The Conduct of Life - Intitial Reception

Intitial Reception

Though hailed by Thomas Carlyle as “the writer's best book” and despite its commercial success, initial critical reactions to The Conduct Of Life were mixed at best. The Knickerbocker praised it for its “healthy tone” and called it “the most practical of Mr. Emerson's works,” while The Atlantic Monthly attested that “literary ease and flexibility do not always advance with an author’s years” and thought the essays inferior to Emerson's earlier work. Yale’s The New Englander while complimenting Emerson's abilities, criticized the book as depicting “a universe bereft of its God” and described its author as writing “with the air of a man who is accustomed to be looked up to with admiring and unquestioning deference.” Littell's Living Age found the book to contain the “weakest kind of commonplace elaborately thrown into unintelligible shapes” and claimed it to read in parts like an “emasculate passage of Walt Whitman.” Others were no less critical, proclaiming that Emerson “has come to the end of what he had to say, and is repeating himself” (Athenaeum) or even calling him a “phrasemonger” and “second-hand writer” (Critic).