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Ralph Waldo Emerson
By Howard Mumford Jones
[This essay conveys the conventional view that a quasi-mysticism, kept somewhat grounded by hardheaded Yankee common sense, is the heart of Emerson's thought.]
Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history. Never systematic, the transcendentalists owed most of their ideas to European theologians and philosophers, often, however, at second hand. A phase of the rebellion in the Western world of the generation of 1830 against conservatism, transcendentalism was also a local product of eastern Massachusetts. There Unitarianism had begun as a revolt against orthodoxy, but by 1820, influenced by Federalist culture, old-line Unitarianism had grown so arid that thirty years later Emerson could, somewhat unjustly, write in his journal that from 1790 to 1820 there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the state. In 1832 he resigned as minister of the Second Church in Boston and, surrounded by domestic sorrows, went to Europe to think things out. After his return he published Nature (1836), the best organized of his books until English Traits (1856), which expresses another side of Emerson. Nature is one of the few books by Emerson which did not begin as a sermon or a lecture. From Nature, The Divinity School Address (1838), and The Over-Soul in Essays (1841) it is possible to put Emersonian doctrine into coherent order.
Emerson repudiates the sensationalistic psychology of Locke, the philosophy of the Scotch common sense school, and traditional Christian orthodoxy. He grants that we get along in practical life by the use of good sense and empirical deductions. But man is more than a biological being, he is a spiritual entity having a perpetual possibility, experienced or latent, of direct contact with deity. Through common sense we judge our business affairs or discover the law of universal gravitation operating in or on matter, but man is more than the sum of his mundane experiences, and the law of universal gravitations, like other laws in science or experience, is the echo of some mightier principle still. The way by which supernatural influence pours in upon the soul is intuition, but Emerson prefers to call it the reason as against the understanding (or common sense). All principles discoverable in ordinary life are but the shadows of spiritual principles beyond space and time, that is, in eternity. Nature seen from the point of view of common sense is commodity; from the point of view of reason it is an alphabet or allegory of divinity. Since the soul in any man (therefore in all men) is a part of deity, God is immediately present in man, and in some sense (this shocked conservatives) is man. This mystical union
Emerson defines as the Over-Soul, or: "...that Unity…within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one… to speak from his character…and which evermore tends to pass into our mouth and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty."
Such is the transcendental affirmation of individualism. As all lines meet at infinity, so all individual affirmations fuse in God.
Emerson, however, was also a Yankee, a master of pithy speech, shrewd, sagacious, ironical, capable of making a little money go a long way, seldom taken in by pretense, never persuaded that slavery was a good investment or Brook Farm a practical scheme for agriculture. The Yankee in him conditions his style, which is aphoristic, as when he writes that a weed is a plant whose virtues have not been discovered, notes that if we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitoes, and sardonically observes that every hero becomes a bore at last. If the Over-Soul expresses individualism raised to the highest spiritual power, Yankee confidence in self is evident in a passage like this from Self-Reliance: "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, is worth a hundred of these city dolls."
This is salty enough. Emerson the Yankee gave good advice to Young America, passed sagacious judgment on Napoleon, told off the State Street merchants,and in English Traits wrote one of the most penetrating analyses of another nation by a native writer in the whole nineteenth century.
Emerson is the master of Sentences, a quality that is the great virtue and the chief defect of his style. Only a few of his poems -- for example; Days fuse into flawless beauty; in too many of them sentences or couplets tend to break away into a series of separated statements. The composition of his essays was agglutinative rather than organic. As striking thoughts occurred to him, he recorded these in his journal; and when he had a new lecture to write, he culled appropriate statements from these notebooks and arranged them, with new ones, in the loosest possible pattern. A paragraph by Macaulay and one by Emerson are at opposite poles of the rhetorical spectrum, the one fully organized with its topic sentence, its developing statements; and its concluding asseveration, the other less a piece of architecture than a pile of blocks. Even though the blocks are very good blocks, the reader comes by and by to feel that the verbal motion is circular, not forward. But it is easy to exaggerate. Emerson, when he wants to, can be thoroughly pliant and cohesive. Thus a minor essay like Culture in The Conduct of Life (1860) is structured with skill; and nobody has ever found fault with the movement of The American Scholar (1837), the most famous demand for intellectual independence in our history. And in everything that he wrote the accuracy and pungency of his diction are beyond praise.
When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration. Emerson then incarnated the moral optimism, the progress, and the energy of the American spirit. In the twentieth century he has been increasingly charged with ignoring or minimizing the force of evil in the universe; and since twentieth-century mysticism in America, so far as it exists, is more likely to find a Freudian or Jungian base than one in philosophic idealism, Emerson's appeal has weakened. Yet with greater linguistic economy than Whitman, his disciple, Emerson created for American individualism a metaphysical matrix more interesting than anything in the so-called Protestant ethic. He remains one of the great shining figures in the history of moral idealism in the United States.
Reprinted from Atlantic Brief Lives, A Biographical Companion to the Arts, ed. Louis Kronenberger, Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. By permission of the publisher. |
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