The uses of observation: A study of correspondential vision in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman 9783111630298, 9783111251387

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S T U D I E S IN A M E R I C A N L I T E R A T U R E Volume XII

THE USES OF OBSERVATION A Study of Correspondential Vision in the Writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman

by

CHRISTOPHER New York

COLLINS

University

1971

MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1971 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-169993

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

In Memoriam C. H. Wells

PREFACE

The purpose of this study is to examine the development and use of correspondence by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. By "correspondence" I mean the relationship perceived to exist between external phenomena and internal realities, events, or states of being. It will be necessary further to define and restrict this term when referring to the particular practitioners of the correspondential method, for although the three authors in question saw in the external world a vast silent language, they each had different ways to decipher it. I propose, in effect, to present here one chapter in the history of an ancient idea. I limit myself roughly to the middle half of the 19th century, 1825-1875, to American literature, and to the works of only three of its writers. Although these men have been called "Transcendentalists", this is not a study of that complex of diverse and often contradictory ideas, but an attempt to isolate what Arthur Lovejoy termed an "idea unit". In his preface to The Great Chain of Being he defined idea units as "implicit or completely explicit assumptions, or more or less unconscious mental habits, operating in the thought of an individual or a generation."1 As far as this study is concerned it is not essential to prove whence and how an idea or image was transmitted from German philosophers or British poets to American "Transcendentalists". Whether it be coincidence or direct influence, it will suffice to indicate that certain thoughts and ways of expression 1 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea, p. 7.

8

PREFACE

were "in the air". My subject, then, will be principally the use of an idea and not the method of its transmission. In my studies of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, I have tried to limit my scope of enquiry to their use of correspondential vision and the effects of this habit on them, and have accordingly neglected all aspects of their life and work peripheral to this restricted scope. As Lovejoy said, the procedure necessary for such a study "requires that we deal only with a part of the thought of any one philosopher or any one age. The part, therefore, must never be mistaken for the whole." 2 Thus, for example, I have generally found it unnecessary to make reference to Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond and have instead concentrated on his mountain journeys. I wish to thank the late Richard V. Chase for his help with and encouragement of this project in its early stages; Robert Gorham Davis for his assistance during the long period of composition; and Lewis Leary for his very useful suggestions on the first-draft manuscript.

*

Lovejoy, p. 21.

CONTENTS

Preface I. The Early Development of Emerson's Theory of Men and Nature, 1826-1836

7

11

II. Emersonian Correspondence as Set Forth in Nature and the Early Essays, 1836-1844

31

III. Thoreau, the Mountain-Climber

58

IV. Whitman on the Open Road

82

V. Transcendental Correspondence in Wider Perspective Bibliography

109 124

I THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN A N D NATURE, 1826-1836

If any common motive runs through the often contradictory writings of this "man without a handle", it is his life-long desire to stand free of circumstances. This very personal motive, stronger than religion, stronger than philosophy, impelled him to deny himself the security of external supports, whether they were the Unitarianism of his father, the philosophical system of Kant and Coleridge, or the fellowship of his Brook Farm friends; even the grief for the loss of a beloved son, who, he made himself declare, was after all "caducous" and not essential to his father's brave and lonely life. His reading and meditation may be considered an attempt to "think out" the problem of personal freedom. He sought by means of them to penetrate the veils of Maya and to reach the changeless kingdom of Brahma where "shadow and sunlight are the same", and does seem to have attained a high degree of stoic imperturbability. This keynote of the "inviolable mind" was struck quite early in his career, in 1826, in his first sermon: Every thoughtful man has felt that there was a more awful reality to thought and feeling, than to the infinite panorama of nature around him. The world . . . seems to him at times, when the intellect is invigorated, to ebb from him, like a sea, and to leave nothing permanent but thought.1 His philosophical studies were undertaken, paradoxically, to seek support for the premise that Emerson needed no support. Thus his independence was dependent on the ideas of such men as 1

A. C. McGiffert, Young Emerson Speaks, p. 2.

12

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

Kant, Coleridge, and Swedenborg. With this motive of his in mind we will proceed to examine his use of the ideas of others through the important decade, 1826-1836, which culminated for him with the writing and publication of his first book, Nature.

1.

CARLYLE: A N INTRODUCTION TO G E R M A N IDEALISM

Emerson was not unprepared for the impact of German idealism. At Harvard he had been exposed to the principal ideas of Bishop Berkeley, ideas which seemed in their very scepticism to be a possibly potent weapon against scepticism. 2 As Whicher maintains, it was from Berkeley that Emerson derived the "noble doubt" of Nature, the doubt "whether nature outwardly exists", and in 1841 he confided to Margaret Fuller that it was Berkeley who converted him from doubt - doubt in the self-sufficiency of the soul - and recalled the joy with which "in my boyhood I caught the first hint of Berkeleyan philosophy, and which I certainly never lost sight of afterwards." 3 About to begin his third year of divinity school, in the winter of 1826-1827 he was forced by ill health to take a vacation from theological studies. It was on his Southern journey that he jotted down this first, quizzical reference to "Transcendentalism": Transcendentalism. Metaphysics and Ethics look inward - and France produces Mad. de Stael; England, Wordsworth; America, Sampson Reed; as well as Germany, Swedenborg. .. .4 Despite the exuberant playing with ideas which he performed in letters to his Aunt Mary, he was, in camera, a sober young professor of the Unitarian faith - or at least so he was determined to be. Emerson, even at the age of 24, was not a man to be swept off his feet. He consequently took a dim view of this inwardlooking doctrine of Wordsworth and his visionary colleagues. 2 Stephen Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Waldo son, p. 16. 3 Emerson, Letters, II, 385 (1841). 4 Emerson, Journal, II, 164 (Feb. 1827).

Emer-

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

13

Later in 1827 he testily noted (with reference to Wordsworth whom he then especially loathed): "Philosophy inverts itself, and poetry grows egotistical" 5 - a curiously misconceived notion of "Tintern Abbey" and The Prelude by the man who was one day to declare that all history is biography and to become himself the master of the egotistical sublime. Although he had read Coleridge and Sampson Reed in 1826 and had displayed some intellectual enthusiasm over their nonUnitarian ideas, he was not thoroughly involved in contemporary philosophy until the autumn of 1827 when he came upon an unsigned article in the Edinburgh Review. Its title was "The State of German Literature" and its author was Thomas Carlyle. Here, in the young Scot's vigorous, forthright exposition of "Kantist" philosophy, Emerson found support for his cherished hope of spiritual self-sufficiency. "The Kantist", wrote Carlyle, in direct contradiction to Locke and all his followers, both of the French and English or Scotch school, commences from within, and proceeds outwards; instead of commencing from without, and with various precautions and hesitations, endeavouring to proceed inwards. The ultimate aim of all Philosophy must be to interpret appearances, - from the given symbol to ascertain the thing.6 Perhaps this inner world, the presence of which "every thoughtful man has felt", 7 was the fountainhead of reality; perhaps it was the human mind which imbued "the infinite panorama of nature" - the given symbol - with its own emanant thing-ness. Perhaps he had misjudged "Transcendentalism": it was not that "metaphysics and Ethics look inward", but that they look from within outward. And not only Metaphysics and Ethics - poetic experience also was not applied to the perceiver from without. "Poetic beauty", Carlyle declared, is not, as the associationists taught, derived from anything external, or of merely intellectual origin; not from association, or any reflex or reminiscence of mere sensations; nor from natural love, either of imitation, of similarity in dissimilarity, 5 6

Emerson, Journal, II, 234. Thomas Carlyle, Critical

tion), p. 67. 7

Young Emerson

Speaks,

and Miscellaneous p. 2.

Essays,

Vol. I (1887 edi-

14

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

of exciting by contrast, or of seeing difficulties overcome. On the contrary, it is assumed as underived; not borrowing its existence from such sources, but as lending to most of these their significance. . . . It swells and is born in the inmost Spirit of Man. . . .8 During the next two years, as Emerson's health improved, his responsibilities increaised. He helped care for his brother Edward, who in November, 1828, suffered a total mental collapse; he finished his studies at the Harvard Divinity School and was ordained and installed as pastor of the Second Church, Boston, March 11, 1829; and on September 30 of the same year he married Miss Ellen Tucker of Concord, New Hampshire. They were busy years, years of familial love and of professional success. They were not years in which to mortar a stoical siege-wall about the all-reliant self. Instead, he had extended his mind's affections (as Epictetus said he shouldn't) into areas over which the mind has no absolute control, viz., his wife and his vocation. In the meantime, however, as his philosophical readings continued, he gradually gave personal assent to the premises of what he vaguely understood as the "New Philosophy" of Europe. In the autumn of 1829 he began reading Marsh's American edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, and began the new year with a program of study which aimed to justify Christian religion not only in the light of post-Lockeian philosophy as Coleridge had attempted, but also to justify it in the light of contemporary science. He did convince himself for a while and, even as late as 1836, could make bold to assert that the "axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics" (Nature, "Language"). Also in this year (1830) he pored over De Gerando's massive work, Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, and from it continued to piece together the fragments of what was slowly becoming his own philosophy. It was about this time, early in 1830, that Emerson again encountered his mysterious "Germanick writer" in the Edinburgh Review. This time Carlyle, in what was officially an expository critique of Novalis, traced the development of German idealism from Kant to Fichte. This essay has been regarded by many, 8

Carlyle, p. 42.

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

15

among them Pochmann - though, oddly enough, not Cameron as a seminal source for those ideas of Emerson which first appeared in Nature. A few examples will suffice to indicate the consanguinity of Carlyle's ideas with Emerson's subsequent "philosophy". First of all in his discussion of the problem of Matter and Spirit, Carlyle presents German philosophy as not merely downgrading the worth of Matter, but flatly denying its existence. This, he says, "in all German systems, since the time of K a n t , . . . is the fundamental principle... ." 9 Furthermore, this is no new notion: it is both ancient and wide-spread and, "as Sir W. Jones informs us . . . prevails among the theologians of Hindoostan." 10 But - as with Emerson's idealism of 1836 - "common sense" enters at the last moment to save the 19th century world from entrapment in the veils of Maya: Neither is it any argument against the Idealist to say that since he denies the absolute existence of Matter, he ought in conscience to deny its relative existence. . . . u

This novel-sounding notion of "relative existence" needs explanation. The reason why the Idealist is able to assign this pseudo-reality to the world outside the mind, is that "his philosophy is Transcendental" (apparently Carlyle's version of "uebersinnlich"), that is, "ascending beyond the senses". Because of his supersensory cognitive power, "he is led to various unexpected conclusions. To the Transcendentalist, Matter has an existence, but only as a Phenomenon.. .". 12 A tree, for example, has existence only relative to the beholder, its phenomenal existence determined by the particular sensible "Nervous-structure" of the perceptor. Thus, two beholders may entirely - and justifiably - disagree. There is, in fact, says Fichte, no Tree there; but only a Manifestation of Power from something which is not I. The same is true of material Nature at large of the whole visible Universe, with all its movements, »

10

11 11

Carlyle, Carlyle, Carlyle, Carlyle,

p. p. p. p.

439. 440. 440. 440.

16

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

figures, accidents, and qualities; all are impressions produced on me by something different from me. This, we suppose, may be the foundation oi what Fichte means by his far-famed Ich and Nicht-Ich,13 Furthermore, Carlyle adds, Time and Space, like phenomenal matter, are also relative, being the creations of the mind of man. As Carlyle's essay proceeds through the outline of German idealist philosophy to its formal subject matter, the writings of Novalis, philosophy merges with mysticism. This mysticizing process, too, was congenial to Emerson who always had faith in the power of the "Inner Light" to warm and illumine the philosopher. He was often stirred by the same "Inner Light" which prompted Novalis to declare (in the words of Carlyle) t h a t . . . "the old hostility of Matter is at an end, for Matter itself is annihilated . . ,".14 How often would Emerson buoyantly announce the end of Matter, only to look about and rediscover that, like Xerxes' Hellespont, it seemed not to listen; and if it heard, it did not seem to care. Nevertheless - and this he could always be sure of - the world of Matter had a spiritual use. The stone he spent his life kicking (with varying degrees of energy and conviction) was, after all, emblematic. Its primary function in the economy of creation was symbolic. This notion he also found expressed in Carlyle's "Novalis": For him [Novalis] the material Creation is but an Appearance, a typical shadow in which the Deity manifests himself to man.15 Thus, Nature becomes the one living perennial Bible, at once the most ancient and the most young of Scriptures. Yet man is not at home in what Baudelaire was to call "this forest of symbols". Although this world might not be the place of trial, as the Puritans would have it, it was, as God's miraculous museum, a no less temporary place of sojourn. Therefore, according to his expositor, Novalis feels always that here he has no home, but . . . [looks] . . . as in a clear vision, to a 'city that hath foundations.' He loves external Nature with 13 11 15

Carlyle, p. 441. Carlyle, p. 442. Carlyle, p. 443.

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

17

a singular depth; nay, we might say, he reverences her, and holds unspeakable communings with her: for Nature is no longer dead, hostile Matter, but the veil and mysterious Garment of the Unseen; as it were, the Voice with which the Deity proclaims himself to man. 16

By using Nature, man may live not only in the realm of Appearances but also in the realm of God's absolute Reality. . . . To live in that Light of Reason, to have, even while here and encircled with this Vision of Existence, our abode in that, Eternal City, is the highest and sole duty of man. 17

Many of the notions presented by Carlyle in this essay were to be developed by Emerson in his first book. Despite the importance of this essay, it must not be forgotten that six more years of personal crisis and philosophical study went into the writing of Nature. At the same time, however, one can say that as early as 1830 Emerson had under consideration the component principles of a critique of Man and Nature, and had only to define these two entities and to assign to them their precise relationship. (NOTE: At this point it should be mentioned that Emerson had very little direct debt to the philosophers of Germany. Although he read German passably well, he was generally content to take his "transcendentale Weltanschauunge" second hand. His main sources were Constant, Mme. de Stael, Hedge, and, particularly, Carlyle and Coleridge. At the time of the writine of Nature all his knowledge of Kant's Critiques was derived from Coleridge and Carlyle.18 According to Pochmann,

. . . Kant never after 1838 held an important place in Emerson's thinking, although he did hold firmly on to an ethical philosophy that is, from first to last, essentially the same as Kant's in practice, though not necessarily derived thence.19

He did not read Fichte except in the translated sections included in Hedge's Prose Writers (1847); his knowledge of him up to that "

17 18 19

Carlyle, p. Carlyle, p. Pochmann, Pochmann,

444. 444. German Culture in America, p. 189. p. 195.

18

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

point came through Carlyle.20 Although he seems to have read Schelling some time during the year 1831, he took pains, as Coleridge had done in his Biographia, to deny all imputations of discipleship. In the soliloquy of his journal he irritably protests: Leave m e alone; do not teach me out of Leibnitz and Schelling, and I shall find it all out myself. 21 )

2.

COLERIDGE ON THE AUTHORITY OF MAN

Perhaps no single event in Emerson's life had deeper impact on his career than the death of his wife on February 8, 1831. It precipitated an urgent need in him to refine his belief in the selfsufficiency of the individual mind, and the conclusions he subsequently arrived at led to his renunciation of a religion based on historic proofs and external formulae. Her death retaught him his old lessons in stoicism. He had been long familiar with Coleridge, particularly the prose works, The Friend, Biographia Literaria, and the Aids to Reflection, but it was not until this dark year of 1831 that the implications of Coleridge's philosophy seemed, almost exclusively, to fascinate his mind.22 It may be useful now to make a brief survey of several passages from the Biographia which are significant in the light of Emerson's subsequent philosophy. They deal with the philosophical bases for the autonomy of the spiritual self within a world of matter, an autonomy for which Emerson always yearned, but never, perhaps, with more urgency than during the several months after Ellen's death. In the eighth chapter of the Biographia, Coleridge begins his history of modern philosophical dualism: T o the best of my knowledge Des Cartes was the first philosopher who introduced the absolute and essential heterogeneity of the soul "> Pochmann, p. 195. 21 Journal, IV, 473 (June 13, 1838). See also Works, I, 161. 12 See especially Journal, II, 377, 405, 430, 444.

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

19

as intelligence and the body as matter. . . . The soul was a thinking substance and the body was a space filling substance. 23

He admits that this problem is not easily solved - that no easy theory of harmony can unite mind and matter. H o w the esse assumed as originally distinct from the scire can ever unite itself with it, how being can transform itself into knowing, becomes conceivable on one only condition: namely, if it can be shown that the vis representativa, or the Sentient, is itself a species of being, i.e., either as a property or attribute, or as an hypostasis or selfsubsistence. 24

After discussing the associationist theory of Hartley, he rejects it for the crude illogicality of its materialism, and declares his belief in the self-subsistence of the spirit. For this doctrine, he says, he has found brilliant support in the writing of Kant, "the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the founder of Critical Philosophy, [which] more than other work at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding." 25 After two chapters of digressions, Chapter XII (a chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or omission of the chapter that follows) girds itself and the reader for an onslaught against the main philosophical problems. He begins by declaring that he has become aware of two realms within the soul, the "spontaneous consciousness", which is occupied with registering sense data, and the "philosophic consciousness". This latter realm, interiorly remote from the experiential surface of consciousness, he suggests, possesses its own, complete, creative subsistence. In order to speak of this "philosophic consciousness" he makes use of a mythic landscape: As the elder Romans distinguished their northern provinces into CisAlpine and Trans-Alpine, so may w e divide all the objects of human knowledge into those on this side, and those o n the other side of the spontaneous c o n s c i o u s n e s s . . . . The latter is exclusively the domain 23

S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 74. For references to this problem in Emerson's journals for this year see Journal, II, 357-58, 361, 362, 368, 404, 409, 414, 422, 425, 435, and 438. 24 Biographia, p. 75. 25 Biographia, p. 84 (Chapter IX).

20

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

of pure philosophy, which is therefore properly entitled transcendental. . . . The first range of hills that encircles the scanty vale of human life is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By the many even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden in mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To the multitude below these vapors appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents on which none may intrude with impunity; and now all aglow with colors not their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few who, measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest unaccessible falls, have learnt that the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few who even in the level streams have detected elements which neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or could supply.26 After setting forth this mythic version of the inner self, a mythos which, as we shall see, was well used by American transcendentalists, Coleridge goes on to tackle again the philosophical problem of dualism. He begins by positing as the basis of all our knowledge a subject and an object, which he defines as the self and nature. Although we may, and must, analyze them separately, "during the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs." 27 Now, the separate existences of the "objective" and the "subjective" are logically unthinkable. . . . The transcendental philosopher can solve (this problem) only by the supposition that the (existence of things without us) is unconsciously involved in (the existence of our own being); that it is not only coherent but identical, and one and the same thing with our own immediate selfconsciousness. To demonstrate this identity is the office and object of this philosophy.28 This point of coalescence he terms spirit, or self, or self-consciousness. By the will the spirit can reflect upon itself and dis26 27 28

Biographia, Biographia, Biographia,

pp. 137-38 (Chapter XII). p. 145. p. 148.

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN A N D NATURE

21

criminate object from subject, " W e begin the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. W e proceed from the self, in order to lose and find all self in GOD."29 The self, therefore, is the transalpine realm, the divine spiritus which dissolves all the walls which sequester the knower from the things known. Herin, Emerson discovered the authority of man. This particular application of the Socratic Gnothi seauton Emerson got directly (according to Cameron) from his reading of Coleridge. "The postulate of philosophy", Coleridge declared, "and at the same time the test of philosophic capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended know-thyself! {E caelo descendit, yvoGiCTECIUTOV) . " 8 0

On July 6, 1831, Emerson wrote the first draft of his poem "Gnothi Seauton". In it "he wrote out, with awkward excitement, the credo of the new Emerson." 31 The basis of self-reliance, he announced to himself, is that the self is Emmanuel, "God in us": If thou canst bear Strong meat of simple truth If thou durst m y words compare W i t h what thou thinkest in the soul's free youth, T h e n take this fact unto thy soul,

-

G o d dwells in thee. C l o u d e d and shrouded there doth sit T h e Infinite E m b o s o m e d in a man. . . . This is the reason w h y thou dost recognize Things n o w first revealed, Because in thee resides T h e Spirit that lives in all; A n d thou canst learn the laws of nature Because its author is latent in thy breast. Therefore, O happy youth, H a p p y if thou dost k n o w and love this truth, T h o u art unto thyself a law, A n d since the soul of things is in thee, 29 30 31

Biographia, p. 154. Biographia, p. 144. Whicher, p. 23.

22

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE Thou needest nothing out of thee. The law, the gospel, and the Providence. Heaven, Hell, the Judgment, and the stores Immeasurable of Truth and Good, All these thou must find Within thy single mind, Or never find. . . .

This discovery or, as he might have termed it, this revelation, came after four months of grief and meditation. It reaffirmed his old belief in the autonomy of the individual soul - now no longer a mere wish but a conclusion based upon an apparently secure philosophical foundation. It was his duty now to follow his own desire to heed the authority within him. That summer of 1831 Emerson solemnly commanded himself: "KNOW THYSELF"; soon he altered this mandate to "trust thyself" and put the implications of this antinomian creed into practice. One more year and Emerson found himself looking out upon the White Mountains: "a few low mountains, a great many clouds always covering the great peaks, a circle of woods to the horizon." There, in the July of 1832, he spent one "unsabbatized Sunday" 32 considering, and all but deciding, to renounce his ministry. In September he did resign his pastorate and one month later his resignation was duly accepted. On December 25, while his former congregation was assembling to celebrate the ancient incarnation of his own Emmanuel, Emerson watched from the rail of the brig Jasper the city of Boston grow smaller and smaller. He had cut his moorings with the past and had like Ahab - albeit an untragic Ahab - set out on the adventure of the unhindered self into, as Whicher says, "the open seas of the mind, a single man against the universe".ss His trip to Europe (December 25, 1832 - October 7, 1833) seems to have only reconfirmed his belief that travel is unnecessary, just as his conversations with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle retaught him that he, himself, must after all be a lamp unto his own feet. He had learned that he could do with" "

Journal, II, 495-97. Whicher, p. 25.

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

23

out teachers and that the "European scene" was indeed the "last schoolroom" in which he was to be instructed. We have seen how Emerson became gradually acquainted with the main principles of Kantian idealism and how, through Coleridge, he was able to devise a set of philosophical beliefs which seemed to guarantee the inviolable suzerainty of the self over the world of matter. We will now see how man, thus invested with divine authority, was to use the material world about him.

3.

SWEDENBORG A N D THE U S E OF N A T U R E

Upon his return from Europe in 1833, Emerson came again before his old congregation and told them of a cultural revolution, now no longer philosophical, but religious in nature. There is a revolution of religious opinion taking effect around us as it seems to me the greatest of all revolutions which have ever occurred that, namely, which has separated the individual from the whole world and made him demand a faith satisfactory to his own proper nature, whose full extent he now for the first time contemplates. . . . Man begins to hear a voice . . . that fills the heavens and the earth, saying, that God is within him, that there is the celestial host.34

Among the confluent traditions and theories that made up this early 19th century "revolution", the strongest single influence was exerted by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and his disciples. According to them, terrestrial creation is a more or less exact copy of God's spiritual kingdom. It is charged with meaning and must be understood in its spiritual sense. This decipherable reference of the "Below" to the "Above" Swedenborg called correspondence, and declared that in his visions he received the revelation of the divinely prescribed symbolism of the world. Each object - horse, moon, heart, oak - had a particular meaning. The universe was a mighty poem which could become intelligible only with the aid of his literal prose-paraphrase. Emerson was always wary of such restrictive dogmatism and never con"

Young Emerson

Speaks, pp. 199-200. Quoted in Whicher, p. 20.

24

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

sidered himself a Swedenborgian. Yet, as soon as he became aware of the ideas of the New Jerusalem Church, he saw how many of them could aid him in the formulation of his own strategy of individual survival. Correspondence, when considered a psychological function rather than a cosmological fact, is roughly equivalent to the Romantic imagination: the mind perceives in the external material universe a likeness to a thing or state of being which is internal, be it spiritual or subconscious or archetypal. The prevailing 18th century psychology denied the existence of this "thing" or "state of being" prior to experience and regarded as melancholic fantasy any attempt to describe a world not recognizable to all good men of common sense. While Emerson, as a very young man, shared this opinion, he nevertheless practiced, with apologies, the art of poetic "fancy". The following poem was written early in the year 1822; Emerson was 18 years old: Deep in the soul a strong delusion dwells, A curious round of fairly fashioned dreams; Yet, quietly the pleasant vision swells Its gay proportions far around, the streams Of the wide universe their wealth supply, Their everlasting sources furnish forth The fabled splendours, whose immortal dye Colours the scene with hues which mock the summer sky.35

We note that, though this is a "delusion", it is "strong" and deeply dwelling in the soul, and that this no doubt suggested to the pious young man a divine purpose for these "fairly fashioned dreams". We also detect here the accents of Nature's "Orphic poet" who spoke of man as once filling "nature with his overflowing currents". But, most important, we see here the earliest record of Emerson's experimentation with the notion of correspondence: an impulse (here only a delusion) rises in the soul and with the aid of the outward senses is symbolically merged with the "wealth" which the "wide universe" supplies, with the "fabled splendours" which the "everlasting sources furnish forth". »5

Journal,

I, 109.

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

25

In 1826, however, the 23 year-old Divinity School student seems even more aesthetically reactionary. Writing to his Aunt Mary, he derided "this new philosophy of poetry" and called it a modern version of medieval alchemy. (William Wordsworth, tranquil, sinecured, and nearing sixty, was the modern upstart in question.) This modern poet . . . seduced by an overweening confidence in the force of his own genius, has discarded that modesty under whose influence all his great precursors have resorted to external nature sparingly for illustration and ornament, and have forborne to tamper with the secret and metaphysical nature of what they borrowed.... The worthy gentleman gloats over a bulrush, moralizes on the irregularity of one of its fibres, and suspects a connection between an excrescence of the plant and his own immortality.36 In October, however, only four months later and on the eve of his approbation as Unitarian preacher, he discovered a small book which had a great and immediate impact on his early development. This book was Observations on the Growth of the Mind by a former upper-classman of his at Harvard, Sampson Reed. Emerson's first reactions we have no record of, but we know that he quickly and enthusiastically wrote of his discovery to the family confidante, Aunt Mary, who forthwith attempted to cool his ardor. In an extant letter he asks her why she doesn't like Reed, and adds, "has any looked so shrewdly into the subtile and concealed connexion of man and nature, of earth and heaven?" Unfortunately, his sect doesn't seem to have many supporters outside of "poor Wordsworth". 37 This "concealed connexion" which the young Emerson noted was revealed, according to Reed, only to those who knew the purpose of created things. This purpose was the education of man, and these created things themselves made up the language through which God's total revelation came to man. There is a language, not of words but of things. When this language shall have been made apparent, that which is human will have answered its end, and being as it were resolved into its original elements, will lose itself in nature. . . . 36 37

Journal, Journal,

II, 107-08 (June 30, 1826). II, 124.

26

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

We drown the voice of nature, with the discordant jargon of ten thousand dialects. . . . Let (a man) respect the smallest blade which grows and permit it to speak for itself. Then may there be poetry which may not be written perhaps, but which may be felt as a part of our being.'8 This possibility of extra-canonical revelation must have appealed to his basic independence of spirit. The half year that followed this discovery was a critical time for Emerson. His health nearly ruined by long hours of study, he was advised to spend the winter in the South. There in the Carolinas and in Florida, although his health returned, his mind was obsessed by religious doubts. He had begun to read Coleridge and the Swedenborgians, and had made the acquaintance of the brilliant young émigré, Achille Murat, whom, to his utter consternation, he found to be a consistent atheist, and at the same time, a virtuous and warm-hearted friend. The following autumn (1827), as we have seen, he came across Carlyle's unsigned article on German literature in The Edinburgh Review, and although he had thrown himself heartily into his theological studies and even more heartily into his pulpit oratory, the new heretical ideas of Europe continued to trouble his mind. Throughout the formative decade prior to the publication of Nature, Emerson's imagination toyed with ideas of Swedenborg. They were logically undemonstrable; yet their strange power to fascinate could not be denied. Early in 1828, Cameron conjectures, he may have begun reading Swedenborg.39 At any rate, the mystic's system was well promulgated in the official organ of the New Church, The New Jerusalem Magazine. There early in 1829, an article by Sampson Reed appeared on the symbolism of animals. In it he outlined the radical idealism according to which the mind is the creator of the material world and can see its correspondent likeness in that world: 88

Reed, Observations on the Growth of the Mind, p. 24, in Cameron's Emerson the Essayist, II, 22. M Cameron, I, 247. For the influence of Swedenborg on American culture see also Marguerite B. Block's The New Church in the New World (Henry Holt, 1931).

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

27

There is perhaps no subject generally less understood, than that of creation. This may be owing to the fact that external creation corresponds to that which is internal, or to regeneration; and that the one cannot be understood without the other. All things material are produced from things spiritual; and when this is seen and acknowledged, the mind is borne outward into the external universe, by the very power which constantly creates this universe.

Here Emerson encountered a man who, like himself, felt "that there was a more awful reality to thought and feeling, than to the infinite panorama of nature around him",40 and who went on to declare the material universe the mirror of man's soul. Many attitudes and impulses dovetailed in the months after his wife's death in February of 1831, and many of them were expressed for the first time in his journals. A few weeks prior to his near-ecstatic rediscovery of the meaning of self-reliance and the writing of his poem "Gnothi Seauton", he made one of his first references to the use of Swedenborg's principle of correspondence. "After a fortnight's wandering to the Green Mountains and Lake Champlain", still mourning the death of Ellen, he writes, I . . . would willingly transfer some of the pictures that the eyes saw, in living language to my page; yea, translate the fair and magnificent symbols into their own sentiments. But this were to antedate knowledge. It grows into us, say rather, we grow wise, and not take wisdom; and only in God's own order, and by my concurrent effort, can I get the abstract sense of which mountains, sunshine, thunders, night, birds and flowers are the sublime alphabet.41

We note here one of the main factors which was to inhibit the creativity of the erstwhile "class poet" of Harvard. The contemplation of correspondences, Reed had written, will produce a poetry "which may not be written perhaps, but which may be felt as a part of our being".42 Emerson's business likewise is not to write down the meanings of the "fair and magnificent symbols", but to learn their meaning through natural sympathy, to permit 40

See above, p. 11. Reed, "On Animals", New Jerusalem Magazine, II (1828-1829), pp. 23, 29 (Cameron, II, 34). 42 See above, p. 26. 41

28

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

their meaning to grow into him - to become a part of his being. Poetry, if it absolutely must be written, will be written only after this reconciliation of man with his symbolic universe. His continued concern with the Swedenborgian concept of man and nature is shown in a playful letter written to his aunt on Christmas D a y , 1831: "What from the woods, the hills, and the enveloping heaven? What from the interior creation, - if what is within be not the creator? H o w many changes men ring on these two words in and out. It is all our philosophy. T a k e them away, and what were Wordsworth and S w e d e n b o r g ? " 4 3 One year after the writing of that letter, E m e r s o n was aboard ship bound for Europe. T h e freedom of the journey and his abandonment of his past must have permitted that rare synthesis of ideas, attitudes, impulses, and romantic dreams which took final concrete form three years later in his b o o k Nature. T h e philosophy of Coleridge was gradually coming to life in the warmth of Swedenborg's poetic mysticism. M a n must first know himself, as Coleridge said, in order to know the great i AM; and it was for this very purpose that "outward N a t u r e " existed. H e had hardly begun his return voyage than he wrote: There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. . . . Every act puts the agent in a new condition. The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. 44 T h e faculty which perceives its likeness in the external world is the inner self, which is distinct from the everyday practical intellect as Coleridge's philosophic consciousness is distinct from the spontaneous consciousness. " I recognize", he told his former congregation in 1833, "the distinction of the outer and inner self - of the double consciousness . . .; that is, there are two s e l v e s . . . ; within this erring passionate mortal self, sits a supreme calm immortal m i n d . . . , " 4 5 F r o m this point on, encouraged by the plausibility of Coleridge's reasoning and by the fervor of Swedenborg's imagination, 41

44 45

Journal,

II, 4 4 0 .

Journal, III, 20 (Sept. 8, 1833). Young Emerson

Speaks,

p. 200.

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

29

Emerson worked busily, but deliberately, upon the manuscript of his first book which was to combine the notions of an autonomous, creative mind and an emblematic nature. Continuing to develop the implications of Swedenborg's nature, he wrote (Nov. 2, 1833): There is not a passage in the human soul, perhaps not a shade of thought, but has its emblem in nature. And this does not become fainter, this undersong, this concurrent text, with more intimate knowledge of nature's laws, but the analogy felt to be deeper and more universal for every law that is revealed. It almost seems as if an unknown intelligence in us expressed its recognition of each new disclosure. . . . Nature is a language, and every new fact that we learn is a new word. . . ,48 On December 21, 1834, he could declare: "Blessed is the day when the youth discovers that Within and Above are synonyms." He never came closer to espousing a thorough going Swedenborgianism than during the several years prior to 1836. Although his radical protestantism would never permit him to accept New Church dogma, his need to assign a religious role to the dualism of the "ME" and the " N O T - M E " prompted him to accept its founder's doctrine of correspondence. When he read Elizabeth Peabody's manuscript translation of Oegger's Le Vrai Messie in the summer of 1835, he had already been convinced that correspondence was the grammar which made man and nature inter-decipherable; Oegger's description of "a language of nature" seemed only to corroborate Emerson's own conclusions. Thus correspondence became an important part of Emerson's strategy of non-alignment. When he moved to Concord in November of 1834 and made his separate peace with the world - to be ratified by himself again and again - he carried with him the means to maintain a life of calm self-reliance. Justified not by faith, but by Coleridge, he had learned to reverence the self within as a very God, and, prompted by Swedenborg, he had learned to look upon the outside world as the multiform mirror in which the God within beheld Himself. In his large clapboard «

Journal,

III, 2 2 7 .

30

EMERSON'S THEORY OF MEN AND NATURE

citadel in Concord he proceeded to write down his discovery and prepare it for publication. The next chapter will outline the Emersonian doctrine of correspondence as he promulgated it in Nature and the early Essays.

II EMERSONIAN CORRESPONDENCE AS SET FORTH IN NATURE AND THE E A R L Y ESSAYS, 1836-1844

In looking at the objects of Nature . . . I rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a bolical language for something within me already and forever exists, than observing thing new.

seem symthat any-

S. T. Coleridge.

The small volume, Nature, published anonymously in 1836, might be considered the manifesto of American transcendentalism. In it were set forth many of the large questions which were occupying the minds of a new generation of American thinkers, suddenly exposed to the rapid currents of European thought: Is the external world absolutely discontinuous with the individual mind? In what sense may the external world be considered an illusion or a mere phenomenon? How can a phenomenon be used as an instrument of self-realization, that is, for the contemplation of Spirit? How can poetry be used to achieve this contemplation? How is man transformed by this contemplation? Because it posed so many of these crucial questions, Nature can be regarded as a seminal précis of the philosophizing of the entire transcendental movement. 1.

M A T T E R AS PHENOMENON

Emerson had originally meant to write two essays, one on "Nature" and one on "Spirit", one celebrating the symbolic purpose of the material world, the other maintaining the priority and preeminence of man's soul over all created things. Only a

32

EMERSONIAN CORRESPONDENCE

month before the planned publication of the two essays, he decided to combine both into a single, long essay. Here he was faced with the task of making the reconciliation of the Mind with the external world of Matter philosophically convincing. In his journal entry for August 8, 1836, he wrote, "The book of Nature still lies on the table; there is, as always, one crack in it, not easy to be soldered or welded." This split occurred, when, "after describing nature in its material aspects, Emerson merely jumped to the conclusion that nature might just as well be described as ideal." 1 Although he seemed so effortlessly to interrelate Nature and Spirit in his first book, his subsequent books and essays returned again and again to this demon of dualism. Throughout all his writing this constant rumination went on: the long monologue of his essays and lectures never digresses far from the dilemma of spiritual man in a universe of matter. In Nature, he exuberantly declared that "the axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics". 2 But eight years later he had to admit: "I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe the difference, and I shall observe it." 3 Throughout his life he struggled with the implications of this problem. "A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two." 4 The crack between "Nature" and "Spirit" he found in the summer of 1836 could not be welded philosophically. He could find no strictly philosophical argument capable of the task, and so was forced to consider other means. First of all, he began Nature be admitting the Cartesian dualism: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and S o u l . . . . All that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and

1

F. I. Carpenter, An Emerson Handbook (New York, 1953), p. 53. R. W. Emerson, Nature, C. W., I, p. 38. (NOTE: All quotations from Emerson are taken from Emerson's Complete Works, Riverside Edition, 1895.) 3 "Experience", C. W., Ill, p. 85. 4 Journal (1837), quoted in Stephen Whicher's Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia, 1955), p. 31. 2

EMERSONIAN

CORRESPONDENCE

33

art, all men and my own body, must be ranked under the name, NATURE."5

He would have liked, perhaps, to have found some tertium quid which could subsume Spirit and Nature. He knew he could not find the answer to his problem by using scientific method. Scientific method had its value in the observation and classification of analyzable objects in nature. The mind, on the other hand, could not be studied empirically. T o do so, he believed, would be to reduce it to the level of a sensation-registering machine. Although he could not find that long-sought substratum of being, he was encouraged by the philosophical revolt of idealism in Europe at least to turn the tables on scientific materialism. Why, he asked, should the mind be considered liable to the laws of nature? Why should not what we call nature be understood as subject to the laws of the mind? In this idealist revolt, Emerson saw the opposition of a poetic world-view to a mechanistic world-view. For according to idealism, external matter derives its existence from the poiesis of spirit. It is the poet who, perpetuating the first six days of Genesis, is the principal shaper of the universe: He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms things to this thoughts.6 The poet here appears as the demiurge of Emerson's idealism. Throughout the first half of Nature, the material world, the "NOT ME", is treated not in terms of quantity, analyzable property, or substance so much as in terms of intelligibility. It seems to exist, as Feidelson points out, only in the epistemological act. One is not greatly surprised, then, that Emerson in his chapter entitled "Idealism" infers that possibly the "external" world exists only in the mind, of the knower: " A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, - . . . whether nature outwardly exists." T o anyone aware of the sovereign activity of the mind it is obvi5

Nature,

C. W., I , p p .

•

Nature,

C. W., I, p . 5 6 .

10-11.

34

EMERSONIAN CORRESPONDENCE

ous that the senses are a lower and less trustworthy faculty. One is led inevitably "to regard nature as phenomenon, not as substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect." It is obvious, furthermore, that mind determines the appearance of matter, for with "a very slight change in the point of vision" - as when one is in a balloon or a ship or a moving train - even the most familiar objects take on new shapes and colors. "The least change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air." One comes to the final understanding "that whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable."7 But, he assures his readers, this common experience, this fact, does not subvert the workings of the universe. This insight does not collapse the painted stage scenery of the world: the stability of phenomena is inviolable. "Their permanence is sacredly respected. . .. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature."8 We begin to see the non-philosophic tendency in Emerson's argumentation. He does not prove the outside world does not exist - from his vantage point within the mind he can only give utterance to "the noble doubt". Treating it as if it were an axiomatic certainty, he rests his whole argument upon this doubt. In fact, rather than outlining a philosophical system, Emerson seems to be saying, Wouldn't it be interesting if we regarded the outside world as intrinsically meaningless, as dependent on the human mind for all significance? The search for a final, philosophically sound solution to the problem is wholly abandoned. Solving the problem is made to appear of secondary importance: Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me.9

He accepts this hypothetical illusionism, not because he is assured of its philosophical truth, but because he has found it useful. 1 8 9

Nature, Nature, Nature,

C. W., I, pp. 52-56 C. W., I, p. 53. C. W., I, p. 53.

passim.

EMERSONIAN CORRESPONDENCE

35

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind.10

This "ideal theory", as it is presented in Nature, allows for a certain unification of mind and matter. This unification first demands the total dematerialization of matter. When this has been accomplished, when all the "NOT ME" has been transformed into phenomena, perfectly assimilable into the "ME", then spirit is able, conceivably, to ingest the universe. For the Emerson of 1836, the contraries vanish before the onward conquest of the mind, and Brahma fills and completes the universe.

2.

P H E N O M E N O N AS L A N G U A G E

But this millenial peace came only after a long struggle. The leaders in this struggle, the champions of the mind, were to be the philosophers and the poets. The latter, however, were to be the principal vindicators of spiritual power, for the poets had at their command the plastic imagination. Emerson seems to enjoy the impetuousness with which the Poet, his cosmic hero, flouts the once arrogant, now subject mind. With a splendid fury the poet launches his Blitzkrieg on the universe. In his heroic passion "he unfixes the land and the sea". To him, "the refractory world is ductile and flexible". He tosses the creation "like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind."11 How has the poet gotten this power? Even if the world is phenomenal, it is composed of an incalculable myriad of different phenomena. How is he able to assimilate into his single self such a mass of particular phenomena? Emerson would answer that, while the scientist is concerned with quantity and classification, and so is obliged to hold the mirror up to nature, in the case of the poet it is nature which holds the mirror, and that in i» 11

Nature, Nature,

C. W., I, p. 63. C. W., I, pp. 56-57.

36

EMERSONIAN CORRESPONDENCE

this mirror the poet discovers his own self reflected. He does this by perceiving the correspondences between the outside and the inside worlds, "real affinities . . . that is to say, the ideal affinities, for only they are real",12 between phenomena and the mind. Since they are "ideal", i.e., belonging to the soul, the soul is potentially the master of them as phenomena. This power of perception "enables him to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul."13 Emerson seems again not to have worried too much about fitting correspondence into a philosophical system. In Nature, he apparently considered correspondence to be the providential ligature of the universe; yet later, in his essay on Swedenborg in Representative Men, he disagrees with the prophet's one-for-one connecting of spiritual fact with material appearance. Yet his discovery and early experimentation with correspondence led him, by 1836, to regard the external world as a decipherable text. In a sense, the volume, Nature, is a celebration of his discovery that when matter as phenomenon becomes matter as language, the "NOT ME" becomes finally assimilable into Mind. All words, he maintains, have their origin in concrete objects. Even the most abstract and humanized concepts stem from natural facts. Thus "wrong" originally meant "twisted", and "spirit" meant "wind". "Words", he says, "are signs of natural facts"; by merely reversing the equation, natural facts become words. For: It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things that are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. 14

In this way the universe is given a purpose. It "exists for the education of each man".15 12 13 14 15

Nature, C. W., I, Nature, C. W„ I, Nature, C. W„ I, "History", C. W.,

p. 59. p. 59. p. 32. II, p. 14.

EMERSONIAN CORRESPONDENCE

37

Emerson soon saw the difficulty of adhering too closely to Swedenborg's notion of correspondence. It was too authoritatian and, in a way, too scientific. He soon discarded the possibility of arriving at "the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature", of uncovering the "hidden life and final cause"16 of the world. He found he could, in fact, discard this whole point of view - this assumption that things in themselves have any property or life or cause disjunct from the contemplating self. For "not in Nature but in man is all the beauty and the worth he sees."17 In outside phenomena, in time and space, the soul discovers only itself: "The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is only the flowing robe in which she is clothed."18 Since 1) only the soul is real, 2) matter is phenomenal, and 3) matter signifies spiritual facts, man's duty and his destiny is, by using matter as language, to explore the Self. The idealists' switch of emphasis from the object to the subject, thus reconciling on their own terms the bipolarity of Soul and Nature, permitted Emerson to declare that the Platonic precept "Know thyself" and the empiricists' precept " 'Study Nature' become at last one maxim."19 For most people this correspondential marriage with the outside world is never consummated. Even for the person who has learned to observe his internal climates in the natural vistas of sky and sea and mountains, this moment is rare and unforeseeable. Yet, when it occurs one feels "that the huge heaven and earth are but a web drawn around us, that the light, the skies, and mountains are but the painted vicissitudes of the soul."20 In these moments when, through a lucky concurrence of outside objects with internal memories and preconscious "instincts", the spark unites the two poles of vision, then in the imaginative act Spirit and Nature are fused. The external objects themselves, without verbal mediation, become the nouns and verbs of an 1« Nature, C. W., I, p. 40.

17

18 19 20

"Spiritual Laws", C. W., II, "The Over-Soul", C. W., II, "The American Scholar", C. "Imagination", C. W., VIII,

p. 140. p. 257. W., I, p. 88. p. 30.

38

EMERSONIAN

CORRESPONDENCE

expanding vocabulary. Then "the facts of Nature" become "the grammar of the eternal language".21 By the poetic return to matter, Emerson hoped that poets would enrich the verbal language. Since in the material world the mind could behold a limitless variety of affinities, a limitless number of reflections of the secret workings of the self, then, perhaps, by grafting these semantic objects into poetry man could develop a language of a subtlety and vastness commensurate to his unknown Self. Provided with names, he would at last know. Then "that which was unconscious truth", would become, "when interpreted and defined in an object, a part of the domain of Knowledge, - a new weapon in the magazine of power." 22

3.

LANGUAGE AS POWER

By his use of external, phenomenal nature the Emersonian seer was able not only to contemplate his soul, but in the same vision to behold the universal World-Soul. For in the timeless, spaceless region within each man, the soul and God were one. Here, through the instrumentality of natural objects, all contraries were finally reconciled. The hints to the solving of the dilemma of the dualistic universe Emerson had found in a mystical theory of language. He said that he considered the genius of Swedenborg and Wordsworth to be the agents of a reform in philosophy, the bringing poetry back to nature, to the marrying of nature and mind, undoing the old divorce in which poetry had been famished and false, and nature had been suspect and pagan. 21

"Beauty", The Conduct of Life, quoted in Perry Miller's (ed.), The American Transcendentalists (Garden City, New York, 1957), p. 185. 22 Nature, C. W., I, p. 41. Emerson made Goethe "The Poet" in his Representative Men; he himself seems to have had something in common with Faust: we recall that, by using things magically, Faust hoped to achieve knowledge of and power over the world: "Dass ich erkenne, was die Welt/ Im Innersten zusammen hält/ Schau' alle Wirkenskraft und Samen,/ Und tu' nicht mehr in Worten kramen." Faust I, 382-85. At this point in the drama he has not turned toward actual experience but hopes by means of magic to bypass the empty words of intellectualization. The Emersonian seer hoped to achieve the same ends of knowledge and power by means of the analogical magic of the imagination.

EMERSONIAN CORRESPONDENCE

39

For the sake of this mystical experience, all the "NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all men and my own body" must serve as instruments. They are useful, but not as conveyors of intrinsic meaning: men and paintings are not to bully the soul with advice or intentions. They are mute reflectors of only that which the observer is disposed to see. This, of course, would tend to the notion of a cumulative tradition and of a society based on cooperative enterprise. The strong architectural upright of Emerson's philosophy, the gospel of Self-Reliance, reaches from the heights of mystical experience to the level of everyday existence. The social implications, however, were merely consequences of the function selfreliance played in the practice of correspondential mysticism, a mysticism in which no intermediaries are tolerated between soul and Soul. In all things - trees, paintings, poems, books, men, women —the visionary's eye perceives form, is enlightened by affinities, and then passes on, outward, turning the world to glass, to perfect transparency. When all obstructions have been removed, their ideal forms absorbed into the soul, then the soul, the essential man, stands alone in a vast, deserted cosmos. He looks upon God, the Soul of the universe. In this vision in which "the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one", 23 Man blends into God. Commenting on the centrality of Self, as expressed particularly in Nature and "Self-Reliance", Stephen Whicher writes: Emerson . . . srikes one of the most startlingly new notes, all circumstances considered, ever to be struck in American literature, while hardly appearing to be aware that he has said anything unusual. The lesson he would drive home is man's entire independence. The aim of this strain in his thought is not virtue, but freedom and mastery. It is radically anarchic, overthrowing all the authority of the past, all compromise or cooperation with others, in the name of the Power present and agent in the soul. 24

A familiar image of spiritual enlightenment in transcendental writing is the sun, especially the sunrise. In 1838, after the dis23 84

"The Over-Soul", C. W., II, p. 253. Whicher, op. cit., p. 56.

40

EMERSONIAN CORRESPONDENCE

appointing reaction his Divinity School Address received, he wrote in his Journal: The world . . . hears not the cock crowing: it sees not the grey streak in the East. At the first entering ray of light, society is shaken with fear and anger from side to side. Who opened that shutter? they cry, Wo to him! They belie it, they call it darkness that comes in, affirming that they were in light before. Before the man who has spoken to them the dread word, they tremble and flee . . . The wild horse has heard the whisper of the tamer: the maniac has caught the glance of the keeper. They try to forget the memory of the speaker. . . . But vain, vain, all vain. It was but the first mutter of the distant storm they heard. - it was the first cry of the Revolution, - it was the touch, the palpitation that goes before the earthquake. Even now society is shaken because a thought or two have been thrown into the midst. It now works only in a handful. . . . But the doom of State Street, and Wall Street, of London, and France, of the whole world, is advertised by those thoughts; is in the procession of the Soul which comes after those few thoughts.25 Note how the image of sunlight blends into the image of the alldestroying storm, the cosmic Revolution. The generally received impression of the "Sage of Concord" here fades before the advent of a young god, a millennial Apollo who is to effect the annihilation of all the fossil institutions of the world and to bring to a purged world the mastery of the Soul. As Stephen Whicher points out, this ambition for power within the ideal dimension of the universe was for extra-moral, or super-moral power. In communion with the Over-Soul, the Emersonian seer, in the genuine tradition of nineteenth century hero-worship, became an Übermensch. Emerson admired Napoleon not because he conquered Europe, but because as a "Representative Man" he vindicated the pure, extra-moidl power of the soul. "Culture" was the discipline which developed Napoleons of the soul. In Emerson's use of the word, it always signified "selfculture", that is, a culture of the self, undertaken by the self. In one of the lectures he delivered on "Culture" in 1837, Emerson wrote: 25

Journal (1838), quoted in Whicher, op. cit., p. 74.

EMERSONIAN CORRESPONDENCE

41

His own Culture, - the unfolding of his nature, is the chief end of man. A divine impulse at the core of his being, impels him to this. The only motive at all commensurate with his force, is the ambition to discover by exercising his latent power . . . . Culture, in the high sense, does not consist in polishing or varnishing, but in so representing the attractions of nature that the slumbering attributes of man may burst their iron sleep and rush, full-grown, into day.26

Culture is thus the ascesis by which the seer ascends to the climax of visionary power, that ecstasy in which the human soul is transfigured into the Universal Soul. Culture presents those natural objects to the soul which are capable of awakening its "slumbering attributes" so that they may burst forth into selfrealization and self-fulfillment. It is not surprising, then, that art should be assigned an important function in this ascesis. It is important to note, however, that Emerson made a distinction between Art and the arts. Art (capitalized) meant the reconstruction of the ideal unity of man, nature, and God; the seeing of affinities, not the making of poems; the act and not the artifact.27 While expression was as natural and necessary as exhalation, the imaginative act in itself was considered a complete act, prior to, and independent of, its incorporation into an artistic medium. As is perhaps evident from his own poems, Emerson did not experience the white-hot moment of creative discovery within the verbal medium. Writing to Lydia Jackson in 1835, he explained his modification of the term "poet": I am a born poet. . . . a poet in the sense of a perceiver & dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul & matter, & especially of the correspondence between these and these. 28

The arts were intended to be servants of Art, for the same reason 26

"Lectures on Culture", quoted in Whicher, op. cit., p. 84. "Art", C. W., II, p. 338. Jacques Barzun also makes this distinction. In Classic, Romantic, and Modern (p. 72) he says that "at its best, romantic art is perfect art, complete in the manner of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, though it has not always the shaDe of that very different thing, a perfect work of art." 28 Letters, I, p. 435. 27

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that verbal language was a servant of Language. The essential Language of the universe was that significance, i.e., correspondential meaning, which the mind perceived in the outside world. True Art was simply the mind's recognition and comprehension of this Language. By means of the discipline of "Culture", an individual might hope to develop the "Art" of perceiving correspondences, of reading the "Language" of the universe. The arts, therefore, were assigned a definitely instrumental role in the seer's discipline; they were stimuli, "points of departure", just as were forest walks, scientific journals, and the sound of wind blowing across the strings of an Aeolian harp. If the hereditary prerogatives of the arts seemed somewhat slighted, certainly Art was given measureless prospects. For Emerson the interest of a work of art lay in that which is in ACT OR ENDEAVOR TO PROCEED, to reach somewhat beyond, and all the better, if that be somewhat vast and divine.29

A work of art is a commemoration of a wedding of mind and nature; it is not to be considered as the offspring of this union. It has value only insofar as it indicates to others a pathway into the uncharted Self. The artist sketches a few thoughts: "the procession of the S o u l . . . comes after those few thoughts." 30 Self-realization is the final purpose of the poet's work. For this purpose, the poet carefully draws forth the correspondential meaning from "every dumb and inanimate object". Unhusking it of its conventional, utilitarian meanings, he gives it a new, human, (therefore more true) significance. He consents that this object will represent his thought. This decision is not the outcome of logical deliberation; nor does he, ex post facto, charge his chosen symbol with an influx of manifold meaning. The decision is simply the result of the thought's assuming, in the moment of vision, the correspondent aspect of the object. The Emersonian symbol is the temporary guise under which the emanations of the mind are revealed to the mind. The symbolizing poet "perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol", 29 30

Letters, I, p. 299. See p. 40.

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43

recognizes "the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol."81 In the procession of the soul, symbols are paving stones and guideposts. The soul uses particular symbols and, in its passage, leaves panorama of symbols. They seem to flow past like objects viewed from a moving train. The proof of progress is the "fugacity of symbols". This progress of the mind through material forms is beauty, for Emerson defines beauty as "the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms."32 The symbolizing mind does not rest in the image: The quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. . . . All symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive. . . . M

Vivien Hopkins in her study of the Emersonian aesthetic writes: Emerson thinks of the symbol as having effect not so much through perfect fusion of idea with image, as through the expression given to the object by the idea, in the moment of flowing through it. The idea may remain in the reader's mind, or the object may be put to fresh uses by the post; but the idea and image are not considered as inseparably fused in a new unity. The material object has only temporary value in objectifying spiritual i n t u i t i o n . . . . Emerson's theory of the symbol is, then, ideal rather than structural.34

Emerson's aesthetic is quite inimical to the aesthetic which considers the work of art as an object detached from both the creator and the receptor. For Emerson there existed, as far as the work of art was concerned, only the primary artist, i.e., the poet, and the secondary artist, i.e., the reader; through both these there passed the electric recognition of the common Language of the world. Their functions were different: the primary artist was the explorer; the secondary artist was the colonist; but for both the road was the same, both were part of the same procession of the soul. Upon the performance of these two functions depended the 31

"The Poet", C. W., II, p. 24. "Beauty", The Conduct of Life, quoted in Whicher, p. 178. 33 "The Poet", C. W., II, p. 37. 34 V. C. Hopkins, Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson's Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 130-31. 32

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progress of man to self-realization. The particular glimpses of this revealed self which were commemorated in poetry were to be thought of as occurring at two temporal stages, first the genetic stage, and secondly the effective stage. In the first stage, the poet, face to face with the forms of external nature, constructs imaginatively a set or series of objective forms correspondent to an otherwise ineffable complex of thoughts which are revealed, at that moment, within him. He himself becomes the (almost) automatic means through which this process of symbolization takes place. "His health and greatness consist in his being the channel through which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fulness in which an exstatical state takes place in him." 3 5 This, we should keep in mind, is the pre-verbal stage of the poet's work. It is the exploration of an unknown continent. The poem itself is the story of the journey and of the discovery of strange countries. Yet this is not a wholly unfamiliar landscape; the journey of discovery is more a journey of rediscovery, a "return", as Marcel Raymond said, "to an infinitely remote homeland". 38 This book of travels is useless unless it stirs the reader to launch his own expeditions into the undiscovered self. Any consideration of irony, paradox, and the tension of contraries within the structure of a travel book is decidedly beside the point. The second stage of the aesthetic act occurs, for Emerson, at the moment of reception. In his essay on "Art" he describes this moment: Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new artists. 37

What William Wimsatt has called the "concrete universal", the poem as a construct of symbols which lives an autonomous life separate from the reader and the poet, would have been for Emerson a shocking perversion of the function of poetry. "There "The Method of Nature", quoted in Miller, op. cit., p. 59. Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (New York, 1950), pp. 37-38. 37 "Art", C. W., II, p. 338. 35

36

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45

is", he wrote, "a mischievous tendency in him [the poet] to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine." He bitterly criticized the pure technicians who "seek in art the exhibition of their talent" and the pastoral creationists who sought in art "an asylum from the evils of life". These people were guilty of attempting "to detach the beautiful from the useful".38 Poems themselves are merely instruments. There is higher work for Art than the arts. They [i.e., the poems and the paintings] are abortive births of an Imperfect or vitiated instinct. A r t . . . , in its essence, immense and u n i v e r s a l . . . . is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end. 39

In accordance with their instrumental purpose, poems exist only in the subjective experience of the receptor at the moment of reception. Of the affective nature of Emerson's aesthetics, Regis Michaud writes: "L'œuvre d'art a proprement parler, ce n'est pas telle statue, tel tableau, telle symphonie, tel poeme, mais tels gestes, telles actions que la vue ou l'audition nous suggéré."40 Miss Hopkins in her thorough and scholarly treatment of Emerson's aesthetics, cannot, however, resist summoning him before the tribunal of mid-twentieth century criticism: Evaluation of Emerson's concept of the symbol must admit its inferiority to a truly structural theory. . . . If the observer is always fleeing f r o m the material aspect of the symbol to the idea represented, and f r o m that idea to others, his aesthetic appreciation takes on a disembodied quality. 41 38

"Art", C. W„ II, p. 341. "Art", C. W., II, p. 338. And by "creation" he meant the re-advance of the creative conscious - the wide contemplating eye of the seer - into the Unknown. Therefore, "The poet should rejoice if he has taught us to despise his song; if he has so moved us as to lift us, - to open the eye of the intellect to see farther and better." ("Poetry and Imagination", C. W„ IV, p. 59.) 40 Régis Michaud, L'Esthétique d'Emerson (Paris, 1927), p. 24. 41 Hopkins, op. cit., p. 133. 39

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Wimsatt in his critique of Martin Foss' Symbol and Metaphor describes this "fleeing", or in Foss' words "metaphorical process", by means of an image: the mind is a fire which consumes an inexhaustible supply of fuel in the form of an endless series of symbols. It is, he says, "a celebration of the bondfire to the ultimate negation of the fuel". He concludes whimsically, "The fun is no doubt in the flames, the inexhaustibly varied metaphoric process." 42 All three references - Hopkins' "fleeing", Wimsatt's "fire", and Foss' "metaphorical process" - Emerson would have understood as synonymous with his flowing of the mind through a series of natural objects, only he would have called it "the procession of the Soul". In any case, he would have had little patience with an "embodied" idea, in Miss Hopkins' sense. The establishment of autonomous poetic universes Emerson foresaw in the neat cosmography of Swedenborg. In criticism of this, he wrote in Representative Men that "the slippery Proteus is not easily c a u g h t . . . . Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves." 43 Reacting instinctively against what Sherman Paul has called Swedenborg's "hypostatization of insight", Emerson maintained in his aesthetics, as in his philosophy, an absolutely fluid organicism. His reaction to selfcontained verbal cosmoi would have been no less emphatic. A true poet, he believed, was first of all a voyant; "it is pitiful to be an artist, when by forebearing to be artists we might be vessels filled with the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulation of omniscience and omnipresence." 44 Emerson would have sympathized with Rimbaud's abhorrence of the Symbolistes. "There is higher work for Art than the arts", he had said, and he would not bar African safaris from the true artist's Art. 4.

EMERSON A N D T H E TRADITION OF ANTI-ART

Charles Feidelson, in his Symbolism and American Literature, proved successfully that classical American literature was not 42 43 44

W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal Icon (New York, 1960), p. 123. "Swedenborg: the Mystic", Representative Men, C. W., IV, p. 121. "The Method of Nature", in Miller, p. 60.

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47

simply the work of quaint, indigenous men of letters who flourished during the "Flowering of New England" and the "Times of Melville and Whitman". He pointed to the fact that from Emerson on, American literature played a sensitive and responsive part in the history of Western art and ideas. The writers of America's "Classic Age", he affirms, anticipated modern symbolism because they lived in the midst of the same intellectual forces; mid-nineteenth century America was a proving ground for the issues to which the method of modern literature is an answer. They envisaged the symbolistic program to an extent that few of their English contemporaries even thought possible. . .

Feidelson begins with Puritanism and then details the various effects it had on the development of an American symbolist literature. He then goes on to show how Emerson was a repository of nineteenth-century impulses and ideas into which a great mass of diverse tendencies coursed and out of which streamed an even more diverse assortment. Taking the elder Henry James' remark "Oh you man without a handle!" for the epigraph to his chapter "Toward Melville: Some Versions of Emerson" he indicates ways in which Emerson's speculations into art and metaphysics anticipated and, in fact, suggested the symbolist method of Melville. Emerson was a "man without a handle" not because he was smoothly non-committal but because he offered his contemporaries a hundred different handles; one for laissez-faire liberals, one for Fourierists; one for Abolitionists, one for slave-holders - each person who read Emerson's gospel of individualism assumed that he was that embattled, heroic, Emersonian "individual". To writers he offered (at least) two "handles": one led to the symbolism of Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James; the other to the "anti-art" tradition of Thoreau and Whitman. "Anti-art" is a strong expression and is used most often in a derogatory sense by critics opposed to the using of poetry as a means to an ulterior end. These critics usually accuse the "anti45

Charles Feidelson, Symbolism 1953), pp. 75-76.

and

American

Literature

(Chicago,

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artist" of mixing mysticism with poetry. Yet there exists today, and apparently always has existed, a belief that art is not autotelic but instrumental, and, since Rimbaud, the instrumentalism has assumed all the aspects of a mystique. Of this new development Marcel Raymond writes: . . . w e discern here [in Rimbaud's visionary ambitions] a new conception of literature - a conception that has been clearly recognized only in our day. The poetic sense becomes closely akin to the mystical and prophetic sense, a means no longer of expression but of discovery, an instrument as subtle as the finest point of the mind and capable of projecting its antennae into the very heart of the unconscious. 46

M. Raymond concludes his study of French poetry, From Baudelaire to Surrealism, by drawing attention to two contrary tendencies - the symboliste and the anti-poetic. "On the one hand, we have artists who have faith in beauty and strive to produce works of art; at the other extreme, there are those who despise art, convinced like Rimbaud that 'the idea of beauty has become stale', who subordinate poetic activity to goals that transcend it." Of the artists he says, "All of them believe, if not in the omnipotence of thought, at least in its power, in its ability to beget durable forms. Using a convenient antithesis, we may say that their adversaries humiliate art (technique, deliberate and conscious activity) before nature." 47 Dissatisfied with the literary ideals of his time, Rimbaud blamed the narrow professionalism of art: L'intelligence universelle a toujours jeté ses idées naturellement; les hommes ramassaient une partie de ces fruits du cerveau: on agissait, on en écrivait des livres: telle allait la marche, l'homme ne se travaillant pas, n'étant pas encore éveillé, ou pas encore dans la plénitude du grand songe.

Instead of working with things, with mere words, the new poet was to "work upon himself". For this he must first know himself: 46

Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (New York, 1949), p. 35. 47 Raymond, pp. 343-45.

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49

La première étude de l'homme qui veut être poète est sa propre connaissance, entière; il cherche son ame, il l'inspecte, il la tente, l'apprend. Dès qu' il la sait, il doit la cultiver! Je dis qu' il faut être voyant, se faire voyant. 48

When the poet as "voyant" transcends poetry, by means of poetry, he at last arrives "dans la plénitude du grand songe". For Emerson, also, literature was a means to a non-literary end. Works of art, he said, were 'abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated spirit". Art (capitalized), on the other hand, he equated with natural mysticism, with the "ACT OR ENDEAVOR TO PROCEED, to reach somewhat beyond, and all the better, if that be somewhat vast and divine." When he spoke of books and formal learning, he set them within the mythic geography of a romantic pilgrimage: Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when intervals of darkness come, as come they must, - when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. 49

To have recourse to the learning of the effete East and to the arts of Europe was only a temporary turning away from the great objective of the seer. Not to be diverted from his journey to the new world, to the voyant's magic city, "the sunbright Mecca of the desert", he turned his back to the East, declaring, "I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West." As early as the 1920's, when Surrealism first emerged as a distinct "movement", critics noted certain similarities between this literary doctrine and the mystic romanticism of Emerson. In 1927, Régis Michaud, in his L'Esthétique d'Emerson, wrote that a school of moderns ont trouvé pour désigner leurs doctrines un vocable qui n'aurait pas 48

"

Oliver Bernard, éd., Rimbaud (Baltimore, 1962), pp. 9-10. "The American Scholar", C. W., I, p. 73.

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effrayé Emerson, celui de swr-réalisme qui ressemble fort à ce qu'il appellait le transcendental. 50 And in 1941, F. O. Matthiessen in American Renaissance noted that Emerson went so far in this belief in the selfless release of creation as to say, "The muse may be defined, supervoluntary ends effected by supervoluntary means" - a theory to be developed, in ways unforeseen by Emerson, by modern poets of the unconscious. 51 Emerson, indeed, believed that there was a part of himself which was withdrawn from the multifarious world of noise and illusion and which bordered on the vast, silent domain of spiritual reality. By suspending the artistic will, he could experience the mystic afflatus. At such moments he could say with Rimbaud " . . . JE est un autre.. . . J'assiste à l'éclosion de ma pensée . . ,".62 He described this experience in "The Over-Soul": When I watch that flowing river [of thoughts], which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire to look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come. 53 For both Emerson and Surrealism, this experience of "alien energy" is immeasurably more valuable than any conscious, formal translation of it into words. Andre Breton, spokesman for French Surrealism, envisaged a "poésie, au besoin sans poèmes". 54 Emerson - almost a century before - declared: There is higher work for Art than the arts. They are abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art . . . , in its essence, immense and universal . . . is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end. 55 50

L'Esthétique d'Emersoti (Paris, 1927), p. VI. American Renaissance, p. 59. 52 Bernard, p. 9. 5S "Over-Soul", C. W., p. 251. 54 André Breton, "La Confession Dedaigneuse", Les Pas Perdus (Paris, 1920), p. 17. Cf. Reed on the future "language of nature": "Then may there be poetry which may be felt as part of our being." See above, p. 26. ss "Art", C. W., p. 339. 51

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51

Art (capitalized) had special function. It was, for Emerson, a demiurgic aesthetic which, by its mystic powers, could restore man's dominion over nature by infusing it with the vital soul of man. "Man is the dwarf of himself", "the Orphic poet" of Nature sang. "Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents." External nature was the creation of man's spirit, but it is now the dead, empty shell from which man's creative soul has withdrawn. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house (the external world), and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt himself and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is Instinct.56

Only by the "supervoluntary" agency of the unconscious can those correspondences by perceived which may someday permit the redintegration of man and the universe. For, in Breton's words, "Les contacts primordiaux sont coupés: ces contacts je dis que seul le ressort analogique parvient fugitivement à les rétablir. D'où l'importance que prennent, à longs intervalles, ces brefs éclats du miroir perdu." 57 Both the French Surrealists and the American Transcendentalist used correspondence (what Whitman called "the thought of likeness"). Both groups sought to use correspondence as a magic highway homeward out of exile - as Thomas Wolfe, himself somewhat of a gargantuan Transcendentalist, put it, "Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door." To gather these correspondences, they had only to look about them with the eyes of a seer. "The fact of the imagination", Emerson said, "is in showing the convertibility of every thing into every other t h i n g . . . . All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language." 58 "The poet cannot see a natural phenomenon which does not express to him a cor58

57 58

C. W., I, p. 58. André Breton, "Signe Ascendant", Pas Perdus, p. 44. "Beauty", in Miller's The American Transcendentalists, p. 185.

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respondent fact in his mental experience."59 In Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, André Breton echoed these words of Emerson: Ce qui demeure, ce qui culmine, c'est la certitude que rien n'est vain, que toute chose considérée tient un langage déchiffrable susceptible d'être entendue à l'unison de quelque émotion humaine. 80

Both Surrealism and Emersonian idealism, basically revolutionary doctrines, have as their goal the restoration of man. Man, Emerson said, is a "god in ruins": only by the liberation of the powers of the self (i.e., by spiritual "culture") can he regain the lost dominion of the universe. As Michel Carrouges writes: . . . si la poésie surréaliste apporte une vision de la métamorphose glorieuse de l'homme, tout le surréalisme, par l'armorce d'une autorévelation de l'homme et la mise en mouvement de toutes les puissances secretes de l'être humain plongé dans le cosmos, inaugure l'effective transmutation de la condition humaine. 61

The chaos we see in the external world is only a reflexion of the chaos within us. If we resolve the conflicts within ourselves, we will see that all the antinomies of nature were only illusions. Man's mind, M. Carrouges maintains, is not "esclave congenital et éternel du cosmos, mais provisoire serf . . ,".62 Like Apollo enslaved to Admetus, his servitude is not forever. He is a "god in ruins" whose poetry is his triumphal reentry into his ancient cosmic domain. Gradually - Emerson and the adherents to this mystic tradition agree - man will find his place in a universe of "otherness", reconcile all things in himself, and unite as God with God.

5.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL OBSERVER

But how did the nineteenth-century American set out to achieve this great work? How did he, this romantic-puritan hybrid, fit 59

"Inspiration", C. W., VIII, p. 257. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (Paris, 1929), p. 77. 81 M. Carrouges, André Breton et les données fondamentales réalisme, 5ème édition (Paris, 1950), p. 80. 68 Carrouges, p. 39. 60

du sur-

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into this tradition of anti-art? He generally began with the hints that Emerson furnished. To the observer, Emerson taught, all things seen are part of the spectacle. There exists a strict dualism of the "me" and the "not me" - the central self and the flowing, ambient world of phenomena. Upon this dualism he based his method of poetic mysticism, the method of correspondence. The "anti-poetic" bias of his writings is a natural consequence of this method. For by using immediate phenomena as aesthetic signification, he exalted the aspects of the life he saw flowing about him into works of art: True art is never fixed, but always flowing. . . . All works of art should not be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or a romance. 6 3

Thus even one's fellow men and women become part of the great spectacle, and there exists only the spectacle and the spectator. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance? - a subject and an object. 64

By 1842, when the essay "Experience" was published, he had come to realize some of the consequences of illusionism. The enthusiasm of 1836 had somewhat waned. He felt himself a bystander, eternally separated from the men and women of the masquerade. . . . the longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. . . . There will be the same gulf between every me and thee, as between the original and the picture. The universe is the bride of the soul. 65

Only in the absolute reality of the "great and crescive self" do external things have value. Men and women, objects and events, 63 64 65

"Art", C. W„ II, p. 340. "Experience", C. W., Ill, p. 81. C. W., Ill, p. 78.

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are recognized as pictures which have been copied from the original, and the original is the increate self of the spectator. Men and women seem to fade into a great painted landscape, are lost in an Emersonian "Nature", which is the austere and only "bride of the soul". As has often been noted, Emerson and the Transcendentalists spent considerable time writing and discussing the ideal of "Friendship". Yet few intellectual groups have suffered more from the lack of sympathetic human cohesiveness. In the Platonic highlands of Transcendental friendship, too often the individual, divested of human aspect, appeared in the chilly white garments of Idea. As early as 1838, Alcott regretfully wrote of Emerson, "Men are too purely ideas with him. He makes affection an idea and despoils it of all life. Men are uses with him."66 The use to which Emerson put his friends was the same use to which he put all external appearance: the use of correspondence. As Sherman Paul writes: "His doctrine of friendship expressed an ideal relationship in which the friend supplied the deficiency of nature and proved the possibilities of the fullest self-culture. Like nature the friend was both a source of inspiration and a mirror of the self."67 A friend was valued for the sake of the affinities he bore to the self. The more similar he seemed, the better mirror he provided. For this "class of people to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold . . . I will go to prison, if need be; b u t . . . " the rest were useless to him. The poor? "Are they my poor? I tell thee . . . that I grudge the dollar, dime, cent, I give to such men as do not belong and to whom I do not belong."68 The contemplation of the "great and crescive self" was the highest duty of the Emersonian mystic. This he did by observing the correspondence that exist between the phenomena of the outside world and the reality of the world within. If this practice ruined "the kingdom of mortal friendship and love", then lover 66

Quoted in Sherman Paul's Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man Nature in American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 179. 67 Emerson's Angle, p. 178. 68 "Self-Reliance", C. W., II, p. 53.

and

EMERSONIAN CORRESPONDENCE

55

and friend had to be renounced. H e chose to view the masquerade, collecting from it what impressions h e could use, but felt as little obliged to interfere with the lives of the maskers as a man in a museum feels obliged to save St. Sebastian from the archers. T h e gap is unbridgeable: In Flaxman's drawing of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep on the threshold. T h e face of the god expresses a shade of regret and compassion, but calm with the conviction of the irreconcilableness of the two spheres. H e is born into other politics, into the eternal and the beautiful. T h e m a n at his feet asks for his interest in turmoils of the earth into which his nature cannot enter. . . . T h e god is surcharged with his divine destiny. 69 This detachment, this visual exploitation of people, objects and events - as Emerson was painfully aware - created unfortunate situations. In 1842, in a lecture delivered in Boston's M a sonic Temple, he tried to explain the ideas and behavior of the new generation whose mentor he had been. They are idealists, he said; according to the idealist, Mind is the only reality. . . . Nature, literature, history, are only subjective p h e n o m e n a . . . H e does not respect labor, or the products of labor, namely property, otherwise than as a manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the law of being; he does not respect government, except as far as it reiterates the law of the mind; nor church, nor charities, nor arts, for themselves; but hears at a vast distance, what they say, as if his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His thought, - that is the Universe. 70 They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely; the repel influences; they shun general society. . . . This retirement does not proceed f r o m any whim on the part of the separators; but if anyone will take the pains to talk with them, he will find that this part is chosen both f r o m temperament and f r o m principle; and with some unwillingness too, and as a choice of the less of two evils; for these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial, they are not stockish or brute, - but joyous, susceptible, affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be loved. 71 60 70 71

"Experience", C. WIll, p. 83. "The Transcendentalism, C. W., I, p. 315. C. W., I, p. 323.

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The reason for this lonely withdrawal, this passionate yearning for self-realization, this apparently paradoxical behavior, he presented quite simply: From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this beholding of all things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics. It is simpler to be self-dependent. . . . Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude. 72

This "transfer of the world into the consciousness" is tantamount to the vesturing of the world in the garments of the mind, or, in more scientific language, "projection". Elsewhere, in fact, Emerson states that "the mind penetrated with its sentiment or its thought, projects it outward on whatever it beholds." 73 In other words the consciousness beholds two "worlds" simultaneously the sensed world and the pre-conscious world which is projected on the sensed world. When using this projectionist vision, the Emersonian seer was in great danger of solipsistic isolation in the fierce, ungovernable world of unconscious phantasy. This was the danger which Carl Jung spoke of when he said: As we know, it is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one encounters projection, one does not make them. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into the replica of one's unknown face. In the last analysis therefore, they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable. The resultant sentiment d'incompletude and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified. 74

Yet Emerson's Transcendentalist would risk this danger. The Transcendentalist, Emerson continued, was aware of two lives: one he lived with the prudential Understanding, the other with the divine Reason; and that the two "really show very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other: one 72 73 74

C. W„ I, pp. 315-16. C. W., IV, p. 15. Carl Jung, Psyche and Symbol (Garden City, N. Y„ 1958), p. 8.

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57

prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise."75 Thus the word "Transcendental" may be understood as referring to that inviolate "paradise" within the self, which transcends the world of the senses. From this Transcendental sanctum, the self is able to look down upon the curious acts and attitudes of the body. From this point of vantage, the self looks down upon the body's passage through a kaleidoscopic universe of sense experience. It watches. It collects many millions of impressions which in memory it broods upon. Then gradually out of the mass of sense emerge the features of the self, the God-Within-the-Soul. In his Journal of 1837, Emerson urged himself to persevere in this transcendental observation: The victory is won as soon as any Soul has learned always to take sides with Reason against himself; he transfers his Me from his person, his name, his interest, back upon Truth and Justice, so that when he is disgraced and defeated and fretted and disheartened, and wasted by nothings, he bears it well, never one instant relaxing his watchfulness, and, as soon as he can get a respite from the insults and the sadness, records all these phenomena, pierces their beauty as phenomena, and like a God, oversees himself. . . . Keep the habit of the observer, and as fast as you can, break off your association with your personality and identify yourself with the Universe. Be a football to Time & Chance, the more kicks, the better, so that you may inspect the whole game and know its uttermost law.76

C. W., I, p. 333. ™ Journal (1837), pp. 315-16. 75

Ill THOREAU, THE MOUNTAIN-CLIMBER

When the soul begins to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its very self; thus detached, it is not in nothingness but in itself . . . it is in the Supreme . . . If from that heightened self we pass still higher - image to archetype - we have won the Term of all our j o u r n e y i n g . . . . This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of Earth, the passing of solitary to solitary. Plotinus. Sixth Ennead, 9,11.

Emerson's most immediate follower, Henry Thoreau, used this process of correspondence (or "projection") deliberately and with the scrutiny and the control of his consciousness. As a romantic, he believed that the internal world revealed by external analogy was attainable and for knowledge of himself he risked the loss of all that was not himself-he risked the total isolation of the insane: that spiritual blindness of the man who has lost his vital link to a reality external to himself. Considering himself an exile in a world of gross, intrinsically meaningless matter, Thoreau resolved nevertheless to begin the perilous journey to the world of spirit, to return to the Universal Spirit of Which his own soul was one small errant particle. 1.

D E P A R T U R E FROM SOCIETY: T H E B E G I N N I N G OF A J O U R N E Y

When Emerson wrote his lecture "The Transcendentalist", he must have had in mind, among others, his newly acquired handy

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man, Henry Thoreau. Certainly the twenty-five year old Thoreau was a perfect example of the intense idealist of the rising generation. Like many others who were in college in the late 1830's, he had been struck by the startling force of Emerson's Nature. This transcendentalist manifesto had revealed to him a new vista to contemplate and conquer. By precept and example, Emerson had proved that poets could exist outside Boston, and mystics and philosophers outside the ranks of the New England clergy. Transcendentalism became for Thoreau, as for many others of his generation, a sufficient career in itself. Yet his transcendentalism, like everything about him, differed from the transcendentalism of his contemporaries in both type and intensity. For Emerson, transcendentalism, (or idealism, as he preferred to call it), was a world view in which a system of opposed, but component, elements remained in constant interaction. This "law of Compensation" was the cornerstone of his morality. Although he often expressed confidence in the final dominion of Spirit over the world of matter, his honesty forced him to admit a fundamental dualism, a "bi-polarity" of Mind and Matter, the Self and the External World. He might at times withdraw to the inner realm of "infinitude and paradise", but he could not long ignore the "buzz and din" of the world about him. He believed that a man's health depended on the successful balance of the inner and the outer worlds, but found this theoretical balance difficult, if not impossible, to attain. To his dismay, he discovered that when one enters the sanctum of the self, "transfers his Me from his person, his name, his interest, back upon Truth . . . and like a God, oversees himself", the buzz and din of the world becomes transformed into a masked pantomime or into a gallery of tableaux vivants. Re-entry into the social masquerade was not always easy for Emerson. He had to brace himself: "Let us be poised, and wise and our own today. Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are." 1 Thoreau, too, understood the process of transcendence and lived through some of the disadvantageous consequences of it. 1

Emerson, "Experience", Complete

Works,

III, p. 63.

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In a piece of vivid self-analysis he describes the process and the effect: With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof f r o m actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. 1 only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from byself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and the criticism of a part of me, which, at it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes. 2

The experience of transcendental observation, as Thoreau thus describes it, deserves closer scrutiny. First of all, this experience is one of knowledge, not of action. This knowledge, furthermore, is not the product of ratiocination, but of passive contemplation. An "Indra in the sky" is superior to logic. While the transcendent self looks down upon the grosser self, what it sees is an aimless thing, a perfectly irresponsible piece of "driftwood in the stream", a citizen of Concord with nothing better to do than to "feebly tabulate and paddle in the social slush".3 From the observer's superior vantage point, there is no moral distinction between one piece of driftwood and another: "all things, good and bad, go by . . . like a torrent." All the events of one's entire life appear as scenes and acts in a gigantic play, a play in which all the roles are filled by otherwise nonexistent actors and actresses. Indeed, to regard our fellow men and women as "personages" or apparitions or waxwork approxi2

Thoreau, Walden, WII, pp. 149-50 (NOTE: all quotations from Thoreau taken from The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, enlarged edition (Boston, 1906). 3 W., VI, p. 230. Letter to Harrison Blake, Aug. 8, 1854.

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mations of Transcendental Virtue "may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes". This habit of transcendental observation often turned the world into a fiction for him, as it did for his mentor, Emerson. It presented the world as an object of immediate aesthetic contemplation. One obvious difficulty with this process was that the actors in "the play, it may be the tragedy, of life" were sometimes inclined to take hold of the spectator, lift him from his seat, and drag him with them onto the stage. There, there was only conf u s i o n - l o u d , badly made-up, upstaging leading-ladies; wickedeyed confidantes that plucked at one's lapels; and kind, but painfully patronizing sages. In short, they became no longer picturesque. They became slightly embarrassing. NATURE.

I wish I could write it larger than that. NATURE.

. . . Absolutely the safest thing to get your emotional reactions over is NATURE. 4 Nature was safer than society, because it was utterly un-human. Nature was the safest spectacle, because it never looked back. It remained a spectacle, a permanent source of correspondence, a glassy pool untroubled by the crosscurrents of human emotion; it was a pool fit for a mystic Narcissus to gaze in. But it must be pointed out that Thoreau withdrew from society not because he hated human contact and not because he cherished a burning love for nature, else he might long ago have passed into the oblivion of the hermits and the horticulturists. He shunned involvement in society. He admitted he felt "not wholly involved in Nature". Regarding Thoreau's retreat to nature, Perry Miller writes: This lover of Nature was not a lover of nature itself: as he said, he ever sought the "raw materials of tropes and figures". For him these metaphors - or, as he sometimes called them, "types" - were the rewards of an exploitation of natural resources, as self-centered, as profit-seeking, as that of any railroad-builder or lumber baron, as that of any John Jacob Astor.6 4 5

D . H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. Perry Miller, Consciousness in Concord (Boston, 1958), p. 33.

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There is, indeed a striking paralled between the exploiter of natural resources and the exploiter of natural correspondences. Both regard nature not as a self-existent entity, but as a means by which they may attain an ulterior and purely personal objective. Both are instinctual capitalists: the one converts labor and material into promissory notes which he then stores away in a bank; the other converts experience into language which he stores away in his journal.6 The one decisive difference between the economic exploiter and the correspondential exploiter is that the former must be a member of society, whereas the latter must not. Though both are motivated by a desire to possess, to appropriate external nature to themselves, the railroad-builder or the lumber baron must depend on the cooperation of others to achieve his objectives. He must learn to conceal his anarchistic acquisitiveness. He must become a staid and decorous member of society. His stepbrother, the poetic exploiter, on the other hand, must work alone: his industrial holdings are contained within his five senses and from them alone is he able to bring forth the desired product. What few economic exploiters are capable of doing, the exploiter of phenomena does with ease: he uses and has absolute control over men and women, preempting their property at will. He is not at all compelled to cooperate with society. For him men and women, as well as trees and sunsets, are exploitable phenomena, puppets of the imagination. And most important: he may do all this without the least danger of self-involvement. Surely nature is the safest spectacle, but, provided it keep its aesthetic distance, even society may be put to use. This power of the imagination, by which the observer enriches himself not by the possession of things but by the temporary experience of things, was a prime element of transcendental doctrine. In fact, Emerson claimed the whole world as the poet's usufruct: The charming landscape which I saw this morning is undubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms.... There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the 8

Emerson often referred to his journal as his "bank".

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parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of those men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.7

To the poet he declared: Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord!8

In an early poem, incorporated into the Week, Thoreau describes the proprietary vision of a young friend in words that might well have described himself: No strength went out to get him victory, When all was income of its own accord; For where he went none other was to see, But all were parcel of their noble lord.9

Note the passive receptiveness of the observer, (No strength..."); an example of one of Thoreau's favorite figures of speech, the commercial metaphor, ("When all was income.. ."); the nearvoyeurism of the poet's work, ("none other was to see . .."); and the imperiousness with which he appropriates the correspondential objects which he sees, ( " . . . parcel of their noble lord"). In Walden, after commiserating "the young men . . . whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle and farming tools",10 and are condemned to spend their lives as serfs to their own property, Thoreau recommends a safer mode of possession. He had come close to such serfdom himself once: he had bought the "Hollowell place", but before the owner handed him the deed, Mrs. Hollowell, fortunately, persuaded her husband to buy back the farm. Thoreau acquiesced, no doubt, with a secret sigh of relief. His tour of the farm, all the same, was not a total waste of time: I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually 7 8

•

10

Emerson, Nature, C. W., I, p. 14.

Emerson, "The Poet", C. W., Ill, pp. 44-45.

Week, W., I, p. 276. Walden, W., II, p. 5.

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carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With regard to landscapes, "I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute." I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. 11

Of this mode of possession Sherman Paul writes: The cognitive act was not a knowing of things, but a having, an inner possession of them. As much of the external world as man transformed into himself and radiated with meaning, so much did he truly possess: and again, this was not knowledge, but an acquisition of being, an enlargement of self. 12

When Thoreau thus exploited the landscapes of New England, he did not do so as a fanciful tourist, but as a transcendental businessman in search of fresh sources of correspondence. "He is the richest", he said, "who has the most use for nature as the raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life."13 The "enlargement of self" is, in Thoreau's sense, a revelation of the self. The collecting, sifting, meditating upon the sense of experience was his life's vocation. Generally speaking, for New England transcendentalism there existed four ontological categories: the Self, Society, Nature, and God. Transcendentalists usually agreed about "Nature" and "God", relating them in accordance with the mystique of "Natural Piety". The first two entities, however, were the objects of endless dispute. How was the autonomy of the self to be reconciled with the apparent existence of other equally autonomous selves? If the self were to yield some of its autonomy to other selves, how could it escape the eventual contagion of institutionalism? Emerson maintained that the only safe solution lay in moderating between the two poles of Solitude and Society. But II

Walden, W., I, pp. 91-92. Perhaps the underlining of "survey" was a humorous reference to Thoreau's own surveying. 12 Sherman Paul, The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration (Urbana, 111., 1958), p. 7. 13 Journal, V, p. 135.

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there were those among the transcendental fellowship who grew impatient with Emerson's "aurea mediocritas". Those who gravitated more to the pole of Society were attracted sooner or later to the ideas of Alcott, Ripley, and Brownson, while those who felt the vocation of Solitude had, of course, their model in Thoreau. For him, "Society" faded into and was absorbed by Nature: what had been a quaternity now became a severely absolute trinity - Self, Nature, and God. By means of sense-objects, the observer was able to plumb the depths of his own being and there, within himself, behold the hidden city of God. Upon this quest, Thoreau staked his life. His mentor, Emerson, was one who felt compelled to balance the "infinitude and paradise" of the transcendent self with the "buzz and din" of society, but Thoreau proposed to banish from his life this buzz and din, to extricate himself, not only mentally, but physically from the masquerade, from the "noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting". Society was the court of Admetus to which he had been sentenced to labor for a certain term. But he was not a doer. He was a seer. The most glorious fact in my experience is not anything that I have done or hope to do, but a transient thought, or vision, or dream, which I have had. I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes for one true vision. 14

King Admetus must have wondered about his strange, dreamy shepherd, just as Emerson wondered about his "poor, dear Henry". After Thoreau's death, Emerson wrote: . . . I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that 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. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!

Which is one of the funniest and, at the same time, one of the most pathetic statements in the history of American letters.15 "

Week, W., I, pp. 145-46. Emerson's "Biographical Sketch" in introduction to Thoreau's Writings, Vol. I, p. xxxi. 15

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T h o r e a u spent his life in step with a distant drumbeat which, for all the buzz and din of Concord, E m e r s o n c o u l d s e l d o m hear. Huckleberrying w a s a part of the exploration of nature and the exploration of the self. U s i n g nature as correspondence, h e discovered that his self constituted an e v e n vaster w o r l d for which to engineer than the w o r l d in w h i c h h e walked. W e must never forget the T h o r e a u v i a n m e t a p h o r of the e x ternal for the internal. "I d o believe", he said, "that the outward and the inward life correspond. . . ." 1B In the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water, where m e n go and come. T h e landscape lies f a r and fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest traveled. 1 7 T h r o u g h o u t his writings h e m a d e it clear that the only real land worth exploring w a s the self: W h a t a f t e r all was the m e a n i n g of that South Sea Exploring Expedition . . . , by a recognition of the f a c t that there are continents & seas in the m o r a l world t o which every m a n is a passage and inlet, all unexplored by him . . . 1 8 "Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be Expert in home-cosmography." W h a t does Africa, - what does the West stand f o r ? Is it not our own interior white on the chart? . . . Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every m a n is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the C z a r is but a petty state, a h u m m o c k left by the i c e . . . . Obey the precept of the old philosopher, a n d Explore thyself." 1 9 T h e external world of matter w h i c h extends in vanishing perspectives to the horizon of the earth w a s the s y m b o l of the inverse 19

W„ VI, p. 160. Letter to Blake, Mar. 27, 1848).

17

W „ V, p. 135.

18

Journal, III, p. 270. Walden, W., II, pp. 353-54. Yet he recognized the difficulty of such a venture: "It is easier to discover another such a new world as Columbus did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so w e l l . . . . We live on the outskirts of it." Week, W., p. 409. 19

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world which he glimpsed somewhere within himself. In his 1840 journal he wrote: I cannot see to the bottom of the sky, because I cannot see to the bottom of myself. It is the symbol of my own infinity. My eye penetrates as far into the other as that depth is inward from which my contemporary thought springs.20 Following the Hermetic maxim, "as above, so below", he hoped that by this voyaging outward he could correspondentially effect a voyage inward to that real world for which the world of matter served merely as a symbol. For the sake of this voyage of discovery, this pilgrimage to the inner realms, he resigned from all the organizations which he had never joined, and set out for his visionary Zion. Like Bunyan's Pilgrim, fleeing the City of Destruction, Thoreau was bound for the Delectable Mountains, beyond which, somewhere, lay the Celestial City. 2.

THE RIVER J O U R N E Y T H R O U G H THE WILDERNESS

According to an inverse cosmography, this arduous pilgrimage into the self might correspond to some similarly difficult journey outward to some almost inaccessible location. In mountainclimbing Thoreau found a perfect symbol of this pilgrimage. His many trips up New England river valleys, over wild stretches of wooded country, to the slopes and summits of mountains had a profound significance for him. Thoreau, it should be noted, not only put to practice the theories of transcendentalism, but also acted out the symbols of its poetry. His spiritual pilgrimage of discovery could not be accomplished by sitting in his scholar's room in the house of Emerson and writing a poem about a pilgrimage. His renunciation of the "buzz and din" of a trivial Concord demanded a total extrication, mind and body, from its "social slush". Mere poetizing would not suffice. A more powerful symbolic magic was necessary. His life itself had to enact the ritual of journey and discovery. 20

Journal, I, 150. Cf. "This world has many rings, like Saturn, and we live now on the outmost of them all." Week, W., I, p. 411.

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My life hath been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and live to utter it.21

It was natural, therefore, that as an inland American he would regard the river as a highway of adventure outward from the tedious involvement, the quiet desperation of the village. Its steady flow contrasted with the angular rigidity of the streets and houses, and so could symbolize the freedom of wild nature. Furthermore, the river had become a new symbol of poetic inspiration. With the new theory of organic poetry came the notion of inspiration as influx, Emerson in "The Over-Soul" describes this experience: When I watch that flowing river [of thoughts], which, out of regions, I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.22

Thoreau recognized that the external river was merely symbolic of an inner stream "whose fountains are within". There was a Concord River; there was also another river: I was born upon thy bank, river, My blood flows in thy stream And thou meanderest forever At the bottom of my dream.2'

It was to reach the sources of this river that Thoreau departed from the settled and assured life of his fellow-townsmen. Using his recurrent transcendental metaphor, he recommends a journey on the Concord of the mind: That river, - who shall say exactly whence it came, and whither it goes? Does aught that flows come from a higher source? Many things drift downward on its surface that would enrich a man. If you could only be on the alert all day, and every day!24

His journey was toward the higher source. The river itself was 21

Journal,

"

Emerson, C. W., II, p. 252.

23

"

Journal,

I, p. 150. I, p. 438.

W., VI, p. 268. Letter to Blake, Dec. 9, 1855.

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his highway and "the river was the way to the mountains, to the fountainhead and source of rivers."25 Here, we should recall the mythic topography which Coleridge sketched in the ninth chapter of his Biographia Literaria (see above, p. 19-20). He, too, proposed a spiritual journey to "the heights overlooking the inner world, the domain of the philosophic consciousness". Most people, he said, were confined in the valley and were circled by "the first range of hills". "By the many even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden in mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate." These preliminary heights are regarded as awesome regions by the simple everyday inhabitants of the lowlands. But in all ages there have been a few who, measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest unaccessible falls, have learnt that the sources must be far higher and far inward: a few who even in the level streams have detected elements which neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or could supply.26

"How and whence", Coleridge says, the "ascertaining vision" can reach "these thoughts, these strong probabilities" is a mystery: he only knows who has experienced contact with the "Trans-Alpine: inner world, who climbed, to the high fountainhead of all the rivers. The rivers of America were, furthermore, the highways into a great continental wilderness, routes of escape from the dull mercantile villages of the coast. For Thoreau, this region to the west symbolized the unexplored continent of the self. In his essay, "Walking", he wrote: We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world. . . . Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more and withdrawing into the wilderness. . . . Every sunset 25 26

Shores of America, p. 226. Biographia Literaria, p. 138.

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which I witness inspires m e with the desire to g o to a West as distant and fair as that into w h i c h the s u n goes d o w n . 2 7

We must not, of course, mistake this inner West for that region of North America beyond the Appalachians. Thoreau, in a letter to Harrison Blake, laid down his judicial opinion on the course of frontier expansion: "The whole enterprise of this nation which is not an upward, but a westward one, toward Oregon, California, Japan &c, is totally devoid of interest to me, whether performed by foot or by a Pacific railroad.... No, they may go their way to their manifest destiny which I trust is not mine." 28 In this essay on the art of "sauntering", he went on to explain what he meant by the "West": T h e W e s t of w h i c h I speak is but another n a m e for the Wild; and what I h a v e been preparing to say is, that the Wilderness is the preservation of the World. 2 9

"Wildness" for him had a special significance: it meant that multiformity of free nature, which supplied him with "tropes and figures".30 His inward journey could proceed only by means of the light reflected from external analogy. This analogy he could not find in the tame precincts of the town or in what he considered the institutionalized arts of a Europeanized New England. He had, therefore, to spend his life walking through the "Wildness" of the woods and hills, discovering the taste and feel and smell and sound of the land, exploring America, while at the same time exploring the vaster America within himself. This New World, which he coveted, he felt he could achieve "only by the " "Walking", W., V, pp. 216-19. Cf. "Let us migrate interiorly without intermission, and pitch our tent each day nearer the western horizon." Journal, I, p. 131. m W„ VI, p. 210. Letter to Blake, Feb. 27, 1853. » "Walking", W„ V, p. 224. 30 Poetic naturalism seems to have been a popular and honored occupation among the early Romantics. Novalis in his autobiographical novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, could write seriously of a young man who was wont to make excursions "um . . . im Walde nach Schmetterlingen, Käfern und Pflanzen umherzugehn und die Eingebungen des stillen Naturgeistes durch den Einfluss seiner mannigfaltigen äusseren Lieblichkeiten zu vernehmen."

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Perpetual instilling and enriching of the reality that surrounds us." 31 As we have suggested, Thoreau's life was an attempt to enact the symbols of his thought. Believing, as he did, that the "outward and the inward life correspond", he sought to perform in the external world actions which would correspond to, and thereby effect, actions in the internal world. A natural symbolism developed which was roughly this: Past the town flowed a river the source of which lay somewhere in the highlands to the west. Following the river upstream, one traveled through a wilderness of swamps and forests. Finally one reached the mountains, the fountainhead of the river. There, on the summit, one could have a view of the vast, undefiled, unexplored country beyond. According to the process of correspondence, as we have seen, this journey may be translated in terms of an interior journey: despite one's securely circumscribed patterns of thought and conduct, one is at times conscious of an unaccountable flow of reminiscence, a small vague emotion which has no apparent connection with one's immediate circumstances. One usually dismisses it as a fantasy. But if one handles it carefully, (Thoreau said that some things he could perceive only by looking at them out of the corner of his eye), then, with time and practice, one becomes aware of a stream of images flowing into the consciousness out of a vast preconscious wilderness.32 Here, one can proceed no further without recourse to external correspondence. By means of correspondence one is then able to explore the inner world of the self until, in the moment of vision, as from the peak of a great mountain, one may behold and know in its totality this inner kingdom of the self. This vision of the undiscovered America within him, Thoreau got from the correspondential ritual of boating, walking, and mountain climbing. Emerson got it, less strenuously, from talk"

Walden, W., II, pp. 107-08. T h e wildness of nature was only symbolic of the essential wildness of the inner world: "We s o o n get through with Nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy. T h e merest child which has rambled into a c o p s e w o o d dreams of a wilderness so wild and strange and inexhaustible as Nature can never s h o w him . . . . " Journal, VI, p. 293. 32

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ing, reading, and meditation. The vision and its symbology are similar to Thoreau's, though the " m o d e . . . of illumination" is different: Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection; the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. Do but observe the mode of our illumination. When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water; or go to the fire, being cold; no! but I am at first apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed the approaching traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement before the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.33 The world revealed in this "illumination" is, Emerson asserts, not a conscious projection: he does not make it, he discovers it. It is the revelation not only of a new, apocalyptic Jerusalem; it is also the vision of an uncrumbled Paradise; it is Omega and Alpha. This America, this West, again, does not belong to the external geography of nature, since only by dying out of nature does the seer hope to enter wholly into it. 3.

THE MOUNTAIN A N D THE VISION OF THE NEW WORLD

"I once saw the day break from the top of Saddleback mountain in Massachusetts, above the clouds. As we cannot distinguish objects through this dense fog, let me tell this story more at 33

Emerson, "Experience", C. W., Ill, pp. 72-73.

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34

length." So Thoreau begins the mountain-journey narrative of the Tuesday chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. It is a recollection which, he says, he might as well tell us now, since the early morning fog that blankets the Merrimack Valley prevents him from describing the sights along the shore. Once wandering for several days among the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, he caught sight of a mountain seven or eight miles away. "My route lay up a long and spacious valley. . . . A stream ran up the middle of the valley.... It seemed a road for the pilgrim to enter upon who would climb to the gates of heaven."35 He reached the summit at sundown and there spent the night. He awoke early in the morning and climbed to the top of a wooden tower, an observatory built by students from Williams College. From this point of vantage he awaited the gradual coming of the dawn. As the light increased, I discovered around me an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower, and shut out every vestige of the earth, while I was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on my carved plank, in cloudland. . . . As the light in the east steadily increased, it revealed to me more clearly the new world into which I had risen in the night, the new terra firma perchance of my future life. There was not a crevice left through which the trivial places we name Massachusetts or Vermont or New York could be seen. . . . All around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled. It was such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise. 36

The trivial earth with its busy occupations lost all substantiality when viewed from this height. There is considerably more than transcendental rhetoric in his recreation of this experience: It was a favor for which to be forever silent to be shown this vision. The earth beneath had become such a flitting thing of lights and shadows as the clouds had been before. It was not merely veiled to me, but had passed away like the phantom of a shadow, and this 34 35

3S

Week, W., p. 189. Loc. cit.

Week, W., I, pp. 197-98.

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new platform was gained. As I had climbed above storm and cloud, so by successive days' journeys I might reach the region of eternal day, beyond the tapering shadow of the earth. . . ,37

This dawn, of course, is no mere meteorological phenomenon. It is a "mode of illumination", in this case, an external event transpiring coinstantaneously with that internal event to which it corresponds. This dawn is for Thoreau an "Inward Morning". 38 With Coleridge, he was convinced that "in our life alone does Nature live", and for him also, when his power of imagination slackened, came a time of depression: But, alas, owing, as I think, to some unworthiness in myself, my private sun did stain himself, and "Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly wrack on his celestial face," for before the god had reached the zenith the heavenly pavement [i.e., the cloud-covering below him] rose and embraced my wavering virtue, or rather I sank down again into that "forlorn world" from which the celestial sun had hid his visage . . . 39

He thereupon began his journey downward from the mountain to the plain where he soon found himself "in the region of cloud and drizzling rain, and the inhabitants affirmed that it had been a cloudy and drizzling day wholly." 40 At the end of the thirteenth book of Wordsworth's Prelude, the poet celebrates the re-acquiring of the power of imagination. "I remember well", he says, "That in life's every-day appearances / I seemed about this time to gain clear sight / Of a new world a world, too, that was fit / To be transmitted and to other eyes / Made visible. . . ." This newly discovered world, he found, was correspondent to the world of "every-day appearances"; it was maintained by "A balance, an ennobling interchange / Of action from without and from within." (II. 367-376.) 37

Loc. cit. Cf. his poem "The Inward Morning": "Packed in my mind lie all the clothes/ Which outward nature wears," etc. Week, W., I, p. 313. 39 Week, W., I, p. 199. Cf. Goethe's "Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;/ Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist tot! Auf, bade, Schiiler, unverdrossen/ Die irdsche Brust im Morgenrot!" Faust I, II, 443-46. 40 Week, W., I, p. 200. 39

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Then, to end his chronicle with an episode emblematic of this regained power, Wordsworth chooses an excursion curiously similar to Thoreau's climb up Saddle-back Mountain: In one of those excursions . . . . . . through the Northern tracts I left Bethgelert's huts at couching-time, And westward took my way, to see the sun Rise, from the top of Snowdon. It was a close, warm, breezeless summer night, Wan, dull, and glaring, with a dripping fog Low-hung and thick that covered all the sky. (II. 1-13 passim) As he climbed slowly toward the summit, suddenly he noted a strange brightness on the ground. and lo! as I looked up The moon hung naked in the firmament Of azure without cloud, and at my feet Rested a silent sea of hoary mist. A hundred hills their dusky backs up heaved All over this still ocean; and beyond, Far, far beyond, the solid vapours stretched, In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes, Into the main Atlantic. . . . (II, 39-47.) When the fog was finally dissipated by the wind, the poet tries to interpret "that vision". . . . it appeared to me the type Of a majestic intellect, its acts And its possessions, what it has and craves, What in itself it is, and would become. There I behold the emblem of a mind That feeds upon infinity . . . . . . a mind sustained By recognitions of transcendent power, In sense conducting to ideal form, In soul of more that mortal privilege. (II, 66-77 passim)

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"One function" of this divine Soul within man "had Nature shadowed forth". This one function was the "mutual domination", the regency of both the physical laws of nature and the correspondent laws of the mind over the phenomena of the visible world. The broad all-embracing view from the mountain is thus for Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Thoreau an emblem of self-knowledge which for them was another way of saying a contemplative knowledge of God. It is a "mode of illumination". As Thoreau grew older, these moments of illumination came less often. He found it more and more difficult to relate the outer with the inner world. His later journals became minutely precise registries of naturalist detail. These details were the facts he hoped would one day flower into truths. He realized, at any rate, that they would never be useful to him unless he could grasp them in the imaginative vision, unless they could be transmuted from disparate facts to correspondential truths. In a letter written in 1857, he assures himself that the truth is still the truth. . . . Ktaadn [the mountain in Maine which he climbed in 1846, see Writings III, pp. 3-92] is there still, but much more surely my old conviction is still there, resting with more than mountain breadth and weight on the world, the source still of fertilizing streams, and affording glorious views from the summit, if I can get up to it again. 41

Throughout the summer and fall of 1857, Thoreau is obsessed by the image of the Mountain. "Let me suggest a theme for you", he writes Blake " - to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for y o u . . . . Going up there and being blown on is nothing. We never do much climbing while we are there, but we eat our luncheon, etc., very much as at home. It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?"42 On October 29, 1857 he recorded in his journal: 41 42

W., VI, p. 316. Letter to Blake, Aug. 18, 1857. W., VI, pp. 320-321. Letter to Blake, Nov. 16, 1857.

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This morning... for the twentieth time at least, I thought of that mountain in the easterly part of our town (where no high hill actually is) which once or twice I had ascended, and often allowed my thoughts alone to climb. I now contemplate it in my mind as a familiar thought which I have surely had for many years from time to time . . . I can Now eke out the vision I had of it this morning with my old and yesterday forgotten dreams. My way up used to lie though a dark and unfrequented wood at its base, - I cannot now tell exactly, it was so long ago, under what circumstances I first ascended, only that I shuddered as I went along (I have a distinct remembrance of having been out overnight alone), - and then I steadily ascended along a rocky ridge half clad with stinted trees, where wild beasts haunted, till I lost myself quite in the upper air and clouds, seeming to pass an imaginary line which separates a hill, mere earth heaped up, from a mountain, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity. What distinguishes that summit above the earthly line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know no path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. . . . are there not such mountains, east or west, from which you may look down on Concord in your thought, and on all the world? . . . It chances, now I think of it, that it rises in my mind where lies the Burying-Hill. You might go through its gate to enter that dark wood, but that hill and its graves are so concealed and obliterated by the awful mountain that I never thought of them as underlying it. Might not the graveyards of the just always be hills, ways by which we ascend and overlook the plain.43 In the poem which he appends to this strange dream narration he links the ascent of the mountain with the theme of the inward pilgrimage: the way up is "a spiral path within the pilgrim's soul" which "leads to this mountain's brow".44 In his letter to Blake (November 16, 1857, Writings VI, 321), he says he sees this dream mountain as clearly as one sees Wachusett. Wachusett was one of the mountains to the west of Concord which, in the Week, he had called the Delectable Mountains, addressing them: I fancy even Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven "

Journal, X, pp. 141-43.

** Journal,

X, p. 144.

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And yonder still, inspite of history's page, Linger the golden and the silver age; Upon the laboring gale The news of future centuries is brought, And of new dynasties of thought From your remotest vale.45

There is no doubt that Thoreau imagined himself a pilgrim. In fact he called himself a "saunterer", a walker bound "a la Sainte terre".46 He fled the contamination of a trivial Concord with the same urgency with which Bunyan's Pilgrim fled the City of Destruction. The way into the wilderness was the way to the mountains. Both these pilgrims had before them the distant peaks of the Delectable Mountains: When the Morning was up, they had him to the top of the House, and bid him look South, so he did; and behold at a great distance he saw a pleasant Mountainous Country, beautiful with Woods, Vinyards, Fruits of all sorts, Flowers also; Springs and Fountains very delectable to behold. . . . When thou comest there, from thence, said they, thou maist see to the Gate of the Coelestial City. . . ,47

As his dream suggested, the mountain was a symbol not only of transcendental vision, but of death. The two were not contrary, for by death the ulterior self could at last transcend its corporeal circumstance and be released into the freedom of pure vision. This was indeed the meaning of the pilgrimage. Only by death could Christian enter the gates of the Celestial City. Only by first dying out of nature did the Emersonian mystic hope to be reborn into that land of visions, that "sunbright Mecca in the desert", that "new yet unapproachable America . . . in the West." 45

W., VI, p. 321. "Walking", W., V, p. 205. One of the heroes of his younger days was Godfrey of Bouillon. See Sherman Paul, The Shores of America, p. 126, et. sqq. 47 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (London, 1895), p. 64. Thoreau was an admirer of Pilgrim's Progress-, in the Week, p. 72, he called it the best sermon ever preached from a N e w Testament text. On the theme of pilgrimage, cf. Thoreau's poem "Pilgrims": "Have you not seen,/ In ancient times,/ Pilgrims pass b y / toward other climes,/ With shining faces,/ Youthful and strong,/ Mounting this hill/ With speech and song?", W., V, 413. 48

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Yet there were other forces at work. Not even Thoreau was entirely self-propelled. His life cannot be treated as a calm, clear-eyed, linear pilgrim's progress from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Withdrawal from society meant not only freedom but also deprivation.48 The exploration of the self could afford the social contact only of similar selves; when the ideal likeness could not be found in others, then one was indeed alone. On the road between the two Cities, Thoreau felt the magnetic pull of both poles. This tension had little to do with his Puritan askesis: it actually had a great deal more to do with the "Romantic agony", in this case the yearning for the being who could, by satisfying the needs of both human love and divine vision, reconcile the opposed poles, and thereby resolve the painful tension. His sauntering to the Holy Land was, at the same time, the melancholy grand tour, the lonely compulsive pilgrimage of a Childe Harold. On his pilgrimage to the Celestial City, Thoreau traveled alone - he had no Faithful, no Hopeful - his one companion was Alastor, the Spirit of Solitude. Shelley's poem tells the story of a journey which is surely more a propulsion than a pilgrimage. It begins innocently enough as a brave poetic adventure. W h e n early youth had passed, h e left H i s c o l d fireside and alienated h o m e T o seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. M a n y a wild waste and tangled wilderness H a s lured his fearless steps. . . . (II. 7 5 - 7 9 ) 48 On May 21, 1856, he wrote one of his jaunty letters to his long-time disciple Harrison Blake. The subject under discussion was "Society" and "Solitude": "Society", he wrote, "is an idling down on the plane at the base of a mountain, instead of climbing steadily to its top. Of course you will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with with . . . . I love society so much that I swallowed it all at a gulp, - that is, all that came my way. It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all." W., VI, p. 281. His journal entries, however, belie his carefree determination to soar above society: e.g., "No fields are so barren to me as the men of whom I expect everything but get nothing. In their neighborhood I experience a painful yearning for society, which cannot be satisfied." Journal, V, p. 87 (1853). He referred to his relationship with Emerson as his lifelong tragedy.

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But his dream encounter with the "veiled maid" reveals to him the emptiness of his life. Mrs. Shelley interpreted this crucial episode in words that could well describe the strange, tragic syndrome of "transcendental Friendship": His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all the wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of the sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception.49 After a period of desperate wandering, he decides that only by entering through the "dark gate of death" can he attain his embodied vision. With "a gloomy smile / Of desperate hope", he begins his voyage, which soon becomes the voyage of a Bateau Ivre over an insane sea. Having reached the "ethereal cliffs / Of Caucasus", by some demonic power of the storm the little boat is sucked up into the caverns of the mountain and propelled upward, until at last the Poet finds himself floating on a mountain river on the other side of the Caucasus. He follows the river through the highlands until, at the sundown of his last day, Lo! where the pass expands Its stoney jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks, And seems with its accumulated crags, To overhang the world: for wide expand Beneath the wan stars and descending moon Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom Of leaden-colored even, and fiery hills Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge Of the remote horizon. (II. 550-559.) 49

G . B. Woods, ed., English Poetry ment (Chicago, 1950), p. 1338.

and Prose of the Romantic

Move-

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81

This, then is the goal of his voyage, a vision of a desolate, inhuman world. He has made his journey to the land beyond the mountains and has died on a crag overhanging the world. Thoreau's companion on his long journey was also Alastor, the demon of solitude. But Thoreau was not only a Romantic he was also a Puritan. He never gave up hope that someday Alastor would lead him across the Delectable Mountains and into the Celestial City. The sorrow of the lonely quest could be forgotten in the bitter joy of the adventure. And what journey can compare with the journey into the vast world within? to the delectable primitive mounts within you, which you have dreamed from youth up, and seen, perhaps, in the horizon, but never climbed.50 To set about living a true life is to go a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men. . . .51

50

W„ VI, p. 260. Letter to Blake, Sept. 26, 1855. " W., VI, p. 160. His first letter written to Harrison Blake, dated March 27, 1848.

IV WHITMAN ON THE OPEN ROAD

Mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent Pour partir.... Étonnants voyageurs! quelles nobles histoires Nous lisons dans vos yeux profonds comme les mers! Baudelaire, Le Voyage.

Whitman was not so willing to give up humanity for the sake of a transcendental pilgrimage. At the same time, however, he coveted, as did Thoreau, "the joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender gloomy heart". The Puritan "straight and narrow path" he therefore transformed into the romantic "Open Road", which he made his highway of observation, of correspondence-gathering, and of transitory contact with other men and women. Leaving the visionary landscape of the Delectable Mountains, we turn now to another stage upon this route of pilgrimage: the Open Road between the two Cities.

1. A CORRESPONDENCE OF LOVE

Thoreau met Whitman in the fall of 1856, shortly after the publication of the second edition of Leaves of Grass. He was somewhat surprised at the sudden advent of the new poet, and found Whitman's poetry to be the finest sermon ever preached in America. Writing in December to Harrison Blake, he reported: "Walt Whitman . . . is the most interesting fact to me at present.

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I have read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time." Yet this interesting shock of recognition was accompanied by a perhaps more interesting shock of disaccord: I did not get far in conversation with him - two more being present - and among the few things which I chanced to say, I remember that one was, in answer to him as representing America, that I did not think much of America or of politics, and so on, which may have been somewhat of a damper to him.1

In this ironically humorous episode we see the confrontation of two world views. For Thoreau, America, especially the America through which he sauntered in search of "tropes and figures", represented the world of vision. For Whitman, (at least as late as the edition of 1860), America was this world of vision. He energetically maintained that the palpable world was alive with its own imaginative fire. This he maintained. This he promulged. Yet, on this subject of poetic material and poetic process he was never certain. In an early poem, first published by Emory Holloway in 1927, the young Whitman describes a newly discovered world within him, a world which is not a vast universe correspondent to the material cosmos, but a little skull-enclosed file cabinet of images: In a little house pictures I keep, Many pictures hang suspended It is not a fixed house, It is round - it is but a few inches from one side of it to the other side, But behold! it has room enough - in it, hundreds and thousands, all the varieties; . . . here, see you, my own States - and here the world itself rolling through the air; And there, on the walls hanging, portraits of women and men, carefully kept. . . ,2

Despite his reading of Emerson and the Transcendentalists, Whitman always found it difficult to envisage a non-material entity, a 1 1

Thoreau, Writings, VI (Letter to Harrison Blake, Dec. 7, 1856). Quoted in Allen's, The Solitary Singer, pp. 144-45.

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thing undetermined by time and space. Mystics in the tradition to which Swedenborg belonged envisaged spiritual existence under the symbol of the Cosmos. But how, Whitman kept asking himself, could such a cosmos be present within the human brain? His "materialism" did not preclude his "spiritualism", but it did make it difficult for him to image the poetic process as an act transpiring in a non-dimensional "world". If he perceived emotive shapes within him, these shapes and impulses - certainly not innate did not correspond to some "world" pre-existent to their registry: they symbolized or, to use Whitman's more exact term, they "tallied" with the palpable world external to the senses. The poet was a "Kosmos", not in his own intrinsic right, but only by virtue of the internalization of matter. This Lockeian materialism remained always a part of Whitman's poetics. The mind (or what he vaguely and variously called the "soul") was an engulfing organ. It was like a perfectly empty storehouse into which streamed all the objects and events he saw, read, or heard. These things were never confronted with internal, pre-existent analogues. In Salut au Monde he celebrates the discovery of an internalized world which seems to swell to larger and larger proportions with each new fact and image. What widens within y o u Walt Whitman? What waves and soils exuding? What climes? what persons and cities are here? W h o are the infants, some playing, some slumbering? What rivers are these? what forests and fruits are these? What are the mountains call'd that rise so high in the mists? Within m e latitude widens, longitude lengthens. . . . 3

Yet Whitman also believed in some sort of correspondence; he acknowledged that his artistic method was based on some sort of interaction between outer fact and inner meaning. In "Song of the Open Road" he invoked: Y o u objects that call from diffusion m y meanings and give them shape! 4 3 Leaves of Grass, I, 163. All quotations from Leaves of Grass are taken from the three volume edition published in 1897 under the supervision of Maurice Bucke, Thomas B. Harned, and Horace L. Träubel. 4 L. of G„ I, 178.

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His "meanings" - already a suggestion of innate properties of the mind. In 1860 in the small interrogation "Locations and Times", he makes a more explicit reference to this theory and/or method of poetry: Locations and times - what is it in me that meets them All, whenever and wherever, and makes me at home? Forms, colors, densities, odors - what is it in me that corresponds with them?5

In his speculations, he went even beyond this correspondence of the poet with the external world; he even suggested the doctrine of Universal Analogy. He thought a "thought of the clef of the universes", and that A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ingrown, small, large, suns, moons planets, All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.6

He seems never to have been sure of how his poetry was made. In his assumed status of prophetic "litteratus" of the United States he has won something of an international renown for flatulence. The foregoing statements on the aesthetic process have about them some of this bardic stridency. If Emerson could write on the lintels of his door-post "Whim", Whitman (containing multitudes) could, at least, contradict himself. As a consequence, his apostrophic decrees show very little consistency. It is seldom in his formal efforts at self-explanation that we may hope to understand his aesthetic method. In his best poetry (his only real poetry, as some would say), we may hope to get a clue to his method. In this poetry we are introduced into the ques5

L. of G., II, 38. « L. of G., II, 22.

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tioning, relentless, powerful, and elegiac moods of a poet, a human being, not a deputed spokesman for a continent, not a monstrous, conglomerate "Kosmos". In the first edition of Leaves of Grass we find two poems on the art of poetry, "Song of the Answerer" and "There Was a Child Went Forth". The first is a somewhat pretentious prose manifesto arranged as verse; the second is an interesting poem which combines the brilliant imagery of "Song of Myself" with the searching, meditative mood later to be monumentalized in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd". It begins by suggesting internalization: There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became, And that object became a part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.7

All things were absorbed into him: lilacs, grass, a bird's song, young animals, fish, water-plants, sprouting grain, blossoming trees, and the commonest weeds; a drunkard, a schoolmistress, friendly boys and quarrelsome boys, girls and negroes; city and country; his mild mother and the anger of his father. This unconnected series of objects and events then undergoes a strange transmutation. Its effect upon the young poet is one of bafflement; the world of discrete objects overpowers him with its multitudinous variety. He is struck by the sense of what is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal, The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time, the curious whether and how, Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks? Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not flashes and specks what are they? The streets themselves and the façades of houses, and goods in the windows, Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank'd wharves, the huge crossing at the ferries. . . .8 7 8

L. of G., II, 135. L. of G., II, 137.

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This turnabout is not simply a switch from a sensationalist to a phenomenalist view of reality. The poem is about a feeling. This feeling Whitman often expresses by such words as "impalpable", "drift", and especially by the word "curious". And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and the beautiful curious liquid.9

Viewed from a certain angle, the bewildering series of sense impressions lose their individual meaning and assume an "ensemble" meaning, an aesthetic "drift", in the eyes of the observer. He finds himself involved in the "curious whether and how" - that is, whether sensed objects have reality and how the "doubts of day-time and of night-time" somehow transmute commonplace scenes into strangely evocative vistas: The village on the highland seen from afar at sunset, the river between, Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of white or brown two miles off, The Schooner near by sleepily dropping down the tide, the little boat slack-tow'd astern, The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping, The strata of color'd clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint away solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motionless in. . . .10

The aesthetic "drift", i.e., the cumulative effect of observing an indeterminate mass of objects in motion, is perhaps what the poet meant when he wrote: The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing.11

His poetic method was neither pure absorption (at least in his more successful poems), nor was it a correspondence of externalinternal analogues. Instead, it was often the cultivation of the 8

L. of G„ II, 137. L. of G., II, 137-38. 11 L. of G., I, 14. By "drift" I understand the non-verbal effect of an accumulation of verbal images. Translating, in this case justifiably, Whitman into R. P. Blackmur, one might say: "Language is nothing, the gesture everything." 10

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tenuous mood of wonder and yearning. Objects that produced a correspondent resonance in him were not used as Thoreau used them - they were loved; they were not simply recognized - they were pondered, touched, fondled, adored. To distinguish this mode of correspondence from Thoreau's introspective method, one might call Whitman's method resonantal correspondence. For Whitman the touch of things, the rub of them against his senses, was enough to precipitate his poetry. One year after the first edition (in which "There Was a Child Went Forth" first appeared), Whitman's great poem of resonantal correspondence was published: "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry". Here the experience of the poet's transcendental observation is confronted with the mystery of time. For our purposes now, however, we will consider only the experience of observation as it is described and embodied in the poem. Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west - sun there half an hour high I see you face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose. . . , 1 2

These people and scenes are not being "absorbed" in the outlandish sense in which Whitman is supposed to have ingested reality. The mind reaches out and only touches them, only feels the friction of their surfaces. And that is all the observer can do. Here on the ferry he cannot stand at ease in Nature, "aplomb in the midst of irrational things".18 In this state of flux, in this moment of vision, he cannot declare in celebration of himself: I know I am solid and sound, T o me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, A11 are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. 14 11

"

14

L. of G., I, 191. L. of G„ I, 12. L. of G., I, 57.

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89

Thoreau was able to do this, to place himself in the midst of irrational things and use them reflectively, but the poet of resonantal correspondence was obliged to come closer to them, to feel himself, in a sense, immersed in the spectacle. The impalpable sustenance of me f r o m all things at all hours of the day. The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, T h e similitudes of the past and those of the future. T h e glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river. . . , 15

Whitman continues, saying that just as he experienced these strangely beautiful sights, so too will many other observers feel as he has felt. He then examines this feeling and suggest an explanation: I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me, In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me, In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me, I too had been struck f r o m the float forever held in solution, I too had receiv'd my identity by my body, That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my b o d y . . . , 16

The experience is not one of total immersion in the "solution", it is not one of total disintegration of personality, as Lawrence maintained, for the solidity of matter determines his separate identity. The body, which is the receptor of external stimuli, is 15 L. of G., I, 191. This poem is structurally and verbally similar to Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode"; cf. the two poets' description of the "glory" which correspondence reveals: "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,/ the earth, and every common sight did seem/ Apparelled in celestial light,/ The glory and the freshness of a dream." 16 L. of G., I, 194-95. Cf. with Whitman's "abrupt questionings", Wordsworth's " . . . obstinate questionings/ Of sense and outward things."

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the very thing which prevents the observer from merging totally in the "float" of external objects. This corporeally defined identity is the "Me myself" of "Song of Myself": Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the came and watching and wondering at it.17

This self-portrait of Whitman as transcendental observer, "both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it", is comparable to Thoreau's "doubleness", his reference to that part of himself which is a "spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it." But for Whitman all that mattered was the process of the questionings, the sensation of the individual identity in contact with the float held in solution. Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers! Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!18

After having enumerated in a litany of love the objects which themselves are the solution, the components of the "simple, compact, well-join'd scheme", he addresses them once more: You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers, We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforth, Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us, We use you, and do not cast you aside - we plant you permanently within us, 17 L. of G., I, 37. Among Whitman's papers, Emory Halloway discovered this note: "I cannot understand the mystery, but I am always conscious of myself as two - as my soul and I: and I reckon it the same with all men and women." Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (N. Y.), II, 66. 18 L. of G., I, 197.

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We fathom you not - we love you - there is perfection in you also. . . ,19 Both Thoreau and Whitman used phenomena as correspondence. For Thoreau, the discovery and observation of analogical phenomena was only the first step. The second step was the revelation of the world of the self which these phenomena produced. His introspective correspondence made the complete circuit, as prescribed by transcendental "nature-mysticism": from self to Nature, and from Nature to the Divine Self. For Whitman, however, phenomena were "dumb, beautiful ministers", tantalizing, baffling objects of wonder, not to be fathomed, but to be loved. He used them not as a mystic, but as a poet. This first step of the correspondential process was where the poet stopped: Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much, The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion, The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love, The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much, I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther, But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.80 2.

THE OPEN R O A D A N D WHERE IT LED

Emerson had noted in his "Idealism" chapter of Nature that "we are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women, - talking, running, bartering, fighting - the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized [i.e., made to seem unreal] at once, or, at least, wholly 18

L. of G., I, 198-99. Once more of, this with the resolution of Wordsworth's "Ode": "And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,/ Forbode not any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might " !0 L. of G., I, 9-10.

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detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial beings."21 Whitman was similarly affected by traveling and by the sight of passing scenery. But his organ of reception was not restricted to the Emersonian "transparent eyeball": instead, all his senses, indeed all his body, responded to the concourse of people and things. Employing this correspondence of love, Whitman could rightfully call himself the "caresser of life". In "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" his link with the human race had been close - he was almost "disintegrated". Nevertheless, he "had been struck from the float forever held in suspension"; the body which pulsed with the imagery of the life about him was that part of himself which determined his identity, his uniqueness, his separateness from the spectacle. The freedom of the body, (i.e., the self as identified and defined by the body), was a necessary prerequisite for the observation of this spectacle. This freedom is the freedom of his "Song of the Open Road". The vistas seen from the Open Road are pictorial, but not in an Emersonian sense; that is, people and things do not form parts of a Poussin landscape, but of a large canvas of Delacroix, vibrating with color, even with music-in fact almost about to burst into operatic chorus: The earth expanding right hand and left hand, The picture alive, every part in its best light, The music falling in where it is wanted and stopping where it is not wanted, The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road.22

To enter this living picture, Whitman had to achieve a radical freedom: From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, 21 22

Emerson, Complete L. of G., I, 179.

Works, I, 55.

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93

Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.23

In 1856 he could not foresee the consequences of this total escape from the holds that would hold him. In 1856, one year after the first edition, the exhilaration of self-discovery was too inebriating: I am larger, better than I thought, 1 did not know I held so much goodness.24

This magnitude and wealth was revealed to him by the practice of transcendental observation: Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul. Here is realization, Here is a man tallied - he realizes here what he has in him . . . 25

Yet this correspondential "tallying" does not produce a mystical serenity as it did for Thoreau (and perhaps once for Whitman himself, if we may so interpret section 5 of "Song of Myself"). Instead it produces a desire to merge with the "beautiful, dumb ministers" and with the "men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood."86 Correspondence produces the "efflux of the soul": Here rises the fluid and attaching character, The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman. . . . Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the love of young and old, From it falls the charm that mocks beauty and all attainments, Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact.27

So ends the first half of "Song of the Open Road" (sections 1-8). 23 24 25 26 27

L. L. L. L. L.

of of of of of

G., G., G„ G., G.,

I, I, I, I, I,

180. 180. 182. 182. 183.

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In it we may detect a pattern of action: 1) separation from the "holds" of society, 2) the use of roadside scenery to "tally" the journeyer, and 3) the "shuddering longing ache of contact", (which, because it remains an "ache", is an ache for contact). Then beginning with section 9, Whitman delivers his "invitation au voyage". Again we note the start of what is apparently the same triple pattern of disengagement, observation, and the ache for contact. First he exhorts his hearers to cut themselves loose from the attachments of society. In vain will they hope to settle in a city: they will hear and respond to the "irresistible call to depart". Like him, they are to flee from the stable involvements of society, from the "hold" even of lovers: What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting, You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach'd hands toward you.28

This "efflux of the soul" is a peculiar "happiness". This "attaching" character it imbues is extraordinarily "fluid", preferring the passionate kisses of parting to the passionate kisses of staying. What is offered in exchange? - "Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!" And who are they? . . . they are the swift and majestic men - they are the greatest women, Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas, Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land, Habitués of many distant countries, habitués of far-distant dwellings, Trusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers, Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore.29

Then he reveals the fact of the ultimate freedom of the great Companions, that they are Journeyers as with companions, namely their own diverse phases.30 " 30

L. of G., I, 185. L. of G., I, 186. L. of G., I, 186. (Italics mine.)

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It is, Whitman tells us, with their childhood that they travel, with their youth, maturity, and finally "with their own sublime old age of manhood or womanhood" Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death. Allons! 31

A grim invitation! And a Mephistophelean promise of the use of the world, for this is part of the transcendental observer's bargain: T o see no possession but you may possess it enjoying all without labor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstracting one particle of it, To take the best f r o m the farmer's f a r m and the rich man's elegant villa and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and the fruits of orchards and flowers and gardens, T o take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through. . . . 32

This Faustian power to observe and to manipulate phenomena was the power Thoreau gloried in (see above p. 61-64) and was the extra-moral prerogative of Emerson's "Poet". The spectacle observed by the journeyer was unitary and significant not because of the significance of its particular components, but because of that "ensemble" value which the observing mind discovered in it. It was (we must recall), after all, only a picture. For this reason Emerson could declare: I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my account in sots and bores also. They give a reality to the circumjacent picture, which such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill spare. . . . If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. T h e great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. 33

It was for this reason, too, that Whitman could say, "Evil propels »> L. of G., I, 186. L. of G., I, 187. Cf. "Song of Myself" (48): "And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth"; and from the 1855 Preface: "The most affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out of the stronger wealth of himself." 33 Emerson, "Experience", C. W., Ill, 64-65. 32

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me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent."34 Poetic receptivity can never afford to be moralistic. That splendid montage, section 8 of "Song of Myself", beginning "The little one sleeps in its cradle", is composed of: a bloody-haired suicide, the blab of the pave, the sluff of shoes, snow-balls, hurrahs, mobs, a sick man, a street fight, the over-fed and the starved, pregnant women, howls, and adulterous offers. All these things have a cumulative meaning quite different from that of any participant - it is the observer's meaning: "I mind them or the show or reasonance of them - 1 come and depart." 35 To follow the great companionless Companions on the Open Road, one must divest oneself of the attachments of society and learn to come and to observe and to depart. But what of the "fluid and attaching character", what about the sweat of the love of young and old", the delectable "efflux of the soul"? From the end of section 8 to the end of the poem (section 15) there is no mention of the "ache of contact". After promising his hearers the usufruct of the world, the poet introduces the Emersonian "procession of souls", but without the martial orchestration of the "Master": Forever alive, forever forward, Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied, Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men, They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go, But I know that they go toward the best - toward something great. 36

This is hardly a triumphal procession. Where did the road lead? Whitman in 1856 did not know. "The goal that was named cannot be countermanded", but what, in fact, is the goal? Whitman L. of G., I, 60. L. of G., I, 41-42. 30 L. of G., I, 188. Whitman had a great admiration for Tennyson. Cf. the foregoing lines with the bleak sentiment of progress in "Ulysses". Of "Ulysses", Whitman wrote in 1857: "'This redeems a hundred Princesses and Mauds, and shows the great master." (Complete Prose Works, VI, 128.) 34 35

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hoped that he could overcome the isolation of the observer's road by converting observation into a new type of democratic poetry, a poetry which would bind him securely to his countrymen. "I will scatter myself among men and women as I go, / I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them."37 He would experience America on the Open Road, "tally" it in himself, and then be able to embody America, be its living, prophetic symbol, thus in his own person doctrinal to a nation. For this purpose he produced out of himself his "leaves of grass", intending to distribute them as sacramental embodiments of himself. ("Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man.")38 He dreamed of social engagement, not with single individuals, but with the American People, the "En Masse" of North America. After the publication of the 1856 edition, Whitman thought seriously of becoming an itinerant lecturer, a combination perhaps of John Brown and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was a strategy which he hoped might overcome the solitude of the Open Road. On April 24, 1857 he wrote himself this note: True vista before - the strong thought-impression or conviction that the straight, broad, open, well-marked true vista before, or course of public teacher, "wander speaker", - by powerful words, orations, uttered with copiousness and decision, with all the aid of art, also the natural flowing vocal luxuriance of oratory. That the mightiest rule over America could be thus - as for instance, on occasion, at Washington to be, launching from public room, at the opening of the session of Congress - perhaps launching at the President, leading persons, Congressmen, or judges of the Supreme Court. That to dart hither or thither, as some emergency might demand — the greatest champion America could ever know, yet holding no public office or emolument whatever, - but first in the esteem of men and women. 39

Something happened in 1858. He did not wander hither or thither, launching out at Congressmen. The "straight, broad, open, well-marked, true vista" vanished. He underwent a crisis, no doubt the greatest crisis of his life. The cause of it is not known. 37

L. of G., I, 180. L. of G., II, 289. 39 Complete Prose Works, VI, 7-8. For a more lengthy account of Whitman's lecture plans, see Allen's The Solitary Singer, pp. 218-20. 38

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It seems to have involved some personal, undoubtedly sexual, disappointment. The Open Road, the endless public road, thronged with the "great Companions" ended in the sands of a Long Island beach. "The swift and majestic men . . . the greates women": where were they now? Here there was only the bleak seacoast "where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways." 40 Whitman's first period, beginning in 1855 ends in 1860 with his confrontation of the sea in "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life" and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking". The road of the transcendental observer led over hills, through cities, among men and women, but it ended inevitably with the realization of his absolute solitude. He discovered, as Emerson sadly remarked, that "after all it was a solitary performance . . . a subject and an object", 41 a seer and a spectacle. Looking at the slender rows of straw, splinters, and reeds left by the tide on the beach, he meditated on the correspondences they stirred within himself: . . . I thought the old thought of likenesses, These you presented to me you fish-shaped island As I wanded the shores I know, As I walk'd with that electric self seeking types.42 He practices reflective correspondence: the familiar scenery of the coastline opens and admits him into the scenery of an "impalpable" inner world. From the "shores I know", he is translated to the shores I know not, As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck'd, As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me, As the ocean so mysteriously rolls toward me closer and closer, I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd up drift, A few sands and dead leaves. . . . 40

41 42

II, 14. Emerson, "Experience", C. W„ III, 81. L. of G., II, 14.

L. of G.,

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99

O baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth, Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am. . . .43 As we noted earlier, Whitman's characteristic method of correspondence was one by which the analogical objects were loved as things-in-themselves, and the poet was the "caresser of life". The Open Road was Whitman's strategy for achieving observation and at the same time contact: it had a character that was "fluid and attaching". The inner world responded to the stimuli of the outer world but did not reveal itself. It was the dark, fertile loam out of which the leaves sprouted. Whitman had a fear of this inner world and of discovering what he came to call his "real Me" - at least up until the emotional crisis of 1858-1859. In "Song of the Open Road" he told of a dreadful Doppelgänger: No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession, Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes, Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and bland in the parlors, In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public assembly, Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bedroom, everywhere, Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones, Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbon and artificial flowers, Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself, Speaking of anything else but never of itself.44 43

L. of G., II, 14-15. Cf. these "impalpable breezes" of the inner world with Wordsworth, The Prelude, lines 33-35, Book I: "For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven/ was blowing on my body, felt within/ A correspondent breeze 44 L. of G., I, 189.

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His strategy of psychic hygiene was to exorcize this phantom on the Open Road. He found, however, that the inner self could not be lost in the fresh air, that all such attempts were futile. Finally, on the sea shore he realized . . . that amid all the blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows, With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written, Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath, I perceive that I have not really understood anything, not a single object, and that no man ever can. . . . 45

He learned something else on that seashore — there with his solitary self, there fronting the dark, enigmatic sea. He learned what saved his art: he learned to convert sorrow into poetry. The "shuddering longing ache of contact", attenuated and subtilized, became the psychological tension out of which emerged his greatest poems. "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" is perhaps the first conscious acceptance of this lifelong theme and source of poetry. It celebrates, at least formally, a correspondential experience - the poet's translating of the bird's lament. O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you, Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent f r o m me, Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night, By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon, 45

L. of G., II, 15. We have heard this ironical laughter before. In "Song of the Open Road" it accompanied the journeyers out of the city on to the futile highway: "You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you."

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The messenger then arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within, The unknown want, the destiny of me.46 With the publication, in 1860, of the Calamus poems, Whitman made the confession which in "Song of the Open Road" he had said "no husband, no wife, no friend" was "trusted to hear".47 The secret self, the eternally solitary self, had been embraced at last and the "hell under the skull-bones" became the "sweet hell within", the generator of poems. 3.

THE AESTHETICS OF THE OBSERVING SELF

Viewing the Leaves in chronological perspective, we can trace a general rhythm, a diastole and systole in the poet's relation to external reality. The dilation of "Song of Myself" (1855) and "Song of the Open Road" (1856) is countered by the withdrawn, meditative "Out of the Cradle . . . " (1859) and "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life" (1860); the public-minded enthusiasm of the early "Drum Taps" (1861-1863) is countered by the passive, maternal "Vigil Strange I Kept On the Field One Night", "The Wound-Dresser" and finally by "When Lilacs Last In the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1865-1866). These two great rhythmic waves of dilation and withdrawal, of the lover's reaching out and the solitary's renunciation, of the virile taking of the whole universe for his bride and the feminine passivity of the thrush alone in the swamp singing the carol of death: these two waves were all that the poet could sustain. After his Lincoln elegy, as Malcolm Cowley remarked, Whitman tended to become good, gray, but less and less a poet. A clue to the secret of Whitman's great decade, 1855-1865, is perhaps implicit in the bird's song in "When Lilacs . . .": Prais'd be the fathomless universe For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love — but praise! praise! praise! For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death48 48 47 48

L. of G., II, 12. L. of G„ I, 189. L. of G„ II, 101.

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Indeed, his poetry is a long canticle of praise - of himself, of objects he saw about him, and, finally, of death. In all the poems (especially those which might be termed poems of "appetency") there are two "characters" present: the first person singular self and the second person singular (and plural) object(s) of his world. In no poem is this subject-object relationship more conspicuous than in "Song of Myself". Here the poet enters the poem as the active component of environmental reality, not only in his apostrophes to "bare bosom'd night", or "cool breath'd earth" or the sea, or humanity, but also in the single point-of-view, cinematographic "catalogues". It is especially in these lists - for example sections 8 and 15 - that the poet sets forth the objects of observation, the evidence with which he justifies his Bacchic lyricism. His poems are, in this way, comparable to litanies in which the object of religious communion is invoked under a series of aspects, e.g., "rosa mystica", "turris davidica", each time followed by the devotee's response, "Ora pro nobis." Similarly, Suzanne Langer speaks of ritual as the "formalization of overt behavior in the presence of sacred objects. This is, so to speak, a complement to the life-symbols. . . . The rites enacted at their contemplation formulate and record man's response (to the realities as symbolized by the sacra)."*9 Speaking of the "great poet" in the 1855 Preface, Whitman wrote: "His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things." In his less successful poems, e.g., "Salut au Monde", the "catalogues" appear coldly disjunct from the lyric response. But at his best, Whitman makes his listed objects radiate the light of the love he felt for them. In his Lincoln elegy, the life-symbols, the sacra which he offers to Death, vibrate with the correspondence of love: Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes, W i t h the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray s m o k e lucid and bright, With the floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air, 49

Suzanne Langer, Philosophy p. 133.

in a New Key (Cambridge, Mass., 1948),

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With the fresh, sweet herbage underfoot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific, In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there. .. .50 After this recreation of felt reality, the poetic observer is not only justified, but compelled to make his antiphonal response. There is, therefore, nothing forced or hyper-rhapsodic about Sing on, Sing on you gray-brown bird . . . warble your reedy song, Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe. O liquid and free and tender! O wild and loose to my soul - O wondrous singer!51 In Whitman's poems we have, as he promised, "the origin of all poems": 52 a subject contemplating an object. It is not merely a contemplation of the poet's subliminal meaning as reflected in phenomena - Thoreau's method - but a yearning, a reaching out to the "dumb beautiful ministers" that are capable of producing strangely bewildering reactions in the observer. This contact with reality is perhaps the "touch" of the much-pondered 28th section of "Song of Myself": "Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity... ," 53 The imagery is sexual, for so was Whitman's relation to all things external to himself. The separation and the subsequent tension between the observer and the observed is the built-in drama of Leaves of Grass. In "Song of Myself", as in Emerson's Nature, the "ME" and the "NOT ME" are buoyantly described as merged and inter-identifiable. This tension, however, is not so easily resolved. As early as "Song of the Open Road" we find another type of release: "the delicious near-by freedom of death." 54 There is a simpler interpretation of Whitman's death-fixation than the popularized Freudian ocean-womb-regression one. Death was the one con50 61 52 53 54

L. L. L. L. L.

of of of of of

G„ G„ G., G., G„

II, II, I, I, I,

98. 99. 35. 68. 186.

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ceivable natural termination to a life of emotional tension. The poet longed for death as a weary man longs for sleep. Returning to the bird's anthem of death in "When Lilac L a s t . . . " , we find the universe praised For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love . . . 55 The poet's relation to the ever-tantalizing objects, to the objects of love which he longed for, but could barely touch, pointed to the inevitable "cool-enfolding death". Death was not so much the supreme merging (as D . H. Lawrence maintained), as it was the longed for termination of pain. His poetry transformed this pain and was the prolongation of his life. It was the externalization of this tension, the therapeutic ordering of a chaos of impulses. Like the thrush's, it was "death's outlet song of life", a "song of the bleeding throat": (for well dear brother I know If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die) 66 One critical approach to Whitman (the one which the poet, as good, gray poet, himself supported) has been to treat his Leaves as democratic gospel. Malcolm Cowley, in his introductory essay to the American Classics Series complete edition (1948), wrote of this "socio-historico-nationalistic" approach: It has led to serious misconceptions of American literature and whole bookracks full of third-rate critical and creative writing. It has led to the notion that the ideal American poet or novelist is a rough-hewn aboriginal creature tallying in his works - as Whitman would say the geographical features of the country: high as the mountains, broad as the prairies, tangled as its swamps. But the American writers of stature have rarely been lettered savages or extraverts flinging their arms right and left to embrace multitudes; they have been, for the most part, hurt and lonely men - as Whitman was hurt and lonely when he wrote his first great poems; and they have been more concerned in their works with depth than with breadth of emotion; more interested in achieving psychological truth and honest crafts55 56

L. of G., II, 101. L. of G., II, 95.

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105

manship than in reproducing the sweep of the continent as seen from a train window.57

However, since Cowley's essay, another group of critics has arisen whose apparent aim is to save Whitman for American letters by applying a formalist exegesis to his poetry. One example of this tendency is found in R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam. Not content with successfully proving that Whitman Adamically named the creatures of his world, he feels obliged to go one step further and assert that Whitman created them. From Adam to God is a promotion that might have pleased the old Camden poet, but is one that a critic can grant only by dint of semantical legerdemain. Dostoevsky and Balzac, Professor Lewis admits, were each said to have created a world; but when we say this "we knowingly skip a phrase, since what we mean is Dostoevsky's (or Balzac's) selective embodiment of an already existent world. In the case of Whitman, the type of extreme Adamic romantic, the metaphor gains its power from a proximity to the literal, as though Whitman really were engaged in the stupendous task of building a world that had not been before the first words of his poem."58 No one could disagree with this. The "world" of Whitman's poetry is not a novelistic replica of 19th century America. His poetry is fundamentally not about beaches, ferries, and Americans: it is about his stance on and among beaches, ferries, and Americans-in other words, it is about him. He was a lonely man; he wrote his poems to externalize the tension, the "longing ache of contact". He did not write them to palliate his pain, but to discover it. "Come", he said in "Calamus", "I am determin'd to unbare this broad breast of mine, I have long enough stifled and choked. . . ,"59 The need to confess is different from the need to fabricate. Yet Lewis writes on the "theme of loneliness": "The only recourse for a poet like Whitman was to fill the space by erecting a home and populating it with companions and lovers."60 57 58 58 80

R. W. B. Lewis, The American The American Adam, p. 49. L. of G., I, 138. The American Adam, p. 49.

Adam

(Chicago, 1954), pp. 29-30.

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WHITMAN ON THE OPEN ROAD

If this had been his desire, he could have satisfied it, as hundreds of his contemporaries were doing, by writing sentimental romances. Nothing so thoroughly succeeds in missing the point as Lewis's imputation of "creationism" to Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry". After quoting the first lines, he writes: This is not the song of a trovatore, a finder, exposing bit by bit the substance of a spectacle which is there before a spectator looks at it. It is the song of a poet who creates his spectacle by projecting it as he goes along. The flood tides, the clouds, the sun, the crowds of men and women in the usual costumes: these exist in the instant they are named and as they are pulled on toward one another, bound together by a single unifying eye. . . . 61

Professor Lewis implies that a finder finds only the external world and does his "bit by bit" finding with the logic of a file clerk and that to manipulate phenomena is to create it. "You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers.... We use you, and do not cast you aside." 62 - so said Whitman about the objects which he used to "furnish . . . parts toward the soul". But Lewis, excited by his own demiurgic idea, goes on: With the world, so to speak, a going concern, Whitman is now able to summon new elements into existence: sea gulls, the sunlight in the water, the haze on the hills, the schooners and sloops, and ships at anchor, the large and small steamers, and the flags of all nations. 63

However, if Whitman created the world of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", why should we not say that Wordsworth created the world of Tintern Abbery, or Goldsmith created the world of Auburn? Whitman had enough trouble with this world and in determining his own place in it. He had no need to construct another verbal cosmos. He himself was a "Kosmos", composed of every sight and sound and smell and touch that had come his way. Everything he saw in the external world tended to activate the dark cosmos within: his "Salut au Monde" was the response of 81

The American Adam, p. 49. «2 L. of G., I, 198-99. 53 The American Adam, p. 53.

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107

one world to another. But the observed world remained separate from the world within the observer. Gradually the two worlds drifted farther apart. Only his poetry could place them, for a moment, in ecstatic conjunction. The struggle which Leaves of Grass contains was not a struggle to write democratic slogans or formalistically analyzable verse. His best poetry - his only poetry - was no part-time occupation: it was a matter of life or death. Which is only to say that, in this respect, Whitman was no different from any other great poet. Whitman, as we have noted, used the external world as resonantal correspondence. His spontaneous reaction to the external, sensed world pleased him so much, he said, that he was reluctant to go any further than this "first step", preferring instead to "stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs." 6 4 In "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" he declared that the birth of his poetry came from a moment of resonantal correspondence: the bird that sang to the boy started " a thousand warbling echoes" within him, "never to die". Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations, . . . be absent from me. 65

The mature poet then promised to "fuse" the bird's song With the thousand responsive songs at random, My own songs awakened from that hour. . . , 68

He hoped to practice this mode of correspondence as a free, mobile American on the expansive, optimistic Open Road of America. Yet the detachment demanded by the correspondential discipline condemned Whitman to the fate of the solitary onlooker. At first exulting in the vastness of the Self and in its power to "dictate" poems to him, he later came to realize that, as Emerson said, it was after all a solitary performance. The Open Road led nowhere. Looking into himself - employing introspective correspondence - he had to admit that he had "not 64

•s 66

L. of G., I, 9-10. L. of G., II, 12. L. of G., II, 13.

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WHITMAN ON THE OPEN ROAD

really understood any thing, not a single object. . . ," 6 7 and the 1860 edition included "At once I find, the least thing that belongs to me, or that I see or touch, I know not." The lost pilgrim accepted his fate and like the "noiseless, patient s p i d e r . . . surrounded, detached", sent out his poetic threads in search of the incommunicable reality external to himself. The external world of men and women and things became the object of his unsatisfied love. He believed in the existence of two worlds, of the soul within and of matter without. The outer world activated the inner by arousing resonances which, in turn, took the verbal shape of poems. There was thus maintained an equilibrium of mutual recognition. Between these two discrete worlds poetry was Whitman's only envoy.

«

L. of G., II, 15.

V T R A N S C E N D E N T A L CORRESPONDENCE IN WIDER P E R S P E C T I V E

To conclude this short, and perforce restricted, "history of an idea", it may be useful to view our three American Romantics in the larger context of American culture. First of all we will very briefly examine the evolution of some ideas and attitudes from the age of Puritanism to the age of Romanticism and point out the conditions under which the idea of correspondence emerged as a principal factor in the writings and lives of Emerson,Thoreau, and Whitman. Secondly, we will make some general conclusions concerning the effect of the practice on the practitioners. And, lastly, we will look for the traces of this powerful idea in a culture which, after the Civil War and the popularization of science, rejected the premises of Transcendentalism and with them the method of correspondential observation. The journey motif has always been an important and powerful mythic theme. As a symbol of transition from one state of being to another, this motif had special meaning for the Europeans of the sixteenth century who discovered that this symbol might be enacted, that besides the metaphysical pilgrimage of the soul from its Inferno of sin, through purgation, and upward through the circles of Paradise, there was an earthly pilgrimage that could be made away from the failures of Europe and toward the promise of America. Since the Puritans believed that material objects and events were types by means of which God continued to instruct His people, it was inevitable that they should interpret their journey from the Old to the New World as a type of the Christian's journey from the secular world of sin to the heaven of the vision

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of God. In her "Meditations", Anne Bradstreet wrote: He that is to sail into a far country although the ship, cabin, and provision be all convenient and comfortable for him, vet he hath no desire to make that his place of residence, but longs to put in at that port where his business lies. A Christian is sailing through this world unto his heavenly country, and here he hath many conveniences and comforts; but he must beware of desiring to make this the place of his abode, lest he meet with such tossings that may cause him to long for shore before he sees land. We must, therefore, be here as strangers and pilgrims, that we may plainly declare that we seek a city above, and wait all the days of our appointed time till our change shall come. 1

In this paragraph we see how the Puritans' actual experience became interwoven with the mythic journey of the soul to God. Like the Puritans' journey from the ancient corruption of Europe to the new paradise of America, the conversion of the soul - in Bunyan's "similitude" - is a journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. The motif of the mystic journey seems to have been submerged during the prudential "Age of Franklin". But its power reasserted itself in the age of Transcendental Romanticism. For it was then that Americans suddenly realized that perhaps the New World was larger than they had thought, and in the three decades before the Civil War, the spiritual expansion of the imaginative mind kept pace with the geographical expansion of the pioneer nation. The "West" with all its complex meanings fascinated the minds of the new American Romantics. Thoreau looked westward in the twilight and saw another and different America on the far horizon: The morning hope is soon lost in what becomes the routine of the day, and we do not recover ourselves again until we land on the pensive shores of evening, shores which skirt the great western continent of night. At sunset we look into the west. For centuries our thoughts fish those grand banks that lie before the newfoundland, before our spirits take up their abode in that Hesperian Continent to which these lie in the way. 2 1

In Perry Miller's The American Puritans (Garden City, N. Y., 1956), p. 280.

2

Thoreau, Journal, VI, p. 53.

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111

Anne Bradstreet, writing in the mid-1600's said that a Christian "is to sail into a far country" and spoke of the conditions of his pilgrimage to the "city above". Thoreau, writing two hundred years later, said that "to set about living a true life is to go a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men." Despite their (apparently) identical destination, these two voyagers, the Puritan and the Romantic, used different means. The Puritan was directed by God's grace - the Romantic relied on his own powers of imagination. Bradstreet's voyager is committed to the danger and the comforts of a divinely-wafted ship; Thoreau needs no ship and no shipmates - his thoughts

can detach themselves from the

"routine of the day" and can "fish those grand banks" that lie "before that Hesperian Continent". 3 H e can, by his own power, anticipate the vision of God which the Puritan hopes to enjoy only after death. H e conjures God by the magic of the imagination while the Puritan labors and waits for the invasions of grace. After Christian finishes telling Pliable about the joys of God's Kingdom, Pliable asks " H o w shall we get to be sharers thereof?" Christian answers: " T h e Lord, the Governor of that country, hath recorded that in this Book; the substance of which is, if we be truly willing to have it he will bestow it upon us freely." The Romantic also had recourse to a book, but his book was not written by "the Lord, the Governor of that country": his book was literature, the product of his own journeying mind. The contents of this book were his own experiences, especially those things which he experienced visually. A t least in the case of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, his mission was just as urgent and austere as that of the man whom Bunyan b e h e l d the man who "put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, Life! Life! Eternal L i f e ! " who "looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the Plain." Y e t this journey was one of visual discovery. If we contrast Thoreau's proposed journey with that of Bunyan's pilgrim, we can readily see the difference: "What is a course of history or philosophy", Thoreau asks in Walden, 5

Thoreau, Works, VI, p. 160.

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"compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity." This pilgrimage is not for a justified professor of the Faith, but for a Romantic seer who does not consult the Bible but instead, out of the continuous revelation of phenomena, creates bibles. The switch from the providential determination of the Puritans to the spiritual "free will" of the Romantics was a radical change of point of view. Imagination superseded Grace; no longer waiting for the visitations of God, man set out to rediscover and to repossess the supreme Spirit of the Universe. The Romanticism that grew up in Concord tended, nevertheless, to develop within the patterns of the older New England religion. The journeying mind of the Romantic progressed by means of observing - not the allegorical types of nature, but the correspondences that seemed to exist between itself and the outside world. This, as Matthiessen pointed out, appears to be related to the older Puritan framework of ideas: The tendency of American idealism to see a spiritual significance in every natural fact was far more broadly diffused than transcendentalism. Loosely Platonic, it came specifically from the common background that lay behind Emerson and Hawthorne, from the Christian habit of mind that saw the hand of God in all manifestations of life, and which, in the intensity of the New England seventeenth century, had gone to the extreme of finding "remarkable providences" even in the smallest phenomena, tokens of divine displeasure in every capsized dory or runaway cow. 4

The Romantic transformation of Puritanism, which was American Transcendentalism, asserted that sensed matter was the material of poetry but demurred from dwelling upon or possessing that matter. Emerson in his essay "Poetry and Imagination" stated that "the poet accounts all productions and changes of Nature as the nouns of the language, uses them representatively, too well pleased with their ulterior to value much their primary meaning." In his American Renaissance, Matthiessen includes this passage and adds: 4

F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 243.

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113

The representation he is thinking of is Swedenborg's, the correspondence between the physical world of appearance and the real world of spirit. The prospect of expressing the ulterior meanings is what caused Emerson to value literature above the other arts, since its medium is less material, and for that reason, "the finest tool of all" in being "nearest to the mind". A single statement like that can suggest a long background of Puritan distrust of plastic richness as a snare for the eye. . . .5 Diary-writing was another activity that continued to be a part of the cultural pattern of America. The new Romantics of the 1830's were never seriously tempted to give up New England and follow Childe Harold on exotic cruises or poise themselves beside Manfred on the rim of Alpine cliffs. Like their forbears they stayed at home and in great journals plotted the course of their souls' pilgrimage by recording every fluctuation in the life of the spirit. Unlike the Puritans, however, they recorded the action of the imagination - man's rediscovered power to apprehend God - and not the infusions of God's pentecostal grace. The Transcendentalist filled his journals with the suggestive phenomena of the world. "Let us not underrate the value of a fact", wrote Henry Thoreau; "it will one day flower in a truth." In his journals he held the "factual" world in the service of his soul and demanded that it reflect as yet undiscovered truths of his inner self. The Transcendental journals, e.g., those of Emerson and Thoreau, were much more "autobiographical" than those of the Puritans only because they were about the adventures of the self - its struggles to comprehend its destiny by means of the fluctuating power of its inborn imagination. With heroic faith in the universal relevance of this internal monologue,6 Emerson declared in his essay, "Spiritual Laws", "He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public." Again, like the Puritans, the Transcendentalists believed that art should be useful. The universal relevance of the Transcendental monologue depended on how effectively it was able to arouse 5

American Renaissance, p. 40. On the Emersonian monologue see Constance Rourke's Humor, pp. 134-35. 6

American

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the imaginative powers within others. It was created to be useful to the imagination, and not, as in the case of Puritan erudition, to the rational understanding. Yet in both aesthetics, art was used to implement the "journey", the pilgrimage of the soul from a state of blindness and chaos to a state of illumination, power, and tranquillity. In these ways the Transcendentalists adopted the superannuated framework of Puritan culture and developed with it a native American Romanticism. This framework, first of all, consisted in a vaguely visualized geography: a city which the traveller escapes from, a road of exile and questing, and another city, a transfigured city at the end of the wilderness. This Romantic pilgrimage was not undertaken through a 17th century universe teeming with angelic and diabolic life, but through a Newtonian world-machine that was essentially soulless, inert, and dead. The generative spirit of the universe now existed only within man. In the final chapter of Nature, the "Orphic poet sang": Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun, from woman, the moon. The laws of the mind externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from afar and on high. 7

To understand himself man therefore had to recognize the correspondences which still exist between the external world of matter and the inner, once-demiurgic, world of spirit. He had to study external forms in order to understand the nature of his hidden self. "Our age is ocular", Emerson remarked in one of his journals. The eye tended to become the main organ of experience. The "Great Work" was the contemplation of man's inner, divine self, and only the eye could link and permit the inter-illumination of 7

Emerson, Complete

Works, Vol. I, p. 58.

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115

the inner and outer worlds. As the Swedenborgian apostle Sampson Reed said, "The eye appears to be the point at which the united rays of the sun which the united rays of the sun within and the sun without converge to an expression of unity." 8 Emerson experienced this "expression of unity" by means of seeing. In this famous passage from Nature he tells how the seer, for an ecstatic moment, can re-experience the primal monism of the world: In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, - no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God. 9

The new "Orphic" cosmology of Emerson, as we have noted, turned the rational Puritan cosmos inside-out: God was at the center of the undiscovered inner world, not at the rim of the outermost sphere. Although the voyage-motif was equally suited to both spiritual quests, it had to be adapted to the new direction which Romantic beliefs indicated. As an archetype, it had to undergo many alterations, but none of them more important than the new function which the spiritual pilgrim assumed - the function of seer, or observer of correspondence. In the lives of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman we have noted the basic disadvantage of the correspondential method. When the seer views the external world, in the words of Emerson, as "the painted vicissitudes of the soul", he runs the risk of projecting the autonomous forces and properties of the unconscious upon the outside world. Thus the most dominant impulses of the unconscious tend to control the correspondential process and, like the conventional reason, present to the conscious mind a limited number of pre-selected objects. The "seer", thereby, be8

In Sherman Paul's Emerson's Angle of Vision (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1954) p. 73. Cf. also Whitman's "Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,/ If I could not how and always send sun-rise out of me" (Song of Myself, 25). • Emerson, Complete Works, I, p. 7.

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comes the captive spectator to a magic-lantern show within himself. T h e writers whom we have considered took this risk. It is not surprising, therefore, that they all were, in a sense, compelled to write autobiographically. 1 0 A s Thoreau put it: I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. 11 The knowledge he possessed of himself he got precisely by narrowing his experience of others, by remaining separate from the spectacle of life. In his journal for 1858, he speaks of this detached attitude: The November twilights just begun! It appeared like a part of a panorama at which I sat a spectator.... Just such a piece of art merely, though infinitely sweet and grand, did it appear to me, and just as little were any active duties required of me. We are independent on all we see. . . . Only the rich and such as are troubled with ennui are implicated in the maze of phenomena. You cannot see anything until you are clear of it. 12 T o " s e e " as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman saw was, indeed, to stand clear of the spectacle. T h e "greatest p o e t " , as Whitman envisioned him, was a m a n apart from his countryman: " H e is a seer . . . he is i n d i v i d u a l . . . he is complete in himself. . . . " (from the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass). Their ideal of friendship was often too high for human nature. With apparent reference to Emerson, Thoreau wrote: " N o fields are so barren to me as the men of whom I expect everything but get nothing." 1 3 Sooner or later these three observers of life were forced to recognize the fate which their choice of correspondential vision had allotted to them. Emerson, the least exuberant, was accordingly the least disillusioned; he had early learned that the "great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship 10

See Jon Beckmann, The

passim. » Walden,

W., I I , p . 4 .

Faltering

12

Journal,

X I , pp. 273-275.

"

Journal,

V , p. 87.

Ego

of a Naturalist

(Barre Press, 1968),

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117

and love", and had declared in mirthless epithalamion: "The universe is the bride of the soul." 14 He had told himself as early as 1837 to undergo all the attrition of life, the insults, the disgrace, the defeats, without blinking, for his one strategy was to record "all these phenomena", pierce "their beauty as phenomena", and to oversee himself. "Keep the habit of the observer", he said: "Be a football to Time & Chance, the more kicks, the better, so that you may inspect the whole game and know its uttermost law." 15 His two disciples, perhaps more wholeheartedly Emersonian than their "Master", entered more uncompromisingly into the life of the correspondential observer and suffered more acutely from the disadvantages inherent in the method. Thoreau responded with wit and resignation, while Whitman wrote the love lyrics of death - "Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me." The disadvantages of the habit, at times, however, seemed majestically offset by the joy of heroic separation, the joy which Whitman celebrated in "A Song of Joys": Yet O my soul supreme! Know'st thou the joys of pensive thought? Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart? Joys of the solitary walk, the spirit bow'd yet proud, the suffering and the struggle? The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings day or night? Joys of the thought of Death, the great spheres Time and Space? 16

Wanderers of the road between the two cities, they warmed themselves only with the "joys of the free and lonesome heart": their only permanent companion was Alastor, the spirit of solitude. "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude",17 wrote Thoreau. 14

"Experience", C. W., Ill, p. 81. »5 Journal, IV, pp. 315-16. 16 "A Song of Joys", L. of G., I, p. 220. " Walden, W., II, p. 150.

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It should be apparent by now that despite their personal and, in a sense, professional detachment from their countrymen, these three Romantic pilgrims displayed many of the attitudes and traits which in diluted form have become part of American culture. Without entering too extensively into broad social analysis, we ought briefly to relate this literary tradition to the larger and more diffuse culture which these three men have helped to shape and make articulate. We have already seen how the Puritan pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem in the West was transformed gradually into a Romantic pilgrimage. Thoreau sketched out this new mythic geography when he wrote: We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions.18

Perhaps behind the phenomenon of Romantic individualism and the native isolationism that formed its broader base, was the great national longing to wash the guilt of Europe from the (essentially European) culture of America, the American's insistence that he was, in Prof. Lewis's words, "the radically new personality, the hero of the new adventure; an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry... ."1» When Washington warned his countrymen against entering into foreign involvements he was speaking mainly of political prudence on an international scale. However, when Emerson made similar statements, he was not discussing an international, that is, America-to-Europe, relationship, but the personal relationship of the American individual to Europe. With these famous words he admonished the "American Adam" not to travel: Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.20 18 19 20

"Walking", W., V, p. 218. American Adam, p. 5. "Self-Reliance", C. W., II, p. 49.

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119

We can almost watch personal isolation emerging from the national isolationism of the 1830's: bullied by kings and emperors, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world. .. .21 The isolation of the American continent from the continent of Europe was thus easily translated into the righteous isolation of the individual, the self-reliant man, from Europe and all the pleasurable corruption that Europe seemed to represent. Nothing was easier, then, than for Thoreau, safe and free by Walden Pond, to declare: "I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself." 22 Notwithstanding their patriotic fear of Europe, Americans always recognized the commercial necessity of retracing their course back across the "Lethean stream". Although they were convinced that there's no place like home, they found that intellectual and actual wealth was often quicker gotten elsewhere; in trading with Europe and the Far East, in frontier land speculation, or in California gold-prospecting. Like his foot-loose, enterprising countrymen, the Romantic Pilgrim was also on an open road in quest of self-remunerative gain - in quest of correspondences with which to illuminate and comfort his personal isolation. When non-commercial travellers finally began to be drawn back to the flesh-pots of the Old World, they generally displayed the detachment of the Emersonian observer. Tourism may, in fact, be termed the Romantic pilgrimage gone to seed. While the Pilgrim gathers correspondences, the tourist gathers "impressions", generally proved and preserved on photographic film. The speed of the modern tour allows the greatest possible amount of ocular gain, and at the same time safeguards the voyager from any pernicious involvement with the natives. For the Romantic Pilgrim the eye, we have said, is the main organ of experience. When we seek to distinguish this voyeuristic

21

"

"History", C. W., p. 14. Walden, C. W., II, p. 144.

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trait in the culture of America, we find so many examples that only a few need to be mentioned. The principle of ocular experience is this: the observer is visually involved in a series of scenes, while he remains physically detached from their actual consequences. He is either in motion (as in a train) and is viewing static landscape, or is static himself (as in a city) and is viewing moving throngs of people. Among the examples of visual, vicarious enjoyment popular with Americans was the painted "panorama". Even when they could view in their own neighborhoods enough wild nature to satisfy the wildest of nature-poets, Americans of the mid-nineteenth century would pay to see a large, circular painting of the shores of the Mississippi. In a less spectacular way, native painters depicted the savage and romantic beauties of the American wilderness for the homes of Eastern burghers: great purple mountains rose and over-shadowed a vast landscapes of grass and trees and water beside which dwarfed Indians on horseback poised in the unseen presence of Manito and beneath this on a carved bookcase might be Washington Irving's Tales from the Alhambra or Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. It is worth noting that many literary careers were launched by a judicious feeding of the American public's need for exotic phantasy. Besides Irving and Poe, we might mention Cooper, Melville (in his early works), and Twain (in his American and European travel writings). This observer's attitude which we have noted in the works and lives of our Romantic pilgrims is made simpler for their twentieth century countrymen. The modern observer can have a stationary vantage point within a darkened motion picture theater, where he can watch, in perfect security, men and women braving all the violence of passion, villainy, and hostile nature. The American hunger for ocular experience is perhaps most conspicuous in "television-viewing": now it is no longer necessary to risk even the dangers of nature and traffic to watch figures on a screen; now observation can be practiced in the perfect privacy of one's room. It should be kept in mind that the correspondential observer is not an isolated phenomenon, peripheral to the main course of American culture. Rather, he plays an important role in what

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Philip Rahv has called the "Cult of Experience", and expresses in his particular way the difficulty and pain of freeing himself from his Puritan past. While the main stream of American literature has tended to an empirical realism, the correspondential observer has held back, jealous of the secret inviolable world within himself. While others hurled themselves into the factual, social and sociological reality of their age, he has preferred to watch what Emerson designated as the "NOT ME, (that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body... .").23 From the deep, secure observatory of the self, the observer looks out at his body and its futile commerce with the world and then, as Emerson wrote, "oversees himself". Thus art becomes a way to deal with external reality, to subject it, as phenomena, to the dominion of the transcendent self. The "experience" of the correspondential observer on his Romantic Pilgrimage to self-knowledge is not what he does, but what happens to him, and is only preliminary to the essential act of overseeing himself, inspecting "the whole game", and knowing "its uttermost law". The open road of the American pilgrimage is the road which connects (and at the same time separates) the inner world of consciousness and the outer world of sensation. In every case the pilgrim is aware of the two poles of magnetic attraction; the inner world is his goal, but he cannot progress toward it without using the correspondences of the outer world. For Thoreau these poles took the expressed form of contact with the External - both society and nature - and solitary contemplation of the Internal Self; for Whitman, the journeying Soul and the Body which by its tangency linked the Soul with the "ensemble", the "enmasse". There have been many kinds of progress, but for America the oldest is the pilgrim's progress. It began with the first sailing of the Puritans to New England and has continued as an underlying theme ever since. Though it has undergone many transvaluations, it has retained its basic structure: the pilgrim is one chosen to «

Nature,

C. W., I, p. 2.

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make a long journey from the carnal city of this world to the spiritual city of another world. The basic transvaluation has been effected by the influence of romanticism, according to which the voyager is to progress by the light of his imagination toward a constant contemplation of Platonic Beauty. In a nation where social progress and industrial progress struggled for approval and ascendency, where biological evolution became a highly adaptable mythos, the followers of the ancient pilgrimage, the ancient progress, were not silent: Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of the universe, all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance. Allons! through struggles and wars! The goal that was named cannot be countermanded.24

Wait, Thoreau said; "there is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." To set out on the real progress was to abandon all the mediate aims of the other progresses. It was to accept the tragic singularity of all men and to follow one's separate pathway back to the original Eden of reconcilement. Walt Whitman spoke for all the American pilgrims of the spirit when he named this the passage to "primal thought", the "voyage of the mind's return. . . ,"25 This was a lonely and perilous voyage. Yet with the inspired zeal of Bunyan's pilgrim who ran crying "Life! Life! Eternal Life!", the American pilgrim in every generation echoes these words of Whitman: Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor,! Cut the hawsers - haul out - shake out every sail! Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough? Have we not grovel'd here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes? Have we not darkened and dazed ourselves with books long enough? 24 25

"Song of the Open Road", L. of G., I, pp. 188-89. "Passage to India", L. of G., II, p. 193.

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Sail forth - steer for the deep waters only, Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.26 The idea of the pilgrimage continued to have a history, but correspondence gradually has faded from the "history of ideas" - at least from the history of viable American ideas. When Darwinian science destroyed the optimistic transcendental teleology, it also invalidated its law of correspondence and made the products of correspondential vision seem as fanciful as they had seemed in the 18th century. Songs of myself ceased to be written (or at least ceased to be read) and in their place appeared Sister Carries and Mc Teagues. In the 20th century, the idea of correspondence has seldom provided Americans with a method of seeing 20th century reality. As in the pre-Romantic period it seems to be submerged beneath the surface of our culture. We need not suppose, however, that such an underground river, flowing as it does from the times of Heraclitus to the present, is very likely to expend itself and cease to be a potent force in the history of man's struggle to understand his place in the universe.

26

"Passage to India", L. of G., II, pp. 196-97.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Gay Wilson, The Solitary Singer (New York, 1955). Barzun, Jacques, Classic, Romantic, and Modern (Garden City, 1961). Bernard, Oliver, ed., Rimbaud (Baltimore, 1962). Breton, André, Les Pas Perdus (Paris, 1920). Cameron, Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Paris, 1929). Carlyle, Thomas, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1887). Carpenter, F. I., An Emerson Handbook (New York, 1953). Carrouges, M., André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme (Paris, 1950). Covey, Cyclone, The American Pilgrimage (New York, 1961). Emerson, R. W., Emerson's Complete Works (Boston, 1895). Feidelson, Charles, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago, 1953). Foss, Martin, Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience (Princeton, 1949). Halloway, Emory, ed., Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (New York, 1921). Hopkins, V. C., Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson's Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, 1952). Jung, Carl, Psyche and Symbol (Garden City, 1958). Lane, Lauriat, Jr., ed., Approaches to Waiden (San Francisco, 1961). Langer, Susanne, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, 1948). Lawrence, D. H., Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923). Lewis, R. W. B., The American Adam (Chicago, 1954). Michaud, Régis, L'Esthétique d'Emerson (Paris, 1927). Miller, Perry, Consciousness in Concord (Boston, 1958). , ed., The American Puritans (Garden City, 1956). , ed., The American Transcendentalists (Garden City, 1957). Paul, Sherman, Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in American Experience (Cambridge, 1952). , The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration (Urbana, 1958). Rahv, Philip, Image and Idea (Norfolk, Conn., 1957). Raymond, Marcel, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (New York, 1950). Rourke, Constance, American Humor (New York, 1931). Thoreau, Henry, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston, 1906).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Whicher, Stephen E., Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Emerson (Philadelphia, 1955). Whitman, Walt, Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia, 1897). , Leaves of Grass (Garden City, 1897). Wimsatt, W . K., The Verbal Icon (New York, 1960).

125 Waldo

STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE 3.

KENT G. GALLAGHER: The Foreigner in Early American Drama: A Study in Attitudes. 1966. 206 pp. / 29.—

4.

Three Plays by J. W. (Capt. Jack) Crawford: An Experiment in Myth-Making. 1966. 287 pp. / 36.—

5.

NORMAN J. FEDDER: The Influence of D. H. Lawrence on Tennessee Williams. 1966. 131 pp. /21.—

6.

LEONARD GREENBAUM: The Hound & Horn: The History of a Literary Quarterly. 1966. 275 pp., 2 plates. / 36.—

7.

KENNETH E. RICHARDSON: Force and Faith in the Novels of William Faulkner. 1967. 187 pp. 27.—

8.

CHESTER CLAYTON LONG: The Role of Nemesis in the Structure of Selected Plays by Eugene O'Neil. 1968. 231pp. / 31.—

PAUL T. NOLAN:

Faulkner's Twice-Told Tales: His Re-Use of his Material. 1966. 118 pp. / 22.—

10.

EDWARD M. HOLMES:

11.

LESTER JAY MARKS:

14.

RICHARD K. PETERSON:

Thematic Design in the Novels of John Steinbeck. 1969. 144 pp. f 28.— 1970.231 pp.

Hemingway: Direct and Oblique. / 34.—

15.

WILLIAM j. FREE: The "Columbian Magazine" and American Literary Nationalism. 1968. 176 pp. / 29.—

16.

JOHN D. BRANTLEY:

1968.136 pp.

The Fiction of John Dos Passos. / 23.—

17.

GEORGE BRANDON SAUL:

Quintet: Essays on Five American Women Poets. 1967. 50 pp. f 11.—

18.

Conrad Richter's Ohio Trilogy: Its Ideas, Themes, and Relationship to Literary Tradition. 1970. 210 pp. / 32.—

19.

P H Y L U S FRANKLIN: Show Thyself a Man: A Comparison of Benjamin Franklin and Cotton Mather. 1969. 93 pp. / 21.—

20.

JOSEPH

21.

L. HUGH MOORE J R . :

22.

JONAS SPATZ:

23.

STEPHEN A. BLACK:

James Thurber: His A Critical Study. 1969. 128 pp.

Masquerades: f 24.—

24.

MARION K.

RICHARDS: Ellen Glasgow's as a Novelist. 1971. 203 pp.

Development f 32.—

26.

G. A. M. JANSSENS:

27.

JOSEPH GALLEGLY: From Alamo Plaza to Jack Harris's Saloon: O. Henry and the Southwest He Knew. 1970. / 25.—

CLIFFORD D. EDWARDS:

j. WALDMEIR: American Novels of the Second World War. 2nd printing. 1971. 180 pp. / 21.—

Robert Penn Warren and History: 'The Big Myth We Live'. 1970. 201 pp. / 3 5 . — Hollywood in Fiction: Some versions of the American Myth. 1969. 148 pp. f 28.—

The American Literary Review: A Critical History, 1920-1950. 1968. 341 pp. / 3 8 . —

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