I take my title from “Illusions,” the final essay in The Conduct of Life. Emerson has just named women as “the element and kingdom of illusion,” and defied anyone to “pluck away the … effects and ceremonies, by which they live.” In a moment he will announce with chilling calm that “[w]e are not very much to blame for our bad marriages.” The pivot between these statements comes in a punning interjection that discovers or exposes the illusions of matrimony, not in men's or women's actual faults, but encoded in the letters that name the space between them, the married state: “Too pathetic, too pitiable, is the region of affection, and its atmosphere always liable to mirage.”¹ In this essay I want to dwell not on “Illusions” per se but on the lines of thought about affection and illusion, marriage and mirage, friendship and love that connect this essay to earlier Emersonian texts. What would it mean to take such observations seriously? What ethic and epistemology of love would it take for Emerson to mean them in the way we now grant he means the more general philosophical investigations of, say, “Self-Reliance,” “Circles,” or “Experience”?² And how do these lessons in love's philosophy respond to Puritan and sentimental strains in nineteenth-century New England culture, especially to its continuing concern with amorous idolatry?

Critics as a rule shy away from Emerson's thoughts on love, dismissing them as the bristlings of a congenitally cold fish or writing them off as mere moralizing expressions of Platonic piety. John McCormick, for example, tugs in embarrassment at the “bland blanket of transcendental uplift” in the “published, public, quasi-philosophical” work. He is relieved to find a “much more human figure” lurking in the journals, one with a “pulsing, emotional and often torn spirit” we pity and understand, if not necessarily admire.³ In a book-length study of love, sex, and marriage in Emerson, Erik Ingvar Thurin feels compelled to reassure us that Emerson “married twice, and some of his best friends were women.”⁴ Even Emerson himself, rereading “Love,” laments, “I … have much more experience than I have written there, more than I will, more than I can write” (JMN, 7:368).

Some critics take this journal entry as an invitation to psychobiography, to a patient recovery of that unnamed experience.⁵ It is tempting to account for Emerson's ideas through references to his “one first love” and second marriage or to the hopes and frustrations he found in his friendships with, among others, Margaret Fuller and Caroline Sturgis, and in doing so lose sight of the independent complexity of the ideas themselves. Like David Van Leer, I “find such accounts convincing, [but] I do not feel … that Emerson's meaning is all that clear,” and while I share the impulse to “read through to the why of Emerson's statements,” I too “find myself all too often stuck on the preliminary question of what.”⁶ We need to read “Love” and “Friendship” more closely as texts, with more attention to structure and wordplay than the essays seem at first to demand, and set them in a context of other works on similar subjects, both earlier and later. Perhaps the “much more experience” Emerson could not record in “Love” finds its way, not just into the journals and letters, but into the essay that he finally called “Experience,” with its hardest of sayings on human relations. In “Love” (1841), two people are “shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years” (CW, 2:109); in the later “Experience” (1844), “[m]arriage (in what is called the spiritual world)” is declared “impossible, because of the inequality between every subject with every object”; and even outside the spiritual world, “[t]he great and crescive self … ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love” (CW, 2:44). The earlier essay seems a little self-conscious, but here in the mordant, memorable passages of “Experience,” we learn that self-consciousness, “the discovery we have made, that we exist[,] … is called the Fall of Man”; and that since this fall our dearest loves are mere “idolatries,” since love itself can never “make consciousness and ascription equal in force” (CW, 3:43, 44).

These bracing admonitions trust in Kant, not the Bible. The gulf between noumenal subjects and phenomenal objects, and not the second commandment, chastens our desires. But in the same manner that Emerson describes “the subject” as “the receiver of Godhead” (CW, 3:44), so does he powerfully and suggestively infuse other philosophical terms with theology. This conjunction of Puritan love-doctrine, romantic solipsism, and American individualism, which we find, in one way or another, throughout Emerson's published works, marks him as an important and unrecognized theorist of human affections. Spanning the “failure of continuity” Bernard Duffey sees between the colonial and postromantic American imaginations, Emerson restates the Calvinist discrimination between human and divine loves that haunted Anne Bradstreet and other early American writers in terms that have preoccupied American poets ever since. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Adrienne Rich—all respond, directly or indirectly, to what the deeply Emersonian feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton calls “our Protestant idea” of “the Solitude of Self.” All wonder what can and will happen when that sole self falls in love.⁷

1

To understand Emerson's lessons in love's philosophy, we must first appreciate the continuing force of certain Puritan notions of love in nineteenth-century America. As historians Karen Lystra, Ellen K. Rothman, and others maintain, the inclination to idolatry troubled lovers and ministers, poets and novelists, long after the colonial period. “I beg you, my dearest Mary,” wrote Samuel Francis Smith in an 1834 love letter, “see that you do not worship any image of clay—and pray that I may be kept from similar idolatry.” “Daily you occupy a portion of my thoughts,” Mary Holyoke Pearson wrote to Ephraim Abbot in 1812, “too large a share, I fear. Could I love my Creator in proportion to the creature, I should be happier.”⁸ Jonathan Edwards, by then a half-century dead, would have been pleased with her qualms. “The primary object of virtuous love is being, simply considered,” he argues in The Nature of True Virtue. “No exercise of love, or kind affection to any one particular being,” whether one's self or a suitor, a husband, wife, or child, “has anything of the nature of true virtue,” although from a benevolence toward and consent to “being in general,” which will come in the end to mean God, “may arise exercises of love to particular beings, as objects are presented and occasions arise.”⁹

Popular poet Martin F. Tupper's warning to husbands in 1854, “Take heed lest she love thee before God; that she be not an idolator,” thus uses a familiar discourse. But how serious is he when a few pages earlier in Proverbial Philosophy he defines love as “a sweet idolatry enslaving all the soul, / A mighty spiritual force, warring with the dullness of matter,” with no worry at all about the contradiction.¹⁰ Admittedly, Tupper is not much of a poet, and British at that, but his awkward lines illuminate an important development in American romantic culture; as Lystra writes, “[T]he metaphorical distance between God and man … was collapsing” in the nineteenth century. Though human romance once provided a vocabulary to describe the soul's romance with God, that metaphorical relation was reversed, so that Nathaniel Hawthorne tells Sophia in 1839, “I have really thought sometimes, that God gave you to me to be the salvation of my soul.” Stanley Cavell speaks of the “horror” expressed by Hawthorne, as by Poe, that “marriage cannot bear up under its metaphysical burden”: a burden of “ensuring the existence of one's other.”¹¹ In practice, as Lystra shows, this might entail the burden of acting as another's “symbol of ultimate significance,”¹² say by forgiving all of another's sins—an absolution that no earlier intercessor in Protestant America had been licensed to give.

“Within the context of the nineteenth-century religion of romantic love,” writes Lystra, “Milton's lines must be changed to reflect a different emotional logic: ‘he for God in her, she for God in him.’”¹³ Likewise the Puritan strictness that saw an end to marriage at death and death as God's final check on our impulse to idolatry drifts out of focus through the colonial and post-revolutionary periods. For every Gusta Hallock who agonizes over the way love for another person displaces her love for God, so that God takes him away with no hope of reunion, we find many lovers, diarists, and poets who insist on the sanctity of fervent love below and its continuation above.¹⁴ Annis Boudinot Stockton damns death in her 1780 “Extempore Ode in a Sleepless Night by a Lady Attending on Her Husband in a Long and Painful Illness”: “[T]hou canker-worm of human joy! / Thou cruel foe to sweet domestic peace!” She ignores the consequent need to wean affections, just as she avoids expressing those “doubts, and gloomy fears” an earlier Puritan poet would have worked through to reach a pious acceptance of loss by the end of the poem.¹⁵ In an amatory acrostic “Oh, may propitious Heaven,” published in the mid-eighteenth century, Martha Brewster restates the Puritan distinction between mundane and heavenly pleasures and rewards, although with no apparent conflict between “Injoying ev'ry lawful Sweet below” and “Viewing by Faith, the Fountain whence they Flow.” But Brewster's final prayer for God to “Renew our Love to Thee, and Love us up to Heaven” implies that the couple will be carried up as such, a proposition that the Puritan Bradstreet, while tempted, scrupled to suggest.¹⁶ In “To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband” (1773), Phillis Wheatley is still more explicit in her vision of a heavenly reunion:

There fix thy view, where fleeter than the wind
Thy Leonard mounts, and leaves the earth behind.
Thyself prepare to pass the vale of night
To join for ever on the hills of light:
To thine embrace his joyful spirit moves
To thee, the partner of his earthly loves;
He welcomes thee to pleasures more refin'd,
And better suited to th' immortal mind.(17)

There may be no marriage in the hereafter, but in the “new domestic heaven” of these poems, couples are rejoined just as mothers and children meet “beyond” in the elegies for children increasingly common by the early nineteenth century.¹⁸

We do not insult these poems by calling them sentimental, for they unabashedly champion the force and value of human sentiment against the chill of strict theology. They anticipate the “feminization of American culture” that Ann Douglas traces in the nineteenth century, a group of related shifts in the political, theological, and literary realms. And though this feminization is evident in the increasing presence and popularity of women authors, we find its effects in the writing of men as well. The heaven Wheatley envisions in 1773 may still distinguish between earthly pleasures and those enjoyed by the “immortal mind,” but in its companionable domesticity, it looks forward to the one detailed by Congregationalist minister George Cheever in 1853: “[N]ot the dim incomprehensible universality of omnipresence merely, but a place for our abode … with as intimate a home circle, as the dearest fireside on this earth can have, nay incomparably more intimate and personal and definitely local in our Father's House.”¹⁹

Against this grandly sentimental ground a few figures stand out, startling in their contrast. We find some women—Mary Moody Emerson and Margaret Fuller most memorably—who announce a feminist suspicion of romantic union. They suspect its idealizations, the overvaluation of men by women lovers or the etherealization of women by their men. And they suspect erotic attraction, which leads to the entanglements of marriage and children and to a loss of self, a life lived purely through and for another. “[L]iberty is a better husband than love to many of us,” noted Louisa May Alcott in her diary on Valentine Day, 1868.²⁰ Though Fuller may have longed in private for “a full, a godlike embrace from some sufficient love,” in public she disavowed the constraints of such desire.²¹ We can “live too much in relations,” she warns, falling into “distraction, or imbecility, from which [we] can only be cured by a time of isolation.” Hence her praise of celibacy, of the “old bachelors and old maids” whose numbers (in percentage of the population) rose throughout the nineteenth century. Hence also her praise for the thought of “a wise contemporary” who observed that “union is only possible to those who are units. To be fit for relations in time, souls, whether of man or woman, must be able to do without them in the spirit.”²²

Is this unnamed contemporary Emerson, who called himself “I whose name is Unit” in an 1840 letter to Fuller (L, 2:258)? Certainly he had made similar pronouncements. If religion tells us “‘[i]t is not good for man to be alone,’” he told the Second Church congregation in 1829, “[i]t says also, ‘Go into thy closet and shut thy door.’” “These are not two laws but one,” he continues, for “no man is fit for society who is not fit to stand alone” (CS, 2:84).²³ In his later “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” Emerson looks back on a trend from 1820 to 1840 directly opposed to the rising importance of human love in sentimentalism, one that binds him to Fuller in a common cultural protest. He writes, “It seemed a war between intellect and affection,” a war that intellect won. “Instead of the social existence which all shared, was now separation. … The young men were born with knives in their brain,” ready to cut all social ties through “introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives,” and “driven to find all [their] resources, hopes, rewards, society and deity within the self” (W, 10:325, 329). In 1839 Hawthorne unself-consciously courted Sophia as “Mine own self,” and attests that he felt “as if [his] being were dissolved, and the idea of [Sophia] were diffused throughout it. Am I writing nonsense?” he demands. Yes, one imagines Emerson's young men would reply. As Emerson himself grew up to testify, the truest love has nothing to do with such “maudlin agglutinations.”²⁴ At the heights of affection all forms indeed dissolve into one, but lovers are not mingled:

Plain and cold is their address,
Power have they for tenderness;
They can parley without meeting;
Need is none of forms of greeting;
They can well communicate
In their innermost estate;
When each the other shall avoid,
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.

(W, 9:117)

That last couplet of “Celestial Love,” wonderfully perverse, cuts against the sentimental grain. And it typifies Emerson's pronouncements on love. Too much the skeptic to extol sentimental enthusiasms below, he is equally scathing on the dream of domesticity above. In a journal entry from November 1840, later used in “Swedenborg; or, The Mystic,” he chides the Swedish visionary for his “attempt to fix & eternize the fireside & nuptial chamber[,] to fasten & enlarge these fugitive clouds of circumstance[,] these initial pictures through which our first lessons are prettily conveyed.” A relationship of “one to one, married & chained through the eternity of Ages, is frightful … & is no more conceivable to the soul than the permanence of our little platoon of gossips, Uncles, Aunts, & cousins.” Rather, in heaven “[w]e meet & worship an instant under the temple of one thought & part as though we parted not, to join another thought with other fellowships of joy” (JMN, 7:532).²⁵ This motility applies to earthly loves as well. Cupid, Emerson's figure for “Initial Love,” has a mincing, insinuating approach. “[H]is wish is intimacy, / Intimater intimacy, / And a stricter privacy” in which “The impossible shall yet be done, / And, being two, shall still be one.” But erotic unions do not last, for

As the wave breaks to foam on shelves,
Then runs into a wave again,
So lovers melt their sundered selves,
Yet melted would be twain.

(W, 9:108-9)

Hence the poet's decree in “Give All to Love” that the lover even on earth must

Keep … to-day,
To-morrow, forever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.

(W, 9:92)

Ideal affections may light on two and even join them into one, but they always flicker elsewhere, onward and upward. A Platonic ladder of affection leads from human loves to a union with what he calls in “The Over-Soul” “the Lonely, Original, and Pure” (CW, 2:174) and elsewhere simply the “gods”:

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

(W, 9:92)

As a love poet, Emerson is uninspiring. He calls himself “cold because [he is] hot,—cold at the surface only as a sort of guard & compensation for the fluid tenderness of the core,” but he found few ways to embody either that tenderness or the keen brilliance of his colder self in verse (JMN, 7:368). Neoplatonism is hardly a poetically restrictive philosophy—not for the Elizabethans or the Italian poets of the sweet new style, not for his contemporary Poe—and when Emerson expresses his faith that we are all essentially one man, one mind, at best longing to be alone with the alone, as an apology for his erotic attraction to a woman in “To Eva,” we glimpse the compositional potential. Similarity acts across the threatening difference of sexes, granting a license to love:

Ah! let me blameless gaze upon
Features that seem at heart my own;
          Nor fear those watchful sentinels,
Who charm the more their glance forbids,
Chaste-glowing, underneath their lids,
          With fire that draws while it repels.

(W, 9:95)

But this man who calls himself “a photometer” and not “a stove” is unable to get much heat into his measures (L, 4:33). Perhaps even philosophical intensities have too erotic a tone, derived from the loves that nourish them, for Dame Philosophy as much devours as consoles her admirers:

Philosophers are lined with eyes within,
And, being so, the sage unmakes the man.
In love, he cannot therefore cease his trade;
Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek,
He feels it, introverts his learned eye
To catch the unconscious heart in the very act.
His mother died,—the only friend he had,—
Some tears escaped, but his philosophy
Couched like a cat sat watching close behind
And throttled all his passion. Is't not like
That devil-spider that devours her mate
Scarce freed from her embraces?

(W, 9:374-75)

The most affecting moments in Emerson's love poetry are those in which philosophy has not yet pounced on and throttled or devoured her sage, as in unpublished poems to his first wife, Ellen—those he wrote before her untimely death seventeen months into their marriage, which though clumsy move us in their vain hope for “graybeard years” together,²⁶ and especially the less artful, more anguished lines he wrote in the first weeks after her death:

In yonder ground thy limbs are laid
Under the snow
And earth has no spot so dear above
As that below
And there I know the heart is still
And the eye is shut & the ear is dull
But the spirit that dwelt in mine
The spirit wherein mine dwelt
The soul of Ellen the thought divine
From God, that came—for all that felt
Does it not know me now
Does it not share my thought
Is it prisoned from Waldo's prayer
Is its glowing love forgot

(JMN, 3:228)

The ignorance confessed in the last lines, which keeps their author from too quick a compensation for his loss, holds philosophy at bay. As in “Dirge,” the well-paced and achingly restrained elegy for his brothers, these lines for Ellen do not reject the ascent of souls promised in Plato and Plotinus. But they speak their piece from “the middle of the mount”: not the proud, uncrowded heights of “Celestial Love” but a “lonely field” and wooded valley, a Concord fall's “long sunny afternoon” (W, 9:145).

Emerson would concern us far less if he were more or less maritally unhappy, more or less erotically repressed, more or less consistently a Neoplatonist poet bucking the age's sentimental trend. Mary E. Hewitt has a poem, tediously brief, in which Plato sets aside philosophy to hymn the wrinkles of his “fair friend, Archeanassa.”²⁷ That Emerson reclaims such philosophy for verse marks an interesting nineteenth-century tug-of-war, but little more. But when we turn from the primarily Neoplatonic poems to the more complex fabric of Puritan, romantic, and transcendental ideas in the sermons, lectures, and essays, we find a more interesting struggle underway in which the Hamlet-like self-consciousness mourned in “Philosopher” is found to be an unhandsome and incurable philosophical condition and not a more or less pitiable psychological case, one where the most moving moments come after philosophy, not before it. I do not suggest that these texts form a seamless garment of Emersonian thought. But when we look back with the hard sayings of “Experience” and other late essays in mind, a pattern or development emerges in which an old fear of idolatry is secularized into a skeptical, scrupling epistemology of love.

2

Emerson's early sermons frequently extol both Platonic and sentimental pieties, with little public worry over the tension between them. In December 1827, shortly before the twenty-four-year-old minister met his first wife-to-be, he preached to her church that “by the strong cords of friendship and love God invested the fireside with its sacred delights”; Rusk notes that a year later in another sermon to her church, Emerson explained a contrasting Platonic progress whereby “the affections … tended to expect perfection in the loved person, and from seeking perfection in the human friend were led to seek it in God.”²⁸ As Joel Porte observes, the sermons also show that Emerson maintained an inordinate attachment to Puritan ideas of sin and innate depravity, to the sublime rhetorical claims of Edwardsian Calvinism, and to the demands of a “great preeminent unpartaken relation” with “his Maker” (CS, 2:84).²⁹ “Our religion takes the individual out of the mass and reminds him of the burden he must bear alone,” Emerson observes in 1829, six weeks after his wedding to Ellen. “It recommends the duties of self-command, of the connexion of the soul with God;—it teaches that to each soul is its own destiny which is stript of all connexions and friendships—the soul hath neither father nor mother nor wife nor sister,” so that “before God we are solitary unrelated men” (CS, 2:82, 84). This isolating Puritan strain will be my first concern.

I will focus on Sermon CIV, preached on 12 January 1831, a month before Ellen's death, for in it the tension between the connection of the soul with God and the interhuman “web of relations” that should “awaken [the] heart and [the] conscience amid the present despondency” is particularly notable (CS, 3:84). Addressing members of a Unitarian philanthropic group, the Howard Benevolent Society, Emerson chose as his text Luke 10:27: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself.” An appropriate passage, no doubt, given the audience, but a thorny one as well: will love for God turn out to be the same as, a model for, a part of, or the actual substance of our love for one another? Reformed theology held that inasmuch as our love is human, it is suspect. “Adam Rent in himselfe from his Creator,” as John Winthrop put it, and thus “rent all his posterity allsoe one from another, whence it comes that every man is borne with this principle in him, to love and seeke himselfe onely.”³⁰ “No one is able to love God from his whole heart, etc., and his neighbor as himself,” writes Luther. This commandment is “an impossible law.”³¹ Emerson's immediate theological precursor, William Ellery Channing, denied the doctrine of original sin on which such charges are based. Jesus came to “set free our imprisoned energy for love”; and it is our love, in its potential “largeness and liberty,” that both Channing and Jesus, in Channing's view, address.³² According to Robert Lee Patterson, Channing believes that “[t]he affections of the home, … are intended to overflow until they embrace the entire human race.” And yet even for Channing love for God is the only love commensurate with, and able to repay, the soul's true yearnings. “In language which reminds us of Edwards,” Patterson writes, “he warns us that fellow human beings will disappoint us by their imperfections, and sometimes their disloyalty.” But Channing does not take the common orthodox step of Edwards, who moves from this observation to “the conclusion that God is, not the supreme, but the only legitimate object of love.”³³ As a founding gesture, proving himself at once more conservative and more radical than Channing, Emerson will so move.

At the start of his sermon Emerson promises to “present the principle on which the great class of social duties depends.” He sifts through a number of possible grounds for neighborly duty, echoing in his progress the via negativa logic of Edwards's Nature of True Virtue. “[S]elf love well calculated,” for example, will not do. “In any common use of the word self,” he argues, “in any sense less than that infinite sense in which self-love loses itself in the love of God and the Universe,” it will not suffice. Nor will our divinely commanded love for our neighbors. “[I]n that degree of strength in which the sentiment is ordinarily found,” he observes, it cannot “be safely trusted as the support of such various and incessantly returning duties as we owe to others” (CS, 3:84, 85, 86). Not that we cannot love anyone properly: the sermon admits, as Luther will not, that “[t]he love of our neighbor is a principle of wonderful force where it really acts.” But our love is “too capricious and discriminating,” he writes, “too selfish” (CS, 3:87, 86). A good decade before “Self-Reliance,” Emerson will not sanction questioning a sense of responsibility for our neighbors.

At this point in the sermon we might expect a turn to Christ as the teacher of benevolence, since his command to “love … thy neighbor” prompts a lawyer to demand to know who his neighbors are, and the parable of the Good Samaritan is Christ's answer. Yet instead of a Unitarian Jesus who sets our love-energy free, Emerson offers a vision of men glorified in their dependence on deity, and he does so in such terms that we can hardly recall his earlier admission of some partial value in the love for neighbors we muster on our own. The neighbor's claim is “through God,” Emerson declares, and he expands by shifting into a sublime rhetorical register that owes more, once again, to Edwards than to Channing. “The Scriptures teach us that nothing is more intimate than our relation to Him,” he explains. “They teach that we are God's children, not by any metaphor but in a far stricter sense than we are the children of men. We are made of him—we live but in him, as the leaf lives in the tree” (CS, 3:87; emphasis added).³⁴ All love collapses into love of God; indeed, for the next four paragraphs we hear nothing of neighbors at all.

But who in love actually acts? Who loves? When we keep divine commandments we “all but identify” with God, says Emerson—an unsteady distinction, and the effort to maintain it forces him into a revealing syntactical strain. “We shall be parts of God,” he writes, “as the hand is part of the body, if only the hand had a will.” That “if only” reads at once as plaintive (if only it could, or did) and as mocking the very possibility. Emerson remains Unitarian enough to cling to some notion of will. But “free agency” does no good. “We are made of God as the urn is made of clay,” he explains, “but separated from our great Parent by our free agency. … Whenever we act from self, we separate ourselves from God; when we do right, we consent to his action by our hands” (CS, 3:88). For Edwards, true virtue consists of a “consent, propensity and union of heart” with “being in general,” rather than lying in any partial or personal affection;³⁵ likewise here love for a neighbor consists of allowing “a full consent between God in him and God in [us]” (CS, 3:89). Commandments to be holy, merciful, and perfect as our father in Heaven are otherwise not merely “impossible,” as Luther said. They are incomprehensible. As for self-love, “[t]here is not an inch of ground in the Creation left” for it to stand on. “We are not,” Emerson preaches, “our own” (CS, 3:88, 90).³⁶

The sermon backs down from these rhetorical heights, chatting of fathers and brethren and even (in a cancelled passage) of an angel's voice that tells the human race, “Little Children[,] love one another.” This nervous and infantilizing return to the interpersonal, to speaking of love of each other “for God's sake” and “for our own sake” (CS, 3:311, 91), as though the second were not just a limited vision of the first, seems required not just by the expectations of Emerson's audience, but by an internal logic as well. Though Scriptures “teach us that we are God's children … in a far stricter sense than we are the children of men,” such strictness would seem unbearable after a while—a perspective that we cannot deny, yet which denies us the power to love of our own volition, even to love each other in any ordinary sense of the phrase (CW, 3:87). Without the paternal metaphor's support, after all, impartial benevolence “for God's sake” is hard to recognize as human love.³⁷ The love of God's children for each other is a divinely sanctioned version of the love of parents and spouses Emerson admits might occasionally work (such love as he clearly felt for his young wife). By contrast, God's love for himself through us leaves us part of the circuit but finally out of the picture.

Throughout Emerson's career he proposes that “the ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism,” shunting us away from merely social affections (CW, 3:40). Yet his texts vary as to precisely when these ardors or doubts will be acknowledged and how (or how closely) we may be reunited with one another. In Sermon CIV we start with the social, and when God returns as a person, a father, we fall into place as his children, our lives together restored and reassured. We find a new, less certain structure in the “Human Culture” lecture called “The Heart,” written in 1838, seven years after the sermon. The period between witnessed Ellen's death, Emerson's resignation from the Second Church, his travels in Europe and return to Concord, his marriage to Lidian Jackson, the deaths of Edward and Charles, the birth of Waldo, and the start of friendships with Fuller, Thoreau, and Carlyle. In the lecture Emerson struggles to make cold ardors and human warmth meet on adult grounds: grounds called “the impersonal” (EL, 2:279), a Platonic goal that stands opposed to any sentimental vision of domestic, fireside bliss.³⁸ One thinks of Emerson's unnerving journal entry, five years into his second marriage: “I marry you for better but not for worse. I marry impersonally” (JMN, 7:336). If by the 1830s, as Lystra observes, the “worst fears of early American religious leaders” were coming to pass, as “the personhood of the loved one … had become a powerful rival to God as the individual's central symbol of ultimate significance,”³⁹ Emerson does his best to undo that rivalry, and not simply by reasserting a personal God's first claim on our affections. “Personhood” turns out to be a questionable term in any context, social or religious: well before Emerson resigned his ministry he had stopped thinking of God in personal terms, and this loss of personality somehow also applies to us and to those neighbors we are admonished to love.⁴⁰

When the loss appears in “The Heart” and later texts, it is flagged by the phrase “in strict science” or “in strictness.” Echoing the words “far stricter sense” of Sermon CIV, these phrases hint that this impersonality comes at some cost—we must be strict, enforce it on ourselves—and that the cost is associated with a language whose tone is ungraceful, merciless, philosophical, and pure. Examining “the social relation, the powers of affection” in “The Heart,” Emerson is first obliged to outline a doctrine that sounds quite asocial, hardly affectionate:

In strictness we ought to say, the soul seems to be insulated. With persons pure soul has nothing to do. … In strictness the soul does not respect men as it respects itself. It looks at a continual unfolding of the impersonal, at a total infusion, impenetration of its own essence by the nature of justice, of truth; it postpones persons, all persons, to this contemplation of the impersonal, the One.

(EL, 2:278-79)

Faced with such a blur of assertions, it helps to imagine Emerson's concerns. What would the photographic negative of these strict assertions resemble? The soul would respect others as much, perhaps more, than it respects itself; it would be tangled up in persons. And in the religious more than the philosophical sense, God's disrespect of the personal would be true. We would in fact have to love our neighbors, and ourselves, as a condition of loving a personal God; and such affection would stem at most from a partial infusion of our souls by the divine. This mixture of our own and God's efforts, of eros and agape, is characteristic of the sentimental synthesis of love and religion that developed in the early nineteenth century, recalling Thomas Aquinas, who maintains “that charity proceeds from an intrinsic principle while still being ‘added to human nature[,] … perfecting the will.’”⁴¹ This vision of caritas, rejected by the Reformation, is not the essential sameness of human and divine affections in Channing or its symmetrical opposite, the “full consent between God in him and God in me” of the Edwardsian moments in Sermon CIV (CS, 3:89).

Emerson thus implicitly recasts the argument of Sermon CIV in Platonic or Plotinian terms. But “strict and stern science” teaches us a lonelier lesson than the “strict sense” of the sermon. Our neighbors now “must” appear as embodiments of our thoughts, repetitions of self: a solipsistic, narcissistic threat we did not face when we were images of God. And strict science requires us to confess something new, “that all persons, the very nearest and dearest, underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness.” Before our neighbors crowded in too close; now they flee from us, fall away, vanish.⁴² “[L]over and enemy,” Emerson now contends, “can never enter by infinity the precincts of selfhood.” This lack of access, and not our inability to love properly en masse, makes our relations “partial,” a situation our lecturer calls “pathetic” (EL, 2:279).

The word “pathetic” seems to me carefully chosen against an alternative designation of our relations as tragic, the vision, according to Cavell, of King Lear and Othello. “[S]kepticism's ‘doubt,’” he explains, “is motivated not by (not even where it is expressed as) a (misguided) intellectual scrupulousness but by a (displaced) denial, by a self-consuming disappointment that seeks world-consuming revenge.”⁴³ The sources of Emerson's disappointment are not hard to find: the loss of Ellen (“[S]he never disappointed me except in her death” [L, 1:376]); the quotidian losses of his marriage to Lidian (“The husband loses his wife in the cares of the household”) and a consequent sense of “incongruities[,] defects … [,] surprise, regret, strife” coming between them; and perhaps the insufficiency he felt in the “affections & consuetudes that gr[e]w near [him]” and in his inability to respond to them (JMN, 5:297, 322). In his 19 May 1837 journal entry, used in “The Heart,” Emerson utilized a phrase that reappears in “Experience.” He laments the disappointments of his connection to any ideal friend, in this case Carlyle. “We never touch but at points,” he complains.

I am led on from month to month with an expectation of some total embrace & oneness with a noble mind, & learn at last that it is only so feeble & remote & hiant action as reading a Mirabeau or a Diderot paper, & a few the like. This is all that can be looked for. … Baulked soul! It is not that the sea & poverty & pursuit separate us. Here is Alcott by my door,—yet is the union more profound? No, the Sea, vocation, poverty, are seeming fences, but Man is insular, and cannot be touched. Every man is an infinitely repellent orb, & holds his individual being on that condition.

(JMN, 5:328-29)

The “innavigable sea” and fast-held “poverty” that isolate in the later essay “Experience” (CW, 3:29, 46) are metaphorical restatements of the literal “seeming fences” that Emerson dismisses here, and the later loss of Waldo might have reminded him that while “[t]here is nothing so easy as to form friendships & connexions,” “a Tragedy” will inevitably come to give “protection” to the “helpless” gulf between us (JMN, 5:17).⁴⁴

Emerson's losses, failures, and frustrations, however, hardly prompt the revenge Cavell describes. It is as if to avoid such an impulse that Emerson quickly contrasts the “absolute condition” he describes at the start of “The Heart” with “the relative and actual” condition of “our position in nature.” In the latter, having to do with acts and relations, we are “tenderly alive to love and hatred,” “woven all over” with a vital “net” of emotions that recalls the “web of relations” (reminiscent of George Eliot) named early in Sermon CIV (EL, 2:280; CS, 3:84). And these loves, fears, hopes, and regrets “respect other men” as the soul, we have read, does not (EL, 2:280; emphasis added). If there are sacred “precincts of selfhood,” there are equally sacred “precincts of actual life” where “we know ourselves as partial and social creatures.” And this partiality now opens the way to connection. “We see that our being is shared by thousands,” Emerson explains, “who live in us and we in them.” Or is it, as once was claimed in theological terms, that something common lives in us all? “[O]ver all men and through all men is diffused an affection”; “[i]t is an element they all breathe,” which “informs each of the presence, of the brotherhood, of the wants of the other” (EL, 2:279, 281).⁴⁵ While Sermon CIV has a three-step trajectory (from comfort to strictness to home), “The Heart” alternates between these absolute and relative claims. We might call them moods of strictness and kindness, as when Emerson drops the aside that “in general there is a great deal [of kindness] that makes the earth habitable,” while by implication strictness, which is never “in general,” would make the world uninhabitable, unlivable, deathly. (Indeed, “[t]he moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed,” bringing it back to life.) Theology calls these moods justice and mercy. We cannot simply choose one, nor can we blithely unite them—how live in two moods at once? And yet the desire persists.⁴⁶ As when the syntax of Emerson's sermon reveals the tension between the individual and the divine will, so here we find a too-insistent phrase, an overstated case: “The Heart is as I have said a community of nature which really does bind all men into a consciousness of one brotherhood” (EL, 2:282, 290, 283; emphasis added).

Perhaps uncertain of this assertion of brotherhood—especially since earlier in the lecture conversation proves too unsatisfying, too evanescent a relation to prove its existence—Emerson tries a second and equally unsatisfying proof. He looks to glances, which intertwist like Donne's “eye-beames” to unite self and other.⁴⁷ When our gazes intersect, he writes, we realize “that all men have one soul,” thus proving “the radical unity” of our nature. “We look into the eyes to know if this other form is another self; and the eyes will not lie, but they give a faithful confession what inhabitant is there” (EL, 2:283; cf. JMN, 5:8). This knowledge of the other as “another self” sits poorly, though, with what we have already heard. “[A]ll persons that surround you,” Emerson says early in the lecture, “must seem to you as the thoughts, opinions, emotions, affections which have taken body and on which … the student soul reads … its own nature and law” (EL, 2:279). Is it “the rounding mind's eye” then, as he later puts it (CW, 3:44), that looks in and fills out the eyes of another? I find such concerns, attributed to the later, openly skeptical essays, implicit in two comments from “The Heart.” “Every man meets glances,” Emerson writes, “which shall illustrate for him all that he hath heard of the terrors and beauty of the Cherubim”—cherubim, linked with knowledge and perception, strictness and solitude, and not seraphim, who figure abandonment to love. And “the unity, the community of men,” he insists, is grounded in “perception and acknowledgment of a strictly identical nature of which all the individuals are organs”; but that key term “strictly” reminds us of solitary, solipsistic heights, not of heavenly agape (EL, 2:284). Identical, he means, to me: moral education does not consist of discerning an equivalent center in you, but in finding that center is the same as my own.⁴⁸

Acknowledging the one soul between us thus seems the first effort to name an adult version of “Little Children[,] love one another.” But in practice, as in the poem “To Eva,” it seems prompted primarily by the fear that someone's “sweet dominion” over the will might be caused by something other than “[a] sympathy divine” (W, 9:95). Questions of narcissism, subjectivism, even idolatry arise. Am I recognizing the god in you, or just treating you like the god in me? These are difficult, unhappy questions, since the intersection of strictness and indulgence, where the soul seeks “to domesticate these rare and lofty satisfactions,” has the “two societies of Marriage and Friendship” for its social site.⁴⁹ There we may be entirely satisfied by “the indulgence of affection toward one soul,” Emerson assures us, because of the “infinite nature of one soul.” But are those two single souls the same? And if they are distinct, which proves the infinite nature: that of the object, or that of the indulger? “In the highest friendship,” he explains, “we form a league with the Idea of the man who stands to us in that relation, not with the actual person. We deal with him as with a just, true, pure, and universal soul and make him therefore a representative to us of the entire Humanity.” Such statements mark the Neoplatonist Emerson we suspect, more comfortable with ideas than with other people. And they imply, as the author himself seems discomfited to find, that our relations are not reciprocal but ascriptive, not my acknowledgment of something within you, but a deal struck, within me, with the universal soul. The lecture moves on to praise “conversation … the first office of friendship” and “heartiness” as “inspiration,” but the cheerfulness rings a little hollow. The last word, we sense, has already been spoken: “We walk alone in the world” (EL, 2:288, 292, 294).

3

Less than a year after first delivering “The Heart,” Emerson lectured on “Love.” In this lecture too we find allusions to “strict philosophy,” according to which “there is a quite infinite distance between our knowledge of our own existence and the evidence we have for the existence of nature including that of persons”; and here too we find that since “[p]ersons are love's world,” we must “descend from the high ground of absolute science and converse with things as they appear” in order to “treat of Human Life,” the subject of this new lecture series (EL, 3:56). I will pass over this lecture, however, in favor of Emerson's revision as it appears in Essays: First Series. For in this version of “Love,” implicitly paired with “Friendship,” Emerson once again considers the question of love's ascriptive impulse—the “illusion” that “attributes to the beloved person all which that person shares with his or her family, sex, age or condition, … with the human mind itself,” so that while it is “these which the lover loves, … Anna Matilda gets the credit of them” (W, 6:319). He also explores the scandal of succession, the losses and alterations that chasten our idolatries and, as he will say in “Experience,” make us all idealists. Recall the Puritan admonishment: “[L]et this caution be minded, that they don't love inordinately, because death will soon part them.”⁵⁰ The object of my affections may vanish, but I remain, and the guilt of outlasting the one-to-one relation of love casts what the essay calls a “certain stain of error” (in the lecture it is “a certain slime” [EL, 3:54]) over every autobiography. “Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth,” he explains. “But all is sour, if seen as experience. … With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing. But grief cleaves to names, and persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday” (CW, 2:100).

We can give the names Ellen, Edward, and Charles to those mournful “partial interests.” Indeed, in the journal source for this passage, the “remembering & remembering talk with Lidian” recalled on 4 March 1838, Emerson does just that (JMN, 5:456). Likewise he seems to take his own sad experience—an initial and short-lived ideal love followed by a long-lasting and pragmatic “modulated” affection in which “the trick of solitariness” remains uneased—to be the human norm (L, 1:434, 4:33). As David Leverenz charges, Emerson “universalizes his self-pity and his inability to love Lidian,” although he does so in the faith that his audience can summon up their own sad names and interests and errors, just as Whitman assumes we all have a “secret silent loathing and despair” that we long to confess.⁵¹ Emerson may be correct, at least in a general sense, and part of the critical resistance to “Love” comes from a certain sentimentalism, a continuing “erotic faith” that love is aroused by the qualities of a particular beloved and that a passionate and inextricable merger of two into one can be accomplished in this life and will survive, somehow, after the grave.⁵² Emerson tells us that love is prior to and superior to its objects, that we confuse the occasion of our happiness (call it Charles, Edward, Ellen, Lidian) with its efficient cause, which can be found elsewhere, within; and he holds to the line that the true union to be desired—indeed, the only one possible—is the union of the soul with the good and the beautiful, and that to attribute those ultimate virtues to any person is a snare and a delusion, a brilliant and painful mistake.⁵³ But Emerson has his reservations about stepping “on this ladder of created souls” up to divinity (CW, 2:106). We find them expressed in the essay on “Intellect,” a little later in the same collection, where the intellect, “void of affection,” leaves each truth “eviscerated of care” (CW, 2:193, 194). We find the same reservations in the structure of the essay on “Love,” where Emerson relates a love story in three veins: sentimental, Platonic, and only finally Emersonian, this last a view that encompasses the others, but only if we read the following essay, “Friendship,” as the conclusion to “Love.”

Since love begins, according to Emerson, with “a private and tender relation of one to one” (CW, 2:99), let us begin by examining that phrase. “Tender” has been Emerson's word for a stance toward other persons that permits or even produces connection.⁵⁴ In “Love,” for the first time, the word is associated with youth as well as connection, and stands contrasted with “mature philosophy.” The “palpitations of joy and sorrow” that mark “the meaning of the Heart” at any age in “The Heart” (EL, 2:281) are here the “throbbing experience” of “every youth and maid,” which Emerson the philosopher begs leave not to portray in “vivid tints” (CW, 2:99). More than memories of Ellen are encoded in that phrase. Although Emerson writes of tenderness earlier, “private” has no long history in the same works, and its appearance here signals a new insistence, not on love as a violation of public mores, but on its interiority, as though it occurs entirely within an isolated subject. Love, writes Emerson, “is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames” (CW, 2:100). “How high that highest candle lights the dark”—until one remembers that the fire beams out, as in Wallace Stevens's poem, from the interior of a private bosom still.⁵⁵

With that tenderness and privacy in mind, Emerson now begins the love story. The “rude village boy” and the “school girls who … talk half an hour about nothing, with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy” are characters in his quick comic sketch of a “novel of passion” replete with puns and rhetorical extravagance. But as the boy sees one particular girl and “instantly” feels “as if she remove[s] herself from him infinitely, and [is] a sacred precinct,” Emerson's tone grows more serious. We read of the precinct of selfhood in “The Heart,” into which no other could enter, but here a distance inserts itself at the first moment of affection, as though it were a precondition for relationship. “[O]ne alone distances him,” he writes; “and these two little neighbors that were so close just now, have learned to respect each other's personality” (CW, 2:100, 101). That respect so distances them that the beloved hardly appears, or seems needed, when Emerson describes

the visitations of that power to [the youth's] heart and brain, which created all things new; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry and art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light …; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound[;] when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows, and studious of a glove …; when no place is too solitary, and none too silent for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts, than any old friends, though best and purest, can give him.

(CW, 2:102)

The youth seems most enraptured when alone with ever-available nature, confessing his affection to a sympathetic cloud or a tree. Then a sudden shift of perspective leaves the boy a “fine madman” who merely “soliloquizes” (CW, 2:103). Like one of Freud's “ancient” theorists of love (like Freud himself, for that matter), Emerson cares less about the qualities of the beloved than about the character of “that power” itself.⁵⁶ Love in this essay, unlike the affections in “The Heart,” seems fundamentally antisocial: for all that it gives the lover to another, “it still more gives him to himself.” No longer does the lover belong to family or society; rather “he is somewhat; he is a person; he is a soul” (CW, 2:104).

With this declaration Emerson closes the first part of the essay, turning from sentimental to Platonic reflections to consider “the nature of that influence” so potent over youth, naming it “Beauty” (“the flowering of virtue”). “The ancient writers,” “Plato, Plutarch, and Apuleius[,] … Petrarch, Angelo, and Milton,” are his avowed source (CW, 2:104, 106), those who believed that “the Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and fair” (CW, 2:105-6). But how seriously does Emerson believe, for example, that “[i]n the particular society of his mate” the lover “attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint, which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy that they are now able without offence to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing the same” (CW, 2:106)? Perhaps Hawthorne thought Emerson was serious, since a counter to those lines seems to underlie the plot of “The Birth-mark.” But in fact, while Emerson says this “dream of love” will serve to counteract the “subterranean prudence” of most marriages, he does not endorse the idea entirely and proves as bothered as Hawthorne by this unbelievable process of mutual improvement (CW, 2:107, 106).

Now that the ancient writers have had their say, Emerson supplies the final position that both supplements and corrects the sentimental and Platonic stances. He first disposes of the bulk of the “novel of passion.” The lovers glance at one another, a moment of radical connection and unity both in “The Heart” and in Emerson's journals (cf. JMN, 5:8), little knowing “the precious fruit” to come of “this new, quite external stimulus.” The plot quickens: “From exchanging glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth and marriage.” Even the wedding night appears in the account, albeit obliquely: “Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled.” This unity encompasses the lovers as well. “Does that other see the same star, … read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now delight me?” the lovers wonder, but only when they are physically apart, the distance between them quite different from the ontological unseen gulf that intellect and strict science finds between every self and other, lover and beloved. They are, by Emerson's account, quite happy, “discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed” (CW, 2:107, 108). A companionable ideal that may have been Emerson's model was an instance of “recorded loneliness … during his absence from Ellen.”⁵⁷

“But the lot of humanity is on these children,” the next sentence grimly announces; and while we are hardly surprised—they seem “tender” in both senses of the word—we must wonder which lot? Mutability? Isolation? Considering both the text and Emerson's biography, the first seems the obvious answer. “Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to all”; and in a phrase that sounds to me as sad as “Jesus wept,” we learn the inevitable result: “Love prays.” But these prayers make “covenants with Eternal Power in behalf of [a] dear mate” (CW, 2:108). As “means to effect a private end,” these prayers are not the “contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view” that Emerson commends in “Self-Reliance” (1841), where they are rather seen as “vicious” expressions of “meanness and theft” (CW, 2:44). The union such prayer brings in this essay (whether it is with God or the beloved we cannot be sure) is “yet a temporary state,” because the lover's soul will soon learn that neither God nor the beloved is as personal as once thought. “[A]rous[ing] itself … from these endearments, as toys,” the soul “aspires to vast and universal aims”—a “mature philosophy” (CW, 2:108, 99). This recapitulates the earlier and absurdly easy progress toward divinity, where lovers could point out one another's blemishes “without offence” (CW, 2:106), but now the results turn sour. “The soul which is in the soul of each,” Emerson writes, “craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other.” Hence arise, not “mutual joy,” but “surprise, expostulation, and pain” (CW, 2:108; cf. JMN, 5:297).

The couple has reached the limits of both sentimental love, with its vision of fireside union, and Platonic love. One imagines them retreating to the verse of Hewitt or a cold draft of Plotinus for relief. We have returned to the moment in Emerson's lecture where “the heart” is “repelled” by the multitude as such and by each individual as “an infinitely repellent orb” (EL, 2:288, 279)—the moment when it finds itself “betrayed” and rallied in marriage or friendship, “concentrating its desire … on one.” But in “Love” the painful surprise comes from within the private and tender relation, and it brings back with renewed force the questions that plagued us earlier. Is “[t]he drawing of the entire satisfactions of the heart from the indulgence of affection toward one soul” allowed by “the infinite nature” of the indulger or of the soul beheld? Are these souls in fact the same? Does forming a “league with the Idea … not with the actual person” in order to “make him a representative to us of the entire Humanity” mean we never truly deal with him at all (EL, 2:288)? Emerson must somehow allow for the mundane experience of being, in his brutally unsentimental phrase, “shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years,” despite the soul's new maturity and aspiration to universals (CW, 2:109).

As if in response to these questions, Emerson distinguishes the “signs of loveliness, signs of virtue” that drew the lovers together (and that appear and reappear through time) from “the substance” of virtues. “[T]he regard changes,” he writes—we are meant to think both of the physical glance and of the new estimation of these lovers for one another's virtues—and this new regard “repairs the wounded affection.” And “as life wears on, … a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions” enables the pair “to employ all the resources of each, and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of the other” in a distinct, but complementary, process (CW, 2:108). Not “the infinite nature of one soul” as in “The Heart,” but the nature of this relationship, which in its temporal duration makes a virtue of mutability's wear, can provide the employment and acquaintance that “Love” endorses in place of mere “satisfactions” (EL, 2:288). The two “resign each other, without complaint, to the good offices which men and women are severally appointed to discharge in time” (CW, 2:109; emphasis added). Furthermore, Emerson suggests that we can know nothing but our idea of the other: “All that is in the world which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of woman.” He abandons metaphors of politics and commerce in favor of a little couplet on taste, Locke's and Edwards's favorite trope for the incorrigibility of sense. “The person love does to us fit,” he quotes Abraham Cowley, “Like manna, has the taste of all in it” (CW, 2:108-9).

There is something unsatisfying about this resolution, for it fails to resolve the tension between nuptial society and the solitary love of virtue, the moods of indulgence and strictness, of experience and intellect, that Emerson has tried to reconcile in structure and in substance since Sermon CIV. “The Heart” offers one vision of balance—“[t]he highest conversation,” which “seems to be a marriage of the intellect and the affections” (EL, 2:292). But in this essay, conversation is undercut by misunderstandings and subjectiveness, and such a marriage seems forced as a best-case scenario.

What Emerson suggests as an alternative, or at least as a firmer foundation for conversations to come, is something called “the real marriage.” After surprise and expostulation, after the wounded affections' repair, after a certain chastening, as the couple's “once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and … becomes a thorough good understanding,” the lovers “exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of each other's designs.” The pun on “disengaged” seems to me one of Emerson's finest. Only after leaving off “engagement,” after all, can we be truly married. Year by year, he writes, this exchange of passion for loving disengagement involves a “purification of the intellect and the heart” (CW, 2:109). This twofold purification comes as the lovers of “Love,” if not Ralph Waldo and Lidian Jackson Emerson, turn into friends.⁵⁸ And “celestial” friendship, not romantic or prudential or “natural” marriage, will turn out to be the ground for their progress toward divinity as well (EL, 2:288).

4

In her extensive treatment of the “Love” and “Friendship” essays, Mary Kupiec Cayton describes what she calls Emerson's third “stage” of love, the stage that involves these purifications, as “thin and unconvincing.” Following Carl F. Strauch, and for solid biographical reasons, she reads the essay on friendship as exploring a social alternative to Emerson's unsatisfying marriage to Lidian, one based on his “Concord Experiments” (as Cayton's punning chapter title puts it) with a community of friends centered on Fuller and Sturgis. “If marriage did not completely fulfill his need for relation,” Cayton observes, “friendship—at least in 1839 and 1840—seemed to.” Yet even friendship proved to have its crises and limits, provoked in part by the difference between Victorian men's and women's expectations of what friendship would involve; and, she concludes, “[t]he fear that like everything else in life, friendship will prove ‘phenomenal’ forces him to ascend to a spiritual plane,” where in some ideal state, “the feeling that ‘the not mine is mine’” might last, and friendship “overcome the gap between ‘the ME and the NOT ME’ (as Emerson had put it in Nature).”⁵⁹ I cannot quarrel with Cayton's overall sense of the essay and its context. Yet her glancing reference to the “phenomenal” nature of friendship touches on what is to me the heart of the essay, its epistemological claims.

Unlike Sermon CIV, the lecture, or the essay on “Love,” “Friendship” gives an overt philosophical framework for its assertions, one in which words like “phenomenal” must be read as terms of art. Emerson is not only a Neoplatonic but also a romantic philosopher, and when he writes in “Love” that the lovers must “exchange the passion that once could not lose sight of its object” he means the word “object” in its full post-Kantian force (CW, 2:109). Not only does passion, with its eye on an “object” or end, use the other as a means, it must treat the other as an object inasmuch as he or she remains in the phenomenal and not the noumenal realm, an object of perceiving subjectivity. Emerson repeats what he wrote in “The Heart”: “In strictness, the soul does not respect men as it respects itself.” But in “Friendship,” he also provides a metaphysical foundation for this lesser respect:

I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty, more than on your wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine. … I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee, also, in its pied and painted immensity,—thee, also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,—thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that.

(CW, 2:116)

My assurance of your substantial identity, in the philosophical sense, has fallen away. “I who alone am” know only phenomena, not things (let alone persons) in themselves, and I “see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own.” Indeed here, “the Deity in me … usually connives” to raise “thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance” between us—that is to say (as “The Heart” does not) that the condition of insularity by which we hold our individual being is in general a function of the God in me, and not something that he serves to counteract (CW, 2:120, 115).

The purification of the heart thus involves exchanging a passion for objects for the knowledge of the other's phenomenality.⁶⁰ We must leave off clutching, wean our affections, grow out of our proprietary interests in one another, and learn to “hold [this relation] by simple affinity” of “virtue with itself,” which allows the interior deity to negate the walls it helped raise (CW, 2:115). This connection can yield the “higher self-possession” that, Emerson claims in “The Over-Soul,” we attain through “common nature” and “unity of thought”; and it anticipates the alluring independence that he describes in “Swedenborg,” where “it is only when you leave and lose me by casting yourself on a sentiment which is higher than both of us, that I draw near” (CW, 2:165, 4:72). Yet Emerson knows full well that in practice our virtues will not often coincide: like the “high freedom of great conversation,” where two souls become as one, this coincidence is “an evanescent relation,—no more.” In strictness, in the world of intellect, we will always be reminded of the concern that arises in “The Heart,” namely, that a friend's or beloved's virtues are in the eye of the beholder. “We overestimate the conscience of our friend,” he writes; we feel “a property in his virtues,” as if they were our own, and in time we realize that they are in some sense our own, since we “bestow” virtues and “afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation” (CW, 2:122, 115, 116).

On these epistemological grounds, Emerson revives the lingering Puritan fear of loving creation more than its creator, of “idolatry” with its “adulterate passion” and “perpetual disappointment” in the other (CW, 2:126, 117). We need no theology to warn us of these dangers, he seems to say, but theology gives us the precise, prophetic term for mistaking our own creative power, bestowals, and amorous imagination for another's intrinsic virtues. And we cannot easily evade Emerson's argument, even through appeals to his own biographical frustrations. At stake, after all, is the danger that love will make us proclaim another's sovereign selfhood as real to us as our own, only to find ourselves ignored or undermined, ready for a fall. If “idolatrous love attributes an absolute value to the loved one,” this “first falsity” inevitably leads to “searing disappointment” and “bitter solitude,” so observes not Emerson but Simone de Beauvoir, a century later and a continent away.⁶¹

As we realize that we have forgotten our own strength, that we have slipped from bestowing virtues to worshipping our creation, our hearts may be purified, albeit painfully. Yet this purification might well prompt the intellect to retreat from the social realm altogether, to rally elsewhere and alone in the solipsistic heights of virtue and “strict science.” To ward off this retreat the intellect too must be purified. Musing on this second purification, Emerson names “two elements that go to the composition of friendship,” each of them equally “sovereign.” The second he names “Tenderness,” a word that reminds us of the couple in “Love.” The first, “Truth,” which receives more attention, involves the moral sense, as it appears in the “municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity.” Solipsism necessarily betrays these social virtues, and by insisting on their continued claim Emerson restrains the intellect, both in its enthusiasms and its potential disappointment (CW, 2:119, 121).

At the close of “Friendship,” Emerson turns to a third modulating force, one that we have not seen before: the power of seeming, of the heart's imagination. “True love transcends the unworthy object,” he writes in the final paragraph, because all objects as such are unworthy of the way we must treat them for true friendship to take place, which is “as a god,” or as a “receiver of Godhead” as he puts it in “Experience” (CW, 2:127, 3:44). But such love is not necessarily delusional: it may be a self-consciously fictive gift, one that does not infantilize us and that is too well aware of the powerful and performative nature of its praise to be idolatrous. Intellect demands that we sacrifice the passionate love-object on the altar of strict science, that we confess it is in some sense sinful, a lie. To bring the love-object back, as the heart desires, we impute selfhood, virtue, divinity to the other. “Friendship demands a religious treatment,” Emerson writes, and in this essay it receives one. Through an erotic economy of love and disappointment we have returned to a gracious economics of salvation, where both strictness and indulgence, justice and mercy, can be satisfied (CW, 2:123).

In the “Love” and “Friendship” essays Emerson seems confident that such imaginative satisfactions will suffice, in part because they imitate God. “It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space,” Emerson writes, revising Matthew 5:45 (CW, 2:127). As gratuitous bestowers of value, we are likewise enlarged by so shining.⁶² Later in his career the dicta are more bitter. “Never can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force,” he asserts in “Experience,” since “[t]he soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten, … admitting no co-life” (CW, 3:44, 45). While I am tempted to explain this shift in tone by referring to a biographical event (the death of Waldo is an obvious candidate), I suspect that it stems from the ambivalence inherent in Emerson's philosophy of love. The self-enlarging bestowals at the end of “Friendship” are only one of Emerson's proposed solutions to our epistemological solitude. “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire, is to forget ourselves,” he writes at the end of “Circles”—that is, among other things, to forget the stateliness, deference, and poise incumbent on our separateness (the heart of his later essay on “Manners”) and be “surprised out of our propriety” by the “flames and generosities of the heart” (CW, 2:190). On the other hand, if the “evanescence and lubricity of all objects” turns out to be “the most unhandsome part of our condition,” perhaps with more of Emerson's restraint we might find our condition “handsome” indeed, which is to say attractive, drawing objects and persons to us without the need to clutch at them and hold them fast (CW, 3:29).⁶³ Finally, Emerson's theory of bestowal is unavoidably complicated by his continuing assumption that love must be deserved, a mathematically proportionate response to the worth of the beloved: a bestowal of virtues that is then valued, rather than, as in Whitman, a bestowal of value itself.⁶⁴ When M. Wynn Thomas speaks of the “cold emotional logic” of the end of “Friendship,”⁶⁵ he has this underlying structure of appraisal in mind—the essayist's solar expansiveness so different, in tone if not in metaphor, from Whitman's appreciative “[l]ove like the light silently wrapping all.”⁶⁶ In bestowing virtues, doesn't Emerson simply make a gift and then marry for the money? Both shame the beloved, and the telling makes it worse.

If I risk distorting the tone of the record, however, I do so for two reasons. First, while Emerson is unable to maintain the poise of, or write a love poetry commensurate with, his theory of bestowal, I believe Whitman does, extolling its pleasures and its therapeutic value. And despite my reservations, there seem to be strong grounds for admiring not only the logic of Emerson's doctrine but its ethic as well. I will close with these grounds, since they involve a summary of Emerson's progress from the theology of love where we began to the “too pathetic, too pitiable” world of affection and illusion that “Love,” “Friendship,” and the later essays confront.

In Sermon CIV Emerson retreats from his strongest assertions, based on a God that dwells in the human heart, to a comforting rhetoric of father and child. Behind this segregation and hierarchy of the human and divine lies a need to keep God, who mediates between us, both above us and distinct from us. For if love for neighbors is “through God,” then something of the machinery of the “‘triangular’ desire” René Girard describes in the opening sentence of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel must come into play: “Don Quixote has surrendered to Amadis the individual's fundamental prerogative: he no longer chooses the objects of his own desire—Amadis must choose for him.” Emerson's sermon suggests that Christians cannot choose their poor: God chooses for them. And yet, as Girard also points out, “[t]he impulse toward the object is ultimately an impulse toward the mediator,” so much so that “the desiring subject wants to become his mediator; he wants to steal from the mediator his very being of ‘perfect knight’ or ‘irresistible seducer.’” As long as the mediator, in this case God, stays fundamentally distinct from the desiring subject, or the man who wants to love his neighbor, no rivalry can ensue. But in “internal mediation,” where the distinction dissolves (say, when God takes up his seat within the soul), “the subject is torn between two opposite feelings toward his model, the most submissive reverence and the most intense malice. This is the passion we call hatred.”⁶⁷

Girard's description illuminates Miles Standish's feelings toward John Alden, or Dickinson's (on occasion) toward Christ, perhaps better than any specific moment of ambivalence in Emerson. Yet he names a threat that Emerson must check: that as God becomes less a father above than an internalized god, one's access to the other or even to the god in the other will be thwarted, paling by comparison to the access granted to that god, or to put it philosophically, the access to one's own existence. This is the threat we left behind many pages ago, when we touched on the potential for tragedy in Emerson's epistemological isolation. The skeptic may end up like Othello, who (in Gerald L. Bruns's commentary on Cavell's reading of the play) “wants to possess, and can never have … Desdemona's own self-certainty of her fidelity. … [H]e wants to not-doubt Desdemona as she not-doubts herself, as Descartes could not-doubt his own existence.”⁶⁸ Skepticism in Othello leads to murder: a tragic case Emerson is at pains to avoid. (As we have seen, he anticipates and counters, before Hawthorne, the deathly trajectory of “The Birth-mark”). I would love to say that the “true marriage” of “Love” and “Friendship” presents us with a comic alternative, perhaps something like the screwball comedy of remarriage that Cavell describes in Pursuits of Happiness and elsewhere.⁶⁹ But while points of similarity emerge—the importance of conversation, of being “alert and inventive,” to “add rhyme and reason” to the drudgery and “daily needs” of life together (CW, 2:121)—Emerson's vision seems never so shared, so reciprocal as Cavell's. He makes his student the philosopher seem unabashedly sentimental, for when “the air clears and the cloud lifts” as at the end of “Illusions,” the scene contains only one mortal and “the gods”: “they alone with him alone” (W, 6:325).

Between tragedy and comedy, though, comes pathos, the “too pathetic, too pitiable” world. For Emerson never gives up his faith in the moral sense and returns again and again to those “municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity” (CW, 2:121) where the heart finds its mature, philosophical home.⁷⁰ Since effusions of affection (as in Whitman) are rather less common than tales of submission or revenge or the “metaphysically desperate degree of private bonding” in tragic romance (to which Cavell refers), the return to and revision of Calvinist theology in Emerson may be no more radical than it is admirable.⁷¹ If never two were one, then surely the “municipal virtues” need to have their say. And is there nothing noble in the scene as Emerson's lovers, “really” married through friendship, by ascription deified, through Concord take their solitary way?

Notes

1. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-4), 6:315-16. Quotations from “Illusions” and other essays in The Conduct of Life, from “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” and from Emerson's poems are taken from this edition and are cited in the text as W, with volume and page number. Other Emerson texts quoted in this essay, cited parenthetically by volume (when appropriate) and page number, are as follows:

   CS The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Albert J. von Frank, 4 vols. (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1989-92).

   CW The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Joseph Slater et al., 4 vols. to date (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1971-).

   EL The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1959-72).

   JMN The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman and Ralph H. Orth et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1960-82); deletions Emerson made in the process of writing have been ignored in the interest of readability.

   L The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939).

2. The major figure in a twentieth-century reevaluation of Emerson as an American philosopher, or as one who calls for an American philosophy, is Stanley Cavell. See “Thinking of Emerson” and “An Emerson Mood,” in The Senses of Walden (San Francisco: North Point, 1981), 121-60; “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant (Terms as Conditions),” chap. 2 of In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 27-49; and the lectures collected in This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989).

3. John McCormick, “‘The Heyday of the Blood’: Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in American Declarations of Love, ed. Ann Massa (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 35.

4. Erik Ingvar Thurin, Emerson as Priest of Pan: A Study in the Metaphysics of Sex (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981), 21. Only outside the literary world, it seems, has this side of Emerson been approached with due consideration. Philosopher Irving Singer finds a place for him in his three-volume history of The Nature of Love as a transitional thinker between romantic and modern notions. The essay “Love,” Singer argues, “combines Hegelian, Neoplatonic, and Christian elements in a way that reveals why each of these is so unsatisfactory from our contemporary perspective” (The Nature of Love, 3 vols. [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984], 2:484). But even Singer gives Emerson only a paragraph and a half of explication, hardly time to explore the subtleties of this one essay, let alone the several that make up his ars amatoria. For the sort of attention these issues deserve (taking Emerson at his words), we would turn to Cavell, but though he has written about Emerson and about love and skepticism, he has not yet done both at the same time.

5. See, for example, the efforts of biographers like Ralph L. Rusk (The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949]); Henry F. Pommer (Emerson's First Marriage [Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1967]); Gay Wilson Allen (Waldo Emerson: A Biography [New York: Viking Press, 1981]); and John McAleer (Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter [Boston: Little, Brown, 1984]). See also the work of Carl F. Strauch (“Hatred's Swift Repulsions: Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Others,” Studies in Romanticism 7 [1968]: 65-103); and the more recent critical work of Mary Kupiec Cayton (Emerson's Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800-1845 [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989]).

6. David Van Leer, Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), xiii. I suspect that my agreement with Van Leer stems from our common debt to Michael Colacurcio.

7. Bernard Duffey, Poetry in America: Expression and Its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1978), xiii; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Solitude of Self,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen Carol Du Bois (New York: Schocken, 1981), 247.

   American love poets continue to display the influence, direct or indirect, of Emersonian ideas on love. Gertrude Reif Hughes notes that “there is something deeply Emersonian about Rich's severe renunciation of her lovers' union” in the poem “Origins and History of Consciousness” (“‘Imagining the Existence of Something Uncreated’: Elements of Emerson in Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language,” in Reading Adrienne Rich, ed. Jane Roberta Cooper [Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1984], 152-53). Virginia M. Kouidis sees Marianne Moore and Mina Loy as quarreling, in love poems and other poems, with the claims of “Experience.” See her “Prism into Prison: Emerson's ‘Many-Colored Lenses’ and the Woman Writer of Early Modernism,” in The Green American Tradition: Essays and Poems for Sherman Paul, ed. H. Daniel Peck (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989), 115-34. I have traced this tradition of response in readings of Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and John Ashbery in “When I'm Calling You: Reading, Romance, and Rhetoric in and around Hart Crane's ‘Voyages,’” Arizona Quarterly 47 (winter 1991): 85-118, and I have recently finished a larger study, What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry, in which it plays an important role.

8. Quotes are taken from Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 243; and Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 19.

9. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8, Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 544, 541; emphasis added.

10. Martin F. Tupper, Proverbial Philosophy (London: Thomas Hatchard, Picadilly, 1854), 162, 159.

11. Lystra, Searching the Heart, 240; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Letters, 1813-1843, ed. Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson, vol. 15 of the Centenary Edition of The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1984), 330; Stanley Cavell, “Two Cheers for Romance,” in Passionate Attachments, ed. Williard Gaylin and Ethel Person (London: Macmillan, 1988), 91.

12. Lystra, Searching the Heart, 252.

13. Lystra, Searching the Heart, 258.

14. See Lystra, Searching the Heart, 252-57.

15. Annis Boudinot Stockton's poem was published in Rev. Samuel Stanhope Smith's Funeral Sermon on the Death of the Hon. Richard Stockton (1780). It has been brought back to print in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter et al. (New York: Heath, 1990), 1:658.

16. Martha Brewster, “An Acrostick for My Husband,” in Poems on Divers Subjects (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1757), 33; Anne Bradstreet, “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” in The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. John Harvard Ellis (New York: Peter Smith, 1932), 394.

17. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John C. Shields (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 30 (spelling modernized).

18. The phrase “new domestic heaven” is from Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), 214; see also 204.

19. George Cheever, The Powers of the World to Come (New York, 1853), 221.

20. Quoted in Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America, The Generations of 1780-1840 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984), xi.

21. Quoted by Emerson in JMN, 11:500.

22. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992), 312, 298. For more on celibacy, see Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, 3, 29-45. In Summer on the Lakes, Fuller mourns the wasted love and energy of a young alter-ego, Mariana, whose “large impulses are disproportioned to the persons and occasions she meets, and which carry her beyond those reserves which mark the appointed lot of woman.” “Such women as Mariana are often lost,” she writes, “unless they meet some man of sufficiently great soul to prize them,” a man “man enough to be a lover!” But since men like Philip Van Artevelde, her example from Summer on the Lakes, (or like Giovanni Angelo Ossoli) “come not so often as once an age, their presence should not be absolutely needed to sustain life” (Essential Margaret Fuller, 131, 132).

23. Emerson echoes these comments on love in “Friendship”: “The condition which high friendship demands, is, ability to do without it. … There must be two, before there can be very one” (CW, 2:123).

24. Hawthorne, Letters, 316. The phrase “maudlin agglutinations” is Emerson's, from “The Uses of Great Men” (CW, 4:15).

25. This vision of the hereafter proposes as spiritual counsel the whimsical independence Emerson's first wife, Ellen Tucker, declares in a poem that begins “When we're angels in heaven”:

    I shan't keep a carriage
    My wings will be strong
    And our earthly marriage
    Will be vain as a song.

    I therefore shall use them
    As I may see fit
    And tea out and dine out
    Nor mind you a bit.

    (One First Love: The Letters of Ellen Louisa Tucker to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edith W. Gregg [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1962], 157.)

26. Tucker, One First Love, 14.

27. Mary E. Hewitt, Poems: Sacred, Passionate, and Legendary (New York: Lamport, Blakeman, 1854), 196.

28. Young Emerson Speaks: Unpublished Discourses on Many Subjects by Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Arthur Cushman McGiffert Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), 19; Rusk, Life, 134. Although Emerson “was doubtless abashed” at preaching this Platonic sermon to Ellen's church, Rusk asserts that the sermon “served to restore the dignity of his philosophy, which had proved so unreliable in her presence” (133).

29. See Joel Porte, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 169-71.

30. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, 1623-1630, ed. Stewart Mitchell (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), 290.

31. Martin Luther, Weimar Auflage, quoted in Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 695.

32. Quoted in Robert Lee Patterson, The Philosophy of William Ellery Channing (New York: Bookman Associates, 1952), 169. “Love,” Channing observes, “may prove our chief woe, if bestowed unwisely, disproportionately, and on unworthy objects; if confined to beings of imperfect virtue, with whose feelings we cannot always innocently sympathize, whose interests we cannot always righteously promote, who narrow us to themselves instead of breathing universal charity, who are frail, mutable, exposed to suffering, pain, and death” (quoted in Patterson, Philosophy, 236).

33. Patterson, Philosophy, 169, 236, 237. “The difficulty,” Patterson goes on, “can be solved, if at all, only by showing not only that human love leads on to the love of God, but also that the love of God augments and fosters human love. Such a solution, however, we do not find in the thought of Channing” (238). We can find it in Aquinas, in what Nygren calls his “caritas-synthesis” (Agape and Eros, 476-558, 613-58). A different solution is worked through by Emerson.

34. Cf. Edwards: “The whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and God is the beginning, middle, and end in this affair. And though it be true that God has respect to the creature in these things; yet his respect to himself, and to the creature in this matter, are not properly to be looked upon as a double and divided respect of God's heart” (“Concerning the End for Which God Created the World,” in Ethical Writings, 531).

35. Edwards, Ethical Writings, 540.

36. Cf. John Calvin: “We are not our own; therefore, neither is our own reason or will to rule our acts and counsels. We are not our own; therefore, let us not make it our end to seek what may be agreeable to our carnal nature. We are not our own; therefore, as far as possible, let us forget ourselves and the things that are ours” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1972], 2:7).

37. The phrase “human love” bears for me an overtone of imperfection, of faithlessness and tender disappointment, as in W. H. Auden's “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm” (“Lullaby,” in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson [New York: Random House, 1976], 131). I draw it here, though, from Patterson's discussion of love and benevolence. “It has been urged by the atheistic idealist, McTaggart,” he writes,

    that the fundamental defect of theism is that it sets, and must set, a low value upon human love. The point of this criticism will not be duly appreciated until the distinction be grasped between love and benevolence. Benevolence is basically volitional in character; it does not, indeed, exclude emotion, but that emotion is of an impersonal variety. Theists of all faiths and in all ages have concurred in emphasizing the value of benevolence. When it comes, however, to personal affection and devotion, such as engages the whole personality, theists have habitually told us that this in its purest and intensest form belongs to God alone, that the creatures are to be loved “for God's sake” rather than for themselves. In no Christian thinker is this characteristic more pronounced than in Channing's predecessor, Edwards. Love, Edwards maintains, should be proportionate to its object. God, the Supreme Good, alone deserves the fullness of one's love; to bestow this upon any finite being would be idolatry.

    (Philosophy, 268)

38. While the years between Sermon CIV and “The Heart” are extraordinarily eventful, even before Emerson's marriage to Ellen he imagined an effort at self-culture that would lead one from interhuman affections to the “sublime” world of love for God. See JMN, 3:146.

39. Lystra, Searching the Heart, 241-42.

40. Emerson's push toward “the impersonal” will thus force a few revisions on Cavell's history of skepticism, in which “the philosophical problem of the other” appears “as the trace or scar of the departure of God.” For Emerson, God (“the god,” “the gods,” the “Over-soul,” or “Spirit”) can never be said to depart, but as at the close of “Give All To Love,” functions mainly to drive off lesser lovers. The simultaneous loss of personality in God and man gives new resonance to Cavell's question, “[C]ouldn't the other suffer the fate of God?” (The Claim of Reason [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979], 470). I find this linkage as compelling as the sociopolitical explanation offered by David Leverenz, where “solitary male freedom,” which presumes the “depersonalized servitude” of others, vitiates the self (Manhood and the American Renaissance [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989], 44).

41. Singer, Nature of Love, 1:320-21, quoting Thomas Aquinas, On Charity (De Caritate), trans. Lottie H. Kendzierski (Milwaukee: Marquette Univ. Press, 1960), 21.

42. According to Michael Fischer, Cavell's work suggests that “the sense of a gap between us and others originates in our wishing to give up responsibility for maintaining those shared forms of life linking us” to them (Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989], 64). Given the constricting social web in America between 1820 and 1840 and Emerson's depiction of the contemporary “war between intellect and affection,” there may be this sort of wish-fulfillment in his skeptical and individualistic claims. The importance of gender in this drive to separation is easily overstated. Compare, for example, Mary Moody Emerson's exultation in “the advantage of loneliness,” quoted in Phyllis Cole, “The Advantage of Loneliness: Mary Moody Emerson's Almanacks, 1802-1855,” in Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 10.

43. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 6.

44. “Many of the questions [of ‘Experience’] seem familiar,” Van Leer explains, “and offer recognizable (if not entirely predictable) reformulations of earlier problems. … If psychologically Emerson shows an unsuspected willingness to treat the authentic facts of experience, philosophically he merely develops the next stage of his epistemological argument,” including, I would add, his argument over the epistemology of love (Emerson's Epistemology, 143).

45. Emerson calls this “common soul” a sort of ether, “an element” of love, and his litany of its attributes surely echoes Paul's Corinthian hymn to agape. “This common soul plunges into water to save the drowning man; seizes the bridle of the rearing horse; runs over the burning rafters of the flaming house to rescue the child,” Emerson writes. “It takes counsel only of itself; sneers never; imputes never a low motive. … No King was ever yet able to kill or root it out” (EL, 2:281).

46. We might compare this to the Puritan desire to “live in the world but not of the world,” one of the goals of weaning one's affections (Douglas Anderson, A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990], 3).

47. John Donne, “The Exstasie,” in John Donne: The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 59.

48. For more on the difference between the cherubim and seraphim, that “old politics of the skies,” see “Intellect” (CW, 2:204). In a letter to Fuller (25 September 1840), Emerson tries to finesse their differences by claiming that they “are not inhabitants of one thought of the Divine Mind, but of two thoughts, that [they] meet & treat like foreign states, one maritime, one inland, whose trade & laws are essentially unlike” (L, 2:336). I find this “two thought” system rather unconvincing; yet when Emerson explains in the lecture how, other than etymologically, “Courage is of the Heart,” he dares us to deny that we, too, do not act on a similar faith. “If we believed in the existence of strict individuals,” he writes, “natures, that is, not radically identical but unknown, unmeasurable we should never dare to fight” (EL, 2:285). The same perhaps might be confessed of our “daring” to love.

49. Why are marriage and friendship the issue, and not general social duty? “The Heart,” Emerson insists, “truly regards all men as its neighbor” because, we may assume, it sees itself, or the god in it, in them. Still, “in the actual state of society it presently finds abundant obstacle to the indulgence of sympathy. It is chilled and sneered at and betrayed” (EL, 2:288). Our affections, repelled by the multitude as such, and from each individual as “an infinitely repellent orb,” will “rally in some one object,” Emerson writes; and the heart accommodates itself “by concentrating its desire of helping and comforting upon one” (EL, 2:279, 288).

50. Benjamin Wadsworth, The Well-Ordered Family (Boston, 1712), 26; quoted in Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 49.

51. Leverenz, Manhood, 69; Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” in Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, ed. Sculley Bradley et al., 3 vols., in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1980), 1:236. It is worth noting that Emerson's journals often work on the same level of abstraction, so that his observations about a husband who “loses the wife in the cares of the household” and who “cannot rejoice with her in the babe for by becoming a mother she ceases yet more to be a wife” are drawn only loosely (or in the second case, not at all) from his own experience (JMN, 5:297).

52. See Robert M. Polhemus, Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. 1-27.

53. “Marriage unites the severed halves and joins characters which are complements to each other,” Emerson writes in the lecture on “Love” (EL, 3:62), sounding a bit like Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium; but this vision of union disappears when he revises the lecture into an essay.

54. In Sermon CIV a “tender reverence for our mutual nature, divine in its origin,” properly grounds “all our dealings with mankind” (CS, 3:89). In “our position in nature,” Emerson writes in “The Heart,” “[w]e are tenderly alive to love and hatred”; shortly thereafter we are warned not to “wrong the truth and [our] own experience by too stiffly standing on the cold and proud doctrine of self-sufficiency” (EL, 2:280). In “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” Emerson puns on the word “tender” again, though with a different set of senses. “There grew a certain tenderness on the people,” he writes in the second sentence of the piece; a few pages later the notion that “the individual is the world” gives people “a neck of unspeakable tenderness; it winces at a hair” (W, 10:325, 326, 327).

55. Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” in The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1982), 524.

56. According to a footnote Freud added in 1910 to his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” “[t]he ancients laid the stress upon the [sexual] instinct itself, whereas we … emphasize its object” (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, 1901-1905, ed. James Strachey [London: Hogarth Press, 1953], 149). I am grateful to Deborah Garfield for pointing out this connection.

57. Pommer, Emerson's First Marriage, 82.

58. Emerson sounds quite stoutly Victorian in his emphasis on exchanging passionate marital relations for companionable ones. But unlike the advice writers cited by Steven Seidman, he will not propose marriage as a site of both self-realization and perfect emotional union. See Seidman's Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 30-32. Whether his purifications are sublimations of sexuality seems to me an arguable and not very interesting point. Lest I seem merely soft-hearted here, let me adduce textual evidence that friendship is what “true marriage” means. A “cheerful, disengaged furtherance,” Emerson calls it in “Love” (CW, 2:109); and in “The Heart,” a “manly furtherance” appears as one of the “stern conditions … of friendship” (EL, 2:289). While love begins as a “private and tender relation of one to one,” friendship appears in “Friendship” as “a just and firm encounter of two” in which we “dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's life”—the same sort of “offices” to which the married couple resigned one another a moment ago (CW, 2:99, 114, 121). Finally, the tale of friendship with a “commended stranger” in the opening pages of “Friendship” recapitulates all the crucial stages of “Love,” as though to suggest, in fact, that the lovers were at best strangers to each other from the start (CW, 2:114).

59. Cayton, Emerson's Emergence, 200, 208, 209, 210.

60. Unlike Sartre, Emerson is never bothered by the fact that he is just as phenomenal, just as much an object and not a subject, to the perceiving other as the other is to him.

61. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 687.

62. Singer also speaks of the way bestowing value will “augment one's own being as well as the beloved's” (Nature of Love, 1:7).

63. For a discussion of this pun on handsomeness and attraction, see Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 87.

64. See Walt Whitman, “A Song for Occupations,” in Leaves of Grass, 1:83-98.

65. See M. Wynn Thomas, “A Comparative Study of Emerson's ‘Friendship’ and Whitman's ‘Calamus,’” ATQ 55 (1985): 57.

66. Whitman, “Song of the Universal,” in Leaves of Grass, 3:681.

67. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1985), 1, 10, 54, 10. “We shall speak of external mediation,” Girard explains, “when the distance is sufficient to eliminate any contact between the two spheres of possibilities of which the mediator and the subject occupy the respective centers. We shall speak of internal mediation when this same distance is sufficiently reduced to allow these two spheres to penetrate each other more or less profoundly” (9).

68. I quote Gerald L. Bruns, “Stanley Cavell's Shakespeare,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 614. For Cavell's reading of Othello, see “Othello and the Stake of Other,” chap. 3 of Disowning Knowledge, 125-42.

69. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981); see esp. the chapters “Knowledge as Transgression: It Happened One Night” (71-109) and “The Importance of Importance: The Philadelphia Story” (133-60).

70. The “simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty,” Emerson puts it in “Illusions,” are still “the root of all that is sublime in character” (CW, 6:322).

71. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 10.