The Diary of George Templeton Strong

After reading a novel set in 1893, I’ve stayed in old New York for the first volume of The Diary of George Templeton Strong. Strong was the son of a lawyer, and a graduate of Columbia University (class of 1838). He was just a little younger than Thoreau, who graduated from Harvard in 1837, and in some ways he was the anti-Thoreau. Both men wrote enormous diaries, but Strong’s was all about politics, his legal career, and the turmoil of life in Manhattan, while Thoreau’s was largely about taking walks in the countryside around Concord, Massachusetts.

Strong’s diary is very entertaining to read, and it’s unfortunate that it’s almost unobtainable. Only the first volume can be checked out of the New York Public Library system. He is probably best known, to those who know him at all, through the entries he made in the Civil War years that were used in Ken Burns’ documentary, and read in the best upper-crust Manhattan tones by George Plimpton. But those excerpts didn’t give a sense of how funny he could be. Here he is griping about the Transcendentalists, on September 25, 1840. (His comments would apply more to characters like William Ellery Channing than they would to Thoreau.)

Tried to read Kent this morning, but his pages, which never were remarkable for order and perspicuity, seemed even more hazy than ever. It was a toss-up between the ex-Chancellor and the Boston transcendentalists. The latter gentry have rather the advantage, by the way, for whereas the Chancellor merely contradicts himself on alternate pages and writes a book as his wife would make a pudding, by taking care to mix the ingredients—eggs, butter, and all—into undistinguishable homogeneity, the Eastern Magi take care to write so that it’s impracticable to know what any one sentence means and no one can therefore safely assert that any two passages are irreconcilable or unconnected, which is very delightful to behold and shows a true Yankee ingenuity in dodging the shafts of criticism. They’re safe behind the thick cotton of the infinite and The Incomprehensible.

As to their enunciation of the fact that “Matter is orbed and spirit is sphered” (or vice versa -- I forget which and it don’t much matter), I do not entirely agree with the pundits aforesaid. The thoughtful mind can never forget that in the polarization of the universal dual the essential idea is first individually evolved, and that from this purely spiritual genesis, extending as it does upwards into the profound and downwards into the exalted (and not according to Locke, vice versa), or in other words from the intensely spirituous, is first seen to emanate the dawnings of the Exotic. Strange, then, that any should be so utterly blind as not to deduce from these self-evident propositions the identity of the Ideal and the truncatedo-conical of the material and the right angulo-hexagonal triangular!