I
A friend of mine, one of the Elder Bookmen of Harvard, told me some
twenty years ago that he had only once seen Ralph Waldo Emerson vexed out
of his transcendental tranquillity and almost Olympian calm. It was a
Sunday afternoon in Concord, and the philosopher had been drawn from his
study by an unwonted noise in the house. On the back porch he found his
own offspring and some children of the neighbours engaged in a romping,
boisterous game. With visible anger he stopped it, saying, “Even if you
have no reverence for the day, you ought to have enough sense and manners
to respect the traditions of your forefathers.”
Emerson’s puritanism was in the blood. Seven of his ancestors were
ministers of New England churches of the early type. Among them was
Peter Bulkley, who left his comfortable parish in Bedfordshire, England,
to become the pastor of “the church in the wilderness” at Concord,
Massachusetts; Father Samuel Moody of Agamenticus, Maine, who was such a
zealous reformer that he pursued wayward sinners even into the alehouse
to reprove them; Joseph Emerson of Malden, a “heroic scholar,” who prayed
every night that no descendant of his might ever be rich; and William
Emerson, the patriot preacher, who died while serving in the army of the
Revolution. These were verily “soldiers of the Lord,” and from them and
women of like stamina and mettle, Emerson inherited the best of puritan
qualities: independence, sobriety, fearless loyalty to conscience,
strenuous and militant virtue.
But he had also a super-gift which was not theirs. That which made him
different from them, gave him a larger and more beautiful vision of the
world, led him into ways of thinking and speaking which to them would
have seemed strange and perilous, (though in conduct he followed the
strait and narrow path,)—in short, that which made him what he was in
himself and to countless other men, a seer, an inspirer, a singer of
new light and courage and joy, was the gift of poetic imagination and
interpretation. He was a puritan _plus_ poetry.
Graduating from Harvard he began life as a teacher in a Boston school
and afterwards the minister of a Boston church. But there was something
in his temperament which unfitted him for the service of institutions.
He was a servant of ideas. To do his best work he needed to feel himself
entirely independent of everything except allegiance to the truth as
God gave him to see it from day to day. The scholastic routine of a
Female Academy irked him. The social distinctions and rivalries of
city life appeared to him both insincere and tiresome. Even the mild
formulas and regulations of a Unitarian church seemed to hamper him. He
was a come-outer; he wished to think for himself, to proclaim his own
visions, to act and speak only from the inward impulse, though always
with an eye to the good of others. So he left his parish in Boston and
became a preacher at large to “these United States.” His pulpit was the
lecture-platform; his little books of prose and verse carried his words
to a still larger audience; no man in America during his life had a more
extended or a deeper influence; he became famous both as an orator and as
a writer; but in fact he was always preaching. As Lamb said to Coleridge,
“I never heard you do anything else.”
The central word of all his discourse is Self-reliance,—be yourself,
trust yourself, and fear not! But in order to interpret this rightly one
must have at least an inkling of his philosophy, which was profoundly
religious and essentially poetical. He was a mystic, an intuitional
thinker. He believed that the whole universe of visible things is only
a kind of garment which covers the real world of invisible ideas and
laws and principles. He believed also that each man, having a share
in the Divine Reason which is the source of all things, may have a
direct knowledge of truth through his own innate ideas and intuitive
perceptions. Emerson wrote in his diary, “The highest revelation is that
God is in every man.”
This way of thinking is called transcendentalism, because it overleaps
logic and scientific reasoning. It is easy to see how such a philosophy
might lead unbalanced persons into wild and queer and absurd views and
practices. And so it did when it struck the neighbourhood of Boston in
the second quarter of the 19th Century, and began to spread from that
sacred centre.
But with these vagaries Emerson had little sympathy. His mysticism
was strongly tinctured with common sense, (which also is of divine
origin,) and his orderly nature recoiled from eccentric and irregular
ways. Although for a time he belonged to the “Transcendental Club,” he
frequently said that he would not be called a transcendentalist, and
at times he made fun, in a mild and friendly spirit, of the extreme
followers of that doctrine. He held as strongly as any one that the
Divine light of reason in each man is the guide to truth; but he held it
with the important reservation that when this inner light really shines,
free from passion and prejudice, it will never lead a man away from
good judgment and the moral law. All through his life he navigated the
transcendental sea safely, piloted by a puritan conscience, warned off
the rocks by a keen sense of humour, and kept from capsizing by a solid
ballast of New England prudence.
He was in effect one of the most respected, sagacious, prosperous and
virtuous villagers of Concord. Some slight departures from common custom
he tranquilly tested and as tranquilly abandoned. He tried vegetarianism
for a while, but gave it up when he found that it did him no good. He
attempted to introduce domestic democracy by having the servants sit
at table with the rest of the household, but was readily induced to
abandon the experiment by the protest of his two sensible hired girls
against such an inconvenient arrangement. He began to practise a theory
that manual labour should form part of the scholar’s life, but was
checked by the personal discovery that hard work in the garden meant
poor work in the study. “The writer shall not dig,” was his conclusion.
Intellectual freedom was what he chiefly desired; and this he found could
best be attained in an inconspicuous manner of living and dressing,
not noticeably different from that of the average college professor or
country minister.
[Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
_From a photograph by Black, Boston._]
Here you see the man “in his habit as he lived,” (and as thousands
of lecture-audiences saw him,) pictured in the old photograph which
illustrates this chapter. Here is the familiar _décor_ of the
photographer’s studio: the curtain draped with a cord and tassel,
the muslin screen background, and probably that hidden instrument of
torture, the “head-rest,” behind the tall, posed figure. Here are the
solemn “swallow-tail coat,” the conventional cravat, and the black satin
waistcoat. Yet even this antique “carte de visite,” it seems to me,
suggests something more and greater,—the imperturbable, kindly presence,
the noble face, the angelic look, the serene manner, the penetrating
and revealing quality of the man who set out to be “a friend to all who
wished to live in the spirit.”
Whatever the titles of his lectures,—_Man the Reformer_, _The Method
of Nature_, _The Conduct of Life_, _Fate_, _Compensation_, _Prudence_,
_The Present Age_, _Society and Solitude_,—his main theme is always the
same, “namely the infinitude of the private man.” But this private man
of Emerson’s, mark you, is linked by invisible ties to all Nature and
carries in his breast a spark of the undying fire which is of God. Hence
he is at his best when he feels not only his personal _unity_ but also
his universal _community_, when he relies on himself and at the same time
cries
“I yield myself to the perfect whole.”
This kind of independence is the truest form of obedience.
The charm of Emerson’s way of presenting his thought comes from the
spirit of poetry in the man. He does not argue, nor threaten, nor often
exhort; he reveals what he has seen or heard, for you to make what you
will of it. He relies less on syllogisms than on imagery, symbols,
metaphors. His utterance is as inspirational as the ancient oracle of
Delphi, but he shuns the contortions of the priestess at that shrine.
The clearness and symmetry of his sentences, the modulations of his
thrilling voice, the radiance of his fine features and his understanding
smile, even his slight hesitations and pauses over his manuscript as
he read, lent a singular attraction to his speech. Those who were
mistrustful of his views on theology and the church, listened to him
with delight when he poetized on art, politics, literature, human
society and the natural world. To the finest men and women of America
in the mid-Victorian epoch he was the lecturer _par excellence_, the
intellectual awakener and liberator, the messenger calling them to break
away from dull, thoughtless, formal ways of doing things, and live freely
in harmony with the laws of God and their own spirit. They heard him
gladly.
I wonder how he would fare to-day, when lecturers, male or female, have
to make a loud noise to get a hearing.