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Introduction to "His lectures were poetry, his teaching the music of the spheres: Annie Adams Fields and Francis Greenwood Peabody on Emerson's 'Natural history of the intellect' university lectures at Harvard in 1870"

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Citation Bosco, Ronald A. 1998. Introduction to "His lectures were poetry, his teaching the music of the spheres: Annie Adams Fields and Francis Greenwood Peabody on Emerson's 'Natural history of the intellect' university lectures at Harvard in 1870". Harvard Library Bulletin 8 (2), Summer 1997: 7-26.

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His Lectures Were Poetry, His Teaching the Music of the Spheres: Annie Adams Fields and Francis Greenwood Peabody on Emerson's "Natural History of the Intellect" University Lectures at Harvard in 1870

Ronald A. Bosco RONALD A. Bosco, Distinguished Service Professor of American Literature at the University at Albany, State University of New York, has been an editor of the INTRODUCTION Emerson Papers at the Houghton Library since I 977. I

irtually all accounts of the transformation of Harvard from a predominantly Vundergraduate college to a research university open with the inauguration of Charles W. Eliot as president in 1869 and his first major administrative deci- sion: to institute a series of "University Lectures" and designate a distinguished r See, for instance, Haskins, "The faculty to deliver them.' A forerunner of the Graduate School of Arts and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences;" Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, Sciences, the lectures were offered in two series of courses on Modem Literature 333-34; and Peabody, "The Germ of and Philosophy in academic year 1869-1870, with some individual courses the Graduate School," r 76-8 r. repeated in 1870-1871. During the first year, Ferdinant Bacher, Francis James Child, Elbridge J. Cutler, William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell, and W. D. Whitney presented courses in literary criticism; the philosophy series featured Francis Bowen on "Seventeenth-Century Philosophy," James Elliot Cabot on "Kant," George Park Fisher on "Stoicism," John Fiske on "Positive Philosophy," Frederic Henry Hedge on "Theism, Pantheism, and Atheism," Charles Sanders Peirce on "British Logicians," and Ralph Waldo Emerson on "Natural History of the Intellect." Reflecting on his experience attending the entire philosophy series and some of the modem literature lectures in 1869-1870, Francis Greenwood Peabody reveals that the passing of nearly a half-century had not diminished the luster of this moment in his post-graduate education: "The two groups made a constellation of talent more brilliant than had ever been seen, 2 Peabody, "The Germ of the or perhaps has ever been seen again, in American academic life. " 2 Graduate School," 176. Advertised in Harvard brochures and Boston newspapers for "graduates, teachers, and other competent persons (both men and women)," admission to the series was open to members of the Harvard faculty, to others by the invitation of individual lecturers, and to registered students who could apply courses toward A.M. requirements. As reported in A Catalogue ef the Officers and Students of Haward Universityfor the AcademicalYear 1869-70, three men registered for both 8 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

the modern literature and philosophy series; three men and one woman registered for the philosophy series; and six women registered for the modern literature series. Tuition paralleled the undergraduate scale: Each series cost $150 for the full academic year; a single term of either series cost $100; and individual lectures cost $28 each. If Emerson's compensation is representative, faculty members received $8. 7 5 for each lecture they delivered. Despite the promise of his idea, meager enrollments in the first year of the Lectures gave President Eliot pause. By the end of 1870, he abandoned the initiative altogether in favor of establishing a graduate school, and the University Lectures were discontinued after the spring term in 1871. Although a comprehensive study of the University Lectures and their service to the institutionalization of graduate preparation in late-nineteenth-century America would be important, my purpose here is to document, first, the otherwise unstudied close of Emerson's long career as a lecturer and intellectual presence in America, and, second, his last statements on what had been, according to his literary executor and fellow lecturer James Elliot Cabot, the "chief task of his life": a formal accounting of "mind" developed through the scientific classification of its properties in a "Natural History of the Intellect," or, as Emerson also called 3 Memoir, 2:633; TN r:134. it, a "New Metaphysics. " 3 Regrettably, the manuscripts from which Emerson lectured on "Natural History of the Intellect" in 1870 no longer survive. Except for documentation provided below from Emerson's published writings and fragmentary lecture manuscripts, the primary materials comprising the present study are reports from others on his performance in the spring of 1870 during which he delivered sixteen lectures of, roughly, thirty minutes each in the first series of the University Lectures. The reports come from Annie Adams Fields (1834-1915), Emerson's friend and the wife of his publisher James T. Fields, who with her husband attended the "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures at Emerson's 4 See Appendix B for a collation of invitation, and Francis Greenwood Peabody (1847-1936). 4 Emerson's 1870 lecture titles against manuscript pages in Fields and Although scholarly deference to her husband's career as a prominent Boston Peabody. publisher and editor of the Atlantic Monthly has tended to obscure Annie Fields's reputation, recent studies have affirmed the confidence in her contribution to New England literary culture and social reform from the 186os to 191 5 that Mark A. DeWolfe Howe first expressed in Memories of a Hostess (1922), a biography drawn largely from her diaries. Fields is most remembered today as the keeper of a literary salon in her home on Boston's fashionable Beacon Hill. For the better part of a half-century, 148 Charles Street served as an "American Mecca" for international guests such as Charles Dickens; as a comfortable setting where American luminaries such as Oliver Wendell Holmes or Emerson would hold intellectual conversations with a select company; and, especially, as the locus of an extensive network for American women writers which began after James T. Fields's death in 1881, when Sarah Orne Jewett became Annie's companion. Association with this network was energizing and reciprocal for women writers of the period. Among many others, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and, of course, Jewett profited from Fields's literary counsel and encouragement, and she herself produced literary essays as well as life-and-letters volumes on her husband (1881), John Greenleaf Whittier (1893), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1897). At the same time, Fields rather effectively practiced the Emersons Lectureson "Natural History efthe Intellect" 9 belief shared by Stowe, Whittier, and Emerson that active engagement in social reform was a natural complement to one's literary life. A founding member of institutions such as the Associated Charities of Boston (1879), Fields wrote numerous influential works on the plight of the poor as well as guides to the administration of charitable causes, including How to Help the Poor (1883), which sold over 22,000 copies during its first two years in print. 5 5 For critical and biographical treatments of Fields in addition to Howe's In contrast to the vagaries of Fields's reputation, Peabody's has been consistently and those in American women's and literary biographical dictionaries since secure, and hardly more so than in the annals of the Harvard Divinity School. 1980, see Donovan, "Annie Adams He took his A.B. with final honors in philosophy at Harvard in 1869, his A.M. Fields and Her Network oflnfluence;" Gollin, "Profile: Annie Adams Fields" and S.T.B. also at Harvard in 1872, his S.T.D. at Yale University in 1887, and and "Subordinated Power: Mrs. and Mr. James T. Fields;" and Roman, was honored with an LL.D. by Western Reserve University in 1907 and an Annie Adams Fields,which also provides a bibliography of Fields's publications S. T .D. by Harvard in 1909. Except for a brief stint as minister of the First Parish and collected manuscripts (182-86). Church in Cambridge (1874-1880) following his ordination in 1874 and a course of lectures delivered as the first American exchange professor at the University of Berlin in 1905, Peabody devoted his entire career to teaching and service at Harvard. There, after appointments as a tutor in Latin (1870), overseer (1877- 1882), and lecturer on ethics and homiletics (1880-1881), he became a leading figure at the Divinity School, occupying the ranks as Parkman Professor of Theology (1881-1886, 1893-1894), Plummer Professor of Christian Morals (1886-1913), Dean (1901-1906), and Preacher to the University (1905-1906). In the preserved remnants of his University Lecture on "Imagination," Emerson wrote: "Every speaker speaks to his best listener." 6 In Fields and 6 Leet. 7.70-71 { 15v}. Peabody, Emerson enjoyed two remarkably acute and sympathetic listeners, whose reports constitute our most authoritative account of what Emerson actually said during his lectures at Harvard. Although the circumstances of their attendance at Emerson's lectures differed greatly and their respective intellectual interests undoubtedly influenced how they listened to him, Fields and Peabody consistently agree in what they heard, and both exude unapologetic delight in, as Peabody expresses it, words and ideas "taken from the master's lips." 7 7 Peabody, "The Germ of the Graduate School," 18 r. Fields's report, by far the more detailed of the two, is printed below from two sources. For all but part of her account of Emerson's last lecture, the text follows the manuscript of a letter Fields composed concurrently with hearing Emerson's lectures to her longtime friend and correspondent Laura Winthrop Johnson, who was then living on Staten Island. Eliminating all personal references and asides about difficulties that Emerson is now known to have experienced in delivering those lectures, Fields mined approximately half of the extant letter for "Mr. Emerson in the Lecture Room," an article she published about Emerson's "Natural History of the Intellect" course after his death in 1882. That article, which appeared over the initials "A. F." and is written in the guise of a j oumalist reporting on Emerson's lectures, supplies here Fields's commentary on Emerson's last lecture now missing from her letter to Johnson. 8 8 In addition to holdings at the Houghton Library, major collections of Peabody's report follows the text of notes he kept during Emerson's course Fields's papers are at the Massachusetts Historical Society and The Huntington and bound together in a large copybook with notes from the other six philosophy Library. With the exception of the letter courses. Except for his report on Emerson, which survives in the rough and upon which the present study is based, Fields's correspondence to Johnson from rushed format one might expect from a collection of class notes, Peabody's 1864 to 1884 is at the Huntington; searches there and elsewhere have not yielded the reports on other courses are recorded in a reasonably fair copy that he likely last pages of Fields's letter to Johnson on made while preparing for examinations at the end of the term. The fact that Emerson's lectures. Emerson did not give an examination in his course thus preserved the spontaneity IO HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

and precision with which Peabody recorded Emerson's words from interpretative revision after the fact, a characteristic difference between Fields's original letter to Johnson and her recasting of it as "Mr. Emerson in the Lecture Room." Like Fields, Peabody improved upon his notes of Emerson's course for later publication, first in "The Germ of the Graduate School," and then in his obituary of Joseph Bangs Warner, his Harvard College classmate and a fellow registrant in the 9 In the Houghton Library, see MS philosophy series.9 Am 1679 for Fields's letter to Laura Winthrop Johnson begun on 28 April An important but, to many of his biographers, inexplicable feature of 1870; in the Harvard University Archives, see HUC 8869.370, box 499, Emerson's reputation as a lecturer, which all forms of the reports by Fields and for Peabody's bound volume of notes Peabody underscore, is the "aura" that seems typically to have emanated from on the 1869-1870 University Lectures in philosophy. As reported in item him as he performed on the speaker's platform. Only the word "aura" adequately *45M-649 of the accession records of the Houghton Library, Fields's letter conveys the admiration recorded in so many contemporaneous personal and was deposited on 14 February 1934 by Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, her literary newspaper accounts of his nearly 1,500 appearances at the lectern from the 1830s executor and biographer; Peabody's to the effectual close of his career in the early I 870s. As Robert D. Richardson, volume was deposited in the Harvard University Archives in 1937 as part of Jr., reminds us in his recent intellectual biography of Emerson, during the middle the "Francis Greenwood Peabody Papers" bequest from his estate. Fields's twenty-five years of his active career of four decades, Emerson was "out and "Mr. Emerson in the Lecture Room" first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly; away from home lecturing for four, five, or even six months out of each year, Peabody's obituary on Warner appeared every year. " 10 With a geographic expansiveness that paralleled the expansion of in The HarvardGraduates' Magazine. his talent and reputation, over these years Emerson routinely travelled from New

10 Richardson, Emerson:The Mind on England's lyceums to lecture engagements in New York, in the middle-Atlantic Fire, 418. states and Washington, D.C., and in newly established mid-western states; in the I I For authoritative accounts of Emerson's lectures by date and place, late I 840s, he lectured throughout England. II Though Emerson found lecturing see von Frank, An EmersonChronology. exhausting, his biographers all agree that, while he most enjoyed lecturing at home in New England, he generally liked all his audiences and relished the attention and praise they so generously gave him-even if they did not always understand or approve of what he said. More than publishing alone, they observe, lecturing facilitated Emerson's reputation as a public figure in his time, and supplied the major portion of his income. At the same time, biographers marvel at the discrepancy in newspaper reports between negative assessments of Emerson's actual performance as a lecturer and the sheer admiration of his "presence" with which those reports are finished off. Fields and Peabody reveal similar contradictory responses to Emerson's University Lectures in 1870. Both notice that Emerson's voice did not always carry well, that he often lost track of his thought while rummaging through the unsewn leaves of his text, and that he occasionally launched into strings of quotations from his favorite sources which, for all anyone knew, may or may not have had relevance to the topic at hand. While Fields edited out most evidence of Emerson's lapses in "Mr. Emerson in the Lecture Room," in her letter to Johnson she does not withhold comment on examples that she, her husband, or others observed. For instance, in her article Fields reports the unexpectedly abrupt conclusion of Emerson's eleventh lecture, which was on "Identity," this way:

"Among the laws of the mind are powers and analogies which should be considered. First among them stands Identity; then follow Metamorphosis, Flux" ... Here Mr. Emerson paused, his sentence still unfinished, while he seemed to search among his papers for its conclusion. After a few moments, finding nothing 12 Fields, "Mr. Emerson m the to advance the subject satisfactorily, he rose, and so ended the lecture of the day. 12 Lecture Room," 825. In her letter to Johnson, this moment, which was also witnessed by Longfellow, is treated more fully and critically, but it is finished with Fields's characteristic Emerson'sLectures on "NaturalHistory of the Intellect" II approval of those positive suggestions she nevertheless managed to take from the lecture:

There are laws of the mind, there are powers and analogies which we shall consider. First among them stands the one we have been considering, Identity, then follow Metamorphosis, Flux"-- -- Here the papers became inextricably tangled and we were left in a kind of mist. I walked away with Mr. Longfellow, who could not resist a kindly smile of sympathy with me over something in this lecture which reminded us of "little wanton boys who swim on bladders." But no one could fail to be stimulated by the suggestion which was various and endless. It was indeed poetic seed-grain. {25}

In contrast, Peabody is sparing of criticism in both his notes and "The Germ of the Graduate School," but in the later piece he is candid about the difficulty he had following "the winding stream of Emerson's aphorisms," even to the point of being unsure "which way it flowed." Writing about the awkward conclusion of the lecture on "Identity," in his notes Peabody enters only the word "Omitted," thus reporting that, as with Emerson's lectures on "Memory" and "Platonists," he had cut the class. Yet in his article, in a passage that betrays his debt to Fields's "Mr. Emerson in the Lecture Room" for language he obviously never recorded about a scene he had not observed, he appears to remember quite well what had occurred: "Once the lecturer was saying: 'Among the laws of the mind are Metamorphosis, Flux,'-and then, after vainly looking for further notes, hastily illustrated his proposition by slipping away." What is important here is less Peabody's plagiarism of Fields than his manner of phrasing, which in this witty understatement of Emerson's plight shifts anything that might be construed as blame away from his subject. Throughout the piece, to the extent that he is critical of Emerson's performance, Peabody always renders criticism lightly, transferring Emerson's problems to the "boyish bewilderment" of "a youthful note-taker" or attributing them to an academic setting which he treats as impossibly limiting t~ Emerson's scope. Explaining the last point in 1918, he wrote that over the years he retained "a vivid impression of the speaker as not altogether happy in his mood or at home on his platform. The academic harness seemed to gall his Pegasus."' 3 13 Peabody, "The Germ of the Fields and Peabody thus invariably emphasize the positive aspects of Emerson's Graduate School," 180-8 1. performance, and both attribute their overall approval to qualities they associate with his "presence." While one could argue that Fields's quick forgiveness in her letter to Johnson of Emerson's occasional slips at the lectern is predictable, there is no reason to doubt that she was sincere in her conviction of the insightfulness of what she heard Emerson say and the inspiration she received in his presence. Indeed, her tone in both the letter and the article corresponds to that found in her "Glimpses of Emerson" ( 18 84, 1897), where, against the background of the many years of good company she and her husband enjoyed with him, Fields celebrates Emerson as representing "[t]he perfect consistency of a truly great life, where inconsistencies ... become at once harmonized by the beauty of the whole nature."' 4 And of the two, Peabody is actually the more effusive in his praise. 14 Fields, "Glimpses of Emerson," 67; Fields's essay first appeared in Though his notes occasionally reveal momentary confusion over one or another Harper's, 2 (February 1884): 457-67. of Emerson's weighty pronouncements as well as amusement that someone of Emerson's stature could take, for example, the Chaldaic Oracles so seriously, Peabody is moved by Emerson's presence and offsets any doubts he has by 12 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

recording statements he does understand with multiple exclamation marks. His practice is even more pronounced in "The Germ of the Graduate School," where in contrast to Cabot, who is described as a "scrupulous, though by no means vivacious" lecturer, or Peirce, who is written off as a "brilliant but erratic genius," Emerson is portrayed as the fount of enduring truths conveyed through memorable aphorisms, arresting sentences, and thought-provoking quotations. He writes of Emerson's performance, "[I]t was not lectures to which we were listening, but poetry; not the teaching of the class-room, but the music of the 15 Peabody, "The Germ of the spheres. " 15 Graduate School," r 80. Between them, then, Fields and Peabody echo the sentiments of many who sat in Emerson's audiences over the years, and they justify the admiration of yet another interested listener who had heard Emerson lecture on "the power of thought" years earlier at the Freeman Place Chapel in Boston. Like them, Abby Alcott, the wife of Emerson's lifelong friend Bronson Alcott, found Emerson's sentences and presence more than adequate compensation for whatever inade- quacies she or anyone else may have detected in his delivery in January 1849: "He is abrupt-disjointed[,] fragmentary[,] but you are arrested by a truth which like a cut diamond sparkles and radiates-you forget the rubbishy stuff which covered it in its normal state-the transition from Scenes of Misery to the r6 In the Houghton Library, see A 59 Banquet of Beauty was too much-my brain reeled with it." 16 M-3 r r (2), folder 4. II

The reason of a new philosophy or philosopher is ever that a man of thought finds he cannot read in the old books. I can't read Hegel, or Schelling, or find interest in what is told me from them, so I persist in my own idle & easy way, & write down my thoughts, & find presently that there are congenial persons who like them, so I persist, until some sort of outline or system grows. 'Tis the common course: Ever a new bias. It happened to each of these, Heraclitus, or 17 Emerson in r87o;seeJMN16:r89. Hegel, or whosoever. 17

To an unexpected degree, documentation accompanying the reports by Fields and Peabody on Emerson's "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures shows that they capture his statements on mind verbatim or nearly so. Yet the accuracy of their reports is more than a function of their respective capacities as good listeners: It is, rather, indebted to Emerson's compositional practices and lecture method- ology. The compositional longevity of Emerson's prose and verse that both cite corroborates Cabot's testimony in A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1887), as well as that of Emerson's daughter Ellen, that he took pleasure in the prospect of the Harvard series as an opportunity to organize extensive journal, notebook, and prior lecture materials on the intellect into a publishable work. On 6 May 1870 Ellen wrote to cousin Haven Emerson about her father's effort on the course: "There is a great deal that is delightful to him in it. The subject and the kind of class are after his own heart, and he [has] of course ever so much mate- r8 ETE r:552-53. Cabot treats rial for the lectures, that he has been collecting all his life." 18 What Emerson had Emerson's overall purpose for the lectures in Memoir, 2:63 3-44. been collecting were "lustres": sentences and paragraphs on the intellect that had become more finely wrought with progressive revision in journals and notebooks and with repeated testing at the lectern. The ease with which Fields and Peabody recorded them owes much to the practices Emerson followed in composing both his lectures and his published works, and which, as he once admitted, had their origin in his own style of reading: Emerson'sLectures on "Natural History of the Intellect" 13

The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done I feel as ifl did; what is ill done I reek not 0£. .. I read Prod us, and sometimes Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and the imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine pic- ture in a chromatic experiment, for its rich colors. 'Tis not Proclus, but a piece of nature and fate that I explore. 19 19 "Nominalist and Realist," W 3:233. As suggested by her remark that the wisdom dispersed, even haphazardly, in his Harvard lectures served as "poetic seed-grain," Fields completely understood and approved of Emerson's practices. Although she admits some discouragement at being able to recall "no more but the pointiliations both of thought and expression which dazzle one" in these lectures that are "poetry and music," in an aside to Johnson she reveals herself a confirmed believer in "the lustres": "The Platonists may ... be read for sentences even if the argument of the whole section be lost" { 1 5, 3 1 } . On the other hand, in his academic frame of mind, Peabody found those practices irksome while sitting in Emerson's course, but he evidently appreciated their subtle, enduring effect by the time he wrote "The Germ of the Graduate School." There, anecdotes and arresting sentences-some original with Emerson, some borrowed from an array of philosophers, historians, and scientists whose work he liberally quotes-serve Peabody as Emerson's lessons on the intellect. Whether, then, as mechanical helps to clarify his thoughts, as springboards to new ideas, or as ends-in-themselves, as Emerson recorded his own or inherited ideas for himself in journals and notebooks and then dispersed them in lectures and writings for others, he conveyed ownership of the ideas as universal intellectual property for all concerned. For himself and those "best listeners" like Fields, Peabody, and Abby Alcott, Emerson's method established the conditions for individual intellectual competency, if not also individual greatness. Assuming their expansive use of it over time, Emerson believed his method could serve well-practiced modem thinkers as means through which they too might achieve lasting insights. To that extent, his practices immediately (as with Fields and Alcott) or in fond remembrance long after the fact (as with Peabody) were undoubtedly the source of the aura with which listeners credited him. Indeed, Emerson consciously willed this effect by, as he allowed in his journal for 1870, persisting in his "own idle & easy way": writing down, reflecting upon, and bringing-at best-an impressionof order to his thoughts and borrowed "lustres," and then authoritatively delivering them from the lectern or in published prose especially to those "congenial persons" who would "like" them. Emerson believed that these were the most successful compositional practices followed by luminaries of the past, and he apparently said so in his University Lectures, though neither Fields nor Peabody reports the fact. On leaves contained in the now fragmentary manuscript of the "Conduct of Intellect" lecture delivered in 1870 and again in 1871, he wrote:

It is much to record your results in sentences. 'Tis more to add method, and report the spirit of your life symmetrically. Of those who read good books, and converse about them, the greater part are content to say, I was pleased, or, I was displeased, it made me active, or inactive,-rarely does one eliminate or define the quality of that life which the book woke in him. So rare is a general reflection. But to arrange many general reflections in their natural order, so that I shall have one homogeneous web, ... this continuity is for the great. The wonderful men are wonderful hereby. The observations that Pythagoras made respecting sound 14 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

and music are not in themselves unusually acute; but he goes on, adds fact to fact in an order; makes two steps, three steps, or even four, and every additional step 20 Leet. 15.70-71 { 14r-17r}. counts a thousand years to his fame. 20

Evidence collected by the editors of Emerson's Early Lectures and by those editing his forthcoming later lectures demonstrates that from his earliest days as a lecturer Emerson consistently deployed such strategies to enhance his presence at the speaker's platform, emphasizing, as he once confessed to Margaret Fuller, 21 Emerson to Fuller, 21 December "that disconnectedness which ... constitutes so eminent a beauty in my style. " 21 1840; see Letters 2:372. For discussion, see the editors' introductions through- However, his adaptation of successful practices in that medium represents only out EL. Emerson's "later" lectures, the second of what are, in fact, three distinct but overlapping stages of his from I 843 (the year after the last lecture printed in EL) to 1871 (the last compositional process. year for which the complete text of a late lecture survives), are being edited Emerson's first stage of composition always occurred in his journals and note- by Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson under the title "The Later Lectures of books, where he recorded everything from his waking thoughts, to texts copied Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871," from his voluminous readings, to passages translated from his favorite classical and for publication by the University of Georgia Press in 1999. modem writers, to snippets of correspondence received from select friends, to modest prose drafts that were either original with him or syntheses-"assimila- 22 Emerson's practice of "assimila- tions," to use his term-drawn out of one or more of the foregoing sources. 22 tion" follows directly from his admission quoted above from "Nominalist Out of those entries, Emerson constructed lecture prose, virtually sentence by and Realist" (1844): "What is well done I feel as if! did; what is ill done I sentence. Throughout his career, the major portion of Emerson's actual lecture- reek not of... I read for the lustres." A writing time was devoted first to his creation of elaborate indices to journal and comparable statement contemporaneous with his Harvard lectures occurs in notebook sources on specific topics, and then to his adaptation of extant journal "Quotation and Originality," W8:191: "If an author give us just distinctions, and notebook prose appropriate to the topics for use at the lectern. This was his inspiring lessons, or imaginative poetry, it is not so important to us whose they version of "process writing," and as his second stage of composition it yielded are. If we are fired and guided by these, free-standing lectures on individual topics as well as lectures on related topics for we know him as a benefactor .... [The] worth of [his] sentences consist in their series. Whether free-standing or parts of series, Emerson's lectures grew in length radiancy and equal aptitude to all intel- ligence. They fit our facts like a with repeated reading and became increasingly sharpened in thesis and scope charm." Reports by Fields and Peabody capture Emerson assimilating with each successive delivery. on several occasions, as when he bor- The physical form of Emerson's lecture manuscripts reflects his practices at this rows definitions directly from Sampson Reed or Plato, dresses his favorite say- crucial second stage of composition and demonstrates the service of those practices ings of Proclus or Thoreau in new paraphrases, or shares anecdotes of to the stage that followed. Although the pages of a few of his lecture manuscripts Michael Angelo or the Platonist Thomas Taylor as if they were of his from the 1840s, 18 50s, and 186os are sewn together and appear reasonably neat own composition. and finished, the vast majority of lecture manuscripts from these decades consist of heavily emended unsewn leaves. With multiple revisions undertaken on pages worn thin by repeated use, and with new prose added on relatively fresh pages of varying paper stocks interleaved among the worn pages, these manuscripts survive as concrete evidence that Emerson created lectures incrementally and by organizing them around discrete thoughts occasionally strung together with transitional prose. While these practices set Emerson apart from most nineteenth- century American lecturers, who typically would write out a lecture as a single, seriatim work, they were of immense value to him as he moved to his third and last stage of composition: the revision of finished lectures into more contiguous prose for publication as essays or books. Emerson's volumes Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), and The Conduct efLife (1860) all began as lecture series, and many of his major essays, especially those of his later career, were hardly spontaneous outpourings, but had been tested aloud and variously sub- jected to expansion, close revision, or wholesale rethinking of authorial thesis- all from the lectern. "Poetry and Imagination," an essay printed in Letters and Social Aims (1876), illustrates Emerson's third stage of composition and its relation Emerson'sLectures on "Natural History efthe Intellect" 15 to his preparation and presentation of lectures in a remarkable way. Although it appeared late, "Poetry and Imagination" includes among its sources Emerson's lectures on "The Poet" ( 1841), "Poetry and Eloquence" ( l 8 54), and "Poetry and Criticism in England and America" (1861), several lectures he delivered on "Natural History of the Intellect" in 1870 and 1871, and "conversations" he led under the titles "Poetry" and "Imagination" from l 870 to l 872. Lectures were thus an extended midpoint in Emerson's compositional process, marking his intellectual and authorial progression from raw jottings in journals and notebooks to polished prose in published essays. Cabot's and Ellen's testimony on Emerson's excitement at the prospect of participating in the University Lectures makes it clear that Emerson intended to use his course to the same purpose: to construct a volume he might have named after his course title, "A Natural History of the Intellect." Although he had been lecturing on philosophy since the 1830s, when he delivered twelve lectures on "The Philosophy of History" at the Masonic Temple in Boston in 183 6- l 8 3 7 and ten on "Human Life" at the same site in 1838-1839, Emerson's formal lecture sources for the Harvard course actually come from three major series he developed between 1848 and 1866. First in order of composition were three lectures he gave in a "Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century" series which he delivered in England in 1848 and in Boston, possibly Worcester, and New York in 1849 and 18 50. The lectures on intellect in that series were "The Powers and Laws of Thought," "The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science," and "The Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought." During the 1850s, he revised and expanded these for delivery in a series that he variously entitled "The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy" and "Intellectual Science" at the Freeman Place Chapel in 1858. Of the six lectures in that series, four had direct bearing on Emerson's evolving treatment of intellect: "Powers of the Mind," "Natural Method of Mental Philosophy," "Memory," and "Self-Possession" (or, as he had earlier entitled it, "Health and Exercise of the Mind"). 23 In the early 186os, he 23 For Emerson's purpose and working-titles while composing these lec- continued to develop aspects of intellect in passages interleaved in lectures such tures in 1857-1858, see Emerson to Horatio Woodman, 21 February 1858, as "Resources," "Perpetual Forces," and "Celebration of the Intellect;" by 1866, in Letters 8:550-51. he was in a position to organize his prior work into the most elaborate treatment of intellect he had given before delivering the Harvard lectures in 1870. Indeed, Emerson seemed to have worked out all of the distinctions he wished to make in the properties and functions of the mind, when, between 14 April and 19 May l 866 in his "Philosophy for the People" series, he delivered these six lectures at Chickering Hall in Boston: "Seven Metres of Intellect," "Instinct, Perception, and Memory," "Genius, Imagination, and Taste," "Common Sense," "Conduct of the Intellect," and "Immortality." Collectively, lectures from these three series contained the materials on intellect which, as Ellen reported to Haven, her father had been working on "all his life." Along the way, and in hand as he organized his Harvard lectures, Emerson also devoted several topical notebooks to the subject of intellect: Notebook IT 24 For Notebooks IT, PH, and ML, see TN 1:130-85, 2:330-84, and 3:238- (subtitled "Natural History of Intellect" by Emerson) in the 1850s; Notebooks 328, respectively. Along with unpub- lished Notebook "Morals" which is ML ("Moral Law"), IL ("Notes on Intellect"), and TO ("To Intellect, the contemporaneous with them, TO and IL are being edited by Ronald A. Guardian")-all during the 1860s; and Notebook PH ("Philosophy") in the late Bosco under the working title, 186os in direct preparation for the Harvard course. 24 These multiple lecture and "Emerson's Construction of Intellect." In the Houghton Library, see bMS Am notebook sources suggest that Emerson's yet further division of topics on intellect 1280 H 134a for "Morals." 16 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

in individual lectures at Harvard was an intentional device to organize the whole into publishable form. In doing so, he was following the very same procedure he had used earlier to organize the "Representative Men" and "The Conduct of Life" lectures into books. At Harvard in I 870, what had previously served Emerson at Chickering Hall as six topical headings under which to develop intellect in as many lectures, became thirteen discrete topics elaborated upon across sixteen lectures: I. "Introductory: Praise of Mind" (26 April); 2. "Transcendency of Physics" (28 April); 3 and 4. "Perception" (29 April, 3 May); 5 and 6. "Memory" (5, 6 May); 7. "Imagination" (IO May); 8. "Inspiration" (12 May); 9. 2 5 There has been some minor con- "Genius" (13 May); IO. "Common Sense" (17 May); II. "Identity" (19 May); fusion among Emerson's editors and biographers concerning the titles under 12 and 13. "Metres of Mind" (20, 24 May); 14. "Platonists" (26 May); 15. which he lectured at Harvard in 1870 and 1871 and the actual dates ofhis lec- "Conduct of Intellect" (3 l May); and 16. "Relation of Intellect to Morals" (2 tures; this list, as confirmed by reports 25 from Fields and Peabody, is definitive June). for 1870. Confusion over titles and Manuscripts of most lectures on intellect that Emerson delivered in the "Mind dates stems from Emerson's own reports in his Pocket Diaries, where he and Manners of the Nineteenth Century" series from l 848 to 18 50 and "The erroneously lists "Conduct oflntellect" for "Platonists" as his fourteenth lec- Natural Method of Mental Philosophy" series in 1858 survive in their entirety. ture delivered on 26 May and "Art" for "Conduct of Intellect" as his fifteenth With appropriate reference to passages in them that continued to serve him in lecture delivered on 3 I May; see ]MN 1866 and, to judge from Fields and Peabody, in 1870, these are included among 16:395. The numbering of Emerson's lectures has also been the source of the forty-nine complete lectures forthcoming in "The Later Lectures of Ralph minor confusion that is also reflected in the numbering system used by Fields Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871." 26 However, except for shards and occasional prose and Peabody. Emerson originally agreed to deliver eighteen lectures at drafted across continuous leaves, manuscripts of neither the 1866 "Philosophy for Harvard both in 1870 and in 1871. the People" series nor the l 870-1871 "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures However, in 1870 he reduced that number to seventeen and then cut the survive in their entirety. While leaves from these lectures are used to document lecture scheduled for 27 May, thus reducing the total number of lectures references found in the reports by Fields and Peabody below, virtually every he gave in 1870 to sixteen; see Fields {33} and Peabody {55}. With some sheet of these late manuscripts which does survive shows evidence of multiple alteration in his topics and order of hands in their current arrangement in folders at the Houghton Library and, in delivery, Emerson delivered seventeen, not eighteen, lectures at Harvard in some instances, in their annotation. Evidence in the manuscripts as well as from 1871, the titles and dates of which follow in the Introduction. what is known of his compositional practices indicates that Emerson is himself

26 See n. 21. partly responsible for the current state of these manuscripts, having mined all of 27 Emerson's biographers, bibliogra- the "Philosophy for the People" lectures for sections that would yield greater phers, and editors agree that Lettersand SocialAims is the most tortured of his individual topical development at Harvard. This is certainly the case with volumes with respect to determining "Perception" and "Memory" from "Instinct, Perception, and Memory" in the what exactly in that volume came directly from his hand and what came earlier series which became two discrete lectures in 1870, and presumably with from the collaboration between Cabot and Ellen Emerson. Cabot's role as "Imagination" from "Genius, Imagination, and Taste," "Common Sense," and Emerson's literary executor has been treated by Simmons in "Arranging the "Conduct of the Intellect," all of which were enlarged with new writing for Sibylline Leaves: James Elliot Cabot's delivery in 1870. The other hands evident in the manuscripts are those of Cabot, Work as Emerson's Literary Executor." This subject is revisited by Ronald A. Edward Waldo Emerson, and occasionally Ellen Emerson. Bosco and Glen M. Johnson, editors of Lettersand SocialAims, volume 8 in the At the urging of his family, Emerson designated Cabot his literary executor in on-going CollectedWorks of Ralph Waldo Emerson series published by Harvard 1875. With Ellen's assistance, Cabot revised a number of Emerson's mostly com- University Press, in articles devoted to plete lecture manuscripts for some of the eleven essays included in Letters and essays included in that volume; see Bosco, '"Poetry for the World of Social Aims in 1876. 27 But Cabot's editing activity most relevant to the present Readers' and 'Poetry for Bards Proper': Poetic Theory and Textual Integrity in discussion is his publication of two essays in volume 12 of the Riverside Edition Emerson's Parnassus," for Emerson's completion of"Poetry and Imagination" of The Works efRalph Waldo Emersonin 1893. Volume 12, which Cabot entitled several years before Letters and Social Natural History Intellect,contained the title essay "Natural History of Intellect" Aims was published, and Johnson, ef "Emerson's Essay 'Immortality': The and "Memory." As Edward Waldo Emerson describes Cabot's work in creating Problem of Authorship." these essays, it becomes clear that Cabot mined all of Emerson's previous lecture 28 See, particularly, W 12:421-25, 442-43, 445, and 447. materials on intellect and on memory as a "department" of intellect for them, and that he was particularly ruthless in appropriating prose from the Chickering Hall and Harvard University Lectures series.28 Emerson'sLectures on "Natural History ofthe Intellect" 17

Even before Cabot's death in 1903, Edward was at work enlarging upon Cabot's role as Emerson's literary executor and editor, and he published the Centenary Edition of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1903-1904 in twelve volumes that generally paralleled Cabot's Riverside Edition. In printing "Natural History oflntellect," Edward retained Cabot's title for the essay, but he amplified the text by adding to Cabot's essay, which he subtitled "Powers and Laws of Thought," a new section subtitled "Instinct and Inspiration" which he drew from manuscript sources, and a third section subtitled "Memory" in which he reprinted Cabot's essay of the same title. To complement his considerably enlarged text of "Natural History of Intellect," Edward added the essay "The Celebration of Intellect." For his explanatory notes on both essays, Edward further mined his father's earliest lectures on intellect (the "Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century" lectures of 1848-1850 and "The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy" lectures of 1858), and from them as well as from the 1866 series he drew additional passages to give readers a glimpse of the original purport and flavor of his father's lectures in 1870. At the same time, before deciding that Cabot had appropriated virtually all usable prose from Emerson's manuscripts for posthumous publication under Emerson's name, Edward made one last exhaustive survey of his father's lecture manuscripts. He was at this task as late as 1904, when, for example, he attached a dated outline to the leaves of "Classes of Men" from the 186os, indicating how the lecture could be slightly rearranged and then expanded into an essay.29 Again, except for Emerson's lectures on intellect from 29 In the Houghton Library, see bMS Am 1280.205 (8) for the manu- the "Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century" and "The Natural Method script of "Classes of Men" and of Mental Philosophy" series which survive complete, only scattered leaves Edward's attached notes. remain from his lectures on intellect delivered in the 1860s and 1870s, texts which first Cabot, and then Edward, so thoroughly mined. Subsequent editors of Emerson agree that he was fortunate in having Cabot and Edward as his first editors. While Cabot's principal role was to cull Emerson's manuscripts in the late 1870s and into the 1880s for material to arrange as essay-length publications, his major achievement was the preservation and promotion of Emerson's reputation through A Memoir and editions such as the Riverside. Edward, on the other hand, devoted most of his middle years to preparing the Centenary Edition of his father's Works, which, with its extraordi- nary documentation, has served as the starting point for scholarly research on Emerson's writings for almost a century. 30 Yet the praise modem editors accord 30 The Centenary Edition is being grad- ually superseded by the Harvard Collected Cabot's and Edward's work has never been extended to the "Natural History of Works. Edward's detailed annotations in each volume have proved crucial to schol- Intellect" and "The Celebration of Intellect" essays, nor should it be. As even ars during this century. the most cursory comparison between Fields's and Peabody's reports of Emerson's 1870 University Lectures and Cabot's and Edward's compilation of essays from them discloses, the essays are simply not reflective of the comprehensive treatment of intellect Emerson developed across those sixteen lectures at Harvard. Instead, the essays as they stand are Cabot's and Edward's treatment of how Emerson might have transformed those lectures into essays had he enjoyed the health and reserve of energy to see the work through himself. Cabot acknowledged as much in a brief headnote appended to the Natural History ofIntellect volume in 1893: [Emerson] had, from his early youth, cherished the project of a new method in metaphysics, proceeding by observation of the mental facts, without attempting 18 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

an analysis and coordination of them which must, from the facts of the case, be premature .... He would [instead] give anecdotes of the spirit, a calendar of mental moods, without any pretense of system. None of[Emerson's] attempts in [lectures on intellect], however, disclosed any novelty of method, or indeed, after the opening statement of his intention, any marked difference from his ordinary lectures. He had always been writing anecdotes of the spirit.

Cabot had made an identical argument a few years earlier in A Memoir, writing that the major frustration of Emerson's career was that he "had long cherished the thought of a more fruitful method for the study of the mind, founded on the parallelism of the mental laws with the laws of external nature, and proceeding by simple observation of the metaphysical facts and their analogies with the physical," but that he could not finish the project. Edward reprised Cabot's position in the introduction to his notes on the "Natural History of Intellect" essay, adding that his father felt "disappointed and mortified" at his failure to make a coherent case for his "Natural History of the Intellect" during the Harvard 31 For Cabot's remarks, see The lectures or afterwards in an extended piece of proseY Works efRalph Waldo Emerson, 1893, 12:iii-iv, and Memoir, 2:634; for Of course, there is no point in arguing that Cabot and Edward ought to have Edward's, see W 12:424. left well enough alone and preserved Emerson's Chickering Hall and Harvard lectures in the state in which they found them. But there is justice to voicing reservation about their work, especially since even Emerson had qualms about the roles Cabot and Edward might eventually play in preparing his manuscripts for publication, and he once went so far as to express the fear that, owing to their respective academic training, each possessed an intellectual blind spot that would prevent him from appreciating the extravagance and scope of projects such as his on the intellect. In Cabot's case, Emerson's fear may well have been that as a strict logician Cabot was not the best equipped to appreciate the range of spontaneity needed to comprehend and convey Emerson's project on the intellect. (Peabody confirms this conjecture in "The Germ of the Graduate School" when he appraises Cabot's performance in 1870 as "scrupulous, though by no means vivacious.") In Edward's case, Emerson's fear was that neither intellectual aptitude nor devotion to a father's legacy was sufficient to overcome the positivism he associated with Edward's pursuits as a physician. In a letter to her sister Edith Emerson Forbes dated 22 August 1872 and captioned "Read to yourself," Ellen reported the substance of her father's fears about both men in language that is as straightforward as any she used in commenting on serious matters within the family. Responding to Edith's suggestion that Emerson take Cabot into a partnership to finish various projects then in hand, including the volume that would become Letters and SocialAims, Ellen wrote that when she broached the subject with him, he said, "'No, nobody could do it.'" In that letter, Ellen described her father as petrified at the prospect of what would eventually become of the voluminous journals and manuscripts he had accumulated over the years, and she quoted him to this effect: '"They are invaluable to anyone like me. If Edward were a scholar by profession, they would be a mine of 32 32 ETE 1: 690, 692. riches to him. Otherwise they are worthless."' Ellen's letter captures Emerson's only recorded reservation over the service that, as he had to realize in 1872, Cabot and Edward would one day perform as his literary executors and editors. What Ellen ultimately captures is not a matter of personal tension between Emerson and Cabot or Edward, for there was none Emerson'sLectures on "Natural History of the Intellect" 19 to speak of; instead, she captures the tension between the investment Emerson as an idealist had made in writings that progressively led to the "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures and what he feared would be their fate in the hands of persons of the more rational tum of philosophic mind courted by Cabot and Edward. Rationalists such as they always demanded something which Emerson steadfastly refused to give to critics, and which he resisted even in himself: To use the term Cabot said Emerson's particular philosophy lacked, they demanded "system." Thus, the tension Ellen discloses is one that Emerson understood first-hand, as his biographers Cabot, Ralph L. Rusk, Gay Wilson Allen, and, more recently, Richardson have all shown. Their respective treatments of his life cast Emerson's intellectual development as something of a slow-waltz engagement between rational and antirational sides of his nature; it is an engagement admirably demonstrated in his longterm construction of a "Natural History of the Intellect. " 33 By its very nature, Emerson's proposal of a "Natural History of the 3 3 For their treatments of the tension in Emerson between rationalism and Intellect" was more a poetic than a philosophical or scientific construction, a dif- antirationalism in the context of his plans for the "Natural History of the ference he underscored in private shortly after finishing his second Harvard Intellect" lectures, see Cabot as cited in course in 1871. Considering the difference between histories of natural science n. 18; Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 442-43; Allen, Waldo Emerson, as usually written and his own distinctly nonscientific version of a natural history 641-46; and Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 562-64. of intellect, he wrote: "All science must be penetrated by poetry. I do not wish to know that my shell is a strombus, or my moth a vanessa, but I wish to unite the shell & the moth to my being: to understand my own pleasure in them; to reach the secret of their charm for me. Reality ... has a sliding door." 34 34 ]MN 16:251. Emerson's natural history of the intellect could be neither natural nor history to the extent that those terms might be understood in his time or our' s as referring to the scientific classification and development of a subject. When Emerson applied classification strategies in eight of the thirteen topics he developed across the Harvard lectures of 1870 ("Perception," "Memory," "Imagination," "Inspiration," "Genius," "Common Sense," "Identity," and "Metres of Mind"), he spoke, as Fields and Peabody reveal, analogically, not analytically. Similarly, when in 1870 he elaborated on Sampson Reed's argument in Obsewationson the Growth of the Mind (1825) that "the science of the mind itself will be the effect of its own development," Emerson conceded the logical circularity of his own position wherein his science of the mind dealt with the effects, not the causes, of the mind's operation. In tum, Emerson took those effects to constitute the science of the mind as a Farmer's Almanac of selected intellectual activities or "mental moods," which amounted to no more than a restatement of the mind's effects (Fields { 1-2}, Peabody { 3-4}). And although natural historians and friends such as Louis Agassiz may have been scandalized at the facility with which Emerson appropriated the language of scientific inquiry into his idealistic philosophy, writing in his j oumal for l 867, Emerson identified that facility as essential to his continued belief in the unity of mind and matter through the agency of Nature as the poet's and, through the poet, everyman's supereminent trope. Over the course of his career, Emerson modified that belief, which he had first expressed in Nature (1836) and then again in later essays such as "Circles" (1840) and "Culture" (1860), only to the extent that during the 1850s and 1860s he amplified Nature to include his brand of natural history in service to the ideal scientificpoet as the "sliding door" across which he communicated with Nature, on the one hand, and material reality, on the other: 20 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

The good augury of our larger dedication to natural science, in this century, is not so much for the added material power which it has yielded, ... as for the intellectual power it evokes, &, shall I say, the sublime delight with which the intellect contemplates each new analogy appearing between the laws of nature & its own law & life .... I see the law of all nature: Every atom falls to every atom. Then comes the farther thought[:] herein I am apprised that this universal material attraction is only a particular example of a more universal law,-we will call it, 3S ]MN 16:65; c£ "Progress of Centrality,-which holds for mind as well as matter. 35 Culture," W 8:222. The frustration of Cabot and Edward at having to deal with the antipositivist bias in Emerson's "Philosophy for the People" and "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures from 1866 and 1870-1871 is the very delight of "best listeners" like Fields and Peabody. More than Cabot and Edward, and perhaps because they were so moved by witnessing his performance first-hand, Fields and Peabody willingly accept what in strict terms are the scientific limitations of Emerson's natural history, spun out as it is across an array of moods, insights, and anecdotes drawn from his own experience and from the lives of unexpected prose poets such as Napoleon, Plato, Thoreau, and the Platonist Thomas Taylor. The experiences and sayings of a Napoleon or a Thoreau confirm for Emerson and his listeners that, for the attentive person of thought, new analogies are always making themselves known between the laws of Nature and the laws of materiality. Thus, when Peabody records the gist of Emerson's paraphrase of Napoleon, "'I have no wit-nor want it; it's the wit of the thing I want,"' and when Fields seconds Emerson's praise of Thoreau's naturalism which treats the environment as a store-house of "fanciful suggestion" awaiting translation into moral analogy, or registers approval of Plato's belief that "no man who always understands himself can ever be a poet," or comments that in his translations of Plato, Taylor "tilts against many notable windmills" of fixed interpretation, they reveal their assent to the thesis disclosed throughout these lectures: "[I]fhis intellectual digestion [is] perfect," anyone has the capacity to be an ideal Emersonian scientist, poet, and moralist (Peabody {45}, Fields {16, 32}). Reading their manuscript and published reports, one comes to appreciate that Fields, more than Peabody, recognizes that Emerson's resistance in the "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures was much less to science or the narrowness of scientific classification than to rationalist philosophy and metaphysical systems which, as with unpoetichard science, degenerated into dogmatism with exclusive use. This was an old complaint with Emerson, which Peabody succinctly captures in the equation, "System-makers = gnats grasping the Universe" {3}. In a journal kept some thirty years before the University Lectures, Emerson wrote against the intellectual bankruptcy of narrowly told and too willingly accepted philosophy, history, and science:

Nothing is so shallow as dogmatism. Your soaring thought is only a point more[,] a station more whence you draw triangles of the illimitable field [that offers representations of the universal]: and the event of each moment, the harvest, the shower, ... the bankruptcy, the amour of Julia ... are tests to your theory, your truth .... If I have renounced the search, come into a port of some pretending dogmatism . . . some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour, I am as a bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, locked himself up, & given the key to another to keep. 36 Emerson'sLectures on "NaturalHistory of the Intellect" 21

The near-adoration Emerson expresses toward the Platonists and ancients such as Zoroaster in lecture 14 of "Natural History of the Intellect" reflects his lifelong resolve to resist the exclusively rational in himself or in any other meta- physician he encounters. For Emerson, philosophic dogmatists foreclose on "the sublime delight with which the [individual] intellect contemplates each new analogy appearing between the laws of nature & its own law & life," and render the highest joy of intellectual activity the creator's, not the receiver's. When philosophers, historians, and scientists announce definitive treatments of their subjects, they thwart the idealist's end as artist. 37 Fields and Peabody and, years 37 In connection with this point, see earlier, Abby Alcott understood this bias out of which Emerson wrote and lec- JMN5:462. tured, so that Abby's description of herself leaving Emerson's lecture with her brain reeling is not criticism, but praise for the moment of artistic creativity his sentences had generated in her. As Fields and Peabody reach for words to describe Emerson's lecturing and teaching in 1870 and find that only "poetry" or "music" will do, they similarly reveal his success in conferring the joy of intellectual activity upon his hearers, rather than hoarding it for himself This was the enduring impression that Fields and Peabody took from Emerson's lectures on the intellect.

III

Writing in his journal for 1866, Emerson paused to make this entry: "I find it a great & fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me: That is the ugly disparity between age & youth." 38 For Emerson, the unpoetic disparity 38 ]MN 16:25. between the creativity that is the blessing of youth and the labor to leave a legacy of accumulated wisdom that is the burden of age was nowhere more apparent than in the contrast between the excitement with which he had once pledged himself to write a "New Metaphysics" and the "doleful ordeal" that project had become by the time he completed his second course of University Lectures at Harvard in 1871. "When we read true metaphysics," Emerson wrote in the opening pages of Notebook IT (1850s), "we shall jump out of our skin;" the New Metaphysicians "are to write a collection of Accepted Ideas, a Table of Constants." 39 In effect, Emerson's New Metaphysics proinised to be a report of 39 TN 1:134. the original laws of the Inind. In fact, however, when in the fall of 1869 and spring of 1870 he collected materials and devised new indices in Notebook PH for topics to develop in the "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures, all that struck him as remaining of that brilliant idea were mounds of prior journal, notebook, and lecture texts in which he had elaborated on various components of the New Metaphysics. In confronting those mounds, Emerson confronted not only what he took as the impossibility of his task, but also his own mortality. The impossibility of his New Metaphysics, he believed, was the sheer magnitude of the project: The New Metaphysics required his construction of a model philosophy replete with its own internally consistent poetics, history, and science, which would also be a thorough biography of the thoughts and aspirations of the human race-and all contained in one book. On the other hand, Emerson's confrontation with his mortality must have stemmed from signs of the inevitable diininution of his intellectual power. For in developing Notebook PH, Emerson discovered that he had lost mastery over the most crucial of his compositional practices, that basic form 22 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

out of which his lectures had always flowed: his keeping of journals and notebooks. It is inconceivable that Emerson did not himself feel the falling off of his creativity in that notebook; the cramped hand that scrawls across the manuscript pages of PH, struggling to retrieve life from amply tested words and ideas, is a 40 See my editor's introduction, TN manifestation of falling off that is palpable and unnerving. 40 Indeed, Emerson 2:22-23. admitted as much to Thomas Carlyle, when in one of his last letters to him, he used the expression "doleful ordeal" to describe his second course at Harvard, and added that while he had "abundance of good readings & some honest writing on the leading topics" of his "Natural History of the Intellect," they were all

41 Emerson to Carlyle, IO April "spoiled. "4' 1871, in CEC, 477-78. The example of Notebook PH, the pronounced negativism of Emerson's assessment of his performance at Harvard in 1870 and 1871, and comments by Cabot, Edward, and Ellen have led succeeding Emerson biographers to believe that the "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures were a failure. Yet that judg- ment stands at considerable odds with the overall positive view expressed by Fields and Peabody. The only plausible explanation for this conflict of opinion is that the parties critique Emerson's performance from very different perspectives. As noted already, in their criticism of the "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures, Cabot and Edward are resisting the non-traditional philosophic form and content ("anecdotes of the spirit") out of which Emerson spoke on intellect; their intellectual commitment was to analytic thinking, whereas his was to ana- logic thinking. In any case, one demonstrable fact argues against their view that Emerson's University Lectures were a failure: Between them, Cabot and Edward culled approximately 130 printed pages from this material for essays published in their respective NaturalHistory of Intellectvolumes, and this total does not account for either the additional prose that Cabot appropriated from the lectures for the many essays he published under Emerson's name in the late 1870s and 1880s or that which Edward used and acknowledged in notes to the Centenary Edition. In contrast to her brother's and Cabot's response to Emerson's performance at Harvard in 1870, Ellen's preoccupation with her father's state of mind during his rush to complete the lectures and her assessment of his actual performance came out of an entirely different perspective. Unlike Cabot or Edward whose contact with Emerson was erratic, Ellen generally saw her father daily, for by 1870 she was quietly assuming the role of parental guardian that customarily fell to the unmarried daughter living at home in nineteenth-century America. From this perspective, she balanced that cheerful report to cousin Haven about her father's delight in the prospect oflecturing at Harvard with remarks on the toll she feared the lectures were taking on him: "I suppose he never was so hardworked & hur- ried before, and ... never was less able to bear it. These terrific 18 lectures ... are eating him all up. Today he delivered the 5th. He hardly finds any consolation 42 Seen. 18. in saying 'only thirteen more,' for thirteen is too many." 42 Writing to Edith on 27 May 1870, the day Emerson cut what would have been his fifteenth lecture, Ellen confided that the concern she expressed to Haven was right on the mark, and she quoted her father to the effect that he had come to admit as much to himself: "Today would have been Father's 15th lecture, but he could not get it into shape and has stayed at home. He said yesterday 'If the Divine Providence 43 ETE 1:557. will carry me through this next lecture I'm not afraid of the rest. "' 43 Emerson himself, in providing details of his preparation and performance during the lectures, serves as his harshest critic. During the fall of I 869 and spring of Emerson~Lectures on "Natural History of the Intellect" 23

1870, he felt old and tired. As entries in Notebook PH suggest, he was trying to rework too much of that substantial body of already used lecture material on intellect for his texts, and his inability to capitalize on processes of revision that before this time had always worked to his advantage left him dejected. And in the months just prior to his Harvard course, he was grossly overextended with professional commitments. To be sure, when President Eliot first approached him for the University Lectures, Emerson was glad for the opportunity to return to a subject that was, as Ellen said, "after his own heart." In fact, his own enthu- siasm for the philosophy series and its importance to Harvard's coming of age as a university helped him to convince Cabot to participate. Cabot, grudging the investment of time a course would require of him, had initially declined Eliot's invitation, but citing his belief in the social merit of the cause as well as its value to Harvard's reputation, Emerson persuaded Cabot to change his mind when he wrote to him on 17 June 1869: "The project seems to me highly worthy of the College, indicating its good will to be a working College in these active & emulous times, and a right step toward the position of a University we would give it." 44 44 Letters6:73. Despite the "limited thirst for philosophy" among students voiced by fellow 45 For the exchange between Emerson and George Park Fisher, see lecturer George Park Fisher in September 1869, in November Emerson was still the editors' commentaries in Letters 45 6:89 and 9:351; the second quotation is expressing to friends his "pleasure in the prospect" of the lectures. However, from Emerson to Anne C. L. Botta, 30 between November 1869 and the opening of his course in April 1870, Emerson November 1869, Letters6:93. experienced a change of heart. On 3 May 1870, the day on which he delivered his fourth lecture, he complained to James Freeman Clarke that because of preoccupation with other business in the opening months of 1870, he could not get his papers into shape for the course. Reporting that he was composing lectures only hours before giving them (so Ellen's comments to Haven and Edith describe her father's usual practice during the first Harvard course, not anom- alies), he admitted doubting after the first lecture whether "continuance [was] practicable. "46 46 Letters 6:n5-16. Even before the course began, Emerson confessed com- As Emerson's first Harvard course drew to a close, Carlyle wrote on 31 May: parable fears to Carlyle; see Emerson to "I hear of your lecturing at Harvard College, with immense acceptance, well- Carlyle, 23 January 1870, in CBC, 559. merited, I do believe." 47 What Carlyle knew about Emerson's performance is 47 CBC, 569. unknown; in any case, Emerson did not immediately respond to his friend's compliment. By 2 June, when he ended the course with "Relation of Intellect to Morals," he was just glad to have the ordeal over with-and with good cause. For serving as undercurrent in the concern Ellen expressed to Haven and Edith and in Emerson's disenchantment with his prospects as he approached the course is the professional schedule he maintained to the day he began to deliver the lectures. It was a schedule that would have exhausted even a much younger person. In the fall of 1869, when he might otherwise have been at work on the lectures, Emerson was active as an overseer and member of several academic committees at Harvard; he also gave four lectures unrelated to intellect, revised portions of his six volumes of published prose for a two-volume Prose Works printed late in 1869, and rewrote eight lectures from the 186os and four essays previously printed in the Atlantic Monthly for the twelve essays that would comprise Society and Solitude (1870). Emerson's schedule in the spring of 1870 was equally taxing. In addition to visiting the Harvard College Library and Boston Athenaeum for new readings and devising new indices in Notebook PH, Emerson read proofs for Society and Solitude, gave eight lectures in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts 24 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

between 1 February and 23 March, negotiated with President Eliot on a bequest of books from Carlyle to Harvard College, and was an active member of the Saturday and Examiner Clubs, Concord Social Circle, and academic committees at Harvard. Little wonder, then, that after delivering his first "Natural History of the Intellect" University Lecture on 26 April, Emerson doubted the wisdom or practicality of continuing. With all evidence in hand, it is clear this schedule exerted a substantial negative effect on Emerson's ability to write the lectures, and at least in part, it accounts for his ambivalence about the quality of his performance while delivering them, particularly against the contrary evidence provided by Fields and 48 This point, and its reinforcement Peabody. 48 Unable to revise and enlarge earlier lectures on intellect for delivery in my treatment of Emerson's schedule prior to his second course, is confirmed anew at Harvard as Notebook PH shows, when he opened the course with by the details of his schedules for 1869- 1871 in von Frank, An Emer.ronChronology, "Praise of Mind" before the small, expectant audience that had assembled to hear 454-70. him, Emerson must have realized that the sweeping treatment of New Metaphysics he had promised himself in the 1850s was in serious jeopardy. Though he never explicitly recorded the fact, this was the realization that induced his negativism during the course in 1870 and led him to believe he had failed. In denial, Emerson made plans for a second "Natural History of the Intellect" course in the spring of 1871 in what would be the last term of the University Lectures. Writing to Carlyle on 17 June 1870, he acknowledged his friend's earlier compliment, but reiterated the negativism and ambivalence he felt during the course. As preface to what he had hoped the course would accomplish in 1870, and to what he thought he might still manage to make of a reprise in 1871, Emerson told Carlyle that the lectures were an "oppressive engagement of writing & reading[,] ... a task more formidable in prospect & practice than any foregoing one .... [They] made me a prisoner." The only "shining side" to the experience, he said, was that despite its difficulties, the course proved he had enough material to "construct a fair report of what I have read & thought on the Subject." He then explained how he envisioned the lectures serving the New Metaphysics:

[T]he topics give me room for my guesses, criticism, admirations & experiences with the accepted masters, & also the lessons I have learned from the hidden great. I have the fancy that a realist is a good corrector of formalism, no matter how incapable of syllogism or continuous linked statement. To great results of thought & morals the steps are not many, & it is not the masters who spin the 49 CEC, 570. ostentatious continuity. 49 50 Conway wrote to Emerson on 4 July, and Emerson responded on 18 Keeping to a demanding schedule oflectures, library visits, and committee ser- July 1870; see Letters 6:124-25. Once described by Carlyle as a "paltry vice, and making little satisfactory progress in Notebook PH, Emerson found the unhanged creature," Hotten pressed his case relentlessly, and his claim on months between June 1870 and the opening of his second course in February Emerson's writings was continued by 1871 even more tortured than those preceding his first. Most distracting to him Chatto & Windus, his successors after his death in 1873. For Carlyle's com- now was the news Moncure D. Conway sent in July that the unscrupulous ments on Hotten, see Carlyle to Emerson, 4 June 1871, in CEC, 580; English publisher John Camden Hotten planned to bring out a collection of for extended treatment of this conflict, see Welland, ''.John Camden Hotten Emerson's fugitive writings; that news set off a protracted battle between and Emerson's Uncollected Essays," Emerson and Hotten and his successors that lasted until 1875.50 A few days before 156-75, and Simmons, "Arranging the Sibylline Leaves," 341-43ff. his second course opened, Emerson wrote to Annie Fields, offering tickets for s1 Emerson to Annie Adams Fields, her and James should they wish to attend the new lectures; if they accepted his IO February 1871; see Letters 6:145. invitation, no evidence of the fact has been found.51 Ellen accompanied her father to the first lecture, and although she confessed to being "absorbed" by a Emersons Lectureson "Natural History efthe Intellect" 25 large globe left beside the speaker's platform by a geography professor who had used the room earlier, she reported to Edith that she thought the course was off to a good start: "Yesterday [was] ... Father's lecture. Ever so many people came. It was a large audience and a beautiful lecture." 52 52 ETE 1:578. But, as he admitted to Carlyle some months later, her father felt differently:

Emerson knew the new course would not "repair the faults of the last year. " 53 53 Seen. 41. Fastened to his writing table, as he described his situation to Conway throughout the second course which ran from February to April, Emerson faced as squarely as he could the "ugly disparity" between youth and age, and the final realization that he had taken his New Metaphysics as far as he ever would. 54 54 Emerson to Conway, 16 April Slightly rearranging the order of lectures he had followed in 1870, dropping the 1871; see Letters6:150. lecture on "Platonists" and perhaps the one on "Perception" as well, adding new lectures on "Wit and Humor," "Demonology," and "Poetry," and expanding "Conduct of Intellect" into two lectures, Emerson delivered these seventeen lectures at Boylston Hall in 187 I: I. "Introductory" ( 14 February); 2. "Transcendency of Physics" (17 February); 3. title unknown, but possibly some version of "Perception" (21 February); 4. "Memory, Part 1" (24 February); 5. "Imagination" (28 February); 6. "Memory, Part 2" (3 March); 7. "Inspiration" (7 March); 8. "Common Sense" (IO March); 9. "Wit and Humor" (14 March); IO. "Genius" (17 March); 11. "Demonology" (21 March); 12. "Poetry" (24 March); 13 and 14. "Metres of Mind" (28 and 31 March); 15. "Will and Conduct of the Intellect" (3 April); 16. "Conduct of the Intellect" (5 April); and 17. "Relation of Intellect to Morals" (7 April). 55 At the conclusion of "Relation of 55 See n. 25. Intellect to Morals," he thanked the class for their attendance and attention, reading from the same text he had used at the close of his course in 1870:

I have to offer to the class who have honored these lectures with an attention so punctual and so sympathetic my thanks for their toleration. Whilst I deeply regret that the suddenness with which the proposal to read them was made and accepted has made the discourses quite too rapid and imper- fect to be just to questions of such high and enduring import: Let me say that the act of reading these sketches to you has given much assistance to my view of them, and will enable me I hope hereafter to give a greater completeness of the leading statements. 56 56 Leet. 16.70-71 {2r-2v}.

Occasionally in the pages of his journals and notebooks from the first half of the l 870s, glimpses of a robust Emerson emerge. In passages such as this he appears idealistic, as unapologetic as ever for his antirational approach to philosophy and science, and perhaps too, still fired to write the New Metaphysics:

I do not know that I should feel threatened or insulted if a chemist should take his protoplasm or mix his hydrogen, oxygen & carbon, & make an animalcule incontestably swimming & jumping before my eyes. I should only feel that it indicated that the day had arrived when the human race might be trusted with a new degree of power, & its immense responsibility; for these steps are not soli- tary ... but only a hint of an advanced frontier supported by an advancing race 57 behind it. 57 Emerson in 1871; seeJMN 16:232. Unfortunately, such moments are scattered and rare. With his hope to give "a greater completeness" to the leading statements of his "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures as the last step in his construction of the New Metaphysics dashed by the time the second Harvard course ended, Emerson, and eventually 26 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

Cabot and Ellen, began to appropriate passages from the lectures for use in Letters and SocialAims. The essays "Poetry and Imagination" and "Inspiration," which appeared in that volume, are considerably indebted to these lectures for sentences and whole paragraphs. Cabot and Edward also extensively mined prose from the lectures for service in essays such as "The Scholar," "The Sovereignty of Ethics," and "Art and Criticism" which they published under Emerson's name, for text in their respective treatments of intellect in the Natural History ofIntellect volumes, and in Edward's case, for notes throughout the Centenary Edition. Thus, although the manuscripts themselves no longer survive, we have in various forms the ideas and prose which in the "Natural History of the Intellect" lectures Emerson considered the penultimate treatment of his New Metaphysics. Through the reports of Emerson's University Lectures in 1870 by Fields and Peabody which follow, we are a step nearer to knowing first-hand what Emerson had to say about the "Natural History of the Intellect," and here we listen to him without the extensive rearrangement of his words and ideas editorially imposed on them by his executors. Most important of all, these reports suggest that Emerson was far closer to successful completion of his New Metaphysics project than he imagined. Reading them against the volumes of his published writing that preceded them, it would appear that the principal mistake Emerson made in deciding that completion of his work on the New Metaphysics was impossible was in believing that he had to write it all out in one new book. In Nature, Essays: First Series and Second Series, the biographies of RepresentativeMen and those he wrote on Aunt Mary Moody Emerson and Thoreau, English Traits, The Conduct ofLife, and Society and Solitude Emerson had already seen an extended Preface to the New Metaphysics into print. Although he did not live to witness it, his mistake was corrected by WilliamJames,John Dewey, George Santayana, and others of that new generation who succeeded Fields and Peabody as Emerson's "best listeners."