The American Adam / Edition 1

by R. W. B. Lewis

Overview

Intellectual history is viewed in this book as a series of "great conversations"—dramatic dialogues in which a culture's spokesmen wrestle with the leading questions of their times. In nineteenth-century America the great argument centered about De Crèvecoeur's "new man," the American, an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Mr. Lewis reveals this vital preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind, illuminating history and theology as well as art, shaping the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age. He traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and others, and in an Epilogue he exposes their continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226476810
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	09/15/1959
Series:	Phoenix Bks.
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

R. W. B. Lewis is professor emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University.

Read an Excerpt

The American Adam

Innocence Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century

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By R. W. B. Lewis

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1955 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-47681-0

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CHAPTER 1

The Case against the Past

Democracy ... is revolutionary, not formative. It is born of denial. It comes into existence in the way of denying established institutions. Its office is rather to destroy the old world, than fully to reveal the new.

HENRY JAMES, SR., "Democracy and Its Issues" (1853)

IN THE decade following the end of the War of 1812, an air of hopefulness became apparent in American life and letters. It expressed the sense of enormous possibility that Americans were beginning to share about the future of their new country; but hopefulness at the outset was combined with feelings of impatience and hostility. For believers in the future could not fail to notice, dotted across the American scene, many signs of the continuing power of the past: institutions, social practices, literary forms, and religious doctrines — carry-overs from an earlier age and a far country and irrelevant obstructions (as it seemed) to the fresh creative task at hand. Emerson, tracing the haphazard movement for social reform in New England, remembered the "noise of denial and protest" which was the first symptom of the reformist spirit; "much was to be resisted," he said, "much was to be got rid of by those who were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to construct." More vehement patriots even regretted that Americans were forced to communicate with one another in an old, inherited language. Indeed, the urge to root out vestiges of the culture and society of the Old World became so intense over the years that a commentator like the elder Henry James was led to identify democracy itself with a program of denial and destruction.

Nothing was to be spared. Thus it was, according to one story, that a huge crowd of people gathered together on some broad western prairie to build an immense bonfire: a cosmic bonfire, upon which was piled all the world's "outworn trumpery." The heraldry of ancient aristocratic families fed the flames, to the crowd's mounting enthusiasm; after that came the robes and scepters of royalty; the scaffold and other symbols of repressive institutions; and finally the total body of European literature and philosophy. "Now," declared the chief celebrant, "we shall get rid of the weight of dead men's thoughts."

The story is a fantasy, to be sure — a fantasy composed by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1844 and called "Earth's Holocaust." But it was close enough to history, and, like every good story, it was truer than history. Its theme may have been suggested by the historic activities of a religious group known as the "Millerites," though the Millerites were only among the more extreme and disappointed of the age's millennialists. But Hawthorne, as usual, enlarged upon his historical materials; and, in doing so, he managed very accurately to catch in a fable the prevailing impulse to escape from every existing mode of organizing and explaining experience, in order to confront life in entirely original terms. And at the same time, in the divided attitude that gives his story its vital tension, Hawthorne managed to convey the deep reservations that certain Americans felt about the contemporary passion to destroy. A genuine sympathy informs the irony and melancholy of "Earth's Holocaust"; but though one can tell from Hawthorne's notebooks that he too would have set fire to many symbols of injustice, he makes it clear at the end of his story that the true source of oppression — the human heart — has remained untouched by the conflagration: a conclusion Melville was to find at once profound and appalling.

The drama of "Earth's Holocaust" has a ritual quality, and much of its dialogue is incantatory in tone. Behind the story, one sees such ritualistic historic events as the burning of the Bastille, and, beyond that, the recurring human instinct to purge by fire. Hawthorne had articulated the need he detected in the atmosphere of the day for a purgatorial action — preceding, as it were, the life of the new Adam in the new earthly paradise. Thoreau, alert to the ritual aspects of human behavior and the primitive energy of words, gave voice to the same instinctive need while he was reflecting on "the essential facts of life" at Walden Pond. He made semantic fun of a deacon whose dreary effects had been sold at auction: "Instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them." This private little joke led Thoreau to wonder whether the tribal customs of "some savage nations" might not be usefully instituted in America — the ceremony of the "busk," for example, which he found described in William Bartram's eighteenth-century travel-book: "When a town celebrates the busk ... they have previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares and the whole town, of their filth, which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast together into one common heap and consume it with fire." The whole of Walden, according to one reading, is a metaphoric expansion of Bartram's busk — the busk of the human spirit, when clothes and pots and pans are discarded as symbols of ambitions and interests.

But the rite of purification was more than a poetic invention. The need for it, in fact, had long been expressed in a series of concrete political and economic proposals, all of them voicing a belief in the need for periodic and radical change in the very structure of American society.

II

The American argument against institutional continuity drew its force and its fervor from the native conviction about the rights of man. For the principle of the rights of man led to a restriction on the rights of men. In order to insure the freedoms of future men, those of the present (the argument ran) must have only temporary validity; and rights, consequently, were given a time limit. The constant in the argument was "the present generation," and the principle of judgment was the sovereignty of the living. The principle had been formulated and flaunted in the writings of Jefferson and Paine; it helped to ease the painful break with the past that the political situation demanded. "The Creator," Jefferson pronounced, no doubt consciously echoing St. Matthew, "has made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powers can only belong to persons. not to things, not to mere matter, unendowed with will. The dead are not even things." These are metaphysical statements: rights are attributed to that which can be said to be real; and the question of reality turns upon a dialectic of dead and living which is essentially biological. The author of that extraordinary contribution to natural history, Notes on Virginia, was among the first to make natural history the queen of the sciences, the new metaphysic, and to turn the inquiry of reality into an investigation of natural processes. In the generation of hope, his logical successor was Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Although we currently all too often employ a pious phrase about our heritage when we mention Thomas Jefferson, he himself was opposed to several kinds of inheritance, finding them, in the name of the sovereign present, mere forms of slavery. He posed the general problem in a letter written to Madison from Paris, in 1789: "The question, whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have started on this or our side of the water. Yet it is a question of such consequence as not only to merit decision, but place, also, among the fundamental principles of government. ... I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self-evident, 'that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living'; that the dead have neither power nor rights over it." Jefferson was even willing to calculate the approximate life-expectancy of any single generation: it amounted to about nineteen years. The arithmetic was applied. The devices by which society orders itself must be introduced and consented to by the living; hence legislation may not endure longer than the estimated life of the consenting generation, and a complete review of all laws should be made every nineteen years. Such a policy would, of course, have meant periodic administrative chaos, and the proposal was not acted upon; though there was administrative chaos enough, as Tocqueville discovered. It was, however, administrative fear that operated against the proposal; an older argument against change in law, which considered the effect of change on the stability of moral habits, scarcely entered the discussion; habit was already a term of abuse.

Jefferson could not have foreseen, nor would he have approved, all the consequences of the principle of the sovereign present. He was attempting to make the practical controls of life dependent upon the voluntary agreement of the living. He did not mean to reject the whole scheme of values of the past, or to assert that each generation in turn should do so. And yet this is what was proposed, stage by stage, over the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1829 the economic authority of the living was affirmed with some violence in a book called The Rights of Man to Property, Being a Proposition To Make It Equal among the Adults of the Present Generation. The author was one Thomas Skidmore, a leader in the Workingmen's movement in New York and Philadelphia and for a time a follower of Fanny Wright and the progressive laborites. The reforms urged by Skidmore seemed extreme even to his associates; but his manner of reasoning was symptomatic of a deepening sense of the disjunction between generations. Skidmore reflected the contemporary awareness, on which the first tentative efforts toward a labor movement were based, that, without equality of economic opportunity, the great phrases of the Declaration of Independence rang somewhat hollowly. In developing his thesis, Skidmore managed to attack the whole concept of inheritance. "If property is to descend to particular individuals from the previous generations, and if the many are born, having neither parents nor any one else, to give them property, equal in amount to that which the sons of the rich receive, from their fathers or other testators, how is it established that they are created equal?" Transmission in any kind from one generation to another was a fiction: "One generation cannot sell, give or convey, even if it had the right, to another. The reason is, that the one is dead; the other living. The one is present; the other absent. They do not and cannot meet, to come to a treaty, to make delivery; to give or receive." The terms "testator" and "heir" should be dispensed with, Skidmore went on; and the question to be answered was simply: "How long does a man own property?" Skidmore's general principles were shared far beyond the bounds of the labor movement, and they continued to be enunciated. From the main contention, that denied commerce between generations, the argument could easily be extended beyond the political and economic areas.

To an acute foreign observer, visiting this country a few years after the appearance of Skidmore's polemic, such an extension of principle seemed already to be operative. Alexis de Tocqueville had probably the handsomest talent in the century for sensing the significant drift of contemporary social and intellectual history; and his experience and wisdom told him that the disjunction between generations was inevitably becoming a striking aspect of democracy as such: "for among democratic nations each generation is a new people." The insight followed from Tocqueville's analysis of the intellectual character of democracy in America, in the second volume of his great study (published in translation here in 1840); but it gained additional force from his survey of institutions in the preceding volume (1837).

He had observed there, in a section called "Instability of the Administration in the United States," that "no one cares for what occurred before his time. ... In America, society seems to live from hand to mouth, like an army in the field. Nevertheless, the art of administration is undoubtedly a science, and no sciences can be improved if the discoveries and observations of successive generations are not connected together in the order in which they occur." On the evidence, Tocqueville could infer that "democracy, pushed to its furthest limits, is ... prejudicial to the art of government," something the Jeffersonians might cheerfully have confirmed. Tocqueville noticed a similar brevity of life in philosophic theories or literary conventions. Democratic literature, he thought, was not only shorn of received conventions, it was inherently almost incapable of generating its own; "if it should happen that the men of some one period were agreed upon any such rules, that would prove nothing for the following period." That circumstance was to comprise an important part of the artist's dilemma in America.

As the principle of the sovereign present thrust upward from its political and economic roots, it managed to affect not only literature, but educational beliefs, too, and religious doctrines (fifty years before John Dewey elaborated it into a coherent philosophic statement). In the forties, those who favored territorial expansion in the direction of Oregon but who found activity hampered by long-standing laws were able to reiterate Jefferson's suggestions about change in laws with considerably larger confidence. By 1850, when Hawthorne was writing The House of the Seven Gables, he could draw a plausible portrait of a young reformer who wanted to apply the idea of the sovereign present to every imaginable phase of life:

Shall we never, never get rid of this Past? It lies upon the present like a giant's dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of the old giant his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to bygone times, — to Death, if we give the matter the right word! ... For example, a dead man, if he happen to have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he died intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and living judges do but search out and report his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds. Whatever we do of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand obstructs us. ... And we must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of right to interfere.

The profession of the speaker, Holgrave, adds to the content of the speech, for this young ex-Fourierite and earnest member of the party of Hope ("How you hate everything old!" his audience, Phoebe Pyncheon, tells him) is not only an artist; he is a practitioner of the peculiarly appropriate new art of photography. The instrument of Daguerre could achieve in art what the hopeful sought for in life: the careful and complete differentiation of the individual in time and space, the image of the single person in all his rugged singularity. Dead forms and conventions of art are implicit in the catalogue of the oppressive past, to be destroyed at set intervals, in the proposition Holgrave brings forward a moment later:

If each generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change, comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public edifices — our capitols, statehouses, courthouses, city-halls and churches — ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years or thereabouts, as a hint to people to examine and reform the institutions which they symbolise.

The estimated time-span for the life of institutions is close to Jefferson's; but both of Holgrave's speeches, as their references move forward from money and laws to moral principles and religious doctrines, indicate the expanded application since 1789 of the notion of periodic "purification." According to the opposition party, the real trouble was that the suggestions of the Holgraves had long been put into practice. The immediate had triumphed, someone said in the alert New York weekly, the Literary World, in the same year (1850); education was sacrificed to "the immediately practical"; houses were built "which fall into tombs and monuments upon the passer-by; ... anybody makes a new religion nowadays, a patent Christianity. The old," the article concluded, "was better."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The American Adam by R. W. B. Lewis. Copyright © 1955 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents

Prologue: The Myth and the Dialogue
I. The Danger of Innocence
1. The Case against the Past
2. The New Adam: Holmes and Whitman
3. The Fortunate Fall: The Elder James and Horace Bushnell
II. The Narrative Image
4. The Fable of the Critics
5. The Hero in Space: Brown, Cooper, Bird
6. The Return into Time: Hawthorne
7. Melville: The Apotheosis of Adam
III. The Past and the Perfect
8. The Function of History: Bancroft and Parkman
9. The Real Presence: Parker and Brownson
Epilogue: The Contemporary Situation
Adam as Hero in the Age of Containment
Index