"The Transformation of Genius into Practical Power": Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Public Lecture

Abstract

The relationship between American intellectuals and the democratic culture that constitutes their milieu has long been a tenuous one. Historians and literary critics have often characterized this association as a class and a culture conflict. Harvard philosopher George Santayana went so far as to claim that the genuine American intellectual, alienated from bourgeois society, possessed what he called a sacred rage, elemental disgust with her or his philistine compatriots. By this account, the true intellectual is of necessity always outsider. In contrast, some of the nation's deepest thinkers, including Santayana's colleague William James, have deeply lamented this chasm and its implications for the relevance of their work and have sought to narrow the gap between the intellectual class and the balance of society. With the architect Louis Sullivan, they contend that in a democracy can be but one test of citizenship, namely: Are you using such gifts, such powers as you possess. . . for or against the people? In both cases, the role of the intellectual democratic culture has been and remains a major preoccupation of American scholars.1 The advent of a democratic political culture the early American republic entailed the occasion of the first debates on the relationship between intellectuals and democracy the United States. Such was particularly the case the 1830s Brahmin Boston where, as Perry Miller once observed, there could hardly be found a group of young Americans more numb to the notion that were any stirring implications the word `democracy.' Miller acutely noted how a profound irony lurked beneath Transcendentalism, that momentous intellectual movement of the early republic, because the Transcendentalists simultaneously represented the first homegrown American literary-philosophical school, and yet somehow remained alien to the booming, buzzing confusion of a burgeoning American nation. Transcendentalism proved to be almost a byword for otherworldly, inchoate intellectual community that only marginally traveled beyond the parochial confines of eastern Massachusetts. Whether the logical outgrowth of Unitarian Congregationalism or its dedicated nemesis, Transcendentalism seemed altogether too intellectual, too elitist, and too apolitical to be of any great relevance to the unfolding social and political drama of the Jacksonian era.2 No one was more aware of this singular tension than Ralph Waldo Emerson. This seemingly aloof, bookish, Harvard-educated son of a leading Brahmin minister revolted against his parents' and church's elitism order to fend off both the class-based ennui that Miller styled Prufrock-ism and the Federalist-bred sour grapes so typical of New England. While still his twenties Emerson quit his prestigious pulpit at Boston's Second Church, with its $1,800 annual salary, not so much as a result of grave theological or doctrinal disaffection, but for social and broadly political reasons. Despising the smug insularity that characterized his well-healed Unitarian congregation at the Second Church, craving relevance, and spurred on by a sanguine democratic vision, Emerson hit the road, as it were, order to put his high cultural training to sweeping pragmatic use. He effected his true greatness neither as a preacher the Unitarian church nor as a poetphilosopher his study but abroad the land, away from his Transcendentalist circle where he created himself as a unique and enduring model of the intellectual service to the nation. At the lyceum, the lecture hall, and on tour, he turned himself into the nation's first democratic intellectual.3 Like so many intellectuals, the Concord sage more than once professed a preference for the privacy of his study to venturing out among amorphous audience. Writing to Thomas Carlyle 1844 about his discomfort as a public figure, Emerson labeled his recent participation the fight to abolish chattel slavery as an intrusion. …