THE LURE OF THE WEST
“_If I had a pocket full of money I think I should go down the Ohio and
up and down the Mississippi by way of antidote to what small remains of
Orientalism (so endemic in these parts) there may still be in me--to
cast out, I mean, the passion for Europe, by the passion for America;
and our reverence for Cambridge, which is only a part of our reverence
for London, must be transferred across the Alleghany ridge._”--EMERSON
TO MARGARET FULLER.
New England has always been the home of an intense patriotism. The
spirit of Bunker Hill and Lexington has never been quenched. Nor can
it be said that any part of the country has sent out more men who have
taken part in an effective way in large national enterprises.
Yet in the days before the Civil War, when Boston became conscious of
itself as a literary center, it was open to the charge of not having
yet discovered America. It belonged to a New England that still looked
to Old England for its models. This, I take it, was always true more of
the literary circles than of the mass of the people, but it was that
which determined the admiration of those who aspired to “culture.” As
Daniel in Babylon prayed with his windows opened toward Jerusalem,
so the Boston literati, when they took pen in hand, wrote with their
study windows open toward London. As to what was happening in the great
hinterland beyond the Hudson, they cared little. And the people in the
hinterland, who were so busy opening up the resources of the continent
that they hadn’t time to be literary, resented in a good-natured
way the Bostonian attitude. It had that “certain condescension”
which Lowell resented on the part of Europeans, but from which he
and his friends were not altogether free when they encountered the
representative men of the West.
I think if is fair to say that Emerson did more than any one else to
redeem the New England group of authors from the kind of provincialism
which was their darling sin. He did it in a twofold way: first, by
attacking their imitation of things English, and then by inculcating a
hearty admiration for the America that was growing up in the West.
In “English Traits” he pays tribute to the sturdy virtues of the
English character and the wealth of English talent. But he insists
on treating England not as the Mother Country, but as a different
country,--as different as France or Italy. He admires it, but it is
with a critical detachment. Hawthorne wrote of England as The Old Home.
Emerson had very little of the Old Home idea. There were ties of deep
friendship, but he recognized that the genius of Britain and the genius
of America were different. He admired the differences.
“The wealth of the source is seen in the plenitude of English nature.
What variety of power and talent, what facility and plenteousness
of knighthood, lordship, ladyship, royalty, loyalty; what a proud
chivalry is indicated in ‘Collin’s peerage’ through eight hundred
years. What dignity resting on what reality and stoutness. What
courage in war, what sinew in labor, what cunning unknown, what
inventors and engineers, what seamen and pilots, what clerks and
scholars.”
But this admiration has nothing in it of the provincial’s attitude to
the greatness and privilege of those who belong to the capital. Had one
said, “Go thou and do and be likewise,” Emerson would not have budged
an inch. His attitude toward the sturdy Englishman would be like his
attitude toward the Churchman:
“I like a church, I like a cowl,
I love a prophet of the soul,
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowlèd churchman be.”
Emerson had an admiration for the true-born Englishman, but not for
the anglicized American. He believed in culture, but there must be an
American culture that must grow out of the conditions of our own life.
In his lines entitled “Culture” he defined the cultivated man as one who
“To his native center fast,
Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world’s flowing fates in his own mould recast.”
And when he thought of the world’s flowing fates, his mind turned
westward. There great things were happening. A new civilization was
being created. There was nothing condescending in the attitude of the
thinker to these men of action, who on an unparalleled stage were
beginning a new act.
Against the fastidious critics of Boston, Emerson defends the rough and
ready men of the West, who were already making their influences felt in
politics.
“As long as our people quote English standards, they dwarf their own
proportions. A Western lawyer of eminence said to me he wished it
were a penal offence to bring an English lawbook into court in this
country, so pernicious had he found in his experience our deference
to English precedent. The very word commerce has only an English
meaning and is pinched to the cramp exigencies of English experience.
The commerce of rivers, the commerce of railroads, and who knows but
the commerce of air balloons must give an American extension to the
pond-hole of admiralty. As long as our people quote English standards,
they will miss the sovereignty of power.”
Even before the Civil War Emerson discerned clearly the significance
of the Middle West and the great part it was destined to play in the
development of civilization. The old thirteen states had a tradition
that was essentially British. The great states which had been
established in the Mississippi valley were in their origin purely
American. There was no colonial background to their history. Here the
pioneer spirit had developed freely. It was the spirit of Daniel Boone
and Davy Crockett and Peter Cartwright.
Emerson reminds his fastidious friends that there is an explosive
energy in young America.
“Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot live on nuts and herb
tea and elegies, cannot read novels and play whist, cannot satisfy
all their wants at the Thursday lecture or the Boston Athenæum. They
pine for adventure, and must go to Pikes Peak, had rather die of the
hatchet of a Pawnee than sit all day and every day at a counting-room
desk. They are made for war, for the sea, for mining, hunting and
clearing, for hairbreadth adventures, huge risks and adventurous
living.... Their friends and governors must see that some vent for
their explosive complexion is provided. The roisterers who are
destined for infamy at home will cover you with glory and come back
heroes and generals. There are Oregons, Californias and exploring
expeditions enough appertaining to America to find them in files to
gnaw and crocodiles to eat.”
Emerson could not satisfy all his wants in the Boston Athenæum or the
Saturday Club. Every year he escaped from his neighbors for a lecture
tour in the West. It was before the days of the Pullman car, and
traveling in interior America meant roughing it.
He did not put on any airs as a missionary of culture. He could not
make a living as a writer of books. He must earn something as an
itinerant lecturer.
“It comes to this. I’ll bet you fifty dollars a day for three weeks
that you will not leave your library and wade and freeze and ride and
run, and suffer all manner of indignities, and stand up for an hour
every night reading in a hall! I bet I will. I do it and win the nine
hundred dollars.”
The ways of the lecturer were not always pleasant. “Two nights in a
rail car and a third on the floor of a canal boat, where the cushion
allowed me for a bed was crossed at the knees by another tier of
sleepers as long-limbed as I, so that the air was a wreath of legs.”
In 1853 he writes from Springfield, Illinois, “Here I am in the deep
mud of the prairies. It rains and thaws incessantly and if we step off
a short street we go up to the shoulders perhaps in mud. My chamber is
a cabin, my fellow-boarders are legislators. Two or three governors or
ex-governors live in the house. But in the prairie we are all new men,
and must not stand on trifles.”
In mid-winter he makes this entry in his journal: “My chief adventure
was the necessity of riding in a buggy forty-eight miles to Grand
Rapids; then after lecture twenty more in return, and the next morning
back to Kalamazoo in time for the train hither at twelve.” This was at
a time when Kalamazoo was a name strange to Bostonian ears.
It was not comfortable traveling through blizzards to discourse
to audiences which gathered in chilly or stuffy halls, but it was
interesting. “Here is America in the making, America in the raw. But it
does not want much to go to lecture, and ’tis a pity to drive it.”
It is only fair to add that Emerson’s appreciation of the new West was
intellectual rather than intimately social. He saw it in the large,
and treated it in a symbolic way. He saw the significance of the
western man’s boastfulness over the growth of the country. He liked to
watch towns grow. He would have delighted in the Chicago man’s remark
that when Chicago turned to culture it would make culture hum. That was
after Emerson’s own heart, and it was that spirit which he wished to
infuse into his well-beloved Boston.
In 1839 he writes, “It is a sort of maxim with me never to harp on the
omnipotence of limitations. Least of all do we need any suggestion
of checks and measures, as if New England were anything else.... Our
virtue runs in a narrow rill, we have never a freshet. One would
like to see Boston and Massachusetts agitated like a wave with some
generosity, mad for learning, for music, for philanthropy, for freedom,
for art. We have insight and sensibility enough if we had constitution
enough.”
The old Puritan capital of Massachusetts has become a great
cosmopolitan city, and what were then raw towns of the West are
to-day making culture hum, but it is interesting to read Emerson’s
judgments. He insisted that the rough work which the pioneers were
doing, clearing the forest, building railroads, laying out cities and
incidentally speculating in corner lots did not indicate that they were
materialistic. They were idealists of an heroic sort. They were big men
doing big things. The amenities would come in time. The fierce energy
with which they did their work would be turned at length to the finer
arts. He greeted them as the makers of a new civilization. The men of
the West knew all this before. But they were glad to have Mr. Emerson
come out and confirm them in their splendid anticipations.