‘The Heyday of the Blood’: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Abstract

Henry James’s review-essay ‘Emerson’ established an interpretation of Emerson’s character that the passage of a century has changed slightly if at all.¹ Reviewing James Elliot Cabot’s ‘official’ biography, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1887), James found in Emerson’s life and work a man of genius, but ‘paleness’ too, ‘a lack of colour’, a life in which ‘Passions, alternations, affairs, adventures had absolutely no part …’ (2). In the course of considering Emerson’s lack of enthusiasm for the paintings in the Louvre and the Vatican, together with his hostility to such as Shelley, Dickens, Jane Austen, Cervantes, Dante and Aristophanes, James remarked darkly, ‘There were certain complications in life which he never suspected’ (31). Seventy-five years after James’s essay, Waggoner virtually echoed James’s summary, writing that Emerson ‘platonized’ love and ‘armored’ himself against grief at the death of his wife and his son, for ‘he could not afford to think about love with all the power of his mind and heart as he could think about most other subjects’.²