XL, 314-54, esp. 313-14). Indicative of the interest in Strauss is the fact that between January, 1839, and November, 1847, the Christian Examiner devoted five articles, totaling 123 pages, to Das Leben Jesu. Aside from those by Parker and Ellis (already mentioned), these are by Henry Ware, Jr., (Jan., 1839), Stephen G. Bulfinch (Sept., 1845), and Geo. R. Noyes (Nov., 1847). Two articles on Strauss appeared later, one by O. B. Frothingham (Mar., 1865), who, in reviewing the new French translation by A. Nefftzer and C. Dollfus (2 vols., Paris, 1864), finds it an "interesting and valuable book," though it "lacks the warmth the glow, the human interest, that carries us along in the brilliant romance which Renan calls the life of Jesus" (p. 287), published orig- inally in 1863 and first translated into English by C. E. Wilbour (N.Y., 1864). 438. For example, the influence of Strauss on the theology of Parker, especially in what he called his "Absolute Religion," is not hard to discern in such works of his as "Some Account of My Ministry" and "Experiences as a Min- ister." A thorough examination of the precise extent to which Parker followed the German critics is in order. 439. Of course, there were notable excep- tions. For instance, Andrews Norton, though himself a student of German, would not allow his son to study the language at Harvard for fear that it would corrupt his Unitarianism. 440. We have already observed how handily men like Ripley, Norton, Sears, W. H. Chan- ning, Bartol, and Parker could refer to German theological scholarship. The list, as will appear, can be widely extended. A case in point is Stephen G. Bulfinch, who, in the course of his review, speaks with some degree of discrimi- nation of Niebuhr, Eichhorn, Bauer, Gabler, Paulus, Heyne, Neander, De Wette, Ullmann, Tholuck, Herder, Schleiermacher, Kant, Schel- ling, Jacobi, Eschenmayer, Menzel, and Weisse. See also J. H. Allen's "Recent German Theol- ogy," Christ. Exam., LXIII (Nov., 1857), 431-40, in the course of which he refers to fifty theologians. While Emerson left the church with a yawn in 1832, he continued for some years to read rather widely in the theological literature of the time. He does not mention Strauss's Life of Jesus before Jan. 15, 1848 {Journals, VII, 396), but his words imply a prior familiarity with the book, as well as with Tholuck's reply, and a full understanding of the issues involved. 441. After graduating second in the class of 1797 at Yale, Murdock (1776-1856) held a pastorate in Princeton, Mass., 1802-1815; became professor of learned languages at the University of Vermont, 1815-1818; declined a professorship of languages at Dartmouth in 1818; became the Brown Professor of Sacred Rhetoric and Ecclesastical History in the seminary at Andover, 1819-1828, where he was dismissed because of his unwillingness to see ecclesiastical history crowded out of the curric- ulum in favor of sacred rhetoric. He settled in New Haven in 1829, and devoted the rest of his life to Christian scholarship. 442. For a statement of his aims, see the Preface. As to his sources, he says: "The principal authorities consulted in the twelve first chapters of the work are W. G. Tenne- mann's Grundriss der Geschichte der Philo- sophic, ed. 1829: T. A. Rixner's Handbuch der Gesch. der Philos. ed. 1822: W. T. Krug's Encyclopadie. ed. 1824. In the remaining chapters the authorities are generally stated in the work. While writing the four chapters on the Kantean Philosophy, the author had not 562 Notes to Pages 113-15 the Critik der reinen Vernunft before him, but relied upon very copious extracts which he made from that work about eight years ago. Since obtaining the Critik, he has not had the leisure for a thorough verification; but he hopes his statements will be found to be substantially correct." 443. Chapter V treats the following topics: (1) Kant as the critic of sensation, (2) his con- ceptions of time and space, (3) Kant's funda- mental problems, (4) the distinction between knowledge a priori and a posteriori, (5) analyt- ical and synthetical judgments, and (6) Kant's definitions of Sensation, Understanding, and Reason (pp. 44-54). The next chapter analyzes the sphere and the materials of the Under- standing and presents in some detail the cate- gories (pp. 65-67). In Chapter VIII (pp. 68-78), which is devoted to Kantian Reason, specula- tive or theoretical Reason as imparting rational knowledge is distinguished from practical or moral reason as enjoining upon us rational con- duct. This is followed by an exposition of the transcendental ideas of pure Reason and a discussion of the difference between transcen- dental and natural theology. The eighth chap- ter (pp. 79-92) deals with the results to which the critical philosophy leads, with emphasis upon the disciplines of pure Reason in its dog- matic, its polemic, and its hypothetical uses, and upon the canon of pure Reason as it centers upon the problems of the freedom of will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God, as well as questions involving the effects of this philosophy upon opinion, knowledge, and faith. This chapter ends with Murdock's restatement of his purpose, which, be it added, he accomplished rather more successfully in fifty pages than one would expect — namely, to present Kant "fairly and intelligibly'' so that the reader "might form some correct estimate of the merits and demerits of this coryphaeus of modern German philosophers" (p. 92). Ear- lier in the volume (p. 47) he says that he is not acquainted at first hand with Kant's "Critic of Practical Judgment, his Critic of the Judging Faculty, his Prolegomena of Every Future System of Metaphysics ... a Foundation for the Metaphysics of Morals, &c. &c." 444. Tr. by Francis Hayward, London, 1838; 2nd ed., 1848; tr. by J. M. D. Meikeljohn, Lon- don, 1855. 445. Elisa Lee Follen, Life of Charles Follen, I. 145. J49. 617. 446. Life and Letters of George Ticknor, I, 11-12. In his Inaugural Address of 1831, Dr. Follen put back fifty years the date when no German grammar or dictionary was to be found in Boston. "Now," he added, "there are a number of persons who speak, and a large number who read and enter into the sense and spirit of German." — Works, I, 132. 447. Ibid., I, 140. 448. A Literary History of America (Xew York, 1900), p. 295. See also the later testimony of Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams (Boston & N.Y., 1918), Chs. IV and V. EARLY EXPONENTS IN NEW ENGLAND 449. F. L. Jahn, A Treatise on Gymnastics, tr. by Carl Beck (Northampton, Mass., 1828). Lieber reviewed the book in the American Quarterly Review, III (Mar., 1828), 126-50. 450. For further educational services, see George W. Spindler, Karl Follen : A Biographical Study (Chicago, 191 7), pp. 2-3. 451. Some information concerning Beck's activity in public affairs can be gathered from Wm. Newell's Christian Citizen: A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Charles Beck. Deliv- ered March 25, 1866, before the First Parish Church in Cambridge (Cambridge, 1866); An- drew P. Peabody's Harvard Reminiscences (Bos- ton, 1888) ; and John L. Chamberlain's Harvard University (Boston, 1900). A new study of Beck is in order, however. 452. The more important of these are his German Reader for Beginners (1826) and his Practical Grammar of the German Language (1828), which were used consistently at Har- vard and elsewhere as the sine qua non of in- struction in German well into the sixties. From these simple books many of the leaders of American thought and affairs derived their first knowledge of German arts and sciences. It is doubtful that any single one of the many German readers and grammers that have since appeared can boast similarly significant results. The Grammar reached its twenty-first recorded printing in 1859. Among significant data for these two volumes are the following: German Grammar for Beginners: Deutsches Lesebuch fur Anf anger, Cambridge, 1826. vii + 255 pp. ; 2nd ed., 1831. xix + 256 pp. ; 3rd ed., 1836. 232 pp.; repr., 1839. 220 pp.; 10th ed., 1845. 222 pp. ; new ed., with additions by G. A. Schmitt, Boston & Cambridge, 1858. xv 4- 326 pp.; repr., 1867. A Practical Grammar of the German Language, Boston, 1828. xix + 282 pp. The Preface care- fully explains the author's utilization of and improvement upon Georg Heinrich Noehden's Elements of German Grammar (London, 1800; 5th ed., 1827) and John Rowbotham's Practical German Grammer (London, 1824) and his em- ployment of Du Ponceau's philological theories as published in Transactions of the American Notes to Page 115 563 Philosophical Society (I, xvii [1818], 228-64), together with principles derived from Adelung's and the Grimm brothers' grammars and the German prosody of Voss and Schlegel. The second edition appeared in Cambridge in 1831; 3rd ed., Boston, 1834; repr. 1835, 1837; 6th ed., Boston, 1838; repr., 1839; stereotyped ed., Boston, 1839; repr., 1841, 1844; 10th ed., 1845; nth ed., 1845; 14th ed., 1849; 21st ed., 1859. Follen's was the first German grammar to come into general use in American schools. Although John James Bachmair's Complete German Grammar, originally printed in London, had been republished in Philadelphia, by H. Miller, as early as 1772 and reprinted in Phila , delphia in 1788, it never was widely used in college classes. Another of Follen's books designed for use in teaching was his Luther's German Version of the Gospel of John, with an Interlinear Translation, for the Use of Students (Boston, 1835, 160 pp.). It seems probable, also, in view of Follen's having promised something of the sort, that he was responsible for the preparation of German Dramas, from Schiller and Goethe, for the Use of Persons Learning the German Language (Boston & Cambridge, 1831); repr. by Charles Folsom, the University printer, in 1833. The "Advertise- ment" states that the text is adapted to follow Follen's Lesebuch and is designed for students at Harvard. The book contains Maria Stuart (pp. 1-185) an d Tasso and Egmont (pp. 186— 422). 453. Many of his sermons are printed in Volume II of Follen's Works. 454. L. L. Mackall, writing in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine (XI, 492) for March, 1903, reported finding in a Boston bookstore two paper-covered German books printed in 1829, on the outside of each of which was pasted a printed list of rules and bylaws, and on one of them, following the heading, "German Society, 1S28," the following names: C. Follen, S. A. Eliot, G. Ticknor, S. H. Perkins, Wm. T. An- drews, F. C. Gray, J. Pickering, N. L. Bowditch, E. Wiggles worth, F. Lieber, Mr. Miesegalo, T. Searle, J. M. Robinson. Follen's leading role in this effort to foster and spread a knowledge of German culture is hardly to be doubted. 455. In her Reminiscences, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody related how, during the autumn of 1827, a series of informal meetings was begun — some meetings at Dr. Channing's and some at the home of Jonathan Phillips — for discussing the general subject of the education of children. Among those in attendance were the Channings, Phillips, Dr. Follen, the Peabody sisters, and occasionally G. F. Thayer and William Russell, editor of the Journal of Education. "The con- versation soon ranged over every department of education, inquiring into the comparative study of languages, ancient and modern, and into science, history, fiction, and poetry as a means to education." — Reminiscences, pp. 213, 250. See also G. W. Spindler, Karl Follen: A Biographical Study (Chicago, 1917), pp. 107—8; and Sprague's Annals, VIII, 644. Miss Peabody adds that among minds as harmoniously disciplined yet as utterly different as Chan- ning's, Follen's, and Phillips', these discussions became very rich, and that Follen earnestly espoused Froebel's principles by maintaining that the child should be handled not with reference to the future, but to his present per- fection. — Reminiscences, p. 256. She goes on to recount details of Follen's principles, as enun- ciated by Pestalozzi and Froebel, so that when she heard later about the New Education (in which she herself came to take a leading part) she found nothing essentially different from what Follen had advocated half a century earlier. — Ibid., p. 257. Follen was probably the first to introduce Froebel's ideas in the United States, although Froebel's writings and ideas did not gain wide- spread currency before the mid-nineteenth cen- tury, when the kindergarten movement got under way. However, Pestalozzi's works were issued from American presses much earlier : (1) Pestalozzi's Leonard and Gertrude. A Popular Story, Written Originally in Germany, Trans- lated into French and now Attempted in English, with the Hope of its being Useful to all Classes of Society (Phila., 1801, 276 pp.); (2) Solyman Brown's Comprehensive Views of the Systems of Pestalozzi and Lancaster . . . (N.Y., 1825. 34 pp.) ; (3) Letters of Pestalozzi on the Education of Infancy. Addressed to Mothers (Boston, 1830. viii + 517 pp.); (4) numerous British publica- tions; and (5) items enumerated in the section on Alcott. 456. Works, I, 160, 163-64, 167, 172-79, 180-246. 457. Follen declared upon landing in America his intention of becoming an American citizen and set about promptly to master the language. Before the end of the year he was giving public lectures in Boston on civil law in the English language. Particularly significant for informa- tion on Follen's career as a public figure is Kuno Francke's essay in the Papers of the Amer. Hist. Assn., V (1891), 65-81; Dieter Cunz's essay in the A mer.-Ger. Rev., VII, i (Oct., 1940), 25-27, 32; and Spindler's full-length biography. 458. For example, one evening he discussed German art and literature for such an assembled group, and during several evenings he enter- tained another informal audience by reading 564 Notes to Pages 115-16 and explaining Gower's translation of Faust so effectively that they agreed that no one but Shakespeare had written with a power equal to Goethe's. On other occasions he gave descrip- tions of German student life, or discussed the works of such men as Herder, Jean Paul, Schiller, Kant, and Fries. 459. James Marsh of Vermont was one of the first who sought to plant the seeds of German theological and philosophical learning in Amer- ica. Elected to the presidency of the University of Vermont in 1826, he set about immediately to reorganize the university on Coleridgean and Kantian terms. See his Exposition of the System of Instruction Pursued in the University of Ver- mont (Burlington, Vt., 1829; 2nd ed., 1831). In 1829 he edited the first American edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, prefaced by a long "Preliminary Essay," sufficiently acute in its explanation of Kant and Coleridge to be called "the first publication of American tran- scendentalism." In 1833 followed his transla- tion of Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. Mean- while he had sought Follen's assistance in his efforts to fathom German philosophy. Follen replied in a long letter {Remains, pp. 151-53), in which he recommended the Anthropology of Kant, the psychologies of Carus and Fries, Tennemann's history of philosophy, and Schultze's and Tasche's works on logic, the last of which was compiled from notes taken on Kant's lectures. Further, he offered to send books from his own library and invited "a fre- quent exchange of thought" with Marsh "upon subjects of such deep interest to both of us." — Ibid., pp. 152-53. Follen was both stimulating and helpful to Marsh in his work of translating Bellermann and Hegewisch and in projecting his works on psychology and logic. Both of these undertakings remained incomplete at Marsh's untimely death in 1842. Of the former a few chapters are reprinted in the Remains (pp. 239-367). Only notes remain of the system of logic, which was begun at Follen's suggestion, and which was to follow in its general divisions and arrangement the work of Fries. Of several translations of German philosophical works undertaken, none was completed. — Ibid., pp. v-vi. The relations indicated here between Follen and Marsh (and with Henry, with whom Follen projected the establishment of a "philo- sophical journal") suggest that Follen's influ- ence as an authority on German thought made itself felt in various directions. His connection with the Vermont Transcendentalists, as we shall have occasion to observe later, is of pri- mary importance. 460. In 1842, when Follen died, W.E. Chan- ning's parishioners denied Channing the use of his own church for the funeral services of the abolitionist Follen, one of Channing's most inti- mate friends. — Mrs. John T. Sargent (ed.), Sketches and Reminiscences of the Radical Club of Chestnut Street, Boston (Boston, 1880), pp. 37^-73- 461. Of his numerous discourses on German literary subjects, only his lectures on Schiller remain. These were published in 1833 and are reprinted in the Works. 462. For details on his close and important associations with Unitarians of the time, see esp. Spindler, op. cit., pp. 146-72 and below, under Marsh and under Hedge. 463. His formal connection with the Divinity School was terminated in the autumn of 1830, when Dr. John Gorham Palfrey became pro- fessor of ethics. Thereafter Follen devoted his full teaching time to his professorship of Ger- man, although his interest in ethics and philos- ophy generally continued as an absorbing extracurricular activity, and he lost no oppor- tunity to advance the popular knowledge of German philosophy among Americans. See Spindler, op. cit., pp. 123-26. 464. Works, I, 290. 465. Ibid., V, 134. 466. Although there were, as we have seen, several individuals who had made a considera- tion of Kantian philosophy their concern, the popular mind, before 1830, knew little about the critical philosophy beyond what people like President Timothy Dwight and the Rev. Samuel Miller had said about it. "Pope" Dwight, in his "Century Discourses" (1801) at Yale had referred to Kant as a subverter of morals; and Samuel Miller, in his Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803) repeated the charge that the Kantian philosophy served only "to delude, to bewilder, and to shed a baneful influence on the true interests of man" (II, 27). I. W. Riley, in his American Thought (2nd ed., N.Y., 1915, pp. 229-38) places the date for the first sympathetic interpretation of Kant in America in the fifth decade of the last century, and cites as evidence the works of two Reformed Pennsylvania-Germans: Fred- erick A. Rauch's Psychology of 1840 and S. S. Schmucker's Mental Philosophy of 1842. Fol- len's lectures, however, antedate these works by a full decade, as do also the efforts of Marsh and Hedge. 467. Introduction to his Inaugural Discourse, repr. in Works, V, 125-52. 468. See the first lecture on "Moral Philos- ophy." The fourth deals more specifically with Kant's moral philosophy. 469. In the first of his lectures, Follen out- lined his plan, namely, to present "an intellec- Notes to Pa^e 116 565 tual account . . . with historical accuracy" of the systems of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, Spinoza, and Kant and to "give a critical ex- position of their peculiar excellences and de- fects" (Works, III, 14-15). After this survey of the leading ethical systems before Kant, Follen introduces Kant himself in the fourth lecture with a preliminary outline of his general "system of intellectual philosophy" (ibid., p. 79). In his references to Kant's Space, Time, and the Categories as "innate ideas" or "inherent forms," Follen doubtless does violence to the Aesthetic of Kant's first critique, but it does not follow that because the limitations of time in a lecture and the greater limitations of com- prehension among his auditors (whose orien- tation in the critical terminology was nil) forced him to adopt a familiar and popular terminolo- gy, that he therefore misunderstood Kant on these points. It is abundantly evident from subsequent portions of this and other lectures that he had studied the two Critiques closely. It is to be observed, too, that however critical of Kant Follen was in the moral lectures of 1 830-1 83 1 (even imputing to Kant's philosophy the possibility of being put to atheistical uses), in the Inaugural Discourse (ibid., V, 125-52), on September 3, 1831, he attributed to Ger- man philosophy, as "the science of sciences," the great flowering of German literature and the phenomenal progress made by German scientists (ibid., p. 133). He felt duty-bound to deny the accusation that German philosophy tends toward "materialism and skepticism" and a "denial of those spiritual realities which form the foundation of the Christian faith" (ibid., p. 135). Of his projected Psychology too little was written to give any accurate idea of his system. What survives is printed in Works, III, 325-63- 470. Works, III, 83. After presenting, in the first lecture, an outline of the second Critique that covers two and one-half pages in the published works, Follen proceeds to list what he conceives to be the "most important objec- tions," leaving for the next lecture his criticism of the Kantian categories and the conclusion of his remarks on the Kantian system (ibid., pp. 86-92). Disagreeing with the "subjectivism" involved in the Kantian definitions of Time and Space as mere categories of mental forms (ibid., pp. 86-87) an< i demanding a more direct approach such as Fries had made, Follen attacks what he calls the fallacious tendency in Kant to view man in "a double aspect, each excluding the other": (1) "as a pure self-determined intel- ligence," and (2) "as an object of sense" (ibid., pp. 87-88). This dual view of man leads Kant to make a divorce between the rational and the sensible world that forced him to adopt, or at all events to play into the hands of the propo- nents of, an absolute idealism (meaning Fichte and Schelling, for of Hegel he appears to have known little), "which could easily be used as an instrument against itself, and thus again be converted into absolute skepticism, which Kant had set out to refute" (ibid., p. 90). 471. Ibid., p. 90. 472. Ibid., pp. 81-92. 473. In the sixth lecture, Follen goes on to criticize the Kantian categories of the Under- standing (ibid., pp. ill— 13), and then to add a more explicit statement of his more individual objections to Kant's general theory of cognition (pp. 1 14-18). These objections appear in several connections during the course of the following lectures. See, for example, ibid., pp. 117-18. In the remaining ten lectures he refers repeatedly to Kant, who, despite sharp differences, is still Follen's acknowledged master, and the four- teenth lecture concludes with an eloquent ex- pression of the hope that the free German system of philosophy and the enlightened Ger- man university system may be combined with and "perfected by the genius of American freedom" in religion, philosophy, and politics. — Ibid., pp. 294-95. 474. The question of Follen's indebtedness to Schiller is interesting, and, in the case of his ethical convictions, important. Follen's pub- lished utterances, both in his lectures on. Schiller and in the introduction which he wrote for the first American reprint of Carlyle's Life of Schiller (1833), repeatedly profess his admiration for Schiller's worship of freedom. Repeating Goethe's well-known dictum that "Schiller preached the doctrine of freedom," Follen explained that while the v>ord freedom is to be understood in the Kantian sense as synonymous with the moral nature of man, it means in Schiller also the enthusiasm for free- dom which is the living spring of true humanity, and that, as such, it finds one of its most notable expressions in poetry. "Schiller's poetry is distinguished," he says, "by its moral charac- ter. But its morality is not that of a philosopher who insists on an entire separation of the moral principle from all natural desires, nor that of the theologian who maintains that holiness con- sists in denying and crucifying the natural affections. It is a morality that flows from the heart freely and bountifully, receiving and merging in its wide and deep channel all natural desires and affections. It is the morality of nature, the beauty of holiness, the quickening spirit of love and happiness." The importance of Schiller's morality to Follen personally appears in the second of his 566 Notes to Pages 116-18 lectures on Schiller, which contains a resume of the Robbers. In concentrating on Carl Moor's bold attack on tyranny, says Follen, the critics usually overlook completely "the sublime moral" of the play, namely, "the tragic results that accrue to him who of his own free will can- not yield obedience to the moral law." In Moor's headlong career, Follen saw, in epitome, what his own youthful career in Germany might have led to if he had not won the victory over self. 475. Works, III, 225 ff. 476. In this respect Follen is in close agree- ment with most of the New England Tran- scendentalists, who objected to Kant's close identification of religion with morality. Quite possibly Follen predisposed them to take this position of dissent from the Kantian position as well as from the same ultimate conclusion to which their own Unitarian principles would logically have led them. See the differentiation between religion and ethics that Emerson made in the section on "Idealism" in Nature. 477. Follen defines morality as the direction of the mind towards the happiness that results from a striving after the greatest efficiency, after perfection; while religion is the direction of the mind toward the happiness which results from the desire and belief that the world is so constituted and governed as to make possible this greatest perfection. The attainment of this perfection, however, depends not solely upon man himself, upon his faculties and moral effort, but also, partly, upon Providence, upon the power which has created the universe in such a way that man is aided in his striving after it. Furthermore, man's desire and belief that the world is so organized and regulated as to conform to his wants and needs is, in Follen's view, the foundation of religion; from this desire and belief proceeds man's restless striving after an ever-enlarging sphere of existence and action. See esp. Follen's first lecture, Works, III, 3-19, and Spindler, op. cit., p. 174. "The moral man," as Follen explains it, "is like the husbandman who expects the harvest as a result of his own painstaking efforts in prepar- ing the soil and sowing the seed; but the re- ligious man recognizes that the seed sown will not yield the desired harvest unless sunshine and rain are sent by the Almighty's hand." 478. Here enters an intriguing question, namely, to what extent this may represent an influence upon Follen's thought from Constant, whose religious views closely parallel those ex- pressed by Follen. He was familiar with this phase of Constant's theology. See, for example. Works, III, 229 ff., and V, 266, and the essay, "Constant on Religion," Amer. Quar. Rev., XI (Mar., 1832), 103-21. 479. Spindler, op. cit., pp. 174-75. 480. Compare Schleiermacher's Reden iiber die Religion and his Glaubenslehre with Follen's tract on "Religion and the Church," Works, V, 254-3I3- 481. Works, V, 254. 482. The sentiments expressed in this letter, reprinted as No. XIII of "Follenbriefe" by Hermann Haupt in Jahrbuch der Deutsch-Ame- rikanischen Historischen Gesellschaft von Illi- nois, XIV (1914), 26-28, parallel closely many of the principles enunciated by Schleiermacher, namely: the repudiation of irrational devotion to creeds; the differentiation between dogma and religion ; the union of all sects in one church ; the conception of religion as consisting at once of feeling, piety, and reverent contemplation of God ; the sublime work of nature and art as the expression of an immanent Deity — as a symbol through which the mind and heart are directed toward the one eternal God ; and the Christian church as an association of pious men for mutual aid and cultivation of a closer relation to God. Along with Schleiermacher, Follen emphasizes the social nature of religion. The church is not merely an instrument for moral education; it is an association of people seeking after reli- gious truth through the mutual exchange of views. The greater the variety of these views, the better; for each individual is in this way more apt to find that which will satisfy his particular needs. 483. Concerning the influence of Follen upon his students, a number of men testify. See W. H. Channing, "Life and Writings of Dr. Follen," Christ. Exam., XXXIII (Sept., 1842), 33-56, esp. p. 52: Andrew P. Peabody, Harvard Reminis- censes, pp. 117-23; Follen's Works, I, 260-62; Josiah Quincy, History of Harvard University, II, 383; Sprague's Annals, VIII, 547; Ed. Livingston's letter, quoted in Works, I, 308; the class oration (1832), quoted in Works, I, 312; and the editorial by J. F. Clarke in the Western Messenger for October, 1836. 484. See Thomas S. Baker, "America as the Political Utopia of Young Germany, "A mericana Germanica, I, ii (1897), 62-102. 485. Democratic Rev., V, xv (Mar., 1839), 288-308; repr. in Works, V, 314-73. 486. Works, III, 7-9. 487. Ibid., p. 253. This is, of course, strongly suggestive of Kant's "Metaphysische Anfangs- griinde der Rechtslehre" (Kants Werke, ed. by E. Cassirer), VII, 43. 488. Works, III, 270. 489. Ibid., pp. 274, 278, 282-87, 289-90. 490. Ibid., V, 197, 204, 207-16. 491. Specific influences of Follen's views upon those of his associates are hard to sub- Notes to Pages 118-22 567 stantiate, but the direct relationship existing among them and their common interests in the transcendental, romantic, and humanitarian ferment makes the presumption strong. Addi- tional justification for relating the New England Transcendentalists and reformers like Garrison and Sumner to German political idealism, as represented by Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, and for regarding Follen as the link or intermediary- appears in the pecular ethical basis which both parties gave to politics. For a detailed discussion of the relations between Follen's theory and practice and those of Channing, Garrison, Sumner, Parker, and Emerson, see the unpub- lished dissertation of Charles B. Robson, "The Influence of German Thought on Political Theory in the United States" (Univ. of North Carolina Library, 1930), esp. pp. 100, 103-22. 492. C. B. Robson, op. cit., pp. 124-25. 493. Compare Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Abbott trans.), sec. iii, with Emerson's Journals, III, 235, and J. E. Cabot, Memoir, I, 246-47. 494. See Emerson's Works, III, 212, as well as the suggestive discussion of Emerson's in- debtedness to Kantian ethics, beginning page 299 in John S. Harrison's Teachers of Emerson (N.Y., 1910). 495. Robson, op. cit., pp. 125-26. See also Hegel's Philosophy of Right, tr. by S. W. Dyde (London, 1896), pp. 127-29, and Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London, 1899), Chs. IX and X. 496. Works of W. E. Channing, (10th ed., 6 vols., Boston, 1849), V, 256. 497. Robson, op. cit., p. 128. 498. Although Emerson was not then taking part in the regular exercises of the Divinity students, Follen could hardly have failed to attract his attention, omnipresent as he was at the time. However, Emerson's diary is com- pletely innocent of any references to Follen during these years. 499. There were other factors that should have conspired to make Emerson notice Follen, who was in Cambridge the example, par excel- lence, of the German university-trained scholar. We know that he carefully appraised others who had enjoyed the advantages of a German education. For example, Bancroft, who had gone to Germany in 18 18 and fallen completely under the spell of Schleiermacher's educational and religious views, was, upon his return, all but idolized by Emerson as an incipient Her- cules in American learning. — J. E. Cabot, Memoir, I, 93-94, 98, 105. See also Emerson's adulation of Everett upon his return from Germany {Letters of R. W. Emerson, ed. by R. L. Rusk, I, 76. 78, 84; Emerson's Works, X, 330-31; Journals, VIII, 225-26). It will also be recalled that after graduating in 1821, Emer- son had for two years assisted his brother Wil- liam as a teacher, an enterprise which was dis- continued when William went to Gottingen to study divinity — another circumstance that might have directed his attention toward Follen. 500. Cabot, Memoir, I, 145 ; see also Letters, I, 260 (Jan. 28, 1820). 501. Cabot, Memoir, I, 159. 502. Emerson, in a letter to William Emer- son, quoted in Cabot, Memoir, I, 218. 503. Letters, I, 154 (Nov. 20, 1824); see also ibid., pp. 143, 149. 504. Cabot, Memoir, I, 109. 505. Ibid., I, 139. 506. Journals, I, 82 (June 10, 182 1). 507. Ibid., pp. 289-90 (Nov., 1822). 508. Ibid., p. 288 (Apr., 1822). See also Mary S. Withington, "Early Letters of Emerson," Century Magazine, XXVI (July, 1883), 454. 509. Cabot, Memoir, I, 139; Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, I, 29-30, 39—40. 510. For details of this long struggle, see the section below on Emerson. 511. Ill (Mar., 1831), 127-51. 512. Journals, II, 542. 513. Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, I, 34, 53-63 et seq. 514. Ibid., I, 55. 515. O. B. Frothingham, George Ripley (Bos- ton, 1883), pp. 96-97. 516. XI (Jan., 1832), 373-80; see esp. pp. 374-77, containing a high tribute to Kant. 517. H. C. Goddard, op. cit., p. 85; Henry S. Commager, Theodore Parker (Boston, 1936), pp. 31-32; John Weiss, Life and Correspondence Theodore Parker (2 vols., Boston, 1863), I, 49. 518. Commager, op. cit., pp. 30-32, 34, 38- 39 et seq. ; O. B. Frothingham, Theodore Par- ker: A Biography (Boston, 1874), pp. 34-39; J. F. Clarke, Memorial and Biographical Sketches (Boston, 1878), p. 120. 519. Spindler, op. cit., p. 143; John W. Chadwick, Theodore Parker (Boston, 1900), p. 84 ; and Edwin D. Mead, The Influence of Emerson (Boston, 1903), p. no. 520. Commager, op. cit., p. 55. 521. Odell Shepard, Pedlar's Progress. The Life of Bronson Alcott (Boston, 1937), pp. 112-37. 522. F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris, A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy (2 vols., Boston, 1893), I. II8 . 28q - 523. Clarke entered Harvard in 1825, grad- uated with the class of 1829, then entered the Divinity School, and thus remained for another year in direct touch with Follen. Six years later. 568 Notes to Pa of the System of Instruction and Discipline Pursued in the University of Vermont (Burling- ton, 1829; 2nd ed., enl., 1831). This announce- ment was widely publicized among other New England colleges, where it was variously re- ceived — sometimes with fervor, sometimes with disdain, but always with interest. Coming at the moment when Marsh's edition of Coleridge's Aids was engaging widespread attention, few attentive readers failed to grasp the obvious connection. 608. See A Historical Discourse by Rev. John Wheeler, D.D. . . . (Burlington, 1854), p. 38. Also abstracted in Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia of American Literature, I, 834. 609. Besides defending the grammatical and linguistic interprepation of the Scriptures and horrifying the orthodox by supporting Stuart's • findings and championing the value of German : theological criticism, he espoused the doctrines of Original Sin, Atonement, and Redemption in substantially Coleridgean terms. See Remains, P- 137- 610. See the "Advertisement," in which Coleridge says that in its inception, Aids to Reflection, too, was to have been primarily a book of "Selections from the Writings of Arch- bishop Leighton." — Aids, ed. by Marsh (Bur- • lington, 1829), p. lv. 611. Marjorie Nicolson, loc. cit., p. 38. 612. Prose Writers of America (Phila., 1849), p. 440; see also Remains, p. 92. 613. Aids, p. xiv. Compare Coleridge's "Re- flections Respecting Morality," Aids, p. 35. In the course of the "Preliminary Essay," Marsh repeatedly emphasizes the idea that a thinking man "has and can have but one system in which his philosophy becomes religious and his reli- gion philosophical." This assertion of the in- herent rationality of Christian truth, at once the animating principle of Coleridge and of Marsh, naturally conditioned the latter to become the disciple of the former when he found the doctrine so explicitly stated in the Aids. Moreover, the combination by Coleridge of the doctrines of seventeenth-century English di- vines, themselves under the spell of Plato, with the German transcendental philosophy as a framework upon which to reconstruct a spirit- ual religion (which had been obscured and depressed under the influence of Locke and the Notes to Pages 133-35 575 Scottish school) appealed to Marsh. It was in the search for a spiritual and personal religion that he turned to Coleridge and through Cole- ridge to Kant. 614. Yet in the "Preliminary Essay" proper ■ Marsh nowhere draws the distinction itself, although there are numerous references to the extreme importance and significance of it for all departments of human thought and action. See, for example, pp. xv, xviii, xx, xxiii, xxv, xxviii, xxxix-xl, xlii-xliii, xlvi, xlviii. Indeed, he studiously avoids drawing the distinction, adding, "My object is merely to illustrate its necessity, and the palpable obscurity, vague- ness, and deficiency, in this respect, of the mode of philosophizing, which is held in so high honour among us. The distinction will be found illustrated with some of its important bearings in the work, and in the Notes and Appendix ; and cannot be too carefully studied .... In- deed, could I succeed in fixing the attention of the reader upon this distinction, in such a way as to secure his candid and reflecting perusal of the work, I should consider any personal effort and sacrifice abundantly recompensed" (p. xliii, and note 23, p. 262). 615. It has been charged that Marsh some- times uses the word reason to designate the logical faculty, and again, as the equivalent of intuition; that sometimes his distinction between reason and understanding is no more than the distinction between truths that are self-evident and truths that are derivative. 616. Such is the general argument on pages xiv-xxxviii, whence he concludes: "It must have been observed by the reader of the fore- going pages, that I have used several words, especially understanding and reason, in a sense somewhat diverse from their present accepta- tion .... The ambiguity spoken of, and the consequent perplexity in regard to the use and authority of reason, have arisen from the habit of using, since the time of Locke, the terms understanding and reason indiscriminately." 617. Aids, p. xli. 618. Aids, pp. lviii, and 1 and 21 of the text; and notes 3 and 4, pp. 252-54. 619. Aids, note 22, pp. 260-61; see also p. xlviii. 620. See also Marsh's letter to Coleridge, dated March 23, 1829, printed in Remains, p. 137. The extreme need for a distinct terminol- ogy became most apparent to him when he set to writing his own "Psychology" {ibid., p. 246). All his life, the lack of precise terminological tools frustrated his efforts and in the end spelt his defeat in the philosophical works which he planned but failed to complete. In 1837, after he had written at some length on the relation of being and immortality to the Understanding and Reason, he felt constrained to admit: "I am aware that what I have said is not all very perspicuous, and that I have, especially in the last long paragraph, made transitions which it may be difficult to follow. Still, I know not that I should better it, without writing a system, so as to place all the parts in their proper relation to the whole, and thus show where the under- standing belongs." — Ibid., p. 397. 621. Coleridge's trustworthiness is discussed in the section, above, on Coleridge's position as an intermediary between German and American thinkers. 622. Here are included chiefly Bacon, More, and Leighton. See the Preliminary Essay, pp. xxviii-xxxix, xlvi; among the Notes, note 43 (p. 280), note 50 (pp. 288-90), note 59 (p. 305), notes on pages 316-21, note 65 (p. 323) ; and in the Appendix, pp. 375, 395-97- 623. See the passages in Chapter IX of Bio- graphia Literaria, immediately preceding his blanket acknowledgment of indebtedness to Kant, whose every point Coleridge professed to understand in 1817, when that book was published. 624. See Aids, pp. 136-37. The inference in such passages as those on pages 137 and 145 is that Leighton and Kant were co-discoverers of the correct definitions. Kant is mentioned spe- cifically only three times in the Aids (on pp. 137. J 45. and 396). To demonstrate coincident definitions in Leighton and Kant, Coleridge adduced a pas- sage from Leighton: "Faith elevates the soul not only above sense and sensible things, but also above reason itself. As reason corrects the errors which sense might occasion, so super- natural faith corrects the errors of natural reason judging according to sense." At this point Coleridge added that if we substitute "reason" for the word "faith" in the passage quoted, and replace "natural reason" with "understanding," we shall find Leighton's defi- nition to be, "word for word the very definition which the founder of critical philosophy gives to understanding, namely, 'the faculty judging according to sense'." — Works, Shedd ed., 1853, I, 241; see the whole of Aphorism VIII, ibid., pp. 236-53; compare Aids, Marsh ed., 139, and the whole of Aphorism VIII, ibid., pp. 135-45. But such subtractions, additions, and sub- stitutions, while they convert Leighton's pas- sage into Kantian terminology, also convert his meaning into something other than Leigh- ton intended. Passages such as these illustrate Coleridge's enthusiasm for the distinction between Reason and Understanding outrun- ning his discretion. Seldom was a prophet more 576 Notes to Page 135 inspired by a philosophical principle than was Coleridge by this one, and, we may add, seldom has one principle transmitted more enthusiasm than this one did to the men of the first half of the nineteenth century. So great was its signifi- cance for Coleridge that he took it, as he said, as "a magnificent theme, the different parts of which are to be demonstrated, developed, ex- plained, illustrated, and exemplified" in all his philosophical works. See Claud Howard, Coleridge's Idealism, pp. 39, 47. When Coleridge is interested in giving weight and emphasis to this great seminal principle, he is so imbued with its importance that the sees reflections of it in writers whose view of the distinction was quite different from his own (and Kant's), how- ever nearly they may have arrived at conclu- sions consonant with his own. It should be ob- served that when Coleridge is making notes for his own use, instead of publicizing the doctrine, he acknowledges more frankly, "How often have I found reason to regret, that Leighton had not clearly made out to himself the diver- sity of reason and understanding ?" See Works of Robert Leighton, Aikman ed. (Edinburgh, x 835), PP- 352-53. See also his explanation of "the grounds of all Jeremy Taylor's important errors" in Works, Shedd ed., 1853, V, 181, 205, 209, as well as his criticism of the errors arising in Bacon and Harrington — all because they did not consistently distinguish between Under- standing and Reason (ibid., I, 236, 240-41, 264-65, and esp. 306—7). It may well be, of course, that Marsh, in his efforts to popularize Coleridge's philosophy, consciously soft-pedalled the influence upon him of German philosophy (which he knew to be widely suspect in America) at the same time that he related Coleridge's ideas more imme- diately to the revered English Platonists. 625. John Dewey (German Philosophy and Politics, N.Y., 1915) reminds us, however, that German transcendentalism, purely critical and speculative though it was in the beginning, itself rapidly developed the most far-reaching prac- tical applications — in religion, in politics, in art. William James maintained that Kant had been anticipated by the English theologians and the Cambridge Platonists, and A. O. Love- joy has argued that the "Kantian doctrine was destitute of any radical originality; that none of the more general and fundamental conten- tions of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft were particularly novel or revolutionary at the time of their original promulgation [although there had been no such analyses and demonstrations as Kant supplied] ; and that the principal devel- opments of post-Kantian philosophy, even in the ostensibly Kantian schools, were not de- pendent upon the interposition of the ingenious complexities of the critical system, but were present in germ, sometimes in fairly full-blown form, in the writings of Kant's predecessors and contemporaries," chiefly the English Plato- nists. See Lovejoy's "Kant and the English Platonists," in Essays Philosophical and Psy- chological in Honor of William James (N.Y., 1908), pp. 266-301. More immediately useful for our purposes is the careful inquiry into Cole- ridge's sources by Claud Howard in Coleridge' s Idealism: A Study of Its Relationships to Kant and to the Cambridge Platonists (Boston, 1924). He seeks, first, to relate to Kant the anticipa- tions which he finds in the writings of Cud- worth, More, Hooker, Taylor, Leighton, Smith, Whitcote, and Culverwel; next, he seeks to describe Coleridge's attempted correlation of Kant's critical philosophy with the English anticipations of it; and finally, he undertakes to show the essential nature of the fused prod- uct that resulted in the mind of Coleridge. See esp. pp. 32-69, 87-97, 98-101. 626. See Coleridge's Works, Shedd ed., I, 94. It is not to be inferred, of course, that Marsh was ignorant of Coleridge's stricter reliance upon Kant than upon the seventeenth-century divines, for in preparing his edition of the Aids, he reread The Friend and the Biographia Literaria too attentively to have missed the import of Coleridge's flat statements of in- debtedness. Moreover, a letter from Marsh to Coleridge, dated March 23, 1829, leaves no doubt on this point. 627. See Marjorie Nicolson, loc. cit., p. 49. 628. See, for example, Marsh's "Letter to a Friend," entitled "On the Relation of Man's Personal Existence and Immortality to the Understanding and the Reason," dated Dec. 4, 1837, and printed in Remains, pp. 391-97. That his interest in Kant ever transcended this practical point of view is doubtful. His works on psychology and on logic, which he projected but never executed, might ultimately have led him to make a more detailed inquiry into Kant's purely speculative argument; but at his death in 1842 he had done little more than sketch some preliminary notes for these works. On the strength of these, little conclusive evi- dence appears. 629. See, for example, Coleridge's consistent use of the Kantian phraseology in such passages as those on pp. 137 and 142-45, as well as in the Glossary of terms from Appendix E of the Stateman's Manual, all of which Marsh felt constrained to reproduce for his edition of the Aids, pp. 395-99- 630. The extraordinary trouble to which Marsh went to explain Coleridge on Under- Notes to Page 134 577 standing and Reason appears in the pains he took to collect all the passages from Coleridge's published works which bear on the subject and in the cross references which he supplied. The more important notes and cross references in- tended to serve as guideposts for the reader are found on pp. xiii, xv, xix, xlvi, xlvii, 274, 279, 306, 328, 329. Aside from the long "Preliminary Essay," the other passages in the Aids to which Marsh called attention as being of value to the reader in an effort to get the correct distinction include this imposing array of references — (1) from the text: pp. 87-92, 102-5, !3 2 -34. J 35- 45. 151-56, 160-63, 183-84, 193-94. 205-6, 211-13, 238-46; (2) from among the Notes: note 22 (pp. 260-61), n. 23 (pp. 261-62), n. 29 (p. 274), n. 43 (pp. 279-81), n. 50 (pp. 284-91), n. 5 1 (193-94). n - 55 (197). »• 59 (304-21, esp. 309-10), n. 64 (pp. 322-23), n. 66 (pp. 323-26), n. 67 (pp. 326-28), n. 78 (pp. 336-37); and (3) from the Appendix: pp. 343-99, esp. pp. 371- 72, 374-75. 395-99- Most important, in Marsh's opinion, is the application of these distinctions for matters of faith. Accordingly, on page 279, he refers the reader specifically to passages on "pp. 108-20, 132-34, 192-94, 204-6, and the appendix to the first Lay Sermon republished at the end of the Volume." 631. Critique of Pure Reason, Miiller trans., p. 242. 632. Jour, of the Hist, of Ideas, II, ii (Apr., I94 1 ). 137- 633. Fries's influence is discussed below. 634. One aspect of Marsh's Aristotelianism (or his inability consistently to steer clear of what his reading in scientific books had im- pressed upon his mind) is seen in his treatment of space and time. Like Kant, he speaks of mathematics "as a science of space and time," of "necessary and therefore a priori forms of perceptual experience," but he also has in mind "the absolute space and time of Newtonian physics and not just mental forms." At all events, he does not always differentiate between the older and the Kantian concepts of space and time, and ordinarily infers that the powers of the mind, or of the self, are called forth only by objects correlative to them. See John Dewey's more detailed analysis, loc. cit., pp. 138-40. It should be observed, however, that Marsh's inconclusive treatment of space and time appears mainly in his edition of the Aids, and that Dewey's criticism does not apply with equal force to Marsh's later writings. Marsh's failure to isolate what he regards as an ascending and connected series of Sense- Understanding-Reason from the rational uni- verse is what may be attributed to the Aristo- telianism in his thinking. While there is no evidence to show that he read Schelling, in whose system he would have come upon the view of the subject as being in opposition to its object, there is evidence that he read something of Fichte's and knew the general doctrine of Fichte's subjective idealism (see his essay in North Amer. Rev., XV [July, 1822), 123]. Yet there is in Marsh, instead of any tendency to put the subject in opposition to the object, the Hegelian tendency to regard the subject as coming most completely to himself in the ration- al will — "as the culmination, the consumma- tion, of the energies constituting the sensible and physical world." See John Dewey, loc. cit., p. 139. This tendency is not referable to Hegel. It goes back to Marsh's wide reading in the scientific writings of the day (and ultimately through the Baconian tradition to Aristotle), where he found evidence for the idea that nature presents an ascending scale of energies in which the lower are both the condition and the pre- monitions of the higher until the self-conscious mind itself at the apex is reached. Why this particular interpretation appealed to him and how it enabled him to use what he considered the Kantian tripartition of the mind for his purposes in reconciling religion and philosophy we shall have occasion to consider later. 635. See, in the Miiller tr., pp. 41, 56-57, 242- 45. 247, 274, 459, 517. 636. Discussed above, in the section on Cole- ridge. 637. It should be said, in fairness to Marsh, that while he made no amplification, in his edition of the Aids, of this limited view of Understanding, his "Letter to a Friend on the Relation of Man's Personal Existence and Immortality to the Understanding and the Reason" indicates that by December 4, 1837, when it was composed, he had revised his phraseology to bring his interpretation more nearly in accord with that of Kant. While he repeats Coleridge's phrase, "the faculty judging according to sense," he goes on to warn the reader "not to conceive it as being produced out of our sensuous nature." — Re- mains, pp. 392, 394-95. 638. To the inevitability of errors of this sort Kant himself had called attention in the Critique of Pure Reason, Miiller tr., pp. 240-41. 639. Ibid., pp. 11-12. The passage in which these statements are made is one of several which Coleridge arranged in parallel columns, the juxtaposition being designed to help eluci- date the distinction between Understanding and Reason. But see, also, the last two para- graphs of the eighth "Aphorism on Spiritual Religion" (Aids, p. 145), where Coleridge im- plies that the difference between Reason and 578 Notes to Pages 136-38 Understanding is mainly one by which the former proceeds a priori and the latter a poste- riori. Coleridge was too much the poet to follow Kant's method of simple iteration to enforce a meaning. Instead, his fear of writing monoto- nously led him to present his definitions under as many varying lights and points of view as possible. This trait, Frederic Henry Hedge, one of the earliest and best American commenta- tors on Coleridge and Kant, emphasized as being the chief difficulty which readers experi- ence in attempting to follow Coleridge's thought. See Christ. Exam., XIV, i (Mar., 1833), 1 16-18. 640. See, for example, p. 145 and n. 59 (pp. 304-5,308-10) ; also pp. 37 1-72 of the Aids, where Coleridge clearly distinguishes, according to the Kantian criteria, between Reason and Under- standing, between a posteriori and a priori knowledge, and between the pure and the prac- tical Reason (see also pp. 137-39, 142-45, 205-7, 303-4, and 308-10, and compare with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 171, 242-45, 537, and, as he refers to the Understanding, ibid., pp. 41-42, 56-57, and 103-4). Here Marsh adds gratuitously nine and one-half pages of explan- atory matter of his own, together with illustra- tions drawn from Coleridge's Friend and Henry More's Antidote Against Atheism, in the course of which he succeeds in hindering rather than helping the reader to grasp what Coleridge has just labored to explain. He speaks in one in- stance of "the relation of reason, as the power of spiritual intuition in man, to the Supreme Reason" in a manner to suggest that if he had, indeed, understood Coleridge a moment before, he had already forgotten that the Coleridgean distinction proscribed the indiscriminate use of terms like intuition and reason, the former being reserved to the intuition of sensibility (Kant's Anschauung of Sinnlichkeit) , while the latter is described as "the faculty of producing unity among the rules of the understanding according to principles" (see Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 15, 242-43). To be sure, Coleridge himself had not added anything to the clarity of the passage under consideration by introducing the figure of the "inward eye" or by using the words Spirit and Soul (Aids, pp. 308, 137, 142, 309); but these terms do not materially modify or destroy the essential meaning that he aims at in this note. However, Marsh's fondness for More, Cud- worth, and others of the seventeenth-century Platonists led him sometimes to reinterpret Coleridge's interpretation more liberally than even Coleridge's liberal precedent justified. 641. See Coleridge's statement in the Preface and Marsh's repetition of it in his essay regard- ing the didactic and dogmatic rather than the speculative nature of the Aids, the aim being practical rather than theoretical. 642. See Critique of Pure Reason, Miiller tr., pp. 238-42, 243-45, 508-10, 514-17- 643. Ibid., p. 379. 644. Ibid., pp. 563-64. 645. Ibid., pp. 514, 558-64. 646. Ibid., p. 655. 647. Ibid., p. 654; see also p. 274. 648. That Coleridge attached relatively more significance to the practical than to the pure Reason appears from such a passage as the following: "But if not the abstract or specula- tive Reason, yet a reason there must be in order to [form] a rational Belief — then it must be the Practical Reason of Man, comprehending the Will, the Conscience, the Moral Being with its inseparable Interests and Affections — that Reason, namely, which is the Organ of Wisdom and (as far as Man is concerned) the Source of living and actual Truths." — "Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion," Aids, p. 375. And see Essay XI, second section of The Friend (Shedd ed., pp. 458-72), where Coleridge attempts to "fill up . . . the chasm" by means of "the moral being." 649. Aids, pp. 205-7. 650. Ibid., pp. 115, 137. 651. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 562. 652. Ibid., pp. 496-99, 518-20, 562. 653. Note 75, Aids, p. 334. 654. On this score he found in Coleridge only one brief note, and that (in the Statesman's Manual) seemed to leave the question upon which Kant had insisted open for debate. For Coleridge had only this to say: "Whether ideas are regulative only, according to Aristotle and Kant; or likewise constitutive, and one with power and Life of Nature, according to Plato and Plotinus ... is the highest problem of phi- losophy, and not part of its nomenclature" (quoted by Marsh in Aids, p. 396). What Marsh could not know, unless he consulted Kant him- self on this head, was the extreme importance, in the system of critical transcendentalism, that Kant attached to this distinction. See Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 517-18, 539. Contrast with Kant's cautious statements, Coleridge's note, Appendix A, Aids, p. 367. 655. Remains, pp. 135-36. 656. Aids, pp. xx, xxii. 657. Ibid., pp. xxix-xxx. 658. Ibid., pp. xv, xxiv-xxv. 659. When we search for reasons why Marsh failed to interpret clearly and precisely Kant's distinctions, we find two conditioning forces within Marsh that predisposed him to read into the Kantian epistemology certain preposses- Notes to Pages 139-41 579 sions of his own. One of these stems from Aris- totle, the other from Christianity. The former predisposed him to see the space and time relationships of Sense and the categories of the Understanding as more than merely passive forms, remaining inactive until called into action by the actual relationships which subsist among objects. In the Kantian epistemology there is no necessarily progressive development by which the Senses feed into the Understand- ing and both into the Reason. Marsh was able to break through this insularity among the faculties by adopting, instead of the Kantian separatedness, the Aristotelian connectedness of the mind's faculties, the senses supplying the materials of the Understanding, and the Under- standing in turn actualizing these potentialities and supplying the Reason with the materials upon which to exercise itself. This scheme frees man, on purely natural grounds, for the possi- bilities of development and progress. On this score, see John Dewey's careful interpretation of Marsh, loc. cit., pp. 139-42. But if this is an Aristotelian interpretation of Kant, it should be observed that Marsh also separates himself in at least one important respect from Greek thought by introducing elements that are foreign to it, namely (1) the concept of mind as identical with the self, an identification that is alien to classic thinking, and (2) the concept of reason as will, i.e., of a "power to institute and seek to realize ends that are universal and necessary" — that are supplied by nature, but that flow from its own nature as a personal rational self. As Marsh himself points out, both ideas stem from, and are consonant with, Christianity. Where Aristotle, for ex- ample, held that "reason could be actualized by contemplative knowledge apart from any effort to change the world of nature and social institu- tions into its own likeness and embodiment," Marsh, following the spirit of Christian teaching, denies any such possibility, holding instead that "Reason can realize itself and be truly aware or conscious of its own intrinsic nature only as it operates to make over the world, whether physi- cal or social, into an embodiment of its own principles." He condemns nothing so vehement- ly as the purely speculative tendency which would separate knowledge and the intellect from action and will. "By its own nature, rea- son terminates in action, and that action is the transformation of the spiritual potentialities found in the natural world, physical and insti- tutional, into spiritual realities." — See Dewey, loc. cit., p. 141; also pp. 142-50, and Marsh's "Discourses," printed in the latter half of Remains, "On Conscience," "On Hypocrisy," "On the Nature, Ground and Origin of Sin," "On Man's Need of Christ," and his "Tract on Evangelism." The basis of what immediately precedes in this note derives less from the Aids than from his later, more mature, though in- complete, writings in which Marsh sought to construct a comprehensive philosophy of his own. 660. Remains, p. 137. 661. Ibid., p. 112. 662. Ibid., p. 152. 663. Ibid., pp. 291-97, 368-90. 664. Ibid., pp. 187-210. 665. Marsh treats, in this instance, of space and time in equivocal terms, as representing quantities or qualities both "in the sphere of the outer senses" and "in our outward con- sciousness." — Ibid., p. 191. A footnote refers the reader equally to Kant's Krilik der reinen Vernunft, erster Theil, and to Newton's Prin- cipia. However imperfectly Marsh had grasped these pure forms of Kant while he was prepar- ing the Aids, successive passages in this Out- line demonstrate that he was by now familiar with the Kantian concepts of space and time, but that he could still lapse into his earlier view of them. See ibid., pp. 195-97, 302-4, 309-16, and compare with passages on pages 191-93- 666. Ibid., p. 197. There are references also to Kant's Naturwissenschaft (ibid., pp. 191, 197), his Gedanken von der wahren Schdtzung der lebendigen Kraefte and his Himmels System, both in Volume I of Vermischte Schriften al- though no edition is specified (pp. 197, 203). The same notes refer also to Fries's Mathematische N alurphilo sophie and his System der Logik, as well as to Oersted's Identite des forces chimiques et electriques (pp. 194, 197). 667. Remains, pp. 211-38. 668. Ibid., p. vii. His reliance on Fries and Carus reflects Follen's influence. 669. Ibid., pp. 239-367. 670. Remains, p. 118. See also his statement in "Psychology" (Remains, pp. 244-47) °f the linguistic difficulties that beset the epistemolo- gist. 671. Remains, p. 118. 672. In view of Coleridge's poor health at the time and his carelessness as a correspondent, not too much importance is to be attached to Coleridge's seeming neglect of his American disciple. To Americans who subsequently visited him at Highgate, he always expressed gratification at Marsh's service in spreading his doctrines in the New World; while his most intimate associates, among them Henry Nelson Coleridge, James Oilman, and J. H. Green, wrote highly appreciative letters to Marsh. When Coleridge's nephew prepared the 1839 580 Notes to Pages 141-42 edition of the Aids, instead of writing a new introduction, he simply reprinted Marsh's essay, with the explanation that he saw no need for doing again what had already been done well. 673. Convinced that psychology, based on internal evidence, must form the foundation of all philosophizing, Fries concluded that psychol- ogy must rest, first of all, upon empirical knowledge, for we become conscious of a priori cognitions only through a posteriori experience. Accordingly he set himself to establish Kant's criticism of reason on such a psychological basis. Like Kant, Fries stresses the necessity of criticizing the faculty of cognition, but he finds three fundamental faults with Kant. First, he dissents from what he calls Kant's "phenome- nalism," or his subjective view of nature, by which space and time are merely mental forms or avenues of apperception, and insists upon a closer indentification of subject and object — a doctrine which, as we have observed, Marsh was prepared to accept as consonant with what he had read in books of science. Second, Fries objects to what he calls a vicious arrangement of Kant's doctrine by which the value of the categories depends upon transcendental proofs and ideas upon moral proofs, instead of rising, without any proof, to the immediate "knowl- edge of reason." Third, he objects to what he believes to be Kant's confounding psychologi- cal ideas with philosophy, and not properly distinguishing the aids which psychology fur- nishes to metaphysics from metaphysics itself. Fries maintains that he has corrected the errors of Kant, and that he has placed the doctrine of belief (which he considers the "focus of all philo- sophical conviction") on a sound basis. This he claims to have effected by means of researches carried on in the spirit of Kant himself. Starting with Kant by making the limits of science his starting point, he goes beyond Kant and arrives at once at the pure faith of reason in that which is eternal, a faith that is strengthened by pre- sentiment (Ahnung). Knowledge, or science, is concerned only with sensuous phenomena; the true essence of things is the object of belief, which is the offspring of the limitation itself of knowledge. Here, again, in placing feeling and presentiment above science, Fries approaches the doctrine of Jacobi, though by different methods. — See Ueberweg, op. cit., II, 195, 201- 3, and Tennemann's Manual of the History of Philosophy, tr. by Arthur Johnson (London, 1852), pp. 467-69. 674. On the importance attached to precisely these elements of Fichte and Schelling as being the "most important victories" by which Kant's "revolution in philosophy" was consum- mated, see Chapter IX of the Biographia Litera- ria. That Marsh appears to have followed Cole- ridge in attaching unusual significance to Fichte and Schelling, particularly the latter, appears from his inclusion, in connection with note 29, p. 275, of his edition of the Aids, a lengthy quo- tation from The Friend (III, 166-68) on Nature, the Dynamic, Phaenomenology, and Natural Philosophy — all bearing unmistakable Schel- lingian marks. 675. And, we might add, admixtures also of Herder, of Schleiermacher, of Schiller, and of Goethe. 676. XIV, i, 180-29. The essay is of impor- tance (1) because it was the first review article written by an American that interpreted Ger- man thought correctly, (2) because in it was used for the first time in America the term transcendental philosophy in the sense in which it was soon to be understood by the New Eng- land Transcendentalists, and (3) because it served as one of the early important sources for Emerson's knowledge of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. 677. Writing five years after the death of Marsh and almost twenty years after the ap- pearance of Marsh's edition of the Aids, Porter put down this considered opinion: "The American disciples of Coleridge have been numerous . . . and they have certainly been sufficiently diversified. Indeed his influ- ence in this country has been wider . . . than in England. . . . There are many hundreds now living on whose minds his writings dawned like a new light, and on whose ears his words fell like a trumpet note, to stir all their better na- ture, and to strengthen and confirm their broken purposes. . . . Coleridge had the advan- tage of being introduced to our theological arena by one of the most distinguished of our scholars. . . . President Marsh will not soon be forgotten. . . . His essay preliminary to the Aids to Reflection and his criticism of Stuart's Commentary on the Hebrews are among the first specimens of writing of their kind. . . . The influence of Coleridge on the philosophy and theology of New England has been, in some respects, what President Marsh desired it should be. It has opened new fields of inquiry and put us in possession of other modes of viewing religious truths. It has brought within our notice writers who used to be unknown to our libraries. It has rendered our theology tolerant ... at the same time it has made it free. . . . Above all, it has contended for a wake- ful, thorough, and scientific theology, in which, let alarmists and incapables say what they will, rests the hope of the church." — IV, 161-63. 678. Burlington, 1830. See Remains, p. 103. Of this work only the first volume was pub- Notes to Pages 142-44 581 lished. It included Howe's Blessedness of the Righteous and Bates's Four Last Things. 6jg. First American edition from the second London edition, Burlington, 1831. 680. Burlington, 1833. 681. Burlington, 1837. 682. As an indication of the effectiveness of some of his disciples might be mentioned the work of William Greenough Thayer Shedd, who was graduated from the University of Vermont in 1839, served as minister of various congrega- tions in Vermont and New York and as profes- sor at the University of Vermont, 1845-1852; in the Theological Seminary at Auburn, N.Y., 1852-1853; Andover, 1853-1862; Union The- ological Seminary, 1863; and in 1854 brought out the long-standard seven-volume Shedd edition of Coleridge's works. 683. The connections between the Vermont and Concord groups is a matter that needs more attention than can be devoted to it here. It must suffice to point out that Marsh was often in Boston, was well acquainted with Channing, Ticknor, and Bancroft, as well as with many of the "Transcendentalists," and doubtless agreed heartily with many of their aims and aspira- tions. In the Brook Farm experiment, however, he had little faith. "The schemes cherished in New York," he wrote in 1841, "are very nearly of the same character, I suppose, as those which Mr. Ripley and others are going to commence near Boston on the first of April (an ominous day!) and it may be prudent for the New Yorkers to wait the result of their experi- ment. . . . The grand error I take to be in the hope which he [Ripley] indulges of finding men in this world sufficiently under the law of pure reason, or even sufficiently raised by divine grace above the selfishness of human nature, to live together on such terms as they propose. . . . These reformers . . . hope to redeem the world by a sort of dilettanti process, to purge off its grossness, to make a political paradise in which hard work shall become easy, dirty things clean, and a churl a churl no longer." — George B. Cheever, "Characteristics of the Christian Phi- losopher," The Dartmouth (1844), p. 67. The entire letter is quoted in Appendix D of Ro- nald V. Wells's Three Christian Transcenden- talists . . . (N.Y., 1943), pp. 163-68. 684. After graduating from Harvard in 1815 and remaining three years in the Divinity School, he was ordained on June 23, 1819, as the minister of the church at Watertown, Mass., where he remained for twenty-three years. In 1842 he succeeded the Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., as Parkman Professor of Pulpit Eloquence and Pastoral Care at Harvard, and held that office until his death in 1863. 685. By 1835 he had read Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, Berger's Einleitung in das neue Testament, De Wette, Ilgen, Eckermann, Bauer, Corrodi, and other Germans. The Catalogue of a Portion of the Libraries of the Rev. Conveys Francis and His Sister (Boston, 1887) includes titles (many of them in translation) of such writers as Neander, Tennemann, Fichte, De Wette, Niebuhr, Ramdohr, Humboldt, Ranke, Lessing, Tauler, Luther, Melanchthon, Hutton, and Diirer. The more recent German theologi- ual writers of the Tubingen School are conspic- cously absent. See Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc. (1863), p. 6; ibid. (1866), p. 242; Odell Shepard, Pedlar's Progress . . . (Boston, 1937), p. 260; Clarence Gohdes, op. cit., p. 78, n.; and O. B. Frothingham, Boston Unitarianism, 1820-1850 (N.Y., 1890), p. 186. 686. H. S. Commager, Theodore Parker (Bos- ton, 1936), pp. 24-25; H. C. Goddard, op. cit., pp. 85-86; O. B. Frothingham, Transcenden- talism in New England, pp. 353-54. 687. See John Weiss, Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Convers Francis (Cambridge, Mass., 1863), p. 28; H. S. Commager, op. cit., p. 71. Francis' article on Reinhard's Life and Writings for the Christian Examiner (XIII, ii [Jan., 1833], 364-86) included a serious discus- sion of the claims of German theology and left little doubt about his position. His contribu- tions to the strongly pro-Transcendentalist organ, the Western Messenger (see II [1837], 340) re-enforced it. 688. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England, pp. 345-54; Frothingham, Bos- ton Unitarianism, pp. 186-87; Gohdes, op. cit., pp. 40, 223. 689. The son of Levi Hedge, Professor of Logic, Ethics, and Metaphysics at Harvard from 1810 to 1832, he received his early educa- tion from his father and a tutor, young George Bancroft, so that he was ready for college at the age of twelve. Being too young to enter Harvard, but having shown a marked aptitude for acquiring foreign languages, he was sent in 1818 to Germany, in charge of Bancroft, him- self only eighteen at the time. The latter had just graduated from Harvard College and in- tended to complete his education at Gottingen. In Germany, young Hedge studied for four years in various Gymnasia, chiefly at Schul- pforta under the celebrated teacher David Ilgen. Although he later expressed the belief that as a foreigner in Germany he had been too much indulged and left too much to his own devices, so that he might have made better progress if he had stayed at home, he seems, nevertheless, to have made substantial acquisitions. In 1S22, he returned to enter Harvard with advanced 582 Notes to Pages 144—46 standing. Immediately after his graduation in 1825, President Kirkland offered him an in- structorship in German, which the young man declined in favor of three years in the Divinity School, where he began his friendship with Emerson, another divinity student. On May 20, 1829, he was ordained at West Cambridge (now Arlington), Mass., Emerson having been or- dained two weeks earlier. Hedge served as Unitarian minister at West Cambridge, 1829- 1835; Bangor, Me., 1835-1850; Providence, R.I., 1850-1856; Brookline, Mass., 1856-1872. He was editor of the Christian Examiner, 1857- 1861 ; President of the American Unitarian Association, 1 859-1 862; Professor of Ecclesias- tical History in the Harvard Divinity School, 1857-1876; especially appointed instructor in ecclesiastical history for the year 1877-1878; and Professor of German Literature in Harvard College from 1872 until his retirement in 1882. He continued to live in Cambridge until his death in 1890. 690. The Harvard-Gottingen men, except for some minor excursions into philosophy and some attention to theology, had concentrated their efforts on philological matters, so that the knowledge which they brought back with them regarding German critical transcendentalism was relatively slight. On the other hand, Hedge, when he stood in 1870 before a group of Ger- mans assembled in Faneuil Hall, Boston, could truthfully say, "I am a German by intellectual descent. . . . Germany is the fatherland of my mind. It was there I first drew the breath of intellectual life [and] . . . imbibed my first ideas of poetry and philosophy." — Index, I, xxxv (Aug. 27, 1870), pp. 2-3. 691. George Ripley and George Bradford, "Philosophical Thought in Boston," in Winsor's Memorial History of Boston, IV, 307; Nation, LI, mcccxiii (Aug. 28, 1890), 165. T. W. Hig- ginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, 1884), p. 44; John W. Chadwick, Theodore Parker, p. 82 ; Emerson's Journals, IV, 235 ; V, 206. 692. On December 22, 1833, writing to his brother William, Emerson said: "Henry Hedge is an unfolding man who has just written the best pieces that have appeared in the Examiner and one especially was a living leaping Logos, & he may help me." — Letters, I, 402; see also ibid., I, 29—30; Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, I, 25; II, 165, 170-71; and J. E. Cabot, Memoir .... I, 216. The articles referred to are on Coleridge (Christian Exam., XIV [Mar., 1833], 108-29) and on Swedenborg (ibid., XV [Nov., 1833], 193-218). See further, O. W. Long, Frederick Henry Hedge. A Cosmopolitan Scholar [Portland, Me., 1940), pp. 18-24, 3 I_ 4^- 693. See Hedge's circumstantial letter of February 1, 1877, to Mrs. Caroline Dall, in answer to her inquiry regarding his early asso- ciation with the Transcendentalists, in Caroline Healey Dall, Transcendentalism in New Eng- land: A Lecture Delivered before the Society of Philosophical Enquiry, Washington, D.C., May 7, 1895 (Boston, 1897), pp. 14-17. 694. Christian Exam., XIV, i (Mar., 1833), 109-1 1. 695. Ibid., p. 119. 696. Ibid., pp. 120-21. 697. Ibid., p. 123. In calling attention to the primarily critical aspect of Kant's work, he was the first to correct the false emphasis upon the practical aspect of Kant's thought to which Coleridge and Carlyle led Americans to attach a disproportionate importance. Fourteen years later, in his Prose Writers of Germany, Hedge again carefully distinguished between Kant as the founder of the critical method and his fol- lowers as promulgators of the transcendental philosophy. 698. Ibid., pp. 120-21. While "interior con- sciousness" is called by Hedge "a free intui- tion" that "can only be attained by a vigorous effort of the will," he is careful to point out that it is "distinguished from the common con- sciousness by its being an active and not a passive state" (ibid., p. 119). It has nothing to do with intuitive divination. 699. "When this step is accomplished, the system is complete, the hypothetical frame- work may then fall, and the structure will support itself." This, adds Hedge, is "the ideal of the method proposed; we are by no means prepared to say that this ideal has been achieved, or that it can be achieved." — Ibid., p. 121. 700. "In him intellectual philosophy is more ripe, more substantial, more promising, and if we may apply the term to such speculation, more practical than any of the others" (p. 125). Hedge's translation of Schelling's first Berlin lecture, in the Dial for January, 1843 (III, iii, 398-404), is another indication of his preference for Schelling. 701. In concluding his essay, Hedge mentions Hegel, Oken, Fries, Reinhold, Krug, and Platt- ner, but of them (he adds) "our information would not enable us to say much, and our limits forbid us to say any thing" (p. 125). 702. "In theology this method has been most conspicuous. We are indebted to it for that dauntless spirit of inquiry which has inves- tigated, and for that amazing erudition which has illustrated, every corner of biblical lore. Twice it has saved the religion of Germany, — once from the extreme fanatic extravagance, and again, from the verge of speculative infidel- Notes to Page 147 583 ity. But, though most conspicuous in theology, this influence has been visible in every depart- ment of intellectual exertion to which the Germans have applied themselves for the last thirty years. It has characterized every science and each art, and all bear witness to its quick- ening power. A philosophy which has given such an impulse to mental culture and scien- tific research, which has done so much to estab- lish and to extend the spiritual in man, and the ideal in nature, needs no apology ; it commends itself by its fruits, it lives in its fruits, and must ever live" (pp. 126-27). 703. He regarded Schopenhauer as a much truer continuator of Kant than Hegel, whom he regarded always something of a charlatan. See "Frederick Henry Hedge," Nation, LI, mcccxii (Aug. 28, 1890), 166. W. T. Harris credited Hedge with being the first to make the Ameri- can public acquainted with Schopenhauer, through his essays in the Christian Examiner. See Journal of Speculative Philosophy , XI, i (Jan., 1877), I0 7- 704. Averse to identifying himself positively with any party, and opposed to purely specula- tive philosophy, he was never a systematic philosopher. His importance as an intellectual force upon the minds of his associates was con- sequently all the greater, for they agreed with him in depreciating all pure speculation and dialectics as so much jargon. If his had been a profoundly technical system, his effectiveness among them could hardly have been as potent as it was. Instead, he brought them an atmos- phere, a philosophical attitude, a Weltanschau- ung, expressed more in terms of tendencies and significances than technical details, with only as much of abstruse foundations as their under- standing seemed to demand, and no more. See J. H. Allen, "Memory of Dr. Hedge," Unitarian Rev., XXXIV (Sept., 1890), 269. As editor of the Christian Examiner, he espoused no cause and was frankly intolerant of all attempts to organize Unitarian societies into large associations. As a professor in the Divinity School, he objected to the audacities of the western Unitarians, but himself compla- cently doubted personal immortality while cheerfully relegating the entire realm of nature to the devil. He was cautious about accepting the theory of evolution, but was often bold, even rash, in his own speculations. The Unita- rians of the old school never liked his insistence that in the old Arian controversy Athanasius was more nearly right than Arius. His sermon in 1864, before the graduating class of the Divinity School, on "Anti-Supernaturalism in the Pulpit" was hailed with a tumult of acclaim by the conservatives, but it requires little effort to find in his own writings striking examples of the tendency which, on that occa- sion, he so much deplored. Like Emerson, he felt no need to be always consistent ; and when, on one occasion, he was told that the facts were against him, he replied, "So much the worse for the facts." — Cyrus A. Bartol, Radical Problems, p. 70. While this general independence of mind occasioned an awkward sort of unpredict- ability regarding what he might do or say in any given situation, and while it led sometimes to startling and even annoying results, it led, also, to his exerting an influence on several factions. It may also explain why he was not a really vigorous leader in any one of them. 705. In metaphysics fundamentally a fol- lower of Kant, he modelled his religion more closely after that of Schleiermacher, the influ- ence of whose doctrines is most readily discern- ible, from introduction to conclusion, in his Reason in Religion (1865). 706. In the Dudleian lecture delivered at Harvard in 185 1 on the subject of "Natural Religion" (partially printed in the Christ. Exam. for Jan., 1852), he took the position that all religious truth is properly revealed, that it belongs to a higher power than understanding, and that it derives its original life from revela- tion. But what constitutes the most striking part of the discourse is his criticism of the common argument of the existence of God from instances of design in the universe. It is worth- less as "proof," for in all such reasoning we carry with us the idea of God already existing in our mind and in no way dependent on the instances of design. This argument establishes nothing more than "the wonderful mechani- cian, the unfathomable artist." "What religion wants and declares is a Father in Heaven, a moral governor and judge of the rational world. Of this God the natural proofs are our own consciousness, our moral instincts, and the universal account of mankind" (LII, 131-33). 707. Yet the frequency with which the book was reprinted indicates something of its impor- tance for later generations. Published originally by Carey and Hart in Philadelphia, in 1847, it was reprinted in 1848; it went into a second edition in 1849, and a third, published by C. S. Francis of New York, in 1855. A new edition, revised and enlarged, was supplied by Potter and Coates, Philadelphia, 1870. In view of these data and the fact that the 567 finely printed, double-columned pages contained eleven pages of translations from Kant's Critique of Judg- ment and Concerning Eternal Peace, twenty from Fichte's Destination of Man, twelve from Schelling's lecture On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature, ten from Hegel's Philosophy of 584 Notes to Pages 147-49 History, and seventeen from F. Schlegel's Phi- losophy of History (not counting biographical and critical sketches), to say nothing of extracts from the aesthetical writings of Lessing, Men- delssohn, Wieland, Herder, Schiller, and A. W. Schlegel and the more popular or less techni- cally philosophical writings of Boehme, Moser, Lavater, Jacobi, and Novalis — in view of these facts, it seems unwarrantable to dismiss this book as of no philosophical significance because it contained "nothing philosophic except Fich- te's Destiny of Man." See Ren6 Wellek, "The Minor Transcendentalists and German Philoso- phy," New Eng. Quar., XV, iv (Dec, 1942), 658. As first arousing Brokmeyer's interest in Hegel, it played a prominent part in generating the St. Louis School of Philosophy. 708. The selections from Kant's Critique of Judgment and Concerning Eternal Peace are by J. E. Cabot, only the six-page translation of the "Supposed Beginning of the History of Man" being by Hedge himself, while all but two of the twelve pages devoted to Hegel are the work of an anonymous "friend" (the Rev. Henry B. Smith). For the selections from the more dis- tinctively literary figures, Hedge drew heavily upon Carlyle's German Romance. The transla- tions from Schiller, however, are by John Weiss ; the Titan of Jean Paul, by C. T. Brooks; Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften, by George Bradford; Schleiermacher's Church and Priest- hood, by George Ripley; and Schelling's Rela- tion of the Plastic Arts to Nature, by J. E. Cabot. 709. Several of the latter Emerson thought good enough to publish in the Dial (I, iii [Jan., 1841], 290-91). One, entitled "Questionings, or The Idealists," written about 1834, is also preserved in Emerson's Parnassus (1875). 710. Jour, of Speculative Philos., XV, i (Jan., 1881), 77; F. B. Sanborn (ed.). The Genius and Character of Emerson . . . (Boston, 1884), p. xv. 711. Luther's "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott" received its classic expression in English from him. For his other translations, see O. W. Long, Hedge, pp. 23, 28-31. 712. This work, based on his Harvard lec- tures, has been rated as more finished than James K. Hosmer's Short History of German Literature (1879) or Bayard Taylor's academic lectures collected as Studies in German Litera- ture (1879). It was "the most complete treat- ment of German literature up to that time." — Long, op. cit., p. 44. 713. His religious opinions are elaborated chiefly in Recent Inquiries in Theology (i860), Reason in Religion (1866), The Primeval World in Hebrew Tradition (1870), Ways of the Spirit and Other Essays (1877), Personality and Theism (1887), and Martin Luther and Other Essays (1888). His philosophical opinions are best studied in Atheism in Philosophy and Other Essays (1884). This volume reproduces his es- say on Kant, another on Leibnitz (originally printed in the Atlantic Monthly for June, 1858), and an extended version of his essay on Scho- penhauer, originally published in the Christian Examiner for January, 1864. His translation of Leibnitz' Monadology appeared in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for July, 1867 (I, iii, 129-36). An interesting sidelight regarding Hedge is provided by Harris' printing in the same journal for January, 1877 (XI, i, 107-8), twenty-eight questions bearing on Kant, Scho- penhauer, and Hartmann which he selected from a list of questions prepared by Hedge as University Examiner at Harvard. See DAB for other titles. 714. Henry D. Gray, op. cit., p. 17. 715. Sermon on "The Philosophy of Man's Spiritual Nature in Regard to the Foundations of Faith," published in the Christian Examiner in 1834, reprinted the same year as tract No. 87 of the American Unitarian Association, and finally republished in his volume of sermons, Reason, Faith and Duty (1876). 716. Yet in his capacity as Alford Professor of Moral Philosophy at Harvard he conscien- tiously read the German philosophers from Kant through Hegel, as well as Cousin and Jouffroy. He never entered fully into the spirit of tran- scendental philosophy, nor found in it the spir- itual element he sought, but contented himself by combining common-sense rationalism with a simple piety and a lofty ethical tone. For him, as for Channing, philosophy served mainly as a basis for religion. Schleiermacher and De Wette were, therefore, more to his liking than Kant and Hegel. Though a theological liberal, he was temperamentally conservative and cautious; he kept clear of reform agitations, considered Theodore Parker a "phenomenon," and made it his practice, as he said, never to preach about anything until after people in the omnibus had stopped talking about it. 717. O. B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England, pp. 120-22. 718. For convenience of reference, the names are arranged alphabetically, and dates are added. Further details regarding their position are given below. Consult the index. Of the men named, the Congregationalists Hodge and Porter and the Baptist Sears studied in German universities, and several others traveled in Germany. 719. Despite Ware's fulminations against the German theologians on other occasions, he wrote, on February 22, 1829, to Wm. Barry, then studying in Germany: "Your opportunities for Notes to Pages 150-51 585 study are truly enviable .... It might almost make one sigh to think of your listening to Blumenbach and Heeren, (of whom we hear so much, but are condemned to know nothing personally,) and perfecting yourself in a lan- guage which is to be the key to many stores of delightful literature and sound learning, to which we have no access. " — John Ware, Memoir of . . . Henry Ware, Jr. (2 vols, in 1, new ed., Boston, 1854), p. 22. 720. A member of the class of 1804, he pur- sued graduate studies for four years longer, became a tutor in 181 1, librarian and lecturer in 1813, and professor in 1819. After his resigna- tion in 1830, he remained in Cambridge, infor- mally yet closely identified with the Divinity School until his death in 1853. 721. To be listed are (1) A Statement of Reasons for Not Believing the Doctrines of Trini- tarians (Boston, 1833); (2) the several pam- phlets which he contributed to the controversy over the "latest form of infidelity"; (3) The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels (3 vols., Boston, 1837-1844; 2nd ed., 3 vols., 1846-1848; 3rd ed., abridged, ed. by C. E. Nor- ton, 1 vol. 1867); (4) a collection of essays and discourses entitled Tracts on Christianity (Bos- ton, 1852); (5) The Internal Evidences of the Gospels . . . with Particular Reference to Strauss' "Life of Jesus" (2 pts. in 1 vol., ed. by C. E. Norton, 1856, preface, 1855) ; and (6) A Trans- lation of the Gospels with Notes (ed. by C. E. Norton, 2 vols., Boston, 1856). 722. Preface to 2nd ed. (Boston, 1846-1848), I, v. Except where otherwise indicated, all references to the Evidences are to the third edi- tion, abridged, readily available for reference to- day. This abridged edition presents (pp. vii-viii) a "List of the Principal Omissions in the Present Edition," the most important for our purpose being Note A (pp. iii-xxxiv in the 1st ed). It contains an elaborate analysis of Griesbach (pp. iv-x, xviii-xxi, xxiii-xxiv, xxix-xxxiv), as well as discussions of Eichhorn (pp. xi, xxiv-xxv), Scholz (pp. xi, xxxi), Semler (p. xii), Bertholdt (pp. xix-xx), and Hug (pp. xxiv-xxv). All these passages (says Norton, in the 2nd ed., I, v) were omitted in later editions because they consist "principally of statements and arguments, which, having been once made, it is not worth while to repeat, because they concern errors of the day, that have not their origin in any essen- tial or permanent aspect of the subject to which they relate." They are of interest to us only as indicating the extent of Norton's familiarity with the German writers named. 723. They include Baur (pp. 180—82); Eich- horn (pp. 2, 5-10, 24-27, 36-37, 52-55, 60-67, 388-89, 488-91, 499, 501-2, 507, 545, 548, 560, 566-67) ; Gieseler (p. 546) ; Griesbach (pp. 45, 129, 421, 425, 444); Hahn(pp. 178, 341); Hegel (pp. 180-81) ; Less (p. 3) ; Michaelis (pp. 60, 490) ; Mosheim (p. 281) ; Neander (p. 546) ; Olshausen (p. 546); Postel (pp. 370-74); Scholz (pp. 19- 23); Semler (pp. 30, 546); Strauss (pp. 149, 379); Stroth (p. 115); Tennemann (p. 182); Wetstein (pp. 450, 456) ; Wegschneider (p. 178). 724. While it does not follow that Norton had before him the books of all the Germans whom he cited or quoted (for he doubtless relied on secondary sources in some instances), there can be no doubt that he had the originals of the majority named on his desk as he wrote, for many of them were not available at the time in either translation or digest. Moreover, in the first part of the Internal Evidences, which he devoted to an examination and criticism of the myth theory of Strauss, and where he had an English translation of Das Leben Jesu, he often printed passages both in the original and in a translation of his own because he found the existing English version inaccurate or mislead- ing (see pp. 150, 153-54, 54 6 > n -)- Part I. de- voted to taking "particular notice of the late attacks of the infidel theologians of Germany on the credibility of the Gospels" (p. 5), presents the negative part of his argument, directed chiefly against Strauss "as a representative of the class" (p. 7). Others, including Muller (pp. 22-23), Hegel (pp. 54-55, 155), Paulus (p. 101), and Schelling (p. 155), receive their share of Norton's censure for having promulgated a "false philosophy" that has not only "unsettled all just notions of the political relations of men, but, through its irreligion and demoralizing character, done very much to destroy ... all right conceptions of our duties" (p. 177). The notes which accompany the second volume of his Translation of the Gospels cite besides classical, English, and French exegetes, the German reference works of Wetstein (pp. 60, 74, 77, 80, 153, 250, 315, 385), Schoettgen (pp. 71-86), Schleissner (p. 88), Winer (pp. 89, 223, 469), Gesenius (p. 89), Hengstenberg (p. 319), and Buxtorf (p. 469). 725. I, i (Jan., 1839), 87. 726. Ibid., pp. 87, 104-12. 727. As one example among many, see the tolerant view expressed by Charles A. Aiken of Andover in his essay on "The Comparative Value of English and German Biblical Science" in Bibliotheca Sacra, XI, xli (Jan., 1854), 67-86. 58G Notes to Pages 153-54 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST WRITERS RALPH WALDO EMERSON 1. See his statements: (i) "I cannot myself use that systematic form which is reckoned es- sential in treating the science of the mind" (Works, Centenary ed., XII, n); (2) "I confess to a little distrust of that completeness of sys- tem which metaphysicians are apt to affect. 'Tis the gnat grasping the world" (ibid., XII, 120); (3) "The moment it [philosophy] would appear as propositions and have a separate value, it is worthless" (II, 329); (4) "I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back" (II, 318) ; (5) "I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me" (III, 83); (6) Emerson's letter to the Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., Oct. 8, 1838: "I have always been, from my very incapacity of methodical think- ing, 'a chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to rail .... I could not possibly give an account of myself, if challenged. I could not possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands. For I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men." This reply to Ware was obviously designed chiefly to disarm the opposition and to forestall the possibility of a sharp theological debate (for which Emer- son had no relish, and in which he would inevi- tably have been worsted by better theoretical theologians than he ever hoped to be) ; yet it seems clear that Emerson did indeed lack the discipline of a strict metaphysician. 2. Charles J. Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (N.Y., 1890), p. 60. 3. Emerson's confessions, or boasts, of in- consistency and formlessness gave rise to a judgment which became traditional, namely, that he was unable to think consecutively. See, for example, Lowell's essay on "Emerson the Lecturer"; the biographies by O.W. Holmes (Boston, 1885), p. 390; Geo. E. Woodberry (N.Y., 1907), p. 176; Richard Garnett (London, 1888), p. 93; and the more recent views ex- pressed by Van Wyck Brooks (America' s Com- ing of Age, N.Y., 1915, pp. 70-75), Henry S. Canby (Classic Americans, N.Y., 1931, pp. 150- 51), V. F. Calverton The Liberation of American Literature, N.Y., 1932, pp. 254, 255, 261, 270), and Ludwig Lewisohn (Expression in America, N.Y., 1932, pp. 1 1 7-19). On the other hand, for statements of Emerson's fundamental consist- ency, see Horace Mann (quoted in Moncure D. Conway's Emerson at Home and Abroad, Bos- ton, 1882, p. 149), Edwin D. Mead (in F. B. Sanborn's Genius and Character of Emerson, Boston, 1885, p. 236), S. Law Wilson (The Theory of Modern Literature, Edinburgh, 1899, p. 105), John Dewey (Internat'l. Jour, of Ethics, XIII [1903], 405), Hugo Miinsterberg (Harvard Psychology Studies, II, 17), P. E. More (Shel- burne Essays, First Series, Boston, 1904, pp. 73-74), and O. W. Firkins (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston, 1914, p. 299). See, further, Emerson's statement immedi- ately following his denial of the ability to use "that systematic form which is reckoned es- sential in treating the science of the mind": "But if one can say so without arrogance, I might suggest that he who contents himself with dotting a fragmentary curve, recording only what facts he has observed, without at- tempting to arrange them within one outline, follows a system also, — a system as grand as any other, though he does not interfere with its vast curves by prematurely forcing them into a circle or ellipse, but only draws that arc which he clearly sees, or perhaps at a later ob- servation a remote curve of the same orbit, and waits for a new opportunity, well assured that these observed curves will consist with each other .... Metaphysics is dangerous as a single pursuit .... The inward analysis must be cor- rected by roughest experience. Metaphysics must be perpetually reinforced by life .... I think metaphysics a grammar to which, once read, we seldom return . . . and I want only a teaspoonful in a year .... My metaphysics are to the end of use." — Works, XII, 11-13. 4. J. E. Cabot, Memoir, I, 329. 5. Journals, VI, 26 (Aug. 22, 1841); see also Works, I, 410-11. 6. Sweeping as Emerson's profession of in- debtedness to Platonism appears to be (notably in the essay on Plato), a perusal of others of Emerson's statements illustrates the fact that there are others to whom he made much the same acknowledgment. As a lecturer he often allowed himself the luxury of overstatement for the sake of emphasis. His various utterances on Goethe, for example, or on Shakespeare are hardly less laudatory; while the essay on Swe- denborg, or that on Montaigne, if taken by it- self, might lead the reader to the conclusion that the chief influence on Emerson was ex- erted either by the mystical Swedenborg or by the skeptical Montaigne — an inference that would be very wide the mark. 7. For indications of how easily these influ- ences lend themselves to overstatement, see Notes to Pages 154-55 587 Isaac T. Hecker, "Two Prophets of This Age," Catholic World, XLVII (1888), 684, and Geo. W. Cooke, An Historical and Biographical Intro- duction to Accompany the Dial, I, 1-12. 8. Journals, IV, 256 (July 19, 1837) ; see also VII, 69-70 (1845)- 9. Works, III, 233. 10. Cabot, Memoir, I, 289, 290-91. 11. Journals, IV, 286. 12. Ibid, VII, 329 (Sept., 1847). 13. That he considered the tradition of books noble requires no further substantiation than a perusal of the essay on "Books." Holmes's col- lation (based on the published writings of Emer- son) of 3,393 named references, relating to 868 different authors, is indicative of the regard in which Emerson held books (Holmes's Writings, Riverside ed., 14 vols., Boston & N.Y., 1906, XI, 295). If to these are added those found in the Journals and in writings of Emerson that have appeared since Holmes made his count, the first number would easily be quadrupled, and the latter doubled. This revised count (as made in this study) shows that some names (Napoleon, for instance) should be moved down, while others (Luther, Milton, Goethe, Carlyle, and Coleridge, for example) should be moved up in the scale. 14. Journals, VIII, 528 (Feb. 25, 1855); see also II, 249 (1830); IV, 8 (Jan. 24, 1836); and O. B. Frothingham, George Ripley (Boston, 1882), pp. 266-68. 15. Journals, VIII, 528 (Feb. 28, 1855). "Only the inventor . . . knows how to borrow," he wrote in his Journal, III, 143 (Dec. 24, 1834). A good key to the Emersonian workshop is fur- nished by the essay on "Quotation and Origi- nality," where he says, among other things: "Original power is usually accompanied by as- similative power, and we value in Coleridge his excellent knowledge and quotation perhaps as much, possibly more, than his original sugges- tions .... Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it ... . Genius borrows nobly .... The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship. It never troubles the simple seeker from whom he derived such and such a senti- ment." And to illustrate his point, he quoted someone without attribution, on quotation: "It is," he added, "no more according to Plato than according to me." — Works, VIII, 190-93; see also Journals, X, 218-22. 16. Journals, II, 441. "Whoever expresses to us a just thought," said Emerson, "makes ridic- ulous the pains of the critic who should tell him where such a word has been said before" ( Works, VIII, 192). Critics and scholars alike were some- times cavalierly handled by Emerson. The scholar, he said, has often to run to his books for the answer to the simplest question (Jour- nals, III, 557), and the critic too often bores into books merely that he may bore (V, 562). Yet questions regarding sources and origins troubled him : the idea of being dependent at all was a disquieting thought. Twenty years after he published Nature, he set down in his journal what seems to have given him some satisfac- tion: "My son is coming to get his Latin lessons without me. My son is coming to do without me. And I am coming to do without Plato, or Goethe, or Alcott." — Journals, IX, 37 (1856). 17. Ibid., II, 447 (Jan. 9, 1832); see also III, 418-19 (Dec. 28, 1834), X, 382 (1872), and esp. Cabot, Memoir, I, 290-91, for Emerson's in- difference to the relative antiquity or modernity of a truth. 18. Journals, IV, 23-24 (Mar. 14, 1936). Charges of plagiarism he was inclined to mini- mize or ignore altogether, saying, "The very plagiarism to which scholars incline (and it is often hard to acknowledge a debt) arises out of the community of Mind."— /fo'rf., IV, 131 (Oct. 29, 1836). See also III, 363, and IV, 171. 19. "He borrowed from everybody and every book," wrote his friend Holmes, "not in any stealthy or shamefaced way, but proudly, roy- ally, as a king borrows from one of his attend- ants the coin that bears his own image and superscription. "—Holmes, Emerson, p. 221. This observation harmonizes with Emerson's own statement: "Rather let me be 'a pagan suckled in a creed outworn' than cowardly deny and conceal one particle of my debt to Greek art, or poetry, or virtue. Certainly I would my debt were more, but it is my fault, not theirs, if 't is little." — Journals, III, 418-19 (Dec. 28, 1834); see also III, 381, and IV, 189- 90. 20. "This book," he wrote in January, 1834, "is my Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corre- sponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition." — Journals, III, 246. 21. Let him who doubts this compare care- fully Carlyle's "Novalis" with Emerson's Na- ture. 22. Journals, II, 515 (Oct. 1, 1832). 23. A sane treatment of the subject "Emer- son and Quakerism" is by Prof. F. B. Tolles, Amer. Lit., X, ii (May, 1938), 142-65. 24. The authority for the statement rests chiefly upon the evidence of the Rev. David Greene Haskins (Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Maternal Ancestors, with Some Reminiscences of Him, Boston, 1886, p. 48), to whom, because 588 Notes to Pages 155-56 Haskins insisted upon Emerson's denning his religious position, Emerson reputedly made the remark. What easier way out of such prying questions and unwelcome demands (behind which Emerson's experience taught him lurked further demands for "arguments" and "reasons" for his beliefs) than to say simply, "I am more of a Quaker than anything else. I believe in the 'still, small voice,' and that voice is the Christ within us." One remembers that he had put off Henry Ware's questions in the same way. 25 That Emerson read Fox and that he maintained cordial relations with a number of Quakers at various times the diaries and letters of Emerson show ; but he steered clear of sub- scribing to Quakerism or of identifying himself with the sect. Quakerism, like Catholicism, both attracted and repulsed him. In "The Problem," Emerson professed to be allured by the vest of the cowled churchman, but he could not have endured it on himself. Just as his innate Prot- estantism prevented his acceptance of Catho- licism, so his inbred Puritanism and ingrained Unitarianism found something Quakerish in Quakerism that he could not accept. Zealotry and fanaticism were popularly identified in New England tradition with the disciples of J ohn Fox, and it will be recalled that during the period of his struggle to come to terms with himself and his congregation regarding certain rites and ceremonies, Emerson carefully searched himself to make sure he was not "sticking at gnats" and otherwise acting "Quakerish." When he finally came actively in contact with a family of Quak- ers at New Bedford, he commented at length on some of their customs, but concluded, as if it were a matter of surprise to him, "But many of them are excellent people." — Letters, ed. by R. L. Rusk (6 vols., N.Y., 1939), I, 400. See also his letter to Benjamin Peter Hunt, Jan. 23, 1835, in which Emerson asks, "Did you ever meet a wise Quaker? They are few." Although he gives these few credit for being "a sublime class of speculators," their religion is one which it is impossible to deny or confirm. He implies that he would prefer more certitude, such as can be found in "those laws of terrible beauty which took the soul of Newton and Laplace and Humboldt." — Letters, I, 433. The implications in these comments are fairly obvious and should be borne in mind, for it is easy to mistake mere coincidences for influences. 26. Journals, V, 484. 27. H. D. Gray, Emerson. A Statement of New England Transcendentalism as Expressed in the Philosophy of Its Chief Exponent (Stanford Univ., 1917), p. 32. 28. Journals, X, 300. 29. See Merrell R. Davis, "Emerson's 'Rea- son' and the Scottish Philosophers," New Eng- land Quar., XVII, iii (June, 1944), 209-28. 30. For instance, his brilliant essay on the "Over-Soul" — suggesting, as it does wonderful reaches or insights into the truth to those who have had inspirational experiences or illumina- tions like Emerson's own, but suggesting little to all those who have not had them — becomes essentially a restatement of the mystic's creed. It identifies Emerson's search for reality with the unexplained and undemonstrable assump- tion of all mysticism, namely, that the soul perceives truth because it is part of the all- knowing Reality. "How," asked Emerson, in his faltering philosophical way, "can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act ? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its vision is not like the vision of the eye, but is union with the things known" {Works, II, 325), whence follows, in Words- worth's words, "that serene and blessed mood" by which we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul : While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. See also the following passages from the "Over- Soul" (Works, II, 269-74, 2 79) : "Within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the uni- versal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beati- tude is all accessible to us, is not only self-suf- ficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom ... by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is in- nate in every man, we can know what it saith .... All goes to show that the soul of man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all organs ; is not a function, like the power of mem- ory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the back- ground of our being, in which they lie; — an im- mensity possessed and that cannot be pos- sessed .... When it breathes through his intel- lect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affec- tion, it is love. And the blindness of the intel- Notes to Pages 157-60 589 lect begins when it would be something of it- self .... The soul circumscribes all things . . . it contradicts all experience ... it abolishes time and space .... Before the revelations of the soul, Time and Space and Nature shrink away .... The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her, leaving worlds be- hind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor per- sons, nor specialties nor men. The soul knows only the soul ; and the web of events is the flow- ing robe in which she is clothed .... The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth .... We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake." 31. "Emerson and Science," Philol.Quar., X, iii (July, 1931), 225-60. 32. It is significant that among his very first efforts at composition are two prize essays, one on Socrates and the other a survey of ethical philosophy, and that among his very latest pub- lished works (and he worked at it for more years than he did on any other of his writings) is his Natural History of Intellect. There are, moreover, numerous direct statements in which he sides with the scientist and the philosopher. Some of these will appear in the sequel. Here only one is cited. As early as December 30, 1826, writing to his brothers Charles and Ed- ward, he said what takes on added significance because he mentions Kant specifically: "It cannot be a matter of new speculation to you, — the effect of science on the bulk of mankind. That the effect of successful abstruse inquiries is minute, and for long periods, inappropriate is the burthen of many a sigh. But that in the end Jack and Gill [sic] are the better for the painful speculations of Leibnitz and Kant is equally undeniable." — Letters, I, 181. 33. "Plato," Works, IV, 47-48. 34. "Nature," Works, I, 66. 35. Already during his college days he was convinced that "of all sciences the science of the Mind is necessarily the most worthy and elevating." "But," he added, "it cannot pre- cede the others." — Journals, I, 59 (1820). 36. Works, I, 47-48. 37. "The uniform effect of culture on the human mind [is] not to shake our faith in the reality of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote ; but to lead us to regard nature as phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute nec- essary existence to spirit ; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect." — Works, I, 48-49. 38. Cabot (Memoir, II, 78) quotes a letter from Emerson to Margaret Fuller, in which Emerson recalls the joy with which "in my boyhood I caught the first hint of the Berke- leyan philosophy, and which I certainly never lost sight of afterwards." 39. Works, VIII, 223. 40. Ibid., p. 66. 41. For the years prior to the publication of Nature, the following Journal references, by years, indicate the insistence with which the problem of dualism engaged his mind: I (1820), 59-60, 63-64; (1822), 98-99> II2 > I2 7. 133. x 34. 147-48, 155-56, 164, 167-69, 183-84, 186-87, 188-90, 199; (1823), 209, 216, 221-22, 225-26, 228-29, 238-39, 250-52, 258, 290-91, 301, 312, 313, 324; (1824), 345, 348-49, 361, 378-79; II (1826), 104-5; ( I 827), 145, 159—60, 167-68, 173, 217, 223-24; (1828), 230-31, 237; (1829), 269, 273; (1830), 288, 290-91, 304, 310, 317, 320-21, 323, 324, 334, 338, 341, 342, 343-44, 347-5o; (1831), 357-58. 361. 362, 368, 404, 409, 414, 422, 4 2 5. 435. 438; (1832), 445, 478, 490-91; HI (1833), 13, 15, 163, 192-93. 196, 199-201, 207, 210, 212, 213, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 235-37; (1834), 253-54, 267-68, 272-73, 274, 275, 283' 284, 288, 290-97, 305-6, 307, 308-9, 310-n, 314. 3^3. 324. 326-27, 330, 341-42, 343, 349, 352, 353. 362, 377, 381, 388-90, 392, 393, 397- 98, 415, 416, 422-23; (1835), 452. 455. 467. 4 68 . 488,489-90,492,495,500, 512-14, 517,525-28, 529. 539; IV (1836), 12-14, 59-61, 65, 67-68, 71, 76, 78, 92-94, 115-19, 121, 126-29. 42. Journals, I, 209-1 1. See also II, 137-38 (Dec. 12, 1826). The origin of this conviction can be traced back in the Journals to July 13, 1822 (I, 162-63); see also I. 186-87 (Nov. 1, 1822). Even earlier, in his second Bowdoin prize essay, on "The Present State of Ethical Philosophy" (1821), he had declared: "Morality is constituted the rule by which the world must stand." — E. E. Hale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Together with Two Early Essays by Emerson (Boston, 1904), p. 133; see also pp. 132, 134, 135- 43. Journals, I, 78 (Mar. 14, 1821); see also I, 82. 44. See the references cited above. The more he contemplated the problem, the more he be- came convinced of its inscrutability, even to saying, "The Platonist . . . did not widely err who proclaimed the existence of two warring principles, the incorruptible mind, and the mass of malignant matter." — -Journals, I, 148 (June 10, 1822). 45. Journals, I, 155 (June, 1822). 46. Ibid., II, 178 (Mar. 11, 1827). 47. Ibid., p. 289 (Feb. 3, 1830); see also the earlier interchange of letters between himself and Aunt Mary, some of which are printed in Rusk's Life and Letters. 48. Journals, I, 290-91 (Oct., 1823), 361 (Apr. 18, 1824), 29 (1824); II, 124 (Oct., 1826), 298 (June 2, 1830), 456 (Jan. 26, 1832). 49. Ibid., II, 132 (1826), 191-94 (1827). 590 Notes to Pages 160-63 50. Ibid., pp. 155-56 (1827), 161 (1827), 183 (Apr. 6, 1827), 185-91 (1827). 51. The number in parentheses following the name indicates the number of references to be found in Emerson's Journals, Letters, and Works to writers with whom he occupied himself most intently chiefly during the twenties and thirties. The numbers are only approximately indicative of Emerson's interests, since no distinction in the count is made, in the case of Plato, for ex- ample, between a passing reference to him and a quotation from him, or between a passage of a page or two and a full-length essay like "Plato" in Representative Men. In view of the very incomplete indexes to the ten volumes of printed Journals and the twelve- volume Cen- tenary edition of his Works, it is unfortunate that space does not permit giving full volume and page references instead of these summary figures. I have on file the complete references and shall be glad, insofar as I may be able, to supply them to interested students of Emerson. These references are also recorded on the first manuscript draft of this book, deposited in the University of Wisconsin Library. Since these counts were made, Kenneth W. Cameron's genetic studies have appeared. His, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Reading (Raleigh, 1941) is especially suggestive in this connection. 52. For Emerson's relation to Swedenborg see the several studies by Clarence P. Hotson, conveniently located by referring to Lewis Leary, Articles on American Literature Appear- ing in Current Periodicals, IQ20-IQ45 (Durham, N.C., 1947), pp. 52-53. 53. Not specifically named. During the twen- ties Emerson's knowledge of German theologi- cal research was derived almost wholly from secondary sources. 54. See Journals, I, 188 (Nov. 16, 1822), 209- 11 (Jan. 11, 1823); II, 137 (Dec. 16, 1826). 55. Ibid., I, 78 (1821). 56. Ibid., p. 379 (May 2, 1824). There were times when he could say, "Plato, thou reason- est well, but Christ and his Apostles infinitely better, — not through thy fault, but through their inspiration," only to conclude, a little later: "We know that all speculation .... pushed to an extreme is inconclusive and idle, for the nature of matter, as of mind, is buried in inscrutable night, and that we are fools to fear Matter when we do not know that there is any such thing." — Ibid., pp. 382-83 (1824); II, 105 (June 15, 1826). 57. See, for example, ibid., II, 158-59 (Jan., 1827). 58. Ibid., p. 165 (Jan. 3 o[?], 1827). 59. Ibid., I, 360. 60. Ibid., p. 361 (Apr. 18, 1824). Far from being sure of his ground, he was nevertheless resolved to follow the overpowering inner urge to assume the ministry. Very probably the de- cision of his brother William (gone to study theology in Germany) to forsake divinity and thus reject the family calling, even against the advice of Goethe (who had counseled him to master his scruples rather than disappoint the hopes of his family) — very probably this cir- cumstance strengthened his determination to study divinity. Certainly his family, his mother most of all, would be disappointed if not one of her sons followed the traditional calling. Although there is no reference to the effect in the early journals, we cannot be far wrong in surmising that the practical and worldly ad- vice of the old Goethe to William Emerson struck his younger, intensely idealistically- minded brother Waldo forcibly and unfavor- ably. This first disappointment in Goethe as a moralist was recalled later when he undertook to read Goethe's works; it predisposed him to accord Goethe only his "qualified admiration." ■ — See Letters, I, 160-62, where are printed por- tions of William's account of his visit to Goethe in 1824. 61. Journals, II, 158-59 (Jan., 1827). Ob- viously neither Scottish common sense nor Pla- tonic idealism was adequate for his purposes. 62. Ibid., p. 162. 63. Ibid., p. 166. 64. Ibid., p. 167 (Feb. 16, 1827). 65. Ibid., p. 173 (Feb., 1827); see also pp. 201-2 (May 5, 1827), 217 (Oct., 1827), 223-24 (Dec. 17, 1827), and so forth. 66. It is doubtful, for example, whether Emerson, after he had caught the light from Coleridge and Kant, would have been able to "love and honour" Prince Napoleon Achille Murat, "the intrepid doubter" and "consistent Atheist," as frankly and sincerely as he did in 1827, or allowed his arguments to go unchal- lenged. 67. Journals, I, 83; II, 129, 164; Letters, I, 104. 68. Letters, I, 149 (Sept. 12, 1824). 69. Ibid., pp. 154-55 (Nov. 20, 1824). 70. Ibid., pp. 149-50 (Sept. 12, 1824). 71. Ibid., p. 152. 72. Ibid., pp. 76, 78, 84; VI, 254-57; Works, X, 33°-35- 73. Letters, I, 84, 114, 127, 134, 135. 74. Ibid., p. 306 (Mar., 1819). 75. That is, all but the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality." See Journals, II, 105-10 (June 30, 1826). The very interesting manner in which Emerson proceeded from a critical, sometimes almost abusive, attitude to a sincere apprecia- tion of Wordsworth can be studied by referring Notes to Pages 163-66 591 to the indexes of the Journals, Letters, and Works; see also Townsend Scudder, The Lonely Wayfaring Man (London and N.Y., 1936), pp. 29-30; C. J. Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Wal- do Emerson (London, 1890), pp. 44-46; and Cameron, op. cit., pp. 50 (1828), 39 (1858), 40 (1869), 42 (1872). 76. Although Emerson had withdrawn Bio- graphia Literaria from the Harvard Library as early as November 16, 1826 (Cameron, op. cit,. p. 46), the Aids to Reflection is first mentioned in the Journals on October 9, 1829. See also Letters, I, 291 (Jan. 4, 1830), where Emerson speaks of reading "Coleridge's Friend — with great inter- est; Coleridge's 'Aids to Reflection' with yet deeper; Degerando, Hist. Compared des Sys- temes de Philosophic, I am beginning on the best recommendation." 77. Journals, II, 278-79 (Dec. 13, 1829). 78. The question which may be raised at this point regarding whether Plato taught a dualis- tic or monistic philosophy is beside the point; for Emerson, following Thomas Taylor's trans- lation and more particularly the interpretation as given by Plotinus and Proclus, interpreted Plato through their eyes and regarded his philos- ophy as plainly dualistic. On this point Emer- son's direct statements, made at the time under consideration, leave no doubt, however he came to interpret Plato in later years. To be sure, Jowett's translation (1871) came to his shelves, but too late to wield any considerable influence. 79. Emerson's turn from Platonic to German idealism is here referred to as a repudiation of Platonism, even in the face of the impassioned gratulation accorded to Plato in the essay on Plato in Representative Men (written ca. 1846), where Plato is made synonymous with philos- ophy, and philosophy with Plato {Works, IV, 40) . But this discourse is the product of Emerson the lecturer, in which capacity he often allowed himself the luxury of superlatives for the sake of emphasis. Moreover, Representative Men was produced at a time when Emerson had, indeed, turned back from Kant to Plato (see below). Consider also the essay on Swedenborg, where the Swedish philosopher looms as "a colossal soul," second almost to none; whereas in the privacy of his journals, Emerson speaks of Swedenborgianism as "one of the many forms of Manicheism," denying "the omnipotence of God or pure spirit" and as introducing "unnec- essary machinery" (Journals, V, 80, no). So, too, for Plato. However hard Emerson tried to elevate Plato beyond the reach of man, he had in the end to record, in the privacy of his diary, that Plato was but the "great Average Man" (ibid., p. 369). Plato is similarly designated in Repre- sentative Men, but the phrase as used there carries a sense of approbation which it does not possess in the context of the Journals, where it carries a connotation of criticism. Believing as Emerson did in the cumulative progress of the mind of man, he observed that it would be un- natural, indeed, if Plato, living ages before Kant, had made discoveries that remained unknown to his successor. On April 16, 1835, in the very midst of his most intensive study of the Kantian distinctions and their application, he paused to record this question and answer: "Plato had a secret doctrine, — had he ? What secret can he conceal from the eye of Montaigne, of Bacon, of Kant ?" (Ibid., Ill, 468). By his own theory, never held more firmly than at this time, that he who lives last stands the best chance to know most, it followed that Kant, who "climbed from round to round the steps of the myste- rious ladder which is the scale of metaphysical powers," might well have outstripped Plato, as well as Montaigne and Bacon, in the race for knowledge and wisdom. — Ibid., X, 461 (1876). 80. Cabot, Memoir, I, 131. 81. Ibid., pp. 140-42. 82. Ibid., pp. 147-48. 83. Feb. 8, 1832; see Journals, II, 356. 84. Ibid., pp. 356-57 (Feb. 13, 1831). 85. Ibid., pp. 357-58 (Feb. 23, 1831). 86. The journals and letters contain only one earlier reference to Reason and Understanding. This occurs on September 7, 1822 (Journals, I, 167-68), but the two terms are there used in- discriminately and not at all in the Coleridge- Kantian sense that he began to grasp about 1831. Though he was, in 1822, as poignantly aware of the irreconcilable elements of the Platonic dualism on which he had been nur- tured as he was in 1831, when he was making some progress toward effecting a reconciliation, his uncertain allegiance before 1829 to Platonic idealism on the one hand and to Scottish com- mon sense on the other, blinded him to the im- portance of the distinction until Coleridge opened his eyes. 87. Cambr. Hist. Engl. Lit., XVIII, 7. 88. Besides using Madame de Stael's Ger- many, Stewart's Dissertations, and De Geran- do's Histoire Comparee, Emerson frequently found it more convenient, rather than go to original sources, to read such compilations as the following : The Library of Useful Knowledge (see Journals for 1832-34), the American Ency- clopaedia (see ibid., II, 460-61; III, 252, 517; IV, 101), Cousin's translation of Tennemann's Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (ibid., II, 451 ; III, 240), Linberg's translation of Cou- sin's Introduction to the History of Philosophy, Barchou de Penhoen's Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Leibnitz jusqu'a Hegel (ibid., 592 Notes to Pages 166-67 VI, 142-45), Miiller's Universal History, (ibid., Ill, 572; IV, 94, 378, 381), Mary Somerville's Mechanism of the Heavens, and elementary surveys of chemistry, geology, and botany, as well as popularly written accounts of scientific expeditions and voyages. In 1868 he said, "Ah, what a blessing to live in a house which has on the ground-floor one room or one cabinet in which a Worcester's Unabridged ; a Liddell and Scott; an Andrews and Stoddard; Lempriere's Classical; a 'Gradus Ad Parnassum' ; a Haydn's Dictionary of Dates ; a Biographie G6nerale ; a Spier's French, and Fliigel's German Diction- ary, even if Grimm is not yet complete . . . are always at hand." — Journals, X, 261. Bred of the same motive that sent him to encyclopaedias was his preference for transla- tions to the necessity of acquiring foreign lan- guages: "The cheap press and the universal reading, which have come in together, have caused a great many translations to be made from the Greek, the German, the Italian, and the French. Bohn's Library now furnishes me with a new and portable Plato, as it had al- ready done with new Goethes: and John Carlyle translates Dante. To me the command is loud to use the time by reading these books, and I should as soon think of foregoing the railroad and the telegraph as to neglect these books." — Journals, VIII, 34-35. 89. Probably A General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, since the Revival of Letters (Boston, 1822). "It saves," said Emerson, "a world of reading by laying open the history and moral and in- tellectual philosophy since the Revival of Let- ters .... It is a beautiful abridgment of the thousand volumes of Locke, Leibnitz, Voltaire, Kant and the rest." — Journals, I, 289-90; see a similar statement in Letters, I, 225. 90. He continued naively to concern himself with Madame deStael's superficial volume even after he had, on his own account, gone on to better commentators and to a firsthand ac- quaintance with German art and thought. Here, as elsewhere, he displayed something of the child's fondness for the thing which it has known longest and knows best. 91. First mentioned in the Journals, II, 279 (1829). See also II, 283, 327-28. 92. Journals, II, 330-45; see also Letters, I, 290, 306. 93. Chiefly early Greek philosophy. 94. Through De Gerando, he turned to An- quetil-Duperron, and thus learned something about Zoroaster and Confucius. See Journals, II. 333-35- 95. The influence of Cousin on Emerson was very transitory. He soon put aside Cousin's "pompous eclecticism" as less worthy of consid- eration than Coleridgean transcendentalism. See Letters, I, 123. Similarly Jouffroy, although Emerson had heard him lecture at the Sorbonne in 1833, left him cold. See Journals, III, 156, 170. 96. Journals, II, 330. See also Cameron, op. cit., pp. 17 (Feb. 1, 1830), 18 (Apr. 6, 1831). Arthur Christy (The Orient in American Tran- scendentalism [N.Y., 1932], p. 278) has searched the records and found that Emerson drew Vol- umes I and II of De Gerando's Histoire (Paris, 1804, 4 vols., 2097 pp.) from the Boston Athe- naeum on January 11, 1830, and Volume IV on February 1 of the same year. On April 6, 1831, he again drew De Gerando's work from the library, but there is no indication of the volume or volumes withdrawn. 97. Journals, II, 330-32 (Oct. 27, 1830); see also Works, IV, 117, V, 240, and Journals, IV, 1 18-19 (Nov. 4, 1838). 98. See Journals, II, 317 (Nov. 3, 1830). 99. Journals, II, 362 (Mar. 4, 1831). 100. See Journals, II, 330 (Oct. 27, 1830). 101. Herein lay the germ of his discontent with what he considered outmoded and out- grown forms and observances in the church. See Cabot, Memoir, I, 160. 102. Among characteristic diary entries re- cording examples that support this belief are the following: Journals, II, 368, 377-78, 387, 404, 415, 422, 435; III, 445. 103. Bacon is- mentioned altogether eighty- eight times in the Journals, Letters, and Works. In the following list the number in paren- thesis represents the number of references count- ed. The method of counting is the same as that used in the list above. 104. As in the case of the names enumerated earlier, exact volume and page references are on file and available to interested students. 105. Emerson was familiar with the general significance of Darwin's Origin of Species as early as February 5, i860, when he professed, in a letter to his wife, written from Lafayette, Ind., his chagrin at his inability to obtain a copy of "Darwin on Species . . . which I had depended on as a road book .... It has not arrived in these dark lands" (Letters, V, 195). On the same western journey, in Cincinnati, Emerson delighted Moncure D. Conway by "talking over with me the great discovery of Darwin." — Conway, Autobiography, Memories and Experiences (2 vols., Boston, 1904), I, 282. By May, i860, he was discussing species with Agassiz and Thoreau. See Journals, IX, 270; also Letters, VI, 63 (Mar. 16, 1869). As a diligent amateur reader of scientific treatises, Emerson was, of course, familiar with pre-Darwinian I Notes to Page 167 593 speculations on evolution, and his journals con- tain a number of anticipatory statements of the general idea of Darwinian development. See Journals, IV, 303-4 (Oct., 2, 1837) et seq.; see also Journals, IX, 270 (i860); X, 344 (1870), 423 (1873) ; Letters, V, 195 (i860), VI, 63 (1869), VI, 195 (1871); and Works, VIII, 7ft.; and Jo- seph W. Beach, "Emerson and Evolution," Univ. of Toronoto Ouar., Ill, iv (July, 1934), 474-97- 106. Among other influential authors whom Emerson consulted in the succeeding years — ■ including scientists, travelers, men of letters, philosophers, historians, economists, sociolo- gists — are to be listed the following (arranged roughly in the order of the first appearance of their names in Emerson's journal and letters) : Robert Owen (10), Dr. Spurzheim, the phrenol- ogist (13), Leonhard Euler (13), Erasmus (2), F. A. Wolff (6), Winckelmann (14), Diderot (8), Oegger (3), Johannes von Midler's Universal History (7), Jacob Boehme (19), De Condelle (3), Joseph Black (2), Thomas Paine (2), Cob- bett (3), Niebuhr (17), Heeren (16), Everard Home (2), Robert Leighton (1), John Ross's Voyages (1), Bartram's Travels (1), O'Connell's South Sea Islands (5), Richard Bentley (6), Champollion (1), Capt. James Cook's Voyages (3), McClelland 's Geology (1), Leyden (1), Spi- noza (8), Bell's Bridgewater Treatise on the Hand (4), R. Bacon (6), Proclus (19), James Bruce's Travels (1), Belzoni's Pyramids (5), Cail- laud's Travels (2), von Ranke (1), Fourier (22), Lorenz Oken (10), Strauss (4), Lieber (3), Her- bert Spencer (3), Wm. Hamilton (4), Edward Forbes (7), Wm. Buckland (4), Robert Brown (2), Wm. Spence (1), Emmanuel V. Scherb (5), J. B. Stallo (3), Liebig (2), Mulder (3), Oersted (1), Berthollet (2), Renan (3), Schopenhauer (2), J. H. Stirling (16), Comte (1), H. James (9), Wm. James (2), James McCosh (1), Tyndall (3), Hendrik Steffens (1), and Haiiy (2). 107. See the editors' remarks in Journals, II, 365; also III, 17-18 (Jan. 15, 1835). 108. As early as 1827 he had deplored, as one of the "Peculiarities of the Present Age," men's cultivation of "the knowledge of anecdotes . . . instead of systematic pursuit of science" (Jour- nals, I, 164). In 1834, he recognized his "own time" as "the era of science," and believed that "the benefits thence derived to the arts and to civilization are signal and immense." See Cabot, Memoir, II, 712, Appendix F, containing an abstract of the lecture on the "Naturalist," May 7, 1834 ; also "Progress of Culture," Works, VIII, 221. It is significant that on February 1, 1832, in advising his wife's young cousin, Eliz- abeth Tucker, on a course of reading, he should have included, in a list of twenty-seven titles. three novels, five historical works, five religious books, six volumes of poetry, and eight scien- tific books. Two years later, writing to his brother William, he said: "Did you ask me what I am doing ? I have written three lectures on Natural History and of course reading as much geology, chemistry and physics as I could find." — Letters, I, 404. 109. At the age of seventeen, Emerson ob- served: "With regard ... to the study of Nat- ural Philosophy, I do not think any one study so contributes to expand the mind as our first correct notions of this science." — Journals, I, 60. In his seventieth year, he confessed: "If absolute leisure were offered me, I should run to the college or scientific school which offered the best lectures on Geology, Chemistry, Miner- als, Botany." — Journals, X, 393 (Aug. 31, 1872). no. Indoor Studies (Boston, 1904), p. 80. in. M. D. Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 335: see also Conway, "Transcen- dentalists of Concord," Fraser's Mag., LXX, ccccxvi (Aug., 1864), 257. 112. It is a mistake to assume that Thoreau was solely responsible for Emerson the natural- ist. Although Thoreau helped make a better botanist of his friend than he had been before his contacts with the captain of huckleberrying parties, Emerson the poet-naturalist was al- ready well formed in 1833, when Thoreau was just setting off for college. Returned from Europe, where his visits to the Parisian mu- seums and his attendance upon the lectures of the leading scientists of France had helped in- spire him to write a book on "the Nature of Things," Emerson divided his time between writing lectures for a livelihood and attuning his soul to nature. His efforts to peep and bo- tanize are recorded in his observations made at Newton, Mount Auburn, and Roxbury, before his residence in Concord. "Natural History," he told himself on April 27, 1834, "gives body to our knowledge. No man can spare a fact he knows. The knowledge of nature is most per- manent; clouds and grass are older antiquities than pyramids or Athens; then they are most perfect." — Journals, III, 284. To Lydia Jackson, who urged Plymouth over Concord as a home, he wrote during his court- ship, "I must win you to love it [Concord, where he felt he could indulge his love for nature more freely than at Plymouth] .... I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and a dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondence between these and those. A sunset, a forest, a snow- storm, a certain river-view, are more to me than friends, and do ordinarily divide my day with 594 Notes to Pages 167-68 my books .... Now Concord is only one of a hundred towns in which I could find these nec- essary objects, but Plymouth, I fear, is not one. Plymouth is streets." — Cabot, Memoir, I, 236-37- Yes, indeed, if he would write a De Rerum Natura, he must live close to nature and learn her secrets. 113. The more significant passages in the Journals, beginning with 1833, are the follow- ing: III, 17-18, 118, 129, 170, 173, 175, 180, 187, 190-92, 192-93, 194-96, 225-26, 226-28, 246 (1833), 247, 270-71, 290-91, 292-96, 296- 97, 298, 299-300, 304-5, 305-7, 343, 393 (1834), 482, 513-14, 518-19, 559 (1835) : IV, 12-14, 17, 21-22, 27, 32-33, 59-60, 90-95, 115, 122, 129- 31, 131, 146, 149, 169 (1836), 187, 201-2, 294, 303-4, 311-12, 353, 377-78 (1837) ; V, 12, 92-94 (1838), 463-64, 473 (1840), 506-7; VI, 143 (1841), 246 (1842), 428, 462 (1843), 490, 529, 532 (1844); VII, 51-52, 58, 69-70, 104 (1845), 190, 312 (1846), 415, 420-22, 558 (1848); VIII, 9, 19, 32, 49-51, 57-58 (1849), 91, 105, 139 (1850), 177, 208, 214, 249, 252 (1851), 406, 412- 13, 419-20 (1853), 465 (1854), 505, 525, 536, 546, 565 (1855) ; IX, 30-33, 43-44, 59-60 (1856), 106-8, 112-13, 123-25, 129, 134, 138 (1857), 155 (1858), 278 (1861), 440 (1862), 520-21 (1863); X, 60-61, 65-66 (1864), 103, 123, 134, 136-37, 139-40, 164, 169 (1866), 204-5, 211, 219 (1867), 238, 264-65 (1868), 283, 284-87, 298-302 (1869), 363-64, 366-67 (1871), 393, 422-23 (1873), 455 (1861-1872), 462 (1876); see also Letters, I, 389-91 (1833), 401-5 (1834); II, 41(1836), 138-41, 164-65 (1838); IV, 46-51, 70, 87 (1848); VI, 63 (1869), as well as "Life and Letters in New England," Works, X, 328-39. For some indication of Emerson's concern with science before 1833, see such typical passages in the Journals as I, 324-27 (1827); II, 362 (1831) and 488 (1832). 114. See, for example, the emphasis placed upon the transcendentalist's concern with nature and science by Carlyle in his essay on Novalis. 115. Works, I, 329, 330, 332-33. See also Journals, IV, 12 (Feb. 12, 1836): "The idealist regards matter scientifically ; the sensualist ex- clusively. The physical sciences are only well studied when they are explored for ideas . . . I have no hatred of the round earth and its gray mountains. I see well enough the sand-hill op- posite my window. I see with as much pleasure as another a field of corn or a rich pasture, whilst I dispute their absolute being. Their phe- nomenal being I no more dispute than I do my own. I do not dispute, but point out the just view of viewing them." See further, ibid., IV, 13-14, and Works, I, 47-49, 59, 62-63. 116. Works, I, 340. For other significant ref- erences to Kant, see Journals, II, 526 (Oct. 28, 1832), 529 (Nov. 12, 1832); III, 199 (Sept. 8, 1833), 468 (Apr. 16, 1835); IV, 256 (July 19, l8 37). 456 (May 24, 1838), 473 (June 12, 1838); V, 306 (Oct. 28, 1839) ; VI, 143 (1841), 482 (Dec. 31, 1843) ; VII, 152 (1846) ; VIII, 210 (1851), 255 (1851), 530 (Feb. 24, 1855), 543 (1855) ; IX, 294 (i860), 349 (1861), 520 (1863); X, 52-53 (1864), 211 (1867), 224 (1867), 455 (1862-1863), 461 (1862-1863); Works, I, 339; II, 287, 343; VII, 27; VIII, 131; X, 92, 328, 455, 461; Letters, I, 181 (Dec. 30, 1826), 273 (July ? 15 ? 1829), 412-13 (May 31, 1834); II, 135 (May 24, 1838); III, 243 (Feb. 26, 1844); IV, 104 (Mar. 3, 1870). Among references to Kant not printed in the published Journals, see MS Journals, "AC. 1859," p. 218, and "LN. 1866," p. 279. See also C. J. Wood- bury, op. cit., p. 109. 117. Works, X, 338. Thus Goethe became "the interpreter between the real and the ap- parent world." — Letters, 11,202-3 (June 7, 1839). 118. See the extended quotations in Jour- nals, II, 348-51, and the following more impor- tant references to Goethe during the period from 1830 to 1840: II, 330, 348-51 (1830), 502 511, 524, 529-30, 541 (1832); III, 66, 71, 113, 147, 182, 241 (1833), 247, 251-53, 263, 273, 279, 284, 293-95, 299, 302, 309-10, 313-15, 363, 371-72, 385, 428 (1834), 453, 462, 464, 474, 477, 503(1835); IV, 16-18, 27, 28, 31, 34, 37, 72, 79, 81,90,94,99, 115-17, 157, 174(1836), 187, 194, 199, 201-2, 213, 217-22, 224, 225, 324, 383 (1837), 452, 468; V, 17, 45, 57, 59-60, 109, 112- J 3, 133, 145, 153, 154 ( l8 38), 222 (1839), 294- 95, 5° 2 (1840). For subsequent references, see V, 506 (1841); VI, 249 (1842), 466 (1843), 514, 544-45 (1844) I VII, 77 (1845), 176 (1846), 280- 83, 291-92, 303, 329 (1847) ; VIII, 16, 35, 39-7°. 77 (1849), 90-92 (1850), 169, 245, 249 (1851), 489, 501 (1854); IX, 20, 24, 37 (1856), 212-13 (1859), 314 (1861), 471 (1862); X, 177 (1866), 300 (1869), 423 (1873). See also the early letters in the Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, esp. I, 29ff., 311; Letters, I, 161-62, n. 11 (1825), 254 (1828), 305 (1830), 354, 358 (1832), 373 (1833), 425-26 (1834); II, 32-33 (1836), 57, 68, 70-71, 72, 76-77, 88, 100 (1837), 135, 136, 164 (1838), 192, 197, 202-3, 208, 220, 222, 228, 236 (1839), 3°5. 315. 368 (1840), 425-26, 436, 445, 451 (1841) ; III, 43, 73, 83, 108-9 ( l8 42) ; 220, n. 408 (1843), 279, 285-86, 304, 306 (1845), 336, 359 (1846) ; IV, 46 (1848), 257 (1851), 488-89 (1855) ; V, 205, 230 (i860); VI, 190 (1871); Works, III, 55; IV, 261-91 (esp. 273-75), 295-96, 366-78; V, 4; VII, 323; IX, 377; X, 328, 338, 342; XII, 284-85; Cameron, op. cit., pp. 47 (Dec. 5, 1828), 19 (Aug. 13, Aug. 16, and Aug. 20, 1832), 22 (Feb. 28, 1835), 49 (Mar. 14, 1849), 26 (Jan. 7, Notes to Pages 168-71 595 185 1 ). 33 (Feb. 2i, 1S61), 41 (Apr. 25, 1870); 0. W. Holmes, Emerson, pp. 60-61 ; and F. B. Wahr, Emerson and Goethe (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1915), esp. pp. 67-76. 119. To Convers Francis Emerson confessed on April 24, 1837: "I think he must be a very strong or a very weak man who can read his [Goethe's] books with impunity, without feeling their influence in all his speculation. Then there is something gigantic about the man, measure him how you will; his field of thought is im- mense; his acquisitions right German in their variety and thoroughness, and his point of view always commanding. But I will not start such a lion in the corner of a note, but keep this game for the time when I see you." — Letters, II, 72. 120. Emerson borrowed from the Harvard College Library Volume III of Goethe's Werke (probably in the Stuttgart-Tubingen edition) on December 5, 1828 (Letters, I, 305, n. 59). By June 27, 1830, he had read Francis L. Gower's translation of Faust (London, 1823). See Letters, 1, 305. An item in Journals, IV, 17, indicates that by February 28, 1836, he had acquired the forty-volume Stuttgart-Tubingen, 1827- 1830, edition of Goethe. Other entries in the Journals suggest that this forty-volume set may have been acquired as early as 1834. On August 8, 1836, he bought, in Boston, the fif- teen volumes of Goethe's Nachgelassene Werke (Stuttgart and Tubingen, 1832-1833). In 1840 he boasted to Carlyle of having fifty-five volumes of Goethe and of having "contrived to read almost every volume." "But," he added, "I have read nothing else [presumably in the German language] ... I have not looked even into Goethe for a long time." — Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, I, 311. 121. Journals, III, 284 (Apr. 27, 1834), 293- 95 (May 3, 1834); IV, 1 15-17 (Oct. 13, 1836). 122. Works, IV, 273-75. I2 3- Journals, V, 154; Letters, II, 164 (Sept. 28, 1838). 124. Yet he wrote to Hermann Grimm as late as 1871, "For Goethe I have always an ascending regard." — Wahr, op. cit., p. 77. 125. Works, IV, 275. See also IV, 107-9, 261-90; VIII, 7-1 1 ; X, 337-38 (where reference is made to the ideal natural philosophy of Schelling and Oken and the metaphysics of Hegel as of a piece with Goethe's theory) ; and Cabot, Memoir, II, 725. Goethe exerted a definite influence on Emer- son's "The Humanity of Science" of 1836 — the second in a series of twelve lectures entitled "The Philosophy of History." In it he relates his central thought directly to Goethe, who is credited with having reduced "the plant to a leaf, the animal to a vertebra." — Ibid., II, 725. He derived this idea from Goethe at least as early as April 27, 1834. See Journals, III, 284; also 292-95; IV, 1 14-17, esp. p. 116. 126. Journals, IV, 21-22 (Mar. 11, 1836); also 27 (Mar. 17, 1836), 28-30 (Mar. 21, 1836). 127. Werke (55 vols., Stuttgart & Tubingen, 1827-1833), XXII, 245. 128. Journals, IV, 28 (Mar. 21, 1836). In succeeding sections, Emerson aped the words and ideas of the passages quoted from Goethe. 129. See Cabot, Memoir, I, i54ff. ; also H. H. Clark, loc. cit., p. 236. 130. Journals, II, 490-91 (May 26, 1832). 131. Ibid., II, 492 (June 2, 1832). • 132. Cabot, Memoir, I, 155-56. 133. Ibid., p. 158. 134. Works, XI, 1-25; Letters, I, 355-57 (Sept. 11, 1832). 135. Although the form and theatricals of Wilhelm Meister repel him, he goes on to quote approvingly Schiller to the effect that in this book Goethe "leads a child of nature up from the period of 'Apprenticeship' to that of 'Self production' and leaves him assured on the way to infinite perfection." — Letters, I, 354. 136. Cabot, Memoir, I, 158. 137. Ibid., p. 173; see also pp. 174, 175. 138. Emerson's first reading of Carlyle ap- pears to date back to October 31, 1827, when he urged his brother William to read "in the last Edin. Rev. XCI p. 185 ... an account of Richter wh. exactly describes Aunt Mary's style." — Letters, I, 218. Five years were to elapse before he learned the author's name. For Carlyle's early vogue in America see Wm. S. Vance, "Carlyle in America before Sartor Re- sartus," Amer. Lit., VII, iv (Jan., 1936), 363-75, and George Kummer," Anonymity and Carlyle's Reputation in America," Amer. Lit., VIII, iii (Nov., 1936), 297-99. 139. Journals, III, 515. 140. Ibid., p. 524. 141. Ibid., pp. 329-30, 350 (1830), 424, 443 (1831), 519, 542 (1832); III, 115, 117, 159, 181- 82, 185 (1833) et seq. 142. For details, see Journals, III, 25-154, and Letters, I, 362-86. 143. Paris, for all its spectacular and dazzling sights, held little for him beyond the collections in the museum of natural history. He was rest- less to be on his way to England and Scotland. For details on his residence in Paris see Jour- nals, III, 155-71, and Letters, I, 386-91. 144. He had fraternized briefly with Cranch in Rome. See Journals, III, 87-88, 90, 97. 145. Had the European tour been made a year earlier, the very name of Carlyle would have been unknown to him. Coleridge was then in the foreground. But in the meantime the 596 Notes to Pa^e 171 fervor of Carlyle's moral suasion (coming at precisely the time when Emerson stood most in need of moral support) had found a ready reception in Emerson's heart, while the meta- physical abstractions of Coleridge momentarily faded into the background. Eventually, Cole- ridge won the ascendency (as we shall observe later); but during 1833 Carlyle was more im- mediately attractive. 146. Everett's lectures that Emerson heard dealt more with German criticism and historical research than with theology or philosophy. See Works, X, 330-35, 574. 147. In 1867 Emerson recalled that "Dr. [Nath.] Frothingham, an excellent classical and German scholar, had already made us ac- quainted, if prudently, with the genius of Eich- horn's theologic criticism. And Professor [An- drews] Norton a little later gave form and method to the like studies in the then infant Divinity School." — Works, X, 335. 148. Possibly as early as 1821-1822. See E. E. Hale, Ralph Waldo Emerson . . ., p. 100. 149. Cabot, Memoir, I, 138; Journals, II, 77-78, 83, 117, 143 (1826), 164 (1827), 273 (1829), 289 (1830) et seq. See also I, 288 (1822), 335(1823); 11,33(1824), 124(1826). I 5°- Journals, II, 143 (1826), 233 (1828?); IV, 94 (Sept. 23, 1836). Yet, when his address before the Divinity School aroused the spirited Norton-Ripley controversy in 1839, which cen- tered more upon German "infidelity" than upon the Emersonian version of it, Emerson was doubtless a little surprised to find his name linked so prominently with those of Herder, Schleiermacher, and De Wette, on the one hand, and with Cousin and Jouffroy, on the other, as being alike shoots off the parent stem of Ger- man philosophy represented by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The actual connection between Emerson and German theologians like De Wette, Tholuck, and Strauss was, prior to 1838, certainly tenuous. After this date, he could hardly have remained ignorant of them — if for no other reason than that his adversa- ries forcibly brought them to his attention by their elevating him into the same hierarchy of infidelity and iniquity and insisting upon his descent from them. Although a few among the leadership were well enough informed, the gen- eral ignorance among the orthodox clergy of any discriminating knowledge of German theol- ogy was profound. The result was that all Germans alike were under suspicion — Herder as much as Strauss, and Schleiermacher only a little* less than Hegel. 151. Journals, III, 393 (Dec. 14, 1834). An interesting exchange of letters between J. F. Clarke, by now editor of the Western Messenger in Louisville, Ky., and Emerson, while it pre- sents no conclusive evidence, nevertheless prompts conjectures regarding the extent of Emerson's knowledge of Schleiermacher prior to the Norton-Ripley controversy. Emerson had written to Clarke urging him to publish his two essays on Goethe and Carlyle, written some time earlier and only recently transmitted to him in manuscript form through Eliz. P. Peabody. See Holmes, Emerson, pp. 60-61. Clarke replied that the essays had been written in reply to "Mr. Norton's affront on my favorites," but having grown in "self-confidence and self-respect," he preferred to "put back the shaft into the quiver" rather than "launch an arrow at a respectable senior"; for his desire was to "abuse Nortonism instead of Mr. Nor- ton" (Letters, I, 425, Jan. 18, 1835). Meanwhile Clarke advanced a counter proposal : "There is something I wish you to do and that is to write an article about Schleiermacher the < German Platonic, Calvinistic, Spinozaic, but wholly original theologian. De Wette says he is the greatest theologian sinceCalvinand Melanch- thon. Neander thinks he makes an epoch. At his death all Berlin was in tears as when the Queen . of Prussia died. He was a faithful pastor minis- tering to the spiritual wants of high and low, ■ rich and poor, one with another. Depth, Clear- ness, Freedom in thought united with Lofti- ness, Warmth and Earnestness of Sentiment composed his peculiar character. He spurned equally the shallowness of rationalism and the cant of pietism — he had a soul above it all. His 'lectures to the Educated' which first appeared ' in the last century made a great and salutary in- fluence in the pool of theology. He sets forth in that the infinite intellectual dignity and moral of the religious principle. His religion was one of power, love and sound mind if any one's. Now if you have read him, pray write something about him in the Examiner — if not read him, and then you will write." — Letters, I, 425-26 (Jan. 18, 1835)- Another interesting aspect of this letter is that it first called Emerson's attention to Mar- garet Fuller: "There is one in your neighbor- hood (Groton)," writes Clarke," who has drank [sic] very deep of the spirit of German litera- ture. I know not whether you are acquainted, though I think you must be somewhat at least with Miss Margaret Fuller. She has translated the Tasso beautifully into English blank verse. Do you see Henry Hedge often ? I had a letter from him not long since in which he speaks of going to Bangor." — Letters, I, 425. 152. Journals, IV, 235 (Dec. 14, 1834). 153. Journals, II, 526 (Oct. 28, 1832). Emer- son first mentioned Kant's name in a letter Notes to Pages 171-72 597 dated December 30, 1826; but it was not until 1832 that his concern with Kant became in- tense. This interest is partly a reflection of his withdrawal from the Boston Athenaeum, be- tween March 21 and April 3, 1832, of F. A. Nitsch's General and Introductory View of Pro- fessor Kant's Principles Concerning Man, the World, and the Deity (London, 1796). See Cameron, op. cit., p. 19. 154. Journals, II, 422 (Oct. 24, 1831). 155. Ibid., p. 502 (Aug. 11, 1832). 156. Ibid., Ill, 260 (Aug. 12, 1834). 157. Ibid., p. 393 (Dec. 14, 1834). 158. Letters, III, 77 (1842). 159. Ibid., pp. 54, 70-71 (1842). 160. Journals, VII, 152 (1846). 161. Ibid., p. 296 (1846). 162. Ibid., VIII, 418 (1853). However, Jacobi is mentioned prominently in "The Transcen- dentalist" (Works, I, 336), which was first deliv- ered as a lecture in January, 1842. Emerson's first real contact with Jacobi, after Madame de StaeTs enthusiastic but superficial account of him, doubtless came through Marsh's edition of Coleridge's Aids as well as the Friend, when he turned to these works late in 1829. On March 24, 1873, he borrowed Volume II of the eight- volume edition of Jacobi's Werke (Leipzig, 1812-1825) from the Athenaeum and before returning it a month later (see Cameron, op. cit., pp. 23, 81), copied from it the quotation later incorporated in the essay, "The Transcenden- talism" There is nothing to suggest that he again looked into any of Jacobi's works, though he had readily available, of course, such com- mentators as De Gerando and Tennemann. 163. Journals, II, 330 (1830). It is not to be inferred that Emerson read all the German, authors listed below, either in the original or in translation. Precisely when and how he acquired competence in the language still involves ques- tions to which only relative answers can be giv- en. What is certain is that this knowledge was acquired between 1828, when he waved aside Hedge's suggestion that he learn the language by saying that since he had managed for so long without it, he could not consider it very impor- tant (Cabot, Memoir, I, 138), and 1840, when, replying to Carlyle's pointed question whether he read German or not, he said that he had fifty-five volumes of Goethe and had contrived to read nearly all of them (Carlyle- Enter son Corresp., I, 311). Since he added that he had not looked even into Goethe for a long time, it may be presumed that he had learned German some years before — possibly shortly after his visit to Carlyle in 1833. Emerson's observation a propos of Margaret Fuller's "five or six lessons in Ger- man pronunciation," which she administered during April and May of 1837, to the effect that it was dene "never by my offer and rather against my will each time" (Journals, IV, 225), has no necessary bearing on his reading knowl- edge of German at the time. All indications point to the conclusion that he was self-taught in German. However and wherever he acquired his Ger- man, those who persist in raising an eyebrow at Emerson's professed knowledge of Goethe's fifty-five volumes have recently had their an- swer in the essay by Professor Y. D. Yohannan in American Literature, XIV, iv (Jan., 1943), 407-20, on Emerson's translations from the Persian on the basis of the German translations by Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. It is now established that in his effort to render ac- curately some seven hundred lines from Ham- mer-Purgstall's Diwan von Mohammed Schem- siddin Haffis (Stuttgart and Tubingen, 181 2- 1813) and his Geschichte der schbnen Redekiinste Persiens mit einer Bliitkenlese aus zweihundert persischen Dichtern (Wien, 1818), Emerson pro- ceeded with such remarkable fidelity to the German before him (he knew no Persian) that Professor Yohannan found it necessary to call attention to only three "significant examples" of mistranslation, one of which is obviously consciously perpetrated (ibid., pp. 409-10). To be sure, Emerson liked translations, com- pendia, and short cuts. If he wanted to go to Boston, he preferred crossing the bridge to swimming the Charles River. But he was also wise enough to know that if there were a treas- ure at the bottom of the river, he had to dive for it. Before he took the plunge, however, he wanted reasonable assurance that there was a treasure, and that he had located the right spot. He detested random, ineffectual effort. Just as he hesitated to follow William to Germany un- less he could count his gains, so he refrained from diving into the depths of German until Carlyle, Coleridge, and all the world assured him that it would be worth the effort. Not given to doing things by halves or of misrepre- senting his attainments, his profession to Car- lyle that he made himself master of Goethe's voluminous writings is neither an idler's nor a liar's boast. 164. Journals, II, 330, 350-51 (1830); V, 154 (1837); IX, 349 (1861); X, 196 (1867). 165. Ibid., II, 377-78, 423 (1831), 525- 2 7. 541 (1832); III, 262, 347, 363 (1834); IV, 94 (1836). 357. 383 (1837); VI, 512 (1844); VII, 48 (1845); VIII, 554 (1855); see also Works, III, 89; VI, 254; VIII, 185, 329; Letters, I, 354, 358 (1832), 413 (1834); II, 57 (1837), 235 (1839), 265, 269, 354, n. 421 (1840); IV, 190 (1850); Cameron, op. cit., pp. 18, 27, 41. 598 Notes to Page 172 1 66. References are given above. 167. Journals, II, 330, 348-49, 351 (1830); III. 237 (1833), 313-15, 428 (1834); IV, 383 (1837); VII. 151 (1846); Works, IV, 280; and Cameron, op. cit., pp. 23, 26, 42. 168. Journals, II, 401, 443 (1831); II, 541 (1832); III, 272 (1834); IV, 94 (1836); V, 154 (1838); VI, 138 (1841), 488 (1844); Works, III, 46; X, 169; and Letters, II, 424-26 (1841); III, 98, 100 (1842), 116 (1843). 169. Journals, III, 524, 570, 574 (1835); IV, 421; V, 154 (1838); VI, 142 (1841), 377-78 (1843), 517-18 (1844); VII, 152 (1846), 515 (1848); VIII, 549-51 (1855); Works, III, 34, 187; IV, 117, 143; VIII, 277; Letters, III, 23, 96 (1842); and MS Journal, "VA. 1862-63," p. 290. 170. Journals, III, 451 (1835); IV, 378, 383 (1837) ; V, 154 (1838) ; VI, 138, 145 (1841) ; VIII, 91-92 (1850), 323 (1852) ; X, 185 (1867) ; Letters, III, 116 (1843); Works, VI, 181, 286, 412-13; VII, 202. 171. Journals, IV (1836), 383 (1837); Works, XII, 325; and Cameron, op. cit., pp. 21, 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, 40. 172. Journals, IV, 84, 174 (1836); 378, 383 (1837); 389; V, 154 (1838); VIII, 289 (1852), 524. 552-53. 587 (1855); X, 54-55 (1864); Let- ters, IV, 510 (1855); V, 99 (1858); Works, VIII, 43, 282; XI, 299; XII, 95; Cameron, op. cit., pp. 29 (Apr. 1, Apr. 11, 1855), 49 (May 18, 1855)- 173. Journals, IV, 94, 174 (1836), 17, 26-27; V, 17, 37, 68, 154 (1838); VIII, 106 (1850); Letters, II, 154, 158, 174-75 (1838); III, 116 (1843); IV, 185 (1850); Works, II, 19-21; VII, 99. Among German historians, Heeren un- doubtedly exerted the greatest influence on Emerson's lectures and essays. See Journals, V, 68 (1838), and IV, 17 (1838). 174. Letters, II, 373 (Dec. 21, 1840). 175. Journals, III, 260 (1834); IV, 94, 174 (1836), 473; V, 154 (1838); VI, 62 (1841), 249 (1842); VII, 151 (1846); VIII, 530 (1855); X, 34 (1864), 318 (1870); Letters, IV, 24 (1848); Works, I, 336; see also Journals, III, 250 (Jan. 21, 1834), 259 (Feb. 12, 1834); Cameron, op. cit., p. 34 (Feb. 12, 1863); C. J. Woodbury, Talks with Emerson, p. 54; and Emerson's MS Journal, "VA. 1862-63," P- 287. 176. Journals, II, 422, 443 (1831) ; III, 466, 503 (1835) ; IV, 473 (1838) ; VI, 138 (1841) ; VII, 143 (1845), 151-52 (1846); VIII, 69, 76-77 (1849), 126, 128 (1850), 506 (1854), 530 (1855); IX, 295 (1861); X, 34, 52-53 (1864), 455 (1862- 1872); Letters, III, 76-77, 84 (see also Dial, III, 280, for Oct., 1842), 98, 100 (1842), 293, 298-99, 303-4 (1845), 343, 345, 346, 363 (1846); VI, 245-46 (1873); Works, I, 338; III, 32; V, 242; VI, 12; VIII, 131; XII, 70, 430; MS Journals, "TU. 1849," p. 22; "ZO. 1856," pp. 98, 154; "GL. 1861, 1862 1863," p. 248; "VA. 1862- 63," p. 290. 177. Journals II, 502, 542 (1832); VII, 151- 52 (1846); viii, 69, 76 (1849), 530 (1855); IX, 22, 36 (1856); X, 34, 52-53 (1864); 143-44, 177 (1866), 248, 263 (1868), 318, 321. 337 (1870), 423 (1873), 455, 460, 462 (1862-1872); Works, II. 343; V, 242; VIII, 131; X, 328, 338; Letters, III, 98-99 (1842) ; IV, 530-31 (1855) ; V, 421-22 (1865), 521 (1867) ; VI, 18, 20 (1868), 104 (1870) ; Cameron, op. cit., p. 37 (Nov. 4, 1865); MS Journals, "TU. 1849," p. 22; "ZO. 1856," p. 182; "AC. 1856," p. 218; "VA. 1862-63," P- 286; and "LN. 1866," p. 248. 178. Works, I, 335 (Jan., 1842); Journals, VIII, 418 (1853); IX, 254 (1859); also Works, I, 336; VI, 191. 179. Journals, III, 393 (1834); V, 37, 164 (1838); VI (1841); VII, 32 (1845), 151 (1846); X, 380 (1872), 445 (1875); Letters, I, 425-26 (1834); Cameron, op. cit., p. 48 (Sept. 2, 1846, Nov. 8, 1848). 180. See Cameron, op. cit., pp. 22 (May 28, 1835) 26 (Nov. 4, 1845). 181. Journals, III, 348, 428 (1834), 505, 531, 575 (1835) I IV, 26 (1836), 374 (1837), 408 (1838); V, 154 (1839); Letters, I, 450 (1835); II, 347, n. 398; III, 246 (1844); Works, X, 337. 182. Journals, III, 348, 356 (1834); Works, I. 56; V, 252. 183. Journals, III, 428 (1834); IV, 378, 383 (1837); Works, X, 337; XII, 328. 184. Cameron, op. cit., p. 23 (Apr. 5, 1836). 185. Ibid., p. 23 (Apr. 21, 1836). 186. Journals, III, 473 (1835); IV, 94 (1836); VI, 249, 253, 283 (1842); VIII, 574 (1855); IX, 229 (1859), 371 (1862), 496-97. 580 (1863); Works, II, 179; X, 20; XI, 350-51; Letters, I, 218 (1827), 383 (1833), 438 (1835); II, 269, 287 (1840) III, 92 (1844); 346 (1846); 411 (1847); Cameron, op. cit., p. 30 (Mar. 28, 1857). 18 7. Journals, IV, 94, 174 (1836); VI, 138 (1841); Letters, III, 98 (1842), 116 (1843). 188. Journals, II, 502 (1832); 524 (1836); Works, VI, 6. 189. Journals, IV, 9, 174 (1836), 362 (1837); Cameron, op. cit., p. 22 (Feb. 2, 1836). 190. Journals, III, 505-6, 512-15, 527 (1835). 191. Ibid., Ill, 572, 575 (1835) ; IV, 94 (1836), 378, 381 (1837); Letters, III, 23, 96 (1842). 192. Journals, IV, 205, 383 (1837); Letters, II, 68, 70-71 (1837). 193. Journals, IV, 383 (1837); Letters, II, 68, 70, 71, 76-77 (1837). 194. Journals, IV, 199-210, 217-18 (1837); Letters, II, 57, 64-65, 67-68, 72, 77, 87 (1827), 197, 201-3 (1839); IV, 266 (1850), 503 (1855). Notes to Page 172 599 195. Journals, V, 502 (1840); Letters, II, 388 (1841); III, 29 (1842); IV, 266 (1850). 196. Journals, V, 154 (1838), 237 (1839), 502 (1841) ; VI, 229 (1842) ; VIII, 178 (1851) ; IX, 61 (1856); 212-13 (1859); X, 310 (1870); Works, III, 55; VI, 163; Letters, II, 29 (1836), 136 (1838). 374 (1847); IV, 222, 226 (1850). 197. Journals, VIII, 474-75 (1854); MS Journal, "VA. 1862-63," P- 287- 198. Journals, I, 222, 298 (1823); II, 34 (1824), 414 (1831); III, 350 (1834); V, 143 (1841); VIII, 16 (1849), 490 (1854); IX, 294 (1861); Works, IV, 105; VII, 158; X, 133; Letters, I, 181 (1826), 376, 383 (1833); II, 365 (1840); Cameron, op. cit., p. 46 (Feb. 17, 1825). 199. Journals, III, 428 (1834); IV, 378, 383 (1837) ; VIII, 289 (1852) ; Letters, VI, 50 (1868) ; Works, X, 330. 200. References are given above. 201. Journals, II, 143 (1825-1826), 233 (1828); IV, 94. 174 (1836), 383 (1837): V, 133. 154 (1838); Letters, I, 153, n. 62 (1824), 161, n. 12; II, 70-71 (1837); Cameron, op. cit., pp. 47 (Feb. 1, 1829), 18 (Aug. 1, 1831). 202. Journals, I, 83 (1821); III, 279, 356 (1834); IV, 94, 137, 146 (1836); V, 154 (1838); VI, 400 (1843); VII, 100 (1845), 370 (1847); VIII, 16 (1849); IX. 30-31 (1856); 521 (1863); X, 298-99 (1869), 350 (1870); Letters, I, 433 (1835); III. 77 (1842); Works, III, 172, 323; VII, 323. 488; IX, 457; X, 131 ; XI, 51, 455-59- 203. Journals, II, 446—47, 456, 542 (1832). 204. Letters, I, 425 (1834); III, 100 (1842), 374 (i847)- 205. Ibid., Ill, 96 (1842). 206. Journals, II, 416 (1831), 473, 475, 542 (1832) ; III, 348, 350 (1834) ; IV, 174 (1836). 337 (1837); Letters, III, 96 (1842), 230 (1843); Works, I, 113, 281; Cameron, op. cit., pp. 19 (1832), 23 (1836). 207. Journals, IX, 398, 450, 459, 495 (1862), 505 (1863); X, 310, 315-16, 344 (1870), 423 (1873), 445 (1875); Works, X, 105, no, 112; Letters, II, 192 (1839) ; VI, 190 (1871) ; Cameron, op. cit., pp. 32 (Sept. 5, i860), 34 (Mar. 10, Apr. 6, Apr. 13, 1863), 35 (Feb. 10, 1864), 36 (July 9, 1864), 41 (Jan. 29, Feb. 17, Mar. 7, July 7, 1870), 51 (July 13, 1870), 42 (Dec. 28, 1871). 208. Works, XII, 399. 209. Letters, III, 103 (Dec. 12, 1842). 210. Journals, VI, 357 (1843); Letters, III, 176, 194 (1843); 363 (1846); Works, XII, 399. 2ii. Letters, V, 80 (June 28, 1857). 212. Journals, VII, 236 (1846); VIII, 81 (1849); IX, 580 (1863); Works, VIII, 237-65, 421-22. 213. Journals, VII, 396 (1848); Letters, IV, 531, n. 132; V, 28 (1856); Cameron, op. cit., 40 (Mar. 29, 1869). 214. Journals, VII, 152 (1846). 215. Letters, III, 77 (1842); Journals, VII, 151 (1846) ; VIII, 76 (1849), 128 (1850) ; Works, X, 338; MS Journals, "AZ. 1850," pp. 49, 52, 53, 54, 166. 216. Letters, III, 54, 70-71 (1842), 129 (1843) ; Journals, VII, 296 (1848). 217. Letters, IV, 390 (1853). 218. Ibid., Ill, 243 (1844); Journals, VIII, 459 (1854); IX, 212 (1859); Cameron, op. cit., pp. 28 (1854). 36 (1864). 219. Letters, IV, 130 (1849); IV, 276 (1852); V 14 (1856); Journals, VIII, 69 (1849), 246 (1851). 220. Journals, VIII, 77 (1849) ; X, 423 (1873) ; Letters, IV, 470 (1854). 221. Journals, VIII, 487 (1854); X, 423 (I873)- 222. Ibid., IX, 30 (1856); Works, VIII, 222; X, 183. 223. Journals, IX, 30-31 (1856). 224. Letters, IV, 390 (Oct. 12, 1853). 225. Journals, VII, 236 (1846); VIII, 157 (1850); Cameron, op. cit., p. 18 (Dec. 23, 1831). 226. Cameron, op. cit., pp. 33 (Sept. 10, 1861, Feb. 26, 1962), 39 (Oct. n, 1867, Apr. 4, 1868). 43 (June 13, 1872). 227. Journals, VIII, 425-26 (1853); Camer- on, op. cit., pp. 28 (1853), 39 (1854). 228. Journals, IX, 233 (1859); IX, 307 (1861); X, 142 (1866), 411-12 (1873); Works, VIII, 183-84; Letters, V, m (1858), 157(1859), 221-22 (i860), 238, 249 (1861), 514, 543, n. 259 (1867); VI, 12 (1868), 142, 179, 187-90 (1871), 204 (1872); Cameron, op. cit., pp. 37 (Aug. 19, J 865), 38 (Aug. 25, 1866); and Correspondence between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hermann Grimm, ed. by F. W. Holls (Boston, 1903). 229. Letters, VI, 274-75, 282, 287 (1875); Cameron, op. cit., p. 26 (Oct. 15, 1864). 230. Journals, X, 33-34 (1864) ; Works, VIII, 138. 231. Journals, VIII, 351 (1852). 232. Professor Cameron's list of Emerson's withdrawals from libraries indicates that among other significant German authors and titles that engaged Emerson's attention are the fol- lowing: August von Boeckh's Public Economy of Athens (see Cameron, op. cit., p. 48 [Mar. 30, 1847]); Friedrich Buechner's Kraft und Stoff, tr. by J. F. Collingwood (ibid., p. 37 [Aug. 19, 1865]) ; Ludwig Preller's classical studies (ibid., p. 49 [Mar. 25, 1868]); Friedrich Raumer's English studies (ibid., p. 29 [July 26, 1854]); K. Ritter's Comparative Geography of Palestine (ibid., p. 38 [May 13, 1867]); Albert Schweg- ler's History of Philosophy, tr. by James H. Stirling (ibid., p. 40 [Aug. 30, 1869]) ; Adolf Stahr's Weimar und Jena ibid., p. 40 [Nov. 21. 600 Notes to Pages 112-74 1868]); Gustav Waagen's Treasures of Art in Great Britain tr. by H. E. Lloyd (ibid. p. 25 [June 28 1842]); and Karl Witte's Dante Forschungen (ibid., p. 43 [Nov. 12, 1872]). 233. Cabot, Memoir, I, 139. 234. Journals, IV, 286. Coleridge's name is added, almost as if it had been an afterthought. Had the note been written prior to 1833, in- stead of in 1837, the name of Coleridge would doubtless have come first, and Wordsworth's would probably have been omitted altogether, for as short a time as eight months before his visit to Ambleside, he "never read Wordsworth without chagrin."- — Journal, II, 534. In March, 1 819, Wordsworth's poetry had seemed to him "the poetry of pigmies" (Letters, I, 306), and as late as Oct. 22, 1835, he complained of the platitudes in Wordsworth (Journals, III, 561). Even on the occasion of his visit to the old poet, who had insisted on reciting schoolboy-wise some of his verses to the young American, Emerson (at least so he professed later) had hardly been able to contain himself sufficiently to avoid laughing in his face. See Journals, III, 182, and English Traits (Works, V, 22-23). However, see T. Scudder, op. cit., 29-30, where the account of this episode, re-examined in the light of unpublished fragments of the journals, is modified somewhat. Only after Coleridge's critical writings stimulated him to a more sympathetic reading of Wordsworth's poetry did he overcome his antipathy. For Emerson's later judgments of Wordsworth, see Journals, III, 457 (1835) ; IV, 286 (1857) ; X, 68-69 (1864). 235. Emerson had drawnthe Biographia Liter- aria from the Harvard College Library as early as Nov. 16, 1826; see Letters, I, xxxvi, 286, n. 99. The more important references to Coleridge include the following: Journals, II, 268, 277-78, 280 (1829), 320 (1830), 377, 405, 430, 444 (1831) ; 111, 174, 181, 185 (1833), 262, 295, 328, 348, 367, 371, 405, 428 (1834), 439, 463-64, 466, 489, 494. 5°3. 5o8, 536, 539-40, 567 (1835); IV, 63, 93. 152-53 (1836), 279, 286, 356 (1837); V, 109, 112, 119, 133, 140-41, 143 (1838), 528 (1841); VI, 138 (1841), 266 (1842); VII, 329 (1847); VIII, 558, 579 (1855) ; X, 350 (1871) ; Letters, I, 291 (1830), 393, 397, 402, n. 133 (1833), 412 (1834), 432-33, 440, 448 (1835); II, 30 (1836), 78, n. 92 (1837), 126, 173 (1838), 226 (1839), 425-26 (1841); III, 64 (1842); IV, 26 (1848), 265-66 (1851); VI, 19 (1868); Works, V, 10-14; X, 343; Cabot, Memoir, II, 723-24; index to Works. 236. For the more important references to Carlyle, see Journals, II, 515, 524, 525-30, 541-42 (1832); III, 28, 159, 180-82, 185-86, 188, 190, 198, 241 (1833), 272, 274, 294, 299, 3I3-I5. 321, 338. 348, 424 (1834), 457, 472. 486, 557. 573 (1835); IV, 85 (1836), 180-81, 195-96, 198, 212-13, 217-18, 238, 258-59, 272-74, 286, 287, 288, 346, 363, 383 (1837), 389, 398^9, 405-6, 410, 411, 446; V, 4, 17, 90, 153 (1838), 213. 352 (1839), 377, 440-41, 487 (1840), 520, 557- 571 (1841); VI, 222, 251-52 (1842), 387, 389. 394-95. 400, 403, 410 (1843); VII, 152, 196-97. 216, 224-25 (1846), 285, 344-48, 367 (1847), 384, 392, 402-4, 437, 439-40, 441-43. 445, 561 (1848); VIII, 91, 123 (1850), 169, 250, 261-62 (1851), 463 (1854), 579 (1855) ; IX, 195- 96, 204, 212-13 (1859), 423-24, 465 (1862), 529 (1863); X, 63 (1864), 104, 116, 122 (1865), 217 (1867), 315 (1870), 349, 357 (1871), 397 (1872), 4 X 5 (1873), 445 (1875), 476 (1875-1881) ; Cabot, Memoir, II, 724; Carlyle-Emerson Corresp.; and the indexes to Works and Letters. 237. Works, V, 14. 238. Scudder, op. cit., p. 14. 239. Frank T. Thompson, "Emerson's In- debtedness to Coleridge," Studies in Philology, XXIII, i (Jan., 1926), 55-76; N. Foerster, American Criticism (Boston and N.Y., 1928), pp. 62-63. 240. Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, II, 217 (July 17, 1850). 241. Journals, VII, 442 (Apr. 25, 1848). 242. Scudder, op. cit., pp. 60, 209. 243. Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, II, 217. 244. Journals, III, 180. 245. Ibid., pp. 185-86 (Sept. 1, 1833). 246. Ibid., p. 190 (Sept. 2, 1833). 247. One of Emerson's erstwhile scholars at Chelmsford. 248. Journals, III, 185-86. 249. Journals, III, 186 (Sept. 1, 1833). The same ideas are expressed on August 30, 1833, in a letter to Alex. Ireland. Emerson adds: "Carlyle does not pretend to have solved the great problems but rather to be an observer of their solution as it goes forward in the world. I asked him at what religious development the concluding passage in his piece in the Edin. Review upon German Literature (say 5 years ago) and some passages in the piece called Char- acteristics, pointed ? He replied, that he was not competent to state it even to himself — he waited rather to see. — My own feeling was that I had met with men of far less power yet greater insight into religious truth." Either Emerson had read Carlyle's essays very attentively some years earlier, when he first came upon them, or he had refreshed his mem- ory since then. His reference to Carlyle's es- say in the Edinburgh Review is undoubtedly to that on the "State of German Literature" (1827), reprinted in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, I, 20-65, ar *d the passage referred to is Carlyle's attempted explanation of Kantian Notes to Pages 175-77 601 transcendentalism and its significance in shap- ing German religious thought. See ibid., pp. 56-65. 250. Journals, III, 188 (Sept. 2, 1833). 251. Ibid., p. 199 (Sept. 8, 1833). 252. Ibid., p. 205 (Sept. 16, 1833). 253. Ibid., p. 200 (Sept. 8, 1833). 254. Ibid., p. 201 (Sept. 8, 1833). 255. Ibid., p. 196 (Sept. 8, 1833). 256. Ibid., p. 196. 257. Ibid., p. 246 (Jan., 1834). 258. Ibid., pp. 207-8 (Sept. 17, 1833). 259. Ibid., pp. 209-10 (Sept. 17, 1833). It is unnecessary to connect this view of ethics with the practical idealism of Kant in the second Critique. In an essay entitled "Civilization," delivered in Washington in January, 1861, and printed in Society and Solitude (1870), Emerson quoted Kant's Categorical Imperative; but there is little to suggest that he knew much about Kant's second Critique in 1833. It is enough to say that, as in his innate tendency to idealize, without benefit of either Plato or Kant, so he arrived independently at this view of a rigorous Kantian ethics. Later he derived satisfaction in finding that Kant had taken a similar view, but he did not derive the doctrine itself from Kant. In the realm of ethics he was his own sufficient source. 260. Journals, I, 361 (Apr. 18, 1834). Even now he said: "The men of strong understand- ing . . . cut me short — they drive me in a cor- ner — I must not suggest. I must define .... I avoid and defy them." — Rusk, Emerson (N.Y., 1949). PP- 235-36. 261. Works, IX, 315; also IV, 83-84. Aboard ship, on September 8, 1833, he wrote: "I be- lieve that the error of religionists lies in this, that they do not know the extent or the har- mony of the depth of their moral nature; that they are clinging to little, positive, verbal, for- mal versions of the moral law, and very imper- fect versions too, while the infinite laws, the laws of Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy, etc., are all unobserved. — Journals, II, 199. Four years later he observed: "When the conversation soars to principles, Unitarian- ism is boyish." — Ibid., IV, 345 (Oct. 28, 1837). 262. Ibid., Ill, 18. 263. Ibid., p. 196 (Sept. 6, 1833). 264. Ibid., pp. 192-93 ; Cabot, Memoir, I, 248, 259- 265. This design was never executed except insofar as the brief sections on "Idealism" and "Spirit," incorporated in Nature, may be cons- idered as carrying out this plan. 266. Letters, II, 26. 267. Ibid., p. 32. The italics are added. 268. It will be observed that the Paris to which Oliver Wendell Holmes's "Good Ameri- cans" go "when they die" offered little to hold Emerson's interest in 1833. The Jardin des Plantes was another matter. So were the lec- tures at the Sorbonne, where he heard Gay- Lussac, Thenard, Jouffroy, and other "first" scientists of France. The significance to him of the great Parisian museums of natural history can be gauged by the references he made to them in his journals and in his recurrence to them in his lectures. The well-worn program of the Sorbonne lectures he preserved among his slender store of mementos to the end of his days. See Journals, III, 156, 161-64, I 7°> Cab- ot, Memoir, II, 640, 710; Works, XII, 3, 22; Bliss Perry, Emerson Today, p. 42; Letters, I, 387, n. 90. Standing before the glass cases and exhibi- tion cabinets in Paris, Emerson the naturalist was born. He resolved to write another De Rerum Natura. In the Gift for 1844, he wrote: "The universe is a wilder puzzle than ever, as you look along this stark series of once ani- mated forms — the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the bird, beast, worm, snake, and fish, and the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms. Whilst I stood there, I yielded to the singular conviction, that in all these rich groups of natural productions which surrounded me, and in all the vast system which they repre- sented, not a form so grotesque, so savage, so beautiful, but is an expression of some property in man the observer. I felt ... an occult relation between the crawling scorpion, the flowering zoophyte, and man. I was moved to strange sympathies. I said, T will listen to this invita- tion; I also am a naturalist.'" — Perry, op. cit., p. 44. Commenting on the "occult relation between the very scorpions and man" in his diary on July 13, 1833, he said: "I feel the centipede in me, — cayman, carp, eagle, and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies; I say continually T will be a naturalist." — Journals, III, 163. Returned to Boston, he delivered, beginning on November 4, 1833, his first lectures as a layman. The titles are self-explanatory: "Na- tural History," "On the Relation of Man to the Globe," "Water," and "The Naturalist" (see the abstracts of these lectures in Cabot's Me- moir, II, 710-12). "It is in my judgment," so he opened the first of these discourses, "the greatest office of natural science (and one which as yet is only beginning to be discharged) to explain man to himself"; and he concluded: "The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass." — Quoted by 602 Notes to Pages 177-79 Perry from an unpublished MS, op. cit., p. 45. This last idea became a firm conviction, and he used the same words tellingly in his first published book three years later (Works, I, 32- 33). The only difficulty that remained was to explain why the face in the glass answers to that of the beholder, why the laws of nature are but different versions of the laws of ethics. This problem led him into deep water — over his head. The next year he wrote: "I am wading — sometimes overhead — in the most ambitious Course of Lectures — a little precipitatedly undertaken — once a week on a new subject, and each subject the Universe seen from one side; so that the Lecturer's task seems to be nothing less than Puck's T will put a girdle round about the world in forty minutes' — say sixty rather." — Records of a Lifelong Friendship, 1807-1882. R. W. Emerson and W. H. Furness, ed. by Wm. Howard Furness (Boston, 1910), p. 5. The same year he resolved "to write the natural history of reason," and though he found himself unequal to the task, he "returned to the project again and again" until finally, in 1870, when he printed his Harvard lectures, unsatis- factory though they had turned out to be to himself, he gave them the old title, The Natural History of Intellect. — Cabot, Memoir, II, 633, 644. Truly, Emerson the philosopher died hard. Though he forsook the pulpit, he remained all his life a preacher. Condemning eloquence, he yet hankered after a professorship of rhetoric at Harvard. Though he professed to believe that no wise man would look twice into a meta- physical book, he made this confession to Mar- garet Fuller: "Does not James Walker [of Harvard] want relief, and let me be his lieutenant for one semester to his class in Locke ?" — Cab- ot, Memoir, II, 557-58; Letters, IV, 63 (Apr. 25, 1848). Among the last thoughts inscribed in his journals is this one: "Philosophy is called the homesickness of the soul" (Journals, X, 469). Compare Novalis Schriften (4th ed., 2 vols., Berlin, 1826), II, 116. Emerson's source was probably Carlyle's essay on Novalis (Crit. and Misc. Essays, I, 29), where the passage is rendered: "Philosophy is properly Homesick- ness; the wish to be everywhere at home. No- valis has it more properly thus : Philosophy is homesickness, a yearning to be at home in the All." Whatever the source, Emerson was, in more ways than one, sick for and sick of philos- ophy; and he died without finding a cure. 269. Works, I, 4. 270. Works, I, 339-40. 271. Journals, I, 210 (Jan. 11, 1823). 272. Ibid., II, 357-58. 273. Ibid., Ill, 346, 347-49 (1834), 565 (1835); IV, 27, 41 (1836); V, 545 (1841). 274. May 9, 1836. See ibid., IV, 39-50, 63, 139-41 (1836), 409 (1838); V, 545, 546-47 (1841); VI, 394(i843)- 275. Ibid., Ill, 361 (Nov. 15, 1834). On Emer- son's feeling toward Concord, see M. D. Con- way, Emerson at Home and Abroad, pp. 185- 206; Ed. W. Emerson, Emerson in Concord: A Memoir . . . (Boston, 1889) ; and Randall Stew- art, "The Concord Group," Sewanee Rev., XLIV (Oct., 1936), 434-46- 276. A phrase derived from Bacon and De Gerando. See Journals, II, 330 (Oct. 27, 1830); III, 489 (June 10, 1835). 277. Ibid., Ill, 235 (Dec, 1833). 278. Cabot, Memoir, I, 246. The passage is found in Journals, IV, 235-37, an d represents a rather clearheaded perception of the Kantian distinction. It belongs rather to the end than the beginning of the period during which Emer- son contemplated the Understanding-Reason problem and its relation to his problem. See the testimony of Edward Waldo Emerson, who, in editing the Centenary edition of his father's writings, dated the passage 1835. — Works, XII, 421-22. See also Carlyle-Emerson Corresp., I, 50 (Mar. 12, 1835), and my essay, "The Emerson Canon," Univ. of Toronto Quar., XII, iv (July, 1943). 476-84. 279. Understanding and Reason are not, in these two instances, consistently emphasized with capital letters, by which he later habitu- ally distinguished them; indeed, there is, in the interpretation given them, no indication of anything more than a loose parallelism between mind and matter — certainly no glimmering of an understanding of the transcendental forms of Kant. 280. Journals, III, 235-37 (misdated 1833; more likely, June, 1835; see Cabot, Memoir, I, 246, and Journals, III, 489 [June 10, 1835], where Emerson says pointedly: "I endeavor to announce the laws of the First Philosophy"). Other references include the following: Jour- nals, III, 210-11, 330, 376-77, 389-90, 392-94 (1834), 433, 435, 455, 456, 467-68, 488, 489-90, 492, 499-500, 519, 525-26, 529, 539-4°. 567 (1835); IV, 11-14, 21-23, 25-27. 28-29, 32, 33. 37. 59-61, 65, 71, 73-74. 76. 7 8 (1836); also Letters, I, 412-13 (1834); II, 29-30 (1836). During the remaining months of 1836, after Nature was published, the Understanding-Rea- son problem occupied Emerson (so far as the Journals indicate) ten more times: Journals, IV, 92-94, 102-3, II 5 _I 7. 118-19, 121, 122, 124, 126-29, 131, 164 (1836). Thereafter, the matter is referred to specifically in the Journals as follows: IV, 241, 355, 380-81 (1837); V, 13, Notes to Pages 179-81 603 57, 92-93 (1838), 310 (1839). With this last ref- erence (Nov. 3, 1839), Emerson is done with the Reason and Understanding. Only once more, between 1839 and about 1855, when his thinking entered another phase, does he revert to the subject — on August 17, 1843 (Journals, VII, 431). By 1840, the poet had extracted all the distinction held for his purposes, and he was ready to relinquish the terms to the philosophers. 281. Journals, III, 405. 282. See Emerson's restatement of the Cole- ridgean emphasis on the relation of language to thought, Journals, III, 439 (Jan. 13, 1835), 491 (June 20, 1835), and IV, 146 (Nov. 10, 1836); see also the "Author's Preface," Aids to Reflection, Shedd ed., p. 114; Marsh ed., pp. Iviii-lix. For other significant references in the Journals that shed light on the question of Coleridge's relation to Emerson at this partic- ular stage of Emerson's philosophical develop- ment, see III, 371, 379, 383, 405 (1834), 503, 540, 567 (1835). 283. Journals, III, 439 (Jan. 13, 1835). It is worth noting, also, that Emerson was con- sulting Hedge on philosophical problems during the winter of 1834-1835. 284. See Journals, III, 295-96 (May 6, 1834) ; Letters, I, 412 (May 31, 1834). 285. Friend, Shedd ed., pp. 420, 422; Works, 1.33- 286. Journals, III, 25-26 (Mar. 17, 1836). 287. Even after he had worked out his prob- lem — at least to his own satisfaction — he cried, "Why must always the philosopher mince his words and fatigue us with explanation ?" — Journals, III, 467 (Apr. 16, 1835). See also his objection to metaphysics, voiced when he was 67, ibid., X, 336-37 (Oct. 6, 1870). 288. For this part of his definition he could hardly have found authority in Kant. It reflects (1) Carlyle's interpretation, rather misinterpre- tation, as given in his essays on "Novalis" and the "State of German Literature," and (2) the Scottish identification of the intuitive moral will with reason, as he had been taught at Har- vard College. 289. In thus giving the functions of the Un- derstanding, Emerson was doing little more than paraphrasing Marsh's Preliminary Essay to his edition of the A ids, which lay before him. See p. 96, Shedd ed., and p. xi, Marsh ed. 290. Another reflection of Carlyle's miscon- structions. 291. Compare Journals, IV, 74 (June 22, 1836), where the same idea is repeated. 292. Schiller's Don Carlos, IV, xxi, 90-91. Probably quoted from Carlyle's Life of Schiller, Centenary ed., Works, XXV, 67. 293. See Journals, III, 299 (May 21, 1834). 294. Letters, I, 412-13 (May 31, 1834); im- perfectly and partially quoted in Cabot, Mem- oir, I, 218. 295. The passage indicates that Emerson, following Coleridge and Marsh, repeated the fallacious argument that Bacon, Milton, and the British idealists had all anticipated Kant in drawing the distinction between Understanding and Reason. See Table Talk, Shedd ed., p. 336; the last paragraph in Appendix E of The States- man's Manual: A Lay Sermon; Aids to Reflec- tion, Shedd ed., pp. 210-12, 215, 222-23, 2 33~ 36, 263-65, 460; Aids, Marsh ed., pp. in, 115, 118-20, 131-35, 144-45. 155-57. 375-76. 296. Journals, III, 310. 297. Ibid., p. 300. 298. Ibid., p. 377. 299. See Chs. V-XI of Germany, Wight ed., II, 146-230. 300. See Aids, Shedd ed., Works, I, 234-36, "52-53; Marsh ed., pp. 131-35, I44~45- 301. Aids, Shedd ed., pp. 257-59, 368-72; Marsh ed., pp. 149-51. 302. Only when the Understanding "usurps the name of Reason," says Coleridge, does it join "the banners of Anti-Christ, at once the pander and prostitute of sensuality, and wheth- er in the cabinet, laboratory, the dissecting room, or the brothel, alike busy in the schemes of vice and irreligion." — A Lay Sermon, App. B (Works, Shedd ed., I, 464; Marsh ed., p. 378). Note Coleridge's failure in this passage to dis- tinguish between Pure and Practical Reason. 303. Crit. and Misc. Essays, II, 27. For simi- lar constructions by Carlyle of the Kantian dis- tinction, see his essay on the "State of German Literature," ibid., II, 74-83, esp. p. 82. 304. Emerson's firsthand knowledge of Ja- cobi in 1834 was nil. The first reference to Jacobi in his diaries is dated September 8, 1835, and is in no sense indicative that Emerson had Jacobi before him even then. 305. Unless the editors of the Journals are in error, this book, bearing the publisher's date of 1835, was in Emerson's hands on December 2, 1834. See Journals, III, 379. On that day he quoted from "Table-Talk, 362, folio edition." See also Journals, III, 383 (Dec. 6, 1834), and Letters, I, 448 (July 27, 1835), where Emerson records the opinion that "Coleridge's Table Talk is, I think, as good as Spence's or Selden's or Luther's; better." 306. Journals, III, 295 (May 3, 1834). 307. See Carlyle's apology on this score in Crit. and Misc. Essays, I, 83. 308. See Journals, III, 573 (Dec. 7, 1835). 309. A copy of Cousin's Cours de Philosophie (Paris, 1828), bearing Emerson's signature is still in Emerson's house in Concord. 604 Notes to Pages 181-82 310. Letters, I, 322-23 (May 24, 1831). 311. See Journals, III, 451 (Jan. 20, 1832), and Letters, I, 346 (Mar. 5, 1832). Doubtless he had read, two or three years before, Sir Win. Hamilton's long review of Cousin's Cours de Philosophic in the Edinburgh Rev., L, cxix (Oct., 1829), 194-221. See Letters, I, 322, n. 26 (May 24, 1831). 312. Journals, II, 451. 313. Ibid., pp. 529, 542; Letters, I, 346. 314. Journals, III, 389-90 (Dec. 9. 1834). But the democrat in him impelled him to make this qualification; "Democracy, freedom, has its roots in the sacred truth that every man hath in him the divine Reason, or that, though few men since the creation of the world live accord- ing to the dictates of Reason, yet all men are created capable of so doing. That is the equality and the only equality of all men. To this truth we look when we say, Reverence thyself; Be true to thyself. Because every man has within him somewhat really divine, therefore is slavery the unpardonable outrage it is." And this prin- ciple, after doing service in Nature, the A merican Scholar and Divinity School addresses, Self- Reliance, and elsewhere, was kept against the day in 1848 when he wrote the lecture on "Aristocracy." — Works, X, 29-66, 519-20. 315. Letters, II, 123 (Mar. 27, 1838). Into his diary he had written three weeks earlier: "I told Alcott that in the city, Cousin and Jouf- froy, and the opinion of this and that Doctor, showed very large; a fame of the book-stores seemed commanding; but as soon as we got ten miles out of town, in the bushes, we whistled at such matters, cared little for societies, Sys- temes, or book-stores. God and the world return again to mind, sole problem, and we value an observation upon a brass knob, a genuine ob- servation on a button, more than whole ency- clopedias. It is even so; as I read this new book of Ripley's it looks to me — neat, elegant, accu- rate, as it is — a mere superficiality : in my Jack Cade way of counting by number and weight, counting the things, I find nothing worth in the accomplished Cousin and the mild Jouffroy; the most unexceptionable clearness, precision and good sense, — never a slip, never an igno- rance, — but unluckily, never an inspiration. One page of Milton's poorest prose tract is worth the whole." — Journals, IV, 400 (Mar. 4, 1838). Still not out of breath the next day, he added : "Of the French Eclecticism, and what Cousin thinks so conclusive ... I would say there is an optical illusion in it. "Take Cousin's Philosophy . . . this book . . . ought to be wisdom's wisdom, and we can hug the volume to our hearts and make a bonfire of all the libraries. But here are people who have read it and still survive, nor is it at once percep- tible in their future reasonings that they have talked with God, face to face. Indeed I have read it myself, as I have read any other book. I found a few memorable thoughts, for Philos- ophy does not absolutely hinder people from having thoughts, but by no means as many memorable thoughts as I could have got out of many another book, say, for example, Mon- taigne's essays." — Journals, IV, 404-5. See also Letters, III, 20 (Mar. 1, 1842), where, speci- fically referring to Ripley's championship of Cousin, he says, "I was driven at once to say . . . 'There is no hope for an Eclectic' ; I must unfold my own thought." Ripley appears to have been the only one among the leading Transcendentalists who was carried off his feet, momentarily at least, by Cousin. Theodore Parker, for example, soon recognized Cousin's eclecticism as a "brilliant Mosaic . . . but not satisfactory." — Parker, Works, Cent, ed., XIII, 301. 316. Oddly enough Emerson mentions Ham- ilton only twice before 1848, when he heard him lecture. But considering Hamilton's seven essays bearing on German thought in the Edin- burgh Review between 1829 and 1836 (conveni- ently turned to in his Discussions of Philosophy . . . Edinburgh, 1852) and Emerson's known familiarity with that periodical during these years, it is all but certain that he was familiar with the Scot's strictures on and misinterpre- tation of what he called the "Infinito- Absolute" philosophy of Cousin and Kant, between whom he did not differentiate very clearly. See Letters, I, 320-23, n. 26 (Mar. 30, 1830), where, re- ferring to the essay on Cousin in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1829, he asked William, "Do you read the Edinburgh ? The new article on Cousin's Philosophy is said to be great — a key to the whole German system. I can't under- stand it at all." At this admission we need not wonder, for Hamilton misconstrued not only the Kantian distinction between Understanding and Reason but also confused the Pure with the Practical Reason and thus failed to ex- plain the several purposes of Kant in the two critiques. 317. See Journals, III, 292, 298, 414 (1834), 435, 455-56. 467, 488, 492, 500, 539 (1835), IV, 73-75 (1836)- 318. Journals, III, 398 (Dec. 20, 1834). 319. Ibid., p. 457 (Apr. 16, 1835). 320. Ibid., IV, 74 (June 22, 1836); see also III, 308 (June 18, 1834), where Understanding, "in its right place," is called "the servant of the Reason." In such an essay as Carlyle's "No- valis" (1829), which Emerson perused and re- perused, both the Reason-cow*n*-Understanding Notes to Pages 182-85 605 and the Reason-swpra-Understanding relation- ships are repeatedly emphasized. See, for ex- ample, Crit. and Misc. Essays, II, 24-28. Here Emerson found employed phrases that later came to be his own: "Light of Reason," "ma- jesty of Reason," "the vassal Understanding," "Nature, the mysterious Garment of the Un- seen," and the doctrine of circles, or Sphericity. For other examples, see "Characteristics," ibid., Ill, 40-45, and "State of German Litera- ture," ibid., I, 74-84. 321. Table Talk, Shedd ed., 313 (May 14, 1830). 322. Crit. and Misc. Essays, I, 81. 323. Phases like this one, where the "prac- tical" and aspects of the "pure" reason are obviously confused or left undifferentiated, were to cause Emerson much trouble. 324. Crit. and Misc. Essays, II, 27. 325. Ibid., II, 26-28; see also I, 82. 326. See Hill, Shine, "Carlyle and the Ger- man Philosophy Problem during the Year 1826-1827," PMLA., L, in (Sept., 1935), 810. Compare Crit. and Misc. Essays, II, 26. 327. Two Note Books, pp. 221-22. 328. Wm. Allingham, A Diary (London, 1907), p. 273. 329. Hill Shine, loc. cit., p. 810. 330. On secondary sources from which Car- lyle could have derived his misinformation, see ibid., pp. 813-27. 331. See Journals, III, 292, 298, 414 (1834), 435. 455-56, 4°7. 4 88 , 492. 500, 539 (1835). 332. Especially with regard to the essential differences between constitutive and regulative forms of thought. See Table Talk, Shedd ed., PP- 33° (July 2 > J 82o), 502 (Feb. 22, 1834); the last paragraph of Appendix E of the Statesman' s Manual; and Aids, Shedd ed. 215-23, 233-36, 248-53, 460, 464 (Marsh ed., 115-20, 132-35, !44-45. 375-76, 386). 333. Journals, IV, 74 (June 22, 1836). 334. Letters, I, 432. 335. Journals, III, 540. 336. A reference to Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons, which Emerson was reading at the time. 337. Journals, III, 567. 338. As in "Novalis," Crit. and Misc. Essays, II, 25-27. 339. Journals, III, 573 (Dec. 7, 1835). The italics in this passage are added. In the course of his lectures on "English Lit- erature," delivered during the winter of 1835- 1836, Emerson credited Coleridge with having "taken the widest survey of the moral, intellec- tual, and social world" (Cabot, Memoir, II, 723) ; and in English Traits, twenty years later, he spoke of Coleridge as the one "who wrote and spoke the only high criticis:;i in his time," while Carlyle "was driven into the preaching of Fate" (Works, V, 248, 249). In his English notebook Emerson observed concerning Carlyle: "It is droll to hear this talker talking against talkers, and this writer writing against writing .... He is a bacchanal in the strong waters of vitupera- tion" (Works, V, 387; see also ibid., V, 318-23; Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad; and Scudder, The Lonely Wayfaring Man). Carlyle, on his side, having already "happily got done with all that matter [philosophy] al- together," twitted his American friend unmer- cifully about the plans for the projected "book or journal" to be known as "The Transcenden- talist" (to be edited by Hedge) and about the plans for establishing in Boston "the First Phi- losophy." 340. See the section on Carlyle above; also Shine, loc. cit., p. 810 341. Carlyle-Emerson Corresp., I, 67 (May 13, i8 3 5)- 342. Journals, VI, 222-23 (July 12, 1842). 343. Journals, VIII, 261 (Oct. 27, 1851). "In Carlyle, as in Byron," Emerson wrote on June 4, 1847, "one is more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has a manly superiority rather than intellectually . . ." (Journals, VII, 285). 344. For details, see Scudder's Lonely Way- faring Man. 345. Journals, III, 489. 346. Journals, II, 235-36 (June, 1835? Mis- dated in the published Journals as 1833). 347. Table Talk, Shedd ed., p. 265 (Jan. 6, i833)- 348. Journals, III, 236-37 (June, 1835 ?) 349. Crit. and Misc. Essays, II, 26, 50; see also I, 58-61, 70-86. 350. Journals, III, 237. 351. Crit. and Misc. Essays, II, 27. 352. Consider, for example, Goethe's distinc- tion between Gefiihlsmensch and Verstandes- mensch. 353. See Schiller's numerous parallels drawn in his Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung. 354. Journals, IV, 11-14 (Feb. 24, 1835); see also IV, 78 (July 30, 1836). 355. Ibid., IV, 76 (June 24, 1836). 356. Ibid., Ill, 330-31 (Aug. 17, 1834). 357. Ibid., IV, 37-38 (Apr. 19, 1835). 358. Ibid., Ill, 389 (Dec. 9, 1834). 359. Ibid., p. 519 (July 31, 1835). 360. Ibid., IV, 119 (Oct. 15, 1836). 360. Ibid., IV, 119 (Oct. 15, 1836). 361. Ibid., Ill, 455 (Mar. 19, 1835). 362. Ibid., IV, 14 (Feb. 24, 1836). 363. Ibid., Ill, 310 (June 20, 1834). 364. Ibid., pp. 310-11. 606 Notes to Pages 185-88 365. Ibid., pp. 330-31 (Aug. 17, 1834). 366. Ibid., p. 343 (Sept. 15, 1834) ; also p. 434 (Jan. 8, 1835), and IV, 52-53 (Mar. 22, 1835). 367. Ibid., Ill, 376 (Dec. 2, 1834). 368. Ibid., p. 377. 369. Ibid., p. 393 (Dec. 14, 1834); also V, 310-11 (Nov. 3, 1839). 370. Ibid., Ill, 393. 371. Ibid., p. 398 (Dec. 20, 1834). 372. Ibid. 373. Ibid., p. 427 (Dec. 29, 1834). 374. Ibid., p. 467 (Apr. 14, 1835); IV, 11 (Feb. 24, 1836). 375. Ibid., Ill, 488 (June 4, 1835); also IV, 380-81 (Dec. 18, 1837). 376. Ibid., Ill, 474 (May 9, 1835); also VI, 86 (Oct. 9, 1841), 370-71 (Mar. 23, 1843), and "Genius" in the index to the Journals. 377. Ibid., Ill, 489 (June 4, 1835). 378. Ibid., p. 492 (June 21, 1835). 379. Ibid., p. 525 (Aug. 1, 1835); also Works, VIII, 28. 380. Journals, III, 529 (Aug. 3, 1835): "I suspect that wit, humor, and jests admit a more accurate classification by the light of the dis- tinction of the Reason and the Understanding." 381. Ibid., IV, 13 (Feb. 24, 1836). 382. Ibid., p. 14. 383. Ibid., p. 71 (June 17, 1836); also pp. 115-16 (Oct. 13, 1836), 122 (Oct. 20, 1836), 248 (May 26, 1837). 384. Ibid., p. 72 (June 17, 1836). 385. Ibid., p. 113 (Sept. 30, 1836). 386. Ibid., p. 121 (Oct. 19, 1836); also p. 126 (Oct. 25, 1836). 387. Ibid., p. 124 (Oct. 24, 1836). 388. Ibid., Ill, 295 (May 3, 1834). 389. Notably in the last seven Essays of the Second Section (Friend, Shedd ed., pp. 417-72), where he endeavors to reconcile Platonic thought with Baconian methods and emphasizes the extreme importance of the transcendental methodology. 390. Journals, III, 295-96 (May 3-6, 1834) 391. By the end of 1834 the importance of Coleridge for Emerson may be gauged by his asking, "Why, O diff users of Useful Knowledge, do you not offer to deliver a course of lectures on Aristotle and Plato, or on Plato alone, or on him and Bacon and Coleridge ?" — Journals, III, 386 (Dec. 8, 1834). Two weeks later Coleridge is credited with having "thrown many new truths into circulation" (Journals, III, 405). Increas- ingly we come upon entries beginning with "Coleridge said," until in August of the follow- ing year, he is apostrophized as an "acute psy- chologist" (Journals, III, 540), and four months later Carlyle's speculative powers are put down as "limited" (Journals, III, 573). 392. Aids, Shedd ed., pp. 210-12, 215, 234; see also pp. 31-32. 393. Ibid., pp. 241, 460. 394. The Friend, Shedd ed., p. 420. 395. Works, I, 3-4. 396. See, for example, Aids, Shedd ed., I, 393-95, and Biog. Lit., Shedd ed., pp. 706-9; also "Novalis," Crit. and Misc. Essays, II, 25. 397. Steady reader that Emerson was of the British reviews, he might have encountered the Kantian phraseology several times, notably in Sir William Hamilton's essay in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1836. See XLII, 448. 398. See Carlyle's "Novalis," Crit. and Misc. Essays, II, 21-25, an< J Journals, III, 321. 399. In Chapter I, on Commodity, of course, Emerson applies only Sensation and Under- standing, since Commodity does not supply materials for the Reason to work upon. Con- versely, in the chapter on Discipline, Emerson omits Sensation, since Nature's use as Disci- pline is operative only in the realms of Under- standing and Reason. In the chapters on Beau- ty and on Language, however, the Kantian tripartition is applicable, and is applied by Emerson in 1-2-3 order in each case. 400. Works, I, 15-19. 401. Ibid., pp. 19-21. 402. That is. Reason understood here as the "higher," or Practical, Reason. — Ibid., pp. 22- 24- 403. To be sure, all this is presented without the Kantian "transcendental unit of appercep- tion," without the forms of Empfindung, the categories of Verstand, or the Ideas of Vernunft, without explanation of the terms a priori and a posteriori. It is presented without analytic or dialectic, without postulates or antinomies, without the distinctions between pure and prac- tical reason, and without a formal definition of the Ding-an-Sich, which the former strives vainly to apprehend, or the categorical impera- tive, which the latter seeks to formulate. Yet it is perfectly satisfactory as far as it goes. The guide here is obviously Coleridge. 404. In the edition of the Aids that lay before Emerson, Marsh had reprinted in Appendix C, Coleridge's Hints toward the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life, in which this schema is fully developed ; see also Biographia Literaria, Shedd ed., 706. 405. Individual passages, such as those on Linnaeus and Buffon, can be related first to the journals and thence to his reading in Coleridge and in scientific books. In the third section of the chapter on Language are incorporated sen- tences, the exact phrasing of which dates back as far at least as November, 1833: for example, the statement that "the laws of nature answer Notes to Pages 188-90 607 to those of matter as face to face in a glass." On the other hand, the source of the passage which calls material objects "kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator" oc- curs in the Journals, III, 513 (July 24, 1835), where they are quoted directly from Oegger's True Messiah, to the manuscript of which he had access before Margaret Fuller set to work translating it. These circumstances suggest de- rivations from sources other than Coleridge and the critical transcendentalists of Germany — sources which need further investigation. All this lends support to the idea that the further Emerson got into his undertaking, that is, the nearer he approached the chapters on Idealism and Spirit, the more difficulties he en- countered. Obviously parts of Chapter IV were phrased as late as July, 1835; and as we shall have occasion to observe later, some of the sec- tions on Discipline (representing the fourth and highest use of Nature) waited until mid- July of 1836 to receive their final form. See Journals, IV, 67-68. 406. Works, I, 26; cf. sec. 2 of Ch. Ill, on Beauty. 407. Ibid., p. 36. 408. Ibid., p. 47. 409. Ibid., p. 36. 410. On this score, compare also "The Sover- eignty of Ethics" (ibid., X, 184-85), first print- ed in 1878 but composed of notes and lectures dating from 1859 and 1869. 411. Ibid., I, 43. 412. Ibid., p. 41. 413. Ibid., p. 44. 414. Ibid., pp. 41-42. 415. Ibid., p. 43. 416. Ibid., p. 44. 417. Ibid., p. 41 ; see also pp. 40, 44. 418. The relation of Carlyle's essay to Emer- son's Nature is close. See especially "Novalis" (Crit. and Misc. Essays, I, 24, 26, 27-28, 29, 32, 35, 40-41) and "State of German Literature" (ibid., pp. 586°). Indeed, except for the illustra- tions drawn from natural science and the home- spun phrases and figures, Emerson's Nature contains few ideas that have not their counter- part in Carlyle's words on Novalis or in the quotations from Novalis that are adduced for illustrative purposes. 419. Works, I, 47. In this section we come upon another instance of Emerson's peculiar errors in attributing ideas or quotations to their proper sources. Turgot is credited (ibid., p. 56) with the statement: "He that has never doubt- ed the existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries." Now, it happens that Turgot was not one re- garding whom Emerson had any direct knowl- edge. Indeed, a search of Turgot's writings does not reveal the source of the statement there. Most probably Emerson confused Turgot with Dugald Stewart, in whose Dissertation he could have come upon the idea as early as 1822. See Journals, I, 289-90. The same idea is repeated in Carlyle's essay on Novalis in the Foreign Rev., IV (1829), 97-104; cf. Journals, II, 229- 30, andCrit. and Misc. Essays, II, 23. Emerson's misattribution seems all the more strange be- cause he was rereading Stewart in September, 1830. See Journals, II, 308, 310, 321. 420. Works, I, 51. 421. Ibid. 422. Ibid., pp. 47-49. 423. Ibid., pp. 49-50. 424. This represents no more than many ro- mantic post-Kantians did. It is not very differ- ent from the uses to which Kant was put by Novalis and Schleiermacher or by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Insofar as this is true, Emerson is as nearly related to German and English ro- manticism as to the founder of German critical transcendentalism. So much it seems safe to say; to insist upon a nearer relation to Kant, at the time when Nature was being written, would seem to be unwarrantable. 425. Works, I, 56-57. 426. Ibid., p. 59. 427. Ibid., pp. 50-59. 428. Ibid., p. 62. 429. Ibid., p. 63. 430. For, says Emerson, if idealism does nothing more than "deny the existence of mat- ter, it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of me." He cannot rest his case thus and pass up the other two questions. For "when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire, Whence is matter ? and Whereto ? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man; that the dread universal essence, which is not wis- dom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old .... Man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite .... The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of 608 Notes to Pages 190-92 God in the unconscious . . . ." — Works, I, 63- 65- There is nothing to suggest that Emerson identified the process by which he followed "the invisible steps of thought" to his essentially in- tuitive divinations arising out of the "recesses of consciousness" with the labored steps by which Kant's practical Reason arrived at its "affirmations," though it goes without saying that he was less interested in the process than in the results. 431. Works, I, 10. 432. Ibid., Ill, 235-36. 433. Ibid., II, 268. 434. The following passage from Journals, III, 235-36, is misdated 1833 by the editors, as has been explained above. It was undoubtedly written in 1835. 435. Journals, III, 235. The remainder of this passage, as quoted, is as given by Cabot (Memoir, I, 246-47), and his version differs markedly from that printed in the Journals. 436. Works, I, 63. Assured and even dogmat- ic as Emerson's expression is in Nature (except for this one reservation), his journals show him repeatedly humbling himself before his prob- lem. 437. Works, I, 67; see also pp. 10, 34-44. This passage, say the editors of the Journals (I, 412, n.), was inspired by Emerson's visit to the Jardin des Plantes. The chapter heading "Prospects" itself sug- gests that the theory advanced in Nature is not to be thought of as final. In sending the booklet to Carlyle, Emerson spoke of it as the first chapter of something greater, as "an entering wedge to something more worthy and signifi- cant." Carlyle, who considered the gaps and breaks in the philosophy outlined immaterial, if he noticed them at all, replied that he would "call it rather a Foundation and Ground Plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build." — Car- lyle-Emerson Corresp., I, 112; Works, I, 410-2. 438. Works, I, 36. 439. Ibid., p. 40. 440. Ibid., p. 61. 441. Consult Joseph W. Beach, "Emerson and Evolution," Univ. of Toronto Quar., Ill, iv (July, 1934), 474-97, and Harry H. Clark, loc. cit., pp. 225-60. 442. Works, I, 10. This conviction dates back as far at least as 1833. See Cabot (Memoir, II, 710), who misdates the lecture 1832. It was first delivered in 1833. See Bliss Perry's Emerson Today, p. 45. 443. Works, I, 61. 444. Ibid., pp. 403-4, notes. 445. It should be observed, however, that before the year was out he had advanced one step (though a short one) beyond the merely "occult" relation between man and vegetable — the impact, it seems, of acquaintance with Lamarck. See the synopsis of Emerson's lecture on "The Philosophy of History," delivered Dec. 8, 1836, as printed in Cabot's Memoir, II, 725; see also p. 734. Emerson's development from this position toward that of Darwin (which he never fully reached) was very slow and gradual. We shall consider later his subsequent concern with the advance of science and scientific theory. It forms another important chapter in the history of Emerson's philosophic development and im- pinges upon the questions regarding Germanic influence upon Emerson. For the moment it is enough to remark that The Origin of Species (1859) went unnoticed in his journals for a number of years because he had already ex- tracted from Stallo's Principles of Nature (1848) as much as he wanted at the time of Darwinian evolutionary theory. As late as 1873 he ob- served: "Darwin's Origin of Species was pub- lished in 1859, but Stallo, in 1849 [sic] writes, 'animals are but foetal forms of man.'" — Jour- nals, X, 423. 446. At the beginning of this period man is conceived as "the point wherein matter and spirit meet and marry. The Idealist says, God paints the world around your soul. The spiritu- alist saith, Yes, but lo! God is within you. The Self of self creates the world through you, and organizations like you. The Universal Central Soul comes to the surface in your body." — Journals, IV, 78 (July 30, 1836). Here the ideal- ist and the spiritualist, the doctrine of tran- scendence and that of emanation, exist side by side. The next year he is wrestling with his prob- lem still in the same fashion: "Who shall de- fine to me the individual ? I behold with awe and delight many illustrations of the One Uni- versal Mind. I see my being imbedded in it; as a plant in the earth so I grow in God. I am only a form of him. He is the soul of me. I can even with a mountainous aspiring say, I am G^i, by transferring my me out of the flimsy and un- clean precinct of my body .... How came the Individual, thus armed and impassioned, to parricide thus murderously inclined, ever to traverse and kill the Divine Life ? Ah, wicked Manichee! Into that dim problem I cannot enter. A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two .... Cannot I conceive the Universe without a contradiction?" (italics mine). Jour- nals, IV, 247-49 (May 26, 1837). 447. What troubled Emerson as much at this point as his failure in Nature to establish a sys- Notes to Pages 192-94 609 tern of Identity on solid metaphysical grounds was the position of man in which the philosophy expressed in Nature left him — a philosophy by which the individual is part and parcel of God, God is pure spirit, and the world, so far as man is concerned, is an illusion used by God to edu- cate individuals who are, after all, not individ- uals at all. In this case, the individual seemed lost in God; while, in the evolutionary theory, he seemed in danger of being swallowed up in an overpowering, impersonal, natural reality. 448. The name at least of Plotinus was known to Emerson as early as 1830; but in 1837 he became the object of close attention. Proclus begins to be mentioned prominently in 1838. Thereafter the entire galaxy of neo-Platonists is consulted for light. For a detailed, but over- enthusiastic, treatment of the neo-Platonic in- fluence on Emerson, see J. S. Harrison, The Teachers of Emerson (N.Y., 1910). Professor F. I. Carpenter's Emerson and Asia (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), as the title suggests, adds inform- ation, which is essential to any effort to evaluate the elements of Emerson's thought that derive from Greek sources. It may be observed that Emerson was in- clined to be profoundly affected by the last book which he had read, especially when that book struck a sympathetic chord. This is not to suggest that he accepted docilely whatever he found, or that he slavishly echoed whatever he could use. It is simply to record a fact which is apparent again and again in the history of Emerson's concern with books. 449. Journals, IV, 380-81 (Dec. 18, 1837). The extent of Emerson's deflection from the course which Coleridge had charted for him a few years before in the realm of critical tran- scendentalism may be gauged by his designa- tion of the Trismegisti as "that lofty and se- questered class who have been its [the pure intellect's] prophets and oracles, the high- priesthood of pure reason." — Works, II, 345; see also II, 427, notes, where Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Synesius, Proclus and the other Neo-Platonists influenced by Oriental thought — these "great spiritual lords who have walked in the world" — are again named "the high- priesthood of the pure reason." Obviously the word reason has taken on new (un-Kantian) connotations. 450. Journals, IV, 381 (Dec. 18, 1837). This is followed by the passage, eventually used as the second paragraph in the essay on "Intel- lect " which, together with what was drawn from various lectures dating to 1836-1839, serves as the best gradus to a view of Emerson's thought of these years. See Works, II, 325-26, 437-38. notes. 451. The contrast here between the adult and the child suggests kinship with similar ideas in Wordsworth's "Ode," Schiller's Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, Herder, Hamann and beyond them, Plato. It is doubt- ful that Emerson read Schiller's work On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, but he was familiar with Carlyle's Life of Schiller, which contains pas- sages of striking similarity to that quoted. See Carlyle's Works, Centenary ed., XXV, esp. 98, 198, 199. 452. Journals, IV, 383 (Dec. 18, 1837). 453. Works, II, 327. 454. See Works, II, 426-27, notes, and Ca- bot, Memoir, II, 737-40. 455. That he did struggle with this idea the essays mentioned amply demonstrate. See for example, "The Over-Soul," Works, I, 268-69, 271-72, 276, 279, and esp. 280-82, 292, 294-97, and "The Method of Nature," Works, II, 194, 197, 199-200, 210, 221, 223. Indeed, both series of the Essays (1841 and 1844) are worth studying with the design to trace the neo-Platonic elements in them. Espe- cially to the point, besides the references al- ready specified, are "Compensation" and "Spir- itual Laws" of the First Series and those on "Nature" and "Nominalist and Realist" of the Second. "Circles" (written mainly during 1840), permeated as it is with neo-Platonic ideas, ex- hibits already another tendency — that of a re- turn to science and an attempt to proceed to the principle of evolution; it demonstrates most clearly a growing dissatisfaction with the inconclusiveness of intuitional mysteries and marks the beginning of a return to science and philosophy — the last phase of Emerson's philo- sophic development. 456. Thatis, during 1837-1840 Emerson turn- ed more and more from metaphysical specu- lation to history and biography — from theory to practice. It is noticeable, also, that about 1838, as his interest in metaphysics decreases, his references to Coleridge fall off, while those to Carlyle continue unabated — partly, of course, because of the close personal relations with Carlyle, following Coleridge's death in 1834. While he was aware that metaphysically Car- lyle was dead, Emerson nevertheless turned to him for inspiration and affirmation regarding practical matters — for ethical but no longer for metaphysical principles. A comparison of Car- lyle's Heroes and Emerson's Representative Men, in spite of the large differences, serves to illus- trate their relationship. 457. Emerson's philosophic career up to this point is, in some respects, similar to O. A. Brownson's going from creed to creed, each time knowing that he was right and the last G10 Notes to Page 194 time (or two) knowing that he "could not be wrong." The difference is one of degree, not of kind. The last change that Emerson had undergone is best gauged by comparing the Nature of 1836 with the second essay on Nature that he wrote during the early forties. The question with which Nature confronts him is the same; but in as- saulting the problem, he does not now, as he had in 1833-36, array in due order the epistemologi- cal forces of the transcendental method. Now, as then, he concludes that he cannot solve Na- ture's riddle; but now he humbly considers that it was not intended that he should, and lets it go at that. 458. For a consideration of Emerson's earlier concern with evolution, it is important to take into account what he derived of the Hunterian theory from Coleridge's Friend and Aids and from Dr. Abernethy's Lectures; his first con- tacts, in 1830, with Lee's Life ofCuvier; in 1835, with Oegger's True Messiah, or the Old and New Testament Examined According to the Principles of the Language of Nature; with Lyell's Princi- ples of Geology, and, perhaps through Lyell, with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire; in 1836, with La- marck; in 1838, with Charles Bell's Treatise of the Hand . . . Evincing Design; and in 1844, with Robert Chambers' epochal Vestiges of Creation. 459. To Professor J. W. Beach belongs the credit of being the first to point out the possible significance of this book. A more exhaustive study reveals even greater influence than Mr. Beach intimated might be discovered from this quarter. 460. Johann Bernhard Stallo (1823-1900) was a now-forgotten German- American jour- nalist, lawyer, politician, diplomat, statesman, and professor of science and mathematics at St. Xavier, Cincinnati, and St. John's, Ford- ham, N.Y. 461. To be sure, Emerson had, in 1841, read with considerable interest Barchou de Pen- hoen's Histoire de la philosophic allemande de- puis Leibnitz jusqu a Hegel (2 vols., Paris, 1836), and paused long enough to copy extracts con- cerning Boehme, Kepler, Leibnitz, Newton, and Kant (see Journals, VI, 142-46); but the suc- ceeding sections of the journals exhibit no evidence that this was followed up, as it would have been in the early thirties, or as it was to be during the fifties and sixties (whenever he came upon such a book) by further reading and a tracing out of leads supplied or suggested by it. The causes for this doubtless lie in the facts (1) that Emerson was not, in 1841, primarily interested in either metaphysics or science, and (2) that he had not progressed, through the trials and errors of the years, to the point where he would once again be eager and consider him- self capable (as he had believed himself earlier) of proceeding to a new synthesis. 462. Emerson's published journals do not indicate the precise date in the year of 1849 when he turned to Stallo's book. Possibly it was called to his attention as early as March, 1848, when James E. Cabot's laudatory review ap- peared in Parker's Massachusetts Quarterly Re- view, I, ii (Mar., 1848), 263-65. The plans for this new journal were perfected in Emerson's home in May of 1847 (see Journals, VII, 268- 69), and Emerson wrote the editors' manifesto for the new magazine. 463. See Journals, VIII, 76 (Dec. 14, 1849), and esp. Works, VIII, 7, and 359-62, for in- teresting leads to the study of Emerson's prog- ress from an earlier attention to the theory of "arrested and progressive development . . . the electric word pronounced by John Hunter a hundred years ago" to his more mature reflec- tions on Darwin's theory. It is not clear precisely by what means, other than Stallo's book, Emerson came by his knowl- edge of Oken. He mentions Oken as early as August 4, 1842, in a letter to John H. Heath (then in Berlin) as "a continuator of Schelling's thought," and gives him the title of "hero" for the "grandeur of his attempt to unite natural and moral philosophy." — Letters, III, 76-77. See also Journals, VII, 151 (1846). These refer- ences antedate Emerson's reading of Stallo, who devotes a good deal of space to Oken's philos- ophy of nature (see esp. pp. 258, 313). Whether Emerson read Oken, or about him, before 1849 or not, it is clear that Stallo forcibly called (or recalled) Emerson's attention to him, for most of the quotations from Oken which he copied into his commonplace book in 1850 are derived at second hand from Stallo. As an evolutionist, Oken is known for his theory of the origin of life in the Ur-Schleim. Professor Beach has suggested that Emerson's "fluid in an elastic sack," the "infusoria," or microscopically minute bladders with fluid con- tent, may be the stuff which makes up the pri- mary sea-slime of Oken's theory. It is worth noting that while Emerson re- garded the theory of spontaneous generation (or "equivocal generation") as a scientific hum- bug in 1 83 1, his reading in Chambers, Goethe, and Stallo, and others considerably altered his views by 1849. See, for example, what he made of this theory in 1854, when he wrote the intro- duction for "Poetry and Imagination," esp. Works, VIII, 7-8, and 358-60, notes. As the analysis of Emerson's knowledge of science proceeds, it is becoming more and more Notes to Page 194 611 obvious that the claims of earlier students of Emerson to the effect that he anticipated Dar- win by five years (even twenty-five years, in the case of Nature) are overstated. The fact seems to be rather that some years were to pass after the appearance of Darwin's epoch-making book on species before the full significance of the new marshalling of scientific data and of the theories derived thence dawned on Emerson. His con- ception of evolution prior to his reading of Dar- win underwent a gradual development from (i) the vague theories of development as he found them in his reading of the ancient philosophers, to (2) the Hunterian and Coleridgean theory of the scale of being with which he became famil- iar in 1829, to (3) Cuvier's fourfold classification of the animal kingdom, as he read about it in Lee's Life in 1830, to (4) Chambers' anticipa- tion of Darwinian evolution, in 1844-1845 (Journals, VI, 550; VII, 51-53), not to mention supplementary information derived from nu- merous other scientific and pseudo-scientific sources, among which the neo-Platonic tradi- tion must be reckoned as one and the Schelling- ian Natur-Philosophie another. The transition from the Hunterian chain-of-being theory to that of Darwinian evolution involved no such antagonisms for Emerson's mind as did the "bestial theory" to Coleridge's religious pre- possessions, or his demands for philosophic con- sistency, either. For the transcendental cast of Emerson's mind was one in which intellectual contrarieties sometimes succeeded in living hap- pily together in a sort of benign solution. More- over, Emerson was exposed to scientific influ- ences which Coleridge did not live to encounter. For examples of how easily Emerson was pre- pared to pass from the graduated-scale-of-being theory to that of transmutation of species, shortly after reading Vestiges of Creation during 1844-1845, see Journals, VII, 51-52, 58, 69-70, 104 (1845), and "Nature" (written in 1840— 1841), Works, III, 167-96. Emerson's transition from the scale-of-being to a more strictly evolutionary phase of his thinking was made very gradually. A detailed analysis of this transition would assuredly prove interesting. Such a study would have to dis- tinguish carefully between the theory embodied in the quotation printed by Cabot (Memoir, I, 223-24) from Emerson's lecture in December, 1833, "On the Relation of Man to the Globe," and what is sometimes confused with it, i.e., the doctrine of evolution as transmutation of species, as Emerson conceived it increasingly after 1845 and certainly after 1849, when he read Stallo, who carefully drew the distinction between the old and the new. See Stallo's Firs/ Principles, 407-11. Virtually unexplored but important is the question of precisely how much Goethe's scien- tific ideas influenced Emerson. During the thir- ties he worked carefully through Goethe's three more important scientific treatises and extract- ed for his journals the essential ideas from them. By September, 1843, he rated the second part of Faust "the grandest enterprise of literature . . . since the Paradise Lost" (Journals, VI, 466). An attentive reading of his essay on Goethe in Representative Men (1850), particularly of the passage devoted to Faust II (Works, IV, 271 ff), will indicate that little of the full significance of that work was lost to him. It is to be borne in mind, also, that much may have come to Emerson from sources the evidences of which time has obliterated, such as the conversations he had with scientists. From Thoreau he undoubtedly learned much of botany, though he came in the end to be repelled by Thoreau's argumentativeness. There are indications in Holmes's biography of Emer- son that the professor of anatomy at Harvard sometimes discussed scientific matters with the seer of Concord ; and Agassiz tells us that he preferred Emerson's conversation on scientific subjects to that of any other man. See Journals, IX, 520-31; X, 60-61; 75 (1864); also VI, 395; VIII, 69; X, 208; Works, X, 466; Firkins, Emerson, p. 94; Cabot, Memoir, I, 270, 272, 282; Carlyle-Emerson Corresp., II, 204; R. M. Gay, Emerson (N.Y., 1928), pp. 135, 161; Mark Van Doren, Thoreau (Boston, 1916), p. 123, and notably the letters of 1848 (as edited by R. L. Rusk) which record the pleasure Emerson found in the company of British scientists during his second visit to Europe. 464. On Saint-Hilaire, consult the essays by Professors Clark and Beach. 465. Emerson had grasped related ideas (such as that on "sphericity") as early at least as 1840, when "Circles" was written; he had, moreover, encountered the ancient doctrine of a "flowering" in Heraclitus, to whom De Ge- rando had sent him in 1830, and from whom he seems to have borrowed, in 1841, the idea for "Woodnotes II": Onward and on, the eternal Pan Halteth never in one shape. But forever doth escape, Like wave or flame, into new forms Of gem, and air, of plants and worms. After reading Chambers' Vestiges of Creation, he wrote in 1845 (Journals, VII, 58) what seems to be an advance upon the idea expressed in "Woodnotes II": 612 Notes to Pares 194-97 As creeps from leaf to leaf the worm, So creeps its life from form to form, And the poor emmet on the ground On the march of centuries is bound. Indeed, many years before, he had found in Madame de Stael's characterization of German philosophy not only the doctrines of the anal- ogy between mind and matter, of the micro- cosm (earlier noted in Aristotle, Journals, II, 347), of unity in variety and variety in unity, but also the idea, attributed to Goethe, that man's mind "is always advancing, but in a spiral line." See de Stael's Germany (Wight ed., 1859), II, 218-19, 225. However, these and all other early instances miss the precise mark in one way or another, so that the almost exact parallelism of idea and expression, together with the identity of dates between Emerson's reading about the idea in Stallo and his re- phrasing of the motto for the 1849 edition of Nature, suggests that we have here more than a mere coincidence. 466. Consult indexes to Letters and Journals. 467. See Journals, X, 248 (June 16, 1868), and Works, XII, 13. 468. Fichte's more technical works were not available in English translation during Em- erson's productive life; but beginning in 1844, when Wm. Smith translated and Chapman published, in London, The Characteristics of the Present Age, the more popular works became accessible to the British and American reader. On this score, see B. Q. Morgan, op. cit., pp. 113-14. 469. Journals, III, 260 (Feb. 12, 1834). 470. Journals, X, 318 (1870). 471. Crit. and Misc. Essays, I, 60. 472. Wight's ed., N.Y., 1859, II, 193-94. 473. In 1847 Fichte merely reinforced the practical message that Emerson had taught years before. Similarly Strauss (who came prominently to his attention about this time) only advanced a criticism of the Christian tradi- tion which Emerson had not only theorized upon in his own way but actually put into practice years before by renouncing that tradi- tionalism. 474. See Fichte's Preface, as reproduced in Hedge's Prose Writers (3rd ed., N.Y. and Lon- don, 1855), pp. 384-85. 475. Journals, IV, 248-49. Compare Hedge, op. cit., pp. 391 ff. It is significant that after 1850, when Emer- son returned to a reconsideration of German idealism, he never included Fichte in his lists of German thinkers whom he accorded first praise. Kant, Schelling, and Hegel are always named; Schleiermacher and Schopenhauer, sometimes; Fichte, never. It is questionable, also, whether Emerson was prepared, even in 1847, to ad- vance to Fichte's "rigid determinism" and "strict necessity" in nature, as promulgated in The Destination of Man. Emerson never quite subscribed to a naturalistic view of nature. In spite of his belief in the "reign of law," he never relinquished the notion of either an "occult" or a "moral" relation between Nature and Spirit — not even during the period when he came most under the influence of the evolutionary theorists. 476. Hedge, op. cit., p. 400; see also pp. 401- 2. Emerson the Believer might readily acquiesce in such a fatalistic or passive conclusion, but Emerson the Inquirer could hardly have agreed with it, or rested the case with Fichte when the latter concluded : "All my questions are solved." — Ibid., p. 402. 477. How differently Emerson might have reacted toward Fichte if he had ever turned to his more technical works we need not inquire, however nearly they agreed on such points as the immutability of moral law, on freedom, on the individual, on optimism and the belief in the progress of culture, on nature's ability to contradict herself, on the practical reason as the "root of all reason," and on the "sublimity of Action through Will." Practically, Emerson had advanced to Fichte's position long before he discovered the "grand unalterableness of Fichte's morality." If Emerson had been reminded of the similarities between his own philosophy of practice, or "use," and Fichte's ethics, he might have observed that nothing more was involved than another instance illustrating his principle that "there is one mind, and every man is a porch leading into it." — Journals, IV, 171 (Dec. 10, 1836). 478. Scs for example, IX of Biographia Literaria. Schelling is mentioned in Emerson's Journals (II, 422) as early as October 24, 1831. 479. Journals, IV, 473 (June 12, 1838); also Works, I, 161. 480. The italics are added. Obviously this claim is not to be taken literally. 481. Journals, VII, 151-52 (Mar. 24, 1846). Emerson's reading of Boehme, begun in 1835, proceeded haphazardly until May 8, 1844, when he observed: "I have never had good luck with Behmen before today. And now I see that his excellence is in his comprehensiveness, not, like Plato, in his precision. His propositions are vague, inadequate, straining. It is his aim that is great. He will know, not one thing, but all things Jacob Behmen is a great man, but he accepts the accommodations of the Hebrew Dynasty. Of course he cannot take rank with the masters of the world. His value, like that of Notes to Pages 197-200 613 Proclus, is chiefly for rhetoric." — Journals, VI, 517- 482. See the numbers for January and April, 1843. Already in August, 1842, Emerson had admitted to John F. Heath, then in Berlin, where Schelling was lecturing, that "to hear Schelling might well tempt the firmest rooted philosopher from his home." "I confess," he went on, "to more curiosity in respect to his opinion than to those of any living philoso- pher," and he concluded his letter with the wish that Heath would return home soon bringing all of Schelling's best thoughts with him. — • Letters, III, 76-77. 483. Ibid., p. 77; see also pp. 70-71, 98-99, ioo, 243. 484. Ibid., pp. 98-99 (Nov. 2i, 1842). 485. Ibid., p. 243 (Feb. 26, 1844). 486. Ibid., p. 290 (June 26, 1844). 487. Ibid., p. 296 (June 12, 1845). 488. Ibid., pp. 298-99 (Sept. 1, 1845). 489. Ibid., pp. 303-4 (Sept. 28, 1845). 490. Ibid., p. 343 (Aug. 19, 1846). 491. Ibid., pp. 345-46. 492. Journals, VII, 152 (Mar. 24, 1846). 493. Ibid., VIII, 69 (Nov. 17, 1849). 494. Ibid., p. 16 (1849). 495. Ibid., p. 249 (1851). 496. Ibid., pp. 529-30 (Feb. 24, 1855). 497. Ibid., p. 124 (Sept. 1, 1850). 498. Ibid., p. 225 (1851). 499. This snap judgment regarding a Hindu element in Hegel appears substantially the same as that of W. T. Harris, a profounder student of Hegel than Emerson. See Harris, Hegel's Logic (Chicago, 1890), Preface, pp. xiii- xv ; also Kurt F. Leidecker, "Harris and Indian Philosophy," Monist, XLVI, i (Jan., 1936), 112-53. 500. Journals, VIII, 69 (Nov. 17, 1849). Obviously this quotation is derived at second hand from Stallo. See the chapter on Schelling, op. cit., pp. 214-29, esp. pp. 221, 222-24. 501. Journals, VIII, 77 (Dec. 14, 1849); also X, 423 (1873). The printed journals contain only three of Emerson's extracts from Stallo (by no means the most significant). The MS journals contain ten others. 502. Ibid., VIII, 246 (July, 1851). 503. Ibid., p. 533 (Aug., 1855). 504. Journals, IX, 419-20 (May, 1864), el seq. 505. Ibid., pp. 30-31 (Apr. 5, 1856); see also X, 455 (1876): "The analysis of intellect and Nature which the grand masters, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Schelling, Hegel have attempted are of primary value to science . . . ." 506. "Poetry and Imagination" (written ca. 1854), Works, VIII, 8. 507. Journals, VIII, 46-47. 508. Ibid., p. 77 (Dec. 14, 1849). Stallo (op. cit., p. 17) has: "The figurations of nature must be more than a symbol, — they must be the gesticular expression of nature's inner life . . . ." 509. Omitted from the published Journals. Here reproduced from the MS Journal marked "AZ. 1850," p. 52. Emerson records the source correctly as Stallo, op. cit., p. 35. 510. MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," p. 52; quoted from Stallo, p. 58. 511. Journals, VIII, 77; MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," p. 53; source is Stallo, p. 16. 512. MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," p. 43; Stallo, P- 93- 513. MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," p. 53. I have been unable to find the exact source in Stallo, but passages on pages 108, 256, and 304 may have supplied the necessary suggestions. 514. MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," p. 53; quoted from Stallo, p. 304; see also p. 121, where Stallo's statement reads: "Oken sometimes defines animals as foetal men." 515. MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," p. 53; Stallo, p. 291. 516. MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," p. 53; Stallo, p. 192. For further references to Stallo, see Journals, X, 423 (1873), and the following nota- tions under the heading of "Stallo: Oken": "The whole bird is a respiratory organ" (MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," p. 54; Stallo, p. 322). "The bird is an animal of song in full organi- zation : in it nature attains to complete hearing and speaking" (MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," p. 54; Stallo, p. 322). "Hegel, or Oken, or whosoever shall enunciate the law which necessitates gravitation as a phenomenon of a larger law, embracing mind and matter, diminishes New- ton" (MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," p. 166). 517. Journals, VIII, 77-78. This idea of eras or cyclic development becomes henceforth a common one in Emerson's journals. See, for example, IX, 295 (1861); for additional data consult the indexes of the Journals and the Works under the heads of Absolute, Identity, Polarity, Bi-polarity, Organic, Transition, Rotation, Bias, and Idealism. In what Emerson says about cyclic develop- ment, the influence of Herder should be con- sidered. Emerson's interest in Herder dates back at least to 1824 (see Letters, I, 153, 161), by which time he asked William (then in Ger- many) to send him "an English translation of Herder's phil. of history." Such ideas as the Greek deification of nature and the theory of cyclic, genetic development in man's view of nature are prominent in Herder's historical and critical works ; see esp. Ideen zur Philosophic der Geschichte der Menschheit, Bk. XIII. This 614 Notes to Pages 200-202 book became available in English in 1800. 518. Journals, VIII, 487 (1854), X, 462-63 (1862-1872), and Works, VIII, 4-1 1, 66; XII, 17, 19-20. 519. The relative influence of these several men can be studied through key references to be located in the Journals, Letters, and Works by consulting the indexes. 520. Journals, X, 205 (1867). 521. Ibid., pp. 205-6 (1867). 522. For Emerson's sources of the doctrines of Identity and the Absolute, see Stallo, pp. 335-44- 400-7. 523. Journals, VIII, 69 (1850); see also MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," 53 (reproduced above), and MS Journal, "GL. 1861, 1862, 1863," p. 248, as well as Journals, VIII, 126 (1850), and X, 206 (1867), where he asserts that "the laws below are sisters of the laws above." Compare the introduction to "Poetry and Imagination," written ca. 1854 (Works, VIII, esp. 4-1 1), with Part I of Stallo's book, notably the chapter on Schelling, for a very interesting parallel illustra- ting how closely Emerson followed Stallo on both Schelling and Hegel. See Stallo, pp. 214- 19, and 221, 222. The source of Emerson's state- ment appears to be Stallo, p. 222, except that Emerson substituted union for identity in Stal- lo's statement that "the Absolute ... is the identity of the Ideal and the Real . . . ." Just as Emerson found in his reading of Stallo an anticipation by ten years of Darwinian evol- ution, so Henry Adams in 1903, when he tried to read the new "Grammar of Science" as typified by Karl Pearson, found in it "little more than an enlargement of Stallo's book already twenty years old." However, there is a vast difference between the effect Stallo had on the two seekers. Emerson reed Stallo in a way to confirm his faith in the Absolute as "the identity of the Ideal and the Real." The younger man read in Stallo's "Concepts of Modern Science" (as he calls Stallo's Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics of 1882) a con- firmation for his view of "Twentieth-Century Multiplicity." See The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1927), 377, 449, 452. 524. Omitted in the Journals; here quoted from MS Journal, "TU. 1849," p. 22. Compare /owKa/s,VIII,i26,5o6;IX, 295 ; and XI, 3 17-18. 525. This statement, like the second of Schelling's above, is several times exactly repeated by Emerson at this time and later. See MS Journal, "ZO. 1856," p. 154 (not in Journals), and MS Journal "LN. 1866," p. 19 (Journals, X, 144). See also Journals, XI, 317- 18 (1870), and Works, VIII, 1-11. 526. Journals, X, 423 (1873); MS Journal, "ST. 1870-1875," p. 218. 527. See Journals, VII, 69-70 (1845). A more specific source for the phrase than Chambers, who uses the words but not in the sequence and contiguity in which Emerson does, it seems to me, is Hoefer's Nouvelle Biographie Generate. See the passage in Journals, X, 265 (1856), which he derived thence. 528. Much has been made of a passage in the introduction to "Poetry and Imagination" (Works, VIII, 7) as indicating that Emerson arrived at the theory of evolution about 1853- 1854, when most of this essay was written. The passage in question is this: "The electric word pronounced by John Hunter a hundred years ago, arrested and progressive development, in- dicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organisms, gave the poetic key to Natural Science, to which the theories of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Oken, of Goethe, of Agassiz and Owen and Darwin in zoology and botany, are the fruits, — a hint whose power is not yet exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics." Unfortu- nately for the validity of this claim, an examina- tion of the lecture as given in 1854 does not reveal the passage. Evidently it was written and inserted, probably between 1865 (when he jotted down in his journal the passage from which the published version was later elaborated) and 1876 (when it was first printed) . See Journals, X, 265, and Works, VIII, 357-58, notes. 529. In his later years Emerson preferred to use the words transit and transition rather than evolution. For examples, see Journals, VIII, 501 (1854), 529-30 (1855), X, 457-58. 462-63 ( 1 862-1 872). Similarly, he preferred the word bias to individualism or originality , as used during his earlier periods. See Journals, VIII, 226 (1851), 543 (1855), IX, 539 (1863), X, 22-23 (1864), 146-47 (1866). 530. See Works, XII, 17: "Matter is dead Mind." On this score, see Stallo, pp. 108-9, and esp. pp. 16-21. 531. Works, VIII, 4, 5, 7-8; see also Jour- nals, X, 457: "Transition [meaning evolution] is the organic density of the mind .... Tis the great law of Nature, that the more transit, the more continuity. . . . What we call the Universe to-day is only a symptom or omen of that to which we are passing. Every atom is on its way onward. The universe circulates in thought." 532. Works, pp. 7, 8. The doctrine of polarity Emerson found conveniently stated in Stallo's discussion of Schelling, op. cit., pp. 223-24. 533. Emerson himself suggested as much in his Journals, X, 459-60: "Natural Sciences have made great strides by means of Hegel's dogma which puts Nature and thought, matter Notes to Pages 202-3 615 and spirit, in right relation, one the expression or externalization of the other." See also pp. 455. 462-63. 534. Journals, V, 206 (May 26, 1839) ; see also IV, 248-49, 250, 278-79 (1837). 535. "Circles," Works, II, 309-10; see also Journals, V, 223 (June 18, 1839). 536. Each of these propositions is thrice set down exactly in Emerson's daybooks, and repeated in English Traits (Works, V, 242); while the general ideas are reverted to many more times. 537. This sentence, quoted from Schelling, Emerson first wrote on his blotter on October 24, 1831 (Journals, II, 422). He repeated it in in 1850 and 1870 (Journals, VIII, 126, and X, 317-18. 538. Quoted from MS Journal, "AZ. 1850," p. 279, which shows several variations from the printed Journals, VIII, 126 (1850). 539. Journals, X, 318 (1870). 540. MS Journal, "ZO. 1856," p. 98. 541. MS Journal, "ZO. 1856," 154. 542. MS Journal, "DL. 1860-1866," p. 248. 543. Journals, IX, 30 (1856). 544. An example of how Emerson associated Hegel's doctrine of thought as Absolute with Schelling's philosophy of Identity as consuming all diversity occurs in the section of English Traits entitled "Literature." Here he links together, as two great interdependent germinal generalizations, or "constants" in the "vast kingdoms of thought," (1) "Hegel's study of civil history, as the conflict of ideas and the victory of the deeper thought" and (2) "the identity-philosophy of Schelling, couched in the statement that 'all difference is quantitative.'" — Works, V, 242 ; see also X, 338, and Journals, X, 137 (1866), and 205 (1867), where he pro- fesses, on the basis of Schelling and Hegel, to "see the law of all nature in Identity and Cen- trality." Identity is conceived as "One law [that] consumes all diversity." Emerson apparently made less of Hegel's doctrine of opposites than did Whitman, but the passage just quoted (if there were not a dozen besides) is sufficient refutation of the idea that Emerson shut his mind entirely to the antithetical forms of the Hegelian thought processes. After his careful reading of Stallo's book he could hardly have remained unaware of the Hegelian doctrine of opposites. 545. This work of reference Emerson men- tions frequently between 1862 and 1870. See esp. Journals, X, 322 (1870): "I find Nouvelle Biographie Generate a perpetual benefactor, — almost sure on every consultation to answer promptly and well. Long live M. Docteur Hoefer!" It is to be noted that Emerson, especially during his later years, often preferred to read about scientists and metaphysicians than to read their writings. We have already observed the high repute in which he held encyclopedias and handbooks. In 1871, he again confessed his dislike for the reading of technical works: "Physicists in general repel me. I have no wish to read them, and thus do not know their names. But the anecdotes of these men of ideas awake curiosity and delight." — Journals, X, 364; con- sult also X, 365-73. Anent his reading of foreign works, he admitted: "The respectable and sometimes excellent translations of Bonn's Library have done for literature what railroads have done for internal intercourse. I do not hesitate to read all the books I have named, and all good books, in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable .... I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not even a French book, in the orig- inal, which I can procure in a good version. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue." Works, VII, 203-4. Thus he turned, now more than ever, to biographical dictionaries, commentators, ex- positors of science and philosophy, and various other digests and compendia. Instead of return- ing to a firsthand reading of Schelling, for example, he relied on Stallo's First Principles and von Ense's Tagebiicher, a complete set of which he seems to have possessed, and through which he appears to have worked. See Journals, X, 310, 445. Indeed, Emerson had no scruples about preferring as authorities the daily news- papers to the staid Edinburgh or the reputable North American, and repeatedly preserved the phrases and sentences of some nameless hack or journalist provided his words struck a respon- sive chord. See Journals, X, 33-34 (1864). 546. MS Journal, "ZO. 1856," 154. The quo- tation is repeated in MS Journal, "LN. 1866," p. 19 (printed in Journals, X, 144, 1866). See also Stallo, pp. 492-93, as well as pp. 500-1, 509-10, 515, 519-20. 547. MS Journal, "ZO. 1856," p. 182. 548. MS Journal, "VA. 1862-63," p. 286. The fact that Hegel was anticipated by Heraclitus in the idea of things being in a state of becoming was not, in Emerson's opinion, derogatory to Hegel. On the Heraclitus-Hegel relationship, see Journals, X, 321 (1870), where he implies that although both anticipated his own reach- ing this thought, it is nonetheless his own. Emerson's reference to Hoefer's Nouvelle Biographie Generate is easily identified as refer- no Notes to Pages 203-6 ring to Volume XXIII, pp. 743-44, although Emerson had read the same statement regard- ing the Heraclitus-Hegel relationship in Stallo (pp. 49-50, note) in 1849. See the entire passage on Hegel in Hoefer (op. cit., XXIII, 729-53), which Emerson considered carefully about 1862-1863. 549. Journals, X, 240 (May 22, 1868); see also Letters, VI, 18-19 (June, 1868). 550. Journals, X, 101 (1865). 551. Ibid., p. 343 (1870). 552. Ibid., pp. 310, 322, (1870) ; p. 445 (1875). 553. See, for example, ibid., pp. 116 (1865), and 143-44 (1866). 554. Ibid., p. 130 (Jan. 5, 1866). 555. See "Eloquence," Works, VIII, 131, where he speaks of the "metaphysical zymosis [of Germany] culminating in Kant, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and so ending." It is significant that Fichte is omitted from all of Emerson's later tributes to German philoso- phers. 556. Letters, VI, 291 (Mar. 2, 1876). 557. See Journals, X, 21, 25-26, 33 ft. (1864). Something, too, may have come from Alcott, who, like himself, was extending his lecture tours to include St. Louis and other centers of Hegelianism in the West, and with whom he compared notes on American versus European thought, and especially on Western versus New England thought. See ibid., pp. 53. 56 ff. 558. Letters, IV, 530-31 (Sept. 26, 1855). 559. Ibid., V, 421-22 (July 18, 1865). 560. Ibid., p. 514 (Apr. 4, 1867). 561. See ibid., p. 456, n. 54, and V, 514, n. 140. 562. In the list of members as given by William Schuyler (see his article, "German Philosophy in St. Louis," Bull, of the Washing- ton Univ. Assn., No. 2, Apr. 23, 1904 [St. Louis, 1904] pp. 72-73), eighteen individuals are listed as "directors," thirty-five as "associates," and forty-nine "auxiliaries." All of the last group lived at a distance from St. Louis. It included men like A. B. Alcott, F. B. Sanborn, J. E. Cabot, D. A. Wasson, F. H. Hedge, John Weiss, and Emerson in New England; J. B. Stallo and August Willich of Cincinnati; J. H. Stirling of Scotland and T. Collins Simon of England; A. Vera of Italy; Jos. de Fonfride of France; and Karl Rosenkranz, Franz Hoff- mann, Friedrich Kapp, Ludwig Feuerbach, Moritz Carriere, Jakob Bernays, and J. H. Fichte of Germany. 563. Letters, V, 521 (June 28, 1867). 564. Ibid., VI, 15, 18-19, 201, 280, 284, 285-86. 565. Ibid., pp. 103-4 (Mar. 3, 1870). 566. The Harvard catalog for 1869-1870 records an enrollment of only seven students for this course of lectures given by as many men. Emerson's own lectures in the course began in April. 567. Letters, VI, 104. Thomas Davidson's article on "Parmenides" appeared in the first number of Volume IV, which apparently Emerson had just received from St. Louis. 568. Although the Journal was a quarterly, Volume I contained only three numbers, so that the serial number does not proceed regu- larly by multiples of 4 per volume. Whole Number 12, therefore, is bound as Number 1 of Volume IV. 569. Yet the fact that he had the first three volumes of the Journal put in permanent bind- ings indicates that he valued their contents. His resolution formed on March 3, 1870, "to read them much in the next month" (presumably by way of preparation for his Harvard lectures on the natural history of intellect, to be delivered during April and May) seems significant. If he kept the resolution to read, then or later, the first twelve numbers, he became acquainted with a considerable body of information on German systems of thought, for they included, among other provocative essays (1) Harris' smashing twenty-page attack upon the entire Spencerian dispensation, (2) Kroeger's transla- tion of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, (3) several expository articles on Kant's system of tran- scendentalism (including Kroeger's excellent essay in Vol. Ill), (4) Thomas Davidson's trans- lation of Schelling's "Introduction to the Phi- losophy of Nature," (5) B6nard's analysis of Hegel's Aesthetics, (6) Harris' essay on "Hegel's First Principle," and (7) Harris' translations from the Phenomenology and the Logic, to- gether with articles on Leibnitz, Winckelmann, Swedenborg, Cousin, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Goethe. 570. The Kant celebration is reported in the Journal of Spec. Phil., XV, iii (July, 1881) 303- 21, and discussed at some length in my book on New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism (Phila., 1948), p. 876. 571. Journals, X, 137 (1866) ; see also X, 139. 572. MS Journal, "LN. 1866," p. 19. 573. See Natural History of Intellect in Works, XII, 13. 574. MS Journal, "NY. 1868-1870," p. 58; slightly altered in Journals, X, 248. 575. MS Journal, "NY. 1868-1870," p. 251; slightly altered in Journals, X, 321. 576. MS Journal, "AC. 1859," p. 218; not in printed Journals. 5JJ. Journals, X, 455 (1876). 578. Journals, X, 53 (1864). Notes to Pages 206-8 617 579. Works, XI, 458. 580. MS Journal, "ST. 1870-1875," p. 25. 581. MS Journal, "SO. 1856," p. 64 (printed with minor variations in Journals, IX, 22). See also X, 43 (1864). For other tributes to the Ger- mans, see Works, IV, 281; V, 55, 244, 254; XI, 45 8; XII, 312 OTHER EARLY TRANSCENDENTALISTS 582. See his letter of May 15, 1820, in O. B. Frothingham's George Ripley (Boston, 1882), pp. 9-10, 17; cf. Emerson's Letters, I, 152. 583. His biographer lists the following: "... much of Kant, Schleiermacher, Herder, De Wette, Cousin, Jouffroy; something of Hegel; Schopenhauer's 'Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung' (1819); the latest known volumes of Biblical criticism; Paulus, Bauer, Tholuck, Liicke, Bertholdt's 'Einleitung,' Winer's 'Hand- buch der theologischen Literatur,'" and a host of histories of philosophy, literary writings, and moral tracts. Others listed include Bretschnei- der, Ammon, Reinhard, Ritter; Constant, Vico, Fichte, Cabanis, Eichhorn; a "few books now forgotten, about the origin of Christianity; a little of Goethe and Schiller, Luther's Werke, Baumgarten-Crusius ; Heydenreich's 'Betrach- tungen,' and 'Natur und Gott, nach Spinoza,' Wieland's 't)ber Wunder,' Gfrorer's 'Giordano Bruno,' and miscellaneous works in morals and philosophy." — Frothingham, op. cit., p. 46. Ripley's library, called "the finest of its kind in Boston," was large enough to be pledged as security for $400 in 1840, when Ripley was raising the money to organize the Brook Farm community. The failure of the Farm later was hardly a deeper loss for Ripley than the conse- quent loss of his library, though he drew some consolation from the fact that his beloved books went to Theodore Parker. See H. S. Commager, Theodore Parker (Boston, 1936), p. 51. 584. Christ. Exam., IX (Sept., 1830), 70-107. Like Coleridge, he depended to a great extent on the Cambridge Platonists, but his attitude toward Coleridge is distinguished from that of his fellow-Transcendentalists by his being less ready than they to endorse Coleridge's prin- ciples — mainly because he finds Coleridge too "obscure" on many points (ibid., pp. 71, 73). Instead, he professes to "look with deepest interest mingled with cheerful hope, on the progress of the eclectic school in France, of which Cousin, Roger Collard, Jeoffroy [sic] and Degerando are distinguished representatives" (p. 104). At the same time he recognizes the fact that the new religious and philosophical impulse that is converting his "age of superfi- cial, sensuous philosophy" bears the mark, "made in Germany," whence has "emanated more of the intellectual light on the deepest subjects of philosophic inquiry, than most writers of our language have yet been ready to acknowledge." Under this impulse "the best minds of France are awakening to more serious and elevated views of human nature," and he fervently hopes that Americans may follow the French example (p. 104). 585. Ripley initiated his fourteen-volume series of "Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature" with his own Philosophical Mis- cellanies, Translated from the French of Cousin, Jouffroy and Benjamin Constant (2 vols., Boston 1838). Although the remaining twelve volumes in this distinguished series include only two more volumes from the French, the other ten being specimens of German literature and phi- losophy, Ripley's interest in French eclecticism was greater and somewhat longer sustained than was Emerson's, who early found "an optical illusion" in it. See Emerson's Journals, IV, 404 (Mar. 5, 1838). No attempt is made here to evaluate the final importance of French in- fluence upon Ripley. However, the conclusion reached by W. L. Leighton, in his French Phi- losophers and New England Transcendentalism (Charlottesville, Va., 1908), p. 93, is applicable to Ripley as well as to the movement as a whole: "the influence of French philosophy is, in proportion even to German influence alone, slight." 586. Christ. Exam., X, 273-96. 587. Ibid., XI, 347-73- 588. Ibid., pp. 373-80. He indicts the Amer- ican college and university system for neglect- ing literature, history, and philosophy, and re- commends the cultivation and study of all branches of German scholarly and belletristic writing as being at once the most "profound" and the "most original." He attacks as false the contention that the mastery of German is difficult, and as pusillanimous the prejudiced orthodox who consider the Germans as given "to mysticism, rhapsody, wild and tasteless inventions in poetry, and dark and impenetrable reasonings in metaphysics." His championship of Kant as having contributed "more light" than any other "since the brightest days of Grecian philosophy" is particularly vigorous. Having considered the Coleridgean restate- ments of Kant as well as the tenets of the Ger- man philosopher himself, Ripley finds (con- trary to general contemporary opinion) the minds of Kant and Coleridge not at all alike, however well they may agree on some impor- tant propositions. In concluding, he denies the charge that German philosophy is irreligious, by pointing to Tholuck as a staunch defender 618 Notes to Pases 208-10 of Calvinism, who will counterbalance the pantheistic tendencies of Schelling and Hegel. 589. The Cyclopedia of Literature and the Fine Arts Comprising Complete and Accurate Defini- tions of All Terms Employed in Belles-Lettres, Philosophy, Theology, Law, Mythology, Painting, Music, Sculpture, Architecture, and All Kindred Arts, comp. and air. by George Ripley and Bayard Taylor (N.Y., 1854) dispels any doubt that may be entertained on that score. Ripley, who prepared the sections relating to philoso- phy and theology, in the sections on Kant (pp. 337-38), on Transcendentalism (p. 605), on Reason (p. 510), and on Rationalism (pp. 510- 11), meticulously defined and explained the Kantian tripartition of the mind's faculties, indicated the place and significance of space and time for the Kantian sensation, of the categories for the understanding, and of the ideas for the reason, at the same time giving examples and distinguishing between the regulative and con- stitutive forms of the reason, while marking the distinctions between theoretical and practical reason (PP337-38) and between the transcen- dental and the transcendent (p. 605). These distinctions and their significance are further discussed in the section on "Reason" by relat- ing them to and contrasting them with the systems of Locke, Hume, and Stewart (pp. 510- n); while the import of the Kantian criticism for Biblical criticism is discussed in the section on "Rationalism" in reference to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deism and the Germans Baumgarten, Michaelis, Semler, Eichhorn, Paulus, Bretschneider, and Strauss (p. 510). 590. However, he viewed God as a personal Divinity, and at one of the meetings of the Transcendental Club, in February, 1838, is recorded as having taken exception to the im- personal conception of God as put forth by Emerson. — Frothingham, op. cit., pp. 49-50, 56. 591. For example, his discussion of Mackin- tosh's book on ethical philosophy is an incisive and fair commentary not visibly affected by his own predilection for Kant and Coleridge. See Christ. Exam., XIII (Jan., 1833), 311-32. 592. Christ. Exam., XVIII (May, 1835), esp. pp. 167-69. 593. Ibid., pp. 171-72; also p. 197. 594. He approved of Herder's campaign to deflate Kantism as "the ultimate and exclusive philosophy of human nature" and acclaimed his success in making the system "lower its pretensions." — Ibid., pp.|i 88-89, 209. For a good statement of Ripley's dislike for what he called "the anatomical spirit" of German speculations see his article on Fichte in the Harbinger for April 18, 1846 (II, 297), where German philoso- phy is represented as having failed to solve "the mighty problems of Divine Providence and Human Destiny," thus demonstrating the fruitlessness of a method too exclusively specu- lative, although Fichte himself is praised for having recalled man to search "the depths of his own soul" for the "instinctive sense of justice, duty, universal harmony and unity." 595. This interest is traceable directly to Herder and Schleiermacher. His opinion of the latter he stated to Parker as late as 1852: "I regard Schleiermacher as the greatest thinker who ever undertook to fathom the philosophy of religion." — Frothingham, Ripley, p. 229. 596. Christ. Exam., XIX, 172-204, esp. pp. 172-76. 597. Ibid., XX, 1-46, esp. p. 4. 598. Ibid., XXI (Nov., 1836), 226-54. 599. Ibid., XXI, 285-98. 600. Meanwhile he was opening up yet an- other avenue by which European ideas were to gain currency in America, for in 1838 he pub- lished the first of his series of translations, the Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature. In the fourteen volumes published between 1838 and 1842, the French Cousin, Constant, and Jouffroy and the Germans Goethe, Schiller, Uhland, Korner, Burger, Menzel, and De Wette were brought before the public in competent translations by such writers as J. S. Dwight, Margaret Fuller, C. C. Felton, S. Osgood, J. F. Clarke, and Ripley himself. 601. For details, including excellent biblio- graphical notes, see C. H. Faust's essay on "The Backgrounds of the Unitarian Opposition to Transcendentalism," Modem Pkilol., XXXV (Feb., 1938), 297-324. 602. Ibid., pp. 300-305. Some of the ortho- dox were confident in their prophecies that these scorners of revelation and exalters of reason would soon take the same course that the German rationalists had taken, and go "at last full length with the most liberal of them all." Thus Moses Stuart of Andover, himself a pioneer in America in the use of the grammati- cal interpretation of the Scriptures as promul- gated by the Germans, nevertheless told the world, with more heat than logic, that the Unitarians, reasoning as they did, "must necessarily . . . come to the same conclusions with Eichhorn, and Paulus, and Eckermann, and Herder, and other distinguished men of the new German school." If, in a few years, the Unitarian tendency would not produce "the undisguised avowal of German divinity in all its latitude," said Stuart, he was prepared to swallow his own words (Miscellanies, pp. 182- 88). 603. After Parker's sermon on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity it was seriously Notes to Pages 210-14 619 urged, to escape the difficult choice and to remove the odium of Parker's attachment to Unitarianism, that the Association should be dissolved. In the end the majority took the less strenuous, if less logical, course: the Associa- tion was not dissolved, and Parker was not expelled ; but he was vigorously denounced ; and the refusal of his colleagues to exchange pul- pits with him made their action virtual, if not actual, expulsion. 604. "Theodore Parker and Liberal Christian- ity," New Englander, II (Oct., 1844), 353-56. 605. O. B. Frothingham, Theodore Parker (Boston, 1874), p. 114. 606. "Theodore Parker and Liberal Christi- anity," New Englander, II (Oct., 1844), 556. 607. Frothingham, Ripley, pp. 80, 91. 608. Ibid., pp. 84-87, 94-95; see also pp. 67-74. 609. Christ. Exam., XI (Jan., 1832), 372. 610. Reproduced in Frothingham, Ripley, pp. 112-17. 611. Ibid., p. in. 612. He saw "as the key-stone of the system the important truth . . . that the amelioration of outward circumstances will be the effect, but can never be the means of mental and moral improvement." True progress, he saw, with Emerson, was inward progress; but he urged "more attention ... to the philosophy of the system, so that teachers should not flatter themselves that they have caught the spirit, when they only imitate some of its mechanical details." — Christ. Exam., XI (Jan., 1832), 355, 372- 613. The example of the Fourieristic disci- ples in Europe did not go unnoticed by the Brook Farmers. The Harbinger for April 4, 1846, con- tains an article by Ripley on "The Religious Movement in Germany," praising the "social character" of the movement commenced by Ronge in Germany. See esp. II, 190-191. Ripley's concept of the truly social character of Christianity was that it should "bring about a truer state of society, one in which human beings should stand in frank relations of true equality and fraternity, mutually helpful, re- specting each other's occupation, and making one the helper of the other." — Early Letters of Geo. Wm. Curtis to J . S. Dwight, ed. by Geo. W. Cooke (N.Y., 1898), p. 45. 614. While reviewing Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany (1847), he asked concerning purely "philosophical speculation" and mere "literary culture" as illustrated in portions of that book, "to what does it amount?" — Harbinger, VI Feb. 5, 1848), 107. A scholar might take pleasure, he wrote about the same time, in the "remark- able thought processes" of Hegel and of Schel- ling, the "great intellectual analyses" of Kant, or the "subtle speculations of the Oriental phi- losophers," but for him they had come to be merely" intellectual gymnastics" — "airy noth- ings." — Review of J. B. Stallo's General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature (Boston, 1848), in Harbinger, VI (Feb. 5, 1848), no. While objecting to Stallo's book on the ground that the Hegel-Schelling-Oken thesis offers "no point of contact with the American mind," and attacking Strauss, Feuerbach, and mid-nine- teenth-century materialists like Biichner, he was nonetheless interested in Eduard Hart- mann's Philosophy of the Unconscious and usually took a positive attitude toward the advancements made in the sciences. See Froth- ingham, Ripley, pp. 229-30, 286. 615. Clarence Gohdes, op. cit., p. 120. 616. See, for example, his article on George Bancroft in Putnam's Magazine for March, 1853. 617. Frothingham, Ripley, p. 210. Amonq the more important of his articles dealing with German subjects during his later years is a biographical sketch in Putnam's for Novem- ber, 1856 (VIII, 517-27), of Heine's last years, based on Alfred M. Meissner's Heinrich Heine: Erinnerungen (Hamburg, 1856). 618. His growing social conservatism found some justification in the doctrine of evolution, in which he finally anchored his hopes for social betterment, and which he helped to popularize in America; for as he grew older, he became increasingly sure that the "increasing purpose" of the Creator was revealed less through sudden reform than through gradual change. On this head, see Howard A. Wilson's unpublished University of Wisconsin dissertation, "George Ripley: Social and Literary Critic," 1941. Not unnaturally he turned about 1870 with more than passing attention to Eduard von Hart- mann and with increasing absorption to scien- tific books, notably books of physiology (Froth- ingham, Ripley, pp. 228-30, 235). In 1874 he spoke appreciatively of the tendency, "dating from the death of Hegel in 1831, and of Goethe the year following," of the "physical researches' rapidly . . . [taking] precedence of metaphysical speculation" {ibid., p. 276). He still hoped, he said, for the "union of spiritual agencies and material conditions" (ibid., p. 275) ; he professed to see in "the alleged materialism of Tyndall and Huxley ... an unexpected support to the idealism of Berkeley" (ibid., p. 277); and he foretold "a magnificent synthesis of the forces of material nature and the power of spiritual ideas" (ibid., p. 275). But idealism had still to achieve its ends, and the achievements of science were already tangible. So, while con- tinuing to revere Emersonian idealism and to 620 Notes to Pages 214-16 keep on friendly terms with the associates of his former idealistic endeavors, he wrote warningly to his sister Marianne, in Wisconsin, where she had become enthusiastic for the efforts of the Rev. W. Kimball to promote Liberal Christian- ity in the West: "I do not advise you to take Liberal Christianity as a drug. . . . [It] is evidently one of the offshoots of the great banian-tree planted by Theodore Parker" (ibid., p. 257). The tenor of the whole letter is that while Parkerism has born "an abundance of beautiful and wholesome fruit," it is not fruit for him and for those dear to him. Very revealing, also, is a comparison of Ripley's estimate of Emerson, written in 1869, with one written earlier. See ibid., pp. 266-72, where both are reproduced. 619. See his "Letter to a Theological Stu- dent," Dial, I, ii (Oct., 1840), 183-87. 620. Walter Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker (2nd ed., N.Y., 1894), p. 90. It is to be noted that in 1861 the funeral of his first wife (who had embraced Catholicism the year before) "was celebrated ... in fullest accordance with the rite of the Roman Church." — Frothingham, Ripley, p. 239. 621. John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker (2 vols., N.Y., 1864), I, 59, 160-62; Frothingham, Parker, p. 34; Comma- ger, Parker, p. 24. 622. Commager, Parker, p. 26; Frothingham, Parker, p. 39. 623. Weiss, Parker, I, 72-75, 78, 95; Com- mager, Parker, pp. 30-32 ; Frothingham, Parker, 46-47: "Only by transcribing the journal, com- menced in 1835, could any idea be obtained of the extent of his researches. The folio pages are crowded with lists of books read or to be read, — analyses, summaries, comments on writings of every description, in every tongue. Only to name them would be a fatigue, — Eichhorn, Herder, Ammon, De Wette, Paulus, Philo, the Greek historians, the fathers of the Church, the Greek and Latin poets, Plato, Spinoza, the Wolfenbiittel fragments .... In two months . . . the names of 65 volumes are given as having been read in German, English, Danish, Latin, Greek . . . ." In the Spiritual Interpreter, a small magazine which he helped edit for a time in 1835, he published a number of papers reflecting the results of his studies in Biblical interpretation, • — De Wette, Eichhorn, Astruc, and scholars of the moderate school of rationalism supplying the material. As yet he does not deny revelation in the Pentateuch, though he agrees with De Wette that the Psalms cannot be interpreted as Messianic prophecy. — Frothingham, Parker, PP- 55-56- 624. Weiss, Parker, I, 74, 82, 157; Com- mager, Parker.p. 30. 625. Weiss, Parker, I, 74, 75, 83, 85, 113; Frothingham, Parker, pp. 74-75. 626. For Parker's own account of the elabo- rate work that went into this book, see his "Experience as a Minister," Works (Cent, ed., 15 vols., Boston, 1910), XIII, 315. In the Preface (3rd ed., p. xxv) to the Introduction Parker gives a compendious bibliography of some two score of recent works of Biblical criti- cism and history (all but one or two of them by German authors) which he consulted in prepa- ration of that work. 627. In March, 1858, shortly after the ap- pearance of the third edition of the Introduction, Parker calculated his loss in these terms: "No- body knows how much toil it cost me. I lived in a little country village, and had a plenty of time, health, and vigor. It must contain many errors, and I am sometimes astonished that I did the work as well as it is. It cost me 2000 dollars to stereotype it; I have received about 775 dollars back again! . . . But if I were to live my life over again I would do the same. I meant it for a labor of love. It has had no recognition nor welcome in America — it served the purpose of no sect." As a matter of fact, less than a year later the Christian Examiner for January, 1859 (LXVI, 125-27) noticed the work, if not in glowing terms, at least with some appreciation, notably of Parker's own contribution to the book. It has not been possible to ascertain the amount of the final loss or profit from the book, nor how many copies each of the three editions were printed. Considering the frequency with which copies of the third edition have turned up in recent years in bookseller's shops and in ministers' libraries (I have picked up two within a year in the remains of libraries of Unitarian ministers in Wisconsin), it would seem that the book had a fairly large circulation. 628. In the summer of 1837 he read Jacobi and Henry More, the ethical writings of De Wette, Fichte, Coleridge, and Descartes, Gesi- nius' Lectures on the Old Testament, Gabler, Paulus, and Bauer; later in that year he was seeking copies of Krummacher, Twesten, Ten- nemann, and Wegscheider. Then he read Bopp's Vergleichende Grammalik, which he pronounced "awfully written" but "doubtless valuable," Karcher's Analecta and Hobart's life of Sweden- borg. "Spinoza . . . Ovid, Seneca are in pros- pect." "Hume, Gibbon, Robertson are trifles; Schleiermacher, Bouterwek, Baur, Hegel, La- place, Leibnitz are more serious." "The absorb- ing study of this period is the literature of the Bible. The Egyptian and Phoenician alphabets have attractions for him; ancient inscriptions Notes to Pases 217-20 621 and coins, Carthaginian, Persian, amuse him; the Orphic poems have a share of his time; Meiner's book 'On the Doctrine of the One God,' Staudlin 'On the Morality of the Drama,' fall under his notice; but the Bible literature leads all the rest." While still in the Divinity School in 1835 he had acquired Herder's com- plete works in forty-five volumes, and on September 22, 1837, he wrote gleefully to his friend Wm. Silsbee, "I have got lots of new books — upwards of one hundred Germans! Come and see. Some of them are old friends, others are new — all sorts of creatures." — Weiss, Parker, I, 72, 99-104, 111-13; Frothingham, Parker, pp. 89, 91, 108. 629. Systematically, at great cost, and with all the love for bibliography of a true book- collector, Parker filled out each of the impor- tant branches of theological and philosophical learning, of modern science and literature, so that in these fields his library was as complete and up-to-date as his private means could make it. He had more modern theological material than the Harvard Divinity School ; he absorbed in 1S47 the entire library of Ripley into his own. His house in Boston was overrun by scholars who knew what treasures were to be found in his study. — Commager, Parker, pp. 123-29, passim. There were over a hundred editions of the Bible, including a Nuremberg Bible of 1483, and several from the sixteenth century; Latin and Greek classics, many in rare sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions ; Renaissance geographies and books of travel, old chronicles and medieval histories; the huge sets of the Monumenta Germanica Historica and the Bibliothek des liiterarischen Vereins von Stutt- gart; a large section of old and new works on church history, Renaissance science and philos- ophy; another section on civil and canon law; "all the great names of Greece and Rome . . .; Burns as well as Dante, and Chaucer quite as well thumbed as Shakespeare, and many a Servian, Russian, Bohemian volume of provin- cial character"; and the hymns of all nations and all denominations. — Weiss, Parker, I, 4-8. 630. See Journal, Sept. 20, 1839; Weiss, Parker, II, 9. 631. Christ. Exam. XXV, iii (Jan., 1839), 367-84- 632. Ibid., XXVIII, iii, 273-316. The first copy of Strauss had been brought to the vicin- ity by the Rev. Henry Walker of Charlestown about 1837. Walker was a graduate of the Divinity School who had been studying in Ger- many from 1833 to 1837. He lent the book to Parker upon his return from abroad. 633. See Works, XIII, 310. 634. Works, I, 122-23. 635. See Commager, Parker, p. 43. 636. See esp. Works, VIII, 472-73, 475-76, 477-79, 492. 637. Delivered in Waterville, Me., 1849, and printed in Works, VIII, 1-53. 638. See his letter to Dr. Francis of 1839 (Frothingham, Parker, p. 117), in which he argues, on the strength of De Wette's "Biblical Dogmatics," that eventually both the Old and New Testaments "will be dropped out from the Church." "I can't but wish," he adds, "that Jesus had written his own books; but even they must have contained some things local and temporary." The entering wedge made by Strauss and De Wette is here clearly discern- ible. 639. John W. Chadwick, Theodore Parker (Boston and N.Y., 1900), p. 92. 640. Frothingham, Parker, p. 152. 641. T. W. Higginson, editor of the work for the centenary edition, remarks in the Preface that he had to give up the attempt to verify the innumerable notes in his book. He failed to find all of the references in the Harvard Divinity School Library (comprising in 1842 some 1800 volumes), in Ripley's, Francis', and in Parker's libraries combined. 642. See Works, I, xx-xxi. 643. See Works, I, 34-36. While he adopts the distinction between speculative and prac- tical religion, he goes beyond Kant in insisting that religion and morality are different in "type' ' and essentially "unlike." See Works, I, 34-36, notes. 644. Works, I, 12. 645. Works, I, 33. 646. Works, XIII, 301 647. Works, VI, 1-38. 648. Weiss, Parker, I, 74. 649. Ibid., I, 148; see also the review of Menzel's German Literature (Works, VIII, 489), where he takes Menzel to task for omitting men- tion of the Monadology. 650. See Weiss, Parker, I, 48, 150; also Works, II, 216. 651. See his letter of Oct. 3, 1853, quoted in Weiss, Parker, I, 149; also Chs. VIII, IX, and X of "Theism, Atheism and the Popular Theol- ogy," Works, II, 280-389, where he treats "Of Providence," "Of the Economy of Pain and Misery under the Universal Providence of God," and "Of the Economy of Moral Error under the Universal Providence of God" (published in 1853)- 652. Weiss, Parker, I, 166, 169. 653. Works, II, 196. 654. He admired Goethe's precept of self- renunciation, but doubted that Goethe himself 622 Notes to Pages 220-23 lived up to it; he admired Goethe's diligence, but there was no getting round his being "a selfish rogue ... a great pagan" (Weiss, Parker, II, 20-22). Goethe was too self-centered: he "would have been nobler had he struggled .... An excess of good fortune was his undoing." Wilhelm Meister was for Parker insufficiently moral, and especially the women of the work were objectionable, though well-drawn. He was strongly affected by the legendary story of Friederike Brion, and he censured Goethe for his part in that episode. Of all Goethe's works, Parker liked the Wanderjahre best: "I have a better opinion of the giant of Germany since reading this book than before. An enemy of Christianity could by no means have written that description of the School of the Three Reverences, which terminates in reverence of one's self. . . . Who can say that Goethe was ignorant of religion after having read 'The Con- fessions of a Fair Penitent' ?" — Frothingham, Parker, p. 58; see also pp. 108-9 655. For his remarks on Luther, see Weiss, Parker, I, 181; on Schiller, see ibid., II, 23. He called Schiller "proud, inflated, stiff, diseasedly self-conscious." 656. Weiss, Parker, I, 306-7; Frothingham, Parker, p. 60. Heine heads the list of German poets translated into English by Parker. See Weiss, Parker, II, 30-38. Other German poets whom Parker translated at various times in- clude Paul Gerhardt, Simon Dach, Opitz, Riickert, Korner, Geibel, and individual selec- tions from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. While none are outstanding examples of the transla- tor's art, his translations are a credit to Parker's poetic taste and his mastery of the German language. On the whole, they are better than his attempts at original poetry. 657. This could be so only because Parker insisted on seeing no difference between the moral foundation of Kant's practical reason and his own religious intuitions concerning God, moral law, and immortality. 658. Works, XIII, 300-302; Weiss, Parker, I, 454-55- 659. Consult Chadwick, Parker, pp. 92, 175- 77; Frothingham, Parker, pp. 254—55. 660. Frothingham, Parker, pp. 149-50. 661. Chadwick, Parker, pp. 178-79. 662. See the review of Buckle's History of Civilization for a demonstration of Parker's phenomenal knowledge of the historical re- search of his time, Works, VIII, 364-418. 663. Chadwick, Parker, p. 186. 664. Weiss, Parker, I, 315, 376. 665. That Parker may have been influenced in his social and political views by Francis Lieber presents an interesting probability. Both held that a sound political system should have as its basis the moral law of the universe, and should treat the ethical nature of the individual as an end in itself, rather than as a means. Of course, Parker read very widely ; and insofar as his political views were derived, they might have been drawn from many sources — among them Plato and Cousin. Moreover, in close con- tact as Parker was with the Transcendentalists of Boston and vicinity, among whom like ideas circulated freely, Parker could have come by his political views through association with them; though here again, it is worth remember- ing that Lieber's political theories were not unknown. Emerson, in 1854, recorded Lieber's theories as tallying with his own (Journals, VIII, 459) ; and after Lieber went to Columbia, Emerson spoke of his lectures as the outstand- ing academic performances to be heard in America (Journals, IX, 212; X, 55). The subject of Lieber's political influence merits exhaustive investigation. 666. It was a matter of some chagrin to Parker that despite the ease with which he read German and the facility he had in writing the language, his speaking knowledge of it was unequal to the establishment of unimpeded intercourse with the German savants. 667. Weiss, Parker, I, 214-44 passim; Frothingham, Parker, pp. 200-6. 668. See Works, XV, 13-14; Weiss, Parker, I, 430; also I, 269-71, 476ft. In his later years Parker was active in aiding the political refugees who came to America in large numbers after the political defeat of 1848. Even as early as 1846 he was helping the Rev. Friedrich Munch to find a publisher in Boston. In 1 85 1 he helped Dr. Fock, a professor of phi- losophy at Kiel, and Herr Edouard Pelz to find positions in New York and Boston. He went so far as to swallow his pride and ask his old ene- my, Prof. C. C. Felton, to intercede for one of these refugees, Dr. Lobeck, a distinguished classicist of Konigsberg. One of his closest friends was the Swiss natural scientist, Desor, who had visited America to help Agassiz in his Lake Superior explorations. During the summer of 1859 — those last happy months in Switzer- land before he went to Italy with his fatal ill- ness — Parker enjoyed daily the companionship and intellectual stimulation of this generous host, still arguing, studying, discussing the literary, scientific, and theological questions of the day. — Frothingham, Parker, pp. 255-58; Commager, Parker, pp. 112 ft. 669. See Clarke's essay, "The Two Carlyles, or Carlyle Past and Present," Christ. Exam., LXXVII, ii (Sept., 1846), 206-31. "This new writer came opening up unknown worlds of Notes to Page 223 623 beauty and wonder. A strong influence, unlike any other, attracted us to his writing. Before we knew his name, we knew him .... We knew . . . voung men and women who taught themselves German in order to read for themselves the authors made so luminous by this writer." — Ibid., p. 212. ". . . The Unitarian reform had not gone deep enough. It had been a question of opinions, rather than principles and ideas. The common basis of both parties was the material philoso- phy of Locke, not the spiritual philosophy of earlier and later thinkers. . . . Now the first voice ... to break this evil enchantment which held us all was, to many, the voice of Thomas Carlyle ... a man capable of dispensing with the form . . . endowed with a high degree of intuitive faculty, — a born seer, a prophet, see- ing the great realities of the universe .... The work of such a man is to break up the old for- mulas and introduce new light and life. This work was done for the Orthodox thirty years ago by . . . Coleridge ; for the Unitarians in this vicinity, by . . . Carlyle. . . . Carlyle's 'Life of Schiller' opened the portals of German litera- ture, and made an epoch in biography and criticism." — Ibid., pp. 212-16, passim. 670. Edward E. Hale, (ed.), James Freeman Clarke, Autobiography, Diary and Correspon- dence (Boston and N.Y., 1892), pp. 39-40. 671. Ibid., pp. 89-90. 672. Ibid., p. 39. 673. Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, which he read in the Marsh edition during his senior year, confirmed (says Clarke) "my longing for a higher philosophy than that of John Locke and David Hartley. . . . Coleridge showed me from Kant that though knowledge begins with ex- perience it does not come from experience. Then I discovered that I was born a transcendental- ist; and smiled when I afterwards read, in one of Jacobi's works, that he had gone through exactly the same experience. Thus I became a great reader of Coleridge, and was quite ready to accept his distinction between the reason and the understanding judging according to sense." — Ibid., p. 90. In the phrase, "the understanding judging according to sense," we come again upon the damage done by Coleridge's having stated the distinction in these equivocal terms. We have already noted the trouble it gave Marsh and Emerson. Parker, it may be presumed, saw more clearly, though even he refused to go the full length with Kant in the applications of the distinctions between reason and under- standing and between pure and practical rea- son. Clarke, on the other hand, appears never to have read Kant, or, indeed, entertained any serious doubts about his understanding of Kant for he goes on blithely: "This distinction helped me much in my subsequent studies in theology. It enabled me to distinguish between truth as seen by the reason [precisely the 'truth' which Kant had demonstrated to be unascertainable], and its statement as formulated by the under- standing. It enabled me to put logic in its proper place, and see that its function was not the discovery of truth, but that of arranging, methodizing, and harmonizing verbal proposi- tions in regard to it. I could see that those who had the same spiritual experience, and who beheld the same truth, might differ in their statements concerning it, and that while truth was unchanging and eternal, theology might alter and improve from age to age .... Accord- ing to the distinction of Coleridge, the vital truth perceived by the reason is not the same as the doctrinal statement enunciated by the understanding. The reason sees in Christ some- thing divine, finds in him a visible manifesta- tion of the invisible and eternal. In this intel- lectual vision both the Trinitarian and the Uni- tarian may be one, though when they come to express it as a doctrine they differ. The essential fact is the vision of truth as beheld by the rea- son, not as worked out by the understanding. Thus Coleridge's metaphysical statement has really put an end to much conscientious bigotry in the modern church." — Ibid., pp. 39-40. Here is involved what Kant specifically warned against, namely, the confusion of tran- scendental with transcendent knowledge. 674. Ibid., p. 90. 675. Thomas W. Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, 1884), p. 144. It is symbolic of his position that as late as 1845 he invited Parker, then in disgrace with the great majority of the Unitarian clergy, into his pulpit, and extended an invitation also to the Rev. Edward N. Kirk, who, for his part, admittedly would "not have received Mr. Clarke into his pulpit." — E. E. Hale, op. cit., PP- I5I-53- Clarke always insisted that the term "Unitar- ian" had reference, not to a denial of the doc- trine of the Trinity, but to the essential unity in organization and in the teaching of the Church Universal, which he hoped could be attained in the not too distant future. See ibid., pp. 155, 295, note. 676. See Clarke's essay, "Are There Two Religions in the New Testament?" Christ. Exam., LXXXVI, ii (Mar., 1869), 192-208; C. F. Thwing's statement in the Boston Weekly Advertiser for June 15, 1888; and Frothing- ham's in the Radical for Sept.-Dec, 1867, and Jan., 1868. 624 Notes to Page 223 He was constantly answering both the ortho- dox and the liberals in an attempt to keep clearly defined his middle ground. He took the side of Emerson when Norton attacked the New School, less on the ground that the New School was entirely correct and the Old all wrong than on the ground that an acceptance, at all events, a sympathetic hearing of Carlyle, Schleier- macher, and Cousin would aid the much desired progress in religious thought. See his "New School in Literature and Religion," Western Messenger, VI, i (Nov., 1838), 42-47; and "Ger- man Theology" (excerpts from an article in the Foreign Quar. Rev., with comments by Clarke) in the Western Messenger, VI, i (Nov., 1838), 57-60. Yet he felt that both Emerson and Parker had gone too far. For his attitude toward Emerson, see his "Emerson and the New School," Wes- tern Messenger, VI, i (Nov., 1838), 37-42. His discourse, Theodore Parker and His Theology (Boston, 1859), delivered on September 25, 1859, illustrates the difference between him and Parker. He praises Parker the man but criticizes certain aspects of Parker the theologian, notably his too strong devotion to "pure, cold thought" (pp. 7-8) and his uncompromising championship of so-called "Absolute Religion," which, says Clarke, rests upon too great "a love of system." This love of system, together with the desire to simplify, has, in Clarke's opinion, driven Parker into rationalizations of religion which are too simple to include all of the soul's complexities. Thus Parker has come round, in his theology, to present a religion that is more negative than positive ; he has been too strictly critical to be constructive. Clarke did not agree with Parker's denial of the divinity of Christ, and he affirmed a belief in an "actual revelation in Christianity, special in itself, of God" (pp. 17- 18). Thus he held, in conformity with other Transcendentalists who were unwilling to abide in a purely critical philosophy, that "men are usually right in what they assert . . . and they are often wrong in what they deny" (p. 11). See also his "Essay on Miracles," Western Mes- senger, V, i (Apr., 1838), 36-44, for a statement of his belief in the miraculous acts of Jesus and their significance for Christian faith. His own preaching turned upon the message of God's love and upon forgiveness as one of the essen- tials of Christianity. His Manual of Unitarian Belief (12th ed., Boston, 1888) is an exposition of his essential doctrines, stated with exemplary simplicity and touching only the most vital con- cepts of Christian belief. Clarke observed that while he and Parker had "known and loved each other for some twenty years . . . during all that time, he has never loved my opinions, nor I his." Neverthe- less, he concluded, "If Christ be God the Son, second Person in the Trinity, I had rather stand before his bar with Theodore Parker, who de- nies him, but follows his steps, serving human- ity, than with any Orthodox Doctor who writes Southside books to turn our sympathy for the oppressed into approbation for the oppressor." — Theodore Parker and His Theolo- gy, pp. 21-22. 677. Hale, op. cit., pp. 85, 86, 90-91. For other indications of how fully Clarke entered into the "German craze" then regnant at Har- vard, see ibid., pp. 43, 47-48, 62-64, IJ 5' I2I < 125,174- 678. "Margaret," he said, "began the study of German early in 1832. Both she and I were attracted towards this literature, at the same time, by the wild bugle-call of Thomas Carlyle, in his romantic articles on Richter, Schiller, and Goethe. . . . Almost every evening I saw her, and heard an account of her studies." — Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, by R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke (2, vols., Boston, 1852), I, 114. He taught her German pronunciation and- exchanged German books with her for the ! better part of a year. They read Goethe's Wahl- verwandtschaften, Zweiter Romischer Aufent- halt, and the Campagne in Frankreich, Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson and Emilia Galolli, Tieck, Richter, Novalis, and Korner. — Ibid., I, 117, 118, 120-21; see also F. A. Braun, Margaret' Fuller and Goethe (N.Y., 1910), p. 46. Catching her enthusiasm for rendering the' German masterpieces into English, he under- took a translation of Schiller's Jungfrau von Orleans and Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, but never completed either, though he continu- ed throughout his life to turn shorter poems from the German into English. During her life- time, he sent many of his translations to Marga- ret Fuller for corrections and suggestions, and subsequently he chose his erstwhile classmate, Oliver Wendell Holmes, to perform the same services for him. Holmes, for his part, appar- ently enjoyed the relationship with Clarke and spoke of his translations from the German as "faithful, graceful and fluent," adding, in typically Holmesian fashion, that Clarke also wrote "good" original verses — "not as good as mine, but good." — J. W. Thomas, "J. F. Clarke as a Translator," Amer.-Ger. Rev., X, ii (Dec, 1943). 3i- 679. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, p. 123. 680. W. H. Venable, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (Cincinnati, 1891), 80; Clarence C. F. Gohdes, The Periodicals of American Transcendentalism, p. 28. Notes to Pasre 224 625 681. Gohdes, op. cit., pp. 17-35 passim. 682. In the numbers for February, April, May, June, and July, 1836, and January, March, May, and July, 1837. 683. January, and April, 1837. 684. March, 1839. 685. February, 1838. 686. February, 1839. In addition to these contributions by Clarke, the Messenger printed several translations from theological writings, among them portions of The Atonement from the German of Wilhelm Traugott Krug, translated by Samuel Os- good (Sept., and Oct., 1836), and from Olshau- sen's Commentary on the New Testament (Feb., Mar., May, June, and July, 1837). Among thirty-four translations of various German poems (chiefly brief lyrics or epigrams) that are printed in the Messenger, Clarke contributed seven from Goethe and two from Schiller; Dwight, seven from Goethe and four from Schiller. The remaining fourteen, from Korner, Stolberg, Uhland, Goethe, and Rosengarten, are by various translators, including C. T. Brooks, Sarah Margaret Fuller, and C. P. Cranch. Important prose contributions dealing with German writers are Margaret Fuller's essay on "The Life of Korner" (Jan., and Feb., 1838) and a seventeen-page translation by "a friend of the editor" from Goethe's Unterhal- tungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Dec, 1837). In general, the Germans are enthusiastically praised — notably Schiller and Goethe. But the editorial attitude is not entirely uncritical, as can be seen in Clarke's observation on his trans- lation of Schiller's Philosophical Letters, that these letters are not entirely "recommended as to doctrine," but are for appreciation in the way that "a fine poem" is to be appreciated. 687. Theodore, p. xv. Even at that late date, Clarke felt himself under the necessity of de- fending the study of German theology before American skeptics, for both in the "orthodox shades of Princeton" and the "classic haunts of Cambridge" there are still those who scoff at it and attack it for infidelity (ibid., pp. viii-ix). Clarke affirms that in Germany, "the land of light, the home of thought," the scholarly literature of theology is marked by the very opposite qualities; in it one finds impartial and profound investigation, systematic, complete treatises on doctrine, learned and accurate works on Church history, pioneer scholarship in criticism and philology — all showing "life, freedom, depth, and comprehensiveness" (p. x). If German theology is sometimes "extravagant and daring," it also shows "originality and freshness" (p. xiii). It is free from party spirit and sectarian rancor. From the time of Leibnitz is has been marked by a dependence on the intuition, which has been overlooked in English theology since the days of the Cambridge Platonists (p. xiv). Kant was not the opponent but the successor of Leibnitz ; the tendency of German philosophy has always been spiritual and profound (pp. xiv-xv). 688. In the Notes printed at the back of each volume, he included some explanatory aids to the interpretation of modern German philoso- phy, quoting Coleridge and German compilers as sources for his information; occasionally he draws on his knowledge of Schiller and Goethe to reinforce his points. He discusses the distinc- tion between understanding and reason, citing the Aids to Reflection (I, 300-3). He quotes Furness, Sampson Reed, Hahn, Nitsch, and Bretschneider on the subject of miracles (I, 314); Schleiermacher on the subject of "ulti- mate Restoration" (II, 415-20); passages from Tasso, translated by "a friend," possibly Mar- garet Fuller (I, 308) ; Goethe's essay on the Strassburg Minster (II, 420) ; and Schiller's Joan of Arc (I, 303-4). He remarked later in life that the translation of Theodore had been little read (Hale, op. cit., p. 380); yet his ardor for German literature and learning was not thereby diminished. Translating from the German re- mained a lifelong habit. In 1849, on a trip to Europe, he took particular care to visit the romantic scenes of the Rhineland made familiar to him by the German poets, and in Basel he did not neglect to pay a visit to the home of De Wette, only to learn that the author of Theodor had died a few months before. As late as 1851 he read German romance for recreation, and at various times he undertook to translate smaller works of German theology, among them Karl Hase's Leben Jesit (Boston, i860). For other important details, consult John Wesley Thomas, James Freeman, Clarke, Apostle of German Cul- ture to America (Boston, 1949). 689. For instance, he cites Gaussen, Gfrorer, Strauss, and Hase in his Inspiration of the New Testament (Boston, 1871). 690. Hale, op. cit., pp. 295-300, 302, 307, 338, 380-81. 691. See, for example, his articles in the Christ. Exam., LXXI, iii (Nov., 1861), 375-99, and LXXVII, ii (Sept., 1864), 206-31. 692. On the score of Quaker influence, see Odell Shepard, Pedlar's Progress. The Life of Bronson Alcott (Boston, 1937), pp. 69-70, 80, and F. B. Sanborn and Wm. T. Harris, Amos Bronson Alcott. His Life and Philosophy (2 vols., Boston, 1893), I, 155-58. 693. The Journals of Bronson Alcott, sel. and ed. by Odell Shepard (Boston, 1938), p. G26 Notes to Pases 224-27 694. Ibid., p. 32 (Oct., 1 832) ; also p. 67 (Sept. 27. i835)- 695. Ibid., p. xxiii. 696. The excellent indexes which Professor Shepard supplied with both his edition of the Journals and his biography of Alcott afford a ready means for examining the extent of Al- cott's acquaintance with books. The index to the Journals is, of course, little more than in- dicative of Alcott's reading, for the editor was able to select from the fifty-eight volumes of Alcott's manuscript journals something less than one-twentieth. 697. Journals, p. 67 (Sept. 27, 1835). 698. Ibid., p. 230 (Mar. 28, 1850). 699. Pedlar's Progress, p. 50; Dorothy Mc- Cuskey, Bronson Alcott, Teacher (N.Y., 1940), p. 16. 700. Pedlar's Progress, p. 235; see also Jour- nals, p. 218 (Jan. 1, 1850). 701. Pedlar's Progress, pp. 82-83. 702. Dr. Joseph Neef came to the United States about 1806. Two years later he published his Sketch of a Plan and Method of Edttcation , Founded on an Analysis of Human Faculties and Natural Reason, Suitable for the Offspring of a Free People and for all Rational Beings. After three years of Pestalozzian educational activity in Philadelphia, he opened in 1809 the first Pestalozzi school in America at the falls of the Schuylkill in Pennsylvania. Four years later he published his second book, Method of Instruct- ing Children Rationally, in the Arts of Writing and Reading. In the same year he moved his school to Village Green, Delaware County, near the town of Chester, Pa., remaining there until 1816, when he removed to Louisville, Ky., to engage in similar educational efforts there until about 1819. In 1825, at the request of Robert Owen, he moved his school again, this time to New Harmony, Ind., and remained there until the failure of the New Harmony project. He sought earnestly to spread and establish Pestalozzian ideals of education through publications, lectures, and practice. For details see Will S. Monroe, History of the Pestalozzian Movement in the United States (Syracuse, N.Y., 1907), pp. 29-108 passim; Oscar L. Bockstahler, "Contributions to Amer- ican Literature by Hoosiers of German Ances- try," Ind. Mag. of Hist., XXXVIII, iii (Sept., 1942), 231-50, notably p. 232; and Theodore Schreiber, "First Pestalozzian in the New World," Amer.-Ger. Rev., IX, i (Oct., 1942), 25-27. It is said that many of the accomplish- ments of members of the Owen family were the outgrowth of Neef's ideas, and that in this respect his influence assumed national propor- tions. See R. F. Seyboldt, "Francis Joseph Nicolas Neef," DAB, XIII, 402; Meredith Nicholson, The Hoosiers (N.Y., 1915), pp. 105- 7, 115; Robert D. Owen, Threading My Way (N.Y., 1874), pp. 283-84; and Charles H. Wood, "First Disciple of Pestalozzi in America," Ind. School Journal, XXXVII (1892), 659-65. 703. A cousin, who shared Amos Bronson 's interest in the new theories of education. 704. For Maclure's discipleship of Pestalozzi, see W. S. Monroe, op. cit., pp. 9-12. 705. Pedlar's Progress, pp. 84-85, 157. For the influence upon Alcott of William Russell's American Journal of Education and for Alcott's own account of how he endeavored to incorpo- rate Pestalozzian principles into his methods in the Cheshire school, see W. S. Monroe, op. cit., pp. 146-57. See also Dorothy McCuskey, op. cit., pp. 181-85, Ior a ns t 0I books which Alcott bought for his pupils to read and another "for the Instructor's Use in conducting daily stud- ies." Among the latter are (1) Russell's Manual of Mutual Instruction, (2) Epitome of Pestalozzian Instruction, (3) Hints to Parents . . . , in the Spirit of Pestalozzi' s Method, (4) Keagy's Pestalozzian Primer, and (5) Griscom's Monito- rial Instruction. 706. For the history of Pestalozzian educa- | tion in America (aside from the particulars already instanced concerning Maclure, Neef, and Alcott), see W. S. Monroe, op. cit., pp. 158- 223 passim; John B. Wilson, "The Antece- dents of Brook Farm," New Engl. Quar., XV, ii (June, 1942), 320-31. ; 707. Pedlar's Progress, p. 85; see also pp. 86-94; McCuskey, op. cit.; and George E. Haefner, A Critical Estimate of the Educational Theories and Practices of Amos Bronson Alcott, Columbia University Diss. (N.Y., 1937). 708. Pedlar's Progress, p. 141; Sanborn and Harris, op. cit., I, 168-70. 709. Pedlar's Progress, pp. 151-57; Journals, pp. 32, 36. 710. Pedlar's Progress, p. 258. 711. Appearing serially in Fraser's Magazine, beginning February, 1833. ■j 1 2. Journals, pp. 34-35 (1833); see also Sanborn and Harris, op. cit., I, 165. 713. See Journals, pp. 61 (Aug. 7, 1835), 66-67 (Sept. 27, 1835), 471 (Dec. 4, 1876). 714. See ibid., p. 29 (July 1, 1831), for Al- cott's own statement regarding his deficiencies in the languages. 715. Ibid., p. 39 (Apr. 22, 1834). 716. Ibid., p. 39 (Apr. 29, 1834); see also p. 174 (Apr. 7, 1846), and Pedlar's Progress, pp. 158-61, esp. p. 160. 717. Journals, p. 39 (Apr. 29, 1834). 718. Pedlar's Progress, p. 160. 719. Ibid. Notes to Pages 227-30 627 720. Journals, pp. 72, 73, 75, 1226. 721. Pedlar's Progress, p. 196. 722. Ibid., p. 258. 723. Journals, pp. 34-35 (1833). 724. His absorption in Berkeley during 1833 and frequent association with Dr. Channing at the same time represent other powerful influ- ences that would need to be taken into account in any general treatment of Alcott's intellectual development. 725. On the head of particular Kantian ideas that appealed to Alcott, see Sanborn and Harris, op. cit., II, 609-11. 726. Journals, pp. 31, 32, 39, 45, 61, 67, 109, 453. 4 6 4. 47 1 - 727. Ibid., p. 106 (Oct., 1838). 728. Ibid., p. 136 (Dec. 5, 1838). 729. Pedlar's Progress, p. 440. 730. Ibid., p. 294; see also Journals, p. 141. 731. Ibid., pp. 340-41. 732. Ibid., p. 149. 733. He was especially busy with his newly- acquired Platonic and neo-Platonic library, but found time also for the Bhagavat-Gita, Boehme's Epistles, Oken's Physiophilosophy, Swedenborg's Animal Kingdom, Ritter's Hist- ory of Philosophy , Carlyle's Cromwell, Miscel- lanies, Heroes and Hero-Worship, and Sartor, Coleridge's Friend and Church and State, Fichte's Destination of Man, Goethe's Faust (both parts), Wilhelm Meister, Essays on Art, Helena, and the Autobiography, some unspecified works of Schiller and Richter, and the whole pro- gression of neo-Platonists. — Journals, pp. 174, 175, 178-81, 282, 349; Pedlar's Progress, pp. 392-93- 734. Journals, pp. xxiii, 34, 136, 205, 211-12, 2 57» 263-64, 312; Pedlar's Progress, pp. 155, J 57> 39 2 . 4391 Sanborn and Harris, op. cit., I, 315; II, 401, 409, 426, 456, 553-54. 735. Journals, pp. 66-67 (Sept. 27, 1835). 736. Ibid., pp. 34, 109, 332, 530; Pedlar's Progress, pp. 160, 341, 350, 416; Sanborn and Harris, op. cit., I, 315; II, 370, 414, 426, 484, 604, 628. 737. Tablets (Boston, 1868), p. 189. 738. Ibid., pp. 195-97; Sanborn and Harris, op. cit., II, 401-2, 628. 739. Tablets, pp. 190—91. 740. Concord Days (Boston, 1872), p. 238. 741. Journals, p. 530. 742. Pedlar's Progress, pp. 350, 416-17. 743. Journals, p. 211; Sanborn and Harris, op. cit., II, 455-56. The reference here, as sub- sequent entries indicate, is to Alcott's theory of Genesis as derived chiefly from Oken's Elements of Physiophilosophy , in a translation by Alfred Tulk (London, 1847). It seems that Alcott and Emerson discovered, or rediscovered, Oken together. While Emerson says, in a letter dated August 4, 1842, "Oken, of whose speculations I have heard something, I take to be a scholar first, and then a continuator of Schelling's thought" (Letters, III, 77), he showed little further interest in Oken until 1849, when Al- cott's enthusiasm and Stallo's book forcibly recalled his attention to Oken. On September 2, 1849, Alcott recorded another conversation with Emerson: "Of Swedenborg especially there was much said, and of the Goethe and Oken morphologies, with my late experiences and their fruits." — Journals, p. 212; Sanborn and Harris, op. cit., p. 456. 744. On the same page of Alcott's journal that bears the passage just quoted regarding his "late revelation," there is pasted a slip of paper on which are written, in Emerson's hand, the six lines beginning "A subtle chain of countless rings" (Journals, p. 211 ; Sanborn and Harris, op. cit., II, 456). These verses were used by Emerson as the motto for the 1849 edition of Nature (Works, I, 403-4) and were subse- quently incorporated also in the poem "May Day" (ibid., IX, 165-66). Emerson's theory of nature, in which the worm "mounts through all the spires of form" to man, is, of course, fundamentally opposed to his own earlier theory in Nature, and it is also at variance with Alcott's (/evolutionary theories of "Genesis" and "Lapse," not unlike the doctrines taught by the ancient Gnostics. But both theories derive, by opposing approaches, from the same source and particularly from the protracted discussions between Alcott and Emerson during August and September, 1849. 745. Pedlar's Progress, p. 437. 746. Ibid., pp. 438-39. 747. Ibid., p. 439. 748. Journals, p. 211. 749. Works, IV, 107. See also Emerson's Journals, III, 515. 750. Emerson's Journals, III, 505 (Julv 15, 1835)- 751. Ibid., pp. 512-15; see also pp. 505-6, 527. 752. Works, IV, 108. 753. London, 1847, p. 264. In Oken, the whole trunk with all its systems was repeated, with due modifications, in the hand. 754. Tablets, p. 192. 755. Pedlar's Progress, pp. 474-76. For details of Alcott's first visit to St. Louis, which turned out not altogether satisfactorily from Alcott's point of view, see Journals, pp. 303, 312—13, and my study, New England Transcen- dentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism (Phila., 1948), pp. 34-53. 756. Pedlar's Progress, pp. 476-77; Journals, P- 315- 628 Notes to Pages 230-35 757. George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (2 vols., N.Y., 1903), I, 74. 758. Pedlar's Progress, pp. 476, 481. 759. Journals, p. 340 (Aug. 6, 1861). 760. Harris came to Concord personally to invite him, and Alcott observed: "July 17 [1865] Harris comes and spends Tuesday and Wednesday. I find him a profound master of Hegel and the German thinkers, able to apply their dialectic to life, literature, art, society, and a man for whom a great future is opening. He gives hopeful accounts of Brockmeyer [sic], the German genius, and other members of his St. Louis circle ; reads me papers of his own on philosophy, and hears many of my paragraphs, the oracles particularly, speaking of them all with enthusiasm .... The Personal Sketches also interest him deeply. I take great pleasure in this young man, now but thirty, a graduate [sic] of Yale, native of my state, and a success- ful teacher. My wife tells me that he reminds her of myself, at his age, when she first met me in Brooklyn, Conn. I take him to see Emerson, and they have sympathy about authors and opinions." — Journals, p. 373 (July 17, 1865). 761. Pedlar's Progress, pp. 477-80 passim. 762. Ibid., p. 482. 763. Ibid. 764. Journals, p. 381 (Febr. 17, 1866). For details of this second visit, see ibid., pp. 378-82, and see my New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism, pp. 34-53; for Emerson's visits to St. Louis, ibid., pp. 53-65. 765. Journals, p. 379 (Feb. 9, 1866). 766. "If Harris finds a logic in it, calls it 'dialectic' or by any name known to philosophy, then I suppose I am entitled to the praise he bestows on my thinking." — Journals, p. 428; see also Sanborn and Harris, op. cit., II, 613-17. 767. See Journals from 1866 on, esp. pp. 382, 388, 390, for the interesting concern expressed regarding "schools" and "systems." 768. Ibid., p. 382 (Apr. 8, 1866). 769. Ibid., p. 383 (July 20, 1866). 770. Pedlar's Progress, p. 483. 771. Journals, pp. 382, 386, 388, 390, 423, 424- 2 5- 772. Ibid., pp. 387-88 (Aug. 8, 1867). 773. Ibid., pp. 384, 388 (1867). 774. Ibid., p. 402 (1869). 775. Ibid., p. 393 (1869). 776. Ibid., p. 419 (May 7, 1871); also pp. 410-11, and Pedlar's Progress, p. 485. 777. Pedlar's Progress, p. 485. 778. Ibid., p. 490. 779. Journals, p. 404 (1870). 780. Ibid., p. 486. 781. Ibid., p. 507; Denton J. Snider, The St. Louis Movement (St. Louis, 1920), p. 364; Austin Warren, "The Concord School of Philos- ophy," New Engl. Quar., II, ii (Apr., 1929), 199-233- 782. Snider, op cit., pp. 307-8. 783. Ibid., pp. 276-77. 784. Ibid., pp. 332-37. 785. Index, XIII (Aug. 18, 1881), 78-79. 786. Journals, p. 420. 787. Ibid., pp. 444-45, 466, 497, 498, 499, 502, 505. 505-6. 536- 788. Ibid., pp. 428, 442, 444, 453-54, 497. 499-500, 525. 789. Ibid., 428 (Nov. 16, 1872). 790. Ibid., p. 497 (July 16, 1879). 791. Ibid., p. 536 (Aug. 3, 1882). 792. Ibid., p. 537 (Oct. 22, 1882). For Harris' explanation of the reason why he and Alcott could not agree on this point, see Sanborn and Harris, op. cit., II, 629-32. 793. For a more detailed particularization of how Alcott's influence worked, through Harris and the Western Hegelians, to bring New England Transcendentalism of the thirties round full circle, as it were, and to redomesti- cate it in Concord during the eighties, and how this, in turn had its repercussions in the acade- mic world, see my New England Transcenden- talism and St. Louis Hegelianism, pp. 113-25. 794. Because he could not on authority alone accept the doctrine of damnation, he had rejected Calvinism and Presbyterianism and turned to Universalism. But the barren ration- alistic principles of the Universalists, so calmly simple and reasonably reassuring on the sur- face, soon seemed to lead him to logical difficul- ties just as great, and he began to back away, from that position when he perceived that it destroyed the very basis for public morality and neglected all higher authority. He was looking for some formulation which would make a place for religious feeling and yet ex- plain it more satisfactorily than the Lockean philosophy did. Hence he was ready to accept one or another of the current teachings of in- tuitionism which were being propounded by the liberals in the Unitarian church. — Arthur M. Schlesinger, Orestes A. Brownson A Pilgrim's Progress (Boston, 1939), pp. 13-166. 795. Caroline Dall, op. cit., p. 16. 796. Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 33. 797. He continued as its minister until 1843. 798. Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 54. 799. Ibid. See The Convert (N.Y., 1857), pp. 182-83: "... derived in part from Benjamin Constant, Victor Cousin, Heinrich Heine, and the publications of the Saint-Simonians." He adopted Heine's view of history as stated in De I'Allemagne (Paris, 1835), pp. 1-2, as a struggle between Nazarene spirituality and Notes to Pages 235-36 629 Hellenic materialism. Brownson named the protagonists Catholicism and Protestantism, and contending against Heine and Saint-Simon, declared that true Christianity would be the social ideal of the future. For a later restate- ment of his position in New Views (1836), see The Convert of 1857, esp. pp. 185-87; also Schlesinger, op. cit., pp. 55-56. 800. Boston Quar. Rev., I, iv (Oct., 1838), 443. 801. The contributors were mainly writers with Transcendentalist sympathies, including Bancroft, Ripley, Alcott, Magaret Fuller, Sarah H. Whitman, Elizabeth P. Peabody, Parker, Brisbane, and W. H. Channing. 802. Boston Qitar. Rev., I, i (Jan., 1838), 2. 803. XXIII, ii (Nov., 1837), 170-94. 804. Boston Quay. Rev., I, i (Jan., 1838), 101-2. 805. Ibid., II, ii (Apr., 1839), 32. Brownson contended that the influence of German philo- sophy in America has been, on the whole, very small (I, i [Jan., 1838], 86) ; III, iii [July, 1840], 286). Yet he agreed with the Transcendentalists in their desire that French and German litera- ture should become better known primarily because he believed it would bring in the right kind of democratic doctrine to counteract the overwhelming influence of aristocratic English literature (I, ii [Apr., 1838], 161-62; also iv [Oct., 1838], 435-41). In 1838 he was of the opinion that the best German literature had not yet been translated, and the next year he warmly welcomed Dwight's Select Minor Poems of Goethe and Schiller (I, iii [July, 1838], 434; II, ii [Apr., 1839], 187-205). The Review also carried, in January, 1840, a lengthy, appreci- ative review of Goethe by Mrs. Sarah H. Whit- man, on the appearance of Goethe's Conversa- tions with Eckermann, as translated by Margaret Fuller. 806. Brownson' sQuar. Rev., II,ii(Apr., 1S45), 250, 252-53, 254-56; see also his review of her Summer on the Lakes, ibid., I, iv (Oct., 1844), 546- 807. In his Quarterly, as early as January, 1844 (I, i, 136), he finds in Hedge traces of "miserable transcendentalism which has of late obtained amongst us, and which spins Truth, Good, Beauty, even God himself, out of the human soul, as the spider spins its web out of its own bowels." 808. Whatever virtue Brownson had seen in 1839 in Dwight's translations of Goethe and Schiller he rejected six years later as delusion and error, for Schiller has become in his mind the spokesman of Protestant liberalism, and his work is "false in its leading doctrines and unwholesome in its general tendency." In fact, he prefers the heathen Goethe on the ground that at least Goethe never meddled with reform and, unlike Schiller, was not an "inbred radi- cal. . . . The Robbers are not less reprehensible, to say the least, than the Wahlverwandtschaften." ■ — II, iii (July, 1845), 383-84. His critique of the Weiss translation of the Aesthetic Letters is a penetrating study of Schiller's basic cultural theories. Brownson detects the Kantism of the work, but shows that Schiller's version of Kant's aesthetics is even less tenable than Kant's im- perative in the realm of ethics. For when Schiller makes the play impulse (Spieltrieb) — - an inclination of the soul — the determining factor of the aesthetic education of man, he is introducing a dangerous principle. In the final analysis, "his theory. . . practically reduces it- self into the Theory of Attraction, the basis of Fourierism!" (p. 383). Schiller's error (and that of John Weiss, too, in his commentary on the work) is to define Christianity as "the moral imperative transfigured by love." This vague talk of "love" so common among the idealists and transcendentalists is evidence of a base naturalism in philosophy, the great single error of modern thought (p. 386). 809. Ibid., pp. 387-88; see also I, iv (Oct., 1844), 546, and The Convert, Chs. XII and XIV. 810. Schlesinger, op. cit., pp. 177-78. 811. Emerson, for example, was in 1832 enough the logician to repudiate the Unitarian church, and he was ever after an unwilling intuitionist. All his discontent with speculative philosophy stemmed from his inability to find the satisfactory logical and rational way and from an equal dissatisfaction with any purely intuitional theology or philosophy. Parker was, or thought he was, so far removed from the position of the intuitionist that in 1841, in The Transient and Permanent in Christianity, he willingly risked expulsion from the Unitarian Association by asserting the priority of reason over belief. Eventually he achieved a mediation, but again, as in Emerson's case, he was plagued all his life long by logical questions for which he found no complete answer and which made a botch of some of his writings — as, for example his review of Strauss. Ripley was led far enough by the critical spirit to leave his pulpit in 1840, but he found it less difficult than Emerson, for example, to espouse faith, and there are in his later life no such wrestlings with evolution, logic, and dialectics as in Emerson's case. Clarke came even earlier and more readily than Ripley to a mediate position, and from the first counseled both the orthodox and the liberals to steer a middle course between reason and intuition. But Hecker, before he definitely banned the strictly scientific from his religious thinking and made up his mind to become a 630 Notes to Pases 236-38 Catholic, went through a period when he found it hard to lay the spectre that his early reading of Kant had raised. 812. New Views of Christianity (1836), in Collected Works, ed. by H. F. Brownson (20 vols., Detroit, 1898-1908), IV, 44-45. After his con- version and his repudiation of reform, he was equally condemnatory of Schleiermacher for making religion purely subjective and for resolv- ing the church "into general society," at the same time branding his "pantheistic spiritual- ism" as worse than rationalism, deism, and even the atheism of Baron d'Holbach (Works, III, 45; IV, 519; VIII, 424; IX, 480). 813. Actually he had begun to recommend eclecticism as a cure for what ailed America in his essay on "Recent Contributions to Philoso- phy" in the Christian Examiner for May, 1837 (XXII, 181-217). By October, 1838, he con- sidered Cousin "if not the first, one of the first philosophers of the age." — Boston Quar. Rev., I, iv (Oct., 1838), 443). 814. "Eclecticism — Ontology," Boston Quar. Rev., II, ii (Apr., 1839), 179; see also "Eclectic Philosophy," ibid., I, i (Jan., 1839), 27-53, es P- pp. 28, 32-34. 815. "Synthetic Philosophy," Democratic Rev., XI (Dec, 1842), 567-78, esp. p. 571; and "Eclecticism — Ontology," Boston Quar. Rev., II, ii (Apr., 1839), 178, 180-82. It is to be ob- served that Brownson interpreted Kant's analysis as purely empirical and therefore correct within its limits, and that he early defended Kant against the charge of "Tran- scendentalism" as the term was depreciatingly, popularly, and, as he pointed out, incorrectly used (ibid., i [Jan., 1839], 27-28). On the con- trary, says Brownson in 1839, Kant's method is "as truly experimental as Bacon's or Locke's (ibid., pp. 29, 30-31). If Kant is in error, it is not because he "leaves the path of experience or rushes off into speculation" but because he failed to make a thoroughgoing application of his method, for he conceived of experience too narrowly as merely experience of the senses. See ibid. , pp . 30-32 , 38 , 43 , 47-49 - It is at this point that he subsequently attacked Kant as the father of the new "sensist" and "material- ist " schools. 816. Boston Quar. Rev., II, i (Jan., 1839), 37-38, 42-45, 47-49. 817. Ibid., II, ii (Apr., 1839), 178-79; see also V, ii (Apr., 1842), 176-77. 818. "Charles Elwood," ibid., V, ii (Apr., 1842), 129-83, esp. pp. 175-76- 819. Ibid., p. 176; Works, IV, 355. 820. This identification is repeated in 'Remarks on Universal History," Dem. Rev., XII (May, 1843), 474; Works, IV, 391. 821. Henry F. Brownson, Orestes Brownson' s Early Life (Detroit, 1898), p. 413. 822.' 'Critik der reinen Vernunf t, ' ' Brown son's Quar. Rev., I, iii (July, 1844), 282. 823. "Introduction," ibid., I, i (Jan., 1844), 6, 8. 824. Ibid., I, ii (Apr., 1844), 137-74; "i (July. 1844), 281-309; iv (Oct., 1844), 417-49. These essays, comprising a hundred pages, form the fullest and at the same time the most compe- tent critical discussion which had appeared specifically of Kant's first Critique up to this time. In the course of it he shows a good deal of dialectical ability, and he drives home his points with a vengeance. He attacks what he calls the absurdity of Kant's asking the human mind to judge itself — to determine whether or not it has any right to form judgments at all. — Ibid., I, iii (July, 1844), 288; Works, I, 162. Kant's subjective phenomenalism is completely misguided and out of focus because of his "fun- damental error," which makes the effort as "impossible" as it is "absurd," in attempting "to find the object in the subject." If Kant had considered the truth of Fichte's simple equa- tion that "me is me," he could never have fallen into his error. For Fichte's "simple truism is nothing but saying what is, is"; but simple as it is, it is enough "completely to refute the whole critical philosophy." — Ibid., p. 283; Works, I, 163. In the final analysis, Kant has to be put down as an arch-skeptic who denied the possibility of human knowledge, and hence his Critique is in reality "the most masterly defence of Hume," whom he had set out to' refute. Kantism leads to a soul-withering, skepticism, "Universal Doubt and Nescience." —Ibid., p. 308; Works, I, 184-85. Brownson's later attacks upon Kant, which, while repeating his admiration for Kant's analytical powers, merely reiterate the argu- ments enunciated in the essays of 1844. See, for example, "An Old Quarrel," Catholic World, V (May, 1867), 145-59, esp. pp. 152-56. Other passages on Kant are to be found in Works, I, 222, 244-45; II, 295, 299, 520; V, 507; VI, 106; X, 263; XIX, 384. 825. See the article, "Charles Elwood," Boston Quar. Rev., V, ii (Apr., 1842), 152-53, 156—60, 172-73, 175-78, 181-82, and "Remarks on Universal History," Dem. Rev. XII (May, 1843), 473-74. Henceforth Descartes is the arch-subjectivist, the father of all that is most vicious in modernity. 826. "Charles Elwood," Boston Quar. Rev., V, ii (Apr., 1842), 176-77. 827. "The Giobertian Philosophy," Brown- son's Quar. Rev., XXI (Apr., 1864), 129-66, esp. pp. 149-54. and XXI (July, 1864), 293-315, esp. Notes to Pages 238-41 631 pp. 294-95; see also "The Cartesian Doubt," Catholic World, VI (Nov., 1867), 234-51. 828. "Cousin's Philosophy," Christ. Exam., XXI, i (Sept., 1836), 35-54. esp. p. 46. 829. "The Giobertian Philosophy," Brown- son's Quar. Rev., XXI (July, 1864), 295. 830. "Remarks on Universal History," Dem. Rev., XII (May, 1843), 461. 831. Ibid., pp. 461-62; see also p. 467. 832. Ibid., p. 470. 833. "Introduction," Brownson's Quar. Rev., I, i (Jan., 1844), 8; see also III (Oct., 1846), 409- 39, esp. p. 425; XXI (July, 1864), 294-96; XXII (Oct., 1873), 433-65; XXIII (Jan., 1874). 1-37; XXIII (Apr., 1874), 145-79. Hegel's principles are "unreal and worthless," "really less genuine, less profound, and infinitely less worthy of confidence" than those of Reid. See ibid., XXI (July, 1864), 295-96; and Cath. World, V (May, 1867), 153. Hegel's triads, by which he seeks to derive reality from possibil- ity and existence from nothing, are simply ridiculous. See Dem. Rev., XII (May, 1843), 461; also Works, I, 401; II, 38, 71, 268; VIII, 384; IX, 273; XI, 229. Far from being an on- tologist, Hegel is a pure psychologist who has mistaken the method of the one for that of the other — "a subjective idealist who ends in atheism, like all followers of Kant." See Brownson's Quar. Rev., I, i (Jan., 1844), 8, and Rene Wellek, "The Minor Transcendentalists and German Philosophy," New Engl. Quar., XV, iv (Dec, 1942), 676. As Professor Wellek points out, Brownson's several mistaken refer- ences to Hegel's Ideen for das Ideale inspire no great confidence for Brownson's close reading of Hegel. 834. "Spiritual Despotism," Brownson's Quar. Rev., XIV (Apr., 1857), 191-224, esp. p. 191. 835. "Holy Communion — Transubstantia- tion," Brownson's Quar. Rev., XXIII (Jan., I 874), 55-77. es P- P- 59; see also "Refutation of Atheism," ibid., p. 7; and "Catholicity and Naturalism," Works, VIII, 352. 836. Walter Elliott, The Life of Father Keeker (2nd ed., N.Y., 1894), 31 ; see also Henry D. Sedgwick, Father Flecker (Boston, 1900), pp. 5-6. 837. Elliott, op. cit., pp. 15-22. 838. Ibid., p. 32. 839. He was a "partial boarder," paying four dollars a week, at the same time undertaking the bread-making in partial payment for the instruction he received from Ripley, Bradford, Dana, and Dwight. — Ibid., pp. 49-50. 840. "I loved him dearly," said Hecker in 1882. "But he was a complete failure. I loved him dearly, and he knew it, and he loved me; I know well he did. When I came back a Redemp- torist from Europe, I went to see him at the Tribune office. He asked me, 'Can you do all that any Catholic priest can do?' 'Yes.' 'Then I will send for you when I am drawing towards my end.' ... I am persuaded that the fear of facing his friends hindered George Ripley from becoming a Catholic. He sent for me when taken down by his last illness, but his message was not delivered. As soon as I heard that he was ill I hastened to his bedside, but his mind was gone and I could do nothing for him." — Ibid., p. 90. 841. Ibid., pp. 55-56. 842. Ibid., pp. 55, 61 ; see also pp. 62, 63, 65, 76, and Sedgwick, op. cit., pp. 18-19. 843. For details see Elliott, op. cit., pp. 81- 83, 84-88. 844. For his impassioned search at this time "among the philosophers" and "among the sects" for the truth, see Elliott, op. cit., pp. 113-38, passim. 845. Ibid., pp. 89, 151, 153-54. 846. Ibid., p. 176. 847. Ibid., p. 120. 848. "One day, however [says Hecker], I was walking along the road and Emerson joined me. Presently he said, 'Mr. Hecker, I suppose it was the art, the architecture, and so on of the Catholic Church which led you to her ? ' 'No,' said I; 'but it was what caused all that.'" Years later, after he had lectured in Concord on "Why I became a Catholic" (a lecture which Alcott came to hear, but not Emerson), he and Emerson met in the street — Hecker by now confident that he had the truth, Emerson still the transcendental philosopher seeking it. The encounter led Hecker to observe complacently that "none of these men are comfortable in con- versation with an intelligent Catholic. . . . We had a little talk together. . . . He avoided my eyes until he quite turned round! Such men, confronted with actual, certain convictions are exceedingly uncomfortable. They feel in subjec- tion to you. They cannot bear the steadfast glance of a man of certain principles any better than a dog can the look of his master. Like a dog, they turn away the head and show signs of uneasiness." — Ibid., pp. 89-90. Ernest the Seeker had long since ended his search, and had become sure of himself. As Professor Gabriel observes, what Hecker was not aware of was that when Emerson literally turned his back on Father Hecker, "he sym- bolized the rejection by the American people of the Paulist's argument. The golden day when the American democratic faith should for all Americans rest squarely upon Catholic theology did not dawn. Vet Hecker did not work in vain. If he failed to convert American 632 Notes to Pages 241-43 democrats to Catholicism, he succeeded in con- verting an immigrant Catholic Church to New World democracy."- — Ralph H. Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought. An Intellectual History since 1815 (N.Y.,1940), p. 65- 849. For a discussion of this aspect of Heck- er's work and its effectiveness see Gabriel, op. cit., pp. 62-66. 850. That he shared at this time the general enthusiasm for German literature is indicated by his contribution of seven translations to Dwight's Select Minor Poems of Goethe and Schiller and his composition of a prose parable on the subject of Moses Mendelssohn, "Evening Hours and Morning Hours," which appeared in the Western Messenger, VI, v (Mar., 1839), 34 2 -44- 851. Jouffroy's book is a review of Scottish, German, and French contributions to ethics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which he makes a judicious synthesis out of the three traditions on an eclectic basis. Channing added no notes, contributed nothing of his own to the subject, and in the Preface reaffirmed his trust in intuition and in "spiritualistic" reli- gion. He disavowed any genuine interest in the Germans since Kant, for their energies are now absorbed, he says, by "ontology and logic." — Preface, p. xiv. 852. See O. B. Frothingham's review of Furness' The Veil Partly Lifted and Jesus Be- coming Visible (Boston, 1864) in Christ. Exam., LXXVI, iii (May, 1864), 374-92, esp. p. 375; also C. A. Bartol, "Dr. Furness and Dr. Bush- nell: A Question of Words and Names," ibid., LXVI, i (Jan., 1859), 112-24, es P- P- I1 &- 853. Taking issue with Parker and other advanced Transcendentalists on the historicity of Jesus, Furness yet felt he stood with them on other important questions. It was his desire always to give up fruitless theological argu- ment in favor of evangelical preaching and practical reform. He was liberal enough to argue vigorously in favor of a recognition of Parker by the Unitarian Association when, in 1859, that body refused to send Parker an expression of sympathy at his illness. Aside from his purely theological writings, Furness was a prolific translator of German verse. Reviewing Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany (which he helped to edit), he defended the Germans against the charge of "dreaming," and paid tribute to their art and music as well as poetry. See Christ. Exam., XLIV, ii (Mar., 1848), 263-73. The next year he published a translation of G. H. Schubert's The Mirror of Nature: A Book of [Popular Religious] Instruc- tion and Entertainment (Phila., 1849); and in 1856 appeared Julius and Other Talcs from the German of Zschokke and Toepfer. His transla- tion of Schiller's Lied von der Glocke (Phila., 1850) was regarded as one of the best versions of this much translated poem. In 1853 he pub- lished his immensely popular Gems of German Verse, poems of Goethe, Schiller, Uhland, Hei- ne, Chamisso, and others, including what is still adjudged the best English version of Heine's "Zwei Grenadiere." At the Schiller anniversary celebration in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, in 1859, Furness was the principal speaker. A final edition of his numer- ous translations, originally published in many of the liberal journals of the mid-century, appeared in 1886 under the title of Verses, Translated from the German; and Hymns. THE LATER TRANSCENDENTALISTS 854. Lectures LIX-LXIX were printed under the title, Transcendentalism with Prel- udes on Current Events, by Joseph Cook, Boston, 1878. The Boston Monday Lectures, during 1 875-1 877, had the object "to present the results of the freshest German, English, and American scholarship" (Preface). They were stenographically reported in the Boston Daily A dvertiser, and most of them were published in book form in Boston, New York, and London. 855. Joseph Cook, Transcendentalism . . . , p. 29. 856. Ibid., p. 36. 857. Ibid., p. 63; O. B. Frothingham, Recol- lections and Impressions, 1822-1890 (N.Y., 1891), pp. 54-59. 134. i65- 8 9- 858. Leading German universities, "through their great specialists in exegetical and histor- ical research, have decisively given the opin- ion . . . that the Author of Christianity is his- torically only an idolized memory inwreathed with mythical fictions. . . . Tholuck, Julius Miiller, Dorner, Twesten, Ullmann, Lange, Rothe, and Tischendorf, most of whom began their professorships . . . with great popularity, on account of their opposition to rationalistic views, are now particularly honoured on that very account." — Ibid., pp. 29, 30, 37-38. See also Cook's essay on the "Decline of Rational- ism in the German Universities," Bibliotheca Sacra, XXXII, cxxviii (Oct., 1875), 736-72, and a review of Immanuel H. Fichte's Fragen und Bedenken iiber die nachste Fortbildung deutscher Speculation (Leipzig, 1876) in the North Amer. Rev., CXXIV, ccliv (Jan., 1877), 146-47. 859. Cook. op. cit., p. 38. Only in America does this nonsense continue. Originally deriving inspiration from the rationalistic side of Ger- Notes to Pages 243-44 633 man exegetical research, Free Religious Asso- ciationism soon developed an infidelity of its own — an apostasy which the Germans them- selves would today be the first to denounce. 860. See, for example, the three volumes of collected lectures printed under the title of Boston Lectures : Christianity aud Skepticism (Boston, 1870, 1871, 1872). 861. The Christian Examiner, during the period from 1850 to 1880, continued to print more articles and reviews dealing with German theology than did any other American journal. After the Massachusetts Quarterly Review (1847- 1850), none of the Transcendental organs put much emphasis on elucidating strictly foreign points of view; and the Radical (1865-1872) and the Index (1870-1886) differed markedly in this respect from the Western Messenger (1835-1841) and the Dial (1841-1844), both more typical of the earlier phase of Transcen- dentalism. No longer distinctly conscious of being evangels of German thought, writers in the later journals took German theology (as well as philosophy) for granted and no longer pointed to any revolutionary inspiration or novel instruction to be derived thence. 862. See the collection of addresses by Os- good, T. J. Sawyer, Frothingham, H. Blan- chard, C. Miel, B. F. Barrett, E. H. Chapin, H. W. Bellows, A. D. Mayo, T. W. Higginson, B. Peters, D. Wasson, and Horace Greeley, delivered on the occasion of the first anniver- sary celebration of the Young Men's Christian Union of New York on May 13-14, 1858, and published under the title of The Religious A spects of Our Age, with a Glance at the Church of the Present and theChurch of the Future (N.Y., 1858). 863. For details, see Mrs. John T. Sargent (ed.), Sketches and Reminiscences of the Radical Club of Chestnut Street, Boston (Boston, 1880). 864. Recent general treatments of the free religious movements in the United States are Sidney Warren, American Freethought, 1860- 1914 (N.Y., 1843), and Stow Persons, Free Religion, an American Faith (New Haven, 1947). Both have appeared since this section was written; both add measurably to our knowl- edge of the free-thought movement but say very little about its relations with German religious and philosophical thought. 865. R. H. Gabriel, op. cit., pp. 178-79. 866. Throughout the last decade of the Club's existence, scientific subjects were in the ascend- ancy. With O. W. Holmes's reasoned attack on Jonathan Edwards all could agree (Mrs. John T. Sargent [ed.], op cit., pp. 362-75), but when Prof. Benj. Peirce explained the nebular theory in strictly evolutionary terms, it was observed that following his paper "there was less desire than is generally the case to venture theories and criticisms," so that there followed a "period of unusual restraint" and the "reputation of the Club for rapid and brilliant conversation" was felt to be in danger (ibid., pp. 250, 385). Again, when Edward S. Morse spoke on the subject of "Evolution," the membership "felt some delicacy" about venturing upon a discus- sion of the issues, beyond observing, as James F. Clarke did, that it was still difficult to tell on which side of the argument "the burden of proof rested" (pp. 184-85). Apparently the one person present on that occasion who thoroughly enjoyed Morse's discourse was Mark Twain. While he was obliged to leave at an early hour and was therefore unable to join much in the discussion, he became excited when the theory of metempsychosis was introduced, and came away convinced that "it's the passing off on a man of an old, damaged, second-hand soul that makes all the trouble" (pp. 186-87). Nathaniel S. Shaler's and Francis E. Abbot's papers on Darwinism again provoked a painful pause and then a restrained discussion (pp. 259-65, 265— 70). Finally, when Professor Alpheus Hyatt's two discourses on "Heredity" and "Evolution" (pp. 315-28, 329-38) raised the issues still more insistently, the lines of cleavage began to be drawn sharply. The majority of the member- ship (which included people like Weiss, Wasson, and Bartol) were of the opinion that scientific men tend to make "the physical the basis of all things"; the smaller but no less determined group (including Abbot, Higginson, Frothing- ham, Peirce, Fiske, and Morse) declared that no true religion need fear anything from science or from men of science (p. 332). In all these arguments, Leibnitz, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Goethe, Helmholtz, Virchow, Haeckel, Schopenhauer, and a host of other Germans were referred to as authorities on one side or another. There was some justification for the remark made by a sympathetic journal- ist in Chicago, who, denying that the Radical Club had departed this life, expressed himself as pleased that "the harp that once through Sargent's halls the soul of Hegel shed" had not yet "sounded its last note" (p. 386). Indeed, the music was heard everywhere. Each month the New York Tribune carried to its national clien- tele one or two columns of description and com- ment concerning the latest meeting of the Club. Numerous other papers and magazines, some of them as far west as Chicago, more or less regularly devoted space to the Radical Club and either cheered it on or wished it dead. Through such agencies were disseminated the theological and scientific ideas of the new religion based on "human nature" or "humanity." 634 Notes to Pages 244-47 867. Ibid., p. 310. 868. Consider, for example, the close associa- tion of Francis E. Abbot, editor of the Index, with Robert Ingersoll in the organization of the National Liberal League, of which association Abbot made the Index the official organ in 1877, at the same time that it was the mouth- piece, and was soon to become the property, of the Free Religious Association. The journal continued successfully under this joint sponsor- ship for nine years longer, except that Samuel Johnson, writing to Samuel Longfellow, on June 29, 1879, deplored the drift of 'American radicalism into organization, reliance on num- bers, utilities, forces, experience included, as contrasted with personal, interior, ideal values," and raised objections to Abbot's efforts at "organizing the Eternal Truth into Liberal Leagues." — Samuel Johnson, Lectures, Essays, and Sermons (Boston, 1883), pp. 127, 134; see also C. Gohdes, op. cit., pp. 233-36, 240. 869. Index, VIII (Mar. 22, 1877), 134-35. 870. Ibid. (Apr. 19, 1877), pp. 186-87. 871. C. Gohdes op. cit., pp. 247-53. 872. Index, XIV (Aug. 15, 1882), 78; Mead, Influence of Emerson (Boston, 1903), p. 111. 873. That these differences were real and recognized by Parker and Emerson themselves appears substantiated by Emerson, when, re- plying to Conway's request, shortly after Par- ker's death, for an article on Parker for the Cincinnati Dial, he wrote: "I have nothing to say of Parker. I know well what a calamity is the loss of his courage and patriotism to the country; but of his mind and genius, few are less accurately informed than I. ... I have just written to his society, who have asked me to speak with Phillips in the funeral oration that I will come to hear, not to speak .... My relations to him are quite accidental and our differences of method and working such as really required all his catholicity and magnanim- ity to forgive in me." — M. D. Conway, Auto- biography (2 vols., Boston and N.Y., 1904), I, 3i3- 874. Index, XIV (Oct. 5, 1882), 160-61. 875. Ibid. (Oct. 26, 1882), p. 195. 876. C. Gohdes, op. cit., pp. 253-54. 877. Heinzen, who epitomized in one person most of the various German- American radical- isms, had in 1854 transferred his residence to Boston, where he continued through the col- umns of his Pioneer and his untiring personal efforts, to prosecute social, political, and religious revolution. Writing in the Radical for January, 1867 (II, v, 257-69), Samuel Johnson hailed the "German leaven" as a necessary "foil to grim Puritanism." He felt that the "speculative boldness" of the German mind has entered into American life "under admir- able auspices" (pp. 168-69). Even their "cour- age in theological negation" is excused as "needful disintegrative work," and "Missouri is a monument of the Germans' fidelity to an abstract idea." In the sixties and seventies such a point of view was not unusual, though in the middle of the century few were bold enough to espouse it. For example, in 1851, Samuel Osgood had taken a much less lenient attitude toward the German refugees of '48. He saw in their strong anti-Sabbatarianism a good tendency, but he denounced them as atheistical. He conceived their "sensual socialism" to be a definite American problem so long as they should re- main unassimilated. — Christ. Exam., LI, iii (Nov., 1851), 250-59. 878. Index, VII, cccv (May 25, 1876), 246-47. 879. See, for example, the communication from Milwaukee, dated December 20, 1875, in the Index, VII, cccxv (Jan. 6, 1876), 7. 880. Ibid., cccxliv (July 27, 1876), 354. 881. Heinz Kloss, Um die Einigung des Deutschamerikanertums . . . (Berlin, 1937), pp. 224-28, passim. 882. I, xxxv (Aug. 27, 1870), 2-3. 883. See Radical, II, iii (Nov., 1866), 170-77, and ix (May, 1867), 543-49. 884. See, for instance, a letter on the St. Louis Hegelians by A. E. Kroeger in the Rad- ical, I, x (May, 1866), 349-52; also the notice of Harris' articles in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, written in a friendly, receptive tone, in the Index, VII, cccxlv (Aug. 3, 1876), 367; and the analytical discussions of Hegel, ibid., XVI, dcclxxxvi (Jan. 15, 1885, 343-45, and dccciii (May 14, 1885), 551. 885. See Kroeger's critical articles on Goethe in the Radical, II, v (Jan., 1867), 273-82, and vi (Feb., 1867), 332-40, and his review of the Life and Genius of Goethe: Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy (Boston, 1884) in Index XVII, dcccxlviii (Mar. 25, 1886), 466. 886. T. W. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston and N.Y., 1901), 169. 887. Most of these are popular expositions of the transcendentalist position, but occasion- ally Osgood wrote on literary topics, as for in- stance in his short piece entitled "The Love of the Tragic," Western Messenger, III, v (June, I ^37), 749-53. where he reviewed the theories of Burke, Hume, and Schlegel. In an essay, "Religion in Prussia" {ibid., iii [Apr. 1837], 635-37) ne revealed his transcendental inclina- tion to admire the German theologians, notably Schleiermacher. 888. II, ii (Sept., 1836), 73-91 ; iii (Oct., 1836), 185-90. Notes to Pages 247-48 635 889. Ill, i (Feb., 1837), 433-51; ii (Mar., 1837), 505-19; iv (May, 1837), 647-61 ; v June, 1837), 7 IQ -32; vi (July, 1837), 791-803. This work by a conservative German Biblical critic had been acclaimed by some of the orthodox in America, though he was much more liberal than the average of those who were rated "conserva- tive" in America. 890. Christ. Exam., XXV, i (Sept., 1838), 1-23. 891. The Holy Gospels, Illustrated by Over- beck, ed. by Samuel Osgood (Boston, 1856). 892. Characteristic of his attitude is his address on "The Catholicity of the Church of the Future," given on the first anniversary celebration of the Young Men's Christian Union of New York, May 13, 1858. After compliment- ing the youthful Union upon its decision to avoid creed and dogma by adopting a broad catholicity, he urged them to follow their hon- est conviction though they remain a despised minority. But he also urged them to avoid the extreme of radicalism, as expressed by the "great Positivist of France, August Comte," who maintained that "the only way to destroy old institutions is by replacing them." For as "God never left Himself without a witness in any age," so High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, and No Church alike are to be searched and reverenced for the good each contains. True catholicity is to be achieved by a "recon- ciliation of science with faith, industry with spirituality, society with devotion, art with religion, and manliness with godliness." — The Religious Aspects of the Age (N.Y., 1858), pp. 13-14, 15, 17, 30. 893. Christ. Exam., LXXXVI, ii (Mar., 1869), 171-91. 894. Ibid., p. 172. 895. Ibid., p. 176. 896. "Transcendentalism in New England," Internat'l. Rev., Ill (Nov., 1876), 742-63. 897. Ibid., pp. 757, 759-60 898. Christ. Exam., XLII, ii (Mar., 1847), 255. 899. He paid tribute to German learning, but pointed also to its "weak passiveness and vague- ness," its "flighty imagination." See his re- view of Clarke's Theodore in the Christian Examiner, XXXI, ii (Jan., 1842), 348-73, especially page 348. He felt that the new doc- trine of the "soul's sufficiency" had no neces- sary connection with any historical antecedents, but could be found in all ages. It goes back to Hebrew and Greek times: "the Spring of won- der burst up in Teutonic soil, the same living water as in Indian bottles or Jewish jars." He criticizes Parker, "the deputy-sheriff of ideas," and other Transcendentalists for teaching the doctrine of "Divine impersonality," for person- ality properly understood is "no degradation or limitation" of God. See his Radical Problems (Boston, 1874), pp. 66, 76, 85. On the whole, Bartol uttered an effective protest against the growing materialist agnosticism of the sixties and seventies. The radicalism he preached con- sisted of a strong enunciation of the church's duties to further social progress and to strength- en the "bond between man and man." — Ibid., p. 112. 900. Schiller, he feels, has been vastly over- esteemed, and now "the moth and rust" are at work "on compositions which the schoolgirls thirty years ago were mad over, — Don Carlos, Maria Stuart, the Robbers, and Wilhelm Tell." — The Life and Genius of Goethe, ed. by F. B. Sanborn (Boston, 1886), p. 112. Bartol empha- sizes what he considers Schiller's rigid conven- tionality, the hollow rhetoric of his lines, the lack of realism in his dramas, the comparative simplicity of his characters. Goethe, on the other hand, is the poet of life, with all its subtle shadings, its confusion of right and wrong. "Schiller is the poet of a section and season; Goethe, of ages and the world" (pp. 112, 128). Emerson was incapable of a complete under- standing of Goethe's art, for Emerson is but "half-acquainted with this world; Goethe is native to the soil, and knows every mother's son and daughter by heart." Although indebted to Goethe for ideas and points of view, Emerson does an injustice to the author of Faust when he admits that to his "dainty mind" Faust is a disagreeable book, "as if a poem . . . could be made of the leavings when all the sad and dark passages of the world-tale should have been erased" (p. 115). Taking up the delicate ques- tion of the Goethean morality, Bartol pleads for the application of a relative standard. Even if Goethe did err, we cannot refuse to listen to his wisdom so dearly bought. "To say that Goethe gloated over the sin, while he gathered up the lesson, is a calumny. . . . Great men are too scarce to be thrown away, even for grievous faults. Consult proportion in what you judge" (pp. 117-18). On the whole, "Goethe's temper was goodness to every creature that breathes, from an instinctive piety with which the child of seven rears an altar to the Deity . . . He is religious [and] refuses, chief scientific geniub as he was of his time, to admit a scientific basis for religion, it being his own; a naturalist, he sees in nature more than can be reduced to natural laws. He repents where he has been misled, and in 'Elective Affinities' deposits sad experiences, he says, as in a burial-urn. He judges that the sentiment of faith concerns us more than the object on which it is fixed" (pp. 122-23). 036 Notes to Pases 249-50 901. Emerson characterized N. L. Frothing- ham as "an excellent classical and German scholar" (Works, X, 335). He and his daughter Ellen, the sister of Octavius Brooks, were very active translators of German poetry during the thirties and forties. See O. B. Frothingham, Recollections and Impressions, pp. 3-5, for the large German content of his father's library. 902. Ibid., pp. 22, 32-33, 53, 57-60, 74, 134. He mentions having read, already while at the Divinity School, De Wette, "the Strauss and Paulus Schools," Baur, Schwegler, Zeller, Schneckenburger, and the Theologische Jahr- biicher" ; but his real conversion to the new theology did not come until after 1847, when he went to Salem and met Theodore Parker, who appeared to him "a second Luther." "From a shelf in his library, I took Schwegler's 'Nach- apostolisches Zeitalter' . . . which threw a flood of light on New-Testament criticism. This led to a study of F. C. Baur, the founder of the so- called 'Tubingen School.' A complete set of the Theologische J ahrbiicher , the organ of his ideas was imported . . . and carefully perused." — Ibid., pp. 29, 54, 57-59. 903. Ibid., pp. 140-42, 144-45. 904. E.g., Christ. Exam., LI, ii (Sept., 1851), 161-85. 905. In his article on Baur in the Christian Examiner, LXIV, i (Jan., 1858), 1-39, he de- monstrated his high appreciation of German scholarship, though he remained unsympathetic toward certain of the doctrines of the Hegelian school. 906. Recollections and Impressions, p. 137. 907. "Essential human nature," wrote Froth- ingham in his Religion of Humanity (1872), "is the Messiah cradled in the bosom of every man." "Whether there shall be peace or war, rule or misrule, purity or corruption, justice or injustice . . . are questions that men must answer for themselves. There is no higher tribunal . . . there is no super-human or extra- human will by which they can be dealt with. If things go well or ill rests with those who are commissioned to make them go." — Second ed., N.Y., 1872, p. 109. 908. Infidels are not "the progressives" but those who make religion "a cloak of pride, self- ishness, and cruelty" while punctiliously adhering to the letter of the Scriptures. The only infidelity that Frothingham fears is that following upon "ecclesiastical straight-jacket- ing," which is a "disbelief in the primary facul- ties of the human soul; disbelief in the capabil- ity of man's reason to discriminate between truth and error in all departments of knowledge sacred and profane. . . . They are infidels . . . who overlay their reason with heaps of anti- quated traditions . . . and stand dumb before appalling iniquities in obedience to the ill-read letter of ancient record." — Ibid., pp. 124, 126, I3I-33- 909. Stedman left an appreciative appraisal of Frothingham in Octavius Brooks Frothingham and the New Faith (N.Y., 1876). 910. Recollections and Impressions, pp. 128, 134- 911. This periodical was founded by Francis E. Abbot, a professionally trained philosopher and one of Frothingham's ablest associates, who was supported by Emerson for the profes- sorship of philosophy at Andrew D. White's new Cornell University. Failing of the appointment, he went to Toledo, Ohio, and founded the Index on January 1, 1870. — Francis E. Abbot, Testimonials (Boston, 1879), p. 32; Proc. of the Third Annual Meeting of the Free Religious Assn. in Boston, May 26-2J, 18 jo (Boston, 1870), p. 8. 912. Ralph H. Gabriel, op. cit., pp. 176-77; Index, I, i (Jan., 1870). 913. As Croly (pseud. C. G. David) under- stood positivism, it embraced the following tenets: "humanity is the supreme being; im- mortality exists, in objective and subjective forms, but not as conscious life of the mortal faculties; humanity should be paid service, love and worship, the latter being reverence to the noble qualities in man ; wealth should be devot- ed to humanity . . . ; women should be wor- shipped as the example of all that is good in humanity. . . . Human conduct must be deter- mined, not by rights, but by duties alone. These principles are valid and positive because they are proved by the discoveries of science." — Gabriel, op. cit., p. 184. 914. Frothingham's Recollections and Im- pressions, full of references to Emerson, Parker, Kant, Strauss, Baur, and Schwegler as having influenced him, mentions Comte only once and positivism not at all. 915. Henry Edger, a British immigrant of 1 85 1, was the chief earlier apostle in America of the Comtean philosophy. After spending six years energetically proselyting, he counted ten converts, among them his wife and three of his children. His disappointment and faillure led him to abandon the United States about 1880, at the commencement of the decade that saw positivism sweep the country. For the origins of potisivism in America, as well as for the numerous causes that delayed its reception in the United States, see R. L. Hawkins, Positivism in the United Stales 1853-1861, (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), notably pp. 212-25; see also Hawkins, Auguste Comte and the United States, 1816-1853 (Cambridge, Mass., Notes to Pages 250-52 637 1936), and W. I. Riley, American Thought (N.Y., 1915), pp. 397-408. 916. For evidence that Frothingham under- stood the uses to which New England Tran- scendentalists had tried to put German ideal- ists from Kant to Hegel, see his history of Transcendentalism in New England, notably the section, "Germany," pp. 5-59. 917. See his long article, "The German Catholic Movement," Christ. Exam., XLII, i (Jan., 1847), 55-81, a detailed review based on a thorough knowledge of recent history and religious movements, and of the significance of Ronge's revolt against the Roman church; see also "Germany, Religious and Political," ibid., XLIII, iii (Nov., 1847), 394-427. 918. See Gohdes, op. cit., p. 216. Parker rated him "certain and valuable" as a possible con- tributor to his Massachusetts Quarterly Review. — Ibid., p. 165. 919. Frothingham, Recollections and Im- pressions, pp. 194-196. 920. See especially Ch. II, "America's Debt," and Ch. Ill, "The American Opportunity." 921. See his article in the Radical, II, i (Sept., 1866), 1-12, welcoming the new science as the means to fight the vestiges of supernaturalism still existing in New England ; also his criticism of the position of Hedge, in the Radical, I, ii (Oct., 1865), 69-72. 922. Frothingham, Recollections and Im- pressions, p. 199; George W. Cooke, Unitarian- ism in America, p. 419. His manner of writing was always marked by ingenuity, recondite allusions, flights of wilfulness and fancy, but also exhibiting a cheerful independence. He was fond of music, full of special enthusiasms, never long devoted to one task, nervously go- ing from one subject to another. His most important literary work, the biography of Parker, is marred by a lack of organization, though many passages in it are executed in dazzling colors. His bent toward poetry ex- pressed itself in the great number of transla- tions which he made from the German. 923. Weiss may have begun this book as early as 1837, for it appears likely that it was he who contributed the unsigned translation of Schiller's Philosophic Letters to the January and April numbers of the Western Messenger. 924. Weiss is incorrectly credited by Pro- fessor Morgan (op. cit.. No. 8242) with having translated Schiller's Letters Prior to his Mar- riage (Boston, 1841), and with the preparation of a book of Moral and Religious Selections from . . . Jacobi, Shubart [sic], Schiller, Ewald, Richter, Gellert, Haug, and Others (Boston, 1841). See Morgan, op. cit., No. C 560. Both are correctly ascribed by E. C. Parry (Schiller in America, Phila., 1905), to Mrs. Jane Lee Weisse. 925. Frank P. Stearns, Sketches from Con- cord and Appledore (N.Y. and London, 1895), pp. 134-37, 146-51; T. W. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, p. 112. 926. Essays Religious, Social, Political (Bos- ton, 1889), p. 57. 927. E.g., see his series of letters analyzing and criticizing the Kantian position, in the Radical, I, iii (Nov., 1865), 102-5; X (June, 1866), 385, 393; and Index, XVII, dcccxliv (Feb. 25, 1886), 410-11; also "Buckle's Treat- ment of History," Christ. Exam., LXXIV, ii (Jan., 1863), 51-76, and his "Character and Historical Position of Theodore Parker," ibid., LXXVII, i (July, 1864), 1-41, one of the best pieces of characterization and appreciation of Parker ever written. Wasson's three-year residence at Stuttgart from 1870 to 1873 came too late to leave any noteworthy marks on his development beyond the notable essay, "Church and State in Germany," in the Uni- tarian Review, V, i (Jan., 1876), 1-28. 928. He wrote also a long analytical review of Goethe's Meister for the Atlantic of Septem- ber and October, 1865, in which he professed an ever-growing admiration for this novel after repeated readings. The essay reveals a thorough knowledge of currents of thought in Germany since the early eighteenth century and, indeed, a great sympathy of feeling for the Kantian idealists and for Goethe. It is remarkably free of the current cant of criticism. It exhibits a beautiful clarity of feeling and expression and is, all in all, a fine appreciation based on a real understanding of Goethe. 929. Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, C. P. Cranch, J. S. Dwight, T. W. Higginson, C. T. Brooks, G. W. Curtis, and others more or less closely identified with the Transcendental movement are treated below, in the sections dealing with literary influences ; they followed more the literary tradition of Margaret Fuller than Emerson and Parker's concern with philosophy and theology. 930. Samuel Johnson, Lectures, Essays, and Sermons, with a Memoir by Samuel Longfellow (Boston, 1883), pp. 29, 52. 931. Ibid., pp. 416-60. 932. Ibid., p. 434. 933. Ibid., p. 439. 934. Autobiography, Memories, and Expe- riences of M. D. Conway (2 vols., Boston and N.Y., 1904), I, 137, 142-43, 147, 157. 935. Conway thought he saw something symbolic in a little episode which he witnessed in the Emerson household. Edith Emerson named her cat "Goethe." Emerson affected to 638 Notes to Pages 253-55 take it seriously, and once when the cat was in the library and scratched itself, he opened the door and politely said, "Goethe, you must retire; I don't like your manners." — Ibid., 1, 147. 936. Ibid., pp. 199, 248. 937. Ibid., pp. 306-15. 938. Ibid., II, 13, 67-69, 155, 240-41, 308, 312-15, 400-1; for his sojourns in Germany during 1871 and 1884, see ibid., pp. 245-53 an d 416-17, respectively. 939. See "A Hunt after Devils," an anecdote after Auerbach's Keller, made famous by Faust, in Harper's, XXXVIII, iv (Mar., 1869), 540-48; "Christmas in Berlin," Index, XVI, dccxxxviii (Jan. 29, 1885), 363-64; "The Brothers Grimm," Index, XVI, dccxc (Feb. 12, 1885), 388-89; an article on Bismarck, Radical, I, xii (Aug., 1866), 486-90; a letter on Dr. Schliemann, Index, VIII, ccclxxv (Mar. 1, 1877), 99-100; and an article on Heine, Internal' I Rev., VII, v (May, 1882), 425-38. 940. Boston born and bred, Cabot was at Harvard from 1836 to 1840. Early an admirer of Carlyle, he was further inspired by Long- fellow's Hyperion to indulge his desire for a post-collegiate education at Heidelberg. He and two Harvard classmates spent the winter of 1840-1841 at Heidelberg and then migrated (after the fashion of German students) to Berlin, where they were welcomed and admit- ted to the University by Ranke, the great histo- rian. Here Cabot enrolled in the course of Schelling, then delivering the famous series of lectures partially reported by Charles Stearns Wheeler and subsequently printed by Emerson in the Dial for January, 1843. After a semester at Berlin, Cabot went to Gottingen, where he concentrated upon Kant, though he also attend- ed the courses in Rudolph Wagner's laboratory, at the same time that he engaged in the German student activities of the Liederkranz, fencing, dancing, and club life. 941. Higginson, who renewed his acquaint- ance with Cabot at this time, found in him then already what characterized Cabot during the remainder of his life — a "modest and reticent" nature, "bearing unconsciously a certain Euro- pean prestige . . . which so much commanded the respect of a circle of young men that we gave him the sobriquet 'Jarno,' after the well- known philosophic leader in Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister.' " — "J. E. Cabot, " Proc. A mer. A cad. of Arts and Sciences, XXXIX (June, 1904), 652. 942. IV, iv (Apr., 1844), 409-15. Cabot told Higginson that he had read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason twice in the German and "thought he comprehended it, but that Meiklejohn's translation was beyond making out." — Ibid., p. 652. 943. Emerson's Letters, III, 290 (June 26, 1844). 944. Ibid., pp. 298-99 (Sept. 1, 1845). 945. Ibid., p. 343 (Aug. 19, 1845). 946. Emerson's Journals, VII, 268-69; Hig- ginson, loc. cit., p. 652; John Weiss, Parker, I, 126; Gohdes, op. cit., pp. 160-64. Parker's Massachusetts Quarterly Review maintained itself for three years, showing more of studious and systematic work than its predecessor but far less of freshness and originality, and then went under, as Parker explained in the last number, "because it became what its projec- tors designed it should be." — III, iv (Sept., 1850), 524. Higginson observed that while Par- ker's Review was designed to be "the Dial with a beard," it turned out rather to be "the beard without the Dial." 947. I, i (Dec, 1847), 140. 948. I, ii (Mar., 1848), 263-65. 949. If Stallo had met with more reviewers like Cabot, he might have had less occasion to regard his book as failing in its aim to arouse American thinkers to the importance of such Hegelian concepts as Werden, Identitalslehre, and the Absolute, and he might not have left his professorship of philosophy for the law and the bench. 950. Higginson, loc. cit., p. 653; Emerson's Letters, VI, 73. 951. See his essay, "Hegel," in the North Amer. Rev., CVI, ccxix (Apr., 1868), 447-83, in reality a review article on Hegel's Werke, 2nd ed., 15 vols., Berlin, 1840-1845; G. H. Lewes' History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte, Vol. I (London, 1867); and the Journal of Specula- tive Philosophy, Vol. I (St. Louis, 1867). 952. See esp. "Some Consideration on tne Notion of Space," Jour, of Spec. Philos., XII, iii (July, 1878), 225-36, an essay which Harris chose as the leading article for the number, followed immediately by William James's "Brute and Human Intellect," pp. 236-76. See also V, i (Jan., 1871), 38-48, and XIII, ii (Apr., 1879), 199-204. 953. He cites Goethe in support of his defini- tion of a proper metaphysics and the conclu- sion that "Philosophy is idealism," not materi- alism ; its methods are mental, not physical (CVI, ccxix, 447, 451-54). The facts of science, important as they are, must not be regarded as ends in themselves, but in relation to human- ity. Their proper orientation is to be made, not in pursuing the strict method of physical science merely, but by relating them to the Hegelian concepts of Werden and Identitat, in terms of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis move- ment of the Hegelian logic. This, and this method only, affords a means by which the Notes to Pages 257-59 639 irresistible demands of science can be met, at the same time that the truths derived by the older method are preserved (pp. 455-59)- The common tendency of inductive philosophers since Kant to oppose Hegelian idealism is a manifestation of a one-sided attention to the senses and the failure to recognize in the Hegelian system the full and adequate provi- sion that it makes for science and natural law (pp. 462-66). The remaining portion of the essay is a vindication of Kantian idealism and of the Hegelian procedure. It is noteworthy that Harris thought it expedient to devote ten pages of the January, 1871, number of his Journal (V, i, 38-48) to call the attention of his readers to Cabot's essay. THE SPREAD OF INTEREST IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY THE ST. LOUIS MOVEMENT 1. See D. H. Harris (ed.), A Brief Report of the Meeting Commemorative of the Saint Louis Movement in Philosophy , Psychology, Literature , Art, and Education, in Honor of Dr. Denton J. Snider's Eightieth Birthday, Held January 14th and 15th, ig2i . . . (St. Louis, [1921]), pp. I5ff. Almost none of the speakers at this com- memorative festival failed to pay reverence to the Transcendentalists. For the numerous points of association between the New England reformers and the St. Louis leaders, see Denton J. Snider, The St. Louis Movement . . . (St. Louis, 1921), and A Writer of Books in His Genesis (St. Louis, 1910), pp. 329-99 passim; Louis J. Block, "The Philosophic Schools of St. Louis, Jacksonville, Concord, and Chicago," in D. H. Harris (ed.), op. cit., pp. 14-17; Cleon Forbes, "The St. Louis School of Thought," Mo. Hist. Rev., XXVI, i (Oct., 1931), 69-70. 2. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, pp. 27-29. 3. Whereas the New England Transcenden- tal movement had originated among discontent- ed ministers who left the pulpit to spread their reforms through the Lyceum lecture and the periodical column, the St. Louis Movement had its beginning chiefly among teachers who spread their doctrines through schools — private, public, elementary, collegiate, kindergarten, and communal. W. T. Harris was a teacher and administrator in the public school system of St. Louis, who rose eventually to the position of U.S. Commissioner of Education; Denton J. Snider, William McKendree Bryant, Thomas Davidson, Charles F. Childs, Louis J. Block, and Horace H. Morgan were high-school teachers; Francis E. Cook and B. V. Dixon were school principals; James K. Hosmer and George H. Howison taught at Washington Uni- versity, and J. H. Watters taught in the St. Louis Medical School; the Misses Susan E. Blow, Amelia C. Fruchte, Susan V. Beeson, Mary E. Beedy, and Anna C. Brackett were all connected with the public or private schools of St. Louis. Among others prominent in the movement, A. E. Kroeger was a journalist by profession and for a time a city official; J. Z. Hall and J. H. Watters were physicians, and Britton A. Hill, J. G. Woerner, Horatio M. Jones, and H. C. Brokmeyer were lawyers. 4. Often spelled Brockmeyer. Brokmeyer's son tells us that while his father was about the business of advancing the life of pure thought, he utterly disdained to quibble over the spell- ing of names, even when his own name was involved. See Chas. M. Perry, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy. Some Source Material (Norman, Okla., 1930), pp. 48-49. Brokmeyer's works were published under the name Brok- meyer (without the c). Although Harris and Snider generally used Brockmeyer and Alcott used both forms, Brokmeyer is adopted in this study. To his son Eugene, Brokmeyer often expressed his dissatisfaction with the English language as inadequate for reproducing the thought of Hegel. His impatience with language and other known traits of his personality offer clues why, when Louis J. Block undertook to revise Brokmeyer's translation of Hegel's Logic, he found the task "too much for him." The "professor of Philosophy" to whom the manuscript was next referred for editing pro- fessed it to be "too profound for him." How- ever that may have been, something of the difficulty is suggested by W. F. Woerner's observation: "Brokmeyer was the worst speller I have ever known and absolutely indifferent to grammatical construction." — Ibid., pp. 3,4 50- 5. See the bibliography in Perry, op. cit., pp. 96-140. 6. See JoSP, XVI, iv (Oct., 1882), 433-39, for a bibliography, prepared by Harris, listing in titles by Kroeger. 7. Perry, op. cit., p. 42. 8. Howison left Washington University in 1871 to teach in the Boston School of Technol- ogy (1871-1879). The following year he lectured on ethics at Harvard and spent 1880-1882 studying under Lotze, Paulsen, Michelet, Zeller, and others, chiefly at the University of Berlin. During 1 883-1 884 he occupied the post later held by John Dewey at the University of Michigan, and in 1884 went to the University 640 Notes to Pages 259-60 of California, where he remained as head of the Department of Philosophy until igio and as professor emeritus until his death in igi6. During his St. Louis period, Howison con- cerned himself little with the more popular phases of the St. Louis Movement, but was an officer of the Philosophical Society and contrib- uted articles to the avowedly Hegelian Journal of Speculative Philosophy (see especially his extended essay on German philosophy in the volume for 1883). He also participated in the fifth (1883) and seventh (1885) sessions of the Concord School of Philosophy. Eventually he demonstrated his individualism and originality by becoming virtually the founder of personal- ism, preferring a form of personal idealism or spiritual pluralism to the absolute idealism of Hegel. While he dissented at many points from Hegel, he was and remained a potent force in the advance of the speculative method of Hegel — directly through his teaching and his leadership in the "Philosophical Union" at Berkeley, and indirectly through the remark- able group of students who heard his message, learned his method, and, in their turn, promul- gated both. Among the more prominent of his students were Charles Bakewell (1867 — ), head of the Department of Philosophy at Yale (1905- 1933); Evander B. McGilvary (1864-1953), who taught at Cornell, 1899-1905, and at the University of Wisconsin, 1905-1934; Harry A. Overstreet (1875 — ), prominent at New York University from 191 1 to 1939; Sidney Edward Mezes (1863-193 1), professor at Texas from 1897 to 1908 and president from 1908 to 1914, and professor at the College of the City of New York (1914-1929) and president (1929-1931); and Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873 — ), active at Johns Hopkins from 1910 to 1938. While none of these taught a pure Hegelian doctrine, their tutelage and later prominence are enough to suggest that the speculative method as taught and exemplified by Howison (involving doc- trines derived from Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Lotze, and F. C. S. Schil- ler) received through them a powerful and widespread currency. To Howison as much as to any other man is attributable the American academic concern with speculative thought during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth centuries. 9. Twenty-one of those who formed the neucleus of the movement have 229 books to their credit, not counting the m titles that belong to Kroeger nor the 479 that belong to Harris. Associated more or less closely with the movement were public men like Carl Schurz and Joseph Pulitzer and, among academicians, George Sylvester Morris, a skillful teacher of philosophy at Michigan and Johns Hopkins (1870-1889), translator of Ueberweg's History of Philosophy (1871-1873), and editor of Griggs Philosophical Series to which he contributed Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. A Critical Expo- sition (1882) and Hegel's Philosophy of the Stale and of History (1887). 10. Edward L. Schaub (ed.), William Torrey Harris, J^J5-J9J5 (Chicago, 1936), p. 3. Bibliog- raphies for the several members of the Move- ment are found in Perry, op. cit., pp. 78-140. While the St. Louisans produced a veritable avalanche of books, not one of them wrote a book that can be called a literary success. The Transcendentalists, on the other hand, owed much of their force and permanence of influ- ence to their literature. 11. However much the "multiracial, poly- glotic" St. Louisans differed in religion, politics, and other matters, there was "one faith univer- sal, that St. Louis could not help becoming the largest, richest, most influential city in the land." This "fanaticism" or "craze," as Snider called it, reached a kind of crest in a series of publications between 1869 and 1875 by Logan Uriah Reavis that culminated in his St. Louis: The Future Great City of the World (1875), a tome of some 900 pages. Reavis claimed that 150,000 copies of his several books passed into circulation. Concerning Reavis as the prophet of the "Illusion" see Snider, op. cit., pp. 82-89. 12. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, p. 66. 13. Forbes, loc. cit., XXV, i (Oct., 1930), 86; Snider, The St. Louis Movement, pp. 52-69. 14. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, p. 141. 15. "This upburst and domination of Ger- manism," says Snider (The St. Louis Movement, pp. 142-43), "I followed not from the outside but from the inside; I not only studied it as an object but felt it and appropriated it till it became a part of myself. And there were many natives here like me — and many who experi- enced it as the uplift of a new strange spirit ... as the revelation of the peculiar racial conscious- ness of old Teutonia welling forth just now on the banks of the Mississippi." This period may be dated as beginning with the Great Camp Jackson Deed (1861) and ending with the retirement of Schurz from the U.S. Senate (1875), thus corresponding roughly with the Prussian surge toward unity from the conquest of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864 and the defeat of Austria in 1866 to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and the formation of the German Empire. American Teutonia sensed the rapid, gigantic upswing of ancient Teutonia — felt "the deep undercurrent of connection between German Notes to Pages 260-64 641 St. Louis and the old, or rather, the new Father- land in Europe." Snider speaks of the whole community being "borne along in the fioodtide of German spirit." "The majority of the in- habitants were composed of Germans, German- Americans, and Germanizers, of which last class I was a right specimen. . . . Public manners and amusements . . . turned German; I joined a German club in which English was tabooed and in some cases unknown. The beer-house was then in its glory as a popular resort, especially Tony Niederwiesser's Valhalla, and George Wolbrecht's Tivoli. In the latter Gambrinus effloresced or rather effervesced with the highest overflow of his divine frothiness, melodiously attuned to the notes of the largest and best orchestra in town. . . . There was a triumphant swing in the crowd, a consciousness that it was on the time's top just now in St. Louis as well as on the other side of the globe." — Ibid., pp. 144-45. See also Carl E. Schneider, "The Establishment of the First Prussian Con- sulate in the West," Miss. Valley Hist. Rev., XXX, iv (Mar., 1944), 507-20, as well as Perry, op. cit., pp. 27, 29-30. 16. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, pp. 146-47. 17. Ibid., p. 36. 18. Both Woerner and Kroeger were born in Germany, but both came to America as boys aged 7 and 11, respectively. 19. In Targee Street, later the scene of the famous shooting chronicled in the ballad, "Frankie and Johnny." 20. See A. C. McGiffert, Protestant Thought before Kant (N.Y., 191 1), p. 253. This conflict which the St. Louisans inherited and sought to arbitrate is, in a sense, the cumulative result of years of controversy. Dr. Channing's sermon at the ordination of Jared Sparks in 1819, Emerson's Divinity School address in 1838, the Norton-Ripley controversy of 1839-1840, and Parker's South Boston sermon in 1841 mark stages in that struggle. When the St. Louis Movement began, the differences between what Parker called the transient and the permanent elements in religion had not been as sharply drawn nor were they as clearly understood as they are now. The drawing of these distinctions between what has been called "religion itself, on the one hand, and the expression of religion in doctrines and rites, or the application of religion through institutions, on the other" is one of the great achievements of the nineteenth century — an achievement in which the St. Louis philosophers played no minor role. — E. C. Moore, An Outline of the History of Chris- tian Thought Since Kant (N.Y., 1918), p. 6. 21. C. M. Perry, "W. T. Harris and the St. Louis Movement," Monist, XLVI, i(Jan., 1936), 61. 22. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, p. 100. 23. Snider could not recall that it held any meetings after 1885. Although he read hundreds of papers and lectures on innumerable occa- sions, he could not remember, when in 19 19 he wrote the history of the Movement, that he "ever read a paper before the Philosophical Society." He remembered the Society as hav- ing had less an active or practical than a quiet or theoretical existence. Although Harris succeeded eminently in the "primal creative act of self-publication of the St. Louis Move- ment" by founding and editing twenty- two volumes of the Journal, that achievement was effected almost singlehandedly. It was Harris more than the co-operative movement who was responsible for the Journal. The Society itself never accomplished anything tangible. Says Snider, "The chief practical object . . . at its foundation was to publish its own gener- ating book, the masterpiece of Hegel. But it never did its real task." In retrospect, the Society seemed to Snider to have existed primarily "to lead each member to give a ra- tional account of his vocation" (an idea derived from Wilhelm Meister, which all the members studied intently at the time), and, secondarily, "to show famous visitors certain formal atten- tions," as when Julia Ward Howe, Emerson, Alcott, or some other luminary came to town. — Ibid., pp. 32, 480-81. 24. There were really two Kant clubs, one going back to 1858-1859 and another founded by Harris in 1874. The latter was especially flourishing about 1877-1887. See W. T. Harris, Hegel's Logic, Preface, p. xv; D. H. Harris (ed.), op. cit., pp. 89-93; Wm. Schuyler, "Ger- man Philosophy in St. Louis," Bull, of the Washington Univ. Assn., No. 2 (Apr. 23, 1904), pp. 82-83; an d Snider, A Writer of Books, p. 393- 25. There is a good deal of confusion regard- ing whether the Philosophical Society grew out of the first of these Kant clubs or the Hegel Club. Since the membership of both was largely the same and the organization of neither very close, it is likely that both were merged inform- ally and gradually, as it were, into the Philo- sophical Society early in 1866. 26. Concerning the Aristotle Society, see the account given by Theodore Harris, the son of W. T. Harris, in a letter to Professor Cleon Forbes, printed in C. M Perry, op. cit., p. 67. 27. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, p. 100. 28. A portion of it still reposes, a bulky manuscript, in the library of the Missouri Historical Society, and a number of manuscript 642 Notes to Pages 264-67 copies exist elsewhere; it has never appeared in print. 29. This is Harris' considered judgment, set down in his Preface to Hegel's Logic. 30. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, pp. 119-20, 204-5. Referring to those years when he wrestled with the Hegelian problem of "Being, Nothing, and Becoming," Snider felt himself whirled dizzily into the "vast Hegelian vortex . . . till I feared me I never would get out of that spiritual maelstrom. I would flee from my narrow rotating room into the steady open air, still my mind could not escape the whizzing wheel of Ixion, on which I seemed pinioned, and would keep careening around through its ever-repeating vortical triplicity. ... I would wander through the streets for miles, seeking to walk off that logical vertigo . . . even in dreamland my brain's Flying Dutchman would start to whirl around. . . . So I would resolve to have nothing more to do with that infernal logic ... I threw the book aside. ... I even thought of burning it. . . . But the next Sunday afternoon I would speed to the philosophers' Academe ... in Salisbury street and listen to . . . the master. He [Brok- meyer] could make all the fettered nomen- clature of Hegel's philosophy dance freely in its heaviest chains — an astonishing feat of mental prestidigitation in seeming, and still at the same time most real. How did he do it ? Logic. Again I would hurry home and take from its hiding place the same fatal book; again the brainwhirl would begin. ... So I kept battling for weeks, months, years; finally came a certain mastery, or at least disentanglement from that vortical labyrinth of ever-spinning and interlac- ing triplets of categories; that is, I could now spin them better than they could spin me." — Ibid., pp. 122-23. Harris' experience was of a kind. Like Snider, he followed Brokmeyer's injunction to get at once Hegel's complete works; and like Snider, he suffered the torments of the damned, until Brokmeyer's "deep insights and his poetic power of setting them forth with symbols and imagery" enabled him to "seize the general thought, its trend as a whole, and gradually to descend to its details." See Harris' Preface to Hegel's Logic. 31. For Brokmeyer's own statement of the extreme importance of "self-determination," see his A Mechanic's Diary (Washington, D.C., 1910), p. 24. 32. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, pp. 123, 175- 33. See the significance attached to these phrases as used for chapter headings in his autobiography, A Writer of Books in His Genesis and in The St. Louis Movement. 34. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, p. 174. 35. Ibid., pp. 179, 212-17. 36. Ibid., pp. 179, 268-69, 2 8o, 479-86; E. L. Schaub (ed.), op. cit., p. 35. 37. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, pp. 33, 236. 38. Ibid., pp. 293-303, 577-85. 39. During his long term as president of the National Education Association he literally dominated the policies of the Association, but all his work was done from within. For the organization of the Association he was not responsible. 40. For example, Miss Blow described the rapture she felt at first awakening, under the influence of Harris' lecturing, to a vision of Hegel: "So vigorously had the lecturer wrestled with Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel that in two hours of what still seems to me miraculous explanation he had kindled in the mind of one eager listener a light which revealed idealism delivered from Solipsism. . . . The open secret was revealed and I knew that I stood upon the delectable mountains and discerned from afar the shining pinnacles of the Eternal City. . . . That afternoon was a solemn crisis in my life. I beheld eternal Reality. I was a novice admit- ted to a sacred fellowship." — Susan Blow, "The Service of Dr. Harris to the Kindergarten," Kindergarten Review, XX (June, 1910), 590. 41. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, p. 279. 42. Ibid., p. 268. 43. Ibid., pp. 269, 2846^. 44. Ibid., pp. 267-68. 45. Ibid., p. 445. 46. Ibid., p. 270. 47. Ibid., pp. 271-77, 285-86, 308. 48. Ibid., pp. 326-38. 49. Ibid., pp. 356-61. 50. Ibid., pp. 359-61; A Writer of Books, p. 43i- 51. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, p. 100. 52. Ibid., pp. 347-5°. 57°-85- 53. Ibid., pp. 267-69. 54. However, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy had a strong academic flavor from the beginning. It bears little evidence of the pro- digious deeds performed in the Winning of the West, largely because Harris, an academician by nature, sought to say something above the ruck and circumstances of common life. Brok- meyer had little trouble convincing him that the theoretical explanation of all the momen- tous events compounded of disunion, war, and reconstruction lay in the Hegelian law of dialectical growth. Persuaded on this point, he readily followed Brokmeyer in subordinating even the ethico-political philosophy of Hegel Notes to Pages 267-69 643 to his more speculative logic and metaphysics, the relative importance of which later genera- tions have insisted on reversing. In ranking Hegel's works "in the order of their impor- tance," Harris categorically put the Logic in first place and the ethical and political works in sixth and seventh, respectively. See JoSP, III, i (1869), v. 55. Harvey G. Townsend, "The Political Philosophy of Hegel in a Frontier Society," in E. L. Schaub, (ed.), op. cit., pp. 70-71. 56. Re-examinations of Hegel's political philosophy have served to correct the view of Hegel as the propounder of political absolutism — have, in short, re-emphasized his political philosophy in precisely the terms in which Brokmeyer and his friends conceived it. Pro- fessor Townsend puts the matter thus: "Hegel's continuous defense of the idea of a united Germany, though modified with the changing years, was neither at the beginning nor at the end a philosophy of isolated and irresponsible central authority and power. It was rather a studiously acquired and, in its total form, a very technical philosophy of the progressive integration of wills through the unfolding of reason. The dominant organicism of his theory, suggesting the modern totalitar- ian state, was nevertheless combined with the doctrine of free participation of individuals and groups, which should associate Hegel unmis- takably with the rising tide of revolutionary liberalism." — Ibid., pp. 72-73. Treitschke's view of Hegel, widely publicized as it was in his History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, is largely responsible for the current misconcep- tions. To be contrasted with it is the interpreta- tion of Hegel as given by Heinrich von Sybel in his Founding of the German Empire (tr. by M. L. Perrin, 5 vols., N.Y., 1890-1891), I, 14, and by Bernard Bosanquet in his Germany in the Nine- teenth Century (3rd ed., London, 1915), XXV, 190-91. 57. VI, 263-79. This is a translation of Dr. Karl Rosenkranz's Hegel as Publicist, made by G. Stanley Hall. Harris himself secured the copyright for Rosenkranz' Hegel as the National Philosopher of Germany (tr. by G. Stanley Hall, repr. from the JoSP, N.Y., 1874), and prepared for it a sixteen-page "Introduction to Hegel's Philosophic Method." 58. JoSP, VI (1872), 268-69, 275. 59. Ibid., p. 278. This view of Hegel as a political liberal was not at all uncommon at the time. It received especially widespread circula- tion in a series of essays by Emilio Castelar in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for July through November, 1873, entitled "The Repub- lican Movement in Europe," in which Hegel is represented as the most conspicuous of the liberals, "the true philosopher of progress," "the philosopher par excellence of the only true political liberty, namely, the ethical." See XLVII, cclxxx (Sept., 1873), 579. 60. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, pp. 52— 69. 61. Ibid., pp. 94-116. 62. Harris, Hegel's Logic, Preface, p. xii. See also Snider, A Writer of Books, pp. 309-14. 63. For a key to the meaning of action and characters, see Perry, op. cit., pp. 41-42, 44-45. 64. JoSP, II, ii (1863), 128. 65. A Columbia dissertation by Francis B. Harmon, The Social Philosophy of the St. Louis Hegelians (N.Y., 1943) traces the evolution of their social philosophy from Hegel's Logic, Philosophy of Right, and Philosophy of History, and then, in successive chapters, treats their theories of the Family, the Economic State, the State, and Religious and Educative Institu- tions. 66. Born on August 12, 1828, near Minden, Prussia, of a father who was a moderately wealthy Jewish businessman and a mother related to Bismarck, Brokmeyer received a common-school education in Germany. At six- teen, he rebelled against Prussian militarism and shipped for America, landing in New York with twenty-five cents in his pocket, three English words in his vocabulary, and a stock of independent ideas. Bootblack, currier, tan- ner, shoemaker, jack-of-all-trades, he pursued a vagrant way westward, traveling mainly afoot through Ohio and Indiana, thence south to Memphis and beyond, to Lowndes and Oktib- beha counties, Mississippi, where he amassed a small fortune operating a tannery and shoe factory, employing slave labor to manufacture shoes that cost him only a pittance. Tiring of money-grubbing, he resumed his interrupted educational career by entering Georgetown University in Kentucky, later literally arguing his way into and out of several institutions of higher learning. At Brown University he is said to have engaged in especially joyous disputa- tion with President Wayland, picking up by the way solid kernels of Emersonian idealism and seemingly some of the eccentricities that ac- companied the Transcendental ferment. Ever more dissatisfied with civilization, he abruptly headed west in 1854, settled in an abandoned cabin in Warren County, Missouri, and support- ing himself by hunting and fishing, lived the life of a hermit, pondering questions "whence we come and whither we go." The loss of his small fortune through the fail- ure of an investment house was compensated for by his discovery of Hegel, in whom he seems 644 Notes to Page 269 to have found answers sufficient at least par- tially to reconcile himself to the ways of the world, for on May I, 1856, he moved into St. Louis with his trunk full of books (Thucydides, Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Plato's Repub- lic and dialogues, Aristotle, Goethe, Hegel com- plete, Shakespeare, Moliere, Calderon, Cervan- tes, and Sterne), and five days later he became an iron-molder. — A Mechanic's Diary, pp. 7, 8-9, 14. He prospered by his ingenuity and in- dustry, indulged in land speculations, and be- came active on many fronts, meanwhile zealous- ly consecrating his evenings to his precious books and permitting no interruptions except to frequent the haunts of small groups devoted to political and philosophical discussion. At one of these informal meetings in 1858 he met Harris, the second in the triumvirate that was soon to be formed. Voluble, bewhiskered, wiry of build, agile of movement, eyes alert ("the quick, almost wild eye of the hunter"), he presented a striking figure as he stood up, not at all chagrined by his workingman's clothes, to defend his position against all comers. His most prominent feature was "an enormous nose, somewhat crooked, which had the power of flattening and bulging and curveting and crook- ing in a variety of ways expressive of what was going on within him." — Snider, A Writer of Books, p. 303. Eyes flashing and hands flailing, he boomed forth wisdom, wit, and profanity; then quite suddenly he would settle back at ease in a chair, cock high his heels, and with half-shut eyes ponder some profundity as he puffed at his "perpetual and vicious pipe." — • Forbes, Mo. Hist. Rev., XXV, i, (Oct., 1930), 91. Still unable to come to terms with the world, he suddenly bought a tract of land in the wilder- ness, built a log cabin, and resumed his solitary life. This idyl was brought to an abrupt end by a severe bilious fever, from the worst conse- quences of which he was saved by Harris, who found him and brought him back to St. Louis. Upon his recovery, he resumed his tutorship of Harris, who pooled his slender resources with those of two kindred "respectable vagabonds" and pensioned Brokmeyer to the extent of food and lodging while he made a literal translation of Hegel's monumental Logic. The first draft was completed during 1 859-1 860. Shortly after his marriage in 1861, he en- listed in the militia, served with distinction, be- came a colonel, organized a regiment of his own, and found himself imprisoned for disloyalty on trumped-up charges. Speedily released, he was elected, six weeks later, as a "War Democrat" to the legislature, where during 1862-1864 he was prominant in opposing all measures aimed at disfranchising Southern sympathizers. In 1865 he opened a law office; the following year he was elected to the Board of Aldermen of St. Louis, and four years later to the state Senate. He took a prominent part in the constitutional convention of 1875. He was elected lieutenant- governor, and in 1876-1877 became acting governor during the illness of Governor Phelps. His ambition to represent Missouri in the U.S. Senate was frustrated by his defeat at the hands of a returned Confederate. His political decline coincided with the bursting of the St. Louis Bubble and the decadence of the St. Louis Move- ment in Philosophy. His first wife died in 1864, and he married again in 1867. About 1880 he became an attor- ney for the Gould railroad, his explanation being that he had to make a living for his family, although it seems certain that the decision was prompted in a large measure by his disillusion- ment over political advancement and the failure to make Hegelianism prevail. His business often carried him into Oklahoma, where he became interested in the Indians. He reappeared in 1884 as elector-at-large on the Cleveland ticket, on this occasion receiving the largest popular vote ever cast in Missouri up to that time. But his half-melancholy sorties into the farther West combining fishing and hunting expeditions with a search for health, became more frequent and more prolonged. For some years he made his home among the Creek Indians, where Snider (whom he tried to draw away from his Homer classes to join him in the establishment of a' kindergarten for the Indian children of Mus- cogee) found him "explaining the deeper phi- losophy of deer-stalking in a pow-wow with ■ some Creek Indians" and trying to form a little philosophical society among them. They conferred upon him the title of "Great White Father" and offered him his choice of the fairest maiden of the tribe — an offer which his Hegel- ianism compelled him regretfully to decline. So he alternated between the wilderness and civilization, appearing occasionally to contrib- ute a lecture to the courses arranged by Harris and Snider in Chicago, Milwaukee, and else- where, revising his translation of Hegel's Logic, shipping numerous mahogany and rosewood saplings back to St. Louis, where at his leisure he whittled out beautifully polished walking sticks for his friends, frugally utilizing the chips for equally aesthetic toothpicks, carefully cut in three different sizes and bottled with elaborate- ly carved corks. The last ten years of his life were spent in St. Louis in quiet pursuits, chief of which was his retranslation of Hegel's Logic. He died July 26, 1906, in his seventy-eighth year, disappointed at the callous American uncon- cern with philosophy but believing that once Notes to Pages 269-70 645 the more insistent work of building a greater physical America were completed, his beloved Hegelianism would prevail and lead the nation to true cultural maturity. 67. Snider, A Writer of Books, p. 393. 68. Ibid., pp. 373, 374-7 8 . 395-98- A passage in Plato's Parmenides, read while still at George- town, regarding the necessity in philosophic speculation not only to examine the affirmation of any proposition but also to consider "what follows from a proposition" and particularly "what follows if we assume the opposite" led to a too literal application of this critical principle, which, in turn, soon led to his dismissal from Georgetown. — Schuyler, loc. cit., pp. 64-65. Later, at Brown, his critical argumentativeness resulted in his "attacking before the whole class President Wayland's argument for the Higher Law." — Snider, A Writer of Books, p. 366. 69. Described in some detail in the latter sections of A Mechanic's Diary. 70. See A Mechanic's Diary, pp. 52, 55-56, 57-58, 59-60, 6gff. Hegel's Logic became, says Snider, Brokmeyer's "anchor of life." "In his last days I found him reading it still, usually poring over his translation of it, with many retrospective reflections, one of which has stayed in my saddened memory on account of its melancholy implication of a lost career: 'If I had my life to live over again, I would devote it exclusively to Hegel — to his expansion and propagation.' Still I could never push him to the point of printing his dearest life-work, though he was at that time amply able to bear the expense." Snider felt that Brokmeyer's failure to get his translation in shape was owing to his having deserted his literary endeavors for three decades while he engaged in politics and conse- quently being unable, later, to resume his liter- ary development, where, as a man of forty, he had left off. "The powers forbade him to do in the 90's what he might and ought to have done in the 6o's." — Snider, A Writer of Books, pp. 384. 387- 71. A Mechanic's Diary, pp. 23, 52ft. Among other authors and books mentioned in his diary between May 1 and November 8, 1856, are Alex. v. Humboldt's Travels in South America (pp. 63-64, 1 18-19), Darwin's Naturalist's Voyage Around the World (p. 65), Spinoza (p. 69), Rousseau (p. 121), Locke's Essay on Human Understanding (pp. 204-6, 220), the neo- Platonists from Ammonius Saccas to Plotinus and Proclus (pp. 229-36), Pythagoras, Heracli- tus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (pp. 231-32), the Church Fathers (pp. 231-33), Descartes (pp. 2 34-3°). Kant (p. 235), and Goethe, who, of course, is prominently mentioned throughout the book. 72. Snider, A Writer of Books, pp. 387-88. 73. The year 1858 marks the time when he sloughed off his eccentricities bred of his earlier addiction to New England Transcendentalism. Applying his own logic, he now stood before his friends and declared that they too must transcend, "must rise out of and above Parker, Alcott, and Emerson." And when they asked how this was to be accomplished, he had ready the answer: "By following the precepts of Kant's criticism, Hegel's speculative logic, and Goethe's humanism as exemplified in Faust . . . the greatest literary embodiment of both and the greatest poem of all time." — Ibid., pp. 390 ft. 74. Ibid., pp. 389-90; St. Louis Movement, p. 279; Harris, Hegel's Logic, Preface, pp. viii-ix. 75. Snider says that Brokmeyer faltered only once during the trying two years that he devoted to his redoubtable task of "tracking and mapping that vast Sahara of Hegelian abstractions." He grew so image-thirsty that he took sudden flight one day from "anhydrous Philosophy to up-welling Poetry as the green oasis of salvation, from whose fountains every- where began to bubble out" his fantastic drama, A Foggy Night in Newport (St. Louis, i860) — "the whimsicalities of which," adds Snider, "he patched together in a rather crotchety whole." — St. Louis Movement, pp. 206-7. 76. Snider said that he himself never used Brokmeyer's version, "never needed it," be- cause he had the original, which, he added, he could read "more easily than Brokmeyer's English" (ibid., p. 13). Harris' account of how he struggled with Brokmeyer's translation offers further hints. He says it was made for "myself and two other friends (George Stedman and J. H.Watters) "at their expense," and he intimates that if he had considered it printable, he would have published it (Hegel's Logic, p. xi). He does not suggest, here or elsewhere, that he was under any obligation to print it, though the tacit assumption may well have been made by his associates then and later. Neither do his words suggest that he felt any sense of com- punction, as Snider suggests he should have felt. The "callousness" of Harris in this matter may be attributed to what can be read between the lines that follow: "I copied the work entire from the manus- cript and am sure I read every word of it. I am equally sure that I did not understand at the most anything beyond the first volume and could not follow any of the discussions in the second and third volumes, or even remember the words from one page to another. It was all over my head, so to speak." — Ibid., pp. xi-xii. The last sentence may have been added 646 Notes to Pages 270-71 gratuitiously in deference to his friend Brok- meyer's feelings. What he might have said quite fairly is that he did not attain to an under- standing of Hegel's logic until years later, when he had divested his mind of this orgy of literality and worked his way through histories and commentaries and, more especially, turned to Hegel himself. Indeed, he says what amounts to just that, but he took care to say it less bluntly; for Brokmeyer was just then setting to work to retranslate the whole, and Harris was never one to wound a friend's feelings. Concerning his failure to print Brokmeyer's translation Harris, in 1890, said simply: "The translation I copied still exists, but has never been printed, any portion of it." This statement implies neither excuse nor guilt. Harris then goes on to pay tribute to Brok- meyer's "deep insights" and his "power of setting them forth with symbols and imagery" in his conversations, thus corroborating Snider's testimony when he calls Brokmeyer an "unreal- ized, perchance unrealizable genius" who "would never smelt and turn into pure coin the crude but rich ore of his genius." — St. Louis Movement, pp. 204-5. All agree in testifying to Brokmeyer's ability as a talker, but when he sought to write, says Snider, it was as if "the cream of his genius . . . got quite skimmed off when he squeezed it through tke pen-point into ink. It is too bad he never found or provided himself with a human phonograph, like the talk-recording Eckermann, as old Goethe did." — Ibid., pp. 207-9; see also A Writer of Books, p. 324, and Brokmeyer's Mechanic's Diary, pp. 206, 216-17. Brokmeyer's manuscript as it exists today, even after several hands have tried to make it readable, is a veritable tangle of English words trying, in the most literal fashion, to reproduce the thought of Hegel's involved sentences. So closely did Brokmeyer stick to the German text that often his sentences fall into the same syn- tactical divisions as the original, even to repro- ducing the punctation. Lacking a glossary (such as W. H. Johnson and L. G. Struthers consid- ered essential in both German-English and English-German when they published their translation in 1929), Brokmeyer's translation bogs down under its own weight of literality and the translator's ineptness with English idiom. 77. JoSP, I, iii (1867), 178-87; II, ii (1868), 114-20. 78. A Writer of Books, p. 327. 79. Ibid., pp. 302-8. At this meeting Harris read from his translation of Hegel's Introduc- tion to the History of Philosophy, stopping often to refer a word of doubtful meaning to Brok- meyer's judgment, which the latter delivered "forcibly and undoubtingly." Ever watchful to find and test a new disciple, Harris gave Snider Hegel's Philosophy of Nature to translate — an assignment which Snider wrestled with through- out the autumn of 1865. On another occasion the hapless Snider, whose head by now was in a whirl, was assigned the preparation of a thesis on the History of the Doctrine of the Immortal- ity of the Soul — a thesis that was never written and, to Snider's great relief, "never called for." Several times at these gatherings in Salisbury Street and on the way home (when Snider managed to get a seat alongside Brokmeyer on the streetcar) "a forthcoming Philosophical Society" was mentioned; and Brokmeyer spoke of it repeatedly when Snider visited him in his law office, whither he repaired henceforth, and where he oftener found a group of philosophers than litigants. — Ibid., pp. 308, 312-13, 315, 316. 80. William Schuyler, a member of several of the associated clubs that operated in St. Louis, is the authority for the following data (op. cit., PP- 72-73)- Directors: H. C. Brokmeyer, W. T. Harris, Britton A. Hill, G. H. Howison, J. Z. Hall, D. J. Snider, P. L. Tafel, J. H. Watters, C. F. Childs, A. E. Kroeger, T. J. Horner, J. G. Woerner, Nathan Hayward, Horatio M. Jones, J. A. Martling, C. L. Bernays, H. H. Morgan, and C. E. Michel. Associates: G. V. Bailey, N. Meyers, D. V. Potter, A. Strothotte, E. C. Kehr, W. C. Lyman, A. Kukleham, J. F. Madison, Silas Bent, G. E. Goodson, H. Bryan, A. Lowry, W. Flint, J. E. Kimball, G. E. Seymour, D. R. Haynes, G. M. B. Maughs, J. A. Higgins, T. Kimball, Wm. Johnson, W. W. Stickney, T. D. Witt, F. M. Crunden, E. T. Merrick, E. L. Bynner, J. L. Pierce, Jno. Eysar, L. J. Block, F. C. Stone, Thomas Davidson, Wm. Berndt, W. C. Ball, F. E. Cook, and F. L. Soldan. Auxiliaries: A. B. Alcott, R. W. Emerson, Jos. de Fonfride (Paris), E. A. Hitchcock (Washington, D.C.), N. B. Buford (Colorado), L. W. Reed (California), F. B. Sanborn (Con- cord, Mass.), John B. Stallo (Cincinnati), J. E. Cabot (Brookline, Mass.), Samuel Tyler (Maryland), Vincenzo Botta (New York City), Jos. C. G Kennedy (Washington), Wm. Gilpin. Henry James (Swampscott, Mass.), E. H. Bow- man (Illinois), D. A. Wasson (Boston), James H. Stirling (Scotland), A. Vera (Italy), Karl Rosenkranz (Prussia), I. Goddard (Ohio), August Willich (Cincinnati), F. H. Hedge (Massachusetts), C. W. Chapman (New Haven), R. T. Colburn (New York City), Friedrich Kapp, Ludwig Feuerbach, Moritz Carriere, Jacob Ber- nays (Germany), James B. Eads, Hy. T. Blow, Notes to Pages 271-73 647 Nath. Holmes, T. McWhorter, A. J. Dickerhoff, T. J. Sanders, J. H. Fichte (Germany), Charles Bernard (Paris), John Weiss (Massachusetts), C. B. D. Mills (New York), S. J. May (Syracuse), J. W. Albee, Charles C. Baldwin (Worcester), E. H. Bugbee (Connecticut), F. H. Peckham (Providence), R. R. Bishop (Boston), Benj. Szold (Baltimore), Franz Hoffmann (German}'), T. Collins Simon (England), and Wm. Clay (Detroit). 81. A Mechanic's Diary, pp. 22gff. 82. For other details of Alcott's visits to St. Louis, see my New England Transcenden- talism and St. Louis Hegelianism : Phases in the History of American Idealism (Phila., 1948), pp. 34-53- 83. Snider did not learn until he went to Concord and more particularly when, more than a half-century later, he came to write his life of Emerson, "what an awful goblin" he had conjured up by his use of the word system. It is noteworthy that Emerson's journals and letters (or Alcott's, for that matter) are innocent of references to Snider. This silence is sufficiently conspicuous to suggest that Snider was in some measure persona non grata among the Concord- ians, as he himself sensed the situation when- ever he was in Concord later. It may be noted, in palliation of Snider, that in his biography of Emerson (1921) he wrote sympathetically, and in some respects it is still the most illuminating account of Emerson's intellectual development. 84. Emerson's Letters, V, 500, 508, 545, 546. For other details regarding Emerson in St. Louis, see my New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism, pp. 53-65. 85. Among the subjects formally discussed by the Society were the following: Faust, Al- cott's Lapse of the Soul, Religion, Friendship, Generation as a Psychological Fact, Memory, Politics, the Character of Emerson, of Thoreau, of Margaret Fuller, Hegel's Dialectic, Herbert Spencer, the Critiques of Hegel, J. F. T. Tafel's Philosophy, What is the True Actual ? Motion — Pure Motion, Goethe's Philosophy of Colors, Shakespeare, The Substantiality of the Soul or Thinking Reason, The Infinite of the Imagina- tion and that of the Reason, Personality as the Fundamental Principle, The Christ of Christian- ity, True Freedom, The Relation of the Individ- ual to Society, The Correlation of Forces, The Permanent Principle of the Universe, Generatio Equivoca, and Schopenhauer's Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason. — Wm. Schuyler, op. cit., pp. 73-74- 86. A Writer of Books, pp. 310-11, 383-84. Brokmeyer felt (says Snider) "a world-creating demiurge" within him that he dared not resist — a genius that worked for both good and evil : "he could be a Faust and a Mephistopheles both in one, or each separately, with something else thrown in." — Ibid., pp. 314, 363. Among Brokmeyer's shortcomings, whenever his neg- ative daemon came over him, was the one- sidedness of his institutionalism. Strongly motivated by the moral consciousness bred into him at Oberlin, Snider saw with alarm Brok- meyer's attitude toward the war, slavery, and reconstruction as less moral than abstract. Brokmeyer declared quite frankly that he was not interested in the slave; he was concerned chiefly with overthrowing evil institutions and with upholding or preserving good ones. This Snider considered an ethical deficiency in Brokmeyer, traceable to Hegel, whose section on morality in the Philosophy of Right Brok- meyer considered "weak and insufficient com- pared with the final sections, in which he treats of institutions." Snider was shocked beyond utterance when he heard Brokmeyer declare, "I would cut that Morality out of Hegel's book; it does not belong there ; it is inconsistent with the rest." — Ibid., p. 357. Another defect that Snider saw in Brok- meyer's character was his glorification of metaphysics at the expense of aesthetics. This, Snider explained, resulted in Brokmeyer's inability to put into distinctive written form the eloquently spontaneous matter of his spok- en word. Brokmeyer could not "form" his thoughts; his written word "never did or could express adequately the man's genius." "The moment he took to script and made his gigan- tesque conceptions flow into and out of a pen's point, there was an enormous shrinkage, as if they could not scrape through so small a vent. . . . He was aware of this collapse in his writing, and he usually upbraided the English language for it, as he often blamed somebody or something for shortcomings which lay in himself. . . ." — Ibid., pp. 324-25. 87. Miss Harris lives on Prospect Road, Wal- pole, N.H., where she considerately set up a workshop for students interested in the wealth of manuscript materials in her possession. The first significant product is Kurt F. Leidecker's Yankee Teacher. The Life of William Torrey Harris (N.Y., 1946). In a letter of February 10, 1944, Miss Harris writes: "I have just placed some of my father's papers in regard to the 'St. Louis Movement' ... in the care of the Missouri Historical Society of St. Louis. Among those which I sent them last fall was the original notebook con- taining the translation of Hegel's Logic (referred to on p. xii in my father's preface [to Hegel's Logic, 1890]) by H. C. Brokmeyer, taken G48 Notes to Pages 273-74 down in shorthand reporting style by my father in 1 86 1 ; also there were other notebooks of my father's translation of Hegel's History of Phi- losophy, made by him in 1865-6 and written in longhand. In the collection, I included, too, Mr. Brokmeyer's letters to my father, covering the years 1861-1896; letters from S. H. Emery, Jr. (leader of the Quincy Movement), some from H. K. Jones of Jacksonville, and T. M. Johnson of Osceola." Others of Miss Harris' materials have been placed in the Library of Congress. 88. The portion of the translation long in Miss Harris' keeping at Walpole, N. H., seems to be in Harris' handwriting, and is probably part of his first longhand transcription of the por- tions dictated to him by Brokmeyer. This copy appears to have been made during 1860-1861. 89. A Writer of Books, p. 319. 90. Emery's copy, presumably still in Quincy, has not yet been located. Most of these details were ascertained by Professor Paul R. Ander- son, in the course of studying the various Platonic movements in the Midwest. 91. It is written in longhand on stamped paper bearing the name of Dayton & Arthur, Quincy, 111. The sheets are abstract, legal cap size, number 16; 32 lines to the page, both sides used. Volume I contains 558, Volume II, 299, and Volume III, 509 pages. Possibly copies or parts of copies of Emery's and Jones's ver- sions were made then or later. The only com- plete copy known today is Jones's in Jackson- ville. 92. Brokmeyer's son Eugene tells me that when his father was asked on his deathbed what disposition was to be made of his manuscript, he replied, "Just leave it in the attic for the vermin ; I have enjoyed every minute of my life devoted to it, in the hope that I might justify my existence by leaving something to posterity worth while, but apparently there is no demand for anything like that at this time." Following Brokmeyer's death, David H. Harris, the brother of W. T. Harris, was placed in charge of a plan to secure the publication of Brokmeyer's works, W. T. Harris having agreed to get the manuscripts in shape and to write introductions (four in all). But Harris found himself in poor health, and in 1908 he returned the manuscripts; whereupon Louis J. Block, then in the Chicago public school system, was commissioned to make the revision, Harris still to write the introductions. At one time they considered publishing the whole of Brok- meyer's writings, but eventually they settled for the Logic only. W. T. Harris undertook the support of the project up to $75.00, and Snider subscribed $100. The St. Louis Society of Psychology also agreed to help. D. H. Harris corresponded with Sonnenschein in London in 1909. Circulars were distributed early in 1909 announcing publication and soliciting subscrip- tions. Block completed his revisions as far as he could, but at W. T. Harris' death on Novem- ber 5, 1909, his four introductions were still unwritten. Again the work languished, the removal of Harris' influence doubtless increas- ing the difficulties. In 1920, D. H. Harris gave the manuscript of the Logic to the Missouri Historical Society of St. Louis. In March, 1923, he borrowed it and returned it in April. In October, 1925, he ordered it sent to Block. When he returned it in December, 1926, it was incomplete, and so it remains today. This activity during 1923- 1926 reflects the efforts on the part of Harris and Block to have the Logic published in the London Allen & Unwin "Library of Philoso- phy," of which J. H. Muirhead was the general editor. When, in 1929, the W. H. Johnson and L. C. Struthers translation of Hegel's Science of Logic appeared in this series, Muirhead pre- faced the text with the following note: "Some years ago the Editor . . . was ap- proached by the surviving friends of Henry Brockmeyer [sic] with a view to the publica- tion ... of the translation which he had left. It was to be accompanied by a short biography of the translator, and to partake of the character of a tribute to his memory both as a philosopher and a Governor of the State of Missouri. As it seemed inappropriate to have a volume of this kind included in a series devoted to the pure study of philosophy, it was impossible to accept this offer, and as there seemed no immediate prospect of the American translation coming out, the Editor felt himself free to make an arrangement with the present translators." The fragment deposited in the Jefferson Memorial of the Missouri Historical Society, since it reproduces none of Hegel's elaborate "Observations" or "Notes" ("Anmerkungen") and because it breaks off at a point about one- fourth of the way through Book II, represents less than a fourth of Hegel's text. It consists of 217 yellow (copy), legal-cap sized sheets, type- written on one side. The manuscript is in two batches, marked Volume I and Volume II. The sheets of Volume I are numbered 1-23, followed by a second series, numbered 1-222, of which pages 2-7 are missing. Volume II contains pages 1-78. The translation ends, in the Hen- ning edition of Hegel's Werke (20 vols, in 22, 2nd ed., Berlin, 1834-1887) at the following point: Erster Theil: Die objective Logic; Zweite Abth. : Die Lehre vom Wesen ; Zweites Buch: Das Wesen; Zweiter Abschnitt: Die Notes to Pages 274-76 649 Erscheinung; Zweites Kapital: Die Erschei- nung — A. Das Gesetz der Erscheinung (Vol. IV, p. 146 of Werke). The manuscript shows numerous corrections or revisions, made with pencil and pen by various hands ; hence it is no longer an accurate or complete index to the Hegel that Brokmeyer taught from i860 to 1880. The Jones manuscript, made in 1878 from Emery's copy, itself made two years earlier, appears to represent more accurately the He- gelian Logic current among the St. Louisans during the sixties. 93. Harris' Hegel's Doctrine of Reflection, Being a Paraphrase and a Commentary Inter- polated into the Text of the Second Volume of Hegel's Larger Logic, Treating of Essence appeared in New York in 1881, and his Hegel's Logic. A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind was published by S. C. Griggs in Chicago in 1890. 94. Already at Andover he had begun to read "with avidity a class of literature whose chief interest . . . was its practical protest against some phase or other of orthodoxy." Among these were Locke's Essay on Human Under- standing and Cousin's criticism of Locke — read- ing that inspired him to establish ' 'both thought and action on solid foundations," and that ultimately led to his Psychologic Foundations of Education. An Attempt to Show the Genesis of the Higher Faculties of the Mind (N.Y., 1905). In the beginning, however, he stumbled around miserably among such pseudo-sciences as phrenology, hypnotism, and mesmerism. Al- though he devoted four terms of his prepara- tory education to Latin and Greek, he began, already at Andover, to disparage "the dead languages" and to demand to know more about nature as revealed by science. His desire appears to have originated in his reading, in 1835, Humboldt's Kosmos and shortly after such works as Vestiges of Creation. But during this "era of hobbies" he still found his interest diverted all too often to "spiritualism, the water cure, vegetarianism, socialism, and all manner of reforms." — Harris, "How I Was Educated," Forum, I (Aug., 1886), 552-61, and "Books That Have Helped Me," ibid.. Ill (Apr., 1887), 143-44. 95. It seems altogether likely that Alcott, who was volubly enthusiastic about his recent "Conversational Tours of the West" (despite the fact that so far they had netted him no more profit than a silver dollar) influenced Harris' decision to go west. But Alcott re- mained entirely unaware of the fact that his "Conversations" had provided for Harris the "turning point in his intellectual career" until years later, when Harris confessed as much to him, and that by these talks (which had seemed a complete failure at the time) he had raised for himself the "most ardent, perhaps the most able, of all his interpreters and defenders." — Shepard, Pedlars' Progress, p. 467; Journals of Alcott, p. 295; Sanborn and Harris, Alcott, II 544-52. 96. "Books That Have Helped Me," Forum, III (Apr., 1887), 144-45. In 1887 Harris wrote: "I endeavor to re-read 'Wilhelm Meister' every year, and always find it more suggestive than before." 97. Harris proved an apt pupil. Soon he corralled a small group of kindred spirits, who, like himself, were willing to attend Uni- versity Brokmeyer. In 1893 Harris recalled that this first class consisted, among others, of J. H. Watters, G. C. Stedman, S. D. Hayden, H. M. Jones, C. F. Childs, Brokmeyer, and himself. Others sometimes identified with this early group are Ira Divoll and Dr. R. A. Hol- land. The lessons began with Kant, although Brokmeyer's goal was to convert them all to Hegel, whose Logic he undertook to translate against the day when his fledglings should be ready to receive it. — Schuyler, loc. cit., p. 66; Snider, A Writer of Books, pp. 342-62, 393-94; Harris, Hegel's Logic, p. viii. 98. For details, see "Books That Have Helped Me," loc. cit., p. 147. By December, 1858, Kant's Critique had led him to make the "logical inference that the unity of time and space presupposes one absolute reason" and to obtain insight "into the true inference from Kant's 'Transcendental Aesthetic' regarding the demonstrability of God, freedom, and immortality." During 1859 he proceeded to the position of being able to refute "Sir William Hamilton's Law of the Conditioned, by proving the infinitude of space and showing that the supposed antinomy rests on confounding men- tal pictures with pure thought." — Harris, Hegel's Logic, pp. viii-ix. 99. The next step in his philosophical pro- gress that Harris records came in 1866, when he arrived at "the first insight that is distinctively Hegelian,". — "the most important apercu" and "the highest thought" in Hegel's logic. This is the distinction between comprehension (Be- griff) and idea (Idee). Harris ascribed to Hegel the honor of seeing "for the first time the pure- thought form of this doctrine." It became for Harris the basis of what he soon came to call "pure" or "speculative" philosophy.. — Harris, Hegel's Logic, pp. ix-xi. As he progressed, notably from 1866 onward, both in his grasp of Hegel and in his practice of "self-activity" and "self-publication" in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, he felt con- 650 Notes to Pages 276-77 vinced that he was advancing to Wilhelm Meister's second phase, his Wanderjahre. The third and final stage, the Meisterschaft, he did not attain until the formation of the Concord School about 1880 and the publication of his major philosophical works: (1) Hegel's Doctrine of Reflection, Being a Paraphrase and Commen- tary Interpolated into the Text of the Second Volume of Hegel's Larger Logic (N.Y., 1881); (2) Hegel's Logic. A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind (Chicago, 1890); and (3) Psychologic Foundations of Education (N.Y., 1905), which formed Volume XXXVII of the Appleton International Education Series, of which he was general editor. Thus Harris came to see his philosophical development as an illustration of the Hegelian dialectic — a life in three moments: the first, a phase of positivism (Harris called this his "saurian" period) up to 1858; second, a conversion to transcendental- ism, from 1858 to 1866; and third, a transcend- ing of transcendentalism, from 1866 onward. Insofar as Hegel was a factor in this develop- ment, Harris said in 1887: "In reading his larger 'Logic,' I always feel myself ushered into a sort of high court of reason, in which all ideas of the mind are summoned to the bar and put on trial. . . . All the collisions and petty details of terrestrial affairs seem to fall away, and one gazes, as it were, into the eternal arch-types, and sees the essence of the conflict, the problem reduced to its lowest terms. In the concluding portions of this 'Logic' Hegel finds the highest idea of a Personal Being in whom will and intellect are one. This is the idea of God, whose knowing is creating. To me this appeared to be by far the most important thought reached by the German mind. . . . Indeed, Hegel's greatest merit seems to me to be that of interpreter of the deepest thought of all nations. This faculty of interpreta- tion shines out pre-eminently in his 'Lectures on the Philosophy of History,' which I place by the side of his 'Logic' as the second of his greatest works. I believe that I .have studied this book through nine times, with intervals of two years between my studies. . . . This work . . . comes nearer being a genuine theo- dicy, a justification of Providence in human history, than any other work I know. 'The world history,' says he, 'is the outward prog- ress of man in consciousness of freedom.'" — "Books That Have Helped Me," loc. cil., pp. 145-49; see also Proc. Nat' I. Ed. Assn. (1910), p. 92. 100. JoSP, XVII, iii (July, 1883), 310; and Hegel's Logic, pp. 1-5, 17, 18-21, 22-56 passim. 101. JoSP, VI, i (Jan., 1872), 3, 5. 102. Ibid., XVII, iii (July, 1883), 297-99, 303-4- 103. Ibid., p. 304. 104. Ibid., p. 307. 105. Ibid., pp. 307-10. 106. That is, materialists. See ibid., VI, i (Jan., 1872), 1-4; also pp. 4-18. 107. Men on the order of Hume and Spencer. For Harris' refutation of these men's point of view, see his Psychologic Foundations of Educa- tion, pp. 218-19. 108. Typified by Kant and Hegel. See ibid., pp. 220-28. 109. See esp. pp. 147-250. no. Most succinctly stated by Harris in "Philosophy in Outline," JoSP, XVII, iii (July, 1883), 296-316; iv (Oct., 1883), 337-56, and much more elaborately in his Hegel's Logic, See also his "Introduction to Philosophy," JoSP, I i (1867), 57-60; ii, 114-20; iii, 187-90; iv, 236-40; II, i (1868), 51-55; ii, 176-81. in. JoSP, I, i (1867), Preface. Already in the second number of the Journal, Harris felt obliged, in an editorial (for which he modestly reserved the last page of the number), to answer the questions of critics why the organ did not contain more original, "indigenous" material: "To prepare translations and commentary, together with original exposition, is our object. Originality will take care of itself. Once disci- plined in Speculative thought, the new growth of our national life will furnish us objects whose comprehension shall constitute original philoso- phy without parallel." Harris contributed more pages of material to the Journal than any of his collaborators. The greater part of his work falls under classifications other than original — notably history of philosophy and commentary. Here, as elsewhere, it is apparent that his strength lay less in original thought than in clarifying and conserving what he considered best in the course of human thought. Professor Merle Curti very appropriately entitled his chapter on Harris in his Social Ideas of A mer- ican Educators "William T. Harris, the Conser- vator." 112. See his "History of Philosophy in Out- line," JoSP, X, iii (July, 1876), 225-70. 113. See the place which he accords to oriental thought, ibid., pp. 231-37. 114. Including Colebrooke's translation of the Sankhya Karika (which he borrowed from Emerson), Wilkins' and Thompson's transla- tions of the Bhagavad Gita, and Wilson's trans- lation of the Vishnu Purana. He also drew upon the Dial, the Massachusetts Quarterly, and the works of Cousin, Sir William Jones, Max Miiller, and Rhys Davids. See JoSP, IX, i (Jan., 1875), 104-5; "Books That Have Helped Me," loc. Notes to Pasres 277-79 G51 cit., p. 150; Hegel's Logic, p. xiii; Poet-Lore, I (June, 1889), 253-59, esp. p. 254; and Kurt Leidecker, loc. cit., p. 81. 115. For his writings on oriental philosophy and literature, see the bibliography in Charles M. Perry, op. cit., pp. 96-140. 116. "Its value," he said, "is chiefly negative, aiding us in getting rid of sensuous conceptions in the realm of thought. It is a sort of cathartic for the imagination ... a kind of prehistoric adumbration of European thought." — "The History of Philosophy in Outline," JoSP, X, iii (July, 1876), 233 ; "The Idea of the State and its Necessity," The Western, n.s.. Ill (Apr., 1877), 211. The key word of his interpretation of Oriental philosophy is "negative unity." Thus "he sought to cover the many-hued and verdant growth of Hindu speculation by a Hegelian term that would grant it a modicum of right to exist, but show at the same time its transitory character." Orientalism could have little more than a "dialectical" value for him. — Leidecker, loc. cit., pp. 85, 121. 117. Snider, St. Louis Movement, pp. 10-11. As early as October, 1865, on Snider's first meeting with the group and some months before the Society was founded, Harris put into his hands a copy of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature and "as my first discipline in philoso- phy," records Snider, "instructed me to make a translation of it." Snider adds: "Brokmeyer would never think of doing such a thing . . . but Harris . . . showed a touch of his pedagog- ical character by whipping me into line the first day." — A Writer of Books, p. 312. 118. Snider, St. Louis Movement, p. 480; A Writer of Books, p. 326. Thus was established the first definitely and significantly philosophical journal in the English language. It appeared regularly in quarterly numbers for twenty-one years, and it terminated only with the twenty- second volume, two of whose numbers bear the dates of January and April, 1888, the third, that of September, 1892, and the fourth, that of December, 1893. Without Harris' persever- ance this achievement would hardly have been possible. The journal severely taxed his ener- gies and was a constant drain on his purse. To William Schuyler he once confided, "I live to publish this Journal"; he did not abandon it until his duties as U.S. Commissioner of Educa- tion forced its discontinuance. The first fourteen volumes were edited in St. Louis, the next seven in Concord, and the last in Washington, D.C. The first thirteen were printed in St. Louis, three different firms successively doing the work ; the last nine bear the imprint of D. Appleton Co., of New York. While the paper used in the early volumes is not the best, its quality beginning with the third volume is noticeably better. Excellence of typography and of proofreading is uniform. The double-columned page was abandoned with the third volume, when the type size was also increased. Throughout the twenty- two volumes, severe economy of space is practiced, the materials being arranged so compactly that few blank spaces are left. The bulk of the volumes varied somewhat. Beginning with the ninth volume, the size of the quarterly numbers was increased from 96 to 112 pages each, though slight irregularities occur in several volumes. All volumes, with the exception of the seventh (three of whose issues number their pages from 1 to 96 and one from 1 to 92) num- ber their pages consecutively for the four issues comprising each volume. Volume X con- tains a general index (ordered alphabetically) of the titles of the contents of the ten volumes; and Volume XV includes, in addition, a com- plete index, arranged alphabetically, of all sub- jects, contributors, book reviews, and corres- pondence in the fifteen volumes. No general index was ever made for the last volumes (XVI through XXII). 119. Snider felt that "Harris was a little heady in this matter; he precipitated his publication upon us before we or even he, were quite ready to support it with mature contri- butions. In my judgment Brokmeyer was the only man among us who had at that time any- thing vital and enduring to say, and the ques- tion then and ever afterwards in his case was, will he say it — formulate it with some degree of completeness ? Still the Journal has vindicated its right to existence by more than twenty volumes . . . which have been read . . . the world over. I saw it in the public libraries at Rome and Athens, where nothing else from St. Louis could be seen . . . and very little from America. It is . . . the most famous and striking philosophical product of the movement, thanks to the tireless activity of its editor." — A Writer of Books, pp. 326-27. 120. Book reviews are distinguished from book notices arbitrarily by length; when longer than 500 words, they are classified as reviews. 121. This classification is again more or less arbitrary, for obviously the 1779 pages classi- fied as original speculation vary considerably in quality. Compare, for example, C. S. Peirce's "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claim- ed for Man" (II, ii, 103-14) with A. B. Alcott's "Philosop hemes" (VII, i 84-88); or compare the contributions of J. H. Stirling or William James or John Dewey or C. F. Goeschel with those of W. H. Kimball or Meeds Tuthill or G52 Notes to Paces 279-81 Elizabeth P. Peabody or J. G. Woerner. What is remarkable is that so large a portion of the 1779 pages is original (as distinct from transla- tion, reprint, comment, analysis, criticism, or history of philosophy) and of a high order. No distinction is made between (i) the more strictly technical philosophical contributions, such as belong to logic, epistemology, etc., and (2) contributions of a more-or-less applied nature, such as law, political science, religion, sociology, or economics, for two reasons: (i) it is very hard to make satisfactory distinctions of this sort, and (2) there is little of the latter type. 122. By and large there is perhaps less justification for labeling as original a consider- able portion of Harris' 229 pages than for thus designating the work of any other of the more mportant contributors under this classification. As much as one half of the 229 pages represent- ed partake of the nature of outlines of philoso- phy or aids to reflection and other types of writing, so that they are more nearly allied with the history and criticism of philosophy than with original speculation. Here, as elsewhere, is apparent Harris' equally great concern with the conservation of thought as with original thought. 123. As distinct from pure psychology, which is included under Philosophy. 124. Exclusive of Philosophy of Science and of Mathematics, of Editorials, Comments, etc., and of Original Speculation in the tabulation above. The 122 pages devoted to Philosophy of Science and the 58 pages given to Philosophy of Mathematics are not counted in this calcula- tion. The 820 pages of editorial comment, cor- respondence, and book reviews, if broken down would not alter the percentages materially. 125. Including the General essay listed under German philosophy. 126. Blasche, Michelet, and Strauss, on the other hand, maintained that the pantheistic idea of God was the only true result of the Hegelian principle. They argued that the unity of Divinity and of Humanity was not to be realized in any one individual but in the whole of humanity, so that the latter became in real- ity a God-Man. Goeschel's attempts to justify the ecclesiastical idea of Christ as specifically the only God-Man and to demonstrate the idea of a personal immortality on the basis of Hegelian philosophy provide the reasons why he appealed to the St. Louisans. The same cause that led them to go to Goeschel repelled them from Spencer. The Journal reproduced the whole of Goeschel's Proofs of the Immortality of the Human Soul in the Light of Speculative Philosophy , tr. from the first Berlin edition of 1835. The first three installments (X, 1877) are by T. R. Vickery, the remaining seven (XVII- XX, 1883-1886) are by Susan E. Blow. The same emphasis on the part of Rosen- kranz to interpret Hegel's God theistically accounts for the 1 29 pages in the Journal devoted to the translations of Rosenkranz' commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology, Phi- losophy of History, Philosophy of Religion, and the Encyclopedia. G. Stanley Hall is respon- sible for a large portion of these translations. Rosenkranz' name does not appear among the German philosophers above, because the St. Louisans' chief interest was in his exegesis of Hegel, rather than in Rosenkranz himself. The case of Goeschel is different, for he appeared (at least in the sections translated) more to build upon the Hegelian bases than merely to explain Hegel. 127. JoSP, I, i (1867), 133; V, ii (1871), 119. 128. The popular hue and cry about Scho- penhauer being what it was, they had to defend Kant against this false disciple. That was easily done. One of the contributors disposed of him as one who is recognized only "in those circles which are unacquainted with scientific culture," and who believe "the more absurd a thought, the more truth must be contained in it." — Ella S. Morgan, "A. Schopenhauer's Philosophy," JoSP, IX, ii(Apr., 1875), 113, 138. 129. As early as 1865 Harris was elected president of the National Education Associ- ation, of which body he became a life director. In 1873 he became president of the National Asso- ciation of School Superintendents. For fifteen years he was an officer of the American Social Science Association, and he was a member of the influential "Committee of Fifteen." 130. John S. Roberts, William Torrey Harris. A Critical Study of His Educational and Related Philosophical Views (Washington, D.C., 1924), esp. pp. 6-20, and Merle Curti, Social Ideas of American Educators (N. Y.,1935), pp. 310-47. See also Will S. Monroe, op. cit., pp. 195-203. 131. St. Louis Movement, pp. 123, 174-75. 132. Here he conducted courses in (1) Mental Philosophy, i.e., psychology according to Hegel's logic, (2) Moral Philosophy, according to Hegel's philosophy of right, (3) Universal History, according to Hegel's philosophy of history, and (4) Natural Science, according to Hegel's philosophy of nature. His course in Moral Philosophy appears to have been espe- cially successful. Although he used Hickok's System of Moral Science as a text, he subjected it to a "transformation" by spinning through it "many new threads" derived from Hegel's Philosophy of Right. This course, designed for high-school seniors, says Snider, became so Notes to Pages 282-86 653 popular that some of his students, after gradu- ating, asked him to offer "a postgraduate course in Mental and Moral Philosophy." — A Writer of Books, pp. 399-405, 407-8, 409-11. 133. Ibid., pp. 415-18, 422-26; St. Louis Movement, p. 179. 134. St. Louis Movement, pp. 188-89. 135. Ibid., pp. 191-94- 136. Ibid., p. 195. 137. A Writer of Books, p. 415. 138. St. Louis Movement, pp. 195-96. 139. Ibid., p. 196. 140. See especially the recapitulation of Snider's argument, JoSP, VI, iii (July, 1872), 250-51. It is interesting to observe that the idea is very similar to that expressed in Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany (3rd ed., N.Y. 1855), PP- 45-2-53- In his next essay on Shakespeare, on The Merchant of Venice, Snider presents his argu- ment even more baldly by dividing the "move- ment of the drama . . . into three parts: 1. Union; 2. The Separation; 3. The Return": "Each of these parts is determined and com- plemented by the others. The Union, by which is meant the bringing together of the three pairs, has produced the collision between Antonio and Shylock, which then returns and dissolves itself. Hence the second step, the Separation, results necessarily from the first. But the parties must overcome this disruption, for they are ration- ally united, and the collision itself must be mediated; hence the obstacles are removed, and there follows the third stage of the move- ment, namely, the Return. This when complet- ed is the same as the first Union, but with the collision which was involved in it harmonized. Here the play must end; no further action is possible. Or, to take more abstract terms, we may express these three stages as Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. That this movement is a type of the movement of Reason itself, needs not to be told to the Thinker. Every spiritual process involves the same moments, and a work of Art as the child of imaginative reason must bear the image of the parent." 141. VI-X (1872-1876). Others appeared in The Western, to which Snider bound himself to furnish an article for each number for one year, at the same time to pay into its ever-gaping treasury five to ten dollars for each contribu- tion. In compensation for this patronage, he was called a "Stockholder," until at last, being chosen Editor, he was forced firmly to decline for fear that this honor would make a pauper of him. — St. Louis Movement, pp. 185-87. 142. Ibid., p. 199. 143. A Writer of Books, p. 419. 144. St. Louis Movement, p. 200. 145. A Writer of Books, p. 423. 146. See also Snider's lecture, delivered at the Goethe School in Milwaukee in 1886, on "Mythology of the Second Part of Faust," in Marion V. Dudley (ed.), Poetry and Philosophy of Goethe (Chicago, 1887), pp. 138-79. 147. St. Louis Movement, pp. 302-5. 148. Ibid., pp. 354-59- 149. Ibid., pp. 280-81. 150. Ibid., pp. 307, 354-55, 362-63. 151. Ibid., pp. 261-62. 152. Ibid., p. 430. 153. Ibid., pp. 421-22. 154. He refused "emphatically to be enter- tained by any citizen" (as were the rest of the lecturers), and he "haughtily rejected all remuneration." — Ibid., pp. 427-29. 155. Ibid., pp. 430-31. 156. Ibid., p. 419. 157. Ibid., p. 394. 158. Ibid., p. 447. 159. Charles M. Perry, op. cit., p. 37. 160. Snider, St. Louis Movement, p. 444. 16 1. Among his allies and collaborators whom he particularly mentioned later were two well-known clergymen, Dr. David Swing and Dr. H. W. Thomas, as well as Professor Louis J. Block. — Ibid., pp. 403-5; see also Perry, op. cit., pp. 33-41. 162. Snider, St. Louis Movement, p. 447. 163. There were ten scheduled lectures during the week from Monday, December 26, to Saturday, December 31. In addition to his own discourses, which opened and concluded the program, Harris gave three, Tom Davidson three, and Frank L. Soldan and Miss Mary E. Beedy one each. Snider recorded with pardon- able pride that he paid Harris and Davidson, who had come from a distance, each $150 plus expenses, and "the other speakers in propor- tion." — Ibid., p. 535 ; see also Perry, op. cit., pp. 36-37- The newspapers reported the lectures "fair- ly," says Snider, and even the Eastern press "took note of the marvelous fact that Chicago had held a large and successful Dante School," and that this was to be followed the next year by a Goethe School as indeed it was. The New York Sun could not forego commenting editori- ally upon Chicago as the "reformed gambler," who, having been "converted from his maddest stock speculation to undertake the penitential journey through the Inferno," was thus viewing "a panorama of its sins." — St. Louis Movement PP- 539-42. 164. See ibid., pp. 552-53, for the program of the 1888 Goethe School. 165. Ibid., pp. 36-37. This was the only occasion for which Snider engaged "a regular 654 Notes to Pasres 286-89 University Professor." Thomas, he said, was "a good man but a misfit for our work, in truth a double misfit — we did not fit him, nor he us who were studying Goethe as a Literary Bible, not so much philosophically or even histori- cally, all of which methods have their due place in the University proper," but which had little place in Snider's curriculum. "Professor R. G. Moulton, who gave us excellent and sympathe- tic help in our later courses," says Snider, "belonged to the so-called University Exten- sion Movement." — St. .Louis Movement, pp. 555-56. 166. Ibid., pp. 565-90, and Perry, op. cit., pp. 33-41. The program of the 1892 Shakespeare School, in which Snider, Harris, R. G. Moulton, H. W. Mabie, and Dr. David Swing collaborat- ed, announced that all profits (from the five- dollar enrollment fees) in excess of "actual expenses" would be donated to the work of "establishing and maintaining Kindergartens in the poorest districts of the city." 167. St. Louis Movement, pp. 571-73. 168. When, in 1880, shortly after his return from Europe, Snider returned to St. Louis, Mr. John Albee, then visiting St. Louis, remarked to him upon the extraordinary role played in that city by the women. "I never saw the like," he said. "I have not talked with any woman here who has not philosophized me beyond my depth. A day or two ago I went with Miss Blow to one of her kindergartens to see the children play, and she so overwhelmed me with her ponderous Hegelian nomenclature in explaining a little game of the babies that I heard my brain- pan crack like a pistol shot." — Ibid., p. 291. 169. Ibid., pp. 294-96, 300. Susan Blow studied under Mrs. Maria Kraus Boelte in New York during 1872-1873. Upon her return to St. Louis, she opened the first kindergarten, in the Des Peres School, in September, 1873. She spent 1877 in studying with Baroness Marenholz Biilow and visiting German Kinder- gartens, whereupon she was placed in charge of the Kindergarten Training School in St. Louis. Her first book, Symbolic Education, was pu- blished in 1894. About 1895 she began ranging throughout the country, expounding Froebel's philosophy and organizing kindergartens in many cities, but also lecturing on Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. When, in 1910, she returned to St. Louis for a meeting of the International Kindergarten Union, of which she was an officer, she had the satisfac- tion of seeing assembled a force of some six hundred kindergartners. See D. H. Harris (ed.), op. cit., pp. 128-33. 170. St. Louis Movement, pp. 294, 301-2, 3i5-i6. 171. Ibid., pp. 319, 570-85. 172. Perry, op. cit., pp. 34-35. 173. Ibid., p. 39. 174. D. H. Harris (ed.), op. cit., p. 43. 175. The more important contributions in psychology are to be found in JoSP, XIV, ii (Apr., 1880), 204-18, 225-39; XV, ii (Apr., 1881), 159-88; XXI ii (Apr., 1887), 189-221; and XXII, ii (Apr., 1888), 138-69. 176. St. Louis Movement, pp. 591-92. 177. Subsequently he added Cosmos and Diacosmos (1909) and Biocosmos (n.d.). William McKendree Bryant's Hegelian publications on education, psychology, and the philosophy of art, and his translation of the second part of Hegel's Aesthetic proved to be valuable supple- mentary books for Snider. 178. St. Louis Movement, p. 597; Perry, op. cit., p. 37. 179. D. H. Harris (ed.) op. cit., pp. 41-43; Snider, St. Louis Movement, p. 596. Miss May Whitcomb, a member of the Chicago Kinder- garten College, put the number of students in the St. Louis Communal University who studied "Snider's Psychology" in 1908 at two hundred. — Perry, op. cit., pp. 36, 37. 180. Weekly meetings, on Monday evenings, throughout the year were held, after 1910, usually in the assembly room of the Cabanne Branch Library. The Pedagogical Society, renamed the Society of Pedagogy and later the Society of Psychology, remained an active organization, and under the presidency of D. H. Harris maintained an active membership of several hundred, as late as 1929. When, upon Snider's death, in 1925, the Denton J Snider Association for Universal Culture was formed, it provided many of the members. 181. St. Louis Movement, pp. 523, 587. 182. Ibid., 588; D. H. Harris (ed.), op. cit., 31-47- 183. Perry, op. cit., pp. 1-78 passim. 184. Snider appears to have been in com- plete charge, and on occasions a one-man faculty ; but more often he was assisted, espe- cially during his later period in Chicago, by Miss Elizabeth Harrison and Mrs. J. N. Crouse, the official heads of the kindergarten work in Chicago, as well as by Professor R. G. Moulton and Louis J. Block. The meetings were held principally on Saturday afternoons, ordinarily in the Lecture Hall of the Kindergarten Col- lege. For texts he used chiefly his own books, of which he distributed "thousands" to his students. — Ibid., pp. 43, 70. In St. Louis he had the assistance principally of Miss Fruchte and Professor Cook. 185. Ibid., pp. 8, 18, 23, 24, 32, 44, 70. Snider's system of psychology and its influence Notes to Pages 289-90 655 through his several educational ventures, as well as through his published work, are matters that warrant closer study. His literary per- sonality has recently been analyzed and ap- praised by Calvin V. Hueneman in "Denton J. Snider: A Critical Study" (diss., Univ. of Wis., 1953). Some of Snider's private papers, includ- ing unfinished manuscripts and voluminous notes, were presented by William H. Miner, his literary executor, to the library of the University of Oklahoma. 186. The meetings in South St. Louis were held at the home of Harris on Second Caronde- let Avenue, and those in the north at Francis E. Cook's, then at the Rev. R. A. Holland's, and finally at William Schuyler's and James A. Garland's. The members were Cook, Harris, Snider, Henry W. Jameson, George B. McClel- lan, E. H. Long, William M. Bryant, Rev. R. A. Holland, George Lane, James A. Garland, T. R. Vickroy, Hugo Haenel, L. W. Allen, S. B. Blewett, William Schuyler, Miss Grace C. Bibb, and a few others. The most important work that came out of this organization was the translation made during 1878-1881 by Harris (assisted by J. A. Garland) of the second volume of the Logic, published in 1881 as Hegel's Doctrine of Reflec- tion, Being a Paraphrase and a Commentary Interpolated into the Text of the Second Volume of Hegel's Larger Logic, Treating of "Essence." — Wm. Schuyler, op. cit., pp. 82-84; J°SP, XI, i (Jan., 1877), 109-10. 187. Snider's activity as a lecturer on Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe prompted a series of small organizations, some of which attained the status of clubs. His singling out of his various classes his most adept pupil to be- come an instructor was a method of propaga- tion that he employed wherever he held classes. Once a year, in a given locality, he would unify these classes into what he termed a "Literary School." Some of his lieutenants conducted classes that ran for years. In St. Louis, for example, Mrs. Thomas E. Ferguson had a Homer class continuously for ten years, and William F. Woerner conducted another. In Chicago he was especially fortunate in finding devoted assistants among his kindergartners. 188. The Rev. Dr. R. A. Holland's Literary Club, though its discussions often took a theo- logical turn, was another active group. About 1 88 1, when Holland went to Chicago, he wrote to Harris in Concord that he proposed "to remove the western headquarters of Hegelian study from St. Louis to Chicago." He founded Kant and Hegel clubs, allied himself with the Sniderian movement in Chicago, and found able allies in Meeds Tuthill, Austin Bierbower, and Louis J. Block. Tuthill made a transcript of Brokmeyer's translation, which served in Chicago as other copies served in Jacksonville and Osceola. — Perry, op. cit., p. 22; Snider, St. Louis Movement, pp. 304-5; Leidecker, op. cit., p. 438. 189. Perry, op. cit., p. 64. Another early club, with wider interests than Harris' musical group, was the Art Society. It originated during the war as an informal discussion group, meet- ing at the house of Mrs. Beverly Allen, but soon blossomed forth as the Art Society, holding semi-public lectures, exhibitions, and discus- sions on sculpture, painting, music, and litera- ture. Bryant became, in time, the moving spirit of this club, and his publication, in 1879, of a translation of the second part of Hegels' JEsthetik provided the textbook for the Art Society. Associated and interlaced with all these organizations were several educational institu- tions and federations: the St. Louis Froebel Society, organized by Mary C. McCulloch, long-time president of the Kindergarten Department of the National Education Asso- ciation and a charter member and long the secretary of the International Kindergarten Union ; the Society of Pedagogy ; the Teachers' Fellowship Society; and the Wednesday Club. In the last three Amelia C. Fruchte was the guiding spirit. These latter groups appear to have made up most of Emerson's and Alcott's audiences when they spoke in St. Louis. 190. For a brief sketch of the institutional life of Jacksonville, see the excellent study by Prof. Paul R. Anderson, "Hiram K. Jones and Philosophy in Jacksonville," Jour. III. State Hist. Soc, XXXIII, iv (Dec, 1940), 479-83. 191. Graduated B.A. from Illinois College in 1844, M.D., 1846, and M.S., 1847, co-founder of the Microscopic Society, a charter member of the Literary Society, acting superintendent of the Jacksonville Historical Society, lecturer on anatomy and physiology at the Illinois College, professor of philosophy there from 1886 to 1900, donor of some $70,000 to his alma mater, founder of the Plato Club in 1865, of the American Akademe about 1884, and the acknowledged leader of its numerous enter- prises — Jones was for Jacksonville what Brok- meyer, Harris, and Snider combined were for St. Louis. His fame as a scientist declined after 1890, when he read before the local medical society a paper in which he rejected the germ theory. 192. For names of other prominent members, see ibid., p. 494. "Harris at this time was not actively aligned with his brother's movement in St. Louis, although he knew about it and had natural sympathies with it. Block, on the other G56 Notes to Pases 291-92 hand, had been an associate of the group in St. Louis and provided a fresh approach, which he had acquired while there. As for the later inclinations of these men, Harris moved decid- edly in the direction of Hegelianism and later became associated with Snider in the Commu- nal University in St. Louis, while Block trans- ferred his major allegiance from Hegel to Plato and became an important leader both in the Plato Club and the American Akademe. Harris left Jacksonville around 1880 . . . ; a little later Block moved to Chicago." — Ibid., pp. 494-96. Here Block identified himself with Snider's efforts and, shifting his philosophical orienta- tion back to Hegel, became closely associated with Dr. Holland's attempts to transfer the center of Hegelian studies from St. Louis to Chicago. 193. Sanborn and Harris, Alcott, II, 508; Alcott's Journals, p. 511 (Aug. 23, 1879). 194. Alcott's Journals, pp. 482-83; Sanborn and Harris, Alcott, II, 508-11. 195. It promptly enrolled thirty-three mem- bers, twenty-one of them from Jacksonville, and the remainder from all over the country, from Galveston to New York City. The membership included Louise M. Fuller (later the editor of the Journal of the American Akademe), Thomas M. Johnson (editor of the Platonist and the Biblio- theca Platonica) , and Harris and Block, both of whom appeared later in the same summer on the Concord programs. Summers in Jacksonville not being deemed conducive to attracting people devoted to philosophical symposia, it was decided to make the Akademe a winter institu- tion. On September 25, a constitution was adopted and eighteen new members inducted, including the publishers A. W. Wagnalls and Abner Doubleday of New York and others from Colorado to the Dutch West Indies. Be- fore the year was out, Jones found it necessary to provide more commodious quarters than his office afforded. Accordingly he turned over to the Akademe a large upstairs room in his home, henceforth known as Akademe Hall. The first complete program was presented in 1883, the third Tuesday of each month being selected as the regular date of the meeting. Ten sessions were to be held each year, from September to June. By May, 1884, there were 180 members; in 1892, when the last meeting was held, 433 members were enrolled, although "probably no more than 200 were members at the time," for the roll was cumulative, and resignations were not recorded. The average attendance during the early years was around fifty; by 1890 it had begun to fall, and during the last years, the average fell to 30. — Paul R. Anderson, loc. cit., pp. 507-8. 196. When he lectured in Jacksonville, though he chose usually a subject more or less identified with Plato, he managed to consider it from a Hegelian point of view. In his dis- course on "Plato's Dialectic and Doctrine of Ideas" he emphasized the dialectical character of Plato's thought; in another lecture, on "Aristotle's Doctrine of Reason," his hearers again perceived an implied criticism of Platon- ic "ideas" ; and in discussing "The Concrete and the Abstract in their Practical Relations to Life," he dwelt on the value of speculative philosophy after the manner of an orthodox Hegelian. — Ibid., pp. 510-n. Among others who contributed prominently to the meetings were Alex. Wilder, of Newark, N. J., the editor of the Journal of the American Akademe (1884-1888, 1889-1892), and Thomas M. Johnson of Osceola, Mo., editor of the Platonist (1881-1884, 1885-1888) and of the Bibliotheca Platonica (1889-1890). At a distance from Jacksonville (though both repeatedly came to the meetings) they maintained a greater degree of editorial independence than might have been possible had they been more closely affiliated with the Akademe. For a succinct characterization of these journals see Paul R. Anderson, loc. cit., pp. 512-18. 197. See Paul R. Anderson, "Quincy, an Outpost of Philosophy," Jour. III. State Hist. Soc, XXXIV, i, (Mar., 1941), 51. 198. Alcott visited in the home of Mrs. Sarah Denman and spoke to the Friends in Council, of whom Mrs. Denman was the organizer and leader; while Emerson visited in the Emery home in 1866 and returned to lecture in Quincy, later, in the year 1867, and in subsequent years. For interesting details regarding the East-West relationships in Quincy, see ibid., pp. 54-57. 199. Born and reared in New Haven, Mrs. Denman had removed to Philadelphia shortly after her marriage, in 1826, to Mathew B. Den- man (a land agent and man of means), and had gone to Quincy in 1842, where she became ac- tive in many philanthropic, civic, and political enterprises. 200. Sorosis of New York and of Jacksonville are listed as being older. The Quincy Friends in Council was the first club of its kind to own a building, a gift from Mr. Denman in 1878, and still on the grounds of the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County. From Quincy, Friends in Council spread to Lawrence, Kans., Berlin, Wis., Marquette, Mich , Burlington and Rutland, Vt., and elsewhere. — Ibid., p. 58. 201. They chose for their first book Lecky's History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. During the second and third years the club read Plato's dialogues. Notes to Pages 292-93 657 Alcott appeared before its members on occa- sions when he visited the Lorenzo Bulls or the Denmans, and the club held special sessions in his honor. Hiram K. Jones often came to Quincy, sometimes for several weeks at a time, the guest of the Denmans. There were papers on Plato and neo-Platonism in its various forms. "Part of the program for two years was given over to the study of Cousin's History of Modern Philosophy. One year 'The Relation between Mind and Body' occupied its attention. In 1877-1878 the time was spent on the philoso- phy of history (presumably a la Hegel). One section in 1 888-1 889 was devoted to the study of English thinkers, and in 1 889-1 890, to evo-, lution as represented in the work of Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. Somewhat characteristic was the program of 1879-1880, devoted to modern science, in which the follow- ing topics were considered : Method of Science (Mill, Whewell, Jevons), Definition and Object of Physics, Theories concerning the Ultimate Structure of Matter, The New Chemistry, Biol- ogy (Cook, Le Conte, Tyndall), The Descent of Life (Darwin, Haeckel, Galton, Huxley, Mivart), Mental Physiology (Lewis, Bain, Martineau, Lotze), Cosmogony (Spencer, Hux- ley), The Theistic Philosophy of Evolution (Gray)." Even while literary, scientific, and historical subjects were considered, philosophy remained the focal interest up to 1890 at least, after which date other interests began to intrude. — Ibid., pp. 62-63. An enlargement of the club's activities came through the ready and mutual interchange of contacts between Friends in Council and the Jacksonville Plato Club. They corresponded and exchanged papers, and when the American Akademe was formed in Jacksonville, Quincy provided one of the largest out-of-town mem- bership lists. The activities of Friends in Council were reported in the Journal of the American Akademe, while Platonic studies in Jacksonville were reported in detail by Mrs. J. O. King to Mrs. Denman throughout the sixties and seventies. These notes, mainly exegetical of Plato's dialogues, were painstakingly copied by Mrs. Denman. Four volumes of these, covering the years from 1873 to 1879, all in Mrs. Den- man's handwriting, still exist and afford ample evidence to show that the ladies of Quincy pursued their philosophical studies seriously. — Ibid., pp. 68-69. 202. Born in New England and reared in the home of a liberal Unitarian minister, who re- moved his family to Quincy when Samuel was fifteen, he enjoyed a year at Harvard and an- other at Amherst before entering the Comstock Stove Foundry in Quincy and making a fortune. Already an Emerson enthusiast, he was further stimulated to philosophical pursuits by Emer- son's visits to Quincy during the mid-sixties. Emerson advised him to study Plato's dialogues and recommended Stirling's Secret of Hegel. See Journal of the American Akademe, III (1887), 168-69. Plato did not hold Emery long; the first numbers of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy soon won him over to Hegel. A steady interchange of letters with Harris (whom, however, he did not meet until 1879, when both went East to organize the Concord School) and contributions to Harris' Journal led to an ever-increasing interest in Hegel, Harris, for his part, finding Emery "a young giant in philosophy." — Paul R. Anderson, "Quincy . . . ," loc. cit., p. 72. 203. It kept no minutes and left no complete list of members, but it met regularly on Thurs- day evenings. The membership was never large, and the average attendance only eight or ten, but its members appear to have been well equipped for the study of philosophy. Among the more active members were Caroline and Mary Chapin (then in charge of the Quincy Female Academy, where the first meetings were held), Mrs. Emery, Mrs. C. H. Bull, Mrs. John McFadon, Mrs. Lorenzo Bull, Mrs. Ebenezer Baldwin, Dr. and Mrs. R. K. Rutherford, and Edward McClure, Emery's brother-in-law. Like Emery, McClure had made a fortune in business, and having retired, attended all the Concord sessions, and subsequently returned with the Emerys to the West. He was a great reader, especially of philosophical books. While his opinions were held in high regard, he stead- fastly refused to write or publicly to discourse on philosophical subjects except in small, infor- mal groups. Mrs. Ebenezer Baldwin was an- other who became an earnest student of Hegel, even to carrying a copy of Stirling's Secret of Hegel with her on a trip taken to restore her health. — Ibid., p. 74. 204. D. H. Harris (ed.), op. cit., p. 20. 205. Paul R. Anderson, "Quincy," loc. cit., \>. 81. 206. Ibid., pp. 70-71. 207. As Professor Anderson points out, William James' memory was at fault when he intimated that this effort was made in 1872. It could not have been before 1879, as will appear from the following quotation and its reference to the "two young business men from Illinois," obviously a reference to Emery and McClure, who first journeyed East in 1879. Recollect- ing an informal philosophical club composed, among others, of himself, Tom Davidson, J. E. Cabot, and C. C. Everett, James wrote: 658 Notes to Pases 293-96 "The previous year we had gone over a good part of Hegel's larger Logic, under the self- constituted leadership of two young business man from Illinois, who had become enthusiastic Hegelians and, knowing almost no German, had actually possessed themselves of a manuscript translation of the entire three volumes of Logic, made by an extraordinary Pomeranian [sic] immigrant, named Brockmeyer [sic]. These disciples were leaving business for the law and studying at the Harvard law-school ; but they saw the whole universe through Hegelian spec- tacles, and a more admirable homo unis libri than one of them, with his three big folios of Hegelian manuscript, I have never had the good fortune to know." 208. Emery was its most prolific writer. His first essay, an exegesis of the Parmenides (first printed in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for July, 1872, read before the American Aka- deme in Jacksonville, and reprinted in an enlarged form in the Journal of the American Akademe for 1887), is inspired by a Hegelian interpretation of Plato, as Emery frankly admitted on the occasion of his oral presenta- tion of the paper in Jacksonville. He sent three other contributions to the Journal of Specula- tive Philosophy: (1) a letter opposing, by the use of Hegelian principles, A. E. Kroeger's thesis that empirical knowledge is sufficient to establish immortality (VI, 90) ; (2) a brief article entitled "Does Formal Logic Explain Active Processes ?" in which he argued that the Under- standing has no way of establishing the exist- ence of motion, and that reason alone can assure us of its certainty (XI, 410-11); and (3) an analysis of Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (XV, 198-200). He took an active part in the discussions at Concord and contributed several lectures, but of these only one (his discourse on "The Elective Affinities") has been preserved in print (The Life and Genius of Goethe . . . , ed. by F. B. Sanborn, Boston, 1886, 251-89). 209. Snider claims that Davidson forsook Hegel because after a "tussle" with the Logic, "he got badly thrown." — St. Louis Movement, p. 124. 210. Davidson turned up repeatedly for the programs arranged by Harris or Snider, nota- bly in Chicago, where, according to Snider, he tried unsuccessfully tc disarrange Snider's plans by setting up rival schools (St. Louis Move- ment, pp. 235-37, 540-43, 549-52). Brilliant, militant, mercurial, Davidson loved intellectual fencing and always succeeded in enlivening the programs in which he participated. After an extended sojourn (1878- 1884) in Italy to study medieval commentaries of Aristotle and to write the life of Rosmini, he settled in London, where he participated in the activities of the Aristotelian Society, became the founder of "The Fellowship of the New Life," later "The New Fellowship," of which the Fabian Society is an offshoot. By 1887 he was living at St. Cloud, N.J., but spent much time in New York, lecturing, writing, and estab- lishing a branch of the Fellowship and a Sum- mer School for Cultural Sciences. In associa- tion with the People's Institute and the Educa- tional Alliance of New York, and assisted by Joseph Pulitzer, he gathered a group of eager young men (chiefly Jewish socialists from the lower East Side) and organized the Bread- Winners' College, designed to help wage-ear- ners share in the best culture of the ages and to raise them to " a higher level of mental and spiritual power." — D. H. Harris (ed.), op. cit., pp. 59-60, 65; DAB, V, 96-97. 211. Journal of the American Akademe, V (1891), 252. 212. As Alcott freely acknowledged, Jour- nals, p. 511 (Aug. 23, 1879). THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY 213. Sanborn and Harris, Alcott, II, 507-8. 214. Alcott's Journals, p. 483. 215. For details regarding fees, bequests, attendance records, length and dates of sessions and other pertinent data, see Sanborn and Harris, Alcott, I, 532-33; F. B. Sanborn (ed.), The Genius and Character of Emerson. Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy (Boston, 1884), Preface; Snider, St. Louis Movement, pp. 350-75, 521-35; and my New England Tran- scendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism, pp. 79-110, 136-43. The programs were regularly publicized in the Journal of Speculative Phi- losophy. 216. Alcott's Journals, pp. 496-98 (July 15-18, 1879). 217. See Lilian Whiting, Boston Days . . . (Boston, 1902), p. 175. 218. Journals, pp. 499, 500, 502, 503, 505. 219. See JoSP, XIV, i (Jan., 1880), 138; also ii (Apr., 1880), 251-53, and F. B. Sanborn (ed.), op. cit., pp. xii-xiii. 220. The chief participants in this most distinctive feature of the third school were Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, the Rev. C. A. Bartol, Mr. J. E. Cabot, Presidents Noah Porter of Yale and John Bascom of Wisconsin, and Professors F. H. Hedge, George S. Morris, J. W. Means, and John Watson. For the pro- gram, see JoSP, XV, i (Jan., 1881), 76-77, and for Secretary Sanborn's reports, ibid., iii (July, 1881), 303-20. 221. It is hard to imagine Harris sitting Notes to Pages 296-98 659 through this perversion of Kantian terms with- out wincing. What might have happened if Brokmeyer had been present is interesting to speculate upon. But Harris and Snider had settled between them the question whether Brokmeyer should be invited to Concord by deciding emphatically, "It cannot be done, it cannot be done! ... he would be sure to spill over in some diablery, or even profanity, which would shock all New England." The newspapers had already found enough to caricature without Brokmeyer's contributing any choice morsels. — Snider, St. Louis Movement, p. 282. 222. Here it may be observed (1) that Alcott paid scant attention to Kant's careful distinc- tions between a posteriori and a priori methods, and (2) that his easy identifications of Kant with Huxley in method and of practical reason with conscience and faith involve the same misconceptions that had persistently plagued the Transcendentalists in their efforts to cite Kant as authority for their affirmations. Alcott went on to explain why Kant "merely shows the infirmity of reason by itself," and hence "settles nothing satisfactorily"; while the practical reason (identified with "the moral sentiment, conscience, the voice of God, and the Holy Spirit") "extends its horizon wider and wider under the illumination, the inspira- tion of faith." At this point Harris might well have inter- rupted to remind Alcott of Kant's distinction between "transcendental knowledge" and "transcendent illusions," but Harris was not one to cross Alcott or to bring his Dean into ridicule. 223. JoSP, XV, iii (July, 1881), 305. 224. Alcott's Journals, pp. 497, 536. 225. JoSP, XV, iii (July, 1881), 306. The comment about Kant's supplying "the step that was ... to take us out of our senses" was, of course, an unintentional witticism that prob- ably went unmarked; but we may be sure that if either Brokmeyer or Snider had been present, one or the other would have improved the occasion to indulge in a little wordplay. 226. Ibid., pp. 307-12. 227. Ibid., pp. 312-14. 228. He went on to argue for catholicity, embracing (1) Kant, regarding whom, he said, we have "heard many things" throughout the week; (2) Fichte, "concerning whom we shall hear a paper next week by Mr. Edwin D. Mead"; (3) Schelling, whose influence Emerson had done something to spread through his re- ports in the Dial, supplied to him directly from Germany by Mr. Charles Stearns Wheeler and also by direct contact with J. E. Cabot, and (4) Hegel, of whom, "of course, we have heard much." — Ibid., pp. 317-19. 229. Ibid., pp. 319-20. 230. The Concordians missed, by precisely a month, the honor of being the first to hold a Kant celebration in America. Professor J. W. Mears of Hamilton College was responsible for arranging the first Kant centennial, observed in the parlor of the Temple Grove Hotel at Saratoga, N.Y., on July 6-7. For the names of the participants and other details see JoSP, XV, iii (July, 1881), 293-302. The program comprised the following papers : (1) J. W. Mears, "Significance of the Centen- nial," (2) G. S. Morris, "The Higher Problems of Philosophy," (3) President John Bascom, "Kant's Distinction between Speculative and Practical Reason," (4) Josiah Royce, "A Cri- tique of the Critique," (5) Lester F. Ward, of the U.S. Geological Survey, "The Antinomies of Kant in Relation to Modern Science," and (6) W. T. Harris, "The Relations of Kant's Kritik to Ancient and Modern Thought." The discus- sion the papers provoked was no less lively than at Concord. The report (in JoSP) repro- duced twenty-five congratulatory letters elic- ited by the occasion from prominent professors, theologians, and other representative men. Only two were negative in spirit. Professor B. N. Martin of New York University felt that "the incompleteness of his [Kant's] work was so great a drawback upon its usefulness" that he "could never refer to it with enthusiasm" {ibid., pp. 299-300) ; while the great McCosh, pleading a prior engagement, regretted his inability to show his "reverence for Kant . . . by attending," and closed with the profundity, "You know that I hold . . . that the American student should labor to take from Kant all that is natural and true, and reject all that is artifi- cial and false." — Ibid., p. 302. 231. Still greater diversity and breadth was sought by having Sanborn deliver three lec- tures on oracular philosophy ; Watson, three on Kant, Schelling, and Fichte; and Kedney, four on the philosophy of aesthetics; while among the special lecturers who gave only one dis- course at this session were Alex. Wilder of Newark (editor of the Journal of the A merican Akademe), who spoke on Alexandrian Plato- nism, Noah Porter on Kantian ethics, James McCosh on the Scottish philosophy, G. H. Howison on German philosophy since Hegel, R. A. Holland on Atomism, C. A. Bartol on the Nature of Knowledge, and R. G. Hazard on the Utility of the Metaphysical Pursuits. — F. B. Sanborn (ed.), op cit., pp. xv-xvi. For other lecturers and their subjects at this session, see ibid., pp. xvi-xviii. Several of the lectures of the fourth school (1882) were reproduced and others abstracted in an "unofficial" but "authorized" 660 Notes to Pages 298-301 publication prepared by R. L. Brightman, entitled The Concord Lectures on Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1883). See also JoSP., XVII, iii (July, 1883), 317. 232. Journal, p. 432 (Mar. 8, 1882). 233. For the subjects of "special" lectures in this session, see JoSP, XVII, ii (Apr., 1883), 214-15, and F. B. Sanborn (ed.), op. cit., p. xviii. 234. This literary tendency was further accentuated in lectures by Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody on "Milton's Paradise Lost," John Albee on "The Norman Influence in English Language and Literature," Edwin D. Mead on "Carlyle and Emerson," Mrs. Julia W. Howe on "Margaret Fuller," Julian Hawthorne on "The Novel," Mrs. Cheney on "Hindu Literature," Dr. Kedney on "Art Apprecia- tion" and on "The Higher Criticism," and H. G. O. Blake's customary readings from Thoreau's manuscripts. — Sanborn, op. cit., p. xviii; JoSP, XVII, ii (Apr., 1883), 214-15; iii (July, 1883), 317-22. 235. What he refers to is that in 1881 "the two main threads of the School" were then most harmoniously "spun alongside of each other by those two ardent philosophic spinners, Dr. Harris and Dr. Jones." Even then he "often heard the whispered decision: 'Dr. Harris has taken intellectual possession of the School.'" — St. Louis Movement, pp. 307-8. As we have seen, Jones retired the next year. 236. The discourses on Emerson were edited by Sanborn under the title. The Genius and Character of Emerson (Boston, 1884). 237. For details, see JoSP, XIX, ii (Apr., 1885), 220-21; Sanborn (ed.). The Life and Character of Goethe . . . (Boston, 1886), pp. xxiii-xxiv. A similar volume grew out of the Goethe School in Milwaukee (1886): Marion V. Dudley (ed.). Poetry and Philosophy of Goethe . . . (Chicago, 1887). Unfortunately Brokmeyer's interesting but unexpected remarks on Faust were not deemed sufficiently canonical for publication. 238. Sanborn (ed.), Emerson, p. xxi. 239. Sanborn (ed.), Goethe, pp. v-xxiii; JoSP, XX, iv (Oct., 1886), 426-443. 240. Snider, St. Louis Movement, 272-73, 274-75. 521-22. 241. He also manifestly enjoyed the story about the romantic young couple, walking in the Walden woods, who became so entangled in their discussion of the philosophy of love that the young lady exclaimed to her suitor, "Pshaw! You are no philosopher, else you would understand the Yesness of my No!" — Ibid., p. 275. Other choice bits of gossip are recorded ibid., pp. 277, 287-89, 350-54, 522; Austin Warren, "The Concord School of Phi- losophy," New Engl. Quar., II, ii (Apr., 1929), 207-8, 211-12; and my New England Tran- scendentalism and Si. Louis Hcgelianism, p. 108. 242. In his own schools, where he was in sole charge, he educated his pupils during the off- season in smaller classes, which served also as recruiting stations for the larger annual schools. Snider felt that his Western schools were what the Eastern schools should have been. 243. Begun as a six-weeks school, the term was reduced to five weeks in 1880 and to four in 1882. Beginning in 1885 it varied from two to three weeks. 244. JoSP, II, i (1869), v. 245. Even while his personalism tended in the end to divert his Hegelianism into new channels, it is to be noted, as Odell Shepard has observed [Pedlar's Progress, 484, 494-95) that the doctrine of personalism had been given some development as well as currency by both Alcott and the St. Louisans long before Howi- son and Borden Parker Bowne gave it more precise form and application. There is enough similarity between the "personal idealism" of Howison and Bowne, on the one hand, and Alcott's doctrine of Personality and the theories current among the St. Louis philosophers, on the other, to suggest more than a casual relation- ship. All agreed upon a doctrine which regards ultimate reality of the world as incorporate in a Divine Person who "sustains the universe by a continuous act of creative will." Thus they achieved a mediate position between the ab- solutism of Hegelian idealism and its antithet- ical philosophies of agnosticism, positivism, materialism, and naturalism. The various ramifications are as yet far from clear, but as investigation into the origin and sources of personalism progresses, it is not improbable that what Whitman spoke of vaguely and Howison and Bowne more coherently as "Personalism" will be found to stem, at least in part, from Alcott's doctrine and from the theories of the St. Louis Hegelians. If that be true, we shall be able to point to another cyclic progression of thought and influence deriving basically from New England Transcendental- ism, joining forces with elements of Western Hegelianism, given a new direction by Howison, eventually turning eastward, and, in individuals like Bowne, Royce, and even Creighton (each of whom had meanwhile drawn from sources in Germany), finding a new orientation and articulation in the East. 246. He wrote for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy and participated in the Concord and other schools. As a professor at Johns Hopkins and Michigan he became widely known as a Notes to Paws 302-5 661 champion of Hegel and Kant, and he became an active co-worker with Harris in publishing the distinguished "Griggs Philosophical Series" of German philosophy. Besides Harris and Morris, John Dewey, C. C. Everett, Noah Por- ter, John Watson, and J. S. Kedney contribut- ed to the series. Morris' translation of Ueber- weg's History of Philosophy in 1873 marks an epoch in the history of philosophy in America. 247. Collected Papers (6 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1931-1935), I, 18, 42. 248. All these relationships are discussed in more detail below. 249. Jean Wahl, The Pluralist Philosophers of England and America (London, 1925), p. 62, 192; Letters of William James, ed. by Henry James (2 vols., Boston, 1920), I 94—95, 208, 265. 250. Francis B. Harmon, The Social Philoso- phy of the St. Louis Hegelians (N.Y., 1943), p. 104. 251. Writings of Walt Whitman (10 vols., N.Y., 1902), IV, 322; IX, 170. GERMAN PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICAN COLLEGES 252. For Locke's tremendous vogue, see Merle Curti, "The Great Mr. Locke: America's Philosopher, 1783-1861," Huntington Lib. Quar., XI (1937), 107-51, and for the earlier period, Benjamin Rand, "Philosophical Instruc- tion in Harvard University from 1636 to 1900," Harvard Graduates' Mag., XXXVII (Sept., 1928), 35, 46-47 ft". 253. Just when the influx of new texts by Scottish authors was at its height is not readily ascertainable,'but the records of college curricula in the early decades of the century show that they were in general use by 18 10, and that they held a dominant position until long after 1850. In 1827 at the College of Rhode Island (now Brown University, a Presbyterian establish- ment modeled after Princeton) the students read Karnes's Elements of Criticism, Stewart's Philosophy of the Mind, Levi Hedge's Logic, Butler's Analogy, and Paley. — Louis F. Snow, The College Curriculum in the United States (Columbia Univ. Diss., N.Y., 1907), p. 122. At Hamilton College in i8i3-i8i6,the course in- cluded Ferguson's Civil Society, Alex. Tytler's Elements of History, Duncan's Logic, Paley's Moral Philosophy, Karnes's Elements, Paley's Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion, and, again, Butler's Analogy. — Documentary History of Hamilton College (Clinton, X.Y., 1922), pp. 143-44. Washington and Lee, to pick another example from another section of the country, in 1842, required of its seniors Whately's Logic, Blair's Rhetoric and Criticism, Tytler's History, Upham's Abridgment of Mental Philosophy, Paley on Moral and Political Philosophy, and Alexander's Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion. — Wm. H. Ruftner, "The History of Washington College 1830-1848," Wash, and Lee Univ. Hist. Papers, VI (1904), 52-53. Professor Levi Hedge, who began teaching at Harvard in 1795, taught from 1820 to 1827 Stewart's Philosophy of the Mind, Paley's Moral Philosophy , Locke's Essay, and logic from his own textbook. At the same time Professor Frisbie gave a course to the seniors in intellectu- al philosophy and political economy and em- ployed Brown's Lectures on the Philosophy of the Mind, Gay's Political Economy, and, in the course on natural religion, Paley's Evidences and Butler's Analogy. — Rand, loc. cit., pp. 44-45- The reasons for the ready acceptance of Reid, Stewart, Brown, and Hamilton lie in the American temperament and the nature of the compromise deemed necessary between theol- ogy and philosophy. Scottish "realism" was considered in harmony with the practical note of the country, and, more important, it was regarded an aid to faith and a safeguard to morality as against the skepticism of Hume and the atheism of the Voltairians. It accorded well with the needs of ecclesiastical orthodoxy, and its appeal to common sense made it easy to teach, putting it within the range of abilities of the busy college president who, besides dis- charging his many stated duties, was generally in charge also of the teaching of philosophy. The Scottish realism, as Riley has pointed out, was taught by men who took philosophy seri- ously but not speculatively. It was the one common ground on which the various protes- tant denominations that had established schools in America could best agree. — I. W. Riley, American Thought from Puritanism to Prag- matism and Beyond (X.Y., 1923), p. 119. 254. To be sure, early generations of students at Harvard and Yale studied Keckermann on logic, physics, and mathematics and consulted Wollebius' digest of theology, Alsted's encyclo- pedia, and Buxtorf's Hebrew grammer; but there was very little direct connection between the early use of these standard productions of German scholarship and the nineteenth-century concern with post-Kantian thought. 255. Alvin S. Haag suggests that men like John C. Kunze, John H. Dreyer, Will, Helmuth and Hendel, some of whom lived in Xew York, knew something about Kant. — "Some German Influences in American Philosophical Thought from 1800 to 1850" (Boston University Diss., 1939; typescript), pp. 8-9, 104-5, 193. 256. Educated at Marburg and Heidelberg, 662 Notes to Pages 305-6 Gros transmitted to America the system of scholastic philosophy then being taught by German theologians. His text, Natural Princi- ples of Rectitude (1795), noteworthy as a "classic statement of scholastic psychology," was limited in its influence because it expounded an outmoded system. See Jay W. Fay, American Psychology before William James (New Bruns- wick, N. J., 1939), pp. 52. 53-58. i85n.; Snow, op. cit., pp. 98-99; Anna Haddow, Political Science in American Colleges and Universities, 1636-1900 (N.Y., 1939), pp. 65-67. 257. Cooper, an extreme rationalist and deist in 18 1 2 argued before a college audience the necessity of physiology as a part of philosophic training, recommending among others the works of Albrecht von Haller, Blumenbach, and Leibnitz. — Introductory Lecture of Thomas Cooper, Esq., Professor of Chemistry at Carlisle College (Carlisle, Pa., 1934), pp. 176-77. 258. For an account of the investigation and its results, see Leonard Woods, History of the Andover Theological Seminary (Boston, 1885), pp. 152, 173-76. Not improbably, the formal investigation facilitated rather than suppressed the vogue of the Germans. At the College of New Jersey (Princeton), long the stronghold of orthodoxy, Professors Alexander and Dod in 1840 wrote an account of New England Transcendentalism and its sources in support of Andrews Norton at the time of the Norton-Ripley controversy. Charles Hodge, of the Princeton Theological Seminary and founder and editor of the Princeton Review, who had studied in Paris, Halle, and Berlin, lent his support to the defenders of orthodoxy; on the other side appeared Andrew Preston Peabody and Theodore Parker. Characteristic of the stubborn resistance found in American colleges are the attack by I. N. Tarbox of Hamilton College on the Germans and the dis- trust voiced in 1848 by Noah Porter of the "foreign look" of Coleridge and the German "skeptics" back of him. See I. N. Tarbox, An Address on the Origin, Progress, and Present Condition of Philosophy (Utica, N.Y., 1845), and Porter's "Coleridge and His American Disciples," Bibliotheca Sacra, IV, i(Feb., 1847), 1 1 7-71. 259. For the influence of Woods and, to a lesser extent, of Moses Stuart in directing Smith to Germany, see Lewis F. Stearns, Henry Boynton Smith (Boston and N.Y., 1892), p. 20. Woods's translation of George Christian Knapp's Lectures on Christian Theology was published in 1831, together with a thirteen- page preface presenting an appreciative account of the rise of the Halle school of theologians, with whom Knapp identified himself. The trans- lation went through several British editions and was reprinted in Philadelphia as the "Second American Edition . . . from the last London edition" of 1854. 260. Remaining in Germany until 1840, Smith met many famous theological teachers, among them Tholuck of Halle, who helped stem the tide of rationalism then rife in the German universities. In Berlin he studied under Neander, Trendelenberg, Hengstenberg, and Schleiermacher. He became a close friend of Frau Hegel, widow of the philosopher, though he never subscribed entirely to the Hegelian system. On his return to America, he was much in the company of Moses Stuart and was on terms of familiarity with several of the New England Transcendentalists. However, he felt that some of the excesses and vagueness of Transcendentalism stood in need of correction, and he differed with them on ideological grounds, finding their theism inadequate. 261. See Elizabeth L. Smith, Henry Boynton Smith, His Life and Work (N.Y., 1881), p. 124. 262. Bibliotheca Sacra, II, ii (Apr., 1845), 260-90. His more important publications include Textbooks of Church History (5 vols., 1 855-1 879); a translation and revision of J. K. L. Gieseler's Textbook of the History of Doctrine (2 vols., 1861-1862); a revision and enlargement of a work by Karl R. Hagenbach ; and his own Relations of Faith and Philosophy (1849) and The Problem of the Philosophy of History (1853). 263. See R. M. Wenley, The Life and Work of George Sylvester Morris, (N.Y., 1917), pp. 88, 91, 96, 153, 208, 213-23. Smith's career shows that the time had not yet come in seminaries like Union for the fullest reconciliation of German speculative thought and American Protestant tradition. While sufficiently well trained. Smith failed, or rather, abandoned the effort to recon- cile "the present knowledge of nature and history with the religious faith handed down in the Church." — Ibid., p. 209. Always dominated by a theological outlook, he labeled the thorough- going philosophical systems of theology as pan- theistic. He regarded the "mediating theolo- gy" of Schleiermacher as the main phenomenon of German theology, and was stimulated by Neander and Twesten, both disciples of Schlei- ermacher, as well as by that "notable represen- tative of the 'new orthodoxy' in Germany, Hengstenberg." — Ibid., p. 195. He was also influenced by the theism of Trendelenberg and Ulrici, of Berlin and Halle; and with Tholuck, "perhaps the most representative member of the Conciliation or Mediating School of Theolo- gy," he was on terms of close personal friend- ship. Unlike Parker and the Transcendentalists, Notes to Pages 306-7 663 he was "thoroughly scared" by developments in the Hegelian left wing, by Strauss particu- larly. — Ibid., p. 212. See Haag, op. cit., pp. 207-19, for the fullest treatment available of Smith's career. 264. The Method and Influence of Theological Studies. A Discourse [at] the University of Ver- mont, August 5, 1845 (Burlington, 1845), p. 37. 265. Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy (N.Y., 1893), p. 159. See ibid., pp. 154-61, for his later rejec- tion in tolo of the tendency to deny revelation and the miracles, as well as the fallibility and late origin of the Bible. 266. (1) Eloquence and Virtue: Or, Outlines of a Systematic Rhetoric ; from the German of Dr. Francis Theremin (N.Y., 1850; Andover, 1854, 1859) ; (2) A Manual of Church History, from the German of Dr. Henry E. F. Guericke (Edinburgh, 1857; Andover, 1863); (3) "Introduction to the Christian Element in Plato and the Platonic Philosophy," translated from the German of D. C. Ackermann and included in Shedd's edition of Coleridge's works; (4) The Gospel A ccording to Mark, by John Peter Lange, revised from the Edinburgh translation, with additions by Shedd (4th ed., N.Y., 1869). 267. The work of Dr. Kunze, Rev. John H. Dreyer, and Charles Rudolph Demme (an immigrant in 1818 and former student at Gottingen and Halle) was probably of minor influence in the English-speaking part of the country. Gettysburg, Hartwick, Union, and Newton among the seminaries were most nota- ble for their early use of German scholarship. — Haag, op. cit., pp. 112-13, 193. 268. A Prussian-born Zwinglian who studied at Heidelberg and Marburg, taking his Ph.D. degree at the latter university, he was called to Giessen as Privatdozenl and was serving as Professor Extraordinarius when he decided to go to America. He first taught at Lafayette College at Mercersburg and served as president of Marshall College from 1836 to his death. 269. Harvey G. Townsend, Philosophical Ideas in the United States (N.Y., 1934), pp. 81-82. 270. Haag, op. cit., pp. 172-73; DAB, XV, 389-90. 271. Haag, op. cit., pp. 196, 200. 272. Ibid., pp. 183-85. 273. See George L. Prentiss, The Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York: Historical and Biographical Sketches (N.Y., 1889), pp. 88-92; Haag, op. cit., p. 3m. 274. Among the more important are the following: Henry N. Day's Fundamental Phi- losophy from Krug (1848); Emmanuel V. Ger- hart's Introduction to the Study of Philosophy 1858); Louis Bautain's Epitome of the History of Philosophy, tr. by Caleb H. Sprague (1841); Wm. G. Tennemann's Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, tr. by A. Johnson (Oxford, 1832), and a revised and enlarged translation by J. R. Morrell (Bohn Lib., London, 1852); Kant's Religion within the Bounds of Pure Rea- son, tr. by J. W. Semple (1838); Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, tr. by F. Haywood (1838) ; Heeren's Ancient Greece, tr. by George Bancroft (1823); John B. Stallo's General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature. Digest of Schelling, Hegel, Oken (1848); De Wette's Theodore; or, the Mystic's Conversion. History of the Conver- sion of a Protestant Clergyman, tr. by J. F. Clarke (2 vols., 1841); and Samuel Osgood's translation of De Wette's Human Life, or Practical Ethics (2 vols., 1842). Other works, chiefly of French derivation, which incorporated a great deal of German thought, sometimes in diluted form, include (1) Henning G. Linberg's translation of Cousin's Introduction to the History of Philosophy (1832) ; (2) Caleb S. Henry's translation of Cousin's Elements of Psychology (1834); (3) George Rip- ley's Philosophical Miscellanies, Translated from the French of Cousin, Jouffroy, and Con- slant (2 vols., 1838) ; (4) W. H. Channing's translation of Jouffroy's Introduction to Ethics (2 vols., 1841-1842); (5) J. C. Daniel's transla- tion of Cousin's Philosophy of the Beautiful (1842) ; (6) O. W. Wight's rendition of Cousin's Course of the History of Modern Philosophy (2 vols., 1852; repr., 1854, 1861, 1866, 1869, 1877, 1879) ; (7) O. W. Wight's translation of Cousin's Lectures of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good (1854; enl. ed., i86i;repr., 1866, 1879); and (8) R. N. Tappan's translation of Jouffroy's Moral Philosophy (1862). To these might be added as books of reference in common use by the 1840's (1) De Gerando's Histoire comparee des systemes de Philosophie and (2) Barchou de Penhoen's Histoire de la Philosophie allemande depuis Leibnitz jusqu'a Hegel. W. H. Channing's translation of Jouffroy's Introduction to Ethics was used by James Walk- ker as a text at Harvard from 1840 to 1850 (Rand, loc. cit., pp. 190-91), and Bowen used Linberg's translation of Cousin's Elements of Psychology as early as 1 845-1 846 and as late as 1870-1871 {ibid., pp. 194, 198-99). The latter became a favorite text in many other American colleges. It reached a fourth edition in 1856, the second (N.Y., 1838) having been especially prepared for use in colleges. Bowen, more than anybody else among the academicians of the time, was responsible for the vogue of the French eclectics and, through them, of the Ger- man transcendentalists, although he subse- quently introduced students in his classes 664 Notes to Pages 307-8 directly to German philosophical works in the original. 275. Of the two works that dominated the field during the earlier decades of the century, Hedge followed the Scottish realists and Whate- ly was interested in restoring the Aristotelian Organon; but thereafter (as Townsend has observed, op. cit., pp. 101-2) men like Walker, Bowen, Coppee, McCosh, Wayland, and Porter, even while still in the tradition of British thought, were all in varying degrees influenced by German romantic philosophy. 276. See Preface, pp. vi-vii. In his paper of 1837 on Locke and the Transcendentalists he had defended vigorously the achievements of Locke against the derogations of the New Eng- land idealists. He wrote then of the "diseased imagination" of everything stemming from Germany and of the "midsummer madness" and the "German mania" then manifested by American disciples. But by 1839 Bowen had undertaken to study the Germans, and his article on Kant in the North American Review for that year (XLIV, civ, 44-68) is a decidedly more moderate and profounder critique. It still reveals a disinclination to follow Kant, but it is designed to put his ideas in a fair light. Be- tween 1839 and 1 84 1 he visited Europe and devoted some time in Germany to the acquisi- tion of firsthand information on the German philosophers (Rand, loc. cit., p. 194). In the Preface to his Logic (1865) he still objects to Kant's "dogmatism and unbelief," but he is ready to admit that Kant's criticism "formed hardly less an era in the history of Logic than in that of Metaphysics" (Preface, pp. iv-v). Bowen's own book is eclectic, depending on Hamilton (himself a borrower from Kant and Lotze), Kiesewetter, Fries, Beneke, Dressier, and Drobisch, among others. Adjusting his courses to the principles of the elective system instituted by Eliot in 1869, Bowen, from 1870 to 1889, turned his attention more and more to continental philosophy, until in the end it re- ceived the larger share. Even in 1868-1869, an elective section of the senior class recited three times a week in Schwegler's History of Philoso- phy, translated by J. H. Seelye in 1856. In 1869-1870 the same class studied Schwegler and Kant's first Critique. Bowen became in reality the first professor to teach the history of philosophy at Harvard. 277. Attacking both idealism and material- ism, Tappan, like Hickok a few years later, had recourse to the works of Coleridge and Kant, and finally attached to himself the label "Tran- scendentalist," by which he meant that he placed value on immediate intuition as opposed to Lockean sensationalism. He followed closely the Kantian distinction between synthetical and analytical, a priori and a posteriori, but defined Reason very loosely. See his Elements of Logic, (N.Y., 1844), 30-31, 42-49, 60, 66-67; also Fay, op. cit., pp. 75-76, no— II. 278. The odium attaching to Kant as tending toward skepticism did not attach to Lotze, who "tried to give a new turn to logic by urging that its object was not ultimately concerned with a priori noetic elements, or stoichiology, " as Hamilton had charged. Instead of being analyt- ic, he method was synthetic, his task being to work out and put together a system of coherent conclusions which would appear as self-evident by a criterion that was at bottom aesthetic and that would circumvent the idolatry of experi- ence and skepticism. — G. S. Hall, loc. cit., p. 150. 279. For an account of how the study of political science, law, and economics developed out of the common matrix of moral philosophy as taught in American colleges (under the aegis, first, of Grotius and Pufendorf and, later, of Locke and Hutcheson), see Anna Haddow, Political Science in American Colleges, 1636- igoo (N.Y., 1939), pp. 1-82. 280. Eighteenth-century texts approached the study of ethics from the theological point of view, teaching that virtue consists in likeness to God. By a slow transition, lasting until the midnineteenth century, the concept of morality as a code revealed in Scripture was transformed into the concept that morality is best studied "in the innate intuitions and sen- timents of men." This humanizing process, as Hall points out, was effected by the Scottish schools in conjunction with the teaching of Shaftesbury and the Cambridge Platonists. Jouffroy's Introduction to Ethics (translated by W.H. Charming in 1842), with its historical account of the English, French, and German schools, gave added impetus to the study of ethics and particularly to the more humanistic interpretation of it. 281. The ethical theories of the French and German writers were presented by Walker chiefly for the purpose of historical informa- tion. In the years 1850 to 1857, when ethics received his chief attention, he used Stewart as a text. In the above-mentioned list he included, however, Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten and Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (available in English translation by J. W. Semple, 1838), Schleiermacher's Entwurf eines Systems der Sillenlehre, and Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophic des Rechts. — Rand, Harv. Grad. Mag. (Dec, 1928), pp. 190-91. 282. Hickok's system of ethics was widely influential in its day, being used at Mt. Holyoke Notes to Pages 308-9 665 Seminary, Minnesota, and Wisconsin in the seventies and eighties. 283. Mark Hopkins, Lectures on Moral Science (Boston, 1862), p. viii. 284. George P. Schmidt, The Old Time Col- lege President (N.Y., 1930), pp. 122-23. 285. Just as in the fields of logic and ethics, the conservatives in the main did not quite ignore idealism but rather made their defense against it as best they could, so in the field of metaphysics. This important change took place about the middle of the nineteenth century — about the time when Transcendentalism was actively reaching beyond the confines of Boston and Concord and making converts wherever Emerson and Alcott spread the doctrine by lectures, and others like Clarke and Parker, carried it through their contributions in the periodicals. 286. Texts most generally used were Stew- art's Philosophy of Mind (1828), Abercrombie's Intellectual Powers (1830), Upham's Mental Philosophy (1831), Rauch's Psychology (1840), Schmucker's Psychology (1842), Hickok's Ra- tional Psychology (1848) and Empirical Psychol- ogy (1854), Wayland's Elements of Intellectual Philosophy (1854), Mahan's System of Intellectu- al Philosophy (1854), Haven's Mental Philoso- phy (1857), Porter's On the Intellect (1868), and Bascom's Psychology (1869). All these texts, except Stewart's and Abercrombie's, acknowledge a greater or lesser indebtedness to German speculation. In certain cases they adopt the Kantian terminology, and in the cases of Hickok and Mahan, go so far as to attempt a harmony of the German and Scottish points of view as well as terminology. 287. Widely read in ancient, British, and Continental sources, Upham was also a student of German scholarship, his first published work being a translation from Latin of Jahn's Bibli- cal Archaeology (1823). Various stories are related of his early struggles with Kant, but it appears that his tripartite division of the facul- ties was derived not directly from Kant but from Asa Burton's Essay on Some of the First Principles of Metaphysics (1824). — Fay, op. cit., pp. 91-109, 183, n. 57; DAB, XIX, 123-24. 288. Fay, op. cit., pp. 125, 207, n. 159; Haag, op. cit., p. 221. 289. A graduate of Union College, at Sche- nectady, he became Professor of Christian Theology at Western Reserve in 1836, moved thence to Auburn Theological Seminary, and finally in 1852 to Union College to become Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, and President in 1866. 290. DAB, IX, 5-6; Fay, op. cit., pp. 120-25. 291. In this "super- Kantian transcendental- ism" he stressed the "constructive" powers of the mind. See Fay, op. cit., p. 91, and W. T. Harris' review of Hickok's Creator and Creation (1872) in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy , VI, iv (Oct., 1872), 383-84. "Accepting the current of distinction between the faculties of the sensibility, understanding, and reason, Hickok credited the reason with an intuitive insight of 'comprehension' altogether different from the discursive procedure of the under- standing."— DAB, IX, 5-6. 292. First published, N.Y., 1854; 2nd ed., N.Y., 1857; rev. ed., Boston, 1882. It was used at Beloit College, for example, from 1866 to 1896, in the classes of Professor James J. Blais- dell, a man known as an absolute idealist, a "Christian philosopher," who rejected both realism and pragmatism. See Ed. D. Eaton, Historical Sketches of Beloit College (N.Y., 1928), p. 204. Hickok had other influential followers in the American academic tradition. His text- book in ethics was used as late as 1877 at Wis- consin in the classes of President Bascom. President J. H. Seelye, who held the chair of philosophy at Amherst from 1858 to 1895, was one of Hickok's staunchest allies. He believed "completely in the transcendental philosophy as presented by Dr. Hickok," and was himself a student of German as well as a translator. O. W. Wight, editor of philosophical books and in charge of philosophy at Hamilton College, dedicated one of his works to Hickok "as a token of the editor's admiration of one of the very ablest metaphysicians America has pro- duced." — The Philosophy of Sir William Hamil- ton, arr. and ed. by O. W. Wight for Use in Schools and Colleges, (N.Y., 1853). It became customary to speak of Hickok as the "ablest dialectician of his day" — an opinion in which the Hegelian Harris, no mean dialectician him- self, concurred. See his review of Hickok's Logic of Reason, Universal and Eternal (187 3) in JoSP, IX, li (Apr., 1875), 222-23. Hickok and Harris exchanged letters in the next four numbers of the Journal, in which they set forth their differences in interpreting Kant's and Hegel's "Transcendental Logic," the conclusion of which was that while they differed on details, they agreed on essentials. For an interesting statement of Hickok's plan for a comprehensive program of graduate study at Union College (which gave consider- able emphasis to the idealist point of view), see his "The College Course and Its Enlargements for Graduates," Bibliolheca Sacra, X, i (Jan., 1853), 162. 293. Haven was by no means an idealist, but his tendency was to attempt the same bridging of the gap between contending philosophies 666 Notes to Pages 309-10 which was essayed by Hickok. His book is note- worthy for its clear, straightforward style and historical perspective, all of which made it a significant book not only in its own right but as offering a clear presentation of German ideal- ism, including Kantian epistemology. Cf. Fay, op. cit., pp. 126, 207, n. 162. 294. In the Preface to the edition of 1857 Mahan wrote: "The individuals for whom I feel most indebted as a philosopher are Coleridge, Cousin, and Kant — three luminaries of the first order." In later editions of Intellectual Philoso- phy (1854 and 1857), however, he described idealism as dangerous, because it builds on the "as if" basis and is therefore "subversive of all the principles of morality and religion." — Ed. of 1857, pp. 331-41, 388-90; see also the attack of Thomas C. Upham, Professor at Bowdoin, upon Transcendentalism, in his Mental Philoso- phy (1869), pp. 390-93- In Mahan we have another case in which German thought colors an American philo- sophic point of view in certain particulars, but leaves him still unsympathetic to any total system of idealism. Toward the end of his career Mahan published a Critical History of Philosophy (2 vols., N.Y., 1883). 295. See Fay, op. cit., pp. 146-47, 311, notes 26-29. 296. Symptomatic of what obtained in the larger schools is what took place at Harvard. In 1 868- 1 869 Harvard had two professors of philosophy; twenty years later the corps of instructors was more than five times as large; for three courses in 1 868-1 869, there were twenty-four in 1896-1897. For schools like Brown, Williams, and Princeton, see their catalogs for the appropriate years; also A. C. Armstrong, Jr., "Philosophy in American Colleges," Ed. Rev., XIII, i (Jan., 1897), 10-22 ; and George P. Adams and Wm. P. Montague (eds.), Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements (2 vols., N.Y., 1930), I, 16, 20, 29-30. 297. Experimental psychology, which has since split off into an independent subject, accounted for a good part of the growth. Logic, now given less attention, if offered at all, became a part of the introductory course rather than a separate discipline for upperclassmen. Ethics as a subject gained in breadth and depth and occupied a relatively larger share of the stu- dent's time. Before 1900 there was only an insignificant amount of research in America in the history of philosophy, but it was recognized as a much needed development for the future. The course entitled Introduction to Philosophy came much into vogue. The material was ordi- narily organized around special problems, and the student was encouraged to work out his own belief after studying many different points of view. Courses in the Philosophy of Nature interpreting the meaning of evolutionary the- ory were sometimes offered ; likewise a combina- tion of ethics and the philosophy of religion. Some schools offered courses in rational psy- chology; in others the point of departure was the study of an epistemological or metaphysi- cal problem ; the larger schools treated psychol- ogy as a separate subject. It was introduced at Harvard in 1876, at Yale in 1881, at Princeton in 1883; Johns Hopkins established an experi- mental laboratory in 188 1. — Armstrong, loc. cit., pp. 15, 16-17, x 9- 298. Rand, loc. cit., pp. 195, 199. 299. In the Middle West such advocates of education reform as Calvin Stowe, Michael Frank, and the more enlightened German- American element (of Wisconsin, for instance), with their direct knowledge of the newest con- tinental methods, had successfully pressed for the organization of elementary and secondary schools with modern features borrowed directly from Europe, and primarily from Prussia; but to President Tappan of Michigan goes the larger share of the credit for charting the plan of the future American university. In the years fol- lowing his assumption of the presidency the successive calendars of Michigan carried the statement: "The system of Public Instruction adopted by the state of Michigan is copied from the Prussian, acknowledged to be the most perfect in the world." — Herbert Adams, "The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities," Report of the Commissioner of Education for i886-i88y, II, 89. Tappan was an eastern-born Presbyterian clergyman of Dutch stock who had studied at Union College and Auburn Theological Semi- nary. Before coming to Michigan in 1852, he had made a name for himself as the author of speculative works on logic, the freedom of the will, the philosophy of university education. Between 1832 and 1839 he held the chair of intellectual philosophy at the University of the City of New York. From a firsthand acquaint- ance with continental higher schools, gained on a trip to Europe in 1852, he derived confirma- tion for the idea already made familiar to him through the writings of Cousin, Horace Mann, and a host of New England critics of the Ameri- can college system, that American colleges, stagnating with their futile narrow perpetua- tion of the English organization and curriculum, needed to be shaken into a lively realization of the larger, broader cultural functions in the new age. Unlike so many critics of American colleges including, above all, Francis Wayland, Notes to Page 311 661 who supported the idea that salvation lay in the direction of increased practicality (in the broad- ening of the curriculum to include science, modern languages, and professional schools), Tappan urged that the university should be- come the repository for the highest cultural and intellectual activity of the age, the refuge of men with the true scholarly spirit, an assem- blage of disinterested, mature, disciplined students in every field of human endeavor; not a dispensary for that alone which is of immedi- ate practical usefulness to the builders of Western commercial enterprise. 300. Henry P. Tappan, University Education, pp. 48-50, 68; Perry, op. cit., pp. 222-23. 301. People ridiculed him for using the title of Chancellor, with its suggestion of the Ger- man Kanzler, instead of the term President, which to them seemed less foreign and arro- gant. He drew to the faculty a number of Ger- man-trained men, probably no higher propor- tion than was to be found at Harvard at the time, but all of them chosen for broad human- istic capacities as inspiring teachers. As director of the Michigan observatory he called Dr. Briinnow from Berlin, a brilliant scientist, who shortly married Tappan's daughter. Beloved by his students, widely respected for his achieve- ments in creating a foundation of such im- pressive solidarity and scope amidst the tur- moil of frontier life, Tappan nevertheless had the defects of his greatness, and in his vision of an ideal failed to cope with petty but none- theless important problems of day-by-day administration. 302. Jacob Gould Schurman (1854-1942), Cornell's third president, continued the policies of White. He spent two years in Berlin and Gottingen studying philosophy and later taught the subject in the newly founded Sage School of Philosophy at Ithaca, N.Y. 303. See Faust, op. cit., II, 201-49; J. A. Walz, German Influence in American Education and Culture (Phila., 1936), pp. 43-56; C. F. Thwing, The American and German University (N.Y., 1928); B. A. Hinsdale, loc. cit., I, 591- 629; Herbert B. Adams, loc. cit., II, 8off. For acknowledgments of White's debt to conti- nental models, see his Autobiography (2 vols., N.Y., 1905), I, 191, 272, 291. 304. G. S. Morris, "University Education," Univ. of Mich. Philos. Papers, 1st ser., No. 1 (Ann Arbor, 1886), pp. 38-39. 305. JoSP, XIII, iii (Oct., 1879), 398-99. It is to be noted, however, that Johns Hopkins under President Gilman appeared in the eyes of some to be "lukewarm towards philosophy" ; that is to say, the school emphasized philology and laboratory sciences but appeared less in- terested in supporting philosophy. See Fabian Franklin, Life of Daniel Coit Gilman (N.Y., 1910), p. 227. G. Stanley Hall, the herald of experimental psychology, and George S. Morris, representing speculative philosophy, were simultaneously invited to lecture at Johns Hopkins, both being "on trial for a chair" there. The decision went in favor of experimen- tal psychology, and Hall was appointed, while Morris felt distinctly that the "times seemed against him," and not even Hopkins was sym- pathetic toward the idealism which Morris championed, and for which he subsequently labored at the University of Michigan. See R. W. Wenley, op. cit., pp. 138-40, 147-53, Ior the influence of the conservative point of view on curricular reforms, and for the adoption of German educational practices, see Noah Por- ter, The American Colleges and the American Public (new ed., N.Y., 1878). 306. The progress made at Michigan and Hopkins is to be observed also at Columbia and Harvard. While in 1880-1881 Columbia had one professor of philosophy, ten years later there were four, sharing the fields of philoso- phy, psychology, ethics, and anthropology. The offerings in the graduate school were especially rich in the history of philosophy and were taught almost exclusively from texts by Ger- man authors. Among books used were Zeller's Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie, Ueber- weg's History of Philosophy (Volume I of the Morris translation of 1871), Schwegler's History of Philosophy, Erdmann's Geschichte der Philo- sophie, and works of Harms, Kuno Fischer, Stockl, Volkmann, Lotze, Hamilton, Sidgwick, Spencer, and von Hartmann. By 1894-1895 Columbia was using Zeller's Outlines of Greek Philosophy, Falckenberg's History of Modern Philosophy, and Windelband's History of Phi- losophy (in the Tufts translation of 1893). The graduate course was divided into three main divisions: The General History of Philosophy; the Philosophy of Kant and his Successors Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herbart, and Scho- penhauer; and Contemporary Psychologists (using Wundt, Volkmann, Ribot, Miinsterberg, James, and Baldwin as texts). — -A History of Columbia University, ij54~igo4 (N.Y., 1904), pp. 278-99. At Harvard in 1 885-1 886 the philosophical offerings were arranged in three groups accord- ing to degree of difficulty: (1) introductory courses; (2) advanced courses for undergradu- ates and graduates, including (a) Systematic courses, (b) Historical courses — including Indian, Greek. French, German, and British, and (c) courses on individual men — including Kant, Hegel, and Lotze; and (3) Research 6G8 Notes to Pages 311-12 courses for graduates and specialists (semina- ries). A staff of three full-time professors and one assistant professor in 1 885-1 886 offered the following: (1) History of Philosophy. Ferrier's Lectures on Greek Philosophy. Outlines of Modern Philosophy. (2) Psychology and Logic. Bain's The Senses and the Intellect. Jevon's Elementary Lessons in Logic. (3) Elementary Philosophy in Connection with Ethical and Regious Questions. Royce's Religious Aspects of Philosophy. (4) Ethics. Earlier English Ethics. Mill's Utilitarianism. Kant's Theory of Ethics. Lectures and Theses. (5) English Phi- losophy. Locke, Berkeley, Hume. (6) Earlier French Philosophy from Descartes to Leibnitz and German Philosophy from Kant to Hegel. (7) German Philosophy of the Present Day. Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vor- stellung, Hartmann's Philosophic des Unbe- wussten. Lotze's Metaphysic (omitted 1885- 1886). (8) Hegel's Phdnomenologie (omitted 1885-1886). (9) Special Advanced Study and Experimental Research in Psychology. (10) Philosophy of Religion. (11) Practical Ethics of Modern Society. Studies in Social Reforms, Temperance, Charity, Labor, etc. (12) Philosoph- ical Theism. History of the Chief Philosophical Controversies about the Being and Nature of God. Discussions and Theses (omitted 1885- 1886). (13) Modern Discussion of the Philoso- phy of Nature. Spinoza. Modern Monism. Spencer's Theory of Evolution. — G. S. Morris, "University Education," loc. cit., pp. 37-38. 307. For a succinct description of the typi- cal college curriculum (in this case Amherst), see James H. Tufts, "What I Believe," in G. P. Adams and W. P. Montague (eds.), Con- temporary American Philosophy, II, 336. 308. Small colleges continued to teach But- ler's Analogy and Evidences of Natural Theolo- gy (using usually Hopkins' Evidences) through- out the period. At Beloit, for instance, the course in Evidences was kept until 1 900-1901. — Ed. D. Eaton, op. cit., p. 204. The history of philosophy was not introduced into Luther College (Decorah, la.) until 1912-1913. At the University of North Carolina in 1889 the course consisted of Christian Evidences, with electives in the history of philosophy and natural theolo- gy; while at Mount Holyoke in 1887 the offer- ings were Hickok's Psychology and Ethics, Moral Science, the History of Art (using the Outlines from Liibke), Theism and Christian Evidences, Studies from Fischer's Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief, Wright's Logic of Christian Evidences, Butler's Analogy, and four years of Bible study (see Mrs. Sarah D. Stow, op. cit., pp. i5off.). Even at the new University of Chicago, still dominated during the nineties by men trained in American theological seminaries Evidences of Christianity and Apologetics were offered regularly. — Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (N.Y., 1934) P- 43- F° r the religious atmosphere at Hopkins in the late eighties see ibid., pp. 38-49, 55. Resistance to evolutionist and materialist thinkers was as strong as that against idealism. So long as it was possible, some larger schools like Yale continued to measure every doctrine that claimed a right to enter into the philosoph- ical courses by the yardstick of Christian orthodoxy. See President Porter's testimony in Fifteen Years in the Chapel of Yale College, p. 382. The question of permitting Professor Wm. G. Sumner to use Spencer's Study of Sociology in the classroom occasioned a two-year-long controversy, in which President Porter assailed the work for its assumption of evolutionism, its implied attacks on theism, and its offences against good taste and decency. — Dorfman, op. cit., p. 43. 309. See H. G. Townsend, op. cit., pp. 103-4. In 1887 the Princeton offerings in philosophical electives were the following: History of Philoso- phy, Metaphysics, Science and Religion, Com- parative Politics, International and Constitu- tional Law, Physiology and Psychology, Peda- gogics, Archaeology, and History of Art. Mental Philosophy was required in the Junior year. — V. L. Collins, Princeton (N.Y., 1914), pp. 3 21 . 323- 310. "Materialism in Germany," Presby. Quar. and Princeton Rev., IV, ii (Apr., 1875), 273-305. esp. p. 283. 311. "The Scottish Philosophy, as Contrast- ed with the German," Princeton Rev., n.s., X, iv (Nov., 1882), 326-44, esp. p. 337. See also his Realistic Philosophy Defended in a Philosophic Series (N.Y., 1887), pp. 16-18. 312. Problems of Philosophy and Principles of Epistcmology and Metaphysics (N.Y., 1905), pp. vii-viii, 333. 313. "Atheism in Colleges," North Amer. Rev., CXXXII, i (Jan , 1881), 32-35. The course at Wisconsin in 1877 included Deductive and Inductive Logic, under Professor Carpenter, and Psychology, Ethics, Aesthetics, and Natural Theology, under President Bascom, who used Jevon's and Fowler's logics, Hickok's Ethics, Chadbourne on Natural Theology, and Bascom's Psychology and Science of Beauty. — JoSP, XI, ii (Apr., 1877), 217. As G. Stanley Hall observed in 1900, the Scottish philosophy continued to recommend itself to American conditions because it "held to an immediate conviction of right and wrong, nonsuited the whole question of reality, which was ascribed to immediate sense, and discussed Notes to Pages 312-13 669 in the most lucid way practical matters of asso- ciation, desire, will, feelings, raising no quarrel with religion, and not unsettling the young .... Under President McCosh ... it developed an amiable modus vivendi with the new psychology and with religion; it has given to education in this country about all the philosophic basis yet popularly recognized ; and it has been in whole- some and fructifying rapport with practical life at every point." — "College Philosophy Forum, XXIX (Mar. -Aug., 1900), 409-22, esp. pp. 413-14- 314. Most important among these are George S. Morris, professor at Michigan and Hopkins, who studied in Berlin for two years after 1864; Julius H. Seelye, president and professor of philosophy at Amherst from 1858 to 1895, studied at Halle in 1852-1853; Josiah Royce, professor at Harvard, studied at Gottingen in 1876 and heard Lotze in Berlin; James McKeen Cattel, professor of psychology at Columbia after 1890, studied at Gottingen; Benj. E. Smith, second translator of Schwegler's History of Philosophy and editor of the Century Dic- tionary, studied at Gottingen in 1880-1881; Borden P. Bowne, professor of philosophy in Boston University and dean of the Graduate School after 1876, studied at Gottingen in 1875 ; G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University and professor of psychology and pedagogy, spent six years as a student in various German institutions between 1870 and 1882 ; George W. Howison, lecturer in philosophy at Michigan and head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California from 1884 to 1909, studied in Europe in 1880-1882, chiefly at Berlin; Henry B. Smith, professor at Union Theological Seminary between 1850 and 1874, studied philosophy, theology, and church history at Halle and Berlin in 1837-1838; and George M. Duncan, professor at Yale from 1888, studied under Wundt, Zeller, and Ribot. In addition there were the German-American Charles P. Krauth, professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the University of Pennsyl- vania, and the prominent German-born Hugo Miinsterberg at Harvard. 315. At Virginia were Georg Blattermann and Scheie de Vere, European-trained teachers of foreign languages. At South Carolina was Francis Lieber, who raised political ethics to the status of an independent study. At Cincinnati, later Detroit and New York, was the Hegelian Johann B. Stallo. At Cornell, Bayard Taylor, famous as an authority on German life and literature, was employed from 1870 to 1877 to lecture on German literature. At Amherst was John F. Genung (Ph.D., Leipzig), who taught rhetoric and English literature, and also H. B. Richardson, German-educated professor of modern languages from 1869 to 1878. For numerous others who fall within this category, see A. B. Faust, op. cit., II, 201-49, 672-76. 316. Sarah D. Stow, op. cit., p. 249. Cook took for his aim in this course to "present the results of the freshest German, English, and American scholarship on the most important and difficult topics concerning the relation of Religion and Science." — Boston Monday Lec- tures. Transcendentalism with Preludes on Current Events (Boston, 1878). According to Hall, it was Cook who first made Lotze popular in this country. Cook followed Lotze's solution of the conflict between faith and science; but he was no careful student of metaphysics, and his "representation of Lotzianism was most unfortunately misleading"; yet he succeeded for a time in convincing the young clergy that the most recent discoveries actually confirmed the Biblical story. — G. S. Hall, Founders of Modern Psychology, pp. 94-96. 317. Stow, op. cit., p. 249. 318. JoSP, XI, i (Jan., 1877), 103-7. 319. See White's Some Practical Influences of German Thought upon the United States, Address delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the German Society, Held in New York, October 4, 1884; also Seven Great Statesmen (N.Y., 1910); and Methods of Teaching History (Symposium of White, C. K. Adams, R. T. Ely, and others, Volume I of the Pedagogical Library, ed. by G. Stanley Hall; 2nd ed., Boston, 1885). 320. Peirce had three articles in Volume II, Howison appeared in Volumes V, XV, XVII, and XIX; Hall in VI, VII, and XI; Morris in X, XI, XV, and XVII; Hickok in X; James in XII and XIII; Royce in XII and XV; and Dewey in XVI, XVII, and XVIII. 321. Principles of Philosophy (forming Volume I of Collected Papers, ed. by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge, 1931), Preface, p. xi, and p. 6. 322. Collected Papers, V, 274. Regarding the Germanic derivation of Peirce's pragmatism, see John Dewey, "The Development of American Pragmatism," in Studies in the History of Ideas, II (N.Y., 1925), 351-77, esp. PP- 35 I_ 54- A good discussion of Peirce's rela- tion to Kant and Hegel on the one hand and to Emerson and James on the other is to be found in Frederic I. Carpenter, "Charles Peirce, Pragmatist," New Engl. Quar., XIV, i (Mar., I94i). 34-48. 323. See Collected Papers, I, 6. In the articles printed in 1868 in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Peirce stood apart from the move- ment to which the journal owed its existence. Not Hegel, nor Kant, but mathematical C70 Notes to Pages 313-14 science, medieval logic, and Descartes at that time provided his starting point. Yet "what is remarkable in all this is . . . the sureness with which Peirce . . . arrived for himself at what is essential in the teaching of Kant, the doctrine that 'the real object of knowledge is determined by mind.'" See J. H. Muirhead, "Peirce's Place in American Philosophy," Philosophical Rev., XXXVII, v (Sept., 1928), 446. On the basis of Duns Scotus he formulated an independent definition of the meaning and place of univer- sal in the being of things (ibid., p. 477). This, Professor Muirhead points out, is not to be identified with what Royce, in agreement with Hegel, called the abstract universal, though there is a clear similarity between Peirce's con- ception and Royce's "concrete universals." 324. Ibid., pp. 477-78. Unlike Hegel, Peirce was not willing to reduce all experience to thought and immediacy. "There was feeling and there was will. Nevertheless experience through which there does not run a thread of thought like a strain of music through notes is a mere confusion and no true experience of any- thing." 325. "The place of the thing-in-itself has been taken once for all by the thing at the determination of which we arrive when the process, as just described, has been brought to completeness in an exhaustive and harmonious experience. This for us must remain an ideal; for its existence as an ideal witnesses to our belief in a community of minds or in a common mind (Peirce believed that the one implies the other) in which it will one day be realized." Muirhead points out that Peirce, while not willing to use this argument as a proof for the existence of a universal mind, to which all truth was already present, thought that Royce's attempt to take this further step was well worthy of consideration. "But he himself could see his way no farther than to appeal to the harmony which the belief in it brings into life both from the side of theory and from practice. Like Coleridge he did not believe that the being of God was demonstrable in any strict sense of the word, but like Coleridge he was ready to say 'assume it and all becomes clear.'" — Ibid., PP- 478-79- 326. Principles of Philosophy, pp. 18, 42. 327. Ibid., Preface, p. vii. 328. Muirhead, loc. cit., p. 478. 329. See especially his Principles of Philoso- phy. 330. See H. G. Townsend, "The Pragmatism of Peirce and Hegel," Philosophical Rev., XXXVIII, iv (July, 1928), 297-303. 331. Ibid., p. 298. In The Simplest Mathema- tics (Collected Papers, IV, 6), he declared: "Hegel, so far as I knew him through a book by Vera [Aug. Vera, author of Introduction a la philosophic de Hegel, Paris, 1855, and a frequent contributor to the Journal of Speculative Phi- losophy], repelled me." 332. Royce received the doctorate at Hop- kins in 1878 and Dewey in 1884. Much of De- wey's early interest in Hegel can be traced to the teaching of Morris. See R. M. Wenley, George S. Morris (N.Y., 1917), 313-21. 333. After graduating at Dartmouth, he entered Union Theological Seminary and came under the influence of Henry B. Smith, who determined Morris' choice of professors when he went to Germany. Smith also urged him to make the translation of Ueberweg and secured for him a position at Bowdoin. — Wenley, op. cit., pp. 88, 91, 96, 120, 153, 218. Following two years of study in Europe, mainly at Berlin under Trendelenberg, the Aristotelian, Morris began in 1870 to teach modern languages and literatures at the University of Michigan, where he remained until his death, except for a period of lecturing at Hopkins during 1877-1880. In 1 88 1 he became a member of the Department of Philosophy at Michigan, becoming head in 1885. For further details, see Wenley. 334. See his article, "University Education," Univ. of Mich. Philos. Papers, 1st ser.. No. 1 (Ann Arbor, 1886); also Wenley, op. cit., pp. 308-26. 335. Besides the two works by Morris, the series (known as "Griggs' Philosophical Clas- sics" from the name of the publisher, S. C. Griggs & Co., of Chicago) included the follow- ing, all edited to a uniform plan: (1) Schelling's Transcendental Idealism, by John Watson, 1882; (2) Fichte's Science of Knowledge, by C.C.Everett, 1884; (3) Hegel's /Esthetics, by J. S. Kedney, 1885; (4) Kant's Ethics, by Noah Porter, 1886; (5) Leibnitz' New Essays Concern- ing the Human Understanding, by W. T. Harris, 1890. The aim of the series, stated in the pro- spectus, was "especially to show, as occasion may require, in what way German thought contains the natural complement of the much- needed corrective, of British speculation." — G. S. Morris, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Preface, p. v; see also his British Thought and Thinkers (Chicago, 1880), the introductory chapter, esp. pp. 19-22. 336. Professor Wenley (op. cit., pp. 321-23) observed that Morris' residence in Germany brought him into contact with the same group of older conservative teachers of whom Smith himself was the disciple. Smith could not answer the questions that disturbed Morris; neither could Smith's mentors. For a time, in the seventies, Morris tried to fall back on a Notes to Pages 314-16 671 theory of the relation between Thought and Being advanced by Trendelenberg, though soon afterward he found it insufficient and internally inconsistent because of its eclectic character. 337. Ibid., pp. 254-56. 338. Ibid., pp. 271-72. 339. In his undergraduate work at Marietta College, he had heard the president lecture "brilliantly in support of the Baconian method, which might have been called his hobby, and against German a priorism and its results." See J.W. Buckhamand J. M. Stratton, eds., George Holmes Howison . . . (Berkeley, Calif., 1934). In St. Louis about 1865 the stimulation of Brokmeyer and Harris turned him seriously to study the German idealists. From 1872 to 1878 he was professor of logic and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lectured at Harvard on ethics during 1879- 1880, and during the next two years studied in Europe, chiefly in Berlin, where he came under the influence of Dubois-Reymond, Ebbinghaus, Paulsen, Lasson, Zeller, and Michelet. In 1883-1884 he lectured at Michigan, and in 1884 was called to California, where he headed a strong and influential department until 1910. 340. Jean Wahl, The Pluralist Philosophies of England and A merica, tr. by Fred Rothwell (London, 1925), pp. 222-23. 341. "He seems not to have studied the phi- losophy of Lotze nor that of Renouvier [two men who stand at the source of pluralism] ; the only predecessors of his pluralism that he quotes are Aristotle, Leibnitz, and Kant." — Ibid., pp. 223-24. It was in Kant that he first found the conception of the ideal domain, the kingdom of ends, that is essential to his phi- losophy. He embraced the entire a priori theory of Kant, finding the Kantian distinction between noumenon and phenomenon basic. In his criticism of evolutionary philosophy he insisted that nature as studied by science must be treated as phenomenal and nothing more, while the real must be conceived as mental and plural. His debt to Leibnitz is apparent in his doctrine of the nature of souls. See ibid., pp. 228-29, and H. G. Townsend, op. cit., pp. 151— 53- 342. G. Stanley Hall, in Founders of Modern Psychology (1895), has given English readers a detailed and sympathetic sketch of this best- known German psychologist among the post- Hegelians. Professor Cohen points out that Royce was profoundly influenced by Lotze in his general attitude to the importance of the "practical" in philosophy. Indeed, Royce him- self frankly acknowledged his debt to Lotze. See Philosophical Rev., XXV, iii (May, 1916), 153. 282. 343. Ibid., p. 153. John Dewey declared that "Royce gives a corrected restatement of the Kantian problem." He does away with the Ding-an-sich. See Papers in Honor of fosiah Royce on his Sixtieth Birthday (n.p., 1916), p. 22. 344. Jean Wahl, op. cit., p. 38. 345. Howison, in Papers in Honor of Josiah Royce, p. 5. 346. Ibid., p. 20. 347. For Royce's own statement of indebted- ness to Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, and the Romantics, see ibid., pp. 9, 282. 348. Immanuel Kant IJ24-1924, Symposium ed. by E. C. Wilson (New Haven, 1925), p. 15; G. P. Adams and W. P. Montague, eds., Contemporary American Philosophy, Personal Statements (2 vols., N.Y., 1930), I, 23; see Palmer's Autobiography of a Philosopher (Boston and N.Y., 1930) for a fuller account of his life. 349. Adams and Montague, eds., op. cit., I, 55- 350. See Katherine Gilbert, "James E. Creighton as Writer and Editor," Journal of Philosophy, XXII, x (May 7, 1925), 256-64. 351. Born in Vermont, Dewey studied at the University of Vermont and there came directly under the influence of the tradition of German philosophy instituted by James Marsh, then being actively promulgated by Marsh's succes- sor, Professor Torrey. The latter introduced him to the German classical philosophers (see Adams and Montague, eds., op. cit., II, 14-15). He entered the graduate school at Hopkins in 1884, where he heard Peirce, but was in closer sympathy with George S. Morris. At this time he sent some articles to W. T. Harris, which were published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy , and he received encouragement from the editor. The teaching of Morris was perhaps the strongest influence in these years, and it ended by making Dewey an Hegelian for a period. See Dewey's testimony given in R. M. Wenley, op. cit., p. 318. 352. Sidney Hook, John Dewey, an Intellectu- al Portrait (N.Y., 1939), pp. 10-15. Dewey expressed his relation to Hegel in these words : "I drifted away from Hegelianism [after 1884]. . . . Nevertheless I should never think of ignoring, much less denying . . . that acquaintance with Hegel has left a permanent deposit in my thinking. ... In the content of his ideas there is often an extraordinary depth ; in many of his analyses ... an extraordinary acuteness. Were it possible for me to be a devotee of any system, I still should believe 672 Notes to Pages 317-18 that there is greater richness and . . . insight in Hegel than in any other single systemat- ic philosophy . . . though when I say this I exclude Plato." — Adams and Montague (eds.), op. cit., II, 20-21. For further details regarding Dewey's Hegelian background, see Morgan G. White's The Origin of Dewey's Instrumentalism (N.Y., i 94 3). 353. See Jean Wahl, op. cit., pp. 29-33. 354. See Letters of William James, ed. by Henry James (2 vols., Boston, 1920), I, 142, 147. 355. Ibid., I, 87, 117. 356. Jean Wahl, op. cit., pp. 62, 192. 357. See James's direct testimony in Letters, I, 147, and Wahl, op. cit., pp. 62, 192. 358. See his "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," address before the Philo- sophical Union at the University of California, 1898, printed in P. R. Anderson and M. H. Fisch, eds.. Philosophy in America (N.Y. and London, 1939), p. 541. 359. Jean Wahl, op. cit., p. 72. 360. For details of Renouvier's debts to Kant, Berkeley, Hume, and others, see ibid., pp. 63-71, 72-73. 87. 361. Ibid., p. 88. His language in attacking the Hegelians was colorful and emphatic. He spoke of his "prejudice against all Hegelians, except Hegel himself .... Their sacerdotal airs! and their sterility! Contemplating their navels and the syllable oum!" — Letters, I, 265. See also I, 208. "The way these cusses slip so fluently off into 'Ideal,' the 'Jenseitige,' the 'Inner,' etc., etc., etc., and undertake to give a logical explanation of everything which is so palpably trumped up after the facts, and the reasoning of which is so grotesquely incapable of going an inch into the future, is both disgusting and disheartening. You never saw such a mania for going deep into the bowels of truth, with such an absolute lack of intuition and perception of the skin thereof. . . . but the era of it may be past now [1867] — I don't know." — Ibid., I, 94-95. This passage was written five years before James came into active personal contact with the American Hegelians, when he participated in the fifth Concord School by delivering three lectures on psychology. But already there is evident in his remarks something of the attitude which he later assumed toward the St. Louis- ans, though he condescended meanwhile to print his first two published articles in Harris' Journal (XII and XIII for 1878 and 1879, respectively). He could not forbear poking sly fun at Emery and McClure of the West and their "self-constituted leadership" in trying to reform Boston and Cambridge by means of the Hegelian precepts contained in the three tomes of Brokmeyer's translation of Hegel's Logic which they brought with them. Snider, years later, observed that James sometimes showed "a streak of that peculiar psychological distemper known to outsiders as Bostonitis — not dangerous, hardly offensive, but symptomatic of some mighty local and possible personal superiority." — D. J. Snider, St. Louis Movement, pp. 334-35. While he credited James with "bringing to the fore the cardinal discipline of the age — Psychology," he resented James's attitude toward himself, Brok- meyer, Harris, and the Hegelians from Quincy and expressed his resentment unequivocally. — Ibid., pp. 326-38. 362. Letters, II, 300. 363. Jean Wahl, op. cit., pp. 183, 186. Fech- ner was an "immanent and phenomenal abso- lutist," who vigorously opposed the Hegelian "transcendent and noumenal pantheism." He was comparatively little known outside the Continent. — Ibid., pp. 46-47; see also G. Stan- ley Hall, Founders of Modern Psychology, pp. 125-40, for a fuller treatment of Fechner. 364. For Lotze's pluralist and voluntarist interpretation of the real from the standpoint of ethical efficacy, and for his relation to Hegel, Herbart, and Fechner, see Wahl, op. cit., pp. 5Q-55- 365. See the articles by Otto F. Kraushaar: "What James' Philosophical Orientation Owed to Lotze," Philosophical Rev., XLVII, v (Sept., T 938), 5!7- 2 6; "Lotze's Influence on the Psychology of William James," ibid., XLIII, iii (May, 1936), 235-57; and "Lotze as a Factor in the Development of James's Radical Empiricism and Pluralism," ibid., XLVIII, v (Sept., 1939), 455-71- 366. Letters, I, 127. 367. Ibid., p. 120. 368. When in 1882 he made a tour of Europe, he went to the universities of Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, Liege, Paris, and Prague expressly to inform himself on the progress of psychology. He made the acquaintance of Stumpf and Mach at Prague, Munck and Baginsky at Berlin, and Wundt and Ludwig at Leipzig. In 1893 Helm- holtz paid a visit to James in Cambridge, and James kept up a correspondence with Stumpf for several years, as well as with Miinsterberg before he came to America. — Ibid., pp. 210, 230, 347- 369. Margaret Miinsterberg, Hugo Miinster- berg. His Life and Work (N.Y., 1922), pp. 29-51. 370. The son of a Norwegian immigrant farmer in the Middle West, Veblen became an observer of American life from the point of view of a critical, objective foreigner. Fully as im- portant as his college courses in the tradition Notes to Pages 318-19 673 of common-sense philosophy at Carle ton College was his learning the German language at an early age and his subsequent study of the works of Kant, Spencer, and other philosophers borrowed from a learned German-American friend, Dr. Prentz. — Dorfman, Thor stein Veb- len and His America, p. 30. 371. XVIII, iii (July, 1884), 260-74. Veblen was interested in tracing the development of Kant's ideas of determinism and moral freedom and interpreting the third Critique as an exposi- tion of a method of inductive reasoning as an active, practical, or pragmatical element in the life process. Though the article was praised by men like Harris and Howison, its tendency is, of course, to establish a method of thought in harmony with Darwinian science and to clear away such romantic and idealistic structures as the various Hegelian systems. 372. The Outlines of Metaphysics is one of a series of six books edited by Ladd. See Dorfman op. cit., pp. 53-54- 373. See Hall, Founders of Modern Psycholo- gy, p. 118; H. G. Townsend, op. cit., pp. 153-54. 374. Contemporary American Philosophy, Personal Statements, II, 239-57. For his criticism of what he called Royce's resolution of all imperfection in the absolute, see ibid., p. 246. Among others whose effectiveness was felt in American lecture halls in favor of German philosophy before 1900 are to be mentioned the following: James Hayden Tufts (1862-1942) and A. C. Armstrong (1860-1925) performed an impor- tant service in translating two important Ger- man histories of philosophy (Windelband's History of Philosophy, tr. by Tufts, 2nd ed., rev. and enl., N.Y., 1901 ; and History of Phi- losophy by Falckenberg, tr. by Armstrong, N. Y., 1903). Tufts was a student of President Seelye at Amherst; he studied in the Yale Divinity School, later taught at Michigan, and then spent a year at Berlin and Freiburg, where he received the doctorate. After 1892 he taught at the University of Chicago, where he worked in close sympathy with Dewey. Armstrong, professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University, was a realist devoted to the elucidation of the history of philosophy. Professor Walter C. Everett (1860-1936), of Brown University, who studied in Germany ( 1 895-1 896) at Berlin and Strassburg, taught a system of realism which was in part constructed on the basis of Schopenhauer's statement of the doctrine of the grades of being. "Work under Windelband in Strassburg," said Everett, "greatly influenced my study and teaching of the history of philosophy. . . . Many years be- fore one heard of emergent evolution or creative synthesis, it affected my attitude to the prob- lem of development, and also that of natural- ism." — Contemporary American Philosophy, I, 332, 338. Warner Fite (1867 ), Professor of Ethics at Princeton, who elaborated a system ofper- sonalism, studied at Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Divinity School before spending two years (1891-1893) in Germany.— Ibid., I, 359- E. V. McGilvary of Wisconsin (1864-1953) was a student of Howison at California. Though he moved far from Hegelian idealism, he stated that his acquaintance with Hegel "proved most useful." "Anyone who has studied Hegel sym- pathetically and thoroughly may violently revolt against his system ; but rebels often carry away much that is positive from that against which they rebel." — Ibid., II, 131. The Scottish-born professor of the Univer- sity of Michigan, Robert Mark Wenley (1861- 1920), was largely influenced by the Hegelian Ed. Caird. Wenley's work was directed to the end of teaching a "synthesis such as the post- Kantians formulated, but freed from their soaring romanticism." Hearing Lotze in the eighties, Wenley was for a time attracted to his teachings. — Ibid., II, 385-411. Finally, George M. Duncan (1857-1928) enjoyed a long career of teaching at New York University. Educated at this school, he spent three years at Jena, Leipzig, and Berlin under Eucken, Paulsen, Wundt, and Fischer. His most important contribution to American appreciation of German thought was his trans- lation, with notes and critical comments, of the Philosophical Works of Leibnitz (1890-1908). 375. Professor Townsend remarks of Dewey, for example: "His early training, like that of most of his generation . . . included a careful study of the Kantian and neo-Kantian philoso- phies. He retains many marks of an early Hegelianism. His revolt against idealism as a philosophy was neither a blind revolt nor a root-and-branch rejection. As a result of the range of his philosophical studies and the long period of his writing, there is scarcely an un- qualified, or, one is tempted to add, an unam- biguous dogma in his philosophy." — Philosoph- ical Ideas in the United States, p. 235 ; see also Riley, op. cit., pp. 323ft. Royce taught German Ethics in 1883-1884 and during 1 890-1 893 the Movement of German Thought from 1770 to 1830, in addition to a seminary in Metaphysics devoted to the discus- sion of the Hegelian system, and James taught a course in Kantian philosophy from 1896 to 1899. These examples can be multiplied mani- fold. C74 Notes to Pages 319-20 376. At Harvard, Bowen is credited with being the first to use German philosophical books in the original, in connection with his course in the history of philosophy. He con- ducted this course from its inception in 1868 un- til 1879, using as texts throughout the period Schwegler's Geschichte der Philosophic im Umriss and Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In his course in "Modern German Philosophy" offered by him from 1873-1874 until his retire- ment in 1889, the texts studied (in the original) were Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten and Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.- — Benj. Rand, "Philosophical In- struction at Harvard . . . ," Harv. Grad. Mag., XXXVIII (Mar., 1929), 198-99; see also pp. 301, 308. A distinct course in Kantian philoso- phy, aside from Bowen's course which empha- sized transcendentalism (but not exclusively) was introduced by Josiah Royce in 1890, and has since been taught regularly at Harvard. 377. A number of the titles listed below are from the compilation, made in 1895, by G. Stan- ley Hall, but many more are gathered from a number of other sources, notably from the descriptions of courses in college and university catalogs and from reports printed in the Jour- nal of Speculative Philosophy of philosophical instruction in the larger universities. Among the texts in most common use (with few exeptions before 1895) were the following: (1) Zeller's Geschichte der griechischen Philoso- phie (1844-1852), tr. by Alleyne in 1881, and used at Harvard under Palmer in the 8o's; (2) Heeren's Ancient Greece, tr. by Bancroft (1823), used at Union as early as 1844; (3) J. J. Elmen- dorf's Outlines of Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1876); (4) Falckenberg's History of Philosophy, tr. by A. C. Armstrong (1893); (5) Kuno Fischer's History of Modern Philosophy (7 vols., 1887); (6) Fr. Ueberweg's History of Philosophy, tr. by G. S. Morris (1871-1873), used at Harvard by Bowen as early as 1872- 1873; (7) Windelband's History of Philosophy, tr. by Tufts (1893) ; (8) Erdmann's Geschichte der Philosophie (3 vols., 1892-1897); (9) Harm's Die Philosophie seit Kant (1876); (10) F. Schle- gel's Philosophy of History, tr. by J. B. Robert- son (2 vols., 1835); (11) Hegel's Philosophy of History, tr. by J. Sibree (1857); (12) Wallace's Prolegomena to Hegel's Logic (1874); (13) Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vor- stellung, tr. by Haldane and Kemp (3 vols., 1883- 1886), used in the original at Harvard, ca. 1873 to 1889; (14) Kant's Religion within the Bounds of Reason, tr. by J. W. Semple (1838); (15) John Watson's Selections from Kant (1888); (16) Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, tr. by J. M. D. Meiklejohn (1855) and again by Max Miiller, the earlier version being used by Bowen at Harvard from 1869 to 1889; (17) Mahaffy's rescript of Kant's ^Esthetic and Analytic (1889) ; (18) Oswald Kulpe's Introduction to Philosophy, tr. by Pillsbury and Titchener (1895; repr. 1907); (19) Schwegler's History of Philosophy, tr. by J. H. Seelye in 1856, but used by Bowen in the German edition from 1868 to 1879; (20) Deussen's Elements of Metaphysics, tr. by C. M. Duff (1894); (21) Deussen's Outlines of Philosophy {ca. 1900); (22) Lubke's Aesthetics (ca. 1878); (23) Ed. von Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten (1868), used by Bowen from 1873 to 1889; (24) Hartmann's Philosophie des Sittlichen (1879); (25) G. V. Gizycki's Student's Manual of Ethical Philoso- phy (1889); (26) Volkmann's Psychology (1875); (27) Beneke's Elements of Psychology (1871); (28) H. Hoffding's Outline of Psychology (1891); (29) T. A. Ribot's German Psychology of To-day, tr. by J.M.Baldwin (1886); (30) George T. Ladd's Outlines of Lotze's Dictata in Psychology (1886); (31) Lotze's Metaphysics in Three Books — Ontology, Cosmology, and Psychology, ed. by Bosanquet (1884) ; (32) Lotze's System of Philosophy, Part I: Logic (1884); (33) Lotze's Microcosmos, tr. by E. Hamilton and E. E. C. Jones (2 vols.) ; (34) Wundt's Grundriss der Psychologic (10th ed., 1896), tr. by Charles H. Judd; and (35) Wundt's Vorlesungen iiber die Menschen- und Tierseele, tr. by Creighton and Titchener (3 vols., 1863). 378. G. Stanley Hall, "On the History of American College Textbooks," loc. cit., p. 160. 379. G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) had stud- ied at Williams in the class of 1867 under Mark Hopkins and John Bascom. On gradua- tion, he entered Union Theological Seminary and enrolled in Henry B. Smith's courses in philosophy and theology. Encouraged by Henry Ward Beecher to go to Germany, he took up in 1868 (aged 22) residence at Bonn and later Berlin, and heard Meyer, Lange (famous author of the Biblical commentaries), and Dorner, "whose philosophical theory he [Hall] epitomized and which later appeared in a series of articles in the Presbyterian Quarterly Review," of which H. B. Smith was then editor. In the course of his philosophical studies at Union and later at Antioch, he became deeply interested in Hegel and made occasional Sunday trips to St. Louis to be instructed by W. T. Harris. — Louis N. Wilson, G. Stanley Hall. A Sketch (N.Y., 1914), p. 55. He translated Rosencranz's epitome of Hegel's doctrine for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vols. VI, VII, and XI (1872, 1873, and 1877). Between inter- vals of teaching and study, he managed to return to Germany in the years 1870-1873, at Notes to Page 320 675 which time he read Zeller, Lotze, Fechner, and von Hartmann. Finally, in 1874, his reading of YVundt's Grundziige der physiologischen Psycho- logic caused him to plan to go a third time to Germany and to enter Wundt's laboratory. In the meantime he took the Ph.D. degree at Har- vard in 1878 under James, Everett, Palmer, Bowen, Bowditch, and Hedge; and between 1876 and 1878 he taught English at that school. During his third period in Germany (1878-1880) he devoted his attention to absorbing the techniques and principles of psychological research. He heard Helmholtz at Berlin and Wundt at Leipzig, and was in close contact with Fechner for a long period. Most important for his later development was the opportunity to become a co-worker in Wundt's psychologi- cal institute at Leipzig in the year of its found- ing. See Hall's own testimony regarding the unquestioned leadership taken by the German psychologists during the years (1870-1882) when he was repeatedly in Germany, as related in Founders of Modern Psychology, pp. v-vi, 42, 59- 380. Louis N. Wilson, op cit., p. 59; see also Hall's two-volume autobiography, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (London and N.Y., 1923)- 381. Among other notable innovators in the new field are to be mentioned the following: George Trumbull Ladd, who studied at Andover in 1869 and became a professor at Yale in 1881, was interested in both German psychology and in supporting idealism. In 1892 he was one of the founders of the American Psychological Association and became its second president. Like Lotze, whom he helped to make known in this country, he sought to combat materialism, to reconcile the opposing claims of the realists and the idealists, and to attain a realistic spiritualism, monistic yet verging on personalism. One of his main efforts was to acquaint America with German thought as exhibited in the post- Kantian idealists, and he thoroughly indoctrinated his graduate students in the works of Hegel and Wundt. His translations of Lotze were widely used, and his Elements of Physiological Psychology (1887) was one of the first handbooks on the subject in the English language. See Riley, op. cit., pp. 265-78. James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944), son of the president of Lafayette College, rivaled Hall and James in his interest in transferring to America the new German methods of experi- mental psychology. Between 1880 and 1888 he studied at Geneva, Paris, Gottingen, Leipzig, and Cambridge. For a time he was an assistant in psychology in Wundt's laboratory at Leipzig, where in 1886 he took the doctorate. In 1888 he returned to America to begin a long career of teaching at Pennsylvania, where he held the first chair of psychology established in this country. His large and well-equipped laboratory at Columbia later, with its nineteen rooms and twenty instructors, was an outstanding establishment in its day. At Princeton, James Mark Baldwin (1861- 1934) established a famous department of psychology, which was similarly close to German precedents. A graduate of Princeton in 1884, Baldwin studied at Berlin, Leipzig, and Freiburg, under Paulsen, Delitzsch, Wundt, Heinze, Stumpf, and Riehl. He became "an enthusiast for the new psychology, and took back with him the full outfit of ideas — Fechner's and Weber's laws, the technique of reaction- time experiments, theories of mind and body, and cognate points of view as pronounced by Lotze, Fechner, and Wundt." Like Hall, he en- joyed the "freedom and range of graduate study" inGermany. Lotze he named as the "most sober and reasonable of the nineteenth century Germans," the "master who became a source of inspiration then and a means of intellectual discipline long afterwards." Baldwin's theoreti- cal work "reached conclusions similar to those worked out by Munsterberg," and he elaborated a social theory of the self in agreement with that of Royce.Ini885 he translated Theodule Ribot's German Psychology of Today, an exposition of the work of Herbart, Lotze, Fechner, Wundt, and others. While he recognized the importance of German methods in raising psychology to the status of a separate discipline, in his later years, as Baldwin watched the development of Ger- man nationalism that led to World War I, he regretted the intense American emulation of German science in the eighties and nineties. "At that day, a German Ph.D. degree, or at least a residence in Germany for study, was almost indispensable to a young American teacher, wishing a post of college grade. In all the range of higher study — in philosophy, philology, physical science — German authori- ties were quoted, German methods adopted, and German approbation courted. The word 'seminar' came over with the thing, and studies became known as 'disciplines.' German govern- esses were placed in many American nurseries, and 'made in Germany' was as true of our education as of our children's toys and the cutlery of our kitchens. The real excellence of German microscopes and chronographs justi- fied the state of mind which gave so uncritical a reception to German Tdealismusse' and Ger- man 'Weltanschauungen' in general." Like earlier critics, he found that many learned German writers displayed a "show of mere- 676 Notes to Pages 320-23 tricious erudition," were interested in "dry-as- dust" minutiae of research, were blinded by "arrogant nationalism," and wrote in a style at once "heavy" and "obscure." — Baldwin, Be- tween Two Wars i86i—ig2i, Being Memoirs, Opinions and Letters Received (2 vols., Boston, 1926), I, 35. 382. A course entitled History of Philosophy was listed as early as 1821 at Columbia College, but there is nothing to indicate that its history was continuous, or that other institutions generally had such a course at the time. Lin- berg's translation in 1832 of Cousin's Introduc- tion to the History of Philosophy and Caleb S. Henry's version in 1841 of Bautain's Epitome of the History of Philosophy (repr. 1856, 1859, 1 861) were in use at Pennsylvania and Harvard by the middle years of the century. Hickok used Heeren's Ancient Greece at Union College as early as 1844, and by 1866 lectures in the history of philosophy were given regularly. Henry B. Smith of Amherst in 1847 expressed a desire to give such a course, and in 1856 Julius H. Seelye of Amherst, the friend and student of Hickok, translated Schwegler's History of Phi- losophy, thus making available the first really usable history for college classes. Reaching its fifth edition within fifteen years, and written by a late Hegelian who emphasized Kant and the post-Kantians, and devoting more than one- third of the book to the Germans from Kant to Hegel, the book became a powerful force in turning academic attention to German critical idealism. A student of Seelye's, Benjamin Eli Smith (1857-1913), on the staff at Hopkins during 1 880-1 882 and fomerly a student at Gottingen and Leipzig, in 1880 prepared a revised, extended version of Schwegler's book. The book that came nearest rivaling Schwegler's was Francis Bowen's Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Schopenhauer and Hartmann (N.Y., 1877). Bowen's announced purpose was to call attention to earlier French and later German philosophers, "with whom comparatively few- English readers are at all familiar." Despite his former outspoken resistence to German idealism, Bowen recognized the value of thorough histor- ical study of rival systems. In the meantime Princeton was offering an elective course in the history of philosophy. At the University of Minnesota, Professor Campbell devoted espe- cial attention to Kant and Hegel in his histor- ical course. At Johns Hopkins the course was given from the beginning of the institution; it was introduced at Indiana University in 1880, and at North Carolina in 1889. Small schools as a rule added the course as an elective, some waiting, however, until well into the new century. 383. On this head, see George H. Mead's essay, "The Philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in their American Setting," Internat'l Jour, of Ethics, XL (Jan., 1930), 211-31. 384. Charles Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (N.Y., 1937), pp. 73I-32- 385. Bancroft's ten-volume History of the United States, begun in 1834, is animated by this spirit, and the philosophical writings of Marsh, Hedge, Follen, Lieber, Murdock, Emer- son, Rauch, Bowen, H. B. Smith, Philip Schaff, G. S. Morris, and especially the St. Louisans Brokmeyer, Harris, Snider, and Kroeger are imbued by the same principle. Rauch was one of the first in America to make the secret of Hegel his own; Lieber gave it wider currency in application by carrying the idea of Entwick- lung into the area of American social experi- ence and constitutional law. H. B. Smith and Philip Schaff lifted the implications of the Hegelian Dialektik into historical study, syn- thesizing the discordant incidents and the con- flicting ideas of the young nation's life, thereby making a new chapter in the philosophy of history; while W. T. Harris, making a similar application to the school system, instituted a new era in American education. — Alvin S. Haag, op. cit., p. 256. Notes to Pages 327-28 677 SOME AREAS AND LINES OF INFLUENCE THE VOGUE OF GERMAN LITERATURE A SURVEY i. The old chapbooks like the Faustbuch, the Fortunatus story, and the Reynard the Fox by Caxton (after the Low-German Reynke de Vos) were sold in Boston from 1680 on. 2. Jakob Boehme's treatise on the Philosoph- ically Divine appeared in Philadelphia in 1688; Johann Beissel's Myslische Spruche and other writings were issued from 1730; and Jo- hannes Tauler's Plain Path in Christian Perfec- tion in 1778 and thereafter. August Hermann Francke, the great pietistic leader, and Johann Kasper Lavater were well known. H. G. Zim- mermann's reflections On Solitude were enorm- ously popular. See Ed. Z. Davis, Translations of German Poetry in A merican Magazines, 17 41- 1810 (Phila., 1905), pp. iQ4ff. 3. Ibid., pp. 96-125. In a similar way the struggle of Switzerland in her wars of libera- tion occasioned a good deal of American notice. See ibid., pp. 134-81 passim, 197, 207. 4. Ibid., pp. 21-61; Frederick H. Wilkens, Early Influence of German Literature in America (N.Y., 1900), p. 8; Bayard Q. Morgan, A Crit- ical Bibliography of German Literature in Eng- lisch Translation, 1481-1927, with Supplement.. . ig28-ig35, 2nd ed. (Stanford, Calif., 1938), pp. 143-45 (hereafter referred to as Morgan). 5. On Gellert and Herder see E. Z. Davis, op. cit., pp. 27-31, 56-65, 195, and listings in Scott H. Goodnight, German Literature in American Magazines Prior to 1846 (Madison, Wis., 1907), hereafter referred to as Goodnight. John Quin- cy Adams prepared a poetical rendering of Oberon in 1799— 1801, but this was not published until 1940. See F. H. Wilkens, op. cit., pp. 44, 47, and H.A. Pochmann's review of Oberon in MLN, LVI, iii (Mar., 1941), 225-27. 6. The Munchhausen tales by R. E. Raspe were introduced in 1787 and frequently reprint- ed throughout the next century. See Edwin G. Gudde, "An American Version of Munchhau- sen," Amer. Lit., XIII, iv (Jan., 1942), 372-90. Other titles that lived far down the next centu- ry were Campe's Robinson the Younger (1790), Salzmann's Elements of Morality for the Use of Children (1795), and K. H. Bogatzky's Golden Treasury (1754, with seventy-seven printings to 1925), a perpetual diary with Bible text commentary and verses. 7. Lenore was reprinted in America in 1798 and 1801, and a few of Burger's other ballads appeared in the journals, as did also Goethe's "Erlkonig" and Herder's "ErlkonigsTochter," in versions by "Monk" Lewis. On the whole, however, the runic and Gothic balladry gave rise as much to burlesque and parody as it did to serious translation. See E. Z. Davis, op. cit., pp. 76, 85-93, 143-88 passim. 8. Ibid., pp. 125-82 passim, and O. W. Long, "Werther in America," Studies in Honor of John A. Walz (Lancaster, Pa., 1941), pp. 86— 116; Morgan, pp. 156-58. 9. For praises as well as attacks by review- ers, see Wilkens, op. cit., pp. 36ft. 10. See Morgan, pp. 41 7f., and E. Z. Davis, op. cit., p. 198. 11. Wilkens, op. cit., pp. 20, 30-33. 1 2 . Miss Sara Sampson was serialized in the American Lady's Magazine for 1799. Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, in many ways the com- panion-piece of the Robbers, was not played in America, and the Walter Scott translation did not appear here until 1814. British transla- tions of Iphigenie (1793) and Hermann und Do- rothea (1805) aroused virtually no notice at the time. 13. Wilkens, op. cit., pp. 13-24. 14. Ibid., p. 21. 15. See the numerous broadsides against the German drama in the Port Folio of Philadelphia in these years, cited in Davis, op. cit., pp. 160 ff. Joseph Dennie, editor of Port Folio, fulminated against Kotzebue's Jacobin leanings; others found him a calumniator of Christianity, a threat to morality. 16. The data on periodical references can readily be located in Goodnight and in Martin H. Haertel, German Literature in American Ma- gazines 1846 to 1880 (Madison, Wis., 1908), herafter referred to as Haertel. 17. Note Adams' serialized Journal of a Tour through Silesia, in the Port Folio, Vol. I (1801) and "Letters from an American Resident Abroad, on Various Topics of Foreign Lite- rature," ibid., I (June 13 and 20, 1801). Other general views of German literature were pub- lished in the Monthly Magazine and American 678 Notes to Pages 328-30 Review (1800), the Literary Miscellany (1805), and the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review (1810). 18. She pointed out that the German roman- tics preserved, in an age of science and ration- alism, a childlike innocence, a warmth of feel- ing, and purity of heart that she judged had virtually disappeared from other national cul- tures. Even while deploring certain wants or defects in him, she declared Goethe to be the greatest of the German poets, and she paid respect to his intellectual power. She strength- ened the repute of Schiller immeasurably by celebrating his moral idealism, his impressive idealistic striving, and his noble work in the service of liberty. She drew attention to the Schlegels and others as serious students who supplied a firm philosophical and aesthetic grounding for the new movement. She revealed to the outside world the lyric genius of the Ger- mans. Extended reviews of her book were carried within the year in the New York Quarterly Re- view and the Philadelphia Analectic Magazine. 19. By 1823 Bancroft was writing of German letters as one of the great national literatures. See Goodnight, p. 43. Bancroft's Miscellanies (1855) include reprints of his early articles on the subject. 20. Barnas Sears, president of the Newton Theological Institute at Andover and editor of the Christian Review, pointed out in 1841 the American debt to German scholars and the general interest in the study of German. He remarked that those who had "German works in their libraries . . . [are] not limited to theolo- gians ; the general scholar, the man of taste, the classical student, the man of science, the learn- ed physician, the school teacher, — all are mastering the literature of Germany. " — Christ. Rev., VI, xxii (June, 1841), 269-84. 21. For a comparison of attitudes see the ar- ticle, "On the state of Polite Literature in Ger- many," by "S." in the Portico (Baltimore, 1816), where the view is that German taste is "hope- lessly deficient." Burger's Lenore has "absurdi- ties and blemishes," and Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea is objectionable on moral grounds. — Goodnight, p. 39. 22. See John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, I, 63. 23. J. F. Clarke, in Western Messenger, II, i (Aug., 1836), 59. 24. With the founding of the Western Mes- senger in 1838 came the inception of a long line of Transcendentalist journals that extends to the Open Court of a much later period (1887- 1936). Note the indexes to periodicals in Good- night and Haertel for a list of journals that car- ried translations of German poetry and prose together with reviews, notices, and criticism. A summation of these data is supplied in Table I, p. 343. 25. C. T. Brooks, J. H. D wight, Herman Bokum, H. W. Longfellow, J. C. Mangan, Sarah Whitman, and Charles G. Leland are a few of the many who issued anthologies of German poetry. For the list of collections of German poetry in the period, see Morgan, pp. 577-628. A re-tabulation, broken down according to authors and periods, is to be found in Table II, below (pp. 344-45). 26. The studies by Goodnight and Haertel on German literature in American magazines to 1880 are an invaluable aid in examining the relative popularity of the German authors, and they are the principal source for the statistical data here presented. 27. The counts of periodical items for the period as a whole (1810-1864) are as follows: Goethe, 379; Schiller, 264; Jean Paul Richter, 101; Theodor KQrner, 80; Uhland 73; Zschok- ke, 50; Heine, 46; Kotzebue, 43; Herder, 41; Luther, 36; Fouqu6, 36; Riickert, 33; Lessing, 27; Tieck, 27; Krummacher (author of child- ren's fables), 26; Burger, 25; A. W. Schlegel,24; Klopstock, 21; Wieland, 20. A number of the lesser Romantics follow next in order. See the full tabulation of these items as compiled from Goodnight and Haertel in Table I, below. 28. For the period 1810-1864, consult Table II, below; for the relative popularity of these lyric poets during the years 1 865-1900, see the same table. A check of the data on the number of books by individual authors translated and pub- lished in the English-speaking world (Britain as well as America) shows that juveniles and books of moral instruction bulked very large in the period. Note the prominence of Schmid, Barth, Wyss, and Bogatzky. Certain writers on history and on science (Niebuhr, Heeren, and the Humboldts) also ranked high. The literary figures with the greatest number of books in English translation (for the period 18 10-1864) were Goethe, 216; Schiller, 187; Fouque, 54; Kotzebue, 52; Zschokke, 52; Gerstacker, 30; the Grimm brothers, 26; Klopstock, 26; Seals- field, 25; Jean Paul, 24; and the Schlegel brothers, 24. In this count each edition and printing of a work was counted separately. The data are taken from Chart II, pp. 15-17, in Morgan. See Table III, below (pp. 346-41), where the tabulation is reproduced in fuller form. 29. The review, probably by the editor Rob- ert Walsh, reflects no general growth of inter- est in Goethe's middle and later periods. The critic still errs in trying to approach this novel Notes to Pages 330-32 679 as an example "of the sentimental species"; and like so many critics after him, he "is disposed to reprobate his [Goethe's] extrava- gancies." — (Walsh's) Amer. Rev., Ill, i (Jan., 1812.) 51-69; cf. the article on this review by John C. Blankenagel, JEGP, XXXV, iii (July, 1936). 383-88- 30. Xo other German writer was as contro- versial a figure as Goethe. For details, see Goodnight, pp. 64-65, and Camillo von Klenze, "Das amerikanische Goethebild," Mitteilungen der Akademie zur wissenschaftlichen Erforschung und zur Pflege des Deutschtums (Munich, 1932), II, 1911., 198. 31. In Carlyle's writings, on the other hand, Goethe is placed above Schiller; and certain students of Goethe, especially Clarke and Mar- garet Fuller, followed Carlyle from the first. But, as von Klenze remarks, Carlyle left on the whole "but a negligible trace on the culture of the genteel tradition." — Charles T.Brooks . . ., MLA Monograph series, No. 7 (Boston, 1937), p. 21. 32. Bancroft's verdict was that "in every- thing that relates to firmness of principle, to love for truth itself, to humanity, to holiness, to love of freedom, he [Goethe] holds perhaps the lowest place." — Miscellanies (N.Y., 1855), pp. i73f-, 180, 200, 203f. 33. Christ. Exam, and Gen. Rev., VIII, ii (May, 1830), 187-200; Christ. Exam., XXXII, iii (July, 1842), 398. 34. Felton's Preface (pp. xiv-xv) to the three-volume edition went far to mitigate the blackness of the picture that Menzel had drawn. 35. Xorton published "Recent Publications Concerning Goethe," in Sel. Jour, of Periodical Lit., I, ii (1833), 250-93. Bancroft's long re- view appeared unsigned in Christ. Exam., XXVI, iii (July, 1839), 360-78. Wood's review of 1835, while repeating the complaint over Goethe's lack of moral conscience, showed in- dependent scholarship and penetration in its treatment of Meister (see Lit. and Theol. Rev., II, 2S2-307). Motley published a sketch of Goethe's life in the N.Y. Rev., Ill, ii (Oct., 1838), 397-442. See Goodnight, pp. 74-81 ; also N.Y. Rev., V (July, 1839), 1-48. 36. The temperate counsel of F. H. Hedge, an authority on German literature in close as- sociation with the Transcendentalists and the editor of the important anthology, Prose Writ- ers of Germany (1847), is quoted by such a re- viewer as A. P. Peabody in his review of Hedge's book in North Amer. Rev., LXVII, ii (Oct., 1848), 464-85; see also Haertel, p. 66. 37. Democratic Rev., XIX, vi (Dec, 1846), 443-4 6 - 38. The dramas considered as productions for the stage never won much admiration. 39. See the review of Goethe's Autobiography in Democratic Rev. (1847); also South. Quar. Rev. (1847), and the review of Lewes' biography in the Eclectic Magazine for 1856. Lewes' bio- graphy stirred T. B. Holcombe, writing in the Southern Literary Messenger (XXII, ii, Mar., 1856, 180-88), to bring violent charges of "pan- theistic infidelity" against Goethe. 40. Before 1814, when he was known chiefly for The Robbers, The Ghostseer, and occasional adaptations of other early plays, his youthful Sturm-und-Drang productions aroused attack in some quarters, particularly in the violently anti-Jacobin Port Folio, which in 181 1 branded him as "sublimely mad." — Port Folio, U.S., VI, ii (Aug., 1811), 183-91 ; see also E. Z. Davis, op. cit., pp. i6of. 41. In 1814 the Quarterly Review (X, xx, 359-409, esp. pp. 382-87), drew attention to Don Carlos and the Bride of Messina, calling the former "the finest play that Europe has seen for above a century," and recognizing in the latter a work "in the spirit of the ancient dra- ma." A. H. Everett, in 1823, published in the North American Review, an important lengthy discussion of all the later dramas, and George Bancroft at this time drew attention to his shorter poems. Commending the poet's character so "as to establish him in the good graces of even the most pietistic critic," he enunciated what was soon to become the standard estimate of Schiller — a poet who believed in virtue, who had an "abhorrence of skepticism," and a "rev- erence for the sanctity of religion and the domestic affections." Bancroft was also among the first to sketch the contrast between the literary personalities of Goethe and Schiller. See North A mer. Rev., XVI, ii (Apr., 1823), 397- 425; XXII, ii (Oct., 1823), 268-87; and Christ. Exam., XXVI, iii (July, 1839), 374. Carlyle's Life of Schiller, published anonymously, appear- ed in 1825 in London and was doubtless read before the Boston reprint of 1833 became avail- able. Charles Follen, teaching German at Har- vard, liked to play up the "moral" Schiller against the "licentious" Goethe. Metrical ver- sions of Don Carlos and Tell were supplied in the 3o's by George H. Calvert and Charles T. Brooks, respectively, and the Wallenstein tril- ogy was available in translations by Coleridge (1800) and Moir (1827; Boston reprint, 1837). Among the biographical studies perhaps none is so indicative of the poet's popular appeal as Mrs. E. F. Ellett's Characters of Schiller (1839; 2nd ed., 1842). The lyrics and ballads appeared in every manner of magazine, anthology, and gift annual, as well as in grammars and readers issued to aid the young iu the study of the 680 Notes to Pages 332-34 language. See the lists in E. C. Parry, op. cit., for detailed data on the widely scattered transla- tions, imitations, and adaptations by Mrs. Hemans, Rufus Dawes, G. W. Haven, James G. Percival, and a host of others. The principal school texts then in use were those by Hermann Bokum, Carl Follen, George J. Adler, David Fosdick, and J. C. Oehlschlager. Tell was the favorite of all the plays, not only because it celebrated the theme of political liberty but also because it retold a story long popular in America. The long didactic poem, The Song of the Bell, was issued in several independent Eng- lish versions and became the most popular poem of German origin after Korner's "Prayer during Battle." — C. von Klenze, C. T. Brooks, pp. 28ff. ; Goodnight, p. 103. 42. At the celebration in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, W. H. Furness delivered an address which was widely printed and re- viewed. In New York the exercises extended through several days, and Tell, Wallensteins Lager, and a play depicting the story of the poet's youth were performed. There was an exhibit of twelve tableaux vivanls from his works. At the Cooper Institute, W. C. Bryant, Judge Charles P. Daly, Karl Schramm, and others addressed the gathering, and Reinhold Solger was awarded the prize for the best poem on the occasion. The Boston celebration was marked by an address in Music Hall delivered by F. H. Hedge, who called Schiller the "most eloquent," the "most national and cosmopoli- tan," the "most translatable" of poets — the "poet of Protestantism as Luther was its proph- et." At Baltimore the Liederkranz perform- med the Song of the Bell set to Romberg's music. Biographical essays by Godfrid Becker and Arnold Ruge were published in Cincinnati and St. Louis, respectively, to mark the anniver- sary. See E. C. Parry, op. cit., pp. 327-41, 359- 68. Two American sets of Schiller's Works were issued in i860 and 1861. Among the many col- lections of his poems in translation, those by Furness and by Lord Bulwer Lytton were most notable. Among all the Schiller lyrics and bal- lads the particular American favorites were "Die Hoffnung", "Die Wiirde der Frauen," "Die Ideale," "Johanna's Farewell" in the Jungfrau von Orleans, and of course "Die Glocke." America had access to translations of the Philosophische Briefe (1837), the Philo- sophical and Aesthetic Essays (1844), the Corre- spondence with Goethe (1845), and the History of the Thirty Years' War (1828). For a charac- teristic tribute to Schiller as being for Germany what Shakespeare is for England, see Natl. Quar. Rev., VI, xii (Mar., 1863), 207-39, esp. p. 208. 43. See the entries on Herder listed in Good- night and Haertel, esp. the articles on "German Literature" in the Ladies Magazine for 1829; Bancroft's article in the North Amer. Rev. for 1825; and the study by George Ripley in the Christ. Exam, for 1835. On Lessing see the cri- tique by G. H. Lewes in 1846; the survey of Lessing's writings in the N.Y. Rev. (1840) ; and the sketch of Emilia Galotli in 1840. 44. "German Literature," South. Lit. Mess., II, vi (May, 1836), 373-80; see also N.Y. Rev. (1836-1837), pp. 263f., 277-79. 45. For details see Camillo von Klenze, op. cit., pp. 33-35; Haertel, pp. 84-85. 46. For indications of this kind of influence see Henry A. Pochmann, "Irving's German Sources in the Sketch Book," SP, XXVII, ii (July, 1930) 477-507, and "Irving's German Tour and its Influence on His Tales," PMLA, XLV, iv (Dec, 1930), 1150-87. 47. Fouque, virtually on the strength of Undine alone ranked third in the frequency of translations in the period 1810-1864. See Table III, below*. 48. America did not completely overlook but certainly did not fully appreciate the stat- ure of Novalis and Bettina; note in Morgan the American translations of Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1842, 1853) and of works by Bet- tina. 49. The Struwwelpeter, the fables of Krum- macher, the vast number of little moral stories by Christoph von Schmid, and Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson were introduced. These bulked large in the totals of German prose made avail- able in this country. Furthermore, books of religious instruction, like Bogatzky's Golden Treasury, Franz Hoffmann's many children's stories, and tales by Nieritz, went into many printings, often under the sponsorship of one of the Lutheran, Presbyterian, or other demo- national societies. 50. For complete listings consult Morgan, Goodnight, Haertel, and Lillie V. Hathaway, German Literature in the Mid-Nineteenth Cen- tury in England and America as Reflected in the Journals, i840-igi4 (Boston, 1935). 51. From Engl. Lit. Gazette (1857), quoted by L. V. Hathaway, op. cit., pp. 99-100; see also South. Quar. Rev., VI, ii (Oct., 1944), 428-45, and Haertel, pp. 12-14. 52. Note the enthusiasm expressed for Korner by the young Margaret Fuller in her essay in the Western Messenger, IV (1838), 306-9. Dr. Follen "rejoiced especially in several battle poems from Korner, the soldier and martyr of liberty." — A. P. Peabody, Harvard Remini- scences (Boston, 1881), p. 118. 53. The young Transcendentalist Wm. H. Notes to Pages 334-35 681 Hurlbut, writing the earliest general critique of Heine and his times, branded the Jung Deutschland group as a "school of scoffers." Ruckert's "oriental magnificence," Platen's "elegance and sincerity," Justinus Kerner's "spiritualism and quaintness," and Geibel's "gay materialism" he was inclined to rate some- what lightly; but he looked on Heine as the leading contemporary writer, the greatest art- ist, even though he lacked "a great and noble purpose" and his macabre and satiric strain was "painful" and "lamentable". — North Amer. Rev., LXIX, i (July, 1849), 216-49 passim. Other critics, E. I. Sears and George Ripley among them, deplored deficiencies in Heine's moral character; see Haertel, pp. 86-89, and H. B. Sachs, Heine in America (Phila., 1916), pp. 13-38. 54. George Eliot, "German Wit: Heinrich Heine" Eclectic Mag. (1856), and Littell's Liv- ing Age (1856); M. Arnold, "Heinrich Heine," Littell's (1863). 55. Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postl), Austrian- born traveler and chronicler of American fron- tier life, was much read in the 40's, when several of his "exotische Kulturromane" were trans- lated, and Frey tag's Debit and Credit (1858) was well received by both critics and the public. On Freytag see L. V. Hathaway, op. cit., pp. 62L, 67-69, 92f. ; and Haertel, p. 33. Other novelists are treated in the discussion of the period 1865- 1899. Of contemporary drama little need be said. Gutzkow's Uriel Acosta (i860) attracted some notice. Hebbel's dramas were not made available, and of Grillparzer's, only Sappho. 56. See DNB, VII, 43-44; and O. B. Froth- ingham, Recollections and Impressions (N.Y., 1891), pp. 3-8. The son, Octavius B., was later a member of the "radical" group and historian of the Transcendental movement ; the daughter Ellen was a frequent translator from the Ger- man. 57. Ibid., pp. 3, 8. He was opposed to extreme Romanticism, disliking Heine and Browning, too; but he approved of Anastasius Griin and Riickert, his only reservation being that the latter was (like most contemporary German writers) "too idealistic, too fluent" for his taste. See his essay on Riickert in Christ. Exam., LI, iii (Nov., 1851), 436. 58. Praise of the Germans was neither unani- mous nor uncritical. Francis Bowen, professor of philosophy at Harvard, denounced the Ger- man importations generally, especially their imputed dangerous effect on philosophic in- struction. See Christ. Exam., XXIII, ii (Nov., 1837), 170-94. Cornelius C. Felton, professor of Greek and later president of Harvard, was more conciliatory ; his principal contribution to the study of the Germans was the translation of Menzel's Deutsche Literatur in 1840. If he damned Goethe's "licentiousness," he also penned praises of the Germans that have the ring of sincerity. In 1845 he was moved to call Germany "the luminous region in the literature of our age. " — Christ. Exam., XXXII, ii (July, 1842), 398; see other reviews, ibid., 1843, and North Amer. Rev., 1842 and 1843. The Rev. Palmer Putnam (1814-1872) is remembered as the orator before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in August, 1844, on which occasion Boston heard perhaps the most thunderous, in- dignant, and crushing blast against German "modernism", and against the "dissolute" Goethe that was ever uttered in that city; but there was no dearth of replies, among them those of George Calvert and Margaret Fuller. The list of distinguished and able writers who had a part in the work of translating and inter- preting the many German authors, old and new, is impressive, including a significantly wide range of professions and philosophic schools, and made up mostly of gifted amateurs in that day — men and women of varied and general interests: e.g., Andrews Norton, pro- fessor in the Harvard Divinity School; Natha- niel Greene, postmaster, politician, and gifted linguist; Eliza Buckminster Lee; Sarah H. Whitman of Providence; William Ware, editor of the Christian Examiner; Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, author and antislavery campaigner; Samuel Gray Ward, wealthy businessman and amateur painter and writer; Charles A. Dana, editor and journalist; George W. Haven, law- yer of Portsmouth ; Alex. Hill Everett, review- er and translator. For others, see the list of translators in Morgan. 59. Upon graduation from Harvard, Calvert resided at Gottingen from January, 1824, to September, 1825, acquiring the language and applying himself to studies and to social life. When, with youthful intrepidity, he called on the old master, he was pleasantly entertained and invited to return. During his stay at Got- tingen, he visited A. W. Schlegel and the histo- rian Niebuhr and formed a liking for the work of Lessing, Schiller, Jean Paul, and Goethe. At first it was Schiller whom he took up most enthusiastically, his first piece being a review in the North American Review of Carlyle's Schiller. 60. Even at this early date he was asserting that Goethe should be judged by his own ad- mirable ideal of self-culture, and that when so understood he would appear "the most com- plete man of his time — the richest specimen of humanity since Shakespeare." — H. W. Pfund, 682 Notes to Pases 335-37 "George H. Calvert, Admirer of Goethe," Studies in Honor of John A . Walz (Lancaster, Pa., 1941), p. 135. On his travels in Europe in the 40's and 5o's, Calvert visited Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Freiligrath in England, the old haunts of Goethe and Schiller at Weimar, the Rhine, and Wartburg. The color and atmos- phere of these places, recorded by one whose enthusiasm for romantic landscapes could be compared only with that of Bayard Taylor, was reproduced in the two series of Scenes and Thoughts in Europe (1846, 1852). He made oc- casional poetic translations from Faust and from the dramas of Schiller during this time, and his later studies centered on the Dichter- paar. The principal work of his later years was Goethe: His Life and Works. An Essay (1872). This modest study, a work not designed to com- pete with Lewes' more detailed biography, presented the poet as intimately known to one who had made him the study of many years. 61. South. Lit. Messenger, II, vi (May, 1836), 373-So- 62. Other prominent critics and translators of the Middle States and the South were Mrs. E. F. Ellett of South Carolina, Mrs. Edward Rob- inson ("Talvj") of New York, Judge Beverly Tucker, C. G. Leland, and G. J. Adler. This list could be extended by a host of occasional con- tributors, professors, theologians, journalists, and lettered gentlemen who had a part in in- troducing the literature in our tongue and in explaining it in critical language not too remote from native habits of thought. 63. See Morgan, p. 8; also Charts A and B in L. V. Hathaway, op. cit., pp. 126-27. 64. Virtually every periodical of consequence participated in the dissemination of critical opinion of German literature. Outstanding for high quality of editorship were the Nation, the Atlantic, the New Englander (to 1892), the North American Review, the Critic (from 1881), the Century (from 1881), Harper's, and the Lit- erary World. Important journals in the South and West were the Sewanee Review (from 1892) and the Dial (1 880-1 895). Of those associated with religious bodies, the Unitarian Review (1871-1891) was outstanding for the abun- dance and broad toleration of its notices. Such more frankly journalistic media as Appleton's, Baldwin's, Godey's, the New Eclectic {Southern Magazine), Putnam's, Scribner's, and Littell's Living Age reprinted the favorite popular prose writers. 65. Among the host of writers and critics, in addition to those mentioned, who played a sig- nificant role in this work were Lowell, Howells, Henry James, Jr., C. E. Norton, A. S. Gibbs, T. S. Perry, Wm. Hand Bowne, B. W. Wells, and Wm. M. Paine. Among the professors of German were Kuno Francke of Harvard, Cal- vin Thomas and E. P. Evans of Michigan, H. H. Boyesen of Cornell, W. H. Carruth of Kan- sas, J. T. Hatfield of Northwestern, J. K. Hos- mer of Washington University, and W. H. Ro- senstengel of Wisconsin. Among foreign critics who were printed (or reprinted) in America were Ernst Haeckel, Richard Wagner, Fr. Spielhagen of Germany; and Edward Dowden, Matthew Arnold, David Masson, Algernon Swinburne, and John A. Symonds of England. For excellence of product and volume of work, the following American translators should be mentioned: C. T. Brooks, W. H. Furness, John Weiss, C. P. Cranch, and J. S. Dwight from New England; Bayard Taylor, C. G. Leland, Professor Scheie de Vere, and Emma Lazarus; A. E. Kroeger, D. J. Snider, Susan Blow, W. T. Harris, Anna C. Brackett of the St. Louis school. 66. Of course, some of the idees fixes of crit- icism lingered on, e.g., the commonplace to the effect that German scholarship was "tho- rough" but lacked "esprit" and penetration, and the view that the language is "cumber- some and confused" when employed in prose. See Haertel, pp. 5f., and Dial, VI, Ixxi (Mar., 1881), 296. Though at bottom there was agree- ment on the value of studying the literature, there was no unanimity over the question as to which writers were suited for wide currency in America. The main critical division developed over the status of romantic versus post-roman- tic writers, especially Heine. Thus Professor Hedge, holding to some of his early preferences, charged Hosmer with bad judgment when he limited the treatment of Jean Paul to four pages out of six hundred in his history, and when he gave the "un-German" Heine alto- gether too much prominence. He objected to Hosmer's quoting Heine's disrespectful re- marks on Novalis and found the Romantics were slighted. See his review of Hosmer's Ger- man Literature in the Unitarian Review for March, 1879. Many critics continued to hold with Carlyle's romantic predilections and to disapprove of the Heine-/ ung Deutschland and positivist reaction against romanticism. In gen- eral, the spokesmen for the religious section of opinion concurred. See R. M. Johnston's "Mo- dern German Religious Poets," Calh. World, XXXVI (Mar., 1883), 764-78, and G. M. Ham- mell's article on Novalis in Methodist Rev., LIII (Sept., 1893), 721-34. 67. There were John Weiss 's complete Wesl- bstlicher Divan (1877), C. E. Norton's edition of the Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle (1887), and a series of native studies on Faust. Notes to Page 337 683 Outstanding book-length studies of the life and writings were those by Calvert (1872), Boyesen (1879), Grimm (1880), Wm. M. Bryant (1893), Kuno Fischer (1895), and Mary H. Ford (1898), in addition to the volumes prepared for the students of the various Goethe schools under the auspices of the St. Louis Hegelians and the Concord School of Philosophy. 68. See the analysis in J. P. von Grueningen, "Goethe in American Periodicals from i860 to 1900" (diss., Univ. of Wis., 1931), pp. 45-51. 69. The Nation, to take one example, men- tioned the poem in 103 of the 332 references it made to Goethe. — Ibid., pp. 131-49. Faust became the poet's established masterpiece, ac- claimed by some "the masterwork of the cen- tury" (see E. C. Stedman's "The Nature of Poetry" in the Century for 1892). Bayard Tay- lor's pioneering rendering of Part If occasioned a good deal of comment on the conclusion of the story. Some critics thought all effort to inter- pret the second part futile, but there was a stronger tendency to insist that it had "in the highest sense simplicity of scope and plan," that "the poem is itself the victim of modern culture whose throes it represents." See the review of Boyesen's Goethe and Schiller in Lit. World for Mar. 15, 1879. Other noteworthy reviews include those by Professor John L. Lincoln in Baptist Quar. for July, 1869; W. W. Goodyear in Lippincott's for Feb., 1877; Pro- fessor Franklin Carter in New Englander, May, 1879; B. W. Wells in Sewanee Rev., Aug., 1894; and J. Reinhard in Sewanee Rev., Jan., 1897. 70. Von Grueningen, op. cit., pp. i88ff. Goethe days were observed by Chautauqua meetings. Prominent lecturers were Bayard Taylor, Anna C. Brackett, J. K. Hosmer, James MacAllister, Josiah Royce, Calvin Thomas, D. J. Snider, and W. T. Harris. The main issues of controversy over Goethe, raised in the 30's were by no means settled out of hand. In the 90's he was mentioned in some quarters with that tone of reverence that implies his apotheosis to the very pinnacle of fame, in the company of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. He was if not a beloved, at least by nearly universal recognition a great writer. See, e.g., C. L. Moore's "Competitive Examina- tion of Poets" in Current Lit. for Aug., 1897. Of the Transcendentalist champions of Goethe, the venerable F. H. Hedge was by far the most effective in carrying forward Margaret Fuller's defense of the master. He praised Goethe for wisdom, learning, and character, taking his stand on the proposition that though Goethe showed us nothing nobler than the realities of human nature, these would nonetheless be of great value. Hedge dismissed the caviling over Goethean "selfishness ' ' and ' ' lack of patriotism, ' ' which continued to be heard. See the article by Hedge on Froude's Carlyle in the Unitarian Rev., Feb., 1885 ; that by M. B. Anderson in the Dial, Mar., 1881; and the defense of Goethe's politics in the Nation, Sept. 16, 1875. The most perturbed and abusive of the all condemna- tions were those printed in the Catholic World, though other religious journals expressed com- parable sentiments with more moderation of language. See von Grueningen, op. cit., pp. 74- 77, citing articles in the issues of May, 1887, April, 1879, and December, 1883, and an attack by Mary E. Nutting in the Andover Review for July, 1889. Goethe's relation to Friederike Brion was most often cited as a particularly reprehensible episode in his life (see Amer. Church Rev., Jan., 1865, and articles by Frances A. Shaw in Appleton's for 1871 and by E. P. Sterns in Lippincott's for April, 1897); and the hue and cry over it continued until at least 1890, when Professor Calvin Thomas examined the matter and forcefully assaulted the struc- ture compounded of hearsay and legend (Open Court, Jan. 30, 1890). 71. Only the circles of the St. Louisans made much of Goethe's relations to Indian mysti- cism, monism, and Buddhism, the majority of commentators stressing (with Matthew Arnold) Goethe's humanism and eclecticism. Goethe the critic was infrequently discussed; his sci- entific endeavors were treated chiefly in the Open Court, in connection with his place in the history of evolutionary theory. 72. EmmaH. Nason, "The Loves of Goethe," Cosmopolitan, XXIV, ii (Dec, 1897), 172-81. Note O. B. Frothingham's warning against the irreligious character of Meister: "Were 'Wil- helm Meister' less admirable as a study of char- acter, more engaging as a work of fiction, more heated or exaggerated in manner, it would be one of the most dangerous works ever pub- lished. . . . Neglect of moral j udgment is absolute ; ethical distinctions are calmly set aside; men and women whose conduct is reprehensible are praised for their elevation of character . . . the authority of conscience is never admitted." — "The Morally Objectionable in Literature," North Amer. Rev., CXXXV (Sept., 1882), 323- 38, passim. On the other hand, Henry James, Jr., in discussing Meister as early as 1865, ap- proached more closely to Goethe's spirit and artistic intent than did any other critic. See North Amer. Rev., CI, i (July, 1865), 281-85. 73. The historians still paid respect to his high idealism, but nevertheless much of the glory shed on him was borrowed from Goethe, for the story of the Goethe-Schiller friendship was by now one of the best-known episodes in 684 Notes to Pages 338-39 German literary annals. Schiller's great later dramas were relatively neglected. The second printing of Hempel's edition of his works ap- peared in 1870; his poems, translated by Wire- man (German and English), in 1871. The Jungfrau von Orleans, Maria Stuart, and Tell appeared in the 70's and the biography by Johannes Scherr had been available in Eng- lish since i860. Note also the translation of the Jungfrau by Calvert (1873 and 1874), the acting version of Maria Stuart as used by Mme Marie Seebach in New York in 1870, and the transla- tion of Tell by Massie in 1878. After 1880 came reprintings of Lytton's version of the Poems and Ballads, the Song of the Bell, Carlyle's essays on Schiller, and W. H. Nevinson's Life (1896). 74. Lit. World, XV, xiv (July 12, 1884), 228; see also Haertel, pp. 79 f. 75. In his review of Stahr's Lessing (North Amer. Rev., Apr., 1768), Lowell pointed out Lessing's strong intelligence and critical acuity, his forthrightness and independence, all of which qualities Americans were quick to praise. He was, says Lowell, a type of the "great writ- er. . . the Valhalla of German letters can show one form [Lessing] in its simple manhood, state- lier even than Goethe's." Lowell noted, too, his contribution to rational criticism in philos- ophy and theology: "At present the world has advanced to where Lessing stood, while the Church has done its best to stand stockstill." The Laokoon was received with enthusiasm as the outstanding document in literary criticism of the modern age. It was Lessing the critic and polemicist who was the subject of most of the articles; his dramas were usually dismissed as lacking fire and "poetical power." See W. L. Phelps, "Lessing and the German Drama," New Englander, LI, iii (Sept., 1889), 198-209. Other notable articles appeared in the Nation, L(Mar. 13, 1890), and LXII (Mar. 5, 1896); Poet-Lore, V (Dec, 1893); and Meth. Ouar. Rev., LIV,, v (Sept., 1894). 76. See articles in the Atlantic, XXXVI, i (July, 1875), 49-57, and XXXVII, v (May, 1876), 607-16. 77. See also Poet-Lore, V (Nov., 1893), 551- 57 ; Chautauquan, XXIII, 610-14; an< i the essay, "Bayard Taylor on German Literature," Penn Monthly, XI (June, 1880), 449. 78. H. B. Sachs (op. cil., p. 81) asserts that 10,000 copies were sold by 1891. Heine's prose was printed in collections by Newell Dunbar (1892) and S. L. Fleischmann (1876). Biograph- ical studies available were those by G. Karpeles (N.Y., 1893), George Eliot (Girard, Kan., n.d.), and Wm. Sharp (N.Y., 1888). 79. Littell's Living Age, LXXIX, mx (Oct. io, 1863), 51-62. 80. See the prefaces in Leland's edition, especially Florentine Nights (London, 1891) and De I'Allemagne (London, 1892); also his trans- lation of von Embden's Family Life of Heine (London, 1893); Lowell's Works (1890), I, 364; II, 90, 167, 170, 229, 327, etc.; Ill, 259, 301; VI, 56, 116, 157, 164; and Howells' article, Atlantic, XXXII, ii (Aug., 1873), 237-39; also Sears's essay on Heine in Natl. Quar. Rev., XIII, i (June, 1866), 56-77. 81. Sachs, op. cit., pp. 52-54. 82. Ibid., p. 61. 83. Old and New, V, vi (June, 1872), 730L Even Professor Boyesen, writing for the Allan- tic (XXXVI, vi, Dec, 1875, 689-98) regretted their unconventional lives and represented their striving as "extreme and largely futile." At most he had a condescending interest in Novalis, whose poems, he said, "possess a potent charm and even a kind of unity. . . . His early death shed a romantic halo over the incidents of his life, which were in themselves sufficiently pathetic" (p. 698). An article in the Methodist Review (LIII, v, Sept., 1893, 721-34), on other hand, was full of praise for the Chris- tian mysticism of Novalis. See also Haertel, pp. 80-86. 84. The plays of Benedix were frequently played in the large theater centers and were published 1 865-1 880; those of Gustav von Moser (including his Bibliothekar as adapted and played by William Gillette in 1882) from 1875 to 1890; and of R. Voss, 1888-1900. 85. Schefer was a versatile minor poet of the post-classical period ; Kortum, an eighteenth- century humorist. Busch's Max und Moritz (1871) elicited some response, but there was no general interest in this artist. After the middle 8o's Frau Johanna Spyri, with Heidi, added yet another to the list of ever-popular and perenni- al children's stories from the German. 86. Note the articles on Sudermann in the Atlantic (1896) and the Literary World (1895, 1896), and on Gerhart Hauptmann in the Liter- ary World (1895). 87. C. H. Brigham, "On the Study of Ger- man," Christ. Exam., LXXXVII (July, 1869), 1-20. 88. Two of these were serialized in the New Eclectic Magazine and in Littell's. See Haertel for complete listings of reviews, and von Klen- ze, C. T. Brooks, pp. 36-38, for a discussion of Spielhagen. 89. Auf der Hohe (1875) was regarded as his masterpiece. His Villa on the Rhine drew wide- spread attention by discussing in its pages the writings of Spinoza, Goethe, Franklin, and Theodore Parker, and by dealing with current American public issues. Before 1880 Auerbach Notes to Pages 339-40 685 was mentioned more frequently in the periodi- cals than any German author except Goethe, and doubtless his name was more widely known among casual readers than that of any classical author. 90. Quotation from article by Helen Zim- mern, Littell's, CLXXVII (May 5, 1888), 561; see also Eclectic Mag., LXXXV, ii (Aug., 1875), 250, and the review of T. S. Perry in the Atlantic for 1874, quoted at length by Haertel, pp. 49f. 91. W. D. Howells, Criticism and Fiction (N.Y., 1891), p. 128. 92. W. H. Browne in New Eclectic, VII (Aug., 1870), 210-19, and Professor Boyesen in North American Review for 1875 complained of his "morbidity" and "pantheism" in religion. 93. Others were "Eugenie Marlitt" (Eugenie John, 1825-1887), Elise Polko, Wilhelmine Hillern, "E. Werner" (Elisabeth Biirstenbin- der, 1S38-1918), Countess Hahn-Hahn, "W. Heimburg" (Bertha Behrens, 1850-1912), Nataly v. Eschstruth, and "Carl Detlef" (Klara Bauer). Male novelists entered the picture a little after the ladies and participated in the same endeavors, especially Felix Dahn, Adolf Streckfuss, Georg Ebers (romancer of far-away places and remote times), A. E. Brachvogel (historical novelist), K. A. Wildenhahn (his- torico-biographical novelist), Ernst Eckstein (historical romancer), and Karl Dingelstedt (exotic romancer). 94. See Hathaway, op. cit., p. 108; Haertel, p. 60. 95. While in 1879 the Literary World had congratulated one of the translators, Mrs. A. L. (Furness) Wister, for her "eminent capaci- ty ... as a selector" of novels that are "well written, well bred, entertaining, and free from . . . ambiguous morality," the same magazine in 1895 expressed its boredom over these vapid, mediocre productions (X, vi, May 24, 1879, 166I, and XXVI, viii, Apr. 20, 1895, 120). The sisterhood of fiction translators made a special category, for which the name of Clara Bell has become proverbial. Mary J. Safford, with ten of Ebers' works and a long list from other authors, exceeded even Clara Bell in volume of output. Mrs. J. W. Davis specialized in "Heimburg," and Mrs. Wister Englished a total of twenty-three novels of "Marlitt," "Werner," and others. 96. One novel of Sudermann's, Frau Sorge, was translated in the 90 's, and his drama, Die Heimat, was produced and translated in 1896. Neither called forth much comment. Though Hauptmann's popularity was to rise soon after 1900, the Atlantic in 1896 denounced as "an- archism" his radical proletarian sympathies and labeled the heroes of his Es War as "radi- cal" and "moral opportunists." — Atlantic, LXXVII, v (May, 1896), 697-702; also Lit. World, XXVI, viii (Apr. 20, 1895), 120, and XXVII, viii (Apr. 18, 1896), 120; Morgan, pp. 210-13. Schopenhauer's Welt ah Wille und Vor- stellung had been available in translation in England since 1883, and other writings in numerous printings were plentiful there before 1900, but there was no such welcome for this author in America. Except for a Milwaukee firm, which brought out his Select Essays in 1 88 1 for its German- American trade, American publishers apparently subscribed to the com- mon opinion that Schopenhauer, while conso- nant with the decadent European temper of the time, had no relevance for the optimistic pro- gressivism of America. Only in the late 90's were his Essays, his Aphorisms, and his treatise on the will brought out in New York. As for Nietzsche, his Unzeitgemdsse Betrachtungen had been reviewed in 1874 and 1875 (see Haertel, Nos. 1395 and 1478), and his works were available in a comprehensive (British) edition (1896, 1899), but the comment on him in the magazines was sparse indeed. But note the short article by the philosopher F. C. S. Schiller in the Bookbuyer, XXX, vii (Aug., 1896), 407-9. From among the large volume of German scholarly, philosophical, and political writing made available in America, the following are especially significant: books of the socialist theorist Bebel (after 1896); Fr. Engels' Anti- Diihring (1892) ; Karl Marx's Kapital (1890) and Manifesto (1898); writings of Ernst Haeckel, Darwinist philosopher, 1879; writings of Ed. v. Hartmann; Ueberweg's History of Philosophy ; writings of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Rosenkranz on pedagogy; several books of social criticism by the popular publicist Max Nordau (after 1884); Winckelmann's treatise on Ancient Art (1880); and of Richard Wagner's writings, Die Zukunftsmusik (1873) and Judentum (1897), The Wagnerian opera inspired not only extensive publishing of the opera texts but also discussions of Germanic mythology and the lore of the Minnesingers, notably A. E. Kroeger's book on The Minnesingers of Germany (1873). The fame of the German classical composers oc- casioned widespread treatment of the biograph- ies of Mendelssohn, Schumann, the conductor von Biilow, and others. Native Germans appeared occasionally in American journals in the capacity of reviewers and critics (often in reprints from English periodicals). Among these were Haeckel, R. Wagner, Spielhagen, and the literary historian Richard M. Meyer. Spielhagen had many 686 Notes to Pages 340-49 acquaintances and correspondents here, and his criticism was well known. — Haertel, Nos. 400, 1793, 1797. 97. A unique article on Platen, detailed and appreciative, appeared in the Southern Review in 1868. Here and there a critic called attention to the Novellen of Keller, but not to his lyric poetry. See Helen Zimmern's article in Apple- ton's, XXIII, ii (June, 1880), 539-49. For full references to these authors, see the indexes to Haertel and Hathaway. 98. See Table III, below (pp. 346-47), listing translations in the period. 99. Lit. World, XVII, xii (June 12, 1886), 200f. 100. Ibid., v (Mar. 6, 1886), 77I; Nation for Apr. 22, 1886; Franklin Carter on FawsMiter- ature in the New Englander for 1879. In 1893 the Nation, LVI (Feb., 16), 120, cited Spiel- hagen's observation that the scholarly and severely technical studies on Goethe and Schil- ler were no argument at all for these authors' vital contemporary influence, and the advent of the new naturalism seemed to him only to widen the gulf between the past and the present. 101. "The Decay of Earnestness," Californi- an, III, xiii (Jan., 1881), 18-25. AMERICAN THEATER AND DRAMA 102. Virtually the only independent Ameri- can effort was David Rittenhouse's translation of Lessing's bourgeois drama Miss Sara Samp son in 1789 or 1790. 103. Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm was translated and produced; Goethe's Goetz was translated by Scott, and his Stella and Clavigo appeared in 1798. Wert her excited widespread imitation and adaptation in novel, opera, dra- ma, and poetry. The Robbers also attained long- term popularity, and Kotzebue in 1 798-1800 dominated the London stage, eight of his plays being performed there before 1800. 104. There were fifty-nine performances in New York in thirty-five seasons between 1794- 1795 and 1828-1829; in Philadelphia it was played twenty-eight times in the same period. In the smaller centers we find occasional men- tion: Providence in 1805, New Orleans in 1806, and Albany in 1815. See C. F. Brede, The Ger- man Drama in English on the Philadelphia Stage IJ94-1830 (Phila., 1918); Louis C. Baker, The German Drama in English on the New York Stage to 1830 (Phila., 191 7) ; F. H. Wilkens, op. cit.; and George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (14 vols., N.Y., 1927-1945). Whit- man recalled seeing a performance in the Bowery after 1835, and audiences saw famous performers, such as Murdock, Edwin and Wilkes Booth, Edwin Adams, and John McCullough, in the role of Carl Moor some thirty times between 1849 and 1875. See E. H. Dummer, "Schiller in English," Monatshefte fur deutschen Unterricht, XXXV, vi (Oct., 1943), 334-37- 105. In 1795 the stages of Charleston, Phila- delphia, and New York almost simultaneously presented works by Lessing and Schiller. Charleston led the way with the premiere of Minna von Barnhelm (The Disbanded Officer, or the Baroness of Bruchsal) , adapted by James Johnstone (London, 1786) on February 18, 1795. It was put on in Philadelphia the next year and then apparently forgotten. The season of 1 795-1 796 in New York saw the production of Reynolds' Werther and Charlotte, but there were only two performances. Kabal and Love was put on (in Lewis' translation) twice during the season of 1 798-1 799, thrice repeated by 1802, and revived in 1813-1815. Finally, 1795- 1796 saw five performances in Philadelphia of an opera by Cobb, with music by Arnold, called The Doctor and the Apothecary (1788), based on a work by the Viennese composer Dittersdorf. 106. In Philadelphia, for example, the Ger- man church bodies fulminated against stage players quite as vigorously as did Presbyterians and Quakers. See C. F. Brede, op. cit. But Ger- man musicians supplying German music for theatrical entertainments became common early in the nineteenth century. See O. G. Sonneck, Early Opera in America (N.Y., 1915), pp. 72, 88. What few scattered performances in German were given are listed in L. C. Baker, op. cit. 107. The Count Maximilian von Moor ("de Moor" in English versions) has two sons, Karl and Franz. The former, a student at Leipzig, having been involved in madcap youthful adventures, is seized with remorse; he confesses his rashness to his father and begs forgiveness so that he may return home to his beloved Amalia. Moved by envy and hatred, the youn- ger brother, Franz, causes an irreparable breach between Karl and his father. Karl reacts with feelings of hatred against mankind. He joins a band of outlaws with the intention of upsetting the moral balance of degenerate society by violence and terror. He frees his unhappy father, whom Franz has imprisoned and mistreated, but the Count dies before Karl can reveal himself. In the final act, Karl sobers and is horrified at his crimes against society. Deciding he must yield himself as a sacrifice for the restoration of a better moral order, he surrenders himself to the authorities after Amalia, who has remained loyal throughout, has died. 108. A History of the American Theatre (N Y., 1832), p. 276. Born in 1766, in Perth Amboy, Notes to Page 349 687 and resident in New York during childhood, Dunlap spent three years in England after 1784, during which time his interest in the theater developed. Originally interested in painting, he led a dilettantish existence with artists and literati in New York. He was a member of the Friendly Club, and in 1793 formed a close friendship with Charles Brock- den Brown. His earliest dramatic writings were The Mysterious Monk and Fontainville Abbey, about 1794-1796. When the Hodgkinsons accepted leading roles in the latter play, the connection was formed through which Dunlap assumed joint managership and, after 1797- 1798, sole managership of the then leading stage of the country. The earliest evidence of Dunlap's contact with German literature is his translation of two idyls of Gessner (printed in the N.Y. Mag., Dec, 1795). In 1796 he pre- pared an opera, The A rchers, based on the Tell story, for presentation at the New York Theatre. For six years after 1797 his company took over the new Park Theatre, in a venture that was beset by grave financial difficulties. He introduced a total of twenty-four pieces from Kotzebue between 1798 and 1806, besides Zschokke's Abaellino (1800-1801) and Schiller's Robbers (1801-1802). In introducing the Germans, Dunlap often went his way independently of English prece- dent, and it is owing largely to him that in America the Kotzebue fad went to much greater extremes than in England. He introduced eleven pieces from the German that were not produced in England at all, and a number of his pieces from Kotzebue and Zschokke were put on here before they were tried in England. He never showed any consuming enthusiasm for Kotze- bue, but he recognized that his plays were financially promising, technically sound, and, when subjected to revision and skillful trans- lation into good English idiom, better for his purposes than anything else available. See his History of the American Theatre, pp. 254, 256, 257I His merits as a translator were consider- able. By applying his knowledge of stagecraft to another author's materials, he often con- structed a play equalling or surpassing the original. See Oral A. Coad, William Dunlap (N.Y., 1917), p. 242. In revising, he excised phrases and expressions not consonant with American standards of manners, taste, morals, or religion. While he toned down Kotzebue's blatant Jacobinical and revolutionary senti- ments when these intruded themselves into the plays, Dunlap tended also to play down the passages where traditional religious attitudes not consonant with his own deistical beliefs entered the play. See Charles M. Getchell, "The Mind and Art of William Dunlap" (diss., Univ. of Wis., 1946). He promoted Gothicism vigor- ously, often under direct inspiration from Ger- man sources. Fontainville Abbey (1794) is significant as the first example of the Gothic in America, antedating C. B. Brown's first effort by two or three years. This work, based, according to Dunlap, on Mrs. Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest, has been called "more thoroughly Gothic than any of its dramatic precursors in England." — Coad, op. cit., p. 154. Ribbemont (presented as The Mysterious Monk in 1 796) belongs wholly in the Gothic category, and The Knight's Adventure (1797), in whose composition Dunlap had a hand, is closely related to The Robbers, via Godwin's Caleb Williams. — Ibid., pp. 158-61. Had it not been for Dunlap, the account of German dramatic influence would be markedly different from what it is, though the final effect of Dunlap's close contacts with German drama of various schools and types was not so much to open new paths as to widen those barely established by his predecessors. It may be observed, however, that American sentimental drama from 1780 on developed generally independently of Kotzebue and other Germans. The American type, using the distressed-lover theme, is not paralleled in Kotzebue, whose pieces specialized rather in drawing affecting pictures of family life. 109. Dunlap, History of the American Thea- atre, pp. 253 f. The Stranger was first published in a free translation by August Schink in Lon- don in 1798; it ran through six editions that year. no. The beautiful and mysterious Mrs. Haller lives as housekeeper on the estate of the Count of Wintersen. In the lodge lives the Stranger, a misanthrope, but one given to per- forming secret acts of charity. When the count's brother-in-law, Baron Steiner, falls in love with Mrs. Haller, we learn from her pitiful soliloquy that she is the Countess of Wald- bourg, who three years earlier had left her husband and children to follow a false lover, and who has spent the interim in bitter repent- ance. The Baron discovers that the Stranger is an old and dear friend; he extracts from him promises to plead his (the Baron's) cause with Mrs. Haller. As the two are brought together, they recognize one another as estranged hus- band and wife. The latter will not ask forgive- ness, for she feels it would prejudice her hus- band's honor to pardon her. He, however, brings in the children at a farewell meeting where the penitent wife and still loving hus- band are to part forever. Count and Countess "press the children in their arms with speechless 688 Notes to Pages 349-50 affections; then tear themselves away — gaze at each other — spread their arms, and rush into an embrace." in. See Dunlap, op. cit., pp. 203-5, f° r his account of how he acquired the language. 112. Self-immolation, or The Sacrifice of Love (Der Opfertod) ; False Shame, or The American Orphan in Germany (Falsche Scham) ; The Wild Goose Chace {Der Wildfang), equally successful as Of Age Tomorrow, farce with music, by Thos. Dibdin; The Force of Calumny, play in five acts (Die Verldumder) ; The Count of Burgundy, comedy in four parts (Der Graf von Burgund) ; The Virgin of the Sun, some- times Rolla, or The Virgin of the Sun, heroic play in five acts (Die Sonnenjungfrau) ; Pizarro in Peru, or The Death of Rolla, heroic spectacle tragedy in five acts (Die Spanier in Peru) ; Sighs, or the Daughter, comedy in five acts (Armut und Edelsinn); The Corsicans, or The Dawning of Love, drama in four acts (Die Corsen) ; The Stranger's Birthday, sometimes The Noble Lie, sequel to The Stranger (Die edle Luge); Joanna of Montfaucon, dramatic romance in five acts (Joanna von Montfaucon) ; The Wise Man of the East, play in five acts (Das Schreibepult, oder Die Gefahren der Jugend) ; The Happy Family, five acts (Die silberne Hoch- zeit) . For data concerning publication of these plays, consult Morgan, pp. 280-89. 113. Meanwhile Philadelphia saw twenty- eight performances of nine different Kotzebue plays during the same season — two of them not previously put on in New York: Reconciliation, or The Birthday (Versbhnung) in the Dibdin version, and Lovers' Vows, as translated by Mrs. Inchbald for the London stage. 114. See the review in the Commercial Adver- tiser for December 11 and 17, 1798. 115. For Pizarro, the announcement prom- ised: "Solemn Procession of Priests and Priest- esses to be Sacrificed, with Hymns and Invocations before going to battle. ... A wild retreat among stupendous Rocks. . . . Warriors returning from battle, with their prisoners. . . a Dungeon in the Rock," etc. — G. C. D. Odell, op. cit., II, 85. The plots of the dramas were well known in eighteenth-century fiction, opera, and drama, and were ultimately derived from Marmontel's Incas. In Dunlap's version, Alonzo, resisting the brutality of Pizarro on his march of conquest in Peru, is captured and sentenced to death. His friend Rolla frees him. As Rolla leaves the camp, he finds the child of Cora and Alonzo in the hands of the Spaniards. At the risk of his life he rescues the infant but is fatally wounded and lives only long enough to restore the child to its distracted parents. 116. Commercial Advertiser, Mar. 31, 1800; cf. G. C. D. Odell, op. cit., II, 87. 117. See Coad, William Dunlap, p. 70. Though Dunlap's version was at first described as superior to that of R. B. Sheridan, the latter was often chosen in preference to Dunlap's more faithful rendition. Its great success in Charleston is described in Eola Willis, The Charleston Stage in the XVIII Century (Co- lumbia, S.C., 1924), p. 456. The performances given in St. Louis from 18 15 to 1839 are de- scribed in Wm. G. B. Carson, The Theater on the Frontier. The Early Years of the St. Louis Stage (Chicago, 1932), p. 90. 118. Annals of the New York Stage, II, 80-81. 1 19. For example, see Port Folio, I, xxxvi (Sept. 5, 1801), 283-86. 120. Lovers' Vows is the story of an erring Baron who in his youth led astray Theodosia. He later repented. Returning in misery to the scene of her early unhappiness, Theodosia accidentally meets her son, the illegitimate offspring of her union with the Baron. The amiable Frederick, in his endeavor to save his mother's life, encounters his natural father, robs him, but receives forgiveness. A tutor in the Baron's household assumes the role of moral advocate, persuades his employer to marry Theodosia and make Frederick his heir. Having thus repaired the evil of his youth, he further patronizes virtue by admitting Theo- dosia to the aristocracy, "and the audience, it is evident by the popularity of the play, was completely satisfied." — -A. H. Quinn, History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War (2 vols., N.Y., 1923), I, 92. 121. G. C. D. Odell, op. cit., II, 80-81. On the lighter side, The Wild Goose Chace, an artificial farce based on a device familiar from Moliere's L' Amour Medicin and other eighteenth-century comedies, was one of Dunlap's most skillful and popular efforts. It is composed chiefly "of the tricks by which Frederick, an amorous youth of one and twenty, attempts to woo and win Nannette, daughter of an old dragon, Madam Brumbach. After a series of entertaining escapades, Frederick discovers that his tutor is the father of Nannette, and from him he gains permission to marry." — Coad, op. cit., p. 218. Dunlap improved on the original by rounding out some sketchy characterization and bright- ening the dialogue, as well as by inserting several songs without warrant from Kotzebue — a practice then common on the English stage. In 1806-1807 Thomas Dibdin's version of the play, renamed Of Age Tomorrow, was substi- tuted for Dunlap's rendition with equal success. 122. See G. C. D. Odell, op. cit., pp. 99L 123. C. F. Brede, op. cit., p. 79. Notes to Pages 350-54 689 124. Gazette for April 4, 1800. 125. Port Folio, I, xxxvi (Sept. 5, 1801), 287. Dennie's campaign had begun the year before. Typical of his line of attack is his printing of a British parody which expressed "contempt for German plays." See ibid., I, n.s., vi (Feb. 15, 1806), 92. The controversy persisted for well over a decade and thoroughly aired both the conservative political views of the editor and the loyalty to Kotzebue of some of his corre- spondents. 126. Dunlap's version, generally recognized as one of his best efforts, was far superior to either of the two British versions (Ludger's and Dibdin's). Dunlap himself called it "perhaps the most meritorious of the many translations and alterations which came from his [Dunlap's] pen. . . . [It] was made more English, particu- larly in the prominent characters of Captain Bertram and his old brother sailor and boat- swain, than any of the previous pieces from the same source." — Dunlap, op. cit., p. 281. See also Coad, Dunlap, p. 228, and Quinn, op. cit., p. 100. The play tells the story of two elderly brothers, one ill and poor, the other choleric and rich, engaged for fifteen years in a lawsuit over a piece of land. The reconciliation is effected by Charlotte, the daughter of one brother, and her lover, a doctor. Comedy is provided by a num- ber of well-drawn characters. 127. Originally a novelistic treatment of outlawry in Italy, Abaellino was cast into dramatic form by Zschokke in 1795. Its inter- national career was long and brilliant, and it was acted throughout Europe in various lan- guages and guises. See Coad, Dunlap, pp. 238L, and J. P. Hoskins, "Parke Godwin and Zschok- ke's Tales," PMLA, XX (1905), 265-95, esp. p. 283. Dunlap's translation proved a success from its premiere in 1801. 128. Dunlap's ascription of Abaellino to Schiller throws an interesting light on the popularity of The Robbers. The author claimed at the time he prepared the translation that he did not know who had written the original. Nothing daunted, he printed some copies of the play with the ascription, "translated from Schiller by William Dunlap," and in at least one town, Providence, it was billed as "the best dramatic work of the best drama-writer of the age, Schiller." — Monthly Mag., Ill (1800), 456; C. F. Brede, op. cit., pp. 102 f. Rugantino, or the Bravo of Venice, a less successful version of Abaellino by M. G. Lewis, was produced in 1809-1810. It had a total of fifteen perform- ances in Philadelphia and New York to 1827- 1828. 129. Dunlap's search for successful stage materials went far and wide. His version of Schiller's Fiesco, played on March 26, 1802, with Cooper in the title role was less than successful. See Coad, Dunlap, p. 238. The Good Neighbor, an Interlude in One Act, was con- cocted by Dunlap from a scene in some uniden- tified piece by the German actor-author August Wilhelm Iffland. Premiered as an afterpiece on February 28, 1803, it was a mild success that season {ibid., p. 241). Another Iffland play, Education, a comedy prepared by Reynolds from Das Gewissen, was imported from Eng- land in 1813-1814, with little success. Another German play belonging to the period of Dun- lap's managership was The Tournament, a Tragedy, "imitated by Marianna Starke from the Agnes Bernauerin (1780) of Count Jos. v. Toerring-Gutterzeii. It had seven performances in 1 803-1 804 and the succeeding season. The story is a literal retelling of the incident in- volving the marriage of Albrecht, son of the Duke of Bavaria, with Agnes Bernauer, a commoner. The American adaptor "ventured to deviate from the truth by preserving the life of Agnes," and giving the "tragedy" a happy ending. See Baker, op. cit., p. 50; Odell, op. cit., p. 156; Coad, op. cit., p. 240. The last play in which Dunlap had a hand was Peter the Great, or the Russian Mother, a translation from Jos. Marius Babo's Die Strelitzen (1790). This story from an incident in the reign of Czar Peter had five performances to 181 5. 130. Kotzebue appears also as the source for the opera, The Cossack and the Volunteer. An unidentified translator adapted this from Der Kosack und der Freiwillige, Liederspiel (1813). Mr. Braun of the orchestra of the Chestnut Street Theater in Philadelphia is credited with arranging the music. — C. F. Brede, op. cit., pp. zbii. 131. The following introductions were not successful: The Devil's Elixir, or the Shadowless Man, musical romance by E. Fitzball, founded on E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale, Die Elixiere des Teufels, put on in November, 1829, in New York; Ugolino, or Blood for Blood, tragedy attributed to J. B. Booth, presumably from Gerstenberg's Sturm-und-Drang tragedy Ugo- lino (1768), played in Philadelphia, 1825; The Fortress of Sorrento, petit historical drama, adapted by Mordecai M. Noah from Sonn- lithner's text to Beethoven's Fidelio, put on by amateurs in New York and played three times from 1816-1817 to 1819-1820. 132. See Odell, op. cit., II, 22, 171, on the Gothic plays put on under Dunlap's management in New York from 1798. On works echoing motifs from The Robbers, see Frederic Ewen, The Prestige of Schiller in England 1788- 1S59 (N.Y., 1932), p. 42. 090 Notes to Pages 354-57 133. Another kind of dependency on Ger- man materials is to be found in the many pieces that employ Germanic historical events and traditional stories. Long before Schiller's Tell, British and particularly American audi- ences were applauding various dramatic treat- ments of the Tell story: The Patriot, or Liberty Asserted (1794), The Archers, or Mountaineers of Switzerland (1796), and a number of others culminating in Sheridan Knowles's William Tell (1825). See Baker, op. cit,, pp. 7-10, and Brede, op. cit., pp. 64 f. Coincident with these was the treatment of Frederick the Great be- tween 18 16 and 1829 in a number of plays and operatic works. 134. The numerous early nineteenth-century American productions in the Gothic-melo- drama category are analyzed, season by season, with careful attention to probable sources, in the studies by Baker and Brede. 135. See O. S. Coad, "The Gothic Element in American Literature," JEGP, XXIV, i (Jan., 1925). ?8- 136. In addition to sources already mention- ed, the following works have been consulted : Arthur H. Wilson, A History of the Philadelphia Theatre 1835-185$ (diss., Univ. of Pa., Phila., 1935) ; James D. Reese, Old Drury of Philadel- phia (diss., Univ. of Pa., Phila., 1932); Frank R. Diffenderfer, "Early Lancaster Playbills and Playhouses," Proc. Lancaster County Hist. Soc., VII (1902) ; Douglas L. Hunt, "The Nash- ville Theatre 1830-40," Birmingham Southern College Bulletin, XXVIII, iii (May, 1935); Jos. E. Schick, The Early Theater in Eastern Iowa. Cultural Beginnings . . . 1836-1863 Chicago, T 939) ! Claire McGlinchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum, (18 11-50) (Boston, 1940); and Ed. G. Fletcher, The Beginnings of the Professional Theatre in Texas (Austin, 1936). 137. Schiller was particularly popular in Chicago. Mary Stuart, introduced in 1867, was given sixty-seven times before 1900, with Fanny Janauschek and Helen Modjeska, among others, in the title role. See Monatshefte fur deutschen Unterricht, XXXV, vi (Oct., 1943), 334-37- 138. There is a certain parallelism in inten- tion between Daly and Dunlap, though they differ in that Dunlap failed to realize his high hopes of exerting a long-continued influence on our stage, while Daly's company became the "standard of artistic achievement for this country," and even carried his practices abroad. See Quinn, op. cit., I, 8f. 139. Daly did not translate directly from the German, but had close transcriptions made for him, which he then reworked with greater or lesser deviations in essential structure and characterization for his own purposes. Pro- fessor Boynton observed correctly that Daly was one who could say and believe that "plays are not written but re-written." 140. By 1865 there had been at least six performances in New York and twelve more by 1870. We find it in the playbills for Boston as late as the season of 1897-1898, with Margaret Mather in the title role. Leah was a profitable success, though in quality it was not among the greater productions of the German stage. Leah, a Jewess, is repudiated by her Christian lover, suffers great miseries, and rises in the end to a noble acceptance. The blank verse of the original was turned into pathetic prose, and Daly's treatment involved other considerable alterations. A part of the success of the play was owing to its novel presentation of a serious social problem in dramatic terms, and liberal American sentiment heartily approved its message. 141. Quinn, op. cit., I, 10. "It is a powerful play in which a young girl, who, through her loss of natural protectors, has become the mistress of an Englishman, Lord Durley, and is forced to leave her lover, Count Julian Dal- berg, who has offered to marry her." The final scene, in which the poor heroine goes mad at the sight of her lover about to marry another, provided the actress Clara Morris with special opportunities. 142. Daly's introductions from the German in later years (to 1899) are skillful adaptations from a number of lesser-known writers of com- edy, who themselves borrowed heavily from the current French fashions of Sardou, Augier, and Dumas fils. These German authors form a group who (though they may be remembered as theater directors and contributers of a large number of erstwhile successes on the German stages) have not maintained any literary repu- tation beyond their own era. 143. In 1875 he produced The Big Bonanza, or Bulls and Bears from Gustav v. Moser's Ultimo, a comedy bordering on farce and dealing with the subject of high finance and speculation. The famous John Drew was intro- duced into New York to take the role of the young lover. Bob Ruggles. The play had its hundredth performance by June 28, 1875, and was seen as late as 1893 at the Columbus Theater. In 1879, again with Drew, New York saw An Arabian Night, or Haroun al Raschid and his Mother-in-Law, another farce-comedy by Moser. The next year Daly prepared The Passing Regiment, based on Krieg im Frieden by von Moser and Franz v. Schonthan and in 1 88 1 produced this glorification of the Prussian officer class with great success. Although trans- Notes to Pages 357-59 691 ferred to the American scene, the play retains greater fidelity to the structure of the original than is common in Daly's adaptations, though when read today, it has a foreign flavor. For details, see Quinn, op. cit., I, 27. John Drew and Ada Rehan took the leads, and there were twenty-four performances during the season of 1881-1882. Further from its original is Daly's version of the sequel to Krieg im Frieden, namely Reif von Reiflingen, played in November, 1882, as Our English Friend. It ran for fifty-eight nights during its first season. From the work of Franz v. Schonthan, Daly next adapted two clever farces, which, according to Professor Quinn, are today probably the best known of his plays : Seven-Twenty-Eight , or Casting the Boomerang from Der Schwabenstreich, and A Night Off from Der Raub der Sabinerinnen (by Franz in collab- oration with Paul v. Schonthan). The former was introduced in 1883 and ran fifty-one times that season. It held its popularity to 1900 and beyond. A Night Off was first played in 1885. From Goldfische by Franz v. Schonthan and Gustav Kadelburg, Daly fashioned his well- known Railroad of Love, introduced in Novem- ber, 1887. This satire of "Mitgiftjagerei," or pursuit of money, is recognized as one of his strongest and "daintiest" works. Notable later adaptations from Schonthan were The Great Unknown (from Die beruhmte Frau), The Last Word (Das letzte Wort), and The Countess Gucki. Several other comedy-farces of the same light and attractive cast were adaptations from Julius Rosen (pen name for N. Duffek, 1833- 1892), Adolph L'Arronge (1838-1908), and Oscar Blumenthal (1852-1917). For others, see Quinn's valuable bibliographies. 144. For Daly's plans and purposes in this respect, see Montrose J. Moses, The American Dramatist (Boston, 1925), pp. 176-77. 145. See Edwin H. Zeydel, "The German Theatre in New York City, with Special Con- sideration of the Years 1878-1914," Deutsch- Amerikanische Geschichtsbldlter, XV (1915), 255-309. See also the brief but suggestive study by Horst Frenz, "The German Drama in the Middle West," Amer.-Ger. Rev., VIII, v (June, J 93 2 ). I 5 -I 7. 37. an d the indispensable biblio- graphical notes by Adolf E. Zucker in Monats- hefte fur deuischen Unterricht, XXXV, v (May, 1943), 255-64, on the German-language theater in Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Davenport, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Manitowoc, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York, Philadel- phia, San Francisco, and Toledo. 146. Actual beginnings appear to go back to 1837. See Fritz A. H. Leuchs, Early German Theatre in New York, 1840-1872 (N.Y., 1928), p. 228, and Odell, op. cit., IV, 184, 295, 528. 147. Daniel Bandmann belonged in this lat- ter category, playing Mephisto and Richard III very successfully in 1862. Later he had a long career on the English stage, and was a favorite in Boston and other cities. See Eugene Tomp- kins and Quincy Kilby, History of Ike Boston Theatre 1854-1901 (Boston, 1908), pp. 104, 106, 354- 148. Leuchs, op. cit., p. 202. 149. For a further discussion of the signifi- cance in the United States of the German theater, see the investigations of Professor Leuchs, and my bibliographical notes in Robert E. Spiller, et al. (eds.). Literary History of the United States (3 vols., N.Y., 1948), III, 289-90. German plays introduced after 1870 are listed in C. F. W. Scholz, "Bibliography of English Renditions of Modern German Drama," Ger.- Amer. Annals, n.s., XV, i-ii (Jan. -Apr., 1917), 3-2 7- EARLY AMERICAN FICTION 150. Aside from the difficulties inherent in the problem of recognizing and establishing literary influence, as distinct from mere parallels or similarities, it is often hard to differentiate between philosophical and literary influence. At what point do the influences of a Kant or a Schelling cease to be philosophical and become literary ? Philosophical concepts were assimilated and transmitted by Germans as various as Goethe, Schiller, the Schle- gels, Novalis, and Heine, but their expression is often so charged with poetic qualities that we ordinarily think of their effect upon essen- tially literary men like Longfellow, Lowell, or Lanier as constituting literary influence. Often we apply the terms philosophical and literary with reference less to the source of the influ- ence than to its object — less with respect to the originator than to the recipient. This broad distinction, or practice, is as nearly practicable as any other frame of reference that can readily be devised, and we shall not lose much of preci- sion when we think of the type of influence which Germany exerted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America as being primarily "philosophical" (or theological), while during the nineteenth century, as our literary men turned to Germany, the "literary" influence came to be steadily stronger until the two ran along not merely complementarily but more nearly equally, and sometimes almost indis- tinguishably. Goethe's impact on Emerson is a case in point. 151. The Choir Invisible (N.Y., 1897), p. 30. 152. The Germanic quality of Brown's Wie- 692 Notes to Pages 359-60 land was noticed more than, a hundred years ago by John Keats, who saw in Wieland "a domestic prototype of Schiller's Armenian [Geisterseher] ... a strange American scion of the German trunk." See Amy Lowell's John Keats (2 vols., Boston, 1925), II, 336. Since then, attention has centered on Brown's de- pendence upon French and English rational- ism, Godwinian and Richardsonian techniques, and various American ingredients, while the Germanic influence was largely overlooked until 1940, when Professor Harry R. Warfel re-examined the alleged connection in "Charles Brockden Brown's German Sources, "MLN, I, ii (Sept., 1940), 357—65. Many of the motifs common to Richardson, Godwin, and Brown were current coin bearing the imprint of many mints — English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German. But Brown's Gothicism was one with a difference, just as his romanticism, embrac- ing both faith in reason and neo-classical taste in letters, was distinguished from the narrower literary phases of romanticism. His Gothicism was no addiction to mere medievalism. As a disciple of the Enlightenment, he viewed the middle ages as rude and barbarous, and in the Preface to Edgar Huntly he described the common Gothic tales as "puerile." While he exploited the terror element of the Gothic, he laid his scene in America in modern times, and he gave a plausible, natural explanation for his mysteries, after the manner of the rational rather than the supernatural Gothic. 153. While Brown was proficient in Latin, Greek, and French, there is little to indicate that he mastered German, although there are numerous suggestions in his work that he had some knowledge of the language. Daily intima- cy with Elihu H. Smith during 1 795-1 798, when Smith was enthusiastically studying German, and their common interest in all their literary ventures make the presumption strong that he was led by Smith to study German. It may be observed, however, that during the 90's a knowledge of German was not an absolute requirement for one bent on knowing the more sensational forms of German literature. 154. Among the more important and first of these were Karl F. Kahlert's (pseud, for Lorenz Flammenberg) Der Geisterbanner, translated as The Necromancer; or, a Tale of the Black Forest, by Peter Teuthold (2 vols., London, 1794), and Cajetan Tschink's Geisterseher, translated by Peter Will as The Victim of Magical Delusion 3 vols., London, 1795). Will's translation appeared serially in the New York Weekly Magazine during 1 796-1 797. Schiller's Geister- seher (1789), which appeared in London as The Ghost-seer; or The Apparitionist in 1795, re- printed in the New York Weekly Magazine during 1 795-1 796 and twice the next year (in Charleston and New York), reinforced the same taste for the marvellous. Closely allied to these were tales that dealt with the secret societies such as the Illuminati, notably Christiane B. E. Naubert's Hermann und Unna (1788), trans- lated anonymously and published in Dublin and London in 1794 and again in London in 1796. Feeding this same taste were Karlos Grosse's Der Dolch, appearing in London in 1795 as The Dagger, and Grosse's Der Genius, translated by James Trapp as The Genius {Lon- don, 1796) and also by Peter Will as Horrid Mysteries (London, 1797). This list is merely suggestive and may be greatly enlarged by searching B. Q. Morgan's bibliography. See also Dabney's Additional Catalog (Salem, 1794), which lists the following titles suggestive of the same type of sub-literary fare : Baron of Mans- tow ; Castle of Wolfenbach; Christiana, Princess of Swabia; Memoirs of Count Cronstadt ; The Female Wert her; The German Gil Bias, or The Adventures of Peter Klaus; History of Count Gleichen; Letters of Albert to Charlotte; Popular Tales of the Germans; Radizal, a Novel; and Rosenberg, a Legendary Tale. 155. Professor David Lee Clark, who has had access to Brown's unpublished early diaries and letters, found in the books that occupied his mind at this time "the very essence for Wer- therism and . . . world weariness," and con- cludes that his mind "was set before Godwin had published a word." — Charles Brockden Brown. A Critical Biography (N.Y., 1923), p. 21 ; Edgar Huntly, ed. by D. L. Clark (N.Y., 1928), p. viii. Considering that Brown's mind began to turn about 1787 to writing epics on such themes as Columbus, Pizarro, and Cortez, we understand why the German sentimentalists were, in Professor Clark's phrase, "his daily companions," and why it was that he served his literary apprenticeship in their workshop. His interest in rationalists like Godwin appears to have begun about 1 794-1 795, or about the time he was introduced by Elihu H. Smith to the members of the Friendly Club of New York — among them William Dunlap, William John- son, Dr. Edward Miller, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Miller, Dr. S. L. Mitchill, James Kent, Anthony Bleecker, Charles Adams, John Wills, and W. W. Woolsey. See Wm. Dunlap, Memoirs of Charles Brockden Brown (Londen, 1822), pp. 10, 46; Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown (Gainesville, Fla., 1949), pp. 40 ff. Contact with this group broadened his interests to include the English and French rational radicals; but when it is recalled that among the membership of the Friendly Club, Smith, Dunlap, and Notes to Paees 360-61 693 Samuel Miller were enthusiastic "Germanists," we comprehend why the new interest did not become one that would exclude his earlier ad- diction to German romance and sentiment. For- their common interest in Burger, Schiller, Kot- zebue, and Zschokke, see Warfel, op. cit., p. no. 156. From Baron Johann K. Riesbeck's Briefe eines reisenden Franzosen iiber Deutsch- land (tr. by P. H. Maty as Travels through Ger- many, 2 vols., London, 1787, and often reprint- ed), Brown learned that Wieland, as poet and novelist, was "without doubt the first of all German writers" (II, 208). Baron Stolberg's Reise in Deutschland (tr. by Thos. Holcroft, 2 vols., London, 1796-1797, repr. 1797, 1801, 1806) and Dr. Charles Burney's Musical Travels (London, 1773) reinforced this opinion, as did numerous critical notices in American and British review periodicals. In a letter of 1793 Brown quoted from Wieland's Oberon (Canto VII, stanzas lii-liii) and added that he had read the whole, presumably in English. It is hard to see how this could have been so, since Sotheby's translation, considered the first, was not printed until 1798, unless Brown got hold of one of the earlier British versions that never appeared in print, or that he had indeed learned to read German. Cf. Oberon .... ed. by A. B. Faust (N.Y., 1940), pp. xvi-xvii; also Wieland, ed. by F. L. Pattee, p. 223; and Warfel, in MLN, I, ii (Sept., 1940), 359. 157. Wieland, Pattee ed., p. 7. 158. Ibid., p. 63. 159. Ibid., p. 88. 160. Ibid., pp. 88, 90. 161. Ibid., p. 47. 162. Ibid., p. 13. 163. Ibid., p. 88. Germanic notes occur in others of Brown's novels. Ormond is adressed to "I. E. Rosenberg, a native of Germany; Helena, Ormond's mistress, sings improvisa- tions "not inferior to the happiest exertions of Handel and Arne"; and Mary Wilmot in Clara Howard, is the daughter of a German merchant and an English lady. 164. II (Apr., 1800), 284-87. As a general reader and later as an American editor who studied the British reviews with a professional eye, Brown realized the drawing power of the superscription "From the German," and be- came familiar with the editor's trick of making sometimes a German ascription for an Ameri- can or a British work "to enhance the popu- larity and give a fashionable cachet" to it. Professor Warfel's discovery of a tale with a German title, in which Brown summarized one of his own stories, indicates that Brown himself used the trick. The practice was general enough to necessitate close scrutiny of everything in American periodical literature from 1780 to 1840 that is labeled "From the German" or that is otherwise alleged to be derived from Ger- manic sources. As an editor, Brown himself catered to this interest, and the Monthly Maga- zine and American Review (1799-1800) and the Literary Magazine and American Register (1803-1808) set a new high in America for the number of translations and intelligences from Germany. The former contains 1 7 and the latter 56 items, a number of them in three and four installments. For an itemization of these materials, see E. Z. Davis, op. cit., pp. 202-3, 207-8. 165. Warfel, loc. cit., p. 360. 166. See Christine Touaillon, Der deulsche Frauenroman des 18. J ahrhunderls (Vienna and Leipzig, 1 919). 167. This theme is strongest in Ormond, where Constantia Dudley, achieving a "rational estimate" before every act, becomes the hero- ine exemplifying the new woman whose speci- fications Brown had previously drawn in Alcuin. Edgar Huntly demonstrates the folly of unconsidered rash attempts to do good. Arthur Mervyn illustrates the necessity for subduing unreasoning terror in the presence of pestilence and other adversities, presenting at the same time advanced ideas of women's rights and social laws. — Warfel, loc. cit., p. 360. 168. Ormond (ed. by Ernest Marchand N.Y., 1937), p. 208. 169. Ibid., p. 231. Constantia's father be- comes an obstacle in the way of Ormond's goal. Ormond's murder of him becomes the benevo- lent act of a pre-Nietzschean superman. "For killing him [Ormond explains to the bereft daughter] I claim your gratitude. His death was a due and disinterested offering on the altar of your felicity and mine" (p. 231). All Ormond's acts are motivated by a high "experiment" in social revolution and reformation, the consum- mation of which he will allow no circumstance to circumvent or negate (p. 235 ; also pp. 207-8 and 231-34). The German translation of Ormond in 1802 by F. von Oertel, the translator of Lewis' Monk, suggests that the "Germanic" quality of this novel was recognized. Brown, it should be added, had been apprised of the Illuminati "perfectibilians" that arose in Germany and spread over Europe not only through the great hubbub raised in America, at just the time when he wrote his novels, by John Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797), but by the nu- merous German novels which dealt with the ideas, schemes, activities, and symbolisms of the Illuminati and similar Biinde. These had pre- pared his mind long before Americans generally 694 Notes to Pases 361-62 became excited and saw Illuminati lurking in every dark corner. Naubert's Hermann und Unna: Eine Geschichte aus den Zeiten der Vehm- gerichte (tr. as Hermann und Unna, 3 vols., Dublin, 1794; London, 1796,) for example, told how "a hundred thousand individuals were held together by an invisible chain, known to each other, but indistinguishable to the rest of the world, whose sittings were covered with the most impenetrable secrecy; whose decrees were arbitrary and despotical, and were executed by assassins whose steel seldom failed to reach the heart of the unfortunate victim." — London ed., I, v-vi. To the Preface of the translation was added an "Essay on the Secret Tribunal and Its Judges" from the Miscellaneous Works of Baron Bock. Brown's friend, Elihu H. Smith, read Hermann and Unna in the Dublin edition of 1794 in 1795. See Warfel, loc. cit., p. 361; C. Touaillon, op. cit. ; Marianne Thalmann, Der Trivialroman des 18. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Geheimbund- mystik (Berlin, 1923), pp. 71-76; Vernon Stauf- fer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (N.Y., 1918); Agnes G. Murphy, Banditry, Chivalry, and Terror in German Fiction, 1790- 1831 (Chicago, 1935), and Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror (London, 1921). 170. Early Influence of German Literature in America (N.Y., 1900), p. 37. 171. Die romantische Bewegung in der ameri- kanischen Literatur (Weimar, 1910), p. 27. 172. Here, however, we must not lose sight of the fact that in the Preface to Wieland Brown specifically referred for confirmation of the idea of religious delusions leading to murder to an incident reported in the local papers (see Wie- land, Pattee ed., p. 4, and Carl Van Doren's summary of the story in the Nation for Nov. 12, 19 14). This report, relating how a farmer living near Tomhannock, N. Y., had killed his wife and four children in a fit of religious mania, was printed in the New York Weekly Magazine for July 20, 1796, the same periodical which was even then concluding its serialization of Schil- ler's Geisterseher (or "The Apparitionist," running in Volume I from May 9, 1795, to June 18, 1796), and was followed shortly after by Peter Will's version of Tschink's Geisterseher (or "The Victim of Magical Delusion," running from July 6, 1796, to June 28, 1797). Schiller's story presented many motifs Brown may have utilized, not only for the claptrap of secret societies and mysterious events but more espe- cially for the arguments in which the relation- ship of reason, understanding, will, the senses, and the feelings to truth and morality are dis- cussed, for both Schiller's and Brown's novels abound in such passages. 173. Wieland, p. 261. 174. Ibid., p. 238; see also p. 257. 175. Uncritically assuming that strange voices which he heard are of heavenly origin, he interprets them as divine commands. He re- fuses to listen to all available sources of knowl- edge, brushing aside Pleyel's qualifying opin- ions and Carwin's explanation of ventriloquial phenomena. While three important elements of Wieland (localities, characters, and atmosphere; the Illuminati theme; and the moral of the tale) appear to be derived from German sources, the two most sensational motifs of the novel — ventriloquism and internal spontaneous com- bustion — are drawn from other sources. Brown drew most of what he knew about ventrilo- quism from the Encyclopaedia ; or a Dictionary of the A rts and Sciences, published in Philadel- phia during the same year that Wieland ap- peared (see Pattee ed., pp. xxx-xxxiv). With regard to Brown's use of spontaneous com- bustion, of which so much is made in the early part of the novel, Brown himself referred (in a footnote) this phenomenon to accounts in "the Journals of Florence" and to "similar cases reported by Messrs. Merille and Muraire, in the Journal de Medicine for February and May, 1783," as well as the "researches of Maffei and Fontana." Pattee suggests that the possibilities of spontaneous combustion were discussed by Brown and his roommate, Dr. E. H. Smith, and with other physicians and scientifically-minded members of the Friendly Club. More recently Professor Warfel has undertaken to re-examine the Selbstverbrennung episode in Wieland with results suggesting that there was a Pennsyl- vania-German source and probably also Ger- man and English intermediary sources from which Brown derived the information original- ly printed in the Italian journals. 176. For indications of his influence on these authors, see David L. Clark (ed.), Edgar Huntly (NY., 1928), pp. xx-xxii, and Ormond (Mar- chand ed.), p. xxxviii. 177. For this information I am indebted to Professor Harry R. Warfel, who has tran- scribed and prepared for publication the extant diaries of Smith. It is to be desired that their publication will not be much longer delayed. 178. Long before Smith turned to learning German, he had been accustomed to read trans- lations of German fictional and dramatic writ- ing in British journals like the Monthly Review, the Monthly Magazine, the English Review, and the Analytical Review. But what is most sug- gestive among his wide talents and interests is that as early as 1796 his reading in the British reviews excited his interest in Kant, to whose Notes to Pages 362-63 695 essay on world peace he made several refer- ences in his diary. Something of the extent of his concern with German literature can be gathered from his notations in the diary, which show that he read during 1795 Lavater's Secret Journal of a Self-Observer (doubtless in Peter Will's translation), the Dublin edition of Her- mann and Unna (Sept. 14), Goethe's Iphigenie aufTauris, apparently in the original (Sept. 28), a translation of Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (Dec. 2), Kalm's Reise durch Nordamerika (Apr. 2, 1796), and the translation of an unidentified German play, "The Negro Slave" (Nov. 19), that appeared in the London Oracle for October 10, 1796. 179. Preston A. Barba, "Cooper in Ger- many," German-American Annals, n.s., XII (Jan. -Feb., 1914), 3-60; also in Ind. Univ. Studies, II, xii (May 15, 1914), 49-104. 180. Thos. R. Lounsbury, James Fenimore Cooper (4th ed., Boston, 1884), p. 68. 181. From Berne he made a number of excursions into the surrounding country, in- cluding a trip to the Jungfrau, to Schaffhausen and Geneva, and a more extended tour through the central and eastern cantons, up the Rhine to its source, and back by the Grimsel Pass, Meiringen, and Thun to Berne. — R. E. Spiller, Fenimore Cooper, Critic of His Times (N.Y., 1931), pp. 141-45. In the journal of this period he recorded his daily travel experiences and took careful note of the past history as well as present details of each valley, town, or notable object that came under his observation, many of them later being transcribed to form letters that comprise the first volume of his Sketches of Switzerland (1836). 182. See Excursions in Switzerland (Paris, 1836), pp. 126-67. 183. See his tribute to Schiller in A Residence in France (Paris, 1836), pp. 173-74. The events associated with the affiliation of the cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden appealed to the defender of the principle of federal union; whereas the ruins of the castle of the Hapsburg family furnished inspiration for the paragraph on that "false policy that has endeavored to raise up, in the center of Europe, an Empire of discordant materials to counteract the power of Russia and France." On the other hand, "the castles of the Erlach family at Spietz and Hindel- bank aroused only sympathetic thoughts in the mind of the American landed proprietor. The power of the latter family was economic, and in this sort of dominance Cooper believed," as he was later to demonstrate in the Littlepage trilogy. — -Spiller, op. cit., p, 146. 184. See the introduction to The Heiden- mauer; Spiller, op. cit., p. 195; James Fenimore Cooper, Representative Selections, ed. by Spiller, (N.Y., 1936), p- 336, n. 70. 185. They proceeded from Paris by way of Cambrai, Brussels, and Aix-la-Chapelle, to Cologne on the Rhine, a stream which he called "an old acquaintance" in the introduction to The Heidenmauer. Thence they went by Kob- lenz, Mainz, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt-am-Main, Darmstadt, Mannheim, Heidelberg, and Lud- wigsburg, to Stuttgart, again visiting Diirck- heim, where he had laid the scene of The Heidenmauer (for details of the journey, see Sketches, Part II, Vol. I). Cooper himself wanted to turn eastward to Vienna, but was induced to continue southward out of consideration for the youngest of the children, whom he wanted to provide with an opportunity to form a memo- rable impression of Switzerland. Hence they proceeded to Zurich and Zug, thence westward to the Bernese Oberland and Berne to Vevey. Here, as he whiled away idle evenings on the lake, philosophizing with the boatman, he formed the outlines for his new book, The Headsman (1833). By October they were back in Paris, and by November of 1833 they all arrived in New York. 186. Appearing simultaneously with the Philadelphia edition of these two parts were the London and Paris editions, Part I being entitled Excursions in Switzerland, and Part II, A Residence in France: With an Excursion up the Rhine, and a Second Visit to Switzerland. 187. Although Cooper acquired what he called "a very respectable travelling German," it was "far from classical," as is indicated by various passages in the Swiss Sketches, among them the passage in A Residence in France (pp. 173-74) m which he expresses his preference for Schiller over Goethe. See also Excursions, pp. 96-97. 188. On the score of Cooper's archaeological prowess and his use of bookish sources for a traveler's information, see Spiller, Fenimore Cooper, pp. 159, 202, 324-25. 189. Following the first seven letters de- voted to his residence in Paris, Letters VIII- XVI relate the journey via Belgium, up the Rhine, and through the Bernese Oberland; the remaining ones describe his summer residence at Vevey on Lake Geneva. In substance this volume covers roughly the fourth of his Ger- man-Swiss tours. 190. Although Cologne is the "dirtiest and most offensive [city] we have yet seen, or rather smelled in Europe," he proceeds in true tourist fashion to inspect the cathedral, to visit the birthplace of Rubens, to view the relics of the eleven thousand virgins, and to buy some Cologne water. He is especially profuse in 696 Notes to Pages 363-67 noting whatever of history or legend is worth recording at Riidelsheim, Ingelheim, Biberich, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt-am-Main, Heidelberg, Ludwigsburg, Stuttgart, Tubingen, Tuttlingen, Schaffhausen, and Zurich. 191. As Cooper explains in the Introduction, the abbey, the castle, the devil's stone, the heathen wall, and the lore relating to them set in motion "the train of thought" and provided the locale for the novel — the destruction of the old orders in both church and state by the advent of Lutheranism. Further talks with the "philosophical" Kinzel and "a convocation held in the parlor of the Ox" clarified the theme of "the following pages," in which Cooper relates the past history of the schisms between church and state as emblematic of the six- teenth-century movement toward popular rights. These, as he saw it, had been given new meaning in terms of the advance of democratic principles in the Europe and America of his own day. 192. Spiller, FenimoreCooper, pp. 218, 219-20. 193. The object of the book, which became also the guiding motive of much that he wrote later, is stated in the last paragraph in these terms: "Our object has been to show, by a rapidly-traced picture of life, the reluctant manner in which the mind of man abandons old to receive new impressions — the inconsistencies between profession and practice — the error of confounding the good with the bad, in any sect or persuasion — the common and governing principles that control the selfish, under every shade and degree of existence — and the high and immutable qualities of the good, the virtu- ous, and of the really noble." This is a heavy cargo for a novel to carry, and as a novel the book fell dead from Cooper's hand. But it remains an interesting examination into the causes for the decay, under the influence of Lutheranism, of feudalism and ancient tradi- tion in Europe, and an exposition of the signifi- cant social and religious heritage which the new world derived from the old. 194. He set himself to check the tendency to ape European models, and in The Lay of the Scottish Fiddle (181 2), Koningsmarke, the Long Finne (1827), and in his several volumes on John Bull and Brother Jonathan he satirized the Englishman no less than the continental European. In his Book of Vagaries he ridiculed the vaunted German love of music and the ease with which Viennese society combines piety with profligacy. The vogue in America of phrenology and animal magnetism Paulding blamed on the Germans' addiction to the pseudo-scientific and mystical, and in Merry Tales of Three Wise Men from Gotham (1839) he made these "German vagaries" the special object of satire. In his telling, though essenti- ally good-natured, ridicule of American readers who swallow "cheap imported goods" and of writers who imitate the "sentimental immo- ralities of German authors" he aimed at keeping American literature within the limits of sanity. 195. Oral S. Coad, "The Gothic Element in American Literature before 1835," JEGP, XXIV, i (1925), 72-93. 196. Odofriede, a deformed peasant, cast out by society, becomes a misanthrope. Evil spirits grant him beauty and riches in exchange for his soul. To avenge himself on mankind, he uses his wealth and charm to ruin the lives of his fellow- men, until in the end he loses command over the spirits and is whisked away by the fearful one. 197. Thomas Roscoe, The German Novelists (4 vols., London, 1826), II, 6on. For other details, see Henry A. Pochmann, "Irving's German Sources in The Sketch Book," Studies in Philol., XXVII, iii (July, 1930), 477-507, esp. PP- 477-79- 198. Blackwood' s Edinburgh Mag., XI (June, 1822), 689. 199. Ibid., XVII (Jan., 1825), 66. 200. See the comment of editor R. W. White on Poe's "Berenice" in the Southern Literary Messenger for March, 1835. 201. Poe's Preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839). 202. Works of Edgar Allan Poe (ed. by J. A Harrison, 17 vols., N.Y., 1902), XIII, 144. GERMANIC MATERIALS AND MOTIFS IN THE SHORT STORY WASHINGTON IRVING I. As editor, during 1812-1814, of the Analectic Magazine, he initiated a new policy by which the Analectic devoted during the first year of his command twenty-four pages to information about Germany, thus beginning a practice by which this periodical soon outdid all other native journals of the day in the dis- semination of German literary lore among American readers. See Goodnight, op. cit., pp. 122-25. 2. Surfeited by this body of melodramatic, murky, substandard literature from Germany, he became predisposed to adopt what became his characteristically curious, quizzical, satiri- cal attitude toward much of German literature. The detachment with which he later handled typically German legendary motifs like that of Lenore in "The Spectre Bridegroom" or of Die Notes to Pages 367-69 697 weisse Frau and similar German ghosts in stories like "The Adventure of My Uncle" and "The Bold Dragoon" and the ease with which he made the transition from the serious to the comic, or sportive Gothic, resulted in part at least from this early conditioning. 3. For Scott's German interests at this time and Scott's influence on Irving, see Pochmann, loc. cit., pp. 485-88, and Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving (2 vols., N.Y. 1935). I. 158-67. 4. P. M. Irving, Life and Letters of Washing- ton Irving (4 vols., N.Y., 1862-1864), I, 282, 284, 285-86, and Letters of Irving to Brevoort (ed. by G. S. Hellman, 2 vols, in 1, N.Y., 1918), pp. 266-67. He conjugated German verbs and scrawled off pages of declensions: "Gute Milch, gutes Bier, guter Wein." He had trouble with the spelling of "Erzalungen" (Erzahlungen) , with genitives and neuters. Discouraged by the insufferable difficulties of the language, he sometimes turned to his fragment of a novel, Rosalie, and other old or abortive literary projects, only to return to "that awful language" which barred his ready access to such delightful bits of lore as he extracted and jotted down, in his notebook of 1818, from Johann Kaspar Ries- beck's Travels in Germany (tr. by P. H. Maty; 3 vols., London, 1787), I, 140-42: "Watzman Mountain in Bavaria where it is said the European Charles the great and all his army are confined until Doomsday — near Sallzburg [sic] — a cleft of the mountain from whence you hear a dull rumbling like distant thunder." In Germany, four years later, he visited the scene where these marvelous events had reputedly transpired, and standing in the ravine, strained his ears, half credulous, half amused, for sounds of the phantom army. See Williams, Life, I, 166, and fournals of W ashington Irving, ed. by W. P. Trent and G. S. Hellman (3 vols, Boston, 1919), I, goff. In a note appended to "Rip Van Winkle," Irving facetiously (or mistakenly) cited this old legend as the source of his story. 5. Letters of Irving to Brevoort, pp. 286-87. 6. His "scribbling" pleased him so much that he would not stop to accept any other employ- ment, however needed, certain, or lucrative. The essays and stories that comprise The Sketch Book bolstered his faltering confidence to re- dedicate himself to a writing career. As the success of The Sketch Book seems to prove, he was right in trusting to his genius. But it may be added that Tales of a Traveller (1824) need not have been the comparative failure that it was if Irving had adhered more closely to the method in The Sketch Book of adapting German sources that made "Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and "The Spectre Bridegroom" such decided hits. But by 1823- 1824 "the buzzards of criticism," with their cries of "Stolen!" and "Plagiarized!" had made Irving timid about reworking old German legends and myths. Consequently Tales of a Traveller became another salmagundi of titbits and counterfeit anecdotes of spurious or dis- guised origin, while the legends and fairy lore of Salzburg and of Riibezahl, carefully gathered though they had been during Irving's Dresden sojourn, reposed in his notebooks, whence his timidity prevented his drawing them forth. 7. Apparently Irving had proceeded far enough by 1819 in his study of German (barring the possibility that he found someone to trans- late the tale for him) to read the story of Peter Klaus in the original, because no translation of it had yet appeared in English or, as far as I have been able to discover, in any language that Irving could read at the time. The story as told in Biisching's Volks-Sagen (18 12), where Irving could have found his source as readily as in Otmar, appears to have received its first English translation in the London Magazine for March, 1822 — too late for Irving's purposes. 8. What makes Irving's story classic is his elaborations upon Otmar's bare narrative, the embroidery, and the inimitable style which Irving added. He translated the locale from the Harz to his own beloved shadowy Catskills, beside the azure Hudson. He substituted for Otmar's Rittermdnner of the Kyffhauser a company of odd-looking personages whom we recognize as the characters of one of his earliest works — Hendrick Hudson and his men, legend- ary shades of the Catskills like the phantom army of Friedrich der Rotbart. He changed the goatherd to a ne'er-do-well but lovable Dutchman, thus providing for those felicitous scenes of Van Winkle domesticity, marred by termagancy on the one side and shiftlessness on the other. He contrasted the tranquil atmos- phere of the colonial inn under whose sign loll the contented Dutch wiseacres with the bustling contentiousness of the mob that intro- duces Rip to the new era. All this is touched by Irving's poignant feeling of mutability, his love for the old Federalists certitudes, his distrust of the untried promises of Jeffersonian republi- canism. For the political significance of the little scene that is enacted before Doolittle's hotel upon Rip's return, see my selected edition of Washington Irving (American Writers Series, N.Y., 1934), Introduction, pp. xlii-lx, esp. p. xlv. Finally, Irving stretched out the story after Rip's return from his long sleep to relate, in his leisurely way, Rip's changed condition. 698 Notes to Pases 370-73 person, and character after he got from under "petticoat government." 9. For the happy manner in which Irving combined something of his own with something borrowed from bookish or legendary materials for a dozen other pieces in The Sketch Book, see Williams, Life, I, 182-83, an d f° r others of Irving's writings, ibid., pp. 263-325. 10. The fact that the story of "der verzau- berte Kaiser Friedrich" immediately follows "Peter Klaus" in Otmar's book suggests that Otmar rather than Grasse, Biisching, or some other, supplied Irving's source. In the other collections the stories are separated. 11. Works of Washington Irving (3 vols., N.Y.: P. F. Collier, n.d.), Ill, 571 n. 12. The subterfuge involved in these notes is probably little more than a reflection of his dislike for ungenerous critics who harped upon the derivative nature of his best offerings. To reveal the sources of his stories was to bait the track and turn the pack loose upon himself. However, his use of unacknowledged materials in The Sketch Book was not his least offense of this kind. Later he angered the Spaniards by offering translations from obscure books as original stories. See Williams, Life, pp. 183-84. 13. Besides knowing the oral tradition cur- rent in Sleepy Hollow of "the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war," Irving was familiar with what he called "the favorite goblin of Ger- man tales" in several versions, including Scott's translation of "Der wilde Jager" and Otmar's "Wild Huntsman of Hacklenburg." In the latter the wild rider hurls a shank of meat at his victim's head. Before writing his adaptation of the libretto of Weber's Freischiitz, entitled The Wild Huntsman (1824), Irving familiarized him- self with many of the German variants of the story. Burns's "Tarn O'Shanter," too, was something to his purpose. Tarn and Ichabod encounter a number of similar experiences on their luckless rides, but unlike Ichabod, Tarn himself escapes bodily injury, while his nag loses her tail. Moreover, Burns does not use what is central in Irving's story — the rivalry- in-love motif, nor what is even more important, the climactic head-hurling incident. The latter Irving found in no English or German tradition until he happened upon the Rubezahl legends as told by Johann K. A. Musaeus in Volksmdrchen der Deutschen (1782). 14. The legends of Rubezahl ("Number-Nip" in the English version) were available in a translation ascribed to William Beckford, published in two volumes in London by Murray in 1 791 under the title of Popular Tales of the Germans. Whether Irving used the original or the translation is immaterial. Beckford follows the original so closely that his version serves as well as that of Musaeus for purposes of com- parison. Since the parallel passages are given in extenso in my essay in Studies in Philology (XXVII, 500-503), they are merely summarized here. All references to Irving's writings, except where otherwise indicated, are to the "Spuyten Duyvil" edition (12 vols., N.Y., 1881). 15. Compare Popular Tales of the Germans, II, 143-44, an d The Sketch Book, 417; see also pp. 425, 442, 446. 16. Popular Tales, II, 145-46, and The Sketch Book, p. 446; also pp. 423-24. 17. PT, II, 146; TSB, pp. 447, 448, 449. 18. PT, III, 147; TSB, pp. 448-49. 19. PT, II, 147; TSB, pp. 449-50. 20. PT, II, 147; TSB, p. 450. 21. PT, II, 149-50; TSB, p. 450. 22. PT, II, 151; TSB, pp. 451-52. 23. PT, II, 165; TSB, p. 452. 24. In Germany later Irving made a tour of the Riesengebirge, the scene of Riibezahl's activities; his off-hand references (Journals, I, 192, 206, 219) to the Rubezahl lore indicate prior familiarity. An interesting point in this connection is that one of the names by which Rubezahl went was "Rip," a variant for "Nip." 25. P. M. Irving, op. cit., I, 335-36. 26. The Sketch Book, p. 202. To give the story an authentic German atmosphere (despite Irving's burlesque overtones), he laid the scene in "the heights of the Odenwald, a wild and romantic tract in Upper Germany"; the characters are given significant names like Count von Altenburg, Herman von Starken- faust, and Baron von Landshort, "a dry branch of the great family of Katzellenbogen," which name Irving took the pains to translate in a footnote; words like Rhein-wein, Ferne-wein, Saus und Braus are scattered throughout ; and the heroine is said to know all the "chivalric wonders of the Heldenbuch" and the "tender ballads of the Minne-lieders by heart." 27. Journals, I, 225. 28. Precisely what Irving's primary motive in visiting Germany was is hard to determine, but it is certain thatScott'sstrongchampionship of German literature bore weight with him. Also, the remarkable success of his first short stories, which had drawn so heavily upon Teutonic legends, made him eager to know more of Germany and her literature. After basking for a while in the public favor occasion- ed by the success of The Sketch Book, and following a vacation in Paris, the necessity of earning a livelihood recalled him to the realities of an author's life. But the projected work on Notes to Pages 373-74 699 "Buckthorne," once called tentatively "The History of an Author," and originally based on his observations of what transpired at literary dinners like those of Longman's, eventually underwent a dozen transformations before finally appearing as Part II in Tales of a Travel- ler. The other manuscripts he worked on at the time simply would not jell. None was com- mitted to paper as readily as " Rip Van Winkle, for instance. He was sorely in need of stimula- tion. In Paris he saw a good deal of George Bancroft, just turned 21, fresh from his studies under Heeren and Schlosser, and what he learn- ed from Bancroft about Germany as a paradise for the literary antiquarian played its part in the decision that finally took him there in 1822. In the meantime, Bracebridge Hall had been completed and published in 1822; and while it got him a handsome check from Murray, the book was a letdown after The Sketch Book (for details, see Williams, Life, I, 207-12). No one knew better than Irving that the book was too pale and buccolic for the romance-hungry readers of 1822. The one robust story between the two covers — "The Stout Gentleman" — the critics chose to damn as "indelicate," "inde- cent." Obviously he had worked the English countryside and antiquarian materials to the limit of the readers' endurance. Here begins Irving's practice of changing his habitat in search of new matter when old themes begin to run thin. Everything pointed to Germany as the land where his stock-in-trade might find most ready replenishment. When finally his physician advised him to try the baths in Ger- many, his mind was easily made up, and on July 17, 1822, he entered the Rhineland at Aix- la-Chapelle. From here his itinerary lay by way of Wiesbaden to Mainz, down the Rhine to Koblenz, thence to Frankfurt, Darmstadt, via the Bergstrasse, through the Odenwald, to Heidelberg, then to Karlsruhe, Kehl, Strassburg, thence eastward to Ulm, Augsburg, Munich, Salzburg to Vienna and finally to Dresden for the winter. From the date of his departure from Aix (Aug. 6, 1822) until he reached Paris a year later, Irving wrote little that survives in print. Though he had gone to Germany with the intention of doing a German Sketch Book (sometimes he spoke of it as "a book on Ger- many" or "my German book") he worked only in a desultory fashion on such narratives as "Buckthorne." In the midst of excursions into the country surrounding Dresden (where he settled longest), the social whirl of the capital, a none-too-promising love affair, amateur theatricals, visits to art galleries, and struggles with a recalcitrant language, his pen did little more than make notes in his journals of the stuff that eventually supplied some of the fodder for Tales of a Traveller, the actual com- position of the bulk of which took place in Paris during the winter of 1823-1824. See the Jour- nals for the Dresden period and Williams, Life, pp. 218, 272-74. 29. P. M. Irving, op. cit., II, 101 ; also Jour- nals, I, 55, n. 3. 30. On the first day of his arrival on German soil he made note of two superstitious beliefs held by the natives {Journals, I, 49) ; just below Bingen he observed the Mouse Tower and on a height opposite the ruins of the castle of Ehren- fels. In the Odenwald, where he had laid the scene of his "Spectre Bridegroom," he was inter- ested in the medieval castles "famous in Ger- man song and story," and at Heidelberg he inquired after "legend and goblin tale" cluster- ing round its castles. At Erbach he remarked on the "chateau of Erbach — Rittershalle, or Knight Hall — armour of Goetz von Berlich- ingen — Gustav Adolph — Wallenstein." Goetz, as the hero of Goethe's play, had been familiar to him since his youth, when it had been popular on the New York stage. Wallen- stein had been available in English since 1800. Near Baden he entered a note about the medieval Westphalian court of justice, the Fehmgericht, which had been called to his at- tention by Scott, and much earlier, by the New York plays of the Dunlap-Kotzebue era. 31. Intent on the picturesque, romantic past, he missed completely the political drama gradu- ally unfolding itself in Germany in the post- Napoleonic era, apparently unaware of what Fichte's popular works had done for the dis- united states. To Hegel's declaration that the era of roughhewing Teutonia was over, and that she was now free to turn to the inward kingdom of the intellect and the spirit — to these subtler forces Irving remained oblivious. To the new- economic thought, the radical theological speculations, and the revolutionary philosophy of Germany he was as insensible as he had been (and as he remained to the end) about such matters, even in his native land. The Germany that interested him was not of the present or future, but of the fabled past. 32. For instance, at Munich, "one part rubbish the other fine," while he met royalty, his repeated visits to the library with its "500,000 volumes" most absorbed his attention. During his month at Vienna, he regularly pa- tronized the Imperial Library. — Journals, I, 79, 81, 104-5. 33. One of them contains the supernatural sleep motif, already used in "Rip Van Winkle." Repeatedly he notes in his diary, as he did at 700 Notes to Page 374 the Golden Eagle in Ober Hollabrun, "sit up until near eleven . . . read'g and writing. Read old legends after going to bed." To his sister he wrote: "I have some wonderful tales told me which I shall keep in mind against I have an- other match at story-telling with the children." — P.M.Irving, op. cit., I, 114; II, 119. At Salzburg he "inscrolled page after page of fable," some in his journals, others in his letters to the Van Warts and the Storrows, who (he knew) would preserve every scrap that came from Geoffrey Crayon, and where all might be borrowed later if needed for a first draft of some tale. "Put me in mind [he wrote to Susan Stor- row] ... of the Emperor and his army shut up in the enchanted mountain — which mountain I have absolutely seen with my own eyes. Put me in mind of the little dwarf woman. . . . Put me in mind of the Black Huntsman and the en- chanted Bullets. Put me in mind. . . ." — Williams, Life, I, 225; Journals, Oct. 19, 1822. Unfortunately he never made literary use of any of these except the story of the Black Huntsman and the enchanted Bullets. 34. Journals, I, 101 (Nov. 2, 1922). 35. P. M. Irving, op. cit., II, 124. Leaving Vienna on November 18, he arrived at Prague on November 22 for a stop of four days. Here he assembled odds and ends for romances that were vaguely germinating in his mind. But soon he was off again, across the broad Bohemian plain, through Schan, Laun, Teplitz, to Peters- wald, where he entered Saxony. Throughout his tour he jotted down bits of folklore and German words, phrases, and savings: for ex- ample, "trinkgeld," "amtsmann," "landwehr," "hausknecht," "elegant schone," "lusthaus," "landkutscher." For many phrases he added a translation; thus, "Bei dem hangt der Himmel voller Geigen" he rendered "with him the heaven hangs full of fiddles," adding, "German saying of a merry fellow who lives joyously"; and "Gleich, says the valet de place, is an hour, and gleich, gleich — two hours." Other examples, with references, are recorded in my essay on "Irving's German Tour and Its Influence on His Tales," PMLA, XLV, iv (Dec, 1930), 1150-87, esp. pp. 1157-58. 36. The romantic lore of Germany now took on added meaning. In May, in preparation for a tour of the Riesengebirge, the legendary haunt of Rubezahl (whose exploits he had already turned to good use), he read the entire Rubezahl saga with the Fosters. — Journals, I, 192, 219. 37. See Journals, I, 137-38, 139, 144, 168, 170, 184, 217. 38. For information regarding this elusive, interesting individual, see Walter A. Reichart, "Washington Irving's Friend and Collaborator: Barham John Livius, Esq.," PMLA, LVI, ii (June, 194 1 ). 5 J 3-3i- 39. The evenings that Irving was not at court or at the Fosters he spent at the theater, often devoting three evenings a week to playgoing. For German operas and plays seen while in Germany, see my essay in PMLA, XLV, 1154- 55. Irving's vocation (for it amounted to that) as opera- and play-goer and his work as play- wright and libretto writer are not sufficiently recognized. During the seventeen years that he spent in Europe he saw a vast number of plays and operas, whose titles, recorded in his diaries, constitute a list — English, French, Italian, German, Spanish — unequalled in the record of any other American man of letters. Following his participation in amateur theatricals at the Foster house, Irving renewed his contacts with John Howard Payne, then engaged in the selection and revision of French plays for the London stage. Irving gave advice, often more than advice, in connection with the plays on which Payne worked during 1823- 1824. Two of them, Charles II and Richelieu, are largely the handiwork of Irving. With these, we may consider Abu Hassan and The Wild Huntsman — adapted by Irving from the German — as the four finished pieces of Irving the playwright. Early in 1823, Irving decided to write an English libretto — part translation, part adapta- tion, from the then most popular German opera of Carl Maria von Weber, a man with whom he was soon on terms of intimacy. He set to work on April 20, with the libretto of Abu Hassan by Karl Franz Heimers before him. That evening he heard Weber play his own music. Irving wrote steadily and finished the rough draft on April 25. The next day his friend Colonel Livius played the music for him; and notations in the diary for the first half of May indicate how rapidly the writing proceeded, Irving working with Livius on the songs until May 28, when the alterations were finished. On May 30 he began work translating and adapting from the German of Friedrich Kind the libretto of Weber's most famous opera, Der Freischutz. (Irving had first seen it performed in Darmstadt on September 20 and again on October 12, 1822.) By June 4 he was revising. We hear no more of it until we come to the Paris journals, October 8 and 11, 1823, when Irving, together with Livius, finally retouched the libretto. It was first produced on the English stage under the title of The Wild Huntsman in London on July 22, 1824. In this connection Irving and Livius deserve credit that has not Notes to Page 375 701 been given them by the bibliographers of the opera and drama. "One may stress the fact," says Hellman, "that the first version in English of a libretto of the first German opera was written by the first famous American man of letters." See George S. Hellman, Washington Irving, Esq. (N.Y., 1925), pp. 148s.; also Williams, Life, I, 234-35, 236, 255-72. 40. See Irving's humorous comments on this meeting, Journals, I, 145. Among things purchased at this time is "Jean Paul's work," and thereafter he frequently mentions reading his writings. — Journals, I, 187, 198. 41. Ibid., p. 189; see also pp. 151, 173-74, 198. 42. As a constant theater-goer and busy with amateur theatricals, operatic and dramatic compositions of his own, Irving could hardly have missed meeting Tieck, the leading dra- matic critic in Dresden. Indeed, a careful read- ing of the manuscript notebooks from which G. S. Hellman and W. P. Trent selected and edited the three volumes of the Journals shows that the editors consistently misread Tieck as Treck in making the transcription, so that the references which Irving made later in "Buck- thorne" to Tieck's Phantasus and his (Irving's) "Fancy" take on added meaning in the light of their close association in Dresden. I surmised that this relationship existed in my 1930 essay in PMLA, XLV, 11 70. The hunch was sub- stantiated the following year by Professor Edwin H. Zeydel in a note, "Washington Irving and Ludwig Tieck," PMLA, XLVI, 946-47. See also The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley (ed. by G.W. Curtis; 2 vols., N.Y., 1889), I, 36, in which Motley reports meeting Tieck in 1834 and Tieck's speaking appreciatively of Irving. Tieck possessed not only the 1831 edition of Irving's writings but a number of individual titles, in both English and German. Throughout the period of his German resi- dence Irving added to the knowledge he had acquired earlier of Burger's poems, Schiller's and Kotzebue's plays, the translations of Hoff- mann in Blackwood's, and tales of other Ger- man romancers appearing in other periodicals, a familiarity with Chamisso's "Peter Schle- mihl," a tale based on the old German folk story of the man who sold his shadow to the devil; and he read Jean Paul, Tieck, Friedrich Laun, Arndt's Marchen, the Grimms' Marchen, much of Goethe and some of Schiller's historical and dramatic works, while Mrs. Foster entertained him by reading from the multi-volume edition of Musaeus and from other collections. See Journals, II, ii; Williams, Life, I, 179, 213, 223, 272, 446-47; II, 287; Journal of 1823-1824 (ed. by Williams, Cambridge, 1931), pp. 72-73, 243. Other literary associations are detailed in PMLA, XLV, iv (Dec, 1930), 1158-60. 43. Williams, Life, I, 235. 44. This was regular procedure beginning early in December, when he engaged the first tutor, until May 16, 1823, when he noted in his diary, "Lesson in morning — paid Schott forty dollars for ninety-six hours of German teach- ing," and the next day he added, "Pay off Mr. Keysler for five and one-half months German tuition at eight dollars the month. Forty-four dollfars]" (Journals, I, 194, 195). Early in January, when he met Tieck, Irving still car- ried on his part of the conversation in English, though this probably means no more than that Tieck's mastery of English invited Irving to use his native tongue in order to facilitate com- munication. Also, the princes and other mem- bers of the Dresden court, being as eager to dis- play their command of English as their dis- tinguished guest was desirous of concealing his halting German, invited Irving, during his early months among them, to speak English. While he never acquired the same facility for speaking German (or French, for that matter) that he subsequently achieved in Spanish, he could make himself understood in both German and French, and he made steady progress during the Dresden period in his ability to handle the language. The Dresden Abendzeitung proudly reported on Jan. 22, 1823: "Herr Washington Irving . . . busies himself tirelessly with our language which he himself speaks, and with whose characteristics he has been acquainted since his earlier sojourn on the Rhine, at Mainz and Vienna." 45. Journals, II, 9-10, 11, 19, 47, 50, 86, 107, 156; III, 190; and Williams, Life, I, 222, 230- 32, 443, n. 36. 46. Even during his last days in Germany, while accompanying the Fosters to Rotterdam, he was in a frenzy of activity not to miss any- thing of importance by the wayside. Together they visited notable spots ranging from the site of the Leipzig Battle of Nations to Auerbach's Keller of Faustian fame, and he made a special effort to trace the wanderings of "The White Woman" of Germany, later turned to good advantage in Part I of Tales of a Traveller. On every possible occasion he urged Mrs. Foster to read, as she had done so often in Dresden, tales of German witches and goblins from Musaeus and other collections, while he busily entered notations in his journal like a miser adding pennies to his hoard. — Williams, Life, I, 243; P. M. Irving, op. cit., IV, 369. 47. Ibid., II, 137-38. 48. During 1823-1824 Irving projected a number of literary undertakings that came to 702 Notes to Pages 375-76 little. One of them appears to owe its inception to Goethe's Faust. On September n, 1824, Kemble asked Irving to write a play for him. His diaries reveal neither assent nor refusal, but during the following month Irving conceived the plan of a play to be entitled The Cavalier. Though nothing came of it, there remain certain notes of a play called El Embozado, based on a suggestion given to Irving the preceding March by Byron's friend, Medwin. El Embozado: The Cloaked Figure was to be a drama of the dual nature of man — a story of crime and seduction in which the young offender is finally saved by the intervention of his better self (Irving later treated a similar theme in his "Don Juan: a Spectral Research"). Hellman connects Irving's El Embozado with Goethe's Faust, for which (Irving remarks) Goethe apparently got sug- gestions from the Magico Prodigioso of Calde- r6n. Irving had long been familiar with the story of Faust and had read Goethe's version in the original. See Williams, Life, I, 443, n. 36; Journals, I, 173; II, 156; Hellman, op cit., pp. 166-67. 49. Having been sent for, on April 27, 1823, by the Queen of Saxony, who intimated that she expected "he would write something about Dresden, etc.," he felt himself in a measure commissioned and committed to write about Germany. — Journals, I, 185. 50. One suspects that the reference is to books mentioned on December 15, 1823: "Return home, and find parcel from Mrs. Foster, with German books." In Paris he read indefatigably and counted himself particularly fortunate at having "within five minutes' walk . . . the great national library." — Ibid. ,11, 168-69, 181-83. 51. P. M. Irving, op. cit., II, 166. 52. Ibid., p. 164 53. Ibid., pp. 20, 55. 54. "Wrote a little at 'History of an Author'" is one passage in his diary at the time. "Tried to commence work on Germany, but could do nothing" is another. Then follows: "Toward twelve o'clock, an idea of a plan dawned on me — made it out a little, and minuted down heads of it." This was a plan "to mingle up the legendary superstitions of Germany in the form of tales and local descriptions and a little bit of the cream of travelling incidents." On Decem- ber 17, 1823, he wrote: "Woke early — felt depressed and desponding — suddenly a thought struck me how to arrange the MSS on hand, so as to make two more volumes of 'Sketch Book' ready ... in the spring." By January 3, 1824, he finished "Wolfert Webber," but then he wrote no more until February {ibid., II, 178- 79). On February 8 he complained of "a fit of sterility for this month past" so that he despaired of "the hope of getting ready for a spring appearance." He also reported that he had "determined to introduce my 'History of an Author,' breaking it into parts and distrib- uting it through the two volumes," explaining that it had "grown stale" and that he would never be able to finish it "as a separate work" (ibid., II, 185-86). Then he wrote "The Bold Dragoon," "The Adventure of My Uncle," "The Adventure of My Aunt," "The Mysterious Picture," and the Italian banditti tales at the rate of ten to thirty pages a day (ibid., II, 187- 91), but by March 25, he had again changed everything. Writing to Murray he said he had given up the idea of a second Sketch Book — instead, he had "run into a plan and thrown off writings which will be more novel and attrac- tive," that after some "rewriting and filling up" the whole would be ready in six weeks, and that the title would be "Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." — Ibid., II, 191. 55. At the last moment the manuscripts were found to be too few for two octavo volumes. He was obliged to pad by writing introductions, conclusions, links, and interpolated passages for "Buckthorne," and he dashed off another robber tale (which it is impossible to say). Tales of a Traveller appeared in four parts: Part I. Strange Stories of a Nervous Gentle- man; Part II. Buckthorne and his Friends; Part III. The Italian Banditti; and Part IV. Money Diggers. 56. See Memoirs, Journal, and Corre- spondence of Thomas Moore, ed. by Lord John Russell (8 vols., London, 1853), III, 252-53. Actually certain autobiographical portions of the story, or stories, had been put in the first draft even earlier. 57. That is, the sections entitled "The Young Man of Great Expectations, ' ' "Grave Reflections of a Disappointed Man," "The Booby Squire," and "The Strolling Manager." Irving worked on the second half of Buckthorne intermittent- ly from December 23, 1822, to June 14, 1823. The last parts appear to have been composed chiefly during this period when he was engaged in private theatricals at the Foster's, reading Faust and discussing Egmont with Emily, talk- ing with Baron Lutzerode about the English and German theaters, and regularly attending the Dresden theater. Very likely his theatrical interests led him to Wilhelm Meister's Lehr- jahre, Goethe's story of the apprentice who follows a theatrical career to prepare for life. 58. Compare Tales of a Traveller, p. 182, and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Bk. I, Chaps. IV and VI, Goethes Werke (Weimar ed., 102 vols., 1887-1918), XXI, 18-24. Notes to Pages 376-78 703 59. Tales, pp. 184-85, and Werke, XXI, 88. 60. Tales, 187-88, and Werke, XXI, 122-23, 211-16. 61. Tales, p. 92, and Werke, XXII, 238-39. 62. Tales, pp. 253, 255, and Werke, XXII, 238. 63. Tales, esp. pp. 253-61, and Werke, XXII 230-56. 64. A group of bachelors have gathered on a baronet's estate for a great hunt. The weather turning inclement, they assemble in the baronial hall, an idyllic setting for the ghost stories which they proceed to relate. 65. That Irving read some of Tieck's works we know, although we do not know precisely which; but considering Tieck's reputation in Dresden and the cordial relations which existed between him and Irving, it is not likely that Irving overlooked Tieck's popular tales. Moreover, "Buckthorne" contains a direct allusion to Phantasus. We read that Buckthorne "fell in company with a special knot of fellows, of lively parts and ready wits, who had lived occasionally upon town, and became initiated into the Fancy," a club similar to Tieck's Phantasus. See Tales, p. 214, and compare Tieck's Phantasus, Vol. IV of Schriften (28 vols , Berlin, 1828-1854), esp. the "Einleitung" and the links. 66. Grasse, J. T. G. Sagenbuch des Preus- sischen Staales (2 vols., Glogau, 1868-1871), I, 15, 224, 267, 283, 521, 765, 783; II, 76, 366, 479, 664, 779. 67. Ibid., I, 572-75. "Die Edelfrau von Scharzfeld" was included in the collections of Biisching, Gottschalck, Grasse, and Roscoe. Very likely Irving read the tale in Biisching, though it is not impossible that the story came to him by word of mouth, as Professor Williams con- jectures (Life, I, 288). Another possibility is that he received a hint for his tale from Jean Paul's Des Feldpredigers Schmelzle Reise nach Flatz (Werke, 2nd ed., 33 vols., Berlin, 1840- 1842, XXIX, 241-319, esp. 296-307), in which there is a nocturnal visit of much the same kind as Irving's "Uncle" experiences. The fact that Irving, after meeting Jean Paul, bought his works and read some of them lends plausibility to the conjecture (see Journals, I, 187). But whether the source is Biisching or Jean Paul and possibly an anecdote current in Paris does not matter so much as that the subject matter is common legendary material, nowhere more than in Germany, and that Irving used it, along with materials gathered elsewhere, to spin another of his characteristic gruesomely ludicrous tales. 68. For "The Adventure of My Aunt," the next story, no specific source seems to exist, at least not in German. Common to many liter- atures, of course, is the motif of the movable eye which the disconsolate widow sees in the portrait of her departed husband, but which belongs to a flesh-and-blood person, a servant, who, secreting himself behind the picture, cuts out an eye of the portrait to observe the lady and take her unawares — to "violate her purse and rifle her strong box." 69. For Irving's familiarity with Schiller, see P. M. Irving, op. cit., II, 155; Journals, II, 156, 166, 190, 203; Williams, Life, I, 38, 294, 443, 446; II, 288, 357. 70. See E. Parry, "Schiller in America," Americana Germanica (Phila., 1905); and consult the Index (under Schiller in America) of the Pochmann-Schultz Bibliography of German Culture in America. 71. Another influence of Die Rauber is found in Tales of a Traveller, the episode in "The Story of the Young Robber," in which the bride, falling into the clutches of the gang, is raffled off by the members of the band. Like Carl Moor, the young robber kills her to keep her from becoming common property. Compare Die Rauber, V, ii, and Tales, pp. 358-63. 72. The dragoon, a roistering blade, rides jollily into the old Flemish town of Bruges, demands lodging of an old innkeeper, and though the house is full, will not take No for an answer. With many loud oaths and claps on the thigh, he cajoles the landlord into a good humor, kisses the landlord's wife, tickles his daughter, chucks the barmaid under the chin, does the honors to the house generally, and so ingrati- ates himself with the burghers that they agree to let him sleep in the garret. He is warned that the room is haunted, but a bold dragoon fears no ghosts. Becoming uncomfortable under the warmth of a double featherbed, he gets up and strolls about the house. When he returns to his room, he finds a most uncommon hubbub. By the light of the fire he sees a pale weazen-faced fellow, in a long flannel gown and a tall white- tasseled night-cap, sitting by the fire with a bellows under his arm by way of a bagpipe, from which he forces asthmatical music. The musi- cian's performance grows fiercer and fiercer, and his head and night-cap bob about like mad. Gradually the pieces of furniture in the room get into motion, and a wild dance begins, in which a long-backed, bandy-legged chair thrusts out a claw-foot, then a crooked arm, and making a leg, slides gracefully up to an easy chair of tarnished brocade and leads it gallantly out in a ghostly minuet. By degrees the dancing mama seizes other pieces of furniture. The antique, long-bodied chairs pair off in couples and perform a country dance; a three-legged 704 Notes to Pages 378-79 stool dances a hornpipe, though badly encumbe- red by its supernumerary leg; while the amorous tongs seize the shovel and whirl it about the room in a German dance. Suddenly the musician strikes up "Paddy O'Rafferty," whereupon the dragoon goes into action, seizes two handles of the clothes-press to lead her off in an Irish dance when — whir! — the whole revel is at an end, and the bold dragoon finds himself seated in the middle of the floor, the clothes-press sprawling before him, the two handles in his hands. 73. Journals, I, 135. 74. The next story, "The Adventure of the German Student," is written in a different key, striking a real note of horror. A German student in Paris falls in love with an imaginary lady, woven of his dreams. Meeting her in distress one night in the streets of Paris, he takes her to his quarters, only to find her a corpse the next morning. A police officer informs him that the lady had been guillotined the day before, and the truth of the statement is confirmed when the student undoes a band about the lady's neck and her head falls to the floor. The young man is tormented by the belief that an evil angel had reanimated the dead body to ensnare him. The story is pitched in the vein of Hoffmann and has all the earmarks of a German horror story; yet there appears to be no specific Ger- man source for it. By Irving's own statement in the mock-acknowledgment of sources that he made in the preface for the pieces comprising the book, it is "founded on an anecdote related to me as existing somewhere in French." He might gracefully have added that he got it from Tom Moore, who had it from Horace Smith (Williams, Life, II, 288) ; but it was not Irving's way to make such an explicit statement when he could do little gentle spoofing. The tricks of Dietrich Knickerbocker never forsook him. 75. See Williams, Life, II, 293-94. 76. Oral S. Coad, "The Gothic Element in American Literature before 1835," JEGP, XXIV (1925), 8 5 . 77. More than half of the pieces employ Ger- man legendary materials, but they are adulter- ated with other elements. For such concoctions a search of printed sources would have sufficed, and his trip to Germany to gather legendary material and to absorb atmosphere was largely wasted effort. Of the real literary treasures that he dug up in Germany he made little use: the Marchen that he wrote so carefully into his notebooks remained between the covers of those books. Instead, he snatched his materials from vicarious sources — his haphazard reading, anecdotes related to him, travel experiences, memories. The book does not owe to Germany, as The Alhambra owes to Spain, a solid body of authentic, indigenous material. 78. Irving's journals from 1820 to 1825 ex- hibit a painful consciousness of the hostile critics and the necessity under which he felt himself to give them no more cause to charge him with plagiarism, even if he had to resort to subterfuge. Equally distressing was the reali- zation that his good friend John Howard Payne had felt himself called to say to him, as early as the summer of 1822, "I want to see you swimming without corks — throwing by trans- lations and reconstructions and writing some- thing from your own brain." — Williams, Life, I, 268. What was worse was the gnawing awareness, as he reshuffled the manuscripts for Tales of a Traveller, that he could not swim without corks. His mind could transcribe, but it could not draw something out of thin air; it needed to have something substantial — a legend, a ruined castle, an anecdote, or an experience — to work on. Lacking a creative mind, Irving had to resort to books and to travel. As for travel, he was fast coming to realize what Emerson was soon to state classi- cally: "Travelling is a fool's paradise," an attempt "to get somewhat which he does not carry." Yet he must go on stuffing his books with secondhand gewgaws, scraps dropped at dinner tables, tags picked up in museums, fragments from travelers' chats, memoranda made in the theater, recollections from random experiences. This having to content himself with ragtags and the skulking involved in dressing them up to make them pass for coin of the realm was melancholy, dubious business. And when, after many false starts and prodig- ious labor, the book was finally done, the review- ers paid him off in precisely the coin he hated most. 79. Blackwood' s charged him with "pillaging the Germans, ' ' ' 'working up old stories ' ' ; another Edinburgh reviewer said he had "no inven- tive faculties at all"; even American friends could no longer be relied on. The New York Mirror for September 25, 1824, added its bit: "Take away his Dutchman with his pipe, his old mansion with his Ghosts, his Uncle Trim, and his Aunt Tabitha — and perhaps a clown of an Old Bachelor, and Mr. Irving is like the one- hundredth copy of a digusting original." Tales of a Traveller should be retitled "Stories for Chil- dren by a Baby Six Feet High . ' ' 80. His supernaturalism was always tinged with either humor or irony; he preserved an air of detachment and dished up a whimsical med- ley of the gruesomely ludicrous. No reader is frightened by a ghost that appears in the castle Notes to Pages 379-81 705 of a baron named Landshort of the family of Katzenellenbogen, or by a headless horseman who serves only to introduce the story of a pumpkin shattering on the cranium of Ichabod Crane. Even "The German Student," Irving's best-sustained story of horror, ends in a characteristic Knickerbocker caper. 81. Fred L. Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story (N.Y., 1923), p. 17. 82. Letters of Irving to Brevoort, pp. 425-28; see also pp. 432-34 ; for his method of writing the book, combining the antiquarian's search for book lore with the romanticist's immersion in atmosphere, see The A lhambra, pp. vii, 30, 40, 47. 56-58. 163-64, 351, 385, 405; P. M. Irving, op. cit., II, 95-96, 100-104, 134-37; and compare Journals, III, 97-100, with Alhambra, pp. 42-44. 83. His Spanish lessons began December 10, 1824. On January 15, 1825, he said he was reading Spanish "satisfactorily" ; yet the lessons continued for some time longer. 84. Grimm's story in summary form is as follows: An innkeeper, accompanied by two companions, is returning bom a journey. They pass by some gibbets on which hang three unlucky wights who had been executed some time ago. One of the innkeeper's companions remarks that the dangling corpses were men who had frequently been the guests of the inn- keeper. In grim jest, the innkeeper compliments the dead men on their nimbleness, as they swing to and fro in the wind, and derisively asks them to be his guests at his house that evening. Arrived at home, the innkeeper goes to his room, where, to his horror, he finds the three dead men waiting for him. They are seated about the table and beckon him to join them. His frantic calls summon attendants, to whom he relates what has happened. He takes to his bed, and in three days he is dead. In Irving's "Guests from Gibbet Island," Yan Yost Vanderscamp, proprietor of "Die Wilde Gans," runs a riotous, uproarious tavern, "a complete rendezvous for boisterous men of the seas," in reality a pirates' den. The govern- ment suddenly takes rigorous measures to eradicate piracy, and several of the most noted freebooters are caught and executed. Among them are three of Vanderscamp's comrades, who are hanged on Gibbet Island, in full view of their favorite resort. One evening, as Van- derscamp returns from a sail in a boat manned by Pluto, his surly Negro slave, the Negro rows the boat near Gibbet Island. They behold "the bodies of his three companions and brothers in iniquity dangling in the moonlight, their rags fluttering, and their chains clanging, as they were slowly swung backward and forward by the rising breeze." Prompted by his companion, Vanderscamp says, "Come, my lads in the wind! I will be happy if you will drop in to supper." The only reply is a dismal creaking of chains. But on reaching home, Vanderscamp is told that three guests are awaiting him in his room. "Vanderscamp made a desperate effort, scrambled up to the room, and threw open the door. Sure enough, there at a table, sat the three guests from Gibbet Island, with halters round their necks, and bobbing their cups together. . . . Vanderscamp saw and heard no more. Starting back with horror, he missed his footing on the landing place, and fell from the top of the stairs to the bottom. He was taken up speechless, and, either from the fall or the fright, was buried ... on the following Satur- day." 85. Gottschalck's tale (as well as Grimm's just mentioned) was translated and published in 1826 in Thomas Roscoe's German Novelists, a collection well known to Irving. 86. Compare the characterizations of the villain as found in Irving's tale {Wolf erf s Roost, pp. 327-28) and Gottschalck's in Roscoe's Ger- man Novelists, pp. 228-33. 87. If, as I believe, this tale of Gottschalck's served as a suggestion for Irving's story, it is very likely that Irving consciously avoided the theme of incest as incompatible with American taste. He had once drawn the charge that "The Stout Gentleman" was "coarse," and was loath to take unnecessary risks. 88. Finally, in this last volume of short tales, Irving used an anecdote which he had long saved "against another fit of scribbling." On his tour from Aix to Dresden, some one told him of a "couple who prayed continuously for children, but in spite of their prayers, they never got any, which was tho[ugh]t very remarkable" (Journals, II, III). Many years later he turned it to advantage in "The Widow's Ordeal" by making it the pivot of the story. The little anecdote may or may not be of German origin, but it does illustrate how Irving would seize upon this or that scrap of lore in the course of his rambles, and how he might eventually turn it to use. 89. Letter to Scott, quoted by Irving in The Sketch Book, Preface, p. 9. 90. Letters of Irving to Brevoort, pp. 400-401. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 91. The passage in which this judgment is made was reprinted in Littell's Living Age for October, 1844 (II, 654), and quoted again in a critique on Hawthorne in the Democratic Re- view for April, 1845 (XVI, 384), though the 706 Notes to Pases 382-84 latter critic professed to find echoes of Hoff- mann also in Hawthorne (ibid., p. 378). 92. First printed in Godey's Lady's Book for November, 1847; reproduced in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (ed. by James A. Harrison, Virginia ed., 17 vols., N.Y., 1902), XIII, 144. This edition is hereafter cited as Works. It is to be observed that this is a guarded statement. While nothing in the way of implication could be stronger, the charge of plagiarism is not expressly made. The qualify- ing phrase, "in some of his work," seems calcu- lated. 93. On April 3, 1852, Littell's (XXXIII, 19) all but repeated the words of the Athenaeum five years earlier, and an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes for April, 1852 (XIV, 365), pointed out a resemblance of Hawthorne's style to lhat of Toepfer, but substituted Nor- dier's name for Tieck's; while the National Magazine for January, 1853, observed: "Saving certain shadowy resemblances to some of the Germans, his manner of working out a sketch is unlike that of any other author." Lowell's characterization of Hawthorne in A Fable for Critics as "a John Bunyan Fouque\ a Puritan Tieck" is, of course, part banter. 94. Prof. H. M. Belden's purpose in "Poe's Criticism of Hawthorne," Anglia, XXIII (1901), 376-404, is "to establish Poe's sincerity as a critic." More favorable to Hawthorne are the conclusions reached in Anton Schonbach, "Beitrage zur Charakteristik Nathaniel Haw- thornes," Englische Studien, VII (1884), 301-2; Pattee, Development of the American Short Story, pp. 105-6; and Myrtle J. Joseph, "Tieck and Hawthorne," Columbia Univ. Master's thesis, 191 1. 95. The Complete Works of Nathaniel Haw- thorne (Fireside ed., 13 vols., Boston, 1896), IX, 332-33 ; herafter cited as Works. While the three Peabody sisters were assid- uous students of the German language and liter- ature, they failed to transfer their enthusiasm to him. They did succeed in arousing his interest in some aspects of the "Newness," particularly Brook Farm, which Hawthorne joined in 1841. While there, he lived in an infectious atmos- phere, but he appears not to have joined any of the several classes at Brook Farm that studied German language, literature, philosophy, or music. — Moncure D. Conway, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (London, 1890), pp. 65-66, 84; Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (2 vols., Boston, 1885), I, 40, 183, 185-87, 251, 263. That he was not then or later an accomplished linguist appears from the doubt he expressed in 1853 regarding his qualifications for a post as "Translator to the State Department," which his friends sought to secure for him. However, J. P. Lathrop's argument (op. cit., p. 207) that Hawthorne did not know Tieck and never would have looked into him if Poe had not nosed out a scent of plagiarism, and that Hawthorne made an effort to get hold of Tieck's tale mentioned in the Note-Books only after reading Poe's criticism (and so, of course, after writing the tales in question) is invalid for reasons of chronology. Hawthorne read Tieck's tale on April 8-1 1, 1843; Mosses was published in 1846; Poe's criticism was first printed in November, 1846. 96. Among the more important collections of translations that included tales of Tieck, B. Q. Morgan (op cit., p. 483) lists seven before 1846. Although Hawthorne was not a close follower of British periodicals, he could have come upon several of Tieck's tales translated there. These are easily identified by turning to the Roloff-Mix-Nicolai bibliographies edited by B. Q. Morgan and A. R. Hohlfeld, German Literature in British Magazines, 1730-1860 (Madison, Wis., 1949), and Lilie V. Hathaway, German literature . . . in England and America as Reflected in the fournals, 1840-1914 (Bos- ton, 1935). From 1825 to 1850 only six of Tieck's tales appeared in American periodicals, but there were many more reviews and critical notices, all of which are identified in the bibliog- raphies of Goodnight and Haertel. 97. In "The Virtuoso's Collection," when the illusions of fancy tempt the visitor with marvel- ous fruits, he says: "I might desire a cottage, but I would have it founded on sure and stable truth, not on dreams and fantasies. I have learned to look for the real and the true." — Works, II, 543. "My destiny is linked with the realities of earth. You are welcome to your visions and shadows of a future state; but give me what I can see, and touch, and understand, and I ask no more." — Ibid., p. 559. In another place Hawthorne rejects the elixir vitae be- cause "it would produce death while bestowing the shadow of life." — Ibid., pp., 551-52. In "The Birthmark" Aylmer comes to ruin be- cause he failed "to find the perfect future in the present." — Ibid., p. 69. See also II, 210-n. Again and again Hawthorne returns to this idea. "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," "Young Goodman Brown," "The Virtuoso's Collection," "The Birthmark," "The Great Carbuncle," "Drowne's Wooden Image," "The Ambitious Guest," "The Bosom Serpent," "The Artist of the Beautiful," "Monsieur du Miroir," "Feather- top," "The Lily's Quest," "The Hall of Fanta- sy" — what are they but repetitions of the moral enforcing his humanistic warning ? Notes to Pages 384-85 707 98. Poe, Works, XI, 113. 99. The December, 1844, number of the Review contained his article on Amelia Webly, and the very number that made the Tieck- Hawthorne allegation contained two articles by Poe — one entitled "Plagiarism" and the other "Mr. Poe Lectures on the Poets." In the issue for May, 1845, appeared the translation of Tieck's "Die Freunde," summarized above. Poe's "Power of Words" was published in the next number. 100. Poe had kept up carefully with Haw- thorne's growing reputation. In his 1847 article he lists (giving magazine titles and exact dates) the reviews of Hawthorne's tales which had appeared before Mosses, indicating at the same time that he knew such reviews of Mosses as had appeared since 1846. That being so, he was familiar with the comparisons that had been made between Tieck and Hawthorne. 101. Not that Poe was necessarily fooled. His statement is carefully worded. He does not directly make the charge of plagiarism: he says "whose manner, in some of his works, is abso- lutely identical with that habitual to Haw- thorne." He italicized "habitual" because he had noted Hawthorne's fondness for the par- ticular kind of allegory contained in Tieck's tale, and he emphasized "some" because he knew very well that "Die Freunde" was not a typical tale of Tieck's. It is, in fact, one of the least characteristic of his shorter pieces and represents, according to Rudolf Haym, Die romantische Schule (3rd ed., Berlin, 1914) pp. 74-76, the transition from his earlier imitative to the romantic style with which Tieck's characteristic manner is customarily associated. How or why the translator chose this piece, so different from the Mdrchen, for which critics praised Tieck most highly, is not readily ex- plicable ; but in so doing, he chanced on a piece that bears unmistakable likenesses to Haw- thorne's moralized stories that Poe was re- viewing. H. M. Belden, working on the dubious assumption that Poe knew no German (Anglia, XXIII, 389, 404), cites contemporary British reviews of Tieck and comes to the odd conclu- sion that Poe, seeing in them a characterization of Tieck's work similar to what he observed in Hawthorne's tales, honestly believed Haw- thorne to have derived from Tieck. The truth of the matter is that it was Hawthorne, not Poe, who knew little German. What is more, Poe's sincerity as a critic in this case is questionable for the simple reason that the charge brought against Hawthorne is calculatingly phrased. His use of, and special emphasis upon, the word some smacks of the species of literary chicanery that Poe indulged in on other occasions and suggests that Poe, knowing full well that Tieck's "Die Freunde" was far from characteristic of Tieck's manner, yet chose it as serving to hang on his strongest American competitor the charge of plagiarism. Compare this performance with Poe's calculated demolition of Drake and Halleck's poetic reputations. 102. Works, II, 213. 103. Ibid., p. 224. 104. H. A. Beers, A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century (N.Y., 1901), p. 163. 105. Works, III, 381-83; IX, 42. 106. Ibid., I, 153. 107. Ibid., IX, 43, 83, 159 108. For numerous examples, see John Erskine, Leading American Novelists (N.Y., 1910), p. 193; Randall Stewart (ed.), The American Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven, 1932). 109. See W. C. Brownell, American Prose Masters (N.Y., 1909), 115; P. E. More, Shel- burne Essays, First Series (N.Y., 1907), pp. 45, 53. 70- no. Erskine, op. cit., pp. 211-13, 233-34; P. E. More, op. cit., pp. 47-49, 53; and appro- priate chapters in Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven, 1948). in. For illustrations of how Hawthorne expanded suggestions jotted down in his note- books into stories, compare Works, IX, 22, with "Mrs. Bullfrog"; IX, 37, with "The Vision of the Fountain"; IX, 106, no, with "The Birth- mark"; and IX, 38, with "The Lily's Quest." For further glimpses into his workshop, see Anton Schonbach, loc. cit., pp. 292-96; Myrtle J. Joseph, op. cit., pp. 44-49; Eliz. L. Chandler, A Study of the Sources of the Tales and Roman- ces Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne before 185J (Northampton, Mass., 1926); Randall Stewart, "Hawthorne and The Faerie Queene," Phil. Quar., XII, ii (Apr., 1933), 196-206; Stewart's edition of the American Notebooks; Alice L. Cooke, "Some Evidences of Hawthorne's In- debtedness to Swift," Univ. of Texas Studies in English, XVIII (1928), 140-62; Neal F. Double- day, "Hawthorne's Satirical Allegory," College English, III, iv (Jan., 1942), 325-37; three essays by Prof. Arlin Turner: "Autobiographi- cal Elements in Hawthorne's Blithedale Ro- mance," Univ. of Texas Studies in English, XV ( x 935). 39-62; "Hawthorne's Literary Borrow- ings," PMLA, LI, ii (June, 1936), 543-62; "Hawthorne's Methods of Using his Source Materials," Studies for William A. Read (Baton Rouge, La., 1940), 301-12; and Spiller et al., Lit. Hist, of the U.S., Ill, 548-51. 112. Cited by H. A. Beers (op. cit., p. 164) as 708 Notes to Pases 385-88 evidence of Hawthorne's borrowing from Tieck. Hawthorne treated the same general theme also in "The Wedding Knell." 113. Works, I, 164. 114. Ibid., p. 153. 115. Poe's Works, XI, ill. Two other tales of Tieck's that have been suggested as influen- cing Hawthorne (see Turner, "Hawthorne's Literary Borrowings," PMLA, LI, 559) were both available in Carlyle's translation of 1827. The first is "The Fair-Haired Eckbert," which is the history of a man who, like Arthur Dim- mesdale, dwells in solitude and is persecuted by a guilty conscience. The other is "The Runen- berg," which relates the story of a man whose heart, like that of Hawthorne's Man of Ada- mant or Ethan Brand, has been so far hardened that he finally goes insane. But obviously these are common motifs not necessarily betokening literary dependence. 116. See Alfred A. Kern, "The Sources of Hawthorne's Feathertop," PMLA, XLVI, iv (Dec, 1931), 1253-59; M. D. Conway, op. cit., pp. 71-72; Alex. Jessup and H. S. Canby, The Book of the Short Story (N.Y., 1903), pp. 10-11; Anton Schonbach, loc. cit., pp. 295, 301-2; Eliz. A. Chandler, op. cit.; and F. L. Pattee, op. cit., p. 106. In Tieck's satire a figure of Robin Hood, made of burnished leather, but exceedingly smart, is used as a scarecrow. Becoming vital- ized by a shooting star, it appears as Baron Ledebrinna and becomes a great authority on literary matters. Like Hawthorne's Feathertop, he is only a scarecrow, but his impositions on the people, blinded by vanity and false stan- dards, hoodwink them into accepting him as a literary dictator. Throughout the story there are hints of his true nature, just as in Haw- thorne's story; he talks of scarecrows and compares himself and others to them; he waves his arms, shrugs his shoulders, and gesticulates. In Tieck's story a good deal is made of Lede- brinna's amorous ambitions, and the later portions of the novel recount his adventures as a lover. 117. Works XI, 211. 118. Omitted from the collected edition of Hawthorne's works, this entry first appeared in print in "Passages from Hawthorne's Note- Books," Atl. Monthly (Dec, 1866), p. 692. 119. Chronologically, it is possible that the "tale of Tieck" over which Hawthorne labored in 1843 was Tieck's "Vogelscheuche," for though he could hardly have seen it in the Novellenkranz version of 1835, it had become available in Volume XIV of Tieck's Gesammelte Novellen of 1842 and in Volume XXVII of his Schriften of the same year. The note of 1840, in comparison with that of 1849, is so remotely related to "Feathertop" that is can hardly be regarded as the primary source of the tale. Indeed, the earlier note is of significance mainly as showing that Hawthorne had already conceived the idea of writing a story on a scarecrow as the model of various types of men, and that alone may be account- able for his being drawn to Tieck's story in 1843. There may well have been a direct con- nection between Hawthorne's note of 1840 and his reading Tieck's tale in 1843, and between both of these and the note of 1849, as well as "Feathertop" itself. Following his dismissal from the surveyorship of the Salem Custom House in 1849, Hawthorne had the further incentive of "immolating one or two" of the Salem gentry who he believed were responsible. His satire therefore had a most immediate political and personal motivation. For details, see Alfred A. Kern, "Hawthorne's Feathertop and R. L. R.," PMLA , LII, ii (June, 1937), 508. 120. Consult E. G. Gudde, "E. Th. A. Hoff- mann's Reception in England," PMLA, XLI, iv(Dec, 1926), 1005-10, and the bibliographies by Morgan, Morgan and Hohlfeld (eds.), Hathaway, Goodnight, and Haertel. 121. Peter Schlemihls witndersame Geschichte (1814), translated in 1824, was available in seven editions or reprints — 1824, 1838, 1843 (2), 1844 (2) — by the time Hawthorne's Mosses appeared, so that Hawthorne had ample opportunities for knowing the story. In "The Virtuoso's Collection" the virtuoso calls "Peter Schlemihl's shadow . . . one of my most valu- able possessions" (Works, II, 556). However, the reference is one that Hawthorne might have made without ever having read Chamisso's tale, for Peter Schlemihl had become the common butt of jokes leveled at the extravagancies of German romanticists. Hawthorne's passage, in its context, is in the nature of a sneer. What's more, in Hawthorne's story there is no loss of shadow : the author merely holds a conversation with his double (himself, as he fancies) in the mirror. The idea is a common possession. Haw- thorne himself wrote on his blotter, as early as October 17, 1835: "To make one's reflection in a mirror the subject of a story." 122. Hawthorne's knowledge of books has not yet been exhaustively studied, but Pro- fessor Austin Warren's essay, "Hawthorne's Reading," New Engl. Quar., VIII, iv (Dec, 1935), 480-97, is very informative. After Pilgrim's Progress, he was influenced most pro- foundly by the Bible, Spenser, Shakespeare, and the New England historians (in the order named). But he was not a bookish author; and, as Professor Warren points out, when Hawthorne Notes to Pages 388-89 709 ?at down to write, "it was — literally and meta- phorically — in a bare room populated primarily by the creations of his own imagination" (ibid., p. 497). The composition of his stories, particu- larly of his novels, was always an intense and exhausting experience. Books did not contrib- ute much to the process. The modern litera- tures barely touched him — German no more than the others. German transcendentalism, hailed by Emerson, Ripley, and others of his associates in Concord and at Brook Farm, left him cold. Except for his satirical comments in his diaries and letters, "The Celestial Railroad," and his less pointed references in The Blithedale Romance and "Earth's Holocaust," he had little to say about German thought. EDGAR ALLAN POE 123. For notable examples, see Works, XII, 41-106; XIII, 141-55. All references, unless otherwise indicated, are to the Virginia-Harri- son edition. 124. Works, I, 150-51. Compare Poe's state- ment in his letter to Thomas W. White, April 30, 1835, printed in Mod. Phil., XXV (1927), 101-5. 125. Richard H. Stoddard, for example, ex- pressed the guarded and uncertain opinion: "If Hawthorne's master was Tieck, as Poe declared, the master of Poe, as far as he had one, was Hoffmann." — Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Lon- don, 1884), I, xiv. In 1881 E. C. Stedman remarked: "He [Poe] was no disciple of Beck- ford, Godwin, Maturin, Hoffmann or Fouque." — Edgar Allan Poe (Boston, 1881), p. 63. But in 1894, in the Stedman-Woodberry edition of Poe's writings, Stedman expressed another view: "There is a pseudo-horror to be found in certain of his pieces, and enough of Ernest Hoffmann's method to suggest that the brilliant author of the Fantasiestiicke, whether a secondary name or not, was one of Poe's early teachers. . . . Hoffmann's spell was un- questionable." — Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Chicago, 1894-1895), i, 96, 98. Meanwhile, Stedman's co-editor, G. E. Woodberry, in his biography of Poe in 1885 said not a word about German sources, but declared of the very tales in which Stedman saw convincing evi- dence of Hoffmann's unquestionable spell that "Bulwer and Disraeli, the popular writers of his time, gave direction to his genius, both in sub- ject and style." — Edgar Allan Poe (Boston, 1885), p. 65 ; also p. 85. In his later biography of Poe (2 vols., Boston, 1909), I, 132-34, and notes, 379-81, a propos of Palmer Cobb's work on Poe's indebtedness to Hoffmann, Wood- berry admitted the influence. His vacillation of opinion is similar to Stedman's; neither is sure of his stand. Nor is James A. Harrison very positive or precise (Works, I, 153-54): "Where or how, precisely, Poe became at first inoculated with this spirit of occult Germany ... is not clear. . . . That somehow — somewhere — he be- came saturated with the doctrines of Schelling and founded some of his finest tales and 'dia- logues of the dead' ('Monos and Una' and 'Eiros and Charmion,' for example) on their poetic mysticism, there can be no doubt. . . . His dreams were his most vivid realities, and he was of the dreaming race — the Germanic — the race of Novalis and Schelling, his masters across the sea." Later biographers and critics of Poe — among them Arthur Ransome, John W. Rob- ertson, Mary E. Phillips, Hervey Allen, Una Pope-Hennessy, Arthur H. Quinn, and N. Bryllion Fagin — are occupied more with ex- plaining what Poe's mind put forth than with how it was formed. Noteworthy exceptions are Killis Campbell, "Poe's Reading," Univ. of Texas Studies in English, V (1925), 166-96, and The Mind of Poe and Other Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1933) ; Margaret Alterton, The Origins of Poe's Critical Theory (Iowa City, la., 1925); Floyd Stovall, "Poe's Debt to Coleridge," Univ. of Texas Studies in English, X (1930), 70— 127, and his "Poe as a Poet of Ideas," ibid., XI ( 1 93 1 , 56-62 .) Among studies dealing specifically with the question of Poe's debt to Germany, the first, in point of time, are Gustav Gruener's articles: "Notes on the Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann upon E. A. Poe," PMLA, XIX, i (Mar., 1904), 1-25, and "Poe's Knowledge of German," Mod. Philol., II, i (June, 1904), 125-40. A broader investigation is Palmer Cobb's "The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of E. A. Poe," Studies in Philol., Ill (1908), 1-105. Cobb's emphasis falls upon four of Poe's stories, "William Wilson," "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," "The Oval Portrait," and "The Assignation," as deriving from "Die Elixiere des Teufels," "Der Magnetiseur," "Die Jesuiterkirche in G ," "Doge und Dogaressa," respectively. In the first three cases the debt is obvious ; the last is doubtful. The treatise by Paul Wachtler, Edgar Allan Poe und die deutsche Romantik (Leipzig, 191 1), primarily concerned with biographical and psychological matters, in- cluding Poe's peculiar mental and physical similarities with Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, Tieck, Arnim, Hoffmann, and others, does not deal with literary relations either exhaustively or conclusively. 126. The late Professor Killis Campbell, our most cautious and best informed Poe scholar. 710 Notes to Pages 389-90 often expressed to his students his belief that Poe had "a good reading knowledge of Ger- man." I have a letter from him confirming this opinion. 127. The Life of E. A. Poe, I, 379. 128. The Development of the Short Story in the South (Charlottesville, 191 1), pp. 17-24. 129. "Poe's Criticism of Hawthorne," Anglia xxiii (1901), pp. 376. 389. 130. For specimens, see Works, XIV, Intro- duction, p. vi; also pp. 38-72. 131. At Stoke-Newington, as well as under Masters Clarke and Burke in Richmond, he showed unusual skill in Latin. — Charles Kent (ed.). The Unveiling of the Bust of Edgar Allan Poe: Poe Memorial, i8gg (Lynchburg, Va., 1901), pp. 13-14. He learned to speak French with "marked facility." — J. H. Ingram, Edgar Allan Poe (2 vols., London, 1880), I, 20, 25. At the University of Virginia, where he studied from January 19 to December 15, 1826, he ex- celled in Latin and French and was accounted "a successful student of Italian and Span- ish." — Kent, op. cit., pp. 14, 20, 21. A circum- stance not without significance is the fact that Poe's library cards were signed by the irascible but gifted Professor Blaettermann. See A. H. Quinn, Edgar A Han Poe : A Critical Biography (N.Y., 1941), p. 103. No German titles are included, but since most of Poe's work was done under the supervision of Blaettermann, who shared with Follen the honor of intro- ducing German as a subject of collegiate instruction in America, it is not impossible that some of Blaettermann's enthusiasm for his native language and literature was imparted to his impressionable student. Indeed, J. A. Har- rison professed to find a "perceptible influence" of Blaettermann "all through Poe's humorous, imaginative work." See Gruener, loc. cit., p. 127. The "School of Ancient and Modern Languag- es," in which Poe was enrolled, included "Latin and Greek languages, the Hebrew, rhetoric, bel- les lettres, ancient history and ancient geog- raphy . . . French, Spanish, Italian, German, and the English language, in its Anglo-Saxon form; also modern history, and modern geography." — Kent, op. cit., p. 14. Here was more than even a Poe could acquire in a year. Indeed, it were well not to add to the seminal influences sup- posedly exerted on Poe by his year in Char- lottesville. But it may be observed that Jeffer- son's School of Ancient and Modern Languages did develop some polyglots. Henry Tutwiller, at the end of the session, was reported excelling in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and mathematics; while Gessner Harrison, who is mentioned along with Tut- willer as among the "hard students," excelled in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, and medicine" (ibid., p. 14). It may be that Poe, besides enrolling in the classes of Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, also studied German. Certainly he was better prepared than most of the students for the study of languages. See Works, I, 45-47; Quinn, op. cit., pp. 97-117. 132. Kent, op. cit., p. 14; Gruener. loc. cit., p. 128. 133- Works, VII, 28; also used as a motto for the title-page of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque ; see Works, I, 150. 134. Works, II, 1. 135. Ibid., pp. 27-28. 136. See Stedman-Woodberry ed. of Works, I, 1 14-16, and Homer E. Woodbridge, "The Supernatural in Hawthorne and Poe," Colo. College Lang. Ser., II (Nov., 191 1), 147. 137. See Works, II, 28-29; for Leibnitz, II, 126, IX, 65, XIV, 217, XVI, 25, 223; for Kant, II, 126, 276, VI, 201; for Schelling, II, 29, 348, 390, XI, 5; for Fichte, II, 28, 359, 392; and for Hegel, XVI, 164. 138. Poe was also familiar with Locke's definition of personal identity as "the sameness of a rational being," and Locke's phrase "principium individuationis." See Works, II, 20, and Locke's Essay concerning Human Under- standing, Bk. II, ch. xxvii, par. 9. 139. Works, II, 128-29, 131. See Campbell, "Poe's Reading," loc. cit., p. 190. 140. His critics have questioned his knowl- edge of all foreign languages, including French (see Arvede Barine, Revue des Deux Mondes, CXLII, 566), and ridiculed even his English. The extent to which they went in their indis- criminate charges is seen in the accusations made by Thomas Dunn English: "He professes to know every language and to be proficient in every art and science under the sun — when, except that half Choctaw, half Winnebago he habitually uses ... he is igno- rant of all. If he really understands the English language, the sooner he translates his notices of the New York literati into it, the better. . . . "... His frequent quotations from languages of which he is entirely ignorant, and his con- stant blunders expose him to ridicule, while his cool plagiarisms from known or forgotten writers, excite the public amazement." — N.Y, Mirror, June 23, 1846. The persistent reiteration of such charges, corroborated by Poe's first biographer, Gris- wold, did not fail to make its impression, so that even T. W. Higginson said: "Poe's [work] is broken and disfigured by all sorts of inequalities and imitations; he not disdaining, for want of true integrity, to dis- guise and falsify, to claim knowledge that he Notes to Page 390 711 did not possess, to invent quotations and references, and even, as Griswold showed, to manipulate and exaggerate puffs for himself. I remember the chagrin with which I looked through Tieck, in my student-days, to find the 'Journey into the Blue Distance' to which Poe refers in the 'House of Usher' [Works, III, 287] and how one of the poet's intimates laughed me to scorn for being deceived by any of Poe's citations, saying that he hardly knew a word of German." — Higginson, Short Studies in American Authors (Boston, 1880), p. 17. Higginson's remarks serve merely to convict him of precisely the sin which he imputes to Poe, for, as Henry A. Beers has pointed out: "Colonel Higginson, a propos of Poe's sham learning and his habit of mystifying the reader by imaginary citations, confesses to have hunted in vain for this fascinatingly entitled 'Journey into the Blue Distance'; and to having been laughed at for his pains by a friend who assured him that Poe could scarcely read a word of German. But Tieck really did w rite this story, 'Das alte Buch; oder Reise ins Blaue hinein,' which Poe misleadingly refers to under its alternate title." — A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century (N.Y., 1901), p. 163. It is time that the evidence for making these broad charges be gathered and the testimony weighed. 141. For instance, in his review of Thiodolf, the Icelander and Aslauga's Knight, he goes easily from Fouque's book into a general though brief survey of German literature and literary criticism, and is rather happy in his generaliza- tions. See Graham's Mag., Dec, 1846; also Works, XVI, 1 15-17. 142. "The German Schwdrmerei — not exact- ly humbug, but sky-rocketing seems to be the only term by which we can conveniently de- signate the peculiar style of criticism which has lately come into fashion through the influence of certain members of the Fabian family — people who live (upon beans) about Boston." — Works, XVI, 166. 143. Ibid., VIII, 163. 144. Ibid., XV, 266-70, exp. p. 270. 145. After using the saying, "Er hat grosse Augen gemacht," he adds: "Here Mr. Crabb again made great eyes (as we say in Germany)." — Works, VI, 20. In the Marginalia he distin- guishes between edelgeboren and wohlgeboren : "Nothing, to the true taste, is so offensive as mere hyperism. In Germany wohlgeboren is a loftier title than edelgeboren." — Works, XVI, 8. In the Marginalia, also, he distinguished be- tween Dichtkunst and Dichten: "The Germans have two words . . . the terms Dichtkunst, the art of fiction, and Dichten, to feign — which are generally used for poetry and to make verses" (Works, XVI, 91); and in reviewing Long- fellow's Ballads and Other Poems, he made use of the distinction (Works, XI, 74). He also notes that "art" in German has an "extensive signifi- cation" which the English does not possess (Works, IX, 200). 146. He quotes several lines from Schiller's "Nadowessisches Totenlied" (which Poe, prob- ably following the book before him, calls Nado- wessische Todenklage), his purpose being to show that a few of the lines from Mrs. Hemans had been suggested by the passage from Schiller (Works, IX, 200). In the same article he asserts that her "Lays of Many Lands" were suggested by Herder's Stimmen der Volker in Liedern, and he quotes this troublesome title correctly. Professor Campbell suggests (Poems, p. 296) that just as Poe was quick to pick up telling German phrases, such as "phantasy-pieces," so he recognized good German titles, as when he adapted Uhland's "The Castle by the Sea" to his "a kingdom by the sea." Poe knew two of O. L. B. Wolff's collections of songs and ballads, including his Sammlung vorziiglicher V olkslieder der bekanntesten Nationen, grossten- theils zum ersten Male metrisch hi das Deutsche w&er/ragen, Frankfurt, 1837 (Works, XII, 95—96,) and he cited two other long German titles cor- rectly (Works, II, 276). The motto selected from Goethe for the title-page of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is aptly chosen (Works, II, 149-50). In only one instance is there the suggestion that Poe's German was faulty, but even here the evidence is inconclusive and may be inter- preted to argue the contrary. In "How to Write a Blackwood's Article" (Works, II, 279), after quoting some "piquant expressions" from French, Spanish, and Italian to be used by the magazine writer who wishes to give his piece a recherche tone, Poe quotes also the following German lines: "Und sterb' ich doch, so sterb' ich denn Durch sie — durch sie." "That's German — from Schiller. 'And if I die, at least, I die — for thee — for thee!'" Now these lines are not from Schiller, but from Goethe, occurring in the ballad "Das Veilchen." Furthermore, they are incorrectly quoted. The first line reads: "Und sterb' ich denn, so sterb' ich doch." Moreover, durch sie is not equivalent to "for thee." But the fact that Poe assigns the lines to Schiller and makes a mistake also in quoting them may be an indication that he was quoting from memory, and that he forgot the 712 Notes to Pages 390-92 author as well as the exact wording of the passage. In "A Predicament" (Works, II, 295), Poe parodies these same lines as follows: "Und stubby duck, so stubby dun Duk she! duk she!" Professor Gruener (loc. cit., p. 133) argues from this parody that Poe knew at least two facts about German pronunciation: namely, that the final d in und is pronounced like a t, and that the German ch in durch is pronounced more like a k than the English ch in church. These distinctions a person only superficially acquainted with the German would hardly make. 147. Works, V, 259. 148. Possibly Deutsche Zeitschrift fur die Chirurgie, which dates back to the early 30's of the nineteenth century. 149. Works, V, i; first published in Snowdon' s Lady's Companion, December, 1842. 150. Confirmed by the statement made in Mrs. Austin's book (p. 314) and by a search of the British Museum and of American libraries. 151. See Goodnight, op. cit., pp. 208, 211, 213, 220. None of these reviews contained the pas- sage either in the original or in translation. 152. Poe had reviewed (in 1836) Mrs. Austin's translation of Fr. von Raumer's England in 1835 (Works, IX, 53-64); doubtless he knew also others of Mrs. Austin's books. 153. Novalis Schriften (ed. by J. Minor; 4 vols., Jena, 1907), II, 315. 154. Poe has gowonulich, evidently a misprint (Works, V, 21). 155. Poe has a colon instead of a period. 156. Fragments of German Prose Writers (N.Y., 1841), p. 97; Poe, Works, V, 1. 157. Both translators follow the original rather closely. Poe is closer in line 4, where Mrs. Austin translates die as every; in lines 7-8 where Mrs. Austin inserts it was; in the slight matter of the semicolon; and in Poe's more literal translation of kam in the last sentence where, however, he disregards hervor. It is a fine point whether Poe or Mrs. Austin trans- lated Begebenheit and Zufdlle more exactly. Evidence such as this would be conclusive in almost any case but Poe's. Some of his more severe critics see in his translation a duplication of the method he employed in compiling The Conchologist's First Book, that is, a deliberate attempt to cover up plagiarism by making slight modifications of the model before him — not important enough to change the sense ma- terially, but sufficient to give his version the appearance of originality. Both translators make idealischer modify the wrong noun, and both render gleichfalls somewhat inexactly as equally. But if Poe followed this procedure, he had, in the first place, somehow to find the original passage in Novalis, for he quotes the German for it. Whoever has looked for a passage in Novalis' Fragmente, especially in such an edition as Poe used in the forties (i.e., lacking the elaborate tables and indexes of more recent editions) will agree that Poe exhibited some facility in the use of German in the mere matter of running down the passage. Of course, there is the possibility that he asked a second person to look up the passage for him; but that seems unlikely when we consider how often Poe would have required the services of such a second person. Moreover, why should he have gone to all the trouble and, in this case, com- mitted a deliberate deception for the mere motto of a tale, when he had so little to gain. He would have achieved virtually the same effect if he had simply quoted Mrs. Austin or given his own translation, without indicating, in addition, the common source — "Novalis. Moralische Ansichten." On the other hand, if he ran across the German passage in his reading of Novalis and jotted it down, what was more natural than that he would cite the German and supply his own translations ? There is evidence that Poe knew and admired the writings of Novalis. Harrison and Wood- berry both think Poe was influenced by Novalis. The former speaks of Novalis as one of "Poe's masters across the German sea" (Works I, 134), and the latter regards Poe's "prose poem" Eureka as growing out of a "single phrase of Novalis" (Poe, I, 93). Since there was no complete translation of Novalis in Poe's day, and the fragments translated by Mrs. Austin cover only seven small pages of her booklet, it seems reasonable to assume that Poe knew Novalis in the original, and that he translated the passage in question indepen- dently, though his attention may have been directed to Novalis by Mrs. Austin in the first instance. While all three of Poe's quotations from Novalis are taken from the Fragmente, they are taken from widely separated sections of the book. It would seem that Poe not only had access to a copy of at least this one work of Novalis but read it. 158. Quoted, Works, VIII, 44, 47; mentioned VIII, 43-44, 47, 126; X, viii, 65, 116; XI, 5, 250; XII, 131; XIII, 43; XVI, 115-17; Wood- berry, Poe, I, 177-78; and below. 159. Killis Campbell, "Poe's Reading," loc. cit., p. 189. 160. Works, I, 150, VII, 28; and II, 279, 295. Both of these poems of Goethe were available to Poe in the original and in translation in Notes to Page 392 713 Bancroft's article, "The Life and Genius of Goethe," N. Amer. Rev., XIV (Oct., 1824), 303- 25. On the other hand, Poe's references and quotations are too numerous and various to make tenable the assumption that he relied solely on translations in magazine articles and anthologies. The passage in Politian, scene iv, line 65, beginning "Knowest thou the land," may be nothing more than an unconscious echo of Mignon's song, "Kennst du das Land"; for this lyric from Wilhelm Meister was already a common possession by 1835 when it is thought Poe wrote this dramatic poem. 161. Campbell, loc. cit., p. 189. 162. Works, IX, 200; Quoted, mentioned, II, 279, VII, 155, VIII, 138, IX, 200, 202. 163. See, for Burger, Works, esp. IX, 173, 202; for Herder, IX, 200, 202, XI, 65; for Kbrner, XI, 65, 80; for F. Schlegel, XI, 5, XVI, 117. 164. For Musaeus, see Works, XVI, 117; for Wieland, XVI, 161; for Winckelmann, XI, 5; and for Uhland, XI, 65. 165. Works, IX, 202. 166. The appropriated passage occurs in an installment of the Marginalia in the Democratic Rev., XIV (July, 1846), 30, that is not included in the Virginia edition. Poe's subterfuge was first uncovered by Professor Carl F. Schreiber in an essay entitled "Mr. Poe at his Conjurations Again," Colophon, II (May, 1930), 2. Piickler- Muskau's book, translated by Mrs. Austin (London, ca. 1831) and reprinted in Philadel- phia in 1833, in a pirated edition, under the title, Tour of a Prince, was known to Poe; he reviewed it and used it as one of those "quaint and curious" volumes of forgotten lore from which to extract, when the occasion seemed to call for it, some odd reference or recondite allusion. 167. Works, XI, 67. 168. Ibid., p. 69. 169. Ibid., XVI, 42. 170. Ibid., Ill, 287; IV, 102; XIII, 144, 145; IX, 202. 171. Ibid., X, 30-39; XVI, 48-51. 172. Ibid., XVI, 117. 173. Ibid., X, 39. 174. See Quinn, Poe, pp. 336—40. Poe dis- cusses and criticizes the German Kunstroman as a "mad — or perhaps a profound idea" (Works VIII, 232). He translates three passages from Novalis. One is used as a motto for "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (Works, V, 1). An- other of the Fragmente is utilized in the Marg- inalia: "The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist" — following which Poe adds his own ideas about the matter (compare Works, XVI, 98-99, and Novalis, Schriften, II, 298). In "The Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (Works, V, 171) he quotes possibly from Carlyle's essay on Novalis, apothegm no. 121 from Novalis' "Paralipomena zum Blutenstaub" (Schriften, II, 141); "We are near waking when we dream that we dream." "The Man of the Crowd" begins with "It was well said of a certain German book that 'es Icisst sick nicht lesen."' This Poe translates literally: "it does not permit itself to be read" (Works, IV, 134). He is familiar with the legends of the Wander- ing Jew, "known to German writers as Ahas- uerus" (Works, XIV, 217), and in Pinakidia there is a note about "German epic poems composed in metre of sixteen and seventeen syllables" (Works, XIV, 186-87). In the Marginalia he comments on the "epidemic of history writing" current in Germany (Works, XVI, 12), and in another note cites "an old German chronicle about Reynard the Fox" to illustrate a point (Works, XVI, 173). Here, too, he criticizes an assertion of Hegel's, which he considers jargon and not original with Hegel in the first place (Works, XVI, 164). Besides his references to Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Poe is interested in the German scientists, historians, and scholars. Alex. v. Humboldt, to whom he dedicated Eureka, is mentioned a number of times and quoted once (Works, XVI, 186-87, 2 99)- Kepler, whom he considered an "immortal," he mentioned ten times (Works, VI, 209, XVI, 196—97, 352). Johann H. Schroeter, Johann F. Encke, and F. W. Beissel are each mentioned once (Works, XVI, 352-53, II, 49), Helvetius twice (Works, XVI, 351, 352), and Madler a number of times. See Works, XVI, 294-99, for Poe's discussion of Madler 's Die Centralsonne (1846) and Vber das Fixstern System (1847), neither of which had been translated by 1847, though Poe may have relied on contemporary British discussions of the theories advanced by Madler. Among Ger- man historians, Poe praises Niebuhr above all others in his review of Niebuhr's Roman History (Works, VIII, 227). Von Raumer, whose A merica and the A merican People he reviewed for the Broadway Journal for Novem- ber 29, 1845, he condemns vigorously (Works, XIII, 13-16; see also IX, 53-64). To argue, in the face of this cumulative evidence, that Poe knew no German seems like trying to beat Poe at his own little game of perverseness. 175. See Harrison's statement on this head (Works, I, 153-54) an d especially Paul Wacht- ler's E. A . Poe und die deutsche Romantik, pp. 7-43, esp. pp. 18-43. Besides the direct avenue, there were the British and American translators and before them the French. The path of Ger- man literature to America, if it is traced chron- ologically, lies through France, whence it was 714 Notes to Pages 392-93 introduced into England ; Americans derived it from both intermediaries. Thus Hoffmann, for instance, might well have attracted Poe's attention by way of French translations. In 1829 Francois Loeve-Veimars, who had made a name for himself as translator of Heine and Schiller and by his articles on German litera- ture generally, began an edition of Hoffmann in French. Though never completed, it contained Hoffmann's most characteristic works. The last volume of the French edition appeared in 1833, the year Poe published his first tale. "France," wrote Champfleury, "was unanimous in wel- coming the tales of Hoffmann and ranking them among the chef-d'oeuvres of romancers." See Gustav Thurau, E. T. A. Hoffmanns Er- zdhlungen in Frankreich (Konigsberg, 1896), p. 245. Hoffmann was considered a "German classic . . . more popular in France than in Germany. His tales were read by everybody. . . . Hoffmann was the most popular author of the day in France." — Theo. Siipfle, Geschichte des deutschen Kultureinflusses auf Frankreich (3 vols., Gotha, 1886-1890), II, 154. But since Poe shows himself familiar with books and selections from the German which in his day were not translated into French, or any other language of which he was master, we may conclude that he generally had sufficient means for learning what he wanted to know of Ger- man belles-lettres without depending on French or other translators. 176. Gruener, loc. cit., p. 140. 177. In this area Defoe and Swift were Poe's prototypes. We recognize their influence in the journalistic instinct, sardonic humor, love for hoaxing the public, genius for seizing upon the latest discovery or scientific inference and pressing it to its conclusion, and mastery of verisimilitude by the use of minutiae. 178. Campbell says of the sources of these stories : "A good many of the books and periodi- cals to which he [Poe] went for his subjects were publications of his own time. Much of the detail, for instance, that appears in 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' was either quoted or adapted from the New York and Philadelphia newspapers of the eighteen-forties." — Poe's Short Stories (N.Y., 1927), p. xxi. 179. For an example of this kind of reason- ing, see Works, IV, 153-56. 180. Ibid., p. 179. The idea is elaborated ibid., V, 2, 38-39. 181. Ibid., V, 171, XVI, 98-99- 182. For examples see Schriften, II, 124, 195, 202, 262, 274; III, 3-4, 26, 339, 374; compare Poe's Works, IV, 153-56, 166. The idea occurs also in Tieck's Schriften, (28 vols., Berlin 1828-1854), IV, 51- 183. Palmer Cobb, in Studies in Philology, III (1908), 48-70, has pointed out in detail the similarities between Poe's "Tale of the Ragged Mountains" and Hoffmann's "Der Magneti- seur," and Paul Wachtler (op.cit., pp. 47-55) has drawn parallels between Hoffmann's tales of mesmerism and those of Poe. 184. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sammtliche Werke, ed. by Eduard Griesebach (15 vols., Leipzig, n.d.), I, 139-75; VIII, 92-130; hereafter cited as Werke. 185. Ibid., VIII, 131. The parallelisms be- tween Poe's "Tale of the Ragged Mountains" and Hoffmann's "Magnetiseur" are obvious, though there are marked differences which Cobb does not sufficiently recognize. Moreover, he appears not to take sufficiently into account the similarities which Poe's story has with "Der unheimliche Gast," the companion-piece of "Der Magnetiseur." Before Poe wrote "The Tale of the Ragged Mountains," he had become interested in the doctrine of metempsychosis, as "Berenice" (1835), "Morella" (1835), "Ligeia" (1838), and "Eleonora" (1842) illustrate. Already fascinated by this doctrine, and hitting upon it in some of Hoffmann's tales, Poe would naturally read on, especially when he found the German romancer combining hypnotism or mesmerism with metempsychosis. Since Poe had written before 1844 four stories dealing with metempsychosis, in none of which there is a hint of hypnosis or mesmerism, it is significant that, beginning in 1844, he wrote three more stories in which he combined metempsychosis and mesmerism in precisely the manner of Hoffmann. Poe's use of the term "fantasy-piece" in describing his stories gives us some intimation about the time when he became acquainted with Hoffmann. In the preface to Tales of the Gro- tesque and Arabesque, he says, "Let us admit, for the moment, that the 'fantasy-pieces' now given are Germanic" (Works, I, 150). To be observed here is that "fantasy-piece" is in- closed in quotation marks and written as one word, as in the German term of Hoffmann's Fantasie-stiicke. Poe's preface was written in 1839. The collection of tales appeared in 1840. Two years later he planned a new edition of his tales, to be entitled Phantasy-Pieces, the title- page of which Poe prepared, and a copy of which is reproduced in Quinn's Poe, p. 338. In a letter to Professor Anthon of New York, Poe wrote in June, 1844: "My tales, a great number of which might be called fantasy-pieces, are in number thirty-six" (Works, XVII, 179). It may be that Poe first saw Hoffmann's title, Fantasie-stiicke in Callots Manier (4 vols., Bamberg, 1814-1815) in the original; but more Notes to Page 394 715 probably, he saw it first in Carlyle's appendix to German Romance (1827), where Carlyle speaks of Hoffmann's "Golden Pot" as belonging to "a strange sort (the Fantasy-piece) of which he himself is the originator. Carlyle later translates the title literally as "Fantasy-pieces in Callot's Manner," and refers to "Prinzessin Brambilla" as "properly another Fantasy-piece." See Car- lyle's Works, Centenary ed. (30 vols., London, 1898-1899), XXI, 4, XXII, 12-13, 16. The title, Tales of the Grotesque and Ara- besque, supplies another link connecting Poe with Hoffmann. It has been argued plausibly, especially by Gruener, that Poe's title was suggested by an essay of Scott's "On the Super- natural in Fictional Composition; and particu- larly on the Works of Ernest Theodore Hoff- mann" in the Foreign Quart. Rev., I, i (July, 1827), 60-98. Scott's essay was the most care- fully thought-out and best-written review of Hoffmann yet to appear in English. Even in Germany it was recommended by Goethe to the German public, and in France it furnished material for two articles on Hoffmann: (1) "Du Marveilleux dans le Roman," a free translation of the first fourteen pages of Scott's article, published in Revue de Paris, I (1829), 25s. ; and (2) the introduction to Francois A. Loeve- Veimars' French edition of Hoffmann's writings (Paris, 1829-1833) — a free and condensed translation of the last twenty-six pages of Scott's article. See Gruener's "Notes," loc. cit., p. 8. Poe was obliged by his duties as editor, if for no other reason, to follow British and American periodical literature. If he saw this particular number of the Foreign Quarterly Rev. — and the first number of a new magazine is likely to be more widely distributed and read than later issues — he must have been impressed by Scott's article dealing with a man whose works were so strikingly like his own, and who has accordingly been called his ' ' Doppelganger " . In his detailed characterization of Hoffmann 's "Fantasic mode of writing," Scott said, "In fact, the grotesque in his composition partly resembles the arabesque in painting" (loc. cit., pp. 81-82). Poe's eye for striking phrases would be sure to note "grotesque" and "arabesque", found in near juxtaposition and used to describe "weird tales" of the type that interested him — designations which, as he put it in the Preface to his own collection of 1840, "indicate with suffici- ent precision the prevalent tenor of these tales . ' ' It seems altogether likely that if anything was lacking, after Poe read Carlyle's German Ro- mance, Scott's article would have supplied whatever was needed to send him to Hoffmann's writings. Turning now to Poe's own stories, we may note that his first productions in prose are six- teen tales known as the Tales of the Folio Club, later incorporated into his first published collec- tion, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. These tales are the first 16 printed in vol. II of Works (see intro., xxxv). Three of them suggest Ger- man influence. "Metzengerstein" is avowedly imitative of the German manner. "The Vision- ary" suggests Schiller's "Der Geisterseher," and "Some Passages in the Life of a Lion" is the kind of title made popular by the German romancers — e.g., Jean Paul's "Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren" and Hoffmann's "Blatter aus dem Tagebuch eines reisenden Enthusiasten." The introduction to the Tales of the Folio Club is satirical of dilettante, philistine literary clubs (see Works, II, xxxv-xxxix), and was intended to be printed with the tales, but finally with- held by the author. The suppressed introduc- tion details the origin and nature of the Folio Club, for, says Poe, "I like to begin at the beginning." This is probably a take-off on Hoff- mann, who likewise begins (and grows tedious in the process) at the beginning (see Werke, VI, 9-30). He proceeds to describe the eleven members, who are required to be "erudite and witty" and to prepare every month a "Short Prose Tale ... to be read to the company assembled over a glass of wine." Now, the best-known collection of Hoff- mann's tales is Die Serapionsbriider, purporting to be the tales read before the Serapions- Klubb, a club of young fellows who take the name from the story of an insane hermit monk named Serapion, who believes he is the mar- tyred monk Serapion whose death occurred 400 years before. The members style themselves Serapionsbriider, and das echt Serapionische is the standard of excellence set up for their liter- ary productions. They meet once a month at the house of one of the brethern, and over a glass of wine each individual, in turn, reads his prose tale. The solemn pledge of each member is to show himself as "geistreich, lebendig, gemiith- lich, anregbar, und witzig" as it lies in his power to be (Werke, VI, 9-17, 145). Poe's and Hoffmann's devices are strikingly similar, despite the wide difference in tone between the two sketches, and it may well be that Poe's realization of the parallelism led him finally to suppress his introduction. It was first printed in the Virginia edition. 186. Cobb, loc. cit., p. 51. It is noteworthy in this connection that Morella's reading, in the tale entitled "Morella," consists of "those mystical writings which are usually considered the mere dross of German literature" (Works, II, 27-28). In the same tale Poe speaks of "the wild pantheism of Fichte" and the "doctrines 716 Notes to Pages 394-97 of Identity urged by Schelling," which "formed, for a long time, almost the sole conversation of Morella and myself" (ibid., pp. 28-29). In the Preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque he denies that his stories express that "Ger- manism" and "pseudo horror" associated with "some of the secondary names of German literature" (ibid., I, 150-51) — a phrase, by the way, used by Scott in his essay on Hoffmann. At one time or another, he mentioned a con- siderable number of German writers who would fall under this classification, but Hoff- mann, the most characteristic of the lot, is not named. The omission was doubtless intentional; for an inveterate pursuer of plagiarism in others, Poe would hardly discuss or mention prominently a writer whose works bore any striking resemblance to his own. 187. Werke, I, 141. 188. Ibid., pp. 142-44. 189. Works, V, 163-65. 190. Ibid., p. 169. 191. Ibid., pp. 171-73. 192. Among other striking points of similari- ty is the fact that both writers employ the device of having the characters introduced through the reminiscences of an older man. Hoffmann uses the Baron to tell of the Major- Alban relationship, and Poe employs Dr. Templeton to relate the Oldeb-Bedloe affair. Furthermore, both are military figures. In Hoffmann's "Der unheimliche Gast," where the "Sizilianischer Graf-Graf S — i" is the exact counterpart of the Danish Major-Alban of "Der Magnetiseur," Hoffmann goes back for the beginnings of the story to the military cam- paign of Wellington in Spain (Werke, VIII, 94). Poe's Oldeb-Bedloe is a young officer under Hastings in India. The procedure of the hypnotists' getting the mastery over the minds of their patients is the same in Hoffmann and Poe (compare Werke, I, 157, 163, VIII, no, 113, 117-18, and Works, V, 164-65, 175). Unlike modern hypnotists, Poe's and Hoffmann's magnetiseurs proceed slowly, and after many failures, by repeated psychic suggestions on their dreams, to direct sugges- tion, and finally to complete control through a mere glance. Bedloe's dream contains certain elements the suggestions for which Poe may have derived from a dream of Medardus in Die Elixiere des Teufels. Bedloe's vision of seeing himself struck by a poisoned arrow and his sensations while he still sees with his eyes yet feels his soul leave his body are strikingly like the dream of Medardus, in which he sees himself stabbed to the heart and sees his soul separated from his body. Once the soul is dissolved into the ether, the body with its gaping wounds becomes plainly visible. A comparison of Hoffmann and Poe (Werke, II, 250; Works, V, 172-73) shows similarities in these self-contemplative pas- sages extending to verbal identities. Finally, a reunion of body and soul takes place, and the martyrs come to their original selves: in Hoff- mann's tale, "durch einen elektrischen Schlag" ; in Poe's story, by the "shock of a galvanic battery." It is possible that Hoffmann was responsible, also, for something in Poe's "Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1829) and "Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841), although Jean Paul's speculations on the states of mind in the transi- tion from life to death may be chiefly responsi- ble for Poe's conceptions in these two dialogues. Palmer Cobb points out (op. cit., pp. 68-69) another similarity in Poe's and Hoffmann's treatment of dreams generally. Compare Hoff- mann, Werke, II, 250, and I, 46, with Poe, Marginalia in Works, XVI, 88-89. 193. He goes on to state his own beliefs in the matter (Works, X, 241). 194. Works, V, 254. Poe's professed belief that a mesmerized person is endowed with heightened perception and intelligence, enabling him to see the relation of all things, is put in the mouth of Mr. Vankirk. See Works, V, 243-44. 195. The explanation for this clairvoyant state the German romanticists sought, says Wachtler, "in der Annahme eines inneren Korpers, des Astralleibes, der unmittelbar mit der Natur in Verbindung stande, dessen Wahr- nehmungen iibertaubt wiirden. Der Astraleib sei der unsterbliche Teil des Menschen" (op. cit., p. 48). Poe has Vankirk propound the same theory in identical terms (Works, V, 250). 196. Works, VI, 163. 197. Ibid., p. 165. 198. Ibid., p. 166. It has been suggested with some plausibility by T. T. Watts (Rambles and Reveries of an Art Student in Europe, Phila., x 855. PP- 37-38) that a partial source for the conclusion of this story (and of "Mesmeric Revelation") is Justinus Kerner's Seherin von Prevorst, a book of the fantastic order which had considerable vogue in America about this time, and that would have appealed to Poe. Poe's attention could easily have been directed to it by Mrs. Catherine Crowe's translation which was printed simultaneously in London and New York, where it was published by Harpers in 1845 and advertised in the Broadway Journal, II (Aug. 2, 1845), 63 — a periodical with which Poe was officially connected at the time. While this book may have contributed some- thing towards Poe's "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," it obviously came too late to have Notes to Pages 397-400 71' any influence on "Mesmeric Revelation," published in 1844, a year before Mrs. Crowe's translation appeared. Of course, Poe may have known Kerner's book in the original; it is certain that he was familiar with Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes, which included (pp. 126-64) a lengthy account of Kerner's Seherin von Prevorst. 199. There come to mind Calderon's Magico Prodigioso and Goethe's Faust, Irving's "Don Juan: A Spectral Research," Hawthorne's "Howe's Masquerade," Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and Boaden's "The Man with Two Lives." Only the last named (Boston, 1829) is sufficiently close to Poe's "William Wilson" to suggest the possibility of influence, and that has been effectively disposed of by Stedman in Works of E. A. Poe (Stedman- Woodberry ed., IV, 295-96) and Woodberry's Life (I, 232 a.). 200. See Wachtler, op. cit., p. 73, and Ricar- da Huch, Blutezeit der Romantik, Chs. XIV and XV. 201. Georg Ellinger, E. T. A. Hoffmann (Hamburg, 1884), 92. 202. For the narrative parallels between the two stories — the growth of evil in the hero (or villain) as he progresses in his criminal career, the evocation of his double (or better self), and the fierce struggles between the dual personali- ties until the double is slain — see Palmer Cobb's circumstantial account. 203. Works, III, 325. 204. A secondary motif in Hoffmann's story — Medardus' play at faro in the Prince's palace — Poe elaborates and makes into his more effective because focal gambling scene at Oxford. Compare Werke, II, 124-25, and Works, III, 316-18. 205. Ellinger, op. cit., pp. 120-21. 206. Works, XIV, 193-202; also XI, 106-9. 207. Ibid., XIV, 194. 208. Works, VI, 147. According to Novalis, it lies in the very nature of man; it is part and parcel of his hankering after liberty (see Nova- lis, Schriften, II, 211). Tieck, also, knew what Poe meant by this impulse toward perversity. See, for example, his feelings when standing on the edge of an abyss, in Tieck's Schriften (28 vols., Berlin, 1828-1854), V, 138-39, VI, 350-31. Compare Poe's Works, VI, 149-50. 209. Works, VI, 151-53. 210. Ellinger, op. cit., p. 92, and Scott in the Foreign Quar. Rev., I (1827), 81. 211. Werke, VIII, 183-84. In the ingenious detection of Cardillac as a murderer we have a striking anticipation of the analytic method which Poe was to apply so effectively in his detective and ratiocinative stories. 212. Werke, III, 15. 213. Compare Werke, II, 158-59, 165, 176, 214, and Works, V, 93, 94. 214. Cf. Wachtler, op. cit., p. 68, and Stephan Hoch, Die Vampyrsagen und ihre Verwendung in der deutschen Literatur (Berlin, 1896). 216. They expressed their ideas about the relation of Love and Death, of Blood and Lust, not only in their writings but in their personal lives. Thus Brentano wrote to Karoline von Giinderode: "Offne alle Adern deines weissen Leibes, dass sich das heisse schaumende Blut aus tausend wonnigen Springbrunnen spritze. So will ich dich sehen und trinken aus den tausend Quellen, trinken bis ich berauscht bin und deinen Tod mit jauchzender Raserei be- weinen kann." — Geiger, Ludwig, Karoline von Giinderode und ihre Freunde (Stuttgart, 1895), 108. Xovalis repeatedly dwelt on the theme. See "Hymnen an die Nacht," Schriften, I, 27, and "Das Lied der Toten," Schriften, I, 114-18, as well as the Fragmente in Schriften, II, 281, III, 66, 299. Ludwig Tieck commented at length on "geheimnisvolle Geliiste, aus Furcht, Grauen und Mitleid gemischt," "Blut und Mord," "Schauer und Graus," and the "Wollust . . . oder magische Wunsch, zu schaffen und zu ver- nichten, in der hochsten Liebe zu verderben und in der Blutgier mit den reinsten Herzens- fibern zu schwelgen." — Schriften, XIII, 60. The folk songs of von Arnim-Brentano in Des Kna- ben Wunderhorn (1818), which Poe knew, in- clude two songs handling similar themes: "Der Pfalzgraf" and "Der Scheintot" (see Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 2nd ed., 2 vols., Berlin, 1876, II, 87-8S, and I, 307-9). In the former, two lovers, one of whom dies, are married in the grave ; and the latter is the story of a young wife who gives birth to a child after she is buried. She is disinterred by her husband; her death had been only a form of asphyxiation. Achim von Arnim treated a similar theme at least twice (see Arnim's Werke, ed. by Bettina von Arnim, 26 vols., Berlin, 1833-1836, XV, 162, XX, 106), and Heinrich von Kleist relates the story of how the Amazon Penthesilea, be- lieving herself insulted by Achilles, her lover, sets her dogs on him and herself tears his body with hands and teeth (Kleist's Sdmmtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Wm. Herzog, 6 vols., Leipzig, 1909, II, 441, 462-463). In his story, "Die Marquise von O" [ibid., IV, 143-203), a young officer despoils the marquise, whom he holds for dead, but who only lies in a trance. A child is the fruit of the deed. Other notable examples are found in Zacha- rias Werner (Ausgewahlte Schriften, hrsg. von seinen Freunden, 13 vols., Grimma, 1841, II, 718 Notes to Pages 400-402 77) and Adolf Milliner (Dramatische Werke, 7 vols., Braunschweig, 1828, III, 160), and Milliner's Die Schuld, I, ix, 462-83). Finally, there is Heine, who knew that Love and Death are often closely allied. He sang of Love as of a Sphinx who kisses the beloved with its lips and with its claws tears the object of its love to pieces (Heine's Sammtliche Werke, ed. by E. Elster, 7 vols., Leipzig, n.d., I, 9). Love for the dead he mentions several times. Two poems especially treat the theme. In the one a Francis- can conjures up from the grave the corpse of a beautiful woman (ibid., I, 268; see also "Salon III," ibid., IV, 328) ; and in the other, "Helena," the poet calls his beloved to him from the grave. The insatiable woman kills him by drawing the breath from his breast (ibid., I, 9). 217. Werke, IX, 171-91, esp. p. 187. 218. It need not be assumed, of course, that Poe had no other possible sources, for there were reported a number of cases from life concerning which Poe might have had informa- tion. Wachtler (op. cit., pp. 71-72) cites three, and there were others. Pitaval tells, in his Causes celebres, how a young man, watching by the corpse of a young girl, is so affected by her beauty as to violate her. After several years, he returns to the community and learns that the girl had awakened from what had been only a trance, and had given birth to a child. Madame de Gomez, in Les Cent Nouvelles (a la Haye, 1739, XIX, 184), relates a parallel case. Final- ly, there is the case, often reported in news- papers and magazines (where Poe may have chanced upon the story), of Sergeant Francois of Paris, who, in the 1740's, dug up corpses in the graveyards and horribly mutilated them. With him the erotic impulse played no role. See Der Vampyr in den Pariser Friedhofen. Ein hochst interessanter Kriminalfall der neuesten Zeit; zundchst fur Psychologen und Arzte. Aus dem Franzosischen der "Gazette des Tribun- aux," Stuttgart, 1849. 219. Compare Werke, III, 23-24, and Works, II, 250-52. 220. Works, II, 252. 221. Ibid., pp. 250-52. 222. James T. Shotwell, "Edgar Allan Poe, as Poet and Romancer," Univ. of Toronto Quar., II, iv (June, 1896), 267. 223. Nathanael, in his fancy, sees Clara's eyes dissolving into ruddy and glowing drops and falling upon his bared breast (Werke, III, 23-24). In Poe the drops are by implication connected with the soulful eyes of Ligeia, and they appear to contribute toward Rowena's transformation in the end. 224. Shotwell, loc. cit., pp. 267-68. 225. Hoffmann made a similar observation concerning his story; see Werke, III, 36. 226. Works, XVII, 49-51. 227. Ibid., p. 52. 228. Ibid., II, 33-34. 229. Ibid., p. 29. 230. Wachtler, op. cit., p. 93. 231. See Schriften, I, lxi; II, 115, 178, 190, 193, 198; III, 29, 83, 163-64, 168, 273, 321, 353. The whole conception of Poe's theory of the power of the will and of the transformation of the body of his dead beloved into a living one could have derived from Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and perhaps also from the facts of Novalis' life, which were well known in Poe's day. Novalis believed, as his biographer Just remarks, that he could keep Sophie von Kiihn alive through his mere will to do so (ibid., I, lxi). His love of Sophie, like the love of Poe's character for Ligeia, Morella, Berenice, and Eleonora, is not the love of Eros, but the love of the intellect, or of the embodiment of the idea in Beauty (ibid., I, lix, lxxi-lxxii). When Sophie died, Novalis formed the will to follow her; he willed to die (ibid., I, lxv). But the preoccupations of his aesthetic and philosophi- cal studies kept him alive in spite of himself and gave him an interest in living. When he met Julie von Carpentier a year later (ibid., I, lxxi- lxxii), he saw in her Sophie — the embodiment of his abstract ideal of womanly beauty. Hein- rich von Ofterdingen, loosely based on the story of his own life, contains these elements highly poetized. In rough outline Heinrich von Ofter- dingen parallels "Ligeia" and "Morella." 232. Emile Lauviere, Edgar Poe, sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1904), 595; Stedman, Works of Poe (Stedman-Woodberry ed.), I, 98; Cobb, op. cit., pp. 81-90; Campbell, The Mind of Poe, p. 171 ; Quinn, op. cit., p. 214. 233. Cobb, op. cit., pp. 81-90. 234. Works, IV, 249. 235. Hoffmann is especially fond of such fantasies as he treats in "Der goldene Topf," where the student Anselmus sees in the door- knocker of Archivarius Lindhorst's house the head of an old applewoman (Werke, I, 176), and in "Der Kampf der Sanger," where peculiar roots in the hands of Klingsohr appear to be meek men and woman (Werke, II, 7). Tieck's "Blaubart" contains a passage in which the figures on the tapestry become alive very much like the horse in the tapestry on the wall of Met- zengerstein, and step out into the room from the walls, but there is no hint of metempsycho- sis; moreover, the figures return to their places (Schriften, IX, 170-71). Heine's poem, "Geoffrey Rudel and Melisande von Tripoli," describes a scene in which figures from the tapestries of Castle Bloy become alive (Sammtliche Werke, I, Notes to Pages 403-5 719 362). The feud between the two houses, Ber- lifitzing and Metzengerstein, remind Wachtler (op. cit., p. 80) of Arnim's "Die Gleichen" and of Kleist's "Familie Schroffenstein," a German version of the Romeo-and- Juliet theme. Sted- man finds certain common properties between "Metzengerstein" and Hoffmann's "Das Majo- rat," but these, like the others, are generalities on which one cannot put a finger with assur- ance. 236. Sdmmtliche Werke, III, 179-339. 237. Schriften, IV, 245-83. The horrible masqueradings and the bizarre costuming rep- resent the chief similarities. 238. Werke, III, 7-39. 239. Ibid., V, 1-98. The wizard in "Klein Zaches" is named Prosper Alpanus; Poe's hero is Prince Prosper. The oriental splendor behind heavy walls is another common feature. Other similarities have been pointed out between Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" and Eichen- dorff's "Ahnung und Gegenwart" by J. Wesley Thomas (A merikanische Dichter und die deutsche Lileratur, Goslar, 1950, p. 81), but they do not appear to constitute influence. 240. See Stedman, Poe's Works (Stedman- Woodberry ed.), I, 97. 241. First observed by Gruener, loc. cit., p. 16. 242. Scott, loc, cit., p. 91. 243. Compare ibid., p. 87, and Poe's Works, III, 277-78. 244. Works, III, 277, 297. 245. While Scott's translated passages from Hoffmann's tales are faithful, the passage in which he describes the castle R sitten differs in a number of respects from the original. In the German story the deep chasm itself is only mentioned in passing. Scott emphasized and thus heightened its descriptive effect and allegorical significance. The fact that Poe seized upon this detail and re-emphasized it, that his description (external and internal) of the House of Usher are markedly like Scott's, and that he seems to have appropriated other features from the article (as noted earlier), all suggest that Poe owes more to Scott's article than to a first- hand reading of "Das Majorat." It may well be that Scott's essay aroused, or accentuated Poe's, interest in Hoffmann and subsequently led him to become better acquainted with the German romantics ; for in other and later stories of Poe (as we have seen) there are more signifi- cant and striking resemblances which could not have been gleaned from Scott's article or other intermediary sources. 246. Die Majoratsherren (ed. by J. Cerny, Vienna, n.d.), pp. 75-78, 81. 247. Ibid., pp. 93, 94. 248. Ibid., pp. 73-75. 249. Ibid., p. 90. 250. Ibid., p. 94. 251. Wachtler, op. cit., pp. 96-97. 252. Sdmmtliche Werke (2. Ausg., 33 Bde., Berlin, 1840-1842), XXIV, 345. 253. Ibid. Jean Paul's Quintus Fixlein con- tains another sketch, "Der Tod eines Engels" (ibid., Ill, 4), which treats a related subject and suggests Poe's pieces ; but the similarities are best explained on the ground of Geistes- or Gesinnungsverwandtsckaft between the two authors. 254. Werke, XII, 5-16. 255. See Works, XVI, 160. 256. Bon-Bon is a restaurateur of uncommon qualifications ; he is skillful in an equal degree as a philosopher. His metaphysical dicta, while not always clear to his auditors, are nevertheless profound: Kant himself is indebted to Bon-Bon for his metaphysics. Bon-Bon is also a connois- seur of fine drinks and a special master in the art of tippling. He takes his drinks according to code, with a flourish and eclat, each brand at a particular time; and he rounds his philosophi- cal essais with a sip from a bottle calculated to give him powers of discrimination and profundi- ty that aid in the spinning of his next syllogism. But his tippling propensities result in tinging his mind with a "strange intensity and mysti- cism" so that he appears to have been "deeply tinctured with the diablerie of his favorite Ger- man studies" (Works, II, 129). On the eve of the story, the Devil himself appears and leads Bon-Bon from one metaphysical subtlety to another until the wine overpowers him, and even the Devil refuses to have his soul. 257. Works, XVII, 28. 258. "Lionizing" finds an interesting parallel in Jean Paul's chapter in Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren entitled "Physiognomische Posts kript iiber die Xasen der Menschen" (Werke, IV, 247-54). In both of the stories, a mountebank becomes a literary lion by virtue of his extraordinarily long nose. In both stories the hero's lionship suddenly ends, the caprice of his admirers having turned to a new fad. 259. Works, XVII, 30. 260. There is plenty of evidence that Poe read Blackwood's as well as theForeign Quarterly, the Westminster, and the Edinburgh. See Works, II, 35-41; VIII, 82, in; XI, 11; Woodberry, Poe, I, 220; II, 61, 71, 408-9; and Campbell, The Mind of Poe, p. 180. Poe read William Mudford's "Iron Shroud" in the January, 1831, number of Blackwood's and later made use of its idea and atmosphere in "The Pit and the Pendulum" (see Pattee, op. cit., p. 123; Wood- berry, Poe, I, 382). In one of his later stories he showed himself familiar with the gruesome 720 Notes to Page 405 series entitled "Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician" (Works, II, 274). The nature of this kind of tale is apparent in the following representative titles: "The Murder Hole," "The Murderer's Last Night," "The Dance of Death. From the German," "The Pandour and His Highness. A Hungarian Sketch," and "Brace- lets. A Sketch from the German." Many of these melanges of sensation and horror — "flam- boyant with adjectives and tremulous with sentimentality" — appeared in American annu- als, souvenir books, gift-books, and ladies' books, which were themselves derived from German examples. "In Germany the annual had had a long history. At first it had been a miscellany of poetic and elegant extracts, but after Schiller had used it for his Maid of Orleans and Goethe for his Hermann und Dorothea, it had become so favorite a vehicle for original articles that H. Payne in 1836, in the North American Re- view, could say, 'An author whose subject is within the intellectual reach of general readers, and who wishes to be soon and widely read, is more sure of being so in Germany, by contrib- uting to a Taschenbuch than by any other mode in which he can give his works to the world.' . . . Hoffmann in Germany made use of it constant- ly for his weird tales. ... In England the annual dates back to 1821. . . . Very probably the early American annuals were copied from these English predecessors, though the editors of the first 'annual proper' published in Ameri- ca, The A tlantic Souvenir, a Christmas and New Years' Offering (Phila., 1825), acknowledged their indebtedness for the idea to Germany and France: 'On the continent of Europe such a volume has long been the attendant of the season, and the shops of Germany and France abound every winter with those which are suited to every age and taste.'" — Pattee, op. cit., p. 123; see also pp. 27-31, 69—90, and for more extended studies, Ralph Thompson, American Literary Annuals and Gift Books, 1835-1865 (N.Y., 1936), and P. A. Shelley, "The German Heritage of the American Annuals and Gift-Book" (diss., Harvard, 1938). 261. Pattee, op. cit., p. 124. 262. For variations see the Harrison- Virginia ed„ II, 356-67. 263. In 1926, when I first considered the question of possible Germanic influence on Poe's critical theories, the subject had received only cursory attention, in F. C. Prescott's Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (N.Y., 1909), and in greater detail in Margaret Alterton's Origins of Poe's Critical Theories (Iowa City, la., 1925). In the latter, a chapter on "Unity in the Drama and the Fine Arts" is devoted to what Poe derived from A. W. Schlegel for his dramatic criticism. In my earlier study I was chiefly interested in the matter of Poe's adaptation of Schlegel's princi- ple of unity to Poe's theory and technique of the short story. Since then Professor James S. Wilson has published his essay, "Poe's Philoso- phy of Composition," North Amer. Rev., CCXXIII (Dec, 1927), 675-84, and three years later appeared the illuminating inquiry by Professor Floyd Stovall into "Poe's Debt to Coleridge," Univ. of Texas Studies in English, No. 10 (1930), pp. 70-127. 264. G. F. Richardson, "Poe's Doctrine of Effect," The Charles Mills Gayley Anniversary Papers (Berkeley, Calif., 1902), pp. 177-86. Poe's criticisms of Hawthorne's tales (Works, XI, 102-13, XIII, 141-55), for instance, have all the earmarks of being pieces of literary joinery, composed of none-too-well digested hints derived from his reading, involving him in anomalies and contradictions. Poe's critical theories, like his philosophical speculations, were an eclectic product, sometimes imperfect- ly assimilated matter borrowed from many sources — mostly from Coleridge, but also from the British reviews, A. W. Schlegel, Plato, Aristotle, Horace, and Christian philosophers, the German romantics, Justice Wm. Wirt and his own reading in the law, Kames and Blair, Dryden and Pope, Locke, Stewart, and Tenne- mann, among others. Woodberry speaks of Poe's "constant parroting of Coleridge," and at one time called Coleridge "the guiding genius of Poe's entire intellectual life," but subse- quently changed entire to early in concession of the greater importance which A. W. Schlegel assumed in Poe's later development as critic and thinker. See his Poe, I, 177-78, and the one-volume edition (Boston, 1885), pp. 93-94. Whether Poe first came to know Schlegel through Coleridge, or whether he read both abou t the same time, or Schlegel even before Cole- ridge, are questions that seem to be of some importance, although a conclusive answer is not easily given. 265. Campbell ("Poe's Reading," loc. cit., pp. 169-70) counts thirty references to Cole- ridge and five quotations, together with impor- tant influences of Coleridge on Poe's prose and verse. See also Poe's Works, IX, 51-52. 266. The Mind of Poe, p. 139. 267. It has been suggested that Poe's characterization in his "Letter to B " of Sophocles as "the bee" indicates that Poe was familiar with Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Poetry as early as 1831, but it is to be remembered that Schlegel was not the first to call Sophocles "the Attic bee." Notes to Pages 405-7 721 268. Works, VIII, 43-47. 269. Compare Works, VIII, 44-47, with Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Litera- ture by Augustus Wilhelm Schlegel, tr. by John Black, rev. according to the latest German ed. by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison (London, 1845), pp. 121, 66-68,70-71, 54-59, 114-15. 66-67, ll 5- 270. Compare Poe's Works, VIII, 44, 46, 47, with Schlegel's Lectures (Black trans.), pp. 66, 1138., 121. 271. Works, VIII, 282; see also pp. 285, 293, 295, 296, 299, 302, 306, 309. 272. Ibid., pp. 125-26. It is noteworthy that the sense of form is the quality in which Poe's early verse is most defective and his latest most marked. It is also significant that of the thir- teen tales published by Poe before 1835 only three are so-called "tales of effect." It would appear that the idea gleaned from Schlegel was an important one for Poe's development as poet as well as story writer. 273. From his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (2nd ed., 1842), printed in Graham's Mag. for May, 1842, and reprinted in Works, XI, 108. 274. These editions are so inaccessible that the 1845 Bohn edition (Black trans.) is used for all references. 275. See J. F. Ferrier, "The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge," Edinburgh Rev., XLII (Mar., 1840), 287-99; Sara Coleridge's edition of her father's lectures, prefixed to the Shedd edition of the Biographia Literaria ; J. L. Haney, The German Influence on S. T. Coleridge (Phila., 1902); Emma G. Jaeck, op. cit., 160-62; Anna A. Helmholtz, The Indebtedness of S. T. Cole- ridge to A. W. Schlegel (Madison, Wis., 1907); G. Herzfeld, "A. W. Schlegel und seine Be- ziehungen zu englischen Dichtern und Kriti- kern," Archiv fiir das Studium der neueren Sprachen, CXXXIX (1919), 149-62. 276. Poe quotes Schlegel's Lectures twice: once in a passage containing ninety-three words (Works, VIII, 44, from Lectures, p. 121), and again in a passage of fifty-three words (Works, VIII, 47, from Lectures, p. 115). The former is referred to "a German critic"; the latter is attributed directly to "Augustus William [sic] Schlegel." The rest of the essay is a rehash of what Schlegel has to say in Lectures IV, V, and VII on the Greek stage and on Euripides, the most notable borrowings being from pages 54-59, 66-71, 1 14-15, and 121 in the Black translation. Poe mentions Schlegel oftener than any other German writer. 277. The numerous encomiums heaped on the German critic alone would have been suffi- cient provocation for Poe, just setting out as litterateur and critic, to make closer inquiries and to provide himself with Black's translation of the Lectures, readily available since 18 15 and republished in Philadelphia in 1833. See also Alterton, op. cit., pp. 7-45, esp. pp. 30-35. 278. "Poe's Debt to Coleridge," loc. cit., pp. 80-100, esp. pp. 80-83. 279. In the "Letter to B— — ," Works, VII, xliii. 280. For a lucid discussion of the evolution of Poe's mature thought in terms of "oneness" or "unity," see the introduction to the Alterton- Craig edition of Poe, American Writers Series (N.Y., 1935), pp. xiii-cxviii. 281. As the context indicates, Schlegel here means "effect," for the passage occurs in the part of Lecture II entitled "Effect." He often uses the terms "impression" and "effect" inter- changeably. See ibid., pp. 38, 39, 41, 243, 244. Poe, in his earlier formulation of the unity-of- effect theory uses "impression." See Works, XI, 106-7. In his later criticism (1847), when he repeated his theory, he still used the term "impression," but he italicized "effect" — evi- dently a deliberate choice of Poe's to emphasize the term (Works, XIII, 150, 152). Professor Wilson's remarks (loc. cit., p. 683) are pertinent here: "In the original, the phrase from Schlegel is 'Einheit der Interesse' and . . . 'Gesammtein- druck auf das Gemuth.' Poe's 'totality of im- pression' seems a truer translation than Black's 'joint impression,' even if Poe never saw the original." In any case, it is easy enough to see how Poe derived from Schlegel's "Einheit der Interesse" (unity of interest), his unity of interest and singleness of effect; and how from "Gesammt Eindruck" (totality of impression), he got his totality or singleness of impression. 282. Precisely the means he emphasized in "The Philosophy of Composition" (Works, XIV, 193-208) and "The Poetic Principle" (ibid., pp. 266-92). 283. From this point it was no long step to Poe's conclusion about the brevity of a good poem or prose tale. See ibid., XI, 106-7, XIII, I50-53- 284. This bears a strong resemblance to Poe's statement that "if the writer's very first sen- tence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then in his very first step has he committed a blunder."— Ibid., VIII, 108; XIII, 153. 285. Compare ibid., VIII, 108, X, 153: "In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or in- direct, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction." 722 Notes to Pages 407-9 286. Schlegel, Lectures, pp. 37-38. 287. Works, X, 114-33, es P- P- I22 - 288. Works, XIV, 196-97. Poe seems also to have taken a hint from Schlegel for his theory concerning the assistance of rhythm, musical tone, and harmony in the production of the pre-established effect. Compare Schlegel, op. cit., p. 38, and Poe, Works, XIV, 275. In good poetry, according to Poe, the writer's object is the "Rhythmical Creation of Beauty." Com- pare Works, XIV, 275, and Schlegel, op. cit., p. 18: "Poetry is . . . the power of creating what is beautiful, and representing it to the eye or the ear." In prose, it is to create "an elevating excitement of the Soul," which, Poe goes on to say, "is quite independent of that passion which is the intoxication of the Heart — or of the Truth which is the satisfaction of Reason. For, in regard to Passion, alas! its tendency is to degrade, rather than to elevate the Soul. Love, on the contrary — Love — the true, the Divine Eros — the Uranian, as distinguished from the Dionaean Venus — is unquestionably the truest of all themes." — Works, XIV, 90; compare R. M. Waerner, Romanticism and the Romantic School in Germany (N.Y., 1910), pp. 28-29. This is but a restatement of Schlegel's idea plus a touch of Poesque terminology; compare Schlegel, op. cit., 244; also pp. 37-38, and Works, XIV, 205. Just here enters the interesting question whether Poe's theorizing on the relation of poetry to music derived anything from the German Romantiker, for his concept of poetry as reaching its consummation in music appears to be little more than a recapitulation of Ger- man romantic theory as exemplified by Schlei- ermacher, Wackenroder, the Schlegels, and especially Novalis. The idea of music as the realization of Poetry is implied by Schleier- macher's declaration that the feeling of man should accompany all his doings "as if it were a holy music ; he should do all with religion, nothing through religion." Wackenroder said that poetry lay conquered at the feet of music. Tieck sought to make tones and notes them- selves into "pure poetry," and in Sternbald (1798) tried to resolve both life and poetry in music. Hoffmann is another who tried to make the transition from romantic authorship to musical composition. Novalis carried the doc- trine to its extreme by seeing the consummation of art in "poems which would sound melodious- ly and are full of beautiful words, but without any sense or connection"; see P. E. More, "A Note on Poe's Method," Studies in Philol., XX, iii (July, 1923) 204; Campbell, The Mind of Poe, p. 185. Evidence, external and internal, is too meager definitely to prove that Poe derived this theory from the Germans, but the presump- tion is strong that he did, or at least, that he drew confirmation from them for his views. 289. It is odd that a critic of Poe's perspi- cuity, while being so solicitous of the reader's state of mental concentration, should have overlooked the effect of the time element on the creative process itself within the poet's mind. 290. Compare Schlegel, op. cit., pp. 75-76, and Poe's Works, XIV, 267. Compare further Schlegel, p. 38, and Poe, XIII, 149, 151, for a parallelism in the idea that an artist is to be judged by the degree of his success in pro- ducing what he sets out to produce. Compare also Poe's and Schlegel's attitudes toward the public: Works, XIII, 149-50, and Schlegel, op. cit., p. 38. 291. Poe's authorship of these three essays in the Messenger has been established by Marga- ret Alterton, op. cit., pp. 107-10. 292. Southern Lit. Messenger, III, i (Dec, 1836), 158. 293. Compare ibid., II, xii (Nov., 1836), 739, and Wm. G. Tennemann, A Manual of the History of Philosophy, tr. by the Rev. Arthur Johnson, 2nd ed. (after the first Oxford ed., 1832), London, 1852, p. 55. See Alterton, op. cit., pp. 109, in. NINETHEENTH-CENTURY POETS, NOVELISTS, AND CRITICS EARLY POETS I. John Quincy Adams' verse translation of Wieland's Oberon, made during 1799— 1801, exerted no influence at the time, for it remained in manuscript until 1940. Philip Freneau (1752- 1832), even while he held the post of translator in Jefferson's Department of State, appears not to have found a knowledge of German necessary, nor did his poetry, then or later, concern itself with anything respecting Germany beyond references to Hessian soldiers and to William Tell as the deliverer of Switzerland. The start- ling coincidences between Schiller's "Indian Death Dirge" of about 1793 and Freneau's "Indian Burying Ground" (1788) is explicable on the ground that both poets found their source in Jonathan Carver's Travels (London, 1778), P- 399- 2. In his poem "To Ennui" the reference to Altorf is probably a reflection of Fanny Wright's play on the subject of William Tell rather than of any direct knowledge of any German literary treatment of the theme. Notes to Pages 409-10 723 3. South. Lit. Messenger, XIII (Dec, 1847), 762. 4. The precise extent of Halleck's knowledge of the German language and literature remains in doubt. He made a brief tour "from Lausanne, through Switzerland to Basle and thence down the Rhine to Strasburg" (James G. Wilson, Life and Letters of Fitz-Greene Halleck, N.Y., 1869, p. 252); he associated with people like Eugene MacCarthy and Lorenzo Da Ponte, who were accomplished German students, and was himself rated by Poe as "a good linguist" (N. F. Adkins, Fitz-Greene Halleck, New Haven, 1930, pp. 134, 142; Poe's Works, XV, 55); but when his books were sold in 1868, the auction catalogue listed as the sole German content of his library three volumes of Goetheana, all of them in translation. Except for his much admired version of the "Zueignung" of Faust I (first printed in the New York Mirror for June 29, 1839), which appears to be a faithful trans- lation, the other three pieces of his bearing superscriptions "From the German" or "Trans- lated from Goethe" (one from Hoffmann von Fallersleben, another ascribed to Goethe, and a third not yet identified) appear less translations than free adaptations — so free that the sources of two of them have never been fixed. The presumption is strong that he relied on existing French or English versions. 5. Adkins, op. cit., pp. 187-88; J. G. Wilson, op. cit., pp. 228-29. 6. Profoundly impressed by Der arme Hein- rich, he translated a large portion of it. Sub- sequently he composed three Minnesongs based on Walther von der Vogelweide and other Middle High German poets, and a number of other poems on such German and Scandinavian models as A. W. Schlegel ("Life's a Dream"), Johann Peter Hebel ("The Little Witch"), and Christian Hendricksen Pram ("The Power of Song"), as well as lesser poets. Another group of his poems, published under the rubric "Teutonia," is inspired in manner and structure by poems of Herder, Schiller, and Goethe. In addition, he wrote a great many songs to the music of various foreign national airs. Eighteen of these were written for German melodies, on the models of J . H. Voss, Mathias Claudius, Lud- wig Holty, Jens Baggesen (who wrote in both Danish and German), and Friedrich von Mat- thisson. Among his posthumous poems is one entitled "Midnight Music," which imitates the measure and structure of Goethe's "Nacht- gesang." He liked to experiment with versifi- cation and prosodic effects, particularly to test meters that were little known or foreign to the English tongue. The Dream of a Day and Other Poems (1843) includes some 150 forms or modifications of stanzas, many of them based on German models. His Studies in Verse, in which he imitated "all accessible" cultivated dialects, remains an unpublished curiosity. For further details see Adolph B. Benson, "James Gates Percival, Student of German Culture," New Engl. Quar., II, iv (Oct., 1929), 603-24. 7. His sonnet on William Tell, composed in 1827 and published in The Talisman for 1828, was merely a literary exercise on a theme made popular by the Tell literature in the periodicals of the day. In his Lectures on Poetry (delivered in 1826 but not printed until 1884) there is a remarka- ble parallelism between the Kantian triparti- tion of mental faculties and Bryant's theory that poetry addresses itself to the passions, the understanding, and the intellect. But the terms as employed in these lectures (notably the first two) are used loosely, and the parallelism is only suggestive ; for there is nothing to indicate that Bryant knew much about Kant at this time, or that he learned much about him later. 8. At Munich he spent three months, and subsequently four months in Heidelberg, whence he was recalled to New York by the illness of a colleague, Leggett, of the New York Evening Post. At Heidelberg he met Longfellow, who, in an effort to conquer his grief over the death of his young wife and to prepare himself for his Harvard professorship, was deeply immersed in a systematic study of German literature. Whether led by Longfellow or by his own inclination, or both, Bryant undertook, at the age of 41, to add German to his knowl- edge of French, Italian, Spanish, and the classical languages. He appears to have made fair progress and gained a degree of initiation into the works of Goethe, Schiller, Riickert, and Heine. Two days before his departure from Heidelberg (January 23, 1836), his translation of Uhland's ballad, "Der Graf von Breiers," appeared in the New York Mirror. Upon his return to America, the infectious atmosphere of German balladry remained sufficiently sustained for him to translate and publish, in July of the same year, in the New York Evening Post, another Teutonic poem which has not yet been identified, but which unquestionably belongs to the type represented by Korner's Leier und Schwert. At the same time he turned old nursery rhymes and popular songs of the day into the idiom of France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, and tried to arouse his daughter's interest in foreign languages, especially rec- ommending to her the German language and literature. — Parke Godwin, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant (2 vols., N.Y., 1883), I, 308, 315, 358. 724 Notes to Paues 410-11 9. Besides the two poems already mentioned, he translated "Das Lied vom Magdlein und dem Ringe" from Uhland in 1842; "Nahe der Ge- liebten," Goethe, 1844; "The Paradise of Tears," an unidentified poem of N. Miiller, 1844; "Der Wanderer in der Sagemiihle," Kerner, 1844; "Burgfraulein von Windeck." Chamisso, 1850; "Die Worte des Koran," Zed- litz, 1865; and "Das erste Lied," Houwald, 1876. 10. The lectures of Dr. Follen on the German poets "quickened his zeal," and "more decided- ly the singular enthusiasm of his teacher, the Baron Ludwig von Mendelsloe," for German balladry stimulated Bryant's fondness for the poetry of tradition and superstition, for the grotesque and the horrific. See, for example, his "The Murdered Traveller," U.S. Gazette, I (Jan. 1, 1825), 286, and "The Robber," N.Y. Mirror, XI (July 6, 1834), 4. 11. T. McDowell (ed.), William Cullen Bryant Representative Selections . . . (N.Y., 1935), p. li. 12. "The Strange Lady," written while he was still in Heidelberg, and based on a typical German legend, that of the handsome Albert, who is led into the forest and to his doom by a dark-haired enchantress, is seriously conceived and without any thought of burlesque. "The Hunter's Vision," also written in Germany, derives from the same general sources, but seems more immediately inspired by Goethe's ballad, "Der Fischer," in which a fisherman, entranced by a mermaid, glides into the water to join her. In Bryant's poem the same motif is adapted to a hunter, who is drawn by a feminine vision (or forest sprite) to join her. "A Presenti- ment," too, belongs to this first period of Bry- ant's enthusiasm for German balladry. As in Goethe's "Erlkonig," which turns on the ghostly ride of a father and his son through the night, so Bryant's poem describes a similar ride, relates the same progressively portentous interchange of question and answer between father and son, and finally presents the same tragic conclusion, although the precise manner of the boy's death is more specifically indicated in Bryant's poem than in his model. See A. H. Herrick, "W. C. Bryant's Bezeihungen zur deutschen Dichtung," Mod. Lang. Notes XXXII, vi (June, 1917), 344-51. 13. During his second trip to Europe (1845), after a leisurely trip up the Rhine, he fell in, at Diisseldorf, with the artists Hunt and Leutze. They took him to the studios of Schroeter, of Kohler, and of Lessing, just then sketching out his now famous "Martyrdom of John Huss." Later, his friends Henry Wheaton and Theo. S. Fay introduced him to all that was "rare and notable ... in Berlin." His third trip to Ger- many (1849) was spoiled for him by the presence of soldiers everywhere; but in 1857-1858 and again in 1867 he visited Germany. His journey- ings on these five occasions were in the nature of a tourist's. He seldom strayed far from the beaten paths of the sight-seers. He appraised the lands he traversed with a journalist-traveler's eye; and while he wrote and printed in the New York Evening Post running accounts of his experi- ences and observations, there is little to indicate that he peered very far below the surface or, so far as concerns Germany, carefully appraised her spiritual achievements. However, the Even- ing Post regularly printed German notices and often lengthy extracts from foreign journals. 14. For the Schiller Festival, November 11, 1859, at the Cooper Institute, he delivered an address on Schiller as a moral idealist and a poet of freedom particularly worthy of whole- hearted American attention. In 1870 he spoke as a pro-German at a German fair on the Franco- Prussian war, and on May 7 of the next year he delivered an address on "The Progress of Ger- man Literature" at a banquet given in honor of the German ambassador. Baron von Gerolt. On the occasion of the "Jahrhundertfeier" of the New York Goethe Club, of which he was a member, Bryant, despite his 80 years, delivered on August 27, 1875, a vigorous address honoring Goethe. In the last year of his life he spoke at a dinner given by the German Social Science Association, April 8, 1878, in honor of Bayard Taylor as the translator of Faust and the newly appointed Minister to Germany. At the con- clusion of his address Bryant was toasted as "the Nestor of American poets," to which he replied in a brief German speech. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 15. Longfellow's interest in Germany is treated in detail in James T. Hatfield, New Light on Longfellow, with Special Reference to His Relations to Germany (Boston, 1933), and in Lawrance Thompson, Young Longfellow (180J-1843) (N.Y., 1938). My indebtedness to these studies is indicated in the notes. 16. On his way to New York City, whence he sailed on May 15, 1826, he called on Ticknor, who gave him letters to Irving, Southey, and Professor Eichhorn. Passing through North- ampton, he stopped at the Round Hill School to consult George Cogswell and George Bancroft, both of whom urged him to spend a year at Gottingen. 17. Experiences along his route of travel whetted his appetite for German literature. While in Vienna, he had been intrigued by the Notes to Page 41 1 725 N achtwachterlied ("Hort, ihr Herren") and had painstakingly copied in German script five lines of it. Dresden, where he arrived on January 13, 1829, offered many advantages. Irving's letters provided easy access to the cosmopolitan society of the Saxon capital, and he soon found a round of court balls, tableaux, concerts, plays, and operas competing with his studies. He engaged a tutor and made some progress in his study of German, even to interlarding the lines of his diary with German phrases. Bottiger, who had known Wieland, Herder, Schiller, and Goethe, conversed agreeably on German liter- ary men and lent him books from his own library ; and Longfellow availed himself of other aca- demic and social opportunities which men like Baron von Lowenstein could provide. See New Light, pp. 13-15; Young Longfellow, pp. 175, 375 n. 8, and Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (3 vols., N.Y., 1891), I, 163-64 (hereafter cited as Life). 18. His first visit to Preble's rooms in "Jew Alley" immediately transported him into the gay, romantic atmosphere of student life in a German university town. His delight on meet- ing his old Portland friend he commemorated in a sprightly prose account in the first six numbers of a manuscript newspaper, "Old Dominion Zeitung," which they prepared for their own amusement, and which became the repository of sketches, stories, news items, songs, jokes, quotations, pen drawings, satirical sketches of the Bowdoin Trustees, and all kinds of nonsense. They also kept a quarto "Journal" (still preserved in Craigie House), filled with drawings, satirical sketches of persons and happenings, and the general pot pourri of a student's random experiences, all plentifully besprinkled with snatches of German. For these records, see Young Longfellow, pp. 137-39, and New Light, pp. 15-18, also frontispieces. Preble gave up his quarters and settled with Longfellow on the Weenderstrasse, just op- posite the old town hall. Here they lived and ate together and attended the same classes. Longfellow proceeded immediately to present his letters from Bancroft and Ticknor and was "well received" by the professors. To allay any fears that his parents might have respecting distractions, he reported that "there are no amusements here whatever: so there is no alter- native but study"; neither need they fear that he or Preble would become involved in duelling : "Pray set your mind perfectly at rest." Finding Gdttingen everyway as good as represented, he asked permission to spend at least the summer: "The Library here is the largest in Germany and full of choise [sic] rare works and the ad- vantages for a student of my particular pursuits are certainly not overrated in the universal fame of the University of Gottingen." — Young Longfellow, pp. 139-40. 19. New Light, pp. 18-19; see also Life, I, 168, and Young Longfellow, p. 142. 20. For one thing, there was no course of lectures on modern literature at the moment. He attended two courses given by Hofrat Heeren on ancient and modern European histo- ry and another by Professor Wendt on Natural Law. He could not have assimilated much of the lectures, but he doubtless learned a good deal of German by his attendance three hours daily upon these German discourses. Much of his time (he wrote) was occupied studying German "under the guidance of an able professor," Benecke, in whose house he also took his meals — an arrangement conducive to his learning to speak the language. He also made the acquaint- ance of Blumenbach, and with Dr. Bode, a one- time associate of Bancroft's in the Round Hill School at Northampton, he made a short walk- ing tour. For the rest, he pursued "other branches of modern literature" ; that is, he read in Spanish and French literature, and he under- took what he described to his father as "a kind of Sketch-Book of scenes in France, Spain and Italy" — the beginning of what was ultimately published in book form as Outre-Mer in 1835. "By it [he added] I hope to prove that I have not wasted my time. . . . But the German language is beyond measure difficult; not to read, — that is not so hard — but to write. And one must write, and write correctly, in order to teach. I can only promise to do my best. I can assuredly lay a good foundation, and much more I cannot expect to do. If I can have the Professorship at Bow. Coll. — I should like it — but I must have it on fair grounds: — with the same privileges as the other professors. No state of probation— and no calling me boy — and retrenching of salary" (May 15, 1829. See Life, I, 174-75; Young Longfellow, pp. 143-44; New Light, p. 19). Shortly before leaving on his Easter vacation tour of Belgium, England, and France of a month's duration, he asked permission to remain in Gottingen throughout the summer; however, late in May, when he received the letter from his father granting the request, but urging him to return by the end of September, he was ready to quit Germany. Homesickness and alarm at his father's report of his sister Elizabeth's illness caused him to leave Got- tingen on June 6. Traveling via Paris, where he heard of his sister's death, he passed through London, Oxford, and Stratford, and on July 1 sailed from Liverpool, arriving in New York on August n, 1829, thus bringing to a close a 726 Notes to Pages 411-12 journey that had been planned for a year, but that had been lengthened into three years and three months. — New Light, pp. 22-23; Life, I, 176. 21. For examples, see Life, I, 172, and New Light, pp. 15-16. His Gottingen notebook con- tains a page of translation from Luther, an- other from Heine's Reisebilder, and a shorter passage from Voss's Luise. His extracts from German poetry are of "painstaking, but by no means impeccable, accuracy." There are slips and solecisms aplenty, and he refers to Lowen- stein as "Livingstern" and "Livingstein," to Bottiger as "Boticher," and to "the celebrated Naturalist, Blumingbach." — New Light, p. 23. During his first stay in Germany he was still a good deal the youthful romantic seeker after the picturesque. This characteristic appears in the several pen drawings which he made of himself, clothed in conventional student garb, seated at a table, a long German pipe in his mouth, a Stein before him on the table, and in his hand a book labeled "Goethe." It bears the title, in Longfellow's handwriting, "H. W. L. 'in the clouds' at Gottingen. April 3, 1829." (The sketch is reproduced as the frontispiece in New Light. A similar sketch of himself and Preble is to be found in Life, I, opposite p. 166.) The picture is more a pose (or romantically imaginative conception of himself) than a realistic portrait of the kind of student he knew himself to be. The volume of Goethe in his hands would have been appropriate in a picture of Longfellow at Heidelberg in 1 835-1 836, but there is little to suggest that at Gottingen in 1829 he got much beyond the phrase book and grammar. 22. Where French had been the only lan- guage offered, it now became a required subject for all students through the Sophomore year, and Juniors were permitted to elect either Spanish or Italian. In 1831 German was added as an elective for Juniors. In 1834, the Juniors were required to take two terms of Spanish or Greek, and Seniors could elect, during their two terms, Italian, German, or Hebrew. During his second and third years at Bowdoin Longfellow taught single-handedly French, Spanish, Ital- ian, and German, and he complained of the excessive routine chores of correcting exercises daily. — Young Longfellow, pp. 150, 153, 180. He was enabled to add considerably to the meager stock of German books in the Bowdoin library (for details, see New Light, p. 25), and occasionally he tried his hand at translating as well as composing in German. The Bowdoin notebook for 1833 contains several transcrip- tions and two original poems in German which Professor Hatfield calls properly "laudable, though halting attempts." Both are printed in New Light, pp. 25-26. 23. The youthful author speaks of having "trimmed" his "midnight lamp in a German university" (Works, 16 vols., Standard Library ed., Boston and N.Y., 1891, VII, 21). Quota- tions from A. W. Schlegel's comments on the Nibelungenlied and the Hofbuch indicate that he knew something of current German literary theory regarding popular or folk literature (pp. 91-92). A night journey, in a French diligence prompts the young man to make a translation of a stanza of Burger's "Lenore" (p. 112). The "German moralist" who is quoted in the chap- ter entitled "A Tailor's Drawer" has been identified by T. M. Campbell as Jean Paul Friedrich Richter — Longfellow's first reference to an author who came to hold a warm place in his esteem; and Hatfield finds the "German allegory" mentioned in the same chapter akin to Jean Paul ; while the thesis that "music is the universal language of mankind — poetry their universal pastime and delight" (p .154) suggests Herder. More definite and important are three quotations from Goethe — one from Werther and two from Faust. The first (p. 176) is a trans- lation of a passage from the second letter in Werther. The second — "What I catch is at present only sketch-ways, as it were; but I prepare myself betimes for the Italian journey" — is a translation of lines 4275-78 of Faust I. It stands fittingly at the head of the chapter entitled "The Journey into Italy." The third occurs in a passage in which, observing "in the shadow of a column ... a young man wrapped in a cloak, earnestly conversing in a low whisper with a female figure," Longfelllow is prompted to comment, "Beware, poor girl, lest thy gentle nature prove thy undoing! Perhaps, alas, thou art already undone! And I almost heard the evil spirit whisper, as in Faust, 'How different was it with thee, Margaret, when still full of inno- cence, thou earnest to the altar here, — out of the well-worn little book lispedst prayers, half child-sport, half God in the heart! Margaret, where is thy head ? What crime in thy heart!'" Compare Works, VII, 231, and Faust I, lines 3776-87. At the close of the book Longfellow devotes four pages to a rapid sketch of his Ger- man tour, following roughly the route he had traveled in 1829: from Trieste via Gratz and the Steiermark to Vienna, a visit to the ancient castle of Greifenstein, thence to Prague, Dres- den, Leipzig, Gottingen, Cassel, Frankfurt-am- Main, Mainz, and on down the Rhine. For the elaboration of these travel experiences, he added, he had not time. They were reserved for his next book, Hyperion (1839). 24. The controversy over the terms of his Notes to Page 412 727 appointment was never forgotten, and his impatience with the narrow religionism, the petty gossip, and the isolation of Brunswick are reflected in a satirical tale entitled "The Wonderful Tale of a Little Man in Gosling Green," which he had the foresight to publish anonymously in Greeley's New-Yorker for No- vember i, 1834. The tale, together with ex- planatory details, is reprinted in Amer. Lit., Ill, ii (May, 1931), 136-48. Hatfield has ob- served that the style of the "Tale," in its digressiveness, quaint turns, unexpected sim- iles, far-fetched allusions, and whimsical mysti- fications, while deriving ultimately from Sterne, seems more immediately influenced by Jean Paul, to whom Longfellow accorded, especially during the Bowdoin and early Cambridge periods, a high and unique place. — New Light, p. 138; see also Young Longfellow, pp. 147-209. The young man who had traveled widely and breathed the enlightened atmosphere of some of the most famous European universities found Bowdoin provincial. His ideas of educational reforms and teaching techniques found little favor among the Bowdoin authorities. How ad- vanced these ideas were appears from a letter to his father, written from Gottingen on March 10, 1829, when, the Bowdoin offer still hanging fire, he proposed an educational venture which must have seemed wild to his practical-minded father. European universities, he writes, are as yet undreamed of in the U.S., where "the idea of a University" remains still "Two or three large brick buildings — with a chapel and a President to pray in it!" Even Mr. Jefferson's "bold attempt" is a failure, for he began "where everybody in our country would have begun — by building college halls and then trying to stock them with students. . . . European universities were never founded in this man- ner." One begins properly with "professors in whom the spirit moves," who are "well enough known to attract students to themselves, and . . . capable of teaching them something they did not know before." Next, capital must be expended for libraries, and books must be made freely available to students. If the Bow- doin affair should terminate badly, he proposed to take the University of Paris and "the Ger- man Universities" for a model — to "let two or three Professors begin the work — let them deliver lectures in some town (Portland seems to me better adapted for it than any other place in our part of the country)." "Yes," he con- cluded, "let Portland set an example to the whole U. States. Let us begin forth-with: As soon as I return — If the matter seems at all plausible — I mean to proffer my humble en- deavors to the execution of such a plan — and put my shoulder to the wheel. The present is j ust the moment: we must take the tide there is in the affairs of men." — New Light, pp. 20-22. Just attained to the maturity of twenty- two, but already up to establishing a university of his own, he found Bowdoin short of his ideal; and though he found domestic happiness and a busy career as professor, poet, critic, and scholar during his six years there, he privately expressed, as early as January 4, 1831, his impatience with "this land of Barbarism — this miserable Down East," and longed for release from his "exile." When, in the summer of 1832, he received an inquiry whether he would consider a translation to New York University, he frankly expressed "a strong desire to tread a stage on which I can take longer strides and spout to a larger audience." But the New York invitation failed to materialize, and efforts to secure a diplomatic post in Spain, a plan to take over Cogswell's Round Hill School at North- ampton, and the prospect of taking a position in the department of languages and literatures at the University of Virginia, all came to naught. For details see Young Longfellow, pp. l6 7. x 75. 182-83, 188-89, 194-97, 199. 205-7. 25. Longfellow met Leigh Hunt, the Lock- harts and Babbages, Sir John Bowring, the translator of Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, August Hay ward, translator of Faust, and the Carlyles. During his repeated visits to the Carlyles there was much talk of Goethe and Schiller. The persuasive "pistol bullets" of Carlyle's talk while dwelling on the idealism of Schiller and the deep moral purposefulness of Wilhelm Meister (which Longfellow had examined only cursorily) opened up to the young American an entirely new approach to an area of these Ger- mans whom he had hardly considered except as lyric poets. Carlyle's opinion of Goethe as "the greatest man that ever lived, excepting only Jesus Christ" set him to thinking and inspired a desire to learn more of the deeper import of Goethe, whom he had neglected during his first stay in Germany. — Young Longfellow, pp. 21 r- 16; New Light, pp. 33-34. 26. Although he was disappointed at finding Professor Berzelius and other notables to whom he had brought letters of introduction away for the summer, Longfellow set forthwith to work (under the direction of Professor Lignel of the University of Upsala, who was in Stockholm at the time) "picking up crumbs in the Swedish language." He also made some elementary explorations into the Finnish language. Mean- while the delicate condition of his wife's health made travel difficult, and the itinerary by which the party had planned to reach Heidel- berg was rearranged several times. By early 728 Notes to Pages 412-13 September they were in Copenhagen, where Longfellow took lessons in Danish from Pro- fessor Boiling, fraternized with the learned gentlemen there as he had in Stockholm, and continued his search for books for the Harvard Library which the Harvard authorities had commissioned him to buy to the extent of 200 pounds sterling. — Life, I, 210, 214-16; New Light, pp. 34-35; Young Longfellow, p. 219 27. For details see New Light, pp. 35-36, and Young Longfellow, pp. 222-23. 28. In Bonn Longfellow paid his respects to A. \V. v. Schlegel, the first of the notable Ger- man literary men whose acquaintance he made. He was, he said, "much gratified to see the translator of Shakespeare," whose version of the Merchant of Venice he had seen enacted in the City Theater of Hamburg, but his account, detailed though it is, deals largely with ex- ternalities and in no way suggests that he recognized Schlegel at the time as much more than the translator of Shakespeare. 29. Her home, only two doors west of the Karlstor, housed also the Russian German- speaking Baron von Ramm, who became his companion on many a ramble in the vicinity. Not far away, Clara Crowninshield found shelter with the romantic-minded Hepp family, where a group of cultivated and socially- inclined boarders arranged almost daily whist parties or musical entertainments, and where Longfellow was known as "Wilhelm Meister." — New Light, p. 37. 30. He presented a letter from Dr. Lieber to Mittermeier, the famed law professor, and found a ready welcome. He became acquainted with Gervinus, the Shakespeare scholar, who unfor- tunately left Heidelberg for Gottingen early in 1836; with Reichlin-Meldegg, who was lecturing on Shakespeare and Schiller; with Thibaut, whose discourses on the Pandects he heard; with Paulus, the rationalist theologian; with Bertrand and Schlosser. He heard with especial interest Schlosser's "long discourse upon Ger- man literature at the present day," including the "Romantic School" and "Young Germany" whose chief apostle Longfellow learned was Heine. Schlosser closed by castigating Wolf- gang Menzel, the latest historian of German literature, ?s a swash-buckling critic who handled matters "gam burschikos." Dr. Um- breit, the librarian, showed him the MSS in the University Library and offered him the use of his own books, while Prorektor Bahr gave him free access to the library shelves. — Life, I, 220- 21; New Light, p. 38; Long, Literary Pioneers, pp. 172-73. 31. He undertook also the superintendence of Clara Crowninshield 's German studies, and with his assistance she prepared a manuscript album of thirty-seven songs (sixteen of them from Goethe) with full musical accompaniment. This manuscript together with Clara's diaries, is preserved at Craigie House. — New Light, PP- 38-39- 32. Like Paul Fleming in Hyperion, he "buried himself in books, — in old, dusty books. He worked his way diligently through the ancient poetic lore of Germany . . . into the bright sunny land of harvests, where, amid the golden grain and the blue corn-flowers, walk the modern bards, and sing." — Hyperion (Works, VIII), p. 70. 33. This work, a running chronological list, with comments and detailed references to sources, originally prepared for printing, remains a bound MS volume stored in Craigie House, of interest today chiefly as indicating the thoroughness and industry with which Longfellow worked at Heidelberg. — New Light, p. 39; I, 227. 34. He worked through the five volumes of Wackernagel's Altdeutsches Lesebuch and con- sidered it "the best book of the kind" he had ever seen. He studied Grimm's Deutsche Gram- matik in three volumes, the Ludwigslied, the Annolied, some of the Minnelieder, and parts of the Nibelungenlied, which he thought "deserves an entire translation in English." He read Flogel's Geschichte der komischen Literatur, Ro- senkranz' Geschichte der Poesie (turned to good use in Hyperion, esp. in Bk. I, Ch. VII), and Schubert's History of the Soul. In folk literature, he read the Marchen of Grimm and Musaeus, Gorres' Volksbucher, Erlach's V olkslieder , and Till Eulenspiegel and Des Knaben Wunderhorn. He read in and about Herder; he consulted the text of Nathan der Weise after seeing the piece performed in Mannheim ; and he commented on the dramatic action of Emilia Galotti. Of Schiller, he read Don Carlos, Wallenstein, and The Thirty Years' War. Burger's ballads in- duced him to read also a life of Burger, and he reread Uhland, Salis, and Matthisson, already begun at Rotterdom. With Clara Crowninshield he perused Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and among representative prose tales of the later romantics, a number of tales by Hoffmann, Tieck, and Carove, Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, and Fouque's Undine. Besides Heine's Roman- tische Schule, he found the poetry of Klopstock, the Stolbergs, Hebel, M. Frey, Zedlitz, and Salis-Seewis to his taste ; and he laid the founda- tion for his apostrophes in Hyperion to Jean Paul as the "eagle of German literature" by reading Campaner-Tal, Flegeljahre, and Titan. —New Light, pp. 39-40, 42 ; Literary Pioneers, PP- 173-75. 253 n - 35- Notes to Pagre 413 729 35. See his penetrating observations, New Light, pp. 40-41, substantially the same senti- ments that animate Chapter VII in Book II of Hyperion: "Mill-Wheels and Other Wheels," esp. p. 114. Among his prized possessions, still preserved in Craigie House, is a fine copy of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, acquired at Heidel- berg during the winter of 1 835-1 836. He also owned and frequently used Erlach's collection of Volkslieder der Deutschen in five volumes and Meinert's Alte deutsche Volkslieder. His close attention to these collections largely accounts for his fine appreciation of the German Volks- lied and his success in rendering it in translation and imitation. 36. New Light, p. 40. For his comments on Goethe's works at the time he read them in Heidelberg, see Literary Pioneers, pp. 174-77. 37. New Light, p. 41. 38. Mary's last words, as he recorded them in his diary, had been, "I will be with you." Sit- ting alone in his study, he mused : "The clock is now striking ten. I am sitting alone in my new home ; and yet not alone — for the spirit of her, who loved me, and who I trust still loves me — is with me. Not many days before her death she said to me: 'We shall be so happy in Heidel- berg!' I feel assured of her presence — and am happy in knowing that she is so. O my beloved Mary — teach me to be good, and kind, and gentle as thou wert here on earth." — Young Longfellow, p. 230. 39. He found satisfaction in the company of Bryant, who, however, was called away from Heidelberg late in January; and he sought the modest social diversions that Heidelberg af- forded. But a cheerfulness momentarily evoked by his first participation in German Christmas festivities ended abruptly with the arrival, on Christmas eve, of a letter telling him of the death of his brother-in-law and dearest friend, George W. Pierce. What helped him conquer an overpowering mood of loneliness and dejec- tion was a bracing letter from Ticknor, who, having been crushed the year before by the loss of his only son, expressed the hope that Long- fellow would find that inner "support without which all external consolation is idle and unavailing," and counseled him to devote him- self "to constant and interesting intellectual labor; you will find it will go further than any other merely human means ; at least such is my experience" (Life. I, 223). Resolving henceforth to "bear upon my shield the holy cross," he returned to his books; but his first sustained bout with German scholarship in the Universi- ty library, while preparing the elaborate syllabus of ten centuries of German literature, soon showed him that arid fact-gathering and source-hunting were not much to his taste. He told himself that as a professor at Harvard he must be proficient in the realm of literary history, but he soon put by the desire to follow strictly in the path of scientific German scholar- ship or to emulate the intellectual feats of Ticknor, his predecessor. Immersion in the romantic literature of Germany directed the main emphasis of his life into the language of sentiment and emotion (see Young Longfellow, p. 231). The resolution and calm required for the composition of poetry was still lacking; he was still too close to his sorrow for that. But the foundations for a poetic career were laid during the winter of 1 835-1 836 at Heidelberg. 40. See his judgments on Wert her in his diary for December 29, 1835, printed in O. W. Long. "Goethe and Longfellow," Germanic Rev., VII, ii (Apr., 1932), 153; other criticisms of Werther appear in New Light, pp. 41-42, and Literary Pioneers, pp. 174-76. 41. Under the combined influence of Goethe, who advised renunciation and resolution, and of Ticknor, who counseled faith and perseverance, Longfellow became himself the moral counsel- lor and spiritual comforter of George W. Greene, who wrote to him from Florence in a mood of ill health and spiritual despair. See the Goethean precepts propounded by Longfellow in his letter to Greene on January 22, 1836, in Life, I, 224-25, also pp. 227-28. He paused little in his own labors unless it were to make a translation of such bits as Salis' "Song of the Silent Land" (Life, I, 224) and Aloys Schreiber's "An die Glocke" (New Light, p. 43) or to seek diversion during the gloomy winter in the com- pany of Clara Crowninshield and Julie Hepp, ever ready to arrange evenings devoted to cards or music or literary discussions, which always grew spirited when they considered the relative merits of Goethe and Schiller (Young Longfellow, p. 232). He undertook for the North American Review an elaborate article on the German drama that he never completed. 42. In April he made a four-day trip in the company of three friends to Frankfurt, where he saw the annual fair, viewed Dannecker's statue of Ariadne, inspected Goethe's house, and heard Don Giovanni, his favorite opera. A few weeks later he went to Mannheim to see Nathan der Weise enacted by the celebrated Esslaer, then 70 years old. By May 14, he was again "growing tired of being cooped up in Heidelberg — beautiful as it is," and felt "a strong desire to be once more on the wing" (New Light, p. 43). In June he made a brief excursion to the baths of Ems and saw at Mainz the cathedral, the cloisters of Saint Willigis, and the tomb of Frauenlob the Minne- 730 Notes to Page 414 singer (Life, I, 229-31). Returned to Heidel- berg, he still found himself restless. He began to discover certain provincialisms in Heidelberg that he had not previously noticed. "The people in general" and "the professors' wives" in particular were "rather limited in their notions, especially affectingAmerica." "Verily," he mused, "the inhabitants of Heidelberg are not a very cleanly and sweet-scented race! Every front entry smells worse than a stable The Hauptstrasse is but a mile long; — there are all kinds of utter abominations on the side- walks. . . . The English are by far the most cleanly and decent people on the face of the earth; — including ourselves under the name of English" (New Light, p. 43; see also Literary Pioneers, p. 177). 43. Finding solitary travel as an "experi- ment of moral alchemy" unsatisfactory, he sought such amusement as scenery and note- book afforded. At various stages in his journey he recorded his observations and feelings in very tolerable German (one such passage, consisting of three paragraphs, correct and idiomatic in all but one phrase, is reproduced in New Light, p. 44). The Journey from Munich to Salzburg was made by coach, in the company of three others, one of whom was "Grilparzer [sic], a poet from Vienna, an insignificant man in appearance; but a very pleasant one in reality" (New Light, p. 44). At Ischl he had for his com- panion, a Mr. K., the intelligent, good-hearted, and eccentric Englishman who figures in Hyperion as Mr. Berkeley, and who really ate his breakfast at St. Gilgen in the hydropathic fashion there described (Hyperion, p. 247; Life, I, 235). And it was at St. Gilgen, on July 5, that he copied from the wall of the little chapel the inscription which he afterwards translated and used as the motto for Hyperion, and which is highly characteristic of many of his later didactic lyrics: Blicke nicht trauernd in die Vergangenheit, sie kommt nicht wieder; niitze weise die Gegenwart, sie ist dein ; der diistern Zukunft geh' ohne Furcht mit mannlichem Sinne entgegen. From St. Gilgen he proceeded by way of Inns- bruck, Constance, Zurich, Brunnen, the Furca and Grimsel passes, and Interlaken to Thun, where on July 20, his path crossed that of the Appletons of Boston. Eleven days later, after he had gone to Geneva and back, he rejoined them at Interlaken and was promptly struck by Frances, the younger of the Appleton sisters. 44. New Light, pp. 45-46; Young Longfellow, PP- 235-37- 45. While they drove along the lake at Zurich, Longfellow translated Uhland's ballad of the "Castle by the Sea," with the assistance of Lady Fanny, who was scribe on the occasion, and made "some of the best lines," as he re- minded her years later. Then they "got out of the carriage and walked," and after a boat ride, resumed their attempt to capture Uhland's elusive mood in English words. At Schaff- hausen, while trying to cheer the failing invalid in the Appleton party, Longfellow read Modern Characteristics, a work on contempora- ry German men of letters. In it he found a sketch of Hoffmann von Fallersleben, which he considered "capital," a judgment that is re- flected in the relatively large proportion of space devoted to that German poet ten years later in his Poets and Poetry of Europe. — New Light, p. 46; Young Longfellow, pp. 236-37. 46. Back at Interlaken, Frances Appleton wrote a brief confession: "Miss Mr. L. consider- ably." And it may be that she dispatched a message that softened the rebuff which she had given him earlier; for in Paris, on September 28, the young widower made an unexpected transcription in his journal of a well-known German Volkslied intimating as much — "Kommt a Vogel geflogen . . ." — Young Long- fellow, 237-38. 47. Upon retiring, Ticknor had urged that the Smith Professor should be relieved of all routine teaching, that he should lecture only and supervise the department, leaving the class drill in French, Spanish, Italian, and German to the foreign-born instructors, Sales, Bachi, Surault, and Bokum. The new professor was pleased with his new position and the payment of his salary for the first quarter "without any ado," as he reported the matter to his father, adding, "I think I shall have nothing to do but lecture. ... I have no classes to hear . . . and in all probability shall never be required to hear any." This last surmise turned out to be overoptimistic. Before many months passed, he found his position entailed both responsibilities and trials. The four instructors were "all pulling the wrong way except one." He super- vised the individual classes ; sometimes he took a class, and almost invariably enjoyed doing so, because he did so by choice. But there were times when a tutor left suddenly and when, no substitute being available, he was required to hear recitations. — Young Longfellow, p. 241; New Light, pp. 48, 52; Life, I, 257. 48. New Light, p. 49; Life, I, 256; Young Longfellow, p. 243. 49. By May 12, the plan was taking definite shape. To his father he wrote: "I have a class in German, and shall soon commence my lectures Notes to Page 414 731 I give you a sketch of my course: I. Introduc- tion. History of the French Language. 2. The Other Languages of the South of Europe. 3. History of the Northern, or Gothic, Languages. 4. Anglo-Saxon Literature. 5 and 6. Swedish Literature. 7. Sketch of German Literature. 8, 9, 10. Life and Writings of Goethe, n and 12. Life and Writings of Jean Paul Richter." — Life, pp. 261-62. It is to be observed that six of the twelve lectures are devoted to modern Ger- man literature, three of them to Goethe. The omission of Schiller is noteworthy in view of the emphasis which Follen had given to him. It has been said that Longfellow never properly evaluated Goethe in comparison with other German figures, and that Jean Paul received always the greater share of his veneration. That he was powerfully drawn to Jean Paul appears both from the outline of this first course of lectures and from statements that he made at various times, chiefly one of 1837, wherein he calls him "the most magnificent of the German prose writers" (Life, I, 259). But this apostrophe, and Book I, Chapter V of Hyperion (entitled "Jean Paul, the Only-One"), where Richter is referred to as "a comet among the bright stars of German literature," com- prise the more significant references to him (I count twenty in all). They belong principally to the young Longfellow, the author of the ro- mantic Hyperion — a book expressive of many sentiments not representative of the mature Longfellow. By contrast, he refers to Goethe no less than 200 times, including thirty quotations or translations of his own. His admiration of Richter is a youthful enthusiasm ; his love of Goethe, while never completely unqualified, grew deeper as the years passed, serving him, especially after he passed the mezzo cammin of his life, often as a personal comforter, as well as a source of poetic inspiration. 50. For further details regarding the contents of these lectures see New Light, pp. 53-54, 56- 62, and Literary Pioneers, pp. 179-80, 182-88. The number of Harvard undergraduates pursuing the study of modern languages had grown steadily under Ticknor's administration. When Longfellow took charge, a modern lan- guage was a required study for Sophomores and Juniors, throughout both years, and for Seniors during the first and second terms. Longfellow viewed his position as challenging his best efforts to be both instructive and interesting. He counted strongly and correctly on his ability as a reader and as a translator of interesting passages for illustrative purposes ; and his innovation of courteously addressing each student as "Mister" won approval. He was fortunate, also, in the room assigned to him for his first class — "Corporation Room No. 5," which provided the right atmosphere. Young Edward Everett Hale, a member of the new professor's first regular class, recalled : "We met in a sort of parlor, carpeted, hung with pictures, and otherwise handsomely furnished. . . . We sat round a mahogany table . . . and the whole affair had the aspect of a friendly gathering in a private house, in which the study of German was the amusement of the occasion. He began with familiar ballads, — read them to us, and made us read them to him. Of course, we soon committed them to memory without meaning to, and I think this was probably part of his theory. At the same time we were learning the paradigms by rote." — New Light, pp. 52-53. Here were innovations, indeed, and the fourteen-year-old Hale could not escape noting the difference between the average tutor's method of "setting lessons and exercises, and hearing and receiving them" and this newer procedure, which, as he noted at the time, he believed he would "like very much." When Longfellow gave his next course of lectures, at, the opening of the new academic year (Sept. 1837), Hale was again present , and again he set down, with the characteristic temerity of a fifteen-year-old Junior, his impressions: "The lectures are to be extemporaneous translations of the German with explanations; as he called it, recitations in which he recites and we hear. He made a long introduction to the matter in hand, very flowery and bombastical indeed, which appeared to me very much out of taste. I believe, however, that it was entirely ex- temporaneous and that he was carried away by the current of his thoughts. In fact, he ap- peared to say just what came uppermost. The regular translation and explanation part of the lecture was very good." — Ibid., p. 55. Hale went to hear the second lecture, which he "liked a good deal better than the first." But when, on October 27, Longfellow concluded his discourses on Faust I , and offered to continue with Faust II for a volunteer section, Hale de- cided, "I shall not go. The lectures are tolerably interesting, but not good enough to compensate for the time taken up by them." — Literary Pioneers, p. 181. In the meantime Longfellow's duties had been more clearly defined: "He was to give one lecture a week [actually he gave two a week] ; to superintend studies and instructors, being present at least once a month in each course; to give two lectures a week during the summer term on 'Belles Lettres, or Literary History.'" He altered the program of his lectures, and to emphasize more recent German literature, began with Goethe's Faust on September 18, 732 Notes to Pages 415-17 1837. As during the preceding spring, he spoke from notes. — New Light, p. 55; Life, I, 276-77. 51. The success of his first series of lectures was such that he told his father in August, 1837, he would "probably have an edition printed . . . not at my expense — which is something unusual." — Literary Pioneers, pp. 180-81. 52. During his early months in Heidel- berg he engaged in joyous disputation with Fraulein Julie Hepp, upholding the "noble idealism" of Schiller against her championship of Goethe's "realism." "I told her I thought the moral impression of Goethe's works was not good, to which she replied, 'Das ist das all- gemeine Irrthum.'" As he went on to read Goethe's later works, he modified his views, but he was not yet ready to agree that all the con- demnation of Goethe constituted merely "universal error" or "common misconception." In his journal for June 4, 1836, he recorded the judgment of a "fat man" whom he met at the hotel a few days earlier, "Goethe desecrates everything he touches. It is as if you should take a beautiful rose, and trample it in the dirt and then say, 'There's your rose — your beautiful rose.'" — Literary Pioneers, pp. 175, 254, n. 53. At another time he said, "There is enough misery in the world to make our hearts heavy ; in books let us have something more than this — something to strengthen and elevate and purify us. Schiller, the beautiful Schiller, does this. He is the prophet of the ideal, Goethe the prophet of the real." — Ibid., p. 177. 53. These sentiments are echoed in the por- tion of his lectures where he outlined for his students the three epochs in Goethe's life (see below) . 54. New Light, pp. 61-62. 55. The passage appears to have been sug- gested by Menzel's German Literature (Felton's translation, 3 vols., Boston, 1840), II, 27; also pp. 24-26, 40, 89-92. 56. Ibid., p. 62. It is to be noted, too, that his strictures on Werther, as set down in his Heidel- berg diary, are tempered in his Harvard lec- tures: "As for the moral effect of the book, I cannot think it bad, unless upon minds weak and willing to err." See Literary Pioneers, pp. 185-86, and Germanic Rev., VII, ii (Apr., 1932), 163. 57. The reference reflects Menzel's German Literature, III, 21 ff. Obviously this is Longfellow's own feeling about the incontinent defamation of Goethe's character. Before his classes he quoted Menzel's charges that Goethe was "not patriotic," that he was "aristocratical and conservative," that he possessed a "base soul," that he "deemed weakness beauty," that he was "selfish," that he was an "enthusiast only for himself," and that he was "always perfecting himself." These accusations, coming from Menzel, Goethe's countryman, he represented as doubly vicious: "If ever a man was . . . misunderstood and calumniated out of his own country, that man was Goethe." And by way of refutation, he pointed out that Goethe was not responsible for his egoism — that the ever-present coterie of worshippers made him an egoist. In exonerating Goethe of the charge of selfishness, he offered what he called "my own impressions." He accounts the singleness of Goethe's purpose in making self culture his main study from youth to old age a great honor to the man — this endeavor to develop and improve what nature had given him, going steadily forward "per- fecting himself into a complete man." All the accusations fall flat before the fact that Goethe was a great philosopher: "This was his religion, to busy himself with the present, fulfilling his destiny. . . . This was his idea of human per- fectibility, and he seems almost to have real- ized it in his own person." Such men are not to be bound by the conventions imposed by lesser men on ordinary men (here he cited his own translation of Venetian Epigram, No. 10). So much for the charge of indifference and self- culture. As for his aloofness from political issues and lack of patriotic fervor, we have the "wise and true" testimony of Eckermann to the contrary. Of Goethe's moral and religious character Professor Longfellow found it "diffi- cult to say anything definite," beyond quoting the famous passage in which Faust makes his pantheistic confession of faith to Margaret in the garden. He translated, and presumably read to his students at this point lines 3432-58. He also adduced pertinent passages from Mrs. Austin's Characteristics, I, 100-103, to show that the subject of religion and immortality occupied Goethe's mind from childhood to the end of his life. Longfellow steadily regarded Faust as largely autobiographical and read much of the autobiographical into others of Goethe's writings. Having concluded his biographical account and having presented a general estimate of the man and his philosophical outlook, Longfellow concluded in a manner apparently designed to •be disarming: "I will now state my estimate of that charac- ter in the fewest possible words : This man, then, was a man of comprehensive and commanding intellect; of rich imagination; and strong, simple, healthy common sense. In character he was calm and dignified ; of great gentleness and benignity in his judgments of other men; of Notes to Pa we 417 733 great sensibility to all forms of beauty; and great love for all forms of truth. He seems to me, indeed, to be strikingly like Franklin, though with more imagination. The practical tendency of his mind was the same ; his love of science was the same ; his benignant philosophic soothsayings seem nothing more than this worldly wisdom of Poor Richard versified and idealized." — Literary Pioneers, p. 184. Here is to be noted another bodily transfer of matter from his lectures to Hyperion. The Baron, referring to the various appellations conferred on Goethe by his admirers and detractors, says, "Well, call him Old Humbug, or Old Heathen, or what you please; I maintain that, with all his errors and shortcomings, he was a glorious specimen of a man." "He cer- tainly was," admits Fleming. "Did it ever occur to you that he was in some points like Ben Franklin, — a kind of rhymed Ben Frank- lin ? The practical tendency of his mind was the same; his love of science was the same; his benignant, philosophic spirit was the same ; and a vast number of his poetic maxims and sooth- sayings seem nothing more than the worldly wisdom of Poor Richard, versified." — Hyperi- on, p. 123. The quotations from Longfellow's notes are transcriptions made by Professor Hatfield while he worked in Craigie House and gracious- ly sent to me at the time. See also New Light, pp. 59—62. and Literary Pioneers, pp. 182-84. 58. See New Light, pp. 50-51, for his letter to Mary Appleton expressing his difficulty while writing lectures in turning from "Christian Dante" back to "Heathen Goethe." 59. While he doubtless revised and altered these notes in later years, their general con- formity to passages in Hyperion and the precise dates written on some of them suggest that they survive substantially in the form first written in 1837-1838. 60. For example, in the lecture on Goethe's life and character, he practically ignored the "Lili" episode and devoted too much space to such minor characters as Hofrat Hiisgen. — New Light, p. 59. 61. Ibid., p. 59; Life, I, 284. 62. New Light, pp. 59-60. 63. Of special interest as indicating what the successive generations of Longfellow's students heard regarding Faust is his teaching-copy of Part I, bought in 1837, and interleaved for manuscript notations, including assignments, outlines of scenes, translations of key passages, comments on and elucidations of the text, the chronology of the play, the prevalence of popular superstitions, illustrated by numerous instances of compacts with the devil, the histor- ical Doctor Faustus, the first Faust book, the puppet plays, the treatment of the legend in the drama, beginning with Marlowe, and references to the translations made by Gower, Hayward, Blackie, Syme, Anster, Birch, Talbot, and Bernays. He calls attention to some "desperate blunders" made by Gower and Hayward. Annotations of the text include the observation that "Auerbach's Cellar" is "perhaps the very best" scene in the entire play, the Cathedral scene is "grand," and the Prison scene is "dread- ful." Unable completely to forego making a display of his learning, he draws literary parallels — some illuminating, some veering on the pedantic — to individual passages in the text, drawing upon Sanskrit, the Bible, Old English, Rabbinical literature, the Eddas, saints' legends, and the modern literatures in many languages. The archangel's song in the "Prologue in Heaven" reminds him of Bryant's "Song of the Stars," and of two stanzas in Milton's hymn, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." Faust, as he appears in the first monologue (11. 354-61), is compared to Mar- lowe's Faustus, Byron's Manfred, and Goethe's own restless life and aspirations. Faust's second monologue (11. 602-736), as well as the one in "Forest and Cavern" (11. 3217-50), suggests certain lines in Wordsworth's Excursion (IV, I 3°~45. 5 1 3"39)- Mephistopheles is to be studied in relation to the satanic figures of Dante, Milton, Calderon, Byron, and Bailey; the character of Margaret, a composite of Goethe's Gretchen, Frederica, and Lili, may be compared with the Margaret in the Old English play of The Countrie Girl. Opposite "Haupt- und Staatsaktion" (1. 583) he cites Wieland: "Shakespeare's Stiicke sind grossten Theils Haupt- und-Staatsaktionen, oder dramatische Novellen und Marchen." "Das dreimal gliihen- de Licht" (1. 1318) led him to investigate its symbolic meaning and to record: "Picture of a three-fold candlestick, used in some churches in the M[iddle] A[ges]. From Ancient Mysteries Described." The "Pentagramma" (1. 1396) is elucidated by a quotation from John Holland's Cruciana: "Employed all over Asia in ancient times as a charm against witchcraft. Bishop Kennet reports opinion [that] if [the sign is] placed against body, the angles will point to the places where Christ was wounded." Laid into the book at this point is a loose sheet of paper illustrating the pentagram. Longfellow's in- scription reads: "Drawn by Agassiz to explain the pentagraph. Jan. 17, 1871." (See New Light, opposite p. 132; Longfellow introduced the pentagram into Christus: The Divine Tragedy, Works, V, 93.) The song of the Spirits (11. 1440- 1505) reminds him of Ariel's song in The 734 Notes to Pace 418 Tempest (I, ii, 376); and the magic mantle which Mephistopheles supplies for his own and Faust's convenience suggests several literary parallels of similar cloaks put to equally evil uses. The magic mirror of the "Hexenkuche" (I.2430) is a common device found in the Gesta Romanorum , in Cervantes, and elsewhere. Two idiomatic expressions are happily explained: "Ja, wenn man's nicht ein bisschen tiefer wiisste" (1. 3051) is translated, "Yes, if I did not know a trick worth two of that!" and "in alien Ehren" (1. 3052) is rendered "Honor bright." Opposite Mephistopheles' mocking observation, "Ich hab' euch oft beneidet/ Urn's Zwillings- paar, das unter Rosen weidet" (11. 3337-38), Longfellow wrote the rhapsodic word "Ex- quisite!" The passage in which Margaret, expressing her fear of Mephistopheles, of his cynicism, and of his cross-marked brow, con- cludes "Dass er nicht mag eine Seele leiden" (1. 3490), Longfellow finds paralleled in St. There- sa's characterization of Satan as one who is incapable of loving — "Poor wretch! He does not love." A bit of independent research appear in his note, line 3569 — "Im Siinderhemdchen Kirchbuss' thun" — where he cites, from the Collections of the Maine Historical Society, I (1831), 272, a parallel case of public penance for adultery as exacted by New England law in York, Me., in 1640. He refers to Shelley's translations from the "Walpurgis Night," adds a number of notes explanatory of allusions in the "Walpurgis-Night's Dream" and calls attention to Heine's description of the Brocken. Finally, he questionably derives Margaret's "Lass mich nur erst das Kind noch tranken" (1. 4443) from the old Spanish ballad of Conde A larcor. 64. While Emerson and his fellow-Transcen- dentalists were assiduous in introducing Ger- man transcendental patterns of thought, and Ripley and Parker were upsetting the orthodox by proclaiming a disturbing brand of German theological criticism, Longfellow was most influential in transforming American critical opinion of German literature (especially of Goethe's relative rank in the German literary hierarchy) in academic circles, while Margaret Fuller did the same work among the more general reading public. 65. Life, I, 330, 331, (Apr. 19 and 21, 1839). 66. Hyperion, p. 123. 67. Ibid.; Life, I, 330. 68. Poets and Poetry of Europe (1847), p. 281. 69. Life, II, 47 (June 21, 1846). 70. Literary Pioneers, p. 196. Highly im- portant in this development was the infectious pro-German atmosphere of the Cambridge- Boston community that enveloped and ab- sorbed Longfellow. There was Carl Follen, the first professor of German at Harvard, whose death in 1840 Longfellow mourned as a person- al loss; George Ticknor, who carried on be- tween Follen's dismissal in 1835 and Longfel- low's inaugural; George Bancroft, whom Long- fellow consulted regarding his first European tour, and whose numerous articles on German literature in general and Goethe in particular he read; J. G. Cogswell, co-founder with Ban- croft of the Round Hill School, which Long- fellow had once considered taking over; Edward Everett, who had brought from Germany the books that formed the nucleus of Harvard's German library, who lectured in Boston on Goethe, Schelling, and Hegel, and who served as president of Harvard from 1846 to 1849 ; and F. H. Hedge, an early member of the Tran- scendental Club, translator of Leibnitz, Fichte, Chamisso, Tieck, and Hoffmann, editor of Prose Writers of Germany — all of them men who like himself, had studied in Germany and got their inspiration at first hand. Then there were several informal groups to which he belonged — for example, the Five of Clubs, composed of C. C. Felton, Charles Sumner, G. S. Hillard, H. R. Cleveland, and himself, and the "Young Faculty Meeting," including some of the same group, plus Benja- min Pierce. In both groups the members went by Germanized names; their Socratic gaudiola, complete with German songs and full accompa- niment of Studenten conviviality, were held on Monday evenings after they had dutifully at- tended the more decorous sessions of the Har- vard faculty. There were also individuals like C. T. Brooks, indefatigible translator from the German, and, somewhat later. Bayard Taylor, translator of Faust. Next, a great number of native Germans came to make Craigie House a kind of second home — people like Tellkampf, who passed the winter of 1838-1839 in Boston lecturing on "the various schools of German philosophy," Franz Lieber, Carl Schurz, Nikolaus Heinrich Julius, Gustav Pfizer, Knut J. Clement, Abbe Liszt, and Dr. J. G. Karl of Bremen. Freiligrath, though he never came to America, elicited much sympathy, and his welfare engrossed much of Longfellow's time. Longfellow's sym- pathy for German exiles was well known, and he paid the price of seeking shelter or careers for a host of expatriated artists and intellec- tuals. He was expected to get up concerts and lectures for "invading foreign talent," to make subscriptions for foreign monuments, and to write memorial verses for American Goethe societies. — New Light, pp. 66-67, 81. As the years passed, demands upon his time multi- Notes to Pages 418-19 735 plied manifold (see Life, II, 59, 175). On March 29, 1850, he observed: "To-day a new class in college wanting to read Faust. And I cannot in conscience say No. Inclination to do everything for the young men prompts me to say Yes; and accordingly I say Yes. It is only one impedi- ment more between me and the real work I have to do." — Life, II, 175. The "seventy lectures" to which he felt "doomed" for 1850- 185 1 hung over him "like a dark curtain." — Ibid., p. 177. After repeated "six hours in the lecture room" he felt "like a schoolmaster," "a playmate for boys," "a fat mill-horse, grinding round with blinkers on." — Ibid., I, 307, 342; II, 259. Remembering that "Art is long and life is short," he resolved to retire, and on April 19, 1854, he delivered his last lecture. — Ibid., II, 259-60, 268. Throughout all the trials and vexations of the years when he tried to combine an academic with a poetic career, there was one professional association that, far from weari- some, lightened his burden — his long friendship with Bernard Rolker, who came to his assist- ance as instructor in German in August, 1838, and remained, at the same rank, for eighteen years. Rolker's fine German Reader was long used at Harvard; his complete translation of W ahlverwandtschaften appears to have intro- duced Longfellow to that work of Goethe's ; and his excellent prose version of Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich was put to good use while Longfellow was engaged in writing The Golden Legend. For a good, though brief sketch of Rolker, see New Light, pp. 64-65. 71. New Light, p. 71. 72. Young Longfellow, p. 267; ibid., p. 268; compare Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (tr. by Carlyle, 2 vols., London, 1899), I, 17, II, 232 ; also II, 2. 73. Oulre-Mer, p. 235. 74. Young Longfellow, p. 268. A passage copied into his notebook in the churchyard of St. Gilgen, and soon to be used as the motto for Hyperion, reinforced the same principle: "Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. Go forth and meet the shadowy Future, with- out fear, and with a manly heart." He recurred to the idea of living in the present repeatedly ; see Life, I, 252, 258-59, 263, 303, 314. 75. Young Longfellow, p. 405, n. 7. The poem was given its final form on July 26, a month after he wrote the first six stanzas. 76. Works, I, 20. 77. See also Faust 1 , 1. 1787: "DieZeit ist kurz, die Kunst ist lang," as well as Wilhelm Meister, vii, 9, and compare Longfellow's "Quatrain": "Why waste the hours in idle talk, When life is short, and time is flying?" — Life, III, 415. 78. The thought and expression are not, of course, original with Goethe, as Longfellow well knew, for he had quoted Hippocrates to the same effect in 1834. What he did not know in 1838, when he wrote "A Psalm of Life," was that other notable anticipations were to be found in Horace, Chaucer, and Franklin's "Ephemera." But it was not until the next year — April 19, 1839, to be exact — that Felton called his attention to "the great similarity between his [Horace's] morality and Goethe's." Two days later, he called Horace "the Latin Goethe — or rather (Spirit of the past forgive me!) Goethe is the German Horace." "He is my favorite classic . . . and half of what we now cry up as so wonderfully said by the German, was quite as well said two thousand years ago by Horace." But he goes on to add, in the next paragraph, what after all shows that Goethe was very much more on his mind that Horace ever was: "There — the church bells begin to ring. Shall I go, or stay ? Do you know I seldom stay at home from church without thinking of that pretty little poem of Goethe, where he says that a truant boy was chased over field and through forest by a church-bell!" — Life, I, 330. Previous to this time (that is, while he was engaged on his several Psalms of Life) he had felt secure in attributing the mandate to live in the present and related ideas to Goethe, as when he wrote in his diary for September 11, 1838: '"Was heute nicht geschieht, ist morgen nicht gethan' [Faust I, 1. 225] says Goethe. What to- day is not a-doing / Is to-morrow still undone." — Life, I, 307. And less than a month prior to his discovery that these sentiments were not entirely original with Goethe he closed a letter to his friend Samuel Ward with the quatrain from Goethe's Zahme Xenien, iv, seemingly under the impression that its expression was peculiar to Goethe: "Liegt dir Gestern klar und offen / Wirkst du heute kraftig frei, / Kannst auch auf ein Morgen hoffen / Das nicht minder gliicklich sei." — Life, I, 327. The influence on "A Psalm of Life," to what- ever ultimate source it may be traced, was, in Longfellow's case, one that derived most direct- ly from Goethe. 79. The release which he sought from the pangs of unrequited love needed frequent re- affirmation. Another expression of his purpose- fulness and of his resolve to build strength into his every thought and action was put into a poem now entitled "The Light of Stars," also written in the summer of 1838, and published six months later in the Knickerbocker as "A Second Psalm of Life" {Works, I, 23-25; Young Longfellow, pp. 270-71). The third Psalm," The 736 Notes to Pages 420-21 Village Blacksmith," repeats the same injunc- tion (see the prefatory note, Works, I, 64). 80. Life, I, 303-5- 81. New Light, p. 68; see also Young Long- fellow, pp. 282, 411-14, n. 20. 82. Life, I, 391. 83. For portions of his lectures emphasizing this "growth of character" in Goethe's works, see Young Longfellow, pp. 273-74; Literary Pioneers, pp. 182-84. 84. Young Longfellow, p. 274. 85. Hyperion, p. 78. His admiration of Wilhelm Meister was never unqualified. See Life, II, 230-31. He reread the book in 1852 and again in 1870. 86. Life, I, 256, 273-74; New Light, p. 49; Young Longfellow, pp. 243, 250. 87. This letter, here printed for the first time, from a photostatic copy graciously supplied by the Rosenbach Company of New York, in whose possession the original remains, has led to interesting findings, for which I am indebted to the late Professor James T. Hatfield, who learned of the existence in Herischdorf, Silesia, of Clara von Jordan, a granddaughter of Clara Crowninshield. This contact led to Clara von Jordan's sending to Prof. H. W. L. Dana the diaries of her grandmother, together with the MS collection of 36 songs set to music, which Longfellow helped Clara Crowninshield prepare during their Heidelberg winter. Sixteen of the 36 poems are from Goethe: (1) Lied der Nacht: "Im Windsgerausch," (2) Wonne der Wehmut: "Trocknet nicht," (3) Klarchens Lied: "Freud- voll und leidvoll," (4) Wechsel: "Auf Kieseln im Bache," (5) Erster Verlust: "Ach wer bringt," (6) Geistesgruss: "Hoch auf dem alten," (7) Trost in Tranen: "Wie kommt's," (8) Nachgefiihl: "Wenn die Reben," (9) Mig- non: "Kennst du das Land," (10) Sehnsucht: "Was zieht mir," (11) Der Fischer: "Das Wasser rauscht," (12) Der Junggesell und der Miihlbach: "Wo willst du," (13) Wanderers Nachtlied: "Der du von dem Himmel," (14) Gretchens Lied: "Meine Ruh' ist hin," and the harper's two songs: (15) "An die Tiiren will ich schleichen," and (16) "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt." 88. Young Longfellow, p. 284. 89. The action of Hyperion follows closely enough Longfellow's own steps as he journeyed sorrowfully up the Rhine in December, 1835, with, as Professor Hatfield observed, "a curious back-turn from Mayence to Bingen" (see Hyperion, Bk. I, Ch. V). Then followed, in regular order, an excursion to Frankfurt with Baron von Ramm, Julie, and Clara (Apr. 10-14, 1836); a tour of the German baths with Mrs. Bryant, her daughters, and Clara (June 1 1-19) ; and finally his own solitary pilgrimage through South Germany, the Tyrol, and Switzerland (June 25-August 20), except that the Swiss experiences (which came last in his travels) are put first, and the real order of travel from Stuttgart to the Tyrol is reversed, the better to introduce the "romance" with Mary Ashburton (Frances Appleton). "Persons and events step freely from the diary into the romance: the 'Baron' corresponds to Baron Jacques von Ramm, a German-speaking lord of landed estates in Russian Esthonia, who also lived in the Himmelhahn pension, and took frequent walks with the young American" during which they discussed German literature in general and Goethe in particular, very much in the manner described in Hyperion. — New Light, p. 71. The man from Bayreuth, "with large intellectual eyes," who "knew Jean Paul," actually held forth on Richter at a Heidelberg hotel dinner on June 4, 1836, very much as Longfellow reports in Book I, Chapter V. The account of Fleming's journey in the company of the refreshing Englishman named "Mr. Berk- ley" is authentic enough, except that the Englishman's name in reality was Kinsley. The visit to the sculptor Dannecker (Hyperion, pp. 282-83), the gossip of Frau Himmelauen (p. 78), and the Latin conversations (p. 259) are literal transcriptions of reality; even the episode of the Polish count who seduced "Emma of Ilmenau" is based on the story of a Pole who did seduce a young lady in Heidelberg — though she was not from Ilmenau (pp. 135- 36; cf. New Light, pp. 71-72). Similarly, Mary Ashburton's sketchbook, the scenes of student life (which seem to owe something to Auerbach's Cellar scene in Faust) and the inscription that stands at the head of Hyperion were drawn from the traveler's notebook. 90. Hyperion, p. 70. 91. Ibid., p. 45. 92. Ibid., pp. 95-96. He took particular pains to quote in full the lines of Uhland's "Castle by the Sea" that he had translated, with the help of Frances Appleton at Zurich (ibid., pp. 184-85). A ramble which the Baron and Fleming took along the banks of a brook inspired the long passage in which Longfellow succeeds admirably in describing the essential spirit of German song (ibid., p. 114). This passage, in which he uses Goethe's "Junggesell und der Miihlbach" for illustrative purposes, is typical of the kind of material that fills page upon page of the book, and explains why in his own songs later he fell so easily into the vein of the German lyric. 93. See O. Deiml, Der Einfluss von Jean Paul auf Longfellows Prosastil (Erlangen, 1927). Built Notes to Pages 421-22 737 as the book is on the general pattern of Outre- Mer, it was easy to modify the sketchbook technique by extending the episodic materials, after the manner of Jean Paul, to make numer- ous sallies away from the main plot in search of decorative elements in both prose and verse, touching legends, quixotic or romantic ad- ventures, sentimental or moral meditations, and anecdotes, all heightened by tricks learned from "Jean Paul, the Only-One," as Long- fellow calls him. This designation means, of course, not that Richter is the only German writer worth considering, nor that he is the greatest of them all, but that he is "the only one of his kind." That Longfellow agreed with the Franconian champion of Jean Paul is patent in his adoption of many of Jean Paul's stylistic turns in Hyperion: the "wild imagina- tion" and "bold nights" of fancy, his "reckless, multitudinous prodigality" of detail, the "extravagances" and eccentric turns of wit and whimsey, the incongruous comparisons, the "magic coloring," and his "serious playfulness." — Hyperion, pp. 37-40; New Light, pp. 72-73, 76. 94. In the chapter entitled "Glimpses into Cloud-Land," the Professor instucts Fleming in the doctrines of "Fichte's Destiny of Man and Schubert's History of the Soul" and, to elucidate his opinions on the conflicting Past, Present, and Future, illustrates his meaning by an elaborate explanation of the Walpurgis Night scene on the Pharsalian Plains in Faust II. Just as the mocking Mephistopheles sits down between the solemn antique Sphinxes and questions them, "even thus does a scoffing and unbelieving Present sit down between the unknown Future and a too believing Past, and question and challenge the gigantic forms of Faith" (Hyperion, pp. 99, 102). At the end of the book Fleming, having been properly instructed, resolves, "Henceforth be mine a life of action and reality! I will work in my own sphere, nor wish it other than it is. This alone is health and happiness. This alone is Life, — Life that shall send A challenge to its end, And when it comes, say, Welcome, friend ! Why had I not made these sage reflections, this wise resolve, sooner ? Can such a simple result spring only from the long and intricate process of experience?" (pp. 276—77). 95. Diary, Mar. 23, 1838, quoted in Young Longfellow, p. 278. 96. Hyperion, p. 222. 97. Letter to Greene, July 23, 1839; Young Longfellow, p. 282. 98. The self-possessed Fanny, who had once before checked the too ardent widower, almost ten years older then herself, did not appreciate the warmth of sentiment expressed in some of the episodes. Though he betrayed no confidence and left out the details of all real scenes, the whole was an indiscretion which the clacking of tongues did nothing to alleviate. She doubtless interpreted the book as a public insult to her, an express wish to triumph over his weak passion by obliterating her from his mind and memory, thus freeing himself to pursue nobler, holier purposes. When she gave no sign, he saw the enormity of his faux pas; but rationalizing his purposes as best he could, feebly reaffirming the doubtful virtue of renunciation, and clutching desperately at what was left of resolution, he wrote to Greene on January 2, 1840, in a tone at once confessional, apologetic, resigned, but also partially in the vein of self- justification: "No matter; I had the glorious satisfaction of writing it; and thereby gained a great victory, not over the 'dark ladie' but over my- self. I now once more rejoice in my freedom; and am no longer the thrall of anyone. I have great faith in one's writing himself clear from a passion — giving vent to pent-up fire. But George, George! It was a horrible thing. . . . But it was all sincere. My mind was morbid. I have portrayed it all in the book ; and how is a man to come out of it ; not by shooting himself like Werther; but in a better way. ... If I had called the book 'Heart's Ease, or the Cure of a morbid mind' it would have been better under- stood" (ibid., p. 284). 99. Apr. 24, 1840, quoted in New Light, p. 70. The allusion to Dante is to the Inferno, iii, 51 : "Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass." 100. Young Longfellow, pp. 336—37. 101. Ibid., p. 342; New Light, p. 70. 102. The chapter on "The Landlady's Daughter" may have some connection with a similar episode in the Harzreise; see New Light, pp. 74-75. During 1839 he exchanged opinions on Heine's style with Mary Appleton. In his Harvard lectures on Goethe (also printed in Hyperion, p. 124) and in the lecture on "Ger- manTales and Traditions" he quoted a consider- able passage regarding German legends from the Harzreise. Marginal notes in this lecture show that the passage was "worked up" for insertion in Hyperion, where it was to have stood after the remarks on Miiller's "Wohin?" (Hyperion, pp. 1 15-16; see New Light, p. 87). He continued to be interested in Heine, and he published an essay on him inGraham's Magazine for March, 1842. In this article he accused Heine of seeking to establish a religion of sensu- 738 Notes to Pages 422-23 ality based on a philosophy of pleasure of the type cultivated by young ladies and young men in America who maintain that "nature must not be interferred with in any way" (XX, iii, 134). While admitting that Heine possessed an abun- dance of wit, vigor, and brilliance, Longfellow found him lacking in taste and refinement; he resembles Byron in recklessness and Sterne in sentimentality. Cf. New Light, p. 88. 103. New Light, p. 78. 104. The Germanic content of Hyperion led some to conclude that Longfellow belonged to the Transcendentalist group, and an anonymous reviewer charge him with writing in that "Germanico-metaphysical style in which small ideas are now-a-days clothed and magnified, much as small-waisted boys are stuffed out with cushions and pillows, when they would enact Falstaff." — Mercantile Journal (Boston), Sept. 27, 1839. But Felton replied to the charge of "Germanism"; and Longfellow, while he ex- plained that he had no apologies to make for his sympathetic treatment of German literature, wished it understood that he knew little about the doctrines of Kant and Schleiermacher or of Baur and De Wette, and cared less; for the American Transcendentalists, he cared not at all. When Ripley urged him to contribute to the Dwight volume of German translations in the Specimens of Standard Foreign Literature, he politely refused, even after his name had been printed as a prospective collaborator. Much of what he saw and heard of the "German craze" seemed to him superficial, and writing to Greene on September 17, 1841, he said as much: "Everybody talks about German literature and philosophy, as if they knew something of them." — Life, I, 368; Young Longfellow, pp. 311-12. 105. After being refused by Cogswell (for the N.Y. Rev.), the essay appeared in the New World, VI I (Oct., 1840), 522-24. See also New Light, p. 86. 106. So does stanza 6 of the "Prelude" in Voices. 107. Hyperion, p. 76. 108. New Light, pp. 84-85. 109. The four new ones are Wilhelm Miiller's "The Bird and the Ship," Tiedge's "Die Welle" (both admirably rendered), Stockmann's "Wie sie so sanft ruhn" (an unrhymed "graveyard" product), and an unidentified poem entitled "The Happiest Land." The "Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem at the Consecra- tion of Pulaski's Banner" was suggested by an account in the North American Review for April, 1825. — Works., I, 39. no. Young Longfellow, p. 309. in. Works, I, 50-51. 112. What Poe was saying about the deriva- tive nature of his poems could be discounted, but not so easily ignored was the warning of his friend Theophilus Eaton against the danger of seeking to escape the hard path of life's duty and the implications of what he said when com- menting on the Voices and the "newer" note of the "ballads": "I think your residence abroad, and your thorough acquintance with foreign literature, has affected your style, sometimes injuriously. But you are now one of us, I hope for good — and every year and every new effort will make you more entirely our own. Your ballad about the Fisherman's Daughter ... is the best thing of its kind our country has produced." — Young Longfellow, 310 p. 113. The same volume included also a trans- lation of Bishop Tegner's long poem in hexa- meters, The Children of the Lord's Supper. Long- fellow's first attempt in this measure (the 44 lines of Frithiof's Homestead, 1837) was also a translation of the same Swedish author. "The new production. . . does not only show a mastery of Swedish, but marks a praiseworthy advance in technique, indicating an approach to the style of Evangeline." — New Light, p. 87. During 1840 Longfellow wrote The Spanish Student (1843), described by himself as "a beaker full of the warm South; no German fogs or Scandinavian sea-weed about it — but mu- sic, sunshine and odours manifold." Ironically enough, its one performance was in a German version by Carl Bottiger of Dessau, given on the stage of the Court Theater in Dessau on January 28, 1855. Thoroughly Spanish though it be, it nevertheless contains several Germanic touches. The lines — I can remember still . . . As in a dream or in some former life Gardens and palace walls — appear to be reminiscent of Goethe's "Mignon," and Preciosa's "And this from thee" recalls a similar remark of Luise to Ferdinand in Schil- ler's Kabale und Liebe — New Light, p. 86. 114. For details see Young Longfellow, pp. 314-26. 1 15. New Light, -p. 92. Professor Hatfield's ex- haustive account of Longfellow's third visit to Germany [ibid., pp. 88-109) and of the Long- fellow-Freiligrath relationship (ibid., pp. 90- 105) obviates the need for a detailed rehearsal here. Most of the fifty-odd letters that passed between the two poets are printed by Hatfield in PMLA, XLVIII, iv (Dec, 1933), 1223-91. Longfellow was often at the Freiligraths' apartment, where he met Louise von Gall, a Notes to Pages 423-24 739 poetess from Darmstadt, whose ability as a singer won her the title of "Nachtigal" in this group. From the fact that the owner of the apartment was named Ihl, they coined, by easy derivation the house-name of "Ihlium". Frei- ligrath was "Hector," his wife "Andromache," and Fraulein von Gall "Helena" of "Gallina." Longfellow was initiated, with proper ceremo- nies, as "Nestor." During July, when they at- tempted to promote a romance between the American widower and the lovely poetess, the matchmaking friends playfully called Longfel- low "Paris", and even after Longfellow's mar- riage Freiligrath and Heuberger rallied him for having disdained the German beauty, who by that time was also happily married, to Levin Schiicking. — New Light, pp. 91-92, 96-97. 116. A four-day trip down the Rhine, in com- pany with the Freiligraths and other literati, and later an Av.sflug to the lovely Wispertal, added variety and fun to the already rich pro- gram of entertainment of dances, parties, ingen- ious charades, and tableaux that the Marien- berg circle provided for their American friend. An explorantion of Nuremberg fixed in his mind the quaint charm of the old city — its musical bells, the dialect, and its historic, artistic, and poetic associations — so that months later he could memorialize them in his well-known poem. He added a large boxfull of books (German, Flemish, and French) to his already consid- erable library of European literature, and he greatly enlarged his knowledge of more recent as well as of older German books. See New Light, pp. 104-5, i° T details. 117. The most obvious parallel exists be- tween "The Slave's Dream" and "Der Mohren- fiirst," though it is not a case of servile imi- tation. "The slave, who 'started in his sleep and smiled,'" as Hatfield observes, "has not much in common with the Moorish prince who battered his drumhead to pieces," while Long- fellow's meter and tone give an entirely different coloration to his poem. Again, there appear to be parallels between Longfellow's lines in the poem "Witness" — "In Ocean's wide domains / Half buried in the sands / Lie skele- tons in chains / With shackled feet and hands" — and these verses from Freiligrath's "Die Toten im Meere": "Tief unter griine Meeres- well' / Auf Muschelbank und Kies / Da schlum- mert mancher Schiffsgesell, / Der frisch vom Lande stiess." But the tendency of the two pieces is altogether different. Finally, "To the Driving Cloud" turns, like Freiligrath's "Negro on Skates," on the contrast between a savage in his native environment and the same individual transformed into a slave, in modern surroundings, and there is more than a casual relationship between the two poems, though Longfellow's hexameters lend an individual character to his poem. For the rest, there is no dearth of similarities between individual poems of the two writers, but none of them is close enough to constitute what can properly be called influence. See New Light, pp. 102-4, 106- 8. Freiligrath made masterful versions of ten of Longfellow's poems, and he translated Hiawa- tha entire (Stuttgart, 1857); and Longfellow made a number of Freiligrath's poems available to English readers. From first to last Freiligrath introduced, either personally or by letter, virtu- ally all of his more notable contemporary Ger- man men of letters to Longfellow, kept him posted on German literary developments, and attended to his requests for books, while Long- fellow exhausted every means at his command for bringing his exiled friend to "the freest country in the world" and settling him in a professorial post, first at Columbia and later at Harvard as his own successor, meanwhile sending several considerable gifts of money during the period of Freiligrath's exile in Eng- land. — New Light, pp. 98-100. 118. There were long evenings when "the divine Fanny" read to him from the Helden- buch or the American Sketches of "our favorite Sealsfield," or Jean Paul's Flegeljahre, or Heine's Buch der Lieder, or Fichte's lecture on The Nature of the Scholar and Smith's biography of Fichte. His Goethe lectures at the University went better than ever, and on Mar. 15, 1844, Pres. Quincy asked him to change the hour to accommodate "many, if not all, of the Juniors" who' ' wish to attend. ' ' Even Fanny was tempted to disguise herself "a la Portia," go to College, and "be a listener." She entered fully into his activities; she suggested the poem on the Springfield arsenal and applauded the one on Nuremberg. Together, they went on "bravely with the book of translations," the volume of Poets and Poetry of Europe . They read Goethe's Italienische Reise and, two days later, "Dickens' Letters from Italy, now published in a vol- ume . . . striking to read in connection with Goethe on the same theme — one all drollery, the other all wisdom." One day they read Zschokke's tales, on another they heard Emer- son lecture on Goethe, and on still another they had a small musical party at Craigie House — "Chopin, Schubert, De Meyer, Liszt, and some German songs." He read widely in other for- eign literatures, but fully half his reading time was devoted to German, and perhaps as much as half of that to Goethe. On June 21, 1846, he observed: "I dreamed last night that Goethe was alive and in Cambridge. I gave him a sup- per at Willard's tavern. He had a beautiful face. 740 Notes to Page 424 but his body was like the Belgian giant's, with an immeasurable coat. I told him I thought Clarchen's song in Egmont was one of his best lyrics. The god smiled." Goethe was being domesticated indeed when he could be wined and dined at Willard's. — Life, II, 18, 29-30, 33, 35-36, 41-44, 77; New Light, pp. no— 11. Longfellow's German library, steadily added to from the time of his first visit to Germany, is far too extensive to be catalogued here. The Goetheana were especially extensive. As Ger- man professor at Harvard, he was steadily on the alert for new translations of Goethe's works for the College library as well as for his own study. He possessed three versions of Werther, four of Wilhelm Meister, four of Dichlung und Wahrheit, and fourteen of Faust, besides individual editions in German, the fifty-six- volume Cotta edition of 1827-1835 and several less comprehensive collected editions in trans- lation. These books he acquired with something more than a mere collector's pride, for his notes show that he made comparisons of at least nine different translations of Faust. In 1839 he thought all existing poetic translations "hearti- ly poor," Hayward's prose one being "in- comparably the best." For his own perusal he always preferred the original, and he was often severely critical of the translators' errors and stupidities, in several cases going to the trouble to refer to the original and to make comparisons and improvements. See Life, I, 348, 364, 401; II, 30, 175; III 162, 195. Other German writers had less extensive but proportionate representation in his library. 119. Fourteen of the German poems were in Longfellow's own translation, seven of them especially prepared for this anthology: (1) the anonymous "Silent Love" from Erlach's Volks- lieder, (2) the evergreen folksong, "O Tannen- baum," (3) Simon Dach's "Anke von Tharau," (4) Dach's "Blessed are the Dead," (5) Mosen's "Statue over the Cathedral Door," (6) Dach's "Legend of the Cross-Bill," and (7) Heine's "The Sea hath its Pearls" — all impeccably rendered. His next volume of poetry. The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1845), contains several German notes, including allusions and trans- lations. "Walter von der Vogelweide" relates the legend of the feeding of the birds on Walter's tomb and refers to the Wartburgkrieg; and the sonnet "Autumn" contains a felicitous allusion to the legend of Charlemagne's "golden bridge" over the Rhine at Bingen (doubtless inspired by Geibel's "Goldene Briicke" in Simrock's Rhein- sagen). There are also six translations, five of them reprinted from Poets and Poetry of Europe, the new offering being a group of a dozen short "Poetic Aphorisms" from the epigrammatic poet Fr. von Logau translated from Wm. Miiller's Dichter des XVII . J ahrhunderts. 120. A notable exception is J. P. Worden (Uber Longfellows Beziehungen zur deutschen Literatur, Halle, 1900), whose findings are incorporated below. Professor T. M. Campbell likewise (in Longfellows Weckselbeziehungen zu der deutschen Literatur, Leipzig, 1907), fails to find influence. 121. Life, II, 117. 122. New Light, p. 114. 123. See Wm. Scherer, Geschichte der deut- schen Literatur (Berlin, 1883), p. 569, for a brief summation; also G. H. Lewes, Life and Works of Goethe (Everyman ed., N.Y., 1916), p. 423. 124. Aside from the facts, (1) that both stories deal with the trials of a banished folk, whose fate is bound up with that of two lovers, (2) that both heroines are beautiful young women (and what heroine is not ?), and (3) that both are industrious and helpful in tending the sick and reviving the faint, there are certain striking dissimilarities. Dorothea, an exile, marries Hermann, a good solid and established burgher, and lives the life of a happy woman in the management of Hermann's substantial home; while Evangeline, emerging from a position of social security, becomes an exiled wanderer who ends finally as a sister of mercy. Dorothea becomes the very embodiment of matronly contentment; Evangeline spends her life in a fruitless search for her lover, once narrowly missing him. Longfellow chose to end his story with the lovers' meeting in a hospital in Philadelphia, there to die in each other's arms, rather than to follow the events as more-or-less authenticated history relates them, namely, that Gabriel married, that Evangeline eventu- ally lost her mind, and after disconsolate wanderings up and down the Teche country in lower Louisiana, died, and was buried near the wall of the old Capuchin church in St. Martins- ville, in southwest Louisiana. Evangeline is the central figure of the American poem, while in the German idyl Hermann occupies that po- sition: Dorothea is kept in the background and does not make her appearance before the seventh of Goethe's nine sections. In Long- fellow's poem, Gabriel, after his first intro- duction at the beginning of the story, hardly reappears until the last lines of the poem, and then only to die. In Goethe's poem, Hermann seeks Dorothea; in Longfellow's it is Evangeline who conducts the search. Evangeline and Gabriel learned their ABC's "out of the self- same book," while Hermann and Dorothea are utter strangers until they meet quite by chance. Evangeline and Gabriel had long been desig- Notes to Page 425 741 nated by their parents as meant for each other ; their love is of long standing, and their betroth- al is a matter of course; in Goethe's poem, love is depicted as love at first sight. Dorothea appears at first in straitened circumstances — willing to become a maidservant in Hermann's home, Hermann meanwhile being the heir apparent of wealthy people. In Evangeline, lover and beloved are presented as living in equally easy circumstances and as of equal social standing. Moreover, Dorothea has loved before, her lover having been guillotined in Paris as a result of his patriotic fervor ; Evange- line's love is her first. In both stories a be- trothal is consummated in the presence of parents and friends, but while in Goethe's story not only father and mother are present (though the girl's parents are both absent), and the mother plays a particularly prominent role, in Longfellow's tale only the two fathers play a part, neither mother being mentioned. Finally, as a result of the different termination of events immediately following the betrothal, Long- fellow's work develops a tragic tone, while Goethe's has been described as "beseelt von der innigsten Herzenswarme." The structure of the two poems of almost equal length is markedly different: Longfellow begins at the beginning and proceeds in simple chronological order, Goethe in medias res. Goethe divides his story into nine Gesange; Longfellow has two parts — the first leading up to the banishment and separation, and the second relating the wanderings of the lovers. Goethe's poem observes strictly the unities; Longfellow's embraces a lifetime and a conti- nent. In the German story, the characters speak in their own persons and relate their own experiences; the American story is presented from the point of view of the third person. While these variations appear superficial, their results are important, for they make impossible in the one precisely what constitutes the strength of the other. In Hermann und Doro- thea the emphasis is on the unfolding of human nature; in Evangeline natural nature is given relatively greater prominence. In the German poem the characters develop plastically, as it were; in Evangeline they are merely presented, full-bodied. In the former full use is made of every situation; in the latter one scene is broken off before yielding its potentialities for character portrayal, and another begun. The one is as economical as the other is prodigal in descriptive details and character portrayal. Goethe's every stroke adds a contributory detail toward the unified, complete painting; Longfellow draws his story in bold, decisive strokes and for the rest, while he devotes enough time and skill to setting, makes little effort to fuse scene with character. Goethe's is a descriptive technique; Longfellow's, the narrative. In Hermann und Dorothea much space is devoted to what the characters say and more to how they react to the various situa- tions; little is devoted to links by which conti- nuity of narrative is maintained ; everything is subordinated to bringing out the human values of the story. In Evangeline the opposite pro- cedure is used: Longfellow, not his characters, relates the events and describes the scenes — with resulting loss in character portrayal. The reason for this difference lies, of course, in Longfellow's realization of his limitations in the technique of dramatic (or direct) presentation, which he had tried in The Spanish Student and found essentially unsuited to his abilities. This basic difference is illustrated in Longfellow's relatively skimpy characterization in the be- trothal scene and the fullness with which Goethe drew it, or in Longfellow's loose intro- duction of essentially foreign elements and Goethe's close motivation throughout. Con- cerning Evangeline little is said except in general terms: she is beautiful, and she is a good housekeeper; Gabriel is repeatedly men- tioned, but he speaks never a word until he is discovered on his deathbed. Contrast the full- ness and richness in which not only Hermann and Dorothea but also the father and mother, the pastor and even the apothecary, are drawn. Details in Hermann und Dorothea derive from an inner, organic necessity; in Evangeline they are embellishments. It is not to our purpose to call one technique better than the other. The significant thing is that they are markedly different. Goethe drew upon his own obser- vations of life; Longfellow derived many of his richest descriptions from books and from Banvard's diorama of the Mississippi Valley, an area of the country he had never seen, and phases of life he never experienced. 125. However, his three English versions were acquired after he had written Evangeline. 126. Life, I, 301. 127. New Light, p. 115. 128. Life, III, 147. 129. Evidently Goethe's poem did not in 1838 suggest anything that he might utilize. Seven years later, when he heard Conolly relate the Acadian story, he may have recalled the German idyl, and he may have hit on the idea of adopting a similar plan as well as Goethe's meter, but there is no evidence to show that he did either. 130. The latter possibility is most plausible in view of the number of references in Long- fellow's diaries between November 28, 1S45, 742 Notes to Pages 425-26 when Evangeline was begun, and February 27, 1847 when it was completed, to hexameters and to Homer. See Life, II, 26, 36, 66, 67, 68, 76-77. As early as 1835 (three years before he read Hermann und Dorothea) he had been struck by the effectiveness of the hexameter in Tegner's Frithiof's Saga. Between 1837 and 1845 (when he decided to use the measure for Evangeline despite its alleged unfitness for the English idiom) he busied himself much render- ing various ones of Tegner's poems into English hexameters and with other experiments in classical forms. (Relevant passages are to be found in Life, I, 401-2, 404, 434, II, 23, 77, 80; Works, I, 219-21; Poetical Works, Cambridge ed., pp. 598, 675; and New Light, p. 118.) These experiments convinced him of the applicability of hexameters to his purpose. 131. He read Ida von Hahn-Hahn in 1847 and Gost[w]ick's Spirit of German Poetry in 1848 (Life, II, 32; New Light, p. 113). In 1848, also, he received a considerable shipment of German books, including Borne's Schriften and Heine's A tla Troll. He enjoyed fean Paul's Levana and Catnpaner-Tal and Schefer's Al- brecht Dtirer (New Light, p. 118; Life, II, 120, 123). It was in this year, too, that Immanuel Vitalis Scherb, the German poet from Basel, came to Cambridge armed with a letter of introduction and an unfinished tragedy on the Bauernkrieg. They had much talk together (as Scherb had wherever he went, and he went everywhere) about the German poets (Life, II, 120, 162, 163, 197, 307, 312, 395). During 1849 he revised his translation of Schelling's essay on Dante for publication the next year in Graham's Magazine (Life, II, 162). He stayed away from the Commencement exercises of 1850 to read Goethe's Campagne in Frankreich (Life, II, 184), and in the same year he acquired the formi- dable set of publications of the Literaturverein of Stuttgart (New Light, p. 120). 132. Kavanagh, p. 369. 133. Life, I, 346. 134. Ibid., p. 405 (Nov. 8, 1841); also I, 423. 135. It is about four times as long as the original, panoramic in its scope, encyclopedic in its grasp of human history — a symphony of many modes and phases of life. It is full of episodes and sidelights, sometimes numerous and prominent enough to obscure the main story, a miracle play with all its accompanying 6clat, including a wild gaudiolum of the monks at midnight, a sermon in the street, a dispute and a fight among scholastics of Salerno, a copyist in his scriptorium glorying in his art, a pious abbot, a carousing friar, a cocksure traveling scholar, a contrite monk, a sneaking friar; Walter von der Vogelweide is introduced; a crusade is thrust into the medley; the Abbess Irmingard relates the story of her love for Walter before her entrance into the cloister; and a picture of simple peasant life is drawn — all these besides the main story of Prince Henry of Hoheneck and Elsie, the young girl who volunteers to offer her life in order to effect the cure of Prince Henry. Added to this multifari- ous scene is the struggle between the good and evil angels who strive against each other, or for and against Poor Prince Henry, and finally, the Mephistophelean figure of Lucifer, who directs the forces of evil and assumes the same role that Mephistopheles plays in Faust. 136. Longfellow's copy, preserved in Craigie House, shows significant marginal notes. 137. Unlike Heinrich, he has not been driven to hopelessness by nameless bodily ills; his trials are more mental than physical. His in- conclusive faith, uncertainty of desires, lack of knowledge, and arrogance of will are further complicated by the disconcerting influence of Lucifer, who seeks to disintegrate completely Prince Henry's already torn mind. In these respects, Longfellow's poem bears closer analo- gies to Goethe's Faust than to Hartmann's poem. Cast into a complex dramatic form, Long- fellow's poem is divided into prologue, epilogue, and six "parts" rather than "acts." Three of the parts — the first, second, and sixth — are concerned primarily with the story of Prince Henry and Elsie; the other three find few parallels in Hartmann's tale; they contain the digressions and sidelights by means of which Longfellow aimed to present the multiform aspects of medieval life — "to introduce some portion of the darkness and corruption of the Middle Ages" against which the "bright stream of faith" could be high-lighted (Works, V, 12). For such a portrayal of contrasts and interplay of conflicting forces, Goethe's Faust was a more adaptable model than the rigidly economical pattern of Hartmann's poem. The Promethean theme of Faust had long interested Longfellow. In Hyperion (p. 140) the Baron says to Fleming, "There is something Faust-like in you" — an observation that is interesting but obviously questionable, for there is little of the Promethean Faust-fire in the sentimental Fleming and less of the Titan blood in his model, the Harvard professor of modern languages and literatures. To realize the difference one needs only to compare Goethe's "Prometheus" with Longfellow's tame poem by the same title. But Longfellow's attraction to the Lucifer or Mephistopheles motif and the applicability of the elastic form of Faust for his purposes prompted a departure from Hart- Notes to Pasre 426 743 mann's model and a reworking of the subject on Faustian lines. This departure is already apparent in the cantata-like prologue which Longfellow chose to add, and which suggests various scenes in Faust. The struggle represent- ed in the prologue, in which the good angels contend with the evil angels (who, led by Lucifer, attempt to tear down the cross of the Strassburg cathedral) is reminiscent of Mephi- stopheles' part in the struggle between the angelic forces fighting for Faust's soul. In the first scene of the drama proper the analogies become even clearer, extending to similarities in setting and stage directions. In the manner of Faust's monologue, Prince Henry bewails his lot as one who has lost all friends, and who (as the sequel explains) is suffering from some nameless ailment. At the conclusion of the monologue there is "a flash of lightning, out of which Lucifer appears, in the garb of a travel- ling physician" (Works, V, 143). This is recog- nizable as a reworking of Goethe's stage direc- tion: "Es zuckteine Flamme. . . . Mephistophe- les tritt, indem der Nebel fallt, gekleidet wie ein fahrender Scholastikus, hinter dem Ofen her- vor" (11. 481, 1320). Compare also the phial and drinking episodes and the accompanying angels' warnings, Faust, 11. 690, 720, 726, and Works, V, 148, 150-53. Lucifer's sudden ap- pearance in disguise, his hatred of sacred objects and symbols, his fear that he may finally be cheated of Henry's soul, his sneers at academic learning, his disguise as a priest, all appear to be derived from Goethe's Mephisto. The accompanying diablerie owes nothing to Hartmann but much to Goethe. Prince Henry's review of the learning of his age and his comments on its inadequacy suggest the opening scenes in Faust and the colloquy between Faust and Wagner. Having found all other remedies ineffectual. Prince Henry turns to black arts and, like Faust, becomes adept in magic, alchemy, and necromancy. He pursues these studies in his search for a remedy of his bodily ailments, but he has also the philosophi- cal turn of mind that seeks a solution of the deep mysteries of the universe. In Faustian desperation he leaps "Headlong into the mysteries /Of life and death" (p. 150). While this skeptical cast of mind appears only fitfully in Prince Henry, it is nonetheless a motivating force in his life, and shows Longfellow digress- ing from Hartmann's example while following Goethe's lead. In reply to Friar Cuthbert's invitation to visit "the image of the Virgin Mary that moves its holy eye," he, a prince, who flourished "about 1230," replies: "Oh, had I faith as in the days gone by / That knew no doubt, and feared no mystery" (p. 264). This typifies more the skeptical temperament of the nineteenth century than the simple faith of the thirteenth. Lucifer has all of Mephisto's craftiness, for every situation a solution and for every ques- tion an answer, couched in typically satanic paradox, equivocal double talk, or sardonic irony (pp. 144-49). His most notable departure from Goethe's model is that he is not the playful Schalk that Goethe portrays. But he is from the first the agent of negation and destruction. His first act is to tempt the Prince to suicide; next, he encourages the monks to unseemly conduct; and he curses whatever and whoever impedes his nihilistic course of action. Yet in the end, his fate is the same as that of Mephistopheles. Like Goethe's Satan who "stets das Bose will und stets das Gute schafft" ( I.1336), so Lucifer "is God's minister, / And labors for some good / By us not understood" (p. 292). Lucifer is also the pessimist who scorns and belittles all human endeavor, rejecting all belief in human integrity and progress, while professing pity for man and his lot (compare Faust 1 , 11. 280-82, 294-96, and Works, V, 146, 147, 151, 180-81, 185-86, 262- 63). Another Mephistophelean attitude appears in Lucifer's seating himself in the confessional chair and mockingly, hypercritically re-enact- ing the many scenes that have been acted there. Again, just as Mephistopheles scoffs at the learning of the scholastics, so Lucifer laughs up his sleeve when he sees the contentiousness of the scholars at Salerno. Both laugh derisively at man's misuse of his rational faculties (Faust I , 11. 282-86, 292; Works, V, 277). And, just as Mephistopheles becomes agitated in the presence of Margaret's purity, or whenever the conversa- tion turns upon God or sacred matters, so Lucifer grows uncomfortable in the presence of Elsie or expressions of faith and piety. In the end Lucifer has to admit his impotency where Elsie is con- cerned, just as Mephisto finds himself unable to triumph over Margaret (Faust I, 11. 2625-27; Works, V, 277) ; but both are sure the men are theirs — body and soul; yet in both cases, they underrate their man, as both underrate man- kind in general; and both are, in the end, cheated of their victims. 138. Like Tennyson in his Idylls, Longfellow adapted his characters to Victorian demands. The result is a variety of inconsistencies and anachronisms: the story of Little Red Riding Hood was hardly current in Germany during the early thirteenth century; Erwin von Stein- bach nourished approximately a century after 1230, the year of Longfellow's story; Saint John Nepomuck died in 1393; and Fra Gabriel- la Bartella, who furnished Friar Cuthbert's sermon, lived in the fifteenth century (Works, 744 Notes to Page 426 V, 13; New Light, p. 127). While slips of this kind are perhaps inevitable in so compendious a panorama, even Freiligrath found the "old, homely, simple story of our Arme Heinrich" treated with "too much brilliancy." — PMLA, XLVIII, iv (Dec, 1933), 1276. The wealth of medieval lore which Long- fellow drew from Germanic sources is too various to be accounted for in detail. Much of it he gathered as a traveler in Germany. Some came from Scheible's Kloster, which he import- ed in 1848. The adventures of Monk Felix are taken directly from Mailath's Altdeulsche Ge- schichle. The Fastrada legend he found in Mossmann, as well as in Miiller's ballad, "Die Sage vom Frankenburger See." The siory of Christ and the Sultan's daughter is virtually a translation from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The Easter Play is in the best tradition of older German miracles and mysteries, though Long- fellow read widely also in English models and in the apocryphal Gospels. The midnight gaudiolum of the monks owes something to the wild scenes in Auerbach's Celler. The line "Still is the night" may be an "unconscious memory" of Heine, and the allusion to the Jews of Bacharach may stem from the same source, while the phrase "w r ith lyre and sword" suggests Korner, whose Leier und Schwerl Longfellow owned and studied. 139. Some amounting virtually to trans- lations appear in Faust I, 11. 1-10, and Works, V, 142; I, 27-28, and V, 142; I, 18-20, and V, 143; I, 690-94, and V, 148-49; I, 1607-9, and V, 150. This note represents the irreducible minimum to which the limitations of space forced me to condense the section of my manuscript in which parallels between the texts of Longfellow and von Hartmann were cited. Fortunately for those who desire a fuller presentation of these data, there has recently appeared a thirty-five-page brochure in which these borrowings and parallels are presented: Carl Hammer, Jr., Longfellow' s "Golden Legend" and Goethe's "Faust," Louisiana State Univ. Studies, Humanities series No. 2 (Baton Rouge, 1952). 140. The year following the resignation of his professorship, Longfellow published Hiawatha, which is so patently indigenous as hardly to ad- mit of foreign influences ; though even here it has been suggested that in the "Famine" scene, for example, the dialogue between Minnehaha and old Nokomis may owe its structure and color- ation to Goethe's "TLrYkdnig" (New Light, ■£>■ 129). In 1856 he followed the suggestion of his German friend Scherb to write on the subject of the Puri- tans and the Quakers, a suggestion that led to The New England Tragedies. Hatfield has suggested that the point-blank "No!" which Longfellow had noted earlier in Hermann und Dorothea VIII, 64) may have offered a suggestion for Miles Standish (1858). The story of "Bertha, the beautiful spinner, the queen of Helvetia," derived from Old Germanic mythology, which Longfellow first "read at a stall in the streets of Southampton" (Works, II, 339); and the last two lines of the eighth canto appear to derive from a similar passage by Fr. Gotter in the Gbttinger Musen- Almanack (1771, p. 4), which Longfellow could have read at Gottingen, Heidelberg, or elsewhere. 141. A major disappointment of this trip was his failure to see once again Freiligrath, whose removal from London to Cannstadt at just this time prevented their meeting. 142. For the most pertinent references, see Life, II, 182, 209, 282, 299, 333, 341, 347, 378, 392, 395; HI, 8, 10, 19-20, 136, 142, 147, 153, 162, 167, 172, 175, 176, 185, 186, 196, 197, 199, 206, 207-8, 211, 218, 236, 237, 263, 273, 276, 280, 283, 298; New Light, 129-36. 143. Platen's "Mut und Unmut" was trans- lated for the same work. In 1870, also, he made an uninspired version of "Ein' feste Burg" for the Interlude "Martin Luther" in The Christus; in 1879 he published his translation of "For- saken," the first stanza of which had already been used as the heading for Book II of Hy- perion ; and Mahlmann's "Allah" seems also to belong to this period. 144. In Part II of Tales of a Wayside Inn (1872) "The Cobbler of Hagenau" is a tale with a German background, based on the story of Tetzel and his indulgences and containing references to Reineke Fuchs, the Meistersingers, Brant, and Eulenspiegel. In the Interlude following "Elizabeth," that story is spoken of as "worthy of some German bard / Hebel, or Voss, or Eberhard" (Works, IV, 226). "Vox Populi," written in 1870, and forming a part of the Third Flight in Birds of Passage, is sugges- tive of Heine's manner, as is also "The Brook and the Wave" in the same section. "The Hanging of the Crane," first printed in the New York Ledger for March 28, 1874, owes its form and structure, as did the earlier "Building of the Ship," to Schiller's Song of the Bell. Keramos (1878) appears to derive from the same source. "Morituri Salutamus," written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Bowdoin class of 1825, lists among examples of productive old age "Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last" and completing Faust "when eighty years were past" (Works, III, 195). The Masque of Pandora (1875), inspired mainly by Greek drama, contains suggestions of the Second Part of Faust, notably in the chorus of the Oreades, Notes to Pages 426-28 745 Waters, Winds, and Forests; and the "Chorus of the Eumenides" suggests Goethe's I phigenie. "The Children's Crusade," a fragment written in 1879, owes some of its lines to Heine's "Wall- fahrt nach Kevlaar," while "Mad River" (1882) in both form and sentiment seems to go back to Goethe's "Der Junggesell und der Miihlbach," which, as we have observed, fascinated Longfellow many years before (Hyperion, pp. 11 3- 16). 145. O. W. Long, "Goethe and Longfellow," Germanic Rev., VIII, ii (Apr., 1932), 175. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 146. Selected Literary Essays of James Rus- sell Lowell, ed. by Will D. Howe and Norman Foerster (Boston, 1914), Introduction, pp. xv- xvi. So it is that often, instead of his essays' developing in a straightforward, organic man- ner, they seem rather to proceed as if his line of thought had been suggested by some word or passage, until the next cleverly turned phrase set him off on another tack. 147. Works (Elmwood ed., 16 vols., Boston, 1904), XI, 132. 148. On October 9, 1835, he professed to getting on "astonishingly" well with the Ger- man language, but found Faust hard going in comparison with what he had read of Schiller. In 1838 he contributed to The Harvardan two verse translations from Uhland: "The Sere- nade" and "The White Stag." — George Wurfl, Lowell's Debt to Goethe (State College, Pa., 1936), pp. 11-12. 149. Works, XIV, 59. 150. Ibid., p. 54. 151. Wurfl, op. cit., pp. 13-14. Maria White, soon to become Lowell's betrothed, was fond of German literature. Her enthusiasm doubtless played its part in developing his sympathetic attitude toward the romantic literature of Ger- many. See, for example, Works, XII, 79. After she read him some extracts from Goethe's correspondence with Bettina Brentano, he eagerly read the book and considered it "beau- tiful" but thought it "mournful that all this love should have been given to the cold, hard Goethe." 152. "Lessing," Works, II, 194-95. 153. Exceptions occur in a familiar essay, "On Getting Up," contributed to the Boston Miscellany for 1842, which contains a number of scattered German literary references (see Early Prose Writings, London, 1903, pp. 40-48), and in a series of essays written during the later 40's for the North American Review (see The Round Table, Boston, 1913, pp. 10, 20, 23, 92, 94, 139, 169, 202, 213). In A Fable for Critics (1848) he refers to Hawthorne as "a John Bunyan Fouque, a Puritan Tieck," and in the same year he records his impatience with German refugees of 1848 who flock to Boston and try to capitalize on their sufferings. — Works, IX, 90; see also XV, 5, and "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" (1869). 154. The Round Table, pp. 21, 172. 155. Lectures on English Poets (Cleveland, 1897), pp. 4, 7, 8, 13, 27, 123, 128-29, 156. 156. Lowell never developed any affection for the German language. In his essay on Les- sing (1866) he wrote: "I have sometimes thought the German tongue at least an accesso- ry before the fact, if nothing more, in the offences of German literature. The language has such a fatal genius for going stern-foremost, for yawing, and for not minding the helm . . . that he must be a great sailor indeed who can safely make it the vehicle for anything but imperish- able commodities." — Works, II, 164. Writing to Miss Loring from Dresden, October 3, 1855, he reported: "I get up um sieben Uhr, and das Madchen brings me my coffee and Butterbrod at 8. Then I begin to study. I am reading for my own amusement (du lieber Gott!) the aesthetische Forschungen von Adolf Zeising, pp. 568, large octavo! Then I overset something aus German into English. Then comes dinner at 1 o'clock, with ungeheuer German dishes. Nachmittag I study Spanish . . . Um seeks Uhr ich gehe spazieren, and at 7 come home, and Dr. R[eichenbach] dictates and I write. Aber potztausend Donnerwetter! what a language it is to be sure! with nominatives sending out as many roots as . . . witchgrass. . . . The confounded genders! If I die I will have engraved on my tombstone that I died of der, die, das, not because I caught 'em, but because I couldn't." — Works, XIV, 318-19 157. New Letters of James Russell Lowell, ed. by M. A. DeWolfe Howe (N.Y., 1932), pp. 77, 117. 158. Works, XIV, 332, 336. 159. When Lowell set out for Europe, he had hoped that travel and study might bring him solace and refreshment of spirit. The two years since his wife's death had been both sad and trying. Abroad he hoped his thoughts might turn into new directions. Instead, they con- stantly turned homeward, and he found himself oppressed by a sense of loss and loneliness. In such a state of mind he could plod dutifully through books and labor to acquire language skills, but he could not respond to the beauties of a foreign literature, or rouse his mind to a spontaneous play with new ideas. His letters are full of German phrases, but hardly any author except Goethe gets any real attention. 746 Notes to Page 428 160. Works, XII, 385. 161. Wurfl, op. cit., p. 19. 162. A long article on Grant White's edition of Shakespeare in 1859 and a review of Max Miiller's Lectures on the Science of Language in 1862 contain references that make it clear he was keeping up with German contributions to learning. The 1866 essays on Carlyle and on Swinburne's tragedies contain extended refer- ences to Carlyle's German sources and to Ger- man dramatic criticism, respectively. That on Lessing followed in 1866, and the essay on Chaucer (1870) listed two German studies of Chaucer. 163. Few of his comments reveal deep pene- tration or real appreciation. The eighteenth century as a whole is a "dead waste" (Works, II, 139, 146, 169, 175-76, 187, 208, 217-19, 222; IV, 379). Goethe excepted, the writers of the Sturm-und- Drang period are a lowly lot. Even Schiller, whom he had once regarded as morally superior to Goethe, is now named with Wieland, Goethe, and Jean Paul as requiring "biographi- cal chemistry" to bleach the spots from his reputation (Works, II, 187). Richter's humor, fine though it be, would be better if Richter had not dealt out "his wine by beer measure" (Works, II, 165). Heine's "battle against Philisterei" is laudable, but he lacks "a refined perception" and often shocks us with a certain "Unfldthigkeit, as at the end of his Deutschland, which, if it makes Germans laugh, as we should be sorry to believe, makes other people hold their noses" (Works, II, 170). As for German humor in general, it is dreary stuff. Even Goe- the, with his "mixture of sentimentalism and sausages" and his "absurd Werthermontirung," shows himself "insensitive to the ridiculous." Herr Hub's Deutsche komische und humoristische Dichtung is almost enough to convince readers that no German has even a suspicion of what humor is, unless the book itself "be a joke in three volumes, the want of fun being the real point thereof" (Works, II, 168-69). Among the romanticists, Tieck is discussed as a dramatist (Works, II, 130) and as a critic of Shakespeare (Works, III, 70; Atl. Monthly, III, Feb., 1859, 246), and Novalis, Fouque\ Burger, Marx, and Schopenhauer are mentioned (Works, I, 381; IV, 32, 380; XI, 181, 312). Lowell's knowledge of German literature was not altogether confined to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Besides lecturing on Middle High German literature, on the Nibe- lungenlied, and Wolfram, Lowell discussed the German folk epic and the Parzival in his essay on Dante. The Minnesingers seemed to him wearisomely artificial, he knew the tenth century nun Hroswitha's drama of Theophilus, and he properly appraised Luther's significance (Works, I, 125, 171 ; II, 363, 367; III, 318). But the number and variety of references is no real indication that Lowell turned as spontaneously or naturally for inspiration to German as he turned to English literature. A high proportion of his German references occur in the essays on Lessing and on Carlyle. The one name that occurs most often is, of course, Goethe. The mature Lowell never feels that Goethe's su- premacy among the Germans is to be doubted ; he habitually expresses his opinion of other Germans by equating them, in this or that particular, with Goethe; and he repeatedly lists Goethe with Homer, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare (Works, II, 157, III, 301, 381; XIV, 320; The Function of the Poet and Other Essays, Boston, 1920, p. 61). Yet few of Goethe's individual works received Lowell's expression of unqualified approval. Goethe's (as well as Schiller's) "striving after a Grecian instead of a purely human ideal" is deplored . Goethe ' ' wasted his time and thwarted his energy on the mechanical mock-antique of an unreadable 'Achilleis.'" It does not disturb Lowell to know that Goethe always bought his classicisms cheap, at second hand, and that for the "purposes of mere aesthetic nourishment [he] always milked other minds," and he does not suggest that the product might have been more authentic if Goethe had done the foraging himself. He calls Goethe "The man of widest acquirement in modern times" and heartily approves his method of levying contribution on lesser minds when it is successful, as it is in Hermann und Dorothea (Works, II, 127, 129; III, 46-47, 133; XI, 142; Wurfl, op. cit., p. 49). Nor was it only the "mock-antique" dramas that Lowell would willingly have given up to oblivion. He used the phrase "dull as a comedy of Goethe" in contexts which indicate that he placed Goethe's comedies at the nadir (Works, II, 146; XI, 202). No German drama really satisfied him: they are all too much contrived, "constructed a priori," and therefore "tedious" (Works, XI, 209, XIV, 337; Wurfl, op. cit., 38). Far more reprehensible, however, is the "innate weakness and futile tendency of the 'storm and thrust'" productions, "the egotistical-super- man" tendency of Goetz, and the "spiritual hypochondriacs" in Werther, whose heartbreaks are "audibly prolonged through life" (Works, II 93-94, 222, 251, 267; III, 63). He responded more favorably to the Gothic spirit in Faust, esteeming it "the only immortal production of the greatest of recent poets, because, despite its Hellenic overtones, it is truly Gothic in execu- tion" (Works, II, 139, IV, 235). In it Goethe gave supreme embodiment to one of the two or Notes to Pages 428-29 747 three myths which seem to be rooted in human consciousness. The figure of Faust is an integral, authentic part of "the natural history of intel- lect, Mephistopheles being merely the projected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariable result of a purely intellectual culture" (The Function of the Poet . . . pp. 64-66; Works, III, 90). Thus Goethe is at once of his age and above it, transcending both the provincial and the national (Works, II, 84, 121, 150; III, 25, 101 ; IV, 234, 380; VI, 103, 108). But his serene impartiality is too detached, too conscious, too profound ; and although Lowell himself never came within miles of a battlefield, he repeats the hackneyed criticism when he expresses the wish that Goethe might have "smelt hostile powder from a less aesthetic distance" (Works, II, 286). A subject of more serious reproach, which the Puritan Lowell shared with Longfellow, Emer- son, and the great host of American critics, is the cold morality with which Goethe pursued his ideal of self-culture. Although Lowell ob- seved that such matters are irrelevant to the evaluation of Goethe's poetry, he held that the world has every right to take them into account in estimating the worth of Goethe the man (Works, II, 194-95, 241-42). That Goethe as an individual greatly interested Lowell appears from his wide reading in Goethe's correspond- ence with Bettina Brentano (Works, XII, 78- 79), with Frau von Stein (Works, II, 168), with Auguste Stolberg (Works, II, 251), with Zelter (Wurfl, op. cit., p. 58), and with Knebel (ibid., p. 28; Works, II, in). He early read Eckermann's Conversations, referred familiarly to Dichtung und Wahrheit (Works, I, 357), and praised G. H. Lewes' Life of Goethe (Wurfl, op. cit., p. 36). Thus he familiarized himself so thoroughly with Goethe's life that in 1881, when he visited various German localities rich in Goethe associ- ations, he had trouble persuading himself that he had not personally known some of the lead- ing actors in these scenes (Works, XII, 271; XVI, 89). 164. For examples see Works, I, 352; II, 86, 108, 139; III, 123; IV, 140; XI, 176. 165. Works, II, 85. Lowell regrets that as Carlyle grew older he turned for a hero from the moderate and wise Goethe to an "asserter of the divine legitimacy of Faustrecht" like Frederick the Great and glorified this ideal in his " Fritziad." 166. Works, III, 57-58. 167. Ibid., pp. 66-67. 168. Ibid., p. 87. 169. As early as 1848 Lowell recognized the importance of German Shakespeare criticism by observing "we owe to the Germans . . . the .first thorough stud}', criticism, and consequent appreciation" of Shakespeare (The Round Table, p. 21). Ten years later, while reviewing Grant White's edition of Shakespeare, he introduced some humorous remarks on the extravagancies of German aestheticians, but again credited them with "the first philosophi- cal appreciation" of Shakespeare. In the same article he referred a bit condescendingly to P. H. Sillig's Die Shakespeare-Literatur bis Mitte 1854 (Leipzig, 1858), and remarked that he was tolerably familiar with many of Herr Sillig's 500 bibliographical items, adding "Among which (setting aside a few remarks by Goethe) we are inclined to value as highly as anything Tieck's essay on the Element of the Wonderful in Shakespeare" (Atl. Monthly, III, Feb., 1859, 245-46). When he incorporated much of this article in the essay "Shakespeare Once More" (1868), he omitted the passage just quoted, and added this observation on German contri- butions to "productive" criticism: "Lessing, as might have been expected, opened the first glimpse in the new direction ; Goethe followed with his famous exposition of Hamlet; A. W. Schlegel took a more comprehensive view in his Lectures, which Coleridge worked over into English, adding many fine criticisms of his own on single passages; and finally Gervinus has devoted four volumes to a comment on the plays, full of excellent matter, though pushing the moral exegesis beyond all reasonable bounds." He added that he merely mentioned Ulrici's book because it seemed "unwieldy and dull, — zeal without knowledge." — Works, III, 67-68. For a revision of his view of Coleridge's debt to the Germans, compare Works, XIII, 134, and his essay on "Coleridge" (1885). 170. Works, II, 171, 224. Lessing's minor poems are dismissed with a few sentences, and the plays are considered striking proof that critical insight alone is not sufficient for great creative work, though both Minna and Emilia act better than anything by Goethe or Schiller. In Nathan the Wise he finds "a sober luster of reflection" that makes good reading but a tire- some play (Works, II, 227). But in prose Lessing is supreme. "Never was there a better example of the discourse of reason" than the Laocoon, and the Dramaturgie stands a close second (Works, II, 229). 171. Judging from what he says in "Shakes- peare Once More," one concludes that the following aspects of his Shakespeare criticism were derived from Germany: (1) the historical approach with its interest in the age and cir- cumstances surrounding the poet ; (2) the attack on the view of Shakespeare as an inspired idiot, lacking judgment and a knowledge of the rules ; (3) the organic theory of an inner unity as 748 Notes to Pases 429-30 distinguished from such mechanical concep- tions as the three unities and the "laws" of verisimilitude, decorum, and propriety; (4) the interpretation of Shakespeare as placing the central idea or moral of his plays within his main characters; and (5) the distinction be- tween classic and romantic drama as found in the shifting of Destiny to a place within man rather than, as in the Greek, outside or above his control. These, in the main, are the con- clusion reached by Prof. Robert P. Falk in a seminar study which he undertook at my sug- gestion in 1938-1939. 172. While expressing surprise in his essay on Dante at the late beginning of German interest in the great Florentine, he paid tribute to Kopisch, Witte, Wegele, and Ruth as Dante scholars and to the translators, Bachenschwanz, Kannegiesser, Streckfuss, Kopisch, and Prince John of Saxony (Works, IV, 22, 145-46, 149, 150, 157, 169, 181, 190, 228). 173. On Chaucer, he singled out Alfons Kiss- ner's Chaucer in seinen Beziehungen zur italieni- schen Literatur (1867) and Wilhelm Hertzberg's translation (1866), at the same time labeling Hertzberg's introduction "one of the best essays on Chaucer yet written" [Works, III, 298). 174. In his appreciative review of Max Midler's Lectures on the Science of Language (Atl. Monthly, Jan., 1862), he voiced his impa- tience with the productions of "Teutonic Ge- lehrte" like Bopp, Popp, Zeuss, Lasser, and Diefenbach, whose "works are terrors to the uninitiated," but in a later essay he remarked that it was long our shame that we had to go to the Germans to be taught the elements of our mother tongue (Works, XI, 155). His sense of obligation to, and impatience with, German scholarship, which "supplied the raw material in almost every branch of science for the defter wits of other nations to work on," received definitive expression in his essay on Lessing (Works, II, 165-67). In it he acknowledged a definite personal obligation, as he did still more pointedly 20 years later in the Harvard Anni- versary address, in which, even while he warned against the danger of the Germans' "mis- leading us in some directions into pedantry," he said, "We owe a great debt to the Germans . No one is more indebted to them than I" (Works, V, 152). 175. Works, II, 164; XIV, 318. 1 76. The confusion wrought by Coleridge alone is sufficiently puzzling, although it may be presumed that in Lowell's day it was less so. At all events, Lowell was fully aware of Cole- ridge's borrowings and once remarked that Coleridge's acknowledgment of general indebt- edness to the Germans was "wholly inadequate, and his evasions in regard to Schlegel leave a very painful impression on the mind." — Works, XIII, 134- 177. For instance, he never occupied himself as closely with English critical writings as he did with Adolf Zeising's Aesthetische For- schungen (Works, XIV, 318), Vischer's Aesthe- tik, which he called the "best treatise on the subject, ancient or modern" (Works, II, 164), Goethe's numerous but scattered critical pronouncements, Schlegel's Vorlesungen, and the entire school of German Shakespeareans. His attitude toward Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt is hardly comparable, partly because much of it is of a piece with German criticism, partly because it is less considerable. 178. If we limit the term "literature" so as to exclude criticism and scholarship, J. J. Reilly appears justified in remarking on "the comparatively slight impression which German literature seems to have made on Lowell (/. R. Lowell as Critic, N.Y., 1915, p. 48), and J. M. Hart is essentially right in observing that though "no one would be so ill-advised as to suggest that Lowell did not know German literature well," his sympathy with it, particu- larly with Goethe, showed rather surprising limitations." — PMLA, VI (1892), 25-31. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMKS 179. For the Genteel writers from Long- fellow, through Brooks, Taylor, and Stedman, to Higginson, Germany provided the staple of romance and sentiment; German ways of thought, poetry, educational methods were admittedly superior; facility in the German language was the necessary accomplishment of a cultivated man; and to make some specimens of German literature available in English was a bounden duty. Despite his Victorian taste and manners, Holmes was as much the child of the eighteenth as of the nineteenth century, who turned for inspiration oftener to the Queen Anne writers than to the romantic transcendentalists of Germany. His education abroad was pursued in Paris, and he never admitted having lost anything by failing to make the rounds of the German universities. Born and bred to enjoy all the requisites of what the Autocrat prescribed as the necessary accoutrements of a gentleman, he had, as a child, "tumbled about" in his father's library, which contained "between one and two thousand books," but it contained almost no German books. Later, at Harvard, he studied "French and Italian, and some Span- ish," but if he attended the classes of Karl Notes to Pages 430-31 749 Follen, he forgot to mention it. During his two years in Paris, where he completed his medical education, French became "a second mother tongue," but the two brief German excursions which he made — the conventional Rhine outing in 1834 and a more extended journey through Germany and Switzerland in 1835 — left him with only a slight appreciation of German literary lore and probably less of the language. — Works (Standard Library ed., 15 vols., Boston, 1892), I, 23; XIV, 42, 60, 97, 102, 148. 180. Works, XIV, 217. 181. Ibid., I, 125-27; II, 3-4, 15-16, 78, 85- 86, 281-82, 301. 182. Ibid., I, 204. 183. Ibid., p. 23. 184. Ibid., p. 262. 185. Ibid., p. 131. 186. Ibid., p. 14. In writing the biography of Emerson, Holmes found it hard to treat sympathetically Emerson's mystical idealism, particularly his excursions into Oriental and German philosophies. Temperamentally and professionally conditioned to laboratory meth- ods and inductive processes, the intuitional and a priori thought processes of the Transcenden- talists seemed to him "vagaries." To deal with "the incommunicable, the inconceivable, the absolute, and the antinomies," said the Auto- crat, is like playing "with a bundle of jack- straws." — Works, XI, 306. 187. Leibnitz and Goethe each are referred to five times, Kant and Jean Paul each four times, and Schopenhauer and A. v. Humboldt each once. Luther is credited with having hatched "the egg of the reformation" which Erasmus laid (Works, I, 87-88). Schlegel's reading of Shakespeare is properly evaluated (I, 33) ; Zimmermann's Treatise on Solitude is re- called as something that he saw "lying about on library tables ... in our younger days" (I, 6) ; Ranke is mentigned as a foremost German historian (IV, 27); and at the suggestion of George Bancroft, Holmes wrote the verses "To Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, for his 'Jubi- laeum' at Berlin, Nov. 5, 1868" (XIII, 105-6). For the rest, a few German scientists are men- tioned in the Autocrat (I, 281), the Professor (II, 11-12), and Elsie Venner (V, 221). Only in his medical essays did Holmes really use the Ger- mans to good advantage. In his essay on "Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions," he singled out Samuel Hahnemann for attack, and in the course of the essay cited sixteen other German medical authorities for or against Hahnemann's doctrines. In others of the medi- cal essays, six more German physicians and specialists are mentioned, and several scientific periodicals are cited. But here, as in the essay on homeopathy, a number of the references are admittedly derived from translations, manuals, and encyclopedias; and it may be presumed that most of his sources involving German authorities were secondary. For, says his biographer, in describing the Doctor's method of work, "His hand was always on the Cyclo- paedias, the Dictionaries of biography, and the innumerable works of reference of every con- ceivable kind which stood in serried ranks be- side his table." — Works, XV, 11. JOHN' GREENLEAF WHITTIER 188. In February, 1837, he went to Harris- burg, Pa., as a delegate to the State Anti- Slavery Convention, visited in the home of Governor Ritner, and in The Liberator for March 1837, published his "Lines," later entitled "Ritner," praising the Governor's courageous single stand against the slave power in politics and referring to the proud history of the liberty- loving Pennsylvania-German Friends who had been the first religious body in this country to issue a protest against slavery. See Whittier Correspondence from the Oak Knoll Collection, 1830-1892 (ed. by John Albree, Salem, Mass., 191 1), p. 46, and Works (Standard Lib. ed., 9 vols., Boston and N.Y., 1892-1894), VI, 128-29. The next year Whittier became the editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman. From it pages during the two years of Whittier's editorship, Profes- sor Iola K. Eastburn (Whittier's Relation to German Thought, Americana Germanica, Xo. 20, Phila., 1915) cites a dozen references to German-American antislavery activities. Among the more notable are (1) the tribute to the early German settlers in the poem "Pennsylvania Hall," in the number for May 31, 18381(2) refer- ences to the pamphlets What is Abolition? and The Moral Condition of the Slaves, published in the German language by the Philadelphia press of C. F. Stollmeyer, editor of the German- American National Gazette and active propa- gandist for abolition; and (3) the translation of Stollmeyer's editorial "A Voice from Germany. G. Seidensticker's Views of American Slavery" (in the number for Feb. 28, 1839), in which German-Americans are exhorted to use their influence and voting power to wipe out the institution that brings down on their adopted land the derision of despotic Europe. 189. The Essex Gazette for September 27, 1828, contained a long synopsis by Whittier of "Der Freischiitz, or The Magic Ball, from the German of A. Apel," with a headnote explain- ing that the scene is laid "in a wild and roman- tic district of Germany" and calling attention to "the wildness of conception" and "the awful 750 Notes to Vage 431 grandeur" of the tale. The translation used by Whittier had appeared in Tales of the Wild and the Wonderfi4l(London&n&V\\\\d.., 1826), pp. 97:8. In the New England Review for October n, 1830, Whittier published "The Skeptic," a tale of a German university student and his wicked companion Faustendorff, with a prefatory note describing it as "a thrilling development of the horrible effects of infidelity on the human heart." In the same magazine for September 5, 1831, appeared Whittier's story, "The Ever- lasting Taper," which (says the author) "is an old narration, and would figure well in an improved edition of Faust's Mephistopheles." The story has several things in common with the Faust legend, but the scene is France, not Germany. Another reference to heartless wickedness as Whittier associated it with Mephistopheles occurs in his article, "Thomas Carlyle on the Slavery Question" (1850), Works, VII, 133. For further details, see Eastbum, op. cit., pp. 79-82, 149-52. 190. H. H. Clark, (ed.), Major Americna Poets (N.Y., 1936), p. 802. In the poem "The Demon of the Study" (1835) he mentioned, among other hobgoblins, the fiend of Faust, Agrippa's demon, and the devil of Martin Luther (Works, I, 25). Agrippa's name also appears several times in "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim." In 1840 Whittier prepared a version of Goethe's "Erlkonig," based on an earlier translation by A. Geohegan (see Eastburn, op. cit., 87-90). Between 1844 and 1878 he referred seven times to Fouqu^'s Undine (ibid., pp. 35, 93-94), which had been translated by his friend, the Rev. Thomas Tracey in his Miniature Ro- mances from Germany (Boston, 1841). He men- tioned also Fouque"s "Die Kohlerfamilie" in "The Agency of Evil" (Works, VII, 263), and Novalis' belief "that the Christian religion is the root of all democracy and the highest fact in the rights of man" (Works, VI, 185). He knew something about Jean Paul and thought Auerbach's story of Gellert "touching and beautiful" (Eastburn, op. cit., pp. 140-41). In "The Haschisch" (1854) there is a reference to "the wizard lights and demon play" of Walpur- gis night (Works, III, 173), and the lines, "She weaves her golden hair, she sings / Her spell- song low and faint," from "The Witch of Wenham" (1877) doubtless involve an echo of Heine's "Lorelei" (Works, I, 361). 191. See, e.g., "The Vale of the Merrimac" (1825), Works, IV, 335; "Pennsylvania Hall" (1835), III, 62; and "To a Friend" (1841), IV, 24. 192. In "Cobbler Keezar's Vision" (1861) Whittier pictures the old man mending shoes on a Connecticut hillside, recalling the German countryside, the merry grape-stained maidens of his native land, the clowns, puppets, imps, and Rhenish flagons of a Frankfurt fair, while he looks into the future through a magic lap- stone wrought by Agrippa of Nettesheim and given by him to a cobbler Minnesinger, who in turn gave it to Keezar (Works, I, 241-47). In "The Sycamores" (1857) Keezar is described "singing, as he draws his stitches, songs his Ger- man masters taught" him (Works, I, 182). In "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim" (1871) the memo- ries of Pastorius turn to the German mystics and scholars who had been his friends (Works, I, 322, 325, 330, 335) or upon his youthful experiences in Germany comprising "Old World flowers," "Altdorf Burschensong," or Christmas observances, all still vivid in his memory (Works, I, 338, 340-41). For similar allusions in "The Vision of Echard," see Works, II, 315- 16. No traveler himself, Whittier wrote, in 1850, to Bayard Taylor thanking him for his tales of travel and adventure — reading which, he said, enabled him to spend "a merry Christmas in Berlin." Ten years later, when they had be- come fast friends, he confessed that Taylor was his most valued proxy by whom to travel far while sitting quietly in his study at Amesbury. — Eastburn, op. cit., pp. 35, 40. 193. Follen's eloquent question, "Shall the U.S. — the free U.S., which could not bear the bonds of a king — cradle the bondage which a king is abolishing?" inspired Whittier's widely known and quoted poem originally entitled "Stanzas," later "Follen," and finally "Ex- postulation." — Works, III, 24-28; VIII, 141- 42. 194. Eastburn, op. cit., 12-15. Whittier's memorial poem, "Follen, on Reading His Essay on 'The Future State'" (Works, IV, 29- 34), celebrates the sweet serenity and benignity of Follen's spirit as the prototype of a soulful humanitarianism incarnate in Tauler, Echard, Spener, Eleanora Johanna von Merlau, Rahel, Woolman, and Pastorius. See Works, I, 141-44, 322, 325, 330, 334-35; II. 3I5- 22 ; IV . 2 °- 195. Luther the reformer served Whittier as a model, not only for virtues to be emulated but also for shortcomings to be avoided (Works, I, 249; IV, 42; VI, 74; Eastburn, op. cit., p. 120) One of Whittier's ringing war poems, "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott," exhorting the nation to recognize slavery as the real issue, was set to the rhythm and tune of Luther's hymn by the same title (Works, III, 219-22). The name of Melanchthon appears several times in Whittier's essays and letters, usually in conj unction with that of Luther ( Works, VI, 128- 29). The tribute "To Ronge," a young German Notes to Pases 431-32 751 Catholic priest of Whittier's own time, who had been excommunicated because of his protest against the "pious fraud" of the Bishop of Treves, is, like many of Whittier's references to Luther, evidence of his sympathy with the iconoclastic reform that characterized the poet's middle years (cf. Works, IV, 41; East- burn, op. cit., pp. 101-2). Another contempora- ry voice from Germany, that of Freiligrath, encouraged him, as it did Longfellow, when he wrote his Poems of Slavery. On July 6, 1848, Whittier published in the National Era an editorial entitled "Our Diplo- macy Trouble Abroad," in which he spoke of "Germany, fermenting like its beer, with new republicanism," and described with approval a "society of abolition propagandism, composed of learned professors, statesmen and divines, j ust established for the avowed purpose of acting upon the slave system of the U.S. through the German emigrants, who are fast filling up our new States and Territories" (Eastburn, op. cit., p. 103). In the poem "Yorktown" (Works, III, 131) and the article "Democracy and Slavery" (Works, IV, 114), both published in the same journal, he spoke of Prussia's ironic laughter at the existence of slavery in the Land of Free- dom, and compared the slaveowner's prating of liberty to Frederick the Great's apostrophiz- ing Cato and Brutus. For other references, see Eastburn, op. cit., pp. 73-74, 104, 122-24, 141-45. 196. See "The Proselytes," Works, V, 205- 12. The introductory paragraphs, in which the weary student is depicted poring over books of bitter and vituperative theological controversy, reveal Whittier's conception of the German intellectual seeker after spiritual truth as far from sympathetic with the so-called German critical study of the Scriptures. That Whittier was aware of the materialistic, as well as the mystical, strain in German thought is evident from his description, in The Stranger in Lowell (1841), of a Pennsylvania-German named J. A. Etzler, who "was possessed by the belief that the world was to be restored to its paradisiacal state by the sole agency of mechanics" (Works, V, 353). Whittier's judgment of Etzler's Para- dise within the Reach of Man, without Labor, by the Powers of Nature and Machinery, recalls Thoreau's longer castigation of the same work for similar reasons. 197. Complete Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Student's Cambridge ed., Boston, 1894), p. 519. For evidence that Pastorius be- longed to the Society of Friends, though there seems to be no record of his joining, see East- burn, op cit., p. 50. In his Preface to John Woolman's journal (1871), Whittier repeated the story how, "in 1688, a meeting of Quakers, who had emigrated from Kriesheim and settled at Germantown, Pa., addressed a memorial against" the buying and keeping of Negroes "to the Yearly Meeting for the Pennsylvania and New Jersey colonies." — Works, VII, 321. Sewall's Selling of Joseph was first printed in 1700. Whittier's principal sources for "The Penn- sylvania Pilgrim" were articles by Oswald Seidensticker in Der deutsche Pionier for 1870 and 1871 and the Penn Monthly for January and February, 1872, as well as essays by Robert Ellis Thompson in the Penn Monthly for August, September, and October, 1871. Besides the details of Pastorius' life in Germany, Whittier's poem presents a wealth of descriptive and narrative documentary material, all indicating that Whittier worked hard to make the picture both detailed and authentic. The mystics Philipp Jacob Spener and Eleanora von Merlau are sympathetically portrayed, though they were probably less closely associated with Pastorius than Whittier represents them. There are also allusions to the seventeenth-century shoemaker-mystic Jacob Boehme, whose doc- trines, as presented in Morgenrothe, had long been familiar to Whittier (Eastburn, op. cit., 1 16-17). Agrippa of Nettesheim is mentioned, and there is a tolerant description of "painful Kelpius . . . maddest of good men," who, "weird as a wizard" in his "den by Wissa- hickon . . . read what man ne'er read before, and saw the visions man shall see no more" until the trump of the Apocalypse shall sound. — Works, I, 330. Whittier's poem on Pastorius contains minor inaccuracies, chiefly in regard to names and religious affiliations, which students of Pennsylvania history and sectarian controversialists have pointed out (see esp. The Penn Monthly, III [Nov., 1872], 636-37). Some of Whittier's errors are owing to his lack of facility in German. While he speaks in his pref- ace to the poem of his sources, chiefly Seiden- sticker's articles in Der deutsche Pionier, he confessed, in a letter of May 17, 1875, to Julius Kirschbaum (who had sent him a copy of his German translation of Whittier's "Clerical Oppressors") that he lacked fluency in the language. — Eastburn, op cit., pp. 76-77. 198. For an account of the factual basis of the story, see Howard M. Chapin, "Whittier's 'Palatine' Discovered," Amer. Collector, III (1927), 118-22. 199. Three decades earlier Whittier had found in C. J. P. Spitta's Geduld an expression of the religious peace which was so important an element in his conception of the spirit of German mysticism, and had made "a free 752 Notes to Pases 432-34 paraphrase" for his "Angel of Patience" (Works, II, 216) from an unidentified German poem celebrating this quality. A translation by the eminent German orientalist, Max Miiller, inspired "The Brewing of Soma" (1872), per- haps Whittier's best known hymn and contain- ing his beautiful prayer for spiritual peace, beginning "Dear Lord and Father of mankind / Forgive our foolish ways!" 200. The other Elizabeth is the thirteenth century Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. 201. Among the poets represented are Riickert, Chamisso, Grimm, Carov6, and Jean Paul. Whittier's continued interest in German Marchen and folk materials appears in these collections, as well as in his ballad, "The Brown Dwarf of Ruegen" (1880), written for St. Nicho- las and based on Arndt's "Die neun Berge bei Rambin." He probably used the close trans- lation contained in Thomas Knightly's Fairy Mythology of Various Countries (London, 1850), a copy of which was in his library at Amesbury, but he did not follow Knightly closely. Elsewhere we find allusions to the tales of Miinchhausen (Essex Mag., Jan. 5, 1825; Works, VIII, 378), the songs of Hans Sachs (Works, III, 292), the coal burner in Hauff's Kaltes Herz who traded his heart of flesh for a cobblestone (Works, VII, 144), Burger's Lenore (Works, V, 411), Walther von der Vogelweide's bequest to the birds (Works, VII, 243), and the "Blue-Cap of German fable" (Poetical Works, Student's Cambridge ed., p. 513). Other German literary figures prominently mentioned are Nicolai (1831), Schiller (1836, 1848), Logau (1844), Krum- macher (1844, 1853), Holthaus (1844), Lessing (twice in 1853), and Herder (1853). For details, see Eastburn, op. cit., pp. 135-41. The German content of Whittier's library at Amesbury was relatively slight: a dozen books translated from the German, including Goethe's Werlher, Hermann und Dorothea, and Faust, two collections of Jean Paul's writings, and the Theologia Germanica (which he mentioned in 1862 as the book Luther "loved next to his Bible." — Works, VII, 284-85). He owned also a dozen other books on German subjects, such as Lewes' Life of Goethe, Eliz. Buckingham's Life of Jean Paul, and William Penn in Germany, the journal of Penn's visit to Germany in 1677. In his study at Oak Knoll, where he spent much of his time after 1876, are preserved three trans- lations from the German, including A. W. Schle- gel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, and The Pennsylvania Dutch and Other Essays by Phoebe Earle Gibbons, published in the same year as "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim." For further details, see Eastburn, op. cit., pp. 152-54- HENRY DAVID THORKAU 202. After graduating from Harvard College, he insisted upon and secured unrestricted borrowing privileges from the College library. As Mr. Canby observes, "Harvard library stands behind his books. It overpacked the Journal and the 'Week' with reading ... it is difficult to conceive 'Walden' without a back- ground of an easy familiarity with the world's best books." — Thoreau (Boston, 1939), p. 50. During 1841-1843 he had Emerson's rich library to browse in; in 1843 he read "deeply, if briefly" in the libraries of New York City; and throughout life he kept adding to his own very carefully selected library until it contained, at his death, some four hundred volumes. He read less widely than did many of his contemporaries ; he lacked the Transcendentalists' pride in catholicity that sometimes ran to dilettantism; he selected his books as carefully as he chose what he must do; and choosing thus deliberate- ly, he became an example of whom it may be said that "what he read he became." 203. Wm. E. Channing, Thoreau: The Poet Naturalist (Boston, 1873), p, 41. 204. His purpose was (as he said it was Goethe's in the Italienische Reise) simply to give "an exact description of things as they appeared to him, and their effect upon him." — Writings (Walden ed., 20 vols., Boston, 1906), I, 347 ; see also II, 347-48; Journal (Walden ed., I, 15; and Canby, op. cit., p. 272. 205. Writings, I, 350. 206. Ibid., 347-4°. 351-53. 4°°-4 01 - 207. See the extensive extracts from Goethe chiefly from the Italienische Reise, in Journal, I, 9-10, 11, 15. 208. Writings, I, 348-30. 209. "Books," he said, "must be read as deliberately as they are written." — Journal, I, 369. "How many a man has not dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book." — ■ Writings, II, 114; see also pp. 112, 120; Chan- ning, op. cit., p. 40. 210. Writings, VI, 296. 211. B. V. Crawford (ed.), Henry David Thoreau. Representative Selections . . . (N.Y., 1934), p. xxix. 212. Channing, op. cit., pp. 41, 203. For Thoreau's favorite reading, as well as his abys- mal gaps in taste and knowledge of books, see Crawford, op. cit., pp. xvii-xxx; Norman Foer- ster, "The Intellectual Heritage of Thoreau," Texas Review, II, iii (Jan, 1917). 192-212; Channing, op. cit., pp. 40, 58; F. B. Sanborn, The Personality of Thoreau (Boston, 1901), p. 36; Mark Van Doren, Henry David Thoreau. A Critical Study (Boston, 1916), pp. 97-98; Writings, II, 117, 119. Notes to Page 434 753 In 1836, during his senior year, Thoreau attended some of Longfellow's initial lectures on German literature (Canby, op. cit., pp. 43- 44). The winter before, when he boarded at 0. A. Brownson's house in Canton, Mass., he and Brownson "stuck heartily to studying German" (Channing, op. cit., p. 32). When Thoreau left Cambridge in 1837, he was "more or less qualified to read and write Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, and Spanish"; and somewhat later in Concord, he carried forward his German studies "enthusiastically" with Sarah Ripley. In 1845, when Sanborn first met him, he had improved his knowledge of French to read it "as readily as English" ; he continued to read Latin and Greek "without difficulty"; but of German, Italian, and Spanish he seemed to Sanborn to have retained only "a little." — Sanborn, op. cit., pp. 36-37, 105. 213. Journals, I, 4-6, 8-10, 11. The trans- lations appear to be Thoreau 's own; they do not correspond to any known printed versions. They were subsequently used in the Week (Writings, I, 348, 352). Compare also Journals, 1, 15, and Writings, I, 347-38. 214. Among the several inventories that Thoreau made of his library, one hurriedly penciled list includes "Goethe" and "De Stael's Germany." See Van Doren, op. cit., pp. 88-90. De Stael's Germany was first noticed in his Journal on March 4, 1838. Another list, repro- duced in the appendix to Sanborn's biography, includes the following items: (1) "Ein Schau- spiel von Goethe [title not indicated]"; (2) "Schiller's Dreysigjahriger Krieg. Leipzig ed. 2 v." (3) "Life of Schiller. By Carlyle. New York 1 v." (4) "Marie Stuart. Stuttgart und Tu- bingen ed. 1 v. [German]"; (5) [J. F.] Grund's Geometry. 1 v." (6) [Leonhard] Euler's Algebra. Boston. 1 v." (7) "Zimmermann on Solitude. Albany. 1 v." (8) "German Dictionary. Philad. 1 v." (9) "German Reader. By Follen. Boston. 1 v." (10) "German Grammar. By Follen. Boston. 1 v." (11) "Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Boston. 5 v." (12) [Johann M.] Bechstein's Cage Birds and Sweet Warblers. 1 v." and (13) "Giinderode. From the German. 1 v." The last is doubtless Margaret Fuller's translation of the Correspondence of Frdulein Giinderode and Bettina von Arnim, a booklet of 106 pages appearing in 1842, and containing about a fourth of the complete text, subsequently completed and published in 1861. 215. For example, Journal, IX, 242-43 (Feb. 6, 1857), and Writings, V, 318. 216. Channing, op. cit., p. 41. 217. "Thoreau's Journal," Shelburne Es- says, Fifth Series, (N.Y., 1908), p. 118. 218. Again, while there is in Thoreau little concern, in the usual religious sense, with God and the soul, there is "a strong sense of individu- alism, or sublime egoism, reaching out to em- brace the world in ecstatic communion," which is on the surface very much like Schleierma- cher's contemplation of the universe. This reverie, or contemplation, that spurns all lim- itations, Paul Elmer More reminds us, passed easily into the romantic ideal of music — and that in a very literal sense. A music box was for Thoreau a means of consolation for the loss of a brother; a hand organ was an instrument of the gods; and the humming of telegraph wires seemed to speak to his soul of the secret harmony of the universe. (Consult the index to the Journal for illustrative passages.) In the many cases in which Thoreau pavs rhapsodical homage to the droning telegraph wires there is often something vacillating from the sublime to the ludicrous. Nor was Thoreau unaware, as More again reminds us, of this intrusion of humor, or irony, into his ecstasy. Like Fried- rich Schlegel, Thoreau indulged in the romantic irony of smiling down upon himself and walking through life a Doppelgdnger. See Journal, IV, 291 (Aug. 8, 1852), though it does not necessa- rily follow that he learned about romantic irony from the German Romantiker. Other characteristic motifs in Thoreau's books seem to have the mark of German romanticism and suggest either Tieck or Nova- lis. Such are his observations on childhood, on sleep, and on nighttime, on the all-enveloping sacrament of silence, and on the new mythology which is to be the end of our study and our art : "all the phenomena of nature need to be seen from the point of view of wonder and awe. . . . Men are probably nearer to the essential truth in their superstitions than in their reason" (Journal, IV, 158; see also II, 279-80), and other passages as indicated under appropriate rubrics in the index to the Journal. These parallelisms, says P. E. More (op. cit., p. 121), are not cases of translation or plagiar- ism, but rather of that "larger and vague migration of thought from one land to another, a part of the atmosphere or climate in which romanticism thrives, and they show how thoroughly the transcendental philosophy of New England had absorbed, or appropriated, the ideas and language of German romanticism, if not its inmost spirit — however circuitous the line by which they passed from one to the other. However,Thoreau's insistence on moral idealism and "character" is not to be confused with the Gemiit and Gefuhlsphilosophie of the romantische Schule. For a succinct statement of this diver- gence, see ibid., pp. 1 21-31, and for an even stronger statement, Van Doren, op. cit., pp. 54-55. 754 Notes to Pages 434-35 219. Writings, I, 347-52 (including trans- criptions and elaborations from Journal, I, 15), 401; VI, 62, 168, 301, 383; and Journal, I, 19. While he confessed in the Week that he was "not much acquainted with the works of Goethe" (Writings, I, 347), he urged B. B. Wiley to read the A utobiography "by all means" (ibid., VI, 301, Apr. 26, 1857). The only other works of Goethe's that Thoreau mentions are Tasso, Italienische Reise, Iphigenie, Faust, and Mei- ster, though it may be presumed that he also knew Margaret Fuller's translation of Ecker- manns Gesprache (Vol. IV of Ripley's Specimens oj Foreign Standard Literature). Tasso and Italienische Reise he obviously read in the Ger- man, but there is nothing to suggest that he read more of Goethe in the original. He appears to have known enough about Goethe to warrant his drawing a contrast between Carlyle's "titanic" style and the "more lasting style of Goethe," and expressing the wish that Carlyle had "cultivated the style of Goethe more, that of Richter less." — Writings, IV, 331-32. While he admired the truthfulness of Goethe's des- criptions, notably in the Italian Travels (even suggesting that he sought in his own writing to emulate Goethe's descriptive techniques; see Journal, I, 11, 15, and Writings, I, 347-48), yet the very care with which Goethe wrote led him to censure Goethe, who, instead of fulfilling the stature of the Man of Genius, was only the Artisan. See Writings, I, 348-49, as well as pp. 250-51. There is a hint (although it is nowhere stated in so many words) that Puritan Thoreau agreed with Puritan Emerson in being unable to excuse moral laxity in "such as he." Finally, despite all of Goethe's cultivation, he lacked universality — the assertions of Thoreau's fel- low-Transcendentalists notwithstanding (Writ- ings, I, 148-49). In short, Goethe lacked the savage, primitive virtues and was not, after all, Thoreau's man. 220. He mentions Schiller only cursorily in his essay on Carlyle (Writings, IV, 330, 340,351), either in pointing out obvious connections and comparisons with Goethe or in referring to Carlyle's biography of Schiller. He repeatedly draws a parallel between John Brown and Wilhelm Tell (Writings, IV, 441; Journal, I, 196; XII, 412; and Writings, IV, 426, 441); but his knowledge of the Swiss hero could easily have come from other sources than Schiller's play. He possessed, by 1840, a two-volume, Leipzig edition of Schiller's Geschichte des Dreissigjahrigefi Kriegs. Though he normally acquired books for the purpose of reading them, it may, in the absence of any references to Schiller's history, be doubted that he waded through these volumes. Jean Paul F. Richter naturally comes in for a good deal of attention in his essay on Carlyle (Writings, IV, 331, 332, 338, 351), but he is not mentioned elsewhere, and Thoreau probably knew no more of him than what could be gleaned from Carlyle's essays. 221. Writings, IV, 353. 222. The extent of Coleridge's influence on Thoreau has not yet been studied exhaustively, but there are significant suggestions in Craw- ford, op. cit., p. xxviii, and especially in Ray- mond W. Adams, "Thoreau's Literary Theory and Criticism," unpublished Ph.D. diss., Univ. of North Carolina, 1928. 223. Journal, I, 466. 224. For details see Fred W. Lorch, "Tho- reau and the Organic Principle in Poetry," PMLA, LIII, i (Mar., 1938), 286-302, esp. pp. 290-97. Here it may be observed that Thoreau drew from the Harvard library on September 5, 1836, "Schlegel's Hist. Litt. [vol.] 1," and on October 3, 1836, "Schlegel's Hist. Litt. [vol.] 2," and the list of charges for 1836-1837 repeats the same entries. The library had at the time both "F. Schlegel's Geschichte der alten und neuen Litt. 2. Th., Wien, 1815, and Lectures on the Hist, of Lit., 2 vols., Phila., 1818." It is not clear whether Thoreau borrowed the German or the English edition. One important respect in which Thoreau's theory of poetic expression differs from that of the German romanticists derives from the insistence that poetry speaks a higher truth than does the prose of science, and that it adopts a more general and universal language. Poetry, he said, has no antiquity ; it is timeless (Writings, I, 98). "A fact truly stated . . . acquires a mythological or universal signifi- cance" (Journal, III, 65), and requires a more than local, individual, or particular expression: "Say it and have done with it. Express it with- out expressing yourself" (Journal, III, 85). In thus emphasizing impersonality and objectivity as the mark of great writing, he distinguished himself sharply from the typical Gefuhlsmensch among the Germans who dwelt long and loving- ly on his emotional uniqueness. 225. It had twelve American printings be- tween 1793 and 1 8 19, and was very popular during Thoreau's younger years. It may be recalled that the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table remembered seeing it often lying about in libraries or adorning parlor tables. 226. Thoreau's copy, published in Albany, was doubtless the one printed there in 1796. 227. It is believed that Thoreau not only helped Wheeler build his cabin but later spent six weeks with him in his retreat ( Writings, VI, 58-59 n. ; Crawford, op. cit., p. xxxi; Canby, Notes to Pages 435-36 755 op. cit., p. 206). His friend Channing also lived on the prairie, and in March, 1845, wrote urging Thoreau to "go out upon that field which I once christened 'Briars' . . . build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive" (Writings, VI, 121). Emerson, in Nature and elsewhere, had recom- mended solitude, and had, at least in poetry if not in actuality, said good-bye to a proud world. Wordsworth and Coleridge had sought the wild places of the British Isles; Germans like Novalis, of whom a good deal was made in the Dial, had apostrophized night and solitude in much the same manner in which Thoreau came to glorify them ; and finally Zimmermann had popularized the idea of solitary reflection as a cure for souls by presenting a whole pro- gramme in a work of two volumes. 228. See Journal, I, 244 (Apr. 5, 1841), 299 (Dec. 24, 1841). 229. Zimmermann's and Thoreau's ideas diverge at several points. Zimmermann is less copious in his observations on the effect of natural solitude upon the mind than is Thoreau, who found the woods and fields a more satis- factory retiring room than a book-lined study. Although Zimmermann pointed out that soli- tude and simplicity are natural companions, Thoreau put more emphasis on the code of simplicity, especially on renouncing the so- called conveniences of housekeeping. But both sought solitude as an antidote for the frivolity of society and as a proper sphere for the culti- vation of liberty and independence; both recommended solitude as nourishing the mind and feeding the imagination; finally, they agreed in identifying solitude with bravery and both with music — an identification and paral- lelism all the more striking because unusual. Compare Zimmermann's Solitude, Vol. I, Ch. IV, with Thoreau's Journal, I, 102-6. For other parallels between the two see Grant Loomis, "Thoreau and Zimmermann," New Engl. Quar., X, iv (Dec, 1937), 7 8 9~9 2 ; an< 3 Canby, op. cit., p. 206, 470-71, n. 3. 230. Writings, I, 389; V, 318; Journal, III, 118-19 (Nov. 15, 1851); XIII, 153 (Feb. 17, i860). On February 6, i860, Thoreau drew "Gesner" from the Harvard library. There is no indication whether this was the Historia Animalum (4 vols., Tiguri, 1551-1560) or Edward Topsell's translation, The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes . . . Collected out of the volumes of Conradus Gesner, and all other Writers (London, 1607). When he had occasion to quote Gesner in his books or in the Journal, he used Topsell. See, e.g., Writ- ings, V, 318. Since these references extend from 1846 to i860, the presumption is strong that Topsell's Gesner was in his own library. 231. Writings, IV, 121; V, 92-93; Journal, II, 11; V, 117, 120-21. Several of these quo- tations were transferred bodily from the jour- nals to the works, as were some from Topsell's Gesner. Most of the quotations from Humboldt are drawn from his Personal Narrative of Travels on the New Continent. I have not been able to identify the particular translation of Humboldt that Thoreau used. 232. Journal, III, 200 (Jan. 17, 1852). The passage is quoted later in Walden (Writings, II, 25). Madame Pfeiffer was an adventuresome German traveler who published in 1850 Eine Frauenfahrt um die Welt. In July, 1854, the Harvard library acquired the second English edition of this work, entitled A Woman's Journey Round the World. Thoreau's quotation is derived from Chapter XXII, page 301, of this edition. Quite possibly Thoreau knew also the translation made by William Hazlitt (London, 1852). 233. Crantz's History of Greenland is quoted four times in Cape Cod (Writings, IV, 60, 60-61, 149-50). I have not found the passages in Thoreau's Journal. He withdrew "Crantz's Greenland 1. 2." from the Harvard library on February 6, i860. Although the library possess- ed also several copies of Crantz in German, the one used by Thoreau was doubtless the History of Greenland: from the High-Dutch (2 vols., London, 1767). For information regarding Thoreau's with- drawals at Cambridge I am indebted to Profes- sor Francis L. Utley. It seems that Thoreau borrowed only one other German work from the Harvard library. On December 10, 1855, he took out "Loskiel Mission . . . America 1796 [1794?]." The library had at the time Georg H. Loskiel's Geschichle der Mission der Ev. Briidcr unter den Indianern in Nordamerika (Leipzig, 1789), and the History of the Missions of the United Brethren among the Indians in North America, (tr. by C. I. La Trobe, London, 1794). I have not noted any use that Thoreau made of this work in either the original or the translation. 234. Channing, op. cit. (1873), p. 40. Other occasional references occur to the Nibelungen- lied (Journal, I, 57), to Luther (Writings, IV, 333), Barthold G. Niebuhr (ibid., V, 290), and Johann J. Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art (Journal, IX, 242-43), but the sum of their combined significance is slight. HERMAN MELVILLE 235. Moby-Dick, I, 139, 167. All references are to the Standard edition, 16 vols., London, 1922-1924. 756 Notes to Pages 436-37 236. The extraordinary range of literary and historical allusion in his "Fragments from a Writing Desk," composed seven years before Typee, suggests that the young man was no stranger to books. His brief subjection to the classical curriculum of the Albany Academy laid the foundation for the knowledge of the classics which his later writings reveal, and it may be presumed that he read somewhat during the years from 1837 to 1841, when he taught school in New York and Massachusetts. It has been suggested that books, among them Otto von Kotzebue's New Voyage Round the World (1830), first aroused what Melville called his "everlasting itch for things remote" which sent him a-whaling in the first place, thus preparing him for his writing career. While the whaling adventure was primarily an education by experience, his signing on the Lucy Ann on the return voyage threw him much in the company of Dr. Long Ghost (John B. Troy ?), a colorful adventurer and "a capital fellow to finish Melville's education." — R. M. Weaver, Her- man Melville, Mariner and Mystic (N.Y., 1921), p. 218. Dr. Long Ghost was an educated man who had enjoyed having and spending money, had cultivated a fine taste for wines, and had associated with gentlemen. During the long hours of the night, Melville found him a boon companion; he could quote Vergil, talk learned- ly of Hobbes of Malmesbury, and repeat poetry by the canto (see Omoo, pp. 13-15). "He was himself a picaresque library, and he who ran with him had much to read." — Weaver, op. cit., p. 53. Later, aboard the U.S. frigate United States, Melville found not only the raw materials for White-Jacket but a man named "Nord," in whose eyes Melville recognized at once "a reader of good books ... an earnest thinker," who had "been bolted in the mill of adversity." With Nord, he "scoured all the prairies of reading, dived into the bosom of authors, and tore out their hearts." — White- Jacket, p. 63. For a suggestive account of how Melville came, even during his experience on the United States, to appreciate philosophical books in a manner to learn to do a little "prancing" of his own "on Coleridge's High German horse," see Ch. XLI of White- Jacket, pp. 207-9. Thus was born the writer Melville who described himself as "a pondering man," and who professed, "I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans." — Weaver, op, cit., p. 339; Moby-Dick, I, 167. 237. Journal up the Straits . . . ed. by R. M. Weaver (N.Y., 1935), Introduction, p. v. 238. Evert Duyckinck's choice collection of 17,000 volumes and the lists of "Books Lent" that Duyckinck kept give us some insight into the use Melville made of his opportunities. For suggestive details regarding his reading, see Willard Thorp (ed.), Melville. Representative Selections . . . (N.Y., 1938), pp. xxv-xxviii; Luther S. Mansfield, Herman Melville, Author and New Yorker 1844-1851 (Chicago, 1938), pp. 189-208; Wm. Braswell, Melville's Religious Thought . . . (Durham, N.C., 1943), pp. 3-18; K. H. Sundermann, Herman Melvilles Gedan- kengut . . . (Berlin, 1937); and esp. Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (2 vols., N.Y., 1951), I, 1936. It requires no great effort to gauge the impact of his rapidly widening familiarity with books as it is manifested in the greater allusiveness and the tendency toward philosophical allegory in Mardi of 1849 and White- Jacket of 1850. It is this quickening of his philosophical percep- tions that Melville referred to when he told Hawthorne: "From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then [1844] and now, that I have not unfolded within myself." — Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (2 vols., Boston, 1884), I, 405. 239. Leyda, op. cit., I, 319-23; Weaver, Mel- ville, pp. 285, 286-89. With Adler he sketched "a plan for going down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople ; thence to Athens by the steamer; to Beyrout and Jerusalem — Alexandria and the Pyramids." While these plans came to naught for lack of money, they stuck together throughout Melville's stay in England, and subsequently Adler turned up in Paris to help Melville over his difficulties with French and to resume their talks of "high Ger- man metaphysics." Melville's brief Rhineland tour was rendered cheerless after Adler's departure and of little profit to him so far as acquiring much of the German spirit goes; but back in London his haunting the bookshops may be presumed to have been inspired partly by a desire to provide himself with the materials more expertly to "ride the high German horse." Among books acquired were no German titles, for Melville knew no German; but it may well be that his purchase in London of Goethe's Autobiography and his Letters from Italy (both in the Bohn edition), coupled with his meeting Bayard Taylor soon after his return, stimulated his interest in Goethe. Another German book purchased at the time was Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, subsequently referred to a number of times in his writings. — Weaver, Melville, pp. 298-99, 301-2, 304; Mansfield, op. cit., p. 199. In the spring of 1857, on the return trip from the Holy Land, Melville made a leisurely and more enjoyable tour of Germany. He crossed Switzerland from Lake Maggiore and entered Notes to Page 437 757 Germany at Basel, proceeded to Heidelberg and Frankfurt (where the places of Goethe interest fascinated him), and thence down the Rhine to Amsterdam. — Journal up the Straits, pp. 166— 7 1 - 240. Weaver, Melville, p. 308. 241. For his reading of German authors he appears to have relied largely upon the Duyck- inck, the New York Library Society, and other New York collections. Something, we may be sure, came to him by way of Carlyle, several of whose books he owned and several others of which he borrowed from Duyckinck, but whom he does not mention in his writings, though the marks of Carlyle's influence are everywhere, especially in Pierre. See R. S. Forsythe (ed.), Pierre (N.Y., 1941), pp. xxxvi-xxxvii. He learned still more about German thought from Coleridge, whom he repeatedly mentions. See White- Jacket, pp. 63, 193, 207; Moby-Dick, I, 236-37; Billy Budd, p. 389; and the diary, quoted by Weaver, Melville, p. 285; also Bras- well, op. cit., pp. 20, 108. In London, in 1849, he acquired the Bulwer Lytton translation of The Poems and Ballads oj Schiller, and shortly after his return from abroad, borrowed Evert Duyck- inck's two-volume (London, 1845) edition of Jean Paul's Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; also Sartor Resartus, Heroes and Hero-Worship and Carlyle's versions of Wilhelm Meister and German Romance. In 1862 he bought and read Madame de Stael's Germany in a New York edition of 1859, underscoring (and commenting upon) various passages in her discussion of Goethe's Elective Affinities that confirmed his own doubts about human intellectual profundi- ty. — Mansfield, op. cit., pp. 199, 206; Braswell, op. cit., p. 15; Leyda, op. cit., II, 651. During the last years of his life he acquired seven volumes of Schopenhauer's works (then being made available in English) and marked numer- ous passages apparently consonant with his own views, but they came too late to exert any in- fluence on his more characteristic writings. For details, see Braswell, op. cit., pp., 117, 144, n. 49- 242. Journal up the Straits, pp. 79-80. 243. Strauss's Life of Jesus, says Melville, has robbed the pilgrim to the Holy Land of much that was formerly sacred. — Ibid., pp. 107-8. Clarel, which represents his mature deliberations on the conflict between knowl- edge and faith, science and religion, often returns to the same theme. See Clarel, I, 136; also Moby-Dick, II, 106; Weaver, Melville, p. 360; and Wm. E. Sedgwick, Herman Melville. The Tragedy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), pp. 208-14. 244. It was this torn state of mind that Hawthorne came to know well in his friend while they lived near each other in the Berk- shires, and when they sometimes "talked onto- logical heroics together" and argued "about time and eternity, things of this world and the next, and books, and publishers, and all possi- ble and impossible matters . . . deep into the night." — Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 400, 415. And it was this same perplexity of mind that Hawthorne commented on sadly five years later when Melville visited him in Liverpool, just before embarking for the Near East, as the result of Melville's long wandering over the deserts of speculation and his inability either to believe or to "be comfortable in his unbelief." — ■ Ibid., II, 135. 245. Miss Nathalia Wright has counted some 600 Biblical references in Melville's prose writings. SeeAmer. Lit., XII, ii (May, 1940), 185. He referred to St. Augustine on original guilt; he was brought up on Calvin ; he wrote familiar- ly of Luther and Melanchthon, he read John and Jeremy Taylor, Fuller, Burton, Browne, Massillon, Tillotson, Bayle, Montaigne, Vol- taire, Paine, Volney, Herbert of Cherbury, Edwards, and Ethan Allen ; and he searched Dante and Milton for their contributions to his problems. He had some knowledge of Polyne- sian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Persian religions, and he avowed a special interest in the position of evil in Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Parseeism. There are also references to the early Christian heretics, the Gnostics, and the Marcionites. He wrote familiarly of Mohammed and the Koran years before he went to the Holy Land, and there are "incidental references to Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese, and Norse beliefs and an abundance of references to Greek and Roman mythologies." — Braswell, op. cit., pp. 11-14, 18. 246. He knew something of Baconian utili- tarianism and Spinoza's pantheism. He wrote of Hobbes as if he knew a great deal about him ; he commented at length on the Lockean re- jection of innate ideas; he referred to Berkeley on matter, Edwards on will, and Priestley on necessity; he praised Hume's skepticism, and in his copy of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea he heavily underscored a passage which reads: "From every page of David Hume there is more to be learned than from the col- lected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart, and Schleiermacher together." — Braswell, op. cit., pp. 14, 15, and notes. 247. In his copy of World as Will and Idea, (I, xi), he marked Schopenhauer's passage on the significance of Kant, and opposite a pas- sage in his copy of Literature and Dogma, in which Arnold spoke of "something splay, some- 758 Notes to Pages 437-39 thing blunt-edged, unhandy, and infelicitous" in the German mind as well as in the language, he wrote "True" (ibid., p. 15), whence we con- clude that he was not overfond of German ways of thought, though he knew too little German to have formed an intelligent opinion based on his own reading of the German philosophers in their own language. 248. Redburn, p. 254; Mardi, I, 14. 249. Mardi, I, 230, 244, 325, 339, 366-69; II, 37, 86-87, 104, 140-42, 160-61, 189, 212, 255, 298-303, 309-11, 329. Other notable references to Kant, aside from the satirical passages on the post-Kantians and the British and American disciples, occur in Moby-Dick, II, 59 ; Pierre, pp. 372, 390-92, 409, 418; and in his diary, quoted in Weaver, Melville, pp. 285, 288. 250. Thus it would appear that Melville knew something about Kantian thought some time before he met Professor Adler and Dr. Taylor. The tone of dissatisfaction with Ger- man metaphysics and the satirical note that characterizes several of his references to the Transcendentalists is doubtless indicative less of disrespect for Kant or critical transcenden- talism than of impatience with abstruse philos- ophy of whatever kind that leads to no positive conclusion or that pretends to more than it achieves. Although he had come to suspect, when he wrote Mardi, that the question "What is Truth ? is more final than any answer" (Mardi, I, 329), as a voyager in the "World of Mind" he dared not overlook any readings or bearings by which he might steer a safe course among the Mardian Isles. 251. Moby-Dick, I, 234-44 passim. 252. Ibid., I, 222. 253. Ibid., I, 204. 254. Pierre, p. 233. 255. At least, Melville's outburst (ibid., p. 421) against "practical unreason" seems to indicate as much. 256. Ibid., p. 231; see also pp. 384, 473, 499. 257. Pierre's experiences serve but to con- firm what Melville had said to Hawthorne: "Perhaps, after all, there is no secret . . . [and] the Problem of the Universe is like the Free- mason's mighty secret, so terrible to all chil- dren. It turns out, at last, to consist of a triangle, a mallet, and an apron, — nothing more." — Julian Hawthorne, op. cii., I, 388. Truth, Melville concluded, lies at the bottom of an endless spiral staircase, concealed by the endlessness of the spirals and the blackness of the shaft. See Pierre, p. 402; also pp. 397, 421, 472. 258. After coming to another impasse in Pierre, Melville shrank within himself. While he continued, as Hawthorne observed, to wander to and fro in the "dismal and monoto- nous" metaphysical regions, and on occasions to regale his friends and visitors with philosophi- cal monologues in the Coleridgean manner, his will to believe appears to have effected at least a partial triumph by the time he wrote Clarel (1876), in which he heaps scorn upon Jewish Margoth, a shallow scientist, who, in his in- sensibility to spiritual values, declares that "All's mere geology," while an ass brays con- firmation (Clarel, I, 310; see also p. 329; Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., II, 135; Braswell, op. cit., pp. 108, 110-20; and Weaver, Melville, pp. 16, 351). At all events, when, during the last year of his life, he wrote Billy Budd, he penned what has been called his "testament of acceptance." See E. L. G. Watson, "Melville's Testament of Acceptance," New Engl. Quar., VI (June, 1933). 319-27. The daemonic titanism of Ahab has given way before a sense of resignation to the inscrutable laws of the universe and acquies- cence in the wisdom of God that remains still past man's finding out, but that is no longer hateful. In what degree this change of heart is attributable to the growing influence upon him of the Christian tradition, the mediating and humanizing experiencing of life and old age, a re-examination of and a pondering upon Kant- ian ethics, or other influences is conjectural. What can be asserted with fair assurance is that his heaping of abuse upon the "new Apostles . . . muttering Kantian categories through teeth and lips dry and dusty as any miller's, with the crumbs of Graham crackers' ' (Pierre, p. 418) proceeds less from any dissatis- faction with Kant than from the persistence of certain "reconcilers" of the "Optimist" or "Compensation" school (ibid., p. 385) — that is, philosophers who pretend to have found the talismanic secret. The group includes all those from Plato and Spinoza to Goethe and Emer- son "and many more" who belong to "this guild of self-imposters," together with "a preposter- ous rabble of Muggletonian Scots and Yankees, whose vile brogue still the more bespeaks the stripedness of their Greek and German Neopla- tonic originals" (ibid., p. 290). It is noteworthy that Kant is never mentioned in this company. He probably had in mind men like Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher among the Ger- mans, and Carlyle and Emerson among Scotch and Yankee disciples. The transcendentalist philosopher Plotinus Plinlimnon in Pierre, the spineless Rev. Mr. Falsgrave in the same book, and the chaplain in White- Jacket, who is genial, well bred, and learned in Plato and in the Ger- man philosophers, but who preaches sermons wholly unsuited to the crew — these are not attacks on Kant but on false disciples and Notes to Page 439 759 traducers of honest divers after the truth like Kant. But even Emerson, whose optimism Melville could not stomach, and whose reputa- tion for expounding unintelligible "transcen- dentalisms, myths and oracular gibberish" had predisposed Melville to question his sincerity — even this Emerson, granted that he be a hum- bug, seemed to Melville "no common humbug". For the sake of argument (he wrote to Evert Duyckinck) let us call Emerson a fool: "Then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. — I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more. ..." He does not credit Emerson precisely with this ability, but he improves the occasion to honor "the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving and coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began." (See Thorp, op. cit., pp. 371-72). For Melville, Kant was one of those thought-divers, and there is not an instance among the dozens of passages that belittle his disciples of all kinds which impugns Kant's sincerity or depreciates his philosophic abilities. The passage in Moby-Dick (II, 59), in which Melville recommends that Ahab, rather than balance Locke against Kant, throw both over- board if he wishes the Pequod to "float light and right," is not so much a condemnation of either Locke or Kant, or both, as an expression of discontent with all philosophy. It is of the same order as Emerson's asking, "Who has not looked into a metaphysical book ? And what sensible man ever looked twice?" — Works, II, 438. 259. Pierre, p. 233. 260. Of the German post-Kantians Melville appears to have known little beyond what he learned from his conversations with Taylor and Adler respecting them. Schleiermacher and the Schlegels are mentioned once, and Schelling not at all; there are in Moby-Dick (II, 190) and notably in Mardi (I, 268; II, 279; see also Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 387-88) passages emphasizing the Ego in a manner suggesting Fichte, but the ideas need not have come direct- ly from Fichte. A single reference to Hegel is made en passant in Clarel (I, 246) and has no particular significance. Herder is passed over altogether. Zimmermann on solitude is twice mentioned in The Confidence Man — pp. 75, 180. There is some concern with pseudo-scientists like Lavater, whose Physiognomy Melville purchased in 1850. Lavater is directly men- tioned several times (Mardi, I, 294; II, 227; Moby-Dick, II, 81, 83; Redburn, p. 351), and there are some allusions to his characteristic ideas (Mardi, I, 113; Moby-Dick, II, 83; Pierre, p. 109; The Confidence Man, p. 309; Clarel, II, 56). The same is true of Gall, Spurzheim, and Mesmer) Mardi, II, 227; Moby-Dick, II, 81; Billy Budd, pp. 72-73; Meade Minnigerode, Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville, N. Y., 1922, p. 71), but concern with phrenology, physiognomy, and mesmerism in the periodical literature of the day and popular interest in them was so widespread that no special im- portance attaches to such references as Mel- ville makes to them. 261. Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 401. In 1856, in Constantinople, he recalled Schiller's Ghostseer (Journal up the Straits, p. 32), and four years later he reread some of Schiller's ballads (Sundermann, op. cit., p. 111). In The Confidence Man (p. 251) he expressed some doubt about Schiller's tenet that "beauty is at bottom incompatible with ill." A final reference occurs in his lecture on "Travelling." See also Leon Howard, Herman Melville. A Biography (N.Y., I 95 I ). P- 333- Obviously Schiller did not provide a vitally inspiring force for Melville. 262. Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 406. Pro- fessor Leon Howard (op. cit., pp. 171, 179, 194; also p. 299) finds unmistakable evidence that Melville read Goethe's Autobiography with special reference to his own inner unfolding while he pondered the allegorical ambiguities of Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre. He alludes to Eckermann's Gesprdche several times (Mardi, I, 204; Moby-Dick, I, xix; II, 119; Pierre, p. 284) ; he mentions Werther twice (Clarel, p. 284; The Confidence Man, p. 22) ; and he appears thoroughly familiar with Faust (Mardi, I, 45 ; White- Jacket, p. 23 ; Moby-Dick, I, 174; Irsael Potter, p. 163; The Confidence Man, p. 223; Billy Budd, p. 315). He repeats Goethe's "See Naples, and — then die!" from the Italian letters (Poems, p. 384), and Dr. Sundermann has discovered a similarity be- tween Goethe's "Mohamets Gesang" and Mel- ville's poem "The Muster" (Poems, pp. 108-9), written in 1865. Following an argument in Clarel (II, 12-13) turning upon the Christian concept of Heaven as a haven for the oppressed, the theme of love as presented in the Sermon on the Mount, and evil in human nature, Melville remarks: "We've touched a theme / From which the club and lyceum swerve, / Nor Herr von Goethe would esteem." Here is reflected the popular American conception of Goethe as a worldly, hedonistic pagan, characterized by Pierre as a "gold-laced virtuoso" and an "inconceivable coxcomb" (Pierre, pp. 421-22; but see Moby-Dick, II, 119). Goethe's claim that he found the "Talis- manic Secret" but proves Goethe a pretentious quack who belongs, with Plato and Spinoza, to the "guild of self-imposters" (Pierre, p. 290). 760 Notes to Paces 439-40 Hateful as he found Goethe's "pantheism," he found even more detestable his optimism : "Goethe's 'Live in the all'" leads himd to ex- postulate, "What nonesense!" Yet he added this postscript: "This 'all' feeling, though, there is some truth in it. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer's day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. . . . This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion." — Julian Haw- thorne, op. cit., I, 406. Here speaks Melville the intellectual skeptic who has come to see truth as so partial or many-sided that he regards the assertion of its pretensions and even the search for it ridiculous. 263. Op. cit., pp. 113 ft. 264. Pierre, p. 74; see also pp. 57, 235-39. 265. Ibid., p. 297. MARGARET FULLER 266. R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J . F. Clarke, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (2 vols., Boston, 1881), I, 114. Apparently no one impelled her more than the younger Carlyle to a study of the German writers, though F. H. Hedge, who had known her since 1823, en- couraged her to study German and lent her books from his library. Even when she was only 13, Hedge had been impressed by her energetic, robust personality — her mind of "mighty force" and her "independent spirit full of extravagant enthusiasms for great literature." — Ibid., I, 90-93. Except for her periods of residence at Groton, Mass., in 1824-1826 and 1 833-1 836, she moved in the social and intel- lectual circles of Cambridge throughout the formative years of her life. She was virtually a member of the famous Class of 1829, for she knew personally the students and professors identified with the new spirit at Harvard at that period. Besides Hedge, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke among the students, Professors Everett, Ticknor, Beck, Follen, and Grater were her friends and mentors. See Thos. W. Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (2nd ed., Boston, 1884), pp. 33, 44-45. About 1832 there was a crystallization of the slowly developing tendencies toward the study of German. In that year Ripley, Parker, and Clarke were first attracted to it, and Margaret's mind was ready to approach the Germans sympathetically. As yet she had found no sphere of activity fully to engage her active mind and well-trained talents. Her first period of study of the language proved a welcome release from the confines of what she considered her circumscribed existence, compounded of what she called "a heavy weight of deceived friend- ship" and "a great burden of family cares." She likened her progress in German to "the rebound of a string pressed almost to bursting." — Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Arthur B. Fuller (new ed., Boston, 1893), pp. 358-59. She occupied herself with the masterpieces of French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish literatures as well as with the German, but to her passion- ate, essentially romantic nature it soon became evident that the recent German literature spoke more directly than any other.— Memoirs, I, 1 12-13. Though self-taught, she gained profi- ciency in German in a remarkably short time. Clarke reports in detail on her studies in 1832: within the year she has read Goethe's Faust, Tasso, Iphigenie, Hermann und Dorothea, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, and Dichtung und Wahr- heit, as well as substantial portions of the works of Tieck, Korner, Novalis, Jean Paul, and Schiller. Even during 1833-1836, while livingat Groton, cut off from the intellectual atmos- phere of Cambridge, she went on with her studies uninterruptedly, Hedge and Clarke sending her books from their own libraries. Thus she added to her knowledge the dramas of Lessing, the poetry of Heine, Klopstock, and Uhland, and other writings of Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, and Schiller's chief plays, as well as the historical and critical works of Goethe and Schiller. For details see Memoirs, I, 108, 121-22, 130, 147-48, 150, 160, 169-70, 174, 242-44; Higginson, op. cit., pp. 89-90; and Harold C. Goddard, Studies in New England Transcendentalism (N.Y., 1908), pp. 93-97. 267. Memoirs, I, 55, 127, 123 — 24. She got Fichte and Jacobi, but found she "could not understand [Fichte] at all, though the treatise .... was one intended to be popular," while Jacobi she could understand only "in details, but not in system." Even "consulting Buhle's and Tennemann's histories of philosophy and dipping into Brown, Stewart, and that class of books" proved unsatisfactory. — Ibid., pp. 127- 28, 165. She took up the study of De Wette and Herder as early as 1833, but she quickly learned that neither provided the "system" that answered her needs. During her residence at Groton, too, she dipped into German theolo- gy and read Eichhorn and Jahn in the original. She was attempting to study the "evidences of Christianity" at a time when, as she wrote Dr. Hedge, she "doubted the providence of God, but not the immortality of the soul." Her translating the German theologians, chiefly De Wette and Herder, for Dr. Channing one eve- ning a week during 1836 and her reading of De Wette's Theodore (which she put aside without Notes to Pages 440-41 761 finishing) likewise left no permanent impression on her mind. — Ibid., pp. 175, 245-46; Higgin- son, op. cit., p. 45. 268. Memoirs, I, 234; also pp. 236-38. 269. The instrumentality of Coleridge, as well as of her Transcendentalist friends, notably Emerson, in the formulation of her private creed is apparent. Never systematically for- mulating her philosophy, she did adumbrate a philosophical position that has points in com- mon with German idealism in general and with Fichte's social ethics and Schelling's panthe- istic Identitdtsphilosophie in particular. Hers was a view which saw the universe as a continu- ous process, with gradations of being ranging from "nature" at the bottom through "man" to "Spirit," or" higher existence," at the sum- mit. This universe was a kind of idealist abso- lute under the aspect of eternity, but from the temporal aspect it was in process of becoming. The human will was the agency that carried forward the movement from nature to Spirit, and it is Spirit that ascends through, though "not superseding nature." Margaret placed strong emphasis on the organic unity, the one- ness and interdependence of parts, with which she viewed the life process. Phrases to the effect that "life and thought" are man's "means of interpreting nature and aspiring to God" point up her conception of the duty of effort and discipline in the struggle toward perfection. Nature is a system whose laws demand man's active work of "interpreting," and God, together with other "intelligences," is a trans- cendent principle, to which man aspires, but which is hardly encompassed by human under- standing. This basically Emersonian metaphys- ical stucture underlies her thought throughout the period of her work in New England. See her "Credo" in Memoirs, I, 88-89; also pp. 77, 123, and the summary of her argument in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, given in Mason Wade, Margaret Fuller, Whetstone of Genius (N.Y., 1940), p. 289. 270. Memoirs, II, 85. 271. Ibid., p. 74. 272. Ibid., I, 342. 273. Ibid., II, 133. 274. Ibid., I, 340-41, 342. Changes wrought on this theme are to be found in all that Mar- garet wrote, especially in Woman in the Nine- teenth Century, where the passages are too numerous to list. Poesy was "the always baf- fled, always reaspiring hope of the finite to compass the infinite," the "Sehnsucht of mu- sic." — Ibid., p. 175. It found expression in "External Nature; the Life of Man; Literature; The Fine Arts." — Ibid., I, 327. Again, in an- other formulation, she wrote of "Religion, in the two modulations of poetry and music," which "descends through an infinity of waves to the lowest abysses of human nature." — Art, Literature, and the Drama (Boston, 1889), p. 16. 275. Memoirs, II, 134; see also I, 120; II, 39. 276. Ibid., I, 189-91, 265, 278, 319-20. 277. Ibid., p. 186. 278. One of the concrete results was her translation, made about 1841, of Schelling's famous lecture Vber das Verhdltnis der bilden- den Kunste zur Natur, the effect of which can be traced in the fragmentary accounts and snatches from her Conversations that we have in her memoirs (ibid., I, 319-51, esp. pp. 324-27, 324-27, 340-45). Ironically enough, as Dr. Wellek observes, she might have saved herself the labor if she had recalled, from her reading of Coleridge's Literary Remains in 1837, that Coleridge's paraphrase in his lecture, "Poesy or Art" already made this treatise available. — Rene Wellek, "The Minor Transcendentalists and German Philosophy, ' ' New Engl. Quar., XV, iv (Dec, 1942), 678-79. Sara Coleridge's edition of Coleridge's Notes and Lectures (1849) lists the parallels between Schelling and Coleridge. It is worth observing that Coleridge's "Poesy or Art" offers one of the few instances, if not the only one, where he employs the word "poesy," and insofar as Schelling stood close to the fore- front of his mind at the time when he wrote the lecture, the German origin of the term seems as inescapable in his case as in Margaret's. In 1847, when Dr. Hedge published his Prose Writers of Germany, he used J. E. Cabot's translation of Schelling's lecture, and Margaret's remains still unpublished. 279. Memoirs, I, 171. In her journalistic work in New York, after the autumn of 1844, she wrote very little on philosophy, theology, or science. There is a review by her of A. v. Humboldt's Kosmos in the Tribune for July 1 1, 1845; a brief biographical notice of William Smith's Memoir of J. G. Fichte, for July 9, 1846; and in reviewing new editions of C. B. Brown's Ormond and Wieland (Tribune, July 25, 1846) she wrote with disarming innocence of Brown and Godwin as "born Hegelians, without the pretensions of science." Apparently she never got much beyond her earlier difficulties with Jacobi and Fichte. 280. Memoirs, I, 204-5. 281. Her class of beginners could read, at the end of three weeks, thirty pages at a lesson. "With more advanced pupils," she reported, "I read, in twenty-four weeks, Schiller's Don Car- los, Artists, and Song of the Bell . . . Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea, Goetz . . . Iphigenia, first part of Faust, — 3 weeks of thorough study ... as valuable to me as to them, — -and 762 Notes to Page 441 Clavigo . . . Lessing's Nathan, Minna, Emilia Galeotti [sic] ; parts of Tieck's Phantasus, and nearly the whole of Richter's Titan." — Ibid., I, 174. We may be sure that this remarkable list of books was covered in twenty-four weeks ony by dint of hard work and superior stimulatioln from the teacher. Her choice of works, especial- ly her emphasis on Goethe, when Goethe was widely suspect, and when the teaching of Ger- man literature was in its formative stages, is testimony to her discrimination. Her choice of Tieck and Jean Paul betrays a leaning toward romanticism which is a significant portent of later developments. 282. It was observed by many who heard her Conversations later that they were based essentially on the principles and methods of the classroom. 283. Her experiences in the liberal atmos- phere of Alcott's Temple School gave her decided and advanced opinions on the teaching of for- eign languages to children. She was convinced that the modern European tongues, "by familiar instruction and an intelligent method," might be taught "with perfect ease during the years of childhood." She felt that "much of the most precious part of short human lives is now wasted from an ignorance of what might easily be done for children, and without taking from them time they need for common life, play, and bodily growth, more than at present." — Life Without and Life Within, pp. 95-96, 103. It was to be several decades before the principles here enunciated got as much as recognition, much less practical introduction, in the educational system of our country. 284. For her detailed plans, see Memoirs, I, 168-69. 285. Higginson relates an anecdote to the effect that when Margaret's successor in Al- cott's school was confronted by one of Marga- ret's admirers who claimed, "Miss Fuller says she thinks in German; do you believe it ?" the reply was, "Oh, yes! I do not doubt it; I myself dream in Cherokee." — Op. cit., pp. 92-93. Horace Greeley, writing after Margaret's death, seriously put forth the theory that her knowledge of German hampered her expression in English. The so-called German influence on her expression is not so much the result as the evidence of her sympathy for the writers of the German Romantic School. She admired Novalis and Jean Paul despite — or perhaps because of — their fondness for far-fetched metaphors, symbolism, dark allegory, and discursiveness. But readers who have trouble with her writing are oftener struggling with her thought than with her mode of expressing it. She was a subtle psychologist; her mind moved suddenly, some- times brilliantly, from a central theme to tangential matters, and she had little gift for shaping her thoughts into any kind of external orderliness. She was often careless about grammatical structure and wrote too hastily to make the successive steps of her thought clear; she seldom revised and was too impatient to polish her expression. Poe, always a severe critic of expression, while calling her an "ill- tempered" and "detestable old maid," yet admitted his admiration for her style (Works, Harrison ed., XV, 79; XVII, 290, 333). Margaret's fervent desire to visit the German scenes made vivid by her reading was frustrated first by family complications and later by her overwhelming disappointment over the sad termination of her romance with James Nathan (Gotendorf), the Hamburg merchant, whom she had met in New York. When she finally went to Europe, many things prevented her visit to Germany, among them a shift in her interests away from Germany to contemporary France, England, and Italy. So "Germanico" never set foot on German soil. 286. See her statement in the Dial, II, i (July, 1841), 134; also Art, Literature, and the Drama, p. 7; Life Without and Life Within, p. 96; and Memoirs, I, 169. It is not recorded how many of her "Conversations" were on the subject of German literature. The only indica- tion is that "Goethe" is named as one of the topics, but undoubtedly she drew largely upon her favorite reading, even when the announced topic was "Mythology" or "Nature." — Memoirs I. 35i- 287. Higginson, op. cit., p. 141. She supported the venture with characteristic generosity and idealistic enthusiasm. She received little, if any, of the promised compensation for her work as editor of the Dial during its first two years or for her translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, published in Ripley's series. Though German literature had found cham- pions before Margaret Fuller wrote for the Dial, the proportion of material on the subject was nowhere so high as in that magazine. Roughly classifying the contents of the Dial as literature (including literary criticisms and book reviews), philosophy, theology, social criticism, education, the arts, and the sciences, an analysis of its four volumes shows that literature absorbed 56.3 per cent of the total space, or 317 items, aggregating 1142 pages. A breakdown of the latter, according to nationali- ties, reveals the following percentages of space: American, 53 per cent, or 255 items totaling 607 pages; German, 18.4 per cent (21 items, 210 pages); Greek, 5 per cent (4 items, 57 pages); Notes to Pages 441-43 763 French, 4.3 per cent (3 items, 48 pages) ; Italian, 1.9 per cent (4 items, 21 pages); all others (Chinese, Latin, Indian, Egyptian, Spanish, etc.) receiving less than 1 per cent each. 288. Art, Literature, and the Drama, pp. 353- 449. An excerpt (Act II, sc. 1-2) appeared in the Dial, II, iii (Jan., 1842), 399-407. In the Preface she made abundant apologies for the shortcomings of her translation: inexact metri- cal pattern, broken lines, slight omissions, condensations of thought, and a few miscon- structions of idiomatic expressions; yet the work is rendered in clear, simple verse and, on the whole does justice to the structure and tone of the original. She took Coleridge's treatment of Wallenstein for her ideal of translation, preserving a tender conscience about the liberties permissible in the translator's art. See Life Without and Life Within, p. 96, and Art, Literature, and the Drama, pp. 355-56; also the Preface to her translation of Giinderode (Boston, 1861), p. vi: "The exact transmission of thought seems to me the one important thing in a trans- lation; if grace and purity of style come of themselves, it is so much gained." 289. Memoirs, I, 287. 290. He fidgeted under her attentions, and she smarted at his rebuffs. She tried the art of pleasing, cajolery, and what she termed "shocking familiarity"; but Emerson main- tained his reserve toward the woman who asked him archly, "Who would be a goody that could be a genius ?" Finally they came to an under- standing: Margaret recorded having "an ex- cellent talk: we agreed that my God was love, his truth." Thereafter she was content to accept his friendship on his, not her, terms. Wistfully she wrote, "My expectations are moderate now!" — H. R. Warfel, "Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson," PMLA, L (June, 1935). 577-78, 581-82, 589-83. 291. Higginson, op. cit., p. 189. 292. As a girl, Bettina (1 785-1 859) had been closely associated with the Heidelberg school of romantics. In many ways she carried to an extreme the idiosyncrasies, the hyperemotional- ity, the pose of spiritual flirtatiousness of that group. In America she became known through her sensational, partly fictional Goethes Brief- wechsel mit einem Kinde (1835-1837), wherein she styled herself as the admiring "child" who basked in the radiance of Goethe's company. Emerson was fond of Bettina's "pure and poetic" nature, "her wit, humor, will, and pure aspirations," and encouraged the appearance of the first American edition of Goethe's Corre- spondence with a Child in 1841 (See Journals , V, 145, 237-38; VI, 229; IX, 212; Letters, II, 208- 9, 210 n., 220, 236. 254 n. ; III, 77); but Mar- garet was the first to notice Bettina, for she owned, or at least was reading, the book in May, 1838 (Emerson's Letters, II, 135-36). There was formed quickly a little Bettina-cult among such adherents of Transcendentalism as Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Sturgis, J. S. D wight, G. W. Curtis, Louisa May Alcott, Mrs. Eliza Buckminster Lee, and Albert Brisbane. 293. Die Giinderode (2 vols., Griinberg, 1840; published in America as Giinderode (Boston, 1842) ; reprinted as Giinderode. Correspondence of Fraulein Giinderode and Bettina von Arnim (Boston, 1 861). The first eighty-six pages are essentially the same text as that of the 1842 edition; the remainder, together with minor revisions of the first part, was translated by Mrs. Minna Wesselhoeft. 294. See Margaret's "Bettina Brentano and her Friend Giinderode, "Dial, II, iii (Jan., 1842), 351; also p. 316; Memoirs, II, 51-52, 58, 140. 295. Giinderode (Boston, 1842), pp. vi-ix. 296. Margaret's life as a case history of pathological repression and sublimation is perhaps overemphasized in Katherine Antho- ny's Margaret Fuller. A Psychological Biography (N. Y., 1920), p. 37; but her translation of Giinderode shows how strong was her predilec- tion for the society of admiring young girls, and the overtones of homosexual attraction appear plainly in her description of Karoline. How- ever, the formation of cults of friendship is so important a part of romantic Weltanschauung that Margaret's views must be examined for their literary and philosophical ramifications just as carefully as for their purely psychologi- cal significance. 297. William Wetmore Story and his Friends (2 vols., Boston, 1903), I 103. 298. See Dial, I, iv (Apr., 1841), 494-96; Life Without and Life Within, pp. 21-24. 299. Many of her critics emphasized her pose of literary dictator as the mark of her work. This impression gained currency because of a mannerism of hers resulting from a strong con- fidence in her own powers — an evidence merely that she had the courage to speak her convic- tions in conformity with her principles. In a time when the sensitive feelings of a Cooper or a Longfellow were distinctly discouraging to any kind of objective criticism, and when Poe was lashing out in personal pique against the objects of his irrational animus, Margaret stoutly affirmed her determination to criticize justly and fairly in the light of universal, ideal principles which she recognized. — Life Without and Life Within, p. 88. 300. Helen C. McMaster, Margaret Fuller as a Literary Critic, Univ. of Buffalo Studies, VII. iii (Dec, 1928), 42. 764 Notes to Pajre 443 301. Art, Literature, and the Drama, p. 357. 302. Ibid., p. 179. See also her "Short Essay on Critics," Dial, I, i (July, 1840), 5-1 1, a remarkably sane yet penetrating statement of the critic's function. 303. See Memoirs, I, 30. 304. Ibid., pp. 146, 160-61. Many of her translations from Goethe were made without thought of publication, but for her pleasure or profit. They reveal much about her struggles over the fundamental questions of religion at the time when she was looking for guidance from Goethe. See F. A. Braun, Margaret Fuller and Goethe (N.Y., 1910), pp. 216-41, for a full discussion of her translations from Goethe ; also the bibliography in Mason Wade, The Writings of Margaret Fuller, pp. 595-600. In her work of introducing the masters of German literature, she could contribute little to the fame of Lessing and Schiller, already relatively well known in America. She accepted both as established classics and devoted to them a large portion of the time in her classes at Alcott's school. Of Lessing she had little to say in her critical works, though Schiller is men- tioned frequently as an example of the "classi- cal" mode of dramatic composition, linked in her mind with Sophocles and Shakespeare. — Memoirs, 1, 121 ; Art, Literature, and the Drama, pp. in, 210. She admired Schiller's historical writings, as well as his poetry and dramas. — Memoirs, I, 148, 244. His high idealism and moral fervor spoke directly to the strain of New England idealism in her, and there was much less of a struggle between her nature and his than between the more complex, worldly Goethe and herself. In 1833 she said: "I don't like Goethe as well as Schiller now. I mean, I am not so happy in reading him. That perfect wisdom and merciless nature seems cold, after those seducing pictures of forms more beautiful than truth." — Memoirs, I, 117. However, in the years following, as she trained herself in the Goethean point of view, the interest in Schiller was eclipsed by admiration for the author of Faust and Meister. See Woman in the Nine- teenth Century, pp. 30, 44-45, 232, 342; Art, Literature, and the Drama, p. 90; Life Without and Life Within, pp. 134-135. 305. Parker and Ripley both started from a supposition that they could show him to be devout, even Christian, at heart ; but they censured him on the score of morality for his personal conduct toward Friederike and Lili and for bringing Christine Vulpius into his house as his unwedded wife. 306. Memoirs, I, 197. 307. Other pieces of Goethe criticism include a review of Egmont, translated anonymously (Boston, 1841), in Dial, II, iii (Jan., 1842), 394; a short notice of a new translation of Faust, in Dial, II, i (July, 1841), 134; a review of George Calvert's translation of the Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, in the New York Daily Tribune for March 14, 1845; a review of S. G. Ward's translation of Goethe's Essays on Art (Boston, 1845), in the Tribune for May 29, 1845. The last two contain ringing answers to the attacks upon Goethe by Palmer Putnam in the 1844 Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard. 308. In the Preface to the Conversations she made a brilliant attack on all classes of Goethe's critics and met the charges arranged under four heads: "(1) He is not a Christian. (2) He is not an Idealist. (3) He is not a Democrat. (4) He is not Schiller." Unlike Parker, who took recourse to the "Bekenntnisse einer schonen Seele" to argue that Goethe was a Christian, Margaret readily admitted that he was a "Greek" in spirit, and as such was not to be judged by con- ventional Christian standards. She pointed out that this is at the bottom of his aversion "for the worship of sorrow," and that his creed is one of self-reliance and calm acceptance — hence not moralistic at all in the usual sense of the word. He is not a spiritual writer as com- monly conceived ; he leaves his readers to draw the moral for themselves. As to the second charge, she pointed out that his plan was never to "alter or exalt Nature," and implied that this, too, is a justifiable way of looking at the universe. As to his being aristocratic, she was not much alarmed at the appearance of acquiescence to tradition in the old sage; she explained it on the ground that an artist needs repose to do his work, and that by nature Goe- the was reflective not active, and conservative because his study was the world as it is, not as he would dream it should be. For those who wanted the other there was Schiller; but one Schiller, she felt, was enough. Margaret pleaded for "habits of more liberal criticism" and urged Goethe's detractors to "leave this way of judging from comparison or personal prejudice." Admitting that her own tastes are "often displeased by German writers, even by Goethe," she attempted an honest assessment of his achievements. She saw that he stood for perfection of the few, for a belief in man's continual effort, for thought rather than reformist action, for nature rather than providence. He was the best German stylist, an admirable critic of art and literature, an acute observer of human beings and of external nature. His mind saw well the individuality of charac- ter and the universality of thought. On the negative side, she admitted she was disturbed — as were many — by his aversion to pain and by Notes to Pages 443-44 765 the isolation of his heart. And on the point of structure, she admitted that some of his later works fell short of the masterly handling shown in the works of his classical period (pp. xviii- xxi). 309. Dial, I, iii (Jan., 1841), 240-74; also Life Without and Life Within, pp. 13-22. 310. Ibid., p. 14. 311. Ibid., p. 20. Though "he did not in one short life complete his circle," we cannot in this world where so few men have in any degree redeemed their inheritance, "neglect a nature so rich and so manifestly progressive" (p. 15). She admits that in the "Lili- Episode" he was '"right as a genius, but wrong as a character." She disposes of the oft-repeated charge of his Epicureanism by showing the difference be- tween "calm self-trust" and the imputed "selfish indifference." Thus she sets the ques- tion of his importance quite apart from the question of his spiritualism. Thus she taught Emerson and the Transcendentalists (and eventually the more sensitive or squeamish moralistic critics in the ranks of the conserva- tives) a point of view which would take them out of their parochialism into the full current of modern life. Her point of view is elaborated in subsequent discussions, notably the essay "Goethe" in the Dial, II, i (July, 1841), 1-41, which is perhaps the most impressive of them all. She moved through his several periods with the assurance that results from thorough study, able to ex- plain the significance of each work for the life of the author and his age. YVerther represents a phase of his youth that he soon overcame ; Eaust of Faust I represents the highest idealistic striving that Goethe ever showed ; Meister is a continuation of Faust ; the Wander jahre is an indispensable second part of the Lehrjahre, wherein the analysis of Wilhelm is completed. The portraits of Marianne, Philine, Theresa, Natalie, and Makarie are symbolical of the stages of education through which the hero must pass. Makarie emerges as the outstandingly spiritual figure, the one who touches most closely the high idealism of Margaret's nature and the one where Goethe's "simple soberness" is abandoned for a time to "glow with the central fire" {ibid., p. 43). In a few paragraphs she absolves the Wahlverwandtschaften of charges of coldness and immorality; she reads this work as one that is "moral in its outward effect, and religious even to piety in its spirit." "Holy" Ottilie is a person of "saintly sweet- ness" (ibid., pp. 48, 49), and the work is so care- fully executed, so richly and delicately wrought, as to command the highest praise: "It is a work of art! At last I understand that world within a world, that ripest fruit of human nature, which is called art." — Ibid., p. 50. Following a similar analysis of Iphigenie auf Tauris, she begs her reader to "enter into his higher tendency, thank him for such angels as Iphigenie, whose simple truth mocks at all his wise 'Beschrankungen.'" In this spirit of enthusiastic enjoyment of his poetic art she presented Goethe in her "Conver- sations" in Boston and her essays in the Dial. Thus she helped Emerson to read Goethe with a less clouded vision and brought him round from an attitude of disdain to the point where he could make Goethe the writer-type in his Representative Men. See Carlyle-Emerson Corre- spondence, II, 114; Memoirs, I, 242-43. 312. She was, of course, familiar with Emer- son's preachments on this score; but his self- reliance, as she interpreted what he said regarding woman's proper sphere in general and how he conducted himself with respect to her in particular, did not appear to extend equally to men and women. See Warfel, loc. cit., pp. 592-93- 313. Life Without and Life Within, esp. pp. 298-99. 314. Memoirs, I, 149, 266. 315. See Higgenson, op. cit., p. 289; also p. 284; Memoirs, I, 167. 316. Memoirs, I, 160-61. 317. On the matter of her appreciation of nature, for example, she stood nearer to the romantics than to Goethe. Though Goethe taught her much in the way of careful observa- tion of nature, and his Spinozistic pantheism had something in common with her feeling for the God immanent in nature, his Farbenlehre appealed to her not because it was a scientific, empirical study but because she could interpret it in its "mystical significance." — Higginson, op. cit., p. 101. Like Xovalis, she looked on the forms of nature symbolically and mystically, and had no sympathy with the "botanizing, geologizing, and dissecting" of the natural scientist. — Memoirs, I, 263. 318. The period of her greatest enthusiasm for Richter was her years at Groton. She pre- scribed his Titan, a most difficult and obscure book for school children, to be read by her advanced class in Alcott's school. The reading of Jean Paul let loose the torrents of sentiment within her, and she loved him deeply. — Ibid., I, 130. Titan, she said, is a "noble work, and fit to raise a reader into that high serene of thought where pedants cannot enter." — Ibid., pp. 169- 70. By 1833 she had written the poems on Rich- ter that she published in the Dial in 1840. In them she celebrated him as the "Poet of Na- ture," a fanciful, delicate painter of scenes in 766 Notes to Pages 444-45 the gorgeous style of Titian, a man "with Raphael's dignity" and "celestial love." Is there in Richter "a want of order," as his critics say ? No, "not of system in its highest sense," for he has the order and plan of the universe itself, being coequal to it and its perfect mirror. "Nature's wise temple and the azure dome/ Have plan enough for the free spirit's home!" This is the effusive, girlish language with which she praised the romantic subjectivity, sublime striving, and moral earnestness of an arch- romantic. 319. See Mason Wade, op. cit., pp. 215-17, and K. Anthony, op. cit., p. 155. 320. Memoirs, I, 118-19; also pp. 120-21, 321. Note her mystical flower- fantasies, with their peculiar hints at a doctrine of the trans- migration of souls: "Yuca Filamentosa," Dial, II, iii (Jan., 1842), 286-88; "Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain," ibid., I, iii (Jan., 1841), 299- 305; also her poems on the passionflower (Memoirs, I, m), the "Dahlia, rose and helio- trope" (Life Without and Life Within, p. 367), "The flower and the Pearl" (ibid., p. 351), and "Lines" (ibid., p. 375). They are filled with symbolism derived mainly from Novalis ("die blaue Blume"), from Faust ("the mothers"), and from remoter neo- Platonic sources. See Higginson, op. cit., pp. 96-97, 99, 305 ; Memoirs, II, 95. She was especially fond of the symbol of the carbuncle of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. See Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 343, and Memoirs, II, 95. 322. She explained these phenomena as evidences of the overdevelopment of the spiri- tual faculties. By no means unduly obsessed with the subject, she took the common-sense attitude that the material and spiritual parts of man's nature "should be in equipoise." She sought a rationale for the phenomena of second sight and prophecy, which, to a woman of her unusal gifts and intuitive powers, seemed an undeniable fact of her existence. In a poet with thorough training and artistic organization, she felt that these gifts of clairvoyance could be transformed into true prophetic power, but she doubted that there was much of higher meaning in the life of the seeress described by Kerner. — Summer on the Lakes, p. 164. 323. See her poem, "Sub Rosa Crux," Memoirs, II, 114. 324. She understood well what Goethe meant by "das Damonische"; indeed, she divined that she was more under the power of the "magnetic fluid" than he — that she was better fitted than he for the role of prophet of the spiritual kingdom. "With me, for weeks and months, the daemon works his will." — Memoirs, I, 224-26; see also pp. 218, 222, 284, and K. Anthony, op. cit., pp. 52-53. 325. "Romaic and Rhine Ballads," Dial, III, ii (Oct., 1842), 137-80. 326. See Woman in the Nineteenth Century, PP- 58-59- 327. Dial, III, ii (Oct., 1842), 179; Art, Literature, and the Drama, p. 333 ; Higginson, op. cit., pp. 131, 294. 328. Among other Germans that occupied her attention, Theodor Kbrner appealed to her romantic interest in medievalism and nation- alism. See her essay on Korner in the Western Messenger, IV, v (Jan., 1838), 306-11, 369-75, and Memoirs, II, 252. She admired Ferdinand Freiligrath, the exiled poet of political liberty (see At Home and Abroad, p. 180). Uhland and Heine figure little in her writings; her projected papers on Novalis and on Tieck never appeared in print. On the subject of Fouqu6, she wrote a review of the Undine for the Tribune (Apr. 4, 1845). Klopstock, whom she studied early, is the subject of a senti- mental sketch "Meta" (Dial, Jan., 1841), one of her weakest performances — one in which she gave a falsely sentimental impression of Klopstock. 329. Her first response went out to Haydn and Handel, well represented in the great choral concerts of the 30's. After 1838, when she came within easy reach of Boston, she heard many performances of classical works by Beet- hoven, Mozart, and others, and the realization broke upon her that a great new cultural force was opening up for her in the musical art. When, in 1 84 1, the epoch-making Boston Academy music series presented the Beethoven sympho- nies, the Boston community felt that Beet- hoven was attuned to the currents of idealism then stirring New England. Some of the younger Transcendentalists, notably J. S. Dwight, supported the vogue vigorously and became converts to the kind of faith that seemed to speak out of Beethoven's great measures. Margaret devoted space in the Dial to urging public support of the concerts. The Beethoven vogue coincided with the high point of the Transcendentalist enthusiasm; after 1844 the Beethoven symphonies were dropped from the programs. 330. Woman in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 190-91; Memoirs, I, 343. In her article on Goethe (Dial, July, 1841) she cited Beethoven as the example of the artist who succeeded where the poet failed — the one figure with whom she dared to reproach Goethe: "We pardon thee, Goethe, — but thee, Beethoven, we revere, for thou hast maintained the worship of the Manly, the Permanent, the True!" — Notes to Pages 445-46 767 Life Without and Life Within, pp. 45-47. See also Art, Literature, and the Drama, 224-25, for her statement of how the "spiral and undulato- ry movements of the beautiful creation" are best expressed in music, and how the listener finds in music "thought most clearly, because most mystically, perceived." See Memoirs, I, 186, 309-10, and her poem "The Land of Music," At Home and Abroad, p. 107. Margaret came to the hearing of Beethoven with her curiosity aroused from her reading of Bettina's Correspondence with a Child. Even in Germany, Bettina's sympathetic appreciation did much for the recognition of Beethoven ; in America there was formed something like a Beethoven cult among Margaret's friends, including Dwight, Lydia Maria Child, and the poet Cranch. In private correspondence these enthusiasts fell into the jargon of musical termi- nology which they playfully employed to describe emotions and feelings: the "flat seventh," "the diapason of the soul," etc., in obvious imitation of Bettina. As for Margaret, she had always been fond of such words as "harmony," "dissonance," "rhythm," "chord," and "melody." Now she yielded more and more to the temptation to write in musical metaphors and thus to becloud still further her none too clear style. For examples, see Woman in the Nineteenth Century ; Mason Wade, op. cit., pp. 289-90; Memoirs, II, 59-60, 99-100; Emerson's Letters, I, 280. 331. Memoirs, I, 275. 332. Emerson showed a sharp perception of the way in which her partly frustrated and thwarted impulses found their "compensation" and their "solace" in art, poetry, and especially music. See her letter, written one evening on returning from the symphony, addressed to Beethoven, confiding her desperate longing — reminiscent of Bettina's adulatory letters (Memoirs, I, 232-34). 333. See Emerson's Letters, II, 239 (Nov. 24, 1839). 334. In her earlier career she had been rela- tively indifferent to the organized reform move- ments of the day, especially toward the slavery issues and the question of socialism, though she was active in the cause of women's rights from the first. It was traditional in her family to stand for democratic Jeffersonianism against Bostonian Federalism, and she was too strong an individualist to entertain the thought of residing at Brook Farm. Like Emerson, she wished the reformers well, but was not con- vinced that the time was ripe for building a Utopia. After 1844, she began to devote more space in her columns to articles on political developments and social experiments, here and abroad, and especially in Germany; and she welcomed the advent of the New York Deutsche Schnellpost as the organ of the German-Ameri- cans in this country. When she saw at first hand the turmoil of Italy and the evils there of oppression, she was stirred to take an active part in political affairs. 335. Memoirs, I, 213. 336. However important Goethe and the Romantic School were to her, still she recog- nized that the enthusiasm of regenerate Unitar- ianism which went by the Transcendental name was basically of New England origin, and she kept throughout her characteristic Ameri- can faith in heroic, unbending idealism. But insofar as American Transcendentalism is a part of the broader movement toward roman- ticism that characterizes the early decades of the nineteenth century, it was inevitable that some American thinkers would become aware of the universal nature of the movement. Margeret was one of those. 337. This inheritance originated in the occa- sional visits that she made to Brook Farm, where the young Transcendentalists gathered to sing, read poetry, enact plays, and hold discussions. Here she often led the conversation, heard the amateur musical performances of Cranch and Dwight, and encouraged their translating the lyrics of Goethe and Schiller. In this carefree, sociable, irrepressibly joyous group of talented and congenial spirits there was engendered a new romantic approach to- ward life and art which in several cases domina- ted these men for the better part of the century and in some cases fed directly into the forces that culminated in the Genteel Tradition. In the beginning, it was the Romantische Schule transplanted to America, isolated and scorned for the most part by the average citizen as well as by the theological and social stalwarts of New England. Yet it was the starting-point for an important tradition in American art and music as well as in literature and criticism. The communal character of so many of the trans- lation projects carried out by these men is note- worthy. Ripley, John Weiss, J. E. Cabot, C. T. Brooks, and others were represented in Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany, while Bancroft, Margaret Fuller, Clarke, G. W. Haven, N. L. Frothingham, Hedge, and C. P. Cranch, W. H. Channing contibuted to Dwight's Select Minor Poems. Goethe's Autobiography was prepared principally by Godwin, but parts were completed by Dwight and Dana. Three men collaborated in the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller. The Dial, the Western Messenger, and Dwight's Journal of Music were essentially co-operative undertakings. Collaboration continued un- 768 Notes to Pages 448-49 abated among the St. Louis Hegelians and the later school of Concord philosophers. MINOR MOVEMENTS AND GROUPS 338. Among others to be mentioned was Charles A. Dana, another member of the Brook Farm community, later editor of the New York Sun. His contribution to the excitement for German was his teaching the language (as well as Greek) in the Brook Farm school. He trans- lated Part III of Goethe's Autobiography. James Elliot Cabot (1821-1903), editor, author, and biographer of Emerson, studied in Ger- many, wrote a notable article on Kant for the last number of the Dial, and provided selections from Kant and Schelling for Hedge's Prose Writers. J. M. Mackie, not properly a Tran- scendentalism was a great admirer of Emerson and Parker. After studying at Berlin, he lived in New York as journalist and author, and in 1845 published a biography of Leibnitz, based on a German work by Guhrauer, besides writ- ing many reviews and notices of translations and of current German publications. William Batchelder Greene, a brilliant, dashing youth, translated some German tales for the Dial. Jones Very (1813-1880) was acquainted with portions of the writings of Goethe and Schiller, but there is little to suggest any direct influence of German writers upon him. Similarly, W. E. Channing the younger (1818-1901), though much in the company of Emerson, S. G. Ward, Thoreau, and later, Sanborn, one of the leading contributors to the Dial, the Present, and the Harbinger, and inevitably subjected to a variety of German influences, remained on the periphery of the German furor. 339. In a portion of her journal labeled "My Sentimental Period," she describes how she was caught up in the Bettina fad, Bettina's book inducing in many girls of Louisa May's genera- tion a desire to form secret ideal attachments with men far older than themselves. As Bettina had worshipped Goethe, so she adored Emer- son, writing letters to him that were never sent, leaving flowers on his doorstep, and singing Mignon's song under his window "in very bad German." — Ednah D. Cheney, Louisa May Alcott. Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston, 1890), pp. 57-59, 345- 340. Late in life she wrote, "R. W. E. gave me Goethe's works at fifteen, and they have been my delight ever since." — Ibid., p. 398; see also pp. 208, 351. 341. Ibid., pp. 101-2, 104, 122, 123, 160, 162. 342. Ibid., pp. 104-5. 343. Ibid., pp. 157, 165. 344. Ibid., p. 166. 345. See Katherine Anthony, Louisa May Alcott (N.Y., 1938). p. 156. While reading proof on Moods, she planned "a story of two men something like Jean Paul and Goethe, only more every-day people," but the fate of Moods dashed her hopes of utilizing such material, and the book as planned was never written. — Cheney, op. cit., pp. 160, 162, 265. Although she tried to teach herself, so that she could say, "I nearly died of German," she made little head- way. In 1865 she missed an opportunity to go to Europe because she "spoke neither French nor German"; but before the year was out another opportunity came to attend an invalid on a tour abroad. She visited Germany, and in her journal she described the "lovely voyage up the Rhine" from Cologne to Mainz, filling her head with pictures, she said, to "last all my life." At Frankfurt she gloried in the literary associations of that city, particularly those touching Goethe. — Ibid., pp. 160, 162, 167, 173, 175, 182, 262. 346. Ibid., pp. 196-98, 201, 261, 268, 273, 2 75. 3M. 320-21, 336, 346, 347, 352, 357, 359. 347. For examples see Little Women (Boston, 1904), pp. 150, 347-49, 365, 373. 384, 386; Little Men (Boston, 1903), pp. 19, 29; Work (Boston, 1904), p. 225 ; Jo's Boys (Boston, 1886), pp. 324-25 ; and the titlepage of Morning Glories. 348. Cheney, op. cit., p. 296. 349. Ibid., pp. 289-90, 379. 350. Even before he arrived in Cambridge, he had studied "some German" with an old Swiss gentleman "who taught a very bad pronunciation." — The Life and Letters of C. P. Cranch, by Leonora Cranch Scott (Boston and N.Y., 1917), p. 19. 351. Ibid., pp. 24-46 passim. 352 Frederick DeWolfe Miller, Christopher P. Cranch and His Caricatures of New England Transcendentalism (Cambridge, Mass., 195 1). 353. Life and Letters, p. 60. Crunch never was able to achieve settled religious convictions. He wrote much poetry for the Western Messenger but contributed little to the discussion of theological questions ; such essays as he wrote were more poetical than controversial. See his "False Reasoning of the Trinitarians," Western Messenger, May, 1837; "Every Child a Unitar- ian," ibid., Dec, 1837; "Modern Platonism," ibid., Dec, 1838; "Dreams," ibid., June, 1839. Inspired by a reading of Carlyle and Jouffroy and by the personal influence of Emerson and W. H. Channing, he was vaguely determined to stand with them; but when, in 1840, his father inquired to know whether his son were turning Transcendentalist, Cranch replied that he was little interested in the "cold, barren" Notes to Pages 449-50 769 system of idealism as propounded by Kant and Fichte, adding that the "quite opposite" philosophy constructed by Cousin and Jouffroy seemed to him to have "far greater recommen- dations." — Life and Letters, p. 50. 354. Ibid., p. 76. Several of his poems echo the characteristic Transcendentalist attitude toward music. See especially his ode read at the annual dinner of the Harvard Musical Associa- tion, Boston, January 27, 1874, and his ode to the memory of Margaret Fuller, wherein he shows a complete sympathy for her theories of music; also the sonnet "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony." — The Bird and the Bell (Boston, I ^75)- PP- 2 35~37. ID 3 _ 73. and Ariel and Cali- ban (Boston and N.Y., 1887), p. 154. 355. Life and Letters, p. 300. 356. Dwight included one in his Select Minor Poems, and Brooks printed two from Goethe in German Songs and Ballads (1842). His version of Heine's "Lorelei" appeared in Folk Songs, edited by Palmer in 1861. He published a good deal in contemporary journals, where a careful search would probably bring to light others of his widely scattered publications. See, for example, H. M. Haertel, op. cit., nos. 33 and 1215, and B. Q. Morgan, op. cit., C47. 357. "He was intimately identified with almost every movement made in behalf of music for nearly a half-century in [Boston]. . . . His work was unique and was never likely to be repeated on the part of any interpreter of music." — George W. Cooke, /. S. Dwight, Brook Farmer, Editor, and Critic of Music. A Biography (Boston, 1898), Preface, p. xi. The son of a free-thinking Boston physician, Dwight went through the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, graduating in 1832. While studying in the Divinity School, he was active in the Pierian Sodality and practiced in instru- mental ensembles with Cranch and other young musicians. That music was equally strong as theology in his interests is suggested by his choice of a topic for his dissertation, "The Proper Character of Poetry and Music for Public Worship" (1836). He took a leading part in the formation of the Harvard Musical Asso- ciation in 1837. From small beginnings, the Association was destined to grow into one of great influence in the cultural life of New Eng- land. Since 18 15 Boston had had its Handel and Haydn Society, inspired and organized by Gottlieb Graupner, a German-born music teach- er and publisher. Between 1839 and 1841 the city had a full-fledged Musical Magazine, edited by Theodore Hach, a German cellist. Yet before 1841, despite the founding of the Acade- my of Music in 1833, there had been little development of orchestral music, and the great symphonic literature of the German school was unknown. By 1841 the Academy, which up to that time had devoted itself primarily to sacred vocal music, oratorios and choruses, was prevailed upon to perform the larger symphonic works of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Haydn, and Weber. These are the concerts to which the Brook Farmers, according to their own reports, responded with ready and recep- tive enthusiasm. In Beethoven they heard a spiritual message of soaring idealism that found no adequate statement in other music. It spoke of the deepest convictions and insights within them — of "ideas of spiritual freedom, of self- reliance, of the dignity of human nature, of social justice, equal opportunities for all, [of] a common birthright in the beautiful." See Dwight's article, "Music as a Means of Culture, " Atl. Monthly, XXVI, civ (Sept., 1870), 321-22; see also p. 323. Thus the growth of interest in Beethoven's music went parallel with the most outspoken expression of idealistic striving. Boston became an important musical center, visited by many famous European soloists — among them Ole Bull, Vieuxtemps, and Jenny Lind. For a time after 1849 the Germania Mu- sical Society, a "miniature but model orchestra from Germany," performed with a standard of excellence unknown in America up to that time. The Harvard Musical Association sponsored chamber music performances in 1844-1850. One important event was the performance of Schiller's Song of the Bell, set to music by Romberg and provided with English text by S. A. Eliot. — J. S. Dwight, "History of Music in Boston," in Justin Winsor (ed.). Memorial History of Boston (Boston. 1880- 1881), IV, 424, 428-31. 358. George Bancroft, Margaret Fuller, J. F. Clarke, W. H. Channing, F. H. Hedge, X. L. Frothingham, G. W. Haven, C. P. Cranch, and C. T. Brooks together provided 35 of the 120 poems in the volume. Of the other translation projects which Dwight planned, he published only Part IV of Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit for the Godwin-Dana volume of 1846, but he assisted Mrs. Eliza B. Lee in her work of translating Jean Paul. 359. Though his friends Lowell and Curtis did their best to find a publisher for his lectures, no editor could be found who would risk bringing out so strange and incomprehensible a book. Yet his Transcendental friends were as enthusiastic as the rest of the world was cool. They saw him as a prophet inspired and listened to his mystical interpretations of the symbolic values in tones and voices. The New York Tribune, as might be expected, welcomed his lectures warmly, but some of his audience 770 Notes to Pages 450-52 thought him a little naive and ineffectual, albeit most lovable and earnest. "His whole life," said Amelia Russell, "seemed one dream of music; and I do not think that he was ever fully awake to all the harsh grating of this outer world." — Cooke, op. cit., pp. 61-62, 74, 78-80, 106, 1 18-19. 360. Ibid., pp. 103-8. 361. He fought for a radical change in the selection of music to be used in church services. Strongly committed to the principle that music is a universal language free of thf fetters of doctrine or dogma, he sought to bre;.,.k down the artifical distinctions between "sacred" and "profane" music, between hymn and song, and between chant (or mass) and hymn. He and Cranch waged a sharp battle with the Unita- rians over the propriety of introducing portions of the mass, on the one hand, and secular music, on the other, into Protestant services. As early as 1839 Cranch had published in the Western Messenger a defense of introducing a hymn to the Virgin Mary at a concert held in the Cincinnati Presbyterian Church. Cranch argued that the words of the hymn were not used with any intent to insult the Protestant who objected to ritualistic forms, but that as art the words with their appropriate music might still be worth listening to. — West. Mess., VI, v (Mar., 1839), 339-41. Dwight introduced masses and secular music into the services of Channing's Religious Union of Associationists. When some members ob- jected, he defended the practice on the ground that music as such ought not to be associated with any particular set of doctrines, "for music is more catholic than all the churches, — the faithful, many-sided servant of the human heart; and whatsoever is good music is a har- mony and help to what is most religious, loving, and profound in human souls, whether it was born on Catholic on heretic or even on heathen soil." — Cooke, op. cit., p. 133. 362. He felt that "music must have some most intimate connection with the social des- tiny of man," that it is the popular art par excellence, and therefore especially adapted to American society. It is "a true conservative element, in which Liberty and Order are both fully typed and made beautifully perfect in each other. A free people must be rhythmically educated in the whole tone and temper of their daily life ... to be fit for freedom. . . . This artistic sentiment allies itself with our progres- sive energies. . . ." — Ibid., pp. 151-52. 363. He published articles in translation by the outstanding authorities of the day, such as Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner. One important feature was the European correspondence written by Alex. W. Thayer, the biographer of Beethoven. In 1 840-1 851 he prepared a trans- lation of Oulibicheff's biography of Mozart, for which he found no publisher. After 1859 his translations from the German were almost wholly limited to musical publications. He translated the words of Bach's St. Matthew Passion music, the Lieder of Schubert, Schu- mann, and many others, including Heine's Buck der Lieder as set to music by Schumann. A longer task was the translation of M. Wohl- fahrt's Guide to Musical Composition. — Ibid., PP- r 55-56, 189, 227. 364. A recent study of Higginson is Howard W. Hintz's "T. W. Higginson: Disciple of the Newness," diss., New York University, 1939. 365. He got into all the reform movements, including Frothingham's Free Religious Asso- ciation, vigorously upheld the antislavery tradition of his family, ran for Congress, resisted the Fugitive Slave Law, gained prominence in the Civil War as the first commander of a Negro regiment for the North, and in his later years settled down to a comfortable existence as author, historian, and essayist. — Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston and N.Y., 1900), pp. 85-128 passim. 366. See his "Decline of the Sentimental," in The New World and the New Book (Boston, 1892), pp. 178ft. 367. "An American Temperament," ibid., p. 25- 368. Ibid., pp. 8-9; "Literature as an Art," Atlantic Essays (Boston, 1871), pp. 25ft., 32, 35; and Cheerful Yesterdays, pp. 188-89. 369. Brooks came from a family of old Massachusetts Puritan stock. He entered Har- vard in 1828, having as classmates John Dwight and Samuel Osgood and as collegemates Charles Sumner, J. L. Motley, O. W. Holmes, and others of the famous class of '29. Follen and Beck initiated him into the German lan- guage. Follen's influence, among the many factors that go to explain his interest in Ger- man, was paramount. A distinguished student of languages, Brooks was offered a tutorship in Greek, but he entered the Divinity school in- stead and studied along with such later Tran- scendentalists as Bartol, Osgood, Cranch, and Dwight. In this company he continued his German alongside his theological studies. The best treatments of Brooks are C. W. Wendte, Poems, Original and Translated by C. T. Brooks. With a Memoir by C. W. Wendte, selected and edited by W. P. Andrews (Boston, 1885) and Camillo von Klenze, C. T. Brooks, Translator from the German, and The Genteel Tradition (Boston and London, 1937). 370. Including Burger, Holty, Schiller, Notes to Pages 453-54 771 Goethe, Riickert, and Klopstock. A few of the poems included were contributed by Dwight, Frothingham, Cranch, Sarah Whitman, and Longfellow. 371. Brooks's work was well received by students of German literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Carlyle congratulated him for his "perfect accuracy" in rendering Jean Paul. Among the Germans who praised his efforts were Freiligrath and Auersperg, with both of whom he exchanged occasional letters. In 1 865-1866 he traveled to Europe, met scholars and writers in many European countries, including Germany, and was pleased to find that in many instances his fame as a translator had preceded him. — Wendte, op. cit., pp. 55, 79, 87; von Klenze, op. cit., pp. 102-14. Among translation projects undertaken in his later years were works of lesser authors whose fame on the whole has not persisted beyond their own time (for details see von Klenze's excellent study). There were two works of fiction by Berthold Auerbach — a portion of Dorfgeschichten (1877) and Dichter und Kaufmann (1877), Riickert's long, intricate, and obscure poem Die Weisheit des Brahmanen (1882); Leopold Schefer's Laienbrevier (1875); and several works from the field of humorous literature, for the appreciation and translation of which Brooks possessed special aptitudes. For a list of translations that still remain in manuscript, see von Klenze, pp. 100— 101. 372. He found European life much to his liking; the thought of returning to "naked America" became repugnant to him, and for a time he made frequent trips across the Atlantic. He traversed Germany, Austria, and Switzer- land several times, studied French, Italian, and German. The last he considered "the most unmusical language of Babel" and the most difficult. See H. A. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis (Boston, 1885), pp. 122-23; Pencillings by the Way (2nd ed., London, 1839), pp. 138- 63 passim. 373. Famous Persons and Places (N .Y ., 1854), pp. 385-91. The titles of Fun-Jottings or Laughs J have Taken a Pen To (1853) and The Rag-Bag, a Collection of Ephemera (1859) are indicative of their contents. 374. See Richmond C. Beatty, Bayard Taylor, Laureate of the Gilded Age (Norman, Okla., 1936). An illuminating but, unfortunate- ly, still unpublished study is Professor John T. Krumpelmann's dissertation, "Bayard Taylor as Literary Mediator between Germany and America," Harvard University, 1924. An American in point of view, tastes, and opinions, Taylor was also an adopted citizen of Germany. Gotha was his second home, for which he exhibited a deep and abiding love just as German was his second tongue. His second wife was the daughter of the famous astronomer Hansen; he lived for long periods among the German people, knew intimately the German landscape from the Baltic to the Rhine; and finally he was chosen to fill the post of American Minister in Berlin in 1878. Reared outside the orbit of the New England tradition, he stood halfway between the "Bohemianism" of New York and the "Brah- minism" of Boston. As one who took his origin in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in the Middle Atlantic region, it was perhaps all the easier for Taylor to become the spokesman for the Ameri- ca of the postwar decades. Nor did he undergo the normalizing process of attending college, but forced his way upward through hack- writing and reporting, relying on his ample natural gifts and hard work. He trained his sensitive mind in observation and careful, even photographic, reporting, thus absorbing im- mediately the American scene developing around him. Little in Taylor's ancestry or early life points to either his enthusiasm for authorship or his interest in Germany. Though both grand- mothers were of South German descent — typical representatives of the race of Pennsyl- vania-Dutch — the English Quaker element in the family predominated. As a child he was quick to learn and to compose verses. He read all the popular magazines and devoured all the novels, histories, geographies, travel books, and volumes of poetry which the circulating library of Kennett Squar.e afforded. — Marie Hansen Taylor and H. E. Scudder, Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor (2 vols., Boston, 1885), I, 5, 9-10; R. C. Beatty, op. cit., pp. 2-4. Irving's sketches and tales, Willis' letters, and Howitt's Rural Life in Germany whetted his appetite for travel abroad, particularly Germany. Thus early, authorship and travel were linked in his mind. As a youth he took a printer's apprenticeship for the dual purpose of learning the literary business and laying up money for a jaunt to Europe. At the age of 19 he made his plans, consulted travelers and friends, and set off on a twenty-four-dollar passage to Europe. Additional funds came partly from the proceeds of a volume of poems he had printed and partly from advances granted by publishers and editors, notably Horace Greeley, of the Tribune, in return for which he contracted to send travel letters from the continent. He accompanied his cousin Franklin Taylor, going to Germany to study, and he hoped to remain abroad a year, possibly two. Taylor knew practically no German when he 772 Notes to Pages 454-55 embarked, but certain initial factors inclined him to Germany. Greeley's assignment, rather indefinite, to be sure, called for letters on Ger- man life and society: "If the letters are good," promised the editor, "you shall be paid for them, but don't write until you know some- thing." — Life and Letters, I, 38. He decided to settle down in Germany and really live among the people. Greeley, he knew, was exacting. 375. As early as November, 1844, in a letter to his mother, he reported good progress in the "glorious" language and a determination to master it and its literature. By the following May he could say: "I was so good a German that I was often not suspected of being a for- eigner." — John R. Schultz (ed.), The Unpub- lished Letters of Bayard Taylor in the Hunting- ton Library (San Marino, Calif., 1937), pp. 8-9; Life and Letters, I, 44. His first reading was in Hauff, Uhland, and Schiller; he took pleasure in visiting the tombs, literary shrines, and former homes of Germany's famous authors; he called on Mendelssohn, Freiligrath, Riickert, and Gerstacker, traveled through the Harz mountains in Goethe's footsteps, and saw Schiller's room in Gohlis. — Beatty, op. cit., p. 38; Views Afoot (Phila., 1889), p. 149. 376. For details see Life and Letters, I, 222, 342; Critical Essays and Literary Notes (N.Y., 1880), pp. 92-111; At Home and Abroad, First Series, pp. 340-41. 377. The book contains a detailed account of a trip from Heidelberg to Nuremberg through the Odenwald, a picture of the "panorama of the Upper Danube," and a "walk through the Thuringian Forest." Taylor tarried at the Wartburg to recall the literary associations of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Walther von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Martin Luther, and the brothers Grimm. Here as much as in the earlier book, he indulged in flights of lyrical landscape description, handling his themes in a masterly manner. He saw his be- loved Thuringia and the Black Forest through the eyes of an ardent lover of nature, and was poet enough to find phrases adequate to convey his sense of the natural beauty of this "green region of mountains and meadows, of tinkling herds and fairy lore." — Life and Letters, II, 478. There were also sketches of such literary per- sonages as Riickert, Gutzkow, the DresdenCircle, Alex, von Humboldt, and finally of literary Wei- mar, with its memories of Goethe and Schiller. 378. Other notable sketches are "The Little Land of Appenzell" (German Switzerland), "In the Teutoburger Forest," partly reminiscent of his earlier visit to Freiligrath, and "The Kyff- hauser and its Legends," the story of the sleep- ing Barbarossa. 379. The feeling expressed is of a piece with the general ambition among the genteel poets to prepare translations of the world's master- pieces and thereby to instruct and elevate a nation of cultural sluggards. Taylor's Faust is one of a series that includes Longfellow's Dante, Bryant's Homer, Cranch's Virgil, Higginson's Epictetus, and G. H. Palmer's Odyssey. 380. Life and Letters, II, 517. His remarkable memory was a serviceable aid in the work and so was his unexcelled facility in the German language. Once started, he neglected nothing to make his work the authoritative English Faust. He studied all the scholarship on the poem and spent much time in Europe gathering materials on Goethe's life and personality at first hand (see Life and Letters, II, 4 - 64, 493, 506). He care- fully studied the methods and shortcomings of his predecessors, and set himself a high stan- dard of fidelity in translating (see his letter to W. H. Furness, ibid., II, 493). Despite his feeling that he was equal to the task, he was to discover sometimes that he had to "break his head in the hunt for words." It was a "heart-rending yet intensely fascinating labor." — Ibid., II, 537- On completing the first draft, he sent the manuscript to Longfellow and Lowell for criti- cism and received their heartiest encourage- ment. The launching of the poem was a great coup for the publisher, and simultaneous publication was arranged in America, England, and Germany. The numerous reviews were almost uniformly full of congratulation and praise. In honor of the publication Fields feted Taylor with an elaborate dinner, attended by all the notables; only Emerson and Whittier sent regrets, but congratulated the author by letter. The newly won honors were so exhilarat- ing that he immediately determined upon another great work devoted to German litera- ture — lives of Goethe and Schiller. But the sale of Faust did not reach expectations. Though "accepted in England, Germany, and America as much the best," as Taylor said, at the end of two years the book returned the writer only $500. 381. Differences over problems of interpre- tation arose as soon as the work appeared. See Taylor's correspondence with R. H. Chittenden in Life and Letters, II, 517-20. Taylor's perfor- mance has been subjected to severe criticism in the study by Mrs. J. C. S. Haskell, Bayard Taylor's Translation of Goethe's Faust, Columbia diss. (N. Y., 1908). See also Morgan, op. cit., p. 166. 382. For details see A. H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor (Boston, 1896), p. 195; Life and Letters, II, 567, 697-98, 701. The entire series was Notes to Pages 455-56 773 published posthumously as Studies in German Literature (N.Y., 1879). Judged from the position of historical or critical scholarship, none of the series is to be rated very high, for the material that Taylor used was a digest of readily available German commentaries and histories; but considered as popular lectures they were successful and of no little cultural value. He brought a lively enthusiasm to his subjects. The lectures on Goethe and on Faust were a wholesome correc- tive to the prejudice against the Goethean morality and the "incomprehensibility" of Faust II. Though he may have oversimplified, Taylor did succeed in conveying the idea that Faust was to be studied as a whole, that the second part could not be dismissed in the way that Carlyle, Lamb, Hayward, and Lewes rejected it. 383. The chapter on Hebel, "the German Burns," is one of his best studies of a German writer, and incorporates amusing and skillful translations of Hebel's poems in the Alemannic dialect. Friedrich Riickert is treated in another essay. Two others, "Autumn Days in Weimar" and "Weimar in June," are devoted to the story of Taylor's study of Goethe's life and are filled with the literary associations of the town, the history of the duchy and court, and accounts of meetings with descendants of the old literary families. 384. He made use of every personal and official connection he could muster to get at his sources. In 1874 he returned to America with his notebooks and his lively mind filled with the subject; he also had aquired a large new library of scholarly works on the two authors. He expected he would require fully three years for the writing of his "dear, unpaying work," but the months and years ran on, and he was busy with lesser employments — newspaper work, his own long poems, lecturing, and trans- lating Don Carlos for Lawrence Barrett, the tragedian, in 1877 — the text of which has never been published. 385. Life and Letters, II, 572. 386. In 1874 Hjalmar H. Boyesen found that Taylor could repeat the whole of Faust I from memory. Taylor's reverence for Goethe at this time is best revealed in the solemn and earnest, if somewhat fulsome, lines of his "Ode to Goethe," read on the occasion of the presenta- tion by the Goethe Club of a bust to be set up in Central Park, New York City, August 25, 1875. His Masque of the Gods and Prince Deukalion are heavily burdened with allegorical figures reminiscent of the characters of Pandora and Faust II. The hexameters of "Home Pastorals" (1875) were used in conscious imitation of Goethe and Gregorovius. — Life and Letters, II> 520. Occasionally he turned to other German poems, as in the case of the free-rhymed ottava rima form of the Picture of St. John, which Taylor himself compared to Wieland's stanza form in Oberon. — Smyth, op. cit., p. 220; Has- kell, op. cit., 9 n. 387. Though cast in a large mold, he aspired too highly and in too many directions for his intrinsic abilities. His whole career, his poetic achievement most of all, was only an approxi- mation to high distinction. His buoyant en- thusiasm, coupled with abundant industry, tended to deploy in the void because he lacked true harmony and concentration. "Aside from his experiments in prose, Taylor wrote lyrics, pastorals, idyls, odes, dramatic lyrics, lyrical dramas, translations, poems in German, poems in every mood and every metre, poems con- spicuously or unconsciously imitative of a host of poets (he had a remarkable but ill-controlled memory), poems on themes Oriental, Greek, Norse, American from coast to coast, poems classical, sentimental, romantic, realistic, poems of love, of nature, of art." — Cambridge Hist, of Amer. Lit., Ill, 42. He sought what he liked to call "cosmical experience," but in his eagerness for universality he lost himself. 388. For indications of American and Ger- man appraisals of his importance as a mediator between the two peoples, see Life and Letters, II, 531, 661, 697, 73I-3 2 . 768. 389. One of his most vivid recollections was his mother's reading to him the ballad-legend of the ruined castle of the Weibertreu, and his memorizing it. His early attachment to every- thing Germanic, Leland himself used to explain, was owing to an ancestress who had married a "High German Doctor with a reputation for sorcery. . . . My mother's opinion was that this was a very strong case of atavism, and that the mysterious ancestor had through the ages cropped out in me." Leland fancied that this ancestor was Washington Irving's High Ger- man doctor who laid the mystic spell on Sleepy Hollow. — Elizabeth R. Pennell, Charles Godfrey Leland. A Biography (2 vols., Boston, 1906), I, 19, 34. As a child of nine he came under the tutelage of Bronson Alcott, who encouraged the lad's interest in German literature. By 1839— 1840, while preparing for Princeton, he consid- ered himself a Transcendentalist, and he read "every scrap of everything about Germany" that he could lay his hands on: "I was very far gone and used to go home from school and . . . study the beloved 'Critic of Pure Reason' and Carlyle's 'Miscellanies.'" During his college years he extended his knowledge to include a thorough reading of Schelling's Transcendental 774 Notes to Pages 456-58 Idealism (in a French version), Fichte's Destiny of Man, a handbook on German philo- sophy, an English version of Spinoza's Trac- tatus Theologico-Politicus, Kant's Aesthetik, and something of Schleiermacher, Justinus Kerner, and Jacob Boehme. He felt himself so well versed in philosophy that he could pass judg- ment on the Germanism of Carlyle and Emer- son: "They dabbled or trifled with freethought and 'immortality,' crying Goethe up as the Light of Lights, while all their inner souls were bound in the most Puritanical and petty goody-goodyism." — Ibid., I, 250; Charles G. Leland, Memoirs (N.Y., 1893), pp. 47, 55, 78- 79, 82, 96, 146, 156-57. 390. Upon his return from Germany in 1848 to his native Philadelphia, he turned journalist and worked as editor under P. T. Barnum and R. W. Griswold. He was active as artist, poet, critic, folklorist, philologist, archeologist, hu- morist, columnist, lawyer, soldier, editor, reformer, and educator. He turned out some fifty books on the most varied subjects, not to mention uncounted contributions to periodicals. Although he wished to be remembered for his services to education, especially his successful efforts to establish industrial art as a branch of public education, his translation of Heine was among his most notable achievements, and his creation of the comic Hans Breitmann was no less. Aside from the numerous series of Breit- mann ballads, several volumes of German travel sketches and impressions, and his translation of Heine, there is a long list of translations from German literature. Many of these are individual pieces, usually as contribu- tions to periodicals; others are complete vol- umes of one or several German authors. From 1842 on, when he contributed his first renditions from the German to the Nassau Literary Monthly, until 1893, when he brought out an eight-volume edition of the Works of Heinrich Heine, together with a translation of von Embden's biography, he exercised his talents as a translator of Lessing, Joseph von Eichen- dorff, Josef von Scheffel, and C. H. Neumann, not to mention shorter pieces from a great many other German authors. The 1893 edition of Heine was a thorough revision of earlier trans- lations — Pictures of Travel (Reisebilder), 1855, and the Book of Songs (Buck der Lieder), 1864. For details see Joseph Jackson's "Bibliography of the Works of C. G. Leland," Pa. Mag. of Hist, and Biog., Vols. XLIX-LI (1925-1927). 391. Pennell, op. cit., I, 154-55, 163, 178. 392. Memoirs, pp. 140, 145. 393. His admiration did not blind him to Heine's defects, as he made clear in the Preface to his Pictures of Travel. To appreciate Heine required, he felt, taking him all in all as he is; he aimed at making his translation "strictly true to the original." Occasionally he failed to capture Heine's deft and delicate play of wit, but he succeeded in producing a literally accurate version. 394. Pennell, op. cit., I, 343-44. 395. See Hans Breitmann Ballads (Complete ed., Phila., 1897), pp. 3-5. Edward S. Bradley, George H. Boker, Poet and Patriot (Phila., 1927), pp. 261-62. 396. Lowell called Leland's parody of the Hildebrandslied "wonderfully good." "The ingenuity with which you have managed the German pronunciation (especially in choosing words where the transposition of p and b, d and t, is comic) adds a new chord to the lyre of humour." — Pennell, op. cit., I, 290. 397. E. S. Bradley, "Hans Breitmann in England and America," The Colophon, n.s., II, i (Autumn, 1936), 67. 398. Pennell, op. cit., I, 353. 399. Memoirs, p. 336. 400. Ibid., pp. 340-41. 401. See Stoddard's Recollections (ed. by R. Hitchcock, N.Y., 1903), pp. 50-67. 402. Ibid., p. 97. 403. A few of his poems contain German allusions: "Drachenfels" has a German locale, "The Helmet" relates a legend concerning a young German warrior, and "The Wine Cup" is vaguely reminiscent of Uhland's "Gliick von Edenhall." 404. His parents spoke and read German, his mother having acquired her facility about the time her brother Edward Everett returned from Germany. Her translations from French and German appeared in the periodicals for years. Hale was a member of Longfellow's earliest classes in German at Harvard. 405. Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1902), PP- 33-34. 37-3 8 - 406. It was their ambition to be able to read Strauss's Leben Jesu, a book which was then on. the proscribed list at the college. — E. S. Brad- ley, George Henry Boker, p. 16. Later, even while at work in a law office, Boker read widely "in English . . . German, French and the classics." — Ibid., p. 35. Two of Boker's five critical essays reflect an early enthusiasm for ancient Germanic literature. — Ibid., p. 25. He followed the trail of his friend "Charlie" Leland on a tour of Europe shortly afterward, and declared the tour through Paris to Heidelberg "the greatest experience of his life." — Ibid., p. 4i- 407. Ibid., p. 246. 408. These letters are printed in his Writings (15 vols., Hartford, Conn., 1904), II, 61-209. Notes to Pages 458-59 775 His account of the trip up the Rhine and his description of old Heidelberg are worthy of Taylor's best efforts. In Germany Warner made good use of his opportunities to get an insight into the life of the people. He was especially attached to Munich, "the dear old city," in which he felt himself "firmly planted." — Writings, II, 209. 409. Unlike most of them, however, he was no linguist. He went on only one foreign tour, from which, uncharacteristically, Germany was excluded. When in 1871 Taylor sent him a copy of his Faust, Stedman admitted his "great misfortune not to read German," and added, "since the receipt of your 'Faust,' I have more understanding of Brooks [the latter's trans- lation of 1856]." — Laura Stedman and George M. Gould, Life and Letters of Edmund C. Sted- man (2 vols., N.Y., 1910), I, 445-49, 488. But it is obvious from his facility in handling German phrases and titles in his essay on Bayard Taylor and elsewhere that he was not entirely ignorant of the language. Moreover, he had read to good purpose such common sources of information as Carlyle's essays, Taylor's complete literary output, and a surprisingly large proportion (for a man who held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for forty years) of the vast body of German literature that was available in Eng- lish. Among Germans whom he mentions most frequently are Goethe, Schiller, Heine, von Arnim, Novalis, the Schlegels, Lessing, Eduard v. Hartmann, Schopenhauer, Richter, Voss, Fouque, Freiligrath, Strodtmann, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Hans Sachs, Boehme, Eckermann, Haydn, Liszt, Bach, Beethoven, von Biilow, and Kepler. 410. Goethe, of course, stood pre-eminent in his estimation, and he appears to have been especially fond of the Conversations with Eckermann and the Goethe-Schiller Correspon- dence. Other important books for him were Lessing's Laokoon and the Hamburgische Dramaturgic and Heine's Romantische Schule. See The Nature and Elements of Poetry (N.Y., 1892), pp. 18-19, 54. 66, 71, 1 18-19, 125-27, 237; Genius and Other Essays (N.Y., 191 1), pp. 7-8, 42; and Poets of America (N.Y., 1885), p. 372. He devoted much attention in his critical writings to the analysis of genius. In Genius and Other Essays he begins his discussion by citing the preromantic position of Lessing. He quotes several passages from the Dramaturgic dis- cusses the effect of Lessing's theories on Goethe, Schiller, and Heine, and obviously derives his ideas on the limits of poetry and painting from the Laokoon [ibid., pp. 7-8, 71 ; Poets of Ameri- ca, p. 449). He proceeds next to cite Schopen- hauer as one who "dispassionately considered the nature of talent and genius" (Genius and Other Essays, p. 21) and concludes that talent lies more in the greater skill and acuteness of the discursive than in the intuitive cognition, while genius "exhibits a development of the intuitive faculty greater than is needed for the service of the Will. . . . Genius is a man who knows without learning, and teaches the world what he never learned." — Ibid., pp. 21, 24. Finally, he draws upon Schopenhauer's succes- sor, Eduard von Hartmann, for his theory of the Unconscious as the explanation of the creative faculty. — Ibid., p. 22; see also The Nature and Elements of Poetry, pp. 46, 156—57, 282. On other occasions in his studies of the poetic faculties he cited Boehme's description of his mystic communion with the spirit (Genius and Other Essays, p. 6) ; Fr. Schlegel's definition in terms of "almost unconscious choice of the highest degree of excellence, and . . . taste as its highest activity" (The Nature and Elements of Poetry, p. 47); and Goethe's doctrine of the daemonic (Genius and Other Essays, pp. 8-9). In The Nature and Elements of Poetry (pp. 26, 47, 92, 134, 143) he adopts Schlegel's idea of personality in literature and Schopenhauer's identification of music and poetry (Genius and Other Essays, pp. 8-9, 21, 24). He was familiar with Fr. Schlegel's Philosophy of History in the Robertson translation, as well as A. W. Schlegel's Lectures; of Schopenhauer he knew the Saunders translation of The Art of Literature and The Art of Controversy. 411. His own "Ballad of Lager Bier" remains a testimony to the popular appeal of certain standard concepts about Germany. It cele- brates the happy conviviality fostered by the good plebeian brew, which, for Stedman, con- jures up a world of Teutonic associations — Gottingen, Munich, Nuremberg, Hans Sachs, Goethe, Faust, the Brocken and Walpurgis- nacht revelry, gentle Margaret, Mephisto, Mignon, and Undine. All this obviously had a deeper inspiration than Pfaff 's and other Bier- stuben which he and his colleagues frequented. One other poem of Stedman's shows some evidence of German associations. It is entitled "Kennst du ?" and begins "Do you know the blue of the Carib Sea?" See Poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman (Boston and N.Y., 1908), pp. 85-90, 325-27. 412. Poets of America, pp. 180-224 passim. 413. The Nature and Elements of Poetry, pp. 21, 65, 130. 414. Poets of America, p. 373. 415. Ibid., p. 147. 416. Slason Thompson, The Life of Eugene Field(N.Y., 1927), pp. 59-60; Writings(i2 vols., N.Y., 1901-1903), III, 1 1 7-21, and XII, 198-99. 776 Notes to Pages 459-61 417. Writings, III, 102-3; XII, 9-14. 418. As his brother observed, it was a trait of Field's "that no matter where he wandered, he speedily became imbued with the spirit of his surroundings, and his quickly gathered impressions found vent through his pen, whether he was in 'St. Martin's Lane' in Lon- don, with 'Mynheer Van Der Bloom' in Amster- dam, or on the 'Schnellzug' from Hanover to Leipzig." — Ibid., I, xxxvi, 200-204. 419. Ibid., Ill, 9-11. 420. Ibid., pp. 161-63. 421. Ibid., pp. 145-46; IX, 37-39, 44-45. 46 47- 422. Ibid., XII, 125-26. 423. Life, pp. 19-2-93- 424. For example, poems like "The Three Kings of Cologne" (Writings, III, 135-36), "Ben Apfelgarten" (IX, 67-70), "Twin Idols" (IX, 56-57), or tales like "Ludwig and Eloise" (II, 187-94), "The Werewolf" (X, 259-65), and "The Fairies of Pesth" (II, 273-90). The last relates the strange event that inspired Volk- mann's Fairy Waltz. "Franz Abt" (V, 167-72) is another story occasioned by Field's love for German music. With all his love for music, he did not hesitate to ridicule it, as in "The Platonic Bassoon" (V, 195-213) and in '"Die Walkiire' und der Boonerangelungen" (X, 296- 303)- 425. The paraphrases from Heine are "Widow or Daughter?" (ibid., I, 62) and "A Heine Love Song" (IX, 71). "A Paraphrase of Heine" (IX, 194) is not a paraphrase but a translation of No. 65 of Heine's Lyrisches Intermezzo, "Es fallt ein Stern herunter." He translated Uhland's "Der weisse Hirsch" (IX, 212-13), "Der Wirthin Tochterlein" (I, 90-91), and "Die Kapelle" (IX, 72). 426. A journalist, contributor to many periodicals, and long an editor, he surveyed a great variety of periodicals and books, and quantities of German stories and poems in translation passed over his editorial desk. Among his intimate friends in Charleston was the Rev. James W. Miles, who was steeped in German metaphysics, but of this little seems to have been imparted to Simms. With German literature he had more acquaintance, and his translations included selections from Italian, French, Latin, and German. In one of the short paragraphs of Egeria: Voices of Thought and Counsel (Phila., 1853, pp. 285-86) he discussed Goethe's song of Margaret in Faust and append- ed a translation of his own. The same volume (pp. 245-46) includes his rendition of one of Schiller's epigrams. In Confession, or the Blind Heart (1841) he quoted nine lines from the scene between Faust and Wagner, and for one of the chapter headings (most of which are drawn from Shakespeare) he used another brief passage from Faust. Fouque"s romance of the waternymph seems to have exercised the same fascination on him that Poe confessed ; Undine appears in four separate poems of Simms. 427. Aubrey Starke, Sidney Lanier (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1933). P- 43°- 428. About this time Carlyle's essays power- fully reinforced his interest in German romanti- cism, "a territory," says Aubrey Starke, "that was forever afterwards Lanier's spiritual home." — Ibid., pp. 29, 39; see also Philip Graham, "Lanier's Reading," Univ. of Texas Studies in English, XI (Sept. 1, 1931), 63-89. In Thorn Fruit, by Lanier's brother Clifford, Sidney, who is thinly disguised as Mark Wilton, translates for Lucy Pegram (Ginna Hankins) "some of the beautiful German poems her old library furnished in the original" and wins her love thereby. We read: "Schiller's 'Des Madchens Klage,' Heine's 'Du bist wie eine Blume,' and 'Die Nahe der Geliebten' of Goethe's were rapturously applauded by his fair auditor." 429. During the first years of service he spent his abundant leisure in the study of music and of German, French, and Spanish. In 1863, while stationed at St. Petersburg, he had access to a small local library, and here he translated parts of Heine, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller. After a raid on his camp by the enemy, he reported a German glossary among the "lost treasures," and to his father he wrote urging that he secure for him "at any price, editions of the German poets Uhland, Lessing, and Tieck." While a prisoner at Point Lookout in 1864, he made translations of Heine's "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam" and Herder's "Fruhlings Gruss," versions which have the virtue of being literal if not smooth. — Graham, loc. cit., pp. 66-67. 430. Starke, op. cit., pp. 1 18-19. Manhood is "morn-clear"; Ginna Hankins is called "all Heaven sweet"; night, in Germanic verbal fashion, "oncometh." However, Morgan Calla- way (Select Poems of Sidney Lanier, N.Y., 1900, pp. xli-xlii) suggests plausibly that the frequent use of compounds is a habit that Lanier could have acquired from his study of Old English, in which, as in German, such compounds abound. 431. Graham, loc. cit., p. 69. 432. Starke, op. cit., p. 483, n. 2. 433. Ibid., p. 92. 434. Works of Sidney Lanier (Centennial ed., 10 vols., Baltimore, 1945), V, 38. 435. We do not know how well Lanier mastered the language, and the extent of his acquaintance with German literature is hard to Notes to Pase 461 777 determine. For the sources from which he acquired his knowledge, see Graham, loc. cit., pp. 76-87, and Starke, op. cit., p. 97. He often engaged himself to do more than he could accomplish, and frequently he had to be con- tent with haphazard attainment of his numer- ous goals. It is doubtful that he ever achieved facility in his handling of German, although he was able to render German poems in smooth translation and to write at least one poem in good German. His sonnet "An Frau Falk- Auerbach" (1878) is, as Bayard Taylor said, "quite remarkable for a neophyte in the lan- guage," but, while it is "informed with a dis- tinct idea, which is German in its nature," it moves "stiffly and somewhat awkwardly." Lanier was acquainted with many Germans in this country. In 1872, in San Antonio, whither he went in search of health, he enjoyed the hospitality of Germans of that city, moving in the circle of people bearing names like Thielepape, Mahucke, Herff, Scheidemantel, and Duerber. He went with Scheidemantel to the meetings of the Mannerchor and, as he reported to his wife, found the singing of "the old German lieder . . . under the leadership of the venerable Herr Thielepape" so beautiful that "imperious tears" rushed to his eyes. When he performed for them on his flute, "Herr Thielepape arose and ran to me and grasped my hand and declared that he hat never heert de flude accompany itself pefore." — Starke, op. cit., p. 162. In New York the next year, by which time he had decided to devote himself to music, he made an ever-widening circle of friends among the German musicians, a circle soon extended to include also those of Philadelphia and Bal- timore. Among them were Gottlieb, Seifert, and Frau Falk-Auerbach of the Peabody Conser- vatory, Theodore Thomas and Leopold Dam- rosch (conductor of the Philharmonic Society of New York), Carl Wehner of Philadelphia, and members of the Philadelphia and Balti- more Mannerchor orchestras and Liederkranz societies. — Ibid., p. 95; see also Gay W. Allen, "Lanier as a Literary Critic," Philol. Quay., XVII, ii (Apr., 1938), 125. To his wife Lanier wrote on May 25, 1876: "I had an invitation from Wehner to . . . spend the morning with him. I went . . . flute in hand. His knowledge of English is less than mine of German, and we wasted not a word in talk beyond the usual salutations. ... At the end of each movement, as we played straight through the book, my big, phlegmatic, square-built German cried 'Gut!', and looked meaningly upon me; I said, 'Wunderschon,' and looked meaningly upon him." — Letters of Sidney Lanier (N.Y., 1899), pp. 1 15-16. Lanier's knowledge of German, never that of the expert, was equal to his making a translation of Wagner's Rheingold. — ■ Starke, op. cit., pp. 106-7. 436. Letters, pp. 103-4; see a ' so hi s poems on Wagner and Beethoven in Poems, pp. 95-96 and 98-100, respectively. 437. Starke, op. cit., p. 209. 438. See Gay W. Allen, loc. cit., pp. 125-26; also his American Prosody (N.Y., 1938), pp. 277-301, and Georg Brandes, Main Currents in the Nineteenth Century (N.Y., 1923), II, 1 15-16. WALT WHITMAN 439. Complete Writings, ed. by his Literary Executors, Paumanok ed. (N. Y., 1902), I, 108 (hereafter referred to as Writings). 440. Ibid., I, 73. 441. Ibid., p. 18. 442. Ibid., V, 296; III, 53-54. 443. Ibid., IX, 4. 444. See the elaborate notes made by Whit- man on his reading, covering all ages, Oriental and Occidental, ibid., IX, 1-230, X, 1-134. Cf. Norman Foerster, American Criticism, pp. 160- 71, and H. S. Canby, Walt Whitman (Boston, 1943). P- 68. 445. For his borrowings from scientific writers see Alice L. Cooke, "Whitman's In- debtedness to the Scientific Thought of His Day," Univ. of Texas Studies in English, XIV (July, 1934), 89-115, and Joseph Beaver, Walt Whitman: Poet of Science (N.Y., 1951); for his relations to Emersonian, Coleridgean, and Carlylean transcendentalism, see J. B. Moore, "The Master of Whitman," Studies in Philol., XXIII (Jan., 1926), 77-89; C. Gohdes, "Whit- man and Emerson," Sewanec Rev., XXXVII (Jan., 1929), 79-83; Wm. S. Kennedy, "Identi- ties of Thought and Phrase in Emerson and Whitman," Conservator, VIII, vi (Aug., 1897), 88-91 ; Leon Howard, "For a Critique of Whit- man's Transcendentalism," Mod. Lang. Notes, XLII (Feb., 1932), 79-85; Fred M. Smith, "Whitman's Poet-Prophet and Carlyle's Hero," PMLA, LV (Dec, 1940), 1146-64; Wm. S. Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman (London, 1896), pp. 76-84; J. T. Trowbridge, My Own Story (Boston and N.Y., 1903), pp. 365-68; for his borrowings from George Sand see Esther Shepard, Walt Whitman's Pose (N.Y. 1938) ; for his Hegelianism see M. C. Boatright, "Whitman and Hegel," Univ. of Texas Studies in English, IX (July, 1929), 134-50; R. P. Falk, "Walt Whitman and German Thought," Jour. Engl. Germ. Philol., XL (July, 1941), 315-30; W. B. Fulgham, "Whitman's Debt to Joseph Gostwick," Amer. Lit., XII, iv (Jan., 1941). 778 Notes to Pages 461-62 491-96; Newton Arvin, Whitman (N. Y., 1938), pp. 191-97; and Gay W. Allen, Walt Whitman Handbook (Chicago, 1946), Ch. Ill; for his parallels with Herder, Goethe, the Schlegels, Heine, Zschokke, and other German poets and philosophers, see R. P. Falk, loc. cit. ; Charles Glicksberg, "Walt Whitman and Heinrich Zschokke," Notes and Queries, CLXVI (June 22, 1934), 382-84; Florence B. Freedman, "Walt Whitman and Heinrich Zschokke: A Further Note," Amer. Lit., XV, ii (May, 1943), 181-82; Richard Riethmueller, Walt Whitman and the Germans (Phila., 1906). 446. Specimen Days (1882), in Writings, IV, 322. 447. Writings, IX, 70. 448. November Boughs (1888), in Writings, III, 66; see also Writings, V, 55-56. 449. His polyglotism (which included words gleaned from Latin, Italian, Spanish, and French phrase books, from the streets of New Orleans and New York, and from various other sources) did not include German. Late in life, referring to the elder Traubel's recita- tion of some German verses to him, he said, "I couldn't understand a word." — Horace Trau- bel. With Walt Whitman in Camden (3 vols., N.Y., 19 15), I, 217; see also II, 2, 5, 53, 191-92; III, 159-60, 495 (hereafter referred to as Camden). He never traveled outside his native country, but he did come in contact with Ger- mans, German-Americans, and others who could impart to him a good deal of information about Germany. From first to last, in New York, New Orleans, Brooklyn, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Camden, St. Louis, and elsewhere, he was actually conscious of many racial, or national, elements, including the German. He had not Thoreau's "great fault of disdain — disdain of men (for Tom, Dick, and Harry)," but constantly cultivated what he called his gregarious amativeness for men. In later life he came to know well a number of Germans. Of primary importance among these was Maurice Henry Traubel, the father of Horace Traubel, who Boswellized Whitman's late years. Their frequent meetings resolved themselves largely into the senior Traubel's reading German poetry to Whitman (in both the original and translation) and generally familiarizing him with the writings of "Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Lessing." Whitman respected Traubel's knowledge, called him "a great man," and acknowledged that he learned much from him. — Camden, I, 146, 217; II, 252-53; III, 173; see also Falk, in JEGP, LX, 316. Among some notes left by Whitman that date pre- sumably to 1856-1857 (Writings, IX, ill— 12) there is a reference to a "Conversation with Mr. Held about German poets . . . Freiligrath, Riickert, Uhland, Kinkel, Hoffmann, Heine, and Xavier." Among prominent citizens of Brooklyn and New York, Whitman recorded the names of a number of Germans. In 1857 he encouraged Friedrich Huene, a young poet, orator, exile of 48, and co-worker with Whit- man on the Brooklyn Daily Times, to under- take a translation of Leaves of Grass into Ger- man. Later he maintained an anxious corres- pondence with Karl Knortz and Thomas W. Rolleston, co-translators into German of Leaves of Grass (Zurich, 1889), occasionally received clippings from German newspapers (which Traubel read for him), and remained constantly desirous that his poems should have a good reception in Germany. The subscribers for the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass included Hubert Herkimer, the painter, and Franz Hueffer, the musical writer. Whitman frequented Pfaff's restaurant for years and knew intimately both the host and the Bohemian society of the place. His edito- rials and columns in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for 1857-1859 contain a number of apprecia- tive references to "Schneiders," the German theater near by, and to the social and convivial entertainments of the large German element in Brooklyn. In Camden the primitive printing office of his friend William Kurtz was one of his favorite lounging places. On visiting St. Louis in 1879, he observed the perfect fusion of native and foreign elements in that city: "its Ameri- can electricity goes well with its German phlegm." — Writings, IV, 282. He celebrated the "polyglot construction stamp" of America (ibid., V, 209), constantly opposed what he called " Yankeedoodledom," nativists, and the Know- Nothing Party, and said that if he had his way, he would banish the word foreigner. See his editorials in The Gathering of the Forces (ed. by C. Rogers and J. Black, 2 vols., N.Y., 1920), I, 14-22, 159-65; II, 15-17. 450. Whenever he mentions prominent national strains, the German is always ranked alongside the English and French. Germany, equally with Homer's Greece and Shakespeare's Britain, comes constantly to his mind. His globe-circling survey of the world, past and present, singles out "the German intellect" as one "from which American students may well derive profit," and he advises the young men and women of the United States "to over- haul . . . the literatures of Italy, Spain, France, and Germany . . . needed for the future of the United States," and he hopes for the day when "really good translations" will be available. — Writings, V, 274-75, 277; also III, 52-54. His identifications of Germany with "intellec- Notes to Page 462 779 tual" progress occur so often that there can be no doubt about the pre-eminence he attached tot he Germans as philosophers, just as he ascribed courtesy to the French, manliness to the Scandinavians, art to the Italians, and mysticism to the Orientals. — Ibid., V, 228. Despite his hatred of American emulation of Europe, in the realm of philosophy, he said in Specimen Days (ibid., IV, 322-23), "the contri- bution which German Kant and Fichte and Schelling and Hegel have bequeath'd to human- ity . . . are indispensable to the erudition of America's future." In that orgy of Whitmanesque cosmopolitan- ism, "Salut au Monde," he sees "the Syrian Alps and the Karnac Alps," he beholds mari- ners "traverse the Zuyder Zee or the Scheld," while other steamers lie in Hamburg and Bre- men harbors ; he sees the windings of the Dan- ube and the Oder; he imagines himself an "inhabitant of Berlin, Berne, Frankfort, Stutt- gart"; he delivers a message of good will from America to the "workingmen of the Rhine, the Elbe, or the Weser . . . the Bavarian, Swabian, Saxon." For comparisons he constantly recurs to Germany. The significance of Carlyle, Burns, and Elias Hicks is equated against the achieve- ments of Goethe, of "Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, and Weber," of "Kant, Fichte, and Hegel." He bemoans the fact that America has not developed "any characteristic music, the finest tie of nationality, such as the German Volkslied, the German airs of friendship, wine and love," a more powerful cement amongst Germans than all racial, linguistic, and institu- tional forces. In "Proud Music of the Storm," a passionate paean in praise of music compar- able to Schiller's "Die Macht des Gesanges," he hears to the accompaniment of the "German organ majestic," the symphonies and oratorios of "Beethoven, Handel, or Haydn," the Creation laving him "in billows of Godhead." For the powerful impact upon him of German music and drama, see Writings, IV, 26, 185, 216-17, 287-88, 290-91; VI, 50, 184-95; VII, 49; Trowbridge, My Own Story, p. 369. 451. Professor Emory Holloway concludes, on the basis of his identification of nearly a hundred quotations from more or less well known authors and of more than a hundred book reviews that Whitman wrote for the Eagle, that "Whitman reviewed more books and knew more about books than any contem- porary editor in Brooklyn, if not New York, exclusive of the editors of literary periodicals." — Uncollected Poetry and Prose (ed. by Emory Holloway, 2 vols.. Garden City, N.Y., 1921), I, 126. Among the books Whitman reviewed were John v. Miiller's History of the World (tr. by Alex. H. Everett), Leonard Schmitz's History of Rome, J. F. Spurzheim's Phrenology, J. J. v. Tschudi's Travels in Peru, Theo. Dwight's Summer Tours, Bayard Taylor's Views Afoot, Ft. L. G. v. Raumer's Amerika, Fr. v. Schlegel's Philosophy of Life and Philosophy of Language (tr. by A. J. W. Morrison), Goethe's Autobiogra- phy, and Schiller's Homage of the Arts and other Translations (tr. by C. T. Brooks). He wrote reviews also of Coleridge's Aids, Biographia Literaria, and Letters, Carlyle's Heroes, French Revolution, and Past and Present, W. E. Chan- ning's Self-Culture , Emerson's Spiritual Laws, Margaret Fuller's Papers on Literature and Art, and Lydia M. Child's Memoirs of Madame de Stael and Madame Roland. He also quoted (sometimes briefly, sometimes to the length of a column or two) from the following Germans in either his Miscellany or his Sunday Reading columns: Goethe, Herder (2), Karl T. Korner, F. W. Krummacher, Jean Paul, Schiller, Uhland (2), Heinrich Voss, and Zschokke (2). 452. Camden, II, 244; see also I, 141, and Richard Maurice Bucke, Walt Whitman (Phila., 1883), p. 52. 453. The Old German Nibelungenlied, "an integral sign or landmark," he said he "went over thoroughly." — Writings, II, 55. Whether he meant by this statement that he secured a translation and really prepared (as one of his memoranda suggests) "a running sketch" of the poem, or whether he contented himself here, as elsewhere, with what he found on the subject in Gostick's German Literature (Phila., 1854) and more especially in Carlyle's essay on "The Nibelungen Lied" remains problematical. His longest note on the subject follows the latter closely, point for point (compare Writings, IX, 83, and Carlyle's Essays, Centenary ed., II, 221-22, 239-64 passim, 265-66, 267, 268, 270); although Gostick's German Literature seems to have supplied supplementary data, especially of the narrative (compare Gostick, pp. 18-31, and Writings, IX, 117, 187, 228; X, 14). He concluded that the Nibelungenlied, like the Scandinavian eddas or the Charlemagne cycle and all" archetypal poems," had their origin "in the great historic perturbations, which they came in to sum up and confirm." — Writings, V, 55-56, 96 n., 292 ; VI, 124 ; IX, 83, 117, 187, 216, 228; Camden, I, 241. Great authors, or "literatuses" (says Whitman), in fashioning types of "Siegfried and Hagen," of "Brunhelde and Chriemhelde," first formed the standards of society, politics, religion, and personality of early Germanic times ; they subsequently be- came "the main support of chivalry, the feudal, ecclesiastical, dynastic world . . . forming its osseous structure, holding it together for hun- rso Notes to Pages 462-63 dreds, thousands of years, preserving its flesh and bloom, giving it form, decision, rounding it out, and so saturating it in the conscious and unconscious blood, breed, belief, and intuitions of man, that it still prevails powerful to this day, in defiance to the mighty changes of time." — Writings, V, 55-56; see also 58-59, 96-97. Here is a concept of literature and of the "literatus" sufficiently grand even for Whitman. 454. On the scope of his reading, see his reading notes in the last two volumes of Writings, as well as Professor Norman Foerster's appraisal of Whitman's general knowledge of books: "As far as reading prepares a writer for critical speculation . . . Whitman was far better equipped for his task than has ordinarily been realized. He was far better equipped than Poe, probably in quantity of reading, quite certainly in quality." — American Criticism, pp. 169-70. Speaking of the pre- 1855 period, Canby (Walt Whitman, p. 68) estimates that "it is doubtful if many American writers or editors (the Concord and Boston group excepted) were reading more widely and with as earnest a search for values." 455. Camden, III, 160-61; see also Writings, IX, in. 456. For other notable examples, see Cam- den, I, 152, 200, 215, 223; Writings, I, 108. 457. Clifton J. Furness, "Walt Whitman's Estimate of Shakespeare," Harvard Studies and Notes in Philol. and Lit. XIV (1932), 1. 458. Writings, VI, 293. 459. Prose Writers of Germany, p. 265. All references to this book are to the third edition (X.Y., 1855). Whitman owned a copy of this book. 460. In this case, since Whitman was pre- paring notes which presumably he alone would see, he was less circumspect about covering his tracks than in his published writings, though even here he sometimes slipped, as we have observed. Another notable instance in which he dropped his guard is his reference, in a footnote in Specimen Days (Writings, IV, 321; see also IX, 171), to Gostick as an authority on Hegel. This hint provoked researches into Gostick's book as the source of Whitman's Hegelianism (notably by M. C. Boatright, R. P. Falk, and W. B. Fulgham), but the extent of his pilferings from this source for his information on Hegel has been only roughly indicated and his bor- rowings in other respects from Gostick have gone entirely unnoticed. For example, Whitman's information on Niebuhr (whom he valued as the "Founder of a New Theory of History") came from Gostick. At the end of one of his passages on the German historian, he wrote: "See pages 249-50-51 German Literature" (Writings, IX, 116). The passages indicated present the following parallelism : Gostick (p. 249) : "In Roman history Barthold Niebuhr, who was born at Copenhagen in 1776, stands alone as the founder of the new school of research, by which the fictions which were mingled with the early history of Rome, and copied from book to book, and from one century to another, have been finally exploded. . . . During his youth he visited London and Edin- burgh. . . . Niebuhr was employed in several political offices during the remainder of his life, until 1823, when he retired to Bonn, and there devoted himself to the task of arranging the copious materials of his Roman history. The French Revolution of July 1830 had such an effect on the mind of Niebuhr, that it hastened his death, which took place at Bonn, January 2, 1831." [Here follows an extract from the Introduction to Niebuhr's Roman History.] Whitman (IX, 116): "Barthold Niebuhr — 1776-1831 — 55 years. Born at Copenhagen, during youth visited London and Edinburgh. Was an occupant of political offices for the younger manhood years of his life — but in 1823 (aged 47) retired to Bonn and became the great reformer of Roman history (and ancient History generally). Was much excited by the French Revolution of July 1830, said to have hastened his death, Jan. 1831 — See pages 249- 50-51 German Literature." Another such note appears in Whitman's memoranda (Writings, X, 16): "Hegel, German literature, prose writers of Germany." The meaning of this memorandum is obviously this: "For Hegel, consult Gostick's German Literature and Hedge's Prose Writers of Ger- many." Still another note, on Lessing, is drawn from the same source: Gostick (pp. 1 16-17) : "We . . . find a prepara- tion for a new era in literature in the writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1787), who was equally eminent as a dramatist and a critic. . . . His life was characterized by remarkable activity. He lived at various times in Berlin, Leipsic, Breslau, Hamburg, and Wolfenbuttel. ... He ably exposed the pedantry of Gottsched, the failure of Klopstock as an epic poet, the false imitations of the ancient classics which had been fashionable, the unpoetic fables of Gellert and others, and the falsity of that style of descriptive poetry which had attempted to do with the pen the work of Notes to Page 464 781 the painter. This last error was fully criticized in his 'Laokoon,' which appeared in 1766. . . . it was in the drama that his services were most remarkable. . . . He produced a didactic drama entitled 'Nathan the Wise' ... in this work the action is suspended for the sake of the doctrine of universal religious toleration which Nathan inculcates. ... It reminds us of a very impor- tant change in the tone of German literature from the national and Christian character which we find in Klopstock, to the cosmopoli- tan character which prevails in the writings of Goethe, Schiller, and other modern poets." Whitman (IX, 155): "Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — 1729-87 — contemporary of Voltaire — very active — lived in Berlin Leipsic, Breslau, Hamburg, etc. Was a severe and almost perfect critic — exposed Klopstock's deficiencies as a poet and the false imitations of the classics — author of Laocoon (1766) — and of good dramas — also a didactic drama, Nathan the Wise, inculcating Kosmos religious notions. He was the R.W. Emerson of his age and paved the way for Goethe and Schiller — Lessing was a Jew." Whitman's spelling of Gost[w]ick's name has occasioned some confusion and comment, but there is no mystery involved here. Whitman used the 1854 edition of Joseph Gostick's Ger- man Literature (Phila. : Lippincott, Gambro & Co., 1854, vii + 324 pp.). In the second, revised, and greatly enlarged edition the name is spelled Gostwick: Joseph Gostwick and Robert Harri- son, Outlines of German Literature (London: Williams & Norgate; Boston: Schonhof & Mol- ler; N.Y.: Henry Holt & Co., 1873, xii + 588 pp.). A reprint of the latter came out in 1883. Whitman knew neither of these much improved editions. 461. Writings, IX, no. 462. Essays (Centenary ed.), I, 198-257. The passages which Whitman paraphrased, or copied, are found in I, 202, 208, 210-n, 211-42 passim, 243, 248. 463. A good portion of the last two pages of Goethe memoranda is devoted to a kind of running argument with Carlyle regarding Goethe's stature as a poet. Revealing comments appear in his remarks on Carlyle's calling Goethe an "antique worthy": "Carlyle vaunts him as showing that a man can live even these days as an 'Antique Worthy'. This vaunt Goethe deserves — he is indeed a cultivated German aristocrat, physically in- extricable from his age and position, but morally bent to the Attic spirit and its occasions two thousand and more years ago. That is he, such are his productions. The assumption that Goethe passed through the first stage of dark- ness and complaint to the second stage of con- sideration and knowledge and thence to the third stage of triumph and faith — this assump- tion cannot pass, cannot stand amid the judg- ments of the soul. Goethe's was the faith of physical well being, a good digestion and appe- tite, it was not the faith of the masters, poets, prophets, divine persons. Such faith he perhaps came near and saw the artistical beauty of — perhaps fancied he had it — but he never had it." — Writings, IX, n 2-13. The stages in Goethe's development here enumerated reflect Carlyle's Essays, II, 430-35, and I, 210-n ; also II, 440. One point of Carlyle's particularly bothered him. Forced to admit Carlyle's observations about Goethe's universal appeal to the culti- vated and uncultivated alike, Whitman still found inexplicable his question, "Why do uneducated minds also receive pleasure from Goethe ? . . . To the little court at Weimar, to the poetical world, to the learned and literary worlds, Goethe has a deserved greatness. To the genius of America he is neither dear nor the reverse of dear. He passes with the general crowd upon whom the American glance des- cends with indifference. Our road is our own." — Writings, I, 202, 208; IX, 1 13-14. This judgment, like that on Shakespeare, who represented for Whitman another modern living in an atmosphere of feudalism and aristocracy, is his characteristic and, in some respects, final attitude toward Goethe; and this, we must conclude, was based less on a firsthand knowledge of a large portion of Goethe's writings than upon a rummaging about among such books as Longfellow's anthology, Gostick's handbook, Lewis' biogra- phy, and above all, Carlyle's essays. Carlyle's essays, it may be observed, served Whitman on a number of other occasions. In 1857 he took cognizance of Carlyle's emphasis in his essay on "Schiller" (1831) on the Brief- wechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe in den Jahren 1794-1805, and some years later, in Camden, he busied himself with The Correspon- dence of Goethe and Schiller, available since 1845 in the Calvert, and since 1877-1879 in the Schmitz translation. See Camden, I, 57. An- other striking instance of close borrowing from Carlyle is Whitman's two-page memorandum of Jean Paul (see Writings, IX, 121-23), a1 ' taken almost verbatim from Carlyle's essay of 1 830 on Richter (Essays, II, 96-1 59) . Whitman's transcriptions are from pages 97, 99, 104, 105, 114, 115-19. 120, 123, 124-25, 135, 137, 139, 141, 142-43, 153-58 passim. A few supple- mentary details are drawn from Carlyle's earlier article on Jean Paul (Essays, I, 1-25), the 782 Notes to Pages 464-65 particular passages supplying Whitman with data being from pages 6, 7, 8-9, 10, 11, 11-14, 25. Professor Emory Holloway points to an- other, much later, instance of borrowing in his "Notes from a Whitman Student's Scrapbook," American Scholar, II (1933), 2 77~7&- 464. The review is reprinted in Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, 139-41, and in Gathering of the Forces, II, 294-95. 465. Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, 140 n. 466. Ibid., I, 140. 467. See Writings, V, 218-22; also III, 44-45, 63, 65; VII, 60. On the score of Whitman's avowed purpose of writing an autobiographical book, consider his remark, "This is no book, / Who touches this touches a man" (Writings, II, 289); also "The book is autobiographic at bottom" (ibid., VI, 285); his observation in "Good-Bye My Fancy" (ibid., VII, 60) that his "chief work" has the aim "to utter the same old human critter — but ... in Democratic Ameri- can modern and scientific conditions." See also ibid., Ill, 44-45, 63-65, and Walt Whitman's Workshop, pp. 9, 131, 174. In a letter written in 1882 to Edward Dowden, Whitman reiterated what he had said at greater length in the 1855 Preface and repeated substantially in the 1876 Preface : "The principle of my book is a model or ideal ... of a complete healthy, heroic, practi- cal modern Man. ... I seek to typify a living Human Personality." — Bliss Perry, Walt Whit- man (Boston, 1906), pp. 199-200. During his last years he spoke with satisfaction of his tenacity of purpose "from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in America,) fully and truly on record" (Writings, III, 65) and of creating an autobiographic "Epic of Man" (ibid., IX, iio-n). 468. Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, 140 n. 469. Emory Holloway, Whitman: An Inter- pretation in Narrative (N.Y., 1926) p. 17. A hint of how directly vital Goethe's autobiography was to Whitman and how he found in it a model for his glorification of "Personality" appears in his statement to Horace Traubel on November 23, 1888: "Goethe impresses me as above all to stand for essential literature, art, life — in perfect persons — perfect you, me: to force the real into the abstract ideal: to make himself, Goethe, the supremest example of personal identity: everything making for it: in us, in Goethe; every man repeating the same experi- ence. . . . Goethe would ask: 'What are your forty, fifty, hundred, social, national, phan- tasms ? This only is real — this person. . . .'" — Camden, III, 159. 470. See Esther Shepherd, Walt Whitman's Pose. 471. Fred M. Smith, "Whitman's Poet- Prophet and Carlyle's Hero," PMLA, LV, iv (Dec, 1940), 1146-64. 472. See Whitman's letter to Emerson, August, 1856; Writings, V, 270; John Bur- roughs, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (N.Y., 1867), pp. 16-17; Richard M. Bucke, Walt Whitman (Phila., 1883), p. 83; and the detailed record of Whitman's daily talk during his late years in Camden, which serve to show that he "longed more for the approbation of Emerson than for that of any other man." 473. Emerson's essay on Goethe in Repre- sentative Men seems not to have made much of an impression on Whitman; there appears to be no carry-over from this essay into Whit- man's extended note on Goethe written in January-February, 1856. It does not follow, however, because Whitman claimed he had not read Emerson's essays before 1855 (see Wm. S. Kennedy, Reminiscences, p. 76, and R. M. Bucke, Walt Whitman, pp. 73-98, esp. p. 82) that therefore he had not become indoctrinated with some Emersonian ideas ; for while he may not have read the Essays, first or second series, before 1855, he could readily have acquired much knowledge about Emerson through the reviews. For instance, the Demo- cratic Review, for which Whitman himself wrote between 1841 and 1847, published be- tween 1839 and 1845 five long essays (itemized by Kennedy, op. cit., pp. 80-81) on Emerson and Emersonianism. 474. A singular gap in Whitman's knowl- edge of Goethe's writings occurs in the case of Wilhelm Meister, which Whitman nowhere mentions except in a passing reference, obvious- ly based on Carlyle's essay on "Goethe" (1832). See Writings, IX, 112-113; compare Carlyle's Essays, I, 232-42. Readily available in Carlyle's translation, this work might have served equally well with the A utobiography and Faust during the gestation period of Leaves of Grass as a biographical and autobiographical model. There is the possibility, of course, that his fail- ure to mention Wilhelm Meister prominently was studied. In 1888 he said that he knew little of Goethe at first hand beyond a reading of Faust and a "looking into" this or that translation, picking up "a poem, a glint, here and there"; yet he insisted on his right to "an opinion of Goethe" (Camden, III, 159-60). His admiration of Goethe was qualified: Goethe's aloofness from his contemporary world — his failure to play a decisive role in the turbulent Europe of his later life — was antithetical to his own demo- cratic-nationalistic creed. "The Goethean theory and lesson (if I may briefly state it so) of Notes to Pages 465-66 783 the exclusive sufficiency of artistic, scientific, literary equipment to the character, irrespec- tive of any strong claim of the political ties of nation, state, or city, could have answer'd under the conventionality and pettiness of Weimar, or of Germany, or even Europe, of those times; but it will not do for America at all." — Writings, VI, 6; see also III, 49; V, 223; IX, 1 10-14; Camden, II, 2-5; III, 159-60. This charge of aloofness was, of course, a stock criticism, and is not necessarily a reflection of much firsthand knowledge of Goethe. 475. Camden, I, 56. 476. Ibid., Ill, 159. 477. Ibid., I, 291. 478. Ibid., II, 378. 479. See ibid., II, 159, for Traubel's report of another instance of Bucke's linking Faust with Leaves of Grass, on which occasion Whitman took particular pains to say that he had never read Faust very attentively. At another time, while admitting that he had known Bayard Taylor for years (ibid., I, 55), he declared that he had never read Taylor's translation {ibid., I, 126) — a declaration that is a little hard to swallow in view of Taylor's general position and the great reputation of his Faust. See also J Sit and Look Out, pp. 69, 215 n. 18, and Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, 136. 480. Richard Riethmiiller, loc. cit., p. 37. 481. As in Goethe's Prologue in Heaven, "the evil spirit that eternally denies" (Faust I, 1. 1338) is acknowledged by the Lord to be an indispensable ally in preserving mankind from false security and enervation; so Satan is included, together with Father, Son, and Santa Spirita, in the "Square Deific." In Faust, God says: "Ever too prone is man activity to shirk, In unconditioned rest he fain would live; Hence this companion purposely I give, Who stirs, excites, and must, as devil work." (11. 340-43) Whitman repeatedly expresses a similar idea in stressing the strenuous life: the man who has never imperiled his life but has retained it to old age, in ease and riches, has not lived — has not achieved anything worth while. In "Song of Myself" Whitman says: "Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me. . . . I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also." (Writings, I, 60) 482. Among his memoranda is this notation: "Theories of Evil — Festus, Faust, Manfred, Paradise Lost, Book of Job." — Ibid., IX, 154. 483. In the poem "Roaming in Thought (After reading Hegel)," he wrote in 1881: "Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that was good steadily hastening towards Immortality, And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead." (Ibid., II, 35). Riethmiiller suggests evidence of dependence in the parallelism between Goethe's "Alles Ver- gangliche / 1st nur ein Gleichnis" (Faust II, 11. 1 2 104-5) and Whitman's oft-repeated expres- sion that ' ' Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost" (Writings, II, 309). But in view of Whit- man's prefatory note to these lines to the effect that they were suggested by a talk he had "lately [1888] with a German spiritualist," it seems gratuitous to seek the source in Goethe or Boehme. Similarly, it has been suggested that Whit- man's feminism may owe something to Goethe's "Ewig-Weibliche" which draws men ever onward and upward, and that his assigning the feminine gender to "Santa Spirita" in "Chan- ting the Square Deific" is evidence of a lingering reminiscence in Whitman's mind of the closing words of Faust. Whitman's Santa Spirita, "including all life on earth, touching, including God, including Saviour and Satan, ethereal, pervading all" and completing the "square deific," is akin to the hardly definable but inviolable feminine power that brings final harmony in Goethe's spirit-world. But again the relationship, in the absence of stronger external evidence, is not supported by internal evidence strong enough to warrant the con- clusion that anything more than a parallelism is involved. 484. See Charles I. Glicksberg, in Notes and Queries, CLXVI, 382-84. We cannot be positive regarding when Whitman's attention was first directed to Zschokke, but opportunites were not lacking during the late 30's and early 40's, when the periodicals contained much infor- mation about him. The publication of Parke Godwin's translation of Selbstschau (Auto- biography) in 1845 was widely noticed. During the period of Whitman's editorship of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the paper serialized Zschokke's "Journal of a Poor Vicar in Wilt- shire," and there is good reason for believing that Whitman himself was responsible for the notice of Zschokke's Tales (tr. by Parke God- win, N.Y., 1845) that appeared in the Brooklyn Evening Star for February 9, 1845. 784 Notes to Pages 466-67 485. Glicksberg, loc. cit., p. 383. 486. Especially those of 1 846-1 847, collected in The Gathering of the Forces; see also H. S. Canby, Walt Whitman, pp. 88-99. 487. The passage, in Godwin's translation, reads: "The Life of Man is striking and inter- esting enough to stand by itself, unrecommend- ed by the merit or celebrity of the Statesman and Author" (p. iv). 488. One paragraph which Whitman copied from page 10 of Godwin's translation reads thus: "I thought that I was alone with God in the World, and that He was educating me in the School of Life, until I should be fit to live at home in Heaven with Him. For me he had built this wonderful place, (the Earth), and all which I saw, men, women, children, animals, were all moved about solely for me and in my presence, being without life or motion when I was away. Whenever I came God hastened to continue the wonderful spectacle for me, to teach and educate the child." These sentiments, suggestive as they are of passages in "There was a Child Went Forth," in "Song of Myself," and in others of Whit- man's poems, where his subjective egoism enables him to see in the visible universe "for me an audience interminable," are yet present- ed with a difference. 489. November Boughs (Phila., 1888), p. 18; Writings, III, 66; see also V, 55-56. Unfortu- nately in Whitman's estimation Goethe forgot this lesson all too soon, and lived too exclusive- ly a literary existence. Even Schiller, whose arduous idealism he admired, seemed deficient on the score of literary exclusiveness. See Camden, I, 57, 58, 146, 217, 357; II, 188-89, 407, 436; Writings, III, 157; IV, 285; IX, 114. Bucke tells us that Schiller's "Diver" was one of the poems that Whitman loved to recite (Walt Whitman, p. 53; see also Walt Whitman's Workshop, p. 205), and Traubel records Whit- man's quoting, on September 30, 1888, "some- thing from Schiller on the background of art," possibly something that had lodged in his memory since 1846 when he reviewed C. T. Brooks's translation of Schiller's Homage of the Arts. 490. It is not necessary to speculate on whether Whitman read Herder in translation or relied on criticism and commentary. He had access to both, in books and periodicals, Ameri- can as well as British. See the bibliographies of B. Q. Morgan, S. H. Goodnight, and H. M. Haertel. Herder had begun with Hamann's proposi- tion that poetry is the mother tongue of the human race. The first language of a people is only a collection of the elements of poetry. The origin of poetry and of language being intimate- ly related, poetry cannot be, says Herder, the privilege of a few cultivated men : it must be a gift for the peoples of the world. Poetry ranks the higher the nearer the nation (or the indivi- dual who helps compose it) stands to nature. Hence the most glorious poetic productions are those of the oldest peoples and of children of nature, like Moses and Homer. For culture is dangerous to poetry. Culture weakens; it destroys the pregnancy of thought and simpli- city of expression, the naivete' and sincerity of sentiment — all of which the old heroes of literature possessed. While attention to their methods may teach modern poets how to write, mere imitation of the great masters will not raise modern poetry to a higher or nobler plane. "The old poets knew how to absorb and reflect their own nature and history, the current thoughts and the language. We must become imitators of ourselves — we must become original." See R. Riethmuller, loc. cit., p. 42. For Herder's "intuitive grasp of the organic unity of all mankind, of the inevitable inter- dependence of the individual, the nation, and the race, which made him the father of the modern evolutionary view of history," see Kuno Francke, Social Forces in German Litera- ture (3rd. ed., N.Y., 1893), p. 319. 491. Writings, V, 54-57, 165-68; VI, 101-2, 105-7. 492. Ibid., V, 205; VI, 11, 284-86. Whit- man's conclusions regarding the stature of the bards who composed the Nibelungenlied and F. Schlegel's theories of literature both appear to have contributed toward the formulation of these views. 493. A comparison of the basic ideas in Whitman's essay, "The Bible as Poetry," with Herder's Vom Geist der ebrdischen Poesie serves to clarify the close parallelism. 494. Leading references to Heine are found in Uncollected Poetry and Prose, II, 94 ; Writings, VII, 11, 70-71 ; IX, 88; Camden, I, 95, 106, 217, 461; II, 53, 324, 336, 474, 546, 553, 554, 560-62; III, 9, 184, 190, 355. He especially emphasized Heine's contemporaneity, his freedom and fearlessness in applying ideas to life, his attack of "humbuggeries," his "superb fusion of culture and native elemental genius," the "primal quality, the direct off -throwing of nature" which he embodied in his writings. He identified himself with Heine as bridging a gap between romanticism and realism and as in- sisting on the necessity for embodying and actually living the theories of the nineteenth century. The attempt to link Faust with Leaves of Grass repeatedly elicited protestations from Notes to Pages 467-68 785 Whitman; but when Traubel mentioned the autobiographical nature of Heine as identical with Leaves of Grass — as fulfilling Whitman's requirement that true autobiography must flow spontaneously from personality — Whit- man did not demur but observed that Heine's work met the requirements of "great auto- biography . . . pre-eminently above all others." In short, he found in Heine that spirit of revolt, "an appeal to nature, an appeal to final mean- ings ... a primal quality not to be named or described," which he himself sought to incor- porate in his own work. — Camden, II, 562. 495. Writings, IX, 181. 496. Ibid., pp. 166-186. 497. See below. He also followed the course of the Baconian theory as espoused by Ger- mans like Kuno Fischer and Karl Miiller. — - Camden, I, 30—32. 498. Writings, VI, 152. 499. Ibid., V, 6. 500. Ibid., IX, 116. 501. This attitude is of a piece with his alternately claiming consistency for his philos- ophy and denying it, of inviting disciples and disclaiming any intention of founding a school. See Writings, I, 70, 108, 140, 290. 502. Camden, I, 156. 503. Writings, II, 168. 504. Ibid., I, 68. 505. Ibid., II, 15. 506. Ibid., I, 181-82. 507. Ibid., p. 64. 508. Ibid., II, 107. 509. Ibid., I, 294. On May 5, 1888, he said to Traubel: "I doubt if anybody includes more than I do: I have room for them all: I am a great accepter." — Camden, II, 436. 510. Writings, I, 156. 511. Ibid., p. 154. 512. Ibid., pp. 146-47. In "I Hear It Charged Against Me" he said: "I will establish . . . the institution of the dear love of comrades." 513. "What we see," he added, "is superior to what we reason about — what establishes itself in the age, in the heart, is finally the only logic — can boast of the only real verification." — Camden, I, 149. Again, he said, "I believe in immortality, and by that I mean identity. I known I have arrived at this result more by what may be called feeling than formal reason — but I believe it: yes I know it. I am easily put to flight . . . when attacked, but I return to the faith, inevitably — believe it, and stick to it, to the end. Emerson somewhere speaks of en- countering irresistible logic yet standing fast to his conviction. There is a judgment back of judgment. . . . Logic does very little for me: my enemies say it, meaning one thing — I say it, meaning another thing." — Ibid., I, 110-11. "I am more likely to be governed by my in- tuitive than by my critical self, anyhow." — Ibid., II, 199. Once he went so far in his anti-intellectualism to declare, "Intellect is a fiend." — Walt Whitman's Workshop, pp. 19 187. 514. Writings, V, 279. 515. Ibid., p. 119. The "invaluable contribu- tions of Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel" are in the same category with the sacred poems, exhibit- ing "the religious tone, the consciousness of mystery, the recognition of the unknown, the Deity over and under all, and of the divine purpose" and illustrating "literature's [not philosophy's] real heights and elevations." — Ibid., V, 136 n. 516. "I resist anything better than my own diversity." — "Song of Myself," 1. 349. 517. The inconclusiveness and dissatisfac- tion which Whitman felt is first distinctly enunciated in the third edition (1 860-1 861) of Leaves of Grass, especially in "Bardic Symbols," subsequently called "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," and "Out of the Cradle End- lessly Rocking." Consult H. S. Canby, Whit- man, pp. 180-81. 518. Camden, I, 156. The necessity under which his disciples placed him of acting always "in character" conspired to develop and accentuate a pose beyond his natural inclina- tion. One of the characteristics of this pose was the false position into which it drove him of denying indebtedness in cases where the debt was most obvious. See the contradictory evi- dence he gave at various times regarding his debt to Emerson as stated in John T. Trow- bridge, op. cit., pp. 367-39, and in W. S. Kennedy, op. cit., pp. 76-85; also his later references to Emerson as recorded in Camden, passim. Whitman was one of those complex individuals in whom the pose became so power- ful that the man who was Whitman became so nearly identified with the poseur as to make the two indistinguishable. The pose was so long and constantly cultivated and the myth so completely embellished, especially in that atmosphere of adoration and discipleship with which Traubel and other admirers surrounded him, that Whitman came near being the man they told him he was and the poet-philosopher he wished to be. 519. This tendency will be recognized in a comparison of such key poems as "Song of Myself" (1855), "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" (1859), "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom 'd" (1865), and "Passage to India" (1871). Compare also the uncompromis- ing and raucous notes in the early prefaces with 786 Notes to Pages 468-70 the more mediate position expressed in his later prose essays. 520. Writings, IX, 170-71. Coleridge's doc- trine of opposites (which Whitman encountered during the 40's when he read the Biographia and the Aids) and Emerson's pronouncements on polarity may well have conditioned him to accept the Hegelian principle. 521. See F. O. Matthiessen, American Re- naissance, pp. 538-39. 522. Writings, IX, 170-71. Whitman goes on to say that all the "variegated, countless objects, the perplexing ideas of immortality," the seeming contradictions between "the fact of death, chemical dissolution, and segregation" and all the conviction of "Identity's continu- ance, despite of death" — the whole "long train of baffling contradictory events" — become under the "absolute logic" of Hegelian reason, "only so many steps on one eternal process of creative thought." — Ibid., IX, 172. 523. Writings, I, 146. 524. "The Base of All Metaphysics," in which he first made his broad assertion of familiarity with all systems of philosophy, is dated 1871. Among the notes reprinted by Dr. Bucke are several that belong to 1856 and 1857 (Writings, IX, 88, 111-12, 120), but they deal with literary figures ; while the passages dealing with philosophers belong, according to Dr. Bucke, to "the late sixties or very early seven- ties." — Ibid., IX, 166 n. Except for these notations, designed as outlines for a series of "Sunday evening lectures" on "the great Ger- man metaphysicians," Whitman's notes are nonphilosophical in character. The manuscripts from which Dr. Bucke printed these notes were "simply a series of fragments," but they form a unit and have all the earmarks of having been made at one time or very nearly consecutively. The coherence which they exhibit is not neces- sarily an indication that they were written in close sequence, but the fact that the order of subjects treated is very close to that of Gostick suggests that they were the result of concen- trated attention. It is entirely possible that Whitman read scatteringly about German transcendental philosophy before becoming absorbed in it, but in view of the general cohe- sion and tone of the lecture notes it is more likely that the period of writing these notes and the period of concentrated interest in German thought were nearly coincident. His reference in the midst of his notations on the German idealists (Writings, IX, 184) to his Vistas, pub- lished in 1871, is suggestive. Although Gostick's book became available to him in 1854, there is no evidence to show that he read it at that time. 525. While ascribed to Burroughs, the pas- sage is in reality a reproduction from a section called "Supplementary Notes" at the back of the second 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass. There can be no doubt that it was written by Whitman. In old age Burroughs himself, in telling about the share that Whitman had in writing Bucke's book, said: "If I remember rightly the Supplementary Notes to the last edition were entirely written by him." — Clara Barrus, Life and Letters of John Burroughs (2 vols., Boston and N.Y., 1925), I, 128; see also As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free (Washington, D.C., 1872), Advertisement, pp. 2-3; and Bucke, op. cit., pp. 210-11. 526. As a Strong Bird, Advertisement, p. 4. The passage is reprinted as part of the "Notice of 1873" which Dr. Bucke included in the second appendix of his biography, pp. 210-13. The same advertisement continues with a blurb for Democratic Vistas. In it Whitmann is quoted as having said in a letter to Burroughs, "I wish to put on record [in Democratic Vistas] the rough sketch or outline, if not more, of a new breed of authors, poets, artists for America — comprehensive, Hegelian, Democratic, sacer- dotal." 527. The letter is printed in Bucke, op. cit., pp. 73-98; see esp. p. 82. 528. As a Strong Bird, Advertisement, p. 4. The title poem of this little volume, now entitled "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood," read in the light of Hegelian identities, takes on a special meaning and significance. 529. Writings, I, 167-68. 530. Ibid., pp. 168-69. Final and paramount to all, says Whitman, is man's idea of his own position in the world of time and space, his faith in the scheme of things, the destinies which he necessitates, his clue to the relations between himself and the outside world, and his ability in intellect and spirit to cope and be equal with them and with Time and Space. These, and thoughts upon these, come to the soul and touch all human beings and form "the greatest themes." For these supreme subjects only Hegel "is large enough and free enough" for America. — Ibid., IX, 169-70. Hereupon follow the paragraphs already quoted which terminate in the passage adapted from Gostick in which Hegel is said to view all things in the universe — past, present, and future — as but "a succession of steps in the one eternal process of creative thought." The pas- sage concludes: "Without depreciating poets, patriots, saints, statesmen, inventors and the like, I rate Hegel as Humanity's chiefest teacher and the choicest loved physician of my mind and soul." — Ibid., IX, 172-73. Notes to Pages 471-72 787 531. This last remark refers directly to the selection from Hegel's Introduction to the Phi- losophy of History printed in Hedge's anthology (pp. 451-52) and there entitled "History as the Manifestation of Spirit." It is to be noted that Whitman nowhere quotes Hegel directly, and that he mentions only two of Hegel's works by title: the Encyclopaedia and the Introduction to the Philosophy of History (ibid., IX, 167, 173). On the basis of the remaining sections of Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History (as reproduced in Hedge's anthology), Whitman credits Hegel with having given "the same clue to the fitness of things and unending progress, to the universe of moral purposes that the sciences, in their spheres . . . have estab- lished in the material purposes. . . . The last and crowning proof of each is the same, that they fit the mind, and the idea of all, and are necessary to be so in the nature of things."- — Ibid., IX, 173. Then he proceeds to draw "a great distinction" between the pagans and the Christians. The former, led by Greek theology, "appreciated and expressed the sense of nature, life, beauty, the objective world," but the problems of "fate, immutable law, the sense of power and precedence" left them in a state of "mystery and baffling unknowness"; while the latter, adopting the principle of "the Christian cultus," in "which the moral dominates," were enabled to approximate the Hegelian ideal of viewing the history of the world as a progres- sion in the consciousness of freedom. Compare Writings, IX, 173-74, an d Hedge's Prose Writers, pp. 450-52. 532. The source of this portion of his notes is indicated in a manuscript scrap in the Whit- man Collection at the Library of Congress (Division of Manuscripts) referring to an article on Schelling in Volume XIV of the New American Cyclopedia, edited by Ripley and Dana and first published in 1862. The same note also refers to articles on Fichte and Kant in Volumes IX and XII of the seventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published 1830— 1842 (see Newton Arvin, Whitman, pp. 308-9). Obviously the dates of publication of these encyclopedias are of little help in determining the time when Whitman made these notes. Whitman himself gives no indication of date. 533. Some of the facts and critical comments regarding Kant which Whitman records (Writings, IX, 174-75) could readily have been derived from Hedge (p. 57), Gostick (p. 266), and De Stael (I, 156) ; but since all are, without exception, in the article in the seventh edition of the Britannica, it would seem that the last named was his chief, if not sole, source on Kant's life. 534. While Kant's arduous labors represent, says Whitman, "in some respects, probably the most illustrious service ever rendered to the human mind" [Writings, IX, 177), it is clear that he was not vitally interested in Kant or his epistemological problems. 535- Writings, IX, 178-79. For all these memoranda on Fichte, Whitman merely made an abbreviated transcription of what lay open before him in Volume IX of the Britannica (7th ed.). 536. Writings, IX, 180. Besides applauding Schelling for checking Fichte's "all-devouring egoism," Whitman approves Schelling's identi- fication of the material and ideal realms, and especially Schelling's argument that the "same universal spirit manifests itself in the individual Man, in aggregates, in concrete Nature, and in Historic Progress." While this part of Schel- ling's philosophy "elevates Man's reason" and "claims for it the comprehension of divine things," it demands, unfortunately, "a sort of Platonic ecstasy or inebriation as the fountain of utterance." At all events, Schelling's "palace of idealistic pantheism," while one of the "most beautiful and majestic structures ever achieved by the intellect or imagination of man (for in Schelling's philosophy there is at least as much imagination as intellect)," was "never com- pleted" and remained "more or less deficient and fragmentary." — Ibid., pp. 180-81. In this attempted summary and estimate of Schelling Whitman followed closely the New American Cyclopedia, first edition, 1862. 537. This opinion is a common one, but Whitman's phraseology suggests Hedge, op. cit., p. 57. 538. Another phrase doubtless borrowed from Hedge, op. cit., p. 383. 539. Writings, IX, 181, 182. 540. Ibid., pp. 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175-76, 178, 179, 181, 182, 185. 541. Ibid., p. 183. The notes conclude (fol- lowing some general remarks on Leibnitz as "starting German metaphysics," gleaned, in all likelihood, from an essay in the Atlantic Month- ly for June, 1858) with another passage of ful- some praise for Hegel, who, aided by Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, performed "the most signal service to humanity" by "carrying Democracy . . . into the highest region." — - Ibid., p. 184. 542. Although neither Carlyle nor Hegel considered the I'nited States worthy of serious attention, Whitman fancifully suggests that the principal works of both might not inappropriately be collected and bound to- gether under the title, " Speculations for the use of North A merica, and Democracy there with the 788 Notes to Pages 472-74 relations of the same to Metaphysics, including Lessons and Warnings (encouragements too, and of the vastest,) from the Old World to the New." — Writings, IV, 311. 543. Ibid, IV, 313. 544. Ibid., p. 316. 545. Ibid., IV, 318-19. 546. Ibid., pp. 319-20. 547. He explains that Hegel regards the whole earth, in its infinite variety and con- trariety as but necessary unfoldings in the endless process of creative thought, "which, amid numberless apparent failures and contra- dictions is held together by central and never- broken unity — not contradictions ... at all, but radiations of one consistent and eternal purpose." — Ibid., IV, 320. 548. "Not any one part, or any one form of government, is absolutely or exclusively true," for "truth consists in the just relation of ob- jects to each other. . . . The specious, the unjust, the cruel, and what is called the un- natural," whether in democracy, oligarchy, or despotism, are not only permitted but in a certain sense inevitable in the divine scheme; but they are, "by the whole constitution of the scheme, partial, inconsistent, temporary, and though ever so great an ostensible majority, are destined to failures" in the one all-enfolding purpose. — Ibid., p. 321. This portion of Whit- man's presentation is simply a restatement of Gostick, op. cit., p. 270. Compare also Gostick's remark, "A majority of democracy in any country may rule as oppressively as on oligar- chy" (ibid., p. 270), with Whitman's observa- tion in Specimen Days (Writings, IV, 321): "A majority or democracy may rule as outrage- ously and do as great harm as an oligarchy or despotism — though far less likely to do so." 549. In the theology, Hegel "translates into science" all apparent contradictions and makes them "fractional and imperfect expressions of one essential unity." — Writings, IV, 321. 550. Ibid., pp. 323-24. 551. "There is that about them," adds Whitman, "which only the vastness, the multiplicity and the vitality of America would seem able to comprehend, to give scope and illustration to, or to be fit for, or even originate. It is strange to me that they were born in Ger- many, or in the old world at all." — Writings, IV, 322 n. Regarding the uses to which Hegelian phi- losophy was put in imperialistic Germany, if the matter came to his attention. Whitman apparently troubled his head not at all. Like the St. Louisans, he took at face value Hegel's definition of the history of the world as "the progress in the consciousness of freedom" and concluded, ipso facto, that Hegel was the phi- losopher of and for democracy. 552. See his notes. Writings, IX, 168-85 passim, esp. p. 185. 553. Consider his "Roaming in Thought (After Reading Hegel)," a poem of 1881. 554. Writings, IV, 320. Finding in Hegel both warrant and voucher for his own large faith in freedom, he adopted the Hegelian philosophy in the lump, or en masse, as he might have said, without inquiring into the epistemo- logical bases on which it stood or the dialectical method by which it was built. For his distrust of cold logic, as against his fondness for intui- tion, see Leaves of Grass (inclusive edition, ed. by Emory Holloway, Garden City, 1925), p. 504; Writings, II, 149; V, 322-23; Workshop, p. 49- It goes without saying that there are im- portant points of difference between Hegel and Whitman. At opposite poles in their philosophi- cal methodology, Hegel dwelt in the realm of the general and universal in about the same proportion in which Whitman concentrated on the individual and particular. Hegel saw the world and mankind through macroscopic eyes; Whitman, through microscopic eyes. For details, see Olive W. Parsons, "Whitman the Non-Hegelian," PMLA, LVIII, iv (Dec, 1943), 1073-93, esp. pp. 1083-92. There is little use laboring the point, or demanding of Whitman methods and processes of thought which he specifically disdained or denounced. His high praise of Hegel originated from an admiration for the conclusions which Hegel reached, not from any critical appreciation of the methods employed. Whitman had no opportunities to consult Hegel in the original, and he availed himself of few of the more reliable secondary sources that could have led him to a better understanding of the more technical aspects of German idealism. For example, he appears not to have known Stirling's Secret of Hegel (avail- able since 1865) or William Wallace's shorter Logic (which appeared in 1874). Neither did he learn much from W. T. Harris, on whom he called in Concord in 188 1. There were pleasant relations with others of the Concord School of Philosophy, and Whitman was pleased when the Morse bust of himself, on being refused in Boston, found a home in the Hegelian shrine in Concord. But he found little in their type of Hegelianism that struck a responsive chord and regarded the Journal of Speculative Phi- losophy as entirely too abstruse (see Writings, V, 26; Camden, I, 191, 284-85; II, 542). For one thing, the contacts came too late. If he had made the acquaintance of Harris a decade earlier, while he was actively engaged in puz- Notes to Pages 474-75 789 zling out Hege] a la Gostick, Hedge, Carlyle, and the encyclopedias, the contact might have been more fruitful. But by 1881 Hegel had rendered up what was renderable to Whitman, and apparently he felt no need for reconsidering a subject into which he had gone as deeply as he cared too, and which had served and was still serving him admirably. 555. As a Strong Bird, Advertisement, p. 4. 556. For a neat summation of this relation- ship, see Newton Arvin, Whitman, pp. 196-97; also Clifton J. Furness, Walt Whitman's Work- shop, pp. 149, 236. LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITERS 557. See Writings (23 vols., Boston, 1904- 1922), XII, 87; XIII, 149; XIV, 7, 25, 235; XV, 50, 58; XVII, 95; XXI, 203; XXII, 169-70, 172-75; XXIII, 257; and index to Vol. XVIII. 558. See ibid., Ill, 6; XXI, 77. 559. His comments about Germany are often of a general nature — usually to criticize her militarism as destructive of her renowned culture. See ibid., XXIII, 3-4, and Clara Barrus, Life and Letters of John Burroughs, II, 213. 560. It would seem that he kept Eckermann constantly near, for the great majority of his references to Goethe, early and late, are trace- able to that book. The number of Goethe's works to which he refers is significantly small. Besides Eckermann, he mentioned only the Autobiography, Werlher, the Goethe-Bettina letters, and Wilhelm Meister — all available in translation. For the rest he seems to have depended on Lewes' Life of Goethe, Carlyle, Tyndall's criticism of Goethe as a man of science, Hermann Grimm's life, and Matthew Arnold's critiques. 561. Barrus, Life and Letters, II, 173. 562. Writings, XVI, 238-39. 563. Ibid., IV, 76. 564. Ibid., X, 102. 565. Ibid., pp. 154-55, 182. 566. Ibid., XXI, 30. 567. Ibid., Ill, 58. 568. Ibid., X, 68. 569. Ibid., p. 172. 570. Ibid., XXI, 28-29. 571. Ibid., XVII, 77; see also Heart of Bur- roughs' J ournal (Boston, 1928), pp. 134-35, 145. 572. One would expect that Burroughs closely examined Goethe as a man of science, but there is little to suggest that he knew at first hand Goethe's more technical scientific treatises — doubtless because they were not available in translation. There are references to Goethe's discussions of the phenomena of the weather (Writings, III, 66; IV, 88), his relation to other scientists (ibid., II, 64; XV, 73, 91), his opinions on scientific methodology (ibid., VIII, 49-50, 54), and his remarks on matter. Finding Goethe's definition of matter as "the living garment of God" consonant with his own reverential view of the Cosmic, he quoted Goethe's phrase four times (ibid., XVIII, in, 260, 280; XIX, 134). Knowing little of Goethe's more special studies, Burroughs followed and repeated the conventional opinion that while "certain branches of scientific inquiry drew Goethe sharply . . . his aptitude in them was clearly less than in his chosen field," where he was supreme, even above Shakespeare and Milton.— Ibid., VIII, 73, 151. 573. Ibid., VI, 245. 574. Ibid.. X, 203-4. 575. Ibid., XVIII, 98. 576. Ibid., VIII, 254. 577. Ibid., X, 140. 578. Much of the same criticism applies to what Burroughs has to say about other Ger- man writers. His comparison of the stylistic elements of Strauss 's Leben Jesu with those of Renan's work, in the absence of a real knowl- edge of German, is a case in point (ibid., X, 64, 79). His friendship for Whitman led him to make inquiries about Freiligrath, who had translated some of Whitman's poems (ibid., Ill, 213). He cited Lessing's Laokoon in defense of Whitman (ibid., p. 235), and he considered Heine's sympathetic theory of criticism as the only one properly applicable to Whitman's poetry (ibid., II, 179, 233; X, 89; XVI, 97). Schiller is mentioned a half-dozen times; he knew F. v. Schlegel's Philosophy of History, and he read Carlyle's essays to good purpose. 579. Ibid., XV, 91; XVIII, 221; XIX, 198. 580. Ibid., XVI, 160. He was also a good deal interested in Schopenhauer. See ibid., X, 67, 261-72; XVII, 198. 581. The title is as symptomatic of his approach to literature as its contents are various. Among his "literary passions" are 18 English writers, 7 American, 4 German, 4 Spanish, 2 French, 2 Russian, and one Norwe- gian. 582. Years of My Youth (N.Y., 1916), p. 90. 583. His study of German was not pursued with the idea of mastering the language but chiefly to read the poetry of Heine. Years later he confessed: "To this day I could not frame a proper letter in Spanish, German, French, or Italian, but I have a literary sense of them all. I wished to taste the fruit of my study before I had climbed the tree where it grew, and in a manner I did begin to gather the fruit without the interposition of the tree. Without clear knowledge of their grammatical forms, I 790 Notes to Pages 475-77 imitated their literary forms." — Ibid., p. ioo. However, in My Literary Passions (N.Y., 1895), p. 170, he observed: "I could once write a passable literary German . . . and I have still what I think I may call a fair German vocabula- ry" His interest in German was immediately reflected in his insertion into the Ashtabula Sentinel of several stories from Heine, a biogra- phical sketch of Goethe in 1855, and, two years later, a serialization of several of Zschokke's longer tales and shorter pieces from Goethe and others. 584. Germans were so numerous and the craze for Germanism so prevalent that he carried his "zeal for everything German" even to taking his lunch in one of the German beer saloons, only to find that the diet of cheese, mustard, sauerkraut, and lager beer made him "very sick," so that he was obliged to forego it as an expression of his love for German poetry. — Years of My Youth, p. 136; see also pp. 135, 178, 210; and Mildred Howells (ed.), Life and Letters of William Dean Howells (2 vols., Garden City, 1928), I, 20, 23. 585. When, in i860, Howells was appointed consul to Rome (subsequently changed to Venice), he was disappointed that he did not get the post in Munich, for which he had speci- fically asked. Four years in Munich instead of Venice, and the opportunity to study at one of the German universities might have materially altered his literary outlook; but he went to Italy, and "for the present," he wrote, I went no further into German literature, and I recurred to it in later years only for deeper and fuller knowledge of Heine." — My Literary Passions, pp. 218, 233. 586. Ibid., p. 148. 587. At fifteen he read "a great deal" of Goethe's prose and "somewhat of his poetry" — notably Wilhelm Meister, the Wahlverwandt- schaften, and Faust — with little enthsuiasm. Not until ten years later did he "go faithfully through Faust and come to know his power." Part of his earlier dissatisfaction with Goethe's prose he later ascribed to the "unwisdom of the critics" who led him to expect too much. — Ibid., pp. 178, 188. 588. Criticism and Fiction (N.Y., 1891), pp. 22-24. 589. "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's Mag., CII, dcx (Mar., 1901), 643. 590. Criticism and Fiction, pp. 86-87. 591. My Literary Passions, pp. 169-70. 592. Ibid., p. 172. 593. Years of My Youth, pp. 178-79; D. G. Cooke, William Dean Howells (N.Y., 1922), p. 27. 594. Literary Friends and Acquaintance (N.Y. 1900), p. 216. 595. H. B. Sachs, Heine in America (Phila., 1916), pp. 171-72. 596. Howells professed to have found great pleasure in some of Auerbach's stories, notablv Edelweiss, but in the end he felt that Auerbach's work affected him "as if it dealt with pigmies." — My Literary Passions, p. 233. During his youth he "felt the romantic beauty of Uhland and was aware of something of Schiller's grandeur" (ibid., p. 179), but he did not after- wards often refer to either. His "Movers" is a narrative poem in hexameters faintly reminis- cent of Hermann und Dorothea, which he says he studied, along with Kingsley's Andromeda and Longfellow's Evangeline, in preparation for another narrative poem written about the same time — "The Pilot's Story." Except for a lingering interest in Goethe and an enduring love for Heine, Howells' early infatuation with German literature subsided about the time he went to Italy. 597. See Notes of a Son and Brother (N.Y., 1914)). PP- 23-24, 28-34. 598. Letters of Henry James, ed. by Percy Lubbock (N.Y., 1920), I, 32; Pelham Edgar, Henry James, Man and Author (London, 1927), pp. 19-20. 599. See his discussion of Wilhelm Meister in Notes and Reviews (Cambridge, Mass., 192 1) and his comparison of Dumas and Goethe in the Nation for October 30, 1874. It has recently been pointed out by Pro- fessor J . Wesley Thomas (A merikanische Dichter und die deutsche Literatur, Goslar, 1950, pp. 133-37) that while James's first reading of Wilhelm Meister left him bewildered, because the book seemed to violate every idea he then entertained regarding a well-constructed novel, he eventually came to understand why Goethe succeeded so well in character delineation despite his inattention to externalities and the usual novel technique. Dr. Thomas points to the wide difference between James's objections to Wilhelm Meister in 1865 and his appraisal of Goethe as the consummate artist in 1873 (while reviewing Victor Cherbullioz' Meta Holdenis), and argues that as James grew ever more wary of the cramping effect of plot, he found in, and eventually adopted from, Goethe's method some of his later techniques for his own basically psychological approach that per- mitted a "continuous revelation" of character. The suggestion deserves to be weighed along with the numerous claims made for the influence upon James by M6rim6e, Daudet, Gautier, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Turgenev, George Sand, George Eliot, Hawthorne, and the rest. Notes to Pages 477-78 791 600. My Mark Twain (N.Y., 1919), p. 17. 601. He said as much himself: "The self- taught man seldom knows anything accurately. ' ' — What Is Man? and Other Essays, p. 290. All references are to the Harper's Author's National Edition of Mark Twain's Works. "To me the most important feature of my life is its literary feature. I have been professionally literary something more than fifty years." — Ibid., p. 130. "One isn't a printer ten years without setting up acres of good and bad literature, and learning unconsciously at first, consciously later— to discriminate between the two, within his mental limitations, and meantime he is unconsciously acquiring what is called a style." — Ibid., p. 136. A typesetter in New York in 1853, he answered his sister's inquiry about how he spent his leisure hours: "Where would you suppose, with a free printer's library con- taining more than 4,000 volumes within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to?" — Mark Twain's Letters, ed. by A. B. Paine (2 vols., N.Y., 1917), II, 543; Minnie M. Brashear, Mark Twain Son of Missouri (Chapel Hill, 1934), P- x 57- Later, on the river, his fel- low-pilots regarded him as "a great reader — a student of history, travel, literature, and the sciences." — A. B. Paine, Mark Twain. A Biography (Centenary ed., 4 vols, in 2, N.Y., !935). P- 1.5 1. 602. Notably Vol. I, Chs. IX-XI, and Vol. II, Ch. XXI. 603. What is Man?, p. 227; see A. B. Paine, op. cit., p. 624. 604. His remarks about not knowing any- thing about books, at least, "not enough to hurt . . . only a few languages and a little history" are part of his studied banter (Letters, II. 543)- H e particularly enjoyed his wife's "torture" when she had to admit to a distin- guished visitor from abroad that her husband was unacquainted with the several foreign authors who came up for discussion. — Paine, op. cit., p. 1350. "It was part of the legend he deliberately created about himself, either because it pleased his vanity to believe that what he had read had been of small value in his development, or because he knew that he was more interesting to his American public in the role of an original." — Brashear, op. cit., p. 197. 605. Howells, My Mark Twain, p. 18. 606. The simple truth is that Mark Twain read early and late, in books of many kinds, and in certain types of books almost constantly. "I like," he said, "history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange happenings, and science. And I detest novels, poetry, and theology." — Paine, op. cit., p. 1536. The books he liked above all others were the Bible, Don Quixote, Morle d' Arthur, Lecky's History of European Morals, Suetonius' Lives, Carlyle's French Revolution, Greville's Journal, Saint- Simon's Memoirs, and Pepys' Diary. These he kept on a table at his bedside or on a handy shelf in the billiard room; he read them again and again, and Paine observed that he always had something new to say about them following each rereading. — Op. cit., pp. 6-7, 511, 1536. For Innocents Abroad he borrowed passages from literary sources totaling some 9,000 words by my count. A propos of his method of writing this, his first full-length book, he observed that "it wears a man out to have to read up a hundred pages of history every two or three miles" — meaning, every two or three pages. — Innocents Abroad, II, 232. Aside from guide books and historical works, the Bible was his main source for this book; and Chapters XV and XXI of Volume II illustrate how diligently he "read up on the Bible" while writing the book. Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, usually considered books in which he drew most directly upon personal experience, contain, each, some 11,000 words of quoted matter exclusive of the appendices; and in Following the Equator he quoted passages aggregating 25,000 words. Joan of Arc, the book which Mark Twain himself held in higher esteem than anything else that he wrote, is based, by his own statement, on "five French sources and five English ones" (Letters, II, 624), while in preparation for A Connecticut Yankee he studied Malory, Lecky, and other books treating of the period until he could say, "I have saturated myself with the atmosphere of the day and the subject and got myself into the swing of the work." — Paine, op. cit., p. 840; see also p. 790 and A Connecticut Yankee, pp. 2-3. The Prince and the Pauper was inspired by Yonge's The Prince and the Page; while Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn without the episodes derived from his reading in Cervantes, Casanova, Baron Trenck, Cellini, and Dumas would be emascu- lated, indeed. The indebtedness of these last books is discussed briefly in O. H. Moore, "Mark Twain and Don Quixote," PMLA, XXXVII (June, 1922), 324-46, and in greater detail in my Master's thesis, "The Mind of Mark Twain" (typescript and microfilm, Univ. of Texas Library, 1924), pp. 1-46 and Appen- dix A. 607. Of German authors, he mentions Heine five times, Goethe and Schiller each three times, and Fritz Reuter once. Most of these references occur in the sections of A Tramp Abroad which record his excursions in Germany and Switzerland. He speaks of Schiller only in connection with Wilhelm Tell, and then onl\' 792 Notes to Pages 478-79 because his travels took him to places associ- ated with Tell. There is nothing to suggest that he read Schiller's play, though he may well have seen it acted in the course of his frequent attendance upon the German theater. Heine's lyrics he appears to have known at first hand. He was interested in Goetz, that "fine old Ger- man Robin Hood," and he claimed on one occasion to have bettered the existing trans- lations of a disputed passage in Faust, with the aid of "a family pow-wow . . . and a heap of dictionaries." — H. W. Fisher, Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field (N. Y., 1922), pp. 192-93. These, except for a long review of Adolf von Wilbrandt's play, Der Meister von Palmyra (in The Man That Corrupted Hadley- burg, pp. 202-15) and occasional references to such Germanic figures as Baron Munchausen, comprise all his significant allusions to Ger- man literature. His literary tastes were neither catholic nor exquisite. But he read a great deal, often whatever he happened upon, seldom with either system or plan. Appendix A, pp. 126- 206 of "The Mind of Mark Twain" (cited above) brings together the important passages in Mark Twain's writings that bear on his know- ledge of books and authors. 608. My Mark Twain, p. 17. 609. Paine, op. cit., p. 616. 610. John R. Schultz, "New Letters of Mark Twain," Amer. Lit., VIII, i (Mar., 1936), 47-48. 611. Paine, op. cit., p. 623; the speech is reprinted in A Tramp Abroad, II, 305-7. During the late summer and early fall the whole party made a leisurely trip through Switzerland and Italy and back to Munich, where they spent the following winter. This journey was undertaken partly to gather materials for a book on Ger- many in the manner of Innocents Abroad. Clemens, accompanied by Twitchell, often struck off afoot for a jaunt of a day or more while the family followed by rail to rejoin them at some predetermined point along the way. It was a perfect holiday, undertaken in the spirit reflected in A Tramp Abroad (1880), a book which serves still as a delightful guide to the Neckar Valley, the Black Forest region, and the Swiss Alps. On the alert for fact and fable, literary and historical, and appreciative of the charm of scenery, he produced a German sketch book incorporating a wealth of custom and legend, all invested in the rare poetical quality that is equalled only by his recollections of boyhood and of pilot life on the Mississippi. For Mark Twain's attitude toward Germany as reflected in A Tramp Abroad, see V. R. West, "Mark Twain in Germany," Amer.-Ger. Rev., II, iv (June, 1936), 32-37. esp. pp. 32-33, 36-37. A. Hiippy has handled the subject of Mark Twain's travels in Switzerland in Mark Twain und die Schweiz, Zurich, 1935. 612. Paine, op. cit., p. 638; J. R. Schultz, loc. cit., p. 49. 613. Ibid., p. 50; A Tramp Abroad, I, 98, 212. 614. In this connection, see his account of the German maid's impieties as recorded in Mark Twain's Autobiography (ed. by A. B. Paine, 2 vols., N. Y., 1914), II, 167-69. 615. Paine, op. cit., p. 848. 616. Dixon Wecter, "Mark Twain as Trans- lator from the German," Amer. Lit., XIII, iii (Nov., 194 1 ). 2 55- 617. Also in The American Claimant, pp. 308-38. Mark Twain claimed in a prefatory note that it was "a valuable invention" and guaranteed to teach French or any other tongue as well as German by the simple expedi- ent of substituting for the German passages the desired language. He called it "the Patent Universally- Applicable Automatically- Adj ust- able Language Drama." The plot is simple. Two sisters, required by their father to speak only German for three months, in order to learn the language and to keep them from communicat- ing with their lovers, contrive to meet the young men, who have been put under similar duress. Circumventing the father, landlady, and maid, they succeed in carrying on a lively exchange of ideas and sentiments, exclusively in the inane and stereotyped phrases of their Meisterschaft texts. In characteristic manner Mark Twain added a note to the effect that if the reader discovered "some tolerably rancid German here and there in the piece," the fault was "attributable to the proof-reader." But that worthy, or someone else responsible for correcting Mark Twain's worst and sometimes most felicitous errors, struck out this blanket disclaimer. — Paine, op. cit., p. 849. There occur many bad spellings and misprints in the printed version, although whoever "corrected" the manuscript took seriously his job of "purifying" the "rancid" state of the manuscript, now preserved in the Huntington Library. The handwriting of the reviser is not Mark Twain's. It need hardly be observed that the manuscript form is incompar- ably more funny than the published text. A reprinting of portions of the Huntington manuscript by Ada M. Klett in the American German Review, VII, ii (Dec, 1940), 10-11, makes it clear that Mark Twain had not attain- ed full "Meisterschaft" of the German language in 1887, but it is equally clear that many of his atrocities are studied, for even in the passages which he had merely to copy verbatim from the type, or specimen, sentences in the text of Meisterschaft or Ollendorff's books, he pre- Notes to Pages 479-80 793 ferred to make "improvements" of his own. 618. After a rapid tour of France and Swit- zerland, they rested for a time at Aix, proceeded thence to Beyreuth for the Wagner festival (commemorated in an appreciative essay, "At the Shrine of St. Wagner"), and after various side trips they went to Heidelberg, shortly afterward settling in Berlin for the winter. 619. Paine, op. cit., p. 936. 620. Ibid., p. 933. Earlier than this he had produced a compound of eighty letters (A Tramp Abroad, p. 306). He persisted in trying to break this record, but as late as 1898 he had come no nearer than "Hottentotenstrottel- mutterattentaterlattengitterwetterkotterbeu- telratte" (a mere seventy). However, the next year he produced what is probably "the last word in monstrosities": "Personaleinkommen- steuerschatzungskommissionsmitgliedreisekos- tenrechnungserganzungsrevisionsfund" (ninety- five). He added: "If I could get a similar word engraved upon my tombstone I should sleep beneath it in peace." — John T. Krumpelmann, Mark Twain and the German Language (Baton Rouge, La., 1953), p. 16. As for learning German the regular way, he again resolved, during this second period of residence in Germany, as he had earlier, that he would abandon altogether the German grammar as "outrageous and impossible," for "only the dead have time to learn it." — A Tramp Abroad, II, 305; Paine, op. cit., p. 623. With or without benefit of grammar, however, the study of German continued until (as Pro- fessor Krumpelmann's detailed inquiries show) he could read journalistic German easily, could write German almost flawlessly, could under- stand even rapid conversational German, and could, "if in the mood to try and given time to shape his phrases," speak acceptably but never fluently. 621. In The American Claimant and Other Stories and Sketches, pp. 502—17. 622. For a discussion of this racy translation, see the essay by Dixon Wecter, loc. cit., pp. 257- 63. The manuscript of twenty-six pages re- mained unpublished until the centennial year of J 935> when Harper brought it out as Slovenly's Peter, with a preface by Clara C. Gabrilowitsch. 623. Again the family were with him — all but Susy, who had died in 1896. There were journeyings in Germany and Switzerland, but much time was spent in Vienna. Here they met the same courtly reception which Berlin had accorded them earlier. 624. Mark Twain's Speeches (ed. by A. B. Paine, N.Y., 1910), pp. 168-75. Averring him- self the truest friend of the German language, he asked for a number of reformations, among them the banning of parentheses, separable verbs, and the use of more than thirteen sub- jects to the sentence. A few months later, reverting to the use of compound words in German, he wrote on the "Beauties of the German Language" (Autobiography , II, 164-66.) While preparing for an audience later with Emperor Franz Joseph, he compacted a speech that would cover all emergencies into a single German sentence of eighteen words, but he found the Emperor so cordially informal that he forgot to deliver it. — Paine, op. cit., 1078-79. 625. During the winter of 1897-1898 he translated several German plays which re- mained unproduced and unpublished, and during the next year he undertook several plays for the Burgtheater in collaboration with a Vienna journalist and playwright, Siegmund Schlesinger. The plan was for Mark Twain to provide the plots based on American themes. The opening scenes of one of them, to be called "Die Goldgraberin," were actually written, but it developed that Schlesinger's lack of English and Mark Twain's difficulties with rapid-fire German made a bad combination, so that the plans had to be abandoned. But Director-General Herr Schlenther, head of the Burgtheater, never doubted that a play by Clemens and Schlesinger, with Frau Kati Schratt (later the favorite of Emperor Franz Joseph), would have been a great success. — Paine, op. cit., pp. 1682, 1071, 1075. 626. Letters, II, 671. In an essay entitled "About Play- Acting," written in Vienna and first printed in the Forum for October of that year, he said that he had found the play "deep- ly fascinating," and that he believed it would turn out to be Wilbrandt's "masterpiece . . . and make his name permanent in German literature." — The Man Who Corrupted Had- leyburg, p. 202. The rest of the eulogistic critique is an elaboration of the "dark metem- psychosis" in the play, which he said constituted "the strength of the piece." It gave him an over- powering sense of "the passage of a dimly con- nected procession of dream pictures." — Ibid., p. 203. 627. While his interpretation doubtless goes beyond Wilbrandt's intention, the important thing is Mark Twain's analysis of it as a pessi- mistic commentary on life. It may be no more than a coincidence, but it seems more likely that Wilbrandt's "majestic drama of depth and seriousness" (ibid., pp. 208, 215) set his mind, already in a responsive mood, to work on the ideas that underlie What is Man? and The Mysterious Stranger, especially the latter. (Com- pare The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, pp. 208-9, with the last long speech of The Myste- 794 Notes to Pages 480-81 rious Stranger.) Mark Twain's mysterious stranger, Philip Traum, is made of the same stuff that Wilbrandt's mysterious stranger, Pausanias, is made of, and the imaginary medieval Austrian village, Eseldorf, and its spiritual atmosphere are not unlike those of Palmyra in Wilbrandt's drama. The connection between Mark Twain and Wilbrandt was suggested as early as 1919 (MLN, VI, 372-73), and more recently it has been argued (by J. Wesley Thomas, op. cit., pp. 131-32) that there is a similar relationship between the monistic determinism of Ernst Haeckel and the pessimism of Arthur Schopen- hauer, on the one hand, and Mark Twain's mechanistic fatalism of his later years, as well as his expression of it in What is Man? and The Mysterious Stranger, on the other. This influence, while possible, is hard to substantiate, the evidence being almost exclusively internal and by no means conclusive. A series of personal disasters, coupled with the direct influences upon him of mechanistically-minded men like Macfarlane and Ingersoll and his early famili- arity with various forms of scientific ration- alism, were sufficient to set his mind in the direction of misanthropy long before he encountered Haeckel and Schopenhauer. 628. During all his years as a journalist he appears to have reviewed only one German book, Berthold Auerbach's Black Forest Village Stories, for the Overland Monthly, September, 1869. For the preceding number he had re- viewed Bayard Taylor's By- Ways of Europe. 629. Letters of Bret Harte (N.Y., 1926), pp. 73-178; Writings (22 vols., Boston and N.Y., 1902-1914), XI, 143; T. D. Pemberton, Life of Bret Harte, (N.Y., 1903). 630. His fame as a writer had preceded him. Some of his poems had been translated into German by Freiligrath ; three volumes of stories had appeared in 1873-1874; the novel Gabriel Conroy went through fourteen printings; and while The Two Men of Sandy Bar turned out a failure on the American stage, the German version was a fair success. — George R. Stewart, Bret Harte, Argonaut and Exile (Boston, 193 1), pp. 224, 227, 232. 631. Letters, pp. 1 17-18, 120, 139. 632. Several later stories touch upon German themes in a superficial way. In "The Indiscre- tion of Elizabeth" he makes a good deal of the red tape of German petty officialdom, and in "Unser Karl," a tale belonging to the espionage class, he turns to good account his experiences in the consular service. Altogether the best of his German yarns are those embodying Ger- man-American characters. "Peter Schroeder" is the storv of a Civil War veteran who distin- guished himself under Schurz only to find that Anglo-Americans ridicule his dialect and his patriotism. Having yearned for Germany for fifteen years, he goes thither, only to find him- self a stranger there as much as in the United States. "The Man and the Mountain" is a variation upon the same theme of repatriation, except that the main character is a Swiss gardener. The dialect in both stories is convinc- ing. Finally, there are three poems that touch German matters. The first, in the form of an ironic preface to Wallace's romantic opera Lurline (1830), is really a parody on the opera and on Heine's "Lorelei." The second, included among the Civil War poems and entitled "Schalk!" is an ironic poem advising Ameri- cans to fight in the German way as prescribed by Emil Schalk. The last, "Schimmelpfennig," commemorates the German-American general of that name who fought in the Civil War. 633. An Easterner by birth, and a graduate of Yale, he sailed round the Horn, spent 1862- 1866 in California, went back to New England intending to study theology, but soon turned back, taught school in Ohio, then in Oakland High School ( 1 871-1873), and thereafter became professor of English at the University of Cali- fornia. A teacher, poet, critic, contributor to magazines, and translator all his life, he was a wide reader, especially of English, but hardly less so of French and German, literature. 634. W. B. Parker, Edward Rowland Sill (N.Y., 1915). PP- 99, 104. 635. Possessed of a fine feeling for French and German lyrics (see Prose of Edward Rowland Sill, Boston, 1900, pp. 93-94, 117-22), he found existing English translations of German lyrics generally "abominable" and offered a few of his own from Schubert, Goethe, and Ruckert. See Poetical Works (Household ed., Boston, 1906), pp. 252-54, 355, 356; also Poems (Boston, 1889), pp. 80-81. 636. See Prose, pp. 24, 33-34,107. 637. Prose, pp. xlv, 181. 638. Prose, p. 141. 639. Walter Neale, Life of Ambrose Bierce (N.Y., 1929), pp. 40-41, 386. His biographer relates a story of how, in 1872, a group of American writers exposed him at a London dinner in honor of Mark Twain. They gave him one of his own stories to read. Flattered but forgetful of his youthful fondness for foreign phrases, Bierce read without a qualm through the first page ; but on turning the page, he came upon phrases in four different languages which he could neither pronounce nor translate. — ■ Ibid., pp. 42-43. 640. Gustav A. Danziger's translation ap- peared serially in the Sunday magazine section Notes to Pages 482-84 795 of the San Francisco Examiner beginning September 18, 1891. The Monk and the Hang- man's Daughter appeared under the joint authorship of Bierce and Danziger in 1892. How large a hand Bierce had in this adaptation, or new rendition, is an open question. 641. Goethe's Erlkonig he says was known "two thousand years ago in Greece as 'The Demos and the Infant Industry'" {The Devil's Dictionary , N.Y., 1926, p. 201). He professes to be familiar with the archaeological investiga- tions of Dr. Schliemann (ibid., p. no) and with the Monadology of Leibnitz (ibid., p. 221). He defines Understanding as "a cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know a house from a horse by the roof on the house," and, he adds, that its nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke, "who rode a house, and by Kant, who lives in a horse." — Ibid., p. 356. In the case of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer there are indications that he possessed more than a passing familiarity with their works. His two essays on the position of woman in The Shadow of the Dial (1909) appear to be influenced by his reading of Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's views of women. See The Shadow of the Dial (San Francisco, 1909), pp. 79-186, 187-203; also Neale, op. cit., pp. 29, 114, 241. 642. German characters appear also in The Faith Doctor (1891), and Swiss- Americans play a prominent role in Roxy (1879). 643. It will be recalled that Lanier had used German characters in a German-American setting in his Tiger-Lilies as early as 1867. 644. For bibliographical documentation of this shift, see Richard Monnig, Amerika und England im deutschen, osterreichischen und schweizerischen Schrifttum der fahre J945-J949: Eine Bibliographie (Stuttgart, 1951). AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM 645. See Wm. Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought 18 10-1835 (Phila., 1936). 646. It was denominated the "New School" by Carlyle (Crit. and Misc. Essays, Cent, ed., I, 54), whose influence can be traced from 1827, when his first articles on German literature appeared, until past the middle of the century, when Whitman, for example, extracted pages of memoranda from these essays. 647. German criticism of Shakespeare comes nearest to forming a coherent body of thought, and therefore its impact on American writers can be traced more readily and more surely than the influence of the individual German critic or the particular critical principle. Ideas and techniques first applied by Germans to Shakespeare were capable of indefinite ex- pansion and application. For example, the Schlegelian interpretation of Aristotelian or- ganic unity, first applied to Shakespeare, soon received a wider application, and in the thought of an Emerson or a Thoreau became the basis of all art and life. Where individual German critics or particular criteria (apart from Shake- speare criticism) made themselves felt in America — as they did in the cases of Poe, Long- fellow, and Lanier — these influences are treated in the preceding sections on these writers. 648. The German discovery of Shakespeare was the third in what may be termed a series of three waves of English influence upon German literature of the eighteenth century. The first involved such classicists as Addison, Pope, and Defoe; the second introduced Milton, Richard- son, and Edward Young; and the third (ca. 1 760- 1 780) coincides roughly with the Sturm- und-Drang agitation and brought in, besides Shakespeare, Ossian and English balladry, Sterne, Fielding, and Young's Conjectures. Lessing's first notice of Shakespeare oc- curred in Beytrage zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters (1750), where he recommended the study of Shakespeare and the Restoration dramatists. By 1759 he was calling for a Ger- man translation and pointing out (in the famous seventeenth Liter aturbrief) that Shakespearean sublimity, terror, and melancholy were more consonant with German taste than the over- refinement of manners, the delicate sensibili- ties, and the romantic heroics that character- ized the French drama. In the 1760's a number of dramas were produced on German stages, and Sturm-und-Drang critics (Gerstenberg, Herder, and Hamann), following Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (1760), hailed him as "der grosse Wilde," an original genius. The young Goethe's enthusiasm pro- duced the famous address Zum Shakespeares Tag (1771), and the activity of translating, adapting, playing, and criticizing Shakespeare went on in ever-increasing tempo. 649. These first three tendencies were in- stituted chiefly by Lessing in the Hamburgi- sche Dramaturgic (1 767-1 768). He was seconded by many others, notably by Herder, who sharply differentiated between Shakespearean and Greek drama and emphasized the domi- nant ideas of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello, and by Schiller, who drew very sharply the distinc- tion (based on the differing conditions and different epochs) between classic and romantic poetry. See T. M. Raysor (ed.), Coleridge's Shakespeare Criticism (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1930), I, xxvii-xxix. 796 Notes to Page 485 The Schlegels popularized Shakespeare by their translations, their periodical criticism, their lectures, and their control over stage productions (see L. M. Price, The Reception of English Literature in Germany, Berkeley, 1932, pp. 322-23). Friedrich Schlegel insisted that an all-pervading unity of theme transfuses the plays of Shakespeare, and he defended the romantic belief that art proceeds from the soul of genius and obeys no external laws. — Augustus Ralli, A History of Shakespeare Criticism (London, 1932), p. 115. A. W. Schle- gel's Vorlesungen synthesized the romantic attitudes: He attacked the neoclassical posi- tion once again, describing Shakespeare not as a wildly luxuriant genius but as a consummate artist, whose very puns and plays on words have their ground in nature. He popularized the historicist position by urging the difference in conditions under which ancient and modern dramas were produced. He clarified the distinc- tion between classical and romantic drama ; he encouraged the study of the literatures of all countries, arguing that even barbarous litera- tures have a claim on our aesthetic apprecia- tion when they are viewed in relation to the times in which they were produced ; and he established as a basic principle the idea that the unity of art, proceeding organically from within, applies as much to Shakespeare's plays as to nature itself. — Ralli, op. cit., pp. 117-23; A. A. Helmholtz, The Indebtedness of S. T. Coleridge to A . W. Schlegel (Madison, Wis., 1907)' P- 355; Raysor, op. cit., I, xxx; and especially R. P. Falk, "Representative American Criti- cism of Shakespeare, 1830-1885," unpublished diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1940, pp. 10-11. 650. Coleridge gave expression to all these principles. "While the remains of his 1808 lectures show less similarity to Schlegel, the 181 1 and 1818 lectures become progressively more dependent ... so that the ultimate effect of his work on Shakespeare is closely parallel to that of the German critic." — Helmholtz, op. cit., pp. 355-57. However, Coleridge's best criticism is his aesthetic analysis of specific plays and his study of individual characters. If he was Schlegel 's debtor in general principles of aesthetics, much of his practical or applied criticism was either his own or derived from British roots. He left his most profound impress on American critics like Hudson and Giles precisely in these respects. See Raysor, op. cit., pp. xxxii-xxxiii, liii; R. W. Babcock, The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry (Chapel Hill, 1931); and R. P. Falk, op. cit., p. 12. 651. XI, 202-4. 652. Wm. Charvat op. cit., pp. 127, 180-82. 653. See his essay comparing French and English tragedy, North Amer. Rev., XVI (Jan,. 1823), 132; also ibid., XLIX (Oct., 1839), 324. 654. Ibid., (VIII Mar., 1819), 320; Charvat, op. cit., p. 179. These unpublished lectures, on subjects ranging from general literary theory to careful analyses of character, are made available in part in G. M. Weimar's unprinted dissertation, "Richard Henry Dana the Elder, Critic," New York Univ., 1920. Excellent summaries are provided by Falk, op. cit., pp. 29-39. Professor Falk (p. 36) finds Dana closest to the "new" critics in his interpretation of Hamlet as a sensitive, delicate student and thinker who is unable to cope with a difficult practical situation. 655. Hudson lectured in the South and West during the 40's. The friend of such men as Dana, Parker, Emerson, and Ticknor, he was a respected member of the Boston literary circle and after 1849 a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church. Convinced that "the Bible apart, Shakespeare's dramas are . . . the great- est classic and literary treasures of the world," Hudson clothed his interpretations in a rhap- sodic and at the same time highly moral tone calculated to bring Shakespeare within the comprehension of the "average American." To the same end he published between 1851 and 1 856 and eleven-volume edition of the dramas — an edition that is rich in the kind of aesthetic interpretation that characterizes his highly successful Lectures. Instead of supplying textu- al criticism, he consciously followed the paths laid out in the writings of Coleridge, Schlegel, Lamb, and Hazlitt. — A. J. George, Essays on English Studies by Henry N. Hudson (Boston, 1906), pp. 7, 104. The "Hudson" Shakespeare, revised by various hands and still published today, remains a popular and influential college edition. 656. Karl Knortz, Shakespeare in Amerika (Berlin, 1882), p. 58. 657. Lectures on Shakespeare (2 vols., N.Y., 1848), I, 134, 169. 658. For a more detailed consideration of his critical opinions and their Germanic parallels, see Falk, op. cit., pp. 45-78. 659. A professional reviewer and essayist, literary editor of the Boston Daily Globe, and a free-lance lecturer in the lyceum movement, he was master of a richly epigrammatic style. Versed equally in English, American, and Ger- man criticism, he placed Schlegel "among the greatest critics of the world" and Schlegel and Coleridge together as "the originators of the school of philosophical criticism." See "Shake- speare's Critics," North Amer. Rev., July, 1848; repr. in Essays and Reviews (2 vols., Boston, 1848-1849; 7th ed., Boston, 1878), II, 217, 220. Notes to Pages 485-87 797 660. See "Shakespeare, the Man and the Dramatist," Atl. Monthly, June, 1867, p. 719. 661. Ulrici's book, for example, seemed to him, as it did to Lowell, "German in the worst sense of the word," built on the theory that Shakespeare wrote to illustrate the five points of Calvinism. Ulrici is "as far from Shakespeare in spirit as old Rhymer himself." — Essays and Reviews, II, 225. Schlegel himself shared in this Teutonic error, and "even Goethe, the most comprehensive intelligence since Shakespeare, failed to 'pluck out the heart' of Hamlet's mystery." — Atl. Monthly, XIX (June, 1867), 722. 662. Falk, op. cit., p. 152. 663. Works, II, 68. Despite his avowal of "principles," Lowell's criticism was variously derived and often impressionistic in practice. Basically humanistic, or antiromantic, in his more mature professions, and desirous of judging objectively on the basis of standards, he lacked the intellectual vigor needed to lift him above impressionism. See Norman Foerster American Criticism (N.Y., 1928), pp. 11 1-56; H. H. Clark, "Lowell's Criticism of Romantic Literature," PMLA, XLI (Mar., 1926), 209-28; H. H. Clark, "Lowell — Humanitarian, Nation- alist, or Humanist ?" Studies in Philol., XXVII, iii (July, 1930), 411-41, esp. pp. 430-41. Lowell stood out among his contemporaries because of his accomplished versatility. Bookish and academic, well — though more widely than deeply or systematically — read in English, Spanish, French, German, and classical litera- tures, an epicurean browser blessed with a. retentive memory, Lowell was understandably an eclectic whose theory and practice would be widely at variance. His knowledge of the classics was important in forming his literary creed, but he could not avoid judging the Greeks by the presuppositions of the nineteenth century. See Works, III, 29, 34; J. P. Prit- chard, "Lowell's Debt to Horace's Ars Poetica," Amer. Lit., Ill (Nov., 1931), 259-76, and "Aristotle's Poetics and Certain American Literary Critics," Classical Weekly, XXVII (Jan. 15, 1934). 89-93- Concluding that Lowell's critical methodolo- gy involved sensitivity to impressions, histori- cal understanding, and an aesthetical judg- ment, Professor Foerster suggests that "it remained for Lowell to state more clearly [than his predecessors] the nature of historical criti- cism, to exemplify it in studies of a series of great writers, and to demonstrate its value as a preparation for literary criticism in its highest form." While Lowell considered the principles of art to be "immutable," he felt that their application must accommodate itself to the material supplied to them by the time and by the national character and traditions. "Behind this conception lies, as Lowell knew, the idea of the organic — the idea that literature is not a manufacture but a growth. . . . The critic who does not seek to understand the genetic principle in the writers of the past is incapable of a complete criticism." — Foerster, op. cit., pp. 120,124. 664. It appeared in the Atlantic for January and February, 1859, as a review of R. G. White's edition of Shakespeare. 665. This approach was no less important in Schlegel and Coleridge, and Lowell might have derived it thence, or, for that matter, from Sainte-Beuve or H. A. Taine, except that he thrice refers the historical method specifically to Goethe. 666. Works, III, 63. 667. For details, see Falk, op. cit., pp. 26-28. 668. Goethe had taken his criticism lightly and had what appeared to be a subjective or impressionistic view of the critical function. In mature life, he said, "I am more and more con- vinced that whenever one has to express an opinion on the actions or on the writings of others, unless this be done from a certain one- sided enthusiasm, or from a loving interest in the person or the work, the result is hardly worth considering." — Goethe's Literary Essays, ed. by J. E. Spingarn (N.Y., 1921), pp. 141-42. As editor of the North American Review and the Atlantic, Lowell was required to undertake a great deal of formal criticism and saw the task before him as far more serious than Goethe in his detachment viewed it. Still, he called upon Goethe for support whenever the opportunity offered, as when, starting from Coleridge's "primary" and "secondary" imagination, he developed his threefold theory of imagination (Foerster, op. cit., pp. 133-40); he elected to omit much of the "Coleridgean moonshine" and tried "to lay hold of the term [imagination] with his understanding," in order "den Gegen- stand fest zu halten," in the words of Goethe.— Works, II, 86. 669. For details, see Falk, op. cit., pp. 88, 89-93, 124-36. 670. She defined the critic's function as a supplement to that of the creative artist, in which both strive together to realize the ideal standard that lies outside or beyond both. Literature is but one of the many evidences in the life of the universe (along with art, religion, and science) that there is a progressive tendency working all things up from Nature, through Man, to Spirit or Ideality. Literature is to be brought before the bar of reason, where critic and writer can settle their differences on equal 798 Notes to Pases 487-89 terms. When she set about to judge, she applied her principles with conviction and energy ; and while she was charged with being a "lean old maid" or "Dr. Johnson in Petticoats," she spoke her convictions, as she believed, fairly and in the light of the high ideal principles that she recognized. Her practice, at a time when a Longfellow or a Cooper nursed their sensitive feelings and a Poe slashed about him in person- al pique, was salutary to the development of a sane, responsible criticism. 671. Life Without and Life Within, p. 88. 672. See Art, Literature, and the Drama, pp. 13-20, 119, 357; and "Short Essay on Critics," Dial, I, i (July, 1840), 5-1 1. 673. In Art, Literature, and the Drama (p. 179) she distinguished between the one mode of criticism which tries "by the highest stan- dard of literary perfection . . . each work that comes in its way, rejecting all that is possible to reject, and receiving with toleration only what is capable of standing the severest test," and the other, which "enters into the natural history of everything . . . believes no impulse to be entirely vain . . . and believes there is beauty in each natural form, if its law and progress be understood." 674. Letters, I, 153, n. 62. 675. Ibid., II, 248, n. 2. 676. Ibid., pp. 424-26. 677. Emerson's reading of Coleridge from 1829 onward seems not to have inspired him to formulate any clear-cut idea of organic unity until after his more active concern with Schle- gel's lectures provided the stimulus; as a definite principle of art the idea finds its first notable expression in "The Poet." 678. "The Poet," Works, III, 5. 679. Ibid., p. 8. 680. The importance which Emerson at- tached to expression appears to be in some measure attributable to Goethe, although the notion is already implicit in the section on "Language" in Nature and in The American Scholar. Emerson had been familiar since 1829 with Coleridge's remarks on the subject in the Preface to Aids to Reflection. But in the journal of 1837 he definitely linked the idea with quotations transcribed into his diaries out of Eckermann's conversations and the corre- spondence of Goethe and Zelter: "Lively feeling of the circumstance, and faculty to express it makes the poet. — Goethe. "They say much of the study of the Ancients, but what else does that signify than, direct your attention to the real world and seek to express it, since that did the ancients whilst they lived. — Goethe." — Journals, IV, 194 (Mar. 18, 1837). The italics are Emerson's and the phraseology suggests that these notations are Emerson's own literal translations. Another point of contact between Emerson and Goethe is in the view of the ancients versus the moderns, the classic versus the romantic. He cites (as Lowell was to do later) the dictum: "'Should,' says Goethe, "was the genius of the antique drama; Would of the modern, but should is always great and stern ; would is weak and small.'" — Journals, IV, 90 (Sept. 23, 1836). The observation harmonized with his own humanistic conception of the ethical values of art based on universally valid spiritual truths or eternal laws; it supported the arguments for his concept of nature in its symbolic role as means to an end, of art as means to the achieve- ment of the ideal. In his applied criticism Emerson looked down upon poets from this empyrean height and accordingly found even Shakespeare wanting — a "half-man," only "a master of revels to mankind." — Works, IV, 217. For this reason, despite his tributes to Goethe's mind, he never materially changed his early view of Goethe the man, when he remarked in 1834, "the Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he." — Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, I, 30. If he did not com- pletely reject art in favor of religion, he was concerned with raising it to the level of religion. 68 1. In Poe, to be sure, it was used in the concoction of a technic for the short story and short poem; but despite Poe's effort to invest the concept with a mathematical-philosophical aura, it remains somewhat artificial and mechanical. In Poe beauty reputedly has nothing to do with the didactic or moral; in Emerson Beauty, Truth, and Goodness are one. Emerson identifies beauty and virtue; Poe persits in damning the "heresy of the didactic." 682. Works, IV, 204. 683. See ibid., pp. 189, 194, 195-96. 684. Emerson was inclined to rate Very's essay on Shakespeare "with those of Coleridge, Lamb, and Goethe." — Wm. I. Bartlett, Jones Very. Emerson's "Brave Saint" (Durham, N. C, 1942), p. 60. 685. Studies in Shakespeare (Boston, 1886; 4th ed., 1889), p. 52. 686. "The Anatomizing of William Shakes- peare," Atl. Monthly, LIII (May, 1884), 596, 603. 687. Ibid., p. 604. 688. Ibid., p. 602; see also "King Lear," Atl. Monthly, XLVI (July, 1880), 113. 689. Horace Traubel, Walt Whitman in Camden, I, 240-41. 690. Whitman's praise and censure of Shake- speare is treated by C. J. Furness, "Walt Whit- Notes to Pages 489-90 799 man's Estimate of Shakespeare," Harvard Studies and Notes in Philol. and Lit., XIV 1932), 1-33; R. C. Harrison, "Walt Whitman and Shakespeare," PMLA, XLIV (Dec, 1929), 1201-38; J. O. Johnson, "Walt Whitman as a Critic of Literature," Univ. of Nebraska Studies in Lang., Lit., and Criticism, No. 16 (1938), pp. 35-50; Falk, op. cit., pp. 310-39; and Falk, "Shakespeare's Place in Walt Whitman's America," Shakespeare Assn. Bulletin, XVII, ii (Apr., 1942), 86-96, esp. pp. 89-91. 691. He echoed the St. Louis Hegelians in declaring that "the formulas of Hegel are an essential and crowning justification of New- World Democracy in the creative realms of time and space." — Specimen Days (1882), in Complete Prose Works (N.Y., 1914), p. 169. He welcomed Hegel's concept of historical progress in which conflicting ideas are reconciled in a higher synthesis — the doctine of a cosmic con- sciousness that unfolds through conflict and contradiction to divine ends. The seeds of the present are contained in the past, and a close reading of the past, even of feudal society, reveals latent germs of the future democratic order of things. For Whitman the societies that bred Homer and Shakespeare were alike "feudal" (Writings, VI, 136), and he significant- ly drew the dividing line just at the close of the Elizabethan age, Shakespeare's work marking at once the sunset of feudalism and its "last gorgeous effort before the advance of the new day." — Prose Works, p. 475. 692. Falk, loc. cit., p. 90. 693. Writings, VI, 120-23, 12 5- HI. 591 V, 96, 207-8. 694. November Boughs, ed. by David McKay (Phila., 1888), p. 18. 695. Writings, V, 55, 130. 696. See Floyd Stovall (ed.), Walt Whitman... (N.Y., 1934). P- xv - 697. See Alice L. Cooke, "Whitman's Indebtedness to the Scientific Thought of His Day," Univ. of Texas Studies in English, XIV (July, 1934), 89-115. 698. Writings, VI, 136; C. J. Furness, loc. cit., p. 9. 699. Shakespeare from an American Point of View (3rd ed., N.Y., 1882), p. 466. 700. Falk, op. cit., p. 352. 701. For a statement of the esteem in which the German system of higher education came to be regarded, see James M. Hart, German Universities: A Narrative of Personal Experi- ences, with Statistical Information . . . and a Comparison of the German, English, and American Systems . . . (N.Y., 1874; 2nd ed., 1878). INDEX Index Only matter in the Notes that warrants treatment as if it were part of the text is fully indexed. Abbreviations are used freely — espe- cially the following: ed., edited, edition, editor infl., influence, influenced lit., literature n, note, notes ref(s)., reference(s) tr., translated, translator trans(s)., translation(s) ABBOTT, Francis E.: 279; on Darwin, 633 n855; Index ed. by, 634 n866; O. B. Frothing- ham's relations with, 636 ngoi Abernethy, John: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Absolute: Emerson on the philosophy of the, 193, 614 n522, 615 n544 Abstract philosophy: Emerson on, 199 Academy of Music (Boston), 769 n357 Achtungvierziger. See Forty-eighters Ackermann, Georg Christian Benedict: Parker on, 216 Acta Euroditorum: Cotton Mather's use of, 34 Adam, Melchior: Cotton Mather's ref. to, 33 Adams, Charles Kendall, 669 n3i9 Adams, Henry: on Bancroft, 75; education of, 483 ; reading of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Haeckel, 483 ; Goethe's infl. on, 483 ; infl. by W. Oswald, E. Haeckel, and E. Mach, 483 ; critical theories of, 491 ; on Stallo, 614 n523 Adams, James Truslow, 42 Adams, John: 55; on German authors, 63; German books in library of, 518 nigo Adams, John Quincy: German transs. by, 50; Wm. Bentley's relations with, 55; Journal of a Tour through Silesia, 62-63 ; Follen's cor- respondence with, 115; on German lit., 328; knowledge of German lit., 359; Wieland's Oberon tr. by, 359, 498 n4; Minister to Prus- sia, 359; letters of travel in Germany by, 677 ni7 Addison, Joseph: 484; on early American stage, 348; Irving infl. by, 381 Adler, George J. : Melville meets, 437; on Kant, 437; on Hegel, 437; transs. by, 682 n62 Agassiz, Jean Louis Rodolphe: 200, 317, 413; Emerson's relations with, 167, 592 mo5, 611 n463, 614 n528 Agricola, Georg, De re metallica, 28 Agricola, Johann, 25, 26 Agrippa, Cornelius Heinrich: De occulta philo- sophia, 28; cited by C. Mather, 34 Aiken, Charles A. : on German theology, 585 n727 Albee, John: on women's role in St. Louis Movement, 654 ni68 Alcott, Abigail May, 228 Alcott, Amos Bronson: 13, 119, 161, 266, 277, 279, 294, 298, 299-300, 302, 441, 631 n848, 651 ni2i; reads Nitsch on Kant, 85; charac- ter of, 224; mystical tendency of, 224; ex- tensive reading of, 224, 226, 627 n723; Co- leridge's infl. on, 224; Boehme's infl. on, 224, 228; Swedenborg's infl. on, 224; reads Aris- totle, Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus, 225; Bacon's infl. on, 225; Aristotle's infl. on, 225; German philosophical infl. on, 225 ; on Locke, 225; on Lavater's Physiognomy, 225; Pesta- lozzi's infl. on, 225, 626 n 705; reads Joseph Neef's Plan and Method of Education, 225; reads Hermann Kriisi's General Means of Education, 225; W. C. Woodbridge and, 225; J. M. Keagy's correspondence with 225; Wm. Maclure's infl. on, 225; J. P. Greaves's infl. on, 225; Wm. Russell's relations with, 226; reads E. Biber's Henry Pestalozzi, 226; Matthew Carey and, 226; W. E. Channing's infl. on, 226; in Germantown, 226; reads A. W. Schlegel, J. P. F. Richter, Herder, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, 226; reads Cousin, 227; inability to read German, 227; on Zimmermann's Solitude, 227; on Colerid- ge, 227; on Schelling, 227, 228, 659 n228; on Plato, 227 ; reads Fichte's Destination of Man, 227; on Kant, 227, 627 n725; philosophical development of, 227; Novalis' appeal to, 227; meets Emerson, 227; on French eclecticism, 227-28; reads mystical writings, 228; buys 803 804 Index German books, 228; on Baader, 228; theory of Genesis infl. by Goethe, Baader, and Stallo, 228; Oken's infl. on, 228, 627 ^43; Sweden- borg's infl. on 228-29; ° n Oegger, 229; W. T. Harris' infl. on, 230; Brokmeyer's attack on, 230, 232, 272; Hegelian infl. on, 230; in St. Louis, 230-31, 271, 273, 627 n755; 641 n23; 646 n82; 655 ni8g; on the West, 230; on dialectics, 230; Parker's clashes with, 230; reads Hegel on philosophy of history, 230; reads Stirling's Secret of Hegel, 232; on Hegel, 232; plans Concord School of Philosophy, 232; in the West, 232; Western "conversa- tional tours" of, 232; Harris supports plans of, 232; on Hegelian logic, 233; "analogical" method of 233, 295, 296; theory of Lapse, 234; W. T. Harris' relations with 230-34, 298; Brokmeyer's opinion of, 271; literary career of, 273; in Jacksonville, 111., 291; Hiram K. Jones's visit to, 291; on W. T. Harris, 295; on H. K. Jones's philosophic method, 295; Kant interpreted by, 295-96; Margaret Fuller teaches in Temple School of, 332; Emerson and, 616 n547; Quaker infl. on, 625 n6g2; literary refs. in Journals of, 626 n6g6; Wm. Russell's infl. on, 625 n705; educational theory and practice of, 626 n707 ; linguistic attainments of, 626 n7i4; Ber- keley's infl. on, 627 n724; W. E. Channing's infl. on, 627 n724; Emerson's talks with, 627 n744; on W. T. Harris, 628 n7&o; on "schools" and "systems," 628 ^67; W. T. Harris on, 628 n792; Concord School of Philosophy founded by, 628 n793 ; visit to Mrs. Sarah Denman, 656 mg8; on Kantian terminology, 659 n222, n225, n228; on Fichte, 659 n228; personalism of, 606 n245; Whitman's per- sonalism related to, 660 n245 Alcott, Louisa May: essay on "Transcendental Wild Oats," 448; enthusiasm for romantic German lit., 448; reads Goethe, Schiller, J. P. F. Richter, and Mme. de Stael, 448; early writings of, 448; immersed in "German- ism," 449; Bettina cult formed by, 768 n 339; on Emerson, 768 n339; on Goethe, 768 n339-40, n345; on J. P. F. Richter, 768 n345 ; German studies of, 768 n345 ; in Ger- many, 768 n345 — A Modern Mephistopheles inspired by Goethe's Faust, 449; Moods: transcendental nature of, 448; inspired by Goethe's Wahl- verwandtschaften, 448 Alcott, William, 225 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey: 447, 457, 458; Judith and Holofernes infl. by Hebbel, 447 Alexander, James Waddel: 109, 149, on Emer- son, 104; on German transcendentalism, 558 n398 ; on German theologians, 558 n400 Allen, Mrs. Beverly, 289 Allen, James Lane, 359 Allen, Joseph Henry: 149; on German theology, 561 n440 Allston, Washington: Gothic elements in, 364; M. Fuller meets, 441 Alsted, Johann: 37, 358; Harvard uses books by, 29; C. Mather cites, 34; Theologia na- turalis, 34; J. Edwards' reading of, 37; En- cyclopaedia, 504 n52, 661 n254; textbooks by, 505 n65 Althusius, Johannes, 500 n20, 516 ni62 Alting, Heinrich: cited by Cotton Mather, 34 Amana, Iowa, 12 America: cultural maturity of, 9 American Akademe (Jacksonville, 111.) : Pla- tonism of, 291; programs of, 291, 545 mg5; Journal of, 302; Hiram K. Jones's founding of, 655 nigi; reorganization of, 656 nig5; membership of, 656 nig5 American Antiquarian Society, 33 American colleges of the eighteenth century: isolated German influences on, 304 American drama, 348 American-German Review, 10 American historiography, 495 n6 American literary history: reinterpretation of, 495 n6 American literature: critical study of, 5; com- prehensive bibliographies of, 4g7 ni4 American Museum: German lit. in, 327 American Social Science Assn. : W. T. Harris' infl. on, 652 ni2g American students in Germany: statistics on 77; studies of, 312 American university education: German infl. on, 4go Amerika dargestellt durch sich selbst: analysis of, 64-65 Amerikanische Ansichten: contents of, 65, 526 "34-35 Amici, Giovanni Battista: Emerson's refs, to, 166 Amish, 21 Anabaptists, 21, 22, 23 Anacreon: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Analectic Magazine, 485 Anaxagoras: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Anaximander: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Anderson, Joseph G., 27g Anderson, Mary, 357 Anderson, Paul Russell: on Platonism in the Midwest, 273, 648 ngo Anderson, Sherwood: Freud's infl. on, 483 Andover Theological Seminary: German theo- logy at, 305, 662 n258 Andreae, Johann Valentin: 37; Christian apolis, 20; infl. in England, 20, 21; Chymische Hock- zeit Christiani Rosencreutz Anno 1549, 27 Angelo, Michael, 279 Index 805 "Angelus Silesius" (pseud.), 345 Annuals: in Germany, 720 n26o Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe: Emerson on, 592 ng4 Anthologies of German lit.: list of, 678 n25 Anthology Club, 20, 56 Antinomians, 22, 81 Antinomianism, 500 1128, 502 n34 Appleton, Frances: 421, 736 n8g; Longfellow's courship of, 414-15, 421-22 A priori versus a posteriori methods, 136, 138 Arago, Francois: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Archetypes: Emerson on, 193 Architecture in America: Gothic infls. on, 364 Aristotle: 304, 310, 311, 319, 544^26; Marsh's view of, 136, 579 n659; Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166; on the unities, 406; on organic unity, 488 Aristotle Society (St. Louis, Mo.), 263, 641 n26 Armbriister, Anton, 44 Armstrong, A. C. : Falckenberg's History of Philosophy tr. by, 673 n374; career of, 673 n374 Arndt, Ernst M., 344 Arndt, Johann: 34, 37, 343; C. Mather on, 34; G. Wesley infl. by, 38; Whitefield infl. by, 511 ni25; teachings of, 510 ni25; Paradies Gartlein, 35; Wahres Christentum, 35, 508 n 1 03-4 Arnim, Bettina (Brentano) von: Emerson's refs. to, 172; Parker on, 216; American vogue of, 343; Longfellow on, 422; M. Fuller on, 441, 442, 444 Arnim, Ludwig (Jo)Achim von: American vogue of, 345; Poe infl. by, 403; the vampire theme in, 717 n2i6 Arnold, Matthew: on Heine, 334, 338, 429 Art Society (St. Louis, Mo.) : W. T. Harris' or- ganization of, 263, 655 ni89; Mrs. Beverly Allen in, 655 ni8g; activities of, 655 ni8g; Wm. M. Bryant's leadership in, 655 ni8g; Hegel's Aesthetic the textbook of, 655 ni8g Ascham, Roger: German interests of, 20 Astronomy: Emerson's interest in, 169 Atheism in Germany: American attack on, 109-10 Athenaeum (London): Hawthorne reviewed in, 382 Atlantic Monthly, 448, 476 A tlantis: analysis of, 66; contents of, 526^7-39 Audubon, John James: 424; Emerson's refs. to, 167 Auerbach, August: Emerson's refs. to, 172 Auerbach, Berthold : 453, 454; Emerson's refs. to, 172; American vogue of, 333, 335, 339, 340, 343, 346, 684 n88-go; Schwarzwalder Dorfgeschichten , 339 Auersperg, Anastasius Alexander, Graf von. See Griin, Anastasius Augustine, St.: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Austen, Jane: Howells on, 477 Austin, Mrs. Sarah: translations by, 390-91, 712 ni57 Ayres, Alfred, 358 BAADER, Franz von: 86, 228; Emerson's refs. to, 171, 172, 198 Babbitt, Irving, 491 Babo, Marius: Die Strelitzcn adapted by Dun- lap, 689 ni29 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 474 Bache, Alexander D., 78 Bacon, Francis: 132, 226, 430, 437, 576 n624, 603 n295 ; Coleridge on, 135, 544 n226, 603 ^89; Emerson's reading of, 166; Emerson on, 160, 206, 591 n79, 592 ni03 Bailey, Philip James: Festus, 447 Bain, Alexander, 310 Bakewell, Charles, 640 n8 Baldwin, Mrs. Ebenezer, 657 n203 Baldwin, James Marsh: 302; studies in Ger- many, 675 n38i; on Lotze, 675 n38i; Miin- sterberg and, 675 n38i ; on Herbart, Fechner, and Wundt, 675 n38i; on German scholar- hip, 675 n38i Ballad: popularity of, 334 Baltimore, Md. : German theater in, 358 Bancroft, George: 13, 19, 43, 57, 62, 66, 68, 72, 72, 77, 78, 112, 328, 329, 447, 490, 491, 619 n6i6; educated at Harvard, 73; at Gottin- gen, 73 ; hears lectures of Eichhorn, Koster, Welcker, Dissen, Planck, and Heeren, 73; criticism of Gottingen, 73-74; enrolls at Berlin, 74 ; visits Goethe, 74 ; tours Germany, 74; helps found Round Hill School, 74- translates Heeren, 74; critical essays on German authors, 74; German infl. on later historical writings, 75; public career of, 75; on Schleiermacher, no; Emerson on, 163; on Goethe, 330, 331, 679 n35; on the German university system, 530 n94 ng7 n98; scholar- ship of, 531 nio3; personality of, 531 nio3; receives German doctorate, 531 nio5; in Berlin, 531 nio6; on Halle, 531 nio6; visit to Hegel, 531 nio7; on German philosophers, 531 ni07; studies German educational me- thods, 531 nio8; teaching career at Harvard, 532 nui; translates German textbooks, 532 nii2; articles on German lit., 532 nii3; later years of, 532 nii4; on German theology, 557 11391 Bandmann, Daniel, 358, 691 ni47 Banvard's panorama of the Mississippi River, 424 Baptist Church in the U.S.: evangelical move- ment in, 511 ni2g Bardili, Christian G., 113 Barlow, Joel, 50, 51 806 Index Barnard, Frederick, 59 Barnard, Henry, 78 Barnard, John, 47 Barrett, George C, 249 Barry, Thomas, 355 Barth, Christian Gottlob, 347 Bartol, Cyrus Augustus: 148, 247, 257, 336, 659 n23i; theological career of, 248; transcend- entalism of, 248; on Goethe and Schiller, 248; on DeWette, 560 n423; on German learning, 635 n8gg; on DeWette's Theodor, 635 n8gg; on Parker, 635 n8gg; on materi- alism and agnosticism, 635 n899; on Schiller, 635 ngoo; on Goethe, 635 ngoo Barton, Benjamin Smith: 515 m6i; in Ger- many, 50 Bascom, John: 299; on free will, 297; W. T. Harris on, 297; Hickok's infi. on, 310; Science of Method, 310; transcendentalism opposed by, 312; History of Philosophy, 320; on Kant, 659 n230 Bassett, John Spender, 75 Bateman, Kate: in role of Mosenthal's Leah 357 Bauer, Klara, 685 n93 Baumgarten-Crusius, Ludwig Friedrich Otto, 618 n58g Baur, Ferdinand Christian: 243, 305, 636 ngoi; O. B. Frothingham infl. by, 250, 636 ngi4 Bayle, Pierre, 87 Bay Psalm Book, 3g Bayrhoffer, Karl Theodor: 279; A. Norton on, 558 n400 Beach, Joseph Warren, 610 n45g Beale, R. C. : on Poe, 38g Bebel, Ferdinand A., 685 ng6 Beck, Carl: 77, 85, 24g, 4go, 4gi, 562 n457~5i ; European career of, 114; Follen's relations with, 1 14 ; teaches at Round Hill School, 114; Jahn's Turnkunst tr. by, 114; at Harvard, 114; on Schiller, 680 n42 Becker, Wilhelm Adolf, 558 n4O0 Beckford, William: Popular Tales of the Germans, 6g8 ni4; Irving's use of, 372 Beecher, Henry Ward: on Goethe's Wahlver- wandtschaften, 447 Beedy, Mary E. : 286, 63g n3 ; on Dante, 653 ni63 Beeson, Susan V., 63g 113 Beethoven, Ludwig van: 27g, 2go, 352, 474; M. Fuller on, 444, 766 n32g-30 ^32; J. S. Dwight on, 450; Transcendentalists' cult of, 767 n330 Behaviorism, 13 Behrens, Bertha: 347; Mrs. J. W. Davis' trans. from, 685 ng5 Belcher, Governor Jonathan: interest in Ger- man pietism, 36; correspondence with Urls- perger, 5og nil Belden, H. M.: on Poe's knowledge of German, 707 nioi Belknap, Jeremy, 52 Bell, Charles, 610 n458 Bell, Clara, 685 ngs Bell, Sir George: Emerson's refs. to, 167 Beloit College: philosophy at, 668 n3o8 Benard, Charles Magloire : on Hegel's aesthe- tics, 616 n56g Bender, Harold S., 14 Benecke, Georg : Geo. Ticknor taught by, 66 Benedix, Julius Roderich: 357, plays of, 684 n84 Bentham, Jeremy: Emerson on, 160, 166 Bentley, William: 51, 52, 57, 61, 65, 78, i4g, 504 n56, 516 ni66; career of, 53; scholarly interests of, 53; German collection of, 53-55, 521 n2i3, 470 n205 ; C.D.Ebelingand, 51-54, 520 n20i; disposition of library of, 520 n20i-02; historical work of, 520 n202; German studies, 520 n205; library of, 521 n204; relations with notable German-Ameri- can merchants, 521 n205; on German music, 521 n2i4 Bergson, Henri, 474, 475 Berkeley, George: 225, 304, 308, 3ig, 616 n569; Emerson infl. by, 158; Emerson on, 160, 58g n38; Alcott infl. by, 627 n724 Berlin, Wis. : Friends in Council of, 656 n200 Bethesda College: inspired bv German pietism, 38 Bethlehem, Pa.: schools in, 42 Bigelow's Florida Bostoniensis: Emerson's refs. to, 167 Bion, 27g Biot, Jean Baptiste: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Birch-Pfeiffer, Charlotte: Lorlie's Wedding adapted from Dorf und Stadt of, 358 Blackwood's Magazine: 406; identified with German horror stories, 405 Blattermann, Georg: at the Univ. of Va., 78, 124, 66g n3i5; Poe and, 710 ni3i Blair, Francis Preston: in St. Louis, 260, 273 Blaisdell, James J., 665 n2g2 Blake, H. G. O.: on Thoreau, 660 n234 Blake, William, 542 n205 Blasche, Bernardt Heinrich: on Hegel, 652 ni26 Block, Louis (Lewis) James: 25g, 28g, 2go, 63g n 3. 655 ni88; on Brokmeyer, 63g n4; Brok- meyer's tr. of Hegel's Logic revised by, 648 n92; Snider assisted by, 653 ni46; in Jack- sonville, 111., 655 ni92; Hegelianism of, 656, ig2 ; Platonism of, 655 nig2 ; in Chicago, 656, nig2; Dr. Holland on, 656 nig2 Blodgett, Levi (pseud.), 218. See also Parker, Theodore Blood, Benjamin P., 279 Blow, Susan E.: 259, 266, 286, 289, 293, 639 Index 807 113 ; characterization of, 265 ; Eliz. Harrison taught by, 285; in St. Louis, 286; Snider opposed by, 286; on W. T. Harris, 642 n4o; Goeschel tr, by, 652 ni26; educational career of, 654 ni6g; studies kindergarten methods in Germany, 654 ni69; books and lectures by, 654 ni6g; infl. of, 654 ni6o. Blumenbach, Johann F. : Thos. Cooper on, 662 n257 Blumenthal, Oskar: 691 ni43; American vogue of plays by, 358 Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar: on Lieber, 571 Boccaccio, Giovanni: Irving infl. by, 377 Bodenstedt, Friedrich Markus, 344 Bodmer, Johann Jakob, 40 Bolder, Peter: 38; in London, 38 Boehm, Anthon Wilhelm: 33, 508 nio2; cited by C. Mather, 34 ; C. Mather's correspondence with, 34-35; J. Edwards' knowledge of, 35 Boehm, Johann Phillip, 42 Boehme, Jakob: 224, 226, 507 n87 n8g, 610 n46i ; infl. on Quakers, 31 ; Emerson on, 172, 612 11481; Alcott's reading of, 278, 627 n733; Whitman on, 467; Philosophically Divine printed in Philadelphia in 1688, 677 n2 Boelte, Mrs. Maria Kraus: Susan E. Blow studies under, 654 ni6g Boethius: Emerson's refs. to, 160 BQttiger, Karl: Emerson infl. by, 374 Bogatzky, Karl Heinrich von, 347, 677 n6, 680 n49 Boker, Henry George: 452, 457; in Germany, 458 774 n4o6; infl. by Schlegelian school, 458; Konigsmark, 458; "Countess Laura," 458; early German studies of, 774 n4o6; on Strauss's Leben Jesu, 774 n4o6; critical es- says of, 774 n4o6 Bokum, Hermann: transs. by, 334 Booth, Edwin: Kotzebue roles of, 356 Booth, Junius Brutus, 356, 358 Bopp, Franz, 56 Bosanquet, Bernard : on Hegel, 643 n56 Boston: German books in, 19; "German craze" in, 114: Schiller's Robbers and William Tell on the stage of, 355 ; chapbooks sold in, 677 ni ; music societies in, 769 n357 Boston Lectures: Christianity and Skepticism, 244, 633 n86o Boston Monday Lectures: Transcendentalism, 632 n854 Boston Quarterly Review: 105, 245; contributors to, 629 n8oi Boulting, William, 279 Bouterwek, Friedrich, 113 Bowen, Francis: 151; on Locke, 104; on the New England Transcendentalists, 104; in Germany, 302, 664 n275; German philo- sophical infl. on, 307 ; History of Philosophy, 320; on German transcendentalism, 558 n40i, 664 n275; German textbooks used by, 674 n376; on German lit., 681 n58 Bowne, Borden Parker: 323; studies in Ger- man}', 319, 669 n3i4; German infl. on, 319; on personalism, 661 n245 Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth: 336; on Richter, 338; on Goethe, 683 n67 n6g; on Schiller, 683 n6g Boylan, R. Dillon, 448 Boyle, Robert, 28 Brachvogel, Albert Emil, 685 ng3 Brackett, Anna C, 259, 268, 289, 639 n3 Bradford, George P.: Goethe's Wahlverwandt- schaften tr. by, 448 Bradford, William (Governor) : German works owned by, 503 n45 Brandmuller, Johannes: cited by C. Mather, 34 Brandt, Gerhardt, 48 Brattle, Thomas, 31 Bread Winners' College, 658 n2io Brentano, Klemens, 345 Brenton, William (Governor), 30 Bretschneider, Karl Gottlieb, 618 n58g Brevoort, Henry, 367, 381 Brewster, William: German books owned by, 503 1145 Brightman, Edgar Sheffield, 323 Brightman, R. L. : The Concord Lectures on Philosophy, 660 n23i Brinton, Daniel G., 279, 467, 468 British-American cultural relations, 7 Broadway Journal, 405 Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold: Konversations- lexikon, 454 Brokmeyer, Eugene, 639 n4, 648 ng2 Brokmeyer, Henry Conrad: 258, 260, 263, 264, 271, 273, 276, 286, 293, 300, 313, 639 n3 n4, 642 n54, 651 nii7, 658 n207, 659 n22i; per- sonality of, 231, 301, 639 n3, 644 n66; Alcott and, 231, 271, 272; American point of view of, 261; Harris' appraisal of, 264; Snider's appraisal of, 264, 284-85, 287, 647 n87; for- eign birth of, 266; peripatetic career of , 266, 643 n66; as governor of Missouri, 266, in Oklahoma, 266, 284; hermit life of, 267, 269, 644 n66; political career of, 268, 644 n66; Hegelianism of, 269; Lutheran background of, 269; in Mississippi, 269; joins Baptist Church, 269; at Georgetown Univ., 269, 643 n66; at Brown Univ., 269, 643 n66; reads Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany, 269; dis- covers New England Transcendentalism, 269; adopts Hegel in toto, 643 n66; meets Harris, 269, 644 n66; on Kant, 270, 645 n7i, 649 ng7; asceticism of, 270; in the Civil War, 270, 644 n66; as expositor of Hegel, 270, 645 n7o; daemonic nature of, 271, 647 808 Index n86; transs. by, 273; Harris instructed by, 273, 649 1197; unconventionality of, 284; in Milwaukee, 284, 653 ni54; on Faust, 284; Emerson's infl. on, 643 n66; favorite books of, 644 n66; land speculations of, 644 n66; meets Snider, 644 n66; domestic life of, 644 n66; among the Indians, 644 n66; eccen- tricities of, 644 n66; Plato's infl. on. 645 n68; argumentativeness of, 645 n68 ; authors and books mentioned by, 645 n7i; infl. of New England Transcendentalism on, 645 n73; on Parker, Alcott, Emerson, 645 n73; on Kan- tian criticism, 645 n73; on Hegelian logic, 645 n73 n75; on Goethe's humanism, 145 n73; as conversationalist, 646 n76; Snider's discipleship of, 646 n79; on Hegelian ethics, 647 n86; shortcomings as a writer, 646 n76, 647 n86; at the Milwaukee Goethe School, 660 n237 - — A Foggy Night in Newport, 645 n75 ; "Letters on Faust," 270; A Mechanic's Diary, 269, 270 —Translation of Hegel's Logic: copies of, 270, 273-74, 641 n28, 647 n87 n88 ngo-92 ; circu- lation of, 273-74; plans for the publication of, 273, 646 n76, 648 n88 ngo-92; S. H. Emery's copy of, 273, 648 n9o; Hiram K. Jones's copy of, 273-74; Harris' attempted revision of, 646 n76; fate of, 646 n76; de- scription of manuscript of, 648 ng2; L. J. Block's copy of, 655 ni88; copies in Jackson- ville, 111., and Osceola, Mo., 655 ni88 Brook Farm: 12, 447, 537 ni53; Ripley's role at, 207, 212, 617 n583; musical instruction at, 213, 769 n357; Parker at, 216; Emerson on, 537 ni53 Brooks, Charles, 78 Brooks, Charles Timothy: 247, 334, 336, 339, 431,446,447,451,452,487, 637 11929; Faust I tr. by, 331, 452; transs. from Richter by, 332-33; Songs and Ballads of Uhland, 334; Riickert transs. by, 339, 452 ; Karl Kortum tr. by, 339; Leopold Schefer tr. by, 339; fond- ness for Schiller, Jean Paul, and the roman- tics, 452; German Lyrics, 452; transs. from Uhland, Korner, Freiligrath, and A. Griin, 452; trans, of Schiller's Homage of the Arts, 452; transs. of Jean Paul's Titan, Hesperus, and Die unsichtbare Loge, 453 ; relation to the Genteel tradition, 453 ; Schiller's Tell tr. by, 679 n4i; career of, 770 n36g; Follen's infl. on, 770 n369; linguistic studies of, 770 n36g; theological studies of, 770 11369; list of German transs. by, 770 n370~7i Brougham, Henry Peter: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Brown, Charles Brockden: 49, 62, 328, 687 nio8; reads sensational German literary productions, 359-60, 692 ni55; reads Gess- ner, Haller, Wieland, and Leibnitz, 360; Utopian meliorism of, 360; on rationalism, 360; on Illuminati, 360-61, 693 m63; pioneer in American fiction, 362; Samuel Miller and, 522 n2; Gothicism of, 692 ni52; early writ- ings of, 692 ni55; Godwin's infl. on, 692 11155; associates of, 692 11155; reads J. K. Riesbeck's travels, 693 ni56; on Wieland, 693 ni56; reads Stolberg's Reise, 693 ni56; reads Burney's Travels, 693 ni56; quotes Wieland's Oberon, 693 ni56; as editor, 693 m63; on the literature of banditry, 693 m63; on religious delusion, 694 ni63; — Carwin the Biloquist, 360; Clara Howard: Germanic notes in, 693 ni63; Ormond: Ger- manic influences on, 693 m63 — Wieland: German elements in, 360, 364; infl. of Schiller's Geisterseher on, 361, 694 11103; infl. of Tschink's Geisterseher on, 361; Keats on infl. of Schiller's Geisterseher on, 691 ni52 Brown, Robert; Emerson on, 194 Brown, Dr. Thomas, 82, 86 Brown, William Hill, Germanic literary motifs in The Power of Sympathy by, 356, 364 Browne, Robert, 502 n32 Browne, Sir Thomas: Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166, 430 Brownell, William C, 491 Brownson, Orestes Augustus: 108, 215; on eclecticism, 104, 106, 235, 630 n8i3; on the Transcendentalists, 104; Catholicism of, 105, 235. 238-39; on Cousin, 105, 106, 553 ^29, 554 n 338; on Herder, 106; on F. Schlegel, 106; on Andrews Norton, 150; on Locke, 161, 235; religious views of 234; personality of, 234; Saint-Simon's infl. on, 234; reads Heine, 234 ; Hedge's infl. on, 234-35, 629 n8o7 ; edits Boston Quarterly Review, 235; on Cousin's "universal reason," 235; on Kant, 235, 236, 237-38, 629 n8o8, 630 n8i5 n824, 631 n833; on Margaret Fuller, 235 ; political activity of, 236; epistemology of, 236; universalism of, 236; turns against Kant, 236, 237-38; on German theologians from Herder to Schleier- macher, 236; on reason, 237-38; repudiates transcendentalism, 238, 239; on Schelling, 238; on Hegel, 239, 631 n833; on Leibnitz, 239; philosophic character of, 557 n375; reli- gious searchings of, 628 n794; sources of, 628 n799; Follen's infl. on, 628 n79g; on German philosophic infl. on American tran- scendentalism, 62gn8o5; on German lit., 629 n8o5 n8o8; on Goethe, 629 n8o8; on Schiller, 629 n8o8; on Schleiermacher, 630 n8i2; on rationalism, 630 n8i2; on Fichte, 630 n824; on Hume, 630 n824; on Descartes, 630 n825; on Reid, 631 n833 Brownson' s Quarterly Review, 106 Bryan, J. G. P.: studies in Germany, 311; Index 809 reports on philosophical instruction in Ger- many, 312 Bryant, William Cullen : 9 : knowledge of German lit, 409; travels in Germany, 410, 723 nj; influenced by Sturm-und-Drang writers, 410; on Schiller, 410, 685 n42; apol- ogist for German letters, 410; Germanic notes in poems of, 722 n2 ; sonnet on Wil- helm Tell, 723 n7; and Kant, 723, n7; Uhland transs. by, 727 n7; on German pop- ular songs, 727 n7; list of German transs. by, 724 ng; Follen's infl. on. 724 mo; infl. by German folklore, 724 ni2; second trip to Germany, 724 ni2; travel letters of, 724 m 2; lecture at the Schiller festival, 724 ni2; on German lit., 724 ni2; lecture on Goethe, 724 ni2 Bryant, William McKendree: 287, 289, 639 n3; versatility of, 258-59; books by, 654 ni.77 Bruno, Giordano: 228; Emerson's refs. to, 166 Bucke, Richard Maurice, 465, 470 Buckland, William : Emerson's contacts with, 194 Buckle, Henry Thomas: Parker on, 622 n662 Buckminster, Eliza, 512 n2i7 Buckminster, Joseph Stevens: 61, 62, 65, 78, 148, 160, 305, 329, 362; at Brattle Street Church, 19-20; German studies of, 55-56; academic career of, 56, 524; Emerson's refs. to, 160; German books in library of, 521 n2i6 Biilow, Baroness Marenholz: Susan Blow studies under, 654 m6g Burger, Gottfried August: 328, 329, 330; lyrics of, 333; American vogue of, 343, 344, 34 6 . 359; Poe on, 392, 713 m63; Irving on, 701 n42 — Lenore: 334, 409; vogue of, 327, 359, 677 n7; Irving's burlesque of, 372-73 Biirstenbinder, Elisabeth, 347, 685 ng3 Busching, Anton Friedrich, Erdbeschreibung, 48 Busching, Johann Gustav: Volks-sagen, 370 Buffalo, N.Y. : German theater in, 358 Buffon, Comte de (Georges Louis Leclerc) : 322; Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166, 606 n405 Buhle, G. G. Johann, 539 ni88 Bulfinch, Stelphen Greenleaf: 149; on German theology, 561 n440 Bulkley, Peter, 503 n47 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Robert Lytton : 430; ed. of poems by Schiller, 680 n42 Burchstead, Dr. Heinrich: in America, 31 Burke, Edmund: Emerson on, 160 Burlington, Vt. : Friends in Council of, 656 n200 Burnet, Gilbert: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Burney, Charles: on Germany, 516 m6g Burns-Gibson, J., 279 Burr, Aaron: and C. D. Ebeling, 51 Burroughs, John: on Whitman, 469; on Ger- man scientists, 474; on German music, 474; on Goethe, 474, 789 n578; on Kant and Hegel, 475 ; on Hegel's infl. on Whitman, 475 ; German garnishment for style of, 475; on Germany, 789 n559; on Strauss, 789 n578; on Freiligrath, Lessing, Schiller, and F. Schlegel, 789 n578; on Schopenhauer, 789 n578 Busch, Wilhelm: 339, 346; Max und Moritz, 684 n85 Butler, Joseph (Bishop): 359; Emerson's refs. to, 160 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 281 Buxtorf, Johann: 26, 29; Bentley's interest in, 53; cited by C. Mather, 34; Hebrew grammar by, 661 n254 Butler, Samuel, 404 Byrd, Colonel William: on German immigra- tion, 51, 513 ni4i Byron, George Noel Gordon: 388, 389, 430, 474' 475^ Manfred, 364; Marino Faliero, 402 CABOT, James Elliot: 179, 204, 232, 279, 584 n7o8, 657 n203, 659 n228; studies in Ger- many, 77, 253 ; on Emerson's religious views, 119-20; Schelling transs. by, 107, 253; Har- vard lectures on Kant, 204, 254, 312; on Kant, Schelling, and Hegel, 253; absolute idealism of, 253, 638 ng53; defends German idealism against positivism, 253, 255; writes on Kant for the Dial, 253 ; instructs Emerson on Kant and Schelling, 253; transs. from Kant, 254; Parker's relations with, 254; on J. S. Mill, 254; on Kant as refuting Mill, 254; J. B. Stallo's Philosophy of Nature reviewed by, 254, 610 n462 ; on Oken, 254 ; Agassiz and, 254, as Emerson's secretary and biographer, 254; W. T. Harris and, 254-55; on Hegel, 255, 638 ngsi; on Cousin, 554 11338; educa- tion of, 638 n94o; at Heidelberg, 638 ng4o; Ranke and, 638 n94o; at Berlin, 638 ng4o; Schelling and, 638 n94o; at Gottingen, 638 n940; Rudolph Wagner and, 638 n94o; T. W. Higginson on, 638 ng4i ; reads Kant, 638 n942; on transs. of Kant, 638 ng42; on the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 638 ng5i ; on Goethe, 638 ng53; idealism of, 638 ng53; on science, 638 n953; on Hegelian dialectics, 638 n953; on Hegel as completing Kantian idealism, 638-39 ng53 Caird, Edward, 279, 302 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 720 n48 Caldwell, Joseph, 59 Calkins, Mary W. 323 Calvert, George Henry: 112, 336, 681 ns8; on Goethe, 330, 334-35, 681 n59, 683 n67; on Richter, 332, 335; transs. by, 334-35, on A. 810 Index W. Schlegel, 335 ; tolerant views of, 335 ; literary career of, 533 11131; Schiller's Don Carlos tr. by, 579 n.41 ; career of, 681 1159; at Gdttingen, 681 1159; meets German writers, 681 n59; visits FYeiligrath, 682 n5g; Scenes and Thoughts in Europe, 682 1159; scenes from Faust tr. by, 682 n59; Goethe: His Life and Works, 682 n59 Calvin, John: 24, 26, 500 n28, 501 n32; Emer- son's refs. to, 160; American Puritans on, 499 ni5-i7; Luther compared with, 21-23; Puritans infl. by, 21-24 Calvinism: 321; Unitarian attack on, 82 Cambridge Platonists: 86, 575 n622, 575 n624; Marsh infl. by, 134; Coleridge on, 576 n625 Camerarius, Philip: cited bv C. Mather, 34 Campbell, Killis: 389; on Poe, 405; on Poe's knowledge of German, 709 ni26 Campe, Joachim Heinrich: Robinson der Jiingere, 677 n6 Carey, Henry C. : List's relations with, 124 Cargill, Oscar: Intellectual America, 496 n6 Carlisle College, 305 Carlyle, Thomas: 83, 85, 108, 121, 122, 153, ■158. J 59. I 6i, 172, 173, 178, 180, 181, 182, 189, 190, 206, 427, 429, 433, 436, 474, 487, 49°. 7 J 3. nI 74: on Locke, 96; on metaphys- ics, 96 ; on Goethe, 96-97, 548 n274 ; Goethe's infl. on, 96-97. io°. 54§ "273, 550 n293, 551 n307 n309; interest in German romantics, 97; on Novalis, 97; reads part of Kant's first Critique, 97; Kant misinterpreted by, 97-99, 181, 182, 440, 603 n288 n2go; on Fichte, 97, I 95. 549 n2 77; on German philosophy', 98, 99,549 my j, 500 11288, 551 n3o8; Germanic, infl. on, 99, 551 n3o6 ^07; on Jacobi, 99; abandons philosophy, 99; interpreter of German lit. and thought, 99, 548 n268 n272; Fichte's infl. on, 99, 550 n293, 551 n30i; on idealism, 100; view of history, 100; on heroes, 100; Schelling's infl. on, 100; on Goethe's doctrine of work, 100; Novalis' infl. on, 100; Richter's infl. on, 100, 332, 551 n 3°7 n 3°9; adopts Schiller's theory of his- tory, 100; F. Schlegel's infl. on, 100; incon- sistent, eclectic philosophy of, 100; American vogue and infl. of, 100, 101, 552 n3ii, 595 11138, 795 n646; on Mme. de Stael, 101, 549 11284; Emerson infl. by, 108, 165, 170, 171; Emerson compared with, 165, 170; Emer- son's criticism of, 172, 174, 183-84, 605 n239, 609 n456; Emerson's visit to, 174; moral philosophy of, 174; views on Chris- tianity, 174-75; Emerson's philosophic prob- lems aggravated by, 186; Alcott's reading of, 226; essays of, 328; Whitman infl. by, 464, 465; Whitman on, 472, 473; on Colerid- ge, 543 n2i3 ; literary character of, 548 n272 ; on Schiller, 549 n277, 551 ^05; on Kant, 549 n2 77 n2 78 n28o; relies on secondary- sources, 549 n282; Jacobi compared with, 549 n284; on understanding and reason, 550 n286 n2go, 551 n307, 603 n303 ^07, 604 11320; philosophically uncritical nature of, 550 n287; Kant's infl. on, 550 n293 n299, 551 n3og; Nietzsche on, 550 n2g8; Jacobi's infl. on, 550 n299, 551 ^07; on Schelling, 551 n303 n304; Schleiermacher's infl. on, 551 n3o6; Mendelssohn's infl. on, 551 n3o6; Werner's infl. on, 551 n3o6; E. T. A. Hoff- mann's infl. on, 551 n3o6; Fouqu6's infl. on, 551 n3o6; Tieck'sinfl. on, 551 n3o6; Novalis' infl. on, 551 n307 n3og; Hedge's use of, 584 n7o8; Emerson on, 595 ni38, 600 n235 n249, 605 n239, 609 n456; derivative nature of philosophy of, 605 n33o; on Emerson, 605 n 339i J- F- Clarke on, 622 n66g; Alcott's reading of, 627 n733; on Goethe and Schiller, 679 n3i; C. E. Norton's ed. of Goethe's cor- respondence with, 682 n67; on E. T. A. Hoffman, 715 m85; on Wilhelm Meister, 727 n25 — "Corn-Law Rhymes," 170; German Roman- ce: 329, Poe's reading of, 715 ni85; Life of Schiller, 603 n2g2, 67g n4i; "Novalis": 98, Kant interpreted in, 182, 184, Emerson quotes, 185, Emerson's Nature infl. by, 607 n4i8 n4ig; Sartor Resartus, 99, 100, 165; "State of German Literature": g8, Kant in- terpreted in, 183, Emerson infl. by, 607 11418; Wotton Reinfred, g8, gg Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation: research activities of, 11, 4g6 ni2 Carove\ Friedrich Wilhelm: Longfellow's trans, of "Marchen ohne Ende" by, 423 Carpenter, Frederic I., ig3 Carrel, Alexis, 474 Carter, Franklin: on Goethe's Faust, 683 n6g; on FawsMiterature, 686 nioo Carus, Karl Gustav: Marsh infl. by, 136, 57g n668 Categorical imperative: Emerson on, 601 n259 Catholicism: Brownson's conversion to, 105-6; Hecker's conversion to, 240-41 Cattell, James McKeen: 302, 320; at Gottin- gen, 669 n3i4, 675 n38i; works in Wundt's laboratory, 675 n38i; at Univ. of Pennsyl- vania, 675 n38i; establishes psychology la- boratory at Columbia Univ., 675 n38i Cause and self-cause: Harris on, 276 Cervantes, Miguel de: Howells on, 476 Chambers. Robert: 200, 201, 610 ^63, 614 n527; Emerson on, 167, 194, 611 n465 Chamisso, Adelbert von: 333, 344, 346; Haw- thorne and, 387; Whitman on, 467 — Peter Schlemihl: 333, 387, 405 ; Hedge's trans, of, 147; Hawthorne on, 708 ni2i Channing, Francis Dana, 55 Index 811 Channing, William Ellery: 81. 82, 148, 158, 161, 210, 241, 323, 441; Unitarian Chris- tianity, 82; criticizes Unitarianism, 82-83; on human nature, 82 ; attacks Lockean sen- sationalism, 83; infl. by Scottish common- sense philosophy, 83 ; reads German authors, 83; denies influence from Kant, 83-84; phi- losophic character of, 84 ; Schleiermacher's infl. on, 85; on Christianity, 85; relations with Follen, 119, 121, 538 11174. 563 n455; on Trinitarianism, 130; Emerson's refs. to, 160; Hutcheson's infl. on, 537 ni65; basic principles of, 537 m65; Ferguson's infl. on 537 ni65; Price's infl. on, 537 ni66; on Kant and Price, 537 ni66; on De Gerando, 538 m68; on Kant, 538 ni7i; on Schelling, 538 ni7i; on Fichte, 538 ni7i; Follen's infl. on, 538 ni74; changing attitude toward German lit., 538 ni74; discussion meetings at home of, 563 n455; Stuart and, 573 n575; Alcott infl. by, 627 ^24; at ordination of Jared Sparks, 641 n20 Channing, William Ellery (the younger), 446, 768 n 33 8 Channing, William Henry: 105, no, 119, 148, 240, 242, 245, 247, 254, 446, 449; J. F. Clar- ke's relations with, 223 ; spiritual nature of, 241; in Rome, 241; Bildungsroman-stTucture of Ernest the Seeker by, 241-42, 249; Goethe's infl. on, 242 ; Xovalis' infl. on, 242 ; DeWette's infl. on, 242; Jouffroy's Introduction to Ethics tr. by, 242, 632 n85i ; O. B. Frothing- ham's biography of, 249; on eclecticism, 555 11357 ; on Kant and the post-Kantians, 632 n8 5 i Charitable institutions in America: Moravian infl. on, 512 ni34 Charleston, S. C. : German drama on stage of, 686 mo5 Chateaubriand, Francois Rene: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Chautauqua: 337; Goethe days observed by, 683 n70 Chemnitz, Martin von, 26 Chicago, 111.: 289; St. Louis rivalry with, 259; Snider's Homer School in, 285; kindergarten movement in, 285; Goethe School in, 286; Snider in, 286, 299; Snider on "philistinism" of, 288 ; Kindergarten College of, 288 ; Hege- lians of, 293 ; Schiller's Robbers and Wilhehn Tell on stage of, 355 ; philosophical school in, 639 ni; Snider's Dante Schools in, 653 11163 Chicago Art Institute: Dante School of, 285; Goethe School of, 285 Chicago Kindergarten College: Snider's lectures in, 287 Child Clifton J. : on German political infl. in the U.S., 12 Child, Francis J., 571 n546 Child, Lydia Maria: on Beethoven, 767 n33o Child Robert, 13, 27, 28, 504 n5i n59 Childs, Charles Francis, 259, 273, 639 n3, 649 n97 Chivers, Thomas Holley, 491 Christianity: evidences of 109; Emerson's views of, 169; Ripley's social view of, 213; Whitman on, 468 Christian Examiner : 66, 148, 210; liberalism of, 80; German philosophy in, 329 Christian Register, 453 Christy, Arthur, 193 Chubb, Percival, 293 Church fathers: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Cibber, Collev: on the earlv American stage, 348 Cincinnati, Ohio: New Englanders in, 359 Civil War: 335; Germans in, 260; position of Germany during, 336 Clark, Harry Hayden: 167, 168; studies scien- tific infl. on American writers, 13; on Emer- son's scientific views, 157 Clarke, James Freeman: 105, 119, 120, 148, 242, 250, 257, 329, 359, 446, 449; Follen and, 122, 568 n523; Emerson's refs. to, 160, at Harvard Divinity School, 222-23; reads Carlyle, Coleridge, Goethe, and Jacobi, 223; on Locke, 223; avoids partisanship, 223; Unitarianism of, 223, 623 ^74-75; Hedge and 223, 596 ni5i; German studies of, 223; on metaphysics, 223; editorial career of, 223; transs. from DeWette's Theodor, 224; transs. from Schiller, 224; on J. P. F. Rich- ter, 224; on Carlyle, 224, 622 n66g; on Ger- man lyric poetry, 224; on DeWette, 224, 596 ni5i; career of, 224, 567 n523; on Goethe, 33°. 33 1 ! Emerson's correspondence with, 596 ni5i; on Andrews Norton, 596 ni5o; Coleridge's infl. on, 623 n673; on Locke, 623 n673; on David Hartley, 623 n673; Kant's infl. on, 623 n673; on Jacobi, 623 n673; on transcendental terminology, 623 n673; Par- ker and, 623 n675; religious position of, 524 n676; on Emerson, 624 n676; on Parker, 624 n676; on system in religion and philosophy, 624 n676; on Christ's divinity, 624 n676; on miracles, 624 n676; on faith, 624 n676; Manual of Christian Belief, 624 n676; "Ger- manism" of, 624 n6~j; on M. Fuller, 624 n678; M. Fuller taught by, 624 n678; German works tr. by, 624 n678; O. W. Hol- mes on, 624 n6j8 ; German theology defended by, 625 n687; on Kant, 625 n687; list of refs. to German theologians and writers, 625 n688-8g; visits DeWette, 625 n688; on in- tuition, 629 n8n Class, George, 289 Claudius, Matthias, 343, 345 812 Index Clay, Henry: Emerson on, 184 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne: 9, 408; Inno- cents Abroad, 6; memory of, 470; A Tramp Abroad, 477, 480; literary personality of, 477-78, 791 n6o7; "The Awful German Language," 478, 479, 480; German allusions in writings of, 478; early study of German, 478; Heidelberg residence of, 478; German letter of, 478-79; in Berlin and Vienna, 479, 793 n6i8; Following the Equator, 479; "The German Chicago," 479; Meisterschaft, 479; Struwwelpeter , 479; The Mysterious Stranger, 480; What is Man?, 480; Adolf v. Wil- brandt's infl. on, 480; at the Radical Club, 633 n866; reading of, 791 n6oi n6o4 n6o6; German writers mentioned by, 791 n6o7; in Germany, 792 n6n, 793 n6i8 n623; know- ledge of German, 792 n6i6-i7, 793 n62o; on the German language, 792 n6i7, 793 n620 n623 ; Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwel- peter tr. by, 793 n622; Siegmund Schlesinger and, 793 n625 ; plans to write a German play, 793 n624 ; on Adolf v. Wilbrandt's Meister von Palmyra, 793 n626-27; and Ernst Haeckel 794 n627; on Schopenhauer, 794 n627 Cloppenburg, Johann: cited by C. Mather, 34 Cobb, Palmer: 389; on Hoffmann's infl. on Poe, 709 ni25 Cogswell, Joseph Green: 43, 57,62,77,112,490, 491, 738 nio5; early education of, 70; sails for Europe, 70; enrolls at Gottingen, 70; pro- digious study program of, 70-71 ; tours Ger- many, 71; inspects German libraries, 71; visits German Gymnasia, 71; visits Fellen- berg at Hofwyl, 71-72; visits Pestalozzi at Yverdun, 71-72; visits Goethe, 71, 530 1185; introduces German library procedures in U.S., 71 ; helps found Round Hill School, 72; organizes Astor Library, 72; personality of, 529 n76 n84; on the American library sys- tem, 530 n87; inspects German schools, 530 n88; German educational infl. on, 530 n8g; teaching career of, 530 ngi; as librarian, 530 1193 Coler, Johann Jacob : 34 ; cited by C. Mather, 34 Coleridge Samuel Taylor: mentioned passim; as interpreter of Kant, 83; knowledge of German, 88; German books owned by, 88, 542 n2og; J. H. Muirhead on, 88, 90, 542 n2i2-i3; philosophic consistency of, 89; philosophic contributions of, 89, 543 n2i3; on Newton, 89; on Kant's first Critique, 89; on Fichte, 89; on Schelling, 89, 94-95, 545 n234, 580 n674; on Spinoza, 89; reliance on Schelling, 89-90, 543 n2i8, 544 n22o; on logic, 90; on Bacon, 90, 544 n226, 606 ^89; on Leighton, 90, 544 n226, 575 n624; on the Kantian distinctions, 90-91, 544 n225, 576 n630, 603 n3Q2; defines reason, 90-91, 545 n226, n230-3i; uninfluenced by Jacobi, 91-92, 542 n2io; reads Schelling, 91; J. Marsh's interpretation of, 92; on pure and practical reason, 92-93, 545 n226 ^30-31, 603 n302 ; attempts to go beyond Kant, 93 ; mysticism of, 93-94 ; on Aristotle, 94 ; on con- stitutive and regulative ideas, 94; on recon- ciliation of philosophy and religion, 94, 138; rejects Kant's unknowable noumena, 94; on Fichte's egoism, 94-95; on Schelling's dynamic principle, 94-95 ; Kantian elements in, 95; Emerson's reading of, 108, 163, 166, 170, 172, 186, 591 n76; Murdock on, 113; helps Emerson understand German philo- sophy, 121; on Neo-Platonism, 134-35; Marsh's tribute to, 138; philosophical "system" of, 142; Emerson on, 163, 183, 543 n2i3, 600 n235, 603 n305, 605 n339, 609 n45&; Emerson's visit to, 172, 173-74, 600 n234; Emerson's growing appreciation of, 179; Emerson compared with, 179; Poe's literary theories infl. by, 405; Poe on, 407; Lanier infl. by, 461 ; on Thomas Wirgman, 539 m86; Germanic elements in philosophy of, 542 n207, 542 n2i2, 543 n2i3; on German transcendentalism, 542 n2og; on Jacobi, 542 n2io; marginalia of, 542 n2io, manu- scripts of, 542 n2ii; Ren6 Wellek on, 542 n2i2; philosophic personality of, 543 n2i3; Carlyle on, 543 n2i3; fragmentary philo- sophy of, 543 n2i3; Schelling's infl. on, 543 n2i8, 544 n22o; on Fichte, 543 n2ig, 580 n674; on Kant, 543 n2ig, 544 n226, 545 n226, 546 n236, 575 ^23-24, 576 n62g-30, 578 11639-40 n659; Kant's infl. on, 544 n2 23-24; on philosophical terminology, 544 n226; on reason, 545 n226 n230-3i, 546 ^238, 558 n396, 576 n63o, 603 n302 ; on Jacobi, 545 n234; Platonic infl. on, 546 n244, 606 n38g; on science, 546 n247, 616 n463; on individualism, 546 11248; on Spi- noza, 558 n3g6; Marsh infl. by, 574 n6i3, 580 n6yj; on regulative versus constitutive reason, 578 n654; Emerson infl. by, 600 11237, 603 n2g5; Ripley on, 617 ^84; Clarke infl. by, 623 n673; Alcott's reading of, 627 n 733; Schiller's Wallenstein tr. by, 67g n4i; A. W. Schlegel's infl. on, 721 n275, 7g6 n65o; on Shakespeare, 796 n650 — Aids to Reflection: 90, gi, i7g, 181, 186, 187, 188, 224, 610 n458; ed. by J. Marsh, 132, 133; Emerson infl. by, 163; Emerson quotes from, 188; Alcott's reading of, 226; purpose of, 578 n64i ; on language, 606 n404 — Biographia Literaria: 8g, 90, 187, 405, 406, 606 n404; Alcott's reading of, 226; Alcott infl. by, 227 — "Essay on Method": 179; Alcott infl. by, 226, 228 Index 813 — The Friend, 92, 145, 179, 181, 186, 224 — "Hints toward the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life," 606 n404 —Table Talk, 181, 184 Colleges in America: inertia in, 130-31; Ger- man philosophy taught in, 304; growth in number of, 522 ni College textbooks: list of, 662 n274; German content of, 662 n274; of French origin, 662 11274 Collegiate education in America: German infi. on, 77-78, 124, 304 Colman, Benjamin: 28, 47, 513 ni4o; interested in German pietism, 36 Colman, George, 348 Cologne, Germany: N. P. Willis' view of, 453 Columbia Univ.: 305, 311; textbooks used at, 506 n67 ; German educational practices at, 667 n3o6; German philosophy textbooks at, 667 n3o6 Columbus: Amerikanische Miscellen: analysis of, 65-66 Combe, George: Emerson on, 160, 194 Common-sense philosophy in America: popu- larity of, 321 Compensation: Emerson's theory of, 175 Comte, Isadore Auguste Marie Francois Xavier: 244; positivism of, 244, 250; H. Martineau's transs. from, 250; O. B. Frothingham on, 636 11914 Comtean positivism: 244; progressive hu- manism infi. by, 250 Conant, Helen S., 336 Concord, Mass.: Emerson on, 602 n275 Concord School of Philosophy: 13, 274, 292, 3 02 > 337- 448. 639 ni; officers of, 205; brief history of, 233; names of lecturers in, 233; philosophical controversies in, 233; Harris' part in, 281; literary emphasis in, 284; Goethe program of, 284 ; Dante program of, 284, 300; Snider's participation in, 284; opening of, 291, 294, 628 n793 ; supporters of, 291; Platonic elements in, 294; Western Hegelians in, 294; Alcott's plans for, 294; Hegel versus Plato in, 294; first session of, 294; second session of, 295; third session of, 295, 658 n22o; Kant centennial celebration of, 295-97, 658 n22i-3o; fourth session of, 298, 659 n23i n234; Westerners withdraw from, 298; fifth session of, 298; climax of, 299, literary character of, 299; sixth session of, 299, 660 n245 ; seventh session of, 299, 66on257; Goethe program of, 299; specu- lative nature of, 299; students of, 299; Snider's opinion of, 299; anecdotes relating to, 299, 660 n24i; quality of faculty of, 299; downward course of, 299 ; eighth session of, 300; ninth session of, 300; Plato program of, 300; Kant centennial of, 616 n57o; fees, atten- dance, and faculty of, 658 11215 ; programs of, 658 n2i5; Snider's humorous remarks on, 660 n24i; length of sessions of, 660 n243 Condelle and Sprengel's Philosophy of Plants: Emerson's refs. to, 167 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 471 Confucius: 186, 228; Emerson on, 160, 592 n94 Congregationalism, 80, 501 n32 Congregationalists, 22 Connecticut Wits: Elihu Hubbard Smith's re- lations with, 362 Conolly, H. L. : 424 ; Longfellow gets story of Evangeline from, 740 ni2g Constant, Benjamin: 216; Ripley on, 103; American vogue of, 555 n339; Follen's rela- tions with, 566 n478 ; Brownson infi. by, 628 n799 Conway, Moncure Daniel: 148, 257, 336, 592 nio5, 634 n873; hears Longfellow's Harvard lectures, 253; joins Goethe cult at Harvard, 252; Unitarian ministry of, 253; Goethe's infi. on, 252; founds the Cincinnati Dial, 253; visits Germany, 253, 638 ng38; consults Strauss at Heilbron, 253; visits Gervinus, 253; Stallo's relations with, 253; August Willich and, 253 ; correspondent for the New York World, 253; on Mignon's Song in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, 447; on Strauss, 447; autobiography of, 637 n934; infi. by Goethe's Faust, 638 ng39; "Christmas in Berlin," 638 n939; "The Brothers Grimm," 638 ng39; on Bismarck, 638 ng39; on Hein- rich Schliemann, 638 ng39; on Heine, 638 n939 Cook, Elisha, 506 n68 Cook, Francis E.: 287, 288, 289, 639 n3; in kindergarten work in St. Louis, 654 ni84 Cook, Joseph: lectures of, 242-43, 312; on New England Transcendentalism, 632 n854'; on German scholarship, 669 n3i6 Cook, Thomas I., 128 Cooke, George Willis: 148; on Transcendental- ism, 81-82 Cooke, John Esten: 482; German Gothic notes in, 460; Richter's infi. on, 460; Leather Stocking and Silk, 460; German literary motifs in writings of, 460; on German-Amer- icans, 460; Carlyle's infi. on, 460 Cooke, P. P., 400 Cooke, Thomas, 353 Coolidge, J. I. T., 212 Cooper, James Fenimore: 362, 482; tours of Germany, 362, 695 ni8i ni83 nigo; tours of Switzerland, 362, 695 ni8i ; on Wilhelm Tell, 362, in France, 362; Sketches of Switzerland , 362-63; in Italy, 362; and Winckelmann, 362; meets Tieck, 363; German setting and origin of The Heidenmauer, 362, 363, 695 814 Index 11183; moral of The Bravo, 363; on Luther- anism, 363; Germanic motifs in The Heads- man, 363 ; Letter to His Countrymen, 363 ; on Schiller, 695 m8i ; Excursions in Switzerland, 695 ni8i-83 m86; knowledge of German, 695 ni87 Cooper, Thomas: 305; on German philosophers, 662 n257 Cooper, Thomas A.: leading role in Kotzebue's Stranger, 349; prefers Shakespearean to Kotzebue roles, 350 Copernicus; Emerson's refs. to, 166 Coppee, Henry C, 307 Cornell Univ.: 320, 534 ni39; A. D. White's organization of, 311 "Correlation of forces": St. Louis Hegelians' espousal of, 262 Correlation of studies: Harris on, 281 Correspondences: Emerson's doctrine of, 188 Cosmic process, 323 Cosmopolitan spirit in America, 341 Cotton, John: 81, 501 n32; criticizes Luther's followers, 23 Cousin, Viktor: 83, 85, 105, 106, 109, no, 119, 122, 161, 172, 179, 216, 309, 396, 616 n56g; Sir Wm. Hamilton on, 87-88, 604 n3i 1 n3i6; Introduction to the History of Philosophy tr. by H. G. Linberg, 102, 166; Elements of Psy- chology tr. by C. S. Henry, 102 ; epistemology of, 103, 237-38; Ripley on, 103; Emerson on, 103, 108, 166, 554 n338, 557 n378 ^89, 592 n95, 603 n3og, 604 11311; on Kant, 103, 553 n33 2 n334-35.' claims of, 103, 108, 554 n335; catholocity of, 104; Emerson uninfluenced by, 104; A. Norton on, 104; objective and subjective reason of, 104, 553 ^28-29, 554 n338; Brownson on, 104, 106, 235, 554 n338, 555, 349; American vogue of, 105, 106, 554 n 339. 557 n 37°; American interpreta- tion of, 106; Kant's relation to, 106-7; James Murdock's view of, 107, vagueness of, 108; Transcendentalists' view of, 109; Emer- son's final appraisal of, 181; on Schelling, 554 n 335; on history, 554 n328; on Herder, 554 n 33 8 : on Christianity, 554 n338; J. E. Cabot on, 554 n338; English transs. of, 555 n339; Ripley's teaching of, 556 n358; Kant compared with, 556 n363; Samuel Johnson on, 556 n364; taught at Harvard, 556 ^64; Linberg's correspondence with, 557 n37o; Ripley's correspondence with 557 n37o; Brownson's correspondence with, 557 n37o; Ripley's edition of, 604 n3i5; Parker on, 604 n3i5; Brownson infl. by, 628 n799; W. T. Harris' reading of, 649 ng4 Cox and Berry (booksellers), 48 Coxe, William: on Switzerland, 516 m6g Cramer's Art of Assaying, 48 Cranch, Christopher Pearse: 148, 242, 249, 359, 446, 455, 487, 637 11929: Emerson's visit to, 171; M. Fuller and, 449; education of, 449; assists in editing the Cincinnati Western Messenger, 449; at Brook Farm, 449; fond- ness for the German Lied, 449; Emerson's infl. on, 449; transs. from the German, 449; Emerson and, 595 11144; on Beethoven, 767 11330; German studies of, 768 n35o; theolo- gical position of, 768 11353 '< on German tran- scendentalism versus French eclecticism, 768 n 353i on music, 769 n354; on church music, 770 n36i Cranmer, John Andrew, 504 n56 Crantz, David: Thoreau on, 435 Crashaw, Richard, 448 Crawford, Bartholow V.: on Thoreau, 433 Creighton, John Edwin: 302, 303, 323, 660 n245 ; studies in Germany, 316; on Kant, 316; speculative idealism of, 316; Wundt tr. by, 3 J 6 Creiling, Johann Conrad, 505 n6i Crevecoeur, Michel G. St. Jean de: American- ism defined by, 4; C. D. Ebeling and, 51 Critical philosophy: Hedge's appraisal of, 145. See also Transcendentalism (critical) ; Tran- scendentalism (German) Critical philosophy of Germany: methodology of, 109. See also Transcendentalism (critical) ; Transcendentalism (German) Croly, David Goldman: Positivist Primer, 250; on positivism, 636 ngi3 Crouse, Mrs. J. N. : Snider assisted by, 654 ni84 Crowninschield (Kronenscheldt), Jacob, 55 Crowninschield (Kronenscheldt) family, 50 Crowninshield, Clara, 412, 728 n2g n3i; 729 n 4 i; 736 n87 Cudworth, Ralph: 216, 228; Emerson's refs. to, 160 Culture of Germany: Emerson's early disdain of, 120 Cummins, Maria, 340 Cunz, Dieter: researches of, 33 Curti, Merle: 281; on W. T. Harris, 652 ni30 Curtis, George Willis, 240, 637 n92g Curtius, Ernst, 347 Cushman, Charlotte: Korzebue roles of, 356 Cuvier, Georges L. C. F. D. : Emerson's refs. to, 166 DACH, Simon, 345 Dahn, Felix, 685 ng3 Dall, Caroline: on New England Transcenden- talism, 537 ni6i, 582 n6g3 Daly, Augustin: managerial career of, 357; dramatic adaptations by, 357, 6go ni42; Wm. Dunlap compared with 6go ni38; methods of trans, and adaptation, 690 ni39 Daly, Charles P. : on Schiller, 680 n42 Index 815 Dampier, William: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Dana, Charles Anderson: 68 1 n58; transs. by, 334, 768 n338; at Brook Farm, 768 n338 Dana, Daniel: 149; on German theologians, 557 11391 Dana, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 736 n87 Dana, Richard Henry: 362, 484, 486; lectures of, 485; Weimar's study of, 796 n654; on Shakespeare, 796 n654 Danhawer, Johann Conrad, 34 Daniel, Samuel: Thoreau's quotation from, 435 Daniell, John Frederick: Meteorological Essays, Emerson on, 166 Dante, Aleghieri, 279, 283, 289, 422, 439, 448, 474. 737 n99 Dante School in Chicago: list of lecturers in, 653 ni63 Darwin, Charles: 172, 200, 243, 322, 474, 489, 610 n463; Origin of Species, Emerson on, 167, 194, 201, 592 nio5, 608 n445, 614 n528 Darwin, Erasmus: Emerson's refs. to, 167 Darwinian evolution: 245; Emerson on, 192, 201; Emerson's efforts to equate Hegelian idealism with, 202 Davenport, John: 501 n3i, 505 n62 ; German books owned by, 29 Davenport, Iowa: Schiller's plays on the stage of, 355 David, C. G. See Croly, David Goldman Davidson, Thomas: 231, 264, 266, 286, 289, 294, 300, 301, 302, 616, n567, 616 n569, 639 n 3. 57 11207; Emerson on, 204, versatility of, 258; individualism of, 265; Aristoteleanism of, 266, 284, 933 ; Aristotle Club organized by, 289; teaching career of, 389; Brokmeyer's infl. on, 293 ; mercurial temperament of, 293, 658 n2io; writings of, 293; at Farming- ton, Conn., 293; establishes schools in N.Y. state, 293; death of, 293; Dante lectures of, 653 ni63; travels of, 650 n2io; schools of, 650 n2io Davis, Henry, 149 Davy, Sir Humphrey: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Day, Henry Noble, 279 Day, Jeremiah, 59 Dean, Dr. D. V., 289 Dean, Julia: 356-57; Kotzebue roles of, 356 De Bow, James D. B. : on eclecticism, 105 Decatur, 111., 292 Dee, John: 27; German interests of, 20 DeGarmo, Charles, 281 Degerando. See Gerando, Joseph Marie de Delavigne, Casimir, 402 Delitzsch, Franz, 320 Demme, Charles Rudolph: infl. of, 663 n267 Democratic Review: 384, 436, 450; on Haw- thorne, 381; Tieck's "Die Freunde" printed in, 382 Democritus: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Denman, Mathew B., 294, 656 nigg Denman, Mrs. Sarah, 292, 294, 656 ni98-99, 657 n20i Dennie, Joseph; anti-Germanism of, 350, 491 Denton J. Snider Association for Universal Culture, 281, 289, 301, 654 ni84 D'Orielli, A., 279 De Quincey, Thomas: 427; inconsistent views on Kant, 96; Kant transs. by, 541 n205; on Kant, 205 n205 ; on German transcendental- ism, 547 n257 n26i n266; on German lit., 547 n26i n266 Descartes, Rene: 216; Emerson's refs. to, 160; Brownson on, 630 n825 Detlef, Carl (pseud.), 685 ng3 De Vere, Maximilian Scheie: German transs, by, 339 DeWette, Wilhelm Lebrecht: 109, no, 112, 113, 130, 171, 210, 242, 245, 247, 596 niso, 636 ngoi ; American vogue of, in, 559 n4i8-20, 560 n424~26; Theodor tr. by J. F. Clarke, in; Human Life, or Practical Ethics tr. by S. G. Osgood, in, 247; Historical- Critical Introduction to the New Testament tr. by O. B. Frothingham, in; Intro- duction to the . . . Old Testament tr. by Parker, in, 216, 224, 560^24; Ripley on, 209. Parker infl. by, 221; Clarke's view of, 224, 596 M51; Views of Theology tr. by S. Osgood, 247 ; Barnas Sears on, 559 n423 ; Cyrus A Bartol on, 560 n423; Samuel Osgood on, 560 n423 Dewey, John: 279, 280, 293, 302, 304, 313, 320, 321, 651 ni2i, 669 n32o; on James Marsh, 136, W. T. Harris' relations with 302 ; radical empiricism of, 316; Hegel's infl. on, 316, 671 "35 1. 674 n375; on Kant, 576 n625; on Hegel, 670 n332 n352; studies German phi- losophy, 671 n35i; at Johns Hopkins, 671 n35i ; Peirce and, 671 n35i ; Morris and, 671 n 35 x ; W. T. Harris' infl. on, 671 n35i ; Plato's infl. on, 671 n352; Hegelianism attacked by, 672 n36i ; on Kant and the neo-Kantians, 674 "375 Dial: 245, 331, 433, 447, 488, 537 ni53; transcendentalist point of view of, 80; on Jouffroy, 105; Emerson prints trans, of Schelling in, 197; German lit, in, 223-24, 633 n86i ; on eclecticism, 556 n368; Journal of Speculative Philosophy compared with, 571 n548; contents analyzed, 762 n287 Dial (Cincinnati), 634 n873 Dialectics: Emerson's dislike of, 198, 205 Dibdin, Charles, 348 Dickens, Charles: German dramatic adaptation of Bleak House, 358 Dingelstedt, Karl, 345, 685 ng3 Distinction between understanding and reason: Marsh's emphasis on, 132; Emerson's appli- 816 Index cations of, 185-86; Emerson on, 602 n278- 80. See also Kant; Reason; Understanding and Reason Dittersdorf, Carl, 686 nio5 Divinity of man: Transcendentalists' view of, 82; Emerson on, 175 Divoll, Ira, 270, 649 no7 Dixon, B. V., 639 n3 Dock, Christopher, 42, 513 ni45 Dr. Fanstus: popularity of, 30, 358 Dod, Albert Baldwin: 109, 149; on Emerson, 104; on German transcendentalism, 558 n398; on German theology, 558 n400 Domestic novel in America: characteristics of, 340; "Gartenlaube" fiction related to, 340; Hawthorne on, 340 Doppelgauger : Poe's use of, 397-98 Dorchester, Mass., 24 Dorner, Isaak August, 320, 632 n858 Douai, (Karl Daniel) Adolf, 246 Drake, Joseph Rodman, 409 Drama in America: dependent on British drama, 348 Draud, Georg, Bibliotheca classica, 503 n47 Drebbel, Cornelius, 27 Dreiser, Theodore: 14, 482; Haeckel's infl. on, 483 Dreissiger, 359 Dreyer, John H: on Kant, 661 n255; infl. of, 663 n267 Drew, John, 690 ni43 Droste-Holshoff, Annette, 345 Drummond, William, 86, 539 ni83 Dualism: Emerson on, 173, 190, 192, 589 n4i "44 Dudley, Marion V. (ed.) : Poetry and Philosophy of Goethe, 660 n237 Duffek, Nikolaus, 357, 691 ni43 Dumas, Alexandre: dramas of, 356 Duncan, George Martin: studies in German universities, 669 n3i4, 673 n374; Leibnitz tr. by, 673 11374 Dunkards, 21, 22, 23, 32, 40, 500 n23 Dunlap, William : 48, 49, 62, 348, 353 ; Kotzebue adaptations by, 348-49, dramatic mana- gerial work of, 349, 686 nio8; Fontainville Abbey, 364, 687 nio8, Kotzebue plays pro- duced by, 687 nio8; stagecraft of, 687 nio8; The Knight's Adventure infl. by The Robbers, 687 nio8; Schiller's infl. on, 687 nio8; Au- gustin Daly compared with, 690 ni38 Du Ponceau, Peter Stephen: promotes study of German, 64 Durie, John: 24, 505 n62; German interests of, 20, 21 ; travels in Germany, 29 Duyckink, E. A., and G. L. : Melville reads in library of, 436 Dwight, Henry Edwin: 533 ni33; studies at Gottingen, 77 Dwight, John Sullivan: 148, 242, 446, 487, 637 n 9 2 9. 738 ni05; Ripley's correspondence; with, 214; Select Minor Poems of Goethe and Schiller tr. and ed. by, 331, 448, 450, 769 n 358; personality of, 449-50; teaches music at Brook Farm, 450; periodical contribu- tions of, 450; musical career of, 450, 769 n 357: evaluation of, 450-51; transs. from the German by, 632 n850, 769 n356; on German music, 767 n330, 769 n357; transs. from J. P. F. Richter, 769 n358; on music, 769 n359, 770 n36i ; on church music, 770 n36i ; on the German composers, 770 n3&3 Dwight, Timothy: 54; at Yale, 564 n466 Dwight's Journal of Music, 450 EAST and West: Harris' efforts to unite, 265; irreconcilability of, 266 Eaton, Theophilus, 738 nii2 Ebeling, Christopher Daniel: 51, 57, 69; rela- tions with prominent German-Americans, 51 ; Wm. Bentley and, 52-54; Amerikanische Bibliothek, 519 ni94; list of historical-geo- graphical works on America, 519 mg5; Amerikanisches Magazin, 519 ni94; ns t of American correspondents of, 519 ni96; ex- changes books with Wm. Bentley, 5ign2oo-i ; sends literary intelligences to Bentley, 519 n20i ; on Kant, 520 n20i ; Samuel Miller and, 522 n2 Ebeling library: acquired by Harvard, 52 Ebers, Georg: 347, 685 ng3 ; Mary J. Stafford's transs. from, 685 ng5 Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von, 339 Eckermann, Johann Peter: 618 n6o2; Emer- son's refs, to, 172; Conversations with Goethe tr. by M. Fuller, 331, 413, 427, 442, 443, 474, 629 n8o5 Eckstein, Ernst, 347, 685 ng3 Eclecticism: 206; in America, 102-9, 538 ni68; Brownson's turn away from, 105; Murdock's view of, 113; Harris' study of, 275; Cousin's system of, 553 n328-2g; W. H. Channing on, 555 n 357; the Dial on, 556 n368; appeal of, 558 n405; Emerson on, 604 n305; Ripley on, 617 n58 4 Economics: German infl. on teaching of, 572 11565 Economy Community, 12 Edgar, Henry: Comtean positivism of, 636 ngi5 Education in America: Hegel's infl. on, 300; history of, 497 ni6 Edwards, Jonathan: 28, 81, 148, 150; reads Boehm on original sin, 35 ; study of German authors, 37; Narrative of Surprising Conver- sions, 38; Emerson's refs. to, 160; textbooks used by, 509 nu6 Eggleston, Edward, 482 Index 817 Eichendorff, Joseph von: 333, 334, 344; Tau- genichts tr. by Leland, 339 Eichhorn, Johann Albrecht Friedrich: 55, 112, 618 11589, 618 n6o2; Emerson's refs. to, 160 Eighteenth-century comedy, 356 Elective system of collegiate education: 310; Ticknor on, 534 ni39; Jefferson on, 534 ni39 Eliot, Charle3 W., 59 Eliot, George: on Heine, 334 Eliot, J. E., 279 Eliot, S. A., 73 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 483 Eliot, W. G., 257 Elkinton, Howard W., 11 Ellett, Elizabeth Fries Lummis: 682 n62; Characters of Schiller, 679 n4i Ely, Richard Theodore, 669 n3ig Elze, Karl, 490 Emanation: Emerson on, 193 Emerson, Charles Chauncy: 170; death of, 178 Emerson, Edward Bliss: illness of 164; death of, 178 Emerson, Mary Moody: 155, 158, 159, 160, 170; Emerson discusses Coleridge with, 163; Emerson's correspondence with, 164, 169; Emerson instructed in self- trust by, 176 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: mentioned passim — Nature: 80, 121, 176, 179, 186, 191, 194, 201, 207; inception of, 176; composition of, 177, 607 n405; dualism accepted in, 158, 177; epistemological problems in, 178-79, 180; significance of Kantian distinctions in, 178, 187-88, analysis of, 186-92; Emerson's fail- ure to attain object in, 191, 610 n265; tran- scendental theory of, 192 ; Oegger's infi. on, 607 n405; Carlyle's infl. on, 607 n4i8-ig; epistemological problem unsolved in, 607 436; inconclusiveness of, 608 n437; Carlyle's appraisal of, 608 n437; compared with "Na- ture" (c. 1844), 610 n457 — "American Scholar, The," 80 — Address before the . . . Divinity College: 80, 109, 176, 207, 641 n2o; criticism of, 104, 555 n35i • — Channing's relation to, 85 ; Kant in library of, 86; Carlyle's infl. on, 91, 155, 172, 174, 587 n2i; on Cousin, 103, 166, 557 ^78-79, 603 n3og, 604 n3i5, 604 n3ii n3i5, n3i6; on German theology, 120-21, 590 n53, 561 11440, 612 n473; on Schiller, 121, 609 n45i; on studying in Germany, 120; on German learning, 121, 571 n547; invites Cariyle to America, 121; Hedge's infl. on, 146, 171, 582 n692, 603 n283; Platonic elements in, 153- 54, 155-58; innate idealism of, 153; on con- sistency, 153, 156, 586 n3; Germanic infl. on. 153; Oriental infl. on, 153; defines Transcen- dentalism as idealism, 153; on systematic philosophy, 153, 156, 197, 585 nl. 586 n3. 589 n35 ; on literary borrowing, 154-55, 5§7 n7, ni5~2i; on literary influence, 154-55, 586 n6, 587 n7; Mendelssohn quoted by, 154; Carlyle's phrases adopted by, 155; note- books of, 155; Quaker infl. on, 155-56; on philosophic methodology, 156, 197, 585 nl, 609 n456; on the one and the many, 156; Harvard teachers of, 156; Scottish common- sense infl. on, 156, 590 n6i ; unsystematic philosophy of, 156; eclectic philosophy of, 156; mystical elements in, 156-57; scientific views of, 157 (see also Emerson, on science) ; on unity and variety, 157; on Platonic du- alism, 157-58, 164, 589 1141 n44, 591 n86; "First Philosophy" of, 157, 179, 184, 185, 195, 602 n28o; on reconciliation of religion and philosophy, 157; as epistemologist, 157; Berkeley's infl. on, 158; on natural law, 158; on nature as ideal, 158, 189, 589 n37, 593 nii2; the Kantian period of, 158; on spirit and nature, 158; on mind and matter, 158; on the moral principle as absolute, 159, 162, 176; 178; reading of, 160, 167; divinations of, 160; on pantheism, 160; on atheism, 166; on necessity, 160; on European transcendent- alism, 161; self-appraisal of, 161, 177; in St. Augustine, Fla., 161-62; religious doubts of, 161, 165; on validity of moral law 162, 178, 589 n42; doctrine of correspondences, 162; considers studying in Germany, 162; on Mine, de Stael, 162. 597 ni62, 612 ^65; in Harvard Divinity School, 162-63; solicits Mary Moody Emerson's advice on Kant, 163; Coleridge's infl. on, 163, 172, 179, 591 n76, 595 ni45, 600 n237, 603 11282 n295, 609 n456, 798 n677 n68o; on Wordsworth, 163, 590 1175, 600 n234, 609 n45i; Platonic dualism repudiated by, 164; on "Compensation", 164; on "Heroism," 164; on "Spiritual Laws," 164; scientific readings of, 164, 166- 68; productivity during Kantian phase, 164; ministerial career of 164; marries Ellen Tucker, 164; repudiates the church, 164; first use of Kantian terminology, 165; Car- iyle compared with, 165, 170; emotional and spiritual crises in life of, 165-66; reads De Gerando, 166; equates science with ethics, 166-68; on science, 167, 201, 546 n247, 592 nio2, 593 nioi 111 12, 594 ni 13-15, 610 n46i , 611 n463, 615 n545; scientific infl. in earlier writings, 167, 610 n458; appraises Goethe's scientific work, 168; Goethe's infl. on, 169, 595 ni28, 611 n4&3; interest in physics and astronomy, 169; considers astronomy as modifying theology, 169; religious crisis of, 169; on Christianity, 169; spiritual turmoil of, 170; self-reliance of, 170; first European journey of, 170-71; instructed by Convers Francis, 171, reads German philosophy, 171- 818 Index 72; Germans referred to by, 171-72, 597 11163, 599 n2 3 2 ; on German lit., 172, 597 nlo 3. 599 n232; visits to Wordsworth, Coler- idge, and Carlyle, 173-75, 00 ° n234; on Carlyle, 174, 183-84, 595 ni38 ni45, 600 n235 n249, 605 n339 n343, 607 n4i8; ap- praises his first European journey, 176; on "Self-Reliance," 176; ethics defined by, 176; on moral and natural law, 177, 178, 601 n268; on moral reality, 178; moves to Con- cord, 178; deep emotional experiences of (1834-36), 178-79; "Prima Philosophia" of, 179, 185, 195; re-reads Coleridge's Aids, 179; Journals of, 179, 183, 201; on understanding and reason, 180-81, 185-86, 601 n26o, 602 n278-8o, 603 n288-8g, 604 n3i4 n320, 606 n33o; on Kant, 183, 195, 589 n32, 591^79, 594 nn6, 596 ni53, 597 ni53, 601 n259, 603 n295, 606 n339 n403, 607 11424; philosophy as defined by, 186; Carlyle complicates philosophic problems of, 186; philosophical assumptions of, 186-87; on time and space, 190; regards Transcendentalism as "useful in- troductory hypothesis," 191; finds proofs of God inadequate, 191; rationalism of, 192; merges reason with intuition, 192, 609 n449; Essays, First Series, 192, 207; intuitionalism in in'The Method of Nature, "193; on 'Intellect', 193; on "The Over-Soul," 193, 488, 588 n3o; intuitionalism of, 193, 197, 588 n30, 607 n430, 629 n8n; on "Experience," 193; on "Politics," 193; non-philosophical period of, 193; Representative Men, 193, 465, 487; English Traits, 193-94; Conduct of Life, 194; Society and Solitude, 194; on "Circles," 194; attempts to equate evolution with philo- sophy, 194; on Stallo, 194, 610 n462, 612 n465, 613 n500-i ; 615 ^44; on evolution, '94. 59 2 1105, 608 n44i n445, 609 T144J, 610 n458, 614 n528; meets leading British scien- tists, 194; reads Haywood's trans, of Kant's first Critique, 195; Fichte's relation to, 195, 196, 243, 612, n473 n475 n477; neo- Platonic phase of, 195, 609 n448 n449 n455 ; on Fichte's Destination of Man, 196; ethical theories uninfluenced by Fichte, 196; self-reliance uninfluenced by Fichtean egoism, 196; on German philosophical accomplishments, 196- 97; on Schelling, 197, 595 ni25, 611 ^63 n477, 613 n482, 614 ^27, 615 n537, 615 n544; J. E. Cabot's infl. on, 197; appraises "Teutonism" of German philosophers, 198; on the German transcendentalists, 198, 607 n424, 612 n475, 616 n555; the Hegelian period of, 198; on "Poetry and Imagination," 201 ; consults histories of philosophy, 203 ; W. T. Harris' Hegelian infl. on, 204 ; receives Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 204 ; par- ticipates in Concord School of Philosophy, 205; German philosophical infl. on, 206-07; epistemological bases of, 206; on the "Amer- ican Scholar," 207; "infidelity" of, 209-10, 555 n 35 x . 59° 11150; Alcott and, 228-29, 616 n547, 637 n744; on Guillaume C. L. Oegger's La Vrai Messie, 229; Oken's infl. on, 229; "pantheism" of, 243; Parker compared with, 245; O. B. Frothingham infl. by, 249; among the St. Louis Hegelians, 272-73; lectures on philosophy at Harvard, 312; on Goethe, 330, 488, 590 n6o, 594 ni 17-19 n2i4-25, 597 m64, 612 n465, 635 ngoo, 637 ng35, 798 n68o; Hawthorne on, 384; Thoreau and, 432, 433. 592 nios, 593 mi2, 611 n463; M. Fuller and, 442, 446, 596 ni5i, 597 ni63, 763 n2go; Cranch's discipleship of, 449; Whitman infl. by, 465 ; Burroughs' relation to, 474 ; on the critical spirit of German scholarship, 487; Wm. Emerson's advice to, 487; on Shakesp- eare critics, 487; on Herder, 487-88, 613 n5i7; "The Poet," 488; on Edmund Malone, 488; A. W. Schlegel and, 488, 798 n676; on Dr. Samual Johnson, 488; on Charles Lamb, 488; on Lessing, 488; on the organic prin- ciple, 488; on Brook Farm, 537 ni53; on Schleiermacher, 560 n43i; Follen's relations with, 567 n4g8-gg ; on scholarly methodology, 571 n547; on Lieber, 571 n54g; philosophic personality of, 586 ni ; Holmes on, 587 ni3 nig; on originality, 587 ni5-2i; on revela- tions of the soul, 588 n3o; on Socrates, 589 n32; ethical views of, 58g n32; on Berkeley, 589 n38; Swedenborg's infl. on, 590 n52; on matter, 590 n56; on Platonic idealism, 5go n6i, 591, 86; on Achille Murat, 590 n66; on Coleridge, 591 n76, 600 ^34-35, 603 n305, 6°5 n 339. °°9 n 45°; on Kant as compared with Plato, 591 n79; on the cheap press, 591 1188, 597 ni63; uses handbooks, manuals, and compendia, 591 n88, 592 n88, 615 n545; on short-cuts to learning, 592 n88, 615 n545; Cousin's infl. on, 5g2 ng5; on foreign langu- ages, 592 n88; on Darwin's Origin of Species, 5g2 mo5, 608 n445, 614 n523; readings in science, 5g3 nio6, 594 nii3; on Zoroaster, 592 ng4; on Confucius, 5g2 ng4; on Bacon, 5g2 nio3; Agassiz and, 5g2 mo5; 611 ^63; lectures on scientific subjects, 5g3 nio8, 601 n268; on nature, 5g3 nii2, 5g4 mi5, 605 n320, 607 n430, 608 n^^2\ in Paris, 5g3 nii2, 5g5 ni43; 601 n26g; on Concord, 5g3 nii2, 602 n275; Thoreau's infl. on, 5g3 nii2, 611 n4&3; on Plymouth, 5g3 nii2; on de Ge- rando, 594 ngi ng4 ng6, 611 n46s; reading of Goethe, 5g5 ni20-22 ni35, 611 n463, 635 ngoo; on Oken, 5g5 ni25; 610 n463, 613 n5i6; on Hegel, 5g5 ni25, 613 n5i6, 614 "513 "523. 6 J 5 n544-45; on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, 5g5 ni35; on A. Norton, Index 819 595 11147; C. P. Cranch and, 595 11144; on E. Everett, 596 11146; Nat'l. Frothingham's infl. on, 596 ni47; German transcendental infi. on, 596 ni5o, 607 n424, 612 n475, 616 n 555 I J- F. Clarke's correspondence with, 596 nisi ; reads Nitsch's book on Kant, 597 ni53; on Jacobi, 597 nib2, 603 ^04; studies German, 597 m63; reads von Hammer- Purgstall, 597 ni63; on translations, 597 ni63, 615 n545; Heeren's infl. on, 598 ni73; on Kant's categorical imperative, 601 n259; German authors read by, 599 n232; Alex. Ireland and, 600 n24g: Kant quoted, 601 n259; Kant compared with, 601 n259; on Unitarianism, 601 n26i; attends Sorbonne lectures, 601 n269; hears Gay-Lussac, The- nard, and Jouffroy, 601 n268; in Parisian natural museums, 601 n268; on metaphysics, 602 n268; Novaljs' infl. on, 602 n268; phi- losophy defined by, 602 n268; on language, 603 n282; on analysis, 603 n287; on reason, 603 n288, 604 n3i4, 605 11343; Marsh's infl. on, 603 n295 ; on anticipators of Kant, 603 n295 ; on Sir Wm. Hamilton, 604 n3ii n3i6; "Aristocracy," 604 n3i4; on the divinity of man, 604 ^14; on Milton, 604 n3i5; Wm. Emerson's correspondence with, 604 n3i6; on pure and practical reason, 605 ^23; on Byron, 605 n343 ; Carlyle's criticism of, 605 n 339 n 343 '• British periodicals read by, 606 n397 ; Kantian epistemology used in Nature, 606 n399 n403 ; on Linnaeus and Buffon, 606 n405; on "The Sovereignty of Ethics," 607 n4io; German romantics' infl. on, 607 n424; Kant as interpreted by, 607 ^24; on transcendental idealism, 607 n43o; infl. by Stallo's Principles of Nature, 608 n445; on Lamarck, 608 ^45; on spiritualism, 608 n446; on individualism, 608 n446; on the individual as "part and pracel of God," 608 n447; on monism, 608 n446; on Plotinus, 609 n448 ; on Proclus, 609 n448 ; relative value of Coleridge and Carlyle for, 609 n456; dissatisfaction with metaphysics, 609 n456; on heroes, 609 n456; Brownson compared with, 609 11457; on Chambers' Vestiges of Creation, 610 n458, 611 n463 n465; reads Lee's Life of Cuvier, 610 n458; reads Lyell's Principles of Geology, 610 n458; on John Hunter, 610 n463, 614 n528; on "equivocal generation," 610 ^63 ; on the "scale of being" theory, 611 n463 ; on Cuvier, 611 n463 ; scientific theories of, 611 ^63 ; on transmutation of species, 611 ^63; on Brit- ish scientists, 611 ^63; on Goethe's Faust, 611 n463, 635 ngoo; "On the Relation of Man to the Globe," 611 n463; on Heraclitus, 611 n465; 615 n548; on Strauss, 612 n473; on Schleiermacher, 612 n475; on Schopen- hauer, 612 n475; 011 Boehme, 612 n48i; on philosophy, 613 n505; on identity, 614 n522- 23, 615 n544; on the absolute, 614 n522, 615 n544 ; Hoefer's Nouvelle Biographie Generate used by, 614 n527, 615 n545; on polarity, 614 n532; on Hegel's doctrine of opposites, 615 n544; on physics, 615 n545; lectures of, 6i6n566; Journal of Speculative Philosophy read by, 616 ns6g; Ripley on, 620 n6i8; on Lieber, 622 n665 ; J. F. Clarke on, 624 n676; Hecker on, 631 n848; influence of, 634 n872; on Parker, 634 n873; in St. Louis, 641 n23, 655 m 89; Snider on, 647 n83; in Quincy, 111., 656 ni98; sixth Concord session devoted to, 660 n236; on Jones Very, 798 n684 Emerson, William (Jr.) : in Germany, 77, 162, 590 n6o; correspondence of, 604 n3i6 Emerson, William (Sr.) : Joseph Buckminster and, 524 ni5 Emersonianism, 242 Emery, Samuel H. Jr.: 232, 263, 274, 291, 292, 294, 297, 298, 299, 303, 648 n87 1190-91 ; Snider's opinion of, 265 ; acquires a copy of Brokmeyer's trans, of Hegel's Logic, 291 ; Harris' infl. on, 292 ; Hegelianism of, 292, 757 n202 ; Emerson's infl. on, 657 n202; reads Plato, 757 n202; in Concord, 757 n202 ; list of writing of, 658 n2o8 Empedocles: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Empiricism, 303 Encyclopedia Britannica: Whitman's reliance on, 571 Engel, Johann Jakob, 343 Engels, Friedrich, 3, 685 ng6 English element in the U.S., 4 English-Scotch literary criticism: American vogue of, 484 English stage: German plays on, 348 Ense, Varnhagen von. See Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August Entwicklungsprozess : American adoption of, 322, 323 Ephemerides Brandenburgicae , 506 n74 Ephrata, Pa.: 12, 32; printing at, 19 Epictetus: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Epicurus: 178; Emerson's refs. to, 160 Epistemology. See Kant, Immanuel; Under- standing and Reason; Pure and practical reason, etc. Erdmann, Johann Eduard, 319 Ericson, Leif, 3 Ernesti, Johann August: Moses Stuart on, 130, 305 Ernst, James E., 25 Eschenmayer, Adam Karl August, 113 Eschstruth, Nathaly von, 685 n93 Ethics: Emerson on, 589 n32 n42 Ethics in American colleges: teaching of, 308- 09, 664 n28o; textbooks of, 664 n28o; Ger- 820 Index man books adopted for teaching of, 664 n28i Etzler, J. A., Thoreau on, 436 Euler, Leonhard: Emerson's refs, to, 172 Evans, E. P., 336 Everett, Alexander Hill: 681 n58; on Cousin, 103; on Musaeus, 333 Everett, Charles Carroll: 307, 657 n207; studies in Germany, 307; Hegelian infl. on, 307; Fichte trans, by, 307 Everett, Edward: 13, 14, 19, 43, 51, 55, 57, 62, 66, 71, 72, 75, 76, 78, 112, 207, 328, 329, 454, 487, 491; enrolls at Gottingen, 68, 528 n6i; hears lectures of Dissen, Heeren, Hugo, and Eichhorn, 68; reads Schiller, Goethe, and Kant, 68 ; writes on Goethe for North A mer- ican Review, 68; visits Goethe, 68; buys German books for Harvard library, 69, 528 n59; appointed at Harvard, 69; educational theories of, 69-70; quoted, 69; rejects invi- tation to Univ. of Virginia, 69 ; later political career of, 69; appointed president of Har- vard, 70; Longfellow's criticism of, 70; studies under Haussmann, Schrader, Welc- ker, Heeren, Reck, Saalfeld, Blumenbach, and Benecke, 70; growing conservatism of, 70; Emerson on, 163, 528 n62; on Goethe, 330; on Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, 490; education of, 528 n54; plans to trans. Klopstock's Messias, 528 n56; travels in German}', 528 n6i ; at Harvard, 528 n62 529 1169; transs. from the German, 529 n63; tri- butes to German literature and learning, 529 n64 1171; Emerson hears lectures of, 596 ni46; Schopenhauer's infl. on, 673 n374; Windelband's infl. on, 673 n374 Evolution: Emerson on, 192, 193, 195, 201, 592 mo5, 608 n445; Radical Club papers on, 633 n866; American resistance to 668 n3o8 Ewald, Georg Heinrich August: Stuart infl. by, 130 Exotic novels of Germany : American vogue of, 685 n93 Experimental psychology: 13; introduction of, 666 n297 Experimentalism, 323 FALCKNER, Daniel, 32 Falk, Robert P. : on German Shakespeare cri- ticism, 748 ni7i Fallersleben, Hoffman von: Whitman on, 345, 467 Familienroman : in America, 48, 360 Faraday, Michael: Emerson on, 166, 167, 194 Farquhar, George: early American perform- ances of, 348 Fate: Emerson on, 202 Faust, Albert Bernhardt: on the German ele- ment in the U.S., 4, 9, 11 Faust: dramatic adaptations of, 355; Melmouth based on, 355 ; burlesque of, 355 ; parody of, 355; ballet on, 355. See also Goethe Faust and Marguerite, 355 Faustbuch: sold in colonial Boston, 677 ni Faust, or the Demon of the Drachenfels, 355 Faust legend : American vogue of, 364 Faustus: in colonial America, 30 Faustus and Mephistopheles, 355 Fawcett, John, 353 Fechner, Gustav Theodor: 313; anti-Hegeli- anism of, 672 n363 Fehmgericht: American interest in, 359 Felton, Cornelius Conway: 249, 334; Menzel's German Literature tr. by, 329 ; on Goethe, 330, 331; on Menzel's view of Goethe, 679 n34; on German lit., 681 n58 Fenelon, Francois: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Ferguson, Adam: W. E. Channing infl. by, 83 Ferguson, Mrs. Thomas E. : assists Snider, 655 ni87 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas, 244 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: 63, 83, 87, 88, 92, 97, 98, 102, 109, 112, 116, 118, 142, 147, 161, 165, 166, 168, 187, 198, 227, 229, 240, 275, 276, 280, 300, 322, 347, 389, 401, 450, 468, 469, 556, n368, 612 0475, 632 n858; Wm. Bentley's defense of, 63; Coleridge on, 89, 543 n2ig; Mme. de Stael on, 101 ; Hedge on, 144; Emerson's reading of, 171; Emerson's refs. to, 172, 195-96, 197, 612 0473 n475 n477; Destination of Man, 195-96, 613 n475; Emerson repelled by, 196; Ripley on, 213, 618 n594; Parker on, 219; Whitman on egoism of, 472; Dr. Channing on, 538 ni7i; Carlyle infl. by. 551 n3oi ; Mme. de Stael on, 552 n32o; transs. from, 612 n468; Kroeger's transs. from, 616 ^69; Alcott's reading of, 627 n723; Brownson on, 630 n824; Long- fellow on, 737 n94 Fiction in America: Gothic elements in, 364 Field, Eugene: German tours of, 459; German notes in works of, 459, 776 n424; Lieder tr. by, 459; "Der Niebelrungen und der Schlab- bergasterfeldt," 459; on German music, 776 n424; transs. from Heine and Uhland, 776 11424; Fields, James Thomas, 426 Fielding, Henry, 359 Finckelnburg, Gustavus Adolphus, 260 Fischer, Kuno: on Goethe, 583 n67 Fiske, John, 243, 299, 633 n866 Fite, Warner: in Germany, 673 n374 Fixe Ideen: Poe's use of, 393, 398-402 Flaxman, John: M. Fuller's reading of, 441 Fletcher, John Gould: Germanic infl. on, 483 Flory, John S., 14 Fludd, Robert: German interests of, 20 Flying Dutchman, The, 354 Foerster, Norman, 495 n6 Index 821 Follen, Carl: 65, 77, 78, 83, 84, 114, 121, 148, 158, 207, 257, 305, 322, 328, 452-53, 490; German textbooks by, 19, 562 11452 ; career of, 84, 114, 563 11457; objects to rigor of Kantian morality, 84, 116; Fries' infl. on, 84-85, 564 n459; DeWette's relations with, no; Du Ponceau's relations with, 114; W. E. Channing and, 84, 115, 119, 121, 538 ni74, 563 n455; in Boston, 115; appointed Har- vard professor, 115, 564 ^63; ethical views of, 115, 116, 118, 121, 566 n477; Marsh's relations with, 115, 565 n459; abolitionist ac- tivities of, 115, 118; Unitarian ministry of, 115; death of, 115, 564 n46o; Schiller's infl. on, 116; Kant espoused by, 116; religious views of, 1 16-17, 566 n482; Schleiermacher and, 117, 566 n488 n482; social views of, 117-18; on rights and duties, 118-19; Emerson's relations with, 119, 567 ^98-99; Emerson's religious views similar to, 120; Ripley on, 121, 208; writes introduction for Carlyle's Schiller, 121 ; Inaugural Address of, 122, 565 n46g; Alcott's contacts with, 122; Clarke taught by, 122; articles by, 122; Ger- man philosophers correctly interpreted by, 123; Parker's biographical essay on, 217; on Goethe and Schiller, 330, 579 n4i; on Rich- ter, 332; Whittier's relations with, 431; as exponent of German transcendentalism, 538 ni74; sermons of, 563 n453; on Froebel, 563 n455 ; on Pestalozzi, 563 n455 ; on German lit., 563 n458; on Carus, 564 n45g; Dr. Chan- ning on, 564 n46o; on Schiller, 564 n46i, 565 n474; on Kant, 564 n468, 565 n46g-7o n473, 566 n476; Psychology of, 565 n4&7; on abso- lute idealism, 566 n47o; on Kantian ethics, 566 n476; on Constant, 566 n478; socio-reli- gious views of, 566 ^82 ; personal infl. of, 566 n483 ; political views of, 566 ^87 ; humani- tarianismof, 566^91 ; J. F.Clarke's tribute to, 568 n523; Lieber compared with, 570 n544 Follen, Eliza Lee Cabot, 339, 681 n58 Fontane, Theodor, 340 Fontenelle, Bernard de Bovier de: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Forbes, Cleon: on the St. Louis Movement, 641 n26 Forbes, Edward ; Emerson and, 194 Ford, Mary H.: on Goethe, 683 n67 Foreign elements in America: estimates and evaluation of, 5, 10; segregation of, 6 Foreign and Colonial Quarterly: on Hawthorne, 381 Foreign Quarterly Review: Carlyle's articles in, 172 Forrest, Edwin : in role of Kotzebue's Rolla, 356; theatrical company, of, 358 Forsyth, Robert: Principles of Moral Science, Emerson on, 160 Fort Sumter, S.C., 268 Forty-eighters : appraisal of, 12, 359; radical- ism of, 634 n877 Foster, Emily: Irving's courtship of, 374-75 Fouque% Friedrich Heinrich Karl: 329, 333, 339, 343. 345. 346. 397. 4 28 — Undine: 405; Thos. Tracey's trans, of, 115; American vogue of, 333, 680 n47 ; dramatic adaptation of, 353, 354, 356; Poe's review of, 392; Longfellow's reading of, 413 Fourier, Francois Marie Charles: Ripley on, 213; American infl. of, 619 n6i3 Fowle, William Bentley, 521 n2i5 Fox, George: 8; Emerson's refs. to, 160 Francke, August Hermann: 28, 33, 37, 38, 54, 677 n2 ; C. Mather's correspondence with, 19, 34, 508 moo; J. Edwards' reading of, 37; American editions of writing of, 509 nii7 Francke, Gotthilf A., 36 Francis, Convers: 148, 158, 216, 244, 249, 305, 329, 334, 491; learning of, 143; wide reading among German authors, 144; Parker's rela- tions with, 143; pro-Transcendentalism of, 143; moderate policies of, 143; Emerson's relations with, 171; career of, 581 n684; studies German theologians, 581 n685; German books in library of, 581 n685 Francis, John W., 48 Franco-Prussian War: American pro-German sympathies in, 247 Frank, Michael, 666 n299 Frankfurt Book Mart, 20 Franklin, Benjamin: 42: attitude toward Ger- mans, 4, 41 ; prints German books, 44; educa- tional interests of, 45-46; in Germany, 45, 515 11156 Franklin College, 305 Franklin and Marshall College, 43 Franz, Wolfgang: cited by C. Mather, 34 Fraser's Magazine: Carlyle's articles in, 172 Frederick the Great: 346; American popular- ity of, 49, 327, 518 ni85; plays based on, 690 ni33 Free Religious Association: 232, 243, 250, 296, 323; attack on, 632 n859; Index expressive of views of, 634 n868 Free Religious movement: Joseph Cook's at- tack on, 242 ; philosophical orientation of, 244; Kantian idealism insufficient for, 250; history of, 633 n864 Free-thinkers, German Americans among the, 246 Freherus, Paulus: cited by C. Mather, 34 Freie-Gemeinden, 243 Freiligrath, Ferdinand: 329, 330, 333, 334, 336, 343, 344, 452; lyrics of, 338; Longfellow and, 423, 424, 738 nii5; B. Taylor's correspon- dence with, 454; Whitman on, 467; Long- fellow infl. by, 739 nii7 822 Index Frelinghuysen (Freylinghusen), Theodor Jaco- bus: 511 11129; Gesang-Buch of, 39 French, John: Agrippa tr, by, 28 Freneau, Philip: Gothic elements in "House of Night" by, 364; and Schiller, 722 ni French neo-classical criticism, 484 Freud, Sigmund: Sherwood Anderson infl. by, 483; Hemingway infl. by, 483 Freytag, Gustav: 343, 346, 356; popularity of, 339; Die Journalisten, 339; Debit and Credit, 339, 681 nss; Die verlorne Handschrift, 339; Die Ahnen, 339 Friedrich II (der Grosse, King of Prussia). See Frederick the Great Friendly Club, 62 Friends in Council (Quincy, 111.) : 656 ni98 n20o; leaders of, 292; programs of, 292, 656 n20i growth of, 656 n20o; Alcott talks to, 657 n20i ; Hiram K. Jones's visits to, 657 n20i ; minutes of, 657 n20i Fries, Jakob Friedrich: Follen infl. by, 84-85, 116; Marsh infl. by, 136, 580 n673; Marsh's refs. to, 579 n666; Kant compared with, 580 nD 73l Jacobi compared with 580 n673; Hedge on, 582 n70i Frisbie, Levi: Emerson taught by, 156 Frischlin, Nicodemus, 29 Froebel, Julius: 122; Follen on, 563 n455 Frobischer, J. E., 358 Frothingham, Ellen: 636 ngoi, 681 n56; Grill- parzer's Sappho tr. by, 339 Frothingham, Frederick, 149 Frothingham, Nathaniel Langdon: 149, 336, 681 n56; Emerson on, 160, 636 ngoi ; on Goethe and Schiller, 334; Emerson infl. by, 596 ni47; library of, 636 ngoi Frotengham, Octavius Brooks: 121, 148, 242, 244. 257, 323. 336. 633 "866, 636 ngoi, 681 n56 ; on New England transcendentalism, 79- 80, 568 n527, 637 ngi6; Harvard teachers of, 249; Parker's infl. on, 249, 636 ngoi ; conventi- onal theism criticized by, 249; scientific skep- ticism of, 249; infl. by German Biblical scho- larship, 249; Darwinian infl. on, 249; infl. by New England transcendentalism, 24g; posi- tivistic progressivism of, 24g; sermons of, 249; members of church of, 249, theological discourses of, 249, positivism of, 250; Bauer's infl. on, 250, 636 ngoi ; Schwegler's infl. on, 250; infl. of Tubingen critics on, 636 ngoi; relations with German- American radicals, 250- 51; list of German theologians read by, 636 ngo2 ; Religion of Humanity, 636 ngo7; anti- ecclesiasticism of, 636 ngo8 ; on Comte, 636 ngi 4 Fruchte, Amelia C: 287, 289, 293, 639 n3; ac- tivities in organizational life of St. Louis, 287, 655 m89 Fruitlands, 12 Fuller, Louis M. : 2go; editor of Journal of the American Akademe, 656 nigs Fuller Sarah Margaret: 112, 119, 161, 241, 242, 2 45. 329. 434. 44 8 . 451. 452, 486, 4 8 8, 491. 637 ng2g, 681 ns8, 717 nig8; Carlyle's infl. on, 122, 440, 568 n524, 760 n266; Follen's contacts with, 122, 568 n524; on Goethe, 122, 330, 331, 335, 440, 443, 764 n304 0307 n3o8 11311; quotation from, 123; unphilo- sophical nature 'of, 123, 441; reads Jacobi, 123, 760 n266; reads Tennemann, 123; reli- gious views of, 123; on Fichte, 123, 760 n266, 761 n26g; Eckermann's Conversations tr. by, 331; studies Locke, 440; on Mme. de Stael, 440; German studies of, 440, 568 n524, 760 n266; reads Kant and post-Kantians, 440; plans a biography of Goethe, 440; "spirit- ual" or intuitional philosophy of, 440; on Kant, 440, 568 n528; on "poesy," 440—41, 761 n274; pro-Germanism of, 441, 446; Goethe's Tasso tr. by, 441, 763 n288; on the character of Tasso, 441 ; on Menzel's view of Goethe, 441, 443-44; on Bettina (Brentano) von Arnim, 441, 763 n2g2; on Flaxman, 441; on Retzsch, 441; on W. Allston, 441; Dr. Channing and, 441 ; as editor of the Dial, 441 ; teaching career of, 441, 762 n283; critical theories of, 442-43, 487, 761 n26g, 763 n2gg-302, 797 n670 (see also Fuller, Mar- garet, aesthetic theories of) ; circle formed around, 442, 767 n337; Emerson and, 442, 446, 596 nisi, 597 ni63, 763 n290 n3i2; on the Romantic school of Germany, 444 ; on Korner, 444 ; Woman in the Nineteenth Cen- tury infl. by Goethe, 444; on Novalis, 444, 445, 766 n32i ; on Goethe's equanimity, 444; on Goethe's female characters, 444, 765 n3ii; infl. by Goethe's "self-culture," 444; infl. by Goethe's "cosmopolitanism," 444; enthusiasm for Beethoven, 444-45 ; Brown- son's rev. of Summer on the Lakes, 62g n8o6; on somnambulism, 445 ; attracted by spirit- ualism in J. Kerner's Seherin von Prevorst, 445; on K. Simrock's Rheinsagen, 445; on the Volkslied, 445; on music as the highest of the arts, 445; on "das Damonische," 445, 766 n324; influence of, 446; encourages transs. from German lit., 446; in Italy, 446; younger Transcendentalists infl. by, 446; anti-Puritanic criticism of, 487; on Goethe's critical principles, 487; A. W. Schle- gel's infl. on criticism of, 487; intuitive pow- ers of, 568 n528; on Schelling, 568 n528, 761 n26g; Emerson instructed in German by, 5g7 ni63; Clarke on, 624 n678; Clarke's teaching of, 624 n678; Hedge's infl. on, 760 n266; education of, 760 n266; German auth- ors read by, 760 n266; German theologians read by, 760 n267; philosophy of, 761 n26g; Index 823 aesthetic theories of, 761 0274 11278; Coler- idge's infl. on, 761 11278; Schelling's infl. on, 761 n278; German books reviewed by, 761 myg; literary style of, 762 n285; personality of, 762 n285, 763 n2g6; conversations of, 762 n286, 765 n3ii; on the Dial, 762 n287; on translation, 763 n288 ; on Giinderode, 763 n293; on Lessing, 764 n304; on Schiller versus Goethe, 764 ^04; on nature, 765, n3i7; on Richter, 765 n3i8; on Emerson 765 n352; flower symbolism in, 766 n32i; Novalis' symbolism appeals to, 766 n32i; on prophecy, 766 n322 ; on German lyric poets, 766 n328; on German music, 766 n32g; on Goethe versus Beethoven, 766 n33o; on reform, 767 ^34; on Brook Farm, 767 n337; American point of view of, 767 n336; teaches German, 781 n28i Fuller, Samuel, German books owned by, 503 Fullerton, George S., 279 Furness, William Henry: 148, 247, 336; Tran- scendentalism of , 242 ; opposes Strauss's myth theory, 242 ; Daniel Schenkel's Character of Jesus Portrayed tr. by, 242; Song of the Bell and Other Poems and Ballads, 334, 680 n42 ; relations with the Transcendentalists, 632 n853; Parker and, 632 n853; German transs. by, 632 n853; German lit. defended by, 632 n853; list of principal works by, 632 n853; on Schiller, 690 n42 GABRIEL, Ralph H. : on Hecker, 631 n848 Galen: 288; Emerson's refs, to, 166 Galileo: Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166 Gardiner, Henry N., 293 Garland, Hamlin, 482 Garland, J. A., 655 ni86 Garrison, William Lloyd: Follen and, 118, 567 n49i ; Whittier and, 431 "Gartenlaube" fiction: popularity of, 335: American imitations of, 340; writers of, 685 n93 Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis: Emerson's refs. to, 166, 601 n268 Geibel, Franz Emanuel August: 330, 334, 336, 343. 344. 356; lurics of, 333, 338; Brunhild, 339; Loreley, 339; Wm. Hurlbut on, 681 n53 Gellert, Christian Friedrich: 40, 52, 55, 328, 329. 343. 345 677 n 5! fables of, 327, 516 ni67 Genee, Franz Friedrich R., American vogue of plays of, 357 Genesis: Alcott's doctrine of, 627 n743 "Genteel" tradition in American lit. : 335; atti- tude toward German literary culture, 340- 41; Transcendental origins of, 446 Genteel writers: German lit. as appraised by, 451-52; German infl. on, 748 ni79 Genung, John F. : at Amherst, 669 n3i5 Gerando, Joseph Marie de: 83, 86, 172, 597 ni62; Histoire Comparee des Systemes de Philosophie, 108; Emerson's reading of, 166, 591 n76, 592 n9i n94 ng6; Emerson's refs. to, 166 611 n465 Georgia: Salzburgers in, 40 Gerhard, Johann: cited by Cotton Mather, 34 Gerhard, Martin, 26 Gerhardt, Paul, 344 German actors in America, 357-58 German-American actors, 357-58 German-American bibliography, 7, 10 German-American citizens: social position of, 337 German- American cultural relations: recent change in direction of, 483-84, 492; studies of, 495 ni ; associations fostering the study of, 496 ni2; neglected areas in study of, 497 ni3 ; problems in study of, 496 nil, 497 ni3 ; bibliographies of, 497 ni4 German- American intellectual relations: dur- ing seventeenth century, 14, 19-32 passim; during eighteenth century, 14, 32-51 passim German-American journalism: bibliography of, 496 n8 German-American journalistic exchanges, 524- 27 n 29-40 German-American literature: studies of, 497 ni7 German-American merchants in America, 49, 52, 518 ni88 German-American organizations, 12 German-Amerivan professional men in colo- nial America, 518 ni88 German-American radicals in the U.S.: 128; proposed unification of, 246 German- American religious activity, 12 German- Americans: union of, 634 n88i German- American writings (in German) : sur- veys of, 497 ni7 German authors: American editions of, 337; Puritan opposition to, 341; in American periodicals, 343 ; relative American popular- ity of, 678 n27 n28 German Baptists in America: literary produc- tivity of, 496 n8 German books: in colonial America, 26, 30, 48, 498 n5-6 n8, 503 ^4-47, 506 n68~75 ; acces- sion of, 329; in the Harvard library, 503 n47 German book trade: reports on, 525 n24 German Biblical criticism, 447 German church periodicals, 497 ni5 German compendia and encyclopedias: in the Harvard library, 506 n74 German composers: Transcendentalists' ap- preciation of, 769 n357 German Correspondent, The: analysis of, 64-65; contents of, 525 n33 824 Index "German craze," 63, 359 German critical transcendentalism. See Tran- cendentalism (critical) ; Transcendentalism (German) German cultural influence in colonial America, 498 ni n4 n8 German culture in America: S, 9; surveys of, 4; aspects of, 12 German domestic novels: American vogue of, 685 n93. See also "Gartenlaube" German drama: in England, 348; sentimental nature of, 348; bibliography of English transs. from, 691 n 149. See also German plays on the American stage German drama in America: 358; statistical summary of, 352; opposition to, 677 ni5; Joseph Dennie on, 677 ni5 German educational influence in America: studies of, 497 ni6 German element in the U.S.: 4; histories of, 495 ni ; bibliographies of, 496 n8, 498 n2-3 German-English cultural relations, 499 nn German-English dictionaries, 47 German exegetical science, 244 German fiction in America, 334, 336 German Gothic literature: American vogue of, 517 ni77 m8o German historians: S. Miller's reports on, 523 nn; popularity of, 678 n28 German horror productions: vogue of, 446-47 German immigration to America: data on, 495 n 4 German "infidelity," 625 n687 German influence in America: in post Civil War period, 447; diminution of, 446-47; studies of, 497 ni6 German influence in American philosophical instruction: revolt against in twentieth cen- tury, 321 German juvenile books in America: popularity of, 341 678 n28; transs. of, 680 n49 German language in America: 47, 63; study of, 310; collegiate study of, 337; early students of, 19-20, 498 n4-6 n8 mo, 521 n2ig. See also Language of Germany German-language theater in the U.S.: biblio- graphy of, 691 ni45 German learning in colonial America, 504 n56 German legends: list of collections of, 703 n67 German literary culture: American respect for, 336 German literature: S. Miller's appraisal of, 60- 61 ; American changing attitudes toward, 328-29, 682 n66; history of, 329; American critics of, 334 ; American scholarly concern with, 336; list of American translators and editors, 336, 682 n65 ; in American period- icals, 336, 524 n22 ; Puritan bias against, 336; in American colleges, 337; abatement of American interest in, 341 ; S. Miller's reports on, 523 n8 nn; Hedge on, 584 n7i2; Emer- son's reading of, 599 n232; general surveys of, 677 ni7; Bancroft on, 678 nig; extremist judgments on, 678 n2i; list of American anthologies of, 678 n25; list of American periodicals sponsoring, 682 n64 ; Hosmer on, 682 n66; American popularity of, 329, 336 German lit. in English translation: biblio- graphies of, 496 n8-g German lit. of terror and horror: American vogue of, 517 ni77 niSo German lyrics: in American collections, 336 German melodrama: on American stage, 354- 55, See also German drama in America German music in America, 336, 521 n2i4 German newspapers in America, 14 German philosophy. See Philosophy of Ger- many German plays on the American stage: 690 ni33; statistical summary of, 350, 351; pro- portion of English plays to, 350; list of un- successful introductions of, 689 11131. See also German drama in America German political influence in the U.S., 12 German political theory in the U.S., studies of, 128 German philosophy: in America, 329, 336, 676 n3i5; Poe on, 7i3ni74; Ebeling's reports on, 520 n20i ; Samuel Miller's reports on, 523 ng ; Carlyle on, 549 mjj; Carlyle's declining interest in, 551 n3o8 German printing in America: bibliography of, 14 German Reformed Church, 305, 500 n23 German religious groups in the U.S. : statis- tical data on, 512 ni36. See also German sec- tarians in the U.S. German romantic critics: M. Fuller infl. by, 443 German romanticism: Emerson's relation to, 607 n424 German romantics: Poe's relation to, 709 ni25; on clairvoyance, 716 nigs; on reincarnation, 718 n235; poetic theories of, 722 n288 German scholars: in England, 20 German scholarship; Samuel Miller's reports on, 524 ni2; American indebtedness to, 678 1120; American opinion of, 682 n66 German scientists, 713 ni74 German sectarians in the U.S.: 500 n22-23; unification of, 40-41, 513 ni39. See also German religious groups in the U.S. German seminaries for women in America, 513 ni46 German sensational lit. : American vogue of, 517 ni77 ni8o; Gothic literature, 517 ni77 ni8o; horror productions, 446-47 Germans in America: in the South Atlantic Index 825 states, 33; cultural autonomy of, 41; his- torical surveys of, 495 ni ; bibliographies on, 496 n8, 498 n3; in colonial America, profes- sional men among, 506 n85 German Society of Boston : members of, 563 "454 German-speaking theater in America: charac- teristics of, 357; German actors in, 358. See also German drama in America German theology: 13; Parker's reading of, 216; American opinion of, 558 n400; American theologians' knowledge of, 561 n44o; as reported in American periodicals, 633 n86i ; see also Theology of Germany Germantown Friends: petition against Negro slavery, 431 Germantown, Pa.: founding of, 19, 41 German transcendentalism. See Transcendent- alism (critical) ; Transcendentalism (Ger- man) German travel lit. in America: vogue of, 516 ni68 German university system: principles of, 310; American colleges infl. by, 310; American esteem of, 799 n70i Germany: English travelers in, 20; English acting companies in, 20; early American periodical concern with, 62-66; American students in, 66; unification of, 336-37; travel books on 516 ni6g Gerstacker, Friedrich, 333, 335, 339, 343, 346, 454 Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von: 795 n648; Ugolino, 356 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried: 484, 485, 490; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Lowell on, 429 Gesenius, Whilhelm: edited by Stuart, 130; Stuart infl. by, 130 Gesner, Konrad von: Mithradates, 27; cited by C. Mather, 34; Thoreau on, 435; Bibliotheca universalis, 503 n47 Gessner, Salomon: 40, 55, 343, 346, 359, 409; Death of Abel, 48, 327; American vogue of, 327 Getchell, Charles M. : on William Dunlap, 687 nio8 Gibbon, Edward: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Gibbs, Josiah Willard, 305 Gieseler, Johann Karl Ludwig: Ripley on, 209; Schaff infl. by, 307 Gifford, Sanford G., 249 Gilder, Richard Watson, 458 Gildersleeve, Basil Lanneau, 571 n546 Giles, Henry: on Coleridge, 485-86; Human Life in Shakespeare, 486 Gillette, William, 684 n84 Gilman, Daniel Coit, 59 Girard, William: on transcendentalism, 106, 556 n267 Glanvill, Joseph, 401 Glauber, Johann Rudolf, 503 n48, 504 n56 Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig, 343, 345 Glenmore, N. Y. : 302 ; T. Davidson's school near, 293 Gnome King, The, 354 Gnostics, 216 Goddard, Harold C: on transcendentalism, 81 Goddard, Mary C, 412 Godwin, Parke : on Goethe, 448 ; on Strauss, 448 Godwin, William, 360 Goeschel, C. F.: 280, 651 ni2i; St. Louisans' approval of, 652 ni26 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: 8, 83, 121, 122, 166, 168, 185, 198, 226, 242, 247, 279, 283, 285, 309, 322, 327, 329, 330, 335, 336, 341, 343. 344. 346. 359. 360, 375, 389, 431, 436, 439, 443. 447. 448. 452, 453. 455. 45®. 484. 485, 489, 491, 610 n463, 616 n56g, 625 n686; Emerson on, 8, 116, 118, 119, 168, 172, 198, 331, 590 n6o, 594, M17, 595 ni24-25, 612 n465, 614 n528, 635 ngoo, 798 n68o; Carlyle infl. by, 97, 548 n2 73; on Entsagen, 97, 99; Mme. de Stael on, 101, 330, Emerson's deci- sion to learn German inspired by, 121; mor- phological theories appraised by Emerson, 168; Emerson infl. by, 169, 595 ni28, 611 n463; Emerson considers self-reliance of , 170; Emerson's paraphrase of, 195; Ripley on, 214; Snider's commentary on, 281; Snider's study groups of, 285-86; American defenders of, 330; critical controversy over, 330, 683 1170; American criticism of life of, 330, 337, 764 n305 ; American condemnations of, 330- 31; Dante compared with, 330; Milton com- pared with, 330; A. Norton on, 330, 331, 679 n35; E. Everett on, 330; relation to Unita- rian thought, 330; Bancroft on, 330, 331, 679 n32 n35, 713 ni6o; Emerson's essay on, 331; Longfellow on, 331, 414-21, 422, 731 n49, 732 n52-64; lyric poems of, 331, 333, 337; essays on art tr. and ed. by S. G. Ward, 33 1 . 457; moral versus aesthetic judgments on, 331; Motley on, 331, 679 n35; Schiller's correspondence with, 331 ; Transcendental- ists' attitude toward, 331, 683 n7o; Leonard Woods on, 331, 679 n35; American reputa- tion of, 332, 337; American magazine refs. to, 332, 337; American hostility toward, changed to tolerance, 337; archives and manuscripts of, 337; monuments in honor of, 337; societies founded in honor of, 337; Hawthorne's use of motifs from, 387; Poe's refs. to, 392, Longfellow's Hyperion infl. by, 421; Entwicklungsroman of, 422; Lowell on, 427, 428, 429, 707 n668; Thoreau on, 433, 764 n2ig; Melville on, 439; M. Fuller on, 441, 443, 444 ; Emery Holloway on, 464, 465 ; 826 Index B. Taylor plans biography of, 454 ; Stoddard on, 457; Whitman on, 467, 782 n474, 783 n48i, 784 n48g n494; scientific theories of, 474, 683 n7i; Burroughs' interest in, 474; aesthetic theories of, 475; Howells on, 476; E. R. Sill on, 481; Carlyle's knowledge of, 548 n2 74; Coleridge infl. by, 580 n675; Wm. Emerson's visit to, 590 n6o; Emerson's read- ing of, 595 ni20-22, 597 ni63 ; Kant as inter- preted by, 605 n352; Parker on, 621 ^64; Alcott's reading of, 627 n733; Kroeger on, 634 n885; Bartol on, 635 ngoo; seventh Con- cord session devoted to, 660 n237; American controversy over merits of, 679 n30, 683 n7o ; Felton on Menzel's estimate of, 679 n34 ; dramas of, 679 n38; Holcombe's attack on, 079 n39; Schiller contrasted with, 679 n4i; Norton's ed. of Carlyle's correspondence with, 682 n67; American studies of, 683 n67; controversial issues regarding, 683 n7o; Hedge on, 683 n7o; Calvin Thomas on, 683 n7o; Catholic World attack on, 683 n7o; list of lectures on, 683 n7o; humanism of, 683 n7i; oriental infl. on, 683 n7i; Poe's quota- tions from, 711 ni46, 712 ni6o; Longfellow infl. by, 729 n4i; H. James and, 790 n59g; on Shakespeare, 795 n&48 -Clavigo, 686 mo3 -Dichtung und Wahrheit: 330, 337, 413, 420, 421, 462, 464, 465, 483; Thoreau's reading of, 433 ; transs. by Parke Godwin, Dwight, and C. A. Dana, 448; Whitman infl. by, 466, 782 n467 n46g ; review of, 679 n39 -Egmont, 331, 337, 413; "Erlkonig," 330, 677 "7 -Farbenlehre: 442; Emerson on, 168; Alcott's reading of, 228 -Faust: 8, 329, 341, 413, 420, 421, 429; Hay- ward's trans, of, 331 ; Brooks's trans, of, 331, 45 2 > 455 ; Anna Swanwick's trans, of, 331, 455; English transs. of, 336; B. Taylor's trans, of, 337, 424, 455; magazine discussions °f» 337> operatic treatment of, 337; drama- tizations of, 353, 354, 355; Longfellow on, 421, 737 n94; Whitman infl. by, 465; M. D. Con- way infl. by, 638 ng3g; Brokmeyer on, 645 n73; Snider's interpretation of, 653 ni46; American opinion of, 683 n6g; Longfellow's annotations on his copy of, 733 n63 ; Long- fellow's Golden Legend infl. by, 742 ni37, 744 nl 38) -Goetz von Berlichingen, 8, 48, 337, 348, 359, 677 ni2, 686 mo3 -Hermann und Dorothea: 331, 332, 337; Long- fellow's Evangeline compared with, 424-26, 740 ni24; Clarke's trans, of, 624 n678; in America, 677 ni2 -Iphigenie: 331, 332, 337; Felton's review of, 330; Longfellow on, 416; in America, 677 ni2 — Italienische Reise, Thoreau's reading of, 433; "Junggesell und der Miihlbach," Longfel- low's trans, of, 736 ng2; Metamorphose der Pflanzen, Emerson's appraisal of, 168; Rei- neke Fuchs, 337; "Shakespeare und kein Ende," 488; Stella, 686 nio3; Tasso, 337; Urfaust, 337 ■ — Wahlverwandtschaften, Die: 337, 429; Felton on, 330; Geo. Bradford's trans, of, 584 0708; C. A. Bartol on, 635 ngoo; R. Walsh's review of, 678 n2g — "Wanderers Nachtlied": 424; Longfellow's trans, of, 421 —Werther: 8, 48, 32g, 330, 337, 350, 364, 4og, 413, 446, 464, 686 mo3; American vogue of, 327, 677 n8; W. H. Brown's use of, 359; Longfellow on, 729 n40 — West-ostlicher Divan, tr by John Weiss, 682 n67 — Wilhelm Meister: 8, 329, 330, 337, 413, 420, 421, 427, 483, 486, 488, 638 n94i, 641 n23; Carlyle's trans, of, 108, 172; Alcott's reading of, 226; Irving's "Buckthorne" infl. by, 376-77, 702 n58, 703 n59-63 ; Lowell's quot. from, 42g ; Thoreau's reading of, 433 ; Emer- son on, 5g5 ni35 ; Parker on, 622 n654 1 Was- son on, 637 ng28; Harris on, 64g ngg; O. B. Frothingham on, 683 n72 ; H. James on, 683 n72 ; Whitman infl. by, 782 n474 Goethe-Haus: in Frankfurt, 337; in Weimar, 337 Goethe School: in Milwaukee, Wis., 284-85 Gottingen: 328-2g; American students at, 515 nioi- 533 n^ 1 Goldsmith, Oliver: 35g; on early American stage, 348; Irving infl. by, 381 Goodwin, William W., 571 n546 Gookin, Daniel, 28 Gorton, Samuel: 25; Lutheran principles of, 25-26 Gostick (Gostwick), Joseph, German Literature: 329, 464, 467; Whitman infl. by, 462, 467, 472, 473. 786 n52 4 Gotha, Bayard Taylor in, 454 Gothic and robber literature : examples of, 692 ni54 Gothic element in American lit., 690 ni53, 696 ni95. 704 1*76 Gothicism: in German lit., 327, 329, 354 in American lit., 363; resistance toward, 363- 64; Paulding on, 364; in American fiction, 364 Gothic plays: popularity of, 356; Dunlap's in- troduction of, 689 ni32; Gothic-melodrama- tic plays, vogue of, 690 ni34 Gottschalck, Kaspar Friedrich : Irving infl. by, 380 Graduate studies in America, 310 Grasse, Johann G. T. : Sagenbuch, 370 Index 82 1 : Grater, Franz W., 128 Gram, Hans, 521 ni24 Grant, Ulysses Simpson : in St. Louis, 260 Graupner, Gottlieb, 521 n2i4, 769 n357 Gray, Asa: Emerson's refs. to, 167 Gray, Henry David: Transcendentalism de- fined by, 81; on Emerson's philosophy, 156 Gray, Henry Peters, 249 Great Awakening, The: 81, 498 n4, 510 ni22; origin and sources of, 37-38; relations with German pietism, 509 ni2o; spread of, 510 ni23 Greaves, James Pierrepont, 225 Greeley, Horace, 443, 491 Green, Thomas Hill, 88, 203, 543 n2i3 Greenberg, Herbert, 504 n5o Greene, George Washington, 413, 420, 729 n4i Greene, Nathaniel, 681 n58 Greene, William Batchelder: 149; German transs. by, 768 n338 Greenough, James B., 570 n546 Griggs Philosophical Series: ed. by George Sylvester Morris, 640 ng, 661 n246; contrib- utors to, 661 n246; list of volumes in, 670 n 335; pro-German aim of, 670 n335 Grillparzer, Franz: 340, 256, 453, 455; Poe on, 392; Sappho tr. by Ellen Frothingham, 339, 681 n55; Ahnfrau, 358 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior: Emerson's refs. to, 172 Grimm, Herman: 279; Emerson's refs. to, 172 Grimm, Jakob: 56; Emerson's refs. to, 172 Grimm, Wilhelm, 172 Grimm brothers : Marchen, 333, 343, 346; vogue of, 341; Irving infl. by, 380 Griscom, John: 78, 626 n705 ; A Year in Europe, 534 ni37; influence of, 137, 534 Griswold, Rufus Wilmot, 491 Grocer, Thomas, 506 n74 Gros, Johann Daniel: 305; career of, 661 11256; works of, 662 n256; infl. of, 662 n256 Griin, Anastasius, Graf von Auersperg: 343, 344; lyrics of, 333; Letzter Ritter, 339; C. T. Brooks's transs. from, 452 ; N. L. Froth- ingham on, 681 n57 Gruener, Gustav, 389, 392 Grueningen, Jean Paul: on Goethe in America, 683 n68 Grund, Franz J., 128 Grundler, Johann Ernest, 35 Giinderode, Karoline von: Emerson on, 172 Guericke, Otto von, 34 Guilloz, Pierre, 271 Gulliver, Julia S., 279 Gustorf, Frederick S., 527 n46 Gutzkow, Karl Ferdinand: 343, 454; Uriel Acosta, 339, 681 n55 HAAK, Theodor: 34, 503 n48; in England, 21 Hack, Theodore, 769 n357 Hackett, James, 356 Hacklander, Friedrich Wilhelm von, 347 Haddow, Anna, 128 Haeckel, Ernst: 474, 633 n866, 685 ng6; H. Adams infl. by, 483; Dreiser infl. by, 483; J. London infl. by, 483 Haertel, Carl: in Portage, Wis., 4 Hagenbach, Karl Friedrich: Philip Schaff infl. by, 307 Hahn-Hahn, Ida von, 343, 347, 685 ng3 Hale, Edward Everett: in Germany, 457; ex- ponent of the Genteel tradition, 457; on Goethe, 457; on Schiller, 457; Light of Two Centuries, 457; on Emerson, 457; literary personality of, 457; on Longfellow's teaching at Harvard, 731 n5o; early education of, 774 n404 Halford, John: Faust adapted by, 355 Hall, Basil: Voyages and Travels, 166 Hall, Granville Stanley: 279, 280, 302, 309, 313, 320, 669 n32o; at the Univ. of Leipzig, 319; Wundt's infl. on, 319; studies German psychology laboratories, 320; Aspects of German Culture, 320; sets up psychology laboratory at Johns Hopkins, 320; at Clark Univ., 320; Karl Rosenkranz's Hegel as Pub- licist tr. by, 643 n57, 674 n379; at German universities, 669 n3i4; list of testbooks used in American courses in philosophy, 674 n377; early education of, 674 n37g; Henry B. Smith's infl. on, 674 n37g; W. T. Harris' infl. on, 674 n379; later trips to Germany, 674 n 379, 75 n 379J m Wundt's laboratory, 675 11379; autobiography of, 675 n379 Hall, James: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Hall, Dr. J. Z., 271, 639 n3 Halleck, Fitz-Greene: on Faust, 409; on Schil- ler, 409; tour of Germany and Switzerland, 723 n4; pro-Germanist friends of, 723 n4; German books owned by, 723 n4; German transs. by, 723 n4 Halle pietism : C. Mather's interest in, 34 Haller, Albrecht von: 360; Physiologia, 47; Thomas Cooper on, 662 n257 Halle school of theologians: Leonard Woods on, 662 n259 Halm, Friedrich: Tngomar, 356; leading roles of, 357 Halsted, George B., 279 Hamann, Johann Georg, 795 n648 Hamilton, Sir William: 82, 309; Kant as inter- preted by, 87-88, 188; Emerson's relations with, 194; philosophy of, 540 nig8; on Kant, 541 nig8, 604 n3i6; on reason, 544 n226; on Cousin, 540 nig8, 604 n3ii n3i6; Emer- son on, 604 n3ii n3i6; Kantian terminology used by, 606 n397; W. T. Harris on, 649 ngS Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von: Emerson's 828 Index refs. to, 172; Emerson's reading of, 597 ni63 Hancock, John, 506 n68 Handel and Hayden Society: in Salem, 521 n2i4; in Boston, 769 n357 Hansel 11 nd Gretel, 8 Harbinger, The, 246, 450 Hardenberg, Friedrich Leopold Freiherr von. See Novalis (pseud.) Harris, William Torrey: 258, 261-64, 271, 274- 80, 285, 286, 287, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294, 297. 2 99, 300, 303, 323, 634 n884, 639 n3, 640 ng, 653 m63; Emerson instructed on Hegel by, 204; in Concord, 204, 266, 284, 628 n76o; Alcott infl. by, 230, 231; Hegeli- anism of, 232, 266, 284, 301 ; literary produc- tivity of, 258; leadership of, 265; philosoph- ical personality of, 265 ; New England origins of, 265 ; Snider's appraisal of, 266, 651 nii7; Alcott brought to St. Louis by, 266; educational career of, 268, 274, 300; Psychologic Foundations of Education, 268, 276, 650 ngg; education of, 274; at Yale, 274; Emerson's infl. on, 274; Alcott's infl. on, 274, 649 ngs; in St. Louis, 275; Parker's infl. on, 275; Goethe's infl. on, 275; meets Brok- meyer, 275; studies Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, 275; philosophic development of, 276, 277, 650 n99; Plato's infl. on, 277; Aris- totle's infl. on, 277; Leibnitz's infl. on, 277; oriental philosophical infl. on, 277, 613 ^99; Hegelian dialectic method adopted by, 277; on Brokmeyer's trans, of Hegel's Logic, 277, 648 n76; educational philosophy of, 281; Nicholas Murray Butler on, 281; in Milwau- kee, 284-85, Kant Club organized by, 289; musical abilities of, 289; in Terra Haute, Ind., 291-92; metaphysical method of, 295, 301; on Kant, 276, 296, 659 n23o; on eclec- ticism, 297; lectures on Fichte, 298; lectures on Hegel, 298, 312; Hiram K. Jones' rivalry with, 298, 600 n235 ; multiform activities of, 301 ; Dewey's debt to, 302 ; on Alcott, 628 11792; on Spencer, 616 n45g; on Hegel, 616 n56g, 649 ngg; Alcott on, 628 n76o n766; on Hegel's Logic, 642 n2g n3o, 650 ngg; presi- dent of National Education Assn., 642 n39, 652 ni2g; Susan Blow's infl. on, 642 n4o; effectiveness of teaching of, 640 n4o; on the German transcendental philosophers, 642 n4o; Susan Blow on, 642 n4o; kindergarten sponsored by, 642 n4o; Snider and, 646 n79; death of, 648 n92 ; books on Hegel by, 649 n93, 650 11299; at Andover, 649 ng4; reading of Locke and Cousin, 649 ng4 ; interest in phrenology, hynotism, spiritualism, mes- merism, vegetarianism, 649 ng4; on the dead languages, 649 n94 ; on Humboldt's Kosmos and Chambers' Vestiges, 649 n94 ; on Goethe's Wilhclm Meister, 649 ng6; Kant's infl. on, 649 ng8; Sir Wm. Hamilton's infl. on, 649 ng8; infl. by Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, 64g ngg; on Hegel's philosophy of history, 650 ngg; Merle Curti on, 652 ni3o; and Whitman, 788 n55 4 Harris, David H.: 290; Snider's infl. on, 288; Brokmeyer's trans, of Hegel's Logic revised by, 648 ng2 ; president of Society of Psychol- ogy in St. Louis, 654 ni8o Harris, Edith Davidson, 273, 647 n87 Harris, Thaddeus Mason, 54 Harris, Theodore, 641 n26 Harrison, Elizabeth: Snider's dependence on, 285, 654 ni84 Harrison, John S., 154, ig3 Harrison, James A.: on Schelling's infl. on Poe, 7og ni25 Harrold, Charles F., Carlyle appraised by, g7 Harte, Bret: 408; in Germany, 480; on German opera, 480; Germanic notes in works of, 480-81, 7g4 n632; on Auerbach, 7g4 n628; German vogue of, 7g4 n630 Hartford, Conn., 24 Hartley, David: Emerson's refs. to, 160; Clarke on, 623 n673 Hartlib, Samuel: German interests of, 20, 21, 28,35 Hartmann, Eduard von: 312, 320, 685 ng6; Saltus infl. by, 483; Henry Adams infl. by, 483; Ripley on, 619 n6i8 Hartmann von Aue: Longfellow's adaptation of Der arme Heinrich by, 425 Hartwick College, 305 Hartwig, Johann Christoph, 305 Harvard, John: gives books to Harvard, 26 Harvard, Mass.: Hawthornes visit to, 385 Harvard College (Univ.): 311; German texts used at, 29; philosophical instruction at, 59; Kant in library of, 86; Locke taught at, 304; German theology at, 305 ; textbooks used at, 505 n64; philosophy courses at, 505 n67, 661 11252; German books in library of, 506 n74; Emerson's lectures at, 616 n566; growth of philosophy department at, 666 n296; Ger- man philosophy introduced at, 667 n3o6; German instruction at, 527 n46, 731 n50 Harvard-Gottingen group: 582 n6go; hailed by Emerson, 163; Mme. de Stael's infl. on, 552 n3i3 Harvard library: German books in, 29-30, 48, 503 n47; Boehme's works in, 31; C. Mather's gift of books to, 35; Ebeling collection ac- quired by, 521 Harvard Musical Assn., 769 n357 Harvard Theological School : Alumni Assn. of, 80 Hase, Karl: Parker on, 219; Clarke's trans, of Leben Jesu by, 625 n688 Haskins, David Greene: on Emerson's Quaker- ism, 587 n24 Index 829 Hatfield, James Taft: 423, 424, 732 1157, 736 1187; on Longfellow's debt to Germany, 414, 7^4 ni5 Hauff, Wilhelm, 333, 343, 345, 346 Hauptmann, Gerhart Johann: 336, 340, 346, 358; Hanneles Himmelfahrt, 339; Die Weber, 339; O'Neill infi. by, 483; articles on, 684 n86; Es War, 685 ng6 Haven, George \V., 681 ns8 Haven, Joseph: in Germany, 309; German books tr. by, 309 ; textbooks in philosophy by, 309; Upham's infi. on, 309; German aes- thetic theories adopted by, 309; Kant as presented by, 665 n293 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: 9, 362, 264; on the domestic novel, 240; Tieck's alleged infl. on, 365, 381, 382; difficulties with German lan- guage, 382; Poe on, 365, 382, 384, 706 ng2, 707 moo nioi; tale of Tieck read by, 382, 385, 706 n95, 708 nug; on transcendental- ism, 384; Tieck's stylistic manner compared with, 383-84; literary personality of, 384, Puritan heritage of, 385 ; Geistesverwandt- schaft with Tieck, 383, 708 nii5; review of, 386; self-analysis of, 386; relations to E. T. A. Hoffmann, 397, 705 ngi; relation to Chamisso, 387; Faustian-Mephistophelean elements in, 387-88 ; the daemonic in, 387-88 ; on Milton, 387; Goethe's infi. on Hawthorne's view of sin, 388 ; likened to Toepfer, 706 ng3 ; likened to Fouque, 706 ng3 ; on fantasy and illusion, 706 ng7; on Tieck, 707 ngg; literary sources of, 707 nui; reading of, 708 ni22; on Melville, 757 n244 — "Celestial Railroad, The": Bunyan's infl. on, 384; similarities between Tieck's "Die Freunde" and, 384 — "Ethan Brand," 384 ;"Feathertop, "708 m 16; "The Great Carbuncle, "384 ; The Marble Faun, 388; "The Minister's Black Veil," 384 ; Mosses from the Old Manse, 384; Notebooks, 384; "The Prophetic Pictures," 397; "The Shaker Bridal," 385 — Twice-Told Tales: 381, 384; appraisal of, 386: Longfellow's review of, 425 — "Wakefield": Tieck's "Der Pokal" likened to, 385 Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody, 382 Hayden, S.D., 64g ng7 Hayne, Paul Hamilton: Russell's Magazine founded by, 45g ; German notes in poems of, 460 Hayward, Abraham, Faust tr. by, 331 Hazard, R. G., 65g n23i Hazard, Mrs. Rebecca N., 28g Hazlitt, William: 42g, 484; on German tran- scendentalism, g6, 547 n256 Heath, John F. : reports on Schelling by, 013 n482 Hebbard, S. S., 279 Hebbel, Christian Friedrich, 240, 245, 256, 453. 681 n55 Hebel, Johann Peter, 345 Hebler, Carl, 490 Hecker, Isaac Thomas: 246; Ripley's relations with, 215, 631 n84o; Prussian birth of, 23g; early reading of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, 240; Brownson's infi. on, 240; humanitari- anism of, 240; at Brook Farm, 631 n34o; instructed by Ripley on Spinoza, Kant, and Cousin, 240; religious nature of, 240; Emer- son's relations with, 240-41; hears Parker preach, 240; Catholocism of, 240-41, 620 n62o; Alcott's contacts with, 240-41; Thoreau's relations with, 240; quotation from, 241; Redemptorist order founded by 241; on intuition, 62g nSn; on Kant, 62g, n8n; on Emerson, 631 n848; Ralph H. Gabriel on, 631 n848; American infl. of, 631 n348 nS49 Hedge, Frederic Henry: 66, 85, 107, 158, 161, 182, 198, 202, 204, 207, 244, 246, 251, 257, 280, 294, 305, 336, 441, 445, 449, 491, 596 ni5i, 605 n339, 612 ni74; urges Emerson to study German, 120; on Coleridge, 142, 144- 45, 146; education of, 144, 581 n689; in Germany, 581 n68g; later career of, 582 n68g; T. W. Higginson's tribute to, 144; helps found the Dial, 144; helps form the Transcendental Club, 144: on German phi- losophy, 144, 145, 5S2 n70i; on Kant, 145- 46, 584 n7i3 n7i6; Fichte analyzed by, 145, 146; on Schelling, 145, 146, 582 n70o; phi- losophic personality of, 146; points of dissent from Kant, 147; distinguishes between Kant and his followers, 147; poems by, 147, 584 n7og; on Luther, 147, participates in Con- cord School of Philosophy, 147; German ly- rics tr. by, 147; Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl tr. by, 147; as professor at Harvard, 147; Emerson instructed by, 171; Emerson infl. by, 204, 603 n2$3; Parker infl. by, 215; on Heine, 338; on German transcendentalism, 580 n676, 582 n6g7 n702; German infl. on, 582 n6go; Emerson on, 582 n6g2; on reason, 582 n6g8; epistemology of, 5S2 nogg; on German theology, 582 n702 ; on Schopen- hauer, 583 n703, 584 n7i3; W. T. Harris on, 583 n703; moderate position of, 583 ^04; on Schleiermacher, 5S3 n705, 5S4 n7i6; on revealed religion, 583 n7o6; religious views of, 5S3 n7o6; Brokmeyer intl. by, 584 n707; on German lit., 584 n7i2, 67g n36; religious books by. 5S4 n7i3; on Leibnitz, 5S4 n7i3; on Lockean sensationalism, 584 Q715; as Harvard professor, 5S4 n7i6; on DeWette 5^4 n7i6; on Hegel. 584 0716; conservatism of, 5S4 n7i6; on Parker, 584 n7i6; on logic, 830 Index 664 11275; on Schiller, 680 1142; on Heine, 682 n66 ■ — Prose Writers of Germany : 147, 448, 470, 582 n6g7, 619 n6i4, 653 11140; Whitman's use of, 462, 463; infl. of, 583 n707; contents of, 583 njo-j; Brokmeyer infl. by, 584 ^07; con- tributors to, 584 708 Hedge, Levi: 56, 307; Emerson taught by, 156 Hedge Club, 144 Heeren, Arnold Hermann Ludwig: 185, 322, 347; Bancroft infl. by, 75; Emerson on, 172, 598 ni73 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: 88, 109, 141, 171, 172, 198, 240, 244, 255, 275, 280, 297, 300, 302, 303, 322, 323, 389, 437, 440, 468, 469, 472, 474, 484, 558 n3g8-99, 584 n7o8, 659 n228; Bancroft infl. by, 75; J. H. Stirling on, 88; Brownson's attack on, 106, 239, 631 n833; Cousin's relation to, 106; Charles Hodge's attack on, no; J. Murdock on, 113; Stallo's analysis of, 194; discussed by Scherb and Emerson, 199; the organic in, 203; Emerson prepared by Schelling to entertain views of, 203; Emerson's quotations from, 203; Emerson on, 166, 172, 185, 187, 198, 204, 205, 206, 595 ni25, 613 nsos n5i6; 614 n 5 2 3 n 533. 615 n544-45; Emerson on St. Louis disciples of, 204 ; Thos. Davidson's trans, from, 205 ; Parker on, 219; Brownson's study of, 239; St. Louisans' interpretation of, 267-68 ; on institutions, 276 ; American educ- ational infl. of, 281; Snider's psychology infl. by, 287; Kant Club studies, 289; ethics of, 301 ; Peirce infl. by, 302, 669 n322; taught at Univ. of Michigan, 311; Whitman on, 472, 473. 474. 7 8 6 11520-22 n526 n528 ^30-31, 787 n542; 788 n549 n^i, 799 n6gi; Ban- croft's visit to, 531 ni07; English transs. of, 541 n203 ; Mme. de Stael on, 552 n32o; Hedge on, 582 n70i, 583 n703; oriental infl. on, 613 n499; Harris on, 616 n569; Ripley on, 617 n588; in The Index, 634 n884; O. B. Froth- ingham on, 636 ngo5 ; doctrine of Werden taught by, 638 n949 ; Idenlitdtslehre of, 638 n949; Cabot's article on, 638 ng5i; Cabot's defense of dialectical method of, 638 ng53 ; Geo. S. Morris on, 640 ng; Snider's study of, 642 n3o; Harris' study of, 642 n3o; infl. in Midwest, 643 n55; political philosophy of, 643 n56; Treitschke's interpretation of, 643 n56; Heinrich von Sybel on, 643 n56; Bos- anquet's interpretation of, 643 n56; phi- losophical methodology of, 643 n57; as a political liberal, 643 n56 n5g; as a political absolutist, 643 n56; Brokmeyer's study of, 645 n75; Harris infl. by, 649 ng8; Rosen- kranz's interpretation of, 652 ni26; Dewey's interest in, 670 n332; Royce infl. by, 671 "347 ■ — Aesthetik: W. M. Bryant's trans, of, 654 ni77 ■ — Geschichte der Philosophie: Harris' trans, of, 646 n79 — Logik, Die: 289; Brokmeyer's trans, of, 258, 264, 270, 648 ngi: Harris on, 650 n97; Harris's trans, of a portion of, 655 ni86 — Phdnomenologie, 289 ■ — Philosophie der Geschichte : 276; Harris on, 560 ngg — Wissenschaft der Logik, 276 Hegel Club (Chicago): 264, 274; founded by R. A. Holland, 655 ni88 Hegel Club (St. Louis), 263 Hegelian absolutism: 638 ng44; Emerson on, 200, 202, 205; Whitman on, 470-71 Hegelian dialectics: 267; St. Louisans' use of, 262-63, 267 1 applicability to post-Civil War America, 268; Harris on, 650 ngg Hegelian idealism : Whitman's acceptance of, 468 Hegelian identity: Emerson on, 205 Hegelian reconciliation of opposites: St. Loui- sans' espousal of, 262; Emerson on, 615 n544 Hegelianism : 8; Emerson's modified accept- ance of, 205-6; pragmatism triumphs over, 303 Heidelberg, Longfellow's criticism of, 730 n42 Heimberg, W. {pseud.) See Behrens, Bertha Heine, Heinrich: 32g 330, 331, 333, 335, 336, 34 1 . 343. 344. 34 6 . 453. 455. 458; Emerson's refs. to, 172; prose writings of, 334; Amer- ican vogue of, 334, 335, 338, 681 n53 n54, 684 n78; Reisebilder, 335, 338; lyrics tr. by Emma Lazarus, 338; works tr. and ed. by Leland, 338; transs. by Francis Hellman, 338; transs. by F. Johnson, 338; transs. by Kate Kroeker, 338; Matthew Arnold on, 338; E. I. Sears on, 338, 681 n53; Transcen- dentalists' view of, 338; Lowell on, 338; Leland on, 338; Howells on, 338; Jewish element in, 338; American criticism of, 338, 682 n66, 684 n78 n8o; Whitman on, 466-67; Sara Teasdale's interest in, 482-83 ; Ripley on, 6ig n6i7, 681 n53; Brownson infl. by, 628 n7gg; Wm. Hurlbut on, 680 n53; N. L. Frothingham on, 681 n57; Hedge on, 682 n66; Newell Dunbar's ed. of, 684 n78; Fleischmann's ed. of, 684 n78; G. Karpeles' biography of, 684 n78; George Eliot's biog- raphy of, 684 n78; Wm. Sharp's biography of, 684 ny8; critical appraisals of, 684 n78 n8o; the vampire theme in, 718 n2i6; Long- fellow on 737 mo2; Whitman on, 784 "493-94 Heinzen, Karl: 246; career of, 634 n877 Hellman, Frances: Heine tr. by, 338 Hellman, George S. : 701 n42 ; on Irving, 700 n3g Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von, 313, 474, 633 n866 Index 831 Helmuth, Justus H. C: 46; on Kant, 661 n255 Hemingway, Ernest: Freud's infl. on, 483 Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm: 13, 112, 130, 171; Andrews Norton on, 558 n400 Henkle, W. D., 279 Henry, Caleb Sprague, no, 538 ni70 Henry, Francis A., 279 Henry, Parick, 43 Henry, O. See Porter, William Sidney Hentz, Caroline Lee, 340 Hepp, Julie: 729; letter of Longfellow to, 420-21 Heraclitus: 206; Emerson on, 160, 613 n505, 615 n548 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 281, 448 Herbert, George, 448 Herder, Johann Gottfried von: 13, 83, 132, 171, 185, 210, 221, 226, 326, 322, 327, 330, 336, 343. 344. 434. 44°. 44 8 . 462, 484, 596 niso, 618 n6o2, 677 n5; American transs. from, no; American vogue of, no, 343, 344, 558 n4o6 n407, 559 n4i5-i7, 680 n43; in the North American Review, no; in the New York Mirror, no; humanism of, no; Transcendentalists' interest in, rio-11; Rip- ley on, no, 208, 209, 221, 559 n4i5, 618 n 594 _ 95l Marsh's concern with, 142; Emer- son on, 160, 166, 173, 613 n5i7; Ripley infl. by, 208, 212; Poe on, 392, 711 ni46, 713 ni63; Whitman infl. by, 464, 466, Whitman on, 467, 784 n490 n493; Coleridge infl. by, 580 n674 ; on Shakespeare, 795 n648-49 — Briefe das Siudium der Theologie betreffend, 33 2 — "Erlkonigs Tochter": early American print- ing of, 677 n7 — Vom Geist der ebraischen Poesie: 322 ; Ripley's review of, 208; James Marsh's trans, of, no — Ideen zur Geschichte der Philosophie der Menschheit, no, 332, 487 Heroditus: Snider on, 286 Herschel, Sir John Frederick William : Emer- son's refs. to, 166 Herschel, Sir William: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Herwegh, Georg, 333, 345, 352 Hessians, 49, 518 ni83, 722 ni Heuerberger, H. C. : Longfellow's relations with, 423 Hevelius, Johann, 503 n48 Heyne, Christian Gottlieb, 63 Heyse, Paul, 333, 339, 341, 345, 346 Hickok, Laurens Perseus: 279, 320, 669 n32o; textbooks in philosophy by, 309; Kantian infl. on, 309; influence of, 309, 665 n2g2; Snider's use of textbooks by, 652 ni32; career of, 665 n2g2 ; German studies of, 665 n292 ; works of, 665 n2g2 ; disciples of, 665 n292; J. H. Seelye on, 665 n2g2; O. W. Wight on, 665 n292 Hicks, Elias: Whitman on, 469 Higginson, Stephen, 73 Higher criticism: American reception of, 112. See also Theology of Germany Hill, Britton Armstrong, 259, 271, 639 n3 Hillern, Wilhelmine von, 347, 685 ng3 Hinsdale, B. A., 281 Historical Society of Quincy and Adams Coun- ty, 111., 656 n2oo History: German influence on teaching of, 572 n565 ; Emerson's reading of, 593 nio6 History of philosophy in American colleges: instruction in, 311, 320; German infl. on, 320, 676 n382 ; introduction at Columbia, 676 n382; early textbooks used, 676 n382; Hickok on, 676 n382; H. B. Smith on, 676 n382; J. H. Seelye on, 676 n382; B. E. Smith's ed. of Schwegler's text on, 676 n382; Bowen's textbook on, 676 n382 Hitchcock, Edward, 305 Hitler, Adolf, 8, 9 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth: 149, 242, 243, 246, 447, 633, n866, 637 ng2g; Convers Fran- cis' infl. on, 143, on M. Fuller, 442; as bio- grapher of M. Fuller, 451; as biographer of Geo. Ripley, 451 ; at Brook Farm, 451 ; Emer- son's infl. on, 451 ; Richter's infl. on, 451 ; on the German romantics, 451, studies French eclectics, 451; helps shape Genteel tradition, 451; on Parker, 621 n64i; on Poe's know- ledge of German, 711 ni4o; as a transcenden- talism 770 n364; as a reformer, 770 ^65; in the Civil War, 770 n365 Hoar, Elizabeth, 197 Hoar, Leonard, 503 n47 Hobbes, Thomas: 537 ni6o; Emerson's refs. to, 160, 537 ni6o Hobhouse, John Cam, 474 Hock, Johann Jacob, 42 Hocking, William Ernest, 323 Hodge, Charles: 149; attacks German theolo- gians, no; studies in Germany, 662 n258 Hodges, Benjamin: supplies Bentley with German books, 52 Hodgkinson, John: dramatic roles of, 350 Hodgson, S. H., 279 Hoefer's Nouvelle Biographie Generate: Emer- son's use of, 203, 614 n527, 615 n545; Holderlein, Johann Christian: 340, 345; Emer- son's refs. to, 172 Holty, Ludwig Heinrich Christoph, 344 Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 491 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus: 333, 338, 343, 346, 406, 716 nig2; Hawthorne's rela- tion to, 387; Poe infl. by, 393, 709 ni25 ; fixe- Ideen in, 399; Scott on, 403; Longfellow's lectures on, 421; American vogue of, 713 ni75; English transs. of, 714 ni75; in France, 714 ni75; Carlyle on, 714 ni85 832 Index — "Abenteurer der Sylvesternacht, Das," 405; "Der Elementargeist," 397 — Die Elixiere des Teufels: 397; Poe's "William Wilson" infl. by, 397-98 — "Fraulein von Scuderi, Das," similarities with Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart," 399 — "Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober," 403 — "Magnetiseur, Der": Poe's "Tale of the Ragged Mountains" infl. by, 393-96 — "Majorat, Das": Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" infl. by, 403 ■ — Phantasiestilcke : Poe on, 392 — "Sandmann, Der": 397, 403; similarities with Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart, "399 — "Unheimliche Gast, Der": 397 — "Vampyr, Der": similarities with Poe's "Berenice," 399-400 Hoffmann, Franz, 347, 680 n49 Hoffmann, Heinrich, Struwwelpeter : trans, by S. L. Clemens, 479; American popularity of, 680 n49 Holcroft, Thomas, 348 Holland, Robert A.: 264, 270, 274, 279, 286, 649, n97, 659 n23i; organizes Literary Club in St. Louis, 655 ni88; in Chicago, 656 nigi Holley, Horace, 59 Holmes, Oliver Wendell: 451, 458, 477; Brah- minism of, 430; provincialism of, 430; on Kant, 430; allusiveness of, 430; slight German infl. on, 430; on Emerson, 587 ni3 nig; 749 ni86; J. F. Clarke and, 624 n678; at the Radical Club, 633, n866; education of, 748 ni79; German excursions of, 748 ni7g; German refs. of, 749 ni87 Homer: 169, 279, 283, 285, 466; Snider on, 283; Poe and Schlegel on, 407 Hooker, Richard: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Hooker, Thomas, 24 Hopff, Johann Kaspar: in England, 21 Hopkins, Mark, 49 Hopkins, Samuel, 81 Horace, 430 Horn, Franz Christoph, 490 Hosmer, James Kendall, 289, 336, 639 n3 Hotson, Clarence Paul, 193 Houston, Texas: Schiller on the stage of, 355 Howard, Leon, 439 Howe, Julia Ward: 243; in St. Louis, 641 1123 Howells, William Dean: 491; The Rise of Silas Lapham, 6; on Heine, 338, 475, 789 n583, 790 n587; Criticism and Fiction, 475; My Literary Passions, 475; Years of My Youth, 475 ; literary apprenticeship of, 475 ; studies German, 475, 789 ^83; in Ashtabula, Ohio, 475; A. W. Schlegel's infl. on, 475-76; on Cervantes, 476; on Shakespeare, 476; on Goethe, 476, 596, 789 n583, 790 n587 ; Heine's infl. on, 476-77; on Jane Austen, 477; on Zschokke, 789 n583 ; pro-Germanism of, 790 n584; on Auerbach, 790 n5g6 Howison, George Holmes: 231, 271, 280, 299, 313. 3i7. 3i9. 323. 639 n3, 660 n245, 669 n32o; Hume lectures of, 298, Kant lectures of, 298, career of, 259, 301, 639 n8; at Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology, 312; rela- tion to the St. Louis Hegelians, 315; spiritual pluralism of, 315; Hegelian infl. on, 315; in the Concord School of Philosophy, 315, 640 n8; on absolutism, 315; on Hegel, 315; Wm. James' infl. on, 315; on F. C. S. Schiller, 315; in St. Louis, 640 n8 ; philosophic personality of, 640 n8; at the Univ. of Calif., 640 n8; students of, 640 n8 ; at the Univ. of Berlin, 639 n8, 669 n3i4, 671 n339; on post-Kant- ism, 659 n23i; Kant's infl. on, 671 n34i; Leibnitz's infl. on, 671 n34i Huber, Francois, Natural History of Ants: Emerson's refs. to, 166; Observations on . . . Bees, Emerson's refs. to, 167 Hudson, Henry Norman: 484, 486; Lectures on Shakespeare, 485; Shakespeare criticism of, 796 n655 ; A. W. Schlegel's infl. on, 796 n655 Hudson River: legends of, 364 Huenemann, Calvin V., Denton J. Snider: A Critical Study, 655 ni85 Hugo, Gustav: Follen's debt to, 118 Hugo, Victor Marie: dramas of, 356 Humboldt, Alexander von: 185, 199, 200, 347, 455; visit to America, 55; Jefferson's educa- tional plans infl. by, 78; Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166, 172; Poe's knowledge of Kosmos of, 391, 4o8;Thoreau on, 435; Stoddard's bio- graphy of, 447; B. Taylor's lecture on, 454; Whitman on, 467; Bancroft on, 513 nio8 Harris' reading of, 649 n94 Humboldt, Wilhelm von: Brief e an eine Freun- din, 481 Hume, David: 308, 437, 471, 537 m6o; Emer- son on, 160, 169, 613 nsos; Brownson on, 238, 630 n824 Hunt, Peter, 173 Hunter, John: Emerson on, 166, 610 ^63, 614 n528 Hurlbert, William H. See Hurlbut, William H. Hurlbut, William H. : Heine transs. by, 448; on German religious poetry, 448 ; on Heine, 680 n53; on the Yung-Deutschland group, 681 n53 Huss, John, 23 Hutcheson, Francis: Dr. Channing infl. by, 83 Hutchinson, Mrs. Anne Marbury: 81; Antino- mianism of, 25 Hutton, Robert: 322; Emerson's refs. to, 166 Huxley, Thomas Henry: 200, 296, 474; Emer- son's refs. to, 167; Emerson's reading of, 201 Hyatt, Alpheus: on evolution, 633 n866 Hyde, William, 271 Index 833 Hypnotism: Poe on, 393 Hyslop, James Hervey: transcendentalism op- posed by, 312 Hymnody in America: German infl. on, 38-39, 512 ni30 IAMBLICHUS, 198, 228, 271 Idealism: Emerson's five arguments in favor of, 190, 607 n430 Idealism in America: 303, 315; schools of, 292; in Illinois, 300; in Missouri, 300; decline of, 303; German infl. on, 304; resistance to, 311 ; Royce's advocacy of, 321 Idealism of Germany: French eclecticism re- lated to, no; American hostility toward, 307 Identity : 202 ; Emerson on, 200, 614 n522 n523, 615 11544 Iffland, Wilhelm: 360, 689 ni29; Dunlap's adaptation of The Good Neighbor by, 689 ni29 Illinois College: library of, 274 Illuminati: 521 n2ii; American interest in, 54, 359 Imagism, 482 Immanence: 187; Emerson's doctrine of, 1S9 Immigration to America: data on, 495 n4 Impartial Register: Wm. Bentley's column in, 53 Inchbald, Mrs. Elizabeth Simpson : on early American stage, 348 Index, The: 151, 243, 246, 247, 634 n884; Ab- bott's contributions to, 245:0. B. Frothing- ham's contributions to, 250; German lit, in, 633 n86i ; Emerson on, 190 Individualism: Coleridge on, 546 n248 Ingersoll, Robert Green: 244; National Liberal League founded by, 634 n868 Instrumentalism, 316, 323 International Journal of Ethics, 302 Intuition: Emerson on, 192; transcendental- ists' view of, 629 n8n Intuitionalism: Emerson attracted by, 197; Emerson's dissatisfaction with, 629 n8n Ireland, Alexander: Emerson's letter to, 600 11249 Irish element in America, 4 Irving, Henry : 355 : in role of Faust, 356 Irving, Washington: 9, 362, 364, 364-65; Ger- man studies of, 367, 373; early contacts with German lit., 367; in London, 367; visit to Scott, 367; on legends concerning Fried- rich der Rothbart, 370-71 ; Musaeus' infl. on, 371 ; in Mainz, 373 ; German tours of, 373-75 ; Karl Bottiger's infl. on, 374; Col. Barham Livius' infl. on, 374 : and Emily Foster, 374— 75 ; in the Dresden literary and court circle, 374-75; meets J. P. F. Richter, 375; in Paris, 375 ; banditti tales of, 378-79 ; use of German Marchen, 379; Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's infl. on, 379; short stories of, 380; infl. by eighteenth- century prose writers, 381 ; romantic elements in, 381; successors of, 381; German sources of, 680 n46; Analeciic Magazine ed. by, 691 ni ; the sportive Gothic vein of, 696 n2 ; sub- standard German lit. burlesqued by, 696 n2 ; German infl. on short stories of, 696 ni97; on the German language, 697 n4; on Johann Kapsar Riesbeck's Travels in Germany, 697 n4; on collections of German legends, 697 n4, 698 nio, 699 n3o; legend of Peter Klaus used by, 697 n7; on Otma's collection of legends, 698 ni3; use of legends of Riibezahl, 698 ni4; in the Riesengebirge, 698 n24, 700 n35 ; travel itinerary of, 699 n28; on German local- ities, 699 n3o, 700 n35, 701 n46; on the Fehmgericht, 699 113 1; superficial observa- tions of European affairs, 699 n3i; in Mu- nich, 699 n32; in Vienna, 699 n32; German lore gathered by, 699 n33; on German idio- matic phrases, 700 n35; Carl Maria Weber and, 700 n39 ; as playwright, 700 n39, 701 n42 ; as theater-goer, 700 n39, 701 n42; reads J. P. F. Richter, 701 n4o; on Kotzebue, 701 n42; on Musaeus, 701 n42 ; on Schiller, 701 n42, 703 n6g; and Tieck, 701 n42, 702 n65, 703 n67; on Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, 701 n42 ; German authors read by, 701 n42 ; and E. T. A. Hoffmann, 701 n42; studies Ger- man, 701 n44; on German legendary lore, 701 n46; literary plans of, 702 n48; Goethe's infl. on plays of, 702 n48; on Calderon, 702 n48; German sketch book planned by, 702 n49; German books received by, 702 n5o; on Goethe, 702 n57; literary borrowings of, 704 n78 n79; critical attacks on, 704 n79; the ludicrous grotesque vein of, 704 n8o; anti- quarianism of, 705 n82 ; studies Spanish, 705 n83 ; use of folklore, 705 n88 — "Adventure of My Uncle, The" : German infl. on, 377, 703 n67 ■ — "Adventure of My Aunt, The": 703 n68 — "Adventure of the German Student, The": synopsis of, 704 n74; sources of, 704 n74 — Alhambra, The: 380, 381, 705 n82; inception of, 373; romantic elements in, 379; Germanic reminiscences in, 379-80 — Bracebridge Hall: 379-81; review of, 364; composition of, 699 n28 — "Bold Dragoon, The": synopsis of, 703 n72 — "Buckthorne": 699 n28, 702 n254; Wilhelm Meister as model for, 376-77, 702 ns8, 703 n 59 _ 63; infl. by Tieck's Phanlasus, 701 n42 — "Devil and Tom Walker, The" : Faustian ele- ments in, 379 ■ — El Embozado planned, 702 n48 — "Don Juan: A Spectral Research": 702 n48; infl. by Gottschalck's "Seeburger See," 380, 705 n85-87 834 Index — "Guests from Gibbet-Island": infl. by Grimm's "The Gallows' Guests," 380, 705 1184 — Dietrich Knickerbocker's History of New York, 381 — "Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The": native ele- ments in, 371; German sources of, 371-72; Musaeus' Volksmarchen used for, 698 mi} — "Rip Van Winkle": 372, 379; based on legend of Peter Klaus, 364, 367-71, 697 n8; orginality of, 697 n8 698 ng — Sketch Book, The: 364, 371, 373, 380, 381; composition of, 367; German sources of, 697 n6 — "Spectre Bridegroom, The": Lenore motif burlesqued in, 372-73, 696 n2; Germanic notes in, 698 n26 — "Story of the Young Robber, The": infl. by Schiller's Robbers, 703 n7i — Tales of a Traveller: 379, 380, 381, 697 n6; review of, 364; inception of, 373-74; com- position of, 375-76, 702 n54~55 n57; frame- work of, 377; characterization of, 379; Tieck's infl. on, 377; sources of, 704 n77 — "Wild Huntsman, The": 700 n33 — Woolfert's Roost: Germanic sources of, 380 — "Young Italian, The": Schiller's infl. on, 377-78 JACKSON, Andrew, 75 Jacksonville, 111.: 289, 294, 302, 303; school of philosophy in, 13, 639 ni ; Plato Club of, 263—64, 290; American Akademe in, 291, 293; organizations in, 655 nigo Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich: 102, 147, 168, 171, 181, 440, 448; noticed in American period- icals, 62; Coleridge uninfluenced by, 91-92; Coleridge on, 92, 545 n234 ; Mme. de Stael on, 552 n32o; Murdock on, 113; Emerson's refs. to, 172, 597 m62, 603 n304; Emerson quotes, 185; Parker's knowledge of, 221; on reason, 545 n234; Carlyle infl. by, 550 n2gg; Fries compared with, 580 n673 ; Clarke on, 623 11673 James, Henry, Sr., 204, 4gi James, Henry: on M. Fuller, 442; in Germany, 4771; on Goethe, 477; on German lit., 477 James, William: 233, 27g, 280, 287, 2g3, 299, 302, 304, 313, 319, 320, 323, 651 ni2i, 669 n32o; at the Concord School of Philosophy, 266, 298; pragmatism of, 284; his opinion of St. Louis Hegelians, 302; his philosophic aims, 317, studies in Germany, 317; Peirce's relation to, 317; Principles of Psychology, 317, 318; Hegel's infl. on, 317; Fechner's infl. on, 317, 318; Renouvier's infl. on, 317, 318; on Kant, 317, 318, 576 n625; Myers' infl. on, 318; Lotze's infl. on, 318, 672 n365 ; articles contributed to the Journal of Specu- lative Philosophy, 638 ng52; on Samuel H. Emery and Edward McClure in Concord, 657 n207; Hegelian studies of, 657 n207; in German and Austrian universities, 672 n368 ; Helmholtz's visit to, 372 n368; correspon- dence with German philosophers, 372 n368; Kant's philosophy taught by, 673 n375; on Goethe, 683 n72, 7go n59g; infl. by Wilhelm Meister, jqo n5gg Jantz, Harold S ; 27, 4g8 ni ; 502 n44 ; 503 n5o ; on early German- American interrelations, 14, 21. 33 Jean Paul. See Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich Jeffers, Robinson, 483 Jefferson, Thomas: 55, 63, 78; plans for a uni- versity; in Germany, 534 ni38; on the elec- tive system, 534 ni3g Jenks, William : German studies of, 54 Jesus: Emerson on, i6g, 184 John, Eugenie. See Marlitt, E. (pseud.) Johns Hopkins University: 314, 4go, 534 ni3g; Germanic educational principles incorpor- ated in, 305, 311; history of philosophy in- troduced at, 311; Kant taught at, 311; philosophy at, 667 n305; G. S. Hall at, 667 n305 ; Geo. S. Morris at, 667 n305 Johnson, Rev. Arthur: on German transcen- dentalism, 539 ni77 Johnson, Franklin: Heine tr. by, 338 Johnson, Samuel: 148; Leibnitz's infl. on, 47; C. Francis' infl. on, 143; on Cousin, 252, 556 n364; reads Jouffroy, 252; James Wal- ker's infl. on, 252; tours Germany, 252; adopts Parkerism, 252 ; joins Radical-Index circle, 252 ; Free Religious Associationism of, 252 ; on Kant, 252 ; on Fichte, 252 ; German authors read by, 516 ni65; on Free Religious Assn., 634 n868; on German radicalism, 634 n877 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 484 Johnson, Thomas M. : 263, 292, 656 nig6; let- ters from, 648 n87; editor of the Platonist and the Bibliolheca Platonica, 656 nig5 Johnson, W. H., 646 n76 Jones, Hiram K.: 264, 279, 290, 291, 294, 295, 296, 300, 302, 303, 648 ngi, 64g ng2 ; Alcott's relations with, 232; in Concord, 232, 291; Platonism of, 232, 266, 284, 291 ; Emerson's infl. on, 2go; Plato Against the Atheists, 2go; studies Swedenborg, 290; on Dante, 290; on Shakespeare, 290; on Hegel, 290, 656 nig6; on Goethe, 290; eclectic nature of philosophy of, 290; Harris' debates with, 291, 660 n235; career of, 291, 655 nigo; American Akademe founded by, 2g2, 655 nigi; phil- osophic personality of, 2g5 ; lectures on Socrates, 295 ; lectures on Plato, 298, 606 nig6; on Christianity, 2g8; letters from, 648 n87; Plato Club founded by, 655 nigi; Harris' rivalry with, 660 n235 Index 835 Jones, Horatio M., 639 113, 649 ngj Jones, Howard Mumford: on French cultural infl. in America, 5, 8, 106, 495 n6, 538 ni68 Jordan, Clara von, 736 n87 Joseph, Myrtle J.: study of Tieck's infl. on Hawthorne, 382, 706 ng4 Jouffroy, Theodore Simon: 83, 85, 106, no, 161, 604 11315; Ripley on, 103; Introduction to Ethics tr. by W. H. Channing, 105; in the Dial, 105; taught at Harvard, 105, 556 ^64; Brownson's attack on, 106; Emerson's hears lectures of, 108, 601 n268; Emerson's refs. to, 166; American vogue of, 555 n339 Journal of English and Germanic Philology: annual German-American bibliography in, 10 Journal of Speculative Philosophy: 234, 247, 258, 263, 265, 267, 277, 282, 283, 287, 292, 301, 302, 303, 336, 616 11568, 623 n884, 649 n99; Emerson's reading of, 204-5, 616 n56g; Hegelianism in, 205; founding of, 277-78, 651 nn8; analysis of, 278-80; ancient phi- losophy in, 278; medieval philosophy in, 278; modern philosophy in, 278; Dutch philosophy in, 278 ; German philosophy in, 278; English philosophy in, 278; music in, 290; infl. of, 313; Dial compared with, 571 n548; Cabot's contributions to, 638 ng52; theoretical nature of, 642 n54 ; history of, 651 nn8; original philosophical writing in, 652 11122; psychology in, 654 ni75; Peirce's articles in, 669 n32o; G. S. Hall's articles in, 669 n32o; Hickok's contributions to, 669 11320; Wm. James' articles in, 669 n32o; Royce's articles in, 669 n32o; Dewey's con- tributions to, 669 n320 Judah, Samuel B. H., Odofriede: 355, 696 nig6; Germanic motifs in, 364 Journal of the American Akademe, 291, 302, 656 nigs Jung-Deutschland school : American vogue of, 333 ; American critics of, 682 n66 Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich: 343, 346; Emerson's refs. to, 172 Jussieu, Adrien de: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Juvenile books. See German juvenile books in America KADELBURG, Gustav, 357, 691 ni43 Kahler, Jeremiah: in Boston, 52 Kaiser, Gustav: O'Neill infl. by, 483 Kalb, John, Baron von, 49 Kalteisen, Michael, 44 Karnes, Lord, Henry Home, 484 Kant, Immanuel: 8, 54, 63, 83, 97, 98, 102, 107, 109, no, 115, 118, 120, 132, 155, 161, 175, 178, 187, 189, 199, 226, 240, 243, 244,262, 280, 302, 303, 305, 309, 310, 319, 322, 347, 389, 439, 440, 469, 472, 473, 474, 484, 518 nigo, 610 461; Samuel Miller's view of, 60; noticed in American periodicals, 62, 524 nig; 661 n255; American interpretation of, 62, 106, 112; J. Q. Adams on, 62; categorical imperative of, 841; early vogue in England, 85-88; J. H. Stirling on, 88; De Quincey on, 88, 541 n205, 547 n26i n265; Coleridge on, 89, 91-95. 543 0219, 545 "226 ^30-31, 546 n2 36, 576 n63o; Coleridge's infl. on, 89, 544 n223 n224, 576 n626 n62g; Emerson on, 79, 158, 159, 168, 170, 179, 184-85, 190, 202, 206, 207, 567 n495, 58g n32, 5gi n7g, 5g2 n8g, 601 n25g, 606 n3gg n403, 607 "424, 613 11505; Sir Wm. Hamilton on, 87-88; Mme. de Stael on, 101; Cousin's interpretation of, 102, 553 n322 ^34-35; Cousin's criticism of, 103; Cousins's relation to, 106-7, 556 n363 ; English transs. from, 113, 539 ni82, 542 n205; Follen on, 116, 564 n46g, 566 n470 11473 n476; Murdock's interpretation of, 1 13-14, 561 n442, 562 n443; Marsh on, 137, 574 n6i3, 575 n628, 578 n6sg, 579 n665-66, 580 n673 : Hedge on, 144, 583 n703, 584 n7i3 ; Mary M. Emerson on, 163; Emerson's view of Plato in relation to, 164; Emerson's refs. to, 165, 166, 168, 172, 185, 195, 198, 594 nn6, 596 ni53; Emerson ponders metaphys- ics of, 170; Emerson on the Kantian dis- tinction between understanding and reason, 170, 606 n399 n403, 607 "424; Emerson's reading of, 171; Emerson's misconstruction of, 181; Carlyle's misinterpretation of, 181, 182, 183, 54g n>77 n28o n288; 550 n2gg; physico-theological argument of, 188; Emer- son's second-hand knowledge of, 195 ; Cabot's Harvard lectures on, 204; Ripley on, 208, 617 11588, 618 n58g; Parker's reading of, 216; Parker's departures from, 2ig; Parker's tribute to, 219, 220, 621, 11643, 622 n657; Alcott's knowledge of, 226; Brownson on, 235, 236, 629 n8o8, 630 n8i5, 631 n833; Al- cott's interpretation of, 295-96; American philosophy textbooks infl. by, 307; Lowell's refs. to, 428; Melville on, 436, 437, 758 n249~5o; antinomies of, 438; criticism of pure reason, 438-39; M. Fuller's acquain- tance with, 440 ; Whitman's interpretation of, 472; E. R. Sill on, 481; Price related to, 537 ni66; Dr. Channing on, 538 11171; John Richardson's transs. from, 542 n205; Wirg- man on, 542 n205; reputed anticipators of, 544 T1226, 576 n625, 603 n2g5; Emerson on ethical views of, 567 n4g5 ; Lieber's debt to, 570 n542; Fries compared with, 580 n673; Emerson compared with, 601 n25g; Emerson on anticipators of, 603 n2g5 ; Goethe on, 605 n352; Schiller's interpretation of, 605 n353; German romantics' interpretation of, 607 11424; in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 836 Index 616 11569; Concord centennial celebration of, 295-97, 616 n570, 658 n220-2i, 659 n22i-3i ; O. B. Frothingham's refs. to, 636 n9i4; Wasson on, 637 ng27; Brokmeyer on, 649 n97 ; Harris infl. by, 649 ng8 ; Peirce and, 669 n322; Royce on, 671 n343; Royce infl. by, 671 n347; Renouvier infl. by, 672 n36o; Hamilton on, 604 n3i6, 606 n397; Clarke on, 623 n673, 625 n687; Alcott infl. by, 627 n725 ■ — Anthropology : tr. by Kroeger, 280 — Critique of Practical Reason, 311 — Critique of Pure Reason: 341 ; Mme. de Stael on, 101 ; negative conclusions of, 191; Fran- cis Haywood's trans, of, 195; critical ana- lysis of, 297; Meiklejohn's trans, of, 638 n942; Geo. S. Morris' analysis of, 640 n9 — Metaphysics of Rights: Kroeger's trans, of, 280 — Prolegomena : Kroeger's trans, of, 280 Kant Centennial (Concord, Mass.) : 205, 658 n220-2i, 659 n230-3i Kant Centennial (Saratoga, N. Y.) : arranged by J. W. Mears, 659 n23o; program of, 659 n230 Kant Club (Chicago): 264; founded by R. A. Holland, 655 ni88 Kant Club (St. Louis): 263, 270, 287, 313, 641 n2o; F. E.Cook first president, of, 289; meet- ings of, 655 ni86; list of members of, 655 m86; literary works of, 655 ni86 Kantian critical philosophy: 242, Emerson's mind initially perturbed by, 164 Kantian distinction between understanding and reason: Emerson's first use of, 165; Emerson's adoption of, 166, 168; Emerson's applications of, 170, 606 n399 n403, 607 n424; Coleridge's explanation of, 177; Emer- son's growing interest in, 179; Emerson's refs. to, 179; Emerson's interpretation of, 185, 190, 202. See also Distinction between understanding and reason; Pure and prac- tical reason ; Transcendentalism (critical) ; Trancendentalism (German) Kantian epistemology : 300; Emerson's use of, 158, 191; Marsh on, 579 n665 Kantian idealism : Emerson's popularization of, 207 Kantian terminology; 84; American interpre- tation of, 92 ; Emerson's use of, 606 n399 n403. See also Kantian distinction between understanding and reason Kant in America: studies of, 542 n205; earliest notice of, 661 11255 Kant's practical philosophy: Emerson on, 159, 184-85. See also Kant, Emerson on Kapp, Ernest, 279 Katzenjammer Kids, 8 Keagy, Dr. J. M., 225 Kean, Edmund, 356 Keats, John, 448 Keckermann, Bartholomaeus: 37, 358; Har- vard uses texts by, 29; popularity of, 505 n64; textbooks by, 661 n254 Kedney, John Steinfort: on Hegel, 294, 298; at the Concord School of Philosophy, 659 n23i Keidel, George Charles, 14 Keith, George, 31 Keller, Gottfried: 339, 340, 453, 455; Novellen of, 686 1197 Kelpius, Johann, 32 Kemble, Charles, 356 Kemble, Frances Anne (Fanny), 356 Kempis, Thomas a: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Kennedy, John Pendleton, 404 Kepler, Johann: 474, 610 n46i; Emerson's refs. to, 166; Lowell's refs. to, 428 Kerner, (Andreas) Justinus: 333, 343, 344, 452; M. Fuller on, 445; Win. Hurlbut on, 681 n53; Seherin von Prevorst, 716 nig8 Kies, Marietta, 277 Kimball, William H., 279, 651 ni2i Kind, Friedrich, Irving's adaptation of Der Freischiitz by, 700 n39 Kindergarten: Harris' promotion of, 642 n4o; Susan Blow's work in behalf of, 654 ni6g Kindergarten College in Chicago; Snider's work in, 654 ni84; leaders in, 654 ni84 King, Mrs. J. O., 290, 657 n20i King's Chapel (Boston), 82 King's College, 46 Kinkel, Gottfried: Whitman on, 467 Kinzel, Christian, 363 Kirby, William, and Spence, William: Emer- son's refs. to Entomology of, 167 Kircher, Athanasius, 34 Kirk, Edward N., 623 n675 Kirkland, John Thornton; 73; on the study of German, 55 Kirksville, Mo. : Harris in, 292 Kittredge, George Lyman, 505 n6i Kleist, Hermann von: 240, 356, 393; Katchen von Heilbronn, 358; "Hermannschlacht," 403; the vampire theme in, 717 n2i6 Klenze, Camillo von: on the Genteel tradition, 453 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb: 40, 55, 328, 329, 330, 341, 343, 344, 346, 359, 409, 424, 455; Messias of, 48, 54, 327; Whitman on, 467 Kloss, Heinz : 11; on German-American asso- ciations, 12; on the unification of German- American groups, 12 Knapp, George Christan: Lectures on Christian Theology tr. by Leonard Woods, 662 n259 Knapp, F. N. : Emerson on Journal of a Natu- ralist by, 167 Knox, John: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Korner, Karl Theodor: 329, 330, 333, 343, 344, 444; Leier und Schwert, 8; lyrics of, 333; Index 837 popularity of, 334, 680 1141; Poe on, 392, 713 11163; M. Fuller on, 625 n686, 680 n52; Follen on, 680 n52 Kohl, johann Georg: Reisen of, 347 Konradin, August, 128 Kortum, Karl: 684 n85; C. T. Brooks's transs. from, 339 Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand von: 8, 3 2 9. 33°. 343. 34 6 . 353. 357. 358, 360, 409; vogue of, 48-49, 328, 349-51. 353. 354. 355. 686 mo3; Dunlap's transs. and adaptations from, 328, 688 nii2; English vogue of, 328; introduced on the New York stage, 349; Mrs. Anne Plumtree's adaptations from, 349; declining vogue of, 351; American actors in leading roles of, 356; Jacobin leanings of, 677 ni2; anti-Christian charges against, 677 ni2; Joseph Dennie's attack on, 689 ni25 — Blind Geladen (How to Die for Love): 353; vogue of, 356 — Der Cossack und der Freiwillige (The Cossack and the Volunteer): 689 ni30 — Das Epigramm (The Blind Boy), 351 — Graf Benjowski (Count Benyowsky) : adapted by Dunlap, 349 — Die Indianer in England (Indians in Eng- land) : adapted by Dunlap, 349 — Das Kind der Liebe (Lovers' Vows) : Dunlap's adaptation of, 349; vogue of, 354, 356; synopsis of, 688 ni20 — Menschenhass und Rene (The Stranger): 325, 351. 354. 355. 364.' on the London stage, 348; Dunlap's adaptation of, 349; characteriza- tion of, 349, 350; moral objections to, 350; leading actors in roles of, 355-56; American vogue of, 360; Aug. Schink's trans, of, 687 niog; synopsis of, 687 nno — La Peyrouse: 353-54; vogue of, 351 — Der Rehbock: 353 — Die Sonnenjungfrau: 349; vogue of, 456 — Die Spanier in Peru, oder Rollos Tod: review of, 349; success of, 350; vogue of, 359; staging of, 688 nii5; synopsis of, 688 nii5; Sheri- dan's and Dunlap's versions compared, 688 ni^7; on the Charleston stage, 688 mi7; on the St. Louis stage, 688 nii7 — Die Versohnung: 688 nii3; by Dunlap, 351 ; by Dibdin, 351; vogue of, 356; synopsis of, 689 ni26 — Der Wildfang: 349, continued popularity of, 356; synopsis of, 688 ni2i; Dunlap's impro- vement on, 688 ni2i; Dibdin's version of, 688 ni2i Kramer, Wilhelm, 45 Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich, 113 Krauth, Charles P., at the Univ. of Pennsyl- vania, 669 n3i4 Kreysig, Friedrich Alexander Theodor, 490 Kroeger, Adolph Ernst: 231, 264, 279, 280, 289, 293. 301. 634, n884, 639 n3, 640 ng, 641 ni8; writings of, 258; Kantian discipleship of, 266; transs. from Fichte, 266; on Goethe, 634 n884-85 ; biography of, 639 n6 Kroeker, Kate: Heine tr. by, 338 Kronenscheldt, Johannes K. P. von, 31, 521 11205 Kriisi, Hermann, 225 Krug, Wilhelm Traugott: 247; Murdock's reliance on, 113; Hedge on, 582 n70i ; The Atonement tr. by Samual Osgood, 625 n686 Krummacher, Friedrich Adolf: 172, 343, 345; Emerson's refs. to, 172; fables of, 680 n49 Kultur-roman, 377 Kunst-roman: Poe on, 713 ni74 Kunze, Johann Christoph: 45; educational career of, 515 ni6o; on Kant, 661 n255; infl. of, 663 n267 L'ARRONGE, Adolph, 691 ni43 Laboulaye, Edouard Ren6 Lefebvre de: on Lieber, 571 n55i La Bruyere, Jean de: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Ladd, George Trumbull: 302, 319, 323; Lotze's Logic tr. by, 308 ; on Lotze, 675 n38i ; on the post-Kantians, 675 n38i ; teaches Kant and Wundt, 675 n38i Lamarck, Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de : 322, 610 n458; Emerson's refs. to, 167 Lamb, Charles, 429, 484 Lambech, Peter, 34 Landor, Walter Savage: 174; Emerson's rela- tions with, 170-71 Lane, George Morton, 470 n546 Lange, Johann Peter, 632 n858 Lanier, Sidney: 9, 795 n643; translates lyrics from Goethe, 460; Wertherish notes in early poems of, 460; German language studies of, 460; Tiger-Lilies, 460—61; German allusive- ness of, 460, Goethe's infl. on, 460; on German music and musicians, 461 ; "The Symphony," 461; The Science of English Verse, 461; German romantic infl. on literary theories of, 461 ; Coleridge and Poe infl. literary theories of, 461; Carlyle's infl. on, 776 n428; German refs. in Thorn Fruit, 776 n428; German transs. by, 776 n42g; German- American friends of, 776 n435 ; poems on Wagner and Beethoven, 776 n436 Language of Germany: becomes fashionable, 63; difficulties of, 109, 112. See also German language in America Laplace, Pierre Simon de: Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166 La Rochefoucauld, Francois: Emerson's refs. to, 160 "Latest Form of Infidelity, The," 109-110, 150 Lavater, Johann Kaspar: 54, 343, 346, 359, 838 Index 677 112 ; Aphorisms, 48 ; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Physiognomy Law in nature: Goethe's infl. on Emerson's view of, 168-69 Lawrence, Kans. : Friends in Council of, 656 n200 Lazarus, Emma: Heine's lyrics tr. by, 338 Learned, John Calvin, 259 Learning in Germany : early British appraisal of, 20; American esteem of, 55, 337; ideals of, 124 Leavelle, Arnaud B., 128 Le Clerc, Jean, 160 Lecture method of collegiate instruction, 322 Lederer, John, 31 Lee, Mrs. Eliza Buckminster, 681 n58 Lee, Samuel, 27-28, 505 n57 Legends of Germany: dramatic use of, 354 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm von: 86, 87, 120, 243, 280, 309, 312-13, 319, 389, 610 n46r, 616 11569, 625 n687; J. Edwards' interest in, 47; S. Miller's appraisal of, 61; Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166, 172; Parker's reading of, 216; Parker's reading of, 216; Parker infl. by, 219; Alcott's views of, 228; Monadology, 280, 584 n7i3; Whitman on, 467, 471; Thos. Cooper on, 662 n257 Leidecker, Kurt F. : on W. T. Harris, 647 n87 Leighton, Archibishop Robert: 576 11624; Coleridge on, 135, 544 mz6, 574 n6io Leighton, Walter L. : on French infl. in New England transcendentalism, 106, 617 n588 Leipzig Book Fair, 525 1122 Leisler, Jakob, 42-43 Leland, Charles Godfrey: 336, 452, 458, 682 n62; on Heine, 338; Eichendorff's Tauge- nichts tr. by, 339; Scheffel tr. by, 339; transs. by, 334, 774 n39o; education of, 456; pro- Germanism of, 456; Heine transs. by, 456, 774 n39o; Hans Breitmann created by, 456; dialect of, 456-57; "De Maiden mid Nodings On," 457 ; in Philadelphia, 457 ; early German interests of, 773 n38g; Alcott's infl. on, 773 n38g; reads Kant, Fichte, Schelling, etc., 773 n 389; on Goethe, 774 ^89; theory of trans., 774 n393; Lowell on, 774 n395; German notes in poems of, 774 ^03 ; return from Germany, 774 n3go; versatility of, 774 n39o; bibliography of, 774 n3go Lenau, Nikolaus: 336, 344, 455: lyrics of, 338; Whitman on, 467 Leo, Heinrich, 558 n400 Leonard, William Ellery, 483 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: 63, 223, 226, 309, 329, 33o, 34 1 . 343. 345. 346. 349, 440, 455, 458, 484, 485, 488; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Parker's reading of, 216, early American vogue of, 332, 338; American critical essays on, 338; Lowell on, 338, 428, 429, 684 n75; E. D. Mead's trans, of Zeller's essay on, 338; Stahr's life of, 338, 684 n75; first American ed. of works of, 338; Shakespeare's infl. on, 348; Whitman on, 467; Carlyle infl. by, 551 n3o6: G. H. Lewes on, 680 1143; on Shake- speare, 795 11648-49 — Emilia Galotti, 332 — Laokoon: 338; Lowell on, 684 1175 — Minna von Barnhelm, 332, 338, 686 mo3 — Miss Sara Sampson : serialized in 1 799, 677 ni2; Rittenhouse's tr. of, 686 nio2 — Nathan der Weise: 8, 338; Longfellow on, 729 n4i Leuchs, Fritz A. H., 358 Leutbecker, Kaspar, 42 Lewes, George Henry: on Goethe, 331, 679 n39; on German transcendentalism, 541 n2oo; Cabot's review of History of Philosophy by, 638 ngs; review of Life of Goethe by, 329 Lewis, Matthew Gregory: 348; German bal- lads reworked by, 677 117; Adelmom the Out- law, 354; The Bleeding Nun adapted from, 354; Castle Spectre, 354; The Forest of Rosen- wald adapted from, 354; Kabale und Liebe tr. by, 348; King Alfonso of Castile, 354; The Monk, 354; Rugantino, 354, 689 ni28 Lewis, Sinclair, 482 Lexington, Ky. : German books in, 359 Libraries and collections in Germany: pur- chase of, 52 Library science in America: German infl. on, 322 Lieber, Francis: 77, 85, 118, 305, 322, 490; European career of, 125, 569 n538; conducts gymnasium in Boston, 125; political phi- losophy of, 125, 570 n54i n543; liberal idealism of, 125; Kant's infl. on, 125-26, 570 n542; American Encyclopedia ed. by, 125, 570 n539; Manual of Political Ethics, 125; Civil Liberty and Self -Government, 126; applies Kant's moral law to American polit- ical theory, 126; Anglo-Saxon concept of liberty espoused by, 126; as exponent of German scholarly methods, 126, 570 n545; helps dispel prejudice against Germany, 127; in South Carolina, 127, 669 n3i5; political services of , 127; internationalism of, 127, 571 n55; correspondence of, 127; Emerson's refs. to, 172, 571 n549, 622 n665; American career of, 569 n537; pro-Anglicanism of, 569 n537; Gilman on, 570 n538; principal works of, 570 n54o; Niebuhr's infl. on, 570 n542; Follen compared with, 570 n544; infl. of, 571 n55o n 553: tributes to, 571 n55i; Judge Story's efforts in behalf of, 577 n552; Parker and, 622 n625 Liebig, Baron Justus von: Emerson's refs. to, 172 Lied: American popularity of, 333 Index 839 Lillo, George : 349 ; on early American stage, 348 Linberg, Henry Gottfried, 105, no, 113, 181, 438 ni69 Lincoln, Abraham, 3 Lincoln, John L.: on Goethe's Faust, 683 n69 Lindsay, Philip, 59 Linnaeus, Carolus: Emerson's refs. to, 167, 606 n405 List, Friedrich: European career of, 124; Americanism of, 124, 568 n533; Charles J. Ingersoll's relations with, 124; Henry C. Carey's relation to, 124; Matthew Carey's alliance with, 124; Outlines of American Political Economy, 124; "American system" of economy promulgated by, 124; protec- tionism of, 124; American career of, 468 n534 ; Hamiltonian economic principles of, 568 n534; later career of, 568 n534; influence of, 569 11535 Literary criticism in America: "gentle affirma- tive school" of, 487; Germanic infl. on, 484- 9^ Literary-historical scholarship, 490 Literary history of America: analysis of, 495 n6 Literary taste in America: changes in, 335-36, 358-59; infl. of German pietistic lit. on, 512 ni33 Literary World (Boston) : on German lit., 340 Lititz, Pa. : schools in, 42 Livius, Barham John: 700 n39; Irving and, 374, 700 n38 Lloyd, Thomas, 42 Locke, John: 46, 87, 118, 120, 206, 309, 471; Transcendentalists' opposition to, 79, 192, 303; Dr. Channing's opposition to, 83, 85; Marsh's view of, 133; Norton on, 150; Emer- son on, 157, 158, 160, 192; Clarke's objec- tions to, 223, 623 n673; in American colleges, 304; Hedge on, 584 ^15; popularity in America, 661 n252; Poe on, 710 ni38 Lockean sensationalism : Transcendentalists' opposed to, 79, 192, 303; Emerson condi- tioned by, 157 Lodge, Oliver Joseph, 474 Lodowick [Ludwig], Christian: 506 n83 n85, 507 n86; American career of, 31; German- English Dictionary ed. by, 47 Loev^-Veimars, Francois, 714 ni75 Logan, James, 33 Logic : American collegiate instruction in, 307-8, 664 n2 75; American textbooks in, 307 London, Jack: Haeckel's infl. on, 483 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth : 9, 70, 78, 249, 329 334, 431, 451, 458, 459, 483; on E. Eve- rett, 70; at Bowdoin College, 410; Geo. Ticknor's advice to, 410, 724 ni6, 729 n3g; first European journey, 411; residence in Germany, 411; studies German, 411; ap- pointed professor at Harvard, 412; second European journey, 412-14; death of first wife, 412, 729 n38; at Heidelberg, 412; on F. Schlegel, 412; on Schleiermacher, 412; makes survey of German lit., 412-13; on Wilhelm Meister, 413, 421, 736 n85; on Werther, 413, 421, discovers the German song (Lied), 413; infl. by German lit., 413, 423, 729 n39, 740 ni2o; tours Austria and Swit- zerland, 413; meets Frances Appleton, 414; on Goethe, 330, 413-20, 729 n38, 729 n4i, 732 n53 n55-64, 735 n77; 736 n83; prepares Harvard lectures on German lit., 414; Fel- ton's relations with, 415; Andrews Norton and, 415; on Menzel's History of German Lit., 415; letter to Julie Hepp, 420-21; Goethe's "Der Fischer" tr. by, 421; Harvard lectures on Goethe, Richter, and Hoffmann, 421, 731 n49; on Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 422; Uhland's "Das Gliick von Edenhall" tr. by, 423; Pfizer's "Der Junggeselle" tr, by, 423; third European tour of, 423-24, 738 nii5, 739 nu6; Freiligrath's literary rela- tions with, 423, 424, 738 nii5, 739 nii7, 744 ni4i; on cosmopolitanism in American lit., 425; fourth European journey, 426; Goethe's "Uber alien Gipfeln" tr. by, 426; influence of, 426; visits Cogswell and Bancroft, 724 ni6; in Dresden, 725 ni7; at Gottingen, 725 ni8, 725 n2o; romantic pen sketch of himself, 726 n2i; buys books for Bowdoin library, 726 n22; on German versus American universi- ties, 727 n24; educational reform plans and proposals of, 727 n24; meets Sir John Bow- ring, August Hayward, and the Carlyles, 727 n25; in the Scandinavian countries, 727 n26; calls on A. W. v. Schlegel, 728 n28; in the Hepp family circle, 728 n28; delivers letters of introduction from Follen to Heidel- berg professors, 728 n3o; in the Heidelberg library, 728 n3o; German poems tr. by, 726 n2i, 728 n3i, 736 n87, 738 niog, 740 nng, 744 ni43; Paul Fleming as, 728 n32; list of books read at Heidelberg, 728 n34; buys collections of German Lieder, 729 n35 ; with Bryant at Heidelberg, 729 n39; Ticknor's letter to, 729 n39; Salis' "Song of the Silent Land" tr, by, 729 n4i ; Alois Schrieber's "An die Glocke" tr. by, 729 1141 ; on Goethe's doctrines of renunciation and resolution, 729 n 4 I - 735 n 77) in Frankfurt, 729 n4i; in Mannheim, 729 n4i ; in Mainz, 729 n42 ; tour of South Germany and Switzerland, 730 n43; Uhland's "Castle by the Sea" tr. by, 730 n45 ; on Hoffmann von Fallersleben, 730 n45; on the Volkslied, 729 n35, 730 n45, 736 ng2 ; teaching German at Harvard, 730 n47, 731 n5o; on Schiller versus Goethe, 732 n52; growing regard for Goethe, 732 n53~64; on 840 Index Dante versus Goethe, 733 1158 ; on Goethe's character, 733 n6o, 736 n83 ; annotations in teaching copy of Faust used by, 733 n63 ; pro-Germanists surrounding, 734 n7o; Goethe and Horace compared by, 735 n78 ; composed the "Psalms of Life," 735 n7g; lyrics from Goethe tr. by, 736 n87 ; on the German Lied, 736 no2 ; Richter's infl. on, 736 ng3; on Heine, 737 ni02; on transcendentalism, 737 mo4; anti-slavery poems of, 739 mi7; life at Graigie House, 739 nn8; readings of, 739 nn8; German library of, 740 nn8; on the hexameter, 741 ni3o; Tegner's infl. on, 741 ni3o; list of later reading of German authors, 742 ni3i; contemporary German authors read by, 744 ni42; German infl. on later poems of, 744 ni40 ni44; on Alfons Kissner's Chaucer studies, 748 ni73 -Ballads and Other Poems, 423 -Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, The: German infl. on, 740 nug -"Birds of Passage", 426; The Christus, 425 -"The Cobbler of Hagenau": Germanic notes in, 744 ni44 -Evangeline : Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea compared with, 424-26, 740 ni24; sources of, 741 ni2g -The Golden Legend: 424; sources of, 425; Der arme Heinrich compared with, 425-26, 742 ni35 ni37; Faustian infl. on, 425-26, 742 nI 37. 744 nI 38; anachronisms in, 743 ni38; miscellaneous German infl. on, 744 ni38 -Hiawatha: Germanic notes in, 744 ni40 -Hyperion: 454, 491 ; view of Goethe in, 331 ; travel itinerary described in, 414, 736 n8g; autobiographical elements in, 420; infl. by Goethe's Wilhelm Meister: 420; moral of, 421 ; Richter's infl. on, 421 ; Goethe's infl. on, 421 ; inception of, 736 n43 n45 ; factual elements in, 736 n8g, 737 ng8 -Kavanagh: theme of literary nationalism in, 425 -"Mezzo Cammin," 423-24 -"My Lost Youth": infl. by Herder's Volks- lieder, 426 -Old Dominion Zeilung, edited by, 725 ni8 -Outre-Mer: 412; German content of, 726 1123 -Poems on Slavery, 424, 739 nii7 -Poets and Poetry of Europe : 334, 425; Goethe and Schiller in, 424 -"A Psalm of Life": Goethe's infl. on, 420 -"The Skeleton in Armor", 423 -The Spanish Student: German performance of, 738 nii3; Germanic notes in, 738 nii3 -"Victor Galbraith": similarities to Mosen's "Andreas Hofer," 426 -Voices of the Night: German infl. on, 422-23; German transs. in, 423 -"Wreck of the Hesperus, The", 423 Longfellow, Samuel: 148, 252, 624 n868; Con- vers Francis' infl. on, 143; Sam. Johnson's biography of, 637 11930 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann: 243, 302, 307, 313, 3 J 5. 3 X 9> 3 2 °. 347; American trans, of, 308, McCosh on psychology of, 312; Kant com- pared with, 664 n378; Jos. Cook's advocacy of, 669 n3i6; Royce infl. by, 671 n34i; rela- tion to Hegel, Herbart, and Fechner, 672 n364; Wm. James infl. by, 672 n365 Louisiana, Germans in, 3 Louisville, Ky., New Englanders in, 359 Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken: 640 n8; German infl. on, 640 n8 Lovell, Maria, 356 Lowell, Amy, 482 Lowell, James Russell: 9, 78, 448, 451, 458, 459, 476, 484, 486, 491; on J. P. F. Richter, 338, 746 m 63; on Heine, 338, 746 m63; allusi- veness of, 427; education of, 427; on foreign language study, 427; on Schiller, 428, 746 ni63; in Germany, 428, 745 ni5g; studies German, 428, 745 ni48 ni56; German refs. of, 428, 745 ni53; as Harvard professor, 428; on medieval German lit., 746 ni63; on Lessing, 338, 428-29, 486, 684 n75, 745 ni56, 746 m62, 747 ni7o; on Goethe, 427-29, 486, 746 ni63, 7g7 n668; German Shakespeare critics cited by, 429, 486, 747 ni6g ni7i; Wilhelm Meister quoted by, 429; on Herman scholars and scholarship, 429, 748 ni74; Goethe's critical infl. on, 429, 486; on Ger- man lit., 428, 429; romantic literary criti- cism of, 486; on Gervinus, 486, 747 ni6g; eclecticism of, 486, 7g7 n663; on A. W. Schlegel, 486, 747 ni6g, 7g7 n665; A. W. Schlegel's infl. on, 486, 747 ni6g, 7g7 n665 ; on Hamlet, 486; on Goethe's interpretation of Hamlet, 486, 7g7 n668; on German Shakespeare criticism, 486, 747 m6g ni7i; on Hawthorne, 706, ng3, 745 ni53; German poems tr. by, 745 ni48; German authors read by, 745 ni5i ; on the German language, 745 ni56; on Max Miiller, 746 ni62; on Car- lyle's German sources, 746 ni62; on the Sturm-und-Drang writers, 746 ni63; on Wieland, 746 ni63; on German humor, 746 ni63; on Carlyle, 747 m65; on P. H. Sillig, 747 ni7o; on Ulrici, 747 ni7o; on German Dante scholars, 748 ni72 ; on German aesthe- tics, 748 ni77; Shakespeare criticism of, 7g7 n663; on Goethe as critic, 7g7 n668; on Coleridge, 7g7 n668 Lowell Institute: lectures on Leibnitz at, 312- 13 Lucretius: 178; Emerson's refs. to, 160 Ludwig, Emil, 14 Ludwig, Otto, 340, 356 Liicke, Friedrich : Ripley on, 209 Index 841 Luther, Martin: 39, 55, 160, 329, 343, 344, 346, 500 1128, 501 1132, 503 1147, 508 11105, 516 ni62, 603 11305; American interest in, 21; Calvin compared with, 21-23; Roger Wil- liams relations to, 25, 502 ^5-43; J. Ed- wards' reading of, 37; doctrines of, 38; Emerson's refs. to, 166; Lowell on, 428; Whittier on, 431 ; American Puritans on, 499 nio-21; "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott" tr. by Hedge, 584 n7ii ; Parker on, 622 n655; Lutheranism: Puritans infl. by, 21; in Ger- many, 22-23; m America, 40, 500 n23; Cooper on, 363 Luther College, philosophy at, 668 n3o8 Lutoslawski, wincenty, 279 Lyceum in the U.S. : history of, 497 ni8 ; lecture program of, 639 n3 Lyell, Sir Charles: 200, 322; Emerson's refs. to, 167, 194 Lyman, Theodore, 69 Lyric poetry of Germany, American reputation of, 33°. 333 Lytton, Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, The Beauforts adapted from Night and Morning by, 358 MAADER. See Baader, Franz von Mabie, Hamilton Wright, 654 ni66 McClure, Edward: 274, 294, 657 n203; in Con- cord, 293 Maclure, William: 225; Pestalozzi's infl. on, 626 n704 McCosh, James: 321; Laws of Discursive Thought, 307; Kant praised by, 307; Hege- lianism opposed by, 307 ; Scottish realism es- poused by, 307; on Scottish philosophy, 312, 659 11231, 668 n3i3 ; philosophical position of, 311; on Scottish versus German philosophy, 312; on Kant, 659 n23o Macready, William Charles, 356 McCulloch, Mary C, 286, 293 McCullough, John: 358; in role of Kotzebue's Rolla, 356 McGilvary, Evander B. : 640 n8; Howison's infl. on, 673 n374; studies Hegel, 673 11374 Mach, Ernst: H. Adams' infl. by, 483 MacKenzie, Henry: pro-Germanism of, 348 Mackie, John Milton: in Germany, 768 n338; on Leibnitz, 768 n338 ; German transs. by, 768 n 33 8 Mackintosh, James: 540ni94; Emerson's refs. to, 160 McMurray, Charles A., 281 McMurray, Frank, 281 Madison, James, 55 Magirus, Johannes, 29 Mahan, Asa: continental idealism adopted by, 309; Cousin's infl. on, 309, 666 n294; Fichte's infl. on, 309-10 ; Coleridge's infl. on, 666 n294 ; Kant's infl. on, 666 n294; on German philos- ophy, 666 n294 Maierus, Michael, 507 n94 Mailath, Johann: Longfellow's use of Alt-deut- sche Geschichte by, 425 Malthus, Thomas Robert: Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166 Mangan, J. C. : transs. by, 334 Mann, Horace, 78 Mann, Thomas, 14 Marcet, Jane: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Marlitt E. (pseud.): 347, 683 n93; Mrs. A. L. Wister's transs. from, 685 ng5 Marlowe, Julia, 357 Marquette, Mich. : Friends in Council of, 656 n20o Marsh, James: 59, 65, 78, 85, 112, 149, 158, 161, 183, 190, 257, 303, 305, 329, 491; on Jacobi, 92; Herder's infl. on, no; Emerson's indebtedness to, 121; Moses Stuart's rela- tions with, 131, 133; at Dartmouth, 131; at Cambridge, 131; at Andover, 131; reads Biographia Literaria, 131 ; inspired by Coler- idge to read Kant, 131 ; reads Plato, 131 ; ex- tends knowledge of German lit., 131; trans- lates Bellermann, 132; at Hampden-Sydney, 132; trans. Herder's Vom Geist der ebrdischen Poesie, 132, 332; elected President of Univ. of Vermont, 132; reorganizes Univ. of Ver- mont, 132; on the distinction between under- standing and reason, 132, 163, 603 n28g; moral system taught by, 132; "Preliminary Essay" to Coleridge's Aids, 135, 139; adopts Coleridge's definitions of Kantian terms, 133, 135; on Coleridge, 133-35; neo-Platonism of, 134; harmony of philosophy and theology sought by, 135; Coleridge's infl. on, 135, 139, 564 n459, 574 n6i3; Aristoteleanism of, 136, 577 n634, 579 n659; Oersted's infl. on, 136; Carus' infl. on, 136, 579 n66 n668; deviates from strict Kantion definitions, 136-37; posthumously published writings of, 139; at- tempted systematic philosophy of, 139-40; Kantian elements in the "Psychology" of, 140-41 ; growing conservatism of, 141 ; Fries' infl. on, 141-42, 564 n459, 579 n666, 580 n673; late works of, 142; Hegewisch ed. by, 142; personal infl. of, 142-43; on Dugald Stewart, 540 ni93; on German theology, 564 n459, 574 n6og; Pollen's relations with, 564 n459; on understanding and reason, 575 n6i4 n5i6 n6i6 n62o; on science, 577 11634; on Kant, 575 n628, 577 n634 n637 n639-40, 578 n659, 579 n665, 580 n673; on pure and practical reason, 579 n659; on space and time, 579 n665; refs. to Kant, 579 n66o; psychology of, 580 n673 ; on Fichte, 586 n674; on Schelling, 580 n674; tribute to, 580 n677; publications of, 580 n678-8i; Shedd 842 Index infl. by, 581 11682; on Brook Farm, 581 11683; Emerson infl. by, 603 n2g5 Marshall, YVyzemann: in the role of Kotzebue's Rolla, 356 Martin, Benjamin Nicholas: on Kant, 650^230 Martineau, James: on Kant and Price, 538 m66; Ripley's review of the Rationale of Religious Inquiry, 209 Marx, Karl: 3, 347; Emerson's ref. to, 172; Das Kapital, 685 ng6; Manifesto, 685 1196 Maryland: Germans in, 33 Massachusetts Bay Company: German inte- rests of, 21 Massachusetts Historical Society, 33 Massachusetts Quarterly Review: 151; German lit. in, 633 n86i ; Parker on, 638 11946 Materialism: 319, 321; Emerson on, 590 n56 Mather, Cotton: 13, 31, 32, 42, 425, 427; A. H. Francke's correspondence with, 19; German authors cited by, 33-34 ; familiarity with German scholarship and science, 33, 34; interest in German pietism, 34-36, 508 mo6; J. Arndt's infl. on, 35; The Christian Philo- sopher, 35, 505, n59, 507 ng6; India Christ- iana inspired by Ziegenbalg, 35; Pufendorf's infl. on, 47; Emerson's refs. to, 160; German correspondents of, 503 n48, 508 mo4; Mag- nalia Christi Americana, 505 n62; sources of, 507 ng6-99 ; German literary infl. on, 507 n97-g8; German encyclopedic works in li- brary of, 508 ngg; use of German sources of information, 509 111 10 Mather, Increase: 30; library of, 33, 506 n70, 507 "93 Mather, Margaret, 355 Mather, Richard, 503 n47 Mather, Samuel: 501 n3i ; interest in Germany, 36; biography of A. H. Francke, 36; gives German books to Harvard, 36 Mather family: library of, 503 n46; German books in library of, 507 ng3-gg Matter, Emerson on, 183, 190 Matthesius (Matthiae), Johann: Serapta oder Bergpostilla, 27 Matthisson, Friedrich von, 343, 345 Maurice, Frederick Denton : on Kant, 88 Mawe, John, Linnaean System of Conchology, 167 Mayhew, Jonathan, 47, 81 Mead, Edwin Doak: 245; on Lessing, 338 Mears, John William: on Kant, 659 n230 Melanchthon, Philipp, 503 n47 Mellen, John: On Divine Vengeance, Emerson's refs. to, 160 Melodrama: replaced by romantic drama, 356 Melting-pot theory, 4 Melville, Herman: 362; education of, 436; second trip to Europe, 437; Geo. J. Adler's talks on German philosophy with, 437; Franklin Taylor's talks on German lit. with, 437; library of, 437; visits Holy Land, 437; on Niebuhr, 437; on Strauss's Leben Jesu, 437. 757 n2 43: on Kant, 437, 438, 757 n2 4 7, 758 n249 n25o; on validity of Kantian ideas of the reason, 438; on inscrutability, 438, 758 n257-59 ; Kant's infl. on, 439 ; on Schiller, 439. 759 11261; on Goethe, 439, 759 n262; German romantic infl. on, 439; familiarity with books, 756 n236 n238-39, 757 n245; buys German books, 756 n239; visit to Germany, 756 n239; German authors read by, 756 n24i; Hawthorne and, 757 11244; Biblical refs. of, 757 n245; on Luther and Melanchthon, 757 n245; on philosophers, 757 n246; on Schopenhauer, 757 n247; on tran- scendentalism, 758 n25on258; on the post- Kantians, 758 n258, 759 n26o; on Fichte, 759 n26o; on Hegel, 759 n26o; on German scientists, 759 n26o — Mardi: 436, 437; on Christian faith in, 438; quest for social justice in, 438; infl. of Fou- qu6's Undine on Yillah in, 439 — Moby-Dick: 436, 437; search for the abso- lute in, 438 ; Kant's first Critique likened to, 438 - — Pierre: 436; moral problems of, 437; Kant's second Critique likened to, 439 — Redburn, 437; Typee, 436 Mencken, Henry Louis, 14, 491 Mendelssohn, Moses: 174; Emerson's refs. to, 172 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Jacob Ludwig Felix: 279, 289, 685 ng6 Mennonites in America: 21, 22, 23, 40; literary productivity of, 496 n8 Menzel, Wolfgang: 331, 343; 558 n54o; Parker on, 621 n649; bias of, 330 —Die deutsche Literatur: Felton's trans, of, 329, 422; Goethe condemned in, 330; Long- fellow on, 415 Merck, Johann Heinrich: Emerson's refs. to, J 7 2 Mercurius Gallobelgicus, 37 Mesmerism : Poe's use of, 393 Metaphysics: Emerson's dislike of, 178, 206; American collegiate instruction in, 308, 310; Emerson on metholology of, 603 n287 Metaphysics in American colleges: German infl. on, 665 n285; textbooks used in the teaching of, 665 n286 Metaphysics in Germany: Mme. de Stael on, 101 Metempsychosis: Poe's use of, 393 Methodism: influenced by pietism, 37-40; Moravian infl. on, 511 ni28 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand, 339, 340 Meynen, Emil : bibliography by, 7 Meyer, Richard M., 685 ng6 Index 843 Mezes, Sidney Edward, 640 n8 Michaelis, Johann David, 47-48, 55, 618 11589 Michaud, Regis: on New England transcenden- talism, 106, 556 n-$6j Michelet, Jules: on Hegel, 652 ni22 Michigan: Germans in, 11; education in, 666 n299 Microcosm: Emerson on, 193 Midwest: German-American radicals in, 246, 247; Hegelian philosophy adapted to, 643 n55; German drama in, 691 ni45 Mill, John Stuart, 307 Miller, Edmund E., 14 Miller, Joaquin Cincinnatus Heine, 14 Miller, Perry: on American Puritanism, 500 n28 Miller, Samuel: 49, 55, 149, 564 n46o; Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 60-61 ; on German learning and scholarship, 61 ; Willich's infl. on, 86; projected historical works of, 522 n2 ; sources of his knowledge on Germany, 522 n3 n7; on Kant, 522 n3 n5; on German lit. and learning, 522-24 n7-i3 Milton, John: 279, 465, 603 n295; Emerson on, 160, 184, 604 n3i Milwaukee, Wis. : Goethe School in, 284-85 ; Snider in, 299; Union of German-American Liberal Societies in, 634 n866 Mind and matter: Emerson on, 158-59, 185, 187, 614 n530 Miner, William H.: Snider's literary executor, 655 m85 Minnesingers: A. E. Kroeger on, 685 ng6 Missouri Historical Library, 273 Missouri Historical Society: copy of Brok- meyer's trans, of Hegel's Logic deposited in, 648 ng2 Mitchell, Ellen M., 279 Mitchell, Isaac, 364 Mitchell, Samuel Latham: 55; Alex. v. Hum- boldt and, 55 Modern Language Assn. of America: Anglo- German Group of, no Modern foreign languages and literatures: American collegiate instruction in, 310 Morike, Eduard, 340, 345 Moesinger, Heinrich: Huiko, 358 Mohammed: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Mommsen, Theodor, 347 Monism : Emerson on, 202 Monist, The, 302 Monroe, James, 55 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de: 604 11315; Emerson on, 166, 591 n79 Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de: Emer- son's refs. to, 160 Moody, Joshua, 28 Moor, Carl: famous actors in role of, 686 mo4 Moral and natural law: Emerson on, 601 n268 Moral and natural nature: Emerson on, 178 Moral law: Emerson on the validity of, 175, 176, 178, 188; confirmed by scientific law, 177 Moral idealism: Emerson on, 589 n42 Moral reality: Emerson on, 178 Moravians: 21, 23, 32, 40; schools of, 42; in America, 61 ; the Wesleys infl. by, 38, 39, 510, 511 ni28 More, Henry, 216, 228 More, Paul Elmer: 491; on Thoreau, 434 Morgan, Bayard Q., 344, 345, 346, 347, 496 119 Morgan, Horace Hills: 279, 281, 289, 291, 639 n3; literary productivity of, 259 Morier, John P.: Irving's relations with, 374 Morris, George Sylvester: 280, 296-98, 301, 302, 307, 310, 313, 669 n32o; H. B. Smith's infl. on, 306, 670 n333 n336; philosophic per- sonality of, 314-15; on Hegel, 314, 663 n263; on Kant, 314; W. T. Harris' relations with, 314; Ueberweg's History of Philosophy tr. by, 314; "German Philosophical Classics" ed. by, 314; Kant and Hegel transs. by, 314; ethical theism of, 315; on German philosophy, 640 n9; Kant analyzed by, 640 ng; at the Sara- toga Kant centennial, 659 n23o; professional career of, 660 n24& ; German theological infl. on, 662 n263; on Schleiermacher, 662 n263; on Strauss, 663 n263 ; at the Univ. of Berlin, 669 n3i4, 670 n333; taught by Trendelen- berg, 670 n333 ; at the Univ. of Michigan, 670 n333; in Germany, 670 n336; Trendelen- berg's infl. on, 670 n336 Morrison, Lewis: in role of Mephistopheles, 356 Morse, Edward S. : on evolution, 633 n866 Mosenthal, Salomon Hermann von: American performances of plays by, 357, Daly's adap- tation of Deborah by, 357 — Leah the Forsaken: 357; Daly's adaptation of, 690 ni4o; success of, 690 ni40; synopsis of, 690 ni40 — Madeleine: 357; Daly's adaptation of, 690 ni4i ; synopsis of, 690 ni4i ; Clara Morris in title role of, 690 ni4i Moser, Gustav von: 347; plays of, 684 n84; Daly's adaptations of plays by, 690-91 ni43 Mosheim, Johann Lorenz von: 47, 55 ; Bentley's interest in, 53 ; Ecclesiastical History men- tioned by Emerson, 160 Mosheimsche Gesellschaft, 65 Morse, Jedidiah, 53, 54 Motley, John Lothrop: 75, 701 1142; early German contacts of, 76; on Goethe, 76, 330, 331, 679 n35; Tieck's Bluebeard tr. by, 76; Otto Bismarck and, 76, 533 ni25; The Che- valier de Satinski, 447; education of, 533 ni24; at Gottingen, 533 ni25; Alex. Keyser- ling and, 533 ni25; travels in Germany, 533 n 1 25; on German historical methodology, 76-77. 533 11128-29 844 Index Moulton, Richard Green: Snider on, 654 11166 Mount Holyoke College: philosophy taught at, 668 n3o8 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: 8, 289, 352; J. S. Dwight on, 450 Miihlbach, Louise (pseud.), 347 Muhlenberg, Frederick Augustus Conrad, 43 Muhlenberg, Gotthilf Henry Ernst, 43 Muhlenberg, Heinrich Melchior, 42, 43 Muhlenberg, John Peter, 43 Muhlenberg family, 49, 305 Mulder, Gerardus Johannes: 199; Emerson's refs. to, 172 Miiller, Friedrich M.: Emerson's refs. to, 172 Miiller, Johannes von: Emerson's refs. to, 172 Miiller, Julius, 632 n858 Miiller, Matthias: in Boston, 52 Miiller, Max: 138; Emerson's refs. to, 172 Miiller, Wilhelm: 334, 343, 344; lyrics of, 338 Miiller, Amand Gottfried Adolf: popularity of Die Schuld by, 353, 354, 358; the vampire theme used by, 718 n2i6 Munch, Friedrich, 622 n668 Miinchhausen. See Munchhausen Miinster, Sabastian, Cosmographia, 503 n4 Miinsterberg, Hugo: 302, 304, 318; at Harvard, 320, 669 n3i4 Muhlenberg. See Muhlenberg Muirhead, John Henry: 313, 539 ni83; on Coleridge, 542 n2 12-13 Munchhausen, Karl Friedrich Hieronimus, Baron von, 8, 327, 346 677 n6 Mundt, Frau Klara Miiller, 347 Mundt, Theodor: Emerson's refs. to, 172 Murat, Achille: 160; Emerson and, 590 n66 Murdock, James: 107-8, 149; Sketches of Modern Philosophy analyzed, 107, 1 12-14, 561 n442, 562 n443 ; on Kant, 113, 561 n442, 562 n443; on Hegel, 113; Jacobi interpreted by, 113; on Coleridge, 113; on French eclec- ticism, 113; philosophical character of, 113; career of, 561 n44i ; on German theology, 561 "44 r Murdock, Kenneth, 33 Musaeus, Johann Karl August: 346, 372; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Alex. H. Everett on, 333; Volksmdrchen der Deutschen used by Irving, 371; Poe on, 392, 713 11164 Musculus, Wolfgang, 29 "Musical Evenings" in St. Louis, 289 Mysticism: Emerson's tendency toward, 192- 93 NACHTIGAL, Johann Konrad Christoph. See Otmar (pseud.) Nason, Emma H.: on Goethe's love affairs, 683 n72 Nashville, Tenn. : Schiller's Robbers and Tell on the stage of, 355 National Education Association: Harris as president of, 642 n39 National Liberal League: Index the o^jcial organ of, 634 n868 Naturalism, 319, 321 Nature: Emerson on, 187, 189, 201, 589 1137, 605 n320, 607 n43o Natural law: Emerson on, 184 Natural-rights philosophers: Follen on, 118 Nazareth, Pa. : schools in, 42 Neander, Johann August Wilhelm: Emerson's refs. to, 166, 172; Schaff infl. by, 307 Necessity: Emerson on, 161, 202 Neef, Francis Joseph Nicolas: 225; educational career of, 626 n702 ; writings of, 626 n702 Neo-Platonism : Emerson's views on, 192-98, 609 n448 n455; Emerson infl. by, 195; Alcott infl. by, 229 New Education: Harris opposed to, 281 New England Almanac, 31 New England Transcendentalism. See Tran- scendentalism (New England) New England Transcendentalists. See Tran- scendentalists (New England) Newness, 81, 82, 536 ni52. See also Transcen- dentalism New Orleans, La. : Schiller's Robbers on the stage of, 355 Newton, Isaac: 610 n4&i; Coleridge's criticism of, 89; Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166 Newtown, Mass., 24 New Views, The. See Newness, The; Transcen- dentalism New York (state) : Germans in, 33 ; Palatines in, 40 New York City: John Street Theatre in, 49; Restoration and Eighteenth-century Eng- lish drama in, 348 ; statistical summary of German plays in, 351-52; German drama in, 355, 686 ni04-5; Schiller's Robbers and Wilhelm Tell on the stage of, 355; Faust plays on the stage of, 355 ; German-speaking theater in, 357-58; Altes Stadttheater in, 358; Neues Stadttheater in, 358; Winter Garden in, 358; Niblo's Garden in, 358; pro- minent German-American merchants in, 518 ni88 New York Evening Post: German lit. in, 410 New York Spy: dramatic criticism in, 354 Nibelungenlied: 428; Whitman on, 467 Niblo's Garden, 358 Niebuhr, Berthold Georg: 86, 112, 185, 347, 437; Follen indebted to, 118; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Whitman on, 467; Lieber infl. by, 570 n542; Poe on, 713 ni74 Nieritz, Karl Gustav, 680 n49 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm: 336, 340, 346; J. G. Fletcher on, 483; on Carlyle, 550 n2g8 Nitsch, Friedrich A.: 227, 539 ni78 ni89; View Index 845 of Kantian Principles, 62 ; Emerson reads Kant as presented by, 597 ni53 Niven, John, 306 Nordau, Max, 347, 685 no,6 Norris, Frank, 482 North American Review: 277, 329, 490; on ec- lecticism, 105; German lit. in, 328 Norton, Andrews: 73, 8i, no, 130, 131, 149, 171, 223, 681 n58; German theologians read by, 13, 557 n393 ; on importance of German learning, 55; attacks German "infidelity," 80, 109; change of attitude toward study of German, 150; debt to German Biblical scholarship, 150-51, 585 ^22-24; Noah Porter's attack on, 210; Parker's opinion of, 216; on Goethe, 330-31, 679 n35; Longfellow and, 415; opposes study of German, 561 0439; professional career of, 585 n72o; major works of, 585 n72i; Emerson on, 596 ni47; Clarke on, 596 ni5o; Evidences of the Gen- uineness of the Gospels, 585 ^22-24 ; Rip- ley's reply to Latest Form of Infidelity by, 210 Norton-Ripley Controversy: 109-10, in, 209, 641, n20, 662 n258; Parker's position on, 218 Norton, Charles Eliot, 277 Norton, John, 505 n62 Nott, Eliphalet, 59 Novalis (pseud.): 97, 189, 223, 242, 258, 334, 338. 343. 345. 393. 439. 44°, 444, 44 8 . 461. 484, 607 n424; Selbsllolung doctrine of, 97; Emerson on, 172, 197, 198; Emerson's quo- tations from 185; Poe's "Mystery of Marie Roget" infl. by, 393: M. Fuller on, 441; Emerson infl. by, 602 n268; H. H. Boyesen on, 684 n83; Poe on, 712 ni57; Poe's transs. from, 713 ni74; the vampire motif in, 717 n2i6 — Fragmente: Poe's use of, 401, 712 ni57 — Heinrich von Ofterdingen: 397, 461, 680 n48 ; Longfellow's reading of, 413 Novelle of Germany: American vogue of, 330, 333 ; collections of, 333 Novelle of Germany: American vogue of, 330, 333 ; collections of, 333 Noyes, George R., 149 Nuremberg "Ephemerides," 34 Nuttal, Thomas: Emerson's refs. to Ornithology of Nutting, Mary E. : on Goethe, 683 n70 Nye, Russell B.: on Bancroft, 552 mo9 OBERLIN, Jean Frederic : Emerson's refs. to, 166 Occultism: Emerson on, 193 O'Connor, William Douglas, 470 Odell, George Clinton Dinsmore: on Kotzebue's Stranger, 350 Oegger, GuillaumeC.L. : Alcott's reading of, 229 — True Messiah: 610 n458; Emerson infl. by, 172, 607 n405 ; M. Fuller's trans, of, 607 ^05 Ohlenschlager, Adam Gottlieb: Poe on, 392 Orsted, Hans Christian: 199; Marsh affected by, 136; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Marsh's refs. to, 579 n666 Ohio Valley: literature of, 624 n68o Okely, Francis, Life of Jacob Boehme, 228 Oken, Lorenz: 171, 198, 200; Hedge on, 582 n70i ; Emerson on, 172, 194, 197, 597 ni25, 610 n463, 613 n5i6, 614 n528, 627 n742; on evolution, 610 ^63; Alcott's reading of, 627 n723; Alcott's theory of Genesis infl. by Physiophilosophy of, 228-29, 627 n743 Oldenburg, Heinrich, 34, 503 n48 Old Philosophers' Row (St. Louis), 261, 267, 272 Oliver, James, 31 Olshausen, Hermann: 247; Osgood on, 635 n88g One and the Many, The: Emerson on, 175, 193 O'Neill, Eugene: German expressionists' infl. on, 483 Open Court, 151 Opera: on New York stage, 352; on Phila- delphia stage, 352 Originality: Emerson on, 587 ni5-2i Osceola, Mo. : 293, 294, 302 ; philosophical club in, 263, Plato School of, 292 Osgood, Samuel: 48, 247, 336, 359; periodical contributions of, 247; Krug's Atonement tr. by, 247; Olshausen's Our Lord's Passion tr. by, 247; on the "faith" philosophy of Germany, 247; on DeWette, 247, 560 ^23; on Schleiermacher, 248, 634 n887; Froth- ingham's argument with, 248 ; transcenden- talism of, 248; teaches German at Union College, 312; on the Forty-eighters, 634 n877; on transcendentalism, 634 n887; on the Schegels, 634 n887 ; on Olshausen, 635 n889; on positivism, 635 n8g2 Ossoli, Sarah Margaret Fuller. See Fuller, Sarah Margaret Ostwald, Wilhelm: Henry Adams infl. by, 483 Otmar (pseud.): 379; Irving's use of Volks- sagen of, 367-71 Otway, Thomas: early American performances of, 348 Over-Soul: Emerson concept of, 177, 190 Overstreet, Harry A., 540 n8 Owen, Richard: Emerson's refs. to, 167, 194, 614 n528; Emerson's reading of, 201 Oxenford, John, 474 PALATINE refugees in London, 21 Paley, William: 359; Emerson's refs. to, 160 Palfrey, John Gorham: Follen succeeded by, 564 n463 Palmer, George Herbert: 318; in Germany, 846 Index 302; idealistic theism of, 316; Kantian infl. on, 316; Caird and, 316 Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), 228 Pareus, David, 24, 26 Paris: Emerson in, 171 Parker, Theodore: 75, 81, 85, 107, 112, 119, 120, 143, 148, 207, 213, 241, 242, 245, 247, 250, 257, 294, 329, 432, 440, 446, 448, 449, 450, 455, 610 n462, 636 ngi4, 641 n20, 662 n258; reads German theologians and philo- sophers, 12, 216, 620 n623, 626 n628; The Transient and Permanent in Christianity , 80, 209, 217-18, 618 n6o3; Follen's contacts with, 122; engages in the Norton-Ripley controversy, 123, 210-n; "infidelity" of, 209-10; early German studies of, 123, 215; Hedge's infl. on, 215; Francis' infl. on, 215; German books in library of, 215-16; in the Harvard Divinity School, 216; DeWette's infl. on, 216, 221, Astruc's infl. on, 216; Ackermann's impact on, 216; Norton con- sulted by, 216; reads Coleridge, 216; at West Roxbury, 216; linguistic attainments of, 215; Ammon's Forlbildung des Christenthums tr. by, 216; Eichhorn's Urgeschichte tr. by, 216; learning of, 216—17, 620 n528; Relation of Jesus to his Age and the Ages, 217; theological aims of, 217; library of, 217, 617 ^83, 621 n629; debt to German biblical criticism, 217, 221-22; Ackermann's Das Christliche in Plato reviewed by, 217; on Strauss' Das Le- ben Jesit, 217, 560 n436, 621 n632; Strauss' infl. on, 217, 561 n438; opposes Strauss' myth theory, 217; Menzel's German Literature re- viewed by, 217; on Follen, 217; "The Amer- ican Scholar" of, 218; skeptical attiude fos- tered by his German studies, 218; transcen- dentalism defended by, 218; Discourse on Matters Pertaining to Religion of, 218-19; Kant's infl. on, 219-20; independent thought of, 219; German philosophy appraised by, 219; ethical views of, 219, 621 n65i; Leib- nitz's infl. on, 219; on Hegelian dialectics, 219—20; Hegel's religious position criticized by, 220; on Kant, 219, 220-21, 621 n643, 622 n657; on Goethe, 220, 330, 331, 621 n654, 764 n305; on Luther, 220, 222; on Schiller, 220; on Heine, 220, 338; on religion versus philosophy, 220; on the British philosophers, 220; Kant acknowledged as his philosophic guide, 220; "absolute theism" of, 220; on reason, 220; Schleiermacher's infl. on, 221; spiritual religion of, 221; German historians' infl. on, 221; Herder's infl. on, 221; Eich- horn's infl. on, 221; Schlosser's infl. on, 221; Gervinus' infl. on, 221; Ronge's infl. on, 221; European tour of, 221, 222, 622 n666; hears Schelling lecture at Berlin, 222; meets Tho- luck, Gervinus, Ullmann, and Ewald at Halle, 222; meets DeWette at Basle, 222; meets Oken at Zurich, 222; German popular- ity of works of, 222; Tubingen infl. on, 243; Emerson compared with, 245; O. B. Froth- ingham's biography of, 249; Louisa M. Al- cott's association with, 448; on Prescott, 533 ni22; on DeWette, 560 n424; Hedge on, 584 n7i6; on Cousin, 604 n3i5; Ripley's library bought by, 617 n583; Ripley on, 620 n6i8; list of German theologians read by, 620 n623 n626 n628; DeWette's Introduction to the Old Testament edited by, 620 n62 7; on the authenticity of the Bible, 621 n638; on Menzel, 621 n649; on Luther, 622 n655; list of transs. from German authors, 622 n656; on Buckle, 622 n662; Lieberand, 622 n665; in Germany, 622 n666; German refugees aided by, 622 n668; Clarke and, 623 n675, 624 n676; intuitionalism attacked by, 629 n8n; W. H. Furness and, 632 n853; Emerson on, 634 n873 ; Bartol on, 635 n899 ; O. B. Froth- ingham infl. by, 636 ngoi ; Wasson on, 637 ng27 Parkerism, 242 Parkman, Francis, 75, 76, 334 Parmenides: Emerson on, 613 n505 Parr, Samuel, 86 Parrington, Vernon Louis, 25 Parry, Sir William Edward: Emerson on the Voyages of, 167 Pascal, Blaise: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Pastorius, Francis Daniel: 19, 32, 41-42, 751 ni97; notable achievements of, 42; Whittier on, 431 Pattee, Fred Lewis: on Hawthorne, 706 n94 Patton, Robert Bridges: in Germany, 77, 533 ni3o; professional career of, 533 ni30 Patton, Simon N., 279 Paul, Saint: Emerson on, 184, 194 Paulding, James Kirke: on Gottingen, 363-64; anti-Europeanism of, 696 ni94; on "German vagaries" and "sentimental immoralities," 696 ni94 Paulsen, Friedrich, 319 Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, 130, 243, 618 n589 n6o2, 636 ngoi Payne, John Howard: Irving collaborates with, 700 n39 Peabody, Andrew Preston: 19, 149; on Andrew Norton's Discourse, no; on New England transcendentalism, 662 n258; on Hedge's Prose Writers, 679 n36 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer: 82, 83, 279, 442, 652 ni2i; Self-Education, 538 ni67; De Gerando's correspondence with, 538 ni67 Peabody, Ephraim, 105, 149, 257, 359 Peabody, Sophia, 382 Pearson, Karl: Henry Adams on, 614 n523 Index 847 Pedagogical Society (St. Louis), 287, 654 11180 Peirce, Charles Sanders: 279, 280, 302, 304, 313, 651 11121; studies Kant, 302; Hegel and, 302, 669 n322, 670 n324; education of, 313; indebtedness to German idealists, 313, 669 n322-23, pragmatism of, 313, Kant's infl. on, 313-14, 323, 669 n322; debt to Hegel, 314; Schelling's infl. on, 314; Royce indebted to, 314, 670 n223; Emerson and, 669 n322; W. James and, 669 n322; and St. Louis Hege- lianism, 669 n323; influences on, 669 n323; on the thing-in-itself, 670 n325; on the proof of God, 670 n325; on Hegel, 670 n33i Peirce, Benjamin: at the Radical Club, 633 n866 Pell, John: German interests of, 20 Pelz, Eduard, 622 n668 Pemberton, Ebenezer, 28 Penhoen, Barchou de, 610 n46i Penn, William: 42, 81; relations with Germans, 3 2 Pennsylvania: Germans in, 3, 4, 7, 32, 61; German schools in, 304-5 Pennsylvania-German culture: histories of, 496 n8 Pennsylvania-German literature : bibliography of, 496 n8; studies of, 497 ni7 Pennsylvania Germans: literary exploitation of, 482 Percival, James Gates: 56-57 influenced by German linguistic researchers, 56-57; writes German verse, 409; studies German philo- sophers, 409; list of German transs. by, 723 n6; poetic versatility of, 723 n6 Perkins, Jacob: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Perkins, James H., 105, 149 Perry Bliss, 78 Perry, Michael, 30 Personalism, 323 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich : 42, 122, 225, 226, 242; Follen on, 115, 563 n455; Emerson's refs. to, 166, 172; Ripley on, 208; American infl. of, 226, 626 n702 n7o6; American books on, 563 n455; J. M. Keagy's discipleship of, 626 n705 Petraeus, Augustinus, 503 n48 Pfeffel, Gottfried Conrad, 345 Pfeiffer, Ida Laura (Reyer) : Frauenfahrt of, 347; Thoreau on, 435 Pfizer, Paul : Longfellow's trans, from. 423 Pfleiderer, Otto, 320 Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard, 55 Philadelphia: Germans in, 41; early German schools in, 45 ; Germanophiles in, 64 Philadelphia stage: English plays on, 348; statistical summary of German plays on, 35 1 . 35 2 ; German drama on, 355, 686 mo4 nio5; Schiller's Robbers and Tell on, 355; Faust plays on, 355; Schiller on, 686 nio5; opposition to, 686 nio6; German musicians on, 686 nio6; German performances on, 686 nio6; Kotzebue on, 688 nii3 Philalathes, Einrenaeus, 505 n6i Phillips, Jonathan, 563 n455 Phillips, Wendell, 243 Philosophers of Germany: Emerson's tribute to, 199, 206; "transcendent" abilities of, 199 Philosophical Review, 303 Philosophical Society (St. Louis): 261, 264, 268, 2 73> 2 77. 3° 2 ; native orientation of, 261; or- ganization of, 263, 271, 641 n25; officers of, 263, 271; constitution of, 271; membership of, 271, 616 n562, 646 n8o; aims of, 641 n23; list of subjects discussed by, 647 n85 Philosophy: Emerson on, 186, 589 n35, 602 11268; American textbooks of, 307-10; Emerson's reading of, 593 nio6 Philosophy in American colleges: Aristotelian infl. on, 59; proliferation of courses in, 307, 310; study of, 310; instruction in, 666 n297 Philosophy of Germany: Congregationalists' interest in, 148, 151; Hedge on, 182; Emer- son's reading of, 171-72; Herder on, 209; Ripley on, 213; American prejudice against, 303; American collegiate instruction in, 310; at Johns Hopkins, 311; American adapta- tions of, 321 Physics: Emerson's interest in, 169 Pickering, Timothy: Ebeling and, 51 Pierce, George W., 729 n39 Pietas Hallensis, 35, 39 Pietism : humanitarianism fostered by, 509 ni2o; social implications of, 510 ni2i Pietism of Germany: Quakers infl. by, 31-32; origins of, 37; Methodism infl. by, 37-40; C. Mather's interest in, 508 nio6; Great Awakening infl. by, 509 ni20 Pietistic lit. of Germany: American vogue of, 63, 3 2 7, 358, 512 ni33; moral impact of, 510 ni2i Pintard, John, 53 Pioneer, The (Boston) : German radical thought in, 634 n877 Piscator, Johann, 26, 29 Pistorius, Johann, 28 Pitcairn, Joseph: 50; Ebeling and, 51 Plagiarism: Emerson on, 587 ni5~2i Platen-Hallermunde, August, Graf von: 334, 340, 345, 686 ng7; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Wm. Hurlbut on, 681 n53 Plato: 118, 206, 228, 303, 311, 319, 322, 468, 544 n226, 612 n48i; Emerson on, 160, 590 n6i, 581 n79, 609 n449; Emerson regards Coleridge superior to, 163-64, idealism of, 189, 590 n6i, 591 n79; Emerson's debt to, 586 n6; dualism of, 591 n78; Jowett's trans, of, 591 n78; Emerson's dissatisfaction with dualism of, 591 n79 n86; Emerson evaluates 848 Index Kant in relation to, 591 njg; Coleridge on, 606 n38g; Alcott's reading of, 627 ^23 Plato Club (Jacksonville, 111.): 263, 302; mem- bers of, 290; Hegel studied by, 290; visitors and speakers, 290-91 ; Snider's talks to, 291; Thos. Davidson's talks to, 291 ; W. T. Harris and, 291; Alcott's visits to, 291; Journal of the American Akademe published by, 291; Hiram K. Jones founds, 655 mgi Plato Club (Quincy, 111.) : organization of, 657 n203; list of members of, 657 n203 Platonist, The, 656 nig5 Plattner, Ernst: Hedge on, 582 n70i Playfair, John: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Plotinus: 194, 226, 228, 271; Emerson on, 160, 173, 192, 6o9n448n455; Emerson infl. by, 193 Plutarch: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Plymouth, Mass.: Separatists of, 24 Pochmann, Henry A.: Bibliography of German Culture in America, 11, 14, 497 ni6 Poe, Edgar Allan: 9, 362, 364; "Germanism" °f> 365; on Hawthorne, 365, 382, 384, 706 ng2, 707 nioo nioi; German infl. denied by, 388 ; German studies of, 388-89 ; at the Univ. of Virginia, 389, 710 ni3i ; Goethe quoted by, 389; on Leibnitz, 390, 408, 713 ni74; on Kant, 389, 713 ni74; on Schelling, 389, 713 ni74, 715 ni86; on Fichte, 389, 713 ni74, 715 ni86; on Hegel, 389, 713 ni74; on Ger- man transcendentalism, 289; knowledge of German, 388-89; erudition of, 390; lin- guistic abilities of, 390, 710 11131 ni4o; transs. from German by, 390-92, 712 ni57; on Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Poetry, 392, 720 n2&7; Goethe transs. by, 392, on Schiller, 392; on Herder, 392; on Korner, 392; on Fr. Schlegel, 392, on Mu- saeus, 392; on Wieland, 392; on Winckel- mann, 392; on Uhland, 392; on Grillparzer, 392; on Ohlenschlager, 392; on Piickler- Muskau, 392 ; on Longfellow, 392 ; on German ballads, 392; on Tieck, 392, 711 ni4o; on Fouqu6, 392, 711 ni4i; on E. T. A. Hoff- mann, 392, 716 ni86; literary themes of, 393; E. T. A. Hoffmann's infl. on, 393-96, 709 ni25 ; infl. of Novalis' Fragmente on, 401 ; tales of horror by, 402-3 ; Gesinningungs- verwandtschaft with German Romantiker, 404; metaphysical-mystical stories related to Tiecks' "Uber den Tod nach dem Tod," 404; Coleridge's infl. on literary theories of, 405, 720 n2&4; A. W. Schlegel's infl. on literary theories of, 405-8, 720 r\z6^, 721 nzjj, 722 n288; doctrine of "effect" adapted from A. W. Schlegel, 406-7, 721 n28o-8i ^83-85; on the three unities, 406-7; on De La Motte, 407; on Newton, 408; on Madler, 408, 713 ni74; on Argelander, 408; on Laplace, 408; on Sir John Herschel, 408, on James Fer- guson, 408, on Thos. Dick, 408 ; on VVm. Whewell, 408; Lanier infl. by, 461; sincerity of, 706 n94; on E. C. Stedman, 709 ni25; reading of, 709 ni25; literary infl. on, 709 ni25, 714 ni78; on Locke, 710 ni38; on "German Schwarmerei," 711 ni42; on idio- matic German, 711 11145, 713 ni74; refs. to German authors, 711 ni46, 713 ni74; on German pronunciation, 712 ni46; Novalis quoted by, 713 ni74; on German scientists, 713 ni74; on Kepler, 713 ni74; on J. H. Schroeter, 713 ni74; on J. F. Encke, 713 ni74; on F. W. Beissel, 713 ni74; on Helve- tius, 713 ni74; on German historians, 713 ni74; satirical vein of, 714 ni77; on metem- psychosis, 714 ni85; and Carlyle, 714 ni85; on Hoffmann's Phantasie-stucke , 7i4ni85; on "Germanism," 716 ni86; on mesmerism, 716 ni94; on clairvoyance, 716 ni95; on per- versity, 717 n2o8; sources of vampire theme in, 718 n2i8; on will, 718 n23i; on reincar- nation, 718 n235; and J. P. F. Richter, 719 n253; foreign periodicals read by, 719 n26o; German derivation of critical theories of, 720 n264; critical theories of 720 ^63-64; doc- trine of "unity of effect" adapted from A. W. Schlegel, 721 n28o; on brevity, 721 11283; on Emerson, 798 n684 — "Assignation, The": similarities with Hoff- mann's "Doge und Dogaressa," 402 — "Berenice": 399; R. W. White on, 696 n20o; similarities with Hoffmann's "Der Vampyr," 399-400 — "Black Cat, The", 398 — "Bon-Bon": 404; German diablerie in, 719 11256 — "Cask of Amontillado", 403 — "Colloquy of Monos and Una": Germanic notes in, 716 nig2 — "Conversations of Eiros and Charmion": Germanic notes in, 716 mg2 — "Eleonora", 399 — Eureka: 406; Alex. v. Humboldt's infl. on, 39 1 — "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar": 393, 716 mg8; compared with Hoffmann's stories of mesmerism, 396-97 — "Fall of the House of Usher, The": parallels with Arnim's "Majoratsherren," 403, 719 n245; parallels with Hoffmann's "Majorat", 403, 719 n245; Scott's infl. on, 719 n245 — "How to Write a Blackwood Article", 405 — "Imp of the Perverse, The", 398 ■ — -"Island of the Fay": similarities with Hoff- mann's "Der goldene Topf," 404 — "Letter to B — ", 405 — "Ligeia": 399; parallels with Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann," 400-1, 718 n223; parallels in Novalis, 718 n23i Index 849 — "Lionizing": parallels in Richter's Auswahl aits des Teufels Papieren, 719 n258 ■ — "Loss of Breath": German horror stories burlesqued in, 405 — "Masque of the Red Death" : 403 ; parallels in Hoffmann and Eichendorff, 719 n237 n239 — "Mesmeric Revelation", 393, 716 ni98 — "Metzengerstein": Germanic notes in, 715 ni8 5 — "Morella": 399; Schelling quoted in motto for, 390; Germanic notes in, 715 ni86 — "Mystery of Marie Roget, The": Xovalis' infl. on, 393 — "Oval Portrait, The": infl. by Hoffmann's "Jesuiterkirche in G — ," 402 — "Philosophy of Composition", 398, 407 — "Pit and the Pendulum, The": infl. of Wm. Mulford's "Iron Shroud" on, 719 n26o - — Politian: Goethe quoted in, 713 ni6o — "Some Passages in the Life of a Lion": Germanic notes in, 715 ni85 — "Spectacles, The": Hoffmann's use of simi- lar motifs, 404 ■ — -"Sphinx, The", 404 — "Tale of the Ragged Mountains": 393; Hoffmann's infl. on, 394-96, 714 ni83 m85, 716 nig2 ■ — "Tales of the Folio Club": parallels with Hoffmann's Seraphionsbriider, 715 ni85 — Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque: infl. bv Carlyle's essay on Hoffmann, 715 ni85 — "Tell-Tale Heart, The": 398; similarities with Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann" and "Fraulein von Scuderi," 399 — "Visionary, The": similarities with Schiller's "Geisterseher," 715 m85 — "William Wilson": infl. by Hoffmann's "Elixiere des Teufels," 397-98; the Doppel- gdnger motif in, 717 nigg; compared with Hoffmann's Doppelgdnger stories, 717 n202 n204; parallels with Hoffmann's "Fraulein von Scuderi," 717 n2ii Poehls, Meno: German taught by, 527 n46 Polarity: Emerson on, 202, 614 n532 Political science in American colleges: German infl. on teaching of, 572 n565 ; introduction and development of, 664 n2 79 Polko, Elise, 685 ng3 Poole, Thomas, 89 Popular literature of Germany: American vogue of, 327 Porphyry: 198, 228; Emerson on, 609 n449 Porter, Xoah: i4g, 2gg; essay on Coleridge by, 142, 662 n258; textbooks in philosophy by, 310; in Europa, 310; Kant's Ethics, 310; Ueberweg tr. by, 310; prominence of, 310; on Kantian ethics, 310, 659 n23i; on Spen- cer, 668 n3o8; Porter, William Sidney: 408; early German reading of, 482; on Auerbach and Spiel- hagen, 482 ; German-American associates of, 482 ; German refs. by, 482 Positivism: 319; Osgood on, 635 n8g2; prin- ciples of, 636 ngi3 Positivist Society in New York, 250 Post-Dispatch (St. Louis), 260 Post-Goethean drama in America, 356-58 Postl. Carl, 8-9, 346, 424, 681 n55 Post-romantic German writers, delayed Amer- ican vogue of, 340-41 Pound, Ezra, 482 Practical reason: 296; primacy of, 92, 186: American interpretation of, 119; Wm. Ha- milton on, 541 nig8. See also Pure and prac- tical reason; Reason; Understanding and reason Pragmatism, 13, 323, 66g n322 Praher, Stephanus, 506 n75 Preble, Edward: Longfellow and, 725 ni8 Presbyterian Church in America, 511 ni2g Prescott, William Hickling: 334, 484, 486; on historiographical methods, 75 ; Alex. v. Hum- boldt's infl. on, 75; Schiller's infl. on, 75; Ranke's infl. on, 75, 532 ni2i; infl. by Eng- lish historians, 76; A. W. Schlegel's infl. on, 485; on German scholarship, 532 nug ni20 Priber, Christian Gottlieb, 44, 514 ni5i, 515 ni52-53 Price, Richard: 87; Dr. Channing infl. by, 83; Emerson's reading of, 159; Emerson's refs. to, 160; quoted by Emerson, 160; Kant's relation to, 538 ni66 Prichard, August, 391 Priestley, Joseph: Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166 Prince, Gov. Thomas: 28; buys German books, 36 Princeton Review: 109, 148, 151; transcenden- talism opposed by, 80; Cousin defended in, 105 Princeton University : 3 1 1 ; textbooks used at, 506 n67; philosophy at, 668 n3og Printing in Germany, 20 Proclus: 198, 226, 612 n48i ; Emerson and, 609 n448 "Progressive development": Emerson on, 191— 92, 201 Proof of God: Kant on, igr Psychology in American colleges : textbooks of, 308-10; development of, 666 n2g7. See also Experimental psychology Piickler-Muskau, Hermann Ludwig Heinrich, Fiirst von: 343, 346; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Poe's trans, from, 392; Poe's quotation from, 713 ni63 Putter, Johann Stephan: Franklin and, 45 Pufendorf, Samuel von: 28, 37, 48, 358, 516 ni62-63; American reputation of, 46-47; C. Mather's ref. to, 47; John Wise infl. by, 47; J. Edwards' reading of, 37 850 Index Pulitzer, Joseph: 260, 289, 640 ng; Thos. Da- vidson and, 658 n2io Pure and practical reason: 137-38; Kant's distinction between, 183; Coleridge on, 184, 578 n648, 603 n302; Emerson on, 189, 191, 604 n3i6, 605 n323, 606 n402; Marsh on, 479 n659; Carlyle on, 605 n323 Pure reason: 296; negations of, 92; Emerson's conception of, 156, 180-81; constitutive versus regulative functions of, 540 ni97. See also Reason; Understanding and reason Puritan dogma: Emerson on, 156 Puritanism: Calvin's infl. on, 21; Luther's infl. on, 21-24; in America, origins of, 499 ni7 n20, 500 n28, 501 n29 n32 Puritans in England : interested in German religious reformers, 20 Putnam, Palmer: 149; attack on German lit., 681 n58 Putnam's Monthly Magazine, 448 Pythagoras: Emerson's refs. to, 160 QUAKER doctrine: Emerson on, 155, 160, 587 n24-25 Quakers: relations with German quietists, 31 Quantity and quality: Emerson on, 202 Quincy, Josiah, 59 Quincy, 111.: 292, 294, 303; Hegelians in, 13; philosophical society in, 263, 656 nig7; copy of Brokmeyer's trans, of Hegel's Logic in, 273 ; Alcott in, 292 ; Emerson in, 292 ; Friends in Council of, 292 ; Plato Club of, 292 ; His- torical Society of, 656 n2oo; organizational life of, 656 n200 RADCLIFFE, Mrs. Ann Ward: Irving infl. by, 379; Romance of the Forest, 687 nio8 Radical, The: 151, 243, 245, 247, 336, 634^84; German lit. in, 633 n86i Radical Club, The (Boston): 232, 448; pro- grams of, 243-44; evolution discussed by, 243, 633 n866; genteel nature of, 244; pro- ceedings of, 633 n863 ; concern with German lit. and thought, 633 n866; N.Y. Tribune re- ports on, 633 n866 Radical religious movements: causes of, 244 Rdubergeschichten, 360 Rahel A. F. Levin, 442 Ramm, Baron Jacques von, 728 n2g, 733 n57, 736 n8g Ramus, Peter, 29, 304 Rand, Benjamin, 302 Randolph, Richard, 279 Ranke, Leopold von: Emerson's refs. to, 172 Raphael, 279 Rask, Rasmus Kristian, 56 Raspe, Rudolf Erich. See Munchhausen, Karl Friedrich Hieronimus Rationalism: Emerson on, 192 Rauch, Friedrich Augustus: Murdock's ana- lysis of, 113; Hegelianism of, 306; Psychology of, 306, 564 n466; Kantian infl. on, 306; career of, 663 n268 Raumer, Friedrich Ludwig Georg: England in ^835, 712 ni52; Poe on, 713 ni74 Raunich, Selma Marie Metzenthin, 14 Realism in America: Whitman in relation to, 474; anti-German atipathy of, 482 Reason: ideas of, 185; as Divine Essence, 190; Carlyle on, 551 ^07; Cousin on, 554 n338; transcendentalists' view of, 557 n372; Coleridge on, 558 n3g6; Marsh on, 575 n6i5~ 16 n62o; Emerson on, 603 n288, 604 n3i4, 607 n43o, 608 n436. See also Kant; Pure and practical reason; Understanding and reason Reason and understanding: Carlyle on, 183; Emerson on, 182, 184. See also Understand- ing and reason Reason-cow/ra-understanding relationship : Em- erson on, 180-82, 188 Reason-sw^ra-understanding relationship: Em- erson on, 180-82, 188 Reason versus intuition: Parker on, 219 Reavis, Uriah: The Future Great City of the World, 640 nil Reed, Sampson: 161, 177; Emerson's refs. to, 160, Observations on the Growth of the Mind, 163 Reform movements in the U.S.: Follen's rela- tion to, 567 n49i Reformation in Germany: British interest in, 20; American Puritans on, 500 n28 Refugees: from Germany to England, 20 Regulative versus constitutive forms of thought Coleridge and Emerson on, 605 n332 Regulative versus constitutive functions of pure reason, 183 Regulative versus constitutive ideas: 138; Coleridge on, 578 n654 Rehan, Ada, 690 ni43 Reichard, Harry Hess, 14 Reid, Thomas: 309; Emerson's refs. to, 160; Brownson on, 631 n833 Rein, Wilhelm, 281 Reincarnation : German literary treatments of, 718 n235 Reingolds, Kate, 357 Reinhard, Joakim: on Goethe's Faust, 683 n6g Reinhold, Carl Leonhard: 86; Carlyle's reliance on, 550 n284; Hedge on, 582 n70i Religion as defined in The Index, 250 Religion in Germany: early reports on, 524 n22; Osgood on, 634 n887 Religion of Humanity, 242, 243, 323, 633 n866 Religious Aspects of Our Age, 633 n862 Religious denominations in the U.S.: relative strength of, 512 ni36 Index 851 Religious rites: Emerson on, 169 Renan, Joseph Ernest, 243 Renouvier, Charles Bernard: 319; infl. on, 672 n36o Restoration comedy, 356 Retzsch, Moritz: M. Fuller on, 441 Reuter, Fritz: 454; popularity of, 339; Ut mine Stromtid, 339 Reynolds, Frederick: Werther and Charlotte, 686 ni65 Rhenanus, Johann: De Rebus Germanicus, 28 Rhode, Johann, 506 n85 Richardson, H. B., 669, n3i5 Richardson, John: 539 ni8o m8i ; Kant tr. by, 86; on Kant , 542 n205 Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich: 83, 223, 226, 247, 329, 330, 335. 343. 346. 452, 453- 458. 716 ni92; Emerson's refs. to, 172; American vogue of, 332 ; Sterne compared with, 332 ; Carlyle's style infl. by, 332 ; Carlyle's tribute to, 332; M. Fuller on, 332, 444, 445; in American periodicals, 333; Lowell on, 338, 428; H. H. Boyesen on, 338; Irving's rela- tions with, 375, 703 n67; Longfellow's lec- tures on, 421 ; Longfellow's Hyperion infl. by, 421, 422; C. T. Brooks on, 453; Whitman on, 467; on Mme. de Stael, 553 n32i; C. T. Brooks's trans, from, 338, 453, 584 n7o8; Alcott's reading of, 627 n733; Hosmer on, 682 n66; Irving buys works of, 701 040; Longfellow on, 731 n49, 737 ng3; M. Fuller infl. by, 765 n3i8 — Hesperus: tr. by C. T. Brooks, 453 — Levana: tr. by C. T. Brooks, 338, 453 — Schmelzeles Reise, 378 — Titan: studied in the Temple School, 332; Longfellow's reading of, 413; tr. by C. T. Brooks, 453 — Unsichtbare Loge, Die: tr. by C. T. Brooks, 453 Riesbeck, Baron Johann Kaspar, on Germany, 516 m6g Riesengebirge, 354 Rigg, J. M., 279 Rimius, Henry, 513 Ripley, George: 80 83, no, 119, 120, 123, 148, 181, 216, 218, 242, 247, 249, 250, 257, 294, 329, 336, 446, 448, 450, 738, mo4; contro- versy with A. Norton, 109, 208; Follen's teaching of, 121; as reformer, 207, as propo- nent of German lit., 207, on German theolo- gy, 207; ministerial career of, 207, 211-12; library of, 207, 213-14, 617 0583; on De Gerando, 208; on German educational me- thods, 208; eclectic philosophical nature of, 208; intuitive philosophy of, 208; conven- tional Christian elements in religion of, 208; Schleiermacher's socioreligious infl. on, 208; 300; on social progress, 208, 212, 619 n6i2, German theologians read by, 209 ; on German biblical criticism, 209; journalistic career of, 209; "infidelity" of, 209; theological posi- tion of, 211, 215, 618 nsgo; at Brook Farm, 2H ; on Strauss, 212; emotional religion of, 212; Pestalozzi's infl. on, 212; moderate socialism of, 212; disillusionment of, 213-14; Spinoza, Kant, and Cousin taught at Brook Farm by, 213; later career of, 214, 618 0589; on Goethe, 214; Ronge's infl. on, 214, 300; accomplishments of, 214-15; middle-ground position of, 215 ; Ffecker's relations with, 215, 631 n84o; O. B. Frothingham's biography of, 249; Fichte's infl. on, 300; on Heine, 338, 619 n6i7, 680 n53; Cousin taught by, 556 n358; on Schleiermacher, 560 n428-2g, 618 n595 ; Cousin edited by, 604 n3i5; list of German authors read by, 617 ^83 ; on the Cambridge Platonists, 616 ^83; on Coleridge, 617 ^84; on French eclecticism, 617 ^84; on educa- tion in America, 617 n588; on Kant, 617 n588, 618 n58g; on Tholuck, 617 ns88; on Schelling, 617 n588; on Hegel, 617 n588; on German philosophy, 618 n58g; on Herder, 618 n594-g5; on Fichte, 618 n5g4; on Fou- rier, 6ig n6i3; on religion in Germany, 619 n6i3; on German philosphy, 6ig n6i4; on Stallo's Principles of the Philosophy of Nature, 6ig n6i4; later conservatism of, 6ig n6i8; on Ed. v. Hartmann, 6ig n6i8; on science, 6ig n6i8; on Parker, 620 n6i8; on Emerson, 620 n6i8; on intuition, 62g n8n; Thoreau on, 754 n22o; on Goethe, 764 n305 — "Life of Herder", no — New American Encyclopedia: ed. by, 214 — Philosophical Miscellanies: 103, 617 n585; eclecticism represented in, 108 — "Religion in France", 208 — Specimens of Standard Foreign Literature: ed. by, 105, 331, 450, 452, 617 ^85, 618 n6oo; M. Fuller plans biography of Goethe for, 443 ; list of, 556 n368 Ripley, Samuel, 160 Ritner, Governor Joseph : Whittier on, 74g ni88 Rittenhouse family, 4g Ritter, Heinrich: Alcott's reading of, 627 n733 Rivinus, Eduard Florens, 66 Rivinus, Franz R., 128 Roberts, John S. : 281 ; on W. T. Harris, 652 ni30 Robespierre, Augustin Bon Joseph, 115 Robinson, Henry Crabb: on German critical philosophy, 95, 547 n253; on Mme. de Stael, 547 n254; Carlyle's relations with, 548 n272 Robinson, Mrs. Edward, 682 n62 Robinson, Rev. John, 24, 501 n32 Robinson, Samuel L., 452 Robison, John: on the Illuminati, 54 Robson, Charles B: 128; on German political infl. in the U.S., 12 852 Index Roding, C. N., 65 Roelker, Bernard: 249; Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich tr. by, 425; Longfellow assisted by, 736 n7o; German transs. by, 735 n70 Rotscher, Heinrich Theodor, 490 Romanticism in England, 82 Romantic literature of Germany: American interest in, 329: American popularity of, 336 Romantic period in American literature, 335 Romantic School of Germany: M. Fuller on, 444 Romantic spectacle plays: 353; vogue of, 356 Romer, Wolfgang, 506 n8s Ronge, Johannes: 247; Ripley infl. by, 214; Parker's correspondence with, 221 Harbinger reports on, 246; John Weiss on, 637 ngi7 Ronzani Ballet Troupe, 355 Roscoe, Thomas, Irving's use of German Nov- elists by, 705 n87 Rosen, Julius von, 357, 691 ni43 Rosenberg, Johann Carl, 34 Rosenkranz, Karl: on Hegel, 643 n57, 652 ni26; G. S. Hall's transs. from, 652 ni26 Rosenmiiller, Ernst Friedrich Karl: Stuart infl. by, 130 Rosicrucians, 27 Rossetti, Christina, 482 Rothe, Richard, 632 n858 Round Hill School: German educational prin- ciples incorporated in, 72 Rousseau, Jean Jacques: 46, 350, 360; Emer- son's refs. to, 160 Royce, Josiah: 280, 291, 299, 303, 304, 313, 317, 318, 319, 321, 323, 660 n245, 669 n32o; studies in Germany, 302, 315; idealism of, 315; eclecticism of, 315; Peirce's infl. on, 315; Kantian elements in, 315; Fichte's infl. on, 315; Schelling's infl. on, 315; Schopen- hauer's infl. on, 315; on Hegel, 315; Wm. James's relation to, 315-16; epistemology of, 315; infl. of 316; on German literature and philosophy, 341; on Kant, 659 n230, 671 n343; at Gottingen, 669 n3i4; Lotze's infl. on, 671 n34i ; acknowledged debt to Schopen- hauer, Kant, Hegel, and the romantics, 671 n347; German ethics taught by, 673 n375; Hegelian system taught by, 673 n375; Kant taught by, 674 n376 Riibezahl legends 371, 372 Riickert, Friedrich: 329, 330, 333, 336, 343, 344, 452, 454; lyrics of, 333, 334, Weisheit desBrahmanen tr. by C.T. Brooks, 339;Whit- man on, 467; Wm. Hurlbut on, 681 n53; N. L. Frothingham on, 681 n57 Ruge, Arnold: Andrews Norton on, 558 n40o; on Schiller, 680 n42 Rush, Benjamin: 50, 515 ni6i ; attitude toward Germans, 49 Russell, John A. : on the Germans in Michigan, 11 Russell, William: 226; Alcott infl. by, 626 n705 Rutland, Vt. : Friends in Council of, 656 n20o Ruzilius, Johann Nikolas, in England, 21 SABINE, Mrs. Elizabeth, 391 Sachs, Hans: Whitman on, 467 Safford, Mary J., 685 n95 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 491 Saint-Hilaire, Geoffroy: 200, 610 n458; Emer- son on, 167, 168, 194, 614 n528 St. Louis, Mo. : 299, 302 ; civic ambition in, 259; "Grand Illusion" of, 640 nil ni5; Teu- tonic elements in, 260-61, 640 nis; Forty- eighters in, 260 ; Germans in control of, 260, 641 ni5; bilingualism of, 260; German book- sellers in, 260; organizational life of, 263, 289, 641 ni5; public schools of, 266; Camp Jackson in, 268, 640 ni5; Alcott in, 271-72, 647 n82; kindergartners in, 286; Snider's "Greek Renaissance" in, 286; Kant Club of, 287, 289. 641 n24; pedagogical societies in, 287; Cabanne Branch Library of, 289; Philosophical Society of, 289; Shakespeare Society of, 289; "Musical Evenings" of, 289; German drama in, 355; Schiller's Robbers and Wm. Tell on the stage of, 355; Hegelians in, 359; Goethe enthusiasts in, 359; Germans in, 440-41 ni5; German club life in, 641 ni5; Tony Niederwiesser's Valhalla in, 641 ni5; George Wolbrecht's Tivoli in, 641 ni5; Prussian consulate in, 641 ni6; Targee Street of, 641 nig; women leaders in, 654 ni68; Literary Club of, 655 ni88 St. Louis Communal University: Snider's or- ganization of, 286, 287; Snider's Psychology taught in, 654 ni79 St. Louis Froebel Society: organized by Mary C. McCulloch, 655 ni89 St. Louis Hegelianism: 13, 322; relations with supernaturalism and naturalism, 261 ; eclec- tic elements in, 262 ; demise of, 303 St. Louis Hegelians: 173, 243, 247, 255, 322; leaders of, 258; literary productivity of, 258-59; naturalism, mechanism, agnosti- cism, atomism, sophism, and pantheism op- posed by, 262; Civil War activities of, 271; New England transcendentalists compared with, 341; social philosophy of, 661 n250 St. Louis Movement: 289, 301, 337; Concord School of Philosophy related to, 257; New England transcendental sources of, 257, 294; philosophic sources of, 258 ; Hegel's Logic as the Bible of, 258; infl. of Western frontier on, 259, 261; dualistic elements in 259; native orientation of, 260 ; recruitments for, 261 ; idealistic nature of, 261 ; humanitarian re- form element in, 261; Hegelianism of, 261- Index 853 63, 294; absolutism espoused by, 261; reli- gious aloofness of, 262 ; Emerson on, 262 ; origins of, 263 ; organizational activity of, 264; New England transcendentalism com- pared with, 266; social and political back- ground of, 267, 643 n65; clubs in other cities related to, 290; propagation of, 290; national scope of, 290; infl. of, 291, 301; female con- tingent of, 293; failings of, 301-2 ; history of, 639 m ; origin in St. Louis public schools, 639 n3 ; list of leading members of, 639 n3 ; lite- rary productivity of, 640 ng-io; religious issues in, 641 n20 St. Louis Philosophical Society: Emerson speaks to, 204; Emerson joins, 204; Hege- lianism of, 313 St. Louis Society of Psychology: plans for pub- lication of Brokmeyer's trans, of Hegel's Logic sponsored by, 648 ng2 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri: Brownson infl. by, 628 n799 Salem Gazette: Wm. Bentley's column in, 53 Salis, Johann Gaudenz von, 343, 345 Salter, W. M., 279 Saltus, Edgar Evertson, Schopenhauer's and von Hartmann's infl. on, 483 Salzburgers in America, 500 n23 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf: Elements of Morality, 677 n6 Sanborn, Franklin Benjamin: 131, 244, 266, 297, 298, 659 n23i ; Alcott's reliance on, 232 ; Snider's opinion of, 265 ; lectures of, 298 ; The Genius and Character of Emerson ed. by, 660 n23&-37 Sand, George: 442; Whitman infl. by, 465 Santayana, George: on post- Kantian philos- ophy, 319; studies in Germany, 319; Fichte's infl. on, 319; Schopenhauer's infl. on, 319; Hegelian infl. on, 319 Sargent, John T., 243, 244 Sartorius, Christian: Pollen's correspondence with, 117 Sauer. See Saur Saur, Christopher: 19, 32, 42; prints German books, 44 Schaffer, Rev. Eduard C, 65 Schaff, Philip: 314; at Union Theological Sem- inary, 306-7; in Germany, 307; German theological infl. on, 307 Schefer, Gottlieb Leopold Immanuel : 684 n85 ; C. T. Brooks's transs. from, 339 Scheffel, Joseph Viktor von: 345; Der Trom- peter von Sacklingen, 339; Gaudeamus tr. by Leland, 339; Ekkehard, 339-40 Scheffler, Johann, 345 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von: 83, 88,92,97,98, 102, 109, 142, 147, 155, 161, 166, 171, 172, 187, 188, 199, 200, 202-3, 2 3°, 238, 275, 276, 280, 389, 434, 436, 468, 469, 472, 484, 614 n525; Coleridge on, 89, 545 n234; Mme. de Stael on, 101, 552 n32o; Hedge on, 144; C. S. Wheeler's trans, from, 197; Emer- son's refs. to, 166, 172; Emerson on, 194, 195, 197. 198, 200, 202, 206, 595 ni25, 613 n478, 613 n482, 613 n505, 614 n523, 615 n 537 n 544." Parker's reading of, 216, 219: M. Fuller on, 441; Whitman on, 471; Dr. Channing on, 538 ni7i; Coleridge's debt to, 543 n2i8, 544 n22o; Carlyle on, 551 n303, 304; Cousin on, 554 n335; J. E. Cabot's trans, from, 584 n7o8; John F. Heath on, 613 n482; Thos. Davidson's transs. from, 616 n56g; Ripley on, 617 n588 Schelling's philosophy of identity: Coleridge on, 197; Emerson on, 200; Stallo's explana- tion of, 202 ; Poe infl. by, 401 Schenkendorf, Ferdinand, 345 Scherb, Emmanuel V: 199; Emerson's refs. to, 172 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von: 8, 83, 121, 122, l66, 185, 226, 279, 309, 328, 329, 330, 335. 336. 34L 343. 344. 34°. 359, 360, 375. 4°9. 43L 44°. 44§. 453. 455. 4«4. 680 n42; Follen infl. by, 84, 116, 565 ^74; Mme. de Stael on, 101, 332; Pollen's lectures on, 121, Emerson on, 172, 595 ni35; Kantian elements in, 332, 605 n353; celebrations in honor of, 246, 332, 680 n42, 632 n853; bio- graphical study of, 332 ; American apprecia- tion of, 332, 683 n73, 703 n7o; lyrics of, 333; rhetoric of, 335; in American collections, 337, 679 n4i ; decline of American interest in, 337-38; Poe on, 392, 711 ni46; Lowell on, 428; Melville on, 439; B. Taylor on, 454; Whitman on, 467 ; Coleridge infl. by, 580 n675 ; John Weiss's transs. from, 584 n7o8 ; Emerson quotes, 595 ni35; Carlyle on, 603 n292, 684 n73 ; Alcott's reading of, 627 n733 ; Furness' transs. from, 632 n853; Bartol on, 635 ngoo; attacks on Sturm-und-Drang pro- ductions of, 679 n40; Jos. Dennie's attack on, 679 n4o; A. H. Everett on, 679 n4i ; Ban- croft on, 679 n4i; Goethe contrasted with, 679 n4i; transs. from, 679 n4i, 680 n4i; Furness on, 680 n42; celebrations honoring, 680 n42 ; Goethe's correspondence with, 680 n42; works available in trans., 680 n42; later dramas of, 684 n73; Hempel ed. of, 684 n73; poems ed. by Wireman, 684 n73; Johann Scheer's biography of, 684 n73 ; W. H. Nevin- son's life of, 684 n73; Thoreau on, 754 n22o; on Shakespeare, 795, n649 — Braut von Messina, Die, 679 n4i — Don Carlos, 328, 349 679 n4i — Fiesko: 328; Cooper in title role of, 689 11129 — Geisterseher, Der: 48, 354, 359; popularity of, 327 — Geschichte des dreissigjdhrigen Kriegs, 680 n42 854 Index — Jungfrau von Orleans, Die: 680 1142; Clarke's trans, of 624 11678; Calvert's ed. of, 684 1173 — Kabale und Liebe: 349; popularity of, 328, 358; trans, of, 328; in New York, 349 — Das Lied von der Glocke: 680 n4i n42, 684 n73, 769 n357 • — Maria Stuart: 684 n73; Fanny Janauschek in, 690 ni37; Helen Modjeska in, 6goni37; success of, 690 ni37 — Philosophische Brief e: ed. by J. F. Clarke, 625 n686, 680 n42 — Poems and Ballads, 684 n73 — Rauber, Die: 48, 354, 359, 686 ni03; vogue of, 327-28; transs. of, 327; reprintings of, 327; on the London stage, 348; on the N.Y. stage, 348; early American reception of, 348; Zschokke's Abaellino compared with, 351; continued popularity of, 355, 358, 364, 680 ni04; Irving infl. by, 377-78; synopsis of, 689 ni32 — "Taucher, Der," 332 — tjber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 605 n353 ■ — Wallenstein: Lowell's quotation from 428; Coleridge's trans, from, 328 — Werke: American ed. of, 680 n42 — Wilhelm Tell: 614 n73; popularity of, 355, 358 ; C. T. Brooks' trans, of, 452 ; Ed. Massie's trans, of, 684 n73 Schlager, Eduard, 246 Schlatter, Rev. Michael, 42 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von: 132, 185, 343, 485, 487, 491; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Poe's debt to, 405-8, 721 n276; Poe's refs. to, 392, 713 ni63; Poe's doctrine of effect derived from, 407 ; Poe's principle of unity reinforced by, 407; Lowell on, 429; Thoreau's refs. to, 433; M. Fuller infl. by, 443; Thoreau infl. by, 754 n222; on Shakespeare, 796 n649 — Vorlesungen iiber dramatische Kunst und Literalur: Poe infl. by, 406-7; John Black's trans, of, 406; Howells infl. by, 475-76; Poe's quotations from, 721 txijj; American ed. of, 721 n277 Schlegel, Friedrich von: 343, 461; Brownson's attack on, 106; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Whitman on, 463, 467; on Shakespeare, 796 n649 Schlegels, The: 322, 329, 345, 346, 406, 435, 436, 484; Whitman on, 467; on Shakespeare, 796 n649 Schlegel-Coleridge school of criticism : 484, 485, 490; Thoreau on, 434; Emerson on, 488 Schlegelius, Paul M., 503 n48 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel: 109, 113, 121, 130, 171, 210, 227, 245, 247, 596 niso, 607 n424; Dr. Channing infl. by, 85; Charles Hodge's attack on, no; Ripley on, in, 209, 213, 560 n428-29, 618 n595; American opposition to, in; Andrews Norton on, in; spiritual Christianity of, in; Unitarians infl. by, in; Follen infl. by, 117, 560 n48o n482; religious views of, 120, 300; Emerson on, 172, 182, 197, 612 ^75; Ripley infl. by, 208; Parker's refs. to, 219, 221, 560 n43o; S. Osgood on, 248, 560 n43o, 634 n887; Bancroft on, 531 nio7 mo8; American vogue of, 560 n427~3o; Hedge on, 560 n43i, 583 n705; Coleridge infl. by, 580 11675 ; Church and Priesthood tr. by Ripley, 584 n7o8; Brownson's attack on, 630 n8i2 Schliemann, Heinrich: Whitman on, 467 Schmid, Christoph von, 347, 680, n49 Schmucker, Samuel S. : Mental Philosophy of, 564 n466 Schneckenburger, Mathias S., 646 ngoi Schonbach, Anton: on Hawthorne, 706 ng4 Schonthan, Franz: American performances of plays by, 357; Daly's adaptations from, 690 ni43, 691 ni43 Schonthan, Paul, 357, 691 ni43 Schoepf, Johann David: American travels of, 43, 514 ni49; publications of, 514 ni5o Scholarship in America: Germanic infl. on, 570 1154° Scholarship of Germany: growing esteem for, 78, 124; early American representatives of, 1 1 4-5 1 passim; American theologians' ac- ceptance of, 242; H. Ware, Jr., on, 584 n7ig Schopenhauer, Arthur: 280, 336, 340, 347, 437, 458, 616 n569, 636 n866; Emerson's refs. to, 172, 612 n475; St. Louisians' con- cern with, 280 ; Saltus infl. by, 483 ; H. Adams infl. by, 483; Hedge on, 583 n703, 784 n7i3; Royce infl. by, 671 n347; F. C. S. Schiller on, 685 ng6; Aphorisms, 685 ng6; Select Essays, 685 ng6; Welt als Wille und Vor- stellung, 685 ng6 Schramm, Karl: on Schiller, 680 n42 Schubert, Franz Peter: songs of, 449 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich von: Furness' trans, of, 632 n853 Schultz, Arthur R. (ed.), Bibliography of German Culture in America, 11, 14, 497 ni6 Schumann, Robert, 279, 289, 685 ng6 Schurman, Jacob Gould: in Germany, 667 n302; at Cornell, 667 n302 Schurz, Carl, 246, 640 ng, 640 ni5 Schuyler, William, 651 nil 7 Schwab, Gustav, 345 Schwabische Uhu, Der, 27 Schwegler, Friedrich Karl Albert: Geschichte der Philosophic, 636ngoi ; Emerson's reading of, 203; O. B. Frothingham, on 636 ngi4 Schwenkfelders: 21, 23, 32, 500 n23; schools of, 42 Science: Emerson infl. by, 166-67; Emerson on, 167, 546 n247, 592 mo2, 593 mo8 niog Index 855 nil 2, 594 ni 13-15, 601 11268; Emerson's knowledgeof, 593 mo6, 594 nii3, 615 n545; in colonial America, 505 n62 Scientific methodology of Germany: adopted in American universities, 322 Scotch element in the U.S., 4 Scotch-Irish in the U.S., 7 Scott, Jonathan M.: Gothic elements in The Sorceress by, 364 Scott, Sir Walter: 97, 340, 380, 475; on E. T. A. Hoffmann, 403; on German lit., 696 n3 Scottish common-sense philosophy: 82, 303, 304; Emerson infl. by, 164, 590 n6i Scottish Hegelians, 302 Scottish philosophers: American use of text- books by, 661 n253; reasons for popularity of, 661 n253 Scottish philosophy: American predilection for, 311, continued popularity of, 668 n3i3 Scottish realism : American vogue of, 309 Scougal, Henry: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Sealsfield, Charles (pseud.), 8-9, 346, 424, 681 n55 Sears, Barnas: 149, 151, 305; German lit. at- tacked by, 130; on DeWette, 559 ^23; on reason, 557 n372; on German scholarship, 678 n2o; on growing American interest in Germany, 678 n2o Sears, Edward I.: on Heine, 338, 680 n53 Seebach, Mme. Marie: as Maria Stuart, 684 "73 Seekers, The, 22 Seelye, Julius H: 309, 320; at Halle, 669 n3i4 Seidensticker, Oswald: bibliography of, 14 Self-activity: Brokmeyer on, 259, 270-71; Harris on, 276; as a motivating force on St. Louis Hegelians, 649 ngg Self-determinism: St. Louisans' espousal of, 264; Brokmeyer on, 642 n3i Self-reliance: Emerson on, 169, 170, 175-76 Seminar method of instruction, 322 Semler, Johann Salomo, 305, 618 n^ig Sentimentalism: in German lit., 327 Separatism: Luther's infl. on, 24-26 Separatists: German religious influences on, 21 Sermon on the Mount: Emerson's interpreta- tion of, 184 Sewall, May W., 279 Sewall, Samuel: 31; on Christian Lodowick (Ludwig), 506 n83 n85 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Shakespeare, William: 169, 279, 285, 289, 430, 433. 448; Snider's Hegelian interpretation of, 289, 653 ni4o; Goethe compared with, 329; on the American stage, 348, 356; German adap- tations from, 358 ; German criticism of, 434, 795 n647 n648; Whitman's criticism of, 467; Howells on, 476; Lessing on, 795 n648-49; Goethe on, 795 n648; the Schlegels on, 796; Coleridge on, 796 n650 Shakespeare criticism: in Germany, 484; or- ganic unity in, 484; appreciative romantic school of, 484 ; expressionistic school of, 484 ; historical-realist school of, 484, 488; nation- alistic school of, 485; philosophic school of, 484 ; Schlegel-Coleridge school of, 484, 485 Shakespeare Society (St. Louis), 263, 289 Shaler, Nathaniel S. : on Darwin, 633 n866 Shedd, William Greenough Thayer: Marsh's infl. on, 306, 581 n682; Coleridge's infl. on, 306; German higher criticism opposed by, 306; Coleridge ed. by, 306; on German Bib- lical scholarship, 663 n265 ; list of German theological works tr. by, 663 n266 Sheldon, Walter Lorenzo, 279 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 279, 455, 475 Sherlock, William: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Sherman, Mrs. Caroline K., 286 Sherman, William Tecumseh : in St. Louis, 260 Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 491 Shepard, Odell, 226, 227 Short story in America: origin of, 364; Ger- manic infl. on, 367-403 passim, 408; Irving's first specimens of, 408, Hawthorne's con- tribution to the development of, 408 ; Poe's technique of, 408 ; later writers of, 408 Sieveking, Georg Heinrich : visits Wm. Bent- ley, 52 Sigourney, Mrs. Lydia Huntley, 447 Sill, Edward Rowland: translations by, 481, 794 n635; biography of Mozart by, 481; on translation, 481 ; on Goethe, Kant, and F. v. Humboldt, 481 Silliman, Benjamin: Emerson's refs. to, 167 Simms, William Gilmore: German Gothic notes in works of, 459; on German lit., 776 T1426; on Goethe, Schiller, and Fouque\ 776 n426 Simrock, Karl: M. Fuller's review of Rhein- sagen by, 445 Smith, Adam: Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166 Smith, Benjamin E.: at Gottingen, 669 n3i4 Smith, Elihu Hubbard : German studies of, 62, 362 ; relations with C. B. Brown and Wm. Dunlap, 362; in the Friedly Club circle, 362; diaries of, 694 ni77; knowledge of German lit., 694 ni78; on Kant, Lavater, Goethe, and Schiller, 695 ni78; on Kalm's Travels, 695 ni78 Smith, Gerrett: O. B. Frothingham's biogra- phy of, 249 Smith, Henry Boynton: 149, 303, 314, 323, 662 n259; studies in Germany, 77, 305, 662 n26o, 669 ^14; education of, 305; at Am- herst, 305 ; list of transs. from German theo- logians, 305, 662 n262; teaching of philo- sophy reformed by, 305 ; at Union Theolo- gical Seminary, 306; meets noted German 856 Index theologians, 662 11260; on New England transcendentalism, 662 n26o Smith, John (Captain), 3, 6 Smith, John (Platonist): Parker on, 219; Coleridge on, 546 n238 Smollett, Tobias George, 359 Snider, Denton Jacques: 231, 258, 263, 264, 266, 278, 293, 300, 639 n3; literary produc- tivity of, 258; "Super-vocation" of, 264, 281, Hegel's infl. on, 264-65, 282, 642 n3o; indi- vidualism of, 265; "Literary Bibles" of, 266, 283, 284; on Emerson, 272, 647 n83; on Alcott, 272-73; literary aims of, 281; on Homer, 281, 283, 298; on Dante, 281, 283; on Goethe, 281; on Shakespeare, 281-82; on Hegelian dialectics, 281, 653 ni40; in the St. Louis school system, 281-82; at Oberlin College, 281; Clarence, 281; The American State, 282; Hegelian political infl. on, 282; Hegelian aesthetic infl. on, 282; on Plato, 282 ; Hegelian analysis of Julius Caesar, 282- 83; System of Shakespearean Drama, 283; critical aims of, 283 ; on Faust, 283 ; European tour of, 283; in the kindergarten movement, 284; "psychological renaissance" promoted by, 284; "communal universities" of, 284; widespread activities of, 285, 290; on the Greek historians, 286; in the Chicago Kin- dergarten College, 287; Hegelian elements in the "Mental Philosophy" taught by, 287; "Psychological Organon" of, 287, 288; list of books on psychology by, 287-88; on Froebel, 287; political theories of, 287; on Greek philosophy, 287; on European philo- sophy, 287; on architecture, 287; on the fine arts, 287; sense of humor of, 288; Communal University of, 289; eighteenth birthday cele- bration of, 290, 639 m; Shakespeare lectures of, 295 ; in the fifth Concord School of Philo- sophy, 298; various schools of, 299; on St. Louis, 640 nn; struggles to understand Hegel, 642 n3o; on Brokmeyer's trans, of Hegel's Logic, 645 n76; Brokmeyer and, 646 n79; in Concord, 647 n83; on Harris, 651 nn8; courses taught by, 652 ni32; Hegel as taught by, 652 ni32; moral philosophy taught by, 652 ni32; Shakespeare as inter- preted by, 653 ni4o; contributor to The Western, 653 ni4i ; on mythology in Faust II, 653 ni46; on Dr. Calvin Thomas, 653 ni65; on R. G. Moulton, 654 m65; on Susan Blow, 654 ni6g; system of psychology of, 654 ni85; C. V. Huenemann's analysis of, 655 ni85; literary remains of, 655 ni85; lectures of, 655 ni87; organization of schools of, 655 m87; on Thos. Davidson, 658 n209; on the humorous aspects of the Concord School of Philosophy, 660 n24i ; on his own literary- schools, 660 n242 Snider's Communal University in Chicago, 288 Snider's Communal University in St. Louis: 287, enrollment of, 288 Snider's Dante School, in Chicago, 653 ni63 Snider's Goethe School: in Chicago, 653 ni65; in Milwaukee, 284 Snider's Homer School, 286 Snider's Kindergarten College of Chicago, 654 ni84 Snider's Literary Schools: characterization of, 288; in Chicago, 654 ni84 Snider's Shakespeare Schools: 286; in Chicago, 654 ni66 Snyder, Alice D. : on Coleridge, 90 Soane, George: 353; Faust adaptation by, 355 Socialism in America, 1 18 Society for the Promotion of Christian Know- ledge, 35, 39 Society of Pedagogy (St. Louis) : 263, 287, 654 ni8o, 655 ni89; Amelia D. Fruchte's leader- ship of, 287 Society of Psychology (St. Louis), 654 ni8o Socrates: 468: Emerson on, 160, 589 n32 Soldan, Frank Louis: 286, 289; educational career of, 259; on Spinoza, 266; Dante lec- tures of, 653 ni63 Solger, Reinhold : on Schiller, 680 n42 Somerville, Mary: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Sophocles: Snider on, 286 Sorosis Club (Jacksonville, 111.), 656 n200 Sorosis Club (New York), 656 n2oo South Carolina: Germans in, 44 Southern Literary Messenger, 404, 405, 460 Southern writers: French orientation of, 459 Southey, Robert: on Kant, 95 Southworth, Mrs. Emma D. E. Nevitt, 340 Space and Time: Carlyle on, 182, 183 Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature: 181; list of, 556 n368 Spence, Payton, 279 Spence, William: Emerson's relations with, 194 Spencer, Herbert: 244, 278, 296, 311; Harris' opposition to, 277, 616 n56g; St. Louisans' on, 280, 652 11126; Bascom's opposition to, 310 Spener, Jacob, 37 Spengler, Oswald, J. G. Fletcher on, 483 Spielhagen, Friedrich: 335, 346, 685 ng6; popularity of, 339; Hammer und Amboss, 339; Problematische Naturen, 339 Spinoza, Baruch: 109; Emerson on, 613 n505 Spiritualism: Emerson on, 608 n446 Spitta, Karl Johann, 345 Spori, Felix Christian: American career of, 30 Spurzheim, Kaspar: Emerson's refs. to, 172 Spyri, Frau Johanna: Heidi, 341, 681 nS5 Stael-Holstein, Mme. Anne Germaine Necker de: 47, 50, 52, 56, 57, 63, 66, 119, 161, 171, 172, 180, 195, 196, 442, 490; Dr. Channing's Index 857 reading of, 83; religious bias of, 101 ; Emer- son's reading of, 120, 162; Emerson on, 160, 597 ni62, 612 n465; Emerson infl. by, 166; on Schiller, 332; Whitman's reliance on, 471 ; H. C. Robinson on, 547 n254; infl. of, 552 n 3 I 3> German lit. and philosophy mis- interpreted by, 552 n3i4 n3i7 ^19-21; on Kant, 552 n32o; on German lit., 678 ni8 — De l' Allemagne : 19, 20, 328; American vogue of, 101; superficiality of, 101; infl. of, 552 n32i ; Emerson's use of, 592 ngo; reviews of, 678 ni8 Staudlin, Carl Friedrich : Parker's reading of, 216 Stage history in America: bibliography of, 690 ni36 Stahr, Adolph : E. P. Evans' review of Lessing by, 338 Stallo, Johann Bernardt: 198, 199, 200, 613 n5og-i5, 615 n545; Emerson on, 172, 612 n465, 613 nsoo-i, 614 n530, 615 ^44; Emerson infl. by, 194, 198, 200; Emerson prepared to accept Hegelian philosophy by, 202; quoted by Emerson, 203; career of, 610 n46o; H. Adams on, 614 n523; in Cincinnati, 669 n3i5 — General Principles of the Philosophy of Na- ture: Emerson's quotations from, 200, 613 n5o6; Emerson's reading of, 608 n445 ; Emer- son's use of, 614 n523; J. E. Cabot's review of, 638 n949 Stanley, Thomas: Lives of the Philosophers read by Emerson, 203 Stapfer, Phillip Albrecht: Carlyle's debt to, 549 n282 Stearns, F. P., 279 Stedman, Edmund Clarence: 249, 430, 452, 457, 645 n76, 649 n97, 683 n6g; on Long- fellow, 458; on Poe, 458; Whitman and Goethe compared by, 459 ; Emerson and Goethe compared by, 459; German leaven in works of, 458-59; on O. B. Frothingham, 636 ngog; on German lit., 775 n409; Ger- man refs. of, 775 n409-n; on Goethe, Schiller, and Heine, 775 n4i4; on German critics, 775 n4io Stedman, George C, 269, 270, 649 ng7 Steele, Richard, 484 Steffens, Henrich: quoted by Emerson, 203 Stephen, Leslie: on Kant and Price, 538 ni66 Sterkey, George, 505 n6i Sterne, Laurence: Irving infl. by, 381 Steuben, Barcn Wilhelm von, 49, 305, 518 m87 Stewart, Dugald: 62, 82, 539 ni83-84, 539 ni86, 607 n4ig; Kant misinterpreted by, 86-87, 539 nI 9°. 54° n.192; Emerson's read- ing of, 120, 160, 166, 592 n8g; German philosophy surveyed by, 540 nig2; on Scot- tish common-sense, 540 mg2 Stiefel, Georg, 42 Stifter, Adelbert, 340 Stirk, George, 28 Stirling, James Hutchison: 200, 279, 280, 302, 651 ni2i, 788 n554; on Kant, 88; on Cole- ridge, 543 n2i3; Emerson's efforts in behalf of, 204 — Secret of Hegel, The: 88; Emerson's reading of, 203-5; S. H. Emery's study of, 657 n202; Mrs. Ebenezer Baldwin's reading of, 657 n203 Stock system of theater management, 357 Stockton, Frank, 4gi Stoddard, Richard Henry: 447, 452, 458; "The W T ine Cup" based on Uhland's "Gluck von Edenhall," 447; biographer of Alex. v. Humboldt, 457; Goethe's infl. on, 457 Stolbergs, The, 345 Storm, Theodor, 333, 340, 345 Storr, Gottlob Christian : Parker's reading of, 216 Story, Joseph: Gothic elements in Power of Solitude by, 364 Story, William Wetmore, 455 Stowe, Calvin E., 105, 666 n2gg Stowe, Calvin S., 88 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 243 Strauss, David Friedrich: 13, 109, 171, 221, 243. 3°5. 347. 437. 596 11150, 618 n58g, 636 ngoi ; Charles Hodge's attack on, no; American controversy over, 111-12; con- tinuing infl. of, 112; Emerson's refs. to, 172, 612 n473; Parker on, 217, 560 n436; M. D. Conway on, 447; American infl. of, 560 n432~36, 561 n437-38; American attacks on, 560 n432; American editorial concern with, 560 n437; Parker infl. by, 561 n438; O. B. Frothingham on, 636 ngi4; on Hegel, 652 UI22; Melville on, 757 n243 — Das Leben Jesu: American vogue of, no; Parker's review of, in, 621 n632 Streckfuss, Adolf, 685 ng3 Struthers, L. G., 646 n76 Stuart, Moses: 65, 78, 85, 112, 131, i4g, 158, 305, 329, 491, 618 n6o2 ; German theologians read by, 13; introduces German at Andover, 19-20, 62 ; turns to German Biblical school- ars, 128-29; reads Schleissner's Lexikon and Seiler's Hermeneutik, 129; urges E. Everett to trans. Herder, 129; E. Everett buys Ger- man books for, 129; builds up German li- brary at Andover, 129; introduces Rosen- muller and De Wette in his classes, 129; charged with teaching German heresy at Andover, 129-30; infl. by Ewald, Rosen- miiller, and Gesenius, 130; prepares Ameri- can editions of Jahn, Ernesti, Winer, and Gesenius, 129-30; German research methods employed by, 130; advocates study of Ger- 858 Index man, 130; replies to Barnas Sears's attack on German lit., 130; later career of, 573 n^6j; Dr. Channing and, 573 n575; influence of, 573 n57i ^76-90; books by, 573 11590; Biblical scholarship of, 574 n594; Commen- tary on the Hebrews, 580 n6jj; H. B. Smith infl. by, 662 n259 Sturm, Johann Christian, 30 Sturm-und-Drang literature: 329, 484; Ameri- can vogue of, 327, 359; English reception of, 348 Subject and object: identity of, 193 Suckling, Sir John, 421 Sudermann, Hermann: 336, 340, 346, 358; ar- ticles on, 684 n86 - — Frau Sorge: tr. by Bertha Overbeck, 685 ng6 — Heimat: 339; tr. by C. E. A. Winslow, 685 n96 Sumner, Charles: 243; Follen and, 118, 567 n49i ; Lieber and, 127; learns civil law from Follen, 128; European tours of, 128; visits German scientists, historians and political scientists, 128; in Germany, 572 n588 Summer, William G. : at Yale, 668 n3o8 Swanwick, Anna: Faust tr. by, 331 Swedenborg, Emanuel: 161, 224, 228, 437, 616 n56g; Emerson's refs. to, 160, 166, 198, 591 n79; Emerson infl. by, 590 n52; Alcott's reading of, 627 ^83 Swing, Dr. David: 654 ni66; Snider and, 653 ni6i Swetzer, Henry, 506 n85 Swift, Jonathan: 430; Irving infl. by, 381 Sybel, Heinrich von: on Hegel, 643 n56 Symbols: Emerson on, 188 Symposium, 108 Synesius: Emerson on, 609 n449 TAINE, Hippolyte Adolphe, 491 Talvj, 682 n62 Tanckmarus, Johann, 503 n48 Tappan, Henry P.: 59; Elements of Logic, 307; at Michigan, 307; Kant's infl. on, 307; in- troduces German educational principles at Michigan, 310-11; history of philosophy in- troduced by, 311; on Coleridge and Kant, 664 n277; educational reform of, 66 n299, 667 n302 ; German educational infl. on, 667 n30i ; German-educated professors employed by, 667 n30i Tarbox, Increase Niles: at Hamilton College, 662 n258 Taschenbuch: in Germany, 720 n26o Tauler, Johannes: Emerson's refs. to, 172 Taylor, Bayard: 242, 247, 336, 431, 446, 452, 457. 458, 478; Goethe's Faust tr. by, 453, 455. 456, 683 n6g; romanticizes Germany, 454; Freiligrath's correspondence with, 454; transs. from Brockhaus' Conservations-lexi- kon, 454; visits German writers, 454; lecture on Alex. v. Humboldt, 454: lectures on Schiller, 454; travels of, 454, 771 n373, 773 n377; At Home and Abroad, 454; By-ways of Europe, 454-55 ; Critical Essays and Literary Notes, 455 ; academic duties at Cornell, 455 ; biographies of Goethe and Schiller planned by, 454, 455. 773 "384: poetry of, 456; lit- erary personality of, 454-55, 456; J. T. Krumpelmann on, 771 ^74; mastery of German, 772 n375; German authors read bv, 772 n375; on German legendary lore, 772 n378; reception of Taylor's Faust transla- tion, 772 n38o-8i; lectures on German lit. by, 773 n382; on Faust II, 773 n382; on Hebel, 773 ^83; on Riickert, 773 ^83; on Weimar, 773 383 ; Schiller's Don Carlos tr. by, 773 n384; on Goethe, 773 n386; literary personality of, 773 n386; versatility of, 773 n386 Taylor, Franklin: Melville's relations with, 437 Taylor, Jeremy: Emerson's refs. to, 160; Par- ker on, 219 Taylor of Norwich, William: Lessing's Nathan tr. by, 348; Goethe's Iphigenie tr. by, 348 Teachers Fellowship Society (St. Louis), 655 ni8g Teasdale, Sara: Heine's infl. on, 482-83 Tegner, Essaias: Longfellow's transs. from, 738 nii3; Longfellow on, 741 ni30 Tell, Wilhelm: plays based on, 690 ni33, 7:2 ni Tennemann, Wilhelm Gottlieb: 172, 597 ni62; J. Murdock's reliance on, 113; Sir Wm. Ha- milton on, 540 ni95; Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophic tr. by Cousin, 108; Poe's refs. to, 407-8; Arthur Johnson's trans, of, 555 n339 Tennent, Gilbert: Frelinghuysen's relations with, 511 ni2g; anti-Herrnhut position of, 513 ni40 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 456 Terre Haute, Ind.: Harris in, 292 Terry, Ellen, 355 Tersteegen, Gerhard, 345 Teutonic destiny: Hegelian sense of, 260 Texas : Germans in, 1 1 ; Nassau Adelsverein in, 1 2 Textbooks in American colleges: Germanic infl. on, 304; in philosophy, 307-10 Textbook method of instruction: German infl. on, 322 Thales: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Thatcher, Samuel C. : in Germany, 55-56 Thenard, Louis Jacques: Emerson's refs. to, 166; Emerson's hears lectures of, 601 n268 Theologische Jahrbiicher: O. B. Frothingham infl. by, 250, 636 ngoi Theology in America: philosophy segregated from, 321; Kantian infl. on, 321 Index 859 Theology of Germany: American attacks on, no; introduced at Harvard, 130; Unitarian growth of interest in, 148-51, 558 n40o; Presbyterian ministers' change of attitude toward, 149; Emerson's knowledge of, 160, 171. 59° n 531 ethical theism of, 243; And- rews Norton on "infidelity" of, 557 n393 ; A. Norton's reading of, 585 ^22-24; Chas. A. Aiken on, 585 njzj; Emerson related to, 596 ni5o; Clarke's defense of, 625 n687; Joseph Cook's reports on, 632 n8s8 Theus, Jeremiah, 44 Thirty Years' War, 20 Tholuck, Friedrich August Gottreu: 13, 112, 130, 171, 558 n400, 596 ni5o, 632 n858; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Ripley on, 617 n588 Thomas, Calvin: Snider assited by, 286, 653 11165; on Goethe, 683 n70 Thomas, Dr. H. W. : Snider assisted by, 653 ni6i Thomas, Isaiah, 521 n209 Thomas, John Wesley: on German influences on American literature, 483, 790 n599 Thomas, Wilbur K., 11 Thompson, John C, 279 Thoreau, Henry David: 199, 242, 637 n92g; A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, 430, 433 ; literary personality of, 432 ; journal of, 433; on Goethe, 433, 434, 435, 752 n204 n207, 754 n2ig; literary allusions in Walden, 433 ; on German philosophy, 433 ; on meta- physics, 434 ; passages from Goethe's Tasso and Italienische Reise tr. by, 434; on German literary critics, 434 ; on the organic prin- ciple, 435; J. G. Zimmermann's infl. on, 435, 755 n22g; on German scientists, 435 ; Etzler's Paradise within the Reach of Man reviewed by, 436; Emerson and, 592 mo5; Emerson's infl. on, 593 nii2; H. G. O. Blake on, 660 n234; on books, 752 n204 n2og; reading of, 752 n2i2; hears Longfellow lecture at Har- vard, 735 n2i2; studies German, 735n2i2; Goethe transs. by, 753 n2i3; German books read by, 753 11214, 755 ^30-34; likened to Schleiermacher, 753 n2i8; romantic irony of, 753 n2i8; German romantic elements of, 753 n2i8; on Schiller, 754 n22o; on Richter, 754 n22o; Coleridge's infl. on, 754 n222; A. W. v. Schlegel's infl. on, 754 mz$; on the German Gefiihlsmensch, 754 11224; on solitude, 755 n229 Thorndike, Augustus, 51-52, 71, 77 Thorndike, Israel: 521 n207; Ebeling's library bought by, 51-52 Thucydides: Snider on, 286 Thwing, Charles Franklin, 626 n676 Ticknor, George: 13, 19, 20, 43, 56, 57, 62, 63, 66, 70, 75, 77, 78, in, 207, 328, 329, 334, 454, 490, 491; enrolls at Gottingen, 66; at- tends lectures of Schultze, Heeren, Dissen, Saalfeld, Bouterwek, Blumenbach, and Be- necke, 66-67 '• teaches German at Harvard, 67; tours Germany, 67, 527 ^2-44; refuses call to Univ. of Virginia, 67 ; exchanges edu- cational views with Jefferson, 67; plans re- vision of Harvard curriculum, 67, 528 n52; helps found Boston Public Library, 68; later visits to Germany, 68 ; Emerson's opinion of, 162; meets A. W. and F. Schlegel and A. v. Humboldt, 527 n44 Tieck, Ludwig: 223, 329, 333, 338, 343, 344, 385. 393. 4°4> 439. 443. 453. 4 8 4. 4 8 7! Emer- son's refs. to, 172; meets Cooper, 363; Hawthorne infl. by, 365; Irving infl. by, 377, 703 n65 ; Hawthorne's stylistic similar- ities with, 383-84; Poe on, 392, 710 ni4o; Whitman on, 467; Irving and, 701 n42; Hawthorne on, 706 ng6; on perversity, 717 n2o8; the vampire motif in, 717 n2i6 — "Der blonde Eckbert," 708 nii5; "Die Elfen," 384; Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 461; "Die Freunde," 707 moi; "Liebeszau- ber," 403; "Der Runenberg," 384, 708 nii5 — "Vogelscheuche, Die": 378, 385-86; simi- larities with Hawthorne's "Feathertop," 708 nn6 Tiedemann, Dietrich : Poe's refs. to, 407 Timrod, Henry: 14; Russell's Magazine found- ed by, 459; "A Vision of Poetry," 460 Tischendorf, Lobegott Friedrich Konstantin von, 632 n858 Todd, C. A., 289 Toerring-Gutterzell, Joseph von: Marianna Starke's adaptation of The Tournment from Agnes Bernauerin by, 689 ni2g Toland, John, 28 Torrey, Prof. John, 139, 305 Tracey, Rev. Thomas: 431; Follen's advice to, "5 Transcendence, 187, 189 Transcendental criticism in America, 486-88 Transcendental idealism, Emerson on, 607 11430 Transcendentalism (critical) : 3, 323; Emerson's first appraisal of, 164; Poe's interest in, 389; Whitman on 467, 471-72; Hedge on, 582 n&97 Transcendentalism (German) : 300 ; Samuel Miller's analysis of, 60-61 ; eclectics' vague restatement of, 109; Cambridge Platonists' relation to, 135; Emerson's popularization of, 159; Alcott on, 233-34; organicism emph- asized by, 322; Dr. Channing's debt to, 538 ni7i; British opposition to, 538 ni77; Sir. Wm. Hamilton on, 541 n 198-99; difficulties inherent in nomenclature of, 541 n20o; Coleridge's firsthand knowledge of, 542 n2og; Wordsworth on, 547 ^49-51 ; Hazlitt 860 Index on, 547 11256; Carlyle infl. by, 551 11299, 55-2 11301-9; Mme. de Stael on, 552 n32o; Alex- ander and Dod on, 558 n3g8; Hedge on, 580 n6j6; Emerson's turn toward, 591 1179; Emerson infl. by, 596 niso; Emerson on, 616 n555; Longfellow on, 738 ni04 Transcendentalism (New England) : 8, 294, 300, 304, 322; indigenous nature of, 13, 81- 82; German sources of, 79-80, 82, no, 534 ni42, 536 niso, 537 ni6i, 662 n258; Emer- son's definition of, 79, 158; analysis of, 79— 82, 556, n367 557, n3i7; definitions of, 79-81, 145; Frothingham on, 79, 249; as a philo- sophical system, 79-80 ; reform movements associated with, 80, 536 ni52; French infl. on, 81, 82, 105; religious nature of, 80, 81; mystical element in, 82; idealistic nature of, 79, 82; James Murdock's appraisal of, 107; history of, 107; Emerson's criticism of, 191; Parker's defense of, 218; compared with St. Louis Hegelianism, 231-32; Free-religious movement related to, 245 ; Osgood's view of, 248; origins of, 107, 248, 639 n3; St. Louis Movement outgrowth of, 257; westward spread of, 300; cyclic movement of, 300; passing of, 303; academic infl. of, 312; lead- ing exponents of, 535 ni43; Lowell on, 535 ni44-45; Unitarian origin of, 535 ni48- 49; eccentricities associated with, 536 ni52; opposed to Lockean sensationalism, 537 m6o; appeal to younger generation, 537 ni62; Unitarian opposition to 558 n404, 618 n6oi, 662 n258; compared with St. Louis Hegelianism, 571 n548; Vermont Transcendentalism related to, 581 n683 ; Caroline Dall on, 582 n6g3; attack on, 618 n6oi, 662 n258; periodicals of, 624 n68o; Brownson's attack on, 629 n8o7; Furness on, 632 n853; Longfellow on, 738 mo4 Transcendentalists (New England) : 78, 247, 293, 336, 341; individualism of, 107; later generation of, 242, 244-45 ; Darwinian infl. on later generation of, 244, 246; Germanism of, 329; caricatures of, 535 ni45 Transcendent versus transcendental know- ledge: Kant on, 138 Transit (Transition) : Emerson on, 614 n52g n53i Translators of German literature: list of, 681 n58, 682 n62 Trappists, 32 Traubel, Horace, 465, 467 Travel accounts: Emerson's reading of, 592 mo6 Trenck, Friedrich, 359 Trendelenberg, Friedrich Adolf, 320 Trent, William Peterfield, 701 n42 Tribune (N.Y.): 243; Ripley as assistant editor of, 214; M. Fuller on staff of, 443 Trost, Martin, 29 Trumbull, John: 518 nigi ; in Germany, 50 Tschink, Cajetan: Geisterseher, or The Victim of Magical Delusion, 361 Tucker, Ellen, 164 Tucker, Elizabeth, 593 11108 Tucker, Judge Beverly, 682 n62 Tubingen school of Biblical criticism: 242; Parker infl. by, 243; O. B. Frothingham infl. by, 636 ngoi Tufts, James Hayden: Windelband's History of Philosophy tr. by, 673 n374; in Germany, 6/3 11374 Turgenieff, Ivan Sergeyevich, 279, 340 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques: Emerson on, 607 n4ig Turnbull, J. D. : The Wood Demon, 354 Turner, Frederick Jackson: frontier theory of, 4 Turner, Joseph M. N., 279 Turner, Sharon: Emerson on, 183; History of the Anglo-Saxons, 605 n336 Turner, Edward: Chemistry ref. to by Emerson, 167 Tuthill, Meeds, 279, 651 ni2i, 655 ni88 Twain, Mark. See Clemens, Samuel Langhorne Twesten, August Detlev Christian, 305, 632 n858 Tyndall, John: 474; Emerson's reading of, 201 Tyrker, Dietrich (Dirk), 3 Tytler, Alexander: Schiller's Rauberxx. by, 248 UEBERWEG, Friedrich: 297, 640 ng; Grund- riss der Geschichte der Philosophic 685 ng6 Uhland, Ludwig: 329, 330, 336, 343, 344, 414, 452, 736 ng2; lyrics of, 333, 334, 338, 339; Poe on, 392, 711 ni46; Longfellow's transs. from, 423; Whitman on, 467 Ullmann, Karl: 632 n858; Ripley on, 209 Ulrici, Hermann: 319, 484, 485, 490; E. P. Whipple on, 797 n66i Understanding: Emerson's interpretation of, 180-81, 601 n26o, 603 n28g; categories of, 185. See also Reason Understanding and Reason: 158; Clarke on, 223, 623 n673, 625 n688; Carlyle on, 544 n22 5. 55° n286 n290, 603 n288 n2go n302 n307, 604 n32o; Marsh on, 575 n6i4~i6 n620, 577 n637 n639, 578 n640, 603 n28g; Coleridge on, 575 n624, 577 n639, 578 n640 n659, 603 n302; Emerson on, 591 n86, 604 n3i6 n320, 606 n38o Underwood, B. F., 245 Union College: Samuel Osgood at, 312 Unionism: St. Louis Hegelians' view of, 267 Union of German-American Liberal Societies, 246 Union Theological Seminary: history of, 663 11273 Unitarianism : Transcendentalism derived from, Index 861 79; traditionalism of, 80; revolt from Cal- vinism, 82 ; negative nature of, 82 ; Emer- son's criticism of, 83, 156, 158, 601 n26i ; O. B. Frothingham's history of, 249; spirit- ual sterility of, 537 ni6o; Transcendenta- lists' opposition to, 618 n6oi ; Clarke's de- finition of, 623 n675; G. W. Cooke on, 637 ng22 Unitarians: 245; English deistic infl. on, 130; on German thought, 148-51; policy of free inquiry, 151; position of (c. 1840), 209-10; German-American radicals propose union with, 246; Osgood identified with evangelical order of, 248; Follen's relations with, 564 n46i Unitarian theology: Emerson's attack on, 209; Follen's views compared with, 566 n476 United States Gazette: on German plays, 350 Unity in variety: Emerson on, 157, 188 Universities in America: liberalization of, 59; philosophical instruction on, 59; New Eng- land Transcendentalists' infl. on, 312 Universities in Germany: Americans attracted by, 19 University education in Germany: American reputation of, 245 University education in the U.S.: liberaliza- tion of, 59, 534 ni39; German infl. on, 666 n299 University of Chicago: 490; Snider on, 288; philosophy at, 668 n3o8 University of Michigan: 534 ni39; Tappan's reorganization of, 310-n; philosophical instruction at, 311 University of North Carolina: philosophy at, 668 n3o8 University of South Carolina, 305 University of Vermont, 78, 574 n6o7 University of Virginia: German infl. on, 78; textbooks used at, 506 n67 ; Blaettermann at, 534 ni40; German instruction at, 534 ni40 University of Wisconsin: 311; philosophy at, 668 n3i3 Upham, Thomas C: on transcendentalism, 666 n294; German infl. on, 665 n287; textbooks of philosophy by, 309; Kantian elements in, 3°9 Urlsperger, Samuel: correspondence of, 509 mil Utilitarianism in America, 118 Usher, John: importer of German books, 30 VALENTINUS, Basilius, 27 Vampirism: German romantics' treatment of, 717 n2i6 Vanbrugh, Sir John: early American perfor- mance of, 348 Vane, Sir Henry, 81 Van Wart, Henry, 372 Varnhangen von Ense, Karl August 343; Emer- son's refs. to, 172; Tagebiicher read by Emerson 205 ; Varnhagen von Ense, Rahel Antonie Frederike Levin, 442 Vaughan, Benjamin : German books owned by, 5i Vaughan, Samuel: German books owned by, 51 Vaux, Calvert, 249 Veblen, Thorstein: reads W. T. Harris on Hegel, 318; on Hegel, 318, 673 n37i; Noah Porter's infl. on, 318; studies Kant, 318, 673 n37o; writes for the Journal of Specula- tive Philosophy, 318; studies Peirce, 318; on Lotze, 319; neo-Kantism of, 319; education of, 672 n37o; Dr. Prentz's infl. on, 673 n37o; on Darwinianism, 673 n37i; on Royce, 673 r>374 Vera, Augusto, 279, 302 Vickery, T. R.: Goeschel tr, by, 652 ni26 Villers, Charles de: 20, 66; on Kant, 539 ni83 Vinci, Leonardo da, 279 Virchow, Rudolf, 633 n866 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor: 558 n40o; Lowell on, 429; A. Norton on, 558 n40o Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet: 87, 120; Emerson's refs. to, 160; Goethe compared with, 329 Vulpius, Christian August: Rinaldo Rinaldini adapted from, 356 Voss, Johann Heinrich: 343; Luise, 424 Voss, Richard : 684 n84 ; Der Monch von Berchtesgaden, 481 Voragine, Jacobus de: Aurea Legenda, 425 Vera, August: on Hegel, 670 n33i Vermont Transcendentalists, N.E. Transcen- dentalists' relation to, 581 n683 Very, Jones: 486, 768 n338; German infl. on, 488; on Shakespeare, 798 n684 WACKENRODER, Wilhelm Heinrich, 461, 484 Wachtler, Paul: on Poe, 713 ni74 Wagner, Joseph J., 113 Wagner, Richard, 346, 474, 685 ng6 Wagoner, Mrs. Adeline Palmier, 289 Walden Pond : Snider at, 266 Waldschmidt, Jacob, 34 Waldus, Petrus, 23 Walker, Rev. Henry, 621 n632 Walker, James: 148; on Jouffroy, 105; philo- sophic character of, 148-49; views on tran- scendentalism, 149; on Schleiermacher, De- Wette, and Kant, 149; lectures on Cousin, 556 n36 4 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 322 Walther von der Vogelweide, 344 Ward, James, 279 Ware, Henry, Jr.: 81, 119, 149, 164, 223; 862 Index Follen's discussions with, 115; Emerson's refs. to, 160; on German transcendentalism, 558 n40i ; on study in Germany, 584 nyio. Ware, William, 149, 681 n58 War of 1812: national literary development after, 358 Ward, Lester Frank: on Kant, 659 n230 Ward, Nathaniel: 12, 605 n63; Germanic infl. on, 29 Ward, Samuel Gray, 413, 681 n58 Warfel, Harry R., 691 ni52 Warner, Charles Dudley: European journeys of, 458 ; books by, 458 ; German travel letters of, 774 n408; on Munich, 774 n4o8 Warner, Susan, 340 Warton, Joseph, 484 Warton, Thomas, 484 Washington University (St. Louis), 260 Wasson, David A.: 148, 232, 243, 244; tran- scendentalism of, 252; Carlyle's and Emer- son's infl. on, 252; metaphysical ability of, 252; Parker and, 252; joins Free Religious Assn., 252; contributes to the Radical, Index, etc., 252; on Comte and Spencer, 252; natural religion of, 252; on Kant, 637 n927; on Parker, 637 ng27; in Germany, 637 ng27; on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, 637 ng28; on German lit., 637 ng28 Watertown, Mass., 24 Watson, John: 279, 298; on Kant, 659 n23i Watt, Gregory: Emerson's refs. to, 166 Watters, Dr. J. H.: 269, 270, 271, 639 n3, 645 n76, 649 n97; Alcott on, 231 Watterson, George, 364 Watts, Isaac, 359 Wayland, Francis: 59, 305, 645 n68, 666 n2gg; textbooks in philosophy by, 309; Coleridge's infl. on, 309; Fichte's infl. on, 309; Kant's infl. of ethics on, 665 n289; Kantian reason as viewed by, 665 n2gi Weber, Karl Maria E. F. von: 352; Irving and, 700 n39 Webster, Daniel: Emerson on, 184 Webster, Noah: 56-57; Wm. Bentley on, 53; draws on German linguistic scholarship, 56- 57 Wedekind, Frank: O'Neill infl. by, 483 Wednesday Club (St. Louis), 655 ni8g Wegscheider, Julius August Ludwig: Parker's reading of, 216 Weiberg, Kaspar, 45-46 Weiler, Martin, 34 Weiss, Georg Michael, 42 Weiss, John: 148, 232, 244, 254, 279, 446, 584 n7o8; in Germany, 251; succeeds Convers Francis, 251 ; Parker and, 251 ; radicalism of, 251; on evolution, 251; various writings of, 251; scientific rationalism of, 251; transla- tions by, 251, 637 ng23-24; on Schiller and Kant, 251; on Novalis and Fichte, 251; on German Catholicism, 637 ngi7: on Ronge, 637 ngi7; on science, 637 ng2i; literary personality of, 637 ng2 2 Wellek, Rene: on Coleridge, 542 n2i2 Wells, B. W. : on Goethe's Faust, 683 n6g Wells, William: Griesbach tr. by, 62 Wendelin, Friedrich, 2g Wendell, Barrett, 114 Wenley, Robert Mark: infl. by Hegel, Kant, and Lotze, 673 n374 Werder, Karl: Shakespeare criticism of, 485 Werner E. {pseud.) : 347, 685 ng3 Werner, Zacharias: the vampire theme in, 717 m6 Wertherfieber, 327 Wertherism, American vogue of, 35g Wesley, Charles; 38; infl. by German hymnody, 38-39, 512 ni30 ni32; in Georgia, 510 ni24 Wesley, John: 33; in Herrnhut, 37; in Georgia, 38; conversion of, 38; at Halle, 38; founds charitable institutions, 38 ; Collection of Psalms and Hymns, 39; first American journey of, 510 ni24; Moravian infl. on, 511 ni28; infl. by German hymnody, 512 ni3o Wesselhoeft, Johann Georg, 128 Wesselhoeft, Wilhelm, 246 Western, The, 258, 282, 336 Western Messenger: German lit. in, 223-24, 257, 359. 625 n686, 633 n86i, 678 n28; Osgood's essays in, 247 Western Philosophical Association, 303 Whately, Archbishop Richard: 307; on logic, 664 n275 Wheeler, Charles Stearns: 435, 659 n228; German universities appraised by, 197; on Schelling's lectures, 448, 638 ng4o; in Ger- many, 448; on German philosophy, 448; on Schelling, 448 Wheelwright, John: antinomianism of, 25 Whipple, Edwin Percy: on organic unity, 485; on A. W. Schlegel, 485, 796 n659 ; on Coler- idge, 485, 7g6 n65g; on Ulrici's Shakespeare criticism, 7g7 n66i Whitcomb, May: on Snider's St. Louis Commu- nal University, 654 ni7g White, Andrew Dickson: 591, 244, 313; at Cornell, 311, 667 n302 ; on German infl. in the U.S., 669 n3ig White, Daniel Appleton: on Gessner, 55 White, Gilbert: Emerson's refs. to, 166 White, John (of Dorchester), 21 White, Maria: German studies of, 745 ni48 White, Richard Grant: 486, 48g; on German Shakespeare criticism , 488 ; on Coleridge, 488; "common-sense" criticism of, 488 White Mountains: Emerson in, i6g Whitefield, George: 33, 38; Emerson's refs. to, 160 Index 863 Whitman, Sarah Helen Power: 334, 681, n58; on Goethe, 629 n8os Whitman, Walt: 9, 433, 486; on Hegel, 303, 461-62, 468, 469, 780 n450 n459-6o, 786 n520 n522, 787 n530 n542, 788 n747 n7 4 g n55i 11553-54; reading of, 461-62, 777 n439, 779 n453; Goethe's infl. on, 461, 465, 466, 783 n48i-83; on Kant, 461, 462, 471, 780 n450, 787 ^33-34; knowledge of German language and lit., 462 ; as editor of the Brook- lyn Daily Eagle, 462 ; on the Nibelungenlied, 462, 467, 779 n453; reads Gostick's German Lit., 462; reads Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany, 462-63 ; on Sophocles, 462 ; pose of, 462, 785 n5i8; on Goethe, 462, 464, 465, 781 n463, 782 n474, 783 n48i, 784 0489; Herder's infl. on, 463, 466; on F. Schlegel, 463; Car- lyle's infl. on, 464, 779 n453, 781 ^63 ; Emerson's infl. on, 465, 782 n472; Hegel's infl. on, 465, 470-71, 780 n46o, 786 n526 n528 n530-3i; on evil, 465; Zschokke's infl. on, 465-66, 783 n484 n488; on Heine, 466- 67, 784 n493~94; on the German critical transcendentalists, 467; on German authors, 467 ; on German philologists, 467 ; on Hein- rich Schliemann, 476; on Niebuhr, 467, 780 n46o; on Alex. v. Humboldt, 467; philoso- phical personality of, 467; contradictions in thought of, 467-68; on brotherhood, 468; on Hegelian idealism, 468; comprehensive- ness of, 468; on Quakerism, 469; paradox in, 469; on Emerson, 470, 782 ^72-73; Schelling's infl. on, 470; Fichte's infl. on, 470; Kant's infl. on, 470-71; on Schelling, 471, 780 n450 n46o, 787 n536; on Fichte, 471-72, 780 n450, 787 n535; on Carlyle, 472, 781 n463 ; Gostick's infl. on, 473, 779 n 453. 780 n46o, 788 n548; on Being, 473; on Hegelian absolutism, 473; on Shake- speare, 488, 489, 798 n690, 799 n69i; on Herder, 489-90, 785 n4go n493 ; famous actors seen by, 686 ni03; studies of literary infl. on, 777 n445 ; polyglotism of, 778 n449 ; knowledge of German, 778 m449; German- American friends of, 778 n449; Maurice Henry Traubel and, 778 n449; on German poets, 778 n449; at Pfaff's restaurant, 778 n449; at Schneiders Theater, 778 n449; William Kurtz and, 778 n449; on German culture, 778 n45o; on German-American cultural relations, 478 n45o; on German lo- calities, 478 n45o; on German music and composers, 478 n45o; books reviewed by, 779 n45i ; Hedge's infl. on, 779 n459, 787 n537- 38; on Richter, 781 ^63 ; autobiographical nature of poems of, 783 ^67; on Faust, 783 n479; parallels with Goethe's Faust, 783 n48i-83; on Schiller, 784 n48g; on F. Schle- gel, 784 n492; on Kuno Fischer, 785 n50i ; on Karl Miiller, 785 n5oi; anti-intellectual- ism of, 785 n5i3; tribute to German phi- losophers, 785 n5i5; on the doctrine of op- posites, 786 n52o; lecture notes on the Ger- man philosophers, 786 ^24; Dr. Bucke on, 786 n524; John Burroughs on, 786 ^25; tribute to Hegel, 786 n530, 787 n542; reli- ance on encyclopedias, 787 ^32-35; on Leibnitz, 787 n54i; on W. T. Harris, 788 n554; on the St. Louis Hegelians, 799 n6gi — "Base of All Metaphyscis, The": 468, 470 — Leaves of Grass: 461, 464, 468, 469, 473; Goethe's infl. on, 465 — "Salut au Monde," 461; "Song of Myself," 471; Specimen Days, 472; As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free and Other Poems, 469 Whitney, William D., 571 n546 Whittier, John Greenleaf: 448, 451; German legendary lore appeals to, 430; on the Penn- sylvania-German pietists, 431 ; interest in the Faust story, 431; Carl Follen and, 431, 750 ni93; W. L. Garrison's relations with, 431; on Luther, 431, 750 ni95; Luther's infl. on, 431; on Wm. Penn, 431; on F. D. Pas- torius, 431; on the Germantown Friends' protest against slavery, 431, 752 n2or ; German- American subjected used by, 431- 32; German subjects used by, 432; on Eph- rata, Pa., 432; on Gov. Joseph Ritner, 749 ni88; German-American anti-slavery prop- agandists and, 749 ni88, 751 ni97; J. A. Apel's Freischutz tr. by, 749 ni8g; German element in tales of, 750 n 189-90; German authors quoted or mentioned by, 750 nigo; German element in poems of, 750 ni92; Bayard Taylor and, 750 nig2; Follen's infl. on, 750 nig3; on German pietists and mys- tics, 750 nig4; on Melanchthon, 750 ni95; on Germany, 750 nig5-g6; on J. A. Etzler, 751 nig6; on German mysticism, 751 nigg; Germans included in anthology edited by, 752 n20i ; German books in library of, 752 n20i — "Barbara Frietchie," 432: Child Life, 432; "Cobbler Keezar's Vision," 432; "Hymn of the Dunkers," 432 — Legends of New England: Gothic elements in, 364 — "Maud Muller," 431-32; "The Palatine," 431 — "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim": 431 ; Germanic infl. on, 751 nig7 - — "The Two Elizabeth's" 432 Wieland, Christoph Martin: 328, 32g, 343, 345, 346, 35g; Emerson's refs. to, 172; Poe on, 3g2, 713 ni64 — Abraham, 48 — Oberon: 518 ni8g; tr. by Sotheby, 327; dra- matization of, 353, 354; tr. by J. Q. Adams, 677 n5, 721 m 864 Index Wigglesworth, Michael, 28 Wilbrandt, Adolf von : Der Meisler von Palmyra, 480; S. L. Clemens and, 793 n62<3— 27 Wildenbruch, Ernst von, 333 Wildenhahn, Karl August, 685 ng3 Wilder, Alexander, 291, 656 nig6, 659 n23i Wildermuth, Ottilie Rooschiitz, 347 Wilkes, George: 486; on Shakespeare, 490; on Dr. Johnson, 490; on Edward Dowden, 490 Will, Peter: 49; transs. by, 48-49; Samuel Miller infl. by, 60; literary career of, 517 m8i; on Kant, 661 n255 William and Mary College, 506 n67 Willard, Sidney: 19; Eichhorn tr. by, 55 Williams, Roger: Luther's infl. on, 25; on Luther, 502 ^5-41 Williams, Sally, 273 Williams, Samuel, 50 Willich, Anthony Florian M.: 227, 539 ni79 ni8i; Kant ed. by, 86; Hazlitt relies on, 96 Willis, Nathaniel Parker: 457, 458; in Europe, 453, 771 n372; European travel sketches of, 453 ! German setting of stories by, 453 ; German writers mentioned by, 453 ; in Ger- many, 771 n372; on the German language, 771 n372 Wilson, Howard A.: on Ripley, 619 n6i8 Wilson, John: German books owned by, 29 Wilson, W. D., 149, 3-7 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim: 48, 279, 309, 616 n56g; Emerson on, 172; Poe on, 392, 713 ni64; Ancient Art, 685 ng6 Windelband, Wilhelm, 302, 313, 315 Winer, Georg Benedict: ed. by Stuart, 130 Winter, William, 457 Winter Garden, 358 Winthrop, Fitz-John, 504 n56 Winthrop, Francis B., 503 n49 Winthrop, John, Sr., 291, 503 n47 Winthrop, John, Jr.: 13, 28, 31, 32; German books in library of, 27; Robert Child and, 27; library of, 503 n49 n5o, 504 n56 Winthrop, Wait, 504 ns6 Winthrop, Wait Still, 28 Winthrop library: disposal of, 503 nso, 505 n6o Winthrop papers, 506 n79 Wirgman, Thomas: 539 ni86; on Kant, 86, 542 n205 Wisconsin: foreign elements in, 4 Wise, John: Pufendorf's infl. on, 47, 81 Wister, Mrs. Annie Lee Furness, 685 n95 Witchcraft in New England: infl. by Faustus legend, 30 Withington, William, 120 Wittke, Carl Frederick: appraises foreign strains in the U.S., 4, 11; on the Forty- eighters, 12 Woerner, Johann Gabriel: 271, 279, 289, 293, 639 n3, 641 ni8, 652 ni2i; books by, 258; Rebel's Daughter, 267 ; Hegelian dialectics employed by, 268 ; Woerner, William F. : Snider and, 655 m87 Wolcott, Elizur, 291 Wolcott, Mrs. Elizur, 290, 294 Wolf, Christian: 48, 86; Samuel Johnson infl. by, 47; S. Miller's appraisal of, 61; Bancroft on, 531 nio7 Wolff, F. A., 172 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 428 Wollaston, William Hyde: Emerson's refs. to, 160; Parker on, 219 Wollebius, Johann: Harvard uses books by, 29; J. Edwards' reading of, 37; digest of theology by, 661 ^254 Woodberry, George Edward, 389, 491 Woodbridge, William C, 78 Woods, Leonard, Jr.: on Goethe, 331, 677 n35; H. B. Smith infl. by, 662 n259 Woolman, John, 81 Woolsey, Theodore Dwight, 570 n546 Wordsworth, William: 157, 161, 163, 172, 174, 187, 407 n424; on Kant, 95, 547 ^49-51; conservatism of, 174; Alcott infl. by, 226; Emerson on, 590 n75; Emerson's visit to, 600 n234 Wooton, Henry: German interests of, 20 Wundt, Wilhelm Max: 302, 313, 315; McCosh on, 312 Wyss, Johann David: Swiss Family Robinson, 347, 680 n49 XENOPHANES: Emerson's refs. to, 160 YALE University: German books in library of, 37; Locke taught at, 304; textbooks in use at, 505 n67, 509 nii5; philosophy at, 668 11308 Young Men's Christian Union, 243, 633 n862, 635 n892 ZEISING, Adolf, Lowell on, 429 Zell, Friedrich (pseud.), 347 Zeller, Eduard: 312, 322, 636 ngoi ; Emerson's refs. to, 172 Zenger, Peter, 43 Zeno: Emerson's refs. to, 160 Zeydel, Edwin H.: on Tieck's infl. on Irving, 701 n42 Ziegenbalg, Bartholomeus: 33, 35; C. Mather's correspondence with, 34; Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig: 38, 40-41; plans unification of German sectarians in America, 41 ; Gesangbuch of, 30 Zimmermann, Johann Georg: 227, 343, 436; Thoreau and, 435, 757 n22g; On Solitude, 48, 346, 677 n2 Zoology: Emerson' interest in, 201 Index 865 Zoar, Ohio, 12 Zollikofer, Georg J.: translations from, 54 Zoroaster: 228, 298; Emerson on, 160, 592 n94 Zschokke, Johann Heinrich Daniel: 329, 333, 346, 343; transs. of tales by, 327, 448; American popularity of, 333; E. R. Sill's in- terest in, 481; Whitman infl. by, 783 ^84 n488 — Abaellino: 333; adapted by Dunlap, 351; popularity of, 351, 355, 360; Rugantino adapted from, 356; international success of, 689 ni27; ascribed by Dunlap to Schiller, 689 ni28 — Selbstschau : Whitman infl. by, 465-66 — Stunden der Andacht: trans, of, 333 — Tote Gast, Der, 339 Zucker, Adolf Eduard: on the Forty-eighters, 12 Zurich, English settlement at, 20 Zwinger, Theodor: Theatrum HumanaeVitae, 34 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA 325 243P75G C002 GERMAN CULTURE IN AMERICA MADISON. WIS 3 0112 025284552 ill in .SIIiilH JWHP flllL mm mSi mm »lilMlIiif