Emerson: The Mind on Fire III

I'm at the middle of the book, and it seems to be getting more interesting at this point. The five surviving Emerson brothers are starting to die off. Edward died in 1834 at the age of twenty-nine. More significantly, Charles died in 1836 at the age of twenty-seven. Charles was close to Waldo and had planned to marry later that year. Waldo had added two rooms to his house so that the couple could move in with him. An organization that came to be known as the Transcendental Club began to meet in the Boston area, and although Emerson wasn't particularly fond of it, it indicated that Emerson was forming a sort of movement that came to be centered around his house in Concord. At this point, Emerson's primary source of income seems to have been his lectures.

A heterogeneous group of people began to meet with Emerson at his house. One was Bronson Alcott, who was a rather eccentric educator and a utopian thinker. He was not thought to be an effective writer. His ventures were usually unrealistic, and he was often unable to support his family. Nevertheless, his daughter, Louisa May Alcott managed to become a successful novelist. Another was Margaret Fuller, a prominent journalist and feminist. Fuller added a dimension to Emerson's group, but she was also not a good writer. She died in a shipwreck in 1850 at the age of forty, which I mentioned in my discussion of the Thoreau biography. Thoreau himself probably met Emerson when he attended a lecture by him in 1835 when he was a student at Harvard. After graduating in 1837, he met Emerson at his house and began to become Emerson's disciple, though I think that that is a rather strong word to use, given Thoreau's independence. Richardson's book emphasizes how close Emerson and Thoreau were for a time. I think that, in Emerson's quest to start a movement, Thoreau may have been the only person who was of much help.

Emerson published Nature in 1836, and it became the centerpiece of the transcendentalism movement. At first the essay was a little controversial, but that died down. I have been reluctant to read Emerson because I know how he developed his ideas, I don't agree with all of them, and Thoreau was probably a better writer. Thoreau was a perfectionist in both reading and writing. He preferred to read everything in the original text, including Latin and Greek, and his writing was straightforward, based on his own experiences, and did not contain many abstract ideas. Emerson, on the other hand, was a frenetic reader, and was actively trying to piece together some sort of gospel, which did not occur to him spontaneously. He wanted to identify a spiritual essence in nature, whereas I consider that a waste of time, because it doesn't exist. This tendency, I think, places Emerson within a now-dead cultural environment that was still active during his lifetime. Up until the late nineteenth century, spiritualism was quite popular, and you could find it in Alfred Russel Wallace, Robert Owen and George Eliot. I think it is ironic that the system that Emerson was trying to replace, Unitarianism, is more rationalistic, and that survived while transcendentalism vanished. Another area in which I think he was incorrect was in his emphasis on individualism. He seemed to think that people could be trained to become more individualistic, and, though I suppose that might occur occasionally, for the most part it is an inborn trait. It is a commonplace statement now that individualistic people were more attracted to the U.S. from other countries than collectivists. Moreover, I noticed from an early age that I was individualistic, and I know that I was born that way, and that no essay would ever have affected me in that respect. Despite the above criticisms, transcendentalism probably did have some positive effects. It can be seen as a precursor to a respect for nature and environmentalism. Furthermore, it is well establish now that exposure to nature can be quite therapeutic.

So, I am looking at this as a story about cultural evolution that has little to do with science or theoretical considerations. Indirectly, Emerson was attempting to differentiate American culture from European culture in order to reduce the appearance of vassalage. But Emerson was hardly exposed to psychology, anthropology, sociology or evolution, so it would have been difficult for him to say anything that I would find interesting. Even so, I have to admire him for living at a time when people were open to new ideas and enjoyed discussing them with others – sooooo nineteenth century!