Anyone who would comprehend America must first read Emerson. Although he was not primarily a political thinker - he constantly complained of being dragged from his desk by public affairs - his work is still the smoothest and most penetrating key to an understanding of what he called "that great sloven continent".
Others, most obviously Tocqueville, may have a broader grasp of the machinery of American life, but Emerson saw straight into its soul. Indeed, it might be said that Emerson was one of the makers of that soul. His early essay, 'The American Scholar', delivered as an address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in August, 1835, was described by his biographer, the great New England jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, as "our intellectual Declaration of Independence", while 'Self-Reliance', published in 1841, might be considered an unofficial appendix to the Constitution of the United States.
Lawrence Buell, a professor of English at Harvard University and a leading Emerson scholar, sketches a definition of self-reliance as
an ethos or practice intended to retrieve a person from the state in which adult people usually languish, acting and thinking according to what is expected of you rather than according to what you most deeply believe. It requires not impulsive assertion of personal will but attending to what the "whole man" tells you.
Self-reliance as Emerson conceives it is no boy-scout aspiration or Smilesian recipe for merely personal success, but a tough and demanding philosophy born out of the New England pioneer spirit, that spirit formed by the Founding Fathers who stood on Plymouth Rock with rotting old Europe at their backs and the untamed wilderness before them. There are dangers, of course, in Emerson's bootstrap theory. "How", Buell asks, "can we know when we are being self-reliant rather than merely headstrong?" He quotes another Emerson scholar's argument that Emerson's fundamentalist insistence on the primacy of the self implies, in Buell's paraphrase, "a forfeiture of individualism and acquiescence to dominant cultural forces that make for a parallel between Emerson's life course and the rise of corporatism in nineteenth-century America". Buell reinforces the point by noting that Emerson's work was taken by such figures as Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller "as underwriting the rugged individualism of captains of industry", and by midwestern businessmen "as reinforcing a middlebrow chamber-of-commerce work ethic". Indeed, one can see in the recent election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the governorship of California an instance of American belief in and admiration for the self-made, self-reliant man.
Emerson was one of the few thinkers, American or otherwise, who clearly recognised that the American Republic was neither an "anti-Europe" nor an attempt to get Europe right in new surroundings, but a wholly original and independent phenomenon. "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close," he wrote in 'The American Scholar'. "The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests." America's day had dawned, and Emerson was its herald.
* * *
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803 of a long line of Unitarian ministers. He studied at Harvard, graduating in 1821, was a teacher for some years, and then, in 1829, became pastor of Boston's Second Church. Also in 1829 he married, for the first time; a year and a half later his wife, Ellen, was dead at the age of 19. Emerson, displaying that eerie candour which was one of the marks of his genius, wrote in his journal: "My angel is gone to heaven this morning & I am alone in the world & strangely happy". Yet Ellen's death was a blow from which he never quite recovered, but which also put iron in his soul. Throughout his life those around him remarked on his detachment and slightly inhuman serenity, traits, or knacks, which he acquired early on in a life marked by loss. In 1835 he married again, this time to the redoubtable, long- suffering but ever loyal Lidian. Their son, Waldo junior, died of scarlet fever at the age of five in 1842. Emerson wrote that he understood "nothing of this fact but its bitterness", yet two years later, in 'Experience', perhaps the greatest of his essays, he wrote, famously, that in the death of his son "I seem to have lost a beautiful estate - no more". The calamity
does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.
Uncanny, yes, inhuman, perhaps, but such searing honesty at least ensures that this is a voice we shall listen to, and trust.
He was equally candid in the matter of religion. Buell exclaims at the almost brutal manner in which Emerson in 1832, in a sermon on 'The Lord's Supper', explained to his Boston congregation that he had decided he could no longer perform the ritual of communion. Declaring that "freedom is the essence of Christianity" and that "I am not engaged to Christianity by decent forms", he announced simply that "this mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it". There, in truth, spoke the propounder of the doctrine of Self-Reliance.
Nor was this the height of Emerson's iconoclasm. In 1838 he delivered at Harvard the 'Divinity School Address', in which he as good as dismissed institutionalised religion in favour of a doctrine of Transcendentalism, which holds that God is in Man - that, indeed, Man is God: "If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God."
Buell puts it well when he writes that "Emerson's god [note the lower case] is an immanent god, an indwelling property of human personhood and physical nature, not located in some otherworldly realm". Or as Emerson himself trenchantly summed up: "Other world! there is no other world. Here or nowhere is the whole fact." Needless to say, the 'Divinity School Address' provoked a great theological to-do, from which Emerson remained serenely detached.
Emerson was now becoming a notable figure not only in America but in Europe also, attracting the attention and admiration of such luminaries as Carlyle and Matthew Arnold. After his first book, Nature, he published two sets of essays, then Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856) and, in 1860, The Conduct of Life, his harshest and most uncompromising tract: "We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity." Yet this brisk bleakness is nothing new. Long before The Conduct of Life, in the magnificent essay 'Experience', he had calmly put forward a hair-raisingly disenchanted view of human life and human endeavours: "It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist", and, again, "How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance?" And in what Buell cites as a "mind-bogglingly extravagant passage" from 'Nominalist and Realist', calculated "both to provoke wonder and give you the creeps", this champion of man as "a golden impossibility" and "a god in ruins" wrote of his fellow creatures:
I wish to speak with respect of all persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals. Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in household matters, the divine man does not respect them: he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the surface of the water.
Well, yes, it may give us the creeps, but even the direst judgment is saved through the agency of style. Emerson is one of the finest writers in the language. He writes like an angel, more often like a fallen one. He fancied to be thought of primarily as a poet, but the verse is ponderous, all the poetry being in the prose. He is brilliantly inconsistent - "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do . . . To be great is to be misunderstood" - and at times infuriatingly self-assured, especially in his more flamboyant dismissals of the things most men hold dear. Yet who will not thrill to a passage such as this, from 'Self-Reliance'?
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
Lawrence Buell has written a comprehensive, penetrating and timely study, the distillation of a lifetime's scholarship, of this great thinker and writer, "the poet of ordinary days", as his disciple, John Dewey, beautifully called him. One caveat, however: Emerson is not for beginners. It assumes on the reader's part at least some familiarity both with the life and the work, and a willingness to be more than a passive imbiber of pre-thought insights. Buell, like Emerson, insists that we read for ourselves, think for ourselves, rely on ourselves. His book is a heady adventure.
* Footnote. Harvard and the Belknap Press are to be congratulated on the production of this book, which is beautifully designed, printed and bound. It sits well in the hand, the page-width is soothing to the eye, and the type is unfussy and well spaced. The copy-editing, however, is another matter. That a university press should allow through such solecisms as "less" for "fewer" and "precipitous" for "precipitate" is a disgrace. One can almost hear Emerson's reprehending sigh.
Emerson By Lawrence Buell
BelknapPress/Harvard University Press, 397pp. £19.95