116 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865me; I am part or particle of God.” For Emerson here, as for William Blake in America,
A Prophecy (1793), “everything that lives is holy, life delights in life”; and to be in
communion with oneself, at the deepest level, is to be in touch with what Emerson
goes on to call the “uncontained and immortal beauty” that runs through the veins
of everything around us. “In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line
of the horizon,” Emerson suggests, “man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own
nature,” supplying wonder and instruction, the sense that in descending into his true
self he is escaping, not only from society, but also from his baser, superficial self. Not
that Emerson neglects the material life in all this. On the contrary, in Nature he
begins with commodity before turning to spirit: in the first instance, what Emerson
considers in the relationship between human nature and nature is the circumstantial
dimension, the uses and practical conquest of our surroundings. This is the element
in Emersonian thought, particularly, that some of his contemporaries and subsequent
generations were to distrust. Herman Melville, for example, was reading Emerson
when he was composing Moby-Dick; and, almost certainly, when he drew his portrait
of Captain Ahab, he was offering a critique of that element in Emersonian
individualism that assumed power over nature and supplied a rationale for endless
growth and expansionism. But, for Emerson, use did not mean exploitation. And,
while he admitted that practical use was “the only use of nature that all men
apprehend,” he was careful to point out that it was easily the least important.”
The more important service to the soul offered by nature was, as Emerson saw it,
aesthetic, intellectual, and, above all, moral. As for the aesthetic, Emerson shared
with Coleridge, the English Romantic poets, and the German idealist philosophers,
the belief that each individual can order his or her environment into a harmonious
whole. “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can
integrate all the parts, that is, the poet,” Emerson insists in Nature. And just as the
poet or artist takes a scene and then rearranges it into a harmony of words or color,
so every person, in the act of seeing, can take a scene and rearrange it into harmony
in their soul, or mind. Everyone can be a poet of deed, if not of word. As for the
intellectual, that service granted to man by nature is summed up in three propositions:
“1. Words are signs of natural facts. 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of
particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.” Developing the beliefs of
his Puritan forefathers, Emerson was as convinced as they were that every literal fact
or event had a spiritual significance. So, in constructing and using an accurate
language – that is, a language that cleaves as closely as possible to facts and events –
we are sticking closely not only to the literal but also to spiritual truth. When a
person or a society uses words that are directly related to the particularities of nature,
they are dealing as exactly as possible with the particularities of that spiritual
presence that circulates through both nature and human nature. An exact language,
in short, is a vital moral instrument. From this, it follows that there is an inevitable
connection between the vitality or debility of any language and the health or sickness
of the person, or the society, using that language. It is a matter, not so much of cause
and effect, as of correspondence, interdependence; and a measure of the moral
decline of anyone or any community is the progressive deterioration of the wordsGGray_c02.indd 116ray_c 02 .indd 116 8 8/1/2011 7:54:38 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 38 AM