An Uneasy Solitude: Individual and Society in the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson

by Maurice Gonnaud, Lawrence Rosenwald (Translator)

Overview

This subtle intellectual biography juxtaposes Ralph Waldo Emerson's revolutionary spiritual thinking with his elitist ideas of race and property—a contrast so sharp as to make his personality seem almost incoherent." Writing in (he great modern tradition of French anglicisles, Maurice Gonnaud compares Emerson's taste for solitude and the lyric ardor it awakened in him to his efforts to confront the social pressures of his times.

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691602707
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #817
Pages:	508
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.00(d)

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An Uneasy Solitude

Individual and Society in the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson

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By Maurice Gonnaud, Lawrence Rosenwald

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06718-6

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CHAPTER 1

THE FAMILY MILIEU

Two years after the Civil War, Emerson noted in his journal that "in old Boston, a feature not be [sic] forgotten was John Wilson, the town crier, who rung his bell at each street corner, — 'Lostl A child strayed this morning from 49 Marlborough Street; four years old; had on check apron, ...' He cried so loud, that you could not hear what he said, if you stood near." As coming from the pen of a venerated and supposedly austere man, the anecdote has all the charm of the unexpected; but at the same time it disorients us and stimulates our imagination. Boston at the beginning of the nineteenth century was still Arcadia. Biographers of Emerson have taken pleasure in describing that city of thirty thousand inhabitants, ranged upon its three hills, with its streets interspersed with green spaces, charmingly provincial and yet, from another point of view, open to the sea and to adventure. Schooners and brigs came to anchor along its docks, with their freights of Antilles rum, Burgundy and Spanish wines, Georgia and South Carolina cotton. To be sure, the port and the city were not to be confused — nothing could be less like the motley crowd around the warehouses than the bourgeois elite established on the slopes of Beacon Hill. But aside from the fact that merchants and shipowners constituted by profession the necessary link between the two classes, people knew perfectly well that Boston's fortunes and its commerce were strictly linked.

There had been a period of difficulty; but the future now looked clear and bright. The violence that in 1786 had accompanied the protest of Shays' Rebellion had had no sequel. The Revolution itself had after all been political and not social, and the few years between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787 were enough to efface any influence of the ideas of Thomas Paine. The establishment of a second legislative chamber, not only at Washington but also in each of the individual states, sanctioned the predominance of an elite minority at the exact moment at which Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, was elaborating the doctrine according to which the government belonged by right to the rich, the just, and the wise. The task was to set limits on the Revolution; and by the beginning of the nineteenth century the limits were set. If on every Fourth of July the lovers of oratory made the Revolution the theme of their discourse, its heroes for the most part — official celebrations excepted, of course — remained within their shrines.

By 1805 the danger, if danger there was, came from the White House; Jefferson's expansionist politics were judged imprudent and their financial consequences feared. But in the eyes of most Americans, such fears were exaggerated; and for Bostonians in particular, there was no doubt that the dawn of a new era, an era both rational and prosperous, had appeared on the banks of the Charles River. The destiny of the city was in the hands of a solid phalanx of merchants who joined a sense of order to a taste for enterprise and considered success to be a providential acknowledgment of their diligence. Already their ships cut through the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, carrying the standard of their might as far as the antipodes. How could such men not have been by natural extension also the leaders of their city?

One has to evoke an image of these substantial men when one attempts to understand the personality of William Emerson, Unitarian minister of the First Church of Boston, and not take at their face value the judgments — not numerous in any case — that his son has left us. That on occasion William preferred the pleasures of conversation to the care of his ministry no one will deny. But one should also note that the religion he had the mission to preach and, if need be, to defend, was itself neither rigid nor especially rigorous. James Eliot Cabot wondered in this regard, not without humor, whether a Unitarian minister's most efficacious tactic in resisting the increasing laxity was not in fact to loosen the bonds of orthodoxy still further. Let us say only that in dealing with the men and women of principle who made up his congregation William did not burn with apostolic zeal. His calling (for it would be unjust to count him as not having had one) led him elsewhere, toward something whose absence from the Boston of 1800 he felt acutely: that taste for the things of the mind and that intellectual curiosity which are the source and condition of culture.

In the letter cited before, Emerson mollifies somewhat the severity of his assessment by adding that William's "literary merits really [were] that he fostered the Anthology & the Athenaeum." The account is incomplete — William Emerson was also one of the first members of the Massachusetts Historical Society — but above all it lacks warmth. Certain critics, and not all of them minor critics, have adopted Emerson's reservations uncritically, and indeed have suggested on the basis of them that from 1790 to 1820 New England was an almost perfect intellectual vacuum. The reality was more varied. On the morrow of the Revolution — as the counterpart, so to speak, of political emancipation — there begins to manifest itself in Boston a desire for an independent intellectual life; and the Unitarian church, still fresh from the schism that had cut it off from the Congregationalist tree but not yet having adopted any doctrine in the strict sense of the term, becomes the avant-garde in the first and timid American Renaissance. The Monthly Anthology, founded in 1805, makes us smile today with its 450 subscribers, its conservative good tone, and its fears regarding France. It is nonetheless true that "the Review far surpassed any literary standards then existing in the United States, and was not inferior to any in England; for neither the Edinburgh nor the Quarterly Review was established until several years later."

The distance is thus less than it seems between William Emerson, first chief editor of the Monthly Anthology and fervent book-collector for the Boston Athenaeum, and his son Ralph Waldo, widely known for his efforts to enrich the city library of Concord and responsible, at a certain moment, for tasks strikingly analogous to his father's editorship. The resemblance becomes still more prominent when for the image of the fervid Transcendentalist one substitutes that equally authentic image of the Saturday Club regular. All in all, the contrast between father and son preserved in literary history derives less from taste or inclination than from temperament. There was in Ralph Waldo Emerson a demand for integrity that was to lead him, at the end of a long and difficult evolution, to a brutal rejection of the humanitarianism of the previous generation. A culture devoted entirely to the graces could not satisfy him even if the life of the mind was stimulated by it. He needed a stronger intellectual sustenance: and is that not as much as to say that for the son of the enlightened minister the atavistic Puritan strain had retained its virulence?

There is hardly any American writer who evokes as powerfully as does Emerson the idea of rootedness. On his father's side, his ancestors are among the immigrants who fled England during the persecutions of Archbishop Laud. Thus one Thomas Emerson, originally of the County of York or of Durham, established himself at Ipswich, Massachusetts in 1635 as farmer and baker. His son Joseph began an impressive line of ministers, interrupted only once between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Often these ministers married the daughters of ministers, so that there gradually constituted itself a sort of intellectual caste, joining the care of souls to a taste for reading and study. This same Joseph Emerson, for example, married the granddaughter of Peter Bulkeley, who had himself crossed the Atlantic to escape Laud's vexations and had distinguished himself as pioneer (founder in 1635 of the village of Concord on the banks of the Musketaquid), as theologian (author of the robust and ponderously scholastic treatise The Gospel Covenant) and as church dignitary (moderator of the synod that exiled Ann Hutchinson from Boston).

Emerson never denied his descent. It filled him in fact with a sort of patrician pride, which echoes here and there throughout his work. Thus an unpublished quatrain of his, undated and untitled, opposes the aristocratic blood inherited from the Bulkeleys to the more ample stream of his more democratic ancestors. One ought also to look in this connection at the only sermon Emerson thought fit to publish before the famous communion sermon of 1832. The circumstances made for solemnity: a young man Emerson had known at the Divinity School was being ordained as assistant pastor of the Congregational Church of Concord. Now Emerson's grandfather William Emerson had been minister at Concord during the Revolution, and then army chaplain (he was to die at thirty-three of the consequences of a fever contracted during a campaign); moreover his widow had married the minister named to succeed him, Ezra Ripley. In the fifty years he ministered to his congregation, Ripley had won everyone's respect. Emerson for his part had had occasion to be much in his company and had considerable affection for him. The task that devolved on him that day — to offer his sympathy to a young colleague he esteemed in the presence of an aged ancestor he revered — was entirely to his taste. The sermon develops the theme of the unity of good men. Though men remain divided in the shadow of sin, hostile to one another, they are rejoined and reunited to the extent that they can see the truth; and the object of the ceremony that is the speech's occasion is precisely to symbolize the solidarity of the just. The text lacks neither solidity nor nobility, but Emerson, who considers himself as the "organ [of] the Christian churches," subjects himself to the constraints of strict impersonality; the effect is thus very powerful when just at the end, stripping away the anonymity he has thus far maintained, he takes on the role of special heir:

I feel a peculiar, a personal right to welcome you hither to the home and the temple of my fathers. I believe the church whose pastor you are will forgive me the allusion, if I express the extreme interest which every man feels in the scene of the trials and labors of his ancestors. Five out of seven of your predecessors are my kindred. They are in the dust, who bind my attachment to this place; but not all. I cannot help congratulating you that one survives, to be to you the true friend and venerable counselor he has ever been to me.

Far from making the peroration familiar, this transition to the first person endows it with an increased dignity, as if Emerson were acknowledging and proclaiming an inheritance received from his minister ancestors.

One should not of course see that inheritance as an unrelievedly somber one. Serious as are all men who believe in the importance of their tasks, the pastors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were delivered by the often precarious conditions of their existence, by their intimate contact with their congregations, and by their own needs for independence and free thought from all that might have fixed them in an attitude of empty solemnity. Calvinists at a time that the word meant rebels, they detached themselves not only from the old orthodoxy but also from the new when it became intolerant or pedestrian in its turn. We know that Joseph Emerson, minister at Maiden, Massachusetts for more than half a century, was one of Whitefield's most enthusiastic supporters, and that he invited him to preach in his church when he visited New England in 1740. Joseph's son William, the minister-soldier, was according to Moncure Conway the first Emerson to entertain religious ideas one might call genuinely liberal. The citizens of Concord chose him as pastor in consequence of a controversy in which the Arminians (the majority) were opposed to the defenders of strict Calvinism. Here as elsewhere, then, Emerson's paternal ancestors remained within the limits of their ecclesiastical functions; but by using the margin of interpretation their faith allowed, they manifested that spirit of free investigation to which Emerson was to bring so devastating a consecration.

The biographers have for the most part been more reticent on the subject of Emerson's maternal ancestors; and we would be reduced to hypotheses if the filial piety of a certain Haskins (the maiden name of Emerson's mother) had not fortunately filled the gap. Here the stock is less noble and less illustrious, to be sure, but it is not without character. The first Haskins needing mention is Emerson's great-grandfather. He arrived at Boston at the beginning of the eighteenth century and worked as a cooper. He died young, of the smallpox. We have more abundant information about his son John, which makes him out to be a vivid and even picaresque figure, full of a solid and appealing vitality. He learned the cooper's trade from his father, but longed to go to sea. He managed to set sail for the Antilles, was captured by the Spanish and then by the French, had the luck to be released by an American ship, and returned to Boston — healed, it seems, of his passion for the sea. He then accepted the offer of partnership made him by his mother's second husband, another cooper. Somewhat later he married a young woman from Maiden (the officiating minister being none other than Joseph Emerson, Ralph Waldo's great-grandfather). Then, probably judging that coopering had no future, he became a distiller and gradually assembled the means for a comfortable living. In 1765 he constructed a spacious house in Boston, in which his family continued to live after his death. He himself lived till 1814, but he remained, in manner (his descendant refers to a certain "military" straightness) and dress, faithful to the Boston of the colonial period. Let us add that this social ascent was accompanied by a change in religion: sometime between the ages of twenty and thirty, John Haskins left the Congregational Church for the Episcopalian. But he displayed a generous tolerance toward his family, permitting his wife the observances of strict Calvinism and allowing his thirteen children free choice in the matter when they came to the years of discretion. The result was that they split pretty much equally between the two churches. Emerson's mother Ruth chose the Episcopalian and held fast to it.

It is neither chance nor preconception that draws our attention so incessantly to matters of religion; it is the nature of things in that Boston of the turn of the eighteenth century. The dogmas had no doubt lost their edge, and people did not still have theological minds; one could, as John Haskins did, elevate enterprise and profit above the agonized meditation on the world to come. But all existence was nonetheless still bathed in a sort of providential twilight, and the idea of man's relations with God, however imprecise and vague, impressed itself on most minds as the fundamental component of human destiny. Thus Ruth Emerson decided at the age of twenty-seven to keep a journal. Like most Bostonian girls of good family, she had received a thorough religious education, though one without mystical excess or extreme fervor; and yet this is what she wrote as an introduction:

I desire now in a better strength than my own to resolve that from this date — April 20 1795 — I will, as God shall enable me, from time to time carefully notice all his providences towards my friends or myself, whether prosperous or adverse, — and conscientiously note down whatever appears to be for the glory of God, or the good of my own soul.

One might see in this a dedication to the contemplative life, if the modest and prudent phrase "from time to time" did not offer an entry by which, at the opportune moment, the claims of the secular might assert themselves.

Offspring of a race of priests, son of a gently and deeply pious mother, Emerson was thus the heir of a spiritual capital that was always to appear to him more precious than the sum of worldly goods. His great-grandfather, the minister Joseph Emerson, seems to have prayed daily that none of his descendants would ever get rich. Emerson had subtler notions on this point, but essentially he was in agreement with it. The meager circumstances in which he grew up are widely known, as is the way in which, when a student at Harvard, he had to perform certain poorly paid tasks to ease the family budget. This necessity never caused him any bitterness. The nephew of President Kirkland to whom he gave lessons described him as "kind, easy, familiar, but self-sufficient, with a wall of reserve about him that no one could penetrate." It is clear that his courtesy and his reticence proceeded from the same source; the young Emerson was unknowingly like Pascal. He did the expected homage to the powers that be and maintained a profound adherence to certain qualities of nature: honesty, that is, loyalty to oneself, and culture, understood in a spiritual sense as well as in a secular.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from An Uneasy Solitude by Maurice Gonnaud, Lawrence Rosenwald. Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. v
• Foreword, pg. vii
• Translator's Preface, pg. xix
• Author's Preface to the French Edition, pg. xxi
• Abbreviations, pg. xxvii
• 1. The Family Milieu, pg. 3
• 2. Harvard: An Apprenticeship in Solitude, pg. 21
• 3. The Schoolteacher Feels His Way, pg. 35
• 4. The Ministry, or, An Attempt at the Safe Middle Way, pg. 62
• 5. The Road to Concord, pg. 111
• 6. Prophecies and Epiphany, pg. 147
• 7. Organizing Victory, pg. 180
• 8. From Affirmation to Challenge, pg. 221
• 9. Malaise, pg. 259
• 10. Exploring the Problems, pg. 298
• 11. Equilibrium Regained, pg. 341
• 12. The Thorn in the Flesh, pg. 387
• 13. A Surrogate Optimism, pg. 407
• 14. The Last Struggle, pg. 443
• Bibliography of Emerson's Writings, pg. 463
• Index, pg. 469