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

[Edwin Percy Whipple], “Some Recollections of Ralph Waldo Emerson” (1882)

Prolific American essayist and literary critic Edwin Percy Whipple advocated for a national literature free from British and other influences and a national critical theory informed by ethics and an appreciation of the essential intellectual relationship between authors and their readers. Although he enjoyed a close friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, helping him to select the title for The House of the Seven Gables and offering him useful commentary on the manuscript of The Blithedale Romance, in the richly anecdotal piece that follows, Whipple clearly identifies Emerson as his premier model of the ideal writer and critic. Written from complete devotion to Emerson, the essay describes their first meeting and emphasizes Emerson’s lofty character and Franklinesque practicality, his antipathy toward spiritualism, and his abilities as thinker and lecturer. Although the accuracy of his memory has never been proven, in this reminiscence Whipple states that he thinks he may have been the source of the characterization of Emerson as a “Greek-Yankee—a cross between Plato and Jonathan Slick,” while at the same time he confesses his own doubt about whether he may also have been the source of the characterization of Emerson as “a Hindoo-Yankee—a cross between Brahma and Poor Richard.” [] “Some Recollections of Ralph Waldo Emerson” () [Edwin Percy Whipple] It is impossible for those who only knew Emerson through his writings to understand the peculiar love and veneration felt for him by those who knew him personally. Only by intercourse with him could the singular force, sweetness, elevation, originality, and comprehensiveness of his nature be fully appreciated; and the friend or acquaintance, however he might differ from him in opinion, felt the peculiar fascination of his character, and revolved around this solar mind in obedience to the law of spiritual gravitation —the spiritual law operating, like the natural law, directly as the mass, and inversely as the square of the distance. The friends nearest to him loved and honored him most; but those who only met him occasionally felt the attraction of his spiritual power, and could not mention him without a tribute of respect. There probably never was another man of the first class, with a general system of thought at variance with accredited opinions, who exercised so much gentle, persuasive power over the minds of his opponents. . . . To his readers in the closet, and his hearers on the lecture platform, he poured lavishly out from his intellectual treasury . . . the silver and gold, the pearls, rubies, amethysts, opals, and diamonds of thought. If his readers and his audiences chose to pick them up, they were welcome to them; but if they conceived he was deceiving them with sham jewelry, he would not condescend to explain the laborious processes in the mines of meditation by which he had brought the hidden treasures to light. . . . [Everybody] who intimately knew this seer and thinker had the good sense never to intrude into the inward sanctities . . . of his individual meditations , and vulgarly ask questions as to the doubts and conflicts he had encountered in that utter loneliness of thought, where his individual soul, in direct contact, as he supposed, with the “Over-Soul,” was trying to solve problems of existence which perplex all thoughtful minds. He would do nothing more than make affirmations regarding the deep things of the spirit, which were to be accepted or rejected as they happened to strike or miss the point of inlet into the other intellects he addressed. . . . The native elevation of Emerson’s mind and the general loftiness of his thinking have sometimes blinded his admirers to the fact that he was one of the shrewdest of practical observers, and was capable of meeting so-called practical men on the level of the facts and principles which they relied upon for success in life. When I first had the happiness to make his acquaintance I was a clerk in a banking house. I have a faint memory of having written in a penny paper a notice of his first volume of Essays which differed altogether from the notices which appeared in business journals of a higher rank and price. The first thing that struck me was the quaint, keen, homely good sense which was one of the marked characteristics of the volume; and I contrasted the coolness of this transcendentalist,whenever he discussed matters relating to the conduct of life, with the fury of delusion under which merchants of established reputation sometimes seemed to be laboring in their...