Essays

Overview

The Essays are two series, published in 1841 and 1844, about three hundred pages together, and they were assembled out of lecture material and journals. That matters for how they read. Emerson kept journals obsessively for fifty years, indexed them, and built lectures by pulling sentences out and setting them in sequence. The essays are therefore made of units rather than arguments, and the joins are often invisible because the sentences are so good.

He had been a Unitarian minister in Boston and resigned in 1832 over the communion service, which he no longer believed he could administer honestly. His first wife had died at nineteen the year before. He travelled in Europe, met Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle, came home, and began lecturing for a living.

The manner is the standing difficulty. Emerson does not argue; he asserts, repeatedly and beautifully, from different angles, and he contradicts himself freely and says so on purpose. Readers who want a position will be frustrated. The right expectation is something closer to a provocation delivered in the finest prose America has produced.

Two practical notes. Nature, the short book from 1836, is not in either series but is usually printed with them and is where the programme is announced. And the essays were lectures first, so they were heard rather than read, which explains the repetition and the periodic returns to a theme.

The argument

Self-Reliance. The centre of gravity. Its claim is that every person has direct access to truth, and that the only measure of a thought’s worth is whether you genuinely hold it. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. What has gone wrong is conformity, which he calls a kind of suicide, and consistency, the reverence for one’s own past positions, which he dismisses with the line about the hobgoblin. Society is a conspiracy against the individuality of its members, a joint-stock company in which members surrender liberty for bread.

He pushes the position further than his admirers usually do. He says that if he is the devil’s child, he will live then from the devil. He tells a philanthropist that he has no obligation to the poor man who is not spiritually his poor, and that his charity should be spent where it belongs rather than where it is expected. The essay is not a comfortable one.

The Over-Soul. What makes self-reliance something other than egotism. Emerson’s claim is that within each person is the soul of the whole, one universal mind, so that trusting yourself and submitting to the highest are the same motion. The doctrine is borrowed loosely from Neoplatonism and from Hindu texts he had begun reading, and it is the load-bearing metaphysics under the whole collection.

Circles. The best-constructed of the essays and the one that undoes the others. Every action has an end that is the beginning of another action, every truth is provisional, and around every circle a larger one can be drawn. There are no fixtures in nature and no absolute statements, and the arrival of a new thought makes yesterday’s conclusion a limitation. He ends by calling himself an endless seeker with no past at his back.

History. The argument that there is one mind common to all individuals, so that the past is not foreign. Everything Plutarch records was done by someone with your faculties; read history as your own biography and it becomes legible.

Compensation. That every excess produces a defect and every deficit an advantage, that nothing is got for nothing, and that the world settles accounts. It is the most conventionally consoling of the essays and the one Emerson wrote after his brother died.

Experience. The great essay of the second series and the darkest thing he wrote. It opens by asking where we find ourselves, describes life as a series of moods succeeding each other like beads on a string, each showing only what lies in its own focus, and confesses that grief teaches nothing and takes nothing away. It was written after his five-year-old son Waldo died of scarlet fever, and he says the calamity has not brought him one step into real nature, that he cannot get it nearer to him, that it is a fact to be reckoned with and nothing else. Anyone who finds Self-Reliance glib should read this one.

The Poet. The essay Whitman read and answered with Leaves of Grass. It calls for an American poet adequate to the material, and observes that America is a poem in our eyes and will not wait long for metres.

How to read it

Read Self-Reliance first and then Experience, in that order. The first is the position and the second is what happened when life tested it, and the pair is the truest picture of Emerson.

Read slowly and one essay at a time. The sentences arrive in volleys and reading twenty pages quickly produces a pleasant blur and no retention.

Do not look for arguments. Emerson stated his own method: he writes what he thinks today in strong words and tomorrow will state what he thinks tomorrow, though it contradict it. The essays are a series of attacks on the same subject from different positions.

Resist the quotability, or at least notice it. Emerson is the most extractable prose writer in English and the sentences are built to be carried off. That is why he has been absorbed into motivational culture, often in ways that remove the strangeness, and it is worth asking whether a philosophy made of detachable sentences can be held to anything.

Read Nature first if you can, for the programme, and Thoreau afterwards for what happens when someone actually tries to live the advice.

Weigh the politics honestly. The essays are individualist to the point of indifference toward organised reform, and Emerson was sceptical of the abolitionist societies for years. He also, from 1844, spoke publicly against slavery, attacked the Fugitive Slave Act as a filthy enactment and said he would not obey it, and supported John Brown. The relation between the essays’ detachment and the later activism is a real question.

Questions it raises

• If what is true in your private heart is true for all, what happens when two private hearts disagree?
• Emerson calls consistency a hobgoblin. Is there any way to distinguish intellectual growth from simply not being accountable for what you said?
• Society is a conspiracy against its members. Does he owe an account of what anyone owes anyone else, and does he give one?
• The Over-Soul turns self-trust into reverence. Without that metaphysics, is self-reliance anything more than confidence?
• Experience says grief teaches nothing. Can that sit in the same volume as Compensation, which says the world settles accounts?
• His sentences have been absorbed into a culture of self-improvement he would probably have despised. Is that a misuse, or the natural fate of a philosophy written in aphorisms?