In 1847-48 Emerson journeyed to Great Britain, lecturing first in industrial cities in the north, then in London, during a time of socio-economic transformation and political unrest. In the next several years he would travel extensively through cities, towns, farmlands, and forests in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. My focus in this essay is on how Emerson's experiences in England and the Midwest combined to shape his vision of Anglo-American civilization as expressed first in the lecture "The Anglo-American" (1852-1855; published 2001), then in English Traits (1856), and on how his judgment of Western democracy and its influence on American character comports with, and can be illuminated by, historian Frederick Jackson Turner's career-long engagement with Western democracy in the studies collected in The Frontier in American History (1920). It is said, if you would see the American, you must cross the Alleghanies. Emerson, "The Anglo-American" (1852-1855) The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American development. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Problem of the West" (1896; 1921)

By "Updike's wager" I mean a willed decision to believe in the face of counterevidence. Emotionally Updike's wager dates back to a crisis in his teens, intellectually to another in the early 1960s, but it assumed new urgency in the 1980s and later as developments in science made belief increasingly problematic. In "On Being a Self Forever" and some of the fiction and nonfiction of his last two decades, Updike sought to reground religion on the pragmatic basis of its consequences for living. Although he remained a churchgoer throughout his life, his practical belief came to consist in a non-doctrinal faith in divine beneficence, a love of Creation, a hope for eternal life in some unimaginable form, and a conviction that belief was essential for the continuity of the ideals and culture of Western civilization.

I title this essay "Six Characters in Search of a Prophet"; it might equally have been called "Six Aspects of a Problem in Search of a Solution." Prefaced by the introductory "Uses of Great Men," delivered as a course of lectures in the winter of 1845–46, and enlarged and revised only slightly for book publication in 1850, Representative Men belongs in its thematic concerns to the earlier half of the decade, a period of crisis and would-be transition for Emerson most openly on display the preceding year in "Experience" (1844) but visible as well in attitudes toward nature, history, and the capacities of the self in "The Method of Nature" (1841), "The Transcendentalist" (1841), "The Young American" (1844), and in contemporary volumes of the journals.1Among the most accessible of Emerson's books, if also among the least attended to critically, Representative Men occupies the position of a fulcrum, or potential fulcrum, within the course of his career. Faced with the disjunction between "the world I converse with in the city and in the farms" and "the world I think," Emerson might attempt to synthesize the actual and the ideal within the terms of his newly emerging thought; he might try to reaffirm established ideas with whatever retrenchments or modifications seemed necessary; or he might intellectually mark time as he awaited life and thought to deliver him from an impasse that admitted of no visible solution.2Of the seven "Lords of Life" designated in the poetic headnote to "Experience" and again in the text, five (Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surprise, Subjectivity) refer to an internal condition (the limitations imposed by temperament, heredity, and the inconstancy of moods), two (Surface and Reality) to an external condition (the ways of the world). The former were long-standing subjects of frustration in Emerson's journals, if only marginally in his public writings through Essays: First Series (1841). The latter grew increasingly prominent in the mid-1840s as rapid industrialization and the coming of the railroad to New England forced him to concede the present-day immovability of capitalism and the fact that its leading figures, nature's "darlings" as he called them in "Experience," "are not children of our law, do not come out of the Sunday school, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the commandments."3 On one side was the world envisioned by the active soul, on the other the world of material power operative upon and within the self. "Cannot Montaigne & Shakespeare consist with Plato & Jesus?" he had asked in a journal entry of 1839.4Representative Men substitutes Swedenborg for Jesus, but the issue remains the same: the incongruity between the mind's impulse toward unity and the unruly plenitude of the world.Originating in a lecture on Napoleon Emerson gave in the winter of 1844–45, Representative Men developed into a vehicle through which he might explore and attempt to resolve the perplexing doubleness of experience. Unlike Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), which had preached reverence for and submission to great men, Emerson's opening "Uses of Great Men" enlists its characters as instruments for the instruction of the self and the furtherance of universal design. Different from ourselves in inhabiting a more elevated sphere of thought or action, great men are "lenses through which we read our own minds"; historical figures created by and reflective of their times, they are capable of speaking powerfully to later ones; and persons to be admired for their gifts and accomplishments, they must nonetheless be resisted lest, like books in "The American Scholar" (1837), they swerve us from our "orbit" and make us a "satellite" in another's mental system.5The paradox at the heart of Representative Men is that while Emerson would profit from the otherness of these "otherest" selves (CW 4:4), he approaches them with suppositions that enclose him within an almost impenetrable sphere of belief and judgment. Among these suppositions are that man is "the centre of things for nature" (CW 4:6), that consciousness of itself through human intelligence is the teleological aim of the universe, that "each material thing has its celestial side" (CW 4:7), that the empirical study of nature (science) is "wanting . . . until it has been humanized" by distilling its moral meaning (CW 4:7), and that "the destiny of organized nature is amelioration" (CW 4:20) understood in recognizably anthropocentric terms. To these must be added another, the authority of "the moral sentiment," which enters the book with the chapter on Swedenborg and rules its assessments of character and achievement thereafter. Although Emerson may not be the "the novice [he] was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago," as he claimed in "Experience," neither has he put former ideas behind him as he works to reconcile them with the ineluctably real.6 The abiding interest of Representative Men is in the spectacle of Emerson, within the context of his personal as well as his intellectual life, struggling to work beyond the terms of entrenched beliefs even as he clings to their essential framework.Just as Representative Men is a sectioned book answering to the particularities of its characters yet held together by the common problem of mind and world, so my discussion of chapters will attend to relevant aspects of that problem as they relate to the book's presiding, if conflicted vision.Historically the first of Emerson's representative men, Plato is important conceptually in establishing the dichotomy that will govern the metaphysics of his book. "Philosophy," Emerson writes, "is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base: the One; and the two.—1. Unity or Identity; and, 2. Variety" (CW 4:27), with "each student adher[ing] by temperament and by habit, to the first or the second of these gods of the mind" (CW 4:27,30). William James would call these temperaments "tender-minded" and "tough-minded," or "monistic" and "pluralistic," and view their opposition as "the most central of all philosophic problems" because so constitutive of others.7 Monism "starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things"; pluralism begins with "the parts, and makes of the whole a collection," though never a complete or holistic collection.8 This, essentially, is Emerson's position, with reservations about both these world-views. Monism (the way of visionary religion) is flawed for him by a "too rapid unification" that fails to respect the particulars of nature, pluralism (the way of empirical science) by an "excessive attention to parts" to the neglect of "fundamental Unity" (CW 4:30,28).Combining "the infinitude of the Asiatic soul" with "the defining, result-loving, machine-making" mind of Europe, Plato for Emerson was one of those rare "balanced" souls "perceptive" of both (CW 4:31). By "Plato," Emerson turns out to mean "the double star" of Plato the "robed scholar" and his character Socrates, a "plain old uncle" with a "Franklin-like wisdom" and an enjoyment of the life of the streets (CW 4:38,42,40). Plato is a lofty Don Quixote tilting at the "super-essential" (CW 4:35), Socrates a droll, corporeal Sancho Panza of "conquering intelligence" (CW 4:41); paired, they form the writer Plato in his "extraordinary power" (CW 4:40). Yet even this "balanced" soul is balanced for only in its happy complementarity as it passes back and forth between the ideal and the actual. Plato "is charged," Emerson says (the charge is substantively his own), "with having failed to make the transition from ideas to matter" (CW 4:43). Philosophically, this is fatal. "The mouthful [of the universe] proves too large" for him, and like the proverbial "Boa Constrictor" he is "strangled" trying to swallow it (CW 4:43). "Unconquered Nature lives on, and forgets him," Emerson concludes: "No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains" (CW 4:43,44).Positioned near the outset of Representative Men, Emerson's judgment of failure will qualify the achievement of each of his interpreters of nature. Having introduced the problem of Unity and Variety, Emerson will proceed to ask whether "modern criticism" (by implication himself in what follows) can "draw the line of relation that subsists between Shakespeare and Swedenborg," the consummate poet of the many and the polymathic scientist turned visionary of the One (CW 4:53).If for modern readers Swedenborg is the least illustrious of the characters in Representative Men, for Emerson he was the most indispensable. It was Swedenborg, not Plato, who in his view came closest to showing what no writer had ever shown—"the correspondence of meaning between every part [of the universe] and every other part" (CW 4:66)—and whose example spoke most directly to his own ambitions, past, present, and (metaphysically, at least) to come.A presence virtually from the outset of his intellectual life, Swedenborg was in Emerson's mind when, traveling with his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson in the White Mountains a month after having informed the Second Church of his reluctance to administer the Lord's Supper, he recorded what would become a chief article of his own religion: "Swedenborg 'considered the visible world & the relation of its parts as the dial plate of the invisible one.'"9 The quotation, which he came upon in that month's issue of the New Jerusalem Magazine and reproduced four years later in Nature, must have seemed almost providential to him, both for its timeliness in this "hour of decision" and for its association with his companion Mary, who years earlier had brought Swedenborg to his attention through Mme. de Staël.10 More profound debts were to Bostonian Sampson Reed, whose Swedenborgian Observations on the Growth of the Mind (1826) had for him "the aspect of a revelation" when he read it soon after its publication, and Swedenborg disciple Guillaume Oegger, whose theories of the relationship between matter, spirit, and language he transcribed in a lengthy journal entry of 1835 and drew upon in Nature.11Describing Swedenborg's ideas in Representative Men, Emerson revisits many of his own in Nature with an empathy so strong as almost to seem, after "Experience," a renascence of early belief. "The thoughts in which" he says Swedenborg "lived" were, and to a large extent remain, his own thoughts, foremost among them the correspondence between matter and mind that allows (in Swedenborg's words) "'any natural truth'" to be translated into "'a spiritual truth'" (CW 4:60,65). The task Emerson faced in "Swedenborg" was to separate what he considered Swedenborg's unparalleled understanding of the symbolism of things from the "peculiarities" of the "Lutheran bishop's son" who, for all the "grandeurs" of his converse with truth, "remains the Lutheran bishop's son" (CW 4:67,76).In titling his chapter "Swedenborg, or the Mystic" Emerson echoes Frederic Henry Hedge's 1833 characterization of Swedenborg as "the greatest mystic that Christianity has ever known."12 As Emerson uses the term, "mysticism" is a quality of visionaries across the ages characterized by "ecstasy" (a "getting out of their bodies to think") and "trance" (CW 4:55) and involving "access to the secrets and structure of nature, by some higher method than by experience" (CW 4:54). In "The Over-Soul" (1841) he located the fount of religion in figures from Socrates to Swedenborg in "Revelation," "an influx of the Divine Mind into our mind" that overwhelms the cognizant "I" and discloses "absolute law."13 Such "announcements of the soul") had their memorable advent.14 "Every man," he observed in 1841, "has had one or two moments of extraordinary experience, has met his soul, has thought of something which he never afterwards forgot, & which revised all his speech, & moulded all his forms of thought."15 Friedrich Schleiermacher called such initiatory moments "the birthday of [one's] spiritual life" and, like Emerson, viewed their impress on character and thought as transformational and the terms in which they were experienced as determinative of a person's religion.16The nature of Emerson's own religious experience is pertinent to "Swedenborg" in explaining why Swedenborg should have appealed to him and why the notion of correspondence retained its prominence in his thought long after his enthusiasm for its champion had cooled. For this, one must look backward almost twenty years to the beginnings of Emerson's spiritual life. "Conversion from a moral to a religious character," he wrote in 1830, "is like day after twilight. The orb of the earth is lighted brighter & brighter as it turns until at last there is a particular moment when the eye sees the sun and so when the soul perceives God."17 If Emerson had such "a particular moment" it may well have been in early January 1827, when, having journeyed south to St. Augustine to regain his health, he began to inscribe ideas that had been taking shape at least since his discovery of Sampson Reed the preceding September. Pondering his own "notions of compensation not yet fully unfolded," he felt himself "standing on a higher stage" of moral "science" than anyone before him and "instructed by a better philosophy"—one in which an apprehension of moral law pervading the universe displaced the Christian scheme of salvation and damnation as the source and center of religion.18 "Instead of denouncing a future contingent vengeance," he wrote in a journal entry of January 4, "I see that vengeance to be contemporary with the crime."19 God, he added a few days later, has "secured the execution of his everlasting laws by committing to every moral being the supervision of its own character [,] by making every moral being the unrelenting inexorable punisher of his own delinquency."20Whether "mystical" or not, Emerson's illumination of 1827 laid the basis for a post-Scriptural, post-doctrinal, and (it would prove) post-Christian religion and filled him with the wonderment of a convert. "The emotions of this hour may be peculiar & unexampled in the whole eternity of moral being," he remarked in April 1827: "I lead a new life. I occupy new ground in the world of spirits, untenanted before. I commence a career of thought & action, which is expanding before me into a distant & dazzling infinity. Strange thoughts start up like angels in my way and beckon me onward."21What Emerson could not resolve in 1827 or by the time he sailed home from Europe six years later was what he "mean[t] by Morals" and how moral laws related to the "laws of nature as they are known to the human mind."22 The sciences of geology and astronomy had vastly expanded time and space, challenging Biblical history and cosmology most directly but subverting other forms of anthropocentrism as well. The Copernican astronomy that "disprove[d] dogmatic theology" and made "the great scheme for the salvation of man absolutely incredible," as Emerson noted approvingly in 1832, also threatened to make his universe of moral law incredible.23 Yet science could not be overridden, parried, or ignored. "The Religion that is afraid of science, dishonours God & commits suicide," he wrote in 1831: "It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates [,] tyrannizes over a village of God's empire but is not the immutable universal law."24It was here that Swedenborg was of incalculable importance to Emerson in the early 1830s and afterwards. Distinguished as a scientist, he was (as O. W. Firkins pointed out) "what Emerson sought for in vain among the mystics of past ages and the investigations of his own—the subordination of really high scientific accomplishments to mystical and philosophical ends."25 In "The Uses of Natural History" (1833), the inaugural lecture of his secular career delivered a month after his return from Europe, Emerson quoted Swedenborg in what amounts to a rehearsal for the "Language" section in Nature: "The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass. 'The visible world,' it has been said, 'and the relation of its parts is the dial plate of the invisible one.'"26 Journal entries over the next few years enlarge upon the idea as Emerson scoured the sciences for whatever moral analogies could be drawn from them. He even wondered whether "the use of Natural Science" might be "merely ancillary to Moral" science: "I would learn the law of the diffraction of a ray because when I understand it, it will illustrate, perhaps suggest, a new truth in ethics."27 What W. C. Brownell said of Hawthorne—"He did not find sermons in stones. He had the sermons already; his task was to find stones to fit them"—applies to Emerson as he searched for sermons in the stones of science.28 By the time of Nature his Swedenborgian confidence had become complete: "The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every substance."29Philip F. Gura sees Emerson's "interest in Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences" as "lifelong."30 Unhappily, this is true, but with a codicil. While preserving a firm belief in the principle of correspondence, Emerson increasingly took issue with both the particulars of Swedenborg's version of it and the rigidity of his allegorical method. Like other chapters in Representative Men, "Swedenborg" begins with exposition, proceeds to praise, and ends with pointed criticism, but nowhere (save with Goethe) is the praise higher or the criticism more invested than with Swedenborg. The praise comes apropos of a long quotation about correspondence from Swedenborg's Animal Kingdom, a book Emerson sees as aspiring toward "a picture-language" of "such grand presage" as to supersede "other science," "absorb all faculties," and enable "each man" to ask "of all objects what they mean" (CW 4:65,66). With the project itself, Emerson is in full sympathy. What vitiates it for him is the "theological bias" that "fatally narrowed [Swedenborg's] interpretation of nature," which is "not human and universal, but is mystical and Hebraic" (CW 4:68). "Mystical" here does not mean visionary; it refers pejoratively, as it sometimes does with Emerson, to the subjectivity, literal-mindedness, and dogmatism he saw in mystics like Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme who, as he said in "The Poet" (1844), mistake "an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one."31 "Swedenborg fastens each natural object to a theologic notion," Emerson complains in Representative Men: "a horse signifies carnal understanding; a tree, perception; the moon, Faith"; and so on (CW 4:68). But "the slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. . . . Nature avenges herself on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist" (CW 4:68).In praising the nature of Swedenborg's project while objecting to his execution of it, Emerson is writing with oblique reference to himself and marking the distance he has come since Nature even as he retains its key Swedenborgian idea of correspondence. In Nature he himself had been guilty of subjectivism and allegory, announced in the propositions that frame the book's section on "Language": "1. Words are signs of natural facts, 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of spirit."32 Emerson wished to believe that the "relation" he saw "between mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God," but the examples offered of it in Nature are as fanciful and naïve as those he would deride in "Swedenborg." "Who looks upon a river, in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of things?"33 "An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch," and so on.34 Because "A" (a moral law) could be likened to "B" (a physical law), it followed that "A" was inherent in "B" and that "B" existed in order to instruct us in "A."35 By early 1843 Emerson had distanced himself from such reasoning. Commenting on Swedenborg in a lecture on recent literary influences on New England, he wrote mockingly of allegorism, "Nature is a tablet on which any sense may be inscribed, only not anything cunning and consciously vicious. Draw the moral of the river, the rock, and the ocean. The river, the rock, and the ocean say, 'Guess again.'"36On the deepest level, Emerson's criticism of Swedenborg went beyond Swedenborg's Christian theology, which he saw as "retrospective" (CW 4:80), and his analogical bent, which he himself would never entirely forswear. His quarrel in Representative Men is with Swedenborg's entire "system of the world," which "wants central spontaneity" (CW 4:74). Swedenborg's "Universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order, and with unbroken unity, but cold and still" (CW 4:74–75). The source of Swedenborg's errors lay in a lack of poetic imagination, "a very high sort of seeing" (as Emerson described it in "The Poet") that came by the intellect's "sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others."37 Swedenborg's symbolism solidified what was perpetually in motion, deadened what was alive, and substituted doctrine for what could be communicated only through metaphor. Emerson's conception of Swedenborg has not changed by 1845–46 so much as his conception of the universe has changed. The world that had once been static and allegorical, as in Nature, now appears "fluid and volatile," and within this new vitalism Swedenborg's universe seems desiccated.38 If the ideal poet needed to be a mystic in his perception of law, the mystic needed to be a poet in his expression of it. As a seer, Emerson told Sampson Reed in 1842, Swedenborg was "a grand poet"; as a writer, he was the least of one.39In "Swedenborg" Emerson pays tribute to the visionary who beheld the essential nature of things while criticizing the dogmatist who dwelt on the "Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment," its living source (CW 4:76). But Emerson's separation of the Swedenborgian wheat from the chaff is by no means as distinct as it seems. The "mystic," he remarked in 1846, is one "who beholds the flux" and "labels & tickets one thing or two," then "seeks to accredit this new jail because it was builded by him who has demolished so many jails."40 The Swedenborg of Representative Men is just such a jailer, yet having demolished Swedenborg's jail Emerson envisions a "dictionary of symbols . . . yet to be written" (CW 4:68) in the belief that it might not be a jail but the open air of absolute truth. Two world-views co-exist uneasily in Emerson's Janus-faced chapter; one looks backward to a universe of fixed correspondences, the other forward to a universe of "rapid metamorphosis" such as he had depicted with mingled exhilaration and terror in "The Method of Nature," the most cosmologically prescient and least anthropocentric of his essays.41Placed just after "Swedenborg" and before "Shakespeare," "Montaigne, or the Skeptic" is linked to both. Philosophically, it pairs with "Swedenborg" in exemplifying the opposition of the monist and the pluralist; temperamentally, in its celebration of the carnival of life and "a most uncanonical levity" (CW 4:93) it looks ahead to qualities in Shakespeare, whose copy of the Essays, Emerson notes, "is the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's library" (CW 4:92). In contrast to Swedenborg, whom Emerson called "disagreeably wise" (CW 4:80), Montaigne delighted him, as he had since Emerson read him soon after college and felt as if he himself had "written the book in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience" (CW 4:92). "Full of fun, poetry, business, divinity, philosophy, smut," Montaigne appealed at once to the philosophical realism Emerson imbibed from Hume and to the pleasure he took in things that "smack of the earth and of real life, sweet or smart or stinging" (CW 4:94).42 Painfully conscious of his own formality and inhibition, Emerson reveled in their opposites when he came upon them in books or in colorful figures like Father Edward Taylor, the seaman-turned-preacher who served as a model for Melville's Father Mapple, or in writers like Carlyle, whose style had a "sinew & vivacity comparable to Plutarch & Montaigne."43 Much as Virginia Woolf dipped into the writings of her father, Leslie Stephen, "to stiffen my fluid vision," so Emerson could use "old Montaigne . . . to balance my fine jaunty gauze stuff."44 His sentence on Montaigne's prose—"Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive" (CW 4:94)—is itself a sentence that would bleed.Emerson begins "Montaigne" with a propositional statement, "Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals" (CW 4:85), that reaffirms the metaphysical premise of Representative Men. Neither of the two classes of thinkers, the sensationalists with their "perception of Difference" and the moralists with their "perception of Identity" (CW 4:85), satisfies Emerson, each neglecting the truth of the other. In presenting the skeptic as "a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two" (CW 4:88), Emerson appears to be offering a golden mean. The openness of the skeptic's question "Que sçais je" (What do I know?) (CW 4:94) seems a promising point of departure until, on issues of supreme importance to Emerson, it turns out to involve the sort of "total suspense of judgment" on non-evidentiary matters that Emerson had found in Hume.45 "What is the use of pretending to powers we have not?" Emerson has Montaigne ask: "What is the use of pretending to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? . . . If there is a wish for immortality, and no evidence, why not just say that? If there are conflicting evidences, why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to make up his mind, yea or nay,–why not suspend the judgment?" (CW 4:89). To Emerson, such suspension of belief was tantamount to non-belief, whether in a "Scotch Goliath" like Hume or in his beloved Montaigne.46The argument of "Montaigne" turns upon the question of whether "Montaigne has spoken wisely" (CW 4:96). Not wisely enough, Emerson judges, after which the search for a middle ground gives way to a dichotomy between "natural believers" like himself (CW 4:96) and de facto non-believers including Montaigne. "When will you mend Montaigne?" Emerson had asked himself in 1835: "Can you not express your own conviction that moral laws hold?"47 "To 'mend Montaigne,'" as Joseph Urbas comments, "would be . . . to show that the causal order in nature and the moral law within are one and the same."48 "Showing," however, is what Emerson can't do; he can only overrule. The notable thing about his effort to do so is the vast territory it cedes to its opponent, as though belief were not an argument from reason and experience but a choice made openly and defiantly against them. Having declared his faith, Emerson proceeds to "celebrate" the skeptic Montaigne by airing "doubts and negations" (CW 4:98) that have nothing to do with Montaigne himself but are his own, recent or chronic: "the power of moods, each setting at nought all but its own tissue of facts and beliefs" (CW 4:99); the fact "that the laws of the world do not always befriend, but often hurt and crush us" (CW 4:100); and the "double consciousness," as he called it in "The Transcendentalist," that leaves the would-be believer alternating between parallel planes of the "great and little" with no prospect of their intersection—in brief, the irreconcilable disparity "between the theory and practice of life" (CW 4:101).49Against these negatives Emerson arrays the moral sentiment as "the final solution in which Skepticism is lost" (CW 4:103). Charles Lowell Young finds Emerson's appeal to this quality "mystical" in seeming to rest on "contact with an ultimate reality."50 George Santayana doubted whether Emerson ever knew what he meant by such ideas.51 Through the Divinity School Address at least, Emerson did seem to know even as he allowed that the laws apprehended by the moral sentiment "refuse to be adequately stated."52 By the early 1840s, however, as the brightness and clarity of his originating vision dimmed, a note of weariness and attenuation appears in his journals. If thought is indeed "like manna, that fell out of heaven, which cannot be stored," by the time of Representative Men Emerson seems to have been living on stale manna.53 A remembrance of vision has supplanted the experience of it; doctrines like "the moral sentiment" are what remained—talismanic terms charged with nebulous meaning and invoked with increasing frequency to connect him with a revelation that time has hollowed out. "Well it took you up, & showed you something to the purpose; that there was something there," he remarked in a journal entry of 1852, returning to the image he had used to describe "conversion" in 1830: "Look, look, old mole! there, straight up before you, is the magnificent Sun. If only for a second, you see it."54Having identified himself as a "natural believer" in "Montaigne," Emerson can draw the metaphysical corollary: "We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things; all worlds are strung on it as beads: and men and events and life come to us only because of that thread" (CW 4:96). In Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989) John Updike would quote this passage in describing religiosity as a persistence of belief "against all the powerful post-Copernican, post-Darwinian evidence that we are insignificant accidents within a vast uncaused churning."55 "Against the evidence" is the position Emerson comes to in "Montaigne": "things seem to say one

Clemens Spahr's American Romanticism and the Popularization of Literary Education takes its place within what, as evidenced by his extensive bibliography and copious textual citations, is a burgeoning effort to situate Transcendentalism within its immediate social and institutional contexts. In this case, Spahr focuses on the debate over the nature and desirability of universal education and its relationship to established hierarchies of class, privilege, and power. For Spahr, “Romantic” educators (referring mainly here to the Transcendentalists, with the addition of Frederick Douglass) began with an idea of education premised on the potential of all human beings for self-culture. They soon found themselves running afoul of what Spahr calls “exclusionary mechanisms” in the culture. Still more troublingly, they were led to recognize their own status and that of their students or audiences as members of a middle-class literary culture at a distance from the populace they sought to educate and transform. Journalism and the lecture hall were venues they used to broaden their audiences and extend their reformist reach. Yet even there they came up against obstacles that made them see—as Orestes Brownson saw early on—the need for a radical transformation of class society. The chapters that follow Spahr's introduction trace this narrative as it plays out in the genres of the Romantic conversation (notably Bronson Alcott's Temple School and Margaret Fuller's conversations for women), periodical literature (Brownson's Boston Quarterly Review, The Dial, and Fuller's writings for The New-York Tribune), and the reformist lecture (as practiced by Emerson, Thoreau, and Douglass) set within the lyceum movement of the 1830s and ‘40s.Spahr's is a useful, well-researched book but not one that critically examines its suppositions. Although the words “Romantic” and “Romanticism” are omnipresent in its chapters, they are left undefined other than implicitly as a shared belief in human capacity, the preeminent value of self-culture, and the extension of developmental possibility across the boundaries of class, gender, and race. In essence, “Romanticism” for Spahr resembles what it was for T. E. Hulme: the view “that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you rearrange the society by the destruction of oppressive order these possibilities will have a chance and you will get progress.” The opposing attitude, labeled conservative or what Hulme calls “classical,” is that “man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant” and who must be disciplined by “tradition and organization” for “anything decent” to be “got out of him.” The difficulty with such a binary, which tacitly informs Spahr's chapters, is that it transforms history into an ongoing morality play that pits earnest, if naïve idealists against self-interested defenders of the status quo. In doing so, it simplifies the tangled, fluid, and (as lived) often bewildering nature of social processes.Intellectually, the presiding spirit over Spahr's book is French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, for whom “education is always, subconsciously, involved in the reproduction of social structures” as they “rest on exclusivist privilege.” As Spahr applies this idea, it proves a mixed blessing. It gives his discussion focus, often with good results, but it also controls his selection and interpretation of materials so as to preclude attention to other factors and to overlapping, alternative, or competing contexts. One would scarcely know from Spahr's discussion of Emerson's Divinity School Address that its call to reject tradition and authority, and the vehement reaction to it by some in the Unitarian establishment, had anything to do with Emerson's radically depersonalized view of God. Similarly, in arguing that Thoreau's “radical rhetoric” in “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1859) signifies a redefinition of the educator “in a time of political crisis,” Spahr neglects Thoreau's engagement with politics and slavery in journal entries, lectures, and writings. Thoreau's involvement was intermittent, if at times all-consuming, and confined chiefly to the separate occasions that produced “Resistance to Civil Government,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” More representative of Thoreau in later years are his meditative natural history essays and his final lecture, “The Succession of Forest Trees,” delivered to Middlesex farmers on how best to manage their woodlots. Spahr is most successful with Alcott as an educator and Brownson as a radical reformer.Although not directly pertinent to Spahr's emphasis on institutions, absent from his discussion is serious consideration of an obstacle to change more formidable than the opposition of the privileged. In his 1837 Address on Education Emerson voiced the Romantic educators’ belief that “the chief end of man” is not to “make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise” but to “explore himself—an inexhaustible mine.” In practice, however, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed of 1830s Americans and as might be said of most subsequent American generations (youths of the 1960s partially excepted), the first priority of individuals and families in the United States has indeed been to make a fortune and bequeath it to descendants. Emerson understood this and saw the task of the educator as nothing less than that of effecting a conversion. “Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power,” he wrote in “The American Scholar: “Wake them, and they shall quit the false good, and leap to the true.” Egalitarian reform was the precondition for universal self-culture, as Brownson and Fuller understood. But, without an accompanying transformation of values, the most that reform might produce was a diffusion of the comforts and satisfactions of middle-class life across the general population. In this respect, Romantic educators may have been right to champion what Spahr calls a “literary” education. It was not simply an entrenched and exclusionary educational system that thwarted them. It was the ethos of a “people too busy to give to letters” more than cursory attention, as Emerson said, and too bent on what Brownson called “money-getting” to heed appeals for the free and full development of the self.

For Alice Munro, “the 1960s” extended in spirit a few years past the end of the decade and centred not upon racial conflict, riots in the cities, or protests against the Vietnam War but, rather, upon the situation of women of her generation as they came to terms with the social and sexual upheavals of the period. In returning to the 1960s decades later, Munro was exploring two related questions: how they were experienced by people like herself at the time and how, provisionally, they and fictionalized versions of herself as actors in them appear with distance. Although apolitical as a writer, Munro could not avoid politics in the home as sympathy with the women’s movement merged with that for other forms of contemporary protest, laying bare deep divisions between herself and her husband that found their way into themes in the fiction. Omniscient but non-committal in “Differently” (1989) and related stories set in the 1960s, and sympathetic toward her women but ironic about their missteps and confusions, Munro establishes a distance from fictionalized versions of her younger self without inscribing a moral viewpoint of her own. As she looks back on her characters, on the 1960s as a cultural phenomenon, and vicariously on herself as she felt and behaved at the time, Munro, too, seems to say, with wry aloofness, “Differently.”

Abstract:Readings of American Pastoral commonly center on the failures or limitations of the American dream, on the multi-generational immigrant experience of upward mobility and ethnic assimilation, and/or on the political and cultural convulsions of the 1960s. To set the book beside To the Lighthouse is to place it within a broader transnational context and subsume Roth the historian of twentieth-century America to Roth the metahistorian and metaphysician reflecting on forces of destruction inimical to civilized order and operative across time. The aim of this essay is twofold: to situate American Pastoral more firmly within the revolutionary context of the 1960s and at the same time, through Woolf, to consider its historicism as it extends beyond the story of the Levovs and America to a disorder latent in things and capable of erupting at any time.

Abstract:Written in 1962 and published in five years later, "Museums and Women" is a series of vignettes featuring each of the most important women in his Updike's life through that time: his strong-willed, mercurial mother; the schoolgirl its hero decides he loves; the Radcliffe student (a version of Updike's Mary Pennington) he would marry; and the lover for whom he, like Updike, would nearly leave his wife. Beyond its status as an autonomous work of fiction, "Museums and Women" is a matrix for Updike's semi-autobiographical treatments of love, sex, marriage, and infidelity. Focusing on "Museum and Women," the essay moves outward to consider Updike's life and work in thematically related writings across his career: stories of the 1960s and beyond, Marry Me: A Romance, Of the Farm, Couples, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, and Villages, a late novel comprising a reassessment of his life as it was shaped by his relationships to women.

December 01 2017 Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion. Edited by Jonathan A.Cook and BrianYothers. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Pp. 296. $99.95 cloth; $34.95 paper.) Robert Milder Robert Milder Robert Milder, professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, has published widely on Melville and other American Renaissance writers and is the author of Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (2006), among other books. He is currently at work on a study of spirituality in the American Renaissance that includes Melville Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Robert Milder Robert Milder, professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, has published widely on Melville and other American Renaissance writers and is the author of Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (2006), among other books. He is currently at work on a study of spirituality in the American Renaissance that includes Melville Online Issn: 1937-2213 Print Issn: 0028-4866 © 2017 by The New England Quarterly2017The New England Quarterly The New England Quarterly (2017) 90 (4): 625–628. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00652 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Robert Milder; Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion. The New England Quarterly 2017; 90 (4): 625–628. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00652 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThe New England Quarterly Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2017 by The New England Quarterly2017The New England Quarterly Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

With the publication of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Pi? erre with its historical note by Leon Howard and Hershel Parker, an orthodox interpretation of the novel has begun to emerge, an interpre? tation not so much of the meaning of the book as of Melville's complex intentions in writing it. The essence of this interpretation, first presented by Professor Howard in his biography of Melville and modified only slightly in his section of the historical note, is that when Melville began to write the book which was to become Pierre, he was planning to turn out a genuinely popular story, touched by the strange mystery of the Gothic romance yet full of the 'genialities' he had so admired in The House of the Seven Gables1 In Moby-Dick, so the argument runs, Mel? ville had exhausted the last remaining portion of his nautical experience, his twenty-six months as a whaleman, but more than that he had exhaust? ed the patience and attention of his audience. By November 25, 1851, roughly two weeks after the publication of Moby-Dick, he was still over four hundred dollars in debt to Harper's and needed a new book which would sell well enough to carry him over the next winter.2 It was im? perative that he do something new,3 and with a shrewd appreciation of the popular taste he turned toward the feminine audience which formed the largest novel-reading public in his time,4 hoping to regain a measure of his popularity through the tried-and-true formula of a romance. As it proved, he could not resist the inner compulsion to write as he pleased,5 producing a book far less genial than appalling; yet his initial motive was pure: he genuinely conceived Pierre as a popular romance, and long after the book was completed he remained curiously unwilling to face the fact of what he had done and persistently thought of the book he had intended rather than the book he had written.6 Though this theory has much to recommend it, it involves us in a highly controversial reading of Pierre, particularly of the early books,

Hawthorne and Dostoyevsky are united not only by the common subject of crime and punishment but also by their preoccupation the operation of what both regarded as “moral law.” In the absence of traditional religious belief, moral law was the writers’ conduit to universal order and to God. Yet what moral law was—real or socially conditioned, naturalistic or supernatural—was a mystery to them and became more so as they explored how the mind operated. The essay focuses on three texts—Crime and Punishment, The Scarlet Letter, and The Marble Faun —but it is not a traditional critical reading; it is a reflection on the vision of the writers as they trace their subject from the conscious and unconscious determinants of crime through its psychological effects to its endpoint in punishment and whatever renewal may or may not lie beyond.

The essay traces Emerson's ideas of “godless religion”; his attraction to and disenchantment with contemporary science; the challenges of 1841–44 as his thought impelled him beyond the terms of his religious synthesis; his efforts thereafter toward a new synthesis; and, when these failed, his retreat to an increasingly rarefied idealism.

My general subject is Hawthorne writer and man. I'll begin and end with that; but since if you're like me, or my children, or many of my students, you read The Scarlet Letter in high school, I'd like to focus on that book, reach out to others as they come up, then return to Hawthorne again. Chances are, even if you had very good English teacher as I did, you respected The Scarlet Letter but didn't enjoy it much or see what it had to do you with you in 20th or 21st century--Hawthorne writing in mid-19th about mid-17th and in style that even in his own time seemed quaint and old-fashioned. I've titled this The Scarlet Letter--Again??? to suggest certain rolling of eyes, as in know all about that. Do we really have to go through it again? That same English teacher who taught you The Scarlet Letter may also have told you that a great book is one that grows for you as you grow and changes with time. A cliche, but true--sometimes, with some books, to an extent. I love The Great Gatsby. I read it at 16 on my own and was smitten by it; I memorized ending, for its sound, with only vaguest idea what it meant. I read it again in high school English, in college, and in graduate school, and I've taught it many times since. It stopped changing for me at about age 30--the age Nick Carraway turns within book and year older than Fitzgerald was when he wrote it. Fitzgerald did his work so well that Gatsby's story becomes everyone's and becomes America's. Whenever I read book I am drawn back into it and am 16 and 22 and 30 again, in addition to what I am at time, but book doesn't change great deal for me, though works like Ronald Berman's The Great and Modern Times can help enrich its cultural context. Gatsby is great book, but maybe after 30 we have other concerns than what Fitzgerald called the loss of those illusions that give such color to world that you don't care whether they are right or wrong so long as they partake of magical glory.' I doubt many 16 year olds memorize ending of The Scarlet Letter or are moved by story of Hester Prynne as they are by Gatsby's. Those of my students who read book in high school and again few years later in college usually like it much better second time, not because teaching is better but because they are better readers and have lived more. We change; cultural contexts also change. Hardly anyone in 1950s and early '60s, heyday of Hawthorne criticism, thought to about gender, sexuality, and feminism. Presentism is imposition of contemporary interests and values upon text, but these themes are prominent within text; they were simply not, for long time, on most peoples critical radar. As readers we also have our private radars--habits of thinking, underlinings in old editions, passages in text that leap out at us and passages that don't. Sometimes when I come across quotation in student essay or read The Scarlet Letter in fresh copy, I'll be astonished--Hawthorne said that?--and book will rearrange itself for me like landscape after seismic shock. Hawthorne's public style is generally so quiet and formal that it is easy to overlook how much is packed into it, how filled it is with qualification and ambiguity, and how, like Moebius strip, it can turn back on itself in irony or self-deconstruction. More than almost any American text I have taught, The Scarlet Letter continues to surprise. Hawthorne himself surprises, not least, as Melville recognized, because he lulls us into thinking he won't. From first, readers had illusion of comfortably knowing thanks partly to chattiness and seeming candor of his autobiographical prefaces. Hawthorne himself mocked idea that a little preliminary talk about externals amounted to anything confessional: These things hide man, instead of displaying him, he remarked in his Preface to The Snow-Image. …

This chapter focuses on Salem, Massachusetts, as a “habitation” of Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings, a psychological locale rather than a physical and cultural one. It examines the paradox of Hawthorne's relationship to Salem, his ancestral home and ground of identity. It also considers Hawthorne's aesthetic development during the Salem years. Finally, it analyzes some of Hawthorne's works of fiction related to Salem, including the short stories “The Haunted Mind,” “Fancy’s Show Box,” “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” and “Young Goodman Brown,” as well as the novels Fanshawe (1828) and Twice-Told Tales (1837).

Hawthorne's years in England, the least studied phase of his career, are especially significant for the challenge that English materialism posed to his New England austerity and his romancer's idealism. Beyond recording his complex response to English life and character, his “English Notebooks” and “Our Old Home” show how England permanently inflected his character and sense of experience.

With their fluent colloquial prose and curiosity about life's spectacle, Hawthorne's voluminous notebooks belie the common notion that temperament and talent led him to write works of allegorical romance rather than realism. The essay argues that Hawthorne cultivated romance not because he believed in its idealizing vision but rather because, extrapolating from his experience of “the real,” he didn't.