Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context by Donald E. Pease (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 263 primitive bard for his contemporaries" (199). Van Anglen also connects these translations to transcendentalist theories of language and words, suggesting that they show Thoreau's concern to refresh the language by returning words to their original, primitive meanings. Van Anglen 's discussion of these points-more detailed than can be suggested here-is both lucid and convincing. At the same time, it raises an interesting question. All of Thoreau's literary translations date from the 1840s. Given his life-long passion for ancient scriptures and the root meanings of words, why did Thoreau essentially abandon substantive literary translation after 1850? The answer, it seems to me, lies in the reason Thoreau gave at the end of Walden for leaving the pond. He discontinued serious literary translating because he had several more (literary) lives to live. In effect, his translations mark an early apprenticeship to a continuing concern with poetry and language. He did not abandon this concern when he stopped substantive translation; he only expressed it differently. Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, appeared in 1849, the year he undertook his last literary translation. He may have seen his path veering toward the writing of his own books, works in which he would "translate" the "texts" of nature and his inner thoughts into words of his own choosing. Perhaps, too, he recalled Emerson's words from·'The American Scholar'': ''When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.'' William G. Heath Department of English Lakehead University Donald E. Pease. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. xiv + 303 pp. Visionary Compacts, Donald Pease's "transcript" of his readings in nineteenthcentury American literature, is an attempt to challenge established thinking about the relationship between ideology and literature from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Pease wants to move away from the view that the writers of this period based their work on ''the Revolutionary mythos'' (ix), according to which the historical break with Europe was adapted to sanction opposition to any established form, idea or government. His quarrel with this view is that such opposition is simply another form of what D.H. Lawrence called ''negative freedom," freedomji-om rather than freedom to. Pease claims that the writers he studies (Hawthorne, Whitman, Poe, Emerson and Melville) actually sought principles that would unify all Americans. He calls their writings ··visionary 264 Shorter Book Reviews compacts'' because of the vision of cultural solidarity and agreement they contain. Pease is more successful at dealing with the literary text than he is with the cultural context. He brings a fresh approach to all of the writers he discusses, and locates confirmation of his thesis in some surprising places (Hester Prynne' s selfassertions and Emerson's self-reliance are viewed as examples of the visionary compact rather than, as one might expect, the Revolutionary mythos). However, he fails to convince us that the concerns of these writers were shared by the public at large. He never makes the connection between literature and culture because his readings exist in a vacuum. Unlike Larzer Ziff, for example, whose Literary Democracy sketches in the social background to the literary foreground, Pease provides no social documentation to corroborate his assertions. For example, he writes that "Before [Hawthorne's] contemporaries could recover the shared task they inherited from the past, they had to be dispossessed of the Revolutionary mythos as the approved way of organizing their time" (53). But he gives no contemporary evidence that Americans ''possessed'' this way of organizing their time in the first place. What we miss in this book is the persuading power of words taken from letters, diaries, newspapers and other sources to show us the cultural context promised in the book's subtitle. One other demurral must be entered. Because it is frankly revisionist, Visionary Compacts is an important book. Unfortunately, its importance does not keep it from being dull. Pease's style is abstract and verbose, as in this representative sentence: ''While the concept of the American jeremiad is quite resourceful in disclosing...