sion." Emerson warned himself against antinomianism, as Bercovitch points out, and celebrated what he referred to as "common virtue standing on common principles." But these common principles, according to Bercovitch, turn out to be the self-congratulatory illusions that have enabled Americans to identify the Kingdom of God with the future of their own country, to proclaim their moral superiority to the Old World, and to appoint themselves saviors of mankind. In Bloom's view, Emerson's religion (or his literary substitute for religion), was timeless and universal; but in Bercovitch's view it was highly parochial, so completely bound up with the American sense of mission that it lost sight of any larger truths. Emerson was the heir not of the second-century Gnostics but of the seventeenth‐ century founders of Massachusetts Bay, in whose worldview "the migration to America displaces conversion as the crucial event."

Bercovitch's view of Emerson is just as one-sided as Bloom's, but he is surely right to place Emerson in the Puritan succession. (Bloom, on the other hand, dissents from the "distinguished tradition in scholarship ... that finds Emerson to have been the heir ... of the line that goes from the Mathers to Jonathan Edwards.") The Puritan tradition, however, was never monolithic: from the beginning, it was torn between works and grace, tribalism and spiritual individualism—between the Puritans' understanding of themselves as a corporate community and their understanding that the relations between man and God finally take precedence over communal and civic obligations. The point is not simply that Puritanism was always pulled in both directions; the point is that these tensions themselves constituted the Puritan tradition, which has to be understood as a continuing attempt to negotiate the treacherous ground between Arminianism and antinomianism. It is the ambiguity of the Puritan legacy, I believe, that enables critics and commentators to come to opposite conclusions about Emerson, to see him simultaneously as an antinomian and as a religious liberal, a gnostic and a poet of American national identity. This ambiguity, incidentally, extends to American impressions of Europe, which were far more complicated than Bercovitch makes them out to be. A deep strain of Anglophilia—often associated with Arminianism—early appeared alongside the ritual denunciation of old-world corruption. Both Edwards and Emerson set themselves against the cultural subservience to Europe that has so often afflicted Americans, especially the "better class" of Americans; and their celebration of America needs to be read in that context—as a corrective to the fashionable demand for imported models of cultural sophistication, not as the assertion of a messianic spirit of national chauvinism.

JAMES. On the eclipse of idealism in the Gilded Age, see "Literature Truly American," Nation, 2 Jan. 1868, 7-8; "The Great American Novel," Nation, Jan. I868, 27-29; "The Organization of Culture," Nation, 18 June 1868, 486-88; [Henry James], "Mr. Walt Whitman," Nation, 16 Nov. 1865, 625-26; Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman (1980); and William T. Stafford, "Emerson and the James Family" (1953), in Edwin Cady and Louis J. Budd, On Emerson (1988).

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