1858-1858. AEt. 50-55.
Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture
read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at
Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The
"Saturday Club."
After Emerson's return from Europe he delivered lectures to different
audiences,--one on Poetry, afterwards published in "Letters and Social
Aims," a course of lectures in Freeman Place Chapel, Boston, some of
which have been published, one on the Anglo-Saxon Race, and many
others. In January, 1855, he gave one of the lectures in a course of
Anti-Slavery Addresses delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston. In the same
year he delivered an address before the Anti-Slavery party of New York.
His plan for the extirpation of slavery was to buy the slaves from the
planters, not conceding their right to ownership, but because "it is
the only practical course, and is innocent." It would cost two thousand
millions, he says, according to the present estimate, but "was there
ever any contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this would
be?"
His optimism flowers out in all its innocent luxuriance in the paragraph
from which this is quoted. Of course with notions like these he could
not be hand in hand with the Abolitionists. He was classed with the Free
Soilers, but he seems to have formed a party by himself in his project
for buying up the negroes. He looked at the matter somewhat otherwise in
1863, when the settlement was taking place in a different currency,--in
steel and not in gold:--
"Pay ransom to the owner,
And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay him."
His sympathies were all and always with freedom. He spoke with
indignation of the outrage on Sumner; he took part in the meeting at
Concord expressive of sympathy with John Brown. But he was never in the
front rank of the aggressive Anti-Slavery men. In his singular "Ode
inscribed to W.H. Channing" there is a hint of a possible solution of
the slavery problem which implies a doubt as to the permanence of the
cause of all the trouble.
"The over-god
Who marries Right to Might,
Who peoples, unpeoples,--
He who exterminates
Races by stronger races,
Black by white faces,--
Knows to bring honey
Out of the lion."
Some doubts of this kind helped Emerson to justify himself when he
refused to leave his "honeyed thought" for the busy world where
"Things are of the snake."
The time came when he could no longer sit quietly in his study, and, to
borrow Mr. Cooke's words, "As the agitation proceeded, and brave men
took part in it, and it rose to a spirit of moral grandeur, he gave a
heartier assent to the outward methods adopted."
* * * * *
No woman could doubt the reverence of Emerson for womanhood. In a
lecture read to the "Woman's Rights Convention" in 1855, he takes bold,
and what would then have been considered somewhat advanced, ground in
the controversy then and since dividing the community. This is the way
in which he expresses himself:
"I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in
public affairs. But it is they and not we that are to determine it.
Let the laws he purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous
impediment to women. Let the public donations for education be
equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a
church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do
theirs;--and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish
a voice in making the laws that are to govern them. If you do refuse
them a vote, you will also refuse to tax them,--according to our
Teutonic principle, No representation, no tax.--The new movement
is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may
proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart is prompted to
desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish."
Emerson was fortunate enough to have had for many years as a neighbor,
that true New England Roman, Samuel Hoar. He spoke of him in Concord
before his fellow-citizens, shortly after his death, in 1856. He
afterwards prepared a sketch of Mr. Hoar for "Putnam's Magazine," from
which I take one prose sentence and the verse with which the sketch
concluded:--
"He was a model of those formal but reverend manners which make
what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an
impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is
an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class
remaining, and always a few young men to whom these manners are
native."
The single verse I quote is compendious enough and descriptive enough
for an Elizabethan monumental inscription.
"With beams December planets dart
His cold eye truth and conduct scanned;
July was in his sunny heart,
October in his liberal hand."
Emerson's "English Traits," forming one volume of his works, was
published in 1856. It is a thoroughly fresh and original book. It is not
a tourist's guide, not a detailed description of sights which tired
the traveller in staring at them, and tire the reader who attacks the
wearying pages in which they are recorded. Shrewd observation there is
indeed, but its strength is in broad generalization and epigrammatic
characterizations. They are not to be received as in any sense final;
they are not like the verifiable facts of science; they are more or less
sagacious, more or less well founded opinions formed by a fair-minded,
sharp-witted, kind-hearted, open-souled philosopher, whose presence
made every one well-disposed towards him, and consequently left him
well-disposed to all the world.
A glance at the table of contents will give an idea of the objects which
Emerson proposed to himself in his tour, and which take up the principal
portion of his record. Only one _place_ is given as the heading of a
chapter,--_Stonehenge_. The other eighteen chapters have general titles,
_Land, Race, Ability, Manners_, and others of similar character.
He uses plain English in introducing us to the Pilgrim fathers of the
British Aristocracy:--
"Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the
House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy
and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything
they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and
killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin.
Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent
and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy
thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by
assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and
snake, which they severally resembled."
The race preserves some of its better characteristics.
"They have a vigorous health and last well into middle and old age.
The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin,
a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the
island."
English "Manners" are characterized, according to Emerson, by pluck,
vigor, independence. "Every one of these islanders is an island himself,
safe, tranquil, incommunicable." They are positive, methodical, cleanly,
and formal, loving routine and conventional ways; loving truth and
religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form.
"They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and
mace, sceptre and crown. A severe decorum rules the court and the
cottage. Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They
hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expressions; they use
a studied plainness."
"In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial by Jury,
but the dinner is the capital institution."
"They confide in each other,--English believes in English."--"They
require the same adherence, thorough conviction, and reality in
public men."
"As compared with the American, I think them cheerful and contented.
Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy."
Emerson's observation is in accordance with that of Cotton Mather nearly
two hundred years ago.
"_New England_, a country where splenetic Maladies are prevailing
and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded numberless
instances, of even pious people, who have contracted those
_Melancholy Indispositions_, which have unhinged them from all
service or comfort; yea, not a few persons have been hurried thereby
to lay _Violent Hands_ upon themselves at the last. These are among
the _unsearchable Judgments_ of God."
If there is a little exaggeration about the following portrait of the
Englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, and the
likeness will be smilingly recognized by every stout Briton.
"They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of
waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run
into absurd follies with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly
carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense;
leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew
hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock
in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every
secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic;
they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking virgin' to know why
she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the
inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate
and send to Bentley the arcanum, bribed and bullied away from
shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror
they cause."
This last audacious picture might be hung up as a prose pendant to
Marvell's poetical description of Holland and the Dutch.
"A saving stupidity marks and protects their perception as the
curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first
deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them
justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.--High and
low, they are of an unctuous texture.--Their daily feasts argue a
savage vigor of body.--Half their strength they put not forth. The
stability of England is the security of the modern world."
Perhaps nothing in any of his vigorous paragraphs is more striking than
the suggestion that "if hereafter the war of races often predicted,
and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism
and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English
civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating
castles and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their
colonies."
In reading some of Emerson's pages it seems as if another Arcadia, or
the new Atlantis, had emerged as the fortunate island of Great Britain,
or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust
doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,--or if
they do, never think of denying that they have done it. But this was a
generation ago, when the noun "shoddy," and the verb "to scamp," had not
grown such familiar terms to English ears as they are to-day. Emerson
saw the country on its best side. Each traveller makes his own England.
A Quaker sees chiefly broad brims, and the island looks to him like a
field of mushrooms.
The transplanted Church of England is rich and prosperous and
fashionable enough not to be disturbed by Emerson's flashes of light
that have not come through its stained windows.
"The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on
the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's
chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed
hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him,
and the religion of a gentleman.
"The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing
left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and
reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to
take wine with him."
Sydney Smith had a great reverence for a bishop,--so great that he told
a young lady that he used to roll a crumb of bread in his hand, from
nervousness, when he sat next one at a dinner-table,--and if next an
archbishop, used to roll crumbs with both hands,---but Sydney Smith
would have enjoyed the tingling felicity of this last stinging touch
of wit, left as lightly and gracefully as a _banderillero_ leaves his
little gayly ribboned dart in the shoulders of the bull with whose
unwieldy bulk he is playing.
Emerson handles the formalism and the half belief of the Established
Church very freely, but he closes his chapter on Religion with
soft-spoken words.
"Yet if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake
the suffering of all evil, _souffrir de tout le monde,
et ne faire souffrir personne,_ that divine secret has existed in
England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson,
and of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame."
"English Traits" closes with Emerson's speech at Manchester, at the
annual banquet of the "Free Trade Athenaeum." This was merely an
occasional after-dinner reply to a toast which called him up, but it had
sentences in it which, if we can imagine Milton to have been called up
in the same way, he might well have spoken and done himself credit in
their utterance.
* * * * *
The total impression left by the book is that Emerson was fascinated
by the charm of English society, filled with admiration of the people,
tempted to contrast his New Englanders in many respects unfavorably with
Old Englanders, mainly in their material and vital stamina; but with all
this not blinded for a moment to the thoroughly insular limitations
of the phlegmatic islander. He alternates between a turn of genuine
admiration and a smile as at a people that has not outgrown its
playthings. This is in truth the natural and genuine feeling of a
self-governing citizen of a commonwealth where thrones and wigs and
mitres seem like so many pieces of stage property. An American need not
be a philosopher to hold these things cheap. He cannot help it. Madame
Tussaud's exhibition, the Lord-Mayor's gilt coach, and a coronation, if
one happens to be in season, are all sights to be seen by an American
traveller, but the reverence which is born with the British subject went
up with the smoke of the gun that fired the long echoing shot at the
little bridge over the sleepy river which works its way along through
the wide-awake town of Concord.
In November, 1857, a new magazine was established in Boston, bearing
the name of "The Atlantic Monthly." Professor James Russell Lowell
was editor-in-chief, and Messrs. Phillips and Sampson, who were the
originators of the enterprise, were the publishers. Many of the old
contributors to "The Dial" wrote for the new magazine, among them
Emerson. He contributed twenty-eight articles in all, more than half of
them verse, to different numbers, from the first to the thirty-seventh
volume. Among them are several of his best known poems, such as "The
Romany Girl," "Days," "Brahma," "Waldeinsamkeit," "The Titmouse,"
"Boston Hymn," "Saadi," and "Terminus."
At about the same time there grew up in Boston a literary association,
which became at last well known as the "Saturday Club," the members
dining together on the last Saturday of every month.
The Magazine and the Club have existed and flourished to the present
day. They have often been erroneously thought to have some organic
connection, and the "Atlantic Club" has been spoken of as if there was
or had been such an institution, but it never existed.
Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club from the first; in reality
before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a Platonic
idea. The Club seems to have shaped itself around him as a nucleus of
crystallization, two or three friends of his having first formed the
habit of meeting him at dinner at "Parker's," the "Will's Coffee-House"
of Boston. This little group gathered others to itself and grew into a
club as Rome grew into a city, almost without knowing how. During its
first decade the Saturday Club brought together, as members or as
visitors, many distinguished persons. At one end of the table sat
Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable
rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always
pleasant to look,--whose silence was better than many another man's
conversation. At the other end of the table sat Agassiz, robust,
sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. The stranger
who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the
table would have heard in answer the names of Hawthorne, Motley, Dana,
Lowell, Whipple, Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, Judge Hoar,
eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, Dwight, the leading musical
critic of Boston for a whole generation, Sumner, the academic champion
of freedom, Andrew, "the great War Governor" of Massachusetts, Dr. Howe,
the philanthropist, William Hunt, the painter, with others not unworthy
of such company. And with these, generally near the Longfellow end of
the table, sat Emerson, talking in low tones and carefully measured
utterances to his neighbor, or listening, and recording on his mental
phonograph any stray word worth remembering. Emerson was a very regular
attendant at the meetings of the Saturday Club, and continued to dine at
its table, until within a year or two of his death.
Unfortunately the Club had no Boswell, and its golden hours passed
unrecorded.