The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are
ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy
in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so
slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode
of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we
gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of
us. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into
the phantom of an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase
suggestive of his singularity--happy are those whose singularity gives
a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a
diminution and abridgment.
An ideal wraith like this, of Emerson's personality, hovers over all
Concord to-day, taking, in the minds of those of you who were his
neighbors and intimates a somewhat fuller shape, remaining more
abstract in the younger generation, but bringing home to all of us the
notion of a spirit indescribably precious. The form that so lately
moved upon these streets and country roads, or awaited in these fields
and woods the beloved Muse's visits, is now dust; but the soul's note,
the spiritual voice, rises strong and clear above the uproar of the
times, and seems securely destined to exert an ennobling influence over
future generations.
What gave a flavor so matchless to Emerson's individuality was, even
more than his rich mental gifts, their singularly harmonious
combination. Rarely has a man so accurately known the limits of his
genius or so unfailingly kept within them. "Stand by your order," he
used to say to youthful students; and perhaps the paramount impression
one gets of his life is of his loyalty to his own personal type and
mission. The type was that of what he liked to call the scholar, the
perceiver of pure truth; and the mission was that of the reporter in
worthy form of each perception. The day is good, he said, in which we
have the most perceptions. There are times when the cawing of a crow,
a weed, a snowflake, or a farmer planting in his field become symbols
to the intellect of truths equal to those which the most majestic
phenomena can open. Let me mind my own charge, then, walk alone,
consult the sky, the field and forest, sedulously waiting every morning
for the news concerning the structure of the universe which the good
Spirit will give me.
This was the first half of Emerson, but only half; for genius, as he
said, is insatiate for expression, and truth has to be clad in the
right verbal garment. The form of the garment was so vital with
Emerson that it is impossible to separate it from the matter. They
form a chemical combination--thoughts which would be trivial expressed
otherwise, are important through the nouns and verbs to which he
married them. The style is the man, it has been said; the man
Emerson's mission culminated in his style, and if we must define him in
one word, we have to call him Artist. He was an artist whose medium
was verbal and who wrought in spiritual material.
This duty of spiritual seeing and reporting determined the whole tenor
of his life. It was to shield this duty from invasion and distraction
that he dwelt in the country, that he consistently declined to entangle
himself with associations or to encumber himself with functions which,
however he might believe in them, he felt were duties for other men and
not for him. Even the care of his garden, "with its stoopings and
fingerings in a few yards of space," he found "narrowing and
poisoning," and took to long free walks and saunterings instead,
without apology. "Causes" innumerable sought to enlist him as their
"worker"--all got his smile and word of sympathy, but none entrapped
him into service. The struggle against slavery itself, deeply as it
appealed to him, found him firm: "God must govern his own world, and
knows his way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, which
has none to guard it but me. I have quite other slaves to face than
those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the brain of
man, and which have no watchman or lover or defender but me." This in
reply to the possible questions of his own conscience. To hot-blooded
moralists with more objective ideas of duty, such a fidelity to the
limits of his genius must often have made him seem provokingly remote
and unavailable; but we, who can see things in more liberal
perspective, must unqualifiably approve the results. The faultless
tact with which he kept his safe limits while he so dauntlessly
asserted himself within them, is an example fitted to give heart to
other theorists and artists the world over.
The insight and creed from which Emerson's life followed can be best
summed up in his own verses:
"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man!"
Through the individual fact there ever shone for him the effulgence of
the Universal Reason. The great Cosmic Intellect terminates and houses
itself in mortal men and passing hours. Each of us is an angle of its
eternal vision, and the only way to be true to our Maker is to be loyal
to ourselves. "O rich and various Man!" he cries, "thou palace of
sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and
the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of God;
in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong."
If the individual open thus directly into the Absolute, it follows that
there is something in each and all of us, even the lowliest, that ought
not to consent to borrowing traditions and living at second hand. "If
John was perfect, why are you and I alive?" Emerson writes; "As long as
any man exists there is some need of him; let him fight for his own."
This faith that in a life at first hand there is something sacred is
perhaps the most characteristic note in Emerson's writings. The
hottest side of him is this non-conformist persuasion, and if his
temper could ever verge on common irascibility, it would be by reason
of the passionate character of his feelings on this point. The world
is still new and untried. In seeing freshly, and not in hearing of
what others saw, shall a man find what truth is. "Each one of us can
bask in the great morning which rises out of the Eastern Sea, and be
himself one of the children of the light." "Trust thyself, every heart
vibrates to that iron string. There is a time in each man's education
when he must arrive at the conviction that imitation is suicide; when
he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; and know that
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn
can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
which it was given him to till."
The matchless eloquence with which Emerson proclaimed the sovereignty
of the living individual electrified and emancipated his generation,
and this bugle-blast will doubtless be regarded by future critics as
the soul of his message. The present man is the aboriginal reality,
the Institution is derivative, and the past man is irrelevant and
obliterate for present issues. "If anyone would lay an axe to your
tree with a text from 1 John, v, 7, or a sentence from Saint Paul, say
to him," Emerson wrote, "'My tree is Yggdrasil, the tree of life.' Let
him know by your security that your conviction is clear and sufficient,
and, if he were Paul himself, that you also are here and with your
Creator." "Cleave ever to God," he insisted, "against the name of
God;"--and so, in spite of the intensely religious character of his
total thought, when he began his career it seemed to many of his
brethren in the clerical profession that he was little more than an
iconoclast and desecrator.
Emerson's belief that the individual must in reason be adequate to the
vocation for which the Spirit of the world has called him into being,
is the source of those sublime pages, hearteners and sustainers of our
youth, in which he urges his hearers to be incorruptibly true to their
own private conscience. Nothing can harm the man who rests in his
appointed place and character. Such a man is invulnerable; he balances
the universe, balances it as much by keeping small when he is small, as
by being great and spreading when he is great. "I love and honor
Epaminondas," said Emerson, "but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I
hold it more just to love the world of this hour than the world of his
hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by
saying, 'He acted and thou sittest still.' I see action to be good
when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if
he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and peace,
if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space for all
modes of love and fortitude." "The fact that I am here certainly shows
me that the Soul has need of an organ here, and shall I not assume the
post?"
The vanity of all superserviceableness and pretence was never more
happily set forth than by Emerson in the many passages in which he
develops this aspect of his philosophy. Character infallibly proclaims
itself. "Hide your thoughts!--hide the sun and moon. They publish
themselves to the universe. They will speak through you though you
were dumb. They will flow out of your actions, your manners and your
face. . . . Don't say things: What you are stands over you the while
and thunders so that I cannot say what you say to the contrary. . . .
What a man _is_ engraves itself upon him in letters of light.
Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There is confession
in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the
grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression.
Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not trust him. His
vice glasses the eye, casts lines of mean expression in the cheek,
pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast upon the back of the head,
and writes, O fool! fool! on the forehead of a king. If you would not
be known to do a thing, never do it; a man may play the fool in the
drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see.--How can
a man be concealed? How can he be concealed?"
On the other hand, never was a sincere word or a sincere thought
utterly lost. "Never a magnanimity fell to the ground but there is
some heart to greet and accept it unexpectedly. . . . The hero fears
not that if he withstood the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go
unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it,--himself,--and is pledged by it
to sweetness of peace and to nobleness of aim, which will prove in the
end a better proclamation than the relating of the incident."
The same indefeasible right to be exactly what one is, provided one
only be authentic, spreads itself, in Emerson's way of thinking, from
persons to things and to times and places. No date, no position is
insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only genuine:--
"In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns.
With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has read the story
of the Emperor, Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home to
the surrounding woods the faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and
marches in Germany. He is curious concerning that man's day. What
filled it? The crowded orders, the stern decisions, the foreign
despatches, the Castilian etiquette? The soul answers--Behold his day
here! 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. Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable,
obliterated past what it cannot tell,--the details of that nature, of
that day, called Byron or Burke;--but ask it of the enveloping
Now. . . . Be lord of a day, and you can put up your history books."
"The deep to-day which all men scorn," receives thus from Emerson
superb revindication. "Other world! there is no other world." All
God's life opens into the individual particular, and here and now, or
nowhere, is reality. "The present hour is the decisive hour, and every
day is doomsday."
Such a conviction that Divinity is everywhere may easily make of one an
optimist of the sentimental type that refuses to speak ill of anything.
Emerson's drastic perception of differences kept him at the opposite
pole from this weakness. After you have seen men a few times, he could
say, you find most of them as alike as their barns and pantries, and
soon as musty and as dreary. Never was such a fastidious lover of
significance and distinction, and never an eye so keen for their
discovery. His optimism had nothing in common with that indiscriminate
hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whitman has made us
familiar. For Emerson, the individual fact and moment were indeed
suffused with absolute radiance, but it was upon a condition that saved
the situation--they must be worthy specimens,--sincere, authentic,
archetypal; they must have made connection with what he calls the Moral
Sentiment, they must in some way act as symbolic mouthpieces of the
Universe's meaning. To know just which thing does act in this way, and
which thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret (somewhat
incommunicable, it must be confessed) of seership, and doubtless we
must not expect of the seer too rigorous a consistency. Emerson
himself was a real seer. He could perceive the full squalor of the
individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration. He might
easily have found himself saying of some present-day agitator against
our Philippine conquest what he said of this or that reformer of his
own time. He might have called him, as a private person, a tedious
bore and canter. But he would infallibly have added what he then
added: "It is strange and horrible to say this, for 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 round which the Universe revolves
passes through his body where he stands."
Be it how it may, then, this is Emerson's revelation:--The point of any
pen can be an epitome of reality; the commonest person's act, if
genuinely actuated, can lay hold on eternity. This vision is the
head-spring of all his outpourings; and it is for this truth, given to
no previous literary artist to express in such penetratingly persuasive
tones, that posterity will reckon him a prophet, and, perhaps
neglecting other pages, piously turn to those that convey this message.
His life was one long conversation with the invisible divine,
expressing itself through individuals and particulars:--"So nigh is
grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man!"
I spoke of how shrunken the wraith, how thin the echo, of men is after
they are departed? Emerson's wraith comes to me now as if it were but
the very voice of this victorious argument. His words to this effect
are certain to be quoted and extracted more and more as time goes on,
and to take their place among the Scriptures of humanity. "'Gainst
death and all oblivious enmity, shall you pace forth," beloved Master.
As long as our English language lasts men's hearts will be cheered and
their souls strengthened and liberated by the noble and musical pages
with which you have enriched it.
[1] An Address delivered at the Centenary of the Birth of Ralph Waldo
Emerson in Concord, May 25, 1903, and printed in the published
proceedings of that meeting.