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Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
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As if in fulfillment of its thesis that eloquence emerges as the product of a dialogue between orator and audience, Emerson's 1870 version of "Eloquence" bears the impress of its long history of spoken delivery. Passages of the 1870 text appear in Emerson's Journal as far back as 1844; Emerson drafted the essay on his second trip to Europe in 1847; and as an address, "Eloquence" was a frequent part of Emerson's repertoire throughout the second half of his public career, during which he revised, re-developed, and rethought the essay repeatedly. One of these revisions is especially worth noting here. Near the outset of the 1870 text, Emerson ascribes particular powers of eloquence to various regional, ethnic, and national sensibilities, describing the "Irishwoman" whose "speech flows like a river-so unconsidered, so humorous, so pathetic, such justice done to all the parts!" as well as "Our Southern people" who "are almost all speakers, and have every advantage over the New England people, whose climate is so cold that t'is said we do not like to open our mouths very wide" (1903-04, 7. 68-69). In a footnote to a later edition of Society and Solitude, Edward Emerson reports a second-hand anecdote concerning the essay's reception, in which "Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson relates that he heard Emerson speak thus in praise of Southern eloquence, to the content of students from that section, in the audience; a content that was lessened when he went on, 'The negro too is eloquent'" (1903-04, 7. 368). By 1870, Emerson had apparently decided to omit the remark.
It would be tempting to suppose that Emerson's decision to exclude the remark from his 1870 edition of Society and Solitude, and hence to exclude African Americans from the constellation of articulacy and ethnicity that essay charts, was more of a grudging acquiescence to the popular racism of his day than it was an indicator of Emerson's felt ambivalence over the eloquence of the "negro." Such a view is certainly implied in Edward Emerson's notes to "Eloquence. " But Emerson's troubled attitudes about race necessarily bar the way to such a conclusion. While Emerson was always a monogenicist-while he never found that African Americans and Caucasian Americans were so profoundly different as to indicate ultimately disparate biological origins for each race-he long believed that the differences were significant enough to make genuine social and political equality impossible. Writing in his journal at the age of 19, attempting to argue the case in favor of slavery as a kind of thought-experiment (only months before, he had proclaimed in the same journal that "no ingenious sophistry can ever yet reconcile the unperverted mind to slavery"), he slipped into the required perspective rather too easily, relating that "I saw ten, twenty, a hundred largelipped, lowbrowed black men in the streets who, except in the mere matter of language, did not exceed the sagacity of an elephant" (1960-82, 2. 55). In 1837, no longer writing within such a consciously constructed persona, he actually suggested that the middle passage was "only a little worse than the old sufferings. [Africans] exchange a cannibal war for a stinking hold" ( 5. 382). But Emerson progressed well beyond such views by the time he reached middle age. Two years after the Civil War, he wrote angrily in his Journal, "You complain that the negroes are a base class.Who makes & keeps the jew or the negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?" (16. 55)
