A Historical Guide to

Ralph Waldo Emerson

JOEL MYERSON,
Editor

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

A H I S T O R I C A L G U I D E TO
Ralph Waldo Emerson
 HISTORICAL GUIDES
TO AMERICAN AUTHORS

The Historical Guides to American Authors is an interdisciplinary, his-

torically sensitive series that combines close attention to the United
States' most widely read and studied authors with a strong sense of
time, place, and history. Placing each writer in the context of the vi-
brant relationship between literature and society, volumes in this series
contain historical essays written on subjects of contemporary social, po-
litical, and cultural relevance. Each volume also includes a capsule biog-
raphy and illustrated chronology detailing important cultural events as
they coincided with the author's life and works, while photographs and
illustrations dating from the period capture the flavor of the author's
time and social milieu. Equally accessible to students of literature and
of life, the volumes offer a complete and rounded picture of each au-
thor in his or her America.

A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway

Edited by Linda Wagner-Martin

A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman

Edited by David S. Reynolds

A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson

Edited by Joel Myerson
 A
Historical Guide
to Ralph Waldo Emerson

EDITED BY
JOEL MYERSON

New York Oxford

Oxford University Press
2000
 Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta
Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul
Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai
Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw

and associated companies in

Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 2000 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A historical guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson /
edited by Joel Myerson.
p. cm. — (Historical guides to American authors)
Includes bibliographical references and index,
ISBN 0-19-512093-0; ISBN 0-19-512094-9 (pbk.)
I. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882 2. Literature and history—
United States—-History—I9th century. 3. Authors, American—
19th century Biography. I. Myerson, Joel. II. Series.
PSI63I.H45 1999
814'.3—dc2I 99-13122
[B]

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
 For Matthew J. Bruccoli

An institution is the lengthened shadow

of one man . . . and all history re-
solves itself very easily into the biog-
raphy of a few stout and earnest
persons—
"Self-Reliance" (CW, 2:35-36)
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Abbreviations ix

Introduction 3
Joel Myerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882: 9

A Brief Biography
Ronald A. Bosco

EMERSON IN HIS TIME

"The Age of the First Person Singular": 61

Emerson and Individualism
Wesley T. Mott

Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 101

William Rossi

Emerson and Religion 151

David M. Robinson
 viii Contents

Emerson and Antislavery 179

Gary Collison

Emerson in the Context of the

Woman's Rights Movement 211
Armida Gilbert

Illustrated Chronology 251

We Find What We Seek: 269

Emerson and His Biographers
Ronald A. Bosco

Bibliographical Essay 291

Joel Myerson

Contributors 311

Index 313
 Abbreviations

AW Emerson's Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel

Myerson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).
CEC The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).
CS The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 4 vols.,
ed. Albert J. von Frank et al. (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1989-1992).
CW The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 5 vols. to
date, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater, and Douglas
Emory Wilson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1971-).
EL The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3 vols., ed.
Robert E. Spiller, Stephen E. Whicher, and Wallace E.
Williams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1959-1972).
JMN The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, 16 vols., ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H.
Orth, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1960-1982).
L The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., ed. Ralph L.
Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1939,1990-1995).
TN The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3 vols., ed.

IX
 x Abbreviations

Ralph H. Orth et al. (Columbia: University of Missouri

Press, 1990-1994).
W The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols., ed.
Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin,
1903-1904).
A H I S T O R I C A L G U I D E TO

Ralph Waldo Emerson

This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction
Joel Myerson

R alph Waldo Emerson's reputation has never been as un-

shakeable as it is today. Modern editions of his writings—
letters, journals, notebooks, and published works—comprise
nearly fifty volumes, with even more in preparation. In the last
decade alone, nearly one thousand articles and books have been
published discussing his life, ideas, and writings. He has been
seen as beginning a line in American poetry that runs from him
to Walt Whitman to Allen Ginsberg; his educational ideas were
an important influence on Charles W. Eliot when he was presi-
dent of Harvard; and he is viewed as the progenitor of a line of
pragmatism in American intellectual life that was filtered
through William James. In his own life he was a minister, a lec-
turer, a professional author, an agent for other authors (including
Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau),
and a traveler through America and Europe; modern studies of
all these occupations mention Emerson as a serious and often
important practioner of them. Every major critical trend in
American literary study since 1900 has dealt with Emerson in
some fashion. He is here to stay—and the bicentennial celebra-
tion in 2003 of his birth will undoubtedly set off another round of
reevaluations of this seminal figure in American literature and
thought.

3
 4 Introduction

A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson presents materials

that students of Emerson and American Romanticism will find
useful in understanding the man and his times. Rather than at-
tempting to duplicate the many bibliographic essays that attempt
to survey the massive amount of scholarship written on Emer-
son, or the valuable and detailed chronologies and biographies of
Emerson's life, or the numerous critical surveys that attempt to
help us find ways to read Emerson's writings, this book presents
historical essays designed to show us how Emerson was a prod-
uct of his time.
Writers do not create their works in a vacuum. Among Emer-
son's contemporaries, for example, we can state with certainty
that Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was as much about
the author's dismissal from the Salem Custom House as it was
about Hester Prynne, or that Herman Melville wrote as much
about slavery as he did about seafaring. Emerson's long life
(1803-1882) spanned an exceptional American century, as he ob-
served and commented upon the War of 1812, Jacksonian democ-
racy, the Mexican War, the antislavery campaign, the Civil War,
Reconstruction, and, throughout his life, the tremendous growth
of science and technology. A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emer-
son places Emerson within that century by publishing essays that
discuss him in the context of individualism, nature and natural
science, religion, antislavery, and women's rights.
A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson contains chronolo-
gies of both Emerson's own life and the major political, social,
and literary events of his age. Here we can observe many inter-
esting connections, such as how, in 1836, when Emerson pub-
lished his first book, Nature, the Battle of the Alamo was fought,
and William Holmes McGuffey published his first school reader;
or, how, in 1873, when Emerson returned home to Concord from
his last trip abroad, the first cable car was used in San Francisco,
the first code of rules for football was drafted, Emily Post was
born, and Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published a
book whose title became synonymous with the time, The Gilded
Age.
Ronald A. Bosco's two essays, one on Emerson's life and the
other on biographical studies of Emerson, show how we have
 Introduction 5

appropriated Emerson and how this process began during Emer-

son's own age; that is, Bosco attempts to interpret and demon-
strate Emerson's own proposition that "[a]n institution is the
lengthened shadow of one man . . . and all histoiy resolves it-
self very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest per-
sons."1 Moreover, many of the essays in the book deal chrono-
logically with Emerson's development, and help to flesh out the
physical dimensions of his life. The general outlines of that life,
as can be seen from the chronology in this book, are impressive
but not, for someone of Emerson's reputation and class, very re-
markable: he joined and then resigned from the ministry; he was
a successful lecturer and writer; he suffered family losses but had
a successful family life; he was a resident of Concord, Massachu-
setts, for nearly fifty years; he traveled a good deal as a lecturer,
and made one trip to California and three to England or Europe;
and he numbered among his friends or acquaintances nearly all
the major literary and New England political figures of his era.
Yet, of all the writers of his time, he has had the greatest legacy
in the most areas of American life.
Emerson's life was lived against sweeping changes in a rapidly
developing young nation. When he was born, America had not
been a country for even three decades. In Emerson's youth, there
were only about six million people in the country, and only six
cities had populations in excess of ten thousand; the size of the
United States, just prior to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, was
236,826,000 acres; there were seventeen states; in 1830, the first
year that such statistics were kept, forty miles of railroad tracks
were built; and $28,000,000 was in circulation. At the time of
Emerson's death there were over fifty-two million Americans,
and 223 cities had populations over ten thousand; the size of the
country was 1,837,763,000 acres; there were thirty-eight states;
84,866 miles of railroad tracks spanned from the Atlantic to the
Pacific; and $1,409,398,000 was in circulation. The physical
changes in America were, in a sense, just as great as the personal
and intellectual changes in Emerson.
In "The Age of the First Person Singular: Emerson and Indi-
vidualsm," Wesley T. Mott deals with a concept that is synony-
mous with the author of "Self-Reliance." By tracing the develop-
 6 Introduction

ment of this idea in Emerson's own thought as well as in the

culture around him, and in our present day, Mott helps us to
better contextualize Emerson's thinking about and acting on this
subject.
"Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science," by William Rossi,
traces Emerson's development as a student and practitioner of
this concept. After all, Emerson's first book was titled Nature, and
one reason he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1834 was to
leave the city and live closer to the natural world. Rossi shows
us how Emerson's study of natural science drew upon the works
of contemporaries, and represented a serious intellectual in-
quiry, not just an attempt to capture a pastoral sense of romantic
nature.
David M. Robinson, in "Emerson and Religion," reminds us
that, just as Transcendentalism was first and foremost a religious
movement, so, too, can Emerson's own beginnings be found
within a religious context. He was, after all, a student at Harvard
Divinity School and ordained a minister, served as pastor of the
prestigious Second Church and Society in Boston, and wrote on
the subject of religion his whole life.
In "Emerson and Antislavery," Gary Collison brings the pic-
ture of the "Sage of Concord"—as those who view Emerson as
an abstract, philosophical writer tend to call him—back to reality
by showing how concerned Emerson was with this, the great so-
cial campaign of the nineteenth century. Too often, contempo-
rary readers of Emerson tend to think of him as far removed
from daily life and concerns; Collison shows him absorbed and
involved in the fight for freedom.
Armida Gilbert, in "Emerson in the Context of the Woman's
Rights Movement," presents a topic not much examined until re-
cently. With the growth of feminist studies, we have come to see
just how important to Emerson's personal and intellectual devel-
opment were such women as his aunt Mary Moody Emerson
and his second wife, Lidian. Gilbert traces Emerson's views of
women and women's rights from youth to old age, and also
evaluates his ideas and language within the context of others
writing on this subject during the period, and discusses the reac-
tion of contemporaries to his comments on the subject.
 Introduction 7

Finally, I provide a bibliographic essay on the current state of

Emerson's texts, followed by a comprehensive listing of the books
written about Emerson and his times, grouped under the headings
"Bibliographies," "Collections of Essays," "Biographies," "Reli-
gion," "Unitarianism," "Transcendentalism," "Concord, Massa-
chusetts," "Philosophy," "Literary History," and "Books on Ralph
Waldo Emerson."
Illustrations will help the reader to visualize Emerson and his
surroundings. The images of Emerson range from those of him
as a young man to a picture of him at his writing table a few
years before his death. It is important to document and trace the
physical changes in Emerson from a handsome young man to his
strong middle age to his quieter later years because most images
that are used in anthologies date from the later years of his life,
when his declining creative powers (caused by old age and apha-
sia) are reflected in his features. The essays in this volume trace
the development of Emerson's creative powers; the pictures
should reflect how he appeared at these different stages of his
career.
I thank T. Susan Chang for having the vision to create this se-
ries and the kindness to allow me to edit a volume in it. Robert
Newman, Chair of the Department of English at the University
of South Carolina, provided valuable support. I am grateful to
Michael McLoughlin and Chris Nesmith for help in seeing the
book through production. As usual, Greta indulged my obession
with Emerson.

NOTE
i. "Self-Reliance," in CW, 2:35-36. Especially valuable for follow-
ing Emerson's daily life are the chronologies that begin each volum
of JMN; and Albert J. von Frank, An Emerson Chronology (New York:
G. K. Hall, 1994).
This page intentionally left blank
 Ralph Waldo Emerson
1812-1892
A Brief Biography

Ronald A. Bosco

T he study of Ralph Waldo Emerson's biography has long

challenged both general readers and specialists in American
literature. As the bibliographies printed in this volume indicate,
Emerson, whose private and public writings alone now approach
fifty printed volumes in modern editions, has been the subject of
numerous book-length biographies. A recently published chro-
nology of major events in his life extends to well over five hun-
dred pages.1 A person who engaged in complex personal and
intellectual relationships with many persons in America and
abroad, who had something to say about every important reli-
gious and philosophical controversy, political and social event,
and scientific discovery that came to his attention between the
18205 and the late iS/os, and who nearly filled four notebooks
with the titles of books he considered essential to read, Emerson
defies easy summary.2
Divided into two parts, this essay is designed to introduce
readers to the highlights of Emerson's life and thought. The first
section, "Emerson's Personal and Professional Life," focuses on
the details of his personal and professional development, con-
centrating on the 18305 as a defining decade for Emerson and,
through an account of his principal publications and transforma-
tive events and relationships in his personal life, on the evolution

9
 io Ralph Waldo Emerson

of his idealistic philosophy. The second section, "Emerson and

America's Coming of Age," focuses on the intellectual service
Emerson performed for America through his lectures and writ-
ings and identifies him as a principal architect of American cul-
ture. Whereas the first section is largely descriptive, the second
is interpretive; what links the two is my own interest in the
processes of Emerson's intellect and imagination, as well as in
the nature of his character and personality, as I have found them
disclosed in the prose and verse of modern editions of his writ-
ings in which I have participated as an editor and a reader.3

Emerson's Personal and Professional Life

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on 25 May 1803 in the parsonage

of the First Church on Summer Street in Boston. His father, the
Reverend William Emerson (1769-1811), who could trace his
family's roots in America back to the first generation of New En-
gland settlement and was himself the product of several genera-
tions of ministers, was pastor of the prestigious First Church.
His mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson (1768-1853), whose father
was a wealthy distiller in Boston, came from a family that had
made its name in the West India trade. Of eight children born to
the Reverend Emerson and his wife, Ralph was the fourth and
one of only five to survive to maturity.
Emerson's early years were spent mostly in school and in the
company of his four brothers: William (1801-1868), Edward Bliss
(1805-1834), Robert Bulkeley (1807-1859), and Charles Chauncy
(1808-1836). Of these, William, Edward, and Charles eventually
pursued careers in the law, although both Edward and Charles
would die of tuberculosis at a relatively young age; Robert—or
Bulkeley, as he was known in the family—was feebleminded and
spent most of his adult years working for his room and board on
farms outside of Concord, Massachusetts. With the death of
Emerson's father in 1811, the family fortunes dwindled quickly.
For many years his mother operated a succession of boarding-
houses, and with the aid of her sister-in-law Mary Moody Emer-
son (1774-1863), who became the boys' principal educator and
 A Brief Biography II

muse, she struggled to keep her family together and to provide

her sons with respectable educations.
There was virtually no indication during his youth that Emer-
son would ever rise to make the mark on American life and let-
ters with which he is credited today. He entered the Boston Latin
School in 1812, when he was nine years old, and Harvard in 1817,
when he was fourteen. Emerson's years at Harvard were gener-
ally undistinguished. Although he enjoyed his readings in the
Latin and Greek classics, he performed no better than satisfacto-
rily in either mathematics or philosophy. He eventually gradu-
ated thirtieth out of a class of fifty-nine. Between 1821, when he
graduated from Harvard, and 1825, he grudgingly occupied him-
self as a teacher in and around Boston. His only pleasures during
these years seem to have been an occasional walking tour, a few
rude attempts at poetry, reading in any classical or modern stud-
ies of science, philosophy, and literary history which he could get
his hands on, and engaging in an extended correspondence with
his aunt Mary about the books he was reading and about knotty
questions of philosophy or theology as he encountered them in
his readings or in the sermons he heard that promoted the liberal
brand of Christianity that would soon emerge as Unitarianism.
The years between 1825 and 1827 were promising but also diffi-
cult for Emerson. Periodically inclined to prepare for the min-
istry, he studied at the Harvard Divinity School in 1825 and 1827
but did not take a degree; between stints at Harvard he taught
school in Chelmsford and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and on 10
October 1826, after he preached before the Middlesex Association
of Ministers, he was approbated (licensed) to preach by the
American Unitarian Association. Over the following month he
preached in Waltham and in his father's old church in Boston. By
the end of November, however, Emerson, who had been experi-
encing trouble with his eyes, joints, and lungs—early signs, as he
knew, of tuberculosis—took the advice of his physician and trav-
eled to Charleston, South Carolina, and St. Augustine, Florida, to
improve his health.
Emerson returned to Boston in June 1827. On his way home
from the south he preached in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia,
and New York City. Not interested in a pulpit of his own, over the
 12 Ralph Waldo Emerson

next year and a half he preached steadily in and around Boston,

throughout the Connecticut Valley, and in New Hampshire. On 25
December, while preaching in Concord, New Hampshire, he was
introduced to sixteen-year-old Ellen Louisa Tucker. Over much of
1828, he continued to preach wherever he was invited, but mostly
in the vicinity of Boston or in Concord, New Hampshire, and he
courted Ellen. After they were engaged on 17 December, Emerson
began to think seriously of taking on a pastorate of his own.
Most of Emerson's biographers agree that the 18303 was a
defining decade in his personal and professional life. But the
decade actually opened for him in 1829, when he was ordained as
the junior pastor of Boston's Second Church on n March, pro-
moted to pastor of the Church on i July, and married Ellen on 30
September. Enjoying financial security and a degree of social
prominence for the first time in his adult life, relishing the intel-
lectual activity of composing weekly sermons in which he could
draw out Unitarianism's humanistic qualities through reference
to his extensive studies in biography, philosophy, and history, and
delighting in a marriage in which he described himself as pos-
sessing "the luxury of an unmeasured affection for an object so
deserving of it all & who requites all" (JMN, 3:149), Emerson
comfortably settled into the dual role of pastor and husband.
Drawing upon his readings in German Higher Criticism and the
works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Victor Cousin, among
others, in sermons before his congregation Emerson rehearsed
many of the themes that would later characterize his teachings
for the public in lectures and essays. Emphasizing self-culture and
what he would later describe as "the infinitude of the private
man," the moral authority of the individual intellect and con-
science over the authority of religious or social institutions and
even the Bible, and the liberation from its inherited past which
the inventiveness and political freedom of the present offers the
human race, Emerson's sermons from 1829 to 1832 anticipate
the idealism of Nature (1836), "The American Scholar" (1837), and
"The Divinity School Address" (1838).
In spite of their promise, however, the opening years of the
18305 delivered several successive blows to Emerson's personal life
and professional ambition. Although he knew that Ellen had a tu-
 A Brief Biography 13

bercular condition before their marriage, Emerson hoped that

rest and winter travel to warm climates would lessen the debilitat-
ing effects of her disease and, perhaps, provide an actual cure. But
Ellen's condition worsened immediately after their marriage; a re-
cuperative journey to Philadelphia in the winter of 1830 and the ef-
forts of several doctors, one of whom recommended a ten-year
relocation to Cuba or a comparable environment (L, 7:194), could
not stay the inevitable. Ellen died on 8 February 1831 at the age of
nineteen, leaving Emerson, as he explained to his Aunt Mary, bal-
ancing between relief that her suffering had finally ended and de-
jection at the prospect of life without her:

My angel is gone to heaven this morning & I am alone in the

world. . . . I have never known a person in the world in
whose separate existence as a soul I could so readily & fully
believe & she is present with me now . . . in her deliver-
ance. . . . [But] I see plainly that things & duties will look
coarse & vulgar enough to me when I find the romance of her
presence . . . withdrawn from them all. (L, 1:318)

Two months before Ellen's death, Emerson's brother Edward,

who had been hospitalized for a physical and mental breakdown
in 1828, left Boston for Santa Cruz and, eventually, Puerto Rico,
having himself exhibited the symptoms of tuberculosis. Al-
though he said little about his brother's departure, in the privacy
of his journals Emerson recorded Edward's death in 1834 with a
dark thought that echoed his dejection at Ellen's passing: "So falls
one pile more of hope for this life" (JMN, 4:325). Yet, devastating
as Ellen's death and Edward's illness must have been, perhaps the
most decisive blow to the stability of Emerson's life in the early
18305 occurred in 1832, when he found himself at odds with his
congregation over the meaning of the Lord's Supper, which he
considered an example of "worship in the dead forms of our
forefathers" (JMN, 4:27). After members of the Second Church
rejected his request that he be relieved of having to celebrate the
Lord's Supper with the bread and wine, Emerson resigned his
pastorate on 22 December, and on Christmas Day he set sail
from Boston for Europe aboard the brig Jasper.
 14 Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson's journey to Europe, which lasted from December

1832. to October 1833, was the first of three extended trips abroad,
and it proved to be an ideal physical and psychological tonic. On
this occasion he visited Malta, Sicily, Italy, Switzerland, France,
England, and Scotland, and on virtually every page of the travel
journals he kept during his journey, he described a new and unex-
pected delight (see JAIN, 4:102-248). Like that of other Americans
of this era such as Washington Irving and James Fenimore
Cooper, who visited or lived in Europe, Emerson's provincial-
ism was quickly worn away by the charm and historical signi-
ficance he everywhere encountered in the European landscape.
He roamed Palermo, Messina, Pompeii, and Naples as any tour-
ist might, imagining the grand but silent histories that lay hidden
behind their ancient walls and beneath their worn walks. In-
spired by the architectural splendor of Italy's churches, the art of
her great masters, and the simplicity of her many monastic or-
ders, Emerson, whose resignation from his pulpit was a princi-
pled stand against ecclesiastic ritual, was unexpectedly attracted
to, rather than repulsed by, the rituals of the season when he
stayed in Rome during Easter week. In Florence, he visited the
tombs of Machiavelli, Galileo, Dante, and Michel Angelo; at-
tended a performance of Bellini's opera La Straniera, praising the
prima donna as "a noble Greek beauty, full of dignity, & energy
of action [and] . . . voice" (JMN, 4:171); and met with the En-
glish poet and essayist Walter Savage Landor.
Arriving in Paris in mid-June from Italy and a brief stay in
Switzerland, Emerson was initially shocked by the character of
the city. "I was sorry to find," he wrote, "that in leaving Italy I
had left forever that air of antiquity & history which her towns
possess & in coming hither had come to a loud modern New
York of a place" (JMN, 4:197). His Yankee temperament was vari-
ously awed and tried by the opulence of the city's shops, the fri-
volity of the city's night life, and the high fashion sported by
Parisian society. But Emerson's resistance to Parisian life passed
quickly. Within a few days he was enjoying pleasant walks along
the city's magnificent boulevards, visiting the Louvre and the
Jardin des Plantes, and attending lectures on science at the
Sorbonne and observing the seminars of Jean Baptiste Biot,
 A Brief Biography 15

Dominique-Francois Arago, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, and

Louis Thenard, who were then France's leading men of science.
On the Fourth of July, Emerson joined a large number of fellow
Americans who had gathered to honor the Marquis de Lafayette,
the hero of the American Revolution, at a dinner, and just before
leaving Paris, he likely accompanied Jussieu on a botanical excur-
sion in the countryside outside of the city.
Italy surprisingly but thoroughly captivated Emerson's imagi-
nation, and Paris eventually won him to her charms. In traveling
to England and Scotland, however, Emerson carried with him a
very definite set of expectations: He wanted to experience first-
hand the roots and modern sites of Anglo-Saxon culture. Arriv-
ing in London on 21 July, he threw himself into an itinerary that
included extended visits to Westminster Abbey, the House of
Commons, the homes of the poet John Milton and the philoso-
pher Jeremy Bentham, and the British Museum. He met with the
economist John Stuart Mill, called on Coleridge in his home at
Highgate, and saw the novelist Harriet Martineau. Leaving Lon-
don on 9 August, he rode northward into Birmingham, Kenil-
worth, and Sheffield, stopping at Warwick Castle along the way,
and he arrived at Edinburgh on 16 August. He toured Edinburgh
with Alexander Ireland, who would become a lifelong friend
and supporter and, eventually, one of Emerson's first biogra-
phers, and before leaving the city, he preached at the Unitarian
Chapel. Between 21 and 26 August, he continued his travels
northward into the Scottish Highlands, visiting Inversnaid, Dum-
barton, Glasgow, and Dumfries before stopping at: Craigenput-
tock, where he spent the night at the invitation of Thomas and
Jane Carlyle. The lifelong friendship between Thomas Carlyle
and Emerson which emerged from that first meeting sustained
and, occasionally, irritated both men for the next forty years.
For Emerson, the virtue of meeting Carlyle in person on this
occasion, and of mastering over time Carlyle's dense, volume-
length excursions into English and Continental history, politics,
and literary criticism, was that his newfound friend represented
for him the voice and vision of Anglo-Saxon culture for which he
had come to England and Scotland in the first place. Emerson's
ride through the English Lake District and his long-awaited visit
 16 Ralph Waldo Emerson

with William Wordsworth at Rydal Mount a few days after his

stay with Carlyle seemed anticlimactic by comparison. Neither
the landscape immortalized in English Romantic poetry nor the
sage of Romanticism himself could fire Emerson's imagination
or his desire to make something of his life in quite the same way
that he had felt himself inspired during his overnight conversa-
tion with Carlyle. In effect, Carlyle had invited Emerson back
into the world of the living; his counsel to the young American
was, in so many words, "Seize and channel the power that resides
within you." There is no small irony in the fact that after leav-
ing Wordsworth and traveling to Manchester, Emerson made
his final journey in England on a railroad. This was probably his
first ride on a train, and the material power of the engine that
carried him to Liverpool complemented the raw power repre-
sented by the names of railroad engines he saw in Liverpool's rail
yards: the Rocket, the Goliath, and the Pluto. These served then as
oblique, but nonetheless sure, emblems of the life that Emerson
would make for himself back in America. On 4 September he
boarded the brig New York for his return home, pausing the next
day while sailing away from the coast of Ireland to make the fol-
lowing entry in the last of his travel journals: "I like my book
about nature & wish I knew where & how I ought to live. God
will show me" (JMN, 4:237).
"The call of our calling is the loudest call," Emerson wrote in
December 1833, two months after his return to Boston from Eu-
rope (JMN, 4:252). He had, indeed, returned home a new man.
Having left the traditional "call" of the pulpit, Emerson never
looked back, although between 1833 and 1836 he occasionally
served as a supply preacher for congregations in and around
Boston. But his entire focus now was on determining his true
calling—on deciding "how I ought to live"—and Europe had cer-
tainly widened his perspective on the possibilities available to
him. In addition to the friendships he made with Ireland and Car-
lyle and the intellectual correspondences in which he could now
engage with them, he became excited at the prospect of partici-
pating in the lyceum movement then sweeping America. He saw
that the lecture hall could serve him as an easy site of transition
away from the pulpit and, while providing him with a steady
 A Brief Biography 17

source of income, also afford him a congenial forum, in which to

test his evolving thoughts on philosophy, literary history, nature,
and the human condition. Less than a month after returning
from Europe, he delivered the lecture "The Uses of Natural His-
tory" before the Natural History Society in Boston; during 1834,
he presented "The Relation of Man to the Globe," "Italy," and
"The Naturalist," among other lectures, in Boston, New Bedford,
and Concord, Massachusetts. By 1835, increasingly confident of
his ability as a lecturer and self-assured in the timeliness and
lightness of his ideas, he delivered two large lecture series in
Boston. The first of these consisted of six lectures on biography
and featured studies of Michel Angelo, Martin Luther, Milton,
George Fox, and Edmund Burke. Emerson's second series, for
which he received two hundred dollars, was sponsored by the So-
ciety for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Devoted to English
literature, this series consisted of eight lectures distributed
among topics such as "Permanent Traits of the English National
Character," "The Age of Fable," and readings on Chaucer, Shake-
speare, Lord Bacon, and a number of other English poets and
writers.
Although Emerson limited himself to local engagements be-
tween 1833 and 1835 and for several lectures drew topics from a rel-
atively safe body of materials that included his experiences in Eu-
rope or subjects derived from his readings in and journal notes on
biographical figures who he had formerly treated in his sermons,
there can be no doubt that his early successes as a lecturer encour-
aged his conviction that the lyceum provided one important
answer to his question about how he should live. Between the
mid-i83os and the effective close of his career in the 18705, Emer-
son delivered roughly fifteen hundred public lectures. More than
any other activity in which he engaged, lecturing facilitated the
growth of his reputation as an intellectual presence throughout
America. Over the years he developed popular and profitable lec-
ture series on philosophy, New England and American life, liter-
ary history, natural history, and cultural history, became a fixture
at many college commencement exercises, and wrote a host of in-
dividual lectures on topics as diverse as temperance, personal
ethics, women's rights, abolitionism, and what he variously called
 18 Ralph Waldo Emerson

"the spirit of the times." With geographic expansiveness that cor-

responded to the expansion of his talents and reputation, he grad-
ually traveled from New England's lyceums to lecture in New
York, in the Middle Atlantic states and Washington, D.C., in newly
established midwestern states, and in England; late in life, he trav-
eled overland to lecture in California.
Emerson's renewed self-confidence in his professional life sup-
ported by his early successes as a lecturer was mirrored in a num-
ber of significant developments in his private and personal life. "I
know," he wrote retrospectively in the essay "Experience" (1844),
"that the world I converse with in the city . . . is not the world
I think" (CW, 3:48). Although he had been a dutiful keeper of
journals and notebooks since his college days, on his return from
Europe Emerson began to regard his journals as a "savings bank"
in which he had to make regular deposits of insights into "the
world I think." Much like his letters and conversations with close
friends, his brothers, and Aunt Mary, Emerson considered his
journals and notebooks an extension of his private life. There—
perhaps only there—he could be completely himself. In them, he
recorded everything from his dreams and waking thoughts, to
texts copied from his voluminous readings, to passages he trans-
lated from his favorite classical and modern writers, to snippets
of correspondence he received from select friends, to modest
prose drafts that were either original with him or syntheses—"as-
similations," to use his term—drawn from one or more of the
foregoing sources. Emerson quickly realized the value of his
journals to his composition process; encouraged by their service
to the lectures he gave between 1833 and 1835, he devoted increas-
ingly large portions of each day to writing in them and devising
elaborate indices to the thoughts they contained on a great vari-
ety of subjects.
Published during the last four decades of this century in nine-
teen substantial volumes, Emerson's Journals and Miscellaneous
Notebooks (JMN) and Topical Notebooks (TN) are an extraordinary
repository of the world he thought. They are private documents
inasmuch as they collectively report his deepest engagements
with his mind, imagination, and conscience. Beginning with the
travel journals he kept in Europe in 1833, however, they also took
 A Brief Biography 19

on a public dimension as the first and most crucial stage of his

composition process; for the remainder of his life, he would
draw his lectures out of them, and with his lectures serving as
a middle stage of composition, eventually the major essays on
which his reputation rests today.
Several developments brought renewal to Emerson's personal
life in 1834 and 1835. In May 1834, after settling a legal dispute with
her family, Emerson received the first of two inheritances from
Ellen Emerson's estate. The $11,600 he received at this time (he
would receive another payment of $11,675 in July 1837) enabled
him to pay off his debts, see to the security of his mother, who
depended on him and his brother William for financial support,
and leave Boston for Concord, the Emerson family's ancestral
home. A few months earlier—probably in March—he had met
Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and following a ten-
month courtship, he proposed to her in January 1835. Whereas
from first to last Emerson tended to idealize both the real life
and his memory of Ellen, Lydia, whom he eventually renamed
"Lidian" and sometimes called 'Asia" in his journals and letters,
was not a person he could so easily adapt into the mold of his
ideal woman. He admired her for her spirituality and intellect,
but even before their marriage he recognized that their life to-
gether would be one based on mutual respect for each other's in-
tellectual and spiritual independence, not on the romantic love
that characterized his marriage to Ellen. They were married in
September 1835 and settled into a large home that Emerson had
purchased and renovated in Concord. There, they raised four
children: Waldo was born in 1836 but died from scarletina in 1842;
Ellen Tucker, a daughter Emerson named for his first wife, was
born in 1839 and cared for her parents during their later years;
Edith was born in 1841 and, like her sister, occasionally served as
her father's editorial assistant before and during the early years of
her marriage to William Hathaway Forbes; and Edward Waldo
was born in 1844 and eventually became a physician, married
Annie Keyes of Concord, and performed a lasting service to
his father's reputation by editing the Centenary Edition of his
Works (W).
Emerson's journals and letters of 1835 reveal his sense that he
 20 Ralph Waldo Emerson

had not completely answered the question of how he ought to

live; nevertheless, established by the end of the year in Concord
with his new wife, he could believe himself fairly well restored to
sound professional and personal ground. He occupied himself
with long stints of writing in his journals, where he drafted prose
for potential use in new lectures. He took occasional day trips to
Cambridge and Boston for new reading materials, and at home
he left the solitude of his study for extended walks in Concord's
woods or along her riverbanks. What nagged at him most in his
moments of privacy in 1835 (as for some years afterward) was a
belief that he had yet to bring to fruition one last dimension of
his life in order to satisfy the loud call of his calling: He had to be-
come an original author.
By 1835, Emerson had long been living through words: words
written in his journals, words spoken from his pulpit and lectern,
and words that, as he once confessed to Carlyle, cluttered and con-
fused his private thoughts, dreams, daytime reveries, and con-
versation. "[M]y journals," he wrote to Carlyle on 30 June 1840,
"which I dot here at home day by day, are full of disjointed
dreams, audacities, unsystematic irresponsible lampoons of sys-
tems, and all manner of rambling reveries, the poor drupes and
berries I find in my basket after endless and aimless rambles in
woods and pastures. I ask constantly . . . whether life may not
be poetic as well as stupid" (CEC, p. 272). The challenge before him
in 1835 was to bring order to the formlessness of the words he had
been gathering; they required a unifying theme, a unifying vision,
to hold them together before they could achieve a degree of fi-
nality in print. As the year opened, he shared this thought with his
brother William: "I think when I have done with my lectures
which begin shortly I shall write & print a discourse upon Spiritual
& Traditional Religion, for Form seems to be bowing Substance
out of the World & men doubt if there can be any such thing as a
spiritual nature out of the carcass in which once it dwelt" (7 Janu-
ary 1835; L, 1:430-31). By 20 June, however, he had discarded his
idea of a discourse on traditional religion and was moving instead
toward an announcement of the new, spiritual religion of the age,
or, as he refers to it here, "the First Philosophy":
 A Brief Biography 21

I endeavor to announce the laws of the First Philosophy. . . .

[T]heir enunciation awakens the feeling of the moral sublime,
& great men are they who believe in them. Every one of these
propositions resembles a great circle in astronomy. No matter
in what direction it be drawn it contains the whole sphere. So
each of these seems to imply all truth. Compare a page of
[Francis] Bacon with [Jonathan] Swift [or Lord] Chesterfield
. . . & see the difference of great & less circles. These are
gleams of a world in which we do not live: they astonish the
understanding. . . .
There is every degree of remoteness from the line of
things in the line of words. By & by comes a word true &
closely embracing the thing. That is not Latin nor English nor
any language, but thought. The aim of the author is not to tell
truth—that he cannot do, but to suggest it. He has only ap-
proximated it himself, & hence his cumbrous embarrassed
speech: he uses many words, hoping that one, if not another,
will bring you as near to the fact as he is. (JMN, 5:50-51)

Language itself, as Emerson remarked at the conclusion of

the journal sequence just quoted, is "young & unformed" (JMN,
5:51). The unifying vision he required for his spiritual discourse
that would restore substance to the world and lives of ordinary
men would have to be constructed with words, but mortared
with thought. Only thought, not words, was eternal; only
thought could serve as the organizing first law of "the First Phi-
losophy": all in the universe is related.
During a visit on 13 July 1833 to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris,
Emerson spent the day wandering through the rooms of the
Cabinet of Natural History. His account of the thoughts that oc-
curred to him as he studied case after case of specimens pre-
served in the museum makes clear that this was the day when the
unifying vision he required for his spiritual discourse—his "book
about nature," as he had described it when he sailed away from
England—was born. Here he witnessed for the first time in his
life the relational nature of all things in the universe. Nature was
suddenly and unexpectedly large and seemed to him thoroughly
organic; observer and observed became one as objects came to
 22 Ralph Waldo Emerson

life as extensions of the mind that beheld them and symbols of

the imagination that interpreted them:

How much finer things are in composition than alone. 'Tis

wise in man to make Cabinets. When I was come into the Or-
nithological Chambers, I wished I had come only there. The
fancy-coloured vests of these elegant beings made me as pen-
sive as the hues & forms of a cabinet of shells, formerly. It is a
beautiful collection & makes the visiter as calm & genial as a
bridegroom. The limits of the possible are enlarged, & the
real is stranger than the imaginary. . . .
I saw black swans & white peacocks, the ibis the sacred &
the rosy; the flamingo, with a neck like a snake, the Toucan
rightly called rhinoceros; & a vulture whom to meet in the
wilderness would make your flesh quiverf,] so like an execu-
tioner he looked.
In other rooms I saw amber containing perfect musqui-
toes, grand blocks of quartz, native gold in all its forms of
crystallization, threads, plates, crystals, dust; & silver black as
from fire. Ah said I this is philanthropy, wisdom, taste—to
form a Cabinet of natural history. . . . Here we are im-
pressed with the inexhaustible riches 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,—K
the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient in the
very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, 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. I feel the centipede in me—cayman,
carp, eagle, & fox. I am moved by strange sympathiesf;] I say
continually, "I will be a naturalist." (JMN, 4:198-200)

"I will be a naturalist." Among the meanings attached to the

profession of naturalist in the nineteenth century was this: a nat-
uralist was a person who, among other things, believed that spiri-
tual truth derived from nature, not from miraculous or super-
natural revelations, and that everything from the order of the
universe to the evolution of personal and cultural ethics could be
 A Brief Biography 23

discovered through the close study of nature broadly construed.

This brand of naturalism relied entirely on the intuitive capacity
of the observer of nature, and the observer's ability to move
from the factual to the metaphoric or relational meaning of ob-
jects, events, persons, ideas, and even words as he encountered
them in nature. Intuition enabled the observer to see through the
remoteness or ambiguity of words and things to the unifying
source of all in the universe: thought. In stating that he would be
a naturalist, Emerson meant that he would be a naturalist of this
variety; he thereby staked a claim for himself as a cultural priest
and visionary who would enlarge his recognition in the Jardin
des Plantes of the relatedness of all objects in the universe into
the organizing principle of his First Philosophy. He would put
his personal "Cabinet of Natural History" on display not only
through his lectures but also in the grand, penetrating sweep of
the volumes he would publish. There he would write, as he re-
named his First Philosophy in 1853, a "New Metaphysics" (TN,
1:134), and his New Metaphysics would be an analogic, not an
analytic or theologically revealed, system of philosophy replete
with its own internally consistent poetics, ethics, and history. His
New Metaphysics would be a spiritual as well as a material biog-
raphy of the human race, and he was confident that, as this biog-
raphy gradually unfolded, he would remove all limits of the
possible for mankind, liberate the spiritual content of human ex-
perience from the ritualized confinement of institutional religion
and politics, and awaken in his fellows a feeling of the moral sub-
lime. This, finally, was the call that Emerson heard loudest of all.
The year 1836 was one of tragedy, triumph, and renewal in
Emerson's life. In May his brother Charles suddenly died from
the disease that had earlier claimed both Ellen and his brother
Edward. Emerson revealed his devastation at his loss of Charles,
whom he variously described as his intellectual equal, muse, and
truest companion, when he wrote to Carlyle, "[W]e made but
one man together" (17 September 1836; CEC, p. 148). Between
moments of despair over Charles's death, he continued to work
steadily on the manifesto in which he would announce his First
Philosophy to the world. Nature, which was published on 9 Sep-
tember, is Emerson's sweeping declaration of the divinity of
 24 Ralph Waldo Emerson

human life and the universality of thought. Having assimilated

much from his readings in Platonic and Neoplatonic thought, in
Eastern philosophy and religion, and in natural history, Emerson
proclaimed nature the resource through which individuals could
restore "original and eternal beauty" to their world and achieve
the redemption of their souls (CW, 1:43). In its appeal to intuition
and the senses, its conviction that language, like any other mate-
rial fact, is symbolic of a higher spiritual reality that governs the
universe, and its song of the "Orphic poet," which reminds mod-
ern man that he is "the dwarf of himself," that is, the dwarf of
a figure who before time began "was permeated and dissolved
by spirit" and "filled nature with his overflowing currents" (CW,
1:42), Nature impressed many early readers as a highly progressive
and idealistic text.
Emerson's extravagant and impressionistic style in Nature was
consistent with his message. His opening description of himself as
a "transparent eye-ball" in whom all egotism has vanished and the
currents of "Universal Being" circulate was an apt characteriza-
tion of the transformation he hoped to effect in human culture
(CW, 1:10). Emerson's own personal transformation from the shell
of the man he was when he left Boston for Europe in 1832 was
completed with the birth of his son Waldo on 30 October 1836.
Professionally, Emerson had hit his stride with the publication of
Nature, and in the months just prior to its appearance, he joined a
number of like-minded thinkers and writers to form a "sympo-
sium" in which they could discuss their radical ideas on philoso-
phy and theology. In the Transcendental Club, which formally
convened on 19 September, Emerson found his ideas reinforced by
the beliefs and encouragement of others. Between its formation
in 1836 and its dissolution in 1840, the Transcendental Club in-
cluded Bronson Alcott, James Freeman Clarke, Convers Francis,
Margaret Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge, Theodore Parker, Eliza-
beth Palmer Peabody, and Henry David Thoreau among its mem-
bers. The club's most lasting effects on Transcendentalism in
America were that it lent cohesiveness, if not complete consis-
tency in practice, to the movement's main principle that God was
immanent in all aspects of the Creation, and it instigated the
founding of the Dial as the movement's unofficial journal in 1840.
 A Brief Biography 25

Fuller edited the Dial between 1840 and March 1842; Emerson as-
sumed the editorship from her, but the journal, which was a con-
venient target for critics of Transcendentalism, failed for lack of
subscribers in 1844.
In 1837, Emerson expanded on the themes of Nature in "The
American Scholar," an address he delivered before Harvard's Phi
Beta Kappa Society during commencement celebrations. In the
address, he challenged America's future writers and professors to
break with their dependence upon imitation of classical and Eu-
ropean models in their own art and thought. Imitation, Emerson
argued, made men and their intellects passive; he wanted, in-
stead, active scholars, men of original thought who aspired to be
something more than the mere "parrots" of other men's words
and ideas. In 1838, Emerson reinvoked Man Thinking, the force-
ful image he introduced in "The American Scholar," to stir the
imaginations of the young ministers who were then graduating
from the Harvard Divinity School. In religion as in art, he said,
imitation cannot move beyond its models, so the imitator dooms
himself to hopeless mediocrity (CW, 1:90). Observing that the
formalism of traditional Christian practices was a sign of "a
decaying church and a wasting unbelief" that left worship-
ers thoughtless, defrauded, and disconsolate, he urged his audi-
ence to become "newborn bard[s] of the Holy Ghost[,] . . . ac-
quaint men at first hand with Deity[, and] . . . rekindle the
smouldering, nigh quenched fire on the altar" (CW, 1:88, 90, 92).
Among members of Emerson's expanding Transcendentalist
circle, Nature, "The American Scholar," and "The Divinity School
Address" were intellectually liberating performances; among
members of the literary, educational, and religious establish-
ment, however, the first two pieces represented the gibberish of
a pantheistic romantic who had lost control of his ability to think
and write clearly, while "The Divinity School Address" was sim-
ply the collected ravings of a heretic. In "The Divinity School Ad-
dress," Emerson had indeed tested and crossed the line that the
establishment traditionally drew between belief and unbelief,
and he did so in the very seat of establishment power: Harvard.
Yet by 1838 his position should have come as a surprise to no one.
His attack on the forms of religion was an old complaint; when
 26 Ralph Waldo Emerson

he said, "Miracles, prophecy, poetry, the ideal life, the holy life,
exists as ancient history merely; they are not in the [true] belief,
nor in the aspiration of society; but . . . seem ridiculous" (CW,
1:80), he was expounding on the teachings of German Higher
Criticism about which he had preached earlier in the decade and
enlarging on the issue of conscience that had occasioned his res-
ignation from the pulpit in 1832. His stirring challenge to the
young ministers that they "dare to love God without mediator or
veil" followed directly from his appeals to individualism and Man
Thinking, in Nature and "The American Scholar"; similarly, the
counsel he offered them in the address drew upon his evolving
doctrine of self-reliance, a doctrine he himself had followed for
much of the 18305 as he worked out the details of his true calling:
"Obey thyself. That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That
which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen" (CW,
1:82-83, 90).
Emerson appears to have been unfazed by the harangue to
which he and his ideas were subjected by the establishment dur-
ing the late 18308 and early 18405. He knew that he had crossed a
line, but it was one he believed he had to cross in order to
awaken his contemporaries from their intellectual and imagina-
tive stupor. "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of
the private man," he wrote at the opening of the 18405, which
"the people accept readily enough, & even with loud commenda-
tion, as long as I call the lecture, Art; or Politics; or Literature;
or the Household; but the moment I call it Religion,—they are
shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth
which they receive everywhere else, to a new class of facts"
(JMN, 7:342). Thus, he continued to write in his journals and cre-
ate new lectures out of them. Between 1839 and 1841, he orga-
nized some of his lectures into essays for publication in a single
volume. For all practical purposes, it would seem that writing,
lecturing, and his first years of fatherhood kept his mind cen-
tered on his domestic life and his calling as controversy swirled
around him.
The appearance of Emerson's Essays, published in America
and England in 1841, enhanced his reputation at home and
abroad. The volume contained twelve essays: "History," "Self-
 A Brief Biography 27

Reliance," "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," "Love," "Friend-

ship," "Prudence," "Heroism," "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "In-
tellect," and 'Art." Collectively, these essays demonstrated the
wide application to which various aspects of Emerson's idealistic
philosophy could be put. In "History," for instance, Emerson
drew his readers' attention to their share in the universality of
nature and the human condition through thought. As he himself
had realized at the Jardin des Plantes in 1833, everything in the
universe stands in a fundamental relation to everything else; all
is, as he then discovered, unified by thought or, as he wrote in
"History," mind:

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man

is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. . . . What
Plato thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel;
what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand,
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius
is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by
nothing less than all his history. (CW, 2:3)

And with man explicable by nothing less than all his history,
Emerson reduced history itself to an empty discipline which he
supplanted with biography:

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history

in our private experience, and verifying them here. All history
becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no His-
tory, only Biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson
for itself—must go over the whole ground. What it does not
see, what it does not live, it will not know. (CW, 2:6)

The "infinitude of the private man," nature's organicism, and

the importance of the individual's realization that he is part of a
universe strung together by multiple relational threads are recur-
rent themes throughout Essays. In "Self-Reliance," which ranks
with Nature as one of his best-known works, Emerson merged
the Socratic ideal of "Know thyself" with the Stoic ideal he had
counseled the Divinity School graduates to emulate, "Obey thy-
 2,8 Ralph Waldo Emerson

self." Against these ideals, both of which represent rejections of

imitation, the doctrine of self-reliance became an ethical con-
struction that Emerson applied to realize the political impulses of
democracy:

Our reading is ... sycophantic. In history, our imaginatio

plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate are a
gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small
house and common day's work: but the things of life are the
same to both: the sum total of both is the same. Why all this
deference to Alfred . . . and Gustavus? Suppose they were
virtuous: did they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends
on your private act to-day, as followed their public and
renowned steps. When private men shall act with original
views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings.
(CW, 2:36)

Whereas in "Self-Reliance" he stressed the centrality of indi-

vidual will and power to the personal and cultural ascendancy of
the "private man," in "The Over-Soul" Emerson demonstrated
that individual will and power must themselves yield to a force in
nature that he variously described as "higher" and "greater" than
they. That force is thought or, as he also called it in Nature, spirit.
It is analogous to the one mind common to all individual men in
"History," and it facilitates the transformative moment in Nature
when the speaker becomes a "transparent eye-ball," although in
"The Over-Soul" Emerson obliquely represented it as a "stream
whose source is hidden," pouring moment by moment "being"
into man. "Our being is descending into us from we know not
whence," he wrote; but even as his being descends from an ori-
gin higher than he, "within man is the soul of the whole; the
wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and parti-
cle is equally related; the eternal One" (CW, 2:159-60).
Three years after the appearance of Essays, Emerson published
Essays: Second Series (1844). The volume contained nine works:
"The Poet," "Experience," "Character," "Manners," "Gifts," "Na-
ture," "Politics," "Nominalist and Realist," and "New England Re-
formers." Readers have sometimes critiqued this volume as the
 A Brief Biography 29

point in Emerson's life and thought where his idealism yields to

realism and fatalism. An important fact about Emerson's life
which lends credibility to this view is that as he wrote and com-
piled the essays for the volume he was immersed in an extended
period of mourning over the death of his son and namesake
Waldo in January 1842.
Emerson's journals and letters of the period from 1842 to 1844
show that he was beyond consolation at the loss of this son
whose birth had signaled the reconstitution of the father's own
intellectual and personal manhood. For months after Waldo's
death, Emerson measured everything in his universe through the
impression left on it by the boy's life and death. Nature, his own
idealistic thought, and his relationships with friends and family,
which formerly had been invigorated and unified by Waldo's
presence, now struck Emerson as cold, empty, and foreboding his
own doom. As the man of words tried to cope with his loss on
paper, his sentences, many of them fragments, became emblems
of his suddenly shattered existence:

Yesterday night . . . my little Waldo ended his life. . . .

What he looked upon is better, what he looked not upon is in-
significant. The morning of Friday ! woke . . . & every cock
in every barnyard was shrilling with the most unnecessary
noise. The sun went up the morning sky with all his light, but
the landscape was dishonored by this loss. For this boy in
whose remembrance I have both slept & awaked so oft, deco
rated for me the morning star, & the evening cloud, [and]
. . . how much more with his lively curiosity every trivial
fact & circumstance in the household. . . . For every thing
he had his own name & way of thinking[,] his own pronuncia-
tion & manner. And every word came mended from that
tongue. A boy of early wisdom, of a grave 8C even majestic de-
portment, of a perfect gentleness[.] . . . Every tramper that
ever tramped is abroad but the little feet are stillf.] . . . Sor-
row makes us all children again[,] destroys all differences of
intellect[.] The wisest know nothing[.] (JMN, 8:163-65)

Waldo's death, and Emerson's seeming inability to reconcile

himself to his loss on any of the terms associated with his own
 3O Ralph Waldo Emerson

idealism, unquestionably exerted a negative impact on his phi-

losophy. The limitations of Emerson's Transcendentalist views
on history, biography, and the "over-soul" are exposed through-
out the essay "Experience," where in a world without Waldo, the
doctrine of self-reliance, for example, is checked by "Illusion,
Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, [and] Sub-
jectiveness." "[T]hese," Emerson now wrote, "are the threads on
the loom of time, these are the lords of life" (CW, 3:47). Similarly,
in "Gifts," Emerson treated optimism and brotherly love with
sentiments bordering on contempt. Yet as a whole, Essays: Second
Series does not justify the negative reading it has sometimes been
given. In "The Poet," for example, Emerson moved his philoso-
phy a significant step forward, identifying the poet as the "sayer,"
the "namer," the representative of beauty, who stands among
"partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his
wealth, but of the commonwealth" (CW, 3:4-5). The poet is the
priest and visionary who, recognizing that the "[u]niverse is the
externization of the soul," introduces his fellows to "the secret[s]
of the world, . . . where Being passes into Appearance, and
Unity into Variety" (CW, 3:9). There have always been great
poets—Chaucer, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare—but consistent
with his views on the past in Nature and "History," in "The Poet"
Emerson argued that since "the experience of each new age re-
quires a new confession," his age required its own poet, who, by
writing "his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into univer-
sality," would "draw [for] us with love and terror . . . the flow-
ing vest [and] . . . firm nature," "chaunt our own times and so-
cial circumstance," celebrate "[our] bravery," and declare "[our]
new religion" (CW, 3:7, 21).
As he did in "The Poet," in "Nominalist and Realist," another
of the essays printed in Essays: Second Series, Emerson reaffirmed
his idealism in the face of both personal adversity and the chal-
lenge to humanity which he found represented at this time by
slavery. Although he had experienced great personal losses before
which left him feeling dejected and fragmented, the feelings were
momentary, not permanent, in the larger scheme of his life. In an
autobiographical aside on the comfort he had always taken in
reading and writing, he announced himself restored to the ideal:
 A Brief Biography 31

"I am faithful again to the whole over the members" (CW, 3:137).
Emphasizing the fluidity of nature and experience, in "Nominal-
ist and Realist" he argued, "Nothing is dead": "It is the secret of
the world that all things subsist, and do not die, but only retire a
little from sight, and afterwards return again." "There is some-
what spheral and infinite in every man," he concluded; "every
man is a channel through which heaven floweth. . . . Nature
keeps herself whole, and her representation complete in the ex-
perience of each mind" (CW, 3:142-43).
Although Waldo's death and the appearance of Essays and Es-
says: Second Series were momentous events for Emerson during
the 18408, they do not entirely define either his personal or his
profession life at this time. The good health and growth of his
children Ellen, Edith, and Edward restored calm to his domestic
life, while his extensive lecturing on the lyceum circuit further
enhanced his visibility in America, enlarged his supply of new
materials for eventual publication, and provided him with a sub-
stantial income. Reluctant to take up reformist causes during the
18305, in the 18405 Emerson became an antislavery activist and an-
nounced his views in a forceful address, "Emancipation of the
Negroes in the British West Indies," delivered at the Concord
Court House on i August 1844. Having thrown himself into the
political arena with this address, he became an influential
spokesperson for abolitionism for the remainder of the 18405 and
throughout the 18505 as he adapted his moral conviction of "the
infinitude of the private man" into denunciations of the inhu-
manity of slavery and spoke repeatedly against the infamous
Fugitive Slave Law after its passage in 1850.
At the end of the 18403, Emerson made his second trip abroad.
With Thomas Carlyle and Alexander Ireland making most of the
arrangements, he undertook an extended lecture tour of Scot-
land and England, delivering sixty-four lectures between 2 No-
vember 1847 and 24 February 1848 in twenty-five cities and towns,
and a series of six lectures entitled "Mind and Manners of the
Nineteenth Century" between 6 and 17 June 1848 at the Literary
and Scientific Institution in London. During his tour he visited
extensively with Carlyle and met with many prominent scientists
and naturalists, including Robert Chambers, Charles Lyell, and
 32 Ralph Waldo Emerson

Richard Owen, and with literary figures such as Wordsworth,

Thomas De Quincey, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Macaulay, and
William Makepeace Thackeray. He attended performances of
Shakespeare's King Lear and Rossini's opera La Cenerentola, and
he dined with Frederic Chopin. By all accounts, when he was
abroad this time, Emerson cut a thoroughly cosmopolitan figure,
and while his first journey to Europe had restored him personally
and shown him the way to his true professional calling, he re-
turned home from this trip an established international figure
with an increasingly wide following.
One important result of this tour was that Emerson, ever the
penetrating observer, came home with several journals full of in-
sight into English history, manners, and character (see JMN, 10).
He transformed the observations entrusted to these journals into
"England," one of the most popular lectures of his entire career,
a few lecture series devoted entirely to English culture, and En-
glish Traits, which, since its publication in 1856, has stood as the
fullest expression of Emerson's thought on Anglo-Saxon culture.
Another important result of the tour was that several of the lec-
tures he delivered in the "Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth
Century" series in London became the basis for his construction
of a "Natural History of the Intellect." A law crucial to his First
Philosophy or "New Metaphysics," in a lecture series entitled
"Natural History of the Intellect," which he delivered on his re-
turn to America, Emerson established the authority of the in-
tellect in a formal accounting of the mind which he developed
through a scientific classification of its properties. Predict-
ably, the properties that most intrigued him were genius, talent,
memory, "self-possession," and the moral or ethical dimensions
of the mind. Between the 18505 and the 18705, he continued to
work on this subject, elaborating on it in three substantial lecture
series: "Natural Method of Mental Philosophy" (1858), "Philoso-
phy for the People" (1866), and "Natural History of the Intellect"
(1870,1871).
A dimension of Emerson's development during the 18405 and
18505 which he considered as crucial to his personal and profes-
sional well-being as the love of his family and his increased
stature in America and abroad was his participation in an ever-
 A Brief Biography 33

widening circle of intellectual friends and acquaintances. Early

in his life, Emerson had relied almost entirely on his brother
Charles, his Aunt Mary, and Ellen to serve as sounding boards for
his ideas and ambitions. When they were not available, in his
journals he turned to luminaries from the past—Plato, Proclus,
Shakespeare, Montaigne, or Ben Jonson—for confirmation of
ideas or feelings. However, with his growing correspondence
with Carlyle and the formation of the Transcendental Club,
Emerson began to rely heavily on the conversation, companion-
ship, and intellectual rigor of intimates who over the years in-
cluded not only Carlyle but also Alcott, the poets Ellery Chan-
ning and Jones Very, Fuller, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, Thoreau,
and many others. Luminaries from the past could only partially
fill his needs; as he explained in "Uses of Great Men," Emerson
recognized that his own "infinitude" as a private man had to be
nurtured, tested, and informed by flesh-and-blood relations:

[I]t is hard for departed men to touch the quick like our own
companions, whose names may not last as long. What is he
whom I never think of? whilst in every solitude are those who
succour our genius, and stimulate us in wonderful manners.
There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than
that other can, and by heroic encouragements hold him to his
task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to
whatever virtue is in us? We will never think more cheaply of
ourselves or of life. We are piqued to some purpose. (CW, 4:9)

Given the canonical stature that Emerson enjoys today, it

would be natural for some to think of Alcott, Channing, Fuller,
Tappan, or Thoreau as his disciples. However, there is no evi-
dence that he ever thought of them in this way; instead, these
were persons against whose ideas and feelings he measured the
depth of his own and established his humanity. In fact, in his
journals he explicitly rejected friendship as a disciple-making en-
terprise when he wrote: "The new individual must work out the
whole problem of science, letters, & theology for himself. . . .
The private soul ascends to transcendental virtue . . . but this
liberty is not transferable to any disciple . . . nor to the man
 34 Ralph Waldo Emerson

himself when he falls out of his trance & comes down from the
tripod" (JMN, 7:202, 216). The value, then, that Emerson found in
meeting and walking or talking with his friends confirmed one of
his general rules about friendship and conversation: When they
are best, they provide one with "a series of intoxications" that
yield inspiration ("Inspiration," W, 8:292). As journal entries such
as these about Alcott suggest, in the presence of his friends
Emerson found his faith in the ideal justified, and he felt himself
personally and intellectually enlarged:

I think [Alcott] has more faith in the Ideal than any man I have
known. Hence his welcome influence. A wise woman said to
me that he has few thoughts, too few. . . . Well, Books, con-
versation, discipline will give him more. But what were many
thoughts if he had not this distinguishing Faith, which is pal-
pable confirmation out of the deeps of nature that God yet is?
With many thoughts, & without this, he would be only one
more of a countless throng of lettered men; but now you can-
not spare the fortification that he is. ...
Alcott is a certain fluid in which men of ... spirit can
easily expand themselves & swim at large, they who else-
where found themselves confined. He gives them nothing but
themselves. . . . Me he has served . . . in that way; he was
the reasonable creature to speak to, that I wanted." (JMN,
7:34,11:19)

Just as he could rely on Alcott's "faith in the Ideal" to nourish

and restore his own when necessary, so too Emerson could turn
to Channing and Thoreau, the artist and the naturalist, for ex-
pansions of his own view of nature each time they served as his
personal guides on walks through Concord's fields and woods or
along its riverbanks. Without directly naming them, in "Country
Life," a lecture first delivered in Boston in 1858, Emerson revealed
his reliance upon the eyes and knowledge of these "professors"
of nature:

There are two companions, with one or other of whom 'tis

desireable to go out on a tramp. One is an artist, or one who
has an eye for beauty. 'Tis sometimes good to carry a tele-
 A Brief Biography 35

scope in your pocket, specially for birds. And as you take a

telescope, that you may see what your eyes cannot reach, so, if
you use a good and skilful companion, you shall see through
his eyes, and, if they be of great discernment, you will learn
wonderful secrets. In walking with [him], you shall see what
was never before shown to the eye of man. And as the percep-
tion of beauty always exhilarates, if one is so happy as to find
the company of a true artist, he is a perpetual holiday, and
ought only to be used, like an oroflamme or a garland, for
feasts and may-days, and parliaments of wit and love. The
other is a naturalist, for the reason that it is much better to
learn the elements of geology, of botany, of ornithology, and
astronomy, by word of mouth from a companion, than drily
by book. There is so much, too, which a book cannot teach,
which an old friend can.4
Because he stood to learn so much from his friends, Emerson
was willing to expose his most hidden thoughts arid feelings in
conversations and correspondence with them. As remarked al-
ready, one of the most sustained relationships that Emerson en-
joyed was with Carlyle. Their correspondence from 1834 to 1872
served Emerson as a testing ground for his ideas and as a site
where, as in the case of his remark to Carlyle after Charles Emer-
son's death, he could openly express his feelings or, at other
times, confess the inadequacies he feared his lectures and writ-
ings betrayed about his ability.5 With Caroline Sturgis Tappan, he
could express his most profound doubts about the efficacy of
freedom against his perception of fate without fearing censure or
rebuke. In a remarkable letter written on 22 July 1853, he de-
scribed to her the nightmare world he thought he lived in when
the "heavy cobweb" of "fate" that hung about seemed to close in
on him: "Friends are few, thoughts are few, facts few—only one:
only one fact, now tragically, now tenderly, now exultingly illus-
trated in sky, in earth, in men & women, Fate, Fate" (L, 8:374-75).
Able to write out his feelings so freely to Tappan, Emerson could
feel emancipated from his fears and restored to the ideal. He felt
the same way about the effect his relationship with Fuller had on
him. Once he called her "my audience" (JMN, 11:258), but the
nature of their friendship was sufficiently interactive that she
 36 Ralph Waldo Emerson

served variously as Emerson's alter ego, confessor, and conduit

to the ideas and feelings of others as well. In Memoirs of Margaret
Fuller Ossoli (1852), on which he collaborated with William Henry
Charming and James Freeman Clarke after her death, Emerson
remembered Fuller's roles and the satisfaction and enlargement
he drew from them. In conversation and correspondence with
her, he wrote, "[her] companion was made a thinker, and went
away quite other than he came. The circle of friends who sat
with her were not allowed to remain spectators or players, but
she converted them into heroes."6
As the nineteenth century reached its midpoint, Emerson re-
marked in his journal:

Culture, the height of culture, highest behavior consist in the

identification of the Ego with the universe, so that when a
man says, I think, I hope, I found,—he might properly say, the
human race thinks, hopes, & finds,—he states a fact which
commands the understandings & affections of all the com-
pany, and yet, at the same time, he shall be able continually to
keep sight of his biographical ego. (1850; JMN, 11:203)

The necessity of the dual maneuvers represented in this passage

of discovering and keeping true to one's own identity while also
accepting that one's identity must always be constructed in rela-
tion to persons, events, and things outside of oneself in nature is
an important lesson that Emerson found reinforced by the com-
pany of his friends. As a lesson, it brought forward into the 18505
the ideal laws of the First Philosophy Emerson had announced
in Nature, and it effectively summarized one of the controlling
themes of Representative Men, which he published in 1850, and
The Conduct of Life, which appeared in 1860. As he had with En-
glish Traits, Emerson created both of these volumes out of lec-
ture series. Representative Men has its origin in a popular series of
the same title which he delivered in America and England be-
tween the mid-i84os and 1848; The Conduct of Life has its origin in
a lecture series that he gave sparingly during the 18505, although
several of the essays in the volume—"Power," "Wealth," "Cul-
 A Brief Biography 37

ture," "Worship," and "Beauty," in particular—were drawn from

lectures that performed extensive service outside of Emerson's
Conduct of Life lecture series.
Representative Men consists of seven chapter-length essays, or
"lectures," as Emerson called them: an introductory essay enti-
tled the "Uses of Great Men," a two-part essay on Plato, and one
each on Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and
Goethe. Emerson underscored the representative quality of the
volume and the figures it treated by identifying each principal fig-
ure with either a quality that defined his character or a simple
statement of his profession. Hence, Plato is "the Philosopher,"
Swedenborg "the Mystic," Montaigne "the Skeptic," Napoleon
"the Man of the World," and Goethe "the Writer." But in a radi-
cal departure from his practice in 1835, when in his "Biography"
lecture series he developed Michelangelo, Martin Luther, Milton,
and others as exemplary, unblemished heroes, in Representative
Men Emerson did not portray heroes as such, but as men of un-
common ability whose lives also revealed a host of common
flaws inherent in human character and behavior: intellectual con-
ceit, pettiness, and avarice, to name a few. For instance, Sweden-
borg, a philosopher who Emerson greatly admired, is portrayed
as possessing a narrow "theological bias"; overvaluing form, he
lacks "central spontaneity" and is unable to incorporate the "ap-
paratus of poetic expression" into his philosophy (CW, 4:67-68,
74, 80). Swedenborg and his system are too cerebral; lacking in an
essential appreciation of nature (in the Emersonian sense of the
term), neither Swedenborg the person nor the philosophy he
promotes has "the power to generate life" (CW, 4:74-75). Simi-
larly, although in Emerson's estimation Napoleon is "the incar-
nate Democrat . . . the idol of the common man, because he
had in transcendent degree the qualities and powers of common
men" (CW, 4:130-31), he too turns out to be a failure because of
his lack of moral sentiment. In a burst of rage, Emerson attacked
Napoleon's character, noting that he was "singularly destitute of
generous sentiments," lacked "the merit of common truth and
honesty," and was unjust, egotistic, monopolizing, and thor-
oughly unscrupulous. "In short," he concluded, "when you have
 38 Ralph Waldo Emerson

penetrated through all the circles of [Napoleon's] power and

splendour, you [are] not dealing with a gentleman at last, but
with an impostor and a rogue" (CW, 4:145-46).
Among Emerson's major works, Representative Men is one
of the most difficult to account for as an expression of his ide-
alistic philosophy. Featuring imperfect, defective men, it struck
nineteenth-century readers, as it often does readers of today, as
Emerson's concession to the inevitable failure of the ideal in the
real world of real men. Put another way, the book seems to con-
firm one of Emerson's personal confessions in "Experience":
"[T]he world I converse with in the city . . . is not the world I
think." Yet this reading is at odds with both Emerson's meaning
in "Experience" and his stated purpose in Representative Men. In
"Experience," Emerson's "world I think" is the world of the ideal,
and to the extent that the men who people and act in that world
are idealized representations of human character and behavior,
they provided Emerson with a goal, an ideal, to aspire to in his
own thought and ethics. The men who write, think, and act in
Representative Men, on the other hand, are from "the world I con-
verse with in the city," or in history, Emerson would say. They are
subjects still evolving toward ideal thought and action; in them,
the ideal is nascent, not actualized, so that as persons, as men,
they are less important in themselves than they are suggestive
representations of the potential humans have to achieve the
ideal. Emerson explained this point fully in his introduction to
Representative Men:

The genius of humanity is the real subject whose biography is

written in our annals. . . . The history of the universe is
symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man in all the pro-
cession of famous men is reason or illumination, or that
essence we are looking for. . . . The study of many indi-
viduals leads us to an elemental region wherein the individual
is lost, or wherein all touch by their summits. Thought and
feeling that break out there, cannot be impounded by any
fence of personality. This is the key to the power of the great-
est men[: spirit] diffuses itself. . . . If the disparities of talent
and position vanish . . . even more swiftly the seeming in-
 A Brief Biography 39

justice disappears, when we ascend to the central identity of

all the individuals, and know that they are made of the sub-
stance which ordaineth and doeth.
The genius of humanity is the right point of view of his-
tory. The qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now
more, now less, and pass away. . . . No experience is more
familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone: the world is
not therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sa-
cred emblems, turn out to be common pottery, but the sense
of the pictures is sacred, and you may still read them trans-
ferred to the walls of the world. ("Uses of Great Men," CW,
4:18-19)

The idealistic vision Emerson ultimately advanced in Represen-

tative Men provided the necessary foreground for The Conduct of
Life. In this volume, he enlarged on the theme he had developed
in his journal in 1850: "[T]he height of culture [arid] highest be-
havior consist in the identification of the Ego with the universe."
Because that theme followed directly from the conclusion of
"Uses of Great Men" quoted previously, it implied Emerson's
recognition of the fact that, although "the height of culture [and]
. . . behavior" had not yet been achieved, the world was not
therefore "disenchanted." "The lesson of life," as Emerson had
learned firsthand during the periods of devastating grief that fol-
lowed the deaths of his first wife, brothers, and son, and ex-
plained in his treatment of Montaigne, "is practically to general-
ize, to believe what the years and the centuries say against the
hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to
their catholic sense." To survive in the city, to survive in an evolv-
ing yet imperfect culture, the idealistic individual had to learn "to
look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting" and "to bear
the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence, without
losing his reverence" (CW, 4:104-5).
In writing and publishing The Conduct of Life, Emerson ex-
pected readers to recognize that his emphasis was still on rever-
ence for nature and thought. Although he admitted repeatedly
in the volume that the individual had to submit to the sway of
myriad influences on his life, influences that ranged from fate, to
 4O Ralph Waldo Emerson

culture, to the illusion and subjectiveness he had called "the lords

of life" in "Experience," he held fast to his idealism. "If we must
accept Fate," he asserted, "we are not less compelled to affirm
liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty,
the power of character" ("Fate," W, 6:4). "Does the reading of
history make us fatalists," he wondered; if so, "[w]hat courage
does not the opposite opinion show," that the record of human
thought and of men's expression of moral sentiment makes men
free ("Fate," W, 6:28-29). Admitting that imbecility often seemed
to be the key to all ages, "imbecility in the vast majority of men
at all times, and even in heroes in all but certain eminent mo-
ments," Emerson countered with his belief that "Imbecility
. . . gives force to the strong" ("Power," Vl^ 6:53, 54). In an un-
characteristic rhetorical maneuver, he paused in the middle of
his essay "Power" to state, "[H]ere is my point":

[A]ll kinds of power usually emerge at the same time; good

energy and bad; power of mind with physical health; the ec-
stasies of devotion with the exasperations of debauchery. The
same elements are always present, only sometimes these con-
spicuous, and sometimes those; what was yesterday fore-
ground, being to-day background;—what was surface, playing
now a not less effective part as basis. . . . The faster the ball
falls to the sun, the force to fly off is by so much augmented.
And in morals, wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures
with great impulses have great resources, and return from far.
In politics, the sons of democrats will be whigs; whilst red re-
publicanism in the father is a spasm of nature to engender an
intolerable tyrant in the next age. (W, 6:64)

The Conduct of Life echoed the idealistic certainty out of which

Emerson had argued in "The Method of Nature" (1841), an often
overlooked essay that he published from an oration he had deliv-
ered at Waterville College in Maine. "Things ripen, new men
come," he proclaimed in that essay; he asserted, further, that as
for man, "it is his attitude,—not feats, but forces,—not on set
days and public occasions, but at all hours . . . as in energy"
that makes him, through thought in which all men share, "formi-
 A Brief Biography 41

dable and not to be disposed of" (CW, 1:120, 127-28). In "Illu-

sions," the essay that concludes The Conduct of Life, Emerson
reaffirmed the idealism with which he continued to respect the
power of man, his mind, and the efficacy of thought. In an ex-
tended conceit that depicted "[e]very god . . . sitting in his
sphere" and a "young mortal . . . in the hall of the firmament
[temporarily blinded by] snow-storms of illusions," he showed
that once "the air clears and the clouds lift a little," two essentials
remained: the young mortal still possessing the integrity of his
will and thought, and the gods, who, as universal rnind, sanction
eternally moral man's will and thought (W, 6:325).
In the context of Americans' rising skepticism that accompa-
nied foreshadowings of the Civil War in the 18505, the terrifying
reality of the war in the early i86os, and Abraham Lincoln's as-
sassination in 1865, Emerson reaffirmed that ideal yet again, first
in a journal passage, and then in adaptations of the passage in his
essay "Culture" in The Conduct of Life and the title essay of Society
and Solitude, a volume of twelve essays published in 1870 that
drew almost entirely from lectures:

Nature has as seldom a success in her machines, as we in ours.

There is almost never good adjustment between the spring &
the regulator, in a man. He only is a well made man, who has
a good determination. Now, with most men, it does not ap-
pear for what they were made, until after a long time. . . .
[T]hey have a determination, but they ripen too slowly than
that it should distinctly appear in this brief life. As with my
Catawbas, the season is not quite long enough for them.
(JMN, 11:197-98; cf. W, 6:134, 7:8)

This, Emerson might have agreed, would have sufficed as an apt

closing commentary on his life and thought. Once he heard and
heeded his call in the 18305, he never strayed far from his mission
to win his hearers and readers to the ideal, even though, as this
passage suggests, he appreciated that the human race was not
likely to convert to idealism any time soon. This is not to say that
the last twenty years of his life were merely an extended anticli-
max to either the intellectual ferment that characterized his early
 42 Ralph Waldo Emerson

career or the sense of urgency that drove him to write in his jour-
nals and later create from them lectures and essays for ever ap-
preciative audiences. Far from it. He spent much of the 18605 lec-
turing throughout America, editing the papers of his friend
Thoreau, who died in 1862, collecting his poetry for a volume he
titled May-Day and Other Pieces in 1867, and editing a two-volume
collection of his Prose Works that appeared in 1869.
As the 18705 opened, the decade seemed to an aging but still
vigorous Emerson as promising as the preceding four decades
had been. His Yankee humor, not always apparent in his writings,
surfaced when he received an early sales statement for Society and
Solitude. "My new book sells faster . . . [than] its foregoers," he
remarked in his journal; "[tjhis is not for its merit, but only shows
that old age is a good advertisement. Your name has been seen so
often that your book must be worth buying" (JMN, 16:175). He
gave his "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures at Harvard in
1870 and 1871 a mixed review, although students and others who
attended them gave them consistently positive notice.7 In April
and May 1871 he traveled to California, and after his return he
spent the remainder of the year negotiating engagements for the
1871-1872 lecture season, working on Parnassus, an anthology of
his favorite poetry that he had been collecting for fifty years, and
arranging journal material and several lectures for another vol-
ume of essays he expected to publish. He was not, however, des-
tined to complete either Parnassus or his anticipated volume of
essays by himself. On 24 July 1872 his house was substantially
damaged by fire, the short-range effect of which was to break his
inclination to write, while its long-range effect was to accelerate
the progress of what today might be diagnosed as either senile
dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Late in 1872, his daughter Ellen
accompanied him on a recuperative journey to Europe and
Egypt; lasting from October 1872 to May 1873, this trip abroad
provided Emerson with an occasion for one last meeting with
Carlyle and other friends and admirers in England, and for a re-
turn to some of the sites that in 1833 had restored his spirits. But
this time he returned home unrestored. Gradually accepting the
editorial services of his daughters, Ellen and Edith, and of James
Elliot Cabot who he named his literary executor in 1875, Emer-
 A Brief Biography 43

son saw Parnassus into print in 1874 and Letters and Social Aims, the
volume of essays he had begun earlier in the decade, in 1876. He
died in Concord on 27 April 1882, having faced his last years with
an equanimity foreshadowed in the closing lines of his poem
"Terminus" (1867):

As the bird trims her to the gale,

I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
"Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed." (W, 9:252)

Emerson and America's Coming of Age

Moments after Emerson died on the evening of 27 April 1882, the

bells of Concord's First Parish Church tolled seventy-nine times
to mark his passing. His death was not unexpected. Approaching
his seventy-ninth birthday, Emerson had lived a remarkably long,
productive, and influential life by any standard. Over the nearly
half-century since his first appearance on the American scene as
an original voice of national faith in individualism, optimism, na-
ture, and social reform, his words had moved his countrymen to
aspire to an ideal level of human thought and action unimagin-
able to earlier generations of Americans. An intellectual and so-
cial doctrine that erased most vestiges of Calvinism and fatalism
retained from the formative years of American settlement,
Emerson's message conveyed his "instinctive faith" in possibility
and in "a perfect system of compensations" founded upon the
universality of these laws:

That the mind is in its own place

That exact justice is done . . .
That the Soul is immortal . . .
That the best is the true.
 44 Ralph Waldo Emerson

That the Mind discerns all things.

That the Mind seeks itself in all things
That truth is its own warrant. (JMN, 3:316-17)

Emerson's message was well known by the time of his death,

and in spite of the lofty and occasionally abstract manner in
which he articulated it, Americans easily found in it a place for
themselves and their collective aspirations. His message reso-
nated with their "instinctive faith" in themselves as individuals
and as a people and in the possibilities of a great national future
represented by the vast landscape of the North American conti-
nent. Delivered from the pulpit he occupied during his early
years, from the lecture platform from which he spoke through-
out his career, and in the printed essays and volumes that lent au-
thority, if not finality, to his words, Emerson's message was pro-
gressively adapted into an American New Testament. To call it
such is hardly an exaggeration, for in his own time as in ours,
Emerson was respected as a cultural priest and visionary, and
much as we might, his contemporaries, who first received his
words, intuitively responded to their prophetic strains.
In ways that postmodern Americans will critique and resist,
nineteenth-century Americans embraced Emerson's new Ameri-
can testament for the confidence it expressed in their individual
power and for the absolute faith it held in the grand destiny of the
American cultural experiment. Like him, they believed "that Reve-
lation is not closed and sealed, but times of refreshment and words
of power are evermore coming, . . . that neither is the age of
miracles over and forever gone[—Jthat the Creation is an endless
miracle as new at this hour as when Adam awoke in the garden"
(CS, 4:246). They found that belief reinforced in the words of Na-
ture, where after lamenting American dependency on the past and
on the retrospective preoccupation of biography, history, and criti-
cism that yielded so many "sepulchres of the fathers," Emerson
counseled readers, "'Build . . . your own world'" (CW, 1:7, 45).
America's future ministers and men of letters heard that counsel
echoed in the themes of Emerson's "The American Scholar" and
his address before the Harvard Divinity School in 1838. In the first
 A Brief Biography 45

address, Emerson extended his rejection of the past, challenging

his audience to espouse a philosophy of "self-trust"—of trust liter-
ally in themselves as well as in the high spiritual causes working in
the nascent national impulses of the day. Praising the opportuni-
ties for improving the human condition opened by new science,
the virtue of the commonplace ("[t]he literature of the poor,
the feelings of the child, the [ideas] of the street, the meaning
of household life"), writing that is "blood-warm," not "cold and
pedantic," and an intellectual life consonant with an environment
"inflated by the mountain winds" and "shined upon by all the stars
of God," Emerson asked his audience to channel their youthful
enthusiasm into creating an elevated national consciousness. He
imagined it to be a consciousness wherein "each believes himself
inspired by the Divine Soul which inspired all men," wherein "[w]e
will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we
will speak our own minds" (CW, 1:67-70).
Emerson's new American testament was perfectly timed. In-
deed, its spirit was in the air, for Americans already had hints of
the elevated national consciousness for which Emerson called in
J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's exuberant definition of them:
"The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles]],]
. . . entertain[s] new ideas, and form[s] new principles." A new
Adam transported into a new Eden from the corruption, "servile
dependence, penury, and useless labor" of decadent European
culture, his task was to carry on the work of Revelation and cre-
ate miracles out of his own ideas, talents, and land.8 Americans
also had glimpses of the height to which this new consciousness
called them in the verses of Philip Freneau, where all the prom-
ises of human culture first voiced in Asia, then in Europe, were
portrayed as fully realized in the western movement of intellect,
morals, and the arts to America:

To western woods, and lonely plains, . . .

Where Nature's wildest genius reigns,
To tame the soil, and plant the arts—
What wonders there shall freedom show,
What mighty states successive grow! . . .
 46 Ralph Waldo Emerson

While virtue warms the generous breast,

There heaven-born freedom shall reside,
Nor shall the voice of war molest,
Nor Europe's all-aspiring pride—
There Reason shall new laws devise,
And order from confusion rise. . . .

Far brighter scenes a future age,

The muse predicts, these states will hail,
Whose genius may the world engage,
Whose deeds may over death prevail,
And happier systems bring to view,
Than all the eastern sages knew.9

And if Crevecoeur's conception of the American or Freneau's

portrayal of the laws of human nature being finally realized in
America struck any as too abstract, Americans could find aspects
of the ideal national consciousness to which both of these writ-
ers drew their attention personified in Benjamin Franklin's eleva-
tion of the pragmatic to the virtuous, in Thomas Jefferson's
Renaissance-style personal life and professional career, and in
Thomas Paine's revolutionary individualism so forcefully con-
veyed in his statement "My own mind is my own church."10
Emerson lived the major part of his public career from the
18305 through the 18705. These were heady and hectic times.
These were times in which the example of a Franklin, a Jefferson,
or a Paine could be selectively invoked to bring an abstraction
down to earth, but more important for Emerson's purposes,
these were also times in which each discernible aesthetic, intel-
lectual, political, or social advance seemed a new confirmation
that the evolutionary track of American character and culture
represented the final stages of a divinely inspired and guided na-
tional destiny. As one historian closer than we are to the prevail-
ing sentiments of the age put it, Americans of this time harbored
an ideal conception—a "dream"—of what they represented and
were destined to accomplish, and that conception inspired and
motivated the highest rank intellectual as well as the person on
the street. Imagining the frame of mind exhibited by an Arneri-
 A Brief Biography 47

can at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Henry Adams

wrote that "his dream was his whole existence." And although
the particulars of each American's dream certainly varied from
one person to the next, Americans collectively dreamed of a
"great democracy" that would "transmute its social power into
the higher forms of thought," "provide for the moral and intel-
lectual needs of mankind," "take permanent political shape,"
"give new life to religion and art," and produce "a higher variety
of the human race."11
From Adams's historical perspective—he was writing at the
end of the century—and from Emerson's immediate perspective,
broad strokes of mid-nineteenth-century American experience
not only confirmed their ideal conception of the ultimate end of
this "great democracy" but also established the mythic terms
that, now fully assimilated into American culture, intellectual
historians and politicians invoke in modern contexts today.
Those broad strokes of American social history included the
opening of the American West and the discovery of unimagined
natural resources along the way; the legitimation of political
doctrines such as Manifest Destiny; the promotion of education,
labor laws, sanitation and health care, and other reforms for the
public good; the coming of age of the print industry in America,
which coincided with the beginning of the lyceum movement as
means to disseminate ideas, history, and art, as well as news and
information, to the populace; the rise of a distinctively American
literary class, which included Washington Irving, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt
Whitman, among many others, who addressed American sub-
jects directly to an American audience; and the progress of ex-
perimental science and invention, which revolutionized industry,
medicine, and agriculture in America and facilitated geographic
expansion.
Yet almost as a counterpoint to each seeming advance of
American culture, circumstances and events such as these raised
serious questions about the extent to which the ideal could, in
fact, be fully realized: the continual displacement and eventual
eradication of entire native tribes; the persistence of institutions
such as slavery, and the second-class citizenship accorded to
 48 Ralph Waldo Emerson

women and freed blacks; and the spoiling of the natural environ-
ment and the creation of a menial worker class to support indus-
try, expansion, and trade, all in the name of progress. Con-
fronting this dark side of nineteenth-century American life,
Adams found that the century's social history raised at least as
many unsettling questions about the ideal as advocacy for it ap-
peared to answer. Given such circumstances and events, could
America consistently follow an enlightened course that elimi-
nated or, at least, lessened what seemed to be the inevitable
bloody results of human politics in Western culture: war and
class struggle? Could the American really create in himself and
his fellows a whole new mind, a whole new race? In sum, could
the American ideal ever be fully realized?
Adams, who died in 1918, was never able to answer these ques-
tions to his own or his readers' satisfaction. In 1891 he concluded
the ninth and final volume of his History of the United States by
stating that American "history required another century of ex-
perience" before answers could even be attempted.12 But Emer-
son had no difficulty: His answers to all questions such as these
were consistently affirmative. As cultural priest and visionary,
he, as with most of his contemporaries, cared less about as-
sessing the impact of particulars than he did about expressing
confidence in the ideal. Unless they happened to provide factual
support for the ideal or lent themselves to imaginative advo-
cacy of the ideal through poetry or another art, the particulars—
circumstances and events, and persons as well—were only so
many finite steps along the way to the ideal. If those steps hap-
pened to be negative, as certainly slavery and the creation of a
low worker class were, they did not compromise the ideal;
rather, they showed the necessity of making broader generaliza-
tions in support of the ideal.
Although he occasionally skirted skepticism as he encountered
illustrations of the dark side of human nature and experience dur-
ing his time, Emerson was steadfastly optimistic that all particular
negatives were capable of being eventually rectified by an enlight-
ened race. Since "[m]ind seeks itself in all things" and "truth is its
own warrant," good—the ideal—would, he believed, inevitably
 A Brief Biography 49

emerge out of, and prevail over, personal or cultural evil. With
Walt Whitman, Emerson could insist that the particular was inca-
pable of permanently offsetting or contradicting the ideal. Writ-
ing out his ideal conception of self, Whitman had to admit that
human experience displayed as much variety in morals, thought,
and action as there were individuals in the race. Facing that variety
which exhibited evil along with good, he asked, "Do I contradict
myself?" "Very well then," Whitman answered, "I contradict my-
self": "I am large, I contain multitudes."13
In the "multitudes," both Whitman and Emerson established
their surest confidence in the eventual triumph of the ideal self
and ideal culture over the personal or particular. In a sweeping
romantic gesture, Emerson, effectively speaking for both, identi-
fied "the permanent," the ideal, in "the mutable and fleeting"
("Montaigne, or the Skeptic," CW, 4:105). Employing metaphors
of nature's persistent evolution toward perfection as representa-
tions of the individual's and the culture's persistent evolution to-
ward the ideal, he expressed confidence in the ideal both in print
and in the privacy of journal entries such as this:

We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the omnipo-

tence of the Soul: We do not believe there is any force in
Today, to rival or re-create that beautiful yesterday. We linger
in the ruins of the old tent where the Soul gave us bread &
shelter 8i organs[;] we cannot trust its power anew to feed[,]
to cover & empower us. We cannot find again aught so dear,
so sweet, so graceful. But the voice of the Almighty saith, On-
ward for evermore! We cannot stay amid the ruins. . . .
The finite is the foam of the infinite. We stand on the shore
& see the froth & shells which the sea has just thrown up, &
we call the sea by the name of [its] boundary. . . . We do
the like with the Soul. We see the world which it once has
made, & we call that God, though it was only one moment's
production, & there have been a thousand moments & a
thousand productions since. But we are to learn to transfer
our view to the Sea instead of the Shore, to the energy instead
of the limitation, to the Creator instead of the World. (JMN,
7:202-3)
 5O Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rejecting idolaters and sepulchre-builders, persons who in

seeing only the negative or limitation reinforced the intellectual
and imaginative stupor of their time, Emerson proposed a new
class that would think and write as prophets and priests, who
would create the dear, sweet, and graceful in their fellows
through reverence for the "force in Today" instead of through
reference to "the ruins of the old tent," who would look to "en-
ergy instead of limitation," to the metaphoric "Sea instead of the
Shore." Contrary to what we may infer from so much of the
seemingly positive historical evidence presented by nineteenth-
century American life, the "force" and "energy" for which Emer-
son wished to create a new sense of reverence in readers was not
the material. For Emerson and others of the class he proposed,
material progress alone could be neither the arbiter of a culture's
values nor the measure of a culture's value. In "The Method of
Nature" he took issue with cultures that measured their worth
only through the material and that directed their complete atten-
tion to the "results of machinery, commerce, and the useful
arts." These, he argued, inevitably produced a variety of "puny"
and "fickle folk" whose lives revealed the spiritual impoverish-
ment of their culture, not its devotion to the ideal (CW, 1:120).
Such cultures, he said, "died by suicide," and the sure signs of
their demise were first the decay, then the dissolution of thought
("The Man of Letters," W, 10:246).
Distinct from the material, then, the "force" and "energy"
most revered by Emerson followed directly from his "instinctive
faith" in the higher cause illuminated by American experience:
the infinite capacity of "Mind" and "Soul." Confident of the infi-
nite capacity of "Mind" and "Soul," Emerson could express un-
wavering confidence in immortality as a concept and a fact and
in the ultimate triumph of the ideal over experience. In "The
Method of Nature," he wrote that he shared his countrymen's
delight in "the music of the water-wheel," felt with them "the
pride which the sight of a ship inspires," and looked "on trade
and every mechanical craft as education." But he also wrote that
waterwheels, ships, and the like were, in the final analysis, just so
many temporal, finite inventions that repeat themselves "a thou-
sand times." Proclaiming, "I will not be deceived into admiring
 A Brief Biography 51

the routine," Emerson discerned something more "precious" in

multiple acts of material invention: "the intellectual step," "the
spiritual act," whereby inventions are initially made, then re-
created and improved upon by succeeding generations or in dif-
ferent nations (CW, 1:120-21).
As suggested by his remarks in "The Method of Nature," for
Emerson the "perfect system of compensations" represented in
his journals required compartmentalization of life between expe-
rience (the finite) and the ideal (faith in the spiritual and infinite).
One can read this essential dualism in religious terms and imag-
ine the individual standing with his feet planted in this world of
transition and of human care and woe, while his heart and eyes
are fixed firmly on the permanence and salvific wonder of the
next. One can also read this essential dualism in philosophical
terms, where Platonism provides the model for understanding
experience only as a temporal redaction of a higher realm of ex-
istence, where ideas, not the material, the practical, or the par-
ticular, are dominant. Yet however read, Emerson's "perfect sys-
tem of compensations" always required absolute confidence in
his culture's predisposition to aspire to and finally realize the
ideal, and Emerson affirmed—and reaffirmed—that confidence
throughout his career. For instance, in "Circles" he defined the
universe and all it contained as "fluid and volatile," as entities in
which "[p]ermanence is but a word of degrees," for events and
individuals "always walk as prophecies of the next age" (CW,
2:179-81). If along the way to the next age an individual or a cul-
ture seemed stuck at a negative moral, social, or political im-
passe, that moment in time did not compromise the ideal: For
Emerson, the ideal was larger than the individual or the culture.
When pressed for proof, Emerson had only to turn to the exam-
ple of nature to argue for the constancy of the ideal in spite of
any apparent evidence to the contrary:

And it seems as if nature, contemplating the long geologic

night behind her, when at last in five or six millenniums she
had turned out five or six men,—say, Phidias, Plato, Menu,
Columbus, was nowise impatient of the millions of disgusting
blockheads she had spawned along with them, but was well
 52 Ralph Waldo Emerson

contented with these few. These samples, she said attested the
virtue of the tree, these were a clear amelioration of trilobite
& saurus, and a good basis for further proceeding. The next
advancements should be more rapid. With this artist time &
space are cheap, & she is insensible to what you say of tedious
preparation. (JMN, 11:167; cf. CW, 4:45)

The attractiveness of Emerson's conception of the relation be-

tween the finite and the ideal, like that of his conception of nature
and its relation to life, is its elasticity: its capacity to find good
emerging from evil, its confidence that with mind fixed on the
ideal, each generation possesses and shares across the ages a "re-
cuperative power" to "make the sons of the miscreants of today
the benefactors [of] the next age" (JMN, 15:286; TN, 3:233). "The
first lesson of history," Emerson often said, "is the good of evil.
Good is a good doctor, but Bad is a better." Oppression, "savage
forest laws," and despotism made possible "the inspirations of [a]
Magna Charta"; in the nineteenth century, modern versions of
the same make possible a great democracy's realization of its aspi-
rations (JMN, 13:440, 458; TN, 3:125; "Considerations by the Way,"
W, 6:258). The "perfect system of compensations" upon which
nineteenth-century American minds like Emerson's relied and the
headiness of the times turned thus provided for genius alongside
"blockhead" mediocrity, for unprecedented levels of individual
freedom and power alongside institutions such as slavery, and
for poetry alongside apparent cultural dissolution. Emerson was
completely aware that even among the seemingly unqualified as-
pects of American promise and progress enumerated here—the
opening of the West, advancements in industry and invention,
and the like—misappropriations of power and the crudest forms
of inhuman behavior could be found. But he believed that these
abuses were transitory, not permanent, and that in America, as in
nature, they would be ameliorated over the sure, progressive evo-
lution of the culture.
"My . . . quarrel with America," Emerson once wrote after
debating the merits of American culture against English culture
with Henry David Thoreau, is "that the geography is sublime,
but the men are not; that the inventions are excellent, but the in-
 A Brief Biography 53

ventors, one is ashamed of; that the means by which events so

grand as the opening of California [and] Texas, . . . &C the junc-
tion of the two Oceans, are effected, are paltry, the filthiest self-
ishness, fraud, & conspiracy." Without absolute confidence in the
ideal, the juxtaposition between the sublime and the shameful in
human affairs as Emerson developed it here would surely lead
one to despair of the value of progress or invention as those
terms were understood in the nineteenth century. Emerson's
immediate response to the opposition of the sublime and the
shameful on this occasion was to identify this compensation in
the example of nature: 'As . . . we find in nature, that the ani-
malcule system is of ferocious maggot & hideous mite, who bite
& tear, yet make up the fibre & texture of nobler creatures; so all
the grand results of history are brought about by these disgrace-
ful tools" (JMJV, 11:284-85). As with poetry, which Emerson be-
lieved represented "faith" as well as "protest" in the "uproar of
atheism" that civilization could be (JMN, 13:239), nature, in this
case assisted by science, served as an indispensable lens through
which one could see through reality to the ideal. Here, by recog-
nizing the "nobler creatures" and the "grand results of history"
that emerge out of "disgraceful tools," Emerson showed practi-
cally how to "transfer our view to the Sea instead of the Shore, to
the energy instead of the limitation." While "disgusting block-
heads," like "ferocious maggotfs] & hideous mitefs]," may ap-
pear to prevail in one generation, their power is momentary and
soon transformed by the enduring impact on the human race of
a great philosopher like Plato, of a revered lawgiver like Menu,
or of a discoverer of new worlds like Columbus. Emerson ac-
knowledged as much in "Montaigne, or the Skeptic" in 1850,
when he admitted that there is always in this world a "chasm" be-
tween "the largest promise of ideal power" and "shabby experi-
ence": That, he said, is the reality of every person's life (CW,
4:104). A few years earlier, he had defined the shabbiness of expe-
rience: "Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise,
Reality, Subjectiveness,—these are the threads on the loom of
time, these are the lords of life" ("Experience," CW, 3:47). How-
ever, in "Montaigne, or the Skeptic," Emerson showed that to
survive these "lords" one had only to accept that through "the
 54 Ralph Waldo Emerson

years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and
atoms, a great beneficent tendency irresistibly streams" with this
"lesson of life": "believe what the years and the centuries say
against the hours; . . . resist the usurpation of particulars"
(CW, 4:104)-
At about the time that "Montaigne, or the Skeptic" appeared
in print, Emerson wrote in his journals, "We should kill our-
selves if we thought men . . . could derange the Order of Na-
ture" (JMN, 11:95). A decade later he reiterated that belief in
"Fate," developing it as an imaginative hedge against the anarchy
of material culture and the pessimism to which one would in-
evitably be drawn who ever lost faith in the constancy of the
ideal and in the good which that constancy implied for the
human condition: "If we thought men were free in the sense that
in a single exception one fantastical will could prevail over the
law of things, it were all one as if a child's hand could pull down
the sun. If in the least particular one could derange the order of
nature,—who would accept the gift of life?" (W, 6:48-49). Emer-
son's American New Testament, consistently idealistic and vi-
sionary, sustained his contemporaries in the work of establishing
a national identity and culture. The "order of nature" and the
constancy of the ideal were one and the same, and they moved
Americans to embrace "the gift of life" not only for themselves
but also, and more important, for the fulfillment of the promises
of the "great democracy" which, collectively, they had inherited.
In concert with nature, Americans could stand as individuals and
at the same time create out of themselves a culture exhibiting a
new mind and a new configuration of the race. Even the gross
barbarity of the Civil War did not deter Emerson's advocacy for
his new American testament. The war, the problems associated
with Reconstruction, and the rapid rise of a wealthy industrial
class that profited from the war and its aftereffects were not im-
pediments to the ideal but only, as he suggested in his lecture
"The Rule of Life" (1867), just a few more of "the very stairs on
which [the American] climbs" toward his realization of the ideal.
That ideal, he said, could be neither "profaned" by war or mate-
rialism nor "forced" into premature existence, for it followed
the slow but progressive "natural current" which he had earlier
 A Brief Biography 55

defined in "Montaigne, or the Skeptic" as "a great beneficent

tendency."
"I can be poor," Emerson wrote in "The Rule of Life," for

a good soul has the art of being poor, [and] does not need fine
cloths, nor sweet cake, and spiced food. . . . [I]n America,
there need be no poverty to the wise. America is the glorious
charity of God to the poor. If you go out west,—and you need
not go very far west, you may find multitudes of men in
America who bought last year a piece of land, and a house,
and with their own hands raised a crop which paid for their
land and buildings.

By their labor, Emerson's westward emigrants were slowly but

surely bringing to closure the ideal America that Crevecoeur and
Freneau had once imagined and in which Emerson fully believed;
through their labor, these Americans exercised personal power to
"defy the cold patron, the official secretaries, and the conservative
committees" that would otherwise deny them the opportunities
afforded to independent men in a democracy. "The Rule of Life"
was Emerson's final statement against the apparent primacy of
the "the lords of life." In that lecture he envisioned a land in which
"absolute justice" prevailed and men of "healthy perception"
dominated. There, he said, "a new feeling of humanity infused
into public action" would be found that would answer "the ques-
tions of the rights of women, the law of free trade, the treatment
of crime, and regulation of labor."14 Unlike Henry Adams, then,
Emerson, writing out of his confidence in "the order of nature"
and the constancy of the ideal, did not require another century of
experience to believe that the America which he and his contem-
poraries envisioned would be realized.
In a remarkable display of the seamlessness between theory
and practice, Emerson's new American testament also sustained
him personally in those dark hours when he suffered the loss of
family and friends, balanced between the justice of the Union
cause and the horror of the Civil War, and endured the inevitable
diminution of individual power that came with his own advanc-
ing age and infirmity. Over the last decade of his life, he appeared
 56 Ralph Waldo Emerson

in public with some regularity, sometimes as a lecturer, but more

often as a guest in the homes of friends, where he would con-
verse on poetics, morals, political reform, and the American na-
tional character—subjects that, still dear to his heart, seemed to
reinvigorate his mind. At other times, he could be found dis-
charging his duties as a Harvard Overseer, attending ceremonial
events in Boston or Concord, or participating in meetings of the
Radical and Saturday Clubs. The public tributes he received dur-
ing his journey to England and Egypt in 1872-1873 confirmed his
already acknowledged international stature, and throughout the
18703 the sales of a steady stream of publications appearing over
his name provided tangible reminders that, at home and abroad,
his ideas commanded as much attention and exerted as much in-
fluence as they ever had. Yet over that same decade, Emerson's
decisions to entrust his literary affairs to James Elliot Cabot and
his business affairs to his son-in-law William Hathaway Forbes,
and his increasing reliance on his daughter Ellen for his day-to-
day needs, were visible concessions by him to the inevitable. To
judge from his comments in the essay "Old Age," they were con-
cessions he willingly made.

When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well
spare. . . . But the central wisdom, which was old in in-
fancy, is young in fourscore years, and, dropping off obstruc-
tions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I
have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have
heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine
of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution.
The mode of it baffles our wit, . . . [but] the inference from
the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,—
at the end of life just ready to be born,—affirms the aspira-
tions of affection and of the moral sentiment. (W, 7:335-36)

NOTES
i. See Albert J. von Frank, An Emerson Chronology (New York: G.
K. Hall, 1994)-
 A Brief Biography 57

2. For Emerson's notebooks on books, seeJMN, 8:442-79, 550-76,

16:325-46; TN 2:199-255. Emerson's actual reading has been recon-
structed by Kenneth Walter Camerson; see Emerson's Reading
(Raleigh, N.C.: Thistle Press, 1941; rev. ed., Hartford, Conn.: Tran-
scendental Books, 1962); and Emerson's Workshop: An Analysis of His
Reading in Periodicals Through 1836 (Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental
Books, 1964). For a reconstruction of Emerson's personal library, see
Walter Harding, Emerson's Library (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1967).
3. The editions to which I refer are the Journals and Miscellaneous
Notebooks (JMN), Topical Notebooks (TN), Complete Sermons (CS), Col-
lected Works (CW), and The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1843-1871, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, forthcoming from
the University of Georgia Press.
4. "Country Life," which Emerson first delivered on i March
1858 as the opening lecture in a series entitled "Natural Method of
Mental Philosophy," will appear in full in the forthcoming Later Lec-
tures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871.
5. For examples of the latter, see Emerson to Carlyle, 19 April
1853, where Emerson discussed his inability to bring his lecture
"Fate" to an adequate conclusion, and Emerson to Carlyle, 17 June
1870 and 10 April 1871, where he judges his repeated efforts to bring
order to his twenty years' worth of lectures on philosophy dismal
failures (CEC, pp. 485, 570, 577-78).
6. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 2 vols., ed. Ralph Waldo
Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke
(1852; Boston: Roberts, 1884), 1:213.
7. Unfortunately, the texts from which Emerson lectured at Har-
vard no longer survive; nevertheless, Emerson's performance in 1870
and the gist of his lectures have been recently reconstructed from
the notes of two auditors. See Ronald A. Bosco, "His Lectures Were
Poetry, His Teaching the Music of the Spheres: Annie Adams Fields
and Francis Greenwood Peabody on Emerson's 'Natural History of
the Intellect' University Lectures at Harvard in 1870," Harvard Li-
brary Bulletin, n.s., 8 (Summer 1997): 1-79.
8. J. Hector St. John [de] Crevecoeur, Letters from an American
Farmer, ed. W P. Trent and Ludwig Lewishon (New York: Fox,
Dumeld and Co., 1904), p. 56.
9. Philip Freneau, "On the Emigration to America and Peopling
 58 Ralph Waldo Emerson

of the Western Country," lines i, 3-6, 37-42, 55-60. See The Poems of
Philip Freneau, 3 vols., ed. Fred Lewis Pattee (1907; New York: Russell
and Russell, 1963), 2:280-82.
10. Thomas Paine, "The Age of Reason," in The Life and Works of
Thomas Paine, 10 vols., ed. William M. Van der Weyde (New Ro-
chelle, N.Y.: Thomas Paine National Historical Association, 1925),
8:5.
11. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the
Administrations ofjejferson and Madison, 9 vols. (1891-1896; New York:
Antiquarian Press, 1962), 1:173,184.
12. Ibid., 9:242.
13. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," lines 1323-25. See Leaves of
Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 3 vols., ed. Scully
Bradley et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 1:82.
14. Emerson first delivered "The Rule of Life" on 12 May 1867 at
Fraternity Hall in Boston; he delivered it again on 12 March 1871 at
Horticultural Hall in Boston. The lecture, which has never been
published, will appear in full in the forthcoming Later Lectures of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871.
1-MliRSON IN
HIS T I M E
This page intentionally left blank
 "The Age of the
First Person Singular'
Emerson and Individualism

Wesley T. Mott

To believe your own thought . . . —that is genius.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?
. . . live ever in a new day.
"Self-Reliance" (CW, 2:27, 28, 29,33)

] nHi all'.pis,
rn lictures," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal
s^4o, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infini-
tude of i'-'i-*trivate man" (JMAT, 7:342). And he perceived that, for
"• , I':- <<;r,Tsiporaries' materialism and timidity, this was a kind
H r - h i i > faith for "the Age." 'A personal ascendency," he de-
, Luc A tr hi-- 841 "Introductory Lecture on the Times," "—that is
the only fact much worth considering" (CW, 1:169). Emerson was
America's great philosopher-psychologist-poet of the Self as well
as a keen observer of the characteristics of "the times." But his
true gift to his contemporaries, and to later generations, was his
ability to ignite in others an empowering sense of self-reliance.
As twenty-eight-year-old Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal

61
 62, Emerson in His Time

during the first winter of his Walden experiment, "Emerson has

special talents unequalled— The divine in man has had no more
easy methodically distinct expression." And he acknowledged his
generation's gratitude to his mentor: "His personal influence
upon young persons greater than any man's."1
Since the late 18305, Emerson has been a dominant presence in
American culture. He gave voice to the restlessness and idealism
of his age, and a younger generation turned to him for inspira-
tion. Even Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, though
they quarreled with his vision, could not ignore him. The count-
less thousands who read his books and attended his lectures—
whether they were baffled, stirred, or merely curious, whether
they thought of him as a dangerous heretic or the champion of a
new age—approached him as a celebrity. And, eventually, when
the passage of time smoothed out the edges of his early radical
reputation, he came to be regarded as a national treasure, an ora-
cle approached to reassure a sometimes troubled America that its
self-image was true, its mission on track. Today, on the verge of
the twenty-first century, invoked as often as Shakespeare or the
Bible by politicians and social commentators, in television com-
mercials and on uplifting greeting cards, Emerson remains, to
use that much overworked term, an American icon.
Usually, invoking Emerson proves harmless. Quoting the Sage
of Concord on the beauty of a snowstorm or a forest grove is in-
nocuous enough. But the matter becomes stickier when we in-
voke him to endorse political or social agendas. It matters a great
deal what Emerson meant when, for example, we quote him on
virtues and qualities relating to moral value or national purpose.
In the American experience, perhaps no abstract terms are more
emotionally or ideologically charged than self-reliance and indi-
vidualism, terms whose currency is generally credited to Emerson.
The perennial debate over the condition of the American
body politic, and even the state of the national psyche—so of-
ten fought over the implications of "individualism"—inevitably
comes back to Emerson. He is celebrated as an originator of our
virtues, and damned for releasing our vices. Ironically, for a
writer quoted to buttress so many self-images and ideologies,
Emerson has often seemed a cracked mirror reflecting a con-
 Emerson and Individualism 63

flicted culture's split personality. This should perhaps come as no

surprise, for critics have long observed that readings of Emerson
typically reflect his readers. Still, it is fair to ask why Emerson's
pronouncements on the "self" have inspired and empowered so
many while eliciting such a range of creative (mis)readings. Em-
erson often is thought to have desired through "self-reliance" to
transcend (read escape) the weight of time and history. But for
more than perhaps any other major American writer, history
may help to explain just what Emerson meant.

Uses of Emerson

"True genius," noted Emerson in "Uses of Great Men," "will not

impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses" (CW, 4:11).
Emerson himself has been a liberating god to generations of
readers. Without his support and example, Thoreau probably
would not have found his voice, and Whitman might not have
risen to the call for a new and genuine American poet. In the
twentieth century he has influenced writers as diverse as
Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Ralph Ellison.
More than any other major American writer except perhaps
Mark Twain and Thoreau (whose relevance to political and envi-
ronmental issues in the second half of the twentieth century has
been striking), Emerson has spanned the gulf separating letters
and academia from popular culture, transforming countless
more obscure readers who have found in his message of indi-
vidualism the strength to live their own lives. Edgar Lee Masters
once testified that Emerson spoke to a uniquely American search
for identity, reassuring us that "we had possibilities . . . that we
were potential geniuses, ready to expand wings and fly if we laid
our hands upon the springs of courage that were within us and
within the human breast everywhere."2 As a Texas high school
and college student, Grammy Award-winning musician Don
Henley responded similarly. Because of his tireless efforts to save
historic sites in Walden Woods threatened with development and
to establish a Thoreau Institute to carry on educational programs
and research on the Concord writers, Henley is more readily as-
 64 Emerson in His Time

sociated with Thoreau. But "Emerson's essay 'Self-Reliance,'" he

declares, "was one of the primary forces that motivated me to
become a song writer. It gave me confidence in myself."3
Emerson has not appealed only to sensitive, searching souls,
however. Legendary Ohio State football coach and military histo-
rian Woody Hayes—the same coach who in a nationally televised
game lunged onto the field and slugged an opposing player as he
scampered by the Ohio State bench with an interception—adored
the mild Concord philosopher: "Emerson," declared Hayes in a
lecture at Harvard during the 1982 centennial of Emerson's death,
"he's on my starting eleven. In fact, he's my No. i."4 And other
competitive types have found a soulmate in the Concord Sage. He
was the favorite author, for example, of Henry Ford.5 But if "self-
reliance" could be employed to validate aggressive, entrepreneur-
ial self-assertion, then, as many in the wake of the Great Depres-
sion came to think, Emersonian individualism must be a veil for
economic Darwinism, an endorsement of wealth and privilege.
Henry B. Parkes considered Emerson an optimist lacking a vision
of evil who naively thought "success . . . a result of moral good-
ness."6 Allen Tate concurred, mocking Emerson as "the light-
bearer who could see nothing but light, and was fearfully blind,"
who, lacking a tragic sense, "unwittingly became the prophet of a
piratical industrialism, a consequence of his own wordy individu-
alism that he could not foresee."7 Indeed, Emerson not only has
been linked to the release of commercial impulses; he also has
been used in commercials on television. A spot for Nike athletic
equipment that ran during the early 19905 showed rapid-fire shots
of supple, self-absorbed youths, as a muted voice-over intoned a
series of one-line aphorisms from Emerson's "Self-Reliance," all
culminating in Nike's crass trademark slogan designed for a narcis-
sistic, attention-span-impaired generation: "Just do it." What "it"
meant was less important than reassuring consumers that their
fleeting impulses, however unreflective, must surely be worthy of
acting on (all the better if a profit was to be made in the process!).
Although Emerson is cited to bolster mercantile and conser-
vative values, he also inspires innovators, rebels, those making a
stand for conscience. The essay "Self-Reliance" in this sense is
both a stirring call to personal freedom of thought and expres-
 Emerson and Individualism 65

sion, and the philosophical forerunner and underpinning of

Thoreau's enormously influential "Resistance to Civil Govern-
ment" ("Civil Disobedience"), which is usually regarded as a
more experiential or practical application of Emerson's ideals, a
ringing call for moral integrity instead of mere expediency in
politics. Although it has more often been Thoreau who has fired
the minds of reformers worldwide in the twentieth century—
Gandhi in South Africa and India, Martin Luther King, Jr., in
the 19608 civil rights movement in the United States, dissident
Chinese youth at Tiananmen Square in 1989—Emerson, too, has
been a beacon of individual liberty. Tolstoy considered him one
of the world's great thinkers, and much of the world has come to
regard Emersonian self-reliance itself as distinctively American.8
American students, too, are occasionally "turned on" by Emer-
sonian as well as Thoreauvian individualism. John Lydenberg
once recalled a leader of the militant student organization Stu-
dents for a Democratic Society declaring "that his actions made
him feel 'like an Emersonian man.'"9 Emerson even supplied the
radical sixties with two of its trademark terms when, in "Historic
Notes of Life and Letters in New England," he observed that
"[t]here are always two parties, the party of the Past and the
party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement" (W,
10:325; emphases added). In this spirit Karl Keller, in the waning
days of the interminable Vietnam War, found in the Emersonian
Self a staunch counterweight to imperialism.10
Even as Emerson has been malleable to competing doctrines,
however, he has often seemed strangely unapproachable. To
many he seems denatured—an abstract, cool, remote marble bust
of a figure. The widely held version of Emerson as a serene
philosopher above the din of the world was constructed in the late
nineteenth century, a period of extensive immigration and social
unrest. Polite middle-class readers found comfort invoking the
Waspish Sage of Concord—self-contained, peaceful, removed
from the strife of an increasingly alienating, threatening world.11
He was depicted during the 1903 centennial celebration of his
birth as, in Len Gougeon's words, "a cross between a conservative
Boston Brahmin and a captain of industry."12 Similarly, against the
Communist "menace" of the Cold War during the 19505 and
 66 Emerson in His Time

19605, Emerson as optimistic individualist appealed to conserva-

tive minds as a rock-solid embodiment of 'American" values. This
Emerson in twentieth-century popular mythology has become a
rhetorical symbol who, depending on one's politics, rose above, or
"transcended," the messy world of social unrest (the right-wing
figure), or wimped out while his counterpoint Thoreau heroically
went to jail for refusing to pay his poll tax as a protest against slav-
ery and the war with Mexico (the left-wing straw man). "Henry!
Henry!" the Left supposes Emerson to have asked. "What are you
doing in jail?" To which Thoreau supposedly retorted, "Waldo!
What are you doing out of jail?" To Emerson's activist detractors it
is beside the point that this episode never happened.13 Emerson
also has appeared in a New Yorker cartoon as a flaky, irrelevant ide-
alist and inept egghead who pontificates, "The only thing in the
world, of value, is the active soul" even as his suffering wife Lidian
complains, "The roof is leaking." To which the obtuse poet Waldo
offers, "By the rude bridge that arched the flood." This is only a
more patronizing version of satire that started with Christopher
Pearse Cranch's famous 1839 caricature of Emerson's account in
Nature of a surprising moment of oneness with the universe, in
which he becomes "a transparent eye-ball" (CW, 1:10): Cranch's
rendering of a huge eyeball, sporting a hat and mounted atop
spindly legs, contemplating a landscape, remains a classic spoof of
the mystical streak in Transcendentalism.14
Add to these contradictory versions of Emerson the difficult
nonlinear quality of his prose, and today's "general reader" knows
Emerson less as an author to be read and enjoyed than as a pur-
veyor of platitudinous wisdom or as a benchmark for certain cul-
tural values. But in academia, at least, Emerson has reemerged at
the twentieth century's end as a complex—even elusive—and con-
tinually stimulating writer. The proliferation of important new
editions and monographs inspired in part by the 1982 centennial of
his death shows no sign of abating, evidence of both the daunting
breadth of Emerson's work and the many ways in which he re-
mains central to American culture. Emerson, finally, is not a pro-
pagandist but a thinker and artist whose prose is deliberately
provocative, fluid, contradictory15—a fact easily overlooked by
polemicists. Oliver Wendell Holmes long ago remarked on the
 Emerson and Individualism 67

hazards of trying to appropriate his message: Emerson was "the

poet whom some admired without understanding, a few under-
stood, or thought they did, without admiring, and many both un-
derstood and admired,—among these there being not a small
number who went far beyond admiration, and lost themselves in
devout worship."16
And yet even in the academy, conjuring up the image of
Emerson as a timid or smug defender of the status quo has re-
mained rhetorically irresistible. The late president of Yale Uni-
versity A. Bartlett Giamatti told graduating seniors in 1981 that
Emerson is the source of that ugliest American trait, a "worship
of power." Emerson, he said, "freed our politics and our politi-
cians from any sense of restraint by extolling self-generated, un-
affiliated power as the best foot to place in the small of the back
of the man in front of you." Emerson allegedly rejected the past,
custom, and what Giamatti above all found lacking in American
culture, civility. "To Emerson," he proclaimed, "we owe that
spirit of Puritan America that has survived to today, the smug,
abstract moralism that is distrustful of any accommodation, that
is always certain of its righteousness because it is merely self-
regarding, that is scornful of any flexibility of spirit because it
has never looked over its shoulder."17 Giamatti was a dynamic
president, a charismatic baseball commissioner, and a respected
scholar of English Renaissance literature. But he might have read
more Emerson (his address was based on Emerson's essay
"Power") before trading in one of the oldest polemical cliches in
American literature. Giamatti's Emerson is an amoral monster
who anticipates the meanness of economic boosterism and jin-
goism, of Nietzsche, Hitler, the Vietnam War.
Much of our eagerness to either appropriate or ridicule Emer-
son derives from our national anxiety over the very significance
of "self" as both a social and an existential construct. Emerson's
emphasis on the individual has been accused, for example, of de-
stroying human bonds. Self-reliance, it has been alleged, makes
too great a demand on friendship. Wilson Carey McWilliams in
1973 found Emerson's "radical individualism and privatism . . .
so extreme that despite his own practice it could serve to moral-
ize disloyalty and self-seeking"; in effect, Emerson's theory of
 68 Emerson in His Time

friendship was nothing more than "a teaching of sublimation."18

Moreover, self-reliance has been accused of disdaining the com-
munal ties essential to religion and culture and of tending to an-
archy in politics. Quentin Anderson memorably charged Emer-
son with constructing an "imperial self" that results in "a denial
of history, membership in a generation, charity, reform, institu-
tional means of every sort."19 Indeed, Emerson has recently
been blamed for the extreme forms of self-absorption, self-help,
and self-therapies spawned during the selfish 19805. In their best-
selling sociological inquiry into the erosion of community in
American life, Habits of the Heart (1985), Robert N. Bellah and his
colleagues explained that "the current focus on a socially unsitu-
ated self from which all judgments are supposed to flow is a de-
velopment out of aspects of American selfhood that go all the
way back to the beginning." They note, however, that it was
Emerson who "popularized" the term self-reliance, and "it still
comes easily to the tongues of many of those to whom we
talked." And Emerson comes in for much of the blame for per-
verting a concept he initially conceived as a challenge to con-
formity. "Most of us," Bellah and his team assert, "imagine an
autonomous self existing independently, entirely outside any
tradition and community, and then perhaps choosing one."
The resulting moral vacuousness of what is derisively called
the "Me Generation" they trace directly to Emerson's essay "Self-
Reliance."20
What we make of Emersonian individualism, then, is no mere
academic exercise but a matter central to our cultural identity.
Does he call out our best instincts or justify aggressive competi-
tion? Does he champion human rights and justice or endorse in-
stitutional power? Is he a clueless philosopher or a sinister shill
for vested interests? Emerson's use as a straw man often serves
noble purposes. But in quoting Emerson, as with Shakespeare
and the Bible, context is everything. Self-reliance and individualism
being inherently abstract terms, the uses to which we put Emer-
son say more about us and our rhetorical needs than about him.
It is possible to reconstruct the world in which Emerson actu-
ally declared his doctrine of self-reliance. Much of the paradox of
Emerson's legacy can be explained by the competing definitions
 Emerson and Individualism 69

of individualism that arose from tensions within European and

American culture during the 18305 and 18405, the period that saw
the publication of his seemingly most affirmative (and until re-
cently his most canonical) writings. The Emerson who emerges
from this context is far richer and more challenging (if less handy
as a rhetorical cudgel) than the self-canceling stereotypes of the
champions and detractors we have just seen.

Emerson in His Time

"Just do it," the commercial slogan of the 19805 and early 19905,
exploited a trademark phrase of the defiantly idealistic 19605—
"Do your own thing." This phrase, in turn (ironically, consider-
ing its fate in American culture), may be traced to Emerson's
ringing challenge in "Spiritual Laws" to "convert" "that thing
you do" "into the obedient spiracle of your character and aims"
(CW, 2:83). Emerson's own aim here is to call us to fulfill our
highest "vocation," just as, in using a variation on the phrase in
"The American Scholar" (CW, 1:64), he had called for ethical
thought and action that partakes of the very divinity of creation.
As Robert D. Richardson, Jr., has written, "[T]he central work of
[Emerson's] life was to be uncovering and making available those
sources of power that exist in people and in the world."21
But what kind of power? "It is said to be the age of the first per-
son singular," Emerson noted in his journal early in 1827 under the
heading "Peculiarities of the present Age." More than a generic ob-
servation that his contemporaries were newly preoccupied with
private matters, this journal entry lists six other major manifesta-
tions of the times. Among these are the spread of the English lan-
guage and the reform impulse, including the tendency to associ-
ate into societies "to promote any purpose." Particularly
significant for our purposes are the fourth and sixth, in which
Emerson observes both intellectual and economic forces trans-
forming the age: "4. Transcendentalism. Metaphysics & ethics
look inwards—and France produces Mad. de Stael; England,
Wordsworth; America, Sampson Reed; as well as Germany, Swe-
denborg.—. . . . 6) The paper currency. / Joint stock compa-
 jo Emerson in His Time

nies" (JMN, 3:70-71). Other forces shaping Emerson's sense of

individualism might be noted here: the legacy of the American
Revolution, with its elevation of personal political liberty; the
emergence of Unitarianism, or "liberal Christianity," with its re-
jection of Calvinist doctrines of human depravity and its liberat-
ing emphasis on human potential for moral growth;22 and the
election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, which would soon transform
Emerson's understanding of American politics. Emerson's jour-
nal list does reveal, however, his early awareness of the emergence
of sometimes antagonistic kinds of individualism that, ironically,
would later create confusion and argument over whose values
Emerson himself endorsed. Boston's population boomed in the
18205, although a painful recession loomed in 1828. Emerson
rarely quarreled with the market economy per se, instead target-
ing the broader issue of materialism, and he counted successful
businessmen among his early parishioners and friends; George
Sampson, he thought, exemplified the possibility of virtue in the
marketplace. Although he saw the dawning importance of laissez-
faire capitalism in American life, it would be decades before the
appearance of terms such as "rugged individualism" and "self-
made man," labels initially worn as badges of honor by successful
entrepreneurs but tainted later in the century by association with
the avarice of economic Darwinism and the "robber barons." Nor
could Emerson yet see the full implications of the young nation's
expansionist impulse that would popularly be called "Manifest
Destiny," a slogan that would lose its original connotation of ide-
alistic mission to spread democracy when it was invoked in the
18405 to rationalize war with Mexico, lingering as an ugly signifier
of American foreign policy.
The elements that Emerson labels "Transcendentalism," how-
ever, are a good starting point to understand the intellectual
sources of his concept of individual identity that would become
"self-reliance." Emerson's essays are sprinkled with evidence of a
rich foreground, and as he would later write in "Intellect," he
knew that even that most personal matter of inspiration is no
simple gift to the lazy: "[I]n a moment, and unannounced, the
truth appears. . . . But the oracle comes, because we had previ-
ously laid siege to the shrine" (CW, 2:197). All his life Emerson
 Emerson and Individualism 71

laid siege to the shrine by constant reading and conversation.

Phyllis Cole recently has revealed, moreover, what—given our
simplistic preconceptions about "Emersonian individualism"—
can only be called a stunning irony: the fact that Emerson's very
sense of self-reliance was arrived at collaboratively with his bril-
liant and independent Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, who intro-
duced him to an eclectic range of classical and new philosophy
and literature, encouraged him to articulate his ideas, and even
provided key concepts and terms that we now consider "Emer-
sonian."23 Emerson's generation was awash with both traditional
and radical movements proclaiming the moral centeredness and
innate sanctity of the individual, but he assimilated these ideas
and gave them fresh expression ,24
"Metaphysics & ethics look inwards." Or, as Emerson ex-
plained in 1841, the age had come to reject the dominant meta-
physics of John Locke, which held that the mind perceives truth
from external facts and experiences mediated by the senses: The
"Idealism" of the day came to be called Transcendental, Emer-
son claimed, from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant's use
of the term to refer to ideas that are "intuitions of the mind
itself" (CW, 1:207). Emerson was oversimplifying things. Locke
was no leaden materialist; the American Transcendentalists'
use of Kant was somewhat freewheeling; and Emerson himself
knew better than to confuse every fleeting whim or mood with
genuine intuition. Nevertheless, Emerson became the leading
American spokesman for a new metaphysics coming from Eu-
rope, largely via such British commentators as Thomas Carlyle
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that announced the inner reserves
of each person to know truth. Emerson's generation had been
prepared for such new ideas by the Scottish Common Sense phi-
losophy that dominated the Harvard curriculum in the early
nineteenth century. Thinkers such as Thomas Reid and Dugald
Stewart, writing in large part to answer the skepticism of David
Hume, were concerned to establish a basis for ethics by showing
empirically how the mind works to apprehend truth. Each per-
son, they believed, possesses a timeless and universal moral sense
that can be cultivated. Implicit in their teaching was introspec-
tion, which, combined with the idealist teachings of German
 72 Emerson in His Time

philosophers and theologians, reached a young American audi-

ence anxious to find a moral basis to challenge what they per-
ceived to be stagnant institutions and corrosive social problems.
Emerson's classical training—especially Plutarch's Lives and
Morals—afforded examples of ethical conduct and heroism, and
Plato, with his Doctrine of Forms declaring the reality of the
Ideal, held lifelong fascination. Emerson was deeply grounded
in the Stoics, who demonstrated the divinity of the Creation;
the importance of ascetic, virtuous living; and, perhaps most im-
portant for Emerson, the perpetual change, flux, and transition
that pervades the laws of nature. The Swedish mystic Emanuel
Swedenborg was a more modern advocate of the "correspon-
dences" the mind perceives between the natural and spiritual
realms, and Emerson was drawn enthusiastically to the contem-
porary American Swedenborgian Sampson Reed, whose "Ora-
tion on Genius" (1821) and Observations on the Growth of the Mind
(1826) proclaimed the divinity of Nature and "the powers of the
mind." Young Americans theologically trained to examine the
state of the soul also eagerly received new concepts of human
nature, the imagination, and artistic expression emanating from
British and European Romanticism. Emerson responded warmly
to Byron's restless depiction of the soul and, more lastingly, to
Wordsworth's elevation of the common man as a topic of litera-
ture, his concept of the poet as seer, his exploration of solitude as
both occasion for and subject of contemplation, and his celebra-
tion of the soul's mystical connection with nature. From the Ger-
man Goethe, whom Emerson encountered in translation as early
as 1827 and regarded as a heroic modern figure, he learned to ap-
preciate natural processes and, accordingly, to understand an or-
ganic aesthetics of fluid form.25 Emerson's radical faith in the di-
vinity of each person also closely resembles the Quaker concept
of the Inner Light, or indwelling of Christ's spirit in each human
breast; Emerson turned to Quaker writings during crises in his
own life and often declared his affinity with that sect's commit-
ment to truth and reform.
Cumulatively, these components of Emerson's education and
experience point toward the dignity of the individual, indeed, the
divinity of each soul. And together they suggest why the term
 Emerson and Individualism 73

Transcendentalist is something of a misnomer in the New En-

gland context: Theologically, transcendent refers to a God who is
above or apart from the world; Emerson's God, or Over-Soul, is
detectable by the mind as pervading the entire Creation, includ-
ing the soul, and is therefore an immanent divinity, perception
of whom energizes the individual. By training and inclination
Emerson posed basic questions related to identity: Who am I?
Where am I? Why am I here? What ought I to do as a moral
being?26 We must discard, then, stereotypes of Emerson as a self-
created Romantic visionary who merely rejected the past, of a
hermetically sealed prophet of easy inspiration. His doctrine of
intuition, moreover, is no less radical for being the product (as his
journals and manuscripts further testify) not of lightning flashes
of insight but of extensive reading, years of reflection, and care-
ful revision. Emerson's self-reliance is not merely the sum total of
influences or abstract ideas but rather the most striking expres-
sion by an American of a historic international shift in the very
structure of sentiment and feeling.
Emerson's challenge as a minister, lecturer, and essayist was to
find fresh ways of naming and describing the age's new sense of
personal power without relying on the institutional language of
churches, schools, and politics. Several of his most striking terms
and phrases have come to seem familiar and stale over a century
and a half, while others have been metamorphosed beyond any-
thing he would have recognized or approved. Long a charged
term in American life, individualism still bedevils literary and cul-
tural critics and readers of Emerson. But in Emerson's young
adulthood the term scarcely existed. In Noah Webster's American
Dictionary of the English Language, published in 182,8, the year be-
fore twenty-five-year-old supply preacher Waldo Emerson would
be ordained by Second Church in Boston, the term individualism
was not to be found.27 Individual was defined straightforwardly
as "[a] single person or human being," and even individuality was
matter-of-factly given as "[s]eparate or distinct existence; a state
of oneness." Just as tellingly, Webster offered no definition of self-
culture or self-reliance, terms that were central to the emerging
culture of liberal Unitarianism and, soon thereafter, Emersonian
Transcendentalism. Webster conceived even of self as primarily a
 74 Emerson in His Time

component of pronouns; his "Use 3" only hinted at Romantic

connotations of the term: "Self is sometimes used as a noun, not-
ing the individual subject to his own contemplation or action, or
noting identity of person. Consciousness makes every one to be
what he calls self."
As a young minister at the Second Church in Boston (1829-
1832), Emerson was already wrestling with the implications of
the "Self"—an unfashionable term in the late twentieth century,
when literary theorists have treated "self-construction," accord-
ing to Daniel Walker Howe, "as essentially pathological."28 But
to Emerson, immersed in intersecting traditions that valued
habits leading to moral growth, nurturing the self was life's great
project. A theological liberal, he encouraged his parishioners
to cultivate God's gifts, reason and feeling, in the unending
growth of the soul to approach the "likeness to God" preached
by his hero William Ellery Channing in his acclaimed 1828 ordi-
nation sermon for the Reverend F. A. Farley in Providence,
Rhode Island. The doctrine of likeness would always be for Emer-
son not license to boast Godlike power but rather a standard
against which to measure character. Although Emerson retained
a strong New England Puritan sense of the snares to which
human nature is vulnerable, he eventually went beyond Chan-
ning in drawing out the implications of the potential divinity in
each person, insisting on the literalness of his favorite Scripture
verse, "[B]ehold, the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke
17:21).29 But he remained concerned with the "twofold nature in
every individual," the "strange dualism" that is humanity's bur-
den as well as glory (CS, 4:219). And so, like Benjamin Franklin in
his concern with "practical considerations," he urged self-im-
provement not as self-promotion but as "duty" (4:72). The nine-
teenth century, he knew, enjoyed "freedom of choice of pursuit,"
which is to be preferred over old constraints of heredity; but he
went on in a Puritan vein to caution that with this blessing more
is asked of us. Are we "better" (4:73)? Scriptures declare us "a law
to ourselves" (Romans 2:14 [CS, 4:74]), but the habits we develop
fit or unfit us, he thought, for the afterlife (4:75).
Emerson's more Transcendental notion of self-reliance begins
to appear even in earlier sermons but always with qualifications.
 Emerson and Individualism 75

Despite our partial perception of truth, for example, Emerson

believed in the unity of "[m]oral excellence," as exemplified in
the aphorisms of the ancients (2:41). Although he believes in the
instinctual "perception of right in the soul," his focus is not on
freedom and self-assertion but on "self-command" (2:42). Indi-
vidual accountability is of paramount concern for the modern
Christian because all history is marked by the "struggle" of rea-
son with pride (2:44). Emerson was faced, then, with the paradox
of our "free agency" and our "dependence on God" (2:71). Even
our "social life" is at odds with "independence of character."
How, then, do we distinguish among persons and judge behav-
ior? "The merit of all action," Emerson stresses, "is measured by
the principle" (2:73); and he defines immortality itself as the
"transferring of the whole being from self to God" (2:74).
In a Fast Day sermon given first in April 1830, moreover,
Emerson emphasized the importance to the individual of "civil
relations." The government, he thought, should be "out of
sight" (2:162), leaving its citizens "in entire freedom"; he praises
the government for intruding only in matters of taxes and the
jury system, and finds it a positive force in actually redressing
problems. But as he surveys the social scene, he finds cause for
worry. He sees "a licentious press" serving "party purposes," and
"selfishness" plaguing the "common usages of trade." Pervading
all affairs is the problem of "Self interest," which fosters "dis-
union." All have a stake in civic matters, and politics is essentially
a measure of "private virtue" (2:163-64). And since this is so, what
is needed above all is the salutary influence of "a solitary indi-
vidual" (2:165). Here again the Emersonian paradox comes full
circle: the virtuous individual is not self-seeking but selfless, act-
ing according to principle. The purpose of life, he says in another
sermon, is "conducting life well," an "unceasing effort at self cul-
ture." This process, always accompanied by laws of "retribution"
and "compensation," demands constant watchfulness (2:246-48).
When Emerson begins in his sermons to use "self-reliance" b
name, then, his listeners were fully aware that he refers not to
one's lower, materialistic, egotistical "self" but to one's higher,
principled, moral Self. In this sense he can declare that we must
not "distrust" ourselves but instead must "value our own souls"
 76 Emerson in His Time

(2:263). Great men, he explains, exhibit "individuality" of charac-

ter but similarity of "purposes." Society exhibits superficial
"tame resemblance of one man's thoughts and conversation to
another's" (2:264). We must not, however, "imitate any being"
(2:265) but rather cultivate that "self-reliance which grows out of
the Scripture doctrine of the value of the soul" (2:266). Though
no worshiper of the past, Emerson had great respect for the
lessons of history, and he had long been interested in biography
as moral exempla modeled by heroes. Never a "hero worshiper"
in the manner his friend Carlyle came to advocate, Emerson
regarded biography as one more piece of ballast to stabilize the
self against the risks of mere self-regard. As he would state in
"Uses of Great Men" in Representative Men (1850), "Other men are
lenses through which we read our own minds" (CW, 4:4). And in
his sermons dawned a more Romantic, or Transcendental,
theory of biography whereby the individual does not copy but
rather is the measure of the virtues and flaws of "great men."30
Self-trust, he insists in one sermon, solves the problem of "rote"
religion. "The only way for a man to become religious is to be so
by himself." To "trust in self" is a God-given imperative, so long
as you remember the "origin of self," which is God (3:202).
All this concern with self-examination, effort, and humility—
all this dedication to what Emerson calls "social duties," "noble"
as opposed to "selfish passions," and charity based on "love of
God" (3:84, 87)—may sound to the modern ear like priggish
moralism; the inspiring, provocative, even radical Emerson of the
great essays may seem to have gone into eclipse. Emerson, how-
ever, calls this selfless moral life "sublime" (3:87, 90), and his life-
long commitment to moral purpose is the key to understanding
what he means by self-reliance.
Even as a teenager Emerson associated the moral philosophy
of the ancients with contemporary behavior (JMN, 1:341), and
the moral sentiment provided an alternative to Calvinistic deter-
minism as he reflected on free will (JMN, 2:146-47). He came to
regard the "immortality of moral truth" not as a merely reflec-
tive, intellectual process but as an activity (JMN, 3:21); and in the
summer following the death of Ellen, he was associating the
"moral sublime" with "hearpng] of a person of noble feelings," an
 Emerson and Individualism 77

emotion that can be provoked by reading (he cites the verse of

Edward Young as well as Shakespeare and Bacon [JMN, 3:274]).
By 1836 the "moral sublime" has become more fully defined, em-
bracing not simply moral standards, conscience, behavior, and
beauty but feeling as well. Over the course of his life, Emerson's
thought and writing evolved from the exhortations of his Unitar-
ian sermons, to the Romantic exuberance of his great Transcen-
dentalist lectures and essays, to more pragmatic considerations
of human limitations. The constant factor in his intellectual life,
however, is a conviction that all personal growth and expression
exists in a moral context, an ethical imperative that does not stifle
the individual but, to the contrary, gives our lives vital, even
heroic, purpose.31 In his early lectures and essays, Emerson was
now ready to give expression in a distinctly American setting to
the spirit of a new age that he had encountered in the 18205.
By 2 March 1837, when Emerson rose at the Masonic Temple
to deliver his lecture "The Individual," he was articulating ideas
that he had been contemplating for years and that decades of ear-
lier writers had also rehearsed. But he was on uncharted ground.
The Revolution had declared all men politically equal; the Com-
mon Sense philosophers had declared the moral sense innate in
all people; and the Romantics had exalted imagination and cre-
ation as a divine liberation. What this meant for life in a competi-
tive free-market democracy, however, was far from clear. As the
editors of this lecture observe, Emerson actually titled the lec-
ture "The Individual," the term individualism not then being "in
common usage" (EL, 2:173). Indeed, as Koenraad W. Swart ex-
plained in a pioneering essay, the term from its beginnings in Eu-
rope had a "perplexing variety of meanings": "first, the idealistic
doctrine with equalitarian implications of the rights of man, or
what may be called political liberalism; secondly, the anti-statist,
largely utilitarian doctrine of laissezfaire, or economic liberalism;
thirdly, the aristocratic cult of individuality, or Romantic indi-
vidualism."32 Emerson at various times seems to endorse each of
these often mutually canceling ideologies, which has com-
pounded the difficulty of locating the "tradition" of individual-
ism to which he belongs: (i) He believed that all people partake
of the "Universal Mind" and therefore innately possess the dig-
 78 Emerson in His Time

nity and responsibility of self-reliance, a conviction that led him

inexorably to speak out on matters of social injustice, especially
slavery; (2) although he lamented the materialism of the age, he
could declare "[t]he Marine Railway, the U.S. Bank, the Bunker
Hill monument [among the] perfectly genuine works of the
times" (JMN, 5:150), and he had faith that, properly employed,
money is, "in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses" (CW, 3:136
[a statement that F. O. Matthiessen found "staggeringly inno-
cent"]); and, of course, (3) he continually declared the virtual di-
vinity of the private individual, which, we have seen, derives
from several traditions.33 In the lecture that preceded "The Indi-
vidual," Emerson had described "The Present Age" as "The Age
of Trade," a politically liberating force but one that risked intel-
lectual "bribery" with the unleashing of "large masses," popular
opinion, and superficiality (EL, 2:160,161). It was "an age of facts
and not of principles"; and for all the dynamic forces unleashed
in such a time, "we pay a great price for this freedom" (166,169).
"The Individual" draws on Emerson's classical, Christian, and
Romantic ideals to awaken his audience to reserves of character
still dormant in this "era of the increased political and moral
power of individuals" (EL, 2:173). What he calls "society" divides
the individual, who fails to perceive that the "improvements of
our day are mechanical and do not exalt man" (175). The new in-
dividual, potentially as great as the heroes of antiquity, "finds
again like them new perils to virtue." Emerson is convinced that
"[a]ll men are of one essence" (178), a stance that deters arro-
gance, injustice, and selfishness even as it affords a moral base for
truth by positing the "identity" of truth "from the first to the last
seer" (180). Indeed, arriving at principles "imposes a new duty
upon the cultivated mind of our time" (181). The fully realized in-
dividual has achieved not prosperity but a kind of stoic wisdom
"that his place is as good as any place; his fortunes as good as
any" (185). Such an individual has experienced truth personally,
but the experience affirms a sense of cosmic place—"the eternity
of man; the identity of the soul in every age" (187).
By 1842, however, Emerson was noting that many of his
reform-minded contemporaries "think that the vice of the age is
 Emerson and Individualism 79

to exaggerate individualism, & they adopt the word I'humanite"

(JMN, 8:249). In France especially, at least until the revolution of
1848, individualism was a pejorative term implying either the so-
cial disruptions of capitalism or Romantic tendencies to "eccen-
tricity" or "isolation."34 "'Democratic individualism,'" Lawrence
Buell has observed, is "something of an oxymoron."35 And al-
ready in the mid-i83os, of course, the French social critic Alexis
de Tocqueville was shrewdly observing a pattern of tensions,
ironies, and awkward paradoxes in American life. He saw a cul-
ture proclaiming the ascendancy of the individual, where intro-
spection was rarely found; a society boasting its foundation on
religious principles, where religious tenets and institutions sel-
dom informed public life; a democracy of equality and freedom,
where conformity and the "tyranny of the majority" often sup-
pressed minority opinions. Tocqueville noted, " Individualism' is
a word recently coined to express a new idea. Our fathers only
knew about egoism." The new idea might seem less insidious:
"Egoism springs from a blind instinct; individualism is based on
misguided judgment rather than depraved feeling." But by what-
ever name, the result was withdrawal from a sense of history and
from community. Moreover, Tocqueville observed that "[i]ndi-
vidualism is of democratic origin and threatens to grow as condi-
tions get more equal."36 Emerson would read Democracy in
America in April 1841 and meet Tocqueville in Paris in May 1848.
But in much the same spirit he had already been forming his own
opinions about the paradoxes of American democracy. "When I
spoke or speak of the democratic element," he wrote in his jour-
nal in September 1836, "I do not mean that ill thing vain & loud
which writes lying newspapers, spouts at caucuses, & sells its lies
for gold, but that spirit of love for the General good whose name
this assumes. There is nothing of the true democratic element in
what is called Democracy; it must fall, being wholly commercial"
(JMN, 5-.2.03).37
This helps to explain why Emerson's important little book Na-
ture (1836), published six months before he presented the lecture
"The Individual," declares the priority of the individual even as it
resists the American doctrine of self-assertion. In a famous pas-
 8o Emerson in His Time

sage Emerson evokes the moment of mystical awareness not as a

moment of "mean egotism" or of Romantic defiance but of one-
ness, of selflessness:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that

nothing can befal me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leav-
ing me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the
bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted
into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a
transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of
the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle
of God. (CW, 1:10)

A sense of genuine well-being consisted in an awareness of one's

microcosmic place in a changing universe of fixed law, a stance
that enacted both the Gospel declaration that in order to find
one's life one "shall lose it" (Matt. 10:39) and the cosmic accep-
tance Emerson was discovering in Eastern philosophy; indeed,
true self-discovery meant an abandonment of what is usually
meant by self. A platonist and spiritualist, Emerson saw the cor-
ruption of political and economic aggression as well as the fail-
ure of conventional models of spirituality. Like his European
contemporaries, he thus had trouble with the concept of sepa-
rateness, and available terminology failed him. "Who shall define
to me an Individual?" he wrote in May 1837. "I behold with awe
& delight many illustrations of the One Universal Mind. I see my
being imbedded in it. As a plant in the earth so I grow in God.
. . . Hard as it is to describe God, it is harder to describe the In-
dividual" (JMN, 5:336-37). "Self-reliance," which we have seen
Emerson already using by 1830 in his sermons, is perhaps a term
closer to the idea of individual identity that Emerson was trying
to describe.38 But even in his great essay "Self-Reliance" he wor-
ries that the very term self-reliance is inadequate to describe the
openness to and influx of truth, which is, after all, the purpose of
solitude, reflection, and integrity:

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the in-
stant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a
 Emerson and Individualism 81

past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting

to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes;
. . . Why then do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the
soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent.
To talk of reliance, is a poor external way of speaking. Speak
rather of that which relies, because it works and is. (CW, 2:40)

Emerson emphasizes organic process over final accomplishment,

and as in his more conventional sermons, he still implies a source
of inspiration and vitality that is greater than, but pervades and
animates, the individual. As Merton M. Sealts, Jr., demonstrates,
moreover, Emerson's concept of the 'American Scholar" is not
confined to the inner life of the individual but implies a public
mission "to awaken the intellect in others."39
Emerson's ongoing critique of America's materialism and cri-
sis of spirit is not a solitary, Byronic lament but, in the vein of
Carlyle's "Signs of the Times" (1829) or "Characteristics" (1831), a
moral critique of the age. And for Emerson the problem was
partly, in today's jargon, a generation gap. Nature begins with the
well-known complaint that "[o]ur age is retrospective. It builds
the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and
criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face
to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an
original relation to the universe?" (CW, 1:7). Emerson frequently
gives voice to his generation's desire to make its own mark. Na-
ture's scheme of spiraling ascent of human uses of the phenome-
nal world, from material "commodity" to "spirit" and "pros-
pects," suggests an impulse both to harness and to surmount the
materialism of the age. (The panic of 1837 would only confirm
the folly of placing undue faith in the things of the world.)40
Emerson's essays and lectures, although surely not social or eco-
nomic treatises, are more than abstract philosophical medita-
tions; they are spiked with rather specific complaints about
American values.
Even as Emerson targets economic and political excesses of
the age, he refuses to offer as an alternative a retreat into some
idealized, uncontaminated solitude. An unassuming man him-
self, Emerson does not invite his reader to smugness or arro-
 82 Emerson in His Time

gance. For all the aspirations encouraged in Nature, for example,

he reminds us that at present, in actuality, "[a] man is a god in
ruins" (CW, 1:42). And for all the confidence Americans exhibit,
he observed ennui and self-doubt. In "The Individual" he de-
clares, "The age is infected with the malady of Hamlet" (EL,
2:180). We are no longer afflicted by the Puritans' "fear of Sin,"
he notes in his "Introductory Lecture on the Times," but "our
torment is Unbelief, the Uncertainty as to what we ought to do"
(CW, 1:179). His lecture and essay "The Transcendentalist" (CW,
1:201-16), carefully couched in the third-person voice, is a portrait
not only of idealism but also of a generation's alienation from
American life and failure, at present, to find an alternative course.
Inspiration itself, so central to the Transcendentalist, could not
be sustained continually. Even in his late lecture "The Preacher,"
he still finds himself "in a moment of transition" with a crisis of
belief and authority. "We are born too late for the old," he
laments, "and too early for the new faith" (W, 10:217). Not the
beaming optimist of stereotype, Emerson knew ambivalence
and displacement.
Emerson thus critically examined his age's celebration of indi-
vidualism, but he did not stand at some Olympian distance to
sniff and scoff. He shared, and gave expression to, the expansive
spirit of the 18305 without becoming its dupe, as exemplified by
his selectively enthusiastic appropriation of the heroic and
mythic Davy Crockett. The epigraph of the colorful frontiers-
man and politician's self-promotional autobiography became the
defining slogan of Emerson's assertive, even cocky, generation:
"Be always sure you're right—THEN GO AHEAD!"41 Quickly short
ened to "Go ahead" (minus the original ethical qualification) in
Davy Crockett's Almanacks and in the popular mind, the slogan
immediately caught on even in Emerson's Yankee Boston. The
Daily Evening Transcript reprinted several anecdotes that turned
on the phrase for purposes ranging from broad humor to proud
boosterism. One tells of a "fellow," always spouting the phrase,
who habitually falls asleep in church. At one service the "clergy-
man had pronounced the words 'in conclusion,' when up
jumped the fellow and exclaimed, 'Well, then, go ahead!'" (n
June 1834, p. 2). A very different anecdote boasts of two locomo-
 Emerson and Individualism 83

tives being built in Lowell, "where the union of the best Yankee
and foreign mechanical skill produces the highest perfection in
machinery. One is to be called the 'Double Speeder,' and the other,
'David Crockett,' and when they 'go ahead' it will be in earnest" (25
July 1834, p. 2). Humor underlies this anecdote too—but it turns
on a pun that appeals to the self-satisfied spirit of an entrepre-
neurial city outwardly confident of where it is going, and how it
is getting there.
Emerson's stance toward Crockett is especially revealing be-
cause Emerson's own relation to the West, or the frontier, is often
cited as an index of his distinctly "American" qualities. "The cardi-
nal points of his teaching—optimism, melioration, democracy, in-
dividualism, self-reliance—derive their chief sanction and mean-
ing," wrote Ernest Marchand in 1931, "from the psychology bred
by the American frontier."42 The classic theorist of the shaping in-
fluence of the American West, Frederick Jackson Turner, already
had declared in 1920 that "the most important effect of the frontier
has been in the promotion of democracy . . . [and] individual-
ism." But Turner had observed a dark side to the frontier expe-
rience. Akin to "selfishness," "[ijndividualism in America has
allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has ren-
dered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that fol-
low from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit."43 Ever since
William Bradford described the Pilgrims' impression of Cape Cod
in 1620 as "a hideous and desolate wilderness," the menace of the
frontier has been a strain in American thought. When Creve-
coeur posed the question "What is an American?" during the
American Revolution, he observed ambivalently that the frontier
promotes not only independence and vitality but also degeneracy,
lawlessness, drunkenness, and violence.44
In assessing Emersonian individualism and its relation to na-
ture and the frontier, we confront both history and myth. Was
the American West a field of egalitarian opportunity or an arena
(in Albert J. von Frank's phrase) of "predatory individualism"?45
The fact is, Harvard-educated sometime minister Emerson was
fascinated by Crockett, whose autobiography he encountered in
the months when Nature was taking shape in his journals. Pub-
lished in 1836, the year Crockett was killed at the Alamo, Nature
 84 Emerson in His Time

famously asserts, among other key Transcendentalist tenets,

the "radical correspondence between visible things and human
thoughts" (CW, 1:19). "This immediate dependence of language
upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a
type of somewhat in human life," he goes on, "never loses its
power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the con-
versation of a strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman, which
all men relish" (20), a passage previously used in the 1834 lec-
ture "The Naturalist" (EL, 1:71) and the 1835 lecture "English Lit-
erature: Introductory" (EL, 1:222). Emerson's correspondential
theory of language is indebted, it is well known, to Platonic and
Swedenborgian philosophy. But behind Nature's statement that
the generic backwoodsman is an originator of language is, quite
specifically, Davy Crockett.46 In the 1835 lecture, the sentence
about the "piquancy" of the backwoodsman's "conversation" is
followed by reference to a colorful phrase Emerson himself rel-
ished: "I showed him the back of my hand." This phrase, too, is
attributed simply to "a backwoodsman"; but an 1835 journal
entry indicates that Emerson considered it to be Crockett's
(JMN, 5:64; see also JMN, 6:168; TN, 2:324; and W, 8:14, where,
however, he attributes the phrase to "our Kentuckian orator").
And another 1835 journal entry praises Crockett and a handful of
others for using the "language of Nature" (JMN, 5:78). The fall
of the Alamo provided the nation with a motive and a rallying
cry for the war with Mexico (1846-1848), which Emerson and
many New Englanders vehemently protested as a veiled means
of expanding the slave territory. Crockett, however, remained in
Emerson's imagination not a jingo but a figure of democratic
integrity, a man with a gift for transforming experience into
forceful metaphor (TN, 1:56). He had also become an American
martyr. Decades later Emerson would welcome armed conflict
in a just cause, supporting the Civil War as a war of liberation,
the only means of eradicating the abomination of slavery.
But the carnage put his ideals to the test. In his Journal WAR
(1862) he copied Crockett's motto as a reaffirmation of principle:
"Be sure you are right, then go ahead" (JMN, 15:183). In selec-
tively using Crockett as man of nature, man of true words,
and man of action, Emerson, in representatively 'American"
 Emerson and Individualism 85

fashion, had both absorbed and had a hand in shaping our

frontier myth.
In Emerson's "Power," from The Conduct of Life (1860), the
essay that so disturbed Giamatti, Crockett is implicit in the figure
of the Western politician, "half orator, half assassin," who epito-
mizes American energy, dependent as it is upon "natural forces,"
an energy that, for all its untidiness, is preferable to the stultified
refinement of English culture. Certainly no sel/-portrait is Emer-
son's appreciative sketch of the "savage" man of nature:

Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot live on nuts,

herb-tea, and elegies; cannot read novels and play whist; cannot
satisfy all their wants at the Thursday Lecture or the Boston
Athenaeum. They pine for adventure, and must go to Pike's
Peak; had rather die by the hatchet of a Pawnee than sit all day
and every day at a counting-room desk. They are made for war
for the sea, for mining, hunting and clearing; for hair-breadt
adventures, huge risks and the joy of eventful living. (W, 6:68)

These robust qualities are at odds not only with the urban, so-
phisticated, mercantile life of midcentury Boston but also with
the somewhat anemic religious, philosophical, educational, and
reform (note the allusion to vegetarianism) elements that Emer-
son often criticized in Transcendentalism itself.
But if Emerson valued Crockett for his "natural" grasp of lan-
guage, and the frontiersman as an antidote to the decadence of
civilization, he did not blindly romanticize the "savage" aspects
of American life, and nowhere is this more evident than in his cri-
tique of American politics. "The backwoodsman," wrote Freder-
ick Jackson Turner, "was intolerant of men who split hairs, or
scrupled over the method of reaching the right," fostering "the
unchecked development of the individual" and a political climate
that, in the 1828 election, had found a representative hero in
Andrew Jackson. Emerson was no more an advocate of what
Turner called "elaborate governmental institutions" than the
Jacksonians (nor, for that matter, of elaborate theological, artis-
tic, or intellectual institutions).47 But he despised Jackson for re-
leasing the very "unchecked" individualism that Turner would
 86 Emerson in His Time

later diagnose. It was one thing for the artist to use "savage,"
"natural forces" as emblems of "human life," but quite another
to embody—ironically, indeed, to institutionalize—these traits in
a political movement, whereby the power of creative energy
would be perverted into the crudeness and corruptions of
merely political power. Jackson, whose presidency (1829-1837)
spanned the crucial years from Emerson's ordination at Second
Church to the publication of Nature and the preparation of the
lecture "The Individual," represented all that Emerson abhorred
in cultural and political life. Surveying history for the essential
"Man" in late 1836, Emerson was appalled at the present specta-
cle: "[WJhen I look for the soul, shall I find a Jackson Caucus?"
(JMN, 5:265). Jacksonian democracy shares certain key tenets
with Transcendentalism. Both exalted the common man, criti-
cized the gross materialism of new wealth, and favored limited
government. But Jackson cultivated the spoils system in politics;
opposed the national bank; introduced a leveling in American po-
litical life that failed, for the most part, to extend to disenfran-
chised minorities; promoted expansionism at the expense of Na-
tive Americans; and actively opposed abolitionism. Emerson saw
the hypocrisies of Jacksonian democracy, resented the medioc-
rity it fostered in American life, and insisted that his vision gave
due credit to the dignity and decency of the common man: "Do
not charge me with egotism & presumption. I see with awe the
attributes of the farmers & villagers whom you despise" (JMN,
5:493).
The essay "Power"—Giamatti's proof text and the source of
Emerson's celebration of the frontiersman—must be placed in
the context, moreover, of other essays in The Conduct of Life.
Emerson's essays, like his sentences and paragraphs, play against
each other and are cited separately at risk of great distortion of
his vision. Briefly, the essay "Culture" also values Power but cau-
tions against "a narrower selfism" and the "goitre of egotism"
(W, 6:133, I34)- The essay "Worship" notes that "[w]e live in a
transition period" where genuine worship seems lost (207); but
this plays against his assertion in "Power" that "[everything
good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition" (em-
phases added [71])—indeed, since "Self-Reliance," transition for
 Emerson and Individualism 87

Emerson had meant fluid moments of possibility, circumstances

from which heroic and virtuous action may emerge. "Worship"
refuses to base the sublime moral sense on any anemic religi-
osity. To the contrary, Emerson allows that "[e]ven the fury of
material activity has some results friendly to moral health. The
energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the reli-
gious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction."
He goes on to suggest that "[t]he cure for false theology is
mother-wit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your
moral perceptions at this hour" (214). Each of these essays in its
own way reasserts the buoyant idealism of his great essays of the
18305; read in the mutual oscillation that these essays demand,
each affirms the dignity of both material and spiritual activity
when they are charged with power and character founded on a
person's "central solitude" (241).
Any lingering suspicion that Emerson's notion of power is a
call for a Superman in the economic, political, or military arena
must be dispelled by his masterful portrait of Napoleon in Repre-
sentative Men. Napoleon, although he had died in exile in 1821,
still captured the world's imagination, even in the United States.
Emerson's sketch, first presented as a lecture in January 1846 and
for years a popular favorite from his lyceum repertoire, evokes
Napoleon's charisma even as it demolishes his monstrous, de-
structive egotism. Napoleon was "the incarnate Democrat," the
"representative" of the middle class, "thoroughly modern" in his
"delight in the use of means," a "strong and ready actor, who
took Occasion by the beard, and showed us how much may be
accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men pos-
sess in less degrees" (CW, 4:130,133,141). In one sense "Napoleon
is France . . . Napoleon is Europe" (129). But in outlining his
magnetic appeal, Emerson is shrewdly aware that, in his embodi-
ment of restless marketplace values, Napoleon is also the United
States: "Paris and London and New York, the spirit of commerce,
of money, and material power, were . . . to have their prophet,
and Bonaparte was qualified and sent" (130). In a stunning shift of
focus, Emerson declares that, in Napoleon's releasing of pent-up
forces, "feudal France, was changed into a young Ohio or New
York," a shift that implicates the American audience in Napo-
 88 Emerson in His Time

Icon's vices (139). For Emerson proceeds to pull the rug from
under Napoleon's dazzling charm and achievements: "Bonaparte
was singularly destitute of generous sentiments"; he was "egotis-
tic, and monopolizing," "a boundless liar," "intensely selfish,"
and "without conscience" (145, 146, 147). His admirers "found
that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men" (147). In
the end, Napoleon's amoral materialism is symptomatic of the
great modern sickness: 'As long as our civilization is essentially
one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by
delusions. . . . Only that good profits, which we can taste with
all doors open, and which serves all men" (148).48
The aggressive and predatory qualities of the "self-made"
man in politics and commerce, then, were always central con-
cerns in Emerson's commentary. He sought to capture instead a
sense of a more enduring individualism founded on reflection,
principle, and ethical action. With other American writers, he
also detected a polar opposite—and in some ways darker—threat
lurking within nineteenth-century individualism: the psychologi-
cal and social (and hence moral) isolation of self-reliance. Emer-
son's worry on this score was both personal and social. It was
personal because, having resigned his pulpit in 1832, he felt com-
pelled to define, in a competitive, career-driven society, a "voca-
tion" for himself as "thinker," lecturer, and writer. As Henry
Nash Smith observed decades ago, this vocational crisis underlies
Emerson's attempt in "The American Scholar" to wed thinking
and action—indeed, to define thinking itself as dynamic action.49
And Emerson's worry v/as social because he observed that the
young adults of his own generation seemed unmoored by the re-
lentless competition and materialism of the age. One strain in
Emerson criticism considers self-reliance an elitist product of the
Federalist Boston in which he had been raised, a kind of snooty
protective shell against the unsavory hurly-burly of the rising
democracy. David Leverenz has argued that the market economy
created great anxiety among young men and that the literary
stance of "self-reliance" really reflects a "fear of humiliation,"
that it is a defense mechanism carrying a "heavy interior price."50
Emerson, too, was acutely aware that the most idealistic were,
for all their passion and principles, without direction, and he as-
 Emerson and Individualism 89

cribes this flaw most bluntly to those young people popularly

called Transcendentalists, a stance showing extraordinary self-
awareness given his widespread identification as the leader of
that "party."51
Generations of college students have been taught that Ameri-
can literature is founded on a great rift between the irrepressible,
self-reliant optimism of Emerson and the brooding, haunted,
neo-Calvinist meditations of Hawthorne and Melville on the im-
penetrability of nature and the inevitable corruption of the
human psyche. We tend to forget that their fictional "quarrel"
with Emerson is grounded in large part on their respect for his
integrity. Hawthorne gently satirized the devotees who flocked
to be near Emerson, stating that he himself "sought nothing
from him as a philosopher," but he admitted the personal appeal
of one "so quiet, so simple, so without pretension." And Mel-
ville, Merton Sealts reminds us, once thought Emerson "a great
man."52 Emerson, moreover, was no fool who could not con-
ceive of evil. True, he characteristically sees evil as limitation or
as social injustice rather than as a literal cosmic fact. But Emer-
son, too, was above all a keen observer of character who, as often
as he celebrated our potential, chronicled our failures and self-
deceptions. In what amounts to countercultural analyses of the
dangers of the isolated Self, Hawthorne and Melville dissected
the progressivist, optimistic ideals of their age, anticipating by
well over a century Bellah's critique of the "socially unsituated
self." In The Blithedale Romance (1852), Zenobia, who has been de-
luded by her unrequited love for Hollingsworth, has a kind of
epiphany, albeit mingled with anger and self-pity. She suddenly
sees that his treatment of the other Blithedale Utopians and his
single-minded pursuit of prison reform are not altruistic, and she
charges him with being "[a] cold, heartless, self-beginning and
self-ending piece of mechanism! . . . It is all self! . . . Self,
self, self! . . . You are a better masquerader than the witches
and gypsies yonder; for your disguise is a self-deception."53
Melville's Ahab, despite the grandeur of his titanic defiance of
the universe, is American literature's most tragic isolated Self, his
obsession with an idea paralleled by his withdrawal from the
human community. But Hawthorne and Melville were antici-
 90 Emerson in His Time

pated by a decade by Emerson's essay "Intellect," with its own

classic analysis of monomania:

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention

on a single aspect of truth, and apply himself to that alone for
a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself, but
falsehood. . . . How wearisome the grammarian, the phre
nologist, the political or religious fanatic, or indeed any pos-
sessed mortal, whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a
single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison
also. (CW, 2:200-201)

A central strain of American thought since the earliest years

has worried about the excesses of individualism, from John Cot-
ton's concern that "liberty" not destroy the Massachusetts Bay
Colony's fragile ecclesiastical and political fabric, to James Madi-
son's worry that "absolute democracy" meant strife and "fac-
tion." This additional irony of democracy informed Emerson's
disgust with Jacksonian politics. But his more fundamental con-
cern was with the threat of isolated individualism, an awareness
felt all the more keenly because he had often been charged him-
self, since the "Divinity School Address" (1838), with infidelity
and antinomianism. Antinomianism, an old heresy that asserted
that God's "Elect" are immune from moral law, had implied since
the 16305 in New England the fear of spiritual, ecclesiastical, and
social anarchy. Because of their anti-Lockean emphasis on intu-
ition and their criticism of institutional authority in the name of
the "higher law," Transcendentalists like Emerson were subject
to charges of being the new antinomians—a charge Emerson
notes in both "The Transcendentalist" (CW, 1:204) and "Self-
Reliance."54 Emerson took pains to show that true self-reliance,
being reliance on a higher power, is cause not for arrogance but
for humility. Like all great moralists, he was convinced that we
are free, but free only to do right. As he wrote in "Self-Reliance,"
"If any one imagines that this law [self-reliance] is lax, let him
keep its commandment one day" (CW, 2:42). In this light, his cri-
tiques of monomania, corrupt power, and antinomianism consti-
tute not a blind assertion of the autonomous self's prerogatives
 Emerson and Individualism 91

but a major phase in America's long-standing wariness of the un-

moored self.
For Emerson, then, genuine individualism was not narcissism,
monomania, or isolation. Indeed, it was the answer to these dis-
eases of the self as well as the remedy for the "existing evils" of
institutional and social life. As he affirmed in "New England Re-
formers" in 1844, for all the reformist turmoil of the 18305 and
18405, "in each of these movements emerged a good result, a ten-
dency to the adoption of simpler methods, and an assertion of
the sufficiency of the private man." Group reform, in turn, had
its limits, for however "excellent" a protest might have been
"when it was done the first time, . . . of course, [it] loses all
value when it is copied." He was encouraged, however, that New
England had witnessed "a steady tendency of the thoughtful and
virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritual facts" (CW,
3:150-51).
One final great irony of Emersonian individualism needs to
be mentioned. Even as Emerson is still often invoked to endorse
national mission or personal aggrandizement, late-twentieth-
century psychology and literary theory have announced the dis-
appearance of the self as a meaningful, knowable entity. The nine-
teenth century's faculty psychology, we are now told, was naive
in positing a stable center of knowledge, insight, and growth.
The Romantic (and Transcendentalist) Self is now seen as simply
another version of the now discredited Judeo-Christian Soul. Per-
sonality is diagnosed as a bundle of volatile moods and emotions
endlessly stirred in a soup of conflicting perceptions, experi-
ences, and impulses. The notion even of authorship has been
questioned. Only the text matters, we have been told; the "au-
thor" is a mere fiction, the product of accumulated cultural
forces, a mere game of words.
Now Emersonian self-reliance is, in a sense, to blame for
this development. The nightmare image that opens the essay
"Experience"—of waking on a "stair" whose base and destina-
tion are obscured—is calculated to disorient. "Sleep lingers all
our lifetime about our eyes. . . . All things swim and glimmer"
(CW, 3:27). Emerson's more buoyant declaration in "Circles" is
also invoked as evidence of his modernism: "I unsettle all things.
 92 Emerson in His Time

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment,

an endless seeker, with no Past at my back" (CW, 2:188). Even in
these skeptical, unsettling essays, however, Emerson celebrates
small victories and provisional insights. "Experience" insists on
no transcendence above the world of phenomenon and percep-
tion: "We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate
well on them" (CW, 3:35); and "If I have described life as a flux of
moods, I must now add, that there is that in us which changes
not, and which ranks all sensations and states of mind" (42). Even
as Emerson expressed the flawed, fragmentary nature of percep-
tion that thwarts permanent insight and knowledge, he held to
his belief in the abiding centrality of character and the reality of
self. In "Circles," even as the "flying Perfect" evades final codifica-
tion, final meaning, the quest is inherently valuable: "[T]his in-
cessant movement and progression, which all things partake,
could never become sensible to us, but by contrast to some prin-
ciple of fixture or stability in the soul" (CW, 2:179,188).
And so Emerson's vision of individualism unsettles even his
unsettlers. He was challenged, sometimes discouraged, by the
"lords of life" that threatened to derail the "self" by baffling un-
derstanding, perception, consciousness itself. His "optimism"
was a hard-earned faith forged against the backdrop of early ill-
ness, personal loss, and doubt. Indeed, these stubborn facts are
often the starting point of his essays, whose charged prose re-
quires the reader, too, to earn hope and genuine self-reliance.55
He did not succumb to the nihilism and sophism that marks so
much late-twentieth-century criticism. He remained a product of
a democratic, classical, Judeo-Christian tradition who honed his
views of character on mysticism, Stoicism, and moral philoso-
phy. He accepted the challenge of flux implicit in each of these
traditions, confronting head-on the psychic and social destabiliza-
tion that were intensified by the gross materialism of his age and
the disruptive insights of modern science. But he remained an
advocate of human dignity founded on the centrality of charac-
ter. His enduring appeal is not that he endorsed certain ideolo-
gies but that he never lost faith in the potential of the individual,
the potential not to achieve final truths or successes—and surely
not to dominate others—but to grow continually. Emerson ex-
 Emerson and Individualism 93

plores the many moods, states, and dimensions of self: the glo-
ries of unfettered horizons, the despair of loneliness, the terror
of alienation and disorientation, the obligation of ethical treat-
ment of others, the existential imperative to create meaning, the
need for continual self-culture. He accepts, even requires, a large
measure of equivocalness, of flawed vision, of paradox—a stance
that balks those who want either to vilify or to worship him. Not
bland self-confidence or arrogant self-assertion but openness
and courage are the hallmarks of Emersonian individualism.
And these are the qualities that for generations have made Emer-
son a representative, modern American and the great teacher of
self-reliance.

NOTES
1. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY D. THOREAU, Journal Volume 2:
1842-1848, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1984), p. 224.
2. Edgar Lee Masters, The Living Thoughts of Emerson (London:
Cassell and Company, 1947), p. 2. On Emerson's creative "provoca-
tion" of others, see Merton M. Sealts, Jr., "Emerson as Teacher," in
Emerson Centenary Essays, ed. Joel Myerson (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1982), pp. 180-90; reprinted in Sealts, Beyond
the Classroom: Essays on American Authors (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1996), pp. 3-14.
3. Interview, 13 August 1990, Concord, Mass. See my "Don Hen-
ley, Walden Woods, and Emerson," Emerson Society Papers i (Fall
1990): 4.
4. Lance Morrow, "The Bishop of Our Possibilities," Time, 10
May 1982, p. 124. Christopher Newfield has recently made the case
that Emersonian individualism is based on deep "contradictions"
that mark "a very significant shift in the history of U.S. liberalism
from a democratic toward a corporate kind of liberalism. It does so
by introducing submission at the center of an extravagant American
freedom"; see The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 6,10.
5. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression
in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1941), p. 368. On John D. Rockefeller's appropriation of self-
 94 Emerson in His Time

reliance in the industrial arena, see Howard Horwitz, "Transcendent

Agency: Emerson, the Standard Trust, and the Virtues of Decorpo-
ration," in By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 171-91.
6. Henry B. Parkes, "Emerson" (1941); reprinted in Emerson: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Milton R. Konvitz and Stephen E.
Whicher (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 128.
7. Allen Tate, Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (New York:
Scribner's, 1936), p. 7.
8. Clarence Gohdes observed this with respect to Europe in 'An
American Author as Democrat," in Literary Romanticism in America,
ed. William L. Andrews (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1981), p. ii.
9. John Lydenberg, review of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Portrait of a
Balanced Soul, by Edward Wagenknecht, and The Power and Form of
Emerson's Thought, by Jeffrey L. Duncan, American Literature 47
(March 1975): 122.
10. See also EL, 3:187. In his 1841 lecture "The Conservative,"
Emerson observed that from the point of view of the "reformer,"
one who seeks "comfort . . . take[s] sides with the establishment"
(CW, 1:195). Karl Keller's take on Emerson as a resister of the state is
found in "Emerson and the Anti-imperialist Self," American Transcen-
dental Quarterly, no. 18 (Spring 1973): 23-29.
11. See H. L. Kleinfield, "The Structure of Emerson's Death,"
Bulletin of the New York Public Library 65 (January 1961): 47-64;
reprinted in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Profile, ed. Carl Bode (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1969), pp. 175-99.
12. Len Gougeon, Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. 342.
13. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, The Night Thoreau Spent
in Jail (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), p. 67. For a more plausible
version of this dramatic rendition, see Walter Harding, The Days of
Henry Thoreau (New York: Knopf, 1970), pp. 205-6.
14. See F. DeWolfe Miller, Christopher Pearse Cranch and His Cari-
catures of New England Transcendentalism (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1951), plate 3 following p. 36.
15. B. L. Packer describes Emerson's style: "The ambiguities, la-
cunae, paradoxes, and understatements with which Emerson is so
generous turn the sentences of his essays into charged terminals
 Emerson and Individualism 95

that the reader must take the risk of connecting" (Emerson's Fall: A
New Interpretation of the Major Essays [New York: Continuum, 1982],
p. 6).
16. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The New Portfolio," in A Mortal
Antipathy, vol. 7 of The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 14 vols.
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900), p. 18. Martin Bickman nicely
states what we miss when we merely paraphrase Emerson or settle
for generalizations about his lively prose: "A central paradox is that
we cannot simply render or present an Emerson of process as a
substitution for an Emerson of wisdom and statement. We must
show him—or catch him—engaged in his dynamic constructions of
meaning through our own active and dynamic constructions, in our
making of it happen" ("'The Turn of His Sentences': The Open
Form of Emerson's Essays: First Series," ESQ: A Journal of the Ameri-
can Renaissance 34 (ist and and Quarter 1988): 73.
17. A. Bartlett Giamatti, The University and the Public Interest (New
York: Atheneum, 1981), pp. 172,174,176.
18. Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 285, 286. A classic
essay on Emerson and friendship is Carl R Strauch, "Hatred's Swift
Repulsions: Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Others," Studies in Ro-
manticism 7 (Winter 1968): 65-103.
19. Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Lit-
erary and Cultural History (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 54. Keller's arti-
cle ("Emerson and the Anti-imperialist Self") is in large part a rebut-
tal of Anderson. Anderson extends his treatment of the "isolation"
he finds embodied in Emerson in Making Americans: An Essay on Indi-
vidualism and Money (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992),
p. 154.
20. Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism
and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985),
pp. 55, 65.
21. Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 45.
22. On Emerson and Unitarianism, see David M. Robinson's Apos-
tle of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and Lecturer (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), and his "Introductory Historical Essay,"
CS, 1:1-32, as well as his essay in this volume.
23. Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcen-
 96 Emerson in His Time

dentalism: A Family History (New York: Oxford University Press,

1998). Cole expanded on this collaboration in "Emersonian Individu-
alism as a Two-Person Project" (paper presented at the Emerson So-
ciety panel "Emerson: Influences and Resonances," Thoreau Society
Annual Gathering, Concord, Mass., 10 July 1998). We should read
the essay "Self-Reliance," she concluded, "as an internal conversa-
tion rather than a flat pronouncement."
24. Richardson's The Mind on Fire is a model of clarity in present-
ing the often obscure and complex reading and ideas that ignited
Emerson's imagination. For concise definitions and explanations of
the sources, nature, and influences of American Transcendentalism,
see also Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism, ed. Wesley
T. Mott (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996); and Encyclopedia
of Transcendentalism, ed. Wesley T. Mott (Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 1996).
25. See Gustaaf Van Cromphout's fine monograph Emerson's
Modernity and the Example of Goethe (Columbia: University of Mis-
souri Press, 1990).
2.6. David Robinson has movingly shown how Thoreau's famous
encounter with Mount Ktaadn in The Maine Woods takes up and ex-
tends the question Emerson asks at the beginning of the essay "Ex-
perience": "Where do we find ourselves?" (CW, 3:2,7); see "Thoreau's
'Ktaadn' and the Quest for Experience," in Emersonian Circles: Es-
says in Honor of Joel Myerson, ed. Wesley T. Mott and Robert E.
Burkholder (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1997),
pp. 207-23.
27. An American Dictionary of the English Language, ed. Noah Web-
ster, 2 vols. (New York: S. Converse, 1828).
28. Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Ed-
wards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1997)) p. 5- Howe's important study rehabilitates the often discred-
ited tradition of faculty psychology, defining individualism as "the
belief that ordinary men and women have a dignity and value in
their own right, and that they are sufficiently trustworthy to be al-
lowed a measure of autonomy in their lives" (p. 9).
29. On Emerson's concept of the God within, see Wesley T.
Mott, "The Strains of Eloquence": Emerson and His Sermons (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), pp. 53-78.
30. Van Cromphout discusses Emerson's shift from a Plutarchan
 Emerson and Individualism 97

to a Goethean approach to biography in Emerson's Modernity and the

Example of Goethe, pp. 98-115. On Emerson and biography see also
Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Emerson on the Scholar (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1992), esp. pp. 46-59, 155-72; and Ronald A. Bosco,
"The 'Somewhat Spheral and Infinite' in Every Man: Emerson's
Theory of Biography," Emersonian Circles, pp. 67-103. In his bio-
graphical lectures of the 18305 and in Representative Men, Emerson
came to place "great men" in historical and cultural context and to
judge their "representative" failures as well as achievements.
31. Jonathan Bishop observed that "[t]he entire Soul-Nature rela-
tion can only become emotionally interesting when Soul seems to
mean Self and Self means Me. We cannot take the impersonality of
spirit seriously until it becomes a personal event"; Emerson, he sug-
gested, is "fully aware of this paradox, not to say pleased with it"
(Emerson on the Soul [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964],
P- 93)-
32. Koenraad W. Swart, "'Individualism' in the Mid-nineteenth
Century (1826-1860)," Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (January-
March 1962): 77-90; quotation on p. 77.
33. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 4. Important discussions
of Emersonian individualism include Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism
and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1964); Harold Bloom, "Emerson: Power at the Crossing," in
Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lawrence
Buell (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993), pp. 148-58; also in
Buell's collection, Sacvan Bercovitch, "Emerson, Individualism, and
the Ambiguities of Dissent," pp. 101-29; and Charles E. Mitchell, In-
dividualism and Its Discontents: Appropriations of Emerson, 1880-1950
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
34. Swart, "Individualism,"' pp. 78-81, 83.
35. Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in
the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973),
p. 272.
36. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer
and Max Lerner, trans. George Lawrence (1835, 1840; New York:
Harper and Row, 1966), p. 477. For useful commentaries, see Abra-
ham S. Eisenstadt, ed., Reconsidering Tocqueville's Democracy in
America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), esp.
Seymour Drescher, "More Than America: Comparison and Synthe-
 98 Emerson in His Time

sis in Democracy in America," pp. 77-93, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,

"Individualism and Apathy in Tocqueville's Democracy," pp. 94-109.
37. John Dewey remains the greatest critic of the paradoxes and
ironies of American life—the frequent discrepancies between our
myths of individualism and its realities—who at the same time
champions Emerson for his perceptive and dynamic contribution to
the national character. See especially Individualism Old and New
(New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1930) and Philosophy and
Civilization (New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1931). In a simi-
lar vein, Harold Bloom insists, "Individualism, whatever damages its
American ruggedness continues to inflict on our politics and social
economy, is more than ever the only hope for our imaginative lives"
("Emerson: Power at the Crossing," p. 157).
38. The first use of the term self-reliance noted by the Oxford En-
glish Dictionary is in Harriet Martineau's Society in America (1837).
Swart notes that Emerson used the term individualism favorably in
his 1846 journal as the Brook Farm community was collapsing (p.
86). But see also his 1842 Journal N (JMN, 8:251) and the 1844 lecture
"New England Reformers" (CW, 3:157).
39. Sealts, Emerson on the Scholar, p. 244. David Lyttle offers two
helpful discussions of Emerson's sense of the individual and subjec-
tivity: "Emerson's Transcendental Individualism," Concord Saunterer,
n.s., 3 (Fall 1995): 89-103; and "'The World Is a Divine Dream': Emer-
son's Subjective Idealism," Concord Saunterer, n.s., 5 (Fall 1997): 93-110.
40. See William Charvat, 'American Romanticism and the De-
pression of 1837," Science and Society 2 (Winter 1937): 67-82; reprinted
in The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870, ed. Matthew J.
Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), pp. 49-67.
Packer suggests that Emerson's 'American Scholar" is actually cre-
atively liberated by the "squalor" of the business world (Emerson's
Fall, p. 95).
41. A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Ten-
nessee, Written by Himself (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1834; Philadel-
phia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1834).
42. Ernest Marchand, "Emerson and the Frontier," American Lit-
erature 3 (May 1931): 174.
43. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History,
foreword by Ray Allen Billington (1920; New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1962), pp. 30, 32.
 Emerson and Individualism 99

44. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed.

Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Modern Library, 1952), p. 62;
J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer
(London: Davies and Davis, 1782).
45. Albert J. von Frank, "'Build Therefore Your Own World':
Emerson's Constructions of the 'Intimate Sphere,'" Emersonian Cir
cles, p. 9.
46. On Emerson's fondness for broad language and humor and
his attraction to Crockett, see also V L. O. Chittick, "Emerson's
'Frolic Health,'" New England Quarterly 30 (June 1957): 209-34, and
David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive
Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf,
1988), pp. 448-54, 487-97.
47. Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 254.
48. In "Nominalist and Realist," Emerson offers a slightly more
playful but no less cogent critique of hero worship: 'All our poets,
heroes, and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many parts to satisfy
our idea. . . . there are no such men as we fable; no Jesus, nor
Pericles, nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor Washington, such as we have
made. We consecrate a great deal of nonsense, because it was al-
lowed by great men. There is none without his foible. Must I believe
that if an angel should come to chaunt the chorus of the moral law,
he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with private
letters, or do some precious atrocity? It is bad enough, that our ge-
niuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit
for society, who has fine traits. . . . [each] want[s] either love or
self-reliance" (CW^ 3:134).
49. See Henry Nash Smith's seminal essay "Emerson's Problem
of Vocation: A Note on The American Scholar,'" New England Quar-
terly 12 (March 1939): 52-67; and Sealts's definitive Emerson on the
Scholar.
50. David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 72, 74. Leverenz
considers Emerson a victim of the American cult of manhood.
51. See "The Transcendentalist." Packer argues that even "[t]he
term 'self-reliance' implies dualism, disunion, a poor frightened indi-
vidual attempting to rely on that Aboriginal Self presumed to be
within. . . . When the soul is really present, Emerson insists, all
sense of dualism ceases" (Emerson's Fall, p. 145).
 loo Emerson in His Time

52.. Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Old Manse," in Mosses from an

Old Manse, vol. 10 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel
Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), p. 31; Mer-
ton M. Sealts, Jr., Pursuing Melville, 1940-1980 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 251.
53. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, vol. 3 of The
Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1964), p. 218.
54. See Wesley T. Mott, "Emerson and Antinomianism: The
Legacy of the Sermons," chap. 6 in "The Strains of Eloquence." For a
broader treatment of antinomianism in American culture, see Amy
Schrager Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of
Dissent in the Literature of New England (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1987).
55. See Gertrude Reif Hughes, Emerson's Demanding Optimism
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984).
 Emerson, Nature, and
Natural Science

William Rossi

What mischief is in this art of Writing.

. . . We sit down with intent to write
truly & end with making a book that
contains no thought of ours but
merely the tune of the time.
(JMN, 4:314-15,19 August 1834)

R
alph Waldo Emerson lived through a time when the physical
environment was extraordinarily transformed, no less than
the broadly cultural forms through which his contemporaries
on. mv»i ,',-id experienced nature. The emergence of agricul-
tural and industrial capitalism, and the rapid population growth
they stimulated, dramatically changed both urban Boston and,
eventually, rural Concord landscapes.1 While these transforma-
tions are registered only obliquely in Emerson's writing about
nature, their effect, if only in affording him a measure of physical
comfort and reflective detachment, can hardly be overestimated.
Indeed, the stance of detachment and the apparently abstract
level on which Emerson engages nature have led recent com-
mentators to devalue his writing, especially in comparison with
the more empiricist rendering of nature perfected by his onetime

101
 IO2 Emerson in His Time

protege, Henry Thoreau.2 But, as for many of his contempo-

raries, for Emerson the physical presence of nature mattered less
than its putative meaning or the "higher" presence mediated
through the physical.
If this partly explains why Emerson had more of a nineteenth-
century audience than Thoreau did, including a substantial
British one, it also suggests both the necessity and something of
the difficulty of situating Emerson's "nature" historically. Per-
haps no single term in Emerson's lexicon is more important for
understanding his multivalent achievement. Yet the sheer profu-
sion and protean significance of "nature" for Emerson presents
the first obstacle to a critical yet sympathetic historical analysis of
it. This profusion is itself a measure of how deeply Emerson's
conception of nature informs his writing. As Eduardo Cadava
observes, "Like the weather, whose cyclical and repetitive charac-
ter is joined always to its unpredictability and constant alteration,
his language works to trace the permanency of the infinite vari-
ability that makes nature nature."3
Second, for a self-consciously American writer such as Emer-
son, nature is by definition ahistorical: to move alone into nature is
to move outside of history and culture. Discounting to the point
of invisibility the presence of centuries-old native cultures
granted free play to a pastoral ideology in which American nature
appeared uncultivated in comparison with European, and thus
was made more readily the scene of individual encounters with
transhistorical truth and new visions of human possibility.4
"Here," as he puts it in Essays: Second Series, "no history, or church,
or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year"
(CW, 3:100). But, as Cadava demonstrates, "Emerson's engage-
ment with history and politics" is evident in the way nineteenth-
century political and social history is inscribed even in the meteo-
rological language he uses and, more important, in the way "his
words and sentences" also "work to engage already-changing his-
torical and political relations," relations which Cadava explores by
measuring how "Emerson's language [of nature] works to revise
the [political] language he inherits."5
To situate Emerson's nature in history, this essay will take a
different but complementary approach. As Emerson was well
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 103

aware, in an era when post-Enlightenment science was rapidly

becoming the principal interpretive authority of nature, a soli-
tary experiential encounter with nature's "truth" also carried
overtones of scientific discovery. Emerson's long-standing enthu-
siasm for science is well established; and, as Michael Branch has
observed, his "enduring fascination with natural history, natural
philosophy, or natural science" is evident enough in the tides of
many of his works, from the early lecture "The Uses of Natural
History" (1833) and his first book, Nature, to his unfinished major
work, The Natural History of Intellect (18705).6 But while an abid-
ing interest in contemporary science deeply informed Emerson's
stance and vision, like the representations and explanations it
produces, science, too, is necessarily embedded in history and
culture. Consequently, just as the disciplinary definitions of natu-
ral knowledge changed from "natural history" to "natural sci-
ence" in accord with the increasing professionalization and so-
phistication of science, so the meaning of "nature" as mediated
by science also changed dramatically in the five decades of Emer-
son's career. Given the key role science played in the seculariza-
tion of nature and of nineteenth-century society generally, then,
tracing Emerson's nature(s) in relation to the shifting cultural sta-
tus and definitions of natural knowledge as well as to the chang-
ing conceptions of nature stimulated by science will help us see
more precisely how, despite Emerson's claims to the contrary,
"history" is, after all, "interpolated on the divine sky and the im-
mortal year" in the nature of his writing.

A Common Discourse of Nature

Emerson could represent himself as discovering and disseminat-

ing a knowledge of nature that complemented that of natural
philosophers, or natural "scientists" (as they were first called
in 1833), because he shared with them and with other Anglo-
American contemporaries the broad cultural discourse of natu-
ral theology, a language of nature he had inherited (to borrow
Cadava's terms) and through which he wrote contemporary
relations to nature. Formally and narrowly defined, natural the-
 IO4 Emerson in His Time

ology or "natural religion" seeks to establish a knowledge of

God accessible to all rational human beings without recourse
to supernatural revelation. As promoted in the modern era by
seventeenth-century deists, a theology based on nature could
ground the existence of God through evidence of the lawlike
regularity of the natural world (the argument from design),
thereby rendering belief both rational and universal and thus
avoiding sectarian dispute. But if rationalists wished to dispense
with revelation, orthodox divines in the later seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, most influentially Joseph Butler in The
Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and
Course of Nature (1736), used natural theology to complement rev-
elation and thus deflect the threat of scientific materialism.
The single most popular and often-cited example of nine-
teenth-century natural theology is William Paley's Natural The-
ology (1802). Written in response to critiques of natural theology
by Immanuel Kant and David Hume, Paley's book brought the
teleological argument from design to bear on the minute consid-
eration of apparently purposeful structural adaptations of or-
ganisms to their environments, such as the adaptive organization
of the eye to the reception of light. To appeal to a growing urban
audience and to supplement Butler's now traditional argument
based on the analogy between moral laws and natural laws,
Paley relied heavily on mechanical and industrial metaphors,
drawing examples from contemporary natural history to argue
that just as examining the carefully planned mechanisms of a
watch leads one to infer a designer of that watch, so empirically
studying intricate natural "mechanisms" leads one to infer a de-
signer of nature. Moreover, judging from the "vast plurality of
instances" in which "the design of the contrivance is beneficial"
and even pleasurable to the animal or human being possessing it,
Paley also inferred that the designer is benevolent, concluding,
"It is a happy world after all."7
Paley's book has often been characterized as the sole, imperial
instance of an unchanging genre, one given scientific credibility
by the eight Bridgewater Treatises published in the 18305, most of
them written by prominent Oxbridge scientists commissioned
explicitly to demonstrate the "Power, Wisdom, and Goodness
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 105

of God, as manifested in the Creation."8 Defined this way,

nineteenth-century natural theology has been represented as an
impediment to a scientific understanding of nature and, at the
same time, as a stumbling block to vibrant belief, reducing the in-
ward power of spiritual experience to a logical operation, "as if a
philosophical truth like God, or freewill . . . were something
deposited at the foot of an induction," in the words of one of its
most trenchant nineteenth-century critics.9 Until very recently,
historians have thus tended uncritically to sympathize, on the
one hand, with Darwin, who, in the process of turning Paley's
conception of adaptation on its head, noted sharply that "[i]t is
so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the 'plan
of creation,' 'unity of design,' &c., and to think that we give an
explanation when we only restate a fact."10 And, on the other
hand, they have tended to agree equally with Coleridge, who ex-
pressed his disdain for "the rational Christian" and at the same
time his "fear" of "the prevailing taste for Books of Natural The-
ology, Physico-theology, Demonstrations of God from Nature,
Evidences of Christianity &c. &c.," exclaiming, "Evidences of
Christianity! I am weary of the Word. Make a man feel the want
of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need for
it; and you may safely trust it to its own Evidence."11
But if by 1851, when Emerson's friend Frederic Henry Hedge
delivered the Dudleian Lecture on Natural Religion at Harvard,
natural religion had become "irrelevant" and "empty" in Ameri-
can liberal Christianity, in large part because of Transcendental-
ists like Hedge and Emerson who had dissolved the distinction
between natural and spiritual "evidence," outside the lecture
hall—from orthodox pulpits, in periodicals and other print
media, on the lyceum circuit, and in debates between scientific
writers on such topics as the plurality of worlds—the "rage for
design" had hardly "peaked."12 Nor was the situation much dif-
ferent in Britain, where, as in America, the discourse of natural
theology, "as an aspect of scientific culture, was particularly
prominent and persistent." Even after the triumph of scientific
naturalism led by Darwin, this discourse persisted on both sides
of the Atlantic in the work of "middle-class popularizers of sci-
ence," whose "audiences remained enthralled by the traditional,
 io6 Emerson in His Time

moral, aesthetic, teleological, and divine qualities of the natural

world."13
As a cultural discourse of nature, natural theology was inte-
gral to the wider issue of what was called "man's place in na-
ture." In the context of this debate, Paley's book "defined a way
of looking at the world that was probably shared by the majority
of his contemporaries," certainly the Protestant Christians
among them, whose doctrinal differences could readily be ac-
commodated within the ambiguity of this discourse. During the
18305, when Emerson was redefining his vocation from that of
Unitarian minister to lecturer and writer, preoccupation with the
question of "man's place in nature," as evidenced in the wide-
spread production of natural theology literature, amounted to "a
major cultural event," according to one historian. Moreover, at a
time when many naturalists were themselves clerics and the in-
stability of science as an enterprise made public and ecclesiastical
support for science crucial, natural theology provided a mal-
leable discursive means "for connections between scientific and
religious discourses to be made and remade rather than sev-
ered."14 In maintaining these connections, the figure of Francis
Bacon proved especially useful. Putting his own spin on the an-
cient book of nature topos, Bacon laid down the dictum in The
Advancement of Learning (1605) that no "man can search too far, or
be too well studied in the book of God's word, or the book of
God's works, divinity or [natural] philosophy; but rather let men
endeavour an endless progress, or proficience in both." Simulta-
neously separating and relating science and theology, Bacon's ad-
vice was quoted and alluded to endlessly by nineteenth-century
writers and naturalists—as Darwin did in an epigraph to On the
Origin of Species and as Emerson would—in support of interpre-
tations of nature's text that ranged from literalist biblical geology
to naturalistic evolutionary biology, from evangelical Christianity
to pantheism.15
A good instance of the malleability of the discourse of natural
theology was the shift away from the functionalist type of teleo-
logical explanation exemplified by Paley and some of the Bridge-
water writers toward explaining biological phenomena in terms
of a harmonious system of "secondary" (that is, natural) laws
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 107

analogous to those discovered in the physical sciences. This was a

significant transformation in the discourse both for nineteenth-
century natural science and for understanding Emerson's writing
of nature. In the late 18305, naturalists began to describe them-
selves as "philosophical naturalists" to signify their interest "in
discovering the laws of the living world" rather than being con-
tent "with the mere description of individual beings." And it was
"precisely this search for laws or generalizations that, in the
course of the nineteenth century, transformed the study of natu-
ral history into the science of biology." Yet despite their hostility
to explicitly teleological explanation, "the laws, of whatever sort,
that [naturalists] substituted for particular explanations in terms
of purpose were themselves thought to be purposeful. Each law
was supposed to play its part in carrying out the creator's grand
design."16 Thus, while the introduction of "natural law" has
often been portrayed as a kind of bugle call to the final battle be-
tween the forces of science and religion in this period, that war-
fare model for understanding those relations is now seen as hav-
ing concealed much more than it has revealed.17 In fact, the
discourse of this "new" natural theology accompanied the pro-
fessionalization of biology and in many ways sustained scientific
inquiry into the natural world in both epistemological and
rhetorical terms.
This is not to deny the vigorous efforts during this period to
employ science on behalf of "revelation," particularly in antebel-
lum America, where biblical geology was especially strong, nor to
overlook the presence of naturalists and radical intellectuals, al-
ready in the first half of the century, who conceived natural law in
strictly material terms, an interpretation that very much con-
cerned Emerson and that became more prevalent following the
notorious publication of an early evolutionary tract, Vestiges of the
Natural History of Creation in i844.18 It is rather to point up the im-
portance, especially for a figure like Emerson, of the "common in-
tellectual context" provided by the discourse of natural theology
and the complex interpenetration of cultural interests it helped
support. As a rhetorical resource employed for multiple audiences
and multiple purposes—social, philosophical, aesthetic, ethical,
political and religious—this discourse, though "common," was far
 108 Emerson in His Time

from homogeneous. Nor was it without internal problematics.

Especially following the publication of Vestiges, in the later 18405
and 18505, the common context was fragmented both within reli-
gious culture, by denominational differences, and more broadly
by the heavy burden that "religious apologists . . . placed on
the sciences, which they were eventually unable to carry."19
Again, although this discourse nourished relations between pro-
fessional science and a generally educated public, from the begin-
ning those relations were strained by the widening gap between
an increasingly specialized science and its public.20
Moreover, at the heart of natural theology lay an ontological
and epistemological problem that was only exacerbated by the
increasing specialization and consequent fragmentation of natu-
ral knowledge, a problem that would become central to Emer-
son's philosophical and literary project, indeed to his vocation:
articulating the relationship between what, in broad nineteenth-
century terms, was called the "moral" and the physical spheres of
creation. For "if design could only be perceived in the physical
world, it would be difficult to maintain that the Creator of nature
was also responsible for man's intellectual and spiritual charac-
ter." The primary task of natural theology, then, was to demon-
strate the unity of these two spheres, a difficult task given the
way "Christian religious and moral values were invested in [a]
Cartesian dualism of mind and matter" that assumed the superi-
ority of the human mind (as the locus of free will and moral re-
sponsibility) over inert matter.21 Ultimately this dichotomy was
not resolved so much as abandoned, only to be reinscribed in the
"fundamentally altered" structure of relations between science
and the public in the 18705 and i88os, once the secularization of
nature was complete and the "radical distinction" enforced be-
tween experts "professionally concerned with the explication of
secular nature and the general public with their moral con-
cerns."22 Even in this state of affairs, however, the discourse of
natural theology proved its rhetorical resilience, and not only in
the middle-class popularization of science. Reformulated in an
"agnostic worship of nature," natural theology inspired the late-
century promotion and practice of "the religion of science" by
such well-established and visible professional naturalists as
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 109

Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall. Ironically, a key source

of their inspiration, mediating the transition from a religious to a
scientific culture, was the natural supernaturalism of Thomas
Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson.23

From "Moral Science" to Nature

Referring to Emerson's reading of William Paley and others,

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., observes that the design argument was
"not what mattered most" to Emerson in this literature; he was
"much more interested in the relationship between the natural
world and the human mind than . . . in the natural world as
proof of a designing deity."24 But while this interest is certainly
"a distinguishing mark of both American and German transcen-
dentalism," it was also shared by many of Emerson's less radical
Anglo-American contemporaries who likewise assumed that the
two spheres of moral and physical creation were somehow
closely related. Although it must seem paradoxical now, because
of this assumption Emerson's initial approach to this problem-
atic relationship, and the first step toward his radical formulation
of "nature," began as an inquiry into moral philosophy. As in
most antebellum liberal arts institutions, at Harvard College,
from which he graduated in 1821, moral philosophy provided
"the integrative, synthesizing" element in the curriculum.
Within that curriculum the subject of natural theology played an
essential role, complementing revelation as matter did spirit and
thus helping to sustain the ontological and epistemological dual-
ism on which Unitarian theology was based. But design was evi-
dent not only in "external" nature but also in the structure of
mind itself. Indeed, as Daniel Walker Howe notes, Harvard
moralists were actually more satisfied by "the argument for the
existence of God from the design of the human mind" because,
as Francis Bowen wrote, the evidence of consciousness was
"even more direct, logical, and convincing" than the evidence of
the material universe.25
As a student of moral philosophy at Harvard, Emerson had a
keen interest in this dimension of the subject, what he described
 no Emerson in His Time

in his 1821 Bowdoin Prize Dissertation as efforts "to institute and

methodize the science of morality."26 And as a young minister
six years later, he confessed "anxious to do more than doubt" the
"rec[eive]d maxim that there are no discoveries in morals." "I
desire to assert distinctly," he wrote, not only that there are "dis-
coveries in morals" but also that the "science of morals does
advance" (JMN, 3:60-61). The importance Emerson attaches to
"discoveries" makes it clear that, like Bowen, he was guided by
the belief that he was articulating universal elements of the
mind's constitution. This notion of "moral science" was derived
from the Scottish Common Sense realism that underpinned the
Harvard curriculum in moral philosophy. But it has also been
traced to the cultural and intellectual instability of "science,"
both the term and the enterprise, during this period. Part of the
cultural work of professionalizing bodies like the British Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Science (founded 1831) was to
"make 'science' mean natural knowledge," when the word was
still used and understood in the broad sense of scientia.27 And
while the cultural work of nascent institutions like the British As-
sociation was going forward, "the aims, method, and cultural im-
plications of science" were the subjects of extensive public de-
bate in the quarterlies and other periodicals on both sides of the
Atlantic.28 Thus, in the mid-i83os, Emerson could admire Co-
leridge as an "acute psychologist" and practitioner of "our pro-
foundest Science" for his penetrating observations of mental ac-
tivity construed as manifestations of the psyche or soul (JMN,
5:85—86). Indeed, Emerson sounds like an odd combination of
clinical psychologist and moral philosopher when reflecting in
his journal on dreams as one of the "keys by which we are to find
out the secrets of our own nature." They are like "comparative
anatomy" or "test objects"; "that must be a good theory of the
Universe, that will explain these phenomena" (JMN, 3:321-22).
Before this time, however, Emerson had begun moving to-
ward much stronger claims for revelation, resulting in a "shift in
[his] concept of the very grounds of religious belief" and a dis-
satisfaction with the argument of Paley, who, for other Unitari-
ans besides Emerson, "was deficient in enthusiasm."29 This ten-
dency was further fed by his reading in 1830 of Coleridge's The
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science m

Friend and Aids to Reflection, where, as we saw, Coleridge spurned

the Paleyan mechanical model of design and accompanying "ra-
tional" evidence in favor of intuitive spiritual experience that
would be "its own Evidence."30 But Emerson's religious enthusi-
asm and piety also had sources closer to home, having long been
nurtured by his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, whose own sensitiv-
ity to the beauty of nature and partiality to Joseph Butler's analog-
ical argument for "the compatibility of moral and physical laws in
the universe" stimulated Waldo's.31 At bottom, he felt that while
"arguments from design could prove the existence of God," they
could not account for "God's providence," a limitation noted as
well by other natural theologians and naturalists.32 Yet even after
Emerson's inquiry took him deeper into consciousness, intuitive
experience, and ultimately philosophical idealism, he continued
to refer to it in terms of "science."33 Thus, as Wesley Mott sug-
gests, in terms of the design argument, Emerson's conviction that
"consciousness [provides] better evid[ence] than proof" ought not
be construed as "rejecting science or denying the importance of
reason" but rather as widening their domains.34
One of the last sermons Emerson preached before resigning
his pulpit illustrates more precisely his mode of making the de-
sign argument at this time while also pointing toward his subse-
quent radical revision of it. While noting the popular association
of science with skepticism, he argues instead that astronomy il-
lustrates beautifully "the irresistible effect" of science "in modi-
fying and enlarging the doctrines of theology" (CS, 4:156). Al-
though nominally preaching on a text from Acts, the real text of
this sermon is nature, to which he immediately draws the con-
gregation's attention by enumerating a series of "useful reflex-
tions" on the "remarkable spectacle" of a recent solar eclipse, the
grandeur and beauty of which "makes a kindred impression
upon all men." The first of these, the "feeling of joy" and "pride"
in "the powers of the human intellect" that predicted the eclipse,
is quickly subordinated to "a better reflexion": that "[t]his human
mind is but a derived light from the source of wisdom as yonder
sun is but a spark of his enkindling." Translating this metaphori-
cal "reflection" explicitly into the problematic of natural the-
ology, he concludes, "It is only the knowledge of God that unites
 112 Emerson in His Time

this bright outward Creation of brute matter to the brighter in-

ward Creation of intelligent mind," since "the God of nature and
the God of the Bible are . . . the same."35 As a Unitarian minis-
ter reading the book of nature, Emerson does not go as far as he
would in a few years, when in Nature he indistinguishably "blends
scientific objectivity and religious enthusiasm" through the natu-
ral symbol of light, "treating the 'inner light' of the radical Prot-
estant tradition as though it behaved according to Newton's
laws."36 Here he is careful not to identify the human mind simul-
taneously with the "spark" of the sun and the "Infinite Mind."
But within this liberal orthodoxy, the figure of the human knowl-
edge of God as "a spark of his enkindling" shoots ahead not only
to the symbolism of light in Nature but also farther to the open-
ing paragraphs of "The Poet," suggesting how Emerson's philo-
sophical and literary imagination is captivated by the act of
knowing, which here is associated with "God's government," and
prompts the conclusion that because "this enlargement of our
religious views . . . comes to our minds inevitably by the prog-
ress of science, . . . it cannot be doubted that it was designed"
(CS, 4:158).
Emerson's view of the capacity of science to enlarge the doc-
trines of theology in this sermon bears the distinct influence of
John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Phi-
losophy, which he had read the preceding winter and which
"quickened his already lively interest in science."37 His excite-
ment owed in large part to the way Herschel (son of the famous
astronomer for whom Uranus was originally named) supported
Emerson's own expanding conception of the mind's relationship
to nature. Under the aegis of Bacon, an engraving of whose bust
embellished the title page above the legend "Minister and Inter-
preter of Nature," Herschel explicated and updated Baconian in-
duction for a popular audience, as "the process of considering a
class of phenomena, or two associated classes of phenomena, as
represented by a general law, or single [unifying] conception of
the mind."38 While he lays out particular methodological pre-
scriptions, Herschel nonetheless presents science as the achieve-
ment of "man," a heroic, virtuous, and autonomous exploration
of the laws of nature, an exploration both unified in all its "de-
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 113

partments" and accessible to "any person of good ordinary un-

derstanding."39 As Richardson notes, "Herschel's enthusiasm for
science rivals and takes over the language of religious enthusi-
asm."40 More specifically, Herschel emphasizes that "constituted
[as] a speculative being," "man" does not contemplate "the ob-
jects around him . . . with a passive, indifferent gaze" but is ac-
tively drawn to explore "a system disposed with order and de-
sign," through which "he is led to the conception of a Power and
an Intelligence superior to his own." Nor does this inquiry dis-
close only external "phenomena and relations." But "[a] world
within him is thus opened to his intellectual view," affording an
"insight" into "boundless realms beyond," an insight which "is in
reality the source of all his power, the very fountain of his pre-
dominance over nature."41
Emerson was thus well primed to undertake a more intensive
study of nature almost a year before he sailed for Europe and
made his momentous visit to the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle
in Paris, the center of French natural history, botany, and zoology.
As we have seen, and as Herschel's "insight" exemplifies yet again,
the beliefs (in the words of a critic Emerson quotes in his journal)
that a "subtle and mysterious analogy . . . exists between the
physical and moral world" was virtually a cliche in the intellec-
tual culture of this period, a popular refrain, to borrow Emer-
son's metaphor from this chapter's epigraph, in "the tune of the
time."42 Herschel's Discourse not only echoed but also helped
focus Emerson's inquiry, enlarging his sense of the unifying
power of the mind to discern general "laws." That generalizing
power was evident to Emerson in the Paris Museum, where it
was reflected in the natural systems of classification used to
order nature. More than this, though, as David Robinson notes,
Emerson was impressed by "the physical evidence" of the "unity
and dynamism of nature."43 Standing in "the collection of com-
parative anatomy" before the arrangement of "a perfect series
from the skeleton of the balaena [whale] . . . to the upright
form and highly developed skull of the Caucasian race of man,"
amid the "bewildering variety of animated forms" and "the
upheaving principle of life every where incipient," he felt that
"there is an occult relation between the very worm, the crawling
 ii4 Emerson in His Time

scorpions, and man." "I am moved by strange sympathies," he re-

ported in his journal and a subsequent lecture: "I say continually 'I
will be a naturalist'" (JMN, 4:199-200; EL 1:10).
How seriously Emerson entertained the vocation of profes-
sional naturalist is unclear. It did not take him long to realize he
lacked the temperament for "counting stamens or filaments or
teeth," craving instead the unifying insight that would "integrate
the particulars," as extolled by Herschel (JMN, 4:287-291). The
facts of "natural history [have] no value," he protested; "it is like
a single sex. But marry [natural history] to human history & it is
poetry" (JMN, 4:311). Emerson's impatience with the tedium of
taxonomy should not obscure the fact that the "marriage" of the
moral and physical spheres he wished to celebrate had been im-
plicit in his inquiry from the beginning. Moreover, because of the
way that "science" and "poetry" have so often been opposed to
one another (and were seen by other Romantics to be opposed),
Emerson's rejection of natural history as a vocation, and his de-
sire to produce "poetry" from the marriage of natural history
and human experience can conceal the extent to which his pur-
suit of "science" in the broad sense continued rather than
abated.44
Part of the "mischief" in the "art" of Emerson's writing has in
fact been to conceal the immediate cultural resources and reso-
nances that enabled his project and thus unintentionally to ob-
scure its scope and Emerson's own ambition. We get a glimpse of
that ambition, and of how Emerson conceived the union of
"moral science" and physical science, in a journal passage written
in early November 1833, on the eve of his first natural history lec-
ture and two months after he had begun to plan "my book about
nature" on the ship back home from Europe (JMN, 4:237):

Bacon said man is the minister & interpreter of nature: he

is so in more respects than one. He is not only to explain the
sense of each passage but the scope 8i argument of the whole
book. He is to explain the attractiveness of all. ... There is
not a passion in the human soul[,] perhaps not a shade of
thought but has its emblem in nature. And this does not be-
come fainter this undersong, this concurrent text, with more
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 115

intimate knowledge of nature's laws[,] but the analogy is felt

to be deeper & more universal for every law that is revealed.
Let a man under the influence of strong passion go into
the field & see how readily every thought clothes itself with a
material garment. . . . Now I say is it not time something
was done to explain this attractiveness which the face of na-
ture has for us renewed this ad day of November? . . .
I wish to learn the language [of nature] not that I may
know a new set of nouns & verbs but that I may read the
great book which is written in that tongue. . . .
To an instructed eye the universe is transparent. The light
of higher laws than its own shines through it. (JMN 4:95-96)

As he had begun his inquiry ten years earlier, so here, in this

preview of Nature, Emerson begins from the standpoint of
"moral science": the assumption that the "attractiveness" of na-
ture as experienced "in the fields" and "under the influence of a
strong passion" is a universal element of "man's" mental consti-
tution. Especially notable is his repeated desire not only to read
nature but also "to explain . . . the scope & argument of the
whole book," and to do so from its total effect on the perceiver.
As Albert J. von Frank observes of the natural history lectures,
"Emerson does not deploy" the argument from design "as
Bishop Paley had done, to confirm the existence of God" as the
creator of nature, "but instead to draw attention to the effect" of
nature "itself, showing how nature is to be understood as a
medium for self-regarding human consciousness."45 But what is
perhaps most striking about this passage is the role played by the
figure of Bacon. As noted earlier, Bacon's dictum regarding the
"book of God's word" and the "book of God's works" was often
invoked by naturalists and natural theologians. So Emerson in-
vokes him here, not casually but to enable his own project. Ulti-
mately, that is, Emerson here casts himself as "the [secular] minis-
ter and interpreter of nature."
Two years later, well into the composition of Nature, Emerson
had so completely absorbed Bacon's dictum into his own project
of uniting the two spheres that there was no need to invoke the
figure himself: "Man stands on the point betwixt the inward spirit
 Ii6 Emerson in His Time

& the outward matter. He sees that the one explains, translates
the other: that the world is the mirror of the soul. He is the priest
and interpreter of nature thereby" (JMN, 5:103). By this time, he
had also developed the rhetorical means or "method" of arti-
culating that "point betwixt the inward spirit & the outward
matter": the doctrine that matter and spirit "correspond" to, or
"translate," each other.
Emerson is usually thought to have developed the rhetorical
means of marrying mind and nature by appropriating the doc-
trine of correspondence from the eighteenth-century mystic and
naturalist Emanuel Swedenborg, although, as Lawrence Buell
notes, the idea was "in the air."46 Indeed, a less mystical version
of this doctrine formed the theoretical climate of Anglo-Ameri-
can natural science in which Emerson immersed himself upon
his return from Europe. The key explanatory principle in this sci-
ence was derived from the functional comparative anatomy of
George Cuvier, one of the architects of the exhibition of organic
life that so enraptured Emerson at the Paris Museum. In his
anatomy and in the natural system of classification based on it,
Cuvier used the Aristotelian "final cause" or purpose as a syn-
onym for his fundamental principle of "the conditions of exis-
tence." According to this principle, "since no animal could exist
without the condition which rendered its existence possible, the
parts of an animal were necessarily correlated to assume internal
harmony as well as harmony with its environment."47 While
overt natural theology was virtually nonexistent in post-Enlight-
enment, Catholic France, and although Cuvier (who was Protes-
tant) deliberately avoided referring to God or Providence in his
work, his "conditions of existence" easily served the metaphysi-
cal and intellectual requirements of Anglo-American natural the-
ology, where it was translated into the doctrine of "perfect adap-
tation." Most obviously in the popular Bridgewater Treatises
(though hardly confined to them), perfect adaptation "served as a
complete explanation of organic phenomena," one in which the
"condition" of a being's "existence" was thus conceived as given
by a benevolent deity or incomprehensible final cause itself in-
scribed in that condition.48
This theory lies behind what strikes modern readers as the
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 117

oddly passive and static conception of adaptation in pre-Darwinian

nature writing. Because the adaptation of organisms is conceived
as preordained or designed, the environments are always said to be
adapted to them rather than vice versa. Thus, for example, in his
second natural history lecture, Emerson cites the "history of navi-
gation" as affording instances "of the accurate adjustment of the
powers [of the sea] to the wants of man" (EL, 1:38). As a "complete
explanation," then, perfect adaptation implied the correspondence
or "ray of relation" between the moral and physical worlds, ob-
server and observed, that Emerson sought, a relation he was able
to perform in Nature precisely because he participated so deeply
and imaginatively in the cultural project of natural theology as it
informed contemporary natural science.
Fully as much as his philosophical idealism, then, the assump-
tion of perfect adaptation and the larger "design" it mirrors un-
derpin both the cosmic optimism of Nature and what seems a
rather abstracted narrative perspective. "We must trust the per-
fection of the creation so far," Emerson's speaker says in the sec-
ond paragraph of the book,

as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has

awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every
man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquires
he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as
truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and ten-
dencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great
apparition that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire,
to what end is nature? (CW, 1:7)

Like the design nature is already describing, "every man's condi-

tion" is conceived here as identical to the "end" or final cause
waiting to be read as a "hieroglyphic," and soon to be previewed
in the notorious transparent eyeball passage that follows in the
first chapter. In the next four chapters, Emerson then follows up
the purpose of nature and the true condition of "every man" in a
stepwise, loosely inductive manner, demonstrating the increas-
ingly unifying "uses" nature serves, from "commodity" up to
"discipline." While this logical structure derives from the ser-
 n8 Emerson in His Time

monk form out of which Emerson's lecture and essay style de-
veloped, the procedure of "enumerating the values of nature
and casting up their sum" is also followed by the Bridgewater au-
thors, several of whom emphasize as well the "discipline" that
nature serves for humanity.49
But while the Bridgewater authors typically draw the infer-
ence of design from innumerable evidences of perfect adapta-
tion, Emerson aims poetically to represent this "condition" from
within design, as theophany. At the same time, his theoretic
ambition is fulfilled by intimating the "solution" to this "hiero-
glyphic" intuitively, rather than inferentially—in Coleridgean
terms, as an intuitive truth of Reason rather than a logical con-
clusion of Understanding.50 Because "the one aim of all science,"
Emerson asserts, is "to find a theory of nature," and a "true
theory" is one that is "its own evidence," this mutually reinforc-
ing double emphasis on theoretical explanation and poetic revela-
tion addresses what Emerson felt were the moral and spiritual
deficiencies of the conventional design argument, of which Co-
leridge also had complained. Finally, the social and political im-
plications of Nature, no less than Emerson's poetic style and epis-
temological stance, ran directly counter to the conservatism of
many treatises of natural theology, which tended to emphasize
human dependency on the standing order. Radically protestant
in its religious enthusiasm, Nature was also potentially radical in
other ways. Because " 'Nature is not fixed but fluid,'" Emerson
looked for "a correspondent revolution in things" as the spirit of
nature was realized (CVl^ 1:44, 45).

Emerson and Evolution

Emerson was able to consider becoming "a naturalist" in the

early 18303 and to pursue his inquiry through scientific theory
not only because of the common context provided by natural
theology but also because the process of professionalization was
only then getting under way in England and the United States.
Even while he was devising and performing the bold, unifying
trope of correspondence, the social forces of scientific profes-
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 119

sionalization were undermining the unified perspective of "all

science" that Emerson wished to claim.51 Thus, the palpable ten-
sion between "the poet" and "the theorist" in Nature resonates
from cultural as well as personal sources.52 Indeed, despite plen-
tiful descriptions of "the unity of science," like Herschel's, even
within the developing scientific community the specialization of
knowledge was threatening to disintegrate what William
Whewell called "the empire or commonwealth of science." At
virtually the same moment when Emerson stood in the Paris
Museum, as "part of a strategy to prevent disintegration" Whe-
well had coined the term "scientist" to "highlight the common
enterprise in which astronomers, chemists, geologists, and
botanists were engaged."53
But if the theoretical stance Emerson tried to establish in Na-
ture was being undercut by the increasing authority and special-
ization of professional science, in the aftermath of its publication
Emerson was already focusing more on the problem of intellec-
tual and social fragmentation, envisioning the American scholar,
for example, as a "university of knowledges," and one who ap-
prises us of the "commonwealth of mind" (CW, 1:69; JMN,
5:232).54 Explicitly decrying the "moral" effects of scientific spe-
cialization in the lecture "Humanity of Science" delivered in De-
cember 1836, Emerson claimed, "Whilst the laws of the world co-
exist in each particle [of nature], they cannot be learned by the
exclusive study of one creature. A man shall not say, I will dedi-
cate my life to the study of this moss, and through that I will
achieve nature. Nature hates cripples and mono-maniacs" (EL,
2:2.6).
As scientific literacy had been crucial to the Unitarian minister
for "enlarging the doctrines of theology," so to the secular "min-
ister and interpreter of nature" it remained essential now for sus-
taining the unity of the two spheres he had articulated in Nature.
As Emerson saw it, the chief "benefit" of "the popularization of
science [will be] to keep the eye of scientific men on that human
side of nature wherein lie grandest truths" (EL, 2:38). Bearing in
mind that his contemporaries regarded scientific knowledge as
cutting-edge versions of the "grandest" human truths is espe-
cially important for understanding how Emerson's representa-
 I2O Emerson in His Time

tions of nature develop in relation to emergent evolutionary

ideas. Because of the broad discourse within which evolutionary
issues were publically debated, evolution "did not just mean spe-
cies, but everything from nebulae to the human mind."55 Con-
sequently, Emerson's self-appointed role as mediator between the
scientific and "human side of nature" also positioned him at the
forefront of the "human side" of evolutionary theorizing.
While his vision of physical nature changed dramatically over
the course of his long life, there is reason to doubt that Emerson
ever really abandoned teleology. In this respect Emerson's ad-
vancing knowledge of science continued to enlarge, rather than
to undermine, his theology. Yet in this he did not differ a great
deal from many contemporaries who came to accept evolution-
ary views. Contrary to neo-Darwinian historical accounts, rather
than effecting an immediate "revolution," Darwin's theory was
widely received and accommodated to an "essentially non-
Darwinian conceptual framework" that stressed "the orderly,
goal-directed, and usually progressive character of evolution."
Accordingly, to assess Emerson's relation to evolutionary theory
more precisely as it emerged in the first half of the nineteenth
century, we will do better to distinguish between progressionism
and transmutationism.56
Although these two theories were often conflated as "develop-
ment," especially after 1844, Emerson's contemporaries were
quite sensitive to the essential difference between them, for it in-
volved nothing less than naturalizing the widely sought "connec-
tion" between the moral and physical spheres of creation. Where
transmutationists interpreted the history of life, evident in the
fossil sequence, as a history of genealogical descent down to
humanity, progressionists argued that the increasing complexity
of those organisms reveals a goal-directed progress toward hu-
manity and the unfolding of a divine plan. At best progression-
ism was "evolution without physical continuity. The continuity
exists only in the mind of God, who has created a succession
of new and higher life forms after the extinction of all of their
predecessors through a series of divinely invoked universal
catastrophes."57
Early in his career Emerson held the view that, as he put it in
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 121

his natural history lecture "The Relation of Man to the Globe,"

"from times incalculably remote there has been a progressive
preparation for [man] . . . preparing [the world] to be habit-
able by him. He was not made sooner, because his house was not
ready" (EL, 1:29). This view implied neither transmutation nor
any continuity between mammals and other orders, contrary to
the impression Emerson seems to give in extolling "the upheav-
ing principle of life every where incipient" in the Paris Museum
exhibitions.58 As might be expected from the spiritualization of
matter effected in Nature, in the 18305 Emerson could be down-
right repulsed by the materialist implications of transmutation,
not only because of an inclination, deep in the spiritual traditions
that formed him, to privilege spirit over matter, but also because
of the specter of determinism that such theories raised. In re-
sponse to the grim picture of natural law given by Thomas
Malthus, who argued that as a result of unrestrained sexual pas-
sion human population increase led naturally to vice, starvation,
and death, Emerson wrote: "Malthus revolts us by looking at a
man as an animal. So do those views of genius semi-medical
which I spit at" (JMN, 5:227).59 Presumably, this is why, although
Emerson celebrates Lamarck's attempt at a unifying vision of na-
ture, he finds his "system . . . imperfect" (JMN, 5:220). At the
same time, as Evelleen Richards has shown, the path Darwin
took to evolution, "along the route that led to natural selection,"
was not the only one. Rather, "there were a number of paths that
ran along side and sometimes intersected with Darwinism."60
Much to the consternation and horror of many progressionists,
progressionism, brought down to earth by the anonymous au-
thor of Vestiges, would turn out to be one of them.

Before considering Emerson's complex relation to that "beastly

book," as one prominent geologist called it, we should note the
effects of two developments in Anglo-American science and its
popularization on Emerson's representations of nature following
the publication of his first book in 1836.61 The first of these has al-
ready been mentioned: the development of a more comprehen-
sive and encompassing conception of natural "law," in the context
 12,2 Emerson in His Time

of a new natural theology. Although in Nature "the perfection of

the creation" is assumed to be sustained by the "permanence of
laws," attention to them is subordinated to the disclosure of the
"end" or final cause of nature. Perhaps Emerson was wary of the
common association of mechanistic natural law with French sci-
entific materialism, an association that even threatened the early
nineteenth-century reputation of Newton.62 In any case, while
references to natural law certainly do occur in Emerson's earlier
writings, beginning with his lecture series on "The Philosophy of
History," delivered in winter 1836-1837, the concept assumes a new
prominence, with subtle but significant effects on his representa-
tion of human relations to nature.
On one level, in addresses during the late 18305 and in Essays:
First Series (1841), Emerson still maintains that "in the divine order,
intellect is first, nature secondary" (CW, 1:123). As in "The Ameri-
can Scholar" address (1837), where "vanquishing] and planting]"
"the wilderness" is a metaphor for "extending] by being, my do-
minion," so in Essays the same impulse to "reduce [nature] under
the dominion of man" makes itself felt (CW, 1:59,2:20). Now, how-
ever, the new emphasis on the all-embracing present "law" places
humanity within a comprehensive "natural" unity much more
than previously, an effect that correspondingly reduces the power
attributed to human will as the agency of "dominion." In this re-
spect, "Spiritual Laws" focuses a theme that runs through the Es-
says: "[W]e are begirt with laws which execute themselves. . . .
Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom
which animates all whom it floats" (CW, 2:79, 81). "Power and wis-
dom" are, of course, two attributes of God that the Bridgewater
and other writers of natural theology purport to establish. But
where these authors infer such attributes from "natural facts,"
inviting their readers to step back and behold the evidence and the
logical conclusion, Emerson places his readers "in the middle of
the [experiential] stream" that, as it "animates all whom it floats,"
further elides the traditional distinctions between "the soul,"
"God," and "nature," leading a conservative writer and reader of
the discourse such as Bowen to protest "the grave error of repre-
senting the Divine Being as a mere abstraction . . . without
consciousness, personality, or intelligence."63 Again, in tracing
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 123

"the natural history of the soul" in an address on "The Method of

Nature," Emerson identifies "ecstacy" as "the law and cause of na-
ture" and, simultaneously, as the divine state through which "the
best in any [human] work" is performed. "Draw[ing] from nature
the lesson of an intimate divinity," he effectively renders that di-
vinity more intimate, as a "Supreme Presence" in nature, than any
personality above or apart from it (CW, 1:130).
Related to this is a discernible shift in the way Emerson repre-
sents "final causes" in nature. Where his first book followed the
"end" or final cause of nature up to "Spirit," and where the
American Scholar and the Divinity School addresses inculcated
the sublimity of rising intellectually and morally to that vision,
Emerson now claims that "Nature knows" no "single end." In-
deed, "if man himself be considered as the end, and it be as-
sumed that the final cause of the world is to make holy or wise
or beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded." Rather,

All is nascent, infant. . . . We can point nowhere to any-

thing final; but tendency appears on all hands: planet, system,
constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in
July; is becoming somewhat else; is in rapid metamorphosis.
The embryo does not more strive to be man than yonder burr
of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a globe,
and parent of new stars. (CW, 1:125,126)

This image of growth unfolding lawfully throughout nature and

the universe, while of course a Romantic commonplace, can
nonetheless be tied more directly to a second development in
Anglo-American science and its popularization that carried Emer-
son's progressionism farther in the direction of a genuinely evo-
lutionary vision. In its popularization by the Scottish political
economist and astronomer John Pringle Nichol, the nebular hy-
pothesis Emerson sketches here became a standard "natural fact"
in support of a progressionist cosmology, one that Nichol used to
support a broad social reformist program.64 As its secret author,
Robert Chambers, would do three years later in Vestiges, Emerson
here conflates the growth of nebulas with that of embryos as
manifestations of the same "tendency" in "total nature." Like
 124 Emerson in His Time

Chambers, too, he was inspired by Continental theories concern-

ing a morphological "unity of type" or, as Darwin referred to it in
comments cited earlier, "unity of plan."
Initially, Emerson's exposure to morphology came through
Goethe, who coined the term to designate a general Urtype under-
lying both both plant and animal anatomy.65 Working from the
belief that nature constituted a harmonious whole, in his classic
Metamorphosis of Plants Goethe argued that plant organs are all
metamorphosed variations of a primal leaf "type"; and the like as-
sumption facilitated his discovery of the intermaxillary bone in
the human skull, a bone hitherto found only in "lower" verte-
brates. Although the search for a vertebrate archetype was carried
out by Carl Gustav Carus, and fully elaborated in the 18405 by
British comparative anatomist Richard Owen, Goethe was widely
regarded as the founder not only of "the leading idea of modern
botany," as Emerson wrote in Representative Men (1850), but also of
the entire research program known as "transcendental morphol-
ogy."66 While for Goethe "the archetype may have had only an
ideal not an actual existence," it was emphatically "not a Platonic
idea." Indeed, "the vertebrate archetype provided a direct step-
ping-stone to the notion of evolutionary ancestors," leading Ernst
Haeckel in 1866 to identify Goethe as "a principal founder of evo-
lutionary theory."67 The archetype acquired this evolutionary di-
mension through its apparent embodiment in the phenomenon of
embryonic repetition, in which the whole history of nature ap-
peared to be telescoped in the embryonic development of higher
vertebrates, the so-called law, made famous by Haeckel, that "on-
togeny recapitulates phylogeny."68
In pre-Darwinian biology and in science writings, this law was
more often expressed as a powerful metaphor, "the gestation of
nature," in which "the history of nature [was] construed as one
long gestation analogous to a normal human pregnancy." Ac-
cording to Evelleen Richards, it was precisely the ambiguity of
this metaphor, "encapsulatpng] the organicism, the uncompro-
mising developmentalism, anthropocentrism, and insistence on
the fundamental unity of all nature," that "gave the metaphor of
gestation its explanatory power and led to its wide deployment
in nineteenth-century biology."69 Just as Cuvier's functionalist
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 125

adaptation had been made to serve Anglo-American natural

theology in the 1830$, so the metamorphic development of a uni-
tary "type" such as the vertebrate—"striving" through the his-
tory of nature like "the embryo" does "to be man," in Emerson's
image—confirmed the operation of general "laws" of nature in
the new natural theology.
In progressionist terms, "unity of type" at once placed "man"
within a larger natural whole and privileged him as her highest
production or "end." Properly sanitized of transmutationist
taint, "unity of type" could even be promoted in a Bridgewater
Treatise as proof of a larger "unity of design." This interpreta-
tion no doubt contributed to Emerson's appreciation of Peter
Mark Roget's treatise, Animal and Vegetable Physiology, "the only
good one I believe in the series except [Charles] Bellfs]," he con-
fided to Margaret Fuller while reading the volume in October
1838 (L, 2:169)7° A Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and
Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, Roget
(of Thesaurus fame) provided in this dense, two-volume work
abundant and authoritative testimony concerning the "laws of
Analogy" by which "the manifold structures and diversified phe-
nomena of living beings . . . are extensively, and perhaps uni-
versally connected." In his conclusion, Roget summarized the
latest Continental researches in support of the hypothesis that,
through "innumerable modifications," "Nature" keeps "a certain
definite type or ideal standard" to which "she always shows a de-
cided tendency to conform."71 But the most startling evidence of
the "progressive metamorphoses" through the vertebrate type
came from embryology. As Roget summarized the law: the
physical characteristics "which distinguish the higher animal, on
its attaining its ultimate and permanent form" are "those which
it had received in its last stage of embryonic evolution." Nor was
"the human embryo exempt from the same metamorphoses."
For in its own "progressive development," the embryo traversed
the entire vertebrate series, from fish through "reptile" and
"quadruped" to its present form.72 Roget took pains to disclaim
the radical materialist implications of his hypothesis, in effect
attempting to confine his readers' interpretation of "evolution"
to the progressionist sense of an "unfolding" metaphysical de-
 126 Emerson in His Time

sign. Yet the very urgency of his denunciation, not to men-

tion the length and exuberance of his summary (placed at the
elevating end of the book), indicates Roget's ambivalence as
well as the ambiguity noted by Richards: the uneasy coexistence
of idealist and materialist interpretations in the same "natural
fact."
Thus when Emerson figures "[a]n individual man [as] a fruit
which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen," and one
"with whom so long the universe travailed in labor," he invokes a
process of "gestation" that could be read as simultaneously ideal
and actual, spiritual and physical (CW, 1:127-128,129). At the same
time, in his writings during this period, unity of type becomes
the symbol of a central unity and teleology evident in nature and
in every aspect of human life: "Every thing is made of one hid-
den stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamor-
phosis. . . . Each new form repeats not only the main charac-
ter of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims,
furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every
other" (CW, 2:59). Whether Emerson was willing or able at this
moment to go the whole hog, as Huck Finn would say, is ulti-
mately less important than how these new figural resources and
his own bold theorizing in tune with transcendental morphology
enriched his representations of nature and humanity's relation
to it.
For one thing, it enabled the expression of a sympathetic,
even filial, identification with nature only partially registered ear-
lier, as when Emerson pauses briefly during the upward spiral of
his argument in Nature to protest: "I have no hostility to nature,
but a child's love to it. ... I do not wish to fling stones at my
beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest" (CW, 1:35-36). Second,
while remaining uncompromising in his progressionism, refigur-
ing nature in this way complicated his previously single-minded
emphasis on linear ascent by opening it out, conceptually as well
as aesthetically, into nonlinear forms, such as in the "law of un-
dulation" in "Intellect" (CW, 2:197). Even in "The Over-Soul," one
of the more otherworldly essays in Essays: First Series, the "flow-
ing robe" in which the soul is "clothed" materializes and devel-
ops through the imagery of biological metamorphosis:
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 127

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its
progress to be computed. The soul's advances are not made
by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a
straight line; but rather by ascension of state, such as can be
represented by metamorphosis,—from the egg to the worm,
from the worm to the fly. (CW, 2:163)

Perhaps the most complex and memorable instance of this devel-

opment is the essay "Circles." A paean to nonlinearity, "Circles"
traces "the same law of eternal procession" through the "inces-
sant movement and progression which all things partake," and in
a multitude of forms and directions: as eternally and unexpected,
as "always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every
deep a lower deep opens"; "tendpng] outward . . . to immense
and innumerable expansion"; vertically "scal[ing] this mysterious
ladder" (CW, 2:186,188, 181,179). Unrestricted by either the theo-
logical or the scientific orthodoxy that constrained Roget, deeply
sympathetic with transcendental biology, and positioned to in-
terpret for a general audience that "side of nature wherein lie
grandest truths," Emerson was prepared for Vestiges as well as
anyone could have been.
Vestiges was so popular and so widely perceived as dangerous
in large part because in it Robert Chambers rewrote the familiar
progressionist narrative as a transmutationist one. He under-
stood that the "reception of novelties in science" is "regulated
very much by the amount of kindred or relative phenomena
which the public mind already possesses and acknowledges, to
which the new can be assimilated."73 Consequently, the model of
progressive development he presented in Vestiges was just as te-
leological and linear as those of the progressionists. And initially
it seemed just as innocuous. Beginning with the "birth" of the
universe according to the nebular hypothesis, the veiled author
argued that life had developed from a simple monad (or "glob-
ule") "up" to the complexity of higher mammals, including hu-
manity, a process that might yet result in an even "higher"
human state, given the right social and political conditions, mak-
ing "room," as Emerson put it in his journal, "for a better species
of the genus Homo" (JMN, 9:232).
 128 Emerson in His Time

But where Roget, in considering the same body of Continen-

tal research that Chambers drew upon, had resisted the "seduc-
tive speculations" of the "transcendental school," insisting that
"there still exist specific differences, establishing between them
an impassable barrier of separation, and effectively preventing
any conversion of one species into another," Chambers expli-
cated a host of hints or "vestiges" culled from recent research in
various mainstream and marginal scientific disciplines, in favor of
what, in his defense, he pointedly called "the actual progression
of species."74 Having begun on earth by electrical means (here
Chambers cited controversial experiments by Andrew Crosse,
who claimed to have generated mites through electricity), the
progressive development or "natural history of creation" was ef-
fected by an ordinary, natural, even domestic "law." Citing the ex-
perimental research of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire on malformations
as instances of aborted or "arrested development," Chambers ar-
gued that if conditions disrupting the normal process of gesta-
tion could result in underdeveloped organisms that resembled
earlier evolutionary "types," then past conditions protracting the
normal length of gestation might well have produced more "ad-
vanced" species. Thus, the mechanism of transmutation, "the
production of new forms, as shewn in the page of the geological
record, has never been anything more than a new stage of
progress in gestation, an event as simply natural, and attended
as little by any circumstance of a wonderful or startling [i.e., mi-
raculous] kind, as the silent advance of an ordinary mother from
one week to another of her pregnancy."75 By making gestation
the mechanism of the development process, Chambers literal-
ized the metaphor that had long carried such "transcendental"
speculations. In the process, as James Secord has noted, he do-
mesticated transmutation itself, "infuspng] with all the domestic
virtues" a subject that had been "associated in the public mind
with radical revolutionaries and dissolute foreigners."76
In "attempting to weave a great generalization out of the
truths already established" in specialist disciplines, Chambers un-
wittingly challenged scientific authority, making it necessary for
scientific reviewers to publicly "clarify the meaning of science
and scientific practice."77 What especially troubled and, in some
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 129

cases, infuriated many professional scientists was that Cham-

bers's vision of a universe under "law" was in perfect accord with
the new natural theology many of them shared. As he recurred
to this vital point in his conclusion:

Thus the whole is complete on one principle. The masses of

space are formed by law; law makes them in due time theatres
of existence for plants and animals; sensation, disposition, in-
tellect, are all in like manner developed and sustained in ac-
tion by law. It is most interesting to observe into how small a
field the whole of the mysteries of nature thus ultimately re-
solve themselves. The inorganic has been thought to have one
final comprehensive law, GRAVITATION. The organic, the other
great department of mundane things, rests in like manner on
one law, and that is, DEVELOPMENT. Nor may even these be
after all twain, but only branches of one still more compre-
hensive law, the expression of a unity flowing immediately
from the One who is First and Last.78

Although panned as an atheistic and materialistic tract by

many orthodox reviewers, especially in the United States, on the
whole the book was generally well received among certain
groups of liberal Christians, rationalists, and radicals.79 Indeed,
while vigorously attacked by Francis Bowen in the North Ameri-
can Review, the Unitarian Christian Examiner followed the English
liberal Unitarian Prospective Review, the Westminister Review, and
others in Britain that saw "nothing atheistic, nothing irreligious,
in the attempt to conceive creation, as well as reproduction car-
ried on by universal laws."80 In the context of the liberal recep-
tion of Chambers's book and the discourse in which he pre-
sented natural law, Emerson's enthusiasm for Vestiges, as "a good
approximation to that book we have wanted so long & which so
many attempts have been made to write," whose author, he
thought, had "come as near to succeeding as a man [who was]
not a poet could," is not surprising (L, 3:283; 8:23). His interest
in Chambers's theory was ardent enough, apparently, that, in
Britain three years later, he not only met twice with Chambers
but sought out Andrew Crosse as well.81
 130 Emerson in His Time

But where orthodox commentators interpreted Chambers's

natural theology as a vicious masquerade, for Emerson, who
was committed to a similarly sweeping vision of natural law,
Chambers's "theology" did not go far enough: "What is so un-
godly as these polite bows to God in English books?" he wrote
in his journal. "Everything in this Vestiges of Creation is good
except the theology, which is civil, timid, & dull" (JMN, 9:211). If
we link this criticism with his qualified praise of Chambers as
"good" for one "not a poet," we can understand how far Emer-
son's metamorphic vision of nature had taken him, without
imagining that he somehow mystically "anticipated" evolution.
In Emerson's reading, what is "ungodly" and "timid" in Cham-
bers's "theology" is his failure to recognize and to represent the
identity of self, God, and the metamorphic power of nature. As
he had put it in "The Method of Nature": "[A]s the power or
genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the descrip-
tion of it be. The poet must be a rhapsodist: his inspiration a
sort of bright casualty: his will in it only the surrender of will to
the Universal Power, which will not be seen face to face, but
must be received and sympathetically known" (CW, 1:132). Bear-
ing in mind Emerson's ecstatic elaboration of metamorphosis
and law in this and other post-Nature writings, and looking
ahead to his Vestigian representations of natural process in
subsequent years, we need not wonder what "poet," in Emer-
son's mind, might better have represented "everything good" in
Vestiges.

Freedom, Force, and Fate

We can now understand how, looking back in the early i86os,

Emerson might well have characterized his vision of nature a
decade earlier as "my Darwinism" (TN, 1:49). While not evolu-
tionary in either the naturalistic or the purely technical sense in
which Darwin's theory is now understood, the evolutionary pro-
gressionism Emerson began to envision in the 18405 was nonthe-
less in tune with the "transcendental" evolutionary theorizing
summed up and further stimulated by Vestiges. The genuinely
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 131

evolutionary (rather than merely progressionist) way Emerson

imagines human-nature relations at this point is evident in their
decidedly more material representation.
Thus, in the opening lecture of Representative Men, we readily
recognize his Baconian figure of the minister and interpreter
of nature of fifteen years earlier when he asserts that "the possi-
bility of interpreting nature] lies in the identity of the observer
and the observed," because "[e]ach material thing has its celestial
side, . . . its translation through humanity into the spiritual
and necessary sphere." But now the corollary is that humanity is
"not only representative but participant" in the material body of
nature and thereby also in the "ends" to which "all things contin-
ually ascend." "The reason why [the observer] knows" the physi-
cal qualities and organisms of nature is that, in the immense
scheme of evolutionary time that now informs Emerson's vision
more precisely, "he is of them: he has just come out of nature, or
from being a part of that thing. Animated chlorine knows of
chlorine, and incarnate zinc of zinc. Their quality makes his ca-
reer, and he can variously publish their virtues, because they
compose him" (CW, 4:7).
As significant as this evolutionary transformation in Emer-
son's representation of nature was, however, the publication of
Essays: Second Series (1844) indicated that, in the "moral" domain,
an arguably more profound change had already taken place in
Emerson's conception of humanity as "participant" in nature.
The opening chapter, "The Poet," seems not just to reaffirm the
high idealism of the late 18305 and early 18405 but to soar higher
still. With his "better perception," the poet beholds and articu-
lates the Goethean archetype incarnate, familiar from Essays:
First Series: "that within the form of every creature is a force im-
pelling it to ascend into a higher form" (CW, 3:12). As the theorist
and poet of Nature had followed the "end of nature" up to
"spirit," so, in beholding "the flowing or metamorphosis," this
ideal poet embodies scientific as well as literary "genius." He
knows not only the "facts" of "astronomy, chemistry, vegetation,
and animation." But "[h]e knows why," and thus posesses "true
science," much as Emerson had imagined his own vocation ten
years earlier (CW; 3:19).
 132 Emerson in His Time

In comparison to "The Poet," the cosmology, epistemology,

and poetics of Nature appear almost static. But reading "The Poet"
in relation to the next essay, "Experience," reveals the dark under-
side of its almost manic optimism. Poets are "liberating gods,"
it turns out, because they represent the few who can open "new
passages . . . for us into nature," making "the metamorphosis
. . . possible" (CW, 3:18,16). Having "set [his] heart on honesty"
in "Experience," Emerson acknowledges in "The Poet" as well
that most of us most of the time "lack the affirmative principle,
and . . . have no superfluity of spirit for new creation." So rare
is inspiration and the perception of "unity" that perhaps "there is
no power of expansion in men" (CW, 3:40, 27,33).
True, earlier essays do occasionally look on "our experience"
skeptically. "Compensation," for example, attempts to give due
weight to the perception that "[t]here is a crack in every thing
God has made. It would seem, there is always this vindictive cir-
cumstance stealing in at unawares, even into the wild poesy in
which the human fancy attempted to make bold holiday, and to
shake itself free of the old laws, . . . certifying that the law is
fatal." But typically (as the phase "it would seem" betrays here),
the voice of the speaker in these essays occupies a stable perspec-
tive and position apart from the appearance of "vindictive circum-
stance." In "Compensation" that perspective opens onto the
"deeper fact" that, finally, "the soul" lies "[u]nder all this running
sea of circumstance" and is identical with "real Being." Similarly,
the "incessant movement and progression" in "Circles" comes to
rest in the "principle of fixture or stability in the soul," a "central
life" that is "somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowl-
edge and thought, and contains all its circles" (CW, 2:63, 70,188).
"Experience," reflecting the ordinary and often "unhandsome"
condition the essay explores, offers no such position and secures
no ultimate affirmation (CW, 3:29). Rather than affirming pro-
gressionist ascent thematically or structurally, the essay traces a
labyrinthine path in which "one section of the essay yields to the
next, as one mode of experience grows out of another," with
every affirmation Emerson wrests from his struggle revealing a
"hidden negation," and "each step toward resolution . . . gen-
erat[ing] a further complication."82
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 133

As Robinson has shown, the ongoing dialogue with skepti-

cism, initiated in "Experience" and growing out of Emerson's
personal sense of the limitations of Transcendentalist vision, de-
velops directly into the ethical and pragmatistic orientation of his
later work. At the same time, Essays: Second Series also suggests
that Emerson experienced skepticism as part of a broader cul-
tural and intellectual tendency: the growing naturalistic move-
ment to define natural law in purely material terms. The real
threat posed by Vestiges, as many reviews and books written
against it show, was Chambers's extension of natural law into the
"moral" domain of mind. Once human as well as animal behav-
ior is "proved to be under [the domain of] law," Chambers wrote
triumphantly, the "old metaphysical character [of mind] vanishes
in a moment, and the distinction usually taken between physical
and moral is annulled."83 As the expositor of Transcendentalist
vision, Emerson had been implicated in the failure of that vision
to realize its social promise. As secular minister and interpreter
of nature, he was equally implicated now that "natural law" had
turned into a double-edged tool. Such a redefinition not only
threatened individual moral agency but also, for Emerson and
others, rendered the universe morally bankrupt, evacuated of
"beneficent purpose" (CW, 3:112).
His later enthusiasm for Vestiges notwithstanding, in "Experi-
ence" Emerson diagnosed this threat clearly enough in the ten-
dency among "physicians" to reduce human behavior to "tem-
perament," an explanation in which "[s]pirit is matter reduced to
an extreme thinness: O so thin!" and that "puts all divinity to
rout" (CW, 3:31). Emerson's most visible target here is the popular
science of phrenology, upon which in fact Chambers had drawn
heavily for the annulment he announced.84 But his critique en-
compasses the wider trend he disparages as "this trap of the
so-called sciences" that allows no "escape . . . from the links
of the chain of physical necessity" (CW, 3:32). On the same
grounds, in Representative Men and in "Fate" he would reckon
with the "rule," formulated by "the new science of Statistics,"
(which Chambers also cited), "that the most casual and extraor-
dinary events, if the basis of population is broad enough, be-
come matter of fixed calculations," a rule that would reduce
 134 Emerson in His Time

Emerson's representative men of genius to blips on the screen of

history.85
The magnitude of this threat, and the consequent importance
of maintaining a faith that "the results of life are uncalculated
and uncalculable," helps account for Emerson's peculiar animus
against "generalizing" in these essays (CW, 3:40). Even early in his
career, his ambivalence toward this act of mind is implicit in his
persistent characterization of it as "tyrannical." But so long as
the power of generalization was understood as creating an
"order & classification in the mind" that discloses "the corre-
spondent Order actually subsisting in Nature," it could be cele-
brated as a means of disclosing unity and design, as with the
schoolboy in "The American Scholar," who, "tyrannized over by
[his] own unifying instinct," comes to see "that he and [nature]
proceed from one root" (JMN, 5:168; CW, 1:54-55). But in Essays:
Second Series, Emerson is more apt to valorize the capacity of na-
ture to escape knowing. Now, nature "resents generalizing and
insults the [natural] philosopher every moment with a million
fresh particulars." Any reductive effort to "get rid of the parts
by denying them" only reveals that the philosopher is himself
"the more partial" (CW, 3:139). Significantly, Emerson's primary
strategy for fashioning a "new philosophy" to circumvent these
contemporary threats and to recuperate a moral universe is thus
to "take them in," rather than simply deny their validity. For in a
meaningful universe not even "skepticisms are . . . gratuitous
or lawless." Rather, they are parts of a larger whole that, "[t]o the
intelligent, . . . converts itself into a vast promise and will not
be explained" (CW, 3:33,112).
The problem posed by materialist deployments of natural law,
severely limiting the ethical and metaphysical possibilities Emer-
son had long explored, only loomed larger in the years after Es-
says: Second Series. By 1850 a host of such limitations had arranged
themselves in his mind under the category of "Fate," a "fact" he
identified with nature as early as 1845.86 Lecturing on the subject
often during the 18505, he made "Fate" the most formidable essay
of his last major book, The Conduct of Life (1860). More relentlessly
than in "Experience," Emerson "honestly state[s] the facts," build-
ing up through the first half of the essay the overpowering pres-
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 135

ence of "this mountain of Fate," "this cropping out in our planted

gardens of the core of the world," into every sphere of contempo-
rary life: "in matter, mind, and morals; in race, in retardations of
strata, and in thought and character as well" (W, 6:5,12,19, 21). As
his geological metaphors suggest, "Nature" is a symbol for all of
these manifestations, representing the rule of material law in
moral as well as physical domains. And the challenge to the proj-
ect of natural theology is made explicit by Emerson's grim substi-
tution of Bacon's dictum: The book of nature is not the book of
God; "The book of Nature is the book of Fate" (W, 6:15).
Emerson's moral pragmatism is abundantly evident in his de-
termination to address the pressing contemporary issues brought
together under "fate" not in general terms but through the "prac-
tical question of the conduct of life."87 Yet the physical metaphors
that animate "Fate" and its companion essay, "Power," also indi-
cate how Emerson's sense of the problem of "conducting]" "life"
and "power" still resonates as much as ever with the contempo-
rary question of "man's place in nature." In connection with the
pressure exerted by reductionism, beginning in the mid-i84os,
Emerson begins to rely increasingly on metaphors drawn from
physics and chemistry, the better to suggest an elemental essence
(CW, 3:42). Thus, in the key essay "Nature," in Essays: Second Series,
he revives from Coleridge the distinction between natura naturata
(nature as object) and natura naturans (nature as vital process); and
he then breaks the latter term into two interpenetrating and
quasi-physical properties, "Motion, or change" and "Rest, or iden-
tity" (CW, 3:105-6). Likewise, in "Experience," while abjuring the
capacity of any generalization to convey the "ineffable cause,"
which "refuses to be named," he elects a phrase by Mencius,
"vast-flowing vigor," as closer than most. And generally in later
writings, he more frequently employs metaphors of "force" and
"energy."88
The fulcrum for moving the mountain of Fate in Emerson's
essay is a complex figure of polar force: "man" as "a stupendous
antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe"
(W, 6:22). Like a reprise, "Fate" exhibits several of the theoretical
concepts Emerson had appropriated from science through the
discourse of natural theology—the perfect adaptation or "mu-
 136 Emerson in His Time

tual fitness" between organisms and "habitat"; the teleological

and progressionist "ascending effort . . . of the Universe"; the
"Unity in things" revealed through "the omnipresence of law"
(W, 6:37, 35, 25). None, however, is more central to the essay or
better illustrates how, in this late work, Emerson fashioned a pe-
culiarly tensive harmony of his own through that discourse than
polarity.
Emerson had long been intrigued, as were Coleridge and
Goethe, with figures of polar dynamism as useful natural sym-
bols for reconciling opposite qualities or terms into a larger
whole. Like Coleridge, Emerson understood polarity not as sim-
ple dualism but rather as a relation between two opposing ele-
mental forces that together constitute an underlying, tensive, and
vital unity. According to Coleridge, the effort to comprehend
polar relations will always lead to contradiction because the rela-
tionship itself is not logical but imaginative, an intuitive truth of
Reason rather than a proposition of Understanding. But Emer-
son's models for conceiving polarity were not only literary ones.
Due in part to the availability of newly translated writings of
German nature philosophers and naturalists (which Emerson
read at this time), in the late 18408 and 18505 polarity was widely
employed as as explanatory principle in Anglo-American science,
particularly in the idealist biology of Richard Owen and Edward
Forbes, who Emerson met in England, and in the work of Har-
vard scientists Asa Gray andjefferies Wyman.89
Emerson's most explicit, if abstract, articulation of the para-
doxical polar relation Coleridge described occurs at the end of
Essays: Second Series in the essay "Nominalist and Realist," where
it enables him to reassess the problem explored in "Experience"
that we have no access to "universality . . . in its primary
form." Yet because "Nature keeps herself whole, and her repre-
sentation complete in the experience of each mind," glimpses of
that whole will come if we "see the parts wisely." Thus,

The end and the means, the gamester and the game,—life is
made up of the intermixture and reaction of these two amica-
ble powers, whose marriage appears beforehand monstrous,
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 137

as each denies and tends to abolish the other. We must recon-

cile the contradictions as we can. . . . All the universe over,
there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator-creature,
mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be
affirmed or denied. (CW, 3:143-44)

In "Fate" Emerson names the opposing pole in this "old

Two-Face" "Power." Like Fate, Power is a force manifested both in
nature and, as the freedom of thought and will, in humanity. Be-
cause the two elements are conceived as interpenetrating one an-
other in an irresolvable tension, in the moral terms of the essay,
"fate slides into freedom and freedom into fate." At the same time,
polarity obliterates the traditional dichotomy of "man" and "na-
ture." For humanity is simultaneously constituted a part of the
"elemental order" and of "the spirit which composes and decom-
poses nature": for "the lightning which explodes and fashions
planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him" (W, 6:22,36).
This cosmic force field of "the cunning co-presence of two
elements which is throughout nature" is always kept in view in
the essay. But through physical and chemical metaphors of "fu-
sion" and "reaction," Emerson channels this paradigm into the
more pragmatic purposes of the essay and the book: not to over-
come material fate but to transform it into moral freedom and
power (W, 6:22, 29, 20). Faced with fate and "incompetent to
solve" the contradictions "of the time," Emerson writes at the
beginning of the essay, "we can only obey our own polarity."
Paradoxically, for many readers, following that same course leads
him at the end to urge them to "build altars to the Blessed Unity,"
whose other face is "the Beautiful Necessity," confident (though
it "passes understanding") that underlying them is "a Law which
is not intelligent but intelligence."90
Emerson's fascination with what he called "the powers and
laws of thought" was also channeled into another project in his
later career. Inspired in an 1848 lecture by Richard Owen while in
England, he determined to make a "masterly enumeration" of
the natural laws of mind comparable to Owen's scientific enu-
merations, which impressed him as having "the widest applica-
 138 Emerson in His Time

tion" (W, 12:3, 42.6). Although he never finished the project, three
lectures related to it were collected and published posthumously
by his editor, James Elliot Cabot, as Natural History of Intellect.
While, as Richardson notes, "these lectures continue and deepen
the problems raised in Nature," they also lack the assurance em-
bodied in the prophetic voice of that earlier work, Emerson's
first, bold effort to articulate the unity of the moral and physical
spheres of nature.91 As in Nature, his deep faith in the parallelism
and perpetual dialogue of mind and nature persists. But, as the
title of the collection suggests, Emerson's confidence in his cul-
tural position as interpreter of nature had significantly dimin-
ished in the face of a greater demand for rigor and "system" in
studies of "morals" or mind as in those of nature. Inspired by a
scientific lecturer to a parallel project, he is notably self-conscious
about his lectures' absence of method, wholly lacking in "that
systematic form which is reckoned essential in treating the sci-
ence of the mind," and approximating closer an outdated "natu-
ral history," even "a sort of Farmer's Almanac of mental moods"
(W, 12:11). But if these very late writings inevitably reflect, as part
of the tune of their time, the increased positivism and regard for
professional expertise that shaped the social and intellectual cli-
mate in which they were delivered, further separating the very
domains Emerson had long sought to unify, he also had auditors
for whom his harmonies still resonated.92 Their responses to his
lectures, and those of innumerable readers since then to his writ-
ings of nature, testify to Emerson's continuing power to speak to
a public "nature" still accessible to all.

NOTES

I would like to acknowledge research support for this essay from

the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University
of Oregon Summer Research Program.
i. For recent accounts of the transformation of Concord land-
scape, see Robert A. Gross, "Culture and Cultivation: Agriculture
and Society in Thoreau's Concord," Journal of American History 69
(June 1982): 42-61; Brian Donahue, "Damned at Both Ends and
Cursed in the Middle: The Flowage of the Concord River Meadows,
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 139

1798-1862," Environmental Review 13 (1989): 47-68; and David R. Fos-

ter, Thoreau's Country: Journey through a. Transformed Landscape (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
2. See, for example, Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History
of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
pp. 103-107; Robert Kuhn McGregor, A Wider View of the Universe:
Henry Thoreau's Study of Nature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press),
pp. 34-55; Max Oehlschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory
to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991),
pp. 134-36; and Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David
Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1995). For more balanced assessments of Emer-
son, see Michael P. Branch, "Ralph Waldo Emerson," in American
Nature Writers, ed. John Elder (New York: Scribner's, 1996), 1:287-307;
and David M. Robinson, "Three Moments in Emerson's Nature"
(Paper presented at the University of Oregon, 29 October 1996).
3. Eduardo Cadava, Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), p.2.
4. On American pastoral ideology and New World dreaming,
see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature
Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1995), pp. 31-82.
5. Cadava, Emerson and the Climates of History, p. 7.
6. Branch, "Ralph Waldo Emerson," p. 287. Important studies of
Emerson and science include Harry Hayden Clark, "Emerson and
Science," Philological Quarterly 10 (July 1931): 225-60; Gay Wilson
Allen, "A New Look at Emerson and Science," in Literature and Ideas
in America: Essays in Honor of Harry Hayden Clark, ed. Robert Falk
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), pp. 58-78; Carl F. Strauch,
"Emerson's Sacred Science," PMLA 73 (June 1958): 237-50; David
Robinson, "Emerson's Natural Theology and the Paris Naturalists:
Toward a Theory of Animated Nature," Journal of the History of
Ideas 41 (January-March 1980): 69-88; David Robinson, "Fields of In-
vestigation: Emerson and Natural History," in American Literature
and Science, ed. Robert J. Scholnick (Lexington: University of Ken-
tucky Press, 1992), pp. 94-109; Walls, Seeing New Worlds, pp. 53-92;
and Lee Rust Brown, The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and
the Pursuit of the Whole (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
7. William Paley, quoted in D. L. LeMahieu, The Mind of William
 140 Emerson in His Time

Paley: A Philosopher and His Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska

Press, 1976), p. 82; Neal C. Gillespie, "Divine Design and the Indus-
trial Revolution: William Paley's Abortive Reform of Natural The-
ology," Isis 81 (June 1990): 214-29.
8. For an examination of the Bridgewater Treatises as epitomiz-
ing "the essential obstacles faced by the sciences" (p. 216) in this pe-
riod, see Charles Coulston Gillespie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in
the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion
in Great Britain, 1790-1850 (New York: Harper, 1951), pp. 209-16. For
more recent attempts to assess the role played by the treatises in
contemporary culture, see John M. Robson, "The Fiat and the Fin-
ger of God: The Bridgewater Treatises," in Victorian Faith in Crisis:
Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief,
ed. Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (London: Macmil-
lan, 1990), pp. 71-125; and Jonathan R. Topham, "Beyond the 'Com-
mon Context': The Production and Reading of the Bridgewater
Treatises," Isis 89 (June 1998): 233-62.
9. Frederic Henry Hedge, "Natural Religion," reprinted in An
American Reformation: A Documentary History of Unitarian Christianity,
ed. Sydney E. Ahlstrom and Jonathan S. Carey (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1985), p. 407.
10. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859; rpt., Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 481-82.
11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a
Manly Character, ed. James Marsh (Burlington, Vt.: Chauncey
Goodrich, 1829), pp. 245, 248. Recent reconsiderations of nineteenth-
century secularization pertinent to this essay include Frank M.
Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 3-37; David
Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination
in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), esp. pp.
13-112; and Kevin Van Anglen, "Reading Transcendentalist Text Reli-
giously: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Myth of Secularization," in See-
ing into the Life of Things: Essays on Religion and Literature, ed. John L.
Mahoney (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), pp. 152-70.
12. Headnote to Hedge's "Natural Religion" p. 403; James
Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in
America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 97;
John Hedley Brooke, "Natural Theology and the Plurality of
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 141

Worlds: Observations on the Brewster-Whewell Debate," Annals of

Science 34 (May 1977): 221-86.
13. John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Per-
spectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 197;
Bernard Lightman, '"The Voices of Nature': Popularizing Victorian
Science," in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 188.
14. Brooke, Science and Religion, pp. 192, 198; Pietro Corsi com-
ments on natural theology treatises in the 18305 in Science and Religion:
Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1988), p. 180. For the debate on "man's place
in nature," see Robert M. Young, Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in
Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp.
pp. 164-247.
15. Young, Darwin's Metaphor, pp. 12-13 (Bacon quoted on p. 12).
16. Philip Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early
Nineteenth-Century British Biology (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1983), p. 4; Dov Ospovat, "Perfect Adaptation and Teleological
Explanation: Approaches to the Problem of the History of Life in
the Mid-Nineteenth Century," Studies in the History of Biology 2
(1978): 44; see also Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory:
Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838-1859
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 6-38.
17. For critiques of the military metaphor, see James R. Moore,
The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to
Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 1-122; and
Ronald L. Numbers, "Science and Religion," in Historical Writing on
American Science: Perspectives and Prospects, ed. Sally Gregory Kohl-
stedt and Margaret W. Rossiter (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1986), pp. 59-80.
18. See, respectively, Neal C. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the
Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), esp.
pp. 19-40; and Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology,
Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1989).
19. Brooke, Science and Religion, p. 195; for a specific analysis of
the contemporary American scene, see Turner, Without God, With-
out Creed.
 142. Emerson in His Time

20. Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowl-

edge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993), pp. 28-48.
21. Richard Yeo, "William Whewell, Natural Theology, and the
Philosophy of Science in Mid Nineteenth Century Britain," Annals of
Science 36 (September 1979): 496.
22. Steven Shapin, "Science and the Public," in Companion to the
History of Modern Science, ed. R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Chris-
tie, and M. J. S. Hodge (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 1005.
23. Bernard Lightman, The Orgins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbe-
lief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987), pp. 147, 159, See also Turner, Contesting Cultural Au-
thority, pp. 131-50; and Ruth Barton, "John Tyndall, Pantheist: A
Rereading of the Belfast Address," Osiris, n.s., 3 (1987): 111-34.
24. Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), p. 142.
25. Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral
Philosophy, 1805-1861, rev. ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press, 1988), p. 95. Howe traces this preference to the belief that
"mind was the active and superior substance, matter the passive and
subordinate substance."
2.6. Quoted in Clark, "Emerson and Science" p. 226 n. 9. As Clark
notes, Emerson regards Bishop Butler and his Analogy of Religion,
Natural and Revealed as the premier instance of this.
27. This instability can readily be seen in Nature, where the older
term natural philosophy is used for physics and intellectual science is
used for metaphysics (CW, 1:33-34) right alongside the more recent
and restrictive physical science and empirical science (p. 39).
28. Yeo, Defining Science, pp. 33, 37.
29. Wesley T. Mott, "From Natural Religion to Transcenden-
talism: An Edition of Emerson's Sermon No. 43," in Studies in the
American Renaissance 1985, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: Univer-
sity Press of Virginia, 1985), p. 6; Francis Bowen, Critical Essays on a
Few Subjects Connected with the History and Present Condition of Specu-
lative Philosophy (Boston: H. B. Williams, 1842), p. 169. As Mott
points out, in 1829 Emerson complained that Paley and Newton
"seemed shallow." He rejected "Paley's watchmaker God because
the concept separates 'the laws of nature' from the active 'power'
of God."
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 143

30. Albert J. von Prank, An Emerson Chronology (New York:

G. K. Hall, 1994), p. 45-
31. Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcen-
dentalism: A Family History (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), p. in.
32. David Robinson, Apostle of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and
Lecturer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 129;
John Gascoigne, "From Bentley to the Victorians: The Rise and Fall
of British Newtonian Natural Theology," Science in Context 2 (Au-
tumn 1988): 235.
33. Thus he characterized the "Spiritual Religion" that had re-
placed his Unitarianism, "It simply describes the laws of moral na-
ture as the naturalist does physical laws and shows the surprizing
beauties and terrors of human life"; or, thirteen months later, in
February 1836, "The Idealist regards matter scientifically. The sensu-
alist exclusively" (JMN, 4:364; 5:12).
34. JMN, 3:79; Mott, "Natural Religion," p. 6.
35. CS, 4:153,154. The sermon was first preached 27 May 1832; the
introductory paragraphs describing the eclipse date from 30 Novem-
ber 1834.
36. B. L. Packer, Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major
Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 78.
37. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p. 124.
38. Quoted in Richard Yeo, "Reviewing Herschel's Discourse,"
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20 (December 1989): 546.
39. John F. Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natu-
ral Philosophy (1830; rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
pp. 219, 25.
40. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p. 123.
41. Herschel, Preliminary Discourse, pp. 4, 6.
42. Emerson alludes to this phrase in a journal entry for 17 April
1832; it occurs in a review by Francis Jeffrey, published in the Edin-
burgh Review (JMN, 4:11).
43. Robinson, "Emerson's Natural Theology and the Paris Natu-
ralists," p. 79. In The Emerson Museum, Lee Rust Brown argues that
the unity Emerson discovered at the museum "was a version of pre-
cisely the kind of writing to which he had long aspired" (p. 61).
44. For a different interpretation, see Albert J. von Frank's pene-
trating study, "The Composition of Nature: Writing and the Self in
 144 Emerson in His Time

the Launching of a Career," in Biographies of Books: The Composi-

tional Histories of Notable American Writings, ed. James Barbour and
Tom Quirk (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), p. 12.
45. von Frank, "The Composition of Nature," p. 22.
46. Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in
the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973),
pp. 149-50.
47. Toby A. Appel, The Cuvier-Geojfroy Debate: French Biology in the
Decades Before Darwin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p.
46; Baron Cuvier, The Animal Kingdom, Arranged After Its Organiza-
tion; Forming a Natural History of Animals, and an Introduction to Com-
parative Anatomy (1828; rpt., London: Henry G. Bohn, 1863), p.2.
48. Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory, p. 33. For most
Anglo-American biological and geological theorists in the 18305,
"perfect adaptation had the status not of a postulate of natural the-
ology, nor of an element in a particular ideology." Rather, it was
"a fact apparent to all who took the trouble to observe organisms"
(P- 36).
49. CW, 1:8; Robinson, Apostle of Culture, pp. 85-94. It should also
be noted that, although not quite in the Emersonian sense of a mys-
tic "ray of relation [that] passes from every other being to him," a
cognate notion of "correspondence" is implied in the doctrine of
perfect adaptation, and occasionally the term is used as well (CVl^
1:19). How close the two conceptions of correspondence are can be
seen in the passage from Charles Bell's The Hand, to which Emerson
alludes approvingly in a December 1834 journal entry, understand-
ably misidentified by his editors (JMJV, 4:355).
Describing how the geological transformations that have pro-
duced the contemporary landscape "were necessary to prepare the
earth for that condition which should correspond with the faculties
to be given to man," Bell goes on to imagine, "If a man contemplate
the common objects around him—if he observe the connection be-
tween the qualities of things external and the exercise of his senses,
between the senses so excited, and the condition of his mind, he will
perceive that he is in the centre of a magnificent system, . . . and
that the strictest relation is established between the intellectual ca-
pacities and the material world" (The Hand: as Evincing Design [Lon-
don: William Pickering, 1834], pp. 37-38).
50. Soon after learning Coleridge's distinction, Emerson listed in
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 145

his journal among the "necessary" truths, "scanned & approved by

the Reason far above the understanding," the "saying" that '"Design
proves a designer'" (JMN, 3:2,36). Emerson describes the value of
Coleridge's distinction in a letter to his brother Edward on 13 May
1834 (L, 1:412-13).
51. As he admitted to himself and to the Boston Natural History
Society in 1834, in his last natural history lecture, compared to that
of "the Natural Philosopher," his natural knowledge was "quite
superficial" (EL, 1:70).
52. While she uses a poststructuralist rather than a historicist
model for understanding Emerson the "theorist," Julie K. Ellison il-
luminates the large extent to which Emerson represents his perspec-
tive as that of "culture," "thought," or "theory" in Nature; see her
Emerson's Romantic Style (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1984), pp. 86-88.
53. Yeo, Defining Science, pp. no, in.
54. In Splintered Worlds: Fragmentation and the Ideal of Diversity in
the Work of Emerson, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1993), Robert M. Greenberg exam-
ines the "fragmentary self" in Emerson's writing of the late 18303
and 18405 in the cultural context of increasing fragmentation in
American social and intellectual life; see pp. 23-81.
55. James A. Secord, "Introduction" to Robert Chambers, Vestiges
of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. xiv.
56. Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting
a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)
p. 5. In The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and
Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), Robert J. Richards argues that, owing to the
important role embryonic recapitulation played in Darwin's theoriz-
ing, his own theory was actually much more ideological than histo-
rians have recognized.
For an overview of evolutionary theory, see Peter J. Bowler, Evo-
lution: The History of an Idea, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1989); on the varieties of progressionism in nineteenth-
century historiography, anthropology, and biology, see Bowler's The
Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Basil Black-
well, 1989).
 146 Emerson in His Time

57. Evelleen Richards, '"Metaphorical Mystifications': The Ro-

mantic Gestation of Nature," in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. An-
drew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 136.
58. Although the question is far from clear-cut, given the ab-
sence of any unified system of classification in the museum, which
"displayed as many different classificatory systems as there were
[curators'] chairs to which Cabinets were attached," the likehood
of Emerson's having foreseen evolution there, as Ralph Rusk
claimed, seems remote (Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Voca-
tion, Science, and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France [Manchester,
England: Manchester University Press, 1984], p. 178; Ralph L.
Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson [New York: Scribner's, 1949],
pp. 188-89).
Emerson could well have known of Lamarck's system, as Robin-
son argues ("Emerson's Natural Theology," pp. 76-80). However, his
apparently evolutionary vision of "a perfect series from the skelton
of the balaena [whale] . . . to the . . . skull of the Caucasian
race of man" while standing before Cuvier's cabinet of comparative
anatomy is consistent with Cuvier's theory of development within
(rather than across) the four separate embranchments into which he
divided animal life. To discourage any potential transmutationist in-
terpretation, and to register his vehement opposition to Lamarck's
model of continuous "ascent" of all life, Cuvier actually exhibited
the four branches in the cabinet "in a descending order from the ver-
tebrates to the molluscs, articulates, and radiates" (Philip Reid
Sloan, "On the Edge of Evolution," introduction to Richard Owen,
The Hunterian Lectures in Comparative Anatomy, May-June [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992], p. 41; cf. Brown, The Emerson Mu-
seum, pp. 59-79).
59. On "Malthus and the Evolutionists," see Robert M. Young,
Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 23-55. In a similar vein, two
years earlier Emerson objected strongly to a "Loathsome lecture last
eve. on precocity, 8C the dissection of the brain, & the distortion of
the body, & genius, &c. A grim compost of blood & mud. Blessed,
thought I, were those who, lost in their pursuits, never knew that
they had a body or a mind" (JMN, 4:362).
60. Evelleen Richards, "A Question of Property Rights: Richard
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 147

Owen's Evolutionism Reassessed," British Journal for the History of

Science, 20 (June 1987): 168.
61. Adam Sedgwick, quoted in Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and
Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850-1875 (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 29.
62. Gascoigne, "From Bentley to the Victorians," pp. 233-35.
63. Bowen, Critical Essays, pp. 214-15.
64. On the fortunes of the nebular hypothesis in America, see
Ronald L. Numbers, Creation by Natural Law. LaPlace's Nebular Hy-
pothesis in American Thought (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1977); Pringle's use of it is examined in Simon Schaffer, "The
Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress," in History, Hu-
manity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, ed. James R. Moore
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 131-64. For
Emerson's reading of Nichol and its role in his changing conception
of nature during this period, see David Robinson, "The Method of
Nature and Emerson's Period of Crisis," in Emerson Centenary Essays,
ed. Joel Myerson (Carbondale: Southern Illinous University Press,
1982), pp. 80-82.
65. On the pervasive importance of Goethe to Emerson, see CW,
4:151-66, and Gustaaf van Cromphout, Emerson's Modernity and the
Example of Goethe (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990); for
the impact of Emerson's early reading of Goethe, see Richardson,
Emerson: The Mind on Fire, pp. 170-74, and Robinson, "Emerson's
Natural Theology," pp. 86-87.
66. CW, 4:158; R. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution, pp. 34-39.
See also Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists, pp. 19-20, 24-99;
Nicholas Rupke, "Richard Owen's Vertebrate Archetype," Isis 84
(June 1993): 238-44; and Appel, The Cuvier-Geojfroy Debate, pp. 202-37.
67. Rehbock, "Transcendental Anatomy," in Romanticism and the
Sciences, p. 146; Rupke, "Owen's Vertebrate Archetype," pp. 242, 231;
R. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution, p. 37.
68. Stephen J. Gould provides an exhaustive history of the hy-
pothesis of embryonic recapitulation in Ontogeny and Phylogeny
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977); for another view and a
critique of Gould's historiography, see R. Richards, The Meaning of
Evolution.
69. E. Richards, '"Metaphorical Mystifications,'" p. 131.
70. For Emerson's appreciation of Bell's The Hand, see note 49.
 148 Emerson in His Time

71. Peter Mark Roget, Animal and Vegetable Physiology, Considered

with Reference to Natural Theology, 2 vols. (London: William Picker-
ing, 1834), 2:625, 627.
72. Ibid., pp. 630, 631.
73. [Robert Chambers], Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,
2d ed. (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), p. 140. All citations are
to this edition, which Emerson owned; see Walter Harding, Emer-
son's Library (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967).
74. Roget, Animal and Vegetable Physiology, pp. 636, 637; [Robert
Chambers], Explanations: A Sequel, p. no (emphasis added), in Ves-
tiges, ed. Secord.
75. [Chambers], Vestiges, p. 170. Geoffrey's research and "tera-
tological theory of evolution" is recounted in Appel, The Cuvier-
Geoffroy Debate, pp. 125-36.
76. James A. Secord, "Behind the Veil: Robert Chambers and Ves-
tiges," in History, Humanity, and Evolution, pp. 185-86.
77. [Chambers], Vestiges, p. 279; Richard Yeo, "Science and Intel-
lectual Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain: Robert Cham-
bers and Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," in Energy and En-
tropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain, ed. Patrick Brantlinger
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 27.
78. [Chambers], Vestiges, p. 251.
79. Secord, "Introduction," pp. xxviii-xxix; see also Desmond,
Archetypes and Ancestors, pp. 29-31.
80. William Henry Smith, reviewing Vestiges in Blackwood's
(quoted in Corsi, Science and Religion, p. 263). For the Christian Exam-
iner, Joseph Henry Allen praised the book's testimony that "the
mode of [divine] action is perfectly regular, and can be ascertained by
us. This, we conceive, is the real value of the name [law] and of
natural science which interprets it." Thus "understood, the phrase
laws of nature has a meaning to us, very far from being either bar-
ren or irreverent" ("Vestiges of Creation and Sequel," Christian Ex-
aminer 40 [May 1846]: 339).
81. L, 4:19; JMN, 10:221. Emerson identified Crosse in a letter to
William Emerson by the electrically generated mites that bore his
name: "(Acarus Crossii in the Vestiges)" (L, 4:71). His meetings with
Chambers were arranged by Alexander Ireland, a Manchester jour-
nalist he had met on his first European visit in 1832, and who
arranged his second visit. As Chambers's intermediary with his pub-
 Emerson, Nature, and Natural Science 149

lisher and one of only a few who knew the author's identity, Ireland
was the one most likely to have revealed it to Emerson. Chambers's
authorship was not disclosed publicly until 1884, thirteen years after
his death (CV^ 5:xxii-xxiii; Secord, "Introduction," pp. xxiii, xxxviii-
xliii).
82. David Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism
and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1993), pp. 60, 63-64.
83. [Chambers], Vestiges, p. 232.
84. Secord, "Behind the Veil," pp. 172-74.
85. W, 6:17. And see CW^ 4:62, on the "terrible tabulations of the
French statists."
86. "Fate is found in the bill of the bird which determines tyran-
nically its limits" (JMN, 9:297). Although it is beyond the scope of
this essay, it should be noted that in his antislavery writings Emerson
also links "fate" with the doctrine of black racial inferiority and thus
implicitly with racial science; see, for example, AW, pp. 36-37.
87. W, 6:3; see Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life, pp.
134-58.
88. See also Michael Lopez, Emerson and Power: Creative Antago-
nism in the Nineteenth Century (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 1996).
89. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, pp. 467, 518-19;
Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists, pp. 18-19,102-13; E. Richards,
"A Question of Property Rights," pp. 129-71; Toby A. Appel, "Jef-
feries Wyman, Philosophical Anatomy, and the Scientific Reception
of Darwin in America," Journal of the History of Biology 21 (Spring
1988):69-94
90. W, 6:3, 48, 49. For a cogent statement of the argument that
"the essay's energy is dissipated" by a "facile either/orism that takes
comfort in the prospect that we can neither shun the fated nor incur
the non-fated," see Lawrence Buell, "Emerson's Fate," in Emersonian
Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson, ed. Wesley T. Mott and Robert
E. Burkholder (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1997)
p. 24.
91. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p. 450.
92. See Ronald A. Bosco, "His Lectures Were Poetry, His Teach-
ing the Music of the Spheres: Annie Adams Fields and Francis
Greenwood Peabody on Emerson's 'Natural History of the Intel-
 150 Emerson in His Time

lect' University Lectures at Harvard in 1870," Harvard Library Bul-

letin, n.s., 8 (Summer 1997): 1-79. As Bosco shows, the tension be-
tween this late-century positivist climate and Emerson's "poetic" ap-
proach was registered even in Cabot's and Edward Emerson's
editorial disposition toward these lectures.
 Emerson and Religion
David M. Robinson

We distinguish the announcements of

the soul, its manifestations of its own
nature, by the term Revelation. These
are always attended by the emotion of
the sublime. For this communication is
an influx of the Divine mind into our
mind. It is an ebb of the individual
rivulet before the flowing surges of the
sea of life.
(CW, 2:166)

T Ralph Waldo Emerson's religious thought and the vital prin-

his belief in the presence and power of the soul is the core of

ciple of his entire intellectual achievement. His doctrine of the

soul developed in the 1820s and 1830s as he fused the Unitarian
theology of self-culture with the spiritual and idealistic doctrines
from several Neoplatonic, oriental, and European Romantic
sources, and as his interest was kindled in the new scientific dis-
coveries of his day. His doctrine of the soul blossomed into a pas-
sionate and visionary expression of the premises of Transcen-
dentalism in key works of the late 18305 and early 18405. Emerson
gradually modified his religious stance during the 18408 and 18505
to accommodate the waning of his experience of ecstatic vision

151
 152, Emerson in His Time

and to reflect his growing sense of the importance of moral ac-

tion as the fundamental end of religious experience. He thus de-
veloped a more pragmatic and ethically centered theory of the
religious life in which work and worship, morals and vision, be-
came increasingly synonymous concepts.

Emerson's Theological Background

The roots of Emerson's religious sensibility lie deep in the soil of

Puritan New England. He was the descendant of a long line of
New England ministers, and son of the minister of the First
Church of Boston, William Emerson. The death of his father in
1811, when Waldo was seven, left him in the care of his mother,
Ruth Haskins Emerson, a deeply pious woman, and his paternal
aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a woman of powerful intellect and a
profound religious sensibility who became one of his chief spiri-
tual influences. Steeped in the older piety of Puritan New En-
gland, but an astute reader of modern philosophy and theology,
Mary Moody Emerson provided her nephew with an example of a
sensibility in which intellectual rigor and religious ardor were co-
equal aspects of the spiritual life.1 These family influences were
augmented by a changing religious climate in New England dur-
ing Emerson's intellectually formative years. New England the-
ology had evolved dramatically in the two centuries between the
Puritan settlements and Emerson's early manhood; the Calvinism
of the early Puritans had been contested, modified, and in many
quarters rejected entirely. Emerson's father was among the lead-
ing ministers of the anti-Calvinist liberal party who had led most
of the established churches in the Boston area to a theological
stance that was characterized as 'Arminian," or, eventually, Uni-
tarian. This progressive and largely optimistic faith, still struggling
for its status as a legitimate and independent religious movement,
was Emerson's chief religious heritage. Rooted in older patterns
of piety and belief, it was nevertheless a dynamic, evolving reli-
gious philosophy.2
The emphasis of Calvin and other Protestant theologians on
the availability of saving grace to the "elect" of God inculcated a
 Emerson and Religion 153

powerful, pietistic response in many, but it also left a complex set

of theological questions and psychological pressures with which
later believers and theologians grappled. The place of moral ac-
tion or "works" in the Christian life and in the plan of salvation
was for many problematic. If salvation is entirely the work of
God's grace, what role or necessity could works play in it, if any?
And if the elect are chosen by God, what place was left for the ac-
tive pursuit of salvation by the individual? Finally, what assur-
ance could the believer have of the state of his or her soul? Were
there any signs, internal or external, that might provide the cer-
tainty that one had undergone a saving conversion experience?3
Such issues became extremely important to the Puritans in
the late seventeenth century, when the children and grandchil-
dren of the first immigrants began to face questions concerning
their faith, their relationship with the church, and the state of
their souls. Perry Miller has described this period as one of cul-
tural crisis, in which the Puritan leadership had become "con-
vinced that their societies were slowly degenerating" (Nature's
Nation, 51), and had responded in part by reemphasizing the con-
cept of the "preparation for salvation," a view of the conversion
process that reserved God's place as the final dispenser of grace
but emphasized the importance of the individual's preparing the
soul, through study, self-examination, prayer, and good works,
for the reception of that grace. Conversion was not necessarily
an abrupt or sudden change but might be a more extended
process. The nature of this process of preparation for the recep-
tion of grace thus became a central concern of New England
theological thought for the next century.
The modification of the strictest form of Calvinism that the
concept of "preparation" represented was also accompanied by
an inclination to alter the received depiction of God and of the
spiritual capacities of human nature. These Arminian tendencies
became increasingly influential as an alternative to Calvinism
during the eighteenth century. As Conrad Wright has pointed
out, the first generation of Puritan immigrants had already mod-
erated Calvinism to some extent through a version of "Cove-
nant" theology that in effect bound the sovereign will of God to
certain contractual obligations with his chosen people (Begin-
 154 Emerson in His Time

nings, 14—17). Further modifications of Calvinism continued in

the 17405 and 17505 when opposition arose to aspects of the
preaching and doctrines in the widespread revivals led by
Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield known as the Great
Awakening. Charles Chauncy, minister of the First Church in
Boston, led the opponents of the emotional preaching and exces-
sive religious enthusiasm of the Awakening, gradually turning
that critique into a reformulated liberal theology that rejected
the Calvinist doctrine of innate depravity and depicted God in
more compassionate terms. "By the middle 1750*8," Wright notes,
'Arminians no longer pretended they were orthodox, but instead
began to condemn Calvinism by name and attack its dangerous
tendencies" (Beginnings, 89).
The liberals established a stronghold in Boston and by the
early decades of the nineteenth century were the dominant theo-
logical party at Harvard. Controversy between the liberals and
orthodox became heated in 1805, when Henry Ware was elected
Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, and the controversy re-
sulted in a split of the original congregational churches in which
the Unitarians, as the liberals were now known, emerged as a
new denomination.4 In "Unitarian Christianity" (1819) William
Ellery Channing, the leading spokesman for the new generation
of liberals, declared the separate existence of the Unitarian
movement and advanced a theological program centered on the
human capacity for reason and spiritual development. By the
iSaos Unitarianism had a strong foundation in Boston and east-
ern Massachusetts, and the split of the original Puritan congrega-
tional churches was permanent.
In "Unitarian Christianity" Channing defended the human ca-
pacity to make reasoned judgments about theology, and to act as
independent moral agents in meeting life's experiences, thus re-
jecting the darker implications of the Calvinist doctrine of innate
depravity. "Say what we may, God has given us a rational nature,
and will call us to account for it," he declared. "We may let it
sleep, but we do so at our peril. Revelation is addressed to us as
rational beings" (76). For Channing, this affirmation of human
capacity was linked with a renewed sense of the justice and
benevolence of God, a denial of the Calvinist idea of the predes-
 Emerson and Religion 155

tined election to salvation of only a certain number of individu-

als. This avowal of both human capability and the justice and
benevolence of God was the cornerstone of the Unitarian dis-
sent to Calvinism, the basis from which they would build a
theology that emphasized spiritual potential and ongoing self-
culture as the basis of the religious life.
Channing added one further dimension to this version of
Christianity, one that was decisive in his influence on Emerson.
This is a harder quality to specify and explain, but Emerson
termed it Channing's "moral imagination" and referred to Chan-
ning's 1821 Dudleian Lecture at Harvard, "The Evidences of Re-
vealed Religion," as a performance that exemplified this quality.
It was less the specifics of Channing's arguments in defense of
Christianity than his capability to present a compelling witness to
the reality of lived spiritual experience that constituted for Emer-
son the act of "moral imagination" that was so conclusive. Chan-
ning emphasized an "internal" evidence of Christianity as deci-
sive, "an evidence to be felt rather than described, but not less
real because founded on feeling." Such a conviction in the reality
of religious truth "springs up and continually gains strength, in
those who apply it habitually to their tempers and lives" (143).
Channing thus provided the nucleus of the two vital elements
of the Unitarian outlook as it had emerged in the first decades of
the nineteenth century, a theology that referred inevitably to the
doctrine of the "moral sense."5 All individuals, according to this
doctrine, possessed an innate capacity for moral choice, a confir-
mation of the indwelling of divine or godlike attributes within
the soul; and although it might be weakened or overridden by
the passions, it could also serve as the basis for an ongoing spiri-
tual and moral cultivation, in which the soul would grow, in
Channing's phrase, toward an ever-increasing "Likeness to God."

Emerson's Ministry

Emerson came into intellectual maturity in the 18205, just as

Channing had emerged as the Unitarians' leading spokesman.
During the 18205, Emerson struggled with both vocational deci-
 156 Emerson in His Time

sions and severe health problems. His brother William had chosen
to enter the ministry and went to study in Germany, the center for
biblical and theological studies. But after encountering the Higher
Criticism of the Bible there, in which the scriptural texts were ap-
proached as historical and cultural documents and subjected to
reasoned analysis, he underwent a crisis of faith and withdrew
from ministerial study. Emerson, too, had felt the pull of family
tradition, with his Aunt Mary's encouragement, and his education
leading him toward the ministry. He struggled with the decision,
however, dreading the necessary pastoral visiting and counseling
involved in ministerial work because of his innate shyness, and
lacking enthusiasm for the emotionless logic he associated with
theological discourse. It was at this point that the example of
Channing was decisive for him, providing a version of the min-
istry based on imaginative, highly inspirational preaching, a kind
of poetry from the pulpit that fired Emerson's vision of his own
potential.
In an extraordinary moment of self-analysis, Emerson set out
his doubts and hopes about his vocation in his journal in 1824. Al-
though he had made the decision to begin his studies for the
ministry, it was clear that he lacked confidence that he had the
skills to succeed. Confessing his indifference to the dry reasoning
of theology, he admitted instead "a strong imagination & conse-
quently a keen relish for the beauties of poetry," qualities that
were "the highest species of reasoning upon divine subjects."
Such thinking is "the fruit of a sort of moral imagination" such
as Channing had displayed in his Dudleian Lecture (JMN, 2:238).
This inner conflict about the ministry would haunt Emerson
even after he successfully began his career at the Second Church
of Boston, one of the city's oldest and most historically signifi-
cant churches. Two major crises, however, attended the begin-
ning of his career. The first was a crisis of health. In the middle
18205, Emerson developed symptoms of tuberculosis, affecting
his breathing, stamina, and vision, slowing down the pace of his
studies, and, as they increased in intensity, threatening his life. He
found that rest and avoiding overwork and stress were his best re-
sponses, and at perhaps his darkest hour in this crisis, he em-
barked on a voyage to South Carolina and Florida in i826.6 The
 Emerson and Religion 157

change of surroundings, the enforced leisure of the voyage, and

the warmer climate helped him regain his strength, and he re-
turned in 1827 to begin a round of supply preaching in various
New England pulpits, and eventually to take the pulpit at the Sec-
ond Church in Boston from the ailing Henry Ware, Jr., one of
the best Unitarian preachers of his day. Although awkward and
insecure as a pastor and adviser to his congregation, a role in
which he felt uncomfortable, Emerson was an original and ap-
pealing preacher, pouring much intellectual energy and spiritual
intensity into a wide-ranging series of sermons.7
During one of his engagements as a supply preacher in Con-
cord, New Hampshire, Emerson met Ellen Tucker, whom he
would marry in 1829, after he had become minister of the Sec-
ond Church. Theirs was a profoundly deep and passionate bond,
into which the emotionally reserved Emerson poured much
ardor, and from which he received much devotion and affection.
But Ellen, too, was a victim of tuberculosis, and she died in 1831.
Ellen's death shook Emerson deeply, and as Robert D. Richard-
son, Jr., has written, it changed him permanently, emphasizing in
the most painful way the impermanent quality of happiness and
achievement in the world, and thus bringing him to believe
"completely, implicitly, and viscerally in the reality and primacy
of the spirit" (no).
Emerson's reaction to Ellen's death, combined with his con-
tinuing restlessness in the role of a minister and his increasing in-
clination to push at the accepted boundaries of Unitarian the-
ology, led to his resignation from his pulpit at the Second Church
in 1832. Emerson requested that the church not require him to
administer the Lord's Supper, explaining that "I cannot bring my-
self to believe that [Jesus] looked beyond the living generation,
beyond the abolition of the festival he was celebrating and the
scattering of the nation, and meant to impose a memorial feast
upon the whole world" (CS, 4:187). Although his congregation
was reluctant to let him resign, they could not grant his request.
Emerson resigned, using this situation to help him set a new di-
rection in his life that began with a trip to Europe in 1832-1833. Al-
though he continued to preach for several years after his return,
he had in fact launched a new vocation with his first independent
 158 Emerson in His Time

public lectures in 1833-1834, lectures that contained the seed of

his first book Nature (1836).

The Emergence of Transcendentalism

Emerson's emergence as an original, influential thinker in the

middle and late 18308 resulted from the coalescence of three
strands of inquiry: his exploration of the "moral sense," his deep-
ening commitment to the philosophy of idealism, and his new
interest in science and the study of nature. As we have seen,
Emerson took the moral sense doctrine from the Unitarian tradi-
tion, a belief that he increasingly identified with both the in-
dwelling of divinity and the power of the human imagination.
Emerson's deepened interest in philosophical idealism and what
he called the "spiritual philosophy," the second crucial concept in
his intellectual emergence, amplified both the importance and
the meaning of the moral sense, helping him construct a vision
of a unified, organic cosmos. His idealism was grounded in a
deep reverence for Plato and the Neoplatonic tradition, and his
reading in the English Romantic writers Samuel Taylor Cole-
ridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle reinforced and
extended this idealism, and led him for further confirmation to
the work of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich
Schleiermacher, and other German idealist philosophers.8 "Ideal-
ism sees the world in God," he wrote in Nature, in a passage that
exemplifies the mixture of poetic metaphor, philosophical specu-
lation, and visionary energy that marked his early work. "It be-
holds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and
events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated,
atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as
one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the
contemplation of the soul" (CW, 1:36).
The convergence of Emerson's concept of the moral sense
with his growing comprehension of idealism was supplemented
by a third element, his new interest in science, one that was
stimulated by his trip to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in 1833,
where he saw botanical exhibits that suggested to him both the
 Emerson and Religion 159

order and the evolutionary energy of the natural world. Filled

with a new ambition to become "a naturalist," he returned to
America and began to lecture on scientific topics, declaring that
"the greatest knowledge of natural science" is "to explain man to
himself" (EL, 1:23). For Emerson, there was not a natural form
"so grotesque, so savage, or so beautiful, but is an expression of
something in man the observer" (EL, 1:10). The study of science
was therefore not only a mode of discovery, interpretation and
explanation of the external world but also, as Emerson saw it, a
form of self-exploration, a means of investigation that would re-
inforce and extend his developing conception of the interconnec-
tions between idealism and the moral sense.9
Emerson's Nature was his first attempt at a comprehensive and
systematic expression of his emerging religious vision, taking as
its subject the nature of the external world and the mind's rela-
tionship to it. In Nature Emerson set out to explain the necessary
connections among the three key strands of his thought—a be-
lief in the human access to the moral sense, a vision of all reality
as "one mind," and a conviction that the study of nature could
help reveal that comprehensive unity. He begins with a dramatic
account of a revelatory or mystical experience in the natural
world, in which he attains an enormously expansive vision, and
also loses the sense of distinction between his own identity and
that of the natural world. "Standing on the bare ground,—my
head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all
mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am
nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of God" (CW, 1:10). Emerson's
"transparency" indicates his merger into the surrounding land-
scape, while his identity as an "eye-ball" suggests his continuing
expansion of vision. He links this experience to a merger of his
own being with God, as the divine "currents" flow through his
veins.
Emerson uses this revelatory experience, a brief but intense
occurrence, as a means of framing his larger inquiry about our
comprehension of nature, and about its origins and purpose. He
goes on to propose an ascending series of levels of understand-
ing, "Commodity," "Beauty," "Language," and "Discipline," each
 160 Emerson in His Time

step of which increasingly emphasizes the role of nature in the

process of human self-understanding. In discussing nature as
"discipline," he makes it clear that nature ultimately serves as the
moral manifestation of God; in understanding nature we also
recognize the unity of being that underlies all moral perception.
"This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of na-
ture, as to seem the end for which it was made" (CW, 1:26). Emer-
son's concluding call to the revitalization of life, "Build, there-
fore, your own world" (CW, 1:45), was an important indication
that he felt his new vision was an enabling and empowering one,
capable of reinforcing the self-reliance and self-confidence of his
readers, and of spurring important movements of social and po-
litical reform as the means of building the world anew.10
While Nature found a loyal readership, especially among
restless younger people who were searching for alternatives to
religious and political convention, Emerson achieved greater
prominence through two major public lectures at Harvard, "The
American Scholar" (1837), an address to the Phi Beta Kappa So-
ciety, and the "Divinity School Address" (1838), a speech to gradu-
ating ministerial students at Harvard Divinity School. In "The
American Scholar" Emerson described the role of the "scholar," a
term that included anyone from the poet to minister to teacher
who engaged in critical study of society, nature, and the mind. He
termed the scholar "Man Thinking" and denned the intellectual
life in terms of growth and creativity. "To create,—to create,—is
the proof of a divine presence" (CW, 1:57). By this standard, the life
of the thinker was a continual quest for the new, an ever-renewing
effort to reach beyond what had been achieved and known, a
building on the past to go always beyond it.11
This questing and experimental attitude could, however, gen-
erate intense opposition when it was applied to the subject of re-
ligion, as Emerson discovered after his "Divinity School Ad-
dress."12 "In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely,
the infinitude of the private man," he commented in his journal.
"This, the people accept readily enough, & even with loud com-
mendation, as long as I call the lecture, Art; or Politics; or Litera-
ture; or the Household; but the moment I call it Religion,—they
are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth
 Emerson and. Religion 161

which they receive everywhere else, to a new class of facts"

(JMN, 7:342). Emerson's address became controversial because of
his lack of emphasis on the importance of the supernatural char-
acter of Jesus and the biblical miracles, and his critique of the life-
less preaching of the contemporary church. Since religion was
intuitively founded on the "moral sentiment," it could not be
taken "second hand" from tradition, the church, or any other ex-
ternal authority (CW, 1:77, 80). The "proof" of the biblical mira-
cles was therefore irrelevant to real religious belief.
The exaggerated reverence for "the person of Jesus" also falsi-
fied religion, Emerson argued, because Jesus should not be re-
garded as a supernatural being but rather as the prophet who
most completely realized the divinity within every individual.
Emerson thus radically democratized Jesus' claim of divinity:
"He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 1 am divine.
Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God,
see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think'"
(CW, 1:81).
Emerson was inviting controversy with these remarks, but he
saw himself as an awakener, taking a message of encouragement
for innovation to the new ministers in his audience. But his audi-
ence also included many of the Unitarian ministers in the Boston
area, who also heard Emerson's stinging critique of the state of
contemporary preaching. "I think no man can go with his
thoughts about him, into one of our churches, without feeling
that what hold the public worship had on men, is gone or going"
(CW, 1:88). Emerson blamed the decline on a lifeless preaching
that relied on "tradition": "it comes out of the memory, and not
out of the soul; . . . it aims at what is usual, and not at what is
necessary and eternal" (CW, 1:87). The preacher must instead be a
kind of poet, "a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost" (CW, 1:90), de-
riving from the intensity of experience a message that would also
move others. While this was a message of awakening, it was not
a call to abandon the ministry or the church, or to work toward
the establishment of a new religious denomination. Emerson
urged his listeners "to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched
fire on the altar" and to breathe "new life . . . through the
forms already existing" (CW, 1:92). Even though he was finding a
 162 Emerson in His Time

new vocation in his lecturing and writing, he urged those called

to the ministry to bring an infusion of new energy into the
church.
The reaction to the "Divinity School Address" was one of the
key elements of the "Transcendentalist controversy," one of the
most significant intellectual conflicts in American religious his-
tory. Andrews Norton, an influential Unitarian theologian, at-
tacked Emerson's "infidelity," warning against his abandonment
of the centrality of the biblical miracles and the divine nature of
Jesus. Other Unitarians, though not as outraged as Norton, were
uncomfortable to varying degrees with Emerson's insistence on
intuition as the basis of religious authority, his intensely poetic
(and hazy, some felt) language, and his attack on the churches
and their practices. Emerson gained support, however, from
young intellectuals like Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Orestes
Brownson, and James Freeman Clarke, who found in Emerson a
convincing expression of their own restlessness with the preva-
lent Unitarian theology, and others like Margaret Fuller, Henry
David Thoreau, Christopher Pearse Cranch, and John Sullivan
Dwight, who saw in Emerson a literary and aesthetic example, a
man who made it seem as if a life of art and letters was indeed
possible in America.13 By 1840 the Transcendentalists had de-
cided to publish their own magazine, the Dial, which served as a
medium for theology, literature, and social theory, giving this al-
ternative movement a short-lived but influential voice in Ameri-
can culture.14

The Moral Law and the Development of the Soul

In addition to his two major addresses of the late 18305, Emerson

also presented annual series of lectures on such topics as "The
Philosophy of History" (1836-1837), "Human Culture" (1837-1838),
"Human Life" (1838-1839), and "The Present Age" (1839-1840), ex-
tending his work as a preacher into a larger national stage. These
lectures increased his public following and served as the basis for
his second book, Essays (1841).15 In such early lectures as "Reli-
gion" (1837), "Holiness" (1838), and "Religion" (1840), Emerson
 Emerson and Religion 163

continued to propound a theory of religion that stressed the ap-

prehension of the moral sense and the continual effort to cultivate
the innate potential of divinity within the self. "The moments in
life when we give ourselves up to the inspirations of this senti-
ment, seem to be the only real life. The mind is then all light" (EL,
2:345). He distilled this religious vision into the essays "Compensa-
tion," "Spiritual Laws," "The Over-Soul," and "Circles" in Essays
(1841), providing there a revitalized understanding and language
for religious experience.
"Compensation," now largely overlooked in Emerson's canon,
is his most effective exposition of the nature of the moral law, a
demonstration of how every decision and act is "moral" because
of its involvement in an inescapable web of cause and effect.
Emerson explicates this process as a manifestation of the law of
"polarity, or action and reaction," the phenomenon by which
every fact or event in nature is answered by its opposite. "An in-
evitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and
suggests another thing to make it whole; as spirit, matter; man,
woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under;
motion, rest; yea, nay" (CW, 2:57). Emerson argues that "the same
dualism underlies the nature and condition of man" (CW, 2:58),
implicating itself in the inescapable consequence of every act we
take. Revising the Christian theology that stressed an eventual ret-
ribution in the afterlife for acts during life, Emerson argued in-
stead that "every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates
itself," moving inevitably to its sometimes unwanted or unin-
tended completion. "Crime and punishment grow out of one
stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the
flower of the pleasure which concealed it" (CW, 2:60).
The universe is thus a self-regulated system, physically and
morally, in which no single element or act can be isolated from
its larger context. An act always carries with it the full conse-
quences of its effect on reality, and those consequences inevitably
entail what we know as "reward" and "punishment." "Justice is
not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of
life" (CW, 2:60). Punishment is not a judgment from some exter-
nal source such as God but a manifestation of the "balance" of
reality.
 164 Emerson in His Time

This self-regulating balance arises from the deeper implication

of the law of polarity, the unbreakable unity of being, in which
"the universe is represented in every one of its particles." Every
part of nature is a microcosm of the entirety of nature, Emerson
argues, and is thus in our practice inseparable from that entirety.
"Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every
thing is made of one hidden stuff" (CW, 2:59). When this law is
perceived in ethical or moral terms, it means that one cannot
"detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright,
&c. from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair." Self-
indulgence, greed, sensuality, and all other self-centered acts are
self-condemning, for they violate the soul's law of unity. To vio-
late this law through self-serving action is to cut oneself off from
the necessary unity of things, an isolation that cannot be long
sustained. "This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted,"
Emerson explains. "The parted water re-unites behind our hand"
(CW, 2:61). Or, translating this concept into the law of reward and
punishment, "You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong"
(CW, 2:64).
The unified moral universe that we encounter in "Compensa-
tion" is extended in "Spiritual Laws" and "The Over-Soul," both
of which emphasize the necessity of recognizing the transcen-
dent sources and ends of the natural world and of human life. In
"Spiritual Laws" Emerson argues the futility of assuming that we
can, through the exercise of our wills, achieve satisfactory or ful-
filling ends. The better posture is one of openness and humility,
based in a recognition that "there is a soul at the centre of nature,
and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the
universe." Out of this recognition of our fundamental powerless-
ness, however, a new and different sense of power can emerge.
"We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by
lowly listening we shall hear the right word" (CW, 2:81). While
these essays indicate a striking kinship between Emerson's think-
ing and some of the fundamental concepts of Hinduism and
other Asian religions, their roots are more in the traditions of
Neoplatonism and Christian mysticism, as Arthur Versluis has
shown.16 But Emerson did have a keen interest in Asian religions,
originating in the 18205 and deepening throughout his life. Al-
 Emerson and Religion 165

though initially skeptical of what he felt were the pantheistic and

"superstitious" qualities of Asian religions, he found an affinity
with Hinduism's mythical representations of the indwelling of
God in the individual, and the concept of the universe as the
manifestation of one mind, doctrines that he had worked out on
a Platonic basis, but for which he found important confirmation
in Asian scripture. Using both Western and Eastern traditions, he
attempted to forge a universal religion, incorporating the truths
from both. Versluis notes that Emerson shared with Thoreau a
"sense of contemporaneity with all ages" and attempted in his
thinking to transcend "temporal and cultural boundaries" (79).
The "soul at the centre" is the subject of "The Over-Soul,"
Emerson's extended exposition of the immanent God of the soul
and nature. "We live in succession, in division, in parts, in parti-
cles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise si-
lence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is
equally related; the eternal ONE" (CW, 2:160). While this reformu-
lation of the concept of God is a profound statement of affirma-
tive faith, it also had its troubling qualities for many of Emerson's
readers, for it abandoned the idea of a personal deity. The Over-
Soul is better conceived as a source of energy, an enabling power,
of which each individual is a particular manifestation. "The soul
in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs;
is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of
comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but
a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intel-
lect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they
lie,—an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed"
(CW, 2:161). Rather than possession or control, we must exercise a
kind of vigilant watchfulness and openness to the disclosures of
the soul, or its revelations, the "influx of the Divine mind into
our mind" (CW, 2:166).
This stance of perpetual openness to new revelation was the
focus of "Circles," in which Emerson depicted the self as a per-
petually expanding circle, whose circumference represented si-
multaneously the fact of attainment or accomplishment and the
need to continue it. "There is no virtue which is final; all are
initial" (CW, 2:187), Emerson warned, emphasizing the danger of
 i66 Emerson in His Time

complacency and the always renewing need to push ahead to the

next act, discovery, or goal. Emerson thus represented the spiri-
tual life as one of process, of perpetual change and energy, in
which "nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing
spirit" (CW, 2:189). In such a world, there was no secure identity
except in movement and direction, and even that identity had
elements of the unpredictable. "Life is a series of surprises. We
do not guess to-day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-
morrow, when we are building up our being" (CW, 2:189). For
Emerson, such surprises were a crucial guarantor that experi-
ence was open, and that the self could be continually renewed
and refreshed. "I am only an experimenter. . . . I unsettle all
things" (CW, 2:188), he declared, emphasizing the restless condi-
tion of the soul and its necessity to resist complacency and to
push forward perpetually.
This religious vision depended on both determination and en-
ergy for its enactment. While Emerson emphasized transforma-
tion and empowerment, his doctrine could leave the individual
vulnerable to spiritual exhaustion and loss of purpose or direc-
tion. In "Circles" he gave the Over-Soul a new name and a new
characterization, "the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying
Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once
the inspirer and condemner of every success" (CW, 2:179). This
paradox of achievement meant that the inspiration to further ac-
complishment carried with it the eventual condemnation of that
accomplishment, and thus created a perpetual, insatiable longing.
Emerson expressed this problem through the objection of an
imagined skeptical reader who accuses him of arriving at "a fine
Pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of all actions"
(CW, 2:188). His philosophy undercuts the motivation to act be-
cause each act creates the conditions of its own devaluation in our
desire for the new. Such a vision threatened motivation and thus
moral action itself. Emerson dismissed the objection with a reaf-
firmation of his faith in the value of experimentation and change,
but its presence in "Circles" suggests how his Transcendental opti-
mism was, even as he articulated it, being undermined.
A second form of doubt also emerged during the early 18408,
connected with the waning of Emerson's experience of mystical
 Emerson and Religion 167

consciousness. He had based much of his faith on such intense

moments of enlightenment, but he came to feel that they were
unreliable and increasingly rare. Such experiences come of their
own, as moments of grace, but depart just as quickly and myste-
riously. They thus provide an increasingly unreliable basis for
faith. As he remarked in one journal entry, "We wish to exchange
this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous day-light, this fever-
glow for a benign climate" (JMN, 8:99). Thus he was forced in
the 18405 to reexamine and test the faith he had developed, and
that decade marks for him a significant intellectual turn.

Emerson's Ethical Vision

Emerson's crisis of faith was deepened by the death of his five-

year-old son Waldo in 1842. Emerson's poem "Threnody" is an
elegy for Waldo, and there is also an important reference to his
death in Emerson's greatest essay, "Experience" (1842), in which
he explores his changing assumptions and records his struggle
against a loss of faith and optimism.17 "Where do we find our-
selves?" (CW, 3:27), he begins, indicating the loss of assurance and
direction that marks this new phase. "Experience" is replete with
images of bewilderment, enervation, and isolation, and Emerson
repeatedly depicts as fragmented and chaotic the world that he
had previously shown to be an exemplum of unified purpose.
"Well, souls never touch their objects," he writes. 'An innaviga-
ble sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we
aim at and converse with" (CW, 3:29).
While "Experience" is ultimately an affirmative essay, the affir-
mation that Emerson offers is more tempered and of a different
quality from the optimistic faith of his early essays. Midway
through the essay he declares that happiness is "to fill the hour"
(CW, 3:35), seeing in concerted action a certain release from fruit-
less introspection and an avenue to fulfillment that philosophy
may never yield. "To finish the moment, to find the journey's
end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good
hours, is wisdom" (CW, 3:35). While the circumstances of life are
complex and unpredictable enough to prevent us from relying
 i68 Emerson in His Time

completely on such pragmatic remedies, "Experience" moves to-

ward ethical purpose and pragmatic action as the most reliable
reconstitution of spiritual experience. Even in the face of re-
peated loss and defeat, experience teaches us to maintain a
courageous and tenacious patience. "Never mind the ridicule,
never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!—it seems to say,—
there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the
world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into
practical power" (CW, 3:49).
By endorsing the end of "practical power," Emerson was plac-
ing new emphasis on the life of morally directed action, and on
the larger goals of political transformation and the accomplish-
ment of social justice. During the late 18405 and early 18505, as his
reputation and public influence grew, he elevated ethical work
over mystical vision as the focus of the spiritual life and preached
a religion of action, in which the devotion to a principled task be-
came a new route to enlightenment and a new mode of wor-
ship.18 "I like not the man who is thinking how to be good," he
remarked in his journal, "but the man thinking how to accom-
plish his work" (JAW, 15:462).
Emerson's change in emphasis was reinforced by the climate
of social experiment and political reform in the 18405, which
brought a number of his friends to regard political commitment
as the fundamental measure of religion. By temperament Emer-
son was not inclined toward political engagement, but he came
to see that in some areas, particularly slavery, it was the right and
necessary step for his moment in history. He watched with sym-
pathy and interest while friends such as George Ripley and Bron-
son Alcott undertook Utopian communal experiments at Brook
Farm and Fruitlands, and although he remained skeptical about
the viability of such experiments, he shared the alienation from
conventional social patterns and practices, and concurred in the
hope for a social system that shared goods and power more
justly, and was less competitive and materialistic.19
In later volumes The Conduct of Life (1860) and Society and Soli-
tude (1870), Emerson criticized the materialistic and consumerist
qualities of American culture and tried to redefine the American
myth of success in terms of higher principle. He condemned the
 Emerson and Religion 169

"shallow Americanism" (W, 7:290) that focused entirely on the

amassing of wealth by any means as the measure of success, and
insisted that the performance of satisfying work or the accom-
plishment of worthwhile and helpful duties was a better mea-
sure of success. Wealth cannot be defined in purely economic
terms, he explained in the essay by that title; it is better thought
of as widened possibilities of living, and opportunities for deeper
experience. Money can be useful in creating such opportunities,
but it can also be obstructive. When it becomes an end in itself, it
destroys the very possibilities of richer experience that it should
have made available.
Emerson thus engaged American culture as a critic of its val-
ues and practices, calling his readers back to a principled life of
"plain living and high thinking" (W, 7:116) and urging a renewed
attention to the details of ordinary life and daily experience. His
conscience was also engaged deeply by the continued existence
of slavery in America, and he became an increasingly outspoken
opponent of it during the 18405 and 18505, seeing the antislavery
movement as a great moral crusade. Len Gougeon has traced the
stages by which Emerson became committed to antislavery, and
this deepening political commitment paralleled and reinforced
his new pragmatic emphasis.20 Of particular note are Emerson's
two addresses on the Fugitive Slave Law in 1851 and 1854, in
which he emphasized the moral violation that slavery repre-
sented and fiercely attacked the public policy that condoned its
continuation. The law, which required the cooperation of citi-
zens and public officials in the North in the return of escaped
slaves, was for Emerson "contrary to the primal sentiment of
duty," and, therefore, "the resistance of all moral beings is se-
cured to it" (AW, 58). It was for him a case in which a higher law,
grounded in moral duty, must override a flawed civil enactment.
"This law must be made inoperative," he declared in 1851. "It
must be abrogated and wiped out of the statute-book; but whilst
it stands there, it must be disobeyed" (AW, 71).
This call to resist and disobey the law signaled the growing se-
riousness of the political crisis as Emerson saw it, and although
he did not welcome the building tensions and the threat of dis-
union and war, he saw no alternative but to face it with the con-
 170 Emerson in His Time

viction of a religious duty, making it clear that slavery was a

grave moral challenge, and identifying its eradication with the
broad sweep of historical progress. "I know that when seen near,
and in detail, slavery is disheartening. But Nature is not so help-
less but it can rid itself at last of every wrong" (AW, 85). Emer-
son's historical optimism was a crucial part of his message as an
antislavery writer; for him, slavery was a fundamental violation
of the natural order of the world, and could not be permanent.
But its eradication, while perhaps inevitable, required the exer-
tion of will and energy within the present generation. "Liberty is
never cheap," he remarked, admitting that "mountains of diffi-
culty must be surmounted" in the struggle to attain it (AW, 86).
But as he also added, "Liberty is aggressive. Liberty is the Cru-
sade of all brave and conscientious men" (AW, 88). That willful
aggressiveness, the historical manifestation of the moral sense
through the human will, is the element of nature that ultimately
can restore the rightful moral balance to the world. The "Provi-
dence" that guides the world, he says in conclusion, "will not
save us but through our own co-operation" (AW, 89).

Emerson's Later Religious Writings

Emerson's orientation toward moral and political action, a shift

reinforced by the historical circumstances of the American politi-
cal crisis, did not completely displace his continuing interest in
speculative and poetic work. Although his faith in the kind of im-
mediate mystical enlightenment represented by the "transparent
eye-ball" experience waned, he increased his attention to other
sources or processes of revelation, finding in the closely related
categories of inspiration and symbolism important means
through which the world reveals itself to us.
Emerson distilled much of his later thinking about perception
and inspiration into "Poetry and Imagination" (W, 8:1-75), an
essay that evolved through several versions from the 18405 until
its presentation as a lecture in 1872.21 Although its specific con-
text was literary creativity, the essay is closely related to Emer-
son's continuing speculation on religious understanding, since
 Emerson and Religion 171

for him the inspiration that made poetry possible and the inspira-
tion that we link to religious knowledge and piety were insepara-
ble. Both poetic and religious understanding were forms of sym-
bolic perception, the capacity to see the connections among the
separate entities of nature, and to recognize, through the per-
petual expansion of such kinships, the ultimate unity of the uni-
verse. "God himself does not speak in prose" (W, 8:12), he wrote,
referring to the poetic and symbolic quality of the world's vari-
ous scriptures, and to the idea he had advanced earlier in Nature,
that the parts of the world themselves were symbolic, always
suggesting a larger truth beyond their simple factuality. "Nature
itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are tropes" (W,
8:15), he declared, thus making perception a constant work of as-
sociating and drawing analogies. "All thinking is analogizing," a
pushing at the boundaries of the separate identities we confront
to find larger categories of association. Emerson names the
imagination as the "reader of these forms," the intellectual
faculty driving this "endless passing of one element into new
forms, the incessant metamorphosis" (W, 8:15).
Emerson's depiction of the power of imagination and
metaphor in the perception of the ultimate nature of reality is
part of a growing interest in the nature of perception that marks
his later thought, a focus of one of his most ambitious projects,
The Natural History of Intellect. Although he was never able to
complete the project as fully as he had originally conceived it, he
offered a provisional version in a series of lectures at Harvard in
1870.22 Impressed with the progress that scientists had made in
their understanding of the history and processes of the natural
world, Emerson believed that the same kind of intellectual
model could be developed to explain the nature and processes of
the mind. Moreover, he felt that progress in natural science
would necessarily result in an increased understanding of the
realm of the mental.
Emerson's commitment to the work of modern science was
less a divergence from the idealism that he had espoused in Na-
ture and other early works than a way of confirming it. "I believe
in the existence of the material world as the expression of the
spiritual or the real," he declared, adding that "I await the insight
 1/2 Emerson in His Time

which our advancing knowledge of material laws shall furnish"

(W, 12:5). He regarded scientific progress as the advancing ability
to explain the universe in terms of the functioning of laws, thus
reducing the seemingly disparate particulars of phenomena to
the expression of a unified force or system. "There is in Nature a
parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind and
makes it available. This methodizing mind meets no resistance in
its attempts" (W, 12:19—20).
Imagination, whether expressed in poetic metaphor or the re-
finement of an explanatory natural law, was the conjunction of
the mind's innate push toward the perception of unity with the
corresponding revelation of unity in the physical universe. The
perpetual tendency of the imagination was thus to reduce multi-
plicity to unity, to perceive order through chaos. Unwavering in
his belief in the integral unity of the world, Emerson continued
to seek and find confirmations of this fundamental belief in psy-
chology, mythology, the natural sciences, and almost every other
human expression or endeavor. It was his deepest and longest
held belief, the foundation of both his religious and his ethical
vision.
Even though Emerson's belief in a fundamentally unified cos-
mos, ordered by law and permeated with spiritual energy, could
yield much of religious significance and value, it left open one of
the questions that pressed men and women the hardest in the
nineteenth century, the immortality of the soul. Emerson's
"Over-Soul," the Transcendentalist answer to the Christian con-
cept of the deity, was explicitly impersonal, an energy or law of
being that could not be reduced to human definition or analogy.
While he was willing to say that "I am a better believer, and all
serious souls are better believers in the immortality, than we can
give grounds for" (W, 8:346), he was careful to distinguish be-
tween such a faith and the more commonly accepted notion of
the continuing existence of the separate, individual conscious-
ness. He lectured often on the subject, recognizing that the un-
dermining of traditional Christian beliefs that resulted from
modern science left many in a kind of anguished doubt. But as
his late compilation "Immortality" (W, 8:321-52) suggests, he also
recognized that he could offer only a limited form of assurance
 Emerson and Religion 173

in calling his audience to a larger view of what immortality

might mean when separated from the fate of particular individu-
als. Confessing that "there is a drawback to the value of all state-
ments of the doctrine," he registered a reluctance in "writing or
printing on the immortality of the soul." Readers come with a
desire for confirmation and reassurance about their personal
fate, something that he cannot provide: "the hungry eyes that
run through it will close disappointed; the listeners say, That is
not here which we desire" (W, 8:345).
Emerson believed that the conventional religious hope for
personal immortality was a distortion of both individual identity
and the nature of existence itself. His strategy therefore was to
bring his readers to consider the issue from a higher perspective,
one that did not so immediately involve their self-interest. With-
out a surrender of self-interest, one cannot understand the sense
in which immortality may be affirmed. "I confess that everything
connected with our personality fails. Nature never spares the in-
dividual" (W, 8:342—43). Instead, we must come to see immor-
tality as a larger condition or quality of reality in which we have a
part, or to which we contribute. Our concern must be shifted
away from ourselves and directed toward something larger than
us. "The soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private
I see not to be good." It is not what we believe or experience that
is the basis of immortality, but what we help to create, or enact.
"We have our indemnity only in the moral and intellectual reality
to which we aspire. That is immortal, and we only through that"
(W, 8:343).
There is a form of assurance or comfort in this view of im-
mortality, but to obtain it we must surrender our demand for an
eternally enduring separate consciousness, a demand that Emer-
son depicts as fundamentally shallow. "Here are people who can-
not dispose of a day; an hour hangs heavy on their hands; and
will you offer them rolling ages without end?" (W, 8:348). For
Emerson, it is only when "the last garment of egotism falls" that
the individual is "with God," a state in which he or she "shares
the will and immensity of the First Cause" (W, 8:348-49). Reli-
gious growth is in this sense an increasing capacity to displace
private needs and desires with more selfless and universal ones.
 i/4 Emerson in His Time

Immortality, then, "is not length of life, but depth of life. It is not
duration, but a taking of the soul out of time, as all high action
of the mind does: when we are living in the sentiments we ask no
questions about time" (W, 8:347). That intensity of experience,
involving as it does a commitment to a continuing energetic cre-
ativity, constitutes the religious life for Emerson. His religious vi-
sion offers one of the most challenging and original modern ap-
proaches to the question of religious faith.

NOTES

1. For information on these early family influences, see Evelyn

Barish, Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1989), pp. 3-71; The Selected Letters of Mary Moody
Emerson, ed. Nancy Craig Simmons (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1993); Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 3-59; and Phyllis
Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
2. On the origins and development of New England Unitarian-
ism, see Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America
(i955; rpt., Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1976). For the influence
of Unitarian ideas and culture on Emerson, see Lawrence Buell, Lit-
erary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973); and David M. Robin-
son, Apostle of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and Lecturer (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
3. On the doctrine of the preparation of the soul, see Perry
Miller, '"Preparation for Salvation' in Seventeenth-Century New En-
gland," in his Nature's Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1967); and Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in
Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1966).
4. On the denominational emergence of Unitarianism, see
Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Phi-
losophy, 1803-1861 (1970; rpt., Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press, 1988); Conrad Wright, ed., A Stream of Light: A Sesqui-
centennial History of American Unitarianism (Boston: Unitarian
Universalist Association, 1975); David M. Robinson, The Unitarians
 Emerson and Religion 175

and the Universalists (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985),

pp. 25-46; and Conrad E. Wright, ed., American Unitarianism, 1805-
1865 (Boston: Northeastern University Press in cooperation with the
Massachusetts Historical Society, 1989).
5. For discussions of the concept of "moral sense" in Emerson,
see Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph
Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953),
pp. 6-16; Jonathan Bishop, Emerson on the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1964), pp. 66-72; and Robinson, Apostle of Culture,
pp. 50-55-
6. On Emerson's crisis of health, see Barish, Emerson: The Roots of
Prophecy, pp. 145-210.
7. On Emerson's preaching career, see Robinson, Apostle of Cul-
ture; and "Historical Introduction" (CS, 1:1-32); Wesley T. Mott, "The
Strains of Eloquence": Emerson and His Sermons (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989); and Susan Roberson,
Emerson in His Sermons (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1995).
8. There is a vast literature on Emerson's intellectual sources.
The best single source for understanding how his wide reading
shaped his thinking is Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Other
important sources include Kenneth Walter Cameron, Emerson the Es-
sayist, 2 vols. (Raleigh, N.C.: Thistle Press, 1945); Sherman Paul,
Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in American Experience
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952); Henry Pochmann, Ger-
man Culture in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1957); David Van Leer, Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Es-
says (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Leon Chai,
The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1987). For informative discussions of Emer-
son's early religious development, see, in addition to Whicher and
Paul, Sheldon W Liebman, "Emerson's Transformation in the
i82o's," American Literature 40 (May 1968): 133-54; and Robert Milder,
"Emerson's Two Conversions," ESQ: A Journal of the American Re-
naissance, 33 (ist Quarter 1987): 20-34.
9. For Emerson's views of science, see Harry Hayden Clark,
"Emerson and Science," Philological Quarterly 10 (July 1931): 225-60;
Robinson, Apostle of Culture, pp. 71-94; Robinson, "Fields of Investi-
gation: Emerson and Natural History," in American Literature and Sci-
 176 Emerson in His Time

ence, ed. Robert Scholnick, (Lexington: University Press of Ken-

tucky, 1992), pp. 94-109; and Lee Rust Brown, The Emerson Museum
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
10. On Nature see B. L. Packer, Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation
of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1992); Robinson, Apostle
of Culture, pp. 85-94; Van Leer, Emerson's Epistetnology, pp. 19-58; and
Alan D. Hodder, Emerson's Rhetoric of Revelation (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989).
11. On Emerson's development and use of the concept of the
scholar, see Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Emerson on the Scholar (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1992). For a discussion of the push of
the intellect for ever newer creation, see Richard Poirier, The Re-
newal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random
House, 1987); and Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1992).
12. On the "Divinity School Address" and the ensuing contro-
versy it provoked, see Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists: An An-
thology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); C. Conrad
Wright, "Emerson, Barzillai Frost, and the Divinity School Address,"
in his The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 41-61,128-31; Packer, Emerson's Fall,
pp. 121-37; Robinson, Apostle of Culture, pp. 123-37; and Robinson,
"Poetry, Personality, and the Divinity School Address," Harvard
Theological Review 82 (1989): 185-99.
13. For an informative history of the Transcendentalist move-
ment, see Barbara Packer, "The Transcendentalists," in The Cam-
bridge History of American Literature, vol. 2, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 329-604.
14. On the history of the Dial, see Joel Myerson, The New England
Transcendentalists and the Dial: A History of the Magazine and Its Con-
tributors (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1980).
15. The volume was given the title Essays: First Series after Emer-
son published a second collection of essays in 1844 as Essays: Second
Series.
16. See Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism and Asian Re-
ligions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 54-61.
17. On the significance of "Experience," see Whicher, Freedom
and Fate, pp. 109-22; Packer, Emerson's Fall, pp. 148-211; Van Leer,
 Emerson and Religion 177

Emerson's Epistemology, pp. 143-87; and David M. Robinson, Emerson

and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later
Work (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 54-70.
18. For a detailed discussion of Emerson's move toward a more
pragmatic, ethically oriented outlook, see Cornel West, The Ameri-
can Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 9-41; Robinson, Emerson and
the Conduct of Life; James M. Albrecht, '"Living Property': Emerson's
Ethics," ESQ.- A Journal of the American Renaissance 41 (1995): 177-217;
and Michael Lopez, Emerson and Power: Creative Antagonism in the
Nineteenth Century (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
1996).
19. For an informative consideration of the Utopian experiments
influenced by Transcendentalist thought, see Richard Francis, Tran-
scendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands,
and Walden (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).
20. On Emerson's commitment to the antislavery cause, see Len
Gougeon, Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1989); AW; and Eduardo Cadava, Emer-
son and the Climates of History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1997). For a discussion of Emerson's influence on the antislav-
ery movement, see Albert J. von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns:
Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univeristy Press, 1998).
21. On the significance of this later work as a key statement of
Emerson's poetic theory, see Ronald A. Bosco, '"Poetry for the
World of Readers' and 'Poetry for Bards Proper': Theory and Tex-
tual Integrity in Emerson's Parnassus," in Studies in the American Re-
naissance 1989, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1989), pp. 257-312.
22. See Ronald A. Bosco, "His Lectures Were Poetry, His Teach-
ing the Music of the Spheres: Annie Adams Fields and Francis
Greenwood Peabody on Emerson's 'Natural History of the Intel-
lect' University Lectures at Harvard in 1870," Harvard Library Bul-
letin, n.s., 8 (Summer 1997): 1-79.
This page intentionally left blank
 Emerson and Antislavery

Gary Collison

E had never been identified with the abolitionists."1 Many

merson," said Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1884 biography,

biographers and critics have argued that just the opposite is true,
pointing to Emerson's numerous private and public statements
against slavery. Still, for a variety of reasons, Holmes's erroneous
view of Emerson has been remarkably persistent. Not the least
of these reasons are Emerson's own words. "Every reformer
is partial and exaggerates some one grievance," and every re-
former's obsessions are "somewhat ridiculous," wrote Emerson
in his 1839 lecture "The Protest" (EL, 91). Even as the Civil War
approached and Emerson shared the platform with abolitionists
on dozens of occasions, he still disdainfully kept many of them
at arm's length. "They are a bitter, sterile people, whom I flee
from," he wrote in his journal (JMN, 14:166). Similar disparaging
remarks about abolitionists and other reformers punctuate
Emerson's lectures, journals, and letters. This attitude, together
with his oft-expressed repugnance toward involvement in the po-
litical arena and his insistent self-portraiture of himself as a poet-
philosopher, has inevitably supported the view promoted by
Holmes of an aloof and remote "Sage of Concord."
The trajectory of Emerson's career and interest in antislavery
provides another explanation of why he has often been thought

179
 i8o Emerson in His Time

detached from the antislavery battle. The works of his early ca-
reer, Nature (1836), Essays: First Series (1841), and Essays: Second Se-
ries (1844), give little hint that he was at all concerned with the
immediate social issues of his day. These works of the first
decade of Emerson's career as an essayist and lecturer were writ-
ten before he had developed a more activist stance and when
radical abolitionists constituted a widely despised vocal minority.
Critics who have seen Emerson as essentially opposed to aboli-
tion have concentrated on this earlier period of his career and
thus viewed Emerson's position as static rather than dynamic. As
was also true in the case of Henry Thoreau, Emerson's views
gradually evolved until the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law
of 1850 provided the impetus for a far more radical stance and
for much greater participation in the campaign against slavery.
Emerson delivered the majority of his important lectures on the
subject of slavery in the two decades following the passage of the
new law, a period of his career that until recently has been given
comparatively little attention. These later works expressed a far
more radical position.
Trends in historiography and literary criticism have also
helped to diminish appreciation of Emerson's antislavery activi-
ties. Generations of historians saw the Transcendentalists as, at
best, lightweight dilettantes who had little influence in the aboli-
tionist arena. This view was challenged by Stanley Elkin's Slavery:
A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959),
which took the Transcendentalists seriously. However, Elkins
concluded that their impact was largely negative because their
uncompromising idealism and rigid self-righteousness rendered
them unable to work practically for reform. Thus, although
Elkins helped bring Emerson and the Transcendentalists onto
center stage, ultimately he ended up merely adding a new twist
to the historians' conventional judgments. In literature depart-
ments, the reign of New Criticism from the 19405 through the
19605 also devalued Emerson's interest in antislavery and reform.
New Criticism turned away from biographical and historical con-
texts to focus on the words, images, metaphors, and other formal
elements of Emerson's writings. While this narrowing of atten-
tion to texts rather than contexts brought about a new, unprece-
 Emerson and Antislavery 181

dented appreciation of Emerson's artistry, it also consciously

marginalized the religious, political, and social dimensions and
contexts of his works. This negative effect was magnified by the
fact that the New Critics concentrated on Emerson's earlier,
most densely poetical works.
That situation has changed dramatically. Since 1960, a flood
of scholarly attention to abolitionism, slavery, African-American
history, Transcendentalism, and related topics has inevitably
brought attention to the byways of Emerson's career and to his
connections with his cultural world. The rise of social history
and cultural studies greatly expanded the field of vision of both
the historical and the English professions and in the process
helped to break down the wall between the two disciplines. This
development has made it possible to examine how Emerson's life
and ideas are woven into the fabric of his times and how impor-
tant Emersonian threads have been to developing patterns of ide-
alism in antebellum culture. Studies of Emerson's involvement
with antislavery and other reforms reached their climax in 1990
with the publication of Len Gougeon's Virtue's Hero: Emerson, An-
tislavery, and Reform, an exhaustive study of Emerson's relation-
ship to and involvement in the antislavery crusade. This work
was followed by Gougeon and Joel Myerson's Emerson's Anti-
slavery Writings (1995), which brought together Emerson's extant
major antislavery statements, including some that had not been
included in Emerson's collected works. Together these two pub-
lications reveal the dynamic evolution of Emerson's views and
convincingly demonstrate what many of Emerson's contempo-
raries and biographers already knew—that his contribution to
the antislavery movement was considerable.
To be sure, the collection of Emerson's lectures and published
letters on the subject edited by Myerson and Gougeon makes a
slim volume. Of eighteen extant pieces written between 1838 and
1863, only a few are extended discussions of slavery. The first ex-
tended lecture was delivered to a small audience of Emerson's
neighbors in Concord. Almost all of his contributions are occa-
sional pieces arising in response to a new public conflict over slav-
ery. But taken together with other statements by Emerson for
which no manuscript or printed copy survives and with the many
 182 Emerson in His Time

passages concerned with slavery in his letters and journals, they

show Emerson's intense devotion to the American ideals of lib-
erty and freedom transforming him into a passionate advocate
for the abolition of slavery. They show him thinking often and
deeply about slavery, participating in abolitionist rallies, and cor-
responding and debating with dozens of abolitionist friends and
acquaintances. They show a progressive evolution of his relation-
ship to antislavery and a progressive evolution of his thought.
They reveal that when the Fugitive Slave Law energized the
movement by giving it a new raison d'etre, Emerson could not
help but be drawn even further into the debate.2 Later works
show how, by the 18505, Emerson had moved away from his
original "moral suasionist" view—a faith in the power of reason
to convert the Southerner—toward the increasingly militant,
radical stance similar to that also adopted by his friend Henry
Thoreau.
The work of Gougeon and Myerson, together with newer
works that build on their conclusions, such as Robert D. Richard-
son, Jr.'s, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995) and, especially, Albert J.
von Frank's The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in
Emerson's Boston (1998), also make the important argument that
Emerson's contributions add up to far more than the mere nu-
merical sum of his public letters and speeches.3 As von Frank has
put it, "One may make a careful survey of Emerson's opinions
. . . and never come close to what it was in his thought that
made a difference in the struggle" (p. xvii). The reason one would
"never come close" is that such an approach lacks an understand-
ing of the way in which antebellum American culture had ac-
corded Emerson a privileged position. Emerson's reputation as
America's leading intellectual gave any participation enormous
power and impact. By the 18405 he had become the de facto spiri-
tual leader to whom a large group of Americans, mostly North-
erners, looked for instruction, guidance, and inspiration. Emer-
son's unstinting defense of idealism, with its call to higher
morality and its elevation of the individual conscience over the
laws of society, influenced many Americans to question the gov-
ernmental policies and to apply standards to American society
that exceeded—and often contradicted—those set in the politi-
 Emerson and Antislavery 183

cal, economic, social, and even religious realms. Emerson filled a

void in American culture. Von Frank even argues that "the cul-
ture was such as to allow Emerson to be almost infinitely redupli-
cated in others, to live and act through men and women, whom
he may . . . be said to have colonized" (p. xviii). Whether or
not one is willing to go as far as von Frank in assigning an almost
hypnotic agency to Emerson's antislavery participation, it is clear
from recent work that Emerson became thoroughly engaged in
the slavery debate and ended up playing a significant role in the
campaign against slavery.

Emerson's Antislavery Background

Emerson's religious and social background explains a great deal

of his early reluctance to participate in reform in general and the
antislavery movement in particular. The son of a Unitarian cler-
gyman and a clergyman himself, early in his career he inevitably
reflected some of the fundamental assumptions and viewpoints
common to the denomination and his ministerial role. "Unitari-
ans were conservative, believers in providential arrangements of
society, believers in respectability, in class distinctions," wrote
second-generation Unitarian minister O. B. Frothingham.4 Minis-
ters tended to reflect the views of the social class that filled the
best pews, the businessmen, entrepreneurs, the aristocracy of
old money. If anything, the growth of free-market capitalism in
the first half of the nineteenth century exacerbated this identifi-
cation with money and power. The typical Unitarian minister,
with his disdain for "agitating" subjects and abhorrence of stri-
dent "enthusiasm" and "fanaticism," shunned the radical aboli-
tionists and other zealous reformers as a species of madmen who
would willingly bring down the whole of society to make their
point. Emerson inherited the cast of mind and the reticent per-
sonality that were endemic among Unitarians and, as a young
clergyman in Boston in the early 18303, reflected the familiar Uni-
tarian critique of mass reform movements from his Second
Church pulpit. His private opinions were even more critical. The
abolitionists are an "odious set ... the worst of bores and can-
 184 Emerson in His Time

ters," reads one journal entry, a fairly typical sample of Emer-

son's early opinions (JMJV, 9:120). Much of this inheritance, as
much temperamental as intellectual, would remain with him for
his entire life. He would never lose his abhorrence of partisan
politics or his distrust of organizations that demanded allegiance
to a standard line of thought.
But other aspects of the New England Unitarian heritage
could more than cancel the inherent conservative impulses.
When the original Unitarians broke away from the Congrega-
tional Church in the early decades of the nineteenth century,
they did so reluctantly and were careful to disagree with gentle-
manly decorum, yet they obviously exhibited a strong reform
orientation from their moment of origin. Devotion to con-
science, self-culture, and independence of mind provided fertile
ground on which social reform causes could naturally take hold
and flourish. Also, the notion of social responsibility that was in-
herent in the ministry and in the Brahmin cast of mind provided
a powerful springboard for a reform mentality among Unitari-
ans. Unitarian ministers and laypersons figured prominently in
the peace and temperance movements, in prison reform, in poor
relief, and in other humanitarian causes that emerged in the first
half of the nineteenth century when growing immigration, ur-
banization, and industrialization created social problems of a
scale and complexity that rendered the older small-scale indi-
vidual and parish-led methods of social amelioration increas-
ingly ineffective. The most prominent first-generation Unitarian
leader, William Ellery Charming, went about as far as possible in
the liberal reform direction without rejecting his Congregational
background entirely. Beginning as early as 1831, at almost the
exact moment that William Lloyd Garrison was rejecting gradu-
alism and African colonization as fraudulent and embracing the
cause of immediate abolition, Channing swallowed the repug-
nance he felt for the abolitionist "agitators" and began to speak
out publicly against slavery. In publishing his slim volume enti-
tled Slavery in 1835, Channing lent his enormous reputation as the
most highly respected preacher of the era, at least in New En-
gland, to the abolitionist movement, despite serious misgivings
about the tactics of the Garrisonians and other radicals.
 Emerson and Antislavery 185

Emerson and other Transcendentalist ministers such as

Theodore Parker and George Ripley were great admirers of
Charming, whom they regarded as the elder statesman of liberal
religion, and with whom many retained intimate friendships
until Channing's death in 1842. Henry Ware, Jr., another first-gen-
eration Unitarian whose liberalism led him cautiously but inex-
orably toward a public antislavery stance, was senior pastor at
Boston's Second Church when Emerson began his ministry
there. Most of the second-generation Unitarian ministers who
became Transcendentalists, including Emerson and Theodore
Parker, would imitate these mentors in being slow to take up the
cause of antislavery. But as a group they would follow and then
surpass their mentors in many reform arenas. The Transcenden-
tal Club, where Emerson joined many of his former ministerial
colleagues, became a forum for debating how to reform both
church and society. Reform impulses from within the group led
to the experimental Utopian community at Brook Farm (1841-
1847), founded by Ripley after he resigned from the Unitarian
ministry. In antislavery, the Transcendentalist circle had the ex-
amples of other ministerial colleagues such as Charles Pollen and
Samuel J. May, a full-blown Garrisonian. William Henry Furness,
Emerson's colleague and close friend, became increasingly vigor-
ous in his support of the abolitionist cause. Lydia Maria Child,
one of the most outspoken New England abolitionists, was sister
to Unitarian minister Convers Francis, sometime "moderator" of
Transcendental Club meetings. Such connections could be ex-
panded almost endlessly. Suffice it to say that an extensive, ever-
growing network of reform and antislavery Unitarian ministers
and laypersons tied Emerson to the antislavery movement in
dozens, even hundreds, of ways.5
For Emerson, another set of personal connections to antislav-
ery would result from his 1834 move to Concord, Massachusetts,
shortly after he resigned from his duties as minister of the Sec-
ond Church of Boston. Although distancing him from the imme-
diate world of Boston antislavery as well as from the Boston
black community (with which, however, Emerson appears to
have had only very limited contact), the move brought him into a
new, more intimate and more inescapable antislavery orbit.
 186 Emerson in His Time

Many of Emerson's Concord neighbors and friends of the next

three decades already sympathized with the antislavery cause by
the time he arrived. The Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society
took the lead in local antislavery work, promoting the cause by
holding meetings, distributing literature, sponsoring lectures,
and supporting other activities, including taking care of fugitive
slaves. The Concord Lyceum frequently invited antislavery fig-
ures to lecture, with Emerson himself sometimes penning the in-
vitations. Concordians were regular subscribers to William Lloyd
Garrison's Liberator. Friends and neighbors, many of whom were
leading citizens of the town, took fleeing fugitive slaves into their
homes and assisted them to their next destinations. John Brown
would later visit Concord to solicit support for his dangerous en-
deavors, and F. B. Sanborn, later Emerson's biographer, joined
the so-called Secret Six conspirators who helped raise funds that
John Brown used for his 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harp-
ers Ferry. As with Emerson's connections to Unitarian antislavery
figures, his Concord connections multiplied his links to the anti-
slavery network almost indefinitely.6
Emerson's own family surrounded him with an even more inti-
mate and no less intense antislavery climate. Concord minister
Ezra Ripley (d. 1841), Emerson's stepgrandfather and a principal
member of the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society, spoke out
publicly against slavery in the 18305. Emerson's intellectual aunt,
Mary Moody Emerson, was staunchly opposed to slavery, and her
influence on her nephew was profound. She regularly prosely-
tized him and even plotted a breakfast for the visiting British aboli-
tionist George Thompson at her unsuspecting nephew's home.
About the same time, Emerson's elder brother Charles gave an an-
tislavery lecture in Concord, and both brothers defended British
writer Harriet Martineau after she aroused a storm of criticism for
openly espousing sympathy with the abolitionists. Emerson's sec-
ond wife, Lidian, was an active and vocal member of the Concord
Female Anti-Slavery Society, as were the Thoreau women and
many other wives of Concord's elite.7
Given his liberal-Unitarian ties, his activist Concord friends and
neighbors, and his family history of involvement, antislavery was
an integral part of Emerson's environment. Not surprisingly, the
 Emerson and Antislavery 187

subject of slavery appears with considerable regularity in Emer-

son's private as well as public writings from 1821 onward. In 1826,
he mentioned "the slave's misery" in his first sermon. Like Chan-
ning, Emerson found his opposition to slavery further strength-
ened by a brush with the real thing on a visit to the South for his
health. Emerson made certain that his Second Church congrega-
tion knew that he hated slavery and other social evils and expected
them to feel the same way. "Let every man say then to himself—
the cause of the Indian, it is mine; the cause of the slave, it is mine"
(CS, 4:115), he exhorted his Fast Day audience in 1832.8 In 1837,
prompted by the murder of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in
Alton, Illinois, Emerson delivered an entire address on the subject
of slavery. The address does not survive, but Emerson's notes and
journal entries show that its thrust was a vigorous defense of the
principle of free speech.

Joining the Cause: 1837-1843

The antislavery influences in Emerson's environment did not au-
tomatically make him into an antislavery activist. His first major
foray as a reformer, an 1838 letter to President Van Buren protest-
ing the expulsion of the Cherokees from their homelands in the
South, he found a disturbing, hateful task. "I fully sympathize, be
sure . . . ," he wrote in his journal, adding with annoyance, "It
is not my impulse to say it & therefore my genius deserts me, no
muse befriends, no music of thought or of word accompanies.
Bah!" (JMN, 5:479). But the multiple influences of family, friends,
neighbors, and colleagues, together with his growing sense of his
responsibilities as an American spokesman for idealism, were to
lead him inexorably into the antislavery camp.
How strands of Emerson's life and thought connect with so-
cial activism in general and antislavery in particular during his
early career is nowhere better explained than in his famous 1837
address "The American Scholar," which he delivered before Har-
vard University's Phi Beta Kappa Society. Although the speech
says nothing directly about antislavery, it has much to tell us
about Emerson's positioning himself in the landscape of reform
and articulates the tensions that were to continue to define his
 i88 Emerson in His Time

lifelong ambivalent relationship with abolitionism. On one side

of his equation delineating the life of the true scholar Emerson
placed the role as poet-philosopher-scholar, which he saw as de-
manding absolute intellectual freedom as well as long periods of
intense concentration away from the jangling demands of daily
life. The free mind needed separation and independence to es-
cape the suffocating influences of tradition and conformity;
without this independence, the poet-scholar would shrink into
the bookworm, the pedant, and the parrot. "Society everywhere
is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its mem-
bers," he would say in "Self Reliance" (CW, 2:2.9),
But while Emerson placed absolute independence of mind
and an essentially art-for-art's-sake position on one side of his
formula, on the other he placed the ideal of duty. The concepts
of duty and work were deeply rooted in his history and psyche.
In addition to the traditional duties assigned to the scholar to re-
member the past and study its lessons, the true scholar for Emer-
son was also to be part priest, part prophet, and part poet. His
role, he announced toward the end of "The American Scholar,"
was "to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts
amidst appearances" (CW, 1:62). This definition of a highly social
role, a role as a leader, a shaper of public opinion, has obvious
roots in his ministerial background. The resulting tension be-
tween the conflicting demands of Emerson's creative genius for
isolation and disengagement and the demands of his public role
as guide and preceptor to his community and to humanity would
continue to define and plague Emerson throughout his career.
It is no coincidence that the 1837 sermon, his first open pro-
nouncement on antislavery, was delivered about the same time as
"The American Scholar" and the even more radical "Divinity
School Address" (1838). In these revolutionary years Emerson
was breaking free of the conventional role he had assumed in
choosing the formal role of minister, a role that he soon found
stifling. But having gained his independence from the constraints
of the ministerial role, Emerson was not eager to relinquish it to
a cause or crusade. While he respected the work of reform be-
cause it was built on a foundation of divine principles, he was un-
willing to force his energies into a narrow channel. It took an-
 Emerson and Antislavery 189

other seven years before Emerson was ready to deliver another

public antislavery address. The occasion was the tenth anniver-
sary of the emancipation of the slaves in the British West Indies
on i August 1834. The program of antislavery lectures scheduled
that day in Concord was one of many such events throughout
New England. Both the Fourth of July and the first of August
had become annual events in the abolitionist calendar. They were
natural occasions for attacking the contradictions between
America's professed ideals and its actual practices.
By 1844, it was impossible for Emerson to remain aloof from
the antislavery controversy any longer. He had become a leading
citizen of his town and the leading intellectual of his region, if not
of the nation. He had become the spokesman for American ideal-
ism. Many of his fellow citizens expected his guiding voice and
opinions on subjects of importance to the community and the na-
tion. Moreover, by 1844 Emerson had been battered by the storm
of criticism that followed his "Divinity School Address," giving
him firsthand experience of the intractability of conservative, re-
actionary elements in American society. The experience placed
Emerson in a new vantage point. He was now linked with the abo-
litionists by the experience of being denounced and shunned by
many of the same reactionary voices in American society that had
been condemning abolitionism. It was no longer possible to main-
tain the barrier that he had mentally placed between himself and
them. Additionally, by 1844 it had become impossible to be silent
without appearing to condone the continuation of slavery, espe-
cially with the imminent annexation of Texas threatening an im-
mediate expansion of slave territory. When he was asked by his
fellow citizens to speak on the subject of the West Indian emanci-
pation, he could not refuse without appearing to be insensitive to
this great story of the triumph of principle.
The historical and celebratory aspects of the i August anniver-
sary gave Emerson an excellent opportunity to engage the issue
of slavery in ways that suited his genius. For the first half of this,
his first major public address on the slavery issue, Emerson
stayed close to his sources. From Thomas Clarkson's History of
the Rise and Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the
African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) and James J.
 190 Emerson in His Time

Thome and J. Horace Kimball's Emancipation in the West Indies

. . . (1838) he got many vivid details of the sordid history of
brutality and oppression in the slave trade, as well as the tri-
umphant story of protest and eventual emancipation in the
British West Indies. These works awakened Emerson to the hu-
manity as well as the degradation of the slave and led him to a
deep appreciation of the heroic efforts of the slave's defenders.
He echoed his sources in cataloging the various horrors of the
slave trade and slavery in the West Indies with the heartfelt re-
pugnance of an abolitionist. The lecture also provided a capsule
history of the antislavery crusade and capsule biographies of the
hero-activists who led the successful campaign to abolish the
slave trade and slavery. His warm tribute to the English leaders
contained none of his customary animadversions regarding the
abolitionists.
The main lines of Emerson's argument against slavery in his
address were to become the foundation of all his future state-
ments on the subject. Like Frederick Douglass and many other
abolitionists black and white, Emerson rejected what many took
as a perfectly logical approach to evaluating slavery, namely, that
its morality could be determined by observation and simple cal-
culation. Supported by the coerced behavior and testimony of
slaves and by racist assumptions, this kind of moral arithmetic
led slavery apologists to argue that the abuses in the system were
exceptions and that slavery was not the cruel and barbarous sys-
tem it had been painted to be by the abolitionists but a largely be-
nign and even benevolent system. Slaves were generally content
and happy, as evidenced by their cheerful demeanor, joyful
singing, and loyalty to their masters. For Emerson as for other se-
rious thinkers, the issue could not be understood by observing
slave behavior, soliciting slaves' opinion, or weighing "kind" ver-
sus "cruel" masters to see which way, and how far, the balance
tipped. The issue for Emerson as for Douglass was the basic iniq-
uity upon which the system was founded and the distortions and
fraud that perpetuated its evils. Slavery was nothing more than
the stealing of human beings for one's own advantage. Slaveown-
ers, even the kindest and most progressive, were still robbers and
thieves who were complicit in the worst brutalities. As he would
 Emerson and Antislavery 191

put it later, "No excess of good nature and tenderness of moral

constitution [in owners] has been able to give a new character to
the system, to tear down the whipping house" (AW, 85).
What made the evil of slavery doubly horrific for Emerson
was the willingness of members of so-called civilized society to
avert their eyes from evil because they loved the advantages they
gained from the system of slavery. In a powerful passage of the
address, Emerson defined slavery as a "convenience" to white so-
ciety. "We found it very convenient to keep them at work," he
reasoned acidly, "since, by the aid of a little whipping, we could
get their work for nothing but their board and the cost of whips."
The sarcasm dripped from his words:

What if it cost a few unpleasant scenes on the coast of Africa?

That was a great way off; and the scenes could be endured by
some sturdy, unscrupulous fellows, who could go for high
wages and bring us the men, and need not trouble our ears
with the disagreeable particulars. If any mention was made of
homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we
would let the church-bells ring louder, the church organ swell
its peal, and drown the hideous sound.

Emerson excoriated white complicity in slavery by linking his au-

diences' familiar everyday comforts and luxuries with the thiev-
ery, violence, and deceit with which these luxuries had ultimately
been purchased. "The sugar they raised was excellent; nobody
tasted blood in it. The coffee was fragrant; the tobacco was in-
cense; the brandy made nations happy; the cotton clothed the
world" (AW, 20).
Overall, the address rests upon a foundation of Emersonian
optimism. In the West Indian emancipation Emerson saw a sign
that the slope of the world's morality tended invariably upward,
and that as the world became more moral and more civilized,
eventually the United States would fall into line. This argument
may strike the modern ear as hopelessly naive after a Civil War,
two world wars, the Holocaust, and countless other tragedies of
a scale scarcely comprehensible a century and a half ago. But
Emerson had no crystal ball in which to foresee the cycles of
 192 Emerson in His Time

human progress and folly or the terrible consequences of tech-

nological advances in warfare. Although the Mexican War
loomed on the horizon, he was looking back on a time of peace
in America and on many hopeful signs of the progress of the
human spirit. Reason and morality had triumphed in the West
Indian emancipation beyond the fondest hopes. Freed slaves did
not injure their masters. No rioting and insurrection followed.
The freed slaves had shown themselves not only to be worthy of
citizenship but also to be representatives of the best in humanity.
"I have never read anything in history more touching than the
moderation of the negroes" (AW, 15), wrote Emerson of the be-
havior of the slaves after emancipation.
Emerson's 1844 address is also noteworthy for its attack upon
the almost universal denigration of the Negro. In the experience
of emancipation in the British West Indies, Emerson found a
powerful refutation of racist view of Africans, annihilating what
he called "the old indecent nonsense about the nature of the
negro" (AW, 29). In short, the emancipation and its aftermath
proved absolutely that the widespread belief in the inferiority of
the Negro was false. Emerson's views of blacks, however, would
later sometimes smack of the Romantic racism that Gougeon
notes was "very much in the air in Emerson's circle and else-
where" (180). In his journals and letters, particularly in the 18505,
Emerson increasingly considered negative views of blacks, iden-
tifying them in private journal passages with "brute instinct" and
calling them "imitative, secondary" (JMN, 13:198).9 Nevertheless,
as Gougeon notes, Emerson "ultimately . . . rejected" these
speculations and during the Civil War foresaw "the rapid cultural
development of blacks as an inevitable consequence of emanci-
pation that would finally redeem them from the debilitating ef-
fects of the institution of slavery" (185).

Reluctant Advocate: 1844-1850

The 1844 Address . . . on ... the Emancipation of the Negroes in

the British West Indies announced Emerson's approval of the abo-
litionist movement and his entrance onto the antislavery stage.
 Emerson and Antislavery 193

"We are indebted mainly to this movement [in the British West
Indies] and to the continuers of it, for the popular discussion, and
a reference of every question to the absolute standard" (AW, 28),
he said. But Emerson's admiration for the movement in Britain
and the West Indies was not easily transferred to the American
situation. He knew the triumphal story of West Indian abolition
only secondhand and retrospectively from the point of view of
its leading figures. He did not know the leaders intimately. The
actuality of the American situation was far more cloudy and full
of contradictions. Up close, the "incidental petulances or infirmi-
ties of indiscrete defenders of the negro" (AW, 32) were readily
visible. Their words and methods were open to criticism; they
had not yet proved themselves effective advocates for humanity;
and their absolutism had not the purity of motive and purpose of
Clarkson's or Granville Sharp's. They supported the cause of hu-
manity and the highest standard of human morality, but they
also recklessly fanned the flames of controversy and hatred and
seemed willing to precipitate insurrection and civil war. As far as
anyone could determine, they had not moved the nation one
whit closer to abolishing slavery. In fact, they seemed to have po-
larized the nation and hardened the position of the South. They
argued among themselves and denounced each other. Emerson
the idealist was not ready to link arms with them in the public
arena, where "the alarms of liberty and the watchwords of truth
are mixed up with all the rotten rabble of selfishness and
tyranny" (AW, 32).
For the next six years following the 1844 address, Emerson
continued to be sought after to speak in support of antislavery
and other reforms. As much as possible he kept to the sidelines,
unwilling, as he wrote in the "Ode Inscribed to William Henry
Charming" (1846), to leave his "honied thought / For the priest's
cant, / or statesman's rant" (W, 9:76). But in these years he could
no longer retreat entirely into his poetry and his study. His ad-
dress on the West Indian emancipation proved very popular, and
he was called to repeat it several times. He attended other aboli-
tionist gatherings. Even the Channing "Ode," despite its dis-
claimer, showed him fully engaged with the evil of slavery. It
contained a stinging critique of the times. "Things are in the sad-
 194 Emerson in His Time

die, and ride mankind" (W, 9:78) Emerson observed darkly, and at
the end he presaged the Civil War in the line "Half for freedom
strike and stand" (W, 9:79). In 1845, the debate over the annexa-
tion of Texas (as a slave state) drew him into the public arena
once again. Later in the year he turned down an invitation to
speak before the New Bedford lyceum to protest the exclusion of
blacks. When his friend and constant companion Henry Thoreau
protested the Mexican War by refusing to pay his taxes and was
thrown into jail, Emerson found himself further caught up in the
issue of slavery and found his own relative reserve on the subject
directly challenged.
In 1847, Emerson briefly lent his name and pen to the efforts of
fellow Transcendentalist Theodore Parker's new intellectual jour-
nal, the Massachusetts Quarterly Review (1847-1850). Intended as a
sequel to the Dial, the journal was too ponderous and too domi-
nated by reform for Emerson's tastes. Nevertheless, Emerson did
not discourage the project at first, and Parker even managed to
wrest an "Editor's Address" for the first issue from the him. After
Emerson found himself named as the senior editor despite all his
protests, he steered clear of the project. The brief address, how-
ever, showed Emerson fully in sympathy with Parker's reform
agenda. Emerson pointedly lamented that American "moral and
intellectual effects are not on the same scale with trade and pro-
duction" and promised a journal with the "courage and power suf-
ficient to solve the problems which the great groping society
around us, stupid with perplexity, is dumbly exploring" (W, 11:327,
331-32).

A Full-Blown Abolitionist: 1850-1865

Enactment of the new Fugitive Slave Law in September 1850 was

to transform the slavery debate and both Emerson's position to-
ward it and his role in it. The new law superseded the old, largely
unenforceable statute of 1793, under which enforcement powers
and responsibilities were not clearly defined. When conflicts
among federal, state, and local authorities arose, as was in-
evitable, there was no easy way to solve them. By the 18403, nu-
 Emerson and Antislavery 195

merous states, including Massachusetts, had further weakened

the federal statute by passing "Liberty Laws" that blocked the use
of state and local jails and the participation of state and local offi-
cials in fugitive slave cases. This left the federal marshal and fed-
eral courts virtually helpless. The new Fugitive Slave Law solved
these conflicts by absolving states of responsibility in fugitive
cases, by designating special federal commissioners to hear fugi-
tive slave cases, by authorizing federal officials aided by federal
troops when necessary to return fugitives once they had properly
been identified, and by providing for penalties of up to one thou-
sand dollars in fines (and one thousand dollars compensatory
damages to the owner for each fugitive lost) and six months in
jail for persons accused of "aiding and abetting" fugitive slaves.
The law also authorized the federal marshal to call out a "posse
comitatus" of citizens to assist in capturing a fugitive slave or to
prevent a threatened rescue. Most outrageous of all, the law de-
nied the right of habeas corpus and jury trial, and it prohibited a
person accused of being a fugitive slave from testifying in his or
her own defense. For all practical purposes, the "summary" hear-
ing provided for under the new law was to be held merely to de-
termine the identification of the accused and to verify the au-
thenticity and completeness of documents presented by the
claimant attesting to ownership. Persons accused of being fugi-
tive slaves were thus to be treated as mere property in Northern
as well as Southern federal courtrooms. While some of the spe-
cial federal commissioners as well as federal judges, who could
also conduct hearings, provided time for the accused to confer
with lawyers and to have his or her case defended at length, in
other instances commissioners or judges expedited the proceed-
ings before any defense could be mounted, sometimes before
anyone knew of the arrest.10
Although the new Fugitive Slave Law, the final portion of the
bills collectively known as the Compromise of 1850, ostensibly
settled the conflict over slavery, it fell far short of its goal. Only
some of the particular questions about where slavery would be
permitted as the nation expanded, and where it would be forbid-
den, were settled. Even the compromises over territorial expan-
sion provided, at best, a temporary lull in the political arena. By
 196 Emerson in His Time

the mid-iSsos, the slavery issue would turn Kansas Territory into
a bloody battleground. Moreover, the compromise would do
nothing to soothe the inflamed feelings of Southern extremists
and their Northern abolitionist opponents. The Southern ex-
tremists felt betrayed by the compromise package, believing that
the new laws unfairly confined slavery and that the Fugitive Slave
Law could not or would not be enforced in the North. Northern
radicals felt equally betrayed by the extreme restrictiveness of a
law that suspended the Bill of Rights, immediately turning any
citizen accused of being a fugitive slave into a chattel, guilty until
proven innocent. This attack on basic rights of citizens energized
the antislavery movement. Newspaper headlines telling of fugi-
tives seized and returned from New York City, Philadelphia, and
other Northern centers fed a growing reaction against the law.
Abolitionists gleefully seized on each new case for the publicity it
automatically gave to their cause. Moderate and even pro-South
newspapers across the North found themselves printing stories
that inevitably boosted local antislavery sentiments.11
"This filthy enactment" (JMN, 11:412), Emerson would call the
new law, among other hard names. Although at first his reaction
was tempered by the belief that the new law, like the old, would
not be obeyed in New England, the statute automatically en-
gaged his deepest feeling. Before the law, Emerson said, he had
"lived all my life without suffering any known inconvenience
from American slavery" (AW, 74). The law, and, particularly actual
attempts to arrest fugitive slaves in Boston, would rapidly inten-
sify Emerson's evolving activism. It had been one thing when
fugitives, or slaves, resided at some remote location. It was en-
tirely another when the slave owner and the U.S. marshal came
knocking on your neighbor's door. As Emerson was to articulate
again and again with great clarity and force, under the new Fugi-
tive Slave Law, a fugitive slave case in Massachusetts automati-
cally involved every Massachusetts citizen. What Emerson could
not know in September 1850 was that attempts to seize his neigh-
bors were inevitable. Although many assumed that antislavery
sentiment would prevent a fugitive slave from being arrested in
Boston, and that no owner would foolishly risk the dangers or ex-
penses involved in trying to seize a Boston fugitive, efforts to do
 Emerson and Antislavery 197

just that were in the works from almost the day the new statute
became law. Daniel Webster and the Union-Whigs eagerly hoped
for success in a Boston fugitive slave case. What better proof of
the effectiveness of the Compromise of 1850 than returning a
fugitive slave to his or her Southern owner from Boston, the os-
tensible capital of abolitionism?
The first attempt on a Boston fugitive came in late October, a
little over a month after the new law became operative, when
agents of a Macon, Georgia, slave owner arrived in Boston and
set about securing the arrest of two fugitives, William and Ellen
Craft. This was to be exactly the high-profile proof Daniel Web-
ster and the Unionists wanted. The Crafts were well known for
their amazing escape by train from Georgia. The light-skinned
Ellen, dressed in male attire, had pretended to be an ailing
planter journeying to the North for medical treatment, with her
dark-skinned husband, William, playing her trusty body servant.
After being sent on to Boston for safety, William set up a carpen-
try shop, while Ellen worked as a seamstress. When the attempt
to arrest the Crafts became known, antislavery sympathizers
were aroused. Emerson followed the developments of the case as
they were reported in the press with great interest, as evidenced
by comments in his correspondence and journals. When the
Crafts fled from Boston, Emerson noted the successful thwarting
of the law in his journal, where he had begun to keep a regular
'Anti-Slavery Almanac" (JMN, 14:429).
During the excitement over the Crafts, Emerson made no
public pronouncements. The following February, a second at-
tempt to arrest a Boston fugitive slave, a waiter named Shadrach
Minkins, ended within hours when a band of black Bostonians
led by Lewis Hayden rescued the fugitive from the U.S. marshal's
custody and sent him on to Montreal. Again, Emerson confined
his response to his journals, letters, and conversation. In March
he sent a letter to the Middlesex Anti-Slavery Society expressing
his regret that he would be out of town lecturing during the an-
nual meeting in Concord in early April. That he had been deeply
stirred by the fugitive slave incidents in Boston and elsewhere is
clear from one sentence in his brief letter. 'At this moment it
seems imperative," Emerson wrote, "that every lover of human
 198 Emerson in His Time

rights should, in every manner, singly or socially, in private and in

public, by voice and by pen . . . enter his protest for humanity
against the detestable statute of the last Congress" (AW, 51). It is
an uncompromising statement, a pledge to put aside his reserva-
tions about public protest and join the antislavery chorus. Not
surprisingly, it found its way almost immediately into Garrison's
Liberator.
In April 1851, after a third fugitive slave, Thomas Sims, was ar-
rested and then actually sent back to slavery from Boston,
guarded by an army of local and federal troops, Emerson made
good on his "in private and in public" pledge by quickly joining
in the outcry over the loss of Sims. Invited by his fellow citizens
of Concord to address them in the wake of Sims's rendition, he
readily agreed. "The last year has forced us all into politics, and
made it a paramount duty to seek what it is often a duty to
shun," Emerson declared in the opening of his speech in explana-
tion of his change of position. With remarkable candor, Emer-
son confessed to being shaken by the treatment of Sims. "I wake
in the morning with a painful sensation, which I carry about all
day," he said, the origin of which he identified as "the odious re-
membrance of that ignominy which has fallen on Massachusetts,
which robs the landscape of beauty, and takes the sunshine out of
every hour" (AW, 53). Letters written about the same time, as
well as journal passages filled with similar confessions of anger
and despair, reveal Emerson's remarks in Concord to be genuine,
not mere rhetorical hyperbole.
Emerson's speech, a jeremiad decrying the fallen moral state
of Massachusetts, shows a decided radical shift. It is in this
speech, Emerson's version of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience,"
that he first offered a full statement of the priority of "higher
law" and the necessity of resisting unjust legislation such as the
Fugitive Slave Law. "Laws do not make right, but are simply de-
claratory of a right which already existed," he said. For this rea-
son, "an immoral law makes it a man's duty to break it, at every
hazard" (AW, 57). The Fugitive Slave Law, which perfectly exem-
plified an immoral law, "must be made inoperative. It must be
abrogated and wiped out of the statute book; but, whilst it
stands there, it must be disobeyed" (AW, 71). This conclusion was
 Emerson and Antislavery 199

the most radical political statement Emerson had ever offered.

Although more familiar Emersonian optimism about "the im-
mense power of rectitude" (AW, 70) tempered the extreme state-
ments, the address still stands among Emerson's works as a
unique tour de force of emotion barely restrained by reason.
Len Gougeon rightfully calls it "by far the most strident and acer-
bic of his career."12 It proved very popular, and Emerson re-
peated it at least nine times, apparently most often at Free Soil
Party rallies supporting John Gorham Palfrey's congressional
candidacy.
Emerson's willingness to be drawn into a political campaign
indicates just how ready he had become to demonstrate, almost
defensively, his commitment to his principles on whatever stage
was offered—to "clear my own skirts," as he said in a letter to
Thomas Carlyle (CEC, 470). When Palfrey lost the election at the
end of May, however, Emerson's distaste for the experiment, to-
gether with his heavy lecture schedule, led him to retreat from
the political and reform arenas. His journal entries show him pri-
vately debating and defending his course. After chiding himself
"because I had not thrown myself into the deplorable questions
of Slavery," he reported finding "in hours of sanity" the reassur-
ance that he was laboring in the cause of humanity in his own
way: "I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit,
imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts . . . which, important
to the republic of Man, have not watchman, or lover, or de-
fender, but I—" (JAIN, 13:80). Although he turned down every in-
vitation to speak at abolitionist rallies, he continued to follow
political and legal developments with intense interest and con-
demned slavery and racism in letters and conversation. Finally, in
the spring of 1853, he did accept an invitation to attend a dinner
honoring New Hampshire's abolitionist senator, John Parker
Hale, and even prepared a speech, but he may have been
crowded out of the opportunity of speaking by the horde of lu-
minaries in attendance. His one public expression on the issues
appeared that spring in Autographs for Freedom, a fund-raising col-
lection like the Liberty Bell, to which he had submitted poems in
1851. This time Emerson's contribution was a single poem, "Free-
dom." As in his Liberty Bell contributions, the poem was at least
 200 Emerson in His Time

as much about Emerson's struggle to remain poetically free as it

was about the larger issues of freedom and slavery.
By 1854, new national and local conflicts were challenging
Emerson to enter the public spotlight once again. First came the
furious debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which became law
later in the spring. The result of complicated political maneuver-
ing, the new act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of
1820 that banned slavery from above the 36° 30' parallel. Emerson
consented to give a speech in New York on 7 March 1854, a date
with great resonance for the New England antislavery brigade.
Exactly four years earlier, Daniel Webster had given his famous
speech supporting the Fugitive Slave Law, turning many of his
former admirers, including Emerson himself, against him. Emer-
son's speech was not one of his strongest efforts. It lacked the
passion of his 1851 speech to his Concord friends and neighbors,
and lacked as well the concrete imagery that usually distin-
guished his best writing. Much time was devoted to balancing
the claims of the parties to the antislavery debate and to his own
reluctance and unsuitability as an antislavery spokesman. "Gen-
tlemen, I have a respect for conservatism," one section began
(though Emerson, in typical fashion, remade the word by defin-
ing his own idea of "true" conservatism). In his analysis of
Daniel Webster's virtues and defects, too much homage was paid
to virtues for abolitionist listeners. Emerson himself considered
his speech an unfinished and unsatisfactory attempt at a "plea for
Freedom addressed to my set" (L, 8:397), and it met with the luke-
warm reaction that could be expected from the militant antislav-
ery press. Still, the speech was a remarkable attempt at a compre-
hensive treatment of the corrosive effect of slavery on American
life and morals, and it contained many pungent remarks about
the essential role of individual conscience in the cause of free-
dom. "Liberty is aggressive. Liberty is the Crusade of all brave
and conscientious men" (AW, 88), Emerson proclaimed near the
end of the speech.
In January 1855, Emerson once again raised his voice in public
to register his opposition to slavery. Eight months earlier a sec-
ond fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, had been arrested in Boston
and sent back into slavery. The case had attracted enormous in-
 Emerson and Antislavery 201

terest locally and nationally. Abolitionists, who were conve-

niently gathered in the city for a meeting, agitated with renewed
energy while initiating a variety of legal maneuverings behind
the scenes. A public meeting fired up the crowd, who were then
released into the streets to attack the Boston Court House and
rescue Burns. Poorly planned and even more poorly coordinated,
the attack might yet have succeeded. At one point Thomas Went-
worth Higginson and others fought their way into the building,
only to retreat when the crowd did not follow them, but not be-
fore Higginson and several others received wounds and one of
their number had fatally shot one of the men guarding the Court
House. Then Emerson's friend Amos Bronson Alcott, who had
been in attendance at the exciting meeting, gained a measure of
fame by walking up the Court House steps alone and then re-
tracing his steps.13
Emerson's 1855 speech crackled with the personal outrage
that comes from having his home territory once again invaded
by slave catchers and his fellow citizens once again corrupted by
the government and its laws. The speech contained Emerson's
by-now familiar themes: the conflict between the "doctrine of
the independence and the inspiration of the individual" and the
need for "social action" (AW, 103); the "sickness of the times"
(AW, 101) that permitted such an outrage against principle by
Daniel Webster and others; and the inevitable moral develop-
ment of America, which would lead to a time when slavery "will
yield at last, and go with cannibalism, tattooing, inquisition, du-
eling, [and] burking" (AW, 93). The essay again shows Emerson's
talent for placing the contemporary subject of slavery versus
freedom in the context of the moral development of humankind
and civilization. Echoes of biblical language and references to the
great moral and judicial leaders of history are brought to bear
upon the Burns episode to place it in the framework of historical
injustice. As in other speeches, Emerson measured contempo-
rary judges and politicians against the heroes of humankind's
quest for freedom and justice and found them woefully lacking.
On several more occasions before the Civil War erupted,
Emerson rose to protest slavery and to support the cause of lib-
erty and the slave. Each occasion was to be provoked by some
 2O2 Emerson in His Time

new crisis arising out of the intensifying national conflict over

slavery. The first came after Congressman Preston S. Brooks of
South Carolina caught Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts
at his desk on the floor of the Senate and flogged him with a cane
so severely that Sumner's life was endangered. Provoked by Sum-
ner's caustic personal attacks on various Southern politicians in
his "Crime Against Kansas" speech a few days earlier, the out-
raged Brooks had committed himself to avenging the honor of
his colleagues in strict accordance with the Southern code of
gentlemanly behavior. By flogging Sumner, he earned the con-
gratulations of many of his fellow Southerners in Congress and
throughout the South.14 In the North, Brooks's outrageous be-
havior provoked an immediate flood of denunciations and
protest meetings. At a meeting of Concord's citizens, Emerson
gave a brief speech that focused on the unspotted character of
Sumner, with whom Emerson had been corresponding, rather
than on Brooks's villainy. In the speech, Emerson announced
simply, "I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of
freedom" (AW, 107). For Emerson, the Brooks affair confirmed
the impossibility of reasoning with the South; the Southerners
had been so corrupted by their institution that they were no
longer capable of civilized debate. Slavery had dragged civiliza-
tion back into barbarity.
Later in the year Emerson attended a meeting for the relief of
antislavery settlers in Kansas territory, many of whom had trav-
eled from Massachusetts to help make a plurality for abolition
and so bring Kansas into the Union as a free state. A civil war in
Kansas territory had erupted over the issue, prompting the
speech from Charles Sumner that resulted in his beating. Aboli-
tionist settlers in Kansas found themselves repeatedly attacked by
Missouri "border ruffians" intent on driving them out through
intimidation and violence. Lawrence, Kansas, a free-soil strong-
hold, was plundered by a pro-slavery band. In Concord and else-
where, protest meetings were held to raise money and supplies
for the besieged settlers. Moved by the reports of the plight of
the settlers, Emerson attended meetings and at one delivered an
impassioned plea for all citizens to give aid generously. "We must
learn to do with less, live in a smaller tenement, sell our apple-
 Emerson and Antislavery 203

trees, our acres, our pleasant houses" (AW, 112), Emerson chal-
lenged his audience. In the speech he came close to calling
openly for revolution. Recalling the time when Massachusetts,
"in its heroic day, had no government—was an anarchy," Emer-
son declared himself "glad to see that the terror at disunion and
anarchy is disappearing" (AW, 115). Clearly he had begun to ac-
cept the idea that war was becoming not only more and more in-
evitable but also more and more necessary. "The war existed
long before the cannonade of Sumter and could not be post-
poned" (AW, 133), he would say later.
In 1859, another shocking event propelled Emerson back into
the antislavery campaign. In September, John Brown attacked the
federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in a futile attempt to start a slave
insurrection. Already admired by Emerson, to whom the old
man had been introduced by Henry Thoreau during Brown's
visit to Concord in 1857, Brown's arrest and execution for his
crazy assault removed any reservations that Emerson might have
entertained about the zealous Kansas freedom fighter. In Con-
cord, both Thoreau and Emerson added their voices to the cho-
rus of abolitionist praise showering down upon Brown's name.
In several speeches, Emerson placed Brown in company with the
greatest moral heroes of history. For Emerson, Brown's willing-
ness to sacrifice his life and the lives of his sons for the lowly slave
and the highest principles illustrated true courage and devotion
to humankind. "Nothing can resist the sympathy which all ele-
vated minds must feel with Brown" (AW, 118), Emerson pro-
claimed in an address before a meeting in Cambridge for the re-
lief of John Brown's family. In another speech entitled simply
"John Brown," Emerson portrayed Brown as a figure who reme-
died the deficiencies of ego and self-interest that tainted the
character of abolitionists and other reformers. Brown was "ab-
solutely without any vulgar trait; living to ideal ends, without
any mixture of self-indulgence or compromise, such as lowers
the value of benevolent and thoughtful men we know" (AW, 122),
Emerson declared. Clearly, he recognized in Brown's muscular,
militant idealism a natural counterpart to his own image of him-
self as the fearless, independent American scholar. Brown ful-
filled the ideal of true manhood that had been Emerson's lifelong
 204 Emerson in His Time

theme and preoccupation. Emerson's approving remarks about

Brown's extremist statement, "Better that a whole generation of
men, women and children should pass away by a violent death,
than that one word of either [the Golden Rule or the Declaration
of Independence] should be violated in this country" (AW, 118),
starkly displayed Emerson's heightened militancy as well as his
near idolatry of Brown.15
Once the Civil War had erupted, Emerson became a passion-
ate advocate of the cause of the Union and of freedom for the
slave. With many other antislavery supporters, he called for the
immediate emancipation of the slaves. When Lincoln's prelimi-
nary Emancipation Proclamation (1862) finally came, too tardy
and too limited in its application to please many radical oppo-
nents of slavery, Emerson defended the president vigorously.
"Forget all that we thought shortcomings, every mistake, every
delay," Emerson pleaded; "call these endurance, wisdom, magna-
nimity, illuminated, as they now are, by this dazzling success"
(AW, 130). By the proclamation, "we have . . . planted ourselves
on a law of nature" and "shall not fear henceforth to show our
faces among mankind" (AW, 132). His speech on the proclama-
tion, delivered in Boston and soon published in the Atlantic
Monthly, had a wide audience and undoubtedly helped to silence
the critics and cement public opinion behind Lincoln. Emerson
also composed poems for abolitionist gatherings, one of which,
the popular "Voluntaries," was a tribute to the black Massachu-
setts Fifty-fourth Regiment and its commander, Colonel Robert
Gould Shaw, who had died leading their ill-fated assault on Fort
Wagner, South Carolina.
In 1863, with Lincoln's reelection in doubt and with rumors
about a negotiated settlement in circulation, Emerson again took
a leading role in public discussions with an impassioned speech
entitled "Fortune of the Republic." Delivered on numerous occa-
sions in one of the darkest periods of the war, with the end of
hostilities still distantly in the future, the speech shows Emerson
attempting to buoy up the hopes of the nation. "The people have
met the dreadful issues so frankly," he declared. "The youth have
shown themselves heroes. The women have shown a tender pa-
triotism, and an inexhaustible charity" (AW, 152). Having long
 Emerson and Antislavery 2.05

since abandoned any hope in the conversion of the South, he ra-

tionalized the terrible bloodletting in a remarkable statement in
which he described the war as a process of nature, "as necessary
as lactation, or dentition, or puberty, to the human individual"
(AW, 139). By 1863, he had come to believe no sacrifice was too
great when the grand principle of human freedom was at stake.
"[We want] a state of things which allows every man the largest
liberty compatible with the liberty of other men," he declared
(AW, 153). Noteworthy is the fact that in both speeches he finally
dropped the opening apologia of most of his antislavery state-
ments. Now he rose to defend the war and its principles vigor-
ously, without hint of reluctance.16
Even after the war, when he might have retreated to his study
and his books, Emerson continued to be a spokesman for na-
tional idealism. He spoke at the memorial service for Lincoln
held in Concord and at the service at Harvard to memorialize the
college's war dead and welcome its returning heroes. He worried
over the difficulties that lay ahead in Reconstruction. He main-
tained a keen interest in the work of Charles Sumner and the
other Radicals as they tried to counter the Johnson administra-
tion's tendency to relax federal supervision and controls imposed
on the South. In several speeches, Emerson celebrated the new
nation's opportunity to advance the cause of humanity now that
the blighting influence of slavery had been swept away. "Was
ever such coincidence of advantages in time and place as in
America today?" he asked in "Progress of Culture," his second
Phi Beta Kappa address, delivered at Harvard in July 1867. "The
fusion of races and religions, the hungry cry for men which goes
up from the wide continent; the answering facility of imagina-
tion, permitting every wanderer to choose his climate and gov-
ernment . . . the new claim of woman" (W, 8:207-8). He par-
ticipated in a tribute to William Lloyd Garrison and visited the
Freedman's Institute (later Howard University) in Washington,
where he delivered an impromptu talk on worthwhile books. In
the last decade of his life, with his abilities declining rapidly, he
gave few public addresses but continued to show an interest in
the developments in the South and in the possibilities unleashed
by the repudiation of slavery.
 2o6 Emerson in His Time

Emerson's Importance
During the mid-i85os, as Emerson had come more and more to
accept the role in the antislavery campaign that had been thrust
upon him, Northern public opinion had been swinging more and
more to the side of the abolitionists. The Sims case in 1851 had
disturbed many supporters of the Fugitive Slave Law in Boston
and elsewhere throughout Massachusetts who had once believed
that Southern interests needed to be respected, no matter how
repugnant the system of slavery was, because the Constitution
recognized and protected slavery. By 1854, when a second fugitive
slave was sent back into slavery from Boston, the violation of
rights of persons recognized as citizens by the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts began to seem too outrageous even to the men
of commerce and finance that Emerson had frequently attacked
for their moral obtuseness. The murder of Kansas settlers from
Massachusetts, the violent assault on Charles Sumner, and re-
newed fugitive slave cases throughout the North accelerated this
trend. So, too, did the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. An instant best-seller, the novel found
its way into the hands of many people who would not have char-
acterized themselves as abolitionists, at least when they first
picked up the book. This antislavery tract in the form of a novel
had the power to make the evils of slavery immediate and palpa-
ble and so, like local fugitive slave cases, helped to energize an
otherwise emotionally remote subject.
What part Emerson himself had in this dramatic shift in pub-
lic opinion is hard to pin down. Clearly, he had not been a Wen-
dell Phillips, a William Lloyd Garrison, or even a Theodore
Parker. His voice was heard only occasionally. He did not march
in the streets in protest. He did not join abolitionist organiza-
tions. And though he did write and speak against slavery, these
utterances make up but a tiny portion of his work. Yet, as the
leading figure in New England intellectual life, as the primary
spokesman for idealism in America, and as a figure of enormous
popularity and prestige, Emerson spoke words that had an incal-
culable resonance and residual effect. Whenever he spoke out
against slavery and the slave power in the name of a higher law
 Emerson and Antislavery 207

for humanity, he not only lent his name and enormous prestige
to the abolitionist cause but reinforced the intellectual and moral
underpinnings of the movement. The eagerness with which he
was sought out by antislavery groups is one measure of his broad
and deep effect. When abolitionists assembled their portraits for
an 1857 lithograph print "Heralds of Freedom," Emerson was
asked to contribute his likeness. It is a measure of the importance
of Emerson's name, and an acknowledgment of his important
contributions to the antislavery cause, that they made the re-
quest. It is a measure of Emerson's acceptance of the role that
had been largely thrust upon him that he consented.17 The fin-
ished print shows William Lloyd Garrison's image surrounded by
portraits of six other "heralds." Emerson's likeness hovers di-
rectly above Garrison's, as if to suggest that he was the guardian
spirit of the group.

NOTES

1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston:

Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), p. 304.
2. Len Gougeon, Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990); AW. The present essay is
heavily indebted to these two works. For the sake of brevity in the
notes that follow, relevant sections of Gougeon's Virtue's Hero and
his introduction and notes to AW are not specifically mentioned, but
every note referring to an aspect of Emerson's antislavery activities
could begin, "In addition to Gougeon, see . . ." For an early schol-
arly analysis, see Marjory M. Moody, "The Evolution of Emerson as
an Abolitionist," American Literature 17 (March 1945): 1-21.
3. Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995): Albert J. von Frank, The Trials of
Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1998).
4. Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Boston Unitarianism, 1820-1850:
A Study of the Life and Work of Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (New
York: Putnam's, 1890), p. 251.
5. Excellent discussions of the relationship between Unitarian-
ism and antislavery can be found in Douglas C. Stange, Patterns of
Antislavery Among American Unitarians, 1831-1860 (Rutherford, N.J.:
 20 8 Emerson in His Time

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977); Daniel Walker Howe,

The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (Middle-
town, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1970), pp. 270-305; and
Conrad Wright, "The Minister as Reformer: Profiles of Unitarian
Ministers in the Antislavery Reform," in his The Liberal Christians:
Essays on American Unitarian History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970),
pp. 62-80.
6. For descriptions of Emerson's Concord circle of neighbors
and friends and their antislavery and reform activities, see Richard-
son, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, pp. 208-14; and the revised and en-
larged edition of Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biog-
raphy (New York: Dover, 1982).
7. For Emerson's family influences, see The Selected Letters of Lid-
ian Jackson Emerson, ed. Dolores Bird Carpenter (Columbia: Univer-
sity of Missouri Press, 1987); The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emer-
son, ed. Nancy Craig Simmons (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1993); and Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Tran-
scendentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 220-45.
8. For an analysis of Emerson's early attitudes toward politics,
abolition, and other reforms, see Wesley T. Mott, "The Strains of Elo-
quence": Emerson and His Sermons (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1989), pp. 113-41.
9. Modern commentary noting the ambiguities and complexities
of Emerson's thinking about race include Eduardo Cadava, Emerson
and the Climates of History (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University
Press, 1997); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Ge-
nealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1989), pp. 28-35; and Phillip Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History: An
Examination of English Traits (New York: Columbia University Press,
1961).
10. On the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the
Northern background, see Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict:
The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington: University of Kentucky
Press, 1964); and Robert F. Dalzell, Daniel Webster and the Trial of
American Nationalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). Thomas D.
Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780-1861
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1974), is useful for understanding the
Northern background of opposition to the fugitive slave laws of
1793 and 1850.
 Emerson and Antislavery 209

n. For the effects of the Fugitive Slave Law, see Stanley W.

Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law,
1850-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970).
12. Gougeon, Virtue's Hero, p. 160.
13. Von Frank's The Trials of Anthony Burns is an exhaustive study
of Emerson and the Burns case that supersedes everything that has
been written on the subject.
14. For the Sumner incident, see David Herbert Donald, Charles
Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 278-311.
15. On Emerson's ideas of manhood, see David Leverenz, Man-
hood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1989), pp. 42-71.
16. On Emerson and the Civil War, see Cadava, Emerson and the
Climates of History, pp. 149-201; and Len Gougeon, "Emerson's Cir-
cle and the Crisis of the Civil War," in Emersonian Circles: Essays in
Honor of Joel Myerson, ed. Wesley T. Mott and Robert E. Burkholder
(Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1997), pp. 29-51.
17. The lithograph is reproduced in Courage and Conscience: Black
and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 18.
This page intentionally left blank
 Emerson in the Context of the
Woman's Rights Movement
Armida Gilbert

I n order to understand Emerson's developing attitudes toward

the woman's rights movement, it is necessary to appreciate the
way in which the movement began, grew, and changed and the is-
sues around which the early debates were centered. Before even
the earliest stages of the woman's rights movement in America,
Emerson had been introduced to the ideas that would inform it,
especially through the pioneering work of his friend Margaret
Fuller. As explained by her, first in "The Great Lawsuit,—Man Ver-
sus Men, Woman Versus Women" in the Transcendentalist liter-
ary journal, the Dial, in 1843, then in expanded form in the first
book written in America to argue for woman's rights, Woman in
the Nineteenth Century, in 1845, Fuller's ideas, transmitted to Emer-
son through their frequent conversations and correspondence,
came to form the core of his thinking on women. Fuller's care-
fully reasoned tactics would form the basis for the approaches and
arguments that would later be adopted by the nascent woman's
rights movement, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony,
and Matilda Joslyn Gage acknowledged in their monumental His-
tory of Woman Suffrage
Suffrage, when they stated that Fuller's work "gave a
new impulse to woman's education as a thinker."1 Thus Emerson
shared essential concepts and patterns of thinking about issues re
garding women with the American woman's rights movement

211
 212 Emerson in His Time

from the earliest days of its existence, inspiring suffragists to ac-

cept him as one of their champions.
Following on Fuller's prescient presentation of the issues of
women's role in society, the woman's rights movement in nine-
teenth-century America emerged from the crucible of the aboli-
tionist movement, in much the same way that the contemporary
women's movement would later spring from the furor of the
civil rights movement. The catalyzing event for the woman's
rights movement was the 1840 World's Anti-Slavery Convention
in London. After women organized and planned the first interna-
tional convention, a massive undertaking, when they arrived at
the site they were informed that they could not be seated at their
own conference due to their sex; all women were to be excluded
from the platform and convention seating, allowed only to stand
voiceless and silent in the aisles and gallery. Outraged, organizers
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton agreed to hold the
first woman's rights convention upon their return to America.2
By 1848, these American women had organized their historic
first woman's rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York.
As Julia Ward Howe, later leader of the suffragist American
Woman's Party, observed, 1848 was considerably before "the
claims of women to political efficiency had begun to occupy
the attention . . . of the American public"; full recognition of
the "woman question" came only after the Civil War. Word
spread quickly among women involved in social reform, how-
ever, and another National Woman's Rights Convention was held
in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, only two years after the his-
toric Seneca Falls convention. Emerson was invited to the con-
vention and gave it his support; according to Howe, although
Emerson was prevented from attending the convention, his ab-
sence was due to his deep involvement in editing the Memoirs of
Margaret Fuller Ossoli, which, as Howe paraphrased Emerson, "he
hoped, would be considered as service in the line of the objects
of the meeting."3 That Emerson so closely correlated Fuller and
the woman's rights movement reflected her formative influence
on his thinking on women's issues from the beginning of his
public identification with the movement—indeed, from before
the beginning of the movement.
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 213

As was the common practice, the convention prepared a Call

to Convention, a public declaration of principles that would be
signed by the attendees, indicating their agreement with these
principles. Emerson signed this statement of support, an unusu-
ally bold step for a writer who generally avoided identification
with any formal organization for social reform and who tended
to be extremely cautious about any public pronouncement. His
willingness to be publicly included as a supporter of the conven-
tion, then, indicated not only his awareness of the aims of the
woman's movement long before most of the country realized its
existence but also the strength of his agreement with its beliefs.4
Much later, in 1876, Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled
Emerson's backing of the convention in a brief article, "Tested
by Time," in the suffragist organ the Woman's Journal, in which
he erroneously referred to this as the "first National Woman's
Rights Convention."5 Apparently, then, nearly thirty years later
Higginson was still unaware of the first convention in Seneca
Falls in 1848, and it was possible that Emerson, too, was unaware
of the Seneca Falls convention. This was especially likely, since it
went almost entirely unreported by the press, even in New York
State, and news of it spread only by word of mouth among those
most intensely interested in the fledgling movement.6 If Emer-
son did then believe, as did Higginson, that he was signing the
initial declaration of principles for the very first woman's rights
convention, his actions became even more daring.
Emerson wrote a public letter to Lucy Stone in the New York
Daily Tribune on 17 October 1851, apologizing that again his work
on the Fuller memoirs would prevent his attendance at that
year's Worcester Woman's Rights Convention. He reminded the
public that he had signed the previous convention's declaration
of principles and stated that he continued to stand by them (L,
4:261-62). In his journal, he mused, "I think that, as long as
[women] have not equal rights of property & right of voting,
they are not on a right footing. But this wrong grew out of a sav-
age & military period, when, because a woman could not defend
herself, it was necessary that she should be assigned to some man
who was paid for guarding her. Now in more tranquil & deco-
rous times it is plain that she should have her property, &, when
 214 Emerson in His Time

she marries, the parties should as regards property, go into a part-

nership full or limited, but explicit & recorded" as compared to
the law and custom of the time, by which the husband took full
legal possession of all the woman's property upon marriage,
even her clothing. Emerson continued, "I find the Evils real &
great. If I go from Hanover street to Atkinson street,—as I did
yesterday,—what hundreds of extremely ordinary, paltry, hope-
less women I see, whose plight is piteous to think of" (JMN,
11:444.) Emerson typically doubted the efficacy of legislation in
correcting the "Evils" of women's condition, wishing instead
that they could be removed by repairing "the rottenness of
human nature" (JMN, 11:444), which had initially allowed the rise
of such unjust laws.
In 1855, Emerson would appear in person to address that year's
woman's rights convention. His address on that occasion was
later revised to form the essay "Woman." This lecture has yet to
be published. Another source of evidence for Emerson's position
on women's rights was an unpublished lecture known as the
"Discourse Manque. Woman," which appears to be drawn al-
most entirely from the 1855 address.7
In both the original lecture and the slightly emended essay
form, "Woman" was Emerson's most public and extended state-
ment of his opinion on women's issues, a serious avowal of his
dedication to woman's rights. Couched as it was in the terms
of the nineteenth-century woman's movement, the essay has
continued to be a source of controversy and even chagrin for
contemporary readers. Yet Emerson made his partisanship of
woman's rights clear from the start, first by staking a claim for
the importance of the issue, an opinion he held throughout his
life; in his journal in 1868, Emerson stated, "I wish the American
Poet should let old times go & write on ... Woman's Suf-
frage" (JMN, 16:88). Emerson thus declared in the "Discourse
Manque," drawn largely from the 1855 address, that the woman's
movement was "no whim, but an organic impulse,—a right and
proper inquiry,—honoring to the age"; of the "good signs of the
times," he stated, "this is of the best." Emerson went on to con-
trast the healthful and thoughtful supporters of woman's rights
with the presumably unhealthy and thoughtless detractors of the
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 215

movement, whom Emerson attacked—in very strong language

for him—deriding the "cheap shots" at women and their rights
and the "monstrous exaggeration" of every sexist writer from
Aristophanes to Rabelais and the highly popular Tennyson. As he
observed in his journals, even poets promoted a stereotyped and
generic view of woman that knew her "only in the plural" (JMN,
12:568). They thus became like the "misogynist" he had met who
"looked on every woman as an imposter" (JMN, 11:455) because
real women did not resemble these bland and homogenized
stereotypes.
Emerson had deplored this tendency to denigrate women, and
particularly their intellectual efforts, for some time. Writing in his
journal in 1841, he quoted the mayor of Lowell, Massachusetts, as
saying disparagingly of a group of women arriving to testify in a
trial, "There go the light-troops!" and criticized, "Neither Plato,
Mahomet, nor Goethe have said a severer thing on our fair Eve.
Yet the old lawyer did not mean to be satanic" (JMN, 8:85). In 1848,
in his memoirs of France, he observed, 'At the Club des Femmes,
there was among the men some patronage, but no real cour-
tesy. The lady who presided spoke & behaved with the utmost
propriety,—a woman of heart & sense,—but the audience of men
were perpetually on the look out for some equivoque, into which,
of course, each male speaker would be pretty sure to fall; & the
laugh was loud & general" (JMN, 10:268). Similarly, after seeing
Isabella Glyn Dallas give her Shakespearean readings, Emerson
called her "a woman of great personal advantages & talent—great
variety & of style, & perfect self possession" and complained that
"her audience was not worthy of her, impertinently read newspa-
pers & had a trick of going out" (JMN, 16:201). Even in his analysis
of the character of Napoleon Bonaparte in Representative Men,
Emerson chided Napoleon's "unscrupulous" nature in saying,
"Leave sensibility to women" and his "coarse . . . low familiar-
ity" in pulling women's ears and pinching their cheeks (JMN,
12:568). The "pitiless" James Fenimore Cooper was another of-
fender, with his boast "I can make any woman blush," which
women met with "natural resentment" (JMN, 11:446).
Having established the significance of the issue and the super-
ficiality of its opponents' arguments, Emerson consolidated his
 216 Emerson in His Time

position by establishing woman's strengths. Unfortunately, the

strengths he singled out for praise, however complimentary to
nineteenth-century women, would come to seem problematic to
late twentieth-century readers. As he had stated in the address
to the 1855 Woman's Rights Convention on which the essay
"Woman" was based, "Women feel in relation to men as ge-
niuses feel among energetic workers, that tho' overruled &
thrust aside in the press, they outsee all these noisy masters" (see
alsoJMN, 16:146). This praise of women's "oracular nature," their
greater intuitive powers,8 has reminded many contemporary
women of the cliche of "women's intuition." Whenever women
used their intelligence more quickly or efficiently than the men
around them, it was dismissed as "women's intuition," not recog-
nized as a sign of equal intellectual capacity. In the address,
Emerson had clarified this idea by suggesting that what appeared
to be women's intuition was actually the result of a quicker
thought process: "They learn so fast & convey the result so fast,
as to outrun the logic of their slow brother." Also, Emerson did
not believe the intuition to be a lower faculty than the intellect,
but at least equal, and possibly higher. In addition, he held that
men as well as women relied on intuition. In his essay on
Emanuel Swedenborg in Representative Men, the mystics named,
who based their work on the intuitive faculties, were largely
male, although Madame Jeanne Marie de la Motte-Guion was
also included. That Emerson respected Madame Guyon (the
name had variant spellings) was evident in his ownership of
Lydia Maria Child's biography of her.9 Further, during this pe-
riod, even the strongest suffragists clung to their claim for psy-
chic and spiritual superiority.10 Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth
Century resounded with such rhetoric: "The especial genius of
Woman I believe to be ... intuitive in function."11 Her influ-
ence on Emerson was evident here, as in so many of the other
ideas in "Woman," particularly since he had been so recently at
work on her Memoirs.
Like Fuller, then, Emerson suggested that women's faster
thought processes placed them in the vanguard of social reform:
'Any remarkable opinion or movement shared by women will
be the first sign of revolution" (W, 11:406). In this firmer logic,
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 217

women influenced the progress of society. As Emerson observed

in his journal: "[T]hey buy slaves where the women will permit
it; where they will not, they make the wind, the tide, the water-
fall, the steam . . . do the work" (JMN, 10:103; see also JMN,
8:307). The French Revolution was another example (JMN,
10:296), and in considering Fourier's idea of communal living,
Emerson wrote, "The important query is what will the women
say to the Theory?"12 Like Fuller and most other nineteenth-
century feminists, also, Emerson did not take into account the ef-
fect of social conditioning in creating women's "strength" of
"sentiment" and "sympathy," as well as in creating the "Gulf be-
twixt men & women" (JMN, 12:307).13 However, awareness of
the effects of gender role conditioning was decades away with
the nascent science of sociology, and Emerson's tropes here,
however painful to postmodern sensibilities, were no different
than those of his female and suffragist contemporaries. In fact,
by following the paths of argument laid down by Fuller and her
suffragist successors, Emerson proved how closely he adhered to
her ideas.
Thus Emerson's views as expressed in the address on which
"Woman" was based were what contemporary critics would to-
day term "essentialist," implying an innate, inborn difference be-
tween the male and female temperaments that held true across
the bounds of cultural and historical conditioning. While today
essentialism can be viewed as one among a variety of hotly con-
tended feminist viewpoints, in Emerson's time, given this lack of
awareness of social conditioning, it was the norm. It was truly
the woman's (singular) movement in the nineteenth century,
generally agreed on an essentialist philosophy and a demand for
equal legal rights, as compared to today's far more diversely ori-
ented women's (plural) movement, in which a multiplicity of
often clashing viewpoints have struggled for expression.14 Emer-
son's assumption of intrinsic emotional and physical discrepan-
cies in men and women's strength, then, was aligned to his era.
As debatable as it may be in our time, few in the nineteenth cen-
tury would have disagreed with Emerson's paraphrase of Swe-
denborg that "the difference of sex [runs] through nature and
through thought." The most outspoken suffragists of Emerson's
 218 Emerson in His Time

time would have agreed that women were, in his words, "More
vulnerable, more infirm, more mortal" than men, in a time
when women had an exceptionally high death rate, especially in
childbirth. Fuller, in fact, had stated unequivocally in Woman in
the Nineteenth Century that "woman is the weaker party" (22).
Emerson may also well have had the premature demise of his
first wife, Ellen, in mind here. Indeed, Ellen Tucker Emerson
was, with Fuller, the previously unacknowledged model for
Emerson's vision of womanhood, "complete in her perfections"
(JMN, 5:108), a "mate by spiritual affinities & not by sex" (JMN,
3:374). As he mused in his journal, "I can never think of women
without gratitude for the bright revelations of her best nature"
(JMN, 8:381). He continued to contemplate her sayings and ex-
amples throughout his life15 and even continued to commemo-
rate their wedding anniversary after his second marriage. His re-
spect for the literary efforts of women may have arisen from his
admiration for her work, and he quoted several of her poems in
his journal, kept a special notebook for her verses, and printed
them in the Dial and in his own volume of poetry, Parnassus.
At times Emerson did approach a more androgynous ideal, as
when he noted in his journals, 'A highly endowed man with
good intellect & good conscience is a Man-Woman, & does not
so much need the complement of Woman to his being as an-
other. Hence his relations to the sex are somewhat dislocated &
unsatisfactory. He asks in woman sometimes the Woman, some-
times the Man" (JMN, 8:175,10:392). He concluded, 'Always there
is this Woman as well as this Man in the mind" (JMN, 8:230), and
"there is no sex in thought, in knowledge, in virtue" (JMN, 3:192).
He also quoted the Hindus as saying, "Man is man as far as he is
triple, that is, a man-woman-child" (JMN, 16:146). Thus "the
finest people marry the two sexes in their own person. Her-
maphrodite is then the symbol of the finished soul. . . . in
every act shall appear the married pair: the two elements should
mix in every act" (JMN, 8:380). Elsewhere, he observed the "fem-
inine element" was always to be found in "men of genius" (JMN,
10:394), and that "when a man writes poetry, he appears to as-
sume the high feminine part of his nature. . . . a king is
dressed almost in feminine attire" (JMN, 8:356).16 Emerson, then,
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 219

agreed with Fuller that both men and women contained a bal-
ance of traits that society called masculine or feminine, but un-
derstandably, given that they were already in advance of the
awareness of their times, neither he nor Fuller was able to apply
this insight further to reach today's hypothesis that social condi-
tioning may create all gender traits.
Perhaps contemporary readers have wished that Emerson
could have leapt far enough ahead of the mind-set of his era to
be aware of the effects of societal conditioning precisely because,
despite Emerson's consonance with the ideas of his era, the lec-
ture and the essay "Woman" constituted a prescient statement of
views that would not become current until recent times. When
Emerson began to analyze the popular responses to the woman's
movement, he sounded remarkably like women who would not
be writing until the twentieth century.
An example would be the hoary charge that women had pro-
duced no masterworks in the arts and sciences. In the original ad-
dress on which "Woman" was based, Emerson's response to this
charge was that women excelled instead at life. He admired what
he called in his journals this "putting of the life into [women's]
deed" and used as examples Mary Seton, "who put her arm into
the bolt to save Queen Mary," and "the women in the old sieges
who cut off their hair to make ropes & ladders" (JMJV, 10:345).17
This was in itself an advance on his earlier reflection of the ste-
reotype that women's role was simply to inspire men. Emerson
then went a step further and realized that it had not been possi-
ble for female genius to be recognized until the new educational
opportunities of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Here
he anticipated English essayist and novelist Virginia Woolf's clas-
sic lecture, "A Room of One's Own," which also refuted this
charge by reference to women's historic denial of access to edu-
cation. In the original address Emerson had also followed the
same line of argument as Woolf's essay often titled "Woman in
the Professions," pointing out that, in Emerson's words, women
"are better scholars than we [men] are at school & the reason
why they are not better than we, twenty years later," was not be-
cause of an innate intellectual deficit, a stereotype he had himself
unthinkingly echoed earlier in his career (JAIN, 5:190, 9:190), but
 22O Emerson in His Time

"because men can turn their reading to account in the profes-

sions, & women are excluded from the professions." Similarly, as
he controverted the "monstrous exaggeration" of the misogy-
nists, he noted their tendency to resort to stereotypes of women
as mentally deficient and of femininity as an illness, anticipating
the twentieth-century analyses of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Si-
mone de Beauvoir, and others. When this skeptical and cynical
view of women as constitutionally unfit became a medical sys-
tem, Emerson realized, women suffered as much as under slav-
ery; both were systems based in a materialistic worldview "sell-
ing woman by the pound" (JMN, 5:190). Emerson showed
interest in anything that undercut these stereotypes, noting, for
example, that Theodore Lyman "insisted that he had himself
seen hysteria oftener in men than women" (JMN, 16:173). Simi-
larly, he refuted the claim that women who asked for autonomy
really only wanted to be men: "I cannot even find that a woman
wishes to be her lover, though she wishes to be united to him"
(JMN, 9:195). Woman was not, as the common wisdom insisted,
a "homme manque," an incomplete man, but a complete and
self-sufficing being.
Still, contemporary critics have questioned the address and
the essay that was based upon it because both were typical of
Emerson's penchant in public statements to first summarize all
the negative ideas on a topic, then turn to the positive—the tech-
nique his friend, the feminist Caroline Dall, called seeming "to
lure the conservatives on over his flowers till all of a sudden their
feet are pierced by the thorns of reform."18 In the second half of
the essay, if contemporary readers can bear through, they will
find Emerson stating an agenda of women's rights that was ex-
tremely radical even for the late nineteenth century, much less
for its midpoint. He had come a long way from his youthful ac-
ceptance, through the mid-i84os, of the common excuse that
women did not need rights because men would take care of
them, since "every woman is a man's daughter and every man
is a woman's son" (JMN, 8:411). Possibly seeing the plight of
women, such as Concord neighbor Ellery Channing's wife Ellen,
whose husbands manifestly did not care and provide for them,
had dispossessed Emerson of this chivalric illusion. Emerson
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 221

called openly for women to receive their "one half of the world
. . . the right to [equality in] education" and "employment, to
equal rights of property, to equal rights in marriage, to the exer-
cise of the professions; of suffrage." In essence, Emerson was
here setting out the complete agenda of the 1850 Women's
Rights Convention for which he had signed the call, proving that
he was fully aware of his actions in so doing and truly supported
all of these then-radical reforms.
The 1855 address, then, encapsulated Emerson's support for
total equality for women: "Let the public donations to education
be equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a
church, let them have and hold their property as men do theirs."
In a time when colleges were closed to women and the law for-
bade their owning property, Emerson's demands were extremely
progressive. Emerson even went so far as to argue that if suffrage
was denied to women, "You [must] also refuse to tax them,"
based on the American principle of no taxation without repre-
sentation. That Emerson was aware of this central and most con-
troversial principle of Susan B. Anthony's in only the first decade
of her public work revealed how much he was abreast of the de-
veloping suffrage movement and how far ahead of his time he
was, but it was not surprising, given that Anthony also cited
Fuller as her source material. Emerson was certainly aware of
the early feminist activists, praising Lucretia Mott, co-organizer
of the first American woman's rights convention, as a woman
whose "sense, virtue, & good-meaning" guaranteed "victory in
all the fights to which her Quaker faith & connection led her"
(JMN, 11:249).
Another reason for the contemporary chagrin over "Woman"
may come from the fact that Emerson, like many among the
relatively few Americans who first became aware of and involved
with the woman's movement in the 18508, experienced some con-
fusion from listening to the women who constituted both the
pro-suffrage and the equally vocal anti-woman's rights cam-
paigns. Emerson was influenced for a time by women, such as
his own daughter Ellen, who were antisuffrage and at first be-
lieved the antisuffrage view that the majority of women did not
want change and that it would thus be forced violently upon
 222 Emerson in His Time

them. Other of the women around him, such as his aunt Mary
Moody Emerson, while like Emerson himself repulsed by the
materialism and lack of moral judgment in the political and com-
mercial worlds women would be entering, finally persuaded him
that change in their status was nonetheless essential. At the time,
however, Emerson had not yet come to his later realization that
even the most refined and intellectual women desired the vote,
as he stated in the 1855 address, "The answer that, silent or spo-
ken, lies in the minds of well meaning persons, to the new
claims, is this: that, though their mathematical justice is not to be
denied"—a position Emerson held as given, extreme though it
was at the time—"yet the best women do not wish these things."
Despite this belief, Emerson did not ameliorate the radicalism of
his demands for equality, urging that even if the most favored
women did not want or even need political parity, it must never-
theless be available for the benefit of the women who lacked
their social and economic advantages.
Emerson understood that such women were deprived of in-
tellectual stimulation and were, as he stated in his journals,
"Starved for thought & sentiment" (JMN, 10:78). Therefore, "in-
tellectual men [were] most attractive to women" (JMN, 9:82).
Equally serious was the problem of economic powerlessness.
Emerson often responded with strong sympathy to the plight of
impoverished women.19 He refused to fall into the trap of blam-
ing the victim, asserting that while a donation "of 100 dollars"
would make "little difference" to the lives of an "easy man," "Let
it fall into the hands of a poor & prudent woman, and every
shilling & every cent of it fully tells, goes to reduce debt" (JMN,
8:319), a comment possibly based on observation of his neighbor,
the philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott, and his hard-pressed but
practical wife, Abigail May. Similarly, he avoided the tendency to
blame •women more heavily than men for breaches of decorum:
"I heard a woman swearing very liberally, as she talked with her
companions; but when I looked at her face, I saw that she was no
worse than other women; that she used the dialect of her class,
as all others do, & are neither better nor worse for it; but under
this costume was the same probity, the same repose as in the
more civilized classes" (JMN, 8:347). He realized that change in
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 223

women's financially dependent position was essential to their

freedom; in his journals he observed: "Society lives on the system
of money & woman comes at money & money's worth through
compliment. I should not dare to be woman. Plainly they are cre-
ated for that better system which supersedes money. . . . On
[sic] our civilization her position is often pathetic. What she is
not expected to do & suffer for some invitation to strawberries &
cream." At the time he wrote that passage, Emerson consoled
himself, "Fortunately their eyes are holden that they cannot
see."20 By the time he was writing the 1855 address, the woman's
rights movement had made it plain to Emerson that women did
indeed see their subservient economic position and linked it di-
rectly to their deprivation of political rights and civic opportuni-
ties. This awareness of the result of women's socioeconomic
powerlessness and especially of the plight of working-class
women was relatively rare even in the woman's movement, as re-
cent histories of the British and American suffrage movements
have made clear. For Emerson to display it this early was evi-
dence of how much deep and serious thought he had given the
question. While recognizing that economic barriers to women
were most burdensome to the underprivileged, Emerson did not
see them as lesser beings but insisted that impoverished and
working-class women retained their dignity: "In the labours of
house & in poverty I feel sometimes as if the handiness & deft
apparatus for household toil were only a garb under which the
softest Cleopatra walked concealed" (JMN, 10:78).21
Emerson also recognized that the demands of being solely re-
sponsible for child care were heavy for women, asking in his
poem "Holidays,"

Whither went the lovely hoyden?

Disappeared in blessed wife;
Servant to a wooden cradle,
Living in a baby's life. (W, 9:136).

Emerson sympathized with the multiple roles into which

women were forced and the blame that often accrued to them:
"A man is sometimes offended at the superfluous superogatory
 224 Emerson in His Time

order & nicety of a woman who is a good housewife. But he

must bear with little extremities & flourishes of quality that
makes comfort for all his senses throughout his house" (JMN,
5:377).
Society did its "worst in intruding into the education of young
women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by
teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift,
and that woman's life has no other end." Such were the difficul-
ties of marriage for women that "the fair girl whom I saw in
town expressing so decided & proud choices of influences, so
careless of pleasing, so willful, & so lofty a will, inspires the wish
to ... speak to this nobleness" and "to say to her, Never strike
sail to any. Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not
in vain you live, for the passing stranger is cheered, refined, &
raised by the vision" (JMN, 5:445).
Emerson's periodical reading further illuminates his interest
in the issue of marriage, an institution with great impact on
women's status, particularly in the nineteenth century. He had
begun his investigation of these ideas as early as 1817, at the age
of fourteen, when he borrowed Hannah More's Strictures on a
System of Female Education,22 which emphasized the need to de-
velop woman's intellect as well as her emotions, her logical as
well as her affective nature, her sense as well as her sensibility.
Further, More argued that marriage should be a union based on
educated, mutual understanding, common interests, genuine re-
spect, and sexual equality. Although as a youth he had occasion-
ally mimicked the cynical attitudes of Byron and his ilk toward
marriage, Emerson came to respect this idea of "Marriage of the
minds" (JMN, 12:357). From Verlake he had gained the idea that
"A man & a woman" together constituted "the true social unit,"
including the radical proposition that "the married couple should
not take either the name of husband or wife, but a new name
common to both" (JMN, 8:342).
He continued his exploration of the issue in 1829 by reading
one of his major intellectual influences, Sampson Reed, whose
unsigned "Introduction to Entomology" contained, of all things,
a passage on celibacy.23 The next year he followed this with read-
ing in the same month two articles, Caleb Reed's unsigned article
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 225

on the nature of affection and John Hubbard Wilkins's unsigned

"On Marriage."24 In 1831, he returned to Sampson Reed with an
unsigned article on "Guardian Angels," which, like the previous
articles, stressed the permanence of spiritual ties between the
sexes, and in 1832 with Reed's similar piece, "Marriage in the
Heavens."25 In 1834 Emerson also returned to Caleb Reed, whose
unsigned article the "Supposed Extinction of Our Proper and Pe-
culiar Loves at Death" reinforced this argument that human af-
fections are eternal.26 And in 1835, a last unsigned piece by, again,
Sampson Reed concerned marriage in heaven.27 All of these arti-
cles on marriage and affectional ties which Emerson devoured in
the 18305 were published in the New Jerusalem Magazine, an organ
of the church founded by the philosopher Emanuel Sweden-
borg,28 and conditioned Emerson to its view of marriage as a
state of spiritual relation, leading him to argue for "Marriage
from Character" (JMN, 12:487) or "ideal" marriage (JMN, 12:437,
492, 496), rather than seeing marriage as merely a financial and
social contrivance, "Marriage empirical" (JMN, 12:347, 489, 491).
This outlook would predispose him to see women as souls rather
than chattel and to assume their equal rights in marriage, for
which he would argue so strongly in "Woman."
At first Emerson had considered the "chief institution" of
marriage to be either the producer or the product of "good-
Order in Society" (JMN, 2:209), but before the time of Representa-
tive Men he was asking, "Is not marriage an open question, when
it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in
the institution wish to get out; and such as are out, wish to get
in?" He went on to quote Socrates: "Whether you take a wife or
not you will regret it" (JMN, 12:535). Emerson continued to try to
solve the riddle of marriage, considering not only the ideas of
Swedenborg and Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose idea of marriage
for love, he noted, removed the scent of the Inquisitor's oppres-
sion, but even such unlikely solutions as "For marriage find
somebody that was born near the time when you were born"
(JMAT, 8:168).
If marriage were a spiritual state, Emerson observed, its offi-
cial and legal codification by the state was suspect. "The wave of
evil washes all our institutions alike," especially marriage (JMN,
 226 Emerson in His Time

8:185), so that "We marry no worse than we eat or dress or

speak" (JMN, 12:308), but no better either. "None ever heard of
a good marriage from Mesopotamia to Missouri and yet right
marriage is as possible tomorrow as sunshine. Sunshine is a
very mixed & costly thing as we have it, & quite impossible, yet
we get the right article every day. And we are not very much to
blame for our bad marriages" (JMN, 10:351). Emerson seemed al-
most to be aware of the negative results of social conditioning
and gender roles on marriage: "We live amid hallucinations & il-
lusions, & this especial trap is laid for us to trap our feet with, &
all are tripped up, first or last. . . . Into the Pandora-box of
marriage, amidst dyspepsia, nervousness, screams, Christianity,"
comes "poetry, & all kinds of music, [and] some deep & serious
benefits & some great joys. . . . And in these ill assorted con-
nections there is ever some mixture of true marriage. The poor-
est Paddy & his jade, if well-meaning & well tempered, get some
just & agreeable relations of mutual respect & kindly observa-
tion & fostering of each other. & [sic] they learn something, &
would carry themselves wiselier if they were to begin life anew
in some other sphere" (JMN, 10:351-52). The influence of Han-
nah More's work, with its emphasis on the need for "mutual re-
spect" to constitute a "true marriage," and the Swedenborgian
emphasis on the positive effects of marriage on the afterdeath
state or "other sphere" were both evident in Emerson's views. In-
deed, he echoed both More and Swedenborg frequently in his de-
sire for "the true nuptials of minds" (JMN, 8:94) and his argu-
ment that "[m]arriage should be by gravitation" (JMN, 12:362) of
like minds and souls to one another, not by social or material
negotiations.
On the other hand, Emerson recognized the dangers of mar-
riage as a social institution rather than a spiritual partnership,
since the "low ground" of marriage (JMN, 8:293), an "unfit mar-
riage" (JMN, 8:69) or "Mezentian marriage"29 could paralyze in-
dividual growth. In addition, the demands of marriage as a social
unit mitigated its function as an emotional relationship: "The
husband loses the wife in the cares of the household. Later, he
cannot rejoice with her in the babe, for by becoming a mother
she ceases yet more to be a wife. With the growth of children the
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 227

relation of the pair becomes yet feebler from the demands chil-
dren make until at last nothing remains of the original passion
out of which all these parricidal fruits proceeded; and they die
because they are superfluous" (JMN, 5:297).
Yet as long as women lacked autonomy in society, the institu-
tion of marriage remained necessary for women's security: "We
cannot rectify marriage because it would introduce such carnage
into our social relations. . . . Woman hides her from the eyes
of men in our world: they cannot, she rightly thinks, be trusted.
In the right state the love of one, which each man carried in his
heart, should protect all women from his eyes" and make him
"their protector & saintly friend, as if for her sake. But now there
is in the eyes of all men a certain evil light, a vague desire which
attaches them to the forms of many women, whilst their affec-
tions fasten on some one. Their natural eye is not fixed into coin-
cidence with their spiritual eye" (JMN, 8:95). While "the soul
says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the
body would join the flesh only" (JMN, 2:61). Men had not yet
learned to deal with their lower instincts: "Jesus said, When he
looketh on her, he hath already committed adultery! But he is an
adulterer already before yet he has looked on the woman, by the
superfluity of animal, & the weakness of thought, in his consti-
tution" (JMN, 11:435).
Thus "no man could be trusted" without the institution of
marriage: "We cannot spare the coarsest muniment of virtue"
(JMN, 9:50). Emerson even approached an awareness of how
men's repressed desires were often projected psychologically onto
women, the phenomenon so notable in the witch trials when
women were accused of arousing men's lust simply by walking
down the street:

It happened once a youth & a maid beheld each other in a

public assembly for the first time. The youth gazed with great
delight upon the beautiful face until he caught the maiden's
eye. . . . But he felt by that glance he had been strangely be-
guiled. The beautiful face had been strangely transformed. He
felt the stirring of owls & bats, & horned hoofs, within him.
The face which was really beautiful seemed to him have been
 228 Emerson in His Time

usurped by a low devil, and an innocent maiden, for so she

still seemed to him, to be possessed. And that glance was the
confession of the devil to his inquiry. (JMN, 5:8)
Until men could acknowledge and accept responsibility for their
own desires, women could not trust their fidelity without the
surety of marriage: "Therefore it will not do to abrogate the laws
which make Marriage a relation for life, fit or unfit" (JMN, 8:95).
Emerson summarized, "We need all the conventions of marriage
against our evils."30
The Swedenborgian view of marriage as a spiritual relation-
ship could help solve some of these problems, which, Emerson
wrote, arose "whenever bodily familiarity grows up without a
spiritual intimacy," as in marriage for social status or financial
support. "Purity in marriage" arose when "the partners are uni-
versally near & helpful, & not only near bodily," when "their wis-
doms come near & meet. . . . Therefore the remedy of impu-
rity is to come nearer" (JMN, 8:392). Thus "what a dupe is the
libertine! He thinks he has the sparkle & the color of the cup &
the chaste married pair only the lees. They see that he stays al-
ways in the basement & never has one glimpse of the high joys
of a perfect wedlock" (JMN, 5:365).
Ultimately, then, Emerson believed that marriage was worth-
while: "[H]ow little think the youth & maiden who are glancing
at each other across a mixed company as with eyes so full of ma-
terial intelligence . . . of the precious fruits long hereafter to
proceed from that gentle external stimulus." Immediately after
marriage, "they begin to discover incongruities, defects. Thence
comes surprise, regret, strife: But that which drew them first was
signs of loveliness, signs of virtue. These virtues appear & reap-
pear, & continue to draw, but the regard changes, quits the sign
& attaches to the substance" (JMN, 5:297). In other words, the
couple would come to appreciate each other's inner, rather than
outer, beauty. Such "perfection of the intellect and the heart,
from year to year, is the real marriage" (JMN, 2:109). This "real
marriage" came "to mitigate the disaffection," and life
exorts the resources of each & acquaints] each with the
whole strength & weakness of the other. All the angels that
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 229

inhabit this temple of a human form show themselves at the

doors & all the gnomes also. By all the virtues that appear, by
so much kindness, justice, fortitude &c, by so much are they
made one. But all the vices are negations on either part & they
are by so much made two. At last they discover that all that
first drew them together was wholly caducous, had merely a
prospective end like the scaffolding by which a house is built,
& the wholly unsuspected & wholly unconscious growth of
principles from year to year is the real marriage foreseen &
prepared from the first but wholly above their consciousness.
This is the boarding school & God. (JMN, 5:297-98)

Emerson pondered this "real marriage" deeply in the mid-i83os:

How fast the frivolous external fancying fades out of the

mind. . . . Mourn for the rapid ebb of inclination not one
moment. . . . The parties discover every day the deep &
permanent character each of the other as a root & foundation
on which they may safely build their nuptial bower. They
learn slowly that all other affection than that which rests upon
what they are is superstitious & evanescent . . . there is no
luck nor witchcraft nor destiny nor divinity in marriage that
can produce affection but only these qualities that by their na-
ture exort it. (JMN, 5:208)

A real marriage, then, was built on principle and fostered com-

plete trust and devotion, as Emerson noted in 1841: "We love that
lover whose gayest of love songs, whose fieriest engagement of
romantic devotion is made good by all the days of all the years of
strenuous, long suffering, ever-renewing benefit. The old Count
said to the old Countess of Ilchester, 'I know that wherever thou
goest, thou wilt both trust & honor me, and thou knowest that
wherever I am I shall honor thee'" (JMN, 8:134). This "nuptial love
releases each from that excess of influence which warped each
from his own and gives each again to himself & herself, so that
they acquire their own features & proportion again, & new beauty
& divinity in each other's eyes." Emerson referred to such success-
ful marriages as a "constitutional nuptial affection" (JMN, 12:369),
the "joy of the noble in loving" (JMN, 12:491).
 230 Emerson in His Time

Ultimately, marriage was subjective (JMN, 12:545), and out-

siders could not hope to understand or interfere successfully:
"When wary fathers & guardians see what potencies mingle in
this game of love & marriage, they will hardly dare to advise,
dare to dissuade, & incur the life-long responsibilities of making
or marring a marriage" (JMN, 12:586). Yet Emerson ignored his
own advice and entered into many matchmaking attempts with
regard to younger male and female acquaintances such as Anna
Barker and Samuel Gray Ward. Indeed, the very frequency of
Emerson's attempts at devising matrimonial pairs from among
his single friends suggests that his opinion of marriage was posi-
tive enough for him to attempt to bestow its benefits on the unat-
tached members of his circle. And he noted that women's ten-
dency to date their lives "from their marriage" was "more
reasonable" than men's to do so from some "magnified trifle"
such as "the foolish games of their college life" (JMN, 8:291).
Considering, then, all the social roles, expectations, and in-
stitutions that affected women's status, Emerson had made a
strong case for equal rights, stating boldly in the 1855 address
that women "[h]ave an unquestionable right to their own prop-
erty. And if the woman demand votes, offices, and political
equality with men . . . it must not be refused." The change in
number—from the plural of "the best •women" to the singular
"the woman"—is interesting here, implying that even if only one
woman desired the vote, it must be granted her. Further, Emer-
son determinedly refuted the objections to woman's suffrage. In
reply to the common objection to women's political participa-
tion, their "want of practical wisdom," he argued wittily that a
less than perfect grasp of the issues had never disqualified men
from voting. If men voted as they were told by their political
bosses and parties without troubling to inform themselves on the
issues, women could certainly do no •worse. In response to the
charge that women lacked worldly experience, Emerson quipped
that this was "not a disqualification, but a qualification." In a
somewhat ironic tone, he pointed out that there would never be
a shortage of voters who would represent "the expediency . . .
the interest of trade or of imperative class interest." Even if
women did vote from a basis of naivete and aim "at abstract right
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 231

without allowing for circumstances," as many opponents of suf-

frage argued, they would serve to balance morally the voting
populace who aimed only at material gain or maintaining a
prejudicial status quo without allowing for right or justice. Emer-
son's implied argument was thus that granting women full politi-
cal participation would improve the entire nation—again, an
echo of Fuller's tactics, as they were adopted by the suffrage
movement.
Indeed, for Emerson women's civilizing influence was a ma-
jor reason to give them the ballot. This argument was em-
phasized in the address to the 1855 Woman's Rights Convention
upon which "Woman" was based. Emerson made the equation
plain: "Woman is the power of civilization"; woman "altered &
mended" the "rough & reckless ways of men" (JMN, 10:83).
Therefore, given the "election frauds & misdeeds" with which
the land was rife, extending the suffrage to women to "civilize
the voting" was "the remedy at the moment of need." This was a
more specific application of the general principles which Emer-
son stated in his journals as "the virtue of women [is] the main
girth or bandage of society" (JMN, 10:83).
Emerson took this argument further in answering the other
common objection to woman's suffrage, that it would "contami-
nate" women and "unsex" them. He pointed out that this argu-
ment "only accuses our existing politics. . . . It is easy to see
that there is contamination enough, but it rots the men now."
Rather than denying the vote to women in order to protect them
from the dirty business of politics, he suggested, the wiser course
was to clean up the political system. Again, Emerson here dupli-
cated Fuller's tactics, as she was wont to argue, as were other suf-
fragists such as Sojourner Truth, that if the system were inimical
and harmful, then the system itself needed to be changed; ban-
ning women from it was only avoiding the problem. In fact, sug-
gesting that to "[i]mprove and refine the men" was to "do the
same by the women," Emerson implied that the better educated,
the more moral men became, the more they became, in his
phrase, "true men," the more they not only would be willing to
give women their "half of the world" but also would insist, like
Emerson himself, on their right to it. Emerson, then, saw a "real
 232 Emerson in His Time

man" as one who was secure enough that he did not need to
force others into a subservient position in order to aggrandize his
own status. To Emerson, a "real man" was one who actively ad-
vocated women's rights and equality; in today's terms, to be a
real man was to be a feminist.
Despite his belief in the 18505 that most women did not desire
suffrage, then, Emerson nonetheless insisted it be available for
those who did. Especially notable in the "Discourse Manque"
was how uncertain Emerson appeared to be about the true de-
sires of women on this issue—notice the hedging language on
the part of a writer who was usually so straightforward: "I do not
think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in public af-
fairs" (emphasis added). In the very next sentence, though, when
Emerson returned to his call for equal opportunity, he again
found his accustomed directness of voice: "But it is they and not
we that are to determine it." While Emerson was uncertain of
the wishes of the women about him—and he was apparently re-
ceiving a great deal of contradictory information at this time—
he was certain that the right to choose rested with them, not
with men. Emerson explicitly acknowledged women's right to
decide for themselves the part they would play on the national
and world stage; men's role, in his view, was simply to support
them in enforcing their decision against the weight of en-
trenched prejudice and tradition. As he would write in a letter to
Caroline Sturgis Tappan in 1868, "It is of course for women to
determine this question! the part of men, if women decide to as-
sume the suffrage, is simply to accept their determination & aid
in carrying it out" (L, 9:326-27). In his journals he had reached a
similar conclusion as early as 1843, the same year Fuller's "The
Great Lawsuit," the basis of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ap-
peared in the Dial: "To me it sounded hoarsely the attempt to
prescribe didactically to woman her duties. Man can never tell
woman what her duties are" (JMN, 8:381). When "the state & du-
ties of Woman" were only "historically considered," they "had a
certain falseness" (JMN, 8:372). "Women only can tell the heights
of feminine nature, & the only way in which men can help her, is
by observing woman reverentially & whenever she speaks from
herself & catches him in inspired moments to a heaven of honor
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 233

& religion, to hold her to that point by reverential recognition of

the divinity that speaks through her" (JMN, 8:381). The language
of "sacred womanhood" here was a means of expressing respect
for women's strengths. "Woman is not," as the nineteenth cen-
tury often considered her, "a degraded person with duties forgot-
ten, but a docile daughter of God with her face heavenward en-
deavouring to hear the divine word & to convey it to me" (JMN,
8:372).31 Emerson's was thus a very progressive opinion even for
the 18508, especially in anticipating contemporary feminism's em-
phasis that women not ask men for rights, thereby implying that
those rights were men's property to give to women as a gift,
but rather that women should grasp their rights for themselves.
As Fuller, again, had stated, these were women's "birthright"
(Fuller, 177), and Emerson's trust in Fuller's judgment was again
apparent.
In fact, one could argue that Emerson followed Fuller with
such implicit faith that he echoed her even in those ideas that con-
temporary feminism has discarded. Today's critics, who would
not condemn Fuller for such concepts, have ignored her profound
influence on Emerson when they have attacked him for following
her lead. An example would be Emerson's statement that "a mas-
culine woman is not strong, but a lady is,"32 echoing Fuller's senti-
ment that a true woman would "never wish to be man-like"
(Fuller, 51). Emerson sounded most like Fuller when he argued
such ideas as that it was "impossible to separate the interests and
education of the sexes." Woman in the Nineteenth Century was full
of such pleas for the unity of women's and men's interests, as
when Fuller stated that women's "interests were identical" with
men's, or that "I believe that the development of the one can-
not be effected without that of the other" (Fuller, 156). What
has sounded to contemporary readers like an implication that
women's interests were only important as they affected men was
to nineteenth-century readers a daring avowal of the equal signifi-
cance of women on the •world stage, as well as a politic way to ap-
peal to men's self-interest. Emerson emphasized his anticipation
of this transformation in attitudes toward women's place when he
concluded, perhaps overly optimistically, "[T]he aspiration of this
century [for women's equality] will be the code of the next."
 234 Emerson in His Time

Viewing the time line, then, of the development of Emerson's

thoughts on women, and particularly on their right to political
equality, Emerson was already, at the beginning of the American
suffrage movement in the 18505, convinced of and speaking out
for its necessity. While his arguments, influenced by Fuller, were
couched like hers in the essentialist nineteenth-century language
of sacred womanhood, gentility, and intuitive superiority, his po-
litical demands on behalf of woman were as bold as hers.
Emerson's ideas of woman's role were also continually evolv-
ing, then. Emerson had come far since the 18305, when he had at-
tempted to understand gender differences by means of such su-
perficial and unlikely distinctions as "the man loves hard wood,
the woman loves pitch pine" (JMN, 5:308, 6:228);33 since the
18405, when he quoted stereotypes of the nineteenth-century
ideal of the passionless woman (JMN, n:25);34 and even since
1851, when he wrote, "Few women are sane" or "There could be
no conversation with women" because they "are always thinking
of a husband."35 By 1855, only a few years later, his ideas of
women's capability had broadened to encompass "half of the
world."
The next major change in Emerson's developing awareness of
women's issues would come once most Americans had become
aware of the woman's rights movement, after the Civil War. By
this time, encouraged by such women in his circle as Mary
Moody Emerson and Louisa May Alcott, Emerson had become
aware that the one caveat he had withheld—that women them-
selves did not desire the vote—was untrue. Emerson commented
upon this change himself in the previously mentioned letter to
Caroline Sturgis Tappan on 13 November 1868. In response to
Tappan's statement that "[a]ll women should feel & cry that they
are suffering from being governed without their consent," he ex-
plained that previously, he had "believed that women did not
wish [to enter into public life], that those whose decision would
be final, the thoughtful serene typical minds shrank from it."
However, he continued, "I have been much surprised to find that
my saints or some of them have a feeling of duty that however
odious the new order may appear in some of its details they must
bravely accept 8t realize it" (L, 9:326-27). This process of transi-
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 235

tion in Emerson's views has not been previously recognized.36

Emerson himself would see this recognition of women's desire
for emancipation as the point of his conversion to the woman's
cause, even though he had been actively supporting it since 1850,
and in the i86os and 18705 he would become an icon of the suf-
fragist leaders.
Today's readers may be surprised that the suffragists would
find any aspect of women's equality "odious." However, many
women, like Emerson himself, valued some of the qualities that
had arisen from women's socially enforced exile to a passive role
in life: unselfishness, spirituality, cooperativeness, gentleness, car-
ing. They feared that when women entered into work and poli-
tics, they would be forced to behave as men had been condi-
tioned to so as to survive in the patriarchal outer world and
would lose these attributes. Again, Julia Ward Howe, who by the
time of Emerson's death had become a distinguished poet as well
as a leader of the suffragist American Woman's Party, provided
one of the most insightful analyses of this conflict between the
appreciation of the more nurturing, "feminine" traits in both
women and men and the need for fuller social and political free-
dom. She especially contrasted Emerson's attraction to the
beauty of the feminine character as it had developed in a hot-
house environment of artificial restrictions against his recogni-
tion of the justice of women's demand for a more equal and ac-
tive part in defining their own lives. In analyzing this conflict,
Howe accurately noted an essential Emersonian debate between
Beauty and Justice, or Truth, as Emerson called the principle for
which Howe used the term Justice.
In a more abstract fashion, this dialectic between Beauty and
Truth rang throughout Emerson's works as it did those of other
Romantics such as the English poet John Keats. Emerson re-
spected "Ode to a Grecian Urn" practically alone among Keats's
works because it addressed this Romantic problem of the proper
relationship of Beauty to Truth. However, although he stated in
"The Poet" that Beauty and Truth were equal, Emerson dis-
agreed with Keats as to the exact equivalence of Beauty and
Truth (Keats had claimed "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"). Emer-
son believed that Truth was even more important: than Beauty.
 236 Emerson in His Time

This decision was notable in, among other indicators, Emerson's

placing the chapter "Beauty" in his book Nature before that on
Truth ("Discipline"), since the chapters were placed, in typical
Romantic fashion, in rising order of importance.
Emerson, Howe noted, did not use stereotypical definitions of
Beauty as feminine and Justice or Truth as masculine, but rec-
ognized that "justice, as well as beauty, was to him a feminine
ideal." To Emerson, Beauty and Truth each embodied a "femi-
nine" as well as a masculine "Ideal." Further, Howe recognized
Emerson's stand, in declarations such as "Woman," that woman
must have the power to decide for herself what her role in soci-
ety would be: "He believed in woman's power to hold and adjust
for herself the scales in which character is weighed against attrac-
tion."37 As Emerson had stated to Caroline Sturgis Tappan, the
power of self-determination must be given to women even if
their ultimate choice would involve less of "attraction" (Beauty)
and more of "character" (Truth) than Emerson's personal aes-
thetic sense would find pleasing.
Yet Emerson, who himself shrank from the public sphere,
admired and appreciated the intensely spiritual unselfishness
women had been forced to develop while sequestered as "the
angel in the house." He also had, as seen in "Woman," deep
doubts about the corruption inherent in participation in the
world of politics and commerce. He would have preferred to see
women remain, and men become, more inner-directed, aloof
from the materialistic concerns of social life. While Emerson's
democratic tendencies and his profound respect for the women
in his own life forced him to support the movement for women's
equality, he had an abiding distrust of the public and especially
the political arena, which women were entering by their agita-
tion for suffrage and would be entering even further by gaining
the vote. Emerson feared that women, previously excluded and
therefore protected from these areas, would make the same mis-
takes that he saw men as having made, losing their spiritual fo-
cus to the necessary compromises of politics (as had Daniel Web-
ster, a prime example) and falling into the lure of materialism
when they entered the workplace. Ultimately, Emerson ques-
tioned the feasibility of anyone, not only women, being what he
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 237

had called in the lecture on which "Woman" was based "inno-

cent citizens." To Emerson, the very possibility of being both
"innocent" and a participating "citizen" of a flawed—at that
time, even slaveholding—political system was highly question-
able. Aspirations to innocent citizenhood appeared to him to be
laudable in principle but in the practice of the corrupt state re-
grettably oxymoronic. However, he also recognized that the
choice was not his to make, but women's own. If they believed
that political and social equality was necessary to their spiritual
development, his responsibility was to support them in their
struggle. He would no more keep them housebound in order to
promote their spiritual beauty any more than he would keep the
slaves in captivity in order to enjoy the harmony of their songs
for freedom..
Emerson's position was thus characteristic of nineteenth-
century feminists, female and male, and the suffragists were out-
spoken in their praise and gratitude for his efforts on behalf of
women's empowerment, education, and equality. The leaders of
the suffragist movement specifically addressed Emerson's role, as
they saw it, in the woman's rights movement. While Emerson,
with characteristic modesty would not give himself credit for his
early support of the woman's rights movement, suffragists such
as Julia Ward Howe were adamant concerning his stand.38 In par-
ticular, Howe stressed Emerson's respect for women's intellect,
even crediting him with an important role in her own conversion
from judging women by their physical attractiveness to consider-
ing their true character, the very trait she had emphasized in her
analysis of Emerson. As she told it, when Emerson "asked me if I
knew Margaret Fuller[,] I told him I thought her an ugly person.
He then dwelt upon her mind and conversation."39 Clearly,
Emerson had transcended the Victorian valuing of women solely
for their ornamental role, to appreciate them on the same
grounds by which he did men—for their intelligence. Emerson
recognized the "sad mortifications" of women being judged by
society only on their appearance. To him, the key attraction was
inner, not outer, beauty, "the beauty of being as it outshines the
beauty of seeming" (JMN, 5:389). This sort of beauty was avail-
able for women of any social class, even if the circumstances of
 238 Emerson in His Time

their lives meant they could not afford the outer accouterments
of artificial, socially defined beauty: "A woman never so neat &
trim does not please by inoffensiveness, while she only complies
with the exactions of our established decorum, but is coarse.
But, as soon as her own sense of beauty leads her to the same
perfect neatness, & we ascribe to her secret neatness, then she is
lovely, though sick, poor, & accidentally squalid" (JMN, 11:436).
Even in admiring the famous actress Elisa Felix, known as
Rachel, Emerson admired her "terror & energy . . . defiance
or denunciation," and most of all her "highly intellectual air" and
"universal intelligence."40 Indeed, he counted seeing Rachel
more highly than hearing a lecture by the renowned scientist
Michelet and as one of the high points of his trip to France. Simi-
larly in his poem "Hermione," although the titular heroine is
"not fair" in appearance, her "sceptered genius" is sufficient to
enrapture the speaker.41
Howe's perception of the value of Emerson as a teacher of
women was upheld by Ednah Dow Cheney, a leader of the Mass-
achusetts Woman Suffrage Society and the School Suffrage Asso-
ciation and a prominent writer. Cheney recalled Emerson's total
and eager attention to every person he met, however young,
making no distinction between male and female.42 Emerson's
journals bear testimony to this respect for his youthful and fe-
male audience; in the late 18405 or early 18505 he wrote, "No part
of the population interests except the children & the young
women" (JMN, 10:465).
As Cheney had suggested, Emerson persisted in taking seri-
ously his female audience, despite the fact that they were a hin-
drance to his public (i.e., male) reputation. As Howe would recall
later in an article for the special issue of the Critic on Emerson's
work, "The distinguished jurist, Jeremiah Mason, said of [Emer-
son's] lectures: 'I cannot understand them, but my daughters do.'
This dictum was at the time considered a damning piece of
irony."43 Indeed, it could be argued that women, especially the
suffragists, were among Emerson's earliest and most sympa-
thetic audience because they shared his sense of alienation from
the social sphere and were intimately acquainted with society's
strictures against nonconformity. Howe continued to emphasize
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 239

Emerson's respect for women as an important audience and his

"sympathy with the new opportunities accorded to women. He
spoke more than once in favor of woman suffrage, and was for
many years an honorary member of the New England Women's
Club, to whose gatherings he occasionally lent the charm of his
presence and his voice."44 Cheney also recalled Emerson's hon-
orary membership in the New England Women's Club, noting
that he became such immediately upon the club's formation in
1865: "He frequently came to its meetings and read some of his
most personal and charming papers there," including the first
draft of his reminiscences of Mary Moody Emerson, a major fig-
ure in his intellectual development.45
These public reminiscences of his Aunt Mary were typical of
Emerson's respect for the women of his circle. He often quoted
their bon mots and insights in his journal, citing most frequently
his aunt, the "prophetic" and "profound" Mary Moody Emerson,
on whose journal entries he based his poem "The: Nun's Aspi-
ration" (W, 9:490 n). Aunt Mary was a profound influence on
Emerson's formative years, probably the most important person
in his life in terms of inspiring and helping to shape his ideas and
expectations. After his marriage, another important influence
was his second wife, Lidian. The impact of both these women's
lives and thought on Emerson deserves further explication in
separate studies.
Other women whom Emerson quoted and referred to in-
cluded his mother, Ruth Emerson, and his daughter Ellen. Emer-
son especially praised friend and fellow Concordian Elizabeth
Hoar, whom he called "immortal . . . an influence I cannot
spare" (JMN, 8:105), considered a fit contributor to the Transcen-
dentalist literary journal the Dial, and wrote of so often that he
created his own index of his allusions to her. Emerson also fre-
quently cited the "inspired" Sarah Alden Ripley, whose "high &
calm intelligence" (JMN, 9:149, 8:94) created in him "some feel-
ing of unworthiness" (JMN, 5:481); and the Quaker Mary Rotch.
He equally admired Rebecca Black, who shared his Aunt Mary's
unconventionality and original thinking. Jane Welsh Carlyle,
wife of Thomas Carlyle, he regarded at least as highly as her hus-
band. The same was true of Sophia Ripley, a "true worker" who
 240 Emerson in His Time

ran the Brook Farm community together with her husband,

George. He also quoted and praised Anna Barker Ward, the "ge-
nius" of Dial contributor Caroline Sturgis, to whom he referred
in his essay "History," as well as Louisa May Alcott, lesser known
women, and women no longer remembered today.
Emerson was also concerned with the effect of his lectures on
women, especially what would today be called "empowering"
women, as one anecdote made clear. Respected author, lyceum
lecturer, and women's rights activist Elizabeth Oakes Smith re-
called that after one of Emerson's lectures on "Power," he "ap-
proached the bright-minded Mrs. C.—I noticed he uttered the one
word, 'Well?' interrogatively, and with an almost childish simplic-
ity, to which she replied: 'Oh, Mr. Emerson, you make me feel so
powerless, as if I could do nothing.'" At this expected response of
stereotypical feminine helplessness, Emerson, in Oakes Smith's
words, "Looked grave and turning to me, repeated the enigmati-
cal monosyllable, 'Well?' . . . to which I replied, 'In listening to
you, Mr. Emerson, no achievement seemed impossible; it was as
though I might remove mountains.' Ah, that is well,' he answered
cordially."46
This response to Emerson by the suffragists has suggested a
facet of his work that has been thus far overlooked in the ongo-
ing debate over Emerson's response to women's issues. Like Mar-
garet Fuller before them, the suffragists saw Emerson as one
who encouraged women's intellectual independence and hon-
ored their literary status on fully equal terms with men. They ap-
preciated his respect for the women and young people in his au-
dience and his efforts to recruit brilliant women for his Concord
coterie. They had no difficulty in reconciling his respect for
women's spiritual endowments with his awareness of their need
for entitlement and empowerment in society, since they them-
selves performed the same balancing act. While they recognized
that he would himself prefer to cultivate both men's and
women's souls even at the cost of their social participation, they
knew that he understood their need and right to make that deci-
sion for themselves and would support their choice.
Further, as more critics of nineteenth-century women writers
have begun to recognize, they were deeply aware of stylistic con-
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 241

cerns. Dall's "thorns of reform" comment was a fine example.

The suffragists comprehended Emerson's typical technique of
laying forth all the negative sides of an idea before the positive,
and saw that he applied this technique evenhandedly, as much for
his criticism of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth as for
women's issues. Indeed, they recognized, as few contemporary
readers have, Emerson's strategy in using this advanced argumen-
tation form to lure opponents of his ideas by apparent agreement,
then trap them into considering reforms. Julia Ward Howe also
stressed that Emerson tended to qualify his public statements,
suggesting in her speech at the memorial meeting for the ninety-
sixth anniversary of Emerson's birth that "Emerson was as great
in what he did not say as in what he said. Second-class talent tells
the whole story, reasons everything out; great genius suggests
even more than it says."47 Emerson, in Howe's analysis, inspired
the reader to consider for himself or herself the implications of a
particular idea. Women could then apply these implications to
and for themselves, as Margaret Fuller had done in extending
Emerson's concepts of self-reliance, individualism, and the pri-
macy of spiritual or moral character to women and their condi-
tioning in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Thus, Emerson's full
ideas on women's rights were not stated publicly but must be in-
ferred from the incidents of his life and his response to women
who dared to carry out the radical ramifications of his ideas for
women, such as Fuller and Howe. There was no question in their
minds that Emerson was, as they would have phrased it, a true
friend and proponent of woman's rights.
The suffragists were so intent on clarifying Emerson's support
of the woman's rights movement for good reasons. As Emerson
had become revered as the Sage of Concord, his opinions carried
moral weight. The antisuffrage establishment was eager to claim
his allegiance and had shown itself fully capable of distorting his
views in order to make it appear so.
A typical example would be the review published in the
Philadelphia Inquirer of James Elliot Cabot's biography of Emer-
son. The Inquirer had not publicized Emerson's support of the
1850 and subsequent woman's rights conventions, his signature of
the declaration of principles, or his delivery of the address at the
 242 Emerson in His Time

1855 convention, with its demands for full political and social
equality. When Emerson sent his regrets for the 1869 Woman
Suffrage Convention in Newburyport, Massachusetts, however,
the Inquirer immediately assumed that his failure to appear was
due to the fact that "had he put in an appearance he would have
been forced to give utterance to his view on the necessity and
propriety of women being enrolled in the grand array of voters."
Ignoring the fact that Emerson had already appeared at woman's
suffrage conventions and had publicly stated those views, the In-
quirer quoted a few selected phrases from his letter turning down
the invitation, then speculated extravagantly in order to interpret
them as proving Emerson was antisuffrage. For example, their in-
terpretation of Emerson's statement that "he found so much
work that could not be set aside, that he was forced to decline all
new tasks not imperative," was that Emerson "does not regard
their claims to vote at all pressing." The Inquirer then urged the
"illogical" suffragists, in light of Emerson's supposed lack of
sympathy, to "review their crude and hasty conclusions" in ask-
ing for equal rights.48
Contemporary readers may question how the Inquirer could
infer a position in direct opposition to that which Emerson had
repeatedly publicly championed. However, there were several
reasons that the reading public, both in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, has been confused about Emerson's stand on the
issue despite his eloquent public statements.
First there was the tendency to assume a unilateral attitude
among all members of a particular demographic group: that
is, all pre-twentieth-century men feared and so hated women;
therefore, as a nineteenth-century man Emerson must have been
against women's rights. Such assumptions, however, were based
on faulty evidence, as the work of early male feminists such as
John Stuart Mill, author of the pioneering essay On the Subjection
of Women, had shown. Premoderns were certainly capable of as
wide a range of social responses as postmoderns, and class, gen-
der, race, nationality, religion, and other factors could not be
used accurately to predict any individual's opinions. Even among
women, as those in Emerson's circle proved, there were pro-
suffrage conservative Puritans such as Mary Moody Emerson
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 243

and antisuffrage liberal Unitarian /Transcendentalists such as his

daughter Ellen.
Another factor preventing public recognition of Emerson's
position, however forcefully and publicly stated, was the com-
mon nineteenth-century problem of the posthumous memoir,
or biography. Perhaps the most effective example of this was
Rufus Griswold's posthumous biography of Edgar Allan Poe,
which introduced the entirely false charge that Poe was a de-
ranged drug addict and alcoholic, slanders that came to be gen-
erally accepted as the truth despite their lack of basis in fact.
Emerson's early biographer, James Elliot Cabot, certainly did not
invent any such untruths, but he did quote only enough of Emer-
son's correspondence to give the impression that Emerson, like
himself, opposed women's rights, while largely ignoring Emer-
son's public record on the subject.49
Indeed, this pattern of late Victorian and fin de siecle writers
knowingly or unknowingly distorting the views of their prede-
cessors recurred throughout the nineteenth century. The most
famous instance would be Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians,
which poured scorn upon the most renowned nineteenth-
century Britons such as Florence Nightingale and Queen Victo-
ria, turning them into caricatures. In Emerson's own circle, Julian
Hawthorne's biography of his father, novelist Nathaniel Haw-
thorne, would severely distort Hawthorne's views of women
until they appeared to match Julian's own misogynist attitudes.50
Given the larger paradigm of the late Victorian writers inaccu-
rately revisioning the Romantics, Emerson came off compara-
tively well in the distortions introduced by contemporaries such
as the Inquirer writer and successors like Cabot.
The letter that Cabot quoted to Emerson's detriment was, in
fact, Emerson's response to the invitation to address the 1850
Woman's Rights Convention for which he had signed the decla-
ration of principles. Cabot ignored the fact that the letter of 18
September 1850 clearly stated Emerson's support of the women's
cause: "The fact of the civil and political wrongs of women I
deny not. If women feel wronged then they are wronged. . . .
I should vote for every franchise for women . . . if women
asked or men denied it." Cabot also did not point out that Emer-
 244 Emerson in His Time

son at the time was editing Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli,

which, as Howe had reported, he considered a service to the suf-
frage cause. In addition, Cabot failed to mention the 1851 public
letter to Lucy Stone reiterating Emerson's support of woman's
rights. Since the letter was written before Emerson's recognition
in the i86os that many, if not most, women desired the vote, that
caveat was to be expected: "I imagine that a woman whom all
men would feel to be the best would decline such privileges if of-
fered, and feel them to be rather obstacles to her legitimate influ-
ence." But even this early, Emerson's doubt that he understood
the situation correctly was apparent as he continued: "Yet I con-
fess I lay no great stress on my opinion." As mentioned earlier,
Emerson also objected to the entry of any thoughtful person,
man or woman, into the corrupt political process: "A public con-
vention called by women is not very agreeable to me. . . . I
should not wish women to wish political functions, nor, if
granted, to assume them." As Emerson stated in his musings on
the next year's convention, "I do not think that a woman's con-
vention . . . can much avail" because "[i]t is an attempt to
manufacture public opinion" (JMN, 11:444). Here Emerson re-
flected the Transcendentalist conviction that legislation could
not improve individuals. Rather, genuine social change could
only come about through influencing the private individual;
when enough individuals were enlightened, public opinion
would of necessity change. Emerson went on to lament, that, "It
is not rather a private meeting of private persons sincerely inter-
ested, instead of ... a public meeting." Emerson's own wish
to withdraw from public, and especially political, life was his rea-
son for refusing to appear at the convention, just as he had re-
fused to appear at any of the antislavery meetings for many
years. By 1855, Emerson would have realized that his preference
for social reform to come about through a "rejuvenescence" of
human nature created by Ideal Beauty, so that "the Woman's
Convention should be holden in the Sculpture Gallery, that this
high remedy might be suggested" (JMN, 11:444), was overly ideal-
istic, and he would have come to support the women's more
practical legislative route to equality.51
The Woman's Journal took Cabot to task for his distortion of
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 2,45

Emerson's views in the 24 September 1887 issue, calling the biog-

raphy "a valuable contribution" in most regards, but "unfair" and
"misleading" as regarded Emerson's suffrage views. In particular,
the author of the notice, H. B. Blackwell, stated that Cabot had
failed to include Emerson's later work, especially the address at
the 1855 convention, which was considered "so valuable that it
has been published by the suffragists as a leaflet."52
Cabot's biography did lead many to confuse the few early
doubts Emerson had felt regarding the means employed by the
woman's suffrage movement to reach the public—but not re-
garding their goals—with a wider disregard for women's rights.
This error was picked up by newspapers such as the Tribune and
transmitted to the public without question. Since Eimerson's es-
says and letters were unpublished, the public could read only
Cabot's biography or the notices given of it in the daily papers
and were deceived into believing Emerson was antisuffrage.
Therefore, however much letters to the Tribune and the Woman's
Journal sought to reestablish the facts of Emerson's position,53
the force of this received opinion was great enough that even
with the advent of scholarly editions of Emerson's works, it has
remained largely unchallenged until now.
Emerson, then, took women's issues very seriously and spent
a great deal of time studying and contemplating the roles, rights,
and responsibilities of women. As we rediscover the suffragist
and women writers of the nineteenth century, so we will con-
tinue to rediscover male suffragists such as Emerson. It is our re-
sponsibility to see that they are, finally, given the credit that their
forward-thinking efforts deserve.

NOTES
1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn
Gage, History of Woman Suffrage
Suffrage (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881),
1:40.
2. Ibid., i:53ff.
3. Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1819-1899 (Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin, 1899), p. 158.
4. Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Women Suffrage, 1:820.
 246 Emerson in His Time

5. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Tested by Time," Woman's

Journal 7 (i January 1876): i.
6. Even many historians today remain unaware of the slightly
earlier 1850 women's rights convention in Salem, Ohio; see Stanton,
Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, I:io3ff.
7. Both the 1855 address (bMS Am 1280.202 [12]) and the "Dis-
course Manque. Woman" (bMS Am 1280.202 [13]) are soon to be
published in The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by
Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson. My source is the clear text of
these forthcoming works.
8. For other examples see JAIN, 5:119,12:386.
9. The Biographies of Lady Russell, and Madame Guyon . . .
(Boston: Carter, Hendee, 1832). Listed in Walter Harding, Emerson's
Library (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967), p. 59.
10. The popularity of the spiritualist movement during this pe-
riod helped to bolster these claims.
n. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Joel My-
erson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1980), p. 102.
All subsequent references are to this edition.
12. JAW, 9:100. SeeJMJV, 9:54, for the answer: "Married women
uniformly decide against the communities."
13. See alsoJMN, 3:147, for a meditation on the difficulties of inter-
gender communication under "the terms of intercourse in society."
14. Perhaps I should also observe that while in the late nine-
teenth century the woman's suffrage movement split over regional
and political issues, these controversies occurred largely after Emer-
son's active involvement in the movement, and so I will not address
them here.
15. See, for example, JAIN, 2:357, 410-11; 3:148-49, 151, 153, 159-62,
181-82, 195, 226-29, 240, 272, 275, 285-86, 289-90, 303 n; 5:19, 119, 188,
190, 264, 456; 6:148-49, 235; 8:29, 339, 381, 498; 12:385. See also the
poems to her: "To Ellen at the South," "To Ellen," "Lines to Ellen,"
"To Eva," "The Amulet," "Thy Eyes Still Shined," probably "Good
Hope," and possibly "Security."
16. Emerson repeats this idea in JAIN, 9:21.
17. It is interesting that Emerson misremembered this deed (ac-
tually Katherine Douglas's) as being undertaken to aid another
woman, when in actuality Douglas acted to protect James I of
Scotland.
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 247

18. I am indebted to Helen Deese for providing me with infor-

mation from her forthcoming edition of the Dall journals. This is
from the journal of 23 September 1855.
19. See, for example, JMN, 1:49,10:181. Also see L, 3:443.
20. JMN, 10:392, 9:108, where the first sentence of the passage is
replaced by "Woman. It is the worst of her condition that its advan-
tages are permissive."
21. See JMN, 2:206, for a further meditation on women's "house-
hold toil."
22. Hannah More, Strictures on a System of Female Education, 2
vols. (Philadelphia, 1800); see Kenneth Walter Cameron, Emerson the
Essayist (Raleigh, N.C.: Thistle Press, 1945), p. 241.
23. [Sampson Reed], "Introduction to Entomology (4)," New
Jerusalem Magazine 2 (May 1829): 274-82. Listed in Kenneth Walter
Cameron, Emerson's Workshop (Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental
Books, 1979), P- 43-
24. [Caleb Reed], "The Love of the World," New Jerusalem Maga-
zine 3 (March 1830): 199-206; [John Hubbard Wilkins], "On Mar-
riage," New Jerusalem Magazine 3 (March 1830): 217-19 (both listed in
Cameron, Emerson's Workshop, p. 45).
25. [Sampson Reed], "Guardian Angels," New Jerusalem Magazine
5 (November 1831): 112-19; [Sampson Reed], "Marriage in the Heav-
ens," New Jerusalem Magazine 5 (May 1832): 321-28 (listed in Cameron,
Emerson's Workshop, pp. 48, 49).
26. [Caleb Reed], "Supposed Extinction of Our Proper and Pecu-
liar Loves at Death," New Jerusalem Magazine 8 (October 1834): 50-53
(listed in Cameron, Emerson's Workshop, p. 54).
27. [Sampson Reed], "Changes Effected at Death—Personal
Form and Appearance (5)," New Jerusalem Magazine 8 (May 1835):
296-300 (listed in Cameron, Emerson's Workshop, p. 55).
28. Emerson also owned Swedenborg's Conjugal. Love (listed in
Harding, Emerson's Library, p. 262).
29. Named after the king who tied living prisoners to dead
(JMN, 8:34).
30. JMN, 12:368. See JMN, 9:191; 12:338, 369, 491 for similar ideas.
31. For other references to sacred womanhood, seeJMN, 12:224,358.
32. See also JMN, 5:505, for a similar statement.
33. For other examples, see JMN, 12:206, 302.
34. For earlier examples of Emerson's repeating negative stereo-
 248 Emerson in His Time

types about women, such as their weakness, see JMJV, 6:186-87,

9:169. Many such quotations are from Plato, whom Emerson later
came to rank as a misogynist equal to Mahomet (JMJV, 9:184).
35. JMN, 11:445, 433- See alsoJMJV, 9:103, 9:107,11:444.
36. In fact, the editor of the volume in which this letter appears,
Eleanor M. Tilton, in a footnote terms Emerson's statement "eva-
sive" and observes, "In Emerson's own household, only Ellen took
his position" (9:327), thus assuming, despite the content of the letter
concerning the change in his position, that Emerson was antisuf-
frage. So pervasive has been the assumption of Emerson's mono-
lithic and static opinion on women's rights that the evidence to the
contrary, even in his own words, has been ignored.
37. J[ulia]. W[ard]. Hfowe]., "Ralph Waldo Emerson," Woman's
Journal 13 (6 May 1882): 140.
38. 'At more than one woman suffrage meeting, he has entered
his protest against the political inequality which still demoralizes so-
ciety." Howe was certain where Emerson's loyalties lay on the suf-
frage question: "He was for us, knowing well enough our limitations
and shortcomings, and his golden words have done much both to fit
us for the larger freedom, and to know that it belongs to us" (Howe,
"Ralph Waldo Emerson as I Knew Him," Critic 42 [May 1902]: 410).
39. Julia Ward Howe, "Reminiscences," in Concord Lectures on
Philosophy, ed. Raymond L. Bridgman (Cambridge, Mass.: Moses
King, 1882), p. 63.
40. JMN, 10:269; see also JMN, 9:304, for more praise of Rachel's
"majestic delivery."
41. See aso JMN, 9:190, for a quotation from Plato which suggests
that women as well as men can attain Ideal Beauty, "such of them as
are of sufficient genius."
42. Ednah Dow Cheney, "Reminiscences," in Concord Lectures on
Philosophy, ed. Bridgman, p. 74.
43. Howe, "Ralph Waldo Emerson as I Knew Him," 411-15. The
importance of this anecdote to nineteenth-century women was evi-
dent in the many times they recorded, repeated, and analyzed it.
Ednah Dow Cheney, for example, mentioned it in her lecture
"Emerson and Boston," printed in The Genius and Character of Emer-
son: Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy, ed. F. B. Sanborn
(Boston: James R. Osgood, 1885), p. 19; and in her Reminiscences of
Ednah Dow Cheney (Boston: Lea and Shepard, 1902), pp. 232-33.
 Emerson and the Woman's Rights Movement 249

44. Howe, "Ralph Waldo Emerson as I Knew Him," 413.

45. This may have been the "Ladies Club" to which Emerson
gave Cheney tickets for his series of private conversations in Boston
in 1872 (JMN, 16:440). His respect for her was also emphasized by
giving her a copy of his Poems (JMN, 9:456, 461) and the second se-
ries of Essays (JMN, 9:129), and he owned her Memoir of Seth W. Ch-
eney (1881) (listed in Harding, Emerson's Library, p. 58).
46. Selections from the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, ed.
Mary Alice Wyman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924),
p. 145.
47. Laura E. Richards and Maude Howe Elliott, Julia Ward Howe,
1819-1910, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1916), 2:263-64.
48. Anonymous, "Ralph Waldo Emerson and Woman's Suf-
frage," Philadelphia-Inquirer, 31 July 1869, p. 4.
49. In the distortion thus introduced, Emerson suffered the same
fate he had meted out, innocently and unknowingly, to Margaret
Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, when the works he had meant to
be tributes to them, The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli and the
essay "Thoreau," instead seriously damaged their posthumous liter-
ary reputations.
50. See Katherine Gilbert, "Nineteenth-Century Feminist: The
Development of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Anti-patriarchal Attitudes
in His Life and Writings Through 1850" (Ph.D. diss., University of
South Carolina, 1995).
51. Finally, Cabot failed to note that within the next few years
Emerson would have realized not only the need for more practical
means to realize women's rights but also that the importance of
these issues outweighted his desire for thoughtful seclusion, and he
would then appear on the platforms of both woman's rights and an-
tislavery conventions.
52. H. B. Bflackwell], Review of Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Woman's Journal 18 (24 September 1887): 312.
53. Especially in the "Editorial Notes," Woman's Journal 18 (22 Oc-
tober 1887): 337.
This page intentionally left blank
I L L U S T R A T li D
C I! R O N O L O G Y
 Emerson's Life Historical Events

1803: Ralph Waldo Emerson born. 1803: Thomas Jefferson is president.

Ohio becomes the seventeenth
1805: RWE's brother, Edward Bliss state. First tax-supported public
Emerson, born. library founded in Salisbury, Conn.
Louisiana Purchase completed.
1807: RWE's brother, Robert
Bulkeley Emerson, born. 1804: Lewis and Clark expedition
begins. Elizabeth Marshall, first
1808: RWE's brother, Charles woman pharmacist, begins
Chauncy Emerson, born. practicing in Philadelphia.
Nathaniel Hawthorne born.
1811: RWE's sister, Mary Caroline
Emerson, born. RWE's father, the 1805: Jefferson's second inaugural.
Reverend William Emerson, dies. Boston Athenaeum founded.

1812: Enters Boston Latin School. 1806: William Gilmore Simms

born. Noah Webster, Compendious
1814: RWE's sister, Mary Caroline Dictionary of the English Language.
Emerson, dies.
1807: Henry Wadsworth Longfel-
1817: Enters Harvard College. low and John Greenleaf Whittier
born.
1818: Begins occasional school-
teaching at Waltham. 1808: William Cullen Bryant, The
Embargo.
1821: Graduates from Harvard
College. 1809: James Madison inaugurated
as president. Oliver Wendell
1822: "Thoughts on the Religion Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe born.
of the Middle Ages," RWE's first
publication, appears in the Christian 1810: American population is
Disciple and Theological Review. 7,239,881. Margaret Fuller born.
Charles Brockden Brown dies.
1824: Begins formal study of religion.
1811: Harriet Beecher Stowe and
1825: Registers as a student of Sara Payson Willis ("Fanny Fern")
divinity at Harvard. born.

252
 Rlustrated Chronology 253

i8i2: War is declared on Britain.

Louisiana admitted as a state.
American Antiquarian Society
founded.

1813: Madison's second inaugural.

Game of craps first introduced in
New Orleans. Boston Daily Advertiser
founded.

1814: Francis Scott Key writes "The

Star-Spangled Banner." The Treaty
of Ghent ends the war with Britain.

1815: Library of Congress acquires

Thomas Jefferson's book collection.

1816: Harvard Divinity School

Emerson's first publication, an essay in organized. Indiana admitted as a
the Christian Disciple (1822). From state.
the collection of Joel Myerson.
1817: James Monroe inaugurated
1826: Approbated by American as president. Mississippi admitted
Unitarian Association to preach. as a state. Henry David Thoreau
Sails to Charleston, S.C., and St. born. William Cullen Bryant,
Augustine, Fla., to improve health. "Thanatopsis."

1827: Returns to Boston. Meets Ellen 1818: Illinois admitted as a state.

Louisa Tucker in Concord, N.H.
1819: Alabama admitted as a state.
1828: Edward is committed to Julia Ward Howe, James Russell
McLean Asylum (released in the Lowell, Herman Melville, and Walt
fall). Engaged to Ellen Tucker. Whitman born. Washington Irving,
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.
1829: Becomes colleague pastor at
Second Church, Boston. Ordained i8zo: American population is
at Second Church. Promoted to 9,638,453. Maine admitted as a state.
pastor. Marries Ellen Tucker on 30 First high school opened in Boston.
September.
 254 Illustrated Chronology

1821: Monroe's second inaugural.

Missouri admitted as a state.
Saturday Evening Post founded.

1822: Washington Irving,

Bracebridge Hall.

1823: Hudson River school of

landscape painting formed. James
Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers.

1824: Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok.

1825: John Quincy Adams

Emerson in 1829, from a miniature by inaugurated as president. Unitarian
Sarah Goodridge. From Houghton
Church organized.
Library, Harvard University.

1826: Lyceum movement begins.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of
the Mohicans.

1827: Sarah Josepha Hale proposes

Thanksgiving as a national holiday.
First African-American newspaper,
Freedom's Journal, founded. Edgar
Allan Poe, Tamerlane and Other Poems.

1828: First Native American

newspaper, Cherokee Phoenix,
founded. Noah Webster, American
Dictionary of the English Language.

Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson in 1829, 1829: Andrew Jackson inaugurated

from a miniature by Sarah Goodridge. as president. First hotel with
From Houghton Library, Harvard bathrooms opens in Boston.
University.
 Illustrated Chronology 255

1830: American population is

12,866,02,0. Indian Removal Act
signed. Emily Dickinson born.

1831; Antislavery newspaper The

Liberator founded. Nat Turner's
slave rebellion. Edgar Allan Poe,
Poems.

1832: Pseudoscience of phrenology

introduced in America. Louisa May
Alcott born.

1833: Jackson's second inaugural.

American Antislavery Society
founded. Horatio Greenough
completes first large marble
sculpture by an American, a statue
of George Washington. Lydia Maria
Order of Services at the Ordination
of Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1829). Child, An Appeal in Favor of the Class
of American Called Africans.

1834: First valentines commercially

1831: Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson manufactured. Southern Literary
dies of tuberculosis. Messenger founded.

1832: Sends farewell letter to 1835: Samuel F. B. Morse invents the

Second Church resigning his telegraph. Mark Twain born.
position. Sails for Europe. William Gilmore Simms, The
Yemassee.
1833: Meets Jane and Thomas
Carlyle. Returns to America. 1836: Battle of the Alamo. Arkansas
Delivers his first public lecture, admitted as a state. First college
"The Uses of Natural History," in for women, Mount Holyoke,
Boston. RWE's brother, William chartered. First of the school
Emerson (b. 1801), marries Susan readers by William Holmes
Woodward Haven. McGuffey published.
 2.56 Illustrated Chronology

1837: Martin Van Buren

inaugurated as president. Michigan
admitted as a state. Financial panic
hits America. William Dean
Howells born.

1838: Establishment of the first

transatlantic steamship service.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym, of
Nantucket.

1839: Abner Doubleday lays out

the first baseball diamond. First
photographs (daguerreotypes)
taken in America.

Pamphlet printing of Emerson's letter

of resignation from the Second Church
(i«3*)-

1834: Meets Lydia Jackson of

Plymouth. Receives partial
inheritance of $11,600 from Ellen
Emerson's estate. Edward dies of
tuberculosis in Puerto Rico. Moves
to Concord, Mass.

1835: Proposes to Lydia Jackson

on 24 January (engagement
announcement at end of month).
Begins first lecture series,
"Biography," in Boston. Delivers
discourse on Concord's history
(published in November). Marries
Lydia Jackson (whom he calls
"Lidian"). Christopher Pearse Cranch's 1839
caricature of the famous "transparent
eye-hall" lines from Nature. From
Houghton Library, Harvard University.
 Illustrated Chronology 257

The Emerson House in Concord, Massachusetts,

I8j6: Charles dies suddenly in New 1840; American population is

York, Nature published. First 17,069,453. Republic of Texas
meeting of the Transcendental recognized as a nation. National
Club. RWIi's son, Waldo Emerson, Anti-Slavery Standard founded.
born, Kdgrtf Allan Poe, Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque.

1841: William Henry Harrison

inaugurated as president but dies
after only a month in office, John
Tyler inaugurated as president.
Brook Farm Utopian community
founded near Boston.

184*; Sons of Temperance founded.

Sewing machine patented. Charles
Dickens visits America,

1843; Bvonson Alcott begins

Fruitlands Utopian community near
Harvard, Massachusetts. First
Lidian Jackson Emerson in 1853. From working typewriter patented.
the Concord Free Public Library. Hcmy James bom.
 Binding of Kmerson's first book,
Nature (1836). l;rom the collection of
Joel Myenon. Kmerson in 1844, from a miniature by
Caroline Neagits Hildreth. From The
Journals of Ralph Waldo Hmerson,
ed. I'.dwttrd Waldo Kmenon and Waldo
Emerson 1'orbes, 10 voh. (Boston:
Iloughton Mifflin, 1909 1914), vol. i,
frontispiece.

I hawing oj Concotd ccntct m the mW-i&fos byj. W, iimbu. I'rom Conceit Vtee
Public Library,
 Illustrated Chronology 259

1837: Receives remainder of

inheritance (another $11,675) from
Ellen Emerson's estate. Delivers
address "The American Scholar" at
I larvard (published 23 September).

1838: Carlylc's Critical and Miscella-

neous assays published, edited by
RWli. Delivers address at the
I larvard Divinity School (published
2.1 August). Delivers address
"Literary Ethics" at Dartmouth
(Bottom left) Broadside printing of
College (published 8 September).
KmersoH's Concord Hymn (1837 (tfyj).
(Ihp right) Manuscript of "To Eva"
1839: RWH's daughter, HllcnTiickcr
(published 1840), Mmerson's poem
Emerson, born. Jones Vcry's Itesays about his first wife, l!mm the collection
and Poems published, edited by RWE. of Joel Myerson, (Hottom right) Wrap-
perfrom the January i$/j?. Dial. Vrom
1840: First issue of DM appears. the collection of Joel Myerson.

1841: Kssays [1'irst Series] published

on 19 March (and in England on 21
August). Delivers "The Method of
Nature" at Wateiville College,
Maine, on u August (published ?.i
Ociobet). RWIi's daughter, Edith
Emerson, born
 2.6o Illustrated Chronology

1842: Waldo Emerson dies of 1844: Fruitlands community closes.

scarlatina. Margaret Fuller resigns Margaret Fuller, Summer on the
as editor of Dial; Emerson becomes Lakes, in 1843.
editor.
1845: James K. Polk inaugurated as
1843: Carlyle's Past and Present president. Florida and Texas
published, edited by RWE. admitted as states. Margaret Fuller,
Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
1844: Last issue of Dial appears. Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven and
RWE's son, Edward Waldo Other Poems and Tales.
Emerson, born. Delivers address
"Emancipation of the Negroes in 1846: Smithsonian Institute
the British West Indies" at authorized by Congress. Mexican
Concord Court House (published 9 War begins. Iowa admitted as
September and in England in a state. Margaret Fuller, Papers on
October). Essays: Second Series Literature and Art. Nathaniel
published on 19 October (and in Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old
England on 9 November). Manse. Herman Melville,
Typee.
1845: Purchases forty-one acres at
Walden Pond. 1847: Brook Farm community
closes. Henry Wadsworth
1846: Poems published in England Longfellow, Evangeline.
on 12 December (and in America on
1848: Gold discovered in California.
25 December).
Seneca Falls women's rights
convention. Wisconsin admitted as
1847: Sails for England.
a state. James Russell Lowell, The
Biglow Papers and A Fable for Critics.
1848: Arrives in Paris in May.
Returns to England in June. 1849: Zachary Taylor inaugurated
Returns to America in July. as president. Elizabeth Blackwell is
first woman in America to receive
1849: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures M.D. degree. Sarah Orne Jewett
published. born. Edgar Allan Poe dies. Henry
David Thoreau, "Resistance to Civil
1850: Representative Men published Government" and A Week on the
on i January (and in England on 5 Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
January). Margaret Fuller dies.
 Illustrated Chronology 261

linterson in 1848. l;mtn lloughton Library, (Above') Manuscript letter by Kmerson,

Harvard University. it January jSyi, concerning a lecture
engagement. I'rom the collection of Joel
Myerson, (Kelow)Whitman.'s printing
1854; Memoirs of Margaret l!uller of Kmcnon's letter of M July iSy to
Ossoli published, coedited by him in praise of Leaves of Grass,
RWIL

1853: RWli's mother, Ruth I laskins

Hmerson, dies.

1856: Knglish Traits published on

6 August (and in Hngiarul on 6
September).

1839: Robert Bulkelcy Hnierson dies.

i8(>o: The Conduct of Life published

in America and Singfand on
8 December,

I86SK 1 Icnry David Thoreau dies.

"Thorcau" appears in Atlantic
Monthly.
 262, Illustrated Chronology

1863; RWli's aunt, Mary Moody

Hmcrson, dies. Thoreau's Excursions
published, edited by RWB.

1865: Thoreau's letters to Various

Persons published, edited by RWB.
lidith Rmcrson marries William
1 lathaway Forbes.

1866: Complete Works published in

two volumes in Bngland. Ralph
Emerson Forbes, RWH's first
grandchild, born. Awarded 1,1 ,.D.
degree by !tarvard,

1867: May-day anil Other Pieces

published on 29 June (and in
England on 8 June). Sign warning "colored people of
Boston" about "slave ditchers," written
by Theodore Parker. Prom the Boston
Public Library.

1850: American population is

23,191,876. Compromise of 1850
and Fugitive Slave Law enacted.
California admitted as a state.
Margaret Fuller dies. Nathaniel
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Later.

1851: Kate Chopin arid Grace King

born. James Fenimorc Cooper dies.
New York Times founded. Karl Marx's
work begins publication in New-York
Tribune, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.

185*: Merman Melville, Pierre.

Harriet Beeehett Stowe, Uncle Tom's
Cabin.

limerson, dressed in his lecturing outfit, 1853: Franklin Pierce inaugurated as

in tfyy. From the Concord Free Public president. First elevator with safely
Library. devices manufactured. William
Wells Brown, CJofel.
 Illustrated Chronology 263

1854: Kansas-Nebraska bill enacted.

The slave Anthony Burns is
returned to the South. Henry David
Thoreau, Walden.

1855: Fanny Fern (Sara Payson

Willis), Ruth Hall. Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.

1856: First kindergarten in America

opened. Congress passes American
copyright law.

1857: James Buchanan inaugurated

as president. Central Park is laid out
in New York City. Financial panic be-
Poster welcoming Emerson upon his re-
turn from a trip abroad following the gins, leading to recession. Herman
partial burning of his house in 1873. Melville, The Confidence-Man.
From the Concord Free Public Library.
1858: Minnesota admitted as a state.
Atlantic telegraph cable laid. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat
at the Breakfast Table. Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, The
Courtship of Miles Standish.

1859: Oregon admitted as a state.

John Brown seizes arsenal at
Harpers Ferry, Virginia; he is
captured and hanged. Washington
Irving dies.

1860: American population is

31,443,321. Pony Express mail
service begins. Nathaniel
Emerson in i8tf,from a drawing byS.W.
Rowse. From The Complete Works of Hawthorne, The Marble Faun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward
Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston:
HoughtonMifflin, 1903-1904), vol. 6,
facingp. 168.
Emerson at the writing table in his study in 1879. From Houghton Library, Harvard University.
 Illustrated Chronology 265

1868: William Emerson dies. 1861: Confederate States of

America formed, with Jefferson
1869: Prose Works published in two Davis as president; American troops
volumes in America. fired on at Fort Sumter in
Charleston, South Carolina; Civil
1870: Society and Solitude published
War begins. Abraham Lincoln
in America and England on 5 March.
inaugurated as president. Kansas
1871: Begins trip to California in admitted as a state.
April (returns 30 May).
i86z: Lincoln submits Emancipa-
1872: RWE's house severely tion Proclamation to Congress.
damaged by fire. Goes to Europe Henry David Thoreau dies.
with Ellen in October. Arrives in
Egypt in December. 1863: Lincoln issues Emancipation
Proclamation; also delivers "The
1873: Returns to Europe in Gettysburg Address." Robert E.
February. Sees Carlyle for the last Lee's Confederate forces defeated
time. Returns to America in May. at Gettysburg. Thanksgiving Day
Delivers address at the opening of made a national holiday. West
the Concord Free Public Library. Virginia admitted as a state.

1874: Edward Waldo Emerson 1864: Nevada admitted as a state.

marries Annie Shepard Keyes. Nathaniel Hawthorne dies.
Parnassus (title page dated "1875")
published, a poetry collection 1865: Lincoln's second inaugural.
edited by RWE. Civil War ends. Lincoln
assassinated; Andrew Johnson
1875: Letters and Social Aims (title inaugurated as president.
page dated "1876") published in Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing
December (and in England on 8 slavery, passed. Ku Klux Klan
January 1876). founded. Potato chips introduced.
Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps.
1876: The "Little Classic Edition" of
RWE's works is published in nine 1866: Root beer first commercially
volumes. manufactured. Herman Melville,
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the
War. John Greenleaf Whittier,
1878: Delivers address "Fortune of
Snow-Bound.
the Republic" on 25 February in
Boston (published 10 August).
 266 Illustrated Chronology

1880: Delivers one hundredth 1867: Nebraska admitted as a state.

lecture before the Concord Alaskan Territory purchased. First
Lyceum. successful typewriter patented.
Mark Twain, The Celebrated Jumping
1882: Catches cold on 20 April. Frog of Calaveras County, and Other
Ralph Waldo Emerson dies in Sketches.
Concord, Mass., on 27 April. Buried
on 30 April in Sleepy Hollow 1868: First American kindergarten
Cemetery, Concord. opens in Boston. Louisa May
Alcott, Little Women.

1869: Ulysses S. Grant inaugurated

as president. Women suffrage
granted in Wyoming.

1870: American population is

39,818,449. William Gilmore Simms
dies.

1871: National Rifle Association

founded. Stephen Crane born.

1872: Jehovah's Witnesses founded.

Sara Payson Willis ("Fanny Fern")
dies.

1873: Grant's second inaugural.

First code of rules for football
drafted. Willa Gather and Emily
Post born. Mark Twain and Charles
Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age.

1874: Women's Christian

Temperance Union founded.
Robert Frost, Ellen Glasgow, Amy
Lowell, and Gertrude Stein born.

1875: First baseball glove worn.

Illustrated Chronology 267

1876: General Geroge Armstrong

Custer and his men killed at the
Battle of Litle Bighorn. Colorado
admitted as a state. Mark Twain,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

1877: Rutherford B. Hayes

inaugurated as president. Thomas
A. Edison patents the phonograph.
Henry James, The American.

1878: First bicycles commercially

manufactured. Carl Sandburg and
Upton Sinclair born. Wiliam Cullen
Bryant dies.

1879: First Church of Christ,

Scientist, founded by Mary Baker
Eddy. Thomas A. Edison perfects
the elecric light. Henry James, Daisy
Miller and Hawthorne.

1880: American population is

50-155,783. H. L. Mencken born.
Lydia Maria Child dies. Henry
Adams, Democracy.

1881: James A. Garfield inaugurated

as president. Garfield assassinated;
Chester A. Arthur inaugurated as
president. Joel Chandler Harris,
Uncle Remus, His Songs and His
Sayings. Henry James, The Portrait of
a Lady and Washington Square.

1882,: Standard Oil Trust organized.

Electric fan invented. Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow dies. Walt
Whitman, Specimen Days and Collect.
This page intentionally left blank
 We Find What We Seek
Emerson and His Biographers

Ronald A. Bosco

J
ustifying his selective appropriation of historical fact to suit his
artistic purposes while writing The Crucible, the American play-
wright Arthur Miller remarked, "One finds I suppose what one
seeks."1 Miller's comment recognizes the influence that the intel-
lectual and imaginative predispositions of writers and readers
exert on historical materials, and it is as instructive for biographi-
cal and critical writing as it is for works of fiction or drama that
have their source in history. It is especially instructive in account-
ing for the variety of ways in which biographers ami critics have
treated Ralph Waldo Emerson's life and thought since the nine-
teenth century, for Emerson's biographers have never been ca-
sual commentators on their subject. Typically, they have ap-
proached Emerson with a clearly defined view of his ideas, inner
life, social significance, and influence on American culture. Simi-
larly, although scholarly criticism on Emerson has not always
concentrated on his biography, critics have invariably selected bi-
ographical elements to help make the case for their particular
reading of his thought and its relation to his times.
In a chronological sketch of his life the factual Emerson ap-
pears to be quickly and easily known; however, at the close of
more elaborate biographical and critical studies, readers may
well believe that the "essential" or "complete" Emerson remains

269
 27° Emerson and His Biographers

as much a subject open to interpretation and analysis by today's

readers as it was to his contemporaries. In fact, the essential
Emerson, which is, of course, the interesting Emerson who fasci-
nates biographers and spurs their critical ingenuity, remains the
enigmatic figure foreshadowed in a witticism that circulated in
Boston after his return from Egypt in 1873. As Emerson himself
reported it, the witticism typically opened with the question,
"What do you think the Sphinx said to Mr. Emerson?" "The
Sphinx probably said . . . 'You're another,'" was the standard
reply (JMN, 16:294).
Among major nineteenth-century American writers, Emer-
son ranks first in terms of both the number and the variety of bi-
ographical treatments of his life. The essay that follows is in-
tended to bring order to that number and variety and, in concert
with the bibliographic essay included in this volume, to provide
readers with starting points for their own consideration of Emer-
son as a biographical subject. The first section of this essay places
Emerson in the context of nineteenth-century approaches to
American biographical subjects and recognizes early appropria-
tions of his life as a means to complete an emerging portrait
of the ideal American. The second section identifies the several
phases through which appropriations of Emerson's biography
have passed between the end of the nineteenth century and
the present. Finally, drawing on recent biographical and critical
scholarship, the third section provides readers with suggestions
for several directions in which they may wish to take their own
thinking about Emerson's biography.

Over the century following the Revolution, Americans mourned

the passing of many native heroes and public figures. Late-
eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century newspapers, broad-
sides, and pamphlets reveal unexpectedly long periods of mourn-
ing after the passing of political figures such as Benjamin
Franklin and George Washington, popular figures such as Davy
Crockett and the fallen heroes of the Alamo, and literary figures
 Emerson and His Biographers 271

such as the poet Lydia Howard Sigourney of Hartford, Connecti-

cut, whose immense popularity in her day has been displaced by
almost complete obscurity in our own.2 Perhaps the most sus-
tained national outpouring of grief occurred after the assassina-
tion of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. But there is a significant differ-
ence between public response to the passing of figures such as
these and the forms through which Emerson's passing was ac-
knowledged and his significance to American culture initially ap-
propriated. It is perhaps predictable that in the case of persons
like Washington, Franklin, and Crockett emphasis would be
placed on a generally uniform set of virtues that each demon-
strated in his life and that were worthy of emulation by the
Americans he left behind. Only personal history distinguished
one hero from another as obituary eloquence was concentrated
on celebrating each for his manliness, integrity, force of convic-
tion and perception, and patriotism. In Emerson's case, however,
these virtues appear to have been either overlooked or thought
of as inappropriate memorials to his character and contribution
to American culture. The fact that Emerson was respected as a
cultural prophet and visionary, whereas the other heroes men-
tioned here were men of action, only partially accounts for the
difference.
Emerson's final illness occurred over the brief span of about
ten days. In contemporary responses to his illness and death, al-
most all of the personal elements of his life—that is, almost all of
the factual information contained in a biographical chronology—
were set forth and repeated in newspaper reports and pamphlets
of the human interest variety with which we are familiar today.
For instance, early on, successive newspaper headlines ran, "Ralph
Waldo Emerson Sick," "Mr. Emerson's Condition," "Mr. Emer-
son Somewhat Better," "No Hope for Emerson," "Mr. Emerson
Dead," "Into the Unknown, of Which He Spoke So Grandly,
Ralph Waldo Emerson Has Passed," "Ralph Waldo Emerson's Fu-
neral," "Emerson at Rest," and so forth. Several of the accounts
appearing under such headings originated in the Boston press and
were immediately reprinted in other newspapers; most were
eventually supplemented with an editorial on Emerson's signifi-
cance or with reminiscences by persons who knew him well.
 272 Emerson and His Biographers

Between 24 and 25 April 1882, when notices of Emerson's final

illness first appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser, New-York Daily
Tribune, New York Evening Post, New York Herald, and New-York
Times, and the close of that year, more than two hundred such
reports appeared in America and abroad. In them, the facts of
Emerson's life and death dominated the prose. These facts in-
cluded reference to his New England lineage and character, his
prominence as an author of many volumes of prose and of occa-
sional poetry, his years of service as a lecturer on the lyceum cir-
cuit, and his association with virtually every American luminary
of his time and with international figures such as Thomas
Carlyle. But in several reports, the facts were momentarily off-
set by poignant and sometimes hyperbolic expressions of what
America's imminent or realized loss of Emerson meant for the
nation. When on 27 April, the day that Emerson died, the Boston
Evening Transcript reported that hope for his recovery had en-
tirely faded, the paper rehearsed one of the more common
laments heard in the days immediately following: Emerson was,
according to the Transcript's reporter, "the teacher, the inspirer,
almost the conscience . . . of his countrymen." On the day
after his death, the Boston Daily Advertiser considerably extended
that lament, declaring America's loss of Emerson to be the loss
of "the most philosophical mind and temper of this century."
As writers reiterated the details of Emerson's life in the days and
months that followed, expressions of his significance that had ini-
tially served as formulaic laments were themselves transformed
into emphatic statements of fact. Although his poetry had never
won him a wide readership, Emerson suddenly became the Ameri-
can poet; while throughout his life newspaper reporters com-
plained of his haphazard lecturing style and the difficulty of mak-
ing sense of many of his pronouncements, Emerson suddenly
became the American sage; and although he often scorned meta-
physicians and systematic thinkers as "gnat[s] grasping the world"
(Natural History of Intellect, "Powers and Laws of Thought," W,
12:12), Emerson suddenly became the American philosopher. These
transformations occurred very early in the mourning process:
Writing in the Chicago Dial on 3 May, W F. Allen stated that Emer-
son alone had given "tone and shape to American thought," and in
 Emerson and His Biographers 273

an article that appeared in the Nation on 4 May, Thomas Went-

worth Higginson suggested that Emerson's method of analogical
thinking represented a new brand of systematic philosophy.3
Appropriation of Emerson's life and thought by biographers
and critics has occurred on a massive scale in the century since
his death. The several hundred biographies and critical studies
referenced in the bibliographies and notes of this volume barely
scratch the numerical surface of the many thousands of works
devoted in whole or in part to Emerson referenced in the stan-
dard secondary sources.4 As the following brief survey indicates,
appropriations that went beyond obituary eloquence also ap-
peared throughout 1882 as complements to the facts about Emer-
son's life and as justifications for occasional hyperbole concern-
ing how Emerson was to be best remembered. Significantly,
these examples serve as early indicators of how Emerson would
be appropriated by later generations of readers.
Concentrating on Emerson as poet and philosopher, in The
Character and Genius of Ralph Waldo Emerson James Little argued
that Emerson was America's Shakespeare, and through judicious
selections from his writings he showed that Emerson surpassed
Socrates and Plato for moral authority and intellectual great-
ness.5 Writing under the title "Emerson's Personality" in the Cen-
tury Magazine in July 1882, the poet Emma Lazarus praised Em-
erson's newness and nationalism as the logical outcomes of
American values which shaped him and which his writing rein-
forced. Although Emerson appears to have written only one
complete address which he delivered on three occasions in sup-
port of women's rights and to have been a reluctant participant
in debates over women's suffrage during his time, in "Ralph
Waldo Emerson," an obituary printed in the Woman's Journal on
6 May, Julia Ward Howe, the feminist reformer and author of
"The Battle Hymn of the Republic," appropriated Emerson as a
champion of women's issues.6 In 'A Woman's Estimate of Emer-
son" appearing in the Christian Register on 27 July, Mrs. L. J. K.
Gifford carried Howe's claim a significant step further: Arguing
that his reliance on intuition in his lectures and writings exhibited
a feminine side to his otherwise manly oratory, she predicted that
Emerson would long enjoy a following among women.
 274 Emerson and His Biographers

In "Carlyle and Emerson," published in the Critic on 20 May,

the American naturalist John Burroughs drew this conclusion
from the lifelong friendship between the two men: Whereas Car-
lyle believed in men and in life as it was really lived, Emerson be-
lieved most, if not only, in ideas. In the swirl of appropriation
that occurred throughout 1882, many anecdotes of Emerson's
behavior and friendships were circulated to provide support for
one or another reading of his life and influence, and most sec-
onded Burroughs's portrayal of Emerson as primarily a man of
ideas. In one, which appeared in the Christian Union on 20 July in
a series of "Literary Notes," the pride of Boston's Brahmin class
was justified at the same time as Emerson's preoccupation with
ideas was lightly, but advantageously, underscored. The anecdote
concerns the responses of Emerson and his friend Theodore
Parker one day to the news that the world would end at mid-
night: "'Well,' replied Parker, coolly, 'I am not concerned, I live
in Boston.' 'As for me,' added Emerson, equally undisturbed, 'I
can get along without it.'"7 But the extremes to which commen-
tators near and far were inclined to go in appropriating Emerson
to their purposes is perhaps no better illustrated than in these re-
marks made by a visitor to Concord from Calcutta shortly after
Emerson's death. Speaking at Concord's School of Philosophy,
Protap Chunder Mozoomdar asserted that Emerson as a man of
ideas, and the ideas that he advanced, transcended national
boundaries:

Where the blue Narbudda, so still so deep, so pure, flows

through the high milk-white walls of the marble hills near
Jubbulpoor, in the natural alcoves of the virgin rocks there are
devotional inscriptions in Sanskrit. I wish Emerson had com-
posed his essays on nature there. . . . Amidst this ceaseless,
sleepless din and clash of Western Materialism, this heat of
restless energy, the character of Emerson shines upon India
serene as the evening star. He seems to us to have been a geo-
graphical mistake. (Quoted in W, 8:413)

The early claims cited here for Emerson as the American poet,
sage, and philosopher complement the claims made for him dur-
 Emerson and His Biographers 275

ing the same time as America's foremost Romantic interpreter of

nature, champion of individualism, religious thinker, and propo-
nent of social reform. When they are viewed collectively, these
claims draw a distinction between Emerson's attractiveness as a
biographical subject whose life was devoted to thought and the
shaping of his culture and the attractiveness of Washington,
whose life demonstrated one form of political activism, or
Crockett, whose feats of daring and wilderness survival symbol-
ized a peculiarly rugged, American type of heroism in the nine-
teenth century. Washington's and Crockett's lives easily became
the stuff of national legend and lore, with America's first presi-
dent declared "the Father of His Country" and the resourceful
woodsman named "King of the Wild Frontier." In contrast,
Emerson's life was appropriated to complete an emerging por-
trait of the ideal American which the political activism or rugged
heroism of a Washington or a Crockett could only partially rep-
resent: Emerson became, in the words of "The American
Scholar" (1837), "Man Thinking."

II

For nineteenth-century Americans, the ideal American was a fig-

ure who could not be contained or represented in one individual;
in effect, their ideal American was an aggregate figure composed
of exemplary qualities drawn from more than one life. Had his
life served no more lasting purpose than to supply the intellec-
tual dimension that completed the emerging portrait of that
ideal American, Emerson would still be an important biographi-
cal subject for us to study today. Yet as his contemporaries recog-
nized and rather fully documented in the obituary essays pub-
lished in 1882, Emerson's life was noteworthy for more than this
service alone. First from the pulpit, then from the lecture plat-
form, and finally in the many essays and poems he collected and
published during his life, Emerson introduced his fellow Ameri-
cans to a range of literary, social, political, religious, and philo-
sophical concerns that has not been duplicated by any other per-
son of his own or succeeding generations. It is for his facility in
 276 Emerson and His Biographers

conceptualizing and expressing that wide range of concerns, as

well as for his rare intellectual competency, that Emerson's life
has so fascinated American biographers and critics. At the same
time, the disposition of biographers and critics to treat Emer-
son's life selectively and to appropriate his ideas and works to
their particular purposes has been encouraged by his having pro-
vided them with an extraordinarily broad set of concerns and
array of personal accomplishments to investigate.
Appropriation of Emerson's life and thought by biographers
and critics has gone through roughly four generational phases
since 1882. It is fair to say that, on the whole, Emerson has been
gifted with a remarkable set of competent and thorough biogra-
phers and critics; however, it is also fair to say that although each
biographer and critic makes a claim for the objectivity of his or
her view of Emerson, none of the biographical or critical studies
listed in the bibliographies of this volume is neutral. All betray
the interests of authors who have gone to Emerson and found in
him a personal quality or an incarnation of American values for
which they have sought all along.
Among biographers of his own and immediately succeeding
generation, Emerson was uniformly portrayed in positive terms.
For example, in reading Moncure Daniel Conway's Emerson at
Home and Abroad (1882), Alexander Ireland's Ralph Waldo Emerson:
His Life, Genius, and Writings (1882), James Elliot Cabot's A Memoir
of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1887), Edward Waldo Emerson's expres-
sion of filial devotion to his father's legacy, Emerson in Concord
(1889), and Oscar W. Firkins's Ralph Waldo Emerson (1915), one
achieves a firsthand sense of how the words and example of a
person like Emerson, who actually had few close personal friends
and intimates, nevertheless inspired a generation that included
these writers as well as Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, and
Henry David Thoreau to achieve nineteenth-century Americans'
shared dream of personal and cultural fulfillment.
In contrast, biographers and critics from 1915 to the mid-1950s
rendered a more varied portrait of Emerson as an individual
while, in some cases, also moderating what had become a too
idealized version of some aspects of his influence and thought.
The force of much of the biography and criticism of this period
 Emerson and His Biographers 277

will be found in a cluster of books that appeared between 1949

and 1953: The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1949) by Ralph L. Rusk,
Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson's Aesthetic Theory (1951) by Vi-
vian C. Hopkins, Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in
American Experience (1952) by Sherman Paul, and Freedom and
Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1953) by Stephen E.
Whicher.8 Written by persons who had little quarrel with Emer-
son's canonization by F. O. Matthiessen in American Renaissance:
Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), these
studies nonetheless acknowledged, for example, that inasmuch
as it had been so easily popularized as a defense of the brutal ex-
cesses of capitalism in America, Emerson's doctrine of "self-
reliance" was not as entirely humane as he or others may have
thought.9 They also argued that Emerson's philosophy was more
vague and sentimental ("feel-good") than rigorous, and that
rather than being the thoroughly original American thinker cele-
brated by earlier biographers, Emerson was really a gifted
adapter of Platonic idealism, metaphysical speculations drawn
from Shakespeare, John Milton, and Thomas Browne, and or-
ganic theories of art and history promoted by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich von
Schlegel to the conditions American life exhibited during his
time. While these views certainly did not diminish Emerson's in-
fluence on the development of American intellectuals such as
William James, John Dewey or George Santayana who came
after him, or on modern writers such as Robert Frost or Charles
Olson who, like Walt Whitman before them, found license for lit-
erary experimentation in the theory Emerson advanced in "The
Poet" (1844), they provided necessary correction to the some-
times too enthusiastic appropriation of Emerson's ideas and aes-
thetics by earlier biographers and critics.
Of the studies just mentioned, two exerted an enormous influ-
ence on Emerson biography and criticism in the middle of the
twentieth century, and their influence continues to the extent that
they still condition how his life is received and appropriated today.
The studies are Matthiessen's American Renaissance and Whicher's
Freedom and Fate. As Gerald Graff has observed, Matthiessen's
book was instrumental in professionalizing American literary
 278 Emerson and His Biographers

study and in identifying Emerson as a dominant force in the emer-

gence of a distinctly American form of thought and literary ex-
pression.10 By representing the 18308,18408, and 18508 as the period
during which the democratic spirit of America, the quest for a na-
tional literary identity, and Americans' belief in the grand scale of
their cultural destiny fully merged, and by naming the period—in
part, at least—the Age of Emerson, Matthiessen showed that the gap
between social theory and literary practice had been bridged in
America, and that the bridge itself had been built with Emerson's
writing and thought. Put another way, Matthiessen showed that
to a large extent biographers and critics closer to Emerson's time
may have had a better grasp of his significance than did those who
between the two world wars found reasons to call his significance
into question. In contrast, Whicher's Freedom and Fate performed
a very different service for Emerson biography and criticism.
Using psychological criticism and limiting his discussion to Emer-
son's life and writings from the 18305 through 1860 as the only por-
tion of his career worthy of attention, Whicher put a rather nar-
row and, one might well argue, undeserved negative spin on
Emerson's significance.
Because it adheres to a chronological approach to Emerson's
life and thought, Whicher's position is relatively simple to recon-
struct. Whicher acknowledged that Emerson began his career as
a champion of individualism, a true believer in the freedom of
the individual, and a confirmed idealist. Indeed, initially there is
little difference between the person typically portrayed through
statements from Nature (1836), "The American Scholar," and
journals in Emerson biography and criticism and the figure
Whicher finds exhibited in Emerson's writings from the 18305.
However, as Whicher turns his attention to Emerson's mature
years and considers his writings of the 18403 and 18508 as expres-
sions of a suppressed, tortured interior self that has its origins in
the 18308 and earlier, he portrays a figure very different from the
one portrayed, for example, by Emerson's contemporaries and
earliest biographers. Doubtful that his religious calling is genu-
ine, unsure of his capacity for love or grief, skeptical that the
spiritual represents anything more than an ingenious human
construction, and conflicted over his relation to the Puritan past
 Emerson and His Biographers 279

that he overtly rejects even as he recognizes its influence on his

own psychological and philosophical disposition, Whicher's
"inner" Emerson is completely at odds with the one Emerson
publicly projected in Nature and "The American Scholar." He is a
figure who, while living in a period when nature offered Roman-
tics an infinite variety of consolations over the loss of intimates
through death, is incapable of consolation after the deaths of
Ellen Tucker, his first wife, in 1831; Edward and Charles Emerson,
his brothers, in 1834 and 1836, respectively; and Waldo, his son, in
1842. He is a figure who seems no longer to believe in "the perfect
system of compensations" for which he once argued as he finds
himself adding poverty, materialism, disease, and classism, all of
which he observed firsthand in England in 1847 and 1848, to those
"lords of life"—temperament, succession, and subjectiveness,
and the like—which he had identified in "Experience" in 1844
(JMN, 3:316-17; CW, 3:47). By the time Representative Men appears
in 1850, he is a thorough skeptic, effectively ceasing to measure
men and their cultures according to his own exacting, idealistic
standards of what is desirable, and willing to accept them at face
value: as imperfect and limited by circumstance. In The Conduct of
Life (1860), he finally concedes the necessity of the individual's
submission to fate.
Whicher ended his critical treatment of Emerson's "inner life"
in Freedom and Fate with an interpretation of "Fate," the essay
with which The Conduct of Life opened, that confirmed his posi-
tion. In 1957, he published an anthology of readings that, like his
book, emphasized the Emerson from Nature to "Fate" as the only
Emerson worth knowing or studying.11 Until the late 19808,
Whicher's critical book and anthology completely dominated
Emerson biography and criticism. Even though Whicher did not
consider English Traits (1856) in his construction of Emerson's
"inner life," his Emerson is a figure who Philip L. Nicoloff re-
ceives and expands on in Emerson on Race and History: An Exami-
nation of English Traits (1961).12 In Nicoloff's study, Whicher's
dark Emerson concedes that a fundamental, self-destructive ma-
terialism exists at the heart of Anglo-Saxon culture, and that inas-
much as materialism can be denned as a racial property, it carries
with it the seeds of the potential destruction of American cul-
 280 Emerson and His Biographers

tare. Twenty-five years after NicolofFs study appeared, Wallace

E. Williams re-created Whicher's Emerson at crucial moments in
his historical introduction to the Harvard edition of Representa-
tive Men. There, Williams argued that Emerson's preoccupation
with "spotted and defective" men such as Napoleon demon-
strated his rejection of the idealism evident in Nature and earlier
writings and his concession to the essential imperfection of men
and culture (CW, 4:xxiv-xxv). But perhaps the most complete ac-
ceptance of Whicher's Emerson will be found in the work of
John Michael. Michael, who views skepticism as the prevailing
characteristic of Emerson's personality and thought throughout
his life, conveys in Emerson's own terms the conditions under
which he and others appropriate Whicher's Emerson as they fol-
low his descent into skepticism. Reading "The Method of Na-
ture" (1841) as Emerson's acknowledgment of the practical limi-
tations of Nature and the idealistic system it announces, Michael
states:

The promise of the book, like the promise of ... man, is fi-
nally deceptive, but the desire to find an adequate interpreter,
an adequate interpretation, a reliable reflection of the self and
of the world, persists and expresses itself in the hopes by
which it is repeatedly duped. . . . One is always caught in
the crack between the transcendent self and the inhabited
world, between that intangible, unutterable consciousness
and the material world that appears around it. This, Emerson
specifies, is what a person should know. It is what he has come
to know.13

Whicher's Emerson is also a figure with whom both Gay Wil-

son Allen and John McAleer had to contend in the major biogra-
phies of Emerson they wrote during this period. Allen's Waldo
Emerson: A Biography (1981) and McAleer's Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Days of Encounter (1984) both confront this dark figure head-on,
but they do not concede that the figure is itself more than one
writer's personal construction of Emerson.14 Instead of conces-
sion, Allen and McAleer treat the shifts in Emerson's intellectual
views evidenced by his writings of the 18405 and 18505 as mo-
 Emerson and His Biographers 281

ments during which the mature Emerson reassessed and ulti-

mately reaffirmed the justice of his early, idealistic conceptions
of the individual and American culture. Concentrating on
Emerson's poetic theory as well as on his actual practice in
"Threnody," the elegy he composed after his son Waldo's death,
and in "Days," "Brahma," and "Song of Nature," three of his
best poems, which he printed in May-Day and Other Poems (1867),
Allen shows Emerson moving beyond formulaic Romantic con-
solations when he has to accommodate his personal desires to his
loss of family members and close friends, and resisting rank skep-
ticism or naturalism when he has to face and accommodate him-
self to the persistence of cultural materialism in America before,
during, and after the Civil War. Concentrating on the importance
of personal relationships to Emerson as means to indulge and ex-
press his confidence in the ideal as he exchanged ideas and tested
the limits of art, morals, philosophy, and nature with the likes
of his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, Jones Very, Fuller, Bronson
Alcott, and Thoreau, McAleer portrays Emerson surviving the
negative side of personal experience and culture not just by hav-
ing access to the printed wisdom of Socrates, Plato, and Shake-
speare but also, and more important, by possessing the friendship
of persons such as these who, Emerson believed, could have spo-
ken with Socrates, Plato, and Shakespeare as equals. These per-
sons, as McAleer's study persuasively shows, were Emerson's real
teachers, and against the imperfection of men and the sense of
fatalism to which the times seemed to be directing him, they pro-
vided Emerson with elevating lessons. Their lessons were the
friendship and example they extended to him; through these,
they enlarged Emerson's capacity for feeling and sentiment as
they illuminated his personal world with "their habitual gran-
deur of view" ("Character," W, 10:101).
For several reasons, Whicher's Emerson continues to exert in-
fluence on the shape of Emerson biography and criticism to this
day. First, because that figure has achieved canonical stature
equivalent to that of any other appropriation of Emerson, biog-
raphers and critics are obliged to state clearly the relation be-
tween their own Emerson and Whicher's. Second, because
Whicher's is a very narrow and incomplete Emerson constructed
 282 Emerson and His Biographers

through reference to, at best, only the middle third of his life, it
has reinforced the disposition of many biographers and critics to
concentrate only on these years—the years in which Nature,
Essays: First and Second Series, Representative Men, English Traits,
and The Conduct of Life appeared—as most important literarily
and personally to account for in studies of Emerson's life and
thought. And third, as Leonard Neufeldt observed some time
ago, Whicher's Emerson is "efficient" in that his is a more mod-
ern (one might also say tragic) than romantic story, and for a
practiced psychological critic, his is a story easy to tell and to
teach.15 Indeed, the longevity and influence of Whicher's Emer-
son is evident in the introduction to Emerson printed in the most
recent edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature
(1998). There, the many lectures Emerson delivered between the
18508 and the 18705 are dismissed along with Society and Solitude
(1870), Parnassus (1875; a poetry anthology on which Emerson
had worked on and off for nearly fifty years), Letters and Social
Aims (1876), and a host of essays published in the North American
Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere as "a slow anticlimax"
to the writings and intellectual ferment of Emerson's earlier
years.16 The Norton Anthology's Emerson is barely distinguishable
from the one anthologized by Whicher in 1957. Emerson's liter-
ary and intellectual legacy anthologized here opens with Nature
and closes with "Fate" and "Thoreau" (1862). The only justifica-
tion the editor mentions for extending representation of Emer-
son's achievement two years beyond "Fate" is that the later essay
is "the source for many of Thoreau's sayings, which otherwise
would [be] lost."17 In effect, Whicher's Emerson still prevails:
"Thoreau" is not anthologized to extend Emerson's reputation
but to preserve some of the sayings of its subject.
Yet in the 19808 and 19905, the biographies by Allen and
McAleer have been joined by other biographical and critical
treatments of Emerson to restore a degree of completeness to
the intellectual and personal dimensions of his life. The most in-
teresting and original writing on Emerson today is being carried
out in the spirit of recovery and reinvention. Supported by schol-
arly editions of his Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, com-
pleted in 1982; Sermons, completed in 1992; Topical Notebooks,
 Emerson and His Biographers 283

completed in 1994; and Antislavery Writings, published in 1995,18

several works have undertaken detailed study of Emerson's early
years as a minister and lecturer; brought Emerson's domestic life
and influences and his position in American intellectual and so-
cial history into contemporary discussions of gender, race, and
class; tested his durability against the doctrines of deconstruc-
tionism and postmodernism; and initiated serious review of the
major writings of Emerson's later years.19 As admirably demon-
strated by the example of Robert D. Richardson, Jr.'s, recent in-
tellectual biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), today's
scholars are allowing Emerson a voice in the important conversa-
tions of our day, and while doing so, they are illustrating for us
how a century ago Americans could so easily have imagined that
this cultural priest and visionary was the reincarnation of Shake-
speare in their age.20 By enlarging this one "man's nature [as an]
. . . advertisement . . . of the character of his fellows" ("Poli-
tics," CW, 3:125), and by universalizing his biography as an expres-
sion of his culture's dreams, current biographers and critics are
giving us the most thoroughly Emersonian Emerson to date.

Ill

Even as his recent biographers and critics are providing us with a

more complete and reliable Emerson than has been seen in a
while, much more remains to be done. Several directions avail-
able to the present and next generation of Emerson's biogra-
phers and critics have been hinted at in this essay. One of the
most obvious and promising courses open to them is to extend
serious study of Emerson into the writings of his later career.
This portion of his life and achievement has been virtually lost to
the present generation, largely as a consequence of Whicher's in-
fluence. Since nearly half of the works included in the forthcom-
ing edition of Emerson's later lectures come from this period and
show Emerson dealing extensively with subjects drawn from phi-
losophy, science, morals, and American social history, biogra-
phers and critics will soon have at their disposal new resources
through which to approach this period of his life, assess his repu-
 284 Emerson and His Biographers

tation, and rule on the extent to which biographical and critical

neglect of the later Emerson has been fair.21 Reading these lec-
tures against Emerson's journals and notebooks, they may well
be surprised by what they find. For instance, in contrast to
Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose story "Rappaccini's Daughter"
(1844) discloses one nineteenth-century writer's distrust of sci-
ence as a corruptive influence on the human spirit, Emerson, in
several lectures and journals from the 18505, i86os, and 18705, em-
braces science as both a confirmation of his idealism and a
means to expand on his earlier confidence that "the order of na-
ture" ensures that the human race possesses the capacity to offset
the effects of materialism and reject fatalism. In a journal entry
dated 1871, Emerson explicitly addressed this point:

I do not know that I should feel threatened or insulted if a

chemist should take his protoplasm or mix his hydrogen, oxy
gen & carbon, & make an animalcule incontestably swim-
ming &C jumping before my eyes. I should only feel that it indi-
cated that the day had arrived when the human race might be
trusted with a new degree of power, & its immense responsi-
bility; for these steps are not solitary . . . but only a hint of
an advanced frontier supported by an advancing race behind
it. ...
All science must be penetrated by poetry. I do not wish to
know that my shell is a strombus, or my moth a vanessa, but I
wish to unite the shell & the moth to my being: to understand
my own pleasure in them; to reach the secret of their charm
for me. (JAIN, 16:232, 251)

Another promising direction in which future Emerson biogra-

phers and critics may wish to go is suggested by Gerald Graff's
work noted earlier: to study Emerson further for the influence his
writing and thought have exerted on the professionalization of lit-
erary study and, one might add, creative writing in America.22 On
the other hand, while reading this essay some may have wondered
whether that remark by the visitor to Concord from Calcutta
about Emerson's having been "a geographical mistake" was hy-
perbole delivered for effect or an honest statement of opinion.
 Emerson and His Biographers 285

Along with "Persian Poetry," which Emerson first published in

1858 and collected in Letters and Social Aims in 1876, the recently
published Emerson notebook "Orientalist" provides a useful start-
ing point for serious inquiry (W, 8:235-65; TN, 2:39-141). Indeed, as
the following reading shows, our access now to a work such as
"Orientalist" provides us with new ways of extending discussion
of Emerson's poetics and nationalism beyond "Fate" and the ef-
fective end of his career in the early i86os alleged by Whicher and
others.
While all of Emerson's recently published topical notebooks
invite new biographical and critical readings of his poetics and
views on rhetoric, nature, fate, and philosophy, "Orientalist"
stands apart from most of them as a completely unexpected re-
source. In part because of its unusual range (it is a notebook in
which Emerson recorded his thoughts while he studied Eastern
culture as well as translated a substantial amount of Persian po-
etry from German sources and drafted several versions of
"Brahma" and other of his poems) and in part because it dates
from the 18503 and i86os, "Orientalist" provides a wealth of unex-
plored information on the directions Emerson's idealism and na-
tionalism took during his middle and later years. Here one will
find Emerson's summary testimony to the East as a principal in-
tellectual and imaginative influence on his brand of idealism
throughout his life; here, too, one will find Emerson actively en-
gaged in reconstructing the Eastern origin of ideas and values
which he and his heroes such as Plato, Shakespeare, and Mon-
taigne have assimilated, and finding in that reconstruction a de-
gree of personal satisfaction and illumination which he expressed
in a near-devotional epigraph he inscribed in Latin at the begin-
ning of the notebook: "Ex oriente lux"—"Light out of the east."
Emerson's "Orientalist" is a natural complement to the schol-
arly attention devoted today to postcolonial and transnational
studies. This notebook and "Persian Poetry" underscore his con-
viction that nature and fate transcend all forms of temporal or na-
tional expression and his belief that the nonmaterial, the spiritual
content of experience, is, as he stated so clearly in "The Method of
Nature," the only and ultimate value. In the imaginative freedom,
occasional primitivism, wonder at nature's prospect, and compre-
 286 Emerson and His Biographers

hensive unity of Brahman faith which he found celebrated in the

panegyrics, epics, and sensual lyrics of Anvari, Firdousi, Saadi, and
especially Hafiz, Emerson appears to have achieved relief from
crassness, brutality, and vulgarity as he encountered them in
nineteenth-century material culture. And contrary to Whicher's
thesis, in the 18505 and i86os Emerson seems still able to realize the
idealism of Nature and "The Method of Nature" in poems such as
"Saadi," where he represents the ideal empowering the poet as si-
multaneously "joy-giver and enjoyer" once he heeds the muse's
counsel against humanity's fatal limitation: its preoccupation with
the flesh, with the material world. Emerson's idealism is also evi-
dent in "Brahma," where it is expressed in that one line which re-
creates the power of the infinite and the constancy of "the order
of nature": "I keep, and pass, and turn again." In "Orientalist" as a
whole, moreover, readers will find that Emerson's creative acts of
initial and revisionary translation are themselves manifestations
of "the spiritual act," not merely its representation or repetition.
His repeated reworking of Hafiz's intoxicating rhythms, his evi-
dent pleasure in re-creating Anvari's and Firdousi's exoticism and
in emulating their spontaneity in verses of his own, and his em-
bracing of Eastern mysticism and mythology are Emerson's con-
scious reenactments of Eastern "Light." Through his assimilation
of its visionary aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, Emerson
seems to be saying that the East has the power to nourish other-
wise impoverished individuals and nations and to transmute, as he
implies in the couplet he used as the epigraph for "Persian Poetry,"
materialism into wisdom (W, 8:235).
Emerson's own facility in appropriating ideas from the long
span of Western and Eastern thought justifies the disposition of
his many biographers and critics to appropriate his life and mes-
sage to their particular ideological and psychological purposes.
And because biography is a written form of personal relationship
established among a writer, a subject, and a reader, we should
have reason to believe that our biography of Emerson has not yet
been written. If we choose to write that biography, it may well
be that through our own appropriations of his life and thought
Emerson will perform services for us today comparable to those
 Emerson and His Biographers 287

for which biographers and critics have turned to him over the
past century. While we certainly do not need more facts about
Emerson's life, since the facts reported in the thoroughly anno-
tated volumes of his published journals, notebooks, letters, and
primary works will take the better part of anyone's career to
master, what the facts of those volumes disclose about the essen-
tial Emerson—about the growth of his mind and art, about his
connections with and responses to the people, events, and
dreams of his time, and about the extent to which his life may be
read as an archetype for the spiritual journey of all thoughtful
Americans—has hardly been exhausted. Because the greatest
virtue of Emerson as a thinker and as a biographical subject is his
ability to transcend time and place and speak directly to Ameri-
cans in terms they can understand and judge the value of for
themselves, Emerson needs to be discovered, thought about, and
written about by every American generation, including our own.
The day that any generation is content to accept the published
record as the complete report of the essential Emerson, Emerson
and that part of America he created will cease to exist.

NOTES
1. The Crucible: Text and Criticism, ed. Gerald Weales (New York:
Viking, 1971), p. 41.
2. Lydia Howard Sigourney (1791-1865) was a prolific writer of
historical verse, occasional poetry and fiction, and essays on popular
topics of the day. During her career, she published over sixty books,
most of which are now forgotten. Virtually every newspaper in
America announced her death in headlines that proclaimed her liter-
ary immortality.
3. For complete bibliographic details on newspaper accounts
cited in this and following paragraphs, as well as for additional
works published in this genre between late April and the end of
1882, see Robert E. Burkholder and Joel Myerson, Emerson: An Anno-
tated Secondary Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1985), pp. 204-35.
4. See Burkholder and Myerson, Emerson: An Annotated Secondary
Bibliography, which accounts for Emerson biography and scholarship
 288 Emerson and His Biographers

published before 1980, and their Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Annotated

Bibliography of Criticism, 1980-1991 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1994).
5. James Little, The Character and Genius of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
with Selections from His Works. An Address (Manchester, England: n.p.,
1882).
6. For details of Emerson's position with respect to women's
rights, see the essay on Emerson and women in this volume and
Emerson's 'Address at the Woman's Rights Convention, 20 Septem-
ber 1855," forthcoming in The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1843-1871, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson. Emerson drew on
his 1855 'Address" for a lecture he delivered on 2 December 1860 in
Boston and for another he delivered on 26 May 1869 before the New
England Woman's Suffrage Association; however, the 'Address" it-
self was not published until 1884—two years after Emerson's death
and nearly thirty years after its original delivery—when it appeared
as "Woman" (see W, 11:403-26).
7. As quoted in Burkholder and Myerson, Emerson: An Annotated
Secondary Bibliography, p. 228.
8. Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York:
Scribner's, 1949); Vivian C. Hopkins, Spires of Form: A Study of Emer-
son's Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951);
Sherman Paul, Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in American
Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952); and Stephen
E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953).
9. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the
Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941).
10. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 219.
11. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1957).
12. Philip L. Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History: An Examina-
tion of English Traits (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
13. John Michael, Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 156-57.
14. Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography (New York:
Viking, 1981); and John McAleer, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of En-
counter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984).
 Emerson and His Biographers 289

15. Leonard Neufeldt, The House of Emerson (Lincoln: University

of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 12.
16. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ^ vols., ed. Nina
Baym et al. (New York: Norton, 1998), 1:1072.
17. Ibid., 1:1202 n. Whicher also included "Thoreau" in his an-
thology, explaining that although Emerson had "an inadequate ap-
preciation of Thoreau's importance as a writer and a social critic,"
the essay is "probably the best thing he ever did" in the biographical
genre; see Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 498 n.
18. Emerson's Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeori and Joel My-
erson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).
19. The following studies provide useful starting points for those
interested in pursuing these avenues of current scholarship. For
Emerson's early years as a minister and lecturer, see Wesley T. Mott,
"The Strains of Eloquence": Emerson and His Sermons (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989); Susan L. Roberson, Emer-
son in His Sermons (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995);
and David Robinson, Apostle of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and Lec-
turer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). To ex-
amine the ways that Emerson has been brought into contemporary
discussions of gender, race, and class, see Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody
Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Len Gougeon, Virtue's Hero:
Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1990); David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Christina Zwarg,
Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995). For Emerson's durability both
within and outside of contemporary preoccupation with decon-
struction and postmodernism, see Evelyn Barish, Emerson: The
Roots of Prophecy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989);
Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic
Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993); Stanley Cavell,
Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian
Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Mer-
ton M. Sealts, Jr., Emerson on the Scholar (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1992). For studies that concentrate on the recovery of
Emerson's later writing and thought, see Ronald A. Bosco, "His Lec-
tures Were Poetry, His Teaching the Music of the Spheres: Annie
 290 Emerson and His Biographers

Adams Fields and Francis Greenwood Peabody on Emerson's 'Natu-

ral History of the Intellect' University Lectures at Harvard in 1870,"
Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s., 8 (Summer 1997): 1-79; David M.
Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Pur-
pose in the Later Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993); and Lawrence Buell, "Emerson's Fate," Len Gougeon, "Emer-
son's Circle and the Crisis of the Civil War," and Ronald A. Bosco,
"The 'Somewhat Spheral and Infinite' in Every Man: Emerson's
Theory of Biography," all in Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel
Myerson, ed. Wesley T. Mott and Robert E. Burkholder (Rochester,
N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1997), pp. 11-28, 29-52, and
67-103, respectively.
20. Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1995).
21. For The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871, see
note 6.
22. See D. G. Myers, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since
1880 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1996), pp. 31-33, where an
argument is made for crediting Emerson with the professionaliza-
tion of creative writing in American higher education.
 Bibliographical Essay

Joel Myerson

T~\ alph Waldo Emerson was an extremely popular author in his

Xvlifetime.1 Beginning with The Conduct of Life in 1860, his
books were brought out by the prestigious Boston publisher
Ticknor and Fields (which later became Houghton, Mifflin). This
firm also published such New England writers as Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Low-
ell, and Henry David Thoreau, and it made a conscientious effort
to package and market them as the "standard" American au-
thors. Accordingly, all of Emerson's works were kept in print,
and an eleven-volume collected edition of his writings was pub-
lished within two years of his death.
The control of Emerson's writings was kept within the family.
As Emerson's intellectual powers waned after 1872, his published
works more and more became collaborations with his daughter
Ellen and James Elliot Cabot, who would later become his liter-
ary executor and biographer.2 The two helped Emerson put to-
gether Letters and Social Aims (1876); Ellen and her sister, Edith
Emerson Forbes, assisted their father in assembling the an-
thology of his favorite poetry, Parnassus (1875). After Emerson's
death, Cabot took the lead in putting together, both from previ-
ously published and from manuscript works, Miscellanies (1884),
Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1884), and Natural History

291
 292 Bibliographical Essay

of Intellect (1893). The centenary of Emerson's birth was marked

by the publication of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
edited and with annotations by his son Edward.3
Emerson's writings have fared even better in the twentieth
century. Ralph L. Rusk's edition of The Letters of Ralph Waldo
Emerson set high standards for editorial accuracy and annota-
tional quality, standards that were maintained by Joseph Slater in
his edition of Emerson's correspondence with Carlyle and
Eleanor M. Tilton in her supplementary edition to Rusk.4 Begin-
ning in 1959, a series of editions of Emerson's works started com-
ing out that forever changed the scholarly approach to him by
making available for the first time his lectures, journals, note-
books, and sermons. The editors of Emerson's Early Lectures,
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, Poetry Notebooks, Topical Note-
books, and Complete Sermons added twenty-seven new volumes of
Emerson's works to his literary canon. All these editions
achieved the highest standards of textual accuracy (and reporting
of Emerson's revisions in the manuscripts) and are fully anno-
tated, to the point of showing the usages Emerson made of his
ideas and phrases between his journals and other writings.5
Anyone wishing to read all of Emerson's work is faced with the
daunting prospect of some fifty volumes of primary texts. Fortu-
nately, there are some ways to access this material easily. In addi-
tion to the many general anthologies of Emerson's published
writings, there are good one-volume selections from his antislav-
ery works, literary criticism, journals, and letters.6 Also, there are
a number of concordances (none, alas, complete) to help readers
find specific references in Emerson's writings to people, places,
and concepts.7 And editors are still working on Emerson: a new,
textually accurate and fully annotated edition of Emerson's Col-
lected Works is ongoing,8 and editions of his Later Lectures and the
correspondence among his brothers are forthcoming.9

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

American Literary Scholarship. 1963-present. Durham, N.C.: Duke

University Press, 1965-.
Burkholder, Robert E., and Joel Myerson. Emerson: An Annotated Sec-
 Bibliographical Essay 293

ondary Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh

Press, 1985.
. "Ralph Waldo Emerson." In The Transcendentalists: A Review
of Research and Criticism, ed. Joel Myerson, pp. 135-66. New
York: Modern Language Association, 1984.
. Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism,
1980-1991. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Charvat, William. Emerson's American Lecture Engagements: A Chrono-
logical List. New York: New York Public Library, 1961.
Emerson Society Papers. Annual bibliography of Emerson studies.
Myerson, Joel. "Ralph Waldo Emerson." In Prospects for the Study of
American Literature, ed. Richard Kopley, pp. 6-20. New York:
New York University Press, 1997.
. Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982.
, ed. Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Piitz, Manfred. Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Bibliography of Twentieth-
Century Criticism. New York: Peter Lang, 1986.

COLLECTIONS OF ESSAYS

Bode, Carl, ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Profile. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1969.
Buell, Lawrence, ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Es-
says, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993.
Burkholder, Robert E., and Joel Myerson, eds. Critical Essays on
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983.
Cady, Edwin, and Louis J. Budd, eds. On Emerson: The Best from
American Literature. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1988.
Donadio, Stephen, Stephen Railton, and Ormond Seavy, eds. Emer-
son and His Legacy: Essays in Honor of Quentin Anderson. Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.
Konvitz, Milton R., ed. The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.
Levin, David, ed. Emerson: Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.
Mott, Wesley T., and Robert E. Burkholder, eds. Emersonian Circles:
 294 Bibliographical Essay

Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson. Rochester, N.Y.: University of

Rochester Press, 1997.
Myerson, Joel, ed. Emerson Centenary Essays. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1982.
Porte, Joel, ed. Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982.
Sanborn, P. B., ed. The Genius and Character of Emerson: Lectures at the
Concord School of Philosophy. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1885.
Sealts, Merton M., Jr., and Alfred R. Ferguson, eds. Emerson's
"Nature"—Origin, Growth, Meaning. New York: Dodd, Mead,
1969. 2d enl. ed., Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1979.

BIOGRAPHIES

Allen, Gay Wilson. Waldo Emerson: A Biography. New York: Viking,

1981.
Baker, Carlos. Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. New
York: Viking Press, 1996.
Barish, Evelyn. Emerson in Italy. New York: Henry Holt, 1989.
. Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1989.
Cabot, James Elliot. A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 2 vols.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1887.
Cole, Phyllis. Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendental-
ism: A Family History. New York: Oxford University Press,
1998.
Conway, Moncure Daniel. Emerson at Home and Abroad. Boston:
James R. Osgood, 1882.
Cooke, George Willis. Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings, and
Philosophy. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881.
Emerson, Edward Waldo. Emerson in Concord. Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin, 1889.
Emerson, Ellen Louisa Tucker. One First Love: The Letters of Ellen
Louisa Tucker to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Edith W Gregg.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.
Emerson, Ellen Tucker. The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson. Ed. Edith
E. W Gregg. 2 vols. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press,
1982.
 Bibliographical Essay 295

. The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson. Ed. Delores Bird Carpen-

ter. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
Emerson, Lidian Jackson. The Selected Letters of Lidian Jackson Emer-
son. Ed. Delores Bird Carpenter. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1987.
Emerson, Mary Moody. The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson.
Ed. Nancy Craig Simmons. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1993.
Engstrom, Sallee Fox. The Infinitude of the Private Man: Emerson's Pres-
ence in Western New York, 1851-1861. New York: Peter Lang,
1997.
Firkins, O. W. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1915.
Garnett, Richard. Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. London: Walter
Scott, 1888.
Gonnaud, Maurice. An Uneasy Solitude: Individual and Society in the
Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Trans. Lawrence Rosenwald.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987 [Paris:
Didier, 1964].
Haskins, David Greene. Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Maternal Ancestors.
Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1886.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin, 1884.
Ireland, Alexander. In Memoriam: Ralph Waldo Emerson. London: Simp-
kin, Marshall, 1882. New edition as Ralph Waldo Emerson: His
Life, Genius, and Writings. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1882.
Kleinfield, H. L. "The Structure of Emerson's Death." Bulletin of the
New York Public Library 65 (January 1961): 47-64.
McAleer, John. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter. Boston: Lit-
tle, Brown, 1984.
Pommer, Henry F. Emerson's First Marriage. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1967.
Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1995.
Rusk, Ralph L. The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Scrib-
ner's, 1949.
Sanborn, F. B. The Personality of Emerson. Boston: George E. Good-
speed, 1903.
Scudder, Townsend. The Lonely Wayfaring Man: Emerson and Some
Englishmen. London: Oxford University Press, 1936.
 296 Bibliographical Essay

[Thayer, James Bradley]. A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson. Boston:

Little, Brown, 1884.
von Frank, Albert J. An Emerson Chronology. New York: G. K. Hall,
I994-
Woodberry, George Edward, Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York:
Macmillan, 1907.

RELIGION

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975.
Jackson, Carl T. The Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nine-
teenth-Century Explorations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1981.
Kazin, Alfred. God and the American Writer. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Persons, Stow. Free Religion: An American Faith. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1947.

UNITARIANISM

Ahlstrom, Sydney E., and Jonathan S. Carey, eds. An American Refor-

mation: A Documentary History of Unitarian Christianity. Mid-
dletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.
Allen, Joseph Henry, and Richard Eddy. A History of the Unitarians
and Universalists in the United States. New York: Christian Lit-
erature Company, 1894.
Cooke, George Willis. Unitarianism in America. Boston: American
Unitarian Association, 1902.
Howe, Daniel Walker. The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Phi-
losophy, 1805-1861. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1970.
Hutchison, William R. The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform
in the New England Renaissance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1959.
Robinson, David. The Unitarians and the Universalists, Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.
Wider, Sarah Ann. Anna Tilden, Unitarian Culture, and the Problem
 Bibliographical Essay 297

of Self-Representation. Athens: University of Georgia Press,

1997.
Wright, Conrad. The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America. Boston:
Starr King Press, 1955.
. "The Early Period (1811-1840)." In The Harvard Divinity
School: Its Place in Harvard University and in American Culture,
edited by George Hunston Williams, pp. 21-77. Boston: Bea-
con Press, 1954.
. The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.
. The Unitarian Controversy: Essays on American Unitarian His-
tory. Boston: Skinner House, 1994.
, ed. A Stream of Light: A Sesquicentennial History of American
Unitarianism. Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association,
1975.
Wright, Conrad Edick, ed. American Unitarianism, 1805-1865. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1989.

TRANSCENDENTALISM

Albanese, Catherine. Corresponding Motion: Transcendental Religion

and the New America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1977.
Asselineau, Roger. The Transcendentalist Constant in American Litera-
ture. New York: New York University Press, 1980.
Barbour, Brian M., ed. American Transcendentalism: An Anthology of
Criticism. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1973.
Boiler, Paul F. American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860: An Intellectual
Inquiry. New York: Putnam, 1974.
Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the
American Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1973.
. "The Transcendentalists." In Columbia Literary History of the
United States, gen. ed. Emory Elliott, pp. 364-78. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988.
Christy, Arthur. The Orient in American Transcendentalism. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1932.
Flower, Elizabeth, and Murray G. Murphey. "Transcendentalism."
 298 Bibliographical Essay

In their A History of Philosophy in America. 2 vols., 1:397-435.

New York: Putnam, 1977.
Francis, Richard. Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at
Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1997.
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks. Transcendentalism in America: A His-
tory. New York: Putnam, 1876.
Grusin, Richard. Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Au-
thority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1991.
Gura, Philip F., and Joel Myerson, eds. Critical Essays on American
Transcendentalism. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
Hochfield, George. "New England Transcendentalism." In American
Literature to 1900, edited by Marcus Cunliffe, pp. 135-68. New
York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1987.
Kaplan, Nathan, and Thomas Katsaros. The Origins of American
Transcendentalism in Philosophy and Mysticism. New Haven,
Conn.: College and University Press, 1975.
Kern, Alexander C. "The Rise of Transcendentalism, 1815-1860." In
Transitions in American Literary History, edited by Harry Hay-
den Clark, pp. 247-314. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1954.
Koster, Donald N. Transcendentalism in America. Boston: Twayne,
1975-
Miller, Perry, ed. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1950.
Mott, Wesley T, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.
. Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism. Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 1996.
Myerson, Joel. The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial: A His-
tory of the Magazine and Its Contributors. Rutherford, N.J.: Fair-
leigh Dickinson University Press, 1980.
, ed. The American Transcendentalists, Detroit: Gale Research
Company, 1988.
. The Transcendentalists: A Review of Research and Criticism.
New York: Modern Language Association, 1984.
Packer, Barbara. "The Transcendentalists." In The Cambridge History
of American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, vol. 2,
 Bibliographical Essay 299

Prose Writing, 1820-1865, pp. 329-604. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1995.
Pochmann, Henry A. New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis
Hegelidnism. Philadelphia: Carl Schurz Foundation, 1948.
Rose, Anne C. Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-18^0. New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981.
Simon, Myron, and Thornton H. Parsons, eds. Transcendentalism
and Its Legacy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1966.
Versluis, Arthur. American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Vogel, Stanley M. German Literary Influences on the American Transcen-
dentalists. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955.
Whicher, George R, ed. The Transcendentalist Revolt Against Material-
ism. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1949. Rev. ed., Gail Kennedy, ed.,
The Transcendentalist Revolt. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1968.

CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS

Brooks, Paul. The People of Concord: One Year in the Flowering of New
England. Chester, Conn.: Globe Pequot Press, 1990.
Engel, Mary Miller. I Remember the Emersons. Los Angeles: Times-
Mirror, 1941.
Fischer, David Hackett, ed. Concord: The Social History of a New England
Town, 1750-1850. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University, 1983.
Jarvis, Edward. Traditions and Reminiscences of Concord, Massachu-
setts, 1779-1878. Ed. Sarah Chapin. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1993.
Oehlschlaeger, Fritz, and George Hendrick, eds. Towards the Making
of Thoreau's Modern Reputation: Selected Correspondence of
S. A. Jones, W. A. Hosmer, H. S. Salt, H. G. O. Blake, and D. Rick-
etson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Remembrances of Concord and the Thoreaus: Letters of Horace Hosmer to
Dr. S. A.Jones. Ed. George Hendrick. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1977.
Scudder, Townsend. Concord: American Town. Boston: Little, Brown,
1947-
Stearns, Frank Preston. Sketches from Concord and Appledore. New
York: Putnam, 1895.
 3OO Bibliographical Essay

Stoehr, Taylor. Nay-Saying in Concord: Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau,

Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979.
Swayne, Josephine Latham. The Story of Concord Told by Concord
Writers. Boston: E. F. Worcester, 1906. 2d rev. ed., Boston:
Meador, 1939.
Wheeler, Ruth. Concord: Climate for Freedom. Concord, Mass.: Con-
cord Antiquarian Society, 1967.

PHILOSOPHY

Bauerlein, Mark. The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of

Belief. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.
Cavell, Stanley. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Consti-
tution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990.
. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
. Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida.
Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995.
. The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition. San Francisco:
North Point Press, 1981.
. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson
After Wittgenstein. Albuquerque, N.M.: Living Batch Press,
1989.
Goodman, Russell B. American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Howe, Daniel Walker. Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to
Abraham Lincoln. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
. The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Kateb, George. The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Patterson, Anita Haya. From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and
the Politics of Protest. New York: Oxford University Press,
1997-
Shi, David E. The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in Ameri-
can Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of
Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
 Bibliographical Essay 301

LITERARY HISTORY

Andrews, William L., ed. Literary Romanticism in America. Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Sym-
bolic Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Biasing, Mutlu Konuk. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987.
Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Romanticism. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982.
. The Breaking of the Vessels. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982.
. Figures of Capable Imagination. New York: Seabury Press,
1976.
. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976.
Brantley, Richard E. Coordinates of Anglo-American Romanticism: Wes-
ley, Edwards, Carlyle and Emerson. Gainesville: University
Presses of Florida, 1993.
Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture from Revolution
Through Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1986.
Carafiol, Peter. The American Ideal: Literary History as a Worldly Ac-
tivity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
. Transcendent Reason: James Marsh and the Forms of Romantic
Thought. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1982.
Chai, Leon. The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Cowen, Michael H. City of the West: Emerson, America, and Urban
Metaphor. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967.
Fredman, Stephen. The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson
and the Emersonian Tradition. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1993.
Gilmore, Michael T. American Romanticism and the Marketplace,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Grey, Robin. The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance,
Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Gura, Philip F. The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Litera-
 302 Bibliographical Essay

lure in the New England Renaissance. Middletown, Conn.:

Wesleyan University Press, 1981.
Gustafson, Thomas. Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the
American Language, 1776-1865. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1992.
Hedges, William L. "From Franklin to Emerson." In The Oldest Revo-
lutionary: Essays on Benjamin Franklin, edited by J. A. Leo
Lemay, pp. 139-56. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1976.
Hertz, David Michael. Angels of Reality: Emersonian Unfoldings in
Wright, Stevens, and Ives. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uni-
versity Press, 1993.
Howe, Irving. The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of
Emerson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Johnson, James L. Mark Twain and the Limits of Power: Emerson's God
in Ruins. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.
Kazin, Alfred. An American Procession: The Major American Writers
from 1830 to 1930—The Crucial Century. New York: Knopf,
1984.
Kramer, Michael P. Imagining Language in America from the Revolution
to the Civil War. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1992.
Kronick, Joseph G. American Poetics of History: From Emerson to the
Moderns. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.
Lease, Benjamin. Anglo-American Encounters: England and the Rise of
American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981.
Leverenz, David. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1989.
Marr, David. American Worlds Since Emerson. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1988.
Matthiessen, P. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age
of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press,
1941.
Miller, Perry. "From Edwards to Emerson." In Errand into the Wil-
derness, pp. 184-203. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1956.
. The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the
Era of Poe and Melville. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.
 Bibliographical Essay 303

New, Elisa. The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American

Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Parini, Jay, ed. The Columbia History of American Poetry. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993.
Parrington, Vernon Louis. The Romantic Revolution in America,
1800-1860. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927.
Peach, Linden. British Influence on the Birth of American Literature.
London: Macmillan, 1982,
Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961.
Poirier, Richard. Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1992.
Railton, Stephen. Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the
American Renaissance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1991.
Reising, Russell J. The Usable Past: Theory and the Study of American
Literature. New York: Methuen, 1986.
Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive
Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York:
Knopf, 1988.
Reynolds, Larry J. European Revolutions and the American Literary Ren-
aissance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988.
Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson's Tomb: The Politics of Classic American
Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Rowland, William G., Jr. Literature and the Marketplace: Romantic
Writers and Their Audiences in Great Britain and the United
States. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
Ruland, Richard. The Rediscovery of American Literature: Premises of Criti-
cal Taste, 1900-1940. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Shucard, Alan. American Poetry: The Puritans Through Walt Whitman.
Boston: Twayne, 1988.
Spencer, Benjamin T. The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary
Campaign. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1957.
Spengemann, William C. A Mirror for Americanists: Reflections on the
Idea of American Literature. Hanover, N.H.: University Press
of New England, 1989.
Stafford, John. The Literary Criticism of "Young America": A Study in
the Relationship of Politics and Literature, 1837-1830. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1952.
 304 Bibliographical Essay

Waggoner, Hyatt H. American Poets from the Puritans to the Present.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
Weisbuch, Robert. Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and
British Influence in the Age of Emerson. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986.
Wilson, R. Jackson. Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Liter-
ary Marketplace, from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson.
New York: Knopf, 1989.
Wolfe, Gary. The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and
Emerson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Ziff, Lawrence. Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Inde-
pendence in America. New York: Viking, 1981.

B O O K S ON RALPH WALDO E M E R S O N

Bishop, Jonathan. Emerson on the Soul. Cambridge: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1964.
Brantley, Richard E. Anglo-American Antiphony: The Late Romanticism
of Tennyson and Emerson. Gainesville: University Presses of
Florida, 1994.
Brown, Lee Rust. The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the
Pursuit of the Whole. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1997.
Cadava, Eduardo. Emerson and the Climates of History. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Cameron, Kenneth Walter. Emerson the Essayist. 2 vols. Raleigh,
N.C.: Thistle Press, 1945. Rpt., Hartford, Conn: Transcen-
dental Books, 1972.
. Emerson's Reading. Raleigh, N.C.: Thistle Press, 1941. Rev. ed.,
Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books, 1962.
. Emerson's Workshop: An Analysis of His Reading in Periodicals
through 1836 . . . Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books,
1964.
Carpenter, Frederic Ives. Emerson and Asia. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1930.
Cayton, Mary Kupiec. Emerson's Emergence: Self and Society in the
Transformation of New England, 1800-1845. Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1989.
 Bibliographical Essay 305

Cheyfitz, Eric. The Trans-Parent: Sexual Politics in the Language of

Emerson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.
Duncan, Jeffrey L. The Power and Form of Emerson's Thought. Char-
lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973.
Ellison, Julie. Emerson's Romantic Style. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1984.
Field, Susan L. The Romance of Desire: Emerson's Commitment to Incom-
pletion. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1997-
Geldard, Richard G. The Esoteric Emerson: The Spiritual Teachings
of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hudson, N.Y.: Linclisfarne Press,
1993-
Gelpi, Donald L. Endless Seeker: The Religious Quest of Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991.
Gougeon, Len. Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
Hallengren, Anders. The Code of Concord: Emerson's Search for Univer-
sal Laws. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1994.
Harding, Walter. Emerson's Library. Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1967.
Harris, Kenneth Marc. Carlyle and Emerson: Their Long Debate. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Hodder, Alan D. Emerson's Rhetoric of Revelation: Nature, the Reader,
and the Apocalypse Within. University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1989.
Hopkins, Vivian C. Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson's Aesthetic
Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951.
Hudnut, Robert K. The Aesthetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Materi-
als and Methods of His Poetry. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen
Press, 1996.
Hughes, Gertrude Reif. Emerson's Demanding Optimism. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.
Hutch, Richard A. Emerson's Optics: Biographical Process and the Dawn
of Religious Leadership. Washington, D.C.: University Press of
America, 1983.
Jacobson, David. Emerson's Pragmatic Vision: The Dance of the Eye.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Kateb, George. Emerson and Self-Reliance. Thousand Oaks, Calif.:
Sage, 1995.
 306 Bibliographical Essay

Lange, Lou Ann. The Riddle of Liberty: Emerson on Alienation, Free-

dom, and Obedience. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986.
Leary, Lewis. Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Interpretive Essay. Boston:
Twayne, 1980.
Loewenberg, Robert J. An American Idol: Emerson and the "Jewish
Idea." Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984.
Lopez, Michael. Emerson and Power: Creative Antagonism in the Nine-
teenth Century. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
1996.
Loving, Jerome. Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.
Makarushka, Irene S. Religious Imagination and Language in Emerson
and Nietzsche. New York: St. Martin's, 1994.
Michael, John. Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
Mitchell, Charles E. Individualism and Its Discontents: Appropriations of
Emerson, iSSo-igyo. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1997.
Mott, Wesley T. "The Strains of Eloquence": Emerson and His Sermons.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.
Neufeldt, Leonard. The House of Emerson. Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 1982.
Newfield, Christopher. The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Sub-
mission in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996.
Nicoloff, Philip L. Emerson on Race and History: An Examination of En-
glish Traits. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
O'Keefe, Richard R. Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A
Blakean Reading. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press,
1995-
Packer, B. L. Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays.
New York: Continuum, 1982.
Packer, Barbara. "Ralph Waldo Emerson." In Columbia Literary His-
tory of the United States, gen. ed. Emory Elliott, pp. 381-98.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Paul, Sherman. Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in American
Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952.
Perry, Bliss. Emerson Today. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1931.
 Bibliographical Essay 307

Poirier, Richard. The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections.

New York: Random House, 1987.
Porte, Joel. Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict. Mid-
dletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966.
. Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Porter, Carolyn. Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer
in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner. Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1981.
Porter, David. Emerson and Literary Change. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1978.
Rao, Adapa Ramakrishna. Emerson and Social Reform. Atlantic High-
lands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980.
Roberson, Susan L. Emerson in His Sermons. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1995.
Robinson, David. Apostle of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and Lecturer.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
. Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose
in the Later Work. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Rohler, Lloyd. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Preacher and Lecturer. Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Rosenwald, Lawrence. Emerson and the Art of the Diary. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988.
Scheick, William J. The Slender Human Word: Emerson's Artistry in
Prose. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978.
Sealts, Merton M., Jr. Emerson on the Scholar. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1992.
Sowder, William L. Emerson's Impact on the British Isles and Canada.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966.
Stack, George J. Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity. Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1992.
Staebler, Warren. Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Twayne, 1973.
Teichgraeber, Richard R, III. Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom: Situat-
ing Emerson and Thoreau in the American Market. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Thurin, Erik Ingvar. Emerson as Priest of Pan: A Study in the Meta-
physics of Sex. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981.
. The Universal Autobiography of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lund,
Sweden: C. W K. Gleerup, 1974.
 308 Bibliographical Essay

Van Cromphout, Gustaaf. Emerson's Modernity and the Example of

Goethe. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990.
Van Leer, David. Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Major
Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Wagenknecht, Edward. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Portrait of a Balanced
Soul. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Waggoner, Hyatt H. Emerson as a Poet. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1974.
Whicher, Stephen E. Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,i953.
Williams, John B. White Fire: The Influence of Emerson on Melville.
Long Beach: California State University, Long Beach, 1991.
Yannella, Donald. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
Yoder, R. A. Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1978.
Zwarg, Christina. Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play
of Reading. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995.

NOTES

1. Emerson's life as a professional author may be followed in Joel

Myerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982); and Myerson, "Ralph Waldo
Emerson's Income from His Books," in The Professions of Authorship:
Essays in Honor of Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed. Richard Layman and Joel
Myerson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996),
pp. 135-49-
2. See Nancy Craig Simmons, 'Arranging the Sibylline Leaves:
James Elliot Cabot's Work as Emerson's Literary Executor," Studies
in the American Renaissance 1983, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1983), pp. 335-89.
3. SeeW
4. See L; CEC; and The Correspoondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed.
Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).
5. See EL;JMN; The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
Ralph H. Orth et al. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986);
TN; and CS. Also of value is Ronald A. Bosco, "His Lectures Were
Poetry, His Teaching the Music of the Spheres: Annie Adams Fields
 Bibliographical Essay 309

and Francis Greenwood Peabody on Emerson's 'Natural History of

the Intellect' University Lectures at Harvard in 1870," Harvard Li-
brary Bulletin, n.s., 8 (Summer 1997): 1-79.
6. See AW; Emerson's Literary Criticism, ed. Eric Carlson (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel
Porte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); and The Selected
Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1997).
7. See George Shelton Hubbell, A Concordance to the Poems of
Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: H. W Wilson, 1932); Eugene F. Irey,
A Concordance to Five Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Gar-
land, 1981); and Mary Alice Ihrig, Emerson's Transcendental Vocabulary
(New York: Garland, 1982). A more complete concordance by Irey,
keyed (as are all the others) to the 1903-1904 edition of Emerson's
Complete Works, is available at the Web site maintained by the
Thoreau Institute, wwAV.walden.org.
8. See CW. The volumes published are Nature, Addresses, and Lec-
tures (1971); Essays: First Series (1979); Essays: Second Series (1983); Rep-
resentative Men (1987); and English Traits (1994).
9. The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843—1871, ed. Ronald
A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, is a multivolume edition to be published
by the University of Georgia Press. Bosco and Myerson are also edit-
ing the correspondence of Charles, Edward, and William Emerson
and their brother Waldo for publication by Oxford University Press.
This page intentionally left blank
 Contributors

RONALD A. Bosco, Distinguished Service Professor of English

and American Literature at the University at Albany, SUNY, has
been an editor of the Emerson papers at the Houghton Library
of Harvard University since 1977. With Joel Myerson, he has re-
cently completed The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1843-1871, and he and Myerson are now at work on an edtion of
the Emerson brothers' correspondence.

GARY c o L L i s o N , Professor of English at Penn State University-

York, has published articles on Theodore Parker, the Harvard Di-
vinity School, and other subjects realted to New England Tran-
scendentalism. He is author of Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive
Slave to Citizen (Harvard, 1997).

ARMIDA GILBERT is currently preparing a book on Emerson and

women. She has presented papers on the subject at professional
conferences and is currently teaching at East Georgia College.

WESLEY T. MOTT is Professor of English at Worcester Poly-

technic Institute and Secretary of the Ralph Waldo Emerson So-
ciety. He has written and edited five books about Emerson and
New England Transcendentalism.

3H
 312 Contributors

JOEL M Y E R S O N , Carolina Distinguished Professor of American

Literature at the University of South Carolina, has published
nearly sixty books about the American Romantic period, in-
cluding twenty volumes of the annual Studies in the American Ren-
aissance (1977-1996). A former President of the Association for
Documentary Editing, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, and
the Thoreau Society, he is currently editing Transcendentalism: A
Reader for Oxford University Press.
DAVID M. R O B I N S O N is Oregon Professor of English and Dis-
tinguished Professor of American Literature at Oregon State
University. He is the author of Apostle of Culture: Emerson as
Preacher and Lecturer (Pennsylvania, 1981), The Unitarians and the
Universalists (Greenwood, 1985), and Emerson and the Conduct of
Life (Cambridge, 1993). He has directed a number of National En-
dowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for School
Teachers on the New England Transcendentalists and is cur-
rently serving as President of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society.
W I L L I A M ROSSI is Associate Professor of English at the Uni-
versity of Oregon. He is coeditor of Journal: 1853 in The Writings of
Henry D. Thoreau (Princeton, forthcoming), and is working on
a study of Thoreau's environmental writing and the mid-
nineteenth-century evolutionary debates.
 Index

Abolitionism, 86,149,169-70, Bell, Charles, 125,144

179-209 Bellah, Robert N., 68, 89
Adams, Henry, 47, 48, 55 Bellini, Vincenzo, 14
Alamo, Battle of, 4, 84, 270 Bentham, Jeremy, 15
Alcott, Abigail May, 222 Bickman, Martin, 95
Alcott, Amos Bronson, 24, 33,34, Biot, Jean Baptiste, 14
168, 201, 222, 281 Bishop, Jonathan, 97
Alcott, Louisa May, 234, 240 Black, Rebecca, 239
Allen, Gay Wilson, 280-81, 282 Blackwell, H. B., 245
Allen, Joseph Henry, 148 Bloom, Harold, 98
Allen, W. P., 272-73 Bosco, Ronald A., 4-5, 9-58,
American Woman's Party, 235 269-90
Anderson, Quentin, 68 Boston Daily Advertiser, 272
Anthony, Susan B., 211, 221 Boston Evening Transcript, 272
Anvari, 285 Bowen, Francis, 109-10,122,129
Arago, Dominique-Francois, 15 Bradford, William, 83
Aristophanes, 215 Branch, Michael, 103
Aristotle, 116 Bridge-water Treatises, 104,106-7,
Atlantic Monthly, 282 116,118,122
Autographs for Freedom, 199 British Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science, no
Bacon, Francis, 17, 77,106,112, Brook Farm, 98,168,185, 240
115-16,131 Brooks, Preston S., 202
Beauvoir, Simone de, 220 Brown, John, 186, 203—4

313
 314 Index

Browne, Thomas, 2.77 Christian Union, 274

Brownson, Orestes, 162 Civil War, 54, 55, 84,194, 204, 234,
Buell, Lawrence, 79,116 281
Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 14,17, Clarke, James Freeman, 24,36,
37,99 162
Burke, Edmund, 17 Clarkson, Thomas, 189-90,193
Burns, Anthony, 200-201 Clemens, Samuel L. See Mark
Burroughs, John, 274 Twain
Butler, Joseph, 104, in Cleopatra, 223
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, Cole, Phyllis, 71, 96
81 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 12,15,
71,105, no-ii, 118,135,136,
Cabot, James Elliot, 42, 56,138, 144-45,157, 277
150, 241-42, 243-45, 249, Collison, Gary L., 6,179-209
276 Columbus, Christopher, 53
Cadava, Eduardo, 102,103 Communism, 65-66
Caesar, Julius, 99 Compromise of 1850,195-96
Calvinism, 70, 76, 89,152-55 Concord Female Anti-Slavery So-
Carryle, Jane Welsh, 15, 239 ciety, 186
Carlyle, Thomas, 3,15,16,31,33, Concord Lyceum, 186
34, 42, 71, 76, 81,109,157, 272, Concord School of Philosophy,
274 274
Carus, Carl Gustav, 124 Conway, Moncure Daniel, 276
Chambers, Robert, 31,107-8, Cooper, James Fenimore, 14,
123-24,127-30,133,148-49 215
Charming, Ellen Fuller, 220 Cotton, John, 90
Channing, William Ellery, 74, Cousin, Victor, 12
154-56,184-85,187 Craft, Ellen, 197
Channing, William Ellery the Craft, William, 197
Younger, 33, 34, 220, 276 Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 66,
Channing, William Henry, 36. See 162
also Ralph Waldo Emerson, Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John,
"Ode Inscribed to William 45-46, 55, 83
Henry Channing" Critic, 238
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 17, 30 Crockett, Davy, 82-85, 270-71,
Chauncy, Charles, 154 275
Cheney, Ednah Dow, 238-39 Crosse, Andrew, 128,129,148
Cherokees, 187 Cuvier, George, 116,124-25,146
Child, Lydia Maria, 185, 216
Chopin, Frederic, 32 Daily Evening Transcript (Boston),
Christian Examiner, 129 82
 Index 315

Dall, Caroline Wells Healey, 220, "The American Scholar," 12,25,

241 26,44,45, 69, 88, 98,122,
Dallas, Isabella Glyn, 215 123,134,160,187-88,278-79
Dante Alighieri, 14, 30 'Art," 27
Darwin, Charles, 105-6,120,121, "Beauty," 37
124,130 "Biography," 17,37
De Quincy, Thomas, 32 Bowdoin Prize essay, no
Descartes, Rene, 108 "Brahma," 281, 285-86
Dewey, John, 98, 277 "Character," 28
Dial, 24-25,162,194, 218, 239 "Circles," 27, 51, 91-92,127,132,
Douglas, Katherine, 246 163,165-166
Douglass, Frederick, 190 "Compensation," 27,132,163-
Dwight, John Sullivan, 162 64
The Complete Sermons of Ralph
Edwards. Jonathan, 154 Waldo Emerson, 282-83
Eliot, Charles W, 3 The Conduct of Life, 36, 37, 39,
Elkin, Stanley, 180 40, 41, 86,134,168-69, 279,
Ellison, Julie K., 145 282
Ellison, Ralph, 63 "The Conservative," 94
Emerson, Charles Chauncy, 10, 23, "Country Life," 34
33,186, 279 "Culture," 36, 41, 86
Emerson, Edith, 19,31, 42 "Days," 281
Emerson, Edward Bliss, 10,13, 23, "Discourse Manque. Woman,"
279 214-15, 232
Emerson, Edward Waldo, 19, 31, "Divinity School Address," 12,
150, 276 25-26, 27-28, 44, 90,123,
Emerson, Ellen Louisa Tucker, 160-62,188-89
12-13,19, 23, 33, 76,157, 218, "Editor's Address" (Massachu-
279 setts Quarterly Review), 194
Emerson, Ellen Tucker, 19,31, 42, "Emancipation of the Negroes
56, 221, 239, 243, 248 in the British West Indies,"
Emerson, Lidian Jackson, 19, 66, 31,189-93
186, 239 Emerson's Antislavery Writings,
Emerson, Mary Moody, 6,10-11, 283
18, 33, 71, in, 152, 156, 186, "England," 32
222, 234, 239, 242-43, 281 "English Literature," 17
Emerson, Ralph Waldo "English Literature: Introduc-
'Address to the Citizens of tory," 84
Concord" (on the Fugitive English Traits, 32,36, 279, 282
Slave Law), 198-99 Essays: First Series, 26,122,131,
"The Age of Fable," 17 162,180, 282
 316 Index

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (continued) "The Method of Nature," 40,

Essays: Second Series, 28, 30, 50, 51,123,130, 280, 285-86
131—34,180, 282 "Mind and Manners of the
"Experience," 18, 28, 30, 38, 40, Nineteenth Century," 31,32
92,132-33,135,167-68, 279 "Montaigne, or the Skeptic,"
"Fate," 40, 54,133,134-37, 282, 53-54, 55
285 "Natural History of the Intel-
"Fortune of the Republic," lect," 32, 42,138,149-50,
204-5 171
"Freedom," 199-200 Natural History of the Intellect,
"Friendship," 27 103
"Gifts," 28, 30 "The Naturalist," 17, 84
"Hermione," 238 "Natural Method of Mental
"Heroism," 27 Philosophy," 32
"Historic Notes of Life and Nature, 4,12, 23-24, 25, 26, 27,
Letters in New England," 64 28, 30, 36, 66, 79-80, 82,
"History," 26, 27, 28, 30, 240 83-84, 86, 103, 112, 115,
"Holidays," 223 117-18, 119, 121, 122, 126,
"Holiness," 162-63 130,131-32,135,142,157,
"Humanity of Science," 119 158-60,171, 180, 236, 278-79,
"Human Life," 162 282
"Illusions," 41 "New England Reformers," 28,
"Immortality," 172-73 9i
"The Individual," 77, 78, 82, 86 "Nominalist and Realist," 28,
"Intellect," 27, 70, 90 30-31, 99, 136-37
"Introductory Lecture on the "The Nun's Aspiration," 239
Times," 61, 82 "Ode, Inscribed to W H.
"Italy," 17 Channing," 193-94
The journals and Miscellaneous "Old Age," 56
Notebooks of Ralph Waldo "Orientalist," 285-86
Emerson, 18-19, 282-83 "The Over-Soul," 27, 28,
"Lecture on Slavery," 201 126-27,163-66,172
Letters and Social Aims, 43, 282 Parnassus, 42, 43, 218, 282
Lord's Supper sermon, 13,157 "Permanent Traits of English
"Love," 27 National Character," 17
"Manners," 28 "Persian Poetry," 285-86
"Mary Moody Emerson," 239 "Philosophy for the People," 32
May-Day and Other Pieces, 42 "The Philosophy of History,"
Memoirs of Margaret Fuller 122,162
Ossoli, 36, 212, 213, 216, 244, "The Poet," 28, 30,112,131-32,
249 277
 Index 317

"Poetry and Imagination," "Wealth," 36

170-71 "Woman," 214-15, 216-17, 219,
"Politics," 28 221-23, 230-31, 237
"Power," 36, 40, 67, 85, 86-87, Works, 19
i35 "Worship," 37, 86
"The Present Age," 78,162 Emerson, Robert Bulkeley, 10
"The President's Proclama- Emerson, Ruth Haskins, 10,19,
tion," 204 152, 239
"Progress of Culture," 205 Emerson, Waldo, 19, 24, 29,167,
Prose Works, 42 279, 281
"The Protest," 179 Emerson, William (brother), 10,
"Prudence," 27 19, 156
"The Relation of Man to the Emerson, William (father), 10,
Globe," 17,121 152
"Religion," 162-63
Representative Men, 36,37,38,39, Farley, F. A., 74
97,124,131,133-34, 2.79, 280, Felix, Elisa, 238
282 Firdousi, 285
"The Rule of Life," 54, 55 Firkins, Oscar W, 276
"Saadi," 285 Pollen, Charles, 185
"Self-Reliance," 26, 27, 28, Forbes, Edward, 136
64-65, 68, 80-81, 86-87, 90, Forbes, William Hathaway, 19,
96,188 56
"Society and Solitude," 41 Ford, Henry, 64
Society and Solitude, 41, 42, Fourier, Charles, 217
168-69,182 Fox, George, 17
"Song of Nature," 281 Francis, Convers, 24,185
"Spiritual Laws," 27, 69,122, Franklin, Benjamin, 46, 74,
163-65 270-71
"Terminus," 43 Freedman's Institute, 205
"Thoreau," 249, 282, 289 French Revolution, 217
"Threnody," 167, 281 Freneau, Philip, 45-46
The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Frost, Robert, 277
Waldo Emerson, 18-19, Frothingham, O. B., 183
282-83 Fruitlands, 168
"The Transcendentalist," 82, 90 Fugitive Slave Law, 31,169-70,180,
"Uses of Great Men," 33,37, 63, 182,194-200, 206
76 Fuller, Margaret, 3, 24, 25, 33,36,
"The Uses of Natural History," 162, 2ii—12, 216—19, 22,1,
17, i°3 231-34, 237, 240, 241, 249, 276,
"Voluntaries," 204 281. See also Ralph
 318 Index

Fuller, Margaret, (continued) Herschel, John, 112-14,119

Waldo Emerson, Memoirs of Higginson, Thomas Wentworth,
Margaret fuller Ossoli 201, 213, 274
Furness, William Henry, 185 Hinduism, 165
Hitler, Adolph, 67
Gage, Matilda Joslyn, 211 Hoar, Elizabeth, 239
Galileo, 14 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 66-67,
Gandhi, Mohandas, 64 179
Garrison, William Lloyd, 184,185, Hopkins, Vivian C., 277
186,198, 205, 206-7 Howard University, 205
German Higher Criticism, 12,156 Howe, Daniel Walker, 74, 96,109
Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 67, 85, 86 Howe, Julia Ward, 212, 235-39, 241,
Gilford, Mrs. L.J. K., 274 244, 248, 274
Gilbert, Armida, 6, 211-49 Hume, David, 71,104
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 220 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 100-109
Ginsberg, Allen, 3
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Ilchester, Count and Countess of,
37, 72, 124, 131, 136, 215, 229
2.77 Individualism, 61-100
Gougeon, Len, 64,169,181-82, Ireland, Alexander, 15, 31,148,
192,199 276
Graff, Gerald, 277-78, 284 Irving, Washington, 14, 47
Gray, Asa, 136
Great Awakening, 154 Jackson, Andrew, 70, 85-86, 90
Greenberg, Robert M., 145 James, William, 3, 277
Griswold, Rufus, 243 Jefferson, Thomas, 46
Guyon, Jeanne Marie de la Jeffrey, Francis, 143
Motte-, 216 Jonson, Ben, 33
Jussieu, Antoine Laurent de, 15
Haeckel, Ernst, 124
Hafiz, 285 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 200
Hale, John Parker, 199 Kant, Immanuel, 71,104,157
Harvard University, 71,109-10,154, Keats, John, 235-36
205 Keller, Karl, 64
Hawthorne, Julian, 243 Keyes, Annie, 19
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 4, 47, 62, Kimball,J. Horace, 189-90
89, 243, 284 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 64
Hayden, Lewis, 197
Hayes, Woody, 64 Lafayette, Marquis de, 15
Hedge, Frederic Henry, 24,105 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 121,146
Henley, Don, 63-64 Landor, Walter Savage, 14
 Index 319

Lazarus, Emma, 274 Miller, Perry, 153

Leverenz, David, 88 Milton, John, 15,17, 37, 241, 277
Liberty Bell, 199 Minkins, Shadrach, 197
Lincoln, Abraham, 204-5, 271 Missouri Compromise, 200
Little, James, 274 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, 33,
Locke, John, 71, 90 37, 285. See also Ralph Waldo
Lovejoy, Elijah, 187 Emerson, "Montaigne, or
Luther, Martin, 17, 37 the Skeptic"
Lydenberg, John, 64 More, Hannah, 224, 226
Lyell, Charles, 31 Mott, Lucretia, 212, 221
Lyman, Theodore, 220 Mott, Wesley T, 5-6, 61-100, in
Mozoomdar, Protap Chunder,
McAleer, John, 280-81, 282 274
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 32 Myerson, Joel, 181-82
McGuffey, William Holmes, 4
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 14 Napoleon, 37,38, 87-88, 215
McWilliams, Wilson Carey, 67-68 Natural science, 101-50
Madison, James, 90 Nature, 101-50
Mahomet, 215 Neoplatonism, 151,157
Malthus, Thomas, 121 Neufeldt, Leonard, 282
Manifest Destiny, 70 New Criticism, 180-81
Marchand, Ernest, 83 New England Woman's Club,
Martineau, Harriet, 15,32, 98, 239
186 Newfield, Christopher, 93
Mason, Jeremiah, 238 New Jerusalem Magazine, 225
Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Newton, Isaac, 112,122,142
194 New-York Daily Tribune, 272
Massachusetts Woman Suffrage New Yorker, 66
Society, 238 New York Evening Post, 272
Masters, Edgar Lee, 63 New York Herald, 272
Matthiessen, F. O., 78, 277-78 New-York Times, 272
May, Samuel J., 185 New York Tribune, 245
Melville, Herman, 4, 47, 62, 89 Nichol, John Pringle, 123,147
Menu, 53 Nicoloff, Philip L., 279-80
Mexican War, 66, 70, 84,192,194 Nietzche, Friedrich, 67
Michael, John, 280 Nightingale, Florence, 243
Michelet, Jules, 238 Nike Athletics, 64
Middlesex County Anti-Slavery North American Review, 129, 282
Society, 186,197-98 Norton, Andrews, 162
Mill, John Stuart, 15, 242 The Norton Anthology of American
Miller, Arthur, 269 Literature, 282
 32O Index

Olson, Charles, 277 Ripley, Sarah Alden, 239

Owen, Richard, 32,124,136-38 Ripley, Sophia, 239-40
Robinson, David M., 6,113,133,
Packer, Barbara L., 94-95, 98, 99 151-77
Paine, Thomas, 46 Rockefeller, John D., 93-94
Paley, William, 104-7,109-11,115, Roget, Mark, 125-26,127-28
142 Romanticism, 77,114,151, 279
Palfrey, John Gorham, 199 Rossi, William, 6,101-50
Parker, Theodore, 24,162,185,194, Rossini, Gioachino Antonio, 32
206, 274 Rotch, Mary, 239
Parkes, Henry B., 64 Rusk, Ralph L., 146, 277
Paul, Sherman, 277
Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 24 Saadi, 285. See also Ralph Waldo
Pericles, 99 Emerson, "Saadi"
Philadelphia Inquirer, 241-42 Saint-Hilaire, Geoffroy, 128
Phillips, Wendell, 206 Sampson, George, 70
Plato, 33, 37, 53, 72,124,157, 215, Sanborn, F. B., 186
248, 277, 281, 285 Santayana, George, 277
Plutarch, 72, 96-97 Schelling, Friedrich, 157
Poe, Edgar Allan, 243 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 277
Pound, Ezra, 63 Schleiermacher, Freidrich, 157
Proclus, 33 School Suffrage Association, 238
Prospective Review, 129 Scottish Common Sense philoso-
Puritanism, 67, 82,152-54 phy, 71, 77, no
Sealts, Merton M. Jr., 81, 89
Quakers, 72 Second Church (Boston), 74, 86,
156-57,187
Rabelais, Francois, 215 Secord, James, 128
Rachel (actress), 238 Seneca Falls Woman's Rights
Reconstruction, 54, 205 Convention, 212-13
Reed, Sampson, 69, 72, 224-25 Seton, Mary, 219
Reed, Caleb, 224-25 Shakespeare, William, 17,30,32,
Reid, Thomas, 71 33, 37, 62, 68, 77, 82, 241, 274,
Religion, 151-77 277, 281, 285
Revolutionary War, 70, 77, 270 Sharp, Granville, 193
Richards, Evelleen, 121,124,126 Shaw, Robert Gould, 204
Richards, Robert J., 145 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 225
Richardson, Robert D., Jr., 69, Sigourney, Lydia Howard, 271
109,113,138,157,182, 283 Sims, Thomas, 198, 206
Ripley, Ezra, 186 Smith, Henry Nash, 88
Ripley, George, 162,168,185, 240 Social Darwinism, 64, 70
 Index 321

Socrates, 281 Transcendental Club, 24, 33,185

Spenser, Edmund, 30 Transcendentalism, 69, 70, 71, 73,
Stael, Madame de, 69 74-75, 82, 84, 86, 89-90, 91,
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 211-12 105,133, 151, 158-62,166,
Stein, Gertrude, 63 180
Stevens, Wallace, 63 Truth, Sojourner, 231
Stewart, Dugald, 71 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 83,
Stoics, 72, 92 85-86
Stone, Lucy, 213, 244 Twain, Mark, 4, 63
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 47, 206 Tyndall, John, 100-109
Strachey, Lytton, 243
Sturgis, Caroline. See Caroline Unitarianism, 70, 73, no, 112,
Sturgis Tappan 151-77,183-85
Sumner, Charles, 202, 205, 206
Swart, Koenraad W, 77 Van Buren, Martin, 187
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 37, 69, 72, Van Cromphout, Gustaaf, 96-97
84,116, 216, 225—26, 228 Verlake, 224
Versluis, Arthur, 165
Tappan, Caroline Sturgis, 33, Very, Jones, 33, 281
35-36, 234, 240 Victoria, Queen, 243
Tate, Allen, 64 Vietnam War, 64, 67
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 215 von Frank, Albert J., 83,182-83
Thackeray, William Makepeace,
32 Ward, Anna Barker, 230, 240
Thenard, Louis, 15 Ward, Samuel Gray, 230
Thome, James J., 189-90 Ware, Henry, Jr., 157,185
Thompson, George, 186 Ware, Henry, Sr., 154
Thoreau, Cynthia Dunbar, 186 Warner, Charles Dudley, 4
Thoreau, Helen, 186 Washington, George, 99, 270-71,
Thoreau, Henry David, 3, 24, 33, 275
34, 42, 52, 61-62, 63, 64, 66, Webster, Daniel, 73-74,197, 200,
101-2,162,180,182,194, 201, 236
203, 249, 276, 281. See also Westminster Review, 129
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whewell, William, 119
"Thoreau" Whicher, Stephen E., 277-83,
Thoreau Institute, 63-64 285-86, 289
Thoreau, Maria, 186 Whitefield, George, 154
Tiananmen Square, 64 Whitman, Walt, 3, 47, 49, 63, 277
Tilton, Eleanor M., 248 Wilkins, John Hubbard, 225
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 79 Williams, Wallace E., 280
Tolstoy, Leo, 64 Woman's Journal, 244-45
 322 Index

Woman's Rights Convention Woolf, Virginia, 219-20

(1850), 212-14, 243 Wordsworth, William, 16, 32, 69,
Woman's Rights Convention 72,157, 241
(1855), 214, 216, 221, 242, World's Anti-Slavery Convention
244-45 (1840), 212
Woman's rights movement, Wright, Conrad, 153
211-49, 274 Wyman, Jeffries, 136
Woman Suffrage Convention
(1869), 242 Young, Edward, 77