Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

“an insoluble problem; on one side was ‘art’ and ‘learning’; on the other was‘worldly’ or ‘material’ success” (both p. 113). It was possible for a best-sellingauthor like Irving to combine art and material success, but this combinationconstituted a shackling of the free spirit, and like Franklin, Irving lookedforward to retirement, at which time he could do what he really wanted.About William Lloyd Garrison one might observe that, for an ambitiouswould-be professional, a cause—like the abolitionism for which hebecame famous—is as useful as wisdom and/or talent. But Garrison wasmoral, disciplined, and courageous, an unshackleable free spirit: “And hehad made his own self his real writing subject, a subject he had immediateaccess to wherever he was” (p. 153). As Wilson points out, Garrison’s “vocabularyof ‘independence,’ ‘luxury,’ and ‘cares’ echoed the autobiographyof Benjamin Franklin as much as it anticipated [the transcendentalism of]Emerson” (p. 152). For culture to teach, as it should do, it has in some wayto achieve what Wilson describes in his introduction as a position abovethe tawdry side of economics, a position that could be gained only throughthe quality of the works themselves. To his own great credit, Wilson pointsout that even elevated culture must cope with the artistic marketplace, andthat it is legitimate to investigate how representative men and women havegone about it.Whereas Garrison needed a cause, and because he ultimately becamehis cause and felt no inner need to retire, Emerson, who also never“retired,” was compelled to work on the image of an individual unboundedby any particular cause at all, but perhaps by all good causes. So when heleft the church, as Wilson points out with startling insight, Emerson took hisindependence seriously and confined himself to fostering in his audiencesand readership the cultural ideal of the poet-hero. Presumably the virtuous,courageous, and transcendental role model for society will inspire byhis sheer example, not by activism. Wilson shows how defensive this wason Emerson’s part in the light of marketplace pressures. It was perhaps asthough everyone in the economy wanted to retire from humdrum businessinto a culture that instructed, but mostly entertained, their own selves, theselves which, as Franklin so shrewdly observed, the ambitious wealthy oftendo not succeed in mastering.It is the old aristocratic principle again: in England you cannot be atrue amateur sportsman if you have ever labored with your hands for pay.The empress of China is said to have sported long fingernails to show thatshe did no work. Nevertheless, it was the work that mattered in the “real”world. Therefore, to cite an aphorism, the English dethroned their kings as325