Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform
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Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform
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Overview
At the core of Butler's study are the writers George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, a quartet of friends who would together define the humane liberalism of America's late Victorian middle class. In creative engagement with such British intellectuals as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, John Ruskin, James Bryce, and Goldwin Smith, these "critical Americans" articulated political ideals and cultural standards to suit the burgeoning mass democracy the Civil War had created. This transatlantic framework informed their notions of educative citizenship, print-based democratic politics, critically informed cultural dissemination, and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy. Butler argues that a careful reexamination of these strands of late nineteenth-century liberalism can help enrich a revitalized liberal tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807877579 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 01/05/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 738 KB |
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CRITICAL AMERICANS
Victorian intellectuals and transatlantic liberal reformBy LESLIE BUTLER
The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2007 The University of North Carolina PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8078-5792-2
Chapter One
Victorian Duty, American Scholars, and National Crisis
Do you ask me our duty as scholars? ... Thought, which the scholar represents, is life and liberty. There is no intellectual or moral life without liberty. Therefore, as a man must breathe and see before he can study; the American scholar must have liberty, first of all; and as the American scholar is a man and has a voice in his own government, so his interest in political affairs must precede all others. He must build his house before he can live in it. He must be a perpetual inspiration of freedom in politics. He must recognize that the intelligent exercise of political rights, which is a privilege in a monarchy, is a duty in a republic. If it clash with his ease, his retirement, his taste, his study, let it clash, but let him do his duty. George William Curtis, "The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times," 1856
By all accounts, George William Curtis was a rousing public speaker. His success depended on his presentation of high-mindedVictorian idioms and ideals to audiences eager for clear perspective. At no time were these skills more in evidence than in his 1856 plea for college students to "introduce thought and the sense of justice into human affairs." In considering "The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and to the Times," Curtis implored the "scholarly class" in his audience to recognize the responsibilities that had made it the "upper house in the politics of the world." Those who did no more than offer a "vague declamation about freedom in general" and then retreat to their studies helped to sanction the canard "that the scholar is a pusillanimous traitor." Only by making the sort of commitment that the times demanded could scholars show society that the "pale student of books" was something more than a "recluse, a valetudinarian, and unpractical and impractical man."
Curtis's oration was heavily indebted to Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The American Scholar," from which Curtis borrowed much of his language. Addressing the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard nearly twenty years earlier, Emerson had sketched a powerful and imaginative vision of the scholar's role. Emerson's address had, in turn, followed in a line of similar orations, most notably Joseph Stevens Buckminster's 1809 "The Danger and Duties of Men of Letters." But if Curtis resembled these predecessors, he also departed from them by rooting the scholar's duty explicitly in "politics and the times," which in 1856 unmistakably meant in the growing sectional crisis. A note of particular urgency thus crept into the address, as he imagined that even the most bookish student would be overwhelmed by the "air that steals in at his window, darkens his study and suffocates him as he reads." The mounting national crisis had become part of this atmosphere, as an imminent storm seemed to be brewing with violence in Kansas and on the floor of the U.S. Senate, where Charles Sumner had recently been beaten by the South Carolinian Preston Brooks. Only the victory of the new Republican Party, Curtis believed, could calm the crisis or at least bring it to an appropriate climax. Curtis had a clear vision of the scholar's duty, and his speech represented an effort to channel the lofty energies of Emerson's solitary Truth-seeker into more immediately political concerns. Curtis called on the young American scholars in his audience "to determine whether this great experience of human freedom, which has been the scorn of despotism, shall, by its failure, be also our sin and shame." American scholars' duty now explicitly included opposition to slavery.
Curtis's call to duty and action did not meet with immediate success, at least in strictly political terms. Though the Republican candidate John C. Frémont carried most of the North, the Democratic James Buchanan emerged victorious. Curtis would have to wait until 1860 to see a Republican elected to the White House. He placed great confidence in Abraham Lincoln and in a party platform that, with the prompting of Curtis and others, included a direct invocation of the Declaration of Independence. Those who voted Republican along with Curtis exhibited a clarifying sense of duty that, one way or another, he thought, could not fail to set the country on a nobler path.
Curtis's 1856 speech set him on a new personal course at the same time that it roused others to action. With this speech, Curtis first expressed his determination to engage in party politics and to act on his sense that a matured conception of a public duty necessarily went beyond writing the light-hearted travel narratives, novels, and satiric social sketches that had thus far made him famous. Curtis had come to believe that what he called the "scholar's office in the State" necessarily involved more than private learning and reflection and that an essential duty involved taking part in the "elevation and correction of public sentiment." Apart from the explicit connection to the antislavery movement, his conception of scholarly responsibility-which would thereafter define his public utterances-was broadly Emersonian. Many of its key elements-the need to "turn and face" the danger, to be the "world's eye," to "cheer, to raise, and to guide men," and to initiate a "revolution" in the "idea of Culture"-had in fact received classic expression in Emerson's 1837 "American Scholar" address.
Curtis used comfortable certitudes when speaking of the scholar's duty, but his assurance masked his tentative evolution toward this ideal. He had struggled with the problem of vocation in his youth and drifted while searching for an appropriate career. Neither the conception of duty nor the drift were exceptional in the mid-nineteenth century, when many men of his social background and generation wrestled with the problem of finding appropriate and satisfying work. These elite northeasterners had been raised in households of middle-class privilege. If they had lacked affluence, they at least had comfort and access to cultural advantages such as exposure to books and a college education. More often than not they had, in Oliver Wendell Holmes's phrase, "tumbled about in a library" and had learned to value the life of the mind and the soul over that of the mere body. They wanted their vocations to exemplify this upbringing as men of ambition and principle.
Curtis and his liberal circle of friends-Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton-spoke in a Victorian idiom of character and duty that requires some effort to recover. That effort begins by attending to the subtleties of meaning embedded in their words and the specificity of context encircling their biographies. It begins by recognizing the sense of national crisis with which this generation grew up, a sense that all was not right with the American experiment and that the forces of greed and cowardice had clouded its ideals. The conception of duty they invoked while striving to find a role in American society stemmed from their class and place, but it was born as well of the historical moment during which they came of age. All four searched for meaningful and fulfilling work; all responded in some way to a Romantic emphasis on genius and imagination. All four also recognized, however, that the exalted American scholar had to be brought down to earth and had to play a role in the emerging national crisis.
Manlike Let Him Turn and Face the Danger
Thomas Wentworth Higginson reveled in the significance of the moment. "I have never heard of a time in the history of the world," he told an assembled group of Unitarian ministers in 1853, "when there was such a movement going on in the human race, when questions so important were grasping the public mind." Though still a young man, Higginson could speak from experience about the "reforms, practical, social, spiritual" that he had seen "rising for twenty years." He had been involved in many of these efforts as an advocate of temperance, women's rights, free religion, and, first and foremost, abolition. His reform record bolstered his sweeping claim to the Unitarian ministers that "every public man" was at that moment "taxed to the utmost to do his duty to great thoughts and great labors."
Higginson's sense of duty had deep roots, extending in some respects back to the Puritan New England of the 1630s, when the Reverend Francis Higginson established a family tradition of religious and cultural leadership. While the Higginsons' economic standing was ruined by the loss of their fortune during the War of 1812, their cultural influence was preserved by the role that Higginson's father played as steward of Harvard College. In Cambridge, the young Wentworth grew up, earned an undergraduate degree, and nurtured an ambition to be "guiding, governing, pointing out the true course to those who cannot find it unaided." How this ambition might be satisfied in the context of the 1840s, however, would prove to be a more significant challenge than he might have imagined.
Higginson entered Harvard in 1838, one year after Emerson had delivered his stirring address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Not until after Higginson graduated from college, however, did his desire to "guide" and "govern" take a literary turn, leading him to consider adopting the Emersonian role of "Man Thinking" as his life's work. With reform and Transcendentalism in the air, this period of "the newness," Higginson later recalled, saw passing "through the whole community a wave of that desire for a freer and more ideal life." Against this backdrop, the barely twenty-year-old Higginson grappled with the problem of vocation and found himself alienated from the conventional career choices-politics, the ministry, the law-all of which seemed too traditional, uninspired, and incapable of capturing the aspirations and longings of an age that the shrewdest observers on both sides of the Atlantic realized was altogether unprecedented.
Higginson began reading Romantic literature and philosophy, mixing Goethe and Carlyle with a regular immersion in local Transcendentalists. ("The usual dose of Emerson, and to bed," he typically reported in one of his diary entries.) He read the Dial with his future wife, Mary Channing, visited the utopian community at Brook Farm, and met local luminaries at Elizabeth Peabody's foreign bookstore. He found his imagination especially fired by the life and writings of Jean Paul Richter, the "moral poet" who had bravely turned to literature when his religious faith faltered and who endured poverty and solitude to pursue his literary calling. Higginson devoured Eliza Buckminster Lee's biography of Richter and began writing poetry, reportedly by moonlight. Higginson soon vowed that he would become a writer-a noble, suffering one at that. In preparation for his Romantic calling, he took additional classes at Harvard while living in a room adorned simply with a Titian print, a bust of the Greek goddess Hebe, and fresh flowers. He imagined himself a "sort of pariah, an outcast of the world," a solitary seeker after Truth. Dining frugally on bread and milk, he read voraciously, attended lectures and musical performances, and generally sowed his "intellectual wild oats," as he later recalled. Like Emerson's scholar, this aspiring artist was consciously forgoing the "ease and pleasure of traveling the old road" by choosing "poverty and solitude." Hardly a year into this regimen, however, Higginson abandoned his literary plans and entered Harvard Divinity School in the fall of 1844.
Higginson's belated choice of the ministry over literature constituted less a return to a venerable family tradition than a fresh assessment of the imperatives of the present day. The decision reveals some of his complicated thinking about duty and provides a glimpse into how he negotiated the competing claims of self and society. Like the Romantic-Transcendentalist writers he read and befriended, Higginson sensed a tension between self-development and public life. Yet for Higginson, that tension arose not simply from distrust of the world's intrusions on individual self-reliance but also from his fear that individuals focusing on the self might neglect their larger public responsibilities. For all his literary aspirations and lifelong love of books, Higginson harbored a profound ambivalence toward an exclusively interior life. He loved literature, nature, and beauty but sensed "inwardly that something more will be sought of me." Even while boasting of his pariah-like seclusion, he could not help thinking that his solitude had a whiff of self-indulgence and social irresponsibility. This belief no doubt represented in part a reaction to his real brush with self-indulgence after college, the dandyish "strutting" about in a "beautiful combination of gaiters and high heels" and the bohemian posturing as a starving artist. His family had laughed at both the foppish fashion and the moonlight-drenched poetry, which may have led him, in his later embarrassment, to associate the two.
Higginson's fear of self-indulgent social irresponsibility constituted more than a personality trait-it stemmed, as was the case with Curtis and others, from a sense of a deepening national crisis. In a world so much in need of action, Higginson wondered how one could justify a strictly contemplative life, how one could cultivate one's inner freedom when so many others were left unfree, slaves to masters, to alcohol, or to outworn ideas. His engagement to Mary Channing and consequent association with her family had brought him into contact with abolitionists and activists of all types who pressed him on exactly these matters. A subscription to William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator was followed by his reading of Lydia Maria Child's Appeal on Behalf of That Class of Americans Called Africans, a work that deeply moved Higginson. "An aesthetic life-how beautiful," he confided in his journal, "but the life of a Reformer, a People's Guide, 'battling for right,'-glorious, but Oh how hard!" Higginson thought he found an answer to his vocational dilemmas-a way to unite ambition and duty, thought and action-as he listened to the antislavery sermons of William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, and Theodore Parker, all of whom signaled the possibilities of a modern ministry. "One might accomplish something and lead a manly life even in the pulpit," he realized, using a common if uncommonly vague adjective. In seeking a career as a Unitarian pastor, Higginson inverted Emerson's earlier vocational crisis. Where the Concord sage had rejected the ministry and checked "militant humanitarianism" to discover his true vocation as Man Thinking, Higginson rejected the interiority of Man Thinking to become Man the Reformer.
Man the Reformer Higginson soon became, embarking in 1847 on a veritable multimedia career in a new position at a Newburyport church. He announced his conception of the ministry in his first public address, significantly titled "The Clergy and Reform." He imagined here an "eternal antagonism" between the clergy and what he called the "progressive, thinking, or literary class," further explaining that both groups vied to provide the "moral and intellectual government of the people." Because ministers inherited an "established station," they as a class incurred a "tremendous responsibility" to prove their worth. They had to justify their leadership role in society by actually leading, by "guiding, reforming, and regenerating the world." Though drawing a minister's regular salary allowed him and Mary to wed in 1847, Higginson remained leery of the institutional prestige of the clergy, identifying strongly with the "progressive, thinking, or literary class" throughout his life. His skepticism stemmed from a concern that institutions, while crucial forces in society, often lost touch with the principles that animated them. Individuals had to ensure that institutions remained instruments for social life rather than becoming their own ends; Higginson strove to do this throughout his career as a reform minister.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CRITICAL AMERICANS by LESLIE BUTLER Copyright © 2007 by The University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Preface xi
Introduction 1
Victorian Duty, American Scholars, and National Crisis 17
Manlike Let Him Turn and Face the Danger 20
The World's Eye...the World's Heart 26
To Cheer, to Raise, and to Guide Men by Showing Them Facts amidst Appearances 35
This Revolution Is to Be Wrought by the Gradual Domestication of the Ideal of Culture 42
The War for the Union and the Vindication of American Democracy 52
Understanding That a "Democracy Can Think" 54
Emancipating the Public Opinion of the North 63
A Struggle of the Antidemocrats with the Democrats 69
Conquering the Old World 74
The Liberal High Tide and Educative Democracy 87
The Tide Is Turning in Favor of Liberalism 89
The Total Overthrow of the Spirit of Caste 98
To Exercise Their Minds on the Great Social and Political Questions 109
Modern Republicans Must Be Reading Republicans 121
Liberal Culture in a Gilded Age 128
Something Better Than Riches...Something Utterly Apart from This World's Wealth 131
Still Colonists and Provincials in Culture 142
A Passion for Diffusing 153
ThereIs No Country Where Genuine Criticism...Is More Needed 165
The Politics of Liberal Reform 175
A Sovereign to Whose Voice Everyone Listens 178
Slackening the Bonds of Party Tyranny 191
Unable to Beget or Bear...Doomed to Sterility, Isolation, and Extinction 200
The Political Interest of the World Is Centered in America 208
Global Power and the Illiberalism of Empire 221
Subordinating Public Policy to Moral Law 224
Ireland Is England's Touchstone, as Slavery Was Ours 232
America Has...Chosen the Path of Barbarism 241
Imperialism-the Great Moral Plague of Our Time...on Both Sides of the Atlantic 249
Epilogue 262
Notes 269
Bibliography 325
Index 361
What People are Saying About This
In this important contribution to transatlantic intellectual and cultural history, Leslie Butler skillfully resurrects the ideas of cultivation and cosmopolitanism advanced by Victorian critics long neglected or misunderstood. Joining a chorus of distinguished historians including Daniel Walker Howe, James Turner, and Jonathan Hansen, she demonstrates that these unfairly maligned partisans of liberal democracy battled against slavery and racism, championed women's rights, and opposed political corruption and imperialism not because they distrusted 'the people' but because they wanted their nation to redeem the promise of popular government.—James T. Kloppenberg, author of The Virtues of Liberalism
In this beautifully written and fair-minded book, Leslie Butler overturns a century of debunking to recover, in the liberals of the Victorian era, experience instructive for America today. She demonstrates the continued vitality of her subjects' reflections on democracy, race, and the role of the media, on party politics, overseas interventions, and, not least, the social responsibility of the arts.—Daniel Walker Howe, author of Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln