“Self-reliance” – the prehistory of Emerson’s famous word

By Seth Lobis

We hear “self-reliance” and tend to think “Emerson.” And so we confirm him: “Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense.” And yet, in confirming him, we betray him, for he also wrote: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages.” Emerson has long since joined the bards and sages, and we have come to rely on him.

The Oxford English Dictionary credits not Emerson but John Stuart Mill with the first use of “self-reliance,” which appears in a letter dated 25 November 1833 that Mill wrote to Thomas Carlyle. Mill uses the word to describe a French journalist, “a man singularly free, if we may trust appearances, from self-consciousness; simple, graceful, almost infantilely playful as they all say when he is among his intimates, & indeed I could see that myself; & combining perfect self-reliance with the most unaffected modesty.” One cannot blame the OED for giving us just the final phrase; the sentence as a whole goes on for three hundred words. Emerson’s own correspondence with Carlyle began around the time of Mill’s letter. In a rather pained journal entry from May 1835, Emerson listed “the sublimity of Self-reliance” as one of the subjects he had yet to take up. When he did, five years later, he opposed self-reliance to conformity, consistency, and self-consciousness. He allied it, memorably, with “the nonchalance of boys,” with what Mill calls the “infantilely playful.”

The OED’s tautological definition of “self-reliance” — “Reliance upon oneself, one’s own powers, etc. (rarely with unfavorable implication)” — sends us from the compound to its two elements, first to the marvelous headnote on “self-,” a history in miniature. Of the thirteen “self” compounds attested in Old English, only “self-will” — “One’s own will or desire” — and its cognates survived into Middle English. In the fourteenth century the plant name “self-heal” brought the total to two. In the mid-sixteenth century, “self” became “a living formative element,” likely under the influence of Greek compounds formed with auto-. During the period from around 1645 to 1690 the prefix appears to have been at the center of a neologizing craze. It remains “of unlimited application” — hence the OED’s polite begging off before giving “a typical selection” of compounds. In “self-reliance” the prefix is “adverbial”; it conveys reliance “on oneself.”

The OED defines “reliance” as “[t]he (or an) act of relying; the condition or character of being reliant; dependence, confidence.” The earliest attestation is in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, which dates back to the first decade of the seventeenth century, but the word is not widely used until the eighteenth century. In the sense in which we are now familiar with it — “To depend on a person or thing with full trust or confidence; to rest upon with assurance” — the verb “rely” dates back to the late sixteenth century. During that period “rely” was still in use in a sense attested as early as the mid-fourteenth century — “To gather (soldiers, followers, etc.) together; to assemble, to rally.” By the mid-seventeenth century this and related senses had fallen into desuetude. The English verb derives from the French relier, which, in turn, derives from the Latin religare, “to bind up or back.” Etymologists have proposed religare as the root of “religion,” so that, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, the Latin religio primarily denoted “obligation” or “bond between man and the gods.” We might make sense of the etymological kinship in this way: religion requires of us a reliance on something beyond ourselves.

Having worked through the two elements, we may now return to the compound and to the parenthesis in the OED’s definition — “(rarely with unfavorable implication).” That “unfavorable implication,” where it exists, is the irreligious one that the self-reliant put themselves before God. In only one of the entry’s four examples does “self-reliance” have a negative connotation: writing in the 1860s, Edward Meyrick Goulburn urges those of us who have given in to temptation “to examine whether there be not some particle of self-reliance lurking at the bottom of our hearts.” The OED records a use of “self-relying” that antedates the first use of the noun. In his novel Anne of Geierstein; or, The Maiden of Mist (1829), Sir Walter Scott writes of “[t]he self-relying resolution of a mind too virtuous to suspect evil.” The OED’s evidence suggests, then, that in its earliest uses the word had a markedly positive connotation. Having tracked down three eighteenth-century uses of “self-reliance,” I think the case is otherwise.

The earliest example I found is from Michael Pope’s Life and Death, Consider’d, as the Important Concern of the Gospel Dispensation, published in London in 1709. In a chapter entitled “Inordinate Self-Love,” a kind of exercise in imitative form, Pope piles up “self” compounds to emphasize the inordinateness of “self” ills: “Some are self-conceited, ... wise in their own Eyes; some are self-confident, leaning to their own Understandings; some are self-willed, not denying themselves; some are self-interested, always sacrificing to their own Nets; and some are self-delighting, warming themselves in the sparks of their own Fire: and hereby the Gospel is rejected.” He goes on to write of “the Word of God” that “It doth forbid Self-reliance, for the way of Man is not in himself, it is not in Man that walketh to direct his Steps; we are therefore to trust in the Lord with all our heart.” The more we rely on ourselves, the less we rely on God. Pope’s qualification that no one “is allowed by God to be ... a Self-hater” is drowned out by his torrential conclusion: “Self quarrels with all, falsifies with all, undermines all, ensnares all, disturbs all, one single Syllable disquiets the whole World.” It is hard to imagine a less Emersonian sentiment.

The hymn Befiehl du deine Wege, or “Upon Divine Providence,” which appears in Psalmodia Germanica; or, A Specimen of Divine Hymns, translated from the High Dutch (London, 1722), sounds a similar note. Here is the second stanza:

Unto the Lord turn wholly,
For he will never fail
To rescue thee from Folly,
If thou dost but bewail
Thy stiff-neck’d Self-Reliance;
Shake off that Yoke of Hell,
Which ever bids Defiance
To him that governs well.

The hymn appears in the second edition of Miscellanea Sacra: or, A Curious Collection of Original Poems, upon Divine and Moral Subjects (London, 1732) as well as in the Lutheran Hymn and Prayer-Book published in New York in 1795. In a sermon entitled “Free-will and Merit fairly examined; or, Men not their own Saviours,” preached in May 1774, the remarkably named Augustus Toplady compressed the orthodox view into a sentence: “Self reliance is the very bond of unbelief.”

Emerson may well have been set on redefining “self-reliance,” but if he did, his intention was surely not a blasphemous one. That is, I do not think he intended to make a secular virtue of a Christian vice. (One might emphasize it as a Calvinist vice; Toplady was not only a vehement opponent of John Wesley, but also the author of Historic Proof of the Doctrinal Calvinism of the Church of England.) In October 1830 Emerson delivered a sermon on Matthew 16:26 — “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” — under the title “Trust Yourself.” In his exhortation to his fellow man Emerson reconciled self and God: “let him trust fully his own share of God’s goodness, that correctly used it will lead him on to perfection which has no type yet in the Universe save only the Divine Mind.” Emerson emphasized not the sinful self, but the “self-relying soul,” the divine self, not the “world-disquieting” self, to recall Pope, but the world-changing self. The story of “self-reliance,” it seems to me, parallels the story of “self-trust,” a word that Emerson also favored. The one I have tried to tell, however schematically, is suggested by a juxtaposition of two examples in the OED’s entry on “self-trust,” glossed as “self-confidence.” The earliest attestation is in Arthur Golding’s edition of Calvin’s sermons on Deuteronomy (1583): “Let vs vnderstand that there is no strength in vs, and that we must rid our selues of all selfe­trust.” The third attestation is in Emerson’s essay “Heroism,” which appeared in the same 1841 volume as “Self-Reliance.” His predication is sublime: “Self-trust is the essence of heroism.” For Toplady “self reliance” was “essential infidelity.” Both were fighting for nothing less than the essence of man.

Emerson’s anti-Calvinist exaltation of the self did not convince, or convert, all. Not long after its publication, Mary Moody Emerson described Essays as a “strange medly [sic] of atheism and false independence.” In “false independence” we hear a sneer at “self-reliance.” At the very least Emerson reminds us how narrow, how concrete, how static a dictionary definition can be; no phrase or synonym will do when a term signifies, as Barbara Packer suggests “self-reliance” did for Emerson, “everything praiseworthy in the universe.”

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Seth Lobis, a scholar of Renaissance poetry, teaches in the English department at Boston University.