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" The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters 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. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42667699 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Emersonj Lectureson "Natural History of the Intellect" 7 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 regis- tered 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 other- wise 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 treat- ments 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