Emersonian Transcendentalism, too, had roots in his ancestral world. A current of mild awakening had already coursed through a liberal and generous Congregationalism, which had largely done away with the Puritan belief in inherent sinfulness and predestination. Ministers in Emerson’s circles espoused inborn goodness and a knowledge of God at birth. The “sentiment of religion,” an inner divinity, was to be cultivated through self-improvement and service. Emerson substituted “Nature” for God, proposing that the soul was roused most readily on walks in the woods or on a muddy common, apart from society. And it was Emerson who turned Transcendentalist inner divinity into the secular gospel of “Self-Reliance.” “I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me,” he boasted. (This gave the aged Ripley infinite heartache.)
Emerson’s extreme doctrine of individualism emerges in Gross’s account as an utter contradiction of the visible, practical interdependence of Concord life. In his eagerness to elevate exemplars of his creed, Emerson plucked up young Thoreau, a nature-loving schoolteacher with a gift for classical languages, and encouraged his development as a representative character, “the man of Concord.” He even installed him beside Walden Pond on acreage he had bought on a whim. The extent to which each man perhaps chafed at communal and family constraints, laboring under an unwelcome sense of dependence, isn’t really Gross’s concern. His point is social: Transcendentalist philosophy expressed a profound intuition of changes that were under way in America, in the details of work and the economy, but that had not yet obviously touched the family and the spirit. The movement was so successful because it rechanneled religious rhetoric to address modernizing shocks, otherwise unspoken, and tried to reassert an individual’s control of his fate.
The quest of The Transcendentalists and Their World, as Gross turns from the luminaries to the daily Concord round, is to show that the transformations taking place in communication, travel, capitalism, and national party politics had been subtly diminishing the bonds of local feeling for decades since the Revolution. Emerson and Thoreau proposed that personal will and spiritual renewal could face down an atomization and sense of alienation that were spreading without anyone’s deliberate choice. Gross takes up the challenge of revealing how that erosion and resistance were felt by ordinary people as they navigated their lives in the local community.