The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson Edited by Joel Myerson Columbia University Press new york The Press acknowledges with thanks a Centennial gift from Betsy Carter and Paul Carter, Emeritus Trustee of the Press, toward the costs of publishing this book. Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright ᭧ 1997 Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882. [Correspondence. Selections] The selected letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson / edited by Joel Myerson. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0–231–10282–8 (acid-free paper) 1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Correspondence. 2. Authors, American—19th century—Correspondence. I. Myerson, Joel. II. Title. PS1631.A4 1997 814Ј.3—dc21 [B] 97–15060 CIP Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and dura- ble acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10987654321 For Greta Contents Introduction 1 Chronology 17 Biographies 27 The Letters 39 Index 461 Introduction Ah you always ask me for that unwritten letter always due, it seems, always unwritten, from year to year, by me to you, dear Lidian,—I fear too more widely true than you mean,—always due & unwritten by me to every sister & brother of the human race. I have only to say that I also bemoan myself daily for the same cause—that I cannot write this letter, that I have not stamina & constitution enough to mind the two functions of seraph & cherub, oh no, let me not use such great words,—rather say that a photometer cannot be a stove.... Besides am I not, O best Lidian, a most foolish affectionate goodman & papa, with a weak side toward apples & sugar and all domesticities, when I am once in Concord? 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson did not feel comfortable writing letters. The excerpt above from a letter to his wife addresses the problems he had in fully expressing his feelings to her as well as to “every sister & brother of the human race.” As a well-known author and lecturer, who was often referred to as “the Sage of Concord,” Emerson had a firmly established public persona behind which he could take refuge. Whether he faced the public in print or on the lecture platform, he was able to be separated from them and their questions; but the medium of correspondence did not offer the same type of defensive barrier. Emerson was able to stave off those who wished access to the private man until 1939, when Ralph L. Rusk published his magisterial six- volume edition of The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Earlier editions of Emerson’s letters had been controlled by his family, friends, or literary executors. Besides a few scattered letters published in the typical nineteenth-century “life and letters” biographies of his friends and acquaintances or in newspaper and magazine articles (the most extensive being his correspondence with Henry David Thoreau), the only significant collections of Emerson’s letters published before Rusk’s edition were the ones that appeared in James Elliot Cabot’s two-volume Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1887) and in the book-length collections of his correspondence with Thomas Carlyle (3 vols.; 1883, 1886), the German writer Herman Grimm (1903), and his childhood friend William Henry Furness (1917), as well as his letters to the British poet John Sterling (1897) and his long-time friend Samuel Gray Ward (1899).2 In each case, the published letters presented a sanitized Emerson, a public portrait suitable for veneration. To accomplish Introduction 2 this, the editorial policies were appropriately lax; just as the makeup artist covers or eliminates the physical blemishes of the subject, these editors covered Emerson’s spelling and grammatical lapses, and eliminated references they considered too personally revealing according to the standards of the time or the picture of him that they were trying to present. Accordingly, the man who defined evil as “merely privative, not absolute” in his “Divinity School Address,” stood before the admiring pubiic as a smiling and beneficent Boston Brahmin incarnation of his own essay on “Self-Reliance.” This filio- pietistic editing may have satisfied the concerns of the family, but it did not present an Emerson in touch with the global wars and other concerns of the early twentieth century. Rusk’s edition changed forever the way in which we view Emerson. In nearly 2,800 pages, Rusk presents 2,313 letters never before published and 271 hitherto published only in part, as well as references to 509 letters already printed 3 and another 1,281 that were probably written. Rusk’s editorial policy is straightforward: he prints the letters as they were written with only a few, minor editorial interventions.4 Finally, the private Emerson is allowed to speak for himself directly to his public, and the results are impressive. Odell Shepard heralds the publication of the Letters with a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review, announcing that “[n]ot many events in the history of American literature have been more important than the publication of these long-awaited volumes,” for here is “a performance boldly planned and triumphantly achieved, of which America has every reason to be proud.” 5 Reviewers praise Rusk for his editorial work and for giving us the unvarnished Emerson, one whom we could now reassess in light of this important new addition to his canon. Shepard feels that “those who know how he suffered throughout life with an almost total inability to heave his thought and feeling into spontaneously spoken words will be glad to know that he often made himself amends with a racing, garrulous, and somewhat slovenly pen.” Thus, the “effect of the many letters in which he thus lets himself go, oblivious of the points of punctuation and scornful of capital letters, is like that of a log- jam suddenly broken.” In addition to this new vitality, Van Wyck Brooks notices “an impression of Emerson that is new and unexpected in its concrete- ness....Itisthesocial and mundane Emerson who chiefly appears in these letters, and it will surprise many readers to find out how much of his life was social and mundane”; or, as Townsend Scudder III phrases it, the “casual explorer may get something of a shock to learn how much the brain of a great intellectual can be stuffed with the customary events of existence.” 6 Introduction But on the other side of the Atlantic, the man who embodied so many 3 aspects of American intellectual and literary history was not receiving such a positive reception. The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement dismisses the letters because “as a whole they do little to illuminate that deeper side of him,” and the reviewer in the Manchester Guardian, after describing the six volumes as having “a massive dignity befitting the last rites of an inevitable canonisation,” goes on to complain that “Emerson was more concerned with what he said than with his way of saying it; and if, in fact, he had not much to say he had an irresistible impulse to go on saying it.” 7 These and many other reviews show that while everyone agrees that Rusk’s editorial work is superb, there is much less consensus about what the letters themselves demonstrate. Typical of this lack of agreement is the reviewer in Time, who, while positively commenting on Emerson’s letters, raises questions about letter writing in general: “The best letters are brief, direct, factual. The best letter writers are usually women and soldiers, who observe closely, state simply. Worst letter writers are usually writers—who philosophize.” 8 Part of the reason for this simultaneous praise of and resistance to Emerson’s letters may have been the fact that they were the first private documents of his to be released without serious editorial intervention and thus were a univocal presentation of a man whose private writings are truly multivocal. The only other edition of Emerson’s private writings published before Rusk’s Letters was The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Emerson’s son, Edward Waldo Emerson, and grandson, Waldo Emerson Forbes, in ten volumes between 1909 and 1914. Just as in the various editions of letters edited by family members, the Journals, too, presented the “Sage of Concord” to the public. As the editors of the modern edition of Emerson’s journals characterize their predecessor, the editors of that earlier edition believed “[e]ssential privacy was not to be invaded, no one was to be embarrassed, texts were to be made grammatical and ‘correct,’ ‘trivia’ were to be elimi- nated,” resulting in a portrait of “what his chief editor felt impelled to make him, still more the mystic than the Yankee, and always, from beginning to end of the five thousand well-printed pages, ‘Mr.’ Emerson.” 9 Rusk’s edition literally breaks this mold by allowing readers to form their own versions of Emerson through enabling them to read his texts without mediation. Twenty years later, this task of reading the private Emerson was made considerably easier as four decades of intense (and highly professional) edito- rial work began. The mere six volumes of Emerson’s letters were soon joined by three volumes of his early lectures (1959–1972), sixteen volumes of journals Introduction 4 and miscellaneous notebooks (1960–1982), a new edition of the correspon- dence with Carlyle (1964), one volume of poetry notebooks (1986), four volumes of his complete sermons (1989–1992), three volumes of topical notebooks (1990–1994), and four additional volumes of letters (1990–1995).10 Both Joseph Slater, editor of the Carlyle correspondence, and Eleanor M.