RALPH WALDO EMERSON
VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES
Published and in Preparation
_Edited by_ WILL D. HOWE
ARNOLD _Stuart P. Sherman_
BROWNING _William Lyon Phelps_
BURNS _William Allan Neilson_
CARLYLE _Bliss Perry_
DANTE _Alfred M. Brooks_
DEFOE _William P. Trent_
DICKENS _Richard Burton_
EMERSON _Samuel McChord Crothers_
HAWTHORNE _George Edward Woodberry_
THE BIBLE _George Hodges_
IBSEN _Archibald Henderson_
LAMB _Will D. Howe_
STEVENSON _Richard A. Rice_
TENNYSON _Raymond Macdonald Alden_
WHITMAN _Brand Whitlock_
WORDSWORTH _C. T. Winchester_
[Illustration: RW Emerson]
Ralph Waldo Emerson
HOW TO KNOW HIM
_By_
Samuel McChord Crothers
_Author of_
THE GENTLE READER, THE PARDONER’S WALLET
OLIVER WENDEL HOLMES AND HIS FELLOW BOARDERS
ETC., ETC.
_WITH PORTRAIT_
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1921
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
_Printed in the United States of America_
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
INTRODUCTORY
The mind of Emerson was a searchlight revealing not itself but the
various objects on which it successively turned. An intense and narrow
beam of light would shoot through the darkness and reveal some object.
Then it would pick up another object which would have its brief moment
of visibility. The landscape was never revealed in any one view.
The only way to know Emerson is to join him in his intellectual
exercises. In spite of his personal aloofness I know of no one with
whom we can more readily come to a feeling of intellectual intimacy.
He had no pretensions and no reserves. In clear sentences he told us
what from time to time he thought. He made no attempt to connect these
thoughts into a coherent system. For any one else to attempt to do this
would be to misrepresent him.
In the short chapters which follow I have treated Emerson as a
contemporary rather than as a writer of the last generation. His
thought is as pertinent to the twentieth century as to the nineteenth.
Indeed I think that in many respects we may be nearer to him than were
those who first listened to him. The prejudices which he encountered
have largely died away. The problems over which he was meditating
remain.
I wish to make grateful acknowledgment to Houghton Mifflin Company for
special permission to make extracts from their authorized and copyright
editions of Emerson’s works. Also to Doctor Edward Emerson for the use
of his edition of his father’s journals.
S. M. M.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE APPROACH TO EMERSON 1
II A DISCRIMINATING OPTIMIST 16
III THE OPENER OF DOORS 29
IV THE PARISH OF YOUNG MEN 40
V SPENT THE DAY AT ESSEX JUNCTION 47
VI FRIENDSHIP WITHOUT INTIMACY 56
VII I HATE THIS SHALLOW AMERICANISM 68
VIII THE POET 75
IX THE POETRY OF SCIENCE 95
X PIETY 108
XI THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 116
XII THE LURE OF THE WEST 122
XIII EMERSON’S ELUSIVE SMILE 133
XIV THE QUIET REVOLUTIONIST 142
XV MEDITATIONS ON POLITICS 158
XVI THE CANDID FRIEND OF ENGLAND 172
XVII AMONG HIS BOOKS 181
XVIII EMERSON’S HISTORIC SENSE 197
XIX PEACE AND WAR 209
XX THE FORTUNES OF THE POOR 215
XXI THE CUTTING EDGE 223
XXII TERMINUS 230
EMERSON
CHAPTER I
THE APPROACH TO EMERSON
“_But, critic, spare thy vanity,
Nor show thy pompous parts,
To vex with odious subtlety
The cheerer of men’s hearts._”
So Emerson writes of the Persian poet Saadi who “sat in the sun” and
with smiling lips uttered his thoughts to whosoever chose to listen. He
had nothing to prove, nothing to apologize for, nothing to lament.
“Denounce who will, who will deny,
And pile the hills to scale the sky;
Let theist, atheist, pantheist,
Define and wrangle how they list,
Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer,--
But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer.”
We are so used to wrangling and defining, to building systems of
thought, and with odious subtlety criticizing other men’s systems, that
we hardly know how to get along without these intellectual exercises.
What is there to say about a literary man or a philosopher who cares
for none of these things?
To become acquainted with Emerson we must discard any conventional idea
of the literary man or the philosopher. We must not become too much
interested in his works. We must be genuinely interested in the things
he was thinking about, so as to find joy in comparing notes. He was not
a man of letters in the sense of a maker of books, and he was careless
about the articulation of his thought, and so he is the despair of
those who try to “place” him.
There are those who think they can explain a man of genius by means of
painstaking investigation of the town he lived in, the folks he knew,
the books he read, the party to which he belonged, and the family into
which he was born. A great deal can be explained in this way, in fact
all those things in which he was like the thousands of other persons
who were subjected to similar influences. But what about his genius,
which is the one thing in which he differed from those who were about
him? It happens that it is this difference which is the matter of vital
moment.
There are indeed great men whose difference from their contemporaries
is in the quantity of their endowment rather than in its essential
quality. They think and feel as does the average man, they share his
opinions and habits of thought, only they have everything in greater
abundance. They are representative of the time in which they lived and
we can not think of them as belonging to any other place or period.
This is perhaps what we mean by a _great_ man. The term is quantitative.
But there are others whose genius is essentially timeless. They owe
very little to their immediate environment. They might have lived
anywhere or at any time, and the substance and manner of their thinking
would have been very much the same. Ralph Waldo Emerson was of this
order. In one sense he was a typical American, more than that he was
a New Englander, and his thought was colored by the experience of the
passing day. But it was only colored. The texture was not peculiar
to America. That he was born at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, the descendant of a long line of Puritan preachers, that he
was educated at Harvard College, and became for a time the minister
of a Unitarian Church, that he was interested in what was called the
Transcendental Movement, that he traveled about the country delivering
lyceum lectures, that he took a worthy part in all sorts of reform
movements, and that he lived in Concord to a good old age--all these
are interesting facts. If we happen to be interested in Emerson, we
like to know about them. But they do not enable us to know what manner
of man he was, or what gift he may have for us.
Indeed, if we take such facts too seriously, we may obscure the real
Emerson, for he certainly did not take them very seriously, and was
rather absent-minded in regard to them. It was one of his whimsies
to profess a great contempt for foreign travel. Concord was good
enough for him and he could see all that was most worth seeing without
wandering from the vicinity of the town house. But this was not because
he had any unusual prejudice for a particular locality, but that he had
means of getting away from it that his neighbors did not possess. One
place is as good as another to one whose mind is free of the universe.
Emerson’s mind was in the most literal sense cosmopolitan; he was
a citizen of the world, as no mere traveler can become. The globe
trotter is lured on by the expectation of coming to foreign parts.
Emerson did not think of any portion of the world as foreign. It was
all of a piece. Wherever he happened to be, he was confronted by the
marvel of the whole which manifested itself in every part. He was
like the citizen in a great metropolis, who leaves to strangers the
transitory joys of sightseeing. He goes about his own business, and
yet he is gladly conscious all the time that he belongs to the mighty
aggregation.
In dealing with such a person, the biographer is always more or less
of an intruder. To Emerson the inner life was much more important than
the events and circumstances of the outer life. To the inner life as
disclosed by himself, we may go directly. Thus only we know what manner
of man he was. He was describing himself when he wrote:
“There is an external life, which is educated at school, taught to
read, write, cipher, and trade; taught to grasp all the boy can
get, urging him to put himself forward, to make himself useful and
agreeable in the world, to ride, run, argue, and contend, unfold his
talents, shine, conquer, and possess.
“But the inner life sits at home, and does not learn to do things,
nor value these feats at all. ’Tis a quiet, wise perception. It loves
truth, because it is itself real; it loves right, it knows nothing
else; but it makes no progress; was as wise in our first memory of
it as now; is just the same now in maturity, and hereafter in age,
as it was in youth. We have grown to manhood and womanhood; we have
powers, connection, children, reputations, professions: this makes
no account of them all. It lives in the great present; it makes the
present great. This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no
express-rider, no attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun, and
broods on the world. A person of this temper once said to a man of
much activity, ‘I will pardon you that you do so much, and you me that
I do nothing.’ And Euripides says that ‘Zeus hates busybodies and
those who do too much.’”
All this is quite foreign to the mind of the typical American. It was
not characteristic of the nineteenth century. It is not easy to explain
why Emerson should have turned up when he did.
If, however, it is necessary for us to “place” Emerson, and to classify
him, it might be as well to ignore the accident of his birth, and put
him among those with whom his ways of thinking and speaking would have
been most congenial.
He was a philosopher, not in the modern sense, but in the simpler
ancient sense of a lover of wisdom. He belonged in a way with the men
who in Athens liked to walk about in the gardens discoursing about the
nature of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Perhaps the Greek
dialectic might have wearied his more direct mind. It would have seemed
a too roundabout way of getting at moral truths.
I rather think that he would have been more at home with less
sophisticated thinkers, let us say with the lovers of wisdom in the
land of Uz, who gathered around Job, in his happier days before Satan
mingled with his affairs. It is in the cool of the evening, and they
gather at the gate, and Job discourses on the pleasant mysteries of
life. And people who had been bearing the heat and burden of the day,
and whose souls were parched, came for refreshment. In their arid
lives, it was wonderful to meet a man who was thinking aloud. “My
speech dropped upon them, and they waited for me as for the rain.”
Such speech comes in sentences that are easily remembered. In the land
of Uz people do not get their ideas from books, but from the lips of a
man who has the gift of direct address.
In process of time scribes gather these scattered sentences into
volumes, and we have collections of what the Hebrew scholars call
Wisdom Literature. So we have the Proverbs, The Wisdom of Solomon, and
the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach. They contain the observations and the
meditations of men who had found time for such things. They are enjoyed
by those of kindred temper.
Emerson’s essays belong to this Wisdom Literature. They are gnomic,
that is to say, they consist of pregnant sentences. Their arrangement
is a matter largely of accident.
Had he lived in the land of Uz, Emerson would have uttered these
sentences to a little group at the city gate, and trusted to their
memories for the preservation of what was of value. Being an American
in the nineteenth century, he jotted them down in his note-book when
they occurred to him, and then as opportunity offered presented them to
groups of his fellow-citizens, gathered on winter evenings in poorly
ventilated halls. All the way from Massachusetts to Iowa he found his
audience, and gave them freely of his best. Then acting as his own
scribe, he gathered the sentences together into the form familiar to us.
To get his general point of view, read the ninth chapter of Proverbs:
“Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars;
she hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also
furnished her table. She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon
the highest places of the city.... Come, eat of my bread, and drink of
the wine which I have mingled.”
It is all very simple and natural. Wisdom is the builder. She builds
according to her own plan, and when the house is furnished, she makes
her feast and sends forth her maidens with the invitation to her table.
And the thinker, who is he? He is not the architect, he did not plan
the building. Nor is he the high priest ordering the sacrifice. He
does not take himself so solemnly. He is only one of the invited
guests, who has not lost the sense of wondering curiosity. He can
not churlishly sit down to the feast without being introduced to the
hostess. He wanders about among all the marvels, seeking her. For, says
the son of Sirach, “It is the chief point of Wisdom to know whose gift
it is.”
In the nineteenth century Ralph Waldo Emerson lived a life that was as
simple as that of the antique philosophers. He practised an art which
has been thought to be lost--the art of meditation. The fruit of his
meditations he offered to all those whom it might concern.
Emerson was a man thinking. There is no Emersonian system of
philosophy, only an Emersonian way of looking at things, and that
is perfectly simple. There is a legal phrase, “without prejudice,”
which is used of parties to a controversy, implying that should the
negotiations fail, nothing that has passed shall be taken advantage
of thereafter. Thus should the defendant offer _without prejudice_ to
pay half the claim, the plaintiff can not consider this offer as an
admission of his having the right to _some_ payment.
To read the words of Emerson in the spirit in which they were written,
we must remember to take what he says without prejudice. Each sentence
makes its own appeal, and it is for us to determine whether it rings
true or false. But we must not hold him responsible for the inferences
which we may draw. He was not uttering oracles, though the form might
sometimes seem oracular. He aimed to challenge us rather than to secure
docile acceptance of his ideas. He did not attempt at any one time to
state the whole truth. He preferred to state a half truth in such a
manner that we should be ready to supply the other half. Instead of
avoiding extreme opinions, he wished to have them confront each other
in the same mind.
“This is true, that other is true. But our geometry cannot span the
extreme points and reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each thought
frankly, by harping, or if you will, pounding on each string, we
learn at last its power. By the same obedience to others’ thoughts, we
learn theirs and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them.”
The method which he recommended and which he followed was in the
highest degree unsystematic. It was “the method of taking up in turn
each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of human life,
and by stating all that is agreeable to experience on one hand, and
doing the same justice to the opposing facts, the true limitations will
appear. Any excess of emphasis on one part would be corrected and a
just balance made.”
In other words, Emerson would never assume the cool judicial attitude
in regard to any vital question. He would speak as an advocate of the
side which for the moment seemed to him most important. But he would
always reserve the right to state the other side just as strongly. Not
only did he claim the right to take both sides, but also to change the
subject as often as he liked. He believed that there were certain
general principles which were applicable to all the various professions
and callings. One who was in Milton’s phrase “a skillful considerer of
human things” had a right to express his opinions, for in spite of all
the modern division of labor, life is still made up of a few simple
elements.
In the following chapters I have made no attempt to harmonize the views
of Emerson. That would only obscure the sharp outlines of each separate
view. One who would know Emerson must not read his word with the
docility of a mere disciple. He must rather take it as a game and match
his wits against a quick antagonist.
It is the mental attitude which that unconventional sixteenth-century
preacher, Bishop Hugh Latimer, sought to inspire in his congregation.
In his famous Sermon on the Cards, he challenged his congregation to
play a game of cards, which in those days was called “Triumph.”
Quoth Latimer: “Whereas, ye are wont to celebrate Christmas in playing
at cards, I intend by God’s grace to deal unto you Christ’s cards. The
game we shall play at shall be called the triumph (trump) which if it
be well played, he that dealeth shall win, the players shall likewise
win, and the standers and lookers on shall do the same, inasmuch that
there is no man that is willing to play at this Triumph with these
cards but that they shall all be winners, and no losers. Let therefore
every Christian man and woman play at these cards, that they may have
and obtain the triumph; you must mark also that the triumph must apply
to fetch home with him all the other cards whatsoever suit they be of.
Now then take ye this first card which must appear and be shewed to you
as followeth.”
In some such way Emerson invites us to join in his favorite recreation.
It is the free play of thought in which “he that dealeth shall win, the
players shall likewise win and the standers and lookers on shall do the
same.”