Six Characters in Search of a Prophet: Emerson's Representative Men

I title this essay "Six Characters in Search of a Prophet"; it might equally have been called "Six Aspects of a Problem in Search of a Solution." Prefaced by the introductory "Uses of Great Men," delivered as a course of lectures in the winter of 1845–46, and enlarged and revised only slightly for book publication in 1850, Representative Men belongs in its thematic concerns to the earlier half of the decade, a period of crisis and would-be transition for Emerson most openly on display the preceding year in "Experience" (1844) but visible as well in attitudes toward nature, history, and the capacities of the self in "The Method of Nature" (1841), "The Transcendentalist" (1841), "The Young American" (1844), and in contemporary volumes of the journals.1Among the most accessible of Emerson's books, if also among the least attended to critically, Representative Men occupies the position of a fulcrum, or potential fulcrum, within the course of his career. Faced with the disjunction between "the world I converse with in the city and in the farms" and "the world I think," Emerson might attempt to synthesize the actual and the ideal within the terms of his newly emerging thought; he might try to reaffirm established ideas with whatever retrenchments or modifications seemed necessary; or he might intellectually mark time as he awaited life and thought to deliver him from an impasse that admitted of no visible solution.2Of the seven "Lords of Life" designated in the poetic headnote to "Experience" and again in the text, five (Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surprise, Subjectivity) refer to an internal condition (the limitations imposed by temperament, heredity, and the inconstancy of moods), two (Surface and Reality) to an external condition (the ways of the world). The former were long-standing subjects of frustration in Emerson's journals, if only marginally in his public writings through Essays: First Series (1841). The latter grew increasingly prominent in the mid-1840s as rapid industrialization and the coming of the railroad to New England forced him to concede the present-day immovability of capitalism and the fact that its leading figures, nature's "darlings" as he called them in "Experience," "are not children of our law, do not come out of the Sunday school, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the commandments."3 On one side was the world envisioned by the active soul, on the other the world of material power operative upon and within the self. "Cannot Montaigne historical figures created by and reflective of their times, they are capable of speaking powerfully to later ones; and persons to be admired for their gifts and accomplishments, they must nonetheless be resisted lest, like books in "The American Scholar" (1837), they swerve us from our "orbit" and make us a "satellite" in another's mental system.5The paradox at the heart of Representative Men is that while Emerson would profit from the otherness of these "otherest" selves (CW 4:4), he approaches them with suppositions that enclose him within an almost impenetrable sphere of belief and judgment. Among these suppositions are that man is "the centre of things for nature" (CW 4:6), that consciousness of itself through human intelligence is the teleological aim of the universe, that "each material thing has its celestial side" (CW 4:7), that the empirical study of nature (science) is "wanting . . . until it has been humanized" by distilling its moral meaning (CW 4:7), and that "the destiny of organized nature is amelioration" (CW 4:20) understood in recognizably anthropocentric terms. To these must be added another, the authority of "the moral sentiment," which enters the book with the chapter on Swedenborg and rules its assessments of character and achievement thereafter. Although Emerson may not be the "the novice he was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago," as he claimed in "Experience," neither has he put former ideas behind him as he works to reconcile them with the ineluctably real.6 The abiding interest of Representative Men is in the spectacle of Emerson, within the context of his personal as well as his intellectual life, struggling to work beyond the terms of entrenched beliefs even as he clings to their essential framework.Just as Representative Men is a sectioned book answering to the particularities of its characters yet held together by the common problem of mind and world, so my discussion of chapters will attend to relevant aspects of that problem as they relate to the book's presiding, if conflicted vision.Historically the first of Emerson's representative men, Plato is important conceptually in establishing the dichotomy that will govern the metaphysics of his book. "Philosophy," Emerson writes, "is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base: the One; and the two.—1. Unity or Identity; and, 2. Variety" (CW 4:27), with "each student adhering by temperament and by habit, to the first or the second of these gods of the mind" (CW 4:27,30). William James would call these temperaments "tender-minded" and "tough-minded," or "monistic" and "pluralistic," and view their opposition as "the most central of all philosophic problems" because so constitutive of others.7 Monism "starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things"; pluralism begins with "the parts, and makes of the whole a collection," though never a complete or holistic collection.8 This, essentially, is Emerson's position, with reservations about both these world-views. Monism (the way of visionary religion) is flawed for him by a "too rapid unification" that fails to respect the particulars of nature, pluralism (the way of empirical science) by an "excessive attention to parts" to the neglect of "fundamental Unity" (CW 4:30,28).Combining "the infinitude of the Asiatic soul" with "the defining, result-loving, machine-making" mind of Europe, Plato for Emerson was one of those rare "balanced" souls "perceptive" of both (CW 4:31). By "Plato," Emerson turns out to mean "the double star" of Plato the "robed scholar" and his character Socrates, a "plain old uncle" with a "Franklin-like wisdom" and an enjoyment of the life of the streets (CW 4:38,42,40). Plato is a lofty Don Quixote tilting at the "super-essential" (CW 4:35), Socrates a droll, corporeal Sancho Panza of "conquering intelligence" (CW 4:41); paired, they form the writer Plato in his "extraordinary power" (CW 4:40). Yet even this "balanced" soul is balanced for only in its happy complementarity as it passes back and forth between the ideal and the actual. Plato "is charged," Emerson says (the charge is substantively his own), "with having failed to make the transition from ideas to matter" (CW 4:43). Philosophically, this is fatal. "The mouthful of the universe proves too large" for him, and like the proverbial "Boa Constrictor" he is "strangled" trying to swallow it (CW 4:43). "Unconquered Nature lives on, and forgets him," Emerson concludes: "No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains" (CW 4:43,44).Positioned near the outset of Representative Men, Emerson's judgment of failure will qualify the achievement of each of his interpreters of nature. Having introduced the problem of Unity and Variety, Emerson will proceed to ask whether "modern criticism" (by implication himself in what follows) can "draw the line of relation that subsists between Shakespeare and Swedenborg," the consummate poet of the many and the polymathic scientist turned visionary of the One (CW 4:53).If for modern readers Swedenborg is the least illustrious of the characters in Representative Men, for Emerson he was the most indispensable. It was Swedenborg, not Plato, who in his view came closest to showing what no writer had ever shown—"the correspondence of meaning between every part of the universe and every other part" (CW 4:66)—and whose example spoke most directly to his own ambitions, past, present, and (metaphysically, at least) to come.A presence virtually from the outset of his intellectual life, Swedenborg was in Emerson's mind when, traveling with his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson in the White Mountains a month after having informed the Second Church of his reluctance to administer the Lord's Supper, he recorded what would become a chief article of his own religion: "Swedenborg 'considered the visible world his task was to find stones to fit them"—applies to Emerson as he searched for sermons in the stones of science.28 By the time of Nature his Swedenborgian confidence had become complete: "The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every substance."29Philip F. Gura sees Emerson's "interest in Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences" as "lifelong."30 Unhappily, this is true, but with a codicil. While preserving a firm belief in the principle of correspondence, Emerson increasingly took issue with both the particulars of Swedenborg's version of it and the rigidity of his allegorical method. Like other chapters in Representative Men, "Swedenborg" begins with exposition, proceeds to praise, and ends with pointed criticism, but nowhere (save with Goethe) is the praise higher or the criticism more invested than with Swedenborg. The praise comes apropos of a long quotation about correspondence from Swedenborg's Animal Kingdom, a book Emerson sees as aspiring toward "a picture-language" of "such grand presage" as to supersede "other science," "absorb all faculties," and enable "each man" to ask "of all objects what they mean" (CW 4:65,66). With the project itself, Emerson is in full sympathy. What vitiates it for him is the "theological bias" that "fatally narrowed Swedenborg's interpretation of nature," which is "not human and universal, but is mystical and Hebraic" (CW 4:68). "Mystical" here does not mean visionary; it refers pejoratively, as it sometimes does with Emerson, to the subjectivity, literal-mindedness, and dogmatism he saw in mystics like Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme who, as he said in "The Poet" (1844), mistake "an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one."31 "Swedenborg fastens each natural object to a theologic notion," Emerson complains in Representative Men: "a horse signifies carnal understanding; a tree, perception; the moon, Faith"; and so on (CW 4:68). But "the slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. . . . Nature avenges herself on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist" (CW 4:68).In praising the nature of Swedenborg's project while objecting to his execution of it, Emerson is writing with oblique reference to himself and marking the distance he has come since Nature even as he retains its key Swedenborgian idea of correspondence. In Nature he himself had been guilty of subjectivism and allegory, announced in the propositions that frame the book's section on "Language": "1. Words are signs of natural facts, 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of spirit."32 Emerson wished to believe that the "relation" he saw "between mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God," but the examples offered of it in Nature are as fanciful and naïve as those he would deride in "Swedenborg." "Who looks upon a river, in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of things?"33 "An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch," and so on.34 Because "A" (a moral law) could be likened to "B" (a physical law), it followed that "A" was inherent in "B" and that "B" existed in order to instruct us in "A."35 By early 1843 Emerson had distanced himself from such reasoning. Commenting on Swedenborg in a lecture on recent literary influences on New England, he wrote mockingly of allegorism, "Nature is a tablet on which any sense may be inscribed, only not anything cunning and consciously vicious. Draw the moral of the river, the rock, and the ocean. The river, the rock, and the ocean say, 'Guess again.'"36On the deepest level, Emerson's criticism of Swedenborg went beyond Swedenborg's Christian theology, which he saw as "retrospective" (CW 4:80), and his analogical bent, which he himself would never entirely forswear. His quarrel in Representative Men is with Swedenborg's entire "system of the world," which "wants central spontaneity" (CW 4:74). Swedenborg's "Universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order, and with unbroken unity, but cold and still" (CW 4:74–75). The source of Swedenborg's errors lay in a lack of poetic imagination, "a very high sort of seeing" (as Emerson described it in "The Poet") that came by the intellect's "sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others."37 Swedenborg's symbolism solidified what was perpetually in motion, deadened what was alive, and substituted doctrine for what could be communicated only through metaphor. Emerson's conception of Swedenborg has not changed by 1845–46 so much as his conception of the universe has changed. The world that had once been static and allegorical, as in Nature, now appears "fluid and volatile," and within this new vitalism Swedenborg's universe seems desiccated.38 If the ideal poet needed to be a mystic in his perception of law, the mystic needed to be a poet in his expression of it. As a seer, Emerson told Sampson Reed in 1842, Swedenborg was "a grand poet"; as a writer, he was the least of one.39In "Swedenborg" Emerson pays tribute to the visionary who beheld the essential nature of things while criticizing the dogmatist who dwelt on the "Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment," its living source (CW 4:76). But Emerson's separation of the Swedenborgian wheat from the chaff is by no means as distinct as it seems. The "mystic," he remarked in 1846, is one "who beholds the flux" and "labels one looks backward to a universe of fixed correspondences, the other forward to a universe of "rapid metamorphosis" such as he had depicted with mingled exhilaration and terror in "The Method of Nature," the most cosmologically prescient and least anthropocentric of his essays.41Placed just after "Swedenborg" and before "Shakespeare," "Montaigne, or the Skeptic" is linked to both. Philosophically, it pairs with "Swedenborg" in exemplifying the opposition of the monist and the pluralist; temperamentally, in its celebration of the carnival of life and "a most uncanonical levity" (CW 4:93) it looks ahead to qualities in Shakespeare, whose copy of the Essays, Emerson notes, "is the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's library" (CW 4:92). In contrast to Swedenborg, whom Emerson called "disagreeably wise" (CW 4:80), Montaigne delighted him, as he had since Emerson read him soon after college and felt as if he himself had "written the book in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience" (CW 4:92). "Full of fun, poetry, business, divinity, philosophy, smut," Montaigne appealed at once to the philosophical realism Emerson imbibed from Hume and to the pleasure he took in things that "smack of the earth and of real life, sweet or smart or stinging" (CW 4:94).42 Painfully conscious of his own formality and inhibition, Emerson reveled in their opposites when he came upon them in books or in colorful figures like Father Edward Taylor, the seaman-turned-preacher who served as a model for Melville's Father Mapple, or in writers like Carlyle, whose style had a "sinew they are vascular and alive" (CW 4:94)—is itself a sentence that would bleed.Emerson begins "Montaigne" with a propositional statement, "Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals" (CW 4:85), that reaffirms the metaphysical premise of Representative Men. Neither of the two classes of thinkers, the sensationalists with their "perception of Difference" and the moralists with their "perception of Identity" (CW 4:85), satisfies Emerson, each neglecting the truth of the other. In presenting the skeptic as "a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two" (CW 4:88), Emerson appears to be offering a golden mean. The openness of the skeptic's question "Que sçais je" (What do I know?) (CW 4:94) seems a promising point of departure until, on issues of supreme importance to Emerson, it turns out to involve the sort of "total suspense of judgment" on non-evidentiary matters that Emerson had found in Hume.45 "What is the use of pretending to powers we have not?" Emerson has Montaigne ask: "What is the use of pretending to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? . . . If there is a wish for immortality, and no evidence, why not just say that? If there are conflicting evidences, why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to make up his mind, yea or nay,–why not suspend the judgment?" (CW 4:89). To Emerson, such suspension of belief was tantamount to non-belief, whether in a "Scotch Goliath" like Hume or in his beloved Montaigne.46The argument of "Montaigne" turns upon the question of whether "Montaigne has spoken wisely" (CW 4:96). Not wisely enough, Emerson judges, after which the search for a middle ground gives way to a dichotomy between "natural believers" like himself (CW 4:96) and de facto non-believers including Montaigne. "When will you mend Montaigne?" Emerson had asked himself in 1835: "Can you not express your own conviction that moral laws hold?"47 "To 'mend Montaigne,'" as Joseph Urbas comments, "would be . . . to show that the causal order in nature and the moral law within are one and the same."48 "Showing," however, is what Emerson can't do; he can only overrule. The notable thing about his effort to do so is the vast territory it cedes to its opponent, as though belief were not an argument from reason and experience but a choice made openly and defiantly against them. Having declared his faith, Emerson proceeds to "celebrate" the skeptic Montaigne by airing "doubts and negations" (CW 4:98) that have nothing to do with Montaigne himself but are his own, recent or chronic: "the power of moods, each setting at nought all but its own tissue of facts and beliefs" (CW 4:99); the fact "that the laws of the world do not always befriend, but often hurt and crush us" (CW 4:100); and the "double consciousness," as he called it in "The Transcendentalist," that leaves the would-be believer alternating between parallel planes of the "great and little" with no prospect of their intersection—in brief, the irreconcilable disparity "between the theory and practice of life" (CW 4:101).49Against these negatives Emerson arrays the moral sentiment as "the final solution in which Skepticism is lost" (CW 4:103). Charles Lowell Young finds Emerson's appeal to this quality "mystical" in seeming to rest on "contact with an ultimate reality."50 George Santayana doubted whether Emerson ever knew what he meant by such ideas.51 Through the Divinity School Address at least, Emerson did seem to know even as he allowed that the laws apprehended by the moral sentiment "refuse to be adequately stated."52 By the early 1840s, however, as the brightness and clarity of his originating vision dimmed, a note of weariness and attenuation appears in his journals. If thought is indeed "like manna, that fell out of heaven, which cannot be stored," by the time of Representative Men Emerson seems to have been living on stale manna.53 A remembrance of vision has supplanted the experience of it; doctrines like "the moral sentiment" are what remained—talismanic terms charged with nebulous meaning and invoked with increasing frequency to connect him with a revelation that time has hollowed out. "Well it took you up, that there was something there," he remarked in a journal entry of 1852, returning to the image he had used to describe "conversion" in 1830: "Look, look, old mole! there, straight up before you, is the magnificent Sun. If only for a second, you see it."54Having identified himself as a "natural believer" in "Montaigne," Emerson can draw the metaphysical corollary: "We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things; all worlds are strung on it as beads: and men and events and life come to us only because of that thread" (CW 4:96). In Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989) John Updike would quote this passage in describing religiosity as a persistence of belief "against all the powerful post-Copernican, post-Darwinian evidence that we are insignificant accidents within a vast uncaused churning."55 "Against the evidence" is the position Emerson comes to in "Montaigne": "things seem to say one