The ancients entertained noble notions of the poet. He was an enthusiast
and a rhapsodist. His work was done in surprise and delight. And all
good epic poets were thought to compose, not by choice, but by
inspiration; and so, too, the good lyric poets drew, they tell us, “from
fountains flowing with nectar, and gathered flowers from the gardens and
glades of the Muses; they, like bees, being ever on the wing. For the
poet was a thing light-winged and sacred, unable to compose until he
became inspired, and the imagination was no longer under his control.
For as long as he was in complete possession of it, he was unable to
compose verses or to speak oracularly.” And hence all noble numbers were
credited by them, not to the poet whom they knew, but to the Power
working in and through him, and making him the most delighted of
auditors whenever he chanted his verses, because he did not conceive
them to be his. He was the Voice, the favored of the Nine. Hence the
value they set upon discipline as the means of poetic divination. The
poet, they conceived, must be most virtuous. It was essential to his
accomplishment that he be chaste, that he be gentle, that he be noble in
his generation, that his endowment be older than himself; that he
descend from a race of pure souls,—bring centuries of culture in his
descent among men, ideas of ages in his brain,—enabling him to conceive
by instinct, and speak his experiences unconsciously, as a child opens
his lips, in his most rapturous accents. Therefore, any pretence of
ownership in the gift was esteemed an impiety. For a prayer, a song, a
tender tone, a glance of the eye, all those magnetic attractions known
to friendship, had a like ancestry; were ours personally, primarily, as
we became worthy of being their organs.
Is it an egotism in us to claim for New England and for a contemporary
of ours parts and antecedents like these? or shall such endowments,
admirable always, and awakening enthusiasm, be the less prized when
represented in a countryman of ours, and when we have so frequently
partaken of the pleasure which his books, his lectures especially,
excite? I allude, of course, to Emerson. A rhapsodist by genius, and the
chief of his class, his utterances are ever a surprise as they are a
delight to his audiences; select though these are, and not all unworthy
of him.
Hear how Goethe describes him, where in his letters to Schiller, he
calls the rhapsodist—
“A wise man, who, in calm thoughtfulness, shows what has happened; his
discourse aiming less to excite than to calm his auditors, in order that
they shall listen to him with contentment and long. He apportions the
interest equally, because it is not in his power to balance a too lively
impression. He grasps backwards and forwards at pleasure. He is
followed, because he has only to do with the imagination, which of
itself produces images, and up to a certain degree, it is indifferent
what kind he calls up. He does not appear to his auditors, but recites,
as it were behind a curtain; so there is a total abstraction from
himself, and it seems to them as though they heard only the voice of the
Muses.”
See our Ion standing there,—his audience, his manuscript, before
him,—himself an auditor, as he reads, of the Genius sitting behind him,
and to whom he defers, eagerly catching the words,—the words,—as if the
accents were first reaching his ears too, and entrancing alike oracle
and auditor. We admire the stately sense, the splendor of diction, and
are surprised as we listen. Even his hesitancy between the delivery of
his periods, his perilous passages from paragraph to paragraph of
manuscript, we have almost learned to like, as if he were but sorting
his keys meanwhile for opening his cabinets; the spring of locks
following, himself seeming as eager as any of us to get sight of his
specimens, as they come forth from their proper drawers; and we wait
willingly till his gem is out glittering; admire the setting, too,
scarcely less than the jewel itself. The magic minstrel and speaker!
whose rhetoric, voiced as by organ-stops, delivers the sentiment from
his breast in cadences peculiar to himself; now hurling it forth on the
ear, echoing; then, as his mood and matter invite it, dying like
“Music of mild lutes
Or silver coated flutes,
Or the concealing winds that can convey
Never their tone to the rude ear of day.”
He works his miracles with it, as Hermes did, his voice conducting; the
sense alike to eye and ear by its lyrical movement and refraining
melody. So his compositions affect us, not as logic linked in
syllogisms, but as voluntaries rather, or preludes, in which one is not
tied to any design of air, but may vary his key or note at pleasure, as
if improvised without any particular scope of argument; each period,
each paragraph, being a perfect note in itself, however it may chance
chime with its accompaniments in the piece; as a waltz of wandering
stars, a dance of Hesperus with Orion. His rhetoric dazzles by circuits,
contrasts, antitheses; Imagination, as in all sprightly minds, being his
wand of power. He comes along his own paths, too, and always in his own
fashion. What though he build his piers downwards from the firmament to
the tumbling tides, and so throw his radiant span across the fissures of
his argument, and himself pass over the frolic arches,—Ariel-wise,—is
the skill less admirable, the masonry less secure for its singularity?
So his books are best read as irregular writings, in which the sentiment
is, by his enthusiasm, transfused throughout the piece, telling on the
mind in cadences of a current under-song, and giving the impression of a
connected whole—which it seldom is,—such is the rhapsodist’s cunning in
its structure and delivery.
The highest compliment we can pay to the scholar is that of having
edified and instructed us, we know not how, unless by the pleasure his
words have given us. Conceive how much the Lyceum owes to his presence
and teachings; how great the debt of many to him for their hour’s
entertainment. His, if any one’s, let the institution pass into
history,—since his art, more than another’s, has clothed it with beauty,
and made it the place of popular resort, our purest organ of
intellectual entertainment for New England and the Western cities. And,
besides this, its immediate value to his auditors everywhere, it has
been serviceable in ways they least suspect; most of his works, having
had their first readings on its platform, were here fashioned and
polished in good part, like Plutarch’s Morals, to become the more
acceptable to readers of his published books.
And is not the omen auspicious, that just now, during these winter
evenings, at the opening of this victorious year, _his_ Sundays have
come round again; the metropolis, eager, as of old, to hear his words.
Does it matter what topic he touches? He adorns all with a severe
sententious beauty, a freshness and sanction next to that of godliness,
if not that in spirit and effect.
“The princely mind, that can
Teach man to keep a God in man;
And when wise poets would search out to see
Good men, behold them all in thee.”
’Tis near thirty years since his first book, entitled “Nature,” was
printed. Then followed volumes of Essays, Poems, Orations, Addresses and
during all the intervening period down to the present, he has read
briefs of his lectures through a wide range, from Canada to the Capitol;
in most of the Free States; in the large cities, East and West, before
large audiences; in the smallest towns and to the humblest companies.
Such has been his appeal to the mind of his countrymen, such his
acceptance by them. He has read lectures in the principal cities of
England also. A poet, speaking to individuals as few others can speak,
and to persons in their privileged moments, he must be heard as none
others are. The more personal he is, the more prevailing, if not the
more popular.
Because the poet, accosting the heart of man, speaks to him personally,
he is one with all mankind. And if he speak eloquent words, these words
must be cherished by mankind,—belonging as they do to the essence of
man’s personality, and, partaking of the qualities of his Creator, they
are of spiritual significance. While, in so far as he is individual
only,—unlike any other man,—his verses address special aptitudes in
separate persons; and he will belong, not to all times, but to one time
only, and will pass away,—except to those who delight in that special
manifestation of his gifts.
Now were Emerson less individual, according to our distinction, that is,
more personal and national,—as American as America,—then were his
influence so much the more diffusive, and he the Priest of the Faith
earnest hearts are seeking. Not that religion is wanting here in New
England; but that its seekers are, for the most part, too exclusive to
seek it independent of some human leader,—religion being a personal
oneness with the Person of Persons; a partaking of Him by putting off
the individualism which distracts and separates man from man. Hence
differing sects, persuasions, creeds, bibles, for separate peoples,
prevail all over the earth; religions, being still many, not one and
universal, not personal; similar only as yet in their differences. Still
the religious sentiment, in binding all souls to the Personal One, makes
the many partake of him in degrees lesser or greater. Thus far, the
poets in largest measure; mankind receiving through them its purest
revelations, they having been its inspired oracles and teachers from the
beginning till now. The Sacred Books,—are not these Poems in spirit, if
not in form? their authors inspired bards of divinity? Meant for all men
in all ages and states, they appeal forever to the springing faiths of
every age, and so are permanent and perennial, as the heart itself and
its everlasting hopes.
See how the Christian Theism, for instance, has held itself high above
most men’s heads till now; its tender truths above all cavil and debate
by their transcendent purity and ideal beauty! how these truths still
survive in all their freshness, keeping verdant the Founder’s memory!
and shall to distant generations; churches, peoples, persons, a widening
Christendom, flourishing or fading as they spring forth, or fall away
from this living stem.
“The Sun of Man, at last the son of woman,
Brother of all men, and the Prince of Peace,
Grafts, on the solemn valor of the Roman,
_Fresh Saxon service_, and the wit of Greece.”
Now, am I saying that our poet is inspiring this fresher Faith?
Certainly I mean to be so understood; he, the chiefest of its bards and
heralds. Not spoken always, ’tis implied, nevertheless, in his
teachings; defective, it is admitted, as colored by his temperament,
which trenches on Personal Theism not a little by the stress he lays on
Nature, on Fate; yet more nearly complementing the New England
Puritanism than aught we have, and coming nearest to satisfying the
aspirations of our time.
But it were the last thought of his, this conceiving himself the oracle
of any Faith, the leader of any school, any sect of religionists. His
genius is ethical, literary; he speaks to the moral sentiments through
the imagination, insinuating the virtues so, as poets and moralists of
his class are wont. The Sacred Class, the Priests, differ in this,—they
address the moral sentiment directly, thus enforcing the sanctions of
personal righteousness, and celebrating moral excellence in prophetic
strain.
’Tis everything to have a true believer in the world, dealing with men
and matters as if they were divine in idea and real in fact; meeting
persons and events at a glance directly, not at a million removes, and
so passing fair and fresh into life and literature, the delight and
ornament of the race.
Pure literatures are personal inspirations, springing fresh from the
Genius of a people. They are original; their first fruits being verses,
essays, tales, biographies—productions as often of obscure as of
illustrious persons. And such, so far as we have a literature, is ours.
Of the rest, how much is foreign both in substance and style, and might
have been produced elsewhere! His, I consider original and American; the
earliest, purest our country has produced,—best answering the needs of
the American mind. Consider how largely our letters have been enriched
by his contributions. Consider, too, the change his views have wrought
in our methods of thinking; how he has won over the bigot, the
unbeliever, at least to tolerance and moderation, if not to
acknowledgment, by his circumspection and candor of statement.
“His shining armor
A perfect charmer;
Even the hornets of divinity
Allow him a brief space,
And his thought has a place
Upon the well-bound library’s chaste shelves,
Where man of various wisdom rarely delves.”
Am I extravagant in believing that our people are more indebted to his
teachings than to any other person who has spoken or written on his
themes during the last twenty years,—are more indebted than they know,
becoming still more so? and that, as his thoughts pass into the brain of
the coming generation, it will be seen that we have had at least one
mind of home growth, if not independent of the old country? I consider
his genius the measure and present expansion of the American mind. And
it is plain that he is to be read and prized for years to come. Poet and
moralist, he has beauty and truth for all men’s edification and delight.
His works are studies. And any youth of free senses and fresh affections
shall be spared years of tedious toil,—in which wisdom and fair learning
are, for the most part, held at arm’s length, planet’s width, from his
grasp,—by graduating from this college. His books are surcharged with
vigorous thoughts, a sprightly wit. They abound in strong sense, happy
humor, keen criticisms, subtile insights, noble morals, clothed in a
chaste and manly diction, and fresh with the breath of health and
progress.
We characterize and class him with the moralists who surprise us with an
accidental wisdom, strokes of wit, felicities of phrase,—as Plutarch,
Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Antoninus, Saadi, Montaigne, Bacon, Sir Thomas
Browne, Goethe, Coleridge,—with whose delightful essays, notwithstanding
all the pleasure they give us, we still plead our disappointment at not
having been admitted to the closer intimacy which these loyal leaves had
with their owner’s mind before torn from his notebook; jealous, even, at
not having been taken into his confidence in the editing itself.
We read, never as if he were the dogmatist, but a fair-speaking mind,
frankly declaring his convictions, and committing these to our
consideration, hoping we may have thought like things ourselves;
oftenest, indeed, taking this for granted as he wrote. There is nothing
of the spirit of proselyting, but the delightful deference ever to our
free sense and right of opinion. He might take for his motto the
sentiment of Henry More, where, speaking of himself, he says: “Exquisite
disquisition begets diffidence; diffidence in knowledge, humility;
humility, good manners and meek conversation. For my part, I desire no
man to take anything I write or speak upon trust without canvassing, and
would be thought rather to propound than to assert what I have here or
elsewhere written or spoken. But continually to have expressed my
diffidence in the very tractates and colloquies themselves, had been
languid and ridiculous.”
Then he has chosen a proper time and manner for saying his good things;
has spoken to almost every great interest as it rose. Nor has he let the
good opportunities pass unheeded, or failed to make them for himself. He
has taken discretion along as his constant attendant and ally; has shown
how the gentlest temper ever deals the surest blows. His method is that
of the sun against his rival for the cloak, and so he is free from any
madness of those, who, forgetting the strength of the solar ray, go
blustering against men’s prejudices, as if the wearers would run at once
against these winds of opposition into their arms for shelter. What
higher praise can we bestow on any one than to say of him, that he
harbors another’s prejudices with a hospitality so cordial as to give
him, for the time, the sympathy next best to, if, indeed, it be not
edification in, charity itself? For what disturbs and distracts mankind
more than the uncivil manners that cleave man from man? Yet for his
amendment letters, love, Christianity, were all given!
How different is he in temper and manners from Carlyle, with whom he is
popularly associated! but who, for the most part, is the polemic, the
sophist, the scorner: whose books, opened anywhere, show him berating
the wrong he sees, but seeing, shows never the means of removing. Ever
the same melancholy advocacy of work to be done under the dread master;
force of stroke, the right to rule and be ruled, ever the dismal burden.
Doomsday books are all save his earliest—Rhadamanthus sitting and the
arbiter. He rides his Leviathan as fiercely as did his countryman,
Hobbes, and can be as truculent and abusive; the British Taurus, and a
mad one. Were he not thus possessed and fearfully in earnest, we should
take him for the harlequin he seems, nor see the sorrowing sadness
playing off its load in this grotesque mirth, this scornful irony of
his; he painting in spite of himself his portraits in the warmth of
admiration, the fire of wrath, and giving mythology for history; all the
while distorting the facts into grimace in his grim moods. Yet, what
breadth of perspective, strength of outline! the realism how appalling,
the egotism how enormous,—all history showing in the background of the
one figure, Carlyle. Burns, Goethe, Richter, Mirabeau, Luther, Cromwell,
Frederick,—all dashed from his flashing pen, heads of himself, alike in
their unlikeness, prodigiously individual, willful, some of them
monstrous; all Englishmen with their egregious prejudices and pride; no
patience, no repose in any. He still brandishes his truncheon through
his pages with an adroitness that renders it unsafe for any, save the
few that wield weapons of celestial temper, to do battle against this
Abaddon. Silenced he will not be; talking terribly against all talking
but his own; agreeing, disagreeing, all the same; he, the Jove,
permitting none, none to mount Olympus, till the god deigns silence and
invites. Curious to see him, his chin aloft, the pent thunders rolling,
lightnings darting from under the bold brows, words that tell of the
wail within, accents not meant for music, yet made lyrical in the
cadences of his Caledonian refrain; his mirth mad as Lear’s, his humor
as willful as the wind’s. Not himself is approachable by himself even.
And Emerson is the one only American deserving a moment’s consideration
in his eyes. Him he honors and owns the better, giving him the
precedence and the manners:
“Had wolves and lions seen but thee,
They must have paused to learn civility.”
Of Emerson’s books I am not here designing to speak critically, but of
his genius and personal influence rather. Yet, in passing, I may say,
that his book of “Traits” deserves to be honored as one in which
England, Old and New, may take honest pride, as being the liveliest
portraiture of British genius and accomplishments,—a book, like Tacitus,
to be quoted as a masterpiece of historical painting, and perpetuating
the New Englander’s fame with that of his race. ’Tis a victory of eyes
over hands, a triumph of ideas. Nor, in my judgment, has there been for
some time any criticism of a people so characteristic and complete. It
remains for him to do like justice to New England. Not a metaphysician,
and rightly discarding any claims to systematic thinking; a poet in
spirit, if not always in form; the consistent idealist, yet the realist
none the less, he has illustrated the learning and thought of former
times on the noblest themes, and come nearest of any to emancipating the
mind of his own time from the errors and dreams of past ages.
Why nibble longer there,
Where nothing fresh ye find,
Upon those rocks?
Lo! meadows green and fair;
Come pasture here your mind,
Ye bleating flocks.
There is a virtuous curiosity felt by readers of remarkable books to
learn something more of their author’s literary tastes, habits and
dispositions than these ordinarily furnish. Yet, to gratify this is a
task as difficult as delicate, requiring a diffidency akin to that with
which one would accost the author himself, and without which graceful
armor it were impertinent for a friend even to undertake it. We may
venture but a stroke or two here.
All men love the country who love mankind with a wholesome love, and
have poetry and company in them. Our essayist makes good this
preference. If city bred, he has been for the best part of his life a
villager and countryman. Only a traveller at times professionally, he
prefers home-keeping; is a student of the landscape; is no recluse
misanthrope, but a lover of his neighborhood, of mankind, of rugged
strength wherever found; liking plain persons, plain ways, plain
clothes; prefers earnest people, hates egotists, shuns publicity, likes
solitude, and knows its uses. He courts society as a spectacle not less
than a pleasure, and so carries off the spoils. Delighting in the
broadest views of men and things, he seeks all accessible displays of
both for draping his thoughts and works. And how is his page produced?
Is it imaginable that he conceives his piece as a whole, and then sits
down to execute his task at a heat? Is not this imaginable rather, and
the key to the comprehension of his works? Living for composition as few
authors can, and holding company, studies, sleep, exercise, affairs,
subservient to thought, his products are gathered as they ripen, and
stored in his commonplaces; the contents transcribed at intervals, and
classified. The order of ideas, of imagination, is observed in the
arrangement, not that of logical sequence. You may begin at the last
paragraph and read backwards. ’Tis Iris-built. Each period is
self-poised; there may be a chasm of years between the opening passage
and the last written, and there is endless time in the composition.
Jewels all! separate stars. You may have them in a galaxy, if you like,
or view them separate and apart. But every one knows that, if he take an
essay or verses, however the writer may have pleased himself with the
cunning workmanship, ’tis all cloud-fashioned, and there is no pathway
for any one else. Cross as you can, or not cross, it matters not; you
may climb or leap, move in circles, turn somersaults;
“In sympathetic sorrow sweep the ground,”
like his swallow in Merlin. Dissolving views, projects, vistas open wide
and far,—yet earth, sky, realities all, not illusions. Here is
substance, sod, sun; much fair weather in the seer as in his leaves. The
whole quarternion of the seasons, the sidereal year, has been poured
into these periods. Afternoon walks furnished the perspectives, rounded
and melodized them. These good things have all been talked and slept
over, meditated standing and sitting, read and polished in the
utterance, submitted to all various tests, and, so accepted, they pass
into print. Light fancies, dreams, moods, refrains, were set on foot,
and sent jaunting about the fields, along woodpaths, by Walden shores,
by hill and brook-sides,—to come home and claim their rank and honors
too in his pages. Composed of surrounding matters, populous with
thoughts, brisk with images, these books are wholesome, homelike, and
could have been written only in New England, in Concord, and by our
poet.
“Because I was content with these poor fields,
Low, open meads, slender and sluggish streams,
And found a home in haunts which others scorned,
The partial wood-gods overpaid my love,
And granted me the freedom of their state;
And in their secret senate have prevailed
With the dear, dangerous lords that rule our life,
Made moon and planets parties to their bond,
And through my rock-like, solitary wont
Shot million rays of thought and tenderness.
For me, in showers, in sweeping showers, the spring,
Visits the valley;—break away the clouds,—
I bathe in the morn’s soft and silvered air,
And loiter willing by yon loitering stream.
Sparrows far off, and nearer, April’s bird,
Blue-coated, flying before from tree to tree,
Courageous, sing a delicate overture
To lead the tardy concert of the year.
Onward and nearer rides the sun of May;
And wide around, the marriage of the plants
Is sweetly solemnized. Then flows amain
The surge of summer’s beauty; dell and crag,
Hollow and lake, hillside, and pine arcade,
Are touched with Genius. Yonder ragged cliff
Has thousand faces in a thousand hours.
... The gentle deities
Showed me the lore of colors and of sounds,
The innumerable tenements of beauty,
The miracle of generative force,
Far-reaching concords of astronomy
Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds;
Better, the linked purpose of the whole,
And, chiefest prize, found I true liberty
In the glad home plain-dealing nature gave.
The polite found me impolite; the great
Would mortify me, but in vain; for still
I am a willow of the wilderness,
Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts
My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk,
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds.
For thus the wood-gods murmured in my ear:
‘Dost love our manners? Canst thou silent lie?
Canst thou, thy pride forgot, like nature pass
Into the winter night’s extinguished mood?
Canst thou shine now, then darkle,
And being latent feel thyself no less?
As, when the all-worshipped moon attracts the eye,
The river, hill, stems, foliage, are obscure;
Yet envies none, none are unenviable.’”
I know of but one subtraction from the pleasure the reading of his
books—shall I say his conversation?—gives me, his pains to be impersonal
or discrete, as if he feared any the least intrusion of himself were an
offence offered to self-respect the courtesy due to intercourse and
authorship; thus depriving his page, his company, of attractions the
great masters of both knew how to insinuate into their text and talk,
without overstepping the bounds of social or literary decorum. What is
more delightful than personal magnetism? ’Tis the charm of good
fellowship as of good writing. To get and to give the largest measures
of satisfaction, to fill ourselves with the nectar of select
experiences, not without some intertinctures of egotism so charming in a
companion, is what we seek in books of the class of his, as in their
authors. We associate diffidence properly with learning, frankness with
fellowship, and owe a certain blushing reverence to both. For though our
companion be a bashful man,—and he is the worse if wanting this
grace,—we yet wish him to be an enthusiast behind all reserves, and
capable of abandonment sometimes in his books. I know how rare this
genial humor is, this frankness of the blood, and how surpassing is the
gift of good spirits, especially here in cold New England, where, for
the most part,
“Our virtues grow
Beneath our humors, and at seasons show.”
And yet, under our east winds of reserve, there hides an obscure
courtesy in the best natures, which neither temperament nor breeding can
spoil. Sometimes manners the most distant are friendly foils for holding
eager dispositions subject to the measure of right behavior. ’Tis not
every New Englander that dares venture upon the frankness, the plain
speaking, commended by the Greek poet.
“Caress me not with words, while far away
Thy heart is absent, and thy feelings stray;
But if thou love me with a faithful breast,
Be that pure love with zeal sincere exprest;
And if thou hate, the bold aversion show
With open face avowed, and known my foe.”
Fortunate the visitor who is admitted of a morning for the high
discourse, or permitted to join the poet in his afternoon walks to
Walden, the Cliffs, or elsewhere,—hours likely to be remembered, as
unlike any others in his calendar of experiences. I may say, for me they
have made ideas possible, by hospitalities given to a fellowship so
enjoyable. Shall I describe them as sallies oftenest into the
cloud-lands, into scenes and intimacies ever new? none the less novel
nor remote than when first experienced; colloquies, in favored moments,
on themes, perchance
“Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute;”
nor yet
“In wand’ring mazes lost,”
as in Milton’s page;
But pathways plain through starry alcoves high,
Or thence descending to the level plains.
Interviews, however, bringing their trail of perplexing thoughts,
costing some days’ duties, several nights’ sleep oftentimes, to restore
one to his place and poise for customary employment; half a dozen
annually being full as many as the stoutest heads may well undertake
without detriment.
Certainly safer not to venture without the sure credentials, unless one
will have his pretensions pricked, his conceits reduced in their vague
dimensions.
“Fools have no means to meet
But by their feet.”
But to the modest, the ingenuous, the gifted, welcome! Nor can any
bearing be more poetic and polite than his to all such, to youth and
accomplished women especially. I may not intrude farther than to say,
that, beyond any I have known, his is a faith approaching to
superstition concerning admirable persons; the divinity of friendship
come down from childhood, and surviving yet in memory if not in
expectation; the rumor of excellence of any sort, being like the arrival
of a new gift to mankind, and he the first to proffer his recognition
and hope. His affection for conversation, for clubs, is a lively
intimation of the religion of fellowship. He, shall we say? if any, must
have taken the census of the admirable people of his time, numbering as
many among his friends, perhaps, as most living Americans; while he is
already recognized as the representative mind of his country, to whom
distinguished foreigners are especially commended on visiting us.
Extraordinary persons may be forgiven some querulousness about their
company, when we remember that ordinary people often complain of theirs.
Impossible for such to comprehend the scholar’s code of
civilities,—disposed as men are to hold all persons to their special
standard. Yet dedicated to high labors, so much the more strict is the
scholar with himself, as his hindrances are the less appreciable, and he
has, besides, his own moods to humor.
“Askest how long thou shalt stay,
Devastator of the day?”
“Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The Gods arrive.”
Companionableness comes by nature. We meet magically, and pass with
sounding manners; else we encounter repulses, strokes of fate;
temperament telling against temperament, precipitating us into vortices
from which the nimblest finds no escape. We pity the person who shows
himself unequal to such occasions; the scholar, for example, whose
intellect is so exacting, so precise, that he cannot meet his company
otherwise than critically; cannot descend through the senses or the
sentiments to that common level where intercourse is possible with men;
but we pity him the more, who, from caprice or confusion, can meet
through these only. Still worse the case of him who can meet men neither
as sentimentalist nor idealist, or, rather not at all in a human way.
Intellect interblends with sentiment in the companionable mind, and wit
with humor. We detain the flowing tide at the cost of lapsing out of
perception into memory, into the limbo of fools. Excellent people wonder
why they cannot meet and converse. They cannot,—no—their wits have ebbed
away, and left them helpless. Why, but because of hostile temperaments,
different states of animation? The personal magnetism finds no
conductor, when one is individual, and the other individual no less.
Individuals repel; persons meet; and only as one’s personality is
sufficiently overpowering to dissolve the other’s individualism, can the
parties flow together and become one. But individuals have no power of
this sort. They are two, not one, perhaps many. Prisoned within
themselves by reason of their egotism, like animals, they stand aloof;
are separate even when they touch; are solitary in any company, having
no company in themselves. But the free personal mind meets all, is
apprehended by all; by the least cultivated, the most gifted; magnetizes
all; is the spell-binder, the liberator of every one. We speak of
sympathies, antipathies, fascinations, fates, for this reason.
Here we have the key to literary composition, to eloquence, to
fellowship. Let us apply it, for the moment, to Emerson’s genius. We
forbear entering into the precincts of genesis, and complexions, wherein
sleep the secrets of character and manners. Eloquent in trope and
utterance when his vaulting intelligence frees itself for the instant,
yet see his loaded eye, his volleyed period; jets of wit, sallies of
sense, breaks, inconsequences, all betraying the pent personality from
which his rare accomplishments have not yet liberated his gifts, nor
given him unreservedly to the Muse and mankind.
Take his own account of the matter.
“When I was born,
From all the seas of strength Fate filled a chalice,
Saying: ‘This be thy portion, child: this chalice,
Less than a lily’s, thou shalt daily draw
From my great arteries,—not less nor more.’
All substances the cunning chemist, Time,
Melts down into the liquor of my life,—
Friends, foes, joys, fortunes, beauty and disgust;
And whether I am angry or content,
Indebted or insulted, loved or hurt,
All he distils into sidereal wine,
And brims my little cup, heedless, alas!
Of all he sheds, how little it will hold,
How much runs over on the desert sands.
If a new Muse draw me with splendid ray,
And I uplift myself into its heaven,
The needs of the first sight absorb my blood;
And all the following hours of the day
Drag a ridiculous age.
To-day, when friends approach, and every hour
Brings book, or star-bright scroll of Genius,
The little cup will hold not a bead more,
And all the costly liquor runs to waste;
Nor gives the jealous lord one diamond drop
So to be husbanded for poorer days.
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Why need I galleries, when a pupil’s draught,
After the master’s sketch, fills and o’erfills
My apprehension? Why seek Italy,
Who cannot circumnavigate the sea
Of thoughts and things at home, but still adjourn
The nearest matter for a thousand days?”
Plutarch tells us that of old they were wont to call men Φῶτα, which
imports light, not only for the vehement desire man has to know, but to
communicate also. And the Platonists fancied that the gods, being above
men, had something whereof man did not partake, pure intellect and
knowledge, and thus kept on their way quietly. The beasts, being below
men, had something whereof man had less, sense and growth, so they lived
quietly in their way. While man had something in him whereof neither
gods nor beasts had any trace, which gave him all the trouble, and made
all the confusion in the world,—and that was egotism and opinion.
A finer discrimination of gifts might show that Genius ranges through
this threefold dominion, partaking in turn of each essence and degree.
Was our poet planted so fast in intellect, so firmly rooted in the mind,
so dazzled with light, yet so cleft withal by duplicity of gifts, that,
thus forced to traverse the mid-world of contrast and contrariety, he
was ever glancing forth from his coverts at life as reflected through
his dividing prism,—resident never long in the tracts he surveyed, yet
their persistent Muse nevertheless? And so, housed in the Mind, and
thence sallying forth in quest of his game, whether of persons or
things, he was the Mercury, the merchantman of ideas to his century. Nor
was he left alone in life and thinking. Beside him stood his
townsman,[1] whose sylvan intelligence, fast rooted in sense and Nature,
was yet armed with a sagacity, a subtlety and strength, that penetrated
while divining the essences of the creatures and things he studied, and
of which he seemed both Atlas and Head.
Footnote 1:
Thoreau.
Forcible protestants against the materialism of their own, as of
preceding times, these masterly Idealists substantiated beyond all
question their right to the empires they swayed,—the rich estates of an
original genius.
[Illustration: EMERSON’S SUMMER HOUSE.]
[Illustration: THE SUMMER SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY, CONCORD, MASS.]