Faithful Passages: American Catholicism in Literary Culture, 1844–1931

1. Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and Catholic Criticism

21 1 Orestes Brownson in Young America Popular Books and Catholic Criticism Nor is it true that the general tendency of art, or aesthetic culture, is to liberate the mind. The panders to vice know very well that art is one of the most effectual means of enchaining their victims, and do not fail to enlist architecture, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, in their service . . . and we may lay it down as an invariable rule, that art uniformly tends to corrupt, when not preceded and accompanied by high spiritual, or moral and religious culture. Brownson, “Schiller’s Aesthetic Theory” (1846) More than any other American writer, Orestes A. Brownson (1803– 76) worked at the intellectual confluence of nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic literary cultures. In a career that spanned numerous religious conversions and produced a daunting body of publications , Brownson during his most productive years (1844–70) also became the preeminent American Catholic intellectual of his generation . Because of his rigorous program of self-education and his close contacts with the leading New England thinkers of his day, Brownson’s intellectual interests were diverse and wide-ranging; he not only wrote 22 E Orestes Brownson in Young America extensively about religious topics but also tried his hand at composing fiction, published substantial essays on political theory and philosophy, lectured widely about religion on the lyceum circuit, and fashioned himself into a book reviewer with considerable influence among Catholic intellectuals. And like many of the leading thinkers and writers of his day, Brownson was acutely conscious of the emerging power and influence of the United States in the nineteenth century and sought to shape its literary culture in ways commensurate with both his own religious commitments and his belief in American political ascendancy. Herman Melville, one of Brownson’s contemporaries, provides a useful way of illustrating the high stakes that Brownson and other American Catholic activists—enamored with the idea of a “Young America” with limitless creative potential—believed to be in play in the rapidly expanding literary marketplace of the middle nineteenth century. The intensity with which the brash concept of American “manifest destiny” was joined by a correspondingly fervent drive for the development of “Young American Literature” may be registered at numerous junctures in antebellum writing, but nowhere more bitterly than in Melville ’s scathing chapters on the subject in Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852). Late in that novel, upon his arrival in New York City, the ingenuous and ill-fated protagonist Pierre Glendinning discovers the ruthless market forces and shallow literary talents at work in harnessing a powerful— and lucrative—American desire for books and reading. Melville’s Pierre constitutes an important fictional example of how the opportunities of commercial publishing, conditioned by political and cultural forces, were confronted by a new professional class of American writers. Disowned by his wealthy mother and faced with an impoverished life in New York City with his half-sister/lover Isabel, Pierre Glendinning sets out to make his name as a “Young American” professional author, only to encounter grave difficulties in reconciling his own lofty ideas with the crassness of a profit-driven and politically shallow literary marketplace . Pierre’s failure to align his views with the practical demands of this prevailing theme in antebellum literary circles—the idea of an immensely gifted and youthful nation on the cusp of a cultural power so profound as to require new modes of literary representation—figures as a part of his tragic decline in Melville’s novel. It is also a reminder of the imaginative energy that Young America embodied for a generation of media-savvy antebellum writers and reformers of all kinds.1 The concept of Young America inevitably found its way into ante- Orestes Brownson in Young America E 23 bellum religious debates, particularly those advanced by Brownson, a former leading transcendentalist, a sometime colleague of Emerson and Thoreau, and later a self-appointed cultural critic on all subjects related to Roman Catholicism.2 In Brownson’s essays during the middle decades of the nineteenth century (most of them published in the Boston Quarterly Review and Brownson’s Quarterly Review), Young America is adapted from its originally nationalistic politico-literary stance into a flexible weapon of religious cultural critique. Young America, rather than signifying political idealism and literary innovation (however misguided that innovation might have appeared to skeptics like Melville), in Brownson’s hands...