The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ralph Waldo Emerson · twelve essays · first published as Essays, James Munroe, Boston, 1841; reissued with revisions as Essays: First Series, 1847 · scored on the 1847 text as read in the standard editions, in Emerson’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
The discursive essay of Montaigne and Bacon turned to prophecy: a sequence of oracular sentences with the connective tissue of argument cut away
Mythos
The self-reliant man, a new Adam without a past; the circle that a larger circle will always draw around; the one mind in the many
Phase
New England in the late 1830s, after Nature (1836) and the addresses of 1837 and 1838, by a former Unitarian minister who left his pulpit in 1832
Presentation
Twelve essays without sections or headings, in long paragraphs of declarative and imperative sentences, drawn from the author’s journals and from lecture series given in Boston
Register
Prophetic and aphoristic, the preacher’s timing applied to the list, the example and the turn of a paragraph onto a sentence built to be remembered
Scale
Consciousness, history, nature, the sacred, the household, money, heroism, intellect and art, all held as ideas under one law, in a book of essays
Governing Proposition
Twelve essays in a fixed order: History; Self-Reliance; Compensation; Spiritual Laws; Love; Friendship; Prudence; Heroism; The Over-Soul; Circles; Intellect; Art. The book opens on the one mind common to all men, turns to the single self who must trust it, works through that self’s dealings with justice, love, friendship, prudence and courage, and returns through the soul, the widening circle and the intellect to art. Its sentences stand each on its own authority, and its paragraphs are made of journal sentences reworked through lectures into print. The wager of the book is that the most private act of trust is the most universal, that what a person defers to in church, party, fashion and his own past opinions is his own mind estranged, and that a prose of pronouncement, which asks to be recognised rather than followed, can carry that knowledge whole.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book’s first sentence is its ground: “There is one mind common to all individual men.” “History” follows it out. If one mind is common to all, then every event of the past is an act of that mind, and the reader can recognise it as his own; the past is read as biography, and the essay’s later formula is plain: “There is properly no history; only biography.” The great names of the record, Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, appear as instances of the one mind, not as persons rendered.
Emerson came to this book from the pulpit, which he had left in 1832, and from the lecture hall. The essays were drawn from his journals and from the series he gave in Boston in the later 1830s, on the philosophy of history, on human culture and on human life: lectures built of journal sentences and reworked again for print. That making shows on every page. The paragraphs are long, the sentences stand each on its own, and quotation and anecdote, from Plutarch, the Bible, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Swedenborg and Napoleon, come thick.
The order of the twelve is the book’s argument, and the strongest thing that holds it together. It opens on the universal mind, turns to the single self who must trust it, works through the self’s dealings, and returns through the soul, the widening circle and the intellect to art. The first essay and the ninth state the one mind twice, and much could be moved between them; but the movement from the one mind to the self and back is not removable.
Movement II
“Self-Reliance” is the book’s first pole and its most famous essay. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Its central disclosure is an observation of the mind that holds as stated: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” What we defer to in others is our own thought, estranged, and we recognise it too late.
Against that trust stand the pressures of the world, named one by one. “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” “Envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide.” The worst of the pressures is a person’s own past: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” The essay licenses its own method against it: “Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.”
The defiance has the elevation of the prophet and the hardness of one. It would shun “father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me”, and write “on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.” It meets the claims of others in a sentence: “Are they my poor?” From this essay comes the figure of the self-reliant man, the new Adam without a past, which Emerson made a figure of the American imagination; and it is here that the book is most argued over, as egotism or as a discipline of attention.
Movement III
The essays in the middle of the book take the self through its dealings: justice in “Compensation” and “Spiritual Laws”, then “Love”, “Friendship”, “Prudence” and “Heroism”. “Compensation” asserts a law of self-acting justice, a moral bookkeeping in which every act is paid for in its own coin, and “Spiritual Laws” states the same law again. Whether that law is a theodicy or a psychology is still argued; as a claim about the world it is doctrine, and the world does not keep the books it describes.
“Friendship” holds the friend to the standard of the self: “Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.” “Love” and “Prudence” are the book’s weakest pieces. They add little the other essays lack, and in them the lecture shows through and the form is only a container. “Heroism” takes up courage, and with it the defence of whim against the prudence of the respectable that runs through the book.
Here the book’s limits are plainest. The orders it takes up, the household, money, the state of society, are held as ideas rather than as lived conditions. Labour appears as a moral emblem; the family as a tie to be shaken off; the state, slavery, a live question in 1841, and the poor as objections to be answered in a sentence. The confidence with which the book meets suffering and need is the confidence of its doctrine, and it does not hold.
Movement IV
“The Over-Soul” is the book’s second pole, and the place where its prophetic register is sustained longest. “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty.” Where “Self-Reliance” stood on defiance, this essay stands on self-abandonment: the individual becomes a channel for the universal mind, and authority passes from scripture and church to the soul in which the divine is immanent.
The two poles look like contradictions, and the book makes them one law. What the self relies on, when it relies on itself, is the soul common to all, so that the most private act is the most universal. Whether “Self-Reliance” and “The Over-Soul” contradict each other or name one act from two sides is among the questions the book has kept open for a hundred and eighty-five years. The law is asserted more than shown to govern, and the doctrine that licenses contradiction also excuses it.
The doctrine was not new. Much of it was Coleridge’s, Swedenborg’s and the Neoplatonists’, and the Divinity School Address of 1838 had already spoken it aloud. What was new was the voice: the Unitarian sermon in which Emerson was trained, turned into an essay that pronounces rather than tries, and carried into general print.
Movement V
“Circles” is the best fit of form and knowledge in the book. “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” Every settled view is a circle that a larger one will draw around, and the essay’s paragraphs widen in scope as its subject does. It rises to its dread, “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet”, and to its close: “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
Its last turn is on the reader and on itself. “I am only an experimenter”: the essayist calls himself “an endless seeker, with no Past at my back”, and unsettles everything he has asserted. Where “Compensation” balanced every account, “Circles” lets none close, and the book leaves that tension standing. “Intellect” follows with the choice the whole book has been putting: “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.”
“Art” ends where “History” began, with the one law at the other pole: “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” The book’s reach ran out from these sentences: to Thoreau, Emerson’s friend and lodger, whose Walden put self-reliance to an experiment; to Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass of 1855 answered the call for an American poet; to Dickinson, Nietzsche, William James and Dewey. It has been read for a hundred and eighty-five years, mostly in a few essays and a few dozen sentences, and each decade of a reader’s life reads them differently.
Act III · The Twelve
The lowest of the twelve. The test is subtractive, and the book is made to fail it in part: Emerson built these essays by drawing sentences from his journals into lectures and then into print, and many paragraphs could be shortened, reordered or moved from one essay to another with little lost. “Compensation” and “Spiritual Laws” state the same law of self-acting justice twice; “History” and “The Over-Soul” state the one mind twice; “Prudence” and “Love” add little the others lack. What holds the axis above the cap is the spine. The order is an argument, from the universal mind to the self that must trust it and back through the soul to art. Remove “Self-Reliance” or “The Over-Soul” and the book loses its two poles; remove a third of its sentences and it loses little.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and much of it holds: the authority a person defers to in church, party, fashion and his own past opinions is his own mind estranged, recognised too late in others. “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty” (Self-Reliance) is an observation of the mind that holds as stated. So is the account of social pressure, “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members”, and of the fear of contradiction. “Circles” adds a second truth: every settled view is a circle that a larger one will draw around. The charge, and why the axis stands a tenth above the gate: much of the book is doctrine, not disclosure. “Compensation” asserts a moral bookkeeping the world does not keep, and the book meets suffering and need, “Are they my poor?”, with a confidence that does not hold.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Height is reached often, and at the scale of the sentence, which is where this book lives. The register is the prophetic one, transport rather than terror. “The Over-Soul” sustains it longest: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty.” “Circles” opens on a figure of vast scale and rises to its dread, “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet”, and to its close, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” “Self-Reliance” has the elevation of defiance: “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.” What holds the axis is that the height is of sentences, rarely of a whole essay built to a summit, and that in the duller pieces it lapses into exhortation.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The figures the book makes are two, and both are built and bear weight. The first is the self-reliant man, the nonconformist, “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist”, whom Emerson made a figure of the American imagination: a new Adam without a past. The second is the circle, which “Circles” builds as its own structure, the essay widening ring by ring until the essayist calls himself “an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.” The Over-Soul is a myth of the one mind in the many, built as doctrine. What holds the axis below the gate is the particular: the figures are general, the examples are names, Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, rather than persons rendered, and the archetype rarely acquires a body. The myth is built in idea and only evoked in flesh.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the essay of Montaigne and Bacon, the Unitarian sermon in which Emerson was trained and which he left with his pulpit in 1832, and the German-romantic prose of Coleridge and Carlyle. The turn is double. In form, the essay becomes a sequence of oracular sentences, each standing on its own: Montaigne’s essay is a mind trying itself, Emerson’s a mind pronouncing. In doctrine, the sermon’s authority moves from scripture and church to the individual soul, with the divine immanent in it. The stake was real: the Divinity School Address of 1838 had already spoken this heresy, and this book carried it into general print, with a defence of contradiction and whim against respectable prudence. What holds the axis: the doctrine was largely Coleridge’s, Swedenborg’s and the Neoplatonists’, and the departure is greater in voice than in idea.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. The discontinuous paragraph, in which each sentence stands unsupported by the last, is the doctrine performed: a prose that relies on each sentence’s own authority, contradicts itself when the next sentence requires it, and asks the reader to recognise rather than be persuaded. “Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day” licenses the very method by which the book is written. “Circles” is the best fit of form and knowledge: its paragraphs widen in scope as its subject does, and its closing turn, “I am only an experimenter”, unsettles everything it has asserted. What holds the axis: much of the book would say what it says as treatise or sermon, and in “Prudence”, “Love” and “Art” the lecture shows through and the form is a container.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over a hundred and eighty-five years. The book has been read and reread by readers who found opposite things in it: Nietzsche, who read Emerson closely and set a sentence of his on the title page of the first edition of The Gay Science in 1882; William James and John Dewey, who claimed him for pragmatism; Stanley Cavell, who read “Self-Reliance” as a philosophy of the self’s aversion to conformity; Richard Poirier, Barbara Packer, Lawrence Buell and Robert D. Richardson. The questions stay open: whether self-reliance is egotism or a discipline of attention, whether “Self-Reliance” and “The Over-Soul” contradict each other or name one act from two sides, whether “Compensation” is a theodicy or a psychology, whether the book founds American individualism or criticises it. What holds the axis below the top is that the return clusters on a few essays and a few dozen sentences.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is American letters and thought of the nineteenth century, and the English essay. The intrinsic force is great: the book gave American prose a voice of its own, independent of English models, moved the essay from the moralist’s reflection to prophecy, and made the self, unmediated by church or inheritance, the ground of authority, a reorganisation of what American writing could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Thoreau, Emerson’s friend and lodger, whose Walden (1854) is self-reliance put to an experiment; Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass of 1855 answers Emerson’s call for an American poet; Dickinson, who read him; Nietzsche; William James and Dewey; and a large vulgar progeny in American self-help and New Thought, which the axis does not credit. What holds it: much of this reach belongs to Emerson’s work at large, to Nature and the addresses as much as to this book, and is credited here only in part.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The highest of the twelve. Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and eighty-five years, and the figure sits at the usual height for that age. The text survives whole, in print without a break, in scholarly and popular editions, and its 1847 revision is stable. Presence is continuous and wide in the United States, where “Self-Reliance” is among the most read and taught essays in the language, quoted in commencement addresses, in politics and in advertising; the book has been translated into the major European languages. Its surface is barely fixed to its moment: the Unitarian controversies behind it are history, and it is read for what it says to the reader now. What keeps it from the widest figure: the presence is of two or three famous essays more than of the book, it is concentrated in America, and it is fame as much as reading.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Emerson’s own English. The command is of the sentence, and at that scale it is among the greatest in American prose: compressed, concrete in its metaphors, exact in its rhythm, built to be remembered. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” “Envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide.” “Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo” (Friendship). “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose” (Intellect). The list, and the turn of a paragraph onto an aphorism, are handled with a preacher’s timing. What holds the axis below the top is the larger making: paragraphs follow one another without transition and sometimes without order, essays end where the material runs out rather than where the argument arrives, and the weaker essays fall into abstraction and repetition. The making bears weight in the sentence and is slack in the structure.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the defiance of “Self-Reliance”, which would shun “father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me”, and the self-abandonment of “The Over-Soul”, where the individual is a channel for the universal mind. They obey one law, and the book makes it explicit: what the self relies on, when it relies on itself, is the soul common to all, so that the most private act is the most universal. “History”, “There is properly no history; only biography”, and “Art”, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not”, are the same law at the two ends of the book. What holds the axis: the law is asserted more than shown to govern; “Compensation” balances every account while “Circles” lets none close, a tension left unresolved; and the doctrine that licenses contradiction also excuses it.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged on what a book of twelve essays holds, and it reaches widely: consciousness and its intuitions; history, read as the one mind’s biography; the natural order, as law and as figure; the sacred, without a church; love, friendship and the household; prudence and money; heroism and the state of society; intellect and art. One law joins them, which is the integration the axis asks for. What holds the axis there is that the orders are held as ideas, not as lived conditions. Labour appears as a moral emblem; the family as a tie to be shaken off; the state, slavery, a live question in 1841, and the poor as objections to be answered in a sentence. The book encompasses a great deal of thought and very little of the world as it is suffered.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8. A book in print without a break for a hundred and eighty-five years, with one essay among the most read in the language; a return by readers as opposed as Nietzsche, the pragmatists and Cavell, on questions it has not let close; and a voice that gave American prose its own and turned the essay from reflection to prophecy, with Thoreau and Whitman among its heirs.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6, then The Encompassed at 7.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0. A book made of journal sentences, whose order is an argument while its paragraphs often are not; many orders of life held as ideas rather than as conditions suffered, with labour, slavery and the poor answered in a sentence; and figures built in idea, the self-reliant man and the circle, that rarely acquire a body.
The Necessity Cap clears narrowly, The Inevitable 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form 8.2, The Made 8.6 and The Inner Law 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment 8.6, The Swerve 8.6, Pressure on Tradition 8.8 and The Imperishable 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 falls short, its figures general, names and types rather than persons, the myth built in idea and evoked in flesh. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable at 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the book is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays, first published by James Munroe in Boston in 1841, and reissued with revisions as Essays: First Series in 1847, after the Second Series of 1844. It is scored as the book as published, in the 1847 text as read in the standard editions (the Harvard Collected Works, volume II; the Library of America Essays and Lectures): twelve essays in their order, History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect and Art. The essays weighed most are Self-Reliance, Circles, The Over-Soul, History, Compensation and Intellect; Love and Prudence are weighed least, as the book’s weakest pieces, and are known less closely than the rest. The book is on the literature desk as prose in literary form, where the writing is the work. It was written in English, so there is no question of translation. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, no length is given, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where the words are certain, cited by essay, without paragraph numbers. Named as history: Emerson’s Nature (1836) and the addresses of 1837 and 1838; Montaigne, Bacon, Coleridge, Carlyle and Swedenborg; Thoreau’s Walden (1854); Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855); Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882); and among the critics Stanley Cavell’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (1990), Barbara Packer’s Emerson’s Fall (1982), Richard Poirier, Lawrence Buell and Robert D. Richardson’s biography (1995). Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the month of first publication, the nature of the 1847 revisions, the length of the book and of each essay, a British edition with a preface by Carlyle, the essay from which Nietzsche took his epigraph, the term of Emerson’s exclusion from Harvard after 1838, and a remark of Whitman’s reported at second hand.