GREAT BIOGRAPHY
Otto, Max. C.
Great Biography THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Ralph L. Rusk. Charles Scribner's Sons. 592 pp. $5. Reviewed by Max C. Otto THIS IS a remarkable biography, a very remarkable biography. From...
...She presided with wifely and motherly affection, with domestic genius and more than a suggestion of humor and intellectual independence, over the Concord home from the day she entered the newly purchased house as a bride, to the year of her death, 57 years later...
...Rusk would have written a far different biography of the husband...
...So he hoped to have found his life companion...
...The courtship and marriage of "the 25-year-old philosopher" and the beautiful quick-witted girl of 17 whom his mother called "a blessing sent from heaven to Waldo," shows Emerson to have been capable of a degree of feeling not usually ascribed to him...
...He needed more elbow room...
...And when the war was over "he found it hard to get the poison of hate out of his blood...
...One gets a sense of the unfolding career and personality of a great human being almost as if one had witnessed it as it actually occurred...
...Rusk, "he had had doubts about the ministry, but his family connections were mostly like anchors holding him to it . . . Probably Ellen, while she lived, was a persuasive argument for his keeping a regular profession...
...we resist it by disobedience to every evil command, and by incessant furtherance of every right cause...
...To his fame as a literary man, his participation in the war effort had added repute as a loyal and influential citizen, but he had to confess "that this mad war has made us all mad...
...We read in this biography that the war proved to be "a disease in his own system as well as in the body politic...
...It is doubtful that even Emerson's closest friends knew so much about him as a thoughtful reader can learn from this extraordinary account...
...A chapter written with sympathetic insight and delicacy is devoted to Ellen Tucker...
...She was eight months his senior, and they were married, after a brief and sober courtship, in his 32nd year...
...Rusk says: "Possibly, as tradition has it, Emerson climbed the stairs to give his blessing to the infant philosopher...
...And none of it—meticulous workmanship, a staggering quantity of factual material, or the labor required to transform a mass of data into a living whole of experience—none of this obtrudes upon the reader...
...Incidentally, if this review were intended for the author instead of "the public," I would offer to bet him that whenever he uses the word "doubtless," which he does now and again, it is more often than not precisely when he makes a statement that is open to doubt...
...The former treats of Emerson's steady alienation from the ministry...
...Margaret Fuller, William Ellery Chan-ning, and many others...
...Equal understanding is shown in the pages of the book given over to Emerson's second wife, Lidia Jackson, or Lidian, as he renamed her to avoid having her called "Lidier," in the New England dialect...
...I might raise an eyebrow here and there as, for example, when Mr...
...congregations and temples and sermons—how much sham!' " A little more than a year later, he severed his connection with the profession which had once seemed to offer the best opportunity for usefulness...
...In a word— for fear I may have failed to suggest it—this is really a great book...
...One learns about the Emerson children, and becomes newly acquainted with such worthies as Thoreau, Alcott, Whitman, Hawthorne...
...And is there nothing to say of an adverse nature...
...Both were clearly aware that their companionship was based on a less unrestrained enthusiasm than it might have been earlier in their lives...
...Had she lived, Mr...
...But such matters, of which there are a number, are minutiae in so massive and magnificent a work...
...Moreover, I could wish use had been made of John Dewey's address delivered in connection with the Emerson centenary in 1903, in which he was described as the supreme exponent of democracy for all time...
...He noted in his journals 'how little love is at the bottom of these great religious shows...
...He had done all that he could well do in the narrow mahogany pulpit...
...I have now been four days engaged to Ellen Louisa Tucker," he confided to his Journal...
...The author's plan to let the days and months and years of Emerson's life unroll, alive with the events and with the people that came and went and with what they said or wrote, is so successfully carried out that the best word I think of to describe the result is the word "uncanny...
...It is exactly the book for those who know little or nothing about Emerson, and indispensable for those who have read and studied his writings with care...
...That job, I am convinced, is done...
...Possibly, but not by "me...
...The summaries of Emerson's essays and addresses are of an exceptionally high order of excellence...
...The biographer combines scholarship, in the best sense, with the creative power of a gifted artist and with sheer hard work...
...The vital development of the life story itself, mastered and superbly told, supplies its own dramatization, and it is abundant...
...From the "Prologue," introducing Emerson's father and mother, it moves, aglow with life, through chapter after chapter to the twenty-fifth "Terminus," which tells of Emerson's closing years and last days...
...It may seem a reckless thing to say, but I gladly assume the responsibility of saying it: There is no reason from now on why anyone should write another Life of Emerson...
...This may be true, if you make "something" and "incipient" vague enough...
...But by October of 1831, some eight months after her death, his religious doubts were beginning to be strengthened by a positive dislike of the church...
...There is not in the whole book a touch of the Actionizing which is currently approved as a desirable device for heightening the drama of authentic biographical details...
...She was the wife of Waldo Emerson," as the author states, "less than a year and a half, yet she had stirred him more than anybody else ever had done or would do...
...His thinking did not thrive so well as before...
...From the start," says Mr...
...but we are here for immortal resistance to wrong...
...But whether or not William James received the blessing, his Pragmatism doubtless owed something to the incipient Pragmatism which he found, many years later, in the writings of the Trans-cendentalist...
...He no longer enjoyed a sphere of almost limitless intellectual liberty...
...Two chapters of peculiar interest are entitled "Theses Nailed to the Church Door" and "The Fierce Storm of War...
...Will my Father in Heaven regard us with kindness, and as he hath, as we trust, made us for each other, will he be pleased to strengthen and purify and prosper and eternize our affection...
...The second Mrs...
...There is an expert analysis of his poetry...
...The crack of his idealism, present from the beginning if not always visible, had now grown too wide to escape detection...
...And then it is hardly worth saying...
...Emerson had to share the task of her husband's struggle to find his place in the world, and, later, when he had become famous, to adjust herself to the household demands, by no means always simple ones, which fame entailed...
...A crucial test of Emerson's transcendental philosophy came 30 years later...
...that there was no minority to stand fast for eternal truth, and say, cannons and bayonets for such as already knew nothing stronger...
...The Civil War had drawn him into the war fervor...
...He believed he had just entered upon his life work as a minister of religion...
...But tuberculosis cut short their joy...
...Those brief comments, of course, do not convey any conception of the book's wealth of content...
...It is a provocative idea...
Vol. 14 • February 1950 • No. 2
