In the winter and early spring of 1838, the American Peace Society held a
course of lectures in Boston. This lecture was the seventh in the course.
Mr. Alcott wrote in his diary at that time:—
“I heard Emerson’s lecture on _Peace_, as the closing discourse of a
series delivered at the Odeon before the American Peace Society.... After
the lecture I saw Mr. Garrison, who is at this time deeply interested
in the question of Peace, as are many of the meekest and noblest souls
amongst us. He expressed his great pleasure in the stand taken by Mr.
Emerson and his hopes in him as a man of the new age. This great topic
has been brought before the general mind as a direct consequence of the
agitation of the abolition of slavery.”
The lecture was printed in 1849 _Æsthetic Papers_, edited by Miss
Elizabeth P. Peabody.
Although the chronicles of the campaigns and acts of prowess of the
masterly soldiers were always attractive reading to Mr. Emerson,—much
more acts of patriotic devotion in the field,—and he was by no means
committed as a non-resistant, he saw that war had been a part of
evolution, and that its evils might pave the way for good, as flowers
spring up next year on a field of carnage. He knew that evolution
required an almost divine patience, yet his good hope was strengthened
by the signs of the times, and he desired to hasten the great upward step
in civilization.
It is evident from his words and course of action during the outrages
upon the peaceful settlers of Kansas, and when Sumter was fired upon
and Washington threatened, that he recognized that the hour had not yet
come. He subscribed lavishly from his limited means for the furnishing
Sharp’s rifles to the “Free State men.” In the early days of the War of
the Rebellion he visited Charlestown Navy-Yard to see the preparations,
and said, “Ah! sometimes gunpowder smells good.” In the opening of his
address at Tufts College, in July, 1861, he said, “The brute noise of
cannon has a most poetic echo in these days, as instrument of the primal
sentiments of humanity.” Several speeches included in this volume show
that at that crisis his feeling was, as he had said of the forefathers’
“deed of blood” at Concord Bridge,—
Even the serene Reason says
It was well done.
But all this was only a postponement of hope.
[119] _Page 152, note 1._ With regard to schooling a man’s courage for
whatever may befall, Mr. Emerson said: “Our culture therefore must not
omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season that he is born into
the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being
require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned,
self-collected and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take
both reputation and life in his hand, and with perfect urbanity dare the
gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude
of his behavior.”—“Heroism,” _Essays, First Series_.
“A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far
valuable that it puts every man on trial.”—“The Conservative,” _Nature,
Addresses and Lectures_.
[120] _Page 156, note 1._ Mr. Emerson used to take pleasure in a story
illustrating this common foible of mankind. A returned Arctic explorer,
in a lecture, said, “In this wilderness among the ice-floes, I had the
fortune to see a terrible conflict between two Polar bears—” “Which
beat?” cried an excited voice from the audience.
[121] _Page 160, note 1._ In his description of the Tower of London in
the journal of 1834, it appears that the suits of armor there set up
affected Mr. Emerson unpleasantly, suggesting half-human destructive
lobsters and crabs. It is, I believe, said that Benvenuto Cellini learned
to make the cunning joints in armor for men from those of these marine
warriors.
In the opening paragraphs of the essay on Inspiration Mr. Emerson
congratulates himself that the doleful experiences of the aboriginal
man were got through with long ago. “They combed his mane, they pared
his nails, cut off his tail, set him on end, sent him to school and
made him pay taxes, before he could begin to write his sad story for
the compassion or the repudiation of his descendants, who are all but
unanimous to disown him. We must take him as we find him,” etc.
[122] _Page 162, note 1._ In _English Traits_, at the end of the chapter
on Stonehenge, Mr. Emerson gave a humorous account of his setting forth
the faith or hope of the non-resistants and idealists in New England, to
the amazed and shocked ears of Carlyle and Arthur Helps.
[123] _Page 164, note 1._ “As the solidest rocks are made up of invisible
gases, as the world is made of thickened light and arrested electricity,
so men know that ideas are the parents of men and things; there was never
anything that did not proceed from a thought.”—“The Scholar,” _Lectures
and Biographical Sketches_.
[124] _Page 164, note 2._ In “The Problem” he says of the Parthenon and
England’s abbeys that
out of Thought’s interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air.
[125] _Page 167, note 1._ Mr. Emerson in his conversation frankly showed
that he was not yet quite prepared to be a non-resistant. He would have
surely followed his own counsel where he says, “Go face the burglar in
your own house,” and he seemed to feel instinctive sympathy with what Mr.
Dexter, the counsel, said in the speech which he used to read me from the
Selfridge trial:—
“And may my arm drop powerless when it fails to defend my honor!”
He exactly stated his own position in a later passage, where he says that
“in a given extreme event Nature and God will instruct him in that hour.”
[126] _Page 172, note 1._ Thoreau lived frankly and fearlessly up to this
standard.
[127] _Page 173, note 1._ This same view is even more attractively set
forth in “Aristocracy” (_Lectures and Biographical Sketches_, pp. 36-40).
Rev. Dr. Cyrus A. Bartol, in an interesting paper on “Emerson’s
Religion,”[C] gives, among other reminiscences, the following: “I asked
him if he approved of war. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘in one born to fight.’”