RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was born in Boston. He came from old
Puritan stock, several of his direct ancestors being clergymen. He
was one of eight children, of whom six were living when his father,
the Reverend William Emerson, died in 1811. Mr. Emerson had been so
beloved by his parishioners that they continued to pay his salary for
seven years, and for three years gave the use of the parish house to
the family. The nature of these years is presented in the essay on
"Domestic Life":
Who has not seen, and who can see unmoved, under a low roof, the
eager, blushing boys discharging as they can their household
chores, and hastening into the sitting-room to the study of
to-morrow's merciless lesson, yet stealing time to read one chapter
more of the novel hardly smuggled into the tolerance of father
and mother--atoning for the same by some passages of Plutarch or
Goldsmith; the warm sympathy with which they kindle each other
in school-yard, or barn, or wood-shed, with scraps of poetry or
song, with phrases of the last oration or mimicry of the orator;
the youthful criticism, on Sunday, of the sermons; the school
declamation, faithfully rehearsed at home.... Ah, short-sighted
students of books, of nature, and of man, too happy could they know
their advantages, they pine for freedom from that mild parental yoke;
they sigh for fine clothes, for rides, for the theatre, and premature
freedom and dissipation which others possess. Woe to them if their
wishes were crowned. The angels that dwell with them, and are weaving
laurels of life for their youthful brows, are Toil, and Want, and
Truth, and Mutual Faith.
There was a great deal of work for the young Emersons in the day, but
the spirit of play and playfulness survived it all, as this bit of
verse shows. It was written by Ralph to his brother Edward.
So erst two brethren climb'd the cloud-capp'd hill,
Ill-fated Jack, and long-lamented Jill,
Snatched from the crystal font its lucid store,
And in full pails the precious treasure bore.
But ah, by dull forgetfulness oppress'd
(Forgive me, Edward) I've forgot the rest.
In due time Emerson went to Harvard, entering the class of 1821. Here
he earned part of his expenses and profited by scholarships, which must
have been given him more on account of his character than because of
his actual performance as a student, for he stood only in the middle
of his class. He was almost hopelessly weak in mathematics, but he won
three prizes in essay-writing and declamation. He was a regular member
of one of the debating societies, crossing swords with his opponents on
the vague and impossible subjects which lure the minds of youth. His
appointment as class poet at graduation argues no special distinction,
for it was conferred on him after seven others had refused it. All the
while, however, his mind had been active, and he came out from college
with the fruits of a great amount of good reading which had doubtless
somewhat distracted him from the assigned work. Emerson's experience
at college should not be confused with that of many budding geniuses
who showed their originality by mere eccentricity. With Emerson, as
with Hawthorne and Thoreau too, the independence appeared simply in his
choosing the things at which he should do his hardest work. He was full
of ambition. An entry in the Journal of 1822 proves that at this age he
was more like the Puritan Milton than the care-free Cooper: "In twelve
days I shall be nineteen years old, which I count a miserable thing.
Has any other educated person lived so many years and lost so many
days?" He blamed himself for dreaming of greatness and doing little to
achieve it, but he decided not yet to give up hope of belonging to the
"family of giant minds." Already, too, he was in thought joining his
own future with the future of the country in such jottings as these.
"Let those who would pluck the lot of immortality from Fate's urn, look
well to the future of America." "To America, therefore, monarchs look
with apprehension and the people with hope." If his countrymen could
boast no great accomplishment in the arts, "We have a government and a
national spirit that is better than persons or histories." The judges
of his own future utterances were to be a nation of free minds, "for in
America we have plucked down Fortune and set up Nature in his room."
These comments, of course, reveal the sentiment and the lofty rhetoric
of the commencement orator, for they were all written before he was
twenty-two. In later years he wrote more simply and less excitedly, but
he never forgot that his own life was always part of the life of the
nation.
The five years just after graduation were not encouraging. He taught
in his brother's school for a while, but loathed it because he taught
so badly. Ill-health harassed him. While he was studying in the
Divinity School his eyes failed him, so that he was excused from the
regular examinations at the end. And a month after he was admitted
to the ministry his doctor advised him to spend the winter in the
South. It was not until 1829, when he was twenty-six years old, that
he was settled in a pastorate. Then the future seemed assured for
him. The church was an old and respected one, the congregation made
up of "desirable" people. If the young preacher was able to prepare
acceptable sermons and make friends among his parishioners, he could
be sure of a permanent and dignified position in his native city. But
although the flock were perfectly satisfied with their shepherd, in
three years he resigned. He had found that certain of the forms of
church worship embarrassed him because he could not always enter into
the spirit of them. Sometimes when the moment for the "long prayer"
came, he did not feel moved to utter it, and he felt that to "deliver"
it as a piece of elocution was dishonest and irreverent. Administering
the holy communion troubled him still more, because he felt afraid
that to the literal Yankee mind this symbolical ceremony was either
meaningless or tinged with superstition. So he expressed his honest
doubts to his congregation, explaining that if these features of
worship were necessary he could no longer continue to be their pastor,
and they reluctantly let him go.
Two years were yet to pass in the preparatory stage of Emerson's life.
For the first seven months of 1833 he was abroad, traveling slowly from
Italy up to England. In reading his daily comments on what he saw, one
finds no trace of the eager zest for the novelties of travel enjoyed
by Irving and Cooper; he seems rather to have gone through with the
tour as a sober and conscientious process of education. His most vivid
experiences were not in seeing places but in meeting English authors,
and with one of these, Thomas Carlyle, he made the beginning of a
lifelong friendship. It was like Emerson to be especially attracted to
Carlyle, who was almost unknown at the time, to seek him out on his
lonely Scotch farm, and to feel a deeper sympathy and admiration for
him than for famous men like Wordsworth and Coleridge and De Quincey.
No single man and no amount of public opinion ever made up this young
American's mind for him. When, after a year of preaching and lecturing
in America he went late in 1834 to settle in Concord, the richest
memory he treasured from his travel was the founding of this new
companionship. In the fabric of the long life that remained to him no
two threads are more important than those of Concord and Carlyle--the
place he loved most and the greatest of his friends.
Rightly considered, these thirty-one years are a piece not only of
Emerson's life; they are a piece of American history. They exhibit
the life in Boston of a boy and young man with a fine Puritan
inheritance. Among all the traits which came down to him from the
past, none were more dominant than his rectitude and his independence.
Like the boys of earliest Pilgrim families, he was trained at home
in "the uses of adversity," given a careful schooling, and sent to
college to be prepared for the ministry. His mind, like that of his
ancestors, "derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation
of superior beings and eternal interests"; but like some of the
strongest of these--like Roger Williams, for example (p. 11), he was
bent on arriving at his own conclusions. Fortunately men were no
longer persecuted for their religious beliefs in the old savage ways.
Emerson's withdrawal from the pulpit did not forfeit him the love
of the people whom he had been serving. Though men could still feel
bitterly on the subject of religious differences, the new century was
more generous than the old had been. Travel along the Atlantic seaboard
and in Europe enriched his knowledge of the world, but only deepened
his love of the home region; and here as a full-grown man he settled
down with his books and among an increasing circle of congenial friends
to think about life and to record what he had thought.
It was therefore no accident that in three successive years--1836,
1837, and 1838--Emerson made three statements in summary of his
chief ideas on men and things. In all of them there was a central
thought--that life had become too much a matter of unconsidered
routine and that people must stop long enough to make up their minds
what it was all about. He offered no "system." He pleaded only that
people begin to think again, so that if they followed in the footsteps
of their fathers they should do so with their eyes open, or if they
decided to strike off into new paths they should not be blind men led
by the blind.
The first of the trio[13] was the essay on "Nature," published as a
slender little book in 1836. He opened with an appeal for his readers
to look at the wonders around them. "If the stars should appear but
one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and
preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God
which had been shown." He went on to discuss nature as Commodity, or
source of all the things man may use or own; as Beauty, or source of
delight to body, spirit, and mind; as Language, or source of the images
and comparisons by means of which man attempts to express abstract
ideas; and as a Discipline, or source of training to the intellect
in understanding nature's laws and to the moral sense in obeying and
interpreting them. In all these respects he contended that the man who
will truly understand nature must combine the exactness of observation
which belongs to science with the reverence of feeling which is the
basis of religion.
[13] Found in the volume "Nature, Addresses and Lectures."
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something. But when
a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal
relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same
time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then
will God go forth anew into the creation.... So shall we come to look
at the world with new eyes.... The kingdom of man over nature, which
cometh not with observation,--a dominion such as now is beyond his
dream of God,--he shall enter into without more wonder than the blind
man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.
Such was Emerson's gospel of beauty. It did not attract any wide
attention; but across the sea it was hailed with admiration by Carlyle,
who showed it to his friends, and it attracted the attention of Harvard
College, so that Emerson was invited to speak before the Phi Beta Kappa
society in the following summer.
The result of this invitation was his famous address on "The American
Scholar." It was an appeal this time for independence in the realm
of the intellect. It has frequently been described as the American
Declaration of Intellectual Independence; and the comparison to
Jefferson's document stands in the fact that it did not contain a new
idea in America, but that it stated memorably what had been uttered
again and again by other Americans. "Our day of dependence, our long
apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The
millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed
on the sere remains of foreign harvests." To make his point, Emerson
held that the American scholar must not continue to be "a delegated
intellect" but must become _Man Thinking_. Unlike most of the later
essays the address is clear and orderly in structure. After a brief
introduction the scholar is discussed in terms of the chief influences
which surround him. The first is nature, and this section is brief
because of its full treatment in the essay of the preceding year. The
second is the spirit of the past as it is best recorded in books.
Emerson accepted without qualification the books which contain the
story of history and the explanation of exact science. Yet, as science
is ever advancing and the interpretations of history are continually
changing, he might have said of these what he said of books which
attempt to explain life: "Each age, it is found, must write its own
books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of
an older period will not fit this." The third great influence on the
scholar is participation in life.
Only so much do I know as I have lived.... If it were only for a
vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our
dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town; in the
insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many
men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in
all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our
perceptions.... Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get
tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day.
With these influences affecting him the scholar must perform his
duties without thought of reward in money or praise. He must feel all
confidence in himself. "Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a
popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be
the crack of doom." Signs of the interest that the scholar is showing
in life (as a combination of all sorts of people with common interests
but diverse fortunes) comfort Emerson. These _will redeem_ scholarship.
And so he concludes to the young college men:
We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we
will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer
a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread
of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath
of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist,
because each believes himself inspired by the divine soul which also
inspires all men.
This address was inspiring to all who heard it. The young scholars went
out with a new feeling for the dignity of learning as an equipment
toward leadership, and the older Harvard professors felt in Emerson's
words some reward for a college that had helped to produce such a man
as he. An immediate consequence of the address was a further invitation
to speak the next year before the students of the Divinity School;
and in 1838 he talked in a similar vein to the budding clergymen.
This address in a way rounded out his "philosophy" by applying the
rule of self-reliance to the third aspect of man's life; after beauty
in "Nature" and truth in "The American Scholar" came the moral sense
in "The Divinity School Address." He started, as in the former two,
with a kind of prose poem on the wonder of life. He went on to speak
of the need of religion that was fresh, vivid, and personal. Then he
referred to the defects of "historical Christianity," which was his
name for the church embodiment of Christ's teaching. These, in his
opinion, were two: that modern Christianity was a system of belief very
different from the simple teachings of Jesus and that this system was
dangerous because it had become fixed. "Men have come to speak of the
revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead."
The remedy for these defects was the same as for the deadened attitude
toward Nature and Truth--that man should be self-reliant. To the
young divinity student he declared, "Yourself a newborn bard of the
Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first
hand with Deity." Christianity has given mankind two great gifts: the
Sabbath and the institution of preaching.
What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits, in lecture-rooms,
in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men or your own
occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your life and
conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men
with new hope and revelation?
Although the Harvard authorities might have foreseen that he would
speak as frankly as this, they were shocked when he presumed to
advocate independence in religion. Two hundred years earlier he would
have been banished from Massachusetts for saying less. As it was,
however, Harvard closed its lecture rooms to him for nearly thirty
years, and the conservative clergy expressed their outraged feelings
in speech and print. Emerson was undisturbed. To one of them, his
friend the Reverend Henry Ware, he wrote a seldom-quoted letter that
completely represents him. It deserves careful study.
Concord, October 8, 1838.
My dear Sir:--
I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter of last week,
and the Sermon it accompanied. The latter was right manly and noble.
The Sermon, too, I have read with great attention. If it assails any
doctrines of mine--perhaps I am not so quick to see it as writers
generally--certainly I did not feel any disposition to depart from my
habitual contentment, that you should say your thought, whilst I say
mine.
I believe I must tell you what I think of my new position. It strikes
me very oddly, that good and wise men at Cambridge and Boston should
think of raising me into an object of criticism. I have always
been--from my very incapacity of methodical writing--"a chartered
libertine" free to worship and free to rail,--lucky when I could make
myself understood, but never esteemed near enough to the institution
and mind of society to deserve the notice of the masters of
literature and religion. I have appreciated fully the advantages of
my position; for I well know, that there is no scholar less willing
or less able to be a polemic. I could not give account of myself, if
challenged. I could not possibly give you one of the "arguments" you
cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands. For I do not
know what arguments mean, in reference to any expression of thought.
I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say
so, or, why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not
even see, that either of these questions admits of an answer. So
that, in the present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself
suddenly raised into the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy
when I advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to
make good his thesis against all comers.
I certainly shall do no such thing. I shall read what you and other
good men write, as I have always done,--glad when you speak my
thoughts, and skipping the page that has nothing for me. I shall go
on, just as before, seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see;
and, I suppose, with the same fortune that has hitherto attended
me; the joy of finding, that my abler and better brothers, who work
with the sympathy of society, loving and beloved, do now and then
unexpectedly confirm my perceptions, and find my nonsense is only
their own thought in motley.
And so I am,
Your affectionate servant,
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Thus far it is clear that Emerson's message to the world was almost
unqualifiedly personal: an attempt to shake men out of their lazy ways
of drifting with the current into active swimming--with the current
if they thought best, but usually against it. The whole problem was
summarized in his single defiant essay on "Self-Reliance,"[14]--defiant
because in this protest he was almost entirely concerned with telling
men what they should _not_ do. They should not pray, not be consistent,
not travel, not imitate, not conform to society; but should be Godlike,
independent, searching their own hearts, and behaving in accord with
the truth they found there. It is an anarchy he was preaching, an
elevated lawlessness. And the first reaction to such teaching is to
ask with shocked disapproval, "What would happen to the world if all
men followed his advice?" There are two very simple answers. The first
is that if all men followed Emerson's advice, completely as he gave
it, the world would be peopled with saints, for what he asked was that
men should disregard the laws of society only that they might better
observe the laws of God. And the second answer is that such a query
sets an impossible condition, for the pressure of custom is so strong
and the human inclination to do as others do is so prevailing that
counsel like Emerson's will never be adopted, at the most, by more than
a very small and courageous minority.
[14] "Self-Reliance" Essays, First Series.
One fact to keep in mind in reading all Emerson is that he regularly
expresses himself in emphatic terms. In consequence, what he says in
one mood he is likely in another to gainsay, and in a third, though
without any deliberate intention to defend himself, he may reconcile
the apparent contradiction. He simply follows out his own ideas on
consistency.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have
stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
yourself; what then?... A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
This sort of balancing of his views of independence is to be found in
an essay of thirty years later on "Society and Solitude." The first
two thirds of this seem to be quite as unqualified as anything in the
early declarations. He quotes Swedenborg: "There are angels who do not
live consociated, but separate, house and house; these dwell in the
midst of heaven, because they are the best of angels." He says for
himself: "We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care
you shall not be, if there is anything good in you." "We sit and muse,
and are serene and complete; but the moment we meet with anybody, each
becomes a fraction." Then, however, comes the corrective note: "But
this banishment to the rocks and echoes no metaphysics can make right
or tolerable. This result is so against nature, such a half view, that
it must be corrected by a common sense and experience." In the earlier
essays and addresses Emerson had said repeatedly that a man's education
could not be complete unless it included contact with people, and in
this essay he came round to the reverse of the medal, that no man could
fully express himself who was not useful to his fellows. "Society
cannot do without cultivated men." This idea was, of course, always
in Emerson's mind, but it was in the later years, after he himself
had seen more and more of life, that he expressed it in definite
assertions instead of taking it for granted as something the wise man
would assume. The concluding paragraph in this essay not only sums up
Emerson's views on society and solitude but illustrates the kind of
balance which he often strikes between statements which little minds
could erect into hobgoblins of inconsistency:
Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme
antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the
diagonal line. Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must
keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions
are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy.
These wonderful horses need to be driven by fine hands. We require
such a solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in
the street and in palaces; for most men are cowed in society, and say
good things to you in private, but will not stand to them in public.
But let us not be the victims of words. Society and solitude are
deceptive names. It is not the circumstance of seeing more or fewer
people, but the readiness of sympathy that imports; and a sound mind
will derive its principles from insight, with ever a purer ascent to
the sufficient and absolute right, and will accept society as the
natural element in which they are to be applied.
Throughout the most fruitful years of Emerson's life he lived quietly
in Concord, writing without hurry in the mornings, walking and talking
with his friends who lived there and with the increasing number of
more and less distinguished men who came to receive his inspiration.
But three winter months of each year he gave to lecturing, giving
frequent series in New York and Boston and going out into the West as
far as Wisconsin and Missouri. In these months, as a combined prophet
and man of business, he earned a fair share of his income and exerted
his widest influence. What he meant to his auditors has been best said
by Lowell in his brief essay on "Emerson the Lecturer." Recalling the
days when he was a college student, sixteen years younger than Emerson,
Lowell wrote:
We used to walk in from the country [Cambridge, four miles out from
Boston] to the Masonic Temple (I think it was) through the crisp
winter night, and listen to that thrilling voice of his, so charged
with subtle meaning and subtle music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to
the hail of a ship that came with unhoped-for food and rescue.... And
who that saw the audience will ever forget it, where everyone still
capable of fire, or longing to renew in himself the half-forgotten
sense of it, was gathered?... I hear again that rustle of sensation,
as they turned to exchange glances over some pithier thought, some
keener flash of that humor which always played about the horizon
of his mind like heat-lightning.... To some of us that long-past
experience remains as the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever
had.... Did they say he was disconnected? So were the stars, that
seemed larger to our eyes, as we walked homeward with prouder stride
over the creaking snow. And were not _they_ knit together by a higher
logic than our mere senses could master? Were we enthusiasts? I hope
and believe we were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth
something for once in our lives. If asked what was left? what we
carried home? we should not have been careful for an answer. It would
have been enough if we had said that something beautiful had passed
that way.
If people were puzzled to follow the drift of Emerson's lectures--and
they often were--it was because most of them were so vague in outline.
They literally did drift. There were two or three explanations for
this defect. One was that Emerson seldom set himself the task of
"composing" a complete essay. His method of writing was to put down in
his morning hours at the desk the ideas that came to him. As thoughts
on subjects dear to him flitted through his mind he captured some
of them as they passed. These were related,--like the moon and the
tides and the best times for digging clams,--but when he assembled
various paragraphs into a lecture he took no pains to establish "theme
coherence" by explaining the connections that were quite clear in his
own mind. It happened further, as the years went on, that in making up
a new discourse he would select paragraphs from earlier manuscripts,
relying on them to hang together with a confidence that was sometimes
misplaced. And auditors of his lectures in the last years recall how,
as he passed from one page to the next, a look of doubt and slight
amusement would sometimes confess without apology to an utter lack of
connection even between the parts of a sentence.
In his sentences and his choice of words, however, there were perfect
simplicity and clearness. Here is a passage to illustrate, drawn by
the simplest of methods--opening the first volume of Emerson at hand
and taking the first paragraph. It happens to be in the essay on
"Compensation."
Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and
it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals
in the wood the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and
mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the
foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet
or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws
and substances of nature--water, snow, wind, gravitation--become
penalties to the thief.
In this passage of ninety words more than seventy are words of one
syllable, and only one of the other eighteen--_transpires_--can baffle
the reader or listener even for a moment. The general idea in Emerson's
mind is expressed by a series of definite and picturesque comparisons.
"Be sure your sin will find you out," he said. "You commit the wicked
deed, creep, dodge, run away, come to your hiding place, climb the
ladder, and hope for escape. But nature or God--has laid a trap for
you. Your footprints are on the new-fallen snow; human eyes follow them
to the tell-tale ladder leading to your window; and you are caught. The
laws of the universe have combined against you in the snowfall, the
impress of your feet, and the weight of the ladder which you could not
raise."
There is, perhaps, no great difference in the language used by Emerson
and that in the paraphrase, but in the way the sentences are put
together Emerson's method of composing is once more illustrated.
Emerson suggests; the paraphrase explains. Emerson assumes that the
reader is alert and knowing; the paraphraser, that he is a little
inattentive and a little dull. Lowell again has summed up the whole
matter: "A diction at once so rich and homely as his I know not where
to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like home-spun
cloth-of-gold. The many cannot miss the meaning, and only the few
can find it." This is another way of saying, "Anybody can understand
him sentence by sentence, but the wiser the reader the more he can
understand of the meaning as a whole." What is said of his prose
applies in still greater degree to his poetry, as it does to all real
poetry.
About his poetry, however, because common agreement has made poetry
so much more dependent upon form and structure than prose, there has
been wide disagreement, swinging all the way from the strictures of
Matthew Arnold to the unqualified praise of George Edward Woodberry.
On the whole, a good deal of the argument has been beside the mark
because it has been a condemnation of Emerson for writing in an unusual
fashion rather than an appraisal of the actual value of his verse. In
"Merlin" Emerson stated his poetic thesis and in a measure threw out
his challenge:
Thy trivial harp will never please
Or fill my craving ear;
Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
Free, peremptory, clear.
No jingling serenader's art,
Nor tinkle of piano strings,
Can make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs.
The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace....
The natural result was that there is the closest of resemblances
between much of Emerson's verse and some of his most elevated prose.
His prose frequently contains poetic flashes; his verse not seldom is
spirited prose both in form and substance. In his Journal he sometimes
wrote in prose form what with a very few changes he transcribed into
verse, and in his essays there are many passages which are closely
paralleled in his poems.[15] They are the poems of a philosopher whose
first concern is with truth and whose truth is all-embracing. Emerson
wrote no narratives, no dramatic poems, no formal odes, almost no poems
for special occasions, and when he did write such as the "Concord Hymn"
he made the occasion radiate out into all time and space when the
embattled farmers "fired the shot heard round the world." The utter
compactness and simplicity of his verse made it at times not only
rugged but difficult of understanding. "Brahma," which bewildered many
of its first readers, is hard to understand only so long as one fails
to realize that God is the speaker of the stanzas. The poems are like
Bacon's essays in their meatiness and unadornment. Had they been more
strikingly different from the ordinary measures they would probably
have been both blamed and praised more widely. Few of his poems have
passed into wide currency, but many of his brief passages are quoted by
speakers who have little idea as to their source.
[15] Such abstruse poems as the following are really expounded
in corresponding essays: "Written in Naples" and "Written
in Rome"--the essay on "History"; "Each and All"--the essay
on "Compensation"; "The Problem"--the essays on "Art" and
"Compensation"; "Merlin"--the essay on "The Poet"; "The
World-Soul"--the essays on "Nominalist and Realist" and
"The Over-Soul"; "Hamatreya"--the essay on "Compensation";
"Musketaquid"--the essay on "Nature"; "Étienne de la Boéce"--the
essay on "Friendship"; "Brahma"--the essays on "Circles" and
"The Over-Soul."
Not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowled churchman be.
Wrought in a sad sincerity.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone.
... if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.
Oh, tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire!
Those who are fortunate enough to have known him--he died in 1882--all
agree that the real Emerson can be known only in part through his
printed pages. His life was after all his greatest work. He was serene,
noble, dignified. His portraits, at whatever age, testify to his fine
loftiness. Every hearer speaks of the music of his voice. Withal he
was friendly, full of humor, a good neighbor, a loyal townsman, and
an engaging host to those who were worthy of his hospitality. Charles
Eliot Norton, returning from Europe with him in 1873, when Emerson was
sixty-nine years old, wrote in his journal: "Emerson was the greatest
talker in the ship's company. He talked with all men, yet was fresh and
zealous for talk at night. His serene sweetness, the pure whiteness
of his soul, the reflection of his soul in his face, were never more
apparent to me." No single quotation nor any group of them can make
real to the young student that quiet refrain of reverent affection
which is sounded in the recollections of scores and hundreds who knew
him.
This almost unparalleled beauty of character is the final guarantee
of the line upon line of his poetry and the precept upon precept of
his prose. What he taught must be understood partly in the light
of himself and partly in the light of the years in which he was
teaching. Let us take, for example, his two chief contentions. First,
his insistence that the truth can be found only by searching one's
own mind and conscience. Testing this doctrine by an examination of
the man who preached it, one sees that he inherited a power to think
from generations of educated ancestry. He had an "inquiring mind"
and an inclination to use it. Furthermore, he inherited from this
same ancestry a complete balance of character. He did not tend to
selfishness or self-indulgence, and was free from thinking that the
"voice of God" counseled him to ignoble courses. Puritan restraint
was so ingrained in him that he needed no outward discipline and did
not see the need of it for others. Freedom for him was always liberty
under the law of right; and this freedom he championed in a period
and among a people who for two centuries had been accepting without
thought what the clergy had been telling them to believe. It had been
for them to do what they were told, rather than to think what they
should do. Now in Emerson's day there was a general restlessness. The
domination of the old church was relaxed, and all sorts of new creeds
were being propounded. The theory of democratic government was on
trial, and no man was quite certain of its outcome. The expansion of
Western territory and the development of the factory system were making
many quick fortunes and creating discontent with quiet and settled
frugality. Men needed to be told to keep their heads, to combine wisely
between the old and the new, and to accept no man's judgment but their
own. The "standpatter" would be left hopelessly behind the current of
human thought; the wild enthusiast would just as certainly run on a
snag or be cast up on the shore.
This led to the second of Emerson's leading ideas--that a man should
not be "warped clean out of his own orbit." Reasoning from the evident
working of a natural law in the universe, he was convinced that there
was a spiritual law which controlled human affairs. He was certain that
in the end all would be well with the world. It was his duty and every
other man's to be virtuous and to encourage virtue, but as the times
were "in God's hand" no man need actively fight the forces of evil. It
was the "manifest destiny" theory cropping out again, a belief easy
to foster in a new country like America, where wickedness could be
explained on the ground that in a period of national youth temporary
mistakes were sure to be committed,--and equally sure to be rectified.
"My whole philosophy," he said, "is compounded of acquiescence and
optimism." Hence there was more of sympathy than coöperation in
Emerson's attitude toward life. Like Matthew Arnold in these same
years, he distrusted all machinery, even the "machinery" of social
reform.
To some of his younger friends, and particularly to those who were more
familiar than he with the unhappy conditions in the older European
nations, Emerson's "acquiescence and optimism" seemed wholly mistaken.
We may return to Norton's comment (p. 215), which was unfairly
interrupted: "But never before in intercourse with him had I been
so impressed with the limits of his mind.... His optimism becomes a
bigotry, and though of a nobler type than the common American conceit
of the preëminent excellence of American things as they are, had
hardly less of the quality of fatalism. To him this is the best of
all possible worlds, and the best of all possible times. He refuses
to believe in disorder or evil." This comment is not utterly fair to
Emerson, but it represents the view of the practical idealist who feels
that for all Emerson's insistence on the value of learning from life,
he had drawn more from solitude than from society. One may quote with
caution what the pragmatic Andrew D. White said of Tolstoi:
He has had little opportunity to take part in any real discussion
of leading topics; and the result is that his opinions have been
developed without modification by any rational interchange of thought
with other men. Under such circumstances any man, no matter how
noble or gifted, having given birth to striking ideas, coddles and
pets them until they become the full-grown, spoiled children of
his brain. He can see neither spot nor blemish in them, and comes
virtually to believe himself infallible.
Those who most admire Emerson to-day have perhaps as much optimism
as he but very much less acquiescence. For certain vital things
have happened since he did his work. Time,--Emerson's "little gray
man,"--who could perform the miracle of continual change in life,
has done nothing more miraculous than making men share the burden of
creating a better world. Millions are now trying to follow Emerson's
instruction to retain their independence and not to lose their
sympathy, but they are going farther than he in expressing their
sympathy by work. They are fighting every sort of social abuse, as
Emerson's Puritan ancestors fought the devil; they are adopting
Emerson's principles and Bryant's tactics; they are subscribing to
Whittier's line:
O prayer and action, ye are one.
BOOK LIST
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. Centenary Edition. The Complete Works of Ralph
Waldo Emerson. 1903-1904. 12 vols. Uncollected Writings. Essays,
Addresses, Poems, Reviews, and Letters, by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
1912. The chief works appeared in book form originally as follows:
Nature, 1836; The American Scholar, 1837; An Address delivered
before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, 1838;
Essays, 1841; Essays, Second Series, 1844; Poems, 1847; Nature,
Addresses, and Lectures, 1849; Representative Men, 1850; English
Traits, 1856; The Conduct of Life, 1860; May-Day and Other Pieces,
1867; Society and Solitude, 1870; Letters and Social Aims, 1876;
The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1883; Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1884; Natural History of
Intellect and Other Papers, 1893; Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
with Annotations, 1909-1914.
=Bibliography=
A volume compiled by G. W. Cooke. 1908. Cambridge History of
American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 551-566.
=Biography and Criticism=
The standard life is by James Elliot Cabot. A Memoir of Ralph
Waldo Emerson. 1887. 2 vols.
BOYNTON, PERCY H. Democracy in Emerson's Journals. _New
Republic_, Vol. I, No. 4, pp. 25-26.
BOYNTON, PERCY H. Emerson's Feeling toward Reform. _New
Republic_, Vol. I, No. 13, pp. 16-18.
BOYNTON, PERCY H. Emerson's Solitude. _New Republic_, Vol. III,
pp. 68-70.
BROWNELL, WILLIAM C. Emerson, in _American Prose Masters_. 1909.
BURROUGHS, JOHN. Emerson. Birds and Poets. 1877.
CHAPMAN, J. J. Emerson, Sixty Years After, in _Emerson and Other
Essays_. 1898.
Concord School of Philosophy. The Genius and Character of
Emerson. Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy. F. B.
Sanborn, editor. 1885.
EMERSON, EDWARD WALDO. Emerson in Concord. A Memoir. 1889.
FIRKINS, O. W. Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1915.
GARNETT, RICHARD. Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1888.
HIGGINSON, T. W. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in _Contemporaries_. 1899.
HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL. Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1885. (_A. M. L.
Ser_.)
JAMES, HENRY. Emerson. Partial Portraits. 1888.
LOWELL, J. R. Mr. Emerson's New Course of Lectures, in _My Study
Windows_. 1871.
MAETERLINCK, MAURICE. Emerson, in _Sept Essais d'Emerson_. 1894.
MORE, PAUL ELMER. The Influence of Emerson, in _Shelburne
Essays. Ser. 1._ 1904. Cambridge History of American
Literature, Vol. I, Bk. II, chap. ix.
PAYNE, W. M. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in _Leading American
Essayists._ 1910.
SANBORN, F. B. Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Beacon Biographies.) 1901.
SANBORN, F. B. The Personality of Emerson. 1903.
STEDMAN, E. C. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in _Poets of America_. 1885.
STEPHEN, LESLIE. Emerson, in _Studies of a Biographer. Ser. 2._
1902.
WHIPPLE, E. P. Recollections of Eminent Men and Other Papers.
1887.
WILLIS, N. P. Emerson. Second Look at Emerson, in
_Hurry-Graphs_. 1851.
WOODBERRY, G. E. Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1907. (_E. M. L. Ser._)
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the introductions and conclusions of the essays of 1836, 1837,
and 1838 and note the poetical setting into which the essays are cast.
With these in mind read the foregoing comments on Emerson's poetry (pp.
213-215).
Compare the Emerson and Lowell essays on Shakespeare.
Compare any corresponding sections in Emerson's "Representative Men"
and Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship."
Read Emerson's "English Traits" and Hawthorne's "Our Old Home" for a
comparison in the points of view of the two Americans.
Read any two or three essays for the nature element in them, the kind
of things alluded to, and the kind of significances derived from them.
Read any one or two essays for Emerson's allusions to science and
to the sciences, the kinds of allusions made, and the kind of
significances derived from them.
Follow the footnote on page 214 for a comparison of Emerson's
treatments of the same theme in prose and verse. Read also his poem
"Threnody" and the corresponding passage in the Journal for the winter
of 1842.
Read the essay on Goethe and see whether in Emerson's judgment of
Goethe as a German national character he agrees with or dissents
from the judgment of the twentieth century. Compare with Santayana's
estimate of Goethe in "Three Philosophical Poets."
A sense of the ecclesiastical and theological unrest in Emerson's day
can be secured through the reading of Mrs. Stowe's "Oldtown Folks,"
Charles Kingsley's "Yeast," Anthony Trollope's "Barchester Towers"; or
in poetry, in the poems of doubt of Arnold and Clough and Tennyson's
"In Memoriam."
Read "The American Scholar" with reference to the three influences
surrounding the scholar, and then read Wells's "The Education of Joan
and Peter." Are there any points in common? Compare the section on
Beauty in Emerson's "Nature" and Poe's discussion of beauty in "The
Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition."