Chapter XLVII: Part IV: Other Aspects of the New England Mind

I. The Reign of the Genteel

I. Brahminism and the genteel in letters--a refined
ethicism. Dislike of realistic methods. Lowell’s
position 435

II. Brahminism and history: The New England school:
Ticknor, Jared Sparks--methods of the latter. Bancroft’s
_History of the United States_--an attempt at a
democratic interpretation. Prescott, Motley, Parkman--followers
of the romantic school. Parkman
considered 437

III. Longfellow: Influence of Germany. A poet of the
library--his aloofness--his translations. The slavery
poems. Characteristics 439

II. Nathaniel Hawthorne--Skeptic: A temperament detached,
rationalistic, unhopeful, skeptical about
Utopias. Neither transcendental nor Unitarian in
philosophy, but curious concerning evil. Intellectually
unlocalized--his aloofness from romantic Salem. Like
Jonathan Edwards in probing the psychology of sin.
Tendency to symbolism and allegory. His intellectual
poverty--revealed in _American Notes_. Brook
Farm and _The Blithedale Romance_--reasons for his
interpretation of Hollingsworth and Margaret Fuller.
The sterility of his later years 442

III. The Authentic Brahmin

I. Oliver Wendell Holmes--Beacon Street Wit: Decline
of his reputation. Holmes and Paine as wits. A child
of the eighteenth century turned romantic. A
rationalist--hatred of Calvinism. Defense of Boston--a
Brahmin rebel defending free thought. Attack on
equalitarianism--dislike of the plutocracy--indifferent
to proletarian problems. His heroes respectable.
An amateur--a minor figure 451

II. James Russell Lowell--Cambridge Brahmin: Of
the true Brahmin line. His intellectual confusions.
Influence of his Tory heritage--the Lowells. His
course determined by environment and certain dominant
personalities. Three periods of his intellectual
life: the Maria White period and his immersion in current
radicalisms--reflections in his verse and prose;
the professorial period--immersion in scholarship--his
shortcomings as a critic--as a political writer; the
ambassadorial period--influence of Godkin--resurgence
of Brahmin conservatism--fear of democracy--of
agrarian and proletarian movements--concern at
political corruption--failure to understand its causes--faith
in civil service reform. His escape to London--the
final Lowell an English liberal 460

Conclusion: Effects of the Civil War on earlier
romanticisms--destruction of the slave economy; strengthening of
the rival agrarian and capitalistic economies. Certain
anachronisms--eighteenth-century liberalism--local home
rule--submerged by movement of consolidation. Romantic literary
schools became obsolete. The sovereignty of the middle class
and the emergence of realistic criticism 473

Bibliography 475

Index 483

Book One • The Mind of the South

To those who follow the main-traveled road of American experience, as we know it today, the mind of the old South seems curiously remote. It is so archaic, so wholly apart from all present-day ambitions, as to appear singular. Yet the continental highways we now travel so familiarly, it must be remembered, were not the highways of an earlier America. It is the North that has changed, and not the South, and the nationality that sits so easily upon us would have seemed ominous to the simpler world that determined the ideals of the Old Dominion. The southern mind has grown old-fashioned, but it is native and of long and honorable descent. It derived its singularity from the eighteenth century in which it took shape; and it retained the clear impress of its origins long after the eighteenth century had become an anachronism in America. It was primarily political, of the French rather than the English school; but it was economic also, out of Quesnay and Du Pont de Nemours rather than Adam Smith, with a frank bias towards the Physiocratic agrarianism that was so congenial to the needs and temper of a plantation society; and this political agrarianism, parochial in its outlook rather than national, suffices to explain the singularity of the southern mind in the eyes of a later industrialized America.

Simple and homogeneous in the early years of the nineteenth century, it nevertheless carried the seeds of disruption within it. Beneath the surface of this common political agrarianism disintegrating forces were at work, that were to produce broad cleavages of thought and lead to sharp differences of outlook and polity. An old South and a new South dwelt side by side, and to the West lay a frontier that took particular form as it came under the determining influence of one or the other. Virginia and South Carolina were the germinal centers of southern culture, from which issued the creative ideas that gave special forms to the brood of frontier states. Kentucky and Tennessee were the intellectual heirs of Virginia; Alabama and Mississippi were the intellectual heirs of South Carolina. Of these two schools of thought that looked in different directions and sought different ends, Jefferson and Calhoun were the intellectual leaders; and the contrasts in their philosophies--the rejection by the latter of equalitarian idealism, and the substitution of economic realism--mark the diverse tendencies which in the end disrupted the South. Jackson and Lincoln were followers of the Jeffersonian school; Jefferson Davis finally went with Calhoun; and Henry Clay, lacking an adequate philosophy, wavered between them. The differences between these men were open and patent, and any analysis of the mind of the South, any attempt to understand the conflict of tendencies that marked the development of southern thought between 1800 and 1860, must give due weight to such differences. The problem, therefore, instead of being single is threefold, and involves an examination of the mind of Virginia, the mind of South Carolina, and the mind of the new West from the Ohio River to the Gulf.

Part One: The Virginia Renaissance