It is a singular fact, that Mr. Emerson is the most steadily attractive
lecturer in America. Into that somewhat cold-waterish region adventurers
of the sensational kind come down now and then with a splash, to become
disregarded King Logs before the next season. But Mr. Emerson always
draws. A lecturer now for something like a third of a century, one of
the pioneers of the lecturing system, the charm of his voice, his
manner, and his matter has never lost its power over his earlier
hearers, and continually winds new ones in its enchanting meshes. What
they do not fully understand they take on trust, and listen, saying to
themselves, as the old poet of Sir Philip Sidney,--
“A sweet, attractive, kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of gospel books.”
We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees are thought to be fond of
the spread-eagle style, and nothing can be more remote from that than
his. We are reckoned a practical folk, who would rather hear about a new
air-tight stove than about Plato; yet our favorite teacher’s
practicality is not in the least of the Poor Richard variety. If he have
any Buncombe constituency, it is that unrealized commonwealth of
philosophers which Plotinus proposed to establish; and if he were to
make an almanac, his directions to farmers would be something like
this: “OCTOBER: _Indian Summer_; now is the time to get in your early
Vedas.” What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he out-Yankees us all?
that his range includes us all? that he is equally at home with the
potato-disease and original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over-soul?
that, as we try all trades, so has he tried all cultures? and above all,
that his mysticism gives us a counterpoise to our super-practicality?
There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and
thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling
impulses,--none whom so many cannot abide. What does he mean? ask these
last. Where is his system? What is the use of it all? What the deuse
have we to do with Brahma? I do not propose to write an essay on Emerson
at this time. I will only say that one may find grandeur and consolation
in a starlit night without caring to ask what it means, save grandeur
and consolation; one may like Montaigne, as some ten generations before
us have done, without thinking him so systematic as some more eminently
tedious (or shall we say tediously eminent?) authors; one may think
roses as good in their way as cabbages, though the latter would make a
better show in the witness-box, if cross-examined as to their
usefulness; and as for Brahma, why, he can take care of himself, and
won’t bite us at any rate.
The bother with Mr. Emerson is, that, though he writes in prose, he is
essentially a poet. If you undertake to paraphrase what he says, and to
reduce it to words of one syllable for infant minds, you will make as
sad work of it as the good monk with his analysis of Homer in the
“Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum.” We look upon him as one of the few men of
genius whom our age has produced, and there needs no better proof of it
than his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds. Search for his
eloquence in his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you
will find that it has kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith of
language he belongs to a better age than ours, and might rub shoulders
with Fuller and Browne,--though he does use that abominable word
_reliable_. His eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is
like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a
choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather himself. A diction at once so
rich and so homely as his I know not where to match in these days of
writing by the page; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold. The many cannot
miss his meaning, and only the few can find it. It is the open secret of
all true genius. It is wholesome to angle in those profound pools,
though one be rewarded with nothing more than the leap of a fish that
flashes his freckled side in the sun and as suddenly absconds in the
dark and dreamy waters again. There is keen excitement, though there be
no ponderable acquisition. If we carry nothing home in our baskets,
there is ample gain in dilated lungs and stimulated blood. What does he
mean, quotha? He means inspiring hints, a divining-rod to your deeper
nature. No doubt, Emerson, like all original men, has his peculiar
audience, and yet I know none that can hold a promiscuous crowd in
pleased attention so long as he. As in all original men, there is
something for every palate. “Would you know,” says Goethe, “the ripest
cherries? Ask the boys and the blackbirds.”
The announcement that such a pleasure as a new course of lectures by him
is coming, to people as old as I am, is something like those forebodings
of spring that prepare us every year for a familiar novelty, none the
less novel, when it arrives, because it is familiar. We know perfectly
well what we are to expect from Mr. Emerson, and yet what he says always
penetrates and stirs us, as is apt to be the case with genius, in a very
unlooked-for fashion. Perhaps genius is one of the few things which we
gladly allow to repeat itself,--one of the few that multiply rather than
weaken the force of their impression by iteration? Perhaps some of us
hear more than the mere words, are moved by something deeper than the
thoughts? If it be so, we are quite right, for it is thirty years and
more of “plain living and high thinking” that speak to us in this
altogether unique lay-preacher. We have shared in the beneficence of
this varied culture, this fearless impartiality in criticism and
speculation, this masculine sincerity, this sweetness of nature which
rather stimulates than cloys, for a generation long. If ever there was a
standing testimonial to the cumulative power and value of Character,
(and we need it sadly in these days,) we have it in this gracious and
dignified presence. What an antiseptic is a pure life! At sixty-five (or
two years beyond his grand climacteric, as he would prefer to call it)
he has that privilege of soul which abolishes the calendar, and presents
him to us always the unwasted contemporary of his own prime. I do not
know if he seem old to his younger hearers, but we who have known him so
long wonder at the tenacity with which he maintains himself even in the
outposts of youth. I suppose it is not the Emerson of 1868 to whom we
listen. For us the whole life of the man is distilled in the clear drop
of every sentence, and behind each word we divine the force of a noble
character, the weight of a large capital of thinking and being. We do
not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson. Not that we
perceive any falling-off in anything that ever was essential to the
charm of Mr. Emerson’s peculiar style of thought or phrase. The first
lecture, to be sure, was more disjointed even than common. It was as if,
after vainly trying to get his paragraphs into sequence and order, he
had at last tried the desperate expedient of _shuffling_ them. It was
chaos come again, but it was a chaos full of shooting-stars, a jumble of
creative forces. The second lecture, on “Criticism and Poetry,” was
quite up to the level of old times, full of that power of
strangely-subtle association whose indirect approaches startle the mind
into almost painful attention, of those flashes of mutual understanding
between speaker and hearer that are gone ere one can say it lightens.
The vice of Emerson’s criticism seems to be, that while no man is so
sensitive to what is poetical, few men are less sensible than he of what
makes a poem. He values the solid meaning of thought above the subtler
meaning of style. He would prefer Donne, I suspect, to Spenser, and
sometimes mistakes the queer for the original.
To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life;
yet there are some of us who would hardly consent to be young again, if
it were at the cost of our recollection of Mr. Emerson’s first lectures
during the consulate of Van Buren. We used to walk in from the country
to the Masonic Temple (I think it was), through the crisp winter night,
and listen to that thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle
meaning and subtle music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of a
ship that came with unhoped-for food and rescue. Cynics might say what
they liked. Did our own imaginations transfigure dry remainder-biscuit
into ambrosia? At any rate, he brought us _life_, which, on the whole,
is no bad thing. Was it all transcendentalism? magic-lantern pictures on
mist? As you will. Those, then, were just what we wanted. But it was not
so. The delight and the benefit were that he put us in communication
with a larger style of thought, sharpened our wits with a more pungent
phrase, gave us ravishing glimpses of an ideal under the dry husk of our
New England; made us conscious of the supreme and everlasting
originality of whatever bit of soul might be in any of us; freed us, in
short, from the stocks of prose in which we had sat so long that we had
grown wellnigh contented in our cramps. And who that saw the audience
will ever forget it, where every one still capable of fire, or longing
to renew in them the half-forgotten sense of it, was gathered? Those
faces, young and old, agleam with pale intellectual light, eager with
pleased attention, flash upon me once more from the deep recesses of the
years with an exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, brimming with
love and hope, wholly vanished now in that other world we call the Past,
or peering doubtfully through the pensive gloaming of memory, your light
impoverishes these cheaper days! I hear again that rustle of sensation,
as they turned to exchange glances over some pithier thought, some
keener flash of that humor which always played about the horizon of his
mind like heat-lightning, and it seems now like the sad whisper of the
autumn leaves that are whirling around me. But would my picture be
complete if I forgot that ample and vegete countenance of Mr. R---- of
W----,--how, from its regular post at the corner of the front bench, it
turned in ruddy triumph to the profaner audience as if he were the
inexplicably appointed fugleman of appreciation? I was reminded of him
by those hearty cherubs in Titian’s Assumption that look at you as who
should say, “Did you ever see a Madonna like _that_? Did you ever behold
one hundred and fifty pounds of womanhood mount heavenward before like a
rocket?”
To some of us that long-past experience remains as the most marvellous
and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson awakened us, saved us from the
body of this death. It is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul
longs for, careless what breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in the
ballad of “Chevy Chase,” and we in Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but
called to us with assurance of victory. Did they say he was
disconnected? So were the stars, that seemed larger to our eyes, still
keen with that excitement, as we walked homeward with prouder stride
over the creaking snow. And were _they_ not knit together by a higher
logic than our mere sense could master? Were we enthusiasts? I hope and
believe we were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth something
for once in our lives. If asked what was left? what we carried home? we
should not have been careful for an answer. It would have been enough if
we had said that something beautiful had passed that way. Or we might
have asked in return what one brought away from a symphony of Beethoven?
Enough that he had set that ferment of wholesome discontent at work in
us. There is one, at least, of those old hearers, so many of whom are
now in the fruition of that intellectual beauty of which Emerson gave
them both the desire and the foretaste, who will always love to
repeat:--
“Che in la mente m’è fitta, ed or m’accuora
La cara e buona immagine paterna
Di voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora
M’insegnavaste come l’uom s’eterna.”
I am unconsciously thinking, as I write, of the third lecture of the
present course, in which Mr. Emerson gave some delightful reminiscences
of the intellectual influences in whose movement he had shared. It was
like hearing Goethe read some passages of the “ Wahrheit aus seinem
Leben.” Not that there was not a little _Dichtung_, too, here and there,
as the lecturer built up so lofty a pedestal under certain figures as to
lift them into a prominence of obscurity, and seem to masthead them
there. Everybody was asking his neighbor who this or that recondite
great man was, in the faint hope that somebody might once have heard of
him. There are those who call Mr. Emerson cold. Let them revise their
judgment in presence of this loyalty of his that can keep warm for half
a century, that never forgets a friendship, or fails to pay even a
fancied obligation to the uttermost farthing. This substantiation of
shadows was but incidental, and pleasantly characteristic of the man to
those who know and love him. The greater part of the lecture was devoted
to reminiscences of things substantial in themselves. He spoke of
Everett, fresh from Greece and Germany; of Channing; of the translations
of Margaret Fuller, Ripley, and Dwight; of the Dial and Brook Farm. To
what he said of the latter an undertone of good-humored irony gave
special zest. But what every one of his hearers felt was that the
protagonist in the drama was left out. The lecturer was no Æneas to
babble the _quorum magna pars fui_, and, as one of his listeners, I
cannot help wishing to say how each of them was commenting the story as
it went along, and filling up the necessary gaps in it from his own
private store of memories. His younger hearers could not know how much
they owed to the benign impersonality, the quiet scorn of everything
ignoble, the never-sated hunger of self-culture, that were personified
in the man before them. But the older knew how much the country’s
intellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus of his teaching and
example, how constantly he had kept burning the beacon of an ideal life
above our lower region of turmoil. To him more than to all other causes
together did the young martyrs of our civil war owe the sustaining
strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every record of
their lives. Those who are grateful to Mr. Emerson, as many of us are,
for what they feel to be most valuable in their culture, or perhaps I
should say their impulse, are grateful not so much for any direct
teachings of his as for that inspiring lift which only genius can give,
and without which all doctrine is chaff.
This was something like the _caret_ which some of us older boys wished
to fill up on the margin of the master’s lecture. Few men have been so
much to so many, and through so large a range of aptitudes and
temperaments, and this simply because all of us value manhood beyond any
or all other qualities of character. We may suspect in him, here and
there, a certain thinness and vagueness of quality, but let the waters
go over him as they list, this masculine fibre of his will keep its
lively color and its toughness of texture. I have heard some great
speakers and some accomplished orators, but never any that so moved and
persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertow in that rich baritone
of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deeper waters with
a drift we cannot and would not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is
a long-studied artist in these things) does the deliberate utterance,
that seems waiting for the fit word, appear to admit us partners in the
labor of thought and make us feel as if the glance of humor were a
sudden suggestion, as if the perfect phrase lying written there on the
desk were as unexpected to him as to us! In that closely-filed speech of
his at the Burns centenary dinner every word seemed to have just dropped
down to him from the clouds. He looked far away over the heads of his
hearers, with a vague kind of expectation, as into some private heaven
of invention; and the winged period came at last obedient to his spell.
“My dainty Ariel!” he seemed murmuring to himself as he cast down his
eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy of approval and caught another
sentence from the Sibylline leaves that lay before him ambushed behind a
dish of fruit and seen only by nearest neighbors. Every sentence brought
down the house, as I never saw one brought down before,--and it is not
so easy to hit Scotsmen with a sentiment that has no hint of native
brogue in it. I watched, for it was an interesting study, how the quick
sympathy ran flashing from face to face down the long tables, like an
electric spark thrilling as it went, and then exploded in a thunder of
plaudits. I watched till tables and faces vanished, for I, too, found
myself caught up in the common enthusiasm, and my excited fancy set me
under the _bema_ listening to him who fulmined over Greece. I can never
help applying to him what Ben Jonson said of Bacon: “There happened in
my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His
language was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more
pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in
what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own
graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without
loss. He commanded where he spoke.” Those who heard him while their
natures were yet plastic, and their mental nerves trembled under the
slightest breath of divine air, will never cease to feel and say:--
“Was never eye did see that face,
Was never ear did hear that tongue,
Was never mind did mind his grace,
That ever thought the travail long;
But eyes, and ears, and every thought,
Were with his sweet perfections caught.”