EMERSON, RALPH WALDO (1803-1882), American poet and essayist, was born in Boston, Mass., May 25, 1803. Seven of his ancestors were ministers of New England churches. From them Emerson inherited qualities of self-reliance, love of liberty, strenuous virtue, sincerity, sobriety and fearless loyalty to ideals. The form of his ideals was modified by the metamorphic glow of Transcendentalism, but the spirit in which Emerson con ceived the laws of life, reverenced them and lived them out, was the Puritan spirit, elevated, enlarged and beautified by the poetic temperament.
His father was the Rev. William Emerson, minister of the First Church (Unitarian) in Boston. Ralph Waldo was the fourth child in a family of eight, of whom at least three gave evidence of extraordinary mental powers. He was brought up in an atmosphere of hard work, of moral discipline, and of wholesome self-sacrifice. His aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a brilliant and eccentric woman, was a potent factor in his education. In 1817 he entered Harvard college, and graduated in 1821. In scholar ship he ranked about the middle of his class. In literature and oratory he was more distinguished, receiving a Boylston prize for declamation and two Bowdoin prizes for ethical dissertations. He was fond of reading and of writing verse, and was chosen as the poet for class day. His cheerful serenity of manner, his tranquil mirthfulness and the steady charm of his personality made him a favourite with his fellows, in spite of a certain reserve.
Immediately after graduation he became for three years an assistant in his brother William's school for young ladies, in Boston. The routine was distasteful; independence, sincerity, reality, grew more and more necessary to him. His aunt urged him to seek retirement, self-reliance, friendship with nature ; to be no longer "the nursling of surrounding circumstances." The passion for spiritual leadership stirred within him. In 1825 he entered the divinity school at Cambridge, to prepare himself for the Unitarian pulpit. His studies, much interrupted by ill health, were, however, far more philosophical and literary than theological.
In Oct. 1826 he was "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. The same year a threatened consump tion compelled him to take a long journey in the South. Return ing in 1827, he continued his studies and preached as a candidate in various churches. In 1829 he married a beautiful but delicate young woman, Ellen Tucker of Concord, and was installed as associate minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) in Boston. The retirement of his senior colleague soon left him the sole pastor. There was a homely elevation in Emerson's early sermons, a natural freshness in his piety, a quiet enthusiasm in his manner, that charmed thoughtful hearers. Early in 1832 he lost his wife, a sorrow that deeply depressed him in health and spirits. Follow ing his passion for independence and sincerity, he arrived at the conviction that the Lord's Supper was not intended by Christ to be a permanent sacrament. He was willing to continue the service only if the use of the elements should be dropped and the rite made simply an act of spiritual remembrance. He found his congregation, not unnaturally, reluctant to agree with him, and therefore retired, not without some disappointment, from the pastoral office. He never again took charge of a parish; but he continued to preach, as opportunity offered, until 1847. In fact, he was always a preacher, his supreme task being to befriend and guide the inner life of man.
The strongest influences in his development about this time were the liberating philosophy of Coleridge, the mystical visions of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of Wordsworth and the stimulating essays of Carlyle. On Christmas Day 1832 he started on a trip abroad, during which he met Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle and Wordsworth. His visit to Carlyle, in the lonely farmhouse at Craigenputtock, was the memorable beginning of a lifelong friendship. Emerson published Carlyle's first books in America; Carlyle introduced Emerson's essays into England. The two men were bound together by a mutual respect deeper than a sympathy of tastes and a community of spirit stronger than a similarity of opinions. Emerson was a sweet-tempered Carlyle, living in the sunshine. Carlyle was a militant Emerson, moving amid thunderclouds. The things that each most admired in the other were self-reliance, directness, moral courage. A passage in Emerson's diary, written on his homeward voyage, strikes the keynote of his remaining life. "A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. . . . All real good or evil that can befall him must be from himself. . . . There is a corres pondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without, the principles of them all may be penetrated into within him. . . . The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint man with himself. . . . The highest revelation is that God is in every man." Here is the essence of that intui tional philosophy commonly called Transcendentalism. Neverthe less, Emerson disclaimed allegiance to that philosophy. All through his life he navigated the Transcendental sea, piloted by a clear moral sense, warned off the rocks by the saving grace of humour, and kept from capsizing by a good ballast of New England prudence.
After his return from England in 1833 he went to live with his mother at the old manse in Concord, Mass., and began his career as a lecturer in Boston. His first discourses, delivered before the Society of Natural History and the Mechanics' Insti tute, were chiefly on scientific subjects, approached in a poetic spirit. In the autumn of 1835 he married Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, having previously purchased a spacious old house and garden at Concord. There he spent the remainder of his life, a devoted husband, a wise and tender father, a careful house holder, a virtuous villager, a friendly neighbour, and, spite of all his disclaimers, the central and luminous figure among the Transcendentalists. Some mild departures from established rou tine he tranquilly tested and as tranquilly abandoned. His theory that manual labour should form part of the scholar's life was checked by the personal discovery that hard labour in the fields meant poor work in the study. "The writer shall not dig," was his practical conclusion. Intellectual independence was what he chiefly desired; and this, he found, could be attained in a manner of living not outwardly different from that of the average college professor or country minister. And yet it was to this property holding, debt-paying, law-abiding, well-dressed, courteous-man nered citizen of Concord that the ardent and enthusiastic turned as the prophet of the new idealism. The influence of other Transcendental teachers was narrow and parochial compared with that of Emerson. Something in his imperturbable, kindly presence, his commanding style of thought and speech, announced him as the possessor of the great secret which many were seeking—the secret of a freer, deeper, more harmonious life. More and more, as his fame spread, those who "would live in the spirit" came to listen to the voice, and to sit at the feet, of the Sage of Concord.
It was on the lecture platform that he found his power and won his fame. The courses of lectures that he delivered at the Masonic Temple in Boston, during the winters of 1835 and 1836, were well attended and admired. They were followed by two discourses which commanded for him immediate recognition as a new and potent personality. His Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard college in August 1837, on "The American Scholar," was an eloquent appeal for independence, sincerity, realism, in the intellectual life of America. His address before the graduating class of the divinity school at Cambridge, in 1838, was an im passioned protest against what he called "the defects of historical Christianity" and a daring plea for absolute self-reliance and a new inspiration of religion. "In the soul," he said, "let redemp tion be sought. . . . Cast conformity behind you, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity." A blaze of controversy sprang up at once. Emerson made no reply. But amid this somewhat fierce illumination he went forward steadily as a public lecturer. It was not his negations that made him popular; it was the eloquence with which he presented the positive side of his doctrine. Whatever the titles of his discourses, "Literary Ethics," "The Present Age," "The Conduct of Life," their theme was always the same, namely, "the infinitude of the private man." Those who thought him astray on the subject of religion listened to him with delight when he poeticized the commonplaces of art, politics, literature or the household. The simplicity and symmetry of his sentences, the modulations of his thrilling voice, the radiance of his fine face, even his slight hesitations and pauses over his manuscript, lent a strange charm to his speech. For more than a generation he went about the country lecturing, and there was no man on the platform in America who excelled him in distinction, in authority, or in stimulating eloquence.
In 1847 Emerson visited Great Britain for the second time, was welcomed by Carlyle, lectured to appreciative audiences in Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and London, made many new friends in England and Scotland, paid a brief visit to Paris, and returned home in July 1848. The impressions of this journey were embodied in English Traits (1856). The book might be called "English Traits and American Confessions," for nowhere does Emerson's Americanism come out more strongly. But the America that he loved and admired was the ideal, the potential America. For the actual conditions of social and political life in his own time he had a fine scorn. He was an intellectual Brahmin. His principles were democratic, his tastes aristocratic. He loved man, but he was not fond of men. He had grave doubts about universal suffrage. He took a sincere interest in social and political reform, but towards specific "reforms" his attitude was somewhat remote and visionary. He was a believer in woman's rights, but he was lukewarm towards conventions in favour of woman suffrage. For a long time he refused to be identified with the Abolitionists. But as the irrepressible conflict drew to a head, Emerson's hesitation vanished. He said in 1856, "I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom" ; and with the outbreak of the Civil War he became an ardent and powerful advocate of the cause of the Union.
Emerson the essayist was a condensation of Emerson the lec turer. His prose works, with the exception of the slender volume entitled Nature (1836), were collected and arranged from the manuscripts of his lectures. His method of writing was character istic. He planted a subject in his mind, and waited for thoughts and illustrations to come to it, as birds or insects to a plant or flower. When an idea appeared he followed it, "as a boy might hunt a butterfly" ; when it was captured he pinned it in his "thought-book." The writings of other men he used more for stimulus than for guidance. "I value them," he said, "to make my top spin." His favourite reading was poetry and mystical philosophy, Shakespeare, Dante, George Herbert, Goethe, Berkeley, Coleridge, Swedenborg, Jakob Boehme, Plato, the new Platonists, and the religious books of the East (in translation). Next to these he valued books of biography and anecdote : Plutarch, Grimm, St. Simon, Varnhagen von Ense. Novels he seldom read. He was a follower of none, an original borrower from all. His illustrations were drawn from near and far. On his pages, close beside the Parthenon, the Sphinx, Etna and Vesuvius, you will find the White mountains, Monadnock, Katandin, the pickerel weed in bloom, the wild geese honking through the sky, Wall street, cotton mills and Quincy granite. For an abstract thinker, he was strangely in love with the concrete facts of life. From the pages of his teeming notebooks he took the material for his lectures, arranging and rearranging it under such titles as "School," "Genius," "Beauty and Manners," "Self-Possession," "Duty," "The Superlative," "Truth." When the lectures had served their purpose he rearranged the material in essays and published them. Thus appeared in succession the following volumes: Essays (1st ser. 1841, 2nd ser. 1844) ; Representative Men (185o) ; English Traits (1856) ; The Conduct of Life (186o) ; Society and Solitude (187o) ; Letters and Social Aims (1876). Besides these, many other lectures were printed in separate form and in various combinations.
Emerson's style is brilliant, epigrammatic, gemlike ; clear in sentences, obscure in paragraphs. He was a sporadic observer. He saw by flashes. The coherence of his writing lies in his personality. His work is fused by a steady glow of optimism. Yet he states this optimism moderately. "The genius which pre serves and guides the human race indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favourable to the side of reason." His verse, though in form inferior to his prose, was perhaps a truer expression of his genius. He said, "I am born a poet"; and again, writing to Carlyle, he called himself "half a bard." He had "the vision," but not "the faculty divine" which trans lates the vision into music. In his two volumes of verse (Poems, 1847 ; May Day and Other Pieces, 1867) there are many passages of beautiful insight and profound feeling, some lines of surprising splendour, and a few poems, like "The Rhodora," "The Snow Storm," "Ode to Beauty," "Terminus," "The Concord Ode," and the marvellous "Threnody" on the death of his first-born boy, of beauty unmarred and penetrating truth. But the total value of his poetical work is discounted by the imperfection of metrical form, the presence of incongruous images, the predominance of the intellectual over the emotional element, and the lack of flow. It is the material of poetry not thoroughly worked out. But the genius from which it came—the swift faculty of perception, the lofty imagination, the idealizing spirit enamoured of reality—was the secret source of all Emerson's greatness as a speaker and as a writer. Whatever verdict time may pass upon the bulk of his poetry, Emerson himself must be recognized as an original and true poet of a high order.
His later years were passed in peaceful honour at Concord. In 1866 Harvard college conferred upon him the degree of LL.D., and in 1867 he was elected an overseer. In 187o he delivered a course of lectures before the university on "The Natural History of the Intellect." In 1872 his house was burned down, and was rebuilt by popular subscription. In the same year he went on his third foreign journey, going as far as Egypt. About this time began a failure in his powers, especially in his memory. But his character remained serene and unshaken in dignity. Steadily, tranquilly, cheerfully, he finished the voyage of life.
I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime; "Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave is charmed." Emerson died April 27, 1882, and his body was laid to rest in the peaceful cemetery of Sleepy Hollow, on the edge of Concord.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The principal editions of Emerson's Works are the Bibliography.-The principal editions of Emerson's Works are the Riverside edition prepared by J. E. Cabot (1883-93) ; the Standard Library edition (1894) ; and the Centenary edition prepared by Ed ward Waldo Emerson (1903-04). The Journals were edited by E. W. Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (19o9-14) ; and The Heart of Emerson's Journals, by Bliss Perry (1926). The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1883) was edited by C. E. Norton, who also edited the Letters from Emerson to S. G. Ward (1899) ; the correspondence between Emerson and Hermann Grimm was edited by F. W. Rolls (1903) ; that between Emerson and John Sterling, by E. W. Emerson (1897) ; and Records of a Lifelong Friend ship, 1807-1882: Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Henry Furness, by H. H. Furness (1910). Uncollected Writings (1912) includes essays, addresses, poems, reviews and letters.
The principal biographical studies are by A. B. Alcott (1882) ; Van Wyck Brooks (1927) ; J. E. Cabot (the authorized biography, 1887) ; G. W. Cooke (1881) ; Marie Dugard (1907) ; O. W. Firkins (1915) ; Richard Garnett (1888) ; O. W. Holmes (1885) ; Alexander Ireland (1882) ; D. J. Snider (1921) ; and G. E. Woodberry (1907). Special studies include Joel Benton, Emerson as a Poet (1883) ; Elizabeth L. Cary, Emerson, Poet and Thinker (1904) ; M. D. Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (1882) ; E. W. Emerson, Emerson in Concord (1889) ; H. D. Gray, Emerson 09'7), a study of Emerson's philosophy and of Transcendentalism ; J. A. Hill, Emerson and His Philosophy (1919) ; F. B. Sanborn, ed., The Genius and Character of Emerson: Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy (1885) ; F. W. Wahr, Emerson and Goethe (1915) ; and C. J. Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (189o). Critical estimates are also to be found in Matthew Arnold's Discourses in America, Augustine Birrell's Obiter Dicta (2nd ser.), J. J. Chapman's Emerson and Other Essays, Henry James's Partial Portraits, J. R. Lowell's My Study Windows, Maurice Maeterlinck's On Emerson and Other Essays, John Morley's Critical Miscellanies (vol. i.) , Remy de Gourmont's Deux Poetes de la Nature, George Santayana's Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, and E. C. Stedman's Poets of America. See also G. W. Cooke, A Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1908) ; S. M. Crothers, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1921) ; P. Russell, Emerson, the Wisest American (1929). (H. VAN D.)