"EXPERIENCE"

"Experience," from Essays: Second Series (1844), is the defining statement of the transitional phase in the career of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), flanked on one side by the exorbitant hopefulness of his high transcendentalist period and on the other by the worldly pragmatism of his later years. The title itself is resonant. In his preface to The American (1877), Henry James characterizes "the real" as "the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another." Emerson's "experience" is similarly what the act of living impresses upon us regardless of the innocence or idealism we begin with and the reluctance of the aspiring self to acknowledge defeat or limitation. "I am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago" (p. 491), Emerson confesses late in the essay, distancing himself from Nature (1836), "The American Scholar" (1837), and "Self-Reliance" (published in Essays in 1841 but incorporating journal entries dating back to the early 1830s), yet also inviting comparison to those and other early writings.

Stephen E. Whicher aptly calls "Experience" "an Interim Report on an Experiment in Self-Reliance" (p. 111). "Where do we find ourselves?" the essay begins (p. 471). Although "Experience" is Emerson's most intimate and candid essay—"I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter" (p. 483), he proclaims as if his other writings had been less than wholly honest—its "I" is a representative figure whose frustrations and doubts are meant to illustrate the radical disjunction between ideal and fact, thought and practical power, and the Soul and its psychic complement, the naturalistic self. Emerson still conceives life as an endless journey—"We wake and find ourselves on a stair: there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight" (p. 471)—but the spiritual upward mobility of "Circles," published only three years earlier, has been replaced by bewilderment and a sense of incapacity. The prophet who formerly urged his audiences to awaken now finds that "sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes" (p. 471). In "The Oversoul" (1841) Emerson had figured spiritual power as an upwelling of the "flowing river" of life within the Soul (p. 385). "Experience" returns to the image in tragic counterpoint: "We are like millers on the lower levels of a steam, when the factories above them have exhausted the water. We too fancy that the upper people must have raised their dams" (p. 471).

Emerson's testament to depletion differs from two familiar Romantic analogues, William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (1807), which concerns the loss of visionary power that comes with maturity and socialization, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" (1802), whose subject is psychic depression. Emerson did not believe that the Soul was, or should be, any less accessible to the adult than to the child or that the periodicity of moods, whose tyranny he openly conceded, would eventuate in a chronic diminution of spiritual energy. "Experience" is a confession of disillusion, though its theme of thwarted idealism, of standing at the brink of an empowerment that eludes more than fitful possession, is anticipated by passages in "The Transcendentalist" (1841) and by the prophetic "First Philosophy" journal entry of 1835. "Experience" is not so much a new direction in Emerson's thought as the announcement of a revisionary shift in proportion and tone. Doubts that had always been lurking are openly avowed; vetoes upon transcendentalism's "Saturnalia or excess of Faith" (p. 198) are soberly given their full due.

Some have argued that the death from scarlet fever of Emerson's five-year-old son Waldo in January 1842 contributed heavily to Emerson's chastened mood. Emerson makes use of Waldo's death early in "Experience" to suggest the dreamlike quality that haunts even the most catastrophic life events. We are stoics perforce, by some horrible decree of fate, Emerson implies in ironic reversal of the benign invulnerability to "disgrace" and "calamity" he had claimed in Nature. Waldo's death affected Emerson more than he acknowledged, but no less important to his thought were two other private developments that "Experience" openly, if impersonally, addresses: Emerson's disappointment with the succession of promising disciples—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and the poet William Ellery Channing (1818–1901) among them—who seemed constitutionally doomed to underachievement ("We see young men who owe us a new world . . . , but they never acquit the debt," p. 474) and his frustrations concerning his personal relationships, especially with Margaret Fuller and her friend Caroline Sturgis, which he generalizes into the propositional "Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point" (p. 488).

The year-by-year deferral of the prophesied cultural revolution also eroded Emerson's faith and gave a historical aspect to the drift toward skepticism announced in his lecture series "The Times," delivered in the winter of 1841–1842, in which he conceded the element of truth in the Conservative's case for the fallenness of man and the inertia of social institutions, and in which he deplored his own "double consciousness" ("The Transcendentalist," p. 205), the perpetual bifurcation between the life of the understanding and the life of the Soul. "Experience" develops and causally interrelates these two ideas; it looks at the world from the standpoint of the Conservative's social and metaphysical realpolitik, then, in visceral reaction, labors to reaffirm the claims of free intellect. It is Emerson's mid-career effort to take stock of himself and the world and, so far as he can, to reconstitute faith upon, or at least in full cognizance of, the bedrock of stern, unmalleable fact.

STRUCTURE, LANGUAGE, AND VOICE

Emerson's essays, reputed to lack form, characteristically make their own form. "Experience" begins with a poetic epigraph about the "lords of life" (p. 469), which Emerson returns to enumerate late in the essay: "Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness" (p. 490). After its opening paragraph "Experience" organizes itself into sections centered around these metaphoric gods of limitation. The primary voice is that of worldly sagacity surveying life as it presents itself when the Soul is in abeyance and internal and external necessity hold sway, though "primary" by no means implies "authoritative" or "final." Writing of temperament, Emerson recasts Nature's image of the "transparent eye-ball" (p. 10) as "a string of beads" whose "many-colored lenses . . . paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus" (p. 473). This recognition of chronic subjectivity is what Emerson later calls "the Fall of Man" (p. 487). Mystic vision, oneness with the All, and the Soul's apprehension of absolute Truth have yielded to a "system of illusions" that confine us within "a prison of glass which we cannot see" and from whose distortions we can seldom, and even then only partially, escape (p. 474).

As the intertextual metaphor of seeing suggests, "Experience" is in dialogue with Emerson's earlier writings, but it is a dialogue of imagination and feeling conducted primarily within established categories of thought. Indeed no essay of Emerson's better illustrates Joel Porte's contention that Emerson "is fundamentally a poet whose meaning lies in his manipulations of language and figure" (p. 94) and whose changes in thought are most dramatically signified by changes of imagery. In "Spiritual Laws" (1841), for example, Emerson had represented an individual's special "calling in his character" through the figure of "a ship in a river" that "runs against obstructions on every side but one," on which "all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea" (p. 310). In "Experience" the thought reappears, but Emerson's claims have been drastically reduced: "A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors" (p. 477). Success in life, formerly a cultivation of the particular bent of one's genius, has become sleight of hand, a trick of "adroitly" positioning oneself so as to keep one's gift most often to the light. It is not the propositional content of Emerson's idea that has changed (human beings have one unique ability) so much as its affective content. The infinite has become finite—the organizing idea of the section is "Surface"—and what in "Spiritual Laws" had been a cause for celebration ("There is one direction in which all space is open to [a man]," p. 310) now appears an occasion for lament ("There is no power of expansion in men," p. 477).

In the section on temperament—structurally and tonally a microcosm of the essay—Emerson traces the logic of biological determinism to the point where it calls into question the origin and nature of "the religious sentiment" (p. 474) and seems to condemn human beings to a "sty of sensualism." This is one side of the case, and Emerson concedes that, "on its own level, or in view of nature, temperament is final" (p. 476). But nature—the realm of material causes and effects as grasped by the Understanding—is not the only reality, Emerson argues, and though the Soul may be dormant for long stretches of time, its moments of presence have an authority that overrides the necessitarianism of science and reenthrones Mind, if only temporarily, as the sovereign power in human affairs.

This rhythm of bleak concession, philosophical bottoming out, and urgently affirmative counterstatement governs the structure of "Experience." In the section on surface, the philosophical nadir of the essay, Emerson assumes the weary, illusionless voice of the skeptic, professing (with utter implausiblity) to expect nothing of life and therefore to be thankful for "moderate goods" (p. 480). In truth no one ever expected more of life or was constitutionally less capable of abridging his demand for the ideal. The fact that rankles Emerson, against his early belief, is that nature—"no saint" (p. 481)—seems to honor power and fecundity more than what Mind intuits as the moral law. A chastened Emerson seems ready to accept this lesson and abide within "the kingdom of known cause and effect"; but then in the section on surprise the Soul "with its angel-whispering" (p. 482) temporarily returns, routing the settled wisdom of the Understanding and alluring the self with a prospect of redeemed seeing and being that will never be steadfastly realized. The only incontestable reality, Emerson concludes from the ebbs and flows of vision, is the doubleness of experienced reality, now exalted, now (for ever longer periods) discouragingly mean, the difference depending not on any virtue or behavior subject to human volition but, like the Calvinist's grace, on "more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal" (p. 483).

The balance of "Experience" is largely Emerson's attempt to prophesy, even if he cannot substantively imagine, a "new statement" (p. 487) that will incorporate both skepticism and belief and constitute a viable creed for a post-Christian (and now a post-transcendental) age. Emerson's sense of spiritual interregnum recalls that of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) in Sartor Resartus (1836) a decade earlier, but where Carlyle had leaped to a blustery, indeterminate faith, Emerson is resolute in "hold[ing] hard to this poverty, however scandalous" (p. 490), and using it as the base for renewed ventures into truth. After the philosophical Idealism of his earlier writing, in which consciousness was the primary reality and social institutions its epiphenomenal result, it must have cost Emerson dearly to acknowledge that "the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think" and that not much has been "gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought" (pp. 491–492). The challenge he girds himself to face ("Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!") is to bring these disparate worlds into congruence and (throwing off all drowsiness) to abet "the true romance which the world exists to realize"—"the transformation of genius into practical power" (p. 492).

AFTER THE FALL

It is noteworthy that 1844, the year of "Experience," was also the year of "The Young American," Emerson's détente with capitalism, and "Emancipation in the British West Indies," his impassioned, if belated attack upon slavery. Sensitive always to the signs of the times, Emerson felt that great persons must apprehend and align themselves with historical forces, seeing beyond their immediate manifestations to their teleological direction. In its acknowledgment that nature's "darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law" (p. 481), "Experience" would seem to imply moral and political quietism, if not outright despair. However Emerson's diminished expectations apply chiefly to the prospects of the individual, whose life is now seen as invariably stunted and incomplete, and to the short-term conformity of events to human ethics. Emerson never doubts the immanence and ultimate beneficence of universal Law, indifferent as it seems to himself or to any private person.

Indeed even as he voices his disenchantments Emerson is feeling his way toward a new belief founded on the replacement of the individual by society and of millennialism by a faith in gradual amelioration. Though the individual is always defeated, the species may at least be sure of measurable, if sometimes pitilessly sacrificial progress. Nature is now understood to operate by what in "The Young American" Emerson calls "a cruel kindness" (p. 218). "It will only save what is worth saving," he adds in the Emancipation address, "and it saves not by compassion, but by power" (p. 117). In 1844 power seemed tilting in the direction of abolition; the historical moment had arrived; and the Negro race had proved itself "worth saving" by showing that, "more than any other," it was "susceptible of rapid civilization" (p. 116). The Irish laborers building American railroads were not so fortunate. Emerson grants the wrongs done them, but he sees the Irish as temporary casualties of a laissez-faire capitalism that, for better or worse—in "Man the Reformer" (1841) it had emphatically been for worse—seems the appointed means for advancing humanity during this particular phase of its development. The short-term consolation is that the children of the Irish will have the benefits of American schools and American opportunity; the long-term consolation is that capitalism itself is destined to evolve peacefully into a "benefi-cent socialism" (p. 222). Already in 1844, even as Emerson is cataloging the impoverishments of personal and collective experience, he is beginning, as he would say in "Fate" (1860), "to rally on his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits," and to "build altars to the Beautiful Necessity" (p. 967).

See also "The American Scholar"; Nature; "The Poet"; "Self-Reliance"; Romanticism; Transcendentalism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Emancipation in the British West Indies." In The Political Emerson: Essential Writings on Politics and Social Reform, edited by David M. Robinson. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. Edited by Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983. Quotations from all of Emerson's writings except "Emancipation in the British West Indies" are from this edition.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Experience." In Essays: Second Series. Boston: James Munroe, 1844. First publication of "Experience."

Secondary Works

Allen, Gay Wilson. Waldo Emerson: A Biography. New York: Viking Press, 1981.

Cameron, Sharon. "Representing Grief: Emerson's 'Experience.'" Representations, no. 15 (summer 1986): 15–41.

Jacobson, David. Emerson's Pragmatic Vision: The Dance of the Eye. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Michael, John. Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Packer, B. L. Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays. New York: Continuum, 1982.

Porte, Joel. "The Problem of Emerson." In Uses of Literature, edited by Monroe Engel, pp. 85–114. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973.

Robinson, David M. Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Rusk, Ralph L. The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Scribners, 1949.

Van Leer, David. Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Whicher, Stephen E. Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953.

Robert Milder