With this dramatic exodus from Boston, Emerson started on his second life-altering journey, a nine-month tour of Europe. Like his shorter trip South six years before, this one strengthened him in body and mind, opening new intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional horizons. In Italy he visited ancient temples, catacombs, churches, monasteries, and museums. His New England eyes, used to the Puritan plain style, were overwhelmed by the Continent’s centuries of monumental classic sculpture, painting, and architecture. After touring Syracuse, he proceeded to Naples, where he responded to its glories but also rejected certain “contemptible particulars”.
To a hotel’s overdone splendors and the concern with proper dress, he challenged, “Who cares? Here’s for the plain old Adam, the simple genuine Self against the whole world”.115
1.28 Journal entry: “Here’s for the plain old Adam, the simple genuine Self against the whole world”. 12 March 1833.
Emerson, approaching his thirtieth birthday and proud to stand for the uncomplicated integrity of New World values and tastes, would not be intimidated by the Old World’s surface show.
Heading north, he visited Pompeii, before finally arriving in Rome, where for a month his aesthetic side luxuriated in views of the city’s commanding architecture, art, and historic sites such as the Coliseum. At the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, he witnessed Pope Gregory XVI “bless the palms”. “[W]hat a temple!” he declared of St. Peter’s, whose incense-laden aromas pleased him and whose “immensity” awed him. Going out by moonlight Emerson saw Bernini’s splendid piazza and fountain, and his enthusiasm spilled into his journal: “how faery beautiful! An Arabian night’s tale — ”.116
115 JMN 4: 141.
116 JMN 4: 152, 155–56.
1.29 Roman ruins, Emerson sepia watercolor, 1833.
He continued on to Florence, Milan, and Switzerland, then after five months arrived in Paris where he would stay for almost four weeks. At first, Emerson was impressed with this “vast, rich, old capital”. But after wandering about, he missed Italy’s antiquities and was less impressed, remarking that Paris was “a loud modern New York of a place”.117 Yet the city’s street scenes charmed him enough to record their details. And he absorbed certain antique riches at the Louvre while also bringing himself up-to-date on the latest European science by attending lectures at the Sorbonne. Then on July 13, a defining moment of the trip occurred on one of his visits to the Jardin des Plantes, or Jardin du Roi (King’s Garden), also the site of the Museum of Natural History. Its vast arrangements of plants and array of animal skeletons by genus and species gave Emerson a sudden revelation: all nature was organically unified! He was so excited that he jubilantly wrote in his journal: “I feel the centipede in me — cayman, carp, eagle, & fox. I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually ‘I will be a naturalist’.”118
117 JMN 4: 196, 197.
118 JMN 4: 200.
1.30 Jardin du Roi, Paris, 1820, North-South view.
1.31 Jardin des Plantes, National Museum of Natural History, Paris, 2010, South-North view.
A week afterward in late July, having reached England, Emerson steamed up the Thames, finding “nothing surprizing” [sic] in a London familiar from “books & pictures & maps & traditions”. After checking into his room at Russell Square, he stopped in St. Paul’s Cathedral during a service. In his journal he jotted, “Immense city. Very dull city”, but he admitted “an extreme pleasure to hear English spoken in the streets”. He was also an eager tourist at Westminster Abbey, the House of Commons, Regent’s Park, and the British Museum.119
Most importantly, Emerson paid visits to the great British writers whose ideas and works had been so influential in the United States. In early August, he met Coleridge (who was still in bed when Emerson arrived)—“a short thick old man” who “soiled” his neat clothing with snuff and declaimed against Unitarianism. Emerson found his conversation as difficult to follow as his writings.120 He visited Warwick Castle en route to Edinburgh and Glasgow, and in late August, he arrived at the remote home of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in the hamlet of Craigenputtock.
1.32 Thomas Carlyle in his early 40s, late 1830s.
An elated Emerson called this a “white day in my years”, signifying at once a climactic moment of perfection, startling clarity, and excitement. Carlyle’s enthusiasm for Emerson was equally high, and he invited his new friend to stay the night. The Scot was a garrulous storyteller and opinionated, but Emerson liked the Carlyles from the start: “Truth & peace & faith dwell with them & beautify them. I never saw more amiableness than is in his
119 JMN 4: 204–05, 413–14.
120 JMN 4: 408–11.
countenance”.121 Despite increasing political and philosophical differences, their friendship managed to last for their lifetimes.
Two days later, Emerson visited the elderly Wordsworth, who lamented society’s lack of “moral Culture”. Commenting on the American scene, the aging poet surprised him with a paradox: for social cohesiveness, he thought that the United States needed a civil war. When they turned to assess leading writers, Emerson defended both Carlyle and Goethe. But on favorite examples in Wordsworth’s own work, he apparently agreed with the old man’s preference for poems that moved the heart. Wordsworth took his young visitor to see his garden, and they walked for a mile. Emerson saw “nothing very striking about his appearance”, but thought him kind:
“I spoke as I felt with great respect of his genius”.122
Meeting these great men face-to-face, Emerson had been both impressed and sobered: they were quite human after all. He foresaw that “I shall judge more justly, less timidly, of wise men forevermore”. Emerson especially thought that all of them lacked “insight into religious truth. They have no idea of that species of moral truth which I call the first philosophy”.123 The day after noting this, while waiting for the right weather before sailing home, Emerson added, “Glad I bid adieu to England, the old, the rich, the strong nation, full of arts & men & memories; nor can I feel any regret in the presence of the best of its sons that I was not born here. I am thankful that I am an American as I am thankful that I am a man”.124 When his ship left Liverpool for New York on September 4, 1833, Emerson had learned two priceless lessons. In Naples he had announced himself an American
“Adam”, dismissing European trumperies to represent, if imperfectly, a new set of ethics. Now he felt completely independent, freed from slavish adulation of even the leading minds of England.125
Two days later at sea Emerson wrote, “I like my book about nature &
wish I knew where & how I ought to live. God will show me”.126 He was referring to nature as a world of facts for pursuing reality comparable to his similar search for truth in theological texts. Emerson’s lengthy European tour had only strengthened his focus on that familiar Romantic trinity — Nature, Self, and God. The trip had not marked so much a turning,
121 JMN 4: 219, 220.
as a firming point. The arts and history of ancient cities had widened his perspective, and only strengthened, not shaken, his Yankee identity. Science in Paris had not sparked but rather rekindled his awareness of nature as a world for pursuing truth comparable to theology. And visiting the great literary figures of Britain had given him a strangely empowering revelation.
Far from being in awe of these men as inaccessible titans, Emerson was measuring their biases and foibles as well as their virtues. Though he might learn from such geniuses, he recognized that they were, after all, men, and that his ideals and abilities were as fresh as theirs once had been. In his journal, safely letting slip more than a touch of youthful arrogance and native pride, Emerson allowed that he, the young American, had found these exemplars of European culture less sensitive than he to the ethical life.