by John Updike
The evils of the church that now is are manifest. The question returns, What shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason,—to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul.… Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us; first; the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world.… And secondly, the institution of preaching,—the speech of man to men,—essentially the most flexible of organs, of all forms.
And so the young divinity students of the class of 1838, shaken but, let us hope, inspired, were sent forth to take their places behind the rotten pulpits, to fill the hollow creed and exhausted forms of Christianity with the life of their own souls, somehow; the Harvard faculty did not invite Emerson to speak at Harvard again for thirty years.
Emerson had renounced his own ministry in 1832. At that time the secular profession of lecturer was making its beginnings with such speakers as Edward Everett, Daniel Webster, and Horace Mann; within a decade Emerson was a star of the lyceum circuit.‡ His lectures, many of which became the essays collected in two volumes in 1841 and 1844, from their titles could seem to be about anything—“History,” “Heroism,” “Circles,” “Gifts,” “Manners,” “Experience”—but all were sermons of a sort in behalf of the Emersonian religion, “the speech of man to men,” demonstrating in themselves and urging upon others the free and generous action of a mind open to the inspirations and evidences of the Universal Soul. They were all exhortations to be brave and bold, to trust the universe and oneself. Their supernaturalist content in general, after Nature, tends to fade, but is never disavowed, and usually becomes the final recourse of the exhortation. “Let a man fall into the divine circuits, and he is enlarged,” concludes Emerson’s disquisition on “New England Reformers.” “We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us,” states the essay entitled “Nature.” “Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought.… Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form.”
Of all the essays, the one entitled “Self-Reliance” is perhaps the best known, and has entered most deeply into American thinking. It offers a curious counsel of fatalism couched in the accents of activism:
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.
The society of one’s contemporaries, however, would seem not to be entirely acceptable, for, we learn a page later, “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.… The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.… Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”
Emerson had refused to conform when he resigned the ministry that his ancestors had honored, and did so furthermore at a moment when his widowed mother and a quartet of brothers were all looking to him for stability. At the price of breaking up their Boston home, and with no financial prospects but his eventual inheritance from his recently dead young wife, Ellen, he set sail for the first of his three excursions to Europe. Frail as a young man, he had developed the gift of taking it easy on himself; unlike his three brilliant brothers, William, Edward, and Charles,§ he compiled a mediocre record at Harvard, and he outlived them all, into a ripe old age. His third European trip was undertaken as he neared seventy, in order to escape the renovation of his house in Concord, which had suffered a fire. There was something a touch cavalier about his second trip, too—nine months of lionization in England while his second wife, Lidian, coped in Concord with three small children and straitened finances. Emerson’s great discovery, amid the ruins of the Puritan creed, was the art of relaxation and of doing what you wanted. In “Self-Reliance” he proclaims:
I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.
I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.
The importunities of philanthropy—a real menace in the New England of this time, especially for the foremost proponent of Idealism—must be repelled:
Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
A doctrine of righteous selfishness is here propounded. The Biblical injunction “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is conveniently shortened to “Love thyself”:
I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.… I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.
As the Yippies were to say: “If it feels good, it’s moral.” Or, in the nineteenth-century idiom of William Henry Vanderbilt, “The public be damned!” The American Scholar being advised to “plant himself indomitably on his instincts” shades, in “Self-Reliance,” into the entrepreneur; the great native creed of Rugged Individualism begins to find expression. After deriding feckless college men who lose heart if “not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston,” Emerson asserts:
A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not “studying a profession” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.
Emerson wished to give men courage to be, to follow their own instincts; but these instincts, he neglected to emphasize, can be rapacious. A social fabric, he did not seem quite to realize (and in the security of pre–Civil War America, in the pretty farm-town of Concord, what would insist he realize it?), exists for the protection of its members, as do the laws and inhibitions such a fabric demands. To be sure, he did not create American expansionism and our exploitive verve; but he did give them a blessing and a high-minded apology. Are we afraid the rich will oppress the poor? In his essay on “Compensation” Emerson assures us, “There is always some levelling circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others.” Do our hearts bleed for the manacled slave? “Most suffering is only apparent,” he informs us in his uncollected but fascinating essay upon “The Tragic”:
A tender American girl doubts of Divine Providence whilst she reads the horrors of “the middle passage:” and they are bad enough at the mildest; but to such as she these crucifixions do not come: they come to the obtuse and barbarous, to whom they are not horrid, but only a little worse than the old sufferings.
Do the dirtiness and noise of the railroad and factory affront us? “Readers of poetry,” Emerson says in his essay on “The Poet,” “see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet consecr
ated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider’s geometrical web.” Are we afraid, in a land so carelessly given over to youth and its divine instincts, of growing old? No problem, says Emerson in effect, in his essay on “Circles”: “Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease.… I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.” Death, too, is eloquently fudged away: “And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report.… The divine circulations never rest nor linger” (“Nature”). Are we vexed, depressed, or indignant? Emerson tells us “that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere with the optimism of nature.… Nature will not have us fret and fume” (“Spiritual Laws”).
Understood in relation to Emerson’s basic tenets, these reassurances are not absurd. Further, amid the fading of other reassurances, they were urgently useful, and have been woven into the created, inherited reality around us. The famous American pragmatism and “can do” optimism were given their most ardent and elegant expression by Emerson; his encouragements have their trace elements in the magnificent sprawl we see on all sides—the parking lots and skyscrapers, the voracious tracts of single-family homes, the heaped supermarket aisles and crowded ribbons of highway: the architectural manifestations of a nation of individuals, of wagons each hitched, in his famous phrase, to its own star. Like balloon-frame house construction—another American invention of the 1840s—Emersonianism got the job done with lighter materials. In his journals he struck the constructive note: “It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.”
And, reading Emerson, one wonders if the American style is so much a matter of energy and enterprise as of insouciance, of somewhat reckless relaxation into the random abundance of opportunities which a plenteous Nature has provided. The American accent is a drawl, and Emerson, in his collection English Traits, more than once marvels at the vigor and force and ruddiness of the English, as if in contrast to a languid, lazy, and pallid race he has left behind. Can it be true that, along with our sweet independence and informality, there is something desolate and phantasmal, a certain thinness of experience that goes with our thinness of civilization? As an introspective psychologist, Emerson is nowhere more original than in his baring of his own indifference. “I content myself with moderate, languid actions,” he wrote in his journal of November 3, 1838. “I told J[ones] V[ery] that I had never suffered, & that I could scarce bring myself to feel a concern for the safety & life of my nearest friends that would satisfy them: that I saw clearly that if my wife, my child, my mother, should be taken from me, I should still remain whole with the same capacity of cheap enjoyment from all things.” This was written before the death of his beloved five-year-old son, Waldo. After it, in his uncharacteristically somber essay “Experience,” Emerson confessed:
Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more.… It does not touch me: something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar.… The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para [rubber] coats that shed every drop.
Which brings us back to Melville’s charge of coldness, his picture of Mark Winsome “coldly radiant as a prism.” Emerson in his lifetime was accused of coldness, by Margaret Fuller and Thomas Carlyle among others, and in “Experience” addresses the issue: “The life of truth is cold, and so far mournful; but it is not the slave of tears, contritions, and perturbations. It does not attempt another’s work, nor adopt another’s facts.… I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people’s facts.… A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.” The practical ethics of Idealism, then, turn out to be seclusion and stoicism. “We must walk as guests in nature—not impassioned, but cool and disengaged,” Emerson says in “The Tragic.” Is there possibly, in this most amiable of philosophers, a preparation for the notorious loneliness and callousness and violence of American life which is mixed in with its many authentic and, indeed, unprecedented charms?
Emerson was the first American thinker to have a European influence; Carlyle sponsored him, and Matthew Arnold once said that no prose had been more influential in the nineteenth century than Emerson’s. He was, in German translation, a favorite author of Friedrich Nietzsche, who copied dozens of passages into a notebook, borrowed the phrase “the gay science” for philosophy, and wrote of the Essays, “Never have I felt so much at home in a book, and in my home, as—I may not praise it, it is too close to me.” Both men were ministers’ sons exultant in the liberation that came with the “death” of the Christian God; both were poets and rhapsodists tagged with the name of philosopher. Almost certainly Emerson’s phrase “Over-soul” influenced Nietzsche’s choice of the phrase “Übermensch,” even though “Over-soul” in the edition that Nietzsche read was translated “Die höhere Seele,” the higher soul, which is echoed by Nietzsche’s talk of “the higher men.” From the Over-soul to the Übermensch to the Supermen of Hitler’s Master Race is a dreadful progression for which neither Emerson nor Nietzsche should be blamed; but Emerson’s coldness and disengagement and distrust of altruism do become, in Nietzsche, a rapturous celebration of power and domination and the “ ‘boldness’ of noble races,” and an exhilarated scorn of what the German called “slave morality.” Not just the mention of Zoroaster seems Nietzschean in this passage from “Self-Reliance”:
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. “To the persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed immortals are swift.”
As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
The essay approvingly quotes Fletcher’s “Our valors are our best gods” and bluntly states, “Power is in nature the essential measure of right.” Totalitarian rule with its atrocities offers a warped mirror in which we can recognize, distorted, Emerson’s favorite concepts of genius and inspiration and whim; the totalitarian leader is a study in self-reliance gone amok, lawlessness enthroned in the place where law and debate and checks and balances should be, and with no obliging law of compensation coming to the rescue. The extermination camps are one of the developments that come between us and Emerson’s optimism.
Another is modern science, as it has developed. “Our approach now,” my dermatologist told me the other day, “is that nature is utterly stupid.” The same chemical mechanisms, he went on to explain, will destroy as blindly as they heal, and a goal of contemporary medicine is to block the witless commands that unleash harmful reactions in the body. Where, in this molecular idiocy, can we find indication that “acid and alkali preëxist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit”?
Also, we find aesthetic difficulty in a disconnected quality of Emerson’s discourse that in the actual lectures must have been greatly maske
d and smoothed by his handsome manner and appealing baritone voice. We are left with his literary voice, which (unlike Thoreau’s similar voice) seems pitched a bit over our heads, toward the back rows, and too much partakes of what he himself called “the old largeness.” Knut Hamsun, in his own lectures on The Cultural Life of Modern America, expressed what many a student has groped to say since:
One reads all his excellent comments; one reads while awaiting a conclusion relevant to the subject itself. One awaits the third and final word that can draw a figure or cast a statue. One waits until the twentieth and final page—one waits in vain: at this point Emerson bows and departs. And the reader is left with a lapful of things said; they have not formed a picture; they are a brilliant welter of small, elegant mosaic tiles.
I myself found, preparing for this talk, that the essays melted and merged in my mind; so exciting in their broad attack and pithy sentences, they end, often, disconcertingly in air, and fail to leave an imprint of their shape in the mind. This need not have been so: the one sermon of Emerson’s commonly reprinted is his farewell sermon in the Second Church of Boston, explaining why he could not in good faith administer the Lord’s Supper and therefore must resign.‖ It moves dramatically from careful examination of the relevant Biblical and patristic texts to the speaker’s own conclusions and thence to his beautifully understated but firm farewell. We remember it; its segments are articulated in a single gesture of argument. Of few of his essays can this be said. With his belief in inspiration and what he called “dream-power” and in patterns that all nature would conspire to express once a sufficiently pure surrender to the Over-soul was attained, Emerson read in his Concord study as his whim and his interest dictated and wrote in his celebrated journal, maintained since his college years, such quotations and paragraphs of independent thought as came to him. He assembled his lectures from this lode of intellectual treasure and, though the joinery is cunning and the language often brilliantly concrete, the net effect is somewhat jumbled and vague. We have been superbly exhorted, but to what effect? A demonstration of wit has been made, but somewhat to the stupefaction of our own wits. Modern critics, my impression is, are additionally embarrassed by the Neoplatonic, supernaturalist content of the early essays, and prefer the later, more factual considerations and the journals themselves, where the discontinuity is overt and the tone is franker and more intimate. Yet would the journals and even the excellent English Traits—the centerpiece of Mark Van Doren’s Portable Emerson—make a major claim on our attention had they not been hoisted into prominence by the celebrated, evangelical early addresses and essays? There is this awkwardness, I believe, in Emerson’s present reputation: what we like about him is not what is important, and what is important we do not much like. Emerson the prophet of the new American religion seems cranky and dim; what we like is the less ethereal and ministerial Emerson, the wry, observant, shrewd, skeptical man of this world.