229 - Waldo Emerson

Waldo Emerson
By Gay Wilson Allen
New York, Viking, 1981. 751 pp. $25.00.

His given name was Ralph Waldo Emerson, although he preferred to be known as Waldo. He was part of a special time and place, antebellum Boston. He associated with people like Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, and Whitman. It was still a time for generalists, when a Unitarian minister could discuss the frontiers of scientific discovery with scientists. He was a traveler, making trips to Europe and even to California. He was also a poet, an essayist, and a lecturer.

"The good life, "like" the central man, "is never fully attainable, but Emerson came closer than most men or authors. For that reason John Dewey said that" when democracy has articulated itself, it will have no difficulty in finding itself already proposed in Emerson" (p. xv).

Most recently professor of English at New York University, the author makes extensive use of a vast store of written materials: letters, journals, lectures, as well as the published poems and essays. Through these materials the author intends to reveal the private man, the man within himself. To accomplish that, it is necessary to evoke the world of ideas, for this was his world.

Here is the very core of Emerson's "Transcendentalism". Fastening his attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures that is, upon ideas - in "their beautiful and majestic presence" he feels that his outward life" is a dream and a shade" (p. 280).

The author's strength as a biographer is his understanding of Emerson's ideas; his weakness resides in conveying him as a human being apart from his writing.

The book begins slowly and awkwardly, more like a mere recitation of facts. Only the last 500 pages present him as a man of thought.

In 1845 - 46 Emerson presented a series of seven lectures, entitled "The Uses of Great Men", published in 1850 as Representative Men. The "great" men chosen were Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe.

"The search after the great man", he says," is the dream of youth and the most serious occupation of manhood". On his trip to Europe in 1832 - 33 Emerson had hoped to find a teacher of wisdom, but was disappointed, as we have seen, with every "great man" he met except Carlyle, who did become his friend, though not his fountain of wisdom. From the trip Emerson learned that no one could help him except himself; it was his greatest lesson in self - reliance (p. 453).

He made his choice, not because these men were the greatest, but because each represented something to him: the philosopher, the mystic, the skeptic, the poet, "the man of the world", and the writer. The choices

230 - Waldo Emerson

perhaps revealed more of Emerson than an objective study of greatness. He, it seems, was all of these.

Emerson died in 1882.

On April 28 The New York Times gave three columns on its first page and more than two inside to the death, funeral, and works of Emerson. The anonymous writer declared:"His influence has in all likelihood been greater upon the American, and in less degree upon the English, mind than any other writer in the Nation". The New York World, The Sun, and The Post also carried long notices, and of course the Boston papers, but none gave as much space as The Times or so well summed up Emerson's significance: "Emerson appears to have acted his own definition of a philosophy - he reported to his own mind the constitution of the universe "(pp. 669 - 70).

The bulk here is probably more than most will want to know. And most likely, readers will have to have an appreciation for the time, the man, or his writing to find the book worthwhile.

Gary Hilfiger
Holy Trinity Lutheran Church
New Lexington, Ohio