Representative Men by Ralph Waldo Emerson

First published: 1850

Type of work: Essays

The Work

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men was first presented as a course of lectures in Boston in the winter of 1845 to 1846 and later during his visit to England in 1847. The volume opens with a discussion of the uses of great thinkers and follows with six chapters on those who represent humanity in six aspects: Plato as philosopher, Emanuel Swedenborg as mystic, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne as skeptic, William Shakespeare as poet, Napoleon Bonaparte as man of the world, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as writer.

The book has often been mentioned in connection with Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), but whereas Carlyle saw the hero as a divinely gifted individual above and apart from the common person, Emerson conceived of the “great man” as a lens through which people may see themselves. For Emerson, the great man is one who through superior endowments “inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty.” Such individuals may give direct material or metaphysical aid, but more frequently they serve indirectly by the inspiration of their accomplishment of things and by their introduction of ideas. In Emerson's view, the great man does stirring deeds; he (or she) reveals knowledge and wisdom; he shows depths of emotion—and others resolve to emulate him. He accomplishes intellectual feats of memory, of abstract thought, of imaginative flights, and dull minds are brightened by his light. The true genius does not tyrannize; he liberates those who know him.

For Emerson, all humans are infinitely receptive in capacity; they need only the wise to rouse them, to clear their eyes and make them see, to feed and refresh them. Yet even the great man has limits of availability. People get from one what they can and pass on to another who can nourish mind or spirit or inform a dulled palate. As people are infinitely receptive, so are they eternally hungry; and as people find sustenance, through them the spirit of the world’s great thinkers diffuses itself. Thus, through the ages the cumulative effect of great individuals is that they prepare the way for greater intellects.

Emerson views the representative philosopher Plato as an exhausting generalizer, a symbol of philosophy itself, a thinker whom people of all nations in all times recognize as kin to themselves. He absorbed the learning of his times in ancient Greece, but Emerson sees in him a modern style and spirit identifying him with later ages as well. Plato honors the ideal, or laws of the mind, and fate, or the order of nature. Plato defines. He sees unity, or identity, on one hand and variety on the other. In him is found the idea (not original, it is true) of one deity in whom all things are absorbed. A balanced soul, Plato sees both the real and the ideal. He propounds the principle of absolute good, but he illustrates from the world around him. In this ability lies his power and charm. He is a great average man in whom others see their own dreams and thoughts. He acknowledges the ineffable and yet asserts that things are knowable; a lover of limits, he yet loves the illimitable. For Plato, virtue cannot be taught; it is divinely inspired. Through Plato's writings, we also learn much of the philosophy of his mentor, Socrates, who is to Emerson a man of Ben Franklin–like wisdom, a plain old uncle with great ears, an immense talker, a hard-headed humorist, an Aesop of the mob to whom the robed scholar Plato owed a great debt.

For Emerson the two principal defects of Plato as a philosopher are, first, that he is intellectual and therefore always literary, and second, that he has no system. He sees so much that he argues first on one side and then on another. Finally, says Emerson, the way to know Plato is to compare him, not with nature (an enigma now, as it was to Plato), but with others and to see that through the ages none has approached him.

Emerson would have preferred to discuss Jesus as the representative mystic, but to do so would have meant sailing into dangerous waters: The orthodox believers of the time would probably have objected to the inclusion of Jesus as a representative man. Emerson chose Swedenborg instead, but in reading this chapter of the book one gets the notion that Emerson was forcing himself to praise this eighteenth-century Swedish mystic. Emerson remarks that this colossal soul, as he calls him, requires a long focal distance to be seen. Looking more closely, he finds in Swedenborg a style “lustrous with points and shooting spiculae of thought, and resembling one of those winter mornings when the air sparkles with crystals.” He summarizes some of Swedenborg’s leading ideas as including

the universality of each law in nature; the Platonic doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version or conversion of each into other, and so the correspondence of all the parts; the fine secret that little explains large, and large, little; the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that subsists throughout all things.

Emerson also quotes the following passage from Swedenborg’s theology that must have appealed to the Unitarian Emerson:

Man is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to the world of spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea of man, and every affection, yea, every smallest part of his affection, is an image and effigy of him. A spirit may be known from only a single thought. God is the grand old man.

When, however, Emerson comes to the Swedenborgian mystical view that each natural object has a definite symbolic value—as, a horse signifies carnal understanding; a tree, perception; the moon, faith—Emerson rebels at its narrowness. As for Swedenborg’s theological writings in general, Emerson complains of their immense and sandy diffuseness and their delirious incongruities. Emerson warns that such books as Swedenborg’s treatise on love should be used with caution, and he suggests that a contemplative youth might read these mysteries of love and conscience once, and then throw them aside forever.

As Emerson continues his examination, he finds Swedenborg’s heavens and hells dull, he objects to the theological determination of Swedenborg’s mind and to the failure of Swedenborg in attaching himself “to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities, in its bosom.” When Emerson imagines the impatient reader complaining, “What have I to do with jasper and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony,” and so on, Emerson’s own writing awakes as from a semislumber, and one is reminded of his warning in “Self-Reliance” that when a person “claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not.”

As Emerson perhaps felt relieved after having completed his lecture on Swedenborg, he surely must have anticipated with great pleasure his next on the French skeptic Montaigne. He confesses to having had a love for Montaigne's Essais (1580–1588; The Essays, 1603) since he was a young man. “It seemed to me,” he says, “as if I had written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience.” He is not repelled by Montaigne’s grossness—his frank intimacy about himself—because the Frenchman is scrupulously honest in his confessions. As Emerson had found Swedenborg disagreeably wise and therefore repellent, he is in contrast drawn to Montaigne, whose motto Que sçais je? (What do I know?) was a constant reminder to the essayist to stick to the things he did know, such as his farm, his family, himself, and his likes and dislikes in food and friends.

Emerson is charmed by Montaigne’s conversational style, his calm balance, and his stout solidity. The skeptic is not the impassioned patriot, the dogmatic adherent of creed or party. He is wary of an excess of belief, but he turns also from an excess of unbelief. He is content to say there are doubts. Yet for Emerson, when he turns from Montaigne the man to the skeptic in general whom he represents, the doubter is at base a person of belief. He believes in the moral design of the universe and that “it exists hospitably for the weal of souls.” Thus, concludes Emerson, skepticism is finally dissolved in the moral sentiment that remains forever supreme. The skepticism is on the surface only; it questions specifics, but the skeptic can serenely view humankind’s high ambitions defeated and the unequal distribution of power in the world because he believes that deity and moral law control the universe. Emerson himself was at bottom such a believer, though he had passed through his skeptical stage in life to arrive at his belief.

The discussion of Shakespeare as the representative poet begins with the comment, “Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality.” Shakespeare, like his fellow dramatists, used a mass of old plays with which to experiment. Building upon popular traditions, he was free to use his wide-ranging fancy and his imagination. Borrowing in all directions, he used what he borrowed with such art that it became his.

Emerson touches upon the mystery of Shakespeare’s biography, mentioning the paucity of clear facts (only a few more have become known since the time when Emerson wrote), and then concluding, as have many of Shakespeare’s readers, that his plays and his poetry give all the information that is really needed. In the sonnets, readers find the lore of friendship and of love. Through the characters of his plays, people know Shakespeare because there is something of him in all of the characters.

The dramatic skill of Shakespeare is to Emerson less important than his poetry and philosophy and the broad expanse of his book of life, which pictured the men and women of his day and prefigured those of later ages. Shakespeare was inconceivably wise and made his characters as real as if they had lived in his home. His power to convert truth into music and verse makes him the exemplary poet. His music charms the ear and his sentence takes the mind. In his lines experience has been transformed into verse without a trace of egotism. One more royal trait of the poet Emerson finds in Shakespeare: His name suggests joy and emancipation to people’s hearts. To Emerson, Shakespeare was master of the revels to humankind. It is this fact that Emerson regrets: The world’s greatest poet used his genius for public amusement. As the poet was half-man in his role as entertainer, so the priests of old and of later days were half-men who took the joy and beauty out of life while they moralized and warned of the doom to come. Only in some future time, says Emerson, will there arise a poet-priest who may see, speak, and act with equal inspiration.

A frequently quoted remark of Emerson is that he liked people who could do things. His expansive praise of Napoleon in the opening pages of his portrayal of the Corsican as the representative man of the world is based upon his belief that Napoleon could and did do what others merely wanted to do. Napoleon was idolized by common people because he was an uncommonly gifted common person. He succeeded through the virtues of punctuality, personal attention, courage, and thoroughness, qualities that others possess in lesser degrees. Emerson writes of Napoleon’s reliance on his own sense and of his scorn of others’ sense. To him, Napoleon is the agent or attorney of the middle class, with both the virtues and the vices of the people he represented. He was dishonest, stagy, unscrupulous, selfish, perfidious, and coarse. He was a cheat, a gossip, and when divested of his power and splendor he is seen to be an impostor and a rogue.

Emerson finds Napoleon the supreme democrat who illustrates in his career three stages of personal political development: the democrat in youth, the conservative in later life, and the aristocrat at the end—a democrat ripe and gone to seed. Napoleon conducted an experiment in the use of the intellect without conscience. The experiment failed, however, because the French saw that they could not enjoy what Napoleon had gained for them. His colossal egotism drove him to more attempts at conquest, and so his followers deserted him. Yet Emerson asserts that it was not Napoleon’s fault. He was defeated by the eternal law of humanity and of the world. Here, as before, Emerson sees the moral order in the universe. “Every experiment,” he says, “by multitudes or by individuals, that has a selfish aim, will fail. . . . Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.”

Having considered Napoleon as a man of action who failed after having achieved enormous successes, Emerson turns to Goethe as the representative scholar or writer, one whose intellect moved in many directions and whose writings brought him fame as the greatest of German authors. Emerson calls him the soul of his century, one who clothed modern existence with poetry. Emerson, a lover of nature himself, remarks that Goethe said the best things about nature that ever were said.

Realizing the impossibility of analyzing the full range of Goethe’s writings, Emerson chooses Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–1796; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1824) for rather brief comment. He describes it as provoking but also unsatisfactory, but though he has considerable praise for this novel in which a democrat becomes an aristocrat, readers do not really learn much about it. In fact, one feels that Emerson was struggling with a difficult subject in dealing with Goethe. One comment is worthy of note, however, since it seems a reference to Emerson himself when he says that Goethe is “fragmentary; a writer of occasional poems and of an encyclopedia of sentences.”

Among Emerson’s works, Representative Men has received modest praise, and such chapters as those on Montaigne and Shakespeare have occasionally been reprinted. One of the aptest statements ever made about Emerson’s book is that of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote that Emerson “shows his own affinities and repulsions, and writes his own biography, no matter about whom or what he is talking.”

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. Waldo Emerson: A Biography. New York: Viking, 1981. Print.

Buell, Lawrence. Emerson. Cambridge: Belknap, 2003. Print.

Cameron, Kenneth Walter, ed. Literary Comment in American Renaissance Newspapers: Fresh Discoveries Concerning Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Transcendentalism. Hartford: Transcendental, 1977. Print.

Carpenter, Frederic Ives. Emerson Handbook. New York: Hendricks, 1967. Print.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1820–24. Vol. 1 of Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston: Houghton, 1990. Print.

Lothstein, Arthur S., and Michael Brodrick, eds. New Morning: Emerson in the Twenty-First Century. Albany: State U of New York P, 2008. Print.

Porte, Joel. Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. Print.

Porte, Joel, and Saundra Morris, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.