Where’s Ralph Waldo Emersons ?
There is less to the Bard of Concord than meets the eye
Jan 19, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 18 •
By Micah Mattix
The Weekly Standard
Last February, Harvard’s Belknap Press issued the final volume of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Collected Works, a project that had taken over 40 years. It was conceived at the beginning of what is now called “The Emerson Revival.” Before the 1970s, Harvard professor Lawrence Buell remarks, “even specialists could not be counted on to treat Emerson as anything better than an amateur warmup act.” Poststructuralism, however, provided a paradigm for “Emerson’s fragmentary, self-reflexive prose,” and as its star rose, so did Emerson’s.
Interest in Emerson has been going strong ever since. When I completed graduate school six years ago, no discussion of American literature seemed complete without reference to Emersonian this or Emersonian that: He was regularly brought up in discussions of contemporary poetry and contemporary politics, and once he was even suggested as a source of personal ressourcement during the grind of academic life. In the last half-decade, over 20 books solely or partly devoted to Ralph Waldo Emerson (excluding collections and reprints) have been published by major university presses.
But now that his Collected Works is complete, I’d like to suggest that we close the book on the Emerson Revival. Earlier scholars got Emerson right: He may serve “to swell a progress, start a scene or two,” but he is no American Hamlet, and his work is no great matter.
Most people agree that Emerson is not a philosopher. Logic is a problem for him. So are categories. In case it has been a while since you’ve read the Bard of Concord, let me give you just one example from his only sustained attempt at philosophical argument, “Nature.” He opens with the seemingly central distinction between “Nature” and “Soul” and almost immediately ties himself in knots. “Nature,” he writes, is “NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body.”
It’s odd to think of “my own body” as “not me,” but let’s move on. Stopping to think when reading Emerson rarely pays off. So what is “Soul”? If you think it’s “me,” you’re being entirely too consistent with your categories to benefit from Emersonian wisdom. No, it’s the spiritual force, the “Spirit,” the “infinite mind,” or the “Father,” that is distinct from both “me” and “not me” of which “me” and “not me” are symbols.
Actually, not symbols; the “me” is more like “a transparent eyeball,” and “Nature” is more like a river “whose floods of life stream around and through us,” in which we become “nothing” or “part or particle of God” or something. Emerson is a monist who uses the categories of dualism, and, because of this, he rarely makes sense.
How about Emerson’s much-lauded practical wisdom? Perhaps I’m missing something, but he is rarely either practical or wise. His aphorisms tend to be either chicken soup for the academic soul or the gobbledygook of a man who prefers the sounds of words to their meanings.
In the chicken soup category, we have: “The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers”; “All things are moral”; “To be great is to be misunderstood”; “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind”; and “If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God,” among others.
In the gobbledygook category, we have: “Your conformity explains nothing” (which I’ve been tempted to shout at my son’s Little League games); “The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps”; and “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put.”
Other sayings are downright troubling. “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. . . . Good and bad are but names,” for example. “I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency,” Emerson writes. “Let us never bow and apologize more.”
His central idea, of course, is “Trust thyself.” In his earlier essays, he encourages his readers to disregard the past, institutions, and dogma, and to obey “the eternal law” within. “I will not hide my tastes or aversions,” he writes. “I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.” But in a later essay on Napoleon, who seems to have embodied the “deep” self-trust Emerson lauds, he states confusingly (after praising Napoleon) that what made Napoleon’s egoism wrong was that it “narrowed, impoverished and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him.” And whose fault is this?
It was not Bonaparte’s fault. He did all that in him lay to live and thrive without moral principle. It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man and of the world which baulked and ruined him.
Read that again. It was the “world” that ruined Napoleon, not Napoleon who ruined the world.
To live “without moral principle” is a bad thing for Emerson. He writes in “Self-Reliance” that the “rejection of popular standards” is not “a rejection of all standards.” Yet he refuses to state how we are to decide which ones are good and which ones are bad other than by, again, looking within. The “law of consciousness abides,” he writes—except, of course, when it doesn’t, which is why Emerson concludes his essay on Napoleon with a confusing warning on the dangers of being (you guessed it) selfish: “Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual or selfish aim, will fail.” In short: “Trust thyself, but not always!”
While some Emersonians have tried to untangle Emerson’s prose, most have pivoted to the argument that what makes him worth reading is either his originality or his dazzling metaphors. In a recent issue of Humanities, Danny Heitman asks why Emerson has endured. His answer is that Emerson teaches us “that questioning orthodox belief was not only acceptable, but vital.” The Emerson scholar Donald McQuade, whom Heitman cites, states that it’s easy to forget how radical Emerson’s ideas were, because they have been so thoroughly assimilated: “Faith in human potential, belief in self-reliant individualism, resolute optimism, moral idealism, worshipful return to nature—these are but a few of Emerson’s principles that remain central to the national ideology he helped articulate and popularize.” He was not only the artificer of his age, Lazer Ziff has argued, but of America itself. Those who “believe themselves to be influenced by America,” Ziff writes, “are actually responding to what Emerson said America means.”
Yet, while Heitman (and McQuade) make hay about how Emerson challenged “the ecclesiastical and intellectual status quo,” it is more accurate to say that Emerson espoused the “new thinking” that had been bouncing around New England for a couple of years at just the right time. True, his address to the Harvard Divinity School was unpopular with the old professors, but the students loved it, as did a good portion of New England’s population.
In his excellent American Transcendentalism (2007), Philip Gura notes that Emerson was one of many Unitarian clergymen to be influenced by German idealism and to take part in the pejoratively named “Transcendental Club,” which included William Henry Channing, Orestes Brownson, William Henry Furness, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, and others. Gura writes that there were two basic strains of Transcendentalism: one focused on practical reforms in labor and education, and one (championed by Emerson) proposed “hyper-individualism” or “ego-theism.”
Emerson worked hard to control the meaning of the movement in his essays and lectures, ignoring figures such as Brownson, Channing, and Ripley in “Nature” and “The Transcendentalist.” But the work that Brownson did on behalf of laborers, that Bronson Alcott did with respect to education, and that Theodore Parker did on behalf of abolition were, if not perfect, far more important than Emerson’s bloated obscurities and inane aphorisms. To treat Emerson as the central genius of the “new thought” is to swallow his self-serving omissions whole hog.
Greatly reducing Emerson’s presence on course syllabi and in anthologies would free up space to consider other deserving figures. In the five-volume Norton Anthology of American Literature, for example, other than 50 pages devoted to Margaret Fuller, there are no selections from the work of any other Transcendentalist: nothing from Brownson’s many essays or treatise, nothing from Parker or Ripley, nothing from Channing or Furness. Nor is there anything from other, now largely forgotten 19th-century figures unassociated with the Transcendenlalists, such as Elizabeth Ellet, Charles Fenno Hoffman, and William Gilmore Simms, who might at least help to give a sense of the period’s diversity. By contrast, over 200 pages are devoted to Emerson.
Finally, regarding Emerson’s supposed poetic language: While some of his metaphors are pleasing enough, and while he can put together some nice extended metaphors, he too often lacks control. Mixed metaphors abound. “Embosomed for a season in nature,” he writes (emphasis mine), “whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?”
Can “sliding scales” identify? According to Emerson, they can: “The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.” Can light or an appulse reproduce itself? Yes, says Emerson: “Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech.”
Even when Emerson does stay on course, the scenery often distracts: “Life,” Emerson writes in “Experience,” “is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.” Translation: The adolescent years are rough.
Emerson did get one thing right. In his “Divinity School Address,” he says: “But the man who aims to speak . . . as fashion guides . . . babbles. Let him hush.” So be it. The academic fashions that revived Emerson have guided for too long. It’s time for him to hush so that other voices might speak.
Micah Mattix is assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University.
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