Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman : A Transatlantic Perspective [1 ed.] 9780748635757, 9780748635740

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‘This impressive study in cultural politics clarifies two puzzles: why did Whitman believe that there was a tight connection between free citizens and the “lawless music” of free verse? and why has anyone else ever believed it? With real erudition, Leypoldt spans a history from the Enlightenment to Modernism, while maintaining his focus on Whitman. Rich resources from British, German, French, and American intellectual history are marshaled by a strong sociological thesis.’ Jonathan Arac, Mellon Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman traces the nineteenth-century fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism from its beginnings in transatlantic early romanticism, to the poetry and poetics of Walt Whitman, and Whitman’s modernist reinvention as an icon of a native avant-garde. Whitman made cultural nationalism compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship by trying to hold national authenticity and literary authority in a single poetic vision. Yet the notion that his ‘language experiment’ transformed essential democratic experience into a genuine American aesthetics also owes much to Whitman’s retrospective canonization. What Leypoldt calls Whitmanian authority is thus a transatlantic and transhistorical discursive construct that Leypoldt explores from different angles in this important volume. Günter Leypoldt is Professor of American Literature at the University of Heidelberg.

ISBN 978 0 7486 3574 0 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com

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E d i n b u rg h S t u d i es i n T r a n s at l a n t i c L i t e r at u r es Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor

Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman

A Transatlantic Perspective

Edinburgh

Jacket image courtesy of the Library of Congress. Jacket design: Barrie Tullett

Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective   Günter Leypoldt

‘Günter Leypoldt’s impressive new book represents a sophisticated theoretical attempt to historicize the transnational by showing how Whitman conceived of his cultural authority as involving a deliberate attempt to create parallels and analogies among different aspects of U. S. culture. By contrasting this synthetic version of romantic nationalism with more heterogeneous versions of nineteenth-century aesthetics, including a fascinating chapter on Whitman’s own involvement with the language of classical music, Leypoldt extends both the chronological and philosophical boundaries of critical discussions about the transnational turn.’ Paul Giles, Professor of American Literature, University of Oxford

Günter Leypoldt

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Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman

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EDINBURGH STUDIES IN TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor With the end of the Cold War and the burgeoning of a global culture, the premises upon which Area Studies were based have come into question. Starting from the assumption that the study of American literatures can no longer operate on a nation-based or exceptionalist paradigm, the books in this new series work within a comparative framework to interrogate place-based identities and monocular visions. The authors attempt instead to develop new paradigms for literary criticism in historical and contemporary contexts of exchange, circulation, and transformation. Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures seeks uniquely to further the critical, theoretical and ideational work of the developing field of transatlantic literary studies. Titles in the series include: Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois Daniel G. Williams Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture Michèle Mendelssohn American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation Daniel Katz The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag Ellen Crowell Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells Frank Christianson Transatlantic Women’s Literature Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective Günter Leypoldt

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Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman A Transatlantic Perspective

◆ ◆ ◆

Günter Leypoldt

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

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To E. L.

© Günter Leypoldt, 2009 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3574 0 (hardback) The right of Günter Leypoldt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Whitman and the ‘Lawless Music’ of American Culture

vii ix

1

Transnational Contexts of NineteenthCentury US Discourse 1. The Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Field 2. US Discourse and the Expressivist Turn

17 49

Representative Authors 3. The Poet as Orphic Singer: Ralph Waldo Emerson 4. Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the Future

73 101

Conceptual Fields of US Culture 5. The Music of America 6. National Identity and the Smell of the Woods 7. The Democratic Muse

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131 160 195

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Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman Inventing Whitmanian Authority

8. Contemporary Reception 9. Whitman among the Moderns

237 247

Epilog: After the American Renaissance

256

Bibliography Index

261 289

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PREFACE

This book deals with moments of literary authority in nineteenthcentury US culture. Its broadest thesis is that modern literary space is shaped by the logic of cultural professionalism, which first emerged with the eighteenth-century transformation of the public sphere, and the extension and intensification of the print markets that produced internally validated centers of aesthetic production, or ‘literary fields’ (Bourdieu). Literary fields transcend political and national boundaries and cut across familiar period distinctions. Rather than seeing literary history as a temporal succession of essentially different historical identities (leading from, say, naïve Realists to self-reflexive Modernists, or ‘grandmotherly’ Boston Brahmins to radical Whitmanians), we can imagine historical periods as internally differentiated spaces with relatively separate literary territories that branch into transatlantic and transhistorical connections. There are important ways in which historically and spatially distant literary avant-gardes resemble each other more closely than their immediate literary neighbors: Whitman’s poetics seems light years from Longfellow’s, but it has a great deal in common with earlier avantgardes – according to Harold Bloom, ‘one must go back to Goethe, Blake, Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Shelley and Keats’ to find Whitman’s ‘aesthetic equivalent’ (1995: 265). And no mid-century poet blends as easily as Whitman into the high modernist literary landscape whose representative critics reinterpreted Leaves of Grass as a ‘language experiment’ central to American modernity. It is tempting to account for these family resemblances by locating Whitman in a timeless Western Canon, where the greatest artists compose ‘a simultaneous

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order’ (Eliot 1975: 38) or a linear chain of anxiety-driven ‘influence’. But such approaches, apart from their melodramatic assumptions about universal greatness, neglect the structural affinities of romantic and modernist authorship that transcend individual or discursive contact. Whitman’s work has been shaped by positional continuities of avant-garde discourse that can be traced to the transformations of the literary landscape between 1750 and 1900. Since the early romantic print-market revolution, the separation of specialized producers from lay audiences continues to posit comparable dilemmas and to provoke similar rhetorical solutions, even in today’s university-based culture wars. Professionalism, in other words, effects a transnational and transhistorical ‘curvature’ of literary space that inscribes itself into the habitus of literary intellectuals and shapes their strategies of social legitimation across space and time. Whitman is not, of course, the only poet to come to terms with modern authorship and the logic of professionalism. But his influential fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism gives him exceptional relevance, both within nineteenth-century US literature and its twentieth-century reinvention. Whitman made the cultural nationalism of the Young America movement compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship. Literary intellectuals since 1800 responded to these needs with post-Kantian narratives of legitimation that presented aesthetic form as the most direct expression of socially relevant presences (the infinite, spirit, nature, and so on). Whitman blends similar narratives with high romantic notions of expressivist national identity. No other American Renaissance author manages so persuasively to hold national authenticity and professional authority in a single poetic vision. I wish to examine Whitmanian authority from four angles: its relation to transatlantic contexts; its gradual development from Emerson’s cultural criticism to Whitman’s poetry and poetics; its location within three conceptual fields – music, nature, democracy – that function as contact zones of European and American theories of culture; and finally its invention (or dialectic construction) during Whitman’s retrospective canonization between the 1870s and the 1940s.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Parts of this book appeared as ‘Democracy’s “Lawless Music”: The Whitmanian Moment in the US Construction of Representative Literariness’, NLH 38 (2) (spring 2007): 333–52; and ‘Aesthetic Specialists and Public Intellectuals: Ruskin, Emerson, and Contemporary Professionalism’, MLQ 68 (3) (September 2007): 417–34. I thank Johns Hopkins University Press and Duke University Press for permission to reprint and the journal editors, Ralph Cohen and Marshall Brown, and their anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice. This book is a revised and abridged version of my ‘habilitation’ thesis for the University of Tübingen. I am grateful to friends and colleagues at Tübingen and the University of Maryland, College Park, for their encouragement and constructive criticism. I thank especially Bernd Engler and Jan Stievermann for their personal support and consistently responsive readings. Thanks also to Christoph Reinfandt, Horst Tonn, Horst Brummack, Brendan Bleheen, and Niamh Leypoldt for their helpful comments on the first draft. I am also indebted to many colleagues within the German Association of American Studies who engaged with conference presentations of my argument. In the tricky transition from the German habilitation to this book, I am indebted to Ralph Bauer, Marshall Brown, and Paul Giles for their encouragement and help, the readers and editors of Edinburgh University Press for their comments and suggestions, and the series editors, Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, for their indispensable advice on the revision process. Thanks also to Julian Bisping, Lilian

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Chaitas, Máiréad McElligott, and the copy-editors at EUP for their help with the final manuscript. This project owes much to the forbearance of my family: Niamh, Úna and Cian.

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INTRODUCTION: WHITMAN AND THE ‘LAWLESS MUSIC’ OF AMERICAN CULTURE

Contemporary critics continue to be intrigued by the idea that Walt Whitman’s ‘language experiment’ (Matthiessen 1941: 518)1 embodies a radical politics – as a ‘lawless music’, in Whitman’s own terms (1996: 583), that emerges directly from the Democratic Muse.2 The musical trope is significant because it relates a ‘pure’ aesthetic form to a political practice, implying that Whitmanian poetry does not merely talk about democratic issues but transforms the essence of democracy into a stylistic embodiment that constitutes the founding moment of a genuine American aesthetics (see Kerkering 2003). What interests me here is not the truth value of such narratives but the reasons for their continued rhetorical seductiveness. What discursive constellations could have helped to convince not only Whitman himself but a generation of scholars that both the aesthetic power and the authentic Americanness of Leaves of Grass hinged on the ‘invention’ of a revolutionary style based on paratactical catalogues and free-verse scansion? (Precisely because the experiential richness of Whitman’s work remains beyond doubt, it seems odd that its complexities should be reduced to the ‘meaning’ or the ‘politics’ of his formal method.) It seems that variants of the democratic-style theory of Leaves of Grass remain tempting for critics today, both within and outside of Whitman studies, because their underlying cultural parallelism provides us with narratives of scholarly self-legitimation. Despite the dubious epistemological validity of such narratives, we find them hard to resist in the face of the sustained public skepticism about the function and legitimacy of academy-based literary criticism. The

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problem is not new, of course: Whitman’s centrality within a US horizon of representative literariness emerged with the modernist assertion of a native literary tradition and was foundational to the American Studies movement. As Sacvan Bercovitch has shown, F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941) drew its paradigmbuilding force from a double process of legitimation in which the aesthetic brilliance of Whitman’s formal experiment and his cultural representativeness are connected, as it were, in a virtuous circle of mutual validation: the ‘historical designation “American” gains substance by association with an aesthetic “renaissance”’ while ‘Whitman’s art seems richer for its capacity to express “the age”’ (Bercovitch 1993: 353). A number of critics have explained the American-Renaissance construction as a rhetorical response to mid-twentieth-century scholarly anxieties of marginality. According to Evan Carton and Gerald Graff, the first generation of American literary historians faced ‘a double burden’ of having ‘to justify both the value of American literature’ and the ‘disciplinary credentials’ of university-based criticism. Matthiessen’s fusion of Americanism with formalism resonated especially well with English departments during the 1940s because it implied that ‘literature embodied the real America’ (that therefore ‘the critics’ work was central to the life of the nation’ and ‘criticism was not the poor relation it seemed to be to the more technical or practical occupations’) (1994–2005: 309, 313–14). While Carton and Graff’s explanation seems convincing, I believe we can further illuminate the emergence and contemporary relevance of the idea of Whitman’s representative literariness if we contextualize it within a transnational historical moment that precedes the institutionalization of American Studies by roughly one century. The relevant use of what I will call cultural parallelism – the staging of symptomatic resemblance between artistic forms and cultural identity3 – can be traced to the early 1800s, when it becomes the preferred rhetorical tool with which professionalizing romantic intellectuals (or ‘men of letters’) shore up their claims to cultural authority. In the US, the rhetoric of cultural parallelism can be traced in the tentative romanticism of the North American group (among others, William Cullen Bryant, the Channings, Edward Everett, William Tudor), and in the transcendentalist critical gestures of Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, George Bancroft and Orestes Brownson. It dominates the poetry, poetics and cultural criticism of Whitman, where it becomes so crucial an element of intellectual self-fashioning

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[3

that it is tempting to identify the centrality of cultural parallelism in the US as a Whitmanian moment. It is true that Whitman’s contemporaries would have been baffled by this designation – his poetic and critical writings had so little authority at the time of their publication that he was viewed as an epiphenomenon of more established movements, which might have been labeled Coleridgean or Carlylean (during the 1850s), Hegelian or Emersonian (during the 1860s and 70s), or even Tainean or Spencerian (c. after 1880). If the invocation of a Whitmanian moment can be justified, it is because of the remarkable process of retrospective canonization that his work underwent, even half a century before Matthiessen’s American Renaissance. Whitman’s rehabilitation was largely formulated around the strength of his poetry, but by a process of association his promotion to the pantheon of foundational US voices also enhanced the authority of his cultural and critical concepts. These concepts were increasingly perceived as generic to Whitman’s specific brand of poetic nationalism, but they also ‘infected’, as it were, the rhetoric of cultural critics who used Whitman’s canonization to authorize their own cultural politics.4 Matthiessen’s American Renaissance is an instructive example of how the early twentieth-century ‘invention’ of an American national literature revolves around the construction of an iconic Whitman. Matthiessen’s rhetorical brilliance consists in the persuasiveness with which he conceals his revisionism by staging Whitman’s canonization as a passive act of rediscovery (in the sense of Waldo Frank’s programmatic 1929 proclamation of a much needed Re-Discovery of America as a return to values the genteel nineteenth century supposedly had lost). But the conversion of Whitman into a modernist icon was less a recovery than a process of dialectical transfer between nineteenth- and twentieth-century concepts. Matthiessen’s generation of critics was shaped by Whitman’s late romantic program as much as they reconfigured it in their modernist terms. From one angle, Whitman can be seen as the key influence behind the American-Renaissance construction, mainly because his fusion of post-Kantian poetics with cultural nationalism proved immensely useful in the modernist quest for a national canon (more so than the more cosmopolitan frameworks of otherwise more likely candidates such as Emerson or Thoreau). But seen from another perspective there is also a considerable ‘reverse influence’: as Whitman was refracted through his modernist readers, some of his complexities were smoothed over, and the elements of expressivist nationalism

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in his work were highlighted and rendered more seamless than they would have appeared to his own generation of readers. Whitman’s importance for Matthiessen’s generation lies in his suggestion that the musical cadences in Leaves of Grass might embody a spiritual presence more distinctly American than Emerson’s transnational language of Being. It is partly because Whitman’s modernist canonizers foregrounded his nationalist moments so influentially that we now tend to overlook the strong cosmopolitan elements that he shares with Emerson and Fuller. This cosmopolitan strain lets him suggest, in an anonymous self-review of ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’, for the New York Saturday Press in 1860, that his ‘chants’ will rejuvenate American culture with the methods of Italian opera (1996b: 74) – Margaret Fuller makes a similar point when she argues, in 1845, that Beethoven ‘expresses, in full tones, the thoughts that lie at the heart of our own [i.e. American] existence, though we have not found means to stammer them as yet’ (1860: 74). Why did Whitman’s millenarian quest for a ‘music’ of democratic America lend itself better to the revisionist ends of modernist literary nationalism than Emerson’s or Fuller’s positions? An obvious (if banal) reason is perhaps that Whitman participated more directly than the Boston transcendentalists in the climate of mid-century post-idealism, in which the metaphysical foundations of cultural interiority were reinterpreted in more concrete socio-political terms. Consequently poetic manifestos increasingly defined style as the ‘physiognomy’, not simply of ‘spirit’ as an abstract Platonic entity, but of the ‘spirit of the age’, the ‘nation’, the ‘race’, and finally politico-economic systems such as capitalism, feudalism, and democracy (a tendency towards the concrete that is already implicit in Hegel’s suggestion that there is no spirit outside practice). The most important factor contributing to the lasting influence of Whitmanian notions of representative literariness, I believe, is that Whitman offered a precise definition of a ‘democratic method’ (Whitman 1996: 1058), and his main candidates for stylistic democracy – free-verse scansion and structural dehierarchization – proved quite persuasive. Young-American or Emersonian theories of cultural independence failed to suggest how to overcome the courtly muses of Europe, other than by a focus on homegrown themes. The Boston transcendentalists were aware that European music critics debated the political meaning of form during the revolutionary troubles of 1848 (see Chap. 5 below). When an important left-leaning German music journal suggested that Beethoven was a ‘republican’ composer,

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in contrast to the ‘aristocratic’ Mozart (Brendel 1848: 103), the conservative camp asked provocatively to be shown ‘four aristocratic and four democratic bars’ (‘[S]urely’, they said, ‘if there are aristocratic and democratic pieces of music, one should think that there must also exist singular aristocratic and democratic musical thoughts?’ [Schucht 1848: 758]). Few critics believed, of course, that democratic sounds could be identified by stylistic analysis, as there was a consensus in mid-century theory, on both sides of the Atlantic, that the essence of great symphonies was universal. Even the most fervent musical nationalists among Whitman’s contemporaries (such as the composer-critic William Henry Fry [1813–65]) were conceptual Americanists, nationalist on the level of operatic theme but Italianate in their compositions – they considered their works to be manifestations of an American spirit, but did not defend their Americanness with reference to musical forms (Zuck 1980). This changed during the 1890s, when Dvorˇák’s arrival in New York rendered the idea of racially or nationally inflected musical languages more plausible, and early modernist critics began to scan American compositions for native tonal structures and debate whether jazz rhythms or Indian chants could be an adequate foundation for an American symphonic tradition (Tischler 1986). At around the same period, when Whitman became the ‘Good Gray Poet’ and wrote his later manifestos (such as ‘A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads’ of 1888), the idea of his invention of a democratic style intrigued modernist culture critics: in 1916, the Seven Arts music critic Paul Rosenfeld demanded that American composition ‘must go on where Whitman led’, ‘blazing the path for the song of democracy’ (Rosenfeld 1916: 94). These shifts in sensibility may explain the cultural work of Whitman’s cultural parallelisms, and the tremendous influence of today’s truism that while the genteel sonnet resonates with a hierarchical aristocratic England, the paratactical catalogue rhetoric of the Leaves objectifies a radically democratic ethos. The implication is that the perceptive consciousness of Leaves of Grass ranges freely over America’s natural and social spaces, transcending hierarchy and selective order, each item being linked to the next by a formal parallelism symbolic of e pluribus unum. And indeed, the idea that we might like Whitman because he translates cultural pluralism into beautiful song (rather than just because he sings beautifully, or speaks about cultural pluralism, or both) is powerful in itself and may partly account for the excitement and pleasure with which we read him. But Whitman’s method ‘emerges’ as democratic only because

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he provides the necessary interpretation, the discursive ‘program’, as it were, to his chants. It hardly needs to be pointed out that, except at a very high level of abstraction, there is no ontological connection between, say, paratactical catalogues and the idea of cultural inclusiveness (the catalogues in Hebrew poetry or the Bible rarely strike us as symbolic of democracy). If it now seems natural to associate stylistic dehierarchization with political freedom it is partly because we have already accepted Whitman’s program before we listen to his song. Hence we laugh about Barrett Wendell’s once influential suggestion that Whitman’s catalogues resemble not American liberty but European-style anarchy (‘hexameters’ trying ‘to bubble through sewage’, as he put it in his Literary History of America [1900: 467]), not because Wendell’s interpretation of the catalogue is more absurd than others, but because we have come to accept Whitman’s rather than Wendell’s programmatic vision of literature and politics. The American-Renaissance construction entailed a number of important revisions: for one thing, it encouraged modernist literary historians to reinterpret Whitman’s historical location, retrospectively nationalizing, as it were, mid-nineteenth-century key concepts. When the Dublin-based Shakespeare scholar Edward Dowden published the first major assessment of Whitman’s ‘Poetry of Democracy’ in 1871, he praised him for what he considered a cogent poetic formulation of de Tocqueville’s vision of political modernity and Hippolyte Taine’s concepts of culture.5 After Whitman’s canonizers had done their cultural work (successfully marketing their ‘useable past’), the de Tocquevilles and Taines of mid-nineteenth-century culture (along with the Jeffreys and Carlyles of an earlier generation) had been relegated to the background of what now seemed ‘The Age of Emerson and Whitman’ (as Matthiessen subtitled his study).6 This retrospective foregrounding of nationality might also explain the Americanization of Whitman’s project of attaining poetic democracy. When he published his famous 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, the search for a more natural diction (beyond the ‘chains’ of conventional prosody) already had a long tradition, beginning at the latest with Hugh Blair’s advocacy of Ossian – a number of contemporary reviewers of the Leaves felt indeed reminded of Macpherson’s style.7 Moreover, contemporary audiences were familiar with the idea that democratic times could lead to democratic literature: as early as 1825, Hazlitt censured Wordsworth for his poetic ‘principle of equality’,8 while in the same year William Cullen Bryant praised Sir Walter Scott as a

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democratic leveler of social hierarchy.9 During the 1830s and 1840s, the Young American Democratic Review treated Bryant as an ‘American Wordsworth’ and considered even Longfellow to be a literary democrat. By the 1850s, transatlantic poets liked to place themselves within an Anglo-Saxon democratic tradition reaching back to Milton’s justification of blank verse.10 The assumption that Whitman was the only serious nineteenthcentury poet of democracy is arguably a consequence of the postVictorian revision of antebellum culture, which began tentatively with the devaluation of romantic discourse by realist manifestos during the 1870s and 1880s.11 Dowden’s 1871 review is an early example: it introduces to Whitman’s reception the idea that the democratic voices of New England Brahmins are not democratic in style (an argument that became commonplace to twentieth-century Whitman studies, although Whitman hardly ever used it himself). According to Dowden, Longfellow’s verse has ‘a sweet and characteristic note’, but is of an eminently old-world cast (Evangeline is a ‘European idyl of American life, Hermann and Dorothea having emigrated to Acadie’, Hiawatha could have been ‘dreamed in Kensington by a London man of letters’). Washington Irving ‘might have walked arm-in-arm with Addison’, and ‘if he betrays his origin at all, betrays it somewhat in the same way as Longfellow’, ‘by his quiet delight in the implicit tradition of English civility’ (1871: 34). In William Cullen Bryant, ‘prairie and immemorial forest occupy the broad spaces of his canvas’; but he portrays the splendors of American nature with a sense that ‘he is not native to their influences’ (1871: 35). James Russell Lowell may possess ‘a conception of the democratic type of manhood’, but ‘taken as a whole’ his works ‘do not mirror the life, the thoughts, and passions of the nation’ (1871: 36). A key factor in this refiguration of accepted literary democrats into stylistic feudalists is a modernist shift in what it means to be an aesthetic radical. Early-twentieth-century critics retrospectively projected on Whitman’s poetics the modernist belief that literary subversiveness mainly concerns a work’s formal or stylistic aspects – an idea that would have amazed nineteenth-century audiences. Whitman’s implied readers did not separate form and content as neatly as twentieth-century formalists; they frequently located poetic radicalism in the treatment of theme. For many of his contemporaries, Whitman’s most radical aspect was not his poetic form but his sexual explicitness – which tended to be considered a sign of popular literature rather than the literary avant-garde (see Reynolds 1989 and

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1995). Thus within the late-Victorian literary field Whitman appeared less experimental than today, while Tennyson and Browning were perceived as more thought-provoking than their retrospective classification as genteel poets allows (Santayana himself acknowledges this when in 1900 he attributes poetic ‘barbarism’ to both Whitman and Browning). Indeed, the now commonplace division between Whitman and the poets of gentility12 is a good example of the dialectical emergence of Whitman-centered concepts of representative literariness. Whitman provided some cues when he spoke of the feminized culture of parlor poetry as a symptom of cultural illness – in an early self-review, he proposes Leaves of Grass as a more manly American alternative to ‘Tennyson and his British and American eleves’, whom he characterizes with a personification of ‘Poetry’ as a ‘gentleman to the first degree, boating, fishing, and shooting genteely [sic] through nature’ (1855). But Whitman’s meditations on the influence of British feudalism never accrued to the full-fledged theory of gentility Santayana formulated to much greater acclaim in ‘The Poetry of Barbarism’ (1900) and ‘The Genteel Tradition’ (1911). The success of the Whitman/gentility binary clearly profited from the contemporary dominance of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ theories (see Chap. 1, pp. 25–8 below). Santayana’s and Van Wyck Brooks’ highbrow–lowbrow divide almost completely discredited the nineteenth-century American literary canon – Brooks’ definition of the highbrow alone dismissed most of the New England tradition (not only Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes, but also Poe, Hawthorne, and especially Emerson).13 The breakthrough of the Whitman/gentility binary arrived half a generation before Matthiessen’s intervention and became a critical orthodoxy with the help of the writers and intellectuals of the so-called Seven Arts group (after the short-lived eponymous New York journal), who elevated Whitman to a nearmessianic figure of American cultural self-assertion.14 The extent of Whitman’s iconization during the 1920s and 1930s can be seen by the widespread use of Whitmanian labels to authorize modernist aesthetic practices – such as the choreography of Isadora Duncan, the architecture of Louis H. Sullivan, the music of Leo Ornstein and Charles Ives, the painting of John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe, the photography of Alfred Stieglitz, and the literature of Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and William Carlos Williams.15 In these contexts, the epithet ‘Whitmanian’ signals the artist’s rediscovery of a more authentic America embodied in the artwork’s aesthetic

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brilliance (as opposed to the genteel America objectivized in secondrate artistic conventions). Thus in the first issue of the Seven Arts, the French Nobel Laureate Romain Rolland urges American writers and artists to follow ‘your Homer: Walt Whitman’ in creating a national aesthetics that transposes the ‘rich foundation’ of America’s essential diversity (the ‘unconscious and spontaneous and discordant voices’ of the ‘free moving personalities within your States’) into a vibrant ‘Symphony’ (1916: 51, 48–9). In what follows, I will outline the emergence of Whitmanian authority, roughly between 1800 and the 1940s, approaching it from four angles: Transatlantic Contexts. The first section explores how Whitman’s literary space relates to transatlantic figurations of cultural professionalism, expressivist identity models, and post-Kantian narratives of legitimation. Representative Authors. The second section explores how the transatlantic parameters of professionalism shape mid-century American literary intellectuals. It traces the development of key concepts of Whitmanian authority through the work and intellectual self-fashioning of Emerson and Whitman. Conceptual Fields of US Culture. The third section contextualizes the emergence of Whitmanian authority within three conceptual fields – music, nature, and democracy – which function as contact zones between European and American theories of culture that significantly shape Emerson’s and Whitman’s horizons. The first of these conceptual fields (Chap. 5) deals with the image of a distinctly American music, understood both literally, as American musical composition, and as a metaphor of symptomatic national style. The second (Chap. 6) concerns the spatial imaginaries we associate with the so-called ‘Nature’s Nation’ construct, the nineteenth-century attempts to locate a national aesthetics in physical geography or place. The third conceptual field (Chap. 7) could be called the ‘Democratic Muse’ construction, as it centers around traditional views of the putative connection between cultural efflorescence and democratic institutions. Inventing Whitmanian Authority. The fourth section deals with the dialectical construction of a modernist Whitman during his retrospective canonization. It discusses how the heterogeneous nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman’s work were narrowed into a modernist version of Whitman’s nationalist program.

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Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman NOTES

1. Matthiessen adopted the phrase from Whitman’s unpublished notebooks, where he refers to his work as ‘only a language experiment’. 2. Stephen John Mack’s recent study on the ‘pragmatic’ Whitman, for instance, phrases this idea in only slightly more modern terms when he approvingly identifies ‘one of the great truisms of Whitman criticism that his revolutionary language style and his revolutionary politics are inextricably linked [and] connected symbiotically’ (2002: 3). This understanding of Whitman also defines the recent Cambridge History of American Literature (see Bercovitch 1994–2005, vol. 4). 3. See my discussion below of Ruskin’s linking of architecture and economic modes of production (Chap. 1, pp. 18–19, 34–7), Emerson’s parallelism of Britain’s political, philosophical, moral and aesthetic cultures (Chap. 3, pp. 93–6), Whitman’s interest in cultural coherency (Chap. 4, pp. 109–16) and the various tropes of resemblance current in the conceptual fields of music, democracy, and nature (Chaps 5–7). The rhetoric of cultural parallelism divides cultural practice into (a) putative ‘centers’ of cultural identity (in Whitman’s case: the spirit of democratic liberalism, the logic of agrarian capitalism, the forces of frontier democracy, the ethos of Jeffersonianism, and so on) and (b) into canonical modes of cultural expression (such as Whitmanian free verse). In a second move, the constructed centers of culture are then connected with tropes of resemblance (such as homology, similarity, analogy, symmetry, symbolic or allegorical representationality, and so on) that imply a symptomatic or indexical relationship in which the artifact is portrayed as the cultural center’s manifestation (or to list some of the generic synonyms: objectification, materialization, embodiment, reflection, incarnation, living form, epitome, symbolic resolution, negotiation, or appearance). The tropes of resemblance relevant to Whitmanian authority do not necessarily (although they might) imply simple mimetic reflection between sign and referent. Their most common function is to conceal the arbitrariness of the sign by staging pre-interpretive contiguity between signifier and signified. They thus tend towards a structure of signification that C. S. Peirce has defined as the ‘index’ sign (Peirce 1998: 2/291–2, 2/9). The generic case is the romantic symbol (as proposed by Goethe and Coleridge), which expresses its object not simply by mirroring it, but by being organically related to it (see Kerkering 2003: 19–21). 4. In what follows I will use such heuristic terms as ‘Whitmanian moment’ or ‘Whitmanian authority’ as shorthand for a discursive space that regulates the enunciation of nationality within professionalizing sites of cultural production. Whitmanian authority first emerges in the nineteenth century, but is deeply shaped through the intervention of early

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

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twentieth-century professionalism, the modernist appropriation and retrospective revision of romantic culture models. Dowden’s essay was rejected by Macmillan’s Magazine and The Contemporary Review in 1869 as too dangerous to print. Published by the Westminster Review and reprinted in Dowden’s Studies in Literature (1878), it greatly furthered Whitman’s reputation, both in England and America. Whitman would have been flattered, of course, by these reconfigurations. He never claimed to have invented the political and cultural theories that defined his work. On the contrary, he often authorized his poetry by referencing it with contemporary cultural theorists (see his references to Hegel and Carlyle in Democratic Vistas and his 1882 obituary for Carlyle [1996: 914, 1012]). Whitman’s relationship to Carlyle reveals well how his modernist canonization has obscured his participation in a transnational intellectual field. When he wrote the two Galaxy essays that became Democratic Vistas in response to Carlyle’s ‘Shooting Niagara’, he was intervening in what contemporaries would have perceived as a prominent debate between Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. It is due to the revisionist work of the generation preceding Matthiessen that the crucial role of Mill’s On Liberty in the US has retreated into the background, while Whitman’s frequently anthologized essay now appears as a distinctly American rejoinder to a distinctly British feudalism. See, for instance, Edward Mitchell’s review for the New York Sun in 1882 (Price 1996: 229–31). In the ‘Wordsworth’ section of The Spirit of the Age (1930–4: 11/87). See also Hazlitt’s discussion of aristocratic versus democratic mental faculties in ‘Coriolanus’ (1930–4: 4/214). 1825: 248. According to Bryant, the democratic novelist ‘reduces’ his socially varied characters ‘to the same great level where distinctions of rank are nothing, and differences of character are everything’. For a survey of the cultivation of democratic self-images by increasingly professionalist poets in the nineteenth century, see Crawford 2001. See also David Reynolds’ account of the emerging ‘Whitman myth’ (1995: 451–63) and how Whitman moves towards ‘middle-class culture’ (1995: 522–8) during the 1870s and becomes a celebrity in the late 1880s (1995: 563–70). The label ‘genteel tradition’ has been used to refer to a variety of late nineteenth-century authors, but most accounts focus mainly on such largely forgotten New York and Boston based writers as Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907, poet and novelist); George Henry Boker (1823–90, playwright); Richard Watson Gilder (1844–1909, poet and editor of Scribner’s); Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908, poet, Wall Street broker, and influential critic); Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903,

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poet and editor of the New York Mail and Press); Bayard Taylor (1825–78, novelist, poet, travel writer). Some accounts include William Dean Howells and the leading literary journals at the time, Scribner’s, Atlantic and Century. Critics have identified as academic representatives of gentility, among others, Barrett Wendell (1855–1921, taught English at Harvard 1880–1917); George Edward Woodberry (1855– 1930, taught comparative literature at Columbia 1891–1904) and Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933, taught English at Princeton 1900–23). While the label ‘genteel tradition’ usually refers to the literary establishment of the 1890s, it is sometimes extended, with polemic intention, to their putative predecessors, the so-called ‘Fireside’ or ‘Schoolroom’ poets based in Boston and New York one generation earlier, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. The opinion that the ‘genteel tradition’ marks the lowest point of American literature became a truism with the publication of Malcolm Cowley’s After the Genteel Tradition (1937) and a seminal component of the idea of an ‘American Renaissance’. See Broaddus 1999 and Lentricchia 1994. 13. Brooks changed his mind in what critics have referred to as his second phase after a series of nervous breakdowns. In his later Makers and Finders series and The Life of Emerson (1932), Emerson and other villains of Brooks’ early work emerge as cultural heroes (cf. Biel 1992: 183). Ironically, although Santayana and Brooks perceived Whitman as an essential failure – they considered his work too raw, too emotional, lacking in ideas, progressive energy and critical intelligence – they also presented him as the only hope for a modernist rejuvenation. See Chap. 9 below. 14. Its major figures include the editors of The Seven Arts (Van Wyck Brooks, James Oppenheim and Waldo Frank), its most influential cultural critics (Randolph Bourne, Paul Rosenfeld, Lewis Mumford), and such important modernist literary contributors as Robert Frost, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams and John Dos Passos (see Waldo Frank 1929: 318). 15. Isadora Duncan intended to express, with her choreography, ‘the America of Walt Whitman’, who inspired in her a ‘Vision of America dancing a dance that would be a worthy expression of the song Walt heard when he heard America singing’ (Duncan 1969: 47–8; on Duncan and Whitman, see Bohan 1995). For Sullivan’s references to Whitman, see Sherman Paul (1962). Henry Cowell sees ‘great similarity, artistically, between Ives and Walt Whitman’ (1933: 132); Waldo Frank argues: ‘Walt Whitman . . . would have said [of Leo Ornstein]: “This is my brother singing, who has been long cast down and who now starts with me upon the Open Road”’ (1919: 188). Paul Rosenfeld argues in Port of New York: ‘What Whitman was about in the Manhattan of

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the Civil War era, Sandburg has been doing in his Chicago of the new century’ (1924: 66–7); ‘We know ourselves in Anderson as we knew ourselves in Whitman’ (1924: 190–1); ‘Something Walt Whitmanish abides in [the] essence’ of John Marin’s use of pigment and colors (1924: 126).

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Transnational Contexts of Nineteenth-Century US Discourse

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CHAPTER 1

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY INTELLECTUAL FIELD

In his discussion of Robert Southey’s Sir Thomas More (1829) in the Edinburgh Review of 1830, Thomas Babington Macaulay takes issue with what he considers Southey’s untenable critique of England’s economic progress. What Macaulay deems most deplorable is the Poet Laureate’s crossing over from ‘those departments of literature in which he might excel’ into the domain of social criticism, where ‘he has still the very alphabet to learn’ (1830: 528). Southey’s judgment of modern society proceeds as if ‘politics’ were not ‘a matter of science’ but ‘of taste and feeling’ (1830: 533). His rejection of industrial progress is not derived from such relevant data as ‘bills of mortality and statistical tables’ – which Southey ‘cannot stoop to study’ (1830: 539) – but from a mere aversion to the aesthetics of the changing face of modern England. When Southey implies that the country’s cultural illness can be deduced from the ugliness of industrial towns, Macaulay responds with withering sarcasm: Here is wisdom. Here are the principles on which nations are to be governed . . . We are told, that our age has invented atrocities beyond the imagination of our fathers . . . because the dwellings of cotton-spinners are naked and rectangular. Mr Southey has found out a way, he tells us, in which the effects of manufactures and agriculture may be compared. And what is this way? To stand on a hill, to look at a cottage and a manufactory, and to see which is the prettier. (1830: 540)

Macaulay evidently dislikes Southey’s conservatism, but he also caricatures a new type of claim that the well-being of the social

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organism is better understood by the connoisseur’s intuitive recognition of its aesthetic expressions than by the historian’s scrutiny of socio-political and economic data. Macaulay’s essay provides a case study of the emergence of the modern intellectual’s ‘presumption of a privileged sensibility’ (Posnock 1989: 147), based on the claim that literary-aesthetic knowledge conveys privileged access to the social domain. The Privileged Sensibility of Literary Intellectuals Among Macaulay’s younger British contemporaries, a talented representative of the connoisseur as social critic was John Ruskin, whose first major publication – an essay on ‘The Poetry of Architecture’ for the 1837 issue of the Architectural Magazine – uses the same approach as Southey’s. It aims to demonstrate that the appearance of lowland cottages reflects national character and regional landscape: trimmed thatch and luxuriant rosebushes express Englishness in contrast to the ‘massive windows’ and ‘broken ornaments’ characteristic of French cottages (1903–12: 1/14–17). This early essay seems modest in comparison to the claims in Ruskin’s later work, after he has become an established Victorian sage. In an address before the Royal Institution in 1869, Ruskin argues that the ‘higher arts’ ‘tell the story of the entire national character’, and that therefore Titian’s 1544 portrait of Andrea Gritti ‘tells you everything essential to be known about the power of Venice in his day’. This claim is further fleshed out in a passage that could be read as a polemic rejoinder to Macaulay: So, – if you go to the Kensington Museum, – everything that needs to be known, nay, the deepest things that can ever be known, of England a hundred years ago, are written in two pictures of Reynolds’: the Age of Innocence, and the young Colonel mounting his horse. Carlyle and Froude and Macaulay all together cannot tell you as much as those two bits of canvas will when you have once learned to read them. (1903–12: 19/250)

Ruskin’s insistence on the public relevance of aesthetic expert knowledge seems a great deal more ambitious than Southey’s meditations: the romantic gentleman poet and amateur critic has given way to a quasi-scientific aesthetic specialist trained to ‘read’ the stylistic intricacies of cultural artifacts.

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Ruskin’s approach has been related to the Victorian ‘moral aesthetic’, which seeks to mediate between the social and aesthetic responsibilities of the literary sphere, complicating apparently simple oppositions between art and life.1 The emergence of this critical attitude has been well explained as a response to the nineteenth-century social changes that encouraged the idea of Arnoldian Culture as a remedy for modern alienation. But we can further elucidate the nineteenth-century discourse of the aesthetic specialist if we view it as a rhetorical engagement with the changing rules of intellectual legitimation. Bourdieu’s Concept of Intellectual Autonomy The posture of Southey and Ruskin strongly resembles that of French intellectuals since the Second Republic as analyzed by Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 1996). Despite their differences, Southey and Ruskin both stake their ground as arbiters of taste within what, following Bourdieu, I would call the ‘field’ of Victorian culture that emerged in the wake of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century acceleration and diversification of cultural production. Bourdieu’s account of the ‘invention’ of the modern intellectual revolves around the Third Republic moment of semi-autonomy, when the recognition of literary professionals began to depend more on the opinions of their peers than on the economic and political vicissitudes of society at large. Men of letters were then able to enter the political domain ‘in the name of norms belonging to the literary field’ (1996: 129). Whereas Macaulay or exemplary French ‘literary politicians and political littérateurs’ (1996: 130) like François Guizot (1787–1874), Jules Michelet (1798–1874), or Victor Cousin (1792–1867) had credentials in politics and economics, Zola and the writers, artists, and scholars protesting the Dreyfus affair intervened ‘in political life as intellectuals, meaning with a specific authority founded on their belonging to the relatively autonomous world of art, science and literature’ (1996: 340). Bourdieu visualizes the increasing importance of peer recognition with an electromagnetic metaphor that figures the modern acceleration of literary communication (in the wake of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century extension of readerships and the subsequent commodification of the book) as generating a magnetic field whose centripetal force overrides external interferences (the political and economic obligations on the artist). In Bourdieu’s account of nineteenth-century France, the literary field is fully in

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place towards the second half of the century, when its internal force is strong enough to reverse the economic world. This means that ‘the hierarchy among genres (and authors) according to specific criteria of peer judgment is almost exactly the inverse of the hierarchy according to commercial success’. Thus during the Second French Empire, avant-garde poetry (Baudelaire, for instance) commanded the highest prestige in the literary establishment, while almost completely lacking a paying audience. Other, commercially more viable genres, in the theater, for example, moved into a more popular space, but occupied the lowest rung on the ladder of social prestige. This situation sharply contrasted with earlier stages of French cultural production, when, in the seventeenth century, according to Bourdieu, ‘the two hierarchies were almost merged, with those most consecrated among people of letters, especially poets and scientists, being the best provided with pensions and profits’ (1996b: 114). When the expanding print market creates literary territories that reverse the values of the economic world, it delegitimizes commercial success, encouraging professional authors to detach themselves from the general readership. Thus accelerated cycles of literary commodification subsidize conversations among specialists (with symbolic capital), and the quicker these cycles rotate, the further its cultural avant-gardes spiral out of the common social imaginary, producing an expert discourse that becomes increasingly unintelligible to the wider public. Bourdieu illustrates the ‘take off’ of cultural avant-gardes from mainstream horizons of expectations with a second metaphor that frames cultural production in terms of a ‘playing field’. Under professionalized conditions, participation in avant-garde conversations depends on the mastery of the language games that emerge from a field’s history. In the dynamic cultural space of late-nineteenthcentury avant-gardes, the field has undergone ‘a sort of critical turning in on itself, on its own principle, on its own premises’ (1996: 242). Players can no longer join the game ‘naively’, they must invest in relevant forms of knowledge, while the exclusion of uninformed players further increases the game’s self-reflexivity. This results in artworks ‘whose formal properties and value are derived only from the structure, hence the history, of the field’, until literary communication becomes a ‘social game’ whose artifacts draw their ‘existence and meaning’ from ‘the specific logic and history of the game itself’, which ‘is kept afloat by virtue of its own consistency’ (1996: 248).

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This view of the avant-garde implies that the romantic and modern tendency towards increasingly complex and difficult artifacts based on experimental abstraction (atonal compositions, plotless fiction, non-representational painting, and so on) does not represent the ‘conditions’ (it is not a ‘symptom’ of modern social alienation, or the increasing complexity of the world), or radical artistic progress (the purification of aesthetic form by which the arts approach ‘the condition of music’); rather, it indicates the transformations of the differentiating and dynamizing cultural sphere with its heightened levels of cultural professionalism. By contrast, ‘heroic’ theories of the avant-garde conceive of the intensified print-market as a superficial framework within which ‘art as such’ may realize an essentially autonomous aesthetic potential. This implies that if the print market were to collapse, the aesthetic criteria of the avant-garde would remain in place (as Kantian universals of beauty or Hegelian symptoms of social conditions).2 But Bourdieu suggests that the language games of the avant-garde spiral beyond the general horizon, not towards a telos of market-independent forms of beauty and truth, but in whatever direction (and at whatever level of experimental abstraction) they keep spiraling as long as their respective fields hold the economic world reversed (as long as conversational reflexivity is subsidized by symbolic capital that could not emerge without significant flows of commercially viable literary commodities outside the territories of cultural avant-gardes). To put it crudely: if the literary market were to break down, symbolic and commercial hierarchies would become congruent again (as in seventeenth-century France), and the conversational standards of literary avant-gardes would disappear, like force fields that collapse after the electric plug is pulled. Bourdieu’s analysis translates well to the Victorian field that defines Ruskin’s position in mid-century London. But as Macaulay’s portrayal of Southey indicates, the modern intellectual’s ‘presumption of privileged sensibility’ precedes the near-autonomy finally realized (in Bourdieu’s account) in the 1890s in France by roughly one century. Despite the lower dynamism of romantic literary fields, Zola’s gestures of legitimation already appear in the 1790s, in the tentative avant-gardes of British and German romanticism. Wordsworth and the Logic of the Avant-Garde Wordsworth has become so canonical today that it almost seems counterintuitive to regard him as part of a romantic avant-garde.

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But the extent of his exclusiveness was demonstrated quite recently when William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004) provided convincing evidence that between 1800 and 1830 – in the period literary historians like to call the Age of Wordsworth – Wordsworth had virtually no public audience. He did not in fact become widely read until the 1850s, the so-called Age of Tennyson (St Clair 2005: 4–5). St Clair suggests that literary history needs to be revised (if Wordsworth was ignored by the public during most of his life, he cannot be considered to have defined the age). But based on Bourdieu’s concept of the reversal of the economic world, we can make the opposite claim: Wordsworth’s inaccessibility for the common reader between 1800 and 1830 was crucial to his peer recognition and his being perceived as ‘cutting edge’ and thus a ‘representative man’, to use Emerson’s Hegelian phrase.3 When Wordsworth’s works began to circulate more widely, by the 1830s, they became literary commodities and lost some of their symbolic prestige. Contemporary critics then found Wordsworth too accessible.4 Wordsworth’s situation shows how the dilemmas of professionalism already affect early nineteenth-century discourse. In the gradually reversing economic hierarchies of Wordsworth’s chosen literary territory (the prestigious genre of lyric poetry), symbolic status lies with a literary idiom that excludes popular audiences: the less you are read, the greater your peer recognition; exclusive readerships, however, entail anxieties of marginality. So when the Edinburgh Review criticized Wordsworth for being inaccessible to ordinary readers,5 this charge would have resonated with him, as he himself accused Alexander Pope of being out of touch (with artificial rhymes and ‘arbitrary and capricious habits of expression’ that speak to no-one, especially not to ‘common’ people [2005: 290–1]). Wordsworth’s critique of Pope’s esotericism might well have expressed his own fears of losing touch with public readers, which he did, of course, like all romantic authors who chose to go down the road of peer rather than public recognition (towards symbolic capital rather than commercial success). At the same time, Francis Jeffrey’s demand that Wordsworth should become more accessible invokes social anxieties unknown to aristocratic systems of patronage. Commercial publishing disconnects literary status from aristocratic sponsors, and moves the burden of social distinction to an author’s symbolic recognition, which, in Wordsworth’s literary system, hinges on the cultivation of poetic difficulty. Moving from the romantic avant-garde in the

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direction of popular audiences would equal a surrender of social status and autonomy.6 Perhaps Wordsworth had a choice: in the varied topography of the nineteenth-century print market, relatively self-reflexive avantgardes co-exist alongside less accelerated spaces in which symbolic capital hardly trumps commercial and political modes of validation. These latter literary territories are not restricted to the romantic ‘literary politicians and political littérateurs’ (Bourdieu 1996: 130) who dabble in poetic composition between legislative tasks; they also pertain to influential romantic artists like Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and Lord Byron, who are able to evade the logic of the literary field and become both commercially successful and well recognized among their peers. Even in the 1850s, in the same decade that Baudelaire draws his literary prestige solely from peer recognition (Les Fleurs du Mal came out in a small edition in 1857), Henry Longfellow’s considerable revenues from the sale of Song of Hiawatha (1855) and his popular ‘schoolroom poetry’ do not prevent the Anglo-American literary establishment from celebrating him as one of the most important contemporary poets. But Longfellow’s decanonization in the 1890s is not just a historical accident. The arguments against the ‘genteel tradition’ (too simple, too effeminate) already define the critical climates in the romantic avantgardes that form the context of Wordsworth’s poetics. In the more accelerated literary territory inhabited by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the first-generation German romantics, the practical detachment between professional authors and lay audiences renders the position of public poet an unrealistic ideal. Romantic Specters of the Field: The Twin-Face of the Primitive The literary field is not an empirical entity, to be found in publishers’ lists and library inventories. It also transcends the boundaries of ‘the political and economic world’ (Casanova 2004: 11). But we can recognize the emerging field in the struggle of early romantic avantgardes to come to terms, rhetorically, with the dual nature of literary autonomy. Professionalism both empowers and alienates: it provides a socially prestigious literary space where work consists in relatively independent forms of literary play; yet the resulting distance from the public prompts suspicions that authors are merely playing. The duality of empowerment and alienation recurs in the double-edged fantasy of the primitive that hovers between visions of fear and

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desire (Torgovnick 1990: 245).7 Following Lutz Musner’s thoughts on the relationship between intellectuals and the popular ‘masses’ (2001; see also Frith 1996: 416), I would suggest that the primitivist imaginary can be considered a psycho-dynamic transference of the fears and desires experienced by professional writers.8 Their dilemma of legitimation, in other words, produces specters of the primitive whose symbolic content alternates between signifying a desirable stage of origin (which stands for the connection to ordinary experience that modern authors lose by definition)9 and a loathsome stage of immaturity (which recalls the lower-class spectrum that symbolically recognized literary professionals leave behind).10 The dual perception of the primitive is especially intriguing in the romantic invention of the ‘common people’. For Johann Gottfried Herder, the common Volk is the most essential source of national authenticity, but it also represents the scandal of class. Hence Herder’s disclaimer, in a 1779 preface to his famous edition of German folk ballads, that while the national spirit is best revealed in a nation’s popular songs, the rabble in the streets ‘never sings or creates but screams and disfigures’ (‘schreit und verstümmelt’) (1990: 3/239). Herder’s image of mutilation recalls the cliché of the French revolutionary mob as hordes of urban cannibals (Gibbons 2001), but from the viewpoint of the professionalized author, the social cannibal becomes the cannibal reader. Thus in his treatise On the Study of Greek Poetry (1795–7), Friedrich Schlegel describes popular audiences as ‘connoisseurs of anthropophagy’ (‘Liebhaber der Menschenfresserei’) mainly interested in ‘Iroquois or cannibalistic Odes’ because their immature taste can only cope with ‘disgusting crudities’ (‘ekelhafte Kruditäten’) (1988: 1/70–1). Readerly cannibalism is therefore defined by a preference for the easy pleasures of aesthetic experience drawn from formally undemanding works. Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education (1790s) portray primitive reading as guided by a ‘raw taste’ that shuns ‘tranquility and simplicity’ and instead prefers indiscriminate consumption ‘of what is new and surprising, colorful, adventurous and bizarre, violent and savage’ (‘grotesque shapes’, ‘fast and abrupt transitions’, ‘glaring contrasts’, ‘screaming lights’, and ‘song resonant with pathos’). In Schiller’s literary anthropology, raw taste thus reflects a stage of cultural deficiency where ‘beauty is mistaken for that which excites, that which offers subject matter [Stoff]’ (1992: 8/671). Wordsworth uses similar descriptions in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, when he speaks of a public driven by a ‘degrading thirst

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after outrageous stimulation’ through ‘frantic novels’ and ‘extravagant stories in verse’ (2005: 294). In a more nostalgic frame of mind, anxious to invoke images of ‘connection’, Wordsworth celebrates uncultivated peasants or rustics for their naturalness – their ‘passions’, he says in the Preface, are ‘incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’ (2005: 290). But in moods more conscious of social distinction, he accuses the rustics of being too obtuse to recognize nature when they see it. For instance, his Guide through the District of the Lakes (1810) attributes the disappearance of beautiful Lake District landscapes to the ‘unpractised minds’ of its rural inhabitants, the local peasants who interfere with the harmony of natural shapes because their unsophisticated senses miss the subtleties of natural forms. Like the emerging mass audiences refusing to comprehend his poetry, they lack the perceptional refinement of Wordsworth’s intended peer-readers (they fail to appreciate, he says, ‘the fine gradations by which in Nature one thing passes away into another’, for they see variety only in ‘strong lines of demarcation’ and draw ‘delight’ from artificial ‘formality’ and unnaturally ‘harsh contrast’ (1977: 72–3).11 The dual fantasies of common readers as both cannibalistic and innocent, then, reflect the distance between the romantic avantgarde and the emerging mass readership: the nightmare vision of the reader as a sensuous brute embodies the intellectual’s anxiety of reception, the experience of not being understood, of being misread and mangled by an uncomprehending public. The pastoral vision of the reader as noble savage negotiates the intellectual’s yearning for a ground of social origin and permanence ‘outside’ professional fields. Tropes of Cultural Dissociation Romantic criticism resolves the tension between positive and negative images of the ‘common people’ with historicist narratives of cultural dissociation that portray the cannibal reader as an alienated victim of the times (Wordsworth’s ‘multitude of causes unknown to former times’ that ‘blunt the discriminating powers of the mind’ and reduce it ‘to a state of almost savage torpor’ [2005: 294]). Early romantic intellectuals tend to misrecognize, not the devastating consequences of social differentiation that Marx theorized as alienation of labor (they are too obvious to overlook), but the structural processuality through which they unfold. Late-eighteenth-century cultural models displace the structural mechanisms of cultural modernization

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onto images of bodily disease and blunted sensibility. Arguably, this displacement originates in the emerging literary field: when literary intellectuals grapple with their professional dilemmas of legitimation, they misinterpret their systemic and print-market-related detachment from lay audiences as a shift in cultural sensibilities, a dissociation of the socio-psychological equilibrium into unhealthy extremes: courtly neoclassicists whose over-refined faculties have become imperceptive to nature’s simplicity, mass readers whose blunted perceptional organs fail to appreciate the beauty of natural forms – hence the ‘craving for extraordinary incident’ (Wordsworth 2005: 294) that encourages the public to cannibalize serious literature for sensationalist materials. We can recognize the direction of psycho-dynamic transference – from the writers’ anxieties of reception to their vision of cultural disease – in the intellectualist reduction by which the romantic diagnosis of alienated ‘times’ condenses the complex and wide-ranging effects of social modernization and differentiation into a single opposition (thinking/feeling, reason/sense, reflection/action) that reproduces the felt division between ‘men of letters’ and the ‘working public’. For example, Schiller’s treatise ‘On Grace and Dignity’ (1793) diagnoses a dispersal of psychological energies into cold rationality (driven by analytical understanding) and animalistic feeling (driven by the senses) that causes modern societies to disintegrate into the hordes of the French Revolution and a detached and despotic élite (absolute monarchs, dry rationalists) (1992: 8/330–94). Herman Melville’s Typee (1846) projects this opposition into the exotic setting of the South Seas: in the degenerate societies of Tahiti or Hawaii, Western influences have divided formerly holistic primitive tribes into half-starving sensual beings riddled with disease (1996: 192) and cruel and detached leaders, grotesquely strutting about in the trappings of Western nobility.12 A more literal portrayal of professional deformation appears in Clemens Brentano’s ‘Tale of Honest Casper and Fair Annie’ (1817), whose artist-narrator complains that his position as a professional poet (‘Dichter von Profession’) ‘overfeeds’ and ‘fattens’ his embodied poetic sense (‘Poesie im Leibe’) in relation to other organs (‘brain, heart, stomach, spleen, liver, and the like’) until it resembles an oversized goose liver that tastes good but sickens the goose. Hence ‘those who live solely from poetry have lost their sense of balance’ (1963: 2/782). Post-1800 romantic theory increasingly rephrases images of psychological imbalance in terms of a cultural detachment from an

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interior presence. In August Wilhelm Schlegel’s influential Vienna lectures of 1808, literary form becomes ‘mechanical’ (read: arbitrary and accidental) if it follows from an ‘external force’ (‘äußre Einwirkung’) that suppresses an object’s ‘innate’ quality. Authentic and necessary acts of the imagination, by contrast, derive from an ‘organic’ form that ‘unfolds itself from within’ (‘bildet von innen heraus’) (1923: 2/111–2; 1846: 340; see also Coleridge’s lectures of 1812–13 [1969–2002: 5/495]). Schlegel develops his concept of the organic to mount a defense of Shakespeare’s stylistic roughness against neoclassical critiques. Mid- and late-romantic culture models broaden the interiority/exteriority opposition to distinguish between organic and mechanical ages. In the philosophical jargon of the early nineteenth-century romantic avant-garde, the ‘Mechanical Age’, as Carlyle puts it in 1829, is preoccupied with superficial truths deduced from empirical surfaces and specious moralities based on pragmatic calculation: ‘external combinations and arrangements’ rather than ‘internal perfection’ (1969: 37). The organic-mechanical distinction is flexible enough: Emerson deems the ‘politics of monarchy’ mechanical because ‘all hangs on the accidents of life and temper of a single person’, while in democracy ‘the power proceeds organically from the people and is responsible to them’ (1903: 12/304); Carlyle, on the other hand, considers democratic rule to be an arbitrary imposition of anarchy (the fickle opinions of mob rule), in marked contrast to the authentic political action dictated by a natural aristocracy of ‘great men’. There is a similar ambiguity in romantic conceptions of the ‘traditional’ and the ‘new’: on the one hand, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectuals present their interest in medieval Europe and the Celtic North as a reconnection with an interior permanence beyond the superficialities of the contemporary. When the German romantics Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck journey to medieval Nuremberg in 1793, they experience its Gothic buildings and mystical Catholic rites with a sense of wonder about a holistic Christian past signifying mystery and cultural health (fictionalized in their joint Effusions of an Art-Loving Monk of 1796 and Tieck’s Franz Sternbald’s Journeying Years of 1798). This sense of ‘lived tradition’ is more than an early romantic eccentricity: in 1854, the Boston Brahmin James Russell Lowell is awed by what he deems medieval Italy’s aura of historical permanence (1904: 1/149), and the rootedness of Roman Catholicism, ‘the only poet among the churches’ (1904: 1/230). He considers the historically enriched symbolism of

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Catholicism to offer a more organic sense of the ‘mystery of the Real Presence’ than the Protestant movement with its emphasis on ‘iconoclast Understanding’ (1904: 1/229; see Lewis 1955: 190–1). Lowell’s vision presents the Catholic religion as a delicate balance of sensual and intellectual experience, but his main point is that deep tradition can function as an antidote to the fragmentation of experience. This same point motivates the mid-century celebration of medieval craftsmanship as a return to the communal forms of creativity practiced before the division of labor as it underlies John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851–3) and William Morris’ theoretical groundwork for the British ‘arts-and-crafts’ movement. On the other hand, such concepts of deep tradition co-exist with notions of tradition as a mechanical surface, the dead knowledge of the past that burdens the present by blocking the live emanations of inner nature. Emerson’s rejection of the ‘courtly Muses of Europe’ (1903: 1/114) has a postcolonial ring (see Buell 2007 and Weisbuch 1999), but mainly centers around his conviction that the canons of received knowledge, dazzling though they may be, belong to the ‘sepulchres of the fathers’ (1903: 1/3) that cannot replace present efforts to connect with the continuing revelation of spiritual interiority.13 This motif is so common on both sides of the Atlantic between 1780 and 1850 that it defies national categories (see also J. H. Miller 2007). Both concepts of tradition, at any rate, figure prominently in romantic histories that picture the historical developments since the Middle Ages in terms of a cyclical swerve towards and away from transcendental sources of spiritual presence (usually figured in tropes of depth, height, an emanating light, or ethereal sounds). In 1836, according to Emerson, modern culture has become so distant from its spiritual source that modernity’s forces divide the social center into spiritually empty ‘practical men’ and detached and inactive clergy (1903: 1/94) and break up experience into detached sequences of work and play (‘weary chores’ alternating with ‘voluptuous reveries’). Emerson’s programmatic plea for reconnection, his insistence that ‘Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts forgotten’ (1903: 2/367), reflects a generic desire to ‘close the gap’ between the inside and outside of professional fields – their avant-gardes and lay audiences – or to abolish them tout court. Hence the ‘end-of-art’ or ‘return-of-the-real’ narratives that revolve around the fantasy of a literature ‘after’ or ‘before’ the literary field, where all authors and audiences can communicate on the same level.

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‘End of Art’ – ‘Return of the Real’ The utopian space ‘outside’ the literary field is the site of Wordsworth’s ‘common man’, Herder’s Volksgeist, and Whitman’s Western ‘roughs’. I would like to argue, however, that romantic writers have a firm pragmatic awareness, or tacit knowledge inscribed in their habitus,14 that a literal ‘end of art’, if it implies the actual surrender of an author’s field position, is a fantasy that cannot be acted out without the sort of sacrifice that professionals are rarely willing to make, unless they find more satisfactory occupations elsewhere (in which case they cease to be literary professionals). It is always possible to say, following Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’ (1750), that, since aesthetic cultivation corrupts social fiber (as it corrupted the Greeks, who then succumbed to the less poetic Romans), it is better to turn away from the language games of literary élites and ‘return’ to more widely shared social practices. But most canonical literary Rousseauists have tended to remain within their exclusive literary networks. In Whitman the divergence of manifesto-level rhetoric and literary position is most glaring: his self-image as a Western rough who likes to address all strata of American people with the most natural and unpolished literary forms – ‘belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind’ (2002: 27) – implies a complete rejection of the contemporary literary system. Whitman’s gesture anticipates the manifestos of a classic modern avant-garde that hoped, according to Peter Bürger’s sympathetic account, to reconnect art with ‘life praxis’ by destroying, ‘not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution’ (1984: 49). Well, in theory, Whitman could have left the literary system – he could have distributed the small privately published first edition of the Leaves to the New York dockworkers rather than handing a copy to Emerson, for instance. Yet he surely knew that doing so would have propelled him off the literary field, returning him to the beginnings of his career, to the better selling but less prestigious sensationalist genres he had tried in the 1840s, with tabloid stories and his temperance novel Franklin Evans (1842).15 What does it look like when romantic professionals in fact leave the literary field? Clemens Brentano, for instance, was well connected to the romantic circles in Berlin and Jena and still famous for his contributions to the Heidelberg group of German romanticism when in 1817 he renounced his literary past, after a conversion experience, and for the larger part of his life turned his literary activities

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towards religious edification and popular piety (which his literary peers considered ‘Catholic propaganda’, as Heinrich Heine put it in 1836 [2002: 104]). Brentano defended his new ‘vocation’ as an escape from a literary prison house, even refusing, in his later years, to allow reprints of his earlier, more poetic work. In contrast to more canonical Rousseauists, he acted on his programmatic statements about professional authorship (in his ‘Tale of Honest Casper and Fair Annie’). He indeed connected with a larger public, as his best known devotional works went through several editions and translations. But the low prestige of the devotional genre ruined his literary reputation well into the twentieth century (Schultz 1992). Brentano’s authentic anti-professionalism, however, can hardly be the standard practice in an emergent literary profession where, as in all trades, career breaks are more likely to be involuntary. Take, for instance, Herman Melville’s abrupt and enigmatic retreat from the mid-century American literary scene. It is tempting to assume that his literary vocation foundered on the commercial failure of Moby Dick (the American-Renaissance construction invites us to imagine the author as an Ahab-like figure flinging his ‘No! In Thunder’ at an immature public). Yet Melville seems to have possessed the necessary talent to become a financially successful author: his first novel Typee (1846) was an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, followed by a relatively well-received sequel, Omoo (1847). The trouble with this popular success was that it did not have much purchase in the literary circles that Melville began to admire, as he mingled with the New York literary establishment.16 In the late forties, then, Melville made sustained efforts at aesthetic self-improvement. In preparation for his third novel, Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (1849), he familiarized himself with a wide range of canonical literature,17 and when he finished the manuscript, asked his English publisher to omit the customary reference to ‘the author of Typee & Omoo’ (Parker 1996: 613), as he wanted to ‘separate’ himself from his earlier audiences. Stylistically, the novel is a stark rejection of public taste – a mythical journey embedded in playful Swiftian allegorical satire and esoteric philosophical commentary. In a chapter called ‘Dreams’, the narrator sounds as if he needs to demonstrate the author’s acquaintance with the history of the field: In me, many worthies recline, and converse. I list to St. Paul who argues the doubts of Montaigne; Julian the Apostate cross-questions Augustine; and Thomas-a-Kempis unrolls his old black letters for all to decipher.

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Zeno murmurs maxims beneath the hoarse shout of Democritus; and though Democritus laugh loud and long, and the sneer of Pyrrho be seen; yet, divine Plato, and Proclus, and Verulam are of my counsel; and Zoroaster whispered me before I was born . . . I am served like Bajazet: Bacchus my butler, Virgil my minstrel, Philip Sidney my page. My memory is a life beyond birth; my memory, my library of the Vatican, its alcoves all endless perspectives, eve-tinted by cross-lights from MiddleAge oriels. (1982: 1022–3)

Reviewers noted that Mardi was not ‘written for the multitude’ (Anon. 1846: 45), but few of Melville’s intended audience were impressed.18 The reactions to Mardi already revealed what the relatively cool reception of Pierre and Moby Dick a few years later confirmed: Melville’s failure to reach his literary peers. It could not have been easy for Melville, whose best-selling début had allowed him a brief period of financial independence,19 to see his most ambitious novels become commercial disasters. Yet, given Melville’s awareness that no author of literary standing in the 1850s was able to support him or herself by strictly literary pursuits,20 the greater humiliation lay in the lack of symbolic validation. In contrast to Brentano, who walked away from a position of relative fame, Melville gave up his career at a point when the need to supplement his literary endeavors with journalism and lecture tours seemed the more tedious without the symbolic compensation of peer recognition. Melville’s case demonstrates well the impracticability of Young America’s ‘end-of-art’ narrative. It was always attractive, on the manifesto level, to indulge in visions of apocalyptic renewal – Whitman’s occasional poem ‘Song of the Exposition’ (1871) pictures the Muse of Democracy as literally hacking her way, frontierfashion, through America’s literary salons while the slashed genteel rhymes are ‘howling’ in pain (1900: ll. 50–65). But romantic criticism is also aware of the self-defeating anti-intellectualism implied by such tropes, and thus their limited use as conceptual frames for the realities of the literary profession.21 As a result, romantic criticism could give the ‘return to the real’ narrative a self-legitimizing spin by rephrasing the ‘end-of-art’ as a cathartic radicalization of art, an intensification of intellectual activity that may help to overcome cultural dissociation through perfecting (rather than destroying) the literary field. For example, Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education display a tragic sense of the loss of cultural unity, but they suggest that this is a worthwhile sacrifice: as modernity turns literary intellectuals

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into one-sided specialists lacking in human grace, it leads the ‘species towards the truth’ (1992: 8/575–6).22 Schiller’s sense that aesthetic progress cannot be abandoned also underlies the inverted end-of-art narrative implied in the Hegelian assumption that Christian modernity has become too complex to suit the aesthetic modes of ancient Greece.23 If we ignore the neoclassical elements in Hegel’s terminology (his restriction of beauty to the ‘sensuous manifestation’ of Greek harmony), his end-of-art thesis is really about the beginning of a more radical aesthetic that combines sensuous perception with the rigors of conceptual thinking. Since mere sensuous beauty is not enough to express the age, modern literature needs to develop a philosophical intelligence that incorporates the most recent conceptual developments. Hence the importance, for artists and intellectuals, of being part of a highly technical avant-garde.24 Schiller’s defense of aesthetic professionalism illustrates the root of the romantic fear of the primitive stage. Schiller’s utopian space belongs to the beautiful soul (‘schöne Seele’) whose grace derives from an achieved cultural equilibrium, a delicate balance between duty and inclination that also applies to the liberal state (if the head of state demands an action, Schiller implies, the people’s feelings are already drawn towards it; if they were repulsed by it, the head of state would not find it reasonable in the first place, and so on [1992: 8/361–72]).25 If we apply Schiller’s framework to Melville’s Typee, we understand the predicament of Melville’s alter ego, the main character Tommo. The Typee seem like beautiful souls – they appear to be living in a social utopia where work is always also play, without social hierarchies, economic exploitation, religious strife, despotic leaders or an ugly underclass (1996: 203). Yet when he is on the brink of going native, Tommo discovers the Kurtzian roots of primitive beauty: he catches a glimpse of ‘three human heads’, two of which were the ‘heads of the islanders; but the third, to my horror, was that of a white man’ (1996: 232–3). After his dark revelation, the narrative leaves its sympathetic ethnographic register and returns to the more fast-paced rhythm of the adventure novel, the formerly graceful islanders now behaving like stock savages, almost frothing at the mouth as they try to prevent Tommo’s escape. Professionalism and Post-Kantian Aesthetics We can link the condition of the romantic avant-garde to the nineteenth-century claims on the public relevance of the aesthetic

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specialist, and the early nineteenth-century revision of Kantian aesthetics. The contested reception of Kant’s third critique indicates how the Enlightenment emergence of a ‘disinterested’ sphere of ‘aesthetics’ was perceived as a mixed blessing. It liberates artistic practice from ideological constraints, allowing for a definition of ‘beauty’ based on internal criteria of excellence.26 But it also implies that professional artists and critics ‘merely’ deal in aesthetics, while others (moral philosophers, political scientists, and so on) do the more ‘serious’, socially significant work. The autonomy of literary beauty heralded by Kantian aesthetics recognizes the legitimacy of intellectuals as aesthetic specialists at the risk of their privatization. Emerson’s complaint, in 1837, that American intellectuals are ‘addressed as women’ and thus ‘virtually disfranchised’ by society’s ‘practical men’ (1903: 1/94) indicates the anxieties of social irrelevance (and questioned masculinity) caused by the specter of artistic autonomy viewed as alienation.27 Given the increasing professionalization of transatlantic culture, early nineteenth-century intellectuals found it more and more difficult to legitimate themselves with primitivist gestures that disavowed artistic autonomy altogether. They sought to cope with their anxieties of marginality, not by renouncing artistic autonomy – which would have been difficult in the light of the persistently differentiating intellectual fields – but by redescribing the aesthetic as ‘a vehicle of ontological vision’ (Taylor 1975: 470). The revision of Kant’s aesthetics by the romantic generation of transcendental idealists can therefore be broken down into two stages. They agree with Kant that beauty depends on purely formal criteria; hence they locate the poetic squarely within stylistic parameters distinct from socio-political realities. But then they reconceptualize autonomous style as an ‘organic’ externalization of an interior identity, turning it effectively into a cultural symptom.28 Pure beauty thus becomes a socially relevant auratic presence when it is seen, for instance, as a reflection of unalienated existence (in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man of the 1790s), a symbolic representation of the Infinite (in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism and A. W. Schlegel’s Berlin lectures of the 1800s), or a sensible manifestation of the ‘idea’ (in Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics in the 1820s). A succinct formulation of this post-Kantian narrative can be read in ‘The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism’ written in the 1790s (found among Hegel’s papers but attributed variously to Hölderlin and Schelling), which elevates aesthetic production to a

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master science that will ‘outlive all other sciences and arts’ and make the poet ‘the teacher of mankind’ (Hölderlin 1943: 625). It is important to note the proto-professionalism underlying the post-Kantian revision. In Shaftesbury’s neoplatonism, ‘polite’ amateurs perceive the structural correspondences between the true, the good, and the beautiful simply with their healthy senses (everyone can become a Shaftesburyean ‘virtuoso’), whereas romantic Kantians emphasized trained aesthetic perception. For all their primitivist fascination with the artlessness of ‘common’ experience, philosophies of art after 1800 adapted to the vicissitudes of professionalism inasmuch as they acknowledged the need for aesthetic specialization and stylistic difficulty. This would explain the post-1800 shift to aural definitions of the literary (Abrams 1953: 88–94; Lindenberger 2000: 373–4). If poetry was a sort of ‘music’ instead of a picture of life, it would need cultural workers with musical abilities that (especially in the light of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with classical art music) had to be more refined than those of the eighteenth-century amateur connoisseur. The post-Kantian turn, then, was motivated by the urge to demonstrate the social relevance of formal beauty without giving up its privilege as a self-contained ‘music’. In this view, Beethoven’s compositions, though irreducible to conceptual interpretation, are not ornamental arabesques without content (as Eduard Hanslick’s radical Kantianism implies) but symbolize larger values, which range from the numinous to the socio-political: the ‘language of religion’ (Wilhelm Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck), the ‘Infinite’ (E. T. A. Hoffmann), the ‘Will’ (Arthur Schopenhauer), the ‘Dionysian’ (Friedrich Nietzsche), Democracy (Franz Brendel, Walt Whitman), or millenarian social utopia (Margaret Fuller, John Sullivan Dwight). Uses of Cultural Parallelism: John Ruskin’s Gothic The philosophical intricacies underlying the expressivist revision of Kantian formalism have been well analyzed (see M. Frank 2002 and 2004), but I would like to draw attention to how the argumentative moves underlying this revision develop a cultural force beyond the specifics of German idealism, because they provide the ground for a rhetoric of legitimation especially useful to professionalized intellectuals located in more dynamic mid-nineteenth-century aesthetic fields. No English-speaking nineteenth-century cultural critic realized the potential of the post-Kantian rhetoric of legitimation better than

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John Ruskin. Ruskin’s famous defense of Gothic architecture in The Stones of Venice (1851–3) illustrates the professional aspirations of late-romantic cultural criticism. In attributing social relevance to pure painterly and architectural form, he certainly draws from romantic attempts to explain social phenomena as externalizations of an interior cultural core. But he makes more systematic use of a rhetoric of cultural parallelism, as he repeatedly stages resemblances or correspondences between disparate levels of experience, between artistic forms and the structures of social relations or identities. The style of Gothic façades is seen as an organic expression of the love of liberty and independence inherent in Northern European mentalities and the culture of medieval Christianity; Greek, Egyptian, and Italian-Renaissance ornaments reflect the more indolent mentalities of Southern European cultures and the hierarchical structures of pre-Christian societies (or their decadent heirs in Renaissance Venice or industrial England). The Northern European mind, with its ‘[s]trength of will, independence of character, resoluteness of purpose, impatience of undue control, and that general tendency to set the individual reason against authority’, is ‘traceable in the rigid lines, vigorous and various masses, and daringly projecting and independent structure of the Northern Gothic ornament’. The cultural traits of Southern European peoples, their lack of vital energy, and their indifference to liberty and independence ‘are in like manner legible in the graceful and softly guided waves and wreathed bands, in which Southern decoration is constantly disposed; in its tendency to lose its independence, and fuse itself into the surface of the masses upon which it is traced’ (1903–12: 10/241–2). Ruskin claims that the core values of a culture are ‘legible’ to him, in the gestalts of architectural form. The northerner’s savage individuality logically causes independent lines, while the southerner’s warm-hearted and calm nature transforms itself into soft ornaments, which lose their independence symbolically by melting into their surroundings.29 Ruskin’s most complex exegesis of symptomatic style appears in his proto-Marxist comparison of ornamental types with social modes of production. He argues in essence that architectural structures reflect the degree of social hierarchy in the social bodies out of which they grow. In the societies of antiquity, laborers were tools for easily reproducible and specialized tasks such as the production ‘of mere geometrical forms, – balls, ridges, and perfectly symmetrical foliage, – which could be executed with absolute precision by line and rule’. Their slave labor produced the perfectly regular ‘[s]ervile

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ornament’ (1903–12: 10/189) that dominates Greek and Egyptian art. Gothic architecture, by contrast, reflects Christianity’s recognition of ‘the individual value of every soul’ (1903–12: 10/190): the builders accepted the imperfection of the individual mind and thus allowed workers to engage in more varied and less regularized tasks. Gothic ornaments are ‘constitutional’ or ‘revolutionary’, in accordance with the greater freedom enjoyed by the worker.30 The idea that northern cultures have a natural relationship with liberty that defines their artistic expressions (whereas southerners are more likely to be enslaved) already informs romantic manifestos from the Ossian cult to Schlegel’s and de Staël’s notions of the ‘poetry of the north’. Ruskin, however, sees more rigorous, even scientific parallels between architecture and politics when he systematically charts the conceptual content of ornamental forms. In a typical passage of The Stones of Venice, for instance, he provides a detailed overview of the social hierarchy reflected in the history of architectural styles: The degree in which the workman is degraded may be thus known at a glance, by observing whether the several parts of the building are similar or not; and if, as in Greek work, all the capitals are alike, and all the mouldings unvaried, then the degradation is complete; if, as in Egyptian or Ninevite work, though the manner of executing certain figures is always the same, the order of design is perpetually varied, the degradation is less total; if, as in Gothic work, there is perpetual change both in design and execution, the workman must have been altogether set free. (1903–12: 10/204–5)

Sensitive to the rhetorical potential of cultural parallelism, Ruskin first divides the cultural practice of medieval and ancient cultures into putative cultural centers (that is, the ethos of Christian liberalism vs the ethos of despotism) and canonical modes of expression (that is, Gothic vs Egyptian, Greek, or Renaissance ornament). Then he reconnects the cultural centers and forms of expressions with tropes of resemblance: the rough Gothic textures are homologous with the vigorous and liberty-loving character of northern Christians, the smooth lines of classic art reflect the indolent slave mentality of southern, pre-Christian, and post-industrial societies. He thus links Gothic art and Christian liberalism in a chiastic relationship in which they mutually reinforce one another. Gothic ornament is presented as the sensuous manifestation of the healthiest of cultures, which in turn is said to shine forth in the most beautiful of ornamentation.

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Ruskin’s expert knowledge of ornament, certified by his complex system of technical terms, helps him to master the symptomatic resemblance between aesthetic and social forms, and reveal truths crucial to the well-being of contemporary Great Britain. The rhetorical seductiveness of Ruskin’s argument is generated by the mid-nineteenth-century intellectual field. Ruskin’s narrative offers considerable rhetorical advantages compared to other prominent positions in contemporary criticism. When Victorian formalists (Hanslickian Kantians, Paterian ‘aesthetic critics’) seek to authorize a specific style (such as Gothic art), they are confined to abstract debates about the effects of lines and shapes on the human mind (about whether Gothic style ‘pleases the eye’, intensifies experience, and so on). When Paterian formalists seek to promote social values such as Christian liberalism, they have even less to offer, because they limit aesthetic inquiry to autonomous beauty. Moralist critics like the Carlylean Pugin, who deny the primacy of formalist inquiry and would defend Gothic architecture by reducing it to its moral values, find it easier to stage themselves as public intellectuals because their non-technical approach translates better into political debate. But their evasion of aesthetic form makes them vulnerable to the charge of philistinism voiced by professionalized critics who insist that the elimination of stylistic aspects from the equation misses what is essential (that is, aesthetic rather than merely topical) about art. Ruskin’s cultural parallelism thus gives him an argumentative advantage over Paterians and moralists. It infuses his formalist inquiry into style with tangible social relevance while being technical and specific enough to be acceptable as professional art criticism. Transnational / Transhistorical: Topographies of Professionalism Bourdieu often speaks of the literary field in the singular, as a global phenomenon that gradually increases in dynamism until it reaches a tipping point in the 1890s (the moment where commercial and symbolic hierarchies are completely reversed). This two-dimensional view serves well enough to explain the situation of the French avantgardes (Bourdieu’s main protagonists are Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Zola); and it also helps us understand the structural causalities behind the terminological homogeneity of transatlantic mid-century literary establishments. We can view the shared critical vocabularies between London and Boston as a result of a general transformation of literary authority (from economic to symbolic capital). This explanatory

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framework does not solve all riddles, to be sure, but it seems to offer more convincing accounts of conceptual change than the ‘influence’ paradigm implied by traditional intellectual histories focusing on the transmission of ideas in transatlantic networks. Yet the view of the literary field as a singular entity in linear temporal progression is at once too sweeping and too narrow – too sweeping as it neglects the uneven intensification of the print market in the nineteenth century, when cultural differentiation proceeded in fits and starts; too narrow as its synchronic focus obscures significant parallels between historically remote but structurally similar cultural fields. The transhistorical parallels between the 1790s and the 1850s put a strain on narratives of cultural modernization as a singular linear development, unless we resort to familiar tropes of literary pioneers and latecomers. Consider, for instance, Lawrence Buell’s account of the tension between neoclassical and romantic discourses in nineteenth-century New England: Neoclassicism leads into Romanticism by a series of steps so gradual as to seem almost indistinguishable to some; in American writing, the shift in taste is at once more abrupt and still harder to chart uncontroversially, since the Augustan and pre-Romantic phases coincide more nearly, and the high points of Neoclassicism and Romanticism are separated by at most two generations instead of a century . . . [T]he claim for the nearness of Federalist Neoclassicism to New England Renaissance literature can even be reversed into the claim that Neoclassicism never went away. We find mastodons like Edward Everett lingering around 1865 or after, and a number of writers born after 1800 who might almost have been eighteenth-century writers – for example, Oliver Wendell Holmes (who was fond of likening his life’s history to that of Samuel Johnson). (1987: 92–3)

Buell emphasizes the heterogeneity of literary New England so as almost to explode the concept of coherent literary periods – almost but not quite, because his portrayal of neoclassical Bostonians as ‘eighteenth-century writers’ or ‘lingering’ literary ‘mastodons’ still implies the coherency of historical periods. But rather than viewing Wordsworth as a ‘precursor’ of Baudelaire or Longfellow as a ‘belated’ premodern, it seems more helpful to spatialize literary history towards a more inclusive topography of cultural positions. We can imagine historical periods as internally differentiated spaces whose relatively separate literary territories branch into transatlantic

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and transhistorical connections. Historically and spatially distant literary avant-gardes resemble each other more closely than their immediate traditions: Whitman’s poetics seems light-years from Longfellow’s, but has a great deal in common with earlier avantgardes (from Goethe and Schiller, Blake and Wordsworth to Shelley and Keats) and the high modernist literary landscape whose critical representatives reinterpreted Leaves of Grass as a ‘language experiment’ central to American modernity. The parallels between historically remote cultural fields are apparent in the transhistorical significance of the post-Kantian gesture. Despite the historical and institutional differences, postVictorian university-based literary critics resort to similar rhetorical responses to their predecessors in romantic and mid-century avant-gardes. We can recognize the Kantian separation of the aesthetic from cognitive, moral, or ideological concerns in early to mid-twentieth-century demands for the establishment of ‘sciences of literature’ distinct from other departments within the humanities. At the same time, the romantic fear of intellectual feminization reappeared in polemic questions about the social value of ivorytower scientists analyzing self-contained literary objects. PostKantian responses to this fear can already be seen in new-critical claims about the social relevance of difficulty and abstraction. The public relevance of literary form was a key issue of many recent theoretical ‘turns’ (to politics in the 1960s, history in the 1970s, ethics and ‘culture’ in the 1980s, ecology in the 1990s, and so on), although these turns were not necessarily post-Kantian. They were often motivated by an anti-Kantian conviction that the literary is not reducible to form, that therefore the political relevance of a work does not lie in the politics embodied in its formal ‘music’ but simply in its politics (as many new historicist and postcolonial critics have argued). Yet there are also post-new-critical schools that present their rejection of formalism as a rediscovery of the socio-political value of aesthetic inquiry (as opposed to the value of mere socio-political inquiry). The more full-blooded varieties of this critical trend resonate with romantic and Victorian images of embodiment: Ruskin’s parallelisms reappear in the 1960s, for instance, in Adorno’s ‘homologies’ of political and musical form (Schoenberg’s music breaking up of the ‘shackles’ of totalitarianism),31 and in the postmodernist manifestos on the correspondence of quantum theory and the ‘exploded forms’ of postmodernist fiction and poetics (see Mellard 1980).

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But Kantians of the first generation were already anxious to disprove the suspicion that pursuing technologies of beauty (independent of theology and politics) was merely a sophisticated diversion. Martha Nussbaum’s point that ‘literary theory’ must have a ‘practical dimension’ (1989: 30) is already a major concern in Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education of the 1790s – a treatise that memorably begins with Schiller’s reflection on whether he ‘betrays a culpable indifference to the welfare of society’ by philosophizing about aesthetics at a time when the ‘fate of humanity’ plays itself out in Paris. Schiller’s well-known answer (‘it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom’ [1992: 8/558–60]) is a classic version of post-Kantian dialectics, but it hardly differs in structure from Nussbaum’s assertion that ‘the aesthetic is ethical and political’ (1998: 343). It is hard to see how the transhistorical continuities – between Wordsworth and Coleridge (1800), German romantics (1790s– 1820s), Anglo-American Victorians (1840s–1850s), and twentiethcentury literary critics – can be explained by trajectories of ‘influence’. True, there is a level at which we can identify linear geneaologies of cultural transfer (where Whitman’s work can be said to be a radical adaptation of Emerson’s mid-century appropriation of European forms of transcendental idealism, mediated through Emerson’s acquaintance with Thomas Carlyle [Schiller’s Scottish biographer], Henry Hedge [Coleridge’s American editor], and Victor Cousin [Hegel’s French disciple]). The trouble with the influence paradigm is that it furthers a critical obsession with positive moments of biographical or intertextual contact between specific authors and texts (that is, Emerson’s friendship with Carlyle, or Whitman’s being brought ‘to a boil’ through reading Emerson). Comparativist criticism thus needs to take into account the positional continuities of avant-garde discourse that can be traced to the eighteenth-century transformation of the literary landscape, the transnational and transhistorical ‘curvature’ of professional literary space that inscribes itself in the habitus of literary intellectuals and their strategies of social legitimation. The following chapter seeks to relate the logic of literary professionalism to the rise of expressivist identity models. NOTES

1. See Jerome H. Buckley’s landmark study on The Victorian Temper (1951). Buckley’s concept of the ‘moral aesthetic’ re-evaluates modernist

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stereotypes about the moralist didacticism attributed to ‘Victorianism’ by showing how mid-century critics such as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Tennyson seek to resolve the tension between the public and private aspects of art in a way that not only resembles romantic discourse (Wordsworth, Shelley) but also remains important for supposed ‘aesthete’ critics such as Walter Pater (Buckley 1969: 143–60, 178–184). On the contemporary significance of this issue and the paradigm-building role of twentieth-century readings of Matthew Arnold (beginning with Lionel Trilling’s revaluation in 1939), see Arac 1987. 2. The heroic narrative comes in two important variants. The first deems the rise of the avant-garde a sign of artistic purification and maturation that renders the arts too sophisticated for the non-professional general public. This viewpoint implies that modernist difficulty and abstraction reflect an aesthetic coming-of-age through which the arts realize their intrinsic potential against the backwardness of public taste and independently of social concerns (this is generic to the formalist tradition since Kant; an influential modernist exemplar would be Ortega y Gassett’s dehumanization-of-art thesis of 1925). The second type of heroic narrative stages the modernist move towards aesthetic abstraction as a radical politics of style. The autonomous artwork is then considered central to the bildung of humanity and thus to the social well-being of modern cultures (see, for instance, Schiller’s suggestion that only autonomous art will be able to play a role in the ‘aesthetic education’ of humanity living under the conditions of modern alienation; or more recently, Adorno’s view of abstract formalism as a heroic last-ditch attempt of the modern avant-garde to resist the ideological constraints of the twentieth century, when the culture industry has rendered traditional artistic forms – tonal compositions, plot-based fiction, representational painting – complicit to the ‘system’ and thus aesthetically dysfunctional). 3. St Clair assumes unrealistically that Wordsworth would have been more widely read if it had not been for a market cartel of greedy publishers who kept the price for his works beyond the means of the common reader. This also leads him to speculate that if there had been free distribution of more exclusive literary commodities like Wordsworth’s, Victorian culture might have developed healthier ideologies than under the influence of commercially successful writers like Byron and Sir Walter Scott (the sort of literature, according to St Clair, that is more likely to have contributed to Victorianism as ‘a culture which celebrates and admires war, conquest, patriotic death in battle, and military values in general, a culture which, in the tradition of revived romance, admires honour and respect from equals rather than virtue as such’ [2004: 425]). It is difficult to see how this positivist view of ideological influence explains the intricacies of the nineteenth-

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4.

5.

6.

7.

Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman century field (St Clair indeed sympathetically cites Mark Twain’s view on Scott’s influence on the Civil War [2004: 390]). In an essay for the Englishman’s Magazine (1831), Arthur Henry Hallam criticizes Wordsworth for being mainly a ‘reflective’ poet and prefers the more difficult work of Shelley and Keats (whom he considers ‘poets of sensation rather than reflection’) and the ‘picturesque’ tradition he sees represented by Tennyson (1863: 425–6). Francis Jeffrey complained in 1814 that Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Excursion’ revolves around ‘a few very simple and familiar ideas’, but modifies its subject matter with such ‘long words, long sentences, and unwieldy phrases . . . that it is often extremely difficult for the most skilful and attentive student to obtain a glimpse of the author’s meaning – and altogether impossible for an ordinary reader to conjecture what he is about’ (1814: 4). Jeffrey concludes that in Wordsworth there is ‘an affected passion for simplicity and humble life, most awkwardly combined with a taste for mystical refinements, and all the gorgeousness of obscure phraseology’ (1814: 30). On Wordsworth’s ‘difficulty’, see William Christie (2000). There are similar ambiguities in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817): Coleridge condemns his own ‘careless indifference to public opinion’ as ‘the original sin of my character’ (1969–2002: 7/44), yet one chapter later complains about the misconception that the opinion of ‘the multitudinous PUBLIC’ should be taken as serious criticism (that ‘all men’ are ‘supposed to able to read, and all readers able to judge’ [1969–2002: 7/59]). We can explain this contradiction in terms of a purely moral drama by saying (with James Engell and W. Jackson Bate) that Coleridge is torn between two ‘conflicting ideals in [his] mind’ – ‘the moral and religious desire to serve, lead, and educate as many people as possible’, and his ‘profound interest’ in ‘highly intellectual’ subjects (Bate and Engell 1969–2002: cxxviii). Yet we should note Coleridge’s responses to the symbolic hierarchies of his literary field: his regard for symbolic value is visible in his confession about how ‘the praise and admiration’ of the larger reading public have become ‘less and less desirable’ to him, and that indeed ‘it is difficult and distressing to me, to think with any interest even about the sale and profit of my works’ (1969–2002: 7/44–5). As an art historical term, primitivism refers to the well-known vogue of tribal motifs in modern sculpture and painting in the wake of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Its literary currency has been associated with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and D. H. Lawrence’s Plumed Serpent (1926), tales of a quest in which fear and desire are always close together (as in Conrad’s personification of the ‘fecund and mysterious’ ‘immense wilderness’ with an African woman he describes as both ‘savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent’

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[Conrad 1989: 101]). I would like to use the term in its broader, cultural historian sense that locates primitivism already in eighteenthcentury preoccupations with the difference between the ancient and the modern (M. Novak 1997). On the connection between primitivism and a romantic sense of time, see McGrane 1989. 8. Homi Bhabha has theorized this duality as constitutive of colonial discourse: he speaks of ‘the productive ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse – that “otherness” which is at once an object of desire and derision’ (1994: 67), and of ‘scenes of fear and desire in colonial texts’ that underlie the dual nature of colonial stereotypes as ‘phobia and fetish’ (1994: 72). Bhabha’s Freudian/Lacanian approach compares colonial and sexual fetishism as ‘“play” or vacillation between the archaic affirmation of wholeness/similarity . . . and the anxiety associated with lack and difference’ (1994: 74). His observation of the simultaneity of ‘both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination, and power’ (1994: 67) in colonial discourse seems also pertinent to professionalist constructions of the popular or the ‘masses’. The primitive belongs to the ‘constitutive outside’ (Laclau 1990: 17) of a modern subject formation that co-emerges with the professional culture of the so-called bourgeois classes, which in the eighteenth century deal in commercial trade capitalism and cultivate learned and free professions. According to Andreas Reckwitz (2006: 97–274), this subject formation becomes hegemonic in the late seventeenth (England) and early eighteenth centuries (France and Germany) and constitutes itself around notions of moral and economic autonomy, self-sufficient work, affective intimacy, and literary self-cultivation. As a discursive formation (producing a specific habitus), this subject formation emerges through a complex interplay of negation of and identification with mainly two anti-subjects, the aristocracy and the agrarian and working classes. The aristocracy forms a constitutive other that is rejected as parasitic (socially and economically useless), excessive, and artificial (ornamental), but admired for its autonomy and self-cultivation. The lower classes are rejected for a lack of autonomy (for example, adherence to religious belief rather than moral knowledge), dependency on nonprofessional work, rule-based modes of intimacy (arranged marriages and so on), and their ‘speechlessness’ (their lack of cultivated modes of self-expression) (2006: 184–9). With the nineteenth-century change from trade to industrial capitalism that splits the culture of gentleman traders into separate spheres of professional entrepreneurs and cultural producers, the aristocratic subject becomes less important as a constitutive other than the ‘primitive’ (2006: 245). Reckwitz’s valid point (drawn from Laclau) is that the subject formation of the modern professional is as hybrid and unstable as its shifting constitutive

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outsides (the anti-subjects produced by a negative logic of exclusion), which oscillate between objects of distinction and objects of affective identification (2006: 183). 9. See Edward Said’s definition of the modern intellectual (in my vocabulary: the professionalizing author) as an ‘exile’ defined by ‘restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others’, and who ‘cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home’ (or ever ‘fully arrive’ or ‘be at one’ with a ‘new home or situation’) (1994: 53). 10. On the interplay of emerging stratifications of milieu between 1750 and 1900 as objects of professional distinction, see Reckwitz 2006. On related mechanisms in twentieth-century academic cultures, see Bourdieu 1988, 1996b and 2000, and Wacquant 2005: 133–50. 11. Wordsworth’s belief that the diversity and beauty of nature eludes untutored minds is especially vivid in the following example: [The hill of Dunmallet, at the foot of Ullswater, was once divided into different portions, by avenues of fir-trees, with a green and almost perpendicular lane descending down the steep hill through each avenue;– contrast this quaint appearance with the image of the same hill overgrown with self-planted wood, – each tree springing up in the situation best suited to its kind, and with that shape which the situation constrained or suffered it to take. What endless melting and playing into each other of forms and colours does the one offer to a mind at once attentive and active; and how insipid and lifeless, compared with it, appear those parts of the former exhibition with which a child, a peasant perhaps, or a citizen unfamiliar with natural imagery, would have been most delighted. (1977: 73)] 12. On one of the Hawaiian islands, Queen Kaahumanu unites both defects, despotic rationality and voracious sensuality, in one body: Melville portrays her as a ‘gigantic’ and ‘monstrous Jezebel’ weighing ‘nearly four hundred pounds’, ‘accustomed, in some of her terrific gusts of temper, to snatch up an ordinary sized man who had offended her, and snap his spine across her knee’ (1996: 186). 13. See, for instance, Emerson’s journal entry on his visit to Naples in 1833: [Baiae & Misenum & Vesuvius, Procida & Pausilippo & Villa Reale sound so big that we are ready to surrender at discretion & not stickle for our private opinion against what seems the human race. Who cares? Here’s for the plain old Adam, the simple genuine Self against the whole world. (1982: 99)] 14. See Bourdieu on the concepts of tacit practical knowledge:

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[Each agent has a practical, bodily knowledge of her present and potential position in the social space, a ‘sense of one’s place’ as Goffmann puts it, converted into a sense of placement which governs her experience of the place occupied . . . The practical knowledge conferred by this sense of position takes the form of emotion (the unease of someone who is out of place, or the ease that comes from being in one’s place) . . . The sense of one’s place is a practical sense (having nothing in common with what is generally referred to as ‘class consciousness’), a practical knowledge that does not know itself, a ‘learned ignorance’ (docta ignorantia), which, as such, may be the victim of that particular form of misrecognition, allodoxia, consisting in mistakenly recognizing oneself in a particular form of representation and public enunciation of the doxa. (2000: 184–5)]

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

Bourdieu’s point is that cultural positions are not merely a question of a set of intellectual beliefs (as it is implied in mentalistic theories of culture) but are ‘durably inscribed in bodies in the form of dispositions’ and practices beyond mentalistic representations that are inscribed in a habitus and can thus not simply be changed along with changing ideas (2000: 180–1). See Reckwitz 2002 and 2004 on the notion of practice as tacit embodied knowledge in contemporary cultural theory. On Whitman’s early career as a sensationalist writer and journalist addressing mass audiences, see Reynolds 1995: 85–97. The popular genre of travel writing to which Typee belongs, which uses the ethnographic frame to depict exotic sensualities as a form of ‘genteel pornography’ (Martin 1982: 69), was presumably not suited to impress more exclusive authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne. On Melville’s relation to antebellum professionalism, see Evelev 2006. Including Shakespeare’s plays, Montaigne’s essays, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Seneca’s Morals, Dante’s Divine Comedy, James Macpherson’s Fingal, and Rabelais’ novels (Parker 1996: 577). On the professionalism behind Melville’s Mardi, see Evelev 2006: 51–78. George Ripley’s review for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune called the novel ‘a monstrous compound of Carlyle, Jean-Paul, and Sterne, with now and then a touch of Ossian thrown in’ (Parker 1996: 631). According to William Charvat, Melville was able to live by his works in the first five years of his literary life (1846–51). Between 1853 and 1864, the paychecks from his publisher, Harper’s, failed to cover his debts, and after 1864 his literary income was negligible (1943: 254). In the late 1850s until 1860, Melville went on lecture tours, before in 1866 he became Inspector of Customs in New York. His book of

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman poetry, Clarel, was published in 1876 with the subsidy of an uncle ($1,200, roughly Melville’s yearly income). As Hershel Parker points out, Melville knew well that ‘Hawthorne’s only real money came later, from his appointment in 1853 as consul at Liverpool’, while Emerson, Whittier, Bryant, and Bancroft had independent means that they combined with journalistic and educational positions (1996: 476). In sociological terms: romantic critics had an embodied sense of the slippage between primitivist end-of-art models and the practical habitus of professional literary producers (see fn. 14 above). Schiller pictures the public mind (‘Gemeinsinn’) in the holistic cultures of the naïve and graceful Greeks as ‘resting with indolent complacency on outward appearance’ (content, that is, with primitive beauty). The one-sided minds of modern intellectuals are preferable because they interact in a dynamic conflict that ‘forces’ (‘nötigt’) the public mind to ‘penetrate into the depths of phenomena’ (1992: 8/576). There are parallel narratives in British primitivism: see William Hazlitt’s ‘Why the Arts are not Progressive? – A Fragment’ of 1814 (1930–4: 4/160–4). A foundational formulation of this can be found in Hugh Blair’s portrayal of Ossian as a primitive Orphic poet, in his ‘Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian’ (1763) and his ‘Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres’ (1783). By ironic inversion, it informs the half-serious claim of Thomas Love Peacock’s ‘Four Ages of Poetry’ of 1822 that in trying to revivify the irrecoverable primitive poetic powers of the Greeks, modern poets have lapsed into a grotesque stage of semi-barbarity. On Hegel’s ‘end of art’ motif, see Jameson 1998: 73–92, and, for a contemporary appropriation of Hegel’s notion that modernity displaces traditional aesthetics by a philosophical kind of art, see Danto 1986 and 1997, and L. Brown 1989. The result of this equilibrium is aesthetically valuable, which Schiller renders allegorically with the image of the beautiful soul whose voice turns into pure music (‘Musik wird ihre Stimme sein’ [ibid.]). Critics argue over whether §59 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment implies a ‘symbolic’ or an ‘analogous’ relation between the beautiful and the good. The symbolic view would implicate the artist more directly and personally in pragmatic moral issues. What matters historically (and to my argument), however, is the widespread understanding of Kant as suggesting the autonomy of the aesthetic from moral or cognitive demands, whether or not this view can be securely attributed to him. On the fear of feminization, see Douglas 1977 and Leverenz 1989. As Manfred Frank has shown with regard to early romanticism, the German idealists proceed from Kant’s careful suggestion that there

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might be a vague symbolic relationship between beauty and morals (because aesthetic and moral contemplation involve our faculties in vaguely similar kinds of free play or freedom). But they bend Kant’s transcendental inquiry into a much less careful conclusion when they assert analogical correspondence – and ultimately identity – between aesthetics and practical morality (see Frank 2002 and 2004 and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988: 27–37). 29. In many ways, Ruskin’s argument draws from early romanticism’s revaluation of the Gothic as an expression of the inwardness and melancholic self-reflexivity of Northern European Christianity, as it was popularized by A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808) and Madame de Staël’s On Germany (1810). Another relevant context (even if Ruskin denied it [1903–12: 5/428–9; cf. Landow 1971: 277]) is the writings of the English architect Augustus Pugin (1812–52), whose Contrasts (1836), True Principles of Pointed Architecture (1841), and An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843) combined a functionalist with an ethical reading of architectural form that led him to defend Gothic style as an expression of Roman Catholicism, and to reject neoclassical art as a reflection of pagan beliefs (see Crook 1987). 30. In a letter to Charles Eliot Norton of 1882, Ruskin refers to a ‘“Liberty” of line’ that gives rise to the imperfections of Gothic façades (at which one can hardly look ‘without being seasick!’) and embodies the freedom of the worker, and he speaks of ‘the horror of the restoration which puts it “to rights”’ (1987: 450). Ruskin’s assumption that Christianity marks a stage where humanity (or the spirit of the world) realizes that its essence consists in being free is a romantic commonplace, and a central tenet of Hegel’s history lectures of the 1820s (see Hegel 1986: 12/31). 31. Adorno’s aesthetic theory is Kantian in its suggestion that the artwork approximates ‘real essence’ to the degree of its ‘emancipation from the external world’s factual facade’ (1997: 6), while it is post-Kantian in its consideration of abstract, non-representational form as a precondition of artistic ‘truth value’ and thus as indexical of social health. Adorno’s heroic narrative views musical progress as a negotiation of democratic authenticity. He views Beethoven as an important pioneer on the frontier of democratization, because in his music ‘the din of the bourgeois revolution rumbles’ (1976: 211). While the early Beethoven, according to Adorno, still tries to reconcile the aporias of bourgeois society, his later compositions (particularly his late string quartets) problematize the subject’s alienation by destabilizing the sonata structure with loose phrases and cadences and disconnected decorative trills. Schoenberg’s work, then, appears to be a democratic victory over tonality. In 1955 Adorno argues that in Schoenberg ‘tonal relations’ were ‘stretched to

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Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman the extreme’, until ‘[i]n the end, every sound became autonomous, all tones enjoyed equal rights, and the reign of the tonic triad was overthrown’, so that ‘something like the musical realm of freedom really opens up’ (2002: 636).

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CHAPTER 2

US DISCOURSE AND THE EXPRESSIVIST TURN

Locations of Literary Nationalism The Whitmanian moment combines post-Kantian claims to privileged sensibility with expressivist models of nation- and selfhood that emerged between the 1750s and 1800. The question of cultural selfreliance preoccupied American intellectuals well before the so-called period of ‘literary nationalism’. Yet nationalist poetics have little use for Whitmanian cultural parallelism before 1800. Eighteenth-century American intellectuals, steeped in theological regionalism and socioreligious variants of the translatio imperii idea (Ellis 2002; Freese 1996), are confident that the political and economic advantages of the newly-won independence will entail a flowering of the arts and letters and transform the United States into a cultural center. But they expect the artifacts produced by a future ‘American Athens’ (see McCarthy 1985) to carry universal rather than specifically American signatures. The natural, political, and economic advantages of the US are seen as determining artistic discourses only in a pragmatic sense, inasmuch as they provide superior material conditions and institutional frameworks for a thriving ‘republic’ of arts and letters. As society is not yet understood in terms of an exteriority/interiority opposition, the material and moral conditions of Liberty and Virgin Land are not believed to produce a symptomatic aesthetics. The neoclassical image of the nation as a machine (rather than an organism) implies that once America’s cultural economic and political engines are up and running, artistic practice will follow universal laws independent of social and temporal contingencies.

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This culture model is well represented in Thomas Jefferson’s attempts at ‘cultivating’ the arts in the New World. Jefferson urges the adaptation of Greek and Roman architectural models, not because they ‘express’ a democratic ethos but because of their architectural universality.1 Jefferson’s view of American language and letters follows similar lines. His belief in the moral superiority of America’s democratic agrarianism (1984: 832–4) does not detract from his admiration for European artistic discourses as the best that has been known and thought: he portrays European canonical authors (‘Pope, Dryden, Thompson, Shakspeare’, ‘Molière, Racine, the Corneilles’) as universal models ‘forming style and taste’ (1984: 1412). Americanist scholarship, with its habitual national inflection, has tended to encourage anachronistic readings of Jefferson as a proto-romantic. For instance, when we read how he suggests, in 1785, that Americans should not travel abroad during adolescence, before they have had the chance to develop their moral self-assurance and their ‘style in writing or speaking’ (1984: 837–40), we might well hear Emerson rejecting Europe’s ‘courtly muses’.2 But Jefferson is making the universalist point that immersion in a foreign language at a young age (‘while the imagination is warm’) is detrimental to the cultivation of written and oral style, for he believes that multilingualism hampers the fullest development of the linguistic faculty (‘[N]o instance exists’, he says, ‘of a person’s writing two languages perfectly’). He urges American adolescents to stay at home and speak English until their ‘eloquence of the pen and tongue’ (1984: 839) has become mature enough to withstand the dislocating effect of travel. In contrast to romantic models, Jefferson regards the English language simply as a powerful tool that merits development and improvement, just as many late-eighteenth-century central Europeans believed that the syntactical clarity of French provided the most effective linguistic means for cultivating the arts and polite letters (Mah 1994). Frederick the Great made French the language of the Prussian Academy because he considered it to be a universal language of civility, and in 1780 he attributed the sad state of native German literature to the convoluted syntax of the German language (Mah 1994: 65), even suggesting that the ‘disagreeable’ sounds of German verb-endings should be modified to approach the sonority of the French (Frederick 1994; Casanova 2004: 18–9). Jefferson’s and Noah Webster’s demands for an ‘American dialect’ follow the same linguistic model: when in 1813 Jefferson suggests ‘the improvement of the English language’, he proposes the invention of neologisms

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in post-revolutionary France as a commendable example of linguistic adaptation. As the ‘new circumstances’ in America ‘call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects’, post-revolutionary Americans ‘must enlarge their language, to make it answer its purpose of expressing all ideas, the new as well as the old’ (1984: 1295–6).3 The North American Group and the Idea of Linguistic Alienation The idea that immersion in a foreign language can lead to selfalienation emerges after 1800, when American manifestos of literary nationalism change in pitch. Walter Channing’s essay on ‘American Language and Literature’, in the founding issue of the North American Review of 1815, is a good illustration of this change.4 The essay relates the present ‘barrenness of American literature’ (1815: 307) to the absence of a national language that could ‘embody’ (1815: 312) the new nation’s character. Channing’s view engages with theories of linguistic alienation just emerging in Europe’s nationalist movements. The outlines are well represented in the fourth and fifth of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation before the Prussian Academy of 1807, a rejection of French universality that was influenced by Herder but reflected the nationalist pathos emerging in the Napoleonic Wars (Fichte gave his lectures during the French occupation of Berlin following the military defeat of Prussia). Examining the differences between the German and French cultures, Fichte argues that those Germanic peoples who retained their original language (such as the modern Germans) have an advantage over others (such as the descendents of the Frankish people, the modern French) whose Germanic language has been displaced by their invader’s Romance vocabularies. Linguistic colonization forces a people to use moral, philosophical, and political words to which they have no organic connections, since these words are not part of their everyday language.5 People are better able to grasp a complex intellectual or metaphysical problem (‘das Übersinnliche’) if it is expressed in quotidian vocabularies drawn from designations of basic physical or sensual facts (‘das Sinnliche’) (Fichte 1978: 63). If foreign vocabularies take over the intellectual sphere, the resulting split between the everyday language of lived experience (‘erlebte Anschauung’) and abstract intellectual discourse blurs conceptual clarity and rigor (1978: 66). The influence of a dead language (Latin) reduces French culture to a

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graft on the tree of classical education (‘Pfropfreis auf dem Stamme der altertümlichen Bildung’): this tree offers the classically educated French access to the genteel beauties of antiquity, but it disconnects their intellectual culture from practical life (1978: 86, 88). Living and thinking by turns, the French have only a vague idea of who they are, and even German speakers understand them better than they understand themselves (1978: 63). Channing follows a similar line of argumentation. He contends that a national language is ‘the vehicle of a country’s intellectual state’, indispensable to the ‘rise and progress of literature’ (1815: 309), and he takes German literary nationalism as a point in case: if the Germans had adopted the ‘foppery’ of France, or ‘the language of England’, they could not have expressed themselves authentically, for ‘their language could alone embody’ the ‘character’ of their government, faith, and manners. In contrast to Jefferson, Channing is not interested in universal literary greatness but in expressive authenticity: ‘the splendid obscurity of their [the German] metaphysicks’ or their ‘sentimentality’ (1815: 311–12) are valuable not as transnational classics but because of their national distinctness. The trouble with American culture is that linguistic enslavement makes distinct literary expression a near impossibility: Unfortunately for this country, [t]he language in which we speak and write, is the vernacular tongue of a nation . . . whose natural, political, religious, and literary relations and peculiarities, are totally unlike our own . . . Our descriptions, of course, which must . . . be made in the language of another country, can never be distinctive[.] How tame will his language sound, who would describe Niagara in language fitted for the falls at London bridge, or attempt the majesty of the Mississippi in that which was made for the Thames? (1815: 309)

Channing is not arguing, like Jefferson or Webster, that ‘the English language’ is not expressive enough and should be improved with neologisms, but rather that American identity can only be conveyed in a language whose structure has grown out of its traits (1815: 309). ‘There is something peculiarly opposed to literary originality’, he says, ‘in the colonial existence which was unfortunately so long the condition of America’ (1815: 312). The persistence of British linguistic dominance after independence leads to the vicious circle described by Fichte: the absence of a distinct language in which to express national identity in effect erases the distinctiveness of national

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identity. A people who cannot express themselves – because their vernacular comes from ‘the higher authorities of London’ (1815: 312) – will suffer from a loss of self. It is thus due to the dominance of English that the US has ‘no national character, unless its absence constitute one’ (1815: 311). Anticipating mid-twentieth-century calls for cultural decolonization, Channing argues that it would have been better if the American Revolution had not only given Americans a ‘different moral and political existence’ but also ushered in a ‘confusion of tongues’ that would have stripped them of their linguistic heritage. If Americans had been forced to unlearn their language, they might have experienced linguistic anarchy and lacked a coherent grammar, but at least ‘our descendants would have made for themselves a literature’ (1815: 310).6 ‘Sources’ of Selfhood and the Expressivist Turn Channing’s position reflects the transnational shift in identity models that Charles Taylor has described as an ‘expressivist turn’ in the history of modern subjectivity, a significant cultural watershed that cuts across national distinctions and local socio-political conditions, and indeed becomes so fundamental to Western culture, in Taylor’s view, that more recent ways of imagining selfhood (even up to the postmodernism debates) are largely a working out of eighteenth-century positions for whose ‘vocabularies’ we ‘still instinctively reach’ (1989: 393).7 Tracing the modern emergence of the language of inwardness, Taylor shows how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theological and philosophical discourse appropriates Platonic and Augustinian thought to produce what he calls an ‘ethics of authenticity’ (1991: 26) that locates the source of moral, cognitive, and aesthetic decisions within a self with inner depths. This inward turn can be viewed as a reaction against extrinsic models of human agency that consider moral choice ‘a matter of calculating consequences’. Consequentialist models include the Deist and more orthodox schools ‘concerned with divine reward and punishment’ (1991: 26), and pragmatic schools of the radical Enlightenment that define identity in terms of the effects of moral action (attainment of happiness, evasion of pain, fulfillment of desire, and so on) (1989: 321–2). The reaction against consequentialist models, according to Taylor, develops out of two main traditions. The first is represented by Kant’s ‘formalist’ ethics, which internalizes moral choice by describing it as a function of innate

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reason, independent of desires, sentiments, or consequences (1989: 363–7). The second tradition draws from an interiorization of natural order represented by Rousseau’s notion of nature as a ‘voice within’ that we recognize as our ‘inner guide’ (1994: 28; 1989: 355–6). This viewpoint is prefigured by Shaftesbury’s and Francis Hutcheson’s theories of a moral sense anchored in our feelings, independent of desires, rational inquiry, and utility. Rousseauist approaches tend towards ‘a displacement of the moral accent’ of this idea, so that the inner voice of nature becomes important, not ‘because it tells us what the right thing to do is’, but because being in touch with our deeper selves ‘comes to be something we have to attain if we are to be true and full human beings’ (1994: 28). According to Taylor, Rousseau is a hinge between selfhood as internalized nature and selfhood as autonomous expression: on the one hand, Rousseau belongs to a tradition that locates the source of being in the internal connection with external entities (God, the Idea, the Good). Taylor considers this tradition to run in a line of continuation and intensification from Augustine’s belief that ‘the road to God’ passes ‘through our own reflexive awareness of ourselves’ to Rousseau’s pantheistic notion of nature’s inner voice (1991: 26–7). On the other hand, Rousseau also offers a vocabulary that inspires more radical conceptualizations of inwardness, such as the subjective historicism of Johann Gottfried Herder, the main protagonist of Taylor’s story: Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human. Each person has his or her own ‘measure’. This idea has burrowed very deep into modern consciousness. It is a new idea. Before the late eighteenth century, no one thought that the differences between human beings had this kind of moral significance. There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me. (1994: 30)

This moral ideal, Taylor argues, reinforces the notion (formulated in John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty of 1859) that individuals must look within themselves to find the model by which to live, and that external conformity in fact leads to a loss of selfhood. But more importantly, it sets the stage for a dynamic model of identity according to which self-expression is a way of realizing a potential, so that what we are emerges only in the act of self-articulation. This notion

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is linked to the idea that the self has inner depths complex enough to seem inexhaustible and to offer an essentially unlimited choice of articulation: The sense of depth in inner space is bound up with the sense that we can move into it and bring things to the fore [and] that whatever we bring up, there is always more down there. Depth lies in there being always, inescapably, something beyond our articulative power (1989: 390).

Inwardness and Cultural Acceleration Taylor’s account of the expressivist turn draws from the intellectual histories and literary anthropologies by M. H. Abrams, Isaiah Berlin, and Lionel Trilling, and it focuses largely on ‘milestones’ of philosophical thought. Taylor stresses the social and cultural overdetermination of identity models, and argues convincingly that it is unrealistic to provide a history of modern expressivism that satisfies both sociologists and historians of ideas.8 But perhaps we can ground Taylor’s history-of-ideas approach in Bourdieu’s cultural topography, if we consider how concepts of interiority negotiate eighteenthcentury political and economic conditions – the social anxieties, for instance, that accompanied the displacement of hereditary systems of legitimation caused by the economic instability of the growing capitalist markets. Before the breakthrough of expressivism around 1800, culture and commerce were largely regarded as mutually reinforcing agents of progress. According to mainstream eighteenth-century political theory, commerce cures prejudice, produces human sympathy and brings Europeans closer together in a culture of gentle politeness (Montesquieu 1989: 388–9; Hume 1985: 277). But with the economic acceleration towards the end of the century, ‘culture’ was increasingly considered antithetical to commerce – it became a space of retreat from the economic cycles of consumption and commodity exhaustion.9 The increasing perception of culture as a site of resistance against the quotidian world of commodity exchange recalls Bourdieu’s description of how accelerated cultural fields produce an ‘inverted’ ‘economic world’ (1996: 83) that leads to the highest prestige (the most symbolic capital) being conferred on cultural artifacts with the lowest commercial value (that is, the avant-garde). We can consider Bourdieu’s insight into the reversal of the economic world in terms of an economy of the sacred. Hartmut

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Böhme has recently elucidated this aspect in his work on magic things (2006), where he explores the connections between the increase of consumerism in modern societies (the acceleration of wastage and commodity exhaustion) and an increasing sacralization of things. He proceeds from Marcel Mauss’ exploration of how primal societies regulate their economies with the help of primary fetishes – sacred objects – that stand outside the exchange of goods, and – by their externality – keep the exchange of goods functioning (Mauss 2000; Böhme 2006: 289–97). Following Mauss, and against the grain of secularization theory,10 Böhme argues that this primal economy of the sacred not only remains in place but is even intensified in capitalist modernity: as modern consumerism accelerates the commercial circulation of things, it produces spaces of extraterritoriality where objects receive a sacred aura through being removed from the cycle of commodities and consumption.11 Combining Böhme and Bourdieu we can say that spaces in which the economic world is reversed can become sites of transcendence as well as sites of social distinction. The very commercialization of literary communication does not therefore eradicate the aura of cultural production, as Walter Benjamin suggests (2007: 221–3), it radicalizes it: the more accelerated the print market, the more luminous its auratic spaces – its aesthetic avant-gardes, its museums and sites of memory, its configurations of transcendental objects. Within the eighteenth-century figuration of culture, the turn to interiority emerged as an effective (and highly influential) technology of cultural reauratization.12 For example, when Kant’s first Critique (1781) describes human reason as a faculty within – inaccessible to sensual perception and conceptual knowledge – it renders moral deliberation extraterritorial to the market, removing moral truths from the indignities of economic cycles of consumption. The more radical sensualist identity models in eighteenth-century philosophy indeed seem like allegories of market dependency. David Hume’s famous comparison (1739) between the human ‘soul’ and the unstable conditions of democratic consensus locates personal identity in the uncoordinated circulation of sense impressions, implying that the self fluctuates in the same way that ‘a republic or commonwealth’ is tossed about in ‘incessant changes of its parts’ because its people and laws are determined by the upheavals of the democratic process (1978: 252, 261). Being tossed about by external influence is precisely how romantic intellectuals experienced the scandal of commodified culture. The turn

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to transcendentalist culture models addresses this scandal by making national and personal selfhood a question of interiority. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the shift from sensualist to transcendentalist culture concepts coincides with the print market revolution, when ever higher levels of commodification demanded new locations of cultural reauratization. A similar logic applies to the romantic interiorization of aesthetic experience, represented by the post-Kantian belief that the most disinterested beauty (the purest of the arts) reveals glimpses of metaphysical interiority (when pure beauty becomes the symbolic representation of the infinite, for example). When in 1842 Emerson describes his poetic powers with the image of an acute sense of hearing (a ‘finer ear’) to grasp the musical ‘soul of things’ (Emerson 1972: 25), he can be said to be reacting to an expanding market that strips traditional literary texts of their aura by making them part of a widespread commodity cycle. When literary language is bought and sold in large quantities, music becomes a prime metaphor for a disinterested form that, because it is irreducible to cognitive or moral uses, eludes the cycle of literary massmarket commodities and thus embodies a symbolic (rather than commercial) value that is transfigured with an aura of permanence and extraterritoriality. Another related example is the romantic subjectivization and interiorization of religious experience that Taylor addresses in his later work (2002, 2007). Taylor locates the beginnings of religious interiority in sixteenth-century varieties of denominationalism that connected worshippers ‘to a broader, more elusive “church”’ in which membership was increasingly felt to be a matter of choice and authenticity. There is a characteristic sense that, in Taylor’s words, the religion I join ‘must speak to me’ (2002: 93–4), as opposed to older religious contexts in which people were more likely to ‘feel that they had to obey the command to abandon their own religious instincts, because these, being at variance with orthodoxy, must be heretical or at least inferior’. In the late eighteenth century, believers were increasingly torn between the communitarian ideal of religious unity (however loosely defined) and an emergent belief that the core of religion had to do with ‘[d]eeply felt personal insight’. In the breakthrough phase of expressivism around 1800, it became ‘more crucial’ to explore the ‘powerful feeling of dependence on something greater’ (the infinite, the absolute, the universal soul, and so on) than to know the right theological ‘formula’ (2002: 100). Schleiermacher’s

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definition of religion as an individual ‘sense and taste for the Infinite’ (2001: 80) shows how religious creeds and institutionalized forms of worship came to seem superficial. The spaces of interiority listed above (pure reason, disinterested beauty, personal religious experience) frequently converge or reinforce one another. Consider, for instance, the meditation on picture galleries as temples of holy worship by Wackenroder and Tieck’s ‘art-loving’ friar in 1796: Picture galleries are taken for annual fairs where people judge, praise and scorn new wares in passing. But they should be temples where we admire, in calm and silent humility and heart-felt exalting solitude, the great artists, as the highest of mortals, and where we remain in long, uninterrupted contemplation of their works, warming ourselves in the sun of the most enchanting thoughts and emotions. I compare the enjoyment of the nobler artworks to prayer . . . Like in prayer you must wait for the blessed hours when heaven’s favor opens your inner being with higher revelation; only then will your soul unite itself with the works of artists in a single whole. . . . Works of art, in their way, no more fit into the common flow of life than does the thought of God; they transcend the ordinary and the commonplace . . . (2005: 67–8)

Looking at the turn to inwardness as a result of cultural acceleration does not supply the ‘diachronic-causal story’ that Taylor admits to lacking (1989: 203), but it helps us to understand why expressivism develops in fits and starts rather than in coherent broad strokes. Like the aesthetic of the romantic literary avant-garde, the cult of inwardness first emerges among selected élites, gaining prominence in some literary centers more than in others, and has little impact on the general reading public until the late twentieth century. The sitespecificity of inwardness is especially salient in the religious domain. The romantic religious sensibility defined by Schleiermacher’s On Religion or Emerson’s Divinity School Address was restricted to well-educated groups of artists and intellectuals, while the greater part of the population followed traditional patterns of church attendance and affiliation. As many religious historians have pointed out, this changed only in the second half of the twentieth century,13 when romantic identity models ‘penetrated in some general form deep into our culture’, popularizing the idea that ‘adhering to a spirituality that doesn’t present itself as your path, the one that moves and inspires you’, seems ‘absurd’ (Taylor 2002: 100–1).

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US Locations of Expressive Identity Channing’s suggestion that a distinct national identity requires a distinct language points to an aspect of the expressivist vocabularies of interiority that merits closer attention. According to Taylor, the Herderian notion of the individual’s inexhaustible inner depths invites ‘a close analogy, even a connection, between self-discovery and artistic creation’: Artistic creation becomes the paradigm mode in which people can come to self-definition. The artist becomes in some way the paradigm case of the human being, as agent of original self-definition . . . I discover myself through my work as an artist, through what I create. My self-discovery passes through a creation, the making of something original and new. I forge a new artistic language – new way of painting, new metre or form of poetry, new way of writing a novel – and through this and this alone I become what I have it in me to be. Self-discovery requires poieˉsis, making. (1991: 61–2)14

To the extent that the self is considered inexhaustible, self-expression is not necessarily the ‘making manifest’ or ‘revealing’ of something that is fully formulated beforehand, but can be understood as ‘manifesting a potential which is also being shaped by this manifestation’ (1989: 375). This duality of creation and discovery shows that the expressivist turn sets the stage for the co-existence of a range of identity models that stretches between foundationalist and nonfoundationalist extremes. Depending on whether we understand expression as self-discovery or self-creation, the identity that emerges in the expressive act can either be seen as reflecting a true kernel of being that is realized or fulfilled in the act of articulation, or a process of radical self-creation, in the sense that states of identity are seen as emerging in historically contingent situations or language games prior to which they have no reality, not even ideational or conceptual. Taylor’s analysis also suggests a second dichotomy between self-expression as a solitary journey guided by relatively private techniques of self-culture (that is, in terms of the notion of ‘expressive individualism’ discussed by Bellah et al. 1986 and Fluck 2002), and self-expression conceived along communitarian lines that define identity as dialogical interaction with others. While Rousseauist traditions tend towards the former, the latter is epitomized by Hegelian romantic cultural theories that emphasize negative definitions of

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identity as an effect of social interdependence. The communitarian model outlined in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), for instance, understands the growth of the individual mind through the acquisition of knowledge as a process of self-enlargement in which our finite self is expanded by the assimilation of the views and perspectives of other selves. Individual Bildung is therefore not a solitary search into our deepest selves, but a going beyond ourselves in communion with other minds, until we reconceptualize our private self in terms of its external relationships (see Royce 1983: 206–16). Both individualist and communitarian models of identity in nineteenth-century US discourse alternate between self-discovery and self-creation. Emerson’s individualism, for instance, has been interpreted as shifting between the neoplatonic anchoring of selfhood in private communion with the oversoul – which defines, for instance, his book on Nature (1836) – and the weaker foundationalism he articulates in such essays as ‘Experience’ (1844) that emphasize the fluidity of the self’s natural ground and conceive of identity as a continuum of singular and disconnected moments (a succession of ‘moods’ like ‘many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue’ [1903: 3/50]). This latter tendency in Emerson points directly to the Nietzschean concepts of selfhood that provide the framework for Foucauldian or Rortyan notions of self-culture as an aesthetic pursuit.15 The same ambivalence between selfhood-as-making versus selfhood-as-finding applies to communitarian models of expressivism. The various Bildungsromans of spirit suggested in romantic conceptualizations of historical change are a good example of this. If we stress the more static implications of some of the pantheistic idealisms in romantic literary culture, the progressive and intersubjective articulation of selfhood appears to follow a foundational logic of self-discovery, scripted, for instance, by the rational and hence teleological unfolding of a quasi-platonic truth. Arthur O. Lovejoy has called this structure ‘emanationism’. On the other hand, if we emphasize the nineteenth-century fascination with radical historicism, the teleological element becomes less rigid, so that progress is not so much a gradual fulfillment of a transcendental subject but its constant renewal (self-realization is propelled by a purpose, but this purpose defies anticipation, like a plant that creates its DNA during the process of its growth). Lovejoy’s term for this is ‘radical evolutionism’.16 The ambivalence between self-discovery and self-creation also pertains to identity models common among communitarianminded transcendentalists in America: on the emanationist side of

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the spectrum, we find Orestes Brownson, George Bancroft, and John S. Dwight, who consider democratic communion of minds to be a road to a transcendental self in tune with divine revelation, or James Russell Lowell, who holds that immersion in a transatlantic tradition is the best way to discover a universal self. Whitman’s frequent conceptualization of self-realization in terms of national brotherhood, on the other hand, implies a more radical evolutionism that undermines teleology with images of contingency, which point towards culturalist and historicist conceptualizations of being. Expressivist identity models also suggest a third dichotomy that hinges on whether we locate our spiritual selves within a higher realm (‘mind’, ‘disinterested contemplation’) or in the midst of social practice. The differing answers to this question account for many of the ambiguities in American transcendentalism. The tendency towards romantic idealism in Emerson, Fuller, or Thoreau leads them to believe that self-cultivation is best achieved in a pastoral retreat from the socio-political and economical domains. To an extent this also holds for communitarians like George Ripley, who believe that social reform is best developed in agrarian communities removed from the bustle of America’s metropolitan centers; the Boston Brahmins’ odes to the ‘fireside’ and the quiet ‘night hour’ have often been read as epitomizing a high-brow (or effeminate) resistance to socio-economic realities (or the world of men), but the fascination with a realm of dreams and contemplation beyond social practice that characterizes, for instance, Longfellow’s Voices of the Night (1839) is also a basic tenet of much European romanticism since Novalis’ Hymns to the Night (1800). On the other hand, the post-millennialist idea that Christ’s return will be prefigured by a period of earthly happiness and stability opened transcendentalist intellectuals to a socioreligious approach to human perfectibility, premised on the idea that spiritual regeneration requires a major reorganization of social structure, and that therefore national authenticity is reflected in the health and progressiveness of the socio-economic field. Transformations of this idea can be said to account for the transcendentalist fascination with the artistic symptoms of the modes of production in Brownson’s later pamphlets (‘The Laboring Classes’), but also for the rhetoric of the ‘technological sublime’ (L. Marx 1964: 214) in the romantic celebrations of modern technical achievements as expressions of a sublime purpose (for example, the late romantic American odes to the transatlantic cable in Emerson’s ‘The Adirondacs’ [1858] and Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’ [1871]).

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These three dichotomies, if seen as potentially independent of one another (although in fact they seldom are), open up a threedimensional analytic space that helps to locate the conceptual frameworks of modern identity models and enables us to draw some general conclusions as to how the position of an identity model might affect the function of cultural parallelism as a rhetoric of intellectual legitimation. For example, emanationists, whether they lean towards individualism like the early Emerson or Thoreau, or communitarianism like James Russell Lowell or Orestes Brownson, will be less interested in homologies between aesthetic form and local socioeconomico-political states of nationhood, since they locate the source of selfhood in a Nature beyond time. Evolutionists, on the other hand, are more inclined to parallelize literary expression with contingent forms of selfhood. If they are strong individualists (like the protoNietzschean Emerson of ‘Experience’) they will stage expressive form as homologous to the radical originality of an eccentric self (‘the style is the man’). If they are communitarians (in terms of Whitman’s vocabularies of ‘brotherhood’) they will conceive of authenticity as the stylistic doubling of a nation’s cultural essence by its ‘representative’ artists, dramatizing expressive form as homologous to a national spirit (a Volksgeist itself considered a local manifestation of Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times). But the borders between evolutionism and emanationism are subtle: while most post-1800 American thinkers accept some notion of Zeitgeist (as a temporal stage of Weltgeist, the world spirit unfolding through history) they differ considerably in the extent to which they relinquish the notion of universal foundations. Carlyle’s ‘heroes’ or Emerson’s ‘representative men’ work from within contingent historical and cultural contexts and traditions, but their authenticity remains largely defined by their success in overcoming the contextual limitations of the spirit of the times. Whitman and Taine, on the other hand, allow for a greater degree of difference between historically and spatially remote cultural situations, and, what is more important, they describe local differences in terms of positive potentialities rather than negative limitations. Let me stress here that any attempt at allocating specific authors to rigid categories of selfhood and rhetorical types would be of little heuristic use. The expressivist turn is not a neat switch from one paradigm to the next. Bellah’s sharp contrast between Benjamin Franklin’s utilitarian individualism (where the individual draws self-esteem from successful problem-solving requiring self-discipline and selfrestraint) and Whitman’s expressive individualism (where self-esteem

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hinges on unrestricted self-development) obscures important gray areas of US culture. In fact Whitman’s work alone is heterogeneous enough to illustrate most of the versions of selfhood I have outlined above: While he is generally regarded as the American philosopher of democratic brotherhood (where selfhood emerges in empathetic communion with the multitudes), he has also been criticized and praised for his Emersonian gestures of radical individualism (he is Bellah’s main exemplar of ‘expressive subjectivism’). Moreover, his identity models show varying degrees of foundationalism: as Jimmie Killingsworth has shown (1992), Whitman shifts between images of self-expression from a stable center (as in ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’ of 1868) and images that conceive of expression as radical recreation (as in ‘O Living Always, Always Dying’ of 1860). This ambiguity also colors his communitarian narratives of national progress, which hover between visions of teleological fate – viewing the future US as a millennial paradise regained (‘Passage to India’) – and ‘vistas’ of self-creative voyages into an unknown national future that have encouraged contemporary philosophers to claim Whitman as a proto-postmodernist – in Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, Whitman is said to reject ‘any idea of Divine Providence and any idea of immanent teleology’ (1998: 23). Finally, like many other mid-Victorian thinkers, Whitman oscillates between the natural and technological sublime, alternately locating symptoms of national progress in the spiritual realm of ecstatic epiphany and in the social manifestation of technological modernity. Whitman’s ambiguities reflect the heterogeneity of the nineteenth-century cultural sphere. Nonetheless it seems useful to draw some general conclusions on how the position of an identity model might affect the function of cultural parallelism as a rhetorical strategy. My thesis is that the Whitmanian moment in US discourse is marked by a shift to the non-foundationalist, communitarian, and practice-oriented poles, and that this shift is encouraged by the increasing value of rhetorical strategies for the project of intellectual legitimation. The rhetorical persuasiveness of cultural parallelism decreases to the extent that its underlying identity model leans towards the foundationalist, individualist, and transcendent poles (and vice versa). For example, if a given theory of culture imagines the source of identity as a foundational Platonic essence to be recovered by the act of self-articulation; if it also views this act as the solitary work of an individual genius; and if it thirdly believes that solitary geniuses can best ‘find themselves’ by drawing their inspiration from ‘pure’ experience removed

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from social practice, such a theory of culture does not leave much within the social whole that could be linked by parallelizing rhetoric. The self-expression of genius may be authorized as an emanation of spirit, and the beauty of the self-expressive text can be further authorized as being symbolic of the Infinite, but the structural aspects of literary beauty cannot be convincingly connected with the political or ethical structures of the social domain. The more we move towards communitarian and immanent conceptions of identity, the better we can trope resemblance between social fields. If we conceive the articulation of selfhood as a process of social interaction, we can view the utterances of individual geniuses as representative expressions of larger communities. The creation of symbolic representations of the Infinite then becomes a community achievement, and the degree of literary beauty can be staged as an indicator for social health (that is, as indicating the degree to which the Infinite emanates through the social whole). The more we consider the sources of self to descend from the transcendent sphere of ‘pure thought’ to that of social action, the more sense it makes to see ‘spirit’ emanating through the most disparate social practices. Consequently it becomes more plausible to argue that these disparate practices are structurally homologous, and that therefore a certain textual movement (such as free verse) corresponds to a certain political movement (such as radical democracy) because both are emanations of an underlying Platonic essence (such as a democratically inclined Nature). The degree of foundationalism in identity models is significant because it determines how effectively cultural parallelism can be used to stage historical legitimacy. If identity is thought to emanate from a transtemporal source, cultural change can only be understood as a chronological shifting back and forth between more or less ideal states of cultural health. Historical differences then tend to be conceived as resulting from differing degrees of alienation from a stable center of emanation, and cultural history is viewed as a succession of heroic attempts to overcome this alienation. Thus late romantic American cultural histories such as Emerson’s English Traits or Bancroft’s History of the United States interpret the Elizabethan Age as a culture of authenticity whose unusual susceptibility to the emanating Spirit can be seen in the unusual brilliance with which Shakespearean drama symbolically represents the Infinite. Such narratives typically view the subsequent turn to the rationalist, materialist, pragmatist, and empiricist intellectual cultures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a self-alienating rift from the spiritual

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center of emanation that can be gauged by the general absence of literary beauty. In this interpretation, the most important objective of the transcendentalist effort is to free up the channels of emanation and reinstitute a culture of organic holism in which mechanical neoclassical verse or utilitarian thought have no place. Emanationist narratives of historical change have advantages for the staging of cultural legitimacy. Most importantly, they enable romantic intellectuals to present themselves as part of a ‘visionary company’ that includes such seers or bards as Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton, such ‘organic’ philosophers as Plato, Bacon, and a romantically re-interpreted ‘Kant’. The main disadvantage of emanationist models is that they make it difficult to demonstrate the cultural significance of structural parallelism between the works of visionary companies on the one hand and historically specific social practices on the other – between, for instance, the English literary canon from Beowulf to Shelley and the democratic reforms in the wake of the French and American revolutions. How does one make a case for the organic parallelism of democratic institutions and literary beauty if many of the major canonical authors emerged in pre-modern and aristocratic cultures? One common option is to argue (as I show with regard to Everett and Bancroft in Chap. 7, pp. 205–6 and 217–9) that the Shakespeares and Miltons of literary history were virtual democrats, proto-liberal thinkers writing in opposition to their debilitating aristocratic times. The downside of this argumentation, however, is that it undercuts the emphasis on cultural totality that made the emanationist model so adaptable to cultural parallelization in the first place, because it comes with two self-defeating implications: if democratic ‘great art’ can emerge, say, from Jacobite monarchy, it might be dubious to consider it homologous to democratic institutions; and if aristocratic institutions can be said to produce democratic ‘great art’, perhaps these institutions are more viable than those of contemporary democracies. This problem – a rhetorical problem, which concerns the relative persuasiveness of a given strategy of legitimation – can be solved with historicist frameworks that consider the source of spiritual emanation to be itself constantly changing (as in Lovejoy’s ‘radical evolutionism’). If the structure of spirit varies throughout history, so does the manner in which it can be symbolically represented. Differing standards of literary beauty can then more easily be justified as logical results of a dynamically ‘growing’ spiritual center. Evolutionist narratives of world history as a spiritual Bildungsroman

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enable romantic intellectuals to recognize the value of historical texts and assert the obsolescence of the systems these texts represent. It can be argued, then, that the Miltons and Shakespeares of literary history produce dazzling manifestations of spirit – in its local stage of emanation. The aesthetics of Paradise Lost and Hamlet, in other words, are admirable and valuable, but must not be repeated. The following two chapters explore the location of expressivist identity models in professionalizing literary space in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. NOTES

1. When he pleads with Madison in 1785 to stop the building of the Virginia State Capitol and instead follow the model of the MaisonCarrée at Nîmes, in order to provide ‘proof of national good taste’ (1984: 829), Jefferson stresses that the Maison-Carrée ‘was taken from a model which has been the admiration of 16. centuries’ and ‘the object of as many pilgrimages as the tomb of Mahomet’ (1984: 851). 2. In 1964, Leo Marx interpreted this passage as suggesting that ‘the peculiar “simplicity” of American manners will be embodied in a native language and therefore a distinct style’, the kind of ‘distinctive American idiom’ more fully realized by ‘the work of Henry Thoreau, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Frost’ (1964: 132). 3. Jefferson’s concept of linguistic expression does not yet imply the romantic notion that national languages organically emerge from the nation’s condition. His viewpoint resembles Noah Webster’s Dissertation on the English Language (1787). Webster bases his case for a departure from the British Standard English on national expedience, arguing that a young republic needs to establish a national language in order to obtain the necessary confidence to assert itself politically. On the differences between Webster and Jefferson, see Kelleter 2002: 620–5; on the roots of Webster’s concept of national language, see Bynack 1984; for an overview of the cultural politics of a national language, see Simpson 1986. 4. Channing (1786–1876) was a Boston physician (and later Harvard Professor of Obstetrics and Medical Jurisprudence), but he represents a family crucial to New England literary nationalism. His older brother is the important Unitarian William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), his younger brother Edward Tyrrell Channing (1790–1856) co-founded and edited the North American Review and held a Harvard professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory between 1826 and 1850. In 1815, the North American Review grew out of a Boston literary society devoted to raising the standards of American literature (the Anthology Club,

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1804–11). Modeled on the great British quarterlies and focusing on literary criticism, fiction, and poetry, it aspired to national influence and became the prime sounding board for the New England and Harvard cultural élites. Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads makes a similar point, though without Fichte’s nationalist focus, when he argues that ‘the language arising out of repeated experience’ used by common people in quotidian normality, is ‘more philosophical’ than the sophisticated abstractions of upper-class poets (2005: 290). Such linguistic primitivism resonates through American poetics until the twentieth century: Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’, for instance, uses similar terms to explain the vigor of black writing. Since ‘highly developed languages’ move away from the ‘descriptive words’ of everyday experience, ‘the white man thinks in a written [hence: detached] language’, while ‘the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics’ (1999: 259). Channing offers the language and poetry of Native American cultures as the best example of how true linguistic authenticity may be conducive to a genuine expression of American identity. See Chap. 6, pp. 185–6 below. Taylor’s account of the ‘expressivist turn’ begins with his book on Hegel (1975: 13–29), is fleshed out in Sources of the Self (1989: Chap. 21), and rephrased with different emphases in his radio lectures on The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) and his discussion of ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (1994). His project is both genealogical and evaluative: he charts the historical development of expressivism at the same time as he extrapolates from this history a moral philosophy aimed at clarifying what he takes to be the ‘malaise of modernity’. It is not necessary to agree with Taylor’s reading of the contemporary ‘malaise’ (or his caricature of postmodern philosophy) to consider his historical narrative convincing and conceptually useful. Recent literary criticism provides, of course, a plethora of similar terms for the shift in eighteenth-century literary culture towards centrality of the self. See, for instance, the notion of a ‘lyric turn’ described by Clifford Siskin (1988). Critics have complained that Taylor charts the transformation of the modern self ‘almost entirely through “great men”’ with little attention to ‘broader patterns of social change’ (Calhoun 1991: 233). Yet in a methodological chapter on ‘historical explanation’ (1989: 199–207), Taylor makes clear that the causal determinants of the emergence of inwardness cannot be reduced to the internal dynamics of ideas transmitted through intellectual history (1989: 204), but must be imagined as a complex interactive process in which ‘[t]he causal arrow runs in both directions’ (1989: 206) between ideational models and co-evolving social, economic, and political systems and practices. Taylor does not attempt to outline a ‘clear and plausible diachronic-causal story’ (1989:

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Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman 203) – he implies that this would be ambitious – and instead engages in an ‘interpretive’ inquiry into how the new identity model develops its ‘appeal’ (‘why people found or find it convincing/inspiring/moving’) (1989: 203). ‘Acceleration’ here must be considered shorthand for the dynamization of cultural topographies, spatial environments, material cultures, and social practices during the shift from the trade-based eighteenthcentury commercial society to the productive industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century (Reckwitz 2006: 245). Böhme uses Mauss’ insights to reverse the secularization narrative underlying the Marxian concept of commodity fetishism. Marx’s critique of consumer culture fails to capture the significance of the process by which commodities may transform themselves into collector’s items. They then enter the auratic space of the museum and fulfill similar functions to the inalienable objects discussed by Mauss (Böhme 2006: 369–71). For the relation between the sacred and human exchange, see also Giorgio Agamben 2007: 73–4. The fact that commercialization turns interiority into an auratic space does not imply a specific politics, either subversive or escapist. My argument does not therefore seek to revive the debates around Marxism and Critical Theory about whether interiority should be denounced as a site of romantic ersatz-religion, as Lukácsian Marxist schools argued, or lauded as a site of resistance, as argued by Herbert Marcuse (who defended ‘the affirmation of the inwardness of subjectivity’ as a stage where ‘the individual steps out of the network of exchange relationships and exchange values [of] bourgeois society’ [1979: 3–4]). Moreover, we can agree with Foucault that interiority does not liberate the individual from ‘régimes’ of biopolitical or social disciplining, and still acknowledge the cultural work of auratic presence. See Robert Wuthnow on the post-World War Two shift in the United States towards ‘a new spirituality of seeking’, where relatively unaffiliated believers now search for ‘fleeting glimpses of the sacred’ and ‘partial knowledge and practical wisdom’, in marked contrast to a more traditional ‘spirituality of inhabiting sacred places’ based on regular church membership and attendance, and a fairly coherent ‘metaphysic’ of belief (1998: 3). On Herder’s expressive theory of language, see also Taylor 1995: 97–8. Bellah’s concept of expressive individualism has also been interpreted in non-foundationalist terms. Winfried Fluck reads Melville’s Moby Dick as a literary testing ground for expressivist individualism understood as ‘a constant reinvention of the self’ for which selfhood has to be ‘flexible and fluid’ enough ‘not to remain tied to any single role or iden-

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tity’ (1997: 217). For similar readings of Whitman, see Killingsworth 1992. 16. Lovejoy illustrated the shifting between ‘emanationism’ and ‘radical evolutionism’ with regard to romantic nature philosophy. He shows that Schelling’s early work (his System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800) conceives of history as a temporalized chain of being in which an essential and time-transcending Absolute gradually manifests itself as a world spirit self-realizing in time. By contrast, in his later work (such as Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit of 1809), Schelling moves towards the notion that ‘God never is, but is only coming to be, through nature and history’, and that the goal of this process is not clear from the beginning. Thus Schelling introduces into metaphysics and theology ‘a radical evolutionism’ and ‘attempts to revise even the principles of logic to make them harmonize with an evolutional conception of reality’ (1936: 325). See my discussion of historicity in Chap. 3, pp. 83–93.

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Representative Authors

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CHAPTER 3

THE POET AS ORPHIC SINGER: RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The Poet-Intellectual Emerson’s self-conception as a literary intellectual hinges on his definition of the ‘Poet’, a term that shifts between literary artist, scholar, philosopher, priest, cultural critic, and man of letters (Buell 2003: 40–3). Emerson rarely uses this label to distinguish between the poetic in a strictly literary sense and other intellectual pursuits. Instead he prefers to apply ‘poet’ as an evaluative term that signals not only skills of poetic composition but also depth and universality of vision as well as heightened powers of perception.1 Versed in cultural criticism and artistic expression, the Emersonian poet is above all a ‘doctor’ (1903: 3/8; 1960–82: 7/468) who diagnoses society’s spiritual and cultural state and devises necessary cures, which he transmits to the people in order to guide and instruct them. This recalls Novalis’ 1797 definition of the poet as a ‘transcendental physician’ (‘der transzendentale Arzt’) involved in the poetic ‘construction’ of ‘transcendental health’ (1987: 380). A more important context for Emerson’s intellectual positioning is Thomas Carlyle’s view of the literary profession. In his ‘Novalis’ essay for the Foreign Review (1827), Carlyle associates literariness with difficulty: ‘[N]o good Book’, he says, ‘shows its best face at first’. Literature is not supposed to be an easy pleasure but requires potentially strenuous repeated reading and intense reflection, in marked contrast to the lesser literary ‘amusement from hour to hour’ for shallow readers who are ‘accustomed to see through every thing in one second of time’ (1827: 97–8). Carlyle

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combines his proto-modernist ethic of reading with early romantic claims about the manliness of literary production. Accordingly, the ‘Transcendental system of Metaphysics’ is no ‘mere intellectual card-castle, or logical hocus-pocus, contrived from sheer idleness’, but the ‘most serious’ of ‘all Philosophies propounded in these latter centuries’. It has a direct ‘influence, on the most vital interests of men’ (1827: 116–7). Carlyle’s sense that transcendental physicians must be active seekers of truth rather than refined poetic dreamers can be seen in his mixed praise of Novalis: he admires his attempts ‘to preach and establish the Majesty of Reason’ (1827: 118) with a ‘truly wonderful subtlety of intellect’ (‘his power of intense abstraction, of pursuing the deepest and most evanescent ideas, through their thousand complexities’). ‘His chief fault’, however, lies in his half-hearted will to knowledge. In Carlyle’s gendered terms: lacking ‘the emphasis and resolute force of a man’, Novalis merely ‘sits, we might say, among the rich, fine, thousandfold combinations, which his mind almost of itself presents him’ without actively separating ‘the true from the doubtful’ or taking ‘the trouble to express his truth with any laborious accuracy’ (in this he exhibits ‘a certain undue softness, a want of rapid energy’, and ‘a tenderness’ that is ‘almost as of a woman’, and represents ‘the weakness as well as the strength of an Oriental’) (1827: 138–9). Carlyle’s suspicion of idle aesthetic contemplation accords with his interest in idealist philosophy. It is perhaps significant that he draws his concept of the literary artist from Fichte’s educational treatise On the Nature of the Scholar (1805). Carlyle quotes Fichte as saying that ‘Literary Men’ are like ‘Priests’ whose office it is to reveal the ‘“Divine Idea” pervading the visible universe’ (1827b: 329). But Fichte is really more interested in the academic scholar (‘Gelehrter’), and he implies that for both scholars and literary artists, organic connection with the real comes first, the mechanical act of expression, second. The heroic part of intellectual activity is the effort of grasping (durchschauen), penetrating (durchdringen), getting in touch with (Berührung) the ‘Idea’ (Fichte 1845: 152, 184; 1959: 130, 162). As Fichte explains: the ‘Idea’ must become so ‘clear, living, and independent’ within the author’s mind that it virtually ‘articulates itself in language’, making the writer’s language ‘a vessel for itself, by its own inherent power. The idea itself must speak, not the author’ (1845: 217; 1959: 196). In the Berlin version of these lectures (1811), Fichte supplies an instructive example from musical composition: the creation of meaningful musical artworks hinges first and foremost

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on the artist’s ‘inner susceptibility’ to the ‘supernatural’ realm of the Idea. To express those ‘inner movements’ in musical form, a composer needs to acquire technologies of composition, by a refinement of ‘understanding’ (1959: 249). Thus if Beethoven’s Fifth inspires its listeners with an intuition of the Infinite (as E. T. A. Hoffmann suggests in 1810), this is due primarily to the composer’s spiritual heroism, and only secondarily to his formal skills. We can see this emphasis on philosophical knowing in Carlyle’s lectures on heroism of 1840, which define the poetic (as opposed to the non-poetic) as ‘musical thought’ emerging from ‘a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it’ (Carlyle 1993: 71). This image suggests that deep vision and poetic musicality are identical, that therefore the most profound thoughts are already intrinsically beautiful: hence ‘musical’ per se, regardless of rhythm or rhyme. But this also implies, with Fichte, that beauty emerges rather quietly after the main intellectual work (penetration ‘into the inmost heart of the thing’) has been accomplished. Emerson puts a similar emphasis on the identity of Beauty and Truth in deep visions of the real. His essay on ‘The Poet’ (1844) abounds with images of musical thought: ‘the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody’ that expresses the essential reality behind visible nature: the ‘sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air’. Yet Emerson’s aural images often reverse Carlyle’s and Fichte’s line of causality: he frames the encounter with deep truth or musical thought as only a beginning, to be followed by an organic poetic process: only a listener ‘with an ear sufficiently fine’ ‘overhears’ and ‘endeavors to write down the notes without diluting or depraving them’. The ‘men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully’. The ‘legitimation of criticism’, according to Emerson, lies in the need to improve people’s varying poetic sensibilities, since all ‘poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature with which they ought to be made to tally’ (1903: 3/8, 25).2 The poet, in other words, needs more than just philosophical vision. At some level, these metaphorical differences attest to Carlyle’s and Emerson’s diverging tastes (see Weisbuch 1986: 192–203): During the 1830s, Carlyle gradually loses interest in contemporary arts and letters, and turns to more concrete political and historical topics. In 1833 he reports to his younger brother the ‘growing’ ‘persuasion, that all Art is but a reminiscence now, that for us in these

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days Prophecy (well understood) not Poetry is the thing wanted; how can we sing and paint when we do not yet believe and see?’ (1970–: 7/9). Emerson, on the other hand, takes a more active interest in contemporary poetics: in the ‘Stonehenge’ chapter of English Traits, he gently mocks Carlyle’s dislike of the fine arts: he refers to him as ‘my philosopher’ and quotes him as saying that ‘Kunst is a great delusion, and Goethe and Schiller wasted a great deal of good time on it’ (1903: 5/274). A more important difference is that Emerson is increasingly drawn towards a segment of the transatlantic avant-garde that, in the 1830s, develops in a formalist direction that opposes Carlyle’s visionary poetics. This shift of emphasis is indicated in Arthur Henry Hallam’s controversial review of Tennyson for the Englishman’s Magazine in 1831.3 Hallam dismisses Wordsworth as a ‘reflective’ poet who seems more concerned with philosophical truths than literary beauty (1863: 425), and praises Shelley and Keats as new ‘poets of sensation rather than reflection’. He portrays the Cockney poets as so ‘[s]usceptible of the slightest impulse from external nature’ that they translate their sense impressions directly into sensuous beauty (‘their fine organs trembled into emotion at colors, and sounds and movements, unperceived or unregarded by duller temperaments’). Whereas lesser writers ‘seek for images to illustrate their conceptions’, Shelley and Keats ‘had no need to seek; they lived in a world of images’, and as a result, their productions ‘are not descriptive’ but ‘picturesque’ and ‘full of deep and varied melodies’ (1863: 427–8). Hallam presents Tennyson as the most mature exemplar of this new tradition: unhampered by Keats’ occasional unevenness and Shelley’s political biases, Tennyson writes with ‘luxuriance of imagination’ and possesses an ‘ear of fairy fineness’ (1863: 440). Hallam’s essay may be ‘puffing’ a personal friend, but it nonetheless responds to the evolving shifts and differentiations within early nineteenth-century poetry. Between 1800 and the 1820s, poetic innovation was associated with Wordsworth’s poetry of ideas, which was considered as obscure as Coleridge’s metaphysical speculation, and too ‘difficult’ for a wider public (as the Edinburgh Review remarked about ‘The Excursion’ [Jeffrey 1814: 4]). Wordsworth gained recognition from his literary peers when his poetry circulated in small and expensive editions with little public relevance (St Clair 2004: 660–4). The careers of Keats and Shelley demonstrate that poor sales figures need not entail peer recognition. But in the emerging avant-garde, Wordsworth’s perceived difficulty distinguished him from better-

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selling poets like Byron or Scott (in 1827, Carlyle takes it as proof of Coleridge’s ‘genius’ that his ‘works were triumphantly condemned by the whole reviewing world, as clearly unintelligible; and among readers they have still but an unseen circulation’ [1827: 98]). During the 1820s and 1830s, when due to Wordsworth’s canonical status his works began to circulate more widely (at least relative to the Cockney poets),4 his poetry was suddenly perceived as less difficult, or even too simple, as Hallam’s essay implies. This shift in perspective may stem from a sense of ‘exhaustion’, as Wordsworth was reprinted in larger editions.5 But it also indicates a split within early-nineteenth-century poetic discourse, between transcendentalist men of letters who, like Carlyle, associate professional literary standards with a relentless working out of visionary depth, and more formalist groups of writers and critics who locate the progressive ‘Character of Modern Poetry’ (as Hallam puts it in the title of his essay) in stylistic and compositional complexity (St Clair 2004: 214). These two camps wash over into another, but at the risk of simplification we can say that the transcendentalist avant-garde deems the poetic refinement of imagery superficial to the poet’s engagement with ideas, while formalist poets and critics dismiss philosophical reflection as an excuse for a lack of poetic imagination. Hallam turns the Reason/Understanding distinction against its transcendentalist inventors when he describes Wordsworth as a poet of externalities who merely attempts ‘to instruct the understanding rather than to communicate the love of beauty’ (1863: 441). While Carlyle in 1827 critiques Novalis’ passive acceptance of uncertainty, Hallam defends picturesque poetry as the more professional kind of writing because of its uncertainty: the highest poetry possesses ‘a sort of magic, producing a number of impressions, too multiplied, too minute, and too diversified to allow of our tracing them to their causes’ (1863: 430). Emerson never commented directly on these debates, but his attempts at defining the poet-intellectual show a deep fascination with the visual and auditory metaphors employed by Tennyson’s critical supporters. In 1843 Emerson notes that Wordsworth possesses ‘just moral perception’ while lacking in ‘deft poetic execution’. This is no trivial defect; Emerson seems to be saying in Carlyle’s direction: ‘The poet must not only converse with pure thought’ but also ‘demonstrate it almost to the senses. His words must be pictures, his verses must be spheres and cubes, to be seen and smelled and handled’ (1843b: 514–15; 1903: 12/365–6). In English Traits Emerson repeats this verdict in auditory terms: he hails Wordsworth

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as ‘the voice of sanity in a worldly and ambitious age’, but ‘regrets that his temperament was not more liquid and musical’ (1903: 5/257). One cannot be a true transcendental physician without a fine musical ear with which to translate one’s vision into adequate song (without letting ‘thought’, as he puts it in 1841, ‘flow into music’ [1960–82: 7/468]). English Traits also observes that ‘Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where Wordsworth wanted’: his ‘command of the keys of language’ (‘Color, like the dawn, flows over the horizon from his pencil’) (1903: 5/257). This impression already forms the gist of Emerson’s earlier Dial review of Tennyson’s Boston edition of Poems, which notes the poet’s ‘delicate, various, gorgeous music’ and ‘his power of picturesque representation’ (1842: 274). Behind his enthusiastic praise, however, Emerson grapples with a Carlylean suspicion of formalism. How could one justify poetry in which, as Emerson puts it in the opening sentence, ‘the delight of musical expression is first, the thought second’? Emerson dances around the issue by suggesting that, after decades of reflective poetry ‘had dulled the senses’, Tennyson’s formalism is refreshing (‘What a relief’ after the ‘sermonizing’ and ‘cold abstraction’ to be ‘soothed by this ivory lute!’ [1842: 273]). He also notes the promise in Tennyson’s more recent work (such as ‘Locksley Hall’ or ‘Ulysses’): the ‘new poems’ are ‘deeply thoughtful’, their light ‘mellowed and tempered’, their ‘melody’ ‘less rich, less intoxicating, but deeper’ (1842: 275). The review concludes that ‘England . . . has not shown a due sense of the merits of this poet’ (1842: 276). This polite way of putting the issue, however, is contradicted in a journal entry Emerson wrote the same month his review appeared in the Dial (October 1842). There he calls ‘Tennyson a man of subtle & progressive mind, a perfect music-box for all manner of delicate tones & rhythms, to whom the language seems plastic’, but who is nonetheless not ‘a poet’ in Emerson’s sense: ‘I hear through all the varied music the native tones of an ordinary, to make my meaning plainer, say, of a vulgar man’. Tennyson therefore belongs to the ‘men of talents who sing’ without being ‘children of Music’ – which means, in Emerson’s Carlylean terms, they produce pretty sounds without accessing musical thought (1960–82: 7/471). When Emerson includes this passage in his essay on ‘The Poet’ (1844), he replaces the reference to Tennyson with impersonal formulations (‘a recent writer’, ‘Our poets’, and so on).6 This self-censorship may follow from Emerson’s distaste for the ad hominem polemics in

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contemporary reviews. But perhaps Emerson’s reticence also indicates his indecision about Tennyson’s merits, which may in turn reflect deeper uncertainties about the values and necessities of literary professionalization. I wish to suggest that Tennyson’s musicality and picturesqueness represent for Emerson both the promise and the danger of aesthetic refinement, a duality that in turn reflects the paradox of avant-garde authorship (see Chap. 1 pp. 21–8 above). This ambiguity can be seen in the aural and visual images in Emerson’s descriptions of Tennyson’s work. Emerson seems undecided whether to interpret Tennyson’s picturesque beauty as a sublime manifestation of the Infinite or merely a ‘keen sense of outward beauty’ that has ‘degrade[d] the poet into that basest of beings, an intellectual voluptuary’ (1842: 275). This indecision is even clearer in Emerson’s musical metaphors, which shift between ‘music’ as shorthand for mechanical technique (the poet as ‘musicbox’ obsessed with meter and rhyme) and Carlyle’s sense of ‘musical thought’ as manifesting the melody of the Divine Idea. In his more professionalist mood, when Emerson acknowledges the symbolic pull of the avant-garde, he views Tennyson’s musicality as a form of necessary aesthetic refinement. Whenever he despairs about the intellectual’s social detachment, Tennyson seems an empty formalist. We can see how hard Emerson tries to solve this issue if we follow his reflections on Tennyson’s later works. In 1851 Emerson dismisses In Memoriam as a collection of ‘commonplaces of condolence’ whose ‘sole merit’ consist in ‘[t]he consummate skill of the versification’ (1982: 418). This might explain the more open critique of Tennyson, five years later in English Traits, as a ‘beautiful talent’ without deeper ‘vision’ (1903: 5/257–8). Yet upon reading the first four of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in 1859, Emerson does a complete sea change and portrays the poet as a ‘secular genius’ who brings the Anglo-Saxon spirit to its fullest realization: England is solvent . . . for here comes Tennyson’s poem, indicating a [supreme] social culture, a perfect insight, & the possession of all the weapons & all the functions of a man, with the skill to wield them which Homer, Aristophanes, or Dante had. The long promise to pay that runs over ages from Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Ben Jonson, – the long promise to write the national poem of Arthur, Tennyson at last keeps, in these low selfdespising times; Taliessin & Ossian are at last edited, revised, expurgated, distilled. The national poem needed a national man. And the blood is still so rich, & healthful, that, at last in [Tennyson] a

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national soul comes to the Olympic games . . . – equal to the task. He is the Pisistratus [who] collects & publishes the Homer, ripened at last by the infusion of so many harvests, & henceforth unchangeable & immortal . . . (1960–82: 14/287–9)

In yet another critical mood, in 1867, Emerson sounds more Carlylean again: Wordsworth now seems ‘the manliest poet of his age’ because of ‘the dignity of the thought’, while Tennyson appears the better versifier but with ‘far less manly compass’ (1982: 554). Emerson’s contrast between Wordsworth and Tennyson reappears in his verdict on other important romantic British men of letters: the visionary category includes Shelley, a ‘good English scholar’ rather than ‘a poet’, Coleridge, a poet-theologian inclining towards religious dogmatism, and Carlyle, a poet-moralist with too little time for aesthetic intricacies and too much for messy political debate. The category of singers without vision contains Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Moore, and George Crabbe, poets of society who lack a sense of the Infinite, and Lord Byron, whose poetic skill is dazzling but who lacks moral sense (1840: 149–50; 1903: 12/318–19, 368). Emerson frequently suggests that the ideal poet-intellectual should combine Plato’s profundity with Shakespeare’s range of formal expression. Yet none of Emerson’s so-called ‘representative men’ achieves such an ideal equilibrium. Plato himself comes closest, as he is ‘clothed with the powers of a poet’ who ‘stands upon the highest place’. He ‘mainly is not a poet’ because he subordinates ‘the decisive gift of lyric expression’ to different purposes (1903: 4/43). Carlyle’s favorite ‘hero as man of letters’, Goethe, was ‘the king of all scholars’ due to his clear perception of ‘the fact of life’, but he lacked both brilliance of stylistic expression and powers of moral perception (1903: 12/326–7, 332). Shakespeare, on the other hand, produced beauty without vision, for he used the elements of reality ‘as colors to compose his picture’ and then simply ‘rested in their beauty’, producing mere ‘entertainments’ rather than exploring moral truth and ‘virtue’. Shakespeare’s temperamental opposite, the ‘mystic’ Emanuel Swedenborg, finally, offered a profound religious vision of the world, but one in which ‘[t]he beauty straightway vanished’. Since these representative intellectuals, despite their brilliance, achieved only ‘halfviews of half-men’, the ‘world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle, with Shakspeare the player, nor shall grope in graves, with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration’ (1903: 4/217–19).

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Emerson never suggests systematic explanations for the contemporary dissociation of sensibility into artless Platonists (Goethe, Wordsworth or Shelley) and Shakespearean beautifiers (Tennyson or Byron). But his most recurrent motifs of poetic failure revolve around the intellectual’s inability to gain a vantage point that transcends socio-political practice.7 Indeed, whenever Emerson uses the epithets ‘critic’ or ‘philosopher’ negatively (as an inferior opposite to ‘poet’), he refers to the failure to transcend the local. He implies then that the preoccupation with dogma that causes philosophers (in Emerson’s worst sense of the word) to ‘ador[e]’ a ‘foolish consistency’ (1903: 2/57) is really a result of their inability to detach themselves from practice. Hence if philosophers and critics are ‘failed poet[s]’ (1903: 8/56), it is because their short-sighted preoccupation with the present leads them to overlook ‘the generic law’ behind the facts (1903: 12/346–7). Emerson’s preferred audio-spatial metaphors for universality locate the ‘voices’ of the foundational self either in higher regions ‘where the air is music’ or else near a ‘deep force’ beyond the rubble of traditions. These voices can best be heard ‘in solitude’, while they ‘grow faint and inaudible’ as we enter the sphere of social interaction, which rests on a lower or more superficial (depending on the spatial image) level of existence (1903: 3/8–9; 2/49, 64). If we read these spatial images as metaphors of professionalization, the music of the best contemporary writers seems disconnected not because they are too professional but because they are not professional enough: Byron worships ‘the accidents of society’ (1840: 149; 1903: 12/319); Scott produces ‘a rhymed traveller’s guide to Scotland’ (1903: 5/255–6), and Tennyson ‘is a strict contemporary, not Eternal Man’ (1960–82: 7/471), since he deals in the real rather than the ideal (he ‘contents himself with describing the Englishman as he is’ [1903: 5/257]). The challenge of transcending the real also plagues more visionary contemporary men of letters: Goethe’s low-pragmatic poetry of the ‘Actual’ remains within ‘the dominion of the senses’ (1840: 156; 1903: 12/331); Coleridge produced ‘vast attempts but most inadequate performings’ because he ‘narrowed his mind’ to accommodate the ‘dogma of the Anglican Church’ (1903: 5/249); Wordsworth’s lesser moments show the limitations of ‘a narrow and very English mind’ (1903: 5/24). There is a strong sense, in Emerson, that the failure to transcend socio-political practice resembles the lack of professional focus typical of men of letters dabbling in too many fields while specializing in none. As he puts it in English Traits:

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Hundreds of clever Praeds and Freres and Froudes and Hoods and Hooks and Maginns and Mills and Macaulays, make poems, or short essays for a journal, as they make speeches in Parliament and on the hustings, or as they shoot and ride. It is a quite accidental and arbitrary direction of their general ability. (1903: 5/262)

As we can gather from Emerson’s critique of Carlyle, professional focus is not a question of finding literary topics but attaining avantgarde levels of composition. In a Dial review of 1843, Emerson refers to Past and Present as ‘Carlyle’s new poem, his Iliad of English woes’ (1843: 96; 1903: 12/379), and he finds this inherently socio-political book at its most poetic when Carlyle’s argumentative skill keeps political certainties in constant movement, so that ‘every lordship and worship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism’ is ‘tossed like a football into the air, and kept in the air with merciless kicks and rebounds, and yet not a word is punishable by statute’ (1843: 99; 1903: 7/385). Carlyle’s failure consists in his inability to keep the ball in the air when the local ‘sympathies of the man overpower’ the more universal ‘habits of the poet’ (1843: 98; 1903: 7/383). Emerson’s suggestion that America’s spiritual regeneration is best realized by the disinterested contemplation and difficult forms of a literary avant-garde may seem counterintuitive, in the light of recent discussions of Emerson as a ‘public intellectual’ (in Russell Jacoby’s sense, defined by a commitment to the social ‘vernacular’ [1987: 235]). Lawrence Buell has stressed Emerson’s ‘conviction that intellectuals should speak to broader publics’ (2003: 40), and Cornel West has praised Emerson for an ‘evasion’ of the ‘obsession with method’ of nineteenth-century philosophy (1989: 36–7).8 It is true that Emerson has said that any worthwhile philosophy should resonate with a broader public,9 and he apparently considered it his democratic duty, in his mid-Western Lyceum tours in the 1850s, to lower his register enough to suit even the most uneducated of his middleclass listeners (1982: 449, 465). Still, if we consider Emerson’s highly complex and stylistically demanding published writings (represented by his two essay collections of 1841 and 1844), I wonder how plausible it is to assume that his work addresses both professionals and general readers. (Buell attributes to Emerson a Shakespearean power ‘to reach both connoisseurs and groundlings’ [2003: 27]). In his Harvard Address of 1867, Emerson locates his intended audience in a community of cultivated peers who only pretend to speak to the general public:

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Every book is written with a constant secret reference to the few intelligent persons whom the writer believes to exist in the million. The artist has always the masters in his eye, though he affect to flout them. Michel Angelo is thinking of Da Vinci, and Raffaelle is thinking of Michel Angelo. Tennyson would give his fame for a verdict in his favor from Wordsworth. Agassiz and Owen and Huxley affect to address the American and English people, but are really writing to each other. (1903: 8/219)

If we want to read this passage as a self-reflexive comment (it is, after all, addressed to an audience of New England’s future intellectual élite), we can say that Emerson admits to being aware of the literary field as a space where one may ‘affect’ to address the American public while one’s intellectual legitimacy and authenticity as an American scholar depend on the symbolic value negotiated, not on the lyceum network, but in the very small circles of the ‘intelligent few’.10 ‘Unmasking’ Emerson’s transcendentalism as code for a concealed socio-political program is a popular game (while Emerson ‘tells us’ he is looking for the spiritual rejuvenation of democratic America, ‘in reality’ his interest lies in accumulating symbolic capital to improve his social status). But my intention to point out the symbolic prestige of Emerson’s literary network is not to ‘expose’ an economic ‘reality’ behind Emerson’s spirituality. On the contrary, it seems more appropriate to view Emerson’s allegiance to the avant-garde in connection with the romantic relocation of the sacred from traditional sites of worship to auratic spaces (the museum, disinterested art-as-such) that are extraterritorial to the market of cultural commodities (see Chap. 2 pp. 55–8 above). Their extraterritorality consists, not in any real autonomy – or even otherworldliness – but in the reversed economic world that makes them resist direct commodification. As the avant-garde becomes a site of aura as well as social distinction, post-Kantian criticism begins to identify technical refinement with spiritual depth. Hence Emerson’s emphasis on the artist’s ‘finer ear’ (1972: 358), and his defense of the autonomy of the aesthetic. The Dilemma of Historicity The American Renaissance construction claims Emerson as the father of America’s cultural independence. Yet Emerson’s relationship to Whitmanian authority is more ambiguous, because his self-conception as national physician mediates between two identity models: the

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emanationist expressivism more typical of Wordsworthian romanticism, and the nationalist exceptionalism suggested by the American Herderians of the North American group. The first position brings him close to the transnational aesthetics of the Fireside Poets, who often sound much like Emerson in their definition of organic form; the second opens him to the nationalist rhetoric that leads from the New York-based Young Americans to Whitman. Moreover, Emerson’s famous aphorism (in ‘The Poet’) about ‘America’ being ‘a poem in our eyes’ whose ‘ample geography’ ‘will not wait long for metres’ (1903: 3/38) can be understood in universalist terms: it declares that the overwhelming presence of capital-N Nature provides such fertile ground for poets that they cannot but encounter the music of the Infinite, which they merely ‘translate’ into symbolic beauty. America’s aesthetic advantages over Europe’s landscapes thus reflect the superior scope of the wilderness compared to, say, the Wordsworthian landscapes of the Lake District.11 This is not quite the same as proposing a genuine national aesthetics. The difference, subtle as it may be, can be seen in Whitman’s various adaptations of Emerson’s phrase,12 all of which reflect a more decided shift towards the local. In Whitman’s view of new world poetics, America takes shape as a poem because its specifically American nature is pervaded by a specifically American stage of spiritual emanation that reveals itself in specifically American forms of consciousness, most notably a democratic state, a truly American landscape and characteristically American types of literary beauty. The difference between Emerson and Whitman has to do with differing concepts of historicity. Critics have noted the simultaneous fascination with and fear of historicity in much romantic criticism (Perkins 2000). For example, in his Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley visualizes the opposition between universal and relative beauty in the arts with an allegory in which Poetry is personified as a woman whose beautiful figure is clothed in various historical costumes. According to Shelley’s own interpretation of his image, the ‘eternal proportions’ of the natural body ‘will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume’, and the ‘beauty of internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise’. Thus historically mediated beauty manifests itself as illchosen clothing that, despite its awkwardness, cannot but express the natural dignity and beauty inherent in the outlines of a human body. Giving his argument a further twist, Shelley acknowledges the

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importance of historical mediation by implying that the figure’s dress may be indispensable for rendering the ‘naked truth and splendour’ of eternal form bearable to the human beholder. Mixing his metaphors, he pictures the historical ‘habit’ as a ‘costume’ ‘necessary to temper’ the ‘planetary music’ of unmediated beauty ‘for mortal ears’ (1977: 487). The images of the naked body and divine music signify at once the primacy and the impossibility of unmediated beauty: the arbitrary historical dress is a regrettable necessity.13 Such equivocal images of historical beauty reflect the deep ambivalence with which romantics handle the Platonic and neoplatonic distinction between Being and Becoming, and more specifically, the question where, between these two realms, they should locate essential reality. Romantic and mid-century philosophies of history relevant to Emerson and Whitman offer conflicting views on whether the sources of self (God, the Absolute, the One, the Idea) unfold in radical historical evolution or merely emanate a stable essence that may become clearer in time but remains untouched by historical fashions (Lovejoy 1936: 319–25). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) provides a standard example of the evolutionist position by arguing that the Absolute is a ‘result’ of a ‘process’ of ‘self-becoming’ or ‘self-development’ (‘Sichselbstwerden’) (1967: 81–2; 1986: 3/24). Hegel illustrates his dynamic concept of truth with a famous plant metaphor: the blossoming of a flower, he says, could very well be described as the blossom’s ‘refutation’ of the bud out of which it has grown, just as the blossom’s later displacement by the fruit could be regarded as the succession of ‘a false form of the plant’s existence’ by its ‘true nature’. Yet while these different stages in the plant’s ontogeny may be incompatible with one another, they also share an ‘inherent nature’ whose ‘ceaseless activity’ gives them an ‘organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other’. It is the necessity of all the various stages of development in the plant, he says, that constitutes ‘the life of the whole’. This conception underlies the romantic dialectic, which resolves conflict between incommensurable truth-claims in a temporal process of sublation. Hegel’s term, aufhebung, suggests three meanings: to ‘neutralize’ the older stage of truth (the fruit replaces the blossom), to ‘contain’ traces of the old (the fruit remains related to the blossom), and to ‘lift it up’ onto a higher evolutionary level of historical knowledge (the fruit represents a more advanced organic stage than the blossom). Thus ‘the diversity of philosophical systems’ should not be

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seen as the simultaneity of propositions that fall into stable categories of true and false but as necessary and organically related elements of ‘the progressive evolution of truth’ (1967: 68; 1986: 3/12). It is notable that, although by the time Emerson published his First and Second Series of essays (1841 and 1844) such plant analogies were widely accepted, there was hardly a consensus on exactly which aspects of essential reality should be considered subject to organic (rather than mechanical) transformations, and exactly how these transformations related to the historical succession of aesthetic styles. For strong historicists like Hegel or the later Schelling, the fundamental evolution of spirit entailed a constant redefinition of the True and the Good that made the historical succession of artistic styles not an embarrassment but a logical necessity. Accordingly, the three-stage historical narrative generic to idealist historiography begins with ancient China and Egypt, where human freedom was largely unrealized, so that religious worship was based on dark animal figures and the arts were locked in a ‘symbolic’ state characterized by fantastic and allegorical forms. In ancient Greece, the tentative emergence of freedom manifested itself in rudimentary democracy (autonomy of the few, enslavement of the many), religious polytheism and an aesthetic cult of physical beauty that united form and content in sensuous manifestation. With Christian modernity, finally, a further realization of freedom led to parliamentary reforms, the rise of a religion that pictured individual freedom using the image of God united with man through Jesus, and a ‘romantic’ art that moved beyond the classic beauty of the sensuous Greeks. Whatever this new art is – a more balanced compromise between beauty and sublimity (Victor Cousin), a swerve from the plastic to the picturesque (A. W. Schlegel), a heroic realization of truthful ugliness (Victor Hugo), or a shift from art to philosophy (Hegel) – it is essentially and intrinsically different. Historical change takes place at the level of the Idea (Carlyle’s ‘musical thought’). Weaker historicisms, on the other hand, attribute the succession of aesthetic styles to accidental shifts in conventional cultural surfaces. In 1844 Schopenhauer accused Hegelians of practicing ‘a crude and shallow realism’ that mistakes ‘the phenomenon for the being-initself of the world’. A ‘true philosophy of history’, he said, should not focus on ‘that which is always becoming and never is (to use Plato’s language)’ but instead proceed from the important insight that beyond the ‘endless changes’ and ‘chaos and confusion’ of historical practice ‘we yet always have before us only the same and identical,

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unchangeable essence’ (1958: 2/442–4; 1986: 2/567–70). In 1818 he contends that the ‘spirit of the times’ rests on the ‘prevailing concepts’ of an age, a superficial level of reality that may vary from one period to the next. Since mediocre artworks reach no deeper than conceptual reality, they will drop out of fashion whenever the fickle Zeitgeist shifts its conceptual framework. True beauty, on the other hand, emerges from the level of the Platonic idea and ‘belongs to no age but to mankind’, in contrast to the merely ‘mannered works’, which the ‘dull multitude’ of each generation that ‘knows only concepts’ mistakes for art (1958: 1/235–6; 1986: 1/331). What complicates romantic and mid-century concepts of historicity is a general indecision on the value of historical art. Hegel is famously torn between a historicist perspective – which considers historical artworks to be sui generis and thus valuable per se – and a God’s-eye view from which he can observe how the arts lift themselves from the ‘bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless’ forms of Egyptian culture (Hegel 1993: 83; 1986: 13/109) until they reach perfection in Greece and decline again with the modern age. Paradoxically, the artistic expression of a culture can be ‘quite perfect’ within its ‘determinate sphere’ while remaining an ‘imperfect art’ ‘when compared with the conception of art as such, and with the Ideal’ (1993: 80–1; 1986: 13/105–6). Needless to say, Emerson never defined his philosophy of history with precision. ‘Circles’ (1841) abounds in Hegelian images of organic growth (‘There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile’; ‘There is no virtue which is final; all are initial’ [1903: 2/302, 316]) and historical determinism (the ‘things which are dear to men at this hour’ depend on ‘the ideas’ that have happened to ‘have emerged’ on our ‘mental horizon’, a ‘new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system’ [1903: 2/310]). But Emerson also suggests that ‘[e]ach new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly discordant facts, as expressions of one law’. For example: at first sight, Aristotle seems the polar opposite of Plato, but after taking another step on the ‘mysterious ladder’ (1903: 2/305) of progress, a ‘wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes’ (1903: 2/308; see also Richardson 1982: 62). The suspicion that historical difference is really a concealed continuity even defines such late works as Emerson’s ‘Fate’ (1860), which critics have discussed as a landmark of an aging and less optimistic, hence more historicallyminded Emerson.14 ‘Fate’ may indeed attest to ‘Emerson’s increasing attunement to pragmatic realities’ (Buell 2003: 283), and it is more

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interested than Emerson’s earlier work in how individual ideas are shaped by the ‘spirit of the time’.15 But Emerson approaches historical influence with a tragic undertone, and his metaphorical examples abound in negative parallelisms. Historical determination shows itself, as he puts it, ‘in defects’: [A] crudity in the blood will appear in the argument; a hump in the shoulder will appear in the speech and handiwork. If his mind could be seen, the hump would be seen. If a man has a see-saw in his voice, it will run into his sentences, into his poem, into the structure of his fable, into his speculation, into his charity. (1903: 6/45)

The power of circumstance rests mainly in ‘those intervals when will and perception flag’ (Buell 2003: 283), the implication being that historical determination should be overcome by the three-step move towards self-reliance, from imitation to egotism to universal being: after we have shaken off mechanical dependencies and become aware of our own impulses, we will endeavor to ‘reach a certain clearness of perception’ that entails ‘a knowledge and motive above selfishness’ and leads us to a higher plane within ‘the universe of souls’ that points ‘in the direction of the Right and Necessary’ (1903: 6/27–8).16 Thus ‘the drag of temperament and race, which pulls down’ always offers a road to the ‘universal’: ‘[W]hen a man is the victim of his fate [and] ground to powder by the vice of his race; – he is to rally on his relation to the Universe’ and ‘take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain’ (1903: 6/47–8). How do these views translate into Emerson’s various historical narratives? He first encountered the familiar motifs of romantic historicism through the French philosopher Victor Cousin, a self-declared Hegelian whose Sorbonne lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy (1828–9) were immensely popular in New England.17 Cousin’s account of the history of Western thought weaves together the most important elements of the Hegelian Bildungsroman of spirit: culture progresses through the conflict of antithetical ideas, and this conflict is fought out in military battle; ideas become represented by nations and expressed by national representative men; the progress of ideas follows the dialectics of rising and falling empires; these dialectics in turn follow a rational trajectory that points towards the realization of the idea of freedom; the identity of a historical age is defined by the degree to which freedom has been realized, and the spirit of the age is manifest in homological aesthetic, religious, and

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political expression that can best be reconstructed by philosophical inquiry. We can see this historical emplotment in Emerson’s belligerent ‘Fortune of the Republic’ (1863), which portrays the Civil War as the culmination of a series of ‘revolutions which were not in the interest of feudalism and barbarism, but in that of society’ (1994: 142). This series began with the establishment of Christianity, and its major landmarks were the expulsion ‘of the Moors from Spain, France, and Germany’, Luther’s Reformation, the demise of the Inquisition, the establishment of ‘free institutions in England, France, America’, the industrial and scientific revolutions, and finally, the ‘destruction of slavery’ (1994: 142). Emerson suggests that these revolutions were driven by conflicting ‘principle[s]’: ‘[w]hen the cannon is aimed by ideas, then gods join in the combat, then poets are born’ (1994: 142). His point is, of course, that the Civil War is such an important moment, in which the struggle between oppositional ideas will determine whether ‘peace and prosperity’ or ‘calamity’ will be in store, not only for Americans, but the ‘next ages’. He portrays the military conflict between North and South as a rite of passage that is a matter of course, ‘a great crisis’ as ‘necessary as lactation, or dentition, or puberty, to the human individual’ (1994: 139). Yet Emerson’s view of linear progress also features motifs of cyclical alternation between spiritual presence and absence. In the ‘Fortune of the Republic’, the root of all evil is England’s ruinous inclination to the material and sensual (‘Never a lofty sentiment, never a duty to civilization, never a generosity, a moral self-restraint is suffered to stand in the way of a commercial advantage’ [1994: 141]). It is not that English culture is intrinsically materialist, pragmatist, and empiricist. It has simply strayed further from the light.18 Emerson’s combination of cyclical and linear notions of historical development has affinities to Cousin’s relatively static concept of historical change. In Hegel’s dialectic, progress happens when the struggle between incommensurable positions (say, aristocracy and anarchy) leads to a radically new position (say, constitutional monarchy) in which the clashing extremes are aufgehoben (neutralized, retained, and lifted to a higher level). This implies a potentially infinite process of historical becoming, as each new position faces further incommensurables – if there is an ‘end of history’, it is a millennial utopia that Hegel hardly considered to be a tangible reality. In Cousin’s more static dialectic, by contrast, historical change seems more like an oscillation between unhealthy cultural extremes. Progress emerges from the mediation of imbalances, as incommensurate positions are

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fused into one another by eclectic compromise. The end of history is then a stage of absolute equilibrium. According to Cousin’s cosmology, there are three fundamental stages of nature and mind: one dominated by unity, the second by variety, and the third by the connection or equilibrium of these extremes (1832: 121–3). This ‘triplicity’ (1832: 131) shapes consciousness and basic physical laws, such as, for instance, the law of attraction (1832: 145–6). Historical change arises because various ages or cultures differ ‘in the degree of clearness’ with which they privilege one or the other term (1832: 154). The lowest point in Cousin’s history of civilization arrives in the eighteenth century, where he locates a radical tilt towards the pole of ‘variety’ that causes an unhealthy preoccupation with the finite, the relative, the apparent, the sensual, the arbitrary, the mechanical. This cultural shift explains everything romantic intellectuals despise about the neoclassical eighteenth century: according to Cousin, the age of variety is based on flawed empiricist and sensualist philosophies, which in turn entail flawed systems of government: ‘The philosophy of sensation and of selfishness’, Cousin argues, ‘must be the contemporary of a social order without dignity; of an arbitrary and absolute government; but of an absolute government falling to the ground from weakness and corruption’ (1832: 81–3). Such a sensualist age would have little religious sense, and its ‘[p]oetry and the arts would necessarily betray a character of littleness and meanness’ (1832: 83). The opposite extreme in Cousin’s narrative – a culture obsessed with unity – appears no less lop-sided: it tends towards the infinite, the absolute, the abstract, the immobile, and the conservative. In such a culture, Industry will be feeble and confined; commerce will be limited to the inevitable relations of men to each other who inhabit the same country . . . The nations whose existence will comprise that epoch will be strongly attached to their native soil; they will not go beyond it; and if they do, they will rush forth like a torrent, without fertilizing or keeping possession of the countries which, for a short time, they will overspread. If, during this epoch, any of the sciences should obtain some little development, they will be mathematical and astronomical sciences; which, more than others, recall to the mind of man the ideal, the abstract, and the infinite. It will not be this epoch which will discover and cultivate successfully experimental philosophy, chemistry, and natural sciences. The state will be the reign of absolute, fixed, and unchangeable laws;

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and, if it recognises, it will scarcely notice individuals. The works of art will be gigantic and void of proportion. They will, in a manner, scorn the representation of every thing finite; they will unceasingly break forth towards the infinite, and endeavor to represent it. But being unable to represent it in any form that is not finite, they will forsake all that is natural in that form, they will, purposely, render it strange and fantastical, in order to deprive it of its proper character, and to compel thought to suffer itself to be carried forward towards something unmeasured and infinite. The religion of this epoch will attach itself to the invisible; it will be the religion of death rather than of life . . . Philosophy will be only the contemplation of absolute unity. (1832: 206–8)

The pendulum swing towards unity appears in the childhood stage of man (the culture of ancient Egypt), but it influences various other cultural moments, in the Middle Ages and especially the period between the Ancien Régime and the present. Cousin’s vision of utopian cultural health, finally, posits a historical stage where unity and variety are in absolute equilibrium: You need then only to conceive a mingling of the two first epochs of the finite and of the infinite . . . [A]ll the branches of industry, as well as all the sciences, both natural and mathematical, would then exist; the power of nations would be both territorial and maritime; the preponderating strength of civil governments would be combined with individual liberty, and the finite would exist in harmonious relations with the infinite; in religion, the present life would be referred to God, but at the same time, the dogmas of religion would strictly enjoin the observance of moral duties; the present life would be taken into serious consideration, as not only worth possessing, but as having a value beyond all price; and finally, in philosophy, psychology would be mingled with ontology. (1832: 208)

Cousin portrays his own philosophical practice (‘eclectism’) as an ideal mediation of unity and variety that resolves the opposition of German subjective idealism and French sensualism, an opposition which he takes to have been reflected by the German–French antagonism during the Napoleonic Wars (1832: 434–5). His philosophical lectures, then, present a political vision that sees absolutism (the Ancien Régime) and ‘revolutionary democracy’ (the anarchy of the Terror) resolved in the constitutional monarchy of Louis XVIII, based on a charter of constitutional rights, religious freedom, and a

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bicameral parliament to check the king’s executive power (‘the real unition of the king and people’ [1832: 438]). According to Cousin, such a political system is the logical outcome of a culture of intelligent compromise, which merges diametric opposites in all spheres: absolutism with radical democracy, otherworldliness with hedonism, idealism with sensualism, individualism with communitarianism, dogmatism with relativism. In the arts, the culture of eclectic equilibrium will merge the stale beauty (‘prettiness’) generic to eighteenth-century sensualism with the generalizing sublimity typical of idealism, towards a balanced ‘beauty’ based on ‘harmony and proportion’, which ‘consists in the mingling of the finite and the infinite, of the ideal and the real’ (1848: 195–6). Emerson had little interest in the intricacies of Cousin’s speculations, but the structural similarities are notable. In English Traits, Anglo-Saxon history oscillates between relatively natural and artificial states of being, the former defined by organic and necessary acts, the latter by mechanical and arbitrary ones (see Nicoloff 1961: 47–9). Emerson presents this process as an agonistic drama between two forces, which plays itself out as ‘a very old strife between those who elect to see identity and those who elect to see discrepancies’ (1903: 5/238). Thus Cousin’s followers of ‘unity’ reappear in Emerson’s Platonists, who are ‘cognizant of resemblances’ and keen perceivers of ‘analogy’, which makes them ‘climbers on the staircase of unity’. Cousin’s champions of variety emerge in Emerson’s Lockists, who are not able to recognize identity and thus represent disunity and fragmentation.19 The differences between Emerson’s and Cousin’s narratives can be explained by differing pragmatic intentions: Cousin seeks to legitimate the constitutional monarchy of Louis XVIII along with a classical taste in art. His historical narrative frames both the sensualist eighteenth century and the culture of high romanticism, with its ironic artworks and revolutionary politics, as periods of imbalance. Emerson has different rhetorical needs: he requires a framework that connects him both with the culture of Shakespeare and European romanticism, while distancing him from the neoclassical and sensualist Enlightenment. Consequently he maps Cousin’s tripartite scheme into a dualism between a Platonist age of unity and a ‘Lockist’ age of variety. He describes Platonism as an ideal ‘mental plane’ that accounts for the ‘richness of genius’ of the Elizabethan age (‘the period from 1575 to 1625’) (1903: 5/242–3) and characterizes the best modern poets. Lockism, by contrast, stands for the subversion of the synthetic faculty Emerson locates in

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the post-Elizabethan ‘descent of the mind into lower levels’ (1903: 5/243). Under the spell of Lockism, the English mind ‘accumulates mountains of facts’ (1903: 5/244) and becomes ‘retrospective’ and bounded by ‘municipal limits’ (1903: 5/246). England also succumbs to the arbitrary moral system of utilitarianism (‘good means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity’, which leads to a culture that ‘reduce[s] the intellect to a sauce-pan’ [1903: 5/247]). Inasmuch as Lockism resists the ‘free play of thought’, it furthers reactionary politics at home and aggressive imperialism abroad. Because of their Lockist lapse, England’s representative men are afraid of cultural plurality in the same way that they are scared of the open negotiation of concepts: as they ‘trample on nationalities to reproduce London and Londoners in Europe and Asia, so they fear the hostility of ideas’ (1903: 5/254). Their philosophical ‘suppression of the imagination, the priapism of the senses and the understanding’ (1903: 5/255) entails a suspicion of liberty on all social levels. The ‘Voice’ of England’s ‘Modern Muse’ How does Emerson’s concept of historical presence affect his vocabularies of legitimation? Emerson’s critique of England is based on tropes of cultural parallelism that revolve around an expressivist conceptual metaphor: society is viewed as connected to a spiritual center that emanates through all spheres of the social whole. In his essay on ‘Art’ (first published in the Dial of 1841 as ‘Thoughts on Art’), Emerson uses the image of the sun whose rays function as an interconnecting force that regulates the varied forms of cultural expression: All departments of life at the present day – Trade, Politics, Letters, Science, or Religion – seem to feel, and to labor to express, the identity of their law. They are rays of one sun; they translate each into a new language the sense of the other. They are sublime when seen as emanations of a Necessity . . . (1903: 7/37)

Cousin and Hegel used similar images of total connection to suggest that the essence of the ‘law’ underlying all languages can best be accessed by the philosopher’s conceptual vocabularies. Emerson, of course, insists that the ‘influence’ of spiritual presences ‘is conspicuously visible in the principles and history of Art’ (1903: 7/37). Consequently English Traits suggests that the spirit of England

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manifests itself in a specific aesthetics, which Emerson renders with an aural image whose function resembles Ruskin’s visual parallelisms in Stones of Venice (published just three years previously) and anticipates Whitman’s image of America’s ‘lawless music’: the ‘voice’ of the English ‘modern muse has a slight hint of the steam-whistle’ (1903: 5/251). Britain’s aristocratic government, empiricist philosophy, and moral pragmatism manifest themselves in the metallic sound of English cultural productions. Emerson’s image of steam-whistling British arts synthesizes a variety of critiques of modern alienation that begins with Schiller’s vision of the mechanical state (in his Aesthetic Letters of 1793). Emerson’s most direct influence, Carlyle’s 1829 Edinburgh Review essay on the ‘Mechanical Age’, fashions the romantic organic/ mechanical distinction into a Hegelian vision of a ‘total style’ of a culture, where the mechanical disease interferes with all social domains (intellectual, political, and economic). Prefiguring Emerson’s metaphor, Carlyle suggests that if today we ‘look at the higher regions of literature’ – where we should discern ‘the pure melodies of Poesy and Wisdom’ and a ‘liquid wisdom’ resonating with ‘the deep, infinite harmonies of Nature and man’s soul’ – what we really hear is ‘but a fierce clashing of cymbals, and shouting of multitudes’ (1899: 27/77–8). But Emerson’s account differs from Carlyle’s in the implication that the mechanistic cultural force is most vividly manifest in the arts. He suggests that England’s cultural malaise may have been overlooked by the nation’s most important political and philosophical pundits (Macaulay and Mill, among others) but is astutely recognized by transcendentalist aesthetic specialists (like Emerson) who intuit the mechanical cultural dominant from its most important indicators: the ‘fine arts fall to the ground. Beauty, except as luxurious commodity, does not exist’ (1903: 5/248), and ‘poetry is degraded and made ornamental’ (1903: 5/255). Emerson continues: Pope and his school wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake. What did Walter Scott write without stint? a rhymed traveller’s guide to Scotland. And the libraries of verses they print have this Birmingham character. How many volumes of well-bred metre we must jingle through, before we can be filled, taught, renewed! (1903: 5/255–6).

Like Ruskin and Whitman, Emerson uses parallelistic rhetoric to stage cultural artifacts and socio-political phenomena as symptoms that are particularly evident to the trained eye or the fine-tuned ear of

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the poet-intellectual. Just as Ruskin delivers his critique of capitalist England through an analysis of classic architectural form (see Chap 1 pp. 18–19 and 34–7 above), Emerson sees the evils of a Birminghamstyle economy, the fallacies of ‘feudal institution’, and the aggressive imperialism of British foreign policy with the help of his powers of aesthetic perception. As a poetically sensitive transcendental physician, he does not have to ‘descend’, like Carlyle, to the domain of contemporary politics or economics to perceive England’s cultural sickness. His poetic sensibility also allows him to critique utilitarian ethics and empiricist epistemology without having to engage with the technical intricacies of philosophical or ethical discourses: in his account of the Anglo-Saxon history of ideas, it is the mechanical sound of British poetry that reveals the hollowness of Locke’s and Bentham’s systems. And finally, Emerson’s cultural parallelism enables him, at least by implication, to authorize his own poetics by attributing the mechanist disease to both the neoclassical aesthetics from Pope to Scott and to the lesser moments of his direct rolemodels, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Carlyle, and Coleridge. As against more historically dynamic conceptions of Volksgeist, however, Emerson’s center of emanation does not evolve. The culture of mechanism manifests a historical swerve away from spiritual presence rather than a historically unique stage of spiritual development. Hence the guiding motif of Emerson’s tropes of resemblance is a rupture between universal source and local practice, which is manifested in cultural homologues of sickness. Emerson’s emanationism, therefore, restricts his vocabularies of legitimation, as it limits his function as a transcendental ‘doctor’ exclusively to detecting pathological symptoms rather than positive cultural specifics. As a result, Emerson suggests universal rather than nationalist remedies: in his 1836 lecture on ‘Art’, he suggests that the genre of sculpture is symbolic of people’s present stage of alienation, which leads them to disconnect artificially the useful and the beautiful. Having forgotten to notice the beauty in ordinary living things all around them, ‘[t]hey reject life as prosaic’ and instead produce dead ‘blocks of marble’. This fragmentation of the whole also leads to a compartmentalization of lived experience: people reduce the day to ‘weary chores’ so that they can later ‘fly to voluptuous reveries’. Emerson demands that this distinction between daily practice and aesthetic contemplation be overcome: ‘Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten’ (1903: 2/367). When the unity of life and art has been

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restored and practical pursuits are reconnected to the spiritual center, the steam whistle ceases to be a negative emblem. For, as Emerson explains, the soul-destroying nature of mechanical work does not lie in the work itself but in alienation from the Whole: Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, to mills, railways, and machinery, the effect of the mercenary impulses which these works obey? When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburg, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation. (1903: 2/368–9)

Ruskin, too, draws much of his cultural centrality from a simple sickness/health opposition – diagnosing, as his analysis of architectural ornament claims, the socio-political illness of Renaissance Italy and contemporary London (see Chap. 1, pp. 34–7 above). But as he claims to locate organic culture in concrete socio-historical terms, Ruskin is able to outline positive visions of cultural health. While Emerson sees in Gothic structures only a manifestation of delocalized organicism (the ‘blossoming in stone’ of an ‘eternal’ ‘vegetable beauty’ [1903: 2/21]), Ruskin makes it symptomatic of a social utopia with clearer historical and economical locations (that is, Northern European Christian liberalism under pre-industrial modes of production). Ruskin’s reading lacks, of course, definite nationalist contours – he had little interest in proving his authenticity as a British scholar, because nationalist rhetoric did not seem the most profitable means of intellectual authorization within his field, and within a midnineteenth-century imperial Britain that confidently envisioned itself at the heart of Arnoldian Culture. If Emerson’s calls for American scholars never quite arrived at Ruskinian models of cultural specificity, it is because his sense of historical difference remained within the perimeters of emanationist philosophies of history. NOTES

1. In Emerson’s own self-assessment, he was a poet-intellectual lacking in creative brilliance but not in perceptive powers. In an early letter,

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3.

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5.

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he describes himself characteristically as a born poet who may be of a lower rank because his ‘singing’ is ‘very husky’, but who is still ‘a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter’ (1939–95: 1/435). In his journal, Emerson calls himself a ‘bard least of bards’, least because he fails to shape his materials into ‘lofty arguments in stately, continuous verse’, but nevertheless ‘a bard because I stand near [the great poets], and apprehend all they utter, and with pure joy hear that which I also would say’ (1960–82: 9/472). Another one of Emerson’s terms is ‘poet-sage’ (1960–82: 9/359–60). In 1841 Emerson says that the ‘language of truth is always pure music’, a music that has ‘finer measures’ than conventional prosody, and the ‘finer’ the poet’s ‘ear’, the better he will be able to access ‘the finest rhythms and cadences’ that are yet ‘unfound’ because they belong to a ‘purer state’ of being that is yet to be realized, in which ‘rhythms of a faery and dreamlike music shall enchant us’ (1972: 358–9). How controversial can be seen in John Wilson’s withering response for Blackwood’s Magazine (Wilson 1832). For an overview, see Mazzeno 2004: 13–18. In 1836, his six-volume edition of Poetical Works amounted to 3,000 copies, against 500 copies of the 1820 edition. Keats’ 1817 edition of Poems comprised 500 copies. The 1840 Poetical Works of John Keats reached 3,000. Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel went through twelve editions between 1805 and 1811, totaling over 20,000 copies (St Clair 2004: 611–12, 633, 662–4). The most significant increase of sales happened two decades later, with the hugely popular Victorian editions in the 1850s (St Clair 2004: 715–23). The revised passage reads: [I took part in a conversation the other day concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill and command of language we could not sufficiently praise. But when the question arose whether he was not only a lyrist but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man . . . We hear, through all the varied music, the groundtone of conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary. (1903: 3/9)]

7. On Emerson’s relation of intellectual work and social activism, see Buell (2003: 278–87). It is notable that Emerson scholarship remains divided on this issue. One line of research, stressing Emerson’s relationship to social practice as awkward, runs from Stephen Whicher’s

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8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman foundational Freedom and Fate (1953) through John Carlos Rowe’s At Emerson’s Tomb (1996). This tradition overlaps with one that is skeptical of Emerson’s radicalism (see Newfield 1996; Milder 1999; Bercovitch 1993: 307–52). A different critical tradition, which argues that Emerson’s transcendental thought is not only congenial but foundational to active social reform, is represented by Rose 1980 and Gougeon 1990. In order to appropriate Emerson for pragmatism, West overstates the rigidity of nineteenth-century traditional philosophy (see West 1989: 36) as well as Emerson’s rejection of transcendental idealism. The notion of Emerson as a proto-pragmatist for whom ‘truth lies on the highway’ rather than in traditional philosophy derives from John Dewey’s address for the centenary celebrations in 1903 (2001: 646). Emerson’s pragmatist aspects have been explored notably in Poirier 1987, Levin 1999, and Cavell 2003: 215–23. Another critical tradition has stressed Emerson’s post-metaphysical aspects. Friedl (1997: 272) addresses Emerson’s subversion of ‘metaphysical and substantialist ontology’. For a lucid discussion of both trends, see Buell 2003: 218–41. In a journal entry of 1855 he writes: ‘Whatever transcendant abilities Fichte, Kant, Schelling & Hegel have shown, I think they lack the confirmation of having given (poor) piggy a transit to the field . . . 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 newspapers’ (1960–82: 13/404). See also Emerson’s meditations on class in his journals, notably the entry of ‘Spring? 1853’ that asserts: ‘Certainly I go for culture, & not for multitudes’ (1982: 444–6). See also Bonnie Carr O’Neill 2008. See however Chap. 6, p. 187 below on Emerson’s downplaying of regional differences in nature. For instance, in the 1855 Preface: ‘The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem’ (2002: 616), and in Democratic Vistas (1871): ‘[O]ur republic is, in performance, really enacting to-day the grandest arts, poems, &c., by beating up the wilderness into fertile farms, and in her railroads, ships, machinery, &c’ (1996: 960). See also Shelley’s most famous metaphor of mediation, in the fiftysecond stanza of ‘Adonais’ (1821), which pictures lived experience as a ‘dome of many-colored glass’ that ‘Stains the white radiance of Eternity’ (1977: 405). On late Emerson, see Whicher 1953; Richardson 1995; D. Robinson 1993. For the suggestion that Emerson moves into a later Hegelian phase during the 1850s or 1860s, see van Cromphout 1976 and Richardson 1982. On Emerson and Hegel, see Wellek 1943: 55–9. On Emerson’s cyclical view of history, see Nicoloff 1961: 47–49.

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15. The relevant passage reads: [The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American. The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air . . . This explains the curious contemporaneousness of inventions and discoveries. The truth is in the air, and the most impressionable brain will announce it first, but all will announce it a few minutes later . . . So the great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man [and his] mind is righter than others because he yields to a current so feeble as can be felt only by a needle delicately poised. (1903: 6/44–5)] 16. In his earlier ‘Self-Reliance’, Emerson uses the same conceptual metaphors: he portrays individual growth as a connection to a ‘deep force’ beyond ‘analysis’ in which ‘all things find their common origin’, a ‘soul’ which ‘is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed’ (1903: 2/64). 17. Emerson had read Cousin’s lectures already in 1831, in the French original (Cousin 1828), was impressed by them (Richardson 1995: 114; Emerson 1939–95: 1/322–3), and obtained for his library the 1832 translation by the Boston Swedenborgian Henning Linberg (Cousin 1832). With an influential review for the Christian Examiner of 1836, Orestes Brownson helped bring about Cousin’s central position as a philosophical source of the New England Transcendentalists (Brownson 1836). In the same year, Brownson formulated Cousin’s historical narrative with a stronger emphasis on the role of American institutions, in his New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church. In 1837 George Ripley published an excerpt from Cousin’s lectures in his Specimen of Foreign Literature that became an important summary of Hegelian idealism for the American transcendentalists. He considered it a sign of Cousin’s merit that he simplified the tenets and amplified the punch-lines of European idealism to form an accessible and dramatic narrative of history, one that Ripley believed was more suited to the American character than what he deemed the obscurantism of German philosophy (Ripley 1837: 29). On Emerson and Cousin, see McCormick 1953: 303–11; Nicoloff 1961: 70–8; and Joyaux 1973. 18. Hence the ease with which Emerson can shift his focus from England towards the ‘sensualism’ of American culture, in the revised version of the Address published in Miscellanies (1878). Emerson’s role in this revision remains, however, obscure, as the history of revisions and the extent of Ellen Emerson’s and James Eliot Cabot’s interference is not quite clear (see Emerson 1994: 183–6). 19. As Emerson explains:

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Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman [Whoever discredits analogy and requires heaps of facts before any theories can be attempted, has no poetic power, and nothing original or beautiful will be produced by him. Locke is as surely the influx of decomposition and of prose, as Bacon and the Platonists of growth. The Platonic is the poetic tendency: the so-called scientific is the negative and poisonous. ‘It is quite certain that Spenser, Burns, Byron and Wordsworth will be Platonists, and that the dull men will be Lockists’. (1903: 5/239)]

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CHAPTER 4

WALT WHITMAN AND THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE

The ‘Lawless Music’ of the ‘American Muse’ In ‘Song of the Exposition’ (1871, then called ‘After All, Not to Create Only’), Whitman calls upon the ancient Muse to ‘migrate from Greece and Ionia’ and to leave behind her ‘Gothic European Cathedrals, and German, French and Spanish Castles’ for a ‘better, fresher, busier sphere’ in the American West (1871: ll. 15–22). She is ‘[r]esponsive’ to the poet’s ‘summons’, not because of his powers of persuasion, but because of the inevitability of her westward course (‘her long-nurs’d inclination’ and ‘irresistible, natural gravitation’ [1871: ll. 22–4]). Westward lies historical growth: the Muse has ‘changed, journey’d considerable’ (1871: l. 53) and gone through ‘evolutions’ (1871: l. 36) since the world spirit’s paradisiacal Eastern beginnings.1 Turning ‘her curious eyes’ upon the American scene, she moves beyond the more ‘primitive call’ (1871: l. 40) of ancient traditions and begins to sing in a more advanced key. Whitman portrays her arrival in modern America as an aesthetic revolution: in masculine pioneer fashion she literally hacks a swath through insipid couplets of genteel verse. As she enters the nation’s literary parlors, traditional poems express their fear in rhymed squeaks: And I can hear . . . a terrible aesthetical commotion, With howling, desperate gulp of ‘flower’ and ‘bower’, With ‘Sonnet to Matilda’s Eyebrow’ quite, quite frantic; With gushing, sentimental reading circles turn’d to ice or stone; With many a squeak, (in Metre choice,) from Boston, New York,

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Philadelphia, London; As she, the illustrious émigré . . . Making directly for this rendezvous – vigorously clearing a path for herself – striding through the confusion, By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d, Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers, Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay, She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware! (1871: ll. 50–65)2

While for Emerson the noise of the steam-whistle implies artistic alienation, Whitman considers the pumping of factory engines to be in tune with both democratic modernity and the sublime American landscape. In ‘To a Locomotive’ (1876), the steam train becomes a ‘[t]ype of the modern’ that embodies the ‘pulse of the continent’: a ‘[f]ierce-throated beauty’ whose ‘shrieks’ resonate with the wild prairie scenes of the West. Whitman bids the locomotive to ‘merge in verse’ and thus ‘serve the Muse’ as a paradigmatic model for an American aesthetics, an aesthetics of ‘lawless music’ that should ‘[r]oll’ through the poet’s ‘chant’ and displace the ‘tearful harp’ and the ‘glib piano’ of the inauthentic and non-synchronic older traditions (2002: 395).3 The image of ‘lawless music’ is thus a metaphor of the poetic embodiment of America’s industrial and democratic modernity. Whitman’s concept of poetic lawlessness shifts between primitivist and professionalist conceptions of literary expression. In his more Rousseauist moments, Whitman likes to portray his free-verse stylistics as the end of art: a renunciation of style that leads him to evade the literary field (inhabited mainly by the rhyme and ‘conceits’ of foreign poets) so as to let his ‘song’ emanate as naturally from American democracy as the ‘odor’ that rises from North American ‘forests’ (in contrast to the artificial ‘perfume of foreign court or indoor library’) (2002: 382). When he seems more responsive to the pressures of professionalism, his primitivist self-image gives way to the post-Kantian persona of the aesthetic expert who does not so much renounce poetic style as revolutionize it with feats of formal virtuosity. In these moods, Whitman presents himself as a serious literary intellectual specializing in complex language experiments aimed at furthering the quest for a poetic music sophisticated enough to ‘tally’ with America (1996: 1015). Whitman’s post-Kantian voice first emerges during the 1850s, when he formulates his cultural nationalism in conceptual metaphors drawn from a romantic metaphysics of music. Previously, during his

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so-called ‘apprentice’ days as a New York journalist in the 1840s, Whitman followed the primitivist musical nationalism of the Young America movement, as epitomized by the composer-critic William Henry Fry (1813–65) and Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, endorsing homegrown folk traditions and denouncing the intricacies of imported operatic and orchestral conventions as effete aestheticism representative of Old-World decadence. In an editorial for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846, Whitman rejects the ‘anti-republican spirit’ of French and Italian works, arguing that the ‘music and songs of the Old World’ are not as ‘good and fitting to our nation’ as the more accessible tunes of popular singing groups (such as the Hutchinson family, whose ‘music of feeling’ displays an ‘[e]legant simplicity in manner’ and offers ‘[s]ongs whose words you can hear’ as against the ‘unintelligible’ librettos of opera) (2003: 138).4 In a review he published a year later, Whitman associated the aesthetics of European art music with retrograde politics. The following passage indeed reads like a paraphrase of the declaration of musical independence Fry had read before the New York Philharmonic Society in 1842: Great is the power of music over a people! As for us of America, we have long enough followed obedient and child-like in the track of the old world. We have received her tenors and her buffos, her operatic troupes and her vocalists, of all grades and complexions; listened to and applauded the songs made for a different state of society – made perhaps by royal genius, but made to please royal ears likewise; and it is time that such listening and receiving should cease. (2003: 322–6)

This attitude changed when Whitman became receptive to the music religion that had fascinated Boston transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller and John Sullivan Dwight since the 1830s (see Chap. 5 below). Whitman had no interest in the European Beethoven cult or its Boston branches, but his experiences with Italian opera convinced him that musical complexity was a prerequisite for the expression of metaphysical truth. Consequently his music columns during the 1850s began to assert ‘the supremacy of Italian music’ – he called English opera and popular ballad tunes diluted ‘driblets of Italian music’ (1984: 1/394) – and to caution his readers that if they were used to popular music (‘the church choir, or the songs and playing on the piano or the nigger songs, or any performance of European minstrels, or the concerts of the different “families”’, such as the

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Hutchinsons he had praised a decade before), they were in need of aesthetic ‘development’ (1936: 18–23). Whitman’s conversion to classical music went hand in hand with his preference for a more professionalist self-image. In an anonymous self-review for the New York Saturday Press in 1860, he urges inexperienced readers to mistrust their spontaneous response to ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ (then called ‘A Child’s Reminiscence’), arguing that if they mistake the poem’s author for a primitive iconoclast (‘plainly a sort of naked and hairy savage, come among us with yelps and howls, disregarding all our lovely metrical laws’), they should think again, for they will then have missed the intricacies of the work’s sophisticated musicality: ‘Walt Whitman’s method in the construction of his songs is strictly the method of the Italian Opera, which, when heard, confounds the new person’ who ‘is only accustomed to tunes, piano-noises and the performances of the negro bands’. Because the uninitiated listener to Italian opera may fail to detect ‘any analogy to his previous-accustomed tunes’, he is likely to perceive a seeming aesthetic chaos: it ‘impresses him as if all the sounds of earth and hell were tumbled promiscuously together’. Whitman concludes his selfreview with a plea to the American public to read him with care: [B]old American! in the ardor of youth, commit not yourself, too irretrievably, that there is nothing in the Italian composers, and nothing in the Mocking-Bird’s chants. But pursue them awhile – listen – yield yourself – persevere. (1996b: 75)

He legitimates his demand for readerly exactitude with the postKantian claim that his free-verse poetics (the ‘free strains’ of ‘the Mocking-Bird’s chants’) – precisely because it is a song that evades facile conceptual vocabularies – expresses a deep metaphysical presence crucial to America’s spiritual rejuvenation (it will ‘give to these United States . . . the especial nourishments which . . . have hardly yet begun to be provided for them’) (1996b: 75). Whitman views himself as an Emersonian cultural healer who discerns the musical language of Being with an ‘ear sufficiently fine’ to transcribe and ‘to write down the notes without diluting or depraving them’ (Emerson 1903: 3/25). The romantic music religion can be traced through all the editions of the Leaves. Section 26 of ‘Song of Myself’, for instance, describes the experience of an orchestral concert that is so sensuously overpowering that the speaker comes to ‘feel the puzzle of puzzles’ of ‘Being’ (2002: 49, ll. 609–10). ‘Out of the Cradle’ (1859) tells of a

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writer’s initiation into his poetic vocation while listening to the song of a mockingbird accompanied by the sublime music of a nature Whitman describes with a Schopenhauerian image: as a ‘savage old mother incessantly crying’. The terrible and divine sounds of nature give him intuitive access to reality and generate in him the ‘thousand warbling echoes’ (2002: 210–11) that make of him an Orphic singer (see Spitzer 1949: 245–6 and Irwin 1980: 108–10). In ‘The Mystic Trumpeter’ (1872), the music of inspiration leads the speaker to intuit ‘the vast alembic ever working, the flames that heat the world’ (2002: 393).5 Whitman extends romantic musical concepts in two ways. He gives his musical images a socio-political dimension, presenting them as expressions of social interaction. In ‘Proud Music of the Sea-Storm’ (1869), for instance, the speaker-poet is inspired by a dream in which he hears the ‘hidden orchestras’ of a world music that encompasses ‘Nature’s rhythmus’ – the ‘hum of forest tree-tops’, the ‘undertone of rivers’, and the blasts of winds ‘whistling across the prairies’ – as well as past and present sounds of human action and ‘all the tongues of nations’ (2002: 339). In his ‘Song of the Redwood-Tree’ (1874), Whitman pictures American music as infused with the sounds of pioneers’ axes and chain saws: Thus on the northern coast, In the echo of teamsters’ calls and the clinking chains, and the music of the choppers’ axes, The falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan, Such words combined from the redwood-tree, as of voices ecstatic, ancient and rustling, The century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing, withdrawing, . . . To the deities of the modern henceforth yielding, The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanity, the settlements, features all, In the Mendocino woods I caught. (2002: 176; see Tichi 1979: 244–9)

While for Emerson the music of democracy is indistinguishable from the music of nature, and the din of social practice jars with both of these, Whitman’s music of America incorporates industrial sounds – hence his plea ‘To a Locomotive’ to make the sound of her machine engines ‘my recitative’ (2002: 395).6 Whitman also revises the romantic metaphysics of music by emphasizing the historicity of sound. While Emerson’s ‘primal warblings’

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are located in a space beyond chronological time – a space ‘where the air is music’ (1903: 3/8) – Whitman’s audial images have a temporal dimension: when he speaks of ‘warblings’, he envisions a progressive historical sequence from older to newer sounds. In his ‘Proto-Leaf’ (1860), the essence of the world is pictured as continuous music, to which each historical era contributes in an infinite process of selfexpression: O warblings under the sun . . . O strain, musical, flowing through ages – now reaching hither, I take to your reckless and composite chords – I add to them, and cheerfully pass them forward. (1860–1: 14)7

In ‘Proud Music of the Sea-Storm’, Whitman dramatizes historical process as a dream journey through a westward-moving history of music. It begins with the dawn of civilization (‘the sound of the Hebrew lyre’, ‘Hindu Flutes’, ‘imperial hymns of China’ [2002: 343]) and leads through the liturgical chants of European cathedrals to the Italian operas performed in American concert halls. In the poem’s penultimate section, the speaker feels immersed in ‘all the voices of the universe’, including ‘tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches, and dances’ (2002: 344). At this point he wakes up and realizes that he was listening to metaphorical music: what he heard was not actual sound but unwritten poems, which ‘vaguely wafted in night air’ ready to be set down in a ‘new rhythmus fitted’ for the American self (2002: 345). Whitman’s Uses of Historicism Nineteenth-century vocabularies of historicism allowed cultural critics to shift between strong and weak concepts of historical relativity to suit their argumentative needs. Whitman is most dismissive of the past with regard to non-canonical artworks; he then sounds much like Emerson and Cousin in his invocation of universal aesthetic criteria, and insists that feudal ages produce feeble and effeminate forms of expression, while democratic cultures create sturdy and manly styles closer to an absolute ideal. In ‘Song of the Exposition’ (1871), for example, he declares: Away with old romance! Away with novels, plots and plays of foreign courts

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Away with love-verses sugar’d in rhyme, the intrigues, amours of idlers, Fitted for only banquets of the night where dancers to late music slide The unhealthy pleasures, extravagant dissipations of the few, With perfumes, heat and wine, beneath the dazzling chandeliers. (2002: 170)

It was trickier to dismiss canonical feudalists such as Homer or Shakespeare with reference to their political milieu. Whitman was in this iconoclastic mood often enough: his essay ‘A Thought on Shakespere’ (1888) presents Shakespeare as an effete sentimentalist concocting artificial tales (‘like a fine, aristocratic perfume, holding a touch of musk’) unacceptable to democratic Americans (1996: 1175– 6).8 Yet Whitman also appreciated the symbolic value of canonical literature, and he must have sensed the advantage of Emerson’s attempt to link American culture with a Platonic tradition that included the Elizabethan age. The question was how one could make a case for the parallelism of democratic institutions and literary form without rejecting feudalist writers? One option (see Chap. 7, pp. 205–6) was to present the Shakespeares and Miltons of literary history as virtual democrats writing in opposition to their times. The trouble with this was that the idea of countercultural proto-democrats undercuts the notion of cultural totality that made the feudalism/democracy opposition so useful in the first place (if a democratic Milton can emerge from Jacobite monarchy, what is the use of harping on about the political determination of form?). Whitman’s solution to this quandary is to shift his argumentation towards an evolutionist narrative of historical progress, in which the traditions of feudalism can be considered to have temporary validity, as manifestations of spirit in its local stage of emanation. This means that while Shakespeare’s works are no less admirable for expressing aristocratic forms of beauty, they nonetheless need to be rejected as aesthetic models because they are incommensurable with contemporary culture. In Democratic Vistas, for instance, Whitman puts Shakespeare at the head of an army of poets that may help American writers towards self-reliance: Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres, grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the feudal and the old – while our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New World’s nostrils – not to enslave us, as

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now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own – perhaps, (dare we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy, what you yourselves have left! On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, must we mete and measure for to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards, with unconditional uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the west! (1996: 998)9

When Whitman summons the help of the great tradition, he displays much more patience towards cultural expressions that emerged from feudal ages. It is useful to compare Whitman’s strong historicism to the positivist and scientistic criticism of the French literary historian Hippolyte Taine.10 In his lectures on the philosophy of art at the École des Beaux-Arts (1865–9), Taine speaks of aesthetics as a historicist ‘science’ that ‘neither prescribes nor pardons, but only explains’, so that the contradictory products of different historical cultures must be approached ‘with equal sympathy’ (1985: 19). Taine suggests that literary critics should resemble biologists who treat nature’s multifarious species with equal respect. This implies that the literary products of differing cultures can no more be ranked than biological organisms emerging from differing natural environments (‘milieus’).11 William Dean Howells makes a similar point in Harper’s Magazine in 1887: professional criticism needs ‘to classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise and blame them’ (Howells sees ‘a measure of the same absurdity in the trampling on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him as in the botanist’s grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find it pretty’) (1993: 52). When it suits his argumentative purpose, Whitman can match Taine’s historical relationalism. In section 44 of ‘Song of Myself’, for instance, where he deals with spiritual evolution, he stresses that mankind has come a long way (‘trillions of winters and summers’) and will develop further for an even longer period. Each stage has produced a myriad of forms of ‘richness and variety’ and will continue to do so in the future. But it is impossible to rank these products of evolution other than on the basis of their representationality: ‘I do not call one greater and one smaller, / That which fills its period and place is equal to any’ (2002: 70). Four years later, in ‘With Antecedents’, he applies this evolutionist scheme to intellectual progress. Everything that has been thought by former ages has relative truth and excellence and could not have been different:

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I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god, I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without exception, I assert that all past days were what they must have been, And that they could no-how have been better than they were, And that to-day is what it must be, and that America is, And that to-day and America could no-how be better than they are. (2002: 202)

His programmatic poem ‘Proto-Leaf’ (1860, later retitled ‘Starting from Paumanok’) makes a similar point: What has been left by poets and thinkers (‘Language-shapers’) of past ages is valuable on its own terms: ‘it is admirable’, ‘nothing can ever be greater – Nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves’. Whitman’s persona of the poet studies and respects the past, and turns to his own age not because its products are better, but because they are consistent with who he is: ‘I regard [the works of past masters] all intently a long while, / Then take my place for good with my own day and race here’ (1860–1: 9). At some level, Whitman’s use of strong historicism attests to the late-nineteenth-century importance of historical culture models. Yet at another level, it is well suited to the rhetorical needs of professionalizing intellectuals that Whitman shares with early romantic avant-gardes.12 Cultural Coherency as ‘Total Style’ Whitman’s strong historicism relinquishes foundational criteria of validity and instead looks for cultural consistency. The focus of his inquiry as a cultural critic is then not the absolute quality of cultural forms but their coherence (whether they ‘tally’), and the critic’s authority depends on his ability to detect significant resemblances between cultural domains. The key motifs of Whitman’s rhetoric of consistency emerged in the romantic discourse of national union. Herder’s definition of national character or spirit (‘Nationalcharacter’, ‘Geist der Nation’) tended towards images of equilibrium and harmony. In his This Too a Philosophy of History (1774), he compares the emergence of national difference from human universality to choosing a limited set of tones from the range of a keyboard: ‘if only a few’ of these notes are developed, national unity will follow, for ‘the soul quickly forms a concert for itself from these awakened notes and does not feel the unawakened ones except insofar as they silently

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and obscurely support the sounding song’ (Herder 2002: 297; 1990: 4/39). Whitman was also drawn to concert metaphors of national harmony. In his Preface to Specimen Days (1872), he compares the discords of the present to ‘the preparatory tuning of instruments by the orchestra’ (2002: 651). Herder’s most influential formulations of national wholeness are based on spatial images. In his Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91) he suggests that just as the earth depends on its ‘centre of gravity’ to maintain the ‘equiponderating harmony’ of physical powers, ‘[e]very stable being’ must ‘bear in itself’ a similar ‘equilibrium of its powers’. The same process of calibration and harmonization applies to the level of nationhood: Herder conceives of society as an accidental combination of multifarious forces that contend together in wild confusion, till . . . opposing regulations limit each other, and a kind of equilibrium and harmony of movement takes place. Thus nations modify themselves, according to time, place, and their internal character: each bears in itself the standard of its perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others. (1968: 97–8)

Herder’s admiration of human potentials in ‘wild confusion’ accords well with Anglo-American romantic liberalism as represented by John Stuart Mill’s celebration of individual difference. The key assumption is that freeing human society from all artificial restraints leads not to chaos but to natural harmony (see Ellis 2002: 26). Whitman opens Democratic Vistas with a direct reference to Mill when he says that human nature should be allowed to develop ‘in numberless and even conflicting directions’ in order to assure a people’s ‘vitality’ as the most effective engine of democratic progress (1996: 953). Herderian visions of antagonistic human potentials calibrating themselves into a harmonic national whole go hand in hand with concepts of nationhood that view coherency and historical synchronicity as key conditions of national stability. For example, Hegel’s history lectures of the 1820s imagine historical progress as a succession of national wholes that could not have occurred in any other synchronic or diachronic order. Each local spirit of a people is seen as dividing into different ‘spheres’ that together form a totality, similar to the production of an individual ‘soul’ by the ‘unity’ of its integral parts and ‘faculties’ (1991: 53; 1986: 12/173).13 The Volksgeist is thus bodied forth in the shape and practices of national institutions

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and governments (1991: 50; 1986: 12/69), as well as in the nation’s artistic, religious, and philosophical modes of self-reflection, its forms of consciousness (‘Formen des Bewußtseins’). Hegel attributes to each of the ‘forms of a nation’s consciousness’ specific representational means: religion tends toward ‘presentation’ (‘Vorstellung’), art to ‘sensuous manifestation’ (‘Anschauung’), and philosophy to conceptual representation (‘gedankliches Begreifen’). But all three embody the same essence, as they are merely ‘various aspects and forms [verschiedene Seiten und Formen] of the same substantial being [ebendesselben Inhalts]’.14 Hegel’s emphasis on national consistency leads him to conclude that the ‘Spirit of the State’ can only coexist with homologous forms of consciousness: ‘Only in connection with this particular religion, can this particular political constitution exist; just as in such or such a state, such or such a Philosophy or order of Art’ (1991: 53; 1986: 12/73). His classic example of the dangers of tampering with the organic connection between homologous forms of consciousness is the failure of the late-eighteenth-century political reform movements. He argues that the abstract liberal thought that spread from France to other Catholic countries in the wake of the French Revolution encouraged a mode of social organization based on political and legal freedom. But since Catholicism is animated by a decidedly anti-democratic spirit, it failed to harmonize with the liberal political structures that were attempted in France, Italy, and Spain, so that the unbalanced social organisms of these countries imploded and ‘sank back’ to their former undemocratic conditions. The upshot of Hegel’s interpretation is that ‘with the Catholic Religion no rational constitution is possible’ because it is homologous to a pre-democratic stage of history: the ‘Spirit of the Catholic World’, he says, lags behind ‘the Spirit of the Age’ (1991: 419, 449, 453; 1986: 12/499, 531, 535; see also 1991: 52; 1986: 12/72). Joseph Gostwick’s Outlines of German Literature, apparently Whitman’s prime source of Hegelian philosophy, stresses this aspect, and in fact presents the idea of ‘the indissoluble union of true morals and religion with free and firm institutions’ as central to Hegel’s system (1880: 481). Similarly, Whitman warns of the dangers of combining democratic institutions with feudalist art: ‘[D]emocracy can never prove itself beyond cavil’, he says in Democratic Vistas, ‘until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences’ (1996: 955–6).15

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In mid-century American criticism, Hegel’s vocabulary of organic consistency had to compete with formalist approaches represented by the literary criticism of James Russell Lowell. Yet the literary establishment of the 1850s and 1860s was heterogeneous enough: during Lowell’s editorship in 1860, the Atlantic published an essay on ‘Representative Art’, by Adam Badeau, that stresses the coherency of cultural forms in the terms of romantic idealism: ‘No art is worth anything’, the author argues, ‘that does not embody an idea’, for otherwise it would be ‘like a body without soul’ (Badeau 1860: 687). Art is ‘the expression in outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace’, or an ‘incarnation in colors or stone or music or words of some subtile essence which requires the embodiment’ (1860: 688). Since this essence animating the soul or the ‘character of the age’ is indivisible, an aesthetic expression ‘needs to be of a piece’ with other contemporaneous expressions. Hence: It must be one note in the concert, and that not discordant – neither behind time nor ahead of it, – neither in the wrong key nor the other mode: you don’t want Verdi in one of Beethoven’s symphonies; you don’t want Mozart in Rossini’s operas.

According to Badeau’s strong historicism, the developing spirit of the ages privileged various genres: the Catholic Middle Ages expressed themselves in Gothic architecture; their builders ‘would not be architects, if they lived to-day’, an age in which neogothic fashion only produces ‘mean’ imitations of the great medieval cathedrals. The Renaissance expressed itself in the painterly masterworks of ‘the Angelos and Raphaels and Da Vincies and Titians’, who ‘painted because the age demanded it’ (1860: 687). Badeau’s Atlantic essay is steeped in idealist vocabularies (its main thesis, that the nineteenth century is an age of drama recalls Victor Hugo’s Preface to Cromwell of 1827). Other mid-century critics begin to formulate cultural coherency in biologistic terms drawn from positivist science.16 In his 1855 Preface, Whitman explains that ‘beauty’ is dependent on ‘beautiful blood and a beautiful brain’ (2002: 622). Again there are intriguing parallels to Hippolyte Taine, whose critical shifts between idealist and biologistic vocabularies make him a pertinent case study of the transition period during which Whitman composed the first edition of the Leaves. Taine’s intellectual self-fashioning depends a great deal on materialist tropes of cultural coherency. In the Preface to his Essais

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de critique et d’histoire (1858), he argues that the surface variety of historical cultures is ‘governed and formed by a small number of forces, and most of the time by a single force, which produces their concert and maintains their unity’ (1908: iii–iv). This means that different cultural manifestations ‘presuppose one another’ in such ‘insurmountable interdependence’ that ‘none of them can be altered without transforming the others’. Illustrating this point with a metaphor from printing, Taine argues that individual discourses receive their form from a mental ‘stamp’ that ‘imprints itself’ on all of them. Since any variation of form presupposes a change in the stamp, individual change presupposes the transformation of the master imprint that will alter (and hence destabilize) the whole system (1908: iv). In his Preface to the second edition (1866), Taine makes this point with the biologistic analogies for which he is now primarily remembered. Referring to Geoffroy St-Hilaire’s theory of organic development, he argues that cultural discourses follow the law of compensation: just as disproportionate growth in certain organs can occur only at the expense of other organs – which will consequently be repressed or atrophied – the evolution of certain cultural forms must affect the form and function of all others (1908: xxv). Cultural coherence thus resembles biological homology: the natural sciences teach us that the ‘same plan of organization’ underlies ‘the paw of the dog, the leg of the horse, the wing of the bat, the arm of the human, the fin of the whale’, which are all different manifestations of ‘one singular anatomical basis appropriated for different ends’. By the same logic, the most diverse cultural forms are mere transformations of a ‘common cultural type’ or ‘kernel’ (‘type commun’, ‘noyau’), whose force ‘equilibrates, harmonizes, tempers’ (1908: xxv–xxvi, xviii) such seemingly distant phenomena as, for instance, a hedge at Versailles, a philosophical and theological reasoning of Malebranche, a prosodic rule prescribed by Boileau, a law of Colbert on mortgages, a compliment in the waiting room of the King at Marly, a statement of Bossuet about the kingship of God. (1908: xvii)

Taine portrays cultural health as a result of rigorous coherency, defined by a ‘total style of a culture’ (Jameson 1971: 324). Whitman’s notions of total style are less systematic, but nonetheless central to his self-conception as a poet-intellectual. He imagines himself as a national ‘physician’ who looks ‘our times and lands

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searchingly in the face’, ‘diagnosing some deep disease’ (1996: 961) under the seemingly healthy surface. As the nation’s ‘true author, poet, historian, lecturer, and perhaps even priest and philosoph’, he assures that the ‘spirit and the form’ of a nation ‘are one’ (1996: 1003) – in the 1855 Preface, his list of American cultural forms that need to be made ‘uniform’ includes ‘literature’, ‘style of behaviour’, ‘oratory’, ‘social intercourse’, ‘household arrangements’, ‘public institutions’, ‘the treatment by bosses of employed people’, ‘detail of the army or navy’, ‘spirit of legislation or courts or police or tuition or architecture or songs or amusements or the costumes of young men’ (2002: 635). Whitman’s poet-intellectual is first and foremost an expert ‘equalizer’ of discourses: Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. Nothing out of its place is good and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land. (2002: 619–20)

The poet’s powers of harmonization are also invoked by Whitman’s fantasies about merging with America’s diverse social spectrum (from slave and prostitute to president) or the American landscape (the national bard ‘incarnates’ America’s ‘geography and natural life and rivers and lakes’, the nation’s greatest rivers ‘embouchure’ into him, the vast great lakes are ‘tallied by him’ [2002: 618]).17 Synchronicity and the Corpses of the Past Whitman’s cultural criticism often frames cultural inconsistency in temporal terms, as a non-synchronicity between America’s modernity and its forms of cultural expression – the failure of the Eastern Muse to keep up with the new demands of the West. He likes to picture non-simultaneous cultural forms as decayed or dead parts of an organism whose gradual decomposition poses a threat to the national whole. Tennyson’s In Memoriam uses a similar trope in relation to the theory of evolution: he speaks of (and skeptically questions) the hope ‘That men may rise on stepping-stones / Of their dead selves to higher things’ (2004: 6). Whitman’s ‘O Living Always, Always Dying’ (1860) invokes the evolution of the individual as a self-renewal through the shedding of dead former selves: he imagines

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personal growth as a march along an open road, ‘disengag[ing] myself from those corpses of me’ (2002: 378). Both the necessity and manifest difficulty of disengagement from our former selves is central. Whitman’s use of this motif can be flippant: ‘Boston Ballad’ (1856), for instance, pictures cultural belatedness with images of decay that make non-synchronicity seem more comical than genuinely disturbing. The poem presents the government’s complicity with the slave-owning South as so discontinuous with ideal America that it causes the dead patriots of the Revolution to rise from their graves, and to invite the return of King George: Dig out King George’s coffin, unwrap him quick from the graveclothes, box up his bones for a journey, Find a swift Yankee clipper – . . . steer straight toward Boston bay ... The committee open the box, set up the regal ribs, glue those that will not stay, Clap the skull on top of the ribs, and clap a crown on top of the skull. You have got your revenge, old buster – the crown is come to its own, and more than its own. (2002: 223)

The image of King George’s skeleton being hastily glued together and installed in the Boston legislature makes the relapse into feudalist politics seem an absurd joke rather than a serious threat. In his more serious 1855 Preface, Whitman uses a similar motif to criticize the Anglophile American cultural establishment: America has ‘passed’, he says, ‘into the new life of the new forms’ of democratic modernity, but it appears that the Muses have failed to keep pace: ‘the slough’ of the old cultural systems ‘still sticks to opinions and manners and literature’ (2002: 616). It is as though America’s expressive organs have been blocked by lifeless layers of old forms. Whitman personifies feudalist literary forms as the recalcitrant ‘corpse’ of the late master of an estate. Although the deceased is being ‘slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house’, he appears to resist his proper funeral and ‘waits a little while in the door’. The belated literary establishment that imposes itself on American culture is as unreal and unnatural as the wandering corpses of Gothic romance. Its presence is uncanny but brief: the ‘stalwart and wellshaped heir’ of the estate – presumably a

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Whitmanian rough – to whom the ‘action’ has ‘descended’, already approaches the mansion (2002: 616). Lawrence Buell has pointed out how Whitman’s ‘calculated grotesquerie subverts traditional decorum’, rendering the translatio studii topos ‘hairy and gross’ in order to ‘Calibanize’ it and thus subvert the ‘American as barbarians stereotype’ (Buell 2000: 203). But Whitman also stresses that while the ‘well-shaped heir’ of the poetic estate ‘shall be fittest for his days’, the deceased feudalist master ‘was fittest’ for his own historical stage. Thus conventional English culture is not intrinsically despicable but merely non-simultaneous with American modernity. At any rate, the problem will eventually solve itself. There is no need to overcompensate and ‘repel the past’ and its cultural forms, even though they sprouted from feudal ‘politics or the idea of castes or the old religion’ (it would seem unnatural to deny one’s ancestors). America, then, ‘is not so impatient as has been supposed’, but ‘accepts the lesson with calmness’, confident that the old-world ‘slough’ cluttering contemporary letters will wash off with time as surely and naturally as snakes lose their skin (Whitman 2002: 616). One decade later, Whitman’s tone increases in pitch when he treats the same topic in the Galaxy essays on ‘Democracy’ (1867) and ‘Personalism’ (1868), his rejoinders to Thomas Carlyle’s antidemocratic polemic ‘Shooting Niagara’ (1867) he later extended to Democratic Vistas (1871). Whitman now says that although the spirit of ‘feudalism’ is ‘palpably retreating from political institutions’, it still holds ‘entire possession’ of society’s forms of cultural expression, the ‘subsoil’ of ‘education’, ‘social standards’, and ‘literature’. He warns that if feudalism should persist in American intellectual culture, the democratic center might remain as brittle as Carlyle suggested (1996: 955). It is tempting to view Whitman’s loss of complacency between the 1855 Preface and Democratic Vistas in terms of biographical or political disillusionment – as due to the ravages of the Civil War, the anti-democratic tendencies of the Gilded Age, or the author’s sense of being ignored by the greater public. But we can also read the change of tone as an intensification of Whitman’s professionalist persona. As Whitman denounces the US élites for their undue focus on practical and political (rather than literary) issues, he claims public relevance on the basis of the aesthetic authority as a cultural ‘physician’ able to diagnose the state of America’s democratic experiment, not with reference to its economic or political issues, but to the coherency of its cultural forms.18

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Defining American Style Whitman’s central role in nineteenth-century US letters has to do with the tremendous influence of his claims about American style. Young American, Emersonian, or Boston Brahmin calls for America’s cultural independence had little to say about formal Americanism; they generally evaded the question of whether the courtly muses of Europe could be replaced other than by a mere shift towards homegrown themes. Whitman’s poetry and poetics provided mid-century nationalists with a more precise definition of a ‘democratic method’ (Whitman 1996: 1058). Mediating Form and Content

Nineteenth-century critics used the form–content distinction with a degree of flexibility, blurring the line between national forms and national themes. The romantic quest for cultural independence often enough revolved around the demand for literary adaptations of American topics and themes (Cooper’s adaptation of Scott’s romance model to native themes being a paradigmatic case in point). Whitman was no exception: even as his musical images make authentic Americanness a question of poetic form, his anti-feudalism often refers to literary content. In ‘The Poetry of the Future’ (1881) Whitman finds the Waverley novels pernicious due to their undemocratic ideology and their un-American topics: they ‘turned and condensed brilliant but entirely false lights and glamours over the lords, ladies, courts, and aristocratic institutes of Europe’, leaving ‘the bulk of the suffering, down-trodden people contemptuously in the shade’ (1881: 197; 1996: 1040). This implies that a genuine national literature needs an Americanized and democratized Scott19 who transfers the action from feudal Scotland to modern US settings. Yet Whitman’s criticism of Tennyson, in the same essay, illustrates how form and content tacitly interconnect. It opens with Whitman’s critique of what he deems Tennyson’s ideological allegiance to an unjust social vision, based on hereditary caste, and an undue taste for the life-style of feudal Britain’s upper classes (‘the idleness, the traditions, the mannerisms, the stately ennui; the yearning of love, like a spinal marrow, inside of all; the costumes, old brocade and satin’; the ‘moldy secrets everywhere’, and not ‘one democratic page’).20 But Whitman’s evaluation draws its rhetorical force from suggesting that Tennyson’s ideology translates into his poetic style: feudalism

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emerges as an ‘odor’ ‘pervading the pages like an invisible scent’, and a ‘verbal melody’ that may be of a ‘very high (perhaps the highest) order’, but its sweetness seems ‘perfumed’, and the lines and words on the page are ‘never free’ but seem ‘labored’ and ‘sophisticated’, while ‘the handling of the rhyme’ breathes of a genteel propriety, ‘showing the scholar and conventional gentleman’ (1881: 197–8; 1996: 1040–1). In Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’ ‘there is a constantly lurking, often pervading something, that will have to be eliminated, as not only unsuited to modern democracy and science in America, but insulting to them, and disproved by them’ (1881: 206; 1996: 1049–50). In his more programmatic moments, Whitman narrows down that ‘pervading something’ to two stylistic modes: the patterns of versification typical of classical prosody, and the traditional genre conventions whose hierarchies of selection govern representation. Future American poets should break free from these restrictions, so as to produce formal analogues to modernity that genteel authors such as Tennyson or Scott exclude from their work: the measureless viciousness of the great radical republic, with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those fearful and varied and long-continued storm and stress stages (so offensive to the wellregulated college-bred mind). (1881: 198–9; 1996: 1041–2) Natural Prose

Whitman’s justification of his stylistic choices relies on expressivist notions of organic form (Killingsworth 1993). In his 1855 Preface, he argues that the ‘rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush’ (2002: 622). The image of freely growing prosody (as opposed to a prosody imposed from the outside, which A. W. Schlegel labeled ‘mechanical’) had been a standard trope of romantic avant-gardes since 1800 (see Reinfandt 2003: 134–5). For example, in 1845 Margaret Fuller complains, in a review of Longfellow’s Poems, that contemporary poets often use the ‘rules of versification’ without the powers of imagination that would enable them ‘to enter into that soul from which metres grow as acorns from the oak, shapes as characteristic as the parent tree’. The result is ‘jingling rhymes, and dragging, stumbling rhythms’

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whose ‘substance’ is not grounded in genuine experience but consists of ‘bombast’, ‘affected simplicity, sickly sentiment, or borrowed dignity’ (1852: 152). Fuller’s image of Longfellow’s poems as exotic plants that lack deeper connection to the American soil (‘potted rose trees, geraniums and hyacinths, grown by himself with in-door heat’ [1852: 156]) shows well the attraction of the idea that Whitman’s Leaves have grown ‘directly from the democratic tendencies’ of his life-world, as Edward Dowden puts it in 1871 (49–50). Fuller’s parallelism of soil and form also accords with Emerson’s sense of a poet’s responsibility to the natural ‘rhymes’ beyond the text: Every one may see, as he rides on the highway through an uninteresting landscape, how a little water instantly relieves the monotony: no matter what objects are near it, – a gray rock, a grass-patch, an alder-bush, or a stake, – they become beautiful by being reflected. It is rhyme to the eye, and explains the charm of rhyme to the ear. Shadows please us as still finer rhymes. Architecture gives the like pleasure by the repetition of equal parts in a colonnade, in a row of windows, or in wings; gardens by the symmetric contrasts of the beds and walks. In society you have this figure in a bridal company, where a choir of white-robed maidens give the charm of living statues; in a funeral procession, where all wear black; in a regiment of soldiers in uniform. (Emerson 1903: 8/45–6)

Emerson’s conceit of nature providing a ‘rhyme to the eye’ as a structural blueprint for the poet’s ‘rhyme to the ear’ implies the pastoralist idea that true self-reliance (in the arts and ethics) presupposes a return to unmediated nature, which in turn furnishes us with the most natural culture. The concept of natural rhyme washes over into a stylistics of stylelessness (see Fluck 2007) premised on the idea that nature should really be left to speak for itself, and that therefore the only authentic form of representation is that provided by the represented object itself (Emerson’s suggestion that ‘America is a poem in our eyes’ whose ‘ample geography’ ‘will not wait long for metres’ [1903: 3/38] can be understood in this sense). Romantic poetics likes to frame this idea within primitivist culture models that emerged in eighteenth-century discussions of modern progress. Hugh Blair suggests in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) that the expressive power of ancient writers (such as Ossian or Homer) could not be repeated because in modernity’s more polished environments sublimity has been replaced by beauty (1996: 219). Sublimity

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arises out of ‘simplicity’ and is incommensurable with rhyme (1996: 220). In Pope’s translation, Homer’s style is ‘beautified’ but also ‘weakened’ by rhyme, while Milton’s Paradise Lost shows that ‘[t]he boldness, freedom, and variety of our blank verse, is infinitely more favourable than rhyme, to all kinds of sublime poetry’ (1996: 221). Whitman’s late essay ‘Ventures, on an Old Theme’ (1882) suggests a similar culture model when it argues that versification was once important (‘that the venerable and heavenly forms of chiming versification have in their time play’d great and fitting parts’), but now ‘the day of such conventional rhyme is ended’, as it ‘palpably fails, and must fail, to serve’ as ‘a medium of highest æsthetic practical or spiritual expression’ (1996: 1080–1; see also 879). The primitivist implication is that democratic modernity releases poetry into prose. The more professionalist narrative suggests that natural rhyme needs the sort of perceptional refinement suggested in Wordsworth’s claim that simplicity has to be learned (see also Emerson 1903: 8/48). Liberated Perception

Whitman’s theory of organic style also authorizes the break-up of conventional hierarchies of representation. Just as in ideal America every part of the whole is equally valuable, traditional hierarchies of representation should be replaced by a narrative principle of equality. It is a truism that the catalogue rhetoric dominating the Leaves can be seen as an objectification of the e pluribus unum principle: the perceptive consciousness freely ranges over America’s natural and social spaces, transcending hierarchy and selective restraint, each item being linked to the next by a formal parallelism. The catalogue rhetoric ‘emerges’ as a democratic method in Whitman’s frequent references to empathetic identification across social or ethnic hierarchy, for example, when the narrative centers of ‘Sleepers’ or ‘Song of Myself’ merge with prostitutes, presidents, slaves, and slave owners, or, in ‘Salut au Monde’, connect the ‘daughter or son of England’ with the ‘woolly-hair’d hordes’ in Africa (2002: 124–5). Whitman also extends the notion of democratic method to legitimate his choice of subjects by portraying them as guided by an allembracing inclusiveness. His attempt to present his controversial subject matter as a natural result of a democratic method can best be seen in his ‘A Memorandum at a Venture’, a defense of his ‘Children of Adam’ section in the North American Review of 1882, in which he legitimizes the sexual explicitness of his poems by presenting

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candidness as a natural effect of democratic perception. Whitman makes his point by distinguishing between two modes of representing the body: the euphemistic ‘repressi[on]’ of ‘direct statement’ that dominates literary culture and polite manners, and the coarse ‘sensual voluptuousness’ of working-class discourse (the ‘world in workingday dress’ as against ‘the world in parlor’). He suggests that the ‘Children of Adam’ exemplifies a third representational mode that is both more natural and more adequate to America and Modern Man: it gives the representation of the physical body ‘[t]he same freedom and faith and earnestness which, after centuries of denial, struggle, repression, and martyrdom, the present day brings to the treatment of politics and religion’ (1996: 1055–6). Thus sexual explicitness is portrayed as a natural outcome of a ‘democratic method’ (1996: 1058) in literary representation that is itself homologous to democratic representation in politics. Democratic Realism

Whitman’s concept of unmediated representation converges, to an extent, with the realist manifestos characteristic of Gilded Age editorials. There is a striking resemblance between Whitman’s writing and the theory of ‘artlessness’ proposed by William Dean Howells in his Harper’s ‘Easy Chair’ columns during the late 1880s. Howells’ famous comparison of ‘real’ versus ‘ideal grasshoppers’ – of aesthetic objects taken from nature versus those modeled on abstract philosophies or designed for cheap effects – sounds Whitmanian in its assumption ‘that no author is an authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature’s lips and caught her very accent’ (1993: 73–5). Like Whitman, Howells argues that writing must be grounded in ‘the simple, the natural, and the honest’ (although Whitman would hardly have agreed with Howells that the novels of Jane Austen or the war memoirs of General Grant epitomize such writing). Both Howells and Whitman use the British romance tradition inspired by Sir Walter Scott as a prime exemplar of literary failure, and their narrative of literary history defines literary progress as a process of transcending genre and personal style to achieve correspondence with nature. Howells did not appreciate Whitman’s literary nationalism21 and had little taste for naturalist catalogues (‘realism becomes false to itself’, he said with reference to European naturalism, when it ‘heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it’ [1993: 302]).

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Yet his often quoted suggestion that American fiction should focus on the ‘smiling’ aspects of life is closer to Whitman’s democratic poetics than it may seem at first glance.22 Howells claims that the sordidness of European naturalism follows from a distortion of reality’s intrinsic order, especially its generic obsession with erotic episodes: if novelists are proper ‘historians of feeling and character’ and keep a ‘true perspective’ on the ‘correct proportion’ of reality, they will achieve a more ‘faithful record of life’ that will show the relative ‘exclusion of guilty love’. Contemporary fiction would be ‘incomparably truer’ if it toned down the ‘celebration chiefly of a single passion, in one phase or another, and could frankly dedicate itself to the service of all passions, all the interests, all the facts’ (1993: 344–5). Whitman’s representational modes transgress received conventions of sexual and social decorum, but his authenticity-based rationale of selection is no less suspicious of the immoral and the frivolous than Howells (see Reynolds 2005: 101–4). In his self-review of 1855, Whitman complains about Tennyson’s overemphasis of love and argues that the work of aristocratic authors (‘Shakespeare the same as the rest’) ‘is possessed of the same unnatural and shocking passion for some girl or woman, that wrenches it from its manhood, emasculated and impotent, without strength to hold the rest of the objects and goods of life in their proper positions’ (1855: 90–1). Whitman’s fear of femininity and low-brow sensualism is apparent in his account of a visit to Manhattan in Democratic Vista: he presents the moral core under New York’s shining surface as a ‘dry and flat Sahara’ ‘crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics’, who indulge in ‘flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity’, and display ‘an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon’d, muddy complexions, bad blood’ (1996: 963). The Songs and the Program

The felt aesthetic power of Leaves of Grass is incontestable and defies hasty judgment. But Whitman’s manifesto-level claims arguably tell us less about his aesthetic world than about the cultural contexts that make his claims persuasive. The meaning of Whitman’s ‘song’ remains blank without a specific musical ‘program’, a theory or narrative about literature and culture that shapes our perception of the politics and cultural location of Whitman’s formal movements. The conceptual contingencies of the program rather than ontology

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determines whether we recognize in the Leaves, say, the undulations of the Atlantic Ocean (Matthiessen 1941), the de-hierarchizing turmoil of radical democracy (Dowden 1871), the picturesque roughness of the American landscape (Burroughs 1896), the musical structure of Italian opera (Faner 1951), the dithyrambic rhythms of Oriental and Semitic prophecy (Stedman 1880), the barbarous sensuality of modern sensibilities (Santayana 1989), or, well, ‘hexameters . . . trying to bubble through sewage’ (Wendell 1900: 473). The following chapters discuss how Whitmanian authority interrelates with broader cultural narratives or conceptual fields (third section) and how the less systematic programs of nineteenth-century culture are sharpened (or blunted) during the modernist reinvention of Whitman’s song (fourth section). NOTES

1. Whitman’s vision of spiritual evolution from India to the US first appears in ‘Facing West from California’s Shore’ (1860) and recurs throughout his later work. ‘Passage to India’ (1871) is his most elaborate poetic formulation of this idea. The poem charts the progress of the world soul from India through its stages in antiquity and medieval Europe until it reaches the United States, and he interprets recent technical achievements, such as the opening of the Suez Canal, the junction of the Union and Pacific Railroads, and the laying of the first permanently successful Marine Cable in the Atlantic, as symbols of a spiritual progress that culminates in international brotherhood (see L. Marx 1964: 224). 2. Whitman abridged this section when he included the poem in the Leaves of Grass. 3. This seems like a paraphrasing of Emerson’s ‘Merlin’ (1841 and 1845), which refers to the ‘trivial harp’, ‘jingling serenader’s art’, and ‘tinkle of piano strings’ as symbols of artificial poetry. However, Emerson’s ‘Merlin’ is an Orphic singer whose rudely smitten ‘chords’ resonate with an Ossianic age, as they are ‘chiming with the forest tone / When boughs buffet boughs in the wood’ (1903: 9/120). 4. See Faner 1951, Part 1, Chap. III and Reynolds 1995: 176–93. 5. Other examples are ‘Proud Music of the Sea-Storm’ (1869), in which ‘sound’ is depicted as the most direct connection to ‘Soul’ (2002: 344), and ‘As Consequent, Etc.’ (1876), in which Whitman says his own poems ‘call up, eternity’s music faint and far’, ‘joyously sounding, / Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable’ (2002: 301). 6. Whitman does not literally demand that the declamatory vocal passages of traditional opera be replaced with the atonal or ambient sounds of

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musical modernism. His musical taste was shaped by Italian opera. In his ‘Italian Music in Dakota’ (1881) he refers to Vincenzo Bellini’s 1831 operas La Sonnambula and Norma as nature’s ‘last-born flower or fruit’ (2002: 337). In a very late essay on ‘Poetry Today in America’, he argues that Wagner’s, Gounod’s, and the later Verdi’s ‘free expression of poetic emotion’ have moved beyond Italian opera, demanding ‘a vocalism totally unlike that required for Rossini’s splendid roulades, or Bellini’s suave melodies’ (1996: 1045). Traubel reports a conversation in which Whitman is not quite sure what to make of the idea, suggested to him by friends, that ‘Wagner is Leaves of Grass done into music’, as he cannot make up his mind whether ‘Wagner’s art was distinctly the art of caste’ or ‘a force making for democracy’ (Traubel 1908: 2/116). This passage was expunged when Whitman edited the poem in 1867 and republished it in the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass under the final title ‘Starting from Paumanok’. A similar characterization of Shakespeare already appears in Whitman’s early self-review (1855: 90–1). The same argument can be seen in Whitman’s Preface to November Boughs, ‘A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads’ (1888). It is not clear whether Whitman read Taine before 1882 (when he refers to the latter’s History of English Literature [cf. 1996: 1056]). Since Taine was almost unknown in the US literary establishment before the 1870s, there was probably no direct influence. But the family resemblances between Whitman and Taine are illuminating and attest to the transnational cultural force underlying their critical rhetoric. Modernist critics recognized the similarities: Francis B. Gummere’s Democracy and Poetry (1911) devotes a whole chapter to ‘Whitman and Taine’. On Taine’s emergence in US criticism, see Carter 1998. On Taine’s aesthetic and theoretical premises, see Wellek 1965: 527–57 and Marshall Brown 1997: 33–87. In theory, Taine retains a strong universalist component when he distinguishes between deeper and shallower variants of cultural representationality. His lectures on the philosophy of art undercut their relativist gist by making aesthetic validity a function of representative depth: lesser authors, in other words, represent mere fashions; better ones might capture the essence of a school or whole generation, but only the greatest artists embody a historical period or the essence of a race. According to Taine’s spatial metaphor, ‘spiritual geology’, as he calls it, divides into: superficial fashions of three or four years; the character of shorter periods of around forty years; that of a whole age (the Middle Ages or the Renaissance); certain national traits intrinsic to an ethnicity (the valor that unites ancient Gauls with modern French); and certain racial traits that unite people of the same blood (Germans, Slavs, and Hindus in contrast to Semites or Chinese) (Taine 1985). This

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aspect of Taine’s apparent relativism shows the cultural centrality of the idealist discourse of the representative genius, which is premised on the assumption that the spirit of the age or the nation finds its truest and most beautiful expression in the work of its most brilliant minds. This notion has been most influentially defined, if in varying terms, in Hegel’s Philosophy of History (1822–30), Victor Cousin’s History of Modern Philosophy (1828–9), Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841), and Emerson’s Representative Men (1850). Taine formulates this idea first in 1853, when he asserts that ‘the deeper [a poet] penetrates into his art, the more he has penetrated into the genius of his age and race’ (1861: 343). In his History of English Literature (1864), he attributes this idea to Carlyle, Hegel, and Goethe (1886: 2/465). 12. An influential early romantic formulation of strong historicism can be seen in A. W. Schlegel’s Berlin lectures (1801): [Each artwork must be considered from its own standpoint. It need not attain an absolutely highest point, it is perfect when it becomes the highest of its species, its sphere, its world; thus we can explain how it can be a link in an infinite series and yet satisfactory in itself and independent. (1884: 1/17)] This argumentation first emerged in debates about the status of ancient versus modern discourse. If one considers some of the most influential expressivist versions of this attempt (Friedrich Schiller’s naïve/ sentimental distinction, the opposition of classic/romantic and classic/ Gothic proposed by A. W. Schlegel and Mme de Staël and elaborated on by Victor Hugo and John Ruskin; G. W. F. Hegel’s narrative of the end of art, and so on), the ambiguity of romantic historicism becomes apparent. On the one hand, romantic historiography rarely evades the evaluations implicit in the primitivist interpretation of Greek culture, which tends to be formulated either negatively (presenting the naïve as an inferior beauty, mechanical rather than organic, plastic rather than picturesque, and so on) or in positive terms, as a superior beauty unfortunately no longer possible in a modern world that can overcome alienation only by speculative reason or ironic play. On the other hand, all of these theories are drawn to the idea that there could be absolute parity between the ancient and modern achievements in a way that would preclude comparative evaluation. 13. According to Hegel, the spirit of the nation is made up of a core with a determinate substance or essence, which constitutes the ‘basis and substance’ of all discourses and practices within the national organism (Hegel’s terms are ‘Wesen’, ‘Inhalt’, ‘Grundlage’, ‘Substanz’, and they are usually translated as ‘essence’, ‘content’, ‘identity’, ‘purport’, ‘general principle’, or ‘substance’ [1986: 12/69–73]).

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14. Hence it is ‘One Individuality’, based on the same content, that is ‘honored and enjoyed in Religion’, in the image of a God, ‘exhibited as an object of sensuous contemplation in Art’, and ‘apprehended as an intellectual conception, in Philosophy’ (1991: 53; 1986: 12/73). 15. It is unlikely that Whitman had in-depth knowledge of either Herder’s or Hegel’s work, but his mid-century avant-garde position evidently encouraged him to produce similar concepts. Herder’s theories were present in US discourse since the days of the North American group (notably in the writings of George Bancroft – see Bluestein 1963; Pochmann 1957; and Mueller-Vollmer 2000). While Hegel’s ideas were transmitted by Victor Cousin during the 1830s, his actual works were not fully translated until the second half of the nineteenth century (the Philosophy of History in 1857, the Logic in 1873, and Aesthetics in 1878), although numerous excerpts were available earlier. Whitman’s major sources were Frederick Henry Hedge’s The Prose Writers of Germany (1847), and Joseph Gostwick’s Outlines of German Literature (1854 and 1880). Whitman’s references to Hegel appear mostly towards the end of his career, after the canonizing work of the St Louis Hegelians (with whom Whitman was acquainted) after the Civil War. Apart from a few allusions in Democratic Vistas and the Leaves, Whitman speaks about Hegel in a manuscript fragment from around 1870, the ‘Sunday Evening Lectures’ (1984: 6/2009–18), and in his essay on ‘Carlyle from American Points of View’ (first published in Specimen Day & Collect of 1882), where he argues that Hegel’s ‘formulas’ ‘are an essential and crowning justification of New World democracy in the creative realms of time and space’, so that it is indeed ‘strange’ that Hegel was ‘born in Germany, or in the old world at all’ (1996: 921). See Fulghum 1941; Boatwright 1929; Parsons 1943; Falk 1951; and Lindberg 1991. On Hegelianism in nineteenth-century America, see Goetzmann 1973. 16. See Kerkering 2003 on the mid-nineteenth-century transformation of the idea of national essence to racial essence. 17. See also the opening of ‘Proto-Leaf’, where his Orphic voice will be ‘Tallying, vocalizing all – resounding Niagara’ (1860–1: 5). On Whitman’s geographical visions, see Dougherty 1993, Folsom 1994, and Eitner 1981. On Whitman’s image of the condition of the human body as symptomatic of cultural health, see Killingsworth 1989, Larsen 1988, and Erkkila 1989. 18. In Whitman’s scheme of American self-realization, the production of the ‘poetry of the future’ (1881: 195) serves as the capstone of nationbuilding, in a process consisting of three phases of achieving democracy. The first includes the eighteenth-century ‘political foundation’ of democratic institutions based on general suffrage, the second is the nineteenth-century achievement of the ‘material prosperity’ to support

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basic institutional frameworks. The third and work-in-progress stage is the democratization of cultural discourse that leads to authentic ‘growths of language, songs, operas, orations, lectures, architecture’ which in turn reinforce the democratic state ‘from its own interior and vital principles’, ‘democratizing society’ as a whole (1996: 1000–1). It is notable that during the 1820s and 1830s, the North American group interpreted Scott as a great democrat who levels the artificial distinctions of feudalism by reducing the European nobility in his novels to their human characteristics. The central elements of this characterization already appear in Whitman 1855. See Price 1990. Howells addresses this in 1891, when he suggests ironically that since American writers arrived on the scene after all literary forms had already been invented, there ‘remained nothing for us to do but to invent literary formlessness, and this, we understand, is what the English admire Mr. Whitman for doing; it is apparently what they ask of us all’ (1993: 190). Howells finds that literature does not choose to express itself in a specifically national form, as indeed the need for national identity belongs to the ‘dark ages’ of a literary childhood stage, left behind in the present age of cosmopolitanism. Consequently Howells sees in Whitman’s free-verse poetics, not an embodiment of a democratic ethos, but a ‘formlessness’ that reflects nothing other than its own ‘monoton[y]’ (1993: 190). This famous phrase is more about rigorous adherence to verisimilitude than ‘genteel’ censorship. Howells has little regard for journal policies based on the editor’s ‘tacit agreement’ ‘that he will print nothing which a father may not read to his daughter, or safely leave her to read herself’ (1993: 354).

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Conceptual Fields of US Culture

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CHAPTER 5

THE MUSIC OF AMERICA

Orphic Song Emerson’s and Whitman’s intellectual personae center around the ambiguous image of the poet as Orphic singer. This image gained currency during the romantic shift towards neoplatonism and expressivism, when the poetic was defined more often by musical than by painterly root metaphors (Abrams 1953: 88–94; Lindenberger 2000). The Whitmanian moment draws from the conceptual appropriation of musical images used in the musicological discussions within the nineteenth-century US literary establishment, which in turn negotiates a transnational emergence of a romantic metaphysics of music as embodied form. Let me briefly sketch this development. The Cartesian and empiricist traditions of eighteenth-century aesthetics conceived of instrumental music as ‘pleasurable sound’, capable of producing only vague emotions. These so-called hedonistic theories subordinated music to the verbal art it was supposed to accompany, and to the function of providing either an edifying atmosphere for religious worship or a sensuous commentary to operatic drama. In the emergent vocabularies of sensibility, the idea of pleasurable sound developed into the notion of music as a ‘language of feeling’ that encourages empathetic union of minds. The semantic vagueness of music seemed less reprehensible when it was thought capable of addressing an emotive world beyond rational discourse. In another shift of vocabularies around 1800, the notion of music as a language of feeling developed into that of music as a

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language of the sublime, so that the semantic or conceptual indeterminacy that had been seen as a weakness was now reinterpreted as a mark of its expressive powers: as a ‘language above language’, music could express a metaphysical content (the Absolute, the Infinite, the World Spirit) that is beyond the reach of conceptual proposition or semantic meaning (Dahlhaus 1978: 66–7; 1989: 63). Used in this sense, Orphic ‘song’ becomes a trope for an expressive act that raises language to the status of music, which serves as a metaphor for a sensuous form that completely embodies its expressive content (Irwin 1980: 39–40; Yoder 1978; Sewell 1971; Cameron 1953; Adkins 1948). In his influential transcendentalist manifesto Sartor Resartus (1833–4), Thomas Carlyle pictures Jesus Christ as ‘[o]ur highest Orpheus’ whose ‘sphere-melody’ flows ‘in wild native tones’ through ‘the ravished souls of men’, and ‘modulates and divinely leads them’ with his spiritual guidance. For Carlyle, Christ is not a supernatural being but an exceptionally inspired representative of the visionary ‘Orpheuses, who, in past centuries, by the divine Music of Wisdom, succeeded in civilising Man’ (1987: 199). Emerson’s elaboration of this idea (in his ‘Divinity School Address’) contrasts the ‘vulgar tone of preaching’ generic to Unitarian ministers with the vibrant ‘melody’ of inspired poetry and ‘the severe music of the bards that have sung of the true God in all ages’ (1903: 1/133). Emerson and other literary transcendentalists authorize themselves with romantic variants of the trope of musica universalis or sphere music, which imply that the subtle harmonics of nature can only be perceived by the aesthetic specialist.1 Thoreau believes that ‘the Universe has her own fixed measure and rhythm’, which is audible to the ‘sensitive soul’ (2001: 14). He portrays his quest for spiritual awakening and self-reliance as a sharpening of dulled and misused senses so they can better ‘hear celestial sounds’, and he presents his perception of natural sounds as evidence of spiritual connection (1985: 310; see also 94, 140–2, 204, 272, 309). Emerson, similarly, rephrases the sphere music topos by arguing that while the forms of natural objects are ‘reflected by the eye’, the ‘soul of the thing is reflected by a melody’. Hence ‘[t]he sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed’ already ‘pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air’ and can be heard by those ‘with an ear sufficiently fine’ to ‘write down the notes without diluting or depraving them’ (1903: 3/25).2

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Ambiguities of the Romantic Metaphysics of Music The conceptual complexities of mid-nineteenth-century variants of musical neoplatonism can be seen in the first volume of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World of Will and Representation (1818). In §52, Schopenhauer defines music as the highest form of art because it achieves the most direct representation of essential reality (‘Will’). His concept of music locates itself on the border between the metaphysical and formalist frameworks that compete throughout the nineteenth century: music has a truth value (as an imitation of Will) but it speaks in a sub-conceptual idiom we can only intuit and feel. We can, however, identify certain ‘parallelisms’ or ‘analogies’ between musical form and the shape of the phenomenal world, which confirm our intuition about music’s primal relation to the real.3 Nonetheless, these parallelisms elude conceptual knowledge: we cannot produce a precise conceptual account of the correspondences between music and other representations of Will (that is, other visible phenomena). Schopenhauer acknowledges that from the viewpoint of his Kantian apriorism, his mimetic concept of music seems highly speculative. In order to prove logically his thesis that music represents Will (and that the parallelisms he identifies are not simply fictitious), he would have to hold up the musical sign to its referent. Since this referent is nothing less than the noumenal thing-in-itself, which by Kant’s definition does not exist in unmediated form, conclusive proof remains impossible. Schopenhauer has to admit, then, that his theory of music presupposes a leap of faith, and the best justification he can suggest for such a leap is the universally strong effect of music on its listeners (1958: 1/257; 1986: 1/358–9). Schopenhauer’s skepticism shows that neoplatonic notions of absolute music are at a small remove from the more radical Kantianism suggested by mid-nineteenth-century formalists, who resist Schopenhauer’s leap of faith and put a greater emphasis on the rupture between musical form and ontological reality. The landmark statement of musical formalism is Eduard Hanslick’s treatise On the Musically Beautiful of 1854, which argues that music does not represent any content outside of itself: that its content is in fact identical to its form (1966: 162–3). Hanslick’s comment that the content of music consists in ‘musical ideas’ – structures of sound that have ‘no other content than themselves’ (1966: 162–3) – can be read as a parody of the romantic notion that great music is first and foremost the sensuous manifestation of a Divine Idea (Dahlhaus

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1978: 111–14; 1989: 109–13). If Hanslick’s suggestion is taken seriously, Orphic song becomes a pursuit of pure beauty with little social relevance. The classic example of this view in nineteenthcentury criticism is Walter Pater’s suggestion, in the 1870s, that all arts should ‘aspire’ to the ‘condition’ of ‘music’ (1986: 88), and that the professional qualification of the ‘aesthetic critic’ is simply the ‘power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects’ (1986: xxx). Yet the difference between aesthetic formalism and the romantic music religion is not as sharp as it seems. Pater’s description of pure aesthetic experience – moments of ‘intense consciousness’ or ‘pauses of time’ that make us ‘spectators of all the fulness of existence’ and ‘quintessence of life’ (1986: 95–6) – still imply a quasi-transcendental presence (see Tigges 1999: 18). How fine the line between radical formalism and musical neoplatonism really is becomes apparent in the first edition of Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful, which still included passages that vaguely invoked the romantic music religion, referring to the ‘symbolic significance’ of musical beauty, its power to inspire ‘a feeling of the infinite’ and a sense of the ‘movement’ of the ‘whole universe’ (1965: 32, 104). Schopenhauer’s and Hanslick’s terminologies blur into one another by suggesting that musical beauty eludes conceptual knowledge but expresses a higher presence. The difference is in the underlying direction: while Schopenhauer’s concept of music is metaphysical through and through, Hanslick’s references to the ‘infinite’ were already superficial to his theoretical framework, and were excised from the second edition of his treatise.4 Transcendentalist Concepts of Music: John Sullivan Dwight The position of New England transcendentalism can be viewed in the writings and editorial selections of the Brook Farm associationist, Saturday Club member, and pioneer musicologist John Sullivan Dwight (1813–93). Dwight had a regular musical column in George Ripley’s Brook Farm journal, the Fourierist Harbinger (1845–9), and in 1852 he founded Dwight’s Journal of Music, which remained an influential site of music criticism until it folded due to Dwight’s resistance to contemporary developments (such as Wagnerism) in 1881.5 Dwight’s concept of symphonic music as the language of ‘angelic wisdom’ (1950: 413) addresses key issues of New England’s socio-religious currents. It helps him to make a case for the legitimacy of sacred music in the Church, which remained a contested issue in

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some theological circles until the Civil War; and to present music as an index and instrument of millennial progress. Music as the Language of Religion

By presenting symphonic music as a language of the sublime, Dwight called into question conventional distinctions between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ forms, implying that the sacredness of music can be inferred from its transcendental beauty while the ‘dull solemnity of psalms’ dominating New England churches was in fact a profanation of religious worship (1845: 12; 1845b: 43; 1841; see also 1882). Dwight makes this point with a narrative of musical awakening he takes from German criticism. In 1799 Ludwig Tieck celebrated symphonic music as ‘revealed religion’ in contrast to vocal music as a mere art of declamation (Wackenroder and Tieck 1973: 107). This idea was further fleshed out in the music criticism of E. T. A. Hoffmann, who suggested in an essay on ‘Old and New Church Music’ (1814)6 that the new spirituality emerging in contemporary life necessitates a different kind of sacred music. Hoffmann considered all true music to be religious cult, but he held eighteenth-century church music (including Mozart’s and Haydn’s masses) to have become too shallow to fulfill this function (1963: 212, 227). The ‘progressing spirit of the world’ (1963: 232) has moved away from traditional Christianity towards a romantic spirituality of the sublime, so that the worship of concrete entities has been replaced by vague intimations of Soul. Hoffmann’s famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony of 1810 (which he later incorporated into his ‘Kreisleriana’ tales) interprets the historical transition from Haydn to Mozart and Beethoven as an increase in spirituality. Haydn’s symphonies, Hoffmann said, evoke happy scenes of laughter and joy, Mozart’s display a sense of desire, but in Beethoven’s we see the giant shadows of the sublime and are transported ‘into the wondrous realm of the infinite’ (1963: 36). Dwight’s Journal reprinted Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth (Hoffmann 1855), and Dwight’s own interpretation of this symphony uses similar images, identifying ‘a boundless striving to pronounce the unutterable, to embrace the infinite’ (1853: 3). Hoffmann’s impact on American transcendentalism can also be seen in Christopher Pearse Cranch’s address before the Harvard Society of Music in 1845 (which Dwight reprinted in the The Harbinger). Cranch extends Hoffmann’s comparison to postulate an opposition of reality and spirituality (‘In the works of Haydn’, he says, ‘we

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have a representation of actual life, in Beethoven, of ideal life’), and his paraphrasing twists Hoffmann’s Gothic imagery towards a less gloomy sense of revealed religion: In Haydn I perceive a limited, healthy, cheerful soul, going forth into the sunshine and the spring, like a happy farmer, and piously celebrating the visible works of God . . . His music, therefore, has the relish of real nature. It is daily air and bread and water. But Beethoven’s music is the charmed lotus food, that leaves us all careless of any life, but that within his own dreamy islands. He is the prophet of the restless man of dreams. Fettered in the dungeons of sorrow . . . he retires inward, on the inheritance of his spiritual possessions . . . and receives draughts upon draughts of inspiration, as if he had sat at the very gates of Eden ‘And caught / The Life within like music flowing.’ He sings not of the present, so much as of the unmeasured future . . . [Mozart] describes not the sublime ideal life, but the deeply tender and pathetic moods, the alternating smiles and tears of his changeful earthly existence. (Cranch 1845: 124)7

The German cult of Beethoven adapted easily to the narratives of spiritual awakening favored by New England transcendentalism. Hoffmann’s demand for a new sacred music in accord with the times reappears in Cranch’s address as a reference to the Puritan rejection of music as ‘a noxious weed, which must be rooted out of church and state’. Cranch invokes a transcendentalist culture in which beauty and religiosity merge and brotherhood displaces the stern ‘Puritanism’ that ‘still spreads a chill over our ardent yearnings for freer and more beautiful culture’ (124). Dwight’s essays offer various versions of this narrative. In ‘The Virtuoso Age in Music’, for instance, he maps the spiritual progress of humanity to a list of composers in ascending order of musical style, from Bach to Beethoven: [T]he genius of the old Cathedral, that Gothic sense of the Infinite, produced the Fugue; as the genius of Protestantism produced the Chorus and the Oratorio, in the style of Handel . . . the dramatic genius found utterance in feelings of the individual heart in the Opera and its Mozart . . . the genius of nature, or the feeling of the correspondence of all outward sights and sounds with the inward life of man, moulded a chaos into order in the orchestra [i.e. of Beethoven]. (1845c: 362)8

In an essay on Haydn for the Democratic Review of 1844, Dwight makes a similar point with a slightly different emphasis, phrasing

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recent musical history in the terms with which Hegel imagines the history of art, as a progressive coming of age from antiquity to modernity. In analogy with Hegel’s discussion of Egyptian symbols, Dwight describes Handel’s choruses as music that is still groping to express metaphysical truths: ‘wrought with an overwhelming consciousness of the Infinite’, it erects tonal ‘Egyptian pyramids to God’. The advent of Mozart’s symphonic exploration of human passions is compared to the rise of Greek sculpture, as a musical ‘carv[ing of] human forms and groups’. Haydn’s instrumental compositions are seen as a musical breakthrough that resembles the emergence of landscape painting, when art ‘looked at nature and began to paint her loveliness’. Beethoven, finally, continues the depiction of general nature by focusing on its ‘symbolic, mystic sense’ (1844: 17). Dwight posits a historical trajectory in which music acquires metaphysical resonance by reaching autonomy: Haydn’s ‘separation of the orchestra from the voice’ led to the emancipation of music from its subservience to other arts, to poetry, to words; the cultivation of music pure, music its own interpreter, music for the sake of music, and not for the sake of illustrating, adorning, or expressing a thought or sentiment. (1844: 20)

Dwight’s history of the ‘emancipation of music’ to become an aesthetic medium of metaphysical truth in its own right – a ‘music for the sake of music’ – re-enacts the post-Kantian double gesture generic to romantic professionalism (see Chap. 1, pp. 32–4 above). Dwight breaks with neoclassicism by insisting on the autonomy of musical form – as a field requiring musical experts like himself rather than clergical musical dilettantes presuming to judge the value and legitimacy of sacred music. At the same time, he evades aesthetic formalism by conceiving symphonic artworks as instruments of metaphysical vision. Dwight’s staging of music as symptomatic beauty is based on a distinction between speech as a conceptual language (which only touches ‘distinctions, differences, individualities’) and musical sentiment, which ‘seeks analogies’ and ‘resemblances’ and thus functions as ‘a language of that deeper experience in which all men are most nearly ONE’ (1845: 12–13). In his Fourierist phase during the 1840s, Dwight’s theoretical reflections explored the nexus between musical form and metaphysical truth in terms that were not unlike Schopenhauer’s concept of ‘parallelism’. As he puts it in the Harbinger:

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[Music stands in] exact scientific correspondence and analogy with the laws of man’s nature, with all the laws that govern the created universe, – shall we not say, with the eternal ideas . . . of God? The scale of musical tones is only the scale of the human Passions, or motive springs of action, as that scale is repeated in the sphere of sound and of the ear. And Music, more than any Science, is a key to the knowledge of ourselves, of Nature and of God: to the detection of the same Law, the same Music carried out in other forms, of plants, of planets, of colors, of geometrical figures, of comparative anatomy, and, finally, of the very passions, or spiritual essential springs which animate all these. (1845: 13) Music and Millennial Reform

What distinguishes American transcendentalist music discourse, to an extent, from its European influences is how it integrates a millennialist concern with social perfectionism. The context of the ‘Second Great Awakening’ furthers theological frameworks in which the emergence of Beethoven is phrased in terms of imminent millennial fulfillment. Margaret Fuller characteristically interprets Beethoven’s US success as evidence of a utopian future inscribed in the American spirit. Noting that Beethoven is even popular with musical amateurs, ‘who have not gone through the steps that prepared the way for him’, she argues that his music ‘is felt’ keenly in America ‘because he expresses, in full tones, the thoughts that lie at the heart of our own existence, though we have not found means to stammer them as yet’ (1860: 74). Fuller implies, first, that Beethoven’s symphonic structure embodies a truth about human nature that eludes conceptual proposition (but can be intuited by the inspired poet-intellectual), and second, that in the more perfect social organism of the millennial future, the meaning of Beethoven’s musical religion (which ‘as yet’ remains ineffable) will have been translated into tangible and socially effective truths. Similarly, Dwight argues in his Fourierist phase that ‘music is the key’ to achieving ‘that Divine Order of human society’ characterized by ‘the full accord of Unity and Love’ – an achievement, as the struggling Brook Farmers would have known, that presupposes ‘long ages of painful, violent transition’ before the ‘preparatory discords’ can be ‘resolved’ to communitarian harmony. Dwight pictures music as ‘a great reformer’ that locates itself in the center of social practice, converting the ‘wronged Humanity’ of the alienated present into a social utopia where ‘universal unity shall reign and Society and Industry and Life in all its spheres be music’

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– unless, he adds emphatically, ‘Beethoven, Handel, and Mozart have lived for nothing’ (1845: 13). The communitarian impulse of Dwight’s associationist approach becomes even clearer if it is contrasted with Thoreau’s individualist notions of musical utopia. In ‘The Service’ (1840), Thoreau invokes ‘a world of peace and love’ in which ‘music would be the universal language, and men greet each other in the fields in such accents, as a Beethoven now utters at rare intervals from a distance’ (2001: 13). Thoreau speaks of spherical music in terms of a transcendental ‘rhythm’ or ‘fixed measure’ of the ‘Universe’ that is perceptible to ‘the sensitive soul’, while insensitive souls miss the universal harmony and generate unpleasant noise.9 He considers the true musicality of its citizens to be a premise of a healthy social organism, and presents its attainment as a solitary process of ethical self-cultivation, pictured as a perseverance in following one’s own musical measure: A man’s life should be a stately march to an unheard music, and when to his fellows it seems irregular and inharmonious, he will be stepping to a livelier measure, which only his nicer ear can detect. (2001: 14)

Dwight had a keener interest in communitarian means to social rejuvenation, and he expresses this interest with strong parallelisms between symphonic music and political reform. In 1844 he presents the structural particularities of Beethoven’s Ninth as a symbolic representation of an Associationist social utopia: ‘Each note in the great world-symphony’ is seen as enacting the social relationships that determine the individual’s location between self-determination and the modes of social interaction that ‘bring out his peculiar beauty’ (1844b: 5).10 In 1846, he politicizes Beethoven’s music by saying that its harmonic structure is deeply incongruous with the imperialist mindset associated with the Mexican War. Reviewing the American première of the Ninth (at the Castle Garden in New York on 20 May 1846), Dwight prefaces his discussion with a lengthy digression on the patriotic atmosphere in New York ensuing from the Mexican crisis. A crowd of 50,000 had assembled to respond to the president’s declaration of war, and Dwight remembers the ‘hoarse murmur of their voices’ as a chilling reminder of the ‘lower, fiercer passions’ plotting to prevent social perfectibility. He contrasts the rabble rousers of the political rally with the higher ‘demagogues’ in the concert hall, Mozart and Beethoven, whom he calls ‘leaders of the people in a true way’ because they ‘attun[e]’ their ‘conflicting

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minds’ to a ‘Harmony’ that makes such calamities as the Mexican War impossible (1846: 9). In Dwight’s experience, the structure of Beethoven’s Ninth communicates this hope: it is ‘full of discords, full of the vision of a final Harmony’. The clamor of the Mexican War outside the concert hall finds its structural homology in a different kind of music, the ‘brilliant sensuous creations of a Rossini, or of a Leopold de Meyer’, a music full of ‘animal excitement, war and conquest’ (1846: 11). Aristocratic versus Democratic Music

Dwight’s opposition between Beethoven as a musical democrat and Rossini as a representative of contemporary war-mongering shows how he shifts between the conceptual premises of the romantic music religion and the practical demands of transcendentalist cultural politics: his investment in musical metaphysics urges him to distance Beethoven from political issues such as the Mexican War, to depoliticize him as a voice of felt religion. Nationalist cultural politics, by contrast, encourages the projection on Beethoven of a musical content that serves to legitimate democracy. The suggestion that Beethoven signifies democracy and Rossini war is related to the debates on the content of music that emerged in German criticism during the 1820s, when critics began to view the succession of musical trends in terms of the historicist narratives of romantic idealism. According to the influential Berliner allgemeine Musikzeitschrift edited by Adolph Bernhard Marx, the difference between the melody-based music of the Mozart era and the harmonic complexity of Beethoven reflects a historical progress from the eighteenth-century sensuousness influenced by Italian effeminacy to a Germanic objectivity and morality.11 Marx’s historical scheme takes symphonic music to have continuously progressed from expressing vague intimations of the infinite to more concrete representations, such as the ‘image of life’ (‘Lebensbild’) that Marx heard in Beethoven’s Third (in an 1835 essay apparently influential to Dwight, Marx used the term ‘series of ideas’ [‘Ideenreihe’]).12 The differences between early romantic and new Hegelian critical idioms were thrown into sharp relief by the politicized climate during the 1848 revolutionary disturbances. In an essay on progress in music, the Hegelian Franz Brendel (1811–68), who in 1845 had taken over the editorship of Robert Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, argued that the belief that music reflected ‘merely the eternal

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and the infinite’ was typical of the conservative party, representing the ‘old’ and ‘decayed’ frameworks of ‘state and morality’ that were presently collapsing (1848: 102). Critics with a more progressive notion of the musical arts, he said, cannot but acknowledge that Beethoven or Schumann rendered visible ‘the color of the times’ (1848: 105). Since the times were evidently republican, their music was of a decidedly republican cast, as opposed to the works of Mozart and Bach and their aristocratic spirit. This was not to detract from the artistic merits of aristocratic composers, but it did mean that it was no longer possible to compose such music: its ‘content no longer represents the essence of contemporary consciousness’ (1848: 103). Composers working ‘from within the old, aristocratic sensibility’, Brendel concluded, had ‘nothing of value to say anymore today’ (1848: 104). The political conservatives were as unhappy about Beethoven’s appropriation for a revolutionary ethic as the more traditional formalist critics were dismayed by the historicization of art. Both groups found themselves represented by the standpoint of the traditionalist Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, for which Hoffmann had written thirty years earlier. In the June edition of 1848, Eduard Krüger asked how one could speak of ‘republican or monarchical harmony’ (1848: 401). In the November issue, Johann Schucht said wryly that he was impressed by Brendel’s ability to hear ‘in symphonies or sonatas whether their content is democratic or aristocratic’. Wondering whether aristocrats and democrats have indeed ‘differing perceptional organs’, Schucht requested more concrete musical evidence: Would Mr. Brendel please be so kind as to deduce his point more clearly, and perhaps spell out which newer works contain the spirit of the people and times? . . . Or would he at least show us merely four aristocratic and four democratic bars that can be used as contrastive examples? . . . For if there are aristocratic and democratic pieces of music, one would think that there should also be singular aristocratic and democratic musical thoughts. Should there not? – But of course it is easier to jot down general claims than provide specific examples! (1848: 758)

Schucht’s demand for a sample of aristocratic and democratic bars was a half-serious formulation of a serious challenge, namely to demonstrate the historicity of music by detailed formal analysis. As the publication of Hanslick’s formalist treatise On the Musically Beautiful only six years later indicates, music criticism

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had become professionalized enough, since Hoffmann’s 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth, to demand more than perceptional metaphors that pictured the musical expression of the ‘color’, ‘odor’, ‘voice’, or ‘pitch’ of the times.13 The rejoinder to Schucht’s essay by Brendel’s assistant Ernst Gottschald made a point that must have seemed selfevident to the advocates of musical republicanism: single phrases taken out of context are no more able to carry complex ideas than are isolated parts of a literary text. Gottschald argued that Beethoven’s Ninth reflected a ‘thoroughly democratic politics [Gesinnung]’, as it represents the ‘victorious struggle of freedom against suppression’, by ‘drawing in tones’ the general ‘Stimmung [pitch, atmosphere, harmony]’ of the ‘powers of mind [geistigen Mächte]’. In such descriptions, the referent of music shifts from a transcendental essence (Schopenhauer’s Will, Dwight’s ‘mind of God’) to historical practice. Gottschald, of course, did not provide the conclusive formal proof that Schucht had demanded. But his Hegelian point that ‘one and the same principle in an era’ ‘pervades’ all of its ‘manifestations [‘Erscheinungen’] (Gottschald 1848: 299, 300) was rhetorically more attractive than Schucht’s formalism: it enabled critics to identify stylistic change with human progress, to link Beethoven and republicanism in a double process of legitimation, as representatives, in their own spheres, of the highest realization of spirit. The rhetorical seductiveness of this process of legitimation can also be seen in the theories of programmatic music that evolved during the 1840s and 1850s, and which Brendel himself defended in his influential History of Music (1852).14 Brendel’s argument resembled the narrative of historical progress suggested by A. B. Marx. Whereas Marx’s landmark of musical profundity was Beethoven’s Third – an instrumental symphony – Brendel followed the manifestos of Liszt and Wagner to claim that the newest stage of progress had dawned with Beethoven’s Ninth – a choral symphony. In composing the Ninth Symphony, the argument goes, Beethoven faced the dilemma that the increasingly complex modern conditions could no longer be grasped by purely instrumental music. His attempt to express his age with ever more intricate formal elaborations of musical language was a heroic failure, which he himself acknowledged by including a literary text – Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ – to enhance the expressiveness of his work. Thus the Ninth must be considered the sublation of the symphonic genre, a living demonstration that if music is to keep track with human progress it needs to become programmatic, lifting itself from the ‘empty tonal play’ of absolute music ‘towards content,

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towards deeper meaning, towards characteristic expression’ (Brendel 1903: 567, 648).15 This temporal narrative helped to authorize the programmatic turn as a historically inevitable synthesis of the sister arts (best represented by Liszt’s ‘symphonic poetry’ and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk). The union of textual, aural, and visual media was said to elevate pure form to a higher level, giving it a more substantial content.16 According to this organicist concept, the validity of a musical artwork now hinged on its extramusical ‘ideational content’ (‘geistigen Gehalt’ [1903: 649]). As a result, musical innovations such as Beethoven’s choral symphony, Wagner’s move towards ‘infinite melody’, or Berlioz’s emancipation of tonal color, could no longer be criticized in formalistic terms – for their relation to the harmonic series or the possibilities of counterpoint, for instance. As in Whitman’s organicist notion of poetic form, the aesthetic value of compositional choices became inseparable from the values inherent in their national spirit. Indeed, the debates on musical beauty replayed (or prefigured) contemporary literary debates: Hanslick criticized Wagner’s composition for offenses against formal beauty, and he compared Beethoven’s Ninth to a marble sculpture whose head has been colored but its body left natural (1966: 90–1). Brendel defended Wagner’s compositions as a necessary rejection of formal beauty in favor of a ‘language of tonal realism’ (1903: 579).17 Wagner’s own defense hinged on a rejection of Rossinian melodiousness that resembled Whitman’s dismissal of Tennysonian prosody. In Opera and Drama (1852), Wagner argued that Rossini created ‘absolutely melodious melodies’ that were like ornaments, beautiful and ‘pleasing to the ear’ (2000: 44), but trivial and unreal due to their lack of connection with the social organism. In Wagner’s cultural parallelism, Rossini’s melodious beauty was reactionary because its ‘artificial flowers’ (2000: 42) pandered to the effete tastes of an aristocratic upper class that resembled a parasitic growth on the ‘natural tree of the common people’. Thus: ‘Like Prince Metternich was unable to conceive of the state other than in terms of absolute monarchy, Rossini, by the same logic, identified opera with absolute melody’ (2000: 47). The implication is that Wagnerian ‘endless melody’, like Whitman’s oceanic verse, is more organic and real, and thus more democratic. Dwight knew these arguments well, as most of the landmark musical treatises in Europe were excerpted in his journal.18 But in most of his theoretical statements, he rejected the theory of program

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music, as we can gather from a later essay for the Atlantic Monthly on the ‘Intellectual Influence of Music’ (1870): Now musical art, to be sure, does not describe objects, nor narrate histories, nor unfold cosmogonies and systems of philosophy and ethics, as some imaginative expounders of ‘Ninth Symphonies’ would have us think. It does not express ideas, except of the kind technically known as musical ideas, pregnant little germs of melody, capable of logical development in a way analogous to the development of thoughts. And here, by way of caution, lest we be misunderstood in claiming that music is intellectual and has meaning, we would take occasion once for all to wash our hands of all responsibility for that kind of musical interpretation which seeks to trace a story, a mythology, a thread of doctrine, throughout such or such a symphony, sonata, or ‘tone-poem’; and to express our conviction that music stoops from its proper, higher mission when it undertakes to describe scenes or imitate sounds in nature; and that it is never less intellectual, or more regardless of its own chaste integrity, than when it takes the form of ‘programme music’, not trusting its own proper element, but borrowing chances of effect ab extra, and dividing the attention as if to cover its own insufficiency. (1870: 620)

Dwight’s insistence that music ‘does not express ideas, except of the kind technically known as musical ideas’ is an echo from Hanslick’s radical formalism. But while Hanslick defends the canonization of the German symphonic tradition in purely formalist terms (Beethoven’s music is superior to Verdi’s not because it expresses a ‘higher feeling, or the same feelings more correctly’, but because it ‘fashions more beautiful tonal forms’ [1965: 41]), Dwight explains his preference for Beethoven over Rossini with Emersonian concepts of spiritual depth: Rossini’s music seems as superficial as the steamwhistling British muses in Emerson’s English Traits, and this is what aligns it, in Dwight’s opinion, with the equally superficial public opinion in favor of the Mexican War. The Antebellum Discourse of Musical Nationalism European music critics were wont to use nationalist jargon even before they began to theorize about musical programs (Dahlhaus 1980: 84; see also Applegate 1998, and Beller-McKenna 1998). Yet the major transcendentalist music critics were proponents of Beethoven and had little use for nationalist narratives. This appears

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to contradict Emerson’s proverbial rejection of Europe’s courtly muses. But it was easier to denationalize Beethoven’s music than, say, Wordsworthian poetry. The specifics of the musical medium neutralized the constraints of national cultural politics that governed the critical perception of literary texts. Cultural independence seemed far more realistic when it focused on the literary field, especially since the infrastructural weaknesses of US literary production could be romantically interpreted as an asset: Emerson’s invocation of the poet drawing inspiration from the splendors of pristine forests carried a great deal of rhetorical force. It was harder to see what the American wilderness could do for musical composition: the most fervent nationalist circles of the German cult of Beethoven showed little interest in presenting the Viennese symphonic tradition as a symbolic response to European landscapes (such as, say, the sublime Alps). The pastoral nationalism that motivated the Young American quest for a representative national literature was therefore not an option for transcendentalist music critics, who believed that the spiritual expressiveness of music depended on a minimal level of symphonic refinement. It is true that nineteenth-century American composers liked to reference the sublimity of the American landscapes in their programmatic notes. In 1823, the so-called ‘American Beethoven’, Father Heinrich (1781–1861), subtitled his Opus 3 with the patriotic title Minstrelsy of Nature in the Wilds of North America. But this was a conceptual Americanism with which Heinrich merely packaged his Italianate music. Even though he was later presented as a ‘log-cabin composer’ who drew his inspiration from the American forests,19 music critics largely resisted the ‘Nature’s Nation’ or ‘Virgin Land’ discourse that dominated the literary field. Although the idea of natural music – based on the topos of the music of the spheres – was a common metaphor for romantic literary theories (especially Thoreau’s), mid-century compositional practice, before Charles Ives’ modernist experiments, had little interest in using natural sounds,20 and indeed nineteenth-century critics considered the musical imitation of natural sounds a trivialization of musical artworks, and a throwback to eighteenth-century opera.21 As a result, the cultural nationalists within the transcendentalist circles accepted that, at least for the moment, the musical Bildung of the American mind consisted largely in mere ‘echoes’ of ‘the reigning music of Italy and Germany’ (Dwight 1845c: 348; see also Cranch 1846: 110). Even Margaret Fuller, whose literary criticism was quite unequivocal in its demand for a national literature in tune with

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America’s vast landscapes, as opposed to the claustrophic aesthetics of European poetry (1852b: 123–4), argued in the Dial that in the musical domain there is nothing wrong with ‘studying and copying Europe as we do’, as long as ‘all symptoms of invention’ in America ‘are confined to the African race’, while ‘the Caucasian race have yet their rail-roads to make’ (1842: 52). Today’s awareness of the twentieth-century importance of black folk idioms might make us wonder where Fuller sees a problem – why the rail-road building Caucasians should not simply be content with leaving the creation of a national music to African-Americans. The answer is that, before the 1890s, few relevant cultural critics considered African-American or Native-American song sufficient to provide a viable national idiom for American instrumental music. Dwight located ‘Negro Melodies’ at the level of ‘Yankee Doodle’ and the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ (1855: 140), and in 1859 he reprinted the Boston Courier’s skeptical response to Robert Stoepel’s attempt to use Native-American musical elements for his opera adaptation of Longfellow’s Hiawatha (‘The little Indian music that we know of’, the reviewer wrote, ‘furnishes a very slight foundation for the composer to work upon’ [Anon. 1859: 339; see Pisani 1998 and 2001]). When Fuller therefore speaks of the ‘beauty’ of ‘African melodies’, she does not so much praise the ethnic musical imagination as the human imagination under conditions of aesthetic autonomy. Her point is that the ‘African race’ in the US is musically creative because it has been ‘relieved by their positions from the cares of government’, like the ‘German literati’ (1842: 52) – surely Fuller’s formulation must be considered intentionally ironic. Professionalist transcendentalists like Fuller and Dwight also resisted the notion that musical authenticity should be sought in a tradition of homegrown folk songs, as Young American critics such as William Henry Fry (1813–65), a composer and musical editor at Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, tended to suggest. In a series of lectures for the New York Philharmonic Society in 1842, Fry formulated a ‘declaration’ of musical independence (Zuck 1980: 18) contending that ‘[t]he American composer should not allow the name of Beethoven, or Handel, or Mozart to prove an eternal bugbear to him, nor should he pay them reverence’ (1853: 181). Fry’s Americanism was strictly conceptual: his compositions neither reflect Heinrich’s interest in Americana (most of his operas are set in Europe) nor do they attempt – or even profess to attempt – to move beyond their Italian and Viennese musical influences. But in a series of exchanges with Dwight’s Journal and Richard Storrs Willis’ Musical World

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and New York Musical Times during 1853 and 1854, Fry makes a number of argumentative moves characteristic of Young America’s romantic nationalism.22 His musical nationalism is based on a contrast between the courtly and artificial complexity of European art and the democratic simplicity of a more authentic American folk culture. Thus Fry presents Beethoven’s music as empty formalism – if music consisted in ‘mathematical intricacies’, he says with reference to Beethoven’s Third, ‘I would leave off writing and take up mathematics’ (Fry 1854: 138). American transcendentalists understood Fry’s implicit Wordsworthian point – that common languages are more real than the conventions of an élite. Still, the rhetorical persuasiveness of romantic primitivism did not translate well into musical practice. Literary texts could always displace ‘democracy’ or ‘simplicity’ to a thematic level, thus presenting them, on a stylistic level, with a poetic difficulty adequate to the demands of transatlantic literary avant-gardes (as Emerson’s complex essays well exemplify). In the musical medium, speaking to the common man was more difficult, as it effectively forced composers to move towards simpler folk airs and abandon the paradigm of symphonic art music. For Dwight and Fuller, at any rate, Fry’s position represents a low-brow anti-intellectualism detrimental to America’s cultural rejuvenation. Dwight’s readers would have understood that his essay on ‘Native Music’ was an implied critique of Fry: [One way] of regarding the recent achievements of our countrymen in the field musical . . . is the boastful, shallow patriotic, ‘manifest destiny’, all-the-world-annexing, Yankee Doodle way, which keeps proclaiming our’s the greatest country in the world; believes that Americans can do everything that any other people have done, only a great deal better; that the whole world – of Art, as of all other spheres – is our inheritance, and that we are . . . most capable of governing ourselves, brow-beating our neighbors, bullying the world, reconciling social and moral contradictions and enormities, ‘extending the area of freedom’ (by which is meant slavery), and metamorphosing little mean men into great dangerous presidents. This boastful, bloated parody of the American idea is not confined to politics; its contagion operates even in the peaceful sphere of Art and Music. It mistakes enterprise for genius; the large scale on which things are attempted, for sublimity; familiarity with means, tools, mechanisms and forms, for Art; new combinations, for original ideas; and, in a word, bold ‘go-ahead-itativeness’ [sic] for inspiration armed with divine right to conquer and to charm the world. (1854: 54)

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It seems surprising that American musical nationalists like Fry did not care to defend their projects on Dwight’s theoretical ground, with reference to a Wagnerian concept of programmatic music. Dwight was open to Wagner’s early musical and theoretical work, which he discussed at length in Dwight’s Journal (see Saloman 1984), but as he had little use for nationalist discourse, he rejected Wagner’s theory (in a late review he suggests that Lohengrin and Tannhäuser are great enough to survive Wagner’s theoretical fallacies [1870b: 286]). Nationalists like Fry, on the other hand, had extensive ideological affinities to Wagner, whose organicist critique of absolute music as empty and undemocratic ornament was known in Boston and New York (Dwight’s journal published and reviewed it in excerpts [Dwight 1855b: 67]). And yet Fry’s musical nationalism remains within the bounds of eighteenth-century theories of opera as ‘descriptive’ music that, by the 1850s, had little theoretical prestige.23 Perhaps Young America’s resistance to Wagner’s theoretical tools had simply to do with their dislike of his music, not only because of his avant-garde levels of musical difficulty, but also because of his avoidance of traditional melody – in a review of 1857, Fry complains about Wagner’s and Berlioz’ ‘neglect’ of melody, and contends: ‘A melody worth the name can be utterly dissociated from chords or instrumental accompaniment, and be sung and remembered; and we find nothing of the kind in [Wagner’s] pieces’ (1857: 123–4). Musical Nationalism after Dvorˇák The resistance to the idea of an American sound receded with the influence of Anton Dvorˇák, whose self-fashioning as a Bohemian composer had helped to further the cultural prestige of ethnic musical nationalism in Europe. In an article on Dvorˇák in 1892 in the Century magazine, the New York Tribune music critic H. E. Krehbiel argued that the ‘originality and power in the composer rest upon the use of dialect and idioms which are national or racial in origin and structure’ (657). During his tenure at the National Conservatory of Music in New York,24 Dvorˇák fueled the debate on musical nationalism with practical and theoretical advice on authentic American composition. He attempted to demonstrate the force of ethnic music with his Ninth Symphony (subtitled ‘From the New World’), and explained that the ‘Largo’ movement had been inspired by the mood of Longfellow’s Hiawatha – which he in fact planned to develop into an opera or cantata (see Beckermann 1998: 36) – and that

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its Americanist style resulted from the structural incorporation of native folk elements, such as spirituals and ‘plantation melodies’ (qtd Crawford 1996: 556). When he expounded his position in an influential essay for Harper’s, Dvorˇák reformulated the Young American defense of common folk idioms in a way that made it more convincing to late-nineteenth-century audiences: rather than denouncing the complexity of Viennese composers (as Fry had done), he derived their aesthetic refinement from their national authenticity (the best part of Beethoven’s Ninth, he said, ‘is also the most German’) (Dvorˇák 1895: 434). Dvorˇák concluded that if American composers cultivated their rich heritage of native tunes, it would only be a matter of time before they would produce ‘a real genius’ who could become ‘as thoroughly representative of his country as Wagner and Weber are of Germany, or Chopin of Poland’ (1895: 434). As Dvorˇák explains: A while ago I suggested that inspiration for truly national music might be derived from the negro melodies or Indian chants. I was led to take this view partly by the fact that the so-called plantation songs are indeed the most striking and appealing melodies that have yet been found on this side of the water, but largely by the observation that this seems to be recognized, though often unconsciously, by most Americans. All races have their distinctively national songs, which they at once recognize as their own, even . . . if they have never heard them before. When a Tsech, a Pole, or a Magyar in this country suddenly hears one of his folk-songs or dances, no matter if it is for the first time in his life, his eye lights up at once, and his heart within him responds, and claims that music as its own. So it is with those of Teutonic or Celtic blood, or any other men, indeed, whose first lullaby mayhap was a song wrung from the heart of the people. It is a proper question to ask, what songs, then, belong to the American and appeal more strongly to him than any others? What melody could stop him on the street if he were in a strange land and make the home feeling well up within him, no matter how hardened he might be or how wretchedly the tune were played? Their number, to be sure, seems to be limited. The most potent as well as the most beautiful among them, according to my estimation, are certain of the so-called plantation melodies and slave songs, all of which are distinguished by unusual and subtle harmonies, the like of which I have found in no other songs but those of old Scotland and Ireland. (1895: 432)

Dvorˇák’s argument was controversial,25 and even such composers as Edward MacDowell (1860–1908), who had already experimented

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with the structural incorporation of Native American chants by 1891, were reluctant to accept his nationalist model (see Finck 1897). Most critics were unhappy with the implication that the American soul should express itself in black or Native American sounds; many others shared Dwight’s general dislike of musical folk culture. But Dvorˇák’s influence inspired a controversy about the quest for an American musical form of a magnitude that would have been unthinkable in the 1850s – which we can take as a sign that the conceptual premises of Whitmanian authority had established themselves in US music discourse. By 1916, the Seven Arts music critic Paul Rosenfeld demanded that composers ‘must go on where Whitman led’, ‘blazing the path for the song of democracy’ rooted in a ‘vital relationship to the community’ in America (1916: 94). The idea of an American music in the spirit of Whitman played a leading part in the canonization of Charles Ives, and was indeed furthered by the composer’s own presentation of his experimental avant-gardism as deeply inspired by the American character (as he argues in his privately published Essays before a Sonata of 1920). Ives’ own self-fashioning, which relies on an opposition between the vigorous music of the people and the dry idioms of genteel composition, influenced his critical iconization during the 1930s within the context of Whitmanian modernism. In a seminal 1933 essay, Ives’ first biographer, the composer-critic Henry Cowell (1897–1965), presented Ives’ complex polytonality as a symptom of the composer’s immersion in American village life, implying that the American avant-garde differed from European art music in that it emerged directly from the pulse of the American soul (Cowell 1933: 129). The continuity between Ives’ canonizers and the logic of the Whitmanian moment can be seen in the persistence with which they noted that Ives was a naïve genius who had had no interest in the European musical avant-gardes (a question that still polarizes critics; see Burkholder 1985 and 1996). The image of Ives single-handedly bursting the traditional shackles of tonality suits modernist concepts of musical democracy, and it anticipates Theodor W. Adorno’s canonization of Schoenberg, except that Adorno posits a socio-political rather than a nationalist source of musical form. In Adorno’s heroic narrative of musical progress, aesthetic and social health manifest themselves in an authentic music of democracy, which Adorno describes in terms well suited to Whitman’s image of a ‘lawless music’. While Beethoven’s music already ‘rumbles’ with ‘the din of the bourgeois revolution’ (1976: 211) in France, in Schoenberg,

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‘tonal relations’ were ‘stretched to the extreme’, until ‘[i]n the end, every sound became autonomous, all tones enjoyed equal rights, and the reign of the tonic triad was overthrown’, so that ‘something like the musical realm of freedom really opens up’ (2002: 636). Adorno contrasts the Beethoven–Schoenberg tradition with the inauthenticity of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, Sibelius’ neoromanticism, and popular jazz. The Whitmanian defenders of Ives between the 1920s and 1940s reach similar conclusions. Adorno’s rejection of musical neoclassicism as affirmative ahistoricism is anticipated by Rosenfeld’s polemics against jazz and his critique of Stravinsky’s neoclassical phase as evidencing ‘the psychology of the émigré’ (1928: 36). Rosenfeld also saw an ‘analogy between Eliot’s bookishness and Stravinsky’s cerebralism and archaicisim’ (1928: 41–3). The collection of essays featuring Cowell’s construction of Ives as a Whitmanian musician also includes a manifesto by the American composer Roy Harris (1898–1979), which opens with a celebration of US nature and democracy that resembles the theme and diction of Whitman’s 1855 Preface to the point of unintentional parody. Harris’ opening is worth quoting at length: America is vast and elemental; America is desperately struggling to wrest social balance from her omnivorous industrialism. America is rolling plains, wind-swept prairies, gaunt deserts, rugged mountains, forests of giant redwoods and pines, lonely rockbound shores, seas of wheat and corn stretching on to the elastic horizon, cotton and tobacco fields, fruit orchards, little bare mining towns huddled on the sides of the mountains, lumber camps, oil fields, and New England mill towns. America is smoking, jostling, clamorous cities of steel and glass and electricity dominating human destinies. America is a nightmare of feverish struggling, a graveyard of suppressed human impulses; America waits calmly between the Pacific and the Atlantic while the tide of the Mississippi rises and falls with the seasons . . . Wonderful, young, sinewy, timorous, browbeaten, eager, gullible American society, living in a land of grandeur, dignity, and untold beauty, is slowly kneading consistent racial character from the sifted flour of experience and the sweat of racial destiny. Slowly, surely, there are emerging American types, with characteristic statures, facial expressions, and temperament. (Harris 1933: 149)

As if to prove Whitman’s invocation of an American ‘lawless music’, Harris suggests that there is an American rhythm ‘fundamentally different from the rhythmic impulses of Europeans’, and that ‘from

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this unique rhythmic sense are generated different melodic and form values’. According to Harris, the American ‘sense of rhythm is less symmetrical than the European rhythmic sense’ because the ‘asymmetrical balancing of rhythmic phrases is in our blood; it is not in the European blood’. This is not just a question of neutral differences in style, for according to Harris the European rhythmical sensibility is less sophisticated, as can be seen both in popular music and the contemporary European avant-garde: Anyone who has heard the contrast between a European dance orchestra and an American dance orchestra playing in the same dance hall cannot have failed to notice how monotonous the European orchestra sounds. The Hungarian and Spanish gypsies have a vital rhythmic sense, but it is much more conventional in its metric accents than the native American feeling for rhythm. When Ravel attempted to incorporate our rhythmic sense into his violin sonata, it sounded studied; it was studied, because he did not feel the rhythm in terms of musical phraseology. We do not employ unconventional rhythms as a sophistical gesture; we cannot avoid them. (1933: 151)

With an argument familiar from transatlantic romanticism, Harris implies that the primal rhythmicality of US culture derives directly from its pastoral simplicity: ‘Children skip and walk that way – our conversation would be strained and monotonous without such rhythmic nuances’, and ‘nature abounds in these freer rhythms’. It is a ‘strange phenomenon’, Harris concludes, that ‘the power of repetition’ has self-alienated US musicality by ‘accustoming our ears to the labored symmetrical rhythms which predominate in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European music’ (1933: 153). The cultural force of this idea can be seen by its recurrence – though in a more academic register – in Aaron Copland’s Norton Lectures on Music and Imagination (1951). Copland attributes the preoccupation with rhythmical complexity in American composition to the historical importance of ‘Negroid sources of rhythm’ to US culture. Although he makes this point with the empirical approach of the ethnomusicologist, Copland does not completely resist the rhetoric of Whitmanianism when he identifies (in Villa-Lobos and Charles Ives) a ‘specifically Western imagination’ whose ‘richness and floridity of invention’ is so great that if one wanted to find an ‘analogous largess’, ‘one would have to turn to Herman Melville’s biblical prose or the oceanic verse of Walt Whitman’ (1980: 85, 95).

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In summary, the retrospective canonization of the American Renaissance coincided with a quest for a useable past in latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century musical Americanism. Given the continuing resistance to jazz among modernist cultural theorists, one option was to see American form in experiments with ethnic music – such the ‘Indianist movement’ represented by Arthur Farwell’s (1872–1952) American Indian Melodies (1901) – or in the adaptation of folk traditions inspired by Dvorˇák, as it defined some of the works of George Whitefield Chadwick (1854–1931) and Amy Beach (1864–1944) (see Block 1990, and Nicholls 1998: 249–53). Another option for cultural theorists was the ‘Americanization’ of European classics that had already begun when the transcendentalists interpreted Beethoven as a musical premonition of social utopia. For example, Paul Rosenfeld portrayed the music of Wagner as the epitome of America’s democratic essence. He said that ‘Wagner’s music’ was ‘the sign and symbol of the nineteenth century’ (1922: 3), because it embodied in its structure the material and cultural revolutions of this era. Echoing Whitmanian concepts, Rosenfeld asserts that Wagner ‘express[ed] the man of the nineteenth century’ by discarding ‘the old major-minor system that had dominated Europe so long’ (1922: 13), thus ‘breaking the monarchy of the C-major scale’ (1922: 14). Because of Wagner’s intervention, Rosenfeld argues, ‘there are no longer musical rules, forbidden harmonies, dissonances’, so that ‘East and West are near to merging once again’ (1922: 15) (as Whitman had already proposed in ‘A Passage to India’). This act of redemptive democratization makes Wagner a quintessentially American composer: ‘[W]here was this music more immanent than in the New World, in America, that essentialization of the entire age?’ Rosenfeld answers his rhetorical question by saying that if the nineteenth-century US had had a similarly ‘uninterrupted flow of musical expression’ as Germany, it would have produced no music ‘more indigenous, more really autochthonous, than that of Richard Wagner’ (1922: 6), which is indeed harmonious with both Whitman’s poetic and the cultural and natural premises of the United States: Whitman was right when he termed these scores ‘the music of the “Leaves.”’ For nowhere did the forest of the Niebelungen flourish more lushly, more darkly, than upon the American coasts and mountains and plains. From the towers and walls of New York there fell a breath, a grandiloquent language, a stridency and a glory, that were Wagner’s indeed. His regal commanding blasts, his upsweeping marching violins,

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his pompous and majestic orchestra, existed in the American scene. The very masonry and river-spans, the bursting towns, the fury and expansiveness of existence shed his idiom, shadowed forth his proud processionals, his resonant gold, his tumultuous syncopations and blazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody; appeared to be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art. American life seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose promise might attain something like eternal being. (1922: 6–7) NOTES

1. The idea of sphere melodies goes back to Pythagorean thinking and holds that the movement of the stars produces harmonic sounds whose intervals are based on the numeric relations of the cosmos. Boethius’ influential De Musica describes the music of the spheres as a musica mundana of which the musica humana is an inferior reflection that corresponds to the harmony of the human soul and its physiological structure. The notion that inspired minds are able to hear the music of the spheres and attain mystical knowledge from it is already part of the Pythagorean origin of this topos (see Mehring 2003: 384–91). The sphere music idea looms large in metaphysical concepts of music within neoplatonic thinking, whereas it tends to be dismissed as myth whenever a more empirical interest in tonal relations predominates (such as in the ninth section of the second book of Aristotle’s On the Heavens/ De Caelo). For a summary of how the topos fared in Anglo-American romantic theory, and especially Whitman, see Spitzer 1949. 2. See my discussion of Emerson and Carlyle’s notion of ‘musical thought’ (Chap. 3, pp. 74–5). These notions were also theorized in German idealism. As Manfred Frank has pointed out, Schelling portrays ‘sound’ [‘Klang’] as the ‘infinite concept of God running through all things’. Rhythm (in music or rhyme) expresses the ‘form of movement of universal bodies’ (Frank 2002: 211, 219). 3. Schopenhauer provides an extensive list of parallelisms: for example, he sees an analogy between the fourfold division of harmonic chords (tonica, third, fifth, and octave) and the four spheres of the chain of being (minerals, plants, animals, man) (1958: 2/Chap. 39). Or he takes the melodic interplay between consonance and dissonance, tension and resolution, to parallel the strivings of man driven by the movement of Will. At times his similes become rather literary, as when he interprets the continuation of melody over varying chords or keys as a parable of existence: the change of chord signifies the death of the individual, the continuing melody the persistence of Will (1958: 1/§52).

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4. Hanslick was encouraged to this revision by the Austrian philosopher Robert Zimmermann, whose review of the first edition pointed out the inconsistencies of Hanslick’s aesthetic formalism: as Zimmermann puts it: [What sort of movements of the universe, then, are supposed to resound in music? Of celestial bodies? Is music then aural astronomy? . . . I presume the author has been involuntarily overcome by reminiscences of the same philosophy of art that his treatise elsewhere so very trenchantly refutes. (1854)] 5. For an introduction to Dwight and his intellectual background, see Lowens 1957; Delano 1983; Saloman 1995 and 2001. 6. Hoffmann wove this review into his cycle of tales, entitled SerapionsBrüder (1819). For a summary of his argument, see Dahlhaus 1978: 94–100; 1989: 92–102. 7. In Hoffmann’s text, the move from Haydn to Beethoven is framed with a temporal metaphor of day-into-night (Rumph 1995). Haydn’s music seems harmless, while Beethoven’s sublimity has an undertone of Gothic terror (Hoffmann 1963: 35–6; see also Newman 1983). 8. Dwight’s comparison of musical and architectural styles recalls Schelling’s image of architecture as ‘frozen music’, and it also calls to mind a passage from Hoffmann’s ‘Kreisleriana’ tales which holds that ‘the music of Sebastian Bach relates to the music of old Italy like the Strassburg Minster to Rome’s St. Peter’ (Hoffmann 1967: 50). 9. ‘The coward’, Thoreau says, ‘would reduce this thrilling sphere music to a universal wail, – this melodious chant to a nasal cant. He thinks to conciliate all hostile influences by compelling his neighborhood into a partial concord with himself, but his music is no better than a jingle, which is akin to a jar, – jars regularly recurring’ (2001: 14). 10. As Dwight explains: each individual note in Beethoven’s Ninth [is a whole, a unit in itself, and must assert its individuality, insisting on its own peculiar sound, at the same time that it reverently dedicates itself and helps fulfill beyond itself the harmony of the whole. Apply this to society. Each member is a unit by himself, and individual; and yet he belongs to humanity. In living for the whole he lives most effectually to himself; for it takes all humanity to complete him, to set him in his own only place, and so surround him as to illustrate and bring out his peculiar beauty. He is not himself except in true relations with the whole. Yet he must not lose himself in the whole; he must preserve his individuality. (1844b: 5)] 11. Marx believed that the progress of mind puts increasing demands on music’s capability of turning the thickening plot of humanity’s Bildung into sensible manifestation. Rossini’s music is still too sensuous to

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12. 13.

14.

15.

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render much spiritual meaning, and thus merely useful as a pleasurable backdrop for Italian opera (a notion that informs Dwight’s claim that Rossini represents war). The German tradition epitomized by Haydn and Mozart is said to have enabled music to express more concrete feelings. The landmark composition for the latest breakthrough, according to Marx, was Beethoven’s Third, with which music moved from ‘indeterminate emotion’ to ‘a determinate consciousness’, from the realm of mere ‘feeling’ that had defined Mozart to that of ‘character’ (1884: 271–5). For a summary of Marx’s nationalist argument, see Pederson 1994. On Marx’s influence on Dwight, see Saloman 1995: Chap. 3. See also Burnam 1990. See Saloman 1994, who traces Dwight’s use of Marx’s 1835 encyclopedia article on Beethoven. See Hanslick’s critiques of interpretations of Beethoven’s Ninth that focus not on the music itself but on its supposedly deep symbolic meaning (1966: 66). Hanslick argues that the spirit of the times may affect a musical artwork, but remains irrelevant to its beauty (1966: 81). Dwight respects musically trained critics like Hanslick, but he finds that formalist approaches miss the spiritual or poetic content of music (1853: 1–2). Brendel’s landmark study went through eight editions, four during his lifetime (1852, 1855, 1860, 1867), and four posthumous ones (1875, 1878, 1889, and 1903) that were partly amended by Wagnerian critics (the fifth and sixth by Friedrich Stade, the final edition by Robert Hövker). In 1854, Brendel published a comprehensive study on Wagner’s theoretical works (Die Musik der Gegenwart und die Gesammtkunst der Zukunft) whose basic tenets he then incorporated in the second edition of his History, which he extended by three more lectures. The subsequent editions feature minor revisions that reflect the late-nineteenth-century debates around Wagnerism. Richard Wagner elaborated on this thesis in the first part of his treatise on Opera and Drama (1852), whose English translation had already appeared in the London-based Musical World between 1855 and 1856 and was republished in excerpts in Dwight’s Journal. In 1853, Dwight’s Journal published a translation of Wagner’s 1846 reading of the Ninth Symphony that describes Beethoven’s move beyond the symphonic genre thus: ‘With the beginning of the last movement, Beethoven’s music . . . quits the character, preserved in the first three movements, of pure instrumental music, which is marked by an infinite and indeterminate expression’. Wagner considers the tumultuous beginning of the movement (with a ‘thrilling Recitative of the instrumental basses’) a ‘final effort to express by instrumental music alone a secure, well-defined, and never clouded state of joy’, which fails because instrumental music ‘seems incapable of this limitation: it foams up to a roaring sea, sub-

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16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

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sides again, and stronger than ever presses the wild, chaotic shriek of unsatisfied passion upon our ear’, until Beethoven finally puts a stop to the musical chaos, by saying: ‘“Friends, no more of these tones! Rather let us sing together more pleasant and more joyful strains”’ (Wagner 1853: 138). This was not a return to the eighteenth-century theories that viewed music as a vague emotional commentary on the operatic or sacred text. It meant that the poetic essence of a literary text – itself considered elusive to conceptual paraphrasing – must react with the poetic essence of a musical form. The resulting synthesis would then be a poetic essence of a higher degree. This new poetic content was greater than the sum of its parts, and irreducible to any semantic or conceptual content suggested by the words of the program. This phrase first appears in the posthumous 1903 edition of Brendel’s History (see fn. 15 above). Dwight’s Journal serialized excerpts from, among others, Marx’s Music in the Nineteenth-Century (1855: vol. 7; 1865–7: vols 25–7) and Beethoven (1871: vol. 30), Wagner’s Opera and Drama (1855: 7) and Beethoven (1872: vol. 32), Brendel’s History of Music (1874: vol. 34), Hiller’s Tonleben unserer Zeit (1874: vol. 34), and Ritter’s History of Music (1875: vol. 34). It featured reviews of Marx’s Beethoven (1860–1: vols 16–17), Wagner’s ‘Judaism in Music’ (1869: vol. 24), and the music theories of Wagner (1874: vol. 33 and 1876: vol. 35, on his connection to Schopenhauer), Helmholtz (1873: vol. 33 and 1875: vol. 35), and Hanslick (1876: vol. 36 and 1879: vol. 39). In 1856, Dwight’s Journal published a program note to Heinrich’s Opus 77, Columbæ: The Wild or Passenger Pigeons: A Characteristic American Tone-Picture, for full Orchestra, which the composer signed: ‘A Recollection of a Hermit in his Log-House in Kentucky. Anthony Philip Heinrich’ (Dwight 1856: 183). It is useful to recall that such romantic music religions as Schopenhauer’s make conceptual use of images of music as expression of an archaicDionysian life force, but locate their theories in a musical practice that seems rather tamely classical to modern ears. Even Whitman associated the Schopenhauerian music of nature, which he described in ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ as a ‘savage old mother incessantly crying’ (2002: 210), not with Wagneresque endless melodies or proto-Mahlerian sound cascades, but with the tonal classicism of early Italian opera (his favorites were Vincenzo Bellini’s La Sonnambula and Norma of 1831). Dwight rejected the ‘literal description of nature’ in instrumental music (1840: 128). As he explains in a critique of Father Heinrich: [In its effort to describe things, to paint pictures to the hearer’s imagination, music leaves its natural channels, and forfeits the true

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Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman unity which would come from the simple development of itself from within as music . . . Mr. Heinrich belongs to that romantic class, who wish to attach a story to every thing they do. Mere outward scenes and histories seem to have occupied the mind of the composer too much, and to have disturbed the pure spontaneous inspiration of his melodies. We are sorry to see such circumstances dragged into music as the ‘Indian War Council’, the ‘Advance of the Americans’, the ‘Skirmish’ and ‘Fall of Tecumseh’. Music, aiming at no subject, – music composed with no consciousness of anything in the world but music, is sure to tell of greater things than these. (Dwight 1846: 59)]

22. The episode began when Willis reviewed a performance of Fry’s Santa Claus: A Christmas Symphony (performed by New York’s Jullien Orchestra on Christmas Eve 1853) for his Musical World and dismissed the work as an artistic failure. See Hatch 1962. 23. When Fry defends his music against Richard Storrs Willis’ charge that his compositions are failures, he argues that when his music does use contrapuntal structures it is ‘not for mathematical somersets – ups and downs for the sake of ups and downs, but for the only true direction of music, the conveyance of an idea’ (1854: 138). This sounds Wagnerian enough; but Willis, who was well-read in contemporary music theory, immediately teased out Fry’s conceptual irregularities. In a reply to Fry, he argued that while music may suggest ideas ‘through the emotion which it excites’, it ‘never expressed an idea’ (Willis 1854a: 146). Fry could have rejoined in the spirit of Wagner’s Opera and Drama, but instead answers with what seems a retraction: what he really meant when he had said that music should express an original idea was that it should express ‘an original musical idea’ (1854b: 163, emphasis mine). This phrase is rather surprising, to be sure, because the formalist reference to the purely musical contradicts Fry’s earlier justification of his formal choices, which he said were determined by extra-musical ideas. Willis realized this contradiction and asked how Fry was going to ‘reconcile’ his reference to musical ideas with his assertion that ‘all music is imitative’ (Willis 1854b: 171). It seems that Willis cornered Fry on a conceptual contradiction that Fry did not intend and probably did not see because he used the terms ‘expression’, ‘imitation’, and ‘(musical) ideas’ interchangeably and indifferently to the meanings they had acquired in contemporary music theory. Thus Fry’s argument for musical ideas is rooted in an eighteenth-century theory of opera that restricts music to the function of illustrating the poetic and dramatic work through musical imitation. As Fry puts it in his second reply to Willis: ‘Music is not, as you assert, an independent language’, and ‘melody’ is ‘allied to language; to words, to metre’ (1854b: 163).

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24. Dvorˇák was invited by Jeannette Thurber to teach composition at the National Conservatory: she founded this institute in order to provide a forum for native talents, and hoped that the Slavic nationalist might contribute to the creation of an American school of composition. See Clapham 1981: 21 and, for a discussion of musical nationalism with regard to Dvorˇák and Whitman, Kerkering 2003: 113–51. 25. For an overview of the various positions, see Zuck 1980: 58ff. The relevant documents are reprinted in Tibbetts 1993.

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Chapter 6

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND THE SMELL OF THE WOODS

It is a truism that, for nineteenth-century US cultural critics, the meaning of ‘America’ is deeply rooted in the geographical specifics of the New World.1 Myra Jehlen has shown how this preoccupation with place encouraged eighteenth- and nineteenth-century models of nationhood based on the idea of ‘incarnation’, where cultural production was considered a realization of the continent’s intrinsic potential. In cultivating the land, the American pioneer created ‘nature’s kind of civilization by cultivating not a telos’ (no ‘predetermined program’ imported from Europe and imposed on the New World) ‘but an infinite entelechy’ embodied in the North American space and to be brought to fruition by its pioneer cultivators. ‘“America”’, then, ‘was not allegory, for its meaning was not detachable, but symbol, its meaning inherent in its matter’ (1986: 72–3, 9). Jehlen concludes that ‘the United States was defined primarily as place’ (1986: 6), and that ‘an idea of incarnation can be seen to organize American self-consciousness as grammar organizes speech’ (1986: 21). The concept of incarnation in US discourse draws its persuasiveness from the rhetorical interplay and tension between two geographical models of culture that often reinforce and supplement one another. The first model posits a ‘spatial determinism’ that considers cultural expression to be causally dependent on the topographical environment. Although spatial determinism reaches its greatest authority in the eighteenth century (epitomized by Montesquieu’s connection of morality and place), it remains influential within the natural sciences until well after the Civil War. The second model

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posits a ‘spatial symbolism’ that approaches New World topographies as symbolic prefigurations (or parallelisms) of America’s cultural potential. While spatial symbolism is rooted in preenlightenment discourses of natural theology, it gains cultural centrality within the context of romantic naturism (Naturphilosophie) around 1800. It is helpful, I think, to regard deterministic and symbolist models of space as broader genres that can be further divided according to their focus on spatial and textual particulars. Spatial determinism diverges into what I will call functionalist and symptomatic frameworks. The former focuses on how the natural environment furthers or inhibits cultural production (see Chap. 2 pp. 49–51 above), while the latter assumes that the natural environment is reproduced in the structure of cultural expression (southern landscapes produce hot tempers congenial to love poetry, northern ones induce melancholic reflection, or a democratic restlessness, and so on). Models of spatial symbolism always posit structural parallelisms between nature and culture, but they vary in the extent to which they universalize the spiritual substance of space. Emanationist variants treat the particularities of natural landscapes as signs of a stable spiritual entity – whose concretizations range from a personalized God who authored a Book of Nature, to the various (neo)Platonic or pantheistic life-forces pervading natural space. Such models typically consider cultural well-being to depend on sympathetic closeness to nature, which is then taken to manifest itself in the organic structure of a culture’s forms of expression (the rounded styles of Gothic ornament and oceanic verse emerge from pastoral conditions, while neoclassicism reflects alienation from the ‘tonic’ of natural environments). Whitmanian authority typically draws from a spatial symbolism conceived in terms of an evolutionist or historicist framework that allows for a degree of spiritual pluralism (the simultaneous existence of non-synchronous stages of world spirit, for instance). Particularities of natural landscapes can then be viewed as symbols of a manifest destiny or specific and unique states of being. These analytical distinctions should not be applied too rigorously, but they may elucidate the immensely complex interaction, in the US, between the broad discursive field of pastoralist celebration of American nature and the rhetorical strategies of the Whitmanian moment.2

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Climatic Degeneracy and the Function of Space

Functionalist versions of spatial determinism are all but indifferent to the rhetorical needs of Whitmanian authority. They hinge on the question of whether or not the New-World landscapes are favorable enough to provide a ground for civilized societies. This question was already central to early travel accounts fascinated by America’s fecundity and abundance (such as Arthur Barlow’s ‘The First Voyage’ of 1594), but it outright dominated the reception of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748). Montesquieu’s preoccupation with the connections between place and morals shaped the Enlightenment debates on the corruptive influences of the American climate on higher organisms.3 Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1784–5) is an implicit defense against the claims (made notably by Buffon and de Pauw) that America’s flora, fauna, and aboriginal races are of inferior quality due to the New World’s debilitating climatic and physical disadvantages. Jefferson’s treatise rejects the degeneracy thesis with an agrarianist narrative of American space as a superior, beneficial, and stunningly beautiful resource that will form an ideal basis for moral self-cultivation. This does not make place a structural determinant of cultural forms. Functionalist variants of spatial determinism restrict the legitimation of a national poetics to the binary of cultural health or cultural sickness. For example, the neoclassicist critic Johann Winckelmann (1717–68) authorizes Greek art by arguing that immoderate climates destroy an aesthetic sense (‘The closer nature approaches its center’, he claims, ‘the more evenly it creates’ [1972: 147]). Jeffersonian neoclassicists tend to agree, and stress that the US climate is more moderate than Northern Europe’s and thus more conducive to the building of a future ‘American Athens’ – William Byrd II declares in 1731 that his Virginia home ‘lies much in the same latitude with Italy, Greece’, and ‘all other fine clymates in the world’, and ‘differs but a few degrees from that of Paradise’ (1977: 2/444). A second important spatial narrative follows Rousseau’s inversion of the sickness/health binary, to argue that America’s agrarian utopia will break free from the refined and artificial luxuries of aesthetic discourse towards a wilder, more primitive, but also more authentic and natural roughness that signifies an ‘end of art’ or ‘return of the real’ (see Chap. 1, pp. 29–32 above). The narrator of Crèvecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer (1782), a Pennsylvanian named James, opens

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his introductory letter to his fictive correspondent (‘a great European man’ [1986: 40] living at Cambridge University) with a gesture of humility that is really a thinly disguised claim of superiority. His letters, as James’ local minister puts it, may disregard ‘scientific rules’ (1986: 49) and contain ‘errors of language’, but ‘if they be not elegant, they will smell of the woods and be a little wild’ (1986: 41), resembling ‘something like one of our wild American plants, irregularly luxuriant in its various branches’. While the wildness of these American letters could make them appear ‘ill-placed and useless’ to the eye of the ‘European scholar’, their authenticity may well render them more valuable than if they ‘were clad in all the gowns of Cambridge’ (1986: 46). Crèvecoeur presents his writing, not as an artistic embodiment or symbolic recreation of wild nature, but as an example of nature in the raw, the ‘smell’ of the wilds unfiltered by art and artifice. His emphasis lies, not on the stylistic mimesis of American nature, but simply on the rejection of style.4 The Enlightenment interest in the physical effects of the US environments reappears with the mid-nineteenth-century turn towards the positivist sciences, as we can gather from J. W. Scott’s series of articles on the influence of climate on human development in the 1860 issue of Debow’s Review (1860 and 1860b), which replay Jefferson’s 1785 discussion of European and American levels of humidity (Jefferson 1984: 799–82, 801). Rebuking Mary Somerville’s Physical Geography (1848) and Arnold Guyot’s Earth and Man (1849) for adapting geological data ‘to the self-love of Europeans for whom they wrote’, Scott argues that the ‘climate of North America’ is ‘superior’ to that of Europe ‘by reason of its much wider range of heat and cold, carrying southward its vigor-giving cold air, in winter, to the highlands of the Southern States’ (1860b: 648), and because ‘the more elevated lands in the temperate zone have the purest, and, therefore, the best breathing air for man’ (1860b: 650). According to Scott, ‘the largest and best developed men and women, in the United States, grow up on the elevated portions of our country’ (1860: 504). In 1875, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Atlantic Monthly essay on ‘The Americanized European’ ponders how the US environment might create an American race out of European raw material. Holmes sets out from a discussion of Edward Clarke’s treatise on the Building of the Brain (Boston, 1874), which argues that the English stock can only survive on the American continent if it ‘can develop an organization and a brain equal to the demands made upon it by its conditions’ (1875: 75). Holmes takes Clarke’s thesis as an occasion to

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review the degeneracy debate, but draws his most important evidence for the beneficial effects of the American environment from statistical data on the present health of the nation, such as the enthusiastic estimate of the vigor of American troops by the Surgeon General of the United States in 1861, or the reassuring results of scientific statistics on the average ‘statures for men of different nativities’ (1875: 81) conducted by the United States Sanitary Commission (concluding, for instance, that the men of Ohio and Kentucky are taller than German, French or Irishmen). Holmes urges that the nexus between climate and health be more rigorously researched, before ‘we shall be ready to say whether or not we are on the wrong half of the planet, like the ill-conditioned creatures that hide beneath the white underside of a pumpkin’ (1875: 81–2). Symptomatic Spaces

Holmes’ climatological reflections show how easily spatial determinism shifts from functional to symptomatic variants, from the conceptualization of climatic determinants in terms of a simple health/illness opposition to the notion that specific environments encourage specific cultural traits. What interests him most about the geologist’s climatological argumentation is the notion that the New World conditions may have created racial differences. Holmes suggests that the atmospheric conditions in the US should work together with the effects of ‘the peculiarities of a new soil, the meteorological changes, the electrical and many other little known conditions’ that ‘might lead us to expect, a priori, that the new country would breed a new type of humanity’. Whether this new type will be ‘[b]etter or worse’, Holmes argues, ‘may be questioned’, but it will be ‘different, certainly’ (1875: 83). His vision of an American race with distinct ‘physiognomical and physiological qualities’ combines the desire for Adamic self-reliance with the idea that nature reflects itself in symptomatic terms. This idea is already implied in eighteenth-century theories of climatic influence: according to Montesquieu, ‘Cold air contracts the extremities of the body’s surface fibers’ and ‘shortens these same fibers’, which increases ‘their strength and their spring’, making northern nations more ‘vigorous’, more confident, frank, and self-reliant, but less receptive to sensuous pleasures (1989: 231). The hot environments that influence the southerners account for lengthened nerve ends which make their ‘sensitive machine’ (1989: 234) prone to bursts of

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amorous passion, but also predisposes them to a general indolence and listlessness that explains their tendency to neglect their soils and to succumb to despotic systems of government (1989: 236, 278). Montesquieu’s parallelization of a people’s ‘esprit général’ and their spatial conditions (1989: 308–33) echoes through late-eighteenthcentury Enlightenment discourse. The narrator of Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer compares people to ‘plants’ whose ‘goodness and flavour’ depends on ‘the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow’ (1986: 71). Crèvecoeur’s book is mainly an agrarianist celebration of the invigorating and transformative powers of American nature (‘our great Alma Mater’, whose ‘broad lap’ receives the European seeds and turns them into vigorous plants [1986: 70]). Yet he notes that US landscapes vary in their effects: people living near the coastal regions or in the ‘middle settlements’ (between the Appalachians and the coast) seem to do well enough, but under the spatial conditions of the frontier, ‘men appear to be no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank’ (1986: 72). For: ‘there is something in the proximity of the woods which is very singular’ (1986: 76). Montesquieu explored in great detail the putative connections between climate and democratic government. He suggested that the English parliamentary system may have profited from its drizzling skies, which leads to a melancholic, even suicidal predisposition (‘the English resolve to kill themselves when one can imagine no reason for their decisions’ [1989: 241]). His point was that if a northern nation is so ‘affected by an illness of climate’ that it suffers from general depression (‘repugnance for all things to include that of life’), it may be more likely to become so restless and impatient of sameness and stability that it is ‘apt to frustrate the projects of tyranny’ (1989: 242–3). Montesquieu’s connection of bad weather with democracy reappears, in various transformations or inversions, in US discourse. Jefferson adopts most of Montesquieu’s catalogue of homologies to characterize the difference between northern and southern mentalities in the US (the former are ‘cool’, ‘sober’, ‘laborious’, and ‘persevering’; the latter ‘fiery’, ‘voluptuary’, ‘indolent’, and ‘unsteady’ (1984: 827).5 In 1805, Jefferson suggests that the climatic extremes of the New World create a more ‘cheerful’ condition that ‘has eradicated from our constitutions all disposition to hang ourselves, which we might otherwise have inherited from our English ancestors’ (1984: 1155). This facetious comment points to popular nineteenth-century ideas about how democracy emerges from climatic conditions that

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further a sensibility of restlessness and nervous energy fundamental to an American way of life. De Tocqueville famously observed a ‘restiveness of heart’ in American society (in the first volume of Democracy in America of 1835), which he explained, however, as an effect, not of the climate (‘physical causes’, he said ‘do not influence the destiny of nations as much as one supposes’) but the normalizing tendencies typical of democratic institutions (‘restiveness of heart’ is ‘natural to men, when, all conditions being nearly equal, each sees the same chances of rising’) (2000: 293, 297). But cultural critics found it hard to resist the idea that restless activity exudes from the New World conditions and must therefore be considered a source rather than an effect of democratization. For Emerson this idea had at least some rhetorical appeal: his 1861 lecture on Boston begins with a meditation on climatic reasons for what he considered the city’s unusually high degree of cultural activeness: the ‘larger range and greater versatility’ of Bostonian intellectual culture, he mused, might be due to its ‘climate of extremes’, which ranges from ‘the splendor of the equator and a touch of Syria’ to ‘a cold which approaches the temperature of the celestial spaces’ (1903: 12/185). Emerson’s address was reprinted by the Atlantic in 1892; Holmes’ Atlantic essay of 1875 mentions the theory of climatic restlessness outlined by the Swiss geologist Pierre Édouard Desor (1811–82), an influential associate of the Harvard geologist Louis Agassiz whom Holmes knew personally. Desor’s treatise on the moral and physical effects of the US climate (Desor 1853) fueled American interest in the climatic premises of culture. As The Manufacturer and Builder of 1871 paraphrases Desor’s theory, the ‘changeable and dry’ climate in the United States accounts for the American’s nervous ‘activity, acuteness, his tall stature, his eagerness for gain, his practical talent, and his love of adventure’ (Anon. 1871: 71). Dryness leads to a ‘greater nervous irritability’ than in other continents, so that Americans have to work harder than other nations to maintain ‘the habit of self-government’. As a result, Americans are ‘the most irritable’ people ‘on the face of the earth’ and simultaneously ‘the best disciplined’ one. The ‘large measure in which [liberty] exists here’ is only possible because ‘each individual has been early accustomed to restrain his impulses’. Thus ‘[t]he climate of the United States, in inducing the adoption of certain principles of education’, is crucial to the success story of American democracy (Anon. 1871b: 111). Holmes’ Atlantic essay favors a more careful interpretation of Desor’s data, but the rhetorical potential of nature–culture parallelisms

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in the 1870s can best be seen in the travel writing of the naturist (and passionate Whitmanian) John Burroughs, who wrote about his European travels in a series of essays (for Appleton’s, Scribner’s Monthly, and Galaxy) he later revised for his second book, Winter Sunshine (1875). Burroughs deals with symptomatic spatial determinism in much broader strokes: his Scribner’s essay on ‘Mellow England’ begins by staging his voyage to the British Isles as the return of a colonial naïf to the mother country, a homecoming from the uncultivated periphery to the metropolitan center of power. But Burroughs complicates the imperial cliché when he subverts the generic associations of the urban center with masculine strength and of the wilds with virginal softness. In Burroughs’ gendered conceptual metaphor, the English landscape is not a ravished virgin but a spouse who embraces her cultivators in consensual marriage. It has been transformed into a landscape that is ‘benign and maternal’ rather than broken and destroyed, and it wields in turn a feminizing environmental influence on British civilization (reflected in an ‘atmosphere of ripe and loving husbandry’) (1874: 563). In a subsequent essay for Century magazine, Burroughs extends the marriage metaphor to contrast English and American landscapes, but this time the role of the spouse is played by the climatic conditions: The ‘dominant impression of the English landscape is repose’, he observes, because in England ‘Nature’ is ‘contented, she is happily wedded, she is well clothed and fed’. US landscapes resemble maidens mistreated by conditions personified as aggressive and neglecting husbands: due to America’s ‘cruder soil and sharper climate’, ‘the foliage of the trees and groves of New England and New York looks thin and disheveled’, and ‘[i]n midsummer the hair of our trees seems to stand on end; the woods have a wild, frightened look, or as if they were just recovering from a debauch’ (1883: 113–14). In his Scribner’s essay Burroughs argues that these climatic differences account for what he considers to be ‘differences between the English stock at home and its offshoot in our country’. In general terms, the US climate ‘is more heady and less stomachic than the English; sharpens the wit, but dries up the fluids and viscera; favors an irregular, nervous energy, but exhausts the animal spirits’. As a result, Americans have not enough constitutional inertia and stolidity; our climate gives us no rest, but goads us day and night, and the consequent wear and tear of life is no doubt greater in this country than in any other on the globe. We are playing the game more rapidly, but no doubt less thoroughly and sincerely than the mother country. (1874: 566)

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Hence Burroughs turns the tables on the traditional pastoralist oppositions: the virgin lands of the mainly agrarian US are presented as a hostile environment that turns mice into men, but also induces a culture characterized by consumerism and restlessness. The center of the British Empire, by contrast, is a place where the soft hues of domesticated pastures cause a general complacency and cultural equilibrium. Burroughs makes this point clearly in his interpretation of the famous London fog. His description begins with an apocalyptic tableau resonant of the conventional Victorian attacks on Manchester industrialism (from the opening of Dickens’ Bleak House [1852] to Ruskin’s ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ [1884]), in which the fog appears as ‘a great yellow dog taking possession of the world’ while ‘half London lay buried beneath this sickening eruption’ of ‘an enormous quantity of thick, yellowish smoke’. But foggy London emerges as a pastoralist middle landscape, as the industrial emissions turn out to be conducive to the people’s health: ‘this compound of smut, fog, and common air is an elixir of youth’, evidenced in the ‘fresh, blooming complexions’ and ‘fine physical tone and fullbloodedness among the people’ (1874: 565). Burroughs also presents climatic influence as a symptomatic cause of racial and cultural differences between England and America. English faces radiate with climatically induced vigor, but ‘it is always and everywhere the same face’, while ‘[c]ases of striking . . . beauty’ are ‘easier to find’ in the US (1874: 567). When Burroughs revised his essay for publication in Winter Sunshine, he rephrased and extended this ambiguous passage to sharpen his point. The revised paragraph reads: English women are comely and good-looking. It is an extremely fresh and pleasant face that you see everywhere,– softer, less clearly and sharply cut than the typical female face in this country,– less spirituelle, less perfect in form, but stronger and sweeter. There is more blood, and heart, and substance back of it. (1904: 166–7)

In the later version, English physiognomy is now characterized by a mellow and soft type of beauty that may exceed American types in vigor and sweetness, but is less mature and defined. As Burroughs further elaborates this difference, his praise of British beauty comes to sound almost disparaging (as softness washes over into amorphousness, while American haggardness is rephrased as welldefinedness):

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The American race of the present generation is doubtless the most shapely, both in face and figure, that has yet appeared. American children are far less crude, and lumpy, and awkward-looking than the European children. One generation in this country suffices vastly to improve the looks of the offspring of the Irish or German or Norwegian emigrant. There is surely something in our climate or conditions that speedily refines and sharpens – and, shall I add, hardens? – the human features. The face loses something, but it comes into shape; and of such beauty as is the product of this tendency we can undoubtedly show more, especially in our women, than the parent stock in Europe; while American schoolgirls, I believe, have the most bewitching beauty in the world. (1904: 167)

Burroughs uses in his text these two types of female beauty (soft and vigorous versus hard and defined) as symbolic frames. Based on material he had published in Appleton’s in 1872, he constructs a homology of cultural traits and the conditions of place: England is a mellow country, and the English people are a mellow people . . . By contrast, things here are loud, sharp, and garish. Our geography is loud; the manners of the people are loud; our climate is loud, very loud, so dry and sharp, and full of violent changes and contrasts; and our goings-out and comings-in as a nation are anything but silent. Do we not occasionally give the door an extra slam just for effect? In England everything is on a lower key, slower, steadier, gentler. Life is, no doubt, as full, or fuller, in its material forms and measures, but less violent and aggressive. (1904: 186–7)

The punch line of Burroughs’ study is an inverted Rousseauism that portrays the former colonial masters as a gentle, ‘sweet and mellow people’, ‘more simple, youthful, and less sophisticated’ than the former colonials, who are now of a greater ‘cuteness, wideawakeness, and enterprise’ (which at worst makes them also more ‘impudent’ and ‘superficial’) (1904: 191). Burroughs finally rephrases the distinction between hard and soft climates as one between naïve Greeks and self-reflexive moderns: ‘We are a more alert curious people, but not so simple, – not so easily angered, nor so easily amused. We have partaken more largely of the fruit of the forbidden tree’ (1904: 192). The authority of nature–culture parallelisms in late-nineteenthcentury US discourse can be seen in Josiah Royce’s address before the National Geographical Society in 1898, on the ‘Relations of

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Climate and Civilization’ on the Pacific Coast. Royce – at the time a well-known Harvard philosopher (colleague and friendly philosophical antagonist of William James) – is a great deal more careful than Burroughs, complicating his thesis with disclaimers and qualifications. He nonetheless seeks to demonstrate that ‘the outer aspect of nature unquestioningly molds both the emotions and the customs of mankind’ and ‘affects men’s temperaments in ways which, as we know, somehow or other tend to become hereditary’ (1969: 1/194). Royce suggests that the relatively mild and constant climate in California leads to an ‘inner consciousness’ (1969: 1/190) based on a specific ‘sensitiveness to nature’ that differs ‘in kind’ both ‘from the sensitiveness that a severer climate would inevitably involve’ (in New England or the South) and ‘from that belonging to climates mild but moist and more variable’ (in the British Isles) (1969: 1/195). The Californian climate encourages in the rural populations of farmholders ‘a kind of harmonious individuality that already tends in the best instances toward a somewhat Hellenic type’ (1969: 1/198). At the height of Whitman’s canonization, symptomatic variants of spatial determinism became part of the modernist fascination with the primitive. In 1927, C. G. Jung suggested a relationship between ‘Soul and Earth’,6 and identified ‘a subtle difference’ between ‘the American and the European’ that can be seen ‘in the language, the gestures, the mentality, in the movements of the body’ (1996: 192). Part of this difference is due to a ‘racial infection’ by the more ‘primitive’ Africans (manifesting itself in ‘slightly Negroid mannerisms’ that leave the ‘inner quick of the American character untouched’ [1996: 196–7]). The spatial influence is more fundamental: as the American landscape reacted on European immigrants, the mental state and outer physiognomy of Americans moved closer to that of Native American cultures, amounting to ‘an astonishing likeness between the cast of the American face and that of the red Indian’ as well as a ‘less visible, but all the more intense, influence on the mind’ responsible for the difference ‘in mental attitude’ between Euro-Americans and contemporary Europeans (1996: 198), and the likeness between New Mexican pueblos and American cityscapes (1996: 201). Virtually all members of the Seven Arts group toyed with the idea that, as Waldo Frank puts it, ‘the behavior of our men and women is inseparable from’ the ‘frenzy’ and organic ‘chaos’ of a landscape that ‘turns the Alps almost to monotone’ (1919: 6–7). America has such a high ‘geological tempo’ and ‘atmospheric fury’ that it tends to overwhelm the immigrant, for it ‘unsettles the human organism; keys it up: splinters

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the norm of nervous register into a flux. And the suspense of nerve reacts upon the temperament’ (1919: 6). Within the contemporary discourse of US nature writing, symptomatic spatial determinism has moved from scientific theory to poetic trope, although sometimes the line between literary metaphor and scientific claim seems blurred. A pertinent example is Barry Lopez’s suggestion, in 1984, that the ecological embeddedness of the human mind should be viewed as the interaction between ‘two landscapes – one outside the self, the other within’. Both the interior and the exterior landscapes, Lopez argues, are defined, not merely by their elements, but by the relationships between these elements. His thesis is that the ‘shape and character’ of ‘relationships in a person’s thinking’ are ‘deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature – the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known’. Hence ‘the interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes’ (1989: 64–5; see Buell 1995: 103). What makes Lopez’s theory pertinent here is not the idea that nature experiences have certain effects on our life, our memories, and our self-conceptions (one does not have to be a hard-nosed empiricist to agree). Rather, it is the belief that, first, natural environments and human minds have intrinsic patterns (sets of relationships), and, second, that these patterns tend to be homological. Not only does life on a farm have concrete influences on our behavior, spatial figurations leave a structural imprint on our mental disposition. Symptomatic Spatial Poetics

The spatial legitimation of literary value has as long a tradition as climatic determinism itself. In 1690, Sir William Temple suggested that the English literary genius results from ‘our Clymat’ (1909: 105). Temple concedes that the best ‘Poetry and Musick’ (1909: 108) was written in antiquity; yet modern England leads in the lower genre of dramatic comedy. For: ‘the great uncertainty and many suddain Changes of our Weather in all Seasons of the Year’ affect ‘the Heads and Hearts, especially of the finest Tempers’ and turn the British Isles into a veritable ‘Region of Spleen’ whose ‘Medly of Humours’ has had a good effect ‘upon our Stage, and has given admirable Play to our Comical Wits’ (1909: 106). Temple’s psychology of body

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humors moves beyond the sickness/health binary in its implication that the English climate produces a homologous sensibility (changeable weather, changeable humors). This anticipates, to a degree, the logic of Montesquieu’s parallelism of northern and southern mentalities. The breakthrough point of a climate-theoretical spatial poetics occurs with the romantic division between northern and southern types of literature and art. Within British criticism, this argument was made most prominently during the 1760s by Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) remained a standard work in America until the mid-1800s. Blair’s ‘Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian’ (1763) did not use Montesquieu’s sensualist arguments, or speak of a North–South divide in the arts. But his contrast between Ossianic and Homeric poetry proved influential to romantic discourse: ‘Ossian’s poetry’, according to Blair, is marked by ‘tenderness and sublimity’, a veritable ‘Poetry of the Heart’, which ‘moves perpetually into the high region of the grand, the pathetick’ (1996b: 356). Ossian’s poetry is thus of a different ‘species’ of ‘sublimity’ from Homer’s: ‘Homer’s sublimity is accompanied with more impetuosity and fire; Ossian’s with more of a solemn and awful grandeur. Homer hurries you along; Ossian elevates, and fixes you in astonishment’. Homer has ‘in him all the Greek vivacity; whereas Ossian uniformly maintains the gravity and solemnity of a Celtic hero’ (1996b: 357). In the context of the European Ossian vogue, Blair’s contrast between Celtic and Greek variants of the sublime merges with the early romantic distinction between the ancient and the modern (as in Schiller’s naïve/sentimental opposition). Madame de Staël’s De la littérature (1800) features a chapter on ‘De la littérature du nord’, which she deems best represented in Ossian and Celtic and Icelandic fables, but also in the works of Shakespeare and a variety of contemporary British and German writers. Southern literature includes the work of Homer and other Greek and Roman ancients, and the classic ages of Italy, Spain, and France during the reign of Louis XIV. The defining trait of northern literature is its melancholy, which implies, according to de Staël’s theory of human psychology, a greater capacity for philosophical and reflective states of mind. Melancholic poetry is the poetry which best harmonizes with philosophy. Sadness goes much further into the character and destiny of man than any other mental disposition. The . . . imagination of the north

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. . . is delighted by the seashore, the sound of the wind, the wild heaths; it is an imagination that carries the weary soul towards the future and towards another world. The imagination of the men of the north soars beyond this earth, on which they live; it soars past the clouds that frame the horizon as if they represented the mysterious passage from life to eternity. (1959: 1/180; see Furst 1980: 14–9)

The poetry of the North is thus a spiritual literature, more open to intuitions of the infinite. Another important trait is the tendency towards self-reliance: ‘The poetry of the north harmonized much better than that of the south to the spirit of a free people’. The freedom-loving Greeks submitted so easily to slavery because they were compensated by the ‘beauty of the climate’. For the ‘northern nations independence was the main happiness’, and the ‘harshness of the earth and the gloom of the sky’ engendered a ‘pride’ and ‘superiority to life’ that ‘made servitude intolerable’ (1959: 1/184–5). The northern/southern dichotomy shapes a variety of romantic and Victorian literary and aesthetic theories, most influentially in John Ruskin’s ‘Nature of the Gothic’ chapter in Stones of Venice (1851–3). Ruskin’s lyrical opening invites the reader to an imagined flight over the ‘variegated mosaic of the world’s surface’ (1903–12: 10/186) from the dazzlingly beautiful Mediterranean landscapes to the gloomier but more vital spaces of the cold North. In Ruskin’s tableau, the southern creatures are more delicate, dazzling, and dynamic, while the northern ones are more grim and rugged, but also more sturdy and forceful. He presents the architecture and fine arts of southern Europe as embodiments of southern space, as opposed to the savage and sublime variety of the northern Gothic (which he ultimately prefers): Let us watch [man] with reverence as he sets side by side the burning gems, and smooths with soft sculpture the jasper pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine and rise into a cloudless sky: but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creatures of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them. (1903–12: 10/187–8)

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The dichotomy between northern and southern landscapes and mentalities fascinated US cultural critics (see Barbara Novak 1980; Angela Miller 1993). Motley Deakin’s Home Book of the Picturesque (1851) includes an essay on ‘Scenery and Mind’ by Elias Lyman Magoon that argues from the sensualist position characteristic of de Staël: ‘[t]he diversified landscapes of our country exert no slight influence in creating our character as individuals, and in confirming our destiny as a nation’ (1967: 3). Magoon calls the ‘minds of great men’ ‘transcripts of the first scenes they loved’ (1967: 43) and suggests a causal relationship between the sublimity of landscape and the stamina of a people: ‘[D]wellers in the midst of bold scenery are harder workers, greater readers, and better thinkers, than persons of equal rank elsewhere’ (1967: 8). Magoon paraphrases the romantic distinction between northern and southern literatures (the ‘wild and romantic element’ of the North as opposed to the ‘severe simplicity of the classic south’ [1967: 33–4]), and he includes the American scenery in the spatial topography of the ‘northern spirit’: We children of mists, clouds, woods, darkening tempests, and weeping rain, produce and prefer the beauty of mystery and indefiniteness, in other words, romantic beauty. If we would cultivate a keen pleasure in definite beauty, as it is seen in Homeric literature, and as it stood mightily exemplified in the severely gorgeous splendor of the Acropolis, we must transport our mind at least, if not our person, to other climes. (1967: 34–5).

Anglo-American literary expression is thus said to reflect ‘the daily vicissitudes and fluctuating seasons, – those tints and hues of vernal beauty, summer promise, autumnal wealth, and wintry desolation, – those dimly shrouding mists which alternate with brilliant light, – and which render objects more lovely and harmonious’ (1967: 34). Magoon’s argument shows how sensualist psychology models continued to influence mid-century aesthetics. They seemed less convincing, however, in the romantic circles that rejected empiricist approaches to nature. The transition to post-empiricist identity models is evidently less clear than the canonicity of Coleridge’s criticism encourages us to believe. In 1820, William Hazlitt complains that ‘we are half afraid to hint at the probable effects of Climate [on the national character]’. Just as ‘climate was everything in the days of Montesquieu’, ‘in our day it is nothing’. Hazlitt suggests a compromise: environmental influence ‘continues to be’ ‘but one of

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many cooperating causes’ (1930–4: 16/193, 196). In Spirit of the Age (1825), Hazlitt makes much of Wordsworth’s poetic reflection of the beauties of the Lake District (1930–4: 11/89–90). One generation later, this approach still informs the fourth volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1856), which argues that the mountain sceneries of Central Europe have encouraged the sort of ‘indolent or enthusiastic reverie’ that is conducive to the fine arts. By contrast ‘the comparatively flat scenery, and severer climate, of England and France’ has brought about ‘a practical and rational temperament’ that is ‘wholly retrograde in art’, but favorable to ‘literature’ (1903–12: 6/437). Ruskin also adds that mountain scenery is beneficial to the literary genius: Bacon spent most of his time in marble palaces in the city (1903–12: 6/439); Pascal, by contrast, was driven by the sublime scenery of his Auvergne home at Clermont, discovering with the help of his mountains ‘the great relations of the earth and the air’ (6/440). Shakespeare’s temper would have been different if he had lived in a more sublime country, which presumably would have increased his aesthetic powers: [S]o far as Shakespeare’s work has imperfections of any kind – the trivialness of many of his adopted plots, for instance, and the comparative rarity with which he admits the ideal of an enthusiastic virtue . . . – in a word, whatever difference, involving inferiority, there exists between him and Dante . . . we may partly trace . . . to the less noble character of the scenes around him in his youth. (1903–12: 6/452–3)

In Ruskin’s works, such sensualist nature/culture homologies tend to be rhetorical asides with little relevance to his major argumentation. In US letters, of course, they are central arguments that bear the weight of national claims for literary authority. We can see the rhetorical pitch of nationalist spatial poetics in the poet-politician Alexander Meek’s address before the literary societies at the University of Georgia in 1844. Meek begins by charting the effects of natural spaces on the structure of literary text, and concludes that the superiority of US landscapes will translate itself into homological literary brilliance: Physical causes have always operated in the formation and fashioning of literature. In all the higher productions of mind, ancient and modern, we can easily recognize the influence of the climate and natural objects among which they were developed. The sunsets of Italy colored the

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songs of Tasso and Petrarch; the vine-embowered fields of beautiful France are visible in all the pictures of Rousseau and La Martine; you may hear the solemn rustling of the Hartz forest, and the shrill horn of the wild huntsman, throughout the creations of Schiller and Göethe; the sweet streamlets and sunny lakes of England smile upon you from the graceful verses of Spenser and Wordsworth; and the mist-robed hills of Scotland loom out in magnificence through the pages of Ossian, and the loftier visions of Marmion and Waverley. Our country, then, must receive much of the character of her literature from her physical properties . . . if we dare to think for ourselves, and faithfully picture forth, in our own styles of utterance, the impressions our minds shall receive from this great, fresh continent of beauty and sublimity; – we can render to the world the most vigorous and picturesque literature it has ever beheld. (1857: 118–19)

Meek’s nationalism points directly towards Whitman, but the sensualist premises of his argument were unacceptable to many New England intellectuals. We can see the emergence of a counter-discourse if we follow the development of Longfellow’s poetics in the 1830s and 1840s. At Bowdoin (1829–35), Longfellow is still intrigued by sensualist theories of climatic influence. In a 1832 review of Sidney’s ‘Defence of Poesy’, he argues that ‘natural scenery and climate’ constitute an important influence ‘upon the prevailing tenor of poetic composition’ (1832: 74). For example, English poetry offers ‘manifold and beautiful descriptions’ of natural scenes during morning and evening hours, due to ‘the rural beauty which pervades the English landscape, and to the long morning and evening twilight in a northern climate’ (1832: 72). On account of the more favorable weather, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese poets produce better pastoral compositions. However, the ‘poetry of Southern nations’ also suffers from ‘the prevalence of personification and the exaggerations of figurative language’, as ‘natural effects of a soft voluptuous climate’. Poets in the southern climes tend ‘to let the body lie at ease, stretched by a fountain in the lazy stillness of a summer noon, and suffer the dreamy fancy to lose itself in idle reverie, and give a form to the wind, and a spirit to the shadow and the leaf’ (1832: 73). Thus Longfellow makes the literary forms that Wordsworth criticized as empty neoclassicism (personification) or Goethe denounced as excessive romanticism (allegory) errors of a characteristically southern poetics of place. Almost two decades later, however, Longfellow’s evident rejection of the sensualist paradigm can be seen in his novel Kavanagh (1849),

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which caricatures the spatial poetics with a thinly disguised stab at the nature–culture homologies of Young America (Longfellow’s position is represented in the moderate voice of the village pastor Churchill, who argues: ‘A man will not necessarily be a great poet because he lives near a great mountain’ [1904: 7/424–5]). Longfellow’s literary peers, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell, could not agree more. In a review of Washington Allston in 1840, Holmes remarks wryly that the ‘grandeur of nature in our Western world’ has ‘impressed a tendency to the useful, rather than the beautiful, upon the national mind’, because the ‘mountains and cataracts, which were to have made poets and painters, have been mined for anthracite and dammed for water powers’ (1840: 358–9). James Russell Lowell produced numerous parodies of climatic arguments: in 1849 he absurdly suggests, for instance, that American poets should be sent to a tax-funded writing school located, not in the Rocky Mountains, but in the more monumental landscapes of Asia. He then berates the US landscape for failing to produce literary homologues: ‘There are no such traitors’, he says, ‘as the natural features of a country which betray their sacred trusts’, wherefore ‘[o]ur geographers’ should hold them ‘strictly to their responsibilities’. As if to ridicule symbolic approaches to geological features as epitomized by Arnold Guyot’s Earth and Man, Lowell goes on to suggest that American geographers should draw up precise accounts of ‘the heights of our mountains and the lengths of our rivers’, so they can ‘graduate the scale of reproach with a scrupulous regard to every additional foot and mile’ and present detailed legal accusations (‘such a peak is six thousand three hundred feet high, and has never yet produced a poet’ or ‘the river so-and-so is a thousand miles long, and has wasted its energies in the manufacture of alligators and flat-boatmen’). As if to parody Victor Cousin’s thesis that cultural products can only thrive in homologous geographical locations (see below), Lowell suggests that one should introduce ‘a new system of criticism’ that evaluates an author’s style on the basis of ‘the peculiar configuration of his native territory’: Want of sublimity would be inexcusable in a native of the mountains, and sameness in one from a diversified region, while flatness could not fairly be objected to in a dweller on the prairies, nor could eminent originality be demanded of a writer bred where the surface of the country was only hilly or moderately uneven. Authors, instead of putting upon

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their title-pages the names of previous works, or of learned societies to which they chance to belong, should supply us with an exact topographical survey of their native districts. (1849: 198–9)

Lowell’s satire is all the more remarkable for its awareness of the politics of legitimation that encourages mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals to model their national manifestos on spatial poetics. He suggests cheekily that environmental determinism offers an easy way out of the difficulties of cultural self-reliance: There is, nevertheless, something agreeable in being able to shift the responsibility from our own shoulders to the broader ones of a continent. When anxious European friends inquire after our Art and our Literature, we have nothing to do but to refer them to Mount Washington or Lake Superior. It is their concern, not ours. We yield them without scruple to the mercies of foreign reviewers. (1849: 197–8)

Spatial Symbolism Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes reject spatial determinism for a number of reasons, and they are as unconvinced by sensualist psychology as their transcendentalist peers, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and Thoreau. Yet Emerson’s parallelization of the heterogeneous New England climate with the range of intellectual culture in Boston includes an aside that shows how nineteenth-century monism blurs the distinction between deterministic and symbolist theories of space. ‘How can we not believe in influences of climate and air’, he says, ‘when, as true philosophers, we must believe that chemical atoms also have their spiritual cause why they are thus and not other; that carbon, oxygen, alum and iron, each has its origin in spiritual nature?’ (1903: 12/184). Emerson’s comment attests to the continued appeal, for mid-nineteenth-century US intellectuals, of various transformations of the book-of-nature idea, and the discourse of physico- or natural theology that considered natural phenomena to be transcendental symbols. The romantic discourse of natural theology shifts between pantheist and creationist variants, and encourages the pastoralist idea that proximity to nature leads to ‘a superior grasp of metaphysical reality’ (L. Marx 1986: 44). As Emerson puts it in his lecture on the ‘Young American’ (1844), the American landscape is ‘the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture’ (1903: 1/365).

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Emerson’s Swedenborgian suggestion that ‘natural facts’ correspond to ‘spiritual facts’ is best illustrated by the more ‘religiocentric’ moments of Thoreau’s nature writing (Buell 1995: 128), notably the allegorical readings of the Pond’s dimensions and the melting sandbank in Walden (in ‘The Pond in Winter’ and ‘Spring’). In his later writing, Thoreau also moved towards the spatial exceptionalism we know from Whitman, which considers US landscapes to be symbolic of a specifically American spirituality. In his Atlantic essay ‘Walking’ (1862), Thoreau proposes a symbolic reading of US landscapes. He begins by celebrating the variety, fertility, and scenic grandeur of the American scene with a string of quotations by botanical and geological scientists (such as André Michaux, Alexander von Humboldt, or Arnold Guyot) that culminates in a long tableau, which Thoreau excerpts from a contemporary political history (The Emigrant by the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper-Canada, Sir Francis B. Head): [In] the new world Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colours than she used in delineating and in beautifying the old world. The heavens of America appear infinitely higher – the sky is bluer – the clouds are whiter – the air is fresher – the cold is intenser – the moon looks larger – the stars are brighter – the thunder is louder – the lightning is vivider – the wind is stronger – the rain is heavier – the mountains are higher – the rivers larger – the forests bigger – the plains broader. (Head 1846: 1–2; Thoreau 1862: 663–4)

Thoreau intends this passage to counter ‘Buffon’s account of this part of the world’ (1862: 664). Yet in contrast to Enlightenment naturalists like Buffon, Thoreau’s description has typological undertones: because the US landscapes are of such a grander scale than those of Europe, it would seem that ‘the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind’, and that therefore the natural ‘facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar’ (1862: 664). Thoreau still uses the rhetoric of symptomatic determinism – predicting, for instance, that American skies will literally produce a future high culture by the effects on the mind of their pure light and mountain air (‘For I believe that climate does thus react on man’, ‘there is something in the mountain-air that feeds the spirit and inspires’, leading ‘man’ to ‘grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically’ [1862: 664]). While this brings Thoreau’s

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spatial theory close to Burroughs, Holmes, and Royce, his notion of causal determination rests within a framework of spiritual symbolism: if there was no symbolic significance in the American landscape, Thoreau asks with a rhetorical question, ‘to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?’ (1862: 664). We can relate Thoreau’s evolutionist spatial symbolism to the framework of romantic idealism that, in the US, is best represented by Victor Cousin’s Cours de Philosophie (1828) and Arnold Guyot’s Boston lectures on comparative physical geography, Earth and Man (1849). Idealist Spatial Histories

Victor Cousin, the French follower of Hegel who first introduced American audiences to an accessible version of idealist philosophy of history (see Chap. 3, pp. 88–93 above), situated idealism’s temporal narrative of spiritual progress within a topographical matrix. On the whole, Hegel had little interest in the logic of place. His Lectures on the Philosophy of History of the 1820s show a few tentative nods towards spatial symbolism, implied in allusions to the geographical and ‘physical immaturity’ of the New World (1991: 81; 1986: 12/107) that seem to be influenced by degeneracy theorists such as Buffon. But essentially Hegel suggested that, while ‘historical’ nations need an appropriate spatial theater to act out the roles that the world spirit assigns to them, once culture has taken over, progress takes place in social practice independent of spatial particularities (1991: 80; 1986: 12/106). American landscapes figure merely in terms of an inverted Turner thesis, when Hegel suggests that the North American part of the temperate sphere blocks the dialectic of spirit because of its sheer endless resources and unlimited space, which further an anti-communal tendency and prevent the conflicts and tensions of which progressive revolutions are made. Just as ‘the French Revolution would not have occurred’ if the Germanic forests had still existed, Hegel concludes, America’s historical acts will be mere echoes of European struggles as long as its geography is wild and resourceful (1991: 86–7; 1986: 12/113–14). By contrast, Cousin merged idealist historiography with an evolutionist metaphysics of space more suitable to American concepts of manifest destiny. His symbolic reading of landscape implies that the three epochs of world history cannot take place in the same

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geographical space. ‘Places’, he says, have ‘their laws; and when a place bears a particular character, it leads irresistibly to a specific development of humanity’ (1832: 247). Since ‘the spirit of an epoch’ has to ‘find room for itself in space’ and ‘possess its locality’ (1832: 236), the various stages of world history correspond to specific geographical locations: ‘every place, every territory, represents necessarily an idea’ (1832: 166–7). Thus: [G]ive me the map of any country, its configuration, its climate, its waters, its winds, and the whole of its physical geography; give me its natural productions, its flora, its zoology, &c., and I pledge myself to tell you, a priori, what will be the quality of man in that country; and what part its inhabitants will act in history; – not accidentally, but necessarily; not at any particular epoch, but in all; in short, – what idea he is called to represent. (1832: 240)

Cousin acknowledges the pertinence of eighteenth-century forms of spatial determinism when he argues that it would be ‘an extraordinary idealism’ to assume that ‘external nature’ (1832: 239) does not affect the mind at all. Yet he reinterprets Montesquieu’s spatial determinism in symbolist terms: Doubtless, gentlemen, the relation of man and of nature is not the relation of the effect to the cause; but it is nevertheless an intimate and a profound relation, of which the reason is very simple; it is this: man and nature are two great effects which, proceeding from the same cause, bear the same characters; so that it is absolutely necessary, that the laws of nature should be again discoverable in humanity, and that, by consequence, the earth and its inhabitants, man and nature, should harmonize with each other; because both manifest the same unity. It is thus, gentlemen, and only thus, that we are to understand, and that I admit the idea of Montesquieu. (1832: 242–3)

Cousin’s spatial history, then, accords well with the translatio imperii topos. By assigning each epoch its appropriate theater, Cousin effectively connects geographical space with cultural practices. Thus the Asian continent – massive and colossal – corresponds to the idea of the infinite, and encourages a homological culture that is ‘more or less motionless’ (1832: 206) with little commercial activity. It embodies absolutist monarchy, a strict, anti-human religion, a nonempiricist philosophy focused on the abstract and otherworldly, and

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a schematically allegorical art. The more diverse landscape of Europe, by contrast, accommodates the idea of the finite, and is thus homologous to a culture that tends to the opposite extremes: ‘variety’, and ‘movement’. The European theater symbolizes a radically democratic government, a theist religion tending towards atheism, a materialist philosophy that ignores the spiritual realm, and a fragmentary art obsessed with sensuality. The New World, finally, is staged as a synthesis of the vast shapes of Asia and the various reliefs of Europe. It corresponds to the ‘relation’ between finite and infinite ideas (1832: 247–8), and becomes the geographical template for Cousin’s idea of the most mature culture (it resembles an idealized version of contemporary France). Symbolic Geography

Thoreau’s ‘Walking’ refers to Arnold Guyot’s Boston lectures on Earth and Man of 1849, arguably one of the most influential formulations of spatial symbolism within mid-nineteenth-century New England discourse.7 Like Cousin, Guyot seeks to demonstrate the organic connection between natural space and human culture while avoiding the charge of pantheism (‘[T]he whole universe’, he says, ‘is a thought of God’ [1900: 82]). His thesis is that ‘the forms, the arrangement, and the distribution of the terrestrial masses on the surface of the globe’ are ‘accidental in appearance, yet reveal a plan which we are enabled to understand by the evolutions of history’, and that thus ‘nature and history, the earth and man, stand in the closest relations to each other, and form only one great harmony’ (1900: 16). While Cousin believed that the harmony between geographical space and human history can only be understood by a philosophical inquiry into the parallelism of spatial and ideational figurations, Guyot presents geography as a valid alternative, as it enables the scientist to read God’s Book of Nature directly in its physical manifestations: For [the geographer] who can embrace with a glance the great harmonies of nature and of history, there is here the most admirable plan to study; there are the past and future destinies of the nations to decipher, traced in ineffaceable characters by the finger of Him who governs the world. Admirable order of the Supreme Intelligence and Goodness, which has arranged all for the . . . realization of the plans of mercy for his sake. (1900: 16–17)

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Guyot’s religious vocabulary has the creationist undertones of traditional physico-theologies, yet his method is derived from the positive sciences inasmuch as it is based on intricate ‘readings’ of geographical forms. Sifting through a variety of geological and climatological facts, Guyot identifies symmetries and analogies in the shapes, reliefs, and arrangements of the continents that he interprets as evidence of ‘a physical law’ underlying all geographical formations (one that is no less ‘real’ for being ‘as yet unknown to science’ [1900: 32]). What distinguishes Guyot’s geography from both traditional creationism (like Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth of 1681) and Cousin’s idealist physico-theologies is that it conceptualizes the earth in the organicist terms of contemporary biology. He describes the continental masses as organic wholes that have grown in a process similar to biological systems: The continents are only formed, so to speak, by piecemeal, in the train of the geological epochs; and, nevertheless, the definitive result makes a whole, composed of parts subordinated to each other in a certain system, which might be called an organism in this order of things. (1900: 52)

Guyot imagines the growth of the continental masses as governed by the law of progress as diversification that had been formulated by early evolution theorists. Thus Guyot believes that there was a ‘successive formation, first of our solar system, then of the continents and the beings inhabiting them’, which resemble ‘the formation of the animal in the egg’ (1900: 98) in moving from homogeneity to heterogeneity. He then applies the idea of progress as biological and social diversification to the evaluation of geographical shapes: [W]e may consider . . . those continents the best endowed, the best organized, the best prepared for the development of human societies, which present the most varied contours[,] the most diversified forms, the most numerous contrasts, and the best characterized natural regions. There is here the same relation as between the inferior animal without special organs, and the superior animal richly furnished with special organs. (1900: 98–9)

Guyot’s concept of progress as diversification replaces Cousin’s dialectic with a linear model. The geography most conducive to human development is not Cousin’s ‘middle landscape’ – which balances out immensity and intricacy – but that with the most diversified

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topography. Accordingly, in Guyot’s spatial history, Europe is the place where civilization reaches its cultural peak (even if it has not as yet managed to realize all of its intrinsic potential). Guyot adapts the idea of Europe’s topographical superiority to the translatio imperii topos by proposing a second environmental criterion to explain why culture continues to move west towards the more homogeneous geological formation of the New World: the law of continental contrasts holds that the American and European continents relate to each other like complementary organs, each supplying what the other lacks. America functions as a catalyst to help European civilization to realize its full potential, namely a perfect democracy and a pure (read: Protestant) religion (1900: 284–5). In contrast to Burrough’s comparison between the soft forms of the English motherland and the hard, dry and aggressive conditions of the New World, Guyot’s geographical vision is closer to that of the eighteenth-century degeneracy debate, in which Europe is presented as the more masculine and harsh environment. Guyot indeed images America as an abandoned bride, neglected by the feeble natives (1900: 220), and he personifies the European and American continents as lovers made for one another: ‘The Old World’, he says, ‘calls to mind the square and solid figure of man; America, the lithe shape and delicate form of woman’ (1900: 208). Thus: The two worlds are looking face to face, and are, as it were, inclining towards each other. The Old World bends toward the New, and is ready to pour out its tribes, whom a resistless descent of the reliefs seems to draw towards the Atlantic. America looks towards the Old World; all its slopes and its long plains sweep down to the Atlantic, toward Europe. It seems to wait with open and eager arms the beneficent influence of the man of the Old World. No barrier opposes their progress; the Andes and the Rocky Mountains, banished to the other shore of the continent, will place no obstacle in their path. Soon the moment will come. (1900: 221)

Guyot’s geographical symbolico-determinism provided mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals with rhetorical frameworks for political and cultural legitimation,8 most effectively put to use for both the northern and the southern causes during the Civil War. James de Bow’s southern-based journal interpreted Guyot’s Earth and Man as a ‘philosophy of geography’ that disproves Jefferson’s premise of the equality of men and serves to ‘correc[t] the inveterate and dangerous vagaries’ of political reformers and abolitionists. Referring to Guyot’s

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tables linking racial perfection to climate, de Bow argued against the ‘pseudo-philanthropy’ of ‘seeking in a lower state of civilization, or in a lower ethnological type to imitate the forms and institutions of a higher and more perfect one’ (1851: 286–7). Northern commentators, by contrast, were more interested in Guyot’s organicism. In 1863, the editor of Harper’s, Alfred H. Guernsey, reads Earth and Man as a demonstration of the natural indivisibility of the United States. Proceeding from Guyot’s idea that human history is ‘prescribed and prophesied in the physical structure of the globe’, Guernsey describes nation in terms of an individual organism: A nation, like an individual, consists of body and soul. Its soul is its people; its body is the territory which they inhabit. The mountain ranges and natural frontiers are the bones; the rivers, roads, and canals are the arteries and veins; the trade and commerce carried over them is the blood which is conveyed to the remotest extremities, forming the medium of all activity in the life of the state. (1863: 413)

The essential point Guernsey sees in his ‘argument for the natural indivisibility of the material body of our nation’ is that all organisms need a definite ‘external form and adequate external protection’ in order to survive. Just as ‘[a]n animal deprived of its external covering would speedily perish’, the United States cannot be deprived of the geographical bone structure it acquired in the natural course of events. Hence the manifest destiny theme: The United States, by the acquisition of Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and California, fulfilled this prime law of national life, and assumed control of a territory which the unchangeable laws of nature had marked out as the indivisible home of one great nation, as . . . the physical structure of this vast domain [shows]. (1863: 413) Symbolic Spatial Poetics: Language ‘Fitted’ for ‘Niagara’

The idea that American writing must correspond structurally to the US environment looms large in US criticism half a century before Whitman. Channing’s essay on ‘American Language and Literature’ (see Chap. 2, pp. 51–3 above) legitimates its demands for self-reliance with ‘native peculiarities’ (1815: 308) phrased

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in spatial terms: ‘How tame will his language sound, who would describe Niagara in language fitted for the falls at London Bridge, or attempt the majesty of the Mississippi in that which was made for the Thames?’ (1815: 309). While the Thames and Niagara were conventional icons for the difference between England and the United States, Channing gives the traditional opposition of tame and wild landscapes an expressivist twist when he argues that each geographical space demands a congruous descriptive medium. He illustrates this point with a linguistic theory based on the organic connection between language and landscape he derives from the ‘oral literatures’ of America’s ‘aborigines’. Native American tribes, he argues, compose highly poetic descriptions of native places based on ‘exact ideas’ that are ‘but feebly rendered’ by translations and made to look ‘ridiculous in English dress’. What makes the aborigine’s language untranslatable is that it ‘was made to express his emotions during his observance of nature’. In other words, it embodies the American environment: [The language of the Indian] is now as rich as the soil on which he was nurtured, and ornamented with every blossom that blows in his path. It is now elevated and soaring, for his image is the eagle, and now precipitous and hoarse as the cataract among whose mists he is descanting. (1815: 313–14)

Channing relates the beauty and descriptive power of native languages to their being structurally homologous to the geographical space in which they were ‘nurtured’.9 Such tropes of correspondence also shape the romantic nationalism of the 1840s. Margaret Fuller argues in 1846 that ‘English literature’ exudes ‘a reminiscence of walls and ceilings, a tendency to the arbitrary and conventional that repels a mind trained in admiration of the antique spirit’ to seek the ‘frankness and expansion’ of the ‘summer sky’. Thus English literary culture is ‘in many respects uncongenial and injurious to our constitution’, which needs to develop ‘a genius, wide and full as our rivers, flowery, luxuriant, and impassioned as our vast prairies, rooted in strength as the rocks on which the Puritan fathers landed’ (1852b: 123–4). In 1845, William Gilmore Simms demands that an American genius must ‘be moulded to an intense appreciation of our woods and streams, our dense forests and deep swamps, our vast immeasurable mountains, our voluminous and tumbling waters’ (1962: 16).

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On the other hand, the framework of romantic idealism encouraged American critics to open their tropes of correspondence to transnational symbols. Emerson urged US intellectuals to immerse themselves in American forests, but he often toned down the importance of specific localities. We tend to ‘exaggerate the praises of local scenery’, he says in 1844, for we encounter the same spiritual beauty whether we look ‘from the top of the Alleghanies’, over ‘the brownest, homeliest common’, a mere ‘hillock’, or ‘the marble deserts of Egypt’. As the ‘difference between landscape and landscape is small’ (1903: 3/176), it hardly matters whether our literary endeavor is drawn from the Wordsworthian Lake country or the American wilderness (see also Emerson 1903: 2/351). In his Dial essay on ‘Thoughts on Art’ (1841) Emerson characteristically presents Gothic architecture as ‘a blossoming in stone’ where ‘granite blooms into an eternal flower’ (1841: 376) – eternal rather than specifically Nordic. Poetic Naturism What are we to make, then, of Emerson’s celebrations of New World scenery? Consider, for instance, Emerson’s Dartmouth address, a discussion of literary genius, characterizing the potential of future American poets with a long and enthusiastic word-painting of the American forest that might well have been written by Ruskin or Whitman: The noonday darkness of the American forest, the deep, echoing, aboriginal woods, where the living columns of the oak and fir tower up from the ruins of the trees of the last millennium; where, from year to year, the eagle and the crow see no intruder; the pines, bearded with savage moss, yet touched with grace by the violets at their feet; the broad, cold lowland which forms its coat of vapor with the stillness of subterranean crystallization; and where the traveller, amid the repulsive plants that are native in the swamp, thinks with pleasing terror of the distant town; this beauty, – haggard and desert beauty, which the sun and the moon, the snow and the rain, repaint and vary, has never been recorded by art, yet is not indifferent to any passenger. (1903: 1/169)

Emerson’s ekphrastic technique points to an influential lateeighteenth- and nineteenth-century mode of literary criticism that I will call ‘poetic naturism’. As a genre of literary criticism, it combines descriptions of aesthetic objects (for instance, the reviewer’s plot

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summaries and formal analyses) with ekphrastic nature scenes that are then staged as emanating from the text itself. This type of criticism purports to speak about literature, but becomes intermittently itself literary, as it slides from describing the text into creating wordpaintings of the text’s natural objects. For instance, Hugh Blair’s Dissertation (1763) argues that the emotive power of Ossian’s verse resulted from the primeval environment of the Scottish Highlands. But he leaves the burden of proof mainly to ekphrastic celebrations of ‘wild and romantic’ scenery, which he presents as ‘concordant’ with Ossian’s style: ‘The extended heath by the sea shore; the mountain shaded with mist; the torrent rushing through a solitary valley; the scattered oaks, and the tombs of warriors overgrown with moss; all produce a solemn attention in the mind’ (1996: 356). A similar displacement accounts for Crèvecoeur’s presentation of farmer James’ Letters as exuding the ‘smell of the woods’ (1986: 46). The writer’s style is redescribed in terms of America’s landscape aesthetics. The speaker of Whitman’s ‘Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood’ (1872) paraphrases Crèvecoeur’s conceit on a grander scale when he announces that his song will discard ‘rhyme’ and the ‘conceits’ of foreign poets, thus replacing the ‘perfume of foreign court or indoor library’ with an odor . . . as from forests of pine in Maine, or breath of an Illinois prairie, With open airs of Virginia or Georgia or Tennessee, or from Texas uplands, or Florida’s glades, Or the Saguenay’s black stream, or the wide blue spread of Huron, With presentment of Yellowstone’s scenes, or Yosemite, And murmuring under, pervading all, I’d bring the rustling sea-sound, That endlessly sounds from the two Great Seas of the world. (2002: 382)

Whitman’s copious catalogues of sensuous manifestations of American nature spare him the trouble of spelling out how exactly his poetry differs from the ‘indoor’ type. This strategy already dominates the reception of European nature poets. Consider Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age (1825) on William Wordsworth’s poetic method: [T]he cataract roars in the sound of his verse; and in its dim and mysterious meaning, the mists seem to gather in the hollows of Helvellyn, and the forked Skiddaw hovers in the distance. There is little mention

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of mountainous scenery in Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry; but by internal evidence one might be almost sure that it was written in a mountainous country, from its bareness, its simplicity, its loftiness and its depth! (1930–4: 11/89–90)

In the 1830s, this sort of rhetoric helped to legitimate William Cullen Bryant as an American Wordsworth. Parke Godwin’s review for the Democratic Review presents Bryant’s poems as ‘transcripts’ of American nature. Thus Godwin can interrupt his discussion of Bryant’s work with digressions on American nature: with its endless variety of woodland, grove, and water, with its deep forests brooding in eternal silence, over the slumbering inland, with vast lakes, majestic in their repose, sending back the radiant hues of the sky, where mountain ridges rise to prop the very heavens, where broad streams roll their mighty tides for thousands of miles through fertile plains, where green prairies stretch like oceans arrested in their mightiest heavings, and where a wildness and freshness is pervading every scene. (1839: 283)

The troping of literary form as aesthetic manifestation of American nature was helpful for the ‘puffing’ of American writers who were less successful than Bryant. An instructive example is the reception of Cornelius Mathews’ epic Poem on Man in his Various Aspects under the American Republic of 1843. Mathews was at the time considered to be an important voice of the Young America movement (he was mostly known for his advocacy of copyright laws and his collaboration with E. A. Duyckinck, with whom he co-edited the short-lived New York journal Arcturus). The problem with Mathews’ work was that most reviewers found it conceptually strong but stylistically uneven.10 Even Mathews’ Young American peers could not quite bring themselves to accept his stylistic idiosyncrasies. In an article on ‘Nationality in Literature’, Duyckinck argued that Mathews was a poet with ‘a very fertile and vigorous imagination, but not always a corresponding facility of versification’. The ‘ruggedness’ of his verse ‘mar[s] the beauty of his conceptions’ (1847: 320). In a previous review of Mathews that he co-wrote with O’Sullivan, Duyckinck spoke of a ‘rebellious’ attitude that leads Mathews to ‘shak[e] about’ the ‘fetters of rhyme’, producing a ‘harsh discord of sound’ that reflects the ‘off-hand haste’ of an inexperienced author (1843: 424). Yet the review opens with an ekphrastic passage that turns Mathews’

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stylistic faults into advantages: it argues that his verse is ‘vigorous in its very rudeness and immaturity’, and its spirit of Americanism ‘comes to us like a breath of new life, of the west wind from our own lofty fast-rooted American mountains, over the stagnant vapors of the East – the East whence blows that sirocco so deadly to American energy’ (1843: 415). This sudden burst of lyricism shows the rhetorical strength of poetic naturism within the nationalist framework of Whitmanian authority: the poeticized description of American scenery stands in for formal description, legitimating the text, first, by staging it as the site of spatial authenticity (that is, implying that the uneven rhymes are symptomatic of the vigorous American west wind), and second, by offering a poetic description of nature as evidence for the literariness of the text. In the more fervently nationalist cultural criticism of the 1830s and 1840s, the turn to ekphrastic lyricism often becomes so dominant that it all but displaces the literary object completely, as if the critic had set out to explore the literary possibilities of US culture, but then decided to change his subject, discoursing instead on the beauties of the land. Meek’s essay on ‘Americanism in Literature’ (1844) is a typical case: its section on the climatic influences on literature begins by discussing how the ‘physical character’ of the landscape should continue to affect the form of national literature, as it has throughout history. Meek’s examples from literary history are already ekphrastic (Tasso is ‘colored’ by the ‘sunsets of Italy’, Rousseau and La Martine by the ‘vine-embowered fields of beautiful France’, the ‘solemn rustling of the Hartz forest’ is heard in Schiller and Goethe, the ‘sweet streamlets and sunny lakes of England’ emerge from Spenser and Wordsworth, and the ‘mist-robed hills of Scotland loom out’ in ‘the pages of Ossian’ and Scott). But when his narrative arrives at the point where he explains how he considers the landscape to shape US discourse, he switches to a different genre, digressing into a two-page lyrical word-painting on his experiences in the southern states of the US: In poetry, romance, history and eloquence, what glorious objects, – sights and sounds, for illustration and ornament! I have stood, down in Florida, beneath the over-arching groves of magnolia, orange and myrtle, blending their fair flowers and voluptuous fragrance, and opening long vistas between their slender shafts, to where the green waters of the Mexican Gulf lapsed upon the silver-sanded beach, flinging up their light spray into the crimson beams of the declining sun; and

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I have thought that, for poetic beauty, for delicate inspiration, the scene was as sweet as ever wooed the eyes of a Grecian minstrel on the slopes of Parnassus, or around the fountains of Castaly. Again: I have stood upon a lofty summit of the Alleghanies, among the splintered crags and vast gorges, where the eagle and the thunder make their home; and looked down upon an empire spread out in the long distance below. Far as the eye could reach, the broad forests swept away over territories of unexampled productiveness and beauty. At intervals through the wide champaign, the domes and steeples of some fair town, which had sprung up with magical suddenness among the trees, would come out to the eye, giving evidence of the presence of a busy, thriving population. Winding away through the centre too, like a great artery of life to the scene, I could behold a noble branch of the Ohio, bearing upon its bosom the already active commerce of the region, and linking that spot with a thousand others, similar in their condition and character. As I thus stood, and thought of all that was being enacted in this glorious land of ours, and saw in imagination, the stately centuries as they passed across the scene, diffusing wealth, prosperity and refinement, I could not but believe that it presented a nobler theatre, with sublimer accompaniments and inspirations, than ever rose upon the eye of a gazer from the summits of the Alps or the Apennines. (1857: 119–20)

Meek’s rhapsodic description anticipates the strategy of Whitman’s 1855 Preface, which carries over the structure of the ‘cultural independence’ oration into the diction of a free verse poem. In the Preface, the rhetoric of poetic naturism reappears as Whitman’s fantasy of artistic embodiment, with its catalogues of objects with which a future American bard will merge. The root metaphor of climatic influence thus informs Whitman’s image of the great American Poet becoming one with his spatial surroundings (which he ‘incarnates’). But the ensuing list is long enough to assert itself as a genre in its own right, in the sense that the burden of aesthetic validity shifts from the author’s poetry to the American space: [The American bard] incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes. Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes, Missouri and Columbia and Ohio and Saint Lawrence with the falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do not embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure into him. The blue breadth over the inland sea of Virginia and Maryland and the sea off Massachusetts and Maine and over Manhattan bay and over Champlain and Erie and

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over Ontario and Huron and Michigan and Superior, and over the Texan and Mexican and Floridian and Cuban seas and over the seas off California and Oregon, is not tallied by the blue breadth of the waters below more than the breadth of above and below is tallied by him. When the long Atlantic coast stretches longer and the Pacific coast stretches longer he easily stretches with them north or south. He spans between them also from east to west and reflects what is between them. (2002: 618)

The image of incarnation is then followed up with a second trope that portrays the land growing out of the bard’s body. Again, the depiction of the poet as symbolic creator of nature is displaced by the sheer length of the ekphrastic catalogue: On him rise solid growths that offset the growths of pine and cedar and hemlock and liveoak and locust and chestnut and cypress and hickory and limetree and cottonwood and tuliptree and cactus and wildvine and tamarind and persimmon . . . and tangles as tangled as any canebrake or swamp . . . and forests coated with transparent ice and icicles hanging from the boughs and crackling in the wind . . . and sides and peaks of mountains . . . and pasturage sweet and free as savannah or upland or prairie . . . with flights and songs and screams that answer those of the wildpigeon and highhold and orchard oriole and coot and surf-duck and redshouldered-hawk and fish-hawk and white-ibis and indian-hen and cat-owl and water-pheasant and qua-bird and pied-sheldrake and blackbird and mockingbird and buzzard and condor and night-heron and eagle. (2002: 618–19)

Whitman’s canonizers, finally, used this rhetoric for their own cultural criticism. Consider, for example, Waldo Frank’s influential ‘Our America’ (1917): The physiography of our world bears the stamp of titanic struggle. America is vivid and vibrant beyond the scales of temperate Europe. The Southwest throbs with shrill reds and golds of earth and blues of sky. Rocky New England swoons every summer in a purple verdure that cries against the browns and blacks of the soil. The entire backbone of the continent from the Canadian Rockies to the Sierra Madre is a chaos which turns the Alps almost to monotone. Rocks hurled like crumpled comets against the edge of a mesa they have swept smooth as a table. Canyons so deep that mountains are lost in them like stones. Jagged

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peaks flung through clouds. Rivers that plunge beneath the earth and reappear, walled-in by precipitous mile-high rock. Interminable wastes of thirsty soil, splintered with cactus, spread white with alkali or crystals of salt. Lakes that bubble hot in a bowl of brackish hills. Streams in whose bed gleam phosphorescent fires. Gashes like the Grand Canyon of the Colorado where earth lies disemboweled and men peer down into the stupendous womb of life. Such frenzy is the theater of the American drama. The behavior of our men and women is inseparable from it. (1919: 6–7)

Frank’s celebratory ekphrasis of US space mixes the vocabulary of sensualist mechanical causality (sublime rock formations enlivening the ‘behavior of our men and women’) with that of symbolic embodiment (vibrant physiography as an index of manifest destiny). NOTES

1. Lawrence Buell speaks of ‘the America-as-nature reduction’ as the persistent ‘historic tendency within American culture for intellectuals to imagine the heart of America as more rural than their own positions at the time of imagining’ (1995: 15). See also Leo Marx 2003: 30. The foundational texts in this field are Miller 1956: 204–216; Smith 1950; L. Marx 1964; Nash 1969; and Jehlen 1986. 2. See Leo Marx’ important definition of pastoralism (1986), and Buell’s commentary (1995). 3. The classic statements of the degeneracy thesis are Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749–67; notably ‘De la dégénération des animaux’ of 1766, although Buffon modified his position in his Supplément à l’histoire naturelle, 1774–89); Pehr Kalm’s Travels into North America (1753–61); Cornelius de Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (1768); and William Robertson’s History of America (1777). See Gerbi 1973; Commager and Giordanetti 1967: 49–102; and Jehlen 1986. 4. Critics have found it hard to resist pointing out that the Letters are neither ‘wild’ nor transform (let alone transcend) European neoclassical models. Myra Jehlen, for instance, notes that ‘the opening sentence of the letter, with its balanced clauses, alliterations, and elevated syntax, is hardly wild. Any aromas wafting about the letters are most refined’ (Bercovitch 1994–2005: 1/141). But reminding Crèvecoeur of his artificiality might well imply that if the Letters had been written in a more organic register (one that ‘tallies’ with the landscape, as Whitman would phrase it), it would treat the American scene more adequately. Such an implication would be central to the nature/culture homologies of Whitmanian authority.

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5. Jefferson breaks with Montesquieu’s scheme, for obvious reasons, when he describes both mentalities as characteristically ‘independent’ (the northerners ‘jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others’, the southerners ‘zealous of their own liberties, but trampling on those of others’). 6. Jung made this connection in a lecture he reprinted in 1931 as ‘Seele und Erde’, whose central arguments reappeared in his essay on ‘Your Negroid and Indian Behavior’ for the New York-based Forum in 1930. 7. Arnold Guyot (1807–84) was Professor of Geography and History at the Swiss Academy of Neuchatel before he emigrated to the US in 1848, after the closing of his institute (his emigration was mediated by the Harvard geologist Louis Agassiz). In 1849, Guyot was invited to deliver a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston, which were immediately published (in a translation by the Harvard professor of Greek, Cornelius Conway Felton) with the programmatic title, Earth and Man: Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography in its Relation to the History of Mankind. The success of this book earned Guyot a lecturing post at the Massachusetts Board of Education, and, in 1854, a professorship for geology and physical geography at Princeton, where he joined in the Princetonian endeavor to reconcile Christianity and modern science. 8. For Guyot’s relevance to Walt Whitman, see Stovall 1974: 202–4 and Tichi 1979: 221–4. On the relation between Guyot and Thoreau, see Schneider 2000. 9. His argument combines spatial symbolism with symptomatic determinism – the unity of Indian speech and the American scene is staged as symbolic of an organic connection that could itself be a manifestation of a higher law. At the same time, he implies mechanical causality when he images the native languages as ‘nurtured’ on the ‘rich’ American soil. 10. The North American Review, for instance, argued that while Mathews had potential, his work was flawed by ‘mistakes’ such as ‘harshness of versification’ and an uneven, sometimes unidiomatic diction, as if he had twisted ‘the English language into every conceivable form of awkwardness’ as an illustration for ‘beginners’. The reviewer even emphasized that he regretted this stylistic problem, as he agreed with Mathews’ basic tenets and expected him to be capable of making ‘valuable contributions to our literature’ (Anon. 1844: 510). Margaret Fuller, similarly, concluded: ‘[T]here is poetic substance which makes full chords’, but also a lack of formal rigor that makes Mathews’ poems ‘unpardonably rough and rugged’, so that ‘the poetic substance finds no musical medium in which to flow’ (Fuller 1852b: 134).

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Chapter 7

THE DEMOCRATIC MUSE

Whitman’s programmatic connection of free verse and political freedom is effective and influential because it draws from a conceptual field that has been central to cultural theory since the Enlightenment debates about the relationship between democratic institutions and the state of the arts and sciences. One prominent standpoint in these early debates is represented by the ‘Whig histories’ of democratic progress that assume (with Shaftesbury) that commercial and cultural efflorescence will increase in conjunction with the transition from social conformity and hierarchy to diversity and equality. In the opposite corner, ‘skeptical Whiggism’ contested or (like David Hume) at least qualified these hopes. The heterogeneity of these arguments defies easy categorization into ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’ positions, as the contestation or assertion of democracy’s influence on the arts can appeal to diverse political and aesthetic ends. What increases the complexity of the conceptual field is that the diversity/conformity and equality/hierarchy oppositions characteristic of the Whitmanian moment are not as self-evident as they seem. With only a minor adjustment of their root metaphors, these terms readily reverse their values: the positive sounding ‘diversity’ is at a small remove from its negative cousins, ‘alienation’ and ‘division’, just as ‘equality’ easily washes over into ‘anarchy’ or ‘chaos’. The same goes for the negative terms: cultural ‘conformity’ can be construed as cultural ‘unity’ or ‘wholeness’ as easily as social ‘hierarchy’ can be made to signify social ‘stability’ or ‘order’. Whitman’s opposition between sophisticated poetic feudalism and the ‘lawless music’ of democratic poetry obscures that, in nineteenth-century discourse,

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lawlessness may signify not only the vigor of an authentic imagination but also the sloppiness of mass-produced artifacts or hackwriting. Sophistication may be seen both as stylistic perfection and solipsistic dabbling in disembodied language games. These terms are all the more unstable as they depend on differing valuations of public discourse. The public community can be seen (with Bancroft or Brownson) as instrumental to epistemological and aesthetic improvement, correcting, by a curative majority vote, the false propositions and eccentric styles of idiosyncratic individuals. It can also be viewed (with Hazlitt and Hallam) as destructive to cultural well-being, by tying philosophical and artistic innovation to the lowest common denominator and the highest economic gain. Liberty and Culture in the British Enlightenment In his Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), Shaftesbury presents liberal government as a premise of cultural and intellectual sophistication: ‘All politeness is owing to liberty’, he says, arguing that cultural crudeness is overcome through unrestrained conversation in which ‘[w]e polish one another and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision’ (1999: 31). As an adherent of neo-Harringtonian civic humanism whose formative years were defined by the political upheavals of the Glorious Revolution and the political conflicts with absolutist France, Shaftesbury had a vested interest in the cultural legitimation of republican institutions.1 His blend of political and commercial vocabularies can be elucidated with John Pocock’s analysis of the virtue/politeness opposition in eighteenth-century cultural theory (see Kelleter 2002: Chap. 7). Pocock contextualizes late-seventeenth-century Whig ideology within antagonistic theories of political well-being: contemporary political rhetoric inveighed against the ills of commerce and invoked the virtuous and independent freeman based on the Roman ideals of Cato or Cincinnatus. At the same time there was a sense that modern urban life and politics could only be justified with terms suited to commercial modernity that Greco-Roman republicanism could not provide. As a result, Whig ideology ‘took a decisive turn towards social, cultural, and commercial values’ and created the category of the ‘polite Whig’ (1995: 236–7) represented by Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, or John Trenchard. Polite Whigs believed that the ‘rise of commerce and culture had been worth the loss of virtue it

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had entailed’ because ‘it had vastly enhanced the human capacity for production and consumption, exchange, interdependence, and sympathy’ that formed the basis of ‘new ethical systems’ according to which ‘man’s love of himself might be converted into love of his fellow social beings’ (1995: 147). This shift of emphasis leads midcentury cultural theorists such as Montesquieu to locate the spirit of the law in commercially refined manners rather than governmental institutions; and it induces late-eighteenth-century economists such as Adam Smith to represent commercial energy as ‘a soft, civilizing, and feminizing force’ (rather than, as nineteenth-century cultural criticism would have it, ‘hard, heroic, and philistine’) (1995: 274). Shaftesbury’s most fervent descriptions of the cultural benefits of republican institutions can be seen in his Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author of 1710, in which he openly states his political aims. The greatest threat to cultural well-being lies in what he considers the anti-democratic spirit of the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic bigotry epitomized by the Edict of Nantes of 1685 (1999: 97; see Robertson 1993). Shaftesbury stages the situation in France as a replay of the factors that led Roman civilization from republican stability to cultural bankruptcy: Rome’s aggressive expansion made possible a momentary cultural efflorescence, as the spreading empire was opened up to the cultural treasures of the Greeks, but it also caused the disintegration of democratic institutions, which in turn led to a debilitating cultural decline. Shaftesbury’s horticultural image of Augustan poets as ‘forced plants’ presents Rome’s imperial institutions as a barren environment, yielding a poor cultural harvest and ultimately destabilizing the empire. Rome’s ‘fatal form of government’ so degenerated its citizens’ cultural fiber that the ‘only deliverance’ was ‘a total dissolution of that enormous empire’ at the hands of the barbarians. This dissolution had already been prefigured by an artistic fall from grace: ‘For even barbarity and Gothicism were already entered into arts before the savages had made any impression on the empire’ (1999: 99–100). Shaftesbury’s theory of democratic art views liberty as a necessary condition for universal art to reach its intrinsic potential (see Pocock 1995: 248). In the second section of the Soliloquy, he formulates a foundational myth that locates the emergence of the fine arts in the refinement of governmental systems, which he conceptualizes with a three-stage model of civilizational progress. Whereas in the primitive stage of man the poetic potential of language lies barren, the gradual emergence of political constitutions furthers

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human eloquence. In democratic Greece, the rising prestige of ‘the persuasive arts’ (1999: 107) led to the formation of a uniquely literary speech community consisting of intellectuals who were as talented as the great political rhetoricians but ‘less covetous of public applause’, and thus happy to engage in the ‘contemplation merely of these enchanting arts’ for the sake of improving the musicality of language. Shaftesbury’s terms can be viewed as a response to the emerging literary field. But he frames this emergence as a public development: the implication is that avant-garde artists ‘refined their taste and cultivated their ear’ as well as the ‘public ear’, and ‘by their example taught the public to discover what was just and excellent in each performance’. A literary establishment was thus formed that made bad writing impossible: When such a race as this [i.e. of literary intellectuals] was once risen, it was no longer possible to impose on mankind by what was specious and pretending . . . Nothing of what we call sophistry in argument or bombast in style, nothing of the effeminate kind or of the false tender, the pointed witticism, the disjointed thought, the crowded simile, or the mixed metaphor, could pass even on the common ear while the notaries, the expositors and prompters above-mentioned were everywhere at hand and ready to explode the unnatural manner. (1999: 108)

Shaftesbury’s model was influential, and the link between democracy and art was central to British eighteenth-century critics (see Meehan 1986). A more skeptical interpretation of this link was put forward by David Hume, in three important essays on cultural politics: ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’ (1741), ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ (1742), and ‘Of Luxury’ (1752, later retitled ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’). Hume’s first essay rejects the idea that liberal institutions promote a cultural efflorescence, and the essay’s near-polemical tone reflects the skeptic’s impatience with ‘vulgar Whiggism’ (Forbes 1975). Hume not only challenges what he takes to be the grandiosity of Shaftesbury’s claims, he also calls attention to the political motivation of these claims (that is, the justification of political institutions by reference to aesthetic achievement). Summarizing the Whig argument, Hume points out that the assertion ‘that the arts and sciences could never flourish, but in a free government’, rests on two single examples from Greek and Roman history, which Shaftesbury and Addison deemed sufficient mainly because they ‘entertained too great a partiality’ (Hume 1985: 89–90) in favor

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of democratic government. Hume rejoins with a comprehensive list of evidence that the Whig argumentation had suppressed: But what would these writers have said, to the instances of modern ROME and of FLORENCE? Of which the former carried to perfection all the finer arts of sculpture, painting, and music, as well as poetry, though it groaned under tyranny, and under the tyranny of priests: While the latter made its chief progress in the arts and sciences, after it began to lose its liberty by the usurpation of the family of MEDICI. ARIOSTO, TASSO, GALILEO, more than RAPHAEL, and MICHAEL ANGELO, were not born in republics. And though the LOMBARD school was famous as well as the ROMAN, yet the VENETIANS have had the smallest share in its honours, and seem rather inferior to the other ITALIANS, in their genius for the arts and sciences. RUBENS established his school at ANTWERP, not at AMSTERDAM: DRESDEN, not HAMBURGH, is the centre of politeness in Germany. But the most eminent instance of the flourishing of learning in absolute governments, is that of FRANCE, which scarcely ever enjoyed any established liberty, and yet has carried the arts and sciences as near perfection as any other nation. The ENGLISH are, perhaps, greater philosophers; the ITALIANS better painters and musicians; the ROMANS were greater orators: But the FRENCH are the only people, except the GREEKS, who have been at once philosophers, poets, orators, historians, painters, architects, sculptors, and musicians. With regard to the stage, they have excelled even the GREEKS, who far excelled the ENGLISH. And, in common life, they have, in a great measure, perfected that art, the most useful and agreeable of any, l’Art de Vivre, the art of society and conversation. (1985: 90–1)

Hume aims to expose the ambiguity of seemingly clear oppositions. He believes that the differences between the political parties are more subtle than Tory and Whig ideologues would claim, and he argues that the effects of absolute and liberal rule are too context-sensitive to be reduced to a rigid opposition between democratic growth and monarchic decay of the arts: ‘I am apt to think’, he says, ‘that, in monarchical government there is a source of improvement, and in popular governments a source of degeneracy, which in time will bring these species of civil polity still nearer an equality’ (1985: 95). In his second essay on the topic, published the following year, Hume offers a more complex theorization: he begins by listing a series of carefully formulated ‘general laws’ or ‘observation[s]’

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(1985: 116), the first of which is closer to Shaftesbury’s position: ‘[I]t is impossible for the arts and sciences to arise, at first, among any people unless that people enjoy the blessing of a free government’ (1985: 115). Like Shaftesbury, Hume justifies this proposition with reference to the insecurity and injustice caused by the dominance of arbitrary rule in primitive societies, which reduce their people to ‘slaves’ unable to ‘aspire to any refinements of taste or reason’ (1985: 117). But Hume complicates this thesis with two modifications meant to suggest that the principles derived from primitive societies cannot simply be applied to eighteenth-century Europe. The modification relates the emergence of knowledge to spatial figurations: ‘[N]othing is more favourable to the rise of politeness and learning’, he asserts, ‘than a number of neighbouring and independent states, connected together by commerce and policy’ (1985: 119). This undermines any simple connection of art and free government, because it links the emergence of cultural frameworks to a greater range of factors that include spatial and commercial contexts relatively independent of domestic political systems. Hume agrees with Montesquieu that the cultural frameworks in modern Europe are so intricately interwoven that the borders between, for instance, French and British letters are hardly clear-cut, and the achievements of both cultures must be seen as the result of a common dialogue. The second modification of Hume’s general law introduces a distinction between the spheres of the cognitive and the beautiful, between scientific discourse and the fine arts. Hume argues that in primitive societies, both the cognitive and the beautiful variants of cultural production find their best ‘Nursery’ in ‘a free state’. But in the post-nursery stage of modern Europe, where cultural achievements can easily ‘be transplanted into any government’, liberal and monarchical systems have more ambiguous effects on cultural production: ‘[A] republic is most favourable to the growth of the sciences, a civilized monarchy to that of the polite arts’ (1985: 124). Hume’s concept of ‘civilized monarchy’ questions Shaftesbury’s distinction between free and arbitrary government. The term refers to modern monarchies, such as the French, in which absolute authority is restricted to the king while the nation’s executives ‘must submit to the general laws’ (1985: 125). This restriction assures, at least under a ‘just and prudent administration’, that the people will find ‘a tolerable security’ and are thus able to import many of the cultural advantages developed in neighboring republics.

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[I]n a republic, the candidates for office must look downwards, to gain the suffrages of the people; in a monarchy, they must turn their attention upwards, to court the good graces and favour of the great. To be successful in the former way, it is necessary for a man to make himself useful, by his industry, capacity, or knowledge: To be prosperous in the latter way, it is requisite for him to render himself agreeable, by his wit, complaisance, or civility. A strong genius succeeds best in republics: A refined taste in monarchies. And consequently the sciences are the more natural growth of the one, and the polite arts of the other. (1985: 126)

Hume’s argument can be said to anticipate, in the psychologizing vocabulary of the Enlightenment, the notion of cultural differentiation and literary semi-autonomy. In Hume’s neoclassical terms, beauty is considered a delicate flower, a luxury that springs forth from politeness and is ‘relished’ and produced by only ‘a few’ rare minds who have the ‘leisure, fortune, and genius’ to cultivate their ‘refined taste or sentiment’ (1985: 124). It locates itself in a separate sphere from the more existential achievements of the sciences, ‘these coarser and more useful arts’ that are easier to sustain because they are ‘profitable to every mortal’ and therefore ‘can scarcely fall into oblivion’ ‘when once discovered’ (1985: 124–5). Hume’s preromantic terms express the emerging semi-independence of aesthetic production, and the discontinuity between civilizational progress and the field-based logic of aesthetic production. His essay implies that since cultural refinement depends on manners rather than institutions, strong illiberal governments such as the Bourbon monarchy might well turn out to be the best cultivators of the Muses (a point Voltaire makes in his Le Siècle de Louis XIV in 1752). But Hume’s argument is not so much an apology for civil monarchy as a recognition of the literary field. Hume’s third essay on the topic, ‘Of Luxury’ (1752), sounds like a retraction of some of his earlier views, for it is more open to the Whiggist notion that commerce, liberal government, and cultural refinement (both in the useful and the liberal arts) can be said to reinforce one another. The following, rather sanguine catalogue of the cultural achievements evidenced by a democratic ‘spirit of the age’ sounds like a proto-Whitmanian restatement of Shaftesbury’s claims: Another advantage of industry and of refinements in the mechanical arts, is, that they commonly produce some refinements in the liberal; nor can one be carried to perfection, without being accompanied, in some

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degree, with the other. The same age, which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers, and ship-carpenters. We cannot reasonably expect, that a piece of woollen cloth will be wrought to perfection in a nation, which is ignorant of astronomy, or where ethics are neglected. The spirit of the age affects all the arts; and the minds of men, being once roused from their lethargy, and put into a fermentation, turn themselves on all sides, and carry improvements into every art and science. . . . Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and, what are commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages. (1985: 270–1)

Does this later essay reflect a break in Hume’s ideological development? It seems more likely that Hume’s shift of emphasis is motivated by the essay’s argumentative aim, namely to disprove primitivist notions of art as a ‘luxury’ detrimental to cultural health. Hume relates the primitivist view to a ‘philosophical question’ that ‘has been much disputed in ENGLAND’ (1985: 280),2 but we can view his argument as a rejoinder to Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’, which had been published to great acclaim two years previously. Rousseau argued that the efflorescence of the arts, literature, and the sciences is a sure sign of imminent cultural collapse, for it stifles the people’s ‘sense of original liberty’, ‘cause[s] them to love their own slavery’, and turns them into ‘what is called a civilised people’ (1913: 129–31). While Sparta evicted its artists and scholars, Athens compromised its moral fiber and military muscle when it ‘became the seat of politeness and taste’ (1913: 136), and consequently succumbed to the barbarian Romans, who themselves declined when republican Rome’s embrace of artistic pursuits led to a neglect of ‘military discipline’ and ‘agriculture’ (1913: 138). Hume disagrees that Rome declined as a result of artistic refinement (the ‘disorders in the ROMAN state’ were not caused by ‘luxury and the arts’ but by ‘an ill modelled government’ and the ‘unlimited extent of conquests’ [1985: 276]), and that cultural refinement is inimical to liberty. ‘If we consider the matter in a proper light’, he says, ‘we shall find, that a progress in the arts is rather favourable to liberty, and has a natural tendency to preserve, if not produce a free government’ (1985: 277). The seeming inconsistency in Hume’s essays demonstrates well how Enlightenment notions of ‘democracy’, ‘liberty’, and ‘art’ vary according to specific argumentative ends, and

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the shifting conceptual frameworks of mid- to late-eighteenth-century thought. Behind Hume’s and Rousseau’s rhetorical clash on the aesthetic symptoms of democratic government, there are a number of moves or motifs that would seem less divergent if they were phrased in slightly different terms. Rousseau’s refusal of the fine arts is really a refusal of a neoclassical aesthetics: lacking the late-eighteenthcentury romantic vocabularies for a post-neoclassical aesthetics, he rejects aesthetics as a whole. Similarly, Hume describes spaces of literary autonomy in neoclassical terms (as areas of ‘refined taste or sentiment’ [1985: 124]) that suppress rather than highlight his affinities to Rousseau’s political views and sharpen his implicit grasp of the literary field – implicit in his recognition that some areas of culture (learning, sciences, commerce) have an important relationship with liberal government, while others (polite conversation, moral reflection and poetry) are semi-independent. Instead, when faced with Rousseau’s assertions of the incommensurability of liberty and the arts, Hume’s neoclassical terms pull him in the direction of classic Whiggism, towards Shaftesburyan affirmations of the continuity of commerce and liberal government with truth, beauty, and morality.3 Whig Aesthetics and US Discourse Given the popularity of the liberty-as-cultural-engine idea in eighteenthcentury Great Britain, it is hardly surprising that it suited the selffashioning of US political nationalists. What made the Democratic Muse construct so important for eighteenth-century models of American identity, however, is that it complements theological formulations of the translatio studii or translatio imperii myth with a secular frame of reference. As Joseph Ellis points out, the ‘connection between socioeconomic progress and the arts’ made it possible for Enlightenment intellectuals ‘to speak sensibly of a cultural millennium in America’ that could be envisaged as ‘a natural consequence of human history’ rather than ‘an unfathomable act of God’ (2002: 18; see also Downes 2002). Providential hopes of a cultural efflorescence could thus be confirmed by scientific proof based on the virtuous circle of the Whig connection of liberty with commercial and cultural growth. Early Nationalism

The revolutionary generation formulated the Whig narrative with a great deal of enthusiasm: John Trumbull’s Essay on the Use and

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Advantages of the Fine Arts (1770) applies two critical formulas that were influential enough in pre-revolutionary America to form genres in their own right: the defense of the fine arts as crucial to (rather than destructive of) cultural health,4 and the millennial invocation of translatio as proof of future greatness (Trumbull 1770: 5, 13). Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s short-lived United States Magazine (January to December 1779) illustrates well the rhetorical pitch of revolutionary liberty-as-engine-of-the-arts talk. Reprinting ‘An Oration on the Advantages of American Independence’, which the South-Carolinian physician, politician, and historian David Ramsay had given in Charleston in 1778 to commemorate the second anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Brackenridge interprets the ‘natural’ and ‘easy’ style of Ramsay’s address as proof that the ‘fair establishment of equal liberty’ in America will bring on a ‘new stage erected for . . . immortal and divine eloquence’ (1779: 21). Ramsay’s address opens in the same vein: ‘The arts and sciences’ had ‘languished’ under British ‘subjection’ and ‘will now raise their drooping heads, and spread far and wide, till they have reached the remotest parts of this untutored continent’ (1779: 23). When Ramsay deals with the fine arts, he gives the idea of ‘politeness’ a distinctly negative spin (characterized ‘by the low arts of fawning and adulation’ [1779: 22]), and turns simplicity into an epistemological asset: republican government gives people better self-knowledge by providing more truthful glimpses of human nature than the monarchical culture of dissimulation: ‘In monarchies, an extreme degree of politeness disguises the simplicity of nature’, while ‘in republics, mankind appear as they really are, without any false colouring’ (1779: 53). In the North American Review, these ideas were combined with expressivist models of national identity, although the line between neoclassical and authenticity-based narratives is not always clear. Edward Everett’s Phi Beta Kappa oration in Harvard in 1824 (with Lafayette in the audience) formulates a model of cultural progress in terms of harmonic unity inspired by Herderian vocabularies. In the following passage, the empathetic process by which ‘great minds’ tap into the nation’s essential characteristic is described in terms of musical resonance: By an unconscious instinct, the mind in the strong action of its powers, adapts itself to the number and complexion of the other minds, with which it is to enter into communion or conflict. As the voice falls into the key, which is suited to the space to be filled, the mind, in the various

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exercises of its creative faculties, strives with curious search for that master-note, which will awaken a vibration from the surrounding community, and which, if it do not find it, it is itself too often struck dumb. (1836: 25)

In Everett’s expressivist view, therefore, literature is only authentic if it becomes the ‘voice’ of the nation, which it can only become if a country’s ‘great minds’ manage to ‘reflec[t]’ the national key-note in their literary ‘conceptions’. The more numerous the national chorus of voices, the closer it will get to expressing ‘the Spirit of the Age; the serene and beautiful spirit descended from the highest heaven of liberty’ (1836: 25). American authors have an advantage because of their linguistic union, while in Europe ‘the multiplication of languages’ has become an ‘obstacle’ to ‘the free progress of genius’ (Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine, Dante and Goethe ‘are strangers to each other’ [1836: 26]). Everett thus proposes a cultural parallelism between linguistic and political alienation (in Europe) and harmonization (in the US): In Europe, the work of international alienation, which begins in diversity of language, is carried on and consummated by diversity of government, institutions, national descent, and national prejudices. In crossing the principal rivers, channels, and mountains, in that quarter of the world, you are met, not only by new tongues, but by new forms of government, new associations of ancestry, new and generally hostile objects of national boast and pride. While on the other hand, throughout the vast regions included within the limits of our Republic, not only the same language, but the same laws, the same national government, the same republican institutions, and a common ancestral association prevail, and will diffuse themselves. Mankind will here exist, move, and act in a kindred mass, such as was never before congregated on the earth’s surface. (1836: 29)

Everett anticipates the Humean counter-arguments (about great art thriving under aristocratic patronage) and rejoins that the ‘greatest efforts of human genius have been made, where the nearest approach to free institutions has taken place’. Although in modern times the question is more complicated – as ‘some liberal institutions have existed in the bosom of societies otherwise despotic’ – and although ‘[t]here are times and places’ where ‘the muses’ seem ‘transformed into court ladies’, on the whole, the greatest artists in Western

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history were voicing a democratic ethos in the face of authoritarian environment: Dante and Petrarch composed their beautiful works in exile; Boccacio complains in the most celebrated of his, that he was transfixed with the darts of envy and calumny; Macchiavelli was pursued by the party of the Medici, for resisting their tyrannical designs; Guicciardini retired in disgust, to compose his history in voluntary exile; Galileo confessed in the prisons of the Inquisition, that the earth did not move; Ariosto lived in poverty; and Tasso died in want and despair. Cervantes, after he had immortalized himself in his great work, was obliged to write on for bread. The whole French academy was pensioned to crush the great Corneille. Racine, after living to see his finest pieces derided as cold and worthless, died of a broken heart. The divine genius of Shakespeare owed but little surely to patronage, for it raised him to no higher rank than that of a subaltern actor in his own and Ben Jonson’s plays . . . The most valuable of the pieces of Selden were written in that famous resort of great minds, the tower of London. Milton, surprised by want in his infirm old age, sold the first production of the human mind for five pounds. [Locke] was expelled from his place in Oxford, and kept in banishment . . . Dryden sacrificed his genius to the spur of immediate want . . . Johnson was taken to prison for a debt of five shillings; and Burke petitioned for a Professorship at Glasgow, and was denied. (1836: 23–4)

Everett’s oration was discussed by the North American Review, whose editorship he had held from 1820 to 1823. The new editor, Jared Sparks, gave Everett’s text a generally favorable reading, but also disagreed with some of his points. Even in such a relatively small and closed circle as the North American group, there was no consensus on the significance of democracy and art. Sparks’ review begins with a summary of the first axiom formulated in Hume’s ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, on the dependence of cultural excellence on free government. He omits Hume’s qualifications of his axiom (concerning the specifics of territory and the advantages of civil monarchies), censuring him instead for not having adequately understood that the conditions of primitive societies cannot simply be applied to contemporary situations (a point Hume makes himself, of course). Sparks’ critique of Everett bears a remarkable resemblance to Hume’s arguments: ‘What was the literature of Rome in her republican days? Where are the orators, poets, philosophers,

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historians, of the Swiss cantons, of Venice, of Genoa, of the United Provinces, and of other modern republics?’ (1825: 432). It seems that ‘the spirit of liberty’ may well be able to add a ‘powerful, and unconquerable impulse’ to ‘the great minds’, but it cannot be solely responsible for the ‘progress of extraordinary mental culture’ (1825: 435). Sparks also takes issue with Everett’s conceptualization of US culture in terms of sympathetic wholeness and linguistic unity. He grants that ‘the medium of a common language’ may be useful in fact-based branches of knowledge inasmuch as it facilitates communication. But ‘in works of the imagination’ it is not unity but ‘a diversity of tongues’ that encourages ‘full development and communication of thought’ (1825: 436–7). Sparks phrases this argument using a slightly different vocabulary of romantic expressivism, which conceives of linguistic diversity (rather than homogeneity) as a sign of authenticity and originality. Accordingly, every language contains ‘delicate shades of thought, beauty of imagery, and combinations of ideas, of which no other language is susceptible’. Hence the variety of national literatures, whose great works cannot be translated into other languages without falsifying the authentic ‘spirit’ (1825: 437) they convey (‘Who can imagine Shakespeare writing in French, or Cervantes in Italian, or Metastasio in German?’ [1825: 438]). Sparks invites the reader to picture the linguistic consequences if ancient Greek had become a global language: in all probability it would have broken up into a ‘multiplicity of dialects’ and ‘distinct languages’, in order to embody the ‘new combinations of thought’ evolving in the world. If, on the other hand, Greek had retained its initial ‘purity’, the resulting linguistic unity would have proved disastrous, forcing everyone to imitate ‘the first great writers’ (1825: 438). Sparks’ hypothesis is meant to stress what many intellectuals in the North American group considered the consequences of America’s linguistic colonialization, the imposition of English as a language not organically connected to US culture: As ‘the product of a foreign soil’, English is not ‘growing up with our growth, and receiving on its very front the deep marks of our national character and peculiarities’. In all likelihood, therefore, American letters ‘will be cramped by the language’ (1825: 439). Sparks’ disagreement with Everett shows how slightly different romantic vocabularies generate very different legitimations of democratic institutions. Everett praises democracy in communitarian terms, for furthering authenticity by connecting people in

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empathetic unity: the more people interact with each other (or resonate together, in Everett’s musical image), the better they realize and render distinct their identity, mutually reinforcing their similarities. Sparks’ terms are equally romantic, but emphasize individualist difference. Authenticity comes with the attainment of a unique voice, while harmony depends on variety or difference rather than a reinforcement of similarity. Hence Sparks praises democracy for its centrifugal effect, which makes him more open to accepting the eighteenth-century argument that liberal government presupposes the diversification of interests. De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

The debates of the North American group were brought into focus by the most extensive contemporary inquiry into the connection between democratic institutions and American culture, Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique (published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, the first American editions in 1838 and 1841). De Tocqueville was convinced that democracy was here to stay, following historical necessity, and he hoped his study would contribute to providing a conceptual frame for the changing world order that might prevent such disasters as the French Revolution (‘A new political science is needed for a world altogether new’ [2000: 7]). He treats democratic and aristocratic societies as different in kind. The first volume of Democracy in America sets out to describe the diverging political and legal systems; the second explains how the ‘social state’ in America has ‘given birth to a multitude of sentiments and opinions’ that were ‘unknown in the old aristocratic societies of Europe’ (2000: 399). De Tocqueville’s analysis of democratic culture begins with an exploration of American philosophical methods, noting that the democratic social structure encourages evasion of the ‘spirit of system’. The ‘continual movement’ within ‘a democratic society’ tends to relax the ‘bond’ between generations, classes, and communities (2000: 403). This makes Americans more self-reliant, and thus less interested in philosophical speculation or abstract theory. For ‘permanent inequality of conditions brings men to confine themselves to the haughty, sterile search for abstract truths, whereas the democratic social state and institutions disposes them to demand of the sciences only their immediate, useful applications’ (2000: 438). On the other hand, democracy furthers an inclination to generalize: whereas

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aristocratic societies do not see themselves as a united body but perceive each member as a representative of a different species, thus encouraging mental habits unfavorable to the cognitive process of generalization, democratic systems abolish distinctions and encourage uniform self-images. As democrats learn to view everyone as members of the same social category, their discriminating faculties atrophy (2000: 413). De Tocqueville sees the democratic knack for generalization reflected in three American cultural trends: a penchant for philosophical pantheism (2000: 426), an inclination to taking historiographical birds-eye perspectives (2000: 469–72), and a tendency towards linguistic and conceptual imprecision. This last effect – a loss of clarity through use of ‘generic terms’ and ‘abstract words’ – is the most ‘distressing consequence of democracy’ (2000: 455–6). He attributes it to the breakdown of class barriers: in aristocratic societies class distinction furthers group vocabularies whose linguistic difference may parallel differences in wealth. Democratization encourages a process of social intermingling in which ‘all words in the language mix together’ (2000: 455). Also, democratic vocabularies use abstraction and vagueness in order to extend the half-life period of concepts in the face of the rapid changes in democratic realities: Men who inhabit democratic countries therefore often have vacillating thoughts; they must have very large expressions to contain them. As they never know if the idea they are expressing today will suit the new situation they will have tomorrow, they naturally conceive a taste for abstract terms. An abstract word is like a box with a false bottom: one puts in it the ideas one desires and one takes them out without anyone’s seeing it. (2000: 457)

His view of democracy’s effect on the fine arts resembles Hume’s opinion on the significant relationship between politeness and civil monarchy, though de Tocqueville’s argument proceeds from an analysis of socio-economic modes of production: ‘the natural immobility of aristocratic nations’ furthers specialization, which leads to the emergence of distinct classes of artists who develop high aesthetic standards and compete with one another in the production of singular masterpieces to be sold dearly to a few connoisseurs (2000: 439–40). In the more open democratic societies, groups of artists and consumers are less cohesive and therefore governed to a greater extent by commercial interest. The dynamics of democratic markets,

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then, motivate artists to sell for lower prices to a greater number of recipients, which in turn induces them ‘to manufacture a greater quantity of objects, nearly alike, but of less value’ (2000: 441). Illustrating the effect of the commercialization of art, de Tocqueville refers to the Greco-Roman villas lined along the banks of the New York East River: at first sight they look like ‘small palaces of white marble’, but upon closer inspection their walls turn out to be made of ‘whitewashed bricks’ and their columns of ‘painted wood’ (2000: 442). In the domain of literature, aristocratic structures encourage sophistication: as ‘writers will apply themselves more to perfecting than producing’, ‘[s]tyle will appear in it almost as important as the idea, the form as the content; the tone will be polished, moderate, sustained’. In the best cases, this means the production of ‘a literature in which all will be regular and coordinated in advance’, and which ‘will be groomed in its smallest details’. In the worst case, it encourages a tendency towards ‘a certain softness of spirit and heart’ (2000: 447), or professional detachment. De Tocqueville’s description reads like an allegory of the literary field disconnected from the common social imaginary: It will sometimes happen that the members of the literate class, living only among themselves and writing only for themselves, will entirely lose sight of the rest of the world, which will throw them into the studied and the false; they themselves will impose little literary rules for their own sole use, which will turn them away insensibly from good sense and finally lead them outside of nature. By dint of wanting to speak otherwise than the vulgar, they will come to a sort of aristocratic jargon that is scarcely less distant from beautiful language than the patois of the people. (2000: 447)

Democratic cultures, by contrast, can suffer from a lack of professionalism: discouraging literary castes, they fail to produce coherent literary traditions. Hardly any of the writers in democracies ‘ha[s] received a literary education’, and those who ‘have some tincture of belles-lettres’ tend to be involved in politics or other professions and are thus able to attend only intermittently and ‘furtively’ to literary pursuits. Such semi-professional intellectuals tend to consider ‘the pleasures of the mind’ to be a ‘passing and necessary relaxation in the midst of the serious work of life’, and thus resist professionalism (‘such men can never acquire a profound enough knowledge of the

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literary art to feel its delicacies; the little nuances elude them’). Their lack of literary sophistication, then, leads them to appreciate a lower kind of beauty, one that is easy to recognize, fast-paced, sensationalist, and sharply contoured: They demand facile beauties that deliver themselves and that one can enjoy at that instant; above all the unexpected and new are necessary to them. Habituated to an existence that is practical, contested, and monotonous, they need lively and rapid emotions, sudden clarity, brilliant truths or errors that instantly pull them from themselves and introduce them suddenly, almost violently, into the midst of the subject. (2000: 448)

Democratic literary communication thus leads to a neglect of literary form: Taken in its entirety, literature in democratic centuries cannot present the image of order, of regularity, of science, and of art as in aristocratic times; in it, form will ordinarily be found neglected and sometimes scorned. Style will often show itself bizarre, incorrect, overloaded, and soft, and almost always bold and vehement. Authors will aim more at rapidity of execution than at perfection of details. Small writings will be more frequent than large books, spirit than erudition, imagination than profundity; an uncultivated and almost savage force will reign in thought, and often a very great variety and a singular fruitfulness in its products. One will try to astonish rather than to please, and one will strive to carry away passions more than to charm taste. (2000: 449)

De Tocqueville’s view of democratic and aristocratic literary culture shows a tension between two diametrically opposed interpretations: on the one hand, he prefers the aristocratic writer as a professional interested in the complexities of literary form to the democratic writer churning out sensationalist content in a sloppy style for maximum commercial gain. This aspect of de Tocqueville’s democratic/aristocratic opposition reflects an elegiac sense of cultural decline, and a fear of popular culture as it is experienced by the early-nineteenth-century literary avant-garde. At other times, however, de Tocqueville appears to reverse this valuation and follow a romantic primitivism that views the literary avant-garde as a coterie of detached and effeminate aristocratic artificers obsessed with empty literary conventions. He then seems to commend the

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democratic rejection of style as a timely ‘end-of-art’ and a heroic reconnection with untrammeled nature. His interpretation of democratic culture therefore oscillates between visions of vulgarization and pastoral simplicity, and his notion of democratic style varies between regrettable lack of formal precision and sensible rejection of stale tradition and rule-based formalism. His formulation of the stylistic ‘lawlessness’ of democratic writing, consequently, moves back and forth between compliment and insult, between affirmation and rejection of the conceptual framework of the Whitmanian moment. A similar ambiguity pertains to de Tocqueville’s suggestion that whereas aristocratic art develops the ideal, democratic art focuses on the real. He suggests that the democratic embrace of the real is a mixed blessing for poetry, a genre defined by ‘the search and depiction of the ideal’. The condition of ‘equality’, he argues, ‘dries up most of the old sources of poetry’ (2000: 460), the most important being a sense of history, a fascination with the supernatural, and a taste for the picturesque spectacle of society’s differentiated class hierarchy. Whereas aristocrats are obsessed by their past and encourage Catholicism, democratic societies have an ‘instinctive distaste for what is old’ and further religious skepticism, or the sort of religion that ‘turns attention away’ from supernatural beings as ‘secondary agents’ between God and man, thus forcing the poetic imagination ‘back to earth’, confining it ‘to the visible and real world’ (2000: 459). Moreover, while aristocratic systems intensify social differences to produce extremes that are in themselves poetic, in democracies ‘men are all very small and very much alike’, forming ‘an object of mediocre size’ that ‘will never lend itself to the ideal’ (2000: 460). De Tocqueville’s account recalls the well-rehearsed complaints about cultural homogeneity and barrenness associated with James Fenimore Cooper and Henry James. But democracy in fact provides new sources of poetry: equality may close ‘the past to poetry’ but it ‘opens the future to it’ (democrats ‘scarcely worry about what has been, but they willingly dream of what will be’). The future lends itself well to idealization because it ‘offers a vast course to poets and permits them to move their picture far back from the eye’ (2000: 460). The ‘similarity of all individuals’ in a democracy renders them ‘unsuitable to become the object of poetry’ as individuals, but it enables poets to take a generalizing viewpoint that has its own advantages, permitting them to perceive mankind as ‘a vast democracy of which each citizen is a people’, so that the ‘the shape of the

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human race’ becomes ‘a very rich mine for poetry’ (2000: 461). De Tocqueville makes this proto-Whitmanian point with a vivid comparison of individual banality and national sublimity: ‘One can conceive of nothing so small, so dull, so filled with miserable interests, in a word, so antipoetic, as the life of a man in the United States’, but one will always find, in the US national imaginary, a thought ‘that is full of poetry’ and ‘gives vigor to the rest’. De Tocqueville’s main example of democratic poetic themes is the American preoccupation with manifest destiny: The American people sees itself advance across this wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature. This magnificent image of themselves is not offered only now and then to the imagination of the Americans; one can say that it follows each of them in the least of his actions as in his principal ones, and that it is always there, dangling before his intellect. (2000: 461)

The most important democratic source of poetry is the modern tendency toward self-inspection. In de Tocqueville’s account, the lateeighteenth-century turn towards subjectivity and inwardness stems, not from an increasing self-reflexivity of spirit, as idealist histories suggest, but from social democratization. The ‘depopulat[ion of] Heaven’ and the leveling of social hierarchy that were brought along by ‘the progress of equality’ led to the emergence of eighteenth-century nature poetry. Puzzled about ‘what they could put in place of the great objects that were fleeing with aristocracy’, the Enlightenment poets ‘turned their eyes toward inanimate nature’ so that instead of ‘heroes and gods’ they began ‘at first to depict rivers and mountains’. But the neoclassical preoccupation with ‘descriptive’ poetry was only an intermediate stage of embarrassment (2000: 460). Poets dabbled in sensuous representations of nature until they hit on interiority as an infinitely richer mine of poetic ideality than the best descriptions of external aristocratic manners or the beauties of phenomenal nature: ‘Democratic peoples can amuse themselves well for a moment in considering nature; but they only become really animated at the sight of themselves’ (2000: 460), and ‘there is nothing that lends itself more to depiction of the ideal than man so viewed in the depths of immaterial nature’ (2000: 462) (de Tocqueville exemplifies the romantic preoccupation with inwardness with Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage [1812–18], Chateaubriand’s René [1802], and Alphonse de Lamartine’s Jocelyn [1836]).

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The following table summarizes de Tocqueville’s most salient results: Writing in Aristocratic Ages

Writing in Democratic Ages

Follows rigid ‘systems’ of thought (can be sterile but also helpful)

Prefers flexible pragmatist ad-hoccery (prevents systemmongering but encourages dilettantism)

Pursues pure knowledge for its own sake (can lose touch with reality but enables scientific discovery)

Pursues knowledge for commercial use (prevents academicism but encourages anti-intellectualism)

Respects ‘tradition’ and submits to community (prevents self-reliance but increases communion with others)

Tends toward radical self-invention and individualism (assures selfreliance but encourages solipsism)

Prefers Catholicism (Heavens Prefers Protestantism (direct populated with poetic supernatural relationship to God), eschewing beings) poetical supernatural, tending toward pantheism Fascinated by historical past

Fascinated by present and future

Tends toward idealist philosophy

Tends toward realism or empiricism

Uses refined or embellished beauty or style to suit élitist or professionalized tastes

Compromises beauty and stylistic sophistication to suit mass audiences

Invests a great deal in individual workmanship and high costs of material for small but rich audiences

Is mass-produced to provide cheap artifacts for large audiences

Tends toward concrete and fixed meanings or concepts, and a highly structured (occasionally rigid) style

Tends toward open meanings or concepts, and a minimally structured (occasionally crude) style

Focuses on famous individuals

Focuses on national traits

Chronicles external deeds and events

Explores the interiority of the mind

Draws poetic inspiration from the difference between aristocrats and the poor

Draws poetic inspiration from the general movements of the nation (manifest destiny)

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Thus de Tocqueville’s significance for the Whitmanian moment is that he sharpens the conflicting arguments about democratic culture that have dominated transatlantic fields of cultural production since the early 1700s. Transcendentalism – Romanticism

Romantic cultural critics projected the democratic/aristocratic opposition on the epistemological concepts prompted by Kant’s three Critiques. Friedrich Schiller’s treatise ‘On Grace and Dignity’ (1793), for example, phrases the ideal of the aesthetic existence in terms of a liberal state whose citizens live in an equilibrium of duty and inclination. Unlike absolute states, where a monarchical Reason suppresses the basic needs and inclinations of human nature, or the anarchic conditions of unconstrained sensualism that Schiller attributes to the revolutionary mob in France, the liberal state harmonizes intuitive desire and sense of duty. It centers people in a balanced freedom that is neither constrained by imposed forms nor perverted by formlessness. In Schiller’s allegorical image, the liberal equilibrium turns the citizen into a beautiful soul (‘schöne Seele’) whose voice becomes pure music (‘Musik wird ihre Stimme sein’) (1992: 8/361–72). Romantic critics disagree, of course, on the relationship between democratic institutions and poetic ideals. In an essay on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus for Leigh Hunt’s Examiner (1816), William Hazlitt anticipates de Tocqueville’s argument that democratic conditions subvert the ideal. The ‘principle of poetry’, Hazlitt says, ‘is a very anti-levelling principle’, which ‘aims at effect’, ‘exists by contrast’, ‘presents a dazzling appearance’ (1930–4: 4/214), and focuses on the unusual, the excellent, the salient, and the great. In contrast to de Tocqueville’s sociological explanation, Hazlitt explains poetry’s ‘anti-levelling principle’ with reference to transcendendalist philosophy of mind. He rephrases the Kantian distinction between the imagination (Einbildungskraft) and the understanding (Verstand) in terms of an aristocratic and democratic opposition: The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another; it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of things not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is a monopolising faculty, which seeks the

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greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good, by justice and proportion. The one is an aristocratical, the other a republican faculty. (1930–4: 4/214)

Hazlitt’s definition of the imagination as an ‘aristocratical faculty’ turns the poet into a patrician who thrives in refined and exclusive environments protected from the democratic temper of the times. This idea underlies Hazlitt’s influential interpretation of William Wordsworth in The Spirit of the Age (1825). Wordsworth’s ‘Muse’ is ‘a levelling one’ that ‘proceeds on a principle of equality, and strives to reduce all things to the same standard’ (1930–4: 11/87). Hazlitt’s portrait of Wordsworth already provides the terms that define the self-description of Whitman: His popular, inartificial style gets rid (at a blow) of all the trappings of verse, of all the high places of poetry: ‘the cloud-capt towers, the solemn temples, the gorgeous palaces,’ are swept to the ground, and ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wreck behind.’ All the traditions of learning, all the superstitions of age, are obliterated and effaced. We begin de novo, on a tabula rasa of poetry. (1930–4: 11/87–8)

Hazlitt is fascinated by Wordsworth’s democratic method, but he also finds that the ‘levelling’ principle leaves out a great deal that is worth keeping. It makes ‘[t]he current of his feelings . . . deep, but narrow’ (1930–4: 11/94). Hallam’s critique of Wordsworth as a ‘reflective’ poet (1863: 424) locates the democratic principle in ‘the youthful periods’ of literary history: Genius was democratic under the primitive conditions of Homer or the literary childhood stage of the Elizabethans. But with modernity, the specialization of spheres led to a ‘return of the mind upon itself’ and encouraged the poetic ‘habit of seeking relief in idiosyncracies rather than community of interest’ (1863: 437). Thus ‘Art’ has developed into ‘a lofty tree’ that tends to evade ‘our grasp’ (1863: 431), so that the comprehension of contemporary poetry ‘requires exertion’ of a degree that ‘is not willingly made by the large majority of readers’ (1863: 432). Emerson has a great deal in common with Hazlitt and Hallam here (see Chap. 3, pp. 76–80 above), but for obvious reasons American transcendentalists use the democratic/aristocratic opposition differently. Emerson agrees with Hazlitt’s point that the understanding,

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as ‘a dividing and measuring faculty’, is unsuitable for poetic production. But he relates the ‘mechanical’ (read: sensualist) processes of the understanding to the arbitrary ‘politics of monarchy’, where ‘all hangs on the accidents of life and temper of a single person’. In democracy, by contrast, ‘the power proceeds organically from the people and is responsible to them’ (1903: 12/303). Emerson conceives of the imagination as a democratic faculty crucial for producing an organic ‘art of necessity’, while the understanding produces style that ‘bears the stamp of caprice of chance’ and individual whim (needless to say, Emerson’s fellow transcendentalist Carlyle arrives at the opposite conclusion, as he considers democracy to be the epitome of arbitrary rule). Emerson’s conviction that authentic art was tied to mental processes analogous to the political processes of democratic systems is central to the work of the historian-politician George Bancroft (see Levin 1959; Canary 1974; Klose 2003). Bancroft’s attempt at reformulating romantic epistemology in democratic terms informs the first three volumes of his influential History of the United States (1834, 1837, and 1839) and is theorized in more detail in his Oration before the Williamsburg Adelphi society ‘On the Office of the People in Art, Government, and Religion’ (1835).5 Before Bancroft’s political career took off (Polk appointed him Secretary of the Navy in 1844), he was part of the circle of contributors to the North American Review during the 1820s, under the influence of a Herderian nationalism (he had studied in Göttingen under the theologian Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and the historian Arnold Heeren, whose Politics of Ancient Greece he translated for a 1824 Boston edition [see Mueller-Vollmer 1987: 424 and Howe 1908]). In the 1830s, Bancroft gravitated towards a combination of philosophical transcendentalism and democratic Jacksonianism that aligned him, to an extent at least, with the views of the Cambridge Transcendental Club. During this time, Bancroft’s nationalism engages with the early-nineteenth-century discourse of millennialist perfectionism. He shares with contemporary religious and reform movements the sense that the United States is the leading nation in what must be considered a providentially governed process of cultural evolution towards a millennial or social utopia. The distinctive signature of Bancroft’s perfectionism is that it relates cultural evolution to the effects of democratic political processes. His Williamsburg Oration presents democratic negotiation as the most important corrective of human error. Beauty, truth, and goodness emerge as the

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natural outcome of majority votes: ‘The public mind winnows opinions; it is the sieve which separates error from certainty’ (1838: 395). The image of the democratic body as a ‘sieve’ in which conflicting opinions are normalized into universal truth is a communitarianist adaptation of Cousin’s eclecticism, which conceives of the evolution of truth as a process of purification in which discord between erroneous propositions is harmonized by a public effort (see Chap. 3, pp. 89–93 above). Bancroft’s relevance to Whitman’s Democratic Muse argument lies in his application of the principle of epistemological progress (through democratic ‘winnow[ing]’) to the question of aesthetic value. Countering the notion that the arts depend on a professionalized environment, he concludes that ‘the best judges in matters of taste’ do not emerge from the ‘cultivated individual’ but from ‘the collective mind’, as the ‘public is wiser than the wisest critic’. Bancroft demonstrates this point with a Whig history of the arts from antiquity to the present. In Athens ‘the arts were carried to perfection’ at a time when the democratic conditions induced such artists as Phidias ‘to please the common people’. As soon as ‘Greece yielded to tyrants’, its geniuses ‘then endeavored to please the individual’, so that the former ‘purity of taste disappeared’ and a long period of artistic darkness was ushered in. It was with the ‘popular influence’ furthered by medieval Christianity that ‘the arts again burst into a splendid existence’, because the Church offered an ‘asylum for the people’ in which artists and the common people were once again sympathetically connected (1838: 397). To the degree that Renaissance art was patronized by the ‘wealthy nobility’ of Europe, who sought ‘to adorn their palaces’ with it, it lost touch with ‘the genius of Humanity’, so that what had been ‘the purest beauty’ that ‘appealed to the soul’, now pandered to the senses and became eccentric: [T]he banquet halls of the nobility were covered with grotesque forms, such as float before the imagination, when excited and bewildered by sensual indulgence. Instead of holy families, the ideal representations of the virgin mother and the godlike child, of the enduring faith of martyrs, of the blessed benevolence of evangelic love, there came the motley group of fawns and satyrs, of Diana stooping to Endymion, of voluptuous beauty, of the forms of licentiousness. (1838: 398)

Bancroft attributes the advance of feudalist art to the arbitrary retreat of the ruling élites from their connection with the majority, and he

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supports his case with a narrative of literary history that co-opts (as in Everett’s address quoted above) the most canonical writers into a communitarian tradition (Homer ‘formed his taste’ wandering ‘from door to door’, ‘Shakespeare wrote for an audience’ of ‘common people’, so did Dante, ‘German literature’, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth [1838: 399–400]). Having ‘made Humanity’ its ‘lawgiver’ and ‘oracle’, American culture has already ‘approached so near to nature, that we can hear her gentlest whispers’ (1838: 400), and in future it will make beauty and truth a ‘universal property’, so that the ‘universe opens its pages to every eye; the music of creation resounds in every ear’ (1838: 401–2). Bancroft’s views carry the imprint of Orestes Brownson, the founding editor of and main contributor to the Boston Quarterly Review that first published Bancroft’s Williamsburg Oration. Brownson questioned Emerson’s individualist conception of the intellectual from a communitarian viewpoint. He interpreted Emerson’s Dartmouth Oration (1838) as a call for a ‘literary class’ supported by and separated from the public, and rejoined that ‘[t]he scholar must be a man of business, and do his own share of the drudgery’ (1839: 10), and ‘must speak not to a clique, a coterie, but to the entire nation’ (the present US ‘is neither the age nor the country for scholars to consult only the tastes of scholars, and to address themselves only to a literary nobility’) (1839: 16). In a review of Wordsworth, Brownson proposes a communitarian transcendentalism that defines authentic art as a result of ‘spontaneous reason’, a mode of expression independent of individual volition (1839b: 140) and identical with the voice of democracy: Genius is essentially democratic; his voice is always music to the democracy, and only they who love not the democracy, or have a private end to gain, ever dream of stifling his voice . . . But wherever his word has free course to run and be glorified, wherever it can meet the ear of the people, it vivifies the mass, and becomes the people’s law, it may be, for a thousand centuries. (1839b: 151–2)

Brownson gives the contemporary critique of Wordsworth as a reflective poet a political spin, concluding that Wordsworth is not a democratic writer, because his works ‘rarely strike us as genuine effusions of spontaneity’, but seem ‘mere creations of reflection’ that ‘have been first meditated and moulded in prose, and then done by laborious effort into verse’ (1839b: 155–6). Due to this failure to

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empathize spontaneously with the masses, ‘the voice he utters is the voice of William Wordsworth, not the voice of God’ (1839b: 152). Brownson thus levels at Wordsworth the same charge of mechanical and inorganic composition that Wordsworth himself had used against neoclassical poets: ‘Wordsworth does not seem to us capable of being simple without approaching the silly. He loses his dignity the moment he attempts to place himself at ease, and enter into familiar chat. His naturalness is altogether too near akin to that attained in Dutch paintings, – a copy rather than a reproduction of nature’ (1839b: 155). Young America and the Democratic Review

The founding of John L. O’Sullivan’s United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1837 can be seen as the beginning of a phase of highly pitched literary patriotism generally associated with the label Young America, a movement that included the New York intellectuals Evert Duyckinck, editor of the New York Literary World (1847– 53) and Cornelius Mathews, who together with Duyckinck founded Arcturus (1842–3) and Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion, (1842–3) (see Widmer 1999; Stafford 1952). The Young Americans hardly produced any new conceptualizations of democratic writing, but they gave the Democratic Muse narrative the nationalist pitch we now associate with Whitman’s more fervent statements. In the first issue of the Democratic Review, O’Sullivan anticipates Whitman’s 1855 Preface with a manifesto that merges Jacksonian political principles with the idea of democratic writing: self-government is imaged as ‘beautiful order’ emerging from ‘spontaneous action and self-regulation’ (1837: 7). Later issues declare: ‘All poetry, indeed, is essentially democratic’, and ‘Poetry can never be made the instrument of oppression’ (1838: 54). Because the US is a democratic role model, it is ‘destined to be the great nation of futurity’ (1839: 426), for it will reach authentic self-expression as soon as its literary works ‘breathe the spirit of our republican institutions’ (1839: 428). In a series of essays on the connection of democracy and literature, O’Sullivan arranges the Western literary canon along the lines of a democracy/aristocracy distinction: ‘the greatest poets have uniformly been the warmest partizans’ of republicanism – the ‘Muse of Liberty’ inspired, in O’Sullivan’s order of enumeration: Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Lamartine, Burns, Körner, Schiller, Bryant, Bancroft, Channing, and Hawthorne; by contrast, aristocratic beliefs

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account for the literary failure of ‘the courtly and heartless wits’ that dominated late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century poetry (1842: 199). Yet O’Sullivan also stresses the dangerous influence of the British aristocratic style: ‘The literature of England is . . . essentially and thoroughly imbued with a vicious tone of aristocracy, the influence of which upon American society has been as lamentable as it has been ridiculous’ (1839b: 129). O’Sullivan’s reference to a ‘tone of aristocracy’ signals the gradual sensibility to the formal (as against thematic) effects of institutions on art or literature, as it is crucial to the emergent Whitmanian moment. In October 1839, he published an essay on Bryant (written by Bryant’s son-in-law, Parke Godwin) that stresses this difference, stating that Bryant’s ‘poems are strictly American’, not only in their ‘subjects’, but in ‘spirit’ and ‘tone’. They ‘breathe the spirit of that new order of things in which we are cast’, are ‘fresh, like a young people’, ‘free, like a nation scorning the thought of bondage’, ‘generous, like a society whose only protection is mutual sympathy’ (1839: 283–4). By the end of the decade, the evaluation of stylistic traits according to their democratic content had become a commonplace for Young American critics. Duyckinck’s review of Melville’s White-Jacket, for instance, stresses that ‘his book is thoroughly American and democratic’ (Duyckinck 1974: 272) because it arrives at a synthesis of the poetic and factual. In contrast to ‘Your men of choice literature and of educated fancy’, Duyckinck says, ‘your Sternes, Jean Pauls, Southeys, and Longfellows’ who are hardly able to back up their literary sophistication with practical experience, Melville manages to unite ‘fancy’ and ‘fact’ (1974: 271). Variety/Diversity and Cultural Health Curative Variety

The Democratic Muse idea often revolves around liberalist notions of variety or diversity as sources of cultural health. The positive connotations of the variety/diversity concept can be traced to an assumption of eighteenth-century liberalism: that ‘if all the artificial restraints and regulations imposed on human activity were removed, the result would not be chaos but harmony’ (Ellis 2002: 26). As Carrie Bramen points out, the positing of ‘the curative effects of variety’ (2000: 13) can already be seen in Federalist No. 10, Madison’s classic contribution to the debates on the American Constitution of 1787. Madison

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warns the members of the Constitutional Convention about the dangers of political ‘faction’. He argues that liberal government protects the ‘diversity in the faculties of men’ (1993: 405), and that this will lead to an unequal distribution of wealth, which must entail ‘a division of the society into different interests and parties’ (1993: 406). Madison points out that authoritarian rule will not be able to prevent this division: since the ‘latent causes of faction’ are ‘sown in the nature of man’ (1993: 406) and ‘cannot be removed’, American legislators should focus on ‘the means of controling its effects’ (1993: 407) and find a way to prevent the formation of illiberal majorities. The best way to do so is to encourage (rather than restrict) diversification by enlarging the cultural whole. In smaller societies, Madison argues, there are fewer interest groups, and this increases the likelihood of majority factions, and their ability to form intrigues will be facilitated by the limited expanse of the territory. Hence: ‘Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens’ (1993: 410). Madison’s argument reverses the consensus of eighteenth-century political theorists about the defects of large empires: Hume and Montesquieu said during the 1740s that territorial expansion prepares the ground for tyranny because, first, the fragmentation of the republic prevents the subjects from communicating about their problems, and second, it decreases (as in China) the flow of goods and ideas that assures cultural health (as in modern Europe). Madison redescribes the obstruction of communication in extended republics as an asset that helps the people to prevent tyranny (see Kelleter 2002: 513–16; Wood 1969: 606–16; Pocock 1975: 522–3). The idea of curative variety also plays a role in contemporary religious discourse, as we can gather from the Newport pastor (and later President of Yale), Ezra Stiles, and his ‘Discourse on the Christian Union’ (1760) before a Rhode Island Congregational Convention, on the problem of religious faction. The immediate context of Stiles’ address was the ecclesiastical destabilization caused by the mushrooming of competing religious sects since the Great Awakening of the 1740s. According to the influential doctrine of perfectionist millennialism, the union of Christians was crucial to the establishment of Christ’s Kingdom. The break-up of established Churches into sectarian fragments seemed like a disastrous setback. To an extent, Stiles agrees with this pessimistic reading of revivalism: he speaks of ‘the unhappy excesses’ that congregational Churches underwent

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during ‘the late enthusiasm that prevailed since the year 1740’ (1760: 63). But Stiles suggests that any attempt to restrict religious diversity with recourse to authoritarian Church legislation would be counterproductive to Christian Union, because it would encourage religious despotism based on dogmas that reflect the imperfect vision of its human makers. In Stiles’ view, the most important cause of denominational diversity follows from religious questions ‘which the scripture has not determined, and on which not only the heterodox, but the most orthodox and learned divines have different sentiments’. Whatever answers Church functionaries may provide, as human answers to questions more or less left open by the scriptures they ‘are too imperfect to be adopted by christians as a standard and criterion of christian truth’ (1760: 37). All congregations should therefore enjoy ‘an unlimited, absolute, and self-determining power in the choice of their officers’ such as ‘british freemen enjoy and exercise uncontroulably in the choice of a representative or member of assembly’ (1760: 54). Stiles underlines his argument with references to necessary differences in lifestyles that anticipate the liberalist vocabularies of Mill and Whitman: Men build their houses differently, cultivate their lands differently, pursue the same employments in different methods and in different methods study the sciences – yet if they attain the end it matters little as to the different means. An empire consists of a multitude of cities, burroughs, towns and provinces, differently constituted by accident, according to the course of events, or according to the different geniuses of the people consociated. And yet in these different ways arrive at individual and public felicity. The plan that happily cements and unites all in one general confederacy and public union, reserving to each part its power, liberty, and proportionate influence in the mighty whole, is the wisest and best. Coercive uniformity is neither necessary in politics nor religion. (1760: 120)

Stiles suggests not only that true belief can be manifested in different systems, but that denominational pluralism is more conducive to religious knowledge than ‘[c]oercive uniformity’, because ‘many considerable errors, if let alone, will correct themselves in time on free inquiry’ (1760: 120). The ease with which early romantic cultural criticism adapted the political and religious vocabularies of curative variety can be seen in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Crèvecoeur

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turns Stiles’ argument on its head by suggesting that religious pluralism will ultimately lead to a post-religious culture. He argues that the absence of state-controlled creeds in America allows American farmers to focus on their economic self-realization and relegate questions of belief to the background. People will therefore increasingly intermarry across sectarian divides, until ‘all sects are mixed’ and ‘religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other’. Like Madison, Crèvecoeur presents the extended republic as an asset in overcoming faction: ‘in Europe’ religious ‘zeal’ poses the threat of ‘a grain of powder enclosed’; in America it ‘burns away in the open air and consumes without effect’ (1986: 74–6). E Pluribus Unum

Nineteenth-century motifs of curative variety tend to portray cultural heterogeneity not as an end in itself but as a necessary means to attain a higher stage of unity. This hope has been influentially rendered by the famous image of the cultural melting pot. Crèvecoeur insists that the American ‘race’ has ‘arisen’ from a ‘promiscuous breed’ (‘English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, German, and Swedes’ [1986: 68]) – a ‘strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country’ (1986: 69) – but which has been ‘melted into a new race of men’ who act ‘upon new principles’ and have left their ‘ancient prejudices and manners’ behind (1986: 70). In Crèvecoeur’s vision of American culture, ethnic and social diversity converts European inequality into a ‘fair spectacle’ (1986: 66) of more subtle gradation of social difference: a traveler arriving in the New World will be astonished not to find the disharmony typical of European society (‘the hostile castle and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable cabin’). At first, diversity cures the rigid class oppositions in Europe, then it resolves itself into the ‘pleasing uniformity’ (1986: 67) of a new American ‘character’. Crèvecoeur’s concept of curative variety celebrates social diversity and mixed ancestry as a formative event in the past, resolved by the cultural unity of the present. A similar argumentative structure defines the melting-pot images of Emersonian transcendentalists. Margaret Fuller’s Dial essay on ‘American Literature’ (1846) portrays America’s heterogeneous ethnic origins as a mark of cultural distinction. English culture, she says, ‘is in many respects uncongenial and injurious to our constitution’ because it ‘does not suit a mixed race, continually enriched

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with new blood from other stocks the most unlike that of our first descent’ (1852b: 123). At the same time Fuller subscribes to the romantic belief that authentic national identity is premised on a unified national spirit. She therefore argues that the US will only be able to produce ‘national ideas’ when it has reached a certain unity: the day of genius, she says, ‘will not rise till the fusion of races among us is more complete’ (1852b: 124). In Emerson’s famous journal passage on the ‘Smelting Pot’ (1845), unity and diversity are linked more clearly in a temporal succession, as a multiplicity of ethnic ingredients that enriches the American substance by its diversity but ultimately surrenders its difference in a process similar to refining ore to make metal: Man is the most composite of all creatures . . . Well, as in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting & intermixture of silver & gold & other metals, a new compound more precious than any, called the Corinthian Brass, was formed, so in this Continent, – asylum of all nations, the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles & (the) Cossacks, & all the European tribes, – of the Africans, & of the Polynesians, will construct a new race, a new religion, a new State, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic & Etruscan barbarians. La Nature aime les croisements. (1960–82: 299–300)

In this temporalized e-pluribus-unum formula, variety is both celebrated and limited to a foundational moment in the remote past. During the 1850s, the idea of curative variety tied in well with positivist theories of biological diversity that interpreted evolutionary progress as increasing heterogeneity (an idea first developed in Karl Ernst von Baer’s ‘On the Development of Animals’, 1828–37). Herbert Spencer influentially applied biological concepts to a theory of social evolution (notably in his Progress: Its Law and Cause of 1857 and First Principles of 1861). But for the American late romantics, Guyot’s 1849 Harvard lectures on Earth and Man were more relevant (see Chap. 6, pp. 182–5 above). Guyot suggests that biological organisms begin as a ‘homogeneous unit, without internal differences’ (1900: 79), and he defines progress as ‘diversification’ of ‘organs and of functions’. The ‘multiplicity and the variety of the special organs’ entail ‘a richer life’ and ‘a completer growth for the animal’. Guyot is mainly interested in applying this principle to

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geological formations (interpreting, for instance, the increasing topographical heterogeneity from Asia to Europe as an index of translatio imperii). But he also assumes ‘that the same law of development’ is ‘applicable’ to ‘human societies’: Here, again, homogeneousness, uniformity, is the elementary state, the savage state. Diversity, variety of elements, which call for and multiply exchanges; the almost infinite specialization of the functions [have] been the sign of a social state arrived at a high degree of improvement. (1900: 79–80)

The centrality of this idea for mid-century theories of US nationhood can be seen in an essay by John Stahl Patterson for the Continental Review (1863). Patterson uses Guyot’s argument to make a case for the inseparability of the United States, which he pictures as having diversified itself into a highly complex social organism whose intricate heterogeneity constitutes a unity that cannot be separated without self-destruction (1863: 96). He also applies Guyot’s concepts of social diversification to the ethnic make-up of American society, which he presents as the epitome of unity in complex heterogeneity. Transposing the ‘law of increasing diversity’ (1863: 80) from physical geography onto human cultures, Patterson constructs a narrative of the world’s physical and biological development based on a homogeneity/heterogeneity distinction: ‘primeval geography was simple and uniform’, with only ‘little diversity of coast line, soil, or surface’. But as ‘the cooling process’ continued, the earth’s ‘surface contracted and ridged up’, and the landscape acquired ‘greater irregularity of outline’ and became ‘more variegated’ (1863: 79). Patterson’s detailed explication of geological progress culminates in a rhetorical question: ‘What has all this to do with American Destiny?’ It demonstrates the importance of ethnic diversity: There are simple and complex peoples or races, as there are simple and complex organisms. Take any primitive race, whether described in history or by some contemporaneous traveller: in a physical point of view, the men are all very nearly alike, and the women likewise. Describe one individual, and you have the description for all other individuals of the same sex belonging to the race. And there is not usually as much difference in the physical appearance of the sexes in primitive races as among those who stand higher in the scale. What is true of their physique, is also true of their minds. As one thinks and feels, so all think

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and feel – and that, too, without concert; it is the simple expression of an undiversified mental organism. (1863: 84)

Those races that have developed more quickly than others can be recognized by the differences among their members, who are characterized by ‘great contrarities of physical appearance and mental characteristics’. Patterson argues that ‘[a]mong ‘Anglo-Saxons’ there is often greater diversity in members of the same family, than you would find in a million individuals of a primitive race’ (1863: 85). Patterson reverses the causal relationship between diversity and democracy generic to Shaftesburyan Whig history: he considers ethnic complexity to be the premise rather than the result of democratic systems: Government is simply a growth, a development, and it must correspond to the character of the people out of whose mental status it has sprung. If the people are homogeneous in their mental structure, their social and political interests must be correspondingly homogeneous and simple. (1863: 87)

By the end of the nineteenth century, the notion that the most diverse melting pots yield the most creative civilizations is a prominent theme within the US literary establishment: in 1893 the Atlantic Monthly published Havelock Ellis’ eccentric ‘Ancestry of Genius’, a survey of the racial background of canonical nineteenth-century authors mainly from Britain and France. After discussing the pedigrees of, among others, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, William Morris, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, and Zola, Ellis concludes that the blood of genius is more mixed than that of ordinary citizens, and that national genius thrives best through interracial mixture: ‘Wherever the races have remained comparatively pure’, Ellis argues, ‘we seldom find any high or energetic civilization, and never any fine flowering of genius’. Sweden, for instance, has ‘produced no imaginative genius’ because there ‘the tall, fair, long-headed race exists in its purest form’. The same goes for the French regions of the Auvergne – ‘where the dark, broad-headed race may be found in great purity’ – and Corsica and the Pyrénées-Orientales with their ‘fairly unmixed race of dark, longheaded men’. By contrast, such borderline countries as Lorraine, Scotland, Normandy, Tuscany, Sicily, and Swabia – ‘where two unlike races’ have ‘intermingled and are in process of fusion’ – are

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more likely to yield ‘a breed of men who have left their mark on the world, and have given birth to great poets and artists’. Ellis’ celebration of racial diversity goes further than most melting-pot ideals in that his vision of racial mixture includes blackness (he considers the creole ancestries of Browning, Pushkin, and Dumas to be positive influences) (1893: 389). Within the late-nineteenth-century liberal cultural establishment, the fantasy of an ethnic melting pot had little practical or social effect, as long as the cultural mainstream emerging from the crucible left previous social hegemonies intact. It was relatively easy, say, for Hamlin Garland to celebrate, even demand, that his AngloSaxon heritage disappear in the ‘great heterogeneous, shifting, brave population’ (1960: 15) of the Western states, and that the ‘literature rising from these people will not be English’ but ‘something new’ and ‘American, – that is to say, a new composite’ (1960: 121–2). This attitude changed to the degree that the fantasy of ethnic reversal threatened to become a social reality, when new levels of immigration around 1900 made the Anglo-Saxon mainstream seem less permanent. Henry James’ reflections on cultural otherness in The American Scene (1907) show an awareness of what William Boelhower has labeled ‘ethnic kínesis’, the ‘fluid process of ethnic semiosis’ that turns national identity into a dynamic process of negotiation without stable content (1999: 446). Upon his visit to the Yiddish Quarter in New York, James notes that the ‘unprecedented accents’ issuing from New York’s ethnic diversity ‘may be destined to become the most beautiful on the globe and the very music of humanity’ but ‘whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for English – in any sense for which there is an existing literary measure’ (1946: 139). James’ fear of self-revision becomes clearer in the famous section on his visit to ‘the terrible little Ellis Island’, where the spectacle of mass immigration forces on the beholder (the ‘sensitive citizen’) a shock of recognition in which received notions about American identity are exploded. James renders this experience with metaphors of sublime terror: as a tasting from the ‘tree of knowledge’ that sends a ‘chill’ to the heart, producing a feeling as eerie as that suffered by the ‘privileged person who has had an apparition, seen a ghost in his supposedly safe old house’. Ellis Island causes awe, in other words, because it reveals the degree to which Americans will have to ‘share the sanctity’ and ‘the intimacy’ of their ‘American consciousness’ with ‘the inconceivable alien’ (1946: 84–5). James’ language of sublimity goes beyond the simple affirmation of nativist racism or Brahmin

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snobbery (see Posnock 1991: 279–80). It reflects his recognition that the processuality of assimilation blurs the borders between self and other: ‘Which is the American’, he asks, ‘which is not the alien’, and ‘where does one put a finger on the dividing line, or, for that matter, “spot” and identify any particular phase of the conversion, any one of its successive moments’? (1946: 124). This blurring of the borders of identity accounts for the sublimity of the radically applied meltingpot idea: The sense of the elements in the cauldron – the cauldron of the ‘American’ character – becomes thus about as vivid a thing as you can at all quietly manage, and the question settles into a form which makes the intelligible answer further and further recede. ‘What meaning, in the presence of such impressions, can continue to attach to such a term as the “American” character? – what type, as the result of such a prodigious amalgam, such a hotch-potch of racial ingredients, is to be conceived as shaping itself?’ (1946: 120–1)

For James, the vision of the melting pot is threatening because he cannot be sure that variety must always be curative – that the ‘hotchpotch of racial ingredients’ will improve America’s cultural wellbeing. From a minority position, of course, the prospect of ethnic reinvention seemed more like an opportunity than a loss. Charles W. Chesnutt’s essay on ‘The Future American’ (1900), for instance, insists that ‘scientific circles’ have abandoned the ‘conception of a pure Aryan, Indo-European race’ and instead locate ‘the secret of the progress of Europe’ in ‘racial heterogeneity’ (1996: 18). Chesnutt contends, moreover, that the future American ethnicity will not have evaded but ‘absorbed and assimilated’ (1996: 19) the Native American and African American races, and that this prospect is as inevitable as it is unobjectionable. Like Emerson and Fuller, Chesnutt suggests that initial ethnic heterogeneity will eventually lead to a redemptive stage of racial ‘homogeneity of type’, which he presents as ‘a necessary condition of harmonious social progress’ (1996: 32). Yet Chesnutt celebrates (racial) unity in (ancestral) variety for a practical political reason: to overcome the negative effects of the color-line and racial discrimination. He illustrates his point with an eccentric utopian vision, in which he imagines a reversal of the southern segregation laws, so that interracial marriage should not only be legalized but indeed enforced. According to Chesnutt’s calculation, it

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would then take only three generations to transform America into a nation of racially homogeneous octoroons, whose sole mark of heterogeneity would be their mixed ancestry. What Chesnutt deems desirable about such a colorless nation – where ‘the pure whites would be eliminated’ and where ‘there would be no perceptible trace of blacks left’ (1996: 21) – is that ‘distinctions of color shall lose their importance’ (1996: 32) for social interaction (see Michaels 2006: 290–1). Chesnutt’s vision of curative interracial mixture clashes with the emergent identity politics characteristic of black consciousness theorists like W. E. B. du Bois and Alain Locke, and cultural pluralists like Horace Kallen or Randolph Bourne. For the cultural pluralists, the melting-pot ideal is a failure because it has functioned as a smoke-screen for Anglo-Saxon hegemony. Bourne’s essay on ‘Trans-National America’ (1916) spelled out what James’ Ellis Island episode implied, that any serious application of the melting-pot construct would have to take into account this strong and virile insistence that American shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class, descendent of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decide that American shall be made. (1996: 94)

But in contrast to Chesnutt, Bourne’s main point is that assimilation leads to uniformity, which he considers detrimental to cultural health. He claims, for instance, that the predominantly Anglo-Saxon South is ‘culturally sterile because it has had no advantage of crossfertilization like the Northern states’, whose more diverse immigrants have led to a more vibrant culture. At the same time, he argues that cross-fertilization must not lead to a loss of selfhood: in the best cases, the ‘foreign cultures, have not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous Americanism’, but retained ‘distinctive qualities’, which indeed is what makes them valuable additions to an American federation of cultures. ‘What we emphatically do not want’, Bourne says, ‘is that these distinctive qualities are washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity’ (there is already ‘too much of this insipidity, masses of people who are cultural half-breeds, neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons nor nationals of another culture’) (1996: 98). Bourne considers the loss of cultural distinctiveness to lead to the creation of ‘hordes of men and women without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those of the mob’ (1996: 98–9).

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Kallen’s argument, in his influential Nation essay ‘Democracy versus the Melting Pot’ (1915), is similar: the road to a stable American cultural identity should lead through the cultivation of ethnic difference, not its forced leveling. The development of an ‘American civilization’ would not proceed by forging its multi-racial European immigrants into a new ethnicity, as implied by the meltingpot ideal. It would instead become a mirror-image of the multi-ethnic ‘European civilization’, but without ‘the waste, the squalor, and the distress of Europe’. It would then resemble a perfect symphony by ‘an orchestra’ in which ‘every type of instrument has its specific tonality, founded in its substance and form’ (1996: 92). Kallen’s symphony image shifts the temporal conceptualization of e pluribus unum underlying the melting-pot ideal to a vision of simultaneity: it posits a hyphenated American culture, in which people are both essentially different and part of a larger unity. Another contemporary vocabulary to deal with the late-nineteenthcentury anxiety of self-cancellation within a framework of curative variety is the spatialization of e pluribus unum in terms of a cultural regionalism. Examples are Madison’s argument for territorial expansion, Crèvecoeur’s visions of spatial difference, Whitman’s perceptional camera-eye flights across the US, and the late-nineteenth-century manifestos of the regional novel. All assume that the essence of US culture lies in an unprecedented regional diversity that eludes unitary representation. In the terms of Mark Twain’s programmatic essay on literary regionalism of 1895: ‘There isn’t a single human characteristic that can be safely labelled “American”’ (1895: 52), except ‘the national devotion to ice-water’ (1895: 56). The ‘native novelist’, if he is serious, does therefore not ‘try to generalize the nation’ but simply ‘lays plainly before you the ways and speech and life of a few people grouped in a certain place’, preferably ‘his own place’, whose manners he has absorbed (1895: 51–2). Twain also implies that regional variety can function as an antidote against the ills of normalization. This point is particularly salient in Josiah Royce’s concept of ‘wholesome provincialism’.6 For Royce, the region is ‘a saving power’ against the ills of modern culture, and most prominently its ‘levelling tendency’ towards homogenization. Royce makes this point in similar terms to Bourne: By the levelling tendency in question I mean that aspect of modern civilization which is most obviously suggested by the fact that, because of the ease of communication among distant places, because of the spread

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of popular education, and because of the consolidation and of the centralization of industries and of social authorities, we tend all over the nation, and, in some degree, even throughout the civilized world, to read the same daily news, to share the same general ideas, to submit to the same overmastering social forces, to live in the same external fashions, to discourage individuality, and to approach a dead level of harassed mediocrity. (1969: 2/1074)

Royce presents wholesome provincialism as a practical realization of the romantic quest for a world beyond social practice, a purer realm of moral and aesthetic wholeness, removed from messy politics.7 He argues that while we can empathize with this romantic desire, as post-romantics we have moved beyond idealist solutions: ‘we, too, must flee in the pursuit of the ideal to a new realm’, but ‘no longer intend to flee from our social ills to any realm of dreams’. The modern redemption lies in the ‘realm of the province’ as ‘a realm of real life’ that offers ‘renewed strength’, ‘social inspiration’, and ‘the salvation of the individual from the overwhelming forces of consolidation’ (1969: 2/1083). Royce’s use of romantic idealism shows well the continuities behind nineteenth-century notions of curative variety. In the Anglo-American discourse, these notions can be tied to John Stuart Mill’s demand that the tyranny of the majority be counteracted by individualist difference. In the third chapter of On Liberty (1859), Mill argues with reference to de Tocqueville and Humboldt that ‘diversity’ is indispensable for people to grow towards ‘the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable’ (1997: 94). Mill’s account resembles Schiller’s, not in terms of romantic escapism (as Royce suggests somewhat reductively), but because like Schiller he considers free development to lead to a holistic totality of both ethical and aesthetic richness: Mill says that only if what is individual in people is not worn down into ‘uniformity’ with the masses will ‘human life’ achieve a ‘rich, diversified, and animating’ stage of ‘fulness’. Diversification of character, then, turns society into a morally balanced work of art, by making ‘human beings’ ‘noble and beautiful object[s] of contemplation’ (1997: 89–90). Mill’s argument lent itself well to the American discourse of picturesque diversity: Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) is an obvious adaptation, as its opening paragraph begins with a direct reference to On Liberty. Whitman renders Mill’s connection of cultural health with ‘freedom and variety’ with a climatic metaphor that portrays the

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redemptive powers of cultural diversity with an image of turbulent weather, comparing it to ‘an infinite number of currents and forces, and contributions, and temperatures, and cross-purposes, whose ceaseless play of counterpart upon counterpart brings constant restoration and vitality’ (1996: 953). Vitality, in Whitman, is often used as a synonym of organic beauty, and this indeed points to an important aspect of the discourse of curative variety within the Whitmanian moment in US criticism: the staging of curative variety as an aesthetic asset. This already characterizes Crèvecoeur’s vision of American culture as a ‘great and variegated picture’ that accounts for the ‘pleasing perspective displayed in these thirteen provinces’ (68). NOTES

1.

2. 3.

4.

Shaftesbury also tried to counter the traditional image of the Whigs as a country party of ‘impolite’ manners, in contrast to the Tories as the party of the Court, intellectual leadership and cultural refinement (1978: 432; see Klein 1993: 294). On Hume’s attitude to primitivism, see Pocock 1995: 130. A later Scottish Enlightenment thinker, William Duff (1732–1815) mediated between Hume’s and Rousseau’s terms. Duff’s Essay on Original Genius (1767) distinguishes between more private and more public arts and concludes that they require different modes of cultivation, and that therefore primitive societies, democratic government, and civil monarchy produce different kinds of excellence. Duff shares with Rousseau the notion that poetic genius is a sort of excellence that flourishes best in primitive societies, inspired by the ‘simplicity and tranquillity of uncultivated life’ (1964: 271). ‘Eloquence’, by contrast, finds its most congenial environment ‘under a Democratical form of government’. It is merely ‘Painting and Architecture’ that will best excel ‘in the most advanced state of society, under the irradiations of Monarchical splendor, aided by the countenance and encouragement of the great and opulent’ (1964: 259). Duff arrives at this conclusion because he locates authenticity within the poetic genius, whose ‘impetuous’ ‘efforts of Imagination’ are spontaneous acts of self-expression that do ‘not require long and sedulous application’ or cultural refinement. ‘Painting, Eloquence, Music and Architecture’ differ from poetry because they ‘attain their highest improvement’ through the artist’s ‘repeated efforts’. In this they resemble the sciences, which depend on ‘the reiterated researches and experiments of Philosophers’ (1964: 262–3). On the importance of the idea that art is counterproductive to the health of the American republic, see Harris 1982.

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Bancroft retitled this oration in 1838 ‘On the Progress of Civilization, or Reasons why the Natural Association of Men of Letters is with Democracy’, for The Boston Quarterly Review under Orestes Brownson’s editorship. Royce’s essay originated as a Phi Beta Kappa Commencement Address at Iowa in June 1902, which was republished with additions in Race Questions, Provincialism, and other American Problems (1908). He further developed the idea in ‘Provincialism Based upon a Study of Early Conditions in California’ published in Putnam’s Magazine (1909). Royce refers to a poem by Schiller (‘The Beginning of a New Century’), which suggests, in Royce’s paraphrase, that ‘beauty lives only in song, and freedom has departed into the realm of dreams’, which leaves us merely ‘to flee from the stress of life into the still recesses of the heart’ (1969: 2/1083).

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Inventing whitmanian authority

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Chapter 8

CONTEMPORARY RECEPTION

‘Whitmanian authority’ is a discursive space that regulates the enunciation of nationality within professionalizing sites of cultural production. In this heuristic sense, it first emerges in the nineteenth century, but is deeply shaped through the intervention of earlytwentieth-century appropriations of romantic culture models. Between the 1850s and 1870s, Whitman’s professionalism is unsystematic enough – a string of moods rather than a fully worked-out theoretical framework. Whitman’s modernist readers highlighted his cultural parallelisms and expanded his contradictory meditations on poetics to a full-fledged theory of national expression that twentiethcentury critics reprojected on nineteenth-century discourse. This chapter seeks to reconstruct the heterogeneity of Whitman’s contemporary reception – before the postbellum ‘Whitman myth’ (Reynolds 1995: 456) emerged and recombined with the modernist American Renaissance construction. Whitman’s Authenticity Many nineteenth-century critics welcomed Leaves of Grass as a primitive rejection of literary style. If they had affinities to the Young America movement, which considered professionalized literary circles to be a foreign or highbrow imposition on the national soul, they saw Whitman’s free verse as a liberating refusal to submit to the rules of élitist literary conventions. Edward Dowden’s seminal Westminster Review essay on ‘The Poetry of Democracy’ (1871) suggests that Whitman’s literary method ‘proceed[s] directly from the democratic

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tendencies of the world of thought and feeling in which he moves’ (1871: 49–50), whereas Irving, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, or Emerson were part of a European literary colony. In Dowden’s horticultural image, the reigning ‘moral powers’ in the United States put a hedge around the literature and art of America, enclosing a little paradise of European culture, refinement, and aristocratic delicatesse from the howling wilderness of Yankee democracy, and insulating it from the vital touch and breath of the land, the winds of free, untrodden places, the splendour and vastness of rivers and seas, the strength and tumult of the people.

Within the European biotopes in Boston and New York, ‘indigenous growths’ came to seem ‘like exotics, shy or insolent’, and the general readership ‘expected in an American poet some one who would sing for us gently, in a minor key, the pleasant airs we knew’ (1871: 34). Echoing de Tocqueville, Dowden explains Whitman’s break with the literary field as a natural result of democratic systems: aristocratic ages further literary refinement (1871: 38–9), whereas in democratic periods ‘[f]orm and style modelled on traditional examples are little valued’, so that ‘[e]ach new generation’ is ‘a law to itself’ (1871: 41). Dowden’s dichotomy between authentic democratic primitivism growing out of American conditions and a European-centered aristocratic professionalism resonated well with late-nineteenth-century American regionalists: in his literary manifesto Crumbling Idols (1894), Hamlin Garland describes Alexander Pope as an ‘emperor of literary lace and ruffles’ whose ‘dictatorship’ was embodied in ‘the joyous jog-trot of his couplets’ (1960: 35). He claims that such ‘feudalistic forms’ are becoming obsolete, as it is presently more ‘natural for Americans to say: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller do not satisfy us. They represent other outlooks upon life. They do not touch us directly’ (1960: 140). Referring to Whitman as a foundational figure, Garland presents regional ‘veritism’ as a method able to pierce the literary field with its ‘conventional words and phrases and hackneyed themes’ and achieve ‘freedom of form’ (1976: 207). Before 1900, however, Dowden and Garland represented a minority view. In fact, many literary nationalists denied that Whitman’s work expressed essential America. In 1884, Walker Kennedy finds it ‘praiseworthy’ that ‘Mr. Whitman desires an original American literature’, but holds ‘that the spirit of Mr. Whitman’s poetry is the

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contrary of the democratic spirit’. American democracy ‘may insist on free thought and free speech; but she is not maudlin, nor incoherent’, and ‘[t]here is nothing confused or aimless about her’. Kennedy concedes that there may be a ‘kinship of liberty’ between the logic of Whitman’s writing and the mechanisms of US democracy, but only a superficial one, for ‘the liberty of democracy is the highest evolutionary step in the struggle for the rights of man, while the liberty of Walt Whitman’s poetry is license of thought and anarchy of expression’ (1884: 600–1). Barrett Wendell’s influential A Literary History of America (1900) argues along similar lines. Wendell locates the truest and best expression of America’s national spirit in a New England Renaissance that includes Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau as well as Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, and he presents Whitman as an essentially European author. In Wendell’s view, American democracy springs from a common-sense-based development of English common law rather than ‘abstract philosophising’. It therefore tends to focus chiefly on the ideal of ‘liberty’, in contrast to ‘the theoretical democracy of Europe’ that over-emphasizes the ideal of ‘equality’ to the point of maintaining that nothing ‘ought really to be held intrinsically better than anything else’, and that ‘all superiority, all excellence’ is ‘a phase of evil’ (1900: 467). ‘Song of Myself’ is an ‘inextricable hodge-podge’ that juxtaposes ‘beautiful phrases and silly gabble, tender imagination and insolent commonplace’ (1900: 471) not because Whitman could not write but because his ‘literary anarchy’ reflected Europe’s political unconscious. Reversing Dowden’s view, Wendell makes Whitman ‘in temper and in style’ ‘an exotic member’ of a European ‘brotherhood’ (‘One can see why the decadent taste of modern Europe has welcomed [Whitman] so much more ardently than he has ever been welcomed at home’) (1900: 478). Even more sympathetic readers such as George Santayana, who dismissed Wendell’s literary canon as ‘genteel’, had serious doubts about Whitman’s representativeness: ‘There is clearly some analogy between a mass of images without structure and the notion of an absolute democracy’, Santayana argued in ‘The Poetry of Barbarism’ (1900), but the belief that nature and society should be a ‘formless flux’ was a misconception, a blurring of American reality into a romantic dream of primitive democracy: This dream is, of course, unrealized, and unrealizable, in America as elsewhere. Undeniably there are in America many suggestions of such a society and such a national character. But the growing complexity and

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fixity of institutions necessarily tends to obscure these traits of a primitive and crude democracy. What Whitman seized upon as the promise of the future was in reality the survival of the past. He sings the song of pioneers, but it is in the nature of the pioneer that the greater his success the quicker must be his transformation into something different. When Whitman made the initial and amorphous phase of society his ideal, he became the prophet of a lost cause. (1989: 112)

Santayana sees in Whitman’s literary method an inauthentic vision of the American self that ‘is regarded as representative chiefly by foreigners, who look for some grotesque expression of the genius of so young and prodigious a people’ (1989: 112). Whitman’s Universality Many influential late-nineteenth-century critics rejected expressive nationalism as a form of anti-intellectualism. They preferred to evaluate Whitman’s work in relation to the contemporary literary field, comparing him to transatlantic nineteenth-century aesthetic standards (often understood as universal aesthetic laws). This approach did not necessarily make Whitman look inferior or primitive: in 1874, the British literary critic George Saintsbury argued that even for readers ‘familiarized with the exquisite versification of modern England or France’, Whitman’s style (his ‘many-centered’ rhythm) ‘is by no means a disagreeable contrast therewith’, for it is ‘singularly fresh, light, and vigorous’ (1874: 398–400). Whitman’s first English editor William Michael Rossetti called Leaves of Grass ‘par excellence the modern poem’ (1868: 5) and said that Whitman’s method ‘may be termed formless’ only by readers ‘wedded’ to ‘established forms’, and that one should ‘enlarge the canon till it includes so great and startling a genius, rather than to draw it close and exclude him’ (1868: 7). Yet many contemporary readers – often those with an investment in Tennysonian and Fireside Poetry – perceived Whitman’s stylistic difference as a sign of incompetence. In 1856, the London Critic frames the image of literary primitivism in negative terms: ‘Walt Whitman reminds us of Caliban flinging down his logs, and setting himself to write a poem’, and he seems as ‘unacquainted with art’ as a ‘hog’ with ‘mathematics’ (Price 1996: 170–1). This view was more or less shared by the then best-known New England literary intellectuals: Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that if literary nationalism means ‘lawless independence’ of style, ‘we had better

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continue literary colonists’ (1890: 390). William Dean Howells saw in Whitman’s free-verse poetics a ‘formlessness’ that signified ‘monotony’ rather than a democratic ethos (1993: 190). James Russell Lowell complained that Whitman lacked ‘the taste to discriminate between what is worth saying . . . and what is not’ (1867: 302–3) (‘The business of cataloguing the works of creation should be left to the auctioneer’) (1867: 301). The Professional and the Raw in Whitman Lowell also stressed that whereas Wordsworth, even when he dealt with common people, ‘had the manners and speech of a gentleman’, Whitman had ‘the characteristics’ of a ‘Bowery boy’ (1867: 301). The invocation of the Bowery as a notorious den of lower-class entertainment is revealing (Charles Eliot Norton, similarly, referred to Leaves of Grass as ‘a compound of the Yankee transcendentalist and the New York rowdy’ [1855: 321]). It shows that significant groups of mid-century men of letters experienced Whitman’s explicit sensuality as a mark of popular literature. Even Emerson, as Whitman points out in a famous biographical reminiscence (1996: 939), attempted to talk him into abridging the ‘Children of Adam’ section. Emerson’s intervention has been viewed as genteel squeamishness (see Folsom 1991), but it may well have been motivated by his acute sense of how the literary field defined the borders between imaginative literary sensualism and cheap popular sensationalism.1 Emerson might have seen that within symbolically prestigious poetic discourse, Whitman’s unfiltered realism came across as a neglect of literary form – the sort of neglect that Schiller and Wordsworth attributed to the raw tastes of uneducated readerships drawn to unmediated and sensationalist content (see Chap. 1, pp. 23–5 above). The Pre-Raphaelite William Rossetti, who bowdlerized the first English edition of the Leaves, stressed that ‘the indecencies’ scattered through Whitman’s writings should really be called ‘improprieties – or, still better, deforming crudities’ – ‘to call them immoralities would be going too far’ (1868: 20–1). Rossetti insisted that his exclusion of Whitman’s ‘crudities’ had less to do with moral premises than with his aesthetic conviction that ‘many of [Whitman’s] tabooed passages are extremely raw and ugly on the ground of poetic or literary art’ (1868: 22). There was more at stake than just the question of whether Whitman was offensive to women or children. In his influential Scribner’s essays on American poetry (1880–1), the poet-critic Edmund C. Stedman

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warned Whitman of the detrimental effects of overrepresentation on the artwork’s integrity: ‘It is not squeamishness that leaves something to the imagination, that hints at guerdons still unknown. The law of suggestion, of half-concealment, determines the choicest effects, and is the sure road to truth’ (1880: 55). Stedman has been classified as a ‘genteel’ poet, but his demand for representational opacity reflects a common tendency of cultural avant-gardes since the eighteenth century: to attribute the ills of modern commodification to something like ‘raw’ aesthetic perception. Schiller and Wordsworth considered immature taste insensitive to formal subtlety and therefore in need of overstimulation through obtrusive and unfiltered representations that destroy both the artwork’s beauty and its truth content. In the 1880s, this view can be seen in Nietzsche’s image of immature youths bursting into sacred temples at night, ‘unveiling, uncovering, putting into glaring light’ everything they could find, driven by the realist misconception that ‘truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn’ (1988: 4/438). Stedman approaches Whitman’s realism in precisely these terms when he argues that inasmuch as Whitman ‘draws away the final veil’ he descends into a mediocre ‘pseudo-naturalism’ that provides neither beauty nor truth (1880: 55). Nietzsche’s case against overrepresentation is persuasive enough: In his proto-pragmatist The Birth of Tragedy (1872) he attributes the obsessive need to uncover and unveil to the Socratic fallacy that when ‘thought reaches into the deepest abysses of being’ it ‘is capable not only of knowing but also of correcting being’ – he calls this realist error the ‘metaphysical madness’ of science (2000: 82). He also suggests that excessive acts of unveiling trivialize things by robbing them of uncertainty. In Alexander Nehamas’ paraphrase, Nietzsche holds that ‘beauty’ is ‘the enemy of certainty’, that we only ‘find things beautiful – in nature, in people, in art – when we sense we have not exhausted them’ (Nehamas 2000: 402), so that the ‘enchanted gaze’ of the artist ‘remains fixed on what remains veiled, even after the unveiling’ (Nietzsche 1988: 1/98). Nietzsche’s aesthetics of uncertainty is most convincing, I think, when the act of unveiling is conceived in terms of a relational process rather than a context-independent mode of representation. For example, in Human, All Too Human (1878), he suggests that if we approach friends or lovers too closely, we may trivialize them in a way that resembles ‘repeatedly touching a fine engraving with our bare fingers’ until it is ‘worn down through constant touch’ and reduced to ‘soiled piece of paper’ – ‘Or at least it appears to us so. We never again see its original mark and beauty’

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(1988: 2/280). This implies that overrepresentation is not discovered, as an intrinsic trait; it emerges in unsuitable relationships. Just as the banality of people (or engravings) in Nietzsche’s example is created by reckless beholders who approach them inappropriately (with repeated transgressive scrutiny), the impression that Whitman’s sensualism ‘draws away the final veil’ depends on the beholder’s fieldposition and thus on the relevant contexts and conventions with which Whitman’s representations of the body interact. Nietzsche’s relational viewpoint helps us to see the field-dependency of Whitman’s sensuality, against the continued portrayal of Leaves of Grass as an example of radical disclosure (as Whitman himself claimed, when he defended the Children of Adam section as an authentic representation of natural truths). But Nietzsche’s own work, especially when he moves from philosophical reflection to practical art criticism, shows well how easily the relational view of disclosure as process slides into ontologizing assumptions about what sort of representational modes are natural. During the 1880s, Richard Wagner became Nietzsche’s favorite exemplar of overrepresentation: he rejected the Ring cycle as a tasteless display of deep passion and sentimentalism embodied in a music that ‘leaps out of the wall and shakes the Listener to his very intestines’ (1988: 4/423). In accord with traditional avant-garde perspectives, Nietzsche explains Wagner’s public success with reference to listeners whose degenerate tastes register music only if it overstimulates them: the ‘masses’, the ‘immature’, the ‘blasé’, the ‘sick’, the ‘idiots’, hence: ‘Wagnerians’ (1988: 4/423). We can see the parallel to late-nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman when we recall Nietzsche’s belief that ‘Wagner is the modern artist par excellence’ since he has to provide the tired and ‘exhausted’ nerves of modern audiences with stimulation ‘in the most seductive manner’ (1988: 4/22). Rossetti’s comment about Leaves of Grass being ‘par excellence the modern poem’ can be said to point at a similar direction, and so does George Santayana’s interpretation of Whitman’s intellectual ‘barbarism’ as a symptom of declining modern sensibilities (1989: 114). These viewpoints seem like variations on Wordsworth’s complaint about the ‘multitude of causes unknown to former times’ blunting ‘the discriminating powers of the mind’ (2005: 294). Perceptions of Whitman’s Program Whitman’s nineteenth-century audiences were surprisingly skeptical about the Democratic Muse construction implicit in Leaves

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of Grass. Contemporary readers generally recognized Whitman’s connection to transatlantic forms of literary professionalism. The southern poet-critic Sidney Lanier, for example, complained in his Johns Hopkins lectures (1881) that while Whitman was ‘declaring that he is nothing if not one of the people; nevertheless the people, the democracy, will yet have nothing to do with him’; his ‘sole audience has lain among such representatives of the highest culture as Emerson and the English illuminated’. Lanier called Whitman an ‘aristocra[t] masquing in a peasant’s costume’, and argued that ‘his poetry, instead of being the natural outcome of a fresh young democracy, is a product which would be impossible except in a highly civilized society’ (1883: 45). Lanier also identified in Whitman the self-reflexive trace of the literary avant-garde (his term is literary ‘dandyism’): Everywhere [Whitman’s poetry] is conscious of itself, everywhere it is analysing itself, everywhere it is posing to see if it cannot assume a naive and striking attitude, everywhere it is screwing up its eyes, not into an eyeglass like the conventional dandy, but into an expression supposed to be fearsomely rough and barbaric and frightful to the terror-stricken reader; and it is almost safe to say that one half of Whitman’s poetic work has consisted of a detailed description of the song he is going to sing. It is the extreme of sophistication in writing. (1883: 61)2

There was also widespread critical resistance to the notion that Whitman was an American Adam inventing a new language – that, as Dowden implied, the free-verse method was original to Whitman’s ‘life world’. The more hostile reviewers presented Whitman as an imitator of low popular or eccentric predecessors. For example, the London Leader and Saturday Analyst argued in 1860 that Whitman’s ‘manner’ is the same as that with which Mr. Martin Tupper has made us familiar in his Proverbial Philosophy [1837], and Mr. [Samuel] Warren in his Lily and the Bee [1851]. There is nothing that we can see miraculous in such an imitation. The result is a rhapsody, somewhat Oriental in appearance, prose in form, but rhythmical in its effect on the ear, producing a disjointed impression, such as might be produced by a bold prose-translation of [Friedrich] Klopstock’s famous odes, which would then present so many unconnected assertions, expressed in extravagant diction. (Price 1996: 90)

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More favorable reviewers provided more convincing cases of Whitman’s place in the literary tradition: in the New York Sun (1882), Edward Mitchell compared passages from Leaves of Grass with well-chosen excerpts from the English Book of Psalms and Macpherson’s Ossian poems, praising Whitman’s ‘reversion to a primitive mode of poetic expression’ as a literary success (Price 1996: 229–31). Similarly, Whitman’s New York Times obituary listed his ‘primitive’ roots as signs of literary distinction: Ill-digested and shapeless as his work is compared to the poetry of the great Bards of the past, Whitman resembled one of those poets of medieval Ireland who were crammed with a large amount of ill-assorted knowledge and turgid in rhetoric, but filled with the truest poetic flame and really appreciated only by the extremely naïve on the one hand, and on the other by people with the widest sympathies, the deepest knowledge, and the keenest critical faculty. We may liken him to such poets as were found in Ireland by Edmund Spenser in the sixteenth century, whose songs, when duly translated for him into English, compelled his admiration. (Anon. 1993: 799)

A more precise description of Whitman’s literary space was offered by Stedman, who argued that while his ‘peculiar unrhymed verse’ is ‘capable of impressive rhythmical and lyrical effects’, it is not ‘an invention’ but ‘a striking and persistent renaissance’ of a ‘form’ that tends to be ‘always selected for dithyrambic oracular outpourings, – that of the Hebrew lyrists and prophets, and their inspired English translators, – of the Gaelic minstrels, – of various Oriental and Shemitic peoples’ – ‘and in recent times put to use by Blake, in the “Prophetic Visions”’ (1880: 56). Stedman is also aware of how the Democratic Muse narrative suppresses the realities of the literary field: ‘Technique, of some kind’, he says, ‘is an essential’, and Whitman ‘never was more mistaken than when he supposed he was throwing off form and technique’ (1880: 56). Stedman suggests therefore that one should distinguish between Whitman’s powerful skills and poetic vision and the reductionism of his program: Whitman the practical poet has made profitable use of traditional styles that afforded him ‘the widest range of combination and effect’; Whitman the cultural theorist, by contrast, tended to use rigid and simplistic dogma: ‘His comprehension of his own aim is an after-thought’ (1880: 57). In 1872, the English poet Algernon Swinburne – who was among Whitman’s first English admirers in the

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1860s (Allen 1962: 472–8) – identifies in Walt Whitman ‘two distinct men of most inharmonious kinds’: a great poet and a theoretical ‘formalist’ (neither Pope or Boileau were ‘more rigidly regulated by [their] own formularies’ and indeed neither was ‘more fatally a formalist than Whitman’ [Swinburne 1926: 411–12]). Swinburne admires Whitman the poet, but sees him subverted by Whitman the formalist: ‘It is when [Whitman] is thinking of his part, of the duties and properties of a representative poet, an official democrat, that the strength forsakes his hand and the music ceases at his lips’ (416–17). NOTES

1. 2.

On the culture of sensationalism and Whitman’s connection to it, see Reynolds 1989: Chaps. 6, 7, and 11. George Santayana similarly suggested that Whitman failed to become ‘a poet of the people’ because his themes were less congenial to ordinary folk than he implied. ‘Nothing is farther from the common people’, Santayana said, ‘than the corrupt desire to be primitive’ (1989: 313).

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Chapter 9

WHITMAN AMONG THE MODERNS

How did these complex and conflicting nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman turn into the American-Renaissance consensus? Dowden’s view of the ‘Poetry of Democracy’ proved useful in the modernist quest for a national canon based on Whitman’s ‘spiritual democracy’ (H. A. Myers 1934: 239). After 1900 it became more important to reread Whitman in post-Kantian terms, and to turn Dowden’s praise of Whitman’s democratic primitivism into the modernist image of Whitman’s ‘language experiment’ (Matthiessen 1941: 518). Whitman’s modernist canonizers worked out more systematically what Whitman himself had implied rather than rigorously argued: that Leaves of Grass expresses America’s deepest truths precisely because it is an experimental kind of music – a pure autonomous form that embodies its spiritual reference (‘America’) by analogy. Whitman’s modernist reinterpretation seems connected to an important structural change in the late-nineteenth-century print market, a shift towards an increasing homogenization of literary space. In the nineteenth-century literary landscape, highly dynamic cultural fields still intersected with ‘islands’ of more traditional literary communication where peer recognition continued to be dominated by external forms of validation. Romantic or mid-century literary intellectuals often combined symbolically privileged fieldpositions with popular success – Longfellow could be a genteel Harvard professor, an internationally respected literary artist, and a so-called ‘school-room poet’. To the degree that an increasingly dynamic print market homogenized the literary map, it became harder to combine symbolic recognition with an appeal to mass

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audiences. The tipping point occurs after 1900, when the literary establishment begins to converge with the field-position of the avantgarde, making post-Kantian rhetoric a mainstream phenomenon: all representative literary intellectuals, not only poètes maudits modeled on Baudelaire, were now expected to authorize themselves by autonomous ‘language experiments’ detached from the public and political vocabularies. This development was further encouraged by the institutionalization of literary scholarship at Anglo-American universities,1 and the establishment of ‘sciences of literature’ distinct from other departments within the humanities. John Crowe Ransom’s ‘Criticism, Inc.’ characteristically called on aesthetically-minded professors and students of literature to rescue literary studies from the hostile take-over by historians and moralists, and re-establish ‘the artistic object’ for ‘its own sake’ (2001: 1115). The institutionalization of literary scholarship coincided with new-critical claims about the social relevance of the literary artifact as a complex symbolic web that yields special forms of national wisdom, warranting ‘the sustained attention of serious men who otherwise might have turned to more immediate public or commercial concerns’ (Carton and Graff 1994–2005: 314). This would explain the cultural authority of modernist poet-critics such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, claiming social relevance with reference to their aesthetic expertise. Eliot suggested in 1921 that ‘poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult’, and become ‘more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into [their] meaning’ (1975: 65). In 1929 Pound defined the social uses of literature – its ‘function in the state, in the aggregation of humans, in the republic, in the res publica’ – with the political content of aesthetic form: literary culture should not serve any socio-political content (its ‘function’ was not to force people ‘into the acceptance of any one set or any six sets of opinions as opposed to any other one set or half-dozen sets of opinions’). The writer’s political relevance had more to do with his powers of abstract aesthetic refinement: ‘maintaining the very cleanliness of the tools, the health of the very matter of thought itself’ was crucial to democracy, for ‘the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws, without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati’. If the ‘work’ of literary intellectuals ‘goes rotten’ in the sense that, not their content but ‘their very medium . . . becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot’ (1968: 21).

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Pound’s epithets ‘slushy and inexact’ demonstrate well the dilemma of Whitman’s modernist proponents: how to defend a literary method that had been praised since Dowden for its resistance to formal control. In ‘The Poetry of Barbarism’ (1900), for instance, George Santayana admires Whitman’s ‘profound inspiration’ and ‘genuine courage’ (1989: 109), but seems embarrassed by his indiscriminate ‘surface’ impressions – his ‘vivid’ but ‘monotonous’ ‘phantasmagoria of continuous visions’ (1989: 110). Unable to view Whitman’s perceptional ‘barbarism’ as a professional formal experiment, he dismisses it as ‘a verbal echo’ of a ‘general moral crisis and imaginative disintegration’ (1989: 104). Eleven years later, in ‘The Genteel Tradition’, where Whitman’s democratic style is perceived as a refreshing rejection of the grandmotherly mainstream of nineteenth-century letters, Santayana presents Whitman’s barbarism only in slightly more positive terms, as a promising ‘beginning’ that ‘might possibly grow into a noble moral imagination, a worthy filling of the human mind’ (1968: 98). The manifest difficulty of integrating Whitman’s reputation for democratic authenticity with modernist demands for experimental sophistication becomes even more salient in Van Wyck Brooks’ influential Seven Arts essays on the rejuvenation of American literature. Like Santayana, Brooks presents Whitman as the only nineteenthcentury American author capable of moving towards ‘a middle tradition’ that ‘effectively combines theory and action’ and healing the division between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ sensibilities, between a genteel élite isolated from lived experience and a wider public characterized by spiritual emptiness and uncritical materialism.2 According to Brooks, Whitman ‘fused’ the ‘hitherto incompatible extremes of the American temperament’ (1934: 79), ‘the prig and the æsthete, those two sick blossoms of the same sapless stalk’ (1934: 146), and reconnected the ‘fastidiously intellectual’, ‘disembodied’, ‘shadowworld of Emerson, Hawthorne and Poe’ with living American practice. Whitman had ‘all the ideas of New England, being himself saturated with Emersonianism’, but he also ‘came up from the other side with everything New England did not possess: quantities of rude feeling and a faculty of gathering humane experience’ (1934: 79–80). Thus: Whitman – how else can I express it? – precipitated the American character. All those things that had been separate, self-sufficient, incoördinate – action, theory, idealism, business – he cast into a crucible; and they

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emerged, harmonious and molten, in a fresh democratic ideal, based upon the whole personality. Every strong personal impulse, every coöperating and unifying impulse, everything that enriches the social background, everything that enriches the individual, everything that impels and clarifies in the modern world owes something to Whitman. (1934: 82–3)3

In contrast to Dowden’s image of Whitman as a plant grown on democratic soil, Brooks presents Whitman as an active poetic shaper with considerable powers of organic integration. Still, like Santayana, Brooks balks at interpreting Whitman’s perceptional dehierarchization as serious formal experimentalism. He concludes that the ‘social ideal’ underlying Leaves of Grass is ‘essentially a collection of raw materials, molten and malleable, which take shape only in an emotional form’ (1934: 84). Underneath his primal vigor, Whitman lacked ‘intensity’, was ‘incapable of discipline and he did not see that discipline is, for Americans, the condition of all forward movement’ (1934: 87–8). Modern American literature should therefore spring from ‘a returning upon Whitman’ by ‘adding intellect to emotion’, so that ‘the raw materials’ of Whitman’s ‘social ideal’ are ‘formulated and driven home’ (1934: 89). In fact, Whitman’s formless vigor appears as a foil for Brooks’ concept of the present state of national cultural health. With an intriguing biological metaphor, Brooks invokes America as a formless but vibrant biosphere that urgently waits to be transformed into a higher organism with a more complex and rigorous order: America is like a vast Sargasso Sea – a prodigious welter of unconscious life, swept by ground-swells of half-conscious emotion. All manner of living things are drifting in it, phosphorescent, gayly coloured, gathered into knots and clotted masses, gelatinous, unformed, flimsy, tangled, rising and falling, floating and merging, here an immense distended belly, there a tiny rudimentary brain (the gross devouring the fine) – everywhere an unchecked, uncharted, unorganized vitality like that of the first chaos. It is a welter of life which has not been worked into an organism, into which fruitful values and standards of humane economy have not been introduced, innocent of those laws of social gravitation which, rightly understood and pursued with a keen faith, produce a fine temper in the human animal. (1934: 100)

Matthiessen’s American Renaissance moves beyond Brooks’ reading of Whitman with a rhetorically impressive mediation between

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modernist experimentalism and cultural nationalism. Matthiessen’s nod towards the new criticism can be seen in his insistence that his approach to nineteenth-century literature is ‘preoccupied with form’ (1941: xi), in contrast to historians of ideas like Vernon Parrington, whose Main Currents of American Thought (1927–30) reads canonical literature mainly for its representation of American values. Matthiessen sounds like literary ‘scientists’ such as John Crowe Ransom when he presents professional American Studies as a kind of rescue operation to reclaim a limited number of precious aesthetic objects from the piles of middle-brow American mediocrity. Hence his poignant contrast between Thoreau heroically stacking his own library with four-fifths of the first edition of his Week on the Concord and Merrimack and the resounding economic success of what he presents as an aesthetically indifferent literary mainstream that at best ‘offers a fertile field for the sociologist and for the historian of our taste’ (1941: xi). In contrast to Eliot or Pound, Matthiessen does not want to give up Brooks’ and Parrington’s nationalist socio-political framework. Thus while his new critical tendencies lead him to reject Parrington’s anti-aesthetic bias, he remains Parringtonian enough to tone down the new critical notions of radical autonomy. The Kantian Matthiessen applied T. S. Eliot’s aesthetic criteria and moved freely between timeless representatives of the tradition (Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and so on), which he then linked to his American objects of study, canonizing them, as it were, by association (Shumway 1994: 241). But the post-Kantian Matthiessen staged aesthetic excellence as a mark of cultural expressiveness, implying that the art of America’s Whitmans ‘illuminates’ its cultural essence better than the conventional writing of her Longfellows (that is, representatives of a second-order literature that merely ‘reflects’ [1941: x] contingent cultural surfaces).4 Matthiessen doubles back to the cultural parallelism of the Whitmanian moment, to a motif that figures prominently in Democratic Vistas, where a nation’s representative intellectual is described as its ‘true author, poet, historian, lecturer, and perhaps even priest and philosoph’, who assures that the nation’s ‘spirit’ and ‘form’ ‘are one’ (Whitman 1996: 1003). The difference is that, in contrast to Whitman’s primitivist leanings, Matthiessen makes the literary representation of America a professional pursuit. Around the time of the publication of American Renaissance, the Seven Arts group had come to similar conclusions. In an essay for the centennial of the Leaves, William Carlos Williams presents

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Whitman as an inventor of a ‘new measure’ that embodied a specifically American modernity (see Tapscott 1984). He argues that while the ‘common’ as a poetic source was anticipated in the theories of Robert Burns and William Wordsworth, in Whitman ‘it had gone over to the style of the words as they appeared on the page’, making democracy a question of form (‘From the beginning Whitman realized that the matter was largely technical’) (2002: 836). Williams thus rejects Dowden’s Tocquevillian view of democratic primitivism: ‘Whitman’s verses seemed disorderly, but ran according to an unfamiliar and a difficult measure’. In accord with Eliot’s suggestion that the increasing complexity of the world must translate into modern aesthetic objects, Williams presents Whitman’s stylistic difficulties as ‘essential to the new world, not only of the poem, but to the world of chemistry and physics’. By crafting modernity’s music into experimental form, Whitman ‘was more of a prophet than he knew’, as indeed the ‘full significance of his innovations in the verse patterns has not yet been fully disclosed’. At the same time, Williams considers Whitman’s music to be specifically American: ‘this tremendous change in measure, a relative measure, which [Whitman] was the first to feel and to embody in his works’ changed ‘the entire aesthetic of American art’, which then ‘began to differ not only from British but from all the art of the world up to his time’ (2002: 841). Williams’ reading of Whitman must be seen against the backdrop of the immense cultural authority of Eliot’s critical theory and his most important practical demonstration, The Waste Land (1922). In retrospect, Williams called the appearance of The Waste Land a ‘disaster’ for American letters (1951: 174): ‘It was as if the bottom had dropped out of everything’ because through Eliot’s sheer poetic power ‘the spirit of Whitman’ was being ‘withdrawn from us’, and ‘Free verse became overnight a thing of the past’ (2002: 838; see also Cowley 1951: 112–15). In the spirit of the Whitmanian moment, Williams dispenses with Eliot with similar cultural parallelisms to those that Whitman had used against Tennyson: he presents free verse as a technical innovation that accords with modernity and radical democracy (implying, of course, that his own invention, the ‘variable foot’ in Paterson, marks a further stage of progress). Eliot’s Waste Land is made to seem a remnant of premodern times, due to the poet’s failed courage (‘A man as clever and well informed as he was had the whole world at his feet, but [he wanted] none of the newer freedom’ [2002: 839]) or simply due to Eliot’s feudalist sympathies: his ‘Englishness’, his Catholicism, and his aristocratic

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ideology (‘Eliot had completely lost interest in all things American, in the very ideology of all that America stood for, including the idea of freedom itself in any of its phases’ [2002: 838]).5 NOTES

1.

2.

As Gerald Graff points out, the academization of literary studies in the US between the 1930s and 1950s can be described as a contest for cultural authority among three groups of intellectuals. There are the literary scholars based in language and literature departments modeled on Germanic philology and established during the late nineteenth century, emphasizing historical and linguistic scholarship that evades questions of literary meaning and value: ‘The business of literary scholarship was with matters that could be objectively tested and established, like the etymological roots of the English language, the probable date of a Shakespearean sonnet, or the influences of Milton that can be identified in the poetry of Pope or Dryden’ (Bercovitch 1994–2005: 8/286). After the late nineteenth century, these literary scholars competed for cultural authority with a group of journalist-intellectuals practicing interpretive and evaluative criticism in magazine journals of an increasing degree of professionalism. They argued that the relativism and historicism of literary scholarship miss what is essential about literature. During the 1920s, a third group emerged, consisting of academically trained critics who wrote for professionalized journals and sought to establish a literary science that reconciled the ‘academic rigor’ of literary scholarship ‘with the more general humanistic concerns of nonacademic criticism’ (Bercovitch 1994–2005: 8/286). This group dominated after 1940 and contributed to the establishment of interpretation as a technically complex process (‘explication de texte’) befitting systematic academic inquiry. Effecting a ‘fundamental theoretical shift from positivism to hermeneutics’ (Shumway 1994: 222) this group reflects the modernist sense that the meaning of literature is not self-evident (as it was to the nineteenth-century gentleman reader) but has ‘hidden meanings, requiring the ministrations of the methodologically armed critic’ (Bercovitch 1994–2005: 8/299). Santayana imaged this divide using the architectural opposition between the skyscraper as ‘the sphere of the American man’ and ‘aggressive enterprise’ and the feminized sphere of the ‘colonial mansion’ to which the ‘genteel’ (1968: 86) intellectual tradition retreated. Critics have argued that Santayana was indebted to Brooks’ earlier work, The Wine of the Puritans (1909), which in turn drew from William Morris’ critique of capitalism’s division of culture and practice (Blake 1990: 116). As Steven Biel points out, ‘The highbrow/lowbrow construct

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was Brooks’ major contribution to his generation’s literary and historical understanding’. While for modern readers it ‘seems a hazy and facile method of categorizing and criticizing American literature’, its dismissal of ‘the American pantheon’ had a ‘liberating effect on young critics’ (1992: 168). Susan Hegeman stresses the importance of Brooks’ historical narrative as a ‘symbolic displacement of the fathers’ that was ‘psychologically necessary’ for the ‘cultural movement’ to which he belonged, which ‘saw itself as belonging to a brotherhood of youth, and more generally to an age of profound cultural disjuncture’. Hegeman also argues that Brooks created [an American version of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Where Arnold described an intellectual “Hellenism” and a moralistic “Hebraism” as two competing tendencies in the English temperament, Brooks saw a rarefied, Emersonian Puritan strain competing with that of Pioneer practicality and entrepreneurial drive. The problem for Brooks, as it was for Arnold, was to blend these separate tendencies into a balanced whole. (1999: 71–2)] 3.

4.

5.

Brooks also presents Whitman’s organic approach in economic terms, as indeed his analysis of contemporary society centers around the separation of cultural and economic capital in highly differentiated (professionalized) literary fields. According to Brooks, Whitman faced a situation in which the ‘possession of culture’ is treated as if it resembled something ‘earned, an investment that might have been a yacht, a country-house, or a collection of Rembrandts instead’. This was ‘especially true’ for ‘the New York men of letters who formed the background of Whitman: Stedman, Stoddard, and their group, who cared so much for style’. For them, ‘the essence of literature lay in its remoteness from Wall Street’, and they ‘had the temperament of collectors and connoisseurs’. By contrast, ‘Whitman came in upon them thundering and with his coat off, like an inconvenient country uncle, puddling their artistic expectations’ (1934: 82). In Matthiessen’s words, the ‘artist’s use of language is the most sensitive index to cultural history’ (1941: xv). Formalist sophistication thus marks the difference between dabblers in the idiosyncratic whose ideas bear little cultural centrality, and representative men (to use the romantic designation) whose aesthetic objects contain the essence of their times (see Bercovitch 1993: 359). Williams places Whitman in a Whig history of poetic democratization beginning with Shakespeare, whose blank verse had already labored in the direction of free verse with a ‘technical advance, a certain impatience with restraint’, so that a ‘feeling for prose began to be felt all through his verse’, his later work in fact ‘being freer and more natural in tone’ (2002: 842). After Shakespeare’s death, however, ‘the form began to

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lapse rapidly into the old restrictions’, getting ‘worse and worse with the years until all the Elizabethan tenor had been stripped away’, as Milton was followed by ‘Cromwell and the English Revolution, and Shakespeare was forgotten, together with the secrets of his versification, just as Whitman today is likely to be forgotten’ (2002: 842).

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EPILOG: AFTER THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

During the 1960s and 1970s, the American-Renaissance construction lost a great deal of its credibility;1 but its underlying notion of representative literariness has retained at least some of its rhetorical appeal. It seems that the post-Kantian Whitmanian moment is most adaptable to contemporary US studies when it is phrased in terms of negativity, disruption, and ‘thirdness’. Whitman’s image of American poetry as a ‘lawless music’ already implies the figure of the sublime, as a reference to a ‘real’ America that in contrast to the ‘genteel’ America is always in process and thus eludes conceptual definition (hence the necessity of voicing it in the pre-conceptual language of a poetic ‘song’ that embodies democratic practices by formal parallelism). Whitman’s trope of aesthetic revolution as a means of negative mimesis reappears in the post-1960s idea that authentic America expresses itself in the ‘exploded form’ of the literary post- or latemodern avant-garde (Mellard 1980: ix.). Accordingly, Brian McHale writes that ‘postmodernist fiction’ is culturally relevant as it ‘turns out to be mimetic after all’, an ‘imitation of reality’ that takes place ‘not so much at the level of its content, which is often manifestly un- or anti-realistic, as at the level of form’ (1987: 38). This idea of a desirable stylistic correspondence between high art and radical democracy has also been crucial to the discourse of experimental poetics since the 1960s. Lyn Hejinian’s foundational essay on ‘The Rejection of Closure’ (1983) presents the recovery of poetic authenticity as a commitment to the method of the ‘open’ text, which she deems both truer and more democratic and hence aesthetically more worthy of an academy-based literary avant-garde.2 The Whitmanian impulse of

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language-centered poetics can be seen (at least on a manifesto-level) in its suggestion of parataxis as the main candidate for adequately democratic stylistic openness,3 and also in its dismissal of seemingly more traditional writing (such as confessional or so-called ‘academic’ poetry) as latter-day versions of the genteel. Thus the authors of an important 1988 manifesto for Social Text argue that ‘the widespread contemporary reception of poetry as nice but irrelevant’ is caused by the predominance of ‘sentimental’ and ‘banal’ moments in contemporary writing, resulting from the ‘pseudo-intimacy of an overarching authorial “voice”’ that ‘falls far short of Whitman’s openness of self (which strikes us as much closer to a real self and its processes)’. This assessment may be convincing enough, but it arguably draws its rhetorical force and its assumptions about good poetry from a key premise of the Whitmanian moment: that the difference between the genteel and the real lies on a stylistic level, that therefore a true poetics of democracy ‘necessitate[s] more radical idioms’ in response to ‘the distortions of contemporary “unreal speech”’ prevalent in America’s public sphere (Benson et al. 1988: 264, 267; see Altieri 1999: 313). In the more recent postnationalist critical movements that define themselves against what they consider the literary élitism, political naïveté, and monoculturalism of Matthiessen’s generation, the trope of representative literariness survives in the terms of a transcultural sublime. Gloria Anzaldúa’s celebration of her protean borderland identity, for instance, locates America’s lawless music in the spaces of alterity she stages as generic to radically pluralistic societies characterized by a culture of difference: ‘The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity’. Thus she ‘learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode – nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned’ (2000: 2213). Like Whitman, in other words, the ‘new mestiza’ claims to contain multitudes. The brilliance of her ‘pluralistic’ chant legitimates the culture of the borderland, which in turn attests to the ‘truth’ of her song. Matthiessen’s suggestion that pure literariness and cultural expressiveness are two sides of the same coin can be seen in the notion (often casually implied) that the Western canon remains the best location for revisionist culture criticism – that Shakespeare’s poeticity, for example, contributes to the astuteness with which he illuminates Elizabethan power structures, while his cultural representativeness

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makes him all the more literary. A similar double process of legitimation underlies the recent interest in the interdependence of literary form and moral value. Martha Nussbaum reads Henry James’ The Golden Bowl as an ethico-moral vision that is ‘finely tuned’ because it emerges from ‘a fine work of art’ whose stylistic sophistication defies paraphrase into the ‘flat’ language of moral philosophy (1989: 152). The idea that story-telling offers better insights into moral judgment than abstract theorizing is central to the so-called ‘turn to ethics’ (Garber 2000). But in contrast to more careful literary ethicists such as Richard Rorty, Nussbaum defines moral astuteness as perception of complexity and contends that society’s efforts at ethico-moral melioration are best served by aesthetic specialists trained in the discrimination of artistic forms.4 Such strong claims for the social relevance of stylistic literariness show how ‘engaged’ intellectuals continue to legitimate their socio-politically inflected approach to cultural criticism with their expertise as connoisseurs of literary form.5 The assumption that society’s ethico-moral and socio-political discourse can be better understood through its stylistic embodiments than, well, through ethico-moral and socio-political discourse, seems difficult to evade, so long as we are drawn to view the literary or the cultural in terms of the musical metaphors that have dominated the field of aesthetics since the late eighteenth century. Musical tropes encourage a dualist view of literature that locates its essence (its ‘literariness’) in an ‘other’ elusive to rational understanding. There is nothing wrong per se with inventing aesthetic ‘others’ to language – with attributing to Whitman a poetic je ne sais quoi as shorthand for whatever aspects of his undeniable literary power we cannot explain (where we need an ‘erotics of art’ rather than ‘a hermeneutics’, as Susan Sontag phrased it [1972: 660]). The problems begin when invented non-discursive ‘others’ (Whitman’s ‘lawless music’) are presented as being in a dialectical relationship with political entities (‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’, ‘America’) that purportedly provide, to the sensitive critic, a discursive understanding of these non-discursive ‘others’. Thus aural definitions of the literary imagination invite us to separate the essentially poetic from the essentially social, but then tempt us to reverse this separation by a post-Kantian sleight of hand that presents a culture’s disembodied ‘music’ as its most profound social symptom. It might help us to move beyond this reductionism if we view literary production as the sort of imaginary world-making that cuts

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across rigid world-art oppositions (such as stylistic artistry versus socio-political expressiveness). The world-making trope acknowledges that while form is always political, its political content (hence its ‘representativeness’) depends on the propositions with which it is connected in specific social practices (the readerly and writerly contexts from which it cannot be removed). On the basis of such a definition, we may still read Whitman as a radical democrat, even one, perhaps, who provides us with an important vision of the democratic utopia of an ‘achieved America’, as Richard Rorty suggests (1998: 16–17). But to make this case, we have to be prepared to engage with Whitman’s political or ethical vocabularies, rather than practice a concealed formalism that diagnoses Whitmanian ‘song’ as the most refined location of his politics or ethics. NOTES

1.

2.

3.

4.

This loss in credibility can be followed in Lucy Maddox’s anthology, Locating American Studies, notably in the essays by Bruce Kuklick, Gene Wise, and Alice Kessler-Harris (Maddox 1999: 1–90, 166–214, 335–52). For an overview of recent positions, see Rowe 2002: 3–82. On the question of whether the New Americanists can be said to remain within the American-Renaissance construction, see MacPhail 2002: 149–51. According to Hejinian, the open text may be less ‘soothing’ than the traditional stylistics of closure, but truer to reality (it ‘acknowledges the vastness of the world’) and to the ideal of radical democracy, as it ‘rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies’ (1985: 270–2). Like Whitman, Hejinian implies that while the text can never ‘match the world’ (1985: 285), correspondence can be reached in negativity. Compare Bob Perelman’s suggestion that ‘Whitman’s paratactic catalogues seemed bizarre and discontinuous to most of his contemporaries, yet for this century’s readers they are more likely to suggest connection and a totalizing embrace of society’ (1996: 77). In a characteristic passage, she argues that since artistic sensibilities like James possess greater ‘visual or auditory acuity’ and ‘developed their faculties more finely’, they ‘can make discriminations of color and shape (of pitch and timbre) that are unavailable to the rest of us’, and consequently ‘miss less . . . of what is to be heard or seen in a landscape, a symphony, a painting’. This makes them our best allies (‘fellow fighter[s]’, ‘guide[s]’) in what Nussbaum refers to as ‘the war against moral obtuseness’ (1989: 164). In her later work, on the nexus of law

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and literature, Nussbaum makes even stronger claims, arguing that ‘[l]iterary understanding . . . promotes habits of mind that lead toward social equality’ (1995: 92). On the difference between Nussbaum and Rorty, see Leypoldt 2008. A representative example is Terry Eagleton’s The Idea of Culture (2000), which critiques American society for a destructive Puritanism deeply ingrained in a variety of cultural styles (for example, the ‘fetish of the body’ in popular culture, the ‘middle-class American obsession’ with ‘dieting’, the importance of sexuality in literary and cultural studies, the neo-pragmatist turn in American philosophy, the ‘discourse called political correctness’, and the ‘artless language favoured by American creative writing courses’ [2000: 88–90]). Eagleton’s distrust of America’s economic and political imperialism is hardly controversial today. But rather than offering economic and political arguments, he focuses almost exclusively on the political content of a putatively American cultural style. Like Emerson in English Traits, Eagleton ties aesthetic and conceptual illnesses so gracefully together that one allegation supports the other: America’s Puritanism seems worse by association with aesthetic and philosophical decline, while Rortyan pragmatism and Carveresque minimalism seem the poorer for expressing a cultural neurosis.

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INDEX

Abrams, M. H., 55 Addison, Joseph, 7, 196, 198 Adorno, Theodor W., 39, 41n2, 47–8n31, 150–1 aesthetics Adorno, 47–8n31 anti-aesthetics, 251 avant-garde, 21 Cartesian, 131 ekphrastic techniques, 187–8 Eliot, 251, 252 Kant, ix, 33, 37 morality, 19, 47n28 Rousseau, 203 Schiller, 32 succession of styles, 86–7 Taine, 108 universality, 106 Whiggism, 203 see also art/arts, beauty, literature; music, inwardness African-Americans: see black people Agamben, Giorgio, 68n11 Agassiz, Louis, 166 agrarianism, 50, 162, 165 alienation, 23–4, 25, 33, 161 tropes of cultural dissociation, 25–8 Allen, Gay Wilson, 246 Allston, Washington, 177 America agrarianism, 50 art, 233n4 as biosphere, 250 cultural nationalism, ix, 102–3, 145–6, 251 culture, 49, 219 geography, 160 landscape, 84, 114, 123 language, 50–1, 207

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nature, 163, 219 post-World War II, 68n13 style, 117–23, 163 see also American literature; pioneering spirit American Renaissance construction, 2–3, 6, 83–4, 153, 256 Americanization of classics, 153 Anderson, Sherwood, 8 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 257 Arac, Jonathan, 41n1 architecture, 10n3, 35–36, 155n8 see also Gothic architecture Aristotle, 87, 154n1 Arnold, Matthew, 19, 41n1, 254n2 Art/arts American republic, 233n4 ancient/modern, 125n12 artlessness theory, 121 aura of art galleries, 58 commercialization of, 209–10 dehumanization of, 41n2 democracy, 65, 197–8, 202–3, 206, 209 end of art, 29–32, 46n21, 212 feudalism, 111, 218–19 as institution, 29 and life, 29, 95–6 national character, 18 public/private aspects, 41n1 see also aesthetics, literature; music, inwardness arts-and-crafts movement, 28 associationism, 139 audience: see mass audience; readership aura of cultural production, 56, 57 authenticity art, 217 ethics of, 53 mimesis, 256

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authenticity (cont.) music, 146–7, 151 Whitman, 237–40 see also Taylor, Charles avant-garde aesthetics, 21 economic/symbolic capital, 37–8, 55 France, 20, 21 legitimation, 21 life praxis, 29 mass audience, 248 self-reflexivity, 23, 244 sexual explicitness, 7 Wordsworth, 21–3, 76–7 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 136, 141, 155n8 Bacon, Francis, 100n19, 175 Badeau, Adam, 112 Baer, Karl Ernst von, 225 Bancroft, George, 2 democratic communion of mind, 61 Herder as influence, 126n15 History of the United States, 64, 217 perfectionism, 217 public community, 196 on Shakespeare and Milton, 65 taste, 218 Williamsburg Oration, 217–19, 234n5 Barlow, Arthur, 162 Baudelaire, Charles, 20, 23, 37–8, 248 Beach, Amy, 153 beauty American and English compared, 168–9 Emerson, 28, 75 and freedom, 40 Hegel, 32 Hume, 201 representation of Infinite, 79 Kant, 21, 33–4, 40, 46–7n28, 57 literary, 64–5, 76, 84 morality, 46–7n28 Nietzsche, 242 sublimity, 86–7, 92, 119–20 universal/relative, 21, 84–5 see also aesthetics, art/arts, literature; music, inwardness Beethoven, Ludwig van, 135–57 Adorno on, 47–8n31, 150–1 Brendel on, 141 cult following, 103, 136, 145 Dwight politicizing, 139–40, 144 Fuller on, 4, 138 Hanslick on, 143, 144 Hoffmann on, 75, 135 as republican composer, 4–5, 140 sublimity, 155n7 Thoreau on, 139 transcendentalists, 153 values in music, 34 works Third Symphony, 140, 142, 147, 156n11

Fifth Symphony, 75, 135–6, 142 Ninth Symphony, 139, 140, 142–3, 149, 155n10, 156n13, 156–7n15 Bellah, Robert N., 59, 62, 63, 68–9n15 Benjamin, Walter, 56 Benson, Steve, 257 Bentham, Jeremy, 95 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 2 Berlin, Isaiah, 55 Berlioz, Hector, 143, 148 Bhabha, Homi, 43n8 Biel, Steven, 253–4n2 black consciousness theory, 230 black people, 230 folk idioms, 146 song, 146, 150 writing, 67n5 Blair, Hugh Dissertation, 188 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 119–20, 172 Ossian, 6, 46n23 Blake, William, 245 blank verse, 7, 120, 254–5n5 Bloom, Harold, vii Boelhower, William, 228 Boethius, Anicius, 154n1 Böhme, Hartmut, 55–6, 68n10 Boileau, Nicolas, 113, 246 Boston Brahmins, 7, 27, 61, 117 Boston climate, 166 Bourdieu, Pierre, 44n10 cultural fields, 55–6 economic capital, 37–8 economic world, reversed, 22 habitus, 45n14 intellectual autonomy, 19–21 literary field, vii, 19–21, 37–40 peer recognition, 19, 22–3, 76 politics and economics, 23–4 romantic writers, 29–30 practical knowledge, 44–5n14 symbolic capital, 37–8, 55 Bourne, Randolph, 12n14, 230, 231–2 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 204 Bramen, Carrie, 221 Brendel, Franz, 5, 34, 140–1, 142–3, 156n14, 157n17 Brentano, Clemens, 26, 29–30, 31 Brooks, Van Wyck, 8, 12n13, 12n14, 249–51, 253–4n2, 254n3 Brown, Marshall, 124n10 Browning, Robert, 8, 227, 228 Brownson, Orestes, 2, 61, 62, 99n17, 196, 219–20, 234n5 Bryant, Wiliam Cullen, 12n12, 238 cultural parallelism, 2 democratic novelists, 11n9 essay on, 221 on Scott, 6–7 and Wordsworth, 7, 189 Buckley, Jerome H., 40–1n1

Index Buell, Lawrence America-as-nature, 193n1 on Emerson, 28, 73, 82, 87–8, 97n7, 98n8 neoclassics/romantics, 38 on Thoreau, 179 on Whitman, 116 Buffon, George-Louis, 162, 179, 180, 193n3 Bürger, Peter, 29 Burnet, Thomas, 183 Burns, Robert, 100n19, 252 Burroughs, John, 167–70 American v. English beauty, 168–9 Winter Sunshine, 168 Byrd II, William, 162 Byron, Lord George audience, 219 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 213 commercial success, 23, 41n3, 77 Emerson on, 80, 81 Calhoun, Craig, 67n8 Cambridge Transcendental Club, 217 Carlyle, Thomas art, public/private aspects, 41n1 on Coleridge, 77 and Emerson, 40, 73–4, 75–6, 95 Emerson on, 80, 82 on Fichte, 74 heroes, 62 on heroism, 75 musical thought, 79, 86, 154n2 on Novalis, 73–4, 77 transcendentalism, 73–4, 217 and Whitman, 11n6 works ‘Mechanical Age’, 27, 94 Sartor Resartus, 132 ‘Shooting Niagara’, 11n6, 116 Carton, Evan, 2, 248 Casanova, P., 23, 50 catalogue rhetoric: see paratactical catalogue rhetoric Chadwick, George Whitefield, 153 Channing, Walter ‘American Language and Literature’, 51, 52, 53, 185–6 Channing family, 2 literary nationalism, 66–7n4 national identity, 59 Native American literature, 67n6 Chateaubriand, René, 213 Chesnutt, Charles W., 229–30 Christianity, 35, 36, 37, 47n29, 47n30, 86, 89, 135, 222–3 Clarke, Edward, 163–4 climate Californian, 170 culture, 166 degeneracy thesis, 162 democracy, 165–6 Emerson, 166 geology, 164

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Greeks, ancient, 169 health, 164 humidity, 163 Jefferson, 162, 165–6 landscape, 167 London, 168 Longfellow, 176 Montesquieu, 174 moral/physical effects, 166 New World, 162, 170 climate theory parodied, 177–8 pastoralism, 176 physiology, 164 spatial determinism, 162–4, 171–2 Whitman, 191–2 Cockney poets, 76, 77 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 174 Biographia Literaria, 42n6 Carlyle on, 77 Emerson on, 80, 81 metaphysics, 76 organicism, 27 readership, 42n6 and Wordsworth, 40 communitarianism brotherhood, 62 democracy, 207–8 Dwight, 139 emanationism, 62 identity, 59, 60, 64 literature, 219 self-expression, 59, 60 comparative criticism, 40 confessional poetry, 257 Conrad, Joseph, 42–3n7 content/form, 7, 117–18, 133–4, 210, 248, 259 Cooper, James Fenimore, 23, 117, 212 Copland, Aaron, 152 Cousin, Victor beauty/sublimity, 86 cosmology, 90 culture/geography, 177 culture/unity, 90–1 eclecticism, 91–2, 218 and Emerson, 40, 88–93, 99n17 on Hegel, 126n15 history, 89–90, 180, 181–2 politics/economics, 19 sensualism in arts, 92 spatial determinism, 181 Cowell, Henry, 12n15, 150–1 Cowley, Malcolm, 12n12, 252 Crabbe, George, 80 Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 135–6, 145 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St John de, 162–3 Letters from an American Farmer, 165, 188, 193n4, 223–4, 231–3 spatial difference, 231 cultural health, 91, 96, 113, 126n17, 162, 221–33 cultural nationalism, viii, 102–3, 145–6, 251

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cultural parallelism 94–5, 178 definition, 10n3 historical legitimacy, 64 identity, 62, 63 Ruskin’s Gothic, 34–7 Wagner, 143 as Whitmanian moment, 2–3, 251 Williams, 252 culture antebellum, 7, 144–8 aristocratic/democratic, 209–12, 214, 215 Britain, 169 climate, 166 and commerce, 55, 201–2, 203 commodification, 56–7 common people, 196 geography, 160–1, 177 homogeneity, 212–13 identity, 2 independence, 4, 117 liberty, 196–203 modernization, 25–6 monarchy, 201 nature, 161, 166–7, 169–70, 175, 177, 193n4 pluralism, 230 Pocock, 196 progress, 204–5 transcendentalism, 57 transfer of, 40 curative variety, see diversity Dante Alighieri, 79, 175, 205–6, 219 de Bow, James, 184, 185 de Pauw, Cornelius, 162, 193n3 de Tocqueville, Alexis aristocratic/democratic cultures, 209–12, 214, 215 cultural homogeneity, 212–13 Democracy in America, 166, 208–9 historiography, 209 and Hume, 209 and Mill, 232–3 lawlessness, 212 political modernity, 6 Deakin, Motley, 174 degeneracy thesis, 26, 162, 164, 180, 184, 193n3 democracy and aristocracy, 208–9 art, 65, 197–8, 202–3, 206 arts, 195, 209 canon, 65 climate, 165–6 communitarianism, 207–8 Enlightenment, 202–3 and feudalism, 111 generalization, 208–9 Greek, 198, 199 individualism, 208 institutions, 215

literature, 11n9, 252 modernity, 120 musical forms, 5 nationalism, 117 primitive, 239–40 the real, 121–2, 212 self-reliance, 208–9 Shaftesbury, 197–8 style, 4 Democratic Muse, 1, 31, 218, 221–33, 243–4 democratic/aristocratic literatures, 210–11, 214, 215–17, 220–1 Descartes, René, 131 Desor, Pierre Édouard, 166 Dewey, John, 98n8 Dial Emerson in, 78, 82, 93, 187 Fuller in, 146, 224–5 Dickens, Charles, 168 Dionysian, 34 diversity, 221–33 biological, 225–6 curative variety, 221–4, 225–6, 230, 231, 232–3 Dowden, Edward, 6, 7, 11n5, 119, 123, 237–8, 244, 247, 249, 250, 252 Dreyfus affair, 19 du Bois, W. E. B., 230 Duff, William, 233n3 Dumas, Alexandre, 228 Duncan, Isadora, 8, 12n15 Duyckinck, E. A., 189, 220, 221 Dvorˇák, Anton folk elements, 153 musical nationalism, 5, 148–54, 159n24 national music, 149–50 Ninth Symphony, 148–9 Dwight, John Sullivan, 155n5, 155n8 aristocratic/democratic music, 140–4 associationism, 139 on Beethoven, 139–40, 144, 155n10, 156n12, 156n13 communitarianism, 139 emanationism, 61 Fourierist phase, 134, 135, 138 millennial reform, 138–40 music religion, 103, 135–8 Negro melodies, 146 program music rejected, 143–4, 157–8n21 social utopia, 34 transcendental music, 134–40 works ‘Intellectual Influence of Music’, 144 ‘Native Music’, 147 Dwight’s Journal of Music, 134–6, 146–7, 148, 156n15, 157n18, 157n19 e pluribus unum formula, 5, 120, 225–6, 231 Eagleton, Terry, 260n5 ‘The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism’, 33–4

Index Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 217 ekphrasis, 187–8, 189–90, 192–3 Eliot, T. S., viii, 151, 248, 251–3 Elizabethan Age, 64, 92, 107, 257–8 Ellis, Havelock, 227–8 Ellis, Joseph, 49, 110, 203, 221 emanationism communitarianism, 62 English literary canon/democratic reform, 65 evolutionism, 69n16 historical change, 65, 95 individualism, 62 landscape, 161 Lovejoy, 60 transcendentalism, 64–5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo American intellectuals, 33, 187 aural images, 75, 79, 81, 105–6 beauty, 28, 75 and Carlyle, 40, 73–4, 75–6 on Carlyle, 80, 82 on ‘Children of Adam’ section, 241 on Civil War, 89 class, 98n10 climate, 166 on Coleridge, 80, 81 and Cousin, 40, 88–93, 99n17 cultural independence, 4, 117 cultural parallelism, 10n3, 95 ekphrastic technique, 187–8 Gothic architecture, 96, 187 historical determinism, 87–8 historicity, 84–93 imagination, 217 individualism, 60 inspiration, 145 linear/cyclical progress, 89 monarchy/anarchy, 27 musical thought, 154n2 Naples visit, 44n13 natural rhymes, 119 parallelistic rhetoric, 94–5, 178 Platonists, 92 poet-intellectual, 80–1, 96–7n1 pragmatism, 98n8 rejection of European Muse, 28 representative man, 22, 62, 80 romantic idealism, 61 sensualism in arts, 99n18 on Shelley, 80 on Tennyson, 78–80 transcendentalism, 83, 216–17 transnational language of Being, 4 understanding, 217 universality of music, 132 Whitmanian authority, 83–4 on Wordsworth, 77–8, 80, 81 works ‘The Adirondacs’, 61 ‘Art’, 93, 95 ‘Circles’, 87

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Dartmouth address, 187, 219 Dial reviews, 78, 82, 187 Divinity School Address, 58, 132 English Traits, 64, 76, 77–8, 79–80, 81–2, 92, 93–4, 144, 260n5 ‘Experience’, 60 ‘Fate’, 87–8 First Series, 86 ‘Fortune of the Republic’, 89 Harvard Address, 82–3 ‘Merlin’, 123n3 ‘The Poet’, 75, 78–9, 84 Second Series, 86 ‘Self-Reliance’, 99n16 ‘Thoughts on Art’, 93, 187 ‘Young American’, 178 end-of-art, 29–32, 162 Hegel, 32, 46n24, 125n12 literary field, 28 primitivism, 46n21 Young America movement, 31 end-of-history, 89, 90 English language, 50–1, 52–3, 66n3, 194n10, 205, 207, 253n1 Enlightenment, 33, 53, 162, 163, 165, 195, 196–203 environmental influence, 163, 174–5, 185–6 see also climate ethnicity, 124–5n11, 226–7, 228–9 see also race Everett, Edward, 2, 38, 65, 204, 205–8, 129 evolutionism, 60–1, 62, 65–6, 69n16, 85, 107, 180–1 exoticism, 26, 45n16 expressivism expressive individualism, 62–3, 68–9n15 expressive theory of language, 68n14 identity, 59, 61 inwardness, turn to, 58 national identity, 204 nationalism, 3, 240 organic form, 118 romanticism, 131, 207 turn to, 53–5, 62, 67n7 Farwell, Arthur, 153 feminization, fear of, 39, 46n27 feudalism art, 111, 218–19 democracy, 111 Eliot, 252–3 evolutionist, 107 literary forms, 115–16 poetic, 195 Whitman on, 116, 117–18 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 51–2, 67n5, 74–5 Fireside poets, 12n12, 84, 240 Flaubert, Gustave, 37 Fluck, Winfried, 68–9n15, 119 formalism abstract, 41n2 aesthetic, 134

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formalism (cont.) American, 2 Kantian ethics, 34, 53–4 Lowell, 112 musical, 133–4 Paterian, 37 Tennyson, 78 Victorian, 37 form/content, 7, 117–18, 133–4, 210, 248, 259 Foucault, Michel, 60, 68n12 foundationalism, 59–60, 63–4 France absolute monarchy, 92–3, 196, 215 avant-garde, 20, 21 landscape, 176 literary field, 19–20 politics/literature, 19 Frank, Manfred, 34, 46–7n28, 154n2 Frank, Waldo, 3, 12n14, 12n15, 170–1, 192–3 Franklin, Benjamin, 62 Frederick the Great, 50 free-verse poetics, 4, 102, 104, 127n21, 195, 241, 244 French language, 50 Freud, Sigmund, 43n8 Friedl, Herwig, 98n8 frontier imagery, 31 see also pioneering spirit Fry, William Henry, 5, 103, 146–7, 148, 158n22, 158n23 Fuller, Margaret ‘American Literature’, 224–5 on Beethoven, 4, 138 cosmopolitanism, 4 English literary culture, 186 on Longfellow, 119 Mathews, 194n10 millenarian social utopia, 34 music, 103 national literature, 145–6 romantic idealism, 61 transcendentalism, 2, 178 versification, 118 functionalism, 47n29, 161, 162 Garland, Hamlin, 228, 238 genius, 63–4, 124–5n11, 186–7, 205–6, 216, 218–19, 227, 233n3 gentility, poets of critiqued, 23 listed, 11–12n12 Stedman, 242 Wendell, 239 and Whitman, 8, 101–2, 256–7 Geoffroy St-Hilaire, Isidore, 113 geography, 160–1, 177, 180–1, 182–5 geology, 164, 226–7 German language, 50, 51, 52 German romantics, 23, 27, 29, 40, 46–7n28 Germany, 52, 140–2

Godwin, Parke, 189, 221 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 10n3, 39, 80, 81, 125n11, 176, 190 Goffman, Erving, 45n14 good/beauty, 46n26 Good/True, 86 Gostwick, Joseph, 111, 126n15 Gothic architecture, 101, 112 Christian values, 36 Emerson, 96, 187 Nuremberg, 27 Ruskin, 34–7, 47n29, 47n30, 96, 173 Gottschald, Ernst, 142 Graff, Gerald, 2, 248, 253n1 Greece, ancient aesthetics, 29, 32, 46n23 architectural models, 50 art, 36, 87, 162 arts, 218 climate, 169 democracy, 198, 199 freedom, 86, 173 language, 207 sublime, 172 Greeley, Horace, 45n18, 103, 146 Guernsey, Alfred H., 185 Guizot, François, 19 Gummere, Francis B., 124n10 Guyot, Arnold, 194n7 Boston Lectures, 182 Earth and Man, 163, 177, 182, 184–5, 225–6 organicist approach, 185 progress, 183–4 spatial history, 184 symbolic geography, 182–5 and Thoreau, 179–80, 194n8 habitus, see Bourdieu Hallam, Arthur Henry public community, 196 on Tennyson, 76 on Wordsworth, 42n4, 76, 77, 216 Hanslick, Eduard on Beethoven, 34, 143, 156n13 Kantian aesthetics, 37 On the Musically Beautiful, 133–4, 141–2 radical formalism, 144 on Wagner, 143 and Zimmermann, 155n4 harmonization, 110, 111, 113–14, 173, 204, 205 Harris, Roy, 151–2 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 135, 136–7, 155n7, 156n11 Hazlitt, William British primitivism, 46n23 environmental influence, 174–5 imagination, 216 public community, 196 on Shakespeare, 215

Index Spirit of the Age, 175, 188–9, 216 on Wordsworth, 6, 175, 188–9, 216 Head, Francis B, 179 Hedge, Henry, 40, 126n15 Heeren, Arnold, 217 Hegel, G. W. F. art/philosophy, 86 aufhebung, 85–6 beauty, 32, 33 concrete/abstract, 4 consciousness, 111 Cousin on, 88, 99n17, 126n15 end-of-art, 32, 46n24, 125n12 end-of-history, 89 evolution of spirit, 86 historicist perspective/God’s eye view, 87 history lectures, 47n30, 110–11 history of art, 137 national consistency, 111 organic consistency, 112 social conditions, 21 spirit of nation, 125n13 works Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 125n11, 180 Phenomenology of Spirit, 59–60, 85–6 Hegeman, Susan, 254n2 Heine, Heinrich, 30 Heinrich, Father, 145, 146, 157n19, 157–8n21 Hejinian, Lyn, 256, 259n2 Herder, Johann Gottfried expressive theory of language, 68n14 and Fichte, 51 as influence, 84, 126n15, 204, 217 inner depths, 59 national character, 109–10 Taylor on, 54 Volk, 24 Volksgeist, 29 works This Too a Philosophy of History, 109–10 Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 109–10 history Being/Becoming, 4, 85 Cousin, 88–93 birds-eye perspectives, 209 Emanationism/evolutionism 60, 65, 69n16, 85 Emerson, 84–93 Hegel, 85–93 historicity, 69n16, 84–93, 106–9 historiography, 86, 209 landscape influences, 180 Schelling, 69n16 Whitman, 84, 106–9 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 34, 75, 135, 136, 141, 142, 155n6, 155n7, 155n8 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 33–4

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Holmes, Oliver Wendell ‘The Americanized European’, 163–4, 166–7 Buell on, 38 genteel, 12n12 literary nationalism, 240–1 and Longfellow, 177 Homer, 79–80, 119, 120, 172, 174, 217, 219 Howells, William Dean, 12n12, 108, 121–2, 127n21, 127n22, 241 Hugo, Victor, 86, 112, 125n12 Humboldt, Alexander von, 179, 232–3 Hume, David beauty, 201, 205 and de Tocqueville, 209 identity, 56–7 literary field, 203 and Montesquieu, 200 and Shaftesbury, 200 skeptical Whiggism, 195 spirit of epoch, 201–2 taste, 203 territorial expansion, 222 works ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’, 198–9 ‘Of Luxury’, 198, 201–2 ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, 198, 199–201, 206 humidity, 163 Hunt, Leigh, 215 Hurston, Zora Neale, 67n5 Hutcheson, Francis, 54 Hutchinson family, 103, 104 idealism, 33, 34, 40, 60–1, 74–5, 86–7, 99n17, 112, 140, 154n2, 180–2, 187, 213, 232 identity see Taylor Indianist movement, 153 individualism democracy, 208 emanationism, 62 Emerson, 60, 219 expressive, 59, 62–3, 68–9n15 identity, 60 race, 226–7 Thoreau, 139 utilitarian, 62 industrialism, 17–18, 43n8, 69n9, 102, 105, 151, 168 intellectuals, viii, 1–2, 8, 24, 25–6 alienation, 33 anti-intellectualism, 31, 147, 240 American, 33, 49, 187 autonomy, 19–21 cultural authority, 253n1 habitus, 40 social activism, 97–8n7 interiority, 4, 55–8, 59, 68n12, 213 inwardness, 53–4, 55–8, 67–8n8, 68n12, 213

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Irving, Washington, 7 Ives, Charles, 8, 12n15, 145, 150–2 Jacoby, Russell, 82 James, Henry, 212, 228–9, 230, 258, 259n4 James, William, 170 Jameson, Fredric, 46n24, 113 Jefferson, Thomas agrarianist narrative, 162 American dialect, 50–1 climate, 162, 165–6 on European canon, 50 Greek and Roman architecture, 50 on humidity, 163 linguistic expression, 66n3 northern/southern dichotomy, 194n5 Notes on the State of Virginia, 162 universalism, 50 Virginia State Capitol, 66n1 Jeffrey, Francis, 22, 42n5, 76 Jehlen, Myra, 160, 193n4 Johnson, Samuel, 38 journalist-intellectuals, 253n1 Jung, Carl, 170, 194n6 Kallen, Horace, 230, 231 Kant, Immanuel aesthetics, viii, 32–3, 37, 39, 47n31 beauty, 21, 33, 40, 46–7n28 democratic/aristocratic culture, 215 formalist ethics, 34–5, 53–4 imagination/understanding, 215–16 morality, 46–7n28 noumenal, 133 romantic re-interpretations, 65 works Critique of Judgment, 33, 46n26 Critique of Pure Reason, 56 Keats, John, 42n4, 76, 97n4 Kennedy, Walker, 238–9 Kerkering, John D., 1, 10n3, 126n16, 159n24 Killingsworth, Jimmie, 63, 118, 126n17 Krehbiel, H. E., 148 Krüger, Eduard, 141 Lacan, Jacques, 43n8 Laclau, Ernesto, 43n8 Lake District, 25, 84, 175 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 213 landscape, 18 American, 84, 102, 114, 123, 145–6, 165, 167, 175, 177, 178, 179–80 emanationism, 161 England, 25, 84, 167, 168, 176, 190 European, 84, 145, 173, 182 France, 176 influence on history, 180 language and, 186–7 literature, 190 Meek, 175–6, 190 New World, 162

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northern/southern dichotomy, 174 outside/inside self, 170–1 painting, 137 particular, 161 Scotland, 176, 190 spirituality, 161 Thoreau, 179–80 see climate language and national identity, 50, 51–3, 66n3 speech/music, 131–2, 135, 137–8 unity/diversity, 205, 207 Lanier, Sidney, 244 Lawrence, D. H., 42n7 Liszt, Franz, 142–3 literary field see Bourdieu literary form, 27, 39, 115–16, 127n21, 189, 211, 258 see also form/content literary nationalism, 4, 49–51 Channing, 66–7n4 Germany, 52 Howells on, 121–2 immersion in foreign language, 51 lawless style, 240–1 literary prestige, 20, 23, 30–1, 76 see also peer recognition literature commerce, and culture, 55, 201–2, 203 commercial publishing, 22 commercial success, 19, 20, 23, 30–1, 41n3, 76 commercialization, 20, 56–7, 68n12, 209–10 democratic/aristocratic, 6, 210–11, 214, 216–17, 220–1 landscape, 190 national, 127n21, 145–6, 189–90, 207 and politics, 19, 23 social uses of, 248–9 views on, 73, 253n1, 254n3 as voice of nation, 205 see also American literature Locke, Alain, 230 Locke, John, 92–3, 95, 100n19, 206 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 38–9 climate, 176 decanonization, 23 Fuller on, 119 poetic development, 176 as Schoolroom poet, 12n12, 247–8 sensualism rejected, 176–7 spatial determinism, 178 works Evangeline, 7 Kavanagh, 176–7 Poems, 118 Song of Hiawatha, 7, 23, 146, 148 Voices of the Night, 61 Lopez, Barry, 171 Louis XVIII, 91–2, 92–3

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Index Lovejoy, Arthur O., 60, 65, 69n16, 85 Lowell, James Russell Dowden on, 7 formalism, 112 lived tradition, 27–8 parodies of climate, 177–8 as Schoolroom poet, 12n12 spatial determinism, 178 universal self, 61–2 Wordsworth and Whitman compared, 241 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 17–18, 19, 21, 94 MacDowell, Edward, 149–50 Mack, Stephen John, 10n2 Macpherson, James, 6, 245 Maddox, Lucy, 259n1 Madison, James, 66n1, 221–2, 224, 231 magic things (Böhme), 56 Magoon, Elias Lyman, 174 manifest destiny concept, 180, 185, 193, 213 Marcuse, Herbert, 68n12 Marin, John, 8, 13n15 Marx, Adolph Bernhard on Beethoven, 140, 156n12 historical progress, 142 on Mozart, 140 progress of minds, 155–6n11 Marx, Karl, 25, 68n10, 68n12 Marx, Leo, 61, 66n2, 123n1, 178, 193n1, 193n2 mass audience, 45n15, 247–8 Mathews, Cornelius, 189–90, 194n10, 220 Matthiessen, F. O., 254n4, 257 American Renaissance, 2, 3, 250–1 language experiments, 1, 10n1, 247 Mauss, Marcel, 56, 68n10 McHale, Brian, 256 mechanical/organic forms, 27–8, 94–5, 118, 125n12, 220 Meek, Alexander, 175–6, 190–1 melting-pot, race, 224–5, 227–8, 229, 230, 231 Melville, Herman anthropophagy, 24 commercial success/literary prestige, 30–1, 45n17, 45–6n19 Copland on, 152 works Mardi, 30–1, 45n17 Moby Dick, 30, 31, 68–9n15 Omoo, 30 Pierre, 31 Typee, 26, 30, 32, 44n12, 45n16 White-Jacket, 221 Mexican War, 139–40, 144 Michaux, André, 179 Michelet, Jules, 19 Mill, John Stuart and Carlyle, 11n6 cultural health, 232–3 Emerson on, 94

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individual difference, 110 On Liberty, 54–5, 232 millennial reform, 34, 138–40, 217 Miller, John Hillis, 28 Milton, John, 253n1 blank verse, 7, 255n5 Paradise Lost, 66, 120 as virtual democrat, 65, 107 Mitchell, Edward, 11n7, 245 modernism, 3, 6, 169, 237, 247–55, 251 monarchy, 27, 65, 200, 201, 233n3 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis climate, 164–6, 174 and Hume, 200 northern/southern mentalities, 172, 194n5 spatial determinism, 160, 181 Spirit of the Laws, 162, 197 territorial expansion, 222 Moore, Thomas, 80 morality, 19, 41n1, 47n28, 54 see also ethics Morris, William, 28, 253n2 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus as aristocratic composer, 5 Brendel on, 141 Dwight on, 137, 139 Hoffmann on, 135, 136 Marx, A. B. on, 156n11 music for America, 4, 5, 145–6 and architecture, 155n8 aristocratic/democratic, 140–4 authenticity, 146–7, 151 Emerson, 154n2 Fichte, 74–5 folk elements, 149 history of, 137 as language of feeling, 131–2, 137–8 as language of religion, 135–8 lawlessness, 1, 151–2, 257, 258 metaphysics, 102–3, 105–6, 133–4 millennial reform, 138–40 national, 149–50 organicist approach, 143 and poetry, 34, 157n16 and politics, 4–5 Schopenhauer, 133 sensualism, 155–6n11 of spheres, 132, 154n1, 155n9 stylistic changes, 142 sublimity, 131–2, 135 transcendentalism, 103, 134–5, 138, 146–7 truth, 97n2 universality, 132 music religion, 103–4, 134, 135–8, 140, 157n20 musical criticism, 140–2, 144–5, 148 musical nationalism antebellum discourse, 144–8 Dvorˇák, 148–54, 159n24 Fry, 148 primitivism, 103

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musical trope, 1, 4, 258 Musical World and New York Musical Times, 146–7, 158n22 Musner, Lutz, 24 Myers, H. A., 247 Nantes, Edict of, 197 Napoleonic Wars, 51, 91 nation, 49, 111, 185 Nation, 231 national character, 18, 53, 109–10 national identity, 52–3, 59, 127n21, 204, 225, 228 nationalism conceptual Americanists, 5 cultural, viii cultural criticism, 190 democratic method, 117 early, 203–8 expressivist, 3, 240 North American group, 84 see also literary nationalism; musical nationalism Native American people, 229 chants, 5, 146, 150, 152 culture, 170 literature, 2, 67n6 oral tradition, 186 natural rhymes, 119–20 natural theology, 161, 178 Nehamas, Alexander, 242 neoclassicism, 90, 95, 201, 203–4, 213, 220 alienation, 161 Dwight’s break with, 137 Jeffersonian, 162 musical, 151 nation as machine, 49 nature, 26 personification, 176 Romanticism, 38 Shakespeare, 27 neo-Harringtonianism, 196 neoplatonism, 34, 60, 85, 131, 133, 134, 154n1 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 140–1 New York Philharmonic Society, 103, 146 New York Tribune, 45n18, 103, 146, 148 Niagara/Thames symbols, 52, 186 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 34, 60, 242–3 North American group, 2, 51–3, 84, 126n15, 127n19, 206, 207, 208 North American Review Bancroft in, 217 Channing in, 51, 66–7n4 on Everett, 204, 206 on Mathews, 194n10 Whitman in, 120–1 northern/southern dichotomy, 164–5, 172, 173, 174, 194n5 Norton, Charles Eliot, 47n30, 241 Novalis, 61, 73–4, 77 Nussbaum, Martha, 40, 258, 259–60n4

O’Keeffe, Georgia, 8 organicist approach, 84–6, 96 Brooks on, 254n3 decomposition, 114–15 expressivism, 118 Guyot, 185 mechanical dichotomy, 27–8, 118 music, 143 poetry, 143 Whitman, 120, 143, 254n3 Ornstein, Leo, 8, 12n15 Orphic song, 131, 132, 134 Ortega y Gasset, José, 41n2 Ossian, 6, 36, 45n18, 46n23, 79, 119, 172, 188, 190, 245 O’Sullivan, John L., 189, 220–1 pantheism, philosophical, 209 parallelistic rhetoric, see cultural parallelism Parker, Hershel, 30, 46n20 Parrington, Vernon, 251 Pascal, Blaise, 175 pastoralism, 25, 119, 161, 168, 176, 178, 193n2 Pater, Walter, 37, 41n1, 134 patronage, 22, 205, 218 Patterson, John Stahl, 226–7 Peacock, Thomas Love, 46n23 peer recognition, see Bourdieu Peirce, C. S., 10n3 Perelman, Bob, 259n3 Phidias, 218 Picasso, Pablo, 42n7 picturesque, 42n4, 78, 79, 86, 123, 174 pioneering spirit, 105, 107–8, 160, 240, 254 Plato, 65, 80, 86, 87 Platonists, 81, 85, 92, 100n19 Pocock, John, 196, 197, 222, 233n2 poetics free-verse, 4, 64, 102, 104, 127n21, 195, 241, 244, 252 naturism, 187–93 spatial, 171–8, 185–7 poet-intellectual, 73–83, 94–5, 96–7n1, 113–14, 138 Pope, Alexander, 22, 94, 95, 120, 238, 246, 253n1 Posnock, Ross, 18, 228–9 post-Kantian turn, 32–4, 102–3 Pound, Ezra, 248–9, 251 Price, Kenneth M., 11n7, 127n20, 240, 244, 245 primitivism, 42–3n7 British, 46n23 culture models, 119 democratic modernity, 120, 238, 247, 252 dual perception, 24–5 end-of-art, 46n21 Hume on, 233n2 linguistic, 67n5

Index literary, 240 readership, 24 romantic criticism, 46n21 stages of society, 197–8, 200 print market, vii, viii, 20–1, 23, 26, 38, 56, 57, 247–8 Pugin, August, 37, 47n29 Pushkin, Alexander, 228 race, 146, 162, 163, 164, 169, 234n6 blackness, 228 curative variety, 230 Ellis on, 227–8 Europe, 227–8 Jung, 170 marriage, 229–30 melting-pot, 224–6, 229 Ramsay, David, 204 Ransom, John Crowe, 248, 251 Ravel, Maurice, 152 readership Coleridge, 42n6 common people, 24 lay status, 23 mass, 25, 26 as noble savage, 25 pastoralism, 25 poetry, 22 primitivism, 24 readerly cannibalism, 24 see also audience Reckwitz, Andreas, 43–4n8, 44n10, 45n14, 68n9 regional novel, 231 regionalism, 49, 231, 238 religion, 57–8, 86, 91, 111, 135–8, 222–3 resemblance, tropes of, 10n3, 36, 64, 95 return-of-real narrative, 28, 29–32, 162 Reynolds, David, 7, 11n9, 45n15, 122, 123n4, 237, 246n1 Rhythm, 97n2 American/European, 151–2 dithyrambic, 123 jazz, 5 many-centred, 240 Nature’s, 105 Ripley, George, 45n18, 61, 99n17, 134 Robertson, William, 193n3 Rolland, Romain, 9 Roman Catholicism, 27–8, 30, 47n29, 111, 197, 212, 252–3 romanticism, 92, 131 commercial success, 23 Germany, 21, 29, 40, 46–7n28, 47n29 historicism, 88–9 idealism, 61, 187 identity, 58 metaphysics of music, 105–6, 133–4 music religion, 134, 140, 157n20 national theology, 178 nature philosophy, 69n16, 161 neoclassicist critiques, 38

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Nuremberg architecture, 27 Platonism, 85 post-1800, 26–7 religious sensibility, 58 and transcendentalism, 215–20 writers, 29–30 Rorty, Richard, 60, 63, 258, 259, 260n4 Rosenfeld, Paul, 5, 12n14, 12–13n15, 150, 151, 153 Rossetti, William Michael, 240, 241, 243 Rossini, Gioacchino, 112, 124n6, 140, 143, 144, 155–6n11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques aesthetics, 203 ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’, 29, 202, 203, 233n3 nature, 54, 176, 190 sickness/health binary, 162 Rousseauists, 29, 30, 169 Rowe, John Carlos, 98n7, 259n1 Royce, Josiah, 60, 169–70, 231–2, 234n6, 234n7 Ruskin, John architecture, 10n3, 36, 95 art, 41n1 cultural parallelism, 35–7, 39 end-of-art, 125n12 Gothic, 34–7, 47n29, 96, 173 letter to Norton, 47n30 politics, 95 taste, 19 works Modern Painters, 175 ‘The Poetry of Architecture’, 18–19 Stones of Venice, 28, 35–6, 94, 173 ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’, 168 Said, Edward, 44n9 St Clair, William, 22, 41–2n3, 76, 77, 97n4, 97n5 Saintsbury, George, 240 Sandburg, Carl, 8, 13n15 Santayana, George architectural images, 253–4n2 barbarism, 123, 243, 249 highbrow/lowbrow, 8 intellectual barbarism, 243 on Whitman, 12n13, 246n2 works ‘The Genteel Tradition’, 249 ‘The Poetry of Barbarism’, 239–40, 249 Schelling, Friedrich architecture as frozen music, 155n8 evolution of spirit, 86 Frank on, 154n2 Lovejoy on, 69n16 System of Transcendental Idealism, 33 Schiller, Friedrich aesthetics, 32 autonomous art, 41n2 beautiful soul, 46n25

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Schiller, Friedrich (cont.) beauty/freedom, 40 landscape, 190 mechanical state, 94 and Mill, 232 naïve/sentimental, 125, 172 public mind, 46n22 raw taste, 241, 242 works ‘The Beginning of a New Century’, 234n7 Letters on Aesthetic Education, 24, 31, 33, 40 ‘Ode to Joy’, 142 ‘On Grace and Dignity’, 26, 215 Schlegel, August Wilhelm Berlin lectures, 33, 125n12 end-of-art, 125n12 on Gothic, 47n29 mechanical v. organic, 118 picturesque, 86 poetry of the North, 36 Vienna lectures, 27 Schlegel, Friedrich, 24 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 57–8 Schoenberg, Arnold, 39, 47–8n31, 150–1 Schoolroom poetry, 12n12, 23, 247–8 Schopenhauer, Arthur as influence, 105 parallelisms, 137, 154n3 philosophy of history, 86–7 romantic music religion, 157n20 Will, 34, 142, 154n3 The World of Will and Representation, 133–4 Schucht, Johann, 5, 141–2 Schumann, Robert, 140–1 Scott, J. W., 163 Scott, Walter audience, 219 Bryant on, 6–7 commercial success, 41–2n3, 77, 97n4 Emerson on, 80, 81, 94, 95 as influence, 23, 117, 118, 121, 127n19 landscape, 190 selfhood American, 230 expressivist turn, 62, 68–9n15 as finding/making, 59–60 identity, 53–5, 56–7 modern, 67n8 Nietzsche, 60 Rousseau, 54 social interaction, 64 Whitman, 63 see also Taylor self-reliance, 88, 99n16, 107–8, 119, 164, 173, 178, 185, 208–9 sensualism in arts Cousin on, 90–2 Emerson, 99n18, 217 Magoon on, 174

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music, 155–6n11 nature/culture, 175 rejected, 176–7 sensationalism, 241 Whitman, 243 Seven Arts, 12n14, 170 Brooks in, 249–50 Rosenfeld in, 5, 150 on Whitman, 8, 9 Williams in, 251–2 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of civilization/progress, 197–8 democratic art, 195, 197–8 and Hume, 200–1 moral sense, 54 neoplatonism, 34 Whig tradition, 227, 233n1 works Sensus Communis, 196 Soliloquy, 197 Shakespeare, William audience, 219 blank verse, 254–5n5 Elizabethan power structures, 257–8 Emerson on, 80, 81 Everett on, 206 Infinite, 64 landscape, 175 neoclassicist critiques, 27 as virtual democrat, 65, 107 Whitman on, 107–8, 122, 124n8 works Coriolanus, 215 Hamlet, 66 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 65 Emerson on, 80, 81 Hallam on, 42n4, 76 works ‘Adonais’, 98n13 Defence of Poetry, 84–5 Shumway, David R., 251, 253n1 Sibelius, Jean, 151 Simms, William Gilmore, 186 Siskin, Clifford, 67n7 Smith, Adam, 197 social utopia, 32, 34, 96, 139, 153, 217 Somerville, Mary, 163 Sontag, Susan, 258 Southey, Robert, 17–18, 19, 21 Sparks, Jared, 206–7, 208 spatial determinism climate, 162–4, 171–2 Cousin, 181 incarnation, 160 Longfellow, 178 metaphysics of, 180–1 Montesquieu, 181 rejected, 178 symptomatic framework, 161, 164–78, 171 spatial symbolism, 161, 178–87, 194n9 Spencer, Herbert, 225

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Index Spenser, Edmund, 176, 190, 245 Stade, Friedrich, 156n14 Staël, Madame de, 36, 47n29, 125n12, 172–3, 174 Stedman, Edmund C., 123, 241–2, 245, 254n3 Stieglitz, Alfred, 8 Stiles, Ezra, 222–4 Stoepel, Robert, 146 Stravinsky, Igor, 151 Sullivan, Louis H., 8 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 80 Swinburne, Algernon, 245–6 Taine, Hippolyte aesthetics, 108 biologistic analogies, 113 culture, 6 as influence, 124n10 local differences, 62 self-fashioning, 112–13 universality, 124–5n11 Tasso, Bernardo, 175–6, 190, 199, 206 Taylor, Charles expressivist turn, 53–5, 67n7 on Herder, 59 identity, 55 inwardness, 57–8, 67–8n8 Temple, Sir William, 171–2 Tennyson, Alfred Lord and Wordsworth, 22 art, 41n1 Emerson on, 78–80, 81, 83 evolution of individual, 114–15 formalism, 78 gentility, 8 Hallam on, 76 on love, 122 musicality, 79 picturesque, 42n4 Whitman on, 117–18, 143, 252 works Idylls of the King, 79–80, 118 ‘Locksley Hall’, 78 In Memoriam, 79, 114 ‘Ulysses’, 78 Thoreau, Henry on Beethoven, 139 causal determination, 180 individualism, 62, 139 landscape, 179–80 nature writing, 179 romantic idealism, 61 sphere music, 155n9 as transcendentalist, 2, 178 universality of music, 132 works Walden, 179 ‘Walking’, 179–80, 182 Week on the Concord and Merrimack, 251 Thurber, Jeannette, 159n24

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Tieck, Ludwig, 27, 34, 58, 135 Tocqueville, Alexis see de Tocqueville, Alexis Torgovnick, Marianna, 24 translatio imperii idea, 49, 116, 181–2, 184, 203–4, 226 translations of national literature, 207 Trenchard, John, 196 Trilling, Lionel, 41n1, 55 Trumbull, John, 203–4 Tudor, William, 2 Twain, Mark, 42n3, 66n2, 231 Van Dyke, Henry, 12n12 Verdi, Giuseppe, 124n6, 144 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 152 Volk, 24 Volksgeist, 29, 62, 95, 110–11 Voltaire, 201 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 27, 34, 58 Wacquant, Loïc, 44n10 Wagner, Richard, 142, 149, 156n14 Dwight on, 134, 148 Opera and Drama, 143, 156–7n15, 158n23 overrepresentation, 243 Rosenfeld on, 153 Whitman on, 124n6 Webster, Noah, 50–2, 66n3 Wendell, Barrett, 6, 12n12, 123, 239 West, Cornel, 82, 98n8 Whig histories, 195, 218, 227, 254–5n5 Whiggism, 201 aesthetics, 203 ideology, 196, 199 polite, 196–7 skeptical, 195 tradition, 227, 233n1 vulgar, 198 Whitman, Walt audial images, 106 reception 237–40 aesthetic power, 1, 122–3 Americanness of, 1 avant-garde poets, 39 breaking with literary field, 238 canonization, viii, 3, 8–9, 170, 192 catalogue rhetoric, 1, 5–6, 18, 120–3, 192–3, 243–5, 259n3 ‘Children of Adam’ section, 120–1, 241, 243 Copland on, 152 cultural paralellism, 237, 251 democratic style, 1–2, 119 European music, 103–4 expressive individualism, 62–3 historicity, 84, 94, 106–9 language experiment, vii, 1, 39, 247, 248 lawless music, 1, 94, 101, 102, 150, 151, 195, 256, 257 mass audience, 45n15

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Whitman, Walt (cont.) Mitchell on, 245 organic form, 120 overrepresentation, 242–3 poetic naturism, 190, 191–2 post-Kantian voice, 102–3 professionalism, 104, 116, 241–3 self-review, 4, 8, 104 sensationalism, 241, 246n1 on Tennyson, 117–18, 122 universality, 240–1 Western roughs, 29 works ‘As Consequent, Etc.’, 123n5 ‘A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads’, 5, 124n9 ‘Boston Ballad’, 115 ‘Democracy’, 116 Democratic Vistas, 11n6, 98n12, 107–8, 110, 111, 116, 122, 126n15, 232–3, 251 ‘Facing West from California’s Shore’, 123n1 Franklin Evans, 29 Galaxy essays, 11n6, 116, 167 ‘A Memorandum at a Venture’, 120–1 ‘The Mystic Trumpeter’, 105 ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’, 63 ‘O Living Always, Always Dying’, 63, 114 ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’, 4, 104–5, 157n20 ‘Passage to India’, 61, 63, 123n1, 153 ‘Personalism’, 116 ‘The Poetry of the Future’, 117, 126n18 ‘Proto-Leaf’, 106, 109, 126n17 ‘Proud Music of the Sea-Storm’, 105, 106, 123n5 ‘Salut au Monde’, 120 ‘Sleepers’, 120 ‘Song of Myself’, 104, 108, 120, 239 ‘Song of the Exposition’, 31, 101–2, 106–7 ‘Song of the Redwood-Tree’, 105 Specimen Days Preface, 110 ‘Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood’, 188 ‘A Thought on Shakespere’, 107 ‘To a Locomotive’, 102, 105 ‘Ventures, on an Old Theme’, 120 ‘With Antecedents’, 108–9 Whitmanian authority, 123, 150, 237–40 and Emerson, 83–4 examination of, viii, 10n3, 10–11n4 iconization, 8–9 nature/culture, 193n4 spatial symbolism, 161

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Whitmanian moment, 10–11n4, 63, 195, 221, 233, 251, 253, 256, 257 canonization, 3 cultural parallelism, 3 de Tocqueville, 212, 215 Ives, 150 literary nationalism, 49–51 musical images, 131 rhetoric, 161 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 12n12, 46n20 Williams, William Carlos, 8, 251–2, 254–5n5 Willis, Richard Storrs, 146–7, 158n22, 158n23 Winckelmann, Johann, 162 Woodberry, George Edward, 12n12 word-paintings, 187–8, 190–1 Wordsworth, William audience, 219 avant-garde, 21–3, 76–7 Brownson on, 219–20 canonical status, 77 and Coleridge, 40 commercial success, 97n4 common people, 29, 252 Emerson on, 77–8, 80, 81 Hallam on, 42n4, 76, 77, 216 Hazlitt on, 6, 11n8, 175, 188–9, 216 Lake District, 84, 175 landscape, 190 mass readership, 26 nature, 44n11 personification, 176 raw taste, 241, 242, 243 as representative man, 22 St Clair on, 41n3 sensibility, 81 works ‘The Excursion’, 42n5, 76 Guide through the District of the Lakes, 25 Lyrical Ballads Preface, 24–5, 67n5 world-making, 258–9 Wuthnow, Robert, 68n13 Young America movement, ix, 237 cultural independence, 4, 117 Democratic Review, 7, 220–1 end-of-art, 31 folk idioms, 149 Mathews, 189–90 musical nationalism, 103 nature/culture, 177 pastoral nationalism, 145 Wagner, 148 Zimmermann, Robert, 155n4 Zola, Émile, 19, 21, 37

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