Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, the celebrated essayist and philosopher,
was born in Boston. His father was a Unitarian minister, and the son,
after graduating at Harvard University, entered the ministry also, and
took charge of a Unitarian congregation in Boston. His peculiar ideas on
religious topics soon caused him to retire from the ministry, and he then
devoted himself to literature. As a lecturer, Emerson attained a wide
reputation, both in this country and in England, and he is considered as
one of the most independent and original thinkers of the age. His style is
brief and pithy, dazzling by its wit, but sometimes paradoxical. He wrote
a few poems, but they are not generally admired, being didactic in style,
bare, and obscure. Among his best known publications are his volume
"Nature," and his lectures, "The Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth
Century," "The Superlative in Manners and Literature," "English Character
and Manners," and "The Conduct of Life." In 1850 appeared "Representative
Men," embracing sketches of Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare,
Napoleon, and Goethe.
Such are the days,--the earth is the cup, the sky is the cover, of the
immense bounty of nature which is offered us for our daily aliment; but
what a force of illusion begins life with us, and attends us to the end!
We are coaxed, flattered, and duped, from morn to eve, from birth to
death; and where is the old eye that ever saw through the deception? The
Hindoos represent Maia, the illusory energy of Vishnu, as one of his
principal attributes. As if, in this gale of warring elements, which life
is, it was necessary to bind souls to human life as mariners in a tempest
lash themselves to the mast and bulwarks of a ship, and Nature employed
certain illusions as her ties and straps,--a rattle, a doll, an apple, for
a child; skates, a river, a boat, a horse, a gun, for the growing
boy;--and I will not begin to name those of the youth and adult, for they
are numberless. Seldom and slowly the mask falls, and the pupil is
permitted to see that all is one stuff, cooked and painted under many
counterfeit appearances. Hume's doctrine was that the circumstances vary,
the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the
sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl
equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the
debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.
This element of illusion lends all its force to hide the values of present
time. Who is he that does not always find himself doing something less
than his best task? "What are you doing?" "Oh, nothing; I have been doing
thus, or I shall do so or so, but now I am only--" Ah! poor dupe, will you
never slip out of the web of the master juggler?--never learn that, as
soon as the irrecoverable years have woven their blue glory between to-day
and us, these passing hours shall glitter and draw us, as the wildest
romance and the homes of beauty and poetry? How difficult to deal erect
with them! The events they bring, their trade, entertainments, and gossip,
their urgent work, all throw dust in the eyes and distract attention. He
is a strong man who can look them in the eye, see through this juggle,
feel their identity, and keep his own; who can know surely that one will
be like another to the end of the world, nor permit love, or death, or
politics, or money, war, or pleasure, to draw him from his task.
The world is always equal to itself, and every man in moments of deeper
thought is apprised that he is repeating the experiences of the people in
the streets of Thebes or Byzantium. An everlasting Now reigns in nature,
which hangs the same roses on our bushes which charmed the Roman and the
Chaldean in their hanging gardens. "To what end, then," he asks, "should I
study languages, and traverse countries, to learn so simple truths?"
History of ancient art, excavated cities, recovery of books and
inscriptions,--yes, the works were beautiful, and the history worth
knowing; and academies convene to settle the claims of the old schools.
What journeys and measurements,--Niebuhr and Muller and Layard,--to
identify the plain of Troy and Nimroud town! And your homage to Dante
costs you so much sailing; and to ascertain the discoverers of America
needs as much voyaging as the discovery cost. Poor child! that flexible
clay of which these old brothers molded their admirable symbols was not
Persian, nor Memphian, nor Teutonic, nor local at all, but was common lime
and silex and water, and sunlight, the heat of the blood, and the heaving
of the lungs; it was that clay which thou heldest but now in thy foolish
hands, and threwest away to go and seek in vain in sepulchers, mummy pits,
and old bookshops of Asia Minor, Egypt, and England. It was the deep
to-day which all men scorn; the rich poverty, which men hate; the
populous, all-loving solitude, which men quit for the tattle of towns. He
lurks, he hides,--he who is success, reality, joy, and power. One of the
illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man
has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
'T is the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. 'T is
the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide
away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor
exterior. In the Norse legend of our ancestors, Odin dwells in a fisher's
hut, and patches a boat. In the Hindoo legends, Hari dwells a peasant
among peasants. In the Greek legend, Apollo lodges with the shepherds of
Admetus; and Jove liked to rusticate among the poor Ethiopians. So, in our
history, Jesus is born in a barn, and his twelve peers are fishermen. 'T
is the very principle of science that Nature shows herself best in leasts;
't was the maxim of Aristotle and Lucretius; and, in modern times, of
Swedenborg and of Hahnemann. The order of changes in the egg determines
the age of fossil strata. So it was the rule of our poets, in the legends
of fairy lore, that the fairies largest in power were the least in size.
In the Christian graces, humility stands highest of all, in the form of
the Madonna; and in life, this is the secret of the wise. We owe to genius
always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing
us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies
and peddlers. In daily life, what distinguishes the master is the using
those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more
renowned, or what others have used well. "A general," said Bonaparte,
"always has troops enough, if he only knows how to employ those he has,
and bivouacs with them." Do not refuse the employment which the hour
brings you, for one more ambitious. The highest heaven of wisdom is alike
near from every point, and thou must find it, if at all, by methods native
to thyself alone.
NOTES.--The Brahmanic religion teaches a Trinity, of which Vishnu is the
savior of mankind.
Thebes, the ancient capital of Upper Egypt, was at its most flourishing
period about 1500 B. C. Byzantium was an important Greek city during the
second and third centuries B. C.
Niebuhr (b. 1776, d. 1831), Muller (b. 1797, d. 1840), and Layard (b.
1817, d. 1894), are celebrated archaeologists. The first two were Germans,
and the last an Englishman.