Emerson’s books, prose and verse, remain with us and still live,—“the
precious life-blood of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up on
purpose to a life beyond life.” That they are companionable is proved by
the way all sorts of companionable people love them. I know a Pullman car
conductor who swears by Emerson. A young French Canadian woodsman, (who
is going to work his way through college,) told me the other day that
he liked Emerson’s essays better than any other English book that he had
read. Restive girls and boys of the “new generation” find something in
him which appeals to them; reading farmers of New England and the West
prefer him to Plato; even academic professors and politicians qualifying
for statesmen feel his stimulating and liberating influence, although
(or perhaps because) he sometimes says such hard things about them. I
guess that nothing yet written in America is likely to live longer than
Emerson’s best work.
His prose is better known and more admired than his verse, for several
reasons: first, because he took more pains to make the form of it as
perfect as he could; second, because it has a wider range and an easier
utterance; third, because it has more touches of wit and of familiarity
with the daily doings of men; and finally, because the majority of
readers probably prefer prose for silent reading, since the full charm of
good verse is revealed only in reading aloud.
But for all that, with Emerson, (as with a writer so different as
Matthew Arnold,) I find something in the poems which is not in the
essays,—a more pure and subtle essence of what is deepest in the man.
Poetry has a power of compression which is beyond prose. It says less and
suggests more.
Emerson wrote to the girl whom he afterwards married: “I am born a
poet,—of a low class without doubt, but a poet.... My singing, to be
sure, is very husky and is for the most part in prose. Still I am a poet
in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are
in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondence between
them.” This is penetrating self-criticism. That he was “of a low class”
as poet is more than doubtful,—an error of modesty. But that his singing
was often “husky” cannot be denied. He never troubled himself to learn
the art of song. The music of verse, in which Longfellow gained such
mastery, and Lowell and Whittier had such native gifts, is not often
found in Emerson’s poetry. His measures rarely flow with freedom and
harmony. They are alternately stiff and spasmodic, and the rhymes are
sometimes threadbare, sometimes eccentric. Many of his poems are so
condensed, so tight-packed with thought and information that they seem to
labour along like an overladen boat in a choppy sea. For example, this:
“The journeying atoms,
Primordial wholes,
Firmly draw, firmly drive,
By their animate poles.”
Or this:
“Puny man and scentless rose
Tormenting Pan to double the dose.”
But for these defects of form Emerson as poet makes ample amends by the
richness and accuracy of his observation of nature, by the vigorous
flight of his imagination, by the depth and at times the passionate
controlled intensity of his feeling. Of love-poetry he has none, except
the philosophical. Of narrative poetry he has practically none, unless
you count such brief, vivid touches as,—
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.”
But his descriptive pieces are of a rare beauty and charm, truthful in
broad outline and delicate detail, every flower and every bird in its
right colour and place. Walking with him you see and breathe New England
in the light of early morn, with the dew sparkling on the grass and all
the cosmic forces working underneath it. His reflective and symbolic
poems, like _Each and All_, _The Problem_, _Forerunners_, _Days_, _The
Sphinx_, are full of a searching and daring imaginative power. He has
also the genius of the perfect phrase.
“The frolic architecture of the snow.”
“Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone”
“The silent organ loudest chants
The Master’s requiem.”
“Music pours on mortals
Its beautiful disdain.”
“Over the winter glaciers,
I see the summer glow,
And through the wild-piled snowdrift
The warm rose-buds below.”
“I thenceforward and long after,
Listen for their harp-like laughter,
And carry in my heart, for days,
Peace that hallows rudest ways.”
His _Threnody_, written after the early death of his first-born son, has
always seemed to me one of the most moving elegies in the English tongue.
His patriotic poems, especially the _Concord Ode_, are unsurpassed as
brief, lyrical utterances of the spirit of America. In certain moods,
when the mind is in vigour and the windows of far vision open at a touch,
Emerson’s small volume of _Poems_ is a most companionable book.
* * * * *
As his prose sometimes intrudes into his verse and checks its flow, so
his poetry often runs over into his prose and illuminates it. What could
be more poetic in conception than this sentence from his first book,
_Nature_? “If the stars should appear but one night in a thousand years,
how would men believe and adore and preserve for many generations the
remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”
Emerson’s _Essays_ are a distillation of his lectures. His way of making
these was singular and all his own. It was his habit to keep note-books
in which he jotted down bits of observation about nature, stray thoughts
and comparisons, reflections on his reading, and striking phrases which
came to him in meditation or talk. Choosing a subject he planted it in
his mind and waited for ideas and illustrations to come to it, as birds
or insects to a flower. When a thought appeared he followed it, “as a
boy might hunt a butterfly,” and when it was captured he pinned it in
his “thought-book.” No doubt there were mental laws at work all the
time, giving guidance and direction to the process of composition which
seemed so irregular and haphazard. There is no lack of vital unity in
one of Emerson’s lectures or essays. It deals with a single subject and
never gets really out of sight of the proposition with which it begins.
Yet it seldom gives a complete, all-round view of it. It is more like a
series of swift and vivid glimpses of the same object seen from different
stand-points, a collection of snap-shot pictures taken in the course of a
walk around some great mountain.
From the pages of his note-books he gathered the material for one of
his lectures, selecting and arranging it under some such title as Fate,
Genius, Beauty, Manners, Duty, The Anglo-Saxon, The Young American,
and giving it such form and order as he thought would be most effective
in delivery. If the lecture was often repeated, (as it usually was,)
the material was frequently rearranged, the pages were shifted, the
illustrations changed. Then, after it had served its purpose, the
material was again rearranged and published in a volume of _Essays_.
It is easy to trace in the essays the effects of this method of writing.
The material is drawn from a wide range of reading and observation.
Emerson is especially fond of poetry, philosophy and books of anecdote
and biography. He quotes from Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, George Herbert,
Wordsworth, Plutarch, Grimm, St. Simon, Swedenborg, Behmen the mystic,
Plato, and the religious books of the East. His illustrations come from
far and near. Now they are strange and remote, now homely and familiar.
The Zodiac of Denderah; the Savoyards who carved their pine-forests into
toys; the _lustrum_ of silence which Pythagoras made his disciples keep;
Napoleon on the _Bellerophon_ watching the drill of the English soldiers;
the Egyptian legend that every man has two pair of eyes; Empedocles
and his shoe; the flat strata of the earth; a soft mushroom pushing up
through the hard ground;—all these allusions and a hundred more are found
in the same volume. On his pages, close beside the Parthenon, St. Paul’s,
the Sphinx, Ætna and Vesuvius, you will read of the White Mountains,
Monadnock, Katahdin, the pickerel-weed in bloom, the wild geese honking
across the sky, the chickadee singing in the face of winter, the Boston
State-house, Wall Street, cotton-mills, railroads, Quincy granite, and
so forth. Nothing is too far away to seem real to him, nothing too near
to seem interesting and valuable. There is an abundance, sometimes a
superabundance, of material in his essays, not always well-assorted, but
all vivid and suggestive.
The structure of the essay, the way of putting the material together,
does not follow any fixed rule or system. Yet in most cases it has a
well-considered and suitable form; it stands up; it is architecturally
built, though the art is concealed. I once amused myself trying to
analyze some of the essays, and found that many of the best ones have a
definite theme, like a text, and follow a regular plan of development,
with introduction, discussion, and conclusion. In some cases Emerson does
not disdain the “heads and horns” of the old-fashioned preacher, and
numbers his points “first,” “second,” “third,”—perhaps even “fourth.” But
this is rare. For the most part the essays do not seem to be constructed
but to grow. They are like conversations with the stupid things left out.
They turn aside from dull points, and omit connecting links, and follow
an attractive idea wherever it may lead. They seldom exhaust a subject,
but they usually illuminate it.
“The style is the man,” and in this case it is well suited to his
material and his method. It is brilliant, sparkling, gem-like. He has
great freedom in the choice of words, using them sometimes in odd ways
and not always correctly. Generally his diction is made up of terse,
pungent Anglo-Saxon phrases, but now and then he likes to bring in a
stately word of Greek or Latin origin, with a telling effect of contrast.
Most of his sentences are short and clear; it is only in the paragraph
that he is sometimes cloudy. Every essay is rich in epigrams. If one
reads too much of a style like this, the effect becomes fatiguing. You
miss the long, full, steady flow of sentences with varied cadence and
changing music.
Emerson’s river is almost all rapids. The flash and sparkle of phrase
after phrase tire me after a while. But for a short voyage nothing could
be more animated and stimulating. I read one essay at a time and rise
refreshed.
But the secret of Emerson’s power, (to change the figure,) is in the
wine which he offers, not the cup into which he pours it. His great
word,—“self-reliance,”—runs through all his writing and pervades all that
he says. At times it is put in an extreme form, and might lead, if rashly
followed, to intellectual conceit and folly. But it is balanced by other
words, no less potent,—self-criticism, modesty, consideration, prudence,
and reverence. He is an aspiring, hopeful teacher of youth; correcting
follies with a sharp wit; encouraging noble ambitions; making the face
of nature luminous with the glow of poetic imagination; and elevating
life with an ideal patriotism and a broad humanity. In all his writing
one feels the serene, lofty influence of a sane and chastened optimism,
the faith which holds, amid many appearances which are dark, mysterious
and terrifying, that Good is stronger than Evil and will triumph at last
everywhere.
Read what he says in the essay called _Compensation_: “There is no
penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of
being. In a virtuous action I properly _am_; in a virtuous act I add to
the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and
see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no
excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes
are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always
affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism.”
This is the note that brings a brave joy to the ear of youth. Old age
gladly listens to the same note in the deeper, quieter music of Emerson’s
poem, _Terminus_.
“As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
‘Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed.’”