Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
pessimism had turned him into a serene optimist, often are as bleak and
austerely introspective as those morbid human documents that fill the
old libraries of Puritanism. Such meditations are thin gruel for the
nourishment of a vigorous life, and Emerson must have suffered from
innutrition if he had not come upon more substantial food.
Fortunately the old Puritan anchors were already dragging, and
Emerson was pretty well adrift when the romantic surge caught him
and sent him far along new courses. The Puritan moralizer became
the transcendental seeker; the curious-minded loiterer in the gates
of the temple, who had studied the moral winds by watching the tiny
straws of circumstance--erecting unconsidered trifles into ethical
signposts--calmly quitted the church and set forth on his intellectual
quest. The ties had long been loosening, but it was his year abroad
where he discovered ways of thinking unknown to Concord and Boston,
that effectively liberalized his mind and released him from the
narrow Yankee provincialisms. On that momentous trip Goethe, Landor,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle, set him speculating on new themes,
stimulating afresh the love of Plato, in whom he had long found
inspiration. Continental idealism with its transcendental metaphysics
refashioned Emerson and put him upon his life-work.
Speaking of the intellectual revival of New England later in life, he
remarked that “Goethe was the cow from whom their milk was drawn”; but
it would seem that the influence of Wordsworth proved more immediately
stimulating, for on his return home Emerson set about the systematic
contemplation of nature which left so considerable a deposit in his
mind. Before this he had been too intent on his soul to consider the
sunshine on the fields, but thereafter he made his pilgrimages into the
country with the seriousness of one conducting a novel experiment. In
this new concern for nature there was a deliberate self-consciousness.
In temperament he was a bookish recluse, in love with the printed
page. He was not a Thoreau to love his Walden Pond for its own sake,
and it needed an effort of the will to send him as far as Auburn
wood, to lie on his back and translate nature into metaphysic. But
he had come to the point where his developing philosophy must send
him into the fields. He had looked within himself and discovered the
divinity of the individual soul; but he had not probed the non-self,
the great encompassing universe of matter by which the individual
is circumscribed and of which he is a part. To discover there the
diffused presence of God, to feel his kinship with man, to understand
that the soul is a microcosm, were necessary preliminaries to the
unfolding of his transcendental philosophy, and he went about the work
with painstaking thoroughness. From this creative contact with nature
emerged the Emerson we know, radiant with idealism, glad of life; and
this radiant gladness he put into his maiden essay, _Nature_.
This was in 1836 when Emerson was thirty-three years of age. In the
next two years he published _The American Scholar_, quintessence of
transcendental individualism, and the _Divinity School Address_, the
bible of transcendental religion. With the appearance of the second
series of _Essays_, six years later, the major ideas of his philosophy
were fully elaborated. Stripped of its idealistic phraseology, of its
beauty and fervor, the master idea of the Emersonian philosophy is the
divine sufficiency of the individual. In accepting himself he accepted
his fellows, and he accepted God. The universe he conceived of as a
divine whole, whereof each man is his own center from whom flows the
life that has flowed in upon him, perennially fresh, perennially a new
creation. The law for things is not the law for mind; man is unkinged
in acknowledging any lesser sovereignty than the sovereignty of self.
Statutes, constitutions, governments, schools, churches, banks,
trade--the coercing sum of institutions and customs--these things do
not signify; they are only idols with clay feet that blind men worship.
The true divinity dwells elsewhere, in the soul of man; and that
divinity must rule the world and not be ruled by it. The apotheosis
of individualism--such in briefest terms was the gospel of Emerson;
new only in its radiant dress and idealistic sanctions, the final
transcendental form of a doctrine spread widely by the French romantic
school. It was the same revolutionary conception that Channing had come
upon, that Jefferson had come upon, that Rousseau had come upon--the
idea which in the guise of political romanticism had disintegrated
the _ancien régime_, and in the form of philosophical romanticism
had disintegrated eighteenth-century rationalism--the idea that was
providing Utopian dreams for an ebullient democratic faith.
Thus equipped with a philosophy Emerson was prepared to begin his work
as a critic. The ideal he had drunk of was a perennial condemnation of
the material. The mean and ignoble ends pursued by a mean and ignoble
society were a challenge to the serenity of his faith, and he must set
himself to analyze the causes of the low estate to which the potential
sons of God had fallen. Lesser revolutions in thought were implicit in
this greater one, revolutions which Emerson was bound to go through
with. Despite the jaunty optimism of which he was often accused, his
eyes were never blind to reality; to see, and measure, and judge,
was to become his life business. He did not shrink from the ugliest
fact, and the unhappy condition he discovered men to be in would have
discouraged a less robust faith. At times even he doubted. At times he
seems half persuaded, with Cotton Mather, that the potential children
of light are “strangely and fiercely possessed of the devil.” “Human
nature is as bad as it dares to be,” he commented in his journal; and
at another time, “If it were possible to repair the rottenness of human
nature ... it were well” (_Journals_, Vol. VIII, p. 259).
In seeking an explanation of the tragic gap between the real and the
ideal, he came to attribute a large measure of the cause, like the
eighteenth-century romantics, to pernicious social institutions which
stifle the nobler impulses and encourage the baser; and he became
convinced likewise that the work to which the critic was called was
the work of liberation, setting the mind free from false and ignoble
loyalties that it might serve the true. He prepared therefore to lay
his transcendental yardstick on the little world of Yankee reality and
judge how far short it came of its potential divinity. New England had
never been scrutinized so searchingly, measured so justly. Serene,
imperturbable, he set the ideal in one pan of the scales, and all the
New England realities in the other, and bade his neighbors see how the
balance tipped. For a generation he was the conscience of America, a
pricker of inflated balloons, a gauger of the national brag and cant
and humbug. With keen insight he put his finger on the mean and selfish
and the great and generous. He surveyed his world with the detachment
of posterity and anticipated the slower judgment of time. His
penetration was uncanny and few of his judgments on men and measures
have suffered reversal in the court of final jurisdiction.
So shrewd a critic must concern himself greatly with the Jacksonian
revolution that was hurrying America towards the acceptance of
political equalitarianism. By every compulsion of his transcendental
philosophy Emerson was driven to accept the abstract principle
of democracy. He understood well what hopes for human betterment
were awakened by the principle of majority rule, and as he followed
the noise and tumult of the political campaigns he was driven to
definition. In 1834 he commented in his journal:
The root and seed of democracy is the doctrine, Judge for yourself.
Reverence thyself. It is the inevitable effect of the doctrine,
where it has any effect (which is rare), to insulate the partisan,
to make each man a state. At the same time it replaces the dead
with a living check in a true, delicate reverence for superior,
congenial minds. “How is the King greater than I, if he is not more
just?” (_Journals_, Vol. III, p. 369.)
Somewhat later in the same year he suggested:
Democracy, Freedom, has its root in the sacred truth that every man
hath in him the divine Reason, or that, though few men since the
creation of the world live according to the dictates of Reason, yet
all men are created capable of so doing. That is the equality and
the only equality of all men. To this truth we look when we say,
Reverence thyself; Be true to thyself. (_Ibid._, Vol. III, p. 390.)
When I ... speak of the democratic element, I do not mean that ill
thing, vain and loud, which writes lying newspapers, spouts at
caucuses, and sells its lies for gold; but that spirit of love for
the general good whose name this assumes. There is nothing of the
true democratic element in what is called Democracy; it must fall,
being wholly commercial. I beg I may not be understood to praise
anything which the soul in you does not honor, however grateful may
be names to your ear and your pocket. (_Ibid._, Vol. IV, p. 95.)
His deepening concern over the state of politics in America--the
property-mindedness of the Whigs and the mob-mindedness of the
Democrats--drew him into an analysis of political parties and the
nature of the political state. He was little read in the political
classics, and although he professed a mild approval of Montesquieu
and was never tired of praising Burke, he was little influenced by
either. The latter’s political theory, indeed, was so fundamentally
hostile to Emerson’s major convictions--so legalistic in its
reverence for government from the grave, so explicit in denial of
new-born rights--that it is a fair assumption that Emerson never
took the trouble to understand him but was content to enjoy his
glowing rhetoric. Later commentators are too much given to glossing
over Emerson’s political theory, not approving its implications; or
explaining it away by appeal to certain comments jotted down when
his nerves were tried by enthusiasts;[456] but there is no explaining
away a theory that was the logical expression of his transcendental
philosophy, unless his whole philosophy be explained away. Emerson
knew very well where his political theory led, and he had no timid
compunction about following it through.
In his speculations on the nature and functions of the ideal
republic--a theme that was much in his mind--he elaborated what we
may call the transcendental theory of politics, a theory closely akin
to philosophical anarchism. All the elaborate machinery devised by
political thinkers like Montesquieu and John Adams, with their schemes
of checks and balances to preserve the _status quo_, he calmly throws
overboard; constitutions he is not interested in, nor the complicated
props of coercive sovereignty. The single, vital, principle on which
the true republic must found itself, he insists, is the principle of
good-will. Since “governments have their origin in the moral identity
of men,” the recognition of a common human nature with common interests
must induce rational men to enter a common political brotherhood; and
until men become wise enough voluntarily to coöperate to the common
well-being, no good government is possible. The history of governments
hitherto is a history of the tragic failure of men to achieve a
rational political state. “The idea, after which each community
is aiming to make and mend its law,” he suggests in the _Essay on
Politics_, following Carlyle, “is the will of the wise man. The wise
man, it cannot find in nature, and it makes awkward but earnest efforts