Emerson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, F

Anonymous, “Ralph Waldo Emerson” (1865)

[] Not all reviewers appreciated Emerson’s performance or his ideas as a lecturer. The New York periodical the Knickerbocker had long been an opponent of Transcendentalism in general and Emerson in particular. It reviewed his books negatively , continually grouped him with Thomas Carlyle as examples of bad writing , and kept up a decades-long battle with what it considered the foggy notions originating in Boston. This critical and sarcastic view of “roaring Ralph” manages to say with a great deal of hyperbole and venom that its subject “says nothing.” Anonymous “Ralph Waldo Emerson” (
) Of all the public lecturers of our time, and place, none have attracted more attention from the press, and subsequently the people, than Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lecturing has become quite a fashionable science—and now, instead of using the old style phrases for illustrating facts, we call travelling preachers, perambulating show-men, and floating politicians lecturers. As a lecturer, Ralph Waldo Emerson is extensively known around these parts; but whether his lectures come under the head of law, logic, politics, Scripture ,or the show business,is a matter of much speculation; for our own part, the more we read or hear of Ralph, the more we don’t know what it is all about. Somebody has said that to his singularity of style or expression, Carlyle and his works owe their great notoriety or fame—and many compare Ralph Waldo to old Carlyle. They cannot trace exactly any great affinity between these two great geniuses of the flash literary school.Carlyle writes vigorously ,quaintly enough,but almost always speaks when he says something; on the contrary, our flighty friend Ralph speaks vigorously, yet says nothing. Of all men that have ever stood and delivered in presence of a reporter, none surely ever led these indefatigable knights of the pen such a wild-goose chase over the verdant and flowery pastures of King’s English as Ralph Waldo Emerson. In ordinary cases, a reporter, well versed in his art, catches a sentence of his speaker, and goes on to fill it out upon the most correct impression of what was intended,or what was implied.But no such license fol- emerson in his own time lows the out-pourings of Mr. Emerson; no thought can fathom his intentions , and quite as bottomless are even his finished sentences. We have known “old stagers” in the newspaporial line, veteran reporters, so dumbfounded and confounded by the first fire of Ralph, and his grand and lofty acrobating in elocution, that they up, seized their hat and paper, and departed , horrified at the prospect of an attempt to “take down” Mr. Emerson. If roaring Ralph touches a homely mullen weed, upon a donkey-heath, straightway he makes it a full-blown rose, in the land of Ophir, shedding an odor balmy as the gales of Arabia; while with a facility the wonderful London auctioneer Robbins might envy, Ralph imparts to a lime-box, or pig-sty, a negro hovel, or an Irish shanty, all the romance, artistic elegance and finish of a first-class manor-house, or Swiss cottage, inlaid with alabaster and fresco,surrounded by elfin bowers,grand walks,bee-hives,and honey-suckles . Ralph don’t group his metaphorical beauties, or dainties of Webster, Walker, &c., but rushes them out in torrents—rattles them down in cataracts and avalanches—bewildering, astounding and incomprehensible. He hits you upon the left lug of your knowledge-box with a metaphor so unwieldy and original, that your breath is soon gone—and before it is recovered, he gives you another rhapsody on t’other side,and as you try to steady yourself, bim! comes another, heavier than the first two, while a fourth batch of this sort of elocution fetches you a bang over the eyes, giving you a vertigo in the ribs of your bewildered senses, and before you can say: “God bless us!” down he has you, presto!—with a deluge of high-heeled grammar and three storied Anglo-Saxon settling your hash—and brings you to the ground by the run, as though you were struck by lightning, or in the way of a thirty-six pounder. Ralph Waldo is death, and an entire stud of pale horses on flowery expressions and japonica-domish flubdubs. He revels in all those knockkneed ,antique,or crooked and twisted words we used all of us to puzzle our brains over in the days of our youth, and grammar lessons, and rhetoric exercises...