Tony Tanner

To a person inquiring about his life, Emerson wrote: ‘I have no history, no fortunes that would make the smallest figure in a narrative. My course of life has been so routinary, that the keenest eye for point or picture would be at fault before such remediless commonplace. We will really say no more on a topic so sterile.’ Not so, responds Robert Richardson; we will say 670 pages more on the topic. By the end you might wonder whether Emerson wasn’t rather in the right of it. An unremarkable, rather spartan, childhood; average performances at school and university; an appointment to, followed by a resignation from, the Unitarian Church; three short trips to Europe; two marriages; the loss of a young son; agitation over the slavery issue – and some fifty placid years in Concord. In one year ‘he reorganised his notebooks’; in another he ‘took a new interest in fruit trees’. When such things loom large enough for biographical attention, you sense that it was a pretty quiet life. But Richardson might fairly object that the more important matter is the story of the growth of Emerson’s mind, his intellectual adventures, his creative life. A detailed version of this is what we certainly get, and I doubt if it has previously been attempted so comprehensively. The determination to be exhaustive and definitive is clear on every page; but the result is not unequivocally felicitous.’

In 1911, George Santayana gave an address to the Philosophical Union of the University of California in which he sought to identify and define what he called, in his lecture title, ‘The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy’. Santayana had a bracing view of what it was ‘to possess a living philosophy’ (‘to have a distinct vision of the universe and definite convictions about human destiny’), and in this talk, he outlined a schematic division, or opposition, in American philosophy, or ‘mentality’, which was to have a profound influence on subsequent American attempts at cultural self-analysis. ‘America’, he began,