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17. The Transcendentalists
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201 17 The Transcendentalists I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into the infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. . . . I am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me. I am part and parcel of God. Ralph Waldo Emerson We can make our lives sublime, and departing leave behind us footprints in the sands of time. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Creativity can at once profoundly reflect and shape national power. Inventors , engineers, and scientists clearly do so with the wealth they help make and distribute from their respective enterprises. But painters, writers, composers, sculptors, architects, and choreographers can also empower a nation by creating sources of unifying pride, inspiration, and criticism. The Transcendentalists 202 American arts and letters achieved unprecedented heights during the age of Jackson. Charles Peale’s painting The Artist in His Museum (1822) wonderfully depicted this American renaissance. Peale painted himself drawing a curtain aside and revealing his Museum of Curiosities , the nation’s first. His collection brought together elements of the artistic, scientific, and natural worlds. Peale was not just a fine painter and promoter of art and science; he also passed on his vocation and skills to four of his sixteen children—Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Titian—whose work spanned the early republic and Jacksonian eras. It was during an age of mass and crass materialism that art and literature caught up to commerce in the power of its expression. The Hudson River and Luminist schools of painters and the Concord school of writers produced brilliant, insidiously subversive works that provided an alternative vision to the prevailing national obsession with making money, exploiting others, and often devastating the natural world in the process. And in doing so, they have ever since inspired those who are profoundly restless, curious, questioning, and searching.¹ Thomas Cole and Ralph Waldo Emerson were the founders and leading theorists for the respective schools of painters and writers that drew inspiration from and developed the philosophy of transcendentalism . Asher Durand’s painting Kindred Spirits captured the dynamism between the genres by depicting the poet and publisher William Cullen Bryant and the painter Thomas Cole talking amiably atop a crag deep in wilderness. Transcendentalism is the belief that God and nature are one and thus that people are the closest to God when they immerse themselves in nature. Emerson described a transcendent experience as follows: “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into the infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. . . . I am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me. I am part and parcel of God.”² This outlook reflects a revolution in American thought. For their first couple of centuries in the New World, Americans viewed nature through a Bible-thumping Puritan prism that condemned wilderness as the abode of evil. Any American who ventured there must be constantly vigilant against the temptations of savage life, much as Jesus resisted the devil’s entreaties during his sojourn of forty days and nights. [174.129.140.206] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:33 GMT) The Transcendentalists 203 During the seventeenth century, anyone who expressed the belief that God and nature were inseparable would likely have been condemned for heresy and witchcraft. Transcendentalism was inspired by Europe’s Romantic movement, which celebrated the sublime in nature. It was also a conscious attempt by writers and painters to assert a unique dimension of American civilization . Nature across most of the continent was still largely wild, whereas Europe’s environment had been manipulated by thousands of years of history.³ The transcendentalists celebrated a pristine nature rapidly being destroyed by a civilization obsessed with getting rich and amassing more things. The awareness that all life is transient provokes at once wonder and melancholy. In his journey around the country, Alexis de Tocqueville was strongly moved by his “consciousness of the destruction , of quick and inevitable change that gives such a touching beauty to the solitudes of America. . . . One is in some sort of a hurry to admire them.”4 Henry David Thoreau was a close friend of Emerson and for a while lived with his family and tutored...