Authors: John Updike
Odd Jobs (30 page)
… it is my duty to say to you, that the need was never greater of new revelation than now. From the views I have already expressed, you will infer the sad conviction, which I share, I believe, with numbers, of the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society.
To those of us whose religious views have been formed by the crisis theology of Kierkegaard and Barth, which predicates a drastic condition of decay and collapse within so-called Christendom, it is an eerie sensation to apprehend, in the young life and thought of Emerson, the collapse arriving, as the geology, the paleontology, and the Biblical criticism of the early nineteenth century pile in upon thinking men with their devastating revelations. Emerson was well aware of the historical situation: “The Puritans in England and America,” he said in his Divinity School address, “found in the Christ of the Catholic Church, and in the dogmas
inherited from Rome, scope for their austere piety, and their longings for civil freedom. But their creed is passing away, and none arises in its room. I think no man can go with his thoughts about him, into one of our churches, without feeling, that what hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good, and the fear of the bad. In the country, neighborhoods, half parishes are
signing off
,—to use the local term.”
Yet there is, he feels, great need for
a
religion:
What greater calamity can fall upon a nation, than the loss of worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt the senate, or the market. Literature becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die, we do not mention them.
What is to be done, then? Emerson invokes the soul: “In the soul, then, let the redemption be sought.” What does this mean, exactly? It means, I think, what Karl Barth warned against when he said, “One can
not
speak of God by speaking of man in a loud voice.” Emerson defined “the true Christianity” to the divinity students as “a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man.” An infinitude, in Emerson’s if not in Jesus’s terms, based upon an understanding of each man’s soul as a fragment and mirror of the Universal Soul, the Over-soul, whose language is nature. A special beauty of this new religion is that, new wine though it is, it can be poured into the old bottles of the existing churches. Emerson concludes with a peroration that touches upon practical concerns:
The evils of the church that now is are manifest. The question returns, What shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason,—to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul.… Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us; first; the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole
world.… And secondly, the institution of preaching,—the speech of man to men,—essentially the most flexible of organs, of all forms.
And so the young divinity students of the class of 1838, shaken but, let us hope, inspired, were sent forth to take their places behind the rotten pulpits, to fill the hollow creed and exhausted forms of Christianity with the life of their own souls, somehow; the Harvard faculty did not invite Emerson to speak at Harvard again for thirty years.
Emerson had renounced his own ministry in 1832. At that time the secular profession of lecturer was making its beginnings with such speakers as Edward Everett, Daniel Webster, and Horace Mann; within a decade Emerson was a star of the lyceum circuit.
‡
His lectures, many of which became the essays collected in two volumes in 1841 and 1844, from their titles could seem to be about anything—“History,” “Heroism,” “Circles,” “Gifts,” “Manners,” “Experience”—but all were sermons of a sort in behalf of the Emersonian religion, “the speech of man to men,” demonstrating in themselves and urging upon others the free and generous action of a mind open to the inspirations and evidences of the Universal Soul. They were all exhortations to be brave and bold, to trust the universe and oneself. Their supernaturalist content in general, after
Nature
, tends to fade, but is never disavowed, and usually becomes the final recourse of the exhortation. “Let a man fall into the divine circuits, and he is enlarged,” concludes Emerson’s disquisition on “New England Reformers.” “We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us,” states the essay entitled “Nature.” “Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought.… Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form.”
Of all the essays, the one entitled “Self-Reliance” is perhaps the best known, and has entered most deeply into American thinking. It offers a curious counsel of fatalism couched in the accents of activism:
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. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.
The society of one’s contemporaries, however, would seem not to be entirely acceptable, for, we learn a page later, “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.… The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.… Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”
Emerson had refused to conform when he resigned the ministry that his ancestors had honored, and did so furthermore at a moment when his widowed mother and a quartet of brothers were all looking to him for stability. At the price of breaking up their Boston home, and with no financial prospects but his eventual inheritance from his recently dead young wife, Ellen, he set sail for the first of his three excursions to Europe. Frail as a young man, he had developed the gift of taking it easy on himself; unlike his three brilliant brothers, William, Edward, and Charles,
§
he compiled a mediocre record at Harvard, and he outlived them all, into a ripe old age. His third European trip was undertaken as he neared seventy, in order to escape the renovation of his house in Concord, which had suffered a fire. There was something a touch cavalier about his second trip, too—nine months of lionization in England while his second wife, Lidian, coped in Concord with three small children and straitened finances. Emerson’s great discovery, amid the ruins of the Puritan creed, was the art of relaxation and of doing what you wanted. In “Self-Reliance” he proclaims:
I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.
I would write on the lintels of the door-post,
Whim
. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.
The importunities of philanthropy—a real menace in the New England of this time, especially for the foremost proponent of Idealism—must be repelled:
Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they
my
poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
A doctrine of righteous selfishness is here propounded. The Biblical injunction “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is conveniently shortened to “Love thyself”:
I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.… I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.
As the Yippies were to say: “If it feels good, it’s moral.” Or, in the nineteenth-century idiom of William Henry Vanderbilt, “The public be damned!” The American Scholar being advised to “plant himself indomitably on his instincts” shades, in “Self-Reliance,” into the entrepreneur; the great native creed of Rugged Individualism begins to find expression. After deriding feckless college men who lose heart if “not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston,” Emerson asserts:
A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who
teams it, farms it, peddles
, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not “studying a profession” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.
Emerson wished to give men courage to be, to follow their own instincts; but these instincts, he neglected to emphasize, can be rapacious. A social fabric, he did not seem quite to realize (and in the security of pre–Civil War America, in the pretty farm-town of Concord, what would
insist he realize it?), exists for the protection of its members, as do the laws and inhibitions such a fabric demands. To be sure, he did not create American expansionism and our exploitive verve; but he did give them a blessing and a high-minded apology. Are we afraid the rich will oppress the poor? In his essay on “Compensation” Emerson assures us, “There is always some levelling circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others.” Do our hearts bleed for the manacled slave? “Most suffering is only apparent,” he informs us in his uncollected but fascinating essay upon “The Tragic”:
A tender American girl doubts of Divine Providence whilst she reads the horrors of “the middle passage:” and they are bad enough at the mildest; but to such as she these crucifixions do not come: they come to the obtuse and barbarous, to whom they are not horrid, but only a little worse than the old sufferings.
Do the dirtiness and noise of the railroad and factory affront us? “Readers of poetry,” Emerson says in his essay on “The Poet,” “see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider’s geometrical web.” Are we afraid, in a land so carelessly given over to youth and its divine instincts, of growing old? No problem, says Emerson in effect, in his essay on “Circles”: “Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease.… I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.” Death, too, is eloquently fudged away: “And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report.… The divine circulations never rest nor linger” (“Nature”). Are we vexed, depressed, or indignant? Emerson tells us “that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere with the optimism of nature.… Nature will not have us fret and fume” (“Spiritual Laws”).
Understood in relation to Emerson’s basic tenets, these reassurances
are not absurd. Further, amid the fading of other reassurances, they were urgently useful, and have been woven into the created, inherited reality around us. The famous American pragmatism and “can do” optimism were given their most ardent and elegant expression by Emerson; his encouragements have their trace elements in the magnificent sprawl we see on all sides—the parking lots and skyscrapers, the voracious tracts of single-family homes, the heaped supermarket aisles and crowded ribbons of highway: the architectural manifestations of a nation of individuals, of wagons each hitched, in his famous phrase, to its own star. Like balloon-frame house construction—another American invention of the 1840s—Emersonianism got the job done with lighter materials. In his journals he struck the constructive note: “It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.”
And, reading Emerson, one wonders if the American style is so much a matter of energy and enterprise as of insouciance, of somewhat reckless relaxation into the random abundance of opportunities which a plenteous Nature has provided. The American accent is a drawl, and Emerson, in his collection
English Traits
, more than once marvels at the vigor and force and ruddiness of the English, as if in contrast to a languid, lazy, and pallid race he has left behind. Can it be true that, along with our sweet independence and informality, there is something desolate and phantasmal, a certain thinness of experience that goes with our thinness of civilization? As an introspective psychologist, Emerson is nowhere more original than in his baring of his own indifference. “I content myself with moderate, languid actions,” he wrote in his journal of November 3, 1838. “I told J[ones] V[ery] that I had never suffered, & that I could scarce bring myself to feel a concern for the safety & life of my nearest friends that would satisfy them: that I saw clearly that if my wife, my child, my mother, should be taken from me, I should still remain whole with the same capacity of cheap enjoyment from all things.” This was written before the death of his beloved five-year-old son, Waldo. After it, in his uncharacteristically somber essay “Experience,” Emerson confessed:
