The angel would eat too much gingerbread - Emerson cracks a joke

Somewhere on Wuthering Expectations, although heck if I can remember where, I included Ralph Waldo Emerson in a list of writers I considered humorless. Having read more deeply - or more shallowly? - anyway, more something - in Emerson, I am happy to retract the charge.

In his essay "Nominalist and Realist" (1844), Emerson reminds us that even Great Men are imperfect: "I verily believe if an angel should come to chaunt the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some precious atrocity."

That's, I say, that's a joke, son. I didn't say it was necessarily funny, but an angel stuffing himself with gingerbread is comic. Still deflating the Great Men, he varies the joke in the "Napoleon" chapter of Representative Men (1850) when listing Napoleon's bad qualities:

"He treated women with low familiarity. He had the habit of pulling their ears, and pinching their cheeks, when he was in good humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to his last days. It does not appear that he listened at key-holes, or, at least, that he was caught at it."

OK, "that he was caught at it," not bad.

I have been reading Emerson in something like chronological order. I think he gets funnier as he ages, although I may have only now learned to identify his comic tone. He becomes a bit sour, even, but there's an accompanying recognition of the ridiculousness of things that is very genial. This is easier to see in his journal than in his essays, but traces begin to appear everywhere.

Don't get me wrong - the default Emerson style is "earnest gasbag", but there's a lot of variation around that. Look at this defense of earnestness, in "Montaigne; or the Skeptic":

"The first dangerous symptom I report, is, the levity of intellect; as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers."

This is immediately followed by a parody of his "subtle and admirable friend" Thomas Carlyle, a heavy mocker, who becomes "San Carlo." Again, not exactly funny, but comic, and the only example of Emersonian parody that I have come across, or anyway recognized.

As enjoyable as it is to find this side of Emerson, there is no excuse for this journal entry from December 1850:

"How could the children of Israel sustain themselves for forty days in the desart?
Because of the sand-which-is there."

Carlyle the lecturer - That was not well done!

On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History is a collection of lectures Thomas Carlyle gave in 1840, on the theory and practice of Great Men – Napoleon, obviously, but also religious figures like Mohammed, Luther, and Odin(!?), and writers like Shakespeare and Rousseau. The lectures were enormously successful, greatly increasing Carlyle’s reputation and cash flow.

It is very hard for me to imagine what they were like. Based on the page count, they must have been at least an hour and a half long. And they were difficult. Complicated, sometimes obscure, always pure Carlyle. For example, in the lecture on Luther, Carlyle describes the efforts of Pope Leo X to suppress Luther’s teachings, which leads him to digress on the earlier religious reformer Jan Huss:

“He [Leo X] dooms the Monk’s writings to be burnt by the hangman, and his body to be sent bound to Rome,- probably for a similar purpose. It was the way they had ended with Huss, with Jerome the century before. A short argument, fire. Poor Huss: he came to that Constance Council, with all imaginable promises and safe-conducts; an earnest, not rebellious kind of man: they laid him instantly in a stone dungeon ‘three-feet wide, six-feet high, seven-feet long;’ burnt the true voice of him out of this world; choked it in smoke and fire. That was not well done!” (p. 363)

This gives an idea why Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution is still read – his history writing is vivid, opinionated, original. “A short argument, fire”. There’s a lot of information packed in that sentence. I think it’s a great passage. But hearing it an hour into a lecture, I might think “Wait, who burned Luther?”

And how about this one:

“In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred years, by far the notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte’s countryman, Goethe. To that man too, in a strange way, there was given what we may call a life in the Divine Idea of the World; vision of the inward divine mystery; and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises imaged once more as godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. Illuminated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendour as of Mahomet, but in mild celestial radiance;” and on like that, unstoppably. (p. 386)

Sorry, that’s terrible. Call in a chemist to identify the exact composition of the gas. How many people were really able to follow this? I’ve wondered the same thing about Coleridge’s muddled lectures on Shakespeare, or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lectures on anything, or even William Hazlitt’s lectures, which have a much more straightforward style. What were these events really like? What did their audiences understand? What would I have understood? Carlyle’s lectures are not as high on my time-traveling list as seeing Dickens perform his seventy-minute reading of A Christmas Carol, but I’m curious.

Bonus book-related epigrams from On Heroes:

“The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.” (p. 390)

“All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possessions of men.” (p. 388)

All references are to the old Everyman’s Library edition of On Heroes.

Jane Austen, Great Man of History

Thomas Carlyle, at the beginning of the lectures titled On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History (delivered 1840, published 1841):

“For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” (p. 239, Everyman’s Library edition)

This is a strong statement. One odd thing about it is that I swear Carlyle says the exact opposite in his 1830 essay “On History”, arguing that what is really needed is a bottom-up history of ordinary people.*

I’m more sympathetic with the older Carlyle, the prophet of what we now call social history. But I’m no dogmatist. “Social forces” of all sorts are, intellectual, political, and economic, to me, sufficient causes of, for example, the Reformation or the French Revolution. But within those limits, the specific actions of Martin Luther and Napoleon were consequential. They explain why things happened when they did, instead of fifty years sooner or later, and they direct the “social forces” in specific directions. I sound like a Marxist. Superstructure, vanguard, etc.

Lovers of literature, readers of old books, at least, must all have at least some belief in the Great Man theory. For the reader, the specific work, the exact combination of words, is important. If Jane Austen had died a year earlier, Persuasion would be gone; if a little before that, Emma and Mansfield Park would never have existed. No combination of social forces, no changes in political or economic conditions, would have brought them into existence without her.

It’s easy, in fact, to imagine the social conditions that preclude any Jane Austen novels at all – social breakdown in England (just look at the sad state of literature in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France), or a society so rigidly patriarchal that Austen never received an education. This is the power, at least to me, of Woolf’s invocation of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister in A Room of One’s Own. I imagine all of the wonderful books that could have been.

* For example: "Social Life is the aggregate of all the individual men's Lives who constitute society; History is the essence of innumerable Biographies." ("On History", 5th paragraph). Although I remember a stronger statement somewhere else.