sophistication of taste, along with the new opportunities for venality and corruption, made writers like Emerson and Whitman appear narrow and provincial and at the same time excessively sanguine in their view of human nature. Emerson's "noble conception of good," James said, was not balanced by a "definite conception of evil." Emerson took no account of "the dark, the foul, the base"—aspects of life "to which Emerson's eyes were thickly bandaged." Reviewing the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence in 1883, the year after Emerson's death, James noted that "both were Puritans," by which he meant that they "looked, instinctively, at the world, at life, as a great total, full of far-reaching relations." It was their "interest in the destiny of mankind" and the hopes with which it was associated that now seemed so badly out of date.

William James, like his brother a member of a generation more deeply troubled than Emerson's—a generation given to "morbid" thoughts, to use a word this philosopher found indispensable—shared the feeling that Emerson's limitations declared themselves in his "optimism." Emerson had "too little understanding," according to William James, "of the morbid side of life." In his copy of Emerson's works, James referred to Emerson's vision as an "anaesthetic revelation," the "tasteless water of souls." In The Varieties of Religious Experience, he assigned Emerson to the category of the "once-born," along with Whitman, Theodore Parker, and Mary Baker Eddy. The piety of the "healthy-minded," James thought, contained no awareness of evil, "no element of morbid compunction or crisis." Parker's statement, "I am not conscious of hating God," exemplified this "muscular" attitude. So did Whitman's "inability to feel evil," as James characterized it.

Yet James was of two minds about Emerson. He wrote elsewhere that "Emerson's optimism had nothing in common with that indiscriminate hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whitman has made us familiar." He sensed something deeper in Emerson that made him an exemplary figure, one whose career threw a "strong practical light" on his own. His rereading of "the divine Emerson" in 1903 did him a "lot of good," he wrote to Henry.

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