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“Assume an Identity of Sentiment”: Rhetoric and Audience in Emerson's “Divinity School Address”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Stephen Railton
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Extract

In “the american scholar” Emerson defines the problem of his vocation: The “duties” of the scholar are such as become Man Lecturing. His “office” is an explicitly rhetorical one: “to cheer, to raise, and to guide men.” The most requisite virtue for this task is “self-trust”; yet as Emerson elaborates on his public role, it turns out that he really means trust in the possibility of communion with his audience:

For the instinct is sure that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, – his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, – until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; – that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest secretest presentiment, – to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 9 , October 1984 , pp. 31 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

NOTES

1. I have borrowed this phrase from Henry Smith, Nash, “Emerson's Problem of Vocation: A Note on ‘The American Scholar,’” New England Quarterly 12 (03 1939), 52–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. “The American Scholar,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. I: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, Spiller, R. E. and Ferguson, A. R., eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), 62–3Google Scholar. Subsequent page references to this volume will be cited in parentheses in the text as I, followed by the page number.

3. “Self-Reliance,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. II: Essays, First Series, Slater, Joseph, Ferguson, A. R., and Carr, J. F., eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), 29, 33Google Scholar. Subsequent page references to this essay will be cited in parentheses in the text as II, followed by the page number.

4. Peabody, Elizabeth, “Emerson as Preacher,” in Sanborn, F. B., ed., The Genius and Character of Emerson (Boston: Osgood, 1885), p. 158.Google Scholar

5. Perry Miller provides the texts with which to retrace the controversy in his anthology, The Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 157–246.Google Scholar

6. Both Fox and Luther, for example, were given separate lectures in Emerson's 1835 Course on Biography. In the lecture on Fox he said that “he demanded radical reform of the church. This must every religious mind do that is born into an old church … the divine light rekindles in some one or other obscure heart who denounces the deadness of the church and cries aloud for new and more appropriate practices” (The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3 vols., ed. Whicher, Stephen et al. [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959–1972], I, 174)Google Scholar. Emerson identified so strongly with this issue that he repeated most of the passage two years later, in his lecture on “Religion” for his 1836–1837 course (cf. ibid., II, 94).

7. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 14 vols., ed. Gilman, William H. et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), V, 502, 471Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this source will be cited in parentheses in the text as JMN followed by volume and page numbers.

8. Ellis Gray Loring, for example, a young Bostonian who heard the lecture, felt confused about its theological assumptions – until the Reverend Convers Francis, who also heard it, explained that it did depict “God” as a “personal” deity. But when Loring later questioned Emerson about it personally, he found that if he had been confused, Francis had been misled. Loring's journal comments about “Holiness” are quoted by Tilton, Eleanor M., “Emerson's Lecture Schedule – 1837–1838 – Revised,” Harvard Library Bulletin 21 (10 1973), 389–90Google Scholar. Tilton calls “Holiness” “alarmingly unorthodox” (ibid., 383), but as this kind of misunderstanding itself suggests, its unorthodoxy was at best but vaguely proclaimed. Emerson's own dissatisfaction with the lecture is indicated by his rejection of it for Essays, First Series. There, although he reused the two preceding lectures, “Prudence” and “Heroism,” he rewrote “Holiness” as “The Over-Soul.”

9. Early Lectures, II, 347–50.Google Scholar

10. Ibid., 341.

11. This is Matthiessen, F. O.'s characterization in American Renaissance (1941; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 67–68Google Scholar. It still underlies most discussions of Emerson's style.

12. The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 vols., ed. Norton, Charles Eliot (Boston: Osgood, 1883), I, 61.Google Scholar

13. In 1849, revising “The Divinity School Address” for republication in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, Emerson deleted this infelicitous repetition, and also omitted the repetitious “Be to them a man” from the passage on page 90. By then the psychic need that prompted these insistent iterations lay behind him. Since most reprintings of the address use the 1849 text, however, the pattern of its insistence has been somewhat obscured.

14. Quoted in Peabody, , “Emerson as Preacher,” p. 159.Google Scholar

15. Porte, Joel, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), p. 156Google Scholar. In his analysis of “The Divinity School Address” Porte assumes throughout that Emerson's intention was to shock his audience, an assumption that governs most of the commentary on it. An exception, however, is Stephen E. Whicher, who notes that “the address itself was calculated to give no offense, on grounds of vocabulary at least, to a Unitarian audience” (Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1953], p. 74).Google Scholar

16. Ware's letter is printed in Cabot, James Eliot,. Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887), II, 689.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., 690. Gay Wilson Allen points out in his biography that for “meet dissent” Emerson had initially written “offend” – this is a typical revision, in the direction of conciliation (cf. Allen, , Waldo Emerson [New York: Viking Press, 1981], p. 320).Google Scholar

18. Besides the many passages where Emerson vented into his journal the anger he had suppressed in his pew, there is one from late April 1838, where he “answer[s]” the comments about “miracles” made at the Unitarian “Teachers' meeting” the night before (cf. JMN, V, 477–78Google Scholar; he used part of the passage in the address [cf. 83]). Until the address made him persona non grata, he regularly attended these weekly meetings, but waited until he got home to his journal to speak out against their apostasies.

19. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 6 vols., ed. Rusk, Ralph (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), II, 162.Google Scholar

20. Norton, , Correspondence, I, 220–21.Google Scholar

21. Quoted in Swanberg, W. A., Jim Fisk: The Career of an Improbable Rascal (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959), pp. 212–13.Google Scholar