Introduction: Emerson as Spiritual and Social Revolutionary
© Jean McClure Mudge, CC BY 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0065.11
In the 1830s, when the Puritan-Romantic Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) first proposed transforming every citizen’s heart and soul, he was extending America’s political revolution of 1776 into the country’s core consciousness. From the mid-1840s on, by applying the “new thinking” of his American Transcendentalism to abolition and to a nascent women’s rights movement, that inner revolution penetrated incalculable numbers of disenfranchised blacks and women in numbers far beyond his imaginings. By the mid-nineteenth century, he had become a leading American modernist with vast influence in this country and abroad. Yet early and late, Emerson’s public democratic principles were waging a battle for his soul against his private social prejudices. This interior civil war and its nuances kept him perpetually struggling toward a final resolution. The contest not only helps explain his delay in speaking out for reform. It also exposes Emerson’s most closely-guarded secret self. All the while, this central paradox in his psyche has its stylistic parallel among his often arresting, still-quoted aphorisms, as in: “God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions”.1
This book follows two interrelated themes along the arc of Emerson’s whole career. The dominant one examines his dramatic metamorphosis from idealist philosopher to idealist-turned-activist for fundamental social change while simultaneously fighting his biases against blacks and women. This shift, with its hidden debates, affected him personally and philosophically. It also enlarged him politically and socially, empowering him to help alter the nation’s psyche, its values, and eventually, its laws. Emerson’s growth into a reformer also arguably defined the climax of his career, as his activism surely made tangible the power of applied American Transcendentalism.
Lengthy biographies of Emerson, such as those of John McAleer, Gay Wilson Allen and Robert D. Richardson, Jr., have touched on this change, but their comprehensive purpose tends to bury its centrality as well as its high drama. The opposite effect arises in dedicated studies of Emerson as a reformer, notably the works of Len Gougeon and T. Gregory Garvey. They rightly draw attention to Emerson’s previously minimized activism, but their dedicated focus sacrifices a wider angle on the man. This book takes a step back from details that are proper to both strict biography and specific reform studies to see Emerson’s shift as integral to the whole spectrum of his life and interests, from youth to the Civil War years and beyond, while also examining the deeper complexity of that turn.
The second, supplementary theme of this book traces Emerson’s debt to world letters and, in turn, the reverberation of his revolutionary message abroad. In some cases, his contributions arrived on soil fertile for change; in others, they re-enforced traditional views about nature, strengthened ideas about the self, or suggested concrete reforms. Either way, his legacy of revolution was literally heard “round the world”. Emerson’s international legacy is increasingly appreciated, as in the recent multi-authored works, Emerson for the Twenty-First Century: Global Perspectives on an American Icon (2010) and Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context (2014). But such studies with their particular slants, like the biographies and reform-focused works mentioned above, also obscure the change stressed by this book. Mr. Emerson’s Revolution frames a pointed and succinct, yet nuanced, view of Emerson’s private and public development from philosopher to philosopher-in-action. Today, as part of a burgeoning global interest in American Studies in general, scholars in Great Britain, on the Continent — especially in Germany, Italy, and France — and in India and Japan are focusing on Emerson. In these pages, a chapter on Emerson’s relationships with the West is paralleled by a similar treatment of his influence in the East. The former is longer than the latter, but only because, until now, more Emerson followers have existed in South America, Great Britain, and on the Continent than in the Middle and Far East.
A book about Emerson’s life advancing toward a fulcrum moment in the 1840s, when he took up the abolitionist and women’s rights causes while still conflicted over his attitudes to race and gender, is important right now. Today, he faces an articulate spectrum of critics. With few exceptions, for example, Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People (2010) portrays him as a consistent racist. If generally accepted, this misinterpretation would lead readers to dismiss his lasting positive effect on the freedoms of both blacks and women. Other writers have faulted him for being too slow to take up reform. But such criticism largely rests on Emerson quotes that Painter has arbitrarily selected with little regard to time or place, thus missing his ongoing inner debate about these matters. In contrast, by closely following the course and context of his opinions, mainly expressed in his journals, this book tracks Emerson’s constant questioning and sometime self-chastisement, leading to the gradual amendment and dissolution of his prejudices. Doing so, it may encourage twenty-first-century readers who quietly share such biases to escape them, perhaps more swiftly than he did.2
Since youth, family and faith had so nurtured Emerson’s abhorrence of slavery that once he became a pastor in his late twenties, he readily made that position clear on his own. But slavery was a subject in only eight of his eighty sermons from 1830 to 1837, and then he listed it only in passing among other social problems.3 As for women, Emerson’s lifelong indebtedness to his mother, his aunt, and other women, including both his first and second wives, made him naturally value female talents and directly led to his endorsement of women’s rights. But for some time, he held to the conditioned belief that the proper place of even gifted women was not in public, but in the home, and that women, prone to sentimentalism, were “weaker” than men. Furthermore, from childhood on, he struggled — now painfully, now proudly — with a temperamental aloofness from anyone, no matter race or gender. That cool defensiveness covered his passionate and sensitive nature. It also led him to repeatedly state that using his mind as a dedicated scholar was his best service to society, a sense confirmed by his success as a lecturer. (He welcomed regular, quality conversationalists, but wanted no disciples.) This distancing from others indirectly sustained his recurring doubts about blacks’ abilities and women’s suitable public roles. Such doubts also fed his disdain for self-righteous abolitionists, temperance advocates and philanthropists, impractical communitarians, and, in general, one-note do-gooders. This nexus of reasons complicated and delayed his entry into the public world of reform.
In 1837, as he approached the final year of his preaching, Emerson’s distance from the plight of blacks, reformers and women revealed its complexity in a private complaint he made in his journal about his second wife Lidian, a member of Concord’s Female Anti-Slavery Society. Weary of hearing her grieve over the Middle Passage and “the wretched negro”, he chides her for being totally removed from “the obtuse & barbarous [black]”, whom, he claims, found the “stinking hold” of ships “only a little worse” than “cannibal war”. In his view, Lidian suffers nothing of what he calls their “crucifixions”, implying that her protest is much too easy, cheap, perhaps even hypocritical. He quickly reminds himself of his basic position: the “horrors of the middle passage” are a “violation of nature”. Yet, because he would not put himself in Lidian’s false position, he was not ready, nor would he be for seven years, to join her and others in the public antislavery cause.4 By 1841, his estimate of blacks as “obtuse” and “barbaric” had seemingly faded. As an amateur anthropologist, he did not agree with extreme theories asserting that blacks and whites are of different species. Yet he did assume that blacks’ “degradation” had come from a long-ago “sin”, from which, however, he considered them able to “redeem” themselves. Yet, without a black “saint engaged in that cause” (Frederick Douglass had not yet come to his notice), Emerson concluded that abolitionists’ efforts added up to nothing.5
Nevertheless, by the mid-1840s, Emerson the Transcendentalist and Emerson the Reformer began to meld. His ideas and actions were noticeably affecting each other, even though the tension between his private views about race and gender and his platform declarations only slowly abated in the years immediately before and after the Civil War.6 Early in this transition came a softening of his reserve that even he realized increased the passion and energy he poured into his lectures. In short, in making his revolutionary ideas concrete, by degrees Emerson was revolutionizing himself.
Besides highlighting Emerson’s inner debates about social issues and exploring his impact in America and the world, this book enriches Emerson studies in other ways. First, it breaks open his marble bust to reveal a man whose cool aloofness was actually a self-described “mask”, a check to any embarrassing emotion and a protection against possible hurt. This double veil, which he himself thought “churlish”, went unperceived even by his keenly observant close friend and “best critic”, Margaret Fuller. The closest she came was to charge him with being an emotionally “incomplete man”. Other longstanding close friends, notably Thoreau and Alcott, complained of his distance in their journals. Yet Emerson — when cantankerous, downright ornery or especially when righteously enraged — could so slip his mask as to entirely lose emotional control. In print, critics labeled him a “dangerous” revolutionary, reflecting the degree he put his passions into lecturing. By becoming a virtual performance artist on “stage”, as he put it, he wanted to stir audiences to maximum emotion. That aim helped him endure his tightly scheduled annual tours through challenging winters across a wide swath of America and Great Britain. (Such far-flung activity, illustrated by maps in these pages, belies his reputation as the isolated “Sage of Concord”.) Emerson’s emotional purpose also helps explain his increasing followers. At the outset, he had drawn both the young elite and culture-hungry workmen. By mid-career, he had begun to attract previously marginalized whites and blacks of both genders.
Second, this book offers a set of different points of view while presenting a unified argument. From its inception, seven Emerson scholars including the editor have collaborated in writing this study, often referring forward or backward to one another’s chapters. Unity comes, too, from editing for a common easy-to-read style, while all along distinct voices are preserved. The result is the sort of informed “conversation” familiar to Emerson, and on which he leaned. Those scholars who have previously written on similar themes have here blended their own work with the best past literature and latest research to produce new and previously unpublished work.
Third, the book’s many illustrations include several that have not been widely republished since their first appearance in print, such as a detailed engraving of the King’s Garden (the Jardin du Roi or, later, Jardin des Plantes in Paris), much as Emerson saw it on his visit in 1833. Its classified plants and animals led to his epiphany about the unity of creation, a key aspect of his philosophy. A second, twenty-first-century view of the garden, now the National Museum of Natural History, shows that despite its expanded and updated galleries, its general plan is much the same. Other new photographs include a set of color transparencies of major rooms in Emerson’s house in Concord, Massachusetts, furnished much as he left them. They include selected personal items of Emerson’s, among them his preaching gown and house robe, a terrestrial/celestial globe, a penknife inscribed with his name, and an Italian print of Endymion that, by his own testimony, objectified a major aspect of his emotional life. Of special usefulness are novel custom maps based on historic ones, which for the first time show details of Emerson’s surroundings in Boston, Cambridge and Concord in ways that small-print archival ones cannot, or never attempted. Other custom maps trace Emerson’s three trips abroad and the demanding itineraries he followed at the height of his lecturing career. (The most detailed of his biographies have no maps.) Finally, for the first time in Emerson chronologies, his life is seen in the widest possible context of national and international events. Milestone moments in his life appear side by side with notable national and international events as well as inventions, visually linking him with nineteenth-century America and in relation to both East and West.
Finally, the book is interdisciplinary, drawing upon period and current biographical, literary, historical, philosophical, religious, artistic, social, economic, gender and racial data of a wide sort: reinterpreted, newly discovered or as yet unpublished. It also makes connections between pivotal events in Emerson’s life and the political, cultural and social contexts of his times. The confluence of all these sources gives dimension to philosopher Stanley Cavell’s observation that, as Emerson’s inheritors, Americans are still a “half-Transcendental, half-pragmatic people”.
Structurally, chapters 1 through 4 move chronologically, interweaving Emerson’s public and private lives as they progress up to and through his last productive years. Chapters 1 and 2 are divided into two related parts. Chapters 3 through 5 are solo chapters, focusing respectively on Emerson’s apogee as a social reformer, his post-Civil War years, and his legacy in America. The return to a two-part format in Chapter 6 measures Emerson’s influence abroad. The first part explores mutual influences between Emerson and Europe. The second does the same for Emerson and Asia.
Chapter 1, “The Making of a Protester”, covers Emerson’s boyhood, youth and young manhood as he moves toward becoming his own man. In the first part, “A Legacy of Revolt, 1803–1821”, Phyllis Cole traces Emerson growing up in Boston, living only a stone’s throw from the city’s black district, the “West End”, and in a historically distinguished family that becomes increasingly impoverished after his father’s death. His mother and his father’s sister, Mary Moody Emerson, nurture high ambitions in the young Ralph. At Harvard College, he adopts his middle name “Waldo”, an individualistic young person’s fresh start as a solo Romantic artist who was also standing apart from the theological controversies that swirled about him on campus. Within the framework of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, he begins to explore his own attitudes toward race. In the second part, “Becoming an American ‘Adam’, 1822–1835”, Wesley Mott reveals Emerson’s post-Harvard emotional and intellectual growth, including his extended inner debate about slavery at nineteen. Mott continues to track his changes through ongoing family relationships, a first marriage to Ellen Tucker ending in her early death, his resignation from the ministry, his continuing spiritual search, an early interest in science, a seminal 1832–1833 trip to Europe, his early lectures, a move to Concord and his second marriage to Lydia (Lidian) Jackson, a woman who fast becomes an ardent abolitionist.
In Part 2, “Public and Private Revolutions”, David Robinson devotes Chapter 1, “The ‘New Thinking’, 1836–1850” to the description of Emerson’s reshaping of central neo-idealist ideas from England and the Continent. Within the national and personal contexts of the Jacksonian Era, he discusses Emerson’s pioneering first book Nature and his early essays, and describes their magnetic role in the formation of the “Transcendental Club” and The Dial. He then highlights the major turning point in Emerson’s personal life, the death of his son Waldo, and its role in the central shift of his thought and career from pure Transcendentalism to a Romantic pragmatism. In the second part, “Dialogues with the Self and Society, 1836–1850”, Jean McClure Mudge follows Emerson’s attempts to align his idealism with the reality of personal relationships. First focusing on his sensitivity to the nature of words and dialogue, basic to his philosophy, social reform, and self-understanding, she then shows how key friends — Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and his second wife Lidian — lead Emerson to unveil his “hidden” self. This discovery directs his emotional energies into lecturing, which vaults him to prominence as a leading intellectual at home and abroad.
In Chapter 3, “Emerson the Reformer: Pragmatic Idealist in Action, 1850–1865”, Len Gougeon first frames Emerson’s stress on individual spiritual change and the Constitution’s acceptance of slavery, then showcases the melding of his philosophy with social movements as he becomes a leader among the abolitionists. All along, Emerson is shown to support women’s rights, at first conditionally, then wholeheartedly. For the first time in book form, Gougeon evaluates old and new critics of Emerson’s supposed racism.
Chapter 4, “Emerson’s Evolving Emphases: Actively Entering Old Age, 1865–1882”, reveals Emerson’s remarkable post-Civil War career, testifying to his considerable remaining intellectual vigor despite a physical decline. Jean McClure Mudge freshly measures the permanent mark that his emphasis on reform had made upon his thinking, which now emphasizes ethics over metaphysics. She analyzes ideas from three essays, “Fate”, “Worship” and “Character”, first delivered in the 1850s and published in The Conduct of Life (1860) — the effective basis of his postwar platform. Emerson’s reactions to the Reconstruction Era reflect this final ethical focus as does his full support for women in their desire to serve in public life. Now a celebrated hero of the women’s movement, he supports the career of the young poet Emma Lazarus. A trip to California rejuvenates him, and his third and last tour of Europe helps cement his international reputation. In its last version, Emerson’s poem “Terminus” (1867), in progress over decades, becomes a retrospective self-judgment of his entire career.
In Chapter 5, “Emerson’s Legacy in America: Spawning a Wide New Consciousness”, Jean McClure Mudge examines the different ways in which Emerson left a wide and deep mark upon American politics, poetry, philosophy, and the arts. She traces his influence on Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William James, and Frank Lloyd Wright, while also discussing other figures, past and present, who caught Emerson’s fire.
Chapter 6, “Emerson in the West and East”, returns again to the two-part format of the first two chapters. In “Europe in Emerson and Emerson in Europe”, Beniamino Soressi traces the influence of Old World ideas on Emerson as prelude to a more extensive study of Emerson’s export of American Transcendentalism and his reform ideas. So influenced, leading minds in England and on the Continent helped define the birth of modernism, while tragically, in Germany and Italy, intellectuals subverted Emerson’s ideas into the all-too-real nightmares of Hitler’s national socialism and Mussolini’s fascism. In “Asia in Emerson and Emerson in Asia”, Alan Hodder examines Emerson’s exposure to, and his close focus on, the cultures of Persia, India, China and Japan, framing this fascination within the context of the West’s religious, political and cultural forays into the Middle and Far East. Hodder then traces Emerson’s reception and influence, from ideas to action, in the East, with his impact on Gandhi a notable example.
In the end, even as Emerson disrupted the establishment of his day, his revolution was basically conservative. Change, he believed, was fated — an inevitable good following nature’s model and the self-evident truths of the Declaration. But he wished his revolution of heart and mind to have the same high aim as our War for Independence: to establish a new order of well-being, not endless warfare, unrest and anarchy. (Above his bureau, Fitz Hugh Lane’s framed lithograph “View of the Battle Ground at Concord, Mass”, featuring the field above the town’s Old North Bridge, reminded him of that struggle every day.) Though imperfect, the Constitution had brought about that new order. In 1863, he wrote, “If we continued in Boston to throw tea into the bay at pleasure, that were revolutionary. But our revolution was in the interest of the moral or anti-revolutionary”. In the midst of civil war, he saw slavery as “a violent conservatism” that was “more revolutionary than abolition or freedom of speech & of [the] press”, a “perpetual revolution” of the most dangerous sort: “Society upside down, head over heels, & man eating his breakfast with pistols by his plate. It is man degraded to cat & dog. & Society has come to an end, and all gentlemen die out”. A consummate gentlemen himself and first advocate of America’s civilizing role, Emerson looked to another gentleman, George Washington, for his leading model of “a moral policy”.7 It is for this sort of calm and structured change that Emerson’s revolution, which spread without a formal body of followers, has so many diverse adherents and innumerable beneficiaries today.
My debts to people who helped bring this book to birth are many. Along with Emerson’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century biographers, editors of his works and other Emerson scholars who are individually credited in the Selected Bibliography, our contributors head the list: Phyllis Cole, Len Gougeon, Alan Hodder, Wesley Mott, David Robinson and Beniamino Soressi. They warmly accepted my invitation to participate in this group conversation, willingly adjusted their chapters as they developed through many editing sessions, and stayed loyal to this project over several years (see List of Contributors for more detail about each). My gratitude also goes out to the joint authors of the foreword to this volume, John Stauffer, professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University, and to Steven Brown, Ph.D. candidate, American Studies, Harvard University.
Equally generous and dedicated was Margaret “Bay” Bancroft, president of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association, which is responsible for Emerson’s house in Concord, Mass. From the start, she swiftly supported every request for photography and information about objects with unfailing patience and interest. Leslie Perrin Wilson of the Concord Free Public Library early and enthusiastically expedited my research about Emerson and facilitated, with Conni Manoli-Skocay, my selection of numerous images from the library’s special collections. Carol L. Haines of the Concord Museum helped in producing several custom photographs of Emerson and Emerson-related objects. For sheet music included in a photograph of Thoreau’s desk, I also wish to thank Jan Turnquist, executive director of Louisa May Alcott’s Old Orchard House.
In Cambridge, Leslie Morris, Tom Ford and other staff at the Houghton Library gave me every assistance in research and custom photography. Also in that town, I am indebted to the Harvard University Library, the Cambridge Historical Society, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. In Boston, I wish to thank Catharina Slautterback and Patricia Boulos of the Boston Athenaeum for assistance in image research, the Boston Public Library Prints and Photographs Division and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Further afield, often by e-mail, I benefitted from help given by Michael Kelly, Special Collections Librarian, Amherst College; the New York Public Library; and the Library of Congress. Other miscellaneous institutions are credited in the List of Illustrations.
Beyond archival prints from these collections, I wish to thank photographer J. David Bohl for his aesthetic eye in producing a number of excellent custom transparencies of period rooms, paintings and prints from Emerson’s house in Concord. At Emerson’s house, too, my late husband Lew Mudge, an experienced amateur photographer, took several views of specific objects. In addition, I am greatly indebted to cartographer Darin Jensen whose custom maps for the first time vividly portray important contextual information about Emerson: his Boston, Cambridge and Concord settings as well as his lecturing and travel itineraries in the U.S. and abroad. I am indebted to Jenkins, too, for making image-scanning arrangements. His colleague Sasha Helton carefully, sometimes painstakingly, scanned over a third of the book’s illustrations. For miscellaneous matters in the book’s development, I wish to thank Peter Balaam, Susan Dunston and my son Bill Mudge.
Above all, as this book was being prepared for digital publication, I benefited from the intelligent, tireless work of OBP’s Managing Director, Alessandra Tosi, and her associate and designer, Bianca Gualandi. They helped with innumerable details of final manuscript preparation, formatting, illustrations, permissions, and, in general, introduced me to the novelty of digital publishing. I am indebted, too, to Ben Fried for his careful editing of the whole manuscript, questioning important matters of expression, meaning, and format. Corin Throsby has not only carefully executed the index, but also valuably caught a number of errors throughout the manuscript. For both jobs, I warmly thank her. The computer expertise and patience of Malcolm Lowe in a final formatting of the book’s text and intricate list of illustrations was invaluable. Reliable technical service was provided, too, by Bryan Woodhams in his careful formatting of the Chronology and in the electronic transmission of key images. In addition, Laura Robinson Hanlan, Research Librarian at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, expertly assisted Wes Mott with the mechanics of his chapter. Finally, I appreciate the generous subvention support for this book by the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society and by an anonymous Emerson scholar. If I have inadvertently missed mentioning anyone who is due thanks, I hope that their knowledge of participation and pleasure in this book will be some compensation.
1 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., eds. Robert E. Spiller, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1971–2013), 6: 108. Hereafter CW.
2 Such prejudices apparently pervade academe as well as society at large. See “Professors Are Prejudiced, too”, New York Times, 9 May 2014, http://nyti.ms/1ghpQ8F For America’s persistent racism, see “The Case for Reparations” by senior editor Ta-Nehisi Coates in the June 2014 issue of the Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
3 The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3, ed. Ronald A. Bosco (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991). Ibid., vol. 4, ed. Wesley T. Mott (1992).
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), 5: 382. Hereafter JMN. A month later, his anger over slavery makes him passionately eloquent: “The fury with which the slaveholder & the slavetrader defend every inch of their plunder [,] of their bloody deck, & howling Auction, only serves as Trump of Doom to alarum the ear of Mankind … to take sides & listen to the argument & to the Verdict which Justice shall finally pronounce” (ibid., 440). This fierce principle vs. slaveholders ironically lies at the heart of what has made him annoyed with Lidian. By spring 1838, his annoyance has become disgust in denouncing “dog-cheap” reformers, who’ve invaded Concord (“where every third man lectures on Slavery”). “The martyrs”, he mockingly dubs them, are come “to turn the world upside down”. But without any suffering comparable to blacks, they’ve won no martyrdom: their “skin was never scratched” (ibid., 505). Emerson would not be one of these semi-frauds, as he makes clear a month later, “I hate goodies … Goodies make us very bad … We will almost sin to spite them”. Yet Lidian and others were affecting him. In the same passage, Emerson allows, “A little electricity of virtue lurks here & there in kitchens & among the obscure — chiefly women, that flashes out occasional light & makes the existence of the thing [preaching reform] still credible” (ibid., 7: 31).
5 Even as he puts the responsibility of “redemption” from slavery on blacks themselves, Emerson still wonders about their capability to do the job: “As far as they can emancipate the North from Slavery, well” (JMN 8: 119).
6 Three of these four issues — race, blacks, and abolitionists — could overlap in Emerson’s journal jottings, which were explorations, rather than finished arguments, as proven by degrees of change in his entries. Also, they might depend upon his mood. Cf. his varying forays into race matters, in JMN 13: 54, 286, 466; 14: 387. Women’s issues were normally treated independently.
7 JMN 16: 391.