EMERSON

I

"Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude,

lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need

not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede

anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and

draw individuals out of them. The worst of charity is that the lives

you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! The

calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest

men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no

shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or

lazzaroni at all. If government knew how, I should like to see it

check, not multiply the population. When it reaches its true law of

action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential. Away

with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of

single men spoken on their honor and their conscience."

This extract from The Conduct of Life gives fairly enough the leading

thought of Emerson's life. The unending warfare between the individual

and society shows us in each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or a

musician who exalts and deifies the individual, and leads us back again

to the only object which is really worthy of enthusiasm or which can

permanently excite it,--the character of a man. It is surprising to find

this identity of content in all great deliverances. The only thing we

really admire is personal liberty. Those who fought for it and those who

enjoyed it are our heroes.

But the hero may enslave his race by bringing in a system of tyranny;

the battle-cry of freedom may become a dogma which crushes the soul; one

good custom may corrupt the world. And so the inspiration of one age

becomes the damnation of the next. This crystallizing of life into death

has occurred so often that it may almost be regarded as one of the laws

of progress.

Emerson represents a protest against the tyranny of democracy. He is the

most recent example of elemental hero-worship. His opinions are

absolutely unqualified except by his temperament. He expresses a form of

belief in the importance of the individual which is independent of any

personal relations he has with the world. It is as if a man had been

withdrawn from the earth and dedicated to condensing and embodying this

eternal idea--the value of the individual soul--so vividly, so vitally,

that his words could not die, yet in such illusive and abstract forms

that by no chance and by no power could his creed be used for purposes

of tyranny. Dogma cannot be extracted from it. Schools cannot be built

on it. It either lives as the spirit lives, or else it evaporates and

leaves nothing. Emerson was so afraid of the letter that killeth that he

would hardly trust his words to print. He was assured there was no such

thing as literal truth, but only literal falsehood. He therefore

resorted to metaphors which could by no chance be taken literally. And

he has probably succeeded in leaving a body of work which cannot be made

to operate to any other end than that for which he designed it. If this

be true, he has accomplished the inconceivable feat of eluding

misconception. If it be true, he stands alone in the history of

teachers; he has circumvented fate, he has left an unmixed blessing

behind him.

The signs of those times which brought forth Emerson are not wholly

undecipherable. They are the same times which gave rise to every

character of significance during the period before the war. Emerson is

indeed the easiest to understand of all the men of his time, because his

life is freest from the tangles and qualifications of circumstance. He

is a sheer and pure type and creature of destiny, and the

unconsciousness that marks his development allies him to the deepest

phenomena. It is convenient, in describing him, to use language which

implies consciousness on his part, but he himself had no purpose, no

theory of himself; he was a product.

The years between 1820 and 1830 were the most pitiable through which

this country has ever passed. The conscience of the North was pledged to

the Missouri Compromise, and that Compromise neither slumbered nor

slept. In New England, where the old theocratical oligarchy of the

colonies had survived the Revolution and kept under its own waterlocks

the new flood of trade, the conservatism of politics reinforced the

conservatism of religion; and as if these two inquisitions were not

enough to stifle the soul of man, the conservatism of business

self-interest was superimposed. The history of the conflicts which

followed has been written by the radicals, who negligently charge up to

self-interest all the resistance which establishments offer to change.

But it was not solely self-interest, it was conscience that backed the

Missouri Compromise, nowhere else, naturally, so strongly as in New

England. It was conscience that made cowards of us all. The white-lipped

generation of Edward Everett were victims, one might even say martyrs,

to conscience. They suffered the most terrible martyrdom that can fall

to man, a martyrdom which injured their immortal volition and dried up

the springs of life. If it were not that our poets have too seldom

deigned to dip into real life, I do not know what more awful subject for

a poem could have been found than that of the New England judge

enforcing the fugitive slave law. For lack of such a poem the heroism of

these men has been forgotten, the losing heroism of conservatism. It was

this spiritual power of a committed conscience which met the new forces

as they arose, and it deserves a better name than these new forces

afterward gave it. In 1830 the social fruits of these heavy conditions

could be seen in the life of the people. Free speech was lost.

"I know no country," says Tocqueville, who was here in 1831, "in which

there is so little independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in

America." Tocqueville recurs to the point again and again. He cannot

disguise his surprise at it, and it tinged his whole philosophy and his

book. The timidity of the Americans of this era was a thing which

intelligent foreigners could not understand. Miss Martineau wrote in her

Autobiography: "It was not till months afterwards that I was told that

there were two reasons why I was not invited there [Chelsea] as

elsewhere. One reason was that I had avowed, in reply to urgent

questions, that I was disappointed in an oration of Mr. Everett's; and

another was that I had publicly condemned the institution of slavery. I

hope the Boston people have outgrown the childishness of sulking at

opinions not in either case volunteered, but obtained by pressure. But

really, the subservience to opinion at that time seemed a sort of

mania."

The mania was by no means confined to Boston, but qualified this period

of our history throughout the Northern States. There was no literature.

"If great writers have not at present existed in America, the reason is

very simply given in the fact that there can be no literary genius

without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in

America," wrote Tocqueville. There were no amusements, neither music nor

sport nor pastime, indoors or out of doors. The whole life of the

community was a life of the intelligence, and upon the intelligence lay

the weight of intellectual tyranny. The pressure kept on increasing, and

the suppressed forces kept on increasing, till at last, as if to show

what gigantic power was needed to keep conservatism dominant, the

Merchant Province put forward Daniel Webster.

The worst period of panic seems to have preceded the anti-slavery

agitations of 1831, because these agitations soon demonstrated that the

sky did not fall nor the earth yawn and swallow Massachusetts because of

Mr. Garrison's opinions, as most people had sincerely believed would be

the case. Some semblance of free speech was therefore gradually

regained.

Let us remember the world upon which the young Emerson's eyes opened.

The South was a plantation. The North crooked the hinges of the knee

where thrift might follow fawning. It was the era of Martin Chuzzlewit,

a malicious caricature,--founded on fact. This time of humiliation, when

there was no free speech, no literature, little manliness, no reality,

no simplicity, no accomplishment, was the era of American brag. We

flattered the foreigner and we boasted of ourselves. We were

over-sensitive, insolent, and cringing. As late as 1845, G.P. Putnam, a

most sensible and modest man, published a book to show what the country

had done in the field of culture. The book is a monument of the age.

With all its good sense and good humor, it justifies foreign contempt

because it is explanatory. Underneath everything lay a feeling of

unrest, an instinct,--"this country cannot permanently endure half slave

and half free,"--which was the truth, but which could not be uttered.

So long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they

are timid upon all subjects. They wear an iron crown and talk in

whispers. Such social conditions crush and maim the individual, and

throughout New England, as throughout the whole North, the individual

was crushed and maimed.

The generous youths who came to manhood between 1820 and 1830, while

this deadly era was maturing, seem to have undergone a revulsion against

the world almost before touching it; at least two of them suffered,

revolted, and condemned, while still boys sitting on benches in school,

and came forth advancing upon this old society like gladiators. The

activity of William Lloyd Garrison, the man of action, preceded by

several years that of Emerson, who is his prophet. Both of them were

parts of one revolution. One of Emerson's articles of faith was that a

man's thoughts spring from his actions rather than his actions from his

thoughts, and possibly the same thing holds good for society at large.

Perhaps all truths, whether moral or economic, must be worked out in

real life before they are discovered by the student, and it was

therefore necessary that Garrison should be evolved earlier than

Emerson.

The silent years of early manhood, during which Emerson passed through

the Divinity School and to his ministry, known by few, understood by

none, least of all by himself, were years in which the revolting spirit

of an archangel thought out his creed. He came forth perfect, with that

serenity of which we have scarce another example in history,--that union

of the man himself, his beliefs, and his vehicle of expression that

makes men great because it makes them comprehensible. The philosophy

into which he had already transmuted all his earlier theology at the

time we first meet him consisted of a very simple drawing together of a

few ideas, all of which had long been familiar to the world. It is the

wonderful use he made of these ideas, the closeness with which they

fitted his soul, the tact with which he took what he needed, like a bird

building its nest, that make the originality, the man.

The conclusion of Berkeley, that the external world is known to us only

through our impressions, and that therefore, for aught we know, the

whole universe exists only in our own consciousness, cannot be

disproved. It is so simple a conception that a child may understand it;

and it has probably been passed before the attention of every thinking

man since Plato's time. The notion is in itself a mere philosophical

catch or crux to which there is no answer. It may be true. The mystics

made this doctrine useful. They were not content to doubt the

independent existence of the external world. They imagined that this

external world, the earth, the planets, the phenomena of nature, bore

some relation to the emotions and destiny of the soul. The soul and the

cosmos were somehow related, and related so intimately that the cosmos

might be regarded as a sort of projection or diagram of the soul.

Plato was the first man who perceived that this idea could be made to

provide the philosopher with a vehicle of expression more powerful than

any other. If a man will once plant himself firmly on the proposition

that _he is_ the universe, that every emotion or expression of his mind

is correlated in some way to phenomena in the external world, and that

he shall say how correlated, he is in a position where the power of

speech is at a maximum. His figures of speech, his tropes, his

witticisms, take rank with the law of gravity and the precession of the

equinoxes. Philosophical exaltation of the individual cannot go beyond

this point. It is the climax.

This is the school of thought to which Emerson belonged. The sun and

moon, the planets, are mere symbols. They signify whatever the poet

chooses. The planets for the most part stay in conjunction just long

enough to flash his thought through their symbolism, and no permanent

relation is established between the soul and the zodiac. There is,

however, one link of correlation between the external and internal

worlds which Emerson considered established, and in which he believed

almost literally, namely, the moral law. This idea he drew from Kant

through Coleridge and Wordsworth, and it is so familiar to us all that

it hardly needs stating. The fancy that the good, the true, the

beautiful,--all things of which we instinctively approve,--are somehow

connected together and are really one thing; that our appreciation of

them is in its essence the recognition of a law; that this law, in fact

all law and the very idea of law, is a mere subjective experience; and

that hence any external sequence which we coördinate and name, like the

law of gravity, is really intimately connected with our moral

nature,--this fancy has probably some basis of truth. Emerson adopted it

as a corner-stone of his thought.

Such are the ideas at the basis of Emerson's philosophy, and it is fair

to speak of them in this place because they antedate everything else

which we know of him. They had been for years in his mind before he

spoke at all. It was in the armor of this invulnerable idealism and with

weapons like shafts of light that he came forth to fight.

In 1836, at the age of thirty-three, Emerson published the little

pamphlet called Nature, which was an attempt to state his creed.

Although still young, he was not without experience of life. He had been

assistant minister to the Rev. Dr. Ware from 1829 to 1832, when he

resigned his ministry on account of his views regarding the Lord's

Supper. He had married and lost his first wife in the same interval. He

had been abroad and had visited Carlyle in 1833. He had returned and

settled in Concord, and had taken up the profession of lecturing, upon

which he in part supported himself ever after. It is unnecessary to

review these early lectures. "Large portions of them," says Mr. Cabot,

his biographer, "appeared afterwards in the Essays, especially those of

the first series." Suffice it that through them Emerson had become so

well known that although Nature was published anonymously, he was

recognized as the author. Many people had heard of him at the time he

resigned his charge, and the story went abroad that the young minister

of the Second Church had gone mad. The lectures had not discredited the

story, and Nature seemed to corroborate it. Such was the impression

which the book made upon Boston in 1836. As we read it to-day, we are

struck by its extraordinary beauty of language. It is a supersensuous,

lyrical, and sincere rhapsody, written evidently by a man of genius. It

reveals a nature compelling respect,--a Shelley, and yet a sort of

Yankee Shelley, who is mad only when the wind is nor'-nor'west; a mature

nature which must have been nourished for years upon its own thoughts,

to speak this new language so eloquently, to stand so calmly on its

feet. The deliverance of his thought is so perfect that this work adapts

itself to our mood and has the quality of poetry. This fluency Emerson

soon lost; it is the quality missing in his poetry. It is the

efflorescence of youth.

"In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing

a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,

without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good

fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the

brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the

snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a

child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of

God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed,

and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand

years.... It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not

to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as

heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard nature as phenomenon,

not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to

esteem nature as an accident and an effect."

Perhaps these quotations from the pamphlet called Nature are enough to

show the clouds of speculation in which Emerson had been walking. With

what lightning they were charged was soon seen.

In 1837 he was asked to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge.

This was the opportunity for which he had been waiting. The mystic and

eccentric young poet-preacher now speaks his mind, and he turns out to

be a man exclusively interested in real life. This recluse, too tender

for contact with the rough facts of the world, whose conscience has

retired him to rural Concord, pours out a vial of wrath. This cub puts

forth the paw of a full-grown lion.

Emerson has left behind him nothing stronger than this address, The

American Scholar. It was the first application of his views to the

events of his day, written and delivered in the heat of early manhood

while his extraordinary powers were at their height. It moves with a

logical progression of which he soon lost the habit. The subject of it,

the scholar's relation to the world, was the passion of his life. The

body of his belief is to be found in this address, and in any adequate

account of him the whole address ought to be given.

"Thus far," he said, "our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the

survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to

letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an

indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought

to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this

continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed

expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of

mechanical skill.... The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the

first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it

the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into

him life; it went out from him truth.... Yet hence arises a grave

mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act

of thought, is transferred to the record. 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; as

love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book

becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant.... Books are the best of things,

well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the

one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to

inspire.... The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him,

although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul

active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action

it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the

sound estate of every man.... Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of

genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation bears me

witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two

hundred years.... These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all

confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He, and he

only, knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance.

Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade,

or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other

half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are

that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the

scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his

belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of

the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom."

Dr. Holmes called this speech of Emerson's our "intellectual

Declaration of Independence," and indeed it was. "The Phi Beta Kappa

speech," says Mr. Lowell, "was an event without any former parallel in

our literary annals,--a scene always to be treasured in the memory for

its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless

aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of

approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"

The authorities of the Divinity School can hardly have been very careful

readers of Nature and The American Scholar, or they would not have

invited Emerson, in 1838, to deliver the address to the graduating

class. This was Emerson's second opportunity to apply his beliefs

directly to society. A few lines out of the famous address are enough to

show that he saw in the church of his day signs of the same decadence

that he saw in the letters: "The prayers and even the dogmas of our

church are like the zodiac of Denderah and the astronomical monuments of

the Hindoos, wholly insulated from anything now extant in the life and

business of the people. They mark the height to which the waters once

rose.... It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not

was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity--a faith like

Christ's in the infinitude of man--is lost. None believeth in the soul

of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man

goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding

the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be

blind in public. They think society wiser than their soul, and know not

that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world."

It is almost misleading to speak of the lofty utterances of these early

addresses as attacks upon society, but their reception explains them.

The element of absolute courage is the same in all natures. Emerson

himself was not unconscious of what function he was performing.

The "storm in our wash-bowl" which followed this Divinity School

address, the letters of remonstrance from friends, the advertisements by

the Divinity School of "no complicity," must have been cheering to

Emerson. His unseen yet dominating ambition is shown throughout the

address, and in this note in his diary of the following year:--

"_August_ 31. Yesterday at the Phi Beta Kappa anniversary. Steady,

steady. I am convinced that if a man will be a true scholar he

shall have perfect freedom. The young people and the mature hint at

odium and the aversion of forces to be presently encountered in

society. I say No; I fear it not."

The lectures and addresses which form the latter half of the first

volume in the collected edition show the early Emerson in the ripeness

of his powers. These writings have a lyrical sweep and a beauty which

the later works often lack. Passages in them remind us of Hamlet:--

"How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without space to

insert an atom;--in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in

balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an

odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact

and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor

shown.... The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to

signify the beautiful variety of things and the firmament, his coat

of stars,--was but the representative of thee, O rich and various

man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the

morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the

geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, the bower of love and the

realms of right and wrong.... Every star in heaven is discontent

and insatiable. Gravitation and chemistry cannot content them. Ever

they woo and court the eye of the beholder. Every man who comes into

the world they seek to fascinate and possess, to pass into his mind,

for they desire to republish themselves in a more delicate world

than that they occupy.... So it is with all immaterial objects.

These beautiful basilisks set their brute glorious eyes on the eye

of every child, and, if they can, cause their nature to pass through

his wondering eyes into him, and so all things are mixed."