L He?. Oh, he was beautiful! His hair was like the raven, glossy, plume-smooth, and long. I braided his hair, and it was beautiful! And I sang to him that song. . . . and now! Only the Red Rocks! only the mockery! Down there is the warm Village-our Village. The women are bringing in the wood for the winter fire. They are making many things. ... embroidering They are thinking about the cradles they are making. Gifts there will be . . . . dancing That is where I am to go. The sky has darkened, dead and gray, and she spreads out her naked arms: Snow! The first snow of Winter There will be deep snow, and the great cold... For him there is no returning.. For all who are with him there is no returning. And the Red Rocks will not be kind to them! Wakantanka! Hear me! Help me! I cannot go down there where the People are! I cannot! He must have some one to prepare food! He must have his Woman! He must! She turns gropingly toward the cavernous rocks: Scalped Man! I am coming! The tryst. . . . is kept. EMERSON THE ORIENTAL GEORGE WILLIAMSON There were at least four Emersons. Journal, essay, and poem bear the stamp of Yankee, Romantic, Platonist, and Oriental. All but the Oriental have received something like justice at the hands of criticism. Usually he has been compelled to stand aside while the Platonist put in his claims. This is most unfortunate, for I am convinced that if the Oriental Emerson were allowed to speak, many things which now bewilder or confuse us would become clear, and some qualities of the Emerson mind would acquire a new value. Placing the stress a little differently, I am inclined to believe that Emerson was often more of a psychologist than a philosopher; in other words, that the Oriental in him often dwarfs the Platonist. His final refuge is always the data of personal experience and not the authority of an intellectual system. His own psychology found a very full kinship with that of the East, to which he turned as a religious psychologist and not as a metaphysician. "Forerunners," the most famous of his quest poems, refers to happy guides on eastern hills, who, though fanciful, are suggestive of the fact that his quest was Oriental as well as Romantic. Since the Platonist in Emerson has triumphed where, it seems to me, credit is due the Oriental, I shall call attention to some of the more striking Oriental elements in Emerson. Realizing the necessity of a book for the adequate treatment of this subject, I shall try merely to suggest its importance and possible avenues of approach, not to make a final assessment of its value. Emerson began to read Oriental Scriptures before he had written "Nature," "The American Scholar," or the "Divinity School Address." From 1834 on, the following Oriental Scriptures and poets appear in the list of reading which the Journals1 record: She-King (Confucius); Code of Menu; Confucius, apud Marshman; Calidasa, Megha Duta, apud Asiatic Journal; Menu, Institutes of; Buddha; Zoroaster; Confucius. At this time, the close of 1838, Emerson had completed and given the "Divinity School Address," the last of his three early statements of the essence of his thought. Thereafter, Emerson pursued his Oriental reading almost continuously and added new books year by year, which I shall note in the order of their appearance: Vedas; Vishnu Sarna; the Desatir; Bhagavat-Geeta; Ikhlak-I-Jalaly; Colebrooke, On the Vedas; Vishnu Purana; Rig Veda Sanhita; Upanishad; Sákoontalá; Mahabarata; Zend-Avesta. The repetition of titles, which is frequent, I have omitted, as well as some of the Oriental poets whom Emerson read with avidity. In this list the appearance of the Vishnu Purana marks the year 1847, and the Sákoontalá the year 1857; and between the years 1837 and 1857 there are about fifty entries* under Emerson's Oriental reading in the reading lists of the Journals. The extent of Emerson's acquaintance with Oriental literature will no doubt surprise his casual readers, though certainly not those familiar with his fournals; but the most significant surprise to critics will be the acquaintance with the bulwarks of Oriental thinking which Emerson had as early as 1838. This means that criticism cannot neglect Oriental influence even in the early stages of Emerson's thinking, for the Journals reveal its operation and they are the best guide we have to the ingredients and growth of his mind. In examining this Oriental influence we shall have to keep in mind certain points of view: the relation of Oriental 1 Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, 1909–1914). 2 Zoroaster was an early and late favorite of Emerson, who as early as 1832 found Zoroastrism “as separate and harmonious and sublime as Swedenborgianism -congruent." * In general I keep Emerson's spelling. ism to Emerson's Transcendentalism, which he recognizes in "The Transcendentalist" as he defines what Andrews Norton called "The Latest Form of Infidelity"; the psychological kinship with the East which enabled Emerson to transmute a passage from the Vishnu Purana into that very AngloSaxon poem, "Hamatreya"; and the Oriental conception of Emerson expressed by the East Indian Mozoomdar, “Yes, Emerson had all the wisdom and spirituality of the Brahmans. Brahmanism is an acquirement, a state of being rather than a creed." The editors of the Journals, with a discernment that criticism has not lived up to, chose these words with which to end the record of Emerson's intellectual pilgrimage. Before we come to grips with the Oriental in Emerson, it is necessary that we understand how Orientalism and Transcendentalism were related in his mind. In "The Transcendentalist" Emerson, defining Transcendentalism as a kind of largeness of faith, says: The oriental mind has always tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist who thanks no man, who says, "do not flatter your benefactors," but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.* In the same essay Emerson tells us that the Idealism of his day acquired the name of Transcendental from Kant because "the extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature Nomenclature is about the extent of Kant's contribution to Emerson's Transcendentalism, if we are to judge by the two references to him in the Journals, one of which says, "no great analyst except Kant has yet appeared, and Kant is rather a technical analyst than an universal one such as Cf. the Journals, vol. 7, p. 127. * Need I insist that it is not what Oriental Scriptures are in themselves, but what they meant to Emerson, that determines the influence they had upon his thinking? the times tend to form." Since the times failed him, he turned to the East where he found those who spoke of the problems that troubled him. In the Journals and in History he tells us, "How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind!" He is gratified to find that "The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid and Inca, is expounded in the individual's private life." In fact, Kantian philosophy was less to him than "the necessary or structural action of the human mind" which he found in the conceptions of the Oriental religions; the Eastern prophet was more of a universal analyst than Kant. The kinship of Emerson's idealism with that of the Orient never comes out more distinctly than in this passage from the Journals: Dreary are the names and numbers of volumes of Hegel and the Hegelians, to me, who only want to know at the shortest the few steps, the two steps, or the one taken. I know what step Berkeley took, and recognize the same in the Hindoo books . . . . . I want not the metaphysics, but only the literature of them.5 This he found in the Oriental Scriptures and poets, and thus they were brought into vital relation with his Transcendentalism. How much Kant and Hegel must be discounted in favor of Oriental thought should now be clear, and how important a bearing this has on our discussion should be just as evident. So powerful an effect did this thought have on Emerson that out of India itself has come the judgment that he had all the wisdom and spirituality of the Brahmans. The poem "Brahma" epitomizes the Oriental Emerson. Professor Woodberry has said that it is commonly thought to be the quintessence of Emerson. This indicates how much of our great thinker was fundamentally Oriental. However, as a corrective, we must not forget how genuinely Yankee 4 ▲ Journals, vol. 5, p. 306. Such an analyst he found in the Bhagavat Ghita, which brought to him "the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.” Cf. Journals, vol. 7, p. 511. Journals, vol. 10, p. 248. |