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Swedenborgian Spirit and Thoreauvian Sense: Another Look at Correspondence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Brian R. Harding
Brian R. Harding
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Extract

Since Thoreau's reputation today rests largely on his grasp of concrete reality – on his ability to suggest what he called the ‘hard bottom and rocks’ of that reality in his prose – the connexion between his works and the theories of the mystic Swedenborg does not receive much attention. In recent studies of Thoreau, when the Swedish mystic appears in die text, the mention is commonly brief and dismissive: Thoreau's imagination is often defined in contra-distinction to that of the ‘saint’ of the Transcendentalists. Answering a friend's enquiry in 1856, Thoreau himself admitted that he had not read Swedenborg, ‘except to a slight degree’, but he also stated that he had the highest regard for the mystic's ‘wonderful knowledge of our interior and spiritual life’. The ‘wonderful knowledge’ to which Thoreau here refers was revealed to Thoreau, and to his age, in the theory of ‘correspondence’ between the ‘interior and spiritual’ and the exterior, natural – or material – world. To be aware of that wisdom, Thoreau did not need to read much in Swedenborg's own works, since die theory of correspondence was ' thanks to a number of interpreters ' in the air of New England when Thoreau was developing as a writer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , April 1974 , pp. 65 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 In the index to Harding, Walter's Thoreau HandbookGoogle Scholar Swedenborg is not listed. The dismissive reference to the ‘saint’ of the Transcendentalists occurs in Anderson, Charles R.'s The Magic Circle of Walden (1968), p. 129Google Scholar. Other recent studies in which Swedenborgian correspondence is treated as uncongenial to Thoreau are discussed below. Notable exceptions to the dismissive trend are to be found in Paul, Sherman's ‘The Wise Silence: Sound as the Agency of Correspondence in Thoreau’, New England Quarterly, 22 (1949), 511–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in his The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration (1958)Google Scholar. Paul fully acknow ledges the importance of correspondential vision for Thoreau, though he does not trace its effects in Thoreau's attitude to language as I do.

2 The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Walden Edition (Boston, 1906), vol. 6, p. 300Google Scholar. Future references to Thoreau's works will be to this edition and will be included in parentheses in my text. Vols. 7 through 20 of The Writings are also numbered Vols. 1 through 14 of the Journal. For the sake of clarity I have followed the Journal volume numbering, designating these volumes ‘J’ in my text.

3 The belief that correspondential theory was a ‘pious fraud’ as far as Thoreau was con cerned is Joel Porte's. Porte argues, in his Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalism in Conflict (1965)Google Scholar, that the theory was of no use to Thoreau as a writer and had to be discarded.

4 In addition to Porte's book-length statement of this view, one can find it stated prominently in William Drake's essays on Walden and A Week in Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Paul, Sherman (1962). See especially pp. 73–4.Google Scholar

5 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Volume I, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Spiller, Robert E. and Ferguson, A. R. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 67–8Google Scholar. Hereafter referred to as Nature, Addresses, and Lectures.

6 The Complete Worlds of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Emerson, Edward Waldo (Boston, 1903–4), vol. 4, p. 142Google Scholar. Hereafter referred to as Emerson.

7 Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, p. 18Google Scholar. The lecture on English Literature is printed in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Vol. I, 1833–1836, ed. Whicher, S. E. and Spiller, R. E. (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 217–32Google Scholar. The quotation from Oegger occurs on p. 220. The translation of Oegger, 's Le Vrai MessieGoogle Scholar that Emerson read in manuscript in 1835 and that was published in Boston in 1842 is reprinted in Cameron, Walter's Emerson the Essayist (Harrford, Conn., 1945), vol. 2, pp. 83–99Google Scholar. Emerson, 's interest in Oegger is discussed in the first volume of Emerson the Essayist, pp. 295–8Google Scholar. Thoreau read Oegger in 1842, copying a passage in his journal (J, vol. 1, p. 320).

8 Emerson, vol. 8, p. 20.Google Scholar

9 Thoreau, J., vol. 1, pp. 74–5, 107.Google Scholar

10 Joel Porte, op. cit., considers that this passage makes Thoreau a Lockean rather than a Transcendentalist, though, in an odd variation on Thoreau's ‘purely sensuous’, Porte sees Thoreau arriving by ‘purely Lockean means’ at the ecstatic vision of a Plotinus.

11 Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, p. 10Google Scholar. I have quoted the version of the phrase printed in Nature (1836)Google Scholar and restored by Alfred R. Ferguson. For the history of the phrase's corruption into ‘part and parcel’, see Nature, Addresses, and lectures (1971), p. 288.Google Scholar

12 The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Vol. II, 1836–1838, ed. Whicher, S. E. et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 168–71Google Scholar. The distinction between the ‘Transcendentalist’ and those who ‘rest always in the spontaneous consciousness’ is made in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Vol. V, 1835–1838, ed. Sealts, Merton M. Jr., (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 240.Google Scholar

13 In his ‘The Wise Silence: Sound as the Agency of Correspondence in Thoreau’, Paul shows that correspondence did not mean merely a merging with nature for Thoreau. Thoreau's problem, as Paul interprets it, was to find a ‘delicate balance’ between incommunicable ecstasy and the scientific control of his vision. In The Shores of America, Paul explains Thoreau's development as a movement from the ‘subjective’ and ‘literary’ correspondence of sound to the ‘objective’ correspondence of sight (Shores, p. 343)Google Scholar. The correspondences that I discuss in the second part of my essay resist this classification.

14 The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Rusk, Ralph L. (New York, 1939), vol. 3, p. 342.Google Scholar

15 Aesthetic Papers, ed. Peabody, Elizabeth (Boston, 1849), pp. 112, 123.Google Scholar

16 Wilkinson, James John Garth, Emanuel Swedenborg: A Biography (Boston, 1849), pp. 96, 99.Google Scholar

17 Wilkinson's version of the theory appears in Aesthetic Papers, pp. 137–9Google Scholar; Oegger's statement, which occurs in The True Messiah, is reprinted in Cameron, , Emerson the Essayist, vol. 1, p. 299Google Scholar; Emerson's account of the infancy of the language comes in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, p. 19.Google Scholar

18 Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, p. 18Google Scholar; Early Lectures, vol. 1, p. 220.Google Scholar

19 One modern reader who does not like it is Reger, William, whose ‘Beyond Metaphor’, Criticism, 12 (1970), 333–44Google Scholar, argues that Thoreau was an ‘objectivist’ who did not use symbols and who distrusted generalities as much as Hemingway's Frederic Henry.

20 Channing's interest in the ‘philological side’ of Thoreau's writings is mentioned in Matthiessen, F. O.'s American Renaissance (1941), p. 87.Google Scholar

21 The best analyses of Thoreau's wit, both of them concerned with Walden, are: Moldenhauer, Joseph J., ‘Paradox in Walden’, Twentieth Century Interpretations of Walden, ed. Ruland, Richard (1968), pp. 73–84Google Scholar; Anderson, Charles R., The Magic Circle of Walden (1968), Pp. 17–31, 34–6, 47–56.Google Scholar

22 J. vol. 10, pp. 156–7. Paul, , The Shores of America, p. 195Google Scholar, states that reflexion was ‘nature playing at the game of correspondence’ but sees this as part of the ‘confident subjective idealism’ that Thoreau was to lose after A Week. The date of my quotation from the journals, 2 November 1857, shows that Thoreau's interest in this particular correspondence outlived his ‘subjective idealism’.

23 Fussell, Edwin S., ‘The Red Face of Man’, in Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays. p. 156.Google Scholar

24 Abrams, M. H., ‘The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor’, Kenyon Review, 19 (1957). 113–30.Google Scholar

25 To Wilkinson, ‘correspondence’ is a ‘divine equation’ of which the analogies perceived by man can give only a partial notion though they are its ‘direct offspring’ (Emanuel Sweden-borg, pp. 94, 262)Google Scholar. Thoreau's use of the term ‘correspondence’distinguishes it from ‘analogy’ by a punning insistence on a ‘response’ to the perceived analogy, as my examples here show.

26 J, vol. 4. p. 126.