-
The Emerson Canon
- University of Toronto Quarterly
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 12, Number 4, July 1943
- pp. 476-484
- Article
- Additional Information
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THE EMERSON CANON HENRY A. POCHMANN THE publication during 1903, and 1904 of, the sti1l-s~andard Centenary edition of Emerson's writings (misnamed "complete ")'as edited and carefully annotated by Emerson's son, Edward Waldo, marked a new era of scholarly concern with America's most influential thinker and man of letters; and,the appearance, between 1909 and '1914, of the Journals oj Emerson, prepared for publication by Edward Waldo Emerson a~d Waldo Emerson Forbes (Emerson's nephew), inaugurated a series of investigations that wrought' a complete reinterpretation of the man and his significance. ,Except for the 'appeara'nce, in 1912, of a v, olume ofuncollected e$says, addresses, poems, rev-iews and letters, prepared by Charles C. Bigelow, and the occasional publication of od9.1ectures and addenda to Emerson's correspondence, it has, generally been assumed that the Emerson canon is intact, or nearly so. . It was known, by all who took the trouble to c'ompare the chronological list of Emerson's lectures and addresses (as enumerated in "Appendix F" of James E. Cabofs Memoir) with the Riverside and Centenary editions, that many of Emerson's lectures, sermons and addresses are still unavailable in print, and that they are likely to remain so for a long time~ their sheer bulk being an eff'ec6ve deterrent. .Otherwise it has been uncritically but commonly taken for grantedfor a decade or mor~, by all who are unfamiliar with the store of manuscripts in Concord, that little material essential to the study of Emerson remains generally inaccessible. The more knowing kept silent for one reason or another. In 1931, Professor Bliss Perry's provocative little book, Emerson Today, first aroused the suspicion of the unitiated that all was not well. His casual reference to omissions and conc!ensalions of Emerson's manuscript journals, 'as they appear in the voluminous Emerson-Forbes edition, raised some questions; and when, the next year, Professor Randall Stewart laid bare the 'editorial methods employed in preparing Hawthorne's notebooks for publication, questions were raised as to whether Emerson's journals had·undergone similar 'Iediting" at the hands of kinsmen. When, in 1936, Professor ' Townsend Scudder indicated other serious di~crepancies between the published and the manuscript journals) the questions became 476 THE EMERSON CANON 477 insistent. Among. them are these: (1) How complete is the text of Emerson's writings? (2) Upon what principles, and how intelligently , were the selections made? (3) How faithfully, especially in th'e case of the journals, did the editors execute-their task? To be sure, the publication of Emerson's voluminous manuscripts is an undertaking so extensive that very probably the whole will never appear; nor is it an established fact that the tremendous investment of time and money required for su<;:h a venture would yield commensurate results. It is problematical how much would be added to what is known about Emerson's sermons if Mr McGiffert . should extend his careful ·selection· of twenty-five from the total number of one hundred 'and seventy-odd unpublished sermons preserved in Concord. The Jaw' of diminishing returns is inexorable. Yet Mr M~Giffert's "List of Sermons," giving ti'tles, together with interesting data from Emerson's "Preaching Record," will tantalize the critical student of Emerson until these sermons become accessible to him. Questionable though the need may be for a complete edition of the existing sermons, in the case of the journals there is what appears ,' to me at'least, incontrovertible evidence that the whole should be printed. The ten published volumes include only approximately one-third of the whole. Emerson's diaries, kept for a period of more than half a c'entury, transmute a long life of rich experience into teemingly fertile literary lore. Surely this generation, which is willing to support an expensive six-volume edition of hitherto uncollected letters of Emerson, many of them drearily prosaic, can ill afford to be content with a third of Emerson's diaries, where the talk is not, as often 1n the letters, about the hundrum trivia of daily intercourse, but predominantly of matters that Emerson thought noteworthy enougp,to warrant recording. It must be said, in fairness to the editors of the publish'ed JoU:rnals , that the bulk of manuscript, to say nothing of incoherence of sequence, undated scraps, and interpolations, presented formidable difficulties, many of-which'the two 'kinsmen succeeded admirably in resolving. They practised lio concealment ,of the fragmentary nature of their compilation. So far from promising a complete transcription, they specifically said, in the preface, that they were presenting "selections." What is not clear, however, is (1) how 'successful their selection of materials i~ in presenting to the student all that is most essential, and (2) how far' family ties and other 478 THE ''uNIVERSiTY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY considerations of taste and delicacy, as these were understood during our pre-war era, resulted in tamperings with the text. Doubtless the anxiety of the editors to keep the bulk of the published journals within hounds is responsible for the many brack", eted notes indicating a passage o'mitted altogether, or, as in the case ofEme~son',s account of his visit to Wordsworth, on August 28,1833, a notation referring the reader to some portion of Emerson's published works. In this instance he ,reads: "[Here follows the story of the visit, which is printed in' English Traits almost exactly as in the' notebooks....r'l The phrase «almost exactly" can, of course, be made to cover a good deal of territory, and it does just that in this instanc~. Professor Scudder, having re-examined the relevant passages in the manuscripts, finds that there is in them "no trace of ' the slightly contemptuous attitude" which Emerson expressed ,some' twenty years after the visit, when he recalled the incidents preparatory to writing an account of his "First' Visi t' to England."2 So far from' finding Wordsworth's recitation of three sonnets «like a school-boy declaiming" in a' manner provoking his youthful visitor nearly to laughing into the old poet's face, there is, instead,_ in the journal as written in 1833, the decIaratien that he found Wordsworth 's sonnets, especially the. second and third, "more beautiful than any of his printed poems." A letter written two days after the visit at Rydal Mount," printed for the first time in Professor Rusk's compilation, is confirmatory. The note of condecension was introduced as an afterthought. One may hazard the guess that the editors, confronted with an awkward discrepancy between Emerson 's published record and his private notation, chose the easy way out by suppressing the latter. Similar incongfuities occur between the two versions of Emerson's visit to Carlyle. The account of Emerson's call at Highgate is omitted altogether from the EmersonForbes Journals. Suchin'dication as is made of the date of this call points to July 31, 1833; the unpublished diary sh~ws it to' have occurred on August 5.8 All this would suggest, perhaps, to the generation which edited the journals of the major American men of letters that the student of this fifth decade of the twentieth century is of curiosity all compact, and that his ,head is bese'i with prying eyes-before, behind, and on both sides; yet if these few IJournals, III, 182. 2Centenary ed., V, 23. 3Consult Dr Scudder's Lonely Wayfaring Man (London, 1936), 13-14, 19-30, 204--9.·1 THE EMERSON CANON 479 instances are I indicative of the authenticity of the- text which the Emerson-Forbes Journals present, there is some justification for the questions that have arisen. tf the editors permitted what,seem to be glaring errors of omission '" in the accounts of Emerson's first meetings with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle-meetings whlch they' were well aware were of the greatest importance in Emerson's development-we may wish to examine the care with which they presented the thousands of pages containing materials patently less significan t. Less reprehensibJe, perhaps, than these errors of omission, but" ,equally disturbing .to the' student intent upon grasping the real Emerson, are errors of judgmen't. One, so long as it rem'ains uu"cor- ~e~'ted, will continue to plague investigators ben't on ·tracing the growth 'of Emerson's philosophical' powers. As in the case of Emerson's visits to the great British authors, it involves a crucial experien.ce in the intellectual history of Emerson. The editors .of the journals printed the passage of five pages which contains Emerson's first enunciation of his "First Philosophy" at the end of the 1833 diary. At the head of-this passage they set this note: "IThe following, probably written in 1833, are from ·a smaller note-book.l" This represents an ante-dating by two years or more of a passage which, all the evidence indicates, could not have been written as early as 1833. It is odd that the editors did not avail themselves of the dating given this passage by J. E. Cabot, who ··doubtless bas.~d his conclusion _on a correlation of this with other passages bearing on the same theme and stated emphatically: it • • • in June,'183S, I find in Emerson's journal the beginning of an '- attempt to expound the First Philosophy."4 He .then proceeds to quote, with minor alterations, extracts from the passage in question, together with others dra.wn, presumably, from other portions of the manuscript journal. The .result repre,sents two distinct versions , so that it is impossible, without referring both to the original manuscript, to determine which is authentic, or how far one surpasses the other in authenticity. It may be observed in passing that Professor Bliss Perry, in preparing The Heart oj Emerson's Journals , cautiously avoided an exact dating by making the notation , "From Notebook, undated" (p. 81). The problems raised by the content of these passages are crucial, and are gr~atly confused by the false dating. Concerned as Emerson 4Memoir, I, 246. 480 THE UNIVERSITY OF' TORONTO QUARTERLY is with the momentous distincti.on between Understanding and Reason-by which he came ultimately to resolve-to' his own satisfaction , at least-the epistemological problem? which troubled him in the process of writing Nature, this passage, if writt~n in 1833,' would have obviated all the difficulties which he experienced in the composition of the book. That is, if the "First Philosophy!' had , been in ,his mind as definitely as the passage indicates 'as early as' 1833, N~/ure should have been completed out of hand. Yet journals and letters combine to demonstrate that although it was begun in 1833, when his initial efforts gave him enough satisfaction to admit, HI like my book about Nature," he fussed over the little tract~ throughout the rest of the year, throughout 1834 and 1835, and until mid-September of 1836, when it was finally printed. Between September, 1833, and September, 1836-1ong years as Emerson impatiently reckoned time then, weighing his accomplishments against the passage of the years-his original plans were frequently modified. As late as June 28, 1836, he reported to his brother William: "My little book is nearly done. Its title is 'Nature.' Its contents w,ill not exceed in bulk Sampson Reed's .'Growth of the Mind.' My design is to follow'it by another essay, 'Spirit,' and'the two shall make a decen t volume." This design was never carried out~ Planned originally as a separate work, to provide a balance or counterpart for Nature, the projected essay on Spirit was eventually abandoned' altogether. What he had to say on the subject became the seventh and shortest chapter of the book Nature; ' while the preceding chapter, on "Idealism;" was inserted between the chapter dealing with ,N ature and her Uses and that on Spirit, in orde,r to make the transition and to help effect the "marriage of Matter and Mind." What, therefore , began as a separate essay became finally little more than an ' interpolation in another essay. The question why this should have , been -so,strikes at the very heart of the entire problem of the development of Emerson's philosophy;5 and the date of the passages on the "First Philosophy" is of the essence of the problem. Indeed, it is precisely the difficulties incident to the "marriage of Matter arid Mind" that had to be treated in these chapters (or in the proposed second essay on "Spirit") which caused the unseasonable delay in the writing of what is, after all, less a book-than a booklet. ~I hope to deal with this problem in a study of German cultural intl.uence~in America to be published shortly. THE EMERSON CANON ' 481 We are told b.y Cabot-and the journals are confirmatory in the main-that the first five chapters (including the "IntroductionH and the four Uses of N ature: ,"Commodity," "Beauty;" "Discipline ," and "Language") had been "for some time in hand." But iri proportion as he approached the critical point-that is, the section on Spirit,-and the epistemological problem which had to be faced and solved before jt couid be written-his difficulties increased. This chapter certainly was not composed before 1835; it is doubtful whether it received its final form before August" 1836. Cabot is OUf authority for the assertion that Chapter VI, on "Idealism," designed to bridge the gap between Nature and Spirit, was written last, of all.6 Thus Emerson reported, on August ,8, 1836, "The book on 'Nature' still lies on the table., There is always a crack in it, not easy to be soldered or wefded." The persistent crack, we have reason to pelieve, was a crack in his own thinking-his inability to span the "chasm," as he called it, between matter and mind. It is at this point that the question of the 1833-versus-1835 dating of the passage in the 10urnals intrudes most prominently into the , study of how and why, Emerson reached the philosophical conclusions .presented-in Nature. If the passage was written in 1833, as, the Emerson-Forbes Journals suggest~ the delay in completing Nature is unaccountable; if it was penned in "June, 1835," as Cabot says, the' del~y is explicable on the ground that the ~etaphysical basis of Nature did not come to hand until the latter date. Emerson first encountered the Kantian distinction between Understanding and Reason in Madame de Stael's Germany, very likely in the year 1821, and again in Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, as edited by James Marsh in 1829. By October I, 1832, he had discovered the "Germanick new-light writer," and a year ,later he had seen both Coleridge and Carlyle vis-:-a-vis. But there is no indication in the journals, unless we admit the mis-dated passagein the record, and there is none in the correspondence, sermons or lectures, that he occupied himself either seriously or intelligently with the distinction before 1834.. Except for the mis-dated and mis-placed passage, there are, between September, 1833, when Nature was beg\ln, and December, 1834, when Emerson turned his attention definitely upon the epistemological aspect of his problem, only two 'cursory allusions to the Kantian distinction in the journals, and 6Memoir. I, 259. . I 482 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY one in the letters. In ,the ,latter, dated -May 31, 1834, he still assumes that "Milton,,' Coleridge, and the Germans" all defined - Understanding and Reason in identical terms. The Reason mentioned in these is' either too, much like that which occurs in his sermons or too much like the revelatory and intuitive inner light of the Quakers to be identified with the Pure Reason of Kant. , There is much contern with the !lntagonism of mi~d and matter and'with the particulars of the "theory of nature," as these appear' in the first fiv~ sections of the .book Nature (1836); but there,is .no . coming-to-grips with the basic principles of epistemology, or anyI , , thing like a comprehension of them in terms of. German critical transcendentalism. Reason and Understanding are not, in the three references mentioned, consistently. emphasized with capital letters, as was his later practice. There is, in the interpretation given them) '. no indication of anything more than a loose parallelism with mind·and matter, respectively-certainly no glimmering of an understanding of either Kant's analytic or his dialectic. It is, of course~ not to be inferred from what has been said, that Emerson ever completely grasped Kant's distinction, or that, if he did, he 'was ' content to accept the 'severe limitations which Kant placed upon} the theoretical Reason. . Subsequent nO,tations in the journals suggest that Emerson did not arrive at anything like his nnal conception of Reason and Understanding before December, 1834, by which time, unless the editors of the "Journals are again in error, his examination of Table Talk and a re-examination ,of Coleridge's ,earlier works red him gradually. to an interpretation approximating that of Kant. After . December 2, 1834, Emerson's concern with the ,Kantian terms became a passionate and all-absorbing study, T~e distinctions between these two terms, or rather the Coleridgian 'explanation of them, and the applications to be made in the development ot the "First Philosophy of Boston" are specifically mentioned in the journals, sometimes at considerable length, between Dece~ber 2) 1834, and September 3, 1836, a total number of thirty-four' times. The answer to the question to what degree Emerson grasped the meaning and significanc~ of Kant and his'successors is importa~t, not only for a comprehension of Emerson but also for, the entire study of idealism in American thought; but it does n~t directly concern the matter in hand. What is very much to the point is that if the passage/ which represents in some respects the highestpoint 7JouTl1als, III, 235-7. THE EMERSON CANON 483 in Emerson's comprehension of t}le Kantian dichotomy, is dated 1833~ then it seems impossible that Emerson should have concerned . himself, often blunderingly, with the distinction between Reason and Understanding and its applications some fifty more times there..:. after. 1 That is, if he comprehended, in 1833, the essential problems I involved as clearly as he seems to in this passage, then the puzzleheadedness of a score or more references during 1833-5 becomes inexplicable. If, then, these few instances, all taken from the short section comprising sixty pages of the 1833 journal" are, indicative of ·what , may be expected of the five-thousand-odd pages that comp:rise the remainder of the printed journals, we may well w~ndet whether it would not be a profitable labour to collate the manuscript journals with the printed version and prepare a volume or two giving variant readings, furnishing the more important omissions, and otherwise indicating, by summary or synopsis, the c0!1tents of the passages deleted-many of which, we suspect, are of more importance to the serious :student of Emerson than the editors dreamed. The extreme importance of such deleted passages came to my 'attention when, follpwing the leads of Professor Josep~ Warren Beach)s provocative article on "Emerson and Evolution/' which appeared in this journal (July, 1934), I had the manuscript journals after 1849 searched for references to post-Kantian philosophers. The results revealed a score of passages omitted in the Journals which not only fully corroborate the surmises of Professor Beach but supply, at the same time, objective proof that Emerson)'s philosophy , far from being a haphazard affair of whim, rags and patches, and irreconcilable contrarieties, followed a course of consecutive develop~ent, traceable through four rather clearly defined epistemological phases. The demonstration of this four-fold progression, suggesting a complete reinterpretation of Emerson, must wait for another occasion. It is mentioned only to emphasize the importance to the progress of Emerson scholarship of a complete and authentic recording ofthe journals. Obviously better than a volume or two of addenda would be the alternative, provided the neces'sary perrt:lissions and adequate support were procurable, of re-editing the whole. ' Although the Emerson Memorial Association of Concord has rec~ntly graciously placed in t~e Harvard College Library an almost I complete typescript of the manuscript journals, access to and quo- 484 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY tation from the en,tire corpus are still far from unrestricted. It would seem that the sooner all these mate'rials are made freely available, the better it will be for all concerned. The availability of support for a printing of the complete journals, in view of the handsome subvention recently accorded Professor Rusk's expensive six-volume edition of Emerson's letters, would seem to be' not impossible . It'should be added that Mr Rusk's massive collectio~ of hitherto unpublished letters and parts of letters still leaves the student of Emerson under the troublesome necessity of consulting and collating half-a-,dozen othe~ books and ~ollections of special correspondence, some of them out of print and no longer procurable. The inchoate state of the Emerson canon is not peculiar to Emerson. That of Lowell is not better. Professor Thomas Ollive Mabbott's projected definitive edition of Poe's writings promises to clarify the canon of Poe. Professor Currier's bibliography of Whittier indicates all too clearly the bad state of WhitJier's text, ' and Professor Thompson's book on the young Longfellow hi~ts at some of the difficulties in the way of a thorough-going scholar in that field. In the case of Emerson there are at least two encouraging circumstances: the Emerson heirs are fully aware of the demands of sound scholarship, and they are ther~fore gradually making their valuable materials a~ailable. Meanwhile, much of what has been and is being written on the subject of Emerson is condemned to be provisional and tentative. , \ ...