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This is the text of a talk given at the Chapel in the Pines, Eastham, on 31 August 03.
It is based on the bibliography and selected Emerson essays. Emerson is quoted,
not always exactly, but as this was an informational talk, and not a scholarly article, my own
language has been merged without attribution with that of the other writers.
I read the first three books and two articles. I wasn't able to get the Buell in time, and I
read the turner article after giving the talk.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Emerson, the mind on fire. 1995
I went through this chronology quickly, to set Emerson in his place and time. CHRONOLOGY
The following text was read. Emerson read all his lectures. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born 200 years ago, on May 25, 1803. I was listening to a PBS special on his birthday, when a woman with a thick southern accent called in and said her family had moved to a small town in Mississippi when she was a High School senior. She was lonely there and afraid, until a teacher assigned her Emerson’s “Self Reliance.” She said it changed her life. "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” In a doctor’s waiting room in June, a big no-nonsense fellow noticed my book and said, “Emerson! He’s my man!” He said he lived by one of Emerson’s sayings: “Good thoughts are no better than good dreams unless they be executed.” My conclusion is that the main thing Emerson has to say to us, both in his lifetime and 200 years later, is that we should trust our own experience, and think and speak for ourselves rather than rely on the authority of churches and creeds, academia and government, commerce and society. If independent thinking and expression is an American characteristic, it’s partly thanks to him. John Dewey wrote in 1929 that Emerson was “the prophet and herald of any system which democracy may henceforth construct.” Emerson’s other big idea is a kind of down-to-earth philosophical Idealism. In the center of our being, he says, beyond this “spotted life of shreds and patches,” we and our fellow men are one with nature, and with God or Spirit. In each of us, this Spirit is a sleeping giant which Emerson hoped to awake. -- A hundred and fifty years later, we think in terms of modern science. But Emerson’s idealism wasn’t meant to be metaphysical, like Hegel’s. It was meant to be poetic, and it remains just as good a metaphor for the mysterious ultimate reality which enfolds us as the more imaginative flights of contemporary particle physics. For “superstring,” you could easily substitute Emerson’s “fast flowing vigor.” Dewey wrote also that Emerson was “the one citizen of the New World fit to have his name uttered in the same breath with that of Plato.” And William James wrote, “Emerson was a seer...his life was one long conversation with the indivisible divine, expressing itself through individuals and particulars.” But as one Emerson scholar writes, “Emerson’s legacy is a mirror in which each generation finds what it seeks: the visionary, the intellectual, poet, mystic, archetypical individual, nature lover, reformer, and scientist.” Perhaps he’s all of these and more. George Santayana wrote: “Emerson belongs to that mystical company of devout souls that recognize no particular home and are dispersed throughout history...” And Henry James Sr. called him, “a man without a handle.” Many people have a favorite Emerson poem or essay. I like the essay “Experience.” It’s full of dark sayings: “Every ship is a romantic object, except the one we sail in.” “It is almost all custom and gross sense. There are few opinions, and these seem organic in the speakers.” “Life is a train of moods, like a string of beads.” “Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung.” “If there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian.” “The molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom, shows that the world is all outside; it has no inside.” “I see not, if one be caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from the chain of physical necessity.” – BUT, “the intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor.” This is Emerson’s and William James’s Will to Believe, and the same acknowledgement by contemporary philosophers, that however bleak the picture, we have no choice to keep plugging away as if life might have a meaning and a goal. – In Emerson’s words: “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.” “Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.” “Do broad justice where we are, by whomever we deal with...” “If we take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures.” “A man is a golden impossibility, until he is born.” “Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.” My favorite Emerson poem, “Days” is similarly dark and light:
Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Although it wasn't included in the talk, the Turner article should be mentioned here. Emerson instinctively anticipated a number of the subsequent conclusions of science: evolution by natural selection; the mathematical basis of physical reality; the Big Bang; Maslows heirarchy of needs; Freud's subconscious; the animal nature of man and no distinction between "natural" and "man-made"; Stephen Wolfram's cosmology as the playing out of a single algorithm. Of course, Emerson also believed in the spirit and in some measure of human freedom. In talking with friends, I found that many of them knew far more about Emerson than I did, or ever will. I didn’t even remember having read him in college, until I found my marked up Rinehart Edition. I did remember reading Thoreau and have re-read Walden several times. I think we’ve internalized Emerson. After Shakespeare and the Bible, he has more pages in Bartletts than anyone else. I read through them, and I liked some: ”In skating on thin ice our safety is in speed.” “The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.” But many seemed obscure, like someone else’s choice. I felt I could pick a hundred better ones. There was one though, from his essay “Circles,” that’s particularly apt. ”Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker....” Emerson was a thinker. He was a teacher and a catalyst for his fellow intellectuals and the average American. He continued his Latin School and Harvard education through lifelong, wide-ranging, reading. He read for ideas. He said, “Read like a hawk sliding on the wind over a marsh, to nourish and stimulate your own thought.” He filled 260 manuscript notebooks and journals. He wasn’t a professional academic. His business was lecturing and writing for the general public. He gave more than 1500 lyceum lectures over 40 years, as many as 80 a year, to ordinary, self-improving citizens.
He read all his lectures, but evidently with practiced skill and effect. His voice, a colleague said, “was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever heard.” His method of speaking, and writing, was aphoristic, the piling up of great sentences. Someone wrote that his lectures were like, “an army all officers,” or “a bag of duck shot.” Emerson himself said, “I’m a rocket manufacturer.” And he said, “Who can make a good sentence, can make a good book.” I’ll invent an Emersonian saying of my own: “Reading Emerson is like swimming among water lilies.” – Even people who weren’t sure of what they’d heard (and there must have been quite a few) went away uplifted. He called the lyceum his secular pulpit, and in Emerson’s words, “the true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life -- life passed through the fire of thought.” He spoke and wrote about religion, politics, science, and literature, but his underlying theme was the human individual: who we are, and how we should live. His best known essay, “Self-Reliance,” is on the ultimate authority of the individual conscience. “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” “Prayers are a disease of the will, creeds a disease of the intellect.” “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” “My life is for itself.” “If the single man plant himself on his instincts and there abide, the world will come round to him.” This is the American spirit. “Self-Reliance” can also be seen, Forrest Church says, as “a relentless screed against every manner of conformity to the expectations of society.” Church says Emerson “espoused the Libertarian belief that self-reliance, if practiced widely, would solve most of the world’s problems.” He calls Emerson “an early supply-sider, an advocate of trickle-down compassion.” But those are today’s judgments. For Emerson, the context of “self-reliance” was religious, not libertarian or survivalist. He stopped using the phrase after 1841, because it was becoming confused with self-sufficiency. What he meant was that each person is an inlet to the One mind of creation and that through self-development we can discover this mind and be united with others in a shared creation guided by common moral laws. This is far from Ayn Rand objectivism. Emerson was raised in a puritan and moderate Calvinist atmosphere by his mother and Aunt Mary Moody Emerson. He grew up in the Christian beliefs in the dualism of body and soul, the afterlife, and heaven and hell. He moved beyond this background only gradually, from the time he entered Harvard in 1817 to the death of his first wife in 1831, his leaving the pastorate in ‘32, and his first trip to Europe in ‘33 The process involved personal doubt of his calling, his reading of Plato and Plotinus (that everything exists in a universal mind or soul; world of nature only a weaker copy), Montaigne (skepticism), the Roman Stoics (man is part of nature, and know thyself), Kantian idealism, Goethe (self-development and nature as symbol), German biblical criticism, Quaker belief and practice (the “inner light”), eastern religions, and Swedenborgian spiritualism. Emerson scholar David Robinson writes, “The real Copernican Revolution in New England religion was the Emersonian notion of the human spirit being empowered — that the individual could intuit religious truth.” Emerson said this in a thousand ways. He said Jesus was unique in his estimate of the greatness of man, because he recognized the eternal revelation of the heart and declared that this was God. “Why,” he asks in the essay Nature, “should we not also enjoy an original relationship with the universe?”
Almost as well known as “Self-Reliance” is his essay, “The Over-Soul.” “...that Unity within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other...that common heart of which all sincere conversation is worship, to which all right action is submission...and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty. Within man is the soul of the whole...to which every part is equally related; the eternal One.” The essay ends, “Thus revering the soul...man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh... He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life and be content with all places and with any service he can render.” -- I think I’ve know a few people like this. One of them was my father-in-law.
These ideas developed into the transcendentalist movement in which Emerson was a major figure.
“Transcendentalism was a philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about 1836 to 1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, (and reacting also to Locke, Hume, Hobbes and Enlightenment reductionism). They developed their own faith, centering on the divinity of man and nature. Transcendentalism derived some of its basic idealistic concepts from romantic German philosophy, notably that of Kant, and from such English interpreters of Kant as Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Its mystical aspects were influenced by Indian and Chinese religious teachings (and for Emerson by Quakerism and Swedenborgianism.) Although transcendentalism was never a systematic philosophy, it had some basic tenets that were generally shared by its adherents. The beliefs that God is immanent in man and nature and that individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of traditional authority. The ideas of transcendentalism were most eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the essays “Nature” (1836), “Self-Reliance,” and “The Over Soul” (1841). The movement began with the occasional meetings of a group of friends in Boston and Concord to discuss philosophy, literature, and religion, later dubbed the Transcendental Club. Besides Emerson and Thoreau, the club included among others, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Sarah Bradford Ripley, Orestes Bronson, and Theodore Parker. Much of their writing was published in The Dial, a journal edited by Fuller and Emerson, from 1840-1844. The cooperative community Brook Farm (1841–47) grew out of their ideas on social reform, which also found expression in individual actions against slavery. Primarily a movement seeking a new spiritual and intellectual vitality, transcendentalism had a great impact on American literature, not only on the writings of the group’s members, but on such diverse authors as Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman." (from an Encyclopedia.) Emerson gradually moved from mystical experience to “right action” as the fundamental core of religion. (Karen Armstrong says this is always the test of a true religion, that it produces social justice.) He was never comfortable as an activist, but he recognized, as he wrote, that “it is impossible to extricate yourself from the questions in which your age is involved.” Emerson was always opposed to slavery. From 1850 onwards, in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Law, he became an increasingly courageous and influential public spokesman for a-bo-li-tion. He had advanced opinions for his time on women’s rights and the excesses of capitalism and consumerism. “It is the vulgarity of this country to believe that naked wealth, unrelieved by any use or design, is merit.” No kidding. And he said, “Society, however proud or polished, is barbarous until every industrious man can get his living in it.” Teddy Roosevelt said this more generously around the turn of the century. As a man, Emerson experienced major tensions throughout his life: For one, he sought the Truth, but he also reveled in the “particulars,” the ordinary beauties of nature and the joys of daily life. He particularly loved his orchard. 2) He wanted friendship and love, but there was, as he put it, a “poverty” in his nature, a “trick of solitariness,” that denied him intimacy. As a fellow townsman said of him, “He always seemed to be on stilts.” And, 3) He believed strongly in social justice, but he was uncomfortable with institutions and social action. -- Fortunately, he also had a frivolous streak that to some degree protected him from being over-serious about his confusions and shortcomings. Despite his personal losses and the sorrows of the Civil War, Emerson remained optimistic about life. Critics have said that he was naïve, that he lacked an adequate sense of tragedy and the force of evil in the world. Perhaps so, but he certainly experienced tragedy. He was a nice man, rarely angry, kind, supportive, and generous with his time and money. His family and his many friends loved him, although few were able to get close to him. Herman Melville on Emerson: “Say what they will, he’s a great man….to my surprise I found him quite intelligible.” “I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow…Yet I think 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…I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more…I’m not talking of just Mr. Emerson now---but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving and coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. on Emerson: “What could we do with this unexpected...unclassified, half unwelcome newcomer, who had been for a while potted, as it were, in our Unitarian cold greenhouse, but had taken to growing so fast that he was lifting off its glass roof and letting in the hailstorms? Here was a protest that outflanked the extreme left of liberalism, yet so calm and serene that its radicalism had the accents of the gospel of peace. Here was an iconoclast without a hammer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship.”
CAST OF CHARACTERS: I went quickly though the cast. For a shy man, Emerson had many friends. These are only the closest or most prominent. 1750 1775 1800 1825 1850 1875 1900 J.W. v. Goethe 1749-1832 ----------------------------------- The folllowing are speaking notes, from which I selected brief comments for each person. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). German poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, scientist, lawyer, and bureaucrat. Emerson missed meeting him by a year, but in many ways Goethe was a spiritual father. Goethe’s chief gifts to Emerson include 1) self-cultivation and self-expression as the purposes of life; and 2) a working method of appropriation and creative recombination of the world’s literature. Emerson struggled through Goethe’s Travels in Italy during his own trip there in 1833. . Goethe’s insight into nature of plants came in the public garden in Palermo. Emerson writes, “Goethe suggested that a leaf is the unit of botany, that every part of the plant is only a leaf transformed to meet a new condition.” Life is process. Shades of DNA. Rev. William Emerson (1769-1811), Emerson’s father was the Minister at First Church Unitarian. He was a rational, science-oriented, non-religious, churchy Deist. He was educated, not well-off, sociable, and a rather severe parent. He had little influence on Emerson, except by his absence. Emerson grew up in a household full women and siblings. Ruth Haskins Emerson (1768-1853), Emerson’s mother, had to take in boarders after her husband’s death. She was calm, patient, and undemonstrative but caring. She managed to raise five children in difficult circumstances and sent 4 to Harvard. She prayed and read spiritual literature daily, and she valued personal religious experience and self-knowledge -- Emerson lived among educated and deeply spiritual older women: in particular, his mother, his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley. Aunt Mary Moody Emerson (1774-1863). She was 4 foot 3, attractive, brilliant, well-read, a fine writer, highly religious but independent, a prophetess who combined Calvinist self-scrutiny with an inquiring mind. William Law, 18th century spiritual writer, was a particular favorite of hers . Law wrote of, “the utter futility of the external evidence of Christianity” and “we know the truth by our own direct consciousness and need not go to Moses for it.” Aunt Mary said, “The relation between you and your creator, if you have one, is paramount.” The only true philosophy is “the divine personal agency of your own consciousness.” She was very supportive of her nephews. “They were born to be educated,” she said. Waldo copied 800 pages of her writings and often reread them. “Always do what you are afraid to do,” she said. “Tact is only another name for lying.” And “I am tired of fools.” She never married. Sarah Ripley (177?-1867) Called the best educated woman in America (privately educated of course, women didn’t go to college.) -- Tutor and lifelong friend and supporter of Emerson. Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) Master from 1834-39 of his Temple School, on Transcendentalist principles. It was coed, with one black student, and had an atmosphere of calm and beauty and self-development through gentle Socratic teaching. Helped found Brook Farm and Fruitlands. Father of Louisa May Alcott. Friend, walking companion, and inspiration for Emerson. Impractical and often financially dependant on friends and admirers. A man of a single idea, that the world of the spirit is the only real world. “God is present in his whole being in every particle of the universe, including the soul of each man.” “Every man is a revelation.” A staunch abolitionist. William (Emerson’s older brother) (1801-1869), graduated from Harvard with high honors in 1818, taught school, and then went to study theology at Gottingen in 1823. Emerson was envious. But he heard J.A. Eichorn on the Bible and F.A. Wolfe on Homer (myth, history, multiple authors) and lost his faith. Perhaps it was a bit shaky. He asked Goethe what to do!! I love it. Goethe said go be a clergyman and keep your doubts to yourself. What he did. William didn’t. He came home, not bothering to spend $60 to pick up his doctorate in theology. Worked very hard studying and practicing law. Later had economic reverses. Emerson helped him, and they remained good but not close friends. Lydia Jackson, Emerson’s 2d wife (1802-1892) She was tall, slender, regal, but not considered particularly attractive. She was a transcendentalist, serious, well read, quick witted, read German and spoke Italian and French. She was from a well-to-do merchant family in Plymouth, a year older than Emerson, and over 30 when they met. Emerson decided to call her Lidian, perhaps so that Bostonians couldn’t say “LydiarEmerson,” He also called her Queenie and Asia. He wanted her to call him Waldo, but she couldn’t do it; she called him Mr. Emerson all her married life.. Emerson didn’t like the ball fringe on their marriage bed, so Lidian took it down. She said later, “Husband knows best was my creed in those days, and I really thought he did. She was in poor health most of her life. “My poor broken-to-pieces wife,” Emerson said once. (Was it partly, even largely, psychosomatic?) Emerson’s notebook entries on marriage are more realistic than romantic. He wrote, “He champed the bit, but, good husband, went the way the bridle drew.” And, “Two human beings are like globes which can touch only in one point,” And “Truth is handsomer than the affection of love.” Sophia Peabody Hawthorne complained, “Waldo Emerson knows not much of love.” The Hawthornes were very affectionate. Sophia once sent Nathanial such a sexy letter that she asked him to burn it, and he wouldn’t. Waldo wrote to Lidian from England that he could not compose the reassuring love letter she had always wanted from him. The cause, he said, was a “poverty” in his nature, a “trick of solitariness.” He wrote in his Journal that he felt the “frivolous external fancying” had faded from his marriage. Evidently Lidian was quite happy in the chaste but lively company of Thoreau in these months. In their later years, Lidian recovered her health and was able to cut loose and go out clubbing while her husband stayed home.. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). Friend and walking companion of Emerson and Thoreau. Lived for a while with his wife at the Old Manse, where Emerson had lived. Took part in Brook Farm and later wrote The Blithedale Romance based on the experience. He and Emerson didn’t care for each other’s writing. But his wife, Sophia, liked both Emerson and his writing. Edward (brother) 1805-1834 Led his class at Harvard 1824 by a wide margin and was Commencement speaker. Studied law. . Drove himself very hard, as did all the Emersons, except Waldo. Became ill and went abroad for his tuberculosis. Had a mental collapse; and was committed to McLean Asylum for some months in 1828. Worked with brother William in N.Y. Went to the West Indies for his health. Died in San Juan in 1834 Louis Agassiz 1807-1873. American’s (Harvard's) top scientist. Friend of Emerson and Thoreau. Creationist. Emerson was not a scientist but read science. Bulkeley (brother) 1807-1859 Bulkeley was mentally retarded and emotionally unstable. He was in and out of institutions and a responsibility of his family, chiefly of Emerson, until his death Charles (Waldo’s favorite brother) 1808-1836 Very bright, a favorite of the family, especially with Aunt Mary, a bit vain and insecure. Emerson thought Charles in college was “a honey catcher of pleasure, favor and honor without paying for it.” (Emerson was a bit of a puritan.) Harvard valedictorian though less successful than Edward. Graduated from Harvard Law. Found law hard going, lost his cocksureness, and became finally a good friend and companion of Emerson. Engaged to the beautiful, and intelligent Elizabeth Hoar. He had a dark side, Hamlet-like despondence and genuine literary ability. Waldo and Charles became quite close before his death of tuberculosis in 1836. Waldo felt that Charles had the best mind and character of any man he knew. He warned his wife that she “must be content henceforth with only a piece of your husband; for the best of his strength lay in the soul with which he must now no more on earth take counsel.” Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865. Emerson met Lincoln in 1862, after giving a patriotic speech in DC, demanding Emancipation. He liked Lincoln and described him later as “a frank, sincere, well-meaning man, not vulgar as described, but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness.” And Lincoln said to him, “Oh, Mr. Emerson, I once heard you say in a lecture that a Kentuckian seems to say by his airs and manners, Here am I; if you don’t like me, the worse for you.” Charles Darwin 1809-1882. Origin of species published 1959. They never met, but Emerson spiritually anticipated him. Forrest Church says, “Emerson is the poet Laureate of the interdependent web of life.” Emerson wrote, “The world globes itself in a drop of dew.” and “The ploughman, the plough, and the furrow are of one stuff.” He read and appreciated Origin of Species. He wrote, “The wide universe is made up of a few elements and a few laws; perhaps of one element and one law.” “Nature hates cripples.” Nature destroys to rebuild and improve. Emerson anticipated Freud as well. “The dark walls of your mind are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. Bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.” Margaret Fuller (1810-1850). Called the most brilliant woman in America. She held “conversations” for Boston’s brightest women at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop, for which she charged a fee. She wrote a book on women in the 19th century and was well ahead of her time in many ways. She wrote for the N.Y. Tribune and lived at Horace Greeley’s farm at 49th street and the East River. Margaret was probably in love with Emerson, and he with her, in his way. Lived in Emerson’s house for some months. Lived at Brook Farm. Went to Europe, had a child by an Italian nobleman who she later married. Drowned off Long Island 1850. .Fuller said of Emerson’s essays: ”a string of Mosaics,” but, she said, he was “one of the few who worshiped the God of truth.” Horace Greeley said of Fuller, “Noble and great as she was, a good husband and two or three bouncing babies would have emancipated her from a good deal of cant and nonsense.” Emerson has other female groupies, like the rich, brilliant, and beautiful Caroline Sturgis and Anna Barker. He took long, clearly innocent, walks with them, while Lidian took to her bed. Farce: Channing, Caroline, Ellen. Theodore Parker (1810-1860) Unitarian clergyman. Heard Emerson’s Divinity School Address and was encouraged by it to attack historical Christianity, the bible, dogmas, and ritual. Social reformer, Transcendentalist, leading abolitionist. Parker said of Emerson, “a very extraordinary man”, speaking and writing with a “holy power...to fashion the character of the coming age” The source of Emerson’s strength was “his intellectual and moral sincerity” and “he illustrated his high thought by common things.” “a child of Christianity and the American idea, he is out of the Church and out of the State. In the midst of Calvinistic and Unitarian superstition, he does not fear God, but loves and trusts him.” But, he said, there was “want of logic in his method and exaggeration of the intuitive powers.” Emerson and Parker agreed that the “the essence of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use, or it is nothing.” Ellen Tucker (1st wife) 1811-1831 Intelligent, lively, pretty. They were very much in love, but Ellen was never well. When she died, Emerson was “unstrung by grief.” “The days pass over me, and I am still the same; the aroma of my life is gone like the flower with which it came.” . WHAT IF???? But she didn’t. Harry Bosch in the James Patterson mysteries has a “one bullet” theory, one chance of love. - But Emerson was incapable of permanent despair. Ellen’s loss was the simultaneous spiritual crisis and Emerson’s second birth. Before this, he was a rationalist fascinated by idealism; after this he believed completely in the reality and primacy of the spirit. -- She left him a modest annual income. William Ellery Channing, 1817-1901. This Channing is a nephew of the Unitarian divine of the same name. A poet, walked and talked with Emerson and Thoreau. Married Ellen Fuller, sister of Margaret. Rarely supported his family. Emerson called him a “ragged individualist.” Channing on Emerson: “Those nearest to him feel him hard and cold; no one knows even what he is doing or studying…he cannot establish a personal relationship with anyone, yet he can get on agreeably with everyone.” Channing was the “poet” who accompanied Thoreau on his first walking tour of Cape Cod. Channing on Thoreau: “Each social faculty in which all others delight, he mortifies…” Thoreau on Channing: “Channing tempts me to reckless and sweeping expressions which I am wont to regret.” Henry Thoreau 1817-1862 Toward the end of his life Emerson said Thoreau had been his best friend. Emerson said of Thoreau, he preferred to deal in the natural facts, but that “every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole.” “We communicate,” Thoreau wrote to Emerson, “like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground.” Thoreau’s mother said, “How much Mr. Emerson does talk like my Henry.” Thoreau was both son and brother to Emerson. He adored Lidian and her children and was loved by them. He wrote Lidian innocent love letters. Emerson found Thoreau, “spiced through with rebellion,” brash, irreverent, and amusing.. They walked many miles together, were both modern stoics, sought self-rule, and had a Kantian theory of mind. But what in Emerson was originality was in Thorouh wildness. Emerson was grounded in Christianity, Thoreau in classical literature. Thoreau read his in classics in the original, Emerson in translation whenever possible. Thoreau was far more the scholar and scientist than Emerson. They had a falling out in the ‘50’s. Emerson writes, “Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?” Thoreau wrote, “I had two friends. The one offered me friendship on such terms that I could not accept it, without a sense of degradation. He would not meet me on equal terms, but only be to some extent my patron.” Herman Melville 1819-1891 Melville on Emerson: “Say what they will, he’s a great man….to my surprise I found him quite intelligible.” “I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow…Yet I think 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…I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more…I’m not talking of just Mr. Emerson now---but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving and coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began.” Father Mapple, sailor preacher n Moby Dick, was based on Edward Taylor, the pastor of the Seamen’s Bethel at North End, and a founder of the Cape Cod Camp Meetings two bocks from our house in North Eastham. Taylor was a terrific preacher, a “shouting Methodist,” but he and Emerson were good friends and had great respect for one another. Walt Whitman 1819-1892 Whitman sent Emerson a copy of Leaves of Grass when he privately published it in 1855. Then, he rather shamelessly used Emerson’s letter of appreciation and praise on the cover of the next edition. Emerson backed off just a little over the sexual morality controversy, but he never withdrew his support. Emerson could recognize greatness when his peers couldn’t, and Whitman was always appreciative and laudatory. Emerson on Leaves of Grass: “a wonderful gift...the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom…great power…large perception...incomparable things said incomparably well...free and brave” Nothing quite like it had appears in America or elsewhere and Emerson said so. Waldo (son) (1836-1842) died of scarlet fever at 5 (1836-1842) Very bright, and Emerson’s joy. Gazing around a Victorian parlor, Waldo said, “How glass their knobs are!” Emerson wrote to Margeret Fuller, “Shall I ever dare to love anything again?” It was a deep wound in the family that never completely healed. Both Emerson and Lidian suffered depression, in an age when there were no pills. You hacked it, and the strong survived. Ellen Tucker (daughter) born (1839-1909. Lidian named her. Emerson was greatly touched. They were complicated people. Ellen was a strong, lively, amusing person. She kept house for the Emersons. Never married. Wrote a good diary. Edith (daughter) 1841-1929. Married Will Forbes, whose wealthy father owned Naushuan Island where the Emersons often went to relax. -- This is something interesting about the age: Emerson was moderately well off eventually, but even when they were poor, the boys all made it to Harvard, had trips to Europe, went to the South or the West Indies for their health, and went on extended visits and walking tours all over New Endland. We have to be old and well off to be able do that now. Edith had eight children. Holmes, Oliver Wendell 1841-1935 Edward Waldo (son) 1844-1930 Became physician in Concord. Had seven children. |