I

The question as to what is political and what is not is itself political, as commentators from Marx to contemporary theorists have noted. The surges and currents that swirled around the ideological divisions in the United States during the fifteen or twenty years that preceded the Civil War testify to the accuracy of the observation. In the 1840s and 1850s America was marked by internal struggles not only over the implications of slavery, abolition, and the breakup of the party groupings, Whig and Democrat, that had dominated popular loyalties and elections for forty years, but also over cultural and philosophical issues such as the range of meanings of certain terms (“property,” or “rights”), the virtue or otherwise of certain imaginative fictions (Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example), and the borderline between a rational belief in universal human progress and a more subjective one in a hierarchy of humanity sanctioned by either Scripture or anthropology, or by both. The controversies of that era were as much about the bare existence of particular discourses as they were about the constitutional legitimacy of the southern racial and economic order (and the implications, after the US Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, of such legitimacy for America as a wholeFootnote ¹). The sites of conflict ran the gamut from text to context, from the poetics of political speeches to the politics of literary culture, extending from dueling essays in the northern journals and magazines, through animosity-filled confrontations in the Congress, to actual armed skirmishes in the Kansas territory involving John Brown and others unfriendly to casual compromise. Both the drama and the unease of that period can be sensed in the retrospective lines of Herman Melville's “Misgivings,” from his post-Civil War collection Battle-Pieces: “I muse upon my country's ills—/ The tempest bursting from the waste of Time/ On the world's fairest hope linked with man's foulest crime.”Footnote ²

In this narrative of events, the role of American authors, of whom Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the most significant, is a problematic one. Contemporary scholarship has drawn attention to a difficult question: how consistently Emerson and other literary artists, often but not always supporters of major reform including the antislavery cause, might be seen as coming to grips with the stark choices and violent implications—and indeed the violence itself—of that confrontational era. As John Carlos Rowe has argued in At Emerson's Tomb, the case of Emerson in particular points to an irresolvable contradiction between Transcendentalist thought and the drive toward urgent social change, a kind of structural flaw reflected in the “aesthetic ideology” of the wider American literary project in the nineteenth century.Footnote ³ Rowe's declared intention in his book was to challenge the overvaluation of individual aesthetic dissent, as opposed to collective action, in American cultural history. However, while that book offered some new and refreshing criteria for assessing American authorial careers, it elided, as I show below, several issues critical to grasping Emerson's politics. First, even Emerson's Transcendentalist posture in the early 1840s was more open to the attractions and dangers of political action than the notion of his dismissal of collective action would suggest. At the same time, the changes in Emerson's position over the early 1850s, with particular regard to the politics of antislavery advocacy and the nature of national identity, go beyond the question of the embrace, or refusal, of active political involvement.Footnote ⁴ This complex shift is dramatically demonstrated in Emerson's key political text of these years, his travel narrative English Traits. Published in 1856, the book represents a moment of both transitional politics and transitional poetics—not only a shift in position, but also a shift in Emerson's language and discursive style that cannot be separated from it. As I discuss in the final section of the essay, it is this new and somewhat provisional aesthetic of voice, metaphor, and structure that moves English Traits closer to the ironic literary fictions of the American Renaissance, such as Melville's shorter narratives or Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, and further from the speculative, aphoristic idealism of Emerson's earlier production as writer and lecturer in the era of the Transcendentalist Club and the Dial. Emerson's experience of Britain and the English in English Traits altered the nature of his thinking on government and politics and showed to what degree his earlier ideas were able—or sometimes less than able—to deal with the impressive and even seductive dimensions of English culture and British power at mid-century.Footnote ⁵

Although only one of a range of his writings on politics from the early 1840s (including “Lecture on the Times” and “Emancipation in the British West Indies”), Emerson's essay “Politics” in the 1844 collection Essays: Second Series stakes a distinctive claim with its critique of the lack of credibility of political rhetoric and activity when set against a larger vision of human reality. It is not that politics is without influence or practical importance, Emerson suggests, but rather that the available forms of electoral process, government policy, and state power are inadequate partners for anything like consistent and imaginative human thought. The great problem of politics within the parameters of the normal is that it possesses no language in which to tell the truth. In fact, it cannot even manage its own use as a descriptive term. As Emerson writes, “What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick.”Footnote ⁶ The issue is ultimately not one of semantics, however, but rather of the capacity of politics to grasp and articulate more than the fantasies of radical reformers or the evasive maneuvers of governments. Emerson has a double complaint in this essay. The first part relates to the absence of a basic, consistent grasp of the underlying structures of social energy and moral virtue and the second concerns the failure of political energies to marry a sense of shared humanity to the desire for reform. The “so-called popular party”—presumably Emerson's dismissive term for the confident and combative Democratic Party in its post-Jacksonian vigor—is “not loving; it has not ulterior or divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness” (CW, 3: 123). The party has a legitimate desire to spread citizenship widely and remove the dead hand of social privilege, but lacks the generosity to see through the rhetoric and resentments of today to the configuration of tomorrow. In sharp contrast, the “conservative party” is indicted by Emerson for intellectual timidity and a knee-jerk defense of property rights. Beyond Democrat and Whig myopia, therefore, what is required for the positive energies of the social order to be released is a politics of both intelligence and empathy.Footnote ⁷

The question of how empathy in particular can avoid being distorted in political culture is a theme of some importance in a text that significantly complements “Politics”—the March 1844 lecture entitled “New England Reformers,” which appears as the concluding entry in Essays: Second Series. The latter piece has a stronger satirical and polemical drive than the former, and the audience's attention is directed by Emerson to the discrepancy between the obsessive goodwill of the agitator and reformer and the realization, from another perspective, that such goodwill can be a hair's breadth away from a compulsive neurosis that disables the reformer from understanding the relative, rather than the absolute, importance of his own particular desires. Emerson writes that “society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him: he has become tediously good in some particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest” (CW, 3: 154). The question here is unavoidable: whether American political idealism, represented by a figure whose moral outrage (like Hollingsworth in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance) is fused with a complete lack of emotional sensitivity to others, might not be in danger of becoming a pathology. To a significant extent, the matter of self-renovation remains very active. Thus for Emerson, straddling somewhat conservative and somewhat radical perspectives, depending upon the issue at hand, politics would appear to demand a pragmatic realignment of the self as much as an ideal realignment of the social context. Indeed, without a realignment of the self it would appear that no real experience of the political is worth the time expended: negligence and narrowness lie in wait for those who have only moral critique to guide them. Nevertheless, Emerson makes one interesting move in this particular lecture that he does not quite achieve in “Politics”: he suggests that a life lived within the establishment, perhaps even lived in close proximity to compromise, that brings that establishment's own purported values from theory into practice, could be worth more than a life of oppositional, and therefore ineffectual, virtue (CW, 3: 154–5). One might say that a certain pragmatic gesture graces “New England Reformers” that may point in the direction of future transformations.

Indeed, taken together, both “New England Reformers” and “Politics” reflect a complexity of resignation and optimism, or optimism shadowed by resignation, which seemed to haunt Emerson at that stage of his life—resignation about the contingent and narrow-minded thinking that marked mainstream American politics, and optimism regarding the capacity of the consciousness to see through, or behind, the smoke and mirrors to grasp certain key political ideas and energies.Footnote ⁸ Passages such as the following, from “Politics,” sketch a diagnosis of the condition:

That this “real worth” is not at hand and yet is, potentially, within our grasp makes this piece both American jeremiad and Transcendentalist mission statement. The “Politics” of 1844 says that we must try to grope our way through the shoddy compromises that occlude the way to truth.

In Emerson's case, however, the direction of that effort will be eastward across the Atlantic, back to the origins of American ideas of politics and political liberty. The report on that journey, appearing almost twelve years later, is English Traits, a book-length exercise in “self-probing,” as David M. Robinson has termed itFootnote ⁹; it represents both the transatlantic deployment of the principles and vision of “Politics,” of the republican thought embodied in that essay, and also, paradoxically, the inner sacrifice of those principles and that vision to a new, more pragmatic, perhaps even sardonic concept of politics, culture, and national identity: a slow turn toward realpolitik in both thought and expression. English Traits is, one could say with a little exaggeration, a report on the moment when the irresistible force of Emerson's long-nurtured speculative imagination connected with the immovable object of British actuality.

As Emerson found himself in a more complex and more complicit relationship with the nature of British intellectual and political power, therefore, that relationship demanded a focused critical intelligence to understand its procedures and meanings. His long and searching account of his sojourn in Britain would eventually take its place within a tradition bounded at one end by such intellectually ambitious works as Madame de Staël's influential study of nation and culture Germany (translated into English in 1813), as well as the first transatlantic sociological reading of a democratic polity, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835 and 1840 in English translation), and at the other by the more widely read and often idiosyncratic transatlantic memoirs by both British and American authors such as Washington Irving, Harriet Martineau, Fanny Trollope, and Charles Dickens. Despite the worthy goal of objective engagement, however, Emerson knew that his judgments could not be made, his essays and his book not be written, unless he showed some deeper, more intuitive feeling for the British, their behavior, and their institutions: an entirely critical travel report would be inadequate, even if justified by experience. English Traits is, therefore, “one of the most divided books he would write”Footnote ¹⁰ : it has the difficult job of keeping both awe and rejection operating in tandem, and it manages at times to share with its object—Britain—a certain operative dullness, a kind of well-organized and secure self. In effect, English Traits is a less than favored text among scholars of Emerson and Transcendentalism precisely because it does not display the unpredictable sparks and enigmatic undercurrents offered by the essays, lectures, and journals.Footnote ¹¹ Nevertheless, the book can also be read as a risky experiment in prose, perhaps even an audacious experiment upon the authorial self, one set in motion by travel and stimulated by the psychic skirmishes that were part of American intellectuals’ engagement with Britain and Europe. It was an engagement that involved “their own powerful wish to be original,” as Michael J. Colacurcio has described it, an originality that Emerson and other nineteenth-century authors knew to be a more complicated matter than contemporary American literary nationalism wanted to believe.Footnote ¹²

For its part, however, New England Transcendentalism managed to interweave an undeniably American style and feeling with an enthusiastically international and cross-cultural orientation, a combination that has had sometimes curious effects in the history of Transcendentalist research, with scholars’ intellectual focus being at times inwardly, at others outwardly, directed.Footnote ¹³ Without British poetry, German philosophy, philology, and biography, French social theory, Hindu sacred texts, and Italian national revolution, Transcendentalism would not have had the creative force and analytic energy that it displayed, in many different configurations, between 1838 and the end of the succeeding decade. The movement's originality was, in some obvious ways, a function of its eclectic taste in writing and thought. Indeed, the continual acquiring and promoting of radical ideas from beyond America's shores was one of the targets of Orestes Brownson's anti-Transcendentalist polemic The Spirit-Rapper (1854), in which a morbid interest in the paranormal, dabbling in international revolutionary politics, and a general decline in theological rigor together formed a witches’ brew of dangerous thinking.Footnote ¹⁴ Transcendentalism did not act only as a one-directional receiver and amplifier of European ideas, however. The case of Margaret Fuller, to take an important example, is at least as revealing a part of that story as that of Emerson, although Fuller's particular confrontation with significant political and existential challenges in Europe took on very different shape, and her intellectual development moved toward different goals.Footnote ¹⁵ As a general point, one might go so far as to say that the international experience of figures from the dissolving milieu of Boston Transcendentalism had personal, political, and indeed aesthetic dimensions—reflected in my argument that English Traits reveals a transitional poetics as much as a transitional politics.

Significant elements of Emerson's thought—and thus of his experience of transatlantic cultural exchange—had also undergone a kind of interim testing by way of lectures such as “England” and “The Anglo-American.” Both these pieces, which date from the period between 1848 and 1853, still reside intellectually, however, within the universe of speculation and aphorism that one associates with an earlier stage of his career.Footnote ¹⁶ Although the problem set of English Traits is indeed sketched out in these two lectures, the uneasy, self-probing quality of that book has yet to make its presence felt. For all their acumen and casual confidence, “The Anglo-American” and “The English” have little of that bidirectional interrogation under pressure that the later English Traits contains. Indeed, although the eight years that elapsed between Emerson's trip at the end of the 1840s and the appearance of English Traits can be attributed to the new and time-consuming demands of his public advocacy on the slavery question (and possibly to the fact that the lecture circuit was a more remunerative option than publication), the delay between experience and writing permitted Emerson to open up the text to resonances and implications that might have remained unexplored had it appeared at an earlier point.

In that deferral of several years—despite the lectures developed in the interim—there is nevertheless a suggestion of reluctance on Emerson's part, perhaps even of inertia, and English Traits can be read as a text whose final completion was welcomed but not necessarily celebrated by its author.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite its superficially documentary focus, the book is also in many ways the record of a deeper struggle with a radically different philosophy of power and knowledge, the outcome of which was ambiguous at least. Part of the struggle involves Emerson's seeking a transatlantic vantage point from which to take a new look at the constitutional and political difficulties of the United States, which eight years later is almost an admission that they can no longer be addressed effectively or sufficiently at home. In the “Ironic Coda” at the conclusion of this paper, I argue that the authorial posture of English Traits not only reflects Emerson's circling away from the positions he held in the 1840s (a movement which has been assessed differently by different commentatorsFootnote ¹⁸) but also points to the problem of reading this particular work—a text that is much closer to being an ironic fiction of transatlantic confrontation than a documentary travel narrative. The recalibration of distinctions between politics and nonpolitics requires not only fresh thought, but also a renewed grasp of how language and ideology relate to each other, which puts great pressure on the framework of Emerson's aphoristic logic.

II

The relationship of the US with its former colonial motherland over the first half of the nineteenth century was, in the area of culture, a mesh of conflicting attitudes. On the one hand, Anglo-Americans claimed kinship with an older, greater tradition of English literature and thought; in a less appealing way, they joined the English also in looking down on regions and peoples regarded as dwelling on the lower branches of civilization's tree: the Africans, the Spanish, the Irish, among others. On the other, Americans insisted upon a definable cultural independence that meant little to anyone in Britain. This shifting posture reflected an odd phenomenon: an ambivalent declaration of spiritual fraternity with a nation that had still denied the United States equal cultural status. It was a somewhat fragile situation, and to maintain both kinship and separation nineteenth-century American literary historiography needed to construct a fiction of cultural autonomy.Footnote ¹⁹ Contributing to this project, mid-century literary anthologies compiled by Rufus W. Griswold in 1842 and 1846 and George and Evart Duyckinck in 1855, for example—all in different ways attempting to catalog American writing as a field worthy of preference—reflected a desire to separate American from British literature while often being willing to concede to the motherland a baseline historical and aesthetic superiority.Footnote ²⁰ The inner tensions of that relationship, its mingling of fraternal belonging and callow self-assertion, overshadowed the broader transatlantic encounter, even for writers who had no interest in cultural disharmony. Thirty years earlier than Emerson's trip, even Washington Irving's affectionate and, at times, reverential engagement with England sounds the note of distance, of a critical awareness of dubious location, as he disembarks at Liverpool in 1815: “I alone was solitary and idle. I had no friend to meet, no cheering to receive. I stepped upon the land of my forefathers—but felt I was a stranger in the land.”Footnote ²¹ Irving, often cast as the weak link in the chain of American literary independence, may indeed have left a doubtful legacy in the good-natured, uncritical Anglo-American essay (which is not to ignore the satirical vitality of his earlier writings). His moment of insecurity at the port of Liverpool, however, is the one unmistakable note of self-questioning in the opening to The Sketch Book. The realization of an uneasy foreignness in what is, or is meant to be, familiar is echoed consistently in later transatlantic writing.Footnote ²²

English Traits is replete with Emerson's observations of details of behavior that are both distinctly English and eerily recognizable as transferable characteristics that others may adopt, consciously or not. He reports at one point, for example, on the presumably stereotypical behavior of English tourists abroad:

For modern readers, Emerson's description of the English, let loose on foreign countries and civilizations with their measures, their sense of superiority, and their groping empiricism, prefigures with some accuracy the stereotype of American tourists a century or so later—a demographic whose lack of appropriate reverence became the global butt of jokes on the lines of “honey-when-we-get-back-I-want-our-new-extension-to-look-exactly-like-the-Taj-Mahal!” The principal source of irony here, however, is that Emerson is really admiring rather than censuring the manner in which the English make their presence felt overseas—or rather, perhaps the truth is that he does not really know for certain which reaction he has, and thus communicates a certain desire to cheer and wince simultaneously. This unresolved oscillation between poles echoes throughout English Traits as the transatlantic explorer both confronts and opens himself to an assertive and, in its own terms, successful national culture that feels no great desire or necessity to put on a friendly face for the outside world. Indeed, not only has it no great desire to do so, but the flinty combativeness of English society is the kernel of that very success, and is recognized as such by Emerson.

Originating thus in an environment that could be less than warmly welcoming, Emerson's narrative strikes a sharper note, a more controlled and objective tone, than had been the norm for American literary observers up to that point. As Philip L. Nicoloff comments in Emerson on Race and History, English Traits “was the first book-length study of England by an American which combined depths of perception with a complete freedom from sycophancy and petulance.”Footnote ²³ But a query as to the motive for English Traits remains. One might ask whether there was anything in Emerson's career up to that point which suggests that a survey of the complexities of an entire country would be the natural or logical step for him, as a critic and thinker, to take. One pointer is provided by the argument of Emerson's Representative Men, published some eighteen months after his return from Europe, which is at base a delicate negotiation between the pressures of local and tribal character and the cosmopolitan resonance of the rare and historically significant master-figure. As one critic has set out convincingly, the implication of that volume is that the truly universal man—Plato, Montaigne, or even Napoleon—has been on a downward curve toward the middle-measure of contemporary nationality.Footnote ²⁴Representative Men, I would argue, establishes something like a preparatory ground-clearing for the later book.

Emerson comments in English Traits to the effect that a “wise traveler will naturally choose to visit the best of actual nations” (CW, 5: 19)—the most representative of nations, one might say. Taking “representative” as Emerson meant it—“a sign of the superior” rather than its other implication of “standing for the generality”—then England is a representative culture: for him, the English embody a unique self, a realized potential of human achievement and creative power. Nevertheless, evidence of deliberate self-limitation and moral dullness cannot be overlooked either. The sinking of the individual into the mass of the nation, or even “the race,” becomes a leitmotif in Emerson's analysis of the English: despite its tolerance of eccentricity and its traditions of free expression, England is home also to a hostile policing of new ideas and a political–cultural inertia which marginalizes the thinking individual (CW, 5: 172–3). In this sense, English Traits is both an attempt to explore a nation as if it were capable of individual choices, and a reading of individual behavior as a synecdoche for a national cultural psyche. And, as I noted at the outset, Emerson's reading of England reverses the dynamic of Transcendentalist acquisition of ideas and cultural interventions from Europe, directing those novel concepts of self and community back toward the place whence they came.

What all this amounts to is that a closely plotted argument regarding human values and meanings is built into the organization of English Traits. The sober inventory of topics which function as chapter headings (Race, Manners, Character, Wealth, Religion, The “Times,” and so on) should not be thought of as titles of descriptive analysis, or, at least, not as being merely those. Instead, each topic is explored as a source of significance beyond its relevance as one piece in the jigsaw of English culture. Emerson interrogates each aspect of the British system to see if it is indeed a value, and, if so, for what it may be valued, and clearly he feels both entitled and qualified to conduct that examination. One reason for Emerson's confidence was that his short book Nature (1836) had been a minor success, largely due to Thomas Carlyle's efforts to make the work available to a British audience, and the later essays had bolstered his transatlantic reputation. The fact of Emerson's cultural credit, however, must be seen against a different historical backdrop, one that was charged with political sensitivities around the idea of the United States within the matrix of British political struggles of the late 1840s and 1850s.

The radical forces represented by Chartism and its allies had a strong republican bent—something which had never been quite erased since the days of the United Englishmen and the British Jacobin movement at the end of the previous century—and the US was often enough held up as a country where political rights and universal suffrage (that is, white male suffrage) were granted by constitutional provision, and where neither parasitic aristocracy nor class deference had been able to take root. Conversely, British conservatives found the same ideas distasteful and dangerous, as might be expected. As Henry Pelling comments in his study of Victorian radicals’ fascination with the US, published half a century ago when British left-wing anti-Americanism was a relatively new arrival,

The United States had, in many ways without quite wanting it, acquired a virtual identity as the resolution of the morbid frustrations of the British class system.Footnote ²⁶ Emerson is not entirely free in English Traits from a certain amusement and even pride at this mutual transatlantic projection (looking eastward for cultural history, looking westward for political relief). Nevertheless, the more significant issue is that Emerson had, by the late 1840s, already come to regard expositions of American republican virtue as part of the battery of political conjuring tricks that obscure a true recognition of things.

III

To return briefly to the 1844 essay “Politics,” the principle at work was an investigation of the possibility of an American—or perhaps any—political culture that would draw its strength from longer-term ideas and less provincial terms of reference than had become the norm in the simultaneously provincial and expansionist United States, two terms convergent in the theory of Manifest Destiny justifying the country's imminent war with Mexico. Emerson surveys an American national landscape in which a myopic, cost–benefit-analysis view of things sabotages any longer perspective on the development of the society. The forces of reform are no different in their nature from the ignorant canniness of the political and economic establishment. The forces of conservative stability are “timid, and merely defensive of property” (CW, 3: 123), and thus part of a corrupt symbiosis in which all fail to understand the mission which they have jointly undertaken. Emerson writes,

Thus the possibility of a civitas which relies upon the moral potential of the individual citizen rather than on coercive institutions is specifically held out at the conclusion of “Politics.” Emerson's theoretical position here is at the point of convergence of Romantic and republican lines of inheritance, as Sam MacGuire Worley points out, and “Politics” demands, before any institutional validity can be recognized, “the establishment of true community.”Footnote ²⁷

Complicating the sketch of an uncorrupted, noncoercive state, however, is Emerson's more complex meditation, “Experience.” In that bleak text, also from Essays: Second Series, Emerson portrays a condition in which the individual is bound to struggle against a moral inertia caused by the paralyzing knowledge of existence itself. This inertia can be moved by the recognition of—or opening oneself to the power of—sudden renewal, often achieved by the sharp distinguishing of the self from others:

In the sense of a moral politics, then, the sacrifice of the self to the truth of the other is likely to lead to unhappiness on all sides. One question might be, therefore, whether English Traits resists any attempt to be assimilated to the facts of another, as a good book should. In the memorable formulation by Robert D. Richardson in his biography Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), “English Traits is a final reckoning with England.”Footnote ²⁸ The word “final” makes this a substantial claim for the outcome of the confrontation between the impulses of the two seminal essays “Politics” and “Experience” and the reality of Great Britain in 1848. The search for value, the distrust of tradition, and an easily ridiculed but stubborn belief in the original purity of thought indeed shape the contours of Emerson's intellectual mission.Footnote ²⁹ The case I am arguing, however, is that the transatlantic experience of 1847 and 1848 compromised the politics of “Politics” and made both its certainties and its pleasure in uncertainty equally and disappointingly unworkable in the new environment. Indeed, the transition from private metaphysics to interpretive advocacy is nowhere so visible as in the fact that something close to Emerson's “attitude of defiance and the feeling of impotence,” as Barbara Packer has described the curious emotional posture of “Experience,” reappears a decade later in the transatlantic discourse of English Traits. There, Emerson can't help seeing what he admires, even if he does not always want to admire what he sees.Footnote ³⁰

In a strangely prescient passage in the chapter in English Traits entitled “Ability,” describing the soft power of British commercial dominance, he deploys his insight that people's belief in the inarguable reality of a certain matrix of global political and economic power is almost as strong a weapon as the real-world weapons needed to defend that power against armed enemies. The English nation, writes Emerson,

Rather than all public policy objectives, therefore, as Emerson argues in “Politics,” being “vague and quixotic beside private ones” (CW, 3: 125), it would appear that in Britain government, commerce, and imagination have come together to perform a kind of modern creation story, raising not only a structure but also the symbolic and narrative fictions that justify and nurture it—indeed, that reproduce it as a set of global assumptions. Emerson is describing a phenomenon here that puts the speculative republicanism of his earlier writings under considerable pressure, as the making of the modern world would seem to be an act of power that looks very much like mass geopolitical hypnosis.

Again, one reading of the vision of British power in English Traits is that Emerson is now confronting something that forces at least an involuntary rethinking of the central principle of “Politics.” Rather than the state being a “trick” with a plausible line in popular rhetoric, in the globalizing British Empire of 1848 the defining reality appears to be the convergence and imaginative alignment of state and economic power. “Worth” seems to be measurably present rather than beyond current human grasp—if one is suddenly forced to reconsider what the word might mean. Rather than seeing past the bells and whistles to the true configuration of human existence in society, it turns out that the bells and whistles are somewhere near the center of things, and can create their own truth—a truth that is a truth because people from the Thames to the Nile, from South Yorkshire to the South Pacific, actually believe it.

Indeed, the poetics of the global synchronization behind British rule might well be a type of “future tense,” an act of prophetic valorizing which is ultimately about the long road to American power and its own influence on the imagination of the world. But the creation of this “immense city” has not been achieved without a price, or without posing the question, who pays? In Emerson's anthropologically inflected reading of class conflict, the weight of historical plausibility is always on the side of property; but he also understands that social and cultural resistance to both the blind spots and the rational calculations of industrial capitalism is part of the larger historical equation. The Mechanics’ Institutes (vocational education facilities where Emerson delivered some of his talks), endowed hospitals, a national school system for all children, and the like, not only were elements of a reform program to correct abuses but also reflect a structure of value for the management of sometimes paradoxical class conflicts in a political landscape of exploitation, resistance, and the legitimation of power. As Friedrich Engels noted in 1845, the organized English working class was conscious both of its separate interests and of its potential future role as the leading force for common national progress.Footnote ³¹ What Emerson also perceives is, of course, that such struggles and negotiations are dependent ultimately upon wealth and wealth creation. The somber undertone to this central chapter in English Traits is that all, even its victims, have a symbiotic relationship with each other in a capitalist society—something that would emerge as a significant political problem for both reformist and revolutionary movements in the decades to come. The worker and the capitalist may discover that they have oddly congruent interests that tend toward a mutual ideological reinforcement; in such alliances, more radical forms of politics—a too-intense egalitarianism or a profound anti-industrialism, for instance—are often rejected by both sides as they would open the door to an unwanted instability in the economic order. The changes that have arrived in the slipstream of individualism and free-thinking are now the dominant ideological environment within which English industrial power has secured its place, but these principles may be inadequate to comprehend and master the new social uncertainties with which both the individual and the polity now have to live.

For Emerson, the painful inadequacies of American social and cultural life in the 1840s have made it worth asking, as he did in “Politics,” where such principles may be found at home. Now, he is asking this of another country. Britain at mid-century may still possess two important qualities (clarity in social forms and ethical consistencyFootnote ³²) to a considerable degree, he argues, but she is seriously lacking in a third: “free-thinking” has declined into a casual complacency that, he suspects, is insufficient to meet the economic and political challenges confronting the British social order. There is “cramp limitation in their habit of thought,” Emerson notes, and “a drag of inertia which resists reform in every shape” (CW, 5: 172). Mediocrity has taken root and is defended as a principle; innovation is hated because it innovates. Nor is this purely an establishment phenomenon restricted to a commercial or political elite. Indeed, although of course he does not use the term, Emerson seems at moments to prefigure Antonio Gramsci's wielding of the concept of “hegemony” in his sketch of how, for example, the individualist ethic so crucial to early capitalist development can be transmitted and appropriated across barriers of class, so that the values of a “dominant fundamental group” are, in some senses, shared by otherwise hostile social classes, even though that state of affairs has, at least to some degree, been shaped and supervised by the cultural imagineers of the local ruling entity.Footnote ³³ Emerson is uncertain as to whether the hegemonic power of the British establishment—the power that rests on a kind of grudging but instinctive consent on the part of the majority of the population—is as robust as its representatives would like to believe, and this doubt comes to the surface in a somewhat curious, in fact anomalous, chapter of English Traits.

Although much of English Traits takes a panoramic view of centuries rather than decades, Emerson did to some degree focus in on contemporary challenges in his speech to the Manchester Athenaeum in November 1847, which appears as the final chapter in the book. This particular lecture and the setting in which it was originally delivered open up yet another angle of vision on the class relations of the English industrial northwest. The Athenaeum, a social and educational club for the reform-minded business class, founded in 1835, was a significantly more exclusive body than the Mechanics’ Institutes. An institution of the enlightened upper middle class, the Athenaeum also reflected the commitment of many liberals to personal charitable activity and melioration that often went hand in hand with an almost pathological rejection of organized municipal approaches to the health, education, and housing problems of an urban community at the epicenter of the industrial revolution.Footnote ³⁴ Emerson's lecture plays with an image that seems to capture the possibility of a social or political failure of some kind—with positive consequences for the United States—of exactly that England he has been exploring throughout the entire text:

The reader gets a sense of this “elasticity” as a quality that his listeners in the Athenaeum might have been doubtful about, as elasticity in business, for example, is one thing, but in politics quite another. Despite what appears to be a warning of the fatal consequences of constitutional rigidity in the face of demands for reform—and the potential for America to benefit from such consequences—he is aware of his audience's sensitivities and the self-deprecating irony of the “Speech at Manchester” shows Emerson in fact treading more lightly here than elsewhere in English Traits.

By contrast, in the chapter on “Race” he produces a much more eloquent theory of the capabilities and liabilities at the root of the English character. From the bloodthirsty Norsemen with their “singular turn for homicide” (CW, 5: 32) to the still-existing penchant for brutal flogging in the armed forces in which, as he says, a soldier might wish for a sentence of flogging to be commuted to one of merely death (CW, 5: 35), Emerson draws the picture of a people who are constitutionally suited to taxing physical pursuits, energetic expansion, and the imposition of political and military power. As with the example of the boorish tourists, it is not always clear whether or not Emerson sees Americans as having inherited these characteristics; indeed, there is often a sense that he might be glad that they have not. His motifs, however, betray every so often a willingness to draw creative parallels between Anglo-Saxon history and the colonizing of North America.Footnote ³⁵ “The enchantments of barren shingle and rough weather transformed every adventurer into a laborer” (CW, 5: 42) is an observation which, with a slight change of vocabulary, could bring the ghost of William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation to mind—the first extended account of the English confrontation with the people and landscape of the New World.Footnote ³⁶ Revealing a somewhat ambivalent perspective on Anglo-Saxon cultural dynamism, Emerson moves swiftly from the “barren shingle” through the practical logic and empirical underpinnings of the English mind, taking in the industrial and inventive genius manifested in that history, and ending with a distinctive image of relentless collective progress which, again, raises some doubt as to whether it deserves unrestrained admiration: “whilst in some directions they do not represent the modern spirit but constitute it;—this vanguard of civility and power they coldly hold, marching in phalanx, lockstep, foot after foot, file after file of heroes, ten thousand deep” (CW, V: 56). Roman legions? Workers streaming out of the factory? An android army? The associations called up are suggestive, not to say ominous.Footnote ³⁷ In its milder criticism, the earlier talk before the Manchester Athenaeum had not yet had the benefit of that prophetic insight.

IV

As Philip Nicoloff has observed, Emerson is ultimately conscious, in English Traits, of the larger historical interplay between increase and decay, and between the stability of a nation's institutions and the kinetic surges of belief, struggle, and identity that mark human existence and of which institutions may be dangerously ignorant.Footnote ³⁸ The dogged unwillingness to forgo the bigger picture for the myopia of disconnected detail is the quality that makes English Traits a legitimate successor to “Politics” and the other crucial essays of the early 1840s, despite the pressure that his earlier positions are subjected to. Emerson aimed at providing a broadly ethnological examination of English society and institutions, and delivered thereby one of the memorable critiques of industrial capitalism, aggressive cultural imperialism, and emotionally dysfunctional social interaction—in many ways a counterbalancing text to Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England with its vision of a relentless economic civil war. Emerson's critique is also, as with many other aspects of English Traits, prescient about the emergence of such social phenomena in the United States—phenomena that defined the period that came to be known as the Gilded Age. He is ambivalent, however, as noted earlier, on the question of America becoming the next Britain—and even if that were to happen, he is cautious in the face of any suggestion that a mere reassignment of geopolitical roles is all that is at stake. To be avoided is the mistake, as he expressed it in “Experience,” of doing another's work or adopting another's facts. Upon Emerson's return to the United States, however, one close associate came to believe he had made such an error, and on a transatlantic scale.

The source of the tension between Emerson and Henry David Thoreau at the end of the 1840s can be located in a changed attitude on Emerson's part when he returned from England.Footnote ³⁹ As the two friends had arranged, all through Emerson's absence in England Thoreau had been living at Emerson's house, temporarily filling the place of the absent paterfamilias to help Lidian Emerson and the children. Emerson's return in the summer of 1848 ended this arrangement, of course, and Thoreau seems to have suffered real feelings of rejection. Although Emerson and Thoreau had never completely shared a set of beliefs, the mixture of personal affection and intellectual exchange had been, broadly viewed, a good experience for both men, although perhaps a more significant one for Thoreau. Now, however, Emerson had not only spent several months in the company of some of the more important players in British politics, culture, and science, but had also returned from his trip to England with what appeared (in Thoreau's eyes) to be an uncritical admiration of the efficiency, power, and imperial assertiveness of the British character and the British state. He had also enjoyed a long exposure to a confident eccentricity and unapologetic lack of conformity that had opened his eyes to the primness that marked social interaction in his own American milieu.Footnote ⁴⁰

Emerson had written presciently while abroad that if he spent too long there he would “lose all [his] patriotism, & think that England has absorbed all excellences.”Footnote ⁴¹ Emerson did indeed want, one can assume, some of the disciplined energy of British society to be appropriated by the United States and used in national policy-making, and English Traits was, among other things, the result of an intelligent evaluation of that energy, and that discipline. Evaluating the intelligence (in the sense of data one has collected), however, requires an unprejudiced intelligence (in the sense of intellectual acumen) free of the emotions of patriotic preference and class-based or otherwise limited political interest. Nationalism and uncritical national loyalties were never a given for Emerson, however, and as both Lawrence Buell and Paul Giles have argued, even the ostensibly nationalist rhetoric of the seminal essay “The American Scholar” can be seen as a double-edged thesis, as “a fictionalization of the idea of national identity” rather than the belated arrival, in the summer of 1837, of the cultural annex to the Declaration of Independence.Footnote ⁴² The universe does not write particular nations a free pass, not even the United States, and Emerson's remarks toward the end of English Traits contain an austere admission:

This deeply anti-utopian thought reflects Emerson's departure from any and all assumptions of a uniquely American ability to integrate moral ideals and policy choices, and to project the result internationally (an assumption that persisted, of course, many decades into the future and remains perhaps unquenched to this day).Footnote ⁴³

The transatlantic passage of 1847 and 1848, the crossing in geographical but also in psychic terms, has moved Emerson to a different place. The energies of English Traits are located in its capacity to penetrate through the misleading to the obvious, but also in the reality it ultimately discloses, which is that in order to exercise influence and bend reality to one's will, a new approach is required, one that looks to processes and empirically validated effects, rather than to principles and causes. Indeed, a curious note to himself that Emerson made while in England (“Only that mind draws me which I cannot read”) suggests that, for him, individuality has now changed from the embodiment of higher forces that can be interpreted at the transcendental level to a functionally efficient but otherwise uniquely mysterious (unreadable) entity.Footnote ⁴⁴ To put it another way: in contrast to the original Kantian hierarchy that made so much sense to the younger Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in the Transcendentalist milieu, that of Understanding (the positivist accrual of knowledge within a series of local contexts) being eclipsed by Reason (a structural and almost cosmic grasp of universal principles), it now looked to Emerson as if Understanding, the great British success story, could in fact trump Reason. “Local contexts rule!” would be one way of expressing this new recognition of things and its consequences. Thus, despite the international networks of thought and exchange that brought Transcendentalism to a height of conceptual intensity in the early 1840s, Emerson's English Traits is an item of evidence that the cultural identity of Transcendentalism could not be so easily retranslated across the Atlantic. That said, however, Emerson's empathy with the power and efficiency of British society, an empathy sensed and rejected by Thoreau, does not cause English Traits to be a soft-centered homage to Anglo-Saxon supremacy or even an act of cultural appropriation à la Washington Irving, but it is not quite the detached analysis it occasionally purports to be. Or, if it is detached, the detachment is also from America as much as from Britain, as Emerson has departed the domestic political morbidities of the 1850s for a transatlantic shadowplay in which his racial theorizing about Britain has a meaning at two removes for American race politics and the question of slavery—indeed, in this book, Emerson presents a kind of ethnological counterfactual that, despite its ostensible ease with terms such as “Anglo-Saxon,” tends to undermine the very concept of “race” that he wields so readily. In the wider framework of English Traits, coming to terms with both English inertia and English energies has meant, for Emerson, grappling with a new perspective on politics and culture; and for the book's speculative reading of the sensibility of a future transatlantic relationship, some quantum of the power and institutional personality of Britain had to be embraced at the molecular level.Footnote ⁴⁵

IRONIC CODA

Beyond the implications of English Traits for political and intellectual culture, there is a question of its novel poetics, and this is where a concept such as “Emersonian irony” or similar enters the discussion. That phrase not only captures a communicative act that bears a distinct relation to Romantic irony, the literary negotiation of creative expectation and textual limitation that influenced Emerson and many of his contemporaries profoundly, but potentially also opens up an exchange—which I have gestured toward with some earlier comments—on why the scholarly and critical fate of this work has been so curiously unsatisfactory. At issue are the various ways in which we fail to “read” English Traits (including not reading it). Emerson's struggle with Britain represents an altered field of “Emerson” as a literary–cultural site that we have, perhaps, not yet grasped—or one we have forgotten how to deal with, as it refuses to sit comfortably on one side of the barriers that separate the institutional study of national literatures. In a technical sense, English Traits is a mode of writing that takes something from Tocqueville, something from the extensive transatlantic travel literature of earlier decades, something from the unimpressed tone of the Edinburgh Review writers of a previous generation whom Emerson praises and dismisses in his first chapter, and much of course from Emerson's own writing history, but it is more concerned, at the end, with the gap between action and self-knowledge than with repulsion from or attraction to a specific ideology. Across that gap, falls the shadow.

In a passage on Emerson and Thoreau in In Quest of the Ordinary Stanley Cavell argues that in America “literature is neither the arbitrary embellishment nor the necessary other of philosophy” and that furthermore one implication of that recognition is that they should not be forcibly assigned separate berths in intellectual and scholarly work.Footnote ⁴⁶English Traits might thus be regarded as an exemplary American text, a “literature” that sets out to avoid the negative status that Cavell ascribes to it, and rather aims to be the organic embellishment and possibly the volunteer Other of philosophy. Such “literature,” although deeply rooted in the duties of abstract thought, must respond to the possibility that experiential and political pressures may demand—beyond abstraction—a stronger and closer commitment to empirical reality than the idealist tradition in which Emerson did his original thinking was able to offer. That this text engages in exactly that procedure, and that such a procedure was difficult for Emerson, although not impossibly so, is in my opinion at least partly attested to by the length of time it took for the book to come out—eight years after he returned from his visit to Britain. It may be that he did not want to admit some aspects of this change to himself (as Thoreau suspected), and that may in turn account for the kind of ironic tonality that marks English Traits out from almost all other Emerson texts. This is not a matter, however, of the introduction of irony to a site where it had been previously absent: Emerson had been experimenting with a particular modern variant of Socratic irony throughout his essays and lectures, a variant in which the less enlightened interlocutor is internally rather than externally located—Thrasymachus in the head, so to speak. Or, as a recent critic has put it, it could be seen as a mode of “conflictual collaboration” in which the participants are “all named Emerson.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Emerson seems to entice his inner Other into accepting an assertion that he, Emerson the author, has just made—an assertion from which he then immediately withholds the expected enthusiastic approval and which he often moves to undermine.

This structure is, I would argue, one of the things that make the textual coherence of Emerson's writings simultaneously so robust and so evanescent, marked by “effusions, fractures, and mobilities,” as Richard Poirier noted in his essay “A Question of Genius.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In Emerson's way of proceeding, an assertion is both made and undermined, but with a sardonic glance toward the reader who might have been overimpressed with the initial proposition instead of remaining sufficiently detached to roll with the immediately subsequent challenge that will inevitably arrive like a second wave. In the flow of Emerson's aphorisms, it is the momentary poise, the sense of a brief but effective equilibrium similar to that achieved by a ballet dancer at the apex of a difficult movement, that functions in such a way as to keep both proposition and objection from flying off into space on different tracks. Keeping an escape route open is the job of the musculature of the essays, rather than committing to one particular pole of thinking or conceptualization. To that extent, English Traits departs from the model of the earlier writings, perhaps because in that text Emerson has finally reached the place where he can no longer—in a memorable phrase—“escape from his own moments of utterance.”Footnote ⁴⁹

More of a hybrid text than anything else by Emerson, English Traits thus bears the marks of the embrace of Britain which in turn makes the assertion–retraction dynamic somewhat more difficult to maintain with the usual panache. Throughout English Traits the aphoristic style is often strained, as Emerson feels himself overpowered by, rather than in control of, the phenomena he is confronting. For example:

Emerson is a partisan of such sallies, and still defends implicitly the Transcendentalist insight, but the culture of the British environment is exerting a greater force on his imagination than he has dealt with before. The model of assertion-and-withdrawal (or qualification), visible in the key essays of the 1840s, becomes in English Traits something like assertion-and-withdrawal-and-reluctant-recognition, as the authorial voice realizes that he no longer has access to a supra-discursive vantage point outside the ostensible limits of the discourse. If the mercurial and gifted Reason, in the earlier Emerson, always had the advantage over the bean-counting Understanding, then English Traits shows that that is in no way a universally valid or unalterable hierarchy.

It seems to me, therefore, that English Traits is a record of Emerson's engagement with Britain and of his painful separating from a once-powerful intellectual and cultural legacy, seeking for example to replace an idealist republicanism with an analytic liberalism and an approving nod toward Staatsraison; in other words, he is now willing to substitute, for a concept of politics as the framework for an individual's trek through the slough of public compromise toward individual moral identity, a commitment to politics as an evidence-based tool for necessary change—the kind of politics, in fact, that leads almost inevitably to the exercise of executive power. In sum, the broader context is the changed literary and political atmosphere of the early to mid-1850s, when the United States’ constitutional order, for all its much-invoked strength and elasticity, began to unravel in a disturbing and ultimately morbidly destructive way. Appearing toward the end of a long journey in political, literary, and existential terms, English Traits looks both ways, back to the “Politics,” and indeed the politics, of the high Transcendentalist period ten years earlier, and more powerfully in a forward direction, to the chilly strategist of the Civil War years who in his journal in November 1862 compares the war to cholera with its necessary removal of weakened and infected humanity to the ultimate benefit of the healthy component, and concludes, “Let it search, let it grind, let it overturn.”Footnote ⁵⁰

My closing proposition would be, therefore, that we need to approach English Traits not as an “Emerson text” within the arc of Emerson's creative career from the early lectures of the 1830s to The Conduct of Life in 1860, but rather (or also) as a manifestation of the cultural poetics of the 1850s that was working its way out of the inner contradictions and processes of Emerson's thinking during that critical and uneasy decade in America. Cast into the formal mode of a transatlantic quest narrative, English Traits is Emerson's slow but conscious response to the interplay of confrontation, ignorance, equivocation, and retreat that also structures, often obliquely, many of the significant American fictional works of the first half of the 1850s. These texts include Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852), Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street,” and above all the latter's novella Benito Cereno (both published in The Piazza Tales (1856)), in which Captain Delano's inability to see the actual state of affairs—the slave rebellion—on board the San Dominick is inseparable from his belief in the inner truth of his Yankee moral education. They were the ironic fictions Emerson's contemporaries composed to communicate their sense of the ultimately tragic configuration of those political and psychic forces—not only of North and South, but also of the tendency to believe in the moral superiority of the American constitutional order.Footnote ⁵¹ If the politics of “Politics” from 1844 are Emerson's paradigm of the world before his recognition of the nature of power, and English Traits his imaginative rendering of that inner transformation, then perhaps England is also the absent “common usage and common sense” that Melville's narrator searches for in his struggle with the deadly American idealist vortex in “Bartleby,” and maybe also Silas Foster, the flinty and unimpressed Massachusetts farmer, unresponsive to the romance of reforming the social order, in The Blithedale Romance.Footnote ⁵²

In Emerson's case, the realization that the world offers few or no opportunities to resolve the contradiction between acts willed ideally to the good of humanity and their morbid consequences is staged as a drama of transatlantic ethnological investigation. The narrator of English Traits finds that one of those traits is to ignore, in favor of effective action, the passions and questions that have heretofore filled his own life, and in spite of everything he is intrigued by that discovery. Whether regarded as a self-disciplined farewell to an earlier, more idealist theory of politics, or as a deferred act of writing that appears too late and is, paradoxically, a more contemporary work than it might have been had it been published five or six years earlier when the American national discourse was not yet electric with crisis, English Traits has caused Emerson scholars to concede its existence without considering its significance, and to gesture toward its significance without facing its concrete difficulties as a text. But, as Emerson himself showed, in the history of ideas, yesterday's passionate certainties are no guide to tomorrow's ironic recognitions.