Emerson: Sage, Satirist, or Wisdom Speaker?

George P. Landow

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend to both Carlyle and Thoreau, represents another interesting test case for this theory of genre since an examination of his works suggests some questions of central importance. First, in what ways does this major writer of nonfiction relate to the nineteenth-century sage and his modem heirs? Does my proposed definition of a genre accurately describe his works, or does he write a somewhat different kind of prose or even an essentially different one? Second, if Emerson's writings do not match some of the defining characteristics of the sage's genre, how does this result affect the value of such generic description? Furthermore, does this generic description prove useful when reading other, possibly related, genres?

Many of the sage's concerns and techniques certainly appear in Emerson's writing. He employs a discontinuous literary structure, argument by image and analogy, acts of definition, and visionary promises, and he also uses many techniques to transfer the audience's allegiance to him. Nonetheless, Emerson does not strike one as a sage but as a writer in the ancient wisdom tradition. Two factors or qualities distinguish him from Carlyle, Thoreau, and others who created the genre of the sage. In the first place, the more genial Emerson almost never attacks his audience directly. He avoids directly confronting readers with their faults and flaws, although not because he lacks the satirist's gifts. When I first began to look for identifying characteristics of a possible genre, I thought of those writers who contributed to it under the rubric of "sages and satirists"; that is, I thought of them as those who combined some of the characteristics of traditional wisdom literature with those of satire. One of my colleagues, a well-known authority on the American literary renaissance, asserted that Emerson did not fit my requirements for a practitioner of this putative genre, largely because he never wrote satire. In fact, as I discovered, Emerson frequently employs satire, both its gentle philosophical form and a more traditional pointed one. Emerson certainly matches the savagery of Thoreau and Ruskin when he satirizes the state of English religion:

The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth brushed hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the religion of a gentleman. So far is he from attaching any meaning to the words, that he believes himself to have done almost the generous thing, and that it is very condescending in him to pray to God.... Their religion is a quotation; their church is a doll; and any examination is interdicted with screams of terror. In good company you expect them to laugh at the fanaticism of the vulgar; but they do not they are the vulgar.... The Anglican church is marked by the grace and good sense of its forms, by the manly grace of its clergy. The gospel it preaches, is, "By taste are ye saved." ... It is not in ordinary a persecuting church; it is not inquisitorial, not even inquisitive, is perfectly well-bred, and can shut its eyes on all proper occasions. ("Religion," English Traits, 88~88)

The closing sentences of this passage have much in common with attacks upon religious hypocrisy made by Ruskin and Thoreau, but a difference immediately strikes one: Emerson attacks the English, who are foreigners, outsiders, whereas Thoreau and Ruskin attack their fellow citizens.

The second chief difference that divides Emerson from his friend Carlyle and other sages lies in the fact that, unlike them, he avoids the particular and almost never interprets specific contemporary phenomena. One distinguishing feature of the sage is his ability to unpack meaning after meaning from apparently trivial facts and events, and his characteristic manner of proceeding endows such minutiae with value. Both this manner of proceeding and the attitudes toward reality that make it possible derive largely from the Puritan (or Evangelical) tradition. Specifically, they derive from typological interpretations of the Scriptures which emphasize that both Old Testament history and its fulfillment, both Moses and Christ, have real historical existence.

The first- and second-generation sages all developed within the context of such biblical interpretation, and although none of them ended their careers with anything like orthodox Christian belief, they all retained habits of mind derived from early-nineteenth-century Protestantism. Emerson, in contrast, developed within a New England Unitarianism that denied the importance of both scriptural history and the literal truth of the Bible. Lawrence Buell's fine study of the influence of Unitarian thought upon the American Transcendentalists points to the importance of its "figurative approach to truth. The free and creative use the Unitarians made of scripture and doctrine was a significant legacy to Transcendentalist style as well as thought. Their approach to the Bible was a near anticipation of the Emersonian habit of interpreting its supernatural elements metaphorically."

Unitarian rhetoric anticipates qualities of Transcendentalist prose that distinguish it from that of the sage, such as "the figurative approach to doctrine and (occasionally) language," which, argues Buell, betrays an "impulse to go beyond truth unadorned to celebrate the beauty of truth, an impulse which tends to accelerate as the subject gets more secular, the theological content gets more tenuous, and the writer concentrates more on the appearances or manifestations of his principle than the articulation of the principle itself" (134). The Unitarian tradition, however, does not diverge entirely from the more orthodox Protestant one upon which the sages draw, and the two traditions share many of the same attitudes toward oratory and style. Characteristics that Unitarian rhetoric, Transcendentalist prose, and Emerson's own writings do share with the work of Carlyle and other writers in this genre thus include what Buell describes as typical Unitarian "multiplicity of demonstration, often verging on catalogue rhetoric" and an "intermittent use of rhapsodic as opposed to logical ordering" (134). Defining such literary techniques and both the literary and nonliterary traditions from which they derive helps us read individual works more richly and perceptively, and such an approach also suggests the complex interrelations between individual works, the genres in which they participate, and the traditions that they compose.

The fact that the theory of the sage does not embrace Emerson's writings implies little about its applicability and usefulness since it does not claim to describe all nineteenth- and twentieth-century nonfiction but only a single major strain or form. In fact, as long as it accurately describes a fair number of major works, and I believe it does, the theory proves useful because it can show us how to read and react to them. For this reason, defining the genre created by the Victorian and modern sage has value for understanding other forms of nonfiction as well. Because an approach by means of genre focuses attention upon particular literary techniques, it also helps us better appreciate those devices when they appear in other forms and at the same time it leads us to look more carefully at the way other forms employ alternative, -- or even diametrically opposed, techniques.

Last modified 2000