Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the courage, after this
experiment of Thoreau, to present the card Hawthorne had given me to
Emerson. I must have gone to him at once, however, for I cannot make out
any interval of time between my visit to the disciple and my visit to the
master. I think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to me, for I
have a vision of the fine old man standing tall on his threshold, with
the card in his hand, and looking from it to me with a vague serenity,
while I waited a moment on the door-step below him. He must then have
been about sixty, but I remember nothing of age in his aspect, though I
have called him an old man. His hair, I am sure, was still entirely
dark, and his face had a kind of marble youthfulness, chiselled to a
delicate intelligence by the highest and noblest thinking that any man
has done. There was a strange charm in Emerson’s eyes, which I felt then
and always, something like that I saw in Lincoln’s, but shyer, but
sweeter and less sad. His smile was the very sweetest I have ever
beheld, and the contour of the mask and the line of the profile were in
keeping with this incomparable sweetness of the mouth, at once grave and
quaint, though quaint is not quite the word for it either, but subtly,
not unkindly arch, which again is not the word.
It was his great fortune to have been mostly misunderstood, and to have
reached the dense intelligence of his fellow-men after a whole lifetime
of perfectly simple and lucid appeal, and his countenance expressed the
patience and forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time. It
would be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to the
popular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a
certain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible,
the byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused the
community somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer,
and talking face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse to
find as clear as they were wise; he was more and more read, by certain
persons, here and there; but we are still so far behind him in the reach
of his far-thinking that it need not be matter of wonder that twenty
years before his death he was the most misunderstood man in America. Yet
in that twilight where he dwelt he loomed large upon the imagination; the
minds that could not conceive him were still aware of his greatness. I
myself had not read much of him, but I knew the essays he was printing in
the Atlantic, and I knew certain of his poems, though by no means many;
yet I had this sense of him, that he was somehow, beyond and above my
ken, a presence of force and beauty and wisdom, uncompanioned in our
literature. He had lately stooped from his ethereal heights to take part
in the battle of humanity, and I suppose that if the truth were told he
was more to my young fervor because he had said that John Brown had made
the gallows glorious like the cross, than because he had uttered all
those truer and wiser things which will still a hundred years hence be
leading the thought of the world.
I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome, but I am aware of
sitting with him in his study or library, and of his presently speaking
of Hawthorne, whom I probably celebrated as I best could, and whom he
praised for his personal excellence, and for his fine qualities as a
neighbor. “But his last book,” he added, reflectively, “is a mere mush,”
and I perceived that this great man was no better equipped to judge an
artistic fiction than the groundlings who were then crying out upon the
indefinite close of the Marble Faun. Apparently he had read it, as they
had, for the story, but it seems to me now, if it did not seem to me
then, that as far as the problem of evil was involved, the book must
leave it where it found it. That is forever insoluble, and it was rather
with that than with his more or less shadowy people that the romancer was
concerned. Emerson had, in fact, a defective sense as to specific pieces
of literature; he praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place,
especially among the new things, and he failed to see the worth of much
that was fine and precious beside the line of his fancy.
He began to ask me about the West, and about some unknown man in
Michigan; who had been sending him poems, and whom he seemed to think
very promising, though he has not apparently kept his word to do great
things. I did not find what Emerson had to say of my section very
accurate or important, though it was kindly enough, and just enough as to
what the West ought to do in literature. He thought it a pity that a
literary periodical which had lately been started in Cincinnati should be
appealing to the East for contributions, instead of relying upon the
writers nearer home; and he listened with what patience he could to my
modest opinion that we had not the writers nearer home. I never was of
those Westerners who believed that the West was kept out of literature by
the jealousy of the East, and I tried to explain why we had not the men
to write that magazine full in Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan as
one who alone could do much to fill it worthily, and again I had to say
that I had never heard of him.
I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a notion that it did not
commend me, but happily at this moment Mr. Emerson was called to dinner,
and he asked me to come with him. After dinner we walked about in his
“pleached garden” a little, and then we came again into his library,
where I meant to linger only till I could fitly get away. He questioned
me about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I had
met, and when I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of
Mr. William Ellery Channing. I have known them since, and felt their
quality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but I
answered then truly that I knew them only from Poe’s criticisms: cruel
and spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying as I once did.
“Whose criticisms?” asked Emerson.
“Poe’s,” I said again.
“Oh,” he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from a far
search for my meaning, “you mean the jingle-man!”
I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I had
written the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been more
abashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a
characterization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with; though I
do not agree with the world about him, myself, in its admiration. At any
rate, it made an end of me for the time, and I remained as if already
absent, while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written in the
Atlantic Monthly. He had evidently read none of my contributions, for he
looked at them, in the bound volume of the magazine which he got down,
with the effect of being wholly strange to them, and then gravely affixed
my initials to each. He followed me to the door, still speaking of
poetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might
very well give a pleasant hour to it now and then.
A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give all time and all
eternity to poetry, and I should by no means have wished to find pleasure
in it; I should have thought that a proof of inferior quality in the
work; I should have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to pleasure. But if
Emerson thought from the glance he gave my verses that I had better not
lavish myself upon that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more
of me than I could have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he was
right. I was only too painfully aware of my shortcoming, but I felt that
it was shorter-coming than it need have been. I had somehow not
prospered in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and I came away
wondering in what sort I had gone wrong. I was not a forth-putting
youth, and I could not blame myself for anything in my approaches that
merited withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I must needs
blame myself for something, I fell upon the fact that in my confused
retreat from Emerson’s presence I had failed in a certain slight point of
ceremony, and I magnified this into an offence of capital importance. I
went home to my hotel, and passed the afternoon in pure misery. I had
moments of wild question when I debated whether it would be better to go
back and own my error, or whether it would be better to write him a note,
and try to set myself right in that way. But in the end I did neither,
and I have since survived my mortal shame some forty years or more. But
at the time it did not seem possible that I should live through the day
with it, and I thought that I ought at least to go and confess it to
Hawthorne, and let him disown the wretch who had so poorly repaid the
kindness of his introduction by such misbehavior. I did indeed walk down
by the Wayside, in the cool of the evening, and there I saw Hawthorne for
the last time. He was sitting on one of the timbers beside his cottage,
and smoking with an air of friendly calm. I had got on very well with
him, and I longed to go in, and tell him how ill I had got on with
Emerson; I believed that though he cast me off, he would understand me,
and would perhaps see some hope for me in another world, though there
could be none in this.
But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to any one but Fields,
to whom I unpacked my heart when I got back to Boston, and he asked me
about my adventures in Concord. By this time I could see it in a
humorous light, and I did not much mind his lying back in his chair and
laughing and laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it. He
perfectly conceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that I
could get only through sympathy with him. But I thought it a favorable
moment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly,
which I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myself
if not to the magazine. He seemed to think so too; he said that if the
place had not just been filled, I should certainly have had it; and it
was to his recollection of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose I
may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some four years later. He
was charmingly kind; he entered with the sweetest interest into the story
of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already.
But when I said very seriously that now I was tired of these fortuities,
and would like to be settled in something, he asked, with dancing eyes,
“Why, how old are you?”
“I am twenty-three,” I answered, and then the laughing fit took him
again.
“Well,” he said, “you begin young, out there!”
In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so very young, but
perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portraying
here a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was
morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, who
had met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was good
for him, though he might not have merited his pain any more than his joy,
I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at all sure that I
was not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to New
England.