a transcendentalist only in the loosest sense, himself repudiated the label, and showed little interest, for that matter, in the "progress of society." Not a naysayer, a spokesman for the tragic sense of life like Hawthorne or Melville, he was nevertheless no idiotic "optimist." "No picture of life can have any veracity," he once wrote, "that does not admit the odious facts." His thought did not lack awareness of evil, as so often charged. He knew that "things seem to tend downward," as he wrote in his essay on Montaigne, "to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just," and to deliver society "from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals." If he said yes to life, he understood how easy it is to say no. He preached justice and hope, not optimism. It is time to rescue Emerson from his rescuers, those professional Pollyannas who have tried (beginning in his own lifetime) to counter the early impression of his "fatalism" by making him the patron saint of positive thinking.

Those who would like a glimpse of the tougher side of Emerson's thought might begin with his 1860 essay on fate—a subject more Machiavellian, it would seem, than "Emersonian" in the accepted sense. The "question of the times," he begins, resolves itself into the "conduct of life." How shall I live? Social reform—Americans' answer to every question—is no answer at all, merely another sign of American superficiality. The "terror of life" cannot be "talked or voted away," and freedom is not something that can be guaranteed by a constitution, a "paper preamble." Freedom lies in looking fate in the face; the courage to do this is the sign of greatness in men and nations alike. "Our Calvinists in the last generation," Emerson adds, had something of this "dignity," this "firmness under the wheel."

Emerson's detractors, starting with Melville, have always found his view of nature too benign. In "Fate," however, he speaks of the "ferocity" of nature. "Nature is no sentimentalist." It "will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ship like a grain of dust." The cold "freezes a man like an apple"; diseases "respect no persons." Nature gladly sacrifices the individual to the species. "In certain men digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more of these drones perish, the better for the hive." "Wild, rough, incalculable," nature "tyrannically" imposes inflexible limitations on mankind. If Emerson had ever believed that "positive

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