As the United States aggressively expanded geographically and commercially, politicians and entrepreneurs often sounded a note of supreme confidence in the nation’s prospects. Emerson was caught up in this same “can do” — or in 1830s terminology, “go-ahead” — spirit. But beneath the country’s outward bravado, he also noted a moral crisis. As a
62 Courage and Conscience: Black & White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 10, 17, 30, 80.
Christian steeped in classical Stoicism at home and school, Emerson’s sense of the centrality of ethics in personal or public life had developed early and been sealed at Harvard. This felt philosophical position might have been at odds with the materialistic spirit of the times. Yet his ambition — a continuous theme in his journals of the 1820s — combined with his aunt Mary Moody Emerson’s high hopes that he might become a great poet-prophet, gave him two linked imperatives: he must achieve both artistic and spiritual prominence as well as embody the good. This imperative to action soon forced him, though reluctantly at first, to enter America’s array of social reform.
1.19 Title page, Emerson’s Wideworld 2, 11 July 1822.
Alongside these lofty goals, however, arose familiar self-doubts that now fed his vocational uncertainty. Like most young adults, he focused on fundamentally unanswerable questions about the purpose and meaning of life, sounding now self-indulgent, now on the verge of despair. Throughout the 1820s, his journals are filled with musings about available life choices and his recurring worry that, were he to die at this age, the world would never remember that he had lived. In an impermanent, insecure world, he wondered what avenues might be open to a young man of his interests whose reserved temperament seemed to conflict with family and social expectations.
After Harvard, Waldo began teaching school, a route that his father had taken before settling on the ministry. Older brother William’s school for girls in Boston was a natural place to begin, but Waldo soon became frustrated. In a letter profiling his life to a college classmate in early 1823, he wrote with wry self-effacement, “My sole answer & apology to those who inquire about my studies is — I keep school. —I study neither law, medicine, or divinity, and write neither poetry nor prose”.63 He went on to discuss academic studies, literature, and theology, revealing how deeply he missed the life of the mind. Then in December, William, preparing for the ministry, left for Germany to study “higher criticism” at the University of Göttingen. This emerging field of textual studies examined the Bible not as the inspired Word of God but as a cultural artifact whose meanings emerged in the contexts of history, literature, and anthropology. The religiously orthodox recoiled from such study, deeming it heretical. But the brightest young American divinity students welcomed the exciting scrutiny of scriptural texts for a spiritual reason: it was the soundest means of answering skeptical critiques of religion. Emerson, already familiar with this approach at Harvard and fascinated by William’s firsthand reports, increasingly felt that he was wasting his time and talents.
For all his curiosity and avid reading, Emerson knew how to pace himself. Perhaps from early childhood, when his father expected him to read before he was even three, he had begun to develop a strategy of self-defense. If too much were asked of him, he would not do it, relieving himself of the demand. At Boston Public Latin School, Waldo did not earn the same high grades later achieved by his younger brothers Edward and Charles. And as we have seen, Waldo’s Harvard record, though he had been a runner-up for essay and public speaking prizes, put him only in the middle of his class. In contrast, his brothers would both be first in theirs.
No less able than they, Waldo read widely outside the required curriculum, a habit that meant he might put assignments second. It also reflected his independent streak. Following his own bent was evidently more important than achieving the highest class standing.
Besides, Waldo grew to be conscious of the benefit of relief from rigorous work. In July 1828, after Edward — overly assiduous in his high ambitions — had a temporary breakdown, Waldo thought himself unlikely to follow suit: “I have so much mixture of silliness in my intellectual frame
63 The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., eds. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939, 1990–1995), 1: 127. Hereafter L.
that I think Providence has tempered me against this … Edward had always great power of face. I have none. I laugh; I blush; I look ill tempered; against my will & against my interest. But all this imperfection as it appears to me … is a ballast — as things go — is a defence”.64 In short, not measuring up to others’ high standards, and openly showing it, protected him against trying to meet the world’s demands, whether of his father long ago, his aunt Mary, his college, the institutional church, or eventually of society’s unexamined dictums. In 1838, Emerson repeated the human need for diversion from daily work: “A man must have aunts & cousins, must buy carrots & turnips, must have barn & woodshed, must go to market & to the blacksmith’s shop, must saunter & sleep & be inferior & silly”.65 Edward, and possibly Charles, under equal pressure to achieve, apparently did not find Waldo’s path toward self-saving release.
Silliness aside, however, Emerson, approaching twenty-one, knew he needed to make a career choice. By mid-April 1824, he was finally able to lay out his plans and the reasoning behind them. Through independent reading, he would begin his “professional studies” for the ministry: “I deliberately dedicate my time, my talents, & my hopes to the Church”.
Waldo also knew that his lack of a competitive spirit kept him from careers in business, law, or medicine. “But in Divinity”, he wrote, “I hope to thrive”.
Seven generations of his ancestors had been ministers, and Emerson felt a
“passionate love for the strains of eloquence” that he attributed to traits inherited from his father and grandfather. He put it powerfully, “I burn after the ‘aliquid immensum infinitumque’ [something great and limitless]
which Cicero desired”. He specifically noted, “My understanding venerates & my heart loves that Cause which is dear to God & man — the laws of Morals, the Revelations which sanction, & the blood of martyrs
& triumphant suffering of the saints which seal them”. Still, painful self-consciousness plagued him. He felt timid and clumsy, and as so often before, he berated himself at his core: “What is called a warm heart, I have not”.66
Despite the probable mismatch between pastoral duties and his distant, socially awkward personality, other aspects of the Unitarian pulpit enticed Emerson. Ever since the religious liberal Henry Ware Sr. had been named Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard in 1805, New England
64 JMN 3: 137.
65 JMN 7: 6.
66 JMN 2: 237–41.
ministers had begun to subordinate scriptural and doctrinal exposition in favor of enhancing their own and their parishioners’ “self-culture”. An accomplished “liberal Christian” minister was expected to have broad cultural interests — to pursue scholarship and also to serve local institutions.
Many prided themselves on their literary attainments; the Reverend Joseph Stevens Buckminster, known for his elegant sermons, was asked to preach the funeral sermon for Waldo’s father in 1811. This new model of ministry appealed to Emerson. He might continue to explore his wide intellectual interests while aiming for uplifting literary performance.
William Ellery Channing, pastor of Federal Street Church, surpassed all other Boston ministers as a model of the new preaching.
1.20 William Ellery Channing, 1857.
Emerson, hearing his sermon on revelation in October 1823, had admiringly noted his clear language and ability to convey “the pictures in his mind to the minds of his hearers”. But he thought Channing’s most valuable service was to properly relate nature and divine power. Creation might offer evidence of its creator, but the material world alone was unable “to kindle our piety & urge our faith”. Though not ready to define nature as miraculous, Channing declared the experience of revelation, of sensing the presence of God, a natural happening. As Waldo carefully recorded, “Dr C. regarded Revelation as much a part of the order of things as any other event”.67
67 JMN 2: 161.
Eloquence in the pulpit and on the public lecture platform loomed large in Emerson’s imagination as a means to enhance his ambitions for influence, fame, and power. Political rhetoric had been crucial in defining the principles of the new nation, and in the 1820s lengthy speeches on commemorative occasions had become benchmarks of oratorical greatness.
Inspired at Harvard by his classics professor Edward Everett, Emerson continued to admire the heroic content and impressive style of his public addresses on historical topics. Daniel Webster, elected to Congress in 1822, held Emerson spellbound with his eulogy to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in early August 1826. “Never”, Emerson wrote, “were the awful charms of person, manners, & voice outdone … [I]n what was truly grand he fully realized the boldest conception of eloquence”.68 Though no politician and without ambition to become one, Emerson had done well in public speaking. The ministry not only suited his temperament and talents, it also allowed him to make widely known his ethical and moral concerns, with observations from a wide range of other fields.
Four years after graduating from Harvard College, in February 1825, Emerson entered its Divinity School as a middle student.
1.21 Divinity School, Harvard, 1840.
On and off since 1818, Emerson had continued to teach, including at his brother William’s School for Young Ladies in Boston, which Waldo closed in late 1824 while William was studying in Germany; at a short-lived school that he himself opened in Chelmsford in September 1825; and for a time, at
68 JMN 3: 29.
his brother Edward’s school in Roxbury. Emerson’s habit of reading what he pleased continued: “My cardinal vice of intellectual dissipation — sinful strolling from book to book, from care to idleness, is my cardinal vice still;
is a malady that belongs to the Chapter of Incurables”.69 At the same time, however, he faced a series of serious health problems. An eye ailment, making it impossible to read, first forced him to withdraw from formal study. Then he suffered from a painful hip condition, followed by an “aching” in the chest brought on by “exertion”.70 His physical complaints were not merely psychosomatic. Recent scholarship has confirmed what Emerson privately suspected: he was suffering from tuberculosis (or “consumption” in his day), a rampant nineteenth-century disease that became his family’s curse.71 Longstanding needs of his mother and of his ailing, mentally challenged brother Bulkeley also pressed upon him: “My years are passing away”, he wrote in his journal in March 1826. “Infirmities are already stealing on me that may be the deadly enemies that are to dissolve me to dirt and little is yet done to establish my consideration among my contemporaries & less to get a memory when I am gone”.72
Yet Emerson’s recurring sense of unworthiness and mortality could be swept aside by stunning flashes of insight, breeding confidence in his latent power. Paradoxically, he sensed this power as something beyond him, rooted in the “immortality of moral truth”. It was an ethical lodestone, attracting his whole being, not merely his thought. In true Romantic fashion, he had tapped into a living force that transcended him and others as well as time and place. At the same time, it connected him and every sensitive person to the great minds of history. For Emerson, moral truth had become no abstraction or “vague name”, but a passion and a real principle of personal strength.73 Buoyed by these reflections, in late May, he ecstatically declared, “I feel that the affections of the soul are sublimer than the faculties of the intellect. I feel immortal. And the evidence of immortality comes better from consciousness than from reason”.74 Such trust in intuition — in the heart rather than the head — and in the inherent worth of the individual
69 JMN 2: 332.
70 L 1: 184.
71 See Evelyn Barish, “The Moonless Night: Emerson’s Crisis of Health, 1825–1827”, in Emerson Centenary Essays, ed. Joel Myerson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 1–16; incorporated in her Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989).
72 JMN 3: 15.
73 JMN 3: 21.
74 JMN 3: 25.
attuned to a universal morality lay behind Emerson’s later emphasis on self-reliance, more fully celebrated in his lectures of the next ten to fifteen years.