Volume 10, Number 1 · January 18, 1968
Emerson Behind Barbed Wire
By Lewis Mumford
The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
edited by William H. Gilman, edited by AlfredR. Ferguson, edited by Merrell R. Davis, edited by Merton M. Sealts Jr., edited by Harrison Hayford
Belknap Press (Harvard), 6 volumes pp., $67.00
The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson
edited by Robert E. Spiller, edited by Stephen E. Whicher
Harvard, 2 volumes pp., $25.00
Almost sixty years ago, in 1909 in fact, the first volume of a ten-volume edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Journals was published; and the final volume came out in 1914. In 1883, the twelve-volume collected edition of Emerson's works had been published, with an introductory memoir by James Elliot Cabot, the editor. To bring out Emerson's Journals a generation after his death was, then, a final act of piety, performed by those who had been close to Emerson. But unfortunately for Emerson's reputation this publication was somewhat belated, for the robust Emerson one finds in the Journals is a far more attractive figure than the transcendental ghost lingering in the popular imagination, whose 'paleness' and remoteness led Henry James, the novelist, to speak of the 'white tint' of Emerson's career.
Review, 3390 words
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