6.1 Europe in Emerson and Emerson in Europe
© Beniamino Soressi, CC BY 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0065.08
A subtle chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings;The eye reads omens where it goes,And speaks all languages the rose;And, striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.
Emerson’s phrase, “a subtle chain of countless rings”, metaphorically suits this subject: the mutual influence of the West on Emerson and of Emerson on the West. These “rings” of influence indeed make up “a subtle chain”, seemingly impossible to track, especially when generated by a variety of secondary sources. Nevertheless, its larger links may be identified, first with a brief overview of Emerson’s debt to the West, then with a longer look at his effect upon well-known writers and political thinkers in South and Central America, England, and the Continent. In his fifties, Emerson noted, “… we go to Europe to be Americanized”.1 The Old World, he had long realized, would be reflected in any definition of the New.
Central to all these mutual influences was a call to change in thought and in social reform by both idea and example. Unfortunately in Germany, Nietzsche misused central Emersonian ideas, which Hitler and the Nazis then further perverted. In Italy, the poet-politician D’Annunzio and Mussolini were closer to Emerson’s texts per se, yet similarly corrupted his original intent. Fortunately, in other countries, especially France and England, he had more accurate adherents — from Baudelaire to Camus, George Eliot to Kipling. Through such widely read writers, Emerson energized the West’s general impulse toward adopting more democratic values.
A convenient starting place for a brief overview of Emerson’s indebtedness to the West is his choice of six figures from European culture in his book Representative Men (1850).
He first featured Plato, the 5th-4th century B.C. Greek philosopher and classical advocate of idealism, who postulated a pristine unseen realm of ideas as a model for their imperfect reflection in this rough real world. He also wished to celebrate Plato’s tolerance of unsystematic thinking, his own mental habit. Emerson thus revealed an unstated pattern in his selections: These great men exhibited interests and abilities that he either shared already or that he admired and adopted as his own.
This was true of his second subject Swedenborg (1688–1772), the Swedish scientist, religious philosopher, and mystic who appealed to Emerson for his theories of correspondence and for distinctively uniting science with mysticism, another one of Emerson’s goals (see Chapter 4). The French essayist Montaigne (1533–1592), Emerson’s third figure, complemented Swedenborg with his radical, frank, but balanced skepticism, halfway between idealism and empiricism, a position that by 1844, Emerson had also announced as his own. For his fourth subject, Emerson chose Shakespeare (1564–1616), a close reader of Montaigne, as the poet-dramatist par excellence for his penetrating eye and idiosyncratic creativity. Napoleon (1769–1821), the Corsican commoner who had become a great soldier-statesman, although cynical and egotistic, earned Emerson’s praise for his absolute and practical self-confidence. Finally, Goethe (1749–1832), the poet, dramatist, novelist, and scientist, epitomized the universally talented, all-encompassing writer.
Of these six, by time and personal connection, Emerson was closest to Napoleon, champion of European political revolution, and to Goethe, generator of the Continent’s Transcendentalism, the Romantics’ revolt against the Enlightenment’s strict rationalism. In 1826, he had met Napoleon’s nephew, Achille Murat, in Charleston, South Carolina. Two years before, Emerson’s brother William had privately seen Goethe at his house in Weimar.2
Besides Plato, other classic Greek and Roman authors familiar to him from school and college helped to shape Emerson’s early thinking. Heraclitus’ sense of nature as an ever-flowing and changing river fed Emerson’s view of a world of constant process and potential paradox. But equally influential was Parmenides’ view of reality as a static, hard material sphere, eternally filling all space (the One). Such a notion supported Emerson’s idea of an immutable unity at nature’s core. He was intrigued, too, by the later neo-Platonists Plotinus and Proclus, who refined and synthesized these two images. Plotinus advanced an early theory of signs as well as the idea that Parmenides’ One, emanating into ordinary things, reflected its perfection there. Proclus united old and new ideal views of the cosmos with pagan theological imagery. On a more immediate note, the Stoics Seneca and Marcus Aurelius complemented the Bible in instructing Emerson on how to deal with hardship. And Plutarch, model enough as a moral essayist, also taught Emerson to see history through the lens of biography.
Among later authors, in his essay “The Poet”, Emerson praised Dante whose La vita nuova (The New Life, 1295) showed him “dar[ing] to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality”.3 It seemed to him “the Bible of Love … as if written before literature, whilst truth yet existed …”44
Boehme’s Aurora Consurgens (Dawn, The Dayspring, 1612) impressed Emerson with the possibility of achieving a natural and radically individual spiritual philosophy without any formal education. And on his aesthetic side, he admired Michelangelo’s fearless, bold translations of inner torment into immediate brushworks and Promethean chisel strokes. As a model for his own ambitions, Emerson applauded Francis Bacon’s tireless search for power through knowledge. In contrast, Hume’s radical empiricism and his anti-causation theory chafed against Emerson’s life-long belief in “soul”, with its free will, and in causation as a natural law. For a time, he found some comfort in the Scottish School of Common Sense adopted by Unitarianism, but rejected its pure rationality as he moved toward a Transcendentalism of the heart. Electrified by the grandly beautiful cosmologies of the scientists Herschel and Humboldt, Emerson played them against Milton’s universal drama of humanity’s fall.
Emerson’s sensitivities naturally drew him to the Old World’s Romantics: from the young German writer Novalis, for exalting the synergies of poetry and philosophy, to Hegel, for his extreme idealism and belief in the generative force of Geist, or spirit. Schleiermacher’s individualistic interpretations naturally appealed to him. So, too, did J. G. Herder’s anthropocentrism and his view of man as an animal able to compensate for a loss of instinct by acquiring art and technology. In his essays “Thoughts on Modern Literature” and “Europe and European Books”, Emerson found that Wordsworth’s “wisdom of humanity” and his “just moral perception”5 spoke to the essential, as did the English poet’s sense of the “elemental” correspondences between nature, mind, life, and immortality. On a practical note, the iron determinism of the Belgian Adolphe Quételet’s social statistics appealed to Emerson, as did the quirky wealth of W. S. Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. More significantly, as seen in Chapter 1, he was early on attracted to Coleridge’s literary criticism and poetry as well as to his fragments of 1834 and 1836. Altogether, these works enhanced Emerson’s understanding of familiar classical figures, and, for the first time, introduced him to Spinoza and more contemporary German Romantic philosophers, especially Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. Complementing these thinkers, the startlingly fresh power of the French women novelists Mme. de Staël and George Sand showed Emerson a distinctive female perspective on manners and the art of conversation.
From this rich European legacy, Emerson built his own approach to pursuing the truth and transformed the whole into his “new thinking”. For the most part, he had a positive, receptive view of Europe’s immense cultural and economic heritage. But early and often, as in “Friendship”, he came to warn against the tyranny of antique ideas, the Old World’s actual or virtually “dead persons”,6 and its corrupting luxuries.7 One of the first steps in Emerson’s revolution was to try to end America’s depressing nostalgia for England and Europe, a national “tape-worm”, he came to call it in “Culture”, eating away one’s mind.8 By proclaiming the authority and trustworthiness of each individual, as guided by a universal Over-Soul, he hoped that the passion for developing one’s potential “genius” would spread first in families and communities, then to the whole country. For Western intellectuals, this new faith in the infinite capacity of the single soul marked Emerson’s most visible, radical difference from past thinking. Previously unrecognized as Emerson followers, certain Hispanic writers in the New World deserve first mention.
Emerson in Latin America
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), the Argentine poet, critic, and short-story writer, notably represents those Americans outside the United States who clearly caught Emerson’s infectious message.
Borges’ devotion to Emerson, both thoroughgoing and lifelong, led him to state, “Yo tengo el culto de Emerson” (“I’ve made a cult of Emerson”).9 In his short story, “La otra muerte” (“The Other Death”, 1949), Borges openly preferred Emerson, the “great poet”,10 to Poe,11 and even ranked Emerson’s poetry above his essays.12 Elsewhere Borges celebrated Emerson’s verse as “spontaneously original”, unique but never deliberately transgressing accepted poetic convention.13 (In contrast, Whitman “tries too hard”.)14 For Borges, Emerson’s “tranquil felicity” made him “the most elevated intellectual poet”, one who produced “very interesting ideas”.15 Nor did Emerson’s famous aloofness diminish Borges’ empathy, noting, “If a poet writes in a reserved way, he is expressing himself”.16 Emerson’s poems were for Borges “engraved” or “sculpted”, yet not so much visual and spatial as musical and temporal, “renewing the past each time he remembered it”.17 In his poem, “Emerson”, Borges echoed Emerson’s vision in “Days” of a coming better humanity (“Quisiera ser otro hombre”). Of all the poems, Borges favored “History”, “The Past”, (which he translated), and in particular “Brahma”. This last he thought very “clean” in delineating identity, quoting the line: “When me they fly, I am the wings”.18
Emerson’s ideas took root in many themes that Borges later explored: the pervasiveness of illusions and dreams; the varieties of time-perception, identity and otherness; the identification of “I” and the Eye; and the interconnections between the micro- and macro-worlds. He found especially appealing Emerson’s notion in “Nominalist and Realist” that all works are inspired by, and emanate from, one impersonal writer.19 In 1967, Borges stated: “I think that Emerson is a finer writer and a finer thinker than Nietzsche”.20 At a time when Europe’s literary and philosophical circles were attempting a “Nietzsche Renaissance”, to retrieve him from his ignominious association with the Nazis (of which more below), Borges’ statement was audaciously bold.
Until his last days, Borges held Emerson in the highest regard. Blind and losing his memory, he wrote, “Elogio de la sombra” (“In Praise of Darkness”, 1969), a poem recalling Emerson’s “Illusions”. In it, he lists greatly cherished things he knows he will forget; among them, Emerson is the single literary name. In the winter of 1962, Borges had visited Emerson’s house, an experience reflected in both the line in “Elogio”, “Emerson and the snow and many things”, and in another work, “Poema de la Cantidad” (“Poem of Quantity”, 1970): “solitary and lost lights / which Emerson would have admired so many nights / from the snows and the rigors of Concord”.
Well before Borges, José Martí (1853–1895), Cuba’s late-nineteenth-century poet, journalist, and revolutionary, had taken Emerson’s model of the active reformer more to heart than the Argentinian.
At eighteen, during Cuba’s first attempt to throw off Spanish rule in the Ten Years’ War, Martí was imprisoned for six months for denouncing a pro-Spanish high school classmate. Afterward, he studied in Spain, then left for Mexico, and, for a time, taught in Guatemala. Moving to New York City, he reported on the U.S. for a wide readership in Hispanic America. Fascinated by America’s model, he excitedly introduced his audiences to Emerson, whose Nature and Representative Men were his favorite works. In 1882, just three weeks after his hero’s death, Martí wrote a radiant hagiographic essay, “Emerson”, in which each of his encomiums competes with the next, together creating a myth — eventually widespread — of an Emerson “who found himself alive, and shook from his shoulders and his eyes all the mantles and blindfolds that the past casts over men”. “His mind was priestly; his tenderness, angelic; his wrath, sacred. When he saw enslaved men, and thought of them, he spoke as if, at the foot of a new biblical mountain, the Tablets of the Law were once again being smashed. His anger was Mosaic”. Martí’s unrelieved praise exceeds any evaluation of Emerson, then or since.21
In additional appreciation, he translated Emerson’s poem “Good-Bye, Proud World”. Two of Martí’s own poems include Emerson in their titles: “Cada uno a su oficio. Fábula nueva del filósofo norteamericano Emerson” (“Each to His Own Work”, 1889), and an undated long poem, simply titled, “Emerson”. The latter focused on a mood of “Panic”: “Nobody hinders his will / And lands and waters / Are atoms of his brilliant body / Which obey his invincible will”. A similar exuberance fed Martí’s continuing protest against Spanish rule in Cuba. In 1892, he started the Cuban Revolutionary Party, and three years later, returning to the island to help lead its second struggle for independence, was almost immediately killed in battle. Nevertheless, Martí became an “Apostle of Independence” in his country. Eventually, though Emerson was decidedly not a socialist, his work came to inspire Fidel Castro through Martí’s example.22
Emerson in England and Scotland
In his lifetime, Emerson made three trips to England and Europe. On his first trip (1832–1833), he was only twenty-nine and unknown, yet succeeded in meeting four leading writers. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Landor represented an older, already distinguished generation.
But the rising Scottish historian and social critic, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), was only eight years Emerson’s senior. Carlyle’s friend John Stuart Mill had warned him in advance, “From one or two conversations I have had with [Emerson] I do not think him a very hopeful subject”.23 But Carlyle and his wife Jane gave Emerson a warm welcome. Jane remembered the visitor who “in the Desert [of rural Scotland], descended on us, out of the clouds as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only one day”.24 In turn, Emerson liked Carlyle’s frank simplicity. Their ensuing letters for a time document an intensely appreciative exchange. Each served the other as literary critic, agent, and press officer in their respective countries. Later, they would maintain their ties but differ over social issues, especially slavery in America.
Most importantly, Carlyle uniquely strengthened Emerson’s sense of his own powers. Nature, the Scot said, gave him “true satisfaction”. He correctly noted it as “the Foundation and Ground-plan” of Emerson’s work.25 Of “The American Scholar” (1837), he said, “I could have wept to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart”. Carlyle, a clergyman’s son like Emerson, blessed his friend’s debut: “May God grant you strength; for you have a fearful work to do! Fearful I call it; and yet it is great, and the greatest”.26 In the same breath, he demanded that his friend practice patient self-reliance: “Do not hasten to write; you cannot be too slow about it. Give no ear to any man’s praise or censure”.27
Carlyle sent Emerson’s lectures and books to friends in England and Europe, and forwarded their reactions back to Emerson in Concord. As early as 1838, he wrote of the favorable opinion of Harriet Martineau, the English feminist and social observer. She had met Emerson during her two-year tour of America in 1834–1836. In her Retrospect of Western Travel (1838), she was one of the first foreigners to publicize Emerson’s representativeness as an American as well as his special gifts: “There is a remarkable man in the United States, without knowing whom it is not too much to say that the United States cannot be fully known … [He] is yet in the prime of life. Great things are expected from him, and great things, it seems, he cannot but do … He is a thinker without being solitary, abstracted, and unfitted for the time. He is a scholar without being narrow, bookish, and prone to occupy himself only with other men’s thoughts”. Martineau went further, praising Emerson for neglecting “no political duty”, for being “ready at every call to action”.28 At this early date, such a description of Emerson’s activist side by a foreigner was clearly both remarkable and prescient. Perhaps exaggerated, it nonetheless came six years before his 1844 Concord abolitionist speech showed his true colors to family and friends.
Before Emerson’s lectures appeared as essays and his reputation grew, Carlyle’s personal advice vitally encouraged him. His Scottish friend judged him to be producing “a sort of speech which is itself action, an artistic sort”. He had glimpsed Emerson’s gift to create words that breathed. Wishing him to sharpen this talent, he exhorted, “You tell us with piercing emphasis that man’s soul is great; show us a great soul of a man, in some work symbolic of such: this is the seal of such a message, and you will feel by and by that you are called to this. I long to see some concrete Thing, some Event, Man’s Life, American Forest, or piece of Creation, which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well Emersonized, depictured by Emerson, filled with the life of Emerson, and cast forth from him then to live by itself”.29 Carlyle was virtually defining Emerson’s true vocation and also, like Martineau, predicting his entry into social reform.
When Emerson’s Essays I appeared in 1841, Carlyle welcomed them as the only true, alive sensibility that responded intelligently to his own. Emerson’s was “a voice of the heart of Nature” that, although too imperfect to express the infinitude, was itself “an Infinitude”.30 Carlyle positively described his friend’s ethereal words as “light−rays darting upwards in the East”, the promises of a “new era”. Nevertheless, shortly after The Dial appeared that same year, Carlyle found it “shrill, incorporeal, spirit-like”.31 Despite his own lapses from the concrete, this historian-philosopher always disliked whatever in Emerson he found excessively abstract, and rightly assessed his influence on The Dial, even though at that moment, Margaret Fuller was its editor.
By his second trip to England and Europe in 1847–1848, Emerson had become a literary star, internationally known as the author of Nature, Essays I and II (1841, 1844), the founder-editor of The Dial (1842–1844), and, in short, the champion of avant-garde American culture. But his “Divinity School Address” (1838), in challenging the need for any clergy to interpret spiritual experience, had spawned fierce theological controversies at home and abroad, leading opponents to call him a corruptor of youth. Also, Emerson’s “Man the Reformer” (1841) had circulated underground in Britain as a little classic of radicalism before his arrival at Liverpool in November 1847. At Mechanics’ Institutes, he addressed huge crowds of aspiring young workers and professionals in industrial cities such as Liverpool and Manchester as well as smaller elite audiences in London. Leading figures, from politicians and aristocrats (Lord Lovelace, Lady Byron, and the man of letters Monckton Milnes) to writers (Thackeray, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, and Matthew Arnold), all took note of him. In contrast, Emerson was in fundamental disagreement now with Carlyle over a range of economic, political, and social issues. Emerson was dismayed to find his old friend an “epicure in diet” and a “sansculotte-aristocrat”, a “magnificent genius” lost in dogmatism and aimlessness. The two further disagreed about Carlyle’s current hero, Cromwell.32 However, their friendship would continue in an intermittent correspondence all their lives.
When George Eliot (1819–1880) first met Emerson in June 1848, she was already familiar with his essays. A month later, she extravagantly described him as “the first man I have ever seen”.33 Twelve years later “with venerating gratitude”, she recalled his “mild face, which I daresay is smiling on some one as beneficently as it one day did on me years and years ago”.34 At the same moment, Eliot was appreciating the “fresh beauty and meaning” of “Man the Reformer”, which she had turned to for her “spiritual good”. Despite this appreciation, Eliot rarely noted any indebtedness to Emerson in her own works, except in Romola (1863). In her chapter “The Blind Scholar and his Daughter”, Emerson’s declaration of intellectual independence (“The American Scholar”) transfigures her character’s emancipation.35 However, Eliot’s interest in reading his works continued all her life. His Society and Solitude (1870) gave her “enough gospel to serve one for a year”.36 And on New Year’s Day 1877, anticipating her own death which came three years later, Eliot recalled Emerson’s stirring poem “Days”.37
On this second trip to England, Emerson’s awareness of the Continent’s revolutionary unrest was heightened by his concern for Margaret Fuller, in Italy for the New-York Tribune to report on that country’s fight for unification. In this context, he re-encountered Wordsworth. Fourteen years before, as he recounted in English Traits, his general admiration for Wordsworth’s “great simplicity” had been qualified by surprise at finding certain “hard limits to his thought”, assessing him at that time as “one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity”.38 Now on this second visit, he and Harriet Martineau happened to awaken the seventy-eight-year-old Wordsworth from a nap. After silently pulling himself together, the poet gave way to a spate of bitterness about the French and then the Scots, intoning that Scotsmen were incapable of writing English. That included Carlyle, he said, “who is a pest to the English tongue”.39 Emerson could not know that Wordsworth had long thought the same of him. Seven years before, he had sardonically written a friend, “Our two present Philosophers [Emerson and Carlyle], who have taken a language which they suppose to be English for their vehicle, are verily ‘Par nobile fratrum’ [“a noble pair of brothers”], and it is a pity that the weakness of our age has not left them exclusively to the appropriate reward, mutual admiration. Where is the thing that now passes for philosophy at Boston to stop?”40 Although Emerson had always qualified his appreciation of Wordsworth, after his death in 1850, he remarked in English Traits, “His adherence to his poetic creed rested on real inspirations. The Ode on Immortality is the high-water-mark which the intellect has reached in this age”.41
In 1850, Carlyle praised Representative Men, ignoring the difference between Emerson’s essentially democratic, self-affirming uses of great men and his own hierarchical treatment of parallel figures in Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). But he disagreed with Emerson about Plato, whom he disliked. He also regretted that his friend had ended each of his profiles with criticism. Six years later, Carlyle’s enthusiasm for Emerson’s English Traits was less qualified. By 1860, he especially liked The Conduct of Life, and ten years later, Society and Solitude as well. Yet he criticized a continuing optimism in Emerson, ignoring his friend’s exploration of nature’s predictably unsentimental ways in “Fate”.42 During Emerson’s third trip to Europe in 1872–1873 — for the most part, an old man’s enjoyment of his celebrity — he twice saw Carlyle for a final time, their dwindling contact soon to end in old age and infirmity.
An American friend and admirer of Emerson, Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), co-editor of the North American Review and art professor at Harvard, was also a long-time resident in England and on the Continent. Eventually, he edited the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence. Paralleling Carlyle’s trans-Atlantic role in enhancing Emerson’s reputation in the West, Norton also promoted Emerson in letters and gifts of his books to friends. Norton’s contacts included the Rossetti brothers — the poet-painter Dante Gabriel and the editor William — as well as the editor-critic Leslie Stephen. In America in 1863, Stephen met Norton and, probably through him, Emerson. Almost forty years later, Stephen published a comprehensive short exposition of Emerson’s writings.43 Not surprisingly then, Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) came to applaud Emerson’s “firm and glittering” analogies. In her novel about women in modern times, Night and Day (1919), the suffragette Mary muses, “I must reflect with Emerson that it’s being and not doing that matters”.44 But earlier, Woolf had largely dismissed Emerson as a mere “schoolmaster”.45 Her surface attention contrasts with the lesser novelist Dorothy Richardson, whose Miriam in Pilgrimage (13 vols., 1915–1938) either quotes or mentions Emerson more than any other writer.46
The Irish author Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), wit and celebrated aesthete, was strongly attracted to Emerson, principally at first for his ideas on art and for his whimsy. Later, he adopted some of his more substantial ideas. Wilde’s early focus on only a part of Emerson’s legacy produced a rather ambiguous effect. On the one hand, believing Emerson to be a “fine thinker”47 and, with Whitman, one of America’s two best poets,48 he heavily borrowed phrases, even whole sentences from Emerson. In the United States in 1882 to give a lecture series popularizing aestheticism, Wilde echoed Emerson’s views on the unity of beauty and utility.
But on the other hand, in the same series he called the symbolism of Transcendentalism escapist and “Asiatic”.49 In this series, too, he quoted from “Man the Reformer”, then without attribution stole several sentences of Emerson’s (with variants) with which he concludes his “Domestic Life”. As Wilde’s tour ended, he at least recognized the “Attic genius” of “New England’s Plato”, perhaps because Emerson had died only weeks before. Then in “L’Envoi”, an introductory essay of the same year, Wilde recalled Emerson’s comment in “Nominalist and Realist”: “I am always insincere, knowing that there are other moods”,50 revealing that at this stage he was principally drawn to Emerson the droll “master of moods” rather than the model authentic man.51
In his critical dialogue The Decay of Lying (1889), Wilde continued to emphasize the puckish Emerson. But in assigning him the role of artist as absolute liar “for art’s sake”, Wilde ignored the moral limits Emerson gave to imaginative creation. In another dialogue, The Critic as Artist (1890), Wilde culls Emerson’s essays “Compensation” and “The Over-Soul” for his characters’ exchanges on the human psyche. Wilde’s Ernest announces, “… Men are wiser than they know” and “We are wiser than we know”. And his Gilbert wryly says he lives “in terror of not being misunderstood”, paraphrasing “Self-Reliance” (“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? … To be great is to be misunderstood”.). Elsewhere in this dialogue, Wilde quoted or referred to “Self-Reliance” at least three more times.
Again, this time bridging the individual and politics in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), Wilde leaned heavily on Emerson. Drawing on “Self-Reliance”, “The Poet”, and also on his “Considerations by the Way”, Wilde quotes and paraphrases Emerson’s treatment of a slew of subjects: conformity, freedom, imitation, autonomy, misunderstanding, individualism, tradition, property, mobs, philanthropy, and man as symbol.52 Wilde’s single novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the story of a handsome young degenerate, follows this same Emerson-indebted pattern. His Lord Henry condenses, paraphrases and typically exaggerates ideas from “Self-Reliance” and “Success”, as in “People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself”.53
After his imprisonment in 1895, Wilde, perhaps seeking to justify his life choices, selected Emerson’s essays as prime reading matter, now gravitating to his more serious thoughts. Wilde’s posthumous published letter De Profundis (1905) comments on a central passage from “Success”: “‘Nothing is more rare in any man’, says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own’. It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinion, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation”.54 Wilde could adopt this much, but not the full load of Emerson’s thought.
Emerson was also widely read among British philosophers, such as A. N. Whitehead and the novelist-lecturer John Cowper Powys (1872–1863). Powys’s One Hundred Best Books (1916) cites an edition of Emerson’s major writings and praises his “clear, chaste, remote and distinguished wisdom … with its shrewd preacher’s wit and country-bred humor”. He also noted a vital link in the chain of Emerson’s influence in Europe: “Nietzsche found him a sane and noble influence principally on the ground of his serene detachment from the phenomena of sin and disease and death”. Powys was one of the first to call attention to the now well-known Emerson-Nietzsche connection. That relationship, generally overlooked by mainstream criticism, especially in Europe, had already excelled any other in scope and rich ramification in the West.55
Emerson in German-Speaking Europe
The indebtedness of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) to Emerson has long been known, but for the most part only in specialist circles.56 Furthermore, like José Martí in Cuba, Nietzsche superbly illustrates the literal revolutionary effect of Emerson’s ideas in his native country and throughout Europe. But Nietzsche’s frequent celebration, especially on the Continent, has more than eclipsed his malignant role in departing from Emerson’s core intent. In fact, his misinterpretations of Emerson, taken up and further falsified by the Nazis, fed Germany’s political ambitions and contributed to the catastrophes of World War II.
In 1862, the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche’s delight with a new translation of The Conduct of Life led him to buy Emerson’s Essays I and II.57 Later, he acquired other works, including a second copy of The Conduct of Life and translations by Herman Grimm. From the start, Nietzsche copiously underlined and made exclamatory notes of praise in the margins of these works: “Ja!”, “Gut!”, “Sehr Gut!”, “Das ist recht!”, “Das ist wahr!” Directly or indirectly, Nietzsche referred to Emerson over a hundred times in his books and manuscripts, and regularly in his notes and letters. He rarely traveled without his Emerson.58
Arguably, Emerson was Nietzsche’s first as well as his last intellectual mentor. The American had already magnetized him a year before he began studying Plato and three years before he took up Schopenhauer. Then for over twenty-five years, Emerson remained a vital touchstone as Nietzsche wrote Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen (Untimely Considerations, 1873–1876); rejected Schopenhauer in 1876–1877; and composed Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1885). Nietzsche’s Götzen-Dämmerung (The Twilight of the Idols, 1888) further praised Emerson. A draft of Ecce Homo (also 1888) contains one of Nietzsche’s most heartfelt confessions of Emerson’s influence, and an original interpretation of him as a radical skeptic. So great was Nietzsche’s debt that, evidently to disguise the importance of Emerson as a constant source, he censored this mention of him.59
Yet Nietzsche often departed from Emerson’s original meaning. His treatment of fate and freedom heads the list of misinterpretations. The year he first devoured Emerson (1862), Nietzsche published essays of his own on his hero’s subjects — fate, freedom, and history — topics that Heidegger later described as Nietzsche’s “essential center”.60 In a near-paraphrase of Emerson’s “Fate”, Nietzsche urged the simultaneous embrace of, and resistance to, circumstance. But he went further, proposing a cultural revolution that far exceeded anything Emerson had envisioned: the subversion of the entire Christian tradition. The teen-age Nietzsche claimed that Christianity had inculcated a system of moral “slavery” and human degradation by preaching original sin and guilt, the superiority of soul to body, and an afterlife beyond this existence. By the 1880s, Nietzsche was adding to Christianity other traditions he thought equally injurious, whether religious or not: Buddhism, Platonic idealism, Socialism, and Democracy. For him, their valuation of equality and an ethic aligned with the poor, weak, and diseased promoted false goals and a debilitating herd mentality.61
In contrast, Emerson’s criticism of Congregational and Unitarian forms of Christianity in early nineteenth-century New England had focused on removing the powers of clergy and dogma which he felt separated the single believer from God. Emerson’s Jesus of Nazareth was an admirable man, even a model human being, but was neither wholly, nor even partially, “God’s son”. Such a role falsely elevated him above the rest of humanity. As for Platonism, Buddhism, and other philosophies or faiths, Emerson explored them with deep curiosity, looking for spiritual enlightenment. Too individualistic to support socialism, he nevertheless firmly and with vigor championed both equality and democracy. Their effects could disappoint, but they were infinitely preferable to a hermetic hierarchy or monarchy. Emerson would have considered Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist (The Antichrist, 1888), opposing both Christian thought and democracy, a travesty of his concept of self-reliance, which he always linked to a larger ethical norm.
Nietzsche had made his departure from this central Emersonian idea clear in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885). In large part inspired by Emerson’s “Character”,62 Zarathustra embodied Nietzsche’s famous concept of an “Ubermensch”, “Man above men”, or a so-called super-man. In Emerson’s “Power”, his “plus man”63 had rejected conformity not to be independent for its own sake but to act authentically, drawing energy and motivation from a higher moral spirit. Since the 1830s, Emerson had developed this concept of the extraordinary man from his “Man Thinking” (“The American Scholar” and “The Poet”) as well as from his select group profiled in Representative Men. Again, he rooted humanity’s “plus” state in an intimacy with creation’s overarching ethical order. In contrast, Nietzsche’s Ubermensch epitomized not only a surplus of humanity and life, but also was above any moral, religious, or even cosmic law.
Similarly, in his posthumous work, Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power, 1901), Nietzsche continued to reverse Emerson on this subject. Once again, Emerson’s sense of life as “a search after power” arose from a belief that legitimate authority comes only to a soul in harmony with the heart of nature: universal moral law. His “Divinity School Address” (1838) early announced a personal and profoundly meditative quest, both endless and experimental, aiming for, but always short of, eternal truth. No such idealism framed Nietzsche’s Will to Power. For him, philosophers never innocently and disinterestedly explore for truth’s sake. Their actual goal is all-encompassing power, from worldly influence and infinite fame to physical, political, and technological control.64 Nietzsche’s natural will to power not only inverted Emerson’s understanding of the soul in tune with cosmic force. But in addition, his attitude, an apparent realism laced with cynicism, added an amoral touch. In effect, Nietzsche questioned the very sincerity of his hero’s idealistic pursuit of truth.
In “Considerations by the Way”, Emerson theorized on the “good of evil” as impetus: “Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.65 Nietzsche explored this basic idea in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Then, only two years later in The Antichrist, he developed a rough and rigid antithesis to Emerson’s views, turning upside down the Christian concept of the ethical. Instead of empathizing with the weak, ill, enslaved, obedient, peaceful, ignored, or poor, he championed the healthy, rich, and powerful in all of history’s traditional hierarchies — political, military and social.
Nietzsche’s ultimate sense of time and focus also radically differed from Emerson’s with implications for his concept of free will. Emerson argued for engagement in this present existence, emphatically stating, “There is no other world. God is one and omnipresent; here or nowhere is the whole fact”.66 But Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882) introduced the concept of “the Eternal Return”, which conceived of the world as endlessly repeating itself in every detail.67 This ultimately closed arc implied a static, wholly determined universe. Such a vision was quite the opposite of Emerson’s early and continuing sense of the world’s change, movement, and expansion, and humanity’s parallel action within it. In “Circles” (1841), he had written, “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning …”68 Writing “Fate” in the 1850s, he was more explicit in championing free will: “To hazard the contradiction, — freedom is necessary”. In short, it was determined. He went on, “a part of Fate is the freedom of man … Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free”. This fundamental paradox arose from Emerson’s lifelong existential experience of “choosing and acting”.69
As his Beyond Good and Evil (1886) reveals, Nietzsche’s politics also radically distanced him from Emerson. The two differed on such major issues as progressive democratic goals, abolition, feminist ideals, peace, and war. Contrary to his posthumous reputation, Nietzsche was not a Nazi, nor was he a fascist, nationalist, socialist, pan-German enthusiast, or racial purist. He hated anti-Semites and mass movements. But in his later super-reactionary opinions, he eclipsed Emerson’s sense of empowering “each and all”. Nietzsche came to advocate a pro-slavery, autocratic new order, his “warmongering” attitude pushing him to invoke a “new terrorism”.70 More famously, he gave a new framework to his earlier transformation of Emerson’s “representative men” into lawless “Ubermenschen”, ripe for the Nazis’ misuse. Emerson had noted one “good of evil”: “Wars, fires, plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races and dens of distemper, and open a fair field to new men”. Nietzsche went much further, proposing a true theory of active eugenics “in order to shape the man of the future through breeding and … the annihilation of millions of failures”.71
In brief, the later Nietzsche had quite corrupted Emerson’s leading ideas. In turn, the Nazis, heralding Nietzsche as a prophet, either perpetuated earlier untruths about him or invented new ones. Thus, any alleged claims of a link between the real Emerson and the National Socialists, past or present, are quite false. Nietzsche’s association with the Nazis began with his sister Elisabeth, wife of a fervent anti-Semite, who imposed her own bias upon her brother’s posthumous book Will to Power, censoring Nietzsche when he spoke against anti-Semites.72 Then in 1918, just after Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I, a successful German book mythologized Nietzsche as a pivotal Germanic-Nordic-Greek myth-creator for the German people.73 The next year, a booklet interpreted him as “Prophet” of an extreme, dictatorial form of “Socialism”.74 But not until the mid-1920s did a full “Nazification” of Nietzsche take place, when certain German writers applied his “master morality” and presumed anti-Semitism to a proto-Nazi racial interpretation of the “Jewish question”.75 Also in the pre-Nazi years, the chief editor of Nietzsche’s works, Alfred Baeumler (who became a Nazi in 1933), assumed Nietzsche to be anti-Jewish and celebrated him as both a philosopher and a political scientist. Others profiled him as godfather of a new German nation and “wisdom”, based on a life-enhancing amoral law.76
Meanwhile, Elisabeth Nietzsche had started a correspondence with Mussolini in 1923, which led to their meeting in the early 1930s. In 1932, she also became a friend of Hitler’s.77 In the next two years, Hitler visited the Nietzsche-Archive in Weimar at least three times, paid tribute to Elisabeth with private gifts, and was photographed looking at Nietzsche’s bust.78 Nietzsche’s cousin Richard Oehler reproduced one such picture in his 1935 book, where he combined quotations from Nietzsche and Mein Kampf (1925–1926).79 In the later 1930s, most Nazis were either ignorant of, or deliberately overlooked, Nietzsche’s deep indebtedness to the democratic Emerson. Martin Heidegger, then a member of the Nazi party and an Anglophobe, censored a German scholar’s study of the Nietzsche-Emerson connection.80 On Mussolini’s sixtieth birthday in 1943, Hitler gave him a complete edition of Nietzsche’s works, an act that symbolized the culmination of Nietzsche’s legacy to the Nazi-Fascist movements.81
The deep, continuous tie between Emerson and Nietzsche serves as a master key for Emerson’s entrance into the viscera of twentieth-century European culture. Students of Nietzsche’s would inevitably be introduced to Emerson. In turn, their writings referred to both. For example, Belgian Nobel Prize-winner Maurice Maeterlinck, a key figure in the French symbolist movement, wrote a far-reaching essay “Emerson” (1897) that emphasized the everyday presence of a world of transcendental, spiritual mystery and beauty. In Austria, novelist Robert Musil (1880–1942) read Maeterlinck’s essay and quickly noted the Emerson-Nietzsche relationship. Musil soon dedicated himself to what he termed “essayism”, or Emerson’s constant experimentation. He was also drawn to his exaltation of individual action and his aversion to both philosophical systems and the slavish adulation of history.
Throughout his career, Musil quoted, paraphrased, or integrated Emerson into his writing.82 As a young engineering student at the turn of the century, he read a German edition of the Essays,83 to which he returned in 1905 and again in the 1920s. The radical dynamism of “Circles”, as applied to both morals and politics, was a particular favorite. Sometime between 1899 and 1904 in an undated journal entry, Musil celebrated The Conduct of Life as a model of “an advanced culture”.84 Eleven more times, his journals refer to Emerson at moments when he was recording seeds for his novels, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Perturbations of Young Torless, 1906) and his masterwork, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities, 1930, 1933, 1943, incomplete). Many of his journal entries draw on “The Poet”, particularly on Emerson’s idea that man is “only half himself, the other half is his expression” and on the daily need to express one’s own “painful secret”, or inmost truth.85
In The Man Without Qualities, Musil took Emerson’s experimentalism, a theme pervading his novel, and made it a “sense of possibility”. From the beginning, his main character Anders (later Ulrich) is characterized by his enthusiasm for “the new, the technical, the Emersonian”.86 Emerson’s “Circles” had stated: “Men walk as prophecies of the next age … I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false”. After Emerson, Musil has Anders/Ulrich say: “Men walk in the world as prophecy of the future, and all their deeds are tests and experiments, for every deed can be surpassed by the next”. Musil/Anders/Ulrich goes on to quote Emerson without attribution: “The virtues of society are vices of the saint”. In the same breath, as if to finally credit him, his hero names Emerson as “a Man whom I love”. Significant traces of Emerson extend into the novel’s other characters: Clarisse, Leinsdorf, Arnheim, and Lindner. In reading Emerson along with Maeterlinck, Novalis, and Nietzsche, Musil thought, “We experience the most powerful movement of the mind”.87 In these authors, he found a vital, immediate relationship to the world, where contemplation and action are one.
Maeterlinck’s “Emerson” of 1897 immediately inspired Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), the twentieth-century bohemian Austrian poet.88 That winter, he read Emerson’s Essays,89 and twice quoted them in his Florenzer Tagebuch (Florentine Diary, 1898). Like Musil, he was drawn to “Circles”: “I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back”.90 Rilke echoes this thought in his essay “Notizien zur Melodie der Dinge” (“Notes on the Melody of Things”, 1898): “We are right at the start, do you see. As though before everything. With a thousand and one dreams behind us and no act”.91 Other images from “Circles” as well as “The Poet” and “The Over-Soul” were evident in this essay, including Pentecostal figures of “cloven flames and fiery men who speak holy words”, of doors opening, mountain peaks and men as trees. Notable, too, is the figure of the poet-speaker whose work implants his perceptions in everyone. Emerson’s “The Poet” refers to the men “of more delicate ear” than most of us who, hearing nature’s “primal warblings”, write, however imperfectly, “the songs of nations”.92 Rilke writes: “… a broad melody always wakes behind you, woven out of a thousand voices, where there is room for your own solo only here and there. To know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody”.93
This essay was part of a veritable flood of creativity that poured from Rilke in 1898.94 In that year, his major essay “On Art” and another prose text, “Intérieurs”, heavily drew from Emerson, the latter even mimicking his style.95 In 1899, Rilke published a collection of poems in an Emerson/Whitman-like mode, For My Joy (Mir Zur Feier). Metamorphosis was its major theme, with at least four poems probably inspired by Emerson. The same year his Book of Hours, vol. 1, also appeared, its title alluding to Emerson’s “Genius of the Hour” (from “Art”) that “dwells in the hour that now is” (from “Over-Soul”). The book also repeats other favorite Emerson themes such as the creative glance of the poet and existence as a state of perpetual becoming. Rilke’s Book of Images, a collection of poems written between 1898 and 1901, includes other themes that echo Emerson: the creative power of imagination, memory’s selectivity, and fully living in the moment.
Emerson in French-speaking Europe
Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), a central figure in Polish literature, was also a multilingual poet claimed by several nations, especially France.
Among Romantics, he became ranked with Byron and Goethe. Mickiewicz and his colleague at the Collège de France, historian Edgar Quinet (1803–1875), shared a common passion for Emerson, beginning with Nature (1836), which they read in 1838. Only six years later, Quinet added Emerson’s name to his list of the greatest modern philosophers after Vico, Condorcet, Herder, and Hegel. In the period 1843–1845, Mickiewicz and Quinet quoted and copied several passages from Emerson in both their journals and course lectures. For Mickiewicz, Emerson was “the American Socrates”, similar to, but “more profound” than, the French spiritual and social philosopher Pierre Leroux. He also likened Emerson’s sensitivity to that of Polish and Slavonic people, attuned to the “continual influence of the invisible world on the visible world”. In Paris in 1847, Margaret Fuller used a gift of Emerson’s Poems (1846) to win an introduction to the handsome, vibrant, and inspiring Pole, who shared her enthusiasm for women’s rights.96
Through his teaching and translations, Mickiewicz contributed to the diffusion of Emerson’s essays in France. In his courses, he quoted the first lines of “Man the Reformer” and ideas that probably derived from Emerson’s “Farming”. With “History”, he translated these essays for “La Tribune des Peuples”, his newly founded internationalist leftist magazine. Ideas from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and “Spiritual Laws” have been identified in seven of Mickiewicz’s “Apothegms in Verses”.97 Besides his students, he introduced Emerson to the French historian Jules Michelet. Yet Mickiewicz regretted Emerson’s apparent isolation from his time, nation, and land,98 revealing an ignorance of the American’s far-reaching readership and lecture audiences as well as his active antislavery and pro-women’s rights work.
Of other leading French authors who enhanced Emerson’s reputation in Europe, the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) made a strong contribution.99
The two may have brushed shoulders, but did not meet in Paris in 1848, when the radical Baudelaire and the curious Emerson attended two separate revolutionary rallies. Although Baudelaire’s American idol, Edgar Allan Poe (d. 1840) had not favored Emerson (and vice versa), Baudelaire was attracted to him via a French translation.100 In addition, he knew at least parts of Representative Men, evident from his vitriolic attack on Voltaire in Mon coeur mis à nu (My Heart Laid Bare, 1864). Baudelaire suggested Emerson should have written an essay about the eighteenth century philosophe entitled “the Anti-Poet, the King of Gawkers, the Prince of Superficials, the Anti-Artist, the preacher of janitresses”.101 Baudelaire’s purchase of English Traits102 and an edition of The Conduct of Life in English showed his attraction to Emerson’s most intense confrontations with urban, industrial culture. The latter book, especially, was a guide to an empowering ethics for modern life, a project for which Poe was no model.
The Conduct of Life is also widely present in Baudelaire’s diary-like works, beginning in their first pages: My Heart Laid Bare (1864) and Fusées (Rockets, 1867). In Rockets, he either quotes or paraphrases from “Power” and other essays, taking up Emerson’s ideas on concentration, the value of constant ambitions, and the virtue of repeated practice. In these writings, Baudelaire, the bohémien par excellence, repents his wasteful ways, seeks empowerment (with uncertain results) through self-reliance, and promises himself to refrain from any dissipation. A whole section of Baudelaire’s journals on Hygiène (Hygiene, 1867) includes a long series of quotes, in English this time, from The Conduct of Life.
On the theme of concentration, Baudelaire often repeated a sentence from Emerson’s “Considerations by the Way” in his book on Delacroix (1863): “The hero is he who is immovably centered”. And he praised Emerson as “the overseas moralist” who, “though passing for leader of the boring Bostonian school, has nonetheless a certain acumen à la Seneca, proper to sharpen meditation”. The wisdom Emerson applies, he wrote, “to the conduct of life and to the domain of affairs can equally be applied to the domain of poetry and art”.103 Baudelaire’s attraction to Emerson, particularly his idea of the supremacy of the solitary artist, may have helped him shift from advocating a confrontational socialism to an ethic of radical authenticity.104
In contrast to Baudelaire, the philosopher and writer Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was almost bilingual in English and French and thus could read Emerson in the original.
In 1917, he declared that he “loved Emerson”, undoubtedly a result of his admiration for William James, Emerson’s younger friend and close reader, as seen in Chapter 5.105 Bergson’s earliest references to Emerson in 1906–1907 borrow ideas from the beginning of his “Character” that focus on the gap between character and action.106 He cites Emerson’s examples of the English statesman William Pitt and George Washington as unusual men, whose characters alone distinguished them. Although Bergson rarely referred to Emerson — only three times in thirty years — the span of his references testifies to a lasting regard. Like Dickinson and Nietzsche, he may also have resisted compromising his own originality by too frequent reference. Bergson echoes Emerson in his similar interest in the nature of time, organic vital force, intuition, and the comic. His final notice was in 1936, when he once again spoke of William James, this time to say his work reminded him of Emerson.107 There, Bergson slightly misquoted Emerson’s “Character”, in defining it as “a reserve of force which acts solely by its presence”. (Interestingly, James recognized Bergson’s indebtedness to Emerson when he re-read Emerson and thought of Bergson.)108
Marcel Proust (1871–1922) knew Emerson early, probably from high school, and also favored writers who were Emerson followers: Bergson, Baudelaire, Thoreau, Carlyle, and George Eliot. Proust’s diary and correspondence of his early twenties contain frequent references to Emerson.
Then in 1895, the year before his first novel appeared, he claimed to have read Emerson’s Essais “drunkenly”.109 The same year, he encountered a French edition of Representative Men. And in the next, Proust’s Les plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days, 1896) used four selections from Emerson as chapter headings. In Pastiches et mélanges (Mixtures, 1919), he refers to Emerson at least six times.110 From this early and continuous interest, it is not surprising that Emerson ideas appear in vital parts of Proust’s best-known work, the autobiographical novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–1927). In the third volume of this novel, Le côté de Guermantes (The Way of Guermantes, 1920–1921), the narrator Marcel describes a conversation that “had been entirely about Emerson, Ibsen and Tolstoy”.111
More recently, Albert Camus (1913–1960), the Franco-Algerian philosopher and novelist, emerged as yet another admirer of Emerson and a keen reader of his Journals.
In his own journals of 1951–1952, Camus so frequently quotes Emerson that he identifies them with a mere “E”, as with “The only immortal is the one for whom all things are immortal”.112 In other places, only a sentence separates an Emerson “wall-gate/door” quotation from Camus’ Emerson-sounding notes: “The time of criticism and polemics is over — Creation … Totally eliminating criticism and polemics — From now on, the single and constant affirmation … The worst of fortunes is a bad temperament”.113 Elsewhere, Camus records three more Emerson thoughts. One on radical authenticity is certainly from his journal: “What remains but to acquiesce in the faith that not lying, nor being angry, we shall at last acquire the voice and language of a man”.114
In his last four years, Camus evidently felt particular affinities with Emerson. His exemplary short story, “Jonas, or the Artist at Work” (1957), reflects Emersonian themes — from self-reliance to the individual’s conflicting needs for solitude and for society. The same year, Camus twice refers to Emerson in his lecture, “L’artiste et son temps” (“The Artist and His Time”), given four days after his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. Early in his remarks, he paraphrases the American: “Man’s obedience to his own genius, Emerson said magnificently, is faith par excellence”.115 Ending inspirationally, he directly quotes Emerson on a major point: “Every wall is a door”. (Camus substitutes “door” for Emerson’s “gate”.)116 For Emerson, life’s adversities (walls) are potential openings to new possibilities. After the unprecedented horrors of World War II, Camus was re-conceiving the role of the artist, urging writers to leave their escapist, fictional creations and confront the “wall” facing them — the hard facts of radical evil. Emerson’s figure assured Camus that there was indeed a way out, but he stressed, only through the wall itself. Camus may now be added to those who have attempted to rescue Emerson from an army of critics who, early and late, have erroneously dismissed him as a cosmic optimist, ignoring the reality of evil and thus failing to effectively protest against it.
Emerson in Italy
The proto-Nazi and Nazi transformation of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch to support the concept of a “master race”, a full reversal of Emerson’s “plus” man, was largely done in ignorance of the Emerson-Nietzsche relationship. This was not the case in Italy. The poet and politician Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), the “godfather” of Italian fascism, made the connection between the two, no doubt when reading both in the same period.117
That may help explain his elitist interpretation of Emerson. As early as 1893, D’Annunzio clearly linked his futuristic ideas to the American, writing, “The artists of the future … will be the representative men, to use Emerson’s phrase: they will be, like Leonardo, the exemplar interpreters and messengers of their times”.118 Two years later, the idea had taken firm hold: D’Annunzio stressed the poet’s elevated role of prophet, seeing artists alone as “representative men … in modern societies …” To Emerson’s quest for the “great and constant fact of Life”, he attached a Messianic note, “[We] wait for a Man of Life”,119 adding that “the new Renaissance” would be “the restoration of the worship of Man”.120 In 1899, D’Annunzio repeated Emerson’s expectation of poets to be “liberating gods”, saying, “The people are thirsty for poetry, they wait for the poet, the great dramatic poet, as a liberator. The future belongs to the poets”.121
D’Annunzio’s early library was auctioned in 1910. But his later collection, with Emerson’s works frequently underlined, documents how thoroughly the American influenced his ambitions and even, to some degree, his sensitivity. In a French translation of Emerson’s “The Tragic”, D’Annunzio read, “He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain”, then exclaimed, “Lien commun! [A common bond!]”.122 The comment is arresting. Only a few Emerson followers perceived his tragic sense. D’Annunzio also marked Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr’.s biography of Emerson where it noted his unique “seraphic voice and countenance”.123 (By name and style, D’Annunzio and his biographers referred to him as an “archangel”.) More ominously, he also marked several passages in “Self-Reliance”. One, “I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility [that of friends]”,124 would have strengthened D’Annunzio’s devil-may-care flamboyance. In the same year, 1912, D’Annunzio appeared to have translated this idea into his “me ne frego” (“I don’t care”), expressing a callous, “so-what” attitude disregarding all others and any challenge. The slogan became a famous Fascist cry,125 and illustrates how fully D’Annunzio, like Nietzsche, departed from Emerson’s true intent.
D’Annunzio’s heavily-marked Emerson passages detail many more instances of ideas that inspired his radical corruptions. Above all, he grafted onto Emerson’s ideal of the poet-prophet the notion of the poet-duce, the poet as political leader. Without any exterior check, D’Annunzio would embody the artist-as-politician in a blend of narcissistic aestheticism, super-masculinity, bullying rhetoric, and amoral behaviour, all within an excessive lifestyle. Such a leader was at total odds with Emerson’s goals for the poet-in-society and in high contrast to his simple manner and style. Later, D’Annunzio’s readings of Nietzsche’s work further skewed his interpretations of Emerson. In the end, he betrayed even his own ideal of the poet-duce, living a sequestered life of private consumption at his paradise-retreat, the Vittoriale, adored by fans and financially supported by continuous aid from Mussolini.126
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) was undoubtedly happy to keep D’Annunzio, a celebrated World War I hero, literary star, and muted rival, out of public notice. The two had been close for years, from fighting together in Fiume in 1919 to Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, and often corresponded.
Given this contact, D’Annunzio might well have first introduced Emerson to Mussolini, although the destruction or sale of Mussolini’s personal libraries has obscured the scope and dating of this influence. But Mussolini’s long essay about Nietzsche, La filosofia della forza (The Philosophy of Power, 1908),127 would have made him exceedingly curious about the German’s principal source. Thus his claims in 1925 and 1931 that Emerson was among his favorite authors should be taken seriously, not as mere political or diplomatic boasting.128 In 1925, he countered an argument that American civilization is “dominated exclusively by mechanical or materialistic factors and by the thirst for financial gain”, by pointing not only to William James but to Emerson himself.129 Six years later, in support of his “deep sympathy to the people of the great Republic” and its contributions to “modern progress”, Mussolini adduced a list of writers: “Longfellow, Whitman, Emerson”. He remarked outright, “Personally, I am a great admirer of Emerson and James”.130
Associates of Mussolini also bore witness to his knowledge of Emerson. The Duce’s personal doctor reported: “… very often we happened to entertain ourselves at length on Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Emerson and other philosophers”.131 Much closer to Mussolini was his intellectual soul mate, lover, and first biographer Margherita Sarfatti, a journalist familiar with Emerson. In her Life of Benito Mussolini (1925), she quoted Emerson, implying a parallel with her subject: “The reward of a duty performed lies in the acquisition of strength to perform a duty that is more difficult”.132
Mussolini’s interest in Emerson’s ideal of the heroic “great man”, or a superior “representative man”, as a unifying guide for the whole nation paralleled D’Anunnzio’s. But he went further. Mussolini’s leader would shed D’Annunzio’s poetic and mystical aestheticism to be more stoic and Roman, an even stronger strong man. At a moment when Italy was weakened by war and an ineffectual king, and even before elevating himself from prime minister to dictator in 1925, Mussolini had famously said, “Liberty is a rotten carcass”.133 Ruthlessly absorbing all political power unto himself, he was, like Nietzsche, openly attacking democracy. After 1925, Mussolini quickly eviscerated most of Italy’s democratic institutions, built a vast military force, began territorial expansion, and ended by allying himself with an even more potent “Nietzschean” Ubermensch, Hitler. D’Annunzio and Mussolini’s selective sampling of Emerson missed his widest context and deepest presence, his “Over Soul”. Emerson’s aphorism, “Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances, the senses are despotic”, definitively distances him from these two Italians.
Simultaneously, however, a handful of non-Fascist Party Italian writers were accurately reading and interpreting Emerson. The novelist Federigo Tozzi (1883–1920) extolled Nature, and the professor of pedagogy Giuseppe Lombardo Radice (1879–1939) celebrated his educational philosophy in a long essay, Emerson: profeta dell’educazione nuova (Emerson: Prophet of the New Education, 1926). Despite this interest, the Fascists’ use of Emerson led to his general disrepute in post-World War II Italy. For a time, that sentiment grew into an anti-Emerson tradition.134 Then in the late 1950s, Agostino Lombardo, the founder of American Studies in Italy, exalted him as one who illustrated “America becoming conscious of itself”, his endorsement temporarily resuscitating Emerson’s reputation. But influenced by F. O. Mathiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), a work that faulted Emerson for failing to be as realistic as his contemporaries, Lombardo finally found the American “too much a philosopher to be a poet, and too much a poet to be a philosopher”.135 Twentieth-century novelists Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese were similarly cautious or downright critical.136
In the twenty-first century, Italy has shifted toward a more positive view of Emerson with only a touch of its earlier ambivalence. Several translations of Emerson’s works have appeared. And in the fall of 2003, a large International Bicentennial Conference was held, an event honoring Emerson that was unprecedented in Europe.137 Yet that same year, a leading philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, called for a re-examination of Emerson as a “forerunner of Nietzsche”,138 reawakening the negative cast the German had made of his American idol. And in 2008, a newspaper review of an Italian translation of The Conduct of Life — , “Emerson. The Secret Master of Nietzsche”, spoke of both his importance and neglect, while pairing him once again with Nietzsche.139 In the same year, however, novelist Paola Capriolo’s review of the same book called it a true classic, “with sparkling humor and vibrant poetic brightness”.140 In 2008, too, Mario A. Rigoni, a leading critic of the poet Leopardi, noted affinities between the Italian and Emerson.141 Recently as well, the contemporary poet and Emerson scholar Roberto Mussapi has celebrated his essays as “pregnant and vital as voice itself, written in a fluvial prose, all embracing and illuminating”.142
Emerson in Russia
Emerson’s arch-individualistic and anti-communitarian views, as well as his ideas on capitalism and property, did not bode well for his future reception in either Revolutionary or Cold War Russia. But decades before, during Emerson’s last trip to Europe in 1872–1873, he had met Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) in Paris. Turgenev had earlier alluded to Emerson in his novel Ottsi i Dyeti (Fathers and Sons, 1862), deriding him by association with the women’s movement via a fictional, faux-intellectual Russian woman and the real-life novelist George Sand. The greater Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) more fully commented on Emerson in his diaries, more positively than Turgenev on the whole and over many more years.
At age thirty, Tolstoy began with qualified praise of Emerson for his essays on Goethe and Shakespeare.143 By his late fifties, after remarking that Emerson “is good” (possibly referring to “Experience”), Tolstoy told himself, “Read Emerson. Profound, bold, but often capricious and confused”.144 Finally, in his late sixties, he exultantly found that “Self-Reliance” was “marvelous”.145 In 1900, his publishing house, Posrednik (The Intermediary) printed an abridged version of the essay, followed two years later by a version of “The Over-Soul”, followed by several others.146 Tolstoy’s wife and other family members also read Emerson.147
In Tolstoy’s essay “Message to the American People” (1901), he encouraged U.S. readers to rediscover their writers of the 1850s. He listed “Garrison, Parker, Emerson, Ballou, and Thoreau, not as the greatest, but as those who, I think, specially influenced me”. In his preface to Polenz’s Büttnerbauer (1895), he had already included “Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Whittier” in “the great galaxy” of American literature. And his two collections of classic wisdom, The Cycle of Reading (1906) and Path of Life (begun in 1910), included many Emerson excerpts.148 Quotations in the latter work were largely from “Self-Reliance”. But he also singled out a paragraph from the little-known essay, “Works and Days” (1870), affirming the idea that “each day is the best day”, each hour “a critical, decisive hour”. Of Emerson themes, Tolstoy commented on immortality, the importance of living “outside” time, and prioritizing the depth of one’s life above its duration. In yet another diary entry, Tolstoy revealed Emerson’s weight with him: “Read: Emerson was told that the world would soon end. He replied: ‘Well, I think I can get along without it’. Very important”.149
Toward the East
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), yet another follower of Emerson who became a Nobel laureate in literature (1907), began reading Emerson’s poems when he was eight. Around 1880, the fifteen-year-old Kipling listed Emerson as his second choice after Whittier (another Emerson aficionado) on a school poll of students’ favorite poets. Four years later, Kipling wrote a poetic parody, “Kopra-Brahm”,150 dedicated to Emerson. An antic mix of ethereal and common material subjects, the poem’s first two lines are: “Cosmic force and Cawnpore leather / Hold my walking-boots together”. (“Cawnpore leather” deliberately mauled the pronunciation of an Indian hide from the city of Kanpur.) Kipling’s poem draws heavily on images and characters from Emerson, notably “Brahma, to which the title alludes, but also to one of Emerson’s “Fragments on the poet and the poetic gift”, where he whimsically boasted, “[The poet] could condense cerulean ether / Into the very best sole-leather”.151 A native Englishman born in Bombay and educated in Britain, Kipling returned to live in India for several years. Then for four years (1892–1896), he was in Vermont, where he met Emerson’s friend, Charles Eliot Norton. Norton corresponded with young Kipling and admired his poetry. He also gave him books, including his own edition of the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence (1894), reinforcing Kipling’s strong boyhood memories of Emerson.
Apparently Kipling was also drawn to Emerson’s essays — even to obscure ones.152 As Emerson had done, Kipling also introduced his prose with poems, or quoted Emerson directly. Quotations from “Give All to Love” prefaced Kipling’s “The Children of the Zodiac” (1891), and others from “Brahma” for The Day’s Work (1898). When Kipling left India for Japan in 1889, he introduced his impressions of the new country via quotes, with a slight final variant, from Emerson’s “Woodnotes, II”.153 Kipling’s poem “The Inventor”, in The Muse among the Motors (1904), is dedicated to Emerson, emulating his style and themes, but with a more regular rhythm. It presents a Benjamin Franklin-like figure who reflects Emerson’s Promethean desires: his fascination with power, the overcoming of space and time, and a hope for the renewal of man. In a late memoir, Something of Myself (1937), Kipling retained his earlier allegiance to Emerson, quoting a little known fragment from his May-Day and Other Pieces (1867).154
Emerson’s pervasive presence in Kipling appears in his famous “If” (1895), which once competed with Poe’s “Raven” as the West’s best-known poem. While composing it, Kipling was in close contact with Norton and also re-reading Emerson. “If” concentrates and popularizes both Emerson’s ideas and spirit: “trust yourself”, “don’t look too good, nor talk too wise”, “start again at your beginnings”, “talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch”, “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it / And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!”155
From the stanza that heads this chapter, Emerson’s phrase — “a subtle chain of countless rings” — concisely sets the stage for humanity’s progressive evolution. Insight makes it possible: “The eye reads omens where it goes, / And speaks all languages the rose …” The meanings gained collectively define the “rose”, what may be known about creation and ourselves. Such knowledge is universal since it “speaks all languages”. Emerson’s climactic ending, “And, striving to be man, the worm / Mounts through all the spires of form”, alludes to just the sort of unified effort that he, his Western educators, and followers all symbolize: the human mind, perpetually advancing from its lowliest origins, spirals upward to new heights of consciousness.
6.2 Asia in Emerson and Emerson in Asia
© Alan Hodder, CC BY 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0065.09
Please tell Maganlalbhai [Gandhi’s nephew] that I would advise him to read Emerson’s essays. They can be had for nine pence in Durban. There is a cheap reprint out. Those essays are worth studying. He should read them, mark the important passages and then finally copy them out in a notebook. The essays to my mind contain the teaching of Indian wisdom in a Western garb.
Mahatma Gandhi, letter to his son, 25 March 1907
Asia in Emerson
While Emerson has often been viewed as the most American of writers — formulator of such a reputedly distinctive American ideal as self-reliance — it is important to recognize that he was at the same time an unprecedentedly cosmopolitan thinker, drawing on a far-flung range of sources, Eastern as well as Western. Our first public intellectual, he was at the same time our first global intellectual, and as his fame spread throughout the middle and final decades of the nineteenth century, his writings in English and in translation often found an appreciative, at times even an ardent, readership, in various non-Western lands as well. Indeed, numbered among his most admiring readers were several who went on to play momentous roles in the modern religious, literary, or political history of their respective nations, most notably India and Japan. Among Indians, these included Hindu religious reformer and missionary, Swami Vivekananda; Indian poet and Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore; and even Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi himself, chief architect of Indian independence. As colonial subjects themselves, such Indian leaders participated centrally in the tense, politically fraught, ongoing cultural and political exchange between Europe and its Asian colonial possessions. No less significant for modern East-West religious and cultural exchange was D. T. Suzuki, the great ambassador of Zen in the West, whose work also contributed significantly to modern Japanese self-definition vis-à-vis the West.
The most conspicuous expression of Emerson’s international outlook was perhaps his precocious and, in retrospect, quite prescient interest in the classical religious and literary traditions of China, Persia and, most especially, Hindu India. For many centuries, the rich heritage of Asian civilizations had been effectively closed to the European West as a result of the vigorous expansion of Islam in the seventh century, the dominion of the Islamic Caliphates from the seventh through the twelfth centuries, and the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. But with Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, and the subsequent opening of the Indian and East Asian spice trade, barriers to intercultural exchange between Asia and Europe were once again lifted, inaugurating a period of cultural renewal in Europe that the French scholar, Edgar Quinet, referred to as the “Oriental Renaissance”. For many European scholars and artists of the Romantic period, news of the long forgotten and, to many, unsuspected cultural richness of India and China came as an intellectual windfall. To such Romantic thinkers, India in particular came to be viewed as the cradle of Western civilization, despite what they considered the decadence of many contemporary Hindu customs.156
For the sake of convenience, we might date the beginning of this renaissance to the founding in 1784 of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, a scholarly association composed initially of some thirty British civil servants working in Calcutta under the auspices of the East India Trading Company. The Society’s grand ambition was to discover everything that could be known about the human and natural history of the vast Indian subcontinent and to propagate that knowledge for a wider English and European readership. Within a few years, a torrent of translations, monographs, and articles on a wide range of subjects issued from the Society’s press totally transforming European knowledge of several Asian civilizations, past and present. While the various authors of these studies were often accomplished amateur scholars in their own right, they all worked in one capacity or another for the East India Company and later, the British Raj. Among the chief contributors to the Society’s work were Sir William Jones (1746–1794), an accomplished philologist, and the Society’s founder and second president, who arrived in Calcutta in 1783 to join the Supreme Court in Bengal; Charles Wilkins (1749–1836), a printer for the East India Company and first European to learn Sanskrit, who produced the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gītā; Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765–1837), an accountant turned magistrate, who wrote widely on classical Hindu religion and culture; Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800–1894), a British civil servant residing in Nepal, who put together an invaluable collection of Sanskrit manuscripts bearing on the origins and development of Buddhism; and Horace H. Wilson (1786–1860), another magistrate, who went on to become one of the most accomplished Sanskritists of his generation. But for the work of this gifted cadre of British scholar-magistrates, Emerson’s knowledge of Asian traditions would have been all but impossible.
For such lately independent partisans of American liberty as Emerson and his Transcendentalist friends, the British discovery of the traditions of India and beyond was not without a certain pointed political irony since it was underwritten and occasioned by the same British colonial apparatus that Americans had only just recently thrown off after a long and costly war of independence. Generally speaking, nineteenth-century European and American knowledge of Asian traditions and cultures often arose as an instrument or byproduct of the continued political and economic expansion of Britain and other European colonial powers in various spheres of South and East Asia. For British magistrates working in India, one principal early motive for the acquisition of Sanskrit and the translation of selected Hindu texts was to facilitate political jurisdiction over the Indian population. Jones’s own scholarly program serves as a notable case in point. One of the first Sanskrit texts he chose to translate was the ancient Hindu legal code, the Manu-smṛti or “Laws of Manu” — a choice dictated as much by legal and political considerations as by his own scholarly interest. His groundbreaking translation, which he entitled The Institutes of Hindu Law (1794), proved to be one of the first books that Emerson — and after him, Thoreau — consulted in his first tentative efforts to acquire a knowledge of Indian traditions.
Although Emerson was arguably the first American to embrace Asian religious and philosophical traditions as an important complement and corrective to biblical traditions, his interest in Asian civilizations was not wholly unprecedented in earlier American colonial history. Puritan patriarch Cotton Mather had corresponded with Danish missionaries in Madras as far back as the 1720’s, and later in the century, Benjamin Franklin conceived an active interest in Confucianism that later led to a learned exchange with Sir William Jones, with whom he had worked in Paris in the run-up to the American Revolution. In 1794, Joseph Priestly, a transplanted English Unitarian, produced the first serious study of Asian religions in America, and somewhat later, Hannah Adams included an account of Asian religions in her own comparative survey of world religions. Yet, for all these earlier intercultural transactions, no one did more to prepare the ground for later American interest in Asian cultures, particularly Asian religious cultures, than Emerson and his Concord neighbors, most notably Henry David Thoreau and Amos Bronson Alcott.157
In light of his appreciative reception of Asian religious and literary traditions later in life, Emerson’s first reactions to what he could glean about the cultures of India and the Far East do not seem in retrospect especially promising. Since the start of American maritime contacts with India and China in the mid-1780s, Emerson’s hometown of Boston had become a clearing-house for information about the far-off cultures of South and East Asia. Fantastic stories of Indian juggernauts, widow burning, and ascetics draped on hooks passed over India Wharf and the Boston waterfront together with the muslins, spices, and teas of the East India trade. Sensationalistic travel accounts appearing in the magazines and newspapers of the day found a ready readership. Since as early as 1803, Emerson’s father, William Emerson, himself published several articles on India and the Far East in the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, a journal which he edited till his death in 1811. Of course, much of the information provided in these sources proved to be anecdotal and often quite bigoted, reflecting the blend of fascination and repugnance often characterizing the popular imagination in the still provincial and strait-laced town of Boston.158
It is no surprise then that as a young man, Emerson never fully escaped the sense of religious chauvinism and moral superiority characteristic of his time and place. On the one hand, he unthinkingly absorbed the platitudes of the Romantic era, conceiving Asia, and particularly India, as the land of mysticism and the cradle of civilization. “‘All tends to the mysterious East’,” he piously affirmed in one of the earliest entries of the journal he called his “Wide World”.159 By the same token, he was quick to mock the “immense goddery” of the Hindu pantheon. In a letter to his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson in 1822, he even dismissed European orientalist scholarship as “learning’s El Dorado”.160 In preparation for his senior class poem for the Harvard College Exhibition of 1821, he pored through various available journals and books, reading everything about India that he could get his hands on, but the poem that resulted, “Indian Superstition”, simply reflected the biases of his time and place. There he depicted India as an ancient, once proud civilization that in more recent times had fallen into unfortunate confusion and superstition. If anything, his attitude to Chinese civilization at this time in his life was even more censorious: “In the grave and never-ending series of sandaled Emperors whose lives were all alike, and whose deaths were all alike, and who ruled over myriads of animals hardly more distinguishable from each other, in the eye of an European, than so many sheeps’ faces — there is not one interesting event, no bold revolutions, no changeful variety of manners & character. Rulers & ruled, age and age, present the same doleful monotony, and are as flat and uninteresting as their own porcelain-pictures”.161
Blunting the harshness of this reception somewhat, however, were several subsequent influences. While plainly put off by the theology and/or ritualism of Indian and Chinese traditions, Emerson apparently found some of the belletristic literature quite charming. Of particular appeal was the so-called Oriental tale — of which the Arabian Nights and Samuel Johnson’s “Rasselas” provided noteworthy instances. Another example, Robert Southey’s “The Curse of Kehama”, Emerson perused carefully in preparation for his senior-class poem. Perhaps more important in turning the tide of his early prejudice was the Indian reformer, Rammohan Roy, later hailed as the father of modern India, whose life and career Emerson found profiled in the pages of the Christian Register in 1820–1821.
A highly educated brahmin from Bengal, Roy had dedicated his life to reforming contemporary Hindu social and religious customs in accordance with what he conceived to be classical Vedic and Upanishadic ideals. Like other members of the Unitarian community, Emerson was so taken with this socially enlightened man of the East that by the middle of the next decade, he placed Roy on a short list of the world’s greatest and most self-reliant individuals, each of whom, “annihilates all distinction of circumstances”.162
When over the course of the next few years, Emerson’s interests in Asian thought expanded to include other primary and secondary sources, he also found much to appreciate in India’s philosophical contributions. In the early 1830s, he copied out a passage from the Mahābhārata, the great national epic of India, which was contained in Gérando’s history of comparative philosophy, noting that Idealism was “a primeval theory”.163 Soon thereafter, he read a précis of the Bhagavad Gita, arguably the pivotal text of the Hindu Renaissance, which was contained in French scholar Victor Cousin’s survey of the philosophical traditions of the world.
In a letter to the celebrated Indologist Friedrich Max Müller in 1873, Emerson traced the beginnings of his mature interest in Hindu thought to this first encounter with the Gita in Cousin’s sketch.164 Interestingly, Emerson’s earliest investigations of the philosophical traditions of India roughly coincided with the vocational crisis that led in 1832 to his formal resignation from his pastorate at Boston’s Second Church, signaling a new sense of intellectual freedom and the development of his own eclectic religious and philosophical vision.
Despite these few isolated instances, throughout the tumultuous period of the late 1820s and early 30s when, in rapid succession, Emerson experienced the death of his first wife, resigned his ministry, and set off on a precarious new career as a lecturer and essayist, his journal was relatively silent about his interests in Asian religious literature. What references that do occur, however, make it clear that he was now conceiving these Eastern sources in a new light, having all but completely cast off the pejorative views of his student days. One particularly noteworthy instance of this occurs in his discussion of the universal religious sentiment and critique of institutional Christianity in the address that he delivered to the graduating class of Harvard’s Divinity School in 1837: “The sentences of the oldest time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and fragrant. This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to oriental genius, its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true”.165
Over the course of the next several years, Emerson also acquainted himself with such non-Western sources as the Zendavesta, Zoroaster, Sir William Jones’s translation of the Laws of Manu, H. H. Wilson’s translation of the Meghadūta, selected articles on Asian traditions from the Edinburgh Review, various translations of the Confucian classics, “The Arabian Nights” and anthologies containing works by the Sufi poets Saadi and Hafez, and Charles Wilkins’s translation of the Hitopadeṣa. By this point, his growing exposure to religious writings of the East encouraged him to look beyond the scriptural canons of Christians and Jews to a more global scriptural anthology or world bible, an impulse he shared with several of his Transcendentalist friends, including Henry Thoreau and Bronson Alcott. This conception led in 1842 to the publication of the “Ethnical Scriptures” column in the Transcendentalist literary magazine, The Dial. Having recently taken over editorship of the journal from Margaret Fuller, Emerson introduced this new column, with Thoreau’s assistance, to highlight excerpts of recent translations of a range of non-Western texts that they had profited from in their readings.166
Emerson also made important use of the teachings of Confucius and other Chinese sages of the Confucian school as these had been rendered in recent English translations of the Neo-Confucian canon of the Four Books.167 Together with Thoreau, he included excerpts from Joshua Marshman’s translation of the sayings of Confucius for the April 1843 issue of The Dial, and both writers periodically drew upon their knowledge of Confucian teachings in their subsequent writings as well.168
For Emerson, Confucius came to serve as paragon of the moral law, particularly as it governed society and social relations.
According to Confucius, social welfare and harmony must always be rooted in individual character, in the essential human virtues of humaneness and benevolence. In the Confucian emphasis on individual social responsibility, Emerson found a salutary counterbalance to Transcendentalist tendencies to solitude. Confucius thus typified for Emerson the virtues of charity, moderation, gentility, and a humane worldliness. In his speech to a visiting delegation of Chinese officials in Boston in 1868, he extolled Confucius and Confucian teachings as the hallmark of China’s contributions to world civilization:
Confucius has not yet gathered all his fame. When Socrates heard that the oracle declared that he was the wisest of men, he said, it must mean that other men held that they were wise, but that he knew that he knew nothing. Confucius had already affirmed this of himself: and what we call the Golden Rule of Jesus, Confucius had uttered in the same terms five hundred years before. His morals, though addressed to a state of society unlike ours, we read with profit to-day. His rare perception appears in his Golden Mean, his doctrine of Reciprocity, his unerring insight, — putting always the blame of our misfortunes on ourselves …169
Emerson’s study of Islamic literature and culture was more selective but no less consequential. While he sampled various travel accounts and classical texts, including George Sales’ English version of the Qur’ān, he showed no particular regard for Islamic theology as such. Instead he focused almost exclusively on the poetry of Persian Sufism, particularly the poetry of Saadi and Hafiz.
Although familiar with some of the conventions of Arabic and Persian literature since his school days, especially as it was manifested in the Oriental tales noted earlier, he conceived a great fondness for Sufi poetry when he read Joseph von Hammer’s German translations in 1841. Subsequently, he looked to Persian poetry as an inspiration for his own verse, even to the point of adopting the cryptic name of “Seyd” (a kind of anagram of the name of the Sufi poet Saadi) as his designation of the ideal poet. Although the Puritan in Emerson shied away from the sensuality of Sufi poetry, he admired its richness of imagery and expansiveness of expression. Above all perhaps, he found in the ecstatic, aphoristic, and somewhat disjointed character of this verse a model and sanction for his own preferred mode of literary performance, both in poetry and prose.170
The beginning of Emerson’s most sustained engagement with Asian religious philosophy, however, may be dated to the summer of 1845, when he received a copy of Charles Wilkins’s complete English translation of the Bhagavad Gita.
The fact that he mischaracterized this text at the time as “the much renowned book of Buddhism” probably says more about the elementary state of Asian studies in the U.S. in the 1840s than it does about Emerson’s study to that point.171 But reading it in full at this midpoint of his career instigated a wave of appreciation for Hindu religious and philosophical teachings that would carry him to the end of his life. Three years after the Gita’s arrival in Concord, he and his Transcendentalist friends were still reveling in the inspirations of modern Hinduism’s favorite sacred text: “I owed, — my friend and I, — owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavat Geeta. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age & climate had pondered & thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us”.172
By this point, having also examined H. H. Wilson’s translation of the Vishnu Purāṇa and, somewhat later, Röer’s translation of selected Upanishads, Emerson began to form a more rounded conception of Hindu religious philosophy. His essay on Plato, included in Representative Men (1850), reflects this recent immersion in these classical Hindu texts and quite a considerable assimilation of their teachings. What chiefly impressed him about this material theologically were their characterizations of divine reality in impersonal and monistic terms: “In all nations, there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all beings in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purāṇa. Those writings contain little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains in celebrating it”.173 In point of fact, both the Gita and the Vishnu Purāṇa also contain strong theistic elements, but consistent with his critique of Christian theism in his address to Harvard’s Divinity School, it was their characterizations of reality as impersonal and absolute that he found especially compelling.
Emerson’s essay on Plato also exhibits the influence of an intellectual orientation typical of European orientalists generally, most notably in his inclination to essentialize “Eastern” thought in general terms and then to juxtapose it in abstract terms with the civilizations of “the West”. Here perhaps is the most conspicuous instance of this tendency: “The country of unity, of immoveable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense Fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture: its philosophy was a discipline: it is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved infinity, the West delighted in boundaries”.174 The sort of dichotomizing of East versus West exemplified by this passage provides yet another instance of the kind of invidious Western cultural projection that Edward Said famously dubbed “orientalism”, though here appearing on American soil. As Said showed, this way of thinking consistently operated in the service of Europe’s larger colonial ambitions on Middle Eastern and, by extension, American, Asian, and African territories.175 Of course, as Americans still recovering from Britain’s recent colonial project in North America, Transcendentalists like Emerson occupied a more ambiguous political position than European orientalists did, but his language and general way of thinking about “the East” is nonetheless clearly indebted to standard orientalist tropes. To be sure, Emerson’s particular motive for conceptualizing the relationship between East and West in this general way was partly rhetorical — to illustrate his pet doctrine of polarity, with East and West defining the two poles to which Plato was assigned the role of mediator — but he never entirely abandoned this schematic and stereotypical way of thinking about Asian cultures even in his more studious moments.
To judge from the numerous entries Emerson made in his journals from the mid-forties on, in which he copied long passages from his Indian readings and reflected on their significance, he explored this area of literature assiduously during the last few decades of his life. References to Hindu images or ideas in particular surface repeatedly in both his late prose and poetry. The lectures and essays appearing in the late-life collections Representative Men, The Conduct of Life — , and Society and Solitude frequently advance or illustrate an argument with reference to exotic ideas from the Hindu classics in which he was immersing himself. For example, his doctrines of “compensation” and “fate” often found illustration in the Indian doctrine of action or karma; he compared “illusion” to the Hindu goddess “Yoganidra” and the doctrine of māyā; and, as several commentators have pointed out, even the quintessentially Emersonian doctrines of the “self” and the “over-soul” found a vivid expression in the Vedantin notions of ātman and brahman respectively.176 Although such Indian doctrines often performed a mainly illustrative role, Emerson turned to them repeatedly as if to highlight and dramatize the universal value of his ideas.
Two particularly remarkable instances of this Hindu appropriation occur in the poetry of this period. “Hamatreya” (1847), a poem drawing explicitly upon a passage from the Vishnu Purāṇa, offers a scornful critique of Yankee acquisitiveness in the face of the evanescence of human life and the inevitability of death. More noteworthy is Emerson’s famous poem, “Brahma”, produced some ten years later, which he based on a verse from the Kaṭha Upaniṣad. Here Emerson presents a vision of the immortality of the soul thoroughly indebted in both its conception and terminology to the classical philosophy of the Upanishads. Although some early readers dismissed the poem as incomprehensible, Emerson refused to change a line, adhering closely to the form and message encountered in his reading. Despite such instances of explicit indebtedness, Emerson never adopted as whole cloth what he read of Hindu or other Asian religions; on the contrary, he always utilized this material selectively as vehicles by which to extend and dramatize his own ceaseless expression. What he admired most about the Hindu books, he wrote in 1849, was their scope and largeness of treatment: they offered “excellent gymnastic for the mind”.177
Emerson in Asia
Just as Emerson had extolled the virtues of Asian civilization to his American and European readers, it was not long before Asian readers returned the favor by proclaiming the value of Emerson’s writings among their own countrymen and women. Such readers felt a special enthusiasm and even kinship for Emerson’s essays, and found much to admire, not least his seemingly familiar visions of the self and the over-soul, his promotion of self-reliance and the God within, and his inspired paeans to nature. But as in the case of Emerson’s discovery of the East, the East’s discovery of Emerson was largely contingent upon larger movements of world history, in particular nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial politics, and the opening up of various Asian cultures to the political, commercial, and cultural interests of the West. With the consolidation of British political power in India in the late-eighteenth century and growing European dominion throughout the Asian world generally, Emerson’s writings began to circulate through the newly established channels of colonial conquest and power. For some readers in Eastern lands, Emerson’s essays came as refreshment from an unsought source; for others, as inspiration and support in their own struggles for personal and national self-determination. But of various scattered Asian responses to Emerson’s writings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quickest and most concerted came from English-speaking readers in India and Japan.
Knowledge of Emerson’s writings among nineteenth-century Western-educated Hindus owed itself initially to the educational sponsorship of the Brahmo Samaj (“The Society of God”), a religious society founded in 1828 by the Bengali social reformer, Rammohan Roy, which was closely associated with English and American Unitarians residing in India. Raised in the colonial and cosmopolitan setting of early nineteenth-century Calcutta, Roy made it his mission in life to purify the Hinduism of his day of its inveterate concern with image worship, caste restrictions, and the repression of women, particularly such notorious practices as child marriage and the immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres. In its place, Roy advocated a more tolerant, socially responsible, and monotheistic Hinduism, informed by Christian morality, as well as by the philosophical and contemplative vision of the ancient Vedic traditions, particularly the Upanishads. Roy found particular support for his reform program among members of the English Unitarian community of Bengal, whose vision of a universal faith coincided very closely with his own. Throughout the subsequent decades of the nineteenth century, under a succession of talented and charismatic leaders, the Brahmo Samaj expanded its work of religious and social reform, drawing to itself, like a magnet, a whole host of young, idealistic, Western-educated Hindus who saw in the universalizing vision of the Samaj the promise of a more progressive, independent, and cosmopolitan India.178
In 1855, Charles H. A. Dall, a Unitarian missionary from Boston, arrived in Bengal to establish an American Unitarian presence on the subcontinent and to help strengthen relations between the already-existing English Unitarian community and the Brahmo Samaj. Keen to ensure that the religious and theological contributions of the American Unitarian movement did not go unnoticed, Dall circulated copies of the complete works of William Ellery Channing, Emerson, and Theodore Parker among his Brahmo friends and students. Though Emerson had long since broken off formal relations with Boston’s mainstream Unitarian establishment, he knew Dall personally and even conferred with him upon Dall’s return to Boston in 1866 about Dall’s experiences in India.179 From this time forward, young members of the Brahmo Samaj began to absorb Emerson’s essays, together with the more obligatory fare of the British educational system.
One decided early beneficiary of Emerson’s writings was Protap Chandra Majumdar, a third-generation leader of the Brahmo Samaj, who rose to prominence in the Brahmo movement under the tutelage of its charismatic mid-century leader, Keshab Chandra Sen. Having been introduced to liberal Christianity by Charles Dall, Majumdar adopted a form of Christian humanism and scientific theism more devoutly pro-Christian than even that espoused by other Brahmo leaders, a fact that quickly endeared him to several important Unitarian leaders in England and the United States. Before his death in 1905, Majumdar made three trips to the West at the invitation of his Unitarian friends. In the first of these, commencing in 1883, Majumdar even made his way to Concord in hopes of paying his respects to Emerson personally, but unluckily, Emerson had passed away only a few months before. On his return to Calcutta the next year, Majumdar was asked to compose a tribute to the lately deceased Emerson on the topic, “Emerson As Seen From India”, that would be read at the 1884 session of the Concord School of Philosophy. Majumdar readily agreed and responded with as fervent a tribute as his sponsors could possibly have hoped for. Noting the suggestive parallels between Emerson’s writings and Vedic nature worship, and between Emerson’s “Over-Soul” and the teachings of the Upanishads, Majumdar extolled Emerson as the very embodiment of “the wisdom and spirituality of the Brahmans”.180 Several years later, in a lecture entitled “The World’s Religious Debt to Asia”, which he delivered at the Parliament of World Religions in 1893, Majumdar publicly made this connection once again, crediting Emerson’s “Over-Soul” as the inner link between the human and divine.181
Appearing at the Parliament also was the young Hindu scholar-teacher, Swami Vivekananda, monastic leader of the newly emergent Ramakrishna order, who would soon seize the limelight from his senior colleague and many of the other Asian delegates as well.
Born Narendranath Datta, Vivekananda was a highly gifted, Western-educated Bengali who had participated in the activities of the Brahmo Samaj as a young man, embraced its liberal Unitarian values, and strongly supported its agenda of political and social reform. The turning point in his life came, however, in his meeting in 1881 with the revered Hindu saint Ramakrishna, whose teachings and example inspired in him, and many other like-minded young Brahmos, a renewed appreciation for the spiritual power of their native faith. Vivekananda’s presentation in Chicago in 1893 created something of a sensation — few of the delegates attending the conference could muster the kind of eloquence and erudition that he did — and his fame quickly spread, leading to lecture dates and tours throughout the United States.182 In the winter of 1900, Vivekananda was back in the United States and among his various engagements was a lecture series on Sanskrit literature to the local Shakespeare Society in Pasadena, California. Commenting on the Hindu classic, the Bhagavad Gita, Vivekananda took the opportunity to point out to his audience its critical importance for Emerson and, furthermore, the importance of Emerson for all subsequent American history: “I would advise those of you who have not read that book to read it. If you only knew how much it has influenced your own country even! If you want to know the sources of Emerson’s inspiration, it is this book, the Gita … and that little book is responsible for the Concord Movement. All the broad movements in America, in one way or another, are indebted to the Concord party”.183 Such grandiose assertions notwithstanding, Emerson’s principal distinction, as far as Vivekananda was concerned, was that he effectively served as a conduit for the timeless wisdom of the Vedas and Upanishads.
This early appropriation of Emerson by Western-oriented Indian teachers effectively set the terms for Emerson’s subsequent reception among Hindus, both by members of the Brahmo Samaj and among English-speaking Indian readers more generally. For Indian nationalists, including Vivekananda, Emerson was important first because of the political and spiritual value they saw in his insistence on self-reliance, and second, because they conceived Emerson’s teachings on self-reliance as having, at least in part, an Indian, even a Vedic provenance, by virtue of his own readings of classical Indian texts. This sort of response is evident even in the case of Rabindranath Tagore, the celebrated Bengali poet and Nobel laureate.
In an interview on one of his several trips to the United States, Tagore, remarked: “I love your Emerson. In his work one finds much that is of India. In truth he made the teachings of our spiritual leaders and philosophers a part of his life”.184 Like Vivekananda, his Bengali countryman and contemporary, Tagore was an outspoken advocate of Indian independence and a warm admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, even though he opposed certain key features in Gandhi’s program of reform. In a less explicitly political context, the same pattern may be observed in the writings of the Hindu monk and missionary, Paramahansa Yogananda, who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles in 1925. By this point in time the habit of invoking Emerson’s authority to illustrate and validate Hindu religious philosophy had become a matter of common practice among Western-educated Indian leaders and reformers. The famous account Yogananda wrote about his spiritual life, Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), was heavily footnoted with references to Emerson’s essays as if to confer acceptability in an American context.185
From a political standpoint, the most noteworthy example of Indian indebtedness to Emersonian thought, however, was perhaps Gandhi himself, India’s greatest modern statesman and principal architect of Indian independence. It appears that Gandhi had become acquainted with Emerson’s essays as early as 1907, when he cited Emerson in an essay on personal morality. Two years later, while serving a sentence in the Pretoria jail in South Africa, he was reading Emerson again, along with Ruskin, Carlyle, Tolstoy, and the Upanishads. In a letter to his son Manilal, dated March 25 of that year, Gandhi enthusiastically recommended Emerson’s essays, along with the work of Tolstoy: “Please tell Maganlalbhai that I would advise him to read Emerson’s essays. They can be had for nine pence in Durban. There is a cheap reprint out. Those essays are worth studying. He should read them, mark the important passages and then finally copy them out in a notebook. The essays to my mind contain the teaching of Indian wisdom in a Western garb”.186 Over the course of the next several decades, through a period of tumultuous social and political change in India and abroad, Gandhi periodically affirmed the importance of Emerson’s ideas. He was especially enamored of Emerson’s memorable dictum from “”: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines”.187 In a speech delivered in 1928, for example, Gandhi defended Tolstoy’s “seeming contradictions” by invoking Emerson’s choice aphorism and did so several times thereafter, when defending himself against charges that his own personal and political life was sometimes betrayed by inconsistencies.188
While references to Emerson do not bulk large in Gandhi’s writings — at least relative to such primary intellectual and spiritual resources as the Bhagavad Gita, Tolstoy, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Upanishads — they are nevertheless suggestive in view of the apparent close affinities between Emerson’s self-reliance and Gandhi’s program of Swaraj (“self-rule”). In general terms, Swaraj was the principal term Gandhi used to signify his overall political program to achieve Indian self-rule and independence from Britain at the earliest possible moment. The primary sense of Swaraj was thus clearly political, where it was often simply synonymous with home-rule, but it also had important economic, social, cultural, and educational applications as well. One of the main thrusts of Swaraj from an economic standpoint was the Khadi movement by means of which Gandhi hoped to recover Indian economic self-sufficiency through the boycott of British textiles and the resuscitation of India’s homegrown manufacture of cotton cloth. But while the primary application of Swaraj was broadly political, social, and economic, he always conceived of it as simply the outer expression of individual moral and spiritual self-culture. He related Swaraj to the more abstract term satyagraha (“truth-seizing”), which he himself coined, and to ahimsa (“nonviolence”) and swadeshi (“self-reliance”). Indeed, he consistently insisted that the success of the independence movement depended on the cultivation of individual self-rule, self-sufficiency, and self-reliance. In his Young India column of 1920, for example, he asserted that “Government over self is the truest Swaraj, it is synonymous with moksha or salvation, and I have seen nothing to alter the view that doctors, lawyers, and railways are no help, and are often a hindrance, to the one thing worth striving after”.189
Gandhi discovered the link between the outer and inner dimensions of Swaraj in his reading of the Bhagavad Gita, a text that he valued highly along with other Indian nationalist leaders and of course Emerson himself. Ironically, Gandhi first encountered the Gita as a student in London on the recommendation of two young Theosophist friends in the form of Edwin Arnold’s English translation. “The book struck me as one of priceless worth”, he wrote in his autobiography many years later. “The impression has ever since been growing on me with the result that I regard it today as the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth”.190 Setting aside the actual literal and historical setting of the poem, Gandhi sought the heart of the Gita’s teaching in the doctrine of disinterested or selfless action (karma-yoga) as represented in the second chapter. In context, the character of this teaching was clearly religious and moral, and Gandhi recognized it as such. The point of disinterested or selfless action for Gandhi was the liberation of the self, and the point of liberation of the self was the realization of God. This was the heart of Gandhi’s ethics, and the basis of his approach to social and political reform. Emerson was not the source of this crucial feature of Gandhi’s religious and political thought, but he clearly provided an important touchstone, as we see in the reference to the essay “Self-Reliance” above. And to Gandhi, as to other Indian readers before him, Emerson’s example was all the more appealing because it seemed to him so congruent with traditional Indian views of the self and the immanence of the divine — “the teaching of Indian wisdom in a Western garb”.
On July 1, 1942, six months after the United States entered World War II, Gandhi drafted a letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt apprising him of his views regarding India’s support for and participation in the ongoing war. Writing by this point as the acknowledged head of the Indian National Congress and leader of the independence movement, Gandhi began his letter to the American President in warmly personal terms, mentioning his many American friends and correspondents, and the scores of Indians then receiving higher education in the U. S. He then adds the apparently innocuous remark: “I have profited greatly by the writings of Thoreau and Emerson”. Pleasantries aside, Gandhi then proceeds to make clear that his own support for the Allied cause, like that of the Indian National Congress as a whole, would be necessarily contingent on the full realization of Indian independence, adding the pointed observation: “I venture to think that the Allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow so long as India, and for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain and America has the Negro problem in her own home”. To Roosevelt, the logic of Gandhi’s political position could hardly find a more compelling articulation. The seemingly casual juxtaposition of Emerson and Thoreau, two icons of American freedom, with India’s actual subjugation to British imperial rule highlighted the political duplicity in the Allied expectation of Indian support.191
Even Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s successor as president of India, though less concerned with any supposed affinities between Emersonian and Indian thought, nevertheless found in Emerson’s essays support for burgeoning Hindu self-reliance and national self-determination.192 While Nehru obviously read Emerson in more overtly political terms than did some of his predecessors, none of these Indian responses can be entirely separated from the larger colonial and postcolonial situation, if only because this was what brought Emerson to India in the first place. To read Emerson as a Western exponent of ancient Vedic wisdom served not only to inspire these modern Indian readers in terms they could appreciate, but also to bolster their claims for independence and a pivotal position in world civilization.193
Hardly less significant from a cultural standpoint was the response of Japanese readers and scholars to Emerson’s writings, especially during the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taisho (1912–1926) eras of modern Japanese political history. The first significant encounter apparently took place in Boston on July 30, 1872 when an assemblage of local merchants and dignitaries, including Emerson himself, hosted a delegation of fifty Japanese officials at the Revere House. Although Emerson was still reeling from the devastating impact of an accidental fire that nearly burned down the family home in Concord a few days before, he responded to the invitation to speak with characteristic aplomb. In his brief remarks to the assembled guests, he candidly acknowledged what he described as his “extreme ignorance of Japan”, before going on to summarize previous Western contacts with the Far East, up to the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry off the coast of Japan in 1852, and highlighting Japan’s distinctive contributions to world culture. “I remember”, he noted, “that in my college days our professor in Greek used to tell us always in his records of history, ‘all tends to the mysterious East’, and so slow was this progress that only now the threads are gathered up of relation between the farthest East and the farthest West”.194
Sponsoring the Japanese embassy’s momentous visit to the United States in 1872 was the new, outward-looking Meiji government in Tokyo, which had come to power only a few years before. The restoration of the Meiji emperor had quickly resulted in the abandonment of the old feudal system and, eventually, Japan’s emergence as a modern industrial state. While beholden to the West for recent advances in science and technology, Japanese rulers also saw the need to retain and foster certain indigenous spiritual traditions, in particular, the naturalistic traditions of Shinto, which became, in effect, Japan’s state religion, and Neo-Confucianism, which had combined classical Confucian ethics with a more contemplative and transcendentalist metaphysics. Japan thus found itself on the cusp of change, and for a number of influential scholars and teachers, Emerson was seen to support both the new selective respect for things Western and the ancient indigenous wisdom traditions of China and Japan.195 Like the Hindu teachers cited above, some Japanese scholars saw features of their own most valued traditions reflected back to them in the writings of this man of the modern west.
One of the first personal expressions of Emerson’s impact on Japan comes to us from an eyewitness — the young Japanese baron, Naibu Kanda, who had been sent to Amherst College for his education.
On March 19, 1879, Kanda recorded in his journal his reactions to a talk on “mental temperance” that Emerson had given earlier that evening to a rapt gathering of Amherst College students. “We sat there for one hour charmed by every sentence which he uttered”, Kanda wrote, “and when he ended I could not but feel that I had received an impetus toward a life of greater simplicity and truthfulness”. For Kanda the magic of Emerson’s words never entirely wore off. Returning to Japan in 1879, the young baron soon began what became a life-long career as an English instructor at Tokyo University, from which position he dispensed Emerson’s essays and communicated his enthusiasm to a willing generation of Japanese readers.196
By the next decade, Emerson’s writings had also caught the attention of a select group of Japanese scholars and writers, including Tokutomi Soho, a popular social commentator and advocate of modernization, who included quotations from Emerson’s writings in the literary magazine Komumin no tomo (“The People’s Friend”). In 1888, Nakamura Masanao produced a Japanese translation of Emerson’s essay “Compensation”, which was followed two years later, by Sato Shigeki’s translation of the essay, “Civilization”. By the 1890’s, Emerson’s writings began to exert a strong influence on Japanese literary culture more widely, and before long, quotations from Emerson found their way into Japanese newspapers, magazines, and even common usage as well. One of the chief sponsors of this enthusiastic reception of Emerson in Japan was the Romantic writer Kitamura Tokoku, who in 1894 produced a Japanese biography of Emerson, Emerson, the first such treatment of any American author.
Kitamura also contributed numerous short essays on Emerson to the journal Bungakukai (“Literary World”), which had become the mouthpiece of a small group of self-avowed “romantic” writers, including Kunikida Doppo and Tokutomi Roka, who looked to Kitamura as their leader and shared in his admiration of Emerson. The high tide of Japanese interest in Emerson came, however, during the Taisho period. In 1917, Hirata Tokuboku and Togawa Shukotsu brought out a translation of Emerson’s complete works in eight volumes, thus laying a firm foundation for the further propagation and popularization of Emerson’s writings in Japan throughout the next few decades. Although popular interest in Emerson tapered off in the years leading up to the Second World War, Emerson studies enjoyed a brief revival immediately following the war when Emerson was viewed as a principal philosopher of American democracy.197 For readers in Japan, Emerson’s writings expressed and resonated with their love of the natural world, their admiration for simplicity in art and life, and their reverence for a metaphysical dimension of reality — be it the great emptiness or the over-soul — that infused and transcended the material world.198
Among early Japanese interpreters, however, perhaps the most noteworthy for Western readers — and consequential from an inter-religious, inter-cultural, and political standpoint — was D. T. Suzuki, the pre-eminent exponent of Zen Buddhism in the West for much of the twentieth century and, for many early students, its principal interpreter.
It was Suzuki’s representation of Zen, after all, that galvanized the interest of the first Anglo-American students of Zen Buddhism — from such Beat writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, to the philosopher Alan Watts — and through them, of later more committed practitioners, as well. In retrospect, Suzuki’s remarkable success in making Zen not only palatable but compelling to many Americans owed itself in considerable part to his success in presenting Zen in recognizably Western forms of discourse and understanding. By the same token, Zen as Suzuki conceived of it superseded all other forms of spirituality — East as well as West. The effect was to confer on Japan a position of religious, cultural, and philosophical superiority.
Suzuki arrived in the United States for the first time in 1897 to assist Paul Carus, editor of the journal Open Court, in interpreting and translating various Asian religious and philosophical classics for Western readers. Suzuki’s apprenticeship with Carus effectively inaugurated a dialogue and collaboration with Western students of Asian, and especially Buddhist, culture that would continue until his death in 1966. Beginning in the decade of the 1930s, Suzuki turned his attention increasingly to the propagation of Zen among Western readers. Several books published during this period dealt extensively with the nature of Zen and its relationship to the Japanese character. Perhaps the most influential of these, Zen and Japanese Culture (1959), was first presented in a series of lectures that Suzuki presented in the West in 1938 during the run-up to the Second World War. Here he described Zen as a form of pure unmediated experience, beyond all subject-object dichotomies and conceptual distinctions, which was the foundation and essence of all religious experience. In Suzuki’s understanding, Zen was not only the essence of other forms of Buddhism, but also of all religions and philosophies generally. By the same token, he was quick to conceive of it as uniquely characteristic of Japanese spirituality and the Japanese national character. For Suzuki, Japan was the natural home of Zen and only among the Japanese had it assumed its highest forms of expression.199
Crucial to the formation of Suzuki’s conception of Zen as a universal form of religious experience was his reading of several Western philosophers, not least Emerson himself. In Zen and Japanese Culture, Suzuki pauses at one point to note the “deep impressions made upon me while reading Emerson in my college days”. Yet, like the Indian readers discussed previously, he conceived of Emerson less as an original, distinctively Western source in his own right than as a Western reflection of essentially Asian insights. Citing a reference to Buddhism in one of Emerson’s letters, Suzuki notes: “Emerson’s allusion to ‘sky void idealism’ is interesting. Apparently he means the Buddhist theory of śūnyatā (“emptiness” or “void”). Although it is doubtful how deeply he entered into the spirit of this theory, which is the basic principle of the Buddhist thought and from which Zen starts on its mystic appreciation of Nature, it is really wonderful to see the American mind, as represented by the exponents of Transcendentalism, even trying to probe into the abysmal darkness of the Oriental fantasy”. Indeed, reading Emerson for the first time, he goes on to note, was like “making acquaintance with myself”. Yet, while Emerson’s efforts were clearly laudable, they were still, in his view, rather elementary: “The American Transcendentalist’s attitude toward Nature has no doubt a real mystical note, but the Zen masters go far beyond it and are really incomprehensible”.200
As had Vivekananda before him, not only did Suzuki construe Emerson as a Western exponent of essentially Asian — in this case Japanese — wisdom, he also conceived of Transcendentalism as a sort of wellspring of subsequent American culture: “Let us note here, in passing, how Oriental thoughts and feelings filtered into the American mind in the nineteenth century. The Transcendentalist movement begun by the poets and philosophers of Concord is still continuing all over America. While the commercial and industrial expansion of America in the Far East and all the world over is a significant event of the twentieth century, we must acknowledge at the same time that the Orient is contributing its quota to the intellectual wealth of the West — American as well as European”.201 Here in this pointed juxtaposition of American commercial wealth with Japanese intellectual wealth, we witness yet another instance of the ideological and political uses to which Emerson was put in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Emerson provided Suzuki with a pretext to push back against the mounting political and cultural influence of the West by virtue of Emerson’s own estimable but imperfect efforts to incorporate the spiritual wisdom of the East — and even to assert the cultural and religious superiority of Japan in the years leading up to World War II.
What we are left with then is another vivid instance of the complex cultural exchange at work in so many of these early East-West encounters. Like his Indian contemporaries and predecessors, Suzuki essentially viewed Emerson as an expression of Asian thought by virtue of Emerson’s sometime reliance on Asian traditions as an expression of his own thought. None of these Asian readers apparently conceived of Emerson or his writings in primarily a political sense. It was his literary, philosophical, or religious contributions that struck them most of all. Yet how these exchanges took place, whether from West to East or East to West, and what they came to signify, were strongly determined by underlying political realities. Asian intellectuals and political leaders from Vivekananda to Suzuki immediately recognized the potential of Emerson’s writings to aid in the realization of their own visions of self-determination and social justice, and wasted no time in enlisting his help.
1 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. Robert E. Spiller, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), 6: 78. Hereafter CW.
2 P. S. Field, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 61.
3 CW 3: 21.
4 The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols., eds. William H. Gilman, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982), 8: 430. Hereafter JMN.
5 CW 10: 113, 247.
6 R. W. Emerson, 12 March 1833, journal entry, Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 99; CW 2: 126.
7 “The Fortune of the Republic”, Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, eds. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven: Yale University Press), 139, 140–41.
8 CW 6: 77.
9 A. Barnechea, Peregrinos de la lengua (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997), 39.
10 J. L. Borges, W. Barnstone, Borges at Eighty: Conversations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 38.
11 “The Other Death” (1949), in The Aleph (New York: Penguin, 1949), 58.
12 This preference was despite his admiration of “The Poet”, knowledge of little-known essays, and having translated Representative Men, De los héroes. Hombres representativos (Buenos Aires: Jackson, 1949).
13 J. L. Borges and O. Ferrari, En diálogo (Mexico [sic]: Siglo XXI, 2005), 141–42, 213.
14 S. Rodman, J. L. Borges, Tongues of Fallen Angels (New York: New Directions, 1974), 14.
15 J. L. Borges and O. Ferrari, En diálogo, 136.
16 Ibid., 141.
17 Ibid., 213.
18 J. L. Borges, Other Inquisitions, trans. by R. L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 69.
19 Ibid., 10.
20 Recorded and quoted by R. J. Christ, The Narrow Act (New York: Lumen Books, 1995), 45–46.
21 José Martí, Obras Completas (La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1964), 13: 18–23, 30.
22 Ibid., 17: 154, 324–27. “José Martí”, http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/marti.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Martí; http://www.biography.com/people/josé-martí-20703847
23 J. S. Mill, August 2, 1833, in The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812–1848 (Toronto and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 171.
24 Jane W. Carlyle to Emerson, November 7, 1838, The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1883) 1: 192. Hereafter, CCE.
25 T. Carlyle to Emerson, Feb. 13, 1837, CCE 1: 112.
26 T. Carlyle to Emerson, Dec. 8, 1837, CCE 1: 142.
27 Ibid.
28 H. Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London: Saunders & Otley, 1838), 203–04. Martineau’s Retrospect and her Society in America (1837) have been compared to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840).
29 T. Carlyle to Emerson, February 8, 1839, CCE 1: 217.
30 T. Carlyle to Emerson, May 8, 1841, CCE 1: 352.
31 T. Carlyle to John Sterling, December 18, 1841, The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial, ed. J. Myerson (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 73.
32 JMN 11: 172.
33 Eliot to S. Hennell, July 1848, in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 1: 270. Hereafter GEL.
34 Eliot to S. Hennell, August 27, 1860, GEL 3: 337.
35 See E. Fontana, “George Eliot’s Romola and Emerson’s ‘The American Scholar’,” ELN, 32, 1995.
36 Eliot to Oscar Browning, May 8, 1870, GEL 5: 93.
37 GEL 6: 327.
38 CW 5: 12.
39 Ibid., 166.
40 Wordsworth to H. Reed, August 16, 1841, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 7: 230–31.
41 CW 5: 168.
42 T. Carlyle to Emerson, April 6, 1870, CCE 2: 324.
43 Leslie Stephen, “Emerson”, Studies of a Biographer (London: Duckworth & Co., 1902), 3.
44 V. Woolf, Night and Day (1919), ed. J. Briggs (London and New York: Penguin, 1992), 38.
45 V. Woolf, “Emerson’s Journals” (1910), The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1904–1912, ed. A. McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 1: 339.
46 D. Richardson, Pilgrimage (London: Dent, Cresset Press, 1938), 3: 41, 128; 4: 545. On Emersonian sources in Pilgrimage and in Richardson’s letters, see G. H. Thompson, Notes on Pilgrimage: Dorothy Richardson Annotated (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1999), 97, 140, 144, 250.
47 O. Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism”, The Soul of Man. De Profundis. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 13.
48 For Wilde’s judgment on Emerson as a poet, see his interview, January 16, 1882, cited in R. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 167.
49 O. Wilde, “Art and the Handicraftsman”, June 2, 1882, Essays and Lectures (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2007), 103–14.
50 O. Wilde and Rennell Rodd, Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf (Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddart & Co., 1882), 18.
51 In 1885, Wilde wrote to A. P. T. Elder, editor of a fledgling American literary journal: “I see no limit to the future in art of a country which has already given us Emerson, that master of moods …” The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (New York: Fourth Estate, 2003), 249.
52 O. Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (article, Fortnightly Review XLIX: 290, February 1891, 292–319; book, 1904). See O. Wilde, Soul of Man (1999), 11–13: 114, 197–98, 200–02, 204–06, 209–10, 212–16.
53 O. Wilde, Oscar Wilde: The Major Works (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61.
54 O. Wilde, Soul of Man (1999), 114.
55 J. C. Powys, One Hundred Books (New York: G. A. Shaw, 1916), 26.
56 See, for example, studies by Hubbard, Stack, Cavell, Kateb, Lopez, Conant, Mikics, Bloom, Zavatta, and others.
57 Die Führung des Lebens, trans. E. S. von Mühlberg (Leipzig: Steinacker, 1862); Versuche (I and II series), trans. G. Fabricius (Hannover: Meyer, 1858).
58 G. J. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 34.
59 In a chapter draft, “Why I Am So Wise”, Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Ecce Homo, eds. W. Kaufmann, et al. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 25.
60 G. J. Stack, “Nietzsche’s Earliest Essays: Translation of and Commentary on Fate and History and Freedom of Will and Fate”, in Philosophy Today, 37 (1993), 153–69. On the connection with Heidegger’s Nietzsche (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 1: 134; see translators’ notes, D. F. Krell and Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), 40.
61 See, for example, Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, aphorism 56; The Antichrist; The Will to Power, especially sections 751–53.
62 M. Montinari, Reading Nietzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 71–72.
63 CW 6: 31.
64 For both writers on power, see Emerson, CW 6: 30–32; and Nietzsche’s Writings from the Late Notebooks (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially 15, 50, 73, 134.
65 CW 6: 134–35, 137–39.
66 “The Sovereignty of Ethics” (1878), The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904), 10: 199. Hereafter W. See also Emerson’s “Circles”, “Illusions”, “Works and Days”, and the first part of “Poetry and Imagination”. Cf. Nietzsche’s representative views, “Afterworldsmen”, Thus spoke Zarathustra (London and New York: Penguin, 1961), 58–60.
67 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 273.
68 CW 2: 179.
69 CW 6: 12–13. See also E. W. Emerson’s CW of RWE 6: 24.
70 In a draft for The Genealogy of Morals (1887) in Sämtliche Werke: kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1974), 7: 3, 220–21. Hereafter SW.
71 CW 6: 135; Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968), 506.
72 See M. Ferraris, “Storia della volontà di potenza”, in Nietzsche, La volontà di potenza (Milano: Bompiani, 1994), 615. See Colli and Montinari’s notes to SW. Georges Bataille had shown similar manipulations by Nietzsche’s cousin R. Oehler in “Nietzsche et les fascistes”, Acéphale, January 21, 1937, 3–11.
73 Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche. Versuch einer Mythologie (Berlin: Bondi, 1918).
74 H. Bund, Nietzsche als Prophet des Sozialismus (Breslau: Trewendt & Granier, 1919).
75 F. Haiser, Die Judenfrage vom Standpunkt der Herrenmoral: Rechtsvölkische und linksvölkische Weltanschauung (Leipzig: Weicher, 1926); A. Schickedanz, Das Judentum, eine Gegenrasse (Leipzig: Weicher, 1927).
76 For example, see A. Baeumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: Reclam, 1931); F. Mess, Nietzsche: Der Gesetzgeber (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1930).
77 M. Ferraris, “Storia”, in La volontà di potenza, 648.
78 C. Diethe, Nietzsche’s Sister and The Will to Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 151–52.
79 R. Oehler, Nietzsche und deutsche Zukunft [Nietzsche and the Future of Germany] (Leipzig: Armanen, 1935).
80 In Nazi Germany in the 1930s, E. Baumgarten was the principal student of the Emerson-Nietzsche relationship, Der Pragmatismus. R. W. Emerson, W. James, J. Dewey (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1938), 81–96; and secondarily, J. Simon, Ralph Waldo Emerson in Deutschland (1851–1932) (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1937) and H. Hildebrand, Die Amerikanische Stellung zur Geschichte und zu Europa in Emersons Gedankensystem (Bonn: Verlag Hanstein, 1936). For Heidegger’s censorship, see M. Lopez in “Emerson and Nietzsche: An Introduction”, ESQ, 43 (1997), 1–35.
81 G. Zachariae, Mussolini si confessa (Milano: Garzanti, 1948), 25.
82 G. Howes has extensively shown Emerson’s influence in his “Robert Musil and the Legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1985). See also H. Hickman’s studies of 1980 and 1984 on the young Musil.
83 Essays: Erste Folge (Leipzig: Diederichs, 1902). It included “Self-Reliance”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, “Compensation”, “Heroism”, “History”, “The Poet”, and Emerson’s early lecture on “Literary Ethics”.
84 R. Musil, Diaries: 1899–1941 (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 23.
85 Notebook II, 25.VII; CW 3: 6.
86 R. Musil, Tagebücher, ed. A. Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976), 2: 1099, cited in Howes (1985), 221.
87 R. Musil, “Geist und Erfahrung”,Das neue Merkur (1921), 3: 12.
88 J. Simon, RWE in Deutschland (1937), first vaguely recognized Emerson’s influence; Ernst Zinn solidified the connection in his edition of Rilke, Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag, 1955–1966), as did Jan Wojcik, in “Emerson and Rilke: A Significant Influence?” Modern Language Notes 91 (1976), 565–74 and Marilyn Vogler Urion, “Emerson’s Presence in Rilke’s Imagery: Shadows of Early Influence”, Monatshefte für Deutschen Unterricht, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur (1993), 85: 153–69. Das neue Merkur (1921), 3: 12.
89 Dähnert’s edition (Leipzig: Reclam, 1897) included: “Circles”, “Compensation”, “Spiritual Laws”, “Love”, “The Over-Soul”, “Art”, “The Poet”, “Character”, and “Nature” (1844).
90 CW 2: 188.
91 R. M. Rilke, “Notes on the Melody of Things”, in his The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, trans. D. Searls (Boston, Mass.: David R. Godine, 2009).
92 CW 3: 6.
93 R. M. Rilke, Notes, section XVI.
94 For example, see J. Ryan, The Vanishing Subject (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 53. On Emerson’s possible influences on Rilke’s most mature works, see J. Ryan’s discussion of the 1918 poem “To Music”, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161–62.
95 R. M. Rilke, Intérieurs, section XIII, Werke (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchges, 1996), 4: 98–99.
96 A. Mickiewicz, Les slaves (Paris: Comptoir des imprimeurs réunis, 1849), 216–17, 456–57. Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 286–87.
97 See M. Z. Markiewicz, “Mickiewicz vulgarisateur d’Emerson”, Revue de littérature comparée (1955), 29.
98 A. Mickiewicz, Les slaves, 457.
99 E. Montégut, a friend of Baudelaire, also wrote on Emerson; see “Un penseur et un poète américain”, Revue des deux mondes, August 1, 1847. On the Emerson-Baudelaire relationship, see Dudley M. Marchi’s “Baudelaire’s America — Contrary Affinities”, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 47 (2000), 37–52.
100 See Montégut’s preface, Essais de philosophie américaine (Paris: Charpentier, 1850).
101 C. Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare (New York: Vanguard, 1951), 186 (my translation).
102 C. Pichois, J.-P. Avice, Dictionnaire Baudelaire (Tusson, Charente: Du Lérot, 2002), 65.
103 C. Baudelaire, Eugene Delacroix: His Life and Work (New York: Lear Publishers, 1947), 44 (text re-translation mine).
104 D. M. Marchi, has suggested this kind of shift, as possibly stimulated by reading Emerson. Marchi, Baudelaire’s America, 52.
105 H. Bergson, “Speech, France-America Society on March 12, 1917”, Mélanges, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 1244.
106 Idem, “The Theories of Free Will” (Lecture series given at the Collège de France in 1906–1907), Mélanges, 718.
107 H. Bergson to Prof. J. Chevalier, February 1836, in Bergson 1972, 1543.
108 E. H. Cady and L. J. Budd state that James, in his copy of the “Nominalist and Realist”, “wrote ‘Bergson’, by the sentence: ‘It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight’.” On Emerson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), 53.
109 M. Proust letter of 1895, Lettres à Reynaldo Hahn (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 34.
110 Partly translated in Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. J. Sturrock (London, New York: Penguin Books, 1988) and in The Lemoine Affair, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2008).
111 M. Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, et al. (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 377.
112 Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951–1959 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), 28. The Emerson quotation is from “Worship” (1860), but Camus may have found it in Emerson’s Journals of 1846, JMN 9: 452.
113 Camus, Notebooks, 22. Emerson’s journal entry of 27 February 1870, may have been the source for the dangers of criticism and on the necessity of affirmation, while ones of 7 October 1863: “An impassive temperament is a great fortune”, and “Temperament is fortune” (JMN 10: 40) might have been the sources for Camus’s last sentence.
114 Camus, Notebooks, 26; JMN 8: 79. The source of the first and third sentences is unclear.
115 Camus, Discours de Suède (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 30. The Emerson quotation, present in Camus’ journals of 1951–1952, appears to have been either a mistranslation or an inaccurate quotation from memory, probably deriving from Emerson’s comment “obedience to a man’s genius is the particular of Faith: by and by, I shall come to the universal of Faith”. JMN 9: 62.
116 Emerson refers to hope as based on the infinity of the world, saying that “every wall is a gate”. JMN 9: 137.
117 D’Annunzio’s first documented reference to Nietzsche appears in Il Mattino, September 25, 1892.
118 D’Annunzio, “Una tendenza”,Il Mattino, January 30–31, 1893, Interviste a D’Annunzio (Lanciano: Carabba, 2002), 53.
119 Ibid., cf., Emerson, CW 3: 12.
120 Interview, January 1895, in D’Annunzio “Una tendenza”, 55. D’Annunzio’s knowledge of Representative Men clearly predated his 1904 copy, in which he highlighted many passages.
121 CW 3: 17, 18. Interview with F. Pastonchi, La Stampa, October 1, 1899, in D’Annunzio “Una tendenza”, 18.
122 Emerson, Les forces eternelles et autres essais, trans. K. Johnston, with preface by B. Perry (Paris: Mercure de France, 1912), 147. This edition includes “Perpetual Forces”, “The Method of Nature”, “Circles”, “The Tragic”, “Friendship”, “Woman” (D’Annunzio’s library, Vittoriale).
123 Ibid., 18, marked by d’Annunzio with a strong left line.
124 Ibid., 19, marked by d’Annunzio with left and right lines.
125 Gabriele D’Annunzio, ed. J. de Blasi (Florence: Sansoni, 1939), 200.
126 A. Bonadeo, D’Annunzio and the Great War (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 146.
127 B. Mussolini, “La filosofia della forza”, Il pensiero romagnolo, November 29, December 6, 13 (2008).
128 As Denis Mack Smith suggested in his Mussolini (New York: Knopf, 1982), 132. On the Emerson-Mussolini relationship see Giorgio Mariani, “Read with Mussolini”, eds. G. Mariani, et al., 123–31.
129 B. Mussolini, “United Press” interview, December 21, 1925, 123.
130 B. Mussolini, Radio message of January 20, 1931, 123–24.
131 G. Zachariae, Mussolini si confessa (Milano: Garzanti, 1948), 42.
132 Margherita G. Sarfatti, foreword by Benito Mussolini, The Life of Benito Mussolini (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 88. The quotation’s possible source might be “Immortality” (Italian translation, 1931): “Don’t waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it”. E. W. Emerson’s CW of RWE 8: 328.
133 Jean McClure Mudge, The Poet and the Dictator: Lauro de Bosis Resists Fascism in Italy and America (Greenwood: Praeger, 2002), 2, 58–60.
134 In G. Mariani, “The (Mis)Fortune of Emerson in Italy”, Anglistica 6: 1 (2002), 103–31.
135 Ibid., 110.
136 Caterina Ricciardi, “Ralph Waldo Emerson and Elio Vittorini”, Emerson at 2000, 113–21.
137 Ibid.
138 La Stampa, 25 May 2003, 19.
139 Libero, 2 July 2008, 29.
140 Corriere della Sera, 9 September 2008, 43.
141 A. Rigoni, Corriere della Sera, 14 January 2008, 35.
142 Avvenire, 29 June 2008, 18.
143 L. Tolstoy, 24 March 1858, Tolstoy’s Diaries (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 2: 49. Hereafter, TD. He read Herman Grimm’s German translation of Emerson (1857).
144 L. Tolstoy, 12, 13 May 1884, TD 2: 214.
145 L. Tolstoy, 22 May 1894, in ibid.
146 See K. W. Cameron, Emerson and Thoreau in Europe: The Transcendental Influence (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1999), 118.
147 S. A. Tolstaya, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstaya (London: Cape, 1985), 441.
148 L. Tolstoy, Path of Life, trans. Maureen Cote (Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2002), 15, 81, 87, 92, 148, 151–52, 170, 205, 208, 233, 255, 260, 262, 273, 306.
149 L. Tolstoy, January 3, 1890, in TD 1: 275. Several sources report this anecdote of unclear origin.
150 R. Kipling, The Writings in Prose and Verse: Early Verse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 90.
151 W 9: 332.
152 R. Kipling [mostly 1889], Letters of Travel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1920), 13. Kipling quotes Emerson in “Success” on Euripides’ comment about Zeus whom he says “hates busy-bodies and those who do too much”.
153 R. Kipling, From Sea to Sea (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 291.
154 R. Kipling, Something of Myself (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78.
155 Kipling first published “If” in Rewards and Fairies (London: Macmillan & Co., 1910), 181–82.
156 See Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
157 For full-length studies of early American interest in Asian religions, see Carl T. Jackson, The Oriental Religions and American Literature: Nineteenth-Century Explorations (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981); and Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
158 For the following treatment of Emerson’s Asian readings, see also my previous article: “Asia”, in Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context, ed. Wesley T. Mott (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 40–48.
159 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols, eds. William H. Gilman, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982), 1: 12. Hereafter JMN.
160 JMN 2: 86; Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols, eds. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–1994), 1: 116–17. Hereafter L. See also Alan D. Hodder, “Emerson, Rammohan Roy, and the Unitarians”, in J. Myerson (ed.), Studies in the American Renaissance (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 133–34.
161 JMN 1: 83.
162 JMN 4: 283.
163 JMN 3: 362.
164 L 1: 322–23; 6: 245–46.
165 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols, eds. Robert E. Spiller, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), 1: 80. Hereafter CW.
166 Cf. The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 3: 82.
167 For an instructive analysis of the parallels between Emersonian and Neo-Confucian thought, see Yoshio Takanashi, Emerson and Neo-Confucianism: Crossing Paths over the Pacific (New York: Macmillan, 2014).
168 The Dial, 3: 493–94.
169 The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition, 12 vols., ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904), 11: 472–73. HereafterW.
170 See Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism: A Study of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott (New York: Octagon Books, 1978), 137–54.
171 L 3: 290.
172 JMN 10: 360.
173 W 4: 28.
174 W 4: 30.
175 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979).
176 CW 6: 313. Cf. Christy, Orient in American Transcendentalism, 73–113.
177 JMN 11: 137.
178 Cf. Spencer Lavan, Unitarians in India: A Study in Encounter and Response (Boston, Mass.: Skinner House, 1977); David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
179 JMN 16: 37.
180 Protap Chunder Mozoomdar, “Emerson as Seen from India”, in The Genius and Character of Emerson: Lectures in the Concord School of Philosophy, ed. F. B. Sanborn (1885). Reprinted in The Genius and Character of Emerson: Lectures in the Concord School of Philosophy, ed. F. B. Sanborn (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1971), 365–71.
181 Richard Hughes Seager, ed., The Dawn of Religious Pluralism: Voices from the World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893 (La Salle: Open Court Press, 1993), 444.
182 Ibid., 421–32.
183 Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1978), 4: 95.
184 Bailey Millard, “Rabindranath Tagore Discovers America”, The Bookman 44 (November 1916): 247–48. See also R. K. Gupta, The Great Encounter: A Study of Indo-American Literary and Cultural Relations (Maryland: Riverdale Company, 1987), 131–37.
185 Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1946). See notes to pp. 27, 40, 44, 63, 69, 270.
186 Mohandas Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Government Publications Division, 1979), 9: 208–09, 241.
187 W 1: 33.
188 Gandhi, Collected Works, 42: 469; 67: 284.
189 Mohandas Gandhi, Young India, December 8, 1920. For a helpful analysis of the relation of self-reliance to other aspects of Gandhi’s thought, see Raghavan Iyer, “Introduction”, in The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Raghavan Iyer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 9.
190 Mohandas K. Gandhi, Gandhi: An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1993), 67.
191 Gandhi, Collected Works, 76: 264–65.
192 Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 195.
193 For a fuller analysis of the Indian reception of Emerson and Emerson’s reception of India, see my previous article, “‘The Best of Brahmins’: India Reading Emerson Reading India”, Nineteenth-Century Prose 30 (Spring/Fall 2003): 337–68.
194 The full text of Emerson’s remarks was reprinted verbatim in the Boston newspaper, The Commonwealth, on August 10, 1872.
195 See Yoshio Takanashi, “Emerson, Japan, and Neo-Confucianism”, ESQ 48 (1st and 2nd Quarters 2002): 41–45.
196 Bunsho Jugaku, A Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Japan from 1878 to 1935 (Kyoto: The Sunward Press, 1947), xi-xiii.
197 Takanashi, “Emerson, Japan, and Neo-Confucianism”, 41–43. See also Takanashi, Emerson and Neo-Confucianism. We also wish to thank our colleague Hideo Kawasumi of Seikei University for information on Emerson’s reception in Japan.
198 Yukio Irie, “Why the Japanese People Find a Kinship with Emerson and Thoreau”, ESQ 27 (2nd Quarter 1962): 13–16.
199 For the now classic critique of the interplay between Zen and Japanese nationalism in Suzuki’s work, see Robert Scharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism”, History of Religions 33: 1 (August 1993): 1–43.
200 Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 343–44.
201 Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, 344.