Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 117being used, as words become less directly and vitally related to natural, and therefore
moral, facts. One consequence of this, for Emerson, was the pivotal importance of
the poet in any culture. Poets, as he saw it, were “liberating gods” because they could
devise an accurate language. This explains why, in his essay on “The Poet,” Emerson
said that he waited with impatience for a truly American poet. For him, poets were
crucial to the language and moral life of society; an American poet was needed to
enable Americans to speak truly of themselves and their culture.
For Emerson, though, the most fundamental service of nature was moral. “The
Universe is the externization of the soul,” he insisted. Nature is a product and emblem
of the spirit, the Over-Soul; the true self or soul of each individual is divinely
connected to it, operating according to the same rhythms and laws; so each individual,
in beholding and meditating on nature, can intuit those rhythms and learn those
laws. “Every natural process is a version of a moral sentence,” Emerson tells the reader
in Nature. “The moral law lies at the center of nature and radiates to the circumference.
It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All
things with which we deal preach to us.” The style here is characteristic. There is no
visible logic to the argument. What Emerson does is to try to possess the idea by
attacking it from different directions, to locate the heart or kernel of the matter by
inserting various intellectual and verbal probes into its shell. The result is a series of
gnomic statements, a rhetorical pattern of repetition with variation. Emerson was
not a philosopher, but a moralist and a writer of pensées; and what the pensées or
nuggets of thought cluster around here is the notion that nature could and should be
our guide, our moral teacher.
The belief Emerson retained throughout his life in what he called “the wonderful
congruity which subsists between man and the world” could sometimes have
worrying consequences. He was unwilling, for example, seriously to contemplate the
existence of evil. What we may take to be evil is simply the result of our partial
vision, he argued, our dependence on the superficial claims of the false self. “The
ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye,” he explains
in Nature. “The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they
appear not transparent but opaque.” Emerson himself distinguished between what
he called the Party of Hope and the Party of Memory among his contemporaries:
the one committed to the possibilities of the future, the other wedded to the
imperfections and failures of the past. And it is quite clear that Emerson saw himself
as a member of the Party of Hope. This had questionable aspects for those, like
Hawthorne and Melville, of a darker, more skeptical frame of mind. But it also had
more unambiguously positive ones. In “The American Scholar,” for instance, which
Oliver Wendell Holmes called “Our intellectual Declaration of Independence,”
Emerson exhorted his audience to turn from imitation to originality. “We have
listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” he insists. And what the American
scholar must do is become “Man Thinking” in the present, pushing beyond
convention and institutions to learn, not from books, but directly from life. “Life is
our dictionary,” Emerson declares, offering the scholar direct rather than mediated
access to the real. From this, it follows that everything in life is a source of knowledge,GGray_c02.indd 117ray_c 02 .indd 117 8 8/1/2011 7:54:38 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 38 AM