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Emerson on The Scholar, 1833–1837
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
“The American Scholar” (1837) grew organically out of Emerson's thinking about his own vocation after he left the pulpit and began secular lecturing in 1833. The scholar described first in his journal is like Emerson himself at the time, an inactive observer or “Watcher” preparing himself for some still-undefined public service. Later, Emerson developed his ideal figure of “the true scholar” as a writer and teacher who actively guides and inspires mankind, just as he hoped to do when composing his first book, Nature, in 1836. The scholar as Emerson draws him is successively the “intellectual” or “spiritual” man, “the great Thinker” who “thinks for all,” and finally the type of Emerson's Universal Man. As “Man Thinking” the scholar is neither a narrow specialist nor the parrot of other men's thoughts; he exemplifies “the active soul” by creatively transforming temporal events into timeless truth. It is self-reliant originality and creativity, the objects of Emerson's own dedication, that became the central themes of the oration as he shaped it during July and August of 1837.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970
References
1 Parenthetical references within the text are to the following publications : EL = The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959; The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1964- ); JMN=The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1960- ) ; L = The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939); W — The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1903–04). The present essay is an outgrowth of editorial work with Emerson manuscripts in the Houghton Library when JMN, v, was in preparation. Completion of the study was assisted by a grant from the Research Committee of the Graduate School, The University of Wisconsin-Madison.
2 See Henry Nash Smith, “Emerson's Problem of Vocation: A Note on ‘The American Scholar’,” NEQ, xii (March 1939), 52–67.
3 Robert E. Spiller, “From Lecture into Essay: Emerson's Method of Composition,” The Literary Criterion, v (Winter 1962), 28.
4 Stephen ?. Whicher, Introd. to Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957), p. xviii.
5 Cancellations in the manuscript journals are indicated here, as in JMN, by angle brackets: (…); insertions are indicated by paired arrows: ? … ?.
6 The phrase comes from an extract that Emerson had copied in 1832 from a magazine report of one of Schiller's lectures (JMN, vi, 107). The content was evidently in his mind two years later when he referred to Schiller as “prescribing the ethics of the Scholar” (JMN, iv, 367).
7 Emerson's manuscript Journal B, p. 128 (JMN, v, 116—117), reproduced as Plate ? in Emerson's Nature: Origin, Growth, Meaning, ed. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and Alfred R. Ferguson (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1969), p. 4.
8 See Kenneth Burke, “I, Eye, Ay—Emerson's Early Essay ‘Nature’: Thoughts on the Machinery of Transcendence,” in Transcendentalism and Its Legacy, ed. Myron Simon and Thornton H. Parsons (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 3–24. Transcendence, according to Burke, p. 23, “involves dialectical processes whereby something HERE is interpreted in terms of something THERE, something beyond itself.”
9 Emerson had formulated the “secret” in a journal entry of 7 May 1837 describing the sermon of a young Concord minister who failed to convert “one jot” of experience into wisdom for his hearers (JMN, v, 324). The Divinity School Address of 1838, which also draws on this same passage, applies the phrasing specifically to the work of the ministry (W, i, 138).
10 Contrast Emerson's earlier words in Nature: the soul “is a watcher more than a doer, and it is a doer, only that it may the better watch” (W, I, 60).
11 In the journal version Emerson had written: “. . . his life, life metamorphosed” (JMN, v, 464).
12 On man's “degenerate state,” or “degradation,” see Nature, W, i, 70 (“In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, … all history is but the epoch of one degradation”), and the Divinity School Address, W, i, 127.
13 Emerson had been more explicit in a passage of Nature that throws light on his understanding of creativity: “spirit creates; . . . spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us.” Man, who “has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view . . . animates me to create my own world through the purification of my soul” (W, i, 63–64).
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