The Liberal Imagination

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING'S mind is like a house, a labyrinthine structure with windows overlooking the soul on one side and the world on the other. Often discovering darkened halls in the light of day. Channing loses himself in his own house. With neither firmly entrenched transcendental beliefs nor a classical sensibility, the Newport-born preacher appears to live under a roof at once dilapidated and unfinished.

A leading spokesman for the Unitarian cause in the early nineteenth century, Channing preached what Emerson called "sublime sermons." His was a life of the mind, as he grappled with the central issues of his day. Andrew Delbanco believes that Channing's inner life may best be understood through his public utterances, and examines the way his subject spoke as well as what he said. In his biography of Channing, the author acknowledges an abbreviation of outward detail. He prepares us quickly for our journey into William Ellery Channing's mind; we learn in six taut paragraphs that he graduated from Harvard with a gift for oratory and sailed for Virginia in November, 1798, where he grew less sociable and more insular in Richmond as he searched for direction and purpose in his life. Five years later he had decided on a career in the ministry, and spent the rest of his life trying to work out the dilemmas of self and society.

Delbanco is not interested in Channing alone, though he hopes to "help restore Channing to the canon of American literature." He is concerned with the development of the liberal spirit in America in the early nineteenth century. William Ellery Channing is not so much a biography of a man as of an age. It is the story of religion, literature and politics in an experimental democracy, and their intimate and inevitable relationships. Channing serves as an emblem of this age, a man whose religious training and thinking helped draw him into political engagement. Delbanco argues that he is more than merely a transitional figure between Edwards and Emerson, and not simply a reticent observer of his new nation. Delbanco writes:

He did not pronounce the contest between classic and romantic a draw, nor did he congratulate himself on a proud neutrality. He shared and saved the essence of the romantic dream while enlisting himself not in a program of self-therapy but in political action. So often those who began in romantic optimism ended in a paralyzed reaction...How Channing avoided that fate, how he kept disillusion from killing his sense of social obligation is the balance of his story.

DELBANCO IS a learned and lively storyteller, revealing Channing's hopes and fears about his personal life, nature, history, language, slavery, and romanticism. These topics provide the framework for his book. The author's analysis of Channing and the slavery issue is the most provocative. He focuses on Channing's well-known 1842 document. The Duty of the Free States, and encourages us to read it "as one among those mid-century expressions of alarm, even despair, at the unsatisfying choice that America now offered between a cheapened communitarian ideal and the grandiose self." Channing, a man who had believed in the law through most of his life, began to lose faith, suspicious of a legal system that sheltered the madness and cruelty of slavery. Channing's denouncement of the barbarism of the "peculiar institution" was virtually an "antinomian utterance," according to Delbanco. He spoke out publicly for civil disobedience, and attacked the law more ferociously than anything else he had chosen to criticize.

Channing could only glimpse the Keatsian stars and the Thoreauvian mornings. While he looked inward in an age that insisted the truth was outside the self. Channing advanced, Delbanco reminds us, toward the Transcendentalist belief in the internalized, of the divine without reaching it. The author's compelling analysis claims that Channing "is willing to seek truth in the mental process itself." He "discredits" history, "dismantles" nature, and assails the law as he comes closer to understanding his own human head. Delbanco affirms "he has affinities with Emerson, with William James. But he has no school." In an age when man was his own church, and encouraged to be his own government, Channing was a school of one, searching to teach himself the ways of a world and a soul spinning collectively into chaos.

Delbanco describes Channing and the intellectual life of nineteenth century America in academic prose that is alternately stiff and playful, making for some confusion but not obfuscating his larger interpretations. In seeking brevity, the author looks for neatly suggestive anecdotes and historical shorthands to portray his subject, and occasionally descends to awkward constructions, calling Trumball's M'Fingal a "bundle of hesitations," and stretching to describe Channing as fighting "an internal civil war that would last as long as he lived." There are also times when it seems the author reveres his subject almost unceasingly, remarking early in the biography: "William Channing's first sensation of 'the power within' is not a trivial event in the history of the American mind."

Nevertheless, Delbanco deems Channing's awareness of the "pace of social change" occasionally "acute" but more often "naive," and admits: "Without a critic's coercion, no man is a true bellwether for a century, and Channing may not always place his hand consciously on the pulse of his age." When Channing fails as an emblem of his generation. Delbanco shifts to a discussion of America in the nineteenth century, and with thoughtfulness and clarity, connects the dilemmas of this period to those of the twentieth century. When the author declares that "America has become a collection of self-interested combattants swirling about one another," he could easily be describing our own time as well as the 1830s.

IN HIS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, the author mentions how the themes of his book reflect his origins, "from Jewish parents who fled Hitler, and who tried in their transplanted lives to retain the balance between hope and reason which is called liberalism." William Ellery Channing also retained this balance, at a time when it was most delicate. He promoted the idea of a national literature, sought an American Milton enthusiastically while quietly harboring fears and doubts that America could produce one. The beauty of Delbanco's essay resides in its expansiveness: it opens outward from Channing's life to ask larger questions, and leaves the reader something to ponder. Comparing Channing to Henry Adams, the author illuminates a man who "asked the overwhelming question of his century and ours: whether the world is spinning into chaos, or, after a long penance, tapping the divine. That question, which now as then elicits all the varying strategies of self-defense--embarrassment, indifference, and dogma--has rarely been asked with greater dignity." Channing was not a tub-thumping, rabble-rousing patriot, nor is Delbanco a wide-eyed and vociferous liberal. Like his subject, he asks what it means to be an American, and successfully depicts the miracles and misfortunes.