Western American Literature

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...