126 WJ to Henry James, February 6, 1887, *CWJ* 2: 80–81. HJ's review of Cabot's *A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson* was published in *Macmillan's Magazine* 57 (Dec 1887), 86–98, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000389431. In 1869, Emerson also showed his interest in the James' brothers by his pleasure in reading Henry's letters from Italy. WJ to HJ, December 5, 1869, *CWJ* 1: 128.

*Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy* appeared in 1897, followed by *The Varieties of Religious Experience* in 1902. Pervading these books were the same concerns voiced by Emerson and James Sr., but with William's own slant and conclusions. Then, in 1903, to prepare for Emerson's centennial celebration at Concord, James re-read all of Emerson's works.

5.10 William James at 61, 1903.

The overview exhilarated him, and Emerson's example gave him a career lesson. He wrote Henry:

The reading of the divine Emerson, volume after volume, has done me a lot of good, and, strange to say has thrown a strong practical light on my own path. The incorruptible way in which he followed his own vocation, of seeing such truths as the Universal Soul vouchsafed to him from day to day and month to month, and reporting them in the right literary form, and thereafter kept his limits absolutely, refusing to be entangled with irrelevancies however urging and tempting, knowing both his strength and its limits, and clinging unchangeably to the rural environment which he once for all found to be most propitious, seems to me a moral lesson to all men who had genius, however small, to foster … Emerson is exquisite!127

William's heart weakened in 1898. Aware that his time was limited, he would now follow Emerson's example and dedicate himself to "the one

127 WJ to HJ, May 3, 1903, *CWJ* 3: 234. Henry called both Emerson and Hawthorne "exquisite geniuses" and "exquisite provincials". Apparently, he was greatly moved by Emerson's supposed innocence — his father's angle on Emerson — that Henry Jr. equated with provinciality. See Edel, *Henry James, A Life*, 121.

remaining thing … to report in one book, at least, such impression as my own intellect has received from the Universe". He observed that Henry, too, had "been leading an Emersonian life",128 living in the English countryside, at Lamb House in Rye, since 1897. On May 24, the day before the Emerson memorial, Henry answered William: "It affects me much even at this distance … — this overt dedication of dear old E. to his immortality".129 Just after the event, William described it as a "sweet & memorable" occasion, an "aesthetic harmony" bringing back New England's "Golden Age" with its combination of "simplicity & rusticity" with "great thoughts & great names". Having devoured Emerson straight through, he now felt "his real greatness as I never did before". But after hearing "so much" from the other speakers, James also noted, "… There are only a few things that *can* be said of him, he was so squarely & simply himself as to impress every one in the same manner". James found down-home, Emerson-like words to praise him: "He's really a critter to be thankful for".130

Still, James Sr'.s reservation about Emerson's optimism had cast its shadow. Writing a friend only weeks after the Concord ceremony, young James criticized Emerson for his "'once-born'ness", his "extraordinary healthy-mindedness" that made him fail to comprehend "the morbid side of life".131 For James, Emerson belonged to the first of two main religious types — the "healthy-minded" and "sick-minded" — that he had named in *Varieties of Religious Experience* just the year before. He and his father, both long-term sufferers of physical and psychological complaints, were the latter type.132 But the younger James differed from his father as well as Emerson. Though he shared their quest for truth, ethics, and belief, he rejected their monist sense of a single agency at the heart of reality. He argued for a universal pluralism. Nevertheless, William's recent immersion in all of Emerson boosted his confidence. It was high time that he produce his own "magnum opus", "a general treatise" on a "pluralistic and radically empirical philosophy…"133 James, like Emerson, now increasingly preferred

128 WJ to HJ, May 3, 1903, *CWJ* 3: 234.

129 HJ to WJ, May 24, 1903, *CWJ* 3: 240.

130 WJ to Frances R. Morse, May 26, 1903, *CWJ* 10: 251–52; WJ to WJ, Jr., May 29, 1903, ibid., 252–53.

131 WJ to H.W. Rankin, June 10, 1903, *CWJ* 10: 266–67.

132 Allen, *William James*, 166–67, 432–33; Bjork, *William James*, 97–98.

133 WJ to ?, February?, 1903, *CWJ* 10: 208.

reaching the public by lecturing and publishing rather than teaching,134 and lost no time in moving forward.

In 1907, four years after the Emerson centennial, he published *Pragmatism*, and two years later, both *A Pluralistic Universe* and *The Meaning of Truth*. The latter tried to clarify *Pragmatism*, especially for critics who dismissed his test for truth as mere workability. In fact, James's pragmatism was not a theory of truth at all. Stimulated by both religious inquiry — exploring ultimate reality while accepting its elusiveness — and the desire to be scientific, James proposed a *method* of selecting one's beliefs from contending hypotheses: choosing between consequences. Admittedly, the process was subjective — even passionate — but the results were pragmatic (useful). As he wrote, "True ideas are those that we can *assimilate*, *validate*, *corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not"*. 135 This was James's complex scientific, psychological, even emotional test for his longstanding desire for a satisfying faith. After all, his *Will to Believe* had preceded his first description of pragmatism (in a lecture of 1898) by only a year. And as a close friend noted about him, "You perceive that philosophy is vain, because mysticism and not reason is the final word".136

Emerson's concerns — a devotion to nature, the transcendent and mystic, self-reliance, ever-expanding horizons, even a limited personal god — and his perspective and style remained James's gold standard throughout his creative later years. They led him to unfavorably compare George Santayana to Emerson in 1905, when Santayana's *Life of Reason* appeared. James assessed his colleague's book as "a paragon of Emersonianism", but also found it "profoundly alienating" in its "'preciousness' and superciliousness". He asserted, "The same things in Emerson's mouth would sound entirely different. E. receptive, expansive, as if handling life through a wide funnel with a great indraught, S. as if through a pin point orifice that emits his cooling spray outward … like a nose-disinfectant from an 'atomizer'."137 Early the next year, at Stanford, James asked his wife to bring with her from Cambridge Emerson's *Miscellanies* and both sets of his

134 Robert Dawidoff, *CWJ* 3: xxvii-xxviii.

135 As quoted in Myers, *James*, 298.

136 Benjamin P. Blood to WJ, August 28, 1907, *CWJ* 11: 433.

137 WJ to Dickinson S. Miller, November 10, 1905, *CWJ* 11: 111–12. Santayana, having received a similar letter from James, countered that he was a Latin to whom only politics are serious, and that Emerson apparently did not care about humanity's insane, disastrous acts in the name of religion. He also felt that James had missed his (Santayana's) allusion to a lost perfectionism in "some idealized reality". George Santayana to WJ, December 6, 1905, ibid., 578.

*Essays* for a speech on war and arbitration that he was preparing.138 He also stayed in close touch with the Emerson family, attending Ellen's funeral in January 1909.139

Later that year, James answering a query, assessed Emerson the intellectual with the same ambivalence as his father. Though he felt that Emerson lacked "metaphysic *argument*", his "transcendentalist and platonic phrases *named* beautifully for him that *side* of the universe which for his soul … was all-important". And if Emerson might undercut his own thinking in following pages, James did not fault this "literary inconsistency". He could state his largely ideal "monistic formulas" dogmatically, but he did not "*suppress the facts they ignored*", James noted, "so no harm was done". For example, James found the ending of Emerson's essay "History", with its "platonic formulas" "simply *weak* … but there are readers whom they inspire", he acknowledged, "so let them pass!"140 James ignored Emerson's metamorphosis from a young Romantic idealist to a more mature thinker, whose remaining idealism was frequently informed by harsh realities, private and public. 141 James's pluralism may also have led him to miss Emerson's "Worship" (1850), where he had defined mind as "finer matter" and observed divinity pervading every atom. Had James noted this shift, he might have seen that Emerson could have agreed with *Pragmatism*'s facts-first, results-oriented, ethical thinking.

James might have misread Emerson, but his ethical and emotional ties with his father's old friend had been and always remained tight. All his life, he agreed with Emerson's note in the "American Scholar" that character always trumps intellect. After eleven years of increasing heart trouble, ten months before he died in August 1910, James noted to a friend, "… the mere fact of being still part of this real world — the wonderful apparition, as Emerson calls it, has a zest which neutralizes a good many things. I never admired nature more than I did this summer. The great thing is to live *in* the passing day, and not look farther!"142

138 WJ to Alice G. James, January 30, 1906, ibid., 581.

139 WJ to Alexander R. James (son), January 17, 1909, *CWJ* 12: 149–50.

140 WJ to William C. Brownell, September 2, 1909, ibid., 314–15. Brownell's article, "Emerson", appeared in *Scribner's Magazine* 46 (November 1909), 608–24.

141 Barbara Packer points to the essential political and social context of the 1850s in which Emerson wrote his lectures, later collected in *The Conduct of Life* (1860). Historical Introduction, "The Conduct of Life", *CW* 6: xv-lxvii.

142 WJ to Henry P. Bowditch, November 9, 1909, ibid., 360.

#### Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959)

A dramatic example of Emerson's influence on the arts is the work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright's family, then his first employer Louis Sullivan, and finally Lewis Mumford, the public intellectual, architectural critic, and friend of Wright, all championed Emerson. For Wright, so constantly guided by Emersonian principles throughout his life, the result was a startlingly new, indigenous modern architecture, at once American and international in scope. Yet in his *Autobiography* (1943), Wright omitted naming Emerson when listing those he had "long ago consulted and occasionally remembered".143 Wright's high confidence, pride, and tendency to shave the truth made it difficult for him to credit anyone with guiding his genius.144

Emerson's message came to Wright early. His father, an Amherst graduate, sometime Baptist minister, and musician, taught his children to play a piano made by the Emerson Company (no relation). As a child, Frank's younger sister was awestruck that Emerson, the man whom she thought made this instrument, also wrote books. She reported that parents, aunts, and uncles often began their sentences, "As Mr. Emerson says …"145 Emerson's words gave Wright a rudder to face a life filled with considerable turmoil.

While Wright, like Emerson, grew up with fresh, post-war expectations (for Emerson, the Revolution; for Wright, the Civil War), Reconstruction in the 1870s was subverting emancipation in the South. In the North, tensions divided an old agrarianism and abolitionism and a variety of Calvinists, Lutherans, and Unitarians. Among these last were latterday Transcendentalists, including Wright's family in Richland Center, Wisconsin.146 This stirring mixture of social, religious, and philosophical matters gave birth to Progressive reform ideas and to the feisty, changeoriented, democratic atmosphere of Wright's childhood.

In 1876, when Frank was nine, his art-loving mother Anna Lloyd-Jones came home from the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, with its focus on

143 Frank Lloyd Wright, "Index", *An Autobiography* (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 561.

144 He boasted not to have read Sullivan, since working side by side with him, his ideas had been "an open book", ibid.

145 Maginel Wright Barney, *The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses* (New York: Appleton-Century, 1965), 59–60.

146 Finis Farr, *Frank Lloyd Wright* (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961), 15.

Britain's Aesthetic Movement, bringing materials to continue stimulating her son's interest in architecture. The movement's periodicals and books were already in the house. Earlier, Boston art critic James Jackson Jarves' *The Art-Idea* (1864) had nurtured a philosophical basis for America's Aesthetic Movement by combining Emerson's ideas with those of John Ruskin, Britain's premier art critic and social reformer. Together, these sources linked created beauty, democratic education, and moral uplift. By the 1890s, this hybrid British-American Aesthetic Movement was moving in two directions that both influenced Wright: the Arts and Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau.147

Before Frank was in his teens, his father's spirited but failed ministries led the family to Rhode Island and Massachusetts where Anna immersed herself in Transcendentalist thought, especially Emerson.148 Frank also read widely, from sleazy adventure stories to leading architectural books by Ruskin and Viollet-le Duc, as well as Plutarch, Shakespeare, Goethe, Carlyle, and a host of others.149 Simultaneously, during the summers from age eleven, he endured numbingly hard work on his uncle's farm, but that experience gave him unforgettable memories of nature.

At eighteen, Frank witnessed his father's forced departure from the house by Anna and her family. Two years later, in 1887, after leaving high school without graduating and taking two semesters of civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Wright headed for Chicago. Its disastrous fire of 1871 had led to a building boom that was producing the "Chicago School" of experimental, urban, and largely commercial design. Within a year, Wright placed himself with the company of Adler and Sullivan, one of Chicago's most successful firms. Sullivan quickly recognized him as a gifted draftsman. Wright's mother came to live with him in the suburb of Oak Park, where she gave a course on Emerson to a women's group.150 With this continuing link, Wright readily made the

147 Harvard art historian Charles Eliot Norton, friend to Emerson, Ruskin and Carlyle, also devotedly advocated art as a key instrument in building a democratic culture. He worked to coalesce America's technology with aesthetics. Kevin Nute, *Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan* (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), 10–11.

148 Ibid., 24; Farr, 7–8; Wright, *Autobiography*, 17; F. L. Wright, *Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings*, ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 113–14. Hereafter, *Wright CW*.

149 Ada Louise Huxtable, *Frank Lloyd Wright* (New York: Lipper/Viking, 2004), 37–38.

150 A founder of the Nineteenth Century Woman's Club, Anna Wright gave "classes in Emerson and Browning and papers on … the naturalist John Burroughs". Meryle Secrest, *Frank Lloyd Wright* (New York: Knopf, 1992), 225.

Emersonian-like motto of his mother's Welsh family, "Truth against the world", his own.151

But Wright's truth strayed from Emerson's. The frugal Emerson always dressed in simple black. Wright, often a dandy in dress, was capable of carrying self-reliance to excess: he fudged the facts of age and education, carried on several romantic intrigues leading to three marriages, and regularly failed to pay bills.152 Yet while ignoring Emerson's moral expectations, Wright's adoption of his inspiration from nature and his romantic spirit produced buildings of great natural integrity, despite occasional — or some said, more than occasional — leaky roofs.

In Louis Sullivan, Wright found an artistic soul mate and mentor, interested in philosophy, music, and art in general. Besides Emerson and Ruskin, Sullivan was also influenced by a wide range of Romantic and Gothic Revival figures such as the American sculptor Horatio Greenough and the English artist-writer A.C. Pugin, a leading student of medieval architecture. Emerson, who had met Greenough in Rome in 1833, noted that Greenough's 1843 paper on architecture had predated Ruskin's thoughts on architecture's "*morality*" (Emerson's emphasis). In responding to a letter from Greenough, Emerson referred to his theory of proper structure: "[It is] a scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to function and to site; an emphasis of features proportioned to their *gradated* importance in function: color and ornament to be decided and arranged and varied by strictly organic laws …"153 From sources such as these, Sullivan developed an architecture built on the centrality of nature: form should follow function and a building's decoration should emerge organically, flower- or vine-like, from its basic design. To these, he added the Progressive values of individualism and democracy.154 This collation of thoughts poured into his designs for the radically new skyscraper and high-rise, sure symbols of the optimism and ambition that built them.

151 Ibid., 46.

152 Huxtable, xv-xvi.

153 Farr, 79–80.

154 Mark Gelernter, *A History of American Architecture: Buildings in Their Cultural and Technological Context* (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 212–14.

Four years later, Wright, helped by family connections to establish a clientele, opened his own Chicago office. Sullivan had fired him for taking time from the firm's domestic commissions to work on what Wright himself called his "bootleg" houses.155 But now in the period 1893–1910, he independently launched a series of suburban dwelling designs that, despite variations, exhibited his so-called "prairie style": low horizontal outlines; a naked exposure of natural and manufactured materials (brick, reinforced concrete, or glass); informal and freeflowing interior spaces around a central fireplace; and when possible, a marriage of building to site.156 Wright seemed to be fulfilling Emerson's hope for a coming genius, not yet on the scene while he was alive, who would be connected to the "sea-wide, sky-skirted prairie". That prairie epitomized America's virgin land and was a vital part of Wright's beloved native Wisconsin landscape. Emerson had written, "I know not why in real architecture the hunger of the eye for length of line is so rarely gratified".157

As with his aesthetic ideas, Wright's style also hardly emerged *sui generis*. He avidly studied a variety of modernist artistic and scientific models. Beyond Chicago's urban engineering experiments were the international Arts and Crafts movement, technological schools in England and the Continent, the "shingle style" of American architects from the East and Mid-West, and Japan's architecture and art.158 Such inventive bricolage — puttering with many designs to combine with his own solutions — defined his genius. But what truly enabled Wright to unify miscellaneous sources was his commitment to Emerson's call in *Nature*: to make a moral, beautiful new world.

Midway through Wright's life, Emerson's influence was renewed through the critic and Emerson devotee Lewis Mumford. In 1953, Mumford both praised and blamed Wright's work in two *New Yorker* articles. The occasion was an exhibition, *Sixty Years of Living Architecture*, on the site of Wright's future Guggenheim Museum (finished in 1958). Mumford first heralded Wright as "the most original architect the United

155 Huxtable, 70.

156 *Frank Lloyd Wright & Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence*, eds. Bruce B. Pfeiffer and Robert Wojtowic (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), 5.

157 Farr, 79.

158 Huxtable, 76–77.

States has produced, and — what is even more important — … the most creative architectural geniuses of all time … the Fujiyama of American architecture … a volcanic genius that may at any moment erupt with a new plan or a hitherto unimagined design for a familiar sort of building".159

5.11 Frank Lloyd Wright at 59, c. 1 March 1926.

By the mid-twentieth century, Mumford had become a major cultural critic who leaned on Emersonian insights in becoming proficient in art, architecture, literature, theater, sociology, and politics. Already, twentyfive years before, he had commented on Wright, internationally known for his plans and perspective drawings in the Wasmuth Portfolio (1910) and for his long-term project in Tokyo, the Imperial Hotel (1913–1922). Then, Mumford had called him the successor to H.H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan, found in him a counterforce to Europe's mere mechanism (Le Corbusier), and celebrated his unity of function and style with landscape. For Mumford, Wright was as poetic as Carl Sandburg and Sherwood

159 *Wright and Mumford Correspondence*, 27.

Anderson in expressing mid-American values. After a second similar article by Mumford, Wright complained that he did not understand him. Afterward, they began an alternately convivial and contentious relationship.160

Mumford had problems with Wright's refusal to support World War II and other matters that led to an estrangement in 1941. That distancing lasted a decade, but on Wright's initiative, their relationship was restored. By 1953, with leftover tensions in play, Mumford's article about the Guggenheim exhibition was more critical of Wright. He complained of Wright's "America First streak", his disdain for European architecture, and his inability to learn from others different from himself. Nevertheless, Mumford applauded Wright's total humanism: "… his lifework has expressed the full gamut of *human* scale, from mathematics to poetry, from pure form to pure feeling, from the regional to the planetary, from the personal to the cosmic. In an age intimidated by its successes and depressed by a series of disasters, he awakens, by his still confident example, a sense of the fullest *human* possibilities".161

This critical but celebratory review magnifies the differing reflections on Emerson's iconoclasm that had encouraged the Mumford-Wright conflicts. Mumford on Wright was an Emerson-like voice speaking critically — with appreciation and rebuke. Wright thought himself Emerson's arch-advocate and practitioner. Yet the human, ethical, and organic architectural principles that both men championed against an increasingly materialistic, mechanized society were also completely Emersonian. In 1929, in one of his earliest letters to Mumford, Wright explained the enclosed draft of his latest article for the *Architectural Record*. He had defended his core values from anticipated criticism and commented, "… how silly and ungrateful to brand as weakness the radiation of character from my work. Just in proportion to this force, the artist will find his work outlet for his proper character, says Emerson. But no 'mannerist' could have made my varied group of buildings? I cannot hope, nor should I want to emancipate myself from my age and my country. And this quality in my work will have a higher charm, a greater value than any individual-quality could have". His next two paragraphs continued in this Emersonian vein: "The New in art is always formed out of the Old — if it is truly valid as New". And "Art does

160 Ibid., 6, 8, 9, 10–11, 21, 22–23.

161 Ibid., 38–39.

exhilarate and its intoxicating aim is truly no less than the creation of man as a perfect 'flower of Nature'. What an excursion!"162

In 1951, Wright and Mumford exchanged comments about Mumford's latest book, *The Conduct of Life*, a work twenty-one years in the making. As he explained to Wright, Mumford had taken the same title as Emerson's 1860 collection of essays "in order to emphasize the underlying affiliation, despite all differences in personality and philosophy, which you, dear FLW, were first to recognize". Wright replied, "I've missed you Lewis. Your's [sic] is an Emersonian mind but on your own terms. What a man he was and how we need such-now! I've read your little book [*Man the Interpreter*] and, what?  I shall never cease to be aware of the fact that I owe to you primal appreciation and support when it took real courage for you to render it. That I count as one of the real honors that have 'fallen into my lap".163 Two years later, after Mumford's critical review of the new U.N. building appeared, Wright quickly wrote him: "Vive the *New Yorker*! What other magazine would have dared? But the court-jester always spoke what other courtiers never dared utter. Emerson would put his hand on your shoulder and say 'my son?'" The question mark, as habitual for Wright as his underlinings, often means "is that not so?"164

This spiritual sonship with Emerson is a constant thread in Wright's life, from easily recalled Emerson references in early speeches to his later books. In 1896, three years into his independent practice, Wright spoke on "Architect, Architecture, and the Client". Besides invoking Tolstoy, Hugo, and Whistler on art, Wright quoted Emerson's simple maxim, "Art is life". Four years later in another speech, Wright again interlaced Emerson's thoughts with his own, "… we worship at the shrine of Nature and go to her for inspiration …" "We walk in the cool, calm shade of the trees, and they say to us as they said to Emerson long ago, 'Why so hot my little man?' And we wonder why, indeed, so hot!" In his book on urban planning, *The Disappearing City* (1932), Wright includes Emerson among America's fathers, who initiated a democracy "more just and therefore [allowing] more freedom for the individual than any existing before in all the world …"165

162 Probably "Surface and Mass — Again!" *Architectural Record* 66 (July 1919), 92–94. Ibid., 61.

163 Ibid., 195–96.

164 Ibid., 233.

165 *Wright CW* 2: 28, 43; 3: 75.

Emerson's concept of the organic in nature and art became Wright's central working principal. In *Architecture and Modern Life* (1939) he claimed, "[Architecture] is the organic pattern of all things. [The organic] remains the hidden mystery of creation until the architect has grasped and revealed it". Combining the two, Wright saw organic architecture fed by life, then returning to shape everyday existence and its routine rhythms toward new efficiencies and freedoms. Houses so built would not only guide human patterns of activity, sparing their time, but would stimulate "their sense of form in space, in color, in mass, and in action". As their "very texture of living" was improved, people would become better human beings. Wright's range of concern also matched Emerson's in serving the full scope of human needs, from contemplation to defecation. He asked: "Shall the child pause at the window for the view before he climbs fifteen steps to his play room?" And he lifted the lowly outhouse, now inside, to new respect: "… to those who believe with the modern poet that all significant experience may be the subject of art, even the building of a privy may involve architectural values".166 Today's focus on bathroom design and appointments echoes Wright's insistence that organic architecture should serve both body and soul.

In 1958, Wright's tributes to Emerson reached a climax in his appendix to *The Living City*. He saw America leaving the city for the country to be in touch with nature once again, a process made practical by the car. More importantly, he argued that such a movement would literally "ground" people. When "every man, woman, and child may be born to put his feet on his own acres", and when his house arose organically from that setting, "then democracy will have been realized".167 This appendix included excerpts from Emerson's essay "Farming" from *Society and Solitude* (1870), his words ringing true to Wright from his boyhood experiences on the farm. Emerson celebrated the farmer's primary creative role and farming itself as practical and poetic, but above all, as holy work. Despite Wright's complaints about laboring on his uncle's land, he now read Emerson's encomiums about farming and the farmer (a "continuous benefactor") as analogous to architecture and his own work. Emerson wrote, "[The farmer] … makes the land so far lovely and desirable, makes a fortune which he cannot carry away with him, but which is useful to his country long afterwards". For Emerson, this farmer (become architect for Wright)

166 Ibid., 3: 217–18.

167 Ibid., 5: 251.

was nothing less than someone whom the greatest poets "would appreciate as being really a piece of the old Nature, comparable to sun and moon, rainbow and flood; because he is, as all natural persons are, representatives of Nature as much as these".168

Frank Lloyd Wright died in April 1859 at the age of ninety-one. The funeral service was in Madison, Wisconsin, at the Unitarian church where Wright was a member. It began with Psalm 121, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills". Afterward, an excerpt from Emerson's "Self-Reliance" was read: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind".169 Wright may not always have followed Emerson's precepts of strict personal morality and high self-discipline. But as an architect, his effort to make his own way and to plumb artistic integrity consistently testified to Emerson's constant mentoring.

#### Countless Others

More than a century ago, William James noted that Emerson's influence, impossible to trace, had gone "underground". Today, except for some lasting aphorisms, Emerson's matter and method may seem buried. But beneath public awareness, they still exist as aquifers of unconscious values, social norms and habits of mind. More visibly and self-consciously, scores of Americans in literature, philosophy, political theory, social reform, and the arts have emerged from the Emerson font: Robert Frost, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Charles Ives, Aaron Copeland, Fitz Hugh Lane and the Luminist School in Emerson's own time, and Georgia O'Keeffe in ours, to name a few. The endless stream extends to a widely diverse lot — from his namesake Ralph Waldo Ellison to Allen Ginsberg, from Toni Morrison to Barack Obama. For Americans, Emerson is a given at birth, but someone who needs to be brought to one's full consciousness. For immigrants, he is a promise. For everyone, in a world that so evidently needs transforming, his simple recognition that "We change whether we like it or not" should be reassuring.

168 Ibid., 341–43. Just the year before, Wright had published *A Testament*, a reprise of his life and thoughts. He headed one section of the book, "POET—"Unacknowledged legislator of the world" with no attribution to the original Shelley quote. But he credited Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman with his self-image as a poet-architect, the world's first, he claimed. *A Testament* (New York: Horizon Press, 1957), 58–59.

169 Secrest, 13.

### EMERSON IN THE WEST AND EAST

### 6.1 Europe in Emerson and Emerson in Europe

*Beniamino Soressi*

A subtle chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings; The eye reads omens where it goes, And speaks all languages the rose; And, striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.

Emerson, "Nature", 1836

Emerson's phrase, "a subtle chain of countless rings", metaphorically suits this subject: the mutual influence of the West on Emerson and of Emerson on the West. These "rings" of influence indeed make up "a subtle chain", seemingly impossible to track, especially when generated by a variety of secondary sources. Nevertheless, its larger links may be identified, first with a brief overview of Emerson's debt to the West, then with a longer look at his effect upon well-known writers and political thinkers in South and Central America, England, and the Continent. In his fifties, Emerson noted, "… we go to Europe to be Americanized".1 The Old World, he had long realized, would be reflected in any definition of the New.

1 *The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson*, eds. Robert E. Spiller, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), 6: 78. Hereafter *CW*.

Central to all these mutual influences was a call to change in thought and in social reform by both idea and example. Unfortunately in Germany, Nietzsche misused central Emersonian ideas, which Hitler and the Nazis then further perverted. In Italy, the poet-politician D'Annunzio and Mussolini were closer to Emerson's texts per se, yet similarly corrupted his original intent. Fortunately, in other countries, especially France and England, he had more accurate adherents — from Baudelaire to Camus, George Eliot to Kipling. Through such widely read writers, Emerson energized the West's general impulse toward adopting more democratic values.

A convenient starting place for a brief overview of Emerson's indebtedness to the West is his choice of six figures from European culture in his book *Representative Men* (1850).

6.1 Plato, copy Silanion portrait, c. 370 B.C.E.

6.2 Emanuel Swedenborg, before 1818.

6.3 Michel de Montaigne, [n.d.].

6.4 William Shakespeare at 46, 1610.

He first featured Plato, the 5th-4th century B.C. Greek philosopher and classical advocate of idealism, who postulated a pristine unseen realm of ideas as a model for their imperfect reflection in this rough real world. He also wished to celebrate Plato's tolerance of unsystematic thinking, his own mental habit. Emerson thus revealed an unstated pattern in his selections: These great men exhibited interests and abilities that he either shared already or that he admired and adopted as his own.

This was true of his second subject Swedenborg (1688–1772), the Swedish scientist, religious philosopher, and mystic who appealed to Emerson for his theories of correspondence and for distinctively uniting science with mysticism, another one of Emerson's goals (see Chapter 4). The French essayist Montaigne (1533–1592), Emerson's third figure, complemented Swedenborg with his radical, frank, but balanced skepticism, halfway between idealism and empiricism, a position that by 1844, Emerson had also announced as his own. For his fourth subject, Emerson chose Shakespeare (1564–1616), a close reader of Montaigne, as the poet-dramatist par excellence for his penetrating eye and idiosyncratic creativity. Napoleon (1769–1821), the Corsican commoner who had become a great soldierstatesman, although cynical and egotistic, earned Emerson's praise for his absolute and practical self-confidence. Finally, Goethe (1749–1832), the poet, dramatist, novelist, and scientist, epitomized the universally talented, all-encompassing writer.

6.5 Napolean Bonaparte at 43, 1812.

6.6 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at 79, 1828.

Of these six, by time and personal connection, Emerson was closest to Napoleon, champion of European political revolution, and to Goethe, generator of the Continent's Transcendentalism, the Romantics' revolt against the Enlightenment's strict rationalism. In 1826, he had met Napoleon's nephew, Achille Murat, in Charleston, South Carolina. Two years before, Emerson's brother William had privately seen Goethe at his house in Weimar.2

Besides Plato, other classic Greek and Roman authors familiar to him from school and college helped to shape Emerson's early thinking. Heraclitus' sense of nature as an ever-flowing and changing river fed Emerson's view of a world of constant process and potential paradox. But equally influential was Parmenides' view of reality as a static, hard material sphere, eternally filling all space (the One). Such a notion supported Emerson's idea of an immutable unity at nature's core. He was intrigued, too, by the later neo-Platonists Plotinus and Proclus, who refined and synthesized these two images. Plotinus advanced an early theory of signs as well as the idea that Parmenides' One, emanating into ordinary things, reflected its perfection there. Proclus united old and new ideal views of the cosmos with pagan theological imagery. On a more immediate note, the Stoics Seneca and Marcus Aurelius complemented the Bible in instructing Emerson on how to deal with hardship. And Plutarch, model enough as a moral essayist, also taught Emerson to see history through the lens of biography.

Among later authors, in his essay "The Poet", Emerson praised Dante whose *La vita nuova* (*The New Life*, 1295) showed him "dar[ing] to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality".3 It seemed to him "the Bible of Love … as if written before literature, whilst truth yet existed …"44

Boehme's *Aurora Consurgens* (*Dawn, The Dayspring*, 1612) impressed Emerson with the possibility of achieving a natural and radically individual spiritual philosophy without any formal education. And on his aesthetic side, he admired Michelangelo's fearless, bold translations of inner torment into immediate brushworks and Promethean chisel strokes. As a model for

2 P. S. Field, *Ralph Waldo Emerson* (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 61.

3 *CW* 3: 21.

4 *The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson*, 16 vols., eds. William H. Gilman, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982), 8: 430. Hereafter *JMN*.

his own ambitions, Emerson applauded Francis Bacon's tireless search for power through knowledge. In contrast, Hume's radical empiricism and his anti-causation theory chafed against Emerson's life-long belief in "soul", with its free will, and in causation as a natural law. For a time, he found some comfort in the Scottish School of Common Sense adopted by Unitarianism, but rejected its pure rationality as he moved toward a Transcendentalism of the heart. Electrified by the grandly beautiful cosmologies of the scientists Herschel and Humboldt, Emerson played them against Milton's universal drama of humanity's fall.

6.7 Dante Alighieri, after 1841.

Emerson's sensitivities naturally drew him to the Old World's Romantics: from the young German writer Novalis, for exalting the synergies of poetry and philosophy, to Hegel, for his extreme idealism and belief in the generative force of *Geist*, or spirit. Schleiermacher's individualistic interpretations naturally appealed to him. So, too, did J. G. Herder's anthropocentrism and his view of man as an animal able to compensate for a loss of instinct by acquiring art and technology. In his essays "Thoughts on Modern Literature" and "Europe and European Books", Emerson found that Wordsworth's "wisdom of humanity" and

his "just moral perception"5 spoke to the essential, as did the English poet's sense of the "elemental" correspondences between nature, mind, life, and immortality. On a practical note, the iron determinism of the Belgian Adolphe Quételet's social statistics appealed to Emerson, as did the quirky wealth of W. S. Landor's *Imaginary Conversations*. More significantly, as seen in Chapter 1, he was early on attracted to Coleridge's literary criticism and poetry as well as to his fragments of 1834 and 1836. Altogether, these works enhanced Emerson's understanding of familiar classical figures, and, for the first time, introduced him to Spinoza and more contemporary German Romantic philosophers, especially Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. Complementing these thinkers, the startlingly fresh power of the French women novelists Mme. de Staël and George Sand showed Emerson a distinctive female perspective on manners and the art of conversation.

From this rich European legacy, Emerson built his own approach to pursuing the truth and transformed the whole into his "new thinking". For the most part, he had a positive, receptive view of Europe's immense cultural and economic heritage. But early and often, as in "Friendship", he came to warn against the tyranny of antique ideas, the Old World's actual or virtually "dead persons",6 and its corrupting luxuries.7 One of the first steps in Emerson's revolution was to try to end America's depressing nostalgia for England and Europe, a national "tape-worm", he came to call it in "Culture", eating away one's mind.8 By proclaiming the authority and trustworthiness of each individual, as guided by a universal Over-Soul, he hoped that the passion for developing one's potential "genius" would spread first in families and communities, then to the whole country. For Western intellectuals, this new faith in the infinite capacity of the single soul marked Emerson's most visible, radical difference from past thinking. Previously unrecognized as Emerson followers, certain Hispanic writers in the New World deserve first mention.

5 *CW* 10: 113, 247.

6 R. W. Emerson, 12 March 1833, journal entry, *Emerson in His Journals*, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 99; *CW* 2: 126.

7 "The Fortune of the Republic", *Emerson's Antislavery Writings*, eds. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven: Yale University Press), 139, 140–41.

8 *CW* 6: 77.

#### Emerson in Latin America

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), the Argentine poet, critic, and short-story writer, notably represents those Americans outside the United States who clearly caught Emerson's infectious message.

6.8 Jorge Luis Borges at 77, 1976.

Borges' devotion to Emerson, both thoroughgoing and lifelong, led him to state, "Yo tengo el culto de Emerson" ("I've made a cult of Emerson").9 In his short story, "La otra muerte" ("The Other Death", 1949), Borges openly preferred Emerson, the "great poet",10 to Poe, 11 and even ranked Emerson's poetry above his essays.12 Elsewhere Borges celebrated Emerson's verse as "spontaneously original", unique but never deliberately transgressing accepted poetic convention.13 (In contrast, Whitman "*tries* too hard".)14 For Borges, Emerson's "tranquil felicity" made him "the

9 A. Barnechea, *Peregrinos de la lengua* (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997), 39.

10 J. L. Borges, W. Barnstone, *Borges at Eighty: Conversations* (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 38.

11 "The Other Death" (1949), in *The Aleph* (New York: Penguin, 1949), 58.

12 This preference was despite his admiration of "The Poet", knowledge of little-known essays, and having translated *Representative Men, De los héroes. Hombres representativos* (Buenos Aires: Jackson, 1949).

13 J. L. Borges and O. Ferrari, *En diálogo* (Mexico [*sic*]: Siglo XXI, 2005), 141–42, 213.

14 S. Rodman, J. L. Borges, *Tongues of Fallen Angels* (New York: New Directions, 1974), 14.

most elevated intellectual poet", one who produced "very interesting ideas".15 Nor did Emerson's famous aloofness diminish Borges' empathy, noting, "If a poet writes in a reserved way, he is expressing himself".16 Emerson's poems were for Borges "engraved" or "sculpted", yet not so much visual and spatial as musical and temporal, "renewing the past each time he remembered it".17 In his poem, "Emerson", Borges echoed Emerson's vision in "Days" of a coming better humanity ("Quisiera ser otro hombre"). Of all the poems, Borges favored "History", "The Past", (which he translated), and in particular "Brahma". This last he thought very "clean" in delineating identity, quoting the line: "When me they fly, I am the wings".18

Emerson's ideas took root in many themes that Borges later explored: the pervasiveness of illusions and dreams; the varieties of time-perception, identity and otherness; the identification of "I" and the Eye; and the interconnections between the micro- and macro-worlds. He found especially appealing Emerson's notion in "Nominalist and Realist" that all works are inspired by, and emanate from, one impersonal writer.19 In 1967, Borges stated: "I think that Emerson is a finer writer and a finer thinker than Nietzsche".20 At a time when Europe's literary and philosophical circles were attempting a "Nietzsche Renaissance", to retrieve him from his ignominious association with the Nazis (of which more below), Borges' statement was audaciously bold.

Until his last days, Borges held Emerson in the highest regard. Blind and losing his memory, he wrote, "Elogio de la sombra" ("In Praise of Darkness", 1969), a poem recalling Emerson's "Illusions". In it, he lists greatly cherished things he knows he will forget; among them, Emerson is the single literary name. In the winter of 1962, Borges had visited Emerson's house, an experience reflected in both the line in "Elogio", "*Emerson and the snow and many things*", and in another work, "Poema de la Cantidad" ("Poem of Quantity", 1970): "solitary and lost lights / which Emerson

15 J. L. Borges and O. Ferrari, *En diálogo*, 136.

16 Ibid., 141.

17 Ibid., 213.

18 J. L. Borges, *Other Inquisitions*, trans. by R. L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 69.

19 Ibid., 10.

20 Recorded and quoted by R. J. Christ, *The Narrow Act* (New York: Lumen Books, 1995), 45–46.

would have admired so many nights / from the snows and the rigors of Concord".

Well before Borges, José Martí (1853–1895), Cuba's late-nineteenthcentury poet, journalist, and revolutionary, had taken Emerson's model of the active reformer more to heart than the Argentinian.

6.9 José Martí at 41, 1894.

At eighteen, during Cuba's first attempt to throw off Spanish rule in the Ten Years' War, Martí was imprisoned for six months for denouncing a pro-Spanish high school classmate. Afterward, he studied in Spain, then left for Mexico, and, for a time, taught in Guatemala. Moving to New York City, he reported on the U.S. for a wide readership in Hispanic America. Fascinated by America's model, he excitedly introduced his audiences to Emerson, whose *Nature* and *Representative Men* were his favorite works. In 1882, just three weeks after his hero's death, Martí wrote a radiant

hagiographic essay, "Emerson", in which each of his encomiums competes with the next, together creating a myth — eventually widespread — of an Emerson "who found himself alive, and shook from his shoulders and his eyes all the mantles and blindfolds that the past casts over men". "His mind was priestly; his tenderness, angelic; his wrath, sacred. When he saw enslaved men, and thought of them, he spoke as if, at the foot of a new biblical mountain, the Tablets of the Law were once again being smashed. His anger was Mosaic". Martí's unrelieved praise exceeds any evaluation of Emerson, then or since.21

In additional appreciation, he translated Emerson's poem "Good-Bye, Proud World". Two of Martí's own poems include Emerson in their titles: "Cada uno a su oficio. Fábula nueva del filósofo norteamericano Emerson" ("Each to His Own Work", 1889), and an undated long poem, simply titled, "Emerson". The latter focused on a mood of "Panic": "Nobody hinders his will / And lands and waters / Are atoms of his brilliant body / Which obey his invincible will". A similar exuberance fed Martí's continuing protest against Spanish rule in Cuba. In 1892, he started the Cuban Revolutionary Party, and three years later, returning to the island to help lead its second struggle for independence, was almost immediately killed in battle. Nevertheless, Martí became an "Apostle of Independence" in his country. Eventually, though Emerson was decidedly not a socialist, his work came to inspire Fidel Castro through Martí's example.22

#### Emerson in England and Scotland

In his lifetime, Emerson made three trips to England and Europe. On his first trip (1832–1833), he was only twenty-nine and unknown, yet succeeded in meeting four leading writers. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Landor represented an older, already distinguished generation.

21 José Martí, *Obras Completas* (La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1964), 13: 18–23, 30.

22 Ibid., 17: 154, 324–27. "José Martí", http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/marti. html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José\_Martí; http://www.biography.com/people/ josé-martí-20703847

6.10 William Wordsworth at 69, 1839.

But the rising Scottish historian and social critic, Thomas Carlyle (1795– 1881), was only eight years Emerson's senior. Carlyle's friend John Stuart Mill had warned him in advance, "From one or two conversations I have had with [Emerson] I do not think him a very hopeful subject".23 But Carlyle and his wife Jane gave Emerson a warm welcome. Jane remembered the visitor who "in the Desert [of rural Scotland], descended on us, out of the clouds as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only *one* day".24 In turn, Emerson liked Carlyle's frank simplicity. Their ensuing letters for a time document an intensely appreciative exchange. Each served the other as literary critic, agent, and press officer in their respective countries. Later, they would maintain their ties but differ over social issues, especially slavery in America.

23 J. S. Mill, August 2, 1833, in *The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812–1848* (Toronto and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 171.

24 Jane W. Carlyle to Emerson, November 7, 1838, *The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson* (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1883) 1: 192. Hereafter, *CCE*.

Most importantly, Carlyle uniquely strengthened Emerson's sense of his own powers. *Nature*, the Scot said, gave him "true satisfaction". He correctly noted it as "the Foundation and Ground-plan" of Emerson's work.25 Of "The American Scholar" (1837), he said, "I could have *wept* to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart".  Fearful I call it; and yet it is great, and the greatest".26 In the same breath, he demanded that his friend practice patient self-reliance: "Do not hasten to write; you cannot be too slow about it. Give no ear to any man's praise or censure".27

6.11 Thomas Carlyle in his 60s, c. 1860s.

Carlyle sent Emerson's lectures and books to friends in England and Europe, and forwarded their reactions back to Emerson in Concord. As early as 1838, he wrote of the favorable opinion of Harriet Martineau, the English feminist and social observer. She had met Emerson during her two-year

25 T. Carlyle to Emerson, Feb. 13, 1837, *CCE* 1: 112.

26 T. Carlyle to Emerson, Dec. 8, 1837, *CCE* 1: 142.

27 Ibid.

tour of America in 1834–1836. In her *Retrospect of Western Travel* (1838), she was one of the first foreigners to publicize Emerson's representativeness as an American as well as his special gifts: "There is a remarkable man in the United States, without knowing whom it is not too much to say that the United States cannot be fully known … [He] is yet in the prime of life. Great things are expected from him, and great things, it seems, he cannot but do … He is a thinker without being solitary, abstracted, and unfitted for the time. He is a scholar without being narrow, bookish, and prone to occupy himself only with other men's thoughts". Martineau went further, praising Emerson for neglecting "no political duty", for being "ready at every call to action".28 At this early date, such a description of Emerson's activist side by a foreigner was clearly both remarkable and prescient. Perhaps exaggerated, it nonetheless came six years before his 1844 Concord abolitionist speech showed his true colors to family and friends.

Before Emerson's lectures appeared as essays and his reputation grew, Carlyle's personal advice vitally encouraged him. His Scottish friend judged him to be producing "a *sort* of speech which is itself *action*, an artistic sort". He had glimpsed Emerson's gift to create words that breathed. Wishing him to sharpen this talent, he exhorted, "You *tell* us with piercing emphasis that man's soul is great; *show* us a great soul of a man, in some work symbolic of such: this is the seal of such a message, and you will feel by and by that you are called to this. I long to see some concrete Thing, some Event, Man's Life, American Forest, or piece of Creation, which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well *Emersonized*, depictured by Emerson, filled with the life of Emerson, and cast forth from him then to live by itself".29 Carlyle was virtually defining Emerson's true vocation and also, like Martineau, predicting his entry into social reform.

When Emerson's *Essays I* appeared in 1841, Carlyle welcomed them as the only true, alive sensibility that responded intelligently to his own. Emerson's was "a voice of the heart of Nature" that, although too imperfect to express the infinitude, was itself "an Infinitude".30 Carlyle positively described his friend's ethereal words as "light−rays darting upwards in the East", the promises of a "new era". Nevertheless, shortly after *The Dial*

28 H. Martineau, *Retrospect of Western Travel* (London: Saunders & Otley, 1838), 203– 04. Martineau's *Retrospect* and her *Society in America* (1837) have been compared to Tocqueville's *Democracy in America* (1835, 1840).

29 T. Carlyle to Emerson, February 8, 1839, *CCE* 1: 217.

30 T. Carlyle to Emerson, May 8, 1841, *CCE* 1: 352.

appeared that same year, Carlyle found it "shrill, incorporeal, spirit-like".31 Despite his own lapses from the concrete, this historian-philosopher always disliked whatever in Emerson he found excessively abstract, and rightly assessed his influence on *The Dial*, even though at that moment, Margaret Fuller was its editor.

By his second trip to England and Europe in 1847–1848, Emerson had become a literary star, internationally known as the author of *Nature*, *Essays I* and *II* (1841, 1844), the founder-editor of *The Dial* (1842–1844), and, in short, the champion of avant-garde American culture. But his "Divinity School Address" (1838), in challenging the need for any clergy to interpret spiritual experience, had spawned fierce theological controversies at home and abroad, leading opponents to call him a corruptor of youth. Also, Emerson's "Man the Reformer" (1841) had circulated underground in Britain as a little classic of radicalism before his arrival at Liverpool in November 1847. At Mechanics' Institutes, he addressed huge crowds of aspiring young workers and professionals in industrial cities such as Liverpool and Manchester as well as smaller elite audiences in London. Leading figures, from politicians and aristocrats (Lord Lovelace, Lady Byron, and the man of letters Monckton Milnes) to writers (Thackeray, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, and Matthew Arnold), all took note of him. In contrast, Emerson was in fundamental disagreement now with Carlyle over a range of economic, political, and social issues. Emerson was dismayed to find his old friend an "epicure in diet" and a "*sansculotte*-aristocrat", a "magnificent genius" lost in dogmatism and aimlessness. The two further disagreed about Carlyle's current hero, Cromwell.32 However, their friendship would continue in an intermittent correspondence all their lives.

When George Eliot (1819–1880) first met Emerson in June 1848, she was already familiar with his essays. A month later, she extravagantly described him as "the first *man* I have ever seen".33 Twelve years later "with venerating gratitude", she recalled his "mild face, which I daresay is smiling on some one as beneficently as it one day did on me years and years ago".34 At the same moment, Eliot was appreciating the "fresh beauty and meaning" of "Man the Reformer", which she had turned to for her "spiritual good". Despite

31 T. Carlyle to John Sterling, December 18, 1841, *The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial*, ed. J. Myerson (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 73.

32 *JMN* 11: 172.

33 Eliot to S. Hennell, July 1848, in *The George Eliot Letters*, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 1: 270. Hereafter *GEL*.

34 Eliot to S. Hennell, August 27, 1860, *GEL* 3: 337.

this appreciation, Eliot rarely noted any indebtedness to Emerson in her own works, except in *Romola* (1863). In her chapter "The Blind Scholar and his Daughter", Emerson's declaration of intellectual independence ("The American Scholar") transfigures her character's emancipation.35 However, Eliot's interest in reading his works continued all her life. His *Society and Solitude* (1870) gave her "enough gospel to serve one for a year".36 And on New Year's Day 1877, anticipating her own death which came three years later, Eliot recalled Emerson's stirring poem "Days".37

On this second trip to England, Emerson's awareness of the Continent's revolutionary unrest was heightened by his concern for Margaret Fuller, in Italy for the *New-York Tribune*to report on that country's fight for unification. In this context, he re-encountered Wordsworth. Fourteen years before, as he recounted in *English Traits*, his general admiration for Wordsworth's "great simplicity" had been qualified by surprise at finding certain "hard limits to his thought", assessing him at that time as "one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity".38 Now on this second visit, he and Harriet Martineau happened to awaken the seventy-eightyear-old Wordsworth from a nap. After silently pulling himself together, the poet gave way to a spate of bitterness about the French and then the Scots, intoning that Scotsmen were incapable of writing English. That included Carlyle, he said, "who is a pest to the English tongue".39 Emerson could not know that Wordsworth had long thought the same of him.  Where is the thing that now passes for philosophy at Boston to stop?"40 Although Emerson had always qualified his appreciation of Wordsworth, after his death in 1850, he remarked in *English Traits*, "His adherence to

35 See E. Fontana, "George Eliot's *Romola* and Emerson's 'The American Scholar'," *ELN*, 32, 1995.

36 Eliot to Oscar Browning, May 8, 1870, *GEL* 5: 93.

37 *GEL* 6: 327.

38 *CW* 5: 12.

39 Ibid., 166.

40 Wordsworth to H. Reed, August 16, 1841, *The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 7: 230–31.

his poetic creed rested on real inspirations. The Ode on Immortality is the high-water-mark which the intellect has reached in this age".41

In 1850, Carlyle praised *Representative Men*, ignoring the difference between Emerson's essentially democratic, self-affirming uses of great men and his own hierarchical treatment of parallel figures in *Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History* (1841). But he disagreed with Emerson about Plato, whom he disliked. He also regretted that his friend had ended each of his profiles with criticism. Six years later, Carlyle's enthusiasm for Emerson's *English Traits* was less qualified. By 1860, he especially liked *The Conduct of Life*, and ten years later, *Society and Solitude* as well. Yet he criticized a continuing optimism in Emerson, ignoring his friend's exploration of nature's predictably unsentimental ways in "Fate".42 During Emerson's third trip to Europe in 1872–1873 — for the most part, an old man's enjoyment of his celebrity — he twice saw Carlyle for a final time, their dwindling contact soon to end in old age and infirmity.

An American friend and admirer of Emerson, Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), co-editor of the *North American Review* and art professor at Harvard, was also a long-time resident in England and on the Continent. Eventually, he edited the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence. Paralleling Carlyle's trans-Atlantic role in enhancing Emerson's reputation in the West, Norton also promoted Emerson in letters and gifts of his books to friends. Norton's contacts included the Rossetti brothers — the poet-painter Dante Gabriel and the editor William — as well as the editor-critic Leslie Stephen. In America in 1863, Stephen met Norton and, probably through him, Emerson. Almost forty years later, Stephen published a comprehensive short exposition of Emerson's writings.43 Not surprisingly then, Stephen's daughter Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) came to applaud Emerson's "firm and glittering" analogies. In her novel about women in modern times, *Night and Day* (1919), the suffragette Mary muses, "I must reflect with Emerson that it's being and not doing that matters".44 But earlier, Woolf had largely dismissed Emerson as a mere "schoolmaster".45 Her surface attention contrasts with the lesser novelist Dorothy Richardson, whose Miriam in

41 *CW* 5: 168.

42 T. Carlyle to Emerson, April 6, 1870, *CCE* 2: 324.

43 Leslie Stephen, "Emerson", *Studies of a Biographer* (London: Duckworth & Co., 1902), 3.

44 V. Woolf, *Night and Day* (1919), ed. J. Briggs (London and New York: Penguin, 1992), 38.

45 V. Woolf, "Emerson's Journals" (1910), *The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1904–1912*, ed. A. McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 1: 339.

*Pilgrimage* (13 vols., 1915–1938) either quotes or mentions Emerson more than any other writer.46

The Irish author Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), wit and celebrated aesthete, was strongly attracted to Emerson, principally at first for his ideas on art and for his whimsy. Later, he adopted some of his more substantial ideas. Wilde's early focus on only a part of Emerson's legacy produced a rather ambiguous effect. On the one hand, believing Emerson to be a "fine thinker"47 and, with Whitman, one of America's two best poets,48 he heavily borrowed phrases, even whole sentences from Emerson. In the United States in 1882 to give a lecture series popularizing aestheticism, Wilde echoed Emerson's views on the unity of beauty and utility.

6.12 Oscar Wilde at 28, c. 1882.

46 D. Richardson, *Pilgrimage* (London: Dent, Cresset Press, 1938), 3: 41, 128; 4: 545. On Emersonian sources in *Pilgrimage* and in Richardson's letters, see G. H. Thompson, *Notes on Pilgrimage: Dorothy Richardson Annotated* (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1999), 97, 140, 144, 250.

47 O. Wilde, "The Soul of Man under Socialism", *The Soul of Man. De Profundis. The Ballad of Reading Gaol*, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 13.

48 For Wilde's judgment on Emerson as a poet, see his interview, January 16, 1882, cited in R. Ellmann, *Oscar Wilde* (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 167.

But on the other hand, in the same series he called the symbolism of Transcendentalism escapist and "Asiatic".49 In this series, too, he quoted from "Man the Reformer", then without attribution stole several sentences of Emerson's (with variants) with which he concludes his "Domestic Life". As Wilde's tour ended, he at least recognized the "Attic genius" of "New England's Plato", perhaps because Emerson had died only weeks before. Then in "L'Envoi", an introductory essay of the same year, Wilde recalled Emerson's comment in "Nominalist and Realist": "I am always insincere, knowing that there are other moods",50 revealing that at this stage he was principally drawn to Emerson the droll "master of moods" rather than the model authentic man.51

In his critical dialogue *The Decay of Lying* (1889), Wilde continued to emphasize the puckish Emerson. But in assigning him the role of artist as absolute liar "for art's sake", Wilde ignored the moral limits Emerson gave to imaginative creation. In another dialogue, *The Critic as Artist* (1890), Wilde culls Emerson's essays "Compensation" and "The Over-Soul" for his characters' exchanges on the human psyche. Wilde's Ernest announces, "… Men are wiser than they know" and "We are wiser than we know". And his Gilbert wryly says he lives "in terror of not being misunderstood", paraphrasing "Self-Reliance" ("Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? … To be great is to be misunderstood".). Elsewhere in this dialogue, Wilde quoted or referred to "Self-Reliance" at least three more times.

Again, this time bridging the individual and politics in *The Soul of Man Under Socialism* (1891), Wilde leaned heavily on Emerson. Drawing on "Self-Reliance", "The Poet", and also on his "Considerations by the Way", Wilde quotes and paraphrases Emerson's treatment of a slew of subjects: conformity, freedom, imitation, autonomy, misunderstanding, individualism, tradition, property, mobs, philanthropy, and man as symbol.52 Wilde's single novel *The Picture of Dorian Gray* (1891), the story of a

49 O. Wilde, "Art and the Handicraftsman", June 2, 1882, *Essays and Lectures* (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2007), 103–14.

50 O. Wilde and Rennell Rodd, *Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf* (Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddart & Co., 1882), 18.

51 In 1885, Wilde wrote to A. P. T. Elder, editor of a fledgling American literary journal: "I see no limit to the future in art of a country which has already given us Emerson, that master of moods …" *The Complete Letters of Oscar Wild*e, ed. Merlin Holland (New York: Fourth Estate, 2003), 249.

52 O. Wilde, *The Soul of Man Under Socialism* (article, *Fortnightly Review* XLIX: 290, February 1891, 292–319; book, 1904). See O. Wilde, *Soul of Man* (1999), 11–13: 114, 197–98, 200–02, 204–06, 209–10, 212–16.

handsome young degenerate, follows this same Emerson-indebted pattern. His Lord Henry condenses, paraphrases and typically exaggerates ideas from "Self-Reliance" and "Success", as in "People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself".53

After his imprisonment in 1895, Wilde, perhaps seeking to justify his life choices, selected Emerson's essays as prime reading matter, now gravitating to his more serious thoughts. Wilde's posthumous published letter *De Profundis* (1905) comments on a central passage from "Success": "'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own'. It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinion, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation".54 Wilde could adopt this much, but not the full load of Emerson's thought.

Emerson was also widely read among British philosophers, such as A. N. Whitehead and the novelist-lecturer John Cowper Powys (1872–1863). Powys's *One Hundred Best Books* (1916) cites an edition of Emerson's major writings and praises his "clear, chaste, remote and distinguished wisdom … with its shrewd preacher's wit and country-bred humor". He also noted a vital link in the chain of Emerson's influence in Europe: "Nietzsche found him a sane and noble influence principally on the ground of his serene detachment from the phenomena of sin and disease and death". Powys was one of the first to call attention to the now well-known Emerson-Nietzsche connection. That relationship, generally overlooked by mainstream criticism, especially in Europe, had already excelled any other in scope and rich ramification in the West.55

#### Emerson in German-Speaking Europe

The indebtedness of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844– 1900) to Emerson has long been known, but for the most part only in specialist circles.56 Furthermore, like José Martí in Cuba, Nietzsche superbly illustrates the literal revolutionary effect of Emerson's ideas in his native country and throughout Europe. But Nietzsche's frequent celebration,

53 O. Wilde, *Oscar Wilde: The Major Works* (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61.

54 O. Wilde, *Soul of Man* (1999), 114.

55 J. C. Powys, *One Hundred Books* (New York: G. A. Shaw, 1916), 26.

56 See, for example, studies by Hubbard, Stack, Cavell, Kateb, Lopez, Conant, Mikics, Bloom, Zavatta, and others.

especially on the Continent, has more than eclipsed his malignant role in departing from Emerson's core intent. In fact, his misinterpretations of Emerson, taken up and further falsified by the Nazis, fed Germany's political ambitions and contributed to the catastrophes of World War II.

6.13 Friedrich Nietzsche at about 31, c. 1875.

In 1862, the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche's delight with a new translation of *The Conduct of Life* led him to buy Emerson's *Essays I* and *II*. 57 Later, he acquired other works, including a second copy of *The Conduct of Life* and translations by Herman Grimm. From the start, Nietzsche copiously underlined and made exclamatory notes of praise in the margins of these works: "Ja!", "Gut!", "Sehr Gut!", "Das ist recht!", "Das ist wahr!" Directly or indirectly, Nietzsche referred to Emerson over a hundred times in his

57 *Die Führung des Lebens*, trans. E. S. von Mühlberg (Leipzig: Steinacker, 1862); *Versuche* (I and II series), trans. G. Fabricius (Hannover: Meyer, 1858).

books and manuscripts, and regularly in his notes and letters. He rarely traveled without his Emerson.58

Arguably, Emerson was Nietzsche's first as well as his last intellectual mentor. The American had already magnetized him a year before he began studying Plato and three years before he took up Schopenhauer. Then for over twenty-five years, Emerson remained a vital touchstone as Nietzsche wrote *Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen* (*Untimely Considerations*, 1873–1876); rejected Schopenhauer in 1876–1877; and composed *Also Sprach Zarathustra* (*Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, 1885). Nietzsche's *Götzen-Dämmerung* (*The Twilight of the Idols*, 1888) further praised Emerson. A draft of *Ecce Homo* (also 1888) contains one of Nietzsche's most heartfelt confessions of Emerson's influence, and an original interpretation of him as a radical skeptic. So great was Nietzsche's debt that, evidently to disguise the importance of Emerson as a constant source, he censored this mention of him.59

Yet Nietzsche often departed from Emerson's original meaning. His treatment of fate and freedom heads the list of misinterpretations. The year he first devoured Emerson (1862), Nietzsche published essays of his own on his hero's subjects — fate, freedom, and history — topics that Heidegger later described as Nietzsche's "essential center".60 In a near-paraphrase of Emerson's "Fate", Nietzsche urged the simultaneous embrace of, and resistance to, circumstance. But he went further, proposing a cultural revolution that far exceeded anything Emerson had envisioned: the subversion of the entire Christian tradition. The teen-age Nietzsche claimed that Christianity had inculcated a system of moral "slavery" and human degradation by preaching original sin and guilt, the superiority of soul to body, and an afterlife beyond this existence. By the 1880s, Nietzsche was adding to Christianity other traditions he thought equally injurious, whether religious or not: Buddhism, Platonic idealism, Socialism, and Democracy. For him, their valuation of equality and an ethic aligned with

58 G. J. Stack, *Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity* (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 34.

59 In a chapter draft, "Why I Am So Wise", Nietzsche, *On the Genealogy of Morals. Ecce Homo*, eds. W. Kaufmann, et al. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 25.

60 G. J. Stack, "Nietzsche's Earliest Essays: Translation of and Commentary on Fate and History and Freedom of Will and Fate", in *Philosophy Today*, 37 (1993), 153–69. On the connection with Heidegger's *Nietzsche* (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 1: 134; see translators' notes, D. F. Krell and Stanley Cavell, *Philosophical Passages* (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), 40.

the poor, weak, and diseased promoted false goals and a debilitating herd mentality.61

In contrast, Emerson's criticism of Congregational and Unitarian forms of Christianity in early nineteenth-century New England had focused on removing the powers of clergy and dogma which he felt separated the single believer from God. Emerson's Jesus of Nazareth was an admirable man, even a model human being, but was neither wholly, nor even partially, "God's son". Such a role falsely elevated him above the rest of humanity. As for Platonism, Buddhism, and other philosophies or faiths, Emerson explored them with deep curiosity, looking for spiritual enlightenment. Too individualistic to support socialism, he nevertheless firmly and with vigor championed both equality and democracy. Their effects could disappoint, but they were infinitely preferable to a hermetic hierarchy or monarchy. Emerson would have considered Nietzsche's *Der Antichrist* (*The Antichrist*, 1888), opposing both Christian thought and democracy, a travesty of his concept of self-reliance, which he always linked to a larger ethical norm.

Nietzsche had made his departure from this central Emersonian idea clear in *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* (1885). In large part inspired by Emerson's "Character",62 Zarathustra embodied Nietzsche's famous concept of an "Ubermensch", "Man above men", or a so-called super-man. In Emerson's "Power", his "*plus* man"63 had rejected conformity not to be independent for its own sake but to act authentically, drawing energy and motivation from a higher moral spirit. Since the 1830s, Emerson had developed this concept of the extraordinary man from his "Man Thinking" ("The American Scholar" and "The Poet") as well as from his select group profiled in *Representative Men*. Again, he rooted humanity's "plus" state in an intimacy with creation's overarching ethical order. In contrast, Nietzsche's *Ubermensch* epitomized not only a *surplus* of humanity and life, but also was *above* any moral, religious, or even cosmic law.

Similarly, in his posthumous work, *Der Wille zur Macht* (*The Will to Power*, 1901), Nietzsche continued to reverse Emerson on this subject. Once again, Emerson's sense of life as "a search after power" arose from a belief that legitimate authority comes only to a soul in harmony with the heart of nature: universal moral law. His "Divinity School Address" (1838) early

61 See, for example, Nietzsche, *Beyond Good and Evil*, Preface, aphorism 56; *The Antichrist*; *The Will to Power*, especially sections 751–53.

62 M. Montinari, *Reading Nietzsche* (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 71–72.

63 *CW* 6: 31.

announced a personal and profoundly meditative quest, both endless and experimental, aiming for, but always short of, eternal truth. No such idealism framed Nietzsche's *Will to Power*. For him, philosophers never innocently and disinterestedly explore for truth's sake. Their actual goal is all-encompassing power, from worldly influence and infinite fame to physical, political, and technological control.64 Nietzsche's natural will to power not only inverted Emerson's understanding of the soul in tune with cosmic force. But in addition, his attitude, an apparent realism laced with cynicism, added an amoral touch. In effect, Nietzsche questioned the very sincerity of his hero's idealistic pursuit of truth.

In "Considerations by the Way", Emerson theorized on the "good of evil" as impetus: "Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.65 Nietzsche explored this basic idea in *Beyond Good and Evil* (1886). Then, only two years later in *The Antichrist*, he developed a rough and rigid antithesis to Emerson's views, turning upside down the Christian concept of the ethical. Instead of empathizing with the weak, ill, enslaved, obedient, peaceful, ignored, or poor, he championed the healthy, rich, and powerful in all of history's traditional hierarchies — political, military and social.

Nietzsche's ultimate sense of time and focus also radically differed from Emerson's with implications for his concept of free will. Emerson argued for engagement in this present existence, emphatically stating, "There is no other world. God is one and omnipresent; here or nowhere is the whole fact".66 But Nietzsche's *The Gay Science* (1882) introduced the concept of "the Eternal Return", which conceived of the world as endlessly repeating itself in every detail.67 This ultimately closed arc implied a static, wholly determined universe. Such a vision was quite the opposite of Emerson's early and continuing sense of the world's change, movement, and expansion, and humanity's parallel action within it. In "Circles" (1841), he had written, "Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around

64 For both writers on power, see Emerson, *CW* 6: 30–32; and Nietzsche's *Writings from the Late Notebooks* (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially 15, 50, 73, 134.

65 *CW* 6: 134–35, 137–39.

66 "The Sovereignty of Ethics" (1878), *The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson*, ed. E. W. Emerson (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904), 10: 199. Hereafter *W*. See also Emerson's "Circles", "Illusions", "Works and Days", and the first part of "Poetry and Imagination". Cf. Nietzsche's representative views, "Afterworldsmen", *Thus spoke Zarathustra* (London and New York: Penguin, 1961), 58–60.

67 Friedrich Nietzsche, *The Gay Science*, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 273.

every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning …"68 Writing "Fate" in the 1850s, he was more explicit in championing free will: "To hazard the contradiction, — freedom is necessary". In short, it was determined. He went on, "a part of Fate is the freedom of man … Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free". This fundamental paradox arose from Emerson's lifelong existential experience of "choosing and acting".69

As his *Beyond Good and Evil* (1886) reveals, Nietzsche's politics also radically distanced him from Emerson. The two differed on such major issues as progressive democratic goals, abolition, feminist ideals, peace, and war. Contrary to his posthumous reputation, Nietzsche was not a Nazi, nor was he a fascist, nationalist, socialist, pan-German enthusiast, or racial purist. He hated anti-Semites and mass movements. But in his later superreactionary opinions, he eclipsed Emerson's sense of empowering "each and all". Nietzsche came to advocate a pro-slavery, autocratic new order, his "warmongering" attitude pushing him to invoke a "new terrorism".70 More famously, he gave a new framework to his earlier transformation of Emerson's "representative men" into lawless "Ubermenschen", ripe for the Nazis' misuse. Emerson had noted one "good of evil": "Wars, fires, plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races and dens of distemper, and open a fair field to new men". Nietzsche went much further, proposing a true theory of active eugenics "in order to shape the man of the future through breeding and … the annihilation of millions of failures".71

In brief, the later Nietzsche had quite corrupted Emerson's leading ideas. In turn, the Nazis, heralding Nietzsche as a prophet, either perpetuated earlier untruths about him or invented new ones. Thus, any alleged claims of a link between the real Emerson and the National Socialists, past or present, are quite false.  See also E. W. Emerson's *CW of RWE* 6: 24.

70 In a draft for *The Genealogy of Morals* (1887) in *Sämtliche Werke: kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden* (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1974), 7: 3, 220–21. Hereafter *SW.*

71 *CW* 6: 135; Nietzsche, *The Will to Power* (New York: Vintage, 1968), 506.

72 See M. Ferraris, "Storia della volontà di potenza", in Nietzsche, *La volontà di potenza*  (Milano: Bompiani, 1994), 615. See Colli and Montinari's notes to *SW*. Georges Bataille had shown similar manipulations by Nietzsche's cousin R. Oehler in "Nietzsche et les fascistes", *Acéphale*, January 21, 1937, 3–11.

defeat in World War I, a successful German book mythologized Nietzsche as a pivotal Germanic-Nordic-Greek myth-creator for the German people.73 The next year, a booklet interpreted him as "Prophet" of an extreme, dictatorial form of "Socialism".74 But not until the mid-1920s did a full "Nazification" of Nietzsche take place, when certain German writers applied his "master morality" and presumed anti-Semitism to a proto-Nazi racial interpretation of the "Jewish question".75 Also in the pre-Nazi years, the chief editor of Nietzsche's works, Alfred Baeumler (who became a Nazi in 1933), assumed Nietzsche to be anti-Jewish and celebrated him as both a philosopher and a political scientist. Others profiled him as godfather of a new German nation and "wisdom", based on a life-enhancing amoral law.76

Meanwhile, Elisabeth Nietzsche had started a correspondence with Mussolini in 1923, which led to their meeting in the early 1930s. In 1932, she also became a friend of Hitler's. 77 In the next two years, Hitler visited the Nietzsche-Archive in Weimar at least three times, paid tribute to Elisabeth with private gifts, and was photographed looking at Nietzsche's bust.78 Nietzsche's cousin Richard Oehler reproduced one such picture in his 1935 book, where he combined quotations from Nietzsche and *Mein Kampf* (1925–1926).79 In the later 1930s, most Nazis were either ignorant of, or deliberately overlooked, Nietzsche's deep indebtedness to the democratic Emerson. Martin Heidegger, then a member of the Nazi party and an Anglophobe, censored a German scholar's study of the Nietzsche-Emerson connection.80 On Mussolini's sixtieth birthday in 1943, Hitler gave

73 Ernst Bertram, *Nietzsche. Versuch einer Mythologie* (Berlin: Bondi, 1918).

74 H. Bund, *Nietzsche als Prophet des Sozialismus* (Breslau: Trewendt & Granier, 1919).

75 F. Haiser, *Die Judenfrage vom Standpunkt der Herrenmoral: Rechtsvölkische und linksvölkische Weltanschauung* (Leipzig: Weicher, 1926); A. Schickedanz, *Das Judentum, eine Gegenrasse* (Leipzig: Weicher, 1927).

76 For example, see A. Baeumler, *Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker* (Leipzig: Reclam, 1931); F. Mess, *Nietzsche: Der Gesetzgeber* (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1930).

77 M. Ferraris, "Storia", in *La volontà di potenza*, 648.

78 C. Diethe, *Nietzsche's Sister and The Will to Power* (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 151–52.

79 R. Oehler, *Nietzsche und deutsche Zukunft* [*Nietzsche and the Future of Germany*] (Leipzig: Armanen, 1935).

80 In Nazi Germany in the 1930s, E. Baumgarten was the principal student of the Emerson-Nietzsche relationship, *Der Pragmatismus. R. W. Emerson, W. James, J. Dewey* (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1938), 81–96; and secondarily, J. Simon, *Ralph Waldo Emerson in Deutschland* (1851–1932) (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1937) and H. Hildebrand, *Die Amerikanische Stellung zur Geschichte und zu Europa in Emersons Gedankensystem* (Bonn: Verlag Hanstein, 1936). For Heidegger's censorship, see M. Lopez in "Emerson and Nietzsche: An Introduction", *ESQ*, 43 (1997), 1–35.

him a complete edition of Nietzsche's works, an act that symbolized the culmination of Nietzsche's legacy to the Nazi-Fascist movements.81

The deep, continuous tie between Emerson and Nietzsche serves as a master key for Emerson's entrance into the viscera of twentieth-century European culture. Students of Nietzsche's would inevitably be introduced to Emerson. In turn, their writings referred to both. For example, Belgian Nobel Prize-winner Maurice Maeterlinck, a key figure in the French symbolist movement, wrote a far-reaching essay "Emerson" (1897) that emphasized the everyday presence of a world of transcendental, spiritual mystery and beauty. In Austria, novelist Robert Musil (1880–1942) read Maeterlinck's essay and quickly noted the Emerson-Nietzsche relationship. Musil soon dedicated himself to what he termed "essayism", or Emerson's constant experimentation. He was also drawn to his exaltation of individual action and his aversion to both philosophical systems and the slavish adulation of history.

Throughout his career, Musil quoted, paraphrased, or integrated Emerson into his writing.82 As a young engineering student at the turn of the century, he read a German edition of the *Essays*, 83 to which he returned in 1905 and again in the 1920s. The radical dynamism of "Circles", as applied to both morals and politics, was a particular favorite. Sometime between 1899 and 1904 in an undated journal entry, Musil celebrated *The Conduct of Life* as a model of "an advanced culture".84 Eleven more times, his journals refer to Emerson at moments when he was recording seeds for his novels, *Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß* (*The Perturbations of Young Torless*, 1906) and his masterwork, *Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften* (*The Man Without Qualities*, 1930, 1933, 1943, incomplete). Many of his journal entries draw on "The Poet", particularly on Emerson's idea that man is "only *half* himself, *the other half is his expression*" and on the daily need to express one's own "painful secret", or inmost truth.85

81 G. Zachariae, *Mussolini si confessa* (Milano: Garzanti, 1948), 25.

82 G. Howes has extensively shown Emerson's influence in his "Robert Musil and the Legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1985). See also H. Hickman's studies of 1980 and 1984 on the young Musil.

83 *Essays: Erste Folge* (Leipzig: Diederichs, 1902). It included "Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul", "Circles", "Compensation", "Heroism", "History", "The Poet", and Emerson's early lecture on "Literary Ethics".

84 R. Musil, *Diaries: 1899–1941* (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 23.

85 *Notebook* II, 25.VII; *CW* 3: 6.

In *The Man Without Qualities*, Musil took Emerson's experimentalism, a theme pervading his novel, and made it a "sense of possibility". From the beginning, his main character Anders (later Ulrich) is characterized by his enthusiasm for "the new, the technical, the Emersonian".86 Emerson's "Circles" had stated: "Men walk as prophecies of the next age … I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false". After Emerson, Musil has Anders/Ulrich say: "Men walk in the world as prophecy of the future, and all their deeds are tests and experiments, for every deed can be surpassed by the next". Musil/Anders/Ulrich goes on to quote Emerson without attribution: "The virtues of society are vices of the saint". In the same breath, as if to finally credit him, his hero names Emerson as "a Man whom I love". Significant traces of Emerson extend into the novel's other characters: Clarisse, Leinsdorf, Arnheim, and Lindner. In reading Emerson along with Maeterlinck, Novalis, and Nietzsche, Musil thought, "We experience the most powerful movement of the mind".87 In these authors, he found a vital, immediate relationship to the world, where contemplation and action are one.

Maeterlinck's "Emerson" of 1897 immediately inspired Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), the twentieth-century bohemian Austrian poet.88 That winter, he read Emerson's *Essays*, 89 and twice quoted them in his *Florenzer Tagebuch* (*Florentine Diary*, 1898). Like Musil, he was drawn to "Circles": "I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back".90 Rilke echoes this thought in his essay "Notizien zur Melodie der Dinge" ("Notes on the Melody of Things", 1898): "We are right at the start, do you see. As though before everything. With a thousand and one dreams behind

86 R. Musil, *Tagebücher*, ed. A. Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976), 2: 1099, cited in Howes (1985), 221.

87 R. Musil, "Geist und Erfahrung",*Das neue Merkur* (1921), 3: 12.

88 J. Simon, *RWE in Deutschland* (1937), first vaguely recognized Emerson's influence; Ernst Zinn solidified the connection in his edition of Rilke, *Sämtliche Werke* (Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag, 1955–1966), as did Jan Wojcik, in "Emerson and Rilke: A Significant Influence?" *Modern Language Notes* 91 (1976), 565–74 and Marilyn Vogler Urion, "Emerson's Presence in Rilke's Imagery: Shadows of Early Influence", *Monatshefte für Deutschen Unterricht, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur* (1993), 85: 153–69. *Das neue Merkur*  (1921), 3: 12.

89 Dähnert's edition (Leipzig: Reclam, 1897) included: "Circles", "Compensation", "Spiritual Laws", "Love", "The Over-Soul", "Art", "The Poet", "Character", and "Nature" (1844).

90 *CW* 2: 188.

us and no act".91 Other images from "Circles" as well as "The Poet" and "The Over-Soul" were evident in this essay, including Pentecostal figures of "cloven flames and fiery men who speak holy words", of doors opening, mountain peaks and men as trees. Notable, too, is the figure of the poetspeaker whose work implants his perceptions in everyone. Emerson's "The Poet" refers to the men "of more delicate ear" than most of us who, hearing nature's "primal warblings", write, however imperfectly, "the songs of nations".92 Rilke writes: "… a broad melody always wakes behind you, woven out of a thousand voices, where there is room for your own solo only here and there. To know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody".93

This essay was part of a veritable flood of creativity that poured from Rilke in 1898.94 In that year, his major essay "On Art" and another prose text, "Intérieurs", heavily drew from Emerson, the latter even mimicking his style.95 In 1899, Rilke published a collection of poems in an Emerson/ Whitman-like mode, *For My Joy* (*Mir Zur Feier*). Metamorphosis was its major theme, with at least four poems probably inspired by Emerson. The same year his *Book of Hours*, vol. 1, also appeared, its title alluding to Emerson's "Genius of the Hour" (from "Art") that "dwells in the hour that now is" (from "Over-Soul"). The book also repeats other favorite Emerson themes such as the creative glance of the poet and existence as a state of perpetual becoming. Rilke's *Book of Images*, a collection of poems written between 1898 and 1901, includes other themes that echo Emerson: the creative power of imagination, memory's selectivity, and fully living in the moment.

#### Emerson in French-speaking Europe

Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), a central figure in Polish literature, was also a multilingual poet claimed by several nations, especially France.

91 R. M. Rilke, "Notes on the Melody of Things", in his *The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams*, trans. D. Searls (Boston, Mass.: David R. Godine, 2009).

92 *CW* 3: 6.

93 R. M. Rilke, *Notes*, section XVI.

94 For example, see J. Ryan, *The Vanishing Subject* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 53. On Emerson's possible influences on Rilke's most mature works, see J. Ryan's discussion of the 1918 poem "To Music", *Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition* (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161–62.

95 R. M. Rilke, *Intérieurs*, section XIII, *Werke* (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchges, 1996), 4: 98–99.

6.14 Adam Mickiewicz at 44, 1842.

Among Romantics, he became ranked with Byron and Goethe. Mickiewicz and his colleague at the Collège de France, historian Edgar Quinet (1803– 1875), shared a common passion for Emerson, beginning with *Nature* (1836), which they read in 1838. Only six years later, Quinet added Emerson's name to his list of the greatest modern philosophers after Vico, Condorcet, Herder, and Hegel. In the period 1843–1845, Mickiewicz and Quinet quoted and copied several passages from Emerson in both their journals and course lectures. For Mickiewicz, Emerson was "the American Socrates", similar to, but "more profound" than, the French spiritual and social philosopher Pierre Leroux. He also likened Emerson's sensitivity to that of Polish and Slavonic people, attuned to the "continual influence of the invisible world on the visible world". In Paris in 1847, Margaret Fuller used a gift of Emerson's *Poems* (1846) to win an introduction to the handsome, vibrant, and inspiring Pole, who shared her enthusiasm for women's rights.96

Through his teaching and translations, Mickiewicz contributed to the diffusion of Emerson's essays in France. In his courses, he quoted the first lines of "Man the Reformer" and ideas that probably derived from Emerson's "Farming". With "History", he translated these essays for "La Tribune des Peuples", his newly founded internationalist leftist magazine. Ideas from Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and "Spiritual Laws" have been

96 A. Mickiewicz, *Les slaves* (Paris: Comptoir des imprimeurs réunis, 1849), 216–17, 456– 57. Megan Marshall, *Margaret Fuller: A New American Life* (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 286–87.

identified in seven of Mickiewicz's "Apothegms in Verses".97 Besides his students, he introduced Emerson to the French historian Jules Michelet. Yet Mickiewicz regretted Emerson's apparent isolation from his time, nation, and land,98 revealing an ignorance of the American's far-reaching readership and lecture audiences as well as his active antislavery and prowomen's rights work.

Of other leading French authors who enhanced Emerson's reputation in Europe, the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) made a strong contribution.99

6.15 Charles Baudelaire at 41, c. 1862.

98 A. Mickiewicz, *Les slaves*, 457.

97 See M. Z. Markiewicz, "Mickiewicz vulgarisateur d'Emerson", *Revue de littérature comparée* (1955), 29.

99 E. Montégut, a friend of Baudelaire, also wrote on Emerson; see "Un penseur et un poète américain", *Revue des deux mondes*, August 1, 1847. On the Emerson-Baudelaire relationship, see Dudley M. Marchi's "Baudelaire's America — Contrary Affinities", *Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature* 47 (2000), 37–52.

The two may have brushed shoulders, but did not meet in Paris in 1848, when the radical Baudelaire and the curious Emerson attended two separate revolutionary rallies. Although Baudelaire's American idol, Edgar Allan Poe (d. 1840) had not favored Emerson (and vice versa), Baudelaire was attracted to him via a French translation.100 In addition, he knew at least parts of *Representative Men*, evident from his vitriolic attack on Voltaire in *Mon coeur mis à nu* (*My Heart Laid Bare*, 1864). Baudelaire suggested Emerson should have written an essay about the eighteenth century philosophe entitled "*the Anti-Poet, the King of Gawkers, the Prince of Superficials, the Anti-Artist, the preacher of janitresses"*. 101 Baudelaire's purchase of *English Traits*102 and an edition of *The Conduct of Life* in English showed his attraction to Emerson's most intense confrontations with urban, industrial culture. The latter book, especially, was a guide to an empowering ethics for modern life, a project for which Poe was no model.

*The Conduct of Life* is also widely present in Baudelaire's diary-like works, beginning in their first pages: *My Heart Laid Bare* (1864) and *Fusées* (*Rockets*, 1867). In *Rockets*, he either quotes or paraphrases from "Power" and other essays, taking up Emerson's ideas on concentration, the value of constant ambitions, and the virtue of repeated practice. In these writings, Baudelaire, the *bohémien* par excellence, repents his wasteful ways, seeks empowerment (with uncertain results) through self-reliance, and promises himself to refrain from any dissipation. A whole section of Baudelaire's journals on *Hygiène* (*Hygiene*, 1867) includes a long series of quotes, in English this time, from *The Conduct of Life*.

On the theme of concentration, Baudelaire often repeated a sentence from Emerson's "Considerations by the Way" in his book on Delacroix (1863): "The hero is he who is immovably centered". And he praised Emerson as "the overseas moralist" who, "though passing for leader of the boring Bostonian school, has nonetheless a certain acumen à la Seneca, proper to sharpen meditation". The wisdom Emerson applies, he wrote, "to the conduct of life and to the domain of affairs can equally be applied to the domain of poetry and art".103 Baudelaire's attraction to Emerson, particularly his idea of the supremacy of the solitary artist, may have

100 See Montégut's preface, *Essais de philosophie américaine* (Paris: Charpentier, 1850).

101 C. Baudelaire, *My Heart Laid Bare* (New York: Vanguard, 1951), 186 (my translation).

102 C. Pichois, J.-P. Avice, *Dictionnaire Baudelaire* (Tusson, Charente: Du Lérot, 2002), 65.

103 C. Baudelaire, *Eugene Delacroix: His Life and Work* (New York: Lear Publishers, 1947), 44 (text re-translation mine).

helped him shift from advocating a confrontational socialism to an ethic of radical authenticity.104

In contrast to Baudelaire, the philosopher and writer Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was almost bilingual in English and French and thus could read Emerson in the original.

6.16 Henri Bergson at 68, 1927.

In 1917, he declared that he "loved Emerson", undoubtedly a result of his admiration for William James, Emerson's younger friend and close reader, as seen in Chapter 5.105 Bergson's earliest references to Emerson in 1906–1907 borrow ideas from the beginning of his "Character" that focus on the gap between character and action.106 He cites Emerson's examples of the English statesman William Pitt and George Washington as unusual men, whose characters alone distinguished them. Although Bergson rarely referred to Emerson — only three times in thirty years — the span of his references testifies to a lasting regard. Like Dickinson and Nietzsche, he may also have resisted compromising his own originality by too frequent

104 D. M. Marchi, has suggested this kind of shift, as possibly stimulated by reading Emerson. Marchi, *Baudelaire's America*, 52.

105 H. Bergson, "Speech, France-America Society on March 12, 1917", *Mélanges*, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 1244.

106 Idem, "The Theories of Free Will" (Lecture series given at the Collège de France in 1906–1907), *Mélanges*, 718.

reference. Bergson echoes Emerson in his similar interest in the nature of time, organic vital force, intuition, and the comic. His final notice was in 1936, when he once again spoke of William James, this time to say his work reminded him of Emerson.107 There, Bergson slightly misquoted Emerson's "Character", in defining it as "a reserve of force which acts solely by its presence". (Interestingly, James recognized Bergson's indebtedness to Emerson when he re-read Emerson and thought of Bergson.)108

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) knew Emerson early, probably from high school, and also favored writers who were Emerson followers: Bergson, Baudelaire, Thoreau, Carlyle, and George Eliot. Proust's diary and correspondence of his early twenties contain frequent references to Emerson.

6.17 Marcel Proust at 21, 1892.

107 H. Bergson to Prof. J. Chevalier, February 1836, in Bergson 1972, 1543.

108 E. H. Cady and L. J. Budd state that James, in his copy of the "Nominalist and Realist", "wrote 'Bergson', by the sentence: 'It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight'." *On Emerson* (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), 53.

Then in 1895, the year before his first novel appeared, he claimed to have read Emerson's *Essais* "drunkenly".109 The same year, he encountered a French edition of *Representative Men*. And in the next, Proust's *Les plaisirs et les jours* (*Pleasures and Days*, 1896) used four selections from Emerson as chapter headings. In *Pastiches et mélanges* (*Mixtures*, 1919), he refers to Emerson at least six times.110 From this early and continuous interest, it is not surprising that Emerson ideas appear in vital parts of Proust's bestknown work, the autobiographical novel *À la recherche du temps perdu* (*In Search of Lost Time*, 1913–1927). In the third volume of this novel, *Le côté de Guermantes* (*The Way of Guermantes*, 1920–1921), the narrator Marcel describes a conversation that "had been entirely about Emerson, Ibsen and Tolstoy".111

More recently, Albert Camus (1913–1960), the Franco-Algerian philosopher and novelist, emerged as yet another admirer of Emerson and a keen reader of his *Journals*.

6.18 Albert Camus at 44, 1957.

109 M. Proust letter of 1895, *Lettres à Reynaldo Hahn* (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 34.

110 Partly translated in *Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays*, trans. J. Sturrock (London, New York: Penguin Books, 1988) and in *The Lemoine Affair*, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2008).

111 M. Proust, *The Guermantes Way*, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, et al. (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 377.

In his own journals of 1951–1952, Camus so frequently quotes Emerson that he identifies them with a mere "E", as with "The only immortal is the one for whom all things are immortal".112 In other places, only a sentence separates an Emerson "wall-gate/door" quotation from Camus' Emerson-sounding notes: "The time of criticism and polemics is over — Creation … *Totally* eliminating criticism and polemics — From now on, the single and constant affirmation … The worst of fortunes is a bad temperament".113 Elsewhere, Camus records three more Emerson thoughts. One on radical authenticity is certainly from his journal: "What remains but to acquiesce in the faith that not lying, nor being angry, we shall at last acquire the voice and language of a man".114

In his last four years, Camus evidently felt particular affinities with Emerson. His exemplary short story, "Jonas, or the Artist at Work" (1957), reflects Emersonian themes — from self-reliance to the individual's conflicting needs for solitude and for society. The same year, Camus twice refers to Emerson in his lecture, "L'artiste et son temps" ("The Artist and His Time"), given four days after his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. Early in his remarks, he paraphrases the American: "Man's obedience to his own genius, Emerson said magnificently, is faith *par excellence*". 115 Ending inspirationally, he directly quotes Emerson on a major point: "Every wall is a door". (Camus substitutes "door" for Emerson's "gate".)116 For Emerson, life's adversities (walls) are potential openings to new possibilities. After the unprecedented horrors of World War II, Camus was re-conceiving the role of the artist, urging writers to leave their escapist, fictional creations and confront the "wall" facing them — the hard facts of radical evil. Emerson's figure assured Camus that there was indeed a way out, but he

112 Albert Camus, *Notebooks 1951–1959* (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), 28. The Emerson quotation is from "Worship" (1860), but Camus may have found it in Emerson's *Journals* of 1846, *JMN* 9: 452.

113 Camus, *Notebooks*, 22. Emerson's journal entry of 27 February 1870, may have been the source for the dangers of criticism and on the necessity of affirmation, while ones of 7 October 1863: "An impassive temperament is a great fortune", and "Temperament is fortune" (*JMN* 10: 40) might have been the sources for Camus's last sentence.

114 Camus, *Notebooks*, 26; *JMN* 8: 79. The source of the first and third sentences is unclear.

115 Camus, *Discours de Suède* (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 30. The Emerson quotation, present in Camus' journals of 1951–1952, appears to have been either a mistranslation or an inaccurate quotation from memory, probably deriving from Emerson's comment "obedience to a man's genius is the *particular* of Faith: by and by, I shall come to the *universal* of Faith". *JMN* 9: 62.

116 Emerson refers to hope as based on the infinity of the world, saying that "every wall is a gate". *JMN* 9: 137.

stressed, only through the wall itself. Camus may now be added to those who have attempted to rescue Emerson from an army of critics who, early and late, have erroneously dismissed him as a cosmic optimist, ignoring the reality of evil and thus failing to effectively protest against it.

#### Emerson in Italy

The proto-Nazi and Nazi transformation of Nietzsche's Ubermensch to support the concept of a "master race", a full reversal of Emerson's "plus" man, was largely done in ignorance of the Emerson-Nietzsche relationship. This was not the case in Italy. The poet and politician Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863–1938), the "godfather" of Italian fascism, made the connection between the two, no doubt when reading both in the same period.117

6.19 Gabriele D'Annunzio, early 20th century.

117 D'Annunzio's first documented reference to Nietzsche appears in *Il Mattino*, September 25, 1892.

That may help explain his elitist interpretation of Emerson. As early as 1893, D'Annunzio clearly linked his futuristic ideas to the American, writing, "The artists of the future … will be the representative men, to use Emerson's phrase: they will be, like Leonardo, the exemplar interpreters and messengers of their times".118 Two years later, the idea had taken firm hold: D'Annunzio stressed the poet's elevated role of prophet, seeing artists alone as "representative men … in modern societies …" To Emerson's quest for the "great and constant fact of Life", he attached a Messianic note, "[We] wait for a Man of Life",119 adding that "the new Renaissance" would be "the restoration of the worship of Man".120 In 1899, D'Annunzio repeated Emerson's expectation of poets to be "liberating gods", saying, "The people are thirsty for poetry, they wait for the poet, the great dramatic poet, as a liberator. The future belongs to the poets".121

D'Annunzio's early library was auctioned in 1910. But his later collection, with Emerson's works frequently underlined, documents how thoroughly the American influenced his ambitions and even, to some degree, his sensitivity. In a French translation of Emerson's "The Tragic", D'Annunzio read, "He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain", then exclaimed, "Lien commun! [A common bond!]".122 The comment is arresting. Only a few Emerson followers perceived his tragic sense. D'Annunzio also marked Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr'.s biography of Emerson where it noted his unique "seraphic voice and countenance".123 (By name and style, D'Annunzio and his biographers referred to him as an "archangel".) More ominously, he also marked several passages in "Self-Reliance". One, "I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility [that of friends]",124 would have strengthened D'Annunzio's devil-may-care flamboyance. In the same year, 1912, D'Annunzio appeared

118 D'Annunzio, "Una tendenza",*Il Mattino*, January 30–31, 1893, *Interviste a D'Annunzio* (Lanciano: Carabba, 2002), 53.

119 Ibid., cf., Emerson, *CW* 3: 12.

120 Interview, January 1895, in D'Annunzio "Una tendenza", 55. D'Annunzio's knowledge of *Representative Men* clearly predated his 1904 copy, in which he highlighted many passages.

121 *CW* 3: 17, 18. Interview with F. Pastonchi, *La Stampa*, October 1, 1899, in D'Annunzio "Una tendenza", 18.

122 Emerson, *Les forces eternelles et autres essais*, trans. K. Johnston, with preface by B. Perry (Paris: Mercure de France, 1912), 147. This edition includes "Perpetual Forces", "The Method of Nature", "Circles", "The Tragic", "Friendship", "Woman" (D'Annunzio's library, Vittoriale).

123 Ibid., 18, marked by d'Annunzio with a strong left line.

124 Ibid., 19, marked by d'Annunzio with left and right lines.

to have translated this idea into his "*me ne frego*" ("I don't care"), expressing a callous, "so-what" attitude disregarding all others and any challenge. The slogan became a famous Fascist cry,125 and illustrates how fully D'Annunzio, like Nietzsche, departed from Emerson's true intent.

D'Annunzio's heavily-marked Emerson passages detail many more instances of ideas that inspired his radical corruptions. Above all, he grafted onto Emerson's ideal of the poet-prophet the notion of the poet*duce*, the poet as political leader. Without any exterior check, D'Annunzio would embody the artist-as-politician in a blend of narcissistic aestheticism, super-masculinity, bullying rhetoric, and amoral behaviour, all within an excessive lifestyle. Such a leader was at total odds with Emerson's goals for the poet-in-society and in high contrast to his simple manner and style. Later, D'Annunzio's readings of Nietzsche's work further skewed his interpretations of Emerson. In the end, he betrayed even his own ideal of the poet-*duce*, living a sequestered life of private consumption at his paradise-retreat, the Vittoriale, adored by fans and financially supported by continuous aid from Mussolini.126

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) was undoubtedly happy to keep D'Annunzio, a celebrated World War I hero, literary star, and muted rival, out of public notice. The two had been close for years, from fighting together in Fiume in 1919 to Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922, and often corresponded.

Given this contact, D'Annunzio might well have first introduced Emerson to Mussolini, although the destruction or sale of Mussolini's personal libraries has obscured the scope and dating of this influence. But Mussolini's long essay about Nietzsche, *La filosofia della forza* (*The Philosophy of Power*, 1908),127 would have made him exceedingly curious about the German's principal source. Thus his claims in 1925 and 1931 that Emerson was among his favorite authors should be taken seriously, not as mere political or diplomatic boasting.128 In 1925, he countered an argument that American civilization is "dominated exclusively by mechanical

125 *Gabriele D'Annunzio*, ed. J. de Blasi (Florence: Sansoni, 1939), 200.

126 A. Bonadeo, *D'Annunzio and the Great War* (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 146.

127 B. Mussolini, "La filosofia della forza", *Il pensiero romagnolo*, November 29, December 6, 13 (2008).

128 As Denis Mack Smith suggested in his *Mussolini* (New York: Knopf, 1982), 132. On the Emerson-Mussolini relationship see Giorgio Mariani, "Read with Mussolini", eds. G. Mariani, et al., 123–31.

or materialistic factors and by the thirst for financial gain", by pointing not only to William James but to Emerson himself.129 Six years later, in support of his "deep sympathy to the people of the great Republic" and its contributions to "modern progress", Mussolini adduced a list of writers: "Longfellow, Whitman, Emerson". He remarked outright, "Personally, I am a great admirer of Emerson and James".130

6.20 Benito Mussolini at 40 presides over Fascists' first anniversary celebration.

Associates of Mussolini also bore witness to his knowledge of Emerson. The *Duce's* personal doctor reported: "… very often we happened to entertain ourselves at length on Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Emerson and other philosophers".131 Much closer to Mussolini was his intellectual soul mate, lover, and first biographer Margherita Sarfatti, a journalist familiar with Emerson. In her *Life of Benito Mussolini* (1925), she quoted Emerson,

129 B. Mussolini, "United Press" interview, December 21, 1925, 123.

130 B. Mussolini, Radio message of January 20, 1931, 123–24.

131 G. Zachariae, *Mussolini si confessa* (Milano: Garzanti, 1948), 42.

implying a parallel with her subject: "The reward of a duty performed lies in the acquisition of strength to perform a duty that is more difficult".132

Mussolini's interest in Emerson's ideal of the heroic "great man", or a superior "representative man", as a unifying guide for the whole nation paralleled D'Anunnzio's. But he went further. Mussolini's leader would shed D'Annunzio's poetic and mystical aestheticism to be more stoic and Roman, an even stronger strong man.  After 1925, Mussolini quickly eviscerated most of Italy's democratic institutions, built a vast military force, began territorial expansion, and ended by allying himself with an even more potent "Nietzschean" *Ubermensch*, Hitler. D'Annunzio and Mussolini's selective sampling of Emerson missed his widest context and deepest presence, his "Over Soul". Emerson's aphorism, "Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances, the senses are despotic", definitively distances him from these two Italians.

Simultaneously, however, a handful of non-Fascist Party Italian writers were accurately reading and interpreting Emerson. The novelist Federigo Tozzi (1883–1920) extolled *Nature*, and the professor of pedagogy Giuseppe Lombardo Radice (1879–1939) celebrated his educational philosophy in a long essay, *Emerson: profeta dell'educazione nuova* (*Emerson: Prophet of the New Education*, 1926). Despite this interest, the Fascists' use of Emerson led to his general disrepute in post-World War II Italy. For a time, that sentiment grew into an anti-Emerson tradition.134 Then in the late 1950s, Agostino Lombardo, the founder of American Studies in Italy, exalted him as one who illustrated "America becoming conscious of itself", his endorsement temporarily resuscitating Emerson's reputation. But influenced by F. O. Mathiessen's *American Renaissance* (1941), a work that faulted Emerson for failing to be as realistic as his contemporaries, Lombardo finally found the

132 Margherita G. Sarfatti, foreword by Benito Mussolini, *The Life of Benito Mussolini* (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 88. The quotation's possible source might be "Immortality" (Italian translation, 1931): "Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it". E. W. Emerson's *CW of RWE* 8: 328.

133 Jean McClure Mudge, *The Poet and the Dictator: Lauro de Bosis Resists Fascism in Italy and America* (Greenwood: Praeger, 2002), 2, 58–60.

134 In G. Mariani, "The (Mis)Fortune of Emerson in Italy", *Anglistica* 6: 1 (2002), 103–31.

American "too much a philosopher to be a poet, and too much a poet to be a philosopher".135 Twentieth-century novelists Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese were similarly cautious or downright critical.136

In the twenty-first century, Italy has shifted toward a more positive view of Emerson with only a touch of its earlier ambivalence. Several translations of Emerson's works have appeared. And in the fall of 2003, a large International Bicentennial Conference was held, an event honoring Emerson that was unprecedented in Europe.137 Yet that same year, a leading philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, called for a re-examination of Emerson as a "forerunner of Nietzsche",138 reawakening the negative cast the German had made of his American idol. And in 2008, a newspaper review of an Italian translation of *The Conduct of Life* — , "Emerson. The Secret Master of Nietzsche", spoke of both his importance and neglect, while pairing him once again with Nietzsche.139 In the same year, however, novelist Paola Capriolo's review of the same book called it a true classic, "with sparkling humor and vibrant poetic brightness".140 In 2008, too, Mario A. Rigoni, a leading critic of the poet Leopardi, noted affinities between the Italian and Emerson.141 Recently as well, the contemporary poet and Emerson scholar Roberto Mussapi has celebrated his essays as "pregnant and vital as voice itself, written in a fluvial prose, all embracing and illuminating".142

#### Emerson in Russia

Emerson's arch-individualistic and anti-communitarian views, as well as his ideas on capitalism and property, did not bode well for his future reception in either Revolutionary or Cold War Russia. But decades before, during Emerson's last trip to Europe in 1872–1873, he had met Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) in Paris. Turgenev had earlier alluded to Emerson in his novel *Ottsi i Dyeti* (*Fathers and Sons*, 1862), deriding him by association with the women's movement via a fictional, faux-intellectual Russian woman and the real-life novelist George Sand. The greater Russian novelist

135 Ibid*.*, 110.

136 Caterina Ricciardi, "Ralph Waldo Emerson and Elio Vittorini", *Emerson at 2000*, 113–21.

137 Ibid.

138 *La Stampa*, 25 May 2003, 19.

139 *Libero*, 2 July 2008, 29.

140 *Corriere della Sera*, 9 September 2008, 43.

141 A. Rigoni, *Corriere della Sera*, 14 January 2008, 35.

142 *Avvenire*, 29 June 2008, 18.

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) more fully commented on Emerson in his diaries, more positively than Turgenev on the whole and over many more years.

6.21 Leo Tolstoy at 59, 1887.

At age thirty, Tolstoy began with qualified praise of Emerson for his essays on Goethe and Shakespeare. 143 By his late fifties, after remarking that Emerson "is good" (possibly referring to "Experience"), Tolstoy told himself, "Read Emerson. Profound, bold, but often capricious and confused".144 Finally, in his late sixties, he exultantly found that "Self-Reliance" was "marvelous".145 In 1900, his publishing house, Posrednik (*The Intermediary*) printed an abridged version of the essay, followed two years later by a version of "The

143 L. Tolstoy, 24 March 1858, *Tolstoy's Diaries* (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985), 2: 49. Hereafter, *TD*. He read Herman Grimm's German translation of Emerson (1857).

144 L. Tolstoy, 12, 13 May 1884, *TD* 2: 214.

145 L. Tolstoy, 22 May 1894, in ibid.

Over-Soul", followed by several others.146 Tolstoy's wife and other family members also read Emerson.147

In Tolstoy's essay "Message to the American People" (1901), he encouraged U.S. readers to rediscover their writers of the 1850s. He listed "Garrison, Parker, Emerson, Ballou, and Thoreau, not as the greatest, but as those who, I think, specially influenced me". In his preface to Polenz's *Büttnerbauer* (1895), he had already included "Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Whittier" in "the great galaxy" of American literature. And his two collections of classic wisdom, *The Cycle of Reading* (1906) and *Path of Life*  (begun in 1910), included many Emerson excerpts.148 Quotations in the latter work were largely from "Self-Reliance". But he also singled out a paragraph from the little-known essay, "Works and Days" (1870), affirming the idea that "each day is the best day", each hour "a critical, decisive hour". Of Emerson themes, Tolstoy commented on immortality, the importance of living "outside" time, and prioritizing the depth of one's life above its duration. In yet another diary entry, Tolstoy revealed Emerson's weight with him: "Read: Emerson was told that the world would soon end. He replied: 'Well, I think I can get along without it'. Very important".149

#### Toward the East

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), yet another follower of Emerson who became a Nobel laureate in literature (1907), began reading Emerson's poems when he was eight. Around 1880, the fifteen-year-old Kipling listed Emerson as his second choice after Whittier (another Emerson aficionado) on a school poll of students' favorite poets. Four years later, Kipling wrote a poetic parody, "Kopra-Brahm",150 dedicated to Emerson. An antic mix of ethereal and common material subjects, the poem's first two lines are: "Cosmic force and Cawnpore leather / Hold my walking-boots together". ("Cawnpore leather" deliberately mauled the pronunciation of an Indian hide from the city of Kanpur.) Kipling's poem draws heavily on images and

146 See K. W. Cameron, *Emerson and Thoreau in Europe: The Transcendental Influence* (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1999), 118.

147 S. A. Tolstaya, *The Diaries of Sofia Tolstaya* (London: Cape, 1985), 441.

148 L. Tolstoy, *Path of Life*, trans. Maureen Cote (Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2002), 15, 81, 87, 92, 148, 151–52, 170, 205, 208, 233, 255, 260, 262, 273, 306.

149 L. Tolstoy, January 3, 1890, in *TD* 1: 275. Several sources report this anecdote of unclear origin.

150 R. Kipling, *The Writings in Prose and Verse: Early Verse* (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900), 90.

characters from Emerson, notably "Brahma, to which the title alludes, but also to one of Emerson's "Fragments on the poet and the poetic gift", where he whimsically boasted, "[The poet] could condense cerulean ether / Into the very best sole-leather".151 A native Englishman born in Bombay and educated in Britain, Kipling returned to live in India for several years. Then for four years (1892–1896), he was in Vermont, where he met Emerson's friend, Charles Eliot Norton. Norton corresponded with young Kipling and admired his poetry. He also gave him books, including his own edition of the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence (1894), reinforcing Kipling's strong boyhood memories of Emerson.

6.22 J. Rudyard Kipling at about 34, c. 1899.

Apparently Kipling was also drawn to Emerson's essays — even to obscure ones.152 As Emerson had done, Kipling also introduced his prose with

151 *W* 9: 332.

152 R. Kipling [mostly 1889], *Letters of Travel* (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1920), 13. Kipling quotes Emerson in "Success" on Euripides' comment about Zeus whom he says "hates busy-bodies and those who do too much".

poems, or quoted Emerson directly. Quotations from "Give All to Love" prefaced Kipling's "The Children of the Zodiac" (1891), and others from "Brahma" for *The Day's Work* (1898). When Kipling left India for Japan in 1889, he introduced his impressions of the new country via quotes, with a slight final variant, from Emerson's "Woodnotes, II".153 Kipling's poem "The Inventor", in *The Muse among the Motors* (1904), is dedicated to Emerson, emulating his style and themes, but with a more regular rhythm. It presents a Benjamin Franklin-like figure who reflects Emerson's Promethean desires: his fascination with power, the overcoming of space and time, and a hope for the renewal of man. In a late memoir, *Something of Myself* (1937), Kipling retained his earlier allegiance to Emerson, quoting a little known fragment from his *May-Day and Other Pieces* (1867).154

Emerson's pervasive presence in Kipling appears in his famous "If" (1895), which once competed with Poe's "Raven" as the West's best-known poem. While composing it, Kipling was in close contact with Norton and also re-reading Emerson. "If" concentrates and popularizes both Emerson's ideas and spirit: "trust yourself", "don't look too good, nor talk too wise", "start again at your beginnings", "talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch", "Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it / And — which is more — you'll be a Man, my son!"155

From the stanza that heads this chapter, Emerson's phrase — "a subtle chain of countless rings" — concisely sets the stage for humanity's progressive evolution. Insight makes it possible: "The eye reads omens where it goes, / And speaks all languages the rose …" The meanings gained collectively define the "rose", what may be known about creation and ourselves. Such knowledge is universal since it "speaks all languages". Emerson's climactic ending, "And, striving to be man, the worm / Mounts through all the spires of form", alludes to just the sort of unified effort that he, his Western educators, and followers all symbolize: the human mind, perpetually advancing from its lowliest origins, spirals upward to new heights of consciousness.

153 R. Kipling, *From Sea to Sea* (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 291.

154 R. Kipling, *Something of Myself* (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78.

155 Kipling first published "If" in *Rewards and Fairies* (London: Macmillan & Co., 1910), 181–82.

### 6.2 Asia in Emerson and Emerson in Asia

*Alan Hodder*

Please tell Maganlalbhai [Gandhi's nephew] that I would advise him to read Emerson's essays. They can be had for nine pence in Durban. There is a cheap reprint out. Those essays are worth studying. He should read them, mark the important passages and then finally copy them out in a notebook. The essays to my mind contain the teaching of Indian wisdom in a Western garb.

Mahatma Gandhi, letter to his son, 25 March 1907

#### Asia in Emerson

While Emerson has often been viewed as the most American of writers — formulator of such a reputedly distinctive American ideal as self-reliance — it is important to recognize that he was at the same time an unprecedentedly cosmopolitan thinker, drawing on a far-flung range of sources, Eastern as well as Western. Our first public intellectual, he was at the same time our first global intellectual, and as his fame spread throughout the middle and final decades of the nineteenth century, his writings in English and in translation often found an appreciative, at times even an ardent, readership, in various non-Western lands as well. Indeed, numbered among his most admiring readers were several who went on to play momentous roles in the modern religious, literary, or political history of their respective nations, most notably India and Japan. Among

Indians, these included Hindu religious reformer and missionary, Swami Vivekananda; Indian poet and Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore; and even Mohandas ("Mahatma") Gandhi himself, chief architect of Indian independence. As colonial subjects themselves, such Indian leaders participated centrally in the tense, politically fraught, ongoing cultural and political exchange between Europe and its Asian colonial possessions. No less significant for modern East-West religious and cultural exchange was D. T. Suzuki, the great ambassador of Zen in the West, whose work also contributed significantly to modern Japanese self-definition *vis-à-vis* the West.