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The Soldier and the Scholar: Emerson's Warring Heroes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Edward Stessel
Edward Stessel
Affiliation:
Edward Stessel is Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York, Purchase, New York 10577.
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Extract

He is tempted to cease battling; his blood begins to chill; he hears the frost-king's lullaby. But as he is about to yield to sleep, he is startled back into militance by the cry of a titmouse, a small “scrap of valor” that “just for play/Fronts the north-wind.” The courage of the bird returns to him his own and he adopts its Emersonian doctrine that “the soul, if stout within/Can arm impregnably the skin.”

The freshness that Emerson's contemporaries found in his writings derived largely from this brisk militant quality. In an age that Emerson thought lacking in a “literature of Heroism,” his own writings were a constant call to bravery (CWE, 2, 247–48). And his most consistent image for that bravery was the soldier. Men, he said, “should calmly front the morrow” as if it were a battle-formation; they should not be “cowards fleeing before a revolution,” but instead should be “advancing on Chaos and the dark” (CWE, 2, 47, 297). One's life should be “a battle, a conquest”; one should state his convictions as boldly as if he wereopening hostilities: “Every principle is a war-note” (CWE, 9, 353). Even those in sedentary occupations should display the bravery of warriors.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , August 1985 , pp. 165 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Poems, 9 of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition, 12 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904), 233–36Google Scholar. Further references to this edition will be placed in the text, and designated as CWE. For brevity's sake, two other abbreviations also will be used: J for The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Emerson, Edward Waldo and Forbes, Waldo Emerson, 10 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909–1914)Google Scholar; and L for The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Rusk, Ralph L., 6 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939)Google Scholar.

2 Emerson, , “Self-Reliance” (alternate text), Essays, ed. Paul, Sherman (New York: Dutton, 1971), p. 34Google Scholar.

3 Rusk, Ralph L., The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Scribner's, 1949), p. 55Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., 20, 34, 37–38.

5 This metaphor of peacemaking as medicine occurs even more clearly in the Journals: “If one nation refused to fight … they would communicate the contagion of their virtue and innoculate all mankind” (J, 4, 297)Google Scholar.

6 Frost, Robert, “On Emerson,” Selected Prose of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), pp. 118–19Google Scholar. It may not be an accident that the word soldier never appears in the “Concord Hymn.” Emerson could celebrate the courage of the Minute Men more easily because these men were not regular soldiers, but loosely-disciplined “milish.” The transcendental Emerson, so leery of the least threat to the individual spirit, could admire men who had fought but had not submerged their wills within an army.

7 “The puny race of Scholars in this country,” he asserted, “have no counsel to give, and are not felt.” It was no wonder that Americans could find no better use for a scholar than to “ask him to deliver a temperance lecture, or to be a member of the school committee” (J, 7, 30, 36).

8 Pound, Ezra, “Sestina: Altaforte,” Collected Early Poems (New York: New Directions, 1976), pp. 108–09Google Scholar.

9 SrHolmes, Oliver Wendell, “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Two Memoirs, 11 of Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), 88Google Scholar.

10 Guy, the hero of another poem of Emerson's (CWE, 9, 33–34), raises the frown into an ultimate weapon:

Fearless Guy had never foes,

He did their weapons decompose…

If on the foeman fell his gaze,

Him it would promptly blind or craze.

11 Emerson's disappointment in his protégé accounts for the waspishness of his speech at Thoreau's graveside (you could not call it a eulogy): “I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party.” (CWE, 10, 280)

12 Their elders in the Transcendental movement did not seem much more effectual or practical. Edward Palmer, for instance, had renounced the use of money, and wanted two church services each Sunday. (Emerson, more practical, preferred only one: “If the sermon was good I wished to think of it; if it was bad, one was enough.”) And the quixotic Bronson Alcott had malnourished the Fruitlands community by imposing such strict vegetarianism that even some “degraded” vegetables were banned – those that grew downward into the earth. Only the “aspiring,” upward-growing ones were eaten. The Fruitlanders also abstained from eggs and honey, rather than rob hens and bees of the fruits of their labors, and farmed without animal manures because these were “too stimulating to the soil.” See Sanborn, F. B. and Harris, William T., A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1965), 2, 379Google Scholar; also Shepard, Odell, Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott (New York: Greenwood, 1968), p. 363Google Scholar.

13 A literary philosopher like Tolstoi or Stendhal – or Emerson – is apt to be intrigued by war, because in Situations of extremity, a person's true beliefs will replace his polite ones. There were, Emerson thought, “scriptures written invisibly on men's hearts” that could only “be read by war-fires, and by eyes in the last peril.” (CWE, 11, 303)

14 As early as 1847 he had moved toward an elitist viewpoint, dividing mankind into “well-built heads” and heads that were built badly. A member of the first group would be a “poet, king, founder of cities, rich, magnetic”; a member of the second a “bungler, driveler, unlucky, heavy and tedious” (CWE, 10, 44–45). Who will succeed and who will fail is predetermined by natural endowments: “Those who conquer – the victory was born with them” (J, 8, 240). The matter seems almost mechanical to Emerson. “You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber…. When each comes forth from his mother's womb, the gate of gifts closes behind him” (CWE, 6, 10–11).

15 Success in business as well as in government, Emerson thought, required “a trace of ferocity.” Even Utopian communities had found they could survive only by “installing Judas as steward…. Of the Shaker society it was…a sort of proverb…that they always sent the devil to market” (CWE, 6, 66).

16 I have modernized Emerson's spelling from “knaw” into “gnaw.”

17 Military history shows that this is generally the case. But one does not expect to hear it from the author of the “Concord Hymn,” that great celebration of the volunteer soldier.

18 He thought that Wendell Phillips and Garrison so totally had donated themselves to Abolition that they had only “a platform-existence, and no personality.” He admitted that they were “inestimable for workers on audiences; but for a private conversation, one to one, I must prefer to take my chance with that boy in the corner” (J, 8, 434). Emerson loved Abolition as a virtue, but could not abide the virtuous. He did admire Abolition's martyrs, like Elisha Lovejoy, murdered by a mob. But being dead, they could not coerce him morally and thus restrict his freedom. “Freedom boundless I wish. I will not pledge myself not to drink wine, not to drink ink, not to lie, and not to commit adultery, lest I hanker tomorrow to do these very things by reason of my having tied my hands” (J, 5, 253). Believing in the “infinitude of the private man,” he did not want to limit that infinitude by any commitment whatsoever.

19 His reluctance to be caught in any one position is expressed in what may be his most famous statement: “A foolish consistency is the hob-goblin of little minds…. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do” (CWE, 2, 57).

20 Rusk, p. 379.

21 James, Henry, Hawthorne (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), p. 136Google Scholar.

22 Occasionally Emerson would wonder whether “this mad war has not made us all mad” (J, 9, 501), and would list among the benefits of age the prospect that death would soon remove him from “the war,” as well as from “debt…the blues…the dentist's hands…the next winter, and the high prices” (J, 10, 51). Once he told an English friend that the War was the most “wanton piece of mischief that bad boys ever devised”: see §32, Emerson–Clough Letters (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1968)Google Scholar, unpaginated. But these doubts were only momentary. Much more often he worried that a failure of Northern nerve might end the War prematurely, or that too-lenient terms of surrender might be offered to the South.

23 He had not always been so innocently willing to allow a trial-by-battle to determine right and wrong. When the Abolitionist senator Charles Sumner was cudgelled almost to death in the Capitol Building by a South Carolinian colleague, Emerson had commented that “men's bodily strength, or skill with knives and guns, is not usually in proportion to their knowledge and mother wit, but oftener in the inverse ratio” (CWE, 11, 248).

24 Wilson, Edmund, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford, 1969), p. 232Google Scholar.

25 Hawthorne to Henry Bright, 14 Nov. 1861, cited in Mather, Edward, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Modest Man (New York: Crowell, 1940), p. 317Google Scholar. Mrs Hawthorne similarly wrote in her Diary for July 1, 1862, “I heard Mr. Emerson lecture on war. Furious wind.”

26 SrHolmes, Oliver Wendell, “The inevitable Trial,” Pages from an Old Volume of Life, 8 of Works, 86, 117Google Scholar.

27 Lowell, James Russell, “Reconstruction,” Political Essays, 6, of The Complete Writings (New York: AMS, 1966), 261Google Scholar. For Lowell, the War was a “fairy tale” in which the sleeping beauty, America, lulled by prosperity, was woken by the “first fiery kiss” of battle.

28 Whitman, , “First O Songs for a Prelude,” “Beat! Beat! Drums!” and “The Wound-Dresser,” Drum Taps, in Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition, in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 278–79Google Scholar.

29 Parkman, Francis, Letters, ed. Jacobs, Wilbur R. (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 1, 157Google Scholar. Charles Eliot Norton was perhaps the most vehement of all, feeling that suffering and loss of life would toughen the United States and rescue it from luxury and softness. He was willing to accept that “a million men should die on the battlefield”; he thought that human life was overvalued in America. An early Social Darwinian, he held the harsh view that progress could only proceed through the wasting of individual lives – and that contrary beliefs were “feeble sentimentalities.” Horace Bushnell and Orestes Brownson held opinions similar to Norton's. See Fredrickson, George M., The Inner Civil War (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 74–75, 81Google Scholar.

30 Whitman, , Specimen Days, in The Collected Prose, 2, of The Works of Walt Whitman (New York: Minerva, 1969), 30, 66Google Scholar.

31 Melville, Herman, “Supplement,” Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, ed. Cohen, Hennig (New York: Yoseloff, 1963), p. 198Google Scholar.

32 Holmes, , “My Hunt after ‘The Captain,’” Pages from an Old Volume of Life, p. 42Google Scholar.

33 Lowell, James Russell, “Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration,” Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mufflin, 1925), pp. 340–47Google Scholar.

34 Whitman, , The Wound-Dresser: A Series of Letters Written from the Hospitals in Washington During the War of the Rebellion, ed. Burke, Richard Maurice (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898), p. 123Google Scholar; Specimen Days, in The Collected Prose, p. 75.

35 Hawthorne to Henry Bright, 8 March 1863, cited in Aaron, Daniel, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Oxford, 1973), p. 8Google Scholar.

36 Slater, Joseph, ed., The Correspondence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 536, 541–42Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., pp. 541–42.

38 Ibid., p. 542.

39 The poorness of Emerson's war poems may also be due, in part, to dwindling vigor; he was almost fifty-eight when the Civil War began. In “Terminus,” he tells of a visit from the “god of bounds,” who, like a Muse in reverse, shuts off the taps of poetry:

No farther shoot

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.

Fancy departs; no more invent…. (CWE, 9, 251–52)

40 This does not mean that, to be successful, poems must argue both sides of a question. Many fine poems do not argue at all. Others argue only one side, but at least suggest that other points of view exist – or else argue against attitudes so widely held that it can be assumed the reader knows them. (A carpe diem poem is a dialogue with Prudence, though the arguments for Prudence are not necessarily given in the poem.) But what is fatal to a poem is a feeling on the reader's part that a complex issue is being oversimplified for purposes of propaganda. As Yeats has said, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” See Yeats, William Butler, “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 331Google Scholar.

41 Rusk, 256–57. “Among his fellow Concordians,” Rusk says, “Emerson soon came to be respected, if not marvelled at, but was hardly esteemed an equal.” His neighbor Sam Staples, who at various times had been a “Bar-tender, clerk, constable and jailer, deputy sheriff, representative in the General Court, auctioneer, real estate agent, and gentleman farmer,” epitomized the attitude of Concord: “I suppose there's a great many things that Mr. Emerson knows that I could n't understand; but I know that there's a damn sight of things that I know that he don't know anything about.” This same Sam Staples – who had once been Thoreau's jailer – was to bring to the bedside of the dying Emerson the finest consolation in the power of the man-of-the-world: a bottle of choice brandy.

42 Rusk, pp. 420–21; McQuiston, Raymer, The Relationship of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Public Affairs (Lawrence, Kan.: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1923), p. 52Google Scholar. According to MeQuiston, Emerson took “an unexpected amount of interest” in West Point. The great individualist did not find its regimen of discipline in any way distasteful, and even recommended that the system of exams be toughened.

43 Rusk, pp. 421–23, 425.

44 Gohdes, Clarence and Silver, Rollo G., eds., Faint Clews & Indirections: Manuscripts of Walt Whitman and His Family (New York: AMS, 1965), p. 135Google Scholar.

45 Rusk, pp. 369, 411, 428.

46 Pope, Alexander, “Epistle to a Lady: Of the Characters of Women,” Epistles to Several Persons (London, Methuen, 1951), p. 67Google Scholar.

47 This integrity would have been worth, he thought, the sacrifice of “the lives of all this generation of American men, if they had been demanded” (CWE, 11, 345).

48 Slater, , ed., The Correspondence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, 547–48Google Scholar.

49 Lowell, , “A Fable for Critics,” Complete Poetical Works, p. 127Google Scholar.

50 Cited in Mather, , Nathaniel Hawthorne, pp. 159–60Google Scholar.

51 Emerson did not lapse until his final years – if at all – into the smiling senility that some Critics have seen as his condition from the mid-1860s on. During the late 1860s and the '70s he suffered an annoying but not fundamental affliction: occasionally a word or proper name would flee his memory. Unfortunately these blockages – which he wittily called his “embargoes” – were more obvious to him and to those who surrounded him than other, much more serious afflictions might have been.

52 A genius, Emerson admits, might occasionally have to isolate himself because – like a Leyden jar – he must “stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity” (CWE, 7, 6–7).

53 Emerson had always had a slight distrust of solitude. Before the age of twenty, he had put the queston to himself, “Is solitude purer than Society?” and answered, “Eve yielded in solitude to the tempter” (J, 1, 98). He continued to link solitude with temptation: the scholar's or artist's withdrawal from the world could too easily become “a private good, robbed from the rest” (CWE, 10, 19–20). And removal from the world could turn scholars into “incomplete, pedantic, useless, ghostly creatures.” (CWE, 1, 17) For a discussion of this point, see Porte, Joel, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1966), p. 22Google Scholar.

But to the young Emerson, action was no more than a means by which the scholar could “improve his discourse” and make himself one “whose words were loaded with life.” Ultimately, actions were no more than raw material. No action was valuable unless it was “converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin” – in private, through labors as cloistered as the silkworm's (CWE, 1, 94–96). Only through withdrawal could the scholar insulate himself from public opinion and speak as an individual. He would have to “embrace solitude as a bride” and “have his glees and his glooms alone” (CWE, 1, 173–75). The young Emerson, though distrusting excessive solitude, thought privacy a precondition for the scholar's life. But the older man who wrote Society and Solitude saw such privacy as little short of vice.

54 Emerson does admit that “there are men of the most peaceful way of life… who, if they speak are heard, though they speak in a whisper.” But the example that follows is not that of a sage but of a barrister “reputed to have made thirty or forty thousand pounds per annum in representing the claims of railroad companies” (CWE, 7, 79–80). No moonshine here! Emerson no longer recognizes any speech as eloquent unless it has a practical result.

55 Rusk, p. 437.

56 Letters and Social Aims may not be a totally accurate gauge of Emerson's thought in his last decade of life. Like his earlier work, it was mined out of journals and lectures that sometimes had been written years before. But unlike his previous work, it was not mined entirely by Emerson. Some of the work of selecting and combining was performed by his daughter Ellen and James Elliot Cabot. Cabot himself called the volume “almost posthumous,” and recorded that Emerson spoke of it as “your book.” Ellen Emerson, as well, claimed to have done much of the “interesting & painful” work her father could no longer do. But nothing, it appears, was done without his approval, and Ellen Emerson has testified to her father's stubbornness “in defense of his own taste” (see Rusk, pp. 485–87). He was never less than final judge of the book's contents.

57 However, he remains a model for all other men. The thinker must adopt “the art of war” and ride “to battle horsed…on logic” (CWE, 8, 96). The orator's speech must be “action, as the general's word of command…is action” (CWE, 8, 115). Similarly, the scholar's courage should be “as terrible as the Cid's,” though it grows Out of his spirit and “not out of brawn.” (CWE, 8, 311–12)

58 Charles Ives's Essays before a Sonata, written at the turn of the century, sounds as transcendental as the writings of Thoreau. But Ives had made himself a millionaire in the insurance business. Thoreau almost certainly would have felt that Ives had missed the point. See Ives, Charles, Essays Before a Sonata, and Other Writings, ed. Boatwright, Howard (New York: Norton, 1962)Google Scholar.

59 This paragraph owes much to Fredrickson, pp. 166–76.