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University Microfilms International

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 7815836
LISTER, ESTHER DARLENE
E M E R S O N t S P R O C E S S OP C O M P O S I T I O N ,
U N I V E R S I T Y OF C A L I F O R N I A , IRVINE, PH.O, , 1976

University
Mkronims
International soon ze.EBr o a d . a n n a h b o r . m i «biqg

©1978

ESTHER DARLENE LISTER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Irvine

Emerson's Process of Composition

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

in English

by

Esther Darlene Lister

Committee in Charge:

Professor Frank Lentricchia, Chairman

Professor Albert Wlecke

Professor John Rowe

1978
The dissertation of Esther Darlene Lister is approved,

and is acceptable in quality and form for

publication on microfilm:

Committee Chairman

University of California, Irvine

1978
 DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my parents,

Edith and Richard Lister,

in memory

of my grandparents,

Sarah and Oda Gregory, Esther and Cornelius Lister,

who crossed this country by covered wagon,

farmed the fertile soils of Missouri

and Kentucky,

and raised my parents

to believe in

the undaunted emotional support and steadfast encouragement

they have given to me.

 CONTENTS
Acknowledgments .................................... vi

V i t a ................................................. ...

Abstract ............................................. x

Introduction ......................................... 1

Chapter 1* Preliminary Explorations in Search of

Natural Order

Hints for a Peculiar Pursuit:

The Early J o u r n a l s .................. 11

The Hieroglyphic Solution:

Emerson as Preacher and the
Idea of C o m p e n s a t i o n ................ 13

From Exchequer to Quarry:

The Composition of the Journals,
1 8 3 4 - 1 8 4 ? .......................... 37

Notes for Chapter O n e .............. 61

Chapter 2: Emerson as Lecturer:

The Old Lord N e c e s s i t y ................. 72

The Myth of the Twelve H u n d r e d ......... 76

Distempers of the Heated Chamber . . . . 103

Notes for Chapter T w o ............. 124

Chapter 3.: The Transformation of Grief

into Affirmation:
The Experience of "Threnody" and
" The P o e t " .......................... 134

The Critical Response to "Threnody". . . 136

"Threnody": The Reconstructed

Text of C o n t e x t .................... 156

The Structure of Waldo's Death . . . . . 186

The Unfolding of T h r e n o s ............... 204

 Notes for Chapter Three 219

Chapter 4: A Sane discontent: The Anxiety of

Response

Blessed is All That Agitates:

The Emerson A n x i e t y .................. 229

A Certain Disquiet Mingled:

The Sliding Surfaceof Anxiety ......... 241

Notes for Chapter Four ........... 292

Bibliographical N o t e ................................ 304

Note on frimary Sources C i t e d ..................... 317

Bibliography .......... 320

Addendum ..................... 327

v
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to Professor Frank Lentricchia, who

stimulated my interest in Ralph Waldo Emerson through his

graduate courses in American literature. I am also grate­

ful for his continuous encouragement as well as for his

pertinent and constructive criticism.

I would like to thank Professors Albert Wlecke and

John Rowe for carefully reading several drafts of this

dissertation.

I would also like to thank Professors Renee Riese

Hubert and Peter Colaclides for encouraging my studies in

language and linguistics.

I am grateful to Professor Abe Ravitz, chairman, and

the members of the English Department at California State

University, Dominguez Hills, for their support and en­

couragement of my graduate studies during the past eight

years. I am especially grateful to Professors Violet L.

Jordain, James Riddell, and Patricia Eliet for introducing

me to the exacting methods of literary research and critical

study during my year of graduate work at Dominguez Hills.

I would like to express my appreciation to the Alumni

Association of California State University, Dominguez

vi
Hills, for permission to make full use of the research

materials and facilities of the Leo F. Cain Educational

Resources Center for researching and writing my dissertation

while on leave of absence from the University of California,

Irvine.

vii
 VITA

July 5 i 1945 - Born - Hamilton, Missouri

1970 - B.A. , California State University, Dominguez Hills

I9 7 O - Teaching Assistant, California State University,

Dominguez Hills

1971-1973» 1974 - Teaching Assistant, University of

California, Irvine

1975 - Research Assistant, University of California, Irvine

1975 - Lecturer, California State University, Dominguez Hills

1976-1977 - Instructor, California State University,

Dominguez Hills

1977-1978 - Assistant Professor, Colorado Mountain College,

Glenwood Springs, Colorado

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Fields: Literature and Criticism

Studies in American Literature

Professor David Rankin, California State University,
Dominguez Hills
Professor Frank Lentricchia, University of California,
Irvine

Studies in Literary and Critical Research Methods

Professor James Riddell, California State University,
Dominguez Hills

Studies in Criticism
Professor Frank Lentricchia, University of California,
Irvine

Studies in Language and Linguistics

Professors Renee Riese Hubert and Peter Colaclides,
University of California, Irvine

Studies in Comparative Literaturey

Professors Ralph Flores, Renee Riese Hubert, and Max
Yeh, University of California, Irvine

viii
Studies in British and European Literature (14th - 20th
centuries)
Professors Lila Seller, Violet Jordain, David Rankin,
James Riddell, and Michael Shafer, California State
University, Dominguez Hills
Professors James Calderwood, Jesse Gellrich, Robert
Montgomery, and Shirley Van Mar ter. University of
California, Irvine
 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Emerson's Process of Composition

by
Esther Darlene Lister

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Irvine 1978

Professor Frank Lentricchia, Chairman

Emerson criticism from the beginning has been largely

a humpty-dumpty affair of disagreement and contradiction.

Modern Emerson criticism inherited the frustration and

anxiety immanent within nineteenth-century assessments of

Emerson. Although his major poems and essays have been re­

examined by modern and contemporary critics, they have been

examined, more often than not, individually and/or in

isolation from his life and the bulk of his work. Critical

conclusions have been as divergent as the critical methods

or approaches used. Within our own century, Emerson the

essayist and poet has been severed from Emerson the man.

Today's reader knows very little about Emerson's life,

which exists for us only in the three fragmentary pictures

provided by his major biographers (Cabot, Rusk, and Whicher).

The result has been not only a critical innocence about

the man behind the essays and poems but also an inability

to come to grips with Emerson as a whole.

x
 The central question I have posed and attempted to

answer is Why and how did Emerson write? In my study,

I have attempted to integrate Emerson the writer with

Emerson the man through a close examination of the processes

of his life as a writer— what we know about them from the

biographies and his own journal. In my first chapter, I

sketch out the elements of purpose, direction, and choice

within the Emerson we encounter in the journals through

1849 and during his brief career as a preacher. The two

"lives of Emerson" with which we are most familiar— the

external life of the man that Rusk traces in The Life of

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1949) and the internal life of his

ideas that Whicher traces in Freedom and Fate (1953)— are

intrinsically related to and sometimes spring out of his

" life" as a journal-writer. His journal operated as an

integrating tool during 1834-1849: his life informed his

writing, and his writing informed his life. This first

chapter, then, explores the biographical and literary

development of the Emerson of the mid- and late 1840's.

My second chapter examines Emerson as a lecturer.

While exploring why and how Emerson lectured, I have also

tried to expose the myth of Emerson as "rich man" which

springs out of a misinterpretation of his financial con­

dition. I examine Emerson as a lecturer, then, not only

to present more clearly the nature of his role as a

lecturer and the influence it had upon the essays, but also

to suggest that critical misconceptions about Emerson’s

financial condition between 1835 and 1855 have helped to

create the apathy toward his life that exists today.

In the third chapter, my study of the poem "Threnody

not only relates the poem to Emerson's grief over his

first son's death and the transformative effect it had

upon him, but it also explores the relationship between

that poem and many other poems as well as at least two of

his most famous essays. My general objective is to clarify

how raw experience affects the process of composition.

My final chapter examines anxiety as it relates to

Emerson's purpose, his process of composition, and the

critical response. After presenting the effect Emerson

said he wanted to have upon his readers, I focus upon the

response to Emerson and the way in which Emerson created

his own critics within his time and our own. By the

decisions he made and the choices he allows, Emerson

sketched in the circumference of the circle within which

he not only lived and wrote but also may be understood—

or misunderstood.

xii
 Introduction

Readers interested in understanding why and how

Emerson wrote often experience frustration and perplexity--

and sometimes even anxiety. Goaded "by a critical interest

to read Emerson thoroughly in order to know him well, we

immerse ourselves in his published essays, then plunge

into several or more volumes of his journals. Excitement

mounts as again and again we encounter journal passages

which echo ideas and passages earlier found in the essays.

Struck by the similarity between the journals and the

essays— a similarity which seems all the stronger when

reading the journals and recalling the essays— we may

eventually begin comparing passages from the essays with

journal passages. The original critical excitement,

stirred into existence while reading the journals, flickers

and dies as journal passage confronts essay passage.

Occasionally, our original excitement is stirred once more

when a brief essay passage closely resembles the journal

passage. But even the joy of finding a few similar

passages not noted by the editors of the Journals and

Miscellaneous Notebooks* is short-lived. More often than

not, we encounter prototypic journal passages that don't

"^Hereinafter cited as JMN

1
 2

quite mirror the essay passages as closely as we earlier

thought unless we import sentences from here and a passage

from there, from journal contexts totally irrelevant to

the topic of the essay passages, yet which somehow cap­

ture the mood of what Emerson is talking about in that

portion of an essay. The desire to explore how Emerson

wrote arises naturally from the act of reading widely in

Emerson, but it is a desire which is frustrated continually

once we launch our search for the prototypic passages in

the journals. It takes a certain amount of frustration

from this sort of systematic ghost-hunting before most of

us will finally cast aside the critical myth that Emerson's

essays are but patchquilt work from the earlier lectures

and journals.

Reading much of Emerson within a short period of time,

and reading him carefully, generates another significant

phenomenon: as we read one passage in an essay, we recall

another passage in another essay, similar in thought, topic,

or semantic construction. The page, to use Emerson's

phrases in "The American Scholar," becomes "luminous with

manifold allusion" and "every sentence is doubly signi­

ficant." Our flow of continuous reading is disrupted not

only by the memory of these other passages but also by our

own thoughts which crowd in upon us as we lose "sight of

the plan and connexion" of the essay. The result is that

 3

the more Emerson we have read, the less continuously are

we capable of reading another of his essays, so that the

"style" of our reading comes to resemble the style of

Emerson's essays and, quite possibly, the "style" of his

creative process. We become acutely aware of and, perhaps,

disturbed by his style of writing because of such resem­

blances. Nevertheless, although our reading of Emerson is

continually interrupted in this way, we are surprised by

the continuity or similarity of thought which exists among

Emerson* s essays, brought to our attention repeatedly by

the "fine things" in one essay which catch our eye and

cause us to recall another essay passage. This phenomenon,

which many readers experience while reading Emerson inten­

sively, is what we might call the central Emersonian

experience: it links Emerson and his reader through

similar mental activity. It duplicates the experience

Emerson may have had writing his essays, using selections

from journals and lectures of different years, different

periods of thought, himself surprised by the continuity

which exists among them within the "system" which is

himself.

The intent of my study has been to explore in various

directions what I believe is the central Emersonian exper­

ience which leads us not only into closely examining how

we read and understand Emerson, but also into closely

 4

examining how he wrote. I do not wish to suggest, however,

that my paths are the only paths that one should follow.

The nature of my study is experimental and exploratory.

My purpose has been to reveal some new areas for future

exploration, to open up new critical territory, and to

stimulate the re-exploration of old territory. The need

for such exploration and re-exploration is generated by the

humpty-dumpty state of contemporary Emerson criticism.

Emerson criticism from the beginning has been a center for

disagreement and contradiction. Modern Emerson criticism

inherited the frustration and anxiety immanent within

nineteenth-century assessments. Although his major poems

and essays have been re-examined by modern and contemporary

critics, they have been examined, more often than not,

individually and in isolation from his life. Contemporary

critical conclusions have been as divergent as the critical

methods or approaches used. Within our own century, Emerson

the essayist and poet has been severed from Emerson the

man. Today's reader knows very little about Emerson's

life, and the result has been not only a critical innocence

about the man behind the essays and poems but also an in­

ability to come to grips with Emerson as a whole.

A study which proposes mainly to explore necessarily

limits itself to incompleteness: if it is a true explora­

tion, it must avoid the tendency toward dogmatic certitude.

 5

My study has had to contend with its own set of demons.

One demon I've battled with throughout has been the demon

of influence: to get very close to Emerson i often to

imitate him. Another demon has been my tendency, arising

from my interest in his biography and historical environment,

toward reductionism and oversimplification. Historical con­

texts and facts can lead us into Emerson, but they cannot,

by themselves, explain Emerson. But neither can New-Critical

methods which treat a man's literary works in isolation from

his life, whether it be the external life of events or the

internal life of moods, feelings, and ideas. Continually I

have sought to establish a balance between these two critical

perspectives. Yet another demon arose out of the order-

seeking critical mind contending with Emerson. His ideas

are often presented in his essays as beads without a string;

the critical mind, on the other hand, is a natural string-

maker and easily engages in quote-stringing. The imbedded

fallacy in quote-stringing is that the critical mind (and

not Emerson) provides the string, so that the conclusions

are ours, not necessarily Emerson's, since the string and

its shape make the necklace. Of course, we can never fully

exorcise the demon of critical fictions from our work, but

only de-energize his influence by our humble awareness of

the nature and limitations of our work.

 6

My sympathy for Emerson has had a formative and, at

times, distorting influence. In his Emerson on the Soul.

Jonathan Bishop extensively discusses the influence that

our positive or negative feelings towards Emerson can have

in forming our critical stance. A sympathy for Emerson can

make a reader want to "take on" the less sympathetic

critics, to condemn their errors or short-sightedness.

The limitations of such a critical stance are the natural

limitations of anger, the obvious deceptions of defensive­

ness : once the air is cleared of the smoke over-kill,

nothing has been added to our understanding of Emerson,

since the focus was never on him in the first place. A

sympathy for Emerson can make a reader want to ignore the

critics entirely, but such a critical stance is often

weakened by egotism, naivete, and lack of scholarly rele­

vance. A sympathy for Emerson, however, can generate a

desire to understand his critics. In a way, a man creates

his critics. By the decisions and choices that he has

made, he sketches in the circumference of the circle with­

in which he not only lives and writes but also may be

understood or even misunderstood. Observation and analysis

of the areas within Emerson criticism which have most

sharply divided his critics can lead us to an understanding

of the forces contending within Emerson and what he wrote.

While I do not want to imply that there is necessarily a

one-to-one relationship between the problems Emerson had

 7

to deal with and the problems his critics have confronted,

I believe that the frustration, perplexity, and anxiety

experienced by his serious readers are generated by

Emerson's style of writing and his process of composition.

To understand his critics is to begin, at least, to under­

stand Emerson.

The trends in Emerson criticism have added a further

complexity to my exploratory path. His twentieth-century

critics have tacitly agreed that he and his works can only

be handled critically in parts. The student of Emerson,

as a result, often confronts in criticism a number of per­

spectives which, for the most part, little resemble each

other and often present contradictory conclusions. The

two principal studies of Emerson written in the twentieth

century split him in half: one treats the external man,

the other the " inner life" of Emerson. I have attempted,

in this study, to use certain paths into Emerson’s process

of composition not only to add to our critical understanding

of Emerson but also to close the gap between the two major

twentieth-century studies of Emerson: Ralph Rusk's Life

of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stephen Whicher's Freedom and

Fate : An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In the first chapter, "Preliminary Explorations in

Search of Natural Order," I sketch out the elements of

purpose, direction, and choice within the Emerson we

encounter in the journals through 1849 and during his

 8

brief career as a preacher. The focus within this chapter

is upon purpose, direction, and choice as they relate to

his life, ideas, and writing. The two "lives of Emerson"

with which we are most familiar--the external life of the

man (Rusk's concern)— the internal life of his ideas or

philosophy (Whicher*s concern)— are intrinsically related

to and sometimes spring out of his "life" as a journal-

writer. His journal operates as an integrating tool during

this period: his life informs his writing and his writing

informs his life. "Preliminary Explorations in Search of

Natural Order" explores the biographical and literary

development of the Emerson of the mid- and late 1840's ,

lauded by the major critics as the "mature" Emerson.

In "Emerson as Lecturer: The Old Lord Necessity,"

I explore the Emersonian role which is least understood

and rarely examined by contemporary critics. Within this

chapter, I examine why and how Emerson lectured. In so

doing, I have tried to expose the biographical myth of

Emerson as "rich man" which springs out of a misinterpre­

tation of his financial condition by twentieth-century

critics. While the lectures have long been recognized as

the "bridge" between the journals and the essays, the

nature of that "bridge" has never been examined in other

than an aesthetic sense. I examine Emerson as a lecturer,

then, not only to present more clearly the nature of his

 9

role as a lecturer and the influence it had upon the

essays, but also to suggest that predominant critical

misconceptions about Emerson's financial condition between

1835 and 1855 are responsible in large part for the popular

mistrust of him in our own day as well as for the general

critical resistance today to closer examination of his life.

In "The Transformation of Grief into Affirmation: The

Experience of *Threnody and 'The Poet,'" I examine the

nexus of experience during and after the death of Emerson*s

young son, Waldo, which created a major turning point in

his development as an individual and as an artist. I

examine the experience of Waldo's death in terms of the

transformation which emerged from it both in Emerson* s life

and in his work. My study of the poem "Threnody" not only

related the poem to Emerson* s grief and the transformative

effect it had upon him, but it also explores the relation­

ship between that poem and many other poems as well as at

least two of his most famous essays. My major objective

within this chapter is to clarify how raw experience affects

the process of composition as well as the influence his

writing at this time had upon his life.

In my final chapter, "A Sane Discontent: The Anxiety

of Response," I examine anxiety as it relates to both

Emerson*s purpose and the critical response. The first

part of this chapter examines Emerson*s purpose, especially

 10

the effect he wanted to have upon his readers. The second

part of this chapter focusses upon the response to Emerson

and the way in which Emerson creates his own critics.

My purpose throughout this study has been to explore

Emerson and his critics rather than to justify him at the

expense of his critics. For most of the two hundred years

of Emerson criticism, an abyss has existed separating

Emerson from his critics. I do not expect my study to

effect the miracle of closing that gap; I do hope, however,

that from my study will emerge some suggestions, some

directions for other critical minds to use in continuing

the effort to close that gap. I could not have completed

this study without the direction of earlier critical studies.

In many cases, I have received the best assistance from read­

ing those critics with whom I most strongly disagree and

from attempting to understand the processes and forces

within Emerson which have generated our divergent critical

responses to him. I hope that no one approaching my study

expects to find an exhaustive, point-by-point, work-by-

work examination of Emerson's process of composition.

What I have attempted to do, instead, is work through a

few exemplary topics in his life as writer and in the

writing of his life, presenting a perspective on Emerson

which I hope can mediate the distance between Rusk and

Whicher.
 Chapter 1

PRELIMINARY EXPLORATIONS IN SEARCH OF NATURAL ORDER

HINTS FOR A PECULIAR PURSUIT: THE EARLY JOURNALS

Emerson began his journal as an experiment rather than

with a particular purpose in mind. After his junior year

at Harvard, when he was just seventeen, he took stock of

his use of the journal in an entry dated 23 August 1820,

and concluded that while " it has not encroached upon other

occupations . . . it has "prevented the ennui of many an

idle moment" and "has perhaps enriched my stock of language

for future exertions. Much of it has been written with a

view to their preservation, as hints for a peculiar pursuit

at the distance of years." Beginning a new journal after

the end of his first volume (actually, a commonplace book),

Emerson says in an entry written in October of 1820 that he

is granting "a new charter to my pen," because of his

success in keeping his commonplace book, "whose whole aim

was the small utility of being the exchequer to the accum­

ulating store of organized verbs, nouns and substantives,

to wit, sentences." ^

Emerson's earliest extant journals little resemble

his later journals, for they are little more than common­

place books, collections of phrases and sentences culled

11
 12

from his reading. We occasionally encounter his own words

and thoughts, rarely free from self-consciousness, when he

is summarizing, rephrasing, or commenting upon someone

else*s thoughts in drafts of his undergraduate papers,

drafts of philosophical letters to Aunt Mary Moody Emerson,

or adolescent imitations of writers he admired.

The earliest experiment at keeping a journal, I would

suggest, was also an experiment in finding a purpose for

the journal. It was not until Emerson had almost completed

his first experiment in journal-keeping that he began to

muse over the purpose. Since the journal has yet to assume

its own value, he is encouraged at first by the fact that

his private writings do not interfere with the more important,

clearly purposive "other occupations" of a young under­

graduate at Harvard. And since, for the large part, he

could not or did not fill his idle moments with the extra­

curricular activities engaged in by other young under­

graduates, the early journals relieved him of idleness

and boredom.
Yet, neither of these are purposes for a .journal:

they could as well be reasons for collecting stamps or

reading popular novels. Emerson perhaps sensed this while

writing his initial assessment, for he takes the first

step toward formulating a purpose when he considers that

the commonplace book "has perhaps enriched my stock of

 13

language for future exertions'* and preserved "hints for a

peculiar pursuit at the distance of time." Both of these

suggestions, these experimental statements in pursuit of

a purpose, are seed for later fruit. The first suggestion

points to the emphasis Emerson already had in his reading

— to read not so much what a writer says as how he says it

— and it is suggestive, not only of the 1ype of " influence"

reading had upon Emerson then and later, but also of the

" influence" Emerson later had upon himself and his readers

"at the distance of years." When, in October of 1820, the

seventeen-year-old Emerson granted himself "a new charter

to my pen," he had begun that pursuit of himself which

would, in "the distance of years," result in those later

transformations branching off from the journals--the

sermons, the lectures, the poems, and the essays.

THE HIEROGLYPHIC SOLUTION; EMERSON AS PREACHER AND THE

IDEA OF COMPENSATION

In the Introduction to Nature, first published in

September of I836, Emerson wrote, "Every man's condition

is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would

put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as

truth."2 Experience of "truth," then, precedes conscious

or mental apprehension of "truth"; comprehension proceeds

from experience. This is, certainly, a basic Emersonianism

— a central principle, as it were, which, like a pebble

 14

tossed into a still pond and creating larger and larger

circular ripples across the surface of the water, strikes

parallel reverberations in both Emerson's life and his

writing.
Emerson's brief career as a Unitarian minister is

often considered, at least implicitly, as a personal

choice; but the more we examine the family history and the

circumstances preceding his entry into the ministry, the

more we are impressed with the decisive influence of

tradition. Becoming a minister was a necessary part of

Emerson's "solution in hieroglyphic," for an important

aspect of his early "condition" was the need to come to

terms with "the dry bones of the past" before he could

seek his own "original relation to the universe." Ralph

Rusk says in the standard biography of Emerson, "During all

but about forty-three of Concord's one hundred and seventy-

nine years of existence, the preachers in the town's pulpit

had been Ralph's ancestors with the one exception of Ezra

Ripley, but Ripley was the boy's step-grandfather and

almost an Emerson." Concord was the hub of Emerson's

ancestry: "as late as 1814 nearly all of the American

geography of Ralph's family could have been included in a

circle a hundred miles in diameter with either Concord or

Boston as the center. A radius of about thirty-five miles

would have reached all but one or two outlying villages

 15

that mattered" in Emerson's family history.3 Rusk's

description presents the picture of a young Emerson hemmed

in by an ancestral circle. Although we can err in seeking

to determine the exact degree of its influence or control,

there can be little doubt that Emerson felt pressure from

this ancestral circle which would make his world for him.

Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, who often came to live in the

Emerson home while Ralph Waldo was a child, made him

acutely aware of his ancestral heritage at an early age.

She was his major advocate for a life as a minister. When

he chose to leave the pulpit, she became as fierce in

criticism of him as she had once been in support of him.

In fact, after the publication of his Essays in 1841,

Aunt Mary told him that she regretted that he "had not

gone to the tomb amidst his early honors" (as pastor of

Second Church, we suppose) rather than live to be dis­

graced by his Essays.

Emerson once commented, "The difficulty is that we do

not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions

already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to

be useful at all, and this accommodation is, I say, a loss

of so much integrity and, of course, of so much p o w e r . "5

This statement is closely related to the conception of

personal power in the essay "Self-Reliance" (the essay in

the 1841 series which infuriated Aunt Mary the most).

 16

the Introduction to Nature calling for "an original relation

to the u n i v e r s e a n d the Divinity School Address. These

works, first issued in the years 1836-1841, are centrally

related to the crisis of 1832 which resulted in Emerson's

resignation as minister of Second Church, Boston. Although

their meaning far exceeds the particularity of historical

facts, their central core of self-reliance was first molded

within the personal crisis of 1832 when Emerson felt most

keenly within his own life the extreme disparity between

tradition and personal insight. What he later wrote of

"every man's condition" in the Introduction to Nature was

first true of his own condition: he, too, had to act it as

life before he could apprehend it as truth. We can't say

he had to apprehend it before he could write it, unless we

choose to be more faithful to logical priority than to the

priority which existed within Emerson, for the intensity of

his message of self-reliance in these years implies that his

apprehension of truth was inherently a part of his process

of writing.

Emerson's intuition of the truth of self-reliance

springs out of his own experience. The crisis within him

that precipitated his revolt against systematic thought and

adherence to the path followed by earlier men also caused

him to resign from the pulpit at Second Church and quit the

ministry, after only six years as a Unitarian minister and

 17

less than four years as ordained pastor of the Second Church

of Boston. That act was as emblematic as any fact that

Emerson saw in nature ; when he gave up the Unitarian pulpit,

he essentially gave up all pulpits of promulgation, although

this fuller implication may not have been apparent to him in

1832. He was no longer to be a "preacher" in any sense of

the word, not even a preacher of his own system of thought.

When he broke from the Unitarian system— although it was a

structure loose enough for skeptical elbow room— he broke

from all preformed systems. We must not assume, however,

that these fuller implications of the break in 1832 with

the Unitarian system preceded or even accompanied the

historical experience. It is very likely that his appre­

hension proceeded from the experience through the medium

of the works he was beginning to write after his return in

late 1833 from the European tour which quickly followed his

resignation from Second Church.

From his own experience he expressed that any idea,

persisted in, develops walls and becomes a prison.

Although today's reader may be most familiar with this con­

cept as it appears in "The Poet," the essay published in

the 1844 second series of E s s a y s .6 the concept appears in

the journal as early as 1835*. "the truest state of mind,

rested in, becomes false" (13 May 1835)i "there is no wall

like an idea" (late October 1835); "men are imprisoned by

 18

Ideas" (9 November I 836).7 The earliest development of

this idea appears in Emerson's introductory lecture on

English Literature, first delivered 5 November 1835: "A man

thinks. He not only thinks, but he lives on thoughts; he

is the prisoner of thoughts; ideas, which in words he re­

jects, tyrannize over him, and dictate or modify every

word of his mouth, every act of his hand. There are no

walls like the invisible ones of an idea ."8 Emerson's

183? address "The American Scholar" discusses the tyran­

nical aspect of ideas in terms of our "great mischief"

with books.9 Most likely, the concept of the idea as

prison figures in more works by Emerson than I note here

or have located. Yet, as the dates on these journal

entries and earliest works indicate, the concept takes

root in Emerson during the years in which he is apprehend­

ing his need for and the difficulty in forming "an original

relation with the universe." It would, of course, take

time to realize organically in his thinking the full range

of what he had experienced, but because he had the experi­

ence of a preacher in 1826-1832--and kept a journal— he

would eventually realize it, and the action of his thought

would generate new objects within nature : the essays and

poems.

Emerson's need as a preacher to come up with fresh

sermons on a regular basis led him to the practical use

 19

to which his journals could be put. Within a few days of

his ordination as pastor of Second Church, Emerson wrote in

his journal, "I fear nothing now except the preparation of

sermons. The prospect of one each week, for an indefinite

time to come is almost terrifick."10 He solved his anxiety

at Second Church by preaching what Rusk called "his current

thought." Says Rusk: "if some alert deacon of the Second

Church could have leafed through the little volumes of his

pastor's journals covering a period of eight or ten years

he would, with reasonable luck, have come upon nearly all

the peculiar ideas delivered from the pulpit since Waldo

Emerson became pastor,"H

Emerson's "fear" became "almost terrifick" when he

was tied to one pulpit and preached to one audience, but

he had felt that fear to a certain extent earlier, in his

unattached years as a visiting minister. Even in those

days, original sermon-writing was such a slow process for

him that he literally wore out one sermon to avoid either

the fear or the tediousness of preparing new ones. After

he was licensed to preach in October of 1826, he proceeded

to preach the same sermon on prayer on four different

12
occasions in the next four months.

Although these earliest sermons show signs of reliance

on the journals, it was not until faced with the "almost

terrifick" fear of writing a new sermon each week at

 20

Second Church that he developed the regular habit of dipping

into the well of his journals for material.

In the years to come, as a lecturer, Emerson would

discover that his lectures could be only as diverse as his

journals were; his journals could only be as diverse as his

mental explorations were. In the early days of his reli­

ance on the journals for sermon material, the journals did

not have yet the diversity they would develop in later years.

Most of Emerson's earliest sermons, written during the two

and a half years he spent as a visiting preacher, dealt

with aspects of the idea of Compensation. Compensation

w a s , as Bliss Perry has pointed out, an early idea for

Emerson, dating back at least to 1826, when, in late

February or March, the 22-year-old divinity student wrote

in his journal, "The whole of what we know is a system of

compensation. Every defect in one manner is made up in

another. Every suffering is rewarded; every sacrifice is

made up; every debt is paid."1^ While it is difficult to

pinpoint the first appearance of this concept in Emerson's

early journal, an entry made in 1820, when he was only

seventeen years old, suggests that the concept of Compen-

sation was already a part of his thought. Throughout

the early journals, the concept occurs again and again, as

he records examples of Compensation at work within his

daily experience as well as illustrations of the concept

culled from his reading.

 21

Compensation was not merely a recurrent topic in the

early journals; it was the idea that filled Emerson's sky

at that time. He was experiencing what he would express

only much later as true about the nature of the Genius and

the Poet: that the Genius and the Poet stand closer to

nature, actually see within and through nature, and observe

the same eternal principles operating under the surface of

appearance.^ For Emerson, Compensation was one of those

eternal principles. But the Genius or Poet is not a mer­

chant pressing a new product on a reluctant consumer. The

early journals suggest, here and there, Emerson1s sense of

the uselessness of arguing a point. After his resignation

from Second Church and after his return from Europe to pur­

sue eventually a new career as a lecturer, he wrote in his

journal that from that date, 8 September 1833, "I have no

call to expound."^ He did not work to convince anyone of

the "truth" he saw— about Compensation or anything else—

for he realized that even the most carefully constructed

logical argument is no more convincing than the reader or

listener allows it to be. Besides, he didn't care for the

lie at the core of such a carefully constructed argument.

A man, he felt, should not be deluded in order to receive

truth. Let the truth itself, through repetition over a

period of time in different forms, convince a man; such

repetition is natural, a literary technique which mirrors

 22

the repetition of natural principles in different appear­

ances. Such a use of repetition over a period of time also

reflects Emerson's own path of self-discovery in the journals.

The idea of Compensation persisted throughout his

writing career. It appears in the early sermons; in the

journals, especially through I836; in the lectures, especially

in "Duty," first delivered in February of 1839; in several

of the essays included in the 1841 series of Essays and not

merely in the one entitled "Compensation"; and implicitly

in most of Emerson's later works. Repetition in new forms

was the organic and natural "argument," the proper vehicle

for truth. Nevertheless, Compensation did not achieve such

a degree of importance to Emerson simply because he per­

ceived it as one of the eternal principles working in nature.

Like the other ideas which would achieve dominance for him

in later years, Compensation had personal significance for

him. It provided him with an alternative as a minister to

the gloomy view of justice usually portrayed from the pulpit.

It also provided him as an individual with a comforting

overview of the pattern of sorrows and joys within his own

life. According to Rusk, the concept of Compensation in

the early sermons served as Emerson's attempt "to refute

the doctrine, then, as Emerson believed, commonly taught

in churches, 'that judgment is not executed in this world;

that the wicked are successful; that the good are miserable."
 23

Evolving different sermons over a period of time out of

journal material dealing with aspects of the idea of Com­

pensation, Rusk says, Emerson wove these "old threads of

thought . . . into more formal and usually less orthodox

patterns."I? These direct and formal attempts to refute

the popular doctrine regarding universal justice were

basically unsuccessful. His sermons on Compensation

either were not understood or were simply too abstract

and formal to have significance for his congregation.

They were successful only in that they gradually revealed

to him the unorthodox bent of his own mind and conviction,

and in this way contributed to his eventual resignation as

p a stor of Second Church.

Rusk also notes that Emerson's persistent interest in

Compensation reflects his personal and " incessant endeavor

15
to adjust himself to the tragedy of his own losses

Henry Pommer basically agrees with Rusk on this point,

adding that Emerson's intellectual concept of Compensation

sprang out of the constant cycles of what he himself called

19
" joy . . . speedily supplanted by grief." The anxiety

caused by these cycles is first evident as early as 1820

in his journals, which is about the time that Emerson first

refers to the concept of Compensation. In other words,

Compensation did not have value for Emerson merely as a

" truth," but gradually became an active agent within his

spiritual faith.
 24

To sense his personal commitment to this concept, we

need to know more about those cycles of joy and sorrow in

his life. The joys within Emerson's early life were simple

and few: the intellectual enjoyment he received from his

reading, keeping a journal, and writing philosophical

letters to Aunt Mary Moody Emerson; the promising advent

of his career as a minister ; his early months of marriage

to Ellen Tucker in 1829. But little has been said, outside

of their factual inclusion in Rusk's biography, about the

events composing the cycles of sorrow in Emerson's early

life. Between 1826, the year he was licensed to preach,

and 1832, when he resigned as pastor of Boston's Second

Church, Emerson experienced these sorrows: in 1828, the

nervous breakdown of his brother Edward— the sudden descent

from glory of the Emerson everyone saw as destined for

greatness; in 1831, the death of his first wife, Ellen,

from tuberculosis; and, beginning in 1826 and persisting

throughout early manhood, a constant sense of his own reedy

existence with weak lungs that continually threatened to

develop tuberculosis. But these were not the only dark

moments within Emerson's early life. Illness and death

were not new to him. The "tragedy" of these years, to use

Rusk's phrase, was Emerson's inability to cope with the

anxiety of imminent loss around him and within him.

Illness and death had formed a regular and persistently

 25

repetitive pattern within Emerson's life since childhood.

Not even as a child had he been isolated from the reality

of death. In 1807. when he was three years old, his seven-

year-old brother, John Clarke, died of lung inflammation.

In 1311, when he was seven years old, his father died at

age 42 of a stomach tumor after years of broken health.

Afterwards, the young Ralph Waldo suffered for some time

from what was then called a "humour," similar to what we

today know as depression. Three years later, in 1814, when

he was eleven years old, his only surviving sister, Mary

Caroline, died suddenly at age three. (Another sister,

Phebe, had died when she was two years old in 1800, before

Emerson's birth.) Of the seven children born to William

and Ruth Emerson, only Ralph Waldo and one brother would

survive to live beyond early manhood.

Furthermore, Emerson had suffered from rheumatism

since early childhood. Later, it settled in his hip; many

of his early sermons at Second Church were delivered while

he was seated, and during this time he walked only by use

of a cane. He had had serious eye problems when he was

twenty-two years old, and the problems with his sight re­

curred thereafter. He also had lung inflammations through­

out early manhood. After Ellen's death in February of

1831, he suffered from chronic diarrhea for over five

months, brought on by the nervous strain caused by her death.
 26

This disorder was so acute as to keep him from his duties as

pastor of Second Church and make it impossible for him to

accomplish much of anything. Not a healthy man before this

disorder, five months of chronic diarrhea left him, in his

own words, "as white & thin as a ghost." i/Vhen the persist­

ence of this disorder seemed to be life-threatening, he was

aclviggd to voyage. He was too ill to preach his formal

farewell sermon at Second Church. When he left on the

Jasper for Europe on Christmas Day, 1831, the captain of

the Jasper believed that "the ex-minister of the Second

Church was too sick to survive the winter crossing of the

Atlantic."20 Under such circumstances, "easy pessimism"

is the simplest resolution, rather than the "easy optimism'

21
of which Emerson is often accused by his severest critics.

The resolution that he ultimately achieved was neither

simple nor easy. Nor did it occur quickly. Instead,

resolution evolved slowly and only after he had experienced

repetition of the pattern of illness, death, and grief over

a period of years. He found some physical relief during the

crossing of the Atlantic in the winter of 1831; rather than

fulfilling the captain's prophesy, Emerson not only sur­

vived but also regained his physical health during that

pp
voyage across the ocean. There seems to be some central

link between these instances of physical illness before

1840 and an emotional inability to cope with grief;

 27

apparently time and distance and changing circumstances

worked to heal the hurt of grief, and physical recovery

followed. In late April of 1832, Emerson noted in Rome

that his health was then the best it had been since he

was a young boy.

Four years later, on 9 May 1 8 3 6 , Emerson's brother

Charles died suddenly of tuberculosis. The sudden death

of this brother, with whom Emerson felt a close link,

plunged him into extreme nervous strain for five months,

reminiscent of the debilitating five months he had endured

after the death of Ellen five years earlier. This time,

however, the anxiety of grief apparently did not express

itself through physical illness. He seems to have plunged,

instead, into a deep depression with suicidal overtones.

He noted at the time that he felt "a sort of shame at

living at all" and asked "What is there worth living for?"

Rusk says that the strain Emerson endured during this time
• pit
severely shook the foundations of his philosophy.

Certainly the experience at least revealed to him how little

there was in his philosophy to support him during his dark

night of the soul. Nevertheless, the experience did not

deter him from the path he had chosen for himself on 8

September 1833, returning from Europe, in a journal entry

written while still at seat "this is my charge, plain and

clear, to act faithfully upon my own faith; to live by it

 28

myself, and see what a hearty obedience to it will do."

Such a "charge" meant becoming acutely aware of any weak­

ness within that faith and having to endure any resulting

spiritual trauma without easy solutions from others.

In late August or early September, about four months

after Charles• death, Emerson insisted in his journal that

"nothing needs so much to be preached as the law of Com­

pensation out of the nature of things, that the good exalts

& the evil degrades us not hereafter but in the moment of

the deed." Here, the aspect of Compensation which is

emphasized is the spontaneous internal effect on a person

of his good or evil deed. Compensation is not mentioned in

these circumstances as an abstract natural law, as a dis­

tant truth, even though Emerson's severest critics have

claimed that Compensation had little more than an abstract

significance for him. The critical skepticism toward his

concept of Compensation centers on his apparent disregard

for the reality of evil. His concept of evil has been

misrepresented or distorted by some critics. The most

influential of these misrepresentations have not been the

pointed attacks upon Emerson's concept but rather those

misrepresentations which have occurred, perhaps uninten­

tionally, as part of works which include but do not center

upon Emerson. For example, in F. 0. Matthiessen's dis­

cussion in his American Renaissance, Emerson naturally

 29

appears rather naive about evil when continually juxtaposed

with Hawthorne and Melville, New England's masters of the

dark vision. Emerson's naivete, however, is merely a pro­

duct of Matthiessen's method of examination.

But since his concept of evil has been misrepresented

in major criticism, and since the skepticism toward his

concept of Compensation feeds chiefly off the misrepresen­

tation of his concept of evil, we need to look more closely

at what Emerson is saying and not saying about the nature

of evil. To understand what he meant by "good" and " evil,"

we should turn to his definitions for them in "The Divinity

School Address." Although the "Address" was delivered in

1838, Emerson had begun writing it as early as 1835, the

year before Charles* death.28 Seven months after Charles*

death and only a few months after his journal entry on the

spontaneous workings of Compensation, Emerson recorded in

his journal a conversation he had with Charles Chauncy

Shackford regarding Brownson*s statement "of the positive­

ness or entity of moral evil." Here, in this journal

entry we have the source for the definitions which would

appear later in "The Divinity School Address."29 Recording

his comments from the conversation with Shackford, Emerson

writes, "I maintained that evil is merely privative not

absolute. It is like cold the privation of heat. All

evil is death. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much

 30

benevolence & justice as a man hath, so much life hath he

. . . absolute badness is absolute privation. It is anni­

hilation. Pure badness therefore could not exist. Do you

30
not see that a man is a bundle of relations . . .?"

These are not only the definitions used in the "Divinity

School A d d r e s s t h e s e are also the definitions which

underlie any discussion of evil in terms of Compensation in

the works published at a later date. The journal entry

clearly spells out what is strongly implied in the "Divinity

School Address": "pure" evil does not exist. Emerson does

not here or elsewhere deny the apparent reality of evil

and its manifestations within human experience— pain,

sickness, and pessimism especially. He simply refuses to

conceive of a dualistic universe divided between the forces

of two essential powers, the power of good and the power of

evil. This refusal is Emerson's major split with popular

interpretations of the nature of the universe. In dis­

agreeing with Melville's and Hawthorne's dark vision, he

is agreeing with Augustine and the Neo-Platonic tradition

that, in the words of Plotinus, evil exists only as "a

31
certain form of not-being." What Emerson denies to evil

is ontological reality; evil is simply the absence of good.

The good, the spirit of universal and cosmic benevolence,

is the essential source of life and nature and power.

The power feeding self-reliance comes from this spirit

 31

within the individual. Since evil has no essential reality

or power, it achieves apparent reality only in the privation

of good. Not only is there no absolute force of evil in the

universe, but there is not even a man who is totally evil

in even the "apparent" sense. Emerson's statement that

"All evil is death" is not meant to equate evil with death

so much as it is meant to clarify that he is speaking of

evil in terms of how it affects the individual: evil works

within man to obstruct life and gradually annihilate the

individual's powers which affirm life.

Emerson's lecture "Tragedy," first delivered in 1839,

the year after the delivery of the "Divinity School Address,M

turns upon a central discussion of good and evil in human

affairs. In that lecture, he is agreeing with the central

thesis of the critics of our own day who most harshly

criticize what they consider to be the crack in the founda­

tion of Emerson's optimism, when he says in that lecture :

"He has seen but half the Universe who never has been shown

the House of Pain . . . No theory of life can have any solid­

ity which leaves out of account the value of Vice, Pain,

Disease, Poverty, Insecurity, Disunion, Affection, Fear,

and D e a t h . " H e r e , in the lecture "Tragedy," we encounter

Emerson's fullest discussion of evil and "the House of

Pain." It is likely that he referred to this lecture,

perhaps even taking isolated sentences from it, when touch­

ing upon this topic while writing the later essays.

 32

From his life, we know that he had more than his adequate

share of experience within " the House of Pain." It is only

when we recall his experience as well as his major state­

ments on the nature of evil and "the House of Pain" that

we can begin to understand his preference for avoiding pro­

longed discussion of illness or death and reading what he

33
called " the sad in literature." Since evil exists only

in the privation of good, it exists nowhere in the universe

but within the " bundle of relations" that is man. Evil

achieves power, then, only in the absence of power ; its

34-
effect within individuals is to "miscreate our own evils"^

and, through the possible influence of one individual upon

another through temperament, to spread this miscreation.

The implications of this process within man are found in

piecemeal fashion here and there in the essays and in

35
scattered journal entries ; however, these implications

are spelled out most fully in the 1839 lecture "Tragedy."

He says that "there are people who have an appetite for

grief." Since the essence of tragedy is in our " temperament,

not in events," those who "crave pain" always "mishear,"

"misbehold," "suspect," and "dread." They "seize every

rose by the thorn and in every meadow tread on the snake."

They a r e , then, M perverse solicitors of woe."^ By so

doing, they " interfere with the optimism of n a t u r e a s

Emerson phrases it in "Spiritual L a w s . " H e might have

 33

considered these appetites and cravings for negativity in

terms of the misuse of natural laws (implied in his term

"miscreate"); however, Emerson did not avoid evil, or men­

tion of it, from mere superstitious fear. He wasn't afraid

of the bogeyman. He believed the bogeyman existed not in

reality Out There, but in potential within each one of us.

He attributed a great power, then, to human expectation as

well as to the creative and miscreative ability of the

human imagination.
The whole of Emerson's thought on the law of Compensation

and the workings of good and evil rests upon his intuition

that nature is creative and good, and that the progressive

development within nature is always toward optimism.

Written after he regained emotional harmony and during a

period of relative physical health, "Compensation" was his

ambitious attempt to sketch in the perimeters of this

universal law; it is intentionally a bird's-eye view. It

is influenced both by his immediate well-being, caused to

a certain extent by the birth of his first son in late

1836,"^ and by the need to sketch in a comprehensive view

of the operation of this law. In "Compensation," because

of its scope, he can suggest that good eventually comes

out of calamity. Since the movement within nature is

always toward the essential Good, the movement within

human experience is toward spiritual growth. This develop­

ment is, of course, larger than the simple redress of a

 34

particular wrong. Emerson strongly implies that in happi­

ness man easily forgets the -whole system of things" and

stops growing spiritually. Calamity causes a spiritual

crisis which "breaks up" this stasis, this resistance to

growth found in the complacency that accompanies well-being.

Spiritual growth "comes by shocks." 39 jn early 1842,

Emerson again encountered the spiritual "shock" of calamity,

this time the death of his first son. "Experience" was

composed during and after this shock. Both essays trace

the immediate uselessness and unreality of grief. "Compen­

sation," because of the more comprehensive purpose of that

essay, suggests an eventual value for personal loss "after

long intervals of time." The organization of the essay

"Experience" is progressive, tracing a perception that

gradually widens in scope and deepens in comprehension,

working from appearance to reality through the progressive

stages of illusion, temperament, succession, surface,

40
surprise, reality, and Subject or the One. The passage

on grief and the reference to the death of Emerson’s son

occur in the first section, "Illusion." "Compensation,"

on the other hand, develops a comprehensive discussion of

the law of Compensation from a point of view that is con­

sistently above the illusional levels of human perception.

Of the two essays, "Experience" naturally engages us

more, perhaps mainly because of its emotional intensity.

 35

strong visual and tactile imagery, use of the personal

voice, and inclusion of personal experience. "Compensation"

may seem to be too obviously conscious of its comprehensive

purpose to appeal to us when we can have the intensity of

immersion within the "reality" of personal grief found in

"Experience." While the contrast between these two essays

may clarify which we prefer, we should hesitate before

assuming that the statement on grief in "Experience" con­

tradicts the view expressed in "Compensation," or that, as

Rusk assumed, Emerson's bleak view of the meaninglessness

of grief in "Experience" represents any personal failure

after 1342 to have depth of feeling. Emerson did not

change his mind in the years between the two essays about

the essential meaning of personal tragedy. "Compensation"

was published in 1841, about five years after Charles*

death; "Experience" was published in 1844, two years after

Waldo's death, although most of the passage which refers

to Waldo's death appears in the journal shortly after

Waldo's death in 1842. In "Experience," Emerson is writing

within grief, while in "Compensation" he was writing in

memory of past griefs. The major difference between the

two essays is in the perspectives within the essays.

In "Experience," he presses our noses against the

experience of grief and shows us that even in the immediacy

and detail of grief, there is no reality, not even a road

 36

into reality. In "Compensation," he takes us on an intel­

lectual magic carpet tour of the soul's comprehension of the

workings of the natural and universal law of Compensation.

Implicit in both is the realization that the soul is not

touched by g r i e f . ^ As he clarifies in "Experience" and

the lecture "Tragedy,” grief is superficial: it touches

only the surface of experience.

Nevertheless, when all the difference that examination

of literary technique and purpose can reveal is accounted

for, we still sense a central difference between the two

essays that has nothing to do with concept or stylistics or

literary technique. We sense a significant difference in

the Emerson who wrote them both. We recall Emerson's words

in "The Poet" that "All form is an effect of character: all

condition, of the quality of the life ; all harmony, of

/i2
health." "Compensation," like several of the other essays

in the first series of Essays (particularly "Love" and

"Friendship"), strikes us as having been written by one side

of Emerson, as if the mind or the soul could grow fingers

and write. These essays seem abstract, even cold.

"Experience" strikes us, however, as having been written

by a harmonized Emerson, an Emerson whose pen writes out

of flesh-and-blood experience and sketches in his thoughts

and feelings in equal intensity.

There is, indeed, a difference between the Emersonian

optimism of the pre-18E2 years and the Emersonian optimism

 37

of the post-1842 yearss the pivotal experience was the

death of his son, .Valdo, in January 1842. Those works

composed in the months immediately following his loss of

,Valdo— the journal origins of " E x p e r i e n c e " T h e Poet,"

and the poem "Threnody," to mention only a few— document

Emerson's gradual internalization of the "truth" of Com­

pensation: its necessary reality as a component of a working

faith in order not only to sustain loss but also to trans­

form grief at last into supreme affirmation, which is

nothing less than the integration of faith and life so

that each informs the other, so that life is the core of

outward faith, so that faith is the core of outward life.

Furthermore, his idea of Compensation, occurring as it does

throughout his works, is part of a process of composition

that is transformational. Emerson the man and Emerson the

writer are gradually united within this organic process of

transformation. To understand how this transformation

occurred, we need to examine the evolution of purpose and

direction within his journal between 1834 and 1849.

FROM EXCHEQUER TO QUARRY: THE COMPOSITION OF THE

JOURNALS, 1834-1849

After his return from Europe in 1833» Emerson began a

new volume of his journal by dubbing it his "savings'

bank," explaining, "I grow richer because I have somewhere

to deposit my earnings ; and fractions are worth more to me

 38

because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall

be made integers by their addition."43 This is a partic­

ularly rich statement regarding his concept of his journals

at the time— much richer, more purposively directed, and

much more concrete than his early musings in 1820 regarding

the value of keeping a journal. The first of the two 1820

statements, in its vagueness and uncertainly, can only

suggest the journals' future usefulness as reservoirs of

preserved "hints for a peculiar pursuit at the distance of

years." The second statement, written in October of 1820,

posits a "small utility" for the journal: the role of an

"exchequer" to a growing accumulation "of organized verbs,

nouns and substantives, to wit, sentences." This "small

utility" obviously developed beyond its first tentative

scope, for by late 1333 the journal is conceived, not as a

place to preserve, but as a place where Emerson can "grow

richer." By late 1833, the "exchequer" image, with all of

its historical and particularly British echoes, simply no

longer describes the journal. The journal no longer is

merely a receptical to hold the small coin culled from

books and other men's minds. It has become a very American

and practical "savings' bank" where "earnings," not stylis­

tic glitters culled from others, are deposited, not merely

for preservation, but now for the inevitable interest they

will earn while "fractions" combine with "fractions" to

become "integers." The emphasis has shifted from the

 39

preservation of units as_ units to "the recording of " fractions"

whose value is not to be found within themselves but within

the combination they will seek with each other in order to

become the "integers" that will make Emerson "richer."

There is, however, only a hint in this journal entry

of the transformational value he will later find for keeping

a journal. The "savings' bank" image, the best known of

Emerson's comments regarding the use of his j o u r n a l s , i s

not representative of his mature sensitivity to the function

of the journals. In fact, it can be misleading. The monetary

image, no matter how we look at it, is static. The "integer"

or sum of a pile of coins in no way changes the individual

coins themselves. It was not until 1839, after five years

of lecturing and almost three years after the publication of

Nature. that Emerson, again returning to the topic of the

value of the journals, wrote about the transformational

value already present in his journals. Even in his concep­

tion of his journals, indeed of his entire process of

composition, he worked from experience to conception or

mental awareness of what the experience meant. Those early

sentences in Nature ("Every man's condition is a solution in

hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as

life, before he apprehends it as truth") are as applicable

to his apprehension of his own compositional process as they

are to the general topic of man's apprehension of truth.

 40

Rather than leaping ahead to those central 1839 journal

entries, I would like to work up to them in much the way

Emerson did. The two 1839 entries are the result of a grad­

ual awareness of direction and purpose in his writing which

had been developing since about 1834, the year in which he

gave his first lectures.

The index to volume V of the JMN shows that between

1335 and 1838, Emerson made the majority of his journal

comments on composition itself, more so than in the other

volumes of the JMN combined. From 1835 to 1838, he was also

establishing himself as a lecturer and thus beginning to use

continually the journals as sources for lecture material and,

in the process, beginning to record journal entries with this

ultimate purpose in mind. The editors of volume V of the JMN'

list 28 references for "composition," although there are

actually many more, perhaps as many as 50 entries in volume

45
V which relate to the compositional process. ^ In contrast,

the index to volume VII (1838-1842) lists only two passages

under "composition," and "composition" does not even appear

as an index topic in volumes VIII (1841-1843) and IX (1843-

1347).
The topic of composition is discussed so often in the

journals between 1835 and 1838 because it was the topic

which filled Emerson* s sky for several years following his

return from the European tour of 1832-1833• It is impossible,

h e r e , to describe fully the significance that European tour

 41

had in moving Emerson into the new path he afterwards follow­

ed in his life, out of which came, at first, his lectures

and then the essays. We know that the European tour gave

him back his physical health and whetted a renewed interest

in literature and philosophy. These facts are certainly

significant ; however, one experience in particular, Snerscn's

visit to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris during the summer

of 1833, had a profound effect upon him, providing him with

a vital sense of the relationship among the physical, intel­

lectual, and spiritual levels of existence ^ and introducirg

him to the " finer" nature that natural objects assume when

they are "in composition"— that is, when natural objects

are not viewed individually but in relation to each other.

In such a relationship, natural objects become animated by

and are expressive "of some property inherent in man the

observer." By September of that year, the Jardin des Plantes

experience had led Emerson to this insight: "The highest

47
revelation is that God is in every man." So another

effect of the Jardin des Plantes experience was that it

gave him his first profound experiential glimpse of the "All

in each," a concept which is central to everything he wrote

thereafter. Nevertheless, within the immediate experience

of the Jardin des Plantes, it was the phenomena of natural

composition which stimulated his interest, and in the early

lectures delivered soon after his return from Europe, it is

 42

the process of composition within nature that he speaks most

avidly about.
In the lecture "The Naturalist," first delivered during

the late spring of 1834, Emerson said :

Nothing strikes me more in Nature than the

effect of Composition, the contrast between
the simplicity of the means and the gorgeous­
ness of the result. Nature is particularly
skilled in that rule of arthmetic called
Permutation and Combination . . . A few
elements has Nature converted into the count­
less variety of substances that fill the
earth. Look at the grandeur of the prospect
from a mountain top. It is composed of not
many materials continually repeated in new
unions.43

Emerson’s excitement is obvious: he is filled with awe for

"theeffect of Composition" within nature. He is "struck"

by " the contrast between the simplicity of the means and the

gorgeousness of the result." He admires the "skill" of

nature in converting "a few elements" into "the countless

variety of substances that fill the earth." He is impressed

with "the grandeur" of the result.

No doubt, his excitement with natural composition per­

sisted and led him to examples in other areas, for about a

year later, in his second lecture on Shakespeare, he again

returns to the topic of composition— this time, however, it

is poetic composition. If we study the "wonderful produc­

tions" of Shakespeare, Emerson says in this lecture, we

"see that they are no rhapsodies case forth at a heat but

like all other truly great productions are the union of

 4]

many parts each of which came solitary and slowly into the

mind and did not at first attain its full expansion." The

process of poetic composition, then, closely resembles the

process of natural composition. He presents composition in

this lecture as "a law that lies at the foundation of liter­

ature," and he defines the word as meaning a "putting to­

g e t her."^ Emerson then discusses natural composition— a

discussion which closely follows the earlier cited passage

from "The Naturalist” — only to return to verbal composition

in terms of oration. He explains that "the brilliant chain

of sentiments, facts, and illustrations" of the orator, used

to "fire" himself and his audience, is made up of "links,"

each of which the orator "found separate": "one ten years

ago ; one last week; some in his father's house or at his

first school; some of them by his losses ; some in his sick

bed; some through his crimes. . . . " The orator's " living

chain" is made up of "links" from experience over a wide

period of time, and the event or idea making up each "link"

may be, as in natural composition, a "common" element which

becomes "brilliant" only within the "natural affinities” of

composition itself. That these elements may originally

come from personal losses or even from earlier crimes re­

minds us of Emerson1s law of Compensation, whereby strength

develops eventually from out of w e a k n e s s . 5° The "powerful

secret" of composition, he continues, is what distinguishes

" the elaborate written poem" from " the rhapsody of the
 44

Pythoness or the chant of the improvisators (if it were

possible there should be any strictly extempore poetry)

Great poetry, he concludes, "is made up of many islands";

the poem is made up "of many thoughts each of which in its

turn filled the whole sky of the poet."

A year later, in late October of 1836, he returned to

the topic of natural composition, this time in his journal:

"The diamond & lamp black it seems are the same substance

differently arranged. Let it teach the importance of Com­

position" (JMN., V, p. 233). By this time, his attitude

toward natural composition has matured beyond the simple

admiration of the "gorgeous" result of natural composition

into the cooler perspective which notes the wider and deeper

implications of the natural law of composition.

Years after the second lecture on Shakespeare, Emerson

returned to the topic of poetic composition in the essay

"The Poet," but this time he wrote specifically about the

composition of symbols :

the distinctions which we make in events,

and in affairs, of low and high, honest
and base, disappear when nature is used
as a symbol. Thought makes every thing
fit for use. The vocabulary of an omnis­
cient man would embrace words and images
excluded from polite conversation. What
would be base, or even obscene, to the
obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in
a new connexion of thought.52.

Here, the "new connexion of thought" is the digested "law"

of composition, and the quality originally called

 45

"gorgeousness" is now perceived as being "illustrious," a

term suggestive of both essential, rather than superficial,

depth and expressiveness.

That the concept of composition, which developed out

of the vital experience at the Jardin des Plantes in 1833»

was important to Emerson during the 1835-1838 period is

obvious in the numerous references to it in his lectures

and journal entries of this time. He returned to it again

and again, tracing its outlines within new forms. A little

over a year after the first delivery of the second lecture

on Shakespeare, he talked about composition as part of "the

Mechanics of literature" in his lecture called "Literature"

in his Philosophy of History series. The novelty of the

discussion of composition within this lecture is the

analogy he developed between literary composition and

architectural composition*

It is what is already done that enables

the artist to accomplish the wonderful.
. . . One man . . . built a church.
. . . Another . . . spring Z s_/ an airy
arch thereon; a third adopted the foundation
and superstructure . . . .And thus is the
Chapel a work of the human mind altogether
transcending the abilities of any one man
at once. But suppose this done by one man
at different periods, whose foundation has
furnished him the hint of his grander
superstructure and the proportion of the
pile had suggested the afterthought of its
decoration, and you have the symbol of the
Epic poet.

Written composition can surpass any un­

written effusions of however profound a
 46

genius; for, what is already writ is a

foundation of the new superstructure, a
guide to the eye for new foundation, and
a provocation to proceed ; so that the work
rises, tower upon tower, with ever new and
total strength of the builder.53

The architectural image of the writer at different periods

building upon the earlier foundation and following its "hint

of his grander superstructure" not only unconsciously mirrors

the process by which Emerson composed the particular lecture

he is delivering at the moment, but it also suggests the new

way in which he is beginning to perceive the journals in

terms of usefulness over a large period of time. What is

"already writ" is not only "a foundation" upon which to

build, it also contains the necessary "provocation to proceed,"

so that as "the work rises," it contains within it the "new

and total strength of the builder." The result "transcends"

the abilities of the writer at any one particular time.

Not only is Emerson writing more about composition

itself during 1835-1833, but he is also becoming more in­

volved in the process of composition itself by transforming

journal entries into lectures, and by initiating a new type

of " intermediate" journal, which first came dominantly into

use in 1835. He already kept two other kinds of journals—

quotation notebooks and the consecutive journals (e.g.,

Journal B runs from January 1835 to December 1836; Journal

C runs from January 1837 to June 1838). But in 1835» he

also began to use miscellaneous composition notebooks, where­

in passages from earlier journals a n d , occasionally, from

 47

lectures were recopied by topic. These intermediate journals

were used for the "putting together" of compositions.

One example during this period is the short journal

he designated as RO, which he first used in 1835 as a place

to adapt selections from earlier journals which relate to

"the First Philosophy"— specifically, passages written

earlier in 1835 in Journal B as well as materials drawn from

from Journal Q (August 1832) and Journal A (April-August

1834).^ Only sixteen manuscript pages of journal RO are

published in Volume V of J M .^ Yet within these pages are

phrases which will be used in Nature ; phrases drawn from the

lecture first delivered a year earlier, in January 1834, "On

the Relation of Man to the Globe," an early lecture of great

importance in tracing the growth of Emerson's ideas on this

topic, ideas most readers are familiar with only in his later

essays ; about three paragraphs of material which will be used

in the lecture "Religion"; and about one and a half para­

graphs of material which first appeared in the concluding

lecture of his series on Human Culture, and which later,

drawn from the lecture, appeared in the 1842 Dial essay,

"The Senses and the Soul." Occasionally, earlier material

is simply copied into the journal he called R O ; b u t , most of

the time, when comparing the RO entries with the earlier

sources, the JMN editors of volume V have clarified in foot­

notes that the process involved revision, adaptation, or

 48

amplification of the original material. Thus, by the time

that the occasional comments on keeping a journal begin to

be more concerned with transformation of earlier material

rather than merely with the accumulation of material, this

change has already occurred in Emerson’s actual use of the

journals.

On either 15 or 16 April 1839, after almost five years

of writing and delivering lectures, Emerson wrote in his

journal a rather complex evaluative comment regarding the

use of a journal:

Artificial Memory Value of a Catalogue . . .

The simple knot of Now & Then will give
an immeasureable value to any sort of catalogue
or journal kept with common sense for a year
or two. See in the Merchant's compting room
for his peddling of cotton & indigo, the value
that comes to be attached to any Blotting book
or Leger. . . .That book or literary fact which
had the whole emphasis of attention a month ago
stands here along with one which was as important
in preceding months, and with that of yesterday;
&, next month, there will be another. Here they
all occupy but four lines & I cannot read these
together without juster views of each than when
I read them singly.
(JMN, VII, p. 191)

Of course, "the Merchant's compting room" recalls Emerson's

" exchequer" image of October 1820 as well as his metaphorical

counting room or "savings' bank" image recorded in late

1833. Yet there is an important difference in this monetary

image in how Emerson places value. In both the "exchequer"

and "savings' bank" images, value attached itself to the

items being counted or recorded. The limitations of value

were the limitations of the leaves of the specific journal.

There is something concrete about the placement of value in

these earlier images. Within this late entry, on the other

hand, there is something elusive about the evaluation of the

journals. We can see this distinction more clearly by

focussing on where the emphasis falls in this "artificial

memory" journal entry. From the beginning, the emphasis is

upon the passage of time ; the value that the journals have

is located not so much within the journals as outside them

in the "simple knot" that exists among them, "the simple

knot of Now & Then" as Emerson phrased it. The value a

journal has is not measurable, as the earlier "fractions"

into "integers" suggests it is.

Emerson used the term "artificial memory" for the

journals for good reason. The natural memory also records

experience, but within the mind the items assume their own

order, their own rankings of value ; the items within the

natural memory are caught within the flux of their own

concentric circles, one item so linked with another that to

separate them would diminish each's value. Within the

"artificial memory" of the journals, however, the items of

recorded experience are, as it were, deep-frozen; they

appear singular and static, needing only the flash of heat

and light from the inspired imagination to be set into

motion again. The "artificial memory" records experience

within time, within the moment of experience; hence, each

 50

recorded experience contains within it its own sense of

being the idea or experience which filled Emerson* s horizon

at that particular time.

The final two sentences of this passage suggest the

fuller emphasis upon the passage of time in creating the

" immeasurable value" of his journals: "That book or literary

fact which had the whole emphasis of attention a month ago

stands here along with one which was an important in pre-

cedeing months, and with that of yesterday; &, next month,

there will be another. Here they all occupy but four lines

& I cannot read these together without juster views of each

than when I read them singly." The " juster views" of the

journals themselves come, not from seeing the objects them­

selves , but from seeing the objects through the symbols they

have become (i.e., their " existence" within the linguistic

symbol system of the "four lines"). The insight which

Emerson throughout his works persistently attributes to the

poet and the genius (that is, the eternal men) is specifically

an insight which pierces the appearance of things to see

their common spiritual essence ; for Emerson, as writer and

seer, this insight is, emphatically, symbolic insight: an

insight which comes through the symbolic representation of

objects and experiences within his journals. His insight

comes— and this is also clear in this journal entry— only

through the passage of time, for time must pass before he

can read them from a higher plane and form " juster views
of each than when I read them singly." He clearly implies

that this higher plane must be achieved before he can view

them as portions of a larger composition created by the

method, progressive arrangement, or selecting principle

immanent within him as it is within each man. Without the

higher plane which only passage of time brings, the natural

tendency of the mind to unify exaggerates and distorts;

caught within the horizon of the present moment, the mind's

unifying tendency becomes tyrant and cuts the world into

static blocks which can be handled by logic and artificial

means— not to later unify them into a composition which

equates or relates, but to later unify them within a

logical argument or theory which separates, excluding the

life of the mind from the life of experience. Without the

higher plane which only passage of time brings, the unify­

ing tendency of the mind creates exclusive ideas, ideas

which do not flow or change, ideas with walls that repel

further thought rather than stimulate thought, ideas which

become invisible but nevertheless very real prisons for

thought. Without the interlude provided by the artifice

of a journal, or some other symbol system, the thinking

man's dominant at that particular moment. In such circum­

stances, ideas take over and tyrannize man; man becomes the

instrument of his instrument. For Emerson, the journal—

his "artificial memory"— was a way to escape enslavement

by his own instrument.

 52

About seven months after his April journal entry on the

"artificial memory," Emerson wrote on 14 November 1839:

Systems.

I need hardly say to any one acquainted

with my thoughts that I have no System. When
I was quite young I fancied that by keeping a
Manuscript Journal by me, over whose pages I
wrote a list of the great topics of human
study, as, Religion, Poetry, Politics, Love,
&c in the course of a few years I should be
able to complete a sort of Encyclopaedia
containing the net value of all the definitions
at which the world had yet arrived. But at
the end of a couple of years my Cabinet
Cyclopaedia though much enlarged was no
nearer to a completeness than on its first
day. Nay somehow the whole plan of it needed
alteration nor did the following months
promise any speedier term to it than the
foregoing. At last I discovered that my
curve was a parabola whose arcs would never
meet, and came to acquiesce in the perception
that although no diligence can rebuild the
Universe in a model by the best accumulation
or disposition of details, yet does the World
reproduce itself in miniature in every event
that transpires, so that all the laws of nature
may be read in the smallest fact. So that the
truth speaker may dismiss all solicitude as
to the proportion & congruency of the aggregate
of his thoughts so long as he is a faithful
reporter of particular impressions.
(JMN, VII, pp. 302-303)

Coming as it does after at least nineteen years of keeping

a journal, after at least five years of writing lectures,

and less than two years before the composition of the first

series of Essays, this late 1839 journal entry is both

reflective of Emerson's past experience with the nature of

writing and prophetic of the path he will follow in the

Essays.
 53

The first half of this passage is the most literal and

prosaic statement Emerson ever made about the procedure

followed in his early journals. Here, in the first half

of this journal entry, we have his summary of his evolving

concept of the use of the journals: what it was much earlier

and what, by 1339, it had become. We have, furthermore,

not only his word that this summary is basically accurate,

we also have those early encyclopedic journals, those early

"exchequers" preserving the small coin culled from books

and other men's minds. We need only to examine the first

volumes of the JMN, where the concept of the commonplace

book finds its full representation in the form and content

and purpose of Emerson's early journals. Nevertheless, this

most literal statement is slightly misleading in regards to

his transition from commonplace book or retentive journals

to "spermatic" or generative journals. His phrases "when

I was quite young" and "at the end of a couple of years"

suggest that this transition was rather logical, obvious,

conscious, and occurred in the distant past. This is not

true, and again we have the evidence of the journals them­

selves. But neither is Emerson deliberately lying to us

(or rather himself, since they were his journals, written

for his own use). It is much more complex phenomenon than

that. Part of the distortion is caused by his medium:

those literal and prosaic words which inject their own

order and sense of time into the experience. The other

 54

part of the distortion probably should be attributed to

the natural distortion of memory in which everything is

foreshortened or lengthened in terms of influence and

emphasis rather than in terms of the actual passage of time.

Emerson's journals show us quite clearly that there

was no sharp break, no sudden transition into a new type of

journal. The transition occurred slowly. It began, most

certainly, long before he himself was consciously aware of

it. Rather than talking about it in terms of replacement,

we actually should discuss it in terms of displacement.

Those early encyclopedic notebooks dominate the early

journals. The discordant note in those early journals is

the occasional intrusion of statements which resemble those

made in the later "spermatic" journals. Sometime around

the time that Emerson began lecturing, this discordant

element began to expand into the dominant role for the

journals. Soon, the discordant element in the journals

was the encyclopedic element. We know as well from the

evidence of the journals themselves that Emerson did not

keep encyclopedic journals only when he "was quite young"

— at least, not literally young. He actually kept a

journal he called "Encyclopedia" from 1824 to 1336.

In fact, the encyclopedic journals only ceased when their

cataloguing impulse was transformed and reappeared about

this time in the indexes he began to compile for his own

journals, indexes he would follow in composing the lectures

 55

and essays.

In this sense, the literal prosaic form of this journal

entry is misleading. For if we are to read this prosaic

entry accurately, we must read it poetically. We must see

that the time and age references ("couple of years" and

"when I was quite young") cannot be taken too literally.

The encyclopedic journals did begin when Emerson was "quite

young" in years ; the first of the extant encyclopedic

journals was kept when Emerson was only seventeen or eight­

een years old. Although it is possible that he realized at

"the end of a couple of years" of keeping an encyclopedic

journal the impossibility of indexing "the net value of all

the definitions at thich the world had yet arrived," that

realization did not change overnight the form and direction

of his journals. It merely stimulated the growth of a new

journal form and purpose which did not surface dominantly

for a number of years. The years of Emerson's "youth," in

this sense, are not the external years of the man, but the

internal years of the writer.

While evaluating this most literal statement of inten­

tion, we should not ignore the obvious change in intention

within it. The gradual disillusionment with accumulative

truth— with seeing pieces of truth as items, like coins,

to be collected and added and thus statically reformed into

The Truth Itself— is part of Emerson's larger disillusion­

ment with systematic or logical truth. Only after

 56

experiencing his truth as life could he write with total

conscious awareness ;

At last I discovered that my curve was

a parabola whose arcs would never meet,
and came to acquiesce in the perception
that although no diligence can rebuild
the Universe in a model by the best
accumulation or disposition of details,
yet does the World reproduce itself in
miniature in every event that transpires,
so that all the laws of nature may be
read in the smallest fact.

This insight into the "All in each" nature of truth, which

became his central statement regarding truth in the later

essays and poems, evolved out of his own experience within

hisjournals. He did not simply discard the accumulative

method of the early journals for the symbolic all-in-one

method of the later journals; instead, the perception that

"all the laws of nature may be read in the smallest fact"

suggests a new perception as well for the use of an

"encyclopedic" journal. Instead of trying to accumulate

through the journal all of the pieces by which one could

reconstruct the whole of truth, one could use each "fact"

within the encyclopedia as a miniature of the whole and

evolve the whole from out of that miniature. Such a

revision implies as well a movement away from prosaic or

linear prose and toward symbolic prose.

From a larger perspective, this gradual movement in

the evolution of purpose and direction within the journals

can be viewed as a parallel to a movement occurring as well

within Emerson. The trend is toward consolidation and

 57

harmony of Emerson as well as his writing. His developing

process of composition is also a developing process of self-

discovery. The years 1838-1842 were, as A.W. Plumstead

suggests, "a period of consolidation and application rather

than e x p a n s i o n . "58 During these years, Emerson learned how

to make better use of what he already had. As Plumstead

implies, after 1842 we do not get a different or more

realistic or more expansive Emerson; after 1842, we get a

more unified, more harmonious Emerson. It is only in this

sense that we get a "better" Emerson. This "better" Emerson

is not an Emerson who has abandoned idealism for realism,

for Emerson never abandoned idealism to assume realism.

This "better" Emerson is an Emerson who found a way to make

idealism the internal essence of realism. In this sense.

Essays: Second Series is not discontinuous with the 1841

Essays. This "better" Emerson is an Emerson integrated

through the process of his journals.

To examine his essays separately from his journals is

to examine Emerson's life of writing separately from

Emerson's life of experience, and thus encourage rather

than resolve the extremely diverse estimations of Emerson

which have plagued his critics for over one hundred years.

The profound influence which entered Emerson's life during

this vital period did not come from outside of him; it

came from within him. By November of 1846, he could reflect

 58

in his journal that "Genius consists neither in improvising

nor in remembering, but in both, ever trembles the beam of

the balance in nature" (JMN, IX, p. 363). This thought re­

flects the central identity of the poet in the 1844 essay

59
» The Poet": pre-eminently, the poet is the balanced man.

Hie roots of this statement in "The Poet" reach back through

the lectures to the earlier journals— not, as often supposed,

to one prototypic phrase or sentence, but to a progressive

realization that sparkles from a number of entries. The

basic experience lying under this idea of balanced powers

was not one event, which could be recorded in a sentence or

paragraph, but rather a continuum of events : Emerson within

the process of writing. Emerson's process of composition

involved the process of discovering within himself and with­

in his journals a balance between the new and the old—

"neither . . . improvising nor , . . remembering /separate!^,

but in both /together/." It is perhaps nothing more than

a futile (interesting, but futile) chicken-and-egg argument

of priority of origin to attempt to pinpoint which came

first: Emerson1s awareness of "the beam of . . . balance in

nature" or his awareness of "the beam of . . . balance"

within himself. That one is related to the other is otvious.

It may be that one could not have existed without the othe*.

In November of 1846, he recorded a new image which

represents both his use of the journals from the late

1830's onward and his awareness of the link between the

 59

discovery of truth and self-discovery:

Expression is so much
To be a quarry & to quarry yourself
(JMN, IX, p. 364)

The "quarry" image is doubly significant. Not only does it

demonstrate his evolution of purposive journal writing from

the man-made fragmentary, materialistic, external "riches"

of the exchequer and savings' bank to the all-in-one internal

"riches" of nature itself, but it also demonstrates his

utilization in his compositional process of the "All in each'

nature of truth. The image implies the intuition that he

need no longer seek sources (veins of truth, to follow but

the quarry image) external to himself or his experience.

Above all, the image signifies the confident Emerson, aware

that to write truthfully he need do nothing more than to

effectively "quarry" truth from himself, from the vein of

turth which lies within his own experience and observation.

"To be a quarry" is to recognize one's self as the object of

the hunt (another meaning for "quarry"). "To be a quarry &

to quarry yourself" is to permit and even encourage in every

act of expression the integration of the whole man. "To be

a quarry & to quarry yourself" is to need no longer the

encouragement of seeing your own thoughts echoed in another's

book in order to write your own thoughts. "To be a quarry

& to quarry yourself" is, essentially, to give up reading

others, so that you might more fully read and be influenced

 60

by yourself as you were before, at another time, in another

place, under different circumstances. "To be a quarry & to

quarry yourself" is to write from the balanced, integrated

spirit which merges idealism with realism so that spiritual

laws emanate through the outward form of crisp, concrete

"reality." The art of writing, for Emerson, was neither

purely improvising nor purely remembering, but improvising

while remembering.
 61

Notes for Chapter 1

^Cited in Bliss Perry, The Heart of Emerson's

Journals (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,

1926), pp. 6-7.

2 (1 ) Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and Alfred R . Ferguson,

eds. Emerson's Nature— Origin. Growth, Meaning (New York

and Toronto: Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., 1969)# [bj P- 5?

(2) The Collected Works of Ralph Jaldo Emerson, notes and

introduction by Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, Mass.:

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971- ).

I, p. 7. See the Critical Note on Primary Sources Cited,

below. Hereafter, in references to Nature. (1) will be

cited as " 5ealts/Ferguson reprint" and (2) will be cited

as Collected Works (1971)*

^Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson

(New York: Scribner's, 1949; rpt. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1957), pp. 47, 43. Hereafter cited as

Life.

^My information on Aunt Mary Moody Emerson is drawn

from Van V/yck Brooks, The Life of Emerson (New York:

E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1932), p. 18; Rusk, Life,

pp. 160, 284.

 62

5cited in Rusk, Life, pp. 159-160

6»Every thought is also a prison . . . " Here and

elsewhere, 1 cite from the facsimiles of the first editions

in Essays (and) Essays? Second Series, intro. Morse Peckham

(Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company,

1969). The cited phrase from "The Poet" appears on p. 36.

Hereafter cited as "Merrill facsimile."

^The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph

Waldo Emerson, vol. V (1335-1838), ed. Merton M. Sealts,

Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.? Belknap Press of Harvard University

Press, 1965), pp. 38, 102, 245. All references below to

Emerson's notebooks and journals, unless otherwise noted,

are to this edition, hereafter cited as JMN.

^The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds.

Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, Mass.?

Balknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959), I, P* 218.

Hereafter cited as E L .

9cf. "The American Scholar," Collected Works (1971),

I, p. 56.

Incited in Rusk, Life. pp. 138-139•

11Life. p. 153.
 63

^Em e r s o n preached in the South on these occasions

because, at the time, Emerson was traveling in the South

to recover from problems that threatened to develop into

tuberculosis. See Rusk, Life, pp. 117-120.

Incited in Perry, Heart of Emerson*s Journals, p. 30.

l4Cf. JMH, I, p. 19-

15"Genius" (lecture), EL, III, pp. 70, 72, 79» 81 ;

"The Poet" (essay), Merrill Facsimile, pp. 22, 24.

Incited in James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo

Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1887),

p. 201. Hereafter cited as Memoir.

17Life, pp. 280, 124.

^^Life, p. 281.

l^Emerson's phrase occurs in a letter to Aunt Mary

Moody Emerson and is cited in Henry F. Pommer, Emerson's

First Marriage (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern

Illinois University Press; London and Amsterdam: Feffer &

Simons, Inc., 1967), p. 68.

^°For the facts cited in these two paragraphs, I am

indebted to Rusk's Life. For each incident, consult

Rusk's index, for they are not discussed together in one

place.
 64

Rusk’s discussion of Emerson's bout with diarrhea

occurs on pp. 162, 164, 166, 168.

Zlfhe following three articles, together, fairly well

summarize this critical issue: Newton Arvin, "The House of

Pain: Emerson and the Tragic Sense," Hudson Review, 12

(Spring 1959), 37-53; Alexander Kern, "The Dark Side of

Emerson's Optimism," Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 10

(1953), 7-3; Stephen E. Whicher, "Emerson’s Tragic Sense,"

American Scholar, 22 (Summer 1953)» 235-292.

22Rusk, Life, p. 170.

^^Rusk, Life, p. 130.

24Life, pp. 230-231.

25cited in Cabot, Memoir, p. 201.

26JMN, V, p. 192.

^ American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age

of Emerson and //hitman (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford

University Press, 194-1; rpt. 1970) pp. 4, 179-191* One

of the best studies of Emerson's concept of Compensation is

Kenneth Burke's "Acceptance and Rejection," Southern

Review, 2 (1937)» 600-632.

 65

^According to Rusk, Life, p. 26?; see his note for

documentation.

29"The Divinity School A d d r e s s Collected Works

(1971), I, PP. 73-79.

3Qjfv'iN. v, p. 266.

3*Newton Arvin discusses Emerson*s concept of evil in

relation to Augustine, Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists in

"The House of Pain," The Hudson Review, 12 (1959). 37-53;

rpt. in Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed.

Milton Konvitz and Stephen Whicher (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:

Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 46-59. See especially pp. 53-56.

32el, III, pp. 103-104.

33a full discussion of Emerson* s attitude regarding

the mind and its effect upon health is found in Edward

Wagenknecht, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Portrait of a Balanced

Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 24-26.

Hereafter cited as Portrait. Emerson* s attitude about

reading the " sad in literature" is discussed below in

Chapter 4.

Spiritual Laws," Merrill Facsimile, p. 110.

35gee especially those journal entries written in the

aftermath of personal tragedy; for example, see the

 66

following entries made following Waldo's death in 1842i

J M N . VIII, pp. 283, 40?, 444i IX, p. 110.

36e l , ill, p. H O .

37Merrill facsimile, p. 110.

38waldo Emerson was born 30 October, five months after

Charles' death. I hesitate to say that Waldo's birth was

totally responsible for Emerson's recovery from the de­

pression following Charles' death because a simplistic

birth-for-a-death interpretation of Compensation seems to

me to be a misrepresentation of what Emerson meant by Com­

pensation, especially in his emphasis of the internality of

Compensation in the journal entry made a few months after

Charles* death.

39"Compensation," Merrill facsimile, pp. 102-103.

^A l t h o u g h rarely kept in later editions, each of

these stages (illusion, temperament, succession, etc.)

appeared in the first edition as sub-headings within the

essay "Experience," located at the top of each righthand

page.

41see this point in "Tragedy," EL, III, pp. 113-114.

^ M e r r i l l facsimile, pp. 14-15.

 67

^ JMN. IV, pp. 250-251. In Emerson in Concord

(Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889),

Edward .Valdo Emerson erroneously states that the image

occurs at the beginning of a new volume of his father's

journal in 1837 (p.64).

Throughout this section on the journals, references

to the JMN will be included in the text.

^ L a r g e l y because of the emphasis it has received in

the discussions of Emerson's journals. Emerson in Concord,

the " memoir" written by Emerson's son, Edward v/aldo, contains

many scattered comments on Emerson's journals ; published in

1889, it probably contains the earliest commentary on

Emerson's journals. Since Edward Waldo saw the original

journals, the "savings' bank" image probably caught his eye

because of its location. Bliss Perry also emphasizes the

"savings' bank" image in his discussions of Emerson*s

journals. See his preface in The Heart of Emerson's

Journals as well as his earlier essay "Emerson's Savings

Bank" in The Praise of Folly and Other Papers (Boston, 1923),

pp. 114-129. Only a handful of articles have been written

on Emerson's journals since Perry's essay. Perhaps the

central position that the "savings' bank" image has assumed

in considerations of Emerson's journals simply reflects the

lack of adequate critical treatment of the journals.

 68

^ T h i s is not so much an error in the index compilation

of JMN as it is a limitation implicit in the usual method of

compiling an index. The 28 page references are to passages,

in most cases, containing the key word "composition" or its

general definitive phrases, such as "act of writing."

Passages which relate to the topic but which do not contain

the key reference words are not picked up by the indexer.

An index is literal, not interpretative. For this reason,

perhaps, the index of volume V even lists under "composition"

a passage concerning type-setting— that is, the work of a

"compositor."

4 6 Rusk, Life, p. 189.

^ E m e r s o n cited in Cabot, Memoir, pp. 191» 203.

Although both of Emerson's major biographers agree that the

Jardin des Plantes experience affected Emerson profoundly,

Cabot brings us more immediately into the experience's

effect upon Emerson by relying heavily on Emerson's words

in the journal and in letters.

48"The Naturalist," EL, I, p. 73*

49our word indeed originates from the Latin comnositio.

"a putting together."

50»our strength grows out of our weakness," he writes

later in "Compensation" (Merrill facsimile, p. 97).

 69

51"Shakspear (Second Lecture)," EL, I, pp. 317-318.

52»The Poet," Merrill facsimile, pp. 18-19.

53"Literature," EL, II, pp. 63-64.

54î,ierton M. Sealts, Jr., ed. , "Forward . . . ," JMN,

V, p. xvi. In J M N . journal RO is called "RO Mind."

55Because only the first sixteen pages belong to the

1835-1838 period covered by volume V; the rest of the

journal belongs to the I 855-I 856 period covered in a later

volume of JMN.
The JMN are clearly a scholarly tour de force, the best

edition of Emerson's journals and notebooks. However, they

are also a tour de force of modern scholarly methodology

itself. They implicitly inject an orderliness into the

journals through a scholarly devotion to chronology; neither

orderliness nor chronology is a characteristic of trie journals

as Emerson wrote them.

I do not want to imply that the Harvard editors are

wrong in following an orderly methodology, for every con­

sistent method has its limitations, and the methodology

followed in the JMN is certainly the best for the general

Emerson reader and scholar. I only wish to note the

difficulty that the reader and scholar particularly inter­

ested in Emerson's process of composition have with the JMN

in mentally re-creating the journals as they were when

 70

Emerson composed from them. This difficulty,of course,

implies the ultimate limitation imposed upon any study of

Emerson's act of composition made today from the available

editions of the journals. Those interested in Emerson's

compositional process cannot hope for definitive treatment

of this topic until the journals are published in photo­

graphic facsimile.

^ B e t w e e n 1834 and I 836, there are numerous journal

entries which relate to this mental tension or conflict

between the tendency of the mind to unify and the supremacy

of the intuitive response to experience. See 20 June 1834

entry, JMN, V, p. 275; late March 1835 entry, J M N . V, p. 22;

13 May 1835 entry, J M N . V, P. 38; 15 May 1835 entry, JMN.

V, p. 42; 31 July 1835 entry, J M N . V, p. 75i early October

1835 entry, JMN , V, p. 92; mid-October 1835 entry, J M N . V,

p. 94; 22 January I 836 entry, J M N . V, p. 114; mid-September

1 836 entry, JMN . V, p. 194; 13 October I 836 entry, J M N . V,

p. 219.

57See JMN, VI, pp. 115-234.

58„porward . . .," J M N , VII, p. xv.

59-iThe Poet," Merrill facsimile, pp. 6-7. Here as else­

where, the similarity of statement about the Genius and the

Poet rests upon the fact that Emerson drew heavily from the
 71

lecture '*Genius" in formulating the basic characteristics

of the poet in the 1844 essay. I doubt Emerson meant for

much difference to exist between what he calls "the man of

Genius" and "the Poet." In fact, in "The Poet" he strongly

implies that Genius is the essence or spirit of the Poet.

Cf. "The Poet," Merrill facsimile, pp. 5» 11, 12, 24-26.

 Chapter 2

EMERSON AS LECTURER» TH£ OLD LOKD NECESSITY

Although critics and scholars have recognized for some

time the importance of Emerson's role as a lecturer, very

few modern critical studies have been devoted to examining

Emerson as a lecturer.1 In the major book-length studies,

his role as a lecturer has received only limited discussion.

vVhile the lectures are generally recognized as the compo­

sitional "bridge" between the journals and the published

essays, very little has been written to clarify the nature

of this "bridge.” In fact, what has been implied about the

nature of this "bridge" in these studies largely obscures

the issue of why Emerson lectured in the first place : most

of the critical assessments of the value of Emerson* s

lectures rest upon the shaky ground of a posteriori

theorizing since they examine the lectures only to the

extent necessary to explain the essays as a logical effect

of the lectures. Within such a critical approach, exam­

ination of the lectures is limited to whatever is necessary

to plump out prior conclusions about the nature of the

relationship between the lectures and the essays. In this

way, the general critical view of the role of lecturing

72
 73

has sacrificed, so far, whatever does not fit a particular

and prior theory about the nature of the essays through the

general trend of arguing backwards to the lectures.

Today, what most readers of Emerson know about the role

of lecturing and its value is that the Lyceum "provided a

timely lay pulpit" for his ideas and "forced him to reduce

his daily meditations to some sort of order, and thus paved

the way for the essays." Such a conclusion by one of the

foremost scholars of Emerson not only obscures the actual

nature of and motivation for the lectures but it also helps

to negate the necessity for examining more closely the role

of lecturing. The myth of Emerson's "richness," springing

out of a misinterpretation of his legacy from his first

wife's estate and perpetuated in criticism through Whicher*s

influential Freedom and Fate, has also contributed greatly

to forestalling any closer look at the motivation behind

Emerson's lecturing. For years, critics and readers have

assumed, on the basis of this myth, that Emerson lectured

for purely aesthetic reasons, since the inheritance had

left him a "rich man." Not only has this myth undercut the

need for a closer view of Emerson's role as a lecturer, but

it has also greatly contributed to a popular mistrust of

Emerson in our own day, since there is something undeniably

unsavory about reading what a "rich man," who did not have

the common man's trials or fears of poverty, had to say

about self-reliance. I would suggest that this popularized

 74

image of Emerson as a "rich man" has contributed to the

general resistance today within criticism to closer exam­

ination of his life.

It is impossible within the scope of my study to cover

Emerson comprehensively as a lecturer or do more than

initiate a critical revision of this topic. The earlier

vision of him as a lecturer sacrifices the man to salvage

the essayist. Like many studies which propose to initiate

revisions, my study is reactionary in conception; my dis­

cussion must ignore, to a certain extent, the essayist to

present the man who delivered the lectures. I am aware of

the imbalance within my own work; yet it seems necessary,

if only to contribute to a new view of Emerson which will

strike the balance missing in earlier critical assessments.

With the purpose in mind of initiating a critical

revision of Emerson as a lecturer, I see two areas which

need to be discussed to establish critical motivation for

sustaining such a revision, and I will limit my discussion

to those areas. First of all, it is important to examine

why Emerson lectured if we are to see more clearly the role

that lecturing played in his composition. We cannot ignore

the man when considering his writing without distorting

what and how he wrote. To ignore the man when considering

his lectures is to do away with an invaluable interpretative

bridge: the purpose behind the writing, the motivation

that brought it into being and established the primary

 75

conditions of its existence. The first part of my discus­

sion, then, will center upon what I call "the Myth of the

Twelve Hundred," the myth that Emerson’s major financial

needs were met from 1835 onward by the inheritance from the

late Ellen Tucker Emerson's estate. Since little is known

about the legacy outside of Husk's biography, and since

Husk does not include anything other than the bare facts

relating to this legacy scattered throughout a strictly

chronological n a r r a t i v e ,3 my discussion will delve more

deeply into the nature and conditions of this inheritance

than would be necessary otherwise. The purpose of this

portion of my discussion will be to correct the critical

record regarding this legacy as well as to establish a

more basic motivation for the early lectures. The second

part of my discussion will examine closely the evidence

within Emerson's letters for clarifying how he viewed him­

self as a lecturer. This portion will act, then, as an

amplification of the discussion initiated in the first

portion. It will also work as a corrective or balancing

device, since I have no intention of proposing a purely

materialistic purpose for the lectures. By focussing upon

Emerson's reactions to himself within the role of lecturing,

we not only get the internal correlative to the external

examination in the first portion of my discussion, but we

also receive necessary insight into the anxieties engendered

by the pressures of his writing. By carefully unfolding

 76

the vision of lecture-writing, we enter the larger land­

scape of Emerson the man within the act of creating the

identity and reality of Emerson the essayist.

THE MYTH OF THE TWELVE HUNDRED

The myth of Emerson's richness began years before

Stephen Whicher wrote Freedom and Fate (1953)• Van Wyck

Brooks, in his impressionistic biography The Life of Emerson

(1932), made similar assumptions about Emerson's financial

status* "His first wife's estate had been settled . . .%

twenty-two thousand dollars— twelve hundred a year. With

this, and another eight hundred or so from lectures, they

could live without a care."^ Although the myth of Emerson’s

richness probably originated long before Brook's biography,

I center my introduction of the myth upon evidence of its

perpetuation within contemporary criticism, since today's

reader is best acquainted with and therefore most influenced

by the Emerson criticism written within the past fifty years

or so. The sentences cited from Brooks' 1932 biography

should demonstrate that we are not talking about a myth of

recent origin. The major vehicle for the transmission of

this myth, unfortunately, has been Whicher*s highly influen­

tial Freedom and Fate, a book which otherwise is of tremen­

dous value to t o d a y s student of Emerson. Whicher*s book

easily lends itself to perpetuating the myth of Emerson's

richness, accompanied by a distorted view of the role that

lecturing played in Emerson*s life, because Whicher*s

 77

purpose in Freedom and Fate was to write "an inner life"

focussing upon Emerson* s thoughts and philosophy, to fill in

the gap left by the two earlier major biographies by Rusk

and Cabot, which are largely "outer life" biographies.

Nevertheless, as Whicher discovered, it is impossible to

write "an inner life" without some necessary orientation to

"the outer life." Although Whicher's limited and brief ex­

cursions into the outer life encourage, if only by example,

the view that Emerson's outer life is neither important nor

relevant to critical discussions of his ideas and works,

the need Whicher felt to link that inner life with the

outer life at certain crucial places should also tell us

something about the difficulty and perhaps the ultimate

impossibility of writing a purely "inner life" of Emerson.

Early in his book, Whicher rises to consideration of the

external life to indicate the direction Emerson* s life

took from 1835 onwardt

A legacy from the estate of his first

wife that brought him in about $1,200
a year relieved the worst of his fears
of poverty, and he supplemented his
income by more and more extensive
lecturing . . . . It /"the Lyceum_/
provided a timely lay pulpit for his
teachings; it forced him to reduce his
daily meditations to some sort of order,
and thus paved the way for the essays;
and throughout his life it provided be­
tween a half and a third of his income.
Thanks to this largely unforseen market
for his thoughts, he could say, as he
wrote to Carlyle in 1838, " . . . here at
home, I am a rich man."5
 78

,Vithin this statement are at least four assumptions:

1. that Ellen's estate was settled quickly and that

Emerson realized an annual $1,200 of income from it by

1835;
2. that this $1,200 income released Emerson from "the

worst of his fears of poverty" and made at least his

earliest income from lecturing supplementary;

3. that the Lyceum provided Emerson "a timely lay

pulpit for his teachings"; and

4. that by 1338 Emerson had sufficient income yearly

to consider himself in materialistic terms "a rich man."

Before considering these assumptions in the light of

the facts regarding Ellen's estate and Emerson's financial

situation in the years following his return from Europe

in 1833, I want to clarify once again that we are examining

the assumptions of a critical myth, not necessarily the

personal assumptions of Stephen E. vVhicher. Within my

discussion, Whicher*s statement operates as an example of

a pre-existent myth charged with certain implications

which tend to color or manipulate critical discussion.

Let's look briefly at another example of this myth, found

this time in Jonathan Bishop's Emerson on the Soul,

published in 1964, which is also a volume of first-rate

Emersom criticism. Bishop writes, "His first wife's death

gave him, he found, $1,200 a year (an important compensation

for that loss among all his losses). The sum was sufficient
 79

to support the psychic independence he had won."6 While

Whicher implies within his context that this $ 1 ,200-a-year

began in 1835, Bishop assumes that it began soon after

Emerson's return from Europe, at least by 1834. Bishop

carefully cites Rusk as his source for this statement, and

when we examine the page in Rusk which Bishop cites, we

find this statement: "When he had got the whole of the

inheritance in hand, Emerson would, he thought, be sure

of an annual income of about $1,200, an amount equal to

two-thirds of his recent salary as pastor."7 I note the

future conditional mood of the sentence and I accent the

word "thought" in Rusk's sentence, for they are the only

indications within his text of what we discover when we

check his sources : that Rusk's source for this sentence

is a letter written by Emerson to his brother Edward in

1834, in which Emerson conjectures about the annual income

he expects to have once the estate is settled. As Bishop's

misreading of Rusk implies, it is difficult to get a clear

picture of the whole situation involving this legacy from

Rusk, for he scatters the facts needed to construct such

a clear picture throughout almost one hundred pages of

narration.® These facts must be picked out and then read

carefully in conjunction with the elaborate and rather

complex citation of sources at the back of Rusk's book.

Throughout this process, the reader must exercise caution,

for Rusk often implies important qualifications or

 80

interpretations through the use of careful phrasing and

verbal mood. Nevertheless, although obscured by his

method, the major facts relating to the inheritance are

found in Rusk.

As Bishop continues his discussion of Emerson’s life,

he follows— much like Whicher— the implications of the myth

of Emerson’s richness. Bishop assumes that, freed from

materialistic anxieties by the annual income from Ellen's

estate, Emerson chose to lecture for aesthetic reasons:

the lectern provided him with "a new platform," a "re­

definition of the ministry." He goes so far as to say that

"lecturing provided new opportunities" to Emerson "to be

truthful in his own terms," for "nobody would be present

at a lecture on nature or literature or great men equipped

with expectations that could inhibit freedom of speech."9

As we shall see later when considering Emerson's reflec­

tions on himself as a lecturer, as well as the nature of

Lyceum audiences in Emerson's day, Bishop's statement

regarding the possibilities of free speech within the

Lyceum is rather naive. His elaborations upon Emerson as

a lecturer are simply logical unravelings of the implications

within the myth of Emerson's richness. The legacy raises

questions about Emerson's motivation for becoming a

lecturer; the only logical conclusion, under the circum­

stances prescribed by the myth, is that Emerson lectured

for idealistic and aesthetic reasons.

 81

The major reason why it is important to get a clear

picture of Emerson's financial situation in those years

when he began to lecture is not simply to correct a mis­

interpretation of biographical facts but especially to call

into question some of the critical assessments of Emerson

and his writings which rest upon the myth. Later in

Emerson on the Soul, while examining Emerson's essay

"Experience," Bishop is particularly bothered by that

passage early in the essay where Emerson equates the loss

of his son with the loss of "a beautiful estate," and goes

on to say that "bankruptcy" and "loss of property" would

not destroy him but would only be a great "inconvenience."10

Bishop claims that the estate image "leaves a bad taste,"

since Emerson would have had to lead a different life if

his dead wife had not left him property sufficient to keep

him comfortable in Concord."11 Bishop would not have re­

acted in this way, we can safely conjecture, if he had

understood the nature of that inheritance from Ellen

Tucker Emerson and how little it contributed to his material

comfort in the years before the mid-1850's. Let us now

turn our attention to examining the facts about that

inheritance.
Emerson had been married to Ellen for only sixteen

months when she died from tuberculosis in February, 1831.

12
v/e can conclude that Emerson's love for her was sincere.
 82

There is no evidence to support the opinion of gossips in

his day that there was something wrong about the ex-

minister's legal inquiry into his wife's estate after her

death. There is no evidence that he was attempting to do

anything more than collect what was legally due him as

Ellen's husband and only legal heir. While Emerson was

touring Europe in an effort to regain his physical and

emotional health, his brother Charles, a lawyer, acted as

his agent in pursuing inquiries into the Tucker estate.

This inquiry was motivated by Emerson's growing sense of

responsibility as an elder son for his family's financial

support.^3

Ellen's inheritance was based upon the estate of her

father, Bezaleel Tucker, who had died many years earlier

and left his considerable property to his wife and children.

Ellen's mother had remarried in 1821, and Ellen's step­

father had been the prominent former Treasurer of Massa­

chusetts , Colonel William A. Kent.^ The major difficulty

in settling Ellen's inheritance upon Emerson was not the

question regarding his right to her inheritance ; instead,

the legal problem which kept the matter in court for three

years after her death was the fact that Ellen had died

before reaching age 21, hence before she could legally

inherit her share of her father's estate. Although legal

advice assured Emerson he had every right to expect Ellen's

share of the inheritance eventually, the executor of the

 83

Tucker estate firmly believed that final settlement would

not occur within Emerson's lifetime.*5 Actually, this

statement is not as extreme as it may sound, considering

the legal difficulties which had to be settled and noting

the fragile state of Emerson's health which made it logical

to assume that he would not survive his wife by many years.

In March, 1834, the court procedure on the case was

finalized. Two months earlier, in January, only three

months after his return from Europe, Emerson was granted

what Rusk calls a "small sum" from his portion to pay

some d e b t s . H e n r y Pommer, after rechecking the original

document cited by Rusk, clarified that the "small sum" was

$200.17 The court decision in March, 1834, had established

that the total cash value of the inheritance coming to

Emerson was approximately $23,000.^ What Emerson would

eventually receive would not be the cash value, but the

property— largely bank stock— composing Ellen's portion

of the Tucker estate.

When he learned of the court decision, Emerson wrote

his brother Edward a letter in which he described his

plans for using the dividend income from the total inher­

itance . We need to clarify here that at this time, Emerson

had more plans than inheritance.19 jn the letter to

Edward, he foresees the income as paving the way to a

retreat from financial anxiety for himself, his mother,

and Edward. The interest from all of the stock to find

 84

its way eventually into his hands, he figures, should be

about $1,200 a year. Emerson's enthusiasm colors his

phrasing in this letter, changing an estimation into cer­

tainty; he says, " I am made sure of an income of about

$1 ,200."20
Following the court settlement in March, 1834, Emerson

received the first half of the inheritance in May. This

portion, with a cash value of $ 1 1 ,6 0 0 , included 6? shares

in the City Bank, 19 shares in the Atlantic Bank, 31

shares in the Boston and Roxbury Mill Dam, and $3-4,000

in cash.21 Therefore, three years after Ellen's death, the

money that Emerson had received from the estate was $200,

which we know went to pay debts, and $3-4,000, which does

not seem to have remained with him for his own use. Rusk

records that Emerson lent his brother William "some

thousands of dollars" about this time.22

Shortly after this initial settlement, Charles Emerson

wrote William that "the interest of this 11600 . . . will

scarce support both Mother and Waldo ^Ralph Waldo/ at the

rate they live at. Therefore for the present we seem

pretty nearly as poor as ever only Waldo does without a

Profession."23 Emerson, we need to clarify, was not a

spendthrift, but throughout his life he seemed to have

lacked the ability to live within the means of a prescribed

budget. He could not refuse friends and especially his

brothers when they solicited financial assistance. We

 85

should note that, in his letter, Charles' use of "we"

implies that his financial status is dependent upon Bnerson's.

Emerson did not receive the second and final portion of

his inheritance until July, 1837, over six years after

Ellen's death and over three years after he'd begun to

lecture.24 This second portion came to him in the form of

stock shares in the City, Atlantic, and Massachusetts

Banks of Boston.25 If Emerson's initial enthusiasm regard­

ing the $1,200 income he might expect to receive annually

from the total $23,000 in stock were justified, it would

be justified only after mid-1837, by which time he had

received the full inheritance. But this is not how things

turned out.
After the final court decree in July, 1837, William

Emerson tried to talk Emerson into selling his stock and

reinvesting the money, probably in land. Emerson, however,

resisted William's efforts and replied, "As I hope to put

my leisure to high uses, I do not wish to put the good

deodand which secures it, at hazard."26 By this time,

Emerson had already committed himself to lecturing, and the

"high uses" to which he refers in the letter to William

probably included some sense of aspiration through his

writings, especially the "leisure" necessary to take long

walks in the morning hours into the woods, sit, and write

in his journal. The feeling, however, that he expressed

in other letters about lecturing makes it unlikely that he

 86

considered lecturing itself as a "high use" for his

" leisure." Perhaps, as things were to turn out, Emerson's

"leisure" might have been better protected if the money

from the stocks had been carefully reinvested in land.

Emerson* s decision, however, rested upon the sober advice

of Abel Adams, his financial advisor, who assured Emerson

he would never receive, under the present economic con­

ditions, a good portion of the cash value of the stock

were it to be sold.
Emerson* s expenses had grown much larger since 1834.

He moved to Concord in 1834, six months after receiving

the first portion of his inheritance. He now had a house,

barn, and land valued at $ 3 *^5 0 , which meant he had upkeep

expenses as well as annual taxes to pay. In 1835» he'd

married Lydia Jackson. Before their third wedding anni­

versary— coincidentally, less than a year after he'd

received the second portion of his stock inheritance—

Lydia found that she couldn't possibly run the Emerson

household with fewer than three servants. He had to pay

a share of his mother's expenses, since her annual income

was about $225 short of her actual expenses. He also was

responsible for half the expense for boarding his retarded

brother, Bulkeley, in the country,27 but since his brother

William could rarely be relied upon to pay his half,

Emerson usually ended up meeting the full expense for

boarding Bulkeley. Furthermore, Emerson had what he

 87

called "his poor" to care for, those whom he aided

financially, according to his son, out of a "sympathy of

i d e a s . " 28 in the years following the settlement of Ellen's

inheritance, Emerson engaged more and more in providing

financial assistance for his friends and relatives.

If Emerson were unwise in his expenditures, he was unwise

to the extent that he often lent money which would be

needed for his own household budget later in the year.

Even if he had realized $1,200 regularly on a yearly basis

after 1837 from the stock he had inherited, that amount

would have been equal to only two-thirds of the salary

he'd received earlier as pastor of Second Church, certainly

not enough by itself to meet the larger expenses he had

by 1837. But Emerson, despite what in his enthusiasm he

had estimated in 1834, was not receiving $1,200 annually

from the stock investments. He had not begun to lecture

for purely aesthetic reasons; he needed the money to live

on and support those who were dependent upon him. At this

time, says Rusk, the income from the stocks plus what

Emerson made lecturing "was hardly more than enough to

turn the wheels of the domestic machinery that Lidia

quickly built up" in the early years of their marriage.30

So, in 1837, Emerson was far from being a "rich man."

Emerson's belief in 1834 that, with the whole inheri­

tance in his hands, he could count on $1,200 each year in

stock dividends did not rest upon an error in his figures

 88

or upon anything he could have controlled or foreseen. In

1837, the United States was plunged into the worst depressim

the country had ever experienced. This depression lasted

for five years, through 1842; afterwards, the national

economy had a brief recovery, only to collapse once again

in 184?. Ten years later, in 1857» another depression hit

the United States. A financial panic had occurred in 1837»

and the destruction of the national United States Bank in

that year, while it did not cause a devaluation of the

dollar in the eastern states, did cause an interstate fluc­

tuation in the value of paper notes which greatly affected

commerce among the s t a t e s , 31 a situation which was reflected

in the devaluation of the stock Emerson held.

During the depression of 1837-1842, Emerson could rarely

expect much income from his stocks. In 1840, the Atlantic

Bank failed to pay a dividend; normally, his Atlantic Bank

stock provided him with $200 annually. That year, Emerson

earned $300 from a lecture tour; deducting the $200 he was

counting on from the Atlantic Bank stock that year, his

profit from that lecture tour was $100, hardly enough to

cover the expenses incurred on the tour. He delivered

lectures in the winter of 1841, a few months before the

death of his son Waldo, not because the Lyceum provided a

"timely lay pulpit for his teachings** and not out of a

purely materialistic urge to capitalize on the market for

his thoughts, but simply because the City Bank failed to

 89

pay a dividend that autumn. He did not gradually expand

the circle of his lectures because of increased demand by

his Lyceum audience, but mainly because he was coming to

rely more and more on the lectures for the income he needed

to run his household and pay his taxes.3^ The City Bank did

not pay a dividend for eighteen months, from the autumn of

1841 to late 1842; those eighteen months cost Emerson $900

of income for that year. When the City Bank resumed pay­

ment of dividends in October, 1842, the size of the dividends

was meager. Thus, as Emerson says, he was forced the next

year "to go peddling again"— go lecturing again, this time

making a larger lecture circuit that included Baltimore,

Philadelphia, Newark, Brooklyn, and New York. An additional

financial drain upon him from the summer of 1842 through

the spring of 1844 was the faltering Dial, whose editor­

ship he had assumed from Margaret Fuller in mid-1842. At

that time, the income from the Dial’s subscriptions was

only about $50 above expenses per issue. By March, 1843,

the Dial was not solvent, having lost almost one-third of

its subscribers. From that time until the death of the

Dial in April, 1844, Emerson ran himself into debt to keep

it alive.33

During the twenty years between the late 1830’s and the

late 1850's, when the national economy was rocked repeatedly

by depressions, Emerson realized little profit from the

sales of his books. He subsidized the publication of his

 90

books, a common practice ; thus each published book involved

an initial outlay of funds with the hope that, in the future,

they would be, like the stock he had inherited from his

first wife, the source for more income. Yet, before i860,

according to William Charvat, his income from the sales of

his books was "negligible." It was not until about 1878

that "his publishers put him on an annuity basis yielding

a minimum of $1,500 a y e a r . ” 34 But in 1878, Emerson was

seventy-five years old and had only four more years to live.

Between 1833 and 1881, Emerson delivered between 1,469

and 1,602 lectures in 283 to 289 towns in approximately 22

states and Canada. The majority of his lectures were de­

livered in the 1850's: a total of between 485 and 560,

averaging about 48-60 lectures a year during that d e c a d e . 35

By 1850, he had published Nature, the two series of Essays.

Poems. Representative M e n , and the collection Nature :

Addresses and Lectures. English Traits was published in

I 8 5 6 , at the height of his days as a lecturer and after the

publication of the books for which he is most noted, "the

major items of his income would probably have amounted to

a little over $1400 of dividends and rents and perhaps a

little less than $1700 in lecture fees." So it is not

until twenty-two years after the court decree which had

prompted him to write about the $1200-a-year which he felt

assured of from this inheritance that Emerson realized his

prophesy. But it neither made him rich nor "relieved the

 91

worst of his fears of poverty,” for, as Rusk clarifies,

even with $3100 income in 1 8 5 6 , "his expenses were heavy

and he was far from rich."37

Each winter for many years Emerson faced the certainty

that his budget would fail to meet his expenses during the

next year without additional income. Many times it was the

tax bill, due each spring, which kept his budget from

balancing. Each winter he had to decide once more whether

he could get by without lecturing; each winter he would see

no way of managing financially without lecturing. During

the peak of his lecturing days, it was not the dividends

from his bank stock that kept him from poverty; it was the

greater income he realized in those days from "peddling"

his ideas through the Lyceum. Emerson never could be sure

how much income he would receive from his investments. His

refusal to lecture more than was necessary to balance the

household budget not only indicates his aversion for lec­

turing but also his lack of interest in accumulating more

money than necessary to meet his needs. For most of his

life, he had neither the means to be considered nor the

ambition to become a "rich man."

Although Emerson delivered more lectures during the

1850»s than he did during the 1860's, his highest lecture

fees did not come until the I8 6 0 *s.3 8 Charvat implies

that a cause-and-effect relationship exists between the

large number of lectures Emerson delivered in the 1850's

 92

and the increased popularity of his books in the IBôO's.

He assumes, as well, that the higher lecture fees of the

1860's reflect Emerson’s increased popularity. We need to

remember, however, that another depression settled over the

country in the 1850's; this must have affected Lyceum fees

within that decade. Certainly Emerson had developed a

reputation as a lecturer after over twenty years of expe­

rience at the lectern; we cannot deny this reputation its

due as contributing to larger lecture fees and increased

book sales by the i860’s. Yet we also need to fully credit

the influence of the improved economic situation of the

I860's.
If, then, the label "rich" or "financially secure" is

to be applied to Emerson, we must consider it as applicable

to him only after 1878. We must consider Emerson as rich

and financially secure as he was at age seventy-five, de­

scending quickly into senility, who six years earlier had

so lost his memory that he could no longer deliver a lecture

without, as his daughter Ellen said, "blithely read^ing^

the same page twice over," 39 who by 1879 would no longer be

able to make journal entries or remember common words like

"umbrella" or the names of people he had known all his

life, the Emerson who is already a writer in the past

tense only. And if we consider the aged Emerson of 1878

to be rich, we must also admit that the financial security

of his final years came not so much from the income he

 93

realized from Ellen's inheritance as from the minimum

$ 1,500 annuity he received from his publishers as a result

of the growth of popular interest in his books stimulated

within a brief period of national economic stability at the

peak of his experience as a reluctant lecturer.

Now that we have explored to a certain extent Emerson's

financial conditions between 1833 and the latter years of

his life, we can begin to free ourselves not only from the

biographical misinterpretations caused by the myth of his

wealth but also from the influence this myth has had Urou^i

coloring our responses to Emerson* s works. Yet a task re­

mains to be done. We need to probe what Emerson meant

when, writing Carlyle in I 8 3 8 , he said, "here at home, I

am a rich man." Whicher assumed he was referring to monetary

richest we know now that he could not have been. So how

did Emerson consider himself "rich"? What did he mean by

this adjective, especially within the context of describing

his condition "at home"? What was his concept of wealth?

The logical place to begin is with what he said on the

topic in the essay "Wealth" in Conduct of Life.^° In this

essay, Emerson describes and discusses the forms of material

wealth and the ways in which wealth is accumulated only as

a necessary prelude to establishing his central point about

material assets, which is that a man needs enough money to

secure his " independence" from physical need which would

otherwise dominate him. "Poverty demoralizes," he wrote.

"A man in debt is so far a slave." Material wealth or

comfort, then, is a means to an end, which Emerson says is

the liberation of a man's "power and privilege of thought."

This liberation can occur, he says, only when a man has

brought "his wants within his proper power to satisfy."

The ability to satisfy those "wants" comes from a man's

recognition and utilization of that "faculty or "talent"

with which "Nature arms each man" so that he becomes

"necessary to society through the ability "to do easily

some feat impossible to any other." Throughout this essay,

his focus is upon material wealth or comfort as a means,

not as an end in itself. Within this context, the "rich

man" is he who has brought "his wants within his proper

power to satisfy," the man who is neither dominated nor

enslaved by debt or poverty.

According to this essay, the end toward which the means

of material wealth or comfort leads is a higher form of

wealth. Emerson defines this higher form of wealth as

"applications of mind to nature." "The art of getting

rich," he says, "consists not in industry, much less in

saving, but in a better order, in timeliness . . . ."

A man is wealthy to "the degree in which he takes up

things into himself." Finally, Emerson clarifies that

"counting-room maxims" are laws of the universe. The

solitary rule of the merchant, for example, is "absorb

and invest": the " earnings must not go to increase

 95

expense, but to capital again." Emerson specifies that by

the word "invest" he means "to take up particulars into

generals t days into integral eras" so that what is earned

can "ascend in its investment." This higher wealth, he

concludes, "is the right compound interest ; this is capital

doubled, quadrupled, centrupled* man raised to his highest

power."

We should recall that Emerson, as early as 1833• had

discussed in his journal one way in which he grew "richer."

Here, he was not talking about Ellen's inheritance or

wealth as society defines it in dollars and cents. He was

talking about his "savings' bank," his journal, a place

where he could "deposit" his " earnings" and grow "richer"

as "fractions" were added to "fractions" to make "integers."

Furthermore, the 1833 concept of the journal as "savings'

bank" is related to his understanding of composition, the

topic he discussed many times in the journals and lectures

after 1833, which is both a natural and literary law and

which is basically a "putting together" so that what is

composed excels the individual items used in the composition

and creates, in this way, something akin to his concept of

a higher wealth. The "savings' bank" image of 1833 becomes

the "artificial memory" concept of April, 1839* and finally

the "quarry" concept of November, 1846: a movement over a

span of time away from the external characteristics of the

journal to its internal qualities, indeed a basic movement

 96

toward a realization and use of the journal as a vehicle

for self-discovery. Emerson's practice through his process

of composition from journal to lecture to essay— as well as

his more practical actions regarding stock investments and

subsidization of his books for future profits— follow

those "counting-room maxims" he equates with universal laws

in the essay "Wealth."

From a slight shift in our perspective, however, we can

see that his discussion of wealth is not limited in direct

application to the internal wealth of his journal but also

relates to his external role as a lecturer by necessity.

We can see from our earlier discussion of his financial

situation from 1833 onward that the income from Ellen's

inheritance was not sufficient to meet basic expenses for

living, especially after his remarriage in 1835* We need

to observe as well the practical aspects of this role with­

in Emerson's life.

In the early half of the nineteenth century, there were

not many socially acceptable career choices open to an ex-

minister who needed to earn a large part of his living.

The growing Lyceum movement in the U.S. attracted many ex-

ministers, since lecturing not only involved a simple re­

orientation of the oratorial skills developed as a preacher

but also provided a secular pulpit for men who had turned

away or been turned away from the medium of the church's

pulpit. Nevertheless, this general explanation of why

Emerson, like other ex-ministers, easily moved into

lecturing after his return to the U.S. in 1833 does not

fully represent his individual experience if it is shorn

of its practical aspects and subsumed within a post hoc

discussion of the lectures in terms developed to define

the aesthetics of the later essays. Lecturing, for Emerson,

was a practical means for avoiding domination by debt or

physical need. The material "wealth" to be gained from

lecturing, however, was not so much as to make him mone­

tarily a "rich man," but sufficient to be a means to a

higher end* the liberation of his "power and privilege of

thought."
Emerson elsewhere said that one's main difficulty with­

in the world is that one must "accommodate" one's self to

" institutions already made" if one is "to be useful at

all," and that this necessary accommodation is "a loss of

so much integrity and, of course, of so much power.

The ministry had been the early "institution already made"

to which Emerson had "accommodated" himself. If he had a

strength as a minister, it had been the strength of his

thought, which developed from the journals and into the

sermons. Yet the more he realized his strength through

use of the pulpit, the more he felt the opposition to that

development within religious tradition and dogma. In this

way, we can perceive lecturing not only as an immediate

practical solution to the financial difficulties of an ex­

 98

minister, but also as a medium that encouraged him to

further develop his own strength by reaping more fully the

»riches" of his journals. We should beware, however, of

attributing to the role itself the strength or liberation

that Emerson achieved despite the confines of the role. His

development was achieved in essential opposition to the

stasis of thought encouraged by the Lyceum through its

preference for "safe" lectures and from its preference that

a lecturer repeat older lectures which had drawn audiences.

Emerson* s "accommodation" to the social institution of

lecturing did involve the loss of a certain amount of in­

tegrity and power* yet, the pressures of and necessity for

lecturing pressed him more firmly into continuing and

developing his journals, so that their full power would be

realized in the essays of the 184-0*s and afterwards.

Imagine, if you will, a man who seeks and finds a vital

aspect of his psychic identity through thoughts that occur

to him randomly during long walks alone. Imagine, if you

will, this same man with his need for leisure and solitude

held to the same needs and requirements for physical exis­

tence as any other man. The picture, at once, is of a man

whose physical needs stand in opposition to his psychic

needs. This opposition is, very likely, as evident to our

hypothetical individual as it is to us within our conception

of him. The conflict probably generates a certain amount

of anxiety or guilt for him. The central question is how

 99

to meet the physical needs while still allowing the leisure

for those long walks. The best solution, of course, is one

which meets the physical needs through use of the products

of leisure, thus merging external and internal needs within

a vital means of self-expression. Yet this best of all

possible solutions has its drawbacks. Consciousness of the

practical uses of such intensely personal insights probably

inhibits the occurrence of those initial insights. The

physical needs have a regularity that the insights do not

have. Our hypothetical individual eventually realizes he

must either find a better way to meet those physical needs

or find a way to make a fuller and more varied use of the

few insights that do occur. If he chooses the latter path,

which is easier than the former, he begins to explore ways

to combine individual insights to make one truth. The moti­

vation for these new compositions is wholly practical in the

beginning, but once our hypothetical individual becomes

involved in making them, he discovers by accident that there

is something akin to the original pleasure he associated

with the random insights to be found in making these new

combinations. There is the temptation, of course, to go too

far to the new extreme, to value the new combinations more

than the original and fragmentary insights. To do so, he

realizes, might destroy the psychic need and preparation

for receiving the original insights, gathered on those long

walks. If so, he would be doomed merely to follow out the

 100

mathematical possibilities for new combinations of the

material he already has; this could result in continual

patchquilt work of a steadily declining quality or even

in a heightened regard for rigid theory accompanied by a

gradual disregard for the fluidity of fresh intuition. In

avoiding this development, our hypothetical individual be­

comes highly sensitized to the tendency toward persistent

logical development within these new combinations and con­

tinues to value those fragmentary intuitions not simply as

being purer and better than the combinations he can make

from them but also as being the vital life force that he

must continually add to the mixture. The key word for him

becomes "balance.” Our hypothetical individual, if he

follows the path so far described, has found a way to re­

solve the initial opposition between physical needs and

psychic needs. But it is a precarious method that continually

threatens to become either rigidly practical or airily

idealistic. That is, the compositions contain the tension

of opposing needs which generated the compositions in the

first place. Yet new solutions are generated from old

problems. The psychic need for solitude and intuitive

experience no longer is characterized by an inhibiting

anxiety, that to meet this need is to refuse to meet more

practical needs. Likewise, the need to meet the physical

needs is no longer accompanied by regret for the time so

spent; those new combinations, after all, are only the

 101

rearranged, recombined, and merged inspirations. With the

imagination to sustain the inner vision, he can be behind

the podium and walking near Walden Pond at the same time.

In this way, he utilizes the necessary tension between the

two needs within one activity which meets both needs. The

new combinations build upward from the old, injected with

new vitality, and through the whole process issues the total

strength of the original moment of intuitive experience.

My "hypothetical man," of course, roughly represents

my concept of Emerson. Although I won't go so far as to say

that I believe that this description represents Emerson as

he was, I will say that it is probably closer to the truth

than views which represent only one side of him, the sober,

practical "rich man" or the supreme idealist without the

grace of practicality. The role of lecturing for Emerson

was essentially a role of internal as well as external

resolution, out of which a stronger Emerson gradually anerged.

No doubt he recognized the positive direction of development

within his life by 1838, and I believe that this recognition

helped him to view himself, in his own terms, as a "rich man."

A rich man has a future and a direction; Emerson certainly

felt he had both by 1838.

So far, my discussion of Emerson as a "rich man" has

emphasized the Emerson who lectured and kept journals. We

must not overlook, however, the other aspects of his life,

especially those centered in the home. In this respect, a

 102

man is rich by having what he values most. Often what a

man values is what was denied him earlier in life. We know

that Emerson's childhood and early manhood had been plagued

by loss of family through illness and death, and it doesn't

seem far-fetched to assume that his children, born in the

1830*s and 1840's, had more than ordinary meaning and value

for their father. In 1838, Emerson not only had established

a home of his own with his second wife, Lydia, but he also

had one child, his first son, born in late I 8 3 6 , and promise

of a second, his first daughter, to be born in early I839.

Both of the major biographies of Emerson imply that he

received a certain stability from his home life and growing

family, and we know from his letters that he included his

children among his "riches." In early 1842, about a month

after the sudden death of his first son, Emerson wrote to

Carlyle, "You can never know how much of me such a young

child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a

42
very rich man, and now the poorest of all."

The problems inherent within a too close association

of "riches" with anything material, including his first son,

would be resolved for Emerson only in the experience of the

1840's. Within that decade, a new emphasis upon the ultimate

wealth to be achieved through the natural ascension of

spirit into new forms would lead him to his new concept of

the poet. In "Wealth," Emerson would write that "the art

of getting rich consists • • . in a better order, in

 103

timeliness The poet is described in the essay

published in 1844 as "the timely man," as "the reconciler,"

who with "a new energy" participates in "the invention of

nature" and the "ascension, or, the passage of the soul into

higher forms."43 Finally, Emerson's poet was, for him, the

ultimate and "right compound interest," the "capital doubled,

quadrupled, centrupled," because his poet was "man raised

to his highest power."

DISTEMPERS OF THE HEATED CHAMBER

Announcing the publication of his first volume of

essays, Emerson wrote Carlyle on 28 February 1841 that his

"little raft" would soon "be afloat," adding that Carlyle

should "expect nothing more of my powers of construction,

no shipbuilding, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only

boards & logs tied together." After having received and

read Essays. Carlyle responded that it "has rebuked me,

, . . aroused and comforted me." Although Carlyle sensed

he might make "objections of all kinds" to "superficies

and detail," he wondered "but what were all that?" with the

implication that a volume which rebuked, aroused, and com­

forted him had already established its worthiness.^

Carlyle was not so considerate when he read the proofs for

Emerson's second volume of essays in late 1844. His major

criticisms concern the sentences, which, he says, while

they have a "pure genuine Saxon" strength, "are very brief"

 104

and do "not . . . always entirely cohere for me." In this

famous letter, Carlyle labels Emerson's paragraph as "a

beautiful square bag of duck-shot held together by canvas."

Although Carlyle's duck-shot image is often considered by

modern critics to be corrective or negative criticism of

Emerson* s style, we need to note the adjective "beautiful,"

which is often overlooked, and consider the positive link

that adjective established between his 1844 and 1841

comments on Emerson's work. In response to Carlyle's letter

evaluating his second volume of essays, Emerson wrote on 31

December 1844, "I doubt not your stricture on the book as

sometimes unconnected & inconsecutive is just. Your words

are very gently. I should describe it much more harshly.

My knowledge of the defects of these things I wrote is all

but sufficient to hinder me from writing at all."^5

Emerson's response is important, not merely in relation

to his second series of Essays. but especially in relation

to his general attitude about his own writing, which was

formed to a large extent before the publication of Essays

in 1841, within his early years of lecture-writing. It is

important, I would add, to be aware that Emerson did not

intentionally write the way he did: he did not work to

create bags of duck-shot. His style has much to say about

the effect he succeeded in having on his readers but, when

he wrote, he wrote despite his "knowledge of the defects of

these things." He felt the reality of those defects keenly,

 105

and at times they were sufficient to keep him from writing.

At other times, acute awareness of his own defects in

writing made writing difficult. At no other time in his

life do we become so aware through his letter and journal

comments of this effect of his own style upon him as during

the early years of lecture-writing. He did not blissfully

sweep the whole of writing under the magic carpet of in­

spiration. While acknowledging the priority of inspiration,

he often experienced the human anxieties and frustrations

attending the critical moment of "casting." In early 1835•

he noted in his journal, "It is one of the laws of composition

that let the preparation have been how elaborate, how ex­

tended soever the moment of casting is yet not less

critical nor the less all important moment on which the

whole success depends."^ Even reading, which he often said

had a stimulating effect upon him in terms of thinking and

writing, sometimes merely rubbed salt in his wounds. In a

letter to Frederic Henry Hedge, written 14 March 1836,

Emerson confessed he'd read very few books that winter for

"to write a very little takes a great deal of time" and

"there are not many greater misfortunes to peace of mind

than to have keen susceptibility to the beautiful in com­

position and just to lack that additional wit which suffices

to create i t . " ^
The necessity of lecturing made Emerson confront once

again on a regular basis that "almost terrifick" fear of

 106
original composition he'd originally encountered as a

minister writing weekly sermons. Lecturing made it neces­

sary for Emerson to confront continually and deal with,

when and as he could, his anxieties regarding his sense of

limitation as a writer. On 23 October I 8 3 6 , while other­

wise engaged in planning a new series of lectures, he

commented upon his difficulties with writing in a letter to

his brother William, exclaiming "how little masters we are

of our wits! Mine run away with me; I don't know how to

drive. I see them from afar— then they whisk by me— I

supplicate— I grieve— I point to the assembly that shall be,

but the inexorable thoughts will neither run in pairs nor

in strings nor in any manageable system." His only hope,

he said, was in "Necessity"— that is, in his prior commit­

ment to deliver the series of lectures in December: " . . .

Necessity is lord of all & when the day comes, comes always

the old lord and will harness the very air, if need be, to

the cart."48 Necessity, of course, was not merely the prior

commitment to lecture but also the monetary impetus neces­

sitating the lectures in the first place. As he said in

a letter to William on 28 June I 8 3 6 , "I see how it is ever

with me, thus far. I am never a dollar in advance of my

wants & if it were not for an expedient once or twice in a

twelve-month like Lecturing . . . , I should be flat on

my back.

Even Necessity was not always a sufficient prod, and

his lecture-composing, while always slow and laborious.
 107

sometimes went on as late as the day before delivery. On

Christmas day, 1838, Emerson noted in a letter to William,

"I have almost no time to write as I lecture upon Love

tomorrow night 40 pp. is the rule & I count now but 21

finished." Prodded by Necessity to lecture, lecturing in

turn drained him of any desire to write. "In the lecturing

season I hate a pen & have nothing to say," he wrote to

Margaret Fuller in early 1839* ^

Emerson often sought relief from anxiety during lecture-

composing times by taking humorous jabs at himself and his

process of writing lectures. On 15 November 183 6 , in a

letter to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, he commented, "For the

lectures, I hope your compassionate nature hinders you from

laughing at the pretension of the title / t h e series was

entitled "On the Philosophy of Modern Historyÿ. It will

prove, I foresee, but a nom de guerre. The name, like a new

companys charter, must be broad enough to cover not only

what we mean to do but what we might mean to d o . " ^ Emerson

would agree to a lecture series, would then provide a title

for the series so that it could be advertised sufficiently,

and only then would he begin to compose the lectures for the

series. His cart-before-the-horse manner of approaching a

lecture series is indicative, not so much of a general in­

ability to plan ahead of time, but of his general aversion

to lecturing itself except through necessity. It is obvious

as well from his words to Elizabeth Peabody that he used a

 108

title not as a nom de guerre for others so much as for him­

self, as a way to challenge himself to enter what was for

him the battle of writing a series of lectures.

A large number of Emerson*s letters strongly imply that

his brother William's obsession with land speculation in New

York contributed greatly to the necessity for lecturing each

year, especially between I 836 and 1 8 3 9 . Evidently, much

if not all of the $3-4,000 cash Emerson received from the

settlement of the Tucker estate disappeared in loans to

William, and it was only the wise advice of his financial

consultant, Abel Adams, which kept him from allowing William

to re-invest in land the total inheritance. Constantly

throughout the years 1836 to 1839, Emerson is either hirriedUy

forwarding money to William to save him from financial col­

lapse or anxiously awaiting return of part of the money

William owes him so that he can pay his own bills. William

often kept his word regarding repayment, but when he even­

tually sent Emerson money, it was usually a smaller sum than

they had agreed upon and always received much later than it

was due. Although Rusk notes that Emerson and William

theoretically shared the burden of the expense for boarding

their retarded brother, Bulkeley, it was Emerson who paid

the bills and then dunned William for his half, which

William persistently paid late, and which added yet another

drain to his yearly budget, a tottering affair propped up

by the expedient of lecturing. In the period 1836-1839,

 109

although he considered several times the recourse of selling

some of the stock inherited from the Tucker estate, Abel

Adams and the low resale value of those stock during these

years kept him from doing so. He did, however, on several

occasions, use some of the stock as collateral for loans

which always found their way into William's pocket. Emerson

rarely, if ever, was able to refuse William the money he

requested, although he was soon aware that the ease with

which William asked for the money did not characterize his

attitude toward repayment of that money later. His letters

imply that William would unwisely invest money necessary for

his family's subsistence in what might be called get-rich-

quick schemes, sometimes with an unreliable partner ; then,

when the investment collapsed or failed to provide a profit

quickly enough, William would hastily write Emerson for

loans to meet household expenses. Under these circumstances,

Emerson always responded with the necessary funds. The few

times that he refused to send money seem to be times when

William requested money to make new investments. Without

the necessary loans to William during his early years of

lecturing, that "old lord" Necessity would certainly not

have been as powerful as he was as prod for the composition

and delivery of the lectures.

Although in these early years it was the prod of

Necessity rather than the tug of popular demand which placed

a hesitant Emerson behind the podium, he paints this tongue-

 110

in-cheek picture of the origin of a lecture in a letter to

Frederic Henry Hedge on 27 March 1838i

The notes I collect in the course of a

year are so miscellaneous that when our
people grow rabid for lectures as they
do periodically about December, I huddle
all my old almanacks /journals, noteb o o k ^
together & look in the encyclopaedia
/perhaps a reference to Emerson’s journal
which he called "Encyclopedia," kept 1824-
1836, replaced by the indexes to his
journals which he began about this timg/
for the amplest cloak of a name whose folds
will reach unto & cover extreme & fantastic
things. Staid men & good scholars at first
expressed mirth & then indignation at the
audacity that baptised this gay rag bag
English literature, then Philosophy of
History, then Human Culture. . . . 53

New titles did not always mean new lectures54; in fact, since

composition for Emerson was a slow and painful process, he

often used sections from earlier lectures in later ones.

The title of a lecture did not always match the contents—

a fact which continually impedes the progress of the Emerson

scholar who would locate lecture versions of essay sections.

The following journal entry, made in 1840, casts some light

on the logic behind Emerson's sleight-of-hand titles:

In all my lectures I have taught one

doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the
private man. This the people accept
readily enough and even with loud com­
mendation as long as 1 call the lecture
Art, or Politics, or Literature, or the
Household; but the moment I call it
Religion they are shocked, though it be
only the application of the same truth
which they receive everywhere else, to
a new class of facts.55
 Ill

While these last two passages provide us with insight into

how he achieved at least a sense of philosophic consistency

in lectures and essays written over a large span of years,

our attention is more immediately drawn to the manner in

which the Lyceum limited his freedom of expression. Nature

and "The Divinity School Address" had shocked those with

traditional religious beliefs, but none were more sensitive

to controversial topics than those Lyceum committees who

picked lecturers and approved lectures for delivery. Even

as late as 1851, when he was forty-eight years old, Emerson

could say that "all committees . . . think me an erratic

gentleman, only safe with a safe subject."^ The attitude

of the committee-men would cause a larger problem for him

than the more immediate one limiting his titles if not his

topics. The Lyceum committee preferred his older lectures

to his newer ones, most likely not caring to allow him the

chance to spring something new and quite possibly shocking

on his audience. However, newspaper reporters would attend

the lectures, and throughout his lecturing years, Emerson

resented the fact that some reporters would make full reports

of his lectures. According to Rusk, Emerson "made a vigorous

attempt to head off newspaper reports. They were often

annoyingly imperfect but accurate enough to make his lectures

too well known in towns where he had hoped to read them

later. The fuller the newspaper reports, the more they cut

into his fees." 57

 112

As his fame rose, the Lyceum directors who had the

power to decide which lecture Emerson would read, preferred

the popular lectures, no matter how often they had been read,

for they would draw a large audience. Emerson*s distaste

for reading old lectures did not spring solely from a con­

sideration for protecting his fees from the reporters. He

felt it was "a grossness to read these things . . . fully

reported . . . in so many newspapers . " ^ He felt that,

after the newspapers had reported so fully certain lectures,

"they are no longer repeatable, and I must dive deeper into

the bag and bring up older ones, or write new ones, or cease

to r e a d . what did Emerson do with those lectures which

were read to death or prematurely killed off by full news­

paper reports? They became sources for new lectures and,

when they had lost all usefulness even through this continuous

recycling process for the podium, they became through furtiitx"

revision the works for which Emerson is best known— the

essays. A typical essay by Emerson contains recycled por­

tions from several lectures as well as ideas or passages

from the journals, especially the journals kept at the time

of the essay* s composition. It is very possible that, once

all of Emerson* s extant lectures are published, scholars may

discover that very little material from those lectures fail­

ed to find its way into the recycling process that created

the essays.
So fully reported in the newspapers, his lectures—
while they might still draw audiences— could not draw the
"convertible" audience Emerson sought. This audience,

according to a journal entry made in 1839* was one which

could still react to his lectures and be affected by them.

They could not be "agitated" if they knew the lecture before­

hand; and Emerson could not be "agitated" himself by the old

lectures he'd read so often before. Writing totally new

lectures was not always possible, since he wrote so slowly,

and the journal entries could accumulate only so quickly.

Emerson used at least two solutions: one was to mold several

older lectures into a "new" one with a "new» title; the

other was to deliver the same lecture at different times

under different titles, so that newspaper reporters could

not consult in newspaper files the reports on the lecture

and thus "scoop" Emerson before he had a chance to re­

deliver the lecture. It was this second practice which

earned Emerson some indignation from listeners whom he

humorously dubbed » staid men & good scholars." This practice

also may account for a number of the lectures Emerson is

credited with delivering according to Lyceum records,

although copies of the lectures do not survive.

Evidently, newspaper reporters were the bane of most

lecturers in the American Lyceum movement. Samuel Clemens,

who lectured from 1866 through the early 1870's, likewise

had few good words to say about newspapers. As a lecturer,

Clemens had the original idea of introducing himself by

mimicking the traditional purple prose introductions of

 114

Lyceum committee chairmen. At first, he said, "the effect

was very satisfactory." He adds, however, that the strategy

worked » only a little while," since "the newspapers printed

it and after that I could not make it go, since the house

knew what was coming and retained its emotions." Afterwards,

Clemons came up with another unique strategy to use in his

introductions, but once again he must add, "That worked well

for a while, then the newspapers printed it and took the

juice out of it." Finally, Clemens concludes, "I gave up

introductions altogether.»60 In the end, even Ralph Waldo

Emerson must have realized that he was caught in the middle

of the tug-of-war between the Lyceum and the newspapers for

a paying audience.
In late 1853, his friend William Furness asked him in

a letter if the press should be given tickets to Emerson's

upcoming Philadelphia lectures, and Emerson responded on

18 December, "0 certainly . . . perhaps, by sending them,

they may be moved to stay away . . . ."6l Emerson's sleight-

of-hand with his titles was merely one more way by which he

succeeded in adapting to problems as they arose along the

Lyceum trail. To use Lowell's phrase, it is just one more

way in which Emerson "out-Yankees us all,"0* one more way

in which he wins at the "game" of lecturing. Emerson's

attitude toward lecturing emerges very clearly in his

journal description, made in the early 1850's of the

" challenge" he encounters from the Lyceum:

 115

"I'll bet you fifty dollars a day

for three weeks that you will not
leave your library, and wade, and
freeze, and ride, and run, and
suffer all manner of indignities,
and stand up for an hour each night
reading in a hall;" and I answer,
"I'll bet I will." I do it and win
the nine hundred dollars.63

The truth is, however, that "fifty dollars a d a y was the

most he ever received as a lecturer in the United States.

Often enough, he lectured for $20 and, in the country Itfceums,

for $10 and travelling expenses. Nevertheless, no matter how

much of a "game" he would pretend ironically it was, lectur­

ing was essentially serious business. Emerson could be as

certain about lecturing each winter as Franklin said we all

could be about death and taxes. As he soberly noted in his

journal on 1? August 1839, "I see plainly I shall have no

choice about lecturing again next winter. I must do it.

Here in Concord they send me my tax-bill for the current

year, $161.73."64
What should be obvious by now is that it would be a

grave injustice to Emerson to treat his comments in his

letters on lecturing with total seriousness,for they were

not written in total seriousness--indeed, they were often as

not written as comic or ironic relief from the anxiety of

lecture-composing and lecturing. Emerson once had to

explain to his childhood friend Sam Bradford that, while he

would be lecturing near his friend's home, he could not

stay with him, but "must go to an inn." "A lecture is a

 116

nervous disorder," he added, "& hides itself like other dis­

tempers in a chamber." Before a lecture, he concluded, "I

am very bad company." ^5 Emerson's comment appears to be

more than a polite excuse; it implies that he secluded him­

self before and after delivering a lecture because a certam

amount of emotional upheaval went into his preparation for

and delivery of a lecture. This is certainly consistent

with his comment to William about his relationship to the

audience during a lecturet "I will agitate men being

agitated mysel f . " ^ Agitation, as used in this context, is

a stimulation of thought or intellectual response, a

positive end or purpose which evolves out of the gloomy

prod of anxiety which made Emerson a necessary lecturer.

Yet the delivery of those lectures was, to all appear­

ances, emotionless. Emerson read his lectures in a voice

usually devoid of emotion, one that at times could not be

heard clearly by his audience. He evidently used neither

body movements nor hand gestures to relieve the tedium of

reading. One newspaper reporter, after hearing Emerson

lecture in Cleveland in early 1859, wrote that he would as

soon "see a perpendicular coffin behind a lecture-desk as

Emerson." Another reviewer, after Emerson lectured in

New York in 1851, noted that he had few of the graces of

oratory. But another newspaper reviewer, after hearing

Emerson lecture in Springfield (Illinois) in early 1853,

assessed him as a "master of wonderful style and thought,

 117

/who/ was not a lecturer in the usual sense but a nmologist,

talking rather to himself than to the audience."^ Those

in Emerson's audience— especially newspaper reporters— who

came to judge him as a lecturer by the degree to which he

lectured "according to form" were, no doubt, disappointed.

Emerson stated in his journal in 1839 that, as a

lecturer, he sought a "convertible" audience. Earlier, in

another journal entry, he'd said that the orator was success­

ful only "when he is himself a g i t a t e d . T h e r e is, however,

nothing in Emerson's comments which suggests that either

the convertibility of the audience or the agitation of the

orator must be visible. His communication of agitation,

which obviously must not have had anything to do with his

manner of delivery (except by contrast), was successful with

that small portion of his audience which was, in his word,

"convertible." Agitation, in the sense that he is using it,

does not necessarily have anything to do with the ideas in

his lectures. Few of his listeners later recalled, without

the assistance of notes or newspaper reports, the ideas

Emerson covered in a lecture, and some did not realize or

remember the topic on which he spoke. W.C. Brownell, re­

calling his experience as a youth listening to one of

Emerson's lectures, wrote in 1909» "Naturally I do not in

the least recall the topic of Emerson's lecture. I have an

impression that it was not known at the time and did not

appear very distinctly in the lecture itself."^

 118

Van Wyck Brooks clarified, however, that "it was not so

much his ideas that people received as a certain electric

shock that energized their latent power and k n o w l e d g e . " 7°

James Russell Lowell, recalling his thoughts while walking

home after hearing Emerson lecture, later wrote in 1871,

"Did they say he was disconnected? So were the stars. . . .

And were they not knit together by a higher logic than our

mere sense could master? . . . If asked what was left?

what we carried home? we should not have been careful for

an answer . . . . Enough that he had set that ferment of

wholesome discontent at work in us."?* The vitality of

creative agitation, then, is the internal agitation of the

speaker which successfully sets to work "that ferment of

wholesome discontent" within those listeners who are "con­

vertible."
Emerson seems to have had his strongest effect through

his lectures and writings upon his youthful comtemporaries

— yet not too youthful. As John Jay Chapman implies in his

account of his own reading experience of Emerson, Emerson

has his strongest effect upon minds young enough to be

convertible, yet mature enough to seek convertibility: "I

had read Emerson's essays as a boy, but it was not till I

reached college that they assumed any special significance

to me . . . . He let loose something within me which made me

in my own eyes as good as anyone e l s e . " W a l t Whitman

also came under the influence of Emerson at the time when

 119

he needed such a stimulus. In I860, Whitman said to John

Trowbridge, "I was simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me

to a boil."73 John Burroughs, like Walt Whitman, would

similarly be brought to a boil by Emerson, but both men,

like a number of the other young men who in their youth

numbered among his "convertible" Lyceum audiences, would

later grow away from Emerson. They would see "limitations"

in him, because he did not think the thoughts they were

capable of thinking, forgetting that his intent and effect

upon them had been merely to "agitate" them so that they

might think independently. If these men's assessments of

Emerson, drawn when they were young, are accurate, then such

a development was inevitable. That "ferment of wholesome

discontent" instilled or brought to a boil by Emerson, in

leading them to themselves would necessarily lead them

further away from Emerson. It is the ferment of his in­

fluence, then as well as today, which makes it so widely

felt and, later, so easily denied.

Emerson lectured for over forty-five years, from late

1833 to at least 1879, and although he is today best known

as an essayist and poet, he cannot be adequately evaluated

as a writer until his experience as a lecturer has been

more fully explored by scholars and critics. To his

contemporaries, he was first known and best known as a

lecturer. There is no doubt that the lectures he delivered

 120

in these years greatly affected his style and the develop­

ment of his process of composition. What began and persisted

as a necessary role from essentially practical motivation

became the role through which he matured in both thought

and style. If we overlook the practical impetus for his

lecturing by perpetuating the myth of his financial -rich­

ness,1* we can easily bypass serious consideration of him

as a lecturer as well as the development of purpose within

his writing, which begins in the journal and largely matures

in conjunction with the preparation of lectures. But to by­

pass these considerations is to fail to deal with the heart

of Emerson. The concept of the journal as -savings' bank,"

as a place where interest is continually reinvested within

new forms, reaches its fullest development as -quarry-

largely through the persistent exercise of the symbolic

action while composing lectures. The major influence of

lecturing upon his purpose as a writer, however, was that

it made him more interested in acting as prod to his

audience, to get their own thought going, than in indoctri­

nating them with his own ideas. To explore this phenomenon

is not only to examine his influence on other minds but

also to examine the manner in which he influenced and re­

acted to himself as a writer. The result of such exploration

is not a set of conclusions which can be easily summarized,

but such an examination certainly brings us closer to an

understanding of a writer who has perplexed critics for

 121

over a hundred years. It is a key, even if we do not know

specifically how to use it, to know that the perplexity of

response that Emerson generates today is similar to the

perplexity of response he generated in his own day, and

that anxiety, perplexity, and agitation are necessary

characteristics not only of the response to Emerson but

also of his purpose for and process of writing.

Certainly there is sufficient reason to consider

Emerson's resistance to writing in any evaluation of his

accomplishments. The implications within earlier critical

assessments that Emerson saw the Lyceum as a pulpit for his

ideas or that he considered lecturing in any way as a

positive experience for himself as a writer have no support

in the evidence readily available today in his journals and

letters. The need for a prod appears again and again in

his life, enough so as to become an interpretative motif in

understanding the nature of his experience. As a child and

young man, he was a reluctant scholar and might not have

studied at all had it not been for people like his Aunt

Mary Moody Emerson, who acted as prods, encouraging him

through different methods to read, learn, and think. There

is reason to believe that Emerson might not have continued

his early experiment with keeping a journal if the constant

need for sermon material as a young preacher at Second

Church had not made that journal so necessary. There is

good reason to doubt that Emerson would have lectured as

 122

persistently as he did during much of his life if he had in­

deed received as early as 1835 $1*200 a year in steady in­

come from Ellen's estate "to relieve the worst of his fears

of poverty," as the critical myth regarding his richness

maintains. When Emerson began to publish essays in 1841, he

was responding to the request of friends, especially Carlyle,

who wished to see some of his lectures published. We should

not underestimate, however, the financial motive in publish­

ing the Essaysi he subsidized the publication of most of his

works so that he might later reap the profits from his in­

vestment. His literary works were his essential "savings’

bank." Again and again, we see Emerson prodded by necessity

to underwrite the future.

He did not have a high estimation of his writing

ability; his letters record the anxiety he suffered to write

at all. Only those brief journal entries were written

relatively free from the prod of external necessity; if

those journal entries were written under any dominant im­

pulse, it was the internal prod of his own insight or inspi­

ration. Those journal entries were made as the impulse

struck him, certainly not on a daily basis. We cannot and

should not assume that the internal impulse which motivated

those island-like patches of prose in the journals also

operated from the beginning to motivate his lectures and

essays. But neither can we assume that one one motivation

did not eventually strengthen the other once Emerson was

solidly within his regular routine of journal-keeping and

lecture-writing. Certainly the prod of necessity con­

tributed in some way to the journals; certainly, after a

time, the internal impulse motivating the journal entries

helped to "make the inspiration continuous" through the

medium of the essays. In other words, there is no way to

reduce Emerson’s work to a simple diagram spelling out

singular or exclusive motivations. This impossibility is

what makes discussion of his motivation so complex, so

liable to critical understatement and conflicting views.

We can be sure that the myth of Emerson’s richness that has

persisted in criticism to our own day seriously interferes

with our understanding of the nature of that "old lord"

Necessity in initiating and sustaining him as a writer. My

purpose in so closely examining this aspect of him is not

to create sympathy, but rather to clarify that Emerson was

a writer who wrote under pressure and who, without the

impingement of external pressures upon him, might not have

written at all or, at least, would not have written the

essays we value the most today.

 124

Notes for Chapter 2

*The major articles, generally available, are: A.M.

Baumgartner, " 'The Lyceum is My Pulpit* : Homiletics in

Emerson*s Earlier Lectures," American Literature. ]4 (1962-

1963), 477-486* Kenneth Walter Cameron, "The Challenge of

Emerson's Early Lectures," Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 20

(I960), 8-10; Ralph Charles LaRosa, " Invention and Imitation

in Emerson*s Early Lectures," American Literature. 44 (1972),

13-30* Russell Potter, » *Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Emerson,

Saturday Review, 39 (10 March 1956), pp. 9-10, 40-41. None

of these, however, are studies of the role of lecturing. A

good overview of Emerson as a lecturer is found in William

C h a r v a V s introduction to his Emerson's American Lecture

Engagements: A Chronological List, a pamphlet issued by the

New York Public Library in 1961, after the initial publi­

cation of Charvat's work in five issues of the library’s

Bulletin from September i960 to January 1961.

^Stephen Whicher, Freedom and Fate, p. 27.

^without a unified discussion of this issue, it is

easy for Rusk’s reader to pick up certain facts in isolation

and, missing other pertinent facts because they are cited

pages later, draw a distorted conclusion. The major facts

regarding the legacy that occur within Rusk's text are found

in Life on pp. 157* 199-200, 250-251. The reader, however.

 125

should also carefully examine Rusk's notes for the documen­

tation* not all of the details necessary for understanding

this legacy are presented in Rusk's narrative, although he

does note all of the relevant sources in his notes. Henry

F. Pommer (Emerson's First Marriage) rechecked many of the

original documents relating to this legacy and clarifies

several important points. My discussion, below, rests upon

an integration of the research and conclusions of both Rusk

and Pommer.

^Brooks, The Life of Emerson, p. 60.

^Freedom and Fate. p. 27»

^Emerson on the Soul (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1964), p. 174. Bishop's use of "compen­

sation" is probably meant to be a pun. Emerson never used

the concept in the narrow, insensitive manner Bishop implies

here.

?Rusk, Life, p. 200* italics mine.

8The major facts within Rusk's text appear on pp. 157,

199-200, and 250-251.

^Emerson on the Soul, p. 175»

10..Experience," Merrill facsimile, p. 53»

 126

^ Emerson on the Soul, pp. 197-198.

*2Pommer provides us with an excellent portrayal of

Emerson's regard for Ellen in Emerson's First Marriage, a

study which is based upon close acquaintance with the

original records as well as the major biographical assess­

ments .

1^Pommer, Emerson's First Marriage, pp. 62, 64.

14 ,
Pommer, p. 6 .

l % u s k . Life. p. 157.

l6Rusk, p. 200.

1 ^Pommer, Emerson's First Marriage, p. 64. The docu­

mentation is a letter Charles Emerson wrote to William

Emerson on 17 May 1832.

^Pommer, p. 6 5 . A letter written by Charles Emerson

to William Emerson on 13 May 1834 establishes that the first

portion granted to Emerson in 1834 had a cash value of

$11,600; Pommer says the second portion, granted in 1837.

had a cash value of $11,674.49. But see Rusk, Life, pp. 200,

250-251 ; Rusk says the second portion had a cash value of

$11,674.50.

19pommer, p. 64.
 127

^°This letter is cited by Pommer, p. 65 (italics mine)*

cf. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1939)» I » 413-414.

Rusk does not quote this important letter in Life* it is,

however, the source for his statement on p. 200. Hereafter,

Rusk's edition of Emerson's letters is cited as Letters.

21Rusk, Life. p. 200* Pommer, p. 65» cites the relevant

portions of the letter by Charles Emerson which provide this

information.

22Rusk, Life, pp. 250-251.

23cited by Pommer, Emerson's First Marriage, p. 65*

This occurs in the same letter by Charles Emerson cited

above in note 21. Again, this letter is not quoted in Rusk.

24a s Rusk says, Emerson eventually received "the whole

of Ellen's share of the two-thirds of the estate willed to

the Tucker children" (p. 200). Ellen's sister died in

November, 1832, and Ellen's mother died in February, 1833.

The deaths of two of the major claimants of the Tucker

estate probably hastened a court procedure which might have

indeed, as the executor had said earlier, dragged on for

many more years.

^ R u s k , Life, pp. 250-251 •

 128

26cited by Pommer, Emerson'3 First Marriage, p. 65;

cf. Letters, II, p. 92.

2 /'Rusk, Life, pp. 250 -2 5 1 , 200.

2 ® E d w a r d Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord, p. 1 9 8 .

^ E m e r s o n regularly provided financial assistance for

Bronson Alcott and his family, and on occasion assisted

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thoreau, the young Ellery Channing,

Thomas Carlyle, and others. For detailed descriptions

regarding the extent and nature of this aid, see Rusk, Life,

pp. 297-299» and Records of a Lifelong Friendship. 1807-

1882i Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Henry Furness, ed.

Horace Howard Furness (Boston and New York* Houghton Mifflin

Company, 1910), pp. 20-33* Hereafter, Furness' volume is

cited as Records.

3°Rusk, Life, p. 200.

31-Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, New Basic History

of the United States, rev. ed., William Beard (Garden City,

N.Y.* Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1944; rev. ed,, i9 6 0 ),

pp. 197, 524, 243-244.

32Rusk, Life, pp. 286-287.

33Rusk, Life, pp. 295-296. Any examination of the

demise of the Dial should adequately consider the difficulties

 129

of sustaining a literary and philosophic journal when the

econimic situation is as unstable as it was in the U.S. in

the 1840's.

34william Charvat, "Introduction," Emerson*s American

Lecture Engagements, p. 9-

35charvat, pp. 7-9-

36RUsk, Life, p. 392.

3?Rusk, Life, p. 392. Twoyears later, Emerson's in­

come was $4162.11. Increased income from lectures supple­

mented with a good income from book sales made most, if not

all, of the difference (Rusk, p. 400).

3®Charvat, p. 9.

39cited by Rusk, Life, p. 452.

40pUbiished in i860. Because of his compositional pro­

cess, we cannot assume that the ideas within an essay

published, for example, in i860 represent the i860 Emerson

and not, say, the 1840 Emerson. Any essay Emerson wrote

is usually composed of sentences and paragraphs the earliest

versions of which may be found in the journals from two to

twenty years earlier. We cannot say, with any certainly,

that a "late" essay represents the "mature" views of Emerson.

In most cases, we encounter the Emerson who is contemporary

 130

with the e s s a y s publication only implicitly as the human

"compositor" of the essay.

^ C i t e d by Rusk, Life, pp. 159-160.

^ 2The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, edited by

Joseph Slater (New York and London* Columbia Univ. Press,

1964), p. 31?. Hereafter, cited as Corr. of E and C .

43"The Poet," Merrill facsimile, pp. 40, 2 9 , 28, 26.

^Corr. of E and C . pp. 291, 2 9 5 . One should avoid the

earlier edition of the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence cited

by Charles Eliot Norton (The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle

and Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1834-1872. published in Boston by

Houghton Mifflin in 1883), which was hastily issued the year

following Emerson’s death to counter a wave of offensive

criticism of Carlyle stimulated in 1882 by James Anthony

Froude's Thomas Carlyle* A History of the First Forty Years

of His Life, a book which shocked or offended many readers

of that day with its relevation of certain intimate details

of Carlyle's life. Norton's edition of the letters published

only a selection of the letters available from this lifelong

correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle and omits passages

offensive to Victorian sensibilities or boring in Norton's

estimation* Norton also regularized the spelling, corrected

the grammar, improved the diction, and corrected the math

in the letters. For further details on this first edition

 131

of the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence, especially the

circumstances affecting its publication, see Slater's

introduction, Corr. of E and C . p. 64 ff. Slater's edition

provides us with all of the available letters and reprints

then exactly as they were originally written.

^ corr. of E and C . pp. 371-372.

^6JMN, V, p. 14.

^ Letters. II, p. 7-

^ Letters. II, pp. 42-43.

^ Letters. II, p. 26.

5°Letters, II, pp. 177, 182.

^ Letters, II, p. 46.

52see the letters by Emerson on the following pages of

vol. II of Letters: pp. 26-28, 31, 42-43, 50-51, 53-55, 64,

65-67, 68-69, 83, 86-87, 89-91, 91-92, 93, 128, 130, 132-

133, 133-134, 137, 150-151, 162, 172, 217-218.

^Letters, II, p. 121.

^ R u s k , Life, p. 379.

55cited by Cabot, Memoir, p. 320.

 132

S^Emerson*s letter to his second wife, written at

Pittsburgh on 21 March 1851| cited by Cabot, Memoir. p. 5 6 7 .

57Life. pp. 382-383.

^Emerson's letter to his wife, dated 8January 1848;

cited by Cabot, Memoir, p. 515*

59Eraerson*s letter to his wife, dated 16 December 1847;

cited by Cabot, Memoir, p. 508.

^°Samuel Clemens, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed.

Charles Neider (1917; New York* Harper & Brothers, 1959)*

p. I 6 5 .

61Furness, Records. p. 90.

James Russell Lowell, "Emerson the Lecturer," My

Study Windows, by James Russell Lowell (Boston* James R.

Osgood, 1871)* pp. 375-384; cited from the excerpt reprinted

in Thomas J. Rountree, ed., Critics on Emerson* Readings in

Literary Criticism (Coral Gables, Fla.* University of Miami

Press, 1973), p. 41. Hereafter, Rountree's volume is cited

as Critics.

63cited by Cabot, Memoir. p. 5 6 6 .

^ C i t e d by Cabot, Memoir, p. 461. Lecture fees cited

above in the text are based upon Cabot, Memoir, pp. 460-461.
 133

^ L e t t e r from Emerson to Sam Bradford, 4 February 1870;

Furness, Records, p. 149.

^Letters, II, pp. 255-256.

source for this paragraph, including the remarks

by the reviewers, is William Charvat, pp. 48, 35» 25» 28.

68cited in the introduction to EL, III, pp. xvi-xvii.

69»Emerson," American Prose Masters (1909)» by W. C.

Brownell; cited from the excerpt reprinted in Milton R.

Konvitz, ed., The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson*

Selected Criticism Since 1837 (Ann Arbor; University of

Michigan Press, 1872), p. 144. Hereafter, Konvitz*s volume

is cited as Recognition.

7QLife of Emerson, pp. 78-79-

"Emerson the Lecturer," cited from excerpt in

Konvitz, ed., Recognition, p. 47.

72cited by M. A. DeWolfe Howe, John Jay Chapman and

His Letters (Boston* Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937)» p* 76.

73cited by Trowbridge in his My Own Story (1903)»

p. 367; my source for the statement is Rusk, Life, p. 374.

 Chapter 3

THE TRANSFORMATION OF GRIEF INTO AFFIRMATIONi THE

EXPERIENCE OF "THRENODY" AND "THE POET"

Confusion about the motivation and purpose of Emerson's

major works as well as the influence that external pressures

had in forming those works is especially evident in the New-

Critical response to his poetry. The New-Critical practice

has been to discuss Emerson's poetry in isolation not only

from the essays but also from his life. At least some of

the confusion about his poetic work comes, not from the

conclusions of New Criticism, but from the assumptions and

methods of New Criticism. My major premise so far has been

and remains that a close examination of the development of

Emerson's process of composition provides us with a way of

understanding not only how he wrote but also why. In an

earlier chapter. I've explored the development of the

journals, in terras of their intrinsic development of purpose

and ideas as well as their relationship to the sermons,

lectures, and essays. I've also examined Emerson as a

lecturer not simply to clarify the nature of the origins of

the lectures from the journals and their relationship to

the later essays but especially to emphasize the vital

effect that external pressures and responsibilities had in

forming the man, what and how he wrote, and the nature of

134
 135

his reactions to himself and his writing. In hoth of these

earlier chapters. I've suggested that a major turning point

in Emerson* s development as an individual and as an artist

occurred as a result of his grief over, and gradual accept­

ance of, the sudden death of his first son in early 1842.

Critics have noted that a stronger strain of realism emerges

in Emerson's prose in his second series of Essays (1844)»

they have generally agreed that the poem "Threnody" was

written to express Emerson* s grief in 1842, and that its

best lines are those which portray the grieving father's

painful sense of great loss. But none, to my knowledge,

has suggested that these two critical observations are

linked or that most of the poems and essays, published

after Waldo's death in 1842, on which Emerson's high regard

today is based, are molded by the transformations this

experience caused within Emerson.

In this chapter, my purpose will be to examine this

experience closely in terms of the transformation which

emerged from it, both in Emerson's life and in his work.

I will mainly be concerned with the poem "Threnody," not

simply because of its obvious link to the Waldo experience

but especially because of the relationship that poem has

with many other poems and at least two of Emerson's most

noted essays. I will begin with a review of the critical

response to "Threnody." The purpose of this section will

be to suggest the need for looking closely at the text of

 136

>*Threnody*' within the fuller context to which it belongs.

The second part of this chapter, then, presents "the recon­

structed text of context," the poem as published in late

1846 and the earliest drafted lines from the journal as well

as portions of Emerson* s letters regarding the death of

Waldo which relate to images and lines within the published

poem. The third portion will reconstruct, as much as is

possible from various sources, the event of Waldo's death

as well as the surrounding circumstances. The final portion

of my discussion will attempt to unfold the affective nature

of the experience and the poem in terms of their influence

upon Emerson's life and later works. My immediate objective

within this chapter will be to examine how life influences

writing, and vice versa. My larger objective, however, goes

beyond the texts and biographical facts of 1842-1846. I

will be demonstrating that we cannot understand Emerson's

work in isolation from his life, his poems in isolation from

his journals or essays, or any of his forms of writing—

journals, sermons, essays, poems, lectures— in isolation

from the other writings or from his life.

THE CRITICAL RESPONSE TO "THRENODY"

"Threnody" has stimulated a varied and contradictory

critical response since its first publication in Poems in

late 1846. In 1881, John Morley wrote that, as a whole,

"Emerson's poetry is of that kind which springs, not from

 137

excitement of passion o r feeling, but from an intellectual

demand for intense and sublimated expression." One of the

few exceptions mentioned by Morley was the " impressive"

poem, "Threnody."1 W. B. Cairns, in A History of American

Literature (1912), said that "Threnody" expressed "too

intense personal sorrow* and that, for this reason, it

could not "compete with smoother and more academic elegies."2

Ralph L. Rusk, however, believed that »Threnody" is essen­

tially devoid of human emotion: "Emerson, too firmly and

contently fixed in the universal laws, and so grieving that

he could not grieve, collected rich epithets and scattered

them through a poem which, if it was not grief, was a nearly

perfect philosopher's substitute."3 Read within the context

of the other poems published in Poems » "Threnody" does stand

out impressively, as Morley found in his review of Emerson*s

poems. Compared with "more academic elegies," "Threnody"

does, as Cairns felt, miss the mark: it is anything but an

academic elegy.^ Rusk’s evaluation, occurring within the

context of biography, is too stringently faithful to one

statement made by Emerson shortly after Waldo's death and

long before "Threnody" was composed to reflect any sensitivity

to the poem itself. The poem, although rooted in biograph­

ical experience, is more than static biographical fact--

the only reality Rusk's perspective can allow it. To a

large extent, in fact, many of the assessments of "Threnody"

more acutely reflect the critic's or scholar's limited

 138

context than the actual context of the poem itself. F. I.

Carpenter voiced the unique and rather curious view that

"Threnody" was Emerson's attempt to punish himself "for not

being able to realize his sorrow articulately" after Waldo's

death. Although Carpenter blamed Emerson's "New England

habit of self-deprecation" to justify this curious view,

the act of writing a poem as punishment echoes more of

masochism than it does of "New England temperament." Much

later in the Emerson Handbook. Carpenter mentioned the

statistics compiled by R. E. Amacher in the mid-1940's,

showing that "Threnody," at that time, was the most critically

esteemed Emerson poem.^

In view of the inconclusive critical history of response

to the poem, we must ask how "Threnody" became and why it

remains one of the most esteemed of Emerson's poems by

critics when there has been so little specific critical

attention paid to the work itself. The poems which are the

most esteemed critically, according to Amacher's statistics,

have not received most of the critical attention paid to

individual Emerson poems. Part of the problem, perhaps, is

that the two most esteemed poems— "Threnody" and "Woodnotes"

--are also long poems. Generally, it has been true that

the shorter poems— especially "Each and All," "Brahma,"

and "The Snow-storm"— have received most of the attention

in critical articles. Hyatt Waggoner, in his recent study

of Emerson as a poet, bemoaned at some length the lack of

 139

attention that New Criticism has given to Emerson* s poems.6

Nevertheless, although Waggoner listed "Threnody" as one of

Emerson*s best poems— as one of his "greatest" and most

"distinguished" poems, in fact——he wrote at length and in

depth about other poems. Jonathan Bishop discussed

"Threnody" rather thoroughly, even though he did not hold

the poem as a whole in as high esteem as Waggoner does.

The best lines in "Threnody," according to Bishop, are

those lines Emerson wrote during the spring of 1842. To

launch his discussion. Bishop cited the following six lines

from "Threnody"t
The eager fate which carried thee
Took the largest part of me:
For this losing is true dying;
This is lordly man's down-lying.
This his slow but sure reclining.
Star by star his world resigning.

Bishop then said, "These first-written lines are best.

Emerson never wrote better. The melancholy facts, the slow,

broken couplets, give complete expression to feeling."

Bishop concluded, "Later Emerson took up the poem to com­

plete it with an affirmative interpretation, but the later

lines are less successful. . . .Emerson was not the first

or the last to find grief more real and expressible than

consolation."7 Probably grief is easier to express than

consolation, but one can wonder if it is indeed true that

grief is more "real" than consolation or if it only appears

to be so to our modern minds. Emerson, we know from

 140

"Experience,” would disagree with Bishop regarding the

reality of grief. Bishop was not the first, nor perhaps

will he be the last, critic to assume that Emerson wrote

the first part of "Threnody" in the spring of 1842,

immediately after Waldo's death in January, and, at some

later date prior to the poem's publication in late 1846,

tacked on the affirmative second half. The fact is that

Emerson did draft approximately 130 lines of the first part

of "Threnody" during the spring of 1842» he did draft a

little more than a dozen lines of the second half of

”Threnody” during the spring of 1843, so it is not accurate

to assume that the "affirmative interpretation» of the

second half of the poem was added four years later, in

1846, when "Emerson took up the poem to complete it." But

it is also a fact that we do not have an extant copy of

the completed draft of the whole poem in the journal» we

do not even know for certain when the poem, as we know it

today, was written. But we can be certain that the lines

which Bishop admires so much in "Threnody" did not exist

in the spring of 1842 in the form they had assumed by late

1846. Here are the same six lines from "Threnody" as they

appeared in draft in the 1842 journalt

For this losing is dying

This is lordly man's downlying
His slow but last reclining
Star by star his world resigning
For the Fate which kidnapped thee
Took the major part of me 8
 141

These, of course, are not the best lines that Emerson ever

wrote; nevertheless, with the passage of time and within

Emerson's process of composition, they would become six of

his best lines of poetry. My point is not to disagree with

Bishop's conclusions— only with the means by which he

arrived at them.

Let's unravel some of the assumptions acting as scaf­

folding for Bishop's discussion of "Threnody." Bishop is

saying, in so many words, that the finished or final version

of the six lines from "Threnody are excellent because they

are transparent, spontaneous, immediate: they "give complete

expression to feeling." The assumption underlying this

statement is that the lines "give complete expression to

feeling" because they are the "first-written lines"— that

is, that they are the lines written both in the heat of

immediate experience and within the "spell" of vatic inspi­

ration. This assumption has, however, only the reality of

a critical fiction; its life comes from a misconception and

oversimplification of Emerson's sense of inspiration as well

as a basic ignorance of how he actually wrote. His dis­

cussions of inspiration, especially the notions of the

necessary priority of inspiration and the divine origin for

inspiration, are found in the essays "Inspiration," "The

Poet," and "Poetry and Imagination." As a rule, Emerson did

not believe in or act upon a concept of continuous inspi­

ration, the assumption that the poet writes his poem

 142

spontaneously in a rapt condition during which he is but a

mere passive instrument for controlling Muses. Emerson

believed in the necessity for composition, that a writer or

poet participates in creation through the act of composing.

The point is that while one could find sentences here and

there in Emerson's essays from which one could construct an

argument that he believed in the classical concept of inspi­

ration, such an exercise could not add much, if anything,

to our understanding of what he wrote or how he wrote it.

If Emerson had believed in the supremacy of vatic inspi­

ration, he would have allowed the spontaneously drafted

lines for "Threnody" to remain, and we would not have some

of his best lines of poetry. In fact, what is true of

"Threnody" seems to be true of his other poems for which we

have initial draft lines in the journalsi his best lines

are not his "first-written lines."

Another assumption underlying Bishop's conclusions is

that there was a distinct break between the composition of

the first part of "Threnody," lines 1-175# and the com­

position of the second part, which contains the response of

"the deep Heart" of the Universe to the father's "blasphemy

of grief." This assumption, however, is an oversimplifica­

tion of what we can reconstruct today from the journals of

the manner in which Emerson composed "Threnody." During

the spring of 1842, in the months following Waldo's death

in January, Emerson wrote in a small pocket-sized notebook

 143

the earliest versions of 87 of the first 175 lines of

"Threnody." Now, these are not the first 87 lines of the

poem as we know it today. Instead, they are the earliest

draft versions of the published lines 1-11, 16-18, 24-26,

52 - 5 3 , 62-73. 98-101, 105-111, 113-115, 118-120, 122-127,

130-131, 136-149, 152-165, 172-173, and 175. Furthermore,

the lines were not composed in this order. The first

drafted lines are probably the journal drafts of what are

now lines 62-73, the description of the "babe in willow

wagon closed." These 87 early lines were written in the

small notebook the JMN editors designate as "Journal Books

Small /-l7," a notebook small enough to have fit into

Emerson's coat pocket, with a marbled cardboard cover which,

through heavy wear and weather exposure, is now almost worn

off. The editors of Volume VIII of JMN describe how Emerson

must have used this notebook. They claim that "it is clear

that Emerson carried this notebook__7 regularly to the

woods or on walks so that he could compose spontaneously

in the open." Most of the time, "he opened the book at

random," since "the entries are in no demonstrably chrono­

logical order." The entries "vary, from mere jottings, to

prose paragraphs, to lines of poetry— over 500 of them,"

which were later incorporated as parts to some 22 poems.

The notebook was obviously a compositional notebook, since

Emerson often copied or expanded the material in the larger

journals. The JMN editors have ascertained that "Much of

 144

1Threnody” which appears here was written in the spring of

1842." According to "internal evidence for dating," since

few of the entries are dated, "Emerson used the volume as

a journal most heavily from 1840 to 1843." About the parti­

cular use to which Emerson put this notebook, the editors

say*

The volume was so useful to Emerson that

after transferring entries to his larger
journals, he frequently erased a page and
used it again. Many book lists are in­
scribed in ink on top of pencil or erased
pencil journal entries or poetry. Some
pages have three layers of material.°

Therefore, if we are to speak accurately regarding Emerson's

" spontaneous" composition of poems, we must speak of his

"spontaneous" composition of lines of poems, with it being

understood that we are actually speaking of the "spontaneous"

composition of a first or early draft of a line of a poem.

Furthermore, from what the JMN editors, Gilman and Parsons,

say about Emerson's entries in this notebook, there is no

way to pinpoint either exactly when the lines were written

or in what order they were written. That, for example, the

draft version of lines 24-26 of "Threnody" appears on page

42 of the notebook and the draft version of lines 160-165

appears on page 45 does not, in itself, mean that the lines

on page 42 were written before the lines on page 45.

Since Emerson did not compose the first part of

"Threnody" all of a piece in the months following Waldo's

death, when were the other lines for the first part drafted?
 145

And what about the second part of the poem? Was it composed

later and "tacked on" to the poem as an affirmative after­

thought, as Bishop and other critics before him have assumed?

In Emerson's journals and notebooks, we have neither drafted

lines for the other half of the first section nor a completed

draft of the whole poem which preceded the poem as we know

it now. Of the second part of "Threnody," there are drafted

lines in "Journal Books Small for what in the pub­

lished poem would be lines 189-190, 193-194, 211-212 , 214 ,

222 , 230-231 , and 236-237 . A total of 12 lines, then, of

the second portion of the poem were drafted in the spring of

1842, within a few months of Waldo's death. Thirteen

additional lines (versions of lines 270-278, 280-283) for

this second portion of "Threnody were drafted perhaps as

early as the spring of 1843 in another small pocket notebook,

one the JMN editors of volume VIII call "Notebook Trees

A *x j ."10 His compositional habits in this small notebook

were basically the same as the ones earlier discussed in

regard to "Journal Books Small If we accept the

dates assigned through internal evidence by the editors of

JMN, then we can no longer hold the assumption that the

entire first part of "Threnody was composed in the months

following Waldo's death, nor can we continue to assume that

Emerson tacked on the final section at a later date. Half

of the first section was most likely composed during the

same later period during which Emerson composed the major

 146

portions of the -affirmative" second half. We know from

letters that he spent the spring and summer of 1846 working

on the poems to he published late that year in Poems, so it

is very likely that much of this composition occurred

during that time. From what we know of Emerson's habits

with the notebooks he carried with him on his walks, it is

very likely as well that the reason we do not have notebook

versions for these later lines is either that he erased

them or else wrote over them. For these reasons, we should

not consider the expressions of grief and affirmation in

-Threnody- as reflective of two different periods of com­

position or even of two "different" Emersons. Jonathan

Bishop's major criticism of "Threnody is that the poem is

defective in unification of the lines written in 1842 and

the lines written later. If this were so, the structure

should be weak throughout the poem and not just between

the first and second parts of the poem, since over half of

the lines in part one were composed at the later date.

Misunderstandings concerning the composition of

"Threnody are not the only ones that plague modern critical

assessments of "Threnody." The whole question of why

Emerson wrote "Threnody remains unresolved and largely

untouched by modern critics. Although "Threnody is

generally recognized as one of Emerson's poems of strong

personal feeling,11 few have treated the poem within the

wider context of those personal feelings* the poem and

 14?

its relation to the death of Emerson* s five-year-old son,

Waldo, on 27 January 1842. I believe this oversight has

much to do with the phenomenon of the "life-less" Emerson

which has developed in our own day, Carl Bode discussed

this phenomenon briefly in his "Emerson* Enough of His

Life to Suggest His Character." Although Emerson's essays

"have remained in the anthologies and are read wherever

American literature and thought are studied," Bode said,

"the impact of his person has grown fainter. The modern

biographers who write eagerly about Melville or Mark Twain

neglect Emerson. The last full-dress biography appeared in

1949. For America today his life seems to have lost much

of its meaning."12 The Rusk biography, while it has accom­

plished for Emerson scholarship the immense task of making

the external facts of Emerson's life available, sacrifices

a clear impression of the man himself. It is difficult,

within a long work, to sustain a vision of both the inner

and the outer man. This difficulty has been the albatross

of all Emerson biographers. As a result, if one reads only

the Rusk biography for an image of Emerson, one is likely

to come away from it with a "bloodless" view of Emerson and

without a clear sense of the emotional peaks and valleys

within his personal experience. 0. W . Firkins, who pub­

lished a biography of Emerson in 1915» said that Emerson

had two peaks of intense emotional passion in his life *

one was his love for Ellen Tucker Emerson, his first wife,
 148

and the other was his extreme grief for the loss of Waldo. 13

In the lengthy Rusk biography, however, there are only five

references to Waldo, and Rusk's single paragraph on the

effect that Waldo's death had on Emerson is, to say the

least, reserved:

Emerson gradually attained a mood of

acceptance and, in his letters and journals,
wrote down hints that slowly grew into
"Threnody," an ode which was almost a
pastoral, in honor both of the boy and of
nature. But at first he thought he could
comprehend nothing of his loss but its
bitterness. His philosophy was put to
a severe test. To Samuel Ripley it
seemed obvious enough that, since young
Waldo's death, Emerson could never be
the same again. Lidian, having suffered
an incurable wound, brooded over unanswer­
able questions, and, apparently, turned
for comfort to more orthodox doctrines
than Transcendentalism.!^

We get from this description the impression of a bitter man

who, while he eventually accepted the tragedy of his son's

death, never reconciled himself to it, and was less of a

man for it later. But this is not an accurate portrait of

Emerson. Anyone who has read the essays carefully, as well

as the letters and journals of this period and afterwards,

knows that Rusk's description provides us with neither an

accurate portrait of Emerson nor a fair reflection of his

reaction to the loss of Waldo. To be fair to Rusk, however,

we need to clarify that his reserved paragraph on this vital

experience within Emerson's life is shaped by his control­

ling orientation toward the external life according to

 149

existing documentation. Unfortunately, what is actually a

limitation built into Rusk's method has often been taken

for a characteristic of Emerson, and more than one reader

has assumed from Rusk's description that after the death of

Waldo Emerson was a limited writer and a bitter man.

Rusk's comment that the experience severely threatened

Emerson's philosophy has influenced criticism since 1949.

Often, the case has been that the impulse to discuss,

however briefly, the effect of Waldo's death on Emerson's

philosophy has resulted in studies which emphasize a theory

at the expense of Emerson's experience, which is accessible

through the journals and letters. One of the most recent

of these studies has been Henry F. Pommer's discussion of

the loss of Waldo in the latter portions of his Emerson's

First Marriage, a book otherwise excellent for its sensitive

and revealing treatment of Emerson's relationship with

Ellen. Pommer sets out to prove his theory that of

Emerson's two earliest concepts--a belief in immortality

and his theory of Compensation--"only Compensation stood

the challenge of his later thinking; and it survived only

in a form modified by the collapse of his faith in immor­

tality. in proving his theory. Pommer rests his case on

"the most personal of all evidence"— that "when young Waldo

died in 1842, his father had neither expectation nor hope

of seeing him again." In order to prove this. Pommer

offers the j. llowing quotation from Emerson's journal:

 150

I comprehend nothing of this fact

but its bitterness. Explanation I
have none, consolation none that
rises out of the fact itself; only
diversion.

This passage was written between the 20th and the 23rd of

March, almost two months after Waldo's death. Emerson

would pen his first lines for "Threnody in his small pocket

notebook within the next few months. The portion cited by

Pommer of the much longer journal passage is certainly the

best-known portion, since it is the major source for Emerson's

reaction used by Rusk for his paragraph on the topic.

Although he is talking about Emerson* s loss of his belief

in immortality, Pommer fails to cite the earlier portion

of that entry which relates to Emerson*s and his family's

belief that, somehow, Waldo still exists, that his soul is

immortal. Here is the passage Pommer cites within its

fuller context:

this beloved and now departed Boy, this

Image in every part beautiful, how he
expands in his dimensions of Naturel
. . . Ellen /"Emerson's young daughter/
asks her Grandmother /"Ruth Emerson,
who lived with the Emersons^/'whether God
can't stay alone with the angels a little
while & let Waldo come down?'
And Amy Goodwin /"probably Amelia
Goodwin, widow of Rev. H. B. Goodwin,
colleague of Ezra Ripley, Emerson's step-
grandfather_7 too thinks that 'if God has
to send any angel for anything to this
world, he had better send Waldo.* The
chrysalis which he brought in with care
& tenderness & gave to his Mother to keep
is still alive and he most beautiful of
 151

the children of men is not here. I

comprehend nothing of this fact but its
bitterness. Explanation I have none,
consolation none that rises out of the
fact itselfi only diversion; only oblivion
of this & pursuit of new objects.lo

Emerson can find only diversion and not consolation— not

because he is devoid of belief in immortality, but because

his belief in the immortality of the soul has become or

is becoming at this time more inherently linked with the

immortality of nature, a belief which has none of the imme­

diate consolation built into the conventional conception

of individual salvation. By "the immortality of nature" I

do not mean, as Emerson did not, pantheism or simply mate­

rialistic "immortality" of the elements of the physical

body within the processes of natural change. An essential

part of Emerson's concept of nature is the perception of

ascending change. Nature is continually perfecting itself

gradually through new forms. Emerson's sense of immortality

relates specifically to the soul of man, which also coitajns

the divine power immanent in nature and which also grad­

ually perfects itself through new forms. The often-cited

portion of Emerson's journal passage, read in context,

obviously refers to his inability at that time two months

after Waldo's death to rid himself of the expectation of

Waldo's imminent physical presence; items within and

around the house— in this case, the still-living chrysalis

constantly fed his expectation. Within its fuller ccnteacfc,

 152

the passage cited by Pommer is clearly a description of a

natural stage within the experience of grief, not proof of

any permanent collapse of Emerson's belief in immortality.

In the note for his discussion. Pommer goes on to say

that » some lines of 'Threnody might, out of context, be

taken as expressing at the time of Waldo's death a faith

in immortality . . . » but in the context of the poem and

of Emerson1s vocabulary and symbolism at that time, nothing

in the poem argues, in my opinion, for the survival of

personal identity."1? First of all, "the survival of per­

sonal identity" is only one concept of personal immortality,

in this case obviously Pommer*s. There is quite a difference

between saying that Emerson lost his belief in immortality

and saying that Emerson lacked a belief in the survival of

personal identity. The "survival of personal identity" is

a distorting simplification of what Emerson meant by the

immortality of the soul. Jonathan Bishop spent six pages

in Emerson on the Soul just defining "soul" in the sense

that Emerson meant, and in a way the definition of this one

word is the purpose of Bishop's entire book. The "soul,"

in the context of this discussion in relation to immor­

tality, cannot simply be understood in the modern fragmen­

tary sense of "survival of personal identity"» it should

be understood in the wider and less materialistic

Emersonian sense of that portion of the individual which

is eternal, which stands in central relationship to or

 153

immanence within Nature, wherein— as a part of expansive

Nature itself— God is immanent but not limited. The soul,

for Emerson, is the eternal "self" within the individual,

the "self" of "Self-Reliance," through which the individual

discovers his essential relatedness to and influence upon

other men and the universe. It is the "soul" or "self"

which is poetic, creative; and it is through the "soul" or

"self" that the individual changes, evolves. This eternal

"soul" or "self" is not and should not be conceived by us

as limited to the ego. The phrase "personal identity" is

modern and emphasizes the peripheral characteristics of the

individual often associated with the ego, such as social

personality and perceptual coloration (likes, dislikes,

whims, and tics). Emerson's concept of immortality is

rooted in the survival of the immanent soul of man within

an ascending nature, so peripheral change is necessarily a

part of ascension within Emerson's understanding of immor­

tality, even as peripheral change is a natural part of

individual development during a lifetime. To prove that

Emerson did not believe in the survival of personal identity

is not to prove that he did not believe in the immortality

of the soul.
This more central and expansive definition of "soul"

is persistent throughout Emerson and not limited to what

Pommer calls "Emerson's vocabulary and symbolism at that

time." We must, in fact, question what Pommer meant by

"Emerson*s vocabulary and symbolism at that time," since

Pommer is speaking specifically of 1842, and we know that

"Threnody" was composed over a much longer period of time

(1842-1846). Furthermore, it is highly questionable to

suggest that Emerson had a vocabulary and set of symbols

which changed periodically. His process of composition for

both poetry and prose involved the use and reuse of phrases

and "symbols" developed over a period of time within the

journals, a process which encourages a consistency of

phraseology rather than a regular, periodic development of

new phrases and "symbols." Finally, if we are to begin to

ascertain what "Threnody" really means, we must not limit

ourselves simply to the context of the poem as published

nor even to stylistic matters. To do so is to imply that

New-Critical methods can adequately explain the poem; the

history of Emersonian criticism stands as harbinger of New

Criticism's failure, within the limitations of its own

terminology and methods, to deal adequately with the poem.

The poem is expressly concerned with personal feeling.

Although we can argue endlessly over the degree of feeling

within it, we cannot deal adequately with this important

aspect of the poem by divorcing the expressive feeling

within the poem from the feeling of the man himself and the

experiences which generated those personal feelings.

Therefore, the "context" of the poem which we need to con­

sult is not the limited New-Critical context of the poem

 155

itself; it is the wider context of the poem as expression,

and that wider context includes Emerson as expresser as well

as the central biographical experience of Waldo's death.

In the reconstructed context of the poem which follows

this portion of the discussion, the poem as published in

1846 is presented along with the first draft lines which

survive in the notebooks. Textual notes indicate phrases

and sentences from Emerson* s letters and journals regarding

the death of Waldo which not only link "Threnody with the

event of Waldo's death but also indicate the emotional

roots within experience of certain images and lines within

"Threnody." Reading the poem within its reconstructed con­

text shows that "Threnody was not a philosopher's substi­

tute for inexpressible grief, as Rusk claimed. Ordinary

words in the poem, not normally recognized as symbolic or

emotive, reveal their depth of significant meaning within

this reconstructed context. By reading the poem adequately

within this wider context, we do not end up concluding that

"Threnody is only a poem written to commemorate the death

of one small boy. By approaching the poem through its

"biography," we do not end up with biographical conclusions.

We end up with aesthetic conclusions. We end up with a

much larger statement: "Threnody is Emerson's most canplete

statement of the rebirth and reintegration of himself with

his philosophy.
 156

"THRENODY"i THE RECONSTRUCTED TEXT OF CONTEXT

The text of the poem, found to the left on the follow­

ing pages, follows the poem as published in the Centenary

Edition of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1903-

1904), the standard edition until the completion of the new

edition of his Works, presently in preparation by Harvard

University Press. The original drafts of lines and series

of lines, found to the right on the following pages, are

cited from the notebooks in Volume VIII of the JMN. Foot­

notes provide journal and letter passages relating to the

life and death of young Waldo Emerson* journal passages are

cited from the JMN. letter passages from The Letters of

Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Ralph L. Rusk in six volumes

(New York* Columbia University Press, 1939)• References

within brackets above and slightly to the right of drafted

lines indicate both the location of entries within JMN and

the location of the lines within Emerson’s original note­

books. I make these references not only for the sake of

accuracy, but also to emphasize the order in which the lines

appear in the original notebooks, even though the pagination

of the notebooks does not in any way indicate the order of

composition. The drafts are cited as they appear in JMN*

incomplete lines or fragmentary words indicate either that

Emerson left the lines or words unfinished or that the lines

or words were not legible to the JMN editors. I have

 157

attempted to duplicate Emerson's drafts as accurately as

possible. To this end, words cancelled with a broken line

(example: Anê-he) indicate words Emerson cancelled in the

draft ; all underscored words (example: Who in his heart shall

carry) in the drafts indicate words Emerson inserted into

the lines. Draft lines within brackets indicate that,

while the lines are not used in the final version of the

poem, they contain material related to that portion of the

published poem. The numbers which, on several occasions,

precede draft lines are numbers Emerson added after writing

the lines to indicate the order in which the lines should be

read or copied; for this reason, the numbers are underscored.

Lines starred (*) indicate through notes a rearrangement in

drafted lines to ease comparison of the drafted lines with

the published lines.

Abbreviations: JBS . . . Journal Books Small

the JMN designation for
the small notebook in
which Emerson wrote the
majority of the draft
lines which survive.

NT ... Notebook Trees ^ A : I _ 7 ,

The JMN designation for
the small notebook in
which Emerson wrote
some draft lines for the
final portion of "Thren­
ody."

Dates: The JMN editors for volume VIII, Gilman

and Parsons, suggest, from internal
evidence, that the drafted lines of
"Threnody" which occur in JBS were com­
posed in the spring of 1842. There is
no way of dating the composition of the
 158

individual lines or groups of lines,

although— due to variations in darkness
of pencil— Gilman and Parsons suggest
that the lines which occur on pages 40-41
of JBS were composed before those lines
which occur on pages 38-39 and 42-49 of
JBS. They suggest that the 14 drafted
lines for the concluding section of
"Threnody1 which occur in NT were composed
in the spring of 1843. Drafting of the
complete poem, as we know it today, occur­
red after the spring of 1843 and before
the publication of Poems in late 1846.
Since letter passages from this period
indicate Emerson spent much of his time
in 1846 finishing up work on the poems
which would be published in Poems, it is
very likely that Emerson completed the
poem during that time and not earlier.
He habitually finished a work— sermon,
lecture, essay, volume, poem— under the
pressure of a publication or presentation
deadline.
 159

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love and respect by the gentle firmness with which he always treated him. Margaret Fuller & Caroline
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every day his Grandmother gave him his reading lesson & had by patience taught him to read & spell;
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25 This thought pleases me now, that he has never been degraded by us or by any, no soil has stained
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 176

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 177

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 186

THE STRUCTURE OF WALDO* S DEATH

Emerson* s record of his pertinent experience and the

initial stages of the composition of the poem "Threnody" are

found in volume VIII of the Journals and Miscellaneous Note­

books. covering the years 1841-1843. In the foreword to

this volume, the editors say that "the journals in this

volume record a spiritual history which commences in the

placidity of ’The Method of Nature* and ends in the tragic

awareness and skeptical strength of ’Experience.' During

these years of crisis and fulfillment Emerson moves into

his full maturity as a writer even as his private experience

renders him more deeply a man.M1® The death of Waldo,

Emerson* s first-born and five-year-old son, on 27 January

1842, was, as Gilman and Parsons phrase it, the "pivotal

experience of these years." Emerson*s earlier optimism,

positive anticipation, and general acquiescence reflected

in the first series of Essays. published in 1841, disinte­

grated under the crushing blow of his young son's sudden

death from scarlatina, a mild form of scarlet fever.

Emerson's philosophy did not collapse or change radically

at this time; what changed as a result of this pivotal

experience were Emerson* s emotional expectations. Emerson's

journal during this period reflects his need and desire to

accept this loss and understand its meaning. As he ex­

plored in his journal what the editors call "the full

implications of grief and loss," he was writing sentences

 18?

and lines which would later find their way into the essay

MExperience" and the poem "Threnody," Both of these works

— one in prose, the other in poetry— reflect this central

experience in his life.*9 As the JMN editors note, to

discover the in-process versions for poems throughout the

notebooks of this period and to see some of his best poems,

including "Threnody," within the context of the journals

"is to see the complex relationship between Emerson*s

private and his literary life."20 In the end, it is as it

was in the beginning* impossible to separate the two "lives"

without seriously distorting both. The interpenetration of

experience and literature is the essential lesson of self-

reliance that Emerson realized during this period, and only

in this sense is it legitimate to refer to the post-1842

Emerson as the "mature" Emerson. It is only after this

transformational experience that we get a balanced Emerson

reflecting in his writing an integration of idealism and

experience. The fact remains, however, that nowhere in the

critical documents of literary history, neither in criticism

nor in biography, can the student of Emerson find a detail­

ed account of Waldo's death and a treatment of its effect

upon Emerson, especially in the composition of "Threnody."

Nevertheless, we can reconstruct the vital and influential

nature of this event from the journals and letters.

Emerson habitually lectured during the winter months.

By the winter of 1841-1842, he was in the habit of plunging

 188

into lecturing, as he expressed it, "whenever I get into

debt, which usually happens once a year."21 We know from

Charvat's listing of his lecture engagements that, among

other lectures delivered at this time, Emerson lectured on

the "Nature and Powers of the Poet" in Concord on 3 November

1841. On 16 December 1841, he delivered the lecture "The

Poet" in Boston as the third lecture in a series of eight

on the general topic of "The Times" at the Boston Masonic

Temple. We also know, again from Charvat, that approxi­

mately two weeks after Waldo's death, Emerson was in

Providence, Rhode Island, delivering five lectures from

"The Times" series at Franklin Hall, and that on February

12, he read the lecture "The Poet." Later, in early March,

he was in New York lecturing.22 We know from his letter to

Carlyle, written 31 March 1842 from Concord, that he read

six lectures "On the Times" in New York. I cite this

specific information regarding Emerson's lecture engagements

during the winter of 1841-1842 to place the event of Waldo's

death within the larger scope of his activities.

On Monday night, 24 January 1842, Waldo was stricken

with scarlatina. The Thursday before, Emerson had ended

his "little Winter campaign" of lecturing at the Boston

Masonic Temple, and he arrived home on Saturday, 22 January.

Between Saturday and Monday, Emerson was preoccupied with

Henry Thoreau's health, since Thoreau had developed

symptoms of lock jaw while at his father's following the

 189

death of Henry's brother from that disease. Monday morning,

24 January, Emerson was relieved to learn that Thoreau was

much better. But Monday morning introduced a new concern.

As he said in a letter to his brother William, he was con­

cerned about his profits from his recent course of lectures

in Boston. He had earned about $320.00 for the series of

eight lectures at the Boston Masonic Temple. Although he

could easily recall having received $57 per lecture during

an earlier year, his profit from the recent lecture series

in Boston had averaged only $40 per lecture— about 30# less

per lecture. Even with his "best ciphering," Emerson found

that he still needed about $200 more to break even that

year. This need for more money to balance his household

budget was the major reason for his additional lectures that

winter and spring in Providence and New York. Emerson

probably wrote this letter to William during the early

morning hours of Monday, 24 January, since he usually began

his day by writing letters; in this letter, he referred to

Waldo only to mention an interesting remark that Waldo had

made the week before. Early in the day, there was no sign

of "that scarlet pest" which would strike by that night.

Stricken on Monday night, young Waldo died at fifteen

minutes past eight on Thursday night, 2? January. After-

? 4
wards, Emerson wrote four brief letters that night ,

each averaging only five to six short sentences, to Lucy

Jackson Brown, Lidian's sister; William Emerson, his

 190

brother in New York; Abel Adams, his financial adviser who

would arrange for the newspaper notice of Waldo's death;

and Charles Thomas Jackson, Emerson's brother-in-law.

Although Emerson mentioned in three of these letters that

his two-year-old daughter, Ellen, also "has symptoms of the

disorder today," it is obvious that the loss of his first­

born son had his full attention. The most obvious char­

acteristic of these letters is their brevity. Each gives

the basic facts of Waldo's illness and death in about

fifteen wordsi to Lucy Jackson Brown, "Our darling is

dei/"’ad_L7 Waldo was attacked on Monday nig /~ht wi/th

scarlatina and died this evening"; to William Emerson,

"My little Waldo died this evening. He was attacked by the

scarlatina on Monday night"; to Abel Adams, "My little boy

died this evening. He has been ill with scarlatina since

Monday night"; to Charles Thomas Jackson, "Our little Waldo

died this evening* — of scarlatina, with which he was

attacked on Monday night." The similar, almost identical

wording emphasizes the fact that the letters were probably

written in one sitting, one after another. Three of the

short letters, written to family members, also announced

Ellen's development of symptoms* to Lucy Jackson Brown,

"E^~lle_7n has symptoms of the disorder today"; to William

Emerson, "Little Ellen has the eruption today but is not

yet seriously sick"; to Charles Jackson, "Ellen seems to

be affected today with the same disease." The same three

 191

letters also include, as final factual entry, news of

Lidian, his mother, and Edith, Emerson's daughter born the

previous November ; to Lucy Jackson Brown, "Lidian is very

well and her babe"; to William Emerson, "Lidian is very

well, & M o t h e r " 2 6 ; to Charles Jackson, "Lidian is well &

the babe." Besides the bare facts of Waldo's illness and

death, Ellen's infection, and the welfare of family members,

each of these brief letters also contains a terse expression

of Emerson's grief* to Lucy Jackson Brown, "But my boy is

gone"; to William Emerson, "But what shall I say of my Boy?

Farewell & Farewell!"; to Abel Adams, "My darling my

darling!"; to Charles Jackson, "Farewell & Farewell to our

dear boy." What is striking about these letters is their

brevity and similarity of structure. A New Critic might

focus on the similar structural patterns within them;

another critic, working mainly from Rusk's biographical

details, might conclude that these letters are good

examples of Emerson's inability to express his grief ad­

equately. We need to bear in mind, however, the circumstances

under which Emerson wrote these letters. Emerson's letters

were meant to merely announce the pertinent facts, similar

to today's telegrams. Writing four letters within a brief

period immediately following Waldo's death that night,

Emerson would naturally use many of the same phrases and

words, and the letters would share a similarity of structure.

Possibly, going immediately from his son's bedside, or

 192

soon afterwards, to his library to write these letters was

a move by Emerson to realize the fact of Waldo's death.

Those brief concluding understatements of Emerson's grief

which might, under different circumstances, strike us as

devoid of emotional depth are, under these circumstances,

indicative of the great depth of Emerson's immediate grief,

which surpassed the ability of words, any words, to express.

Those four letters, written so quickly after the fact, not

only announced Waldo's death to others ; they also announced

it to Emerson. Furthermore, the condensation of statement

in those letters, plus the emphasis of repetition, probably

etched in his memory the specific facts and circumstances of

Waldo's death.
On 28 January, the day after Waldo's death, before re­

cording the death in his journal, Emerson skipped a page,

probably to separate two clashing moods.His last entry had

been an intensely positive and energetic description of his

experience reading Herrick. The final word in that entry

had been "hilarity." His journal announcement of the death

of his son was the only entry on the next page:

28 January 1842
Yesterday night at 15 minutes after
eight my little Waldo ended his life.^f

In the privacy of his journal, Emerson at this time could

only record the specific facts— the fact that Waldo had

"ended his life" and the specific minute that the event

occurred. For Emerson, during the period immediately

 193

following Waldo's death, the act of recalling and recording

specific details about Waldo and his death was a substitute

for expressing grief. Much later, those carefully recorded

details would suggest their emotional correlatives.

Emerson wrote five more letters announcing Waldo's

death on 28 January, the day following his death, one each

to Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar,

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Caroline Sturgis. A more

emotionally expansive Emerson wrote these letters. Most of

them reverberate with memories of Waldo in life, emotional

outbursts of his surfacing grief, and his reflections of a

Waldo-less world. These letters contain many of the poetic

"facts" of the experience which will later go into the

earliest drafts of lines for " T h r e n o d y . T o Mary Moody

Emerson, he wrote :

My boy, my boy is gone. He was taken

ill of Scarlatina on Monday evening,
and died last night. I can say nothing
to you. My darling & the world's wonder­
ful child, for never in my own or another
family have I seen any thing comparable,
has fled out of my arms like a dream.
He adorned the world for me like a
morning star, and every particular of
my daily life. I slept in his neighbor­
hood & woke to remember him. Elizabeth
/ H o a r , the deceased Charles Emerson's
fiancee, who also lived in Concord/ was
his foster mother filled his heart
always with love & beauty which he well
knew how to entertain and he
distinguished her arrival always with
the gravest joy.

This thought pleases me now, that he

has never been degraded by us or by
 194

any, no soil has stained him he has

been treated with respect & religion
almost, as really innocence is always
great & inspires respect. But I can
only tell you now that my angel has
vanished. You too will grieve for the
little traveller . . . .

To Margaret Puller, he wrote more briefly yet with more

emotion:

My little boy must die also. All his

wonderful beauty could not save him.
He gave up his innocent breath last
night and my world this morning is
poor enough. He had Scarlatina on
Monday night. Shall I ever dare to
love any thing again. Farewell and
Farewell, 0 my Boy!

The letter to Elizabeth Hoar, who also lived in Concord, is

even shorter*

Everything wakes this morning but my

darling boy. I hope you are better &
can come & see us. But your boy you
shall not see.

To Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who, shortly before Waldo's

death, had invited Emerson and a few others to meet the

visiting Charles Dickens, he wrote:

Thanks for your kind invitation, my friend,

but the most severe of all afflictions
has befallen me, in the death of my boy.
He has been ill since Monday of what is
called Scarlet Fever & died last night &
with him has separted all that is glad
and festal & almost all that is social even,
for me, from this world. My second child
is also sick, but I cannot in a lifetime
incur another such loss.

In the letter to Caroline Sturgis, the final sentence con­

veys a sense of the suddenness of Waldo's death*

 195

My little boy died last night, my

little wonderful boy. You too have
seen him & loved him. But you can
never know how much daily & nightly
blessedness was lodged in the child.
I saw him always & felt him every­
where. On Sunday I carried him to
see the new church & organ. & on
Sunday we shall lay his sweet body
in the ground.

The obvious difference between these letters and the letters

written the night Waldo died is the larger degree to which

Emerson unfolds his emotional reaction to Waldo's death.

Although four of these letters mention specific information

regarding Waldo's illness and death, the "fact" of Waldo's

death is overshadowed by Emerson's desire or need to detail

his personal response to his loss. Details from these

letters would be recorded in Emerson's journal a few days

lateri2^ these details would stimulate fuller expression

in the journal about Waldo and the effect his death had

upon him.3°

To present a closer view of Emerson and his family in

the weeks immediately following Waldo's death, I would like

to examine two letters which he wrote during the week after

Waldo's death. On 2 February, six days after Waldo's

death, he wrote to Margaret Fuller:

. . . we are finding again our hands

& feet after our dull & dreadful dream-*1
which does not leave us where it found
us. Lidian, Elizabeth /"Hoar_7, à I
recite chronicles words & tones of our
fair boy & magnify our lost treasure to
extort if we can the secretest
wormwood of the grief, & see how bad
 196

is the worst. Meantime the sun rises

& the winds blow Nature seems to have
forgotten that she has crushed her
sweetest creation and perhaps would
admonish us that as this Child's
attention could never be fastened on
any death, but proceeded still to
enliven the new toy, so we children-'**
must have no retrospect, but illuminate
the new hour if possible with an
undiminished stream of rays.33

This letter to Margaret Fuller is important, not only for

the phrases in it which will be used later in "Threnody,"

but also for what it tells us about the conditions within

the Emerson home a week after Waldo's death. As Emerson

says, they had once again found their "hands & feet,"

although they were far from recovery from grief. Evidently,

Emerson, Elizabeth Hoar, and Lidian found some relief from

their grief by recalling Waldo as he was when he was alive

as well as by sharing their feelings of loss. These con­

versations helped Emerson to remember many of the specific

details about Waldo which were later used in the early

portion of "Threnody."

The early section of this letter seems to be a fair

summary of the first section of "Threnody": "Lidian,

Elizabeth, & I recite chronicles words & tones of our fair

boy & magnify our lost treasure to extort if we can the

secretest wormwood of the grief, & see how bad is the worst.

Meantime the sun rises & the winds blow. Nature seems to

have forgotten that she has crushed her sweetest creation

. . . ." This portion of Emerson's letter to Margaret

 197

Fuller suggests quite strongly the possibility that his

song of lamentation, the first part of "Threnody,” was not

merely the expression of his grief but was, instead, a

reverberation of the lament actually heard in the Emerson

house— that is, the "dirge" sung in prosaic form by

Emerson, Lidian, and Elizabeth Hoar.3^

The final portion of this letter also prefigures the

"affirmative" conclusion of "Threnody": ", . .perhaps

/"Nature_7 would admonish us that as this Child's attention

could never be fastened on any death, but proceeded still

to enliven the new toy, so we children must have no retro­

spect, but illuminate the new hour if possible with an un­

diminished stream of rays." One recalls, in this context,

the admonition of the "deep Heart" of Nature in the second

portion of "Threnody":

Taught he not thee— the man of eld,

Whose eyes within his eyes beheld
Heaven's numerous hierarchy span
The mystic gulf from God to man?
To be alone wilt thou begin
When worlds of lovers hem thee in?
(lines 183-188)

Even as it seems legitimate to suggest that the grief

expressed in the first part of "Threnody" was not Emerson's

grief alone but rather a composite of "the secretest worm­

wood of the grief" expressed in his home, so it seems

legitimate to suggest that the admonishing "deep Heart" is

not addressing merely Emerson. The "worlds of lovers"

hemming him in are, quite possibly, the worlds of Lidian

 198

Emerson and Elizabeth Hoar, the natural and "foster"

mothers of Waldo. To see the latter portion of "Threnody"

prefigured in this early letter to Margaret Fuller, written

the week after Waldo's death and months before the earliest

drafts of lines for "Threnody were penned, is to see that

the "affirmative" second half of the poem was an organic

part of the initial conception of the poem because it was,

very clearly, an organic part of the experiencegenerating

thepoem— the resolution of grief over loss ofWaldo. Far

from being, as a whole, the least successful portion of

"Threnody," the second part of "Threnody includes lines as

poetically successful as those Jonathan Bishop cited from

the early portion of the poem. For example*

Light is light which radiates.

Blood is blood which circulates.
Life is life which generates.
And many-seeming life is one, —
(lines 242-245)

These lines, positive though they may be (and, for some,

less valuable because they are), adequately respond to the

lines cited by Bishop from the early section of the poem:

The eager fate which carried thee

Took the largest part of me*
For this losing is true dying;
This is lordly man's down-lying.
This his slow but sure reclining.
Star by star his world resigning.
(lines 160 -1 6 5 )

In these lines expressing grief, the world shrinks through

the imagistic energy of the ending verbs dying. down-lying.

 199

reclining, and resigning to suggest the self-enclosed and

restrictive orb of grief itself. The world, in the later

lines of consolation, expands through the imagistic energy

of the ending verbs radiates. circulates. and generates to

suggest the cosmic dimensions of supreme consolation. The

response of these and other lines in the latter half of

"Threnody" to lines in the first half of the poem makes us

question the validity of Bishop's criticism that the poem

does not stand as an adequately unified whole. Nevertheless,

we must concede that Bishop admired these lines from the

early section of "Threnody for good reason, although not

for the reason he suggested: like the lines cited above

from the second part of the poem, they were the finished

lines composed most likely in 1846. In the poem as pub­

lished in 1846, we do find many of Emerson* s best lines of

poetry, and from these lines we form our best estimations

of the value of the compositional process that he followed.

Two days after writing to Margaret Fuller, he wrote to

Caroline Sturgis:35

The days of our mourning ought, no

doubt, to be accomplished ere this
£ ~ k February, eight days after Waldo's
death_7, & the innocent & beautiful
should not be sourly & gloomily
lamented, but with music & fragrant
thoughts & sportive recollections.
Alas! I chiefly grieve that I cannot
grieve; thatihis fact takes no more
deep hold than other facts, is as
dreamlike as they; a lambent flame that
will not burn playing on the surface of
my river. Must every experience— those
 200

that promised to be dearest & most

penetrative,— only kiss my cheek like
the wind & pass away? . . . Dear Boy
too precious & unique a creation to be
huddled aside into the waste &
prodigality of things! Yet his Image,
so gentle, yet so rich in hopes, blends
easily with every happy moment, every
fair remembrance, every cherished
friendship of my life. I delight in
the regularity & symmetry of his nature.
Calm & wise, calmly & wisely happy, the
beautiful Creative power looked out from
him & spoke to anything but chaos
& interruption; signified strength
& unity— & gladdening, all-uniting
life. What was the moral of sun
& moon, of roses & acorns, that
was the moral of the sweet b o y s
life, softened only & humanized
by blue eyes & infant eloquence.

In the early part of his letter to Caroline Sturgis, we

find the statement that Rusk separated from its context and,
consequently, m i s i n t e r p r e t e d *36 «Alas! I chiefly grieve

that I cannot grieve . . . ." The statement, within con­

text, does not mean that Emerson was incapable of grief,

unable to express his grief; nor can it support the critical

contention that he never recovered from his grief and was

less of a man and writer because of it. Reading this state­

ment within context, we do not find that Emerson was

shattered by grief or incapable of expressing his grief at

the time the letter was written; his point was that he was

disappointed with grief itself, because the "fact” of his

grief provided him with nothing more "than other facts"

and, like them, was superficial, "playing on the surface

of my river." We recognize this statement as Emerson's

 201

conclusion about the illusion of grief in other writings,

especially the essay "Experience." Emerson's strong desire

to experience fully the reality and meaning of Waldo's

death is emphasized in this letter to Caroline Sturgis and

realized, later, through the composition of "Threnody."

Later in this letter, we find the sentences which are

necessary to recall in understanding fully what he meant

earlier when he said he grieved that he could not grieve:

" . . .his Image, so gentle, yet so rich in hopes, blends

easily with every happy moment, every fair remembrance,

every cherished friendship of my life. I delight in the

regularity & symmetry of his nature. Calm & wise, calmly

& wisely happy, the beautiful Creative power looked out

from him & spoke of anything but chaos & interruption;

signified strength & unity— & gladdening, all unifying life."

Here is the major reason why Emerson grieved that he could

not grieve, for to grieve and remain in grief is to feel

deprived, and Emerson could not contemplate for long the

"Image" of his "dear boy" before sensing that the "Image,"

like the boy in life, was the means of connecting him with

"every happy moment" in his life, both in terms of "cherished

friendship" and in terms of "the beautiful Creative power."

He could not feel deprived for long by Waldo's death before

feeling enriched by his memory. This transition from grief

to memory to consolation is mirrored later in the organi­

zation and structure of "Threnody." Emerson's perception

 202

of -all-uniting life," emanating through "the beautiful

Creative power" which " looked out" from Waldo, becomes a

crucial part of the consolation of "Threnody": the assur­

ance that "many-seeming life is one" (line 24$),

Two weeks after Waldo's death, Emerson lectured in

Providence, Rhode Island. Within a week of his return from

Providence, he wrote his brother William to make arrange­

ments for lecturing in New York. As he had mentioned in an

earlier letter to William, written shortly before Waldo's

death, he needed to lecture to earn the $200 needed to

balance his household budget that year. As a sober nine­

teenth-century New Englander, Emerson knew that whether or

not his son had just died, he still had to pay his taxes in

the spring. His letter to William, written after his return

from Providence, explains why the additional lectures were

necessary:

The lamentable failure of the City

Bank to pay me this year 600 dollars
of income must now set me in motion
once more, & I decide to make a
trial in New York . . . .

I am in no plight of late to do
these things but it is plainly just
& necessary. So you may say, if you
need, that it is a very considerable
& very unlooked for reduction of my
income that drives me to it. We are
well— our sad remainder— . . . .37

Again, the stock inherited from Ellen which, according to

the critical myth, was supposed to make him "a rich man,"

failed to earn a dividend, and Emerson had to go "a

 203

peddling" to New York. Yet his pursuit of the elusive $200

at this time had an emotional cause as well: in New York,

he would be miles away from "our sad remainder," and,

busily submerged in the chore of lecturing, he could once

again achieve a clear perspective on the "plainly just &

necessary." Although we could collapse the emotional need

that Emerson felt to lecture at this time into the simplicity

of escape from grief, in so doing we would overlook the

fuller significance of his decision to lecture. There can

be little doubt that these constant trips to lecture helped

him to achieve a certain aesthetic as well as emotional

distance from Waldo's death and the circumstances of grief,

and that this made it possible for him, after his return

to Concord that spring, not only to begin to write those

first tentative lines for "Threnody" but also to structure

the poem to express and respond to a larger grief than his

own. The letters to Margaret Fuller and Caroline Sturgis,

written the week following Waldo's death, strongly support

the conclusion that "Threnody" as a whole represents the

transition from grief to memory to consolation that Emerson

and members of his family circle experienced in 1842.

Such a conclusion, of course, seriously questions the

prevalent critical views regarding the organization of

"Threnody" as well as why and how the poem was written.

If we expand our discussion, as I do in the concluding

portion of this chapter, to examine the composition of the

 204

early draft lines for "Threnody" within the context of the

notebooks, we can see the larger literary significance of

the Waldo experience in terms of a number of Emerson's

poems and essays.

THE UNFOLDING OF THRENOS

Ninety-eight draft lines for "Threnody" were composed

in the spring of 1842, after his return from lecturing, in

the small notebook that he carried with him on walks into

the woods on his Concord property. But Emerson's particular

manner of composing poetry on these walks belies any sim­

plistic notions that he composed the first section of

"Threnody" all of a piece, that he was consciously aware

that he was writing lines for one specific poem, or that

his manner of composing poetry was radically different from

the way in which he composed prose. On those walks, he

composed lines of poetry— not poems. On those walks, he

composed sentences and paragraphs— not portions of a specific

essay or lecture.

The ninety-eight draft lines of what would four years

later become "Threnody" are interspersed among prose passages

which would later find their way into specific lectures and

essays, as well as among other lines of poetry which would

later find their way into no less than sixteen different

poems, several of which, besides "Threnody," figure prom­

inently within Emerson criticism, especially "Wood-notes,"

"Musketaquid," "Saadi," and "Uriel." In another small

 205

notebook after his return in the spring of 1843 from another

long winter of lecturing, Emerson composed an additional

fourteen draft lines, which would later find their way into

the second part of "Threnody."

Of the first 175 lines, then, of "Threnody"— the lines

which come before "the deep Heart" speaks and which are

often referred to as the first part of the poem— 87 appeared

in draft form during the spring of 1842, which means that

less than one half of the first part of the poem was com­

posed at this early date. Actually, we must modify this

statement further by clarifying that we are talking about

87 lines for a future poem which, in the notebook, exists

merely as lines of poetry. The structure, purpose, and

meaning which we associate with the poem as a whole did not

exist until that later date, most likely sometime in 1846,

when Emerson gathered these lines from his notebook and re­

worked them as lines for "Threnody." The other 88 lines

for the first part of "Threnody" were probably drafted at

this later date. Of the second part of "Threnody" (begin­

ning with line 176 and preceding through the end of the

poem— a total of 114 additional lines), 12 lines were

drafted during that spring of 1842 and 13 more lines were

drafted during the spring of 1843. Therefore, over 20% of

the lines for the second part of the poem were initially

drafted during 1842-1843 and less than 80% originated

later, probably in 1846, during the months immediately

 206

preceding the publication of Poems. But the poem qua poem

did not exist before that date, which we believe was some­

time in 1846, when Emerson set about revising these draft

lines, writing new ones, and basically composing the poetic

structure of the whole we know today as "Threnody."

The notebooks and journals that he used during the

period following Waldo's death are also the journals and

notebooks which contain the early drafted forms of para­

graphs and sentences which would later find their way into

the essays "The Poet" and "Experience," two of Emerson*s

most noted essays in the second series of Essays. published

in 1844. It is not a rare experience to open volume VIII of

the JMN and find, on one page, a passage which talks about

Waldo and suggests an image or line from "Threnody," follow­

ed directly by another passage, written at approximately the

same time, which would eventually become part of either "The

Poet" or "Experience." The Waldo experience was not only the

central experience behind the composition of "Threnody" but

also the central experience within Emerson's life during the

early and mid-1840's. As such, the Waldo experience also

influenced the earliest composition of portions of at least

sixteen of Emerson's poems as well as two of his most famous

and vital essays.3®

The two aspects of Emerson's vital experience during

this time which are usually discussed separately as two

different aspects of his mind— his optimism and his

 207

skepticism— merge within the experience of Waldo's death,

each necessary not only for his emotional needs at this time

but also for his creative needs. The organic unfolding of

threnos— the poetic transformation of grief into affirmation

— occurs not only in "Threnody," although that poem best

represents the experience as a whole, but also in several

of the other poems whose earliest drafted lines are found in

the notebook Emerson used in 1842-1843.39 In some poems,

especially the shorter ones, only portions of the process

of threnos occur, but even in these poems, we can sense how

widely the experience of threnos infused Emerson's poetic

expression at this time.

The final stanza of the short poem "The Amulet," first

drafted in the same notebook Emerson carried out into the

woods with him when drafting the earliest lines for

"Threnody," echoes the initial sense of utter loss, of

estrangement through death, which characterized his early

stage of grief after the death of Waldo:

Alas! that neither bonds nor vows

Can certify possession;
Torments me still the fear that love
Died in its last expression.^

Of course, the experience of one death reminds us of earlier

deaths, and, if only from the single word "vows," we sense

the influence of Emerson's earlier loss of his first wife,

Ellen. Nevertheless, the changing form of young Waldo gone

"to the wastes of Nature" is certainly the major experiential

 208

image earlier in "The Amulet" (the lamented "0 changing

child!" of line 3). These final four lines in "The Amulet"

essentially evolve out of the emotional intensity of the

early stage of grief wherein one realizes that the appear­

ance of stasis within the experience of love cannot last,

cannot "certify possession" forever. And when the object

of deep love dies, it is easy to assume that love itself

dies: "Torments me still the fear that love / Died in its

last expression." Here, in poetry, we see expressed the

fear Emerson felt immediately after Waldo's death, which he

expressed first in the short letter he wrote to Margaret

Fuller the day after Waldo died: "Shall I ever dare to

love any thing again It is, of course, the fear

that had shaken him severely in earlier years, with the loss

of Ellen and the sudden death of his brother Charles. It

is the fear, most specifically, which creates despair and

leads to what in "Threnody" Emerson called "the blasphemy

of grief." An amulet is meant to protect one against injury;

Emerson's poem "The Amulet" expresses the fear that "tor­

ments me still," and fear expressed is essentially liberation

from fear.
In the second part of "Wood-notes," we encounter "the

deep Heart" of "Threnody," but there it is called "the

mighty Heart." We also encounter lines within "Wood-notes

II" which echo Waldo so much that they might have, as

easily, found their way into "Threnody." These lines in

 209

"Wood-notes II," which describe the "bard," recall Waldo *

But thou, poor child! unbound, unrhymed,

Whence earnest thou, misplaced, mistimed Z~?_7

In the early part of "Threnody," the dead child is lamented

by the grieving father as the "genius of so fine a strain"

who came into the world before " the world was . . . ripe"

to sustain him and so is sent back "to wait an aeon to be

born" (lines 140, 149). Although Emerson will later, within

the transformative experience of threnos. find an affirmative

use for the cosmic image of Waldo, here— in the early por­

tions of »Wood-notes II" as in the early portion of

"Threnody"— the contraction of all hope within the image

of Waldo results, after his death, not only in personal

grief but also in a cosmic grief which flows out of despair,

the sense of the world's loss of all meaning. Comparable

to the sense of the world's essential meaninglessness in

"Threnody" is this portrait of emptiness and folly in "Wood-

notes II” :

When thou shalt climb the mountain cliff,

Or see the wide shore from thy skiff.
To thee the horizon shall express
But emptiness or emptiness ;
There lives no man of Nature's worth
In the circle of the earth;

And thou shalt say to the Most High,

"Godhead! all this astronomy.
And fate and practice and invention.
Strong art and beautiful pretension,
This radiant pomp of sun and star,
Throes that were, and worlds that are.
Behold! were in vain and in vain;—
It cannot be,— I will look again.
 210

Surely now will the curtain rise.

And earth’s fit tenant me surprise;—
But the curtain doth not rise.
And Nature has miscarried wholly
Into failure, into f o l l y . "^3

Nature, within these lines, is but "beautiful pretension"

and "radiant pomp"t "Nature has miscarried wholly." These

lines resemble the expression of the disparity between

Nature and the grieving father in the entire first part of

"Threnody," especially in the lines:

The morrow dawned with needless glow;

Each snowbird chirped, each fowl must crow;
Each tramper started; but the feet
Of the most beautiful and sweet
Of human youth had left the hill
And garden,— they were bound and still.
There's not a sparrow or a wren.
There's not a blade of autumn grain,
Which the four seasons do not tend
And tides of life and increase lend;
And every chick of every bird,
And weed and rock-moss is preferred.
0 ostrich-like forgetfulness!
0 loss of larger in the less!
("Threnody," lines 104-11?)

Both natural portraits accentuate man's alienation from

nature. From the depths of threnos. however, comes not

only the source of grief but also the consolation of grief.

We find it, in "Wood-notes II," within the lines already

cited: "There lives no man of Nature's worth / In the

circle of the earth." In the second part of "Threnody,"

"the deep Heart" indicates that the father's grief springs

from his unnatural expectation that, for his son alone, the

natural process will not operate, the "solving rite" (line

236) will not occur:

 211

Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow.

Whose streams through Nature circling go?
Nail the wild star to its track
On the haIf-climbed zodiac?
Light is light which radiates,
Blood is blood which circulates,
Life is life which generates,
And many-seeming life is one,—
Wilt thou transfix and make it none?
Its onward force too starkly pent
In figure, bone, and lineament?
("Threnody," lines 238-248)

The creation of consolation from an acceptance of nature as

continuous creation also occurs in "Wood-notes II," toward

the end of the poem, in lines originally composed in the

notebook Emerson carried out with him in the woods in the

spring of 1842s

All the forms are fugitive,

But the substances survive.
Ever fresh the broad creation,
A divine improvisation,
From the heart of God proceeds,
A single will, a million deeds.

Halteth never in one shape,

But forever doth escape,
Like wave or flame, into new forms4.

Consolation which arises from a belief in a continuous

creation is the consolation of essential immortality. At

the end of "Threnody," the "deep Heart" affirms that "rain­

bows teach, and sunsets show" the same "verdict which

accumulates / From lengthening scroll of human fates," the

same verdict "that inly burned" in the "prayers of saints":

. . .What is excellent.
As God lives, is permanent;
Hearts are dust, hearts* loves remaini
 212

Heart's love will meet thee again.

("Threnody," lines 266-2(59)

Implicit within the transformative experience of threnos

is an affirmative use for Emerson’s expanded "Image" of his

"beloved and now departed Boy," which he first recorded in

his journal soon after Waldo's death,^5 and which expands

in the first portion of "Threnody" initially as

The hyacinthine boy, for whom

Morn well might break and April bloom.
The gracious boy, who did adorn
The world whereinto he was born,
("Threnody," lines 15-18)

and finally as a purposive heir of Nature whose loss

"quenched" a "general hope," because this child was born to

meet a messianic artistic purpose: to

By wondrous tongue, and guided pen.

Bring the flown Muses back to men.
("Threnody," lines 136-137)

The "deep Heart" of Nature, in the second part of the poem,

does not negate this expanded Image— only the implication

that the "prophecy" was indissolubly united with the

physical form of the boy. The "great Heart" emphasizes

to the father that instead of " tutors" he sent to him a

" joyful eye" combined with " innocence" in "a form of wonder"

so that he "might'st entertain apart / The richest flower­

ing of all art" (lines 211-216). The artistic and spiritual

purposiveness remains, therefore, in the Image; only the

physical elements of the Image, the "bone" and "lineament"

 213

of material reality, are gone. Far from negating the ex­

panded Image, the "deep Heart" certifies it through metaphor­

ically linking the essence of Waldo— ". . .a joyful eye, /

Innocence that matched the sky, / Lovely locks, a form of

wonder, / Laughter rich as woodland thunder" (lines 211-

214)— with "The riches of sweet Mary’s son, / Boy-Rabbi,

Israel's paragon" (lines 222-223). Here, especially, we

should recognize that we are dealing with what one critic

recently termed "monistic metaphor,"^6 for even as the

message of organic threnos is to refrain from freezing

"love's tidal flow, / Whose streams through Nature circling

go" (lines 238-239), the message of the later essay "The

Poet" is that "the quality of imagination is to flow, and

not to freeze . . . . all symbols are fluxional; all lan­

guage is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries

and horses are, for conveyance, not as forms and houses are,

for homestead."^"7 We can observe Emerson within the vital

activity of creating monistic metaphor which, as Frank

Lentricchia has said, must "ultimately. . ./destroy/ itself

in order to function properly for the end of revealing a

monistic universe which is hidden from us by our traditional

sense of metaphor that insists we are never to understand

the utter fusion of tenor and vehicle."^®

With this understanding, we can more easily realize

not only the visionary intuition of oneness toward which the

"deep Heart" is leading the grieving father, but also the

 214

path that has been chosen. The metaphoric linking of the

Image of Waldo with "sweet Mary's Son" is not static, does

not present us with a metaphoric "homestead" at which to

tarry* rather, it insists that we use it as a vehicular

"ferry" to go beyond it. The supreme consolation which

arises, like a phoenix from its own ashes, has both spir­

itual and artistic rootsi even as "sweet Mary's Son"

achieved through physical death Supreme Meaning and effective

power, so has Emerson*s "wondrous child" achieved poetic

meaning and imaginative power through both physical and

metaphoric death. Emerson's liberation within the poem

from the wormwood of grief is achieved not through the

negation of Waldo but by the affirmation of Waldo through

the transformative experience implicit within the vehicular

activity of language, art, and nature. Liberated from the

stark prison of lineament and bone, the Image of Waldo

expanded to become the essential image of the Poet.

Emerson asks in "Song of Nature" his perennial and

supreme questions

But he, the man-child glorious,

Where tarries he the while?
The rainbow shines his harbinger,
The sunset gleams his smile.

My boreal lights leap upward,

Forthright my planets roll,
And still the man-child is not born.
The summit of the whole.49

The perennial Emerson question "Where tarries . . . the

 215

man-child glorious?" echoes throughout much of his work

from 1842 onward. In the essay "The Poet," the answer is,

" I look in vain for the poet whom I describe,"^0 for the

full figure of the Poet is an Ideal, realizable in human

form only in degrees. The image of the Poet in the essays

and poems published after 1842 is essential, not corporal.

Like the Sphinx within his poem, Emerson awaited the "seer,"

the "man-child" who contained and knew "the meaning of man."51

A number of his other poems, begun during this period

following Waldo's death, suggest the spirit of the Poet of

the f u t u r e . In "Wood-notes I," the poet is the "forest

seer," the "philosopher," the "wise man"; in "Wood-notes

II," he is the "wild-eyed boy." 53 In "Saadi," the spirit

of Saadi is the spirit of the poet, who has access to divine

wisdom, whose heart "out of woe . . . / Draws . . . a lore

sublime," who is smiled upon by the Muses, whose words are

like "a storm-wind," in whose "every syllable / Lurketh

nature veritable," who makes "Suns rise and set" in his

speech, who sees the "secret" standing "revealed. "54 jn

the third part of "The Initial, Daemonic and Celestial

Love," the poet is the spirit of celestial love whose

vision is "without bound," the "axis of those eyes" being

"the axis of the sphere," whose "eyes pierce / The Universe,"

who sees "rightly" with "transparent mien" through "each

obstruction" and by unified vision sees the unity under­

lying "Equals remote , and seeming o p p o s i t e s . "55

 In prose, Emerson celebrates the same ideal Poet in

"The Poet," the essay which emerged from the ashes of

threnos. The Poet is the man of genius, the child of the

fire, the man of Beauty "isolated among his contemporaries"

because he is the Eternal Man and not the Contemporary Man;

he is the representative man with the "centered mind"; the

man "without impediment," whose "powers are in balance"; the

man who is the Bayer, the idealized human form of the mythic

Neptune, of the théologie Son; he is the "natural sayer"

with "a new thought" and" a whole new experience" whose

thought expressed makes a poem "so passionate and alive, that,

like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an archi­

tecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing"; he

is the "genius" who "realizes and adds" while men of talent

can only "frolic and juggle"; he is the man who sees that

"the Universe is the externalization of the soul" and

through his "deeper insight," "re-attaches things to nature

and the Whole," who "puts eyes, and a tongue, into every

dumb and inanimate object," who "turns the world to glass,"

and who, by standing "one step nearer to things . . . sees

the flowing or metamorphosis" and "perceives . . . that

within the form of every creature is a force impelling it

to ascend into a higher form"; he is the Poet who is "the

Namer" or "Language-maker," who possesses "a very high sort

of seeing" called "Imagination," who achieves "a new energy"

by "abandonment to the nature of things" and so "suffering

 217

the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him"; he is

the "liberating god" whose "use of symbols has a certain

power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men," who

allows other men "a new sense" so that they too may find

"within their world, another world, or nest of worlds"; and,

finally, he is the Poet for whom "all things await" and also

for whom we "look in vain," for he is "the timely man" and

the " r e c o n c i l e r 56

Emerson's purpose in "The Poet" was not to argue,

dichotomize, defend, or theorize, but rather to suggest, to

stimulate, to encourage, to envigorate, to vitalize the

spirit of the Poet which exists in potentia within each of

his readers. Emerson's Poet was not Thoreau, Whitman,

Emily Dickinson, or even himself— even though each of them

vitalized certain aspects of Emerson's ideal. Emerson*s

ideal is the poet one small boy named Waldo might have

become; and, in this sense, Emerson's ideal is the poet of

today or the future who might become. Emerson*s Poet is

the great possibility.

The change which occurred in Emerson after Waldo's

death was not a change which can be fully gauged in terms

of his philosophy, his ideas, or the surface of his essays

or poems. It must be seen as central to Emerson himself

in all of his reality as man, thinker, writer, poet.

Central to this change was a basic break with the past,

which was the completion of the organic break with the past
 218

which had begun many years before with his resignation

from the pulpit. Not merely a biographical fact to be

interpreted solely in terms of the external man, the com­

pletion of this break with the past was essentially a

liberation of Emerson's mind and spirit from the obsession

with the past; it was a transformation of the past which

permitted him the freedom to generate a new focus on the

future from out of the materials of the past. Out of this

transformative process emerged the new image of the Poet,

liberated from the bones and ligaments of the past.

 219

Notes for Chapter 3

1"Emerson," in Critical Miscellanies, by John Morley,

vol. I (London and Basingstroke: Macmillan, 1886); I cite

from the excerpt reprinted in Recognition, p. 80.

2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 236;

cited by Hyatt H. Waggoner, Emerson as Poet (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 34.

3Life. p. 321.

4John M. Reilly has demonstrated how "Threnody" "does

resemble traditional pastoral funeral elegies in significant

ways" and "revitalizes a hackneyed tradition" in his article

"'Threnody' and the Traditional Elegy," Emerson Society

Quarterly, no. 4? (1967)» 17-19*

^Frederic Ives Carpenter, Emerson Handbook (New York:

Hendricks House, 1953). PP* 12, 81. Amacher's statistics

appear in his 1945 unpublished doctoral dissertation. The

Literary Reputation of R.W. Emerson. 1882-1945 (Pittsburgh,

1945). On his "top ten" list, the other nine Emerson poems

a r e , from second to tenth: "Woodnotes," "Days," "Concord

Hymn," "Brahma," "Rhodora," "The Snow-storm," "The Humble-

Bee," "Each and All," and "The Problem."

6see especially pages 3» 7» 48, 63 -6 5 » 66, and 197 in

 220

Emerson as Poet.

^Emerson on the Soul, p. 192.

8JMN. VIII, p. 4 5 5 .

9 j m n . VIII, eds. William H. Gilman and J.E. Parsons,

pp. 442-443.

lOThe titles for the different notebooks assigned by

the JMN editors are somewhat cumbersome to use in discussion.

One wonders if they couldn't have been simpler, but the

editors of JMN caution that the titles were chosen with care

to avoid confusing one notebook with another, which might

happen if the titles assigned were simpler. Nevertheless,

at times, the complex titles can confuse the truth, espe­

cially when different titles are assigned to different

sections of one Emerson notebook. With JMN. it is important

to read the small print.

11..Threnody" is categorized in this way by Reginald L.

Cook in his introduction to the anthology, Ralph Waldo

Emerson: Selected Prose and Poetry (New York: Holt, Rine­

hart and Winston, 1950; rpt. 1 9 6 6 ), p. xviii.

l^Ralnh Waldo Emerson: A Profile, ed. Carl Bode (New

York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. xvi.

l^Firkins, cited by Pommer, Emerson's First Marriage.

p. 102.
 221

l^Ljfe, p. 294. Emerson changed his wife's first name

to "Lidian." Emerson's letters written during this time

suggest that Lidian's disillusionment had more to do with

the lack of emotional comfort she felt she received from

Emerson at this time than with a falling away from belief

in transcendentalism. Lidian often felt that Emerson should

be home with her when he was away lecturing. Her disillu­

sionment at this time ought to be discussed as a topic with­

in marital/personal relations rather than philosophy. There

is no indication that Lidian had ever adopted transcendental

views in the first place. See Letters. Ill, pp. 11-15.

15pommert Emerson's First Marriage, pp. 78-79*

16JMN. VIII, pp. 204-205*

^Emerson's First Marriage, p. 119* For Bishop's

definition of what Emerson meant by the "soul" see Emerson

on the Soul, especially pp. 19-25*

18JMN. VIII, p. ix.

19JMN. VIII, pp. ix-x.

20JMN.-VIII. p. xv.

Zlcited by Charvat, Emerson's American Lecture Engage­

ments . p. 6.

22Charvat, p. 19*
 222

23Letter to Lucy Jackson Brown, 2? January 1842

(Letters. Ill, p. 6); Letter to William Emerson, 24 January

1842 (Letters, III, pp. 4-5).

^ E m e r s o n habitually notified close friends and

relatives immediately of births and deaths through short

letters.

25These letters, cited in the text below, are cited

from Letters, III, pp. 6-7.

26since scarlet fever was known to be contagious,

Emerson realized that William would be relieved to hear

that his elderly mother, who lived with Ralph Waldo and

his family in Concord, showed no signs of the disease.

2 7JMN. VIII, p. 163.

28These letters, which follow in the text, are cited

exactly as they were written (Letters. Ill, pp. 7-9). For

the similarity between phrasing in these letters and

"Threnody," see above, "'Threnody': The Reconstructed Text

of Context," especially notes 6, 7» 16, 23» 2 5 , 28, 29» and

31.

29see especially the entries made 30 January; JMN. VIII,

pp. I63 -I 6 5 .

3°See above, "'Threnody': The Reconstructed Text of

of Context," notes 5 , 7-13» 17-19# 21, 23-24, and 33.

 3lThe week before, in the letter to Aunt Mary, he had

said that Waldo's death had been "like a dream." Sometime

during the next two months, Emerson also referred in his

journal to a nightmare he'd had earlier (possibly immediately

after Waldo's death) in which he saw "lying in a crib an

insane person whom I very well knew» in a scene animated by

"Witchcraft" (JMN. VIII, pp. 215-216). In this context,

one recalls lines 62-69 of "Threnody," that rather dream­

like portion describing "The babe in willow wagon closed,

/ With rolling eyes and face composed." There is reason to

believe that the draft lines for this dream-like portion

were the earliest lines written for the poem.

32in a journal entry made about this time, Emerson said

"Sorrow makes us all children again . . . " (J M N . VIII,

p. 165).

33Letters. Ill, p. 9*

34Elizabeth Hoar was about as closely related to the

Emersons in affection as a non-family member could become.

At age 11, in 1821, Elizabeth had been instructed in Greek

by the young school teacher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was

instrumental in drawing Charles and the rest of the Emersons

back to their ancestral home. Concord, in 1834, following

Emerson's European voyage. Her father was Samuel Hoar, a

prosperous lawyer with an office in Concord, which Charles

 224

took over until his derangement and death in 1836. She w a s ,

at the time, Charles’ fiancee. Her close link to the

Emersons grew even stronger after Charles’s death. She

never married. When Emerson gained a son, Waldo, born a few

months after Charles' death, Elizabeth gained by proxy a

son* she became, as Emerson called her, Waldo's "foster

mother." Rusk, Life, pp. 91, 208, 22?, 230, 274.

^ Letters. Ill, pp. 9-10.

36see above, "The Critical Response to ' T h r e n o d y , f o r

Rusk's use of this statement.

37Letters. Ill, pp. 14-15*

38of the 339 lines of poetry drafted within Journal

Books Small /f"I_7 which would find their way into poems

published by Emerson, almost a third belong to "Threnody."

Of the remaining 241 drafted lines, 37 are initial draft

lines for "Wood-notes II"; 32 for "To Rhea"; 31 for

"Fragments on Nature and Life"; 27 for "Musketaquid"; 26

for "Cosmos"; 24 for "Saadi"; 16 for "The Poet"; 12 for

"Song of Nature"; 10 for "Fragments on the Poet and the

Poetic Gift"; 8 for "The Amulet"; 4 each for "Nature II,"

"The Celestial Love," and "Uriel"; and 2 each for "Nature

I," "Solution," and "Etienne de la Boéce."

Journal Books Small £ I_7 was kept from approximately

1840 to approximately 1856; my point is not that the lines

 225

of all of these poems were initially drafted within the same

period of time. My point is not priority of origin— is not,

in other words, merely a subjective stab in the dark regard­

ing when Emerson wrote certain lines. As discussed earlier,

it is impossible to know exactly which lines were composed

first because of the systemless way in which Emerson used

the notebook. My point, however, deals with the influence

of context: not only the influence of Waldo's death within

the context of life but also the influence of other lines

composed within the immediate context of the notebook itself.

The majority of these lines, we do know, were composed after

Waldo's death. Several of the poems— "The Poet" and the two

"Fragments"--were never considered by Emerson to be finished

poems and were published in the Centenary Edition within an

appendix to Poems. "The Celestial Love" is the third part

of the long poem, "Initial, Daemonic and Celestial Love."

39ln what follows in the text, I cite almost exclu­

sively from those poetic passages originating from the

drafted lined within Journal Books Small /~"l_7 an^ thus

within the influential context of "Threnody." I make but

one exception: lines 234-235 of "Wood-notes II," for which

no earlier drafts survive in JMN. I do not cite from

Dialling, another small notebook Emerson used during 1842-

1843, even though many first draft lines occur therein for

"Wood-notes II" and "Saadi," for I am concerned only with

 226

those lines which occur within the notebook where Emerson

wrote many of the early lines for "Threnody." In what

follows in the text, I cite the lines as published, for I

am concerned with the elements of the experience of threnos

which survive in the poems as we know them today.

^ H e r e and elsewhere, I use the text of Emerson's poems

from the Centenary Edition, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson,

the poet's son, cited from The Current Opinion reprint of

this edition of the poems in The Complete Works of Ralph

Waldo Emerson . . . (New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1923).

Here and afterwards, this source is cited as Complete Works

(Current Opinion). "The Amulet," Poems: Complete Works

(Current Opinion), pp. 98-99. When "Threnody" is cited,

I identify within the text the lines quoted, so that the

reader may refer to the whole poem, which appears above in

"'Threnody': The Reconstructed Text of Context."

41Letters. Ill, p. 8.

42"wood-notes II" (lines 234-235), Poems ; Complete

Works (Current Opinion), pp. 54-55*

43"Wood-notes II" (lines 194-199, 204-216), pp. 55-56.

44»wood-notes II" (lines 260-265, 272-274), pp. 57-58.

45see JMN, VIII, p. 204.

 22?

46prank Lentricchia, "Coleridge and Emerson: Prophets

of Silence, Prophets of Language," Journal of Aesthetics and

Art Criticism. 32 (Fall 1973)# P* 44. Lentricchia's article

is an excellent, sensitive examination of Emerson's use of

language and metaphor in terms of critical theory.

47"The Poet," Merrill facsimile, p. 37.

48Lentricchia, p. 43.

49"Song of Nature"(lines 37-44), Poems: Complete Works

(Current Opinion), p. 245. The earliest draft forms of the

cited lines are found within the same notebook in which

Emerson drafted the earliest lines for "Threnody."

50»The Poet," Merrill facsimile, p. 40.

51"The Sphinx" (lines 7» 9# 10), Poems % Complete Works

(Current Opinion), p. 20.

52yery little of the lecture "The Poet," which Emerson

was reading on lecture tours immediately before and after

Waldo's death, was used in the essay "The Poet." My point

is that the experience of Waldo, especially the transforma­

tive aspects of that experience within his poetry, transform­

ed his concept of the poet as well.

53»wood-notes I" (lines 43, 73# 105) and "Wood-notes

II" (line 71), Poems : Complete Works (Current Opinion),

pp. 44, 45, 46, 49.

 228

54»saadi" (lines 70-71. 125, 127-130, 140, 173),

Poemsi Complete Works (Current Opinion), pp. 132,134, 1 3 5 .

55"The Initial, Daemonic and Celestial Love" (lines

301-303, 222-223, 226-227, 233-234), Poems : Complete Works

(Current Opinion), pp. 114, 111, 112.

56»The Poet," Merrill facsimile, pp. 4, 5 , 6-7, 8 ,

10 - 1 1 , 1 2 , 15, 2 0 , 2 2 , 23, 28-29, 32-33, 40.

 Chapter 4

A SANE DISCONTENT: THE ANXIETY OF RESPONSE

RT.RSSEn IS ALL THAT AGITATES: THE EMERSON ANXIETY

The world of the essay "Experience"— where illusion

reigns, where lethargic sleep distorts vision, where all

things swim and glitter, where we know neither what we are

doing nor where we are going, where evanescence and lubric­

ity characterize objects, where life is but a string of

moods, where dream delivers us only to another dreaml— is

the world without the poet, the world of poetic silence.

Emerson's published reference to his grief over the sudden

loss of Waldo appears in "Experience," and the"shallowness"

of grief, playing only upon the surface of reality within

scene-painting and illusion's counterfeit of what Emerson

called the "sharp peaks and edges of truth,"^ belongs to

this world. Toward the end of "Experience," Emerson said

that his earlier word-picture of the world was incomplete:

"I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me." He also

rejected the implications of his word-picture: "I know

that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms,

is not the world I think. I observe that difference, and

shall observe it. One day, I shall know the value and law

of the discrepance." Emerson's earlier word-picture of the

world, constructed wholly from the phantasmagoria of the

229
 230

senses, is the world as visualized from within grief's

shallow dream, and it represents the world of pure experience,

unmodified by thought, time, language, or memory. Even in

this essay which best reflects his skeptical mood, Emerson

would not reject the certainty of hope: "Patience and

patience, we shall win at the last." He would accept neither

"paltry empiricism" nor "the deceptions of the element of

time": "It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep,

or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to

entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of

our life." Emerson's insight, his light, was not belief in

the phantasmagoria of the senses without thought, but rather

belief, as he expressed it in the last sentence of "Experi­

ence," that "the world exists to realize . . . the true

romance" which "will be the transformation of genius into

practical power."3 In this sense, "Experience" follows

"The Poet" in the second series of Essays for good reason:

the "transformation of genius into practical power" will be

the ultimate evolution of the Supreme Poet, a development

suggested in "The Poet" by his description as "the timely

man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things

await." The poet is "the true and only doctor" not only

to "partial" men but also to the "partial" world*4-: by

reconciling man through the symbols immanent in nature, he

will also reconcile the world through its immanence in man.

Emerson's picture in the early part of "Experience"

 231

of a world where men are lethargic with sleep is his por­

trait of mankind uninspired, made lethargic fcy an obsession

with the materialistic diversity of the surface of life.

For Emerson, uninspired mankind is only half alive— "dead"

from the stomach up (assuming the soul is above the stomach,

of course). For Emerson, the divine spark within man

emanates only within the act of thinking. It is not think­

ers or thought that Emerson valued, but Man Thinking* man

within the act of thinking. Emerson's characteristic ideas

regarding nature, self-reliance, inspiration, compensation,

poetry, character, the scholar, great men, and books are,

from one way of looking at them, but variations upon the

single theme of Man Thinking. Emerson assailed, more than

once or twice, the "dead alive," that "lumpish class" of

men who seemed not at all related to that essential man,

Man Thinking— as he does here, in his journal on 29 January

1837, only seven months before delivering his "American

Scholar" oration*

One has patience with every kind of

living thing but not with the dead
alive. I, at least, hate to see
persons of that lumpish class who are
here they know not why, & ask not
whereto, but live as the larva of
the ant or the bee to be lugged into
the sun & then lugged back into the
cell & then fed. The end of nature
for such, is that they should be
fatted. If mankind should pass a
vote on the subject, I think they
would throw them in sacks into the
sea. 5
 232

In "The American Scholar," he characterized the "mind of the

multitude" as "sluggish and perverted." It is "sluggish"

for it is "slow to open to the incursions of Reason." It

thinks but rarely and then only with effort. The "mind of

the multitude" is "perverted" for it thinks only to end

thought, converting insights into dogmas, even Man Thinking

into "the restorers of readings, the emendators, the biblio­

maniacs of all degrees." "The sluggish and perverted mind

of the multitude",, opens but slowly to the guidance of a new

book and then only to convert the guide into a noxious

"tyrant." ^ The mind of the multitude, then, uses its free­

dom only to create new forms of slavery for itself. When

the mind of the multitude rebels against these tyrants,

which it has created in the first place, it uses its freedom

again in the same way, continuing a cycle of self-perpet­

uating enslavement, the state in which the mind of the

multitude finds stability through repose.

For Emerson, as he wrote in his journal in late

October 1835, "the mob" is " insignificant" for it "is the

emblem of unreason ; mere muscular & nervous motion, no

thought, no spark of spiritual life in it." He considered

it "a bad joke" to call the American mob "a fruit of the

love of liberty. It is permitted like earthquakes &

freshets & locusts & is to be met like a blind mechanical

force."? Yet his low assessment of generalized humanity

did not rest upcn lack of belief in democracy* instead, it

 233

rested upon too much belief in democracy. "When I spoke

or speak of the democratic element," he clarified on 23

September 1836, "I do not mean that ill thing vain & loud

which writes lying newspapers, spouts at causes, & sells

its lies for gold, but that spirit of love for the General

good whose name this assumes. There is nothing of the true

democratic element in what is called Democracy; it must

fall, being wholly commercial."® The principles of govern­

ment, he wrote a few months laters, like everything else,

are subservient to the agency of trade. Indeed, "the very

savage on the shores of the N.W. America, holds up his shell

& cries 'a dollar!'" Y e t , Emerson concluded on a hopeful

note, while the era is the "era of Trade," it is also "a

social era" and "the age of associations" during which "the

powers of Combination" will be discovered. For Emerson,

the spirit of American democracy was not mobbish conformity

infected with the cant of materialism; instead, it was a

loose union of diverse elements, wherein new associations

continually formed through the electricity sparked by " the

powers of Combination," a description which parallels his

description elsewhere of the process of composition.*0

Emerson said in his lecture "The Fortune of the Republic,"

delivered at the Old South Church in Boston only four years

before his death, that our hope as a people rests upon the

fact "that we are a nation of individuals, that we have a

highly intellectual organization, that we can see and feel

 234

moral distinctions, and that on such an organization sooner

or later the moral laws must tell, to such ears must speak."

Our mischief, however, as he also clarified in "The

Fortune of the Republic," is the tendency to "lean on some

other" so that, as he observed, "young men at thirty and

even earlier lose all spring and vivacity . . . ." This

tendency, which Emerson felt went contrary to the spirit of

democracy, has as its source "the extreme difficulty with

which men are roused from the torpor of every day." The

solution? Emerson fervently expressed in this lecture his

own solution, "Blessed is all that agitates the mass, breaks

up this torpor, and begins motion. Corpora non agunt nisi

solutai the chemical rule is true in mind. Contrast,

change, interruption, are necessary to new activity and new

combination."!!
* #

This "torpor of every day" from which men are roused

only with "extreme difficulty" infects "our relations to

each other," as Emerson said in "Experience," so that they

"are oblique and casual."!^ Conversation, which in the

essay "Inspiration," Emerson rated highly as a possible

fount of the inspirational agitation of thought, can

similarly be infected. In late March 1835* he complained,

"There is almost no earnest conversation, so much of dis­

play enters into it. Put two people of good condition to­

gether, the talk on one or both parts will probably be

 235

merely defensive; that is, they are not thinking how they

may learn something, but how they may come off well . . . .

They circulate round point-no-point. Each remains fast in

his own aura & not once do they communicate."1^

The "torpor of every day" is, essentially, an obsession

with the apparent reality of surfaces; as such, it en­

courages one to be concerned with facts and events in

isolation as products of mere whim: no associations are

made, the mind sleeps. "The talk of the kitchen & the

cottage is exclusively occupied with persons. It is the

sickness, crimes, disasters, airs, fortunes of persons ;

never is the character of the action or the object abstract­

ed," wrote Emerson on 22 May I 83 6 . "Go into the parlor &

into fashionable society . . . the fact is the s a m e . " 1^

Blinded to essential significance by the "torpor of every

day," mass man is "easily elated and easily depressed."!5

As such, mass man is rootless and has no stability. He

easily loses himself "in the particulars of Disease, Want,

Insecurity, Disunion," and, so lost, uses his imagination,

not to forge electric "horses of thought," but to fabricate

"a ready and lasting apology" for his mental and physical

torpor, for "duties omitted and faculties rusted . . . for

narrowness and sleep." Suffering and sorrow are, for the

most part, "only apparent," "superficial." They are also

habit-forming, since it is easier, according to Emerson's

view, for man to avoid thinking than it is for him to think.

 236

Man habitually expends his energy, not in mental pursuit

among the "sharp peaks and edges of truth," but in emotional

pursuit of gloom and glory. "I plead for no superficial

tranquility," he claimed in the lecture "Tragedy,""a front

of marble masking a boiling and passionate soul. I say only

that all melancholy as all passion belongs to the exterior

life, that so long as a man is subject to terror or to rage

he is not yet grounded in the soul. For lack of these

natural roots he clings by tendrils of affection to society

. . . in calm times it will not appear that he is adrift

and not moored, but let any disorder take place . . . and

instantly his whole type of permanence is rudely shaken.

In the disorder of society universal'disorder seems to him

to take place, chaos is come again . . . •"^ This descrip­

tion of "chaos . . . come again" mirrors the world view

presented through the senses in the early part of the essay

"Experience."
Since "we have no deeper interest than our integrity,"

Emerson said in the lecture "Comedy," we can "be made aware

by joke and by stroke of any lie that we still harbor." He

identified "a perception of the comic" with the "balance

wheel in the metaphysical structure of man." The perception

of the comic, he concluded, "is a tie of sympathy with

other men . . . a pledge of sanity . . . a protection from

those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities into which

fine intellects sometimes lose themselves." With "the

 237

perception of the ludicrous," a man "is still convertible."17

"All that life demands of us through the greater part of

the day," he said, "is composure, an equilibrium, a readi­

ness . . . ."18 A readiness for what? For expansion of

the mental horizon: "The great mind finds ample spaces,

vast plains, yea populous continents, & active worlds moving

freely within these elastic limits & indeed never approaches

the terminus on either s i d e . " ^ 9

* * *

Few in the audiences of Emerson's day could appreciate

his views on the issue of slavery, since at best his aboli­

tionist spirit was compromised by his intuition that the

Negroes were mainly slaves of themselves (i.e., the slave

mentality). He consistently hesitated short of active

participation in philosophical, social or political reform

movements because of his belief in Man Thinking; for example,

while he did make a speech on temperance before a temper­

ance organization in the early 1840's, he spoke on temperate

living, not simply temperate drinking, and used the occasion,

not to rally support for organized reform, but to declare

once again his ideas on self-reliance. To be effective,

Emerson implied, reform must originate from within the

individual; it could not be effected externally by organized

20
reform movements.

Emerson never found himself entirely in favor of either

side of a social controversy; hence, he was never particularly

 238

strong as a speaker on controversial social topics such as

abolition or women's rights or temperance. On the one hand,

he was in favor of individual liberty (whether that indi­

vidual was female, male, black, or white was not really the

issue); on the other hand, he opposed all movements which

dealt with individuals as a mass, losing the individual in

the crowd. He was cautious of those men, books, and move­

ments which advocated consistency in or loyalty to one idea;

such consistency, he believed, was the road to slavery,

mentally if not physically, because it struck a blow against

the self-reliance of the individual, the individual's free­

dom to interpret truth today differently than he had the

day b e f o r e . I t was on the rock of self-reliance that he

parted company with idealistic communities, including

Fruitlands which his friend and neighbor, Amos Bronson

Alcott, helped found. Communities such as Fruitlands are

little more than embodiments in reality of abstract ideas *

to live in Fruitlands would have been to live Fruitlands.

Emerson* s reaction to being approached by the founders of

one of these mid-century idealistic communities, seeking

his participation, is recorded in his journal: he could

see no reason why he should choose to live in "a little

larger" prison.22 He was consistently opposed to whatever

depressed the human spirit of self-reliance, for whatever

ran counter to self-reliance essentially opposed the

Emersonian ideal of Man Thinking.

 239

* * * *

"Set men upon thinking," he wrote in his journal in late

January I8 3 6 , "& you have been to them a god."23 As

Whicher clarifies in Freedom and Fate. Emerson valued

thinking itself over any thought that emerged, for he

essentially believed thoughts and human truth to be mortal

while believing that the energy of the mind engaged in the

act of thinking was immortal. The "power of recovery" that

Emerson associated with human valor was essentially the

power to recover self-reliance through the use of this

24
energy.
Edward Emerson, Emerson's son, may have been the first

to note that his father was very much aware of the sub­

versive power of a new idea. Certainly Emerson felt excited,

as Whicher suggested, about "the explosive properties of

his thought" as well as "ill-concealed delight at the

thought of the havoc he could wreak— if people were once to

listen to him."25 Amid the rapidly converging circles of

development in the controversial essay "Circles," there is

a Cheshire-cat quality about Emerson* s warning, "let me

remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not

set the least value on what X do, or the least discredit

on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as

true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to

me scared; none are profane . . . ."2^ A scant two para­

graphs later, he has subtly caught the reader inside his

undulating circle: "People wish to be settled; only as far

as they are unsettled is there any hope for them"2?

Emerson unsettled his readers, not to control them but to

liberate them. The act of unsettling is like the proverbial

act of the stone cast into the still pond: the stone causes

but does not control the chain reaction which disrupts the

entire surface of the tranquil pond, and the disruption on

the surface of that pond affects from that moment onward

the future conditions and life within that pond. To un­

settle all things, as Emerson proposed in "Circles" as his

aim, is eventually to unsettle men. But to unsettle is to

participate in unsettling. As Emerson said about his

relation to his audience in lecturing, "I will agitate men

being agitated myself."28 What some critics have considered

Emerson* s major limitation in the essays— his indecision,

ambiguity, lack of linear development toward a conclusion—

Whicher, in his preface to Freedom and Fate, considers

Emerson*s "greatest gift": "his ability to endure the push

and pull of contrary directions in his thought without a

premature reaching out after conclusions that would do

violence to his whole nature." 29 The "push and pull of

contrary directions," if Emerson was indeed an experimenter

who sought to unsettle his readers for their own liberation

of thought, was also necessary to his aim.

 241

A CERTAIN DISQUIET MINGLED» THE SLIDING SURFACE OF ANXIETY

"Those who knew Emerson, or who stood so near to his

time and to his circle that they caught some echo of his

personal i n f l u e n c e b e g a n George Santayana in his noted

essay on Emerson, "did not judge him merely as a poet or

philosopher, nor identify his efficacy with that of his

writings . . . . They flocked to him and listened to his

word, not so much for the sake of its absolute meaning as

for the atmosphere . . . that hung about it." Like others

before him, Santayana located the source of Emerson's power,

not in his doctrine, but in his temperament. "What seemed,

then," continued Santayana, "to the more earnest and less

critical of his hearers a revelation from above was in

truth rather an insurrection from beneath, a shaking loose

from convention, a disintegration of the normal categories

of reason in favour of various imaginative principles . . ."

Yet, for Emerson and for his audience, such "revolutionary

thinking" was both fleeting and, eventually, disturbing,

since a certain long-recognized stability exists in those

"normal categories of reason" which were essentially the

basis of both the grammar and "the general forms in which

experience will allow itself to be stated." Eventually,

Santayana said, "a certain disquiet mingled . . . in the

minds of Emerson's contemporaries with the admiration they

felt for his purity and genius." That disquiet, he added.

 242

was not an insular phenomenon of Emerson* s times but "will

not, even for us, wholly disappear." What is the source of

that disquiet which slowly developed among Emerson's contem­

porary admirers, which infects even t o d a y s reader? It was,

in Santayana'a words, that "that inspiration which should

come to fulfil seemed too often to come to destroy."

Santayana asked, "If he was able so constantly to stimulate

us to fresh thoughts, was it not because he demolished the

labour of long ages of reflection? Was not the startling

effect of much of his writing due to its contradiction of

tradition and of common sense?"30

Destruction is indeed a natural and recurrent stage

in the fulfillment of Emerson's organic purpose: man must

be unsettled, jarred out of his everyday torpor, freed from

his obsession with objects, before he can begin to think,

begin to be receptive to the electricity of inspiration,

begin to pierce the illusionary world of objects to dis­

cover through the unobstructed mind the oneness of essence,

spirit, soul, truth, and reality. Destruction is also a

natural and recurrent stage in Emerson's organic process

of composition: prior to the journal entry is the destruc­

tion of the wholeness of experience to discover truth, and

after the entry is made follows the destruction of isolated

truth to make "new combinations": essays, lectures, poems.

Destruction is characteristic of Emerson* s use of monistic

metaphor. Destruction is, above all, a crucial aspect of

 243

Emerson* s concept of the human ability to perceive and know

truth.

While his ideal was indeed Man Thinking, he was wary

of both the human mind and the products of thinking:

thoughts and their embodiments, thinkers and theories.

Although as his readers we first encounter Emerson's wari­

ness of the mind, thought, thinkers, and theories in the

1837 "American Scholar," this oration is actually the

product of an awareness or sensitivity which had originated

as early as 1835• In late March of 1835, he wrote in his

journal, "No man speaks the truth or lives a true life two

minutes together." A month and a half later, he wrote,

"The truest state of mind, rested in, becomes false . . . .

Perpetually must we East ourselves, or we get into irre­

coverable error, starting from the plainest truth & keeping

as we think the straighest /~"sic_7 road of logic."31

Almost six months later, while delivering the lecture

"English Literature: Introductory," he said:

A man thinks. He not only thinks,

but he lives on thoughts; he is
the prisoner of thoughts; ideas,
which in words he rejects, tyrannize
over him, and dictate or modify
every word of his mouth, every act
of his hand. There are no walls
like the invisible ones of an idea.

A few months later, on 22 January 1836, Emerson discovered

thecreative aspect of this evolving concept: "A man is a

 244

method; a progressive arrangement ; a selecting principle

gathering his like to him wherever he goes." Yet, by the

fall of that year, the limitations of this creative aspect

of man*s mind had occurred to Emerson. In mid-September

he wrote, "To unify is the perpetual effort of the mind."

A month later, he returned to develop this concept:

"Observe this invincible tendency of the mind to unify.

It is a law of our constitution that we should not contem­

plate things apart without the effort to arrange them in

order with known facts & ascribe them to the same law. . . ."

The positive application of the law within the human mind

that urges man to arrange facts and objects coalesces with

the workings of the universal law of composition which he

was also discovering at this time through his journals.

This tendency of the mind to create its own order, however,

often becomes tyrannical and enforces its "imperfect"

results, as Emerson implied in his example, in the " system

of Lamarck" which "aims to find one monad of organic life

which shall be the common element of every animal . . . ."33

This tendency of the mind— which by late I 836 Emerson was

calling a "force" or "law"— grew so much in importance to

him that by 1841 it had become a desire of man, part of an

emotional need, as he suggested in "Circles" when he wrote

that "people wish to be settled."

Emerson not only formulated but also lived and wrote

within the tension between these two contrary directions :

his mind, like other minds, perpetually pulled toward self­

created order (he, too, wanted the horizon shaped out of

the broken lines of inspiration), pulling against that part

of him which realized that "the truest state of mind, rested

in, becomes false." Emerson realized that we see only what

we are. He, like other men, needed the spark, the stimulus

from the activity of other minds to get his own train of

thought going. Even as late as 1850 he would write, "Unless

I task myself I have no thoughts," although, as early as

1837, he'd realized "If you elect writing for your task in

life, . . . you must renounce all pretensions to reading."3^

Although many times earlier and later he said that his aim

was not completeness of statements, he nevertheless did

make the following statement in his journal in 1854: "If

Minerva offered me a gift and an option, I would say, Give

me continuity. I am tired of scraps. I do not wish to be

a literary or intellectual chiffonier. Away with this J e w s

rag-bag of ends and tufts of brocade, velvet, and cloth-of-

gold, and let me spin some yards or miles of helpful twine ;

a clew to lend to one kingly truth; a cord to bind whole­

some and belonging facts."35 The tension within his process

of composition itself could only become more pronounced as

years passed and Emerson began to feel the weight of old age

mentally. As the fire of his imagination cooled, as the

sparks of inspiration faltered, as body and mental heat

decreased, the individual products of inspiration did not

 246

fit together so easily. His composition, earlier described

as much like a smelting process, eventually came to resemble

patchquilt work by the late 1860's. By the 1870*s he need­

ed the aid of a quilter (Cabot) to patch together his

random "scraps" into lectures and essays. Two descriptions

of Emerson at work— one from Bronson Albott and the other

cited by Van Wyck Brooks— suggest the opposing views of

Emerson smelting and Emerson quilting.36 Brooks' portrait

of Emerson writing suggests the earlier Emerson. Emerson

'Would sit in his rocking-chair, his portfolio on his knee,

and the volumes of his journals on the table beside him,

copying, combining, re-writing entries from the latter, and,

as he wrote, in his large, flowing hand, dropping the pages

on the floor."37 Alcott's portrait of Emerson writing,

cited by Charles Woodbury, suggests the older Emerson who,

at moments grew frustrated with his "Jew's rag-bag of ends

and tufts" and longed for the power to spin "some yards or

miles of helpful twine" to make "a cord to bind wholesome

and belonging facts" into "one kingly truth": "Bronson

Alcott has drawn a picture of Mr. Emerson on his knees in

his study, trying to piece together . . . sheets of written

matter with which the floor was carpeted."38

The tension within his process of composition, which

became more pronounced the older he grew, also became more

obvious in his relations with others the more famous he

grew in later life. Emerson probably did not realize that

 247

his admirers, especially the youthful ones, would not be

able to read or listen to him as purely as he would have

them. The following statement written in his journal

during 1859 more clearly reflects his aim than it does the

effect he had upon many youthful admirers:

I have been writing and speaking

what were once called novelties,
for twenty-five or thirty years,
and have not now one disciple.
Why? Not that what I said was not
true; not that it has not found
intelligent receivers; but because
it did not go from any wish in me
to bring men to me, but to them­
selves . . . . This is my boast,
that I have no school and no
followers. I should account it a
measure of the impurity of insight
if it did not create independence.39

It was not the purity of his "insight” which kept disciples

from attaching themselves to him so much as it was the per­

sonal attention he gave to a continuous effort to destroy

discipleship wherever he found it budding. But he had, in

conflict with his aim, a personal charisma which drew

people to him, especially youths. One of these young men,

Charles Woodbury, later reminisced:

There was something "catching" about

him. No one could exactly explain or
even understand it, but every one was
sensible of it; so that his friends
in England and America felt called
upon to warn admirers that they must
be on their guard, and if they sought
a familiarity closer than his pocket
edition, not be carried too far, for
 248

he could not encourage an imitator.

. . . He was not a man to be
approached closely, nor was it well
to be loved by him too dearly . . . .
The fact is, no one meeting Emerson
was ever the same again. His natural
force was so resistless and so
imperceptible that it commanded men
before they were aware.40

Ironically, Charles Woodbury himself, as a young man, was

one of those youthful admirers who "sought a familiarity"

closer than Emerson could endure.

Woodbury was one of the young students who— when

Emerson visited Williams College in Williamstown, Massachu­

setts to deliver a lecture in 1865— urged him to stay long

enough to deliver several more lectures. While Emerson

was at Williams College, he and Woodbury seem to have had

many of what Woodbury later called "conversations," al­

though Woodbury by far did most of the listening. After

Emerson left, Woodbury wrote him and, after some time, was

finally invited to visit Emerson in Concord. Twenty-five

years after that first meeting at Williams College, Woodbury

published his Talks with Emerson, a topical composite of

his journal records of those conversations in I8 6 5 . Despite

the quarter-of-a-century gap between those conversations

and the book. Talks with Emerson preserves for us a sense

of Woodbury's response to Emerson as a youth, and one sus­

pects that, true to his word, in writing the book Woodbury

was more faithful than not to the youthful jottings in his

 249

journal.
Since we get in Talks with Emerson a fairly good

representation of the evolution of his relationship with

Emerson, by examining it we can get a good sense of the

complex response Emerson stimulated in his youthful con­

temporaries. In the beginning, through what he mistakenly

took to be encouragement from Emerson, Woodbury thought of

his role as similar to Boswell's role with Johnson. In at

least one moment of youthful exurberance, he saw his role

as similar to the "gospel writers" recording the words of

Jesus.His passive role continues for the first third

of the book; underneath this passive narrative role, we

sense Woodbury as young college student, accepting as

"gospel truth" everything that Emerson said. But after

this first portion of the book, a revolution occurs within

Woodbury as a result of Emerson's reactions to a manuscript

volume of poems written by Woodbury's seventeen-year-old

friend, Edward King. And, for a few pages at least, we

encounter an involved narrator as Woodbury records what

Emerson said, details the "seismic tremor" the comment

caused within Woodbury, and points to the change in their

relationship which resulted.

About King's poems, Emerson had said:

He seems to see nothing but the

horrible . . . . He paints every­
thing in black, and yet he is a
rosy-cheeked boy. I wonder at
it. We cannot have the Rembrant
colour. Melancholy is unendurable;
 250

grief is abnormal. Victor Hugo

has written such a book. I have
not read it; I do not read the sad
in literature.42

For Woodbury, Emerson's adverse reactions to reading "the

sad in literature" (perhaps coupled with the fact that,

"the sad," in this case, was located in a young friend's

poems) were "the first seismic tremors" disturbing his

idolatry of Emerson since they caused Woodbury's first

"apprehension of possible limitation" in Emerson.43

After recording Emerson's reaction to his young

friend's melancholic poetry, Woodbury spends four pages

describing his own reactions to Emerson's comment, reactions

drawn perhaps verbatim from the journal record Woodbury

made the day of this particular conversation in 1865, when

Woodbury was twenty-one years old and Emerson was well into

his sixty-second year. Woodbury's first reaction is that

Emerson is being inconsistent, in conflict with the advice

he had given him earlier on what he should read. If

Emerson felt this way about "the sad in literature,"

Woodbury argued, why did he tell him to read the Eastern

theological books as well as the Bible? Why did he tell

him to read Greek and Latin literature? Could Emerson not

see that, in the Eastern theological books, "their inspira­

tion is of the pall, their language of the grave . . .

their message . . . covered with vapours of the tomb"?

Could he not see that "'darkness broods' from Genesis to

 251

Revelation" in our own Bible? Did he not realize that "If

ever a literature respired *the sad,' surely the Greek does

and the Latin"?44 of course, Woodbury had over-simplified

and confused the issue; he had overlooked the distinction

between those works wherein "the sad" is merely one part

of the whole and those works whose subject and mood affirm

the existence of "the sad" and encourage our indulgence in

it. Emerson* s aversion to the intentional or purposive

"sad in literature" is much deeper rooted, more complex,

and much more meaningful than the youthful Woodbury can

comprehend.
Our focus, however, is not on Emerson's statement but

on the structure of Woodbury's reaction, since Woodbury's

response to Emerson can give us further insight into the

reaction to Emerson that Santayana described earlier.

Woodbury's first reaction was a perception of limitation in

Emerson; his second reaction was a perception of inconsis­

tency in Emerson. In the beginning, attracted by Emerson

in the medium of his lectures, Woodbury saw Emerson as "a

revolutionary force, questioning, suggesting, destroying

composure, provoking doubt of the order that is, destroying

gods . . . ."^5 Yet Woodbury gradually came to perceive

Emerson, in the medium of the conversations, as the Johnson

for his Boswell, as the Jesus for his Matthew, Mark, Luke,

or John. His response to Emerson is analogous to the

corrupt response to books that Emerson described in "The

 252

American Scholar":

The sacredness which attaches to the

act of creation,— the act of thought,
— is instantly transferred to the
record. The poet chanting, was felt
to be a divine man. Henceforth the
chant is divine also. The writer was
a just and wise spirit. Henceforward
it is settled, the book is perfect ;
as love of the hero corrupts into
worship of his statue. Instantly,
the book becomes noxious. The guide
is a tyrant. . . .The sluggish and
perverted mind of the multitude,
always slow to open to the incursions
of Reason, having once so opened,
having once received this book,
stands upon it . . . .Books are
written on it by thinkers, not by
Man Thinking; by men of talent,
that is, who start wrong, who set
out from accepted dogmas, not from
their own sight of principles.
Meek young men grow up in libraries,
believing it their duty to accept
the views which Cicero, which Locke,
which Bacon, have given, forgetful
that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were
only young men in libraries when they
wrote these b o o k s . 46

Woodbury was one of those "meek young men" who "grow up in

libraries," who have young minds which are malleable and

impressionable and even convertible, and who are capable

of either of two responses to the man or book that stimu­

lates them to thought: the first and easiest is to mold

their thinking after the original; the second, the more

difficult, is to catch the spark of creative thought and

think their own thoughts. Woodbury's initial response to

Emerson was to follow the first and easier path. Yet the
 253

easiest path also has its difficulties, for heroes and

idols alike tend to have clay feet, and the hero-worshipper

and idolizer have but mortal necks which tend to get cricks

in them from long sessions of cloud and star gazing* man

has the power to create and support heroes and idols, but

man also has the more powerful and persistent ability to

expose clay feet. Emerson might have explained the phenom­

enon in terms of two contradictory elements within mans one

a mental tendency or law and the other a need. The power

to create and support heroes and idols develops out of the

mental tendency to create order, to perfect things. But

the basic human need for self-expression, which Emerson

ascribed to all men in the essay "The Poet," will not

remain dormant * when it exerts itself, the clay feet seem

larger, at first, than they really are: the limitless idol

is found to possess "limitations," and "inconsistencies"

are perceived in the perfect hero. The fact that this basic

human need will not forever remain dormant and will repeat­

edly assert itself is at least part of the reason why

Emerson felt Man Thinking was the eternal man, why he felt

that the immortal spark of man's divinity emerged, not in

thinkers nor in particular thoughts, but in the act itself

of thinking. If the easier path of hero worship contains

the seed of its own destruction, why didn't Emerson simply

sit back and allow things to take their normal course?

The mental attitude of disillusionment that persists is.

 254

to one degree or another, melancholia or melancholy. Dis­

illusionment or endured melancholy becomes, in turn, its

own prison* everything, everybody, life itself assumes the

tints of black and gray, and the imagination finds in the

phantasmagoria "a ready and lasting apology for . . .

faculties rusted . . . for narrowness and sleep."^7 Again,

the mind works, continually and subtly, toward stability,

toward rest, toward inactivity, for thinking is hard work.

When the admirer is jolted out of his private spiral of

idolatrous admiration by the "seismic" perception of contra

diction and limitation within the admired, the result is

not necessarily the extreme opposite, lack of admiration or

even active dislike for the once admired. The intense

admirer may become the more distant and self-anesthetized

"appréciator." This is what happened to Woodbury.

The day after his "seismic" shock from Emerson*s

statement about the sad in literature, Woodbury, full of

perplexity and anxiety as well as a certain sense that

Emerson had somehow disappointed him, approached Emerson:

"The next day, full of these triste thoughts, at the cost

of a struggle, but with a youth's temerity, I told Mr.

Emerson of my inability to accept his statements on this

matter as I understood them." Implicitly, Woodbury expect­

ed Emerson either to explain further his comment (and, in

this way, remove the contradiction by unraveling his

thought) or to correct his earlier comment. We see this

 255

implication most clearly in Woodbury's phrase "as I under

stood them." Woodbury is ready to be mistaken if only

Emerson will be correct; Woodbury is ready to continue as

the passive disciple if only Emerson will assume the role

of corrective teacher. Emerson* s response to Woodbury's

inability to accept his earlier statements must have been

as "seismic" for Woodbury's sensibilities as his initial

statement the day before. Woodbury described Emerson's

response;

He heard me patiently, watched my

quivering lips a moment, and then
said briefly, but with beaming
glance—
"Very well. I do not wish
disciples." And now I see that
the occurrence concealed a crisis
in our affairs. For from this
time disappeared in his pupil the
boyish and servile acquiescence,
and I doubt not in the master the
feeling of nausea it could not but
cause. The release saved me my
friend, and made of his friendship
a greater blessing . . . .^8

Emerson* s response--"Very well. I do not wish disciples"

— is as much a response to Woodbury's pose as it is to

Woodbury's statement. Emerson will not be Johnson to

Woodbury* s Boswell. The "crisis" which Woodbury then goes

on to describe as "a crisis in our affairs" is actually the

crisis he alone underwent in redefining his relationship

to Emerson. He assumed that Emerson was "nauseated" by

"the boyish and servile acquiescence" in "his pupil," but

 256

Emerson's "beaming glance" more likely denoted sympathetic

amusement than nausea. Depending on how much one can read

into a glance, it's even possible that that "beaming glance"

— far from being the expression of disapproval— was the

beam of approval. For perhaps the first time, Emerson had

succeeded in prodding the young Woodbury, not just into

response, but into independent thought. And such prodding

can be done as well, and perhaps better, by disagreement

than by agreement.

For Woodbury, however, the response to Emerson was

intertwined with the process of "growing up." To think

independently is to be a man, and to be a man is to put

away (not without hesitation) pupil-master relationships

and take up egalitarian friendships. Even beneath the

surface of this new concept of the Woodbury-Emerson relation­

ship, however, lurks Woodbury-the-pupil trying to please

the older and wiser master, Emerson. Woodbury claimed

that the "crisis" of manhood resulted in his loss of

Emerson the teacher and his acquisition of Emerson the

friendf yet, paradoxically enough, the change moved him

further away from Emerson rather than closer to him.

Ending his narration of this moment of contact with Emerson,

Woodbury rose to a conclusive appreciation of Emerson:

This was a long step toward manhood;

but the remarkable reply /*""! do not
wish disciples"_7 held for me a still
deeper teaching, and one yet more
 257

psychologically formative, in that it

exhibited to me the foolish habit I
had fallen into of concerning myself
with my friend's wares rather than
himself. And afterwards I found myself
less and less drawn by Mr. Emerson's
opinions, advice, literary judgments,
etc. Not that they did not interest me.
One would have to be less or more than
human not to respond to these unique
and wise overflowings of insight and
experience. But now I saw there was a
far richer gift aloof from these and in
reserve, namely, the personality of the
man himself. And to all youth I would
say, recognize this in every great soul
with whom you come in contact— the power
that is his that made him what he is.
It is more to you than all his esoteric
facts and ideas.^9

There is a great temptation to oversimplify in critically

examining Woodbury's reactions to the anxiety kindled in

his response to Emerson. Woodbury's response was complex

and further complicated later by the transparent needs of

a narrator— who by age forty-five, eight years after

Emerson's death, evidently felt himself mature enough to

be tutor if not teacher to other young men— in recollection

of himself as character to tug a lesson out of the experi­

ence for his professed audience, more than evident in

Woodbury's dedication of his book "TO THE YOUTH OF THE LAND

WHO ASPIRE." Reading Woodbury's lengthy account of this

experience with Emerson, we can observe him in the process

of freeing himself from the specific Emerson and attaching

himself to the generalized and harmless Emerson: Emerson

the spirit or personality, Emerson the Great Soul. He

 258

assumed that he was coming to a truer understanding of

Emerson, but he was actually moving out of the sphere of

understanding, which necessitates a certain amount of

healthy collision with those "esoteric facts and ideas,"

and into the more distant and psychologically safer sphere

of appreciation. He chided himself for " the foolish habit

I had fallen into of concerning myself with my friend's

wares rather than himself." However, Woodbury as a young

man was not concerned with Emerson's "wares" until after he

had begun his retreat from Emerson. In the beginning, he

had been concerned only with Emerson himself, with that

"central essence of the man himself" which is "a revolu­

tionary force, questioning, suggesting, destroying composure,

provoking doubt of the order that is, destroying gods . . ,

emancipating thought, sowing a sane discontent . . .then

stimulator, inspirer, liberator of power." He did not

become concerned with Emerson's "wares," his ideas, until

he had imprisoned himself within his Boswellian role as

passive recorder of those ideas uttered by his Oracle; as

such, he was no longer receptive to the "sowing" of "a

sane discontent" but resting within a passive role which

would feed, instead, that tendency of the mind to create

and defend its own order. The "seismic" shock of Emerson's

remarks about the "sad" in literature emanated not so much

from the mental perception of inconsistency as from the

threat that Emerson, with those words, had become to

 259

Woodbury* s security within his Boswellian role. Woodbury

initially chose the easier of the two paths leading out of

the Emersonian disruption of mental torpor : he chose to

imp his mental wings upon the ideas of the Master rather

than fly his own mental flight. In this way, Emerson*s

second statement, that he wished for no disciples, must

have been more "seismically" shocking within Woodbury's

mental and psychological universe than the original state­

ment about the sad in literature, because while the first

statement made Woodbury critical of Emerson* s advice and

ideas, the second shot Woodbury out of his orbit of depen­

dency.

In the end, Woodbury, putting his book together at age

forty-five, would join the flock of those other early

admirers of Emerson and imp his wing on the rising wind of

the general appreciative response to Emerson, which could

not deal with Emerson's "esoteric facts and ideas" except

to acknowledge that they were "unique and wise overflowings

of insight and experience" while centering their attention

safely upon the image of Emerson as "great soul" or "great

spirit." The appreciation of these admirers was a defensive

appreciation which not only defended the "great spirit" of

Emerson from a few negative critics but especially defended

the safe admirers themselves from the necessity of having to

forgo their mental stasis and enter the irritating dis­

content stirred by Emerson's "words of a fine vitality."

 260

They would admire him, make him after his death into an

American institution, but they would never come close

enough to him to understand him. In the logic implicit in

the appreciative stance, they would elevate him to unique­

ness, call him a "seer" and a "wise man," knowing that

whatever has been dubbed "unique" cannot be compared, that

whatever cannot be compared can only be approached through

vague, general, effusive words that, whatever they lose in

specificity, they gain in stability.

The literature of appreciation, which arose during

Emerson* s lifetime and persisted until the turn-of-the-

century as the major expression of positive estimations of

him,has several themes that are repeated defensively.

Writers of the literature of appreciation, meeting the

charge raised early in Emerson's career by the critics who

accused him of a deficiency of logic, admired Emerson's

intuitive mind. Emerson's friend, Theodore Parker, whom

Emerson called the Savonarola of the transcendentalist

m o v e m e n t ,50 comprehensively developed the concept of

Emerson's intuitive mind so that with it, he could ration­

alize Emerson's style. 51 C. A. Bartol, attempting in 184?

to write a review of Emerson's Poems, produced a review

of Emerson and his essays, ignoring the enigma of the poems

for the certainty of established conclusions by earlier

appréciators about Emerson's essays. Wanting to laud

Emerson as a poet while bypassing the chore of dealing with

those poems, he focussed upon the '*poetic" spirit within

the essays. Then, realizing he had bypassed the enigmatic

content of the poems only to confront the controversial

issue of the ideas and philosophy within the essays, he

dragged out the concept of Emerson's intuitive mind, ragged

by then through overuse in earlier reviews by other men, so

that, in his review of Emerson's Poems, he not only avoided

Yvri'fcing about the poems but also avoided writing about the

essays, having brushed away the issues of logic, philosophy,

and literary form so that the only thing left to discuss

would be the "soul" and "genius" of Emerson:

Poetry with him is no recreation or

trial of skill, but the sincerity and
very substance of his soul . . . .It
is a mind in which intuition takes
the place of logic, and an insatiable
aspiration banishes every form of
philosophy. The lightning of his
genius reveals the landscape of his
thought, and the darkness quickly
swallows it up again, till another
flash reveals more or less of it.
It is a mind scorning forms, con-
ventions, and institutions . . . .^

Again and again, here and in other essays of appreciation,

Emerson admirers diverted attention from Emerson's style

and ideas to Emerson's soul or his genius.

A common strategy among the writers perpetuating the

appreciation of Emerson was : if you can't appreciate him

in one form, appreciate him in another. Luckily, Emerson

provided them with several forms to pick among— Emerson

the poet, Emerson the essayist, and Emerson the lecturer.

George Woodberry, in his chapter on the poems in his Ralph

Waldo Emerson, published in 1907, revived Bartol's method

and lauded Emerson's poems as brief, condensed forms of the

essays. To appreciate the poems, he said, we need to forget

the forms and "technical qualities" and seek "the key to

the meaning" within the thoughts of the essays which, like

lighthouse beacons to troubled sailors upon the turbulent

and dark ocean, would lead us through the "often dark and

even unintelligible" matter of the poetry into "its original

power of genius The technical quality of it /"the

poetry__7 is immaterial, and should be neglected and for­

gotten, so far as possible; its value lies in its original

power of genius and owes little to the forms, the matter

itself is often dark and even unintelligible without a

previous understanding of the thought which is the key to

the m e a n i n g . "53 Woodberry argued that the Poems are not

only "a more brief and condensed form of the Essays" but

"in many respects a far finer form." Because of this "far

finer form," he concluded, the Poems appeal "less broadly

to men." The implication, of course, is that the common

reader's tastes are too rough to appreciate this "far finer

form," which can only appeal to men of finer tastes and

more acute sensibilities. Another reason for both the

lack of popular appeal and the importance of the Poems

for the scholar, Woodberry suggested, is that "the thought

... is mixed in the poems with Emerson's personality in

a more intimate and familiar way, and is blended with his

daily life and human concerns. The Poems are autobiography

in a very strict s e n s e . "5^ The implication is that the

poems are autobiographical documents rather than aesthetic

acts. Thus, with Woodberry in 1907, we return to Charles

Woodberry*s appeal seventeen years earlier to the "far

richer" and "aloof" gift of "the personality of the man

himself." 55 Woodberry, Professor of Comparative Literature

at Columbia, wrote several books of criticism in the first

decade of the new century, as American literature came into

its own as a respectable subject for scholarly interest.

His view of Emerson's poems would be influential upon

younger scholars, and, although his view is related to the

general trend in criticism at the time, he must be given at

least part of the credit for the preference which developed

in the first part of the century for reading Emerson's

poetry either as glosses for the Essays or as annotations

for the central topic of biography.

John Morley and Thomas Wentworth Higginson also used

the Emerson forms strategically. Morley resolved the

difficulties with style in the essays by saying that

Emerson was primarily a lecturer and that, therefore, those

weaknessed in his prose are actually the strengths of a

lecturer.^ At the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas

Wentworth Higginson attempted somewhat weakly to revive the

 264

image of Emerson as philosopher, although that image had

been decisively shattered by Matthew Arnold's essay a few

years earlier. 57 First of all, Higginson clarified that

Emerson was not of the "philosophic type" of a Kant or a

Hegel. Instead, "he was only a philosopher in the vaguer

ancient sense." Then, in a futile attempt to clarify his

vague statement of an even vaguer idea, Higginson elaborated

that, as philosopher, Emerson's "mission was to sit, like

Socrates, beneath the plane-trees, and offer profound and

beautiful aphorisms," a passage Ralph Rusk might have had

in mind when he said that Emerson's "Threnody" contained

"rich epithets" scattered about to make a "philosopher's

substitute" for a poem.58 Although Higginson dubiously

linked Emerson with Socrates by the similar manner in which

they sat (i.e. beneath trees), he then destroyed the image

by having to admit that Emerson lacked "even the vague

thread of the Socratic method to tie them the aphorisms_7

together."

While I do not pretend that my discussion so far does

justice individually to the early appreciative reviews and

essays on Emerson which emerged during his lifetime and

immediately afterwards, I have made my point that the

appreciative response that developed during the nineteenth

century was vague and evasive in its praise. Woodberry,

unintentionally I am sure, put his finger on the cause of

this evasiveness in his chapter "Emerson's 'Divinity

 265

School A d d r e s s . D i s c u s s i n g the condemnation which arose

in reaction to Emerson*s " A d d r e s s h e said, "Condemnation

was the more unqualified because attention was naturally

given at first rather to what he denied than to what he

affirmed; what he denied, all men understood; but what he

affirmed, few, if any, clearly made out."59 in everything

Emerson wrote, what he denied was always easier, at first

glance, to see and understand than what he affirmed. The

problem is that what he affirmed was often a new vision or

mixture of the concepts he'd just denied. It is, then, to

a certain extent, understandable why those who would write

in Emerson* s day in appreciation of him would do so in

vague terms. And yet the enigma of the appreciative

response to Emerson during his own time is even more com­

plex in origin and perpetuation than either I have been able

so far to imply or a pure analysis of critical methods in

the nineteenth century could suggest, for after the solid

establishment of his literary reputation in his later years,

the appreciative response fed not so much off immediate

response to his works as off the reservation to criticize

a man who was so clearly held in high respect; those writers

of appreciative essays later in the century often wrote

from a vague knowledge of Emerson himself and his works and

from a very sensitive awareness of the "temper" or "per­

sonality" or "spirit" of his reputation. It is for this

reason that when we read those first critical studies of

 266

the newly respectable American literature at the turn of

the century— such as Barrett Wendell's Literary History of

America (1900), Woodberry's America in Literature (1903).

or his Appreciation of Literature (1907)— we mainly en­

counter the Emerson perpetuated through his reputation.

Against such a formidable American institution as Emerson

became after his death, those who chose to read his works

and not enjoy them stated their objections or reservations,

as Waggoner put it, "as gently as possible or not at all."60

The general response of today's American critic, look­

ing back upon the criticism which emerged in America in the

nineteenth century, is often to shudder at and be somewhat

embarassed by the effusive quality of much of the criticism

written by his forebearers. Often enough, the unexamined

impulse is to ignore most of the canon of nineteenth-

century American criticism as primitive, as if the American

mind did not develop the ability to read critically until

after 1900. When examined, this tendency appears as un­

tenable as the early belief among linguists that a primitive

people must have a primitive language. As their sciences

developed, both linguists and anthropologists discovered

the earliest peoples had languages as sophisticated as our

own— that is, that historical or old does not necessarily

mean primitive or inferior. The effusiveness and vagueness

which characterize most if not all of the appreciative

essays and "reviews" written during the nineteenth century

 26?

about Emerson are generated less by any natural inferiority

within American criticism at that time than by the anxiety

of response which arose within the disturbing atmosphere

that surrounded Emerson and, in Santayana’s words, ” those

who knew Emerson, or who stood so near to his time and to

his circle that they caught some echo of his personal in­

fluence." Rather than attempt to deal with what Santayana

called a "certain disquiet" which mingled "in the minds of

Emerson’s contemporaries with the admiration they felt for

his purity and genius" and which emanated from the persis­

tent fear that Emerson* s inspiration came only to destroy

and not to provide anything substantial enough to replace

those traditional props of stability which he demolished,

Emerson's admirers generally preferred the easier path of

praising Emerson* s genius, although they could never define

it.
Though the writers of the appreciative spirit came to

dominate the American critical discussion of Emerson by

about 1850, they did not dominate the critical picture of

Emerson earlier. The critical view of Emerson earlier,

especially between 1837 and about 1841, was decidedly dark

and rather stormy. Summarizing this earlier period in

Emerson criticism, Thomas J. Rountree said, "Some of the

early reviewers used their reviews as an opportunity to

voice their own concepts rather than describe Emerson's

works critically."61 Certainly this was true in many cases.

 268

Francis Bowen gave Nature its most hostile reception among

the early reviewers in 1837 by attacking not the weaknesses

of Nature but the weaknesses of transcendentalism; even

that headlong charge against transcendentalism was weak,

since Bowen attacked transcendentalism from what Rusk

labelled a rather unimaginative Lockean v i e w . B u t it is

important to note that Francis Bowen was a young philosophy

instructor at Harvard, where there were two H schools" of

philosophic thoughts one, led originally by Andrews Norton,

Professor of Sacred Literature at Harvard Divinity School

from 1819 to 1830, emphasized John Locke and the English

philosophers; the other, less rigidly defined and rather

anonymously defended, was more of a resistance movement

against Lockean empiricism than a self-sufficient "school,"

and emphasized the importance of the Scottish philosophers

in the growth of "new thought." Even in his school days

at Harvard, Emerson had not been a member of Norton's camp;

Bowen's review defines Bowen as a strong follower of Locke,

devoted to the salvation of man through logic.

Andrews Norton's attack on Emerson followed in 1838

when, in a letter published in The Boston Daily Advertiser

on 27 August, he condemned Emerson's "Divinity School

Address"— or gave that impression. The title which has

adhered to Norton's letter since its publication is mis­

leading, for Norton's attack is actually against "a strange

state of things" represented by a "school" which Emerson,

 269

in Norton’s mind at least, advocated. When Norton criti­

cized Emerson, he was actually picking a convenient target

toward which to direct his venom against this "school,"

which, according to Norton, was known by its "restless

craving for notoriety and excitement" and further character­

ized by "the most extraordinary assumption, united with

great ignorance, and incapacity for reasoning." Within

this "school," claimed Norton, "there is indeed a general

tendency among its disciples to disavow learning and reason­

ing as sources of their higher knowledge. . . .The rejection

of reasoning is accompanied with an equal contempt for good

taste."63

Certainly both Norton and Bowen clearly are not

describing "Emerson's works critically," to use Rountree's

phrase, and are making private use of the opportunity to

respond to Emerson* s works "to voice their own concepts,"

Rountree's statement greatly simplified, however, what

actually seems to have occurred as well as glosses over its

significance for critical response today to Emerson. The

significant statement that today’s critical reader can make

in response to these works within the early criticism is

not how they fail to deal critically with Emerson but rather

how they influenced the growing response to Emerson in his

own day. In this light, I would suggest that the major

influence of the statements by Bowen and Norton was to

further stimulate a philosophic opposition to Emerson which

had crystallized certainly by 1839 in outspoken opposition

to what had been dubbed the "school" of transcendentalism.6^

Beneath the facade of this opposition to transcendentalism

is the real issue: the dominant opposition at the time

among philosophic men at several of the leading universities

to the rising tide of "new thought." The heated philosophic

controversy which surrounded Emerson in the second half of

the 1830's encouraged the popular tendency to seek a label

for him. For example, all Emerson had to do was visit the

Boston Swedenborgian Chapel in early 1835 for the rumor to

quickly spread that he was a S w e d e n b o r g i a n . 65 Upon the

slippery surface of heated controversy, similarity or prox­

imity careens swiftly into identity. Accepting no labels,

Emerson endured what every controversial man encounters:

to align one's self with no one or no thing is to be sus­

pected by everyone of everything. In such an atomsphere,

even the most logical criticism rests upon the dubious

foundation of subjective association. Thus, by early I8 3 9 ,

the controversial Mr. Emerson was being critically treated

not only as an advocate but especially as the chief rep­

resentative of the trend of thought disparagingly known by

its opponents as the school of transcendentalism. In the

January 1839 issue of The Biblical Repertory and Princeton

Review, three leading theologians at the Princeton Theo­

logical Seminary— J.W. Alexander, Albert Dod, and Charles

Hodge— attack what the title of their article calls the

 271

"Transcendentalism of the Germans and of Cousin and its

Influence on Opinion in this Country."66 In terms that

reveal the extreme alarmism of their perspective, the three

theologians attack what they believe are the evils of

transcendentalism; Emerson, for them, is little more than

"another alarming symptom" of the "progress" of this school

among New Englanders.6? At this time, of course, philosophy

and religion were linked in the response of the opposition,

and the reaction from the three theologians added credence

to the alarm sounded months earlier by the Reverend Henry

Ware, Jr. who, in a series of letters to Emerson after he

delivered his "Divinity School Address," said that if

Emerson's "unqualified statements" made in that "Address"

became prevalent, they would "tend to overthrow the

authority and influence of Christianity."6®

The intensity of this controversy could only be

strengthened, and the controversy itself be given an un­

necessarily long life, by Emerson's refusal to argue

against this opposition, to explain his views, or to do

anything other than "go on, just as before, seeing whatever

I can, and telling what I see," as he said in his final

letter to Rev. Ware on 8 October 1838. The prolonged and

intense controversy which flared up around him could only

wed Emerson more firmly to self-reliance: "Respect your­

self. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then

a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, & fruit. Trust the
 2?2

instinct to the end, though you cannot tell why or see why.

It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it, it shall ripen

into thought & truth & you shall know why you believe."69

The controversy which surrounded him accented for Emerson

the futility of defensive argumentation and made even more

central to him the insight he'd recorded in his journal

just before the publication of Nature. which would be re­

peated in the lecture "Ethics" in the late 1830's and used

again in "Spiritual Laws," published in 1841 in the first

series of Essays : "A man cannot bury his meanings so deep

in his book but time and likeminded men will find them."?0

But "likeminded men" were rare at this time in Emerson's

life, although even then he had a small, closely-knit set

of appreciators.
Even the rare "likeminded" man at such a time who rose

to Emerson’s defense in print was not free of the habit,

common among Emerson* s opposition, of using the opportunity

to espouse his own views. Such a rare "likeminded" man at

the time of Emerson's "Divinity School Address" was Orestes

Brownson, who in 1838 wrote a defense of Emerson"s "Address"

which chided the narrow minds of Emerson's opponents. Yet

Brownson himself was a controversial figure who throughout

his early life was attracted to new religions and the

latest trends in philosophic theory; he was what could be

called a religious and philosophic speculator, dedicated

only to remaining atop the crest within the rise and fall
of popular ideas. Before 1844, he was dedicated to

rebellion against whatever he found too restrictive or

conservative. First, he was a Presbyterian. Then, he

became a Universalist minister. Then, he became an in­

dependent minister for the general working man.Fora

time, he was close to Thoreau and a few of those men who

had been popularly dubbed "the transcendentalists." He

even sent his son to the Brook Farm experiment. Around

I 8 3 6 , he was a severe critic of both Protestantism and

Roman Catholicism. In 1844, however, he converted to

Roman Catholicism, finally linking himself heart and soul

with the church he'd earlier found to be the leading

71
exponent of all that was restrictive . { Brownson's

evaluation of Emerson's "Address" grew out of what was,

at the time, his own philosophic leaning, which inclined

toward Emerson's exaltation of the "free spirit." Never­

theless, Brownson*s initial "correction" of all those who

can hear no opinions but their own is ironic: in defending

Emerson, he is simply hearing no opinion but his own. The

only reason why Brownson's evaluation of Emerson's "Address"

succeeds in realizing what today's critics basically agree

is the central impetus of Emerson's "Address" is not because

he was more objective than other critics of the time but

simply because, although just as prejudiced, he was prej­

udiced in favor of Emerson's conclusions.

 274

If we want to locate the "best" of the early Emerson

criticism, we should not remain long with the positive

essays, although even a partial awareness of the Humpty

Dumpty nature of the history of Emerson criticism will

initially draw us to it. If our purpose is to locate the

early essays and articles which deal directly with Emerson

and offer either some sense of his immediate impact upon

his contemporaries or "suggestive" insights into Emerson's

work, then the "best" of the early criticism for our pur­

pose are those essays and reviews which severely attack

Emerson. Although Francis Bowen's review of Nature is

weakened structurally by a simplistic Lockean attack upon

transcendentalism, it stands out as unique among the other

criticism for its occasionally candid statements regarding

the difficulty Emerson's reader encounters if he chooses

to read Nature within a logical perspective. Early in his

review, Bowen said that the "highest praise" that Nature

can receive is that "it is a suggestive book, for no one

can read it without tasking his faculties to the utmost,

and relapsing into fits of severe meditation . . . ."?2

Bowen's comment should be considered in terms of what

Emerson believed was the highest purpose for reading as

well as in terms of the purposive emphasis he developed

within his essays upon mental stimulation through sug­

gestiveness. Additional comments throughout the review

make us aware that Bowen based his "highest praise" upon

 275

his own experience while reading and coming to grips with

Nature. When, late in his review, Bowen looked back over

his own work and noted that much of his criticism was

"couched in contradictory terms," he says in frustration,

-we can only allege in excuse the fact, that the book is

a contradiction in itself . . . ."73 Four years later,

C. C. Felton, reviewing Emerson's first series of Essays

and hitting hard at Emerson's "variable" opinions and his

"sovereign contempt for consistency," similarly expressed

his frustration with Emerson*s ideas: "With many of Mr.

Emerson* s leading views we differ entirely, if we under­

stand them; if we do not, the fault lies in the author's

o b s c u r i t y . " F e l t o n ' s and Bowen's comments are significant

when considering the heated negative criticism Emerson

stirred in the late 1830's and early 1840*s. We should

not allow any sympathy for Emerson to prejudice us against

these negative critics so that we assume that without reason

they chose not to deal critically with Emerson and chose

instead to make their articles forums in which to present

their own views. For, as both Felton's and Bowen's reviews

indicate, they did have sufficient cause: the same reason,

in fact, which propelled Emerson's admirers into writing

vague commendations of his "great spirit."

Modern criticism inherits the frustration and anxiety

of early Emerson criticism. Stephen Whicher was very much

aware of the difficulties involved in dealing critically

 276

with Emerson. Emerson, he said in "Emerson's Tragic Sense,"

» can be summed up in a formula only by those who know their

own minds better than his. "75 Hyatt Waggoner said that the

attempt to summarize Emerson with any label can never be

successful, because a careful reading of Emerson's works

and the criticism that has been written will show that each

proposed label "both can be and often has been denied or

shown to be inappropriate. " Neither particular labels

nor any one particular critical method has succeeded in

presenting the essential Emerson.

Even Whicher was not immune to the frustrations in­

herent within criticism itself in dealing with Emerson; his

statement about the "formula-less" Emerson was the fruit of

his own experience. In his assessment of Emerson as a poet

in his Emerson: An Organic Anthology, he often found himself

straddling the fence between his personal response to

Emerson and the requirements of his critical standards.

Even in Freedom and Fate, Whicher occasionally reached out

for a label: "His is a baffling monistic dualism, or

dualistic monism. "79

My point, is not to accent any inconsistency in

Whicher, but rather to state rather strongly that, despite

Hyatt Waggoner's cogent and heated argument to the contrary

in Emerson as Poet, the "problem" with Emerson is not the

exclusive possession of the Victorians, the New Critics, or

any one critical "school" or individual. Waggoner is

 277

probably correct when he said that the major New Critics

did not discuss Emerson's poems because "his poems did not

yield to their methods." Emerson's poems probably do lack

those essential qualities which the New Critics delighted

in finding in poetry and presenting as the qualities which,

for them at least, defined a p o e m . ^ What I take issue with

Waggoner about is the accusation of wrong-doing or inten­

tional ignorance which arises out of his argumentative

stance in Emerson as Poet: "both the Victorians and the

New Critics judged Emerson's verse by inappropriate para­

digms, paradigms calculated to reveal its weaknesses— some

real and some imaginary— and obscure its characteristic

strength.''79 The problem is not with the paradigms of the

Victorians, the paradigms of the New Critics, or even the

paradigms of Hyatt Waggoner; the problem is with critical

paradigms in general. As Whicher said, "Emerson is a

dangerous man to pigeon-hole."®^ It is one thing for a

man to be difficult to pigeon-hole, quite another for him

to be dangerous to pigeon-hole. The significant difference

is the effect such an attempt has and will have upon us as

critics. If, as critics, we are essentially wedded to a

methodology, a perspective, or a set of paradigms— if,

indeed, our security as critics is somehow tied up with

those particular critical tools--then those critical tools

are more easily wielded as defensive or offensive armaments

than as tools for understanding literature or a particular

 2?8

writer. Yet it would be neither fair nor accurate to say we

always have the choice to be either users of or used by our

critical tools. Often enough, we are both. And perhaps it

is only when we are dominantly one or the other that we

least understand Ralph Waldo Emerson. The crux of the

critical difficulty with Emerson is that to understand him

at all, we must first perceive and experience the limitations

of our critical methods.

In "Toward the 'Titmouse Dimension': The Development of

Emerson's Poetic Style," R.A. Yoder established the contra­

dictory nature of modern criticism on Emerson and then says

that there are two tasks we must do as critics before we can

understand Emerson as a poet: one, we must "come to terms

with extremes of opinion about the value of Emerson's

poetry," and two, we must "do the necessary preliminary

work of defining the kind of poetry Emerson wrote."®1

What Yoder proposes as prerequisite tasks for the critic

approaching Emerson's poetry could equally as well be pro­

posed as tasks for the critic approaching anything that

Emerson wrote. This two-part orientation to Emerson ought

to be examined. First of all, to assume that we must first

"come to terms" with the "extremes of opinion" expressed

throughout the past century about the value of Emerson's

poetry and prose seems to assume the validity of a Hegelian

synthesis of earlier critical conclusions in arriving at

an understanding of Emerson. It is to assume as well that

 279

we can synthesize these "extremes of opinion," and that we

must somehow remove a very large and explicit example of

the failure of criticism before we can get down to dealing

directly with Emerson. Criticism's general failure to deal

adequately with Emerson is a nagging source of anxiety;

yet to have to resolve the critical "extremes of opinion"

through some sort of direct and open attack seems as

disastrous a strategy in criticism as it was in warfare

for the Red Coats. The failure of this approach to resolve

difficulties is obvious in the earlier history of criticism.

But is it necessary to engage in critical warfare to

understand Emerson? Need we "kill off" opposing views?

Is it even necessary to do radical surgery on the critical

image of Emerson, keeping the parts we can use to support

our own conclusions and tossing out the others? Mightn't

we be more likely to create a Frankenstein by such methods?

Or could this preliminary task, which Yoder said is

necessary, be otherwise accomplished? Instead of coming

to terms with the conclusions of the earlier criticism

through some sort of forced synthesis of external conclu­

sions, perhaps we could find a way to understand the earlier

criticism in terms of the forces or pressures which molded

it and made it what it was, not in terms of conclusions,

but in terms of motivations. Perhaps we could also link

in some central way the motivations, forces, or pressures

behind the criticism with Emerson, with the motivations,

 280

forces, or pressures operating upon or through him.

Perhaps there is a way, that is, of talking about the vital

forces which help to make and describe a writer in such a

way that they also describe or define the criticism that

has been written about him. I have attempted to show at

least some of the ways in which these critical directives

could be used in my discussions of the nineteenth-century

critics earlier in this chapter.

Secondly, to move on to Yoder's suggestion of a second

task for criticism, to assume that "defining the kind" of

poetry or prose that Emerson wrote is "necessary preliminary

work" is to assume that Emerson is a Cinderella who can be

located, not as the story goes with his own lost shoe, but

with the shoe we've constructed. The end of such an

exercise would be simply another formula or set of labels.

Whicher established over twenty years ago that Emerson

cannot be reduced in such a way. To understand the essen­

tial Emerson, we cannot reduce him. Perhaps, however,

Yoder left out a step; perhaps defining Emerson's works

follows or evolves out of a second step which directs us to

explore first how Emerson wrote, his process of composition

itself, which would lead us naturally into defining in some

essential way the products of that process. Yoder's "tasks"

are presented theoretically in his article ; practical order

may be different and involve unfolding the tasks a bit

more. If indeed Yoder's "tasks" are to be useful, perhaps

 281

we could reorder and unfold them in the following way.

First, since our purpose is to understand Emerson

better, not simply understand Emerson criticism better, we

should begin with Emerson and what he wrote by exploring

how Emerson wrote, his process of composition, which should

give us some insight into why he wrote, a sense of his

aesthetic and practical motivation. Second, since our

interest in the criticism that has been written about him

is modified by the prior interest in understanding Emerson,

we should examine the criticism in terms of why it was

written in order to arrive at what it really adds to our

understanding of Emerson. This path, of course, bypasses

the usual route of reading criticism objectively, as if it

were composed of facts, reading criticism only on the sur­

face to discover what it says. We can no longer assume, as

New Criticism encouraged us to assume, that critical texts

should be read as scientific texts. Our second "task"

assumes, on the other hand, that criticism is not objective,

that it shares in some formative way the subjective aspects

of the literature which is its subject, that to understand

what it says, we must explore how and why it was written.

If we have completed the first two steps with some care, we

should sense where Emerson's "why" is related to criticism's

"why." Such "double vision" is a perceptual necessity,

since earlier Emerson criticism has been least helpful when

its conclusions have varied greatly from the conclusions

 282

arising out of the personal experience of reading Emerson.

Third, from the first two steps we should be able to arrive

at some sort of "definition" of Emerson criticism and

Emerson. This "definition" should not be, and perhaps for

Emerson cannot be, formal. To understand the essential

Emerson, we need to concern ourselves with locating or

creating continuous, rather than discontinuous, definitions

— ones which describe the whole Emerson rather than ones

which "define" his essays at the expense of disassociating

Emerson from what he wrote as well as from what he experi­

enced. Defining the kind of poetry that Emerson wrote, the

kind of essays he composed, is a critical act of specificity

which, theoretically and practically, should follow the more

general critical act which describes the whole Emerson.

Yoder's list of preliminary tasks, in the way that I've

revised and reordered them, could be used as critical orien­

tation for the study of Emerson; I've used the proposed

tasks, as I have described here, as a way of orienting

myself throughout this study to Emerson, to what he wrote,

and to what has been written about him.

If we examine Yoder's preliminary tasks exactly as he

presented them, however, we can see that they compose a

handy formulation of what seems to have been the usual

stance in critical study in more recent years in approaching

Emerson: that is, that resolution of the "extremes of

opinion" in critical study and definition of Emerson's work

 283

by "kind" precede direct, individual work with Emerson.

Because the earlier criticism is antagonistic, it is natural

that our attention as critics first goes to it rather than

to Emerson. However, it seems that much of the criticism

published in recent years adds to the problem, rather than

solves it, by confronting Emerson only second-hand through

the highly inconsistent medium of earlier criticism. We

recall that many critics near the turn of the century fail­

ed to grasp a sense of the essential Emerson because they

dealt only with the illusion of his reputation. To approach

Emerson through any medium other than his own seems to meet

up with the same sort of failure. Hyatt Waggoner said in

the preface to his recent Emerson as Poet that his major

gpal in writing his book was to get us to read Emerson's

work again, read it freshly, and read it "with appropriate

expectations."82 In his critical polemic, the early chapter

entitled "A Century of Criticism," Waggoner proceeded to

kill off rather than to resolve the real difficulties of

earlier critics. With the ground cleared before him for

the rest of his book, however, Waggoner did not read

Emerson again, he did not read him freshly: he read him

through the lenses of the earlier critics. In the end,

far from having given us a fresh évaluation of Emerson or

having explained what are the "appropriate expectations"

with which we should read Emerson, he gave us only a

warmed-over version of John Jay Chapman's statement that

 284

the best of Emerson’s poetry is found in his prose.83 But

this was not the failure of Hyatt Waggoner; it was the

failure in general of this approach through the medium of

the earlier criticism to ever reach Emerson. There is no

stable center in the history of Emerson criticism. If a

critic couches himself solely upon that earlier criticism,

the temptation is to seek both the path of exploration and

the fruits of exploration within that earlier criticism.

By agreeing with Chapman in the specific, Waggoner

disagreed with the spirit of Chapman's assessment of Emerson;

however, Waggoner does reflect the gift of agitation which

Chapman contributed to modern criticism. Let's examine

Chapman for a moment as a critic. Certainly John Jay Chap­

man was the highwater mark for Emerson criticism by the

turn of the century. He did with Emerson what no American

critic had dared to do before him: he sought not to "kill"

R4
Emerson but merely to "deal with him h o n e s t l y . " C h a p m a n

got his own sense of satisfaction from agitating others,

and it was this quality in Emerson he most admired; agitation

is, as well, Chapman's major contribution to major criticism.

He had first of all the vision to see that to deal "honestly"

with Emerson, he would have to break with the cult of admir­

ation for Emerson, which had fairly dominated the critical

field by that time, and even step on the toes of a few "old

Emersonians" still alive in B o s t o n . A l t h o u g h Chapman's

long essay on Emerson contained quite a few fresh insights.

 285

the products of his original inquiry and insistence upon

dealing directly with Emerson, his major contributions to

modern criticism are not those individual gems but rather

his invigorating spirit of free inquiry. What he said in

the end about Emerson, he believed for himselft

He /""Emerson_7says that no man should

write except what he has discovered in
the process of satisfying his own
curiosity . . . . Emerson himself was
the only man of his times who consist­
ently and utterly expressed himself,
never measuring himself for a moment
with the ideals of others, never
troubling himself for a moment with
what literature was or how literature
should be created . . . . The conse­
quence is that he stands above his
age like a colossus.®®

Chapman’s essay on Emerson developed out of "the process of

satisfying his own curiosity" about E m e r s o n . ®7 in writing

his "Emerson Sixty Years After," he shattered most of the

conventions of criticism, especially its unspoken reverence

for prior conclusions, as well as its tendency toward

valuing consistency of evaluation over accuracy of evalua­

tion. In so doing, he snapped the dependency on the past

which had characterized much of the earlier criticism

written in the United States, and in so doing he assured

himself a place in American critical history as the first

modern critic.

As critics preceded by Kenneth Burke and Ernst Cassirer

(whether we like it or not), we are conscious today that we

 286

travel within criticism only partly where we want to go

and partly in the direction our terms lead us. To use

Burke's phrase,88 we have these "terministic screens" with

which to contend, which are capable of opening our critical

eyes to a fresh revelation in one moment and blindly lead­

ing us down a cul-de-sac the next. Our awareness of these

"terministic screens" can become, if we are not careful, an

obsession with "terministic screens." We can spend so much

time and effort escaping the clutches of controlling termi­

nologies by hopping back and forth among them that we never

get around to saying anything significant about our topic

(remember Emerson?) and add nothing more to the critical

canon than another cat-and-mouse semantic game. Or we can,

under such an obsession, dedicate our days to inventing the

new and better mousetrap, hoping at best to come up with

one that loosely fits most literary feet since we know that

a tight fit, which adequately defines one writer, will not

fit the others at all, except by accident. We have become

aware of the possibility of obsession with "terministic

screens" largely by observing the semantic gymnastics of

the very theorist who told us about them in the first place.

For these reasons, we know that if a new direction is

to be indicated for the study of Emerson, it must be a

direction that leads toward Emerson and not necessarily

toward new "terministic screens." The new direction does

not have to be revolutionary and can indeed merely be a

 287

re-orientation. The priority seems to be that this new

direction should actually lead out of Emerson and back to

us in the twentieth century. Waggoner is correct on this

points we do need to read Emerson anew. If a new trail

needs definitely to be cut, if new terms need to be created,

they should be cut as the trail back, created as conscious

vehicles for the content we already have as a result of

this fresh reading. We should realize our critical vehicles

are and should be expendable. If they are so, they are

supremely useful and preeminently meaning-full. If they are

not, they are merely so much baggage to lug around with us,

keeping us from getting where we have the insight to go.

At the same time, we do not need to handicap ourselves,

before we even get started, by getting the horse-and-cart

of understanding-and-judgment turned around. We do not

need a rigid set of "appropriate expectations" before we

begin to read; what we need to gain is the ability to read

Emerson in such a way that the process of reading itself

will suggest the "appropriate expectations. " A movement

away from the priority of judgmental terms, with their

baggage of expectations precipitating a re-run of earlier

critical conclusions, would be a move in the direction that

Lawrence Buell encourages :

The techniques of explication developed

by modern criticism must be adapted to
...works ... in a way that will illuminate
their strengths as well as their shortcomings,
that will not continually contrast them with
 288

what they might have been had their

language been more metaphorical and
their structure more closely knit . . .
Or if the work seems to fail, the failure
must be explained in terms of its own
particular literary objectives.90

Such a movement would also allow us to read and understand

Emerson in the easiest way, according to Josephine Miles,

and perhaps the only way he can essentially be understood:

"To understand Emerson's writing we had best try to follow

what he has to say in the way that he says it."91 in my

study. I've followed the general direction indicated by

Buell and Miles, tracing out "what he has to say in the way

that he says it" within his own process of composition.

It has been my contention throughout this study that to

understand what Emerson says, we have first to understand

how he went about saying it.

Such a movement would also allow critics, much like

the King's Men, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,

reuniting Emerson the writer or poet with Emerson the man.

The disintegration of Emerson began with the best of critical

intentions. Ralph Rusk's standard biography of Emerson is

indeed, as Whicher has called it, a "monument of thorough

and discerning scholarship" which is probably "the best

portrait we can hope to have of the life Emerson's contem­

poraries witnessed. "92 it is also a decidedly dry and

spiritless biography, admirable for its total reliance upon

the "facts" of Emerson's life but devoid of any sense of a

 289

man living, a sense which Cabot's early biography captured,

although only at the expense of sacrificing many of the

"facts" of Emerson's life. Rusk's monumental effort was

to provide us with what Cabot had not ; and Stephen Whicher's

Freedom and Fate, the most influential book on Emerson to

be written thus far in the second half of the twentieth

century, was a supreme effort to provide us with what both

Cabot and Rusk had not: the life of Emerson's mind. The

whole life of Emerson, however, exists for us only in three

fragmentary pictures. The major effect has been that too

few of Emerson's readers today are aware of the life of

Emerson. Cabot's work is two volumes long, and his method

of presentation, stringing Emerson's letters and journal

entries together to form the structure of his narrative,

does not encourage the modern reader. Rusk's biography,

with its wealth of detail and difficult style, is equally

discouraging. Only Whicher's book, with its invigorating

style and fluid structure, attracts the modern reader.

The result is that most readers today are well-acquainted

with the life of Emerson's mind but extremely limited in

their acquaintance with the other aspects of his life.

They know the writer well; the man is still a stranger.

Although both Rusk's and Whicher's biographies were written

with the intention of completing the necessary Emerson

biography, their effect has been to further disintegrate

Emerson. As Carl Bode has observed, the effect has been

 290

to divorce study of Emerson's works from study of his life,

thus creating a "life-less" Emerson: "For America today his

life seems to have lost much of its meaning."?^ The vacuum

has been filled with many misconceptions about Emerson's

life, and these misconceptions have affected adversely our

understanding of his works. As Jonathan Bishop acutely

observed in Emerson on the Soul, understanding Emerson's

life is necessary to any effort to essentially understand

his works. "What a man does in life," says Bishop, "is

like what his work preaches for him." The events and actions

within a man's life, Bishop avers, "parallel," illustrate,

or "interestingly contradict" his "statements." Since "an

artist metamorphoses his experiences," his life can "supply

hints" for understanding "what has been lifted up" and

transformed into literature.94 in this study of Emerson,

I have tried to mediate Rusk, Cabot, and Whicher, and demon­

strate that one way into the "whole" Emerson is through his

process of composition, which not only tells us how he wrote

but also reveals to us a vital sense of Emerson himself.

Most of all, such a new direction for Emerson criticism

would generally make it easier to distinguish between

Emerson's prejudices and our own. It would no longer be

as necessary, as Whicher felt it was when he published

Freedom and Fate, to end a book on Emerson with the warning

that we need to remember "to discriminate the quality of

the man from his classification as a thinker." In making

such a distinction, we will be able to recognize Emerson's

"unique sense of the practical and personal immediacy of

ideas" and not misinterpret his "pragmatic mood" because

"the ideas he chose as weapons are not those we would

select"; we will be able to understand the role that "the

spirit of high-minded rectitude" played in his life and

writings and not merely condemn him because "he found it

easier than we do to hold that evil will bless— still less,

because, to our discredit, we find his sense of duty dis­

tasteful" j and we will be able to appreciate his timeless

and "memorable formulation of the individualistic principles"

instead of closing our minds to it "because of changing

fashions of speech and opinion."95 what Stephen Whicher

admired in the workings of Emerson's mind was "the avoid­

ance of a tight little dogma, the preservation of its

negative capability."9& For a new direction in Emerson

criticism to be launched which will avoid the previous

pitfalls of "tight little dogmas" and easy formulas, a

critical attitude toward Emerson must emerge which approxi­

mates the attitude Carlyle achieved occasionally with his

Yankee friend. Writing Emerson in response to the recent

publication of Emerson's Poems. Carlyle, after mentioning

how he would have Emerson write, added: "but under any

form I must put up with you; that is my lot."97 To "put up

with" Emerson "under any form" is to read what he wrote as

he wrote it.
 292

Notes for Chapter 4

E x p e r i e n c e M e r r i l l facsimile, pp. 49-50, 54.

2"Experience," pp. 52-54.

^"Experience," pp. 90, 92, 93*

4"The Poet," Merrill facsimile, pp. 40, 9» 6.

5j m n , V, p. 284 .

^Collected Works (1971), I , P» 56.

7j m n . V, p. 100.

SjMN, V, p. 203.

9j M N . V, p. 2 3 7 .

10It is not difficult to see the basic similarity between

Emerson* s concept of the democratic element and his concept

of the process of composition. The Emerson phrase "All in

each" which, through repetition in concept or phrase in

many of his works, has become associated with him as descrip­

tive of his philosophy, not only implies his »philosophy

of composition" but also his version of the U.S. motto E

Pluribus Unum.

11»The Fortune of the Republic," Miscellanies: The

Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. James Elliot Cabot

 293

(Boston and. New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884-

1887), XI, pp. 412, 414, 414-415. All references to Qnerson's

essays published after the mid-1840's are to this edition,

commonly known as "the Riverside Edition." See "Note on

Primary Sources Cited" below. Hereafter, Cabot's edition is

cited as Works.

IB»Experience," Merrill facsimile, p. 54*

13jmn, V, p. 2 3 .

14JMN, v, pp. 162-163.

15"The Fortune of the Republic," Works. XI, p. 414.

16„Tragedy," EL, III, 106, 109, 111, 114, 113.

17«Comedy," EL, III, pp. 125-126.

18»Tragedy," EL, III, p. 112.

19jmn. V, p. 8 9 .

ZORusk, Life, pp. 292-293, 367, 369.

21one of the best expressions of this basic Emersonian­

ism in more recent American literature occurs in the first

six paragraphs of Chapter 13 of John Steinbeck's East of

Eden.
 294

22cited by Rusk, Life, p. 289. Van WyckBrooks*

biography of Emerson, while totally unreliable as a

source for the facts of Emerson*s life, contains an

excellent and decidedly humorous portrait of the Fruit-

lands experiment, which includes information on the role

Emerson played as peacemaker. See his Life of Emerson,

pp. 131-135.

23j m N, V, p. 117.

^ Freedom and Fate, p. 9 6 .

25Freedom and Fate, p. 94.

26»circles," Merrill facsimile, p. 262; my italics.

2?"circles," p. 264.

2®Letter to William Emerson, written after preparing

the lectures for the winter of 1839-1840; Letters. II, pp.

255-256.

29Freedom and Fate, p. vii.

30George Santayana, "Emerson," in Interpretations of

Poetry and Religion f 1900 7. by George Santayana, rpt. in

Selected Critical Writings of George Santayana, ed. Norman

Henfrey (Cambridge* Cambridge University Press, 1 9 6 8 ), I,

pp. 117-118, 121.

 31JMN. V, pp. 22, 38.

32EL, I, p. 218.

33JMN, V, pp. 114, 194, 219-220.

34cited by Cabot, Memoir, pp. 574, 2 9 1 .

35cited by Cabot, p. 295*

36Neither "portrait," in the sources in which I found

them, is dated. Nevertheless, I believe the two portraits

have this representative, if not historical, value.

3?Brooks, Life of Emerson, p. 8 8 .

38Talks with Emerson, p. 149.

3^cited by Cabot, Memoir. p. 6 2 6 .

^ Talks with Emerson, pp. 74-75.

^ Talks with Emerson, pp. 5-7î cf. Rusk on Woodbury,

Life, p. 430.

Talks with Emerson, pp. 55-56.

^ Talks with Emerson, p. 5 6 .

^ T a l k s with Emerson, pp. 57-58.

45Talks with Emerson, p. 169-

 296

^ Collected Works (1971)* I » P* 56.

47"Tragedy," EL, III, p. 109.

48Talks with Emerson, p. 60.

49Talks with Emerson, pp. 61-62.

50cited by Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 36.

5lTheodore Parker, "The Writings of Ralph Waldo

Emerson," The Massachusetts Quarterly Review Boston_7*

3 (March 1850), 200-255-

52c. A. Bartol, Review of Emerson's Poems, The Christian

Examiner and Religious Miscellany £ B o s t o n ^ , 42 (March

1847); cited from the excerpt reprinted by Rountree, ed.,

Critics on Emerson, pp. 34-35-

53George Edward Woodberry, "The Poems," in Ralph

Waldo Emerson, by George Edward Woodberry (New York;

Macmillan, 1907); the chapter is reprinted in Konvitz, ed.,

Recognition, from which I cite, p. 129.

^Woodberry, "The Poems," in Recognition, pp. 129-130.

55woodberry, Talks with Emerson, pp. 61-62.

56Morley was the editor of the influential English

Fortnightly Review from 1867 to 1882. He met Emerson during

his visit to the U.S. in 1867. His essay "Emerson" is

 297

included in his Critical Miscellanies (volume I), published

in London and Basingstoke by Macmillan in 1886. He first

published his essay on Emerson in 1881, perhaps in the

Fortnightly Review. An excerpt from his essay is reprinted

by Konvitz, ed., Recognition, pp. 75-95*

^ T h o m a s Wentworth Higginson, "Ralph Waldo Emerson,"

in Contemporaries, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston;

Houghton, Mifflin, 1899); I cite from the excerpt reprinted

in Rountree, ed., Critics on Emerson, p. 68.

58Rusk, Life, p. 321.

59i cite from the excerpt reprinted in Rountree, ed.,

Critics on Emerson, p. 86.

6°Waggoner, Emerson as Poet, p. 15-

^ Critics on Emerson, p. 9*

GZprancis Bowen, Review of Emerson*s Nature, The

Christian Examiner and General Review /~Boston_7• 21

(January 1837), 371-385. Excerpts from Bowen's review are

reprinted in Critics on Emerson, pp. 17-21, and in

Recognition, pp. 3-6. The second part of Bowen's review

followed in the November 1837 issue of The Christian

Examiner and General Review; a portion of this second part

is included only in excerpt reprinted in Konvitz, ed.,

Recognition. For Rusk's assessment of Bowen, see Life, p. 242.

 298

63Andrews Norton, "On the Divinity School Address,"

The Boston Daily Advertiser. 27 August 1838; I cite from

the excerpt reprinted in Recognition, p. 7-

^ Lawrence Buell (Literary Transcendentalism, p. 3)

details the origin amid controversy of the word "transcen­

dentalism." Cabot (Memoir, p. 246) cites a statement from

Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge, one of the young men who with

Emerson helped found a club for philosophical discussions

which was, finally, dubbed "the Transcendentalists." Hedge

said, "How the name 'Transcendental,* given to these gather­

ings and the set of persons who took part in them, originated,

I cannot say. It certainly was never assumed by the persons

so called. I suppose I was the only one who had any first­

hand acquaintance with the German transcendental philosophy,

at the start."

65Rusk, Life, p. 209.

^ C h a r l e s Feidelson in Symbolism and American Literature

has closely examined the similarity of eclecticism between

Victor Cousin and Emerson which, most likely, was apparent

to these three theologians. In this case, as in many others,

the slippery surface of heated controversy made it easy to

mistake similarity for identity. Feidelson clarifies that

the similarity between Cousin and Emerson is superficial*

Cousin's eclecticism is mechanical, Emerson*s is organic.

 299

See Feidelson*s discussion, p. 158, especially his notes on

p. 316.

6?An excerpt from the two articles originally published

under this common title in 1839 is reprinted in Recognition,

pp. 13-15-

68The back-and-forth correspondence between Emerson and

Ware, 16 July - 8 October I8 3 8 , is published in full by

Cabot in Memoir as Appendix B, pp. 689-694.

69jmn, v, p. 187.

70JMN. V, p. 184.

7lMy information about Brownson's background is drawn

from Konvitz*s description. Recognition, p. 10. Konvitz

reprints an excerpt from Brownson*s "On the Divinity School

Address" in Recognition.

72Francis Bowen, Review of Emerson's Nature 1837_7;

cited from the excerpt reprinted in Critics_on Emerson, p.

17.

73sowen, cited from the excerpt reprinted in Critics

on Emerson, p. 20.

74Review of Essays. First Series. The Christian Examiner

and General Review. 30 (May 1841), 253-262; I cite from page

29 of the excerpt reprinted in Critics on Emerson.

 300

75American Scholar. 22 (Summer 1953)I rpt. in Emerson:

A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Milton Konvitz and

Stephen Whicher (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.s Prentice-Hall,

1962), p. 39-

76Emerson as Poet, p. 5^*

77whicher, Freedom and Fate, p. 31.

78Emerson as Poet, pp. 45-4-6.

79Emerson as Poet. p. 66.

80Cited by Waggoner, Emerson as Poet, p. 4?, note 6l.

81PMLA. 8? (March 1972), 255.

8^Emerson as Poet, p. xiii.

^^Emerson as Poet, p. 161.

^ L e t t e r to Minna Timmins Chapman (25 September 1896),

cited by M. A. DeWolfe Howe, John Jay Chapman and His Letters,

p. 120. Hereafter, Howe's volume is cited as Chapman.

85%n a letter to his mother, written 11 January 1897.

after the first part of his essay on Emerson appeared in

the January issue of Atlantic Monthly, Chapman mentioned

that he had received some letters from "old Emersonians

about it——old Tom Ward and Mrs. Shaw . • • •" (cited in

Chapman, p. 77). Both thought, in Chapman's words, that

 301

the first part presented "a true picture of Emerson.M Ward,

however, had indicated that, in Chapman's words, "this first

part 'draws' the old Concord fellows." Chapman did not

believe the second part of the essay, to appear in the next

month's issue, would be liked— in fact, he hoped it wouldn't

be liked. When a couple of his friends reacted favorable to

the first part of his essay, calling it "original, brilliant,

literature, new, noble, a fine piece of criticism," Chapman

confessed that their reaction "scares me a good deal,"

adding, "But I have hopes the second part will upset them.

The first is all adulation. The second has some circular

saws, files, gimlets, and gunpowder . . . " (Letter to

Elizabeth Chanler, 29 December 1896* cited in Chapman,

p. 121). After he received a letter from Thomas W. Ward

(e.g., "old Tom Ward"), a friend of Emerson's, about the

first part of his essay, Chapman wrote him back:

"If this first part 'draws* the old

Concord fellows, the second part will
throw them into convulsions . . . .
"Now I may say I am certain that the
second part will in many ways be un­
sympathetic to you, but if you will
try to take it on a purely intellectual
basis (which is asking a good deal
considering it's about your personal
friends)— why, I'll try to do the
same at the age 80 when I read the
essay of some young smart fellow. , . .
Now I expect you to disagree with what
I say and not like me for it— but don't
destroy my illusions. I want to find
someone on the earth so intelligent
 302

that he welcomes opinions which he

condemns--! want to be this kind of a
man and I want to have known this kind
of man . . . .1 know you didn't
bargain for all this when you wrote
your note but it is too late to
apologize" (cited in Chapman, pp. 1 2 3 - 1 2 4 ) .

86john Jay Chapman, "Emerson, Sixty Years After,"

The Atlantic Monthly. 79 (January and February 1897)i rpt.

as "Emerson" in Emerson and Other Essays, by John Jay

Chapman (New York: Scribners, 1898; 2nd ed., Moffat, 1909);

rpt. in and cited from The Selected Writings of John Jay

Chapman, ed. Jacques Barzun (New York* Farrar, Straus &

Cudahy, Inc., 1957; rpt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday &

Company, Inc., 1959), PP* 222-223.

®?Howe traces Chapman's "process of satisfying his own

curiosity" about Emerson, Chapman, pp. 76-77-

88»Terministic Screens," in Language as Symbolic Action*

Essays of Life. Literature, and Method, by Kenneth Burke

(Berkeley and Los Angeles* University of California Press,

1966; rpt. 1 9 6 8 ), pp. 44-62,

®9waggoner (Emerson as Poet, p. 73) claims that "any

poet we judge worthy of reading at all deserves to have his

works read in the way that will best exhibit their virtue,

their strength."

90Literary Transcendentalism, p. 13-

 303

91Josephine Miles, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1964), p. 5*

92Freedora and Fate, p. vii.

93"Emerson: Enough of His Life to Suggest His

Character," in Bode, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Profile,

p. xvi.

9^Emerson on the Soul, P. 1

95preedom and Fate, p. 172.

9^Freedom and Fate. p. 57.

97carlyle's letter to Emerson, 2 March 1847; cited in

Critics on Emerson, p. 15-

 304

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

1. The bibliographies

Despite Floyd Stovall's lukewarm assurance in

Eight American Authors that "Bibliographies of Emerson...,

though not all that one might wish, are adequate and

generally accessible" (p. 37)» the student who engages in

serious study of Emerson is frustrated by the available

bibliographical tools. First of all, there is no compre­

hensive bibliography of Emerson. And, secondly, one not

only has to consult a half dozen bibliographies to patch

together a continuum of bibliography, one also has to com­

pare listings from several overlapping or concurrent

bibliographies because, if there is one characteristic most

of them share, it is the major characteristic of Emerson

criticism for the past century* the agreement to disagree.

William J. Sowder's Emerson* s Reviewers and

Commentators . . . is a valuable and generally available

source for locating Emerson* s contemporary American and

British reviewers ; Sowder's commentary, furthermore, pro­

vides us with information about these reviewers and about

the publications in which the reviews were published. The

other significant source for locating critical response to

Emerson within his own time is George Willis Cooke's A

Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1908). The bibliography

in Volume I of The Cambridge History of American Literature

 305

provides a selective listing of important publications on

Emerson from Cooke’s ending date (circa 1908) to 1917* A

more complete listing covering the years 1908-1920 is found

in the bibliography compiled by Robert A. Booth and Roland

Stromberg.
Lewis Leary has edited two bibliographies useful

in Emerson research which together cover the years 1900-

1967: Articles on American Literature . . . 1900-1950 and

Articles on American Literature 1950-1967. The former is

the new and corrected edition replacing Leary's earlier

edition published in 1947 and covering the years 1920-1945,

which should not be used for the obvious reasons. Leary's

bibliographies are good sources, but the second bibliography

(covering 1950-1967) has a number of errors, mostly regard­

ing numbers in the listings: for example, "1" is sometimes

mistaken for "7," and "3" is sometimes mistaken for "8."

Volume III of Literary History of the United

States (1948) contains a selective bibliography arranged

topically; a Bibliography Supplement, compiled by Richard

M. Ludwig, was published in 1959. American Literature has

published its annual "Articles on American Literature

Appearing in Current Periodicals" since 1945. The Emerson

Society Quarterly has provided an Emerson bibliography

annually since 1955t from 1955 to 1972, it was compiled by

Kenneth W. Cameron. Emerson criticism between 1951 and

1961 is included in the checklist compiled by Jackson R.

 306

Bryer and Robert A. Rees. Alfred R. Ferguson, probably

most noted among current Emersonians for his contributions

as an editor of the J M N . has compiled a Checklist of Ralph

Waldo Emerson, published by Merrill in 1970.

In addition, a few books of criticism include

admirable bibliographies of sources relating to their

topics. Emerson Grant Sutcliffe's Emerson's Theories of

Literary Expression (1923) includes a valuable bibliography

of pre-1918 sources dealing with Emerson* s style (pp. 140-

142). John Q. Anderson's The Liberating Gods; Emerson on

Poets and Poetry (1971) has a full bibliography listing

major sources for the topic (pp. 121-124). Frederic I.

Carpenter's Emerson Handbook (1953) has an extensive bibli­

ography, selective and annotated, on Emerson's biography,

his prose and poetry, his ideas, and his sources from and

influences on world literature (pp. 45-50, 102-10?, 203-

208, 254-258).
Floyd Stovall's critical bibliographical essay

(’•Ralph Waldo Emerson," Eight American Authors) is still

the best source for getting a bird's-eye view on Emerson

scholarship and criticism. Unfortunately, the effective­

ness of the essay as bibliographical source is hampered by

a number of errors of different kinds. For example, a few

titles are not cited accurately (e.g., the Whicher/Spiller/

Williams edition of the early lectures is entitled The Early

Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson— not Emerson's Early Lectures).

 307

Furthermore, the notation about available reprint sources

for important criticism is uneven— reprints of more recent

articles are noted while reprints of older and more difficult

to locate articles are often not noted. Nevertheless, it

is still an invaluable summary statement of the major

trends in Emerson criticism.

2. The Works and Editions of Emerson

James Elliot Cabot's 14-volume The Works of Ralph

Waldo Emerson (1884-1887). which includes Cabot's two-

volume Memoir, bases its texts upon the collected editions

edited during Emerson1s lifetime under Emerson's supervision.

Called the Riverside Edition, Cabot's edition is the text­

ual source for The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1903-1904), edited in 12 volumes by Emerson's son, Edward

Waldo Emerson. This edition, called the Centenary Edition,

with invaluable notes for each volume added by Edward Waldo

Emerson, is currently the standard edition of Emerson's

works. The title, however, is misleading, since it does

not contain all of Emerson* s works.

According to Merton M. Sealts Jr. and Alfred R.

Ferguson in their Emerson* s Nature— Origin. Growth, Meaning

(196 9 ), the editions of Emerson's works prepared by Cabot

and Edward Waldo Emerson are inadequate for modern textual

study, since their editions include "occasional changes"

in the texts which were not authorized by Emerson. To meet

 308

this newly realized and growing need for an "authorized"

edition of Emerson* s works, adequate for textual study,

the Center for Editions of American Authors is sponsoring

the on-going preparation of The Collected Works of Ralph

Waldo Emerson, an edition in 10-12 volumes, to he published

as each volume is completed by the Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press. The first volume— containing Nature;

Addresses, and Lectures— was published in 1970, with notes

and introduction by Robert E. Spiller, and the text estab­

lished by Alfred R. Ferguson. The project will include a

critical and variorum edition of Emerson* s poems, probably

by Carl F. Strauch. When publication is completed, the

new edition is expected to supercede the Centenary Edition

as the standard edition of Emerson* s works.

The Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson

Forbes edition of The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1909 - 1 9 1 4 ) has been replaced by The Journals and Miscel­

laneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (the JMN; I960- )

as the standard edition. The Harvard University edition

of the JMN— with valuable prefaces to each volume orienting

the reader to Emerson* s life during the period covered by

the journals contained, and scholarly notes citing sources

and cross-referencing the journal entries to passages in

the published works as well as to similar or related

passages elsewhere in the journals— when completed, will

be in sixteen volumesj eleven volumes, covering 1819-1851*

 309

had been published by 1975. Bliss Perry's The Heart of

Emerson's Journals (1926) is still a valuable reference,

mainly for Perry's commentary on the journals in his pre­

face and his introductory notes to each section.

Still the major source for Emerson* s sermons is

Arthur C. McGiffert Jr., ed., Young Emerson Speaks (1938)»

which publishes 25 edited sermons from 170 manuscript ser­

mons, includes a list of all of Emerson* s sermons, and

provides an introduction which traces Emerson*s intellectual

development between 1826 and I 8 3 6 , the years during which

he delivered sermons.

The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in

three volumes edited by Stephen Whicher, Robert Spiller and

Wallace Williams and published by Harvard University Press

(1959, 1964, 1972), publishes, most for the first time, the

lectures Emerson delivered prior to the publication of his

first series of Essays. Other lectures have been published

elsewhere in collections or separately in journals; a number

yet remain unpublished; and some have been lost. An impor­

tant research tool is William Charvat's chronological list,

Emerson's American Lecture Engagements (1961), which is

annotated with information relating to the delivery of the

lecture and with relevant short comments from newspaper

reviews. Charvat*s introduction provides a valuable over­

view of Emerson in his role of lecturer between 1833 and

1881, and relates Emerson the lecturer to Emerson the

 310

essayist. Charvat also includes a good bibliography of

Emerson as a lecturer (pp. 13-14). Before Charvat's list,

the only available list of Emerson's lectures was the one

included in Appendix F of Cabot's Memoir, still valuable

for the short abstracts it provides "as far as possible in

his Emerson' s j own words" of the lectures, especially

for those which no longer exist.

Ralph L. Rusk's 6-volume edition of The Letters

of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1939) is the standard edition, but

it does not include all of the letters. Other important

collections are The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle,

edited by Joseph Slater (1964); A Correspondence Between

John Sterling and Ralph Waldo Emerson . . . (1897) \ Records

of a Lifelong Friendship. 1807-1882. Ralph Waldo Emerson

and William Henry Furness, ed. Horace Howard Furness (1910);

Correspondence Between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Griam.

ed. Frederick W. Hollis (1903); Emerson-Clough Letters, eds.

Howard F. Lowry and R. L. Rusk (1934); and Letters from

Ralph Waldo Emerson to a Friend Samuel Gray Ward_7 . . . ,

ed. Charles Eliot Norton (1899). Numerous letters, not

included in any of these collections, have been published

individually in journals. Still others remain unpublished.

Kenneth W. Cameron has written several articles

regarding the material by Emerson yet unpublished: "Emerson

Manuscripts : Ungathered and Migrant," E S Q . no. 6 (1957),

26-27; no. 43 (1966), 141-144; no. 4? (1 9 6 7 ), 125-126.

 311

"Some Collections of Emerson Manuscripts," E S Q . no.3 (1956),

1-3; no. 5 (1956), 20-21; no. 6 (1957), 21-23.

The extensive manuscript collections, owned by

the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association, is housed in

the Houghton Library, Harvard University. It includes the

journals, letters to Emerson, lectures, sermons, and a

typed volume of notations found in books in Emerson's

library. Occasionally, material from this collection is

published.

3. The biographies

The two-volume earliest biography of Emerson,

A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was written by Emerson* s

literary executor, James Elliot Cabot (1887)• Written in

the Victorian style, much of the content comes from Emerson's

letters and journals with occasional commentary from members

of Emerson's family. What it loses in factuality, it gdns

in immediacy, providing us with our best view of Emerson

from his own and from his contemporaries' perspective.

Occasionally, Cabot comments on the critical reaction to

Emerson's works, and provides some insight into Emerson's

habits regarding writing, publishing, and lecturing. The

six appendices to the second volume include Emerson*s letter

of resignation from Second Church, Boston; the correspon­

dence with the Reverend Henry Ware, Jr., concerning the

Divinity School Address; a list of Emerson's contributions

 312

to the Dial: Emerson'3 letter to President Martin Van Buren

about the expulsion of the Cherokees from Georgia; the

letters regarding the rebuilding of Emerson's home by

friends after it was partially destroyed by fire in 1872;

and a chronological listing of Emerson's lectures and

addresses, with some attempt to cross-reference them to the

published works.
The standard biography of Emerson is Ralph L.

Rusk's The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1949)— an exhaustive

and scholarly work. Yet what it gains in factuality, it

loses in contact with the man himself. Its major flaw--

if it has one— may be in the interpretation Rusk gives to

the facts of Emerson's life. Its secondary but most noted

flaw— its dryness and lack of contact with the vital spirit

of Emerson— is an understandable result of Rusk's decision

to emphasize the facts of Emerson's life which, until his

biography was published, were not available to the general

reader.
Van Wyck Brooks' Life of Emerson (1932) is def­

initely a biography of the lower rank, useless as a source

for facts about Emerson, which are cited incorrectly or

vaguely by Brooks. Indeed, it is a period piece of impres­

sionistic style relying, whenever possible, upon Emerson's

words. However, with the distance that Cabot could not

have as Emerson's contemporary, and with a liberation

through innocence from the domination of facts that Rusk

 313

could not have, Brooks does occasionally succeed through

a wide and sweeping scope in placing Emerson within his

social, historical, and family contexts. A few of his

descriptions— especially those of the Fruitlands experi­

ment and Emerson's dismal failures in domestic reform— are

excellent.
Emerson's son, Edward Waldo Emerson, wrote one

book and one article of value. His Emerson in Concord

(1889) is a very readable, first-hand view of his father,

and it contains some information, especially a picture of

Emerson at work, not found in other sources. His "Tribute

of a Son," first published in 1903. provides more insight

into Emerson the man and the writer. Long unavailable to

the general reader, "Tribute of a Son" was reprinted in

1967 in the Emerson Society Quarterly— a photo copy of the

article as it originally appeared in The Bookloyer,_s

Magazine.
. . . I Remember the Emersons (1941), written by

a relative of Lidian Emerson, Mary Miller Engel, is useful

as a source of verbal family history, passed down in conver

sations and letters by the Emerson family after Emerson's

death, as well as a source for minutae from the mid-century

feminine perspective regarding household and daily life and

information regarding the little-explored role played by

Ellen Emerson, Emerson's daughter, during Emerson's later

years. Engel relies heavily upon the 1$0 or so letters

 314

written by Emerson*s children over a period of 45 years.

Other biographies, written by Emerson's con­

temporaries, are also noteworthy. Remembrances of Emerson

(N.Y.i Cooke, 1901) was written by John Albee, a friend of

Emerson. Emerson at Home and Abroad (Boston, 1882) was

written by Moncure Conway, one of the young men who flocked

to Emerson, seeking a teacher, and remained to become a

friend; Conway is the chief source for later biographers in

dating the onset of Emerson's senility. Talks with Emerson

(1890) by Charles J. Woodbury, another of the young men

attracted to Emerson through his lectures, is an important

source not only for the conversations herein recorded but

especially for its existence as a record of the effect

Emerson had on young minds during his later life.

Perhaps the most valuable addition to the Emerson

biography in the latter part of our own century has been

Stephen Whicher's Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph

Waldo Emerson (1953). It is the supreme study of Emerson's

ideas from the biographical stance. Whicher's book attempts

to do what the biographies by Cabot and Rusk could not do

because of their emphasis upon the external Emerson:

present the inner man of the mind. Whicher's treatment,

however, weakens whenever he must consider the external

Emerson. Yet this weakness plus the book's limitation are

essentially unavoidable, since they arise only in con­

sideration of areas beyond the purposive scope of the book.

 315

Edward Wagenknecth's Ralph Waldo Emersoni Portrait

of a Balanced Soul (1974) is essentially a move toward an

integrated perspective on Emerson. A very readable study,

based upon close acquaintance with the major biographies,

criticism, and works of Emerson, the Portrait's major flaw

is, ironically, its fluid personal style which does not

quite compensate for its occasional lack of attention to the

basics of scholarship. Again, the flaw is predictable,

arising out of the focus of authorial attention. Further­

more, Wagenknecht's lengthy bibliography is flawed with

occasional errors in citing publication dates, volume num­

bers for journals, and page numbers ; nevertheless, it is

useful for learning about— if not locating— sources which

relate to specific areas in the Emerson scholarship.

Wagenknecht appends a valuable statement on the relation­

ship between Emerson scholarship and a book's aim or method.

His appendix B reprints the 1874 Preface to Parnassus, not

included in The Centenary Edition nor easily available else­

where.

Emerson* s First Marriage (1967) by Henry F. Pommer

provides a full-length discussion of Emerson's brief marriage

to Ellen Tucker Emerson, who died about 18 months after her

marriage to Emerson, thus contributing to Emerson* s move

away from a career in the pulpit. Emerson's first marriage

received scant treatment in Cabot's biography— perhaps an

influence of Emerson* s family. Pommer provides a scholarly

 316

treatment of the topic, based upon the primary sources Rusk

consulted in his treatment of the marriage in The Life of

Ralph Waldo Emerson, occasionally disagreeing with Rusk

over his interpretation of those facts. An important aspect

of his study is the contrast he draws between Emerson's

first and second marriages. The weakest part of his book,

however, is when he exceeds the limitations of his topic

and proceeds to discuss Emerson's ideas or philosophy.

4. Earlv Criticism

Only within the past five years has the early

Emerson criticism, written during the ten years after I 8 3 6 ,

become easily available to the general reader. The Recogni­

tion of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Criticism Since 1837.

edited by Milton R. Konvitz, provides a good selection of

lengthy excerpts from the early criticism as well as noted

recent criticism. Another generally available collection is

Critics on Emerson: Readings in Literary Criticism, edited

by Thomas J. Rountree. Rountree succeeds in providing a

larger forum of critical response, but only by severely

limiting in many cases the length of excerpts reprinted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Profile, edited by Carl Bode, pro­

vides some selections from nineteenth-century writers on

Emerson. Kenneth W. Cameron's earlier but less generally

available Emerson Among His Contemporaries . . . provides

some representative reviews and articles by Emerson's con­

temporaries.
 317

Note on Primary Sources Cited

For many years, scholars and students have read

and cited the Centenary Edition of Emerson's works. Only

within recent years has the authority of that edition been

seriously questioned by Emerson scholars. The need for a

new edition of Emerson* s works will be met by the publica­

tion of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson by

Harvard University Press, under the sponsorship of the

Center for Editions of American Authors of the Modern

Language Association of America (see p. 307, above). I

have chosen, after perusual of the available editions, to

use what I believe is the most reliable text for each of

Emerson* s works, currently available. My major criterion

has been to prefer Emerson* s original words as they appear

in facsimiles of first editions whenever the possibility

of textual changes by other anonymous hands exists. When

facsimiles of first editions are not generally available,

I cite the best available editions for the texts. Since I

am not citing consistently from one edition of Emerson, I

note below the texts I have chosen to follows

For the text of Emerson*s poems, I use the Cen­

tenary Edition, citing from the Current Opinion reprint of

this edition in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

. . . (New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1923).

 318

For the text of Emerson's Essays and Essays:

Second Series. I use the facsimiles of the first editions

(1841, 1844) provided in Essays /~and_7 Essays: Second

Series. intro. Morse Peckham (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E.

Merrill Publishing Company, 1969).

For the text of Emerson's Nature. I have used two

sources, the first because it reprints the I 836 text and

includes the substantive revisions Emerson himself made in

the second edition of 1849» the second because it is the

first modern scholarly edition of Nature which critically

establishes the text of Emerson's work: (1) Merton M. Sealts,

Jr. and Alfred R. Ferguson, eds., Emerson*s Nature — Origin.

Growth. Meaning (New York and Toronto: Dodd, Mead & Com­

pany, Inc., 1969)1 (2) The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo

Emerson. Volume 1 : Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. Intro.,

notes by Robert E. Spiller. Text established by Alfred R,

Ferguson. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 1971). Notes to my text cite both sources,

listed (1) and (2) as above. Page numbers within brackets

in these notes for (1) indicate the original pagination of

the 1836 edition, which are cited since several facsimile

editions of Nature are generally available today.

For the text of "The American Scholar,” I use

the new Harvard University edition of The Collected Works

. . . , volume 1, as cited above.

 319

For the text of other essays and published lec­

tures, I use the Riverside Edition, The Works of Ralph

Waldo Emerson, edited by James Elliot Cabot (Boston and

New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884-1887).

 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, J. W . , Albert Dod, and Charles Hodge. "Trans­
cendentalism of the Germans and of Cousin and Its
Influence on Opinion in This Country." An excerpt
from two articles originally published in The Biblical
Repertory and Princeton Review (January 1839), re-
printed in Milton R. Konvitz, ed., The Recognition of
Ralph Waldo Emersoni Selected Criticism Since 1837.
Ann Arbori University of Michigan Press, 1972, pp.
13-15.
Arvin, Newton. "The House of Pain* Emerson and the Tragic
Sense." Hudson Review. 12 (Spring 1959), 37-53»
Reprinted as "The House of Pain" in Milton Konvitz and
Stephen Whicher, eds., Emerson* A Collection of Critical
Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.* Prentice-Hall, 1962,
pp. 46-59.
Bartol, C. A. Review of Emerson's Poems. The Christian
Examiner and Religious Miscellany / Boston /. 42
(March 1847), 255 -2 6 1 . Excerpt reprinted in Thomas
J. Rountree, ed., Critics on Emerson* Readings in
Literary Criticism. Coral Gables, F l a . * U n i v e r s i t y
of Miami Press, 1973, PP* 32-35*
Baumgartner, A. M."'The Lyceum is My Pulpit'* Homiletics
in Emerson's Earlier Lectures." American Literature,
34 (1962-1963), 477-486.

Beard, Charles A. and Mary R. Beard. New Basic History of

the United States. Revised and edited by William
Beard. Garden City, N.Y.* Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
19 44 ; rev. ed., i9 6 0 .

Bishop, Jonathan. Emerson on the Soul. Cambridge, Mass.*

Harvard University Press, 1964.

Bode, Carl. "Emerson* Enough of His Life toSuggest His

Character." Ralph Waldo Emerson* A Profile. Ed. Carl
Bode. New York* Hill and Wang, 1969, pp. vii-xvi.

Bowen, Francis. Review of Emerson's Nature. The Christian

Examiner and General Review Boston_/ 21 (January
1837), 371-385i 21 (November 1837). Excerpt reprinted
in Critics on Emerson, pp. 17-21.

Brooks, Van Wyck. The Life of Emerson. New York: E. P.

Dutton & Company, Inc., 1932.

320
Brownell, W. C. "Emerson." American Prose Masters £ ^ 1 9 0 9 J 9
by W. C. Brownell. Edited by Howard Mumford Jones.
Cambridge, Mass.% Balknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1963 . Excerpt reprinted in The Recognition
of Ralph Waldo Emerson, pp. 143-15^•

Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and

Vision in the American Renaissance. Ithaca and London;
Cornell University Press, 1973.

Burke, Kenneth. "Acceptance and Rejection." Southern Re­

view, 2 (Winter 1937)» 600-632.

Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on

Life. Literature, and Method. Berkeley and Los
Angeles; University of California Press, 19661 rpt.
1968.
Cabot, James Elliot. A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 2
vols. /"Vols. 13 and 14 in The Works of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, ed. James Elliot Cabot.2/ Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin and Company, 1887; rpt. New York; AMS Press,
1969.
Cameron, Kenneth Walter. "The Challenge of Emerson's Early
Lectures." Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 20 (i9 6 0 ),
8-10.
Carpenter, F £ ~ rederic_7. I £ " ves_7• Emerson Handbook.
New York: Hendricks House, 1953*

Chapman, John Jay. "Emerson, Sixty Years After." Atlantic

Monthly, 79 (January, February 1897), 27-41 and 222-240.
Reprinted as "Emerson" in Emerson and Other Essays, by
John Jay Chapman. New York! Scribners, 1898; 2nd
ed., New York; Moffat, 1909* Reprinted as "Emerson"
in The Selected Writings of John Jay Chapman, ed.
Jacques Barzun. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy,
Inc., 1957 1 rpt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1959. pp. 165-224.

Charvat, William. Emerson's American Lecture Engagements.

A Chronological List. Introduction by William Charvat.
New York; New York Public Library, 1961. £~Originally
published in the September - December i960 and Jantary
1961 issues of the Bulletin of the New York Public
Library.

Clemens, Samuel. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Including

Chapters Now Published for the First Time. Ed. Charles

321
 Neider. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959 /^original
edition of the Autobiography first published in 1917_a

Cook, Reginald L. "Introduction." Ralph Waldo Emerson»

Selected Prose and Poetry. Ed. Reginald L. Cook.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950» rpt. 1966.

The Earlv Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 3 vols. Vol. I

Spiller. Vol. II (1836-1838), eds. Stephen E. Whicher,
Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams. Vol. Ill
(1838-1842), eds. Robert E. Spiller and Wallace E.
Williams. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1959, 1964, 1972.

Emerson, Edward Waldo. Emerson in Concord: A Memoir Written

for the "Social Circle" in Concord. Massachusetts.
Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company,
1889.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays /"and 7 Essays : Second Series.
Intro, Morse Peckham. 1841, 1844i facsimile rpt.
Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company,
1969.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. In
The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Volume 1.
Intro., notes by Robert E. Spiller. Text established
by Alfred R. Ferguson. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1970.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Poems. In The Complete Works of

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Volume 9* Preface, notes by
Edward W. Emerson. Centenary Edition. Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1904. Reprinted in
Current Opinion Edition as The Complete Works of Ralph
Waldo Emerson in Six Volumes. New York: Wm. H. Wise
& Co., 1923.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Edited by James Elliot Cabot. 14 v o l s . The Riverside
Edition. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and
Company, 1884-1887.
Feidelson, Jr., Charles. Symbolism and American Literature.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

Felton, C. C. Review of Essays. First Series. The Christian

Examiner and General Review" 30 (May 1841), 253-262.
Excerpt reprinted in Critics on Emerson, pp. 28-31.

322
Furness, Horace Howard, ed. Records of a Lifelong Friend­
ship. 1807-1882. Ralph Waldo Emerson and William
Henry Furness. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1910.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. "Ralph Waldo Emerson."

Contemporaries. by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899» PP* 1-22. Excerpt
reprinted in Critics on Emerson, pp. 68 -6 9 .

Howe, M. A. DeWolfe. John Jay Chapman and His Letters.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937.

The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo

Emerson. 11 vols. /16 vols, projected^/ Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1960-
Volumes cited:

Vol. I (1819-1822). William H. Gilman, Alfred

R. Ferguson, George P. Clark, and Merrell
R. Davis, eds. i9 6 0 .

Vol. II (1822-1826). William H. Gilman, Alfred

R. Ferguson, Merrell R. Davis, eds. 1961.

Vol. IV (1832-1834). Alfred R. Ferguson, ed.

1964.

Vol. V (I835 -I8 3 8 ). Merton M. Sealts, Jr., ed.

1965.
Vol. VI (1824-1838). Ralph H. Orth, ed. 1966 .

Vol. VII (1838-1842). A. W. Plumstead, Harrison

Hayford, eds. 1969 .

Vol. VIII (1841-1843). William H. Gilman, J. E.

Parsons, eds. 1970.

Vol. IX (1843-1847). Ralph H. Orth, Alfred R.

Ferguson, eds. 1971.

Vol. X (1847-1848). Merton M. Sealts, Jr., ed.

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 ADDENDUM

Correction, page 70: Note 58 should read: “Foreword . . .

J..IN, VII, p. xv.

Correction, page 185 : In the journal draft, the line “Not

od deeds, but of doing" should read “Not of deeds,

but of doing."

327