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Emerson’s expectation of the great poet, the great man, is voiced in his “Representative Men”: “If the companions of our childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us.” On the contrary, I think it would surprise most of us very much. It is from the remote, the unfamiliar, that we expect great things. We have no illusions about the near-at-hand. But with Emerson the contrary seems to have been the case. He met the new person or took up the new volume with a thrill of expectancy, a condition of mind which often led him to exaggerate the fact, and to give an undue bias in favor of the novel, the audacious, the revolutionary. His optimism carried him to great lengths. Many of the new stars in his literary firmament have quite faded out–all of them, I think, but Walt Whitman. It was mainly because he was so full of faith in the coming man that he gave, offhand, such a tremendous welcome to “Leaves of Grass”–a welcome that cooled somewhat later, when he found he had got so much more of the unconventional and the self-reliant than he had bargained for. I remember that when I spoke of Walt Whitman to him in Washington in 1871 or ’72, he said he wished Whitman’s friends would “quarrel” with him more about his poems, as some years earlier he himself had done, on the occasion when he and Whitman walked for hours on Boston Common, he remonstrating with Whitman about certain passages in “Leaves of Grass” which he tried in vain to persuade him to omit in the next edition. Whitman would persist in being Whitman. Now, counseling such a course to a man in an essay on “Self-Reliance” is quite a different thing from entirely approving of it in a concrete example.

In 1840 Emerson writes: “A notice of modern literature ought to include (ought it not?) a notice of Carlyle, of Tennyson, of Landor, of Bettina, of Sampson Reed.” The first three names surely, but who is Bettina, the girl correspondent of Goethe, that she should go in such a list? Reed, we learn, was a Boston bank clerk, and a Swedenborgian, who wrote a book on the growth of the mind, from which Emerson quotes, and to which he often alludes, a book that has long been forgotten; and is not Bettina forgotten also?

Emerson found more in Jones Very than has any one else; the poems of Very that he included in “Parnassus” have little worth. A comparatively unknown and now forgotten English writer also moved Emerson unduly. Listen to this: “In England, Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle, three men of original literary genius; but the scholar, the catholic, cosmic intellect, Bacon’s own son, the Lord Chief Justice on the Muse’s Bench is”–who do you think, in 1847?–“Wilkinson”! Garth Wilkinson, who wrote a book on the human body. Emerson says of him in “English Traits”: “There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll, not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality.” To bid a man’s stock up like that may not, in the long run, be good for the man, but it shows what a generous, optimistic critic Emerson was.

VII

In his published works Emerson is chary of the personal element; he says: “We can hardly speak of our own experiences and the names of our friends sparingly enough.” In his books he would be only an impersonal voice; the man Emerson, as such, he hesitated to intrude. But in the Journals we get much more of the personal element, as would be expected. We get welcome glimpses of the man, of his moods, of his diversions, of his home occupations, of his self-criticism. We see him as a host, as a lecturer, as a gardener, as a member of a rural community. We see him in his walks and talks with friends and neighbors–with Alcott, Thoreau, Channing, Jones Very, Hawthorne, and others–and get snatches of the conversations. We see the growth of his mind, his gradual emancipation from the bondage of the orthodox traditions.