The Art of Diary- Emerson

EMERSON
and the Art of the Diary

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EMERSON
and the Art of the Diary
Lawrence Rosenwald
New York Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1988
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosenwald, Lawrence Alan, 1948-
Emerson and the art of the diary / Lawrence Rosenwald.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-505333-8
1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882—Diaries.
2. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882—Style.
3. Authors, American—19th century—Diaries—History and criticism.
4. Autobiography.
1. Title.
PS 1631. R67 1988 818'.303—de19 [B] 87-23074 CIP
246897531
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
FOR CYNTHIA
Is there any other work for the poet but a good journal?
Thoreau, Journal X: 115
Why rake up old MSS to find therein a man's soul? You do

not look for conversation in a corpse.
Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks V: 337
Acknowledgments
No doubt I've forgotten valuable help I've received, and I apologize

to any neglected benefactors. But I remember many with pleasure.
My thanks, for gracious and scrupulous readings of all or part of this,
to Quentin Anderson, Sharon Cameron, Phyllis Cole, Julie Gum-
ming, Arthur Gold, Maurice Gonnaud, Tim Peltason, David Pill-
emer, Monica Raymond, Gail Reimer, Bob Stein, and the members
of the Wellesley College Colloquium on the History of Ideas. The
editors of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo
Emerson (JMN) have by their superb edition made this work possi-
ble. A briefer version of the first chapter appeared in Raritan Review;
both it and the present version have benefited from the expert editing
of Richard Poirier. Joel Myerson provided authoritative bibliographi-
cal help. Wellesley College funded a year's leave. Special thanks to
Margery Sabin, who read the whole manuscript, helped me get rid of
its pedantic clarifications, and showed me by her more literary criti-
cisms what sort of a book I wanted to write and what sort I didn't, and
how to make that clearer to my readers. Finally, my deepest thanks to
Sacvan Bercovitch, friend and teacher, who more than any other
scholar gave me the courage to pursue what in bleaker moments
seemed an obsessive and peripheral interest.
Preface
In November of 1984, Harold Bloom published in the New York

Review of Books an article about Emerson called "Mr. America." The
title promises, and the article performs, a canonization; the can-
onization marks a moment in our history. We have freed ourselves
from the sage of Concord, the bland and simplistic optimist; in his
place we have found our contemporary, a precursor and spiritual
colleague of Nietzsche, a living writer of great power and interest, the
man Bloom describes as the "inescapable theorist of virtually all subse-
quent American writing." 1 This is all to the good, and Bloom in this
article and elsewhere2 has demonstrated by the quality of his atten-
tion to Emerson just how much we have to gain from such a concep-
tion. But while deliberately driving nails into the coffin of one false
Emerson, Bloom offhandedly tidies the bust of another; he does away
with Emerson the fuzzy thinker but retains Emerson the failed artist,
writing that "[Emerson's] true genre was no more the lecture than it
had been the sermon . . . and certainly not the essay, though that is
his only formal achievement, besides a double handful of strong po-
ems."3 This reflects the most tenacious of all our beliefs about Emer-
1. "Mr. America," New York Review of Books 21: 18, November 22, 1984, 19.
2. "The Freshness of Transformation: or Emerson on Influence," ATQ 21: 45-56
(also in David Levin, ed., Emerson: Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence E[New
York: Columbia University Press, 1975], pp. 129-48, and A Map of Misreading [New
York: Oxford University Press], pp. 160-92); and "Emerson: The Self-Reliance of
American Romanticism," in Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Continuum,
1976), pp. 46-64.
3. Bloom, "Mr. America," p. 20.
Xii / P R E F A C E
son, and in his expression of it Bloom leaves us where we began, a

hundred years ago, with Matthew Arnold's judgment "we have not in
Emerson a great poet, a great writer . . . [but] a friend and aider of
those who would live in the spirit." 4 The strongest critics between
Arnold and Bloom only elaborate that judgment. Henry James writes
in 1887 that
Emerson had his message, but he was a good while looking {or his
form—the form which, as he himself would have said, he never com-
pletely found and of which it was rather characteristic of him that his
later years (with their growing refusal to give him the word), wishing to
attack him in his most vulnerable point, where his tenure was least
complete, had in some degree the effect of despoiling him. . . . He is a
striking exception to the general rule that writings live in the last resort
by their form; that they owe a large part of their fortune to the art with
which they have been composed. It is hardly too much, or too little, to
say of Emerson's writings in general that they were not composed at all.5
F. O. Matthiessen brusquely rejeets the Jamesian paradox, writing

straightforwardly in f941 that "Emerson never created a form great
enough to ensure that his books will continue to be read."6
Now we can easily enough make sense of a man who is both a fuzzy
thinker and a failed writer. But what can it mean to have as the
inescapable theorist of our writing a man who was not essentially a
writer at all?
Curiously, Bloom himself hints at the answer; later in the same
article he writes that "Emerson's journals are his authentic work."7
This sentence lies inert, and is not brought into combination with
Bloom's disparagement of Emerson qua writer; but perhaps it can be,
and perhaps then it can help us out of our muddle. To begin, we have
only to take the step of positing that a writer's authentic work is after
all likely to be among his formal achievements, indeed likely to be his
true genre. That I believe to be the case: that Emerson's journals are
his authentic work, his greatest formal achievement, his true and
adequate genre. But to argue as much is difficult, because the argu-
4. Arnold, "Emerson," in Discourses in America (London: Macmillan, 1889), pp.

178-79.
5. James, "Emerson,' in F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family, (New York: Knopf,
1947), pp. 441, 452-53.
6. Matthiesen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968),
p. 75
7. Bloom, "Mr. America,' p. 20.
P R E F A C E / xiii
ment entails assessing a literary masterpiece in a form that we have

come to consider a literary form only very recently.
Let us suppose that a reader living in a world dominated by Poe's
dictum that a true poem must be readable in an hour were somehow
to get interested in the Prelude. He would read, but only be frus-
trated by, scholars' passing, causal, concessive tributes to the power
of that (essentially autobiographical or essayistic) text. He might, if he
were venturesome, attempt to argue that a composition in verse of
many thousand lines might actually be construed as a poem; finally he
might set out, tentatively and exploratorily, to consider what sort of
poem it might be.
This hypothesized world is no more misguided than our own. A
large selection from Emerson's journals was published in ten volumes
between 1909 and 1914. A selection from them made by Bliss Perry
(and distributed by the Book-of-the-Month Club) came out in 1926.
They were published again, this time almost in their entirety, in a
form as faithful to the original as a book can come to a manuscript
without being a facsimile, between 1960 and 1978. An illuminating
section from them made by Joel Porte came out in 1982. It is nonethe-
less the case that no literary study of them has ever been made.
Accordingly, I propose to make a first, preparatory description of
one of the great masterpieces of American writing. My goal, to use
Sharon Cameron's language in her brilliant and original study of Tho-
reau's journal, is to "open the Journal for public scrutiny." 8 The de-
scription is articulated in four sections. The first is a methodological
prologue on reading diaries, or more precisely on the beliefs we hold
that inhibit our reading of diaries and on the program for diary read-
ing that we can derive from looking hard at those beliefs. The remain-
ing sections attempt to carry out that program. The second section,
treating Emerson's journals between 1819 and 1833, is an essay on
how Emerson the diarist finds his form. The third and longest section
comprises five chapters on the form Emerson found: an introduction;
a comparison between the journal and Emerson's own lectures and
essays; a comparison between the journal and other Transcendentalist
journals; a comparison between the journal and the German aphorism
book; and a comparison between the journal and quotation books, for
example, Montaigne's Essays and Eckermann's Conversations with
Goethe. The last section is an account of how Emerson lost the form
8. Cameron, Writing Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 15.
xiv / P R E F A C E
he had found; it discusses the deeay of the journal in the context of the
peculiar character of Emerson's old age.
These individual sections can be conceived of in various groupings.
First, a methodological prologue followed by a narrative of the prog-
ress of Emerson the diarist from beginning to middle to end. Second,
a methodological prologue followed by two different sorts of studies,
one diachronic and one synchronic. This second conception may
make better sense of the actual relation between the third section and
the sections preceding and following it; for though these latter do in
fact treat portions of the journal preceding and following the portion
treated in the third, they also treat them from a different viewpoint.
The second and fourth sections look at the progress of Emerson's art
over time, the third at the nature of his art at an imagined moment of
stasis. That moment is a fiction, of course; the progress of Emerson's
art never stops. But equally a fiction is the notion that in that progress
nothing remains fixed, and the fiction of stasis is necessary to describe
certain of the journal's powers and excellences. In this perspective
the third section is not so much a bridge from the second to the fourth
as a complement to both; both the second and fourth sections, on the
one hand, and the third, on the other, offer independent accounts of
the nature of Emerson's diaristic art, and the divergences between
them result precisely from the divergence in viewpoint from which
they originate.
The third of the possible groupings raises a different question. The
first section proposes a program for reading diaries both as expressive
documents and as works of art. The second and third sections seem
chiefly occupied with the diary as a work of art, the fourth with the
diary as expressive document. This is, in fact, largely the case, not
least because the fourth is occupied with the stretch of Emerson's
diary that is least interesting when read as a work of art. But it is also
true that the two perspectives are intertwined throughout, or rather
that throughout the ensuing account Emerson's formal artistry is
taken as being itself the expression of his general intelligence, an
intelligence within which artistic and personal needs are inextricable
from one another.
I propose to myseli to read Schiller of whom I hear much. What shall I
read? His Rohhers? oh no, for that was the crude fruit of his immature
mind. He thought little of it himself. What then: his Aesthetics? oh no,
that is only his struggle with Kantian metaphysics. His poetry? oh no,
for he was a poet only by study. His histories? And so with all his
P R E F A C E / XV
productions, they were fermentations by whieh bis mind was working

itself clear, they were the experiments by which he got his skill and the
fruit, the bright pure gold of all was—Schiller himself.
In thinking about Emerson and his journals I have come back again
and again to this passage. It is not, I think, a denial of the human
interest of the work of art but an assertion of the esthetic interest of
the human life itself considered as an artifact, perhaps the supreme
artifact, among many. The present book is written to articulate that
interest also.
Wellesley, Massachusetts L. R.
October 1987
Contents
I. Prolegomena, 3
II. From Commonplace Book to Journal, 29

Authority and Rebellion, 30
Strayings and Temptations, 44
A Conscious Beginning, 53
III. The Form of the Mature Journal, 61

Introduction, 61
Interlude: A Practical Note
The Journal vs. the Essays, 65
Is the Journal Really a Work of Art? (Part 1)
The Journal as Artifact
Emerson and his Diaristic Circle, 83
The Journal and the Aphorism Book, 98
Emerson the Gregarious Revolutionary, or,
A Consideration of Two Artistic Forms
The Journal and the Quotation Book, 121
IV. The Loss of Form, 139
Index, 155
I
Prolegomena
The great English and American diaries are among the most highly
regarded and yet systematically neglected of all literary texts. We
agree, in conversation or in remarks written en passant, that these
texts are major works of literature and their authors, major artists; but
when doing literary criticism we do not write about them. We have,
to be sure, the various intelligent small studies of Virginia Woolfs
The Common Reader, of Robert Fothergill's Private Chronicles, of
Thomas Mallon's A World of Their Own. But we have no books even
on Pepys's diary, or on Boswell's, or on Byron's; nor any on Dorothy
Wordsworth's, Sir Walter Scott's, Benjamin Haydon's, Francis Kil-
vert's, or Katherine Mansfield's. Of the great American diaries, Tho-
reau's is the object both of Perry Miller's Consciousness in Concord
and of Sharon Cameron's remarkable Writing Nature; but Samuel
Sewall's, Aaron Burr's, Bronson Alcott's, even Emerson's have occa-
sioned only comments in passing, worshipful quotation, and deferen-
tial silence.1
1. On European diaries sec Michele Leleu, Les Journaiix intimes (Paris: Presses
Universitaircs de France, 1952); Gustav Rene Ilocke, Das Europaeische Tagebuch
(Wiesbaden: Limes, 1963); Alain Girard, Les Journaiix intintes (Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de France, 1963); Uwe Schultz, ed., Das Tagehuch ant der moderne Autor
(Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1965); Peter Boerner, Tagebuch (Stuttgart: Metzger,
1969); V. Del Litto, ed., Le Journal intime et ses formes lilleraires: Actes du Colloque
de septembre 1975 (Geneva: Droz, 1978). The best of these are Girard, Boerner, and
Del Litto; Boerner and Hocke contain extensive bibliographies, Ilocke also a rich
anthology.
The relative abundance of material rightly suggests that European diaries have fared
a little better than their English and American counterparts—but only a little. As the
3
4 / E M E R S O N AND THE ART OF THE D I A R Y
But though we are reticent to speak of diaries as works of art, we

are eager to speak of them as testimonies of character, and quick to
trust them in that capacity; biographers and historians and psycholo-
gists present themselves before diaries as devout Greeks presented
themselves before oracles. Examples of an endemic practice are point-
less; the best evidence of this widespread habit is the common formu-
lae by which the testimony of diaries is introduced, formulae that
once isolated easily reveal the weakness of their underlying assump-
tions, "if we want to see what P really thought of Q, we have only to
consult the pertinent entries in her diary"; "F himself makes the
matter perfectly clear, writing in his diary that . . ."; "X reveals the
deep motivation of the work in a contemporary diary entry, writing
that . . . ." Here and there a skeptic turns up: Leon Brunschvicg,
hating Rousseau, declares in De la connaissance de soi that introspec-
tion leads us not towards but away from a knowledge of the self;
Walter Scott confronts the first appearance of Pepys's diary in f825
with the judicious caution of a lawyer and a man of the world. 2 But for
the most part we take diarists at their word, knowing perfectly well
that we cannot take living men and women so if we are to survive.
Our critical diffidence is surely an error; our psychological credulity is
no less so.
I take it that both errors proceed from our deep beliefs regarding
diaries. 1 take it also that these beliefs are the more deeply held for
having been only shallowly examined, retaining their tenacious hold
on us below the level of critical consciousness, assumptions rather
than conclusions, acted on rather than thought about. Accordingly,
this essay attempts to identify, to assess, and to modify these beliefs.
It is divided into four parts. The first is a definition. The remaining
might be called; The Diary as Artifact; The Diary as Testimony; The
Diary as Literature; they might also be called, more pointedly:
Against the Myth of Privacy; Against the Myth of Veridicality; Against
the Myth of Artlessness.
titles suggest, all these books start from .scratch, taking up the fundamental problems
from the beginning; none of them except Girard's pursues a specific historical investiga-
tion, and neither these books nor any other offers a comprehensive literary study of any
major European diarist.
2. Brnnschvieg, De la connaissance de soi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1931), p. 8; Scott, "Pepys's Memoirs" Quarterly Review 33: (1825-26), pp. 281-
314.'
PROLEGOMENA / 5
We can best define the diary by taking over the Russian Formalist
distinction between form and function 3 and by positing that genres
can in general be described as certain forms and certain functions
occurring in combination. In form a diary is a chronologically ordered
sequence of dated entries addressed to an unspecified audience. We
call that form a diary when a writer uses it to fulfill certain functions.
We might describe those functions collectively as the discontinuous 4
recording of aspects of the writer's own life; more technically we
might say that to call a text of the proper form a diary we must posit a
number of identities: between the author and the narrator; between
the narrator and the principal character; and between the depicted
and the real, this latter including the identity between date of entry
and date of composition. 3
Some annotations are necessary. First, "identity" ought not to be
confused with resemblance. We need not believe that the person
Emerson's diary describes resembles exactly or even very closely the
"real" Emerson; we might say that a better description of the "real"
Emerson is to be found in his essay "The Transcendentalist." In posit-
ing identity we mean simply that if Emerson writes in the diary that
3. See Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopediqiie des sci-
ences du langage (Paris: du Seuil, 1972), pp. 189-91.
4. "Discontinuous" is deliberately vague. Some diarists write entries on the dates
assigned; some diarists write a number of entries at a stretch, Pepys and Boswell among
them, and clearly we ought not to formulate a definition excluding them. But as clearly
we would not call a diary a text written Irom a single retrospective viewpoint.
5. See on this matter Phillippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: du
Seuil, 1975). Lejeune's book has greatly influenced my sense of the diary as a literary
genre, but 1 have been unable to retain much of his terminology. Lejeune understands
the identities noted in the text as making up what he calls the autobiographical con-
tract. He describes this contract as being offered to the reader by the author in the text,
in particular on the title page. "Poetry and Truth: From My Life, by Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe" would thus be an announcement of genre, a declaration of authorship, and
an offer of a deal.
Now the reader of a diary must believe that the identities the autobiographical
contract purportedly guarantees are in fact true. But many diarists do not offer them;
few diaries have authorial title pages, many as we have them begin in mid-course, and
of those which we believe we have the whole, many begin without a declaration of
intent. So the author often offers us nothing. We might, of course, describe ourselves
as concluding a contract with an editor or a press, or with a manuscripts librarian, or
with ourselves; but it makes better sense, 1 think, to speak not of contracts but of
propositions we must believe. To read a diary qua diary we must posit or ascertain the
identities Lejeune sees the autobiographical contract as guaranteeing.
such-and-such was the case, and we come across evidence to the

contrary, we can say that Emerson was mistaken or a liar; neither
statement can be made of the portrait putatively offered by the essay.
The phrase "about his or her own life" is deliberately and polemi-
cally left vague. 6 It is intended generally to allow the definition to
conform to the wild diversity of actual diaries; in particular it is in-
tended to exclude any reference to the self. At one moment or an-
other the diary may take on the supplementary functions of introspec-
tion or itinerary or confession; none of these functions is intrinsic to it.
It is, to be sure, normally a book of the self in the sense that one
person keeps it and not many, and in those cases it is also a revelation
of the self, in the sense that any action is, whether dealing cards or
tying shoes; but it certainly need not be centrally occupied with a
description of the self, or a narration of the self's activity. It may be a
book of court gossip, or remarkable providences, or gleanings from
other books, or notes on the weather.
But it must be a book of time; hence the deliberately and polemi-
cally cumbersome description of the form, and the final and perhaps
redundant qualification in the description of the function. The diary,
the journal, the Tagebuch, the ephemerides must be conceived as a
book of days and dates and intervals. Whatever functions a diary
serves, the writer of it chooses for them a form articulated by dates in
chronological order, and a mode of writing spaced over time.
What neighboring genres does this definition exclude? Obviously,
letter books, autobiographies, and diary fictions; less obviously but
more pointedly, the nearer neighbors of authors' notebooks; Cole-
ridge's and Hawthorne's, Lichtenberg's and Kafka's and Canetti's,
Simone Weil's and Antonio Gramsei's. This is often a felt distinction,
in that many authors, Lichtenberg and Von Platen and Kafka among
them, keep works of both sorts, evidently finding the distinction
necessary in their personal literary economy. More importantly, it is
a distinction corresponding to our practice, to what we actually do
when we read. Lacking even chronological succession, as we do in
Coleridge's notebooks, we have no sense of necessary order within
6. Compare Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976), p. 14: "aside from stating that some portions of the subject
matter must concern the identity of the author, I have placed no further restriction on
the subject matter, not even to stipulate whether autobiography must concern the
'inner' or the 'outer' man or devote more time to the delineation of the self than to
others. ... I believe that more delicate distinctions cannot be made without reference
to far less broad literary contexts."
PROLEGOMENA / 7
the text; nothing keeps us from shuffling the various items around,
since nothing holds them in place, and nothing authorizes our deep
inclination to read the text as a sequence." Lacking dating, we have
no sense of the text's necessary reference to the world outside it; an
undated sequence of entries is formally an event taking place exclu-
sively within the author's mind. A date ties a passage to history; in a
diary every entry can be compared with the world outside it, the date
of the entry indicating both a stage of the writer's life and a moment in
the history of the world, and authorizing us to compare what has been
written with what might have been written but was not.
"The sea-anemone," wrote Lichtenberg, "is half plant, half animal;

man is half body and half spirit: always you find the most extraordi-
nary creatures at the boundaries." In the world of the diary the am-
phibious creature is the diary edited for publication by its author.
Bruce Frederick Cummings seems to have invented the species; he
published in 1919 an edited version of much of his brilliant and
moving diary as Journal of a Disappointed Man, under the pseud-
onym Barbellion. In 1921, after his death, the diary he had kept since
the preparation of the earlier manuscript was published as Last Jour-
nal. Surely if as readers we permit ourselves to take account of infor-
mation about composition we cannot read the two texts in the same
way; both are composed of material written discontinuously, but the
first is also the product of the shaping of that material from a single
perspective. But as surely we do not want to exclude from a consider-
ation of the diary the many writers who have followed Cummings's
example, among them Andre Gide, Julien Green, and Max Frisch. 8
We can get out of this dilemma, I think, by associating diaries
edited for publication by their authors with diaries edited for publica-
tion by people other than their authors. When we speak of a diary, we
7. Hence, presumably, the questionable decision made by Kathleen Coburn to
print the entries of Coleridge's notebooks not in the order in which they appear but in
the closest approximation possible to the order in which they were written (The Note-
books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge [New "York: Pantheon, 1957-731, vol. 1: xx—xxi).
Compare Harald Fricke's argument that aphorism books arc characterized precisely
by the possibility they offer of interchanging two adjacent aphorisms without altering
the sense of either (Fricke, Aphorismus [Stuttgart: Metzger, 1984], p. 13).
8. Compare Frisch's "An den Leser": "the reader would do this book a great
service if, declining to leaf through it as mood and chance dictated, he were to attend to
its ordering sequence; the individual stones of a mosaic—and as such this book is at
least intended—can hardly bear the responsibility on their own" (Friseh, Tagebuch
1946-1949 [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 198] ], p. 7)
always mean, implicitly, the whole of it. 9 When we read an abridged

or altered version of a diary, as when we read an abridged or altered
version of any text, we are reading at the same time the work of the
writer and the work of the editor. The work of the editor is at once an
obscuring and an interpretation of the work of the writer. Normally,
we note principally the obscuring and try to read through it. Occasion-
ally, when the editor interests us, we note also the interpretation, as
in, say, Edmond Scherer's early edition of Amiel's diary, or Bliss
Perry's The Heart of Emerson's Journals. Now Max Frisch the editor
certainly interests us, and when we read Tagehuch 1946-1949, a
selection from the work of Max Frisch the diarist, we will attend to
the work of both diarist and editor. If, as in this case, we do not have
access to the whole of which this is a part, we will not be able to do
certain kinds of reading, just as we cannot do them with any of the
many interesting editions of Amiel. In the end Frisch by Frisch,
Green by Green, Gide by Gide are not essentially different than
Boswell by Pottle, Emerson by Perry, Pepys by Braybrooke, all
abridged and altered, but none the less clearly diaries for that, as
perfection is surely no proper definitional criterion, here or anywhere
else.
II
ALGERNON: Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to

look at it. May I?
CECILY: Oh no. You see, it is simply a very young girl's
record of her own thoughts and impressions, and conse-
quently meant for publication. When it appears in volume
form I hope you will order a copy.
OSCAR WILDK, The Importance of Being Earnest
Wilde's brilliance, perhaps, has obscured his good sense, and the
myth Cecily's mot is aimed at has remained powerful. Let us consider
it as manifested in Joel Porte's introduction to his excellent selection
from Emerson's journal: "[Emerson] attempted to inscribe his soul in
9. It follows that for certain purposes we cannot judge a diary till its author is dead,
since only then do we have a complete text. In this respect as in others a diary seems
not so much a literary work as a literary corpus.
PROLEGOMENA / 9
pages reserved for his eyes alone."10 This is demoiistrably false, and
the evidence falsifying it abundant. In 1819, Emerson concludes an
early volume of the journal by quoting "some remarks upon a few of
its pages from the kindness of one who was persuaded to read them";
the kind reader was Emerson's aunt Mary Moody Emerson, whose
journals Emerson read and remarked on in his turn. Bronson Alcott
was told of Emerson's journals in 1838 and shown them casually after
tea one April evening in 1839:
Dwight left towards evening. After tea we conversed on style, my
Conversations, the future. I looked over E's commonplace books.11
This was only fair play, since Emerson had read passages of Alcott's
journal in 1836.12 Margaret Fuller's journal records a more intimate
scene:
Waldo came into my room to read me what he has written in his journal
about marriage, & we had a long talk. He listens with a soft wistful look
to what I say, but is nowise convinced. It was late in a dark afternoon,
the fine light in that red room always so rich, cast a beautiful light upon
him, as he read and talked. Since I have found in his journal two sen-
tences that represent the two sides of his thought ... I shall write to
him about it.13
Now Porte knows all this—no expert reader of Emerson's journals
can be ignorant of it—yet he writes of a characterization of them that
denies his knowledge. Emerson himself wrote in the book he so
casually displayed that
every young person writes a journal into which when the hours of prayer
& penitence arrive he puts his soul. The pages which he has written in
the rapt moods are to him burning & fragrant. He reads them on his
knees by midnight & by the morning star he wets them. l4
10. Emerson in his Journals (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

1982), p. v.
11. Odell Shepard, ed., The Journals of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown,
1938), pp. 101 and 126.
12. William Gilman, et al., eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1960-
1982), 16 vols., V: 167-70. Subsequent citations will be identified in the text by JMN
plus the volume and page number.
13. Belle Gale Chevigny, Margaret Fuller: The Woman and the Myth (Old
VVestbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1976), pp. 129-30.
14. JMN VIII: 123-24. The passage is followed by a merciless account of what is
likely to happen when the young person finally resolves to show the cherished text to
his dearest friend; the friend responds casually, even coldly, because, after all, tho
writing is simply not very good.
Not even one's own practice, it seems, can help here. We should
begin by noting the myth of the diary as a secret text, since its hold
over us is very great.
In fact the notion that diaries are necessarily private is simply false.
If we wish to know whether a given diary was private, in the only
concrete sense of private—that is, read or not read by readers other
than the author—we have no choice but to find out. Having found
out, we can see a given diarist's habits of secrecy and revelation in the
context of a more general vision of the diarist or diaristic culture. New
England Transcendentalists, we see, passed their diaries around as
scholars pass around drafts of essays. New England Puritans who kept
diaries of spiritual experiences seem not to have passsed them around
to their contemporaries, but were used to reading them in the lives of
their ancestors, and were injoined to preserve them for the use of
their biographers and the edification of their descendants. Some dia-
rists of course neither read other diaries nor reveal their own, though
few, presumably, take the step necessary to keeping them private in
aeternum, that namely of destroying them. Thus Samuel Pepys kept
his diary in shorthand, sank certain erotic episodes still deeper into
obscurity by recording them in a macaronic mixture of Spanish with
English, French, Dutch, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and showed his
diary to no one. There, one would say, we have a secret diary—
indeed with a sort of split-level secrecy, dividing secrets from secrets
by the firmament of language.15 But then Pepys's best editors tell us
that
the care that Pepys took to ensure that the manuscript should seem
clean and shapely, together with his pride in it and his pains to ensure
its preservation in the library which he bequeathed for the use of future
scholars, must mean that he intended it to have some of the qualities of a
printed book . . . the volumes, after admission to his library, were kept
(like the rest of the books) in locked presses, but the title "Journal"
(discernible through the glazed doors) was printed on the spines, and
15. Pepys, Diary, Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds. (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1970-83), l:lxi.
Split-level secrecy is fairly common. Cotton Mather uses Latin to recount ecstatic
visions and episodes of his wife's madness, Michael Wigglesworth to discuss masturba-
tion; E. T. A. Hoffmann uses Greek characters and various pictorial signs for his
accounts of his beloved Kaetchen (Rosenwald, "Cotton Mather as Diarist," Prospects 8:
pp. 144 and 151; Wigglesworth, Diary, Edmund Morgan, ed. (Publications of the
Colonial Society of Massachusetts 35, 311-444, New York: Harper and Row, 1965);
Hoffmann in Hocke, Das Europaeische Tagebuch, pp. 681-87).
P R O L E G O M E N A / 11
the entries in his catalogues of 1693 and 1700 plainly recorded them
several times (as "My own Diary," "Diary—Mr. Pepys's," etc.) in the
longhand of an amanuensis. 16
The question of audience and distribution is then to be settled ad hoc,
not a fortiori, and the spectrum of behavior revealed by particular
investigation is if nothing else far more interesting than that posited
by the myth of necessary secrecy.
A solider distinction than that between secret and revealed is that

between manuscript and book, though this distinction too has to be
narrowed and qualified before it will do us much good. Before 1800
few daries were published qua diaries; many, however, were quoted
extensively in biographies, and diarists must have considered their
diaries to be, among other things, evidence and testimony. 17 But the
independent publication of Evelyn's diary won respectful reviews in
1818, that of Pepys's considerable popularity in 1825, and that of
Byron's (in Moore's Memoirs) European acclaim in 1830; by the
1830s, then, well-read diarists were surely considering the prospect
of posthumous independent publication and, thus, inevitably think-
ing of their diaries as books. Barbellion's 1919 coup gave precedent
for living diarists' entering the literary marketplace; over the course
of the century the precedent has become almost an obligation, as
diaries have followed autobiographies in becoming not so much books
published as intimate guides to famous men and women as books
published by men and women interested in becoming famous. 18
Moreover, the opposition between manuscript and book is too
crude; it presumes too wide a gap, too irreconcilable a difference. We
know too well, perhaps, the difference between what we write on a
scratch pad and the publications of a university press. Formerly, well-
to-do men used the printing press as we use a xerox machine; into the
gap between public and private creep, say, Samuel Sewall's numerous
broadsides, or the hundred privately printed copies of the Education
Henry Adams made to show his friends. But the practical distance
16. Pepys, Diary, 1: xlv and Ixxi.

17. Boerner, Tagebuch, p. 18, writes that Voltaire in the History of Louis XIV was
the first writer to use "contemporary journals for the illustration of historical context."
18. See Boerner, Tagebuch, pp. 51-59. Georges May, De L'Autobiographie (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), p. 32, notes the novelty of Michel Leiris's
having published his autobiography (L'Age d'homme) in 1946 at the age of 35: rather a
first book than a last.
between even the unambiguous manuscript and the unambiguous

book may not be very great. Let us suppose that over the course of his
life Emerson showed his journal to fifty people. Thoreau published A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in 1849. One thousand
copies were printed; two hundred ninety-four were sold. Where is the
great gulf fixed between the distribution of a manuscript and the publi-
cation of a coterie book? Thoreau's famous comment on his own dia-
ristic labors, "I was editor to a journal of no very wide circulation,"
takes on another meaning here. It reminds us not of the ironic differ-
ence between the journal that is a private diary and the journal that is a
published magazine but of the underlying similarity between them
that permits the joke: that both are texts, and both are distributed.
We must, then, set the diary within the local system of production
and distribution, and not outside it; but that is not to say that we
cannot within that system retain something of the concrete opposition
between manuscript and book. In a sense, the diary is a manuscript
riot accidentally but essentially; if we think of a manuscript as a text in
a fluid state, a diary is a manuscript by necessity. During the life of
the diarist, the diary remains unfinished and open; something can
always be added. Frisch publishes the past years of his diary, and we
may class that text along with the diaries of Emerson and Thoreau;
but we may also say that Frisch's diary is finally constituted only at
Frisch's death and is until then essentially and not willfully incom-
plete and fluid, a text still within its author's power—though of course
the same can be said of Leaves of Grass.
Appropriately, then, the diary is also a commodity within its au-
thor's power. Diarists distribute their texts to the readers they
choose, novelists to the readers who can afford the publisher's price;
diarists are craftsmen and novelists industrial workers; diarists are
Luddites in the age of the mechanical reproducibility of works of art.
It follows that diarists elect their audience,19 and we can if we like
speak of the diary as a text for the inner circle. But we will do well not
to press the metaphor too hard; if the audience of the diary is an inner
19. Hence our sense, when we read a diary, that we are overhearing a secret. This
sense results not from the nature of the material but from the conditions of distribution.
We are, of course, in some sense not the intended audience of Boswell's Life of
Johnson; but in publishing that work Boswell renounced any powerful claim that his
intended audience need be his actual audience. Writers of diaries make no such
renunciations, and their intentions regarding their audience can be realized in their
practice. A diarist's intended audience is thus a far more concrete entity than a novel-
ist's, and it is correspondingly clearer that we do not belong to it.
circle, the audience for a novel an outer circle, where as geometers

are we to locate the audience of a letter? Nor ought we to presume
that the audience of a particular diarist will realize some tendentious
notion of intimacy; rather we can learn something about intimacy in
its large sense by attending to what diaries tell us about it in its
narrow sense. What we can presume is that the diarist creates not
only a diary but an audience, and that we are bound to investigate
both creations, translating the distinctions between private and pub-
lic, intimate and distant, esoteric and exoteric, from the language of
myth to the language of history.
Ill
The child is sincere, and the man when he is alone, if he be

not a writer, but on the entrance of the second person hypoc-
risy begins. EMERSON
I fear one lies more to one's self than to any one else.
BYRON
Let us consider this passage from Michele Leleu's Les Journaux

intimes:
Emerson clearly attests his lack of emotion (inemotivite) in his own self-
description: "Ungenerous & selfish, cautious & cold, I yet wish to be
romantic. Have not sufficient feeling to speak a natural hearty welcome
to a friend or stranger . . . [this] is a true picture of a barren & desolate
soul."20
Leleu is interested in Emerson's character—she is in fact a char-
acterologist, and her book has the imprimatur of arch-characterologist
Rene Le Senne—and to describe it, or rather as a piece of evidence
regarding it, she confidently cites a passage of self-characterization
taken from his journal.
This is a risky thing to do. Emerson's early journals are best de-
scribed as deliberately unsystematic commonplace books, and as we
read them we are continually conscious of the literary quality of what
20. Leleu, Les Journaux intimes, p. 189.

is written there, in such passages of self-characterization no less than

in essays on the drama and on slavery. Behind the sentence Leleu
quotes lies the literary tradition of the character from Bishop Hall and
Samuel Butler to La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere; and knowing
this, we distrust her use of it. The interesting point, however, is that
Leleu, like Porte, knows all this; she has noted the propensity of
"phlegmatics" to use diaries as commonplace books on the page pre-
ceding the passage under discussion. It is not enough, then, to refute
the individual error; what we have here is not a naive reader caught in
a contradiction but an expert reader possessed by a myth. But though
the myth of the private diary can be refuted by an appeal to fact, the
myth of the veridical diary cannot be; it is founded irremovably be-
cause it is founded upon a void, founded not on an error of fact but on
truths we hold to be self-evident.
Accordingly, George Gusdorf s classic account of that belief begins
by identifying the powerful intuitions on which it rests.21 The first of
these is a belief about the self: that there exists within each of us a self
independent of our consciousness of it. The second is a belief about
perception: that the inward self is transparent to introspection. Set-
ting out from these two positions, diarists may well feel that if they
can only resist the contemptible temptation to dissemble, then the
truth will come of itself, the fixed and immanent self be gradually
revealed to candid introspection. This is Marie Bashkirtseff s confi-
dent account of the intoxicating prospect:
I am entirely sincere. If this hook isn't the exact, absolute, and strict
truth it has no reason for being. Not only do I always say what I think—
not for one instant have I ever dreamed of concealing what might seem
laughable or discreditable in me. Anyway, I think too well of myself to
want to censor me. So you may be certain, kind readers, that I shall
present myself in these pages in toto. (43-44)
Gusdorf s refutation of this position proceeds along two lines. First,
on grounds of principle: it simply cannot be the case that the self is
distinct from our analysis of it and prior to it. In particular, it cannot
be distinct from the very faculty and process of introspection in-
tended to reveal it: "as Comte remarked, the original sin of introspec-
21. Gusdorf, La Decouverte de soi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948),

pp. 26-88: "L'Attitude d'immanence," and especially pp. 69-77: "L'Echec du journal
intime." Subsequent quotations from the book will be identified by page number in the
text.
tion is that the seeing modifies the thing seen" (64). But our trust in
introspection and our belief in the independent existence of our in-
ward self are not analytical; they are intuitional and feel empirical.
Gusdorf s most striking refutation of them is accordingly through
testimony rather than through argument, in particular through testi-
mony offered by the diarists for whom that trust and that belief have
been central articles of faith.
Typically diarists follow two routes, which we may, following
Gusdorf, call objective and subjective. The objective diarist seeks for
the self in its daily manifestations: its actions, thoughts, and feelings.
This choice leads inevitably to several impassable obstacles. The
calendrical form comes to seem a distortion, forcing the diarist to
create numinous events for boring days. The calendar is in any case
too widely spaced a grid. So much slips through; a full account is
impossible. A book of hours rather than of days, perhaps? Or a diary
kept from minute to minute? "But no—the paper wouldn't have
enough room," writes Julien Green. "And then, how to retrace the
thread of thoughts so numerous and so rapid? As well try to retrace
the flight of a flock of sparrows" (48).22
But perhaps this impossible task is not necessary. Perhaps diarists
can find the self by attending only to what is genuinely important, by
responding not to the calendar but to the rhythms of their own lives,
by giving every event its proper treatment and amplitude. Perhaps,
but eventually this approach too meets impassable obstacles. The first
is the feeling, not specific to the moment but endemic to the enter-
prise, of having botched the job:
Is it possible to keep a journal that gives even an approximately
accurate idea of its author? I'm coming to doubt it. How am I to situate
myself every day at the viewpoint that will give the right perspective?
Necessarily we make frequent mistakes—give this matter an exagger-
ated importance, neglect another that will trouble us till death. We are
too close to the landscape to distinguish foreground from background;
we are in the middle of the landscape we want to paint, and our drawing
is incorrect. (Green apud Gusdorf 51)
The second is that within the idea of selection lurks an assumption
making nonsense of the entire enterprise. To select, to assess prop-
22. Later, Green finds the diarist's death sentence in Stevenson's essay on Whit-
man: "there are not words enough in all Shakespeare to express the merest fraction of a
man's experience in an hour" (Green, Journal 1928-1934 [Paris: Plon, 1938]), p. 87.
erly the importance of an event or situation, we must have a principle

of selection; that principle of selection can only be our sense, or
knowledge of our self; but it is that knowledge that we are seeking to
acquire, and we begin by presuming that we do not have it. "The
vicious circle," Gusdorf writes, "paralyzes the observer or vitiates the
observation" (51-52).
Subjective diarists look elsewhere: to the inward and abiding self,
stripped of all its accidents. They compose "the soliloquy of pure
being," (55) asking not "what have I done?" but "who am I?" The right
question, in the circumstances—but not, so posed, susceptible of an
appropriate answer. Henri-Frederic Amiel, who surely posed it most
often and most heroically, found, representatively and inevitably,
that it revealed not one self but a congregation: "you are legion,
parliament, anarchy; you are division" (58). Stripped of its accidents,
then, the self is like honey unrestrained by the cells of the honey-
comb, protean and formless. We are no better off than we were
before:
Our first investigation fell short of the self, at the level of event, of
calendar time. This time, on the other hand, it seems we have gone too
far; we have gone beyond the self, and it dissolves like smoke. (69)
Gusdorf s argument is devastating; but what exactly does it devas-

tate? It rejects certain techniques by which diarists claim to tell the
truth about themselves: self-portraiture, whether of the self in motion
or of the self at rest; introspection; most generally, description. It
leaves intact, however, our deep belief that diaries do, somehow,
reveal selves; indeed it furthers our investigation of that revelation by
so drastically narrowing it. It points us to the signs of behavior, not to
the truths of assertion; to the investigations of the reader, not to the
insights of the writer.
Let us consider Auden's brilliant comparison between Boswell and
Stendhal:
An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached
the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his
own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness
which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial high-
lights and dramatic shadows.
As an autobiographer, Boswell is almost alone in his honesty. "I deter-
mined, if the Cyprian Fury should seize me, to participate my amorous
flame with a genteel girl." Stendhal would never have dared write such a
sentence. He would have said to himself; "Phrases like Cyprian Fury and
amorous flame are cliches; I must put down in plain words exactly what I
mean." But he would have been wrong, for the Self thinks in cliches and
euphemisms, not in the style of the Code Napoleon.23
Like Gusdorf, but explicitly, Auden deflects our interest from the
thing stated to the statement. Boswell is not praised for accuracy—on
that count Stendhal would be the clear victor—but for "honesty," that
is, for not revising the words that come to his mind by the standards
of concreteness and precision, for giving his first thoughts rather than
his second—or rather, perhaps, his sixth rather than his seventh. And
though Auden seems, puzzlingly, to think Boswell's words are abso-
lutely unmediated rather than simply mediated less often, he is
surely right to consider autobiographical utterance as, above all—
utterance.
Let us consider the implications of that position. To do as Auden
has done requires us to attend not to the singular but to the habitual.
A single entry is like a single sonnet; it may be a single literary
gesture, aimed accurately at a reasonable and commonplace end,
revealing nothing of the gesturer but a reasonable and commonplace
desire and the power to achieve it. A sequence of entries will reveal
not only power but also character. More importantly and perhaps less
obviously, without Stendhal—that is, without a writer imaginably
comparable for this purpose to Boswell, imaginably doing approxi-
mately the same thing but doing it differently—the notion of Bos-
well's honesty is inaccessible to us; it exists only in contrast to Sten-
dhal's rational deceit. So Auden is right to create Stendhal's soliloquy,
because the point he is making about Boswell requires it.
But is there not in this particular contrast something disquietingly
arbitrary? If we are to accept Stendhal as a failure, we must believe
he might have been a success; and how, after all, could Stendhal
have been honest in Boswell's fashion? He shared a common nine-
teenth-century distaste for eighteenth-century abstraction and per-
sonification. And how could Boswell manage to be dishonest a la
Stendhal? He knew nothing of that distaste and shared with his
contemporaries a taste for what Stendhal and his contemporaries
disdained. How, then, can we know that the honesty Auden de-
scribes is distinctively Boswell's, the deceit distinctively Stendhal's?
23. Auden, "Hie et Ille," in The Dyer's Hand (New York: Random House, 1948),
pp. 96-97.
Is he not perhaps describing a contrast between genres, between

cultures, between centuries?
We cannot really know; but we can at least finesse the problem. We
can compare Boswell not with those diarists who make the comparison
most striking but with those allotted him by the accidents of place and
time, with his diaristic contemporaries and colleagues and country-
men. 24 We can look at his diary in light of the diaristie precepts he in
fact thought pertinent to it, notably Samuel Johnson's, 25 just as
graphologists studying a writer's hand insist on knowing the system by
which the writer was taught. We can also compare him with the diarists
he actually read, though here as almost everywhere the pattern of
influences radically differs from that linking artists in other genres with
one another, since novelists, say, read their major predecessors, while
diarists cannot—Pepys is in some obvious way Boswell's natural father,
but neither Boswell nor any other eighteenth-century diarist could
ever have read him.
We need, that is, Boswell's diaristic ancestors, colleagues, and
teachers if we are to know whether what Auden admires in Boswell is
Boswell's or his culture's—or, more precisely, to get a sense of the
mix in Boswell between tradition and the individual talent and to
learn something about the system of talents within which Boswell's
should be conceived. Like a phonetic element, a trait of style taken as
evidence of a trait of character has to be read as part of a language.
Or more generally: the diary's importance as testimony to character
lies in its status as a continuous record of comparable gestures. It is a
series of entries; qua entries, they are comparable, and what they
have in common constitutes a system of habits, a modus operandi.
The modus operandi is instructively like handwriting. Like handwrit-
ing it expresses rather than describes the writer; like handwriting it
can reliably distinguish one individual from another; and like hand-
writing it can be read as evidence not only of identity but also of
character, by a reader knowing the conventions within which the
writer operates.
But of course making a diary offers more expressive room than does
writing a word. For one thing, the one includes the other,—and that
24. See as examples of this sort of practice Rosenwald, "Cotton Mather as Diarist,"
and Fothergill's comparison of Boswell with Dudley Kyder and William Windham
(Private Chronicles [London: Oxford University Press, 1974], pp. 128-51: "Ego and
Ideal").
25. Fothergill, Private Chronicles, pp. 25.
physical fact may remind us, in considering a diarist's modus ope-

randi, to take into account not only the words but also their incarna-
tion and format: the sort of book a diarist buys or makes to write in,
and what it costs; how a volume of the diary is presented qua volume,
what span of time it characteristically includes, whether it is given a
formal beginning or ending; whether the text is immaculate or scrib-
bled over with revisions; whether the page is exploited as a unit of
organization; where dates are placed relative to the entries they gov-
ern; what non-verbal marks accompany the words.26
And the transcribed words themselves? We will want to identify
norms and exceptions at every level of organization. We will want to
note such matters as how long the average entry is, and how fre-
quently and regularly entries are made; which subjects are treated at
length, which in passing, which not at all; how entries are organized,
whether by order of association or order of occurrence or order of
exposition; what use is made of first- and second-person pronouns;
which areas of the entry are habitual and which free—Pepys's marve-
lous improvisation so often tapers comfortably off into the formulaic
"and so to bed"; how sentences are punctuated and words capitalized.
As we identify each pattern we will be able to identify the anomalies
clustered around it and ideally we will conclude this part of our study
with a description not of habits only but of habits and singularities,
habits and epiphanies. Gertrude Stein gives the best account of the
process:
I then began again to think about the bottom nature in people, I
began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the
same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over
again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it
rise and fall and tell all that that there was inside them, not so much by
the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of
their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different. 27
But there is of course a further step. The diarist's modus operandi
can be—must be—described as static, but the diary is kept in time.
26. In an early volume of Emerson's journal, an exhortation to diligence concludes,

verbally: "Cast off your burden of apologies and compliances which retard your steps,
and flee after them lest they reach your Lord and enter in before you and the door be
shut.-" But the dash, the editors tell us, "has been extended into an open-mouthed
snake's head with sharp fangs" (JMN II: 113).
27. Stein, "The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans," in Carl Van Vechtcn,
ed., Selected Writings of (Gertrude Stein (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 243.
Having described the modus operandi as it first becomes recognizable

for us, we then must note how it changes-—and at every level of organi-
zation, for it is as true from the diachronic perspective as from the
synchronic that a set of habits is a way of being, and even the slightest
modification registers a considerable tremor. Cotton Mather, some
years after his wife's death from illness and the "miscarriage" of his
"particular faith" that she would recover, gives up keeping a selective
diary oriented precisely to the recording of such prophetic intuition
and begins to keep an exhaustive diary of resolutions for good deeds—
gives up, that is, both the experience that had misled him and the form
oriented to its presentation, for an experience and form humbler in
ambition and more manageable in execution. Some diaries of course
retain their initial habits to the end, among them Pepys's; but that
marvelous stability is itself testimony. The result is the same. A study
of the modus operandi in stasis reveals the shape of a character, a study
of it in motion the contours of a life.
All this may seem a timid refusal of a reliable access to obvious
truth, and we may long for Leleu's unselfconscious assurance. But the
longest way round is the shortest way home. We may justify our
circumspection theoretically, by reference, say, to Austin's How To
Do Things With Words:
Once we realize that what we have to study is not the sentenee but
the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation, there can hardly be any
longer a possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act.28
But we may also justify it, and more powerfully, on the grounds of our
common experience, as poker players, used car buyers, jury members,
friends, and lovers. Stating is indeed "performing an act," whether by
"act" we mean action or simulation. We need not accept our friends'
sincerest self-assessments as truth; on the other hand, we know how
our coolest antagonists' most adroit deception can reveal their inward
parts and how much we give away of ourselves in our best attempts at
concealment. The art of reading diaries as revelations of selves is the art
we bring to making sense of other people in daily life. 29
28. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 138.
29. Philippe Lejcune notes of autobiography that in it relerential accuracy "is not
critically important. It is essential in autobiography that the referential contract be
made, and that it be kept; but ... it may, by the reader's criteria, be kept badly
without the text's diminishing thereby in referential value" (Le Pacte autobiograph-
ique, pp. 36-37).
IV
I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that
[my diary] had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as
such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent
enough to reflect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil
composed with the aloofness of a work of art.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, April 20, 1919
We now come to the question of the diary's art and immediately

encounter the myth of the diary's artlessness. This myth like the
others is entangled in our intellectual practice; like them it can be
analyzed into its component tenets, and these scrutinized and im-
proved or replaced.
What exactly might "artlessness" mean? First, and most precisely,
it might mean the quality of a quickly and casually produced first
draft; it would be predicated of diaries in the belief that they are in
fact quickly and casually produced, and if so used would lead to
nothing worse than a harmless half-truth. It is probably true that on
the average diaries are less extensively reworked than are most classic
works of art, and in particular true that many writers diaries, such as
Scott's, and Byron's, are less extensively reworked than their poems
and novels. But though some diarists do not revise their entries, some
do; and they are no less diarists for that. Pepys's diary gives an extraor-
dinary impression of spontaneity and immediacy, and we count this
accomplishment a natural consequence of quick writing on recent
events; but Pepys is with the revisers. The text we call his diary was
surely not his first draft, and may on occasion have been his fifth; the
entries composing his vivid account of the Fire of London were pol-
ished to a single narrative in a single process of composition, several
weeks after the fire was over. Boswell took similar pains with his
celebrated account of the seduction of Louisa; Emerson rewrote the
journal of his travels in Italy while sitting in a ship bound for Boston.
To this spectrum of behavior the notion of the casually produced diary
is a very imperfect guide.
More often, however, "artlessness" is used to distinguish not be-
tween degrees of finish but between inexorably opposed and sun-
dered antitheses: between "art" and "nature," that is, between a
well-wrought urn and some mode of spontaneous utterance wholly
unshaped by convention. The convenience and power of the opposi-
tion win over even the expert; thus William Matthews, whose bril-
liant edition of Pepys's diary is one source of the argument in the
previous paragraph, writes that
it is our habit when reading diaries to regard them as products of nature
rather than of art. And in most cases the preconception is valid. Diaries en
masse might well be regarded as natural products, and their commonly
lumpish matters and styles witness the artlessness of their writers.30
To assert that journal accounts are governed only by the uncontami-
nated expressive impulses of the writer is false because it is impossi-
ble. All our utterances are mediated through our sophisticated or
imperfect sense of some public, externally given form: refusing an
invitation, summarizing a newspaper story, alluding to a sexual con-
quest. If "artlessness" means absolute freedom from convention it
describes nothing. The things it is predicated of exhibit not "artless-
ness" but artistic incompetence, and the majority of diaries, like the
majority of novels, bore the reader not because they are the products
of nature but because they are the products of bad art.
How then can we describe the diarist's art? First, by acknowledg-
ing that it is in fact two arts: the art of the entry and the art of the diary
as a whole.
Describing the art of the entry presents no theoretical problem,
only a practical one: our general ignorance regarding the small forms
of literature. Our sense of literary writing is macroscopic; it is more
attentive to large forms than to small, the forms of lyric poetry ex-
cepted. We know little about the small discursive forms: the apho-
rism, the apothegm, the proverb, the bon mot, the Spruch, the
sententia, the maxim, the reflection. We know little about the small
narrative forms, the many varieties of anecdote. We know little about
the small meditative forms. We know still less about the various forms
to which a study of the entry impels us but for which we have no
convenient names: the numerous varieties of ecphrasis, of edifying
quotation, of vignette.31
What might we gain if we did know? Let us briefly consider the
30. Pepys, Diary, I: cxi.
31. Some exceptions: on the whole subject, Andre Jolles, Einfacke Formen (Halle:
Niemeyer, 1930), also the discussion of Jolles in Ducrot and Todorov, Dictionnaire
encyclopedique, pp. 200-201; on the aphorism see Gerhard Neumann, cd., DerApho-
rismus (Darmstadt: Wisscnschaftlichc Buchgesellschaft, 1976; Wege der Forschung
356) and Fricke, Aphorismus; on the anecdote see Heinz Grothe, Anekdote (Stuttgart:
Mctzger, 1984); on the meditation see Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1954).
great Puritan diarist Samuel Sewall. Sewall's best entries are clearly
anecdotes rather than devotions, but "anecdotes" is only a rough
description of them. To define their particular quality we would look
at their available analogues: the anecdotal material in diaries like
Sewall's, in almanacs and newspapers, in court records and on grave-
stones, in histories like Cotton Mather's Magnolia Christi Americana
and records of strange happenings like Increase Mather's Essay for
the Recording of Illustrious Providences. We would learn from this
investigation that a Puritan anecdote is characteristically oriented
toward an edifying punch line. Sewall's, however, are not, are more
theatrical, because they present not one speaker in authority but two
in conflict; that characterization would help us to make sense of the
innovative and generous air of the debates he records between him-
self as suitor and the demurring ladies he courted.32
Describing the art of the diary as a whole presents both a practical
problem and a theoretical one. The practical problem is similar to that
just discussed: an ignorance of many of the neighboring forms. The
large forms most similar to diaries are not only novels and autobiogra-
phies but also those forms which, like the diary, are large forms built
of small: commonplace books, letter books, books of table talk, apho-
rism books, collections of jokes.33
The theoretical problem is more difficult. We have learned in the
last century to see autobiography as a literary genre by attending not
to the intractable givens of the author's life but to the plastic power of
the author's word. Let authors order their lives into a single narrative,
regard them from a single perspective, and we can read the narratives
as art. But diarists write from as many perspectives as they make
entries, and though they control each entry, it seems clear that they
do not control the lifelong sequence of them. From a single perspec-
tive a writer can make a beginning and an ending: two-thirds of any
literary form. But diarists cannot, or at least generally do not. Some-
times they produce a beginning, a deliberately initiatory entry; some-
times they do not, letting their diaries grow imperceptibly from
scraps of paper or datebooks. Some make an ending: Cesare Pavese
and Benjamin Haydon, who were about to commit suicide, and
Pepys, who feared he was going blind. But most just stop—through
32. See further on this my "Sewall's Diary and the Margins of Puritan Literature,"
American Literature 58: 3, October 1986, pp. 325-41.
33. Two exceptions: on books of table talk see F. P. Wilson, "Table-Talk," Hunting-
ton Library Quarterly 4: 1940, pp. 27-46; on commonplace books see Ruth Mohl, John
Milton and his Commonplace Book (New York: Ungar, 1969), pp. 11-30.
death, through loss of interest, through change of character or circum-

stances, through weakness—and Barbellion's gloomy prayer is most
often offered in vain:
Day after day I sit in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my
own history proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right
moment lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax. 34
Such seems to me a fair account of the strongest argument against
seeing the diary as a work of literature. It rests on two beliefs: that
diaries as wholes are in some way the work of chance rather than
design, and that works of chance are not works ol art. Let us consider
both in turn.
To consider the first we shall have to look at diarists' actual behav-
ior as readers and shapers of their texts. We find, as by now we may
expect to find, that is distributed evenly along a wide spectrum. Some
diarists, like Virginia Woolf, are at moments attentive readers of the
whole of their past diaristic creation and shape their future diaries in
response to the patterns that their reading has revealed.
I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing,
with a kind of guilty intensity. . . . there looms ahead of me the shadow
of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. ... What sort of
diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly,
so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that
comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or
capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without
looking them through. . . . The main requisite, I think on re-reading
my old volumes, is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the
mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I
went for things put in haphazard, & found the significance to lie where I
never saw it at the time. But looseness quickly becomes slovenly. A
little effort is needed to face a character or an incident which needs to be
recorded. Nor can one let the pen write without guidance; for fear of
becoming slack & untidy.35
Some, like Emerson and Thoreau, draw extensively on their journals
for the material of lectures and books; they are assiduous readers of
their texts, but seern conscious of them more as aggregates than as
34. Apud Fothergill, Private Chronicles, p. 169. Hence the practical and reason-
able distinction between a journal and a diary: a journal, for example Montaigne's
Journal de voyage en Italic, can have an ending because it is about a terminable and
foreseeably terminable action; a diary cannot, because it is about a life.
35. Anne Olivier Bell, ed., The Diary of Virginia Woolf (New York-. Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1977- ), 1: 266 (April 20, 19J9).
wholes. Some, like Scott, as they write one entry see only the entry
they wrote the day before, and respond to local juxtapositions but not
to large patterns. Some, like Pepys, seem seldom to look back at all;36
and some, like Byron, swear not to.
This journal is a relief. When I am tired—as I generally am—out comes
this, and down goes everything. But I can't read it over; and God knows
what contradictions it may contain.'37
We cannot then presume that diaries as wholes are composed at

random; diarists' relations to their diaries present a wide spectrum of
varying degrees of control and awareness, and in studying any individ-
ual diarist we will need to ascertain where in that spectrum the diarist is
to be found. But the spectrum is bounded. Diarists do not rewrite the
entries of the distant past, nor can they predict even the immediate
future, cannot foresee the deaths and wars and illnesses and matura-
tions by which their lives and diaries will be modified. Each day they
have a new chance at writing the perfect entry, the one exact culmina-
tion of all its predecessors; but their memories of those predecessors
are inevitably faulty, their readings of them inevitably sporadic—what
diarist could keep faithful watch over a constantly growing accumula-
tion of many thousands of pages?38
How then do we read a diary as a whole? First, of course, we can
read the diary as we read any author's collected works; everything
said of the diary in the previous paragraph can be said of any litez'ary
corpus. But can we read a diary as a single literary work? We can, I
think if we look briefly at the unexamined opposite; what do we mean
by determinacy? Not, surely, that every word on the literary page is
the optimal product of concluded deliberation; as Valery has told us,
poems are not finished, only abandoned. But it is over the words on
the page that the author's control is surest. Over the field of literary
36. This is probably characteristic of diarists who write in shorthand, which facili-
tates recording but encumbers reading—that, as much as its secrecy, is its distinguish-
ing trait as a notation.
37. Apud Fothergill, Private Chronicle!,, p. 57.
38. No study of the diary comments in literary terms on the fact that so many of the
classic texts are so long (though for some disgruntled, insightfully practical comments
see Alain Girard, "Le journal intime, un nouvcau genre litteraire?" in Cahiers de
['Association Internationale des Etudes Francaises 17: 105). Pepys's diary in its most
complete edition fills nine volumes, Thoreau's fourteen, Emerson's sixteen; Amiel's,
which has never been published in its entirety, totals some fifteen thousand pages. Foe
rejected from literary consideration any text not susceptible of being read in a single
sitting; what are we to make of a text not susceptible of being read in a single year? In
this respect too the literary diary seems similar not to a literary work but to a literary
corpus.
possibility that precedes them it is clearly less so. An inkblot falls onto
Rossini's manuscript page and suggests an arresting modulation. All
poetry, we are told, is occasional, and all occasions contingent. The
length of the book, its subject, the treatment of its subject, are af-
fected by publishers' individual desires, by the taste of the public, by
the rate of pay. The language itself is given, not elected. What follows
the inscribing of words verges on anarchy. The typeface is what the
printer has in stock; the line breaks and page breaks, the configura-
tion of a page generally, are the product of chance. Critics are swayed
by literary politics, readers by private fantasies. Operas are mediated
through singers independent of composers, plays by actors indepen-
dent of playwrights. The language itself will change, in part precisely
in consequence of the work that its changes will alter. John Cage's
Imaginary Landscape no. 4, a piece composed of what is played
during a fixed period of time by twelve radios, each with one per-
former twirling its tuning-knob and one adjusting its volume, seems
in this context not an aberration but a norm, and diaries in this
context evidently vary from other artworks in degree rather than in
kind, with diarists indeed retaining control over certain aspects of the
transaction between writer and reader that novelists surrender.
The particular quantum of diaristic indeterminacy is not then a
warning not to read diaries as literature but a hint about how to do it
more intelligently. To read a diary we will want to find the local
language for the play of chance and control. In the twentieth century,
we may want John Cage's language:
Observing the effects of the ego on my earlier works, I tried to
remove it, by the use of chance techniques, in my later works. We
discipline the ego because it alone stands between us and experience. I
wanted to let the environment—or experience—into my music. . . .
[My aim was] to make a musical composition the continuity of which
[was] free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the
literature and "traditions" of the art. . . .
What is the purpose of writing music? ... an affirmation of life—not
an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in
creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living,
which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of
its way and lets it act of its own accord.39
39. Cage in R. C. Clark, "Total Control and Chance in Musies: A Philosophical

Analysis, "Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28: 357; Cage, Silence (Middletown,
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), pp. 12 and 59.
We may, that is, want to distinguish invidiously between things as we

order them and things as they are.40 For the Romantics, we will want
to think of Goethe's experiments in automatic writing and the image
of the Aeolian harp, and of Eckermann's justification of the contradic-
tory opinions reported in his Conversations with Goethe on the
ground of a notion of wholeness. For Emerson and Nietzsche we will
need the language of character and will: Nietzsche's remark that "if
someone has a character, he will also have a set of experiences happen-
ing again and again," Emerson's that "the reason of the event is always
latent in the life." For the Puritans we will need the notion that a life
is not so much the work of human will as God's plot, or Pascal's
remark that "every author has a meaning to which all his contradic-
tory passages constitute a harmony or he has not meaning at all." All
the various languages for the opposition between the self and the not-
self can help us in reading the diary that is the product of both.
What are the results of these polemical investigations? We can state

them most clearly as a series of topics to be considered in the study of
individual diarists: how the text was made, how and to whom it was
distributed, how and from whom kept secret; how these practices fit
within the larger patterns of production and distribution and secrecy
characterizing the diarist's culture; the diarist's modus operandi; how
the modus operandi fits within the diaristic context, that is, the dia-
rists the diarist actually read, the local precepts regarding diary keep-
ing, the diaries kept by the diarist's diaristic colleagues; how the
modus operandi fits within the literary context, that is, the literary
40. See also Clark, "Total Control and Chance in Musics," and Leonard Meyer,
"The End of the Renaissance," in Music, The Arts, and Ideas (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 68-84. Meyer calls Cage's sort of art "anti-teleological,"
meaning that it reflects not only a belief regarding the selfs relation to the not-self but
also a belief about the world comprising both: that it is a world of events and not of
causal sequences. From that belief, he continues, we come quickly enough to a distrust
of ordered sequence, not, as in Cage's account, because we distrust the orderer, but
now because we distrust the sequence, with its suggestions of necessity, of determinate-
ness, of one auditory event's seeming to cause or be caused by another. Cage's account
is essentially psychological, and describes the condition of mind consonant with an
interest in aleatoric music; Meyer's is essentially philosophical, and supplements
Cage's by making good sense of the forms which that state of mind will yield, in
particular its predilection for indistinct beginnings and inconclusive endings.
system of the diarist's culture; the evolution of the modus operandi

over time, and the relationship of that evolution to the shape of a life;
the aesthetic relationship between the entry, which the diarist con-
trols, and the diary as a whole, which is at least partly the work of
chance; the place of that relationship within the larger patterns of the
culture, notably the local language for the play of control and chance
that every diary considered necessarily permits us to witness and to
experience. The following series of essays is an exploration of those
topics in connection with the extraordinary journals of Ralph Waldo
Emerson.
II
From Commonplace Book
to Journal
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred
tacks.
"Self-Reliance"
Although temperamentally given to epiphanies, Emerson found his

diaristic form by fits and starts. Accordingly, the present account of
that process follows a zigzag line. The first and longest section gives
an account of the beginning and ending of the Wideworld series,
comprising the first thirteen volumes of the journal; it describes the
form of those volumes as a product of the normative model of the
commonplace book expounded by John Locke and the subversive
influence of the spiritual journal kept by Mary Moody Emerson, and
presents Emerson's altering of that form as a denial, not of the influ-
ence, but of the normative authority, of the Lockean model. The
second section narrates two brief episodes of diaristic apostasy: the
atrophy of the journal during Emerson's ministry, and its metamor-
phosis into a travel book during his first trip to Europe. It presents
these episodes as a story of how in the absence of the Lockean author-
ity Emerson yielded to certain temptations leading him astray from
the development of a genuinely Emersonian journal, suggesting at
the same time that precisely this yielding to temptation made possi-
ble Emerson's conscious achievement, just after his return from Eu-
rope, of the form he had just been straying from. The last section
presents the first of Emerson's mature journals as a form by which the
conflicting influences bearing on the journal are consciously harmo-
nized; it pays particular attention to Emerson's development of a new
29
system of indexing, taking this as a formal development necessary to

Emerson's writing of a journal harmonizing such diverse influences
and also expressive of Emerson's consciousness that such was the
journal he was now and henceforth to keep.'
Authority and Rebellion
At the beginning of Wideworld 1, the first volume of Emerson's

journal, we find a declaration of genre:
these pages are intended at this their commencement . . . for all the
various purposes & utility real or imaginary which are usually compre-
hended under that comprehensive title Common Place book. (JMN I:
3-4)
At the end of Wideworld I, we find an indication of sub-genre: an
index of the topics the volume covers arranged according to the par-
ticular method of keeping a commonplace book devised by John
Locke. We know that Emerson's elder brother Edward had a copy of
Locke's method. We may then posit Locke's method as a model for
Emerson's enterprise. 2
No literary historian could ask for an apter or more suggestive
model; a general rebellion against Locke was of course one of the
creative movements by which New England Transcendentalism came
into being,3 and as we see Emerson choose Locke as his diaristic
authority, we inevitably and to some extent rightly feel that we can
already define Emerson's career as a diarist as a rebellion against the
model he begins with. But even literary rebellions borrow much of
1. On the early journals see Ralph LaRosa, "Emerson's Search for Literary Form:
The Early Journals" (Modern Philology 69:25—35), which despite its title concerns not
the form of the journals hut the form of the sentences they contain, and also Evelyn
Barish Grcensberger, "The Phoenix on the Wall: Consciousness in Emerson's Early
and Late Journals" (American Transcendental Quarterly 21: 45-56).
2. "Posit," because though Wideworld I was written in 1820, Edward's copy of
Locke's method not published until 1821. The JMN editors propose two hypotheses:
that Emerson had access to an earlier edition of the method, or that he added the index
in 1821. Neither hypothesis diminishes the heuristic value of positing Locke's method
as Emerson's model, though the latter forbids us to take it as his point ol origin. The
method was in any case in the air; my colleague David Eerry called my attention to
Boswell's casual mention of Johnson's use of it for the Rambler (Boswell, Life of
Johnson [New York: Modern Library, 1931], pp. 118-21).
3. See on this Cameron Thompson, "John Locke and New England Transcendental-
ism" (New England Quarterly 35: 1962, 435-57).
F R O M C O M M O N P L A C E BOOK TO J O U R N A L / 31
what they rebel against; and as we watch Emerson turn gradually

away from the method Locke instituted, it will be good for us to keep
in mind that the great Transcendentalist was only the great Empiri-
cist's antagonist after being his disciple.
Locke's method describes both a particular sort of commonplace
book and the program of activity necessary to produce it. The first
step of the program is the drawing up of an index page; this comprises
one hundred boxes in all, with each of twenty initial letters being
allotted five boxes, and each of the five vowels by which the initial
letters may be followed being allotted one box of the five. Then,
having prepared the index page, the commonplacer sits down to read.
When he comes across a passage worth transcribing, he makes a note
of it. Later, his stint of reading done, he turns to the first pair of
empty facing pages in the commonplace book, transcribes the pas-
sage, assigns it a subject heading, and enters the subject and page
number in the appropriate slot on the index page. If, that is, he has
filled pages two and three with material relating to miracles, pages
four and five with material relating to skepticism, and then comes
across more material on miracles, he enters it on page six, indicates
the new page number under the old subject heading, and adds at the
end of the earlier entry a note indicating the location of the later.
What are the implications of this method? Practical experience of it
will teach us to feel the pressure imposed by the necessity of devising a
subject heading for a passage directly upon entering it. Locke's
method, that is, requires rapid classification; it implies that category
inheres visibly in the passage itself, not in the use a writer may later
make of it. Clearly, Locke's commonplacer lives in a world of sharply
and evidently differentiated topics, and of passages clearly and inevita-
bly belonging to them; nowhere does the method allow for the diffi-
culty we may feel in assigning a passage to a topic, or for our pleasure in
finding a passage belonging to several topics at once. Topics are imme-
diately available and inherently appropriate for the passages we come
across, pressing themselves on our passive notice much as do the sen-
sory data of experience themselves in the Lockean episternology.
But the real genius of Locke's method is its elimination of the
circumstantial. Let us imagine an actual reading session. It is, say,
Thanksgiving Day, cold and blustery; I am sick in bed, reading desul-
torily, and find myself skipping from C. S. Lewis's defense of miracles
to Samuel Johnson's celebrated comparison of Pope with Dryden to a
newspaper report of a murder. Perhaps my interest in this last pas-
sage has something to do with my experience of the previous pas-

sages, or with the weather, or with my state of health, or with the
holiday on which I am reading. Perhaps, moreover, we may think it of
some importance to see our choice of passages as reflecting who we
are, where we find ourselves in a sequence of events, in a historical
context. Locke clearly does not; his method cleverly and efficiently
removes the detritus of historical or personal context clinging to the
passages we dredge up and leaves them bright, clean, and isolated,
isolated not only from us who found them, from the context in which
they emerged as interesting, but also from one another—for never,
never in a Lockean commonplace book will a fait divers face a justifica-
tion of miracles. Entries are first purified of the circumstances of their
discovery and then placed on a page in isolation, incapable of generat-
ing the serendipitous interest of accidental juxtaposition.
This is of course only as it should be: what better way to prevent
that association of ideas that Locke identified as the great source of
error? But there is another justification also. We imagine the seren-
dipitous interest of accidental juxtaposition as a charm offered by a
book to a reader; but Locke's commonplace book is not a book for a
reader but an instrument for a writer. For why, after all, are we
keeping a commonplace book in the first place? Primarily, it turns
out, so that we can make use of it for public argument and public
advancement:
In all sorts of Learning . . . the Memory is the Treasury or Store-
house, but the Judgment the Disposer, which ranges in order whatever
it hath drawn from the Memory. . . . For it would be to little Purpose to
spend our Time in Reading of Books, if we could not apply what we read
to our Use. . . .
[These details of method] it's likely may seem Minute and Trivial, but
without 'em great Things cannot subsist, and these being neglected
cause very great Confusion both of Memory and Judgment, and that
which above all Things is most to be valued, Loss of Time.
Some who otherwise were Men of most extraordinary Parts, by the
Neglect of these things have committed great Errors, which if they had
been so happy as to have avoided, they would have been much more
serviceable to the Learned World, and so consequently to Mankind. 4
This is the argument of Jean Leclerc in the epistle introducing
Locke's method. It evokes Benjamin Franklin; but it also bears an
4. From John Lock [sic], A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (London:
]. Greenwood, 1706), pp. i-ii and v.
F R O M C O M M O N P L A C E B O O K TO J O U R N A L / 33
uncanny resemblance to Reader's Digest exhortations to "increase your

word-power," which are directed not to the delights of language but to
the attainment of an executive vice-presidency, and it makes clear that
Locke's method of keeping a commonplace book is among other things
an instrument for success. It is intended not to cultivate reading but to
govern it; it implies that reading, unless directed to "the Learned
World, and so consequently to Mankind," is a dissipation and a tempta-
tion. Pure reading, desultory reading are made by it to seem a little
sinful, and the faculty of memory, with its jumbled richness of impres-
sions, is placed by it under the strict control of the judgment.
In many ways, Emerson does surprisingly well as a Lockean com-
monplacer. Each volume is dedicated to a topic. Locke had suggested
keeping one commonplace book for moral philosophy, one for natural
philosophy, one for "the Science, or Knowledge of Signs";5 Emerson's
early volumes seem an attempt to go Locke one better. The figures
made much of in the early journals include such local images of public
success as Webster and Channing and Everett. The topics made
much of include "Greatness," "Pulpit Eloquence," "Fame," and "Im-
provement." Much of the other material suggests a similar concern by
its style. It falls chiefly into two categories: justifications of Christian
doctrine and essays in the style of the quarterlies. The first are evi-
dently intended for the use of Emerson the minister; they articulate
and defend comfortable doctrines. Of the essays something more
should be said, because when we think of Emerson the essayist we
think of the tradition running from Montaigne and Bacon through the
English Romantics to Emerson's own two collections in the 1840s—
that is, we think of a form one of whose charms is the impression it
gives of a private voice speaking in public, of the spontaneous and
idiosyncratic movement of thought that the Lockean commonplace
book is intended to tame and discipline. But the essayistic portions of
the early journals are not at all in that tradition; they evoke the
Spectator, and more immediately the Monthly Anthology and the
North American Review and their English and Scottish models, all of
which Emerson read and celebrated.6 They are, that is, arguments
5. Ibid., p. 10.
6. "You like the Edinburgh Reviews; by only reading one solid dissertation there,
where the finest ideas are ornamented with the utmost polish and refinement of
language you will feel some enthusiasm to turn your own steps into a new path of the
field of belles lettres—" (Ralph L. Rusk, ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson
[New York: Columbia University Press, 1939; henceforth abbreviated as L], 6 vols.,
vol. I, p. 61).
laying down the law, in which an expert speaks to a public seeking

either to be informed about subjects of which it is ignorant or in-
structed about issues concerning which it is in doubt.
In all these aspects the journals seem the ample storeroom of an
edifying public speaker. A storeroom, however is arranged by cate-
gory; Emerson's journals are arranged by time. And with the chrono-
logical ordering of dated entries returns all that Locke had so effi-
ciently banished. Every apergu, every extract, every passage that
for Locke is a thing becomes for Emerson an event. Locke's sample
commonplace book has a passage on the Ebionites, and that passage
is simply raw material, classified for future use. Emerson's journal
has an entry on slavery and then an entry on the Greeks, and those
entries are events in a story set in time. Or, more precisely, they
are actions; the temporal context they imply is not the calendar but
their author's life, and the story they occur in is their author's story.
Moreover, the juxtapositions Locke had so adroitly prevented are
here made inevitable. Emerson writes first about slavery, later
about divine omniscience, and in writing creates a page on which
the two accounts of authority and submissiveness inevitably collide.
The Lockean commonplace book portrays inexorably sundered cate-
gories, the Emersonian journal indissolubly linked facets. The
Lockean commonplace book is a piece of work done by the writer,
distinguishing one category from another; the Emersonian journal
evokes the possibility of work to be done by the reader, the work of
understanding that categories are initially distinguished only that
they may ultimately efface before a perception of unity. "The whole
fascination of life for Emerson," writes O. W. Firkins, "lay in the
disclosure of identity in variety, that is, in the concurrence, the
running together, of several distinct images or ideas."7 The Lockean
commonplace book inhibits that fascination, the Emerson common-
place book stimulates it.
To what force can we attribute Emerson's resistance to the Lockean
model? The journal itself will suggest an answer. Its name and its
7. Firkins, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), p. 237: appo-
sitely cited in Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1973), p. 156.
The quotation book "Universe," the "Catalogue—of Books read from the date De-
cember 1819," and the College Theme Book, all eontemporary with Wideworld 1, also
are dated and arranged chronologically. They are in consequence pretty much unus-
able; what would Emerson do to find a particular quotation or book? So the preference
for chronological order is stronger, at least in this case, than the preference for utility.
structure are derived from Locke; but its most prominent character is
Emerson's remarkable aunt Mary Moody Emerson. It is she who is
represented most often and at greatest length in her own words. She
read his journals and he hers, each commenting on the other's in their
correspondence. It is letters to and from her that the journal records,
which is otherwise no letter book.8 The JMN editors have chosen to
exclude such of these as have been printed elsewhere, either in the
earlier edition of the journal or in Rusk's edition of the letters. It is
hard to fault a sixteen-volume edition for its exclusions, but these
exclusions conceal the nature of Emerson's enterprise: Emerson was
creating a book, one of the components of which was an excerpted
version of his correspondence with his aunt, the genius loci of the
Emersonian journal. 9
Now Mary Moody Emerson's influence on Emerson's general intel-
lectual development is no secret; every biographer takes cognizance
of it, and in particular the influence of the aunt's journal on the
nephew's general intellectual development has been intelligently ex-
plored by Phyllis Cole.10 But as we deny that Emerson's writings live
by their form, we have not as yet considered the obvious formal
questions that relationship evokes. Mary Moody Emerson was the
one strong diarist pertinent to Emerson's early diaristic develop-
ment. 11 What sort of journal did she keep, and what would her gifted
nephew have learned from it about the enterprise he was engaged
upon?
8. In L I: 96, Rusk notes the difficulty of deciding whether a particular passage of
Emerson's prose is "from a letter [to Mary Moody Emerson] or from a scrap of Emer-
son's journals."
9. The editors note that in Blotting Book Y "a further sheet, containing a letter to
Mary Moody Emerson, was tipped with red sealing wax onto the left margin of the
page numbered 5" (JMN III: 163); see also Emerson's remark, JMN V: 138, "I find an
old letter to L[idian]. which may stand here." Surely these explicit cues suggest that
Emerson put letters into the journals by deliberate choice.
10. Cole, "The Advantage of Loneliness: Mary Moody Emerson's Almanacks, 1802-
1855," in Joel Porte, ed., Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect (Cambridge, Massachu-
setts: Harvard University Press, 1982, Harvard English Studies, vol. 10).
11. Emerson later read a good many other diarists, most of those diaries were written
long before his aunt's: Samuel Johnson by 1827 (JMN VI: 65), Pepys by 1838 (JMN VI:
347), Bubb Dodington by 1841 (JMN VIII: 134), Emerson's great-grandfather Joseph
Emerson of Maiden on his 1847-48 trip to Europe (Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo
Emerson (New York: Scribner's, 1949), p. 330), Evelyn by 1854 (JMN VI: 370),
Varnhagcn von Ense by 1863 (JMN VI: 349), Henry Crabbe Robinson some time after
1869 (JMN VI: 372). Pepys is the diarist one woidd like Emerson to have read early, as
being an interesting antagonist; but the ideal lines of filiation for diarists and the actual
ones seldom cross.
Mary Moody Emerson's journal was a descendant of the Puritan

journal of spiritual experiences: the perfect antagonist for the Lockean
commonplace book.12 The commonplace book is a book of others, the
Puritan journal is a book of the self. The commonplace book is a book of
topics arranged in order of convenience, the journal a book of events
arranged in order of occurrence. The commonplace book is directed to
success in what Emerson's Puritan ancestors would have referred to as
the particular calling: the writer's public, professional life in the world.
The journal is directed to salvation, to success in what the Puritans
would have referred to as the general calling: the writer's striving for a
justified soul.13
If we posit the influence of Mary Moody Emerson as an antagonist
to that of Locke, where in the battleground of the text can we see it
manifested? Most obviously in the numerous self-reflective passages
of the journal; but these require some discussion. They are not really
in Mary Moody Emerson's vein; they are not occupied with the moral
status of Emerson's soul. They never predominate in the journal, nor
are they consistently more interesting than passages concerned with
other topics. Emerson excels neither in self-deception nor in self-
knowledge; he has his reserves and his rhetorical evasions, and in the
talent of honesty Boswell and Pepys are his evident superiors. But
neither do the self-reflective passages ever disappear; they are, if not
predominant, at least ineradicable. We might say of them that just as
the decision to date and juxtapose notations of lofty truths suggested
something of Emerson's sense of the necessarily personal, temporal
nature of those truths, so this decision to include notations regarding
the self among those truths suggests something about Emerson's
sense of the possibly lofty, public, almost impersonal nature of the
12. The account of the Puritan journal offered here is based on Rosenwald, "Cotton
Mather as Diarist," pp. 131-33.
13. Mary Moody Emerson's early correspondence with her nephew is among other
things a running critique of his lively interest in the variety of the world, that is, of his
distressing commitment to his particular calling; it is thus an attack both on the ends
and means oi the Lockean commonplace book as this is aimed at furthering worldly
success by means of judicious quotation from the accumulated stock of traditional
wisdom: "Would to Providence your unfoldings might be [in solitude]—that it were not
a wild & fruitless wish that you could be disunited from travelling with the souls of
other men of living & breathing, reading & writing with one vital time-sated idea—
their opinions" (JMN II: 381). Emerson's playful comment in a letter to his aunt
expresses the same tension: "I made a journal as we went, and have not read it over
myself, but apprehend it hath too many jokes to please you; it was written for a more
terrestrial meridian" (LI: 115).
self. It is a commonplace book that Emerson is keeping; but he will

find room in it for introspection and self-depiction, not counting these
things unworthy of his lofty purpose.
The dedications and afterwords of the individual volumes suggest a
similar resistance to the Lockean enterprise. Within the text are
edifying essays; at its margins are the dedications and afterthoughts.
These are characteristically personal, self-conscious, and entire. Cer-
tainly they are not profitable texts, nor are they inevitably adaptable
to some larger public discourse. They are much occupied with the
business of journalizing, and in being so occupied are at odds with the
Lockean scheme, which is not set up to reflect upon itself.
But the rebellion is endemic to the journal as a whole. As we
read, we feel the essayistic material as an antagonist to everything
surrounding it: the personal reflections, the occasional aphorism or
exclamation or anecdote or quotation, the epigraphs, the dedica-
tions, the closing reflections, the comic self-compliments ("Dum a
dum, now, but the book does grow better" (JMN I: 127)), the impu-
dent index categories like "Trash" and "Abortions" (JMN I; 93 and
122; see also JMN II: 256, 269, 285, and 312). Writing for use seems
to alternate with writing for pleasure, and brilliant flourishes of
quotations at the beginnings and endings of volumes frame dutiful
essays within them. Sometimes the contrasts flourish at the center;
one spectacular outbreak in Wideworld 6 offers in succession an
essayistic passage on habit; a personal reflection; the statement that
"there is a great difference whether the tortoise gathers h/im/er self
within h/is/er shell hurt or unhurt", a reflection on the journal; a
note on Marchand's sighting of Mowna Roa at a distance of one
hundred fifty-nine miles; an essayistic1 passage on characteristics of
the passions; the often-quoted, heavily cancelled "I have a nasty
appetite which I will not gratify;" a further personal reflection; a
note on Harrison Otis's "Prodigious display of Eloquence;" the state-
ment "I love my wideworlds;" two edifying anecdotes of fifteenth-
century Italian manners from Sismondi; and a notation that Emerson
weighs 144 pounds (JMN I: 128-35).
We should note further of this extraordinary stretch of writing that
only the essayistic passages of it get indexed: the passages on habit, on
"Characteristics," on self, on history. The rest are simply written, not
written for use, nor digested for the index. The Lockean common-
place book, of course, exists for its index; material not classified in the
index is hardly material at all. The abundance of material in the
Emersonian journal not reflected in its Loekean index is a final, mute

sign of a house divided.
Emerson's own language for the division is the Romantic discourse
of diligence and indolence. He associates the Loekean enterprise with
heroic diligence, the Moodyan resistance to that enterprise with indo-
lence, with caprice, with "silliness," and with the self.
—Now here again is another detached morsel intended to be merely
the first lines of a long treatise upon fate & life, &c, but it is cropped in
the bud by the fiend Caprice; and I must gallop away to some new topic
which my fantastic Genius may suggest . . . (JMN I: 123)
I have rambled far away from my original thought, still there is a loose
unity which binds these reflections together and which leads me back to
the dubious theme—myself . . . (JMN II: 111)
My cardinal vice of intellectual dissipation—sinful strolling from book
to book, from care to idleness, is my cardinal vice still; is a malady that
belongs to the Chapter of Incurables. (JMN II: 332)14
This is familiar talk, but has distinct Emersonian colorings. In Keats's

famous letter to Reynolds, "husyness" hardly has a fair shake and
"indolence" has it all its own way.15 This is partly because Keats
himself, like Coleridge, did not need to fear the reproach "indolence"
usually entails; both writers could celebrate indolence because nei-
ther was lazy. Emerson really was; he did "stroll" from book to book
and from topic to topic. Thus he would dedicate each volume of the
journal to a particular topic. The topics were various: the dead, imagi-
nation, the spirit of America, the future. But Emerson did not keep to
them; given one subject, he inevitably wrote on another.16 He was
one of the most desultory readers and writers of all time, and he
might plausibly worry that he was incapable of the sustained and
directed effort the Loekean enterprise entailed, Nor was he, as we
have already noted, inclined to give up on that enterprise; he wove it
into the fabric of his journal. Later, of course, Emerson will write
over his door the word whim. But for now, "the fiend caprice" is his
14. See also JMN II: 244-45, 302, 309, and 317-18.
15. See Lionel Trilling, ed., The Selected Letters of John Keats, (Garden City:
Doubleday Anchor, 1951), pp. 122-25, and also Trilling's own comments on the issue
in his introduction, pp. 21—23.
16. Sec in this context his account of his discomfort with the formal constraints of
the individual volume itself: "this last effort of the pen seems to have been tortured out
for the mere purpose of ending the book, and I really regret that the sixth wideworld
which boasts of several swelling paragraphs, should close its page with so heartless an
oration" (JMN I: 157).
enemy, not his champion; the unity of the self is a pis idler; want of
method is associated with blundering and selfish rebellion, and desul-
tory reading with disease and vice. We might say that resolution and
independence are in even battle.
Given such strains, it is no surprise that the balance cannot hold: in

1824, the Wideworld series ends. But the ending of the series is not a
precisely defined event, 17 nor does it point clearly to a precisely
definable motive on Emerson's part, so we shall have to look closely
at what happens throughout the period of transition. Emerson him-
self says nothing about it at the time; but his very interesting com-
ments on the matter fifteen years later suggest much about the nature
of the change, associating it in particular with his rejection of the
Lockean notion of topicality.
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 1 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 acqui-
esce in the perception that although no diligence can rebuild the Uni-
verse in a model by the best accumulation or disposition of details, yet
does the World reproduce itself in miniature in every event that tran-
spires, 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: 302-3)
As Emerson tells the story, the early journal seems purely a com-
monplace book, the individual volumes of it essentially topical collec-
tions, the overall goal the compilation of an encyclopedia. The goal
proves unreachable, the circle of knowledge Emerson is seeking to
enclose turns out to be an eternally open parabola. So Emerson sets
17. "Wideworld No XIII" is the last extant journal to bear the title. The next extant
volume is numbered XV but untitled; reference is made in it to a volume numbered
XIV, but it is not elear whether that volume was titled or not.
out on a different principle, striving not to build up the macrocosm

but to record the microcosm, trusting that the "the World [does]
reproduce itself in miniature in every event that transpires," that
"every thought is a world,—is a theory of the whole" (JMN IV: 53).18
This of course implies a much altered relation between the observer
and the object. In the earlier model, the observer must strain for
"proportion and congruency [in] the aggregate of his thoughts," that
is, congruency of one intrinsically partial thought to another. But if
each thought is a whole, proportion and congruency cease to be
adequate standards; fidelity alone is an adequate standard, because
the distinction is not between congruent and incongruent aggregates
but between sincere and insincere impressions.
This is an imperfect description of the early journal, of course. It
minimizes the tension the journal reflects, and in it Emerson the
early diarist seems a more devout and diligent Lockean common-
placer than he ever was, just as the new diarist seems much less of
one than he was in fact to be. What has happened is not the elimina-
tion of a predominant influence but an adjustment in the relation
between that influence and the influence opposing it. It is not that the
Lockean influence is gone; it is that it is no longer normative. Emer-
son singles out topicality as if it constituted the whole of the Lockean
program. It does not; but it is the thing Emerson gains freedom in
giving up. Keeping to a topic is the thing Emerson cannot do, and in
ending the Wideworld series he rejects the claim that he should. He
remains a Lockean commonplacer; but Locke is now not his norma-
tive model but one among his possibilities.
So revised, Emerson's account suggests how to make sense of the
changes we note clustering around the last few Wideworld volumes.
The dedications of the individual volumes shrink, then disappear in
June of 1823. This is as it should be; the dedications are assertions of
topic, titles of volumes in this individual cabinet cyclopedia, and the
shrinkage in them presages the abandonment of the system they
reflect. But the reflections on journalizing are more abundant: indices
18. See also further along this line L II: 441 and JMN IV: 322, and especially JMN
VIII: 224: "Having once learned that in some one thing although externally small,
greatness might be contained, so that in doing that, it was all one as if I had builded a
world; I was thereby taught, that everything in nature should represent total nature; &
that whatsoever thing did not represent to me the sea & sky, day & night, was
something forbidden and wrong."
of the coming alteration in the nature of the enterprise. The cele-

brated self-portrait "Myself," written in 1824 (JMN II: 237-42), sug-
gests the heightened self-consciousness one might expect to attend
such an alteration.19
Around the same time, the cssayistic passages of the journal get
worse. Emerson's prose in them becomes only more turgid and
strained, the sequence of argument from paragraph to paragraph
more tenuous. And Emerson knows it; his derisive after-comments
become more frequent and more biting. The dedication to Wide-
world 11 concludes, "dead ere it reached its original idea. One more
of my extensive family of still born trains" (JMN II: 146). After an
essayistic passage on apathy (JMN II: 158) he writes "fine marble
form! Would it might wake to life." This too is as it should be; for the
essay of the quarterlies that Emerson is trying to write is essentially
contributory to a "cabinet cyclopedia" and formally akin to an encyclo-
pedia entry.
The essayistic passages are worse; but they are also differently
conceived. This is an auspicious but complex symptom. In the earlier
volumes Emerson is sometimes using the journal as a themebook,
writing down, say, the partial but sequential passages of an essay on
drama; and generally the individual essayistic passages feel essentially
incomplete, imperfect components of an unrealized perfect particular
whole. Against this stands in the early journals all the other material,
which feels by contrast irresponsibly autonomous, as if a piece of a
mosaic offered itself as a freestanding sculpture. But now the essay-
istic material itself changes; now Emerson is producing passages in
some sense complete within themselves. We can imagine them as
parts of essays, but are not compelled to imagine them as parts at all,
nor to imagine them as parts of one essay only. This is an auspicious
symptom as it looks towards the nature of Emerson's mature essays,
whose excitement arises from the juxtaposition of wholes, not from
the fusing of parts; but it is still more auspicious as it looks towards the
mature journal, which is precisely the record kept by "a faithful re-
porter of particular impressions," indifferent to "the proportion &
19. Mary Moody Emerson writes to Emerson on April 13, 1824, "it was ingeniously
done to write so well on my old almanacks" (JMN I: 373). The letter she is responding
to is lost, but was presumably written during the period we are now discussing, and
perhaps Emerson's articulate response to his aunt's diaries was part of his rethinking
his own.
congruency of his thoughts" as these awkward essayistic fragments are

indifferent and incongruent to one another. 20
So described, the essayistic passages seem like the products of Emer-
son's genius straining against Emerson's model. They are accompa-
nied, appropriately enough in this period of transition, by some of the
best journalizing Emerson has ever done, which seems in contrast like
the production of Emerson's genius yielding to Emerson's inclination:
the work of the laziness of genius. "The Parnassian nag I rode I percieve
has thrown me, and I have been bestriding a hobby" (JMN II: 329). A
fair sample of his work in this lower but more congenial activity is this
series of remarks loosely centered around Benjamin Franklin:
Franklin was political economist, a natural philosopher, a moral phi-
losopher, & a statesman. Invents & dismisses subtle theories (e.g. of the
Earth) with extraordinary ease. Unconscious of any mental effort in
detailing the profoundest solutions of phenomena & therefore makes no
parade. He writes to a friend when aet. 80 "I feel as if I was intruding
among posterity when I ought to be abed & asleep. I look upon death to
be as necessary to the Constitution as Sleep. We shall rise refreshed in
the morning."
"Many," said he, "forgive injuries, but none ever forgave contempt."—
See Edin. Rev.
That age abounded in greatness: Carnot, Moreau, Bonaparte, &c,
Johnson, Gibbon, &c, Washington, &c.
Institutions are a sort of homes. A man may wander long with profit,
if he come home at last but a perpetual Vagrant is not honoured. Men
may alter & improve their laws so they fix them at last.
"Humanity does not consist in a squeamish ear." Fox
Men in this age do not produce new works but admire old ones; Are
content to leave the fresh pastures awhile, & to chew the cud of thought
in the shade.
"A Great empire like a great cake is most easily diminished at the
edges." Franklin. (JMN II: 208)
20. Perhaps we should note here that these passages also exhibit many more marks
of revisions than do their earlier counterparts. This I think means not that Emerson was
working harder at his prose but that he was thinking of his journal as the fit place for
recording the earlier stages of composition, the lacunae and erasures and unresolved
word choices that open up such extraordinary imaginative space behind them; that is,
he was in this respect also coming to see what is revealed by examining the part as if it
were the whole, the means as if it were the end.
The passage reveals Emerson's movement from a commonplace

book of parts to a journal of wholes. The remark on the abounding
greatness of "that age" is formally dependent on its context because of
"that." The rest of the remarks are formally independent: nothing in
their formulation links them to one another. Each stands by itself.
The change is easy enough to formulate but has large consequences; it
implies Emerson's movement from the Lockean circle to the Emer-
sonian parabola, from a world of topics to a universe of microcosms.
Let us look at the passage more closely, so as to sense some of the
pleasures this new practice offers. Emerson is drawing on an 1806
Edinburgh Review article by Francis Jeffrey. The article is diffuse and
schematic; Emerson has picked out its most interesting assertion and
its most memorable quotation. Moreover, the article presents the
note on Franklin's unpretentious facility as a theorist in a section on
Franklin the scientist, the quotation from the letter to Whatley in one
on Franklin the man of letters and moral philosopher. The two Frank-
lins are not brought into contact, and indeed the weakness of the
article is precisely that in it Franklin's faculties are severed so easily
from one another. By Emerson's juxtaposition of them the gracious
precision of the jest on old age is thereby related to, indeed seems to
exemplify those subtle theories invented and dismissed with extraordi-
nary ease, and we are reminded that however we distinguish among
the various faculties of a single subject, they must in the end be one as
the subject is one. Even as a reader, that is, Emerson has brought us
a good way out of the Lockean world of topics.
As a writer he takes us a good deal farther. Let us look in particular
at the remarks on the age and on institutions. Implicitly they make
Franklin the representative of a heroic past, which is explicitly con-
trasted with a contemplative present; yet this characterization of the
present age cannot be read as an unqualified condemnation. Emerson
is keeping a journal, and these remarks are his actions; it is Emerson
who is both performing and critiquing the contemplation he sees as
characteristic of his age. And keeping in mind this performative as-
pect of his writing we note more carefully that, after all, chewing the
cud of thought in the shade is not so much a declination from as the
necessary sequel to grazing on fresh pastures. Then too, the sayings
quoted of Franklin and Fox refine our sense of "new works"—which,
it seems, are done by the makers of delicate epigrams. This is by itself
something to know, and Franklin's epigram in particular reveals,
surprisingly, not bold vision but tactical adroitness, suggesting that
new works are among other things the works of politicians; Fox's
further suggests that such works may seem harsh and reminds us of
what they may cost. Finally there is the remark on institutions. Juxta-
posed to the remark on the greatness of Franklin's age, it suggests a
notion of Franklin as a member of a class, a man in the end enmeshed
in institutions as he was surrounded by greatness; and the notion is
acutely true of Franklin, who in fact wandered long with profit but
came home at last. This account of progression from a freer stage to
one more bound leads us back to the remark on the procession of ages
and perhaps to some more general perception of the laws of se-
quence: from individuality, fluidity, vagracy, innovation, consump-
tion to institutions and men living in them, admiration, contempla-
tion, rumination.
We should perhaps note in concluding this section that it is pre-
cisely in the context of a reader that the pleasures and insights we
have described are imaginable. The Lockean commonplace book is a
stockroom for a writer; it is no more a book than is a scholar's collec-
tion of index cards. The book Emerson has now found out how to
make borrows a good deal from the Lockean model; but it is essen-
tially a book, and the Lockean model is now not its authority but one
among its sources.21
Strayings and Temptations
Wideworld 13, the last of the Wideworld series, is followed by a

volume numbered 14 but unnamed. We may take this as a signal of
the character of the succeeding volumes. On the one hand, they are
not any longer assigned a topic, and they contain much writing like
that of the Franklin passage. On the other hand, they contain also
Emerson's backslidings in the direction of quarterly essays; the new
21. Interestingly, the development of this practice in the journal antedates by some
years the articulation of its rationale in Emerson's consciousness. Compare Stephen
Whicher: "Emerson came late into his force. The years recorded in the first two
volumes of his journal—those before his resignation from the Second Church—show
little distinction of style or thought. ... In 1830, however, his thought begins to move,
until, at the close of that year and the opening of the next, irresistible suggestions of
sentiment come on him in a rush. ... In the year 1831 Emerson came into his
intellectual majority" (Freedom and Fate [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1953], pp. 3, 19, and 23). Whicher's sense of the shape of Emerson's life is still
pretty much our own, and its persistence is I think a further consequence of our
disinclination to read Emerson's journal as the work of a writer looking for his form.
practice is not consistent. Nor does it seem to occupy the center of

Emerson's consciousness, though the debate over indolence dili-
gence shifts somewhat in favor of indolence.22 Rather the new prac-
tice still seems the product of a powerful but sporadic and unarticu-
lated impulse, an impulse no longer restrained by the Lockean model
but not as yet capable of creating a model of its own.
The remaining portion of this chapter proposes certain elements of
a story about how Emerson comes to understand and to systematize
the practice he has developed. To tell that story in full would be to
rehearse much that is familiar in Emerson's biography, for surely,
say, his marriage with Ellen Tucker and his encounter with Coleridge
contribute to the development of the resolute self-consciousness mani-
fested in the opening statements of Journal A in 1834. Our goal here
is narrower: to look closely at the intervening formal changes in the
journal as we might look at the evolution of Pound's poetry from
"Sestina: Altaforte" to "Mauberley," that is, to see those changes as
situated along the path of an intelligence looking for a form.
The Temptations of the Sermon

The first of those changes takes place during Emerson's brief career in
the ministry. The JMN editors describe the episode as follows:
The journals and notebooks of these years are fewer and less packed
than those in the preceding six years. A major reason is that although
22. Thus see JMN III: 136 and L I: 233.

An epitome of Emerson's progress along this line is articulated by the progress in
the journal of a favorite passage of Horace: "Incipe. Vivendi recte qui prorogat horam,/
Kusticus expeetat dum defluat amnis; at ille/ labitur ac labetur in omne volubilis
aevum." ("Begin now! The man who puts off the time of living wisely [is] a peasant
waiting for the river to run dry; but the river flows and will continue to flow, rolling on
forever.") This is an exhortation to discipline; the peasant waits for the river to run dry
rather than taking control of its course, just as we let life take its course with us rather
than controlling it by the agency of wisdom. Emerson quotes it first as a concluding
epigraph to Wideworld 3 (JMN I: 90). He quotes it next at the close of the dedication of
Wideworld 9 (JMN II: 76): an exhortation to work for human progress. He quotes it
again as a concluding epigraph to Wideworld 9 (JMN II: 101). He quotes it in
Wideworld 10 as exemplifying the course of time (JMN II: 106). So far it has remained
an exhortation; Emerson is on the side of the rightly living man, not on that of the river.
But then, in Wideworld 13 ( J M N II: 250), he suddenly changes sides: "the stream of
liberty which the Holy Alliance are striving to dam—at ille/ labitur et labetur in omne
volubilis aevum." Now he is on the side of the flux, just at the moment that in his
journal he ceases trying to take control of the world through topics and surrenders to its
flux of "particular impressions."
Emerson wrote down many an idea for a sermon in his journals, as

time went on he wrote the sermons independently. He found in the
sermon the outlet for his thought formerly sought in "theme, poem, or
review." In effeet the sermons in manuscript are different versions of
his journals—structured, more formal, prepared for a live audience,
but still the embodiment of what he was thinking from day to day.
(JMN III: ix)
But this account rests on the assumption that the journals are essen-
tially auxiliary to Emerson's real literary production. We have all
along been proceeding on the assumption that the journals are Emer-
son's literary production. How then might we tell the story of his
silence?
In the period of his ministry Emerson created a new literary econ-
omy and a new literary vocation. He had been principally a diarist.
He now became a sermon writer, and the sermon supplanted the
diary.23 This it could do because in its calendrical regularity it both
occupied the diarist's time and imitated the diary's form. That is: it
was not only a text to which the journal might contribute; it was a text
that the journal might become, and indeed did become. And what
does it mean that it underwent this transformation? Emerson the
diarist became Emerson the preacher. That is to say that the pressure
of his vocation led Emerson to become what he had so artfully
avoided becoming of his own election. His particular ministry, in one
of Boston's great churches, had very much the look of a Lockean
career; and in becoming predominantly a writer of sermons he be-
came that public speaker for whom the Lockean commonplace book
was the fit instrument.
In the end, of course, Emerson left the ministry. He left it, the
biographies tell us, in consequence of his principled reluctance to
administer communion, on the ground that it was a merely historical
ordinance. But that decision also restored him to a space in which he
could develop his stubbornly dualistic literary economy. We remem-
ber that Emerson the minister was a fine orator but an indifferent
counselor. We may if we like allegorize this and say that the ministry
entailed for him a predominant focus on one of his two audiences he
later kept in balance; for, as we shall see, the distinguishing feature in
23. Especially vivid indications of that supplaritatiori are two remarks referring the
reader of the journal to the sermons: "for the rest see Sermon LXVI" (JMN III: 180)
and "see this matter at large in Sermon 93" (JMN III; 205). Clearly the journal is no
independent text if what is begun in it is finished elsewhere.
Emerson's later economy is precisely its balancing of congregation

against inner circle, of essay and lecture against journal. The ministry
was the occasion for him to experiment with one of the more usual
systems of literary production: a processing of private raw materials
for the sake of a public finished product. He left it to develop his own
system and his journal.
The Temptations of the Travel Book

In Chapter XVII of Wilhelm Meister, the itinerant Wilhelm prom-
ises his father "a copious journal of his travels, with all the required
geographical, statistical, and mercantile remarks."24 The promise is
dictated by filial piety, but the accomplishing of it goes against Wil-
helm's nature: "as soon as he commenced the actual work of composi-
tion, he became aware that he had much to say about emotions and
thoughts . . . but not a word concerning outward objects" (294). Wil-
hehn's friend Laertes then proposes to him to fabricate a journal to the
father's taste from the books of travels that are Laertes' favorite read-
ing. Things go well; indeed they go surprisingly well, because the
feigned journal comes near to making Wilhelm into a real journalist:
In the marvellous composition of those travels, which he had at first
engaged with as it were in jest, and was now carrying on in conjunction
with Laertes, his mind had by degrees grown more attentive to the
circumstances and the every-day life of the actual world than it was
wont. He now, for the first time, felt how pleasant and how useful it
might be to become participator in so many trades and requisitions, and
to take a hand in diffusing activity and life into the deepest nooks of the
mountains and forests of Europe. (304)
But then Wilhelm's father dies, and his brother Werner, much
impressed with the feigned journal, proposes to Wilhelm to come
home and join him in business. This is too much for Wilhelm, who
confesses the ruse and writes of the journal,
though in words I know the objects it relates to, and more of the like
sort, I by no means understand them, or can occupy myself about them.
What good were it for me to manufacture perfect iron, while my own
breast is full of dross? (318-19)
24. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels,
tr. Thomas Carlyle [vol. 22 in Carlyle's Works (Boston: Dana Estes, n.d., Centennial
Memorial Edition]), p. 294; further citations identified by page number in the text.
Wilhelm's experience is the best model for understanding Emer-

son's first trip to Europe. It is of course not the usual model. As the
story is usually told, that trip seems the logical response to the situation
in which Emerson finds himself on leaving the ministry. He is not in
need of an income; the money that passes to him at his wife Ellen's
death is enough for him to live on. But he is in need of a vocation, and
he occupies an anomalous position in his community, well-liked person-
ally but doctrinally suspect, and generally a little odd-seeming.25 He
does not, that is, quite fit in; and so he journeys out. The trip offers him
an opportunity to think things over, to see the treasures of Europe, and
to assess the philosophical value of travel. The sequence of his re-
sponses to these various things resembles the stretching of a rubber
band. At first, Emerson is very much a young man on his first grand
tour; he enjoys himself enormously, proving a lively and curious trav-
eler, a good companion, and almost a ban vivant. His responses to the
treasures of Europe are generous and intense. But Emerson is later to
write that the traveler "carries ruins to ruins"; and, predictably
enough, the rubber band snaps back, the introspective and self-reliant
philosopher vindicates himself, and Emerson returns to America, plot-
ting that book of the self, Nature, on the voyage homeward.
What is wrong with this account is that it ignores Emerson the
writer. It is based on Emerson's journal, but it reads that journal as a
transparency laid gently over Emerson's character. We say that Emer-
son proved a surprisingly lively and alert traveler; what we actually
see, however, is that he proved a surprisingly lively and alert re-
porter. We say that towards the end of the trip Emerson the introspec-
tive philosopher vindicates himself; what we actually see is that to-
wards the end of the travel journals Emerson the reporter yields to
Emerson the diarist. We have considered what it meant for Emerson
to go to Europe. Let us now consider what it meant for Emerson to
take his journal there.
Travel books are written within a range of conventions, or more
pointedly within a field of contending norms. Lawrence Buell's pio-
25. The most thorough and intelligent account of the period is Gonnaud, Individu
et societe (Paris: Didier, 1964), pp. 131-34. See also John Jay Chapman's reminiscence:
"my grandmother, a Massachusetts woman, told me that the first time she had ever
heard Emerson's name was when a neighbor said to her: 'Oh, have you heard? The new
minister of the Second Church has gone mad' " (quoted in Wilson, The Shock of
Recognition (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1955), p. 598).
neering account of the field of travel writing within which the Tran-
scendentalists functioned describes the central opposition as that be-
tween the statistical model Wilhelm's father enjoins upon his son and
a model Buell calls "subjective-poetical," exemplified in that Tran-
scendentalist bedside book Madame de Stael's De I'Allemagne.26 The
Transcendentalists of course gave their allegiance to de Stael's sort of
book. Frederic Hedge writes that "the most interesting travels are
those that have the least to say about the very things which we go
abroad to see"; Caleb Stetson praises Margaret Fuller's Summer on
the Lakes on the ground that in it Fuller "is much more occupied with
what is passing in her own soul, than with the objective realities
which present themselves to the senses" (196-97).
We assume that Emerson will take his place with Hedge and Stet-
son and Fuller. But even the subjective-poetical sort of travel book
has its dangers for Emerson the diarist. It is after all a single continu-
ous narrative, in which part is subordinated to whole, and as such it is
at odds with Emerson's diaristic practice and its commitment to "par-
ticular impressions." In the journal, each impression is a whole; in the
travel book, in any travel book, each impression is a part. Nor is it
altogether certain that it is the subjective-poetical travel books that
Emerson is going to write in the first place. He is surely in no danger
of writing a book of statistics. But he is not immune to a passionate
interest in the "realities which present themselves to the senses." He
was a good reporter of such realities, and his zestful 1823 journal,
"Walk to the Connecticut," is distinguished not only by its artistic
unity but also by its vivid rendering of them:
The scenery, all the way was fine, and the turnpike, a road of inflexible
principle, swerving neither to the right hand nor the: left, stretched on
before me, always in sight. . . . The Kraken, thought I, or the Sea-
Worm, is three English miles long; but this land-worm of mine is some
forty, & those of the hugest. . . . The building [in Leicester, Massachu-
setts] I found to be an Academy containing ordinarily 80 students—boys
& girls. "Not so many girls now," added the bar-keeper, "because there
is no female instructor, & they like a woman to teach them the higher
things."—Ye stars! thought I, if the Metropolis get this notion, the
Mogul [his brother William, like Emerson a schoolteacher] & I must
lack bread. At Spencer 1 sympathized with a Coachman who com-
26. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, p. 194. The whole account (pp. 188-99) is
excellent. Further citation from it arc identified in the text by page number.
plained, that 'ride as far or as fast as he would, the milestones were all
alike, & told the same number.' (JMN II: 179)
The European trip is then a considerable temptation, because it pres-

ents a glittering opportunity for Emerson to do something he does
well but does not esteem, and to do it in the space in which he has
learned to do something altogether different. Wilhelm's character
comes near to undergoing a fundamental alteration through his simu-
lation of travel writing; ought we not to look for some large problem
in Emerson's practice of it?
On his arrival in Malta, Emerson writes,
I bring myself to sea, to Malta, to Italy, to find new affinities between

me & my fellowmcn, to observe narrowly the affections, weaknesses,
surprises, hopes, doubts, which new sides of the panorama shall call
forth in me. Mean sneakingly mean would be this philosophy, a reptile
unworthy of the name, if self be used in the low sense, but as self means
Devil so it means God. I speak of the Universal Man to whose colossal
dimensions each particular bubble can by its birthright expand. (JMN
IV: 68; first italics mine, second Emerson's)
Emerson the mature writer produced English Traits in accordance

with this exhortation. But Emerson the young man on his first trip to
Europe produced a book of reportage: calendrically regular in its
entries, and full of anecdotes and vivid observations.
Then we went to Dionysius' Ear; a huge excavation into the hard rock
[in Syracuse] which I am not going to describe. Poor People were
making twine in it & my ear was caught on approaching it by the loud
noise made by their petty wheels in the vault. A little beyond the
entrance the floor was covered with a pool of water. We found a twine
maker who very readily took us, one after another on his shoulders into
the recess 250 ft, & planted us on dry land at the bottom of the cave. We
shouted & shouted & the cave bellowed & bellowed; the twine maker
tore a bit of paper in the middle of the cave, & very loud it sounded;
then they fired a pistol at the entrance & we had our fill of thunder. . . .
(JMN IV: 122-123)
The Italians use the Superlative too much. Mr Landor calls them the
nation of the issimi. A man to tell me that this was the same thing I had
before, said "E 1'istessissima cosa;" and at the trattoria, when I asked if
the cream was good, the waiter answered, "Stupendo." They use three
negatives; it is good Italian to say, 'Non dite nulla a nessuno. . . .' (JMN
IV: 176)
Early in the trip this sort of effect took considerable work; the earlier
travel journals were written first in pencil, then "revised with great
care and in [Emerson's] most legible hand later in ink" (JMN IV:
102). As of June 1833, however, Emerson writes only one draft. The
JMN editors explain the change on the supposition that by this time
Emerson "had caught up his journal" (JMN IV: 185). This is possible;
but is it not also possible to think simply that by now Emerson had
learned his job? The travel journals present not a philosopher rebel-
ling against an unphilosophical model but a gifted apprentice learning
his craft.
Or rather, they present Emerson doing both. The journal record-
ing Emerson's travels records also numerous exhortations to travel
more philosophically. "How," Emerson asks while still at sea, "comes
my speculative pencil down to so near a level with the horizon of life,
which commonly proses above?" (JMN IV: 110). He goes to the opera
in Catania, but finds the entrance fee of three taris "too much for the
whistle" and defends his preference for his inward theater, his "own
comedy & tragedy" (JMN IV: 132). In Naples he defends himself
against Naples: "and what if it is Naples, it is only the same world of
cake & ale. . . . Here's for the plain old Adam, the simple genuine
Self against the whole world" (JMN IV: 141).
These exhortations are quickly enough flouted, however. They are
after all only exhortations and affect the texture of the record hardly at
all, which remains essentially an itinerary. But Emerson the journal-
ist and philosopher is carrying on his resistance in other ways also,
though these are evident only if we attend to certain dry bibliographi-
cal data. Throughout the trip Emerson kept more than one journal
concurrently. This was to be his occasional practice all his life long;
but seldom did he produce such a bewildering disarray. He kept
Notebook Q before, during, and after the European trip. The Note-
books Sicily, Italy, Italy and France, Scotland and England, and Sea
1833 each record a part of the trip; all, then, overlap Q. Notebook
Scotland and England does some overlapping on its own; Emerson
used it in 1832 for miscellaneous notes and on the voyage out for
accounts. Notebook France and England contains Italian language
exercises, rought drafts for entries in Notebook Italy and France, and
also some passages on Emerson's English adventures not revised for
Notebook Scotland and England, in particular much of Emerson's
encounter with Coleridge; Pocket Diary II contains mostly memo-
randa but also an anecdote of Burns the younger.
Notebook Q is a sort of philosophical monitor on the other books;

seldom in it does Emerson's pencil "come down so near to the horizon
of life" as it does in the others, and in nearly overlapping passages it is
characteristically the version in Q that presents Emerson looking
inward rather than outward.27 But we can see a more general resis-
tance to the genre he is doing so well at simply in the multiplicity of
books itself. That genre is, as we have noted, essentially a single
chronological sequence, essentially a single narrative; but here is
Emerson creating not one narrative but five. Yes, he seems to be
saying, he will write Emerson on the Grand Tour; but he will make
the Grand Tour into a series of fits and starts, and his narrative a
pointillistic series of images.
In later life Emerson travels widely and often, and is less troubled
by these problems. The poem on the travel-spirit "Una" suggests his
mature solution to them:
At home a deeper thought may light
The inward sky with chrysolite,
And I greet from far the ray,
Aurora of a dearer day.
But if upon the seas I sail,
Or trundle on the glowing rail,
I arn but a thought of hers,
Loveliest of travellers.28
But this easy separation of faculties is impossible for the younger

Emerson, presumably because he is at this time uncertain of the form
27. Thus in Notebook Sicily Emerson writes on February 16, 1833, "to be sure
there is plenty of superstition. Every where indulgence is offered, and on one convent
on our way home I read this inscription over the gate, 'Indulgentia plenaria, quotid-
iana, perpetua, pro vivis et defuuctis.' This is almost too frank, may it please your
holiness" (JMN IV: 117). In O, under the heading "1833, February" (even the more
general date is indieative), he writes, "I am now pleased abundantly with St John's
Church in Valetta. Welcome these new joys. Let my American eye be a child's again to
these glorious picture books. The chaunting friars, the carved ceilings, the Madonnas
& Saints, they are lively oracles, quotidiana et perpetua" (JMN IV: 84).
For a similar division of travel journals by function see Memo St. Augustine and
Journal 1826-1828 in JMN III; for a comment of Emerson's on the underlying ratio-
nale, see JMN V: 82: "the life of a conternplator is that of a reporter. He has three or
four books before him & now writes in this now in that other what is incontinuously
said by one or the other of his classes of thought."
28. In Edward Waldo Emerson, ed., The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emer-
son (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1904; Centenary Edition), 12 vols., IX: 211; see
also Paul O. Williams, "Meaning in Emerson's 'Una,' " Emerson Society Quarterly 31,
p. 48. Henceforth the Works will be abbreviated as W and the Quarterly as ESQ.
to be given his "inward sky." On his first Grand Tour, the conventions
of the travel book do not supplement but encroach upon the journal
he is learning how to keep.
In the Letters to a 'Young Poet, Rilke writes to Franz Kappus that to

know whether or not he is really a poet, he should for a year try his best
to keep from writing poetry; and that in a way is precisely what Emer-
son has done. He is feeling his way towards becoming the greatest
American diarist of the century. In the course of his ministry, he
experiments with being something other than a diarist; he undertakes a
career as a writer in a genre to which the diary is subordinated. In the
course of his European travels, he experiments with being a different
sort of diarist; he is a writer in a genre by which the diary is threatened.
The episode of the ministry has raised the question, what public career
will further my growth as a diarist? The Grand Tour has brought into
Emerson's consciousness the question, What sort of journal am I keep-
ing? Shortly after his return, in December of 1833, he emerges for the
first time as Emerson the diarist we know and as Emerson the lecturer.
These actions have the inevitability of solutions to geometrical prob-
lems. In the career of lecturer, with the notable openness of the form of
the American lyceum lecture, he finds a career in the context of which
Emerson the diarist can flourish. In the mature journal he finds the
form in which the energies of Emerson the diarist are animated. He has
henceforth that clarity of purpose experienced only by those who have
found out their vocation by denying it.
A Conscious Beginning
We date Emerson's mature journals from 1833 for two reasons. The
first is that as of that moment the journal exhibits consistently rather
than sporadically the diaristic qualities we have identified as idiomati-
cally Emersonian; there are no more backslidings till the journal itself
comes to an end. The second is that Journal A, the first of the mature
journals, has the look of a conscious beginning.
What traits make for that look and what do they tell us? 29 The first
29. An obvious one would seem the letter A by which the first of the new journals is
titled, but Linda Allardt suggests on the evidence of the lecture notebooks that Emer-
son did not give the volume that title until some time after the close of the "Philosophy
of History" in March 1837 (JMN XII: xxxvi).
are the changes in physical format: henceforth Emerson's blank books

are bought rather than made and are of relatively uniform size (JMN
IV:249). Journal making remains an artisanal task; but now the artisan
is at least going to buy professional tools.
More suggestive are new volume's epigraphs and first entry. These
are the epigraphs:
Ch'apporta mane, e lascia sera
Not of men neither by man
May I "consult the auguries of time
And through the human heart explore my way
And look & listen"30
Together the epigraphs suggest the commitment to chronological nar-
rative, to individuality, and to sacred vocation that we have associated
with the influence of Mary Moody Emerson. But then we turn to the
opening declaration:
This Book is my Savings Bank. I grow richer because 1 have somewhere
to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because
corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by
their addition. (JMN IV: 250-51)
Here we have the commitment to usefulness, to productivity, and to
collection that we have associated with the influence of John Locke.
Neither influence has been suppressed; rather both have been intelli-
gently thematized.
But the most striking evidence of Emerson's new consciousness,
though also the most abstruse, is his development of an idiomatic
system of indexing. Let us take a moment to set this development in its
context. We recall that Locke's account of commonplacing instructs
the reader to begin with the index, at once the auxiliary and the telos of
the book. What is Emerson's actual practice? Wideworld 1 is set up by
the Lockean scheme (though perhaps, as the editors note, only in
1821). In most of the remaining Wideworld volumes, topics are noted
in bottom or side margins but not gathered into a general volume
index. Wideworld 9 (1822-23) and XVI1IA are Locke-indexed, but
very incompletely. From the end of the Wideworld series till Journal A
30. (1) "What brings the morning and leaves behind the evening": Dante's phrase
for the sun in Paradtso XXVII: 138; (2) Gal. I: 1; (3) Wordsworth, "Not 'mid the World's
vain objeets."
we get a mix of foot indexing and very fragmentary Lockean indexing.31

Presumably Emerson declines to use the Lockean system because of its
museum air and its association with limited topicality, its ordered
world of definable, severable topics, its implied distinctions between
the diligent and the idle, the serious and trivial. Emerson's own indices
have no such associations, but they are very bad tools; to consult the
index the reader has to read the book.
The system worked out for Journal A is both a good tool and an
idiomatically Emersonian tool. First, it is composed, unlike Locke's,
on a blank and unlined page; it suggests, that is, not a set of categories
embedded within a grid but a structure built ex nihilo ,32 Its category
names are taken not only from nouns but also from verbs and adjec-
tives; they allow for invention and variation. It is done after the book
is complete, rather than in conjunction with the individual entry; it
thus suggests leisure rather than demanding efficiency, and presents
the finding of a category as a complex rather than a simple activity. It
permits multiple naming for topically ambivalent passages, or rather
it acknowledges the perception that all passages are topically ambiva-
lent. It justifies Emerson's striking assertion that "classification is a
delight."
Let us look in particular at the index to Journal N. 33 Locke's brief,
dismissive account of the process of finding a category suggests that
he thought of it as something like finding the right spot on the shelf
for a book in a well-ordered library. For Emerson classifying was
inventing, and nowhere more clearly than in the numerous instances
in which a single utterance is indexed under more than one heading
and thus conceived of as more than one entity. One passage is in-
dexed under "Community" and "Individualism" another under "Affir-
mative," "Few Steps," and "Greatness." (Again, we should note even
the grammatical variety among the names; indexing may be pigeon-
holing, but Emerson seems determined to create pigeonholes of di-
31. The quotation books for the period show a somewhat different picture; the JMN
editors describe it as "an attempt on his part to organize the entries more carefully, so
that the random lustre-collecting of the early books gives way to the topic headings and
careful indexing of the later ones' (JMN VI: ix). Even here, however, the impression of
resistance to Lockean efficiency is strong—some of the principles of organization make
use of the books almost impossible—and not until 1829, for Encyclopedia, does Emer-
son make use of a system permitting easy access to the quotations he has gathered.
32. Compare L I: 59: "Poetry is my delight/ Exceedingly bright/ My desire to write/
It in the night/ on paper white."
33. I choose this example because it is published in facsimile in JMN VIII (facing p.
328).
verse sizes and shapes: three bare abstract nouns, one concrete noun
attended by an equally concrete adjective, and one adjective all
alone.) The following passage is indexed under "Education," "Faith,"
and "Fate," and as we consider the passage in the light of the various
rubrics it turns about like a many-faceted jewel.
But he is shallow who rails at men and their contrivances & does not see
Divinity behind all their institutions and all their fetches, even behind
such as are odious & paltry, they are documents of beauty also. The
practice of Prayer is not philosophical,—there is somewhat of absurd &
ridiculous in it to the eye of Science; it is juvenile, and, like plays of
children, though nonsense, yet very useful and educative nonsense.
Well so with all our things,—the most solemn & large,—as Commerce,
Government, Church, Marriage; and so with the history of every man's
dinner today, & the ways by which he is to come at it. (JMN VIII: 281)
As we regard it as bearing on education, we note particularly Elmer-
son's sense of the practical use of apparent absurdity, the instruction
offered by all phenomena; as we regard it as bearing on fate, we note
not the instruction but the power underlying human contrivance; as
we regard it as bearing on faith, we note the perspective of the writer,
the trust in that power and in that education. To assign any passage to
any topic is of course an act of interpretation and not the passive
performance of a mechanical task that Locke's account would suggest;
to assign one passage to three topics is to exploit the interpretive
possibilities of the act, almost to play with them, to proclaim a con-
sciousness of intepretative power.
But as assigning a particular utterance to a particular topic or topics
is a reading of the utterance, a weighting of it in a particular direction,
so the volume index as a whole is a reading of the book. For what after
all does an index tell us? First, and most practically, it tells us where
to locate passages on a subject of interest to us, should we know what
that subject is and know how to name it. But also it makes an argu-
ment about the organization of the book; it says that this passage is to
be associated with these other passages, that they form a group, that
there is some reason for considering them together; it creates themes.
We note, reading the Scarlet Letter, the three scenes on the scaffold,
one at the beginning, one at the middle, one at the end; we judge
them to have something in common with one another, and we extract
from the book this subordinate sequence of it. So Emerson's index.
The passage we looked at is indexed under education; this suggests
that we read it in conjunction with this other passage:
F R O M C O M M O N P L A C E B O O K TO J O U K N A L / 57
Men are great in their own despite. They achieve a certain greatness,
hut it was while they were toiling to achieve another conventional one.
The boy at college apologiz.es for not learning the tutor's task, & tries to
learn it, but stronger nature gives him Otway & Massingor to read, or
betrays him into a stroll to Mount Auburn in study-hours. The poor boy
instead of thanking the gods and slighting the Mathematical tutor, ducks
before the functionary, & poisons his own fine pleasures by a perpetual
penitence. Well at least let that one never brag of the choice he made; as
he might have well done, if he had known what he did when he was
doing it. (JMN VIII: 266)
If we join the two passages together, each illuminates the other, and
both eompose a meditation on education as accident, as fringe bene-
fit, as illumination universally available and universally slighted or
scorned. But suppose we follow the suggestions of the index entry
"Fate" and consider these passages:
Fate, yes, our music box only plays certain tunes & never a sweeter
strain but we are assured that our barrel is not a dead but a live barrel,—
nay, is only a part of the tune & changes like that . . .
Conservatism stands on this, that a man cannot jump out of his skin;
& well for him that he cannot, for his skin is the world; & the stars of
heaven do hold him there; in the folly of men glitters the wisdom of
God. (JMN VIII: 251-52; the two passages occur in succession but on
different pages of the manuscript volume.)
Now we have made a different sampling, traced a different pattern—

considered, to continue the earlier analogy, not the three scenes on
the scaffold but the series of conversations between Hester and
Dirnrnesdale, one of which is coincident with one of the scenes upon
the scaffold. The passage on education, with its telling comments on
our unwillingness to learn the truths daily if haphazardly presented to
us, becomes part of a meditation on fate, thus identified as one of the
journal's themes, its continua, in which we see these vainly neglected
truths in their power, see our unwillingness to learn from them as one
of a number of examples of our inability not to benefit from necessity
but to resist benefiting from it. And so with each of the index head-
ings, each identifying a theme, a thread in the tapestry of a book—or,
rather, not identifying but creating it, the index as a whole creating
the flexible thematic repertory of the particular volume, the idiomati-
cally Emersonian index making possible the idiomatically Emer-
sonian journal.
The Emersonian journal is arguably the genre the Transcendental-

ists did best at; not only Emerson's journal but many others of its sort
as well are their authors' best work, among them Thoreau's, Alcott's,
Fuller's, and Charles King Newcornb's. Of the great English and
German Romantics, on the other hand, surprisingly few kept journals
of literary distinction, and of those who did, none kept journals of
Emerson's sort. Why should this have been so?
In 1816, the German Romantic poet August von Platen, then al-
ready keeping a diary, resolved to keep simultaneously with it a
commonplace book: a place for "ideas, plans, reflections, remarks on
various subjects such as I think worth the transcribing":
My diary will not be broken off in consequence of this waste-book;
seldom have I recorded here individual thoughts of that sort, as they
commonly arise on walks and then easily vanish again, since these pages
have always retained a certain connectedness and precisely on this ac-
count could not be very rich in reflections—all too often it happened
that one object of thought excluded all others and filled the pages itself,
which accordingly had to lose much by way of diversity. 34
This is a commonsensical argument, resting on commonsensical dis-
tinctions between private and public and between work and life. It is
moreover one borne out in both English and Continental practice.
The two great English Romantic journals are presumably Byron's and
Dorothy Wordsworth's; neither is a workplace. The great English
Romantic workplace is presumably Coleridge's notebooks; they are
no journal.
How distinctive then Emerson's enterprise can look! To keep a
waste book, a miscellany, is to acknowledge the transience of thoughts,
the necessity to record them lest they be forgotten, perhaps the possi-
ble fruitfulness of their accidental juxtaposition, and that the Transcen-
dentalists did; but what of the practice of organizing this miscellany
chronologically and intertwining it with the record of a life? Emerson
has chosen to put in his book not only the thousand scraps of reading
and writing a commonplace book must contain but also those contin-
gent data it must exclude. Or: Emerson has chosen to put in his diary
not only the continuous record of his life and thought but also the
thousand evanescent thoughts by which that record is complicated. In
his book, that is, the private and public, the eternal and the contingent,
the life and the work will inevitably collide and fuse. Lofty speculations
34. Hocke, Das Europaeische Tagebuch, pp. 717-18.
must be shown to have arisen in time, in a sequence of other events,

from the mind of a particular human being.
The Transcenclentalist practice suggests two characteristic and com-
plementary American attitudes: an inclination to subordinate all activi-
ties to the recording of a life, and a reluctance to separate the work of
art from the life of the artist, for fear, as Thoreau put it, "that the work
of art should be at the expense of the man." In America all art tends
towards the condition of autobiography, and all autobiography to the
condition of life, but equally all life tends towards the condition of
autobiography and all autobiography towards the condition of art.
Emerson in inventing the Transcendentalist journal found not only an
apt synthesis of conflicting influences but an apt form for the Transcen-
dentalist vision.35
35. For an alternative explanation of the paucity of European Romantic diaries see
Boerner, Tagebuch, p. 45: "Despite their predisposition for the fragmentary, the Ro-
mantics resorted only seldom to the intrinsic jumble of the diary. One reason may be
that a fragment in the Romantic sense is something broken off intentionally and thus
something not susceptible of completion, whereas the diary presents a structure always
perceived in its ongoing growth." On the Romantic fragment see also "The Journal and
the Aphorism Book, "pp. 107ff.
Ill
The Form of
the Mature Journal
Introduction
The Russian formalist Tynianov remarks that underlying literary his-

tory is the concept of the evolution of systems. Tzvetan Todorov,
quoting that remark, continues:
Changes in literary discourses are not isolated; each affects the whole
system, and thus eventually brings about the substitution of one system
for another. We may define a literary period as the time during which a
certain system continues relatively unchanged. 1
We may learn from this that to describe such a text as Emerson's

journal is implicitly to locate it within the systems to which it belongs.
I take these to be the Emersonian literary system; the genre of the
Transcendentalist journal; and, most suggestively, the literary texts
pertinent to Emerson's literary period, in particular of course those
most similar to, and thus most sharply illustrating, the Emersonian
journal, that is, the aphorism book and the quotation book. The follow-
ing leisurely, overlapping essays set the journal within each of these
systems in turn.
One goal of these essays is to make a case for the journal as a work
of art. Now this is something rather different than to make a case for a
despised writer or text. When Eliot revives Donne or Marvell, his
proper strategy is the polemically celebratory description and analysis
of particular, putatively exemplary passages, for an audience pre-
1. Todorov, Dictionnaire, pp. 190-91.
61
sumed to have ignored or undervalued the virtues he seeks to estab-

lish. In the present instance, however, no such attitude can be pre-
sumed; readers of Emerson's journals have characteristically taken
and proclaimed intense pleasure in them. The problem here is to
alter not taste or judgment but mentality. Readers' pleasure in the
journals has so far been sterile, for lack of categories in which to
develop it. The case made here for the journals is an attempt to
supply them; it presents notions in the context of which the journal
we already know and cherish can become not only a source of plea-
sure but also an object of critical thought.
A fringe benefit of the enterprise is a rehabilitation of Emerson the
critic. Traditionally we have begun our judgment of him in that capac-
ity from the presumption that Emerson's literary performance is his
lectures and essays.2 Inevitably we have perceived the real flaws of
that performance, and inevitably perceived also that the performance
is in some way at odds with the theory. There has followed the usual
result of contemplating apparent hypocrisy. When Matthiessen finds
that Emerson's practice and his theory are at odds, Emerson becomes
for him simply a man not living by the standards he preached: a failed
writer and a windy critic.
My own reading of Emerson the critic begins from my judgment
that Emerson's chief literary performance is his journal. Now Emer-
son is a better journalizer than he is an essayist. This fact alone gives
one a certain initial tolerance for Emerson's notorious critical abstrac-
tions. But then a strange thing happens. Many of those abstractions
turn out, when applied to the journal, to be remarkably concrete;
they seemed vague because we had no literary object adequate to
exemplify or illustrate them. Thus the numerous exaltations of nature
over art seem more telling when we imagine them defending (and
defining) a form partly constituted not by art but by chance. Viewed
in the light of his entire literary practice, and in particular with refer-
ence to the heterodox masterpiece at its center, Emerson becomes a
much shrewder and more concrete aesthetician. Once seen as an
extremist, he becomes a precisian.
One thing this series of essays will not do is pay much attention to
the manner in which Emerson altered passages of the journal for use
in the lectures and essays. Such alteration is notoriously among Em-
2. See for example Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1965), III: 163-76; Vivian Hopkins, Spires of Form (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1951); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, pp. 3-75.
THE FORM OF THE MATURE J O U R N A L / 63
erson's chief means of composition, and the question of what happens

to particular passages under adaptation has already attracted some
interest and will no doubt with the completed publication of the
journals attract much more.3 It has not, however, yielded much light;
and it is, I think, not likely to. The reason is that while examining the
process we have also been misconceiving it. We have considered
Emerson as the reviser of a draft for publication. But the journals are
no draft; they are a text. A primary fact about Emerson the writer is
that he created two texts, two large formal structures, for the same
words. If we are to compare individual passages used in both struc-
tures, we ought to do so with a sense of what both structures are. If a
maxim of Goethe's turns up both in Wilhelm Meister and in the
Maximen und Reflexionen, our proper comparative interest is not
between the two versions of the maxim but between the two genres
into which it has been incorporated.
Accordingly, though a consideration of relations between particular
journal passages and their adaptations in the lectures and essays is
peripheral here, the consideration of relations between the journal
qua text and the essays qua text is central. Tynianov's remark holds
good for the study of an individual; there too we have to consider the
whole: the Emersonian literary system. That we have not done so is
responsible for certain grand misconstructions of the essays. We have
seen them in isolation from, or, at best, in superordination to, the
very texts they need to be compared with, on a basis of equality. We
have, for example, considered them fragmentary or associative or
solipsistic, and we have said as much of Emerson's mind, not having
located either the essays or the author within the totality of his produc-
tion. One goal of the following essays is to rectify these errors by
setting each of Emerson's forms within that totality.
Another is to understand these forms, and in particular the form of
the journal, as responses to Emerson's historical world; among the
Emersons these essays have in mind is an intelligent artist living
through America's transition from agrarian to industrial capitalism,
and the forms that that intelligent artist devised are understood as apt
responses to that transition, and in particular as a critique of the
America coming into being from the viewpoint of the America just
passing out of view. In that sense these essays are very much in
3. Sec, for example, Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, pp. 285-88, and Glen
Johnson, "Emerson's Craft of Revision," Studies in the American Renaissance 1980, pp.
51-72.
accord with our current rethinking of Emerson and with our rethink-
ing of the American Renaissance generally. As Sacvan Bercovitch
writes,
On some basic level, we will have to reconceive our so-called radical or
subversive literary tradition as an insistent engagement with society,
rather than a recurrent flight from it. In other words, we will have to re-
historicize the ideal Americas projected in our major texts . . . we will
have to re-see these fictions historically, in dynamic relation to the cul-
ture: neither as mirrors of their time, nor as lamps of the creative imagina-
tion, but as works of ideological mimesis, at once implicated in the society
they resist, capable of overcoming the forces that compel their complic-
ity, and nourished by the culture they often seem to subvert. 4
Among the "ideal Americas projected in our major texts" is the world
of Emerson's journal. It is, I think, not the most extreme of those
worlds; but in its very moderation it escapes certain dangers. "What
our major writers could not conceive," Bercovitch continues,
either in their optative or in their tragic-ironic moods, was that the
United States was neither Utopia at best nor dystopia at worst . . . but a
certain political system; that in principle no less than in practice the
American Way was neither providential nor natural but one of many
possible forms of society.5
Accordingly, their own literary worlds were as Utopian or dystopian as

the America they presumed themselves to be responding to: the
universal corruption of Melville's The Confidence Man- Whitman's
"wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go," Emerson's
own "nation of men" in the vision at the end of "The American
Scholar." The journal as form evokes no such images; it implies a
temperate Jeremiad, a moderate Utopia, and is, precisely on that
account, among the most refractory critiques of nineteenth-century
America.
Interlude: A Practical Note

The writer on Emerson's essays can say to the reader, "read this or
that text and you will feel the force of what I mean." What can a writer
4. Bercovitch, "The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History," Critical

Inquiry 12: 4 (Summer 1986), 642.
5. Ibid., p. 646.
THE F O R M OF THE M A T U R E J O U R N A L / 65
on the sixteen volumes of Emerson's journals recommend to readers

seeking to acquire some independent sense of the text those volumes
eonstitute?
By far the best of the selections from the journals is Joel Forte's
Emerson in his Journals. As a collection of interesting passages it can
hardly be bettered. But it is, as such a collection must be, indifferent
to the form of the material it draws on; and certain aspects of the
following arguments deal with aspects of that form that Forte's selec-
tion of passages obscures. What feasible program of reading will re-
veal them? Emerson's own principle of presentation suggests the best
answer. When he showed the journals to his friends and colleagues he
showed them not a selection but a section: the journals from page ten
to page twenty, or the journals of the year 1841. That is, he set
boundaries but within those boundaries deleted nothing. Accord-
ingly, my own recommendation to the reader would be to read any
one of Emerson's original volumes from beginning to end. A particu-
larly good example is Journal N (JMN VIII: 248-308 and Plate VII
between pp. 328 and 329) because the editors have reproduced its
index. Or perhaps a more Emersonian alternative would be simply to
open any of the JMN volumes from IV to XIV, read for an afternoon a
stretch of continuous pages, and then stop.
The Journal vs. the Essays
Is the Journal a Work of Art? (Part: 1)

We know—and it is both the most important and the most misleading
thing to know about the Emersonian literary system—that Emerson
transcribed and adapted a good many passages of the journal for use
in the lectures and essays; we might even describe these latter as
being predominantly an arrangement of such transcriptions and adap-
tations, supplemented by new material written ad hoc. These facts
have led us to make certain distinctions, to conceive certain beliefs
regarding the Emersonian corpus. Thinking that the essays are
wholes, we have conceived of the journals as fragments; thinking of
the essays as finished products, as ends, we have regarded the jour-
nals as raw material, as means. Accordingly, we have been reluctant
to regard as a literary work what we have understood as essentially
ancillary to literary work. We have regarded the lectures and essays
as literature; the journals, therefore, we have felt obliged to regard as

something else.
Let us begin the long work of regarding the journals as literature by
unsettling the distinction between raw material and finished product.
Elaborated, the distinctions yields a dynamic model of the Emer-
sonian literary system, a model we have so thoroughly assimilated
that we describe it offhandedly, allude to it as to a truism it will not do
to stress. Thus this precise yet almost apologetic formulation of Law-
rence Buell's:
The characteristic Transccndentalist pattern of composition, estab-
lished by Emerson and imitated with varying degrees of success by
Alcott, Thoreau, and Channing, was of course a threefold process of
revision from journal to lecture to essay.6
As we imagine the process, its steps come in a necessary order:
Emerson first writes a passage into the journal, then copies or modi-
fies it for use in a lecture, then copies or modifies the lecture passage
for use in an essay. Each stage subsumes the last, and at the end of
the process, in the essay, the fluid has been solidified, the transient
made permanent.
Against this model we can make three arguments. The first and
most tentative concerns the essays, that is, the stage of print. Some-
times passages printed in one work are printed later in another. This
is the exception, not the rule; but even qua exception the fact dis-
suades us from taking the essays as a monumentum aere perennius.
They are not only cannibalized for; they are also cannibalized from. 7
And if the former happens more often than the latter, we ought
perhaps to regard that pattern as expressing not Emerson's aesthetic
satisfaction but his worldly prudence. What is printed is seldom made
further use of not, perhaps, because it is in any artistic sense final but
simply because it has been read, been made available—not because
Emerson the artist has arrived at a goal but because the reader has
been made part owner of the text.
Also, though again not often, the process sometimes goes in the
opposite direction. Passages from the lectures turn up in later jour-
nals, passages from essays not only in later essays but also in later
6. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, p. 280.

7. Thus, as the JMN editors indicate (JMN VIII: 254), a passage used in "Culture"
(W VI: 142) turns up later in "Quotation and Originality" (W VII: 178) and still later in
"Address at the Opening of the Concord Free Public Library" (W XI: 504).
THE F O R M OF THE MATURE J O U R N A L / 67
journals and lectures.8 The individual essay is already no indissoluble

fabric; now the essays as a whole, the stage of print, is no longer
everywhere the final stage of composition.
The second argument concerns the nature of the transaction, of the
activity we casually refer to as "Emerson's use of journal material for
lectures and essays." Let us imagine the history of a passage: written,
used, thus used up, and discarded. But no; Emerson goes back to the
journals again and again, as well as to the lectures and essays drawn
from them. He goes back even to the early journals, the awkward
juvenalia that most of us would gladly forget. 9 And most tellingly, he
goes back to the same passages he has already used. Often, in fact, he
goes back to passages extensively modified for early lectures and
transcribes them in their original form for use in later lectures and in
essays.10 These passages if any ought to have been used up, because
they were clearly used; but they were not. Nor should we regard this
practice as manifesting happy second thoughts on the part of an older
and wiser writer; "the first and third thoughts agree," runs one of
Emerson's favorite proverbs, and though it is tempting to think of the
later published version of such passages as their final form, nothing
authorizes such a conclusion; all we can say is that it is the last one
Emerson had occasion to give them, the journal passages themselves
properly being conceived as still vital in their cruda senectus.11
A good emblem of the process of adaptation is the Emersonian use
mark: a single vertical line drawn through a passage. It both obscures
and highlights the passage it runs through, both interrupts it and calls
8. See, for example, JMN VII: 63, 209, and 337-38.

The last example is revelatory: a passage used in the lecture "Private Life," given
January 8, 1840, turns up in the journal in an entry dated February 3, 1840. The editors
write that it "may have been written prior to January 8, or it may have been copied
from the lecture." Only an instinctive and unwarrantable belief that the public cannot
be laid under tribute for the private makes the former speculation conceivable.
9. See JMN XII: xxii—xxiii. One striking example: a passage on John Adams used for
the lecture "Old Age," published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, is drawn from a
journal passage written in 1825 (JMN II: 333).
10. See JMN XII: xxi.
11. The one exception is Emerson's practice of physical cannibalization, his occa-
sional tearing out pages of the journal for use elsewhere. When the passage is gone
physically its vitality is spent. But the practice of physical cannibalixatiou is not re-
stricted to Emerson's dealing with the journals; it is as common, indeed more common,
in Emerson's dealing with his lecture manuscripts (see the notes to Stephen Whicher
and Robert Spiller, eds., The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson [Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1959-72; henceforth abbreviated EL], 3
vols.; and also Cabot, Memoir, II: 669).
attention to it. It indicates, that is, that a passage is to be used, not

that it has been used up: an apt hieroglyph for the particular character
of Emersonian use that is not exhaustion. It is then to be distin-
guished from the notation "printed," which Emerson interpolates
sometimes after passages published in books. "Printed" says, pru-
dently, "don't use this again; it's been printed." The use mark says
only, "use this, on this occasion, for such and such a lecture or essay."
The last of the three arguments concerns the nature of the journals
themselves, which cannot be properly described as raw material be-
cause so much of them is cooked. They are, that is, notoriously a book
of quotations, that is, a book for which other books are cannibalized;
they are as often a point of arrival as a point of origin. Even consid-
ered as a book exclusively of Emersonian utterances they are no
universal and uniform first draft; they are a patchwork of copied and
uncopied, revised and unrevised, corrected and uncorrected. Emer-
son transcribes and modifies passages from the journals not only for
the lectures and essays but also for other journals, and not only from
regular journals into topical ones but from one regular journal into the
next, subjecting them to alterations similar to those practiced for the
sake of the podium and the book.12 So we cannot eomforably take the
journals as one term of an antithesis, because it already contains the
other.
Of the Emersonian literary system as a whole,13 then, we can say that
no passage can ever be considered as having attained its final form or
arrived at its final context; that no passage is ever restricted to its initial
context; that any passage can be reused; that no passage, by being
reused, is ever exhausted. The distinction between raw material—or
rough draft—and finished product is worse than useless in understand-
ing Emerson's system of production, in which texts we normally regard
12. The practice is ubiquitous, but one particularly good example is JMN IV: 378:
"A friend once told me that he never spent anything on himselt without deserving the
praise of disinterested benevolence." Emerson is here rephrasing an anecdote he tells
earlier (JMN IV: 292) of his brother Charles, and in rephrasing it removing the name
and thus the element of the personal just as he does in adapting journal passages for use
in lectures and essays.
13. Minus, that is, the letters and the poems. Emerson did not habitually make
copies of his letters, so physically they are not part of the system under discussion. The
case of the poems is more complex. Drafts of them do occur in the journals; but most
often a single poem in the journals corresponds to a single poem in the book or review.
Emerson is, that is, using the journals for writing poems in their entirety, not for
writing groups of lines later to be not only rewritten but also recombined. Appropri-
ately enough, fairly often drafts of poems are written in pencil and later erased and
overwritten—not only used, that is, but also used up.
THE FORM OF THE MATURE JOURNAL / 69
as ancillary to creation, instrumental to creation, subordinate to and

thus other than creation, are in fact forms and modes of creation.
The distinction we can retain is a purely quantitative one: the
essays show less internal copying that do the journals. This is hardly
much of an argument for denying the journal a place in the Emer-
sonian corpus; indeed if we try to understand it in Emerson's terms
we find it tends to put the journal at dead center. For though the
essays are essentially fluid, and only prudentially and apparently
fixed, they tempt the reader to believe otherwise. The journals do
not. "In taking up a cotemporary book," writes Emerson, "we forget
that we see the house that is building & not the house that is built"
(JMN VIII: 132). And still more, it would seem, in taking up a book
that has been made by the passage of time to seem not a shanty but a
mausoleum.
There remains the distinction between the whole and the part,
which has been most vividly formulated by Emerson himself:
This Book is my Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere
to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because
corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by
their addition. (JMN IV: 250-51)
In the model this distinction implies, the journals are a heap of frag-
ments; Emerson the skilled joiner reads through them in search of
fragments apt for joining together; once fitted together, and elabo-
rated, the fragments of the journal become the wholes of lectures and
essays. Against this model are two arguments, the first intuitive and
short, the second speculative and long.
The intuitive argument is that the characteristic utterance in the
diary is simply not a fragment, not, that is, intrinsically incomplete.
James saw this clearly, saying of a journal passage on Webster that it
was "not a rough jotting, but, like most of the entries ... a finished
piece of writing."14 We have only to read a few entries to see it
ourselves—starting, perhaps, with the full, rounded, and misleading
statement quoted in the previous paragraph. But as this is a sort of
epigraph, an undated creed preceding the first of Emerson's mature
journals, we might better take some of the briefer paragraphs closely
following it:
The plough displaces the spade, the bridge the watermen, the press
the scrivener.
14. James, "Emerson," p. 450.

The moral of your piece should be cuneiform & not polygonal. Judge
of the success of the piece by the exclusive prominence it gives to the
subject in the minds of all the audience.
To Goethe there was no trifle. Glauber picked up what every body
else threw away. Cuvier made much of humblest facts. The lower tone
you take the more flexible your voice is. The whole landscape is beauti-
ful though the particulars are not. "You are never are tired whilst you
can see far."
Luther & Napoleon are better treatises on the Will than Edwards's.
Will does not know if it be cold or hot or dangerous; he only goes on to
his mark & leaves to mathematicians to calculate whether a body can
come to its place without passing through all the intermediates. "Men
have more heart than mind." (JMN IV:253-57)
Should we want other evidence than the immediate judgment of
our critical sense, we might note Emerson's rueful account of the
obstacles to marshalling these utterances into essays:
Here I sit & read & write with very little system & as far as regards
composition with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompress-
ible each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.15
As indeed is inevitable; created as rounded wholes, such sentences
and paragraphs can be fitted together only with difficulty and by main
strength. They can be given a place in a larger form and with respect
to that larger form are relatively fragments; absolutely fragments,
however, intrinsically incomplete, they are not.
The speculative argument against the invidious distinction be-
tween whole and part is based on a taxonomy of the Emersonian
literary system and, in particular, on a distinction within the corpus of
the journals. These are suggestively divided by their most recent,
most devoutly erudite, and most astonishingly thorough and rigorous
editors into two classes: the regular journals and the miscellaneous
notebooks. We can distinguish the classes on two counts: the regular
journals are dated and ordered chronologically, the miscellaneous
notebooks are not; the miscellaneous notebooks have generally a par-
ticular topic or special function, the regular journals do not. The
topics and functions vary, of course, hence the legitimate qualification
"miscellaneous." Those distinguished by topic include volumes on
15. Joseph Slater, ed., The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1964; henceforth abbreviated CEC), p. .185.
THE F O R M OF THE MATURE JOURNAL / 71
Charles Chauncy Emerson, on Margaret Fuller, on history, on mind;

those distinguished by function include lecture notebooks, quotation
books, account books. But in all this variety we can hold to the
distinction between the topical and the universal; the miscellaneous
notebooks are above all specialized. They evoke that sad Emersonian
example, the farmer who has ceased somehow to be man on the farm,
the laborer who has ceased to be a man.
But then comes the refractory fact: at no time does Emerson ever
stop using the regular journals for the purposes to which the miscella-
neous notebooks are exclusively devoted. When his brother Charles
dies, he sets aside a book almost as a memorial to him, transcribing
there excerpts from his writings, anecdotes and mots, comments and
descriptions; but he does not then cease discussing or quoting
Charles in the regular journals. He sets aside several books as quota-
tion books, on several plans, but notoriously does not stop recording
quotations in the regular journals. He sets aside several books for
lecture notes but does not cease to write passages for use in the
lectures in the regular journals. At no point, that is, is any function or
topic severed from the regular journals; these remain a sort of undiffer-
entiated protoplasm, an amoeba occasionally putting out pseudopods.
Thus the miscellaneous notebooks are not so much a permanent redis-
tribution of the functions of the regular journals as a momentary
crystallization of them; the topic is identified, the function chosen,
but nothing is ever subtracted from the regular journals, which re-
main, somehow, the whole, undivided and inexhaustible.16 Again
Emerson provides us with a gratityingly precise image of the journals
in this aspect in his portrait of the protean American omni-apprentice:
A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the
professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches,
edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in
successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet.17
16. On the very different relation between sermon and journal in the period of
Emerson's ministry, see "Strayings and Temptations," pp. 45-47.
17. "Self-Reliance," W II: 76.
This image is not an Emersonian fantasy but a recognizably American type. William
Cobbett writes in 1818 that "besides the great quantity of work performed by the
American labourer, his skill, the versatility of his talent, is a great thing. Every man can
use a axe, a saw, and a hammer. Scarcely one who cannot do any job at rough carpen-
try, and mend a plough or a waggon. Very few indeed, who cannot kill and dress pigs
and sheep, and many of them oxen calves. Every farmer is a neat butcher; a butcher for
market; and, of course, 'the boys' must learn. This is a great convenience. It makes you
72 / E M E R S O N AND THE AHT OF THE D I A R Y
Now if we keep this taxonomy in mind in thinking not only about

the journals but also about the whole Emersonian oeuvre, we will
find that the lectures and essays belong in the subordinate category of
the topical notebooks. This feels wrong at first, of course; but as we
reflect on the irreverent comparison between the secondary journals
and the great Emersonian masterpieces, it becomes commandingly
plausible. It illuminates, for example, the peculiar nature of Emer-
son's public titles. Lamb's essays, say, are often ironically titled, the
title promising less than the essay gives, the relation between title
and topic enigmatic and oblique; Emerson's lectures and essays are
titled according to their central topic: not "A Dissertation on Roast
Pork" but "Bacon," "History," "Friendship." Montaigne's essay "On
Some Verses of Vergil" includes passages on the change from youth to
old age, on the remembrance of past pleasures, on virtue and nobil-
ity, on the marriage of Socrates and on Montaigne's own; Emerson's
essay "Love" gives a series of thoughts on love. Nor is that essay, or
any of Emerson's other essays, so shaped by an organizing poetic
power as to become essentially forms other than collections. This
assertion touches on a vexed question, of course. Much intelligent
work has been done to show precisely the contrary. But it has pro-
duced no agreement on the nature of Emersonian poetic order and
has left intact the powerful statements denying its existence. Of these
the most brilliantly sardonic, surprisingly, is Alcott's: "you may begin
at the last paragraph and read backwards."18 The most evocative,
however, are Emerson's own:
In a fortnight or three weeks my little raft [the 1841 Essays] will be
afloat. Expect nothing more of my powers of construction,—no ship-
building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards arid logs tied
together. ... I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every
knowable in nature; but the arrangement [of the Essays] loiters long,
and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house.19
so independent as to a main part of the means of housekeeping. All are ploughmen. In

short, a good labourer here can do anything that is to he done upon a farm" (from
Cobbett, A Year's Residence in The United States of America, in Allan Nevins, cd.,
America Through British Eyes [New York: Oxford University Press, 1948], p. 66).
18. Alcott, Concord Days, eited in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, p. 160.
19. CEC, pp. 291 and 278.
In a November, 1836 letter to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Emerson writes, "you
express overkind opinions of my little book [Nature] but think it wants eonnexion. I
thought it resembled the multiplication table" (L II: 46). See also the letter of March,
1838 to Frederic Henry Hedge (L II: 121) and LII: 463.
Reading the best of the arguments against this assessment, such as

Lawrence Buell's, we can say perhaps that boards are put with other
boards and logs with logs (or, on occasion, deliberately vice versa);
but we cannot by any strategy assimilate the essays to that master-
piece of structural ingenuity, the Yankee clipper, and we will do
better thinking of them as the gathering spaces of a brickkiln than as
the articulated series of forms-in-functions of a house. If the essays are
organized differently from the notebooks, they are still closer in na-
ture to them than they are to the coy, self-reflective associations of a
Lamb or the exuberant, relentless argument of a Hazlitt.
Both essay and topical notebook, then, are gatherings of passages
extracted from the journal by their common subject matter; and
though they can be regarded as wholes with respect to the various
journal passages they collect, they can also and no less plausibly be
regarded as fragments with respect to the journal as a whole. Now
what, in Emerson's scheme of things, is the literary status of a
topical collection? The crucial passage occurs in the 1835 lecture on
Bacon:
Bacon's method is not within the work itself, but without. ... All his
work lies along the ground, a vast unfinished city. He did not arrange
but unceasingly collect facts . . . his work is therefore somewhat frag-
mentary. . . . It is a vast collection of proverbs, all wise but the order is
much of it quite mechanical, things on one subject being thrown to-
gether; the order of a shop and not that of a tree or an animal where
perfect assimilation has taken place and all the parts have a perfect
unity. . . . Works of this sort . . . are never ended. Each of Shakspear's
dramas is perfect, hath an immortal integrity. To make Bacon's works
complete, he must live to the end of the world.20
The "vast unfinished city" has the charm of all fragments and ruins;
the grand conclusion, the vision of the immortal writer laboriously
concluding the infinite work, is remarkably attractive. But Emerson's
criticism of the principle is no less sharp for his admiration of the
project. The order of affinity is simply the order of the shop: "things
on one subject . . . thrown together." The "thrown" carries the point
of the sentence, the depreciation of this coarse and mechanical classifi-
cation. And the antithesis, in the sentence around which the para-
20. Emerson, "Lord Bacon," EL I: 334-35

Compare with this Emerson's later formulation: "Lord Bacon's Method in his books
is of the Understanding, but his sentences are lighted by Ideas" ( J M N VIII: 46).
graph turns, is "the order of ... a tree or an animal where perfect

assimilation has taken place and all the parts have a perfect unity."
Emerson cites at this crucial point a work of nature rather than a
work of literature not, I think, in a sentimental flight to natural
beauty, but in intelligent recourse to a conception of natural order,
namely Goethe's, that is happily and almost inevitably translatable
from the language of science into the language of art. Let us recon-
struct Emerson's sense of that conception so as to apply it to our
purposes:
[Goethe] beholding a plant and seeing ... a petal in transition from a
leaf, exclaimed, And why is not every part of a plant a transformed leaf?
a petal is a leaf, a seed is a leaf, metamorphosed, and slow-paced experi-
ment has made good this prophetic vision . . .
The same gifted man walking in the Jews' burying ground in the city
of Venice saw a sheep's skull on the ground and was struck with the
gradation by which the vertebrae passed into the bones of the head.
Instantly he said to himself, the vertebra of the spine is the unit of
anatomy; all other parts are merely metamorphoses, degradations, abor-
tions, or enlargements of this. The head was only the uppermost verte-
bra transformed. 21
The order of the shop, the order of affinity, is the order of Linnaeus.
It is essentially empirical; it looks at the things of the world and
divides them by their appearances, but makes no attempt to explain
the divisions it passively notes. Hence, for Emerson, the power of the
Goethean conceptions. The Goethean system reflects what Emerson
explicitly says the Baconian system does not, that is, "a method de-
rived from the mind";22 having noted the diverse wonders of the
world, it finds in them "the order of cause and effect" and so reduces
them to unity. Emerson writes in "The Humanity of Science" that the
mind desires by "tyrannical instinct" to reduce many ideas to few, and
few to one.23 Not heeding that instinct, the mind ordering by affinity
gives us simply too many entities and gives them to us as distinct
entities rather than as linked facets.
If we then ask what literary form would correspond to the Goe-
thean system, it seems that we would want not a book of essays or a
series of lectures on various topics but some form by which the law
unifying those topics is articulated and manifested. The various topics
21. Emerson, "The Humanity of Science," EL II: 23-24.
22. EL I: 334.
23. EL II: 23; see on the same subject JMN IV: 289ff and JMN VII: 28.
are so many misleading suggestions, so many strivings "to tear the

part from its connexion" (JMN VII: 105) "Love" is identified by its
title as other than "History," other than "Nature" or "Circles." The
journal, the undifferentiated whole, makes no such distinctions. At
least negatively, at least potentially, it leaves the reader free of the
deception the lectures and essays continually imprint. As contrasted
with the order of affinity, the order of occurrence can be described as
the juxtaposition of the like and the unlike. The phrase evokes the
similes of Donne, though seldom in reading the journal do we experi-
ence the quick, intense, cerebral pleasure asociated with the percep-
tion of a surprising similarity. Indeed we seldom notice the juxtaposi-
tion of any one passage with any other; we notice rather the unity of
all with all. We have passages on art, on history, on self-reliance, on
the poet, all in immediate succession, and our response is not a
perception of how one in particular is related to another in particular
but of how all are related to all. We recall at this point Firkins' remark
cited earlier:
The whole fascination of life for Emerson lay in the disclosure of identity
in variety, that is, in the concurrence, the running together, of several
distinct images or ideas.24
This disclosure the lectures and essays formally occlude, and the
journal formally encourages.25
24. Firkins, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), p. 237.
On this same topic see JMN VII: 102 and Buell's excellent analysis of "The Sphinx"
(Literary Transcendentalism, p. 182)
25. In this connection Emerson's celebrated account of his 1833 visit to the Jardin
des Plantes seems a temporary reconciliation of antitheses. In it Emerson does two
things. He celebrates the organization of the museum: "How much finer things are in
composition than alone. Tis wise in man to make Cabinets. . . . this is philanthropy,
wisdom, taste—to form a Cabinet of natural history" (JMN IV: 198-99). He also
records a vision of nature: "The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever as you
glance along this bewildering series of animated forms,—the hazy butterflies, the
carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes,—& the upheaving principle of
life everywhere incipient in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so gro-
tesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in
man the observer,—an occult relation between the very scorpions and man" (199—200).
Now a cabinet is among other things a principle of organization, by which like is put
with like. Emerson sees this particular cabinet in 1833, that is, twenty-six years before
the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. No grand hypothesis, then, no single
idea, is available to make sense of the "amazing puzzle." Like is grouped with like and
severed from unlike—that is all, and Emerson's sense of amazement, of bewilderment,
is precise and legitimate. But against his bewilderment stands his intuition of continu-
ity, of "the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient in the very rock," of an
"occult relation between the scorpions and man." Nothing in the cabinet itself autho-
The Journals as Artifact

We have, then, two literary corpora. We are tempted, perhaps, to
compare them with respect to form and theme; but we will do better
to describe the journal in these respects by comparing it with works
formally more like it. The necessary comparison in this context is
rather with respect to audience, that is, the comparison between the
journal and the lectures and essays as artifacts and commodities. The
goal of the comparison is the statement of certain facts about the
journal. But in the course of formulating those statements, certain
familiar facts about the lectures and essays will appear in a new light.
We are incorporating into a consideration of Emerson the writer
certain new data concerning Emerson the diarist, and as Emerson
knew, a new fact makes a new system.
Let us begin by contrasting two scenes, two descriptions of diarists
in the act of presenting their diaries to readers. The first is Emerson's
own, drawn from the cloud-capped towers of the imagination:
Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours
of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus
written are to him burning and fragrant; he reads them on his knees by
midnight and by the morning star; he wets them with his tears; they are
sacred. . . . After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his
friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yet with firm-
ness, exposes the page to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? (The
Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson [W] III: 188-89, based on
JMN VIII: 123-24)
The second is Bronson Alcott's matter-of-fact account of a talk with
Emerson in 1839:
We [Alcott, Emerson, and John Sullivan Dwight] had some conversa-
tion after dinner on high themes: the genesis of Nature, the dependence
of the elements of the corporeal and physical world on the Soul, etc.
Afterward, a walk to E's favorite haunts.
Dwight left toward evening. After tea we conversed on style, my
Conversations, the future. I looked over E's commonplace books.26
rizes or educates that intuition, which indeed fights against the principle of organiza-
tion it beholds. It ought to be no surprise then to find Emerson writing soon afterwards
that "Linnaeus is already read as the Plato who described Atlantis. A classification is
nothing but a Cabinet. The whole remains to be done thereafter" (JMN IV: 282; see
further JMN V: 405).
26. Odell Shepard, ed., The Journals of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown,
1938), p. 126.
There is nothing here of one friend's inviting another to share "a

hallowed experience." Indeed Alcott is not at this point Emerson's
intimate friend at all; rather he is an acquaintance showing some
promise of spiritual kinship. It is at this moment, at the moment of
incipient friendship, that Emerson often presents his journal. Lidian
Emerson was offered the journal when still Lydia Jackson: "will you
not honor me, my sibyl, by visiting my lowly study and reading the
page."27 Elizabeth Hoar was still Charles Emerson's fiancee when
Emerson offered her a similar invitation, as graceful and distant as a
courtier's bow: "My dear Elizabeth: Charles allows me to send you,
with the best wishes of the day, my old proverb-book."28
We may say, then, that in Transcendentalist Concord showing a
journal resembles paying a social call; and, like the call, it is returned.
Emerson had read Alcott's 1835 journal in 1836, transcribing passages
from it into his own and adding some very judicious comments on
Alcott's style; so Emerson's 1839 presentation of his own journal to
Alcott was only fair play (JMN V: 167-70). Emerson and Fuller ex-
change diaries as scholars exchange manuscripts, each drawing from
and commenting on the other's.29 We have even the diary as calling
card, as when Charles King Newcomb presents his aloud at a sort of
Emersonian soiree:
just now I have been unusually reminded of your peculiar tastes and
vein of thinking [Emerson is writing to his aunt Mary] by the visit here
of a youth . . . who read me yesterday largely from his journal, his bold
and acute criticism on his readings in literature . . . so naive and collo-
quial and yet poetic in his expression and illustration that [Elizabeth
Hoar] agreed with me in observing the ready resemblance.30
On occasion journals are sent through the mail, sometimes to be read
not only by the correspondent but also by his or her friends. 31 (Letters
27. L I: 437.
28. L II: 3; Rusk identifies the "proverb-book" as Emerson's journal.
29. For Fuller on Emerson see Joel Myerson, ed., "Margaret Fuller's 1842 Jour-
nal," Harvard Library Bulletin 21, p. 338 and 340, and L III: 89-90; for Emerson on
Fuller, L II: 223. The JMN editors suggest that Caroline Sturgis also took part in this
system of exchange ( J M N XII: xviii).
30. L III: 64, June 20 and 22, 1842; see also JMN VIII: 178.
31. Alcott writes in May 1836, "On Saturday last, I sent to Mr. Russell, by the
Morgan's who now leave me for a month to visit their friends, the preceding sheets of
my Journal. 1 prefer this method of communicating with him, as it acquaints him, from
time to time, with my favorite plans, purposes, moods of mind of action; and is a fairer
transcript of my life, than any thing else" (Joel Myerson, ed., "Bronson Alcott's 'Journal
for 1836,' " Studies in the American Renaissance 1978, p. 55).
are treated in much the same way; they arrive in the mail and are
passed around like rare and choice magazines.32) From here to eoterie
publication in the Dial, with its three hundred subscribers, is a small
step, and indeed that step is sometimes taken—"nor Gods nor true
persons have secrets," wrote Margaret Fuller while editing the re-
view, and excerpts from Charles Emerson's journal were published
there, though posthumously, as were excerpts from Alcott's journal
with the author hale and hearty in his forties. 33 Emerson in the jour-
nal names four possible audiences: oneself, a friend, a few friends,
and God. Clearly the journal is read by the least intimate of these
audiences: a comfortable group of friends and colleagues. "I would
have my book read," Emerson writes,
as I have read my favorite books not with explosion & astonishment, a
marvel and a roeket, but a friendly & agreeable influence stealing like
the scent of a flower or the sight of a new landscape on a traveller. I
neither wish to be hated & defied by such as I startle, nor to be kissed
and hugged by the young whose thoughts I stimulate. (JMN VIII: 106)
The scene Alcott describes realizes and articulates this desire.
The journal is offered to friends and acquaintances, not to a single
friend or lover; but also, obviously, it is offered to friends and not to
strangers. Those who read have been invited to read, are known to
Emerson and chosen by him. They compose a small and unified
world. What they are offered is thus an esoteric text—though not a
mystery, no secret scroll guarded by passwords, simply a text for the
few, for a band of brothers and sisters. Appropriately, the offering of
the journal is a conversationalL gesture. We note in Alcott's account
that author and reader inhabit the same room. The moment of read-
ing is typically a tete-a-tete. Emerson offers his journal not so much to
a reader as to an interlocutor, at worst to a correspondent, and awaits
a response. Nor were responses lacking, such as this of Fuller's: "I
have found in his journal two sentences that represent the two sides
of his thought. . . . I shall write to him about it."34
32. JMN VIII: 180: "When C[hanning] says, 'If I were a Transccnclentalist I should
not seal my letters,' what does he truly say but that he sees he ought not to seal his
letters?"
33. Charles Kmerson, "Notes from the Journal of a Scholar," Dial 1: 1, July 1840;
Alcott, "Days from a Diary," Dial 2: 4, April 1842. Fuller's remark is taken from the
preface to the Alcott selection.
34. Belle Gale Chcvigny, Margaret Fuller: The Woman and the Myth (Old West-
bury, New York: Feminist Press, 1976), pp. 129-30. On Emerson as a reader of
Fuller's journals see I, II: 135, 197, 223, and 238-39.
The curious thing is that this audience, and this relation between
artist and audience, seem normative for Emerson. His neat categoriza-
tion of possible audiences excludes the indifferent and the hostile; if
we read him literally, the real audience of the lectures and essays—
the rising middle class of Jacksonian America, the city rather than the
neighborhood, the faces the lecturer would see only once, the readers
the writer would never see—seems no audience at all. Hence the
point of his sharp remark to the Jacksonian enthusiast George Ban-
croft's boast that an editorial in the Globe was read by 300,000 people:
1 only told him then I wished they would write better if they wrote for so
many. I ought to have said What utter nonsense to name in my ear this
number, as if that were anything. 3,000 000 [sic] such people as can read
the Globe with interest are as yet in too crude a state of nonage as to
deserve any regard. (JMN V: 462)
Emerson does, to be sure, celebrate oratory and orators, eloquently,
repeatedly, and amply; against the text shared between friends
might be set the speech or text by which the audience is made the
speaker's vessel or organ, to be played on and exalted at will. But
the actual relation between the Emerson the lecturer and his audi-
ence is in comparison empty, lax, and distant; it is to the ideal
relation as Wilhelm Meister's actual effect as an actor is to Goethe's
notion, or to Wilhelm's own, of the effects of which an actor was
capable. No imperial transaction takes place in the presentation of
an Emerson lecture; the predominant emotions of the audience are
cerebral interest and amiable respect. The editors of the lectures
quote a characteristic remark of Emerson's on ideal oratory: "the end
of eloquence is—is it not?—to alter in a pair of hours, perhaps in a
half hour's discourse, the convictions and habits of years." But then
they go on to note that "the inevitable disappointment of such un-
worldly hopes hastened [Emerson's] eventual disaffection with the
omnibus lecture-series as a form."35 On occasion, of course, a
stronger emotion is evoked; but this is most often an emotion lead-
ing the hearer or reader away from the larger and more distant
audience into the inner circle. This phenomenon Emerson noted,
and indeed celebrated:
35. EL II: xii; the passage of Emerson's quoted is in W VII: 64.

Sec also the admirable collage of comments on Emerson as lecturer in John Mc-
Aleer, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), pp.
484-93. See also L II: 460.
I believe I was not wise to volunteer myself to this fever fit of lecturing
again. . . . But my joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation
for the mishaps of the adventure, and they for the most part come to me
from this publication of myself.36
The telos of the keenest response of the lecture hearer is precisely the
space and role of the journal reader.
A text for friends and not for lovers, in that sense a public text; a
text for friends and not for strangers, in that sense an esoteric text; a
text offered as and within a speech act, within a human relation, not a
text for reception but for reaction; and also, as we see in recalling
Alcott's account once again, a text functioning within an outmoded,
almost idyllic system of production and exchange. One meaning of
"this Book is my Savings Bank" is, "this, and not the Commercial or
the Massachusetts, is my savings bank"; in fact, the journals resemble
not so much a savings bank as the hoarded gold of a thrifty peasant
distrustful of the vaults around the corner, available for the use of
friends but not for the profiteering of bankers. 37 Emerson's journal is
simply shared with Alcott, or exchanged, perhaps, for payment in
kind, a journal for a journal. Nor, unlike the book of essays, is the
journal part of any of the mechanical, technological, or corporate
networks of Emerson's society. Once the book, the pens, and the ink
are bought, the production is all Emerson's own.38 Emerson the dia-
rist requires neither the printing press for production nor the publish-
ing house for distribution; the book he produces is written, not
printed; given, not sold; carried, not shipped.
In this respect too the journal seems Emerson's normative text,
and the sort of textual performance he does best. As a diarist in
Transcendentalist Concord, Emerson is in the thick of things; he
reads as many journals as are to be read, and his journal is zestily
displayed to as many people as is anyone's else's by all the available
media. He is perhaps the most successful of all the Transcendentalist
diarists in the Transcendental diaristic economy. He fills the role of
36. CEC, p. 255.
37. Thus Emerson writes to his aunt Mary in August 1827, "all your letters are
valuable to me; those most so 1 think which you esteem the least. I grow more
avaricious of this kind of property like other misers with age, and like expecting heirs
would he glad to put my fingers into the chest of 'old almanacks' before they are a
legacy" (L I: 208).
38. Interestingly in this connection, Emerson gives over the practice of having the
volumes of his journal hand-sewn, and begins to buy them ready-made, just at the
moment he becomes conscious of them as savings banks, in 1834.
lecturer less fully; he makes, as William Charvat notes, "only the

indispensable compromises with his audience."39 As a lecturer he is
the reliable purveyor of a luxury item, never out of fashion but never
in it. Similar reservations mark his involvement with his publications.
Like the lectures, the books are neither in nor out of fashion, and sell
moderately well. But tellingly, Emerson made sure that they would
not sell better than moderately by allowing the publishers and dis-
tributors he dealt with less than their usual discount on the books'
price, and later by "severely [restricting] the advertising of his
books—at the very moment when Barnum, Beecher, and Bonnet-
were inventing the modern art of ballyhoo."40 Emerson was no aes-
thete denouncing vulgar popularity, indeed he was a lover on princi-
ple of great popular success. But in his behavior, he seems far more at
home, far more engaged, as the purveyor of a journal than as the
seller of a lecture or essay—the fit between him and the diarist's role
is far closer than that between him and the lecturer's.
Let us return to Alcott's scene one last time to consider the diarist
as artisan. Emerson in displaying his journal is not displaying it in its
entirety but tailoring a selection from it to the singular sensibility of
the particular reader at hand; what one reader gets no other reader
will ever get. Similarly, the journal is of course centrally a manu-
script, that is, an unicum, something resembling a painting rather
than the abundantly multiplied artifact of the novel, subject to subtler
control and so incapable of wider distribution. Industry can regularize
and multiply but not customize. In the journal Emerson retains con-
trol of the pagination, and thus of the shape of the page; he can isolate
or juxtapose paragraphs at will (and exploits that freedom, emphasiz-
ing, say, the brief declaration of his son Waldo's death by leaving it
alone on the page, a sentence surrounded by—overwhelmed by—an
expanse of white space). He may scribble or write boldly or doodle.
He need not observe printers' conventions, which annihilate individ-
ual distinctions; he may punctuate and capitalize to shape sentences
and to emphasize or to obscure individual words. 41 He can present
the journal as the thing that in his belief all texts really are anyway,
39. Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed.

(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), p. 306.
40. Ibid., p. 293.
41. Thus JMN VII: 150: "With new perception, we shall disburthen our Memory of
all its trumpery when we can create." Capitalizing "Memory" gives it a special status
interestingly at odds with the proposition in which the word occurs.
82 / E M E R S O N AND THE AKT OF THE D I A R Y
the house that is building and not the house that is built, the text as an
accretion in time, with its corrections, its deletions, its unresolved
alternatives, its first and second thoughts together, its interpolations
and erasures: an artisanal text in a premonetary economy, the perfect
object of an essentially free and friendly transaction between writer
and reader.
Against this we might theoretically set the improvisational freedom
of the lecture, or the impeccable beauty of the book; but again, the
example of the journal seems normative. The Emersonian lecture,
though oral, is read. Emerson and Carlyle discuss the point at length
in their letters, neither moving an inch from his original disposition,
Carlyle steadfastly the improviser and Emerson, knowingly and some-
times sadly, the reader of a text:
I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished
in the lecture-room—so free & so unpretending a platform,—a Delos
not yet made fast—I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety—rich as
conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics & pindarics,
argument & confession. I should love myself wonderfully better if I
could arm myself to go, as you go, with the word in the heart & not in a
paper. 42
Hence, presumably, Emerson's vigilant attempts to prohibit report-
ers from giving full accounts of lectures—he knew that what he said
one night he would say the next, and to a hearer who had read the
account of the lecture he would have nothing new to say.43
Nor does anything in Emerson's work suggest an interest in, a vital,
intense response to, the power and beauty of the book—nothing, say,
to match the spiritualized classification of book sizes Melville used to
create a taxonomy of whales. Emerson was not indifferent to the look of
a book, and attended with surprising care to the layout of the Dial; but
when Nature came out in 1836 with the first sentences of the essays
printed as mottoes, Emerson was only mildly annoyed, and comforted
himself easily enough with the remark that "a good sentence can never
be put out of countenance by any blunder of compositors."44
A text for acquaintances and not for lovers; a text for friends and not
42. CEC 308; sec also Oliver Wendell Holmes's remarks on Emerson's difficulties
with impromptu oratory in Cabot, Memoir 2: 621—22.
43. Cabot writes that Emerson objected even "to the taking of private notes" (Mem-
oir II: 669).
44. JMN V: 190; see also Emerson's occasional disparaging comments on book
composition, e.g., JMN VII: 358 and 404-405, and L II: 381.
for strangers; an esoteric text, conversational rather than intimate,

social rather than solitary, domestic rather than oratorical; a text for
sharing, and not for selling; a craftsman's text in the midst of the
nineteenth century's astounding mechanical reproduction of works of
art: these are the principal traits of the journal qua commodity and
artifact.
Emerson and his Diaristic Circle
Two of his Emerson's diaristic traditions, the Lockoan commonplace

hook and its diametric opposite the Moodyan diary, we have already
considered in describing the process by which Emerson found his
form; and in that description, as in most descriptions of the relation
between an innovative artist and his or her tradition, we proceeded as
if the traditions were originals and Emerson's response to them a
creative translation. We posited, that is, the traditions as things
given, and Emerson's development of them as something free, some-
thing by which the things given were enhanced and augmented. But
there is of course another pertinent tradition also, the tradition of the
Transcendentalist journal, and another way of thinking about Emer-
son's relation with it. Here we should rather conceive of Emerson as
the original, and the tradition as a collective translation of him; for
Emerson is after all the central Transcendentalist, and in speaking of
the Transcendentalist journal we are speaking of a collection of jour-
nals by people very much subject to his influence, though in varying
degrees and manners.
The results of this second investigation are strikingly regular. All
the Transcendentalist journals share with Emerson's the central inno-
vation we discussed earlier, the combination of Moodyan diary and
Lockean commonplace book; but all of them—with the exception of
Thoreau's, which early in its development takes to itself the single
and exhaustive function of recording nature45—conventionalize the
formal invention Emerson devised. It is true, of course, that the
principal Transcendentalist journals are, like their authors, stubborn
individualists: Fuller's is the diametric opposite of Thoreau's, a bril-
liant account of social interactions; Hawthorne's is an exercise book in
scene painting; Alcott's is in diligence if not in gusto almost Pepysian,
45. This is the convincing argument of Cameron, Writing Nature.

faithfully recording the events of the day, reflections upon them, and
so to bed.46 But as we compare Emerson's journal with these journals
of his colleagues, his neighbors, his friends, we find that these latter
are associated with one another, and differentiated from Emerson's,
by certain large formal traits: their strict adherence to the rhythm of
the calendar; the prevalence in them of a form of entry in which
narration precedes reflection; and the prevalence in them of the first
and third grammatical persons, and the relative scarcity of the sec-
ond. Or, more loftily; the telling points of comparison between Emer-
son and the Transcendentalist journal bear on the diarist's relation to
time, the relation between thought and its occasion, and the relation
between speaker and audience. In each of these aspects the diaries of
Emerson's Transcendentalist colleagues resemble more closely than
does Emerson's the general Western diaristic pattern, if we can in-
deed speak of such a pattern. But more important for our present
purpose is that it is Emerson's formal innovations, and not the flatten-
ing out of them performed by his colleagues, that we can make sense
of as intelligent responses to the America with which the Transcen-
dentalists had so equivocal a relation. John Jay Chapman wrote that
46. For Thoreau see Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, eds., The Journal of
Henry D. Thoreau (Boston: lloughton Mifflin, 1906); this is gradually being super-
seded by the edition of the journal being made as part of the Santa Barbara edition of
the complete works. For Fuller see Joel Myerson, ed., "Margaret Fuller's 1842 Jour-
nal"; the edited selections from Fuller's journal in (he Memoirs of Margaret Fuller
Ossoli are to be presumed untrustworthy. For Alcott see Myerson, ed., "Bronson
Aleott's 'Journal for 1836,' " and also Larry Carlson, ed., "Bronson Alcott's 'Journal lor
1837,' " Studies in the American Renaissance 1981: 27-132 and 1982: 53-117; also
Shepard's selection from the journal for periods not covered by these editions. For
Hawthorne see Randall .Stewart, ed., The American Notebooks (New Haven; Yale
University Press, 1932).
Other, wildly diverse journals of approximately the same circle: Robert F. Lucid,
ed., The Journal of Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1968); Donald Yannclla and Kathleen Malone Yannella, eds., "Evert A. Duyckiuck's
'Diary: May 29-November 8, 1847,' " in Studies in the American Renaissance 1978,
pp. 207-58; Guy R. Woodall, "The Journals of Convers Francis," ibid 1981, pp. 265-
343, and 1982, pp. 227-84; Francis B. Dedmond, ed., "Christopher Pearse Cranch's
'Journal. 1938,' " ibid. 1983, pp. 129-49; Frank Shuffelton, ed., "The Journal of Eve-
lina Metcalf," ibid. 1984, pp. 29-46; Judith Kennedy Johnson, ed., The Journals of
Charles King Newcomb (Providence: Brown University Press, 1946); and Kenneth
Walter Cameron's edition of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn's journal in The Transcenden-
tal Climate.
Obviously, the history of the Transcendentalist journal has not yet been written, and
the present account offers a description only of such traits of that journal as help to
make sense of Emerson's.
"if'a soul be taken and crushed by democracy till it utter a cry, that cry
will be Emerson." 47 The comparison between Emerson and his dia-
ristic colleagues reveals the care Emerson took to give that cry a
fitting form.
Most of the Transccndentalists, idlers and Bohemians as they may

have seemed, kept remarkably regular diaries: day follows day with
few gaps and hardly any anomalies, and Alcott, the chief eccentric of
the lot, is as punctual a diarist as John Quincy Adams. Emerson by
contrast seems an idler. His journal G, for examples, is marked
"1841" on its cover. The next date, July 6, 1841, occurs on page ten,
after nine pages of parables and apercus. On page thirteen we get
the notation "Sunday"; on page eighteen, "Nantasket Beach: 10
July." Then nothing till "27 Aug." on page sixty-two; then, on page
eighty, "Aug. 31." Perhaps, of course, Emerson wrote more often
than he dated; forty-four typescript pages between one date and the
next seem too great a work for a single day, and for all we know he
made an entry a day throughout his life. But he did not date regu-
larly, and the formal consequences are considerable. He was also
given to keeping multiple volumes of his regular journal at a time—
that is, not differentiating them by function, as he differentiates the
regular journals from the topical notebooks or as Hawthorne differen-
tiates his chronicles from his waste book, but simply going between
one volume of the regular journal and another, sometimes between
one volume and several others, all devoted to the same purpose. 48
Sometimes he makes "double-enders," that is, abandons a journal for
a while and then returns to it, creating a book of two opposed
irregular sequences, one from the front and the other from the
back.49 Once he keeps a volume exclusively from back to front;
infrequently, but often enough for the practice to seem symptomatic
47. Chapman, "Emerson," in Edmund Wilson, ed., The Shock of Recognition (New
York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1955), 1: 657.
48. See "Strayings and Temptations," pp. 51-53 on the multiplicity of the 1833-
1834 travel notebooks.
These anomalies vary in frequency of occurrence over time, and as we have seen, on
at least one occasion of their more frequent occurrence they express and resolve some
particular difficulty. In this context, however, the point is that the practice is in general
acceptable to Emerson, is consistent with his sense of what it was to keep a journal as it
was not for his diaristic colleagues.
49. On double-enders see also "The Loss of Form," n. 6, p. 142.
rather than accidental, he places dated entries out of chronological

sequence.50
We can read these practices both philosophically and politically.
On the one hand, the irregular sequence of dates creates a book not
so much of days as of events.51 "Beware the sounds of singlehearted
Time/ For they will chill thee like the hoarfrost's rime," writes Wil-
liam Ellery Channing (JMN VIII: 352); in Emerson's journal, time is
not chronos but kairos. The dated entries recording Ellen's and
Waldo's deaths bring the journal into charged time; the undifferenti-
ated flow of duration has been punctuated by a date that is also a fact.
In this context it is Alcott and Adams who seem idlers, passively
submitting to the empty order of the calendar; and Emerson by con-
trast seems for a moment to resemble Coleridge's man of methodical
industry, who "realizes [time's] ideal divisions, and gives a character
and individuality to its moments."52
But the universal pressure of time is in every individual case felt as
the pressure of a particular civilization; and we may do better here to
think not of a philosophical rebellion against Wordsworth's "melan-
choly space and doleful time," against the human condition, but of a
principled, local rebellion against the pressure of what Emerson calls
"our national hurry."53 We may give this argument some weight by
envisioning the national scene in which the diary functions and against
which it rebels, trying to catch in pointillistic images something as
insubstantial as the tempo of a nation: Dickens's first conversation in
America, begun with stunning appropriateness by his learning the
unfamiliar American idiom "right away," Mrs. Trollope's warning that
the boarder who does not "rise exactly in time to reach the boarding
table at the hour appointed for breakfast . . . will get a stiff bow from
the lady president, cold coffee, and no egg." Basil Hall brilliantly
describes an early example of that work of American genius, the fast-
food restaurant:
50. A good example is the swatch of poems in JMN III: 289-95, the first dated July
6, 1831, amidst October entries of the same year, the remainder undated, including
gnothi seauton.
51. Compare Boerner, Tagebuch, p. 12: "the curve of the diary leads from day to
day, the curve of the chronicle from event to event."
52. "On Method," from The Friend, in I. A. Richards, ed., The Portable Coleridge
(New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 341. The whole section is in one of its aspects a warning
against the dangers of the calendrical diary.
53. L II: 398.
We entered a long, narrow, and rather dark room, or gallery, fitted

up like a coffee-house, with a row of boxes on each side made just large
enough to hold four persons, and divided into that number by fixed
arms limiting the seats. Along the passage, or avenue, between the rows
of boxes, which was not above four feet wide, were stationed sundry
little boys, and two waiters, with their jackets off—and a good need, too,
as will be seen. At the time we entered, all the compartments were
filled except one, of which we took possession. There was an amazing
clatter of knives and forks; but not a word audible to us was spoken by
any of the guests. This silence, however, on the part of the company,
was amply made up for by the rapid vociferations of the attendants,
especially of the boys, who were gliding up and down, and across the
passage, inclining their heads first to one box, then to another, and
receiving the whispered wishes of the company, which they straightway
bawled out in a loud voice, to give notice of what fare was wanted. It
quite boggled my comprehension to imagine how the people at the
upper end of the room, by whom a communication was kept up in some
magical way with the kitchen, could contrive to distinguish between one
order and another. It was still more marvellous that within a few sec-
onds after our wishes had been communicated to one of the aforesaid
urchins, imps, gnomes, or whatever name they deserve, the things we
asked for were placed piping hot before us. It was really quite an Ara-
bian Nights'Entertainment, not a sober dinner at a chop-house. . . .
There could not be, I should think, fewer than a do/en boxes, with
four people in each; and as everyone seemed to be eating as fast as he
could, the extraordinary bustle may be conceived. We were not in the
house above twenty minutes, but we sat out two sets of company at
each.54
But the best example of American hurry is perhaps the American
newspaper—that shockingly concrete and lengthy chronicle of the
time, that public "journal" of exemplary regularity, regulated by,
indeed almost a manifestation of, the mechanical succession of days.
This image of calendrical time was among the commonest American
possessions, and surely the most intently scrutinized American text.
Tocqueville notes "the astonishing circulation of letters and newspa-
pers in the midst of these wild forests"; Anthony Trollope, though a
54. Dickens, American Notes, in Andrew Lang, ed., The Works of Charles Dickens
(New York: Scribner, 1900) 28: 27; Frances Trollope, Notes on the Domestic Manners
of the Americans, ed. Donald Smallcy (New York: Vintage, 1949), p. 283; Hall, Travels
in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828, in Nevins, America Through British
Eyes, pp. 111-12.
88 / E M E R S O N AND THK ART OF THE D I A R Y
more judicious writer than his flamboyant and brilliant mother, de-
clares that "to men, and to women also, in the United States [newspa-
pers] may be said to be the one chief necessary of life." When Martin
Chuzzlewit arrives in New York, the newsboys are crying their wares
before his whip touches the shore:
"Here's this morning's New York Sewer!" cried one. "Here's this morn-
ing's New York Stabber! Here's the New York Family Spy! Here's the
New York Private Listener! Here's the New York Peeper! Here's the
New York Plunderer! Here's the New York Keyhole Reporter! Here's
the New York Rowdy Journal! Here's all the New York Papers!"55
Dickens the satirist heightens the character of the press; Dickens the
realist notes the sheer volume and diversity of its productions, and its
universal intrusiveness.
Against such compulsive regularity, against the pressure of the day
so sharply imprinted by the daily newspaper, Emerson's irregulari-
ties seem a sort of principled idleness: a quiet attempt to realize the
American flaneur. This was, as Walter Benjamin noted in comment-
ing on Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," an almost impossible task:
The pressure [of the crowd] has a still more dehumanizing effect in that
in Poe only human beings are referred to in discussing it. When the
movement of the crowd is slowed, the cause is not that vehicular traffic
interrupts it; vehicular traffic is never mentioned. The cause is rather
that one crowd blocks another. In a mass of such a nature, Bohemian
idleness [die Flaneric] was unlikely to yield much fruit. 56
55. Tocqueville in George Wilson Piersori, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 588; Anthony Trollope, North America
(New York: Knopf, 1951), ed. Donald Smalley and Bradford Allen Booth, p. 501;
Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, in Lang, ed., The Works of Dickens, 10: 271.
One more passage for good measure, from Mrs. Trollope: "every American newspa-
per is more or less a magazine, wherein the merchant may Sean while he holds out his
hand for an invoice, 'Stanzas by Mrs. IIemans,' or a garbled extract from Moore's Life
of Byron; the lawyer may study his brief faithfully, and yet contrive to pick up the
valuable dictum of some American critic, that 'Bulwer's novels are decidedly superior
to Sir Walter Scott's;' nay, even the auctioneer may find time, as he bustles to his tub,
or his tribune, to support his pretensions to polite learning, by glancing his quick eye
over the columns, and reading that 'Miss Mitford's descriptions are indescribable.' If
you buy a yard of ribbon, the shop-keeper lays down his newspaper, perhaps two or
three, to measure. I have seen a brewer's dray-man perched on the shaft of his dray and
reading one newspaper, while another was tucked under his arm" (Trollope, Domestic
Manners, p. 93).
56. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus,
in Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwcppcnhaeuscr, eds., Walter Benjamin: Gesam-
melte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 1:2: 556.
Perhaps Emerson found in the journal the only refuge in America

from what Marx called America's "Feverishly adolescent movement
of material production."57 Participation in the Concord cottage indus-
try of journal keeping may be construed as a partial rejection of
American mechanical and mercantile capitalism; this diaristic sugges-
tion of a deliberately unsystematic, irregular, almost dilatory relation
to calendrical time seems a partial rejection of American tempo, of its
conception of time, its adaptation of human rhythms to the rhythms of
clock and calendar and bell.
"A creation is a production from nothing," wrote Kierkegaard; "the

occasion is, however, the nothing from which everything comes."58
This of course leaves to the taste and strategy of the individual writer
the choice of how to present the relation between occasion and cre-
ation. In most of the Transcendentalist diaries, the individual entries
are ordered from dross to gold—from, that is, the bare facts of a lived
day to the truths rooted in it and flowering from it. Not in Emerson's,
however; his utterances seem to arise ex nihilo, altogether severed, to
use another phrase of Kierkegaard's, from the umbilical cord of their
original mood.59
I have read little this week. Indeed, my practice in this respect is
faulty. I should read more than I have done during the past year. The
thoughts of the mighty are not familiar as I would have them. Little, and
little drippings from petty intellects, surely I do not court, nor catch; yet
I am, by far, too much alone for hardy growth, or graceful ease. Books
are always at one's elbow, and, well selected, ever give counsel and
encouragement. . . ,60
Everything good, we say, is on the highway. A virtuoso hunts up
with great pains a landscape of Guercino, a crayon sketch of Salvator,
but the Transfiguration, The Last Judgment, the Communion, are on
the walls of the Vatican where every footman may see them without
price. You have got for 500 pounds an autograph receipt of Shak-
speare; but for nothing a schoolboy can read Harnlet ... I think I will
never read any but the commonest of all books. (Emerson JMN VIII:
284-85)
57. As cited ibid., p. 555.

58. As quoted in J. P. Stern, Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), p. 53.
59. As quoted in Boerner, Tagebuch, p. 24.
60. Alcott, "Diary for 1836," p. 40.
Cut an entry of Alcott's in two, and the second half will be much like
Emerson's; add to Emerson's the occasion that prompted it, and it
will seem much like Alcott's; but Alcott always joins, and Emerson
always severs.61
The immediate temptation is to say that Emerson's journal is a delib-
erately purer book, more ethereal, more inaccessibly shielded in the
ivory tower: thoughts stripped of facts. Much in our traditional sense of
Emerson strengthens that temptation. Margaret Fuller's forthright
declaration may stand for the judgments of his contemporaries:
[Emerson] does not care for facts, except so far as the immortal essence
can be distilled from them. He has little sympathy with mere life: does
not seem to see the plants grow, merely that he may rejoice in their
energy. 62
The JMN editors are more circumspect; but arc they not possessed by
the same idea?
On the theory that some factual details, though tedious in quantity and
isolation, have a certain contrasting interest or usefulness when scat-
tered about among the real products of Emerson's mind, [we] have
included many of them. (JMN I: 37)
"If a man will kick a fact out of the window," Emerson writes, "when
he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner" (JMN VIII:
306). Obviously the real production of Emerson's mind is the whole:
is what it produced, and in fact Emerson's journals actually contain
much more in the way of unimproved fact than do those of his col-
leagues: expenditures, lists of books, quotations recorded without
comment, bare names, names with the corresponding dates of birth
and death, memoranda. "The unconquered facts, they draw me" he
wrote (JMN VIII: 341); and they did. He felt no obligation, to be
sure, to root his truths in facts; but equally little to make his facts
flower into truths. The thoughts are there; the facts are there also.
But their relations are not determined, not specified; they are not
made components of a small intelligible form linking them, but left
independent and suspended.
Thus he writes one day, "G. Minot told me he gave 310 dollars for
61. Stern, Lichtenberg, p. 53, distinguishes between aphorisms and reflections on
the ground that reflections characteristically recount their occasions while aphorisms
characteristically suppress it. On Emerson as aphorist, see "The Journal and the Apho-
rism Book,"pp. 113-17.
62. Fuller, "1842 Journal," p. 330.
his field and Peter How gave 140 dollars for his triangle" (JMN VII:
28-29). Then follows a rhapsody on fact:
Day creeps after day each full of facts—dull, strange, despised things
that we cannot enough despise,—call heavy, prosaic, & desart. And
presently the aroused intellect finds gold & gems in one of these
scorned facts, then finds that the day of facts is a rock of diamonds, that a
fact is an Epiphany of God, that on every fact of his life he should rear a
temple of wonder, joy, & praise, that in going to eat meat; to buy, or
sell; to meet a friend; or thwart an adversary; to communicate a piece of
news or buy a book; he celebrates the arrival of an inconceivably remote
purpose & law at last on the shores of Being, & into the ripeness & term
of Nature. And because nothing chances, but all is locked & wheeled &
chained in Law, in these motes & dust he can read the writing of the
True Life & of a startling sublimity.
Alcott would have chosen a fact more amenable to spiritualization;
Emerson's is stubbornly recalcitrant to it. Alcott would have gone
directly from the amenable fact to its particular spiritualization. Em-
erson proceeds from the recalcitrant fact to a celebration of spiri-
tualization in general; the unconquered fact is not spiritualized but
set within the field of spirit. Alcott offers a quick and precise but
perhaps narrow interpretation, Emerson a slow but insistent exhorta-
tion to interpretation at leisure. Alcott practices a small intelligible
form, the bipartite entry complete within itself. Emerson draws the
reader to a consideration of the journal as a whole, in which these
small transactions among neighbors become exemplary not of particu-
lar spiritual propositions but of the great facts of Number, Neighbor-
hood, and Commerce.
We can get a different view of this distinction by considering an
analogue to it, in the practice of the Puritan diarists of spiritual experi-
ences.63 These were remarkable precisely by their affinity with Emer-
son's colleagues and present antagonists; their diaries, like Alcott's,
are distinguished by their disposition to record process rather than
result. That is: say that one afternoon a Puritan diarist is consumed
with envy at his neighbor's good fortune and becomes conscious of
that passion. Sitting down that evening to his diary, he may record
either the passion or the act of consciousness. The Puritan diarists of
spiritual experiences chose with remarkable regularity to record, not
63. For a fuller account of this practice see my "Cotton Mather as Diarist," Pros-
pects 8 (1983), pp. 131-33.
themselves, but themselves perceiving themselves; their diaries are

cerebral, not affective. Now what does that mean? Better, What
would it mean to make the other choice? The answer has presumably
to be given in moral terms and not aesthetic ones: a failure to fulfill an
obligation. For one of the functions of the diary of spiritual experi-
ences is to monitor the health of the soul; and as it is the soul itself,
with all its capability for deceit and blindness, that is doing the moni-
toring, surely a fidelity to the task requires a sort of meta-monitoring,
a lucid account of the process of introspective perception.
Now one function, and probably the principal function, of the Tran-
scendentalist diary is to register fine thoughts; these are to the Tran-
scendentalists much as experiences of grace are to the Puritans, the
goal of their striving, perpetually sought and sometimes won. Simi-
larly, as Lawrence Buell notes, Transccndentalist failure of percep-
tion corresponds to Puritan spiritual torpor.64 Can we not then pursue
the analogy and see the Transcendentalist recording of circumstance
as essentially similar to the Puritan recording of perception? Like the
Puritans, most Transcendentalists apparently feel obliged to record
the process by which the desideratum is acquired, or at least the
circumstances in which it arose: a guarantee, or at least a suasion, that
the thought recorded is original and authentic. The Transcendental-
ists were neither theologically nor psychologically sophisticated, and
their scattered testimonies to the power of this sense of obligation
have almost no content; they seem an attenuated, desiccated version
of the Puritan rationale. But in their behavior, if not in their proclama-
tions, the Transcendentalists are as skeptical of their moments of
genius as are the Puritans of their moments of grace; both distrust the
immediate evidence. Accordingly, the entry as a whole is owed to the
conscience; the narrative account in particular is owed to the con-
science. Alcott and Fuller earn their thoughts by the sweat of their
facts, dutifully rendering the situation before permitting themselves
the luxury of expatiating on it.
Hence the curiously normative and yet also irresponsibly idyllic
character of Emerson's diary. Both Alcott and Fuller express a sense
of frustration at the form they adhere to:
Oh I am tired of this journal: it is a silly piece of work. I will never keep
another such. Write thoughts, the sum of all this life, or turn it into
poetic form: this meagre outline of fact has no value in any way.
64. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, p. 278.

Since the opening of this year I have read but little. My mind has been
much taken up in the practical operations of my School, and in various
passing thoughts—but a few of which have been committed to these
pages. Now, and then, I have inserted a thought or two. Still this
Journal has been, as yet rather of my outward doings and endeav-
ourings, then of my inward life.65
As we read these passages, Emerson seems to be keeping the exem-
plary Transcendentalist journal; his is that to the condition of which
the others aspire, that characterized by the "sallies of conjecture,
glimpses and flights of ecstasy" associated with the form of the jour-
nal by William Henry Channing.66 Emerson need not write; nor,
once having chosen to write, need he write anything in particular or
limber up before thinking or do compulsory exercises before launch-
ing the free flight of the imagination. He seems, in some sense, to
have no conscience to answer to. To Fuller's thought, or to Alcott's,
the factual occasion is the body encumbering the soul; and Emer-
son's journals must have seemed to them as they read it the flights
of the soul set free. Alcott writes of them rightly that they "are full of
elegant sketches of life and nature. . . . He does not record the
history of his facts, but idealizes whatsoever he observes and writes
his thought in this general form." 67 And yet Emerson's practice may
also have seemed to his diligent colleagues a kind of irresponsible
luxury: the se(f-emancipated soul, its freedom not won but simply
declared. They must have felt rather like Thoreau's reasonable la-
borer, working hard to get the money to go to Fitchburg, and sud-
denly confronted with Thoreau himself, who one fine morning sim-
ply goes there, making light of the preparations for the sake of the
journey, and in the end reaching the goal far earlier. Of such free-
dom Emerson's diaristic colleagues did not, evidently, avail them-
selves; they did their duty. 68
Now Emerson's leisure is of course an argument, a challenge, a
practice formulated in a society full of people kept from leisure by
duty. Our earlier images of hurry are of course also images of obliga-
tion; the landlady's insistence on punctuality, the Plate House's facili-
tation of rapidity, are the creations of men and women hurrying to
work.
65. Fuller, "1842 Journal," p. 337; Alcott, "Diary for 1836," p. 46.
66. Channing, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, II: 14.
67. Alcott, Journals, p. 126.
68. See on Emersonian indolence, also "Authority and Rebellion," pp. 38-39.
In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it,
and he sells it before the roof is on: he plants a garden, and lets it just as
the trees are coming into bearing: he brings a field into tillage, and leaves
other men to gather the crops: he embraces a profession, and gives it up:
he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves, to carry his change-
able longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure, he
instantly plunges into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of
unremitting labour he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity
whirls him over the vast extent of the United Sates, and he will travel
fifteen hundred miles in a few days, to shake off his happiness. Death at
length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of
that complete felicity which is for ever on the wing. 69
This is Tocqueville's account, magisterial and elegiac. But more evoca-
tive, perhaps, is Mrs. Trollope's vignette of elegant Washington
Square. She remarked, she writes, "several commodious seats" be-
neath the numerous trees, "a very agreeable retreat from heat and
dust."
It was rarely, however, that I saw any of these seats occupied; the
Americans have either no leisure, or no inclination for these moments of
delassement that all other people, I believe, indulge in. Even their
drams, so universally taken by rich and poor, are swallowed standing.™
The empty benches, invested with this argument, will stand as the
symbol of the press of obligation from which Emerson's journal is
free; and the journal, with its irregularity, its indolence, its provok-
ingly free, unconditioned sorties at truth, seems a sort of stroller's
bench perpetually occupied—a station in the progress, if that is the
right word, of the great American saunterer.
"It is said to be the age of the first-person singular," Emerson wrote

in 1827 (JMN III: 70). The argument follows easily enough: that the
journal is the apt expression of the pronoun; that the central place of
the journal in the Transcendentalist oeuvre is the apt expression of
the central place of the pronoun in the age. This will hold good,
69. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr. Henry Reeve (New York: Schocken,
1961), 2: 162.
70. Trollope, Domestic Manners, p. 266. See also Thomas Hamilton, Men and
Manners in America, as quoted in Nevins, America Through British Eyes, p. 97, on the
tempo of an American breakfast table, all "hurry, bustle, clamor, and voracity ... a
rapidity altogether unexampled. '
grammatically and essentially, for most of the individual Transcenden-

talist journals; but then comes the odd fact that in Emerson's own
journal the first person is hardly more common than the second.
What are we to make of this?
We are first tempted to ask what Emerson's "you" refers to: him-
self, God, Margaret Fuller? But that question proves futile, and is
based on a misconception. Habitually, we think that pronouns of all
persons refer to a "notion lexicale," that is, to "a fixed and 'objective'
idea, capable equally of remaining latent or of being realized in a
unique object, and remaining identical in whatever representation it
evokes." This is Emile Benveniste's language, who argues, however,
that whereas third-person pronouns do in fact refer to a "notion lexi-
cale," first and second-person pronouns do not. Rather, utterances
containing them belong to "the level or type of language . . . that
comprehends not only signs but also their users."
The instances of the use of "I" do not constitute a referential class,
because there is no "object" definable as "I" to which the instances
uniformly direct us. Every "I" has its own reference, and corresponds on
each occasion to a unique being posited as such.
To what "reality" then does "I" or "you" refer? Only a "reality of
discourse," a very odd thing. "I" can be defined only in terms of "locu-
tion," not in terms of object. . . . "I" means "the person uttering the
present instance of discourse containing 'I.' " . . . The point has to be
stressed: "I" can only be identified through the instance of discourse
containing it, and not otherwise.71
Protean "I" and protean "you" are thus the creations of the speaker or
writer, and the entities to which they refer, if that is any longer the
right word for them, are created at the moment of speech or writing,
the moment of use.
The literary consequence of this argument is that in thinking about
a writer's use of the first and second-person pronouns we have to
consider not what they refer to but what sort of discourse they imply:
It is a fact both elementary and fundamental that these "pronominal"
forms direct us neither to "reality" nor to "objective" positions in space
or time but to the particular utterance that contains them. 72
71. Benveniste, "La Nature des pronoms," in Morris Halle et al., eds., For Roman
Jakobson (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 34-35.
72. Ibid., p. 36.
In the Transcendentalist diary, the first person is normally histori-

cal; that is, "I" is made use of in sentences of historical narrative. The
third person oceupies the rest of the secular territory. The second
person turns up predominantly in expostulatory prayer, being in-
voked there to address the writer's deity. (In Hawthorne it is some-
times used in what we might call a simulated epistolary mode.) Emer-
son's practice is very different. In it the first person is not strictly
associated with sentences of historical narrative and makes its way
more easily into the discourse of fine thoughts. It is a truth teller, not
a story teller, disembodied, disenfranchised, seldom connected with
that civil artifact the person of Ralph Waldo Emerson. And this, by
Emerson's standards, is as it should be:
That which is individual & remains individual in my experience is of no
value. What is fit to engage me & so engage others permanently, is what
has put off its weeds of time & place & personal relation. (JMN VII: 65)
Emerson consistently condemns, as consistently at any rate as the

great denouncer of consistency can do, the merely personal, that is,
the historically personal.
On the other hand, the disembodied "I" has a lot of company. Once
arrived in the discourse of fine thoughts, it meets the second person
there, now a familiar presence in this secular discourse, for extended
confrontation and colloquy.
I value my welfare too much to pay you any longer the compliment of
attentions. I shall not draw the thinnest veil over my defects, but if you
are here, you shall see me as I am. You will then see that though I am
full of tenderness, and born with as large hunger to love & to be loved as
any man can be, yet its demonstrations are not active & bold, but are
passive & tenacious. (JMN VIII: 6)
In Alcott's diary we have a historical speaker who in his relation to

other beings is chiefly a commentator on them; the discourse is
Alcott's alone, and other beings are its objects. In Emerson's diary,
we have a discursive speaker who in his relations to other beings is
characteristically their interlocutor.
The commonsensical minimizer will argue, The sum of this argu-
ment is simply that Emerson is always writing with his eye on the
podium, that the second person is invoked because the diarist is
really a lecturer, a defect rather than a quality of the diary. But that is
turning the matter upside down. Thoreau and Fuller and Alcott were
public talkers too, habituated to addressing audiences. To be a lec-

turer is not inevitably to be a dialogical diarist. Emerson chose to
create a dialogical space in his journal, to evoke the first and second
persons amidst the chronological sequence, the retrospective view-
point, the territory of the autobiographical contract. His speech-
making colleagues chose not to.
Now the conversational space Emerson creates in the journal is the
lyceum, not the confessional: a conversation of philosophers and, in
the particularly Emersonian sense, of friends. But perhaps that civi-
lized, impersonal, hospitable conversation was the appropriate re-
sponse to what seems to have been the almost pathological taciturnity
of Emerson's America. We may recall how silence broods over the
American scenes we have so far considered. The hurried meals are
eaten in silence; as we read through the accounts of them, the actors
in them seem deaf-mutes, robbed by the press of obligation not only
of leisure but also of of speech. The wonders of the Plate House are
done in pantomime:
The sole object of the company evidently was to get through a certain
quantum of victuals with as much dispatch as possible; and as all the
world knows that talking interferes with eating, every art was used in
this said most excellent Plate House, to utter as few words as might be,
and only those absolutely essential to the ceremony.73
As Tocqueville wrote, the American is the Englishman left to him-
self.74 To this bleak pattern the impersonal, leisurely conversation of
the journal is a temperate reproof.
We may conclude by noting what has no doubt long been obvious,

namely, the precise correspondences between the traits of Emerson's
journal evoked by comparing it with those of his diaristic colleagues
and those evoked by considering it as a commodity. As a commodity it
is offered freely to friends for leisurely reading and conversation. As a
text it depicts a writer at leisure, free from the rhythm of calendrical
73. Compare Mrs. Trollope: "[the boarders] ate in perfect silence, and with such
astonishing rapidity that their dinner was over literally before our's was began; the
instant they ceased to eat, they darted from the table in the same moody silence which
they had preserved since they entered the room, and a second set took their places,
who performed their silent parts in the same manner" (Trollope, Domestic Manners, p.
25). See also ibid., pp. 58, 284, and 371-72.
74. Tocqueville, Journey to America, (Garden City: Anchor, 1971), tr. George
Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer, p. 179.
time, free from the press of obligation, speaking to middling friends.

Too often we make too much of the correspondence between various
aspects of a text, exulting that form imitates content as if, once given
that conclusion, neither form nor content were any longer of interest.
But too often, also, we have followed Henry James in marvelling at
the survival of Emerson's writing despite its form; and we could stand
to give its formal aptness some praise, after having so long seen fit to
praise only its power.
The Journal and the Aphorism Book
Emerson knew few of the great masters of the aphorism. He never

read Lichtenberg; he seldom quotes La Rochefoucault or Chamfort;
he got Novalis and Schlegel chiefly at second hand, through Carlyle
and Madame de Stael.75 Carlyle had in any case confidently depreci-
ated the aphoristic form of Novalis's writings:
His Volumes come before us with every disadvantage; they are the
posthumous works of a man cut off in early life, while his opinions, far
from being matured for the public eye, were still lying crude and dis-
jointed before his own; for most part written down in the shape of
detached aphorisms . . . naturally requiring to be remodelled, ex-
panded, compressed, as the matter cleared up more and more into
logical unity; at best but fragments of a great scheme which he did not
live to realize.76
Appropriately enough, Carlyle later in the same essay calls Novalis
the German Pascal,77 thus confusing a principled writer of aphorisms
75. He did know Goethe's Maximen und Reflexionen, but probably not till 1836;
and Harald Fricke argues persuasively that it is a bad example of the genre (Apho-
rismus, pp. 105-13)
Let the first of this chapter's notes offer an explanation for the abundance and length
of those that follow it. Readers of the chapter in its early stages suggested that its
abstruse argument needed as linear a presentation as possible. I chose, therefore, to
remove from the text much of the illustratory material I had gathered. But I thought it
important to retain the material for inspection, as bearing on a topic not much dis-
cussed previously, and accordingly have relegated it to the notes, using them in this
chapter as a sort of supplementary anthology.
76. Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (Boston: Estes, 1869), 2: 9-10.
See also Frederic Hedge's equally confident depreciation of the aphoristic qualities
of Coleridge: Hedge, "Coleridge's Literary Character," in Kenneth Cameron, Emerson
the Essayist (Raleigh, North Carolina: Thistle Press, 1945), 2: 59-69.
77. Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, p. 58.
Emerson's early remark on the Pensees suggests a different position: "if there were
many more such grand fragments in the sweepings of his study 'tis pity the editor did not
print them all; they are seeds for sermons, for Epics, for Civilization" (JMN II: 348).
with a principled maker of systems whose early death left his system a
heap of fragments. As we have seen earlier, Emerson's comments on
Bacon's aphorisms echo Carlyle's disposition of mind, as does his
declaration that the New Testament "has no epical integrity" (JMN V:
466).78 The fragment may have been the Romantic form par excel-
lence; but in Emerson's reading and writing it is neither very promi-
nent nor much praised.
Still, the comparison of journal with aphorism book is indispens-
able, on three counts. One is that the aphorism book is the classic
work of art formally most similar to the journal, in that both apho-
rism book and journal can be described as series of independent
discontinuous utterances; a comparison of the two forms, then, en-
ables us to raise again, and more rigorously, the question of the
journal's legitimacy as a literary work. With that question treated,
we can proceed to a more particular comparison of the two forms,
looking at the nature of the utterances and at the nature of the
audiences they seem to postulate; and here the interest of compari-
son arises not only from the close formal similarity within which it
takes place, but also the extensive theory and comment the apho-
rism book has attracted. Of all the forms the journal resembles, it is
the aphorism book, and in particular the aphorism book of Emer-
son's German Romantic Colleagues, that has attracted the most in-
sightful and various commentary, not least by its practitioners; and it
is in virtue of that commentary that the comparison is particularly
fruitful, revealing in Emerson the journalist someone both more
engagingly social and more deeply, if passively, rebellious than his
European counterparts. Finally, on the basis of that second compari-
son it becomes possible to make certain comments on Emerson the
essayist, and in particular on a tradition in our criticism of Emerson
that in dismissing Emerson the journalist has been led to make
Emerson the essayist stand in his place, and so has seen him as too
enigmatic and imperious a figure.

Can we in fact compare the journals with a literary genre? Earlier, we
considered a variant of that question, in arguing for the claims of the
journal vis-a-vis Emerson's own lectures and essays. But the lectures
and essays were perhaps no very formidable artistic antagonist; and
78. See also the letter to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody of October 12, 1840 (L II: 345).
many of the arguments directed to them do not bear on the literary

creations of Novalis and Nietzsche. These latter creations enable and
oblige us to raise the question again. They are, like the journals,
series of discontinuous independent utterances. But the utterances of
the journal are ordinarily placed in order of occurrence; those of the
aphorism book, in the order pleasing to the mind of the artist. The
aphorism book is of course harder to read as a whole than is a novel or
play. But like a novel or play it is a work of design, and design is
single.79 Order of occurrence, on the other hand, makes for multiple
causation: the author does the entries, and chance does the rest. So
we have finally to consider the journal as a work not of art but of art's
traditional antagonist, chance, and to compare it with a work distin-
guished from it precisely by its artistry alone.
In making the comparison we have to remember that Emerson
made no god of literature; he wrote that criticism must be "transcen-
dental," that is, that it "must consider literature ephemeral & easily
entertain the supposition of its entire disappearance. . . . should
treat the entire extant product of the human intellect as only one
age, revisable, corrigible, reversible" (JMN VII: 352). His aesthetic
gods were rather nature and character: nature, to which "the work of
art is always inferior" (JMN VII: 488); character, which it was Emer-
son's genius to see, in Henry James's phrase, "as a real supreme
thing."80
Let us first see what Emerson has to say about chance in art gener-
ally. Usually when he touches on the subject he, like John Cage,
means by it something like the work of nature—the "frolic architec-
ture of the snow."81
Chance Pictures.
An instructive picture gallery is the weatherstains on a wall or the
figures on a marbled paper for Chance is no mannerist and one instantly
79. For a brilliant reading of an aphorism scries as a single work, see Peter Heller,
"Von den ersten und letzten Dingen": Studien und Kommentar zu einer Apho-
rismenreihe von Friedrich Nietzsche (Berlin: dc Gruyter, 1972). See also Friedrich
Schlegel's remark that "many works praised for their elegant order [Verkettung] have
less unity than a motley heap of insights whose tendency to oneness is animated only by
I their being products] of the spirit of a single mind" (in Mautner, "Der Aphorismus,"
pp. 69-70).
81. Emerson, "The Snow-Storm," W IX: 42; see also JMN V: 265-66, on Emerson's
discovery of the "ice-harp": "I threw a stone upon the ice which rebounded with a shrill
sound, & falling again & again, repeated the note with pleasing modulation."
learns how free & bold the hand of a master might become. For here are
outlines of knights & ladies & beggar women & griffins & ghosts & trees
that need but a stroke or two of an imaginative eye to fill up in to more
commanding and graceful & various forms & attitudes beyond all the
masters drew. (JMN VII: 21).82
Chance is opposed, then, not to design but to human design; and for
Emerson, writing that "a work of art is something which the reason
created in spite of the hands" (JMN V: 206), human design is in se
suspect, for in the hands we should see Reason's usual antagonist
Understanding, the deadly facilitator of the work of art.
Sometimes, to be sure, Emerson makes this argument in an almost
Elioticform:
In all our operations we seek not to use our own but to bring a quite
infinite force to bear. In like manner are our intellectual works done.
We are to hinder our individuality from acting; we are to bring the
whole omniscience of Reason upon the subject before us. (JMN V: 166;
see also JMN VI: 164 and W XII: 71-72)
But for Eliot, artistic impersonality is the product of moral and liter-
ary discipline; it is opposed to selfishness, to self-indulgence. For
Emerson, more literal, more casual, and more radical, artistic imper-
sonality is the product of surrender, of self-abandon; it is opposed to
self, to will, to thought. "We are to aim," the passage continues: "at
getting observations without aim, to subject to thought things seen
without thought." But how do we get "observations without aim"?
Surely not by discipline; that is the way of the understanding. Rather
by something like a surrender of discipline:
The observation of a mere observer is more unsuspicious than that of a
theorist. ... As we exercise little election in our landscape but see for
the most part what God sets before us, I cannot but think that mere
enumeration of the objects would be found to be more than a catalogue;—
would be a symmetrical picture not designed by us but by our Maker.
(JMN V: 43)
By being, that is, "mere observers," enumerators, and—diarists.
Jones Very valued his poems "not because they were his, but because
82. See also, of the many passages along this same line, JMN III: 143 and V: 265,
and also Emerson's preface to the first issue of the Dial, written in collaboration with
Margaret Fuller ("The Editors to the Reader," in Joel Porte, ed., Emerson: Essays and
Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 1145).
they were not" (JMN VIII: 52). We have only to take him at his word
to find one rationale for Emerson's aleatoric text.83
But this argument bears on any product of chance. Can we find
arguments bearing specifically on the journal? The journal is a work in
which the contribution of chance is the consequence of the evolution
of an individual life in its historical context. Artistic order is an order
in which certain aspects of this evolution are denied; in it early and
late are juxtaposed, and the presentation of thought obscures its evolu-
tion. This order Nietzsche criticizes as representing "the Tartuffism of
Wissenschaftlichkeit," that is, "exposition of thought not correspond-
ing to the genesis of thought."84 Emerson's comments on the issue,
though similar in tendency to Nietzsche's formulation, seem to arise
not from principle but from experience. Again and again the journals
record Emerson's disappointment at discovering sources in texts that
obscure them. He reads, say, Burke's orations, and is much taken by
some dazzling passage; later, he finds dispersed in Burke's earlier
works the components that oration unites. He is not altogether dis-
posed to retract his earlier judgment; indeed, on occasion he seems to
think that this faculty of recombining temporally disparate experi-
ences is the essence of artistic power.85 But he retains a distrust of the
dazzling sleight of hand; and he prefers, often, to see thoughts plain:
Every man is a wonder until you learn his studies, his associates, his
early acts & the floating opinions of his times, & then he developes
himself as naturally from a point as a river is made from rills. Burke's
orations are but the combination of the Annual Register which he edited
with the Inquiry on the Sublime & Beautiful which he wrote at the same
83. See along the same line JMN VII: 315 and 324, and also the beautiful parable of
the urn: "Once there was an urn which received water out of a fountain. But sometimes
the fountain spouted so far as to fall beyond the lips of the Urn, & sometimes not far
enough to fill it; so that sometimes it was only sprinkled. But the Urn desired to be
always full and Nature saw the Urn, & made it alive, so that it could move this way &
that to meet the waterfall, and even when the water did not rise out of the spring, it
could change its shape, & with a long neck suck up the water from hollows with its lips.
Then it began to go far from the fountain, looking in many places for wells, & some-
times when the fountain was full, the Urn was gone, & did not come back until the
fountain was a thread; and often, the walking Urn lost its way & came into sands, & was
long empty. Moreover though Nature gave it life, she did not give it more body, so that
what was spent in making feet & legs was lost from the belly of the Urn; and in the
motion of going, much water was spilled so that now it was never full as before. So the
Urn came to Nature, and besought her to take away its life, & replace it at the old
fountain" (JMN V: 167).
84. As quoted in Heller, "Von den ersten und letzten Dingen," p. 414.
85. See, e.g., JMN IV: 363 and JMN VII: 216.
time. Swedenborg is unriddled by learning the theology & philosophy

of Continental Europe in his youth. Each great doctrine is then received
by the mind as a tally of an Idea in its own reason & not as news. (JMN
V:30)
Surely we want Swedenborg unriddled, not enigmatic; we want great
doctrines to be "received by the mind as the tally of an idea in its own
reason & not as news." The writer may need "this tool of Synthesis";
how else is he to produce "such a result as the Hamlet or Lear" (JMN
V: 39) from the insights of a single period?
The Webster with whom you talk admires the oration almost as much as
you do, & knows himself to be nowise equal, unarmed, that is, without
this tool of Synthesis to the splendid effect which he is yet well pleased
you should impute to him. (JMN V: 39)86
But this is dangerously close to being the portrait of a con man. The
magisterial and independent reader will distrust him, and Emerson's
literary theory consistently takes the reader for its court of last appeal.
As Novalis had written,
The reader is the higher court, receiving the case as already prepared by
the lower. The feeling in virtue of which the author has cut the cloth of
his book selects, when acting in the reader, between the book's coarse
and sophisticated elements—and were the reader to edit the book to his
taste, a second reader would purify it still more; and so because the
shaped and reshaped mass comes continually into fresh vessels, it finally
becomes a component member of the working spirit.87
This empirical argument contributes to Emerson's general sense of
art's problems in rendering that supremely beautiful thing character:
I propose to myself to read Schiller of whom I hear much. What shall I
read? His Robbers? oh no, for that was the crude fruit of his immature
mind. He thought little of it himself. What then: his Aesthetics? oh no,
that is only his struggle with Kantean metaphysics. His poetry? oh no,
for he was a poet only by study. His histories? And so with all his
productions, they were the fermentations by which his mind was work-
ing itself clear, they were the experiments by which he got his skill
86. See also JMN IV: 284 and VII: 90:

"Order of wonder.
"If you desire to arrest attention, to surprise, do not give me facts in the order of
cause & effect, but drop one or two links in the chain, & give me with a cause, an effect
two or three times removed." Also JMN VIII: 67 and 289.
87. Novalis, Schriften, 2: 470 (Verrnischte Bemerkungen 125).
& the fruit, the bright pure gold of all was—Schiller himself. ( J M N IV:
54-5S)88
This is not, I think, a denunciation of Schiller, but an implicit rejec-

tion of the literary work, this being understood as partial, momen-
tary, local, in favor of the literary worker. Schiller has not failed as an
artist; art has failed, as it must, to express character. Schiller's art has
failed to express Schiller's character, Hamlet Shakespeare's, Faust
Goethe's. And why? Because work is necessarily a work, "always a
show ... a subdivision which the laws of the Universe do not permit
of beauty from use" (JMN VII: 534), a particular deposit of the char-
acter, a mould into which thought or emotion can flow and be given
shape, but then "a prison . . . of the thought of [sic] the emotion"
(JMN VIII: 316), and a prison from which it cannot escape. Henry
James thought Emerson's finding Hawthorne's novels not worthy of
their author "a judgment odd almost to fascination."89 But between a
man and a work Emerson's judgment in favor of the former was
inevitable.
Has the journal a better claim to represent character? It is after all
itself a work. Or rather: it is a series of works, and the claim we can
imagine for it is based upon its status as a series and, in particular, on
the fact that the agency by which the series is constituted is not an
agency of conscious will. The literary work is precisely the creation of
the author's conscious will. The journal, in this argument, is the
creation of the author's character. Or, more precisely, the journal,
being at every individual moment the creation of Emerson's will,
becomes cumulatively the book of Emerson's character, represented
imperfectly in each of his works, but revealed in their accumulation in
its full truth.
The simple knot of Now & Then will give an immeasurable 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; and if your aims & deeds are superior, how can any record of
yours (suppose, of the books you wish to read, of the pictures you would
88. See in this connection Emerson's similar comments on Carlyle (JMN V: 454)
and also his parable of the fruit gatherer: "the little girl comes by with a brimming pail
of whortleberries, but the wealth of her pail has passed out of her little body, & she is
spent & languid. So is it with the toiling poet who publishes his splendid composition,
but the poet is pale & thin" (JMN VII: 46).
see, of the facts you would scrutinize)—any record that you arc genu-
inely moved to begin & continue—not have a value proportionately
superior? It converts the heights you have reached into table land. 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 an-
other. Here they all occupy but four lines & I cannot read these to-
gether without juster views of each than when I read them singly. (JMN
VII: 191)90
The "juster views" to which Emerson refers are really views of differ-
ent objects. Works are heights, individual and partial; character is
tableland, cumulative, abiding, and whole.
We might of course worry, as many of the great diarists have done,
lest what we record be precisely not our character, be perhaps the
contingent or the superficial. On occasion, Emerson seems to dismiss
that worry: he trusts in "the natural perspective of memory" (JMN V:
90) and writes that "the reason of the event is always latent in the
life. ... At a distance, we shall see the character lifting the condi-
tion, & giving its quality to all the parts" (JMN VII: 125 and VIII:
231).91 But this, clearly, is an untenable position as regards the writ-
ing of texts, because it renders meaningless the distinction between
good writing and bad. Fortunately, Emerson often takes a slightly but
crucially different position, as indeed he does in the long passage just
quoted, in stipulating that the continuous record in question must be
one we are "genuinely moved to begin and continue." Emerson
makes the same stipulation often and expertly and, in so doing, re-
instates the distinction between excellence and mediocrity. 92 It is, as
90. See also JMN IV: 378-79 and the celebrated passage of "Self-Reliance": "Of one
will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost
sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a
sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine
action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity
explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you
now" (W II: 59).
91. See also JMN V: 114 and VI: 222: "a man is a Method or principle of selection
& gathers only what is like him as unerringly as a sparrow builds her nest," and
Lawrence Buell's fine remark that "as Emerson saw, if one denies the assumption of a
unifying, essential soul, personality disintegrates into chaos. Because they rested on
this assumption, the Transcendcntalists put their trust in the 'method' of moment-by-
rnoment inspiration as the most 'natural' path for the intellect" (Literary Transcenden-
talism, p. 330).
92. For example, JMN VII: 418-19 and "Greatness," W VIII: 308.
Emerson articulates it, a moral distinction rather than an aesthetic

one, but it is characteristic of Emerson to think of the moral life as
indistinguishable from the aesthetic, and Emerson's language here
surely makes good, concrete sense of one of his great diaristic virtues.
He is not, as we have noted, a virtuoso of honesty, as is Pepys. He
does not, that is, excel in showing the embarrassing sides of the self.
He presents himself as a grand sinner but never as a petty one, never
as mean or spiteful or niggardly or gluttonous or perverse. But he is
what we might call a virtuoso of sincerity, in the sense that each of the
entries of the journal seems an entire and uncompromised articula-
tion of the thought of a particular moment. This seems sometimes a
deficiency; other writers' thoughts as they articulate them are more
subtly qualified and nuanced. We read Emerson and say, But what
about this and that? We turn from Emerson to Novalis and Schlegel,
or to Stendhal and Amiel, and find authors in whom striking ideas are
accompanied and refined by their antitheses. But there is a deficiency
here also. "The self thinks in cliches," writes Auclen—that is, one-
sidedly. In that sense Emerson is truer to his own self than is Novalis,
truer, that is, to the air of universal self-evidence with which our
thoughts come to our notice. We might, say, have Emerson's thought
about Schiller. But as we wrote it we might say, Yes, but the letters to
Goethe are of abiding interest, the essay on naive and sentimental
poetry is a masterpiece. These are things worth saying, and by taking
them into account we do greater justice to Schiller's work. But we do
less to our own thoughts, and so in the end less to our character.
"Speak what you think now in hard words," Emerson writes in "Self-
Reliance," "and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard
words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day."93
It is told of a Zen master that his great accomplishment was to eat
when hungry and to sleep when tired. Emerson's moral demands on
us as diarists are as axiomatic and as difficult. We must be "genuinely
moved to begin and continue" our record at each moment of its
registering; we must be true, that is, not designedly hypocritical or
partial. We must be who we are, that is, not designedly someone
else. But if we meet these moral demands, Emerson plausibly im-
plies, we will meet the aesthetic ones also.94
93. W II: 57.

94. Consider in this context Emerson's odd comment on Montaigne: "Talent with-
out character is friskiness. The charm of Montaigne's egotism, & of his anecdotes, is,
that there is a stout cavalier, a seigneur of France, at home in his chateau, responsible
We have so far considered Emerson's implicit argument for the

journal in its sharpest form. Let us step back for a moment to
assess it. It leaves in place, as it should, the distinction between the
work of intelligent design and the journal, and it acknowledges the
power of design to produce artistic effect. But it is also skeptical of
artistic effect. It is skeptical first because of its sense of natural
beauty and of the obscuring of natural beauty sometimes brought
about by artistic design. It is skeptical second because of its legiti-
mate interest in character as a subject for art, because of its interest
in reading all literature as the reflection of authorial character, and
because of its sense of the manifold ways in which character is
obscured rather than revealed by much literary treatment. It at least
adumbrates the possibility that "character teaches above our wills,"
and that we will do better portraying it in a form over which the will
has only limited dominion. It does not, in adumbrating that possibil-
ity, reject the project of distinguishing between a good artist and a
bad, though the terms it supplies for that distinction are of the sort
we normally use in moral discourse rather than in aesthetic. It does,
I think, what it was supposed to: it welcomes the journal to literary
citizenship among other, equally empowered citizens of the literary
republic.
Emerson the Gregarious Revolutionary,

or,
A Consideration of Two Artistic Forms
The journal qua book of character is of course a book for Utopian
reading, because it must be read as a whole, in its sixteen volumes, as
we read the whole of an author's oeuvre. Most of our actual reading of
the journal, and most of the reading of it actually done by members of
Emerson's circle, is of a different sort, and of a sort to move the
journal much closer to the aphorism book: it is a reading of a series of
independent utterances for what they say about the world. Let us
now take up the comparison between journal and aphorism book in
this more limited context.
Friedrich Schlegel calls aphorisms "zusammenhaengende Frag-
for all this chatting. Now suppose it should be shown & proved, that the famous
'Essays' were a jeu d'esprit of Scaliger, or other scribacious person, written for the
bookseller, & not resting on a real status picturesque in the eyes of all men, would not
the book instantly lose almost all its value?" (JMN VII: 373-74).
mente," fragments hanging together. 95 Let us consider first the impli-

cations of the adjective. No one fragment, it seems, is intrinsically an
aphorism; it can become one only if it is followed and preceded by
empty space and by other fragments. And what, then, is a fragment?
The word in ordinary discourse suggests something broken and thus
imperfect; but in its literary sense the fragment is properly opposed
not to a whole but to a part, to a component. The first manifestation of
this is formal: an aphorism is an utterance not "cotextually"96 related
to the utterances surrounding it, that is, not linked to them by the
conventions of continuous discourse. This is abstract; we might say
more concretely that we should be able to take two adjacent apho-
risms and reverse their order without producing any evident con-
tresens. It follows that a fragment is an utterance complete in itself. It
is unassirnilable, a soloist refusing to be a member of an orchestra and
thus properly not placed in one, parallel to its fellows but not linked
with them in series. "Spoons and skimmers," Emerson wrote, "you
can make lie indistinguishably together—but vases and statues re-
quire each a pedestal for itself."97
The claims for the aphorism book are two: one philosophical, one
rhetorical. Both claims are polemical. The philosophical claim op-
poses the aphorism book to the system; the rhetorical, the individual
aphorism to continuous discourse. Let us define each in turn.
Emerson's remark that "the system grinder hates the truth" is a
good introduction to the philosophical claim.98 Against clumsy, un-
wieldy, straitjacketing, oppressive systems and arguments stands the
aphorism as the essential exception, the bold insight of the thinker
unfettered by consistency. This is as it is worked out a surprisingly
inoffensive position; the rebellion is all in the posture. Like Bacon,
the German aphorists seldom argue that system and treatise are neces-
sarily false; rather they claim that the systems and treatises presently
available are false. Thus Novalis:
The art of writing books has not yet been discovered. But its discovery
is very near. Fragments of this sort are literary sowings. Of course
95. As quoted in Frickc, Aphorinmus, p. 9. My account of the aphorism is very

much indebted to Fricke's.
96. I take the term from Fricke, Aphorismus, pp. 10-14, who usefully distinguishes
it from "contextually" by applying the first term only to the environment of the page,
the second to the environment of the world.
97. As cited in McAleer, Days of Encounter, p. xii.
98. Emerson, "Lord Bacon," EL I: 326.
there may be some sterile seeds among them—but if only some come
up."
As long as we don't know how to write books—that is, systems—we
should make collections of aphorisms. We should in particular write
aphorisms against existing systems. But Novalis is not claiming, with
Callimachus, that a big book is necessarily a big nuisance; in fact he
looks forward almost prophetically to a golden age in which big books
can at last be written.
The second argument for the aphorism book concerns the relation-
ship between the individual aphorism and the reader. Again, I give it
in Novalis's words: "Absolute unknown = absolute stimulus . . . Mys-
tification."100 That is: the aphorism is suggestive, not explicit. It is a
potential rather than a realized statement, its meaning implicit rather
than explicit; it is a seed and not a flower, less likely to charm readers'
eyes but more likely to germinate in their minds.
Unlike the philosophical claim, the rhetorical claim turns out, as
the German aphorists develop it, to be more refractory than it first
appears. Novalis invokes the term Mystifikation. The word has a
distinctly nasty character to it; it was invented, in French, to describe
the deceits mercilessly imposed on a credulous author named Poinsi-
net; it is, that is, a con man's word, a mocking test of the reader's
acuity.101 Schlegel writes that "an aphorism ought to be entirely iso-
lated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete
in itself like a hedgehog."102 A riddle and a hedgehog; an enigmatic
utterance, an all but impenetrably guarded creature. It seems that
the reader of an aphorism is a combatant aspiring towards initiation:
Galahad or Parzival taking the next step towards the holy grail. But
along with Galahad and Parzival come inevitably a great many less
gifted pilgrims; the nature of the success they all seek presumes that
most seekers must fail, and when they fail they are dupes. Aphorisms,
Novalis writes, are literary sowings. Like some seeds, some apho-
risms fail to come up. Of course, some are sterile; but some, surely,
wither in the infertile soil of a second-rate mind. As we read them, we
run the risk of finding out that the second-rate mind is ours.
99. Novalis, Vermischte Beinerkungen 104, from Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Sam-
uel, cds., Schriften (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960), 2: 462.
100. As quoted from Vorarbeiten zu verschiedenen Fragmentsanimhtngen in Sam-
uel's introduction to the Vermischte Bemerkungen and Bltiethenstaub, ibid., 2: 409.
101. See Littre, Dictionnaire de la langue francaise, s.v. "mystineation."
102. As quoted in Fricke, Aphorismus, p. 88.
110 / E M E R S O N AND THE ART OV THE D I A R Y
Accordingly, the aphorisms of Novalis and Schlegel evoke in the

reader not satiation but hunger. They say less than is necessary, or
rather less than isnecessary for some; they hold something back, and
their ungenerous concision constitutes a challenge. They dare us to
complete them, to prove that for us the sparse words on the page are
sufficient. Do we fail to construe Novalis's "philosophy is homesick-
ness"? We remain in the outer circle, "mystified." Do we make sense
of his statement that "we are most awake when we dream that we
dream"? We advance to the inner circle.103
Both these claims undergo striking alterations as we tailor them to

Emerson's journal. The philosophical claim becomes both more pas-
sive and more radical. For the German aphorists, the treatise is a
necessary antagonist, solidly there in the opposite corner; Novalis's
Bluethenstaub is unimaginable without The Critique of Pure Reason.
For Emerson, evil is privative, "nonsense is only sense deranged,
chaos is paradise dislocated,"104 and the treatise is not the antagonist
of the aphorism book but an imperfect example of it. Thus in 1838
Emerson reads Cousin's Philosophical Miscellanies, in which, writes
its translator George Ripley, the author "finally disengages what is
true in [other] systems and thus constructs a philosophy superior to
all systems, which shall govern them all by being above them all"
(JMN V: 458n). Emerson's response:
This book ought to be wisdom's wisdom, & we can hug the volume to
our heart & make a bonfire of all the libraries. But here are people who
have read it & still survive. Indeed I have read it myself as I have read
any other book. I found in it a few memorable thoughts, for philosophy
does not absolutely hinder people from having thoughts, but by no
means so many as I have got out of say, for example, Montaigne's
Essays. . . . The book of philosophy is only a fact, & no more inspiring
fact than another, & no less; but a wise man will never esteem it any-
103. This almost arithmetical quality of the aphorism justifies Franz Mautner's
comment on the aphoristic mind: "its most striking common trait is an especially sharp,
unreconciled polarity between rational and mystical-affective thinking. Aphorists are
surprisingly often rational "thinkers" with a taste for the irrational—as manifested in
religion, in a curious antinomianism, in a mysticism of nature or language; but they are
at the same time subject to an intense need for giving form" ("Der Aphorismus als
literarischc Gattung," in Gerhard Neumann, cd., Der Aphorismus [Darmstadt: Wissen-
schaftlichc Buchgesellschaft, J976; Wege der Forschung356], p. 73).
104. As quoted in Barbara Packer, Emerson's Fall (New York: Continuum, 1982),
p. x.
thing final or transcending. Plato, Bacon, & Cousin condescend in-

stantly to be men & mere facts.
When all is done the philosophy that has catalogued & classified all
entities is & remains itself'but one fact of the infinity of facts.105
This is no rebellion against the system's power but a denial of its
status. The treatise is not that to which the aphorism is the coura-
geous exception, but simply a disguised collection of aphorisms put-
ting itself forth as something higher, a swaggerer claiming privileged
status and asking to be taken down a peg. The aphorism book in
Emerson's thought is not the exception but the norm.
Hence Emerson's extraordinary theory and practice of reading.
Reading for him is quite simply aphorizing. Coleridge gives the best
description of the process.
Draw lines of different colors round the different counties of England,
and then cnt out each separately, as in the common play-maps that
children take to pieces and put together—so that each district can be
contemplated apart from the rest, as a whole in itself. This twofold act
of circumscribing, and detaching, when it is exerted by the mind on
subjects of reflection and reason, is to aphorize, and the result is an
aphorism.106
To envisage Emerson as reader we have simply to subtitute in Cole-
ridge's description a text for a map. Regardless of the original form of
the text, however finely wrought and systematically unified that form,
the text becomes in Emerson's hands an opportunity to extract a few
choice aphorisms.
I would always . . . judge of a book as a peasant does, not as a book by
pedantic & individual measures, but by number & weight, counting the
things that are in it. My debt to Plato is a certain number of sentences:
the like to Aristotle. A large number, yet still a finite number, make the
worth of Milton & Shakspeare, to me.
Proclus & Plato last me still, yet I do not read them in a manner to
honor the writer, but rather as I should read a dictionary for diversion &
a mechanical help to the fancy & the Imagination. I read for the lustres
105. First paragraph JMN V: 458, most ellipses omitted; second paragraph from
Emerson's letter to Hedge of March 27 and 30, 1838 (L II: 123).
106. From Aids to Reflection, in William Greenough Taylor Shedd, ed., Works
(New York: Harper, 1860), 1: 129.
as if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment merely for

its rich colours.107
Emerson's practice bears out his theory. Coleridge's Aids to Reflec-

tion made possible Emerson's assured rejection of skepticism. We
might as we read the journals expect to find some response to its
argument, to its sustained defense of the testimony of the Reason
against the doubts of the Understanding. In fact the journals register
the book as a few aphorisms, and on occasion Emerson seems to have
distilled it down to the quintessence of "quantum sumus scimus"
(e.g., JMN III: 164, 171, 185). Wordsworth becomes again and again
" 'tis the most difficult of tasks to keep / heights that the soul is
competent to gain" (e.g., JMN IV: 87 and 274); appropriately enough,
Emerson writes of him that "almost every moral line in his book
might be framed like a picture, or graven on a temple porch" (JMN
III: 307).108 Persius becomes "nec te quaesiveris extra" (e.g., JMN IV:
318 (twice), V: 30 and 211, and of course the epigraph to "Self-
Reliance"). Sometimes Emerson the aphorizer deconstructs not only
books but also sentences, as if to include among the arrogant pretend-
ers to impossible coherence not only the system but also the clause.1()9
We might, of course, suppose that Emerson, like some deconstruc-
tive critics, would chiefly delight in deconstructing highly coherent
material and would celebrate its resistance as a high literary excel-
lence. But in fact Emerson has a principled taste for books of a looser
weave: collections, samplings, miscellanies, books of table talk, "maga-
zines of quotation" like Ralph Cudworth's The True Intellectual Sys-
107. First paragraph JMN V: 140; second paragraph JMN VIII: 186.
See also L I: 207, a letter to Mary Moody Emerson on reading Joanna liaillie's plays
"for a kind of better word hunting"; JMN VII: 40, remarking that Thucydides and
Plutarch have "only provided materials of Greek History" (my italics); and JMN VII:
313, VIII: 301, and XVI: 42-43 and 56 on the interest of reading dictionaries and books
that resemble them. (The passage from JMN VIII is later altered so as to minimize that
interest, in "Books," W VII: 211-12.)
108. See also his remark of Bacon that "the Essays would bear to be printed in the
form of Solomon's proverbs, that is, in total disconnection" (EL I: 334), and his approv-
ing comments on Max Mueller's reducing Homer to "the expressions of eternal reli-
gion" ( J M N XVI: 80).
109. For journal E Emerson finds an epigraph in a subordinate clause: "Se mai
continga che'l poema sacro/ Al qual ha posto mano e cielo e terra / Si che m'ha fatto per
pin anni macro" ( J M N VII: 264—65). This is the beginning of Taradiso XXV; it may be
translated, "if ever it were to happen that this sacred poem, to which both heaven and
earth have set their hand, so that it has emaciated me for many years." It continues,
reasonably enough, with, "should conquer the cruelty that bars me; from the lovely fold
where I slept when a lamb."
tem of the Universe.110 He prefers flat town ehronicles to the wrought

histories of Carlyle:
I was so ungrateful in reading & finishing Carlyle's History yesterday as
to say But Philosophes must not write history for me. They know too
much. I read some Plutarch or even dull Belknap or Williamson and in
their dry dead annals I get thought which they never put there. . . .
[Carlyle] exhausts his topic; there is no more to be said when he has
ended. He is not suggestive. (JMN V: 462; JMN VII: 382)111
The chronicles are less tightly constructed and can be more easily
disassembled, aphorized, and assimilated. The stamp on Carlyle's
property is ineradicable, the shaping unmalleable. This trait is not, it
seems, a challenge but a deficiency. The aphorism book, and the
journal qua aphorism book, are that to which all works of literature
are finally to be reduced, but also that to which writers of literature
may properly strive to attain: at once the whole of the literary terri-
tory and the exemplum of literary excellence.
The philosophical claim for the aphorism book becomes more ex-
treme when applied to Emerson's journal; the rhetorical claim, how-
ever, becomes less so. To work this out we have to look closely at the
individual Emersonian utterance, as being the unit corresponding to
the individual aphorism and thus apt for comparison with it.112
110. JMN IX: 265. See also JMN V: 118 and XVI: 133: "I had read in Cudworth from
time to time for years, & one day talked of him with Charles W. Upham, my classmate,—
& found him acquainted with Cudworth's argument, & theology; & quite heedless of all I
read him for,—namely, his citations from Plato & the philosophers; so that, if I had not
from my youth up loved the man, I suppose we might have 'inter-despised.
111. See also in this context Emerson's citation to Hedge of Alcott's disparagement
of "Shakespeare, and all works of art, which require a surrender of the man to them in
order to their full enjoyment" (L II: 30; July 20, 1836), and his striking account of his
very unwilling, almost coerced rereading of Scott's Quentin Durward: "to find a story
which I thought I remembered in Quentin Durward, I turned over the volume until I
was fairly caught in the old foolish trap & read & read to the end of the novel. Then as
often before I feel indignant to have been duped & dragged after a foolish boy & girl, to
see them at last married & portioned & I instantly turned out of doors like a beggar that
has followed a gay procession into the castle. Had one noble thought opening the
abysses of the intellect, one sentiment from the heart of God been spoken by them, I
had been made a particippator of their triumph, I had been an invited and an eternal
guest, but this reward granted them is property, all-excluding property, a little cake
baked for them to cat & for none other, nay which is rude & insulting to all but the
owner. In Wilhelm Meister, I am a partaker of the prosperity' ( J M N VII: 418).
112. I use "utterance" as a neutral term, meaning by it simply what appears be-
tween one blank line in the journal and the next. 1 do not want to call this an aphorism,
for reasons that will become clear, and in particular I do not want to speak here of the
Emersonian sentence. Those who argue that Emerson failed as an artist through insuffi-
The compressive force on the aphorism often reduces it to a single

sentence. Most Emersonian utterances run rather longer. And even
alone this fact hints at a more forthcoming relation between author
and reader. For the aphorist gives the reader only one sentence
because he intends to give him only one clue. The connection with
the reader is taut; the reader's probity and cleverness are on trial.
Emerson inevitably gives the reader enough chances to make success
sure:
What opium is instilled into all that is called pain in the world! It shows
formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough friction to be
endured but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a
thought. People wail & some people gnash their teeth, but it is not half
so bad with them as they say. We court suffering in the hope that here at
least we shall find reality, sharp angular peaks & edges of truth. But it is
scene painting, a counterfeit, a goblin. Nothing now is left us but Death.
We look to that with a certain grim satisfaction, saying, There, at least,
is reality. That will not dodge me; if aught can act & react with energy
on the Soul, this will. (JMN VIII: 200-201)
Take any ofthe.se sentences alone on the page, trim off all superfluity,
and it might become an aphorism: "we court suffering to find reality."
But the aphorism is a closed form; no more can be said. The Emer-
sonian utterance is an open one; much can be added, and all of the
sentences together are social in their plenitude; what reader could
feel bewildered by this discourse?
Indeed, what reader could feel bewildered, even surprised, by the
individual sentences that make it up? Artur Schnitzler writes that "if
you shake an aphorism, a lie falls out, and a cliche remains."113 That is:
one of the traits of an aphorism is its self-evidence, and one compo-
nent of the reader's response is "of course." The responses "perhaps"
or "in some cases" do not occur, or seem inappropriate. But along
with "of course," along with the cliche, and indissolubly linked with
it, is the lie, the other component of the reader's response: "good
heavens," or, "that's outrageous." The two responses are antitheses;
one asserts the self-evident truth of the text, the other its equally self-
evident absurdity. The individual aphorism then seems a mixture of
cient attention to large form have often argued that Emerson's unit of composition is
the sentence and have given us hrilliant discussions of it. But in fact Emerson's unit of
composition is simply and properly what he composed—that is, the paragraphs re-
corded in the journal.
113. As quoted in Mautner, "Der Aphorismus," p. 63.
the conservative and the radical, the excruciatingly dull and the daz-
zlingly novel. Now by Schnitzler's brilliant criterion, Emerson's sen-
tences differ from German aphorisms in the low ratio of lie to cliche.
They are adroitly shaped but not stripped to the bone, and by the
time the paragraph is read through, the lie, the point, the outrage,
the "sharp angular peaks and edges of truth" have been smoothed
over by the opium of repetition in variation.
The aphorism is single, the Emersonian utterance essentially multi-
ple, the one reducing a wide area of experience to a point, the other
diversifying a point of simple truth though its various manifestations
of experience. We may trace this Emersonian taste for single theme
and multiple variation to his distrust of the purely epigrammatic: "the
infinite diffuseness refuses to be epigrammatized, the world to be
shut in a word. The thought being spoken in a sentence becomes by
mere detachment falsely emphatic" (JMN VIII: 87; see also JMN
VIII: 40). We may also trace it to Unitarian catalogue rhetoric and to
the belief underlying that rhetoric that the basic truths are few and
simple, and that the speaker's task is to turn them about long enough
in the sun for everyone to see them. 114 But then, strikingly, Emerson
maintains the practice here, in the inner circle, for Alcott and Euller
and Caroline Sturgis, thus suggesting a particular kind of social rela-
tion within that circle. The relation between Novalis and Schlegel is
both collaborative and competitive; they send their aphorisms back
and forth as composers might exchange puzzle canons. The relation
between Emerson and Alcott is collaborative and critical, but as ex-
pressed in this sort of Emersonian utterance, it seems not so much
competition as friendship, that is, in the Emersonian sense of that
word, a relation of affinity rather than of accomplishment, a meeting
"as water with water." "Let us approach our friend," Emerson writes,
"with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart."115 That is: let us not
put him to the test.
We can enrich this distinction by construing the two practices as
responses to a social situation and hints of a social vision. A text implies
another and opposed text, a mode of reading another and opposed
mode. Novalis's Bluethenstaub implies as its formal antagonists the
Kantian critiques; against the initiate solving riddles couched in apho-
risms is to be imagined the dutiful student offered solutions in systems.
114. On this see Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, pp. 124-27

115. Both phrases from "Friendship," W II: 212 and 200-201.
What should we oppose to the independent friendship suggested in

the journal? Briefly, the orator and his public. Emerson's exemplary
orators are Father Taylor and Daniel Webster, and these, as we have
noted, arecoereers.
This Poet of the Sailor & of Ann street—fusing all the rude hearts of his
auditory with the heat of his own love & making the abstractions of
philosophers accessible & effectual to them also ... is a work of the
same hand that made Demosthenes & Shakspear & Burns & is guided
by instincts diviner than rules . . . He is a living man & explains at once
what Whitefield & Fox & Father Moody were to their audiences, by the
total infusion of his own soul into his assembly, & consequent absolute
dominion over them (JMN V: 4-5; my italics).
The aphorizing hearer disassembles the text; Father Taylor assem-
bles, subordinates, and fuses his hearers. Nor is Emerson's image of
Taylor the fantasy of an underpaid, underappreciated preacher. Ora-
tory is among the great American arts of the period and it is an
imperious art. No hearer of any of the great orators sits back to
aphorize the oration, disassembling it into its component sentences,
choosing a lustre here, rejecting a truism there; such freedom is
simply not available: "eloquence [is] always tyrannical never complai-
sant or convertible" (JMN V: 219). The coercive power of the revival-
ist orators is a commonplace; those in attendance were fused by the
heat of their preachers' love into a cataleptic army. But we might cite
also the great forensic orators: William Pinkney, William Wirt, and
above them all, Emerson's long-beloved Daniel Webster.
While the mentors of the bench were inculcating a chaste and elegant
liberality . . . counsels were putting on exhibitions of forensic melo-
drama which rivaled the splendiferous performances of the theater,
exhibitions widely reported across the country, and attended by as large
crowds as could squeeze into the narrow chambers, always on featured
days including numbers of "the fair sex." On these occasions the perform-
ers played shamelessly to the galleries, and were hailed, like an Edwin
Forrest or a Junius Brutus Booth, as geniuses.116
Perry Miller suggestively describes the lawyers and the revivalists as
the great antagonists of the period; but in striving to create a speaker
of great majesty and power, and an audience wholly subordinate to it,
they were in perfect agreement.117
116. Perry Miller, The Llje of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovieh, 1965), p. 151.
117. On Emerson's own lecturing in this context, see "The Journal vs. the Essays,"
pp. 79-80.
For Emerson as for the German aphorists, then, the isolated utter-
ance has the excellence of suggestiveness. But for the Germans, sug-
gestivcness seems opposed to explicitness; for Emerson, it is opposed
to coercion. The German aphorism locates power in the writer, the
Emersonian utterance in the reader. The reader confronted with the
German aphorism feels its suggestiveness as stimulus, as obligation;
the reader confronted with the Emersonian utterance feels its sugges-
tiveness as license, as freedom. Both forms are sanctuaries: the Ger-
man aphorism from the banality of the establishment, the Emer-
sonian utterance from the tyranny of the majority.
Certain aspects of the preceding discussion have probably seemed

familiar, because certain of the claims we have made on behalf of the
aphorism book and the journal have also been made on behalf of
Emerson's lectures and essays; indeed these claims have constituted a
lively tradition in our criticism.118 But that tradition has been based
on a tacit dismissal of the journals; what becomes of it when we bring
the journals, and not only the journals but also the fragmentary texts
with which we have been comparing them, back into view?
Let us consider that tradition as it is represented in a striking
passage of Barbara Packer's Emerson's Fall:
Obscurities, enigmas, lacunae—like Biblical parables—are tests of the
reader's intelligence and generosity; they serve to divide the elect from
the nonelect. The reader can hear only those texts, or portions of texts,
for which he has ears. "Deep calls unto deep," Emerson notes, "&
Shallow to Shallow."
A "deep" text is one that challenges the reader to intellectual activity.
And Emerson's best critics have always pointed out how well his own
works live up to his demand that a text must involve the reader ac-
tively. . . . The ambiguities, lacunae, paradoxes, and understatements
with which Emerson is so generous turn the sentences of his essays into
charged terminals that the reader must take the risk of connecting; the
latter's reward is a certain electric tingle. . . . For the reader who fails
to go beyond the sentences he is offered, and hence to take them in, the
118. Packer in the early pages of Emerson's Fall does justice to the early writers
in the tradition, among them W. C. Brownell and O. W. Firkins; for the recent
Emerson revival see in addition to Packer's own book Stanley Cavell, "Being Odd,
(letting Even: Threats to Individuality," in T. C. Heller et al., eds., Reconstructing
Individualism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), and "Genteel Responses
to Kant? In Emerson's 'Fate' and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria," Raritan 3: 2,
34-51, and Richard Poirier, "The Question of Genius," Raritan 5: 4, Spring 1986,
77-104.
fragments of an Emersonian essay can lie upon the page like steel filings
when no magnet is present. 119
This is first an argument about the nature of the essays: that they are
characterized by "obscurities, enigmas, lacunae." To say that the es-
says are so characterized is implicitly to compare them with a com-
monsensical scholarly standard of continuous argument; it is to say
that relative to the other objects in our field of comparison, the essays
are discontinuous in argument. But why limit the field so narrowly?
When set within the context composed by Emerson's own works, and
thus properly opposed to the pointillism of the journals, the essays
are distinguished precisely by their continuity. When set within the
larger system of Romantic literature, stretching from the Kantian
critiques and Wilhelm Meister to Novalis's Bluethenstaub and Cole-
ridge's notebooks, what distinguishes the essays is not their fragmen-
tary character but their topical coherence.
Packer's argument and the tradition it represents also propose some
notions about Emerson's relations with his readers. They imagine two
sorts of readers: deep and shallow, elect and nonelect. The shallow
readers leave the various components of an Emersonian essay lying
scattered on the page like iron filings. The deep readers bring them
into order; they regard the evident discontinuities as so many chal-
lenges to discern the underlying structure, the hidden continuity. The
discontinuity is the deceiving surface, the underlying argument, the
inward truth; the "exhilarations of discontinuity" are the opportunities
it offers to put Hurnpty Dumpty together again.
Let us first consider this notion of "deep reading." It is not, I think, as
Packer articulates it, an Emersonian notion. Indeed, it is, as we have
seen, directly in opposition to much of Emerson's theory and practice
of reading. Let us make the point again; it is one of Emerson's favorite
topics, and his articulations of it are endlessly interesting. Emerson
tells us to "read for the lustres": to create, that is, not continuities but
discontinuities, not sequences but fragments, not arguments but
epiphanies. Packer's deep reader takes too servile a posture. Emerson
is after all one of the great rebellious readers. He tells us not to be "too
civil" to books, lest "for a few golden sentences we . . . turn over &
actually read a volume of 4 or 500 pages" (JMN VII: 457). He writes
that "it is taking a liberty with a man to offer to lend him a book as if he
also had not access to that truth to which the bookmaker had access."
119. Packer, Emerson's Fall, pp. 6-7.
Each of the books, if I read, invades me, displaces me; the law of it is
that it should be first, that I should give way to it, I who have no right to
give way and, if I would be tranquil & divine again, I must dismiss the
book. (JMN VIII: 254)120
Of course, to realize these precepts as readers we have to go against

our training as critics. Packer's precepts, after all, tell us to do with
Emerson's essays what we have learned to do with literary texts
generally, that is, to make sense of them as sequences. Emerson's
precepts require us to hold our training in abeyance. When we read
the essays, we experience both the disruptions of a discontinuous
argument and the constraints of a continuous form. How are we to
resolve the dissonance? We must, if we read in Emerson's spirit,
pursue the individual utterance, and let the sequence go to the devil.
The essays in the scheme we have devised are an exoteric text, the
journal an esoteric, and the reading of the essays we have so far
described is a reading that leads implicitly through the essays and
their illusion of continuity to the journal and its discontinuous truths:
a reading for those on the way in. But presumably an exoteric text
ought to offer something of value also to those staying put outside.
We may recall in this context the Emersonian aura, the hazy emotion
and vague impression that the lectures and essays exude:
Emerson' oration was more disjointed than usual, even with him. It
began nowhere, and ended everywhere, and yet ... it left you feeling
that something beautiful had passed that way, something more beautiful
than anything else, like the rising and setting of stars. . . . All through it I
felt something in me that cried, "Ha! Ha! to the sound of the trumpets." 121
This is, strikingly, the comment of the initiate James Russell Lowell.
It is dangerously close to self-parody;122 and no doubt on his better
days, or on Emerson's, Lowell strove to read for the lustres. But here
he celebrates a different response; and surely the common reader,
120. See along the same line JMN VIII: 71: "In every moment and action & passion,
you must be a man, must be a whole Olympus of gods. I surprised you, o Waldo E!
yesterday eve hurrying up one page & down another of a little book of some Menzel,
panting & straining after the sense of some mob better or worse of German authors. I
thought you had known better."
121. Quoted in Chapman, "Emerson," p. 617.
122. Still closer, indeed a good ways over the line, is the newspaper report on an
Emerson lecture in the Alta California: "All left the church feeling that an elegant
tribute had been paid to the creative genius of the Great First Cause, and that a
masterly use of the English language had contributed to that end" (as quoted in Me-
Aleer, Days of Encounter, p. 600).
too, may properly find in the Emerson lecture a vague yet not at all
despicable inspiration and exaltation. Another initiate, Charles Sum-
ner, wrote of Emerson's lecturing that "his strange fancies fall upon
the ear in the most musical cadences";123 we have not the right to
deny the possibility the lectures create for common readers of attend-
ing to the cadences while forgoing the attempt to make sense of the
fancies.
But these readers, too, will feel the strain between formal continu-
ity and propositional discontinuity; and then, surprisingly, they may
in the end be driven to do what illuminated readers do on their own,
that is, take half of a fancy as it strikes the ear and raptly appropriate
it, ignoring the other and no doubt contradictory half. In that sense,
the essays are a brilliant rhetorical instrument. It is possible to miscon-
strue their sentences, it is possible to misconstrue their author; but it
is almost impossible for readers to make the author their dictator,
demagogue, or lawgiver. The passive reader goes away disappointed,
with a pleasant glow, a few sententiae, and no summarizable doctrine;
the active reader goes away elated, with a few sententiae and an
exhilarating freedom from doctrinal encumbrance; but neither can go
away slave to a philosophical system. 124
All of this may seem to make nonsense of Emerson's familiar dictum
that "nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the
whole" (JMN VI: 201).125 Do we not lose the perfect whole in consider-
ation of the alluring fragment? We do, in a sense; but it is not a sense
that leads us back to Packer's mode of reading the essays. The Emer-
sonian mode of reading the whole is we have already long since articu-
lated, in discussing his notion of character: to read the whole is to read
the writer. We might here make much of a small detail: that in reading
the essays and the journals we encounter authors' names and authors'
maxims far more often than we encounter authors' works or arguments
or scenes. That is as it should be; for the author and the utterance, not
the organic work, are the objects of Emerson's interest. 126 The reading
123. From a letter of Sumner's to Richard Moncktori-Miliies, in Thomas Wemyss

Reid, ed., The Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monchton-Milnes (London:
1890), pp. 238-39.
124. On Emerson's unease at the idea of disciples see JMN IV: 279 and VI: 52; also
Cabot, Memoir, 2: 626.
125. See also in this connection the poem "Each and All" (W IX: 4-6) and the
journal passage on which it is based ( J M N IV: 282ff).
126. Compare the extraordinary passage from the Vorrede to Eckermann's Conver-
sations with Goethe: "The thing we call truth is even with respect to an individual
Packer performs, on the other hand, falls between two stools; it is

occupied neither with the individual epiphany nor with the cumulative
revelation of the whole but with the sequences in the middle, and is
thus the one sort of reading Emerson neither practices nor commends.
The illuminated reader reads at the extremes; the critic falls between
them. We might have intuited as much simply by bearing in mind
Emerson's relations with the real readers of his journals. Nothing could
be further from his intellectual style than a text designed to divide
beween the sheep and the goats. The exoteric text offers even the goats
fair pasturage and simply invites the sheep to be fed better food, nearer
their shepherd's dwelling.
The Journal and the Quotation Book
Strict conversation with a friend is the magazine out of

which all good writing is drawn. (JMN VIII; 335)
Any reader of Emerson's journal will have noted that the preceding
essays are only partial descriptions of it, all omitting from consider-
ation the considerable portion of the journal consisting of quotation. I
now propose to consider that neglected territory, or rather to con-
sider the journal as a text characterized precisely by the alternation of
quotation with original utterance. The first part of the essay estab-
lishes Emerson's systematic interest in quotation books. The second
object nothing small or narrow or limited; rather it is, though something simple, yet
also something comprehensive, which, like the manifold revelations of a widely mani-
fested natural law, is difficult to express. It is not to be had in a thesis, nor in the
combination of a thesis and an antithesis; all these lead us only to approximations, and
not to the goal itself.
"Thus, to cite but one example, Goethe's individual utterances regarding poetry
often seem one-sided, even contradictory. Sometimes he emphasizes chiefly the
subject-matter, which is furnished us by the world; sometimes chiefly the inward mind
of the poet. Sometimes success seems to lie in the object, sometimes in the treatment;
sometimes in the perfected form, sometimes, with a neglect of form, in the poet's mind
and spirit.
"All these various statements and contradictions, however, constitute so many indi-
vidual aspects of what is true, and together describe its essence and lead us near to the
truth itself. Accordingly, I have chosen in this and other cases not to suppress these
apparent contradictions, occasioned by different times and seasons. In doing so I rely
on the insight and circumspection of the trained reader, who will not be misled by the
individual occurence, but rather will keep in mind the whole, arranging and unifying it
as is proper" (Gespraeche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. Regine
Otto with Peter Wersig [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1984], p. 9).
attempts to describe the traits by which Emerson's own quotation

book is distinguished; in particular it argues that the inner life of that
book is its image of the practice of friendship as friendship is articu-
lated in conversation. The third part attempts to integrate this image
of the journal with our usual image of the lectures and essays, and to
set both these images within the context of two notions of influence,
that offered by Harold Bloom and that offered by the American de-
bate over the proper relation between American literature and its
European tradition. The essay as a whole is placed last in this series
because in it the theme of friendship, and of the journal as a book of
Emerson and his circle, is here stated most clearly, as in a kind of
recapitulation.
In 1837, Emerson shrewdly named the members of his diaristic

circle: "Montaigne, Alcott, M. M. E., and I, have written Journals;
beside these, I did not last night think of another" (JMN V: 409).
Mary Moody Emerson is, as we have seen, Emerson's one formidable
diaristic precursor, Alcott the nearest of his diaristic colleagues. And
Montaigne? He inspired a good many diarists; but Emerson seems on
the face of things unlikely to have been one of them. Montaigne
teaches the prospective diarist a reverence for the personal and the
quotidian. Emerson the essayist respects and celebrates this teach-
ing; he gives us a Montaigne who declares,
I stand here for truth, and will not, for all the states, and churches, and
revenues, and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as
I see it; I will rather mumble and prose about what I certainly know,—
my house and barns; my father, my wife, and my tenants; my old lean
bald pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat, and what drinks I
prefer; and a hundred straws just as ridiculous . . . If there be any thing
farcical in such a life, the blame is not mine: let it lie at fate's and
nature's door.127
But Emerson the diarist seems not to take the teaching to heart. He
records facts, but not many personal facts, surely nothing to match
Montaigne's gossip on the gout in "De 1'experience," and at times
seems bent on systematically excluding from his text the local and
personal prosiness Emerson the essayist extols.
Emerson the diarist claims as his ancestor not Montaigne the
"grand old sloven" (JMN V: 85) but Montaigne the ventriloquist,
127. From "Montaigne" in Representative Men, W IV: 166-67.
Montaigne the quoter; what links the journal with the Essais is strik-
ingly and simply the abundanee of named voices they record. This is
notoriously true of Montaigne's text; as Emerson notes, reading Mon-
taigne proves the existence of a literary world (JMN VIII: 38), and we
may take this to refer to the number of that world's inhabitants Mon-
taigne allows to speak, so great a number that on occasion it seems
hard to distinguish him amidst their chorus. The same experience
awaits the reader of the journal. No other author's journal is so thickly
strewn with the words of other authors; it is surely among the chief
secondary sources in western literature.
The year 1831 has long been identified as the year of the Cole-
ridgean explosion, in which the reading of the Aids to Reflection
resolved Emerson's conflict with skepticism. We have noted that in
the journal Emerson distills Coleridge's book down almost to its essen-
tial proposition "quantum surnus scimus," and commented on that
characteristic practice.128 But we have now to consider that in the
journal for 1831, Coleridge's book is hardly more prominent than
Joseph Spence's charming collection of Popeana, the Anecdotes, Ob-
servations and Characters of Books and Men. We do not on this
account want to claim that Spence exercised an influence equal to
Coleridge's. But we should acknowledge Emerson s powerful interest
in a undistinguished book in which one writer quotes another, and we
might then suspect that part of the fascination of Coleridge's book was
precisely the traits it shared with Spence's. Spence presents the say-
ings of Pope; Coleridge presents, comments on, transmutes, tran-
scends, but nonetheless leaves typographically intact the aphorisms
of Archbishop Leighton and Henry More. One way, that is, of describ-
ing Emerson's reading in that critical year is to say that it is largely
occupied with books in which one man introduces, narrates, or com-
ments on the sayings of another.
Other aspects of Emerson's reading thicken the pattern. There is,
for example, his principled preference for the secondary source. Thus
he writes to John Boynton Hill,
One good book I advise you to read, if you have not, with all convenient
celerity—[Dugald] Stewart's last Dissertation—one of the most useful
octavos extant. It saves you the toil of turning over a hundred tomes in
which the philosophy of the Mind, since the Revival of Letters, is locked
up. There is a class of beings which I very often wish existed on earth—
128. See "The Journal and the Aphorism Book," p. 112.

Immortal Professors, who should read all that is written, and at the end
of each century, should publicly burn all the superfluous pages in the
world. (L I: 125)
This is a young man's practical advice; but the habit persists. A surpris-
ingly large ratio of Emerson's Goethean anecdotes come from Sara
Austin's melange, Characteristics of Goethe (e.g., JMN IV: 255 and
266); he finds Schlegel in Julius Charles Hare's Guesses at Truth
(JMN IV: 273), Empedocles in Ralph Cudworth's True Intellectual
System (JMN V: 117), Cicero in James Mackintosh's A General View
of the Progress of Ethical Philosophy (JMN V: 43). The scrupulous
notes to JMN point out again and again that a phrase attributed to
Epicurus is taken from Montaigne, an anecdote of Napoleon from the
Cabinet Cyclopedia. We noted earlier that Emerson prefers town
chronicles to Carlyle's histories; a further reason for that preference is
perhaps that the former leave room for the voices of their sources, the
latter absorb them—Belknap quotes, Carlyle swallows. The search
for Emerson's sources is strikingly different from that for Coleridge's
or Thoreau's. In the latter cases, the exhausting hunt takes one back
to the fount—to William Bartram, say, in Coleridge's ease, to the
seventeenth-century town chronicle or to Pindar in Thoreau's. That
Emerson was capable of a long pilgrimage to the originals is estab-
lished by the work he did for his speech at the Concord centennial.
But tracing his sources usually leads to popularizations, transla-
tions,129 synopses, anecdotal and gossipy histories: to reading "by
proxy" (W VII: 220), to books that like the Anatomy of Melancholy are
"made out of authors of dead fame, [resembling] this limestone com-
posed of the fossil infusories" (JMN VII: 451).I30
129. See "Books," W VII: 204: "The Italians have a fling at translators,—i traditori
traduttori; but I thank them. I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, some-
times not a French book, in the original, which I can produce in a good version. I like
to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives
tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across
Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when
I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue."
See also Emerson's striking remark that "the translation of Plutarch gets its wonder-
ful excellence, as does the Eng. Bible, by being translation on translation" ( J M N IX:
253).
130. JMN V: 362: "Do they think the composition too highly wrought? A poem
should be a blade of Damascus steel made up of a mass of knife blades & nails & parts
every one of which has had its whole surface hammered & wrought before it was
welded into the Sword to be wrought over anew."
Perhaps, too, we should consider in this context the quotation books created by
All this establishes the journal as a quotation book, and its author as
a writer with a systematic and varied interest in that sort of book. But
the context of quotation books is too wide; by Emerson's account of
quotation, and by our own, the territory is potentially infinite.131
What sort of quotation book has Emerson written?
He had, as we have noted, a natural eye for the lustre. As com-
pared with Boswell, he is less apt to find the biographically revealing
anecdote, quicker to find what Coleridge calls the philosopheme. As
compared with Auden or with Cyril Connolly, he is less tasteful but
more perceptive. Most of what we find in A Certain World or The
Unquiet Grave is impeccably burnished, none of it pretentious or
empty. But much seems to have been excluded. Emerson gathers the
scraps: a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. Much that he quotes
seems truism rather than aphorism, resembling more Ecclesiastes or
the Book of Proverbs than Nietzsche; but it has a long afterlife, a long
echo. He is more interested in simple truths than are Auden and
Connolly, and more interested in religious ones. He verges on vulgar-
ity, they on preciosity; they offer banquets, he a feast. He is I think
the greatest of all democratic quoters.
But more than these traits what distinguishes Emerson's quotation
book is the intense and diverse images it evokes of relatedness be-
tween the quoter and the persons quoted, and in particular its sugges-
tion of a developing conversation among friends. What traits make for
these effects? Partly the formal independence of the quoted material;
this is often set apart typographically, rather than being embedded
Emerson's reading: "I read alternately in Dr Nichol & in Saint Simon—that is, in the
Heavens & in the Earth, and the effect is grotesque enough" (JMN VII: 427). The
eff'eet may have been grotesque, but the practice was habitual, whether the books
Emerson alternates between are Dr. Nichol and Saint Simon or Plato and the Vedas (L
II: 319-20). He was a remarkably dilatory reader, and what went into his head was
almost always more than one voice at a time.
131. For example, "every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of
all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his
ancestors" ("Quotation and Originality," W VIII: 176); also JMN VII: 121, "literature is
eavesdropping." Emerson knew very well that every text is a bricolage, and his regret
over Coleridge's tacit borrowing from Sehelling in the Biographia concerned not the
borrowing itself but the failure to acknowledge it ( J M N V: 59).
See further on this Joseph Kroniek's very acute "Emerson and Reading/Writing"
(Genre 14: Fall 1981, 363-81), which however suffers, I think, from Kroniek's not
acknowledging that this aspect of Emerson's thought is not its predominant one; the
Emerson who wrote "Quotation and Originality" also invented in 1819 (JMN I: 63) a
symbol to indicate in his quotation books the fact of certain remarks' being the product
of his own original authorship.
in Emerson's own utterance, and the alternation of utterance and

quotation seems an image of the remarks of well-bred interlocutors.
Partly it is that Emerson so often writes directly about authors and
books; the alternation between Emerson and, say, Montaigne in-
cludes a good many remarks of which Montaigne is the subject. Partly
it is the effect of Emerson's treating his contemporaries in this regard
much as he treats the authors of his books; friends are quoted in much
the same way as are books, so Emerson's relations with books come to
seem similar to his relations with his friends. Partly it is certain formal
traits of Emerson's own utterance. We noted previously the open,
social amplitude of his unit of composition, in contrasting it with the
ungenerous concision of the aphorism. In this context, we may define
that amplitude, speculatively, as the proper extent of a conversational
remark; conversation does not after all consist of a series of aphorisms
but of remarks amplified and diversified in a courteous consideration
of one's listeners. Certainly, if we may appeal from an intuition regard-
ing nature to an examination of art, we can say that Emerson's dia-
ristic utterances resemble strongly the sort of remark collected in ana
books, that is, books of table talk, even when these collect the sayings
of men who wrote very differently from Emerson. Emerson in his
essays bears little resemblance to Goethe or Coleridge; Emerson in
his journal sounds very much like Coleridge in the Omniana and
Goethe a la Eckermann.
Other traits, more deeply rooted in the structure of the journal,
make for an effect of curious freedom, as if Emerson's quotations led a
life as independent as that of their authors. One cause here is that
every quotation in the journal is in one aspect a biographical transac-
tion; the journal is a book of Emerson's acts, acts of quotation among
them. As we read, therefore, the series of acts of quotation seem to
form a biographical sequence, being gathered along the line of Emer-
son's life rather than disposed according to the structure of one of
Emerson's essays, and it is easy enough then to construe that se-
quence as the image of a relationship. A greater cause, probably,
arises from the principle of indeterminacy intrinsic to the journal's
composition. Emerson sets down one day a remark of Goethe s. It is
Emerson who selects the remark, perhaps Emerson who translates it,
and as he sets it down he is in a sense its master. But in the develop-
ment of the journal it may become his; the remarks he sets down in
the confident perspective of one day may become the stumbling block
for the confident perspective of another. That is to say that Emerson's
quotations possess, potentially, the same refractory independence as

do his own utterances. Montaigne's motto, "j'ajoute, mais je ne
corrige pas," carries the same consequences, and perhaps in this
respect too Emerson was right to name Montaigne among his diaristic
colleages.
We can sum up many of these traits of Emerson's quotation book by
saying that it resembles that odd literary creature the ana book: a book
composed of the conversational utterances of an eminent man or
woman, often a scholar; a book of table talk.132 Plutarch's lives were
traditionally counted in the category, and these of course, with Mon-
taigne, were Emerson's bedside books; but Emerson knew also Lu-
ther's table talk, and John Selden's, and Pope's, and Johnson's, and
Goethe's, and Coleridge's. Now the usual argument for table talk,
offered by writers as parochial as Alcott and as sophisticated as Hazlitt,
is essentially biographical: that it takes away the veil between us and
the speaker.133 Emerson, on the other hand, seems to have had a
notion of the purely literary interest of the genre, setting aside a para-
graph for it in "Books," writing to Margaret Fuller that Boswell's Life
was worth forty novels, and forthrightly proclaiming in "Clubs" that
"the Table-Talk of Coleridge [was] one of the best remains of his
genius"—this after writing that the Biographia Litteraria was "the best
body of criticism in the English language."134 Among quotation books
ana books as a group are distinguished not only by the gratifying illu-
sion they offer of direct contact with the quoted speaker or speakers but
also, precisely, by their exploration of the nature of friendship as that is
articulated in conversation. Some of the greatest of them, among them
Boswell's Life of Johnson and Eckermann's Conversations with Goe-
the, dramatize the relationship in speech between the quoter and the
quoted speaker, turning invisible amanuenses into loving antagonists
and interlocutors of their great originals.
132. See F. P. Wilson, "Table-Talk," Huntington Library Quarterly 4: 1940, 27-

46.
133. Alcott: "[Coleridge's Table-Talk] is an interesting work. We feel that we know
something of the most celebrated man of the time, from these fragments of his conversa-
tions" ("Journal for 1836," p. 51); Hazlitt: "There is more to be learnt from [authors]
than from their books. ... In the confidence and unreserve of private intercourse,
they are more at liberty to say what they think. . . . We thus get at the essence of what
is contained in their more laboured productions, without the affectation or formality"
("The Conversation of Authors," in P. P. Howe, ed., Works [London: Dent, 1936], vol.
12, pp. 32-33).
134. "Books," W VII: 208; letter to Fuller of June 16, 1837 (L II: 82); "Clubs," W
VII: 236-37; EL I: 379.
Emerson's quotation book is then an ana book, a book of friendship

and conversation. But what sort of friendship and conversation? Ma-
dame de Stael's De I'Allemagne distinguishes German conversation
from French:
In France, the speaker is a usurper, surrounded by envious rivals and
seeking by success to maintain his position; in Germany, he is the
legitimate owner, availing himself of his acknowledged rights in peace
and tranquility. ... In German one measures oneself against ideas, in
French against persons; with German one seeks, with French one has to
arrive.135
The heaped-up antitheses depict two styles of utterance; for de Stael,
a discussion of conversation is properly a discussion of a high individ-
ual talent for speech.
The Transcendentalists partly followed her. Few cultures were
readier to imagine minds set apart for conversation, born to speak and
not to write. Alcott and Fuller are the obvious examples, both in their
self-descriptions and in the comments they draw from their col-
leagues; but Emerson has the notion ready for application also to his
brother Charles, and generally the type is in the air.136
But it is not quite the same type as that de Stael is describing. We
can trace the differences by noting first that nowhere in her discus-
sion does de Stael indicate whether the participants are intimate
friends or newly-met strangers. The place in which the conversation
takes place is implicitly a salon; the conversation itself, in Emile
Deschanel's phrase, is a "tournoi de 1'esprit."137 Among the Transcen-
dentalists the place in which conversation takes place is a home, and
conversation itself, in Emerson's phrase, is "the practice and consum-
mation of friendship."138 De Stael gives us the conversationalist qua
speaker, the fine and copious talker. Emerson, reflecting on Margaret
135. De Stael, De I'Allemagne (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), pp. 109 and 113.
See on this subject also Lawrence Buell's pioneering account of Transcendentalist
conversation in Literary Transcendentalism, pp. 77-102, and Emile Deschanel,
llistoire de la conversation (Bruges: Office de la publicite, 1857).
136. For Fuller's account of herself, see especially Memoirs of Margaret Fuller
Ossoli 1: 107: "conversation is my natural element." For Emerson on Charles see JMN
V: 151: "he was born an orator, not a writer."
137. Deschanel, Histoire de la Conversation, p. 193.
138. W II: 206-7; see also JMN VIII: 130, invidiously contrasting conversation as
the utterance of fine things with conversation as improvisation: "the best of our talk is
invented here, and we go hence greater than we came by so much life as we have
awakened in each other; but you, when your quiver is emptied, must sit dumb &
careful the rest of the evening."
THE F O R M OF THE M A T U R E JOURNAL / 129
Fuller, surely the preeminent Transcendentalist conversationalist,

spends a page or so on her powers of utterance, but four or five on her
powers of inspiration: "the companion was made a thinker, and went
away quite other than he came."139 Transcendentalist conversation is
neither play nor combat but interaction; it requires not so much the
power to imprint as the power to receive:
[Fuller's] nature was so large and receptive, so sympathetic with youth
and genius, so aspiring, and withal so womanly in her understanding,
that she made her companion think more of himself, and of a common
life, than of herself.140
But friendship, too, has a local coloring; and we may turn around
and say first that Transcendentalist friendship is characterized pre-
cisely by its essential linkages with conversation and with the letter.
What do Transcendentalist friends do with each other? They talk or
write. Sometimes they go for walks, though seldom for silent ones.141
What underlies these behaviors is a strikingly impersonal notion of
friendship. For Montaigne, friendship is above all an affinity of the
will, indeed nothing so weak as an affinity but rather a thorough
mingling of wills, "cette confusion si pleine de volontes."142 For Emer-
son, friendship is affinity of thought. Accordingly, whereas in Mon-
taigne's conception friendship is a durable fire, in Emerson's it is
essentially transient; minds change, affinities vanish, and friendship is
as quick to pass away as to flower out: "the systole and diastole of the
heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love."
Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat and
cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth friends as the tree puts forth
leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes the old
leaf? The law of nature is alternation forevermore. I43
Friendship is at times almost a mercantile conception; the friend is

conceived of within the economy of thought as the being most neces-
sary to full intellectual production: "strict conversation with a friend is
139. Emerson et al., Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston: Roberts, 1884), I:
312.
140. Ibid., 1:316.
141. Compare Deschanel on the importance of being seated during conversation:
"on discute dcbout, mais on ne cause qu'assis" (Histoire, p. 180).
142. From "De 1'amitie," inEssais(Bruges: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1937), ed.
Albert Thibaudet, p. 199.
143. W II: 196 and 197.
the magazine out of which all good writing is drawn" (JMN VIII: 335),
Emerson writes, and then proceeds to the inevitable conclusion:
I do then with my friends as I do with my hooks. I would have them
where I can find them, but I seldom use them. ... I cannot afford to
speak much with my friend. If he is great he makes me so great that I
cannot descend to converse. ... So I will owe to my friends this evanes-
cent intercourse. 144
"I marry you for better not for worse," Emerson wrote. Emersonian
friendship is its better moments, its moments of affinity, these being
precisely moments of verbal interchange at such times as the speaker
is not himself self-sufficient. 145
"1 treat my friends as I do my books." Let us turn Emerson's
statement on its head and see how the journal in its treatment of
books mirrors Emerson in his treatment of friends.
We might begin by noting the astonishing variety of Emerson's
quotational practice. At one end is quotation itself, that is, the accu-
rate transcribing of a passge, the addition of quotation marks to it, the
attribution of it to its author and source. Then come various attenua-
tions of this purity: quotation in Emerson's translation; quotation
without attribution or vice versa, transcription without either quota-
tion or attribution. Any of these may then be accompanied with Emer-
son's comments, incorporated into Emerson's discourse, or replaced
by Emerson's paraphrase. Further along the spectrum come various
sorts of referential discourse without quotation: direct characteriza-
tion; extended allusion; reference en passant. Finally come Emer-
son's own utterances.
We can find order in this variety by construing it as representing
the rhythm of Emersonian friendship. Its initial moment is traumatic,
an overwhelming, troubling influx: "a new person is to me always a
great event and hinders me from sleep." Such moments are echoed in
the journal in the abundance and intensity of the initial encounter,
that is, to speak concretely, in the long stretches of unmastered quota-
tion with which Coleridge or Goethe or Confucius make their first
entry into the life of Emerson's mind. Or perhaps, more generally,
144. W II: 214-15.

145. Further on Emersonian friendship see Bell Gale Chevigny, The Woman and
the Myth, esp. pp. 74—80; Maurice Gormaud, Individu et societe dans I'oeuvre de
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Paris: Didier, 1964), pp. 289-305; and Carl Strauch, "Hatred's
Swift Repulsions: Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Others," Studies in Romanticism!:
1968.
they are echoed simply in quotation itself, in the abandonment of

one's own voice to the other's. It is of course true that to quote is to
enhance, and Emerson the empirical reader is sensitive to the power
of quoted passages, noting that "a writer appears ever to so much
more advantage in the pages of another man's book than in his own"
(JMN V: 29); but this power seems usually to be exercised at the
expense of the quoter. "Quotation confesses inferiority. ... If Lord
Bacon appears already in the preface, I go and read the Instauration
instead of the new book."146 On occasion, to be sure, Emerson specu-
lates that "the charm [is] wholly in the new method by which [the
quoted passage is] classified; for, a new mind is a new method" (JMN
V: 254). But the journal is hardly a new method, not in the sense in
which Emerson is using the word here; it is a new context, but the
loosest of all contexts, and the long sequences of uninterrupted quota-
tion, whether from Goethe or Confucius, seem far more a tribute to
the source-text's power than to the target-text's: "a new friend is like
new wine," that is, both are equally intoxicating (JMN VIII: 58). The
passages are selected by Emerson, but they appear in dutifully accu-
rate transcription, at great length, in their own order, uninterrupted
by comment, unassimilated,and foreign.
But the initial moment is only an initial moment. The direct com-
ments that follow such submission, such humility, such piety, reflect
a process of assimilation; Emerson has quoted in extenso, accurately,
submissively, and now speaks in his own person about and to the texts
he has previously humbled himself to transcribe.
The office of conversation is to give me self possession. I lie torpid as a
clod. . . . Then comes by a sage & gentle spirit who spreads out in order
before me his own life & aims, not as experience but as the Good &
desireable [sic . Straightway I feel the presence of a new & yet old, a
genial, a native element. (JMN VII: 176)
Declining to attribute while quoting, declining to quote while attrib-
uting seem so many sorts of impish impertinence. Translating what
one quotes is potentially a means of altering it to one's own genius,
though Emerson exploits this potential only sparingly, performing
mostly translations into "ruggedest grammar English" (L III: 183-
84).147 When the author or the phrase enters the thickly allusive tex-
146. From "Quotation and Originality," W VIII: 188.

147. The phrase is used specifically and aptly of his version of Dante's Vita Nuova,
ed. J. Chesley Mathcws (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).
ture of Emerson's own prose, a new stage has been reached. "By this
original prefix to sentences of Oegger I seem to give them value"
(JMN V: 65), Emerson writes. In quoting persons within our dis-
course, we do, in Emerson's phrase, make them "lawgivers" (JMN V:
29); but in the context of the journal we have rather to distinguish this
procedure from pure quotation on the ground that when we quote
within our own speech we subordinate the order of the quotation; the
elementary rule that in quoting we must subordinate the author's
syntax to our own takes on in this Emersonian drama the importance
of a declaration of independence. Once within our discourse, the
authors whom we make lawgivers must obey our laws. When we
come to comment on them, it makes, in a sense, little difference what
we have to say; we are magistrates assessing their performance by our
standards, and whether they have done well or badly it is we who are
uttering judgment. And when we finally speak in our own person,
without reference to them, we have assimilated them. Then, predict-
ably, the process repeats itself; no assimilation is final for Emerson,
any more than any context is. Emerson's friendships, real and ideal,
textual and voiced, are each a series of encounters, arising almost like
planetary conjunctions, at moments of affinity or proximity, and then
submerged again. They occupy him not at but in virtue of"moments of
connectedness. These over, the friendship disappears, yielding to
solitude, or to another friendship in the circle of friendships.
We should refine this account by noting that the rhythm of quota-
tion so far described is not the only but simply the fullest of the
quotational rhythms the journal exhibits, and by looking briefly at
some of the others and at the varieties of relation they suggest. Some
authors are put through the whole sequence, among them Goethe
and Coleridge. These we know on other grounds are for Emerson
deeply disturbing and enlivening confrontations. Others turn up pri-
marily as ornamental quotations, always and forever assimilated:
Scott, Plutarch, Byron, and Montaigne. This is a deliberately odd list:
two central Emersonian authors and two peripheral. But if we con-
sider Emerson's relations with them all, we find they have in com-
mon a certain comfortableness, an old-shoe quality; they are authors
of Emerson's childhood, bedside authors, and though they earn vary-
ing degrees of Emerson's professed respect, they are all treated with
equal familiarity and ease. Of Emerson's contemporaries, Alcott turns
up in the journal primarily as passages of extended comment, seldom
as passages of extended quotation, suggesting rightly that whereas
Emerson had to work to make sense of him he had an easy enough

time keeping him under. Mary Moody Emerson and Margaret Fuller
offered more resistance and are appropriately represented by their
letters: the only letters, almost, that Emerson incorporates into the
journal.
Let us conclude this part of the argument by sharpening its point. It
is not the case that Emerson takes conversation as the model of all
literary excellence, or conceives of himself as a conversational virtuoso.
He was a mediocre conversationalist and knew it: "if any eye rest on
this page let him know that he who blotted it, could not go into conver-
sation with any person of good understanding without being presently
gravelled" (JMN IV: 354).148 He wrote once that he could talk best with
Elizabeth Hoar—not, that is, with a friend, but with an adopted sister,
with someone not of an elective affinity but of a given. His portraits of
the central Transcendentalist conversationalists, Alcott and Fuller, are
respectfully detached. In the journal, his praises of born conversational-
ists, not only Alcott and Fuller but also Mary Moody Emerson and
Emerson's brothers Edward and Charles, usually lead him to assert his
own deep aptitude for writing.149 He is aware that actual Transcenden-
talist conversation is often boring, often centrifugal, often pompous
and precious:
Alcott wants a historical record of conversation holden by you & me &

him. I say how joyful rather is some Montaigne's book which is full of
fun, poetry, business, divinity, philosophy, anecdote, smut, which deal-
ing of bone & marrow, of corn barn & flour barrel, of wife, & friend, &
valet, of things nearest & next, never names names, or gives you the
glooms of a recent date or relation, but hangs there in the heaven of
letters, unrelated, untimed, a joy & a sign, an autumnal star. (JMN VII:
67-68)
Indeed, on occasion he disapproves of conversation in principle, as a

kind of squandering, a desertion of self.
The conversation of the journals is accordingly a purified and ideal-
148. See also I, II: 29 and especially L II: 438 (to Fuller): "You have a deaf and dumb
brother,—by nature and condition the equal friend of all three,—but who, being
hindered by this slight mishap to the organ, from joining the Conversation, claims a full
report—to the finest particulars."
149. For Emerson on his brother Charles, see JMN VI: 262. On Alcott see JMN
VIII: 2.11-15; on Transcendentalist conversation generally see JMN VII: 242 and 451,
and VIII: 253-54. See also Gonnaud, Individu et societe, pp. 256-57.
134 / E M E H S O N AND THE ART OF THE D I A R Y
ized one. What is left from the actual practice of conversation is

simply the principle of dialogue, of multiple presence, and the
rhythm of friendship as conversation articulates it:
Conversation acquaints us with great secrets of human nature. When it
is earnest, the company are apprised of their unity; they are apprised
that the thought rises to an equal height in all the persons, that all have a
spiritual property in what was said as well as the sayer. They all wax
wiser than they were. It is a Temple, this unity of their thought in which
every one is conscious of a greater self-possession, & thinks & acts with
unusual solemnity. (JMN VII: 102)
Emerson writes that "if you read the letters and diaries of people you
would infer a hetter conversation than we ever find"; his journals are a
record of that better conversation. They are a work informed by the
spirit of conversation, composed by a man highly distrustful of its
practice: a sort of literary amphibian.
We come again to the question of how to situate Emerson the

essayist vis-a-vis Emerson the journalist. The lectures and essays
present none of the rhythms we have described in the journal, nor are
they very bookish even in comparison with the essays of other writ-
ers. Authors' names and the multiplicity of voices disappear as Emer-
son adapts journal passages for his other forms, and Ralph Orth pains-
takingly describes Emerson's numerous means of obscuring not only
the source of this or that quotation but also the fact of quotation itself
(JMN VI: xi-xvi). Montaigne, Emerson tells us, proves the existence
of a literary world. Emerson the journalist does also; Emerson the
essayist does not. How are we to make sense of this distinction?
Easily enough, if we identify Emerson the essayist as the essential
Emerson. Emerson the essayist is after all Emerson the imperial self.
The heart of this experience is a saturation in the currents of Univer-
sal Being, in which "the name of the nearest friend sounds foreign and
accidental," and "to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or ser-
vant, is a trifle and a disturbance."150 The heart of his teaching is the
doctrine of the infinitude of the private man. We presume, then, that
among the "trifles and disturbances" to be purged in the making of a
book of the self are precisely the names and citations in the journals,
that Emerson by temperament and by strategy strives always toward
abstractions, that the direct encounter with single, named, historical
150. From Nature, W I: 10 (ellipses deleted).
others yields always in Emerson to a practice of incorporation and

absorption.151
But these presumptions require that we subordinate the journal to
the lectures and essays. How can we make sense of the distinction if
we subordinate the lectures and essays to the journal?
Harold Bloom rightly situates Emerson among "the great deniers of
anxiety-as-influence."
Niet/sche . . . was the heir of Goethe in his strangely optimistic refusal
to regard the poetical past as primarily an obstacle to fresh creation.
Goethe, like Milton, absorbed precursors with a gusto evidently pre-
cluding anxiety. Nietzsche owed as much to Goethe and to Schopen-
hauer as Emerson did to Wordsworth and Goleridge, but Nietzsche,
like Emerson, did not feel the chill of being darkened by a precursor's
shadow. "Influence," to Nietzsche, meant vitalization.152
Bloom's work is among other things a description of the poet's uncon-
scious mind; but it is useful even if we seek chiefly to regard writers as
conscious makers and to imagine them dealing with the anxiety of
influence by intelligence and craft. We can discern in the form of the
journal a manifestation, perhaps even a tentative and preliminary
explanation, of Emerson's anomalous freedom. Let us look again at
the rhythms of Emerson's encounters with his great precursors. We
deduce that Goethe, say, is for Emerson a troubling figure, and we
note Emerson's success in assimilating him. But we should also note
how much room he is given to imprint himself. The most abject
submission is offered to the chief oppressor, and self-reliance seems
achieved because of, rather than in spite of, self-abnegation. Goethe
is even assigned a special notebook, filled with Emerson's remarkably
passive translations of passages from his works. When we come to
Emerson's magisterial judgment of him in Representative Men, we
should remember that the judge began by yielding himself wholly to
the prisoner at the bar.
But we should also look at the pattern of encounters as a whole.
Bloom speaks of the danger inherent in the poet's leaving his or her
poem open to the predecessor. Emerson's book is open with a ven-
geance. "My language," wrote Karl Kraus, "is the universal whore,
151. The notion of Emerson presented here is best articulated in Oueritin Ander-
son's brilliant and moving The Imperial Self (New York: Knopf, 1971). I do not agree
with it, but I cannot imagine it better stated.
152. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, pp. 46—64.
which I must make into a virgin again." So also Emerson's journal.

Bloom's classic contest between the compiler and the source, be-
tween the poet and the precursor, is a duel to the death in single
combat: Jacob wrestling with the angel. Emerson is most at home in a
circle of friends, not in a friendship. This is a troubling trait, because,
as Emerson himself proclaims, the "law of one to one is peremptory
for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friend-
ship." But perhaps in this context the trait makes sense as strategy.
Fights among multiple contestants are melees, bloody but not fatal,
in which from the point of view of one contestant the other contes-
tants are as much his allies as his antagonists. The introductory essay
to Representative Men, "Uses of Great Men," is Emerson's manifesto
on influence; we find in it the prescription, "Rotation is [nature's]
remedy."
But a new danger appears in the excess of influence of the great man.
His attractions warp us from our place. We have become underlings and
intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help:—other great
men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. . . . The
centripetcnce augments the centrifugence. We balance one man with
his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.153
How appropriate, the American twist given the thought at the end:
the plethora of authorities becomes the separation of powers, and the
anxiety of influence, for a moment, one more of the alienable legacies
of the old world.
We can, it seems, read the journal as depicting not the loss of a self
but the salvation of a self. We can read the swirl of voices not as a
diminution of the self they surround but as its necessary antagonists,
indeed its necessary conquerors, the means by which Emerson makes
his literary place in the world—not, as in so many of Bloom's exam-
ples, by keeping them out of the text, but by abjectly inviting them
in. He who loses himself will find himself.
If we read the journal in this way, what becomes of the essays? In
them the other figures have been assimilated, and half the spectrum
of relations suggested in the journal is gone. What is lost is self-
abnegation; what remains is self-assertion. Here indeed, encounter
yields to absorption. The Goethe of the journals is a powerful and
troubling figure; the Goethe of Representative Men is within Emer-
son's control, assimilated altogether to his voice, his context, his or-
153. "Uses of Great Men," W. IV: 19 and 27.
der. The process by which the assimilation is achieved is truncated;

the fact of the assimilation, the exhilarating independence it brings, is
proclaimed with giddy good cheer. The journals present Emerson
winning his independence in company, the essays Emerson asserting
his independence in solitude.
Now it feels plausible, on commonsensical psychological grounds,
that an esoteric text should present the process of which the exoteric
text presents the result, so in a sense the argument just offered has
made sense of the distinction in question. But we can pursue the
argument so as to base the distinction on historical grounds also, by
setting it within the context of the American debate over tradition and
originality, the calls to imitate or to reject the European literary
heritage, because in that context Emerson's two texts can be con-
strued as two responses to the questions the debate posed.154
The public text contributes to what we might call the ritual function
of the debate, and in particular of the nativist arguments the debate
evoked. Many of these arguments were obscurantist: the intemperate
dismissals of the whole European literary tradition, and, perhaps
more damaging, the neglect of the American literary tradition already
in existence, begun with William Bradford and continuing through
Brown and Irving and Cooper. But the function of these arguments
was not to describe an extant literature but, by hook or by crook, to
create room for a new one; as Bloom has shown, creating such space
takes enormous leverage, whether for an individual or for a nation,
and to have leverage one must have a place to stand in. No text
creates more space than does Emerson's "American Scholar":
Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other
lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life,
cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.155
The air of sovereign assertion, the apparent freedom not only from
European influence but also from influence of any sort whatsoever
reinforces the power of the specifically nativist arguments; it is no
accident that the same oration should contain both the passage just
quoted and the celebrated remark that "books are for the scholar's
154. See Robert Spiller's classic "Critical Standards in the American Romantic
Movement" (College English 8: April 1947, 344-52). For a contemporary view of the
matter see also Richard Milnes's review of Emerson's early works in The London and
Westminster Review 33: 1840, 352-53.
155. W. I: 81-82.
idle times," and no injustice that an oration so little explicitly occu-

pied with America should have been called by Oliver Wendell
Holmes the intellectual declaration of independence.
The private text, on the other hand, tacitly recognizes that the
terms of the debate are flawed, that the opposition between imitation
and originality is a fraudulent opposition, and in particular that the
notion of an originality not itself the consequence of imitation corre-
sponds to nothing in human experience. The private text, revealing
one of the chief initiators of a genuine American literature as the
greatest of all American readers of the literature of the past, is pre-
cisely a demonstration of an originality based on imitation. Emerson
finds his model for that paradox in the practice of friendship. He
treats his books as he treats his friends: not as his parents; not as the
voices of tradition to be rejected by strong Americans; not as the
voices of precursors to be rejected by strong Bloornian poets; but as
his friends, as men and women to yield to, to be excited by, to be
possessed by, to transcend, to assimilate, but always to talk to.
IV
The Loss of Form
Ward said that men died to break up their styles: but Nature
had no objection to Goethe's living, for he did not form one.
JMN VIII: 271
The present chapter is more speculative than the chapters that pre-
cede it, so it should be introduced in more explicit detail. Originally
its subject was the decline of Emerson's journal in his old age; it was
intended as a counterpart to the earlier chapter on the genesis of that
journal, the one to tell of Emerson's finding his form, the other of his
abandoning it. Had this subject remained central to the chapter, the
terms developed in the earlier chapter, then modified in the long
descriptions of Emerson's mature journal, would have sufficed for it.
But then the focus of the chapter shifted. It became clear to me in
looking at the late journals that it was impossible to describe them
without also describing certain patterns in Emerson's old age; the
formal developments in the late journals and the formal develop-
ments in Emerson's powers in his old age seemed intimately enough
related that a description of the one entailed a description of the
other. For this more complex description, however, needing as it did
to be both literary and biographical, new terms had to be devised.
And, as happens when new terms are devised, the story had to be
told with them from the beginning; having, that is, devised terms for
describing the late journals in the context of Emerson's old age, I
found myself constrained to use these same terms to describe the
journal as a whole, so as to make the story of its decline, and of
Emerson's, intelligible.
139
The new terms are derived from Emerson's notions oi memory and
from reflecting on what happens when we posit that in some Emer-
sonian sense the journal is the simulacrum of the memory. The first
part of the present chapter is then an account of those notions, chiefly
based on Emerson's f857 essay on the subject. The second part, and
the longest, is a description of the journal in its entirety, with special
attention to its extensive indices, as a simulacrum of the memory. In
the course of that description a tension in the journal emerges between
two different notions of memory, both very much rooted in Emerson's
language, which I call progressive and cumulative; the opposition be-
tween these notions is similar, though not identical, to several of the
celebrated dichotomies devised to describe Emerson's mental life,
among them James Russell Lowell's "Plotinus-Montaigne" and Ste-
phen Whicher's "freedom and fate." The third part of the chapter, and
the briefest, though originally the chapter's central focus, is a summary
account of the journal over time, its life and death, in the context of the
tension between progressive and cumulative memory; this account
includes a description of the formal developments in the late journals,
which seem in the context thus established not so much puzzling as
inevitable. The fourth and final part of the chapter is a description of
Emerson's old age in the context of his late journals; it attends closely to
the particular character of Emerson's late loss of memory and presents
that loss as a compensation for the increasing predominance of cumula-
tive memory in the late journals.
For Emerson's great and useful antagonist John Locke, memory is

simply the faculty by which absent ideas are retained and recalled. It
is, ideally, our servant and does our bidding promptly, calling up
absent ideas to our "secondary perception" when we wish to review
them. Sometimes, however, it delays; sometimes it declines to act at
all; sometimes it rebels, and absent ideas "are rouzed and tumbled
out of their dark Cells, into open Day-light, by some turbulent and
tempestuous Passion."1
Emerson, too, appreciates memory's "mysterious hooks and eyes to
catch and hold, and contrivances for giving a hint." 2 But his interest in
the faculty is not restricted to the details of their operation. Memory
1. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Peter N. Hidditch, cd.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 152-53.
2. From "Memory," W XII: 93; see also W XII: 94. Subsequent quotations from this
essay will he identified by page number in the text.
THE L O S S OF F O R M / 141
for Emerson is not Locke's obedient and strictly limited servant but
an expression of the whole being: "we estimate a man by how much
he remembers" (W XII: 95). The difference for Locke between a good
memory and a bad is a difference of tempo. For Emerson, on the
other hand, memory is not only a faculty of retention but also a
system of classification, and the difference for him between a good
memory and a bad lies in the loftiness of the categories by which one
idea is linked to another:
This is the high difference, the quality of the association by which a man
remembers. In the minds of most men memory is nothing but a farm-
book or a pocket-diary. On such a day I paid my note; on the next day
the cow calved; on the next I cut my finger; on the next the banks
suspended payment. But another man's memory is the history of sci-
ence and art and civility and thought; and still another deals with laws
and perceptions that are the theory of the world. (W XII: 96)
It follows that for Emerson the memory is perpetually in flux. Not
only are its stores constantly being added to; they are constantly
being reconfigured. For Locke, it seems, new ideas inevitably fit
easily within the old system, which expands but does not change
shape. For Emerson, new ideas demand the reordering of the old
system: "with every new insight into the duty or fact of to-day we
come into new possession of the past" (W XII: 110).3 The Emersonian
moment of insight is an anarchic epiphany:
The joy which will not let me sit in my chair, which brings me bolt
upright to my feet, & sends me striding around my room, like a tiger in
his cage, and I cannot have composure & concentration enough even to
set down in English words the thought which thrills me—is not that joy
a certificate of the elevation? What if I never write a book or a line?
(JMN XIV: 308)
This progressive character of memory is in fact the favorite theme of
the essay. It inspires Emerson to describe forgetting not as an antago-
nist of memory but as a contributor to it: "we forget rapidly," he
writes, "what should be forgotten. The universal sense of fables and
3. See also JMN IV: 19: "The moment you present a man with a new idea, he
immediately throws its light back upon the mass of his thoughts, to see what new
relation it will discover. And thus all our knowledge is a perpetually living capital,
whose use cannot be exhausted, as it revives with every new fact. There is proof for
noblest truths in what we already know but we have not yet drawn the distinction
which shall methodize our experience in a particular combination."
anecdotes is marked by our tendency to forget name and date and

geography" (W XII: 108).4 The history of memory in Emerson's ac-
count is essentially a history of elevation by simplification.
"There is no book like a memory," Emerson writes (W XII: 93;
based on JMN V: 61); but the denial authorizes the comparison,5
which is in any case deeply rooted in Emerson's thought. Elsewhere
he compares the journal to a savings bank and the memory to an
accumulation of capital. He practices literary criticism by comparing a
book with its maker, seeming thus to posit that all literary work
aspires to a condition of mentality. Like the memory, the journal is an
instrument of conservation; it is opposed, as all writing is, to the
squandering intrinsic to conversation and to thought. It is also op-
posed, as all private writing is, to the relinquishment of control intrin-
sic to publication. Both the memory and the journal, that is, preserve
thought both from being wasted and from being spent. 6
As we have noted, however, memory for Emerson is not only the
retention of thought but also the "incessant purification" of the body
of thought retained. As new thoughts enter the memory, they trans-
form and are transformed by the thoughts already stored there; the
categories by which the mind has acccess to the memory's store are
constantly being amended. What images of this process do we find in
the journal?
Most evidently, Emerson's system of indexing. Let us take a mo-
ment to chart its staggering dimension. Emerson writes that the in-
dex of the memory is an index "of every kind":
alphabetic, systematic, arranged by names of persons, by colors, tastes,
smells, shapes, likeness, unlikeness, by all sorts of mysterious hooks and
eyes to catch and hold, and contrivances for giving a hint. (W XII: 93,
based on JMN V: 61)
4. See also L II: 49: "The Muses are ever to me the Daughters of Memory. That
sublime Muse who abolishes Memory, Noos in Greek, and Truth Love or God in English
1 do not desesrve to behold, but at infinite distances I adore him and hope ii him.—"
5. Along the same line we should note that the passage discussed "The Jo irnal and
the Aphorism Book," pp. 104—5, on "the simple knot of now and then" and on the
interest intrinsic to any chronological record that we are "genuinely moved" to begin
and keep, is headed "Artificial Memory" (JMN VII: 191).
6. All through his life Emerson made double-ended journals, beginning a volume
for one purpose and then starting again from the back for another. The JMN editors
attribute this practice to his frugality (JMN VI: 58): an interesting assertion in the
present context, as it suggests that the journal is a means of conservation not only
intrinsically, in that writing in se is preserving, but also intensively, in that Emerson
liked to get as much writing in a single volume as possible.
THE LOSS OF F O R M / 143
Judged by that ideal standard the indices of the journals fall short—
but not by much. First, each volume has its individual index. That
makes sixty or so. These are supplemented chiefly by four other
forms: the topical notebook, a volume set aside for index-like citations
and fully transcribed remarks on a particular topic; the synoptic in-
dex, a cumulative index of many volumes of the journal together; the
quotation book, similar to the synoptic index but distinguished from it
by the greater ratio in it of transcribed remarks to citations; and the
lecture notebook, undertaken with a lecture series in prospect, which
includes both surveys of many journal volumes resembling the synop-
tic indices and collections on particular topics resembling the topical
notebooks. There are, at a rough count, forty or so topical notebooks,
at least five synoptic indices, a dozen quotation books, and a dozen
lecture notebooks. To these we should add a number of odd combina-
tions of various traits of the main forms, among them OP Gulistan, a
quotation book occupied only with persons, and Sigma, a quotation
book occupied only with anecdotes; also, perhaps, the index-like nota-
tions Emerson made in the backs of the books of his own library,
seeming thereby to assimilate them to the volumes of his journal. 7
Finally, we may if we like include in this system even Emerson's
lectures and essays, considering these for the moment an extreme
variation of the topical notebook, and thus considering the Emer-
sonian corpus in its entirety as the journal and its mnemonics. 8
Let us now consider this system as a means of "incessant purifica-
tion." The process begins at the completion of the individual volume.
The first step in classifying its various ideas is the making of the
individual volume index. We saw earlier how that process gave much
latitude for the imagining of "all sorts of mysterious hooks and eyes to
catch and hold." It was, unlike the Lockean index, the product of
reading the volume rather than that of reading only the individual
7. These are eollectcd in a typeseript volume at the Houghton Library (EM 340.1).
OP Gulistan is a particularly interesting book as exemplifying a sort of index Emer-
son explicitly calls for; it is an index "by names of persons," each given a few pages
composed, in varying proportions, of citations to other journals, of mots inscribed or
transcribed for the occasion, and of newspaper clippings. The book hints at a biographi-
cal organization of the accumulated journals, as does the person index to Index Minor
1843; Emerson's maxim that all history is biography is in these structures realized
literally, and we are reminded of how much of the journals can be construed as a
sustained portrait of representative men and women.
8. For an earlier justification of this looking-glass way of regarding the Emersonian
corpus, see "The Journal vs. the Essays, "pp. 72ff. For an account of the lecture notebooks
from a more traditional viewpoint, see Linda Allardt's brilliant preface to JMN XII.
entry, and as such permitted the conception of larger categories. It

permitted also a larger variety of categories, in that no passage
needed to be restricted to one category only; rather each in its poten-
tial multiplicity could find its way into a good many "contrivances for
giving a hint." But the individual volume index was of its nature
incomplete, not only in that it necessarily left things out, but also in
that it reflected a past stage of the memory's development. Appropri-
ately, then, Emerson's multiplication of indices resulted not only
from a transference of data from one index to another but also from a
rereading of the journals by Emerson as he developed from one
moment to the next. As we trace the passages of a particular volume
through the various indices, we see Emerson finding categories for
passages previously neglected and, though less often, new categories
for passages previously indexed. 9 More importantly, we see Emerson
taking passages indexed under small topics in the individual volume
index and grouping them under larger topics in the notebooks and
synoptic indices. Not, of course, that topics have intrinsic sizes; we
can describe the process more precisely by saying that in the note-
books we can see Emerson testing the fitness of various topics to unite
diverse ideas together. Thus in lecture notebook Phi, Emerson tries
out the notion that "Transcendentalism" can make large sense of pas-
sages individually indexed in volume N under the headings "Carlyle,"
"City," "Education," and "Transcendental Criticism."10 We can then
see the topical notebooks and the lectures and essays, and in particu-
lar Emerson's practice of cannibalizing earlier lectures for later
ones,11 as the most ambitious and comprehensive of these attempts at
regrouping. "With every broader generalization which the mind
9. Thus in the individual volume index to Journal N, Emerson neglects this passage:
"Men are so gregarious that they have no solitary merits. They all—the reputed leaders
& all—lean on some other—and this superstitiously & not from insight of his merit.
They follow a fact, they follow success & not skill. Therefore as soon as the success
stops, fails, & Mr Jackson blunders in building Pemherton Square, they quit him;
already they r3emember that long ago they suspected Mr J's judgment, & they transfer
the repute of judgment to the next succecder who has not yet blundered" (JMN VIII:
265). He has, presumably, found no hooks or eyes by which to take hold of it. Later, in
Notebook Phi, he indexes the passage under the heading "Merchants" (JMN XII: 296);
it has a name now and can be remembered. Other passages acquire new names and
new kindred, which bring different aspects of them to light: the assertion, "Bancroft &
Bryant are historical democrats who are interested in dead or organized but not in
organizing liberty" (JMN VIII: 250), is indexed in N under "democracy" and in Phi
under "Bryant & Bancroft" ( J M N XIII: 335).
10. JMN XII: 328; for the index to N see opposite JMN VIII: 328.
11. EL I: xxiii.
makes," Emerson writes, "with every deeper insight, its retrospect is

also wider" (W XII: 109). The search signaled in the mnemonics of the
Emersonian corpus has all the appearances of a search for broader
generalizations and wider retrospects.
But here the analogy between memory and journal ends. Living
memory is essentially progressive; as new insights yield new catego-
ries, old categories are effaced. As noted earlier, the story of the
memory is a story of simplification: "what one had painfully held by
strained attention and recapitulation now falls into place and is
clamped and locked by inevitable connection as a planet in its orbit"
(W XII: 109). The .simulacrum of memory in the journal is both pro-
gressive and cumulative; new insights yield new categories, but old
categories remain. The story of the journal, it turns out, is a story of
accumulation. Among the things accumulated are a good many
schemes of simplification; but the heap of them is always growing.
None of all the forms we have described as Emerson's mnemonics is
ever destroyed. 12 This is only trivially true of the essays, which have
passed beyond Emerson's control. But it is pointedly true of all those
forms lying in between the journal and the essays, which would seem
properly superseded by the essays to which they contribute or by a
new organization of the data they contain. No quotation book is de-
stroyed, nor any synoptic index, though later ones incorporate some
of the material of earlier ones. No index in any lecture notebook is
destroyed, even when the lectures to which it contributes have been
delivered.13 No category, then, is ever final; but no category is ever
superseded. "The soul is progressive," Emerson writes, "and in every
act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole."11 In Emer-
son's own system, however, the soul makes that attempt in a work-
shop cluttered with inventories.
That formulation, however, externalizes the conflict. In actuality,
the conflict between progressive memory and cumulative, which is to
say the conflict between Emerson's freedom and Emerson's fate,
between Plotinus and Montaigne, is intrinsic to the writing of the
journal itself.
12. The exception is the lecture manuscripts, which Emerson cannibalizes physi-
cally, thus destroying the organization the manuscripts represent. But cannibalizing is
the exception, not the rule.
13. Clearly, the lecture notebook indices were preserved deliberately. In those
same lecture notebooks Emerson wrote drafts of lectures in pencil, then erased or
overwrote them. He wrote the indices in ink and left them intact.
14. From "Art," W II: 351.
Here we have to distinguish between the book of the journal and

the act of writing in it. Considered as a book, the journal is a means of
retention; whatever is written in it is stored inert in a sort of ware-
house. But the journal is an open-ended book—as Emerson wrote of
Baeon's work, it cannot be completed till the end of the world15—and
to the dead accumulations of the past comes the living author with the
thought of the moment. The Emerson who wrote "damn consistency"
retains the power to abolish, or at least to contradict, the whole of the
past. Each act of writing is for the duration of the act the eternal
present; it is, in Emerson's phrase in celebration of the forgetfulncss
of genius, "thinking in this moment as well and deeply as in any past
moment" (W XII: 100). But once completed, the act of writing be-
comes the written deposit, one of the stores of memory. Harold
Bloom writes of the journals'
How and ebb, their . . . recording of the experience of the influx of insight
followed by the perpetual falling hack into skepticism. They move con-
tinually between a possible ecstasy and a probable shrewdness. 16
These terms are intended to define the character of the thoughts the
entries record. But they also describe the character of what the en-
tries enact. The possible ecstasy, the flow, is set in motion in the
writing of each entry as it is set on a blank page in the hope of altering
the universe. The ebb, the probable shrewdness, begins with the
completion of the writing, as the new entry becomes a component of
the universe it had hoped to alter.
Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of
transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the
darting to an aim. 17
That power is reflected in the journal by the blank space between one
entry just read and another looming mysterious and unwritten. 18
We have spoken earlier of Lawrence Buell's fine insight that "the
15. From "Lord Bacon," EL II: 335.
16. Bloom, "Mr. America, " p. 20.
17. From "Self-Reliance," W II: 69.
18. See along this line JMN VIII: 65: "the triumph of thought today is the ruin of
some old triumph of thought. I saw a man who religiously burned his Bible and other
books: and yet the publication of the Bible & Milton & the rest was the same act,
namely the burning of the then books of the world, which had also once been a
cremation of more." Also JMN VII: 524: "The method of advance in nature is perpetual
transformation. Be ready to emerge from the chrysalis of today its thoughts & institu-
tions, as thou hast come out of the chrysalis of yesterday."
sense of spiritual torpor which gave rise to much of guilt-feeling

in ... Puritan self-examiners has its counterpart in the Transcenden-
talist confessions of failure of self-perception."19 We can now see that
for both the Puritans and for Emerson what leads to the experience of
failure is precisely the experience of success. The Puritan diarist
records a spiritual experience, an inward and enlivening sense of his
own sinfulness or of God's mercy, and feels perhaps some comfort in
his state. But the act of recording that experience effectively termi-
nates it, and the diarist waits hopefully for other experiences of the
same sort, each of which, once noted, becomes past and tenuous.
Emerson has an insight, and having it is reassured of his genius; but
recording it, he puts an end to it: "when you have spoken the word, it
reigns over you, but whilst it is not spoken you reign over it" (JMN
VI: 225). Or, in Maurice Gonnaud's evocative formulation:
by a supreme effort of purification, spiritual existence came to be de-
fined by a successive denial of each moment in which it claimed to be
embodied.20
The recurring rhythm of the journal is the transit of thought from a

state of energy to a state of mass.
How can we read this rhythm? Not, I think, by taking progressive
memory as Emerson's genuine aspiration, cumulative memory as his
merely prudential compromise, because Emerson's genuine aspira-
tions include prudence also. We may take the preservation of the
journal itself as a necessary act, not an expressive one. Yet Thoreau in
1841 destroyed a good part of the journals he had kept until that
date;21 Emerson destroyed nothing. We may take the retention of the
mnemonics also to be necessary, not expressive, noting that each of
the actual indices is partial and imperfect and must be supplemented
by other indices, also but otherwise partial and imperfect, in the hope
that the fragments will make a whole. But this argument does no
19. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, p. 278; see "Emerson and his Diaristic
Circle," p. 92.
20. Gonnaud, Individu et societe, p. 289.
See also Emerson's remark that "the vanishing volatile froth of the present which
any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment
converted into the Adamantine Record of the past—the fragility of the man into the
Eternity of God. The present is always becoming the Past. We walk on molten lava on
whieh the claw of a fly or the fall of an hair makes its impression which being received,
the mass hardens to flint & retains every impression forevermore" (JMN IV: 22).
21. See the Textual Introduction in Thoreau, Journal (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 616-18.
justice to the astonishing manual energy Emerson exercised on his

mnemonic activity. Let one example stand for the whole: the three
volumes Index Minor 1843, Index II 1847, and Index Major 1847.
The first is a synoptic index of a hundred pages or so, itself not
alphabetized. The second is a much bigger synoptic index, about
three hundred pages, derived from the first but reordering and ex-
panding it. The third is simply a recopying of the second into a fancy
thumb-indexed volume, with some subsequent entries. That is to say
that in a space of four years, probably, Emerson wrote over seven
hundred pages of index material, much of it duplicating earlier indi-
ces. Joel Forte's moving and expert account of Emerson's late
thought, orienting it around a fascination with the opposition be-
tween saving and spending, argues tellingly that the Emerson who
saves is as genuine as the Emerson who spends, and that "Emerson's
economies have made most of our literary extravagances possible."22
Considered synchronically, then, the journal qua simulacrum of
the memory is of necessity a deeply and evenly conflicted book; in it
progressive memory and cumulative memory, Plotinus and Mon-
taigne, are continually and unyieldingly at odds. Considered diachron-
ically, however, the same conflict inevitably takes on a linear rather
than a cyclical character. Initially, and for a good many years, a bal-
ance is maintained between the individual insight and the system into
which it is integrated; the remembrancer and the visionary are evenly
matched. The various mnemonics seem at first precisely the "inces-
sant purification and better method" that Emerson celebrates in the
memory; we recall his remark that "classification is a delight." But a
slip in the balance is inevitable. It is, after all, the remembrancer who
is making the rules by which the journal is kept. The visionary cries
out "to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present." 23
The remembrancer decrees that the record of that judgment be en-
tered in the records of the court. Emerson's celebrated dispute with
Thoreau over the propriety of property ends with Emerson won over
to Thoreau's position and indeed going it one better, sneering at
"literary property," arguing that "the very recording of a thought
betrays a distrust that there is any more or much more as good for us"
(JMN VII: 143-44). But the simple, telling irony is that the evidently
distrustful remembrancer records the remark, on November 10,
22. Porte, Representative Man (New York: Oxford University Pres.s, 1979), p. 282.
23. From "Self-Reliance," W II: 57.
1838. Every new insight, every new elassifieation is one more item in
the collection; and as the collection grows, it seems less and less likely
that any insight can ever unify it. It is an inherently diverse universe,
not subject to simplication.
In this context, the particular formal developments in the late jour-
nals seems not aberrations but consequences. As Emerson's creative
energies wane, the entries in the journal become less frequent and
less abundant: scattered, parsimonious sentences in the place of regu-
lar, abundant paragraphs. In 1859 Emerson writes, "I have now for
more than a year, I believe, ceased to write in my Journal, in which I
formerly wrote almost daily" (JMN XIV: 248). The visionary is with-
drawing; but what vision could have enlivened so enormous a mass?
The remembrancer, on the other hand, is working overtime. As early
as 1849, we note the stretches of indexing material in regular journals
(JMN XI: 93-111). By 1860, the JMN editors tell us, "it becomes
increasingly difficult to apply the editorial distinction between regu-
lar journals and notebooks" (JMN XV: xv). These may seem occur
rences of minor importance; the JMN editors note them in passing,
without comment. But the distinctions thus blurred are essential to
the Emersonian system; they are, in our present context, the distinc-
tions between revelation and consolidation. The blurring is the conse-
quence of an intrusion of the activity of memory into a territory set
aside for the activity of perception; but again, given the immense
mass of material Emerson has accumulated, what room could possibly
remain for any activity but that of charting it? Emerson the writer has
inevitably become Emerson the librarian.
How striking, then, that precisely Emerson the librarian should
lose his memory! In Emerson's journals, the power to create declines
as the power to remember intensifies. In Emerson's life, however,
the power to create and the power to remember decine together; the
striking, celebrated trait of Emerson's old age is not the decay of his
literary powers, though this took place, but the decay of his memory.
How can we make sense of the opposition between Emerson and
Emerson the diarist?
We might at first take the compulsive indexing and the phenom-
ena associated with it in the late journals as a means of compensa-
tion: as the living memory decays, Emerson in frustration works to
reinforce the simulacrum of memory constituted by the journals.
But this intuitively plausible explanation is at odds with Emerson's
seeming recantation of the journals after the burning of his house in
1873, when he told his daughter Ellen that all his early journals
ought to be burned. 24 Nor does it do justice to the quality of libera-
tion suggested by certain of the anecdotes about Emerson's old age,
or to the general air of serenity the accounts of that period diffuse. If
we attend closely to these qualities, we may find ourselves drawn to
a different explanation: that the decay of Emerson's living memory is
at least in part a willed gesture, a compensation for the rigidification
of memory in the journal, and that in making that compensation
Emerson is striving, though with weakened powers, to maintain the
equilibrium between saving and spending that marks the best of his
mature thought.
This explanation may seem intuitively implausible. We have argu-
ments that tell us of how artists respond creatively to the loss of
powers they cannot retain. But we have few arguments that speak of
the loss of any creative power as itself being the expression of an
inward need. On the other hand: psychologists have suggested that
certain aspects of old age are socially rather than biologically deter-
mined, that is, that they are responses to the treatment the elderly
receive and to the notions the elderly hold of themselves in connec-
tion with that treatment. As Ellen Langer writes, "it may be too
strong a statement to say that death itself is an artifact, [but] old age,
at least as we know it, certainly may be."25 She speaks of a collective
artifact and of a class; surely we can imagine one man's old age as an
individual artifact and entertain the possibility that Emerson's old age
is his last creation.
Twice in the late journals Emerson writes, "compensation of fail-
ing memory in age by the increased power & means of generaliza-
tion" (JMN XVI: 172 and 205). Several of the anecdotes of Emer-
son's failing memory tell us of Emerson's inventing descriptions to
identify beings and objects whose names his memory no longer
stored, and in those inventions we may perhaps see the power and
means he refers to. The most celebrated of these is his remark to his
daughter Ellen, at Longfellow's funeral: "the gentleman we have just
been burying was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his
24. Rusk, Life, p. 455.

25. Langer, "Old Age: An Artifact?" in J. McGaugh and S. Kiesler, eds., Aging
Biology and Behavior (New York: Academic Press, L981), p. 281. My thanks to David
Pillemer of the Wcllesley College Department of Psychology for calling this article to
mv attention.
name."26 Longellow's name is his unique distinction; but he belongs

also to the category of the sweet and beautiful. Emerson loses the
singular in the general, the diverse particular in the overarching
unity. 27 A more comic example is Emerson's charmingly improvised
account of an umbrella: "I don't know its name, but I can tell you its
history: strangers take it away."28 To William Henry Channing,
Ralph Rusk tells us, it seemed that
though Emerson's words halted sadly his thoughts were as clear and
swift as ever. Ellen continued to find his struggles for words enchanting.
He arrived at hen only after zigzagging from cat to fish, fish to bird, and
bird to cock. In trying to speak of the Capitol at Washington he could
only describe it as "United States—survey of the beauty of eternal Gov-
ernment."29
It is as if every name were at once an identification and a limitation.
Memory tells us what to call the Capitol; Emerson invents a phrase to
tell us what it is. Ellen was right, perhaps, to find his struggles
enchanting.
It is no accident that all these anecdotes tell of Emerson's conversa-
26. William Dean Howclls, Literary Friends and Acquaintance (New York:
Harper, 1902), p. 210.
See also James Elliot Cabot's account of a story told by George W. Smalley, whom
Kmerson had visited in London in 1873: " 'He could not recollect names. . . . He
resorted to all kinds of paraphrases and circumlocutions. "One of the men who seemed
to me the most sincere and clearmindecl I have met was—you know whom I mean, I
met him at your house, the biologist, the champion of Darwin—with what lucid energy
he talked to us." When I mentioned Huxley's name, Emerson said, "Yes, how could I
forget him." But presently the name had to be given to him again' " (A Memoir of Ralph
Waldo Emerson [Boston: Houghton Mifllin, 1887], vol. 2, p. 628).
27. See along this line James Elliot Cabot's account of Emerson's 1870 Harvard
lecture series "Natural History of the Intellect": "What he wished to impress on the
young men, if I understand him, was not the identity but the infinity of truth; the
residuum of reality in all our facts, beyond what is formulated in our definitions. So that
no definition is to be regarded as final, as if it described an ultimate essence whereby
the thing is utterly discriminated from all other things, but only as the recognition of
certain of its relations; to which, of course, no limit can be set. . , . This, at any rate,
was Emerson's characteristic doctrine, but, in his exposition, he sets forth the ideal
unity, on which the perception of relation is founded, so strongly and exclusively that
no room is left for the diversity in which it is to be realized, or for any relation save that
of identity" (Cabot, Memoir, 2: 642-43).
The late journals record numerous instances of the same peremptory assertion of
unity, for example, JMN XVI: 4, 56, 65, 72-73.
28. Cabot, Memoir, 2: 652.
29. Husk, Life, p. 491.
152 / E M E R S O N AND THE ART OF THK D I A R Y
tion. Earlier, as we have seen, Emerson reproves conversation as

squandering:
The American genius, [Emerson] says, is too demonstrative; most per-
sons are over-expressed, beaten out thin, all surface without depth or
substance.
"The thoughts that wander through our minds we do not absorb and
make flesh of, but we report them as thoughts: we retail them as stimu-
lating news to our lovers and to all Athenians. At a dreadful loss we play
this game."30
This is a reproof to the gaming of spendthrift America, that country
of the moment, as Norman Mailer calls it. But now the game can be
played for a gain: the maintaining of an essential equilibrium. Emer-
son forgets particulars according to "beautiful laws," but more gen-
erally he transfers his activity to areas of unrecorded experience.
Conversation is the chief of them; Charles Eliot Norton, who kept
Emerson company on his voyage homeward from Europe in f873,
wrote that "Emerson was the greatest talker in the ship's company.
lie talked with all men, and yet was fresh and zealous for talk at
night."31 Travel, that is, the experiencing of impressions of foreign
places, is another. Emerson seems a lively and appreciative traveler
in the accounts of both his 1871 trip to California and his 1873 trip to
Europe and Egypt, but the accounts are made by others. His feel-
ings and perceptions are vivid, but they are all experienced in their
moment and let go; it is as if writing itself were remembering, and
now needed for the most part to be dispensed with. Writing from
Egypt, he refers to himself as "an old scribe who for the first time in
his life recoils from all writing. . . . the air of Egypt is full of lotus,
and I resent any breaking of the dream."32 Reading, on the other
hand, remains a central pleasure.33 But this is surely a new kind of
30. Cabot, Memoir 2: 622.
31. Norton, Letters, Sara Norton and M. A. 3De Wolfe Howe, eds. (Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin, 1913) vol. 1, p. 503.
32. As quoted in Cabot, Memoir, 2: 661, from a letter to William Forbes.
33. Thus Emerson writes to Emma Lazarus in 1876, "I send you warm thanks for
your kind letter & invitation [to visit];—but an old man fears most his best friends. It is
not them that he is willing to distress with his perpetual forgetfulness of the right word
for the name of book or faet or person he is eager to reeall, but which refuses to come. I
have grown silent to my own household under this vexation, & and cannot afflict dear
friends with my tied tongue. Happily this embargo does not reach to the eyes, and I
read with unbroken pleasure" (L VI: 296). Curiously enough, Emerson invited Lazarus
to visit him; she accepted, and Rusk quotes Rachel Cohen as saying that the visit lasted
a week and was "one of the happiest memories of Emma Lazarus's life" (L VI: 297).
reading for Emerson, who has quoted so originally, so brilliantly,

and so copiously from his reading all his life. His late reading is to
his earlier reading as conversation is to literature; it is an experience
of the moment, and leaves no trace.
The French diarist Julien Green refers in December 1928 to "that

incomprehensible desire to immobilize the past which makes one
keep a journal." Presumably, the desire is incomprehensible because
it cannot be fulfilled; the past is intrinsically transient. Why, then, do
we seek to immobilize the transient? Because, as Green writes a year
and a half later,
to let slip any detail is to let slip a bit of life itself ... to die ... is to
leave forever the world of remembrance, and death seems to me above
all an absolute and final loss of memory. 34
We remember, we record, simply in order to feel that we are still
alive.
The last years of Emerson's life offer a very different picture. As
Emerson's powers decrease, they polarize. The journal portrays the
rigidifieation of memory after a lifetime of remembering: a sort of
parody of Green's vital desire to "immobilize the past." The life of the
journalist, on the other hand, portrays the abandoning of memory, in
proper compensation. The journals trail off into silence:
Christopher James, of Gold Hill, Nevada, working in the Comstock
Lode, a miner, a Welshman by birth, a Comtist in his politics, and about
23 or 24 years old—a good friend of mine, though I have never seen
him.
His token brought me by B B Titeomb of Watertown, Mass. ( J M N
XVI: 320)
This, the last entry in the last of the regular journals, is followed by
what the editors describe as "a preliminary outline of Emerson's lec-
ture engagements for December 1871 and January 1872," and, inevita-
bly, by an index to the volume. How different from this the last
events of Emerson's life! Cabot quotes a friend who watched by him
one of the last: nights:
He kept (when awake) repeating in his sonorous voice, not yet weak-
ened, fragments of sentences, almost as if reciting. It seemed strange
and solemn in the night, alone with him, to hear these efforts to deliver
34. Green, Journal 1928-1934 (Paris: Plon, 1938), pp. 5 and 26.
something evidently with a thread of fine recollection in it; his voice as

deep and musical almost as ever.35
It is an appropriate ending to a life created by a man who both in his
life and his works was, to a degree greater than we have ever recog-
nized, an intelligent student of significant form.
35. Cabot, Memoir, 2: 683.

Name Index
This index covers both text and notes, but not names mentioned in titles or
quotations. Persons mentioned in the text only as editors or translators are
indicated "ed." or "tr."
Adams, Henry, 11 Bell, Anne Olivier, ed., 24n

Adams, John, 67 n Benjamin, Walter, 88 & n
Adams, John Ouincy, 85-86 Benveniste, Emile, 95 & n
Alcott, Bronson, 3, 9, 58, 72 & n, 76, 77 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 64 & n
& n, 78 & n, 80-81, 86, 89 n, 90-92, Bloom, Harold (including "Bloomian '),
93 & n, 96, 113 n, 115, 122, 127 & n, xi-xii, 122, 135 & n, 136-38, 146 & n
128, 132, 133 & n Boerner, Peter, 3n, 11 n, 59 n, 86 n, 89 n
Allardt, Linda, 53 n, 143 n Booth, Bradford Allen, ed., 88n
Allen, Franeis H., ed., 84n Boswell, James, 3, 5n, 8, 12 n, 16-17, 18
Amiel, Henri-Frederic, 8, 16, 25 n, 106 &n, 21, 30 n, 36, 125, 127
Anderson, Qucntin, 135n Bradford, William, 137
Arnold, Matthew, xii Braybrooke, Richard, 8
Auden, W. H., 16, 17 & n, 18, 106, 125 Brown, Charles Brockden, 137
Austin, J. L., 20 & n Brownell, W. C., 117n
Austin, Sara, 124 Bruccoli, Matthew, J., ed., 81 n
Brunschvicg, Leon, 4 & n
Bruss, Elizabeth, 6n
Bacon, Francis (including "Baconian"), Bucll, Lawrence, 34 n, 48, 49 & n, 63 n,
33, 73-74, 99, 108, 112n, 146 66 & n, 72n, 73, 75n, 92 & n, 105n,
Baillie, Joanna, H2n 115n, 146, 147 n
Bancroft, George, 79 Burke, Edmund, 102
Barbellion, 7, 11, 24 Burns, Robert (son of the poet), 51
Bartram, William, 124 Burr, Aaron, 3
Bashkirtseff, Marie, 14 Butler, Samuel, 14
Belknap, Jeremy, 124 Byron, 3, 11, 13, 21, 25, 58, 132
155
156 / N A M E I N D E X
Cabot, James Elliot, 67 n, 82n, 120n, Dryden, John, 3]

151 n, 152n, 153, 154n dDucrot, Oswald, 5n, 22n
Cage, John, 26 & n, 27 n, 100
Callimachiis, 109
Cameron, Kenneth Walter, 84 n, 98 n Eckennan, Johann Peter, xiii, 27, 120 n,
Cameron, Sharon, xiii & n, 3, 83 n 127
Canetti, Elias, 6 Eliot, T. S., 61, 101
Carlson, Larry, ed., 84 n Emerson, Charles, 68n, 71, 77, 78 & n,
Carlyle, Thomas, 47n, 82, 98 & n, 99, 128 & n, 133 & n
104n, 113n, 124 EEmerson, Edward, 30 & n, 133
Cavell, Stanley, 1 1 7 n Emerson, Edward Waldo, ed., 52n
Cbamfort, Nieolas, 98 Emerson, Ellen (Ralph Waldo's dangh-
Channing, William Ellery, 33 ter), 150-51
Channing, William Ellery (nephew of the Emerson, Ellen Tneker, 45, 48, 86
preceding), 86 Emerson, Joseph, 35 n
Channing, William Henry. 93 & n, 151 Emerson, Lidian, 77
Chapman, John Jay, 48n, 84, 85n, 119n Emerson, Mary Moody (including
Charvat, William, 81 & n "Moodyan"), 9, 29, 35 & n, 36 & n,
Chevigny, Belle Gale, 12 n, 78 n, 130 n 38, 41 n, 54, 77, 80 n, 83, 112n, 122,
Cicero, 124 133
Clark, R. C., 26 n, 27n Emerson, Waldo, 81, 86
Cobbett, William, 71 n, 72 n Empedoeles, 124
Cobnrn, Kathleen, 7n Epicurus, 124
Cohen, Rachel, 152 n Evelyn, John, It, 3.5 n
Cole, Phyllis, 35 & n Everett, Edward, 33
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 6, 7n, 38, 45,
51, 58, 86, 98 n, 111-12, 118, 123-
24, 125 & n, 126-27, 130, 132 Ferry, David, 30 n
Comte, Auguste, 14 Firkins, O. W., 34 & n, 75 & n, 117n
Confucius, 130-31 Forbes, William, 152 n
Connolly, Cyril, 125 Fothergill, Robert, 3, 18, 24n, 25n
Cooper, James Fenimore, ]37 Fox, Charles, 43—44
Cousin, Victor, 110 Franklin, Benjamin, 32, 42-44
Ciulworth, Ralph, 112, 124 Fricke, Harald, 7n, 22n, 98 n, 108 n,
Cnmmings, Bruce Frederick. Sec Bar- 109 n
hellion Frisch, Max, 7 & n, 8, 12
Fuller, Margaret, 9, 49, 58, 71, 77 & n,
78 & n, 83, 90 & n, 92, 93 & n, 95-
96, 101 n, 115, 127 & n, 128 & n,
Dante, 54 n, 131 n 129, 133
Darwin, Charles, 75 n
Dedmond, Francis B., ed., 84n
Del Litto, V., cd., 3n Gide, Andre, 7-8
Desehanel, Einile, 128 & n, 129 n Gilman, William, ed., 12n
Dickens, Charles, 86, 87 n, 88 & n Girard, Alain, 3n, 4n, 25 n
Dodington, Bnbb, 35 n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (including
Donne, John, 61, 75 "Coethean"), 27, 47, 63, 74, 79, 98 n,
N A M E I N D E X / 157
104, 106, 124, 126-27, 130-32, 135- Kafka, Franz, 6

36 Kant, Immanuel (including "Kantian"),
Gonnaud, Maurice, 48 n, 130 n, 133 n, 115, 118
147 & n Kappus, Fran/,, 53
Gramsci, Antonio, 6 Keats, John, 38
Green, Julien, 7-8, 15 & n, 153 & n Kierkegaard, Soren, 89
Greensberger, Evelyn Barish, 30 n Kiesler, S. ed., 150n
Grotkc, Hein/, 22 n Kilvert, Francis, 3
Gusdorf, George, 14 & n, 15-17 Kluckhohn, Paul, ed., 109n
Kraus, Karl, 135
Kronick, Joseph, 125 n
Hall, Basil, 86, 87 n
Hall, Joseph, 14
Halle, Morris, ed., 95 n La Bruyere, Jean de, 14
Hamilton, Thomas, 94 n Lamb, Gharlcs, 72-73
Hare, Julius Charles, 124 Lang, Andrew, ed., 87 n, 88n
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 6, 83, 84 n, 85, Langer, Ellen, 150 & n
96, 104 La Rochefoucauld, Francois de, 14, 98
Ilaydon, Benjamin, 3, 23 LaRosa, Ralph, 30 n
Hazlitt, William, 73, 127 & n Latham, Robert, ed., 10n
Hedge, Frederic, 49, 98, 113n Lawrence, George, tr., 97 n
Heller, Peter, 100 n, 102 n Lazarus, Emma, 152 n
Heller, T. G., ed., 117n Leclerc, Jean, 32
Hidditeh, Peter N., ed., 140n Leighton, Robert, 123
Hill, John Boynton, 123 Leiris, Michel, 11 n
Hoar, Elizabeth, 77, 133 Lejenne, Philippe, 5n, 20
Hoeke, Gustav Rene, 3n, 10 n, 58 n Lelen, Michele, 3n, 13 & n, 14, 20
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 10n Le Senne, Rene, 13
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 82 n, 138 Levin, David, ed., xi
Homer, 112n Lewis, C. S., 31
Hopkins, Vivian, 62 n Liehtenberg, Georg Ghristoph, 6-7, 98
Horace, 45 n Littre, Maximilien, 109 n
Howe, M. A. De Wolfe, ed., 152n Locke, John (including "Lockean"), 29,
Howe, P. P., ed., 127n 30 & n, 31, 32 & n, 33-35, 36 & n,
Howells, William Dean, 151n 37-40, 43-46, 54-56, 83, 140 & n,
141
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 150-51
Irving, Washington, 137 Lowell, Jarnes Russell, 119, 140
Lucid, Robert F., ed., 84 n
Luther, Martin, 127
James, Henry, xii, 69 & n, 98, 100 & n,
104 &n
Jeffrey, Francis, 43 McAleer, John, 79n, 108 n, 119 n
Johnson, Glen, 63 n McGaugh J., ed., 150n
Johnson, Judith Kennedy, ed., 84n Mackintosh, Sir James, 124
Johnson, Samuel, 18, 30n, 31, 35 n, 127 Mailer, Norman, 152
Jolles, Andre, 22 n Mallon, Thomas, 3
158 / N A M E I N D E X
Mansfield, Katharine, 3 Pascal, Blaise, 27, 98

Marchand, Etienue, 37 Pavese, Cesare, 23
Mart?,, Louis, 22 n Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 72 n, 99 n
Marvell, Andrew, 61 Pepys, Samuel, 3, 5n, 8, 10 & n, 11 cc n,
Marx, Karl, 89 18-21, 22 & n, 23, 25 & n, 35 n, 36,
Mather, Cotton, 10 n, 20, 23 106
Mather, Increase, 23 Perry, Bli.ss, xiii, 8
Mathews, J. Chesley, c;d., 131 n Persius, 112
Matthews, William, 10 n, 22 Pillerner, David, 150 n
Matthiessen, F. O., xii, 62 & n Pindar, 124
Mautner, Franz, 100 n, 110 n, 114 n Pinkney, William, 116
May, Georges, 11 n Plato, 125 n
Mayer, J. P., ed., 97n Plotinus, 145, 148
Melville, Herman, 64, 82 Plutarch, 112 n, 127, 132
Meyer, Leonard, 27 n Poc, Edgar Allan, xiii, 25n, 88
Meyerson, Joel, ed., 77 n, 84 n Poinsinet, Antoine, 109
Miller, Perry, 3, 116 & n Poirier, Richard, 117n
Mohl, Ruth, 23 n Pope, Alexander, 31, 123, 127
Monckton-Milnes, Richard, 120 n, 137 n Porte, Joel, xiii, 8-9, 21, 35 n, 65, 101 n,
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem cle, xiii, 24, 148&n
33, 72, 106, 122-24, 126-27, 129, Pottle, Frederick, 8
132, 134, 145, 148 Pound, Ezra, 45
Moore, Thomas, 11
More, Henry, 123
Morgan, Edmund, ed., 10n Reeve, Henry, tr., 94 n
Mueller, Max, 112 n Reid, Thomas Wemyss, ed., 120n
Reynolds, John Hamilton, 38
Richards, I. A., ed., 86n
Napoleon, 124 Rilke, Raincr Maria von, 53
Neumann, Gerhard, ed., 22n, ll0n Ripley, George, 110
Nevins, Allan, ed., 72n, 87n, 94n Robinson, Henry Crabbe, 35 n
Neweomh, Charles King, 58, 77 Rosenwald, Lawrence, 10 n, 18 n, 36 n
Nichol, John Pringle, 125 n Rossini, Gioaechino, 26
Nietzsche, Friedrich, xi, 27, 100, 102, 125 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4
Norton, Charles Eliot, 152 & n Rusk, Ralph L., 33 n, 35 & n, 77 n, 150 n,
Norton, Sara, ed., 152n 151 &n, 152 n
Novalis, 98-99, 103 & n, 106, 108, 109 & Rvdcr, Dudley, 18 n
n, 110, 115, 118
Saint Simon, Due de, 125 n

Orth, Ralph, 134 Samuel, Richard, ed., 109
Otis, Harrison, 37 Sanborn, Franklin Benjamin, 84 n
Otto, Regine, ed., 121 n Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
von. 125n
Schcrer, Edmund, 8
Packer, Barbara, 110 n, 117 & n, 118 & Schiller, Johanu Christoph Friedrich
n, 119-21 von, 104, 106
N A M E I N D E X / 159
Schlegcl, Frieclrich, 98, 100 n, 106-7, Tiedemann, Rolf, ed., 88 n

109-10, 115, 124 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 87, 88 n, 94 & n,
Schnit/ler, Artur, 114-15 97 & n
Schult'/., Uwe, ed., 3n Todorov, Tzvetan, 5n, 22 n, 61 & n
Schwcppenhauser, Hermann, ed., 88n Torrey, Bradford, ed., 84n
Scott, Sir Walter, 3, 4 & n, 21, 25, 113 n, Trilling, Lionel, 38 n
132 Trollope, Anthony, 87, 88 n
Selden, John, 127 Trollope, Frances, 86, 87 n, 88 n, 94 & n,
Sewall, Samuel, 3, 11, 23 97 n
Shakespeare, William, 104 Tynianov, Juri, 61, 63
Shedd, William Greenough Taylor, 11 In
Shepard, Odell, ed., 9n, 76n
Shuffelton, Frank, ed., 84n Van Vechten, Carl, ed., 19n
Sismondi, Jean Charles Leonard Si- Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, 35 n
monde de, 37 Very, Jones, 101
Slater, Joseph, ed., 70n Voltaire, 11 n
Srnalley, Donald, ed., 87n, 88n Von Platen, August, 6, 58
Smalley, George W., 151 n
Socrates, 72
Spencc, Joseph, 123 Webster, Daniel, 33, 69, 116
Spiller, Robert, 67 n, 137 n Weil, Sinione, 6
Stael, Madame de, 49, 98, 128 & n Wellek, Rene, 6211
Stein, Gertrude, 19 & n Wersig, Peter, cd., 121 n
Stendhal, 16-17, 106 Whatlcy, George, 43
Stern, ]. P., 89n, 90n Whicher, Stephen, 44 n, 67 n, 140
Stetson, Caleb, 49 Whitman, Walt, 15n, 64
Stevenson, Robert Lonis, 15 n Wigglesworth, Michael, 10 n
Stewart, Randall, ed., 84n Wilde, Oscar, 8
Strauch, Carl, 130 n Williams, Paul, 52 n
Stnrgis, Caroline, 77n, 115 Wilson, Edmund, ed., 48n, 85n
Surnner, Charles, 120 & n Wilson, F. P., 23n, 127n
Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 103 Windham, William, 18 n
Wirt, William, 116
Woodall, Guy R., cd., 84n
Taylor, Edward ("Father Taylor"), 116 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 21, 24
Thibaudet, Albert, ed., 129 n Wordsworth, Dorothy, 3, 58
Thompson, Cameron, 30 n Wordsworth, William, 54 n, 86, 112
Thoreau, Henry David, xiii, 3, 12, 24,
25 n, 58-59, 83, 84 n, 93, 96, 124, 147
& n, 148 Yannella, Donald, ed., 84n
Thncydides, 112n Yannella, Kathleen Malone, ed., 84n

The Art of Diary- Emerson

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EMERSON

and the Art of the Diary

New York Oxford

Copyright © 1988 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Why rake up old MSS to find therein a man's soul? You do

No doubt I've forgotten valuable help I've received, and I apologize

In November of 1984, Harold Bloom published in the New York

son, and in his expression of it Bloom leaves us where we began, a

F. O. Matthiessen brusquely rejeets the Jamesian paradox, writing

4. Arnold, "Emerson," in Discourses in America (London: Macmillan, 1889), pp.

ment entails assessing a literary masterpiece in a form that we have

productions, they were fermentations by whieh bis mind was working

II. From Commonplace Book to Journal, 29

III. The Form of the Mature Journal, 61

IV. The Loss of Form, 139

But though we are reticent to speak of diaries as works of art, we

such-and-such was the case, and we come across evidence to the

"The sea-anemone," wrote Lichtenberg, "is half plant, half animal;

always mean, implicitly, the whole of it. 9 When we read an abridged

ALGERNON: Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to

10. Emerson in his Journals (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

A solider distinction than that between secret and revealed is that

16. Pepys, Diary, 1: xlv and Ixxi.

between even the unambiguous manuscript and the unambiguous

circle, the audience for a novel an outer circle, where as geometers

The child is sincere, and the man when he is alone, if he be

Let us consider this passage from Michele Leleu's Les Journaux

20. Leleu, Les Journaux intimes, p. 189.

is written there, in such passages of self-characterization no less than

21. Gusdorf, La Decouverte de soi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948),

erly the importance of an event or situation, we must have a principle

Gusdorf s argument is devastating; but what exactly does it devas-

Is he not perhaps describing a contrast between genres, between

physical fact may remind us, in considering a diarist's modus ope-

26. In an early volume of Emerson's journal, an exhortation to diligence concludes,

Having described the modus operandi as it first becomes recognizable

28. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, Massachusetts:

We now come to the question of the diary's art and immediately

death, through loss of interest, through change of character or circum-

We cannot then presume that diaries as wholes are composed at

39. Cage in R. C. Clark, "Total Control and Chance in Musies: A Philosophical

We may, that is, want to distinguish invidiously between things as we

What are the results of these polemical investigations? We can state

system of the diarist's culture; the evolution of the modus operandi

Although temperamentally given to epiphanies, Emerson found his

system of indexing, taking this as a formal development necessary to

Authority and Rebellion

At the beginning of Wideworld 1, the first volume of Emerson's

what they rebel against; and as we watch Emerson turn gradually

sage has something to do with my experience of the previous pas-

uncanny resemblance to Reader's Digest exhortations to "increase your

laying down the law, in which an expert speaks to a public seeking

Mary Moody Emerson's journal was a descendant of the Puritan

self. It is a commonplace book that Emerson is keeping; but he will

Emersonian journal not reflected in its Loekean index is a final, mute

This is familiar talk, but has distinct Emersonian colorings. In Keats's

Given such strains, it is no surprise that the balance cannot hold: in