Robison 1 A Complex Connection: The Intersections of Life, Literature, and Legacy between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne as Revealed Through Their Journals and Notebooks By Elizabeth Robison Robison 2 “To be great is to be misunderstood.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self- Reliance” “Life is made up of marble and mud.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables Robison 3 Chapter 1 “A Complex Connection: The Points of Convergence between the Professional and Personal Lives of Emerson and Hawthorne” In his journal for May 24, 1864, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: I have found in [Nathaniel Hawthorne’s] death a surprise & disappointment . . .. Moreover, I have felt sure of him in his neighborhood & in his necessities of sympathy & intelligence, — that I could well wait his time, — his unwillingness and caprice, — and might one day conquer a friendship. . .. Now it appears that I have waited too long (Selected Journals 2:744). Emerson regrets that, despite their frequent personal and professional contacts, he never truly knew his neighbor and circumstantial friend, Hawthorne. Other of his friends expressed a similar kind of regret concerning Hawthorne, as he was known for his introverted, shy, and at times, even hermit-like tendencies. Interestingly, however, often the same sentiment has been expressed about Emerson himself, who, in his own way, was equally protective of his personal privacy. In “Ralph Waldo Emerson 1812-1892: A Brief Biography,” Ronald Bosco states that “Emerson defies easy summary” (9). Though the veil can never be completely lifted from these authors, as 21st-century readers we have some advantages over the two authors’ contemporaries. In their introduction to Emerson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Joel Myerson and Ronald Bosco identify the unique lens through which we are able to see more of Emerson’s “otherwise elusive personality”— namely his over 200 volumes of notebooks, ledgers, commonplace books, and diaries, collectively referred to as his “journals” (xxiv). Similarly, despite his desire that his work should stand in for his own personal self, and that a biography Robison 4 concerning his life should never be produced (Bosco and Murphy xix), in many ways Nathaniel Hawthorne produced his own biography in the writing of his notebooks. A conventionally composed autobiography inevitably offers a selective and distorted view of a person’s life. By contrast, an unguarded autobiographical record provided by personal journals, notebooks, and diaries affords the most trustworthy self-portrait we can hope for from the writer’s own pen. By reading the private writings that spanned the adult lives of Emerson and Hawthorne, we can appreciate the complexities, character, and humanity of both men in ways we might miss if we limited our study to their published works and public lives alone. Conventional Literary Personas of Emerson and Hawthorne The literary public personas of Emerson and Hawthorne and their now canonical works are among the most recognizable of the productive time period in American literary history commonly known as the American Renaissance. As both authors sometimes demonstrate the stereotypical characteristics of the “movements” with which they are associated— Transcendentalism (Emerson) and Dark Romanticism (Hawthorne)— they often are painted as the quintessential, defining personages within those movements. Emerson himself is responsible for much of what we consider definitivly transcendentalist ideas. From his first major work, “Nature” (1836), which claims that the new age should look to nature as the locus of truth; to his lecture, “The American Scholar” (1837), which calls for American cultural and intellectual independence; to his embrace of non-conformity and uniqueness in “Self- Reliance” (1841); to his clarifying statements as to the role of poetry and art in American society in “The Poet” (1844), Emerson's body of works largely helped create a transcendental legacy that still Robison 5 continues to shape America today in her attempt to remain independent and self-reliant in ever-changing climates. For his part, Hawthorne is often classified as a “dark Romantic,” a term first coined by literary critic Mario Praz in his work The Romantic Agony in 1933; and he has been described as essentially “dark” ever since. He has also been called a “novelistic romantic,” (Murfin and Ray 451), as he, along with Herman Melville, is considered vital to the further development of the American novel within the canon. Thus, for generations Emerson has come to be seen as almost synonymous with optimism, hope, self-reliance, and the universal connection between humans, and Hawthorne has become similarly identified with pessimism, doubt, guilt, and sin. After over a century of classification in their respective theoretical and ideological prisons, it can be difficult to consider either writer as more complicated than the popular image. However, each author, like every human being, is far more complex than any critical or historical label can suggest. This strict classification can lead modern readers to question the accuracy of these designations. We must consider whether our adhesion to titles is completely justified, or rather, if we should accept them as our first step to understanding while acknowledging that we are significantly simplifying these two "elusive" and largely "unknown" writers. As in all human lives, both those that have been minutely recorded and those that are virtually unknown, there is a degree of complexity that cannot be hoped to be understood by even the most intimate of contemporaries, let alone those of us living long after the life in discussion has ceased. I do not contend that the classifications we give Emerson, as a hopeful, genial, outgoing, optimistic teacher of transcendental truths, and Hawthorne as a cynical, brooding, reserved, misanthropic writer of romances and short stories, are altogether untrue, undeserved, or even unhelpful. Rather, they are general descriptions upon which we can scaffold Robison 6 a larger understanding as we explore these two men and their vastly different, yet surprisingly similar outlooks, personalities, relationships, and legacies. This list of opposites may be a good starting place, but it is far from where we should end when considering the legacy of these two men. While we are noting the considerable differences between these men of genius, we must not ignore the minute and the striking similarities, which are greater than we might suppose. We see the value of this more in-depth approach if we strip away the assigned literary movement templates, allowing us to see outright the often dismissed or downplayed similarities between the two which is most often seen in the examination of their complexities and inconsistencies as seen in their journals and notebooks. The Overlapping Lives of Emerson and Hawthorne Emerson and Hawthorne lived in the same time period, and for many years, lived within walking distance of each other. They spent casual time together, had similar backgrounds, similar religious beliefs, and obviously similar vocations. When Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne began their married life in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1842, their first home was “the Old Manse,” which belonged to Emerson’s family and in which Emerson himself had lived previously. The Emerson and Hawthorne families spent time together, and the two men often conversed personally and professionally. Emerson was a pallbearer at Hawthorne’s funeral in 1864 and assisted Sophia in sorting out affairs concerning payment from Emerson and Hawthorne’s shared publisher after Nathaniel’s death (Bosco and Murphy xvi). Despite their frequent contact, Emerson and Hawthorne developed into very different types of published writers with contrasting public personas. However, these personas did not encompass the entire person for either individual. The lack of adherence to their canonical characterizations is seen Robison 7 most prominently in Emerson’s journals and Hawthorne’s notebooks, making the study of the personal writings and the exploration of the men, their lives, their works, and their legacies relevant and interesting to us today by allowing a very different and more human picture of each author. The human complexity exhibited individually by Emerson and Hawthorne, especially that exemplified in each author’s relationship with the other, was what first attracted me to this thesis. Reading the canonical works of both writers, I noticed a surprising number of points of similarity that seemed to belie the notion of Emerson and Hawthorne as almost mutually exclusive types of persons. It struck me as incongruous and improbable that these two men, who both made personal impressions on me through their writing, could be as different in character as is generally supposed. The deeper I read, the more similarities— and complexities— I found, as I saw Emerson and Hawthorne straying from their traditionally-assigned literary “boxes” of transcendental optimist and “dark” Romantic, respectively. Reading their journals and notebooks, I realized— not surprisingly— that each author is much more complex, contradictory, and unpredictable than I had previously believed. This complicated question of personal identity versus public identity gets considerably more interesting and life-like when we consider the personal and professional relationship between Emerson and Hawthorne. Their shared literary, cultural, political, and personal environment included taking day trips together, family dinners, reading— or attempting to read— each other's work, and frequent casual meetings within their Concord neighborhood. It is through these common daily activities noted by the two men in their journals and notebooks, as well as in remembrances and observations of each by their contemporaries, that we see evidence Robison 8 of a relationship that was far more complex than that of strict opposition. In these passages we see a relationship that is familiar and frequent, as well as half-friendly and half-antagonistic. The Concord Circle The consistent presence of each author in the other’s life during the time when they both lived in Concord is demonstrated by the many references each man made to the other in his journal or notebook, recording common everyday activities that often involved the other. Three excerpts from Emerson’s journal from 1843 suffice to illustrate the wide range of topics the two men discussed: I told Hawthorne yesterday that I think every young man at some time inclines to make the experiment of a dare-God & daredevil originality like Rabelais (Selected Journals 2:135). Hawthorne & I talked of the number of superior young men we have seen. H. said, that he had seen several from whom he had expected much, but had not distinguished themselves; and he had inferred that he must not expect a popular success from such; he had in nowise lost his confidence in their power (Selected Journals 2:181). Ellery [Channing] says that Hawthorn[e] agrees with him about Washington [Allston] that he is the extreme of well dressed mediocrity (Selected Journals 2:206). The two men exchanged opinions on the importance of literary originality as revealed through Rabelais; observations and opinions concerning their often connected professional and personal circles; and impressions of contemporary art and artists, including the painter Washington Robison 9 Allston, who had once offered the young Sophia Peabody advice on her own art education (Marshall 231). Entries in Hawthorne’s notebooks during the period of 1842-1844 also describe familiarity between the two men as well as between their families, with entries like the following noting many meals shared at their respective homes: “Mr. Emerson comes sometimes and has feasted on our nectar and ambrosia” (American Notebooks 138). Hawthorne’s son, Julian, described the contact between his father’s family and Emerson’s as “constant” (“Personal Glimpses of Emerson” 226). Emerson, too, records instances of closeness between the two families, especially between his daughter Ellen, and Hawthorne’s daughter, Una, as the two socialized with other young people of Concord (Selected Journals 2:846). These entries and others demonstrate that Emerson and Hawthorne and their families associated together on a friendly, if not personal, level, during their time as neighbors in Concord and extending beyond. Beyond the family relationship, the journals and notebooks show Emerson and Hawthorne’s shared friendships with the larger literary circle of New England notables, such as Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Ellery Channing. Two entries from Hawthorne’s notebooks illustrate: Parting with Mr. Thoreau, I spent half an hour chopping wood, when Molly informed me that Mr. Emerson wished to see me. He had brought a letter of Ellery Channing. . . (American Notebooks 169). After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson’s I returned through the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path. . . It was Margaret [Fuller] herself. . . . we heard footsteps. . .[t]hen he emerged from the green shade, and, behold! it was Mr. Emerson (American Notebooks 151). Robison 10 In addition to affirming shared friendships, these entries from Hawthorne’s notebook as well as those from Emerson’s journal above offer us a brief glimpse of the personalities of the two men. In his record of daily conversations between the two, Emerson comes across as methodic and factual, intent on recording, in the most clear terms, that which he thought, recording only what was discussed in purposefully simple language without embellishment. Emerson’s entries are almost in essay form, as he reports the topics of varying conversations, as well as the opinions of Channing and Hawthorne on Washington Allston. On the other hand, Hawthorne demonstrates a humorous sarcasm— a tone familiar in many of his notebook entries, as he marks the appearance of his two brilliant friends in pseudo-reverential terms: “It was Margaret herself” and “. . . behold! It was Mr. Emerson! [italics added].” Hawthorne’s entries read almost as a short story, with expression and exaggeration. Despite their notable stylistic differences, as demonstrated in these short sets of entries, Emerson and Hawthorne seemed to have more in common in their daily lives than we often assert. Reciprocal Influence: Half-Friendly, Half- Antagonistic As a result of their many contacts, conversations, walks, dinners, and family ties, the friendship between the two authors grew. According to Bosco and Myerson, Hawthorne was one of Emerson’s many “influential relationships” (x), and Bosco and Murphy state that Emerson knew Hawthorne well enough to have been a “reasonable candidate” to write the first posthumous Hawthorne biography (xv). John S. C. Abbott, a classmate of Hawthorne’s, has said that in Emerson, “Hawthorne found a congenial friend” (158). Emerson himself said in his journal in 1842, “There is something grand in the relation of two men between whom a perfect good understanding subsists,” and he goes on to mention Hawthorne as a man with whom he has Robison 11 such an understanding (Selected Journals 2:69). In a similar vein, Hawthorne says of Emerson in 1843, “Mr. Emerson came with a sunbeam in his face; and we had a good talk as ever I remember to have had with him” (American Notebooks 164). This friendly aspect of their relationship is summed up in a somber image of Hawthorne’s funeral, remembered by Franklin B. Sanborn years later in 1880: “. . . it was one of the most touching spectacles to see the Atlantic Club, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Longfellow and others accompany [Hawthorne] to his last place where he now lies in Sleepy Hollow” (203). Despite these instances of mutual respect and friendship, the two writers were often at odds professionally. Neither man seemed to fully appreciate the other’s published writings, and they were often pitted against one another or considered professional binaries by many of their contemporaries (Bosco and Murphy xxxiv), perhaps encouraging an underlying competition between the two. Moncure Daniel Conway notes that both “Nature” and “Young Goodman Brown” were composed in the same room within the Old Manse, and that Hawthorne was “the one American genius. . . comparable with. . . Emerson for power” (208-9). Annie Adams Fields, wife of James T. Fields, Emerson and Hawthorne’s publisher and friend, states, in 1884, after the death of both men: [Emerson’s] feeling respecting the literary work of men nearer to him was not always one of satisfaction. . . [Emerson and Hawthorne] were so unlike that it seemed strange that fate brought them together in one small town. An understanding of each other’s methods or points of view was an impossibility (138). If, as Annie Fields says, mutual understanding “was an impossibility” for Emerson and Hawthorne, it can be equally difficult for us today to determine, precisely, what either writer truly thought of the other. Robison 12 Emerson’s opinions on Hawthorne as a writer are especially arcane, as they appear in writing to be few in number, extremely brief, and lack context to aid in interpretation.1 In 1842, the first year of friendship between the two men, Emerson records this rather devastating comment: “N. Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man” (Selected Journals 1:785). At this point in his life, Hawthorne had so far published only one piece of enduring significance, his collection of short stories, Twice-Told Tales (1837),2 and he was still eight years away from the publication of his defining novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850). Such an entry is nearly impossible to decipher. Whether it be stylistic or that Emerson held the man himself in such a high regard (his “tribute to the man”) that it made Hawthorne’s current level of writing appear simple or worthless to Emerson, these and other detailed interpretations are a stretch due to lack of context. All we can conclude is that, for whatever reason, Emerson disliked Hawthorne’s writing. A second critical comment, written in 1846, is equally brief and cryptic: “Hawthorn [sic] invites his readers too much into his study, opens the process before them. As if the confectioner should say to his customers Now let us make the cake” (Selected Journals 2:319). The run-on sentence suggests a hastily composed entry; and it is difficult to know either what Emerson could have meant in describing Hawthorne’s “process” as too “[open]”; or which particular writings of Hawthorne he might have had in mind.3 1 Interpretation is complicated further as Emerson was no great reader of fiction in general, making it difficult to know how much concentrated effort he put into reading the fiction of Hawthorne. 2 Though only his first significant publication, Twice-Told Tales contains some of Hawthorne’s most well-known and respected short stories, including “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” “The Gentle Boy,” “Wakefield,” and others. 3 Hawthorne’s other most noteworthy collection of short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, was published in 1846 and contains perhaps Hawthorne’s best known short stories, including “The Birthmark, Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “Young Goodman Brown.” Robison 13 Two final surviving comments, composed after Hawthorne’s death, are hardly more instructive. May 24, 1864, the day after Hawthorne’s burial: “I have found in his death a surprise & disappointment. I thought him a greater man than any of his works betray, that there was still a great deal of work in him, & that he might one day show a purer power” (Emerson Selected Journals 2:744). 1867: “To be sure I do not think any of [Hawthorne’s] books worthy of his genius. I admired the man, who was simple, amiable, truth loving, & frank in conversation: but I never read his books with pleasure. — they are too young” (Selected Journals 2:867). From these remarks, we can infer that Emerson detected some promise in Hawthorne’s writings of “a purer power,” though it is impossible to know what basis he saw for that promise as no positive remarks by Emerson on Hawthorne’s works survive. Emerson may also have been the only reader ever to have characterized the often haunted, melancholy writings of Hawthorne as “young.” For his part, Hawthorne was equally critical of Emerson’s literary style and methods. For instance, he seems to have thought Emerson’s writing too abstract, or as his son Julian Hawthorne puts it, “disembodied.” Hawthorne’s own preference was to present the truth “incarnate, as it appears in life and in story” (“Personal Glimpses of Emerson” 224). For Hawthorne, the best way to reinvent the common human experience was through a certain concrete verisimilitude, by creating characters whose actions and thoughts both reflect our everyday experiences, and go to the added step of revealing deep interior truths of human nature that we seldom recognize. Robison 14 On a personal level, Hawthorne seems to have detected— and relished— a certain obsessive element in Emerson’s personality; and he took pleasure in pointing it out to others. The novelist Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) recorded a notable instance. A native of northwestern Virginia, Davis attended a gathering of several Concord literati in 1862. In a memoir recorded thirty-eight years later, she recreates the scene: Mr. Hawthorne said: ‘Here comes [Emerson,] the Sage of Concord. He is anxious to know what kind of human beings come up from the back hills in Virginia. Now I will tell you,’ his eyes gleaming with fun, ‘what he will talk to you about. Pears. Yes. You may begin at Plato or the day’s news, and he will come around to pears. He is now convinced that a vegetable diet affects both the body and soul, and that pears exercise a more direct and ennobling influence on us than any other vegetable or fruit. Wait. You’ll hear presently.’ I was surprised to see the Sage eat heartily of fine sirloin. . . But with the dessert he began to advocate a vegetable diet and at last announced the spiritual influence of pears, to the great delight of his host, who laughed like a boy and was humored like one by the gentle old man (Davis 104). In addition to showing Hawthorne’s personal perspective on Emerson, this passage is interesting in other ways. It shows Emerson’s curiosity: “He is anxious to know what kinds of human beings come up from the back hills of Virginia,” as if they were a different “kind” from those in Concord; it suggests a certain knowledge of fads that is surprising in a writer of his esteem known for seeking out timeless transcendental truths: “He is now convinced” of the virtues of a “vegetable diet”; and it points to some latent hypocrisy: Emerson lauds the vegetable diet after having dined “heartily [on] fine sirloin.” In the end, however, Emerson’s eccentricities do not evoke scorn, but merriment in Hawthorne as Davis records that he “laughed like a boy”; and the Robison 15 “Sage” responded in kind, like a “gentle old man,” perhaps enjoying a joke at his own expense or allowing “a boy” his fun. A Distant Proximity Though physically proximate to Emerson and other transcendentalists, many of whom lived in or made frequent trips to Concord, Hawthorne remained in major respects, distant. One alienating factor, to be mentioned in passing, was Hawthorne’s politics. As a moderate Democrat and life-long intimate friend of Franklin Pierce, President of the United States from 1853-1857, Hawthorne inspired wrath and disbelief among his mostly Republican literary compatriots. Sensitive as he was, Hawthorne felt the hostility while remaining openly faithful to his friend, going so far as to dedicate his final book, Our Old Home (1863), to Pierce (Wineapple 355). Although he was connected to the Concord circle as I have described it, the connection was loose, as Hawthorne remained temperamentally aloof. In his last years, Hawthorne purposefully avoided contact with many of his neighbors in order to live invisibly with his family and his own thoughts for company. Henry James Sr., the father of the novelist, first met Hawthorne at a dinner in 1862 and was so struck by the silence and mystery of the man that he promptly wrote a letter to Emerson in which he describes Hawthorne as the evening’s “profitable object of study” (Bosco and Murphy xxx). James continues: It was so pathetic to see him, contented sprawling Concord owl that he was, and has always been, brought blindfolded into the brilliant daylight and expected to wink and be lively. . . It was heavenly to see him persist in ignoring the spectral smiles—. . . then go home to his Concord den to fall upon his knees and ask his heavenly Father why it was Robison 16 that an owl couldn’t remain an owl and not be forced into the diversion of a canary (xxxi-xxxii). James’s letter underscores how Hawthorne could be physically near while being mentally, emotionally, and professionally distant. Surely, Emerson was one of the transcendentalist “canaries,” of the day, if not the chief canary himself, while Hawthorne remained the solitary Concord owl of the night. As James’s letter demonstrates, then and now we often define each author for what he is not in comparison to the other, just as much as define him for whom he actually is. This can cause us to imagine a superficial dichotomous relationship between the two. Though this makes for an entertaining story— the pitting of Emerson against Hawthorne, a genial personality versus a brooding one, outgoing versus introvert— we begin to sense an overly simplistic and false dichotomy of “light” versus “dark” emerge, with Emerson as the “light” and Hawthorne as the “dark.” Under these broad strokes, we fail to see any blending of the light and the dark within each man, his life, and his works. By looking past the sometimes useful contemporary and literary distinctions made concerning the character and person of each author, we become aware of the common existence in each person of both hope and doubt, optimism and pessimism, as well as a recurring realist approach to life in each author. Thesis Focus, Exploration, and Approach In this thesis, I want to challenge some of the absolute definitions given to each author by focusing on each man’s use of a journal or notebook as a part of the commonplace book tradition of many writers before them. I seek to explore the usefulness of such personal writings both to the author and to the scholar. Finally, and in as much depth as space permits, I will look at each author’s collection of personal writings to demonstrate key passages that belie the popular and Robison 17 reductive images of both writers. My primary sources and materials are Emerson’s Selected Journals in two volumes, edited by Lawrence Rosenwald, and Hawthorne’s American Notebooks, edited by Sophia Hawthorne. These private and personal documents present a more complex view of these two men as both individuals and writers. These sources were chosen because of their important place in the daily lives of each author. Emerson’s journals are said to be “an extension of his private life,” and it is “perhaps only there— he could be completely himself” (Bosco “Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Brief Biography” 18). Emerson used his journals for recording a variety of ideas on topics he subsequently “mined” to produce his lectures, books, essays, and poems. Hawthorne’s American Notebooks, dated 1835- 1853, is a posthumous compilation of his personal journals and notes taken during his time living in both Concord and Lenox Massachusetts when he was in constant contact with Emerson as a neighbor, friend, fellow-intellectual, and writer. The American Notebooks are also important because they contain germinal ideas for many of Hawthorne’s best-known canonical works, including three major novels, The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852); and several short story collections, including Twice Told Tales (1837), Grandfather’s Chair (1840), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851), The Snow Image, and Other Twice Told Tales (1852), and Tanglewood Tales (1853). In this chapter, my goal has been threefold: first to provide some contextual background on Emerson and Hawthorne and their relationship; secondly, to acknowledge both the value and the limitations of their conventional classification as “transcendental optimist” and “dark Romantic,” respectively; and finally, to identify Emerson’s Journals and Hawthorne’s Notebooks as sources that can serve to complicate— and enrich— our understanding of both authors. The Robison 18 next two chapters build on this foundation by looking first at the journal/notebook as a genre; and second, by examining pertinent passages in Emerson’s Journals and Hawthorne’s Notebooks. Chapter 2 “The Role of Journals and Notebooks in the Professional and Personal Literature of Emerson and Hawthorne,” discusses the tradition of the commonplace book, journal, and notebook of which both Emerson and Hawthorne made use of for a multitude of reasons including the recording of details, observations, germinal ideas for future composition, as well as for personal remembrances and reflections. In this chapter, I investigate the benefits of such a practice both to the author in his day as well as for those who study said author afterwards. I also demonstrate within this chapter that the study of personal journals and notebooks is a way to better understand the daily activities, thoughts, moods, and overall humanity of an individual that is otherwise left unearthed. Chapter 3 “The Surprising Legacy of Realist Pessimism and Optimism Intertwined in Emerson’s Journals and Hawthorne’s Notebooks,” centers on the entries from Emerson’s journals and Hawthorne’s notebooks to reveal a more nuanced image of the writers that includes some surprising points of divergence from traditionally held views of Emerson as a hopeful optimist and Hawthorne as a doubtful pessimist. I argue that these entries demonstrate a mélange of hope and doubt and optimism and pessimism grounded in a realist outlook in each author’s life. In this final chapter I demonstrate that the sense of self that is projected in both Emerson’s journals and Hawthorne’s notebooks reveals the identity of each author a step beyond that which traditional classifications allow, as complex human beings who evade simple categorization, and therefore continue to make themselves relatable and relevant today. Robison 19 Chapter 2: “A Complex Connection: The Role of Journals and Notebooks in the Professional and Personal Literature of Emerson and Hawthorne” As we can see from Emerson and Hawthorne’s relationship as neighbors and contemporaries, neither author was writing in a literary void, and neither author can claim complete original authorship for his ideas. For the gathering and developing of ideas, both Emerson and Hawthorne drew heavily on their journals, notebooks and commonplace books. As they did so, they were following a path well-trodden by their literary forebears. According to Lucia Dacome in “Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” the commonplace books kept by authors of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries functioned as “aids to memory and a storehouse of knowledge. . . [commonplace books] were a pedagogic tradition related to rhetoric and the art of memory that dated back to the classic period” (603). The time-honored and distinguished history of notebook writing, as practiced by authors, educators, and philosophers, dates back to Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. These three influential thinkers emphasized, as a part of their pedagogy, the memorization of arguments. The purpose behind this was to enable students to be able to better understand argument, as argument was the vehicle through which the ancients believed truth was found (Berland et al. 22). The ancients’ focus on argumentation, its memory, and its keeping, was to ensure that students were participating in moral, practical, and educational endeavors to improve themselves. The tool by which these arguments were kept for safe keeping and memory were called “topoi” from the Greek, meaning “place,” with an understanding that these “places,” or bits of accepted educational thought, were the common ground of understanding among the educated. This term evolved into the 17th- and 18th-century term “Commonplace” as the Robison 20 practice of “commonplacing” came back into the public eye in the late Renaissance in England. This “commonplace book” of the Renaissance, like that of the ancients, focused on the identification and formation of the common public mind in which general ideas and consciousness were stored (Berland et al. 22). We see this loose designation of “the public mind” in the “highly referenced and allusive” (Berland et al. 30) entries in commonplace books of the era which suggest a common gentlemanly requirement of knowledge of the classics, as well as the science and literature of the age, as a means to success in social conversation, an important institution of the time. The renewed status of the commonplace book came mostly from writers and educators, such as Erasmus, Sir Francis Bacon, and especially John Locke, who advocated the use of a small, pocket-sized notebook carried on the person, in which, “things to be remembered are placed,” as well as a collection of general “wit and wisdom, ancient or modern, transcribed and rephrased by its owner” (Berland et al. 4). The practice of “commonplacing” was widespread among educated persons in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in England and in colonial, and later, republican America. This Anglo-American tradition helped shape the literary environment and literary practices of both Emerson and Hawthorne. One celebrated 17th-century advocate for the use of commonplace books was Sir Francis Bacon, who, in 1625, promoted the use of commonplace books as a “help for the memory” and proclaimed “the diligence and labour in the entry of common-places to be a matter of great use and support in studying” (Berland et al. 25-6). A notable 18th-century advocate was the poet Thomas Gray. Gray used commonplace books throughout his literary career to amass quotations, lists of books, notes, Latin entries, and indexes. His copious and well-arranged commonplace books drew the admiration of James Boswell, who wrote to himself concerning self- Robison 21 improvement: “Get a common-place book, like Gray” (Dacome 618-9). The commonplace books of Bacon and Gray point to some of the traditional purposes of the commonplace book: the development and demonstration of intelligence, of society, of morality, and most comprehensively, of the complete self, closely connected with the gentlemanly pursuit of education. Dacome says of the Gray-Boswell example and others in the 18th century, that commonplace books were “publicly recognized tokens of the moral worth of their compilers” (623), as it was believed that while one was collecting and organizing one’s thoughts in writing on a commonplace book page, one was also working on “[his]own intellectual, moral, and social edification” (615). The idea of commonplace books as resources for intellectual, educational, and moral development began with the ancients, and gained new momentum in England during the late Renaissance. This English tradition emphasized the cultivation of pedagogy and intellect with the end-goal being the creation of “a gentleman,” who would be skilled in argument, capacious in memory, and informed by a “broad acquaintance” with the Western World (Berland et al. 14, 22). An educated gentleman was expected to elevate himself not just intellectually by his education, but socially as well by means of his ability to participate in polite conversation and proper argumentation. In his work, De Copia (1512), Erasmus had encouraged and required the use of commonplace books by his students to write down any thought that could be seen as useful in the present or in the future. He also encouraged the reviewing of one’s commonplace book as a source for inspiration to enhance or illustrate one’s own argument and understanding (Berland et al. 24). One important observation concerning Erasmus and his beliefs about the use of the commonplace book can be seen in Kevin Berland, Jan Kristen Gilliam, and Kenneth A. Lockridge’s commentary concerning the tradition of commonplacing in their book The Robison 22 Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover: “Erasmus held that a reader can understand a text fully only if he can make it his own” (24). This hits at the heart and soul of Erasmus's commonplace book literary descendants, Hawthorne, and most especially Emerson. Erasmus was one of the first notable thinkers to identify the many uses of the commonplace book as a place for self-development through the recording, contemplating, and keeping of ideas both original and learned. Erasmus anticipates the variable-use journals, notebooks, and commonplace books of both Emerson and Hawthorne. Erasmus says this of commonplacing: “This method will also have the effect of imprinting what you read more deeply on your mind, as well as accustoming you to utilize the riches of your reading” (87). This was certainly in the vein of a newly re-emerging tradition of commonplace book use in the intellectual and educational sphere, a practice quickly becoming considered a necessary personal development of all gentlemen of the era, as well as those going forward for the next two centuries. Perhaps the single greatest influence within the English tradition of commonplacing on Emerson and Hawthorne was John Locke’s posthumously published New Method of Making Common-Place Books (1704). Locke meticulously sets forth the purpose of the commonplace book and prescribes how a young gentleman can begin his own commonplace book. Though commonplace books were already in widespread use among 17th-century gentlemen when Locke’s influential treatise was published, Locke’s method streamlined the process of commonplacing and added to its popularity (Berland et al. 29). Locke extended the Erasmian emphasis of having the commonplace writer paraphrase favorite quotations to make make them his own. Locke did not promote the memorization of full sentences, which he believed limited commonplace book writers to the original author’s thoughts without expanding their own thoughts (Dacome 611). He saw paraphrasing as a means of promoting what he regarded as the Robison 23 most specific and important function of the commonplace book— the expansion of the self. Through study and commonplace practice, Locke claimed that self-identity was largely mental, that “the self-lay in the mind,” (Dacome 625) and in the “continuity of memory and consciousness” (Dacome 605). Thus, in order to improve morally and socially, one had to begin with one’s own mind. This would be a claim lived out by many thinkers to come— including Emerson, who believed in valuing and honoring his own thoughts; and Hawthorne, many of whose fictions deal with the life of the mind while muddling the line between reality and the psyche. While he echoed Erasmus’s emphasis on the use of the commonplace book in the gentlemanly pursuit of education, society, and morality, Locke also greatly refined a particular method for organizing, indexing, recording, and retrieving materials in a commonplace book to enhance its usefulness. His goal was to make vast amounts of knowledge both manageable and easily accessible by a system of indexing (Dacome 604). When I meet any thing that I think fit to put in my Common-Place Book, I first find a proper Head. I look into the Index for the first Letter and the following Vowel. . . If [in that] space there is any number, That directs me to the Page designed for words that begin [with that letter] and . . . first Vowel. (Locke 317-318) This indexing system expanded the popularity of commonplace books in 18th-century England and was to greatly influence Emerson’s style of journal writing. After his death, Locke was acclaimed as the author of “the best compiling method” of the 18th-century (Dacome 607). His book was lavishly praised and widely distributed; an 18th-century English gentleman could easily purchase a Lockean commonplace book complete with a pre-stamped index in the front along with Locke’s instructions on how to proceed (Berland et al 27). Robison 24 Locke influenced commonplacing by providing an easy method of compiling that could be used for “business as well as study” (Dacome 619). His method found fertile ground in 18th-century England. Within this English intellectual environment, the mind was popularly esteemed, as we have seen, as a designation of intellectual, social, and moral accomplishment tested by one’s ability to participate in social functions while following and contributing to the proper topics of conversation (Dacome 624). Locke’s influence was felt even by Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries, including Emerson and Hawthorne, who valued commonplacing as a means of molding habits, developing thoughts, improving knowledge, and enhancing intellectual and social interaction, with the ultimate aim of encouraging participation in a “common culture” (Berland et al. 30). Like their British forebears and counterparts, these American writers became avid commonplacers. This ancient—and now modern— practice of honing one’s thoughts into a few words and making those words accessible for further development helped authors like Emerson and Hawthorne cultivate germinal ideas for what became their canonical published works and provides us today with an invaluable documentary record of how those works originated and evolved. Emerson and Hawthorne’s journals and commonplace books provide us with some of the most intimate glimpses we have of the two writers as people. Emerson in the 18th-Century Commonplace Book Tradition Emerson was situated within this commonplace tradition of the 18th century in many of the same ways that those already mentioned were, albeit sometimes with a distinctly Emersonian spin— that it was often used just as regularly for separation from society as for entry into it, and its organization and keeping process was strictly his own. In January of 1820, when he was a sixteen-year-old student at Harvard, Emerson made his first journal entry, in which he set forth Robison 25 the purposes of his “Common Place book,” purposes that are clearly Lockean and that he was to sustain for the rest of his life. Mixing with the thousand pursuits & passions & objects of the world as personified by Imagination is profitable & entertaining. These pages are intended at this their commencement to contain a record of new thoughts (when they occur); for a receptacle of all old ideas that partial but peculiar peepings at antiquity can furnish or furbish; for tablet to save the wear & tear of weak Memory & in short for all the various purposes & utility real or imaginary which are usually comprehended under the comprehensive title Common Place book. (Emerson Selected Journals 1:1) Like Erasmus and Locke, Emerson undertook commonplacing as an aid to memory and “to attain a fertile mode of expression” (Dacome 615). However, he uses it for much more than that, even from the beginning in this passage. Lawrence Rosenwald, Emerson scholar and author of Emerson and the Art of the Diary, says the “principal function” of Emerson’s journals “is to register fine thoughts” (92). The compiling of “fine thoughts” was a practice that Emerson also recommended to others. In First We Read, Then We Write, Emerson biographer Robert Richardson discusses Emerson’s encouragements and expectations in regard to journal use. Emerson says, “Keep a journal . . . for the habit of rendering account to yourself of yourself in some vigorous manner and at more certain intervals than mere conversation” (Richardson “First We Read” 19). Emerson recommended the journaling habit to his young friend, Henry David Thoreau, saying, "Do you keep a journal?" which led to Thoreau’s immediate keeping of his own journal which would prove an important factor in his work for the rest of his life (Buell 121). Emerson’s most characteristic use of his journals and commonplace books comes in recording, developing, and Robison 26 furthering ideas, bettering himself, personally and professionally. With “scrupulous honesty,” he regarded these writings and recordings as incredibly diverse, ranging from big ideas, to discussions on set societal topics, to what he himself calls “confessions” and “childish sentiment” (Porte vi). This, too, can be seen to situate Emerson in the tradition of the 18th century commonplace book. The common encouragement of the 18th century, as voiced by Isaac Watts, author of the well-known work Logick: Or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (1725), supports the Lockean and eventually Emersonian method by saying, “[set] down Things as they occur” (117). This allowed for, as in Emerson’s case, some very randomly assorted thoughts and information within commonplace users’ books. In his earliest commonplace books and journals, Emerson relies heavily on the influence of Locke (Rosenwald 30), both in method (indexing) and purpose (as a means of self-improvement). The influence of his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, is also evident. The chronology and daily note-taking of Mary Moody Emerson in her own journal, influenced Emerson and is seen as a principal factor in his own journaling. This combination of techniques links the Lockean tradition of the 18th-century as well as Emerson’s development of his own tradition, one of pursuing his own thoughts and systems by blurring the lines (Rosenwald 36). Emerson successfully combined the economy, ease, and compiling of the Lockean method with the chronological entry system used by Mary Moody Emerson (Rosenwald 54), although at times, it left his journal practices looking disheveled (Rosenwald 85-8), though notably, Emersonian. Emerson’s Practices of Journal Writing These apparently disorderly practices seem to have served Emerson well. Throughout his life, he kept multiple commonplace books, journals, and other collections of private writing Robison 27 simultaneously, moving fluidly among them (Rosenwald 85). His diverse books of notes and his personal methods of collecting allowed him to use his journals in nearly every aspect of his life. In Emerson’s early journaling, we see him using his journals as a tool for both writing and thinking. Youthful ego and insecurity appear in equal measures, as Emerson embarks on a lifelong habit of soul-searching in his journals (Porte 2). The young Emerson sets down his hopes, aspirations and goals both as a writer and thinker (Porte 46). He indulges quite often in self-reproach and self-deprecation and questions the efficacy of his Christian faith. In a journal entry from April 1824, he writes “I have set down very little which can gratify my vanity. . . every comparison of myself with my mates . . . has convinced me that that there exists a signal defect of character which neutralizes in great part the just influence my talents ought to have” (Selected Journals 1:109). He continues this uncertainty in an entry from January of 1825 “[My] ancestors . . . have been clergymen for many generations & the piety of all & the eloquence of many is yet praised in the Churches. But the dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living” (Emerson Selected Journals 1:121). This noted diversity of his journals is intertwined with some more common and continuous characteristics and habits. They are not as exclusively private and soul-revealing as the journals of some other writers, but rather, as Lawrence Rosenwald puts it, in the case of Emerson, it is “a text for sharing, not for selling” (9, 82). Nor are the journals as spontaneous as one might suppose. In fact, Emerson often painstakingly edited and rewrote journal entries; his European travel journals are a prime example (Rosenwald 21). Emerson and other transcendentalists often shared and exchanged commonplace books and journals as a type of surrogate conversation among friends (Rosenwald 77). For example, Emerson frequently exchanged journals with his aunt Mary Moody Emerson and his Concord neighbor and friend, Robison 28 Bronson Alcott, as well as later with Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. These journalistic tête-à-têtes further demonstrate Emerson’s view of his journals as less of a confessional, and more of a “lyceum among friends” (Rosenwald 83, 97). Besides being a place for friends to meet metaphorically in thought and conversation, Emerson used his notebooks as his 18th-century forebears did: as a place to gather quotes and other bits of information from others that fascinated, confused, or enlightened him. Rosenwald has compared many parts of Emerson’s journals to “an aphorism book,” a repository for brief evocative sentences (Rosenwald 109). The entries, being a collection of often concise “utterances,” leave much to the reader to interpret and can be treated separately from the text that surrounds them. Rosenwald says of Emerson's aphorisms: “the isolated utterance has the excellence of suggestiveness” (117). This “suggestiveness” of Emerson’s aphorisms evokes free thought in his readers and points to an important aspect in the multi-faceted nature of Emerson’s journals as a specimen not only for the writer, but for unnamed readers as well. As he matures, Emerson begins to imagine an increasingly public character for his writing, and he hones his aphoristic style to provoke his own thoughts as well as those of readers. The character of his journals as an “aphorism book” further underscores their role in promoting “friendship and conversation,” in conformity with his belief that “friendship is affinity of thought” (Rosenwald 128-29). Here again, the professional and personal functions of Emerson’s journals blend and converge. To his own regret, Emerson's journal writing tapered off towards the end of his life (Porte 471). Though his entries “halted sadly,” it seemed to Emerson’s friend, William Henry Channing, that “. . . his thoughts were as clear and swift as ever” (Rusk 491). Emerson’s journal writing declined precipitously after his house burned down in 1872, although Joel Porte claims Robison 29 that Emerson himself knew that his influential work was finished by as early as the 1860s (533, 532). Emerson’s Personal and Professional Uses for his Journals Emerson’s prolific journal writing during his peak years served him both professionally and personally, as (in Rosenwald’s words) “Writing for use [seemed] to alternate with writing for pleasure” (37). However, it would be too simplistic to limit the “writing for use” to only his professional writing, and his “writing for pleasure” to his personal writing. During most of Emerson’s active life as a writer, the two types of writing, for practicality and for pleasure, overlapped and blended. After Emerson’s return from his first European travels in 1833 he began using his journals as proving grounds for his lectures. At this time he identified journaling as his “first vocation,” (Rosenwald 53); and in the opening entry of an 1833 journal he writes “This Book is my Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition” (Selected Journals 1:293). This declaration underlies Emerson's maturing realization of his literary vocation and his commitment to collecting and developing the intellectual “savings” in his journals (Rosenwald 54). From 1833 onward, Emerson regularly mined his journals, old and new, for ideas to develop, reflect upon, and combine and expand into publishable lectures and essays. Emerson himself described this process of mining in his journals for the publishable material in a comment about his 1841 Essays: In a fortnight or three weeks my little raft [the 1841 Essays] will be afloat. Expect Robison 30 nothing more of my powers of construction, — no shipbuilding, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together . . . I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement [of the Essays] loiters long. (qtd. in Rosenwald 72) Many of Emerson’s ideas, such as his belief in the need for a new American literature distinct from that of Europe, marinated in his journals long before they emerged in his professional work. His denouncement of slavery also, was a main and most important topic of his journals between 1857 and 1865, when he wrote and eventually spoke out publicly in support of abolition (Porte 471-72). While these ideas were important to him privately, they also make clear his professional positions as a public intellectual. As Emerson himself noted, to stay relevant, a lecturer must both “respect and represent his Age or risk losing an audience” (Porte 362). Emerson’s binocular focus on his professional and personal life assured that he published ideas that may otherwise have remained private and may never have contributed to his profession and his legacy. Though it is plain to see the development and evolution of ideas from journal entry, to expansion, to lecture and essay, other professional habits were first developed within Emerson's private writings as well. It is in his journals that Emerson first articulates the idea of “non-conformity” which became central to his personal and public persona. In an 1834 entry he writes: “Henceforth I design not to utter any speech, poem, or book that is not entirely & peculiarly my work” (qtd. in Porte 91). In this statement, Emerson articulates his resolve to develop a distinctive literary voice, a voice that he honed and refined through the constant practice of journal writing (Porte 212). Robison 31 Emerson’s journals played an incomparable role in his professional literary output. This relationship between the journals and the professional lectures is a more fluid relationship than we might suppose. Despite the presumed chronology of an idea going from journal to lecture, there are instances in which an idea first appears in a lecture, and only later makes its way into the journals (Rosenwald 66). Rosenwald goes so far as to claim that the journal is Emerson’s “authentic work and greatest formal achievement,” and that Emerson is a better journal writer than essayist (62). Once again, we see Emerson blurring the lines between professional and personal. The “backwards” or reverse movement, in which ideas first appear in lectures and then are incorporated into the journals, show that Emerson viewed his journals as more than a means to a professional end; they were also a means of deepening and advancing his thinking in the personal sphere. Thus Emerson valued his journals as a locus for development, both personally and professionally. The personal functions of Emerson’s journal cannot be overstated. Many entries are single chronological records of daily life and events. This is especially noticeable in his travel books where he records his inner reflections alongside observations of outside events and places. In these notations, inner reflection— or the building of a distinct personal identity— offsets the potentially overwhelming of self by famous places and landmarks (Rosenwald 51). Thus in his first European travel journal, dated 1832, where Emerson famously exclaims “Who cares?” concerning the ancient aura of the city of Naples, he admires what he sees but refuses to be “imposed upon” by its historical pomp and grandeur (Porte 88). He chooses to focus on his own “American” identity and his own budding thoughts in the midst of so many architectural and artistic masterpieces, instead of the vast and daunting monuments surrounding him. In entries Robison 32 like these, Emerson seems to have written for the purpose of building a personal identity, suggesting that he both needed and enjoyed this aspect of his journal experience. In his journals, Emerson could express his thoughts and feelings freely and honestly, in ways he could not always do in the public sphere. His journals afforded a safe and private venue for him to react bluntly and genuinely to the events of the day, both personal and public. Examples of this are seen throughout the journals, including how, by taking time to write, he rebels against what he sees as the increasing hustle and bustle of American life (Rosenwald 89); how he writes about the death of his son and namesake, Waldo (Porte 274); and how he expresses his outrage at the plight of African-American slaves and the slow progress of abolition (Porte 472). Indeed, many of Emerson’s journal entries are directed at mainly personal ends, his life, experiences, and friendships, rather than serving as notes towards the production of lectures or essays. This is most poignantly seen in his entries during the years following the death of his young son.4 The journal entries for these years, ranging from 1842 to 1846, lack any demonstrable direction, differing from the majority of the rest of the journals (Porte 274), clearly mirroring the state of his life and mind at the time. As much as the topics and tones of the journal entries vary, one quality is consistent throughout: namely that Emerson is entire, uncompromised, and completely sincere and direct in his expression. In his journals, Emerson labored to perfect his identity as a man true to his own thought-in-the-moment, whatever that particular thought might be (Rosenwald 106). He attached an almost spiritual significance to his journals, writing: Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are to him burning and fragrant; he reads them on his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them 4 For such an example, see Emerson’s Selected Journals 2:65-8. Robison 33 with his tears; they are sacred; too good for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. (Emerson Selected Journals 2:52) The journal, for Emerson, is a trusted friend; it is a reliable source to practice and petition, to flourish and to feel. In short, both as a professional and as a personal space, the journal had practical uses, necessities, and pleasures. Hawthorne and the 18th-Century Commonplace Tradition Nathaniel Hawthorne also famously kept a commonplace book along with journals, ledgers, and family and personal notebooks. Scholars generally describe his collective personal writings as his “notebooks.” In his notebooks he follows his 18th-century forebears much as Emerson did. However, the tone and style of Hawthorne’s notebooks differ significantly from Emerson’s. Living in an intellectual climate in which commonplace books were favored, Hawthorne was exposed early to the habit of the commonplace book and continued to write in a notebook for the majority of his literary career. Much like Emerson, Hawthorne was “at no time casual about his journalizing,” writes Claude Simpson in his Historical Commentary on Hawthorne’s The American Notebooks (681). Hawthorne’s earliest extant notebook begins in 1835, when he was in his early thirties. After his death, his widow, Sophia Hawthorne, observed that “If he journalized before 1835, he destroyed the books. Alas for it” (Simpson 683). Hawthorne follows practices that were typical of the commonplace tradition. Like Emerson, he takes abundant reading notes on a copious variety of topics, ranging from early organs and the theology of St. Augustine (Simpson 678) to the “evil in every human heart,” and the thought that to “look inward is to know Heaven” (Hawthorne, American Notebooks 16, 118). Hawthorne seems to have taken Erasmus’s advice to set down anything he deemed helpful or interesting for Robison 34 the present or for the future. Also included are germinal notes for stories. It is not uncommon to find an idea for a story that later appears in his published fiction (Simpson 678). In general, Hawthorne seems less concerned about the gentlemanly use of a commonplace book and more attentive to setting down and describing the interests of the moment, whether personal or professional. Like Emerson, Hawthorne often used his notebook as a quote book for writing down what he read and heard from others, consistent with the commonplace book ideal as a “place” for storing ideas to be shared with others. However, although he was capable of engaging in polite conversation, he dreaded society and avoided it as best he could, and therefore most likely did not use his notebook as a means of improving his conversation abilities. Rosenwald’s description of Emerson’s quote book as a collection of “unconsidered trifles” (125) applies equally well to Hawthorne and his habits of collecting quotations. Nothing seems to have escaped his almost preternatural attention to detail. As Henry James said, “he noticed everything” and “thought nothing too trivial to be suggested” (James 24). Scholars have differentiated Hawthorne’s notebooks on the basis of the physical places he lived. The American Notebooks of 1835-1853 cover his early literary career, his courtship and marriage to Sophia Peabody, and his periods of residence in Concord, Salem, and Western Massachusetts where he produced his first short story collections and three major novels— The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852). The English Notebooks of 1853-1858 include notes collected during his tenure as U.S. consul to Liverpool, England, an appointment secured through his friendship with the 14th President of the United States, Franklin Pierce. The third and final collection, The French and Italian Notebooks Robison 35 of 1858-1860 covers the period when Hawthorne and his family lived on the continent (Milder and Fuller 7, 12, 17). Collectively, the notebooks afford us a view of Hawthorne’s perspicacious thinking and creative processes. Though Hawthorne does not explicitly define the purposes of his notebooks to the extent Emerson does, he knew how to gather and mine his materials for personal and professional use (Porte ix). It is evident that the notebooks, their characteristics and habits, served Hawthorne in many ways. Hawthorne’s Practices of Notebook Writing Some basic features emerge from Hawthorne’s notebook-writing practices. Like Emerson’s, Hawthorne’s jottings were not merely composed and forgotten, but reread and often expanded in ways that left them “enriched” (Simpson 681). Like Emerson, Hawthorne also kept multiple commonplace books and notebooks going at the same time, although unlike Emerson, he also kept what he called his “wastebook” (a repository for disposable ideas) separate from his official “notebooks” (Rosenwald 85). Hawthorne’s notebook writing is in general more varied and irregular than Emerson’s with his productivity ebbing and flowing depending on the season and his personal mood (Milder and Fuller 12). His notebooks demonstrate fluctuating degrees of concentration. Only rarely did Hawthorne compose in his notebooks during the winter months, as these were the months when he felt most inspired to write the publishable work upon which his livelihood depended. Nearly two-thirds of all the dated entries in his notebooks were written between July and October (Simpson 681). These entries typically include travel notes, notes on family life, notes on experiences (including those at the utopian communal experiment, Brook Robison 36 Farm and his life at the Old Manse in Concord), country walks, descriptions of “striking characters,” and many other minute observations (Simpson 677). These experiences and observations are sometime humorous in tone (Simpson 697). In his foreword to Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa, a selection of entries from The American Notebooks, novelist Paul Auster characterizes the notebooks as “a humorous work by a deeply melancholy man” (xxix). During the time period included in Twenty Days, Hawthorne was alone with his five-year-old son, Julian, while his wife and daughters were temporarily away in Boston. Hawthorne refers to Julian whimsically as “the old gentleman” and to Julian’s pet rabbit, Little Bunny, as an “important. . . personage” (Hawthorne Twenty Days 3,7). Sometimes this humor transgresses the strict Victorian social codes to which Hawthorne adhered in both his published work and in his personal conduct. Hyatt Waggoner states in his introduction to Hawthorne’s Lost Notebook 1835-1841 that Hawthorne “felt no such constraint” in his notebooks as he did in society (25). This lack of constraint prompted his widow to edit the notebooks rather heavily before their posthumous publications. Sophia Hawthorne was thorough in her corrections; and it was not until the 20th century that an “authentic” edition of the notebooks, restoring Hawthorne’s original text, was published (Simpson vii). The “recovered” re-issue of these notebooks allows us to see more of the author’s personality, character, and habits, as well as the bluntness and candor that resisted societal constraints, similar to how Emerson appears in his journals. Hawthorne and Emerson alike used their informal writings to hone a distinctive voice. In contrast to the discursive and philosophical slant of the Emersonian voice, Hawthorne’s notebooks are more consistently focused on “the real world outside of himself” (Milder and Fuller 1). Thus, Hawthorne’s notebooks, especially his American Notebooks, abound with Robison 37 descriptions of people, places, and natural and human scenes (Milder and Fuller 1). Robert Milder and Randall Fuller observe that in his notebooks, Hawthorne “seems secular, tolerant, oriented to the present and immediate. . . rarely introspective” (2). His predominant mode is reflective. “To read Hawthorne in his notebooks is to reflect with him and on him” (Milder and Fuller 7). Hawthorne’s Personal and Professional Uses for his Notebooks While Hawthorne did draw on his notebooks for his published work, he made comparatively less use of his informal writings than did Emerson. Hawthorne expanded fewer than half of the germinal ideas in notebooks into publishable work (Simpson 679). When he did expand, however, the results were remarkable. Embedded in his notebooks are the germs of such well-known stories as “The Birthmark” (1843), “Egotism; or The Bosom Serpent” (1843), “Ethan Brand” (1852) and others, as well as preliminary notes for The Scarlet Letter (1850), The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun (1860). Though the notebooks do not record Hawthorne’s process, (Milder and Fuller 10), “Ethan Brand” affords a striking example of a story that evolved, almost verbatim, out of notebook entries. Much of the imagery and setting in “Ethan Brand” come directly from notes Hawthorne took of his travels to the Berkshires, including his note of seeing a lime kiln burning at night, a central theme in the story. These images were deftly transmitted from notebook to short story (Simpson 680). The descriptive detail manifest in Hawthorne’s published writings was exacting and rivaled by few authors in his time, tracing back, in part, to the practice of accurate description he undertook in his notebooks. As Bronson Alcott, Hawthorne’s next-door neighbor during his last years put it, “His facts are Robison 38 better than most historians, since he [deals] with life and living things as only poets can” (Milder and Fuller 17). As seen in “Ethan Brand” and elsewhere, notes Hawthorne recorded in his notebooks furnish inspiration for setting, imagery, and plot within his novels. This is especially evidenced in The Blithedale Romance, the novel inspired by his brief sojourn as a member of the Brook Farm community. His notebooks contain numerous entries, including transcripts of his letters to his fiancé, Sophia Peabody, which assisted in the conception of the novel, and provided passages of text that went directly into the novel (Simpson 680). Another example of the notebooks shaping and preceding published work is from the period of 1850-1852 when he lived in Lenox, Massachusetts, with his young family. Ideas collected during these years fueled his 1851 book for children, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (Simpson 680). These successful transfers of material from notebook to published work were offset by various failures. A notable example of this type of failure is The English Notebooks which, although they are longer than The American Notebooks, bore scant fruit in his published writings. For whatever reason, he “found it impossible to incorporate into fiction the English experience he so meticulously recorded in his journals” (Milder and Fuller 15). As mentioned earlier, Hawthorne’s writing life tended to be divided between notebook writing in the summers and professional writing in the winters, and his writing in general seemed to fluctuate along with the state of his personal life (Milder and Fuller 8). Notebook production flourished during periods of personal and domestic happiness and stability. For example, during his first sojourn in Concord as a newly married man and during his family residence in Lenox, he experienced prolific notebook writing and the publications of The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851). His time in Concord, at the Old Manse, was a time of happiness Robison 39 and comfort. “Concord was . . . provincial and familiar, and the Old Manse. . . became a haven of stability that allowed Hawthorne to test the winds of change without feeling himself blown about by them” (Milder and Fuller 17). In this same vein, Paul Auster describes Hawthorne’s time in Lenox, Massachusetts “as one of the happiest periods of his life,” (xvii). By contrast, during the time he was employed in the Salem Custom House, where he was professionally unhappy and harried, his notebook writing fell off sharply. (Milder and Fuller 11). Hawthorne’s notebooks, like Emerson’s, are a kind of barometer of the high and low periods of his personal life. While Hawthorne’s notebooks mirror the rhythms of his own life, they also register instances of pleasure in the moment itself. Numerous entries seem to have been written entirely for his own record and enjoyment. Thus Paul Auster aptly calls Hawthorne “the historian of everyday life,” who chronicles experiences and events for no apparent purpose other than personal fulfillment (x). Like Emerson, Hawthorne sometimes writes in a diaristic form as if eager not to omit the slightest details. No event is too small for him to note (Simpson 680). In Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa, he records the daily and hourly adventures and misadventures during the twenty days he spent alone with his son. These entries function both as diaries and as pseudo-letters, as Hawthorne clearly intended them to be read and enjoyed by his family upon their return. Not surprisingly, as she edited her husband’s notebooks after his death, Sophia Hawthorne expressed concern that the notebooks, if published, would be too personally revealing for her husband’s liking, and that they would remove “the veil he drew around him, [that] no one should lift” (Simpson 682). Scholars identify many instances where Hawthorne seems to have written with the assumption that persons outside his immediate family circle would read his notebooks. For Robison 40 instance, he refers to individual people by first and last names, something deemed unnecessary when writing exclusively for close family and friends (Valenti 119). While this observation casts doubt on the perception that Hawthorne never intended anyone outside of his family to read his notebooks, it does not change the fact that despite precision and tone, Hawthorne used his notebooks in a personally fulfilling, if indefinable, way. However Hawthorne might feel about the publication of his notebooks were he still alive, they undeniably include some instances of personal notes that could have proved unseemly when made public. Hawthorne often uses his notebooks to record pent-up anxieties and frustrations, and makes occasional indelicate observations and opinions. For instance, some pejorative remarks he wrote in his English Notebooks concerning the appearance and manners of English women incurred the wrath of the English magazine, Athenaeum, after his death (Milder and Fuller 17). In the privacy of his notebook, Hawthorne permitted himself to write freely, perhaps too freely, without concern for politeness or social responsibility. Outbursts are not uncommon, as in this protest he wrote about the weather in Lenox: “This is a horrible, most hor-ri-ble climate; one knows not, for ten minutes together, whether he is too cool or too warm . . . I detest it! I detest it!! I de-test it!! I hate Berkshire with my whole soul, and would joyfully see its mountains laid flat” (8). This outburst seems to have served the purpose of relieving frustration, because in the next paragraph Hawthorne is back to describing the antics of his son, Julian. Some outbursts, in contrast, are joyful and express happiness and gratitude. Several days after haranguing about the climate, Hawthorne writes of Julian, “Let me say outright, for once, that he is a lovely little boy, and worthy of all the love I am capable of giving him. Thank God. God bless him!” (54). Robison 41 Benefits of the Journal and the Notebook for Emerson, Hawthorne, and Their Readers The benefits we receive as readers of Emerson’s and Hawthorne's journals are as difficult to measure as the benefits they provided their authors. We can only imagine what we might have lost if the two writers had not kept commonplace books. Perhaps the “American Scholar” would have never been. Perhaps The Blithedale Romance would have been forever lost. Informal and loosely structured as they are, the journals and notebooks add significantly to our understanding of their authors as both professional writers and as human beings. In addition, the journals and notebooks of Emerson and Hawthorne serve to enhance our appreciation of the journal as an artform. Lawrence Rosenwald contends that Emerson’s journals are his “authentic work and greatest formal achievement” (xii), implicitly ranking them above his more famous and formal essays; and Hyatt Waggoner sees the character of Hawthorne as the “artist” to be most prominent in his notebooks (27). Both writers worked consciously at their craft of informal writing, while bestowing upon us words and works that are as enduring, interesting, and alive as their “formal writings.” More so than public writings, personal writings reveal the “self” of the author. These private writings provide a space for what Joel Porte calls the “steady and candid recording of thoughts and feelings and fantasies without inhibition or reserve” (viii). Within this space, which the author can keep private as desired, the conventional barriers that generally conceal certain aspects of an author’s life are removed. Idiosyncrasies otherwise hidden are revealed. Emerson appropriately declares that journals are creations of an author’s innate character and representative of the “natural author” (qtd in Rosenwald 105). In a variety of ways, Emerson’s and Hawthorne’s journals are as “useful” to us as they were to their creators. As records of ideas and thought-development, as chronicles of experience, Robison 42 as works intrinsically artistic in their own right, and as revelations of authorial individuality, they add immeasurably to our understanding of these two classic American writers. Robison 43 Chapter 3: “The Surprising Legacy of Realist Pessimism and Optimism Intertwined in Emerson’s Journals and Hawthorne’s Notebooks On September 27, 1842, Ralph Waldo Emerson records what has now become a well-known excursion to the Shaker community in Harvard, Massachusetts with his friend and neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Emerson chronicles the experience and frames it as mutually engaging, stating: Our walk had no incidents. It needed none, for we were in excellent spirits, had much conversation, for we were both old collectors who had never had opportunity before to show each other our cabinets, so that we could have filled with matter much longer days (Selected Journals 2:127-8).5 Indeed, Emerson and Hawthorne were both “collectors”— of thoughts, theories, observations, experiences. The “collection” of each author played an important role in the development of the person behind the persona. Without these collections, we would lose much of our understanding of the human element that makes these two authors the multi-dimensional human beings they were in their own lifetimes and continue to be in our own. Emerson’s journals and Hawthorne’s notebooks now serve as the “collection” that Emerson describes. As discussed in Chapter 2, these personal writings not only contained ideas that would feed into the published works of each author, but also serve to enhance our understanding of the art of journal writing to evoke and elicit those ideas. As a means of revelation and development of self, the journals and notebooks perhaps most importantly provide a means by which we acquire a more human, many-sided understanding of the authors as living people, like ourselves. 5 For Emerson’s full account see his Selected Journals 2:127-31. Robison 44 Both authors are made more human by considering the many instances in their journals and notebooks that go against each of their popularly held personas. By looking for experiences of pessimism, doubt, and inconsistency, we can ground Emerson’s sometimes lofty ideals, making him a real person like ourselves with ordinary experiences, circumstances, and reflections, rather than merely a rather remote philosopher. In the same way, it is when we consider instances of optimism and hope in the notebooks of Hawthorne that we see his humanity, one that is largely lost in his public persona and his published works. The many instances of playfulness, cheerfulness, and grateful contentedness captured by Hawthorne’s recording of quotidian events in his notebooks, gives him a degree of humanity that, like Emerson’s, tends to be obscured by his canonical fame. It is these ordinary passages that bring full and honest life into the character of each man through the contradictory, joyous, and struggle-laden men that they reveal. It is this inner human contradiction between each man’s philosophies and daily existence which makes both Emerson and Hawthorne more appealing, more interesting, and more complex than their often flat, literary characters allow. In this way, one of the biggest benefits of writers’ journals and notebooks is that they enable us to know these otherwise distant authors in a personal way. The less publicized, more spontaneous aspects of their personalities are discovered when we look past the canon and into the private writings contained within Emerson’s journals and Hawthorne’s notebooks. The Realist Perspective of Pessimism and Doubt in Emerson As the leading philosopher of the American Renaissance, Ralph Waldo Emerson retains his commanding presence in American literature, philosophy, spirituality, and thought. The most readily identified persona of Emerson is that of lecturer, author, and philosopher of optimism and Robison 45 hope. Such an image suggests in Emerson a ceaseless finding of the good, the valuable, and the praiseworthy in humankind and the human experience. Emerson’s friend and neighbor Bronson Alcott said of him, “Emerson idealizes all things. This idealized picture is the true and real one to him; all else is nought” (1). This image of Emerson as a rosy optimist, though in some ways accurate, does the real Emerson a disservice. Emerson suggests a different view of himself in his journal: “I, who seek to be a realist, . . . deny and put off everything that I do not heartily accept” (Selected Journals 1: 380). Emerson’s harder edged realism is often overlooked, despite his own insistence on it. Our distorted perception of Emerson makes him seem simpler and less human than he was. Emerson was no stranger to the darker aspects of life. By looking into his journals, we can find an author who entertained pessimistic and doubtful thoughts towards himself and the past, present, and future. The journals further complicate Emerson’s character by revealing inconsistencies between his philosophies and everyday existence. Finally, the journals demonstrate Emerson’s sometimes pessimistic reaction to grief. Emerson’s common humanity is best revealed in his own self-confessed complexity of character seen through less-studied journal entries which demonstrate a realist pessimism alongside the idealistic optimism for which he is known. We initially notice such instances of pessimism and doubt in Emerson’s early journal writing. Though not unusual for a young person ardently examining world and self, these instances of periodic pessimism and doubt persist for the rest of Emerson's life. These types of entries demonstrate Emerson not as a flat figure who could, without hesitation, find the good in himself and the world despite varying positive and negative situations and circumstances, but as a realist wrestling with the highs and lows of life, as well as the everyday experience in between. The secret to Emerson’s continuing tradition is his ability to fuse “human” and philosopher, and Robison 46 his ability to understand, excite, and empathize with those truly human traits of hope and hardship that make up the human experience across centuries. Emerson’s early journals portray a man who is not merely optimistic but notably often pensively pessimistic and self-scrutinizing, and even self-doubting. One such example comes early on in his journal, in an entry dated May 13, 1822, when he was nineteen years old. “Has any other educated person lived so many years and lost so many days? . . . But mine approaching maturity is attended with a goading sense of emptiness and wasted capacity” (Selected Journals 1:44). The unmistakably human traits of regret, frustration, and insecurity about self and the future are apparent in Emerson’s very real in-the-moment self-doubt: a far cry from the fortress of self-trust we typically assign to him. Emerson’s “goading” pessimism towards the path his young life is taking reminds us that all people, even those elevated by their actions, are very much like ourselves. Emerson’s honesty in his own imperfect human thoughts allows us to better connect with him. Seeing this type of pessimism in one of the most notedly “optimistic” thinkers in American history makes us not only reconsider our perspective of the man, but begin to trust and empathize with him as a person in whom hope and doubt are intertwined, with each contributing its own elements to the development of his character. Emerson’s recurring instances of pessimistic self-doubt during this early self-appraisal reflect the pendular course of development of all human thought. On October 25, 1820, Emerson writes, “I find myself often idle, vagrant, stupid and hollow. . . I am indolent and shall be insignificant!” (Selected Journals 1:20). And again, on April 18, 1824, at age twenty, he writes, “I cannot dissemble that my abilities are below my ambition. . . [I feel] an inability to lead and an unwillingness to follow the current conversation, which contrive to make me second with all those among whom chiefly I wish to be first” (Emerson Selected Journals 1:109). These two Robison 47 passages show Emerson not as a tiresome expositor of positivity, but as an ordinary self-doubting and denouncing human unsure of his own abilities. However, as readers a century and a half later, we note in this passage one trait Emerson suggests negatively in himself— the “unwillingness to follow”— to be precisely that which leads to his distinctive teachings and lasting influence. His overwhelmingly identifiable mantras of demanding “an original relation with the universe” (“Nature” 7), his rally call to “[s]peak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense,” and to “[i]nsist on yourself” (“Self-Reliance” 259, 278), were perhaps realized through his sense of failure in being “second with those among whom chiefly [he] wish[ed] to be first.” Emerson’s self-recrimination ironically seems to contribute to his development into the champion of original thought and to feed his lifelong conviction that imitation is futile; and that it is self-delusionary to be first with anyone but oneself. Emerson’s early pessimism extends beyond himself and his personal development. Pessimism towards the past, present, and future can be seen in the following entry written at age twenty-three: “Health, action, happiness. How they ebb from me!” (Emerson The Heart of Emerson’s Journals 33). This entry is a reaction to personal medical issues involving his eyesight, the apparent flare up of lung disease, and his soul’s division between his ancestral priestly heritage and his inner calling to follow an as-yet undetermined vocation. Joel Porte describes this “ebb” of “health, action, [and] happiness” as Emerson “chafing under the weight of his ministerial ancestry,” and notes that “docilely following in his father’s footsteps was a source of considerable conflict” (51). Emerson’s restless uncertainty about the future, grounded in his own doubt about the past and present demonstrate that he was not unaffected by the trivialities of daily existence and circumstance, as he sometimes seems to have been in his Robison 48 published work. Rather, he recorded and obsessed about a variety of personal irritations and calamities that had a formative impact on his life. The complexities of Emerson as a person demonstrated through instances of pessimism continue to reveal themselves as Emerson forms his philosophies on idealistic thoughts while at times, struggling to attain them himself. Emerson’s struggle to maintain his philosophies amid the vagaries of experience shows the nature of philosophy as an ideal we strive to live by, not one that we succeed in without fail. Philosophy may define our thoughts and goals, but it cannot define all our daily actions and feelings. If we expect perfection, we lose humanity. This inconsistency in Emerson is refreshing because it is real. Emersonian philosophies of idealistic self-trust and nonconformity are indeed his direction in life, yet, they are not always manifest in his journals. The reality of human inconsistency is acknowledged by Emerson in his own contradictory nature in certain beliefs and actions. “Every man is bipolar, never a circle somewhere therefore in each one of never so many million you shall find the contrariety, inconsistency of his nature,” he writes (Selected Journals 1:351). He also writes in his journal on May 14, 1835, “When I write a book on spiritual things I think I will advertise the reader that I am a very wicked man, & that consistency is nowise to be expected of me” (Selected Journals 1:411). Though aware of the personal contradiction, Emerson continues throughout his life to write honestly what he feels and thinks, being faithful even to pessimism and other moods that undercut his optimistic mantra. Examples of this type of inconsistency are found in his description of often cold relationships with friends, contemporaries, and even his own family. As a part of his optimism, Emerson believed in the divinity of the individual, freedom for all, as seen in his stolid support of abolition, and the interconnectivity of human beings across Robison 49 time and place as evidenced in his idea of “the Over-Soul.”6 Yet despite these idealistic philosophies, Emerson often comments on his ambivalence towards people or society in his journal. He repeatedly admits to a lack of warm affection for others. “I have not the kind affections of a pigeon. Ungenerous and selfish, cautious and cold” (Selected Journals 1:45). Confessions of personal “coldness” recur regularly. He continues on March 21, 1824, “What is called a warm heart, I have not” (Selected Journals 1:111). And on September 28, 1826, he says, “I was born cold. My bodily habit is cold. I shiver in and out; don’t heat to good purposes called enthusiasm a quarter so quick and kindly as my neighbors” (The Heart of Emerson’s Journals 33). Such honest self-examination complicates our sense of Emerson as a thinker and philosopher, creating a disconnect between these entries and the main principles he develops in his public philosophy. Emerson’s philosophies suggest a naturally warm kinship and affection towards his fellow human, but Emerson’s journals often demonstrate the opposite throughout his life. This “lack of warm affections” by Emerson is something that stretches beyond that of the general populace, to include intimate personal and professional relationships, as well. Of these relationships, Emerson says, “I have so little vital force that I could not stand the dissipation of a flowing and friendly life” (The Heart of Emerson’s Journals 182). In this passage, Emerson suggests that camaraderie can be burdensome, draining away “vital force[s]” that could be better used elsewhere. The value of the ability to draw life, energy, and exuberance from others is not lost on Emerson, however, despite the fact that he feels he does not possess it. In 1838, he writes, 6 “The Over-Soul” is the ninth essay in Emerson’s Essays: First Series originally published in 1841. It discusses the interconnectedness of all things, suggesting each person has the ability to communicate with this innate force (the Over-Soul) residing within humankind and nature without the assistance of any outside source. In this essay, Emerson says, “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. . .. the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one” (386). Robison 50 Why was I not made like all these beatified mates of mine, superficially generous and noble, as well as internally so? They never needed to shrink at any remembrance; —and I at so many sad passages that look to me now as if I have been blind and mad. Well, O God, I will try and learn from this sad memory to be brave and circumspect and true henceforth and weave now a web that will not shrink. This is a thorn in the flesh. (Selected Journals 1:579) This sincere expression of regret for his natural inclinations away from “generous and noble” relationships with those around him breathes life into an otherwise stuffy image of a man comprised only of positivity. His self-acknowledged lack of affection is a reminder that Emerson could see that his personal experiences were in many ways at odds with his public philosophy. It may even be that these negative human experiences served, ironically, to reinforce his commitment to his philosophy, in compensation for his inner defects. Inconsistencies between Emerson’s philosophy and daily life, between his public ideals and his private feelings, extend even to the people most dear to him. He says, “Even for those whom I really love I have not animal spirits” (Selected Journals 2:268). It seems that a healthy enthusiasm is something that Emerson feels he has to work himself up for, even in the places where it would seem to come naturally. This feeling is exaggerated in other journal entries when he expresses blunt, even harsh, sentiments concerning marriage and family: “I think the writer ought not be married, ought not have a family,” he writes in 1841 (Selected Journals 1:770); and he says in 1866, “My idea of a home is a house in which each member of the family can on the instant kindle a fire in his or her private room. Otherwise their society is compulsory and wasteful to the individual” (Emerson The Heart of Emerson’s Journals 318). Though he speaks to the inescapable universal connection among humans, including those closest to him, Emerson Robison 51 often struggles to personally find such a connection fulfilling and useful, especially in comparison to the relationship with oneself. Alcott said of Emerson and his relationships with mankind, “He holds men and things at a distance; pleases himself with using them for this own benefit, and as a means of gathering material for his work” (1). Emerson’s contradictory view of humankind is depicted further by the way he vehemently guards and values his own solitude. He held no secrets regarding his intense need for solitude, often stating his dislike of people and their company. Emerson’s desire and devotion to solitude as an escape from humanity, helped confirm him in his lifelong ideal of “self-reliance.” Yet it also drove him away from his professed belief in the interconnectedness of all human-beings. He purposefully and unabashedly removed himself from the presence of others to pursue his individuality and adhere to his own thoughts. Emerson’s perspective of solitude highlights the opposition within himself. He asserts the collective identity or “oneness” of all people, while he steadfastly believes in the innate need of the individual soul to be in a state of independence from others. Emerson’s perennial delight in solitude is intensified by his unfavorable opinion of society. “I feel a joy in solitude that the merriment of vulgar society can never communicate” (Selected Journals 1:145). Emerson often felt “ill at ease among men” (Selected Journals 1:110), and writes humorously, and in multiple entries throughout his life, of his dislike of visitors. On one occasion, he remarks: “. . . when surprised by company. . . my heart sinks. . . and I think I will run for Acton woods, and live with the squirrels henceforward” (Selected Journals 1:682). He even asserts that “society seems noxious” (Selected Journals 1:444), and confesses to an “emptiness, restlessness and a sort of hatred of the human race” (Selected Journals 2:115). These entries, so at odds with his belief that “[t]he highest revelation is that God is in every man” Robison 52 (Emerson Selected Journals 1:213), illustrate Emerson’s esteem of solitude over society and his deliberate need to separate himself from other “infinite” individuals. While consistent with his ideal of self-trust, this division of solitude and society can be seen to undercut his belief of a universal human connection. Though Emerson prizes solitude and finds society irksome, he realizes there are disadvantages to complete solitude and expresses some misgivings about it. Thus, in 1837 he writes: “I refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if in view of some better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when?” This regret is quickly followed by Emerson’s realistic acceptance of who he is, despite idealistic thoughts he and others may have about the human community. He concludes this same: “I was made a hermit, and am content with my lot” (Selected Journals 1:522). Elsewhere in his journals Emerson refines his opinion of solitude and society and the relationship between the two: “But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude” (Selected Journals 1:375). He acknowledges uses for both solitude and society, and the need, the advantages and disadvantages of each. Yet, in true Emersonian fashion, he remains honest to his first thoughts by declaring, repeatedly, his individual personal need for solitude, and honors those thoughts and feelings by acting upon them regardless of the ideals, expectations, and relationships of those around him. As seen in passages like these, Emerson often sacrificed warmth and genuine camaraderie towards humanity, community, and family in the interest of his own individual development. In 1843, he writes: “Persons are fine things, but they cost so much! for thee I must pay me” (Selected Journals 2:166). Emerson’s first focus was on self-development, at nearly all costs. However, this does not mean that he did not acknowledge the worth of relationships, even Robison 53 while he struggled with his personal valuing of them. Concerning this “contrariety and inconsistency” between Emerson's personal actions and thoughts and his philosophical ones, one more point must be considered. Emerson maintained that human beings could and would continue to perfect themselves if they had the will to do so. A conversation between John Greenleaf Whittier and Emerson recorded by Mary B. Clafin demonstrates this. “Mr. Emerson remarked that the world had not seen the highest development of manhood. ‘Does thee think so?’ said Mr. Whittier. ‘I suppose thee would admit that Jesus Christ is the highest development our world has seen?’ ‘Yes, yes; but not the highest it will see’” (Bosco and Myerson xxiv). While Emerson recognized himself to be a part of the contradictory and inconsistent human race, he also recognized his own ability to improve and even perfect himself. In this way, he is able to be both contradictory as well as follow his own philosophies and principles. Perhaps one of the most genuine ways that Emerson demonstrates his humanity is in his pessimistic reaction to grief, most notably after the death of his five-year-old son, Waldo, in 1842. His expression of grief and its effects on the human intellect and soul remind us of not only of his human experiences, but our own as well. The days and months following his young son’s death were among the darkest periods of Emerson’s life. Journal entries from this period, express sorrow, bitterness, and hopelessness. However, we are also given a glimpse into how Emerson was able to offset emotions by addressing and representing them objectively in his journal. Sorrow is the initial and enduring reaction experienced and expressed by Emerson following Waldo’s death. In a journal entry dated January 30, 1842, two days after Waldo’s death, Emerson writes: “Sorrow makes us all children again, —destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing” (Selected Journals 2:67). He reflects on the fact that sorrow Robison 54 acts indiscriminately upon its victims; the most foolish and “the wisest” alike are at its mercy. A change in himself evoked by sorrow is something that Emerson notices in his own experience, and he faithfully and honestly records that change. He does not avoid its existence, but records it head-on. This is evidenced in his April 14, 1842 journal entry where he writes “If I should write an honest diary, what should I say? Alas that life has halfness, shallowness” (Selected Journals 1:782). Along with this pessimistic view of sorrow creating a life of “halfness, shallowness,” Emerson candidly records his bitterness. “I comprehend nothing of this fact [Waldo’s death] but its bitterness. Explanation I have none, consolation none that rises out of the fact itself; only diversion; only oblivion of this, and pursuit of new objects” (Selected Journals 2:88). These few sentences indicate that Emerson was perhaps, for a moment, looking for something outside of the bitterness, a larger meaning, connection, or lesson. While a pursuit of new objects, distraction, or diversion is a very human reaction to a painful situation that one cannot control, Emerson adjoins it to one of his cornerstone teachings stated in the preface to “Nature:” “The sun shines to- day also. . . there are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship” (7). Emerson not only follows his own philosophies in focusing or distracting himself from the present misery, but also in his ability, in the hardest of times, to write down the most bitter of thoughts, and to reflect on them. Emerson’s almost innate ability to look on each day as its own place and time to be defined by only the individual is challenged, but far from defeated, by his son’s death. His steady determination always to look forward may have grown out of his despair in looking back and realizing that there is nothing there that one can build upon. This is the self-proclaimed realistic Emerson that emerges from his pessimistic journal entries. In 1842, Emerson writes: “. . . an eye Robison 55 fastened on the past unsuns nature, bereaves me of hope, and ruins me with a squalid indigence which nothing but death can adequately symbolize” (The Heart of Emerson’s Journals 178). While a far cry from his earlier optimistically stated “the sun shines to-day also,” there is a noticeable connection between the two passages and sentiments. The inclination to continually move forward, for whatever reason, either joy or inexpressible grief, sorrow, and bitterness, is reflected in each passage. Emerson’s phrasing, “bereaves me” and “ruins me,” indicates that, though he has been seasoned by suffering, he refuses to “stay amid the ruins” (“Compensation” 302)— whether due to the pain the “ruins” continually evoke or to his desire to move to the next phase is of little consequence. Even in the pessimistic nuances of this later passage, we can still see the glimmer of the sun through the darkness of the trees. Without his own personal experience, without the woe and idealistic joy of finding out for one’s self, of learning and experiencing with each new sunrise, both painful and pleasant, the truth of the realization of the necessity of moving forward might not have remained a topic Emerson continued to think and write upon. It was his tragic experience and pessimistic human reaction that proves, even in times of darkness, that Emerson’s ideals are present in his life, though perhaps not as pervasively as we usually assume, but at times perhaps as a means of survival, a way to look anywhere but at the unbearable past and present. Emerson’s pessimism, doubt, inconsistency, and grief in these passages bring much-needed balance to our understanding of Emerson as a whole person as opposed to a literary demigod. Instead, his very pessimism, natural downhearted observations of self, and sometimes gloomy outlook on life, give a true sense of the man, as a person, allowing us to believe in the optimism that he espouses throughout his life work, and in turn, allowing us to find ourselves in Emerson’s hope. Robison 56 Without Emerson’s journals and the insights they provide into his own self-doubt and pessimistic thoughts about himself, humanity, suffering, and everyday events, Emerson as a writer might impress us as a person removed from ordinary human life and concerns. It is this very “pessimism,” exemplified through the journals, which grounds his optimistic message, and humanizes it. In Emerson, we may see ourselves, and be inspired to see past our own pessimism and self-doubt, inconsistencies and grief, not by denying the existence of these emotions and experiences, but by honestly addressing them as they occur. Often times, out of pessimism are hope and optimism born; Emerson is an excellent example of this strictly human quality. The Realistic Optimism and Hope in Hawthorne As a central figure in the developing American literary canon, Nathaniel Hawthorne, like Emerson, was —and still is— subject to critical and public scrutiny. Corroborated by his novels and stories in many ways, his life and work evoke demons of disquietude, ghosts of guilt, and a melancholy life-view. While this image is often upheld in his published works, Hawthorne’s personal character was far more complicated. Though he did have moments of angst and uncertainty, there are also moments of optimism and hope, mostly revealed in his notebooks. In his biography Hawthorne (1879), Henry James says of the established public persona of the author: “The general impression of [the] silence-loving and shade-seeking side of his character is doubtless exaggerated, and, in so far as it points to him as a sombre and sinister figure, is almost ludicrously at fault” (16-7). The rebuttal of these “ludicrous” exaggerations is not often forthright, however. It is buried among the daily recordings of natural and human scenes, observations, ideas for stories, and Hawthorne’s first thoughts within his notebooks. As with Robison 57 Emerson’s journals, it is by looking at common entries that the legacy of an iconic American author becomes the life of an ordinary person. It is the combination of Hawthorne’s public and personal writings and persona that allows us to see Hawthorne as a whole and to understand him in a more nuanced way. It is in his journals that we see a multi-faceted person, like ourselves, struggling and enjoying moments within his daily life. Reading Hawthorne’s accounts of quotidian experiences and events, we are able to understand and appreciate him on a more human scale, as a great writer who was also, in many respects, an ordinary person. In Hawthorne’s notebooks we see the expected Hawthornian critical observation and realist questioning conjoined with a sometimes surprising optimism and hopefulness. James writes: “[A]bove all there was nothing preponderantly gloomy. . . [C]ertainly, the note of depression, of despair, of the disposition to undervalue the human race, is never sounded in his Diaries” (17). The optimistic realist that emerges out of Hawthorne’s notebooks is manifested especially in the playful, amused, and loving character exhibited in his domestic circle, as well as in the simple act of recording commonly recurring instances of cheerfulness and joy in daily experience. Some of Hawthorne’s most cheerful— even exuberant— entries are his descriptions of family life. His time in Lenox, Massachusetts, from 1850-1851, as well as the early family time spent in Concord, demonstrates not only some of the happiest and most hopeful times in Hawthorne’s life, but some of the most productive and optimistic as well. As mentioned, it is during this period that his most famous novels, The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851) were published. The entries during this time are some of his most domestically endearing, recording instances of everyday experience that affect a stark contrast to the rather austere Hawthorne we may associate with his fiction. These entries enrich our sense of Robison 58 Hawthorne as a human being. The playful, amused, appreciative, loving, sarcastic, humorous, open, and honest Hawthorne of his family life and personal circle, appears seldom in his public persona or in his works. These most-welcome snapshots of Hawthorne only come in his journals and in passing mention in letters and in various posthumous reminiscences of the author, such as his wife’s letters to her mother concerning his love for his children and his daughter’s remembrance of his smile (Auster xxxi). The Hawthorne of his notebooks, especially in Lenox and Concord, gives us a much-needed shift in perspective when considering the person behind the dark genius of the early American Romance. In contrast to the guilt-ridden, darkness-driven, doom-writer who is preoccupied with the shadow-side of the human soul, in these notebook entries we find a tree-climbing, thistle fighting, hair-curling, devoted husband and father. Eschewing 19th-century standards of fathers as emotionally remote and dignified, Hawthorne delighted to play with his children on their level after a long day of work in his study. Hawthorne's son Julian recalled that “Our father was a great tree-climber. . . and fond of playing the magician” (Auster xxx). Hawthorne's oldest daughter Una said of him, “He was capable of being the gayest person I ever saw. He was like a boy. Never was such a playmate as he in all the world” (Auster xxxii). Indeed, it seems that for most of his life Hawthorne confined his troubled, depressed, and uncomfortable emotions to his professional life, while flourishing as husband and father. The restless and gloom-filled image of Hawthorne suggested to us in his fiction is an imperfect and incomplete image. Hawthorne’s casual notebook jottings underscore that while he was certainly, at times, a quiet, and gloomy realist, he was also a warm, playful, and humorous man with a much more optimistic outlook than we may suppose. Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny is documentary evidence of this other and more sanguine side of the Hawthornian coin and complicates our sense of Hawthorne the man. In Robison 59 his introduction to Twenty Days, Auster says: it “goes beyond private and into the human realm” (xxv). The context of this selection from Hawthorne’s American Notebooks is the temporary absence of Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, and his two daughters Una and Rose, to visit family in Boston while Hawthorne and Julian stayed behind in Lenox for twenty days. These twenty days display Hawthorne’s satisfaction and frustration at being the sole caretaker of his five year-old son, as well as the pleasure, playfulness, and occasional consternation any working parent in his position has felt as he confronts the tensions between family and work, satisfaction and frustration, annoyance and joy. In these pages the iconic “puritanical” novelist emerges as a friend, a neighbor, and a common person not unlike one of us, his readers. Hawthorne’s domestic notebook writings abound with descriptions of himself at play with his children, as in this entry from July 29, 1851: On our way [to the lake Julian and I] waged war with thistles which represented many-headed dragons and hydras. . .. We threw innumerable stones into the water, for the pleasure of seeing the splash . . .. On our way home, we renewed our warfare with the thistles; and they suffered terribly in the combat. Julian has a real spirit of battle in him, and puts his soul into his blows. Immediately after our return, he called for the jackknife, and now keeps pestering me to look at the feats which he performs with it. Blessed be the man who invented jack-knives. (Twenty Days 8-10) The light-hearted wording and playful subject matter of this passage give us a surprising glimpse of Hawthorne unbuttoned. As we see the author of The Scarlet Letter scampering along with his five-year-old, using a stick as a sword to punish dragon-thistles, we cannot help but consider Hawthorne in a new and different light. The simplicity of throwing rocks into the river Robison 60 demonstrates those figures we consider highly above us in intellect, ability, and daily life, actually do the same common, unimportant actions that we do, often times, for the same reasons. In addition, the passage just quoted shows the simultaneous push-and-pull of being a parent: between irritation and amusement, and between pride and fatigue. As Julian repeatedly disrupts and “pesters” his father, we can imagine Hawthorne feels irritation and fatigue at the constant distraction that accompanies time spent with any young child, impeding progress in whatever literary work Hawthorne may have been trying to accomplish at this given time. Thus the thankfulness to the person who “invented jack-knives” that kept Julian entertained for any amount of time. However, amusement and pride are also present when Hawthorne acknowledges the simple and naive joy of Julian to share his “feats” with his father. There is an underlying fatherly pride that accompanies Julian’s vitality in his play as he slays the imaginary dragons and hydras. This oscillation between irritation and amusement demonstrates very real parental feelings which endear Hawthorne to us by showing that like us, he experiences the tiring circumstances of parenting, but also like us, he is capable of unfathomable love and pride of his family. Hawthorne’s act of recording such seeming trivialities also demonstrates that he values these normal, simple moments of being parent and person, rather than persona, of fulfilling a common and unsophisticated, but ultimately life-changing role in the experience of being human. Hawthorne’s detailed record-keeping of these ordinary, family interactions indicate the rhythm of his daily life. He writes in the moment, recording what is happening, and what he feels, at that instant. As with Emerson, this does much to demonstrate his honesty and his art in his personal writing, which led directly to his published works. In addition to the personal relief that notebook-writing fulfilled, these recordings of his daily interactions with those most important to him serve us well in our understanding of the day-to-day life of Nathaniel Robison 61 Hawthorne, which certainly played a part in the development and the legacy of the author we still study today. One such detailed, ordinary entry comes again, from Twenty Days in which Hawthorne records the daily trials and triumphs of his average fatherhood experience. At about six o’clock, I . . . saw Julian was awake, peeping sideways at me out of his eyes, with a subdued laugh in them. So we got up; and first I bathed him. . . and afterwards I proposed to curl his hair. . .. I attempted the same thing, the morning last, and succeeded miraculously ill; indeed it was such a failure, that the old boy burst into a laugh at the first hint of repeating the attempt. However, I persisted, and screwed it out of his head; he all the time squealing and laughing between pain and merriment. He endeavored to tell me how his mother proceeded; but his instructions were not very clear. . .. After thus operating on his wig, we went for milk (Hawthorne Twenty Days 14). From this entry we see Hawthorne’s amusement with the ordinary, everyday occurrences, detailing the “subdued laugh” in the eyes of his five year-old son as he wakes his father before the sun rises, as well as his humorous description of his “miraculously ill failure” of an attempt to curl Julian’s hair. He details the entire escapade, devotedly describing the interaction between father and son. The interaction itself suggests a type of happiness and trust between the two, and Hawthorne’s record of such a household moment indicates his value of the simple alongside that of the grandiose that he would also incorporate into his fiction. Hawthorne’s resolve to record these “unimportant” daily events accentuates not only his appreciation of the average everyday interactions of his family and children, but also demonstrates his ability to appreciate the innocent optimism and hope he saw reflected in his children. Another notebook entry, dated July 30, 1851, juxtaposes Hawthorne’s realist Robison 62 perspective of the world alongside the optimism of his young son. Hawthorne’s recording of the event suggests the value of Julian’s viewpoint. “I dressed him up; and we set out for the village; he frisking and capering like a little goat, and gathering flowers like a child of paradise. The flowers had not the least beauty in them, except what his eyes made by looking at them; nevertheless, he thought them the loveliest in the world” (Hawthorne Twenty Days 12). These sentences convey an attempt by the father to enter fully into the experiences and outlook of his son. As he watches, engages with, and writes about Julian, Hawthorne— grounded though he is in his adult self— is able to value and appreciate the unadulterated optimism of his son, and hastens to embrace it as he records an otherwise mundane occurrence. Hawthorne’s esthetic immersion in the “beauty” that Julian’s eyes bring to the flowers further demonstrates his appreciation of the happy, hopeful, and optimistic. Hawthorne’s contentment in his personal life, contrasting with the characteristically troubled outlook of his public writings, demonstrates his ability to find an optimistic perspective on the world as he knew it from day-to-day. In 1842 he writes: “My life. . . is more like that of a boy, externally. . .. I seem to have cast off all care, and live with. . . easy trust in Providence” (American Notebooks 146). This perspective is pursued in his attention to enjoying and perpetuating these moments by his recording of honest, everyday experiences, feelings, and thoughts. Given Hawthorne’s background as a family man and his delight in domestic life, we more easily see and understand the outbursts of cheerfulness, joy, and excitement which appear almost haphazardly in other places within his American Notebooks. We can begin to appreciate that these seemingly spontaneous outbursts or reflections, so contrary to the popular and staid image of Hawthorne, are in fact not so random. Rather they are a direct result of the other half of Robison 63 the human being connected to the brooding half, which some readers have erroneously mistaken as a synecdoche for the entire person. Hawthorne’s playfully optimistic side as demonstrated in his relationship with his family is reinforced in other instances of cheerfulness and joy as well. These instances are scattered throughout the notebooks. On April 30, 1840, he writes, “What a beautiful, most beautiful afternoon this has been! It was real happiness to live. If I had been merely a vegetable— a hawthorn-bush for instance, I must have been happy in such an air and sunshine; but having a mind and a soul. . .” (American Notebooks 105); and in November of the same year, he writes, “I feel as if I could run a hundred miles at a stretch, and jump over all the houses that happen to be in my way. . .. Is this not a beautiful morning? The sun shines into my soul” (108). These effusive declarations of hope and optimism demonstrate Hawthorne’s poetic ability to find the beauty and the good in simple, everyday occurrences. More straightforward examples of unconflicted optimism and hope come from Hawthorne’s entries that describe his self-proclaimed “satisfied heart,” as seen in the following outburst: “It is good to be alive now. Thank God for breath, yes, mere breath” (162, 176). Hawthorne writes that his “business is merely to live and to enjoy; and whatever is essential to life and enjoyment will come as naturally as the dew from Heaven” (141). This appreciation of life in its simplest forms continues in Hawthorne’s entries from August of 1842, when he says, “I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I myself can suggest no more appropriate epithet, but which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. . . it is good to live as if this world were heaven” (148). Hawthorne’s optimism in this passage is balanced by his realist tendencies as he continues: “. . . and so it shall be, although in a little while, a flitting shadow of earthly care and Robison 64 toil will mingle itself with our realities” (American Notebooks 148). This passage taken on its own gives a most honest representation of Hawthorne as a person. Hawthorne’s recognized realism is his way of seeing the world as it is, with happiness and sorrow so intertwined as to be inseparable. Hawthorne seems to recognize the existence and need for each and his need to be faithful to the moment which he records. He does not hesitate to be cheerful, joyful, and therefore optimistic when circumstances allow; however, he is also not afraid to experience the “shadow,” “earthly care,” and “toil” when they arise. He does, however, end this entry with optimism when he says, “But I’d rather be on earth than even in the seventh heaven, just now” (151). Hawthorne’s ability to recognize the interweaving of the extremes of human emotion as explored and experienced in his informal and ultimately formal writing, is perhaps what makes him so appealing in his works, and even more so in the study of his person through his notebooks. By considering this interwoven tapestry of life comprised of entwined threads of happiness and gloom, we realize Hawthorne is not solely pessimistic and gloomy as we often think, but rather, a multifaceted individual who recognizes the realities, joys, and limitations of the human experience. He acknowledges— and rebuts— public labelling of himself as a pessimist when he writes, “. . . I have no love of secrecy and darkness,” (American Notebooks 165); and he further undercuts the popular image when he asserts that “. . . all gloom is but a dream and a shadow, and that cheerfulness is the real truth” (154). He eludes reductive classification into either optimistic idealism at one extreme or pessimistic realism at the other; instead he explores, in his notebooks, the entire spectrum of outlooks and emotions. Ultimately, his complexity and inconsistency humanize him. The more we read Hawthorne’s notebooks, the better— and in some sense, the less— we know him. Robison 65 Some of the incongruity we see between the obvious darkness in the works of Hawthorne and the mildness of his day-to-day existence comes not only in entries concerning his simple family life and his sporadically cheerful notebook entries, but also in recurring instances of grateful contentedness that further demonstrate the existence of hope and optimism within Hawthorne as a person. The optimistic realist demonstrated in his notebooks thus far is seen once again, this time in his entry from August 7, 1842, “It is a comfortable thought that the smallest and the most turbid mud-puddle can contain its own picture of heaven” (American Notebooks 141). This passage exudes nuances of conflict and inconsistency, and helps to define the term “optimistic realist.” In this entry, Hawthorne’s realist perspective of what the object is in reality, the “smallest and the most turbid mud-puddle,” is juxtaposed with the idea of heaven, the most ideal of places. The mud-puddle is not an ocean, lake, or stream. It is an undesirable pool of trampled dirt. Yet, heaven not only exists within the mud-puddle, but is contained within it. Not only are contrasting ideas presented together, but they are dependent on one another. The optimism in this passage relies on the honest acceptance of the reality of the mud-puddle for what it is. In conflicting and complementary ways, both Emerson and Hawthorne can be seen to contain degrees of pessimism and optimism as well as doubt and hope. Their public personas profess a distinct leaning of each author towards optimism (Emerson) or pessimism (Hawthorne); but their journals and notebooks blur reductive interpretations of either author as a person. In many instances, both authors are very much realists with both optimism and pessimism deeply interwoven into their characters and their lives, yet it is this compatibility of opposition and the tension it created that advanced the enduring legacies of each author. Robison 66 Conclusion By setting aside the common reductive classifications we generally accept for Emerson and Hawthorne, and instead by looking for points of intersection and overlap of the professional and personal lives of these two influential American authors, we are provided a foundation on which to build a deeper understanding of the complex and human roles each played in the life of the other. These roles vary from friendship to antagonism, and from respect to competition, as demonstrated by their own entries in their journals and notebooks, as well as in the remembrances of their contemporaries. The complication of their relationship beyond that of binaries, provides us not only a better understanding of each man by showing often unseen characteristics, but also gives us an appreciation for the human complexity within each. Each author’s practice of the tradition of the commonplace book provides enlightenment for our further understanding of him as a professional and as a person. From the recording of details, observations, and ideas that would later be turned into the works they are now known for and defined by, to the recording of personal emotions and memories, we get an idea of the writing process as well as the the pulse of their daily lives and moods by the study of the private literature behind the published literature of each. By looking at the less-studied literature left behind in their journals and notebooks, we make a more comprehensive study of the entire person, which is often overlooked or simplified. The study of journals and notebooks dispels much of the simplicity surrounding our understanding of each author, both complicating and enriching our perception of each. In looking at specific quotidian passages from Emerson’s journals and Hawthorne’s notebooks we are able to find a refreshing complexity and inconsistency within each author. It is not their simple adhesion to what they were known for that made them great, but rather their Robison 67 inconsistencies, complexities, and contradictions. The journal and notebook entries reveal a more distinctly complex image of each author, including some unlooked for points of convergence between them seen in the existence of both optimism and pessimism and hope and doubt within each man. These passages also demonstrate a noticeable divergence from popularly held classifications, instead revealing a finely woven tapestry of varying human emotions, characterizations, and habits, making Emerson and Hawthorne— their lives, literature, and legacies— still relatable, useful, and pertinent in our own human experience today. Robison 68 Works Cited Primary Sources: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Compensation.” Emerson: Essays & Poems, edited by Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane. Library of America, 1996, pp. 285-302. ---. Emerson: Selected Journals. Edited by Lawrence Rosenwald. Library of America, 2010. 2 vols. ---. “Nature.” Emerson: Essays & Poems, edited by Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane. Library of America, 1996, pp. 5-50. ---. “Self-Reliance.” Emerson: Essays & Poems, edited by Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane. Library of America, 1996, pp. 259-82. ---. The Heart of Emerson’s Journals. Edited by Bliss Perry. Dover Publications Inc, 1958. ---. “The Over-Soul.” Emerson: Essays & Poems, edited by Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane. Library of America, 1996, pp. 385-400.