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Contexts and Comparisons Chapter 7 - Romanticism  

PASSAGE FOR STUDY

From Emerson's "Self-Reliance:
Sententiae and Transcendentalism

Romanticism takes on different characteristics in different cultures. Even within the British Isles, England and Scotland produced idiosyncratic forms of Romanticism, as each country on the continent of Europe endowed the movement with distinctive national traits. Early in the nineteenth century, Unitarianism, a rational religion produced by the English Enlightenment, paved the way for the emergence in the United States of a literary and philosophical movement, Transcendentalism, whose chief proponent was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). Like the English Romantics, Transcendentalists valued the individual over the group, feeling over reason, and God's creation, the natural world, over that merely human creation, the city. Influenced by German philosophers like Kant, indebted to New England's Puritan traditions, and thus ultimately derived from Plato, the wellspring of Western idealistic philosophy, Transcendentalism also owed much to Asian mysticism (see the Passage for Study drawn from the Bhagavad-Gita, in Chapter 1, which heavily influenced both Emerson and Henry David Thoreau). Its dominant outlook, however, was Romantic.

The Transcendentalists, who also included Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) and Thoreau (1817-1862), encouraged a complete rejection of authority of any kind, affirmed the necessity of self-reliance, and looked to nature as a teacher. It is perfectly understandable why Transcendentalism should have developed in New England, giving Romanticism a specifically American coloration, for America was truly a New World, an Eden, a Paradise, and in this new world, authority came not from above but from the consent of the governed. Here the American Adam and Eve, unencumbered by outdated laws, traditions, and customs, could read the Bible of Nature, find the soul's own truth, and perfect the self.

In a body of work that fills approximately thirty volumes, Emerson wrote about his own experience of man thinking and feeling. Remembered primarily as a brilliant essayist ("Self-Reliance") and lecturer ("The American Scholar"), Emerson, throughout his life, expressed himself in poetry as well. May-Day (1867) and Selected Poems (1876) contain his best known works. Many of these poems explore the very same themes that provide the substance of his books, essays, and lectures. His poem "Self-Reliance," for example, is a brief lyric utterance of the insight that is more fully developed in the essay of the same title.

Emerson's poetry, however, never achieved the acclaim of his essays. The startling aphorisms, or sententiae, that delight the reader of his prose perhaps militate against the organic requirements of a poem. Nature's music, a Transcendentalist might have explained, is heard to greater effect in his essays than when it activates the strings of the poet's lyre, Emerson's favorite image. Nevertheless, as a master of richly condensed units of thought, Emerson achieves a kind of poetry in the totality of his work.

Emerson's Transcendentalist ideas were quickening and liberating to a post-Puritan society. Assuming that God (or good) was everywhere in nature, Transcendentalism fearlessly stirred the romantic soul to awaken and respond to the oversoul animating all creation. Nature's moral imperative was to find and follow the God within, for to be was to be good. The following sententiae culled from the essay "Self-Reliance" typify the ideas that moved the followers of Emerson's American gospel.

Excerpts From "Self-Reliance"

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men -- that is genius.
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.
Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it be none.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
[T]he great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force.
For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosphers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. . . Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts every thing you said to-day. -- 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' -- Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
Life only avails, not the having lived.
If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles it, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.
Discontent is the want of self-reliance.
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands.
Travelling is a fool's paradise. . . . My giant goes with me wherever I go.
Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.
For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. . . . The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
[Men] measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.
[A] man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Questions for Discussion

  1. What are some of the assumptions behind Emerson's ideas?
  2. How do Emerson's ideas relate to the myth of the American dream?
  3. Are Emerson's ideas democratic?
  4. How does the philosophy of individualism support a capitalist economic system?
  5. Do Emerson's ideas provide a guide to living a moral life in a democracy? In a capitalist society?
  6. Does Emerson believe in free will?
  7. Is Emerson naive?
  8. Are there any dangers inherent in Transcendentalism?
  9. Is there any room in Emerson's philosophy for the problem of evil? previous table of contents