"The beauty of Israel has fallen in its high place," said the voice of
Emerson's friend and neighbor, Judge Hoar, trembling and almost hushed
in emotion, and everybody who heard felt the singular felicity of the
words. The plain little country church was crowded, and a vast throng
stood outside in the peaceful April sunshine. Before the pulpit--the
eyes forever closed, the voice forever silent--lay the man whose aspect
of sweet and majestic serenity Death had not touched, and which recalled
his own words: "Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has added
a solemn ornament to the house." It was the man who was beloved of his
neighbors and honored by the world, whose modest counsel in grave
affairs guided the village, and whose thought led the thought of
Christendom. "He belonged to all men, but he is peculiarly ours," said
Judge Hoar truly, speaking for the quiet historic town of which
Emerson's grandfather had been the minister, and in which he lived
during the larger part of his life, and to which his memory will lend an
imperishable charm.
Concord when he first knew it was already famous. A hundred years ago,
at the bridge over the placid river, the Middlesex farmers, hastening as
minute men from all the neighboring country, had obeyed the first
military summons to fire upon the king's regulars; and the red-coated
regulars, turning, had begun, amid the blazing patriot volley of twenty
miles, their long retreat to Yorktown and over the sea. At the point
where the highway by which the soldiers marched enters the village,
under the hill along whose ridge the hurrying countrymen pressed to cut
off the soldiers' retreat, lived for more than forty years the scholar
who belongs to Concord as Shakespeare belongs to Stratford.
"Nature," said Emerson in his first book, written in the old Manse at
Concord, which Hawthorne afterwards inhabited, and which he has so
beautifully commemorated--"Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace
man: only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she
follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of
grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his
thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A
virtuous man is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure
of the visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate
themselves fitly in our memory with the geography and climate of Greece.
The visible heavens and the earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common
life whoever has seen a person of powerful character and happy genius
will have remarked how easily he took all things along with him, the
persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature became auxiliary to a
man." So is Emerson associated with the tranquil landscape of the old
Middlesex town--the gentle hills, the long sweep of meadowland, the
winding river, the woodland, and the pastures under the ample sky. The
broad horizon and rural repose were the fitting home of the lofty and
beneficent genius whose life and word perpetually illustrated the
supreme worth and beauty of truth, purity, and morality. Whoever saw him
there or elsewhere, saw the "sweet and virtuous soul" which George
Herbert likened to seasoned timber that never gives.
The sincerity and serenity of Emerson's character were unsurpassed. The
freshness and glow of his interest in life were perennial. With a sober
tenderness of regret he said to a friend who congratulated him upon his
seventieth birthday, "Yet it is a little sad to me, for I count to-day
the end of youth." In no other sense than the lapse of years, however,
was it true. That auroral freshness of soul which is the distinctive
charm of youth lingered when even memory somewhat failed. "How long it
is since I have seen you!" he said at Longfellow's funeral to a friend
whom he had accosted just before. But he said it with all that
heartiness of sympathy and expectation which, in the golden prime of
his life, when he was in many ways the most striking and original figure
in his country, made him greet every comer as if he expected to hear
from him a wiser word than had yet been spoken. A youth, fascinated by
this simple graciousness of manner, declared that Emerson greeted the
most ordinary persons like a King of Spain receiving an ambassador from
the Great Mogul. The expectancy of his manner implied that every man had
some message to deliver, and he bent himself to hear.
But his shrewdness of perception was exquisite. He did not take dross
because he hoped for gold. His reproof was as sure and incisive as the
stroke of a delicate Damascus blade. When a young man, hearing Emerson
say that everybody ought to read Plato, followed his advice, and read,
he thought, with the audacity of youth, that he detected faults in
Plato, and wrote an essay to set them forth. He asked Emerson to read
it, and when he returned it to the youth, Emerson said, pleasantly, "My
boy, when you strike at the king, you must kill him." One day he sat at
dinner with a distinguished company of statesmen. He was by far the most
famous man at the table; but he modestly followed the conversation,
turning from each guest who spoke, to the next, with the old sweet
gravity of earnest expectation. When all the notable company had gone, a
guest who remained said to him: "I saw you talking with the English
Minister. He is a brilliant man, and I hope that you found him
agreeable." "A very pleasant gentleman," replied Emerson; "but he does
not represent the England that I know."
Despite this sharp apprehension, however, Emerson was sometimes unable
to find any charm in writings which have apparently taken a permanent
place in literature. He could see nothing interesting or valuable in
Shelley. "When I read Shelley," he once said, "I am like a man who
thinks that he sees gold at the bottom of a stream. He reaches for it,
but his hands come up cold, with a little common sand in them." The
waywardness and disorder of Shelley's life may have troubled him. But
this would not have affected his intellectual judgment. His acute
intellect was supremely independent and absolutely courageous. "He must
embrace solitude as a bride," he said of the scholar; "he must have his
glees and his glooms alone." When as a young man he quietly closed his
pulpit door, and declined to preach any more, because he no longer felt
any value in certain religious rites, there was no protest, nor
ostentation, nor newspaper "sensation." It was simply the closing of a
book that he had read, and the amazement and censure and grief of others
could not possibly persuade him to do, or to say, or to affect, the
thing that was not true. Emerson's moral and intellectual integrity was
transparently simple, but it was sublime. It was not expressed in stormy
self-assertion nor cynical contempt. It spoke in tranquil and beautiful
affirmation, perfectly courteous, but absolutely sincere.
But no man more charitably and diligently sought to understand others,
and to be just to what was obscure and foreign to him. He listened
patiently to music. But it did not charm him. He was punctual in the
duties of a citizen. But he had no proper political tastes. Yet for the
true politics, the application of the moral law to the control of public
affairs, no man was more perceptive or uncompromising. He was always on
the right side of great public questions. His hospitable sympathy
entertained every good cause, and in all our antislavery literature
there is no nobler or more permanent work than his address upon the
anniversary of West India emancipation in 1844. The only cloud that ever
arose upon his regard for Carlyle was his displeasure with Carlyle's
contemptuous and cynical sneers at our civil war. He was deeply
impatient of doubtful and half-hearted Americans during the war. "They
call themselves gentlemen, I believe," he said of certain persons, and
in a tone which showed that his lofty and patriotic honor instinctively
and utterly repudiated the pinchbeck claims of educated feebleness to
bear "the grand old name of gentleman."
Those who recall Emerson when he was a clergyman in Boston remember a
singular spiritual beauty in the man, and an indescribable charm of
manner in his public speech. But apparently he impressed his earlier
associates with the purity and refinement of his mind and life, his
lofty intellectual tastes and sympathy, and his literary accomplishment,
rather than by the peculiar force of a genius which was to give the most
powerful spiritual impulse of the generation to American thought. This
is the more singular because there was always something breezy and
heroic in his tone, which might have led to the suspicion of the fact
that he was from the first a fond reader of Plutarch, from whose "Lives"
he draws so many illustrations. As in a mountain walk the traveller is
suddenly aware of wafts of perfumed air, now of the wild-grape blossom,
now of the azalea or sweet-brier, so the strain of Emerson suggests his
sympathy with Plutarch and Montaigne, the Oriental poets and the
Platonists.
But no one could describe accurately his "system" of philosophy, nor
fit him into a "school" of poetry. He was content to call himself a
scholar, and no name was more significant and precious to him. He
shunned notoriety, but he had the instinctive desire of every artist and
of all genius for an audience. When a friend asked him of a young man
whose literary talent had seemed to him to promise great achievement,
Emerson said: "He does nothing; and I doubted his genius when I saw that
he did not seek a hearing." When his own first slight volume, "Nature,"
was published, they were but a few, a very few, who perceived in it the
ripe and beautiful work of a master in literature and thought. The
richness and originality and picturesque simplicity of this book, its
subtle perception, its tone of jubilant power, and the soft glimmering
light of lofty imagination which irradiates every page, do not lose by
familiarity, and are as charming, although of course not so surprising,
as when they first took captive the readers of nearly fifty years ago.
With the eagerness of classification which characterizes many active
minds, Emerson was immediately labelled a Berkeleyan, an idealist, and a
mystic. But he eluded the precise classification as noiselessly and
surely as a cloud changes its form. Astonishment, satire, indignation,
contradiction, spent themselves in vain. Like a rose-tree in June, which
blossoms sweetly whether the air be chilly or sunny, his thought quietly
flowered into exquisite expression. You might like it or leave it. But
the rose would be still a rose.
There was a fashion of calling Emerson obscure. But there is no style in
literature of more poetic precision than his. It is full of surprises of
beauty and aptness. His central doctrine of the identity of men, the
grandeur of every man's opportunity, and the essential poetry of the
circumstances of common life, was a living faith. "The great man," he
said, "makes the great thing." "In the sighing of these woods; in the
quiet of these gray fields; in the cool breeze that sings out of these
Northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet; in
the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the
afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of
vigor; in the great idea and the puny execution--behold Charles the
Fifth's day; another, yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's,
Bayard's, Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day--day of all that are born
of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting
the self-same life--its sweetness, its greatness, its pain--which I so
admire in other men." The temptation to complete the splendid passage is
almost irresistible. But in every page you are drawn on as in a stately
symphony of winning music.
This passage is from the Dartmouth College address, and it has all the
flowing cadence of a discourse written to be spoken. Yet Emerson had
little of the orator's temperament save the desire of an audience, and
an earnestness which was pure and not passionate. But no orator in the
country has exercised a deeper or more permanent influence. His
discourses were but essays, but their thought was so noble, their form
so symmetrical, their tone so lofty, and they were spoken with such
alluring rhythm, that they threw over young minds a spell which no other
eloquence could command. Emerson himself was very susceptible to the
power of fine oratory. No man ever praised more warmly the charm of
Everett in his earlier day. When Webster delivered his eulogy upon Adams
and Jefferson in Faneuil Hall, Emerson was teaching in Cambridge, and
Richard H. Dana, Jun., was one of his pupils. The day before Webster
spoke, the teacher announced that there would be no school upon the
morrow, and he earnestly exhorted his pupils not to lose the memorable
opportunity of hearing the great orator. Dana was of an age to prefer
fishing to oratory, and strolled off with his line to the river, where
he passed the day. When school was resumed, Mr. Emerson with sympathetic
interest asked him if he had heard Webster. The fisher, half ashamed,
reluctantly owned his absence. Emerson looked at him with regret and
almost pain, and said to him, gravely: "My boy, I am very sorry; you
have lost what you can never recover, and what you will regret to the
last day of your life."
But those who heard his own Divinity School address, or the Cambridge or
Dartmouth oration, or the Emancipation address, would not exchange that
recollection even to have heard the Olympian orator in Faneuil Hall.
"Tell me," said a Senator famous for his oratory, to a friend in
Washington, "what do you call eloquence? Repeat to me an eloquent
passage." The friend quoted from Emerson the unequalled passage from the
Dartmouth College address in which the scholar appeals to the young men
to be true to the ideals of their youth--a passage which no generous
youth can read to-day without deep emotion and a thrill of high resolve.
The Senator listened with an air of perplexed incredulity. "Do you call
that eloquent? Now see what I call eloquence," and he declaimed a
glowing piece of rhetoric with ardent feeling. It was a passage from
Charles Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration in Boston sixty years ago. But
effective as it was, his friend reminded the Senator that if the test of
eloquence be glow of feeling and splendor and sincerity of expression,
with an inner power of appeal which searches the heart and moulds the
life, no really greater results in this country could be traced to any
speech than to that of Emerson, who read the greater part of his essays
as addresses, and who sometimes reached a lyrical strain which not the
magnificent Burke nor any other great orator surpasses.
--To talk of Emerson, even if the talker were not of the circle of his
intimate friends, is to raise the flood-gate of happy and inspiring
recollections. It is one of the tenderest of the thoughts that hover
around his memory, as the low winds sigh through the pine-trees over his
grave, that, as with Longfellow, there are no excuses to be made for
grotesque eccentricities of genius, nor for a life at any point unworthy
of so great a soul. He said of his friend Thoreau, who is buried near
him, that he was like the Alpine climber who gathers the edelweiss, the
flower that blooms at the very edge of the glacier. He too lived at
those pure heights, and taught us how to tread them undazzled and
undismayed. Happy teacher, whose long and lovely life illustrated the
dignity and excellence of the truth, old as the morning and as ever
fresh, that fidelity to the divine law written upon the conscience is
the only safe law of life for every man. Noble and beneficent preacher,
who, in a sense that the pensive Goldsmith did not intend,
"Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way."