Emerson and Coleridge Downed South

"Richmond's Messenger attempted to cut down both Coleridge and Emerson, with one swing of the scythe, in a review of the latter's Essays. The review argued that the bulk of Americans who admired the two philosophers were 'ambitious school boys of the metaphysical turn of mind'. The Virginia critic smugly conceded that some grown men might like Coleridge and Emerson, also, but that their number would not 'much exceed the number of the present House of Representatives, that is about one for every seventy-thousand of the population of the country.'"

-- Citation from the Southern Literary Messenger, XVIII (April, 1852), in Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, Rollin Osterweis, 1949, p. 39-40.
   

"But Dickens and Emerson...found themselves unwanted."

"The  stage was now set for Southern romanticism to develop along clearly discernible lines. Ideas, associated with the movement in Europe and the North, were continuing to arrive -- notions matured by Carlyle, Hugo, Michelet, Dickens, Cooper, Irving, the Gothic revival architecture, the nature cult in painting, the evangelical strain in religion; but there was a preconceived plan for treating them. A cordon sanitaire against anything that might threaten the status quo surrounded the South. Romantic ideas must pause at the border and pass inspection before gaining right to entry. Carlyle met a warm welcome, as did Michelet, Uhland, and Mrs. Hemans. Cordiality greeted Irving and Cooper. But Dickens and Emerson, and other devotees of the cult of humanitarianism, found themselves unwanted."
"But Dickens and Emerson...found themselves unwanted."
-- Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, Rollin Osterweis, 1949, p. 55.
   

"he's a jerk"

"Romantic religion, as it developed in the Southwest, combined the two principal psychological phases of romanticism -- sensibility and imagination. The former was represented by the intense emotion which characterized the entire affair. The imagination phase emerged in the procedure of the camp meeting -- the 'jerks,' the 'barking' exercises,' and those heartrending trances in which the victim 'professed to have seen God, heaven, the angels, the devil, and the damned.'"

-- Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, Rollin Osterweis, 1949, p. 188.
  

Schiller in New Orleans, 1842

"Walter Scott and Carlyle were probably the chief conveyors of notions associated with English romanticism, Lamartine the principal 'culture carrier' of the French, and Schiller of the German, so far as New Orleans was concerned....
"A student of 'The German Drama on the New Orleans Stage' [April 1843] found that Schiller was preferred to all other German playwrights in the Louisiana metropolis. He first became well known there in 1842, when Die Räuber was produced at the German theater, probably the earliest organized German stage in America. The influx of thousands of German immigrants to New Orleans, in this period, had led to the establishment of the German theater, in 1839. During the [18]50's not only the German-speaking section of the population but the entire city was enthusiastic for Schiller."

-- Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, Rollin Osterweis, 1949, p. 164.
  

academically speaking

"The university president, like the minister of the forward-looking Protestant denominations, should bring men together in a context of inspiration; he should not gratuitously antagonize them. He should find evil only where it is generally thought to be found, and even then he should spend the larger proportion of his time exalting the good."

"Ritualistic idealism naturally became appropriate to the academic executive, because the role of manager required that such a man always appear confident about his institution. To speak in terms of doubt or failure was to violate the most basic requirement of his office; to do so would at once disqualify him from his post."

-- The Emergence of the American University, Laurence R. Veysey, 1965, p. 382, 437.
   

professionalizing sub specie scientiae

"In the nineteenth-century colleges the study of society belonged to the benign amateurs who were not intimidated by cosmic questions or their own ignorance. The narrow competence and specialization of the economists, historians, political scientists, and others who took their places deflected the classroom from advocacy and conspicuous moral judgment to a style that bore the approved description -- 'scientific,' a style that was objective, cautious, and wary of judgment."

-- Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, Frederick Rudolf, 1977, p. 156.

100 at Harvard in 1877

"Harvard removed a student's disciplinary record from the calculation of grades in 1869, and eight years later adopted a scale of 100, replacing it in 1883 with five letter grades -- A through E. In 1895 letter grades were replaced by a new scale of rank by merit: 'passed with distinction', 'passed', and 'failed.' All this thrashing around in search of the perfect grading system was a response to a changing curriculum and a changing climate of academic life."

-- Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, Frederick Rudolf, 1977, p. 147.

God's CV -- ca. 1700s

"Beginning in the 1760's the idea of the 'man of letters' as a proper definition of the college graduate intruded into the curriculum the study of belles lettres -- orations, history, poetry, literature. An emphasis on reason and observation, on rational moral behavior, replaced a reliance on divine law in the study of ethics. The God who inhabited Dunster's Harvard was a righteous and wrathful God; the God who inhabited Princeton in 1764 was the creator and source of all nature's wonders. The curriculum had shifted from explaining the ways of God to exploring the ways of man."

-- Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, Frederick Rudolf, 1977, p. 53.

~2,500 in 1776

"The English colonies in North America entered upon independence with a college-educated population of approximately 2,500, some of whom were to become famous as Founding Fathers. Many others passed into obscurity as exiles loyal to the Crown."

-- Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, Frederick Rudolf, 1977, p. 26.
   

dead philosophers put in and out of hell

"La Mothe le Vayer discourses at length [in De la vertu des payens, 1642] on the piety and salvation of Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Epicurus, and Confucius, though he is not necessarily convinced of the virtues of all the followers of these righteous infidels. In his opinion, the fate of Aristotle is dubious but hopeful, and he obviously would like to save Julian the Apostate, whose virtues must be commended even though his attitude toward Christianity is deplorable. During the remainder of the seventeenth century, the question of the redemption of the pious pagans twisted back and forth between optimistic and pessimistic convictions so that a dead philosopher saved by one human redeemer might be sent to the Pit by another."

-- Mysteriously Meant, The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance, Don Cameron Allen, 1970, p. 34.
   

three 17th century etiologies of pagan and Christian kinship

"Originality is not an attribute of theological contention in any era, and the seventeenth century was no exception to common experience. The patent similarities between the pagan and Christian systems were explained as as consequence of the revelation to Adam, duly perverted until Moses renewed it original luster and instructed not only the Jews but also visiting delegations of pagans. This was one explanation. A second theory was that fallen angels, overhearing (with sin-obstructed ears) the lucid predictions of prophets, attempted to befuddle potential Christian believers by inventing similar if somewhat erroneous myth-fulfillments gladly adopted by the pagan world. Finally it was imagined that God made a universal revelation of Himself to all men via the operations of the Natural Light, but that some men, Hebrews for instance, were less myopic or light-dazzled than others. All of these propositions were backed by infinite quotation and analytic adjustment of suitable non-Christian legend and speculation. Most of the adherents of these positions were foster-children of Platonism, the stepmother of the Christian Church."

-- Mysteriously Meant, The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance, Don Cameron Allen, 1970, p. 34.
   

worldwide the course of courtly life takes its way

"The practitioners of gentility, as the stories related over and over, lived by the standards of the 'best people,' who always existed elsewhere. If they did not always think of European courts, they had the characteristic provincial habit of envisioning some superior society in a grand metropolis that embodied the highest in cultural achievement. They were fixed in a colonial mentality of periphery and center. In villages they thought of Boston or New York with the same awe as New York regarded London or Paris. In village and city, the structure was the same; ultimate authority lay in a distant place. The genteel lived by a standard outside of themselves and their circle. They could not break the colonial and provincial habit of looking upward and outward for leadership."

-- The Refinement of America, Persons, Houses, Cities, Richard L. Bushman, 1992, p. 414.
   

aristocratic > middle-class parlors

"The contradiction between parlor culture and business culture of the enveloping national economy grew out of the history of the parlor, a history that introduced a deep-seated ambivalence into parlor life. The reason for this disjuncture was that parlors were borrowed from another culture, from royal courts and aristocratic drawing rooms, and did not grow organically from the everyday experiences of the ordinary people who inhabited them. By so borrowing, the middle class introduced into their houses a culture that was alien to their ordinary lives, a culture that valued polish and repose and repudiated work in contrast to the homely, middle-class regard for industry and efficiency. In the aristocratic drawing room, polished manners were the means to advancement in a world of real power; in the middle-class parlor they were an adornment, irrelevant to the world of business in farmyard, shop and factory."
parlored 
-- The Refinement of America, Persons, Houses, Cities, Richard L. Bushman, 1992, p. 264.
   

1790, "...you must call Paris the most magnificent and most vile,..."

Paris, April 1790

"You view everything and ask: What is Paris? It is not enough to call it the first city in the world, capital of splendor and enchantment. Stop here, if you do not wish to change your opinion, for if you go further you will see crowded streets, an outrageous confusion of wealth and poverty. Close by a glittering jewelry shop, a pile of rotten apples and herrings; everywhere filth and even blood streaming from the butchers' stalls. You must hold your nose and close your eyes. The picture of a splendid city grows dim in your thoughts, and it seems to you that the dirt and muck of all the cities in the world is flowing through the sewers of Paris. Take but one more step, and suddenly the fragrance of happy Arabia or, at least, Provence's flowering meadows, is wafted upon you, for you have come to one of the many shops where perfume and pomade are sold. In a word, every step means a new atmosphere, new objects of luxury or the most loathsome filth. Thus you must call Paris the most magnificent and most vile, the most fragrant and most fetid city."

-- Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790, N. M. Kazamzin [translated Florence Jonas], 1957, p. 184-185.
   

to hell with that

"With the growth of the secular and scientific spirit, it had come to seem more and more desirable to base morality not upon rewards and punishments in the hereafter, but upon human nature and what was known as 'the nature of things'."

-- The Eighteenth-Century Background, Basil Willey, 1940, p. 62.
   

Dante's Dante, Spenser's Arthur, Bunyan's Pilgrim, Defoe's Crusoe

"So beneficently had God planned the world, that by giving full rein to his acquisitive appetites the individual was, in fact, adding his maximum quota to the sum of human happiness. Thus, instead of Dante ascending to Paradise under the guidance of Reason and Grace, instead of Spenser's Arthur, fashioned in noble and gentle discipline, instead of Bunyan's Pilgrim setting forth with his load of sin to escape from the wrath to come, the new world offers us as its symbolical figure Robinson Crusoe, the isolated economic man, pitting his lonely strength successfully against Nature in a remote part of the earth, and carrying on a little missionary activity as a side-line."

-- The Eighteenth-Century Background, Basil Willey, 1940, p. 24-25.
   

"climates of opinion", e.g....

"First, [the scientific movement] produced a 'climate of opinion' in which supernatural and occult explanations of natural phenomena ceased to satisfy, and the universe can more and more to be regarded as the Great Machine, working by rigidly determined laws of material causation. The supernatural, in both its divine and its diabolical forms, was banished from Nature."

-- The Eighteenth-Century Background, Basil Willey, 1940, p. 11.

Locke(d) inside

"Locke's prose style is the best index of his mind, and the mind of the age as well. Like Wren's architecture, it is harmonious, lucid and severe, rising occasionally into the dome of manly eloquence....In reading Locke we are conscious of being in the presence of a mind which has come to rest in the 'philosophic' world-view. There is no more of the metaphysical flicker from world to world, none of the old imagery struck out in the heat of struggle or in the ardour of discovery. Locke writes philosophy in the tone of a well-bred conversation, and makes it his boast to have discarded the uncouth and pedantic jargon of the schools. His air is that of a gentleman who, along with a group of like-minded friends, proposes to conduct a disinterested enquiry into truth. The very ease of his prose betokens a mind at rest on its own assumptions, and reveals how fully Locke could count on these being also the assumptions of his readers. His vocabulary is almost wholly abstract and uncoloured; what he offers us is always the reasoning of a grave and serious man, not the visions of enthusiasm or the fictions of poetry."

-- The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry, Basil Willey, 1934, p. 266-267.
   

1700s -- prosaic reality, poetic fancy

"Descartes himself is perhaps only the most conspicuous representative of a way of thought which was irresistibly gaining ground as the century proceeded, and we must now, therefore, ascribe to him all the consequences of that thought. But the fact remains that by the beginning of the eighteenth century religion has sunk to deism, while poetry has been reduced to catering for 'delight' -- the providing embellishments which might be agreeable to fancy, but which were recognized by the judgment as having no relation to 'reality'."

-- The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry, Basil Willey, 1934, p. 93.
  

Hobbes's hates

"Very nearly every statement of Hobbes can be reduced either to hatred and contempt of schoolmen and clerics, or to fear of civil war and love of ordered living in a stable commonwealth."

-- The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry, Basil Willey, 1934, p. 101.
   

an otherness in the universe

"It was one of the privileges of the seventeenth century to be able to believe, without any effort and striving, that 'truth' was not all of one order. It would be more accurate to say that this was unconsciously assumed, or felt, rather than consciously 'believed'. Thus however eager one might be for 'exantlation' [act of drawing out; exhaustion; obsolete -- Sir T. Browne] of one kind of truth, the new kind, the old order of numinous truth was still secure in its inviolate separateness. The feeling that there was a divine meaning, an otherness, in the universe, as well as a mechanical order, was still natural and inevitable; it had not, as so often since, to be deliberately worked up or simulated."

-- The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry, Basil Willey, 1935, p. 66.
   

pop fiction, 1795

"The image of the lazy, fickle reader registered the emergence of a recognizably modern form of print consumption. Authors like Schiller hoped to form intimate connections with active, totally engaged readers, who would labor over their writing in an unceasing effort to enlighten and cultivate themselves. The expansion of the print market confronted them with a growing body of educated men and women who consumed books and journals as a form of leisure activity. They read as much for entertainment and for respite from the demands of work as for moral guidance and other kinds of instruction. The recipe for a popular novel included a brimming cup of 'enlightened' bourgeois moralism, several spoonfuls of domestic sentimentality and romantic adventure, and perhaps a pinch of oblique eroticism. In 1795, the year Die Horen was launched and Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre began to appear, Karoline von Wobeser published a novel with the fetching title Elisa, or Woman as She Ought to Be. The heroine of this tearful narrative is a dutiful young woman who is forced to marry a rake but in the end converts him to her virtuous way of life. Elisa was the greatest commercial success of the decade."

-- Fichte, The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, Anthony J. La Vopa, 2001, p. 276.
   

"Not-I" rocks: Goethe on Fichte's vandalized windows

"You have seen the Absolute I in a great predicament, and of course it is very impolite of the Not-I, which has been subject to law, to fly through the window panes. It goes with [Fichte], however, as it goes with the Creator and Maintainer of all things, who, as the theologians tell us, also cannot manage his creatures."

-- Letter of Goethe to Voigt, cited in Fichte, The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, Anthony J. La Vopa, 2001, p. 265.