read in English in all parts of the world, and have been translated
into many languages. Thirty years ago I spent a long day in showing Don
Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil, some of the interesting things in the
laboratories and collections of Harvard University. He was the most
assiduous visitor that I ever conducted through the University
buildings, intelligently interested in a great variety of objects and
ideas. Late in the afternoon he suddenly said, with a fresh eagerness:
"Now I will visit the tomb of Channing." We drove to Mount Auburn, and
found the monument erected by the Federal Street Church. The Emperor
copied with his own hand George Ticknor's inscriptions on the stone, and
made me verify his copies. Then, with his great weight and height, he
leaped into the air, and snatched a leaf from the maple which overhung
the tomb. "I am going to put that leaf," he said, "into my best edition
of Channing. I have read all his published works,--some of them many
times over. He was a very great man." The Emperor of Brazil was a Roman
Catholic.
Channing's philanthropy was a legitimate outcome of his view of
religion. For him practical religion was character-building by the
individual human being. But character-building in any large group or
mass of human beings means social reform; therefore Channing was a
preacher and active promoter of social regeneration in this world. He
depicted the hideous evils and wrongs of intemperance, slavery, and war.
He advocated and supported every well-directed effort to improve public
education, the administration of charity, and the treatment of
criminals, and to lift up the laboring classes. He denounced the bitter
sectarian and partisan spirit of his day. He refused entire sympathy to
the abolitionists, because of the ferocity and violence of their
habitual language and the injustice of their indiscriminate attacks. He
distrusted money worship, wealth, and luxury.
These sentiments and actions grew straight out of his religious
conceptions, and were their legitimate fruit. All his social aspirations
and hopes were rooted in his fundamental conception of the fatherhood of
God, and its corollary the brotherhood of men. It was his lofty idea of
the infinite worth of human nature and of the inherent greatness of the
human soul, in contrast with the then prevailing doctrines of human
vileness and impotency, which made him resent with such indignation the
wrongs of slavery, intemperance, and war, and urge with such ardor every
effort to deliver men from poverty and ignorance, and to make them
gentler and juster to one another.
In no subject which he discussed does the close connection between
Channing's theology and his philanthropy appear more distinctly than in
education. He says in his remarks on education: ... "There is nothing on
earth so precious as the mind, soul, character of the child.... There
should be no economy in education. Money should never be weighed against
the soul of a child. It should be poured out like water for the child's
intellectual and moral life." It is more than two generations since
those sentences were written, and still the average public expenditure
on the education of a child in the United States is less than fifteen
dollars a year. Eastern Massachusetts is the community in the whole
world which gives most thought, time, and money to education, public
and endowed. Whence came this social wisdom? From Protestantism, from
Congregationalism, from the religious teachings of Channing and his
disciples. Listen to this sentence: "Benevolence is short-sighted
indeed, and must blame itself for failure, if it do not see in education
the chief interest of the human race."
It is impossible to join in this centennial celebration of the advent to
Boston of this religious pioneer and philanthropic leader without
perceiving that in certain respects the country has recently fallen away
from the moral standards he set up. Channing taught that no real good
can come through violence, injustice, greed, and the inculcation of
hatred and enmities, or of suspicions and contempts. He believed that
public well-being can be promoted only through public justice, freedom,
peace, and good will among men.
He never could have imagined that there would be an outburst in his
dear country, grown rich and strong, of such doctrines as that the might
of arms, possessions, or majorities makes right; that a superior
civilization may rightly force itself on an inferior by wholesale
killing, hurting, and impoverishing; that an extension of commerce, or
of missionary activities, justifies war; that the example of imperial
Rome is an instructive one for republican America; and that the right to
liberty and the brotherhood of man are obsolete sentimentalities.
Nevertheless, in spite of these temporary aberrations of the public mind
and heart, it is plain that many of Channing's anticipations and hopes
have already been realized, that his influence on three generations of
men has been profound and wholly beneficent, and that the world is
going his way, though with slow and halting steps.
His life brightened to its close. In its last summer but one he wrote:
"This morning I plucked a globe of the dandelion--the seed-vessel--and
was struck as never before with the silent, gentle manner in which
nature sows her seed.... I saw, too, how nature sows her seed
broadcast.... So we must send truth abroad, not forcing it on here and
there a mind, and watching its progress anxiously, but trusting that it
will light on a kindly soil, and yield its fruit. So nature teaches."
May those who stand here one hundred years hence say,--the twentieth
century supplied more of kindly soil for Channing seed than the
nineteenth.
EMERSON
Emerson was not a logician or reasoner, and not a rhetorician, in the
common sense. He was a poet, who wrote chiefly in prose, but also in
verse. His verse was usually rough, but sometimes finished and
melodious; it was always extraordinarily concise and expressive. During
his engagement to the lady who became his second wife, he wrote thus to
her: "I am born a poet,--of a low class without doubt, yet a poet; that
is my nature and vocation. My singing, 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 correspondences between these and those."
This husky poet had his living to get. His occupations in life were
those of the teacher, minister, lecturer, and author. He was a teacher
at various times between 1818 and 1826; but he never liked teaching. He
was a preacher at intervals from 1826 to 1847, but a settled minister
only from 1829 to 1832. His career as a lecturer began in the autumn of
1833; and his first book, "Nature," was published in 1836, when he was
thirty-three years old. His lectures for money were given as a rule
during the winter and early spring; and for thirty years the travelling
he was obliged to do in search of audiences was often extremely
fatiguing, and not without serious hardships and exposures. These
occupations usually gave him an income sufficient for his simple wants;
but there were times when outgo exceeded income. The little property his
first wife left him ($1200 a year) relieved him from serious pecuniary
anxiety by 1834; although it did not relieve him from earning by his own
labor the livelihood of his family.
In 1834 he went to live in Concord, where his grandfather had been the
minister at the time of the Revolution, and in 1835 he bought the house
and grounds there which were his home for the rest of his days. Before
settling in Concord, he had spent one winter and spring (1826-27) in the
Southern states, and seven months of 1833 in Europe. Both of these
absences were necessitated by the state of his health, which was
precarious during his young manhood. With these exceptions, he had lived
in Boston or its immediate neighborhood, until he settled in Concord.
His progenitors on both sides were chiefly New England ministers. His
formal education was received in the Boston Latin School and Harvard
College, and was therefore purely local. How narrow and provincial seems
his experience of life! A little city, an isolated society, a country
village! Yet through books, and through intercourse with intelligent
persons, he was really "set in a large place." The proof of this
largeness, and of the keenness of his mental and moral vision, is that,
in regard to some of the chief concerns of mankind, he was a seer and a
fore-seer. This prophetic quality of his I hope to demonstrate to-night
in three great fields of thought--education, social organization, and
religion.
Although a prophet and inspirer of reform, Emerson was not a reformer.
He was but a halting supporter of the reforms of his day; and the eager
experimenters and combatants in actual reforms found him a disappointing
sort of sympathizer. His visions were far-reaching, his doctrines often
radical, and his exhortations fervid; but when it came to action,
particularly to habitual action, he was surprisingly conservative. With
an exquisite candor, and a gentle resolution of rarest quality he broke
his strong ties to the Second Church of Boston before he was thirty
years old, abandoning the profession for which he had been trained, and
which, in many of its aspects, he honored and enjoyed; yet he attended
church on Sundays all his life with uncommon regularity. He refused to
conduct public prayer, and had many things to say against it; but when
he was an Overseer of Harvard College, he twice voted to maintain the
traditional policy of compelling all the students to attend morning
prayers, in spite of the fact that a large majority of the Faculty
urgently advocated abandoning that policy. He manifested a good deal of
theoretical sympathy with the community experiments at Brook Farm and
Fruitlands; but he declined to take part in them himself. He was
intimate with many of the leading abolitionists; but no one has
described more vividly their grave intellectual and social defects. He
laid down principles which, when applied, would inevitably lead to
progress and reform; but he took little part in the imperfect
step-by-step process of actual reforming. He probably would have been an
ineffective worker in any field of reform; and, at any rate, strenuous
labor on applications of his philosophy would have prevented him from
maintaining the flow of his philosophic and prophetic visions. The work
of giving practical effect to his thought was left for other men to
do,--indeed for generations of other serviceable men, who, filled with
his ideals, will slowly work them out into institutions, customs, and
other practical values.
When we think of Emerson as a prophet, we at once become interested in
the dates at which he uttered certain doctrines, or wrote certain
pregnant sentences; but just here the inquirer meets a serious
difficulty. He can sometimes ascertain that a given doctrine or sentence
was published at a given date; but he may be quite unable to ascertain
how much earlier the doctrine was really formulated, or the sentence
written. Emerson has been dead twenty-one years, and it is thirty years
since he wrote anything new; but his whole philosophy of life was
developed by the time he was forty years old, and it may be doubted if
he wrote anything after 1843, the germinal expression of which may not
be found in his journals, sermons, or lectures written before that date.
If, therefore, we find in the accepted thought, or established
institutions, of to-day recent developments of principles and maxims
laid down by Emerson, we may fairly say that his thought outran his
times certainly by one, and probably by two generations of men.
* * * * *
I take up now the prophetic teachings of Emerson with regard to
education. In the first place, he saw, with a clearness to which very
few people have yet attained, the fundamental necessity of the school as
the best civilizing agency, next to steady labor, and the only sure
means of permanent and progressive reform. He says outright: "We shall
one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our
root-and-branch reforms, of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is
only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up--namely, in
education." He taught that if we hope to reform mankind, we must begin
not with adults, but with children: we must begin in the school. There
are some signs that this doctrine has now at last entered the minds of
the so-called practical men. The Cubans are to be raised in the scale of
civilization and public happiness; so both they and we think they must
have more and better schools. The Filipinos, too, are to be developed
after the American fashion; so we send them a thousand teachers of
English. The Southern states are to be rescued from the persistent
poison of slavery; and, after forty years of failure with political
methods, we at last accept Emerson's doctrine, and say: We must begin
earlier,--at school. The city slums are to be redeemed; and the
scientific charity workers find the best way is to get the children into
kindergartens and manual training schools.
Since the Civil War, a whole generation of educational administrators
has been steadily at work developing what is called the elective system
in the institutions of education which deal with the ages above twelve.
It has been a slow, step-by-step process, carried on against much active
opposition and more sluggish obstruction. The system is a method of
educational organization which recognizes the immense expansion of
knowledge during the nineteenth century, and takes account of the needs
and capacities of the individual child and youth. Now, Emerson laid down
in plain terms the fundamental doctrines on which this elective system
rests. He taught that the one prudence in life is concentration; the one
evil, dissipation. He said: "You must elect your work: you shall take
what your brain can, and drop all the rest." To this exhortation he
added the educational reason for it,--only by concentration can the
youth arrive at the stage of doing something with his knowledge, or get
beyond the stage of absorbing, and arrive at the capacity for producing.
As Emerson puts it, "Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate
which can make the step from knowing to doing." The educational
institutions of to-day have not yet fully appreciated this all-important
step from knowing to doing. They are only beginning to perceive that,
all along the course of education, the child and the youth should be
doing something as well as learning something; should be stimulated and
trained by achievement; should be constantly encouraged to take the step
beyond seeing and memorizing to doing,--the step, as Emerson says, "out
of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness." Emerson carried this
doctrine right on into mature life. He taught that nature arms each man
with some faculty, large or small, which enables him to do easily some
feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society;
and that this faculty should determine the man's career. The advocates
of the elective system have insisted that its results were advantageous
for society as a whole, as well as for the individual. Emerson put this
argument in a nutshell at least fifty years ago: "Society can never
prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he
was created to do."
Education used to be given almost exclusively through books. In recent
years there has come in another sort of education through tools,
machines, gardens, drawings, casts, and pictures. Manual training,
shop-work, sloyd, and gardening have come into use for the school ages;
the teaching of trades has been admitted to some public school systems;
and, in general, the use of the hands and eyes in productive labor has
been recognized as having good educational effects. The education of men
by manual labor was a favorite doctrine with Emerson. He had fully
developed it as early as 1837, and he frequently recurred to it
afterwards. In December of that year, in a course of lectures on Human
Culture, he devoted one lecture to The Hands. He saw clearly that manual
labor might be made to develop not only good mental qualities, but good
moral qualities. To-day, it is frequently necessary for practical
teachers, who are urging measures of improvement, to point this out, and
to say, just as Emerson said two generations ago, that any falseness in
mechanical work immediately appears; that a teacher can judge of the
moral quality of each boy in the class before him better and sooner from
manual work than from book-work. Emerson taught that manual labor is the
study of the external world; that the use of manual labor never grows
obsolete, and is inapplicable to no person. He said explicitly that "a
man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture"; that
there is not only health, but education in garden work; that when a man
gets sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper by
simply signing his name to a cheque, it is the producers and carriers of
these articles that have got the education they yield, he only the
commodity; and that labor is God's education. This was Emerson's
doctrine more than sixty years ago. It is only ten years since the
Mechanic Arts High School was opened in Boston.
We are all of us aware that within the last twenty years there has been
a determined movement of the American people toward the cultivation of
art, and toward the public provision of objects which open the sense of
beauty and increase public enjoyment. It is curious to see how literally
Emerson prophesied the actual direction of these efforts:--
"On the city's paved street
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet;
Let spouting fountains cool the air,
Singing in the sun-baked square;
Let statue, picture, park, and hall,
Ballad, flag, and festival
The past restore, the day adorn,
And make to-morrow a new morn!"
We have introduced into our schools, of late years, lessons in drawing,
modelling, and designing,--not sufficiently, but in a promising and
hopeful way. Emerson taught that it is the office of art to educate the
perception of beauty; and he precisely describes one of the most recent
of the new tendencies in American education and social life, when he
says: "Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction
between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten." That sentence is the
inspiration of one of the most recent of the efforts to improve the arts
and crafts, and to restore to society the artistic craftsman. But how
slow is the institutional realization of this ideal of art education! We
are still struggling in our elementary and secondary schools to get a
reasonable amount of instruction in drawing and music, and to transfer
from other subjects a fair allotment of time to these invaluable
elements of true culture, which speak a universal language. Yet the
ultimate object of art in education is to teach men to see nature to be
beautiful and at the same time useful, beautiful because alive and
reproductive, useful while symmetrical and fair. Take up to-day the last
essays on education, the last book on landscape architecture, or the
freshest teachings of the principles of design, and you will find them
penetrated with Emerson's doctrine of art as teacher of mankind. Emerson
insists again and again that true culture must open the sense of
beauty; that "a man is a beggar who only lives to the useful." It will
probably require several generations yet to induce the American people
to accept his doctrine that all moments and objects can be embellished,
and that cheerfulness, serenity, and repose in energy are the "end of
culture and success enough."
It has been clearly perceived of late that a leading object in education
is the cultivation of fine manners. On this point the teachings of
Emerson are fundamental; but the American institutions of education are
only beginning to appreciate their significance. He teaches that genius
or love invents fine manners, "which the baron and the baroness copy
very fast, and by the advantage of a palace better the instruction. They
stereotype the lesson they have learned into a mode." There is much in
that phrase, "by the advantage of a palace." For generations, American
institutions of education were content with the humblest sort of
shelters, with plain wooden huts and brick barracks, and unkempt grounds
about the buildings. They are only lately beginning to acquire fine
buildings with pleasing surroundings; that is, they are just beginning
to carry into practice Emerson's wisdom of sixty years ago. The American
cities are beginning to build handsome houses for their High Schools.
Columbia University builds a noble temple for its library. The graduates
and friends of Harvard like to provide her with a handsome fence round
the Yard, with a fair array of shrubs within the fence, with a handsome
stadium instead of shabby, wooden seats round the football gridiron, and
to take steps for securing in the future broad connections between the
grounds of the University and the Cambridge parks by the river. They are
just now carrying into practice Emerson's teaching; by the advantage of
a palace they mean to better Harvard's instruction in manners. They are
accepting his doctrine that "manners make the fortune of the ambitious
youth; that for the most part his manners marry him, and, for the most
part, he marries manners. When we think what keys they are, and to what
secrets; what high lessons, and inspiring tokens of character they
convey, and what divination is required in us for the reading of this
fine telegraph,--we see what range the subject has, and what relations
to convenience, power, and beauty."
In Emerson's early days there was nothing in our schools and colleges
which at all corresponded to what we now know too much about under the
name of athletic sports. The elaborate organization of these sports is a
development of the last thirty years in our schools and colleges; but I
find in Emerson the true reason for the athletic cult, given a
generation before it existed among us. Your boy "hates the grammar and
Gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy
is right, and you are not fit to direct his bringing-up, if your theory
leaves out his gymnastic training.... Football, cricket, archery,
swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding are lessons in the art of
power, which it is his main business to learn.... Besides, the gun,
fishing-rod, boat, and horse constitute, among all who use them, secret
free-masonries." We shall never find a completer justification of
athletic sports than that.
In his memorable address on The American Scholar, which was given at
Cambridge in 1837, Emerson pointed out that the function of the scholar
should include creative action, or, as we call it in these days,
research, or the search for new truth. He says: "The soul active ...
utters truth, or creates.... In its essence it is progressive. The book,
the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with
some past utterance of genius.... They look backward and not forward.
But genius looks forward. Man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents
may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not
his;--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame." And more
explicitly still, he says: "Colleges have their indispensable
office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they
aim not to drill, but to create." When Emerson wrote this passage, the
spirit of research, or discovery, or creation had not yet breathed life
into the higher institutions of learning in our country; and to-day they
have much to do and to acquire before they will conform to Emerson's
ideal.