The American Scholar: Emerson’s Declaration of
Independence
I find it especially appropriate to speak today on
Emerson’s “American Scholar” address and to approach it as
his declaration of independence since we are just finishing the
season of college graduation speeches and also find ourselves
exactly one month from the 4th of July. His speech, the annual
Phi Beta Kappa address, was actually delivered the day after
Harvard’s commencement at the end of August 1837, but, for
all intents and purposes, can be called a graduation talk, since
it was attended by students, faculty, including those of the
theological School, and the Fellows of the Harvard
Corporation, i.e. the overseers of the college. Emerson’s
statement on the nature and duties of the American scholar,
furthermore, is nothing other than a full-throated call for his
auditors to liberate themselves from what William Blake
dubbed “the mind-forged manacles.” The AS stands as the
center piece of 3 works produced in quick succession by
Emerson, which, taken together, represent his first
enunciation of the Transcendentalist vision: “Nature” (1836),
AS (1837), and “The Divinity School Address” (1838).
In actuality, the subject of the American Scholar that is,
the qualities defining such a person, had been the traditional
and prescribed theme for some years before Emerson’s
presentation. What set his talk apart from the earlier ones
were the radical, indeed, the subversive, departures from the
well-worn and predictable script. As I used to tell my students,
don’t let the man’s frock coat and cravat deceive us. He was a
radical and those in attendance that day weren’t long in
recognizing that fact. As might be expected, the young
members of the audience were particularly receptive to
Emerson’s message. Bliss Perry, a novelist, critic, and revered
Harvard English professor wrote, in the 1920’s, a remarkable
essay in which he reconstructed from primary accounts the
vibrant scene of the occasion , including the detail that a
substantial rain had fallen in Cambridge the previous day.
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Perry, after identifying some of the faculty present in the
audience, many of whom had been Emerson’s teachers during
his time as an undergraduate and as a student in the
theological school, proceeds to note that “amid all the learning
and fashion and beauty which throng the meeting house, do
not overlook the eager boys—for their ears catch overtones and
undertones which are unperceived by their elders.” Perry
postulates that although available sources do not say,
Thoreau, still at this time answering to David Henry, instead of
Henry David, might have been in attendance, since he had
graduated the day before and might have lingered to hear his
older Concord neighbor and mentor hold forth. We do know
that two young men who were in attendance carried the
memory of Emerson’s presentation well into their later lives.
One of these was Oliver Wendell Holmes, father of the famous
Supreme Court justice, and a successful physician, poet, and
essayist in his own right. Years later he cited “this grand
Oration” as being “our intellectual Declaration of
Independence. Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of
Harvard since Samuel Adams supported the affirmative of the
question, ‘Whether it be lawful to resist the chief magistrate, if
the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved.’ ‘’ The other
young man, a classmate of Thoreau, was James Russell
Lowell, who himself was later to become a prominent poet and
popular member of the Harvard faculty. He recalled much
later: “The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically and the
Revolution politically independent, but we were socially and
intellectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the
cable….His oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at
Cambridge, some thirty years ago, was an event without any
former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always
treasured in the memory for…its inspiration.”
Significant is Lowell’s suggestion that it was the
young listeners who caught the meaning of Emerson’s words,
implying that the older members of the audience, faculty and
overseers, the academic establishment if you will, were visibly
resistant to the speech. Perry himself concludes most of the
dignitaries greeted the address with equal parts shock and
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mystification. Such a reaction by this distinguished company
ishould not in retrospect, be surprising when we look at the
particulars of the case that Emerson presents.
Although Holmes and Lowell chose to see the theme
of the AS as being a plea for the cultivation of an indigenous
arts and literature, no longer subordinate to English models,
that view, I believe, is giving too much weight to Emerson’s
opening gambit with its oft quoted declaration: “Our day of
dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other
lands, draws to a close.” Holmes’s and Lowell’s focus has been
given undue play by later commentators. My suspicion is that
Emerson inserted this statement at the outset of his address
as a rhetorical bow to what had become, in essence, the
expected sentiment to voice on such occasions as this one, an
early equivalent basically of “Buy American” bumper stickers.
Emerson made the point in order to be done with it so he
could quick march to the points he really wanted to dwell on.
When we look at the AS, we need to recognize
Emerson’s real topic, the formation of the self-motivated
individual, the person who thinks and acts in the now, taking
from the past only that which authenticates his present
experience. The AS then is a foundational statement of
Emerson’s Transcendental philosophy, building on his Nature
essay of the previous year and prefiguring the Divinity School
Address which was to follow in the next , this latter utterance
leading to his being denied any official invitation to the
Harvard grounds for about the next 25 years . I can’t this
morning summon up the requisite glibness to supply a catchy
definition of Transcendentalism, so I will defer to Emerson,
who, on one occasion, when asked to summarize his creed,
said that it could be boiled down simply to a belief in “the
infinity of man.” I don’t think Emerson would object any if we
added “and woman.”
The body of the AS concerns itself with what
Emerson identifies as the three influences which, if actively
sought out and responded to, will lead to the scholar’s
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liberating himself from the mental and spiritual
submissiveness which holds him back from that boundless
potential he needs to reclaim. These influences are: 1) Nature,
2) “the mind of the past”, and 3) “The world…that lies wide
around.” There can be little doubt, even in the absence of a
video record that Emerson from about this juncture to the end
of his discourse locked his gaze on the young men in the
audience who, as at all commencements, were ready to enter
upon their life pursuits. Which probably explains why even
before bringing out the all-important trinity of influences, he
warns of the daunting prospect he sees before them of a
society “in which the members have suffered amputation from
the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,--a good
finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”
Emerson is essentiallyexpanding on his memorable
assertion in the Nature essay that “Man is a god in
ruins.” He is in this broken state because he has shrunk
himself to fit his chosen vocation, his particular line of
work. He has, in effect, been reduced to a function. Thus,
says Emerson,“The priest becomes a form, the attorney a
statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor a rope
of the ship.” Then Emerson delivers the cruelest cut of
all, aimed, it is certain, at some of his former teachers,
now visibly fidgeting in their seats: “In this distribution of
functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the
right state he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state,
when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere
thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men’s
thinking.” If wholeness or integration of the human
being’s squandered powers is to be recovered, Emerson
says the one who aspires to the status of American
Scholar, must properly engage the three aforementioned
influences. Nature is the first of these. For Emerson, it is
the quintessential source of the individual’s
empowerment. Behind its diverse forms moves what he
elsewhere calls the “universal soul” or, more often, the
“Over-Soul.” To look into nature, therefore, is to look into
one’s own soul which is tributary to this larger soul: “ He
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shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul,
answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is
print.” We can assume further fidgeting at Emerson’s
blissful pronouncement, this time from the section
reserved for the faculty of the theological school. They
would have now clearly scented in the air the brimstone
stench of a pagan pantheism. The next year, as recipients
of the Divinity School Address, they would be opening
the windows of their own building to keep from choking.
Emerson next considers the second influence
on the individual —what he designates as “the mind of
the past.” In 1837, books were the basic record of the
past, and, at full throttle now, he wastes no time
detonating another bomb: “The sacredness which
attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is
transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be
a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The
writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is
settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts
into worship of his statue.” It may be difficult for most of
us now to comprehend how truly radical such a
pronouncement would have sounded to his listeners,
even the less rigid among them. This was, however, long
before terms like “active learning” and “critical thinking”
gained currency among educators. Lessons at Harvard
and other colleges of the day consisted mostly of rote
learning and recitation, and classical texts, whether
Homer or Shakespeare, were worshipped and seen as
models primarily for emulation, not for skeptical
scrutiny. He radically insists that one must do “creative
reading,” that the proper end of books is “to inspire.” He
stresses that the reader must draw from a text only that
portion which still seems vital while discarding that
which is dead. We can once more imagine that most of
the Harvard faculty would not only have shifted
restlessly, but would have been aghast at this challenge
to their pedagogical methodology and their inviolable
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texts, whether of the secular or by Emerson’s clear
implication, the religious kind.
Whatever the reaction, Emerson moves directly into
the next influence which must be part of the scholar’s
apprenticeship—the world surrounding him. The scholar,
he argues, must act in this world, must enter the public
forum, not only to be influenced by it but, in turn, to act
upon it . “A great soul,” he says, “will be strong to live, as
well as strong to think.” However, entering this public
sphere, Emerson acknowledges, takes courage. To find
this requisite courage, he implores the scholar to
cultivate “self-trust,” which we can take to mean selfconfidence. Emerson, later, in a famous essay will
substitute the more emphatic self-reliance for self-trust.
Revealingly, he devotes the last part of his address to
discussing the arduous struggle involved in coming to
confidence in oneself, revealingly because the self he is
talking about is indisputably his own.
Few readers, surprisingly, have noticed that
this last part of Emerson’s address takes up more than a
third of its total length. Although the content of this
section is not nakedly confessional (its author had far
too much New England reserve for that) it is obliquely
self-referential. One such passage finds the veil
tantalizingly dropped, when Emerson says that the
aspiring scholar, instead of “treading the old road,
accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of
society… takes the cross of making his own, and, of
course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent
uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and
tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and selfdirected; and the state of virtual hostility in which he
seems to stand to society, and especially to educated
society.”
This list of the ills, the false starts, the
obstacles, both internal and external, confronting
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the striving scholar can be seen as Emerson’s
reflection on his own circuitous path to confidence
and sense of life mission. Now 34 years old, he is
surely remembering a stream of earlier set backs,
waverings, failures, and even tragedy. He had
graduated thirtieth in his class of fifty-nine
students, and by his own admission had been only
narrowly “approbated” or approved for the Unitarian
ministry by the Divinity School faculty. He had lost
two brothers (Edward and Charles) to tuberculosis.
Most shattering of all was the death of his young
bride, Ellen, the love of his life, in early February of
1831, also from tuberculosis. His grief was so deep
that he records, in his diary, visiting her grave some
time afterwards where, he adds, he gazed upon her
face. One recent writer speculates that Emerson
might here have been speaking literally, not
figuratively. Within a year he resigned the pulpit at
Boston’s Second Church, because, he officially
announced, conscience kept him from any longer
administering the sacrament of Communion. Most
probably, he had a deeper motivation, the need to
find escape and balm for has grief-stricken heart. At
the end of 1832 he embarked for Europe and
England, describing this removal as “carrying ruins
to ruins.”
Returning near the end of 1833, his burden
seemingly lightened, Emerson almost immediately
began lecturing around the Boston area, essentially
field testing views that would soon come into clearer
configuration, first in the 1836 Nature essay and
even more succinctly in the AS. But I would strongly
contend that it is this Phi Beta Kappa address that
stands truly as Emerson’s Transcendentalist
coming out party. His Nature piece of the previous
year was unsigned, and the lectures he had given
up to this time were still very much in the rough
draft category. Most of all, the Harvard setting, with
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its notable annual rite and its distinguished gallery
of public figures, was the biggest stage he could
have hoped for to propel wide debate and
accompanying recognition. He made the most of the
chance. It was “chance” in another sense. Emerson
was a stand-in for a previously invited speaker, who
had declined the honor only a few days earlier.