SOURCE: Miller, Perry. “Perry Miller on Nature and American Nationalism.” In A Century of Early Ecocriticism, edited by David Mazel, pp. 314‐28. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, which was originally delivered as a speech at Yale University in 1953 and published in the Harvard Theological Review in 1955, Miller explores the importance of the Romantic movement in America's cultural and intellectual development, arguing that one of the consequences of Romanticism was the birth of environmentalism.]

On May 8, 1847, The Literary World—the newly founded vehicle in New York City for the program of “nativist” literature—reviewed an exhibition at the National Academy. The magazine had just undergone an editorial revolution and the new management was endeavoring to tone down the strident nationalism of the first few issues; still, the exuberant patriotism of the reviewer could not be restrained, for he had just beheld two exciting landscapes of Staten Island painted by J. F. Cropsey.

This artist, said the reviewer, must be ranked along with the acknowledged masters, Thomas Cole and Asher Durand—and this was high praise in 1847. And as do these masters, young Cropsey illustrates and vindicates the high and sacred mission of the American painter:

The axe of civilization is busy with our old forests, and artisan ingenuity is fast sweeping away the relics of our national infancy. What were once the wild and picturesque haunts of the Red Man, and where the wild deer roamed in freedom, are becoming the abodes of commerce and the seats of manufactures. Our inland lakes, once sheltered and secluded in the midst of noble forests, are now laid bare and covered with busy craft; and even the primordial hills, once bristling with shaggy pine and hemlock, like old Titans as they were, are being shorn of their locks, and left to blister in cold nakedness in the sun. “The aged hemlocks, through whose branches have whistled the winds of a hundred winters,” are losing their identity, and made to figure in the shape of deal boards and rafters for unsightly structures on bare commons, ornamented with a few peaked poplars, pointing like fingerposts to the sky. Yankee enterprise has little sympathy with the picturesque, and it behooves our artists to rescue from its grasp the little that is left, before it is for ever too late.

Students of the history of art recognize in this passage a doctrine that had, by 1847, become conventional among landscape painters in Europe, England, and America: that of a fundamental opposition of Nature to civilization, with the assumption that all virtue, repose, dignity are on the side of “Nature”—spelled with a capital and referred to as feminine—against the ugliness, squalor, and confusion of civilization, for which the pronoun was simply “it.” However, though this passage proceeds from a premise as familiar in Dusseldorf as in New York, still it takes the form of an exhortation that is seldom, if ever, encountered in the criticism of Europe. In America the artist has a calling above and beyond an accurate reporting of scenery: he must work fast, for in America Nature is going down in swift and inexorable defeat. She is being defaced, conquered—actually ravished. Civilization is leading us into a horrible future, filled with unsightly structures, resounding with the din of enterprise. All too soon we shall become like Europe. In the old world artists may indeed paint only such “garden landscapes” as are dotted here and there in a setting that man has mastered; but our noble Hudson and “the wild witchery of our unpolluted inland lakes and streams,” this Nature is not man's but “god's.” American artists return from Europe, “their hands cramped with mannerism, and their minds belittled and debauched by the artificial stimulants of second‐hand and second‐rate creations.” This was what America must resist, debauching artificiality. Yet if history is so irresistibly carrying the defiling axe of civilization into our sublime wilderness, will it not be merely a matter of time—no matter how furiously our Coles, Durands, and Cropseys, our poets and novelists, strive to fix the fleeting moment of primitive grandeur—before we too shall be cramped into mannerism, before our minds shall be debauched by artificial stimuli?

The reader may object that I am talking nonsense. This was the expanding, prospering, booming America of the 1840's; here, if ever in the annals of man, was an era of optimism, with a vision of limitless possibilities, with faith in a boundless future. There was indeed some fear that the strife of North and South might wreck the chariot of progress, but the more that threat loomed the more enthusiastically the nation shouted the prospects of wealth and prosperity, if only in order to show the folly of allowing politics to spoil the golden opportunity. Dickens and other foreign visitors report a republic constantly flinging into their faces preposterous vaunts about what it would shortly become, and then steadily making good its wildest boasts. Surely this society was not wracked by a secret, hidden horror that its gigantic exertion would end only in some nightmare of debauchery called “civilization”?

The most cursory survey of the period does indeed display a seemingly untroubled assurance about the great civilization America was hewing out of the wilderness. This faith, with its corollaries of belief in progress and republican institutions, might be called the “official” faith of the United States. It was primarily an inheritance from the eighteenth century: back in 1758, the almanac‐maker, Nathaniel Ames, writing from Dedham, Massachusetts, dreamed that within two hundred years arts and sciences would transform nature “in their Tour from Hence over the Appalacian Mountains to the Western Ocean,” and that vast quarries of rocks would be piled into cities. On the whole, despite the Jeffersonians' distrust of cities, I think it fair to say that the founders had no qualms about doing harm to nature by thrusting civilization upon it. They reasoned in terms of wealth, comfort, amenities, power, in terms which we may conveniently call, though they had not been derived from Bentham, “utilitarian.”

Now in 1840, in 1850, the mighty tread of American civilization was heard throughout the Ohio Valley, across the Mississippi, and the advanced guard was rushing into California. But the astonishing fact about this gigantic material thrust of the early nineteenth century is how few Americans would any longer venture, aside from their boasts, to explain, let alone to justify, the expansion of civilization in any language that could remotely be called that of utility. The most utilitarian conquest known to history had somehow to be viewed not as inspired by a calculus of rising land values and investments but (despite the orgies of speculation) as an immense exertion of the spirit. Those who made articulate the meaning of this drama found their frames of reference not in political economy but in Scott and Byron, in visions of “sublimity.” The more rapidly, the more voraciously, the primordial forest was felled, the more desperately poets and painters—and also preachers—strove to identify the unique personality of this republic with the virtues of pristine and untarnished, of “romantic,” Nature.

We need little ingenuity to perceive that behind this virtually universal American hostility to the ethic of utilitarian calculation lies a religious mood—one that seventeenth‐century Puritanism would not have understood, and which was as foreign, let us say, to the evangelicalism of Whitefield as to the common sense of Franklin. We note, first of all, that this aversion to the pleasure‐pain philosophy became most pronounced in those countries or circles in which a vigorous Christian spirit was alive. In the long run, the emotions excited in the era we call romantic were mobilized into a cri du coeur against Gradgrind. A host of nameless magazine writers uttered it on the plane of dripping sentiment, of patriotic or lachrymose verse, but on higher levels the poet Bryant, the novelists Cooper and Simms, the painters Durand and Cole—and on still more rarefied heights the philosopher Emerson—denounced or lamented the march of civilization. In various ways—not often agreeing among themselves—they identified the health, the very personality, of America with Nature, and therefore set it in opposition to the concepts of the city, the railroad, the steamboat. This definition of the fundamental issue of life in America became that around which Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman organized their peculiar expression. They (along with the more superficial) present us with the problem of American self‐recognition as being essentially an irreconcilable opposition between Nature and civilization—which is to say, between forest and town, spontaneity and calculation, heart and head, the unconscious and the self‐conscious, the innocent and the debauched. We are all heirs of Natty Bumppo, and cannot escape our heritage. William Faulkner, notably in “The Bear,” is only the most dramatic of recent reminders.

Now, in this epoch, American Protestants were especially hostile to utilitarianism, even to the conciliatory form promulgated by John Stuart Mill. In England there were elements in the general situation which supported him, which could rally to his side a few sensitive and intelligent Christians. Sensitive and intelligent Christians in America were so constantly distressed by the charge that America was utterly given over to the most brutal utilitarianism that they in effect conspired to prevent the appearance of an American Mill. The more their consciences accused them of surrendering historic Christian concerns to the rush of material prosperity, the more they insisted that inwardly this busy people lived entirely by sentiment. A review of the gift‐books and annuals of the 1830's and 1840's—if one can bring himself to it—will tell how, at that pitch of vulgarity, the image of America as tender, tearful, dreaming noble thoughts, luxuriating in moonlit vistas, was constructed. These works were produced in huge numbers for the predominant middle class—if the term be admissible; they reposed on the parlor tables of wives whose husbands spent all day at the office pushing the nation on its colossal course of empire. But the more sophisticated or learned disclaimers of utility said, in this regard, about the same thing. An organ of Episcopalian scholarship, The New York Review, declared for instance in 1837 that utilitarianism is a “sordid philosophy.” And why? Because it teaches that virtue is the creature of the brain, whereas true righteousness is “the prompt impulse of the heart.” Yet this review, with no awareness of inconsistency, was at the same time rigorously preaching that because of the fall of Adam the impulses of the natural heart are suspect!

There is one truism about the early nineteenth century which cannot too often be repeated: in one fashion or another, various religious interests, aroused against the Enlightenment, allied themselves with forces we lump together as “romantic.” In England the Established Church was surprised, and momentarily bewildered, to discover that Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge started new blood pulsating through its veins, expelling the noxious humors of indifference, deism, and skepticism. At Oxford, romantic religiosity indeed swung so far to the other extreme that it carried Newman all the way to Rome. (His conversion so shattered the ranks of Episcopalian naturalists in America that The New York Review, finding itself unable to speak for a united body, had to discontinue.) On the Continent there appeared a romantic Catholicism which could afford not to answer but to disregard the philosophes as being no longer relevant. However, this ecstasy of romantic piety did not always require institutions; it could amount simply to a passionate assertion against the Age of Reason. Carlyle and Chateaubriand might have little love for each other, but they could embrace on one piece of ground: they could dance together on the grave of Voltaire.

Everywhere this resurgence of the romantic heart against the enlightened head flowered in a veneration of Nature. Wordsworth did speak for his era when he announced that he had learned to look on her not as in the hour of thoughtless—that is, eighteenth‐century—youth, but as one who heard through her the still, sad music of humanity. This was not the nature of traditional theology: neither the law of nature of the Scholastics, nor the simple plan of Newtonian apologists. It was Nature, feminine and dynamic, propelling all things. Wordsworth had no such vogue in America as had Scott or Byron, but he helped enthusiasts for both of them to find more precise, more philosophical, formulations for their enthusiasm. As early as 1840, Emerson could say, “The fame of Wordsworth is a leading fact in modern literature,” because Wordsworth expressed the “idea” he shared with his coevals. Evert Duyckinck was a thorough New Yorker and thus despised Emerson's metaphysics; still, on reading The Prelude, Duyckinck hailed Wordsworth as one entitled to join the band of immortals “whose voices go up to Heaven in jubilant thanksgiving and acknowledgment of the Great High Priest, in whose temple they perpetually worship.” And Wordsworth had taught both transcendentalist Emerson and Episcopalian Duyckinck that

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of mortal evil and of good
Than all the sages can.

With so many Americans severally convinced that this had become ultimate truth, was not a further reflection bound to occur to a nation that was, above all other nations, embedded in Nature: if from vernal woods (along with Niagara Falls, the Mississippi, and the prairies) it can learn more of good and evil than from learned sages, could it not also learn from that source more conveniently than from divine revelation? Not that the nation would formally reject the Bible. On the contrary, it could even more energetically proclaim itself Christian and cherish the churches; but it could derive its inspiration from the mountains, the lakes, the forests. There was nothing mean or niggling about these, nothing utilitarian. Thus, superficial appearances to the contrary, America is not crass, materialistic: it is Nature's nation, possessing a heart that watches and receives.

In American literature of the early nineteenth century, this theme is ubiquitous. Social historians do not pay much attention to it; they are preoccupied with the massive expansion and the sectional tensions. Probably John Jacob Astor and the builders of railroads gave little thought to the healing virtues of the forests and swamps they were defiling. The issue I am raising—or rather that the writers themselves raised—may have little to do with how the populace actually behaved; nevertheless, it has everything to do with how the people apprehended their conduct. If there be such a thing as an American character, it took shape under the molding influence of these conceptions as much as under the physical impositions of geography and the means of transport.

So, let me insist upon the highly representative quality of an essay by one James Brooks, published in The Knickerbocker in 1835, which so phrased the theme that it was reprinted over the whole country. Manifestly, Brooks conceded, this country seems more dedicated to matter than to mind; there is indeed a vast scramble for property, and no encouragement is given the arts. But, though foreigners may sneer, we need not despair; we do not have to reconcile ourselves to being forever a rude, Philistine order. In the future we shall vindicate our culture, if only we can preserve our union. For this confidence, we have the highest authority:

God has promised us a renowned existence, if we will but deserve it. He speaks this promise in the sublimity of Nature. It resounds all along the crags of the Alleghanies. It is uttered in the thunder of Niagara. It is heard in the roar of two oceans, from the great Pacific to the rocky ramparts of the Bay of Fundy. His finger has written it in the broad expanse of our Inland Seas, and traced it out by the mighty Father of Waters! The august temple in which we dwell was built for lofty purposes. Oh! that we may consecrate it to liberty and concord, and be found fit worshippers within its holy wall!

Walt Whitman had for years been drugging himself upon such prose; in him the conception comes to its most comprehensive utterance, so self‐contained that it could finally dismiss the alliance with Christian doctrine which romantic Christians had striven to establish. However, he was so intoxicated with the magniloquent idea that he had to devise what to contemporaries seemed a repulsive form, and they would have none of it. Nevertheless, Whitman's roots reach deep into the soil of this naturalistic (and Christianized) naturalism. Today a thousand James Brookses are forgotten; Whitman speaks for a mood which did sustain a mass of Americans through a crucial half‐century of Titanic exertion—which sustained them along with, and as much as, their Christian profession.

That is what is really astounding: most of the ardent celebrators of natural America serenely continued to be professing Christians. Or rather, the amazing fact is that they so seldom—hardly ever—had any intimation that the bases of their patriotism and those of their creed stood, in the slightest degree, in contradiction. Magnificent hymns to American Nature are to be found among Evangelicals and Revivalists as well as among scholarly Episcopalians. If here and there some still hard‐bitten Calvinist reminded his people of ancient distinctions between nature and grace, his people still bought and swooned over pseudo‐Byronic invocations to Nature. It was a problem, even for the clearest thinkers, to keep the orders separate. For example, The New York Review in January 1840, devoted an essay to foreign travelers, saying that their defect was an inability to behold in America not the nonexistent temples and statues but the “Future”:

A railroad, a penitentiary, a log house beyond the Mississippi, the last hotly‐contested elections—things rather heterogeneous to be sure, and none of them at first glance, so attractive as the wonders of the old world—are in reality, and to him who regards them philosophically, quite as important, and as they connect themselves with the unknown future, quite as romantic.

For some pages the Review keeps up this standard chant, and then abruptly recollects its theology. Confidence in the American future, it remembers barely in the nick of time, must not betray us into the heresy of supposing man perfectible: “Tell a people that they are perfectible, and it will not be long before they tell you they are perfect, and that he is a traitor who presumes to doubt, not their wisdom simply, but their infallibility.” Assuredly, the American Christian would at this point find himself in an intolerable dilemma, with his piety and his patriotism at loggerheads, did not the triumphant ethos seem to give him a providential way out: America can progress indefinitely into an expanding future without acquiring sinful delusions of grandeur simply because it is nestled in Nature, is instructed and guided by mountains, is chastened by cataracts.

It is here that errors are rebuked, and excesses discountenanced. Nature preserves the identity and the individuality of its various races and tribes, and by the relation in which each stands to her, and the use which each makes of her, she becomes both a teacher and an historian.

So then—because America, beyond all nations, is in perpetual touch with Nature, it need not fear the debauchery of the artificial, the urban, the civilized. Nature somehow, by a legerdemain that even so highly literate Christians as the editors of The New York Review could not quite admit to themselves, had effectually taken the place of the Bible: by her unremitting influence, she, like Bryant's waterfowl, would guide aright the faltering steps of a young republic.

Here we encounter again the crucial difference between the American appeal to romantic Nature and the European. In America, it served not so much for individual or artistic salvation as for an assuaging of national anxiety. The sublimity of our natural backdrop not only relieved us of having to apologize for a deficiency of picturesque ruins and hoary legends: it demonstrated how the vast reservoirs of our august temple furnish the guarantee that we shall never be contaminated by artificiality. On the prairies of Illinois, Bryant asked the breezes of the South if anywhere in their progress from the equator they have fanned a nobler scene than this.

Man hath no part in all this glorious work:
The hand that built the firmament hath heaved
And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown their slopes
With herbage, planted them with island‐groves,
And hedged them round with forests.

Goethe might insist in ancient Germany that he devoted his life to Nature, but in Europe this meant that he became an elegant genius domesticated in the highly artificial court of Weimar. What could Europe show for all of Rousseau's tirades against civilization but a band of Bohemians, congregated amid the brick and mortar of Paris, trying to keep alive a yearning for such naturalness and spontaneity as any child of the Ohio Valley indubitably flaunted without, like them, becoming outcast from society? America, amid its forests, could not, even if it tried, lose its simplicity. Therefore let Christianity bless it.

But—could America keep its virtue? As The Literary World's exhortation to the artists reveals, almost as soon as the identification of virtue with Nature had become axiomatic, the awful suspicion dawned that America was assiduously erecting the barriers of artifice between its citizenry and the precious landscape. If God speaks to us in the sublimity of Nature, then was not the flood of pioneers a devilish stratagem for drowning the voice of God? In the same issue that printed Brooks's “Our Country,” The Knickerbocker also carried an oration on the Mississippi River, declaring that no words can convey what an American feels as he looks upon this moving ocean, because he sees not only the present majesty but the not distant period when the interminable stretch of vacantness shall become bright with towns, vocal with the sounds of industry: “When the light of civilization and religion shall extend over forests and savannahs.” Or, as the same magazine vaunted in 1838, “Nature has been penetrated in her wildest recesses, and made to yield her hidden stores.” But how could we at one and the same time establish our superiority to artificial Europe upon our proximity to Nature, and then view with complacency the rapidity of our despoiling her? And furthermore—most embarrassing of questions—on which side does religion stand, on Nature's or on civilization's? Once the dichotomy had become absolute, as in American sentiment it had become, then piety could no longer compromise by pretending to dwell in both embattled camps.

Once more, in Europe the problem was personal, a matter of the individual's coming to terms with himself, absorbing a taste for Nature into his private culture. Here it was a problem for the society—and so for the churches. Goethe had put it for Europe: the young revel in those aspirations of the sublime which in fact only primitive and barbaric peoples can experience; vigorous youth pardonably strives to satisfy this noble necessity, but soon learns circumspection:

As the sublime is easily produced by twilight and night, when forms are blended, so, on the other hand, it is scared away by the day which separates and divides everything, and so must it also be destroyed by every increase of cultivation, if it is not fortunate enough to take refuge with the beautiful and closely unite itself with it, by which these both become immortal and indestructible.

By recognizing that the sublime is ephemeral, for a nation as for a person, Goethe inculcated the necessity of a mature reconciliation to the merely beautiful, in order to preserve a fugitive glory, one which might, by adroit cultivation, survive into a weary civilization as a memory out of the natural sublimity of youth. But the beautiful is only ornament, amenity, decoration. A nation cannot live by it, neither can a faith. It is far removed from the voice of God thundering out of lofty ridges and roaring waterfalls. Even the painter Cole in 1841 published “The Lament of the Forest,” by which, he seemed to say, he found at the end of his self‐appointed task only a tragic prospect. The forest stood for centuries, sublime and unsullied, until there came man the destroyer. For a few centuries thereafter, America was the sanctuary; now, even into it comes artificial destruction:

And thus come rushing on
This human hurricane, boundless as swift.
Our sanctuary, this secluded spot,
Which the stern rocks have guarded until now,
Our enemy has marked.

It was this same Thomas Cole, this master interpreter of the American landscape whose death in 1848 was, according to The New York Evening Mirror, “a national loss,” who most impressed his generation by five gigantic canvases entitled “The Course of Empire.” The first shows the rude, barbaric state of man; the second is a perfect symbolization of that pastoral conception with which America strove to identify itself. Presiding over each scene is a lofty and rocky peak, which patently represents Nature, but in the pastoral panel, and only in this one, the point of view is shifted so that there can be seen looming behind and above the peak of Nature a still more lofty one, which even more patently is the sublime. In the third cartoon the perspective returns to that of the first, but the entire scene is covered with a luxurious civilization, only the tip of mountain Nature peering over the fabulous expanse of marble. In the fourth, barbarians are sacking the city, and the picture is a riot of rape, fire, pillage; in the fifth, all human life is extinguished, the temples and towers are in ruin, but the unaltered mountain serenely presides over a panorama of total destruction.

The orator who in The Knickerbocker anticipated the civilization to arise along the Mississippi was obliged to warn the young empire to learn from the history of the past, from the follies of the old world: it must so improve the condition of the whole people as to “establish on this continent an imperishable empire, destined to confer innumerable blessings on the remotest ages.” Yet like so many vaunters of American confidence in this ostensible age of confidence, by admitting the adjective into his exhortation he indirectly confesses the lurking possibility of the perishable. Cole's “Course of Empire” was exhibited over and over again to fascinated throngs of the democracy; the series ought, said George Templeton Strong in 1838, “to immortalize him.” Cole made explicit what the society instinctively strove to repress: the inescapable logic of a nationalism based upon the premises of Nature. (Many, even while forced into admiration, noted that the drama as Cole painted it, he being both a pious Christian and a devout Wordsworthian, left out any hint of Christianity; the “Empire” is wholly material, and there is no salvation except for the mountain itself.) The moral clearly was that a culture committed to Nature, to the inspiration of Nature and of the sublime, might for a moment overcome its barbarous origins, take its place with the splendor of Rome, but it was thereby committed to an ineluctable cycle of rise and fall. The American empire was still ascending, rising from Cole's second to his third phase. But if this rationale explained America, then was not the fourth stage, and after it the fifth, inescapable?

The creator of Natty Bumppo and of Harvey Birch (who was a vestryman and a close friend of Cole) grew worried. As Cooper reissued The Spy in 1849, he could only marvel at the immense change in the nation since 1821, when the book had first appeared. America had now passed from gristle into the bone, had indeed become a civilization, and had no enemy to fear—“but the one that resides within.” In his mingling of anxieties and exultations, Cooper is indeed the principal interpreter of his period; even while glorifying the forest‐born virtue of America, he had also portrayed the brutal Skinners in The Spy and the settlers in The Pioneers who wantonly slaughter Nature's pigeons.

It would not be difficult to show how widespread, even though covert, was this apprehension of doom in the America of Jackson and Polk. Of course it was so elaborately masked, so concertedly disguised, that one may study the epoch for a long time without detecting it. Yet it is there, at the heart—at what may be called the secret heart—of the best thought and expression the country could produce. So much so, indeed, that some patriots sought escape from the haunting course of empire by arguing that America was no more peculiarly the nation of Nature than any other, that it had been civilized from the start. For instance, in 1847 The Literary World noticed a work on the prairies by Mrs. Eliza Farnham which once more appealed to the piled cliffs, the forest aisles, the chant of rushing winds and waters in the West against the decadence of eastern civilization. The New York journal, conscious of the city's daily growth, had to ask if this tedious declamation was not becoming trite. After all, the World demanded, when men go deeper and deeper into wild and sublime scenes, do they in fact put off false and artificial ways? Do they become spontaneously religious? Unfortunately, we must admit that some of the fairest portions of the earth are occupied by the most degraded of mankind; even sublimity works no effect on the rude and thoughtless, and so, instead of following a fatal course from the primordial to the metropolitan, perhaps we should try to stabilize this society at the merely decent and sane. “Moral and aesthetic culture require something more than the freest and most balmy air and mellow sunshine.”

The World did not quote Goethe to justify this escape from the cycle of naturalism, but Emerson, who did know his Goethe, could never successfully resolve within himself the debate between Nature and civilization, solitude and society, rusticity and manners. In fact, something of the same debate went on through most of the fiction and poetry, and markedly among the architects and landscape gardeners, of the time. Very few of those who found themselves impelled in both directions consciously tried to find their way into civilization because, thanks to Cole, they had peered into the frightful prospect of Nature. Still, I think it can be demonstrated that some vague sense of doom was at work in all of them, as it surely was in both Cooper and Simms. As the implications of the philosophy of natural destiny forced themselves upon the more sentient, these were obliged to seek methods for living in civilization, all the more because civilization was so spectacularly triumphing over the continent. A growing awareness of the dilemma informed the thinking of Horace Bushnell, for instance, and he strove to turn American Protestantism from the revival, associated with the lurid scenery of Nature, to the cultivation of “nurture” which could be achieved only in a civilized context.

Of course, there was also the possibility of escape from the cycle of empire in another direction, opposite to that chosen by Bushnell. The nation could resolutely declare that it is invincibly barbaric, that it intends to remain so, and that it refuses to take even the first step towards civilization. Or at least, if the nation as a whole shrank from such audacity, if Christians fled for protection to older sobrieties they had come near to forgetting, a few brave spirits might seek the other spiritual solution, though they had to defy the palpable evidence of economic life and to renounce a Christianity that was proving itself incapable of mediating between forest and city. They would refuse to be content with the beautiful, they would defiantly wear their hats indoors as well as out, and would sound a barbaric (and American) yawp over the roof of the world. Possibly there were, in sum, no more than three Americans who chose this violent resort, and in their time they were largely ignored by their countrymen. Yet Whitman, Thoreau, and Melville speak for this society, and to it, in part because, by making their choice, they thrust upon it a challenge it cannot honestly evade. In 1855 Melville pictured John Paul Jones in Paris as a jaunty barbarian in the center of the very citadel of civilization; exclaiming over his incorruptibility amid corruption, Melville apostrophized: “Intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but a savage at heart, America is, or may yet be, the Paul Jones of nations.”

Possibly the fact that America came to its first essay in self‐analysis and self‐expression in the period we call romantic is only fortuitous. But perhaps there is a deeper conjunction. The suspicion that we are being carried along on some massive conveyor belt such as Cole's “Course of Empire” is hard to down. It is more nagging today than it was around the year 1900, when for the moment America could give up the dream of Nature and settle for a permanently prosperous civilization. It more pesters the religious conscience in our time, when a leading theologian expounds the “irony” of American history, than it did when the most conscientious were absorbed in “the social gospel.” So, it is no longer enough to dismiss the period of romantic America as one in which too many Christians temporized their Christianity by merging it with a misguided cult of Nature. No scorn of the refined, no condescension of sophisticated critics toward the vagaries of romance, can keep us from feeling the pull: the American, or at least the American artist, cherishes in his innermost being the impulse to reject completely the gospel of civilization, in order to guard with resolution the savagery of his heart.

In that case, the savage artist poses for the Christianity of the country a still more disturbing challenge, as Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman posed it: if he must, to protect his savage integrity, reject organized religion along with organized civilization, then has not American religion, or at any rate Protestantism, the awful task of reexamining, with the severest self‐criticism, the course on which it so blithely embarked a century ago, when it dallied with the sublime and failed to comprehend the sinister dynamic of Nature?