The History of White People (22 page)

This image of Emerson as a watered-down Carlyle-Teutonist never entirely dissipated, just as critics of Carlyle, Emerson, and transcendentalists have harped on the Teutonic opacity of their style. Southern critics, perhaps naturally, amplified these charges by tacking on an anti–New England, anti-antislavery twist. As the American sectional crisis deepened in the 1850s and Emerson spoke more pointedly against slavery and the slave power, a southern animus against him grew.
¹⁷
*

On the other hand, Americans adored Carlyle’s emphatic writing style and his apparent, if vague, sympathy for ordinary people and a disdain for the elite. Even Garrisonian abolitionists and feminists who advocated civil rights for all, seemed blind to the broader tendency of his politics. By 1840 Carlyle had come to despise their movement outright and deprecate the whole notion of universal human rights. Had they read him attentively, American fans would have realized this. But they did not. Antislavery Americans visiting London for the World Anti-Slavery Conference in 1840 unwittingly sought Carlyle out, ignorant of his approval of slavery as a perfectly appropriate labor regime for those he considered inferior races. Elizabeth Cady Stanton preserved an admiration for Carlyle even after he threw the visiting abolitionists out of his house. In the late 1860s, when abolitionists were splitting over the enfranchisement of poor black men (before educated white women got the vote), Stanton turned into a mean-spirited, Saxon chauvinist more in line with Carlyle’s thought. She happily quoted Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
to the detriment of people she considered inherently inferior.
¹⁸

One notion guiding both Carlyle and Emerson, and supposedly liberal Americans like Stanton, was their heroic figuration of what they termed the Saxon race. Many other Americans—including Thomas Jefferson, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the most popular nineteenth-century American women’s magazine—proclaimed themselves Saxons.
¹⁹
*
Most of these just briefly and easily looked back to “our Saxon ancestors,” before moving on, but Emerson dedicated an entire book to the subject, as we shall see. Cobbled together as race history, it drew on the eighth-century English historian Bede, Norse mythology, and many prevailing versions of English history, notably the (male) historian-bookseller Sharon Turner’s wildly popular
The History of the Anglo-Saxons, from Their First Appearance above the Elbe, to the Death of Egbert
, originally published in 1799 and in its seventh edition in 1852. Emerson owned a copy of the seventh edition and eagerly absorbed its Saxon chauvinism. Digging deep into Old Norse literature, Turner lumps Saxons and Norse together to come up with a list of undying “traits” of the English race. He proclaims liberty the first and foremost of these traits, which he believes persisted from the fifth-century Saxon/Norse conquest and had remained valid ever since. Like Thomas Jefferson, Turner contrasts the Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberty with the Norman inclination toward tyranny. However, Turner’s concept of a Norman “graft” onto England’s original Anglo-Saxon “stock” disagrees with Jefferson’s idea of permanently, racially pure Anglo-Saxons.
²⁰

Carlyle, who imagined himself a representative of Britain’s Norse heritage, infected his followers, including Emerson, with “we Saxon” jargon. Even the cosmopolitan Margaret Fuller, a foremost American interpreter of German romanticism, fell under the spell. On meeting Carlyle in London in 1846, Fuller portrays him admiringly, just the way he liked to be seen: “Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing, but in his arrogance there is no littleness, no self-love: it is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror—it is his nature and the untamable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons…. [Y]ou like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron in his furnace.”
²¹

This Teutonic/Saxon race chauvinism increased in Carlyle and Emerson as they aged, but far more so in Carlyle. His identification with his Saxons as Germans seemed boundless, as he completely embraced German nationalism and Teutonic race chauvinism along the lines of Charles Villers and romantics like the two Schlegels, de Staël’s friends.
²²
As early as 1820, in his twenty-fifth year, Carlyle was already admiring German writers for the “muscle in their frames.”
²³
A decade later, he was delivering popular lectures on German themes. One of several 1837 lectures was entitled “On the Teutonic People, the German Language, the Northern Immigration, and the Nibelungen Lied,” the pagan German epic that later inspired Richard Wagner’s
Ring
cycle. It may seem odd to readers today, but when Carlyle spoke of “the German people,” he was including much of the population of Britain. In any case, Carlyle came to sound a lot like the willfully excerpted version of
Germania
by the Roman author Tacitus, which was then beginning to circulate among German nationalists. Alert to the values of his time, Carlyle sexes his German nationalism masculine.

His Germans are “the only genuine European people, unmixed with strangers. They have in fact never been subdued; and considering the great, open, and fertile country which they inhabit, this fact at once demonstrates the masculine and indomitable character of the race. They have not only not been subdued, but been themselves by far the greatest conquerors in the world.”
²⁴
Those themes of masculinity and race purity would soon reappear in Emerson, with masculinity of far greater consequence. On the matter of racial purity Emerson would waver.

But neither of them had a good word to say for France or the French people—an “Ape-population,” as Carlyle put it. France had turned revolutionary in 1789 and again in 1848, and Carlyle detested anything hinting of democracy. Such broad condemnation raised problems. What was one to make of the virile French Norman conquerors? Carlyle finessed that contradiction by pronouncing Normans to be Norsemen who had merely learned to speak French; obviously, for him, the change of language had not altered their blood, their basic nature, or their manly might. The Norman conquest had clearly benefited Britain, “entering with a strong man [William the Conqueror]…an immense volunteer police force…united, disciplined, feudally regimented, ready for action; strong Teutonic men.”
²⁵
All of this went quite a bit over the top, but American readers loved it. Carlyle might have trashed the French more lustily, but Emerson did his bit.

An 1835 lecture shows just how far Emerson would go. “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius” begins by connecting Americans to the English: “The inhabitants of the United States, especially of the Northern portion, are descended from the people of England and have inherited the traits of their national character.” As for the French, their early enemies may be trusted when they hold, “‘It is common with the Franks to break their faith and laugh at it. The race of Franks is faithless.’…An union of laughter and crime, of deceit and politeness is the unfavorable picture of the French character as drawn by the English and Germans, and even by the French themselves.”
²⁶
The unmanly vices of frivolity, corruption, and lack of practical know-how all afflicted the French. How else to view a people who invented the ruffle, while it took the English to invent the shirt?
²⁷
*
For manly practicality, look to the “English race.” For the childish, “singing and dancing nations,” look south.
²⁸
That north/south dichotomy would prove a durable theory, one Emerson trumpeted and his followers echoed, including his younger and rather priggish English admirer Matthew Arnold, ostensible defender of the beleaguered Celts.

Emerson and Carlyle outlined a transatlantic realm of Saxondom also taken up by Arnold, among many others. In his first letter after Emerson’s 1833 visit, Carlyle wrote, “Let me repeat once more what I believe is already dimly the sentiment of all Englishmen, Cisoceanic and Transoceanic, that we and you are not two countries, and cannot for the life of us be; but only two
parishes
of one country, with such wholesome parish hospitalities, and dirty temporary parish feuds, as we see; both of which brave parishes
Vivant! vivant!
”
²⁹
In the late 1830s Emerson was urging Carlyle to visit the United States, perhaps even to settle permanently: “Come, & make a home with me,” Emerson wrote.
³⁰
What a joy it would be to merge the intellects of Saxondom in their own two persons!

This rhetoric of bonding seemed to have no ceiling. In 1841 Carlyle, following Goethe’s infatuation with the ancient Greeks, wrote, “By and by we shall visibly be, what I always say we virtually are, members of neighboring Parishes; paying continual visits to one another. What is to hinder huge London from being to universal Saxondom what small Mycale was to the Tribes of Greece…. A meeting of
All the English
ought to be as good as one of All the Ionians….”
³¹
And Emerson agreed. Enjoying a reputation for genius in Britain as well as the United States by 1853–55, he repeated a lecture entitled “The Anglo-American.” He might well have been speaking autobiographically in his comments on the “godly & grand British race”: “it is right to esteem without regard to geography this industrious liberty-loving Saxon wherever he works,—the Saxon, the colossus who bestrides the narrow Atlantic….”
³²
But in all this mutual admiration, a rift would soon appear.

Emerson saw himself as a New Englander, virtually as an Englishman, and therefore as a “Saxon.” “We Saxons” peppered his lectures, essays, and journals. In his classic 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson exhorts his readers to wake up the “courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts,” to realize that New Englanders are the final product of a process of distillation that had earlier turned Norsemen into Englishmen over the course of a millennium.
*
Later on, he would portray New Englanders as even more English than the English, as “double distilled English.”

Carlyle would not go that far. For all his Germanicism, Carlyle saw London as the natural capital of Saxondom for the present and foreseeable future. Perhaps later—probably much later—the capital might move west: “After centuries, if Boston, if New York, have become the most convenient ‘
All-Saxondom,
’ we will right cheerfully go thither to hold such festival….”
³³
Before long, this boil would fester and burst, for Emerson’s timetable sprang from a conviction that England was already practically worn out from excessive commercialism, labor troubles, and luxury. The Saxons on Americans’ side of the ocean, woodsmen who reminded Emerson of the Germans of Tacitus, would inherit the mantle of Saxon leadership sooner rather than later.
^†

Emerson did not visit Britain between 1833 and 1847. When he later did, he found Saxon identity weakening as a glue of friendship. Britain was enduring the economic hard times and suffering that would inspire Charles Dickens’s novel
Hard Times
(1854). The ever grumpy Carlyle grew more authoritarian, to the point that in 1848 he complained about Emerson’s equanimity: Emerson was “
content
with everything” and becoming “a little wearisome” with his “pleasant
moonshiny
lectures.” Emerson fired back, reporting that Carlyle “sits in his four-story house and sneers.”
³⁴
Basically, the friendship was over, but on one issue Emerson and Carlyle could still agree. Both looked askance at the Irish.

Carlyle termed the Irish “Human swinery,” playing on the commonplace analogy between Irish people and pigs. The Irish were believed to live with their pigs, and pigs were considered quintessentially Irish, as in the saying, “as Irish as Paddy’s pig.” Over in Concord, Massachusetts, where Irish laborers worked in mud and lived in shanties, Emerson saw no reason to dispute this libel. One of his rare comments on the districts of the poor, where he spent very little time, reveals both prejudice and naïveté: “In Irish districts, men deteriorated in size and shape, the nose sunk, the gums were exposed, with diminished brain and brutal form.”
³⁵
Like Carlyle in
Chartism
(1840), Emerson skirts the issue of whether race alone made the Irish ugly. On such an easy topic, the two found agreement.
*

Then came the American Civil War. Emerson, no radical abolitionist, nonetheless opposed American slavery, particularly after the toughening of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 and John Brown’s raid on the Harpers Ferry, Virginia, federal arsenal in 1859. He also supported the Union during the war itself. Emerson did make a third and last trip to Europe, in 1872–73, only to find that he and Carlyle, both impaired by age, could no longer manage a meeting of the minds. Carlyle voiced a growing antipathy toward just about everybody. Gone were his youthful hints of sympathy for ordinary folk, an inclination always vaguely abstract. After his bitter pronouncements on what he called the “Nigger question” in 1850, he expressed no sympathy whatever with the poor, whether recently emancipated in the Western Hemisphere or despised and impoverished in Ireland and Britain.