II

The attitude of Emerson's mind toward reformers results so logically

from his philosophy that it is easily understood. He saw in them people

who sought something as a panacea or as an end in itself. To speak

strictly and not irreverently, he had his own panacea,--the development

of each individual; and he was impatient of any other. He did not

believe in association. The very idea of it involved a surrender by the

individual of some portion of his identity, and of course all the

reformers worked through their associations. With their general aims he

sympathized. "These reforms," he wrote, "are our contemporaries; they

are ourselves, our own light and sight and conscience; they only name

the relation which subsists between us and the vicious institutions

which they go to rectify." But with the methods of the reformers he had

no sympathy: "He who aims at progress should aim at an infinite, not at

a special benefit. The reforms whose fame now fills the land with

temperance, anti-slavery, non-resistance, no-government, equal labor,

fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when

prosecuted for themselves as an end." Again: "The young men who have

been vexing society for these last years with regenerative methods seem

to have made this mistake: they all exaggerated some special means, and

all failed to see that the reform of reforms must be accomplished

without means."

Emerson did not at first discriminate between the movement of the

Abolitionists and the hundred and one other reform movements of the

period; and in this lack of discrimination lies a point of extraordinary

interest. The Abolitionists, as it afterwards turned out, had in fact

got hold of the issue which was to control the fortunes of the republic

for thirty years. The difference between them and the other reformers

was this: that the Abolitionists were men set in motion by the primary

and unreasoning passion of pity. Theory played small part in the

movement. It grew by the excitement which exhibitions of cruelty will

arouse in the minds of sensitive people.

It is not to be denied that the social conditions in Boston in 1831

foreboded an outbreak in some form. If the abolition excitement had not

drafted off the rising forces, there might have been a Merry Mount, an

epidemic of crime or insanity, or a mob of some sort. The abolition

movement afforded the purest form of an indulgence in human feeling that

was ever offered to men. It was intoxicating. It made the agitators

perfectly happy. They sang at their work and bubbled over with

exhilaration. They were the only people in the United States, at this

time, who were enjoying an exalted, glorifying, practical activity.

But Emerson at first lacked the touchstone, whether of intellect or of

heart, to see the difference between this particular movement and the

other movements then in progress. Indeed, in so far as he sees any

difference between the Abolitionists and the rest, it is that the

Abolitionists were more objectionable and distasteful to him. "Those,"

he said, "who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest

benefits to mankind are narrow, conceited, self-pleasing men, and affect

us as the insane do." And again: "By the side of these men [the

idealists] the hot agitators have a certain cheap and ridiculous air;

they even look smaller than others. Of the two, I own I like the

speculators the best. They have some piety which looks with faith to a

fair future unprofaned by rash and unequal attempts to realize it." He

was drawn into the abolition cause by having the truth brought home to

him that these people were fighting for the Moral Law. He was slow in

seeing this, because in their methods they represented everything he

most condemned. As soon, however, as he was convinced, he was ready to

lecture for them and to give them the weight of his approval. In 1844 he

was already practically an Abolitionist, and his feelings upon the

matter deepened steadily in intensity ever after.

The most interesting page of Emerson's published journal is the

following, written at some time previous to 1844; the exact date is not

given. A like page, whether written or unwritten, may be read into the

private annals of every man who lived before the war. Emerson has, with

unconscious mastery, photographed the half-spectre that stalked in the

minds of all. He wrote: "I had occasion to say the other day to

Elizabeth Hoar that I like best the strong and worthy persons, like her

father, who support the social order without hesitation or misgiving. I

like these; they never incommode us by exciting grief, pity, or

perturbation of any sort. But the professed philanthropists, it is

strange and horrible to say, are an altogether odious set of people,

whom one would shun as the worst of bores and canters. But my

conscience, my unhappy conscience respects that hapless class who see

the faults and stains of our social order, and who pray and strive

incessantly to right the wrong; this annoying class of men and women,

though they commonly find the work altogether beyond their faculty, and

their results are, for the present, distressing. They are partial, and

apt to magnify their own. Yes, and the prostrate penitent, also,--he is

not comprehensive, he is not philosophical in those tears and groans.

Yet I feel that under him and his partiality and exclusiveness is the

earth and the sea and all that in them is, and the axis around which the

universe revolves passes through his body where he stands."

It was the defection of Daniel Webster that completed the conversion of

Emerson and turned him from an adherent into a propagandist of

abolition. Not pity for the slave, but indignation at the violation of

the Moral Law by Daniel Webster, was at the bottom of Emerson's anger.

His abolitionism was secondary to his main mission, his main enthusiasm.

It is for this reason that he stands on a plane of intellect where he

might, under other circumstances, have met and defeated Webster. After

the 7th of March, 1850, he recognized in Webster the embodiment of all

that he hated. In his attacks on Webster, Emerson trembles to his inmost

fibre with antagonism. He is savage, destructive, personal, bent on

death.

This exhibition of Emerson as a fighting animal is magnificent, and

explains his life. There is no other instance of his ferocity. No other

nature but Webster's ever so moved him; but it was time to be moved, and

Webster was a man of his size. Had these two great men of New England

been matched in training as they were matched in endowment, and had they

then faced each other in debate, they would not have been found to

differ so greatly in power. Their natures were electrically repellent,

but from which did the greater force radiate? Their education differed

so radically that it is impossible to compare them, but if you translate

the Phi Beta Kappa address into politics, you have something stronger

than Webster,--something that recalls Chatham; and Emerson would have

had this advantage,--that he was not afraid. As it was, he left his

library and took the stump. Mr. Cabot has given us extracts from his

speeches:--

"The tameness is indeed complete; all are involved in one hot haste

of terror,--presidents of colleges and professors, saints and

brokers, lawyers and manufacturers; not a liberal recollection, not

so much as a snatch of an old song for freedom, dares intrude on

their passive obedience.... Mr. Webster, perhaps, is only following

the laws of his blood and constitution. I suppose his pledges were

not quite natural to him. He is a man who lives by his memory; a man

of the past, not a man of faith and of hope. All the drops of his

blood have eyes that look downward, and his finely developed

understanding only works truly and with all its force when it stands

for animal good; that is, for property. He looks at the Union as an

estate, a large farm, and is excellent in the completeness of his

defence of it so far. What he finds already written he will defend.

Lucky that so much had got well written when he came, for he has no

faith in the power of self-government. Not the smallest municipal

provision, if it were new, would receive his sanction. In

Massachusetts, in 1776, he would, beyond all question, have been a

refugee. He praises Adams and Jefferson, but it is a past Adams and

Jefferson. A present Adams or Jefferson he would denounce.... But

one thing appears certain to me: that the Union is at an end as soon

as an immoral law is enacted. He who writes a crime into the

statute book digs under the foundations of the Capitol.... The words

of John Randolph, wiser than he knew, have been ringing ominously in

all echoes for thirty years: 'We do not govern the people of the

North by our black slaves, but by their own white slaves.' ... They

come down now like the cry of fate, in the moment when they are

fulfilled."

The exasperation of Emerson did not subside, but went on increasing

during the next four years, and on March 7, 1854, he read his lecture on

the Fugitive Slave Law at the New York Tabernacle: "I have lived all my

life without suffering any inconvenience from American Slavery. I never

saw it; I never heard the whip; I never felt the check on my free speech

and action, until the other day, when Mr. Webster, by his personal

influence, brought the Fugitive Slave Law on the country. I say Mr.

Webster, for though the bill was not his, it is yet notorious that he

was the life and soul of it, that he gave it all he had. It cost him his

life, and under the shadow of his great name inferior men sheltered

themselves, threw their ballots for it, and made the law.... Nobody

doubts that Daniel Webster could make a good speech. Nobody doubts that

there were good and plausible things to be said on the part of the

South. But this is not a question of ingenuity, not a question of

syllogisms, but of sides. _How came he there_? ... But the question which

history will ask is broader. In the final hour when he was forced by the

peremptory necessity of the closing armies to take a side,--did he take

the part of great principles, the side of humanity and justice, or the

side of abuse, and oppression and chaos? ... He did as immoral men

usually do,--made very low bows to the Christian Church and went through

all the Sunday decorums, but when allusion was made to the question of

duty and the sanctions of morality, he very frankly said, at Albany,

'Some higher law, something existing somewhere between here and the

heaven--I do not know where.' And if the reporters say true, this

wretched atheism found some laughter in the company."

It was too late for Emerson to shine as a political debater. On May 14,

1857, Longfellow wrote in his diary, "It is rather painful to see

Emerson in the arena of politics, hissed and hooted at by young law

students." Emerson records a similar experience at a later date: "If I

were dumb, yet would I have gone and mowed and muttered or made signs.

The mob roared whenever I attempted to speak, and after several

beginnings I withdrew." There is nothing "painful" here: it is the

sublime exhibition of a great soul in bondage to circumstance.

The thing to be noted is that this is the same man, in the same state of

excitement about the same idea, who years before spoke out in The

American Scholar, in the Essays, and in the Lectures.

What was it that had aroused in Emerson such Promethean antagonism in

1837 but those same forces which in 1850 came to their culmination and

assumed visible shape in the person of Daniel Webster? The formal

victory of Webster drew Emerson into the arena, and made a dramatic

episode in his life. But his battle with those forces had begun thirteen

years earlier, when he threw down the gauntlet to them in his Phi Beta

Kappa oration. Emerson by his writings did more than any other man to

rescue the youth of the next generation and fit them for the fierce

times to follow. It will not be denied that he sent ten thousand sons to

the war.

In speaking of Emerson's attitude toward the anti-slavery cause, it has

been possible to dispense with any survey of that movement, because the

movement was simple and specific and is well remembered. But when we

come to analyze the relations he bore to some of the local agitations of

his day, it becomes necessary to weave in with the matter a discussion

of certain tendencies deeply imbedded in the life of his times, and of

which he himself was in a sense an outcome. In speaking of the

Transcendentalists, who were essentially the children of the Puritans,

we must begin with some study of the chief traits of Puritanism.

What parts the factors of climate, circumstance, and religion have

respectively played in the development of the New England character no

analysis can determine. We may trace the imaginary influence of a harsh

creed in the lines of the face. We may sometimes follow from generation

to generation the course of a truth which at first sustained the spirit

of man, till we see it petrify into a dogma which now kills the spirits

of men. Conscience may destroy the character. The tragedy of the New

England judge enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law was no new spectacle in

New England. A dogmatic crucifixion of the natural instincts had been in

progress there for two hundred years. Emerson, who is more free from

dogma than any other teacher that can be named, yet comes very near

being dogmatic in his reiteration of the Moral Law.

Whatever volume of Emerson we take up, the Moral Law holds the same

place in his thoughts. It is the one statable revelation of truth which

he is ready to stake his all upon. "The illusion that strikes me as the

masterpiece in that ring of illusions which our life is, is the timidity

with which we assert our moral sentiment. We are made of it, the world

is built by it, things endure as they share it; all beauty, all health,

all intelligence exist by it; yet we shrink to speak of it or range

ourselves by its side. Nay, we presume strength of him or them who deny

it. Cities go against it, the college goes against it, the courts snatch

any precedent at any vicious form of law to rule it out; legislatures

listen with appetite to declamations against it and vote it down."

With this very beautiful and striking passage no one will quarrel, nor

will any one misunderstand it.

The following passage has the same sort of poetical truth. "Things are

saturated with the moral law. There is no escape from it. Violets and

grass preach it; rain and snow, wind and tides, every change, every

cause in Nature is nothing but a disguised missionary." ...

But Emerson is not satisfied with metaphor. "We affirm that in all men

is this majestic perception and command; that it is the presence of the

eternal in each perishing man; that it distances and degrades all

statements of whatever saints, heroes, poets, as obscure and confused

stammerings before its silent revelation. _They_ report the truth. _It_

is the truth." In this last extract we have Emerson actually affirming

that his dogma of the Moral Law is Absolute Truth. He thinks it not

merely a form of truth, like the old theologies, but very

distinguishable from all other forms in the past.

Curiously enough, his statement of the law grows dogmatic and incisive

in proportion as he approaches the borderland between his law and the

natural instincts: "The last revelation of intellect and of sentiment is

that in a manner it severs the man from all other men; makes known to

him _that the spiritual powers are sufficient to him if no other being

existed_; that he is to deal absolutely in the world, as if he alone

were a system and a state, and though all should perish could make all

anew." Here we have the dogma applied, and we see in it only a new form

of old Calvinism as cruel as Calvinism, and not much different from its

original. The italics are not Emerson's, but are inserted to bring out

an idea which is everywhere prevalent in his teaching.

In this final form, the Moral Law, by insisting that sheer conscience

can slake the thirst that rises in the soul, is convicted of falsehood;

and this heartless falsehood is the same falsehood that has been put

into the porridge of every Puritan child for six generations. A grown

man can digest doctrine and sleep at night. But a young person of high

purpose and strong will, who takes such a lie as this half-truth and

feeds on it as on the bread of life, will suffer. It will injure the

action of his heart. Truly the fathers have eaten sour grapes, therefore

the children's teeth are set on edge.

* * * * *

To understand the civilization of cities, we must look at the rural

population from which they draw their life. We have recently had our

attention called to the last remnants of that village life so reverently

gathered up by Miss Wilkins, and of which Miss Emily Dickinson was the

last authentic voice. The spirit of this age has examined with an almost

pathological interest this rescued society. We must go to it if we would

understand Emerson, who is the blossoming of its culture. We must study

it if we would arrive at any intelligent and general view of that

miscellaneous crop of individuals who have been called the

Transcendentalists.

Between 1830 and 1840 there were already signs in New England that the

nutritive and reproductive forces of society were not quite wholesome,

not exactly well adjusted. Self-repression was the religion which had

been inherited. "Distrust Nature" was the motto written upon the front

of the temple. What would have happened to that society if left to

itself for another hundred years no man can guess. It was rescued by the

two great regenerators of mankind, new land and war. The dispersion

came, as Emerson said of the barbarian conquests of Rome, not a day too

soon. It happened that the country at large stood in need of New England

as much as New England stood in need of the country. This congested

virtue, in order to be saved, must be scattered. This ferment, in order

to be kept wholesome, must be used as leaven to leaven the whole lump.

"As you know," says Emerson in his Eulogy on Boston, "New England

supplies annually a large detachment of preachers and schoolmasters and

private tutors to the interior of the South and West.... We are willing

to see our sons emigrate, as to see our hives swarm. That is what they

were made to do, and what the land wants and invites."

For purposes of yeast, there was never such leaven as the Puritan stock.

How little the natural force of the race had really abated became

apparent when it was placed under healthy conditions, given land to

till, foes to fight, the chance to renew its youth like the eagle. But

during this period the relief had not yet come. The terrible pressure of

Puritanism and conservatism in New England was causing a revolt not only

of the Abolitionists, but of another class of people of a type not so

virile as they. The times have been smartly described by Lowell in his

essay on Thoreau:--

"Every possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought

forth its gospel. Bran had its prophets.... Everybody had a Mission

(with a capital M) to attend to everybody else's business. No brain

but had its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short

commons sometimes. Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of

money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the

internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an assurance of instant

millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be substituted for

buttons. Communities were established where everything was to be

common but common sense.... Conventions were held for every hitherto

inconceivable purpose."

Whatever may be said of the Transcendentalists, it must not be forgotten

that they represented an elevation of feeling, which through them

qualified the next generation, and can be traced in the life of New

England to-day. The strong intrinsic character lodged in these recusants

was later made manifest; for many of them became the best citizens of

the commonwealth,--statesmen, merchants, soldiers, men and women of

affairs. They retained their idealism while becoming practical men.

There is hardly an example of what we should have thought would be

common in their later lives, namely, a reaction from so much ideal

effort, and a plunge into cynicism and malice, scoundrelism and the

flesh-pots. In their early life they resembled the Abolitionists in

their devotion to an idea; but with the Transcendentalists self-culture

and the aesthetic and sentimental education took the place of more

public aims. They seem also to have been persons of greater social

refinement than the Abolitionists.

The Transcendentalists were sure of only one thing,--that society as

constituted was all wrong. In this their main belief they were right.

They were men and women whose fundamental need was activity, contact

with real life, and the opportunity for social expansion; and they

keenly felt the chill and fictitious character of the reigning

conventionalities. The rigidity of behavior which at this time

characterized the Bostonians seemed sometimes ludicrous and sometimes

disagreeable to the foreign visitor. There was great gravity, together

with a certain pomp and dumbness, and these things were supposed to be

natural to the inhabitants and to give them joy. People are apt to

forget that such masks are never worn with ease. They result from the

application of an inflexible will, and always inflict discomfort. The

Transcendentalists found themselves all but stifled in a society as

artificial in its decorum as the court of France during the last years

of Louis XIV.

Emerson was in no way responsible for the movement, although he got the

credit of having evoked it by his teaching. He was elder brother to it,

and was generated by its parental forces; but even if Emerson had never

lived, the Transcendentalists would have appeared. He was their victim

rather than their cause. He was always tolerant of them and sometimes

amused at them, and disposed to treat them lightly. It is impossible to

analyze their case with more astuteness than he did in an editorial

letter in The Dial. The letter is cold, but is a masterpiece of good

sense. He had, he says, received fifteen letters on the Prospects of

Culture. "Excellent reasons have been shown us why the writers,

obviously persons of sincerity and elegance, should be dissatisfied with

the life they lead, and with their company.... They want a friend to

whom they can speak and from whom they may hear now and then a

reasonable word." After discussing one or two of their proposals,--one

of which was that the tiresome "uncles and aunts" of the enthusiasts

should be placed by themselves in one delightful village, the dough, as

Emerson says, be placed in one pan and the leaven in another,--he

continues: "But it would be unjust not to remind our younger friends

that whilst this aspiration has always made its mark in the lives of men

of thought, in vigorous individuals it does not remain a detached

object, but is satisfied along with the satisfaction of other aims."

Young Americans "are educated above the work of their times and country,

and disdain it. Many of the more acute minds pass into a lofty

criticism ... which only embitters their sensibility to the evil, and

widens the feeling of hostility between them and the citizens at

large.... We should not know where to find in literature any record of

so much unbalanced intellectuality, such undeniable apprehension without

talent, so much power without equal applicability, as our young men

pretend to.... The balance of mind and body will redress itself fast

enough. Superficialness is the real distemper.... It is certain that

speculation is no succedaneum for life." He then turns to find the cure

for these distempers in the farm lands of Illinois, at that time already

being fenced in "almost like New England itself," and closes with a

suggestion that so long as there is a woodpile in the yard, and the

"wrongs of the Indian, of the Negro, of the emigrant, remain

unmitigated," relief might be found even nearer home.

In his lecture on the Transcendentalists he says: "... But their

solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the

conversation, but from the labors of the world: they are not good

citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part

of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the

public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprises of

education, of missions foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the

slave-trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to

vote." A less sympathetic observer, Harriet Martineau, wrote of them:

"While Margaret Fuller and her adult pupils sat 'gorgeously dressed,'

talking about Mars and Venus, Plato and Goethe, and fancying themselves

the elect of the earth in intellect and refinement, the liberties of the

republic were running out as fast as they could go at a breach which

another sort of elect persons were devoting themselves to repair; and my

complaint against the 'gorgeous' pedants was that they regarded their

preservers as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and their work as a

less vital one than the pedantic orations which were spoiling a set of

well-meaning women in a pitiable way." Harriet Martineau, whose whole

work was practical, and who wrote her journal in 1855 and in the light

of history, was hardly able to do justice to these unpractical but

sincere spirits.

Emerson was divided from the Transcendentalists by his common sense. His

shrewd business intellect made short work of their schemes. Each one of

their social projects contained some covert economic weakness, which

always turned out to lie in an attack upon the integrity of the

individual, and which Emerson of all men could be counted on to detect.

He was divided from them also by the fact that he was a man of genius,

who had sought out and fought out his means of expression. He was a

great artist, and as such he was a complete being. No one could give to

him nor take from him. His yearnings found fruition in expression. He

was sure of his place and of his use in this world. But the

Transcendentalists were neither geniuses nor artists nor complete

beings. Nor had they found their places or uses as yet. They were men

and women seeking light. They walked in dry places, seeking rest and

finding none. The Transcendentalists are not collectively important

because their _Sturm und Drang_ was intellectual and bloodless. Though

Emerson admonish and Harriet Martineau condemn, yet from the memorials

that survive, one is more impressed with the sufferings than with the

ludicrousness of these persons. There is something distressing about

their letters, their talk, their memoirs, their interminable diaries.

They worry and contort and introspect. They rave and dream. They peep

and theorize. They cut open the bellows of life to see where the wind

comes from. Margaret Fuller analyzes Emerson, and Emerson Margaret

Fuller. It is not a wholesome ebullition of vitality. It is a nightmare,

in which the emotions, the terror, the agony, the rapture, are all

unreal, and have no vital content, no consequence in the world outside.

It is positively wonderful that so much excitement and so much suffering

should have left behind nothing in the field of art which is valuable.

All that intelligence could do toward solving problems for his friends

Emerson did. But there are situations in life in which the intelligence

is helpless, and in which something else, something perhaps possessed by

a ploughboy, is more divine than Plato.

If it were not pathetic, there would be something cruel--indeed there is

something cruel--in Emerson's incapacity to deal with Margaret Fuller.

He wrote to her on October 24, 1840: "My dear Margaret, I have your

frank and noble and affecting letter, and yet I think I could wish it

unwritten. I ought never to have suffered you to lead me into any

conversation or writing on our relation, a topic from which with all

persons my Genius warns me away."

The letter proceeds with unimpeachable emptiness and integrity in the

same strain. In 1841 he writes in his diary: "Strange, cold-warm,

attractive-repelling conversation with Margaret, whom I always admire,

most revere when I nearest see, and sometimes love; yet whom I freeze

and who freezes me to silence when we promise to come nearest."

Human sentiment was known to Emerson mainly in the form of pain. His

nature shunned it; he cast it off as quickly as possible. There is a

word or two in the essay on Love which seems to show that the inner and

diaphanous core of this seraph had once, but not for long, been shot

with blood: he recalls only the pain of it. His relations with Margaret

Fuller seem never normal, though they lasted for years. This brilliant

woman was in distress. She was asking for bread, and he was giving her a

stone, and neither of them was conscious of what was passing. This is

pitiful. It makes us clutch about us to catch hold, if we somehow may,

of the hand of a man.

There was manliness in Horace Greeley, under whom Miss Fuller worked on

the New York Tribune not many years afterward. She wrote: "Mr. Greeley I

like,--nay, more, love. He is in his habit a plebeian, in his heart a

nobleman. His abilities in his own way are great. He believes in mine

to a surprising degree. We are true friends."

This anæmic incompleteness of Emerson's character can be traced to the

philosophy of his race; at least it can be followed in that philosophy.

There is an implication of a fundamental falsehood in every bit of

Transcendentalism, including Emerson. That falsehood consists in the

theory of the self-sufficiency of each individual, men and women alike.

Margaret Fuller is a good example of the effect of this philosophy,

because her history afterward showed that she was constituted like other

human beings, was dependent upon human relationship, and was not only a

very noble, but also a very womanly creature. Her marriage, her Italian

life, and her tragic death light up with the splendor of reality the

earlier and unhappy period of her life. This woman had been driven into

her vagaries by the lack of something which she did not know existed,

and which she sought blindly in metaphysics. Harriet Martineau writes of

her: "It is the most grievous loss I have almost ever known in private

history, the deferring of Margaret Fuller's married life so long. That

noble last period of her life is happily on record as well as the

earlier." The hardy Englishwoman has here laid a kind human hand on the

weakness of New England, and seems to be unconscious that she is making

a revelation as to the whole Transcendental movement. But the point is

this: there was no one within reach of Margaret Fuller, in her early

days, who knew what was her need. One offered her Kant, one Comte, one

Fourier, one Swedenborg, one the Moral Law. You cannot feed the heart on

these things.

Yet there is a bright side to this New England spirit, which seems, if

we look only to the graver emotions, so dry, dismal, and deficient. A

bright and cheery courage appears in certain natures of which the sun

has made conquest, that almost reconciles us to all loss, so splendid is

the outcome. The practical, dominant, insuppressible active temperaments

who have a word for every emergency, and who carry the controlled force

of ten men at their disposal, are the fruits of this same spirit.

Emerson knew not tears, but he and the hundred other beaming and

competent characters which New England has produced make us almost envy

their state. They give us again the old Stoics at their best.

Very closely connected with this subject--the crisp and cheery New

England temperament--lies another which any discussion of Emerson must

bring up,--namely, Asceticism. It is probable that in dealing with

Emerson's feelings about the plastic arts we have to do with what is

really the inside, or metaphysical side, of the same phenomena which

present themselves on the outside, or physical side, in the shape of

asceticism.

Emerson's natural asceticism is revealed to us in almost every form in

which history can record a man. It is in his philosophy, in his style,

in his conduct, and in his appearance. It was, however, not in his

voice. Mr. Cabot, with that reverence for which every one must feel

personally grateful to him, has preserved a description of Emerson by

the New York journalist, N.P. Willis: "It is a voice with shoulders in

it, which he has not; with lungs in it far larger than his; with a walk

which the public never see; with a fist in it which his own hand never

gave him the model for; and with a gentleman in it which his parochial

and 'bare-necessaries-of-life' sort of exterior gives no other betrayal

of. We can imagine nothing in nature (which seems too to have a type for

everything) like the want of correspondence between the Emerson that

goes in at the eye and the Emerson that goes in at the ear. A heavy and

vase-like blossom of a magnolia, with fragrance enough to perfume a

whole wilderness, which should be lifted by a whirlwind and dropped into

a branch of aspen, would not seem more as if it could never have grown

there than Emerson's voice seems inspired and foreign to his visible and

natural body." Emerson's ever exquisite and wonderful good taste seems

closely connected with this asceticism, and it is probable that his

taste influenced his views and conduct to some small extent.

The anti-slavery people were not always refined. They were constantly

doing things which were tactically very effective, but were not

calculated to attract the over-sensitive. Garrison's rampant and

impersonal egotism was good politics, but bad taste. Wendell Phillips

did not hesitate upon occasion to deal in personalities of an

exasperating kind. One sees a certain shrinking in Emerson from the

taste of the Abolitionists. It was not merely their doctrines or their

methods which offended him. He at one time refused to give Wendell

Phillips his hand because of Phillips's treatment of his friend, Judge

Hoar. One hardly knows whether to be pleased at Emerson for showing a

human weakness, or annoyed at him for not being more of a man. The

anecdote is valuable in both lights. It is like a tiny speck on the

crystal of his character which shows us the exact location of the orb,

and it is the best illustration of the feeling of the times which has

come down to us.

If by "asceticism" we mean an experiment in starving the senses, there

is little harm in it. Nature will soon reassert her dominion, and very

likely our perceptions will be sharpened by the trial. But "natural

asceticism" is a thing hardly to be distinguished from functional

weakness. What is natural asceticism but a lack of vigor? Does it not

tend to close the avenues between the soul and the universe? "Is it not

so much death?" The accounts of Emerson show him to have been a man in

whom there was almost a hiatus between the senses and the most inward

spirit of life. The lower register of sensations and emotions which

domesticate a man into fellowship with common life was weak. Genial

familiarity was to him impossible; laughter was almost a pain. "It is

not the sea and poverty and pursuit that separate us. Here is Alcott by

my door,--yet is the union more profound? No! the sea, vocation,

poverty, are seeming fences, but man is insular and cannot be touched.

Every man is an infinitely repellent orb, and holds his individual being

on that condition.... Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I

see across a gulf; I cannot go to them nor they come to me."

This aloofness of Emerson must be remembered only as blended with his

benignity. "His friends were all that knew him," and, as Dr. Holmes

said, "his smile was the well-remembered line of Terence written out in

living features." Emerson's journals show the difficulty of his

intercourse even with himself. He could not reach himself at will, nor

could another reach him. The sensuous and ready contact with nature

which more carnal people enjoy was unknown to him. He had eyes for the

New England landscape, but for no other scenery. If there is one supreme

sensation reserved for man, it is the vision of Venice seen from the

water. This sight greeted Emerson at the age of thirty. The famous city,

as he approached it by boat, "looked for some time like nothing but New

York. It is a great oddity, a city for beavers, but to my thought a most

disagreeable residence. You feel always in prison and solitary. It is as

if you were always at sea. I soon had enough of it."

Emerson's contempt for travel and for the "rococo toy," Italy, is too

well known to need citation. It proceeds from the same deficiency of

sensation. His eyes saw nothing; his ears heard nothing. He believed

that men travelled for distraction and to kill time. The most vulgar

plutocrat could not be blinder to beauty nor bring home less from Athens

than this cultivated saint. Everything in the world which must be felt

with a glow in the breast, in order to be understood, was to him

dead-letter. Art was a name to him; music was a name to him; love was a

name to him. His essay on Love is a nice compilation of compliments and

elegant phrases ending up with some icy morality. It seems very well

fitted for a gift-book or an old-fashioned lady's annual.

"The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons

of their regards.... The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a

perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in

the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation, and

pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness,

signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. They

appear and reappear and continue to attract; but the regard changes,

quits the sign and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded

affection. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation

and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all

the resources of each, and acquaint each with the weakness of the

other.... At last they discover that all which at first drew them

together--those once sacred features, that magical play of charms--was

deciduous, had a prospective end like the scaffolding by which the house

was built, and the purification of the intellect and the heart from year

to year is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first, and

wholly above their consciousness.... Thus are we put in training for a

love which knows not sex nor person nor partiality, but which seeks

wisdom and virtue everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and

wisdom.... There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the

man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in

health the mind is presently seen again," etc.

All this is not love, but the merest literary coquetry. Love is

different from this. Lady Burton, when a very young girl, and six years

before her engagement, met Burton at Boulogne. They met in the street,

but did not speak. A few days later they were formally introduced at a

dance. Of this she writes: "That was a night of nights. He waltzed with

me once, and spoke to me several times. I kept the sash where he put his

arm around me and my gloves, and never wore them again."

A glance at what Emerson says about marriage shows that he suspected

that institution. He can hardly speak of it without some sort of caveat

or precaution. "Though the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a

moral union of two superior persons whose confidence in each other for

long years, out of sight and in sight, and against all appearances, is

at last justified by victorious proof of probity to gods and men,

causing joyful emotions, tears, and glory,--though there be for heroes

this _moral union_, yet they too are as far as ever from, an

intellectual union, and the moral is for low and external purposes, like

the corporation of a ship's company or of a fire club." In speaking of

modern novels, he says: "There is no new element, no power, no

furtherance. 'Tis only confectionery, not the raising of new corn. Great

is the poverty of their inventions. _She was beautiful, and he fell in

love_.... Happy will that house be in which the relations are formed by

character; after the highest and not after the lowest; the house in

which character marries and not confusion and a miscellany of

unavowable motives.... To each occurs soon after puberty, some event, or

society or way of living, which becomes the crisis of life and the chief

fact in their history. In women it is love and marriage (which is more

reasonable), and yet it is pitiful to date and measure all the facts and

sequel of an unfolding life from such a youthful and generally

inconsiderate period as the age of courtship and marriage.... Women more

than all are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated they

fascinate. They see through Claude Lorraines. And how dare any one, if

he could, pluck away the coulisses, stage effects and ceremonies by

which they live? Too pathetic, too pitiable, is the region of affection,

and its atmosphere always liable to mirage."

We are all so concerned that a man who writes about love shall tell the

truth that if he chance to start from premises which are false or

mistaken, his conclusions will appear not merely false, but offensive.

It makes no matter how exalted the personal character of the writer may

be. Neither sanctity nor intellect nor moral enthusiasm, though they be

intensified to the point of incandescence, can make up for a want of

nature.

This perpetual splitting up of love into two species, one of which is

condemned, but admitted to be useful--is it not degrading? There is in

Emerson's theory of the relation between the sexes neither good sense,

nor manly feeling, nor sound psychology. It is founded on none of these

things. It is a pure piece of dogmatism, and reminds us that he was bred

to the priesthood. We are not to imagine that there was in this doctrine

anything peculiar to Emerson. But we are surprised to find the pessimism

inherent in the doctrine overcome Emerson, to whom pessimism is foreign.

Both doctrine and pessimism are a part of the Puritanism of the times.

They show a society in which the intellect had long been used to analyze

the affections, in which the head had become dislocated from the body.

To this disintegration of the simple passion of love may be traced the

lack of maternal tenderness characteristic of the New England nature.

The relation between the blood and the brain was not quite normal in

this civilization, nor in Emerson, who is its most remarkable

representative.

If we take two steps backward from the canvas of this mortal life and

glance at it impartially, we shall see that these matters of love and

marriage pass like a pivot through the lives of almost every individual,

and are, sociologically speaking, the _primum mobile_ of the world. The

books of any philosopher who slurs them or distorts them will hold up a

false mirror to life. If an inhabitant of another planet should visit

the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life

by attending an Italian opera than he would by reading Emerson's

volumes. He would learn from the Italian opera that there were two

sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the

education of such a stranger ought to begin.

In a review of Emerson's personal character and opinions, we are thus

led to see that his philosophy, which finds no room for the emotions, is

a faithful exponent of his own and of the New England temperament, which

distrusts and dreads the emotions. Regarded as a sole guide to life for

a young person of strong conscience and undeveloped affections, his

works might conceivably be even harmful because of their unexampled

power of purely intellectual stimulation.

* * * * *

Emerson's poetry has given rise to much heart-burning and disagreement.

Some people do not like it. They fail to find the fire in the ice. On

the other hand, his poems appeal not only to a large number of

professed lovers of poetry, but also to a class of readers who find in

Emerson an element for which they search the rest of poesy in vain.

It is the irony of fate that his admirers should be more than usually

sensitive about his fame. This prophet who desired not to have

followers, lest he too should become a cult and a convention, and whose

main thesis throughout life was that piety is a crime, has been calmly

canonized and embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved. He is

become a tradition and a sacred relic. You must speak of him under your

breath, and you may not laugh near his shrine.

Emerson's passion for nature was not like the passion of Keats or of

Burns, of Coleridge or of Robert Browning; compared with these men he is

cold. His temperature is below blood-heat, and his volume of poems

stands on the shelf of English poets like the icy fish which in Caliban

upon Setebos is described as finding himself thrust into the warm ooze

of an ocean not his own.

But Emerson is a poet, nevertheless, a very extraordinary and rare man

of genius, whose verses carry a world of their own within them. They are

overshadowed by the greatness of his prose, but they are authentic. He

is the chief poet of that school of which Emily Dickinson is a minor

poet. His poetry is a successful spiritual deliverance of great

interest. His worship of the New England landscape amounts to a

religion. His poems do that most wonderful thing, make us feel that we

are alone in the fields and with the trees,--not English fields nor

French lanes, but New England meadows and uplands. There is no human

creature in sight, not even Emerson is there, but the wind and the

flowers, the wild birds, the fences, the transparent atmosphere, the

breath of nature. There is a deep and true relation between the

intellectual and almost dry brilliancy of Emerson's feelings and the

landscape itself. Here is no defective English poet, no Shelley without

the charm, but an American poet, a New England poet with two hundred

years of New England culture and New England landscape in him.

People are forever speculating upon what will last, what posterity will

approve, and some people believe that Emerson's poetry will outlive his

prose. The question is idle. The poems are alive now, and they may or

may not survive the race whose spirit they embody; but one thing is

plain: they have qualities which have preserved poetry in the past. They

are utterly indigenous and sincere. They are short. They represent a

civilization and a climate.

His verse divides itself into several classes. We have the single

lyrics, written somewhat in the style of the later seventeenth century.

Of these The Humble Bee is the most exquisite, and although its tone and

imagery can be traced to various well-known and dainty bits of poetry,

it is by no means an imitation, but a masterpiece of fine taste. The

Rhodora and Terminus and perhaps a few others belong to that class of

poetry which, like Abou Ben Adhem, is poetry because it is the

perfection of statement. The Boston Hymn, the Concord Ode, and the other

occasional pieces fall in another class, and do not seem to be

important. The first two lines of the Ode,

"O tenderly the haughty day

Fills his blue urn with fire."

are for their extraordinary beauty worthy of some mythical Greek, some

Simonides, some Sappho, but the rest of the lines are commonplace.

Throughout his poems there are good bits, happy and golden lines,

snatches of grace. He himself knew the quality of his poetry, and wrote

of it,

"All were sifted through and through,

Five lines lasted sound and true."

He is never merely conventional, and his poetry, like his prose, is

homespun and sound. But his ear was defective: his rhymes are crude, and

his verse is often lame and unmusical, a fault which can be

countervailed by nothing but force, and force he lacks. To say that his

ear was defective is hardly strong enough. Passages are not uncommon

which hurt the reader and unfit him to proceed; as, for example:--

"Thorough a thousand voices

Spoke the universal dame:

'Who telleth one of my meanings

Is master of all I am.'"

He himself has very well described the impression his verse is apt to

make on a new reader when he says,--

"Poetry must not freeze, but flow."

The lovers of Emerson's poems freely acknowledge all these defects, but

find in them another element, very subtle and rare, very refined and

elusive, if not altogether unique. This is the mystical element or

strain which qualifies many of his poems, and to which some of them are

wholly devoted.

There has been so much discussion as to Emerson's relation to the

mystics that it is well here to turn aside for a moment and consider

the matter by itself. The elusiveness of "mysticism" arises out of the

fact that it is not a creed, but a state of mind. It is formulated into

no dogmas, but, in so far as it is communicable, it is conveyed, or

sought to be conveyed, by symbols. These symbols to a sceptical or an

unsympathetic person will say nothing, but the presumption among those

who are inclined towards the cult is that if these symbols convey

anything at all, that thing is mysticism. The mystics are right. The

familiar phrases, terms, and symbols of mysticism are not meaningless,

and a glance at them shows that they do tend to express and evoke a

somewhat definite psychic condition.

There is a certain mood of mind experienced by most of us in which we

feel the mystery of existence; in which our consciousness seems to

become suddenly separated from our thoughts, and we find ourselves

asking, "Who am I? What are these thoughts?" The mood is very apt to

overtake us while engaged in the commonest acts. In health it is always

momentary, and seems to coincide with the instant of the transition and

shift of our attention from one thing to another. It is probably

connected with the transfer of energy from one set of faculties to

another set, which occurs, for instance, on our waking from sleep, on

our hearing a bell at night, on our observing any common object, a chair

or a pitcher, at a time when our mind is or has just been thoroughly

preoccupied with something else. This displacement of the attention

occurs in its most notable form when we walk from the study into the

open fields. Nature then attacks us on all sides at once, overwhelms,

drowns, and destroys our old thoughts, stimulates vaguely and all at

once a thousand new ideas, dissipates all focus of thought and dissolves

our attention. If we happen to be mentally fatigued, and we take a walk

in the country, a sense of immense relief, of rest and joy, which

nothing else on earth can give, accompanies this distraction of the mind

from its problems. The reaction fills us with a sense of mystery and

expansion. It brings us to the threshold of those spiritual experiences

which are the obscure core and reality of our existence, ever alive

within us, but generally veiled and sub-conscious. It brings us, as it

were, into the ante-chamber of art, poetry, and music. The condition is

one of excitation and receptiveness, where art may speak and we shall

understand. On the other hand, the condition shows a certain

dethronement of the will and attention which may ally it to the

hypnotic state.

Certain kinds of poetry imitate this method of nature by calling on us

with a thousand voices at once. Poetry deals often with vague or

contradictory statements, with a jumble of images, a throng of

impressions. But in true poetry the psychology of real life is closely

followed. The mysticism is momentary. We are not kept suspended in a

limbo, "trembling like a guilty thing surprised," but are ushered into

another world of thought and feeling. On the other hand, a mere

statement of inconceivable things is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of

poetry, because such a statement puzzles the mind, scatters the

attention, and does to a certain extent superinduce the "blank

misgivings" of mysticism. It does this, however, _without_ going further

and filling the mind with new life. If I bid a man follow my reasoning

closely, and then say, "I am the slayer and the slain, I am the doubter

and the doubt," I puzzle his mind, and may succeed in reawakening in him

the sense he has often had come over him that we are ignorant of our own

destinies and cannot grasp the meaning of life. If I do this, nothing

can be a more legitimate opening for a poem, for it is an opening of the

reader's mind. Emerson, like many other highly organized persons, was

acquainted with the mystic mood. It was not momentary with him. It

haunted him, and he seems to have believed that the whole of poetry and

religion was contained in the mood. And no one can gainsay that this

mental condition is intimately connected with our highest feelings and

leads directly into them.

The fault with Emerson is that he stops in the ante-chamber of poetry.

He is content if he has brought us to the hypnotic point. His prologue

and overture are excellent, but where is the argument? Where is the

substantial artistic content that shall feed our souls?

The Sphinx is a fair example of an Emerson poem. The opening verses are

musical, though they are handicapped by a reminiscence of the German way

of writing. In the succeeding verses we are lapped into a charming

reverie, and then at the end suddenly jolted by the question, "What is

it all about?" In this poem we see expanded into four or five pages of

verse an experience which in real life endures an eighth of a second,

and when we come to the end of the mood we are at the end of the poem.

There is no question that the power to throw your sitter into a

receptive mood by a pass or two which shall give you his virgin

attention is necessary to any artist. Nobody has the knack of this more

strongly than Emerson in his prose writings. By a phrase or a common

remark he creates an ideal atmosphere in which his thought has the

directness of great poetry. But he cannot do it in verse. He seeks in

his verse to do the very thing which he avoids doing in his prose:

follow a logical method. He seems to know too much what he is about, and

to be content with doing too little. His mystical poems, from the point

of view of such criticism as this, are all alike in that they all seek

to do the same thing. Nor does he always succeed. How does he sometimes

fail in verse to say what he conveys with such everlasting happiness in

prose!

"I am owner of the sphere,

Of the seven stars and the solar year,

Of Cæsar's hand and Plato's brain,

Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain."

In these lines we have the same thought which appears a few pages later

in prose: "All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy

that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself." He has failed in

the verse because he has thrown a mystical gloss over a thought which

was stronger in its simplicity; because in the verse he states an

abstraction instead of giving an instance. The same failure follows him

sometimes in prose when he is too conscious of his machinery.

Emerson knew that the sense of mystery accompanies the shift of an

absorbed attention to some object which brings the mind back to the

present. "There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a

snowflake, a boy's willow whistle, or a farmer planting in his field is

more suggestive to the mind than the Yosemite gorge or the Vatican would

be in another hour. In like mood, an old verse, or certain words, gleam

with rare significance." At the close of his essay on History he is

trying to make us feel that all history, in so far as we can know it, is

within ourselves, and is in a certain sense autobiography. He is

speaking of the Romans, and he suddenly pretends to see a lizard on the

wall, and proceeds to wonder what the lizard has to do with the Romans.

For this he has been quite properly laughed at by Dr. Holmes, because he

has resorted to an artifice and has failed to create an illusion.

Indeed, Dr. Holmes is somewhere so irreverent as to remark that a gill

of alcohol will bring on a psychical state very similar to that

suggested by Emerson; and Dr. Holmes is accurately happy in his jest,

because alcohol does dislocate the attention in a thoroughly mystical

manner.

There is throughout Emerson's poetry, as throughout all of the New

England poetry, too much thought, too much argument. Some of his verse

gives the reader a very curious and subtle impression that the lines are

a translation. This is because he is closely following a thesis. Indeed,

the lines are a translation. They were thought first, and poetry

afterwards. Read off his poetry, and you see through the scheme of it at

once. Read his prose, and you will be put to it to make out the

connection of ideas. The reason is that in the poetry the sequence is

intellectual, in the prose the sequence is emotional. It is no mere

epigram to say that his poetry is governed by the ordinary laws of prose

writing, and his prose by the laws of poetry.

The lines entitled Days have a dramatic vigor, a mystery, and a music

all their own:--

"Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,

Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,

And marching single in an endless file,

Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.

To each they offer gifts after his will,

Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.

I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,

Forgot my morning wishes, hastily

Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day

Turned and departed silent. I, too late,

Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn."

The prose version of these lines, which in this case is inferior, is to

be found in Works and Days: "He only is rich who owns the day.... They

come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant

friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts

they bring, they carry them as silently away."

That Emerson had within him the soul of a poet no one will question, but

his poems are expressed in prose forms. There are passages in his early

addresses which can be matched in English only by bits from Sir Thomas

Browne or Milton, or from the great poets. Heine might have written the

following parable into verse, but it could not have been finer. It comes

from the very bottom of Emerson's nature. It is his uttermost. Infancy

and manhood and old age, the first and the last of him, speak in it.

"Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters

the hall of the firmament; there is he alone with them alone, they

pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to

their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of

illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way

and that, and whose movements and doings he must obey; he fancies

himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither

and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now

that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act

for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions

to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the

air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still

sitting around him on their thrones,--they alone with him alone."

With the war closes the colonial period of our history, and with the end

of the war begins our national life. Before that time it was not

possible for any man to speak for the nation, however much he might long

to, for there was no nation; there were only discordant provinces held

together by the exercise on the part of each of a strong and

conscientious will. It is too much to expect that national character

shall be expressed before it is developed, or that the arts shall

flourish during a period when everybody is preoccupied with the fear of

revolution. The provincial note which runs through all our literature

down to the war resulted in one sense from our dependence upon Europe.

"All American manners, language, and writings," says Emerson, "are

derivative. We do not write from facts, but we wish to state the facts

after the English manner. It is the tax we pay for the splendid

inheritance of English Literature." But in a deeper sense this very

dependence upon Europe was due to our disunion among ourselves. The

equivocal and unhappy self-assertive patriotism to which we were

consigned by fate, and which made us perceive and resent the

condescension of foreigners, was the logical outcome of our political

situation.

The literature of the Northern States before the war, although full of

talent, lacks body, lacks courage. It has not a full national tone. The

South is not in it. New England's share in this literature is so large

that small injustice will be done if we give her credit for all of it.

She was the Academy of the land, and her scholars were our authors. The

country at large has sometimes been annoyed at the self-consciousness of

New England, at the atmosphere of clique, of mutual admiration, of

isolation, in which all her scholars, except Emerson, have lived, and

which notably enveloped the last little distinguished group of them. The

circumstances which led to the isolation of Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow,

and the Saturday Club fraternity are instructive. The ravages of the war

carried off the poets, scholars, and philosophers of the generation

which immediately followed these men, and by destroying their natural

successors left them standing magnified beyond their natural size, like

a grove of trees left by a fire. The war did more than kill off a

generation of scholars who would have succeeded these older scholars. It

emptied the universities by calling all the survivors into the field of

practical life; and after the war ensued a period during which all the

learning of the land was lodged in the heads of these older worthies who

had made their mark long before. A certain complacency which piqued the

country at large was seen in these men. An ante-bellum colonial posing,

inevitable in their own day, survived with them. When Jared Sparks put

Washington in the proper attitude for greatness by correcting his

spelling, Sparks was in cue with the times. It was thought that a great

man must have his hat handed to him by his biographer, and be ushered on

with decency toward posterity. In the lives and letters of some of our

recent public men there has been a reminiscence of this posing, which we

condemn as absurd because we forget it is merely archaic. Provincial

manners are always a little formal, and the pomposity of the colonial

governor was never quite worked out of our literary men.

Let us not disparage the past. We are all grateful for the New England

culture, and especially for the little group of men in Cambridge and

Boston who did their best according to the light of their day. Their

purpose and taste did all that high ideals and good taste can do, and no

more eminent literati have lived during this century. They gave the

country songs, narrative poems, odes, epigrams, essays, novels. They

chose their models well, and drew their materials from decent and likely

sources. They lived stainless lives, and died in their professors'

chairs honored by all men. For achievements of this sort we need hardly

use as strong language as Emerson does in describing contemporary

literature: "It exhibits a vast carcass of tradition every year with as

much solemnity as a new revelation."

The mass and volume of literature must always be traditional, and the

secondary writers of the world do nevertheless perform a function of

infinite consequence in the spread of thought. A very large amount of

first-hand thinking is not comprehensible to the average man until it

has been distilled and is fifty years old. The men who welcome new

learning as it arrives are the picked men, the minor poets of the next

age. To their own times these secondary men often seem great because

they are recognized and understood at once. We know the disadvantage

under which these Humanists of ours worked. The shadow of the time in

which they wrote hangs over us still. The conservatism and timidity of

our politics and of our literature to-day are due in part to that

fearful pressure which for sixty years was never lifted from the souls

of Americans. That conservatism and timidity may be seen in all our

past. They are in the rhetoric of Webster and in the style of Hawthorne.

They killed Poe. They created Bryant.

Since the close of our most blessed war, we have been left to face the

problems of democracy, unhampered by the terrible complications of

sectional strife. It has happened, however, that some of the tendencies

of our commercial civilization go toward strengthening and riveting upon

us the very traits encouraged by provincial disunion. Wendell Phillips,

with a cool grasp of understanding for which he is not generally given

credit, states the case as follows:--

"The general judgment is that the freest possible government

produces the freest possible men and women, the most individual, the

least servile to the judgment of others. But a moment's reflection

will show any man that this is an unreasonable expectation, and

that, on the contrary, entire equality and freedom in political

forms almost invariably tend to make the individual subside into the

mass and lose his identity in the general whole. Suppose we stood in

England to-night. There is the nobility, and here is the church.

There is the trading class, and here is the literary. A broad gulf

separates the four; and provided a member of either can conciliate

his own section, he can afford in a very large measure to despise

the opinions of the other three. He has to some extent a refuge and

a breakwater against the tyranny of what we call public opinion. But

in a country like ours, of absolute democratic equality, public

opinion is not only omnipotent, it is omnipresent. There is no

refuge from its tyranny, there is no hiding from its reach; and the

result is that if you take the old Greek lantern and go about to

seek among a hundred, you will find not one single American who has

not, or who does not fancy at least that he has, something to gain

or lose in his ambition, his social life, or his business, from the

good opinion and the votes of those around him. And the consequence

is that instead of being a mass of individuals, each one fearlessly

blurting out his own convictions, as a nation, compared to other

nations, we are a mass of cowards. More than all other people, we

are afraid of each other."

If we take a bird's-eye view of our history, we shall find that this

constant element of democratic pressure has always been so strong a

factor in moulding the character of our citizens, that there is less

difference than we could wish to see between the types of citizenship

produced before the war and after the war.

Charles Pollen, that excellent and worthy German who came to this

country while still a young man and who lived in the midst of the social

and intellectual life of Boston, felt the want of intellectual freedom

in the people about him. If one were obliged to describe the America of

to-day in a single sentence, one could hardly do it better than by a

sentence from a letter of Follen to Harriet Martineau written in 1837,

after the appearance of one of her books: "You have pointed out the two

most striking national characteristics, 'Deficiency of individual moral

independence and extraordinary mutual respect and kindness.'"

Much of what Emerson wrote about the United States in 1850 is true of

the United States to-day. It would be hard to find a civilized people

who are more timid, more cowed in spirit, more illiberal, than we. It is

easy to-day for the educated man who has read Bryce and Tocqueville to

account for the mediocrity of American literature. The merit of Emerson

was that he felt the atmospheric pressure without knowing its reason. He

felt he was a cabined, cribbed, confined creature, although every man

about him was celebrating Liberty and Democracy, and every day was

Fourth of July. He taxes language to its limits in order to express his

revolt. He says that no man should write except what he has discovered

in the process of satisfying his own curiosity, and that every man will

write well in proportion as he has contempt for the public.

Emerson seems really to have believed that if any man would only

resolutely be himself, he would turn out to be as great as Shakespeare.

He will not have it that anything of value can be monopolized. His

review of the world, whether under the title of Manners, Self-Reliance,

Fate, Experience, or what-not, leads him to the same thought. His

conclusion is always the finding of eloquence, courage, art, intellect,

in the breast of the humblest reader. He knows that we are full of

genius and surrounded by genius, and that we have only to throw

something off, not to acquire any new thing, in order to be bards,

prophets, Napoleons, and Goethes. This belief is the secret of his

stimulating power. It is this which gives his writings a radiance like

that which shone from his personality.

The deep truth shadowed forth by Emerson when he said that "all the

American geniuses lacked nerve and dagger" was illustrated by our best

scholar. Lowell had the soul of the Yankee, but in his habits of writing

he continued English tradition. His literary essays are full of charm.

The Commemoration Ode is the high-water mark of the attempt to do the

impossible. It is a fine thing, but it is imitative and secondary. It

has paid the inheritance tax. Twice, however, at a crisis of pressure,

Lowell assumed his real self under the guise of a pseudonym; and with

his own hand he rescued a language, a type, a whole era of civilization

from oblivion. Here gleams the dagger and here is Lowell revealed. His

limitations as a poet, his too much wit, his too much morality, his

mixture of shrewdness and religion, are seen to be the very elements of

power. The novelty of the Biglow Papers is as wonderful as their

world-old naturalness. They take rank with greatness, and they were the

strongest political tracts of their time. They imitate nothing; they are

real.

Emerson himself was the only man of his times who consistently and

utterly expressed himself, never measuring himself for a moment with the

ideals of others, never troubling himself for a moment with what

literature was or how literature should be created. The other men of his

epoch, and among whom he lived, believed that literature was a very

desirable article, a thing you could create if you were only smart

enough. But Emerson had no literary ambition. He cared nothing for

belles-lettres. The consequence is that he stands above his age like a

colossus. While he lived his figure could be seen from Europe towering

like Atlas over the culture of the United States.

Great men are not always like wax which their age imprints. They are

often the mere negation and opposite of their age. They give it the lie.

They become by revolt the very essence of all the age is not, and that

part of the spirit which is suppressed in ten thousand breasts gets

lodged, isolated, and breaks into utterance in one. Through Emerson

spoke the fractional spirits of a multitude. He had not time, he had not

energy left over to understand himself; he was a mouthpiece.

If a soul be taken and crushed by democracy till it utter a cry, that

cry will be Emerson. The region of thought he lived in, the figures of

speech he uses, are of an intellectual plane so high that the

circumstances which produced them may be forgotten; they are

indifferent. The Constitution, Slavery, the War itself, are seen as mere

circumstances. They did not confuse him while he lived; they are not

necessary to support his work now that it is finished. Hence comes it

that Emerson is one of the world's voices. He was heard afar off. His

foreign influence might deserve a chapter by itself. Conservatism is not

confined to this country. It is the very basis of all government. The

bolts Emerson forged, his thought, his wit, his perception, are not

provincial. They were found to carry inspiration to England and

Germany. Many of the important men of the last half-century owe him a

debt. It is not yet possible to give any account of his influence

abroad, because the memoirs which will show it are only beginning to be

published. We shall have them in due time; for Emerson was an outcome of

the world's progress. His appearance marks the turning-point in the

history of that enthusiasm for pure democracy which has tinged the

political thought of the world for the past one hundred and fifty years.

The youths of England and Germany may have been surprised at hearing

from America a piercing voice of protest against the very influences

which were crushing them at home. They could not realize that the chief

difference between Europe and America is a difference in the rate of

speed with which revolutions in thought are worked out.

While the radicals of Europe were revolting in 1848 against the abuses

of a tyranny whose roots were in feudalism, Emerson, the great radical

of America, the arch-radical of the world, was revolting against the

evils whose roots were in universal suffrage. By showing the identity in

essence of all tyranny, and by bringing back the attention of political

thinkers to its starting-point, the value of human character, he has

advanced the political thought of the world by one step. He has pointed

out for us in this country to what end our efforts must be bent.

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