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The Writer
- University of Iowa Press
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Nature 77 It is difficult to overstate the importance of Emerson’s understanding of the poet as representative, as standing for the poet in each of us. And while we continue to think of his 1836 book Nature as his central, necessary book, there is an argument that his 1850 book Representative Men is his most useful. Emily Dickinson recognized and welcomed it as “a little granite book you can lean on.” Emerson’s idea that the great figures in history are each representative of some interest or quality all people share is antimonarchical, antiaristocratic, and antiCarlylean . Carlyle had argued in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) that great people are simply born better and stronger than the rest of us and we should be grateful to be ruled by them. Emerson’s quite different idea provides a rationale for both democracy and universal education . “There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think, what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.” This representativeness of great people can fairly be called Emerson’s central social and religious teaching. The The Writer 78 Nature greatness of Jesus is that “alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. . . . He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World.” As with politics, philosophy, education, and religion, so with literature, with writing. The final, climactic piece in Representative Men is “Goethe, or the Writer,” which begins with Emerson saying, “I find a provision, in the constitution of the world, for the writer.” The reason for this is his equally bold insistence that “Nature will be reported.” Nature, in other words, is self-registering. “All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by his shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain.” As Emerson sees it, the writer is the agent of this self-registration of nature. “Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peachstone ; his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model and sits for its picture.” The writer “believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.” It is strangely moving to note that the final entry in Henry Thoreau’s grand journal, the entry for November 3, 1861 (he would die on May 6, 1862), is also on this idea of nature’s self-registration. “After a violent easterly storm in the night, which clears up at noon, I notice that the surface of the railroad causeway, composed of gravel, is singularly marked, as if stratified like some slate rocks, on their edges, so that I can tell within a small fraction of a degree from what quarter the rain came. . . . Thus each wind is self-registering.” Nature may indeed be self-registering, just as all the poems may have existed before time began, but it takes an Emerson or a Thoreau to notice and to get it down. “Society has, at all times, the same want, namely of one sane man with adequate 78 The Writer [34.230.35.103] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:49 GMT) Nature 79 powers of expression to hold up each object of monomania in its right relations.” For a Platonist, Emerson has surprisingly little faith in general ideas. An idea must be particular or it is just words. In politics, in art, in argument, or in neighborliness, everything is ad hominem, is only legitimate and real when it comes down to particular people. So, for Emerson, “talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrine there set forth.” For the present essay, the particular person is Goethe, the great German writer who “lived in a small town, in a petty state” and who “appears at a time when a general culture has spread itself and has smoothed down all sharp individual traits.” Emerson’s choosing...