By Allen Guelzo, Princeton University
As much as Ralph Waldo Emerson pleaded for a uniquely American philosophy, his Transcendentalism was as much a European borrowing as Scottish realism was. Also, its accomplishments were not quite so sensational as they had seemed. Transcendentalism had all of Romanticism’s weakness for language, which seemed to have no mooring for emotion, no stability, and no translation.
Characteristics of Romanticism
Romanticism was characterized by a sense of admiration, and a sense of desire for harmony with nature. The nature the Romantics were talking about was not the abstract and mechanical nature of the Enlightenment. It was the authentic and the emotionally stirring Mother Nature, the unbridled willful genius of human nature as described by French Romantics like Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Romanticism was also characterized by a revolt against the user, as senseless formality and cold logic, and that, in turn, led to a glorification of emotion, or, as one post-Enlightenment Romantic theorist put it, ‘the sublime’. One pursued the sublime in the place of reason.
It was also characterized by a new understanding of language, in which language did not so much convey facts as it provoked emotion. Above all, Romanticism was characterized in its most familiar forms by the cult of the artist, because among Romantics, painters and composers stopped being what they had been in the 1700s and the 1600s, when they were literally technicians and servants, and instead artists became figures of mysterious insight and towering genius.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Immanuel Kant
In philosophy, the first appearance of Romanticism in America was in the work of James Marsh, who introduced American readers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, a book that, in turn, had introduced English-speaking readers to the Romanticism of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Kant was a hinge figure. He had one foot planted firmly in the Enlightenment, and for that reason there was a good deal of philosophical writing that was analyzed in terms of being part of the Enlightenment. He also had another foot planted in Romanticism, though, and at least for English-speaking readers in the 1820s and 1830s, it was Kant the Romantic who was the most important influence, because American readers and English-speaking readers in general found in Kant yet another kind of answer to David Hume’s skepticism. Kant’s reply to Hume was, “It may be true that we have no evidence from our senses of what constitutes a cause.”
The understanding of material subjects falls into the realm of the phenomenological. Understanding concepts like ‘cause’ or ‘God’ involves an entirely different kind of knowing that Kant defined as the ‘noumenal’. That sort of knowledge, the noumenal, transcends the kind of knowledge that exists merely on the level of the phenomenological, so James Marsh became the founder of what became known as ‘Vermont Transcendentalism’.
New Romantic Theology
Romantic philosophy quickly yielded up a new Romantic theology in America in the hands of Horace Bushnell, a Connecticut Congregationalist and Yale graduate. Bushnell called for a revision of the Calvinist understanding of human nature and the nature of religious language, so that religious terminology was understood not to describe actual literal facts about God, but rather as metaphors that suggest certain transcendent realities.
Bushnell’s comments on language were in turn picked up by several of the New England Edwardsians, most importantly, Edwards Amasa Park, so that one radical response to skepticism, Jonathan Edwards’s, joined hands with another, that of the Romantics.
The most important Romantic American theologian, though, was John Williamson Nevin, the prime mover of the Mercersburg theology. Nevin began his career as a product of the Princeton theology and of Scottish realism, but he soon abandoned them under the influence of German Romanticism.
John Williamson Nevin
Nevin became a theology teacher at the small German Reformed Seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, and there he developed a theology based not on universal human reason, but on church history and church tradition, and the use of literature rather than sermons to promote religious experience.
Nevin was matched in this glorification of tradition and liturgy by Anglo-Catholicism, which was a Romantic religious movement in the Church of England, founded by John Henry Newman. Anglo-Catholicism captured the Episcopal Church in America and, more than any other American religious denomination, converted it from Protestant reasonableness to Catholic Romanticism.
American Literature
Beside the philosophers and theologians, American Romanticism came to full flower in literature. The earliest representatives of Romantic literature were Philadelphia’s Charles Brockden Brown and New York’s James Fenimore Cooper.
Brown specialized in horror novels, such as Wieland, which show the weakness of reason and the power of the passions. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, a series of novels he published between 1823 and 1841, did not contain much in the way of horror, but they did put the untutored natural wisdom of frontiersmen, like Natty Bumppo and his Indian friends, on a pedestal over and against the ponderous rhythm of organized society.
The epicenter of American Romanticism, however, was Boston and its environs, where Emerson gave American Romanticism its classic expression in his celebrated essays, and where he became the lion of a literary circle of Transcendentalists, which included Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Henry David Thoreau and George Ripley.
The literary power of the Transcendentalists has given them a primary place in the history of American thought, a place that may not be entirely well deserved.
Common Questions about Romanticism in America
Romanticism was characterized by a sense of admiration, and a sense of desire for harmony with nature. The nature the Romantics were talking about was not the abstract and mechanical nature of the Enlightenment. It was the authentic and the emotionally stirring Mother Nature, the unbridled willful genius of human nature.
In philosophy, the first appearance of Romanticism in America was in the work of James Marsh, who introduced American readers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, a book that, in turn, had introduced English-speaking readers to the Romanticism of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
The most important Romantic American theologian was John Williamson Nevin, the prime mover of the Mercersburg theology. Nevin began his career as a product of the Princeton theology and of Scottish realism, but he soon abandoned them under the influence of German Romanticism.
