Emerson: The Mind on Fire II

At the time of their marriage, Ellen was already showing signs of tuberculosis, and she died on February 8, 1831, at the age of nineteen. They had been happily married, and this occurring after less than two years was a blow to Emerson. On Christmas Day, 1832, he left on a long trip to Europe, from which he returned on October 8. He was not at all wealthy at that point, and lived very frugally. Later, he received an inheritance from the estate of Ellen's father, but it wasn't large. On the trip, he spent time in several countries and met people. In Rome, he met John Stuart Mill, in Paris, he was struck by the Jardin des Plantes, which stimulated his interest in botany. But he really hit the jackpot in England and Scotland, where he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was the closest to his age, and they maintained a long friendship. When he returned to Massachusetts, he switched to becoming a lecturer and a writer. At a lecture in Plymouth, he met Lydia Jackson, who was about a year older than he was. They married on September 14, 1835. Eventually they moved to Concord, which was the ancestral home of the Emersons. He disliked her name, and they changed it to "Lydian." Besides being nearly a year older than Emerson, she was more conservative than Ellen, but she also seems to have been somewhat more intellectual. In any case, the marriage lasted up until Emerson's death in 1882. While all this is going on, there are various illnesses and deaths in Emerson's family, which have consequences with respect to living arrangements and financial support. I am trying to avoid writing about that, because it is not central to the narrative.   

Richardson is doing a good job showing the development of Emerson's ideas. It is apparent that he didn't really want to be a minister and wasn't a particularly good preacher. He seems to have taken it upon himself to distill a new conceptual model that would be suitable in the mid-1800's. He drew ideas from his readings and travels in order to, in effect, transform Unitarianism into Transcendentalism. It is apparent that he was quite ambitious and energetic in this pursuit.

I am already starting to see Emerson mainly as a participant in the history of ideas who only makes sense if you look at him in the context of the intellectual currents in the U.S. and U.K. at the time. Unfortunately, he came along just as the Romantic poets were dying off, and before Darwin came along. Thus, like Thomas Carlyle, it is hard for me to see him as a force whose ideas have much significance today. Carlyle seems to have led a pro-Germany movement that encouraged intellectuals to adopt German cultural attitudes from the time of Goethe, but that all collapsed in the twentieth century. I now like to use G.H. Lewes as a barometer of intellectual trends in England during the nineteenth century. First he was a Romantic and a friend of Leigh Hunt; as the century progressed, he switched his focus to Goethe and Germany, like Thomas Carlyle. Finally, before he died in 1878, he was essentially a Darwinian devoted to the scientific method. Generally, it appears to me that Emerson was too old to be a Romantic and too young to be a Darwinian. It is also relevant that he had studied little science.

With this in mind, I'm not terribly excited to read much Emerson myself, but I will follow Richardson's examples and analysis in this book. One of Emerson's weaknesses, I think, is his belief in the "great man" theory:

Every great man does in his nature point out and imply the existence and well being of all the institutions and orders of a state.

I think that it would be fair to say that Emerson considered himself a "great man." Not a good sign. I've also been thinking about Emerson's famous statement from Self-Reliance:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

When I first read this some time ago I found it interesting and tended to agree with it. Given what I know now, it can also be seen as self-aggrandizement by Emerson. And, based on my readings on neurology by Vinod Goel and Robert Sapolsky, it is normal for aging human brains to follow methods that they learned earlier in life. Understandably, Emerson could not have known this.