SOURCE: Hopkins, Vivian C. “The Work of Art.” In Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson's Aesthetic Theory, pp. 105-146. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951.

[In the following excerpt, Hopkins explains Emerson's aesthetic theory as it applies to literature.]

FORM IN LITERATURE

In his lecture series on The Philosophy of History (1836-37), Emerson proceeds from the third lecture, on Art, to the fourth, on Literature, and defines the special place of literature in the creative world: “Whilst Art delights in carrying a thought into action, Literature is the conversion of action into thought. The architect executes his dream in stone. The poet enchants you by thinking out your action. Art actualises an idea. Literature idealises action” (lecture on Literature, 1836). For Emerson, the difference between literature and art thus appears in their expression of the ideal; literature is closer to the intellectual, the transcendental, art closer to the actual.

Deeming literature the most universal of the arts, Emerson defines it in this same lecture as “the record of human thought in written language.” One can hardly name a thought or feeling which some writing has not expressed:

Literature is the record of all; the sum and measure of humanity. Every part of man has its department in literature; his observation, in history; his love, in lyrics and novels; his wrath in satire and controversies; his mirth in comedy; his piety in psalms and sermons; his contemplation in philosophy. Even crime and folly have their books. Thus it represents all human thought showing after the passage of centuries and millenniums of years not only its average ability and aim, but also the wild follies and defeats of the mind, and thus discloses the tendencies, and fixes the divine boundaries of the human spirit.

Here in his definition of literature Emerson has indicated a breadth which covers the whole range of human life. If in his critical illustrations and his own practice he drew more often from the observation of history, the love of poetry, or the contemplation of philosophy, than from the wrath of satire, the mirth of comedy, or the crime of fiction, he corrected that lack by including these passionate and frivolous elements in his definition.

In literature even more than in art, Emerson places importance upon the quality of the age. Applying to literary criticism his concept of Necessity, a Fate made beneficent by confidence in God's power, Emerson states that a foreordained place exists for each work of literature. Necessity operates through the age as well as through the individual, so that each finished poem, play, or essay attains power partly through the general temper of the time, partly through the writer himself. Even the form in which the genius writes is beyond his choice, determined by the demands of the time and his own ability. Original expression, paradoxically enough, can be achieved only by a man “charged in his single head with a nation's force.” Accepting a “wave” theory of human progress similar to Taine's, Emerson states that the activity of nations goes by great surges; the tide, full for a short time, ebbs, and the creative “water power” appears again in another place. He uses the chemical term “zymosis” to indicate that fermenting power within an age which induces literary creation. In the essay on “Eloquence” he compares the power emerging in oratory to the geologic force which causes mountains: “As the Andes and Alleghenies indicate the line of the fissure in the crust of the earth, along which they were lifted, so the great ideas that suddenly expand at some moment the mind of mankind, indicate themselves by orators.” Thus the age of Cicero in Rome and that of Lord North in England exemplify periods when the earth's geologic steam was let loose from the mouths of orators.

Although Emerson's reading ranged through German, French, Italian, Persian, and Hindu literature, his theory of the integral relation between the individual writer and the age may best be illustrated through English literature, which he knew deeply as well as widely. His Lectures on English Literature (1835-36), supplemented by his Readings in English Literature (1869), present a good focus for this study.

Covering the span of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period through the eighteenth century, these lectures analyze the interaction of literary genius with the quality of the age. Thus in the Anglo-Saxon and pre-Chaucerian period, Emerson finds individual writers of little importance; here the qualities of the age may be said to exist in the air, and Anglo-Saxon gloom or chivalric fancy to fill whatever vessels come to hand.¹ In Chaucer Emerson recognizes the first individual genius of English literature, praising his balance, his human kindness, his “hilarity of good sense,” his treatment of common things, and a quality of homeliness whose later decline Emerson deplores. In the period of Elizabeth and James, which he considers in one lecture, he finds not only “matchless individuals” but also “multitudes and masses.”

Although Emerson gives some attention to Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon, he reserves two full lectures for Shakespeare, recognizing that even in a great age he towers above his fellows.² Beginning his reading in the sonnets, whose “over-mastering imagination” Emerson praises, he later denotes the sonnets a throwback to “the old Aristotelian culture,” and places them on a level below the plays, which more truly reflect their own time. His analysis of tragedy is best exemplified by his statement of Macbeth as a tragedy of fear, with all its parts subtly united to produce one dominating impression of horror; his criticism of comedy appears in an encomium of Falstaff. Though he ranked the heroic plays below the tragedies, he commented on them at some length, perceiving in them Shakespeare's remarkable distillation of the drama implicit in English history. In considering that Shakespeare was at his best in closet reading rather than in dramatic performance, Emerson shared the romantic view of Shakespeare held by Coleridge and Lamb rather than the prevailing modern opinion that Shakespeare was a dramatist first and a poet second. Deeply though Emerson admired Shakespeare's characters as the fusion of ideal with real—he gives special meed to Henry V, Brutus, and Antony, and like many another idealist, falls prey to the charms of Cleopatra—he presents no analysis of character comparable to Coleridge's or Hazlitt's study of Hamlet, and he neglects the element of passion.³ Emerson cannot resist making sport of the Shakespeare Society for their interest in such items as the second-best bed. On the other hand, he makes his own critical contribution when he applies the test of verse to the moot play Henry VIII. Though acquainted with Shakespearean criticism, he carried that learning lightly, and gave the warning still salutary for scholars, that not critics, but Shakespeare himself, is the ultimate court of appeal.

The significant element in Emerson's criticism of Shakespeare appears not only in the elevated place assigned to the Bard, but in the amount of comment in relation to other figures which is devoted to Shakespeare in this literary survey. Despite the temperamental affinity which critics since Alcott have noted between Emerson and such seventeenth-century figures as Herbert and Thomas Browne, Shakespeare alone has received more attention from Emerson than the whole group of religious writers in the period of the Stuarts. Since much of Emerson's critical statement about Shakespeare has not been published, scholars have not so far appreciated the extent of Emerson's reading or the volume of his notes on Shakespeare. Yet the interpretation which appears in the lectures and readings shows a lively appreciation of varied aspects of Shakespeare, and attests the fact that the transcendental theory of art, exercised by a sensitive critical temper, finds its way to masterpieces which the world calls great.

From the point of view of religious belief, Emerson finds the seventeenth century most satisfying, detecting in George Herbert, Robert Herrick, and the great “solar” poet John Milton the “pure flame” of belief reflected from the spirit of their age.

The eighteenth century Emerson denotes an arid desert, perhaps because his own search for literary values was in large part an attempt to define his difference from neoclassic thinkers. In Johnson and Burke, however, he discovers some perception of “the Necessary the Plain the True the Human,” and he finds in this generally fruitless age another good quality—the increasing democratic spirit, passing from Rousseau and Voltaire to Bentham, the Mills, and Tom Paine, most clearly seen in Franklin, but soon degenerating into utilitarianism. Goethe and Coleridge, Emerson says, had to “reinstate men in the Real,” by interpreting literature in the light of the Kantian distinction between Reason and Understanding.

From his survey of English literature, Emerson concludes that we have come a long way from the medieval love of fable, which resembles decorative ornament in architecture; and from the servile admiration for a king, which causes a serious flaw in so great a writer as Francis Bacon. Summing up England's achievement for the St. George's Society Dinner in Montreal, 1852, Emerson denotes Shakespeare as the “first name” in intellect; Newton, in exact science; Milton, in epic and lyric song; Bacon, in learning and reason. Though he mentions several others as lesser great, these four seem to him (at the moment) to make up the first rank.

Turning to his own age, Emerson sees it inheriting all the advantages of political freedom, since writers speak now to a whole people instead of to a privileged class; and in the insight of philosophical idealism he observes an inner inspiration of even greater value than the political. With all this superiority, Emerson looks at the contemporary scene with a jaundiced eye, failing to see in it the “enthusiasm” of love, patriotism, or religion which lifts literary production off its feet. To a certain extent this denunciation of literature as faithless was a critical concept first expressed by Herder in The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782-83). The excessive subjectivity whose suicidal tendency Emerson notes when he says, “Our young men all had knives in their brains,” is one reason for this skepticism; Emerson finds Goethe citing it also as a destructive quality in the German fin de siècle.⁴ Though literary in origin, the concept was no mere attitude with Emerson, because it expressed a lack which he, as well as Thoreau and Alcott, sensed in contemporary writing. After a meeting with the Transcendental Club, for example, Emerson writes in his journal (1836) that art and literature must die because true worship has been lost. Emerson was obliged to admit that his own extreme liberalism had contributed to that skepticism; nor could he seek revival of a faith, merely for the sake of art, in which credence no longer existed. He reproves Jones Very for making just such a false effort, when he tries to match his “new” intuitions with worn-out religious language that has grown “secondary and morbid.” Using an organic image to show the lack of new-springing faith, Emerson says that modern society seems “composed of the débris of the foregone structures of religion and politics, unmixed composite bronze just as the soil we till is made up of the degraded mountains of the elder world.”⁵

For the most part this censure of his age as unbelieving, with its related fruitless search for a “national” religion to which he could only partially subscribe, was expressed during Emerson's early years of production (1836-41). He is still analyzing the quality of his age (though with a less negative outlook) in 1849, when he remarks that Putnam, Whipple, Dewey, and W. H. Channing, as well as Emerson, are concurrently lecturing on the Spirit of the Times,⁶ and Carlyle is conducting a similar examination of England in The Present Age. Thus many thinkers at the same time seek to solve the problem of “the age,” which Heine called “a sphinx which throws itself from the rock as soon as its riddle has been guessed.” At the opening of the Civil War, Emerson's outlook is again clouded by the acute realization that the greedy monster of war is eating up man's aesthetic production:

All [man's] arts [Emerson says] disappear in the one art of war. All which makes the social tone of Europe milder and sweeter than the miner's hut, and the lumberer's camp in America; the ages of culture behind; traditional skills; the slow secular adjustment of talent and position; the cumulative onward movement; the potency of experience, is destroyed; and the uncouth forked nasty savage stands on the charred desert to begin his first fight with wolf and snake, and build his dismal shanty on the sand.

(Lecture on Art, 1861)

In 1877 Emerson again assails the lack of religious belief, comparing it to Egyptian mummies: “So dead is this faith, so dealeth it with death. Every day the people the heart and life of the youth is falling from this unsubstantial pageant.”⁷

But this negative view does not represent Emerson's complete perspective on the finished or the potential production of his own time. Three months after he has denounced theological aridity in The Divinity School Address, he records the hope that even “the dead pond” of the Church might again become “a treasury of all fine and all sublime faculties if their objects appeared or if an electric atmosphere of thought and heroism enveloped them.”⁸ If an age understands its evils well enough, Emerson believes that it may be on the way to overcoming them. “I like very well,” he says, “that the trials of this age should be new,—early old age, pyrrhonism and apathy; that we should find some topic that is neither classic nor romantic, some spot of virgin soil. Let us wait, and at least do that greatly” (Ms. J. H, 1841). Emerson's belief that his epoch, whatever its faults, has made some progress beyond the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, in which his father was a Unitarian leader, is shown by his terming those years “that early ignorant and transitional Month-of-March in our New England culture.”⁹ To that period he has no wish to return.

Beneath Emerson's whole discussion of “the age” lies a kind of deterministic conviction that certain qualities exist in the atmosphere, apart from the contribution of individuals, just as matter is made up of certain chemical combinations. Thus he traces the poverty of earlier unproductive periods to no individual fault, but to an “endemic disease” in the air, poisoning those who breathe it.¹⁰ Although the burden of The Divinity School Address and of “Self-reliance” is a cry for individual effort, Emerson explains in his journals that the best art cannot proceed from one who separates himself from the tendencies of his time. Thus he values the “composite force indicating the exact amount of conviction of the necessity of self control existing in the total mind of the community,” and asserts: “For every individual who scorns it, it descends; for every individual who passionately attaches himself to it, it ascends” (Ms. J. C, Pt. II, 1837).

That the art of an age must have an “unwilled” relation to the existing time spirit may be considered a corollary of the individual passivity which we have observed in Emerson's creative artist who “receives” inspiration. Thus Emerson asserts: “I cast myself upon the Age and will not resist it. Passive I will think what it thinketh and say what it saith.”¹¹ Overstatement, this, in a typically Emersonian way; yet it serves to correct the evil of a personal pride which tries to convert the “vast Ocean” of the time into a mill wheel for the service of private and selfish interests. One must also realize that Emerson here advocates passivity to the spirit of the age rather than to its material manifestations in laws, institutions, or books, whose importance he minimizes. One might define this concept of “the spirit of the age” as the social counterpart of that more intangible Over-soul, whose mystical importance we have seen in the creative process.

The circular quality of this argument is obvious: individual artists must lead the age, but they must also depend upon the age's spiritual quality. The contradiction is not resolved, but it is given some direction by Emerson's idea of history. Retrospect over the great centuries can give inspiration to our own.

I think not of mean ages, [Emerson says] but of Chaldean, Egyptian, or Teutonic ages, when man was not feather-brained, or French, or servile, but, if he stooped, he stooped under ideas; times when the earth spoke and the heavens glowed, when the actions of men indicated vast conceptions, and men wrote histories of the world in prison, and builded like Himmaleh, and the Allegany [sic] chains.

(Ms. J. ZO, 1856)

Since Emerson conceives, furthermore, that each period must interpret earlier times in the light of its own convictions, he asserts that the advance made by the nineteenth century may come to light when later writers, with fresh perspective, assess its leaders in relation to its general spirit. Emerson himself is able to present a more hopeful view of the Civil War several years after its close, than he could obtain at its beginning. “In America,” he says, “the grandeur was shown by our youth in the war, whilst their fathers were looking for it in the thinkers and statesmen.” In 1878 he states one great advantage resulting from the recent war: “Our eyes are withdrawn from England, withdrawn from France, and look homeward.”¹² Thus some dross has been melted in the crucible of conflict. If religious faith has not revived, at least a stronger, more independent national spirit emerges from the wreckage of war.

LANGUAGE

Nowhere in Emerson's literary theory is the organic principle more clearly expressed than in his conception of language, the stuff and substance of literature. For Emerson language has the vitality of plants, animals, and men, and is conceived in all its complexity as a gradual growth. Thus he writes: “Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent” (“Quotation and Originality”).

Emerson's historical conception of language is the romantic view that the savage naturally expressed his ideas in metaphors, which civilization has crusted over until they have lost their touch with life. Although this idea appeared in that neoclassic guide to composition and Emerson's college text, Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric,¹³ it did not become an operating principle in his thought until he found it more vividly expressed in the mystic writers Sampson Reed and Oegger.¹⁴ Comparing the original emblematic, vital quality of language with its “civilized” disintegration into “fossil poetry,” Emerson indicates in Nature the way to recover its life: “Wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things.”

This concept of language bears out the correspondence which Emerson affirms philosophically between man's spirit and material nature; as soon as man recovers that lost harmony with natural things, he will easily attain vivid expression. He does not believe that there was any “original” relation between the word and the thing. His early experiment in repeating the words “black” and “white” until all fixed meaning vanished taught him his first lesson in idealism. Once the connection has been established, however, the word comes to fit the thing, so that students actually can, by effort, discover the “wisdom of words,” and find with surprise that the common words which have lived for centuries still fit their expanding thought.

This close connection between words and vegetable nature appears in Emerson's description of the positive degree (under-statement) in writing as “the sinew of speech,” in contrast to the superlative as “the fat.” Thus Montaigne's language, an example of “low” or barroom style, issues from the heart of nature: “Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.” Modern civilization, Emerson suggests, can correct its false delicacy by recalling the plain speaking of such ancient writers as Plutarch, who could speak freely because he wrote only for one sex. “Guts,” Emerson says, anticipating the “tough” school of modern fiction, “is a stronger word than intestines.” It is important to recall that Emerson's own use of language, which today seems vital but certainly not racy, shocked Alcott when he first heard Emerson lecture. (Alcott was later to try to modify his own neoclassic diction by a touch of Emerson's saltiness.) The principle of restraint of course always operated in Emerson's published work. Praising Rabelais and Whitman as like masters of this “Rommany,” Emerson maintains some caution in his admiration of Whitman, when he says that Whitman “has not got out of the Fire-club and gained the entrée of the sitting-rooms.” Even climate may have an effect on the kind of language used, as the long frosty nights of England and New England hold those people “pretty fast to realities.” Organic metaphor is used to show lack of clarity in Carlyle's style: “O Carlyle, the merit of glass is not to be seen, but to be seen through; but every crystal and lamina of the Carlyle glass is visible.”

The critic, in turn, may judge by a writer's language how closely his spirit has been in tune with nature—if the language seems vital and earthborn, the work must have value.

Not only in the light of organic form, but from the point of view of a practicing critic does Emerson consider language, with a keen ear for the telling phrase. Western nicknames are cited: “Michigan wolverines,” “Wisconsin badgers,” “Illinois suckers,” “Indiana hoosiers,” “Missouri pikes,” “Iowa hawkeyes,” “Ohio buckeyes,” to illustrate the people, “rough grisly Esaus, full of dirty strength.” Emerson collects country statements that illustrate restraint: “a gun is unhealthy to Britishers”; “rain won't do hay any good”; “Preston never swum as far as he could.” He delights in the colloquial terms that describe a parvenu: “upstart,” “squirt,” “scalawag.” He comments on the triumph of philosophical over popular conception in the use of the word “devil.” While in the popular mind the devil is a malignant power, in philosophy he is negation, falsehood, or nothing. Yet the people's phrases express the philosophical rather than the popular sense of Satan: for example, “the devil a monk was he” means “he was no monk.” The practical writer speaks in this advice: “Blot out the superlatives, the negatives, the dismals, and the adjectives (and very) and finally, see that you have not omitted the thought or fact which the piece was written to state.”

The modern critic would go along with Emerson's suggestion that writers use short words of Anglo-Saxon origin when possible, avoiding long Latin terms, especially “the whole family of Fero.” An amusing illustration of preference for Saxon over Latin words appears in Emerson's attempt to arbitrate a dispute between Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau over the phrasing of his line “Nature doth have her dawn each day” (published in The Dial, January 1841). Concerning her proposal to change “doth have” to “relumes” Emerson writes to Margaret that Thoreau has “boggled” at “relumes” and he has agreed to restore “doth have.” “Othello's melodious verses, ‘that can thy light relume,’” Emerson says, “make that word sacred always in my ear. But our tough Yankee must have his tough verse, so I beg you will replace it.”

Young writers may still gain by studying Emerson's list of dangerously showy words: “asphodel,” “harbinger,” “chalice.” In his catalogue of “vulgarisms to be gazetted” there is an echo of neoclassic strictness not characteristic of his general theory: some of these “banished” terms are “moiety” for “a small part,” “nothing would answer but,” “in our midst,” “might have to go.”

On the whole, however, Emerson's view of language not only harmonizes with organic form, but also shows a practical sense of the vivid in contemporary discourse as well as in writing. H. L. Mencken must applaud his record of such terms as “dab,” “cockney,” “granny,” “peacock,” and “a cocktail House of Commons.” He even shows sufficient objectivity to record Dr. Osgood's contemptuous criticism of his own sermon as “patty-cake.”

POETIC FORM: THE ORGANIC PRINCIPLE IN METER

Poetry, Emerson's favorite literary form, clearly embodies the organic principle, since its special techniques, rhythm and rhyme, issue directly from human nature. In “Poetry and Imagination” Emerson relates rhythm not to natural objects, but to the human pulse:

Metre begins with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs. If you hum or whistle the rhythm of the common English metres,—of the decasyllabic quatrain, or the octosyllabic with alternate sexasyllabic,—you can easily believe these metres to be organic, derived from the human pulse, and to be therefore not proper to one nation, but to mankind.

In establishing the basis of rhythm in human breathing, Emerson's theory of verse bears some similarity to such modern experiments in acoustic metrics as that of Wilbur Schramm, whose Approaches to a Science of English Verse (1935) analyzes by means of scientific instruments the changes of pitch and volume which occur in the reading of poetry. Emerson's theory also opposes the idea of a “national” rhythm (the consideration, for example, that blank verse is a typically English expression) by rooting meter in the ebb and flow of man's breathing.

Sometimes, Emerson says, the poet may catch from nature an auditory suggestion which controls the rhythm of his poem: “As if the sound of a bell, or a certain cadence expressed in a low whistle or booming, or humming, to which the poet first timed his step, as he looked at the sunset, or thought, was the incipient form of the piece, and was regnant through the whole.” This account (doubtless of personal experience) has an interesting modern parallel in A. E. Housman's Name and Nature of Poetry, where Housman speaks of a poetic idea gradually taking on rhythm and form as he walks along.

Rhyme Emerson also conceives as integral to man's nature. Fondness for rhyme, far from being an infantile pleasure, is based on the principle of repetition with difference which appears throughout nature; thus a sonnet's rhymes please by the same principle as nodes in a sea shell, shadows reflecting rocks, columns in a building. The poet's problem in rhyme is “to unite wild freedom with hard sculpture,” and successful rhyme is defined in “Poetry and Imagination” as “the transparent frame that allows almost the pure architecture of thought to become visible to the mental eye.” Although Emerson's poetic ear was subtly attuned to unusual rhymes, he more often conceives of rhyme as visual than as auditory. Skill in rhyme Emerson submits as a test of poetic ability; unusual and untried rhymes indicate a lively imagination. To express the combination of freedom with limitation which rhyme implies, he compares it to a bird's dartings through a wood.

Emerson discovered poetic music in a wide variety of verse—in the ballad, in Beaumont and Fletcher's “Songs,” in Collins' “Ode to Evening” and Gray's “Elegy,” in the Persian Hafiz, and in the work of Ellery Channing. On occasion he could read poetry for the melody, forgetting the meaning. Byron's faults could be momentarily ignored in his enjoyment of the “perfect flow” of the stanza in “Childe Harold” or “The Hebrew Melodies.” Such an attainment of “sound without sense” does not, however, satisfy Emerson as it does Poe. Of the best poetry he requires a certainty of direction as strict as that of a pilot guiding a ship. He was attracted by Ellery Channing's statement of poetry's need for inner coherence: “Drive a donkey, and beat him with a pole with both hands;—that's action: but poetry is revolution on its own axis.”¹⁵

Rhythm, Emerson finds, ascends in power according to the sense, so that the lofty thought necessarily finds rich musical expression. Dominating his whole conception of technique is the insistence that poetry's essence is not mere “metre,” but “metre-making argument.” His view of rhythm thus differs from theories defined in terms of music—such as Poe's comparison of poetry to musical melody in “The Rationale of Verse,” or Lanier's application of musical notation to poetry in The Science of English Verse—and finds a twentieth-century descendant in a critic like John Crowe Ransom, who avers that meaning controls the effect of poetic sounds. Emerson's demand for ideas in poetry does not, however, imply that he lacks interest in metrical experiment. Poets, he says, must not play over the same old airs; he looks for the invention of new meters, as well as new images, “rhythms of a faery and dreamlike music” which will make the best-known English poetry sound like psalm tunes. A prophecy of this new music to come appears in some passages of prose eloquence, which he finds richer than modern verse.

In our discussion of expression in Chapter I, the young Tennyson was cited as an example of a poet whose technique excelled his ideas. Emerson's complete view of Tennyson's poetry, however, shows appreciation for his advance beyond this early stage. If Emerson found the 1833 volume of Poems deserving of the same admiration which might be given to a mechanical dividing machine, he saw in the 1842 Poems a progress beyond mere musical skill to a deeper perception: “The same fluent and apprehensive nature which threw itself with such ease into the forms of outward beauty, has now been intent rather on the secrets of the shaping spirit.” Though the clever verse and superficial thought of “In Memoriam” seemed to revoke this promise, the “Ode on the Duke of Wellington,” “Ulysses,” and “Tithonus” again replaced Tennyson in Emerson's rank of “thinkers” rather than mere “singers.”

FORM AS SPIRIT: THE SYMBOL

The ultimate test of good poetry for Emerson is its embodiment of vital metaphors. A successful symbol is the material object transformed by the creative heat of the poet's imagination. The Plotinian concept of “the flowing,” whose importance we observed in the imaginative process, leaves its mark also on Emerson's conception of the symbol. We recall that Emerson describes the creative insight in “The Poet” as a perception of the flowing or metamorphosis at the heart of nature, a realization that

Within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend to a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, [he] uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature … He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form.

The symbol is the objective realization of the poet's power to “go with” the forms of nature. Readers are electrified by a poet's glowing symbols; indeed, the imaginative effect of a symbol upon his readers becomes the test of a poet's success in perceiving nature's flowing. Since the poet finds this spirit in natural objects, his realization of it in the symbol shows the relation between symbolic and organic form; Nature, in Emersonian language, is herself a trope.

Beauty itself is conceived as evanescent, most attractive in the moment of transition. The myth of Venus born out of the sea is employed in “The Poet” to represent nature as symbol, life overflowing into body.¹⁶ Loveliness is defined in the essay on “Beauty” as “the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.” Running water, birds' flight, aesthetic dancing all show this charm of changing movement. Thus, in the poem “Beauty”:

Was never form and never face
So sweet to Seyd as only grace
Which did not slumber like a stone,
But hovered gleaming and was gone.
Beauty chased he everywhere,
In flame, in storm, in clouds of air.(17)

In this “fluid” interpretation, the poet's symbol is most successful if it admits of more than one application; and that poet deserves most praise who finds ever new objects to contain his thoughts. Emerson's delight in reading poetry is to discover “a new glance at the fact or subject, and from the deepest centre.”

Apart from the Plotinian concept of “the flowing,” the strongest single influence upon Emerson's idea of the symbol is the scientific thought of the time. Without any systematic training in science, Emerson read the works of Oersted, Cuvier, Herschel, Oken and others, with growing interest. His imagination soared under the stimulus of the atomic theory, the nebular hypothesis, and the concept of progressive amelioration.

The impact of science upon Emerson's concept of the symbol differs from his general critical speculation, in revealing a definite chronological development, from an early skepticism concerning the value of science, to a confident assertion that science has the key to unlock the symbol's mysteries. At first reluctant to accept scientific advance, Emerson objects in an early journal passage (1824) to the probing analysis which destroys the flower's beauty and the rainbow's charm, terms scientific progress “the successive destruction of agreeable delusions,” and desires to see Nature reclothed in the charming garments which Science has stripped from her. By 1834, however, Emerson begins to hail scientific research as a long-awaited revolution in human thought. When the scientific dawn does break upon him, it comes so gently that he perceives in its cold, clear light the garment he had sought to make Nature fairer. His wholehearted acceptance of scientific advance, once made, shows no trace of Tennyson's tortured doubt or of Arnold's balanced pessimism.

Emerson's concept of evolution is based on the work of such writers as Laplace, Cuvier, and Herschel. Although he was reading Lyell's Principles of Geology as early as 1836, he found it a mere “catalogue of facts,” and Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) came too late to have any shaping influence on his thought. Emerson's idea of evolution may better be termed “progressive development,” since he fails to recognize the derivation of animate from inanimate forms.¹⁸ This reservation does not proceed from any reluctance to derive man from a vegetable; the lecture on Leasts and Mosts, for example (1868), shows a fascination with Goethe's theory that the universe began “in a plant's stomach.” Nor would Emerson have been unwilling to accept the ape as man's ancestor; he entertained the Pythagorean concept of metempsychosis with something more than irony, frequently noting a wolf's fangs or a fox's teeth beneath the human countenance of certain individuals. The fact remains that his concept of evolution is simply a gradual refinement of natural forms, following a spiral upward movement. Nature is conceived as repeating the same process on different planes, from plant, to animal, to man. Optimism governs this theory, always implying ascension in the successive adaptation from one plane to another. Nor does Emerson think of man as the ultimate creation of Nature. Lecturing on American Nationality in 1861, he says that we have indeed surpassed the saurians, whose efforts in the aqueous ages made the earth habitable for us, but our efforts in draining swamps and clearing forests may be making similar preparation for a future creature superior to ourselves.

The concept of progressive adaptation gives an upward direction to the Plotinian idea of flux. The principle of ascension implicit in Plotinus' theory is made explicit and given tangible proof by the scientific evidence of progressive development. The application to the poet's symbol is obvious: his creation must show the ascension which characterizes the method of nature: “like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms is their change into melodies.” Only by perceiving the necessity which impels every form to move to a higher form, can the poet create a symbol as vital as the objects of nature.

From the atomic theory also Emerson's concept of the symbol is enriched. The essay on “Swedenborg” in Representative Men (1850) traces the atomic theory back to Lucretius, recognizing the contribution made to the conception by Malpighi and Swedenborg. The lecture on Leasts and Mosts (1868) states that the same atom which makes up the animalcule also composes man: “A man is a developed animalcule; animalcule is an arrested man.” Through the atom, man is related to vegetable as well as to animal nature; Wordsworth's respect for “the meanest flower” appears in Emerson's theory, with scientific rationalization, since even a buttercup can make a finer division of matter, and “strip the little Proteus hydrogen of his last coat.” Emerson's respect for the atom's “violence of direction” is worthy of a nuclear physicist:

Nature is made up of atoms, but these are puissant, omnipotent, and we go in and out all our days amid the explosive atoms of nitro-glycerine, each one of which can shatter the planet. Faraday found that a single grain of water has electric relations equivalent to a very powerful flash of lightning.

In Cuvier's account of the eight hundred varieties of marine shells composing the limestone beds of Paris, Emerson finds evidence of the small things that make up a larger whole.¹⁹ He observes that human art follows the same procedure of building vast structures from infinitesimal objects. As the power of the atom in Nature, so is that of the symbol in poetry, small but potentially world-shaking, by its relation to a larger theater of significance.

Not only does science demonstrate the power of the small to mirror the large, but conversely, the dwindling of large things into small, through perspective. Emerson finds in Herschel the demonstration that mountains and seas on the earth's surface, when represented on a globe of sixteen-inch diameter, appear no larger than the roughnesses of an orange rind.²⁰ Likewise, in poetry, mountains and seas are tossed about like baubles in the control of poetic imagination.

Lecturing on Poetry in 1854, Emerson uses a botanical analogy to show “the convertibility of one thing into any other thing.” Just as the same bit of gelatin may become a fish in water, a chamois on a mountain, a worm underground, so the same object may be turned in poetry to varying symbolic uses. Emerson derived this illustration from the physiologist Camper, who converted the drawing of a man's skeleton by a few successive strokes to a horse, a bird, a fish. The height of this “convertibility” Emerson finds in some drawings at the Athenaeum, which begin as a toad and end as the Belvedere Apollo. The concept receives further illustration from the species of infusoria called Proteus, which changes from a ball to a ribbon to a star.²¹

The Emersonian symbol is also illuminated by the contemporary idea of polarized light, which states that when polarized light is viewed through certain transparent solids, a regular succession of colors is seen. Emerson (like Thoreau and Alcott) was excited by this theorem because the production of the color band by this method involved a certain mystery, combined with regularity. In a similar fashion, Emerson finds that the raw materials of nature issue from the poet's refracting imagination, as symbols with a universal appeal for all men, but with an advantage over natural colors in the varying applications which they admit. “There is nothing,” he says, “which comes out of the human heart—the deep aboriginal region—which is not mundane, thousand-faced,—so that if perchance strong light falls on it, it will admit of being … related to all things” (lecture on The Poet, 1841).

The capacity of the symbol to reveal universal truth is further strengthened in Emerson's mind by the relationship which he observes among the sciences, pointing to one universal law of nature. Thus he speaks—inaccurately, it is true—of chemistry's attempt to reduce the elements to two, or “one, with two poles.” Oersted's discovery of the relation between electricity and magnetism leads Emerson to conclude: “Electricity, Magnetism, Light, Heat, Gravity, muscular action—varied forms of one force.” Since the identity of law thus discovered has man for its typical result, Emerson concludes that “chemistry, botany, physiology cannot forget him.” The poet's symbol, in fact, represents the unity at the heart of nature toward which the sciences are striving.

Perhaps Emerson shows overconfidence in the unity of the sciences, and overoptimism in his conviction of man's central importance in the universe. At any rate, his reading of scientific ideas strengthened his belief in the correspondence between man and nature, and led him to place authority on the poet's symbol, which has validity through its creator's relation to physical, chemical, and biological forces. Though Emerson himself might seek in vain to imitate in literary criticism the naturalist's patient collection of facts, according to Sainte-Beuve's ideal, he was not without scientific imagination. Of the slow development of man through time, for example, he says:

Nature and moral laws work in cosmical and secular periods, they can well wait and work slowly. Races are insignificant, ages are a span to these long eternal powers. They can well afford to drop a race or an age out of the flowing eternity.

(Lecture on Natural Religion, 1869)

The same cosmic sense characterizes his comment on space:

Set your thought upon the space itself. Is it boundless? How can it not be? And yet again, is it? Bring home the miracle to your mind, of that space, upon whose area the works of God are a mere dot, and the far-computing thought of man can only enter on its margin. All that exists is lost in the bosom of its great night.

(Lecture on the Moral Sense, 1860)

Passages like these show that science has stimulated Emerson's mind to an awareness of the immensity of space, and of the long, slow development of the universe in time.

In the writing of Swedenborg Emerson thought he had found the embodiment of the true scientific attitude. Swedenborg's appeal for Emerson is easily explained. With some pretension to original scientific research, Swedenborg was dominantly a moral and religious thinker. His conception of nature closely matches Emerson's, in his affirmation of correspondence between material nature and man's soul, his search for “the more in the less, and the great in the small,” and his conviction that material things may be converted to spiritual truths by means of imagination.²² The ascension of forms in nature is described by Swedenborg as “wreathing through an everlasting spiral”; man he terms “a very minute Heaven.” His interest in the “inner Copernican system” of the mind resembles Emerson's. Impressed by Swedenborg's successful creation of symbols as well as by his view of nature, Emerson ranks him at first with such poets as Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare.

Despite Emerson's sympathy with Swedenborg's scientific grasp, he finds Swedenborg a failure at symbolic expression. As in Chapter I of this book we found Swedenborg the exception to Emerson's belief that a true intuition will find the right expression, so does he fail in creating symbols by limiting them to a strictly theological interpretation. Through a “Hebrew symbolism,” Emerson says, by which a horse always signifies carnal understanding; a tree, perception; the moon, faith, he “mistakes the village church for part of the sky.” Though Swedenborg's philosophical interpretation has grasped nature's subtle flowing, his own symbolic expression is so frozen that it cannot partake of the fluid interpretation which Emerson demands.²³

But literature affords Emerson abundant examples of successful symbols. Shakespeare's “miracle of mythologizing” he compares to nature's symbolic touch, when it confers a “secondary glory” on woodpiles by means of snow or moonlight. Wordsworth, whose early poetry seemed to Emerson too pragmatic, creates symbols in The Excursion which arouse the same “right feeling” as that caused by stars, mountains, and winds. In the “musky verses” of Hafiz Emerson discovers a different, but equally effective type of symbol, praising this poet's skill in “naming” cedar, palm tree, and birds. Emerson's keen eye for good symbolic expressions appears in his choice of Spenser's line, “For soul is form, and does the body make,” Michelangelo's, “As from fire heat cannot be divided, no more can beauty from the eternal,” and Thoreau's, “Hell itself may be contained within the compass of a spark.” Among Thoreau's poems, whose symbolic creation Emerson recognized as superior to his own, his favorite was “Smoke.” He has offered a tentative explanation of Thoreau's famous “hound, horse, and turtle-dove.”²⁴ Emerson's blindness to the value of Keats' and Shelley's poetry prevents him from enjoying their fiery symbols, though he commends Shelley's painting of the skylark “Like a poet hidden in the light of thought.”

Of Emerson's own poems, “The Sphinx” and “Brahma” are most successful as symbols. In both these poems, idea has been so integrally fused with image that criticism cannot separate them; the “drowsy Sphinx” has become the riddle of the world, the “red slayer” of Brahma, the mystical idea of union between subject and object. Not always so lucky in finding symbolic expression for his generalizations, Emerson states in the journals (1835) that his method of thought always involves “some material symbol of my proposition figuring itself incipiently.”

He then records some successful symbols: Augustine's figure of the phial of water broken in the sea, to represent the soul's absorption in God; his own image, of weeds in a stream turned in one direction, to symbolize the domination of man's several acts by his will. Seeking to express time's judgment on literary reputation, which kills some books and preserves others, he thinks of potatoes in a pail of water—some at the top, some in the middle, some at the bottom—and this image he condemns as poor. The homeliness of the picture, he says, ill accords with the lofty idea, and the picture of “potatoes swimming in a tub” remains in the mind after the idea of literary reputation is forgotten.

To estimate the value of Emerson's concept of the symbol, one asks how far the theory is structural or organic, postulating a fusion of idea with image into inseparable unity. One notices that Emerson never looks long at the object involved, but usually considers the symbol in terms of the writer's creative power, piercing an object's outer form to its inner spirit; or in terms of its effect upon the observer, as exhilaration or consolation. Spirit is emphasized at the expense of the concrete in “The Poet,” where he maintains “the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol.” “The poet,” he says, “did not stop at the color or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought.”

Implicit in this demand for a “fluid” symbol is a value for novelty. Thus Emerson rebukes preachers for leaning too heavily on the evocative power of Christ's name. “You name the good Jesus,” he says, “until I hate the sound of him.”²⁵ As he had criticized Swedenborg for monotony of interpretation, so does he find fault with Unitarian ministers for using “trite rhetoric” instead of a “little algebra” in their symbols.

Not merely in demanding novel images, but in its conception that not even the single idea of the symbol remains in the observer's mind, does Emerson's theory have fluidity. Each symbol is figured merely as a stimulus to send the reader on to new intuitions. Emerson thinks of the symbol as having effect not so much through perfect fusion of idea with image, as through the expression given to the object by the idea, in the moment of flowing through it. The idea may remain in the reader's mind, or the object may be put to fresh uses by the poet; but idea and image are not considered as inseparably fused in a new unity. The material object has only temporary value, in objectifying spiritual intuition. As the spirit flows on, it leaves the object behind. Emerson's search for the idea implied in the poetic symbol was amusingly rebuked by his daughter Ellen, who replied to his question whether she had learned the meaning of Dante's figures in The Inferno: “No, and I do not wish to: to me they mean leopard, wolf, and Lucia, and any second and interior meaning would spoil all for me.”²⁶

Emerson's theory of the symbol is, then, ideal rather than structural. And it is this “ideal” emphasis of the symbol which renders it an excellent epitome of his general theory of art. In “The Preacher” he shows art embodying the “vanishing Spirit” in painting, sculpture, and temples, but man failing to appreciate truly, by transferring his admiration from the spirit to the “steadfast form.” Yet one need only look at Nature, Emerson says, to realize the importance of “idea”: “Beautifully shines a spirit through all the toughness of matter. The Adamant streams into softest but sharpest form before it.”²⁷ He seeks another term for “Beauty” which will express for art that “delicate future tense” which is implicit in the Latin name for nature, “Natura, about to be born.”²⁸ For Emerson the core of art's interest is that “which is in Act or Endeavor to Proceed, to reach somewhat beyond, and all the better, if that be somewhat vast and divine.”²⁹ The crux of Emerson's aesthetic, as of his symbol, appears in his reverence not for the form, but for the “vanishing Spirit.”

We may well recall Santayana's perceptive comment on Emerson's “fluid symbol”:

If one set of symbols is substituted for another, nothing is changed in the thing signified, in the inner life of the soul, except the vehicle of expression … All ideas … are fluid, and … it matters very little what things exist or how long they endure, since the only reality is the perpetual motion that creates, transforms, and changes them.

(“Emerson's Poems,” Boston Daily Advertiser Centenary Number, May 23, 1903)

To illuminate Emerson's theory of the symbol, one may compare it to that of Blake, whose spiritual perception of the meaning implicit in marble, harp, and cloud received Emerson's praise. Blake is quoted in Emerson's “Poetry and Imagination” on the importance of “second sight”:

He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all. The painter asserts that all his imaginations appear to him more perfect, and more intimately organized than anything seen by his mortal eye.

(William Blake, “On the Bard”)³⁰

Using Blake's theory to illustrate his own, Emerson has twisted the idea to his own purpose: to show the spiritual, not the corporeal, as the abiding element in the symbol. Looking at the whole passage in Blake, one sees that his purpose differs from Emerson's: he is defending his representation of “spirits with real bodies.” In illustrating Gray's “Bard,” Blake says, he has tried to show “a spirit”; but he cannot conceive that spirit, even in imagination, without giving it corporeal form. While Blake agrees with Emerson's idea that symbolic representation excels anything seen by mortal eye, he differs from Emerson in maintaining that inner perception cannot be grasped without concrete form. Once the spirit has been poured into its body, Blake believes that it cannot be separated from its objective clothing. To put the matter symbolically: Emerson believes that men are spirits; Blake believes that spirits are “organised men.”

By contrast with Blake's structural theory of the symbol, Emerson's spiritual emphasis emerges. While Blake thinks of an integral fusion between matter and spirit, Emerson conceives of spirit as flowing out of the matter which it has vitalized in the moment of creation. Whereas Blake considers the form as being developed in the artist's mind in terms of the material to be used, Emerson asserts that the plan grows in the artist's mind in terms of spirit, and by lucky chance gets transferred to matter.

The famous creed of “the familiar, the low” announced in The American Scholar, often taken as a manifesto of realism, actually embodies Emerson's idea of the spiritual symbol. “The near, the low, the common” are not to be simply presented, but “explored and poetized”; the shop, plough, and ledger are to be related to a central cause; it is “insight” into today, not simple representation, which Emerson demands.

Evaluation of Emerson's concept of the symbol must admit its inferiority to a truly structural theory like that of Blake. If the observer is always fleeing from the material aspect of symbol to the idea represented, and from that idea to others, his aesthetic appreciation takes on a disembodied quality. Further, Emerson's theoretical confidence in the symbol's value fortifies his native disposition to read for “gleams and glimpses,” embracing particulars at the expense of general design, forgiving much to a mediocre poem in which he finds “an urgent fiery line like threads of gold in a mass of ore.”

But Emerson's concept has its good points. The symbol represents the result of that creative process by which the poet has participated in the flowing action of nature; if it is well wrought, it will produce the same immediate effect of spiritual elation which the objects of nature inspire. It is thus the point of contact between man and the material world.

The dominantly spiritual cast of Emerson's conception belies Professor Sutcliffe's evaluation of the symbol as the only element of Emerson's poetic which reconciles the material with the ideal.³¹ Emerson's symbol represents, rather, the essence of the poet's vision, which gains rather than loses by being stripped of its material vesture. Based in Plotinian philosophy, enriched by such scientific conceptions as the theory of progressive adaptation and the atomic hypothesis, Emerson's view of the symbol is self-consistent, fruitful in its application to specific poems, and stimulating both to creator and observer.

Eager to improve American poetry, Emerson urges the writers of his time to find new symbols in the world around them. In logging, fisheries, and politics, poets should find material for original poetry. “The northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing,” he says, “are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres” (“The Poet”). Though his own muse favored the tamer aspects of nature: fields of cattle, birds, and calm waters, he looked for a new genius, whose “tyrannical” eye would explore America's wilderness, and interpret her barbarism and materialism as well as her grandeur. If the beginnings of satisfaction appeared in Thoreau's “microscopic” vision and Whitman's “buffalo strength,” there was no one who had yet caught into symbols the excitement of American life, which, Emerson said, “storms about us daily, and is slow to find a tongue.”

CONCLUSION

The extent to which Emerson's view of art represents a new departure in American thought cannot be appreciated without comparing it to the eighteenth-century ideas which were Emerson's starting point. The aesthetic perception of Alison's Essays on Taste, for example, though somewhat liberated from neoclassic theory, was based chiefly on the principle of association. Without denying the validity of association as a description of some mental operations, Emerson sought the secret of aesthetic creation in a much more dynamic idea: the chemical reaction between nature and the mind of man, which results in a new production—the work of art. Emerson's difference from eighteenth-century criticism appears more evident by contrast with Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric, which he studied in college. Consider Blair's treatment of metaphor, with an enumeration of the various figures, a reminder to writers that figures must be suited to their subject, as the “dress of the sentiments,” not vulgar or dirty, but clear, and of course not mixed.³² How different is this analysis from Emerson's concept of the symbol as the penetration by the poet of the phenomenal world, and the evocation of that spirit which lies at nature's heart.

Real comprehension of Emerson's theory of organic and spiritual form must also correct the prevailing impression that his aesthetic is rigidly moral. One has only to look at the Dial reviews of Menzel's Goethe by Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker (January 1840) to see that Goethe is the light leading the Transcendentalists out of a consideration of the work of art as an exemplar of moral commandments, into a freer state of aesthetic appreciation. Goethe performed a similar service for Emerson, as appears when he reminds himself to look at a picture as a picture and a tune as a tune, since “Goethe laughs at those who force every work of art into the narrow circle of their own prejudices.”³³ The journal of 1839, for example, finds that the complex forms of drama, epic, and novel, as well as the musical symphony, allow the writer to express his “knowledge of life by indirections as well as in the didactic way, and can therefore express the fluxional quantities and values which the thesis or dissertation could never give.” Emerson's progress beyond a tendency to look at works of art as evidence of specific moral judgments has come about not by abandoning the term “moral” but by expanding “moral” to a broader signification, inclusive of all natural as well as human life.

Not only by its emancipation from earlier more restricted views, but by breadth of experience in the fine arts and literature, Emerson's conception of art has a richness not possessed by any other contemporary American writer. From the Coleridgean statement of organic form, the Goethean concept of vegetable forms in architecture, the Plotinian theory of spiritual form, Emerson freely adopted suggestions for his interpretation of organic form. Through his well-integrated concept of architectural form, Emerson illustrates his general thesis that the useful arts and the fine arts can learn from each other.

The organic principle, widely employed by modern critics, does not of course derive solely from Emerson, but goes back as far as Aristotle for its roots and includes German and English romantic thought in its growth. The idea has suffered some of the deleterious effect which Emerson observed as characteristic of all language, in becoming a kind of critical cliché whose central meaning is forgotten. Critics can, I believe, refresh their sense of the vitality of “organic form” by attention to the Emersonian interpretation of it, as the seal and sign by which the artist reveals his sympathetic understanding of the universal spirit which links his own soul to objects in nature.

The organic and spiritual qualities of form in Emerson's theory of art enjoy the same integral relation which binds together matter and spirit in his view of nature. As in nature, material objects realize spirit and are in turn vitalized by spirit, so in art the organic principle issues from a spiritual impulse. Through the concept of the symbol in poetry, his favorite art, Emerson clearly demonstrates that if one kind of form must be sacrificed to the other, it is the organic which must give way to the spiritual. Emerson's concept of the “ascension” of form in the symbol has a stimulating effect both upon creative artist and observer. The poet may not rest in satisfaction of a line well turned; the observer may not limit himself to admiring one creative artist. Each must move on to fresh discoveries, modifying former views in the light of new thought. Nor does this free creation and interpretation imply irresponsible impressionism, for the strong hand of the Divine will restrain one who seeks to follow mere caprice.

The principal lack in Emerson's concept of form is the gap which exists between the intuition in the artist's mind and its transference to objective matter. Although this lack may not be explained away, it can be better understood in the light of Emerson's distrust of the principle of imitation. As early as 1820, when he is just beginning to reflect on aesthetic matters, Emerson attributes the pleasure in observing a painting not to its resemblance to natural objects, but to the power required to produce the work.

Clearly Emerson's concept of imitation is not Aristotelian, but the neoclassic sense of the term, that of following models. A late journal passage (1862) distinguishes between photographic representation, which suggests Aristotle's “imitation of things as they are,” and ideal representation, which parallels Aristotle's “imitation of things as they ought to be.” Emerson's demand that a painter present “a better fairer creation than we know” comes close to Aristotelian μίμηsις. While Emerson's theory of the artist's shaping power thus bears some underlying similarity to Aristotelian imitation, such explicit references as Emerson makes to Aristotle imply that he thinks his criticism outmoded.³⁴

Considering the term “imitation,” then, as an imitation of styles, Emerson finds it the chief error of American artists, who exist only to ape England. “Can we never,” he asks in the Dial essay on “Art,” “extract this maggot of Europe out of the brains of our countrymen?” Especially does he regret that we are not only taught but begotten by England, because much of English art and literature is itself derivative. Except for Milton, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, he fails to find illumination on his “idea of the poet” in Chalmers' collection of five centuries of English bards.

His most considered view of course recognizes that Americans cannot cast off the cultural influence of Europe; he says, in fact, that an intellectual discovery of importance for the whole land is made by the first American scholar who reads Homer under a farmhouse roof. Emerson grants that even while he asserts his independence, “the artist has always the masters in his eye.” Thus Michelangelo thinks of Da Vinci; Raphael, of Michelangelo; McKay the shipbuilder thinks of Steers, and Steers, of Poole.³⁵

But absorption of other cultures, Emerson insists, must be carried on with creative intent. His lecture on Literature (1836) demands that we stop printing this “vast carcass of tradition every year with as much solemnity as a new revelation.”³⁶ To Margaret Fuller in Italy he writes, “Ah must we walk proudly too in Rome!” His conclusion is that after foreign travel and reading of other literatures, each man must find beauty in his own native spot, “in the chamber where he sits, in the half acre where his chimney rises.” The best of alien art and literature must be cautiously adapted, lest we lose original inspiration.

Emerson's dislike of the term “imitation,” as “imitation of models” and the typical sickness of American culture, thus kept him from using imitation, as he might have done, to explain how the artist objectifies his creative intuition in material shape.

Besides its failure to show how idea becomes realized in matter, Emerson's theory of form lacks any good criteria by which the great works of art and literature may be judged. In architecture we have the functional guide of comparing the design of a building with its purpose, thereby determining whether its beauty constitutes mere embellishment, or the stronger beauty of structural design. In the fine arts and literature, we have chiefly the subjective criterion: “Does the work give the same impression of unified wholeness that one derives from an oak tree?” Or, if it is on a grander scale, “Does it give the impression that the writer has employed universal laws with daring creative skill?”

Certainly Emerson never studied a work of art in the methodical manner indicated by a modern critic: “Under what circumstances was this work of art created? What did the artist intend to create? How successfully did he accomplish it? By what standards should it be judged? What is its value by these standards?”³⁷

Of these criteria, the “intent of the artist” interests Emerson least, since he is convinced that what is divine in the work will speak directly to what is divine in him. An instance of his using this criterion appears, however, in 1838, when he writes to Alcott concerning that curious production, Psyche (still in manuscript form today), that he must decide whether he is writing a book of prophecy or a literary essay, and revise accordingly.

Emerson's study of the work of art does, however, reveal a concern with the circumstances of creation. The fact that Emerson's theory of art lays down no specific rules and that his criticism follows no systematic procedure should not blind us to the fact that he is aware of historical and biographical influences in art. In his lectures on English Literature we have observed that he relates the writers to the qualities of the age; and that consideration of his own time shows an awareness of the complex atmosphere of the nineteenth century, and of the fact that individuals must reflect as well as guide their age. English Traits reveals a lively sense of those Anglo-Saxon ancestors who look out from the modern Englishman's eye; Representative Men portrays rounded sketches of great individuals, placing the dynamic Napoleon against the background of French geography and history, showing in Plato a balance of Eastern mysticism with Western common sense, and indicating Montaigne as the embodiment of skepticism in his time. Aware also of history's importance in the fine arts, Emerson has wished that he might increase his understanding of the great masterpieces by knowledge of their development down through the centuries. The lecture on Poetry and Criticism includes an amusing comment on the changing attitudes of historical criticism toward great men, which Emerson denotes “white and black washing.” Whitewashing appears in Froude's portraying Henry VIII as a good family man, and in Sainte-Beuve's characterization of Richelieu as a patriot. “'Tis almost Caesar Borgia's turn to be a lamb and a martyr,” Emerson wryly remarks of this “improving” tendency. On the other hand, Forchhammer has “black-washed” Socrates; and Macaulay, William Penn. Emerson finds these changes representative of a healthy tendency in criticism, a passing judgment on old forms in the light of new ideas.

Some awareness of national characteristics appears in Emerson's comments on the English as uncreative, but possessed of a remarkable capacity for absorbing other cultures; the French as light, clever, and humorous, though lacking in true imagination; the Americans as “exaggerated” Englishmen, with quicker apprehension and keener minds. A larger division is recognized in his distinction between Eastern, or Persian, poetry, as characterized by the superlative, and Western, as distinguished by the positive, degree. Again, Emerson makes a racial generalization concerning creative power, stating that the Semite race (Hebrew, Arab, or Syrian) has high imagination in poetry, art, and eloquence; the Indo-European races, exemplified by the Roman, adopt the Semites' beautiful creations and deduce rules from them, but lack any creative strength; and the Mongolians destroy the arts as they conquer other nations. That this last is too broad a generalization to have value scarcely needs comment; but it serves to indicate Emerson's interested speculation about art's relation to the factors of race as well as of biography and national history.

Emerson's analysis of literary history, we have observed, involves a “wave” rather than an “evolutionary” interpretation, implying an ebb and flow throughout the ages, and asserting that an earlier time may have qualities superior to the present. But his very optimism about the future art and literature of his own country implies a confidence in progress. However clearly he recognizes dead spots in his own time as well as in earlier periods, he retains an underlying faith that the future will bring a cultural advance as much better than the present as the present excels the past, even though that advance may appear in unexpected places and in fashions unnoticed by the contemporary observer.

The realization that Emerson judges the highest excellence of art by a mystical standard should not be made to obscure the place which he gives, on the human plane, to historical, biographical, and national factors in the aesthetic drama. In our own day critics like C. S. Lewis and I. A. Richards, fascinated by the psychological aspects of criticism, have tended to neglect the factors of race, time, and environment. It is therefore salutary to recall that this nineteenth-century thinker, no less fertile of ideas concerning the psychology of creating and enjoying art, has by no means abandoned historical and biographical elements, but has used them wherever they could throw light on that ever fascinating enigma, the work of art.

When we turn from the human plane to that more elevated realm of spirit by which works are ultimately to be valued, we seek to define the nature of Emerson's “ideal” standard. Professor Foerster has called Emerson's high aesthetic selection the “classical conception of the ideal.”³⁸ Emerson's criticism of sculpture, which Professor Foerster attests as one instance of his “classical” criticism, has been shown to diverge from the “Greek” ideal in postulating, not the classic Praxiteles, but the Renaissance Michelangelo as its epitome. “The unfading petals five” of Emerson's poems “The Test” and “The Solution,” also cited by Professor Foerster in evidence of his “high selection,” lose force in this connection when one reads Emerson's comment on them.

In “The Solution” of “The Test” Emerson lists the “five” as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Swedenborg. He writes to Lowell concerning the printing of these poems in The Atlantic:

My riddle, you see, is not very deep, and admits, like other riddles, of several solutions. Mine is, five national poets, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, and Goethe. A German can, if he will, interpret it, Bach, Mozart, Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven. If you choose to print it, I can put my solution into rhyme in another number.

(L., V, 230, 1860)³⁹

This comment and the fact that Emerson omitted these verses from his Selected Poems indicate that Emerson attached little importance to their “high selection.”

Since Emerson does not think of a few great names in art or literature as lasting models of excellence, the strictness in his theory of form cannot be called “classic” in the usual sense of the word. Emerson indicates the direction of his “high standard” when he says:

Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other; Ivanhoe and Waverley compared with Castle Radcliffe and the Porter novels; but nothing is great,—not mighty Homer and Milton,—beside the infinite Reason. It carries them away as a flood. They are as a sleep.

(“Literary Ethics”)

By the mystical criterion, all works of art have value in so far as they catch, for a moment, the universal spirit. The great works, which have caught a larger portion, will be longer preserved and appeal to more men than lesser creations, but no single work can absorb enough of the All-soul to keep the attention of one who can discover that Spirit itself.

To state that all aesthetic production shrinks before the Infinite Reason does not, of course, express the whole value of Emerson's theory of form. The very variety and extent of his statements about the arts, as revealed in this chapter, are evidence that before Emerson drives the arts to this ultimate suicidal point, he has much to say of their work alive.

Emerson's specific criticisms of contemporary art and literature reveal a principle of high idealism operating together with a friendly recognition of partial achievement. When he turned from contemplation of the boundless world of spirit to his own country's aesthetic production, Emerson sought to lead and drive American creative effort in the direction of the “spiral flowing.” Appreciation for indigenous American growths, even though crude, appears in a lecture on Literary and Spiritual Influences (1843) where he advises American literature to turn westward, and produce more writing with the flavor of Davy Crockett's and Daniel Boone's exploits. The fact that Europeans are already avidly reading these books, in preference to more polished work imitative of England may, he thinks, indicate that the center of American literary balance is to swing from the seaboard to the middle of the continent. To get rid of Oriental culture, homage to Europe, and subservience to Cambridge, he suggests a boat trip down the Ohio and up the Mississippi.⁴⁰

Despite the broader horizon which he visualizes for all of America, Emerson's chief literary interest still lies in New England. His lecture on Boston (1861) applies the organic principle to his home city. He asserts that a spiritual inspiration pours forth from the aerial fluid of Boston's atmosphere; the bracing quality of Charles River water makes men get up earlier; and exposure to snows, east winds, and changing skies excites them to thought. He dates the beginning of modern literature from Buckminster's Phi Beta Kappa address at Cambridge in 1820. Though Boston has made some contribution to culture through its advance in politics, science, and the learned professions, it has yet to yield a literary masterpiece. To some extent, he says, New England shares with Europe the “re-discovering” quality of the nineteenth century; of the Elgin Marbles and the city of Pompeii in art, the lost manuscripts of Cicero and Milton, the publication of the Sanskrit Vedas. With these rich cultures for a foundation, he has every hope that original and vital literary thought will proceed.

Among his own friends and acquaintances, Emerson expresses hope for the future reputation of the “wild Whitman, with real inspiration but choked by Titanic abdomen,” of Delia Bacon in criticism (despite her quixotic defense of the Baconian hypothesis), of Thoreau, Alcott, and Channing.

Perhaps Emerson's own great essays come closest to the new and dynamic creation which he sought for New England's literature. Besides his own work, his contribution to The Dial as coeditor with Margaret Fuller is significant. Their manifesto in the first number (July 1840) shows their desire that The Dial bear the print of organic form: “It has the step of Fate, and goes on existing like an oak or a river, because it must.” Sensing a lack of earthiness in his own writing, Emerson wanted The Dial to “go straight into life,” covering the domestic, civil, and political topics which his essays omitted. Even when The Dial died, after sixteen numbers, it had done something to answer the cry which Emerson was always hearing: “My bareness! My bareness! seems America to say.”

In The Massachusetts Quarterly Review, that “Dial with a beard” to which Emerson gave reluctant assistance for a year, he finds a lack of intellectual tone and literary skill, and fears that without a sudden upsurge after the January 1848 number, the periodical “will sink in a North American.” Yet his editorial address in the first number represents an excellent expression of the Emersonian hope that American literature will show the ascension of “spiral form”: “Bad as it is, this freedom leads onward and upward,—to a Columbia of thought and art, which is the last and endless end of Columbus's adventures.” The essay, “Boston,” confirms this glimpse of America's future:

What should hinder that this America, so long kept reserved from the intellectual races, until they should grow to it, glimpses being afforded which spoke to the imagination, yet the firm shore hid, until science of art should be ripe to propose it as a fixed aim … What should hinder that this New Atlantis should have its happy ports, its mountains of security, its gardens fit for human abode, where all elements were right for the health, power, and virtue of man?

Notes

1. Emerson drew most of his material on the Anglo-Saxons from James Mackintosh, History of England (London, 1830), vol. I of the Cabinet Cyclopedia, in which he made extensive notes. Later he continued his reading about Alfred and Arthur in J. A. Giles, Six Old English Chronicles (London, 1848).

2. Besides the essay in Representative Men, Emerson gave two lectures on Shakespeare in 1835, readings in 1869, and scattered comments in the Journals and Letters. His reading covers the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and some twenty plays, including a few that are still caviar to the general—Coriolanus, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure.

3. There are some exceptions to this general comment. Mention of passion appears in Emerson's recording Alcott's comment after seeing Midsummer Night's Dream played, that “it was a phallus to which fathers could carry their daughters, and each had their own thoughts, without suspecting that the other had the same” (Ms. J. SO, 1856). Emerson's comment on hearing Mrs. Dallas Glyn read the dialogue between Antony and Cleopatra shows a sense of the importance of real dramatic action. Though Mrs. Glyn varied her voice to show the two parts, it seemed to Emerson that she did not really feel the “great passages,” and that “she ought to go on the stage, where the interruption by the other actors would give her the proper relief” (Ms. J. ST, 1870).

4. Emerson records in Ms. J. C, Pt. I (1837), Goethe's statement that all advancing epochs are objective, while all receding periods (like his own) are subjective (Conversations with Eckermann, 2 vols., Boston, 1839, I, 240).

5. Ms. J. E, 1839.

6. Ms. J. AZ, 1849.

7. Ms. fragment, The Sovereignty of Ethics, 1877.

8. Ms. J. C, 1837.

9. L [The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson], IV, 179, 1850.

10. Ms. J. Y, 1845.

11. Ms. J. E, 1839.

12. Ms. fragment, The Fortune of the Republic, 1878.

13. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric (Philadelphia, 1833), p. 150.

14. In Ms. J. B (1835), Emerson copies Oegger's statement on the idea: “The passage from the language of nature to language of convention is made by … insensible degrees … Primitively men could not name objects they must show them; not corporeally it is true but substantially and by force of thought as those objects exist in God and as we still view them in dreams” (True Messiah, p. 15). Emerson's addition of a note to Reed here shows that he associates the two theories of language.

15. Ms. J. ZO, 1856.

16. Emerson may well have been attracted by the catalogue description of the Venus de' Medici (n15 in the Athenaeum 1840 exhibit) where this Anadyomene or Marine Venus is described as “formed from a mass of white foam,” “first seen floating on the sea,” “afterwards driven by the billows to the island of Cyprus, where the mass suddenly opened, and this beautiful Goddess issued from it.”

17. Cf. the “Ode to Beauty”:

    Thee gliding through the sea of form,
    Like the lightning through the storm,
    Somewhat not to be possessed,
    Somewhat not to be caressed.
    Thou eternal fugitive,
    Hovering over all that live.

18. For a good survey of this question, see Harry Hayden Clark, “Emerson and Science,” Phil. Quarterly, X, 225-260 (July 1931).

19. G. Cuvier, A Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe, tr. from the French (Philadelphia, 1835), p. 184.

20. John Herschel, Astronomy (London, 1833), p. 22.

21. Peter Roget, Animal and Vegetable Physiology, Treatise V of the Bridgewater Treatises, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1836), I, 52.

22. “Swedenborg,” Works, IV, 112-116. For passages marked by Emerson in his copy, see Augustus Clissold, “Introduction,” Swedenborg, Animal Kingdom, II, lxxvii-lxxviii.

23. The protest from Swedenborgians concerning Representative Men (which still appears in modern criticism) was mildly expressed by Emerson's friend J. J. G. Wilkinson, who wrote from Hampstead, England, in 1850, that Emerson's statement of Swedenborg would require “some tough work” to reverse, that Swedenborg apart from his mystic dreams knew more of the spiritual world than Emerson gave him credit for, but that he wholly agrees with Emerson “that the spiritual world is not absolute but fluxional” (Emerson, L., IV, 175).

24. In a late manuscript fragment, Notes on Thoreau, Emerson records Thoreau's own statement from his journal, 1840, on “the hound”: “A good book will not be dropped by its author but thrown up. It will be so long a promise that he will not overtake it soon. He will have slipped the leash of a fleet hound.” Emerson adds: “The bay horse might be such command of property as he desired, and the turtle dove might be the wife of his dream.”

25. Ms. J. Z, Pt. II, 1842-43.

26. Ms. J. DL, 1866. Ellen's objection appears in “Poetry and Imagination” as that of “a young student,” who “does not wish to know what the leopard, the wolf, or Lucia signify in Dante's Inferno, but prefers to keep their veils on.”

27. Ms. J. B, Pt. II, 1836.

28. Ms. J. TU, 1849.

29. Ms. J. HO, 1848.

30. William Blake, “On the Bard,” Descriptive Catalogue, Works, eds. Ellis and Yeats, 3 vols. (London, 1893), II, 373.

31. Emerson G. Sutcliffe, “Emerson's Theories of Literary Expression,” U. Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, VIII, 17-20 (Feb. 1923).

32. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, pp. 158-169.

33. J. [The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson], 1833. For a fuller explanation of Goethe's effect, see my article, “The Influence of Goethe on Emerson's Aesthetic Theory,” Phil. Quarterly, XXVII, 325-344 (Oct. 1948).

34. Although Emerson apparently studied Aristotle very little at first hand, he was familiar with Bacon's statement of the distinction between poetry and history, which he marked both in his Latin copy, De Augmentis Scientiarum, and in the English, “Advancement of Learning,” Works, I, 90. He frequently cites Bacon's phrase that poetry submits “the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”

35. Ms. J. FOR, 1863.

36. This sentence was printed in “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” Dial, I, 137-158 (Oct. 1840).

37. Donald A. Stauffer, The Intent of the Critic (Princeton, 1941), p. 3. Compare Margaret Fuller's formula in “A Short Essay for Critics,” Dial, I, 5-11 (July 1840).

38. Norman Foerster, American Criticism, p. 56.

39. This “high selection” sinks in importance when compared with the number of lists of great names which Emerson reads off, as if he took a satisfaction in their recital similar to a Catholic's recital of the rosary. The significant fact is that so many different names occur. Shakespeare, Homer, Herder are cited as examples of nonegotistic writers (J., II, 233-234); Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, as the only writers whose works he would save (Works, VII, 193-194); Homer and Aeschylus, Horace, Ovid and Plutarch; Erasmus, Scaliger, and Montaigne; Ben Jonson and Izaak Walton; Dryden and Pope, as ideal writers (Works, XII, 341); such disparate elements as Laodamia, James Naylor's dying words, an extract from Coleridge's Friend, and Sampson Reed's oration on Genius, as “the undying words of great men” (J., V, 112).

40. Some of this material appears in “Europe and European Books,” Dial, III, 511-521 (April 1843).

Bibliography

This bibliography, which is intended to be selective, includes only the most important books and a brief analysis of the vital manuscript materials. The notes include references to secondary works and to various sources for Emerson's ideas which are not reprinted here.

Printed Works

The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary ed., Introduction and Notes by Edward W. Emerson, 12 vols., Boston, 1903-1904.

The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Edward W. Emerson and Waldo E. Forbes, 10 vols., Boston, 1909-1914.

The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Ralph L. Rusk, 6 vols., New York, 1939.

Manuscripts

II. Journals

Unprinted material occurs here in a less concentrated form than in the Lectures, for the most part as sentences or paragraphs between printed sections. Only a few manuscript journals which are particularly rich are therefore indicated.

Ms. J. T, 1834. Statements of humor, comments on national characteristics, quotations from Coleridge and the Neo-Platonists.

Ms. J. RO, 1835. Laws of “first philosophy.”

Ms. J. B, 1835-36. Comments on aesthetic form, art and science, philosophy, quotations from Goethe.

Ms. J. C, 1837. Comments on the age, inspiration, music.

Ms. J. Z, 1837. Quotations from the Neo-Platonists.

Ms. J. F, 1840. Art as creation.

Ms. J. AZ, 1850. Comments on art, eloquence, and the age; quotations from Stallo.

Ms. J. ZO, 1856. Material on poetry and imagination.

Ms. J. WAR, 1862. Impact of war upon letters.

Ms. J. NY, 1868. Statements on organic form; quotations from Greenough.

Ms. J. PH, 1869. Quotations and statements on philosophy and imagination.