First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

The Language of the Street

Nature 45 Emerson pointedly preferred the language of the street and of action to that of the study. “Life is our dictionary,” he says in “The American Scholar.” Years are well spent in country labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made. It was a subject he warmed to again and again. “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia. . . . I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we The Language of the Street 46 Nature really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and gait of the body.” Emerson did not always succeed in his language, and his street is not our street. People where I live eat out of a lunchbox or a to-go box, not a firkin. But Emerson’s democratic leanings were always inclining him toward plain, or as we might say, accessible, language. Questions about the public good, he thought, “should not be addressed to the imagination or to our literary associations, but to the ear of plain men [in language] such as plain men, farmers, mechanics, teamsters , seamen or soldiers—might offer, if they would gravely, patiently, humbly reflect upon the matter. There is nothing in their want of book-learning to hinder. This doctrine affirms that there is imparted to every man the Divine light of reason sufficient not only to plant corn and grind wheat by but also to illuminate all his life his social, political, religious actions. . . . Every man’s reason is sufficient for his guidance, if used.” Emerson was interested not just in common language but in the spoken language. His essays all began as lectures. His writing was first speaking. He noted that his friend Thomas Carlyle “has seen as no other in our time how inexhaustible a mine is the language of conversation. He does not use the written dialect of the time in which scholars, pamphleteers, and the clergy write, not the parliamentary dialect, in which the lawyer, the statesman, and the better newspapers write, but draws strength and motherwit out of a poetic use of the spoken vocabulary, so that his paragraphs are all a sort of splendid conversation.” Emerson’s long correspondence with Carlyle was one such conversation, and Emerson set its value high. “Strict conversation with a friend is the magazine out of which all good writing is drawn.” 46 The Language of the Street Nature 47 Not that Carlyle’s own writing was entirely beyond criticism . In one letter, after praising Carlyle’s The French Revolution effusively and at length, Emerson added: “I will tell you more of the book when I have once got it at focal distance —if that can ever be, and muster my objections when I am sure of their ground. I insist, of course, that it might be more simple, less Gothically efflorescent. You will say no rules for the illumination of windows can apply to the aurora borealis. However I find refreshment when every now and then a special fact slips into the narrative couched in sharp business-like terms.” Though Emerson spent much of his working life in his ground floor study in the house in Concord, the room behind the crude but vigorous color print of Vesuvius erupting in 1794 that hung beside the entrance to the study, he was—as the picture perhaps hints—acutely aware of the pitfalls of the sequestered life, and he struggled to stay in touch with the great outer working world. “Now and then a man exquisitely made can and must live alone; but...