The Emersonian intelligentsia would smile to discover such remarks made by a man so hardly acquainted with Emerson and what he wrote. But who can draw inferences too extreme from an author who wishes history would dissolve and who doesn’t care that his verdicts about it might be taken advantage of by future disciples who would then treat history as a ball of clay to be molded into the story that they wish history revealed? It is writers like Emerson who are to blame for that deceitful genre called ‘historical fiction.’ It is writers like Emerson who are responsible for the rewriting of history in our universities. It is because of writers like Emerson that the past is looked at through self-centered microscopes like ‘black history’ or ‘gender studies.’ When a literary pundit wants to put a writer on a pedestal, he has only to speak of him as being ‘Emersonian.’ By that single move, the writer who is likened to Emerson is elevated to the pretentious status that Emerson accords to the legendary gods that he praises so embarrassingly often. Then, some ignorant listener or other, upon hearing the word ‘Emersonian,’ marches like a drone to the bookstore to acquire the latest book that was written by the newly minted genius. After reading just one essay by Emerson, however, a reader may conclude, and should conclude, that both Emerson and his disciples do not transcend anything except knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. As empty as their writings are, they cause a lot of trouble by mistreating history, which they commonly do from the windows of their ivory towers or the turrets of their visionary castles. Besides the Bible, itself largely historical, there is nothing that we need to understand more than history. The past may or may not be about what our present grievance is; and the past can never be about what we wish it to have been.
Having said all of that, the style of Emerson’s essay is attractive. It appears at a glance that the same could be said about his essays generally. The structure, though not the content, always tends toward clarity. The sentences feel short even when they are long because words follow words in proper order. And because places, characters, and even groups like Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca (p. 20) occur with such frequency, the reader is kept in a sort of breathless expectation of what he might encounter next. But alas! one soon begins to feel disappointed after fancy word after fancy word comes up empty of content. You get to big, shiny presents only to discover that they are as empty as the Christmas boxes the department stores put out in December just for show. Incidentally, it is my opinion that Emerson might have borrowed his listing technique from Robert Burton’s once popular Anatomy of Melancholy, which is partly why Burton’s oeuvre is so often arresting. (Burton probably borrowed the technique from the Bible, as in Romans 1.29-31.)
I agree somewhat with Andrew George in his Biographical Note that in these writings there is ‘diction at once so rich and so homely’ (p. xxiv.) But what are rich and homely words worth unless they’re packed with meaning? The following caused me to have an existential, ontological quiver: “Who knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national exultation or alarm?” (p. 28.) One time I gleaned a moral: “We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and sensual” (p. 26.) This is a decent, articulate thought as long as it’s not informed by all that Emerson defined as good, beautiful, unjust, and sensual. And once, though in a passage that is mystical in the bad sense, I got a shiver of excitement from being reminded of what it feels like to come upon a scene that was waiting to work something extraordinary into my experience: “A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabited them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward” (p. 13.) But these attractions are too occasional to commit the picky reader to these essays when better books may be bought for just a few dollars. Sainte-Beuve includes among his criteria for defining a true classic—that which has caused the human mind ‘to advance a step’ (p. xxv.) This is what Emerson’s History failed to do for me. And I have no faith, and no reason to believe, that his other essays or writings will do it. In his day most readers were ‘those who would not give themselves the trouble of comprehending him’ (p. xxii.) Not much has changed, I think. If we hear anything of Emerson, it is because of the voices of the overly tolerant few or because certain persons want to be regarded by their peers as well-read. In light of all that we have from the 19th century that is wholesome and worthwhile to read, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is not worth the time; his writings are wholly unnecessary. Except for the princely style of his prose, he is, in fact, the epitome of Unrequired Reading.
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