assuming that his audience would recognize it as a restatement of positions once widely accepted. He called for bold, fresh ideas, but he did not consider himself, I think, principally an original thinker, whose views would necessarily give offense. Certainly he did not think of himself as a prophet. When he found it impossible to remain in the ministry, the Unitarian church having proved too narrow to contain him, he took to calling himself a scholar, as if to announce that he would continue to work within the conventions of an established calling. He did not set out to invent a new calling or a new way of speaking. He once said of Carlyle that it was only the "despair of finding a contemporary audience" that made it necessary for Carlyle's alter ego, Professor Teufelsdröckh, "to utter his message in droll sounds." ^* He himself faced the same difficulty. Now that Reformation theology had become unrecognizable as such to the sons and daughters of the Reformation, he could no longer hope to reach them by preaching the old gospel from the pulpit. The good news had to be presented—disguised, even—as "transcendental" philosophy (though Emerson himself never accepted this particular label). Unfortunately, the disguise proved so effective that hardly anyone ever managed to see through it.

In order to understand why Emerson found it necessary to adopt an unfamiliar idiom—one that his contemporaries, before they decided to immortalize him in stone, found "extravagant," "perverse," "uncouth,"

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*

Carlyle immediately saw the astuteness of this analysis. He wrote back, "You say well that I take up that attitude because I have no known public, am alone under the Heavens, speaking into friendly or unfriendly space; add only that I will not defend such an attitude, that I call it questionable, tentative, and only the best that I in these mad times could conveniently hit upon."

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