“Sacred Calling” in Nineteenth-Century Authorship: Wordsworth, Emerson, Thackeray

Abstract

“Sacred Calling” in Nineteenth-Century Authorship: Wordsworth, Emerson, Thackeray Günter Leypoldt (bio) To be “called,” as a prophet or priest, requires a gift, “grace,” which entails special powers—a privileged sensibility—combined with special obligations, such as public service for a higher good. In this essay, I wish to examine the discourse of higher calling in two nineteenth-century spaces of literary practice, one defined by poets and what some have called sage writers (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Longfellow, Ruskin, Arnold, Carlyle, Whitman), the other by journalist novelists (Dickens, G. H. Lewes, W. M. Thackeray, George Eliot, W. D. Howells, Henry James, Mark Twain).1 The sage network cultivates a notion of “literature as world-disclosure” that frames writers as spiritual virtuosi who compete with traditional religion. The network of journalist-novelists, by contrast, leans toward entrepreneurial concepts of writing as disciplined work for a democratic marketplace. My claim is that these two tendencies do not reflect successive historical periods (one more religious or idealist, the other more secular and realist) but rather modalities shaped by network-specific writerly sensibilities and performative genre conventions. The nineteenth-century shift in conceptions of authorship from an art-religious visionary poetics to a tough-minded [End Page 599] secular realism, I argue, meant only a shift in the quest for authentic higher principles. In what follows, sections one and two will outline the sage-specific concepts of vocation with a view to Emerson’s and Carlyle’s literary-religious Transcendentalism and Wordsworth’s monumental Recluse project. Section three places Wordsworth and Scott and some of their US successors (Whitman, Longfellow, Stowe, Melville) in the “laureate position” in the literary system, a space that defines how writers of literary ambition mediate between higher and lower aspects of professionalization (peer-based vocational principles vs. economic gain).2 Next, I chart how the rise of quality cultural journalism in the 1830s complicates the discourse of vocation, giving literary authors a sense of leading a “double life” to keep breadwinning and peer-orientation in a meaningful relationship. Finally, section five traces the discourse of vocation in midcentury artist novels of disillusionment (Balzac’s Lost Illusions and G. H. Lewes’ Ranthorpe) and the more pronounced anti-vocational and yet still authenticity-pursuing stance in W. M. Thackeray’s criticism and his novel Pendennis. For all his manifesto-level debunking of Transcendentalist concepts of vocation, I will claim, Thackeray is no less oriented toward higher purposes than the Emersonian sage. Emerson’s and Thackeray’s notions of higher calling follow from their investment in the laureate position, rather than from metaphysical certainties (spiritual, religious, logocentric) that the detranscendentalizers within Emerson criticism frame as a historical naivety to be superseded by modern thinking. The effort of retranscendentalizing nineteenth-century literary culture requires us to see that strong notions of literary vocation reach across the religious-secular divide. [End Page 600] 1. emerson’s “ministry of song” The sage network participates in the visionary turn in romantic-period poetics that blurs the borders between religion and art established by Enlightenment thinking. The new poetics suggested that great poetry requires extraordinary powers of ontological vision, that major poets differ from minor ones mainly by their ability to produce a higher language (a poetic music beyond concepts), and that poetry provides better access to sources of transcendence than theological speculation and religious dogma. These beliefs did not dominate romantic-period literary culture (Lord Byron and Walter Scott had little use for them), but they were central to a tradition that ran from German romanticism to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Longfellow, Fuller, Emerson, and Whitman. Consider, for example, how Emerson describes his vocation to Lydia Jackson, his second-wife-to-be, during their courtship in 1835: “I am born a poet [. . .]. That is my nature & vocation. My singing be sure is very ‘husky,’ & is for the most part in prose. Still am I a poet in the sense of a perceiver & dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul & in matter, & specially of the correspondences between these & those.”3 The context of this passage is Emerson’s transition from a Boston minister to a literary intellectual. His 1832 resignation from his pastoral appointment...