Looking on the bright side
Raymond Carr
EMERSON AMONG THE ECCENTRICS by Carlos Baker Liking, f25, pp. 608 Alas, if we arc to understand the ide- als which still infuse the American mind, we must face reading the outpourings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, dismissed by Herman Melville as 'oracular gibberish'. When he died in 1882, he was the best known American of his day. He had been a central figure in the renaissance of Ameri- can letters. He had given Americans a working philosophy of everyday life.
Emerson started life as a Unitarian min- ister. He abandoned his ministry after rejecting all 'historical Christianity' as the dead relic of the past. 'God is, not was.' `God is in every man.' The individual could become one with a divine universe, discov- ering the moral law within him and act accordingly. The 'Transcendentalism' of Emerson and his disciples was a surrogate religion combining a facile optimism 'there is a force always at work', Emerson wrote, `to make the best better and the worst good' — with a radical individualism. `Self-respect, self-subsistency, a regard to natural conscience' would engender a bet- ter world. No wonder Americans found in his prophetic utterance a comforting creed. The old world of Europe was incapable of rising to the challenges of the 'age of the first person singular'. It lacked 'elasticity'; the hope of mankind lay in America:
This great England will dwindle again to an island which has done well but has reached its utmost expression . . . the old exhausted island will live in her overseas children.
The only trouble was that America had not produced a genius to celebrate its grandeur. He found the necessary Ameri- can genius in Walt Whitman, the tramp with the red face and white body, vividly described by Carlos Baker.
Baker's book does not address Emer- son's thought as such. It is concerned with Emerson the man as revealed in his life as the Sage of Concord. There he set up as the guru of Transcendentalism, encourag- ing his disciples to take up residence often with prolonged stays in his own house. His life became a perpetual, unsolved conflict between the solitude necessary for the operation of genius and the need for the company of the like-minded to stimulate thought. Baker dissects the emotional and intellectual life of this circle of eccentrics who remind one of the Bloomsbury set in their obsessive concern with their own and each other's private lives. Using their copi- ous correspondence and Emerson's diary of 236 volumes, Baker stitches together his abundant quotations to give a totally con- vincing portrait of life at Concord.
In spite of a strong streak of 'Yankee' common sense, Emerson's most touching and abiding characteristic was his readiness to detect genius in friends often distin- guished by their eccentricity rather than by their talents. Ellery Channing was a mediocre poet but to Emerson his 'wild ear-piercing ejaculations' and his 'Commu- nion with what is Highest in Being' gave him entry into the 'Parnassian fraternity'. Alcott was a vegetarian crank, an enlight- ened educational reformer, but a hopeless failure in his lifetime. In this collection of second-raters, Thoreau stands out as the awkward genius. His Walden is an Ameri- can classic. Once he had rejected the dead weight of conventional Christianity, Emer- son developed an anarchic streak. Thore- au's rejection of the conventional was absolute; he refused to pay poll tax to gov- ernments of which he disapproved.
The most notable of Baker's portraits is that of Margaret Fuller, a neurotic, sex- starved blue-stocking whose letters to her potential lovers, male and female, are full of erotic undertones and the insistent demand, `Do you love me?' This was not at all to Emerson's taste. The most that he wanted was an intellectually stimulating amitii amoureuse to relieve the strain of life with his invalid wife to whom he never wrote the love letters she craved. He was, he wrote to her, 'a photometer which mea- sures light but cannot light a stove'.
To Charming he was 'hard and cold'. Margaret Fuller's letters reproach Emer- son for lack of warmth. These were the complaints of those who put too demand- ing an emotional strain on him, essentially a kind and generous friend. Walt Whitman noted his 'sex handicap'. Perhaps his emo- tional capital was exhausted by the early death of his first wife. Surely only obsessive love could lead him to dig up her grave and open her coffin. As for Margaret Fuller, once over her nine-year emotional fixation on Emerson she found sexual fulfilment with a minor Italian nobleman. She, he and their child were drowned at sea returning to America. Emerson and her friends turned her into the lost heroine of the American Renaissance.
What comes out in Baker's book is the earthiness that tempers Emerson's mystical metaphysics. While the orthodox Christians were at church, Emerson read Aristo- phanes and Rabelais. He did not, like Thoreau, retire to the woods, 'It is impossi- ble to extricate yourself from the questions in which your age is involved', and he involved himself in every noble cause of his time. A passionate opponent of slavery, he refused to lecture to audiences to which blacks had been denied admission. A radi- cal, he had no faith in socialism or the Utopian communities favoured by many of his more cranky disciples.
He ended up enjoying the material bene- fits of friendship with a millionaire of intel- lectual pretensions. Such a comfortable resting place has been the last refuge of many a one-time rebellious spirit.
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