educational experiences of later generations. I can cite but two of
them. He taught that each age must write its own books; "or rather, each
generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will
not fit this." How true that is in our own day when eighty thousand new
books come from the press of the civilized world in a single year!
Witness the incessant remaking or re-casting of the books of the
preceding generation! Emerson himself has gone into thousands of books
in which his name is never mentioned. Even history has to be re-written
every few years, the long-surviving histories being rather monuments of
style and method than accepted treasuries of facts. Again, contrary to
the prevailing impression that the press has, in large measure, stripped
eloquence of its former influence, Emerson taught that "if there ever
was a country where eloquence was a power, it is the United States." He
included under eloquence the useful speech, all sorts of political
persuasion in the great arena of the Republic, and the lessons of
science, art, and religion which should be "brought home to the instant
practice of thirty millions of people," now become eighty. The colleges
and universities have now answered in the affirmative Emerson's
question, "Is it not worth the ambition of every generous youth to
train and arm his mind with all the resources of knowledge, of method,
of grace, and of character to serve such a constituency?" But then
Emerson's definition of eloquence is simple, and foretells the practice
of to-day rather than describes the practice of Webster, Everett,
Choate, and Winthrop, his contemporaries: "Know your fact; hug your
fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity....
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly
intelligible to the person to whom you speak."
* * * * *
I turn next to some examples of Emerson's anticipation of social
conditions, visible to him as seer in his own day, and since become
plain to the sight of the ordinary millions. When he accumulated in his
journals the original materials of his essay on Worship, there were no
large cities in the United States in the present sense of that term. The
great experiment of democracy was not far advanced, and had not
developed many of its sins and dangers; yet how justly he presented them
in the following description: "In our large cities, the population is
godless, materialized,--no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These
are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is
it people manage to live on, so aimless as they are? ... There is faith
in chemistry, in meat and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in the
steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine wheels, sewing-machines, and in
public opinion, but not in divine causes."
In Emerson's day, luxury in the present sense had hardly been developed
in our country; but he foresaw its coming, and its insidious
destructiveness. "We spend our incomes for paint and paper, for a
hundred trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of a man. Our
expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in
debt; it is not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship,
that costs us so much. Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have
horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses and
places of amusement? Only for want of thought.... We are first
thoughtless, and then find that we are moneyless. We are first sensual
and then must be rich." He foresaw the young man's state of mind to-day
about marriage--I must have money before I can marry; and deals with it
thus: "Give us wealth and the home shall exist. But that is a very
imperfect and inglorious solution of the problem, and therefore no
solution. Give us wealth! You ask too much. Few have wealth; but all
must have a home. Men are not born rich; in getting wealth the man is
generally sacrificed, and often is sacrificed without acquiring wealth
at last."
We have come to understand by experience that the opinion of masses of
men is a formidable power which can be made safe and useful. In earlier
days this massed opinion was either despised or dreaded; and it is
dreadful, if either confined or misdirected. Emerson compares it to
steam. Studied, economized, and directed, steam has become the power by
which all great labors are done. Like steam is the opinion of political
masses! If crushed by castles, armies, and police, dangerously
explosive; but if furnished with schools and the ballot, developing "the
most harmless and energetic form of a state." His eyes were wide open
to some of the evil intellectual effects of democracy. The individual is
too apt to wear the time-worn yoke of the multitude's opinions. No
multiplying of contemptible units can produce an admirable mass. "If I
see nothing to admire in a unit, shall I admire a million units?" The
habit of submitting to majority rule cultivates individual subserviency.
He pointed out two generations ago that the action of violent political
parties in a democracy might provide for the individual citizen a
systematic training in moral cowardice.
It is interesting, at the stage of industrial warfare which the world
has now reached, to observe how Emerson, sixty years ago, discerned
clearly the absurdity of paying all sorts of service at one rate, now a
favorite notion with some labor unions. He points out that even when
all labor is temporarily paid at one rate, differences in possessions
will instantly arise: "In one hand the dime became an eagle as it fell,
and in another hand a copper cent. For the whole value of the dime is in
knowing what to do with it." Emerson was never deceived by a specious
philanthropy, or by claims of equality which find no support in the
nature of things. He was a true democrat, but still could say: "I think
I see place and duties for a nobleman in every society; but it is not to
drink wine and ride in a fine coach, but to guide and adorn life for the
multitude by forethought, by elegant studies, by perseverance,
self-devotion, and the remembrance of the humble old friend,--by making
his life secretly beautiful." How fine a picture of the democratic
nobility is that!
In his lecture on Man the Reformer, which was read before the
Mechanics' Apprentices' Association in Boston in January, 1841, Emerson
described in the clearest manner the approaching strife between laborers
and employers, between poor and rich, and pointed out the cause of this
strife in the selfishness, unkindness, and mutual distrust which ran
through the community. He also described, with perfect precision, the
only ultimate remedy,--namely, the sentiment of love. "Love would put a
new face on this weary old world in which we dwell as pagans and enemies
too long.... The virtue of this principle in human society in
application to great interests is obsolete and forgotten. But one day
all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in the
universal sunshine." It is more than sixty years since those words were
uttered, and in those years society has had large experience of
industrial and social strife, of its causes and consequences, and of
many attempts to remedy or soften it; but all this experience only goes
to show that there is but one remedy for these ills. It is to be found
in kindness, good fellowship, and the affections. In Emerson's words,
"We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible." The
world will wait long for this remedy, but there is no other.
Like every real seer and prophet whose testimony is recorded, Emerson
had intense sympathy with the poor, laborious, dumb masses of mankind,
and being a wide reader in history and biography, he early arrived at
the conviction that history needed to be written in a new manner. It was
long before Green's History of the English People that Emerson wrote:
"Hence it happens that the whole interest of history lies in the
fortunes of the poor." In recent years this view of history has come to
prevail, and we are given the stories of institutions, industries,
commerce, crafts, arts, and beliefs, instead of the stories of dynasties
and wars. For Emerson it is always feats of liberty and wit which make
epochs of history. Commerce is civilizing because "the power which the
sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast." The invention
of a house, safe against wild animals, frost, and heat, gives play to
the finer faculties, and introduces art, manners, and social delights.
The discovery of the post office is a fine metre of civilization. The
sea-going steamer marks an epoch; the subjection of electricity to take
messages and turn wheels marks another. But, after all, the vital
stages of human progress are marked by steps toward personal, individual
freedom. The love of liberty was Emerson's fundamental passion:--
"For He that ruleth high and wise,
Nor pauseth in His plan,
Will take the sun out of the skies
Ere freedom out of man."
The new National League of Independent Workmen of America has very
appropriately taken its motto from Emerson:--
"For what avail the plough or sail
Or land or life, if freedom fail?"
The sympathetic reader of Emerson comes often upon passages written long
ago which are positively startling in their anticipation of sentiments
common to-day and apparently awakened by very recent events. One would
suppose that the following passage was written yesterday. It was
written fifty-six years ago. "And so, gentlemen, I feel in regard to
this aged England, with the possessions, honors, and trophies, and also
with the infirmities of a thousand years gathering around her,
irretrievably committed as she now is to many old customs which cannot
be suddenly changed; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new
and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, machines, and competing
populations,--I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering
that she has seen dark days before;--indeed with a kind of instinct that
she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle
and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon."
Before the Civil War the Jew had no such place in society as he holds
to-day. He was by no means so familiar to Americans as he is now.
Emerson speaks twice of the Jew in his essay on Fate, in terms precisely
similar to those we commonly hear to-day: "We see how much will has been
expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain.... The sufferance which is the
badge of the Jew has made him in these days the ruler of the rulers of
the earth." Those keen observations were made certainly more than forty
years ago, and probably more than fifty.
Landscape architecture is not yet an established profession among us, in
spite of the achievements of Downing, Cleveland, and Olmsted and their
disciples; yet much has been accomplished within the last twenty-five
years to realize the predictions on this subject made by Emerson in his
lecture on The Young American. He pointed out in that lecture that the
beautiful gardens of Europe are unknown among us, but might be easily
imitated here, and said that the landscape art "is the Fine Art which is
left for us.... The whole force of all arts goes to facilitate the
decoration of lands and dwellings.... I look on such improvement as
directly tending to endear the land to the inhabitant." The following
sentence might have been written yesterday, so consistent is it with the
thought of to-day: "Whatever events in progress shall go to disgust men
with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life and
country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this
continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of
real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the
landscape." In regard to books, pictures, statues, collections in
natural history, and all such refining objects of nature and art, which
heretofore only the opulent could enjoy, Emerson pointed out that in
America the public should provide these means of culture and inspiration
for every citizen. He thus anticipated the present ownership by cities,
or by endowed trustees, of parks, gardens, and museums of art or
science, as well as of baths and orchestras. Of music in particular he
said: "I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms; could
I ... know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and
inundation of musical waves,--that were a bath and a medicine." It has
been a long road from that sentence, written probably in the forties, to
the Symphony Orchestra in this Hall, and to the new singing classes on
the East Side of New York City.
For those of us who have attended to the outburst of novels and
treatises on humble or squalid life, to the copious discussions on
child-study, to the masses of slum literature, and to the numerous
writings on home economics, how true to-day seems the following sentence
written in 1837: "The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child,
the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life are the
topics of the time."
* * * * *
I pass now to the last of the three topics which time permits me to
discuss,--Emerson's religion. In no field of thought was Emerson more
prophetic, more truly a prophet of coming states of human opinion, than
in religion. In the first place, he taught that religion is absolutely
natural,--not supernatural, but natural:--
"Out from the heart of Nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old."
He believed that revelation is natural and continuous, and that in all
ages prophets are born. Those souls out of time proclaim truth, which
may be momentarily received with reverence, but is nevertheless quickly
dragged down into some savage interpretation which by and by a new
prophet will purge away. He believed that man is guided by the same
power that guides beast and flower. "The selfsame power that brought me
here brought you," he says to beautiful Rhodora. For him worship is the
attitude of those "who see that against all appearances the nature of
things works for truth and right forever." He saw good not only in what
we call beauty, grace, and light, but in what we call foul and ugly. For
him a sky-born music sounds "from all that's fair; from all that's
foul:"--
"'Tis not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the cups of budding flowers,
Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
But in the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway something sings."
The universe was ever new and fresh in his eyes, not spent, or fallen,
or degraded, but eternally tending upward:--
"No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new,
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew."
When we come to his interpretation of historical Christianity, we find
that in his view the life and works of Jesus fell entirely within the
field of human experience. He sees in the deification of Jesus an
evidence of lack of faith in the infinitude of the individual human
soul. He sees in every gleam of human virtue not only the presence of
God, but some atom of His nature. As a preacher he had no tone of
authority. A true non-conformist himself, he had no desire to impose his
views on anybody. Religious truth, like all other truth, was to his
thought an unrolling picture, not a deposit made once for all in some
sacred vessel. When people who were sure they had drained that vessel,
and assimilated its contents, attacked him, he was irresponsive or
impassive, and yielded to them no juicy thought; so they pronounced him
dry or empty. Yet all of Emerson's religious teaching led straight to
God,--not to a withdrawn creator, or anthropomorphic judge or king, but
to the all-informing, all-sustaining soul of the universe.
It was a prophetic quality of Emerson's religious teaching that he
sought to obliterate the distinction between secular and sacred. For him
all things were sacred, just as the universe was religious. We see an
interesting fruition of Emerson's sowing in the nature of the means of
influence, which organized churches and devout people have, in these
later days, been compelled to resort to. Thus the Catholic Church keeps
its hold on its natural constituency quite as much by schools,
gymnasiums, hospitals, entertainments, and social parades as it does by
its rites and sacraments. The Protestant Churches maintain in city slums
"settlements," which use the secular rather than the so-called sacred
methods. The fight against drunkenness, and the sexual vice and crimes
of violence which follow in its train, is most successfully maintained
by eliminating its physical causes and providing mechanical and social
protections.
For Emerson inspiration meant not the rare conveyance of supernatural
power to an individual, but the constant incoming into each man of the
"divine soul which also inspires all men." He believed in the worth of
the present hour:--
"Future or Past no richer secret folds,
O friendless Present! than thy bosom holds."
He believed that the spiritual force of human character imaged the
divine:--
"The sun set, but set not his hope:
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye."
Yet man is not an order of nature, but a stupendous antagonism, because
he chooses and acts in his soul. "So far as a man thinks, he is free."
It is interesting to-day, after all the long discussion of the doctrine
of evolution, to see how the much earlier conceptions of Emerson match
the thoughts of the latest exponents of the philosophic results of
evolution.
The present generation of scholars and ministers has been passing
through an important crisis in regard to the sacred books of Judaism and
Christianity. All the features of the contest over "the higher
criticism" are foretold by Emerson in "The American Scholar." "The poet
chanting was felt to be a divine man; henceforth the chant is divine
also. The writer was a just and wise spirit; henceforward it is settled
the book is perfect. Colleges are built on it; books are written on
it.... Instantly the book becomes noxious; the guide is a tyrant." This
is exactly what has happened to Protestantism, which substituted for
infallible Pope and Church an infallible Book; and this is precisely the
evil from which modern scholarship is delivering the world.
In religion Emerson was only a nineteenth-century non-conformist
instead of a fifteenth or seventeenth century one. It was a fundamental
article in his creed that, although conformity is the virtue in most
request, "Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist." In the midst
of increasing luxury, and of that easygoing, unbelieving conformity
which is itself a form of luxury, Boston, the birthplace of Emerson, may
well remember with honor the generations of non-conformists who made
her, and created the intellectual and moral climate in which Emerson
grew up. Inevitably, to conformists and to persons who still accept
doctrines and opinions which he rejected, he seems presumptuous and
consequential. In recent days we have even seen the word "insolent"
applied to this quietest and most retiring of seers. But have not all
prophets and ethical teachers had something of this aspect to their
conservative contemporaries? We hardly expect the messages of prophets
to be welcome; they imply too much dissatisfaction with the present.
The essence of Emerson's teaching concerning man's nature is compressed
into the famous verse:--
"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can."
The cynic or the fall-of-man theologian replies--Grandeur indeed, say
rather squalor and shame. To this ancient pessimism Emerson makes answer
with a hard question--"We grant that human life is mean, but how did we
find out that it was mean?" To this question no straight answer has been
found, the common answer running in a circle. It is hard indeed to
conceive of a measure which will measure depths but not heights; and
besides, every measure implies a standard.
* * * * *
I have endeavored to set before you some of the practical results of
Emerson's visions and intuitions, because, though quite unfit to expound
his philosophical views, I am capable of appreciating some of the many
instances in which his words have come true in the practical experience
of my own generation. My own work has been a contribution to the
prosaic, concrete work of building, brick by brick, the new walls of old
American institutions of education. As a young man I found the writings
of Emerson unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible. I was concerned
with physical science, and with routine teaching and discipline; and
Emerson's thinking seemed to me speculative and visionary. In regard to
religious belief, I was brought up in the old-fashioned Unitarian
conservatism of Boston, which was rudely shocked by Emerson's excursions
beyond its well-fenced precincts. But when I had got at what proved to
be my lifework for education, I discovered in Emerson's poems and essays
all the fundamental motives and principles of my own hourly struggle
against educational routine and tradition, and against the prevailing
notions of discipline for the young; so when I was asked to speak to you
to-night about him, although I realized my unfitness in many respects
for such a function, I could not refuse the opportunity to point out how
many of the sober, practical undertakings of to-day had been anticipated
in all their principles by this solitary, shrewd, independent thinker,
who, in an inconsecutive and almost ejaculatory way, wrought out many
sentences and verses which will travel far down the generations.
I was also interested in studying in this example the quality of
prophets in general. We know a good deal about the intellectual
ancestors and inspirers of Emerson; and we are sure that he drank deep
at many springs of idealism and poetry. Plato, Confucius, Shakespeare,
and Milton were of his teachers; Oken, Lamarck, and Lyell lent him their
scientific theories; and Channing stirred the residuum which came down
to him through his forbears from Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. All these
materials he transmuted and moulded into lessons which have his own
individual quality and bear his stamp. The precise limits of his
individuality are indeterminable, and inquiry into them would be
unprofitable. In all probability the case would prove to be much the
same with most of the men that the world has named prophets, if we knew
as much of their mental history as we know of Emerson's. With regard to
the Semitic prophets and seers, it is reasonable to expect that as
Semitic exploration and discovery advance, the world will learn much
about the historical and poetical sources of their inspiration. Then the
Jewish and Christian peoples may come nearer than they do now to
Emerson's conceptions of inspiration and worship, of the naturalness of
revelation and religion, and of the infinite capacities of man.
Meantime, it is an indisputable fact that Emerson's thought has proved
to be consonant with the most progressive and fruitful thinking and
acting of two generations since his working time. This fact, and the
sweetness, fragrance, and loftiness of his spirit, prophesy for him an
enduring power in the hearts and lives of spiritually-minded men.
End of Project Gutenberg's Four American Leaders, by Charles William Eliot