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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Any attempt to explain Emerson inevitably results, to one degree or another, in explaining one's self, for Emerson's purpose was to awaken each person to assurance that the individual is indeed a self, different from but potentially similar to all others. With this in mind, I shall nonetheless attempt through an examination of his first series of essays to challenge the often expressed critical observation that his essays ultimately consist of aptly phrased, eminently quotable aphorisms strung formlessly together, so that his sentences are often better than his paragraphs, his paragraphs superior to the essays that they compose, and his collection—though wondrously inspiring in parts—is, finally, a miscellany. My enterprise is encouraged by Emerson's observation in his journal not many months after the Essays of 1841 appeared: “It is much to write sentences; it is more to add method & write out the subject of your life symmetrically … to arrange many general reflections in their natural order so that I shall have one harmonious piece.” It is the symmetry, the harmonious whole, the natural order, which I seek to discover and reveal.
1. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed., Gilman, William H. and Pearsons, J. E. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), VIII, p. 49.Google Scholar
2. Blair, Walter and Faust, Clarence, “Emerson's Literary Method,” Modern Philology, 42 (11 1944), 79–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. See, for example, Rusk, Ralph Leslie, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Scribner's, 1949), p. 278.Google Scholar
4. Paul, Sherman, Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in American Experience (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 117–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5. The Complete Works of Emerson, Ralph Waldo, the Riverside edition (Cambridge, 1883), II, p. 18.Google Scholar Hereafter quotations from this edition of the Essays of 1841Google Scholar will be indicated by page numbers in parentheses following each quotation.
6. Whicher, Stephen, Freedom and Fate: The Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), pp. 95, 111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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8. Bishop, Jonathan, Emerson and the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9. Ibid., p. 81.
10. Cabot, James Eliott, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass., 1887), II, p. 693.Google Scholar
11. James, Henry, introduction to Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), p. vii.Google Scholar
12. It can be suggested that Emerson might not have gone as far as William Gilmore Simms did four years later in discussing “History for the Purposes of Art” in Views and Reviews of American Literature (New York, 1845), p. 25Google Scholar, when he said, “Hence it is only the artist who is the true historian. It is he who gives shape to the unhewn fact—who yields relation to the scattered fragments,—who writes the parts in coherent dependence, and endows with life and action the otherwise motionless automata of history. … For what is the philosophy of history but a happy conjuring up of what might have been from the imperfect skeleton that we know.” For relations between Emerson's theories of history and those of Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman, even of Irving, Cooper, and Scott, see Levin, David, History as Romantic Art (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1959).Google Scholar
13. Rusk, , Life, p. 278.Google Scholar
14. Bishop, , Emerson and the Soul, pp. 78–79.Google Scholar
15. Rusk, , Life, pp. 278–79.Google Scholar