Many years ago the Easy Chair used to hear Ralph Waldo Emerson
lecture. Perhaps it was in the small Sunday-school room under a
country meeting-house, on sparkling winter nights, when all the
neighborhood came stamping and chattering to the door in hood and
muffler, or ringing in from a few miles away, buried under
buffalo-skins. The little, low room was dimly lighted with oil-lamps,
and the boys clumped about the stoves in their cowhide boots, and
laughed and buzzed and ate apples and peanuts and giggled, and grew
suddenly solemn when the grave men and women looked at them. At the
desk stood the lecturer and read his manuscript, and all but the boys
sat silent and inthralled by the musical spell.
Some of the hearers remembered the speaker as a boy, as a young man.
Some wondered what he was talking about. Some thought him very queer.
All laughed at the delightful humor or the illustrative anecdote that
sparkled for a moment upon the surface of his talk; and some sat
inspired with unknown resolves, soaring upon lofty hopes as they
heard. A nobler life, a better manhood, a purer purpose wooed every
listening soul. It was not argument, nor description, nor appeal. It
was wit and wisdom, and hard sense and poetry, and scholarship and
music. And when the words were spoken and the lecturer sat down, the
Easy Chair sat still and heard the rich cadences lingering in the air,
as the young priest's heart throbs with the long vibrations when the
organist is gone.
The same speaker had been heard a few years previously in the Masonic
Temple in Boston. It was the fashion among the gay to call him
transcendental. Grave parents were quoted as saying, "I don't go to
hear Mr. Emerson; I don't understand him. But my daughters do." Then
came a volume containing the discourses. They were called _Essays_.
Has our literature produced any wiser book?
As the lyceum or lecture system grew, the philosopher whom "my
daughters" understood was called to speak. A simplicity of manner that
could be called rustic if it were not of a shy, scholarly elegance;
perfect composure, clear, clean, crisp sentences; maxims as full of
glittering truth as a winter night of stars; an incessant spray of
fine fancies like the November shower of meteors; and the same
intellectual and moral exaltation, expansion, and aspiration, were the
characteristics of all his lectures.
He was never exactly popular, but always gave a tone and flavor to the
whole lyceum course, as the lump of ambergris flavors the Sultan's
cups of coffee for a year. "We can have him once in three or four
seasons," said the committees. But really they had him all the time
without knowing it. He was the philosopher Proteus, and he spoke
through all the more popular mouths. The speakers were acceptable
because they were liberal, and he was the great liberalizer. They
were, and they are, the middle-men between him and the public. They
watered the nectar, and made it easy to drink.
The Easy Chair heard from time to time of Proteus on the platform--how
he was more and more eccentric--how he could not be understood--how
abrupt his manner was. But the Chair did not believe that the flame
which had once been so pure could ever be dimmer, especially as he
recognized its soft lustre on every aspect of life around him.
After many years the opportunity to hear him came again; and although
the experiment was dangerous the Chair did not hesitate to try it. The
hall was pretty and not too large, and the audience was the best that
the country could furnish. Every one came solely to hear the speaker,
for it was one lecture in a course of his only. It was pleasant to
look around and mark the famous men and the accomplished women
gathering quietly in the same city where they used to gather to hear
him a quarter of a century before. How much the man who was presently
to speak had done for their lives, and their children's, and the
country! The power of one man is not easily traced in its channels and
details, but it is marked upon the whole. The word "transcendentalism"
has long passed by. It has not, perhaps, even yet gone out of fashion
to smile at wisdom as visionary, but this particular wise man had been
acquitted of being understood by my daughters, and there were rows of
"hardheads," "practical people," curious and interesting to
contemplate in the audience.
The tall figure entered at a side door, and sat down upon a sofa
behind the desk. Age seemed not to have touched him since the evenings
in the country Sunday-school room. As he stood at the desk the
posture, the figure, the movement, were all unchanged. There was the
same rapt introverted glance as he began in a low voice, and for an
hour the older tree shook off a ceaseless shower of riper, fairer
fruit. The topic was "Table-Talk, or Conversation;" and the lecture
was its own most perfect illustration. It was not a sermon, nor an
oration, nor an argument; it was the perfection of talk; the talk of a
poet, of a philosopher, of a scholar. Its wit was a rapier, smooth,
sharp, incisive, delicate, exquisite. The blade was pure as an icicle.
You would have sworn that the hilt was diamond. The criticism was
humane, lofty, wise, sparkling; the anecdote so choice and apt, and
trickling from so many sources, that we seemed to be hearing the best
things of the wittiest people. It was altogether delightful, and the
audience sat glowing with satisfaction. There was no rhetoric, no
gesture, no grimace, no dramatic familiarity and action; but the
manner was self-respectful and courteous to the audience, and the tone
supremely just and sincere. "He is easily king of us all," whispered
an orator.
Yet it was not oratory either in its substance or purpose. It was a
statement of what this wise man believed conversation ought to be. Its
inevitable influence--the moral of the lecture, dear Lady Flora--was a
purification of daily talk, and the general good influence of incisive
truth-telling. If we have ever had a greater preacher of that gospel
who is he?