The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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American Romanticism

CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature 17

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in your own feeling... Beauty in art is truth bathed

in an impression received from nature.

Corot’s poetic landscapes, filled with feathery trees and
misty rivers, and bathed in nuances of silver light, became
so popular in France and elsewhere that he was able to sell
as many canvases as he could paint.

Transcendentalism

Across the Atlantic, along the
eastern shores of the rapidly indus-
trializing American continent,
Romanticism took hold both as an
attitude of mind and as a style.
Romanticism infused all aspects of nineteenth-century
American culture: it distinguished the frontier tales of
James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), the mysteries of
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), and the novels ofNathaniel
Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Herman Melville (1819–
1891). But it found its purest expression in the cultural
movement known as transcendentalism. The group of New
England Unitarian ministers who formed the first
Transcendental Club took its name from a treatise by the
German philosopher Friedrich Schiller (1775–1854).
Schiller’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) defended
the oneness of Spirit and Nature and encouraged the real-
ization of the higher spiritual self through sympathy with

nature. The American transcendentalists—descendants of

the English Puritans—held that knowledge gained by way

of intuition transcended knowledge based on reason and

logic. Reacting against the material excesses of advancing

industrialization, they found sympathetic ideals in such

mystical philosophies as Neoplatonism, and in the reli-

gions of East Asia, introduced into the Boston area in the

early nineteenth century. From Hinduism and Buddhism,

they adopted a holistic philosophy based in pantheism and

in the ideal of a “universal brotherhood” shared by human-

ity, nature, and God.

The prime exemplar of the transcendentalists was Ralph

Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), whose essays powerfully

influenced nineteenth-century American thought. The

son and grandson of clergymen, Emerson was ordained as a

Unitarian minister when he was in his twenties. Like

Wordsworth, he courted nature to “see into the life of

things” and to taste its cleansing power. In the essay entitled

“Nature” (1836), Emerson sets forth a pantheistic credo:

In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these

plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign,

a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not

how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In

the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I

feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace,

no calamity (leaving my eyes), which nature cannot

repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head

bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite

Figure 27.11 JEAN-BAPTISTE-CAMILLE COROT, Ville d’Avray, 1870. Oil on canvas, 21^5 ⁄ 8  311 ⁄ 2 in. Even in his own
time, forgeries of Corot’s late paintings were produced in great numbers. Some of these were the result of Corot’s practice
of allowing his students to copy his works. One French collection is said to contain almost 2500 Corot forgeries.