GLAD TO THE BRINK OF FEAR:
A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson
James Marcus
ISBN 978-0-691-25433-3
Emerson was born in 1803 and began writing early. He wasn’t a systematic
philosopher; his work exemplifies what he preferred: “the sound of a man
thinking”. The essay, the form at which he excelled, was effectively
invented by Montaigne, who died in 1592 and whose motto was “What do I
know?” Emerson wasn’t a scientist, though he read widely about it, as about
much else. Like Montaigne, he
writes from experience and likes to wander and dawdle. While Emerson was
putting together his impressionistic, contradictory volumes in America, in
Europe Marx was seeking to elaborate a scientific theory of history. No one
has tried to build an entire society from “Emersonianism”. Political parties
haven’t embraced his name or adorned their flags with his image. All the
same, as Marcus acknowledges, the Concord sage remains curiously
contemporary. Far more so than Marx, for example, whose predictions have
proved threadbare and whose violent desire for consistency embraces much
contradiction. Emerson was
pre-Darwinian, yet his work shows some inkling of a common origin. He
believes experience is the great guide, like David Hume. He shows us what
can be achieved simply by attending closely to what happens to us and
applying our thinking to it rigorously and honestly; but more importantly,
like Montaigne, he shows us the limits of our cognition.
Perhaps there are few ideas more important. The world is at it is. Some of
it we can comprehend, much is, probably forever, beyond us. By comparison,
the drive to find all-embracing theories seems exorbitant.
In his introduction, Marcus evokes the pandemic and the contrast it made
stark between individual liberty and the collective need to impose
restrictions. Would Emerson have worn a mask and been vaccinated? Well,
there’s a foolish interpretation of his conception of “individualism” (the
term was coined by de Tocqueville in 1835). It’s true he embraced the notion
that wealth is self-regulating:
“The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and
supply”
but you have to set that within the context of his work as a whole. The
problem is we are looking back from a perverted perspective: neo-liberals
recruiting Adam Smith who, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
called the pursuit of personal wealth “a delusion”. Marcus suggests Emerson
accepted the doctrine of the “invisible hand”, but Smith used the term only
twice. It doesn’t constitute a central part of his ideas. He was a classical
liberal, concerned for the greatest development of each individual’s
potential. He didn’t call his famous book The Wealth of Individuals,
and in so far as he accepted the division of labour, it was with caveats. He
was no defender of large-scale capitalism which was yet to come when he
wrote his major works. He believed in the possibility of only “partial
evil”: the world was overseen by a beneficent deity who would not permit
total evil. Hence, the god-given sympathy native to our nature would ensure
we would resist the pursuit of purblind advantage in favour of looking to
the happiness of others. Emerson’s famous self-reliance is not a doctrine of
exploitation, nor of seeking personal enrichment at the expense of others.
Rather it chimes with the classical liberal notion of “human development in
its richest diversity” as Wilhelm von Humboldt expressed it. It’s an inner
self-reliance above all, available to everyone. That is the crucial
difference between Emerson and the perverters of the ideas of Smith and
other enlightenment thinkers: my right to property deprives you of it, but
my right to self-reliance is also yours. Everyone can enjoy freedom of
speech, but if wealth is concentrated in few hands, it is denied to the
rest. To conflate self-reliance with possession of far more than you need,
is to degrade the idea beyond redemption. Throughout Emerson’s work, he is
writing for everyone. He wants us all to rise to the full height of our
individuality, not to accumulate dollars and cast others into the pit of
poverty. He can be forgiven a too ready embrace of the doctrine of the
self-regulation of wealth. Had he lived to see the obscene riches of
contemporary Wall St, wouldn’t he have thought again?
The issue which did make him think again was slavery. He was opposed
from an early age, writing notes against it at nineteen; but he was,
all the same, not convinced of the equality of black and white and was
squeamish about involvement in the abolitionist campaign. The latter
reservation is understandable: he was a solitary by temperament, uneasy as
part of a cause, needing the room to express his quirkiness. There is
nothing wrong with that; many principled people find collectivist activism
uncomfortable. Yet he changed his mind when it became clear to him that too
much was at stake to sit back and observe.
On 7th November 1837, a mob attacked a warehouse in Alton,
Illinois where Elijah Lovejoy had hidden the printing press on which he
turned out abolitionist literature. Lovejoy tried to stop the crowd burning
the place down and was shot dead. For Emerson, two things were in play,
slavery and freedom of speech. He cast off his doubts and threw himself into
the fray, for which he must be admired. His ability to change, to see the
pusillanimity of his previous stance and to stand full square for freedom,
exonerates him of his earlier confusions and proves the character by which
he set so much store.
Emerson tried teaching for a while but didn’t like it, yet he was a teacher
by nature. He began as a preacher and renounced that too, but his essays
contain a blend of both. You could say the essay is a kind of sermon on
paper. He delivered an extraordinary number of lectures, occasionally badly
received but as James Russell Lowell said, “We do not go to hear what
Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson.” Perhaps that how most of his
audiences felt. What was it they were responding to? It’s a commonplace
today that most of what is conveyed in conversation is non-verbal. It’s true
of public speaking too that what we pick up on is not so much what is said,
after all, what did Martin Luther King says in his famous “I have a dream”
oration except racism is vile and we must do away with it? Presumably, in
Emerson’s demeanour and delivery people could discern his integrity and
search for truth and maybe they would have done so if he’d read from a
recipe book.
In his first sermon in 1829, Emerson said eloquence was “the mightiest
engine God has put into the hands of man.” How might he have felt had he
heard Hilter, Mussolini or Trump? There is a negative side to eloquence and
a positive one to being something of a boring speaker. The capacity to move
people to action not by what is said but the way it’s said has been
exploited by some very pernicious people. It’s rational to be wary of
seductive eloquence. The business of swaying huge audiences while not
telling them very much has been perfected by the PR industry and the
propaganda system. Emerson was around before all this, but his faith in
eloquence is a little too glib: unless it is combined with moral rigour, it
can do great harm.
Nature
was published in 1836 and not reprinted until 1849. Emerson was no
publishing phenomenon. These days, he’d be lucky to get into print.
Notoriety would help. Being a convicted fraudster, bank-robber, disgraced
politician, these are sure ways to get publishers and agents interested.
Writing well counts for very little.
Emerson had to pay some of the costs of getting his books to the world
through his publisher, James Monroe who, as a Boston-based bookseller wasn’t
too impelled to send his authors’ works far and wide. The economics and
politics of publishing are neglected topics. Much of the world’s most
interesting literature has found its way to the shelves in hole-and-corner
ways. We read Kafka thanks to the disobedience of Brod, Jane Austen because
her dad had the money to get her books published and Emerson because he
could afford to subsidise his publisher. How many hard-up geniuses has the
world never heard of?
“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your
private heart is true for all men – that is genius.” This is one of
Emerson’s most famous sentences, and Marcus says he lived and died by the
sentence. Is Emerson right? What can we say about Stalin or Pol Pot or
Richard Nixon or Trump? Is what was true for them in their private hearts
true for all men? Emerson isn’t accounting for psychopaths, quite sensibly,
but is he accounting for commonplace go-getting and sharp-elbowed conduct?
It’s reasonable to think so. The self-seeking narcissist knows full well her
behaviour is shabby, but rationalises; and if she subjects that
rationalisation to some serious scrutiny, she will find Emerson is right:
recognising that what you excuse in your own conduct you find obnoxious in
others tells you exactly what Emerson is getting at: we have a common,
inherited nature which includes moral sentiment and when we betray it, we
damage not only others but ourselves.
Emerson, though, had a negative view of philanthropy, or at least
philanthropy of a certain kind, seeing it as what today is derided as
“virtue signalling”. He was in danger of conflating genuine generosity with
the phoney variety. It’s true there’s a Lady Bountiful kind of
philanthropist for whom the display
is what matters, but the genuine form, engaged in without fuss or
attention-seeking is to be praised. In discussing this, Marcus mentions
Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby and her “telescopic philanthropy”, more concerned to
pass on inappropriate skills to African natives than to help her near
neighbours. What Marcus misses here is Dickens’s racism. He sets up a straw
woman in the character of Mrs Jellyby and in knocking her over sneaks in his
dislike of concern for the victims of English colonialism. He was in favour
of the elimination of the people of India, and though there is some
scholarly dispute about the nature of his racism, no one doubts that he
viewed non-Europeans as inferior.
Emerson’s life was marked by tragedy, most notably his son’s death from
scarlet fever at the age of five. In his sixties his memory began to fail
and he almost certainly suffered from Alzheimer’s. What he has left us are
sentences. It is his writing that resonates. He belongs in the great
tradition of essayists: Bacon, Montaigne, Addison, Steele, Hazlitt, Orwell.
He is eminently readable still and
offers no system, no ready-made world view, no panacea, but
stimulates us to think and act for ourselves.
Marcus weaves his own observations into this study, subtly and appositely.
He is an excellent guide to this great American mind. This book should send
you back to the essays, a great antidote to the mindless soundbites of our
two-minute culture.