• “Young America” and the Anti-Emersonian WesternJohn Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing
• Anthony Hutchison (bio)

In October 1870 Bret Harte published a review of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s latest essay collection Society and Solitude in Overland Monthly, the lively new San Francisco-based literary magazine already being lauded in the East for its “Far Western flavor” and “Pacific freshness” (qtd. in Tarnoff 159). Overall, Harte was content to defer to the celebrated “Sage of Concord,” effectively using the occasion to endorse the idea of Emerson as an authentically national figure wholly worthy of the cultural esteem bestowed upon him by his fellow American citizens. “There remains to Mr. Emerson, we think,” the piece concludes, “the praise of doing more than any other American thinker to voice the best philosophic conclusions of American life and experience” (387).

Harte’s forerunning judgment nonetheless sounded a few more equivocal notes. Notably, given his own relatively recent success producing fiction depicting the pioneer mining communities of California, Harte took issue with Emerson’s portrayal of the American West.¹ This was presented in the “Civilization” chapter of Society and Solitude where the region is interpreted as a benign domain in which powerful forces of culture and intellect fuse spectacularly with equally formidable currents associated with nature and will. It is in the crucible of this dynamic, Emerson proposes, in typically unrestrained fashion, that a new and substantive national character will be forged:

’Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin grammar, and one of those tow-head boys has [End Page 237] written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here is one, who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer’s iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands.

(10)

As admiring as he was of Emerson, such Eastern exuberance proved too much for the adopted Westerner Harte.² This was not the West of hard, empirical observation, he lamented, but a fantasy abstracted from the “moral consciousness” of the philosopher. Any extended experience with the region, Harte wrote, would reveal that “the piano appears first in the saloon and gambling-house . . . [and] . . . that the elegancies and refinements of civilization are brought into barbarism with the first civilized idlers, who are generally vicious” (386). The young frontiersman Emerson invests with such potential is far more likely to “be found holding out against pianos and Latin grammars until he is obliged to emigrate” (386). Harte concludes with the claim that there is something deeply resistant to such idealist modes of projection within the culture of the West. The nature-civilization dialectic posited by the Transcendentalist is almost comically misconceived in its detachment from the lived experience of the region:

Romance like this would undoubtedly provoke the applause of lyceum-halls in the wild fastnesses of Roxbury (Mass.), or on the savage frontiers of Brooklyn (N.Y.), but a philosopher ought to know that, usually, only civilization begets civilization, and that the pioneer is apt to be always the pioneer.

(386)

As Kris Fresonke has detailed, the bearing of Emerson’s projections goes beyond conventional scholarly understandings of American Transcendentalism that geographically limit its conception of Nature to long settled, tranquil New England locales. Emerson should be read, rather, more attentively as a seer-poet of the Louisiana Purchase and US–Mexican War annexations. His thought is inspired by exploration narratives as well as both infused and critically engaged with the secular-political expression given to the idea of “design” in Nature transmitted via “manifest destiny” ideology. Fresonke notes that the nineteenth-century West, not least in the incipient federal state’s and cultural producers’ [End Page 238] relentless efforts to map, navigate, and reconfigure its contours, presented an “epistemological problem” to which thinkers such as Emerson sought to provide a metaphysical solution. Once “idealized into a matter of spirit,” however, they found that “nature itself, especially in the American West, didn’t so easily renounce its materiality” (126).

Harte’s barbed rebuttal to Emerson’s post-Puritan, providential image of...

• “年轻的美国”与反艾默森主义的西方约翰·威廉姆斯的《屠夫的穿越》
• 安东尼·哈奇森（生物）

1870年十月布雷特·哈特发表爱默生的最新散文集的审查社会与孤独在陆上月，热闹的新总部位于旧金山的文学杂志在东方因其“远西味”和“太平洋新鲜”已被称赞（在塔尔诺夫（Tarnoff）的第159页中）总体而言，哈特很乐意遵从著名的“协和军圣人”，有效地利用这一机会来认可艾默生作为一个真正的民族人物的想法，完全值得他的美国同胞赋予他的文化尊敬。文章最后总结道：“我们认为，艾默生先生还有很多东西，赞扬我们做出了比其他任何美国思想家都多的事情，以表达美国生活和经验的最佳哲学结论”（387）。

尽管如此，哈特的前瞻性判断听起来还有些模棱两可。值得注意的是，鉴于他自己最近在小说创作方面取得了成功，该小说描绘了加利福尼亚的先锋采矿社区，因此哈特对艾默生对美国西部的刻画表示怀疑。¹这是在《社会与孤独》的“文明”一章中提出的，该地区被解释为一个良性领域，在这里，强大的文化和智力力量与与自然和意志相关的同样强大的潮流惊人地融合在一起。艾默生提议以这种不受约束的方式，在这种动态的坩埚中，建立一种新的实质性民族特征：

真是太奇妙了，钢琴很快进入边境的木屋里。您可能会认为他们在一个松树桩下找到了它。随之而来的是拉丁文语法，其中一个拖拖拉拉男孩在[星期日第237页]写了赞美诗。现在让大学，现在让参议院注意！因为这里是一个人，他根据先驱者的铁质体质打开这些精美的口味，将他们所有的桂冠收归他坚强的手中。

（10）

就像他对爱默生（Emerson）一样钦佩，这种东方的兴旺对于被采纳的西方人Harte来说实在是太多了。^2个他感叹说，这不是艰辛的，经验性的观察的西方，而是从哲学家的“道德意识”中抽象出来的幻想。哈特（Harte）写道，对该地区的任何扩展经验都将表明“钢琴首先出现在轿车房和赌博场所。。。[和] 。。。“首先将文明的闲散者和恶棍混为一谈，他们通常是恶性的”（386）。年轻的前沿人物艾默生（Emerson）具有这种潜力的投资更有可能“被发现反对钢琴和拉丁文语法，直到他被迫移民”（386）。哈特的结论是，西方文化对这种理想主义的投射模式深有抵触。

这样的浪漫无疑会在罗克斯伯里（马萨诸塞州）的野兽牢房或布鲁克林（纽约州）的野蛮边境上引起人们对礼堂的热烈掌声，但是哲学家应该知道，通常，只有文明才能孕育文明，先锋很容易永远成为先锋。

（386）

正如克里斯·弗里森克（Kris Fresonke）所详述的那样，艾默生的预测之涵义超出了对美国先验主义的传统学术理解，后者在地理上将其对自然的概念限于长期定居的，宁静的新英格兰地区。更应该将爱默生作为路易斯安那采购和美墨战争吞并的先驱诗人来读。他的思想受到探索性叙事的启发，并通过“明显的命运”意识形态传播并批判地参与了“自然”中“设计”思想的世俗政治表达。弗雷森克（Fresonke）指出，十九世纪的西方，尤其是在初期的联邦政府和文化生产者中[End Page 238]不遗余力地绘制，导航和重新配置其轮廓的过程，提出了一个“认识论问题”，艾默生等思想家试图为之提供形而上的解决方案。然而，一旦“理想化为精神问题”，他们发现“自然本身，尤其是在美国西部，并没有那么轻易地放弃其实质性”（126）。

哈特的铁丝网驳斥了爱默生的后清教徒时代的天象，...