Emerson is the mountaineer of our literature; to read him is to have the
impression of being on the heights. It is solitary there, far removed from
ordinary affairs; but the air is keen, the outlook grand, the heavens near.
Our companions are the familiar earth by day or the mysterious stars by
night, and these are good if only to recall the silent splendor of God's
universe amid the pother of human inventions. There also the very spirit of
liberty, which seems to have its dwelling among the hills, enters into us
and makes us sympathize with Emerson's message of individual freedom.
It is still a question whether Emerson should be classed with the poets or
prose writers, and our only reason for placing him with the latter is that
his "Nature" seems more typical than his "Wood Notes," though in truth both
works convey precisely the same message. He was a great man who used prose
or verse as suited his mood at the moment; but he was never a great poet,
and only on rare occasions was he a great prose writer.
Life
Emerson has been called "the wingéd Franklin," "the Yankee
Shelley" and other contradictory names which strive to express the
union of shrewd sense and lofty idealism that led him to write
"Hitch your wagon to a star" and many another aphorism intended to
bring heaven and earth close together. We shall indicate enough of
his inheritance if we call him a Puritan of the Puritans, a
moralist descended from seven generations of heroic ministers who
had helped to make America a free nation, and who had practiced the
love of God and man and country before preaching it to their
congregations.
The quality of these ancestors entered into Emerson and gave him
the granite steadfastness that is one of his marked
characteristics. Meeting him in his serene old age one would hardly
suspect him of heroism; but to meet him in childhood is to
understand the kind of man he was, and must be. If you would
appreciate the quality of that childhood, picture to yourself a
bare house with an open fire and plenty of books, but little else
of comfort. There are a mother and six children in the house,
desperately poor; for the father is dead and has left his family
nothing and everything,--nothing that makes life rich, everything
in the way of ideals and blessed memories to make life wealthy. The
mother works as only a poor woman can from morning till night. The
children go to school by day; but instead of playing after
school-hours they run errands for the neighbors, drive cows from
pasture, shovel snow, pick huckleberries, earn an honest penny. In
the evening they read together before the open fire. When they are
hungry, as they often are, a Puritan aunt who shares their poverty
tells them stories of human endurance. The circle narrows when an
older brother goes to college; the rest reduce their meals and
spare their pennies in order to help him. After graduation he
teaches school and devotes his earnings to giving the next brother
his chance. All the while they speak courteously to each other,
remember their father's teaching that they are children of God, and
view their hard life steadily in the light of that sublime
doctrine.
The College Boy
The rest of the story is easily told. Emerson was born in Boston,
then a straggling town, in 1803. When his turn came he went to
Harvard, and largely supported himself there by such odd jobs as
only a poor student knows how to find. Wasted time he called it;
for he took little interest in college discipline or college fun
and was given to haphazard reading, "sinfully strolling from book
to book, from care to idleness," as he said. Later he declared that
the only good thing he found in Harvard was a solitary chamber.
The Preacher
After leaving college he taught school and shared his earnings,
according to family tradition. Then he began to study for the
ministry; or perhaps we should say "read," for Emerson never really
studied anything. At twenty-three he was licensed to preach, and
three years later was chosen pastor of the Second Church in Boston.
It was the famous Old North Church in which the Mathers had
preached, and the Puritan divines must have turned in their graves
when the young radical began to utter his heresies from the ancient
pulpit. He was loved and trusted by his congregation, but presently
he differed with them in the matter of the ritual and resigned his
ministry.
Next he traveled in Europe, where he found as little of value as he
had previously found in college. The old institutions, which roused
the romantic enthusiasm of Irving and Longfellow, were to him only
relics of barbarism. He went to Europe, he said, to see two men,
and he found them in Wordsworth and Carlyle. His friendship with
the latter and the letters which passed between "the sage of
Chelsea" and "the sage of Concord" (as collected and published by
Charles Eliot Norton in his Correspondence of Carlyle and
Emerson) are the most interesting result of his pilgrimage.
The Lecturer
On his return he settled in the village of Concord, which was to be
his home for the remainder of his long life. He began to lecture,
and so well was the "Lyceum" established at that time that he was
soon known throughout the country. For forty years this lecturing
continued, and the strange thing about it is that in all that time
he hardly met one audience that understood him or that carried away
any definite idea of what he had talked about. Something noble in
the man seemed to attract people; as Lowell said, they did not go
to hear what Emerson said but to hear Emerson.
The Writer
Meanwhile he was writing prose and poetry. His literary work began
in college and consisted largely in recording such thoughts or
quotations as seemed worthy of preservation. In his private
Journal (now published in several volumes) may be found
practically everything he put into the formal works which he sent
forth from Concord. These had at first a very small circle of
readers; but the circle widened steadily, and the phenomenon is
more remarkable in view of the fact that the author avoided
publicity and had no ambition for success. He lived contentedly in
a country village; he cultivated his garden and his neighbors; he
spent long hours alone with nature; he wrote the thoughts that came
to him and sent them to make their own way in the world, while he
himself remained, as he said, "far from fame behind the birch
trees."
The last years of his life were as the twilight of a perfect day.
His mental powers failed slowly; he seemed to drift out of the
present world into another of pure memories; even his friends
became spiritualized, lost the appearance of earth and assumed
their eternal semblance. When he stood beside the coffin of
Longfellow, looking intently into the poet's face, he was heard to
murmur, "A sweet, a gracious personality, but I have forgotten his
name." To the inevitable changes (the last came in 1882) he adapted
himself with the same serenity which marked his whole life. He even
smiled as he read the closing lines of his "Terminus":
As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
"Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed."
Emerson's Poetry
There is a ruggedness in Emerson's verse which attracts
some readers while it repels others by its unmelodious rhythm. It may help
us to measure that verse if we recall the author's criticism thereof. In
1839 he wrote:
"I am naturally keenly susceptible to the pleasures of rhythm, and
cannot believe but one day I shall attain to that splendid dialect,
so ardent is my wish; and these wishes, I suppose, are ever only
the buds of power; but up to this hour I have never had a true
success in such attempts."
One must be lenient with a poet who confesses that he cannot attain the
"splendid dialect," especially so since we are inclined to agree with him.
In the following passage from "Each and All" we may discover the reason for
his lack of success:
Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home in his nest at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky:
He sang to my ear; they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.
Our first criticism is that the poem contains both fine and faulty lines,
and that the total impression is an excellent one. Next, we note that the
verse is labored; for Emerson was not a natural singer, like Whittier, and
was hampered by his tendency to think too much instead of giving free
expression to his emotion. [Footnote: Most good poems are characterized by
both thought and feeling, and by a perfection of form that indicates
artistic workmanship. With Emerson the thought is the main thing; feeling
or emotion is subordinate or lacking, and he seldom has the patience to
work over his thought until it assumes beautiful or perfect expression.]
Finally, he is didactic; that is, he is teaching the lesson that you must
not judge a thing by itself, as if it had no history or connections, but
must consider it in its environment, as a part of its own world.
As in "Each and All" so in most of his verse Emerson is too much of a
teacher or moralist to be a poet. In "The Rhodora," one of his most perfect
poems, he proclaims that "Beauty is its own excuse for being"; but
straightway he forgets the word and devotes his verse not to beauty but to
some ethical lesson. Very rarely does he break away from this unpoetic
habit, as when he interrupts the moralizing of his "World Soul" to write a
lyric that we welcome for its own sake:
Spring still makes spring in the mind
When sixty years are told;
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
And we are never old.
Over the winter glaciers
I see the summer glow,
And through the wide-piled snowdrift
The warm rosebuds below.
Typical Poems
The most readable of Emerson's poems are those in which he reflects his
impressions of nature, such as "Seashore," "The Humble-Bee," "The
Snow-Storm," "Days," "Fable," "Forbearance," "The Titmouse" and
"Wood-Notes." In another class are his philosophical poems devoted to
transcendental doctrines. The beginner will do well to skip these, since
they are more of a puzzle than a source of pleasure. In a third class are
poems of more personal interest, such as the noble "Threnody," a poem of
grief written after the death of Emerson's little boy; "Good-Bye," in which
the poet bids farewell to fame as he hies him to the country; "To Ellen,"
which half reveals his love story; "Written in Rome," which speaks of the
society he found in solitude; and the "Concord Hymn," written at the
dedication of Battle Monument, with its striking opening lines:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
Prose Works
Perhaps the most typical of Emerson's prose works is his first
book, to which he gave the name Nature (1836). In this he records
not his impressions of bird or beast or flower, as his neighbor Thoreau was
doing in Walden, but rather his philosophy of the universe. "Nature
always wears the colors of the spirit"; "Every animal function, from the
sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and
wrong, and echo the ten commandments"; "The foundations of man are not in
matter but in spirit, and the element of spirit is eternity,"--scores of
such expressions indicate that Emerson deals with the soul of things, not
with their outward appearance. Does a flower appeal to him? Its scientific
name and classification are of no consequence; like Wordsworth, he would
understand what thought of God the flower speaks. To him nature is a mirror
in which the Almighty reflects his thought; again it is a parable, a little
story written in trees or hills or stars; frequently it is a living
presence, speaking melodiously in winds or waters; and always it is an
inspiration to learn wisdom at first hand:
"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.
It writes biographies, histories, criticisms. The foregoing
generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we, through their
eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the
universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of
insight, and not of tradition?"
The last quotation might well be an introduction to Emerson's second work,
The American Scholar (1837), which was a plea for laying aside
European models and fronting life as free men in a new world. Holmes called
this work "our intellectual Declaration of Independence," and it was
followed by a succession of volumes--Essays, Representative
Men, Conduct of Life, Society and Solitude and several
others--all devoted to the same two doctrines of idealism and
individuality.
Representative Men
Among these prose works the reader must make his own selection. All are
worth reading; none is easy to read; even the best of them is better
appreciated in brief instalments, since few can follow Emerson long without
wearying. English Traits is a keen but kindly criticism of "our
cousins" overseas, which an American can read with more pleasure than an
Englishman. Representative Men is a series of essays on Plato,
Shakespeare, Napoleon and other world figures, which may well be read in
connection with Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship, since the two
books reflect the same subject from widely different angles. Carlyle was in
theory an aristocrat and a force-worshiper, Emerson a democrat and a
believer in ideals. One author would relate us to his heroes in the
attitude of slave to master, the other in the relation of brothers and
equals.
The Essays
Of the shorter prose works, collected in various volumes of Essays,
we shall name only a few in two main groups, which we may call the ideal
and the practical. In the first group are such typical works as "The
Over-Soul," "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws" and "History"; in the latter
are "Heroism," "Self-Reliance," "Literary Ethics" (an address to young
collegians), "Character" and "Manners."
It is difficult to criticize such writings, which have a daring originality
of thought and a springlike freshness of expression that set them apart
from all other essays ancient or modern. They are the most quotable, the
fittest to "point a moral or adorn a tale" that have ever appeared in our
literature; but they are also disjointed, oracular, hard to follow; and the
explanation is found in the manner of their production. When Emerson
projected a new lecture or essay he never thought his subject out or
ordered it from beginning to end. That would have been another man's way of
doing it. He collected from his notebooks such thoughts as seemed to bear
upon his subject, strung them together, and made an end when he had enough.
The connection or relation between his thoughts is always frail and often
invisible; some compare it with the thread which holds the pearls of a
necklace together; others quote with a smile the epigram of Goldwin Smith,
who said that he found an Emersonian essay about as coherent as a bag of
marbles. And that suggests a fair criticism of all Emerson's prose; namely,
that it is a series of expressions excellent in themselves but having so
little logical sequence that a paragraph from one essay may be placed at
the beginning, middle or end of any other, where it seems to be equally at
home.
The Doctrine of Emerson
Since we constantly hear of "idealism" in
connection with Emerson, let us understand the word if we can; or rather
the fact, for idealism is the most significant quality of humanity. The
term will be better understood if we place it beside "materialism," which
expresses an opposite view of life. The difference may be summarized in the
statement that the idealist is a man of spirit, or idea, in that he trusts
the evidence of the soul; while the materialist is a man of flesh, or
sense, in that he believes only what is evident to the senses. One judges
the world by himself; the other judges himself by the world.
To illustrate our meaning: the materialist, looking outward, sees that the
world is made up of force-driven matter, of gas, carbon and mineral; and he
says, "Even so am I made up." He studies an object, sees that it has its
appointed cycle of growth and decay, and concludes, "Even so do I appear
and vanish." To him the world is the only reality, and the world perishes,
and man is but a part of the world.
The Idealist
The idealist, looking first within, perceives that self-consciousness is
the great fact of life, and that consciousness expresses itself in words or
deeds; then he looks outward, and is aware of another Consciousness that
expresses itself in the lowly grass or in the stars of heaven. Looking
inward he finds that he is governed by ideas of truth, beauty, goodness and
duty; looking outward he everywhere finds evidence of truth and beauty and
moral law in the world. He sees, moreover, that while his body changes
constantly his self remains the same yesterday, to-day and forever; and
again his discovery is a guide to the outer world, with its seedtime and
harvest, which is but the symbol or garment of a Divine Self that abides
without shadow of change in a constantly changing universe. To him the only
reality is spirit, and spirit cannot be harmed by fire or flood; neither
can it die or be buried, for it is immortal and imperishable.
Such, in simple words, was the idealism of Emerson, an idealism that was
born in him and that governed him long before he became involved in
transcendentalism, with its scraps of borrowed Hindu philosophy. It gave
message or meaning to his first work, Nature, and to all the
subsequent essays or poems in which he pictured the world as a symbol or
visible expression of a spiritual reality. In other words, nature was to
Emerson the Book of the Lord, and the chief thing of interest was not the
book but the idea that was written therein.
The Individualist
Having read the universe and determined its spiritual quality, Emerson
turned his eyes on humanity. Presently he announced that a man's chief
glory is his individuality; that he is a free being, different from every
other; that his business is to obey his individual genius; that he should,
therefore, ignore the Past with its traditions, and learn directly "from
the Divine Soul which inspires all men." Having announced that doctrine, he
spent the rest of his life in illustrating or enlarging it; and the sum of
his teaching was, "Do not follow me or any other master; follow your own
spirit. Never mind what history says, or philosophy or tradition or the
saints and sages. The same inspiration which led the prophets is yours for
the taking, and you have your work to do as they had theirs. Revere your
own soul; trust your intuition; and whatever you find in your heart to do,
do it without doubt or fear, though all the world thunder in your ears that
you must do otherwise. As for the voice of authority, 'Let not a man quit
his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the anointed and honorable of
the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.'"
Such was Emerson's pet doctrine of individualism. It appeared with
startling vigor in The American Scholar at a time when our writers
were prone to imitate English poetry, German sentimentality or some other
imported product. It came also with good grace from one whose life was
noble, but it had a weak or dangerous or grotesque side that Emerson
overlooked. Thus, every crank or fanatic or rainbow-chaser is also an
individualist, and most of them believe as strongly as Emerson in the
Over-Soul. The only difference is that they do not have his sense or
integrity or humor to balance their individualism. While Emerson exalted
individual liberty he seemed to forget that America is a country devoted to
"liberty under law," and that at every period of her history she has had
need to emphasize the law rather than the liberty. Moreover, individualism
is a quality that takes care of itself, being finest in one who is least
conscious of his own importance; and to study any strongly individual
character, a Washington or a Lincoln for example, is to discover that he
strove to be true to his race and traditions as well as to himself. Hence
Emerson's doctrine, to live in the Present and have entire confidence in
yourself, needs to be supplemented by another: to revere the Past with its
immortal heroes, who by their labor and triumph have established some
truths that no sane man will ever question.
A New World Writer
There are other interesting qualities of Emerson, his splendid optimism,
for instance, which came partly from his spiritual view of the universe and
partly from his association with nature; for the writer who is in daily
contact with sunshine or rain and who trusts his soul's ideals of truth and
beauty has no place for pessimism or despair; even in moments of darkness
he looks upward and reads his lesson:
Teach me your mood, O patient stars,
Who climb each night the ancient sky,
Leaving on space no shade, no scars,
No trace of age, no fear to die!
Though he was and still is called a visionary, there is a practical quality
in his writing which is better than anything you will find in Poor
Richard's Almanac. Thus the burden of Franklin's teaching was the value
of time, a lesson which the sage of Concord illuminates as with celestial
light in his poem "Days," and to which he brings earth's candle in his
prose essay "Work and Days." [Footnote: The two works should be read in
connection as an interesting example of Emerson's use of prose and verse to
reflect the same idea. Holmes selects the same two works to illustrate the
essential difference between prose and poetry. See Holmes, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, p. 310.] Indeed, the more one reads Emerson the more is one
convinced that he is our typical New World writer, a rare genius who
combines the best qualities of Franklin and Edwards, having the practical
sense of the one and the spiritual insight of the other. [Footnote: In 1830
Channing published an essay, "National Literature," in which he said that
Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards were the only writers up to that
time who had worthily presented the American mind, with its practical and
ideal sides, to foreign readers.] With his idealism and individuality, his
imagination that soars to heaven but is equally at home on solid earth, his
sound judgment to balance his mysticism, his forceful style that runs from
epigram to sustained eloquence, his straight-fibered manhood in which
criticism finds nothing to pardon or regret,--with all these sterling
qualities he is one of the most representative writers that America has
ever produced.
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