"Emerson: The Mind on Fire." By Robert D. Richardson, Jr., University of California Press, 671 pp.; $35

Strong feelings of melancholy came over me as I finished the last chapters of Robert Richardson's study of the life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The melancholy surprised me, because it is not an emotion I commonly associate with reading about the lives of authors, artists, or public figures. I do not mean to deny that biographies can prompt in their readers intense feelings of sadness or pathos. In the accounts of some lives, there are more than enough incidents of desperation or self-destructiveness to make any reader ponder matters soberly. For instance, William Faulkner is arguably the greatest novelist America has produced, but no matter how it is told, his life always reads like a never-ending saga of alcoholic stupor and petty cruelty.

Yet even in the case of Faulkner, the story of the life induces pity instead of melancholy. An effective biography often offers countless delights, not the least being the satisfaction of taking the measure of a well-rounded life and tracing from it a pattern you might dream of tailoring your own experience to fit.

On the face of it, Richardson's book offers us just such a heroic pattern. His Emerson is a dynamic figure, arguably the most important in nineteenth-century American literature. All the elements of the Emerson story are treated amply and eloquently in Richardson's study. We hear of how young Ralph Emerson, the third of six sons, was thoroughly undistinguished as a student, even during his undergraduate years at Harvard. He prepared for the ministry in a desultory fashion and never felt comfortable during his brief tenure as a pastor.

Shortly after his first wife died of tuberculosis, Emerson left the pastorate and the Christian church forever. He launched a career as an essayist and public speaker that would eventually bring him oracular status in his own day and an enduring reputation as one of the greatest figures in American literature. And while building an illustrious public career, Emerson also led a full private life. He remarried, raised a family, and experienced the normal range of joys and sorrows. When he died of pneumonia in 1882, a month shy of his seventy-ninth birthday, Emerson was one of the most venerated Americans of his day.

Yet the melancholy remains in Richardson's account of Emerson. My attempts to trace it to its source always brought me back to the title of the book, "Emerson: The Mind on Fire." Richardson borrows this image from passages in Emerson's voluminous journals. "The tongue of flame," wrote Emerson in an 1842 entry quoted by Richardson,

". . . the volcano also, from which the conflagration rises toward the zenith an appreciable distance toward the stars--these are the most affecting symbols of what man should be. . . . A mass of fire reaching from earth upward into heaven, this is the sign of the robust, united, burning, radiant soul."

Even more powerful than the flames of nature are the fires within the self. Richardson points out that fire was also Emerson's image for the poetic impulse, the means of "connecting one's own small flame to the great central fires of life. " In Emerson's words, "We must have not only hydrogen in balloons and steel springs under coaches, but we must have fire under the Andes at the core of the world."

The problem for Richardson is that, in Emerson's case, the fire had gone out at the "core of the world" by the time the great sage reached the age of 50. As a good Emersonian, Richardson implicitly defines as meaningful only that life that is lived at the highest pitch of self-conscious intensity. By Emerson's standards and Richardson's own lights, there is, as a result, little of importance to say about Emerson's last three decades. Richardson takes more than 500 pages to tell the story of the first 50 years of Emerson's life, then dispenses with the last 25 years in 30 pages.

I suspect that this summary dismissal of Emerson's final years was ultimately the source of the melancholy I felt when I finished this biography. Richardson treats the childhood that fed into Emerson's creative vital years and the dotage that eventually seeped out of them as matters of scant interest and little worth. As the "fire goes out at the core" of a creative person's world, the book seems to ask, what remains to command our respect or provoke our amazement? In turn, that question prompts even more troubling ones. What is the true nature of our comfort, if only our own consciousness can secure it? What worth, if any, does a less than dynamically creative, highly self-conscious life have?

In privileging so dramatically the vital activity of the dynamic mind, Richardson is elaborating one of Emerson's own core beliefs. "The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul," wrote Emerson in 1837. Were it not for the mind, the world would be dead. "The scholar of the first age received into him the world around," Emerson asserted, "gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. . . . It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought." Consciousness alone abides, giving life to all that is taken up into it: The world "now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing."

Richardson brilliantly frames his discussion of "virtually all of Emerson's creative life"--the 25 years from 1832 to 1857--by telling of matching macabre incidents. In 1832, when he was 28 and his wife Ellen had been dead for little more than a year, Emerson walked from Boston to her grave in Roxbury, entered the tomb, and opened the coffin. He recorded the incident tersely in his journal--"I visited Ellen's tomb and opened the coffin"--but never spoke or wrote of it again. Richardson reads this deed as a sign of Emerson's "powerful craving for direct, personal, unmediated experience." Not able to believe fully that Ellen was dead, Emerson continued to address her in his journals as though she were alive. But once he had opened the coffin, all began to change, as Emerson accepted the finality of her death. He shifted his focus from the dead to the living, began his withdrawal from the ministry and the Christian faith, and caught his first glimpses of the poetic and prophetic career that lay ahead of him.

A quarter of a century later, Emerson repeated the gruesome gesture. This time it was the coffin of his beloved first-born son, Waldo, into which he peered. Waldo had died 15 years before, at the age of five. He had been the delight of his father's life, and his sudden death had caused waves of grief to wash over the usually arid ground of Emerson's serenity. On a sunny day in July of 1857, Emerson had Waldo's coffin moved from the family vault to Concord's new cemetery, Sleepy Hollow. Once again, Emerson said nothing about what he had seen or about why he had done it. "He said he had looked into the coffin," his daughter later recounted, "but he said no more."

Richardson refuses to interpret these actions as indications of a morbid preoccupation with the past. "No man was ever less inclined than Emerson to live in the past," he explains, "nor was he doing so now." Instead, "Ellen and Waldo, dying so young and carrying down with them so much love and hope, represented a future that never was to come." If the viewing of Ellen's corpse in 1832 cut Emerson's ties to the past and freed him for his creative work, then the opening of Waldo's coffin 25 years later signaled the effective close of the great writer's prodigious career. In Richardson's words, Emerson had come to realize that "each evening brings a reckoning of infinite regret for the paths refused, openings not seen, and actions not taken." As he entered the evening of his years, Emerson closed the lid on his own vital life.

Activity of a kind continued to the end. Emerson still wrote essays, though not as many as before, and went on delivering his lectures. But the vital tension that had energized his greatest creative work had vanished. Emerson the man had died, while Emerson the monument endured. By the late 1850s, according to Richardson, Emerson "was fast becoming an institution . . . and this growing reputation now preceded both the public and the private Emerson wherever he went."

There is melancholy at the heart of "Emerson: The Mind on Fire," then, because there is melancholy at the core of Emerson's understanding of life. Like the larger Romantic movement of which it forms a crucial part, Emerson's idealism began as a bold, confident attempt to ground the spiritual and ethical life in human consciousness rather than in any transcendent source outside the self. Once he had left the church, Emerson never wavered on this point until he died. Richardson cites aphorisms from an unpublished series of lectures that Emerson composed in 1868. Emerson at 65 sounds like Emerson at 30: "The mind is the center of things, so that theology, Nature, Astronomy, and history date from where the observer stands." Or this: "Our whole existence is subjective. What we are, that we see, love, hate. A man externizes himself in his friends, and in his enemies, and parasites, and in his gods."

Emerson never forsook his individualistic idealism, but in unguarded moments he was terrified by its implications. If our "whole existence" is indeed "subjective," then at times we are likely to conclude--as Emerson does in "Experience"--that "souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with." Our problem may be that "we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are. . . . Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects."

For Emerson in his darker moments, the isolation does not stop with the severing of our connections to nature and other persons. We are also cut off from memory and anticipation. "God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. . . . With grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. 'You will not remember,' he seems to say, 'and you will not expect.' "

That is a melancholy prospect of life. But it represents the price to be paid for the radical independence Emerson cherished. Bereft of memory, expectation, and the intimate knowledge both of God and other persons, the Emersonian self can only warm itself by the fires within. When the fuel is spent, and the flames flicker out, there is nothing to do but bank the embers and die, as Emerson did when the final, fatal virus overtook him: "Then, as was his custom, he went to the fireplace and took his fire apart, setting the sticks, one by one, on end on each side, and separating all the glowing coals. That done, he took his study lamp in his hand, left the room for the last time, and went upstairs."

However unwittingly, Richardson's vivid study of Emerson's mind and life raises questions of central concern to the Christian faith. Emerson's isolation and obsession with consciousness may challenge those who claim the name of Christ to acknowledge that our comfort lies not in the fact that we know but that we are known, not in our ability to hold all within ourselves but in our willingness to be held by a love greater than our own. That is, it is not our consciousness that saves us but God's consciousness of us. "What is your only comfort, in life and in death?" asks the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism. "That I belong--body and soul, in life and in death--not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil."

There is fuel for a fire that will never go out at the core of the world.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

Volume 2, No. 2, Page 25

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