SEEING AMERICA FIRST
The spirit of John Milton and John Bunyan crossed the Atlantic Ocean and
settled in Massachusetts, and the spirit of their enemies crossed the
Atlantic Ocean and settled in Virginia. They made two civilizations, and
these civilizations fought a civil war in the new world, just as they
had done in the old.
For the first two hundred years the colonists were busy killing Indians
and clearing the wilderness, so they had little time for art. They had
to break their ties with the old country; and just as we saw Voltaire
finding it easier to rebel in religion and politics than in the field of
culture, so in America we shall find that the Declaration of
Independence was signed a long time before any artist was bold enough to
revolt from British standards of taste. The first American writers were
concerned to handle American themes as they imagined Addison and Steele
and Burke and Dryden would have done.
The first writer to escape this British tradition did so, not by making
an American tradition, but by ascending into the universal and
transcendental. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Goethe and Swedenborg and Plato
and the Hindus, and became a Yankee mystic and democratic saint.
He was the son of a Unitarian clergyman, and followed in his father’s
footsteps. But early in life he realized that he no longer believed the
special doctrines which gave meaning to the communion service, so he
stood up in his church, and very quietly and simply told about his new
convictions, and went out into the world to earn his living as an
independent lecturer.
Puritanism was now two hundred years ancient, but the temper of it still
survived in New England; that is, people were painfully anxious to do
right, and looked up to teachers who had studied such problems. They
were willing to gather in meeting places, and be advised what they
should do, and to pay a modest stipend to the adviser. So this young
rebel was able to earn the simple living which sufficed everyone in
Concord in those days. He studied the world’s best literature in several
languages, he thought earnestly and wrote honestly, and was a model of
dignity, kindness, and wisdom.
His most popular lectures are known to us as “Emerson’s Essays.” I read
them in youth, and owe to them a tribute of gratitude. First of all,
they teach self-reliance, the most fundamental of the pioneer virtues.
It was by self-reliant men that New England was made; and in this
atmosphere of extreme individualism, it was impossible for a philosopher
to value the equally fundamental virtue of solidarity. Emerson has no
conception of a co-operative world, and believes that he has done his
duty to his fellows by courtesy and the speaking of the truth.
The essays are formless, consisting of scattered paragraphs and random
reflections. They are not always easy to interpret, because they soar
into regions of the absolute, where every statement is equally as untrue
as it is true. The bearings depend upon the application; so that we have
to know Emerson’s whole thought, and his life. Applying the highest
tests, we find his doctrine a little thin and his example a little tame.
He lived through stern times, and while his voice was always on the
right side, we feel that he might have been more prompt and more
vigorous. His optimism is beautiful, but a trifle lacking in content. We
want a man to put more reality into his writings, to show us how to deal
with the grim and hateful facts of life. Emerson makes a cryptic
statement--
I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakespeare’s strain.
We say: yes, perhaps; but most of us find it difficult to get the
Shakespeare strain to come out of us. Likewise, we do not know quite how
to reconcile Lord Christ with Caesar; nor can we always get Lord Christ
to agree with Shakespeare--watch the scoffing this book will cause among
the critics! You see how these mystic utterances are liable to be
misunderstood; and how it was possible for the transcendentalist
movement, which produced Emerson, to produce also the horrors of
“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.”
On the other hand, when Emerson deals with justice and liberty in New
England he can deliver as heavy a punch as Byron: for example, his
“Boston Hymn,” discussing the question of compensation for the
enfranchised slaves--
Pay ransom to the owner,
And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay him.
I have discussed these lines in “The Book of Life,” and suggested how
much cheaper it would have been to pay the owners than to fight the
Civil War. I overlooked the fact that this “Boston Hymn” was written
after the Civil War was on. Emerson, combining Yankee economy with wise
humanity, had all along been advocating the sensible course of freeing
the slaves by purchase.
We think of this Concord sage as a philosopher, and less often as a
poet. But he was a great poet; at his best he is among the immortals.
Not only is there wisdom and moral beauty in his verse; there is love of
nature, and there is passion. People sometimes died young in Concord,
just as they did in old England and in Greece, and poets poured their
sorrow into song. Emerson’s “Threnody,” written upon the death of his
five-year-old son, is lacking in all the classical paraphernalia of
Milton’s “Lycidas,” but it is full of such beauty and fervor as are
native to our country, and I see no reason why we Americans should
devote all our time to the worship of foreign gods. If our colleges must
teach the classics, to the exclusion of modern work, let them at least
teach our native classics, which are easier for us to understand.
I propose a motto for our youth: See Emerson first!