The Priest Departs, the Divine Literatus Comes: Emerson
Prometheus’s confession—“in a word, I detest all gods”—is its own confession, its own slogan against all Gods in heaven and earth who do not recognize man’s consciousness of himself as the highest divinity.
KARL MARX, On the Difference Between Democritus’
and Epicurus’ Philosophy of Nature
(Doctoral Dissertation, 1841)
When Ralph Waldo Emerson lay dying in 1882, a friend who watched by his bedside on one of the last nights was astonished to hear him “repeating in his sonorous voice, not yet weakened, fragments of sentences, almost as if reciting. It seemed strange and solemn in the night, alone with him, to hear these efforts to deliver something evidently with a thread of fine recollection in it, his voice as deep and musical as ever.”
The old enchanter was dying, as he had lived, by words. Emerson the writer had lived from day to day by talking to himself in his journal. What was instinctive to him, elemental, was the fragment, the stray observation, the aphorism or epigram that came from an absolute confidence that his perfect freedom made him a vessel of truth and a link to the divine mind. No wonder Emerson found any right sentence sufficient to itself. Though his memory began to fail long before his death, the lack of continuity in his thought was not a hindrance. He was Orpheus, playing what music he liked. Even in his best days as one of the most active lecturers in America, he did not always think it necessary to read a manuscript consecutively. In full sight of an audience he would shuffle pages as if he were looking for some favorite passage superior to argument. When he was unable to write anything new, his daughter Ellen and James Elliot Cabot strung together passages from his old lectures. Emerson had been doing the same thing for years. Ellen was so embarrassed by his reluctance to follow a manuscript that she once sewed his pages together to keep him to the original text.
Strict organization had never been Emerson’s strong point, and in fact it had little to do with his genius for dreaming his way into a subject, for finding himself in his own depths. “A man finds out,” he wrote in his journal for 1859, “that there is somewhat in him that knows more than he does. Then he comes presently to the curious question, Who’s Who? which of these two is really me? the one that knows more, or the one that knows less? the little fellow or the big fellow?” In his “savings bank,” the journal from which he winnowed his best sentences (this was more than Yankee thrift), he formed public utterance from single sentences and passages that were sudden stabs “at the very axis of reality.” Emerson was an organic writer and instinctive stylist who even on the platform seemed to be waiting for his own voice to astonish him. Reading him in an age that finds exotic his insistence that the independent “soul” is all man’s freedom, intelligence, and power, we can still hear the man who dazzled so many brave minds in the nineteenth century. Emerson was the contemporary who discovered them to themselves.
A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.
There are innocent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties.
Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.… Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.
The years after the Civil War were to be one long anticlimax to rhapsodies from Emerson’s genius for personal faith. Then Emerson himself became “a god in ruins,” reduced to the elegance of style that never failed him.
The apostle of perfect personal power—to be gained from the energy and imagination no longer sacrificed to formal religion—was to be misunderstood as a preacher of rugged individualism. Emerson’s unchurched, free, visionary, and ideal “man thinking” would not be the lodestar for twenty million driven Americans. “Things are in the saddle,” he noted as early as the Mexican War (1846), “and ride mankind.” Emerson would eventually be understood as a moralist only. Even before the Civil War there was a subtle shift in his own thinking from the individual as supreme power to power’s proving the worth of the successful individual. Yet in the great early days of Nature, The American Scholar, the Divinity School Address, and “Self-Reliance,” when he was the rising American oracle and a threat to the orthodox, he was all too aware that he wrote by “inspiration,” in short flights that excited him but left him wittily resigned to the accidents of composition. After all, it was at his desk that he discovered what a miracle life can be. To his friend Carlyle, whose furious talk-style he admired:
Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.
For my journals, which I dot here at home day by day, are full of disjointed dreams, audacities, unsystematic irresponsible lampoons of systems, 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 of all men whether life may not be poetic as well as stupid?
In 1851 he noted to himself that “I found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs.” Emerson had the highest confidence in the perceptive powers of his “soul”—in his intellectual gift as a seer. It was the “self-trust” that the founders of a new religion expect of their followers—and that the followers adapt to their own temperament and interest. Once he had found himself in his isolation, a young widower who had the courage to leave the ministry and the church, he became anything but modest or a respecter of modesty. “Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.” To write so much by fits and starts, to make the orphic his method, made him believe in the virtues of passivity. “I am a natural reader, and only a writer in the absence of natural writers. In a true time, I should never have written.”
Whenever that true time may have been, the times now needed an Emerson. New England, the home of our first American saints, did not suit Emerson’s perfectionism. Its intellectual class—the first thing he looked for in any examination of society—was confined to ministers and pedants. Emerson, whom the old Whitman in Camden summed up shrewdly, “He is best as critic, or diagnoser,” did not think of himself as a “prophet” even when he wrote like one in The American Scholar and the Divinity School Address. He was a clairvoyant, a throwback to the great ages of faith who, by identifying faith with the individual soul’s gift for faith, addressed himself to a future of miraculous “self-actualization,” as the young Karl Marx called it. Emerson thus left everything open to the self that Whitman in the first raptures of Leaves of Grass called “miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts.” Nothing was to prove more various than this self, nothing more indeterminate than self-actualization. No American writer ever played more roles than Emerson the inspirer, the “mystic,” the poet, and the inhuman perfectionist. On the lecture platform he was blandness itself, the sage on all subjects. Reporting his mind in his journal, he astonished and disconcerted himself. His mind was porous, plastic, shrewd; his situation in rough, indifferent, hard-drinking Concord was one of isolation.*
Emerson’s disposition was to sit back, to let the world come to him. “Society” was a problem.
I, cold because I am hot—cold at the surface only as a sort of guard and compensation for the fluid tenderness of the core—have much more experience than I have written there, more than I will, more than I can write. In silence we must wrap much of our life, because it is too fine for speech, because also we cannot explain it to others, and because somewhat we cannot yet understand.
His real life was “poetic,” ceaseless thought. “Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.” He would have to be the eternal spectator, making judgments on people from his private mountaintop. Carrying this disposition into society, he knew how it affected others. It mattered less to him than the objectionableness of society. “We descend to meet.” A priggish saying. The great man never quite left off being the great man. But he was far from considering himself the best kind of writer—he was just one peculiarly necessary to “This Age, This Country, Oneself.” “Natural writers” were perhaps those, like Isaiah and Jesus, who did not have to write to be understood. Only such represented a “true time.”
Emerson respected prophets too much to regard himself as one. He did identify all good writing, his own not least, with some fundamental charge of spirit that gave new life to the reader. He “greeted” his contemporaries as an age of hope. Democracy in America was only one revolutionary challenge of the time. If limitless faith in the individual seemed natural to the century’s progress, the individual would transcend the slavish societies of the past by finding divinity within himself. Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848) hailed the century as mankind’s greatest material triumph, made possible by the triumph of middle-class individualists over feudalism and its handmaiden, religion. Freed from religion, opium of the people, mankind would rise to unparalleled heights of creativity and subject nature completely to its material needs. The elder Henry James (a Utopian socialist) noticed that “the kingdom of man is at hand.” The great gospel of the nineteenth century was inevitable progress, confirmed by evolution and promising, with the release of man from physical drudgery and superstition, his moral improvement. Marx was to suggest that man would be free to confront his religious yearnings only when relieved of the struggle for existence. The ascent of man was not to be doubted. The “religion of humanity,” as George Eliot called it, would be the free man’s worship.
Emerson, with his invincible belief that the universe is on man’s side and that there is “compensation” for our losses, remained loftily spiritual in his tastes. He despised fiction because it was mundane; in every “romantic” novelist of his time he saw mere contrivance. Though himself an occasional poet and even one for public occasions, his own taste in contemporary poetry was indifferently conventional. The famous exception remains Leaves of Grass, which Emerson found
the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat & mean. I give you joy of your free & brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire.
Nothing here suggests how much Emerson valued Whitman as a poet. Whitman’s “message” must have been glimpsed by Emerson as the farthest extension of his own, Whitman’s ecstatic lines a startling complement to rhapsodic paragraphs of Nature. Emerson the anthologist never thought to include “the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed.” (It would have blown up a tedious schoolbook like Parnassus.) When Whitman was preparing a third edition in 1860, Emerson went to see him in Boston and attempted to dissuade him from including Children of Adam. Emerson had responded fervently to Whitman’s first edition because of its “great power,” which made him throw off all his usual boredom with polite letters in New England. “I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire.” Thoreau called Whitman’s second edition “a great primitive poem—an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp.” Emerson would have liked this said about himself. He felt his own literary power to be “aboriginal.” In his great essay “The Poet” (1844) he wrote out what he thought he was—a poet of the type before literary specialization, a poet in the “original” sense of the word, a poet who spoke directly to other men out of his representative nature. All true writers were types of “the poet,” not subdivided and classified but integral of mind and spirit, able to see life whole and to express the “All.”
Walt Whitman in 1871 was still trying to explain himself to an unheeding country. He insisted in Democratic Vistas, though his voice was diminished in hope from 1855, that “the problem of humanity all over the world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The priest departs, the divine literatus comes.” This is just what Emerson thought. Divine or not, the literatus (only Whitman could have given such elevation to the word) had a literary mission to his raw new country. It was to be founded on the comprehensive power released to the individual by his emancipation from institutions. Justification by faith, crucial to Protestantism, was to leave self and soul, every person and every mind, free. After all, Emerson had made himself free, had addressed himself to every opportunity. “Ours is the revolutionary age,” he wrote in 1839, “bringing man back to consciousness.” Emerson in his great early period was exalted, perfectly confident, as he confronted every difficulty under the American sun. To this day his readers cannot find the right name for his composite role. He was indifferent to labels and in 1850 shrugged them off—“Call yourself preacher, pedlar, lecturer, tinman, grocer, scrivener, jobber, or whatever lowest name your business admits, and leave your lovers to find the fine name.”
Emerson was not just an “essayist,” and his ideas were not original enough to make him a “philosopher.” The literary categories that Emerson derided are now so fixed that Emerson’s role as a thinker-at-large (who became a presiding influence) seems more complex than in fact it was. America does not have names for literary men like Diderot who are fomenters of a new consciousness; Victorian “prophets” like Arnold, Ruskin, Mill, Carlyle; rebels of thought like Nietzsche, William James, Shaw, Sartre.
Emerson as much as anyone in his time—and perhaps a little more—remains one of them. His whole effort as writer and speaker was to persuade “the American this new man” to be a new man. He could not imagine literature’s not seeking to uproot society by changing the individual. He could not imagine a new world of thought without literature as its medium. Literature was central, and literature was transformation. The writer was a sacred figure through whom new life passed to the people. Without Carlyle’s storminess at the degradation of modern man, but with just as much authority, Emerson tacitly considered himself as much of a hero as his country needed. The nineteenth-century cult of genius touched everyone of the “more prophetic” sort. Even Melville (“Nay, I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow”) had to admit that
Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture, he is an uncommon man. Swear he is a humbug—then is he no common humbug.… There is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctively perceptible. This I see in Mr. Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool;—Then had I rather be a fool than a wise man.—I love all men who dive.
Emerson sometimes called himself a “speaker.” As in any age of a new Gospel, his effective voice was valued before it was read, was “published before it was printed.” Emerson said that the age was revolutionary because it was “bringing man back to consciousness.” But as his surly friend Carlyle told him, he was “a new man in a new country,” and he regarded himself, as many an American then did, as a novelty—the Robinson Crusoe of this island, its first settler and prime discoverer. And it was a country of the spirit as well as a new world. The ex-minister preaching “self-reliance” in all things, starting with organized religion, was God-intoxicated. What went out of him in letters of fire became far more material in the eyes and ears of the American congregation. To himself and for himself, Emerson was many things. His habitual benevolence and insistent optimism made him suspect, even in his own time, as a type of confidence man. But in his great beginning, when the minister of Second Church in Boston unfrocked himself and then offered himself as “man thinking” to any lecture audience that would have him, he was that rarest of all modern intellectuals—an ecstatic, a primitive Christian: “For this was I born & came into the world to deliver the self of myself to the Universe from the Universe: to do a certain benefit which Nature would not forego, nor I be discharged from rendering, & then immerge again into the holy silence & eternity, out of which as a man I arose.”
If in his authority he remained a clergyman and something too self-righteous for a man of genius (the “proof” of his private and pure religion was the “moral sentiment,” which he thought universal and permanent, a “law” of nature confirmed by science), his own faith was deep and wild, sometimes beyond his own reach.
On September 9, 1832, the twenty-nine-year-old minister of Second Church in Boston preached to his regretful congregation a farewell sermon in which he explained why he could not regard the communion service as ordained by scripture. The Lord’s Supper was nothing more than the Jewish Passover feast. Emerson then resigned his pastorate. By the end of the year he was off to Europe; like Melville’s Ahab, he sailed on a Christmas day. When he returned almost a year later, he was ready to publish his first book, Nature. Emerson’s real ministry had just begun.
The formal grounds on which Emerson resigned his pastorate were hardly enough to explain his leaving the church and the ministry. He had really left all formal religion behind him. Emerson was beginning to understand that total “self-reliance”—from his innermost spiritual promptings—would be his career and his fate. The death from tuberculosis of his wife, Ellen, at nineteen, after less than two years of marriage, had increased his intellectual isolation and downright boredom as he went his clerical rounds. He, too, had been in danger from tuberculosis, the New England calamity of the time that was to kill two of his brothers. He and Ellen had loved each other wildly amidst her many frightening “scaldings” of blood. He never got over Ellen. Losing her made him even more impatient with his old way of life, destroyed many clerical cautions.
Emerson always maintained a preacher’s professional unction, but any established creed he found intolerable. Remote and a shade too literary as he often seemed, he awed a majority of his congregation. They pressed him to stay, kept putting off acceptance of his resignation; for a year after he left he continued to receive his salary. Emerson was always to have a positive effect on people who did not know what he was talking about.
If it was hard for Second Church to let its minister go, he also recognized his going as strange. The rumor in Boston was that he had gone mad. The former president John Quincy Adams was to charge that
a young man named Ralph Waldo Emerson … after failing in the every-day vocations of a Unitarian preacher and schoolmaster, starts a new doctrine of transcendentalism, declares all the old revelations superannuated and worn out, and announces the approach of new revelations and prophecies. Garrison and the non-resistant abolitionists, Brownson and the Marat democrats, phrenology and animal magnetism, all come in, furnishing each some plausible rascality as an ingredient for the bubbling cauldron of religion and politics.
No one had ever been more truly born to the ministry than Emerson, and when had an Emerson not been in the ministry? For nine successive generations in New England, Emersons had been ministers. To go over the formal record of Emerson’s leaving—his farewell sermon on the Lord’s Supper, the affectionate letter of resignation, the reluctant vote to accept the resignation—is to summon up the departure scene on an old Greek frieze. A young man is leaving his family; they hold out their hands to him; though already on his way, he looks back to them. Even after Emerson’s resignation had been accepted he was occasionally to appear in his old pulpit and many another. “I like a church; I like a cowl,” he was to begin a famous poem in 1839. “Yet not for all his faith can see / Would I that cowlèd churchman be.”
“In Massachusetts,” Emerson wrote in 1839, “a number of young and adult persons are at this moment the subject of a revolution.
Not in churches, or in courts, or in large assemblies; not in solemn holidays, where men were met in festal dress, have these pledged themselves to new life, but in lonely and obscure places, in servitude, in solitude, in solitary compunctions and shames and fears, in disappointments, in diseases, trudging beside the team in the dusty road, or drudging, a hireling in other men’s cornfields, schoolmasters who teach a few children rudiments for a pittance, ministers of small parishes of the obscurer sects, lone women in dependent condition, matrons and young maidens, rich and poor, beautiful and hard-favored, without conceit or proclamation of any kind, have silently given in their several adherence to a new hope.
These people were Christians who no longer needed a church—moralists and pietists, earnestly independent souls in the oldest Protestant tradition of the “priesthood of all believers.” They were not wholly emancipated, like the George Sand of whom Emerson noted enviously that she “owes to her birth in France her entire freedom from the cant and snuffle of our dead Christianity.” Emerson was not the first and certainly not the last minister to make conscience and imagination his church. He was simply more gifted, startlingly the literatus—unlike George Ripley, who was to establish Brook Farm and later become the New York Tribune’s literary critic under Horace Greeley, or the passionate reformer Theodore Parker, who was for the most part excluded from the churches. Emerson’s marked literary grace in the pulpit had created a bond between him and the congregation. This accord was based more on the man’s extraordinary presence than on an understanding of his mind; it foretells the respect his lecture audiences were to feel for the “mystic” who impressed them by talking over their heads. After he had spoken for the first time on the West Coast in a San Francisco church, a paper reported, “All left the church feeling that an elegant tribute had been paid to the creative genius of the Great First Cause, and that a masterly use of the English language had contributed to that end.”
Emerson’s estrangement from doctrinal Christianity was absolute. All his teaching as a sage-at-large and the exaltation that can still be felt behind the style of Nature, The American Scholar, the Divinity School Address, “Self-Reliance,” “The Poet,” reflect the “dignity” that impressed even a hostile T. S. Eliot and that rests on the minister’s revelation that he did not need a church. Not “God” was dead but the church! And since the church was the Past, it was really only the Past that was “dead.” Freed from obedience to superstition, dogma, hierarchy, and Sunday routine, man on the crest of his inborn faith would find in himself all that men had ever meant by God and thereby become more-than-man-had-ever-been: types of Prometheus and Zarathustra and, from the mountaintop of the Superman or Hero, deliverers of mankind.
New England as a society had been founded on the church. Pilgrims and Puritans had arrived as bodies of organized belief. Amidst the solitude and fright of the wild Western shore, it was always to the church, the essential “body” of believers, the church as emblem, justification, release, that Emerson’s ancestors had clung. The minister was their visible connection to the faith. Wherever radical Protestantism returned to the austerity and directness of the Gospels, it identified the whole people as the “Lord’s People.” The preacher reinforced this identity. By giving out the Word to his people, he assured continuity to their spiritual life, became the teacher of his tribe, a “vessel” to all those dependent on his soul-restoring eloquence.
Emerson looked as if he had been born to this role. His remoteness assured him of success even on the lecture platform. The classic New England minister was not a sweaty actor like Henry Ward Beecher but, like Hawthorne’s Dimmesdale, an oracle suitably distant from the souls he never ceased to instruct. Emerson lamented his inability to reach people easily but was not downcast by this traditional failing. He looked the Puritan minister in his “lofty” bearing, his very leanness—the Yankee leanness which someone said made him look like a scruple. The photographs of him in his prime show a face so assured that it now looks archaic. William James eventually came to adore and even to “represent” Emerson in the succession of American thinkers. But in 1874 he wrote that Emerson’s “refined idiocy seems as if it must be affectation.” The contribution of spirituality to so much self-respect was widely noted. Condescension toward those lacking in grace was also marked. The serenity famous in every decade seemed impermeable to admirers and suspicious critics. “O you man without a handle!” the elder Henry James burst out. “Shall one never be able to help himself out of you, according to his needs, and be dependent only upon your fitful tippings-up?” An inhuman equanimity continued into his letters, which always tried to correct the general impression of his remoteness. Every report of his conversation is surprising—he is cagey, clever, unweariedly performing.
Emerson was to have the greatest possible influence on his contemporaries, on other writers, on the myth of the American as being uniquely free. Whitman was eventually let down by Emerson’s prudish objections to Leaves of Grass, but he would have been nothing without Emerson’s presence in the American picture. He sized up Emerson’s temperament as “almost ideal.” Talking to Horace Traubel in Camden, the old man appreciated in Emerson a “transparency” properly mysterious.
His quality, his meaning has the quality of the light of day, which startles nobody. You cannot put your finger upon it yet there is nothing more palpable, nothing more wonderful, nothing more vital and refreshing. There are some things in the expression of this philosoph, this poet, that are full mates of the best, the perennial masters, and will so stand in fame and the centuries. America in the future, in her long train of poets and writers, while knowing more vehement and luxuriant ones, will, I think, acknowledge nothing nearer [than] this man, the actual beginner of the whole procession—and certainly nothing purer, cleaner, sweeter, more canny, none, after all, more thoroughly her own and native. The most exquisite taste and caution are in him, always saving his feet from passing beyond the limits, for he is transcendental of limits, and you see underneath the rest a secret proclivity, American maybe, to dare and violate and make escapades.
Emerson left the church because he was happy with his mind as it was. He could subsist outside the church because, living on his mind and being responsive to its every prompting, he was satisfied that the “active soul” was an actual mirror of the world. The Greeks may have discovered that the “world” replicates the human mind; Emerson lived this fact without philosophy’s sense that perception can be duplicitous. The “soul” or “mind” had for him such total access to reality that it virtually replaced it. Nature is there to serve man. Mind is everywhere the master. The soul as pure perception, pathway into All Things, became for Emerson the universe as an “open secret.” Once he discovered this secret, he saw that there was no secret. The soul was not just the perfect knower but the real medium of existence. We live in disembodied consciousness as God does. No wonder that John Jay Chapman, who thought Emerson the last barrier to the mob spirit, admitted that
if an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an Italian opera than he would by reading Emerson’s volumes. He would learn from the Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin.
The French biologist Jacques Monod attributed the success of religion to the fact that it makes it possible for us to love the world. Emerson, by placing the world at the disposal of our “ripe perceptive powers,” certainly made it lovable.
This was a creative mind’s sweet illusion—the world is forever moving in the direction of our thought. For Emerson everything came back to the personal sense of power that seized the universe at large as its corollary and friend. “Nature,” everything outside of us, waiting on us alone, perceived and possessed by us alone, easily makes itself known. God speaks through us alone, so He must be in us. We share His power. Even to radical Protestantism, whose hope for emancipation from worldly institutions like the church was finally achieved (and perhaps terminated) in Emerson, his insistence on “the infinitude of the private mind” (“the only doctrine I have ever taught”) was understandably shocking. In his intoxication with the religious sufficiency of his creative powers Emerson paraded before all men a doctrine sufficient only to great creative talent. The farmers and shopkeepers at his lectures were no doubt glad to hear that the individual in America had no limit but the sky.
Emerson aroused something more specific in creative minds from Matthew Arnold to Nietzsche. In America, Thoreau and Whitman, reverberating to Emerson’s revelation, were the nearest to him, the most gifted and lasting in the American line that took the unlimited self as its greatest resource. Thoreau told Moncure Conway that he found in Emerson “the same perfection as the objects he studied in external nature, his ideals real and exact.” Matthew Arnold was moved to write on the flyleaf of Emerson’s Essays:
Strong is Soul, and wise, and beautiful:
The seeds of godlike power are in us still:
Gods are we, Bards, Saints, Heroes, if we will—
(Only Melville among American writers would have thought of Arnold’s next line: “Dumb judges, answer, truth or mockery?”)
Emerson naturally associated his gospel with a great Protestant tradition of independence. He would have associated himself gladly with Keats’s letter of May 3, 1818, on the peculiarly Protestant virtues of Milton and Wordsworth:
In [Milton’s] time Englishmen were just emancipated from a great superstition and Men had got hold of certain points and resting places in reasoning which were too newly born to be doubted, and too much opposed by the Mass of Europe not to be thought etherial and authentically divine.… The Reformation produced such immediate and great benefits, that Protestantism was considered under the immediate eye of heaven.…
And Emerson would have sniffed at T. S. Eliot’s condemnation of D. H. Lawrence (a rebel against the Congregationalist Church, like so many New Englanders):
We are not concerned with the author’s beliefs, but with the orthodoxy of sensibility and with the vast sense of tradition.… And Lawrence is, for my purposes, an almost perfect example of the heretic.
… The point is that Lawrence started life wholly free from any restriction of tradition or institution, that he had no guidance except the Inner Light, the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity.
Emerson, relying on a broad tradition of religious independence, may have carried it so far as to end its connection with religion. His revelation—which became his esthetic as well as his religion—was that the important things come easily to the man who just waits for them. God is easy to achieve—“It,” the “Over-Soul,” the “First Cause.” Lawrence, though he recognized the “inrushes” Emerson got from his God, laughed that Emerson was connected only on “the Ideal phone.” This may explain Emerson’s hold on sceptics.
Emerson provided relief from the commercial round and from the most politicized society of the nineteenth century. His appeal, like that of so many rare spirits in the history of religion, was that he was altogether exceptional. Neither Thoreau nor Whitman, nor any one of his many acolytes and admirers, resembles Emerson in his gift of total conviction. William James in a positivist climate had great trouble finding objective reasons for his religious promptings. He was to conclude in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) that such promptings must not be denied as evidence of God’s existence. From despising Emerson’s attitude of fixed benevolence, James came to admire him, even to envy him. Religiously, Dr. William James the professional scientist could never go the whole way. Emerson began with such an absolute of personal conviction that he left himself no room in which to develop.
Emerson’s God-intoxication was communicated to most people without his performing miracles. Emerson never admitted—he never understood—that so much belief in the soul is a gift. He never doubted that his conviction must pass into his audience and become the gospel of a New World. But was it “religion” or the “word” that he imparted? Was he more the evangel or the always immaculate stylist? Near the end of the twentieth century the rebellious Catholic theologian Hans Küng was to concede that if his was the church of the sacraments, Protestantism was “the church of the word.” Emerson would have liked that. “Golden sentences” came out of his mouth even when he was dying. He had been trained in pulpit eloquence, of course, but his innate artist’s sense of elegance and discrimination, rhetorical strategy and effect, gave him a particular taste for prophetic upwelling and scriptural cut and thrust. He confidently assumed that “soul” is the same as style, for he was so natural a stylist that conventional writers could be put down as conventional souls. No one can miss in the “saintly” Emerson the immodesty of a superb artist on familiar terms with inspiration and thus with “God”: “The maker of a sentence, like the other artist, launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and Old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of a wild, creative delight.”
How spontaneously Emerson reported the explosion of spirit behind his appearance of restraint. The connection between faith and creativity is now so dim that we jealously wonder what Yeats meant when he said that “belief makes the mind abundant.” Emerson himself no longer fortifies a free personal religion. God is dead even for Allen Ginsberg. Emerson may have helped to kill “self-reliance” in religion by dispensing it too confidently from his own subjectivity. But he did recognize himself as a revenant from early ages of faith—a primordial, “aboriginal” kind of early Christian, thoroughly tuned into his unconscious, who knew how to awaken dead souls, to strike, as only the God-intoxicated can.
“I like,” he wrote in his journal, “dry light, and hard clouds, hard expressions, and hard manners.” If Emerson looked and sounded the sage (the wise man of the American tribe who showed his ever more secular countrymen where to look for faith), it was because of his genius for compression. He reduced his style, like his life, to fundamentals. Unlike his literary son Thoreau, he did not train himself to live the absolute. Emerson lived in his study and in mild walks around Concord farms. Thoreau constantly dared himself to invade and master inhospitable country. Thoreau showed a lifelong need to live nature, to roll himself up in it, to enjoy “to the full” woods and fields as his erotic complement. He carried everywhere—even in Concord village, where he despised his neighbors for not being spiritual enough—the myth so dear to the American heart. The solitary man is the virtuous man as well as the more curious explorer of existence. A key sentence in Thoreau’s lifelong journal: “The world appears to me uninhabited.” Another: “It was not always dry land where we dwell.” Emerson gave Thoreau and Whitman the satisfaction—so strange to the European mind—of being not merely an original but the incarnation of originality.
Even Whitman, so amazed by his gifts that he pretended he had invented them—even Whitman, with his posturing and his need to sell himself—made use of the American penchant for turning oneself into Adam. In America, Adam was not just the first man but sometimes the only man, the true God-man, Osiris and Christ and other masquerades for Whitman in his gallery. We know that Whitman was original, for his own literary culture resembles a musty secondhand bookstore. (Whatever is not firsthand in Whitman is fake.) His greatest lines are truly “a song of myself.”
Emerson’s compound of ideas—taken from Plato and neo-Platonists, Kant, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle—could have made him just another New England minister in the “ice house of Unitarianism” trying to keep up an intellectual front in the face of religious doubt. In fact Emerson impressed even the most hostile critics by his lonely certitude. Originality of thought Emerson did not claim or even want. Nor was it authority of style, which he took for granted, that made Emerson the teacher of the tribe and “the actual beginner of the whole procession.” It was his paramount discovery that in an increasingly faithless world he possessed the gift of faith. Belief was something else, formal, a creed; belief usually owed everything to someone else. It was secondary to the heart’s natural loyalties. Though Emerson’s fame and influence came from the joyous ease with which he imparted the “open secret of the universe,” the nature of his appeal, attested even by people who did not claim to understand him, was that it was himself he was imparting. He was the enraptured realization that no one now was in this original relation to nature and a new country.
Emerson as an eponym for freshness, discovery, openness, for all that was hopeful in his country and his century, has survived his actual message because people can still take from him the cardinal theme: a brave beginning. And no one can read Nature or his early essays and journals without sharing his thrill that in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, “glad to the brink of fear,” he recognized in himself a vessel of the Holy Spirit. The thrill, the positive exultation in all the early writings, lies not in any delusion of intellectual originality but in the primacy that he shared with Nature and America itself.
America itself was the original. The confrontation with it by even the most seasoned men—explorers, missionaries, worldly philosophers and cynics—made things new. When John Locke said, “In the beginning all things were America,” that was a figure of speech. But the constant raid on the vast emptiness made a person of Nature for even the practical and superstitious. Nature was wild but waiting to be exploited; as Emerson noted contentedly, it exists to serve. Many men were to make practical use of the unique opportunity; many more, expecting bonanza, fell by the wayside. (It was also typical of the Yankee Emerson to note that the actual founders of small towns in the West invariably failed.) But the first men of literary genius—Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville—characteristically turned their raid on Nature into a book, the world at large into a fable. In their own mythology they acted out the role of primal man. Emerson in his journal, 1840: “I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, ‘This must thou eat.’ And I ate the world.”
The genius of primitive Christianity lent itself to Emerson’s belief that his soul was the center of a cosmic drama. John Milton seems to have infused his spacious mind into American Puritans whose influence over their new country he could not have predicted. Emerson certainly felt himself to be of the greatest possible importance to the cosmos. Which may be why he conceived of empty nature surrounding him as the unutterable stretches of space through which Satan fell. The American as “first man” was a hero of this drama because of all that he could lay his hand to. The gift of conviction that made a new age possible occurred for Emerson in the instant connection between faith and the word. The word alighting in his mind was more than a signal and symbol of faith; it was evidence that his faith was real, that it lived in the word as well as by the word. By the word he passed out faith. And in this century of the word, when literature was still central to thinking men, the word was open to all.
Emerson’s sense of his own authority—so strong that one can hardly miss the exultation behind it—has been dismissed by conservative critics who charge that transcendentalists in the age of Jackson felt themselves to be superfluous. In fact they were simply out of touch with the hard new boisterous times of democratic emergence. Emerson’s contempt for the organized church still gives offense; one churchly literary critic was capable of saying in the 1950s that Emerson was responsible for Hitler. Not to see that Emerson’s life work began in a religious crisis that he shared with the age, that the stream of his writings began because by leaving the church he felt that he also had a solution for others, is to miss Emerson’s central need to overcome all scepticism.
As there was God before the church existed, so God might be rediscovered by striking out on one’s own. The Kingdom of God is within you or it is nowhere. Tolstoy as a young officer during the Crimean War wrote:
A conversation about Divinity and Faith has suggested to me a great, stupendous idea, to the realization of which I feel capable of devoting my life. That idea is the founding of a new religion corresponding to the present stage of mankind: the religion of Christ but purged of dogmas and absolutism—a practical religion, not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth.
*One of literary America’s best-kept secrets. “Always remember that the literary men of Concord have never been popular there during their lives. The Concord people were ignorant, low lived, unambitious save in the money making line, and many large estates were squandered by farmers who neglected their farms, and lounged in the Tavern bar rooms week in and week out.… Do not forget that Emerson began this work, that his first work was to educate his townsmen, to uplift them, that the literary history of Concord has grown up entirely since 1829, or the birth of the lyceum.” (Remembrances of Concord and the Thoreaus: Letters of Horace Hosmer to Dr. S. A. Jones, edited by George Hendrick, 1977)
Hosmer noted acidly that taverns in Concord were scarcely a mile apart, that there were three large taverns in the center of town, and that all stores sold liquor by the gallon or quart. The manufacture of rum barrels was the chief industry; “ministers drink and got drunk, helplessly so.”